How to hit driver

A/N: yeah I changed up the Alliance admiral's name a teeny tiny bit because it really bugged the shit out of me. Not a lot, it's still basically the same name, but now I can't get sued for using it. That change has been a long time coming, really.
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It was said that no plan ever survived contact with the enemy. That, at least in the case of Marcus Wayne’s infiltration of Neldia, was proven entirely true.
His ship, the Peacemaker, had undergone an extensive refit before its jump to Neldia to both modify its sensor signature and repair its failing Aegis barrier. The first objective succeeded. The second did not.
One day later, leaving the derelict Ultimate Vigil behind in deep space, the United Human Alliance courier ship Winged Deliverance logged a real space entry at the edge of the Neldia system. Its crew, having spent their waking hours plagued by hallucinations and enduring horrible nightmares as they slept, found this shift very welcome. The worst, though they could hardly believe it, was still yet to come.
“The Neldian fleet is mustering for war,” rumbled the man who had once held the title and security codes of an Alliance sector admiral. Now, he was a traitor to his homeland. “Security will be high.”
“No need to worry, Admiral,” said Marcus Wayne. “Your code will get us through.” It would not.
It took two hours for the Peacemaker, disguised as the Winged Deliverance, to be challenged by the Neldian Armada. “Transmit clearance code,” said an automated voice. Marcus took out a data disc with the admiral's clearance code on it.
“Hold,” said Terris. She was clad in black, her active camouflage offline to save battery, and she had been sitting at the passive sensor console for the past three hours. “Look at this.” A news broadcast popped up in front of Marcus Wayne and his officers. Sector Admiral Sheparda Dama, or at least he was once a sector admiral, had been tried and convicted of high treason.
“It was a secret trial,” Dama said, still in shock at the revelation. “I had no knowledge of this.”
“Well, that tracks, but what do we do now? What code gets us through?”
“Transmit clearance code,” the voice said again, “or adjust course.”
Dama thought for a moment. “Change course,” he said. “We’re not getting through.”
They did. A great sense of defeat took hold in the hearts of the crew. They would never reach the Neldian hypercom. Sheparda Dama, who would have gladly given his life in defense of humankind, would never get the chance to be the man who broke their chains.
The Peacemaker was halfway out of the Neldia system before Terris spoke again. “Hold it,” she said. “I have an idea.”
That was why she had been placed where she was. Clad in an airtight stealth suit. Inside a hollowed-out asteroid. On a ballistic journey to the heart of Neldian space. It was the most insane idea that Marcus Wayne had ever seen.
But, sometimes, insanity was a symptom of genius.
Terris flew past the Neldian Armada undetected. Many asteroids entered the inner system this way, flung by outer-system prospecting ships to the foundries and shipyards in Neldian orbit, and they were thrown and caught so frequently that only the most cursory of inspections was put upon each one. Terris passed the Alliance fleet entirely undetected.
Terris’ chameleon suit could mimic the sensor return of the precious metals it was buried in, at least enough to fool a probing scan, and the cuts made by Protectoral engineers had been so precise that Terris had fit inside there with barely a centimeter of space to spare. She was effectively entombed inside sixty meters of solid rock.
Interstellar espionage was not a job for the claustrophobic.
Finally, after days of waiting, the signal came. She was in range. A mental command triggered a series of shaped charges in the rock above her, if such directions existed in microgravity, and forty pea-sized explosives blasted a circular tunnel all the way to the asteroid surface. If just one of them had failed, that rock might have been her tomb.
Terris tried not to think about that as she began climbing her way out. A brief burst from her suit’s EVA thrusters was enough to start her on her way, and the tunnel out was wide enough for her to use her arms and legs to speed things up. Finally, after too long a wait, Terris saw the Neldian sun for the very first time.
There was fire in the distance. Comm chatter on every band. Warships burning hard for the outer system. The Coalition fleet was here.
She zoomed in, far more than she had ever had to before, and she could pick out the faintest flashes of blue as warships exploded in the black. A brief crawl around the asteroid, which also helped to warm up her muscles after days of inactivity, let her discern an attack force engaging the Alliance fleet. After a moment’s hesitation, weighing the risks, Terris activated her passive sensor suite to try and decrypt Alliance military chatter.
Instantly, her sensors were flooded with noise from the defensive bastions. The fleet base at the L5 point was loudest, its comm operators screaming indecipherably at fellow Alliance elements fighting in the black. Neldian orbit, where the hypercom station was, seemed to be the centerpiece of all the communications traffic. The hypercom, unsurprisingly, was being used as a relay for comm traffic all across the system. Terris made a note to hack its server banks for intelligence, and perhaps leave a timed virus or two to shut down the system after she was gone.
Her suit bleeped, alerting her that she was in optimum position to make the leap to the hypercom. She zoomed in on it, a red and spiked thing just like everything else the Alliance made, and calculated the right trajectory to land right on its metal surface.
Trying to jump from a moving asteroid out past Neldia’s rings and hit a hypercom station barely three hundred meters in diameter was like shooting a rifle from a jumbo jet in hopes of hitting a mosquito down on Earth. A nearly impossible shot, even with Coalition computers to help make the jump, and anyone lucky enough to make it would have been better served bankrupting their local casino at the slot machines.
Terris gave a command to her suit, activating a set of ion thrusters to boost her off the asteroid and adjust her course mid-flight. She’d never believed in luck.
She coasted silent and graceful past the particle guns in high orbit, like a majestic swan flying on a summer wind. Their sensor arrays were directed out, past her, to the far distant parts of space where a trillion tons of steel were locked in deadly battle. Terris really did wish she could smile at the moment. She was about to have unrestricted access to the biggest communications relay in the star system, able to send out viruses and receive vital intelligence that could cripple the Alliance fleet if placed in the right hands. Terris, confident as ever, knew they would be.
She would make the Neldian Armada burn, and they had no idea she was even coming.
She reached the hypercom station in just under a day, agonizingly slow for a woman like her, hovering just above its surface to avoid triggering pressure sensors. After that, it was simple enough to get inside. Terris found it almost trivial to bypass the airlock sensor grid and trigger the outer bulkhead to open unnoticed, its report to the command room destroyed before it ever arrived. Entering the station itself was easy after that.
Here, there was gravity. She could not hover like she had on the outside of the station. But here, there were no pressure sensors. She really had no need to hover.
The corridor she found herself in was large enough, though nothing like the expansive halls of a dreadnought, and a patrol of marines in powered suits trundled towards her obliviously. Terris had made the right call not to wear a Phantom powered suit. She ducked into an alcove, the chameleon suit concealing her from even their impressive sensor batteries, and they passed by with no clue at all.
Terris made it to the server banks with ease. Most of the hypercom’s security measures took the form of warships in orbit, clustered tightly around the planet to prevent exactly this scenario from happening, but those warships were off waging war. The station defenses were hopeless now that she was actually inside.
