🪞
Welcome back to the Asylum write-up, where we explore the decade-long slow-motion car crash that is the Emilie Autumn fandom.
Sorry this installment took so long to upload! Just a heads-up, I may take some time to deliver the last one too – these posts take forever to format on Reddit's finicky-ass editor, and my dumb real life is currently keeping me from precious Internet time. Thank you for your patience! You have my word that everyone who pre-ordered the final installment will receive a PERSONAL, HANDWRITTEN letter autographed and illustrated by me, a list of the snacks I consumed while composing this write-up, some exclusive behind-the-scenes secrets, and a pony.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.1 – Part 4.2 Part 5

Places, everyone This is a test Throw your stones Do your damage Your worst, and your best (...) And if I had a dollar For every time I repented the sin And commit the same crime I'd be sitting on top of the world today (“God Help Me”, 2006🎵)

Quick recap of where we left off. First, there were five to ten halcyon years of pleasant and meaningful interactions between EA and her blossoming fanbase, prominently by way of her official forum. Then, circa 2009-2010, EA's online presence shifted towards sudden anger outbursts, ban-hammering, and an increasingly top-down communication style.
This created a sort of primordial rift within the fanbase, between those who supported EA's right to speak her mind and regulate her own fan spaces however she pleased – and those who thought that her reactions were rude and inappropriate (at best), and that even fan spaces should allow for reasonable, non-abusive criticism of the artist.
Between a poorly-handled book release (see Part 3), the controversial (Part 2) or dubiously true (Part 4) contents of said book, and serious shade from various former collaborators (Part 5), more and more fans had pressing thoughts about EA's work ethic and choices. EA attempted damage control through drastic forum rules that made it virtually impossible to voice any “serious” critical opinion. It didn't work, of course: instead of squashing the mutiny, she created a schism.
Critical fans and active haters started congregating on unofficial platforms.

“WITH MUFFINS LIKE THIS, WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?”: TROLL LIKE A GIRL

So here we were, the early 2010s. The official forum (which had about 700 members in 2006, if you recall) was now thousands-strong, reaching just over 12,000 registered users in 2012 – not all of them active, but still. In terms of sheer numbers and content creation, the party was POPPIN'... but increasingly in parts of the Asylum that escaped EA's jurisdiction, such as Tumblr, where they could speak their mind freely.

You play the victim very well You've built your self-indulgent hell You wanted someone to understand you Well, be careful what you wish for, because I do (“I Know Where You Sleep”, 2006🎵)

In one wing of Asylum Tumblr, a smattering of call-out blogs emerged, which laid out EA's various lies, faux pas, shitty takes, and general deep-seated terribleness in detailed timelines and screenshots (or, short of that, long-winded bullet points). While many such blogs framed it as “serious” whistleblowing and did their best to remain as fact-based and neutral as they could, there was some genuine disgust, animosity and creepiness towards EA on that side of Tumblr; for some ex-fans, “exposing the truth” was mostly justify obsessive hatred, prying and verbal abuse. Some, for instance, felt the bizarre need to side with EA's mother in their estrangement. (One user, with the URL “emilyautumnfischkopf”, argued in a serious and down-to-earth tone - but with zero sources - that EA's upbringing had been nothing but peaceful and supportive until she ungratefully kicked her loving family to the curb for no reason at all. They were later revealed 🔍 to have an alternate handle as “eaisalyingcunt”.)
Either way, through these blogs, a number of potential drama bombs that had mostly flown under the radar were dredged up from over the years – some of which were hard to ignore, even for supportive fans. Where to begin?
There was that nonsense in-joke song, captured twice on camera during the 2009 tour (to very little outrage, at the time), crassly called “Manatee Retard”📺. Or EA's scathing response, in print, to a wheelchair user who found it insensitive that she used a bedazzled wheelchair as a prop to do sexy acrobatics on stage. (“Your offence taken at my hard-won self-acceptance proves that I indeed have something to fight against”, she wrote). Spoken word tracks where she made trivializing knock-knock jokes about serious mental illnesses she didn't have, like schizophrenia and OCD. Multiple instances of calling Britney Spears a “bimbo” and a “Hollywood fucked-up”, resentfully claiming that she only shaved her head because she was “hopped up on drugs” and certainly not because she was “bipolar”, a word the press liked to wield as an insult anyway. (“That's almost like calling someone a retard!” Yeah, heaven forbid.) The meanest, most distasteful paragraphs in the book. Basically everything problematic EA had ever said or written.📝 In retrospect, it had been a long time coming, but it was a lot to take in – and certainly more off-putting, even to less emotionally invested fans, than silly lies about her age and last name.
In another wing of Asylum Tumblr, some fans had had it up to here and just wanted to have fun. 🎵 If Plague Rats had learned one valuable lesson from EA, it was how to crack a joke in the face of absurd tragedy – and the general state of the EA fandom certainly warranted a few.
In 2012, Fight Like a Girl was released. After six long years, three of which had been peaceful, the Opheliac era was officially over. The new album and ensuing tour confirmed that the Asylum had entered a process of glamorous Broadway-style militarization. 🎵📺
The mood board was “Roman general meets Vegas showgirl meets Victorian street urchin”.🪞 The color palette was, to naysayers, “musty pink and rotten, stale piss yellow”. 🐀 The keyword was “REVENGE” (through the power of... self-expression! sorority! brutal assault with rusty medical implements!). The chorus of the title song had an intriguing run-on line about getting “revenge on the world, or at least 49% of the people in it” 🎵 – which seemed like an awful lot, and was widely interpreted (to cheers, boos, or uncomfortable sighs) as a misandrist jab at literally all men on Earth.
The show was essentially a demo version of the musical, in that the setlist vaguely reflected the order of events in the story – but prior reading was essential in order to get what the hell was going on on stage. This one Broadway reviewer had not perused the literature before seeing the show 🔍, and hated: the set, the choreography, the skits, the plot, the lyrics, the music, the concept. (Seriously, you should read the review. It's not even my show and I feel like quitting show business.)
Pre-show VIP encounters, now violin-free, were lorded over by EA's new manager🐀, whose official title was “Asylum Headmistress”. (Interesting choice – she sounds fun!) The swag bags were less substantial than before, and the “greet” part of the meet-and-greet was rarely more than a quick hug and photo op.
On Twitter, EA continued to embrace her “I am very badass” fronting attitude...

Often wonder if cyberbullies r aware they’re fucking w/ a girl who’s BFs w/ maker of the SAW films & is marrying a knife-throwing scorpion. (🐀📝)

...and her taste for needlessly inflammatory statements. About an aisle sign in a supermarket:

If this does not infuriate you, then you're a fucking potato.

(Again with the confounding crypto-ableism, EA! 🔍) She also went through a phase of raging against Lady Gaga 📝, who had stolen her idea of using a wheelchair on stage as an able-bodied woman. 🔍 That failed to convince anyone that she wasn't the histrionic diva that haters made her out to be.
Spurred on by EA's rallying cries and “us vs them” mentality, loyalists turned the white-knighting up to 11. On Twitter, some Plague Rats got into cat fights with Lady Gaga's Little Monsters (what a time to be alive). Others tried to balance out the Tumblr negativity with initiatives like “Spreading a Plague of Love” – a “positive-only” confession blog, whose extreme fangirling, comically drastic rules and hyper-defensive tone📝 did not debunk the increasingly popular notion that “true Plague Rats” were a bunch of authoritarian and hopelessly brainwashed fanatics.
EA truthers and other anti-fans started lashing out at anyone who dared express any positive opinion of EA, solidifying claims that the backlash against EA was just a conspiracy of bitter, hysterical bullies.
All this to say: every passing day brought new reasons for fans to get mad at EA and each other, and everyone in the Asylum was in need of a laugh. It's not easy having a good time.🦠
Leading up to Fight Like a Girl and in the years that followed, user-submission-based meme blogs took off, most notably “Spreading a Plague of Lulz / Troll Like a Girl”. A lot of the early submissions were absurdist humor and toothless, cheezburger-Impact memes (a style that was, oddly, already dated at the time). Those often originated in good fun, and from loyal fans, on the official forum. But there was also true snark, satirizing EA's questionable ethics, outrageous claims, and easily spoofed artistic gimmicks. A new slang of Asylumspeak emerged: Glittertits (slight NSFW), GAGA!!, EA Gusta and all its memeface variants, Get outta mah house!, Are You Suffering?, Fight Like A Goat, [Random celebrity] copied EA (a subgenre in its own right), ...
Most of the “trolling” was directed at unrepentant bootlickers and, to a lesser extent, red-in-the-face haters and creeps. Meme blogs would post joke comments under “serious” or gushing submissions on Wayward Victorian Confessions, and taunt loyalist accounts by tagging them in their posts. When a few people complained on WVC that almost all of the Bloody Crumpets to date had been thin white able-bodied women, and a few fans responded by sharing their dream-casts for a more diverse line-up, the blog was flooded for days with confessions that “X should be a Crumpet” (candidates included RuPaul, Mitt Romney, Nicki Minaj, EA's therapist, and the WVC admins). Farcical shenanigans like that.
Ah, but some people will always cross the line, won't they. EA threads popped up on merciless, bully-friendly snark platforms like Lolcow, Pretty Ugly Little Liar, and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Snarkers with a mean streak and obsessive haters mingled in some of the more aggressive, 4-chan-spirited retaliation against EA – which would be called “brigading” in modern parlance. This included flooding EA's Goodreads page with one-star reviews (see part 4), repeatedly editing her Wikipedia page to include her legal name and birth year, and ensuring that Googling said name would bring up current pictures of her.
All of this compounded agitation fragmented the once-united fandom beyond recognition.🦠 Through substantial disagreements among fans, personal bickerings, layers upon layers of inscrutable in-jokes, and cross-platform telephone games, the Asylum morphed into a booby-trapped Escher room.
Satire blogs were taken in earnest. Earnest fan blogs scanned as satire. Memes would get called out as abuse. Appreciation without attached criticism would get mocked as bootlicking. Obvious jokes made by EA would be taken at face value. One divisive confession could trigger days and days of debate, to the point that WVC eventually banned confessions in response to other confessions. New waves of infighting created a confusing web of rival sub-factions🐀, each accusing the others of being toxic, cliquish, and delusional.
The shared fantasy was broken, the collective vision had crumbled, no onez was speaking the same language anymore. Fans would jump down the throat of other fans who held almost identical views about EA, except for that one thing she said or did that one time. Everyone had differing thoughts on what should or shouldn't acceptable to discuss, question, excuse, make fun of.
War is hell.

SCORCHED EARTH SHENANIGANS: HONEY, I SHRUNK THE ASYLUM

Would you tear my castle down Stone by stone And let the wind run through my windows Till there was nothing left But a battered rose? (“Castle Down”, 2003🎵)

Haters vs sycophants is not really the kind of conflict where one side can come out on top (if you're participating, you've already lost). But in the long tug-of-war between “grassroots” and “EA-sponsored” fan spaces, the ultimate winner is obvious – in that the former is gasping in agony, a shriveled husk of its former glory, while the latter... is non-existent. This is due in no small part to EA's tendency, like the Czars of old, to settle conflicts by setting Moscow on fire.🔍)
That's not entirely fair: unlike EA, the czar only did it that once.
By early 2013, as EA was gearing up for her third Fight Like a Girl tour at the end of the year, the official forum was... not as lively as it once had been. Not just because of the stifling rules and disgruntlement towards EA, or because EA herself hadn't really posted anything on there in years; the Internet was also changing, and forums in general were fast becoming passé.
This made it difficult for EA to create a safe space where she could talk to fans, and fans could talk to and about her, in a way she deemed suitable (ie, a space she could gate-keep and regulate enough to keep it completely free from negative criticism). Social media was a minefield; she still posted regularly, but didn't interact very much. So EA and the Headmistress came up with a way to filter out the unbelievers: an official fan club📝, aptly called the “Asylum Army”, with a $100 entry price.
Joining the AA came with a dog tag, a sew-on patch, and a lifetime membership certificate signed by EA and – for some reason – the Headmistress. (Unlike EA's best friend and sound engineer back in the forum's heyday, I don't think fans ever really embraced the FLAG-era manager as part of the Asylum in-group. She came across more as a coordinator / businessperson / adult chaperone, at best.🐀) So, slightly better goodies than you'd get by joining the other AA 🔍 ... but not by much. The main appeal was that members would have access to exclusive content, special merch, giveaways, early bird tickets for future shows, and regular video chats with EA.
The concept itself drew a fair amount of criticism, as you can imagine. Between the name🐀, the price, and the inherent gatekeeping of a pay-to-join fanclub, many balked at the monetizing of a concept that had once (like, three years back) been significantly more DIY, grassroots, and inclusive. 📝🐀
Then again, many also longed for a positive, drama-free space where fans could just be fans. And while the creation of the AA was generally recognized as a quick cashgrab, a lot of people were surprisingly cool with it. EA was trying to finance her dream musical, after all – although a number of fans wished she had gone about raising funds in a less sketchy way.
So around 400 fans shelled out (which, according to the Headmistress📝, “basically cover[ed] the cost of running the fanclub itself – keeping the database up, website, etc.”). Enough for a close-knit, but sizable community. But already, there was a conflict of interest: a high fanclub entry fee essentially demands that you pledge loyalty to the artist over loyalty to your fellow fans, who wish to join but can't afford to. Sharing, caring, and ensuring no one felt left out were some of the more positive values cultivated in the fandom... but leaking exclusive content would surely piss off other paying members🐀, and make EA feel betrayed all over again. (And she had barely just started to mellow out on social media!)
...But then again, this is the internet. After the first month of secret AA drops (lyric sheets, some photoshoot outtakes – nothing too juicy, really), there were, yes, some leaks. EA was predictably miffed, and retaliated by... ghosting the fanclub for weeks at a time in its first few months of existence (great look!). She eventually found the “solution” to her problem, by providing something you couldn't right-click-save (and which had been part of the promised perks to begin with): live interaction.
Over webcam, she was her usual in-person bubbly, charming, funny self. Everyone seemingly had a good time during the fanclub video chat, and this gave people faith and hope.
There were a few more events, giveaways, etc. As promised, ahead of the fall 2013 tour (the last one to date, it would turn out), AA members got priority access to show tickets and VIP bundles. The latter were much pricier than before, and only included soundcheck, a photo-op, and three goodies: a tin of loose-leaf tea, a signed printer-paper setlist, and a small flag that said “F.L.A.G.”.🔍 Some stuff continued to leak – but, as some of the outlaws pointed out (scroll down to the Disqus comments), they were mostly relaying information that was relevant to the entire fanbase, such as updates about ongoing projects (the dragged-out recording of the audiobook, for one).
In early 2014, lifetime memberships were closed, and replaced with monthly, quarterly and yearly subscription tiers. Bizarrely, you ended up paying $3 more per month if you bought a $99 yearly subscription📝 – but it did include the patch, dog tag, and piece of paper!

Sometimes I kind of want to be part of the cool kids and register to the Asylum Army. Then I remember how it came about, what you could get for the same price a couple years ago, how the whole thing was and is handled, and that I won’t support any of this bullshit. (And then I roll around naked in all the money I’m saving.) (🐀)

Still, a number of fans rejoiced at the affordable monthly option, and joined – if not for the exclusive content and merch (which were... okay, but not much to write home about), then for the friendly, drama-free exchanges with an artist they actually did love, in spite of all the frustration.
For the still-too-poor or still-undecided, there was always the forum! It wasn't as active as it used to be, but a few die-hards still managed to keep the lights on... until, inevitably, Someone Did Something and Ruined Everything. (Once again: EA's wrath is spectacular, but rarely completely unprovoked.) The incident features one notable figure in the Asylum community. Let's call him the Collector.
OK, so maybe you remember the meme I linked to in Part 4, with Christian Grey and the ginormous EA hoard. Well, that's the Collector's collection. The “Violin” promo that I called the "Holy Grail of the fandom" in the same paragraph? Also his. The handwritten lyrics that went for $940? Guess who won that auction. Over the years, the Collector had probably spent five figures on EA merch and shows, and although that fact was a little unsettling, he was a very active, easy-going, and generally well-liked fixture of the fandom.
One day in 2012, shortly after the Headmistress had replaced EA's old Chicago BFF as main forum admin, the Collector's account got banned or restricted over something dumb. When the ban wasn't lifted as quickly as he hoped, he took it... the way one takes things when one is unhealthily invested: he started spamming Headmistress and the mod team with increasingly rambling and abusive emails (lost to time, probably for the best). When that didn't work quickly enough, he tried a different route.
One of the many auctions that the Collector had won, some years prior, was EA's old iPod Touch📝 – which contained all of her favorite tunes and, buried somewhere in the data cache... a phone number. Which the Collector tried calling. And wouldn't you know it: EA picked up. She congratulated him on his sleuthing skills, listened patiently as he made his case, apologized for any distress caused by the unfair account restriction, and then they got married.
Kidding! She freaked the fuck out, hung up, and banned him for life from the forum and all EA shows and events.
After his ban, the Collector allegedly still tried to attend at least one VIP pre-show (one source in the comments says he was allowed to buy some merch, refunded for his ticket, and escorted out). He joined the Reform forum to bitch about EA and try to rally people to his cause, possibly made revenge posts about her on darker snark forums, and continued to hound the Asylum mod team. So in June 2014, EA came up with a radical and unexpected fix to the Collector problem.

The official Asylum Fan Forum has been shut down permanently. I have personally paid thousands of dollars each year to keep the forum safe and secure for you ... Unfortunately, the forum has not been kept safe and secure for me, a truth which disappoints me greatly, instead becoming a place where people who have physically threatened myself and my staff prey upon forum members, pressuring them to contact me and my staff on their behalf. If the gullible wish to humor my stalkers (who live in their parent’s basement at age 30 something) and thus put me in danger, they may do it on their own dime. They may also fuck off, because stupidity can kill, and I won’t be your victim. To those who enjoyed the forum, you know who to thank for its closure. (“On the closing of the Asylum Forum”)

Voilà! This is how a decade-long archive of shared history ends: not with a bang, but with a dirty delete and a sod-off communiqué.
The obliteration of the forum took everyone by surprise...