The data was encrypted, and she could neither access it nor copy it without potentially fatal consequences, but she wasn’t there to steal data. A brief, milliseconds-long connection to the primary server was all it took to riddle the entire system with custom-tailored computer viruses. The viruses were self-replicating, rather like an electronic version of the biological ones on Earth. They worked similarly, too, meant to latch onto outgoing communications signals and remain inert for a certain amount of time before activating and wreaking havoc across cyberspace.
Terris planned to leave the station in approximately thirty minutes. Shortly after that, the fireworks would begin. It was going to be beautiful.
She heard footsteps. A maintenance worker, no doubt. It was time for her to go. She disconnected from the server, taking pains to hide her involvement, and snuck out of the server room like a ghost in the night.
Next was the transmission array. This room was better-guarded, its door being flanked by marines, but Terris slipped inside by trailing behind an officer as he entered on some unknown pretext. After that, her daring and sleight of hand made sure Admiral Dama’s pre-recorded propaganda transmission was uploaded to the hypercom transmitter. It came with a set of instructions bearing the Admiralty’s seal, changed to be anonymous, to ensure as many people as possible heard his message.
In just under one standard hour, the United Human Alliance would be shaken to its very core. Terris had just made sure of it.
It took longer than she had expected for the door to open again and give her a chance to slip out. Terris had spent that time quite productively, downloading as many incoming and outgoing messages as she could to the internal hard drive just by her spinal cord. Even if they were encrypted, they’d be useful intelligence once Coalition codebreakers took a crack at them.
After that, it was trivial to slip past marine patrols and escape to the hull of the hypercom station. Terris found her ride, an Alliance warship by the name of Brightest Thunder, holding orbit just near the hypercom station. Admiral Dama, even if he was no longer an admiral, still had connections.
She charged her ion thrusters by tapping into the station reactor, an act which did not go unnoticed, but by then it was too late to respond. She had completed her incursion. The damage had been done. Perhaps if the Alliance acted swiftly and accurately, they could undo it, but Terris was a careful woman. She had covered her tracks well.
Waving one final goodbye to the crew of the hypercom station, Terris triggered her thrust pack and shot off into the ink.
“You must be my passenger.” A man in an Alliance captain’s uniform was waiting for her in the Brightest Thunder’s airlock. He wore a helmet and gloves, hermetically sealed to his airtight outfit, so he felt no effects from the vacuum of space. “I was sent by Sector Admiral Sheparda Dama,” he announced after a period of silence, “To transport you and whatever you may have safely to the Coalition fleet.” Nothing. Apart from the dull thudding of the ship’s railgun batteries, firing missiles at range to ward off a strike force of Coalition ships, the airlock was quiet as a ghost.
“You cannot expect me to endanger my life and the lives of my crew without at least some identification that you are who you claim to be!” Silence. Captain Senar Trevy had been standing in that airlock for three and a half hours, while his ship was tasked with screening Neldia and her eighteen billion inhabitants from harm, and he was just now wondering if he had been talking to a ghost.
“I am,” came a voice. Cold. Sterile. Inhuman. Exactly the kind Trevy expected from the secret spies of his former admiral.
“So you are.” Captain Trevy thought for a moment. He cycled the airlock. If his guest held hostile intent, one steel bulkhead would make no difference. “I’ve been stocking the crew with handpicked men and women since I received word of the operation,” he explained as they walked through the ship’s corridors. The crewmen he passed thought him insane. “I can’t vouch for them all, but the ship as a whole will obey me.” No response. Sometimes, Captain Trevy thought himself insane as well.
“This is my personal quarters,” he told the specter, stepping inside and sealing the door behind him. “I must warn you, for your own safety, it would be best not to leave it. The crew are mostly still Alliance loyalists.” He looked around, paying no heed to the decorated furniture or artificial sky, and finally shrugged and sighed. “Are you even here, still?”
Terris decloaked. She stood between him and the door, winged and cloaked in black like a demon of ancient myth. “I am.”
“You’re a black angel.” Senar Trevy, to his credit, kept his composure well. “A spy for the Ierad Republic.” He questioned her purpose here. They both knew it.
“You weren’t told?”
“I was told an alien would be coming aboard, but…” Trevy shrugged again, as if to say ‘what am I supposed to do?’ “The admiral vouched for you. That much is enough for me.” He also knew he had no choice in the matter. From what he knew about black angels, his ship had been lost the moment she boarded.
“I could have impersonated him,” said Terris, voice a perfect replica of Captain Trevy’s own. Even his own mother could not have told the difference. “And I’m trained to lie.” She was testing him, gauging his reaction to assess his personality. She was good at that.
“I could have you screened for deception,” Trevy countered, pointing up at a pearl-sized camera in the ceiling. Terris made a note that it was disabled. “And I could have had the technology officers vet your transmission.”
“I’m trained to lie well.” Terris sat down on Captain Trevy’s bed, a spartan thing compared to the sleeping quarters of most officers. There were no chairs in the room, so her options were few. She took off her helmet and tried to at least appear relaxed. In reality, she was anything but. “It comes with the job, really.”
“Fair,” Trevy chuckled, feigning calm. “I suppose the question now becomes whether or not you can trust me.”
“It’s a safe gamble.” Terris made a mental calculation. It would take her between thirty and fifty seconds to kill Captain Trevy, take the bridge, and vent the ship. That was a very safe gamble. “Besides, that’s what a peace treaty is.” Trevy looked confused. “A leap of faith. You trust your enemy to back their word, and you trust them to trust you as well. If we can’t get along here, can’t put aside our differences to work toward a common goal, then the Alliance will be right. And I hate it when they’re right.”
“I’m speaking to you now because I know they are wrong.” That came as no surprise to either of them. “You know, I was once a foreman of a labor crew in the munitions factories. The most productive unit in my sector.” That one did come as a surprise. “As a foreman, you get leeway to make certain decisions regarding the… well, I suppose they are slaves, under your command. Food intake and the like.” Captain Trevy looked pained when he brought up such memories. Terris wasn’t convinced that was how he really felt. “They use it to weed out any potential xeno sympathizers from the populace. Of course, at the time, I wasn’t so empathetic.”
“So you were a slave driver, and you beat your slaves to make them work. I hope every one of those shells was sabotaged.” Terris’ voice dripped with disdain. She had almost forgotten the Alliance captain was her enemy.
“No, I showed mercy,” Trevy defended himself. “I was generous.” This made Terris reconsider. Perhaps Senar Trevy could be an ally, if not a friend. “I won’t say I was a good man, but I wasn’t cruel. I was practical. Strong, healthy, well-treated workers are more productive than the beaten sacks of flesh in the other factories. My crew’s output was unmatched.”
“And?” Terris cocked her head inquisitively. For a high-ranking officer in the space navy of a genocidal regime, Senar Trevy really did not seem so bad. To be fair, however, she had set the bar pretty low.