I was actually on the forum when it was taken down. I was navigating between posts and when I went to click on a different board, an error message came up. I honestly cried a little, I'm not ashamed to say. (WVC admin on Reddit, 2024)

...and I do mean everyone:

Chicago BFF / ex-admin, the next morning: Whoa, EA forum shut down? Ex-mod: It turns out that if someone spends enough years actively “waging war” to destroy what they can’t have, eventually they’ll be successful. * eye roll * Not even mods got prior warning. Just all the sudden, poof, gone. BFF: Really? She did not let the moderators know?! This is sounding worse and worse. Uggh. I’m so sorry. Such a loss. (...) Ok, threats are serious, but why not just put it in archive mode so no one can post? (...) Sad. I shall light a candle in the forum's honor. (Facebook posts; scroll down for screenshots)

It was a gut punch, especially for people who had poured countless hours into the community, or could have used some prior warning to save years of their own writing from the role-playing threads. One last chance to take a look around the place that had meant so much to so many.

From the wording of the announcement of closing the forum and a number of other things, it sometimes seems like EA doesn't like her fans much. :/ (🐀)

Three months after the forum was nuked, Battered Rose (a venerable EA fansite, which had been around since the Enchant era and had one of the most complete EA galleries online) announced that it was shutting down too.📝 The admin, who had also been a long-time forum mod, cited a lack of “time, energy, passion, or money” to keep the website going... and being upset at the sudden disappearance of the forum. It was, truly, the end of an era for the Asylum.
...Well, no point in living in the past. For those who could afford it, and still wanted to talk to/about EA after that (not everyone did 🐀), there was always the Asylum Army fanclub!
Over the summer of 2014, EA held regular live chats and Q&A's, and... many attendees really enjoyed them, and thought the AA was well worth the money after all. She also quietly parted ways with the much poo-pooed Headmistress around that time.

Just spent over 4 hours giggling, drinking tea and playing guessing games in chat with EA and other Asylum Army members ... No griping, no downers, just lots of fun. I think I like the way the ‘new fandom’ is going and now I’m really glad I finally decided to join the Army. (September 4, 2014🐀; Battered Rose had closed the day before)

The forum was lost forever, but perhaps that was a chance for a fresh start. Could this fanclub thing really be the Asylum Renaissance that fans had been longing for?

...I have come today to a very difficult but necessary decision, and that is to discontinue the Emilie Autumn Official Fanclub. The site itself, and the community chatroom, will remain open to you indefinitely, but I will no longer be making updates to the site. (Newsletter, September 8, 2014📝)

...Never mind, then.
Turns out the fanclub had been the Headmistress' idea all along. EA had been reluctant from the start, and although she really enjoyed the live chats with a safe community of people “who are there for the right reasons”, she couldn't overcome her fundamental discomfort with the concept. Lifetime and regular members would receive a bunch of digital downloads and a -35% coupon on the Asylum Emporium for their troubles. EA said she would definitely pop back once in a while for live chats, for free, just for fun, but to my knowledge, she never did.
And so the most devoted fans were left standing in the rain...

She is happy, she made it. She is fulfilling her dreams, found love and happiness after all the pain. I understand that she now doesn’t need “us” anymore ... That doesn’t change the fact she broke my heart with taking the Asylum Army and the forum from me. Yet, I am happy for her. (🐀)

...while naysayers pointed and laughed, Nelson-style.🦠

I don’t feel sorry at all for the people that paid for the Asylum Army fan club. Most of them knew that EA is an atrocious business woman and has broken many promises before. In fact, I laugh at them. They seriously thought that EA would actually stay consistent with this? (🐀)

EVERYTHING MUST GO: THE ASYLUM WHOLESALE

EA fans were left without an “official” home for about three years. This gave them plenty of time to be annoyed at EA for: not releasing the audiobook on time, not materializing any new project for a while... and the new sin of peddling random, ridiculously marked-up AliBaba jewelry as “merch” on her official store. Think faux-antique cameo pendants and $30 Big Ben rings (...because the Asylum story is set in London, get it?).

The whole accessories section looks like a tacky overpriced English souvenir shop. (🐀)

The fanbase lost a lost of steam in those in-between years, because there wasn't much to stick around for. As evidenced by the positive reception of the AA live chats, even in the midst of unresolved drama, out-loud interactions in a friendly environment have always been EA's saving grace. Considering the amount of online hate, there are shockingly few accounts of bad IRL encounters with EA: most people say that in live conversation, she comes across as a fun, warm, and genuinely sweet person. Some report that their negative opinion shifted after meeting her.
But there were no chats or live shows anymore. There was only social media, where she ignored questions and vague-posted about overdue projects – and the newsletter📝, which was all saccharine love-bombing to promote bland dropshipped trinkets. For fans who remembered the handcrafted merch (and two-way communication) of the early years, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

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Besides the questions in the title I tired to elaborate a little and also each question(s) has two, a. and b. sections. Section a. is meant for sort of a broad understanding. Section b. is my personal, specific case example (active claim, CA ~10 months).
I'm sure who you'll see will depend on state law, your injury, among other things. Regardless of who you see, more importantly: How do we (the injured worker) know if who we've been assigned to is doing their job correctly or just having an off day, since we know it's not required to have good bedside manner, what are they required by definition AND law? That said:

1a. Despite case by case variations; who are personnel that everyone will see no matter what? What should you expect from them, and is there more they can do...but only if you know how to ask? I'm imagining a knowledgeable answer would be a long list of all the possible outcomes within the maximum allowed in WC, but probably more helpful is to address the most common. A small list may only include a companies HR, Claims adjustor, and an Occupational Health doctor for example. Then continuing the list after those essential people is there typically a usual process where if once your case goes for a certain amount of time or ______ happens, you could expect to meet these ______ job title? I'm hoping to help other people at least have an idea of what to expect out of said people.

1b. TLDR: Here's one of the biggest examples of not knowing who to talk to and whether that information is correct. I have not been given crucial test results from 3 months ago. Original test (Neuropathy) doc said to get my results from my doctor, who sends me to therapist, who sends me back to doctor, my adjustor says doctor, doctor sends me to "Specialist", turns out not specialist, who sends me back to my doctor...ummmm....WTF do I do at my next doctors visits in a few days??

1b (cont.) It has come to my attention that I'm completely unaware of exactly what a large majority of the people I've been assigned to see do. In fact, in what capacity do I "have to see them"? Can I request a swap, or how do I make a complaint? I have been MORE than patient, and I've given the benefit of the doubt for so long that I can no longer accept being passed along. I'm already back where I started, for the 3rd time. Uh...so, besides just wanting information for myself, I'd think the test results should help me heal. I've been denied more treatments (Appeal's denied too) where I'd think that those test results could play a crucial role. Where once I thought there has there been a miscommunication, now feels like I'm in an echo chamber, or worse. This is quite alarming as it also shines light into the fact that I am also unaware of how "my doctor" can best help me, if at all. "My doctor", the one I'm required to see at Occupational Health, (I'm told I not allowed to see my family doctor) doesn't seem to do anything other than fill out the "Return to work form". Is that correct? How would I know?? They seem to just write whatever I tell them. Similarly the same goes for what treatments I've gotten. Best I can tell, there is no indication they have reviewed any of the information from other doctors and therapists. It's now going on 3 months where I haven't been given test results.

Unfortunately it's not just my doctor who I'm not getting information from. "Generic Adjustor" Enters the chat. or maybe not, because to top off the confusion, I can't get ahold of my adjustor who so far been the one steering me into the .... direction. Unfortunately I believe I'm waking up too late. I've called multiple times a day for a week straight while leaving messages and follow up emails noting that I've called. They do respond to email, which usually consists of one line stating something like "call anytime, I'll be in the office all week".. Funny thing is I'm not sure what exactly they are even supposed to do or bare minimum required to do. Even when I get ahold of them, I'm questioning if I can even trust them. I'm not saying "it's conspiracy". However due to the most recent info I've gotten, I do think the run around could be very deliberate play. How do I know if they're simply bad at their job or leaving me in the dark. It sure feels like it's purposeful. This all came to a head when after reviewing our last few emails, I see a pattern where they only respond to some of the questions, and even have given verifiably incorrect, contradictory information. How do I check these facts? Should I talk to a supervisor? Is there a system to check and balance these things? Who do I talk to? It all came to a head when I opened mail to find: Request of QME with the reason being "Objection to Primary Treating Physician's determination regarding temporary disability, permanent disability, or the need for future medical care." Aggravating but I'm sure they followed the (rules I was unaware of) book. It's questions like this that have me really, really upset: What is even meant by "Objection to Primary Treating Physician's determination"? 1. Quick sidebar - is that decision made by the "my doctor" that I described earlier - or the "Provider"? > Meaning, those two terms have been used interchangeably, and I fear that, and why I used quotes for "my doctor" earlier, I'm wondering if this other name (who happens to be another doctor at the Occupational Health office) a person I have never met let alone seen is the one calling the shots. Either way I'm pretty worried. 2. Here is another example which shows only a part of the circle of "who do I talk to". Here is a quote from my adjustor 10 days after the letter had been officiated, but before I got it states "you have not seen a specialist, attended a QME, or have a clear treatment plan defined by your primary treating physician.". Am I wrong to have read that to believe I'd still be seeing a specialist? Doesn't it read that the information the specialist decides would be what determines the next step? Isn't it safe to say that by month 10 I'd have a treatment plan --of course unless your not privy to your own test results?
Ending note: There is so many more examples I could give which to me paint a picture of neglect. From what I can tell, I either already signed my rights away or it's just not worth the fight. I don't even want to fight, or believed there would be a reason for a disagreement due to my injury but since that bubble of disillusionment has popped, how can I reproach getting the best medical treatment. I was lead to believe that after seeing a specialist I would have the option to get a second opinion before the QME. I haven't even seen the first specialist (I was sent to an office with a specialist in it, but the person I saw was just a family practitioner).and since both my doctor and my adjutor are not helping ---Who the fuck do I talk to?

LOOOONG first time trip report! 5/13-5/18, stayed at Beach Club, visited all four parks, bought Genie+ every day, had the standard DDP. Family of 4, two girls 5 and 9. I learned so much from this group over the past year and especially loved trip reports, so hopefully this post will be helpful to someone!
💲BUDGET💲
-- I booked the trip a year out so I could break it up into 12 manageable payments. I opened the no fee Disney VISA, which gives you several months of no interest on charges made towards Disney travel packages, rewards dollars to use at Disney, and a couple other perks like character meet and greets and discounts.
-- I signed up for Disney Movie Insiders. This is what you're supposed to do with all those little codes that come in Disney DVDs/Blurays. You enter the codes in exchange for points, and at 1000 points, you can redeem for a $10 Disney gift card. You also get points for being subscribed to Disney+, seeing Disney movies in the theater, their social media accounts, and a whole bunch of other things. I got $50 in gift cards from this alone.
-- If you want Disney-themed luggage, try thinking outside the box to save money! I got plain luggage in Mickey colors--red and black--and Mickey luggage tags to make them Disney themed.
-- I tried to budget for souvenirs via gift cards... but I failed, lol. Everything is so expensive, $100 is gone in a second. Plushes are like $40, coffee cups are $20, etc. Whatever you're planning to spend, double it! I get what people say about most shops having the same stuff, but it's definitely not all of them, most of the ones post-ride have unique stuff. And honestly it's kind of nice most of them have the same stuff, if you want to get whatever your kid was asking for earlier, you don't have to walk all the way back to the one shop you saw it at.
-- We paid for Memory Maker and I'm on the fence about it. On the one hand, it's really nice to get all the ride photos and meet and greet photos and magic shots. It's also really nice for the whole family to be in a lot of pictures and not have to swap with the other adult or find someone willing to take your picture. On the other, we definitely didn't utilize it as much as I wanted to because a lot of the photographers had pretty long lines and I just didn't want to spend time waiting for a picture I could take myself. If we came across someone with a shortish or no line, we made sure to get it, but for anyone with a long line, we just stood around the same spot and took our own.
🗓️PLANNING🗓️
-- If you have kids and live within easy driving distance of another amusement park, highly recommend making a visit BEFORE going to Disney to get an idea of how they handle that kind of day/environment, especially if they have never been. I quickly discovered we would absolutely need a stroller and I would need to be militant with the kids about staying hydrated. Also to avoid face paint, as heat + tears + paint + eyes = bad day! I felt so much better making these discoveries beforehand and being able to prepare accordingly, rather than making them at Disney.
-- USE AN AGENT! An agent is free to you, so why not have the help? Ours was amazing, she gave us quotes, booked the package, rebooked as needed later when a better deal came out, made all the payments, dining and extra reservations, and was just all-around awesome to work with. It was such a load off to know I wasn't on my own with all this stuff.
-- Watch everything Ear Scouts. No one explains Genie+ better, and Rob and Erick's videos are just so positive and beautiful and well done.
-- I also enjoyed reading Disney Tourist Blog--lovingly snarky but super informative!--and Disney Food Blog for fun tips and news.
-- I didn't find any park to be a half day park, we filled our whole day in every one and still didn't see everything!
-- My kids did really well, whenever they were on the verge of cranky, we had one ride in the stroller for a while, bought a snack (usually ice cream or popcorn), and used the bubble wand, and/or gave them some ibuprofen, and everyone felt better pretty quick. We never tried to do fireworks, we were all done by 8 so always left after dinner. The only park we closed down was EPCOT because we didn't get out of dinner until after close, and that was a really cool experience, the park was so quiet and empty and beautiful!
-- You don't NEED a Magic Band... but man, was it convenient. We just had 1.0 Magic Bands though, we didn't bother with the 2.0s.
-- I guess moving through security fast is important to people rope dropping... but as someone who didn't, it added like maybe 30 seconds to a minute to the experience the couple times my bag got flagged, it's really not a big deal.
-- I'm not saying anyone's lying about bad experiences or exaggerating or anything, but try to remember that far more people go on the Internet to complain than they do to praise. I got so stressed about all the things that could go wrong, and we had a pretty much perfect trip. The only attraction that broke down on us was Muppetvision, of all things. The only "bad behavior" we witnessed was the morning we were leaving, we could hear a dad across the hall yelling at his family, I think they overslept and were going to miss their flight or something? We just turned the TV on so we didn't have to hear him. A couple times we forgot to take our stuff with us when we parked our stroller or forgot some food in it, and neither people nor animals bothered it. The only dicey thing that happened to us was me dropping my phone into the Dumbo moat, the cast members fished it out and it still worked, I sent them a cast compliment for all their help! All the cast members were great, I'm not really sure what people expect but IMO they all do amazing for having to be peppy and helpful all day in absolutely blazing heat, walking a ride conveyer belt nonstop, repeating the same spiels over and over, meeting person after person, etc. I wouldn't last a 2 hour shift let alone 8. Cast members, you rock!!!
✈️TRAVEL✈️
-- We flew Delta, flight there was flawless, flight home was delayed by an hour waiting for crew and was a little bumpy (which is not great for a nervous flyer like me) but otherwise fine.
-- Get TSA PreCheck! Good for a few years, if the adults have it the kids have it too. It made the whole experience so much easier. That said, even PreCheck still moves kind of slow at MCO, so definitely get there at least 2 hours early for your flight. Use curbside check-in for bags, way faster than the long line inside!
-- On our agent's recommendation, we used Away We Go for ground transport in Orlando. They communicate really well, both ways were flawless, no complaints!
-- We used Minnie Vans to get to Animal Kingdom + Sanaa and Magic Kingdom, what a wonderful service! Definitely pricey, but they had cartoons on in the car, booster seats they set up for you, and the drivers were so nice and friendly and had fun trivia to share. I never had any problem requesting one when I needed it.
⛱️BEACH CLUB⛱️
-- We knew we wanted an onsite hotel where you could walk to at least one park. This pretty much limits you to a handful of Deluxe hotels or the Swan and Dolphin. Beach Club won for us because it's "in the Disney bubble" and you can walk to 2/4 parks. Note that while you can technically walk to Hollywood Studios, it is a LOOOONG walk. The boat is a nice not crowded alternative! We did not make use of Early Entry or Extended Hours, we're just not built for either. Beach Club was lovely, we booked a resort view but I think we ended up with a water view, we were right by the quiet pool and could see the water beyond from our room. Stormalong Bay was a little crazy for us but we loved the quiet pool. Best thing about Beach Club though is the location, EPCOT is literally steps away!
🌳ANIMAL KINGDOM🌳
-- We had read that there's really no bad day to do AK, so we started there. We rode: Navi River Journey, Flight of Passage, Kali River Rapids, Everest, Kilimanjaro Safaris, Triceratops Spin, and Dinosaur--so pretty much everything! With Genie+ we walked onto all of them. We also met Moana, Pocahontas, and Russell! The only thing we didn't do here that we wanted to was the Gorilla Falls trail, but we just ran out of time before the park closed.
🌐EPCOT🌐
-- We had read to avoid EPCOT on Fridays and Saturdays, so we went on Wednesday. We rode: Grand Fiesta Tour, Living with the Land, Nemo, Spaceship Earth, Imagination with Figment, Frozen, Remy, Journey of Water, and Guardians--everything we wanted! Again, with Genie+, we walked right onto everything! Outside of our character meal (more on that in the dining section!), we also met Anna, Elsa, and Asha! Tried a couple of Flower and Garden snacks: chicken and waffles, fruit and cheese strudel, and potato pancakes, all were delicious! Everyone had a different favorite day, but EPCOT was personally my favorite day, it felt like we were firing on all cylinders and the day just went really smoothly!
🏰MAGIC KINGDOM🏰
-- We had read that Wednesdays were the quietest days at MK, so we were originally going to try to do it that day, but we could only get a reservation for Cinderella's Royal Table on Thursday, so we switched it up. Definitely the most crowded of all the parks we visited, but I think that's just the norm for MK, everyone wants to go to the castle park with the most rides. We rode: Regal Carousel, Tomorrowland Speedway, Barnstormer, Magic Carpets, Mad Tea Party, People Mover, Dumbo, Small World, Little Mermaid, Pirates, Space Ranger Spin, Jungle Cruise, TRON, and Peter Pan. Again, with Genie+, we walked right onto everything! The only ride we missed at this park that we wanted to do was Pooh, I couldn't manage to get a return time that was earlier than we planned on leaving. Outside of our character meals (more on those in the dining section!) we also met Mirabel, Tiana, and Rapunzel! We had both the Rapunzel and Aurora ice creams, both so good and cute!
🎬HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS🎬
-- We had read that, like MK, it's better to do HS later in the week, so we went Friday. We rode: Slinky, Alien Saucers, Toy Story Mania, Rise, Smuggler's Run, Runaway Railway. Again, with Genie+, we walked right onto everything! The only ride we missed was Tower of Terror, again I couldn't manage to get a return time that was earlier than we planned on leaving. We also met Olaf, be aware Olaf doesn't sign stuff, they just give you a signature card. This park needs more shade IMO, especially Toy Story Land, I know it's supposed to be Andy's backyard, but I don't see why that means we can't have some shade from trees or something. 🤪 Blue milk from Galaxy's Edge was really good, the family was all fighting over it!
🍽️DINING🍽️
-- We almost certainly lost some money on the DDP, but I'm still glad we got it because it allowed us to do more table service meals and have less stress overall about expenses. We easily used up everything but child quick service credits, we had a few of those left over near the end.
Here's where we ate!
BOARDWALK DELI/PIZZA WINDOW: Pizza for the kids, sandwiches for the adults. Tasty and satisfying after our day of travel!
BEACHES AND CREAM: Got the kitchen sink for the experience, but honestly it's not great, all the ice cream and toppings melt together quick and you just end up with weird ice cream soup.
SAT'ULI CANTEEN: LOVED this place, everything was so yummy! Best quick service we had!
SANAA: Since Animal Kingdom closes so early, we thought we'd try to extend the experience by eating at Sanaa. What a great idea, we got seated right by a window and saw so many animals! The food was great too.
AKERSHUS: Our favorite princess meal! We met Aurora, Tiana, Snow White, Ariel, and Belle. They were all lovely, and the breakfast was really good too. Only 1 credit on the DDP!
GARDEN GRILL: Our kids really enjoyed getting to look down over Living with the Land and the fact that the restaurant spins. We met Farmer Mickey, Pluto, and Chip and Dale. They were fun and even came to our table more than once. Food was good!
SPACE 220: Not on the DDP, but wow, what a cool restaurant! Almost like a ride with the theming and the elevator up. Food was really good.
CINDERELLA'S ROYAL TABLE: You gotta eat in the castle! We paid for it OOP because we didn't want to use up 2 DDP credits here. You're really going for the location and the princesses, the food is kinda meh, not bad but not as good as other places. The restaurant is small and they have to turn tables quick, so it's very understandable to me that the princesses have to move fast. It's not that they rush you, they'll take all the pictures you ask for and sign whatever and answer your questions, but if you don't have much you need, they try to keep moving. Akershus is much bigger so they are able to be more relaxed there. The only small bummer is that we didn't see Merida (maybe she was on vacation too!) We did meet Cinderella, Ariel, Jasmine, and Aurora though!
CRYSTAL PALACE: We are not big on buffets but we enjoyed meeting Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger!
TOPOLINO'S: Maybe the best food of the trip, steak and eggs were so good! The character artist costumes are so cute too. It was fun to have an excuse to ride the Skyliner to get here from Beach Club too.
DOCKING BAY 7: The theming is great, but the food wasn't as good as Satuli Canteen IMO.
THE MARKET AT ALE & COMPASS: We had quick service credits we wanted to use up on the last day and we didn't want to leave the resort again, otherwise I would have gone somewhere else, food was meh.
✨EXTRAS✨
-- I originally wanted to book Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique for my kids, but it's so expensive/competitive that I decided to didn't want the stress. Instead I booked Have Wand, Will Travel to come to our room and bought dresses from Presley Couture and Only Little Once. I chose Have Wand, Will Travel because they keep character throughout. Fairy Godmother Elyse was amazing and so much fun, my kids loved it and kept talking about it all day!
-- That same morning I ordered a Sammicakes breakfast box with beignets for us to eat. I also ordered a pretend letter from The DCP and Me on Etsy to make it seem like the breakfast came from Tiana. My kids also loved this and had fun telling Tiana about it both times we met her. Sammicakes was good but a LOT of food, sadly we didn't end up eating half of it. It can last you at least 3 days!
-- We had Birthdays and More decorate our door, it was a really fun surprise for the kids on our first day and made our room easy to find. The kids also loved reusing the decorations at home on their own doors!
-- Matching shirts and ear hats, all from Etsy! So many cool designs there, hardest part is choosing!
-- Got my kids a pin trading lanyard with some pins, they loooooved pin trading! It was like free souvenirs.
🧳PACKING🧳
-- Things the Internet Told Me to Pack That I Needed: Scissors, ziploc bags, ibuprofen (kids and adults), garbage bags, big carabiners to hook on the strolleuse to carry multiple bags at once.
-- Things the Internet Told Me to Pack that I Didn't Need: stainless steel straws (the paper straws are more like hard cardboard, they really don't break down unless your kid is gnawing on them or something), ponchos (it did rain some most days, but wearing a poncho was almost more miserable than not wearing one, it's so hot and humid to be walking around in a plastic bag! We did better taking shelter and using umbrellas.), wipes (obv you need them if your kid is younger, but mine were older and just never got messy enough to need them), glow sticks (we never stayed anywhere long enough to use them), bottled wateLiquid IV (the tap water tasted the same as home to us, but we live in a rural area so maybe we are just used to imperfect water?) Basically, the less you can get away carrying in the parks, the better. It's annoying to lug stuff around you don't end up needing or using!
🛞STROLLER🛞
-- I know it seems insane that your 5 year old and 9 year old will need a stroller, but mine definitely did. Once I accepted that I was going to have to get one, I tried to make the best of it, and actually got really into decorating it so we could always easily spot it in the sea (the decorations also later made nice wall decor for a gallery of our trip!) The Magic Spotter flag was the best investment, hardly anyone had them so it was easy to instantly spot our stroller anywhere we left it, even if it got moved. That said, I definitely didn't want to spend a lot on a stroller we were really only buying for this one trip, so I got a used Joovy Caboose on Facebook Marketplace for $50. It was very hard to handle with two older kids in it, and even with one it was hard to handle unless the kid was in the back seat. So we basically used it like a single stroller, glad I didn't spend a lot on it since it was so hard to drive!
☔WEATHER☔
-- We had mostly great weather, it rained some every day except Magic Kingdom day but it passed within an hour each time. We wore socks with Crocs so that if/when it rained, we could just take our wet socks off and walk in our Crocs, this worked great! Don't trust the weather reports though, two days it wasn't supposed to rain. One day it actually didn't, the other day it did and we had to walk in wet shoes because we didn't wear the Crocs that day. Just figure it might rain any day and be prepared! See above note RE: ponchos being not great and shelter + umbrellas being better. When it didn't rain, It. Was. Hot. 🥵 In the 90s but definitely felt hotter with the humidity making it so sticky. We felt there was plenty of shade at Animal Kingdom and EPCOT, but hardly any at Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios, which I would say slightly affected how much fun we had on those days comparatively.
Phew! That's about it, let me know if you have any questions!