“I was investigated for anti-human activity.” Terris could have predicted that. She almost did, too. “They sent me to the fleet, and my labor crew was reacquainted with the energy whips and pain beams.” There was no carrot for an Alliance labor slave. Only the stick. “Their productivity fell thirty percent in the first two weeks alone.” He sounded almost mournful as he said that. He was not lamenting the loss in productivity.
“You see,” said Trevy, “Hatred is not natural. It has to be caused, sustained, nurtured from the day a man is born until the day he dies.” With that, at least, Terris agreed. “And, as you’re about to see, a nation built around cruelty or prejudice cannot sustain itself. It will have to apply pressure to maintain its flawed status quo, like it did with me, and the pressure will build and build until it cannot build anymore.” He tapped a few buttons on the data disc in his hand. It began projecting an image of the battle for Neldia. He placed it on the bed next to Terris. “Now it’s breaking.”
“I wonder if they’ll find themselves in need of more shells.” Terris knew it wasn’t just shells. Every time a slave driver prioritized hatred over hard work, put cruelty over their quota, or even just bowed their head and obeyed the traditional dogma, they hurt the Alliance. Across nine worlds, with billions of slaves not working as they could have, things started to add up. “You know, for a superior species, your fleet is really getting its ass kicked right now. Might want to work on that.”
Captain Trevy nodded. His data disc beeped. He was needed on the bridge. “Agreed,” he said. “I hope this war ends soon, and to our mutual benefit. I’d hate to face you on the battlefield.” He picked up the data disc and turned to leave.
“Oh, forgot to mention, there’s a virus embedded in the transmissions you’ve received. Self-replicating. Nasty piece of work.” Terris shifted a bit in her seat. “Almost forgot about that.”
“Well, better to know now than when it’s activated,” Trevy smiled. “I’ll have Technology Officer Galdir investigate it.” With that, he left. His duty to the Alliance was nonexistent, but the men and women under his command still needed him. He had waited too long in the stateroom.
Terris, with nothing better to do, got to work on cracking the encryption in the transmissions she had copied. She failed. A transmission from deep in unknown space, sent from a dreadnought at the head of a task force known only as the Deep Expedition Fleet, was the only message she could read. Its contents, while troubling, mattered little at the moment. What was far more crucial, however, was the message Terris could not decipher. The military battle plan of Janus Ora’s personal armada.
The battle plan that, when analyzed on a Republic starship, would reveal its terrible secret too late.
The Coalition fleet was walking into a trap.
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Being a natural skeptic, this is a story I never thought I’d be telling. I grew up reading those short, half-edited horror stories that were so popular on the internet, scaring myself out of sleep too many times to count as a kid. These days, I’m still too scared to fall asleep, just like I was when I was 11 reading stories on boards I had no business browsing. This time, though, it isn’t typed words on my aging laptop that have my heart unable to beat calmly in my chest. It isn’t the long traded campfire story that has the hairs on my neck standing in unease.
It’s the envelope sitting on my desk, taunting me as I glance at it from across the room. The top torn open haphazardly, its contents situated neatly against the worn wood grain.
It’s the words that are typed so neatly along the page, bringing back every foul memory I can conjure.
“Thank you for donating.
Come back and see us again soon,
Mr. Weller.”
~
The sun hung lazily in the sky, casting a golden hue over the endless river of asphalt stretching out before me. This highway, flanked by gnarled mesquite trees and sporadic billboards advertising the next southern baptist church, had become somewhat of a familiar friend over the years. It was the unofficial gateway between my life at college and my small hometown nestled on the border of Texas and Louisiana.
I adjusted my review mirror, catching a glimpse of my own tired reflection. Summer break was finally here and I had high-tailed it from the campus as soon as my last final exam hit my professor’s desk. Gone was the grueling cycle of exams, papers, and endless nights spent hunched over textbooks. Whoever said that the college years were the best of their life needed to find the nearest sharp object to take a seat on.
As I drove, the familiar scenery slipping by in a soothing blur, my phone rang, jolting me from my thoughts. The screen flashed “Mom”, causing the involuntary roll of my eyes.
“Hey, Mom, I’m on the road. What’s up,” I spoke into the phone, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice.
”Hi, sweetheart! How close are you to home?” Her voice was warm and overly sweet, exactly the tone she used when she was about to ask for an inconvenient favor.
“Probably a few hours out. Why?”
“Perfect! Listen, can you do me a favor and pick up a case of beer for your dad? He invited his friends over tonight and I don’t have time to run to the store with all the cooking-,” she explained quickly, probably sensing my sigh of annoyance before I could even take a breath.
”Mom,” I interrupted evenly, “you do realize there are, like, zero places to stop for miles, right? The last couple hours are practically deserted.”
“I know, but most gas stations always have the kind your dad likes. Just stop at the next one you see, okay?”
I groaned internally, glancing at my half full gas gauge. I had filled up the tank this morning specifically so I wouldn’t have to stop once on the drive.
“Fine, I’ll see what I can do.”
”You’re the best,” Mom sighed in relief, her tone calm again. “Drive safe, honey.”
With that, she hung up, leaving me to the rhythmic drone of the road and my dusty second hand CD’s once again.
I kept my eyes peeled for the next gas station, hoping to get the beer run out of the way sooner rather than later. About 20 minutes after Mom’s call, a rundown gas station came into view, its neon sky flickering erratically against the dusky sky. Like most gas stations in the middle-of-nowhere-south, it looked like it hadn’t seen a renovation since at least the 70’s.
Pulling in, I parked next to a rusted out pickup and stepped out, the heat and humidity immediately oppressive. The place reeked of old oil and dust, the air thick with the smell of mildew. I made my way inside, the crude “bell” over the door made of old fishing lures and soda caps jingling half-heartedly as I entered.
If I thought the outside of the joint was sad, the inside was plain pathetic. Dimly lit and cluttered with off brand snacks and outdated magazines, I wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t been stocked since at least the 70’s. I quickly located the cooler, grabbing a case of Keystone Light and headed to the counter. I tried not to breathe the air in too deeply, a little afraid of whatever strange diseases probably lingered.
The attendant behind the counter was a greasy, wiry man with sunken eyes and a gaunt face. He glanced up from his equally disheveled book, watching me approach with an intensity that made me uneasy. Placing the beer on the counter, I fished out my license, hoping to make this transaction as quick as possible. He eyed me while I pulled my wallet out, his voice reeking of prolonged cigarette and cheap whiskey.
“Headed to Texas?” he gruffed.
I nodded slowly, trying to piece together how he knew. I was still at least an hour and a half from the border. “Yeah, lucky guess.” I chuckled uneasily.
”Not lucky at all,” he drawled out, “Saw yer license plate.”
I turned towards the glass door, seeing the direct line to my car.
“Ah,” I responded, not quite sure what else to add as I put down my drivers license next to the case of beer.
Is this how social interactions at gas stations are supposed to go?
The greasy man picked up my license, his gaze lingering on it a bit too long as he rang the beer up without glancing at the register.
“You’re an organ donor,” he remarked, casual, as if it were something he asked every day.
Nope. Definitely not a normal interaction.
”Uh, yeah. Just in case, I guess.”
He handed back the license and I fought the urge to wipe whatever strange grime he accumulated on his hands off my card.
“Makes you a good person,” he nodded, offering me a rotted grin.
I forced a smile, increasingly eager to get the hell out of this place. “How much?”
”Fifteen seventy three.” He replied, his accent catching over the vowels.
I handed over two wrinkled 10s, wondering if I should tell him to keep the change so I wouldn’t have to handle anything else he touched. Before I could decide, the man spoke again, peering back at the door.
”Yer headed the wrong way if yer trynna get to Texas. Should take the next left up ahead.”
I frowned, unable to keep up my polite mask much longer. “The road’s straight the whole way,” I argued, “I’ve driven it a hundred times.”
The grimy mess of a man simply smiled, a thin, almost predatory smile.
“Only bein polite. Suit yerself”
I took my change and beer, muttering a quick thanks before bolting it out of there. The encounter left an uncomfortable feeling in my chest, and I couldn’t shake the feeling of those piercing eyes on my back as I walked to my car.
Last time I do a favor for mom, I thought dramatically.
Once inside the safety of my car, I locked the doors and started the engine, eager to put distance between myself and that disgusting gas station. The man’s words and shit-eating grin echoed in my mind, but I dismissed them. The road home was straight, I knew that much for certain.
As the miles ticked by, I found myself turning the music up louder and louder, trying to shake off the unease from the encounter. I tried focusing on the familiar landmarks and the lyrics of the songs I’d heard a thousand times. Thankfully, it only took a few songs for it to work.
The sun began to dip lower into the sky, casting long shadows that stretched across the road. I figured I was about an hour from home at this point, my mind itching to be home.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see that something was seemingly… wrong.
When I glanced to the side, expecting fields of unkempt brush and patches of cactus, instead I saw short, twisted trees. My eyebrows furrowed, trying to make sense of the misplaced flora. I let off the gas slightly, slowing down the car to take in the patches of damp, soggy earth peppering the fields. I looked behind me, my brain desperate to rationalize the sudden change of environment. I gripped the steering wheel tighter, a knot of anxiety forming in my stomach.
This wasn’t right. I had driven this route countless times and the scenery had never changed so drastically. How in the world had I driven myself into a bog?
The road, usually straightforward and predictable, now seemed to wind and twist as my car crept along it, each bend revealing more of the eerie, waterlogged terrain. Doubts crept in, swift and harsh. Had I missed a turn? Was that psycho right after all?
The feeling of unease grew stronger with each passing mile. The familiar landmarks were gone, replaced by dense foliage and the occasional decrepit and rotted building. I glanced at my phone, picking it up in hopes of checking my GPS, but my heart sank when I saw the “no service” icon in the corner.
Panic began to set in, a cold sweat breaking out on my forehead. I needed to find a way back to the main road, or at least to a road sign.
Just as the sense of dread threatened to overwhelm me, I spotted a building up ahead, its bright lights cutting through the encroaching darkness of dusk. Relief flooded through me. Whatever this place is, surely someone in there can tell me where I got turned around.
However, the sight before me only had my eyebrows furrowing deeper. A clean, well-lit, white building stood amidst the desolate landscape, almost cartoonishly out of place. It looked brand new, too pristine for its surroundings. Like a beacon of hope in a sea of… muck.
Desperation overrode my hesitancy of such a place, fueling my decision to pull over. I parked my car in the well-paved lot, comforted by the other vehicles sitting under the bright lights.
I made my way to the entrance, the glass doors sliding open smoothly as I approached. The stark white walls and sterile smell hit me immediately, a stark contrast to the humid smell of wood rot outside.
Is this some sort of clinic?
I paused as I looked around, my eyes landing on a front desk. A cheery looking woman with a bright smile sat behind it, her eyes already on me.
”Good evening! Are you here to donate?” she called out, her voice light and airy.
I turned back to the door for a moment, my instincts not quite thrilled being in such a strange place, but the idea of trying to get myself un- lost in the dark pushed me further towards the front desk.
”Uh, no. I’m actually lost,” I responded, giving the woman a weak smile. “I’m trying to get to Texas and I think I may have taken a wrong turn. Can you point me in the right direction?”
Her smile didn’t falter, but there was a flicker of something else in her eyes. Disappointment? Annoyance? It was hard to tell.
”Of course, sugar. But why don’t you take a seat first?”
I glanced around to what I now assumed was a waiting room. The occupants were an odd assortment of characters, each making me more uneasy than the last. An elderly man in disheveled clothes sat closest, muttering to himself while looking straight through me.
A few seats down sat a young woman with stringy hair, as if she had just gotten out of the shower. Her eyes looked red and puffy and I could only assume she either was terribly allergic to bogs, or she had been crying for a while.
Next, a man with a little girl sitting beside him caught my attention. The girl clutched a small stuffed bunny, her eyes regarding me curiously. She seemed to be the only person aware of my existence and I threw a small smile her way. Her eyes shifted immediately, darting nervously back to the man beside her. The man had no reaction, continuing to stare straight ahead with a vacant expression.
Lastly, a businessman sat in the corner, his wrinkled suit and messy hair contradicting his aloof demeanor. He held a phone to his ear, checking his watch intermittently. The whole scene of the room reeked of impatience and unease, making my skin crawl.
What the hell is this place?
I turned back to the front desk, forcing a smile. “Listen, ma’am. I’m really just looking for directions. I don’t need an appointment.”
The woman tilted her head slightly, her smile never wavering. “Mr. Weller can see you for a donation. It won’t take long.”
“I really don’t have time for that. I just need to get back on the road,” I insisted, the edge of desperation beginning to creep into my voice.
She ignored my plea, typing something into the computer. “Mr. Weller will be with you shortly. Please, take a seat.”
Frustration boiled over. I was about to argue further when I noticed the other patients had started to stare, their gazes heavy and expectant. The atmosphere in the room shifted to feel charged, almost oppressive.
Deciding I had seen quite enough, I muttered quickly. ”Thanks, but I’m going to pass,” and turned on my heel, making a beeline for the exit.
The nurse’s cheerful farewell followed me out, a stark contrast to the chill that had settled in my bones.
I hurried back to my car, the clinic’s lights painting long shadows across the parking lot. Sliding into the driver’s seat, I locked the doors and took a deep breath, trying to steady my racing heart. The “clinic” had rattled me more than I cared to admit.
As I started the engine and pulled back onto the road, the clinic quickly disappeared from view, swallowed by the hungry night. My mind raced, grappling with the bizarre turn of events. The woman at the front desk’s insistence, the strange people in the waiting room, and the clinic itself…
none of it made sense.