Robots are already replacing Internet users by creating virtual reality for them. Virtual reality allows users to interact with computers and other devices without physical contact .It is quite possible that soon the "Internet" will be replaced by a personal advertising application with fake fans of the brands "X in a circle" entering into discussions with the same neurofan of the "triangle of letters"
The Dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that claims that the modern internet consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content driven by algorithmic curation.
Targeted advertising is a way to display ads on social networks tailored to the interests and demographics of the audience. It allows you to interact with customers, inform them about products, increase brand awareness and attract attention to promotions and discounts. Targeted advertising can be used for direct sales, warming up the audience and increasing customer loyalty.
A digital bubble is a phenomenon in which websites determine what information a user wants to see based on their location, past activities, and preferences. As a result, websites show only information that is consistent with the user's past points of view, and he becomes intellectually isolated in his information bubble.
It's great, of course, if I can get Megacorporation bots with my stories about the fucking Dishonord, but it's sad that we'll never get together with them...

Nicholas Mattison bumped his shoulder as he stretched his arms over his head, pulled back the soft pink curtain that draped over his bed like a canopy, and rubbed the sleep out of his green eyes as his bare feet met the plush carpeting of his bedroom.
If Nicholas was any more alert than his still-sleepy, bedheaded current self, he might have astutely recognized that the bed was a little too small for his lanky frame, or recalled that the bed in his freshman dorm definitely didn't have lacy, rose-hued canopy curtains.
The unlikely array of unfamiliar accoutrements in Nicholas' room only properly crystallized once he squinted and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, glancing around a space that resolutely wasn't his. Gone were the haphazard textbooks splayed across his desk, the guitar that had been propped against the mirror hanging on his closet door, and the laundry basket he promised himself he'd get to on Saturday morning, first thing.
Instead, Nicholas' field of view was met with walls painted a garish shade of bubblegum pink, a neat row of posters advertising pop stars he'd never heard of before, and an ornate door with a sign that read "Nick's Room" in bubble-letter script.
With a surge of panic, he pulled open the closet door, biting his lower lip with a brow-furrowing frown when he saw a walk-in selection of elegant ball gowns and starchy-frilled ballerina tutus.
Where WAS he?
**
Hello! Thanks for reading a silly prompt. I wanted to leave it mysterious so we can fill in some blanks together, but the gist of the prompt is this: Our protagonist discovers that, one way or another, he's found himself living in (read: trapped) a dollhouse. Like the post's title says, a daring escape ensues!
And that brings us to your character: Who is she? A fellow college student who found herself plucked from her normal life and brought to the dollhouse? Is she a brought-to-life doll who already lives there? Is she the supervillainess/mad scientist/crazy gal who owns the dollhouse and is gleeful to have a new plaything in Nicholas? It's your call!
If you're interested, please send a message my way! I ask that you be at least 20 as well, with a knack for descriptive, detailed posts that are at least 200 words or so long. (I break Discord's character limit like it's my job, so there's no shame there!) Let me know what you think of the idea, any concepts you might have, and who you may write as a character opposite Nicholas. See you in the dollhouse soon!