Determined to put this fever dream behind me and find my way home, I refocused on the road ahead, hoping that with a bit of luck, I could retrace my steps and escape this unsettling detour. The landscape grew darker, the swamp closing in around me, but I pressed on, clinging to the desperate hope that familiar sights were just around the next bend.
The feeling of unease clung to me like an unwanted second skin as I drove further on, minutes passing with no change. Eventually, at least an hour passed, the monotony of the road broken only by the occasional curve and the distant croaking of frogs. I had long since shut off my radio, seeing as no amount of Lynyrd Skynyrd could make the situation better.
My eyes strained against the darkness, searching for any road signs or landmarks.
Yet as time wore on, familiar trees passing by, an alarming realization began to settle in.
Despite making no turns. Despite the road seemingly taking me far away,
I was back where I started.
Bright lights pierced the gloom ahead, the parking lot coming into view mocking my attempt to leave. My heart sank, a cold wave of dread washing over me the closer I got.
I was back at the clinic.

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(Descriptions of fictional crimes investigated by the story's main Character Max.)
Detective's Fate
It's august of 2008.....
Max is a detective living in Chicago He checks his pistol and puts on his police badge as he walks out his front door.
He has been searching for a serial killer known as the Caller for years and always been one step behind due to the red tape.....
More importantly the chief's lazy attitude towards getting search warrants and actions approved by the courts for raids. Twice Max had good intel on the suspect's locations and photo evidence showing him at the sites.
The department needs more vigilant, caring officers and leaders but no one steps up to do it, instead they just complain about the slow progress and officers. And hinder investigations.
Now Max has decided that it might be time to stop playing by the rules and catch this scumbag.... .... ....
Starting his car Max sets his GPS to the address that "The Caller" was last seen and pulls out of his driveway as the 50 miles of directions pop up.
The killer's nickname being for his signature of calling in as he is committing the crime.
As he drives he remembers his first case, five years ago now..... ..... .....
A woman, Joane Taylor, was found dead in an alleyway after going out for the night. She showed no signs of struggle leading the police to believe she had drank to much and expired from alcohol poisoning.... ...
The death was written off as a "party gone wrong".... That is until several more were found and the coroner decided on a whim to test for other substances.
Once it came out that the deaths were possible murders...
The calls started coming in, almost like the suspect wanted credit before revealing himself....
Then ways of the deaths began changing as the Serial Killer explored his twisted desires searching for his preferred method.
The last case being a young woman found stuffed in a dumpster after the killer apparently got scared off.... Max will never forget it.... .... ....
The GPS finishes and the car beeps its final direction, taking an exit off the highway. Ramps out here are always confusing... Which is funny since he has driven this one for five years now...
The chief says he should sit this one out but he can't... The latest victim 3 months ago.
Marie Spelner, a waitress out on her smoke break talking to her spouse on the phone.
Survived by her husband, no children or living relatives. ....
Max Spelner turns into the driveway of the house he was directed to... Stepping out of the car he walks up and knocks on the door. Looking at the house he knows the family must be doing well if they live here.... Raising his hand to knock again he hears a scream from inside....
A second later the door is answered by a middle aged butler holding a tray with wine glasses on it... "Hello Sir, I'm sorry but this house does not wish to partake in any offers at this time..."
Max calmly says. "I'm not selling anything."
The butler looks confused for a moment before his eyes dart over Max's shoulder seeing his unmarked cruiser and he nods.
Looking past the butler Max sees that a woman is cleaning up after their dog.
"Have you seen this man?" Says Max holds up a picture of the one suspected of being the killer.
The butler gives it a once over before replying. "I'm sorry sir, no I have not." His tone sounds like he is lying... ....
"Are you sure?" The detective asks.
"I would not lie about something like that, sir." He states, his eyes not meeting Max's.
The woman calls from inside "Fletcher, who are you talking too?"
"Some man asking about a killer" he calls back.
"The killer is an inside job!" The woman quickly states.
"What?!" Max says.
"The Killer, it's an inside job." She says again, louder this time. In the same Max also hears a child begin to cry in another room.
"We should start from the beginning, it will be easier to explain trust me." The woman says.
'She seems to know what is going on....
"How do I know your story holds water?" He asks out loud.
"Oh I wouldn't lie. I have been following the case myself and it seems like an inside job to me." She states, somehow sounding hurt.
"Is there anyone else in the house besides you two and the baby?" He asks noticing the baby isn't crying anymore.
"Just Fletcher and I live here, the baby is my cousins but he just stays the night sometimes." She replies.
Max draws his gun and enters the house upon reasonable suspicion of an emergency in progress or suspect on the premisses as the man seems to be deceiving.
While the woman still seems unconcerned that the child is now silent.
He pushes past the butler and rushes towards the area he heard the crying. passes the entryway, the dinning room, and a kitchen before finally finding a child in a playpen.
"There there..." He says in a sing song voice picking up the child. "I'm officer Max, do you know where your mommy is?"
The child just cries louder.
Then he sees the man from the photo walk out of the bathroom, upon seeing him he bolts for the door and Max sets the child down gently then gives chase.
He runs through the house, following the man as he can hear the woman screaming at him to stop but he doesn't."
"Stop or I'll shoot." The man doesn't even break stride.
Instead he runs out of the front door and jumps into his car.
Furious that the man might escape he fires at the car as it drives away.
The back window shatters and he hopes he got his tire, but he doesn't wait to find out as he runs to his car and initiates a pursuit....
He flips on his concealed lights in his cruiser as he reverses down the drive and into the street.
The suspects car is fast but he manages to keep up with it weaving in and out of traffic as people move over for the siren.
As they approach a red light there is heavy traffic in the intersection..... ....
The suspect slams on his brakes and Max's cruiser only just stops short of hitting it. Jumping out the Detective points his firearm at the vehicle running up beside seeing heavily tinted windows.
"Get out of the car and on the ground now!!" He shouts as he moves to the driver's side door.
After seeing no response....
Max throws open the door and the driver is gone with the passenger side open.
He quickly runs to the other side catching the man trying to sneak off tackling him to the ground and then takes his arms putting them behind his back.
Max grabs his radio and calls it in as the man cries.
As he is waiting he hears a noise that sounds like static.....
"Wrong guy moron.. Did you ever stop to think I wanted you close for this one. That I planned everything...Even framing the pothead..... I almost lost interest until you pulled in the driveway... The attic is kinda cramped tho... I think I'll go carve some meat. Maybe graduate to other things to. I'm not sure yet. Lets see if you can catch me before......" A familiar voice says over the radio then cuts off... ...
Max looks at the man on the ground. "Why did you run from me?" He asks.
"Cause I have like 19 grams of marijuana in my pocket." He replies...
"Do you know how stupid that is?! I don't care about that I'm looking for a killer."
Before he can answer Max hears the woman from the house screaming for her life and a child's cries on his radio.
Then from below Max. "He's in the house, he's in the house! My mom and the baby!" The man on the ground says crying.