Chapter 26 - The Infinite Beckons
Previous Chapter
“Okay, this part’s a little tricky.” Ma’et gestured out the shuttle’s cockpit. “You got lined up easy enough, and our velocity’s at a relative zero to the ship. The bay door’s open. Now you engage the lateral thrusters while monitoring the distance from the shuttle to the bay’s interior wall. Come in too fast and you’ll damage them both..”
Trix looked over at the controls, and the neatly gummed labels that the humans had placed over the English text with her own language. She gingerly pressed the ‘Lateral Thruster’ button, then as the control knob next to it lit up, she twisted it slowly.
An earlier misadventure when lining up the ship and the shuttle where she’d twisted the control knob much more rapidly made her much more cautious about giving it too much power too quickly, yet the shuttle slowly drifted - away from the ship. “Other thruster, feathers.”
Chagrined, she dialed the thruster back to zero, then rotated it the other direction. The ship immediately stopped moving away, and instead drifted into the hangar bay. Trix watched as it drifted past the door, staring at the distance readout until it dropped into the yellow and immediately swung the knob the other way. It took a couple of tries to get the velocity back to zero, but she managed it.
“Beautiful. Now we engage the grav plating which lets the ship’s internal grav pull us down as it ramps up, and close the external door via the console over there.” Ma’et gestured to the remote console, and Trix scanned it, punching the buttons as she found them.
“Nicely done. Go ahead and hit the engine shutdown. In the old days there’d be like, thirty steps to it but nearly all of it is automated. But lucky you, you get to read all about the manual sequence since taking over in the event of computer failure is one of a pilot’s duties.” Ma’et chuckled and squeezed Trix’s shoulder. “For now, that’s good enough. Go ahead and open both the lateral boarding door, and the rear loading door. Also extend the rear loading ramp.”
Trix did, then glanced over at Ma’et. “Anything more?”
“Nope. First day on the job, and you’ve done the first job successfully. Not perfectly, but pretty damn good for your first time piloting off planet. Go ahead and head back to talk with the Captain, and I’ll handle the rest.”
Trix unbuckled the acceleration harness (Though, she felt zero acceleration during the entire trip so she couldn’t fathom just WHY Ma’et had insisted on her buckling in) and moved past the much smaller woman as she left the cockpit.
In the back, Josh was already outside the ship, grabbing a handtruck. She watched as he pushed it up the loading ramp to the stack of boxes that contained the food and equipment she’d need for the next few weeks of existence here in space. “Why aren’t you using one of the gravity belts?” She gestured over to the wall where the belts were hanging.
“Eh, this stuff’s fairly light and those have a limited lifespan. I don’t want to burn out the Keplite cores on stuff we can just move by hand. They’re expensive.”
“Oh. What’s Keplite, anyway? Ji and Min have mentioned it a few times.” Trix glanced over at the large belts with their big circular pads in the middle.
Before Josh could answer, Alex walked in between them. “Ji, Min! We’re going to be converting the room across from yours back into crew quarters for Trix. Gonna need you two to move the Spider. Is there room here in the hangar for it?”
“It’ll fit better if we assemble it and use packing mode.” Ji countered, as he hopped out of the shuttle. “It’ll take a day or so. We’ve got it spread all out in there.”
Alex turned over to Trix and beckoned. “Follow me. Gonna give you the full tour while they’re unloading." He took a few steps back, then lifted his arms wide to gesture to their surroundings. "This is obviously the hangar bay. Shuttle's the big thing you were just flying. Below us is a small cargo hold, empty right now. Not gonna show you unless you happen to like large empty boring-ass boxes.” He raised an eyebrow, and Trix quickly shook her head. "Alright. Most of the shit in here is just maintenance tools and loading gear. Nothing exciting. Ramp to main transit corridor here."
They walked out into the hallway. “Okay, well through that door’s opposite the hangar is the fabber bay. The fabber is a huge machine that manufactures stuff for us, like a 3D printer. Do you guys have anything like that?” Trix shrugged, and Alex continued. “Well either way, it can make virtually anything from a bed to a bomb to a computer. The more complex and difficult items take a hell of a lot longer to make. It’s also a major power hog since the manufacturing process uses extremely powerful fields, both magnetic and force. In other words, if you need something and we didn’t bring it with you we can make it here.”
He walked down the hall a bit, and gestured to the doors on either side. “Launcher bays, 1 and 2. Normally we use ‘em to launch beacons, buoys, sensors, things like that into space. If someone tries to start shit with us we CAN use them to launch missiles but we have very few of those available. We’re not out here to get in fights, but if we have to defend ourselves we pack a big punch.” He opened one of the doors and walked inside. “The big hatch over there is the manual tube loader. The ship can auto-load various things but if we need to put something into space that isn’t already in storage, that’s where we do it. If Ji tells you to climb in yourself, he’s joking and you should hit him because it only exists to launch shit into space.”
Trix laughed at that, but she had learned enough of Ji’s sense of humor while working on the car to understand the sentiment. “Will I even be in here at all though?”
“Maybe. If something needs to be manually loaded, we use these. Back when we were at the derelict ship I had to send a battery over to help out while we planned our rescue. You might be asked to do the same.” Alex shrugged and lead her out into the hall. “Last thing here is the ship’s primary armament.” He reached over to the side of the hallway and pressed a hatch release. The compartment it lead to was incredibly small and tightly cramped.
“We don’t use it much outside of scaring off pirates or relieving stress, but this is our primary weapon out in space. Eight-chamber five meter long rotary railgun. Fires one round every 1.2 seconds that travel roughly a million kilometers per hour when fired stationary, or closer to 280 kilometers per second. It fires either solid armor-piercing unguided slugs or flak munitions that are used to produce clouds of metallic debris. The former will shred a ship’s armor and pulverize anything inside. The latter can overwhelm particle shields and damage exterior components without nearly as much penetration. The reason I’m saying all this to you,” He tapped the top of the cannon where it joined to the ship. “This thing’s got a super limited firing arc. Meaning that we can only shoot what we’re pointed at. If, by some miracle, we get into a fight out there then our ability to shoot back is gonna depend on your ability to fly the ship while facing the enemy.”
Trix swallowed heavily as she tried to imagine just how powerful this massive cannon was. She glanced over at the side of it, to the twin belts that fed in ammo. Each round it would fire was longer than her forearm and thicker than her waist.
“That’s the worst case scenario though. In reality, if we get into any shit out there, fighting is the LAST thing we want to do. Negotiation to avoid hostility first, escape second, fight last.” Alex shooed her out of the compartment. “That said if we encounter any low-yield junk out there then we’ll get some target practice in. If you’re game then we can let you try targeting for a bit and unload some kinetic mayhem while things are dull.” He grinned wickedly, as he manually pulled the hatch back into place, sliding two large locking levers into place.
“Okay, that’s it for this deck. There’s stairs on the far side leading up to the tech deck but the ladder here’s quicker.”
They climbed up the ladder, with Alex leading and Trix following. Her wings banged against the ceiling as she climbed, and it took her a few moments to get them tucked in tight enough to get through the hatch but with Alex’s help they got up there.
“Tech deck. Mostly. In the front of the ship here right under Bridge access is the exception, the pool room.” He opened the door and they walked in together. “Mainly used for observation but the pool there is great for relaxation. You can adjust the temperature with the controls on the wall there, goes from chilly to full on hot tub. Adjustable depth from 3 to 10 feet, and the pool walls are display panels. If you use a breather it’s fun to turn the display to external then go down underwater and relax while staring at the stars. Do you swim much?”
Trix nodded. “Sure, there’s a river a… couple kilometers? I think? I’m not good with converting distances yet. Anyway, it’s near the hab and we’d go there when I was younger and didn’t have as much to do in the fields.”
“Cool. Well, feel free to use it but just a word of warning you might want to check if anyone’s in first. Swimwear is optional and since the crew is a pretty tight family we don’t usually get embarrassed if we’re seen swimming in the buff.” Alex waved over at the control console. “If you’re not sure the big green button on the outside is the comm button, just ask if anyone’s using it.”
“Ji brought me in here when we came up to do the medical scans. He showed me Kiveyt from orbit for the first time. Do all human ships have a room like this?” Trix reached over to dip her hand into the water. It was quite warm to the touch.
“Nah. This ship wasn’t originally designed as a scout ship or survey ship. It was originally a yacht. Big luxury vehicle for rich people to fly around in space and have fun in. Throw parties. Most of the ridiculous amenities it has I got rid of ages ago, but that left a huge amount of space we filled up with all the launchers and sensors and whatnot. I kept the pool though because I love soaking after a long day.” He pressed the door control and they left the pool room.
“Just past the pool room on either side of the ship we have collection dishes for D-space particles. Those are EVA only, so you won’t be dealing with those. They let us collect extremely powerful particles which lead back here.” Alex spoke as he walked, and turned the corner into a much, much larger room.
“This is the ship’s main power supply. Charged particles enter the torus reactor and discharge energy which is converted into electrical power and routed through the ship. Those bottles over there…” He gestured to four massive grey metal canisters on the wall. “Contain the actual particles. They’re made of the strongest materials we have because if one ruptured, the ship would instantly explode from the inside out. Don’t worry,” Alex quickly raised his hands. “The chances of that happening are virtually impossible. This is the single most well-protected location on the ship.”
He gestured to the other side of the large room. “Over there’s the terminals that Min is usually at. She and Ji are in charge of all engineering. That means power, propulsion, all computer systems, and the like. Well, the physical parts of them that is. Ma’et is our computer geek when it comes to integration, programming, and all the fun software shit.”
Alex left the room, and gestured to the other side. “I’m sure you’re familiar with medical over there. Let’s do us both a favor and not have to go there much. Otherwise I’m pretty sure Kyshe will gut me.” He didn’t stop to show her inside, and they reached the main staircase. “The back half of the ship on this deck is all propulsion access and maintenance. I’m more or less our damage control guy, along with Ji and Min. For them it’s because they’re smart as shit and for me it’s because I had to learn how to maintain my own ship. Most common damage out here is stray micro meteors or debris while we’re parked and the particle shields are down. Sometimes worn out components inside. Again, no EVA for you so the only thing you’ll need to worry about for DC is being an assistant to one of us while we fix shit.”
They went up the stairwell to the uppermost of the three floors. “There used to be an observation bubble above us, but I had it removed because it was useless. Even if I covered it with ablative plating it was a massive wart on top of the ship that served zero practical purpose. Anyway, the top floor here is where you’ll spend 90% of your time on the ship. Back here…” Alex started walking to the rear of the ship, and walked through a large open doorway. “Mess hall. We generally have two kinds of meals here - when we’re on long deployment, the food extruder over there can produce rations. They’re not amazing but they’re quick both to make and eat. It’ll also make reasonable meat and dairy substitutes. If you want a real meal though we usually keep the good stuff in deep freeze so it takes a fair amount of time to be ready. Other than that the bev dispenser is over there. Water and various juices on tap all the time, alcohol is restricted only to meals only. We all get together for breakfast and dinner though, since it’s just a good way to socialize. Tonight expect a big meal in celebration.”
He walked out of the mess, and opened a door to a large open area. “Rec room. Not used a whole lot because most of us use haptic suits for exercise and recreation but we don’t have a suit that’ll fit you or your wings, so I want you to be in here twice a week at least. Ma’et is a great partner for any exercise that doesn’t involve fighting, unless you like bruises in which case she’ll happily go a few rounds with gloves on. Pilots don’t get the level of exercise you’re used to on the planet working fields so exercise up here will be pretty damn vital.”
She looked around the room, then hurried to catch up to the captain as he walked out. “On the other side of the hall from the Mess is general storage. Cleaning supplies, a small laundry unit if the one in your room quits working, random odds and ends. Also a few extra bunks just in case we need them. Unfortunately I am going to have to have you spend one night in here while we get your room cleaned up and ready for you.” He walked in, and over to one of the walls. “Bunk folds down from here. Looks, uh…” He glanced at the fold-down bed and back at Trix. “Looks tight. Do me a favor and see if you’re gonna be OK there?”
It was very close, but Trix laid down on the sleeping pad and adjusted until she found a good comfortable spot. “For just one night, this will do…”
“Alright, no worries then. We’ll have your room ready quick as we can.” She got off the pad and Alex gestured for her to follow. “Quarters themselves are here, 4 on either side of the main hallway. Myself, Josh, Ma’et, and Amanda on the right in that order. Ji, Min, Your quarters, and the last was converted into a mechanical room for Par. Speaking of…”
He walked into the last room and knocked on a large hatch. “Par, would it be alright if I introduced our newest shipmate?”
“Of course, Captain.” The hatch slid silently open revealing a large, intricate array. Circuit boards were laid out in rows and wires ran between them in perfectly neat, ordered channels. In the center of it all was a large oblong egg-looking object. “Trix, may I present to you Parathanelias Sigma-822.”
Several rows of lights lit up along the side of the egg, and the pleasant musical voice she’d heard so often came from a small speaker alongside it. “It is a pleasure to meet you in person, Trksehnoarala.”
Trix stared at the open hatch then gestured behind her. “I thought you were in those floating metal balls…?”
“The spheres you mention are my remotes. None of them are large enough to house my primary systems. In a way, they are my eyes, ears, and limbs. My true nature is integration here within the ship itself, and I make up for my limited mobility in person by having the greatest mobility of any other member of the crew.”
“He also has an avatar in VR of an organic human, but most of the time he uses the floating spheres to interact with us and the rest of the world. His core,” Alex gestured to the egg-like central object, “houses his base personality and his most important memories. The rest of this is extra storage for less critical information. I’m a bit jealous because his most important memories will always be preserved forever in perfect clarity. The rest of us get to have our memories fade with time, but his will be eternal.”
Alex stood there mutely for a moment then shook his head. “Anyway. Back to the tour. Thanks Par!”
“My pleasure.” The hatch slid silently shut and Alex and Trix left the room. “This room has been empty for long enough I pretty much gave it over to Ji and Min for a long while.” Alex walked into the room next to Par’s. “It’s kind of a mess but we’re going to get it cleaned up then it’ll be yours.”
There was no bed in the room, and the tables against the walls were covered with electronics and quickboards. In the center of the room, a huge metal contraption was spread out. Eight large jointed legs were wired in to a big central circular turret. Above that, a multitude of ‘limbs’ extended out - one a large grasper with clawed metal fingers, another ending with an odd cone-shaped implement with a blackened tip. A third was a huge metal pipe jutting out, and a fourth looked to be a number of small openings to place something into.
Trix gestured to it, “What is THAT thing?”
“That’s the Spider. It’s a long-time project the Twins have been working on. Pretty much since they joined the crew, really. It was meant to be a mechanical walker for the military but… well, that’s their story to tell.” Alex snorted. “There’s going to be enough time to go into the details later. Point is, before we even start leaving the system we’re gonna move this out, get a full king sized bed in here for you, some more storage, and so on. That door,” He gestured to a door on the other side of the room, “Leads to a hygiene unit. Full on shower, no bath but if you want to soak the Pool’s down a floor. Aside from no tub it has a deluxe toilet, sink, and a small cleaning unit for clothes.”
Trix cautiously stepped around the large disassembled robot, and opened the door to peer inside. The hygiene unit was much larger than she’d expected, and she was grateful to see that most of the facilities was familiar to her.
“Okay, one last stop and it’s the most important.” Alex walked out into the hallway and Trix rushed to catch up, almost tripping as she hopped over a piece of scrap cable along the floor. “I’m sure this will become your second home on the ship real fast. The bridge.”
They walked down the hall through a small access corridor into a large, wide open space. A large chair sat in the center with a number of controls and articulating arms present on the back. In front of it, a number of control panels were arranged in rows. The front of the bridge and both sides were dominated by massive window screens that showed the area the ship was currently facing. She could see one screen to the side with a display showing Kiveyt, first as a small dot with a zoomed-in and blown up image next to it.
“The door back there in the corner leads to a briefing room, nothing special there but a table and chairs. The big chair in the middle is mine, but if you ask super nicely I’ll let you sit in it.” Alex grinned, and pointed at the console in the very center of the bridge, in front of the Captain’s chair. “But that station over there is primary navigation. Josh is there quite a lot of the time, though just as often I navigate from the Captain’s Chair or Ma’et controls the ship from her neural interface. As of now, though, I bequeath ownership of it unto you - for the next few weeks, at least.”
Trix walked around the bridge staring at everything. The control consoles were smooth, rounded and sleek in their presentation. Each one had a large keyboard in front covered with the strange runes of the Humans’ language. Various other instruments and implements were present at each station, but at hers she smiled gratefully to see that the keys had already changed and had more familiar and recognizable letters in place of the Humans odd script. The layout was definitely weird, and she knew it was going to take time and effort to grow accustomed but at the very least she would be able to understand what she was doing as she learned. Even better, the seat lacked the same high back that the other seats had, which would have been pressed tightly and uncomfortably against her wings.
She glanced back at Alex, who just nodded at her. Encouraged, she took a seat and glanced around. “This is mine.” She whispered it and then let her wings spread out with pleasure as she realized that from here, from this station, she would be the one personally controlling the entire massive vehicle behind her. It lacked the flight stick of the shuttle or the handle controls of her aircar, and in a way she felt disappointed she wouldn’t be able to manually control the ship the same way she could the smaller vehicles. But as she looked around her and rested her hands on the cool surface of the console, she felt something else. A thrill of anticipation at the thought of being the one in control of this massive ship and everyone inside of it.
Alex climbed several steps up to the captain’s chair on its elevated dais, and took a seat directly behind her. The sight of a winged alien in front of him at the nav console with the stars stretching out above and beyond her was a strange one, but a pleasant one. He tried to think of a witty quip to finish the tour with, but failing that he settled for a much simpler one instead.
“Welcome aboard, Pilot.”
—--
“Okay, before we get started, I believe that this is a special occasion warranting a toast.” Alex sat at the head of the large table at the mess, with the other six organic members of the crew assembled further down. “To our new pilot trainee!”
“Here Here!” “To Trix!” “To our Trainee!”
Alex took a sip of his whisky, and sighed in pleasure. “God that hits the spot. Okay everyone, dig in.”
The dinner was an odd affair, mostly because every single member was wearing their visor. Trix could not speak English, and the crew couldn’t speak her native tongue. Masks which would automatically translate couldn’t be worn during a meal so the solution was to have real-time speech to text appearing on everyone’s visor. Trix, who never had worn a visor before, had a difficult time getting the display to appear just right in front of her eyes but she and Par had gotten it dialed in.
Trix glanced at the array of food in front of her. Some items looked familiar, others completely foreign, and none of it smelled quite right. She gestured to the food. “None of this is from Kiveyt. Is it safe for me to eat it?”
“I went through our entire comestible database while we were on the planet. Surprisingly there’s almost no Terran food you can’t eat.” Josh had a massive burrito nearly as long as Ma’et’s arm on the plate in front of him, and he spoke while dabbing hot sauce over it. “All of our Macronutrients are completely interchangeable. Most Micronutrients are as well. There’s a few exotic vitamins and amino acids that you need that we can’t provide, but we have supplements from the planet that’ll handle those.”
“Oh.” Trix glanced around at the table, trying to decide what to eat. The spread was, per Alex’s suggestion, extremely large and quite diverse. “I’m not sure where to start then.”
Min picked up a large platter with a circular dish on it. “Far as I’m concerned the best place to start is with Pizza. It’s one of the most widely loved foods throughout Terran space.” She dumped a slice onto the plate in front of Trix, while Ji slid a very tall glass of water over to her, alongside an odd reddish looking beverage.
“Give the fruit punch a try too. It’s much more sweet than the juice you were serving down on the planet. A lot more mild too.” He suggested, and gestured to another plate. “Also? Tacos are never a bad choice.”
Trix reached out and picked up one of the odd, semi-circular items. Ji grabbed one as well, and bit into it with gusto. Trix mimicked the motion, crunching into the hard shell. It was quite interesting, tasteless at first as she bit into the shell and the lettuce, but then the spiced meat hit her tongue. It was quite mild but not unpleasant. She chewed on it and gulped down a mouthful. “Not bad.” She took another bite.
The taco vanished quickly, and she glanced down at the slice of Pizza next. “Like this, Trix.” Min gestured to pick it up by the crust, putting her fingers in front of it to prevent it from flopping down. Trix followed Min’s example, and took a huge bite. This one was even milder, almost disappointingly so. “Not much flavor to this one. Is all your food really light like this?”
The humans glanced around at that. “Y’know, Sophie mentioned our rations were tasteless. They have a pretty strong cinnamon taste to ‘em.” Alex sat back thoughtfully as he nursed the glass of whisky in his hand. “The food we had down on the planet was all pretty strong flavors…”
Josh handed the bottle of hot sauce in his hand over to Trix. “Try a dab of this. It adds a kick to some foods.”
Trix took the bottle, and put a few drops of it on the slice of pizza in front of her. She took another bite, and her eyes lit up. The next few bites all had more hot sauce each, and the crust itself ended up practically drenched in it. “Thanks, Josh. That was delicious.”
The rest of the crew was staring at her and she shrunk back slightly at their intense scrutiny. Had she done something wrong? She hadn’t ever offended them during any meals back on the planet, so the sudden shift in attention was jarring and quite uncomfortable.
Ji whistled at the sight of the alien hungrily wofling down the slice of pizza covered in bright spicy sauce. “Here, try some of that on a taco next!” He picked up another shell and offered it to her.
Trix reached out and took the taco, this time pouring a hefty amount of sauce on it. Eating this one was much messier, and she could feel the hot sauce dribbling down the side of her mouth as she took a huge bite. Min handed her a paper towel, and she embarrassedly wiped away the errant food. “Thanks, Min. That was great too, Ji.”
“Hold up.” Alex stood up and walked over to one of the cupboards, pulling out another bottle of sauce. “I’m curious now. This is a lot hotter than the sauce you’ve been trying thus far. See if it’s to your liking. Just, start with a very small amount. A little goes a LONG way.” He walked back to the table, placing the bottle next to Trix. She studied it briefly, mostly the logo - a caricature of a human whose head appeared to be on fire.
“Um, Okay. Should I try it with the Pizza or the Taco?” She glanced between the two dishes she’d already tried. “Either one. Whichever you prefer.” was Alex’s reply.
Trix reached out and grabbed a third Taco, opening up the bottle. Immediately she could smell the fragrant sauce within, and she carefully poured a small amount into the shell. She cautiously took a bite and chewed thoughtfully.
“Too hot?” Alex suggested, but she shook her head. “No. Just…” She poured more sauce on the taco, and ate the rest in only a few bites. “Whew. Sorry, Captain Alexander. That was incredible! I’ve never tasted anything like it before.”
“Captain Alexander just sounds weird. Call me Alex or Al. Or ‘Captain’ if you really, really need to use my rank for whatever reason.” Alex sat down, and chuckled. “But that’s interesting. Very, very interesting. That sauce there?” He gestured towards the bottle. “It’s made with a chemical called ‘Capsaicin’. To humans it’s a powerful spice. Too much of it causes a painful burning sensation that lingers. We normally dilute it to make it more palatable and less painful.”
Trix glanced at the bottle. “I guess that explains the fire on the little picture here.” She grabbed another slice of the pizza, and drizzled the sauce on top.
“Three tacos and two slices of pizza?” Ma’et was impressed as she saw how much food the Avian was packing away.
“The disadvantage of those muscular bodies.” Josh waved his hand towards Trix. “They require all the calories that a Human does and more. Back on the planet I learned their species used to be a lot smaller, but after developing animal husbandry and reliable sources of higher calorie foods they bulked up pretty quick.”
Trix, for her part, slicked off the second slice of pizza with gusto. She grabbed a fourth taco, and liberally poured the spicy sauce all over, before wolfing that down as well. She grabbed the fruit juice that Ji had offered her… the ‘punch’? And downed it almost as quickly.
“I hope after all this is over, we can buy some more of that sauce. I definitely want the others back at home to try it.” She licked her lips, and sighed with contentment. “This juice too. I like how sweet it is.”
“Birds are immune to Capsaicin.” Josh murmured softly, but it was picked up by the visor and translated perfectly. “I wonder what the chances are that space-birds would be too?”
—--
“Slide the jack under that joint there.” Trix did as instructed, wheeling the small hydraulic device under the ‘spider’s’ massive leg. “Great. Just gotta line up the leg with where the servos join in…” Ji and Min lifted the leg and immediately began connecting up cables and lines. After all the connections were made, Ji braced himself against the wall and shoved - hard - against the leg, firmly connecting the mechanical rotary joint into place.
“Okay, testing.” Min walked over to the console and began punching in codes. Like the other six limbs before it, this one shook slightly then began to flex, twist, and move around. “Range of motion is nominal. Motors are all showing peak. Locking joints and anchor bolt systems are green.”
Ji wiped off some sweat from his forehead, and leaned back against the wall. “I knew it was a mistake to work on it up here. At least if we put it in the hangar we could have lowered the gravity.”
“It would have been in the way during the rescue op, and we had enough shit going on then we didn’t need to add ‘reassemble a multi-ton walking modular platform’ to the list.” Min gestured with her head, not even glancing over at her brother. “Man up. Trix hasn’t even broken a sweat.”
“I don’t sweat.” Trix mumbled, as she stared at the massive machine. “This thing is crazy. Puts my car to shame.”
“Yeah, our pride and joy. Together we’ve spent decades refining it.” Min glanced over at Trix with a broad smile. “The modular bay on top has been my focus, while Ji’s been adjusting and perfecting the leg and motion systems.”
“What’s it for?”
“Well, right now it’s kind of in between intended uses.” Ji walked over to a large shelf and gestured to the assorted objects there. “With our original plans it was going to have a bunch of swappable options. Right now, it has short and long range assault armaments and a plasma cutter for breaching sealed doors. A basic military drone capable of adapting to all kinds of situations.”
Trix stared at the array of weapons in front of her. “So this is what the human military uses to fight with?”
“Nah.” Min set down the quickboard and walked over to the huge machine. “We envisioned it as a multi-purpose response unit. Capable of dropping in from outside the atmosphere an landing anywhere, going anywhere. Dealing with any situation that could possibly arise. It’s an all-terrain support mech and its modular nature would have made it able to respond to nearly any situation. And it was rejected by the military.”
“What? Why?”
Ji held up a hand and ticked off his fingers. “One, it’s more expensive to drop one of these than a squad of soldiers. Nevermind the fact that it can do 10 people’s worth of work without putting even a single person in danger. Two, it’s too big to be fired out of normal launchers. Adding new launchers to ships would have been a significant amount of work and cost that the navy wasn’t willing to foot the bill. Three, we didn’t have any money after developing it. Meaning we couldn’t bribe anyone in the government into pressuring the military to work with us.”
“Four, they already have hover tanks and artillery and we couldn’t convince them that our system was superior to those.” Min sighed, and threw herself into a chair.
“Hovering is cheating though.” Ji glared at his sister.
“Cheating? What?” Trix just looked bewildered at this.
“Hovering isn’t all-terrain. Hovering is NO terrain.”
“Oh.” Trix took a seat in a nearby chair herself. “So did the captain buy this then?”
“Nope. See, we were finishing up Uni and started developing the Spider, but we didn’t really have the money to actually MAKE one. We had all the plans and all the research on our side but not the raw materials or the money to get those raw materials.” Ji pulled out a stick of gum and popped it in his mouth. “At first we tried going straight to the military which was a huge mistake, they just made a million excuses and told us to get lost. Then we tried approaching some weapon dev companies for funding. They basically told us they’d fund it in exchange for all the rights to production and we’d get whatever they felt was fair. Which when we pressed on a figure, wasn’t much.”
Trix glanced over at the massive mech. “But it got made, obviously.”
“Yup. When we weren’t sure what to do, a buddy of ours mentioned that Al was looking for an engineering team. We can do starship engineering.” Min grabbed the quickboard and extended one of the spider’s legs towards her, so she could kick her feet up on it. “Matter of fact, this ship’s a thing of beauty. Al is a complete doofus but he takes fantastic care of the ship. When we came on we gave him a list of everything that should change. He sat down with us, went over it point by point, and even though it ended up costing over half a million credits he gave us full authorization to make every single change we suggested.”
“So after we did a stint working as engineers we joined up as crew.” Ji had an odd smile on his face. “Since then, we’ve put the money we made from working here towards building this thing. We actually had it completed but then I had this idea of using an array of microservo actuators instead of a larger servo to give us a lot more fine control over the joints. That didn’t work, like, at all but when we used a combination of them we managed to find just the right ratio that gives us twice the amount of precision in each joint, which lets us use the-”
“ANYWAY.” Min interrupted her Brother before he could get too deep into the weeds. “We had it built, with the original armaments we envisioned, but Al suggested making a module for mining and sampling. We brought it in here in order to disassemble it to make the servo adjustments and while we were at it we were going to be replacing the actual weapons with a mining beam, core sample collector, and an array of sensors. Now though we’re going to put it in storage for a while. We got much more important things to take care of now.”
“Oh.” Trix had begun to tune Ji out when he launched into his diatribe. “But what do you mean joined up as crew? You were already crew, weren’t you?”
Min swung her foot down, and gestured to the ship. “It’s different. There’s employees… and then there’s crew. Right now you’re an employee. You’re working with us, you’re out here, but your home’s back with your Teff. Right?”
Trix nodded.
“Well, when you’re crew… this is your home. We’re all family out here. I don’t know as much about the whole Teff thing but I think it’s sort of similar. This ship’s our home, the crew is our family. Alex may be a childish idiot but he’s loyal to his crew like nothing else.” Min stood up and walked over to put her hand on her brother’s shoulder. “When we worked here and started to see how well he treats his people, we felt like we could really belong here. He asked if we’d like to join up, so we did. Best decision we ever made.”
“Yup. He treats the crew as well as he treats the ship.” Ji gestured around him. “Working for him paid well. Working as crew, we don’t get paid regularly but we get a cut out of every mission and that cut is HUGE. That’s how we could afford to actually build the spider in the first place.”
“Ah. So if he invited me along, does that mean he wants me to join the crew too?” Trix wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Joining another family was commonplace for males who left their Teff to join others, but incredibly rare for females.
“Dunno. He’s hired on specialists in the past who’ve come and gone. And he’s invited people to join up who said no and that was that.” Ji shrugged and pressed the release on the hydraulic press, letting it collapse down. “C’mon, we should get the last leg attached. Then we can pack it up and use a grav collar to move it down to the hangar. Don’t want to make you stay in that cramped storage room again tonight.”
“Yeah, I tried to stretch my wings in the morning and I banged up against one of the shelves. Really not looking forward to that again.” Trix grumbled at the memory, and stood up. “Okay, what more do we need done to get this over with?”
—--