Max uncuffs him and runs to his car heading back to the house as he lays down rubber on the road... ... ...
As he approaches and pulls into the driveway he notices the front door is open.
"Hold on I'm coming!" Max screams jumping out of his cruiser...
He runs into the house finding the woman's body arriving too late. Moving over to her he checks for a pulse but she is gone, a large gash in her neck.
As he stands up he slips in a fluid but gains his balance and tries not to think about what it is....
He rushes to the room the baby was in finding the play pen empty. He leaves the room searching the rest of the house and still doesn't find the child.
"Where are you!!!" He calls out....
"This is the Callers first kidnapping and the media would eat up the fact I failed to stop the man." He thinks as he blames himself.
Sirens begin to blare in the distance as backup is about to arrive... ... ...
"There's a woman dead and a baby missing! The woman is in the dinning room straight ahead of the front door, Hurry!" He yells into his radio...
Looking over at the mother seeing a piece of paper on the floor.
He walks over to it seeing writing.
"So close... Looks like I'm a kidnapper now.... Good luck finding me.... And... I so enjoyed killing that sweet wife of yours. Might do it that way again. Not to the kid tho....later Max. Ps. This game is so fun.." It says.
"He was here..." Is all he can muster as the team enters.
"He was right in this house and I missed it because her son freaked over weed and ran..." He says as another officer speaks to him gently.
"Don't beat yourself up Detective, it's not your fault. He must have hid before you got her and left after you arrived." The words do little to comfort him "First day back on the job and the killer escaped taking a child..." He says as he walks away.
The chief arrives in his new lexus with a screeching of rubber as he lurches to a halt.
He quickly exits and leaves his door hanging open as he rushes into Max's face....
"I told you to stay away from this case MAX!!!!....(takes a breath)...
"If I catch any flak from my superiors, I won't suspend you.... That'd be to easy. Desk duty and an entry level demotion. The new guy will have a higher rank than you if things go my way.... Now get outta my sight...". "(Sighs)...
"This job is gonna be the death of me..." He says walking away from Max and towards the Coroner's van..... ..... .....
On the way home the detective stops by the store close to his house which is unlike him because he usually follows the same routine.
He nears the front door and he hears a kitchen timer ding loudly from behind him as his car explodes throwing him through the storefront windows as they are blown out..... .....
Alarms around the lot and others nearby create a cacophony of noise. His head pounding as his body aches, Max pushes himself up and collapses as the store manager runs over to him telling him not to move as he dials 911.... .... ....
Waking in the hospital Max recalls the feeling of the Shockwave as he flinches in phantom pain.
"Who woulda thought its like holding a ringing metal bat that hurts your hands but all over and way more intense." He thinks.
He suddenly feels tired and falls asleep.... .... .... ....
The next time he wakes, he sees a breaking news story that Jane Saltani is reporting on....
"Young toddler Accidently Shoots Serial killekidnapper ending his life and Alerting residents in the Area." The news anchor says.
Sighing to himself Max thinks about how crazy that is and laughs.
Tho he really wanted to bring the guy in. He closes his eyes to get some much needed sleep as his door opens.
Max looks up to see a man with a silenced pistol pointed at him.
"Hm. Now they think I'm dead. Funny how they just assume they got the right guy. Just like.... You did Detect... ....." Max hears but then hears no more as his end comes at just over the speed of sound....
The Caller leaves the hair of another intelligent convicted murderer that he obtained in a spot that's believable and quickly leaves.....
He disables the surveillance system and sends a virus out to any device that has received video data from the hospital.
Erasing and corrupting the systems. Leaving a master hackers finger prints on a glass from his home....
"Sorry, no witnesses." He says to the security guard as he fires... ..... ..... .... ....

Hi, I know some of you have been interested in Joost’s written stuff, so this is one of them. It’s a short story that Joost wrote for Boekenweek voor Jongeren (Book Week for Young People) in 2019. There’s more info about it here (in Dutch) https://www.vice.com/nl/article/qvgzpv/joost-klein-schreef-een-kort-verhaal-over-een-wilde-nacht-in-berlijn and there was also this promo video for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx7wxnpxps0. It's been translated from Dutch - maybe not the most perfect translation but it's readable. Original in Dutch here. Enjoy

"How come he suddenly has cash?" I looked at Gurb, but he avoided my gaze. Louis never had money and yet he was buying another round. Meanwhile, a Moby song was playing and nothing made sense. "If he has money for drinks, he can surely pay me back, right?"
Just a few hours ago, I was alone in Berlin. Now, ten hours later, I'm standing in some obscure techno club with my best friends. Loud rock music with drunken shouting. "Hey, Miss Murder, can I make beauty stay if I take my life?" I woke up that day with a mild hangover from the lonely yet people-filled night before. Perfect conditions for a 20-year-old dropout.
The Hard Rock Café was the most beautifully ugly place in Berlin. Gurb had driven for seven hours straight in his mother's car, but we didn't notice. An iconic black Mini Cooper. Your body leads your mind, the beat never stops, and you can conquer the world. Louis threw in another crazy dance move. We were happy.
"Do you want another drink, brother?" Gurb asked me, half shouting. An evening filled with rhetorical questions. He saw me dancing and already knew the answer.
Gurb always had money. Louis, on the other hand, never did. Louis was also the youngest of us three. He had just turned 18. I wouldn't call him a cunning fox. More like a jack-of-all-trades. Like the time he made a lot of money on a Wadden Island with a group of boys. They sold large blocks of hash.
"Crazy dude!" I shouted at him. He yelled something back.
"Do you remember back then?" Louis said.
"Back then? Back then? Yeah man, of course!" I had no idea what he meant. "Do you mean the party?"
"Do you mean the party, he says! This guy. When I look at you like this, it makes me happy. The exact same kid is here letting loose just like back in high school!"
We knew each other from secondary school. He joined when I was in the second grade. He was very intelligent. Too young, too much knowledge of the world. His mother is from Brazil. We often went to his mother's place to play on the Playstation Louis and I had bought together.
I lived everywhere at that time. In the crisis shelter where I stayed for a while, for example, I wasn't allowed to have a Playstation. So we set it up in an accessible place, near school. It was always fun with Louis. Going together to the Apple Store. Taking all kinds of photos with all the webcams, posting them on Hyves, and then leaving. Louis always knew how to cheer me up.
"Aaaaaaaaaa!" There was Gurb with five drinks in his hands. Gurb was wearing a blue checkered shirt. Two buttons undone. Hair slicked back. "You look good, brother!"
"You look fresh too! We all look fresh!" Gurb said enthusiastically. Louis was wearing a completely white outfit. We quickly bought this before going out. He also bleached his hair.
"You look like the Brazilian cousin of James Dean in these clothes," I said. Louis laughed. "Let me take a picture."
Suddenly, the DJ switched to some kind of techno. "Ah, here Berlin briefly takes off its mask." I was fine with it all. Louis was talking to a lady.