Hey guys,
I submitted a potential editorial to EW about the STAR Voting initiative that wasn't accepted in time for the election next week, so I thought I'd share it here (as well as on Medium) to get these thoughts out there. Hope you enjoy, and I'd be curious to hear how this sits with others in the Eugene community.
Why do we keep waiting for the perfect solution before escaping a toxic situation?
In the last issue of Eugene Weekly, EW’s editors explained in response to a reader letter why they don’t endorse implementing STAR Voting for Mayor and City Council elections: because this system caused confusion and didn’t increase voter participation when they tried it for their 2018 “Best of Eugene” polls. But that’s only one year, with presumably less outreach and education than would be devoted to a proper legislative rollout. The fact that STAR Voting didn’t immediately rejuvenate the process in this case doesn’t prove it’s not worth trying, but rather that it may need more investment of time and faith to normalize and work out the kinks before achieving the intended results.
The leadership of public bodies — including legislatures and community publications like EW — entails following through with some resolve on experiments like STAR Voting, even when their benefits remain largely theoretical. Otherwise, it’s too easy for ordinary individuals to resign to the inertia of our status quo, especially on matters as disillusioning as our current voting process. Another letter from last issue argued STAR Voting would be too easy to manipulate, but what makes them think it would be any worse than what we have now?
As a nation, we’re at risk of re-electing a narcissistic neo-fascist, who, along with cronies at the state and local levels, would make our nation significantly less safe for people and nature, furthering religious fundamentalist and corporate police control over the bodies of women, LGBTQ, and people of color. There are many reasons for this sad state of affairs, but manipulation of our voting process to perpetuate a two-party oligarchy is near the top of the list.
As easy as it may be to retreat to our ideological bubbles, these are desperate times, and all our commiserating over current affairs and conceiving of better alternatives won’t matter unless we can take the first steps towards voting reform. While I will be voting in favor of STAR Voting this election, I’m not a zealot, and would remain open to similar proposals like Ranked Choice Voting if it proves more tenable. Strangely, I seem to be in the minority among supporters of either camp (for STAR or Ranked Choice), who tend to disparage the other to distinguish their own preferred alternative.
I’m reminded of Monty Python’s biblical parody Life of Brian, wherein the anti-Roman-imperialist group the People’s Front of Judea repeatedly fails to act against their oppressors while fighting incessantly against their identical rival faction, the Judean People’s Front. At this point, it seems counterproductive and bordering on the absurd to split hairs and devolve into sectarian feuds between these two reform efforts, taking marginally different approaches toward the same goal: more nuanced and accurate democratic representation.
“Ranked Choice Voting? Splitters.”
To me, both STAR and Ranked Choice Voting are worth experimenting with, and will only reach their full potential by implementing and amending, maybe even cross-pollinating aspects of both. I see this as equivalent of trying on oxygen masks in an emergency before rushing to save anyone or anything else. At least it gets us closer to having a real voice in legislative polling, rather than the choice between one of two partisan mouthpieces. While it may take time for voters to adjust to the new levels of nuance and decision-making power, this would be well worth it as a long-term investment in fostering a more democratically minded, politically mindful populace.
I’m sick of feeling like my vote doesn’t matter, because neither political party reflects my values and policy beliefs. I don’t pretend to know the perfect ballot structure to realize the real American dream of multicultural democracy and sociopolitical equality, but I’ll gladly accept STAR Voting as a first port in the current shit storm of affordability crises and white supremacist paternalism. We have to start reforming somewhere, and holding our breath for the next best alternative is an act of privilege that misses how dire our current situation really is.
Or, to put it more poetically:
When you’re going through hell,
you don’t wait for the helicopter to heaven —
you take any step up you can.

THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-TWO WEEKS OF FUCK YOU FRIDAYS
SIR KUPSLOCK KUSS THE POMFURY IS NEVER GOING TO LET A DISCONNTION STOP HIM (but sitting on the wires sometimes disconnects the rest of us)
SEEMS LIKE WE STILL GOT SOME WAVES OF DDOS GOING ON HERE AND THERE, WHILE WE'RE TRYING TO GET OUR MOGTOMES OR ALL THE MGP IN THE WORLD (LIKELY THROUGH ENDLESS LEAPS OF FAITH)
LITTLE SCRIPT KIDDIES THINKING THEY ARE REAL GOOD ABOUT TAKING DOWN ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR ONLINE GAMES, NO DOUBT. TROLLS, THE LOT OF THEM.
WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON… OH RIGHT, THERE WAS A LIVE LETTER YESTERDAY. ANYTHING TO BE ANGRY ABOUT?
DISCONNECTING RULES :

• UPPERCASE IS NOT ENFORCED, BUT ENCOURAGED : RAGE LIKE THE TANK GETS DISCONNECTED JUST BEFORE THE TANK BUSTER
  
• EVERY REPLY SHOULD BE EQUALLY ENCOURAGED TO CAPITALIZE WHEN NEED BE
  
• OPTIONAL : TL;DR IN THE FIRST SENTENCE OF YOUR POST, WRITTEN IN 4 WORDS (EG : NEED ALL THE MOGTOMES), OR IN HAIKU IF YOU WANT
  
• READ EVERYTHING IN THE VOICE OF BUSY EVENT MOOGLES
  
• UNTAGGED SPOILERS WILL GET PAPERCUTS
  
• SUBREDDIT RULES STILL APPLY, LIKE NAME DROPPING AND WITCH HUNTS.
  
• WHEN IN DOUBT REFER TO THE FLOWCHART OF RAGE
  

HALL OF RAGE

• LAST WEEK'S TOP VOTED THAT IS NOT BUBBLE WRAP : NO WANNA NO DDOS
• LAST WEEK'S PERSONAL FAVORITE : KITTY

THE MEGA LIST OF MISSPELLED WORDS
IT'S BACK AND BETTER THAN EVER. READ THROUGH IT FOR LAUGH, OR SUBMIT YOUR OWN AWFUL MISSPELLINGS THAT EITHER MADE YOU LAUGH OR YOU'RE TIRED OF SEEING (LIKE TOMBSTONES AND SCRIPTS).
THE SALTWORKS DISCORD
JOIN THE SALTWORKS DISCORD FOR OUT-OF-THREAD RAGE AND VENTING. WE GOT A DEDICATED ALL-CAPS CHANNEL, BUT ALSO GENERAL AND COMIC RELATED CHANNELS.

1991 (Aug. 13, 1991-Dec. 31, 1991):

1. F-ZERO (Launch Title)
   
2. Gradius III (Launch Title)
   
3. Pilotwings (Launch Title)
   
4. SimCity (Launch Title)
   
5. Super Mario World (Launch Title)
   
6. Drakkhen
   
7. Final Fight
   
8. HAL's Hole in One Golf
   
9. HyperZone
   
10. Populous
    
11. Super Bases Loaded
    
12. Super R-Type
    
13. The Chessmaster
    
14. U.N. Squadron
    
15. Ultraman: Towards the Future
    
16. Final Fantasy II
    
17. ActRaiser
    
18. Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball
    
19. Darius Twin
    
20. John Madden Football
    
21. Paperboy 2
    
22. Radical Psycho Machine Racing
    
23. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts
    
24. Super Tennis
    
25. True Golf Classics: Waialae Country Club
    
26. Super Castlevania IV
    
27. D-Force
    
28. Home Alone
    
29. Lagoon
    
30. Super Baseball Simulator 1.000
    
31. Super Off Road
    
32. The Miracle Piano Teaching System
    

1992 (Jan. 1, 1992-Dec. 31, 1992):

1. Earth Defense Force
   
2. Joe & Mac
   
3. Ys III: Wanderers from Ys
   
4. Nolan Ryan's Baseball
   
5. Super Scope 6
   
6. Super Smash TV
   
7. The Legend of the Mystical Ninja
   
8. Extra Innings
   
9. Lemmings
   
10. PGA Tour Golf
    
11. Pit-Fighter
    
12. Smart Ball
    
13. The Addams Family
    
14. WWF Super WrestleMania
    
15. Contra III: The Alien Wars
    
16. Raiden Trad
    
17. Rival Turf!
    
18. Super Adventure Island
    
19. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
    
20. Top Gear
    
21. True Golf Classics: Pebble Beach Golf Links
    
22. World League Soccer
    
23. Xardion
    
24. Arcana
    
25. Jack Nicklaus Golf
    
26. Mario Paint
    
27. Romance of the Three Kingdoms II
    
28. Super Soccer
    
29. The Rocketeer
    
30. Garry Kitchen's Super Battletank: War in the Gulf
    
31. Krusty's Super Fun House
    
32. Space Football: One on One
    
33. Super Soccer Champ
    
34. Thunder Spirits
    
35. Clue
    
36. Spanky's Quest
    
37. Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
    
38. Ka-blooey
    
39. Magic Sword
    
40. Rampart
    
41. Soul Blazer
    
42. Strike Gunner S.T.G.
    
43. Super Play Action Football
    
44. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time
    
45. Axelay
    
46. DinoCity
    
47. F1 ROC: Race of Champions
    
48. Faceball 2000
    
49. George Foreman's KO Boxing
    
50. Monopoly
    
51. RoboCop 3
    
52. Roger Clemens' MVP Baseball
    
53. Super Bowling
    
54. Super Mario Kart
    
55. The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare
    
56. Wheel of Fortune: Featuring Vanna White
    
57. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
    
58. Battle Clash
    
59. BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge
    
60. David Crane's Amazing Tennis
    
61. Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf
    
62. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
    
63. Hook
    
64. James Bond Jr.
    
65. King of the Monsters
    
66. NCAA Basketball
    
67. Phalanx
    
68. Q*bert 3
    
69. Race Drivin'
    
70. Sküljagger: Revolt of the Westicans
    
71. Space Megaforce
    
72. Super Batter Up
    
73. Super Buster Bros.
    
74. Super Double Dragon
    
75. The Irem Skins Game
    
76. TKO Super Championship Boxing
    
77. Wings 2: Aces High
    
78. Bazooka Blitzkrieg
    
79. Best of the Best: Championship Karate
    
80. Captain Novolin
    
81. Chuck Rock
    
82. Cyber Spin
    
83. Firepower 2000
    
84. GunForce
    
85. Imperium
    
86. John Madden Football '93
    
87. On the Ball
    
88. Out of This World
    
89. Prince of Persia
    
90. Road Riot 4WD
    
91. Road Runner's Death Valley Rally
    
92. Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge
    
93. Super Star Wars
    
94. Wing Commander
    
95. Wordtris
    
96. X-Zone
    
97. Bulls vs. Blazers and the NBA Playoffs
    
98. Cal Ripken Jr. Baseball
    
99. Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool
    
100. Gemfire
     
101. Goal!
     
102. Gods: The Bitmap Brothers
     
103. Jeopardy!
     
104. Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour
     
105. Lethal Weapon
     
106. Musya
     
107. NBA All-Star Challenge
     
108. NHLPA Hockey '93
     
109. Pro Quarterback
     
110. Push-Over
     
111. Test Drive II: The Duel
     
112. The Magical Quest starring Mickey Mouse
     
113. WarpSpeed
     

1993 (Jan. 1, 1993-Dec. 31, 1993):

1. California Games II
   
2. Power Moves
   
3. The Hunt for Red October
   
4. Uncharted Waters
   
5. Aerobiz
   
6. Cool World
   
7. Dragon's Lair
   
8. Harley's Humongous Adventure
   
9. Hit the Ice
   
10. Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye
    
11. SimEarth: The Living Planet
    
12. Sonic Blast Man
    
13. Super Valis IV
    
14. The Addams Family: Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt
    
15. Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!
    
16. Doomsday Warrior
    
17. Inindo: Way of the Ninja
    
18. King Arthur's World
    
19. Spindizzy Worlds
    
20. Star Fox
    
21. Super Conflict: The Mideast
    
22. Super Strike Eagle
    
23. Tecmo Super NBA Basketball
    
24. The Combatribes
    
25. American Gladiators
    
26. Batman Returns
    
27. Battle Grand Prix
    
28. Brawl Brothers
    
29. Cybernator
    
30. Fatal Fury
    
31. Outlander
    
32. Street Combat
    
33. Super Ninja Boy
    
34. The Lost Vikings
    
35. The Terminator
    
36. Tom and Jerry
    
37. Toys
    
38. Wayne's World
    
39. Alien³
    
40. Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind
    
41. Congo's Caper
    
42. MechWarrior
    
43. Shadowrun
    
44. Super Black Bass
    
45. Super Turrican
    
46. Taz-Mania
    
47. Vegas Stakes
    
48. Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?
    