Voluptuous breasts, I thought to myself. He gave her one of his two drinks.
"He's with a girl and he's thinking with his dick," I said to Gurb. "Let him be, tonight Berlin is ours!"
The bass kept pounding. "I simply don't have the patience for the club," I said to Gurb. He looked surprised. Like a sweet dog, tilting his head. "I'm just waiting for tomorrow. Can't do my thing here. Don't have patience for the already known. I want adventure and I want it now!"
Gurb started laughing. "Patience is a virtue." Yes. Patience is all well and good, but I think it's a waste of my time. Gurb grabbed my shoulder.
"I think it's time for another beer."
Louis and I were walking through Leeuwarden a year ago when suddenly a red Ford Ka stopped in front of us. It was Gurb, casually driving around the city. He invited us into his car. We hopped in. Since that afternoon, the three of us were together. A few months later, Louis got a tattoo on his ribs in honor of our friendship. It was the name of our group chat. Braddar Force Indigo.
There were also days when Gurb would take me for a drive around Friesland. He reminded me how beautiful Friesland is. The world doesn't spin there. The newspapers I threw away in the Stiens forest in 2011 could still be lying in the same spot, so to speak.
Just before midnight, I found myself in line for the restroom. My eyes fell on a pair of striking shoes. Cigarette smoke invaded my nose for the fourth time. "Müssen Sie eine Zigarette haben?" a female voice spoke to me. I felt like Tom Hanks in the final scene of Angels & Demons, where the new pope first steps onto the balcony. The curtains opened. There I was, witnessing an important moment in history. I was just told how I was sent by God, but my ears didn't want to hear any of it. At least that's how I felt. My mouth was empty. I had no words left. That's when I knew for sure. Berlin might really be as crazy as literally everyone says.
Dark blond, silky hair. Was this real beauty then? She wouldn't look 40, but I think she was. A true woman. Beautiful in all her elegance. I always joked about being interested in older women, but tonight one stood in front of me. "I don't smoke," I said to her.
Someone tapped me. "Please, just go to the toilet!" He was right. I hadn't peed in a while either. My urine was cloudy. "Glomerulonephritis," I said to myself on the toilet. This is an unusual condition. It's an inflammation in the kidneys, I thought I remembered. They should never have given me access to Google.
The evening progressed, and Louis kept buying rounds. "But seriously now. How does Louis suddenly have all that money for drinks?" I asked Gurb. He was outside smoking with a group of Swiss girls. I had strategically positioned myself so that I could always leave the crime scene if necessary.
"You shouldn't ask me," said Gurb. He was laughing with the temporary girlfriend group of Louis. Gurb has a beard. A lot of chicks like that. I get it too.
As much as I enjoyed Louis and Gurb being here for me, something didn't sit right with me. It couldn't just be about the money. "What's up with him?" I heard one of the Swiss girls say to Gurb.
Those kinds of questions really tire me out. "Not much, with you?" I replied.
They all started laughing. "That's not what she meant, brother," said Gurb.
"I couldn't care less whether she meant it or not. Send that brace-face back to Switzerland. Don't drive me crazy, alright!"
Actually, I hadn't drunk that much that evening. "Two vodka Sprites, please!" It's rare for me to get just one drink. "I always get two drinks, then you have to wait shorter for the third one!" Maybe the alcohol was affecting me more than I wanted to admit. Oh well, it was still the three of us against the world.
"Nice shoes, are those Prada?" I asked a random girl at the bar.
"No, these are fake. Why would I buy real ones for 600 dollars if I could just buy these for 20?"
"..."
I'm not very good at that. Talking. To women.
Louis and Gurb were in the smoking area now. It was less blue than the dance floor itself. My clothes already stank, so a visit to the smoking area couldn't hurt. "These people are so underground!" Gurb shouted. Louis was filming him with his phone. "These people..." There was a brief pause. As if Gurb forgot the only line he had. "...so underground!" All three of us burst into laughter. The alcohol flowed through our veins as if it came from the purest mountains. People seemed doubled and the room was full. We had been in the same club in Berlin for several hours.
"Leonardo! What are you hiding from the big boss?" I sometimes called Louis ‘DiCaprio.’ "You a rich guy, now?" I said, with an accent as if I were from the Bronx.
Louis started laughing. "Eh, you know nothing. Bullshit talk."
I had to laugh too. What was I even worried about? Friends are friends, with or without money. That shouldn't matter. Louis probably just worked for that money. Maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought. Maybe he just had enough to buy rounds. But what if my gut feeling was right? That feeling was never wrong. Except for that one time at the Holland Casino in Groningen. Even the best of us have slip-ups. I was just getting worked up again. When it comes down to it, Louis is one of the sweetest guys I know. I had to let it go. After all, it's still Louis.
"I think I'm going to have sex soon, man," Louis said.
"With who?" I asked immediately.
"That one girl."
"Which one?"
"The one with the boobs."
"Oh, her. Just be careful."
"What kind of reaction is that?" Louis asked indignantly.
I'd only had four drinks, but I was acting like a mess. Louis was right. I didn't understand myself. Where was my head at? I'm here in Berlin, supposed to be having the time of my life, but here I am feeling lonely and sad again. Joost once again couldn't control his emotions.
"Sorry," I suddenly said to Louis. "Sorry for my behavior. Been acting dumb towards you all night. It's unnecessary." Sometimes I have that. Mood swings. "Know that crime is never the solution. We've talked about this so many times. Yes, it's tempting and sometimes easy money. I sometimes find it amusing too, but it's always hypothetical. Ask me for help. I can help you, even with illegal things. I'll always have your back." The dancing was kind of over.
The words I had just placed on Louis's plate came from my heart. My Frisian, irregular boys' heart.
Crying in the club. I had never seen myself like that. Crying, yes. In the club, no. I never understood the taboo around crying. Or emotions in general. I saw myself in the mirror. They weren't tears of joy. They weren't tears of sadness either. It was me letting everything go. All the emotions I had ever felt. The emotions I felt between my brother and sister and myself because they wanted to take on a parental role over me, but I was in puberty, so I pushed them away. The emotions I felt when my old neighbors were supposed to take care of my dog, but didn't tell me that he was bitten by one of their dogs. They didn't have money for the surgery, they later told me. They were ashamed of their lack of money. My dog died from this injury. Even the emotions that were all jumping at once during the retake for my swimming diploma A, I let go of.
No emotions. Just for a moment, not feeling anything. Is that too much to ask for?
"You still don’t smoke?"
It had to be the voice of the woman with the cigarettes. I looked over my shoulder through the mirror. It was her. The one with dark blond, silky hair.