49. Rock n' Roll Racing
    
50. Run Saber
    
51. B.O.B.
    
52. Battletoads in Battlemaniacs
    
53. Cacoma Knight in Bizyland
    
54. Dungeon Master
    
55. Family Dog
    
56. Kawasaki Caribbean Challenge
    
57. Mario is Missing!
    
58. Pocky & Rocky
    
59. Super High Impact
    
60. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends
    
61. The Blues Brothers
    
62. The Great Waldo Search
    
63. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
    
64. Wolfchild
    
65. WWF Royal Rumble
    
66. Yoshi's Cookie
    
67. E.V.O.: Search for Eden
    
68. First Samurai
    
69. Disney's Goof Troop
    
70. NFL Football
    
71. Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing
    
72. Super Baseball 2020
    
73. Super James Pond
    
74. Super Slam Dunk
    
75. Final Fight 2
    
76. Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
    
77. Super Mario All-Stars
    
78. Super Slap Shot
    
79. Mortal Kombat: Competition Edition
    
80. Alien vs. Predator
    
81. Boxing Legends of the Ring
    
82. Bram Stoker's Dracula
    
83. Captain America and the Avengers
    
84. Cool Spot
    
85. GP-1
    
86. Mecarobot Golf
    
87. Operation Logic Bomb: The Ultimate Search & Destroy
    
88. P.T.O.
    
89. Plok
    
90. Redline F-1 Racer
    
91. Rocky Rodent
    
92. Super Bomberman
    
93. Super Off Road: the Baja
    
94. Super Widget
    
95. The 7th Saga
    
96. Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends: Adventure Series
    
97. Top Gear 2
    
98. Tuff E Nuff
    
99. Utopia: The Creation of a Nation
    
100. Wing Commander: The Secret Missions
     
101. World Heroes
     
102. Yoshi's Safari
     
103. Zombies Ate My Neighbors
     
104. Aero the Acro-Bat
     
105. Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team
     
106. Capcom's MVP Football
     
107. Cliffhanger
     
108. Daffy Duck: The Marvin Missions
     
109. Family Feud
     
110. Football Fury
     
111. Kendo Rage
     
112. Last Action Hero
     
113. Lock On
     
114. Madden NFL '94
     
115. NBA Showdown
     
116. NHL '94
     
117. Pac-Attack
     
118. Paladin's Quest
     
119. Secret of Mana
     
120. SimAnt
     
121. Sunset Riders
     
122. Super Caesars Palace
     
123. Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
     
124. The Incredible Crash Dummies
     
125. The Ren & Stimpy Show: Veediots!
     
126. The Super Aquatic Games Starring the Aquabats
     
127. The Wizard of Oz
     
128. Troddlers
     
129. True Golf Classics: Wicked 18
     
130. ActRaiser 2
     
131. Disney's Aladdin
     
132. BioMetal
     
133. Championship Pool
     
134. ClayFighter
     
135. International Tennis Tour
     
136. Jurassic Park
     
137. Lamborghini American Challenge
     
138. NHL Stanley Cup
     
139. Out to Lunch
     
140. Pink Goes to Hollywood
     
141. Ranma ½: Hard Battle
     
142. RoboCop Versus The Terminator
     
143. Steel Talons
     
144. Super Battleship
     
145. Super Putty
     
146. Tecmo Super Bowl
     
147. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
     
148. The Lawnmower Man
     
149. Time Slip
     
150. Tony Meola's Sidekicks Soccer
     
151. Total Carnage
     
152. We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story
     
153. ABC Monday Night Football
     
154. Art of Fighting
     
155. Barbie: Super Model
     
156. Battle Blaze
     
157. Battle Cars
     
158. Beethoven: The Ultimate Canine Caper
     
159. Dennis the Menace
     
160. Dig & Spike Volleyball
     
161. F1 Pole Position
     
162. Genghis Khan II: Clan of the Gray Wolf
     
163. Inspector Gadget
     
164. Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D
     
165. Lufia & the Fortress of Doom
     
166. Mario's Time Machine
     
167. Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge
     
168. Metal Marines
     
169. Nobunaga's Ambition
     
170. Romance of the Three Kingdoms III: Dragon of Destiny
     
171. Side Pocket
     
172. Soldiers of Fortune
     
173. Super Chase H.Q.
     
174. Super Nova
     
175. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters
     
176. The Adventures of Dr. Franken
     
177. World Soccer '94: Road to Glory
     

1994 (Jan. 1, 1994-Dec. 31, 1994):

1. Brett Hull Hockey
   
2. Choplifter III
   
3. Lester the Unlikely
   
4. Lethal Enforcers
   
5. Mega Man X
   
6. Riddick Bowe Boxing
   
7. Skyblazer
   
8. Super Battletank 2
   
9. Super Solitaire
   
10. Zool: Ninja of the Nth Dimension
    
11. Ardy Lightfoot
    
12. Bill Walsh College Football
    
13. Bugs Bunny: Rabbit Rampage
    
14. Flashback: The Quest for Identity
    
15. Mickey's Ultimate Challenge
    
16. Ninja Warriors
    
17. Pro Sport Hockey
    
18. Sports Illustrated: Championship Football & Baseball
    
19. Super Alfred Chicken
    
20. 1. Super Bases Loaded 2
21. Super Troll Islands
    
22. T2: The Arcade Game
    
23. Turn and Burn: No-Fly Zone
    
24. Winter Olympic Games: Lillehammer '94
    
25. X-Kaliber 2097
    
26. Chester Cheetah: Wild Wild Quest
    
27. Claymates
    
28. Equinox
    
29. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball
    
30. MLBPA Baseball
    
31. NBA Jam
    
32. Star Trek: The Next Generation - Future's Past
    
33. The Flintstones: The Treasure of Sierra Madrock
    
34. The Peace Keepers
    
35. Wolfenstein 3D
    
36. Young Merlin
    
37. Super Metroid
    
38. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder
    
39. Bébé's Kids
    
40. Champions World Class Soccer
    
41. Dream T.V.
    
42. Fatal Fury 2
    
43. Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics
    
44. King of Dragons
    
45. Knights of the Round
    
46. Legend
    
47. Liberty or Death
    
48. Mega Man Soccer
    
49. Pinball Dreams
    
50. Rocko's Modern Life: Spunky's Dangerous Day
    
51. SOS
    
52. Super Goal! 2
    
53. Time Trax
    
54. Ultima: The False Prophet
    
55. Wheel of Fortune: Deluxe Edition
    
56. Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom
    
57. Andre Agassi Tennis
    
58. ClayFighter: Tournament Edition
    
59. ESPN Baseball Tonight
    
60. FIFA International Soccer
    
61. Jeopardy! Sports Edition
    
62. Relief Pitcher
    
63. Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon
    
64. Space Ace
    
65. Spectre
    
66. Suzuka 8 Hours
    
67. The Pirates of Dark Water
    
68. ESPN SpeedWorld
    
69. Barkley: Shut Up and Jam!
    
70. Capcom's Soccer Shootout
    
71. Championship Soccer '94
    
72. Final Fight Guy
    
73. HardBall III
    
74. Hyper V-Ball
    
75. Jeopardy! Deluxe Edition
    
76. King of the Monsters 2
    
77. Natsume Championship Wrestling
    
78. Operation Europe: Path to Victory 1939-45
    
79. Saturday Night Slam Masters
    
80. Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers
    
81. The Jetsons: Invasion of the Planet Pirates
    
82. The Ren & Stimpy Show: Fire Dogs
    
83. The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang
    
84. Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme: Skiing & Snowboarding
    
85. Ultimate Fighter
    
86. World Cup USA '94
    
87. Disney's Beauty and the Beast
    
88. F1 ROC II: Race of Champions
    
89. Stunt Race FX
    
90. Super Godzilla
    
91. Breath of Fire
    
92. Aerobiz Supersonic
    
93. An American Tail: Fievel Goes West
    
94. Brain Lord
    
95. Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls
    
96. Eek! The Cat
    
97. Elite Soccer
    
98. Fighter's History
    
99. Fun 'n Games
    
100. Mr. Nutz
     
101. Tetris 2
     
102. The Adventures of Kid Kleets
     
103. The Death and Return of Superman
     
104. The Incredible Hulk
     
105. Disney's The Jungle Book
     
106. The Untouchables
     
107. Troy Aikman NFL Football
     
108. Kid Klown in Crazy Chase
     
109. Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage
     
110. Blackthorne
     
111. Illusion of Gaia
     
112. Mario's Early Years: Fun with Numbers
     
113. Michael Andretti's Indy Car Challenge
     
114. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
     
115. Mortal Kombat II
     
116. Obitus
     
117. Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures
     
118. Super Bomberman 2
     
119. Tecmo Super Baseball
     
120. Virtual Bart
     
121. Vortex
     
122. WildSnake
     
123. World Heroes 2
     
124. Final Fantasy III
     
125. Adventures of Yogi Bear
     
126. Disney's Bonkers
     
127. Bubsy II
     
128. Earthworm Jim
     
129. Firestriker
     
130. HammerLock Wrestling
     
131. Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures
     
132. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Volume 1
     
133. Lord of Darkness
     
134. Mario's Early Years: Fun with Letters
     
135. Math Blaster: Episode 1
     
136. Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse
     
137. NBA Live '95
     
138. NCAA Football
     
139. Operation Thunderbolt
     
140. R-Type III: The Third Lightning
     
141. Radical Rex
     
142. Robotrek
     
143. Shaq-Fu
     
144. Shien's Revenge
     
145. Snow White in Happily Ever After
     
146. Sparkster
     
147. Super Adventure Island II
     
148. Super Punch-Out!!
     
149. Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
     
150. The Great Circus Mystery Starring Mickey & Minnie
     
151. Disney's The Lion King
     
152. Uncharted Waters: New Horizons
     
153. Donkey Kong Country
     
154. 3 Ninjas Kick Back
     
155. ACME Animation Factory
     
156. Aero Fighters
     
157. Aero the Acro-Bat 2
     
158. Al Unser Jr.'s Road to the Top
     
159. Animaniacs
     
160. Ballz 3D
     
161. Bassin's Black Bass with Hank Parker
     
162. Beavis and Butt-Head
     
163. Cannondale Cup
     
164. Demon's Crest
     
165. Dragon View
     
166. ESPN Sunday Night NFL
     
167. Ghoul Patrol
     
168. Home Improvement
     
169. Jammit
     
170. Jurassic Park Part 2: The Chaos Continues
     
171. Lemmings 2: The Tribes
     
172. Madden NFL '95
     
173. Mario's Early Years: Preschool Fun
     
174. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
     
175. Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City
     
176. Newman/Haas Indy Car featuring Nigel Mansell
     
177. NHL '95
     
178. Nickelodeon GUTS
     
179. No Escape
     
180. Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure
     
181. Pocky & Rocky 2
     
182. Samurai Shodown
     
183. Sonic Blast Man II
     
184. Speed Racer in My Most Dangerous Adventures
     
185. Stone Protectors
     
186. Street Hockey '95
     
187. Super Bonk
     
188. Super Pinball: Behind the Mask
     
189. The Pagemaster
     
190. The Ren & Stimpy Show: Time Warp
     
191. Tin Star
     
192. TNN Bass Tournament of Champions
     
193. Ultima: Runes of Virtue II
     
194. Ultima: The Black Gate
     
195. WCW SuperBrawl Wrestling
     
196. Wolverine: Adamantium Rage
     
197. WWF Raw
     
198. X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse
     
199. Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel
     
200. Biker Mice from Mars
     
201. Brutal: Paws of Fury
     
202. ESPN National Hockey Night
     
203. GP-1: Part II
     
204. Hurricanes
     
205. Metal Morph
     
206. Micro Machines
     
207. NFL Quarterback Club
     
208. Pieces
     
209. Power Instinct
     
210. Rise of the Robots
     
211. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – Starship Bridge Simulator
     
212. Street Racer
     
213. Tetris & Dr. Mario
     
214. The Adventures of Batman & Robin
     
215. The Tick
     
216. Tiny Toon Adventures: Wacky Sports Challenge
     
217. Uniracers
     
218. Wario's Woods
     
219. Super Game Boy (if counts)
     

1995 (Jan. 1, 1995-Dec. 31, 1995):

1. A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol
   
2. BreakThru!
   
3. Brett Hull Hockey 95
   
4. Carrier Aces
   
5. ClayFighter 2: Judgment Clay
   
6. Full Throttle: All-American Racing
   
7. Mega Man X2
   
8. Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra
   
9. Pac-In-Time
   
10. Rap Jam: Volume One
    
11. seaQuest DSV
    
12. Tecmo Super Bowl II: Special Edition
    
13. The Ignition Factor
    
14. NBA Jam: Tournament Edition
    
15. Addams Family Values
    
16. The Adventures of Mighty Max
    
17. Brandish
    
18. Kirby's Avalanche
    
19. Kirby's Dream Course
    
20. Looney Tunes B-Ball
    
21. NCAA Final Four Basketball
    
22. Pinball Fantasies
    
23. Rise of the Phoenix
    
24. Spider-Man: The Animated Series
    
25. Super Bases Loaded 3: License to Steal
    
26. The Flintstones : The Movie
    
27. Top Gear 3000
    
28. True Lies
    
29. Bust-A-Move
    
30. Sterling Sharpe: End 2 End
    
31. The Itchy & Scratchy Game
    
32. Warlock
    
33. Fatal Fury Special
    
34. Kyle Petty's No Fear Racing
    
35. Metal Warriors
    
36. Stargate
    
37. The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckaroo$!
    
38. Timecop
    
39. Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen
    
40. EarthBound
    
41. Air Cavalry
    
42. Bass Masters Classic
    
43. Hagane: The Final Conflict
    
44. International Superstar Soccer
    
45. Judge Dredd
    
46. Jungle Strike
    
47. Justice League Task Force
    
48. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
    
49. Packy & Marlon
    
50. Phantom 2040
    
51. Super R.B.I. Baseball
    
52. The Sporting News: Baseball
    
53. Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
    
54. King Arthur and the Knights of Justice
    
55. Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire
    
56. Tecmo Secret of the Stars
    
57. Wild Guns
    
58. Ninja Gaiden Trilogy
    
59. Chrono Trigger
    
60. Primal Rage
    
61. Batman Forever
    
62. Captain Commando
    
63. Demolition Man
    
64. Killer Instinct
    
65. Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos
    
66. SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron
    
67. DOOM
    
68. Mega Man 7
    
69. Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus
    
70. Castlevania: Dracula X
    
71. Foreman For Real
    
72. Head-On Soccer
    
73. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition
    
74. NHL '96
    
75. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Crossroads of Time
    
76. WeaponLord
    
77. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
    
78. Mortal Kombat 3
    
79. Big Sky Trooper
    
80. MechWarrior 3050
    
81. NBA Live '96
    
82. Nosferatu
    
83. Porky Pig's Haunted Holiday
    
84. Secret of Evermore
    
85. Spawn: The Video Game
    
86. Tecmo Super Bowl III: Final Edition
    
87. The Mask
    
88. Madden NFL '96
    
89. AAAHH!! Real Monsters
    
90. Dirt Trax FX
    
91. Doom Troopers
    
92. Earthworm Jim 2
    
93. Emmitt Smith Football
    
94. FIFA Soccer '96
    
95. Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
    
96. International Superstar Soccer Deluxe
    
97. Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings
    
98. Jimmy Houston's Bass Tournament U.S.A.
    
99. NBA Give 'N Go
    
100. NFL Quarterback Club 96
     
101. Scooby-Doo Mystery
     
102. Sid Meier's Civilization
     
103. Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety
     
104. Super Turrican 2
     
105. Urban Strike
     
106. Wild C.A.T.s
     
107. WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game
     
108. Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure
     
109. Breath of Fire II
     
110. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
     
111. Kawasaki Superbike Challenge
     
112. P.T.O. II: Pacific Theater of Operations
     
113. Revolution X
     
114. Syndicate
     
115. Disney's Toy Story
     
116. War 2410
     
117. Wayne Gretzky and the NHLPA All-Stars
     
118. Zoop
     

1996-1998 (Jan. 1, 1996-Dec. 31, 1998):

1. Final Fight 3
   
2. Mega Man X3
   
3. PGA Tour '96
   
4. Prehistorik Man
   
5. Sink or Swim
   
6. College Slam
   
7. Cutthroat Island
   
8. Frantic Flea
   
9. Mark Davis' The Fishing Master
   
10. The Brainies
    
11. Power Piggs of the Dark Age
    
12. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
    
13. Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run
    
14. Olympic Summer Games: Atlanta 1996
    
15. Bass Masters Classic: Pro Edition
    
16. Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals
    
17. Magic Boy
    
18. Mohawk & Headphone Jack
    
19. Tetris Attack
    
20. Kirby Super Star
    
21. Ms. Pac-Man
    
22. PGA European Tour
    
23. Power Rangers Zeo: Battle Racers
    
24. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
    
25. Madden NFL '97
    
26. NHL '97
    
27. Oscar
    
28. Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame
    
29. War 3010: The Revolution
    
30. Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits
    
31. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble
    
32. Marvel Super Heroes in War of the Gems
    
33. Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow
    
34. NBA Hang Time
    
35. Disney's Pinocchio
    
36. SimCity 2000
    
37. Street Fighter Alpha 2
    
38. Whizz
    
39. Casper
    
40. College Football USA '97
    
41. Incantation
    
42. Mr. Do!
    
43. NBA Live '97
    
44. Realm
    
45. FIFA Soccer '97
    
46. Lost Vikings 2
    
47. Harvest Moon
    
48. Brunswick World: Tournament of Champions
    
49. Midway Presents Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 1
    
50. Kirby's Dream Land 3
    
51. Arkanoid: Doh It Again
    
52. Madden NFL '98
    
53. Space Invaders
    
54. Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games
    
55. NHL '98
    
56. NBA Live '98
    
57. Frogger
    

Plus, there are 716 Super Nintendo Entertainment System video games in North America.

SPOILERS FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE QUIZ BOOK!!!!
In his latest video on JSAS, Jack was very confused by the impossible quiz book, so I'm going to explain what he didn't understand:
2) Clint Eastwood is a shooting star because he's a star known for shooting things in films (cowboy) like Jack said
6) There's no question mark, it's a statement. What is the best thing since sliced bread.
11) It's asking how many different letters in assassins (a, s, i, n)
12) Corn flakes because they fall on the floor a lot?? (I'm kind of confused here too icl)
18) The dictionary has the meanings of all words, including 'life'
31) There's 100 pennies in a pound, (pond is pound missing a u, so there's no u)
34) Biased. Bi assed. 2
39) Pigs flying means the pigs flew, like swine flu, which kills people.
46) TIQTIQTTIQ = the impossible quiz, the impossible quiz two, the impossible quiz book, so B
MTWTFS = monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday sunday so S
some tips too:
on the dot to dot if you do 1-7 then the dot with no number, you get a skip, but you do have to then click 1-10 in the same time limit as you have, so you have to do 1-7 and 1-10
on the bubble wrap one there's a slightly blueish purple bubble and if you pop it you get this purple monster guy who freezes the bomb on the time limit ones
I really enjoy this style of video so I hope Jack makes more, and I hope he sees this and understands the game a bit more ahaha.

Item	Price	MSRP	% Off
.hack//g.u. Last Recode	$9.99	$49.99	80% off
A Hat In Time	$14.99	$29.99	50% off
Aca Neogeo Metal Slug X	$3.99	$7.99	50% off
Among Us	$3	$5	40% off
Astria Ascending	$15.99	$39.99	60% off
Backpack Hero	$15.99	$19.99	20% off
Baten KaitosⅠ&Ⅱhd Remaster	$29.99	$49.99	40% off
Beacon Pines	$29.69	$19.99	0% off
Beholder 2	$5.09	$14.99	66% off
Bit.trip Collection	$2.00	$9.99	79% off
Blasphemous	$6.24	$24.99	75% off
Braid, Anniversary Edition	$17.99	$19.99	10% off
Bubble Bobble 4 Friends	$13.99	$39.99	65% off
Captain Tsubasa: Rise Of New Champions Month 1 Edition	$9.99	$39.99	75% off
Cattails	$1.99	$14.99	86% off
Chinatown Detective Agency	$9.99	$24.99	60% off
Clive 'n' Wrench	$14.99	$29.99	50% off
Cocomelon: Play With Jj	$11.99	$39.99	70% off
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!	$2.00	$19.99	89% off
Cook, Serve, Delicious, Trilogy!	$13.99	$34.99	60% off
Cotton 100%	$2.49	$9.99	75% off
Cotton Fantasy	$9.99	$39.99	75% off
Cozy Grove	$7.48	$14.99	50% off
Crime O'clock	$10.00	$19.99	49% off
Cris Tales	$3.99	$39.99	90% off
Darius Cozmic Collection Arcade	$17.99	$44.99	60% off
Darius Cozmic Collection Console	$17.99	$59.99	70% off
Dariusburst: Another Chronicle Ex+	$15.99	$39.99	60% off
Death And Taxes	$2.59	$12.99	83% off
Demon Turf	$12.49	$24.99	50% off
Demon's Tilt	$7.99	$19.99	60% off
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition	$9.99	$49.99	80% off
Dinobreak	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
Doraemon Story Of Seasons	$9.99	$49.99	80% off
Doraemon Story Of Seasons: Friends Of The Great Kingdom Special Edition	$19.79	$59.99	67% off
Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise Of The Dragons	$14.99	$24.99	40% off
Dragon Ball Fighterz	$9.59	$59.99	84% off
Dragon Ball: The Breakers	$4.99	$19.99	75% off
Dredge	$17.49	$24.99	30% off
Football Manager 2024 Touch	$29.99	$49.99	40% off
Forager	$6.99	$19.99	65% off
Foretales	$12.99	$19.99	35% off
Framed Collection	$9.99	$9.99	0% off
Frogun	$8.99	$14.99	40% off
Fuga: Melodies Of Steel	$23.99	$39.99	40% off
Fuga: Melodies Of Steel 2	$23.99	$39.99	40% off
Genesis Noir	$7.48	$14.99	0% off
Gimmick! Special Edition	$7.49	$14.99	50% off
God Eater 3	$9.59	$59.99	84% off
Guacamelee! 2	$4.99	$19.99	75% off
Hammerwatch Ii	$14.99	$24.99	39% off
Hammerwatch Ii: The Chronicles Edition	$25.99	$39.99	34% off
Hand Of Fate 2	$8.99	$29.99	70% off
Howl	$9.89	$14.99	34% off
Ikenfell	$5.99	$19.99	70% off
In Other Waters	$14.99	$14.99	0% off
In Sound Mind	$3.49	$34.99	90% off
Infinite Guitars	$11.99	$19.99	40% off
Inside	$1.99	$19.99	89% off
Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series	$9.99	$39.99	75% off
Kraken Academy!!	$17.99	$17.99	0% off
Kraken Odyssey	$11.39	$16.99	36% off
Lego Dc Super-villains	$8.99	$59.99	85% off
Lego Worlds	$5.99	$29.99	80% off
Lego® Star Wars™: The Skywalker Saga Galactic Edition	$19.99	$79.99	75% off
Lego� Marvel Super Heroes 2	$5.99	$29.99	80% off
Lego� Ninjago� Movie Video Game	$7.49	$49.99	85% off
Lego� The Incredibles	$8.99	$59.99	85% off
Limbo	$1.99	$9.99	79% off
Little Nightmares: Complete Edition	$7.49	$29.99	75% off
Manic Mechanics	$12.49	$24.99	50% off
Minecraft	$14.99	$29.99	50% off
Minecraft Deluxe Collection	$19.99	$39.99	50% off
Minecraft Dungeons	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
Minecraft Dungeons Ultimate Edition	$19.99	$39.99	50% off
Minecraft Legends	$19.99	$39.99	50% off
Minecraft Legends Deluxe Edition	$24.99	$49.99	50% off
Monster Prom: Xxl	$4.95	$15.99	69% off
Mortal Kombat 11	$9.99	$49.99	80% off
Moving Out 2	$14.99	$29.99	50% off
Moving Out Deluxe Edition	$13.19	$32.99	60% off
My Friend Peppa Pig	$19.99	$39.99	50% off
My Hero One's Justice	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
My Hero One's Justice 2	$9.99	$39.99	75% off
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst	$4.99	$19.99	75% off
Ni No Kuni™ Ii: Revenant Kingdom Prince's Edition	$9.59	$59.99	84% off
Nobody Saves The World	$9.99	$24.99	60% off
Overcooked! 2	$6.24	$24.99	75% off
Paleo Pines	$17.99	$29.99	40% off
Panorama Cotton	$2.49	$9.99	75% off
Paradise Killer	$19.99	$19.99	0% off
Parents Vs Kids	$7.50	$24.99	69% off
Phantom Breaker: Omnia	$4.99	$19.99	75% off
Puzzle Bobble / Bust-a-move (16-bit Console Version)	$5.99	$7.99	25% off
Puzzle Bobble Everybubble!	$27.99	$39.99	30% off
Raystorm X Raycrisis Hd Collection	$19.99	$39.99	50% off
Read Only Memories: Neurodiver	$13.49	$14.99	10% off
Rustler	$2.99	$29.99	90% off
Scourgebringer	$5.09	$16.99	70% off
She Wants Me Dead Extended Edition	$1.99	$8.99	78% off
Signalis	$13.99	$19.99	30% off
Simulator Bundle: Gas Station Simulator And Barn Finders	$19.97	$29.99	33% off
Slay The Spire	$8.49	$24.99	66% off
Slime Rancher: Plortable Edition	$9.99	$24.99	60% off
Space Invaders Invincible Collection	$17.99	$59.99	70% off
Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission - Launch Edition	$9.59	$59.99	84% off
Superliminal	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
Supraland	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization Deluxe Edition	$4.99	$49.99	90% off
Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival Deluxe Edition	$29.69	$54.99	46% off
Taito Milestones 2	$23.99	$39.99	40% off
Temtem	$17.99	$44.99	60% off
Terra Memoria	$14.99	$19.99	25% off
Teslagrad 2	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
Teslagrad Power Pack Edition	$12.99	$29.98	48% off
Teslagrad Remastered	$4.99	$9.99	53% off
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
The Escapists 2	$4.99	$19.99	75% off
The Ninja Saviors: Return Of The Warriors	$5.99	$19.99	70% off
The Wild At Heart	$9.99	$24.99	60% off
They Always Run	$10.99	$19.99	45% off
They Always Run	$10.99	$	45% off
Ty The Tasmanian Tiger™ 2: Bush Rescue™ Hd	$14.99	$29.99	50% off
Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher	$19.99	$49.99	60% off
Underdungeon	$1.99	$13.99	85% off
Unpacking	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
Unsighted	$7.99	$19.99	60% off
Untitled Goose Game	$9.99	$19.99	50% off
Void Bastards	$8.99	$29.99	70% off
Wandersong	$4.99	$19.99	75% off
Yooka-laylee	$19.99	$19.99	0% off

Item	Price	MSRP	% Off	History*
.hack//g.u. Last Recode	$12.99	$64.99	80% off	Lowest price $12.98 on 2024-3-28
A Hat In Time	$18.89	$37.79	50% off	Matches low
Aca Neogeo Metal Slug X	$4.93	$9.87	50% off	Matches low
Among Us	$3.78	$6.3	40% off	Matches low
Astria Ascending	$21.19	$52.99	60% off	Matches low
Backpack Hero	$20.79	$25.99	20% off	Matches low
Baten KaitosⅠ&Ⅱhd Remaster	$40.19	$66.99	40% off	New Lowest
Beacon Pines	$25.19	$25.19	0% off	Lowest price $12.59 on 2024-3-28
Beholder 2	$6.42	$18.89	66% off	New Lowest
Bit.trip Collection	$2.69	$12.99	79% off	New Lowest
Blasphemous	$7.87	$31.49	75% off	Matches low
Braid, Anniversary Edition	$22.49	$24.99	10% off	New Lowest
Bubble Bobble 4 Friends	$17.49	$49.99	65% off	New Lowest
Captain Tsubasa: Rise Of New Champions Month 1 Edition	$13.37	$53.49	75% off	Lowest price $12.79 on 2023-9-1
Cattails	$2.69	$19.99	86% off	Lowest price $0.2 on 2022-10-20
Chinatown Detective Agency	$13.29	$33.24	60% off	New Lowest
Clive 'n' Wrench	$16.99	$33.99	50% off	Matches low
Cocomelon: Play With Jj	$15.11	$50.39	70% off	Matches low
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!	$2.69	$25.19	89% off	Lowest price $2.49 on 2023-8-7
Cook, Serve, Delicious, Trilogy!	$19.19	$47.99	60% off	New Lowest
Cotton 100%	$2.99	$11.99	75% off	New Lowest
Cotton Fantasy	$12.49	$49.99	75% off	Matches low
Cozy Grove	$8.48	$16.99	50% off	New Lowest
Crime O'clock	$12.50	$24.99	49% off	New Lowest
Cris Tales	$4.99	$49.99	90% off	Matches low
Darius Cozmic Collection Arcade	$22.39	$55.99	60% off	Lowest price $16.79 on 2023-12-29
Darius Cozmic Collection Console	$22.49	$74.99	70% off	Matches low
Dariusburst: Another Chronicle Ex+	$19.99	$49.99	60% off	Lowest price $14.99 on 2023-11-13
Death And Taxes	$2.69	$16.37	83% off	New Lowest
Demon Turf	$14.49	$28.99	50% off	Matches low
Demon's Tilt	$10	$25	60% off	Lowest price $7.5 on 2022-12-23
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition	$12.99	$64.99	80% off	Matches low
Dinobreak	$13.63	$27.26	50% off	Matches low
Doraemon Story Of Seasons	$12.99	$64.99	80% off	Matches low
Doraemon Story Of Seasons: Friends Of The Great Kingdom Special Edition	$26.39	$79.99	67% off	Matches low
Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise Of The Dragons	$20.38	$33.98	40% off	Matches low
Dragon Ball Fighterz	$12.79	$79.99	84% off	Lowest price $11.99 on 2023-1-18
Dragon Ball: The Breakers	$6.74	$26.99	75% off	Matches low
Dredge	$20.99	$29.99	30% off	Matches low
Football Manager 2024 Touch	$41.99	$69.99	40% off	New Lowest
Forager	$9.44	$26.99	65% off	Matches low
Foretales	$14.81	$22.79	35% off	Matches low
Framed Collection	$12.5	$12.5	0% off	Lowest price $2.5 on 2023-8-27
Frogun	$11.99	$19.99	40% off	Matches low
Fuga: Melodies Of Steel	$31.91	$53.19	40% off	Matches low
Fuga: Melodies Of Steel 2	$31.91	$53.19	40% off	New Lowest
Genesis Noir	$19.94	$19.94	0% off	Lowest price $5.98 on 2023-8-7
Gimmick! Special Edition	$9.99	$19.99	50% off	Matches low
God Eater 3	$12.79	$79.99	84% off	Lowest price $11.99 on 2023-2-9
Guacamelee! 2	$6.24	$24.99	75% off	Matches low
Hammerwatch Ii	$19.99	$32.89	39% off	New Lowest
Hammerwatch Ii: The Chronicles Edition	$35.99	$54.65	34% off	New Lowest
Hand Of Fate 2	$11.39	$37.99	70% off	Lowest price $5.69 on 2023-10-5
Howl	$12.86	$19.49	34% off	Matches low
Ikenfell	$8.09	$26.99	70% off	Matches low
In Other Waters	$18.99	$18.99	0% off	Lowest price $5.69 on 2023-6-12
In Sound Mind	$4.49	$44.99	90% off	Matches low
Infinite Guitars	$16.19	$26.99	40% off	New Lowest
Inside	$2.69	$25.99	89% off	Lowest price $2.51 on 2022-9-19
Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series	$13.37	$53.49	75% off	Matches low
Kraken Academy!!	$23.99	$23.99	0% off	Lowest price $7.19 on 2024-5-9
Kraken Odyssey	$14.00	$21.99	36% off	New Lowest
Lego Dc Super-villains	$10.49	$69.99	85% off	Lowest price $6.99 on 2022-11-7
Lego Worlds	$5.99	$29.99	80% off	Matches low
Lego® Star Wars™: The Skywalker Saga Galactic Edition	$24.99	$99.99	75% off	Matches low
Lego� Marvel Super Heroes 2	$7.99	$39.99	80% off	Lowest price $3.99 on 2022-11-7
Lego� Ninjago� Movie Video Game	$8.99	$59.99	85% off	Matches low
Lego� The Incredibles	$10.49	$69.99	85% off	Matches low
Limbo	$2.69	$12.99	79% off	Lowest price $2.51 on 2022-9-19
Little Nightmares: Complete Edition	$9.99	$39.99	75% off	Lowest price $7.99 on 2022-6-23
Manic Mechanics	$13.99	$27.99	50% off	Matches low
Minecraft	$14.99	$29.99	50% off	New Lowest
Minecraft Deluxe Collection	$24.99	$49.99	50% off	New Lowest
Minecraft Dungeons	$12.99	$25.99	50% off	New Lowest
Minecraft Dungeons Ultimate Edition	$25.99	$51.99	50% off	Matches low
Minecraft Legends	$25.99	$51.99	50% off	Matches low
Minecraft Legends Deluxe Edition	$31.99	$63.99	50% off	Matches low
Monster Prom: Xxl	$6.50	$20.99	69% off	Matches low
Mortal Kombat 11	$13.99	$69.99	80% off	Matches low
Moving Out 2	$19.49	$38.99	50% off	Matches low
Moving Out Deluxe Edition	$13.99	$34.99	60% off	Lowest price $6.99 on 2023-5-28
My Friend Peppa Pig	$25.19	$50.39	50% off	Lowest price $20.15 on 2023-12-21
My Hero One's Justice	$13.49	$26.99	50% off	Lowest price $7.99 on 2023-2-9
My Hero One's Justice 2	$13.37	$53.49	75% off	Matches low
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Full Burst	$6.24	$24.99	75% off	Lowest price $4.99 on 2023-5-29
Ni No Kuni™ Ii: Revenant Kingdom Prince's Edition	$12.79	$79.99	84% off	Matches low
Nobody Saves The World	$11.99	$29.99	60% off	Matches low
Overcooked! 2	$6.99	$27.99	75% off	Matches low
Paleo Pines	$23.99	$39.99	40% off	New Lowest
Panorama Cotton	$2.99	$11.99	75% off	New Lowest
Paradise Killer	$25.19	$25.19	0% off	Lowest price $7.55 on 2024-5-9
Parents Vs Kids	$9.00	$29.99	69% off	Matches low
Phantom Breaker: Omnia	$6.24	$24.99	75% off	Matches low
Puzzle Bobble / Bust-a-move (16-bit Console Version)	$6.74	$8.99	25% off	Matches low
Puzzle Bobble Everybubble!	$34.99	$49.99	30% off	Matches low
Raystorm X Raycrisis Hd Collection	$24.99	$49.99	50% off	Matches low
Read Only Memories: Neurodiver	$18.63	$20.7	10% off	New Lowest
Rustler	$3.99	$39.99	90% off	Matches low
Scourgebringer	$6.44	$21.49	70% off	Matches low
She Wants Me Dead Extended Edition	$2.69	$12.38	78% off	Lowest price $2.02 on 2023-7-19
Signalis	$18.89	$26.99	30% off	Matches low
Simulator Bundle: Gas Station Simulator And Barn Finders	$23.96	$35.99	33% off	Matches low
Slay The Spire	$11.38	$33.49	66% off	Lowest price $10.04 on 2021-12-23
Slime Rancher: Plortable Edition	$13.29	$33.24	60% off	Matches low
Space Invaders Invincible Collection	$20.99	$69.99	70% off	Matches low
Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission - Launch Edition	$12.79	$79.99	84% off	Lowest price $11.99 on 2021-9-9
Superliminal	$12.49	$24.99	50% off	Matches low
Supraland	$13.49	$26.99	50% off	New Lowest
Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization Deluxe Edition	$5.49	$54.99	90% off	Matches low
Taiko No Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival Deluxe Edition	$39.68	$73.49	46% off	Matches low
Taito Milestones 2	$29.99	$49.99	40% off	New Lowest
Temtem	$23.99	$59.99	60% off	New Lowest
Terra Memoria	$18.74	$24.99	25% off	New Lowest
Teslagrad 2	$12.99	$25.99	50% off	New Lowest
Teslagrad Power Pack Edition	$19.99	$38.98	48% off	New Lowest
Teslagrad Remastered	$5.99	$12.99	53% off	New Lowest
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope	$13.49	$26.99	50% off	Matches low
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*History is a beta feature, only goes back as far as I've been tracking this item, and may not be 100% accurate

Creation of the Realms
In the beginning there where two beings one of Light and one of Dark Aether one represented Creation and the other Destruction, both of these entities created the Realms of Draakana and Avalar which would become the homes of various species but especially Dragons which where created by the beings to bring forth magic into the realms. However they also created one specific Dragon a purple one that would be able to control all elements including Aether itself, this purple Dragon and all the ones that would follow would protect the Realms and bring an era of change either whether good or bad was up for the Dragon themselves to decide.
The Banishment of the Dragons
Formerly the Dragons lived in what is now known as the Forgotten Realms it was here where their species truly flourished, they build much of realms infrastructure and brought an era of peace across all species in these lands. It was during these times when the connection with Avalar was first founded and both realms entered an age of progress, however eventually a certain Sorceress grew to resent the Dragons believing them to hoard all the magic for themselves and banished them to the other side of the world, and with this the magic across the Forgotten Realms would slowly fade away over time with the portal that led to Avalar being the first to close.
The Founding of the Dragon Realms
When the Dragons awoke in the land they found themselves in they slowly but surely recreated their new home on the Island which would eventually become Dreamweavers. However this Island would eventually become to small for their civilization, and one brave Sea Dragon would set out to find a new home for her and her children. And after a long and exhausting swim she found land but after dragging herself to shore she collapsed and passed away her children would become the first inhabitans of what is now known as Dragon Shores, with the other Dragons following soon after.
The events of the OG trilogy happen
A thousand years after the Dragons have made their home in the new Realms a new purple Dragon was born who became known as Spyro, and whilst Spyro was mostly a thrill seeking young Dragon who didn't care about things such as destiny he would through his adventures bring the Realms into a new age of peace and prosperity. His story began when a creature known as Gnasty Gnorc who after causing much mischief across the Realms because he felt that he didn't fit in with the other creatures, with him having a particular interest in learing magic this caused the Dragons to eventually banish him to the Junkyard which Gnasty build his own kingdom in with him creating othe Gnorcs out of the stolen treasures of the Dragons.
Now Gnasty Always had plans to one day return to the Dragon Realms and take it for himself but after being insulted on live television he decided to put that plan into action now, and with one devasting hit of magic all the Dragons where turned into statues except for Spyro who didn't know it at the time but his ties to Aether had protected him from Gnasty's magic. After this Spyro would go about his first adventure freeing all the Dragons and collecting their stolen gems and eggs all ending with him torching Gnasty, of course Spyro didn't cause any permanent harm to him just enough to hopefully teach him a lesson
Sortly after Spyro's first adventure he found himself into a new mess, having brought to the Realms of Avalar which has been taking over by a small creature called Ripto nobody fully knows where Ripto has come from, perhaps a realm far away from both Draakana and Avalar but seeing how he has a hatred for Dragons it shows that he lives in a place near them. It is during this adventure that Spyro starts to take his role as a purple Dragon more serious whether unintional or not, with him bringing the various warring races of Avalar together and bringing peace across the lands and eventually leading to both Avalar and Draakana re-establishing contact. This adventure eventually ending in him defeating Ripto (or so it seems) and getting the vacation he wanted in the first place.
And now Spyro's last adventure of the og trilogy atleast, after a Thousand years of the magic slowly disapearing in the Forgotten Realms the Sorceress also notices that the magic she uses to keep herself alive is fading as well, with the signs of aging apearing across her body. Not just this but the portals across the Realms are shutting off one by one which would cause trouble for her dominion over the lands, she eventually caught wind of a young dragons adventures and learns where the Dragons have choosen to live after she banished them, and send her apprentice Bianca to steal their eggs, with Bianca believing that she wanted to bring the Dragons back to the Forgotten Realms to bring the magic back. Of course it was Spyro's job to get the Eggs back together with Hunter who choose to travel with Spyro to the Dragon Realms after his adventure in Avalar, and much like before Spyro would help the inhabitans of the Forgotten Realms and thanks to his Aether magic the longer he stays in the Realms the more the magic came back.
A short while into their adventure Hunter and Bianca would start to interact and would begin to catch feelings for eachother, much to the chagrin of Spyro which to be fair if your best friend felt in love with somebody who kidnapped the babies of your species you would not be happy either. But luckily for Spyro after Bianca learned that what the Sorceress plan is for the baby Dragons she would start to help Spyro and Hunter, and eventually Spyro would defeat the Sorceress once in her castle and later for good in the super bonus round.
After this the Forgotten Realms restablished contact with the Dragon Realms and became known as the United Realms under Bianca's leadership, it was also after this that the portal to Avalar was permantly openend only in the United Realms instead of the Dragon Realms thanks to the Professor having to go of old tomes, of course this was easily remedied when the Dragons gave the proper coordinates. This resulted in the cultural exchange between all Realms and a large group of Avalarians to move to Draakana, who created the Valley of New Avalar or just the Valley of Avalar as most called it.
What came after
Most of the events that happenend after the Forgotten Realms are of minor note, such as Spyro freeing the Fairylands from Grendor and saving the Dragonflies twice with the second time being caused by Ripto. The one thing of note with this even is that Spyro started to experiment with a different element mainly bubble breath, which he got access to thanks to Bianca who uncovered runes from the old dragon civilization it is even believed that these runes where created by the first Purple Dragon.
And now we get to the interesting bits, an elder by the name of Red got corrupted by the Sorcerer to plant Dark Gems (which another Dark Master would use later), in order to drain the land of Magic. And whilst Spyro would of course defeat Red the Sorcerer was in the meantime looking into the origins of Aether and the Purple Dragon, this let him to the Shadow Realm a place beyond creation. And after the defeat of Red he set his plan into motion to tap into these Shadow Realms by releasing the Calamity, which trapped everyone from Draakana and Avalar in the Shadow Realm whilst also draining them of their magic, it is also thanks to his meddling with Dark Aether that resulted in his Purple scales. And whilst Spyro would defeat him just like any other villain before hand the Calamity would have had irreparable damage to the world such as the formation of the Ancient Grove a poisonous forest that corrupts all that enter it. And it even changed the nature of the Purple Dragon.
The Age of Malefor
After an unknown amount of time Spyro would grow older and more powerfull having returned to his home of Artisans but some noticed that he would start to behave oddly, he would start to become more and more obsessed with Aether and other elements and eventually fell to the temptations of Dark Aether. This let him to be exiled and he eventually found himself in a place where Dark Aether was most abundant a place that would eventually become the well of souls. If only the Elders had paid attention to Spyro they would have noticed the weird glow in his eyes, and the fact that it looked as if there was something missing. This now soulless husk that was once the Hero of the Realms completely taken over by Dark Aether now dubbed himself Malefor the Dark Master, and he let a campaign of terror against his own kind, destroying the Artisans homeworld leaving it as a useless ruins that got covered up by the ground only to be rediscovered in the future and be renamed as the Ruins of Warfang. The same happenend to the Dream Weavers which Malefor let fall to the ground destroying the landscape and distorting it with runaway magic. Together with his Ape army he waged war agains all other Realms, using the improved Dark Gems now known as Dark Crystals to drain magic of both Dragons and other creatures to fuel his army and ambitions. Luckily for the rest of the world the Dragon Elders and Spyro's old friends managed to corner Malefor and trap him in the Shadow Realms or atleast his Essence, whilst the evil force that has taken his souls place was trapped in the well of Souls.
The Legend begins
Despite Malefor being trapped the damage was still done, much of the world was without magic and the portals became useless, not just that but many started to mistrust Dragons thanks to the ongoing war and many dragons have been killed during the war. But all would change when a new Purple Dragon would be born, who would for some reason insist on being called Spyro not even he knows why. After an attack from the apes on his home with the Dragonflies Spyro learns he isn't one of them and sets out to find where he belongs. It was at this moment that the found Ignitus the Dragon that was task with gaurding the eggs all those years ago, and after learning his name he was of course suprised but the decided to keep it to himself. After their meeting Spyro and Ignitus would retake the Temple and set out to save the othe Gaurdians from Cynder, with him traveling to the Elemental islands which cumulated in him ending up saving Ignitus in the ruins of Dreamweavers now known as the Concurrent Skies, it was here where Spyro learned about Cynders past and followed her to Convexity the place where the Dragon Realms and the Shadow Realms meet. And where Spyro and Cynder fought and whilst Spyro did defeat and save Cynder from her corruption but Malefor's essence is freed from the Shadow Realm, since then Cynder lived with Spyro and the Gaurdians at the Temple but what she has done under Malefors control still haunts her.
A couple of weeks later the Eternal Night approaches an event where the two celestial moons would eclipse and allow spirits to wander the Well of Souls, Spyro would be sent out to stop the Ape king Gaul and to find Cynder who fled the Dragon Temple thanks to her guilt, with spyro also having been tasked with finding the chronicler who has been contacting Spyro in his dreams. Spyros first stop would be the Ancient Grove a large forest that was corrupted by Dark Aether during the Calamity that at this point happenend centuries ago, and is gaurded by Arborik a large tree golem that was created by Malefor as an artificial soldier. But after Spyro defeated him he was kidnapped by a group of pirates and forced into an arena, it was during this time he got a letter addressed by Hunter of Avalar and had a short reunion with Cynder before Gauls forces attacked the pirates and kidnapped her, Spyro used the distraction to escape the pirates but during is flight away from the ship he fell unconscious thanks to the Chronicler, only to be saved by a leviathan who brought him to the shores of the White Isle.
The White Isle is an ancient Island that houses all of Dragon knowledge and is believed to have been created since the beginning of time, with the first Chronicler being also the first Purple Dragon. After Spyro met the Chronicler he told him that he led Spyro here to wait out Malefors return, but after Spyro learned that this would cause Cynder to return to Malefors control he choose to go to the Well of Souls to stop him there and then. And after a long battle on his way to the top and a fight against Gaul who incapacitated Cynder Spyro would fall in the energy beam that sat at the center of the arena, which caused Dark Aether to start corrupting the young Dragon much like it had done before with his previous life. And after this newly formed "Dark Spyro" gave Gaul the finishing blow he flew up to Cynder and Sparx who where horrified to see what had become of Spyro, with Cynder tackling Spyro out of the Energy beam which luckily turned him back to normal. But the Well of Souls started to collapse around them thanks to Malefors return, so Spyro would use his Dragon time ability to freeze them into a large crystal and protect them from the collapsing mountain.
During this three years would pass and during those years Malefor would cause even more damage to the world, first he corrupted the apes into shadowy monsters because he felt that they only followed him for power instead of loyalty, and then he destroyed the magic Crafters homeworld turning it into the Burned Lands whilst raising the ancient temples high up into the skies. After this he sent out his new artificial soldiers out to attack the Realms and used Dark Crystals to once again drain the lands of magic. At the end of those three years Hunter would finally find Spyro and Cynder only to be beaten by Malefors forces who took them to the catacombs which at some point where known as the Celestial Plains, both Spyro and Cynder would wake up at this place and fight their way out of it and finally meet up with Hunter who explained that he was sent out by Ignitus after Spyro didn't return to the temple, as well as the three years that they where absent.
After this they join him and travel to Warfang after a quick disagreement in the Valley of Avalar, a name that for some reason sound familiar to Spyro they found themselves in Warfang, right in the middle of a seige by Malefors army. And after Spyro and Cynder fight themselves through he city and defeat the giant lava golem they reunite with Ignitus, with Cynder asking if they could do something about the magic chains that keep Spyro and Cynder trapped together only to learn much to her annoyance that there is nothing they could do about it. After a short celebration of their victory malefor would announce the return of the Destroyer who would created the belt of fire that will destroy all life on the planet, so Spyro and Cynder would go through the Ruins of Warfang which housed the leftovers of Artisans and open the gate for the Gaurdians and other Dragons to ambush the destroyer in the valley.
After making their way to the valley they noticed that the Destroyer moved to quickly to catch up to them, only for Cynder to suggest to blow the Dam so that the water would slow it down. And so they did after which they destroyed the Dark Crystals that controlled the beast including the ones on the inside, but before they could celebrate Malefor reanimated it with his dark powers this let Ignitus with no choice but to take Spyro and Cynder through the now weaker belt of fire to confront Malefor head on, whilst sending the other Gaurdians to help the other inhabitants to hide underground far away from the surface. However even with Ignitus being an fire Gaurdian the flames eventually overtake him and with his last powers sents Spyro and Cynder through the belt killing him in the progress, this leaves Spyro distraught and he lets the darkness overtake him luckily for him Cynder is there to remind him that he's not alone. And both race through the Burned Lands and the Floating Isle's to confront Malefor before it is to late.
After finally making their way to Malefor the two Purple Dragons finally meet, with Malefor starting to create doubts in both Spyro and Cynder which allows him to sortly retake control of Cynder. During this Malefor would start to taunt Spyro leaving some hints about how they're the same, something Spyro would mistake as meaning something else and he almost gave up completely believing he had failed to protect Cynder, Ignitus and the others. This allowed Cynder to break free, and Malefor to fly in a fit of rage with the battle for the fate of the world finally beginning.
At first they battled high above the volcano but after the Destroyer finally entered it the planet started to break apart, and the fight went on in the same Volcano and the falling Temple that Malefor called home. With them eventually making their way to the core of the Planet, which was made from solid Aether, and with both sides giving one last Aether attack with Spyro and Cynder finally overtaking Malefor he falls on the Crystal and the Light Aether spirits take Malefor away, and hopefully destroying the Dark Spirit that had taken over the old Spyro's body all those centuries ago. But this wasn't the end yet because even with Malefor gone the world was still falling apart, and Spyro saw one last option telling Cynder to leave to life another day for he might not make it out this time, but Cynder choose to stay by Spyro's side and with one last use of Dragon time now amplified by Light Aether, and Cynders declaration of love Spyro stopped the world from falling apart creating a new era for the survivors.
And that's where our story ends the world now exists as a group of floating islands hold together by magic which finally started to really return, and Ignitus became the new Chronicler who started to look where Spyro and Cynder ended up, seeing how they're not in the book of dead dragons. What happens after this is anyones guess, maybe a new Purple Dragon would be born who would protect these newly formed Skylands.

let me lay the scene out for you
i am currently doing a 25 year old software course for my last year of highschool, my teacher insists on teaching us outdated concepts and i have only 3 days to finish this assessment we got last week (health issues and shit have stopped me from starting it and i cant get an extension) basically im asking this as a last ditch effort so i dont have the weight of this courses assessment on my shoulders when i have my art major work and legal studies assessment to worry about.
i have completed 2 aspects of the assessment (there are 3) and i do not have the mental capacity to even begin to think about this part of the assessment that is left. please, i am begging anyone who has read this far if you have nothing better to do, please for the love of all that be, write me the code for this part, i know this is a big ask since im sure most of you have lives to attend to, but to those who would like to help me in this trying time of need, please help a brother out.
i will be offering a hand written thank you letter and 1 tf2 key for anyone who completes this for me.
thank you to anyone considering, have a great day/night/solar cycle
anyway here is the requirments: design a menu interface to allow the user to choose from these options using HTML, CSS and JavaScript in one program: ● Enter at least 10 names and scores (preferably from an external text file). ● Sort the data by name using bubble sort. ● Display sorted names with scores. ● Sort the data by score using the sorting technique above and display sorted scores with names. ● Demonstrate the sort process to the user. ● Search the data using linear search and binary search. ● Demonstrate this Search to the user.

I don't remember a lot of the game but the principal thing i have is that it have an isometric view and the most thing i remember do was place different blocks or something, maybe portals too. There were characters, when i materialize the image of them, i remember a man and a woman, both with some star trek like suit, the man had black hair and the suit maybe was grey. Behind the "isometric" playable map, the background i remember sometimes was black or space and now im remembering that it changes sometimes, for some reason the image of something like a sky with ¿bubbles? in there appears in my mind.
I used to play this in pc in a period when i was a kid (like 2005-2010) and used to play games on an cd emulator so maybe it was between there? i don't know, sry. If it was between those games in the emulator, the emulator had green pxelated letters and black background or something like that but i don't think this is relevant for the game finding.

Platform(s): Windows PC - I believe I played it on XP - specifically accessible through Windows Media Center. At least, that's where I always played it.
Genre: Isometric Action Puzzle Game
Estimated year of release: I believe 2000-2010 Almost certainly wasn't after 2010
Graphics/art style: The whole art direction was very pastel, "cutesy", and cartoony. Every level was made up of a grid of tiles, typically pastel yellow or pink. The camera always centered on your character hopping up and down around the level, with the tiles changing color as your little character hopped on it. I think the score and title was written with big bubble letters. Everything was clearly drawn with pixels but it wasn't 8 or 16-bit. The SFX were also very light cartoony - getting hit by an enemy would make a high pitched "oh" noise
Notable characters: There were many different enemies, but the only character I remember is the main character. You would play a purple little blob with purple ball feet, big black cartoon eyes and a sort of head stalk that ended in a bright yellow star that would swing back and forth.
Notable gameplay mechanics: The game was kind of like Q*bert but flat. Your main character would hop/bounce around on a grid of square tiles that make a sort of level floor - not a pyramid like in Q*bert - and as they hopped on each one it would change color. The goal of each level was to change all the tiles of one color to the other, like from yellow to pink, and avoid whatever enemies there were moving around the stage at the same time. You could play the game with the arrow keys, just pick a direction and your character would hop that way on each tile until you hit an enemy, changed direction, or fell off the stage.
Other details: I always played it through the Windows Media Center application - I would click on that and be able to navigate to a game section to play it. I don't believe it was bundled with it, I can find no information about any WMC bundled games online.

From the novel Boy Swallows Universe, by Trent Dalton

When it’s so hot in summer on this endless street and the Brisbane City Council has laid new bitumen over potholes that explode in frustration, the tar sticks to the rubber of your Dunlops like Hubba Bubba bubble gum and everybody pulls open their curtains despite all the mosquitos blowing in from the Brighton and Shorncliffe mangroves and this whole street becomes a theatre and all those living rooms are window-framed to become televisions playing a live daytime soap opera called Thank God It’s Dole Day and a ribald comedy called Pass the Chicken Salt and a police procedural drama called The Colour of a Two-Cent Piece. Fists are thrown through these front window theatre screens and laughs are had and tears are shed.

From Letter Hunters, by Ana María Shua.

Watching TV How strange to be like this, on the sofa, watching my own face making clumsy faces on the screen. The show’s not bad but my acting leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t recognize my voice; and my gestures seem false, derivative, hardly spontaneous. And the strangest thing, perhaps, is that the show is live.

The first Docudrama.

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