"Not to be rude, but this is the men’s room," I said. She took a step closer and kissed me on my lips. It tasted like more. We started kissing. It had been a while since I had had female contact at this level. It probably didn't look good and it didn't feel good either. She started kissing my neck. Slowly, I noticed the pressure in the erectile tissues of my penis starting to increase. "I really don't have time for this!" I thought to myself. The woman with the cigarettes started to slowly sink down until she was on her knees. I didn't want this. Not now, not like this. She unraveled my penis from my Polo Ralph Lauren underwear. Her tongue was blue. It was probably from cheap shots of alcohol.
Was this real beauty then? Was this the beginning or the end of her story? And had I become the boy my parents hoped I would be? I thought about the fact that this was once someone's little daughter. Somewhere in the world, an old man might be wondering what his daughter is doing. Am I really putting pleasure above my own morals and values?
With my semi-erect circumcised penis still exposed, I lifted her up. After giving her a kiss on her forehead, I pulled up my pants and left the toilets.
It was the usual last hour in any club ever. I met Louis and Gurb at the bar. "Should we have another drink?" I asked Gurb. "I feel like having a cocktail. Something sweet. Lots of sugar. What about you?"
Gurb looked at the menu. "A cognac would go down well right now."
"A cognac? You're only nineteen!" Gurb and Louis laughed. "Two Tequila Sunrises please!" I called to the bartender. "Also, two beers! Thanks!" I also got a beer for Louis. At first, I didn't want to, but I didn't want to spoil the mood either. Besides, I didn't want to show too much that it bothered me so much.
We danced away the last minutes. The club closed, and we decided to walk with the group of Swiss girls. Apparently, they were staying nearby.
As I lagged behind the group, one of them tried to start a conversation with me. "Are you okay?" she asked kindly.
"I'm fine. Just had too much beer. Makes me sleepy." Not true at all, but I've heard people say that.
"You’re tired? The fun has only just began!" And as she said this, she pulled something out of her inner pocket. Her clenched fist, shielded by a half jacket. Who is this girl, anyway? I thought to myself. She opened her hand flat, and right in the center of her palm lay two small pills with a smiley face on them. At least, they looked like it.
"Oh, I don’t do drugs. Sorry."
"Me neither!" And she swallowed a pill. "Now it’s your turn... Or are you scared?"
Scared? Who did this crazy Swiss witch (with really beautiful eyes) think she was. With her "are you scared". I'll show her who's scared.
"Scared? I’m not scared." I picked up the remaining pill and swallowed it.
Everything went in slow motion. Was this who I had become? Was this the same boy from high school? And just before I could swallow, I spat out the pill. She was shocked. I picked up the pill again, dried it with my jacket, and put it back in her fist. "Maybe later!" I shouted, running back to the group, over my shoulder.
I have nothing to say to 9 out of 10 peers I come across. Of course, I can be social. I can also have fun with random people in random situations, but that night, it just tired me out. I also didn't understand what we were doing there. Those girls found me strange anyway. Suddenly, I was the fifth wheel.
"We know this place where they go until 7 in the morning!" The girl leader of the group spoke. I wanted to go home. "If you guys want, you can go. Don't worry about me," I said to Gurb and Louis. The boys had a brief discussion. We agreed to stay for just a little while longer for some drinks. I consented. I was thirsty. "I'll have a Fanta, Louis."
Gurb had reached the last cigarette in his pack. Louis and a girl from the group were nowhere to be found. It didn't even bother me. This guy just walks around with some cash in his pocket and all hell breaks loose. After a night full of stimuli, I understood Louis. Of course, I understood Louis. He's a young god. Handsome, smart guy. But that didn't make me any less angry. It was purely about trust for me. Something inside me said I should stop subconsciously expecting things from people too. It prevents disappointment.
"Hotel please!" I jokingly suggested to Gurb. "Should you call Louis or should I?" I added. Gurb immediately grabbed his Android smartphone and called Louis. He put the call on speaker.
"Are you ready?" Gurb asked.
"Yeah. Sort of."
"What do you mean?"
"We didn't have sex."
"That's fine, right? Tomorrow's a new day!"
"I think I'm in love, man," Louis said.
"...," Gurb said, chuckling as he let out a sigh.
Once we arrived at the girls' hostel, it was already getting light. Louis was thankfully back. There were stains on his pants, around his knees. My focus was solely on arranging a taxi. Although the boys were still flirting, I was really done now. "How are we going to pay for this taxi?" I said a bit too loudly.
There was a silence. "Don't worry. I still have cash," Gurb said.
"Yeah, I knew you would," I replied.
My words clearly hit Louis. "What do you mean by that?" he said.
It was as if time stood still for a few seconds. "Exactly what I said. Better listen." Louis pulled out a small wad of green bills from his pocket. At least 400 euros. "I don't even want to see that money," I reacted. I walked away.
I'll just order a taxi myself.
"Why are you walking away now?" Gurb said.
"Twelve hours ago, I was alone too, and I had a lot more fun then."
"Do you really want to know how I got this money?" Louis said.
Yes, I did want to know. My whole evening revolved around that damn money.
He took a second of pause before he began speaking. "The answer lies in the Mini."
What on earth could be in Gurb's mother's car? Louis was trying to get into my head. "Taxi!"
Once in the taxi, the division was clear. Gurb was upfront, chatting animatedly with the driver. All adventures ever were recounted. Louis and I in the back. One of my best friends since I was thirteen. Funny how things turn out. It was quiet between us. I was in my head, rehearsing how I would bring up the money again. It didn't add up, and he knew it himself. "I don't care, you know," I said, hoping he'd break.
"What don't you care about?"
"About that money."
"What money? You're really a crazy woozy man." Louis burst out laughing again.
On the other hand, it was silent. Gurb had started talking about the driver's family. The driver didn't appreciate it. Gurb meant well. The driver smelled of alcohol. Or was it me? His nails were polished. Maybe his wife was a specialist. I bite my nails myself. Like now.
"In the Mini, oh yeah."
"Shut up. Illegal man."
"You'll never know."
"Stop playing. Just say it!"
Louis grabbed my head, pulled himself towards me, and brought his mouth to my right ear. "Why so serious?" he whispered. He didn't want to tell me.
"But always with this damn money, huh?" I almost shouted at Louis. I broke every silence within a radius of 10 kilometers.
"I'm trying my best, bro. It is what it is. I can't make it any different," he replied. It was clearly bothering him deeply. He ran his hands through his hair. "Sometimes people have to do things. And you know that better than anyone. Sometimes they have to do things they don't really want to or aren't supposed to do."
I knew this spiel all too well. Through all the drunken haziness, I suddenly saw a small glimmer of light. A tiny spark of sincerity. Louis was serious this time.
"I'm sorry. I didn't want to involve you in this. I'm sorry," sweat dripped from his forehead.
"You're serious, huh? Damn, man. What mess have you gotten yourself into now? Worse than Terschelling?" Worse than Terschelling would mean stolen goods. Maybe even violence.
"It's not what you think."
"The Adlon Hotel, right?" the driver chimed in. Always saved by the bell, that Louis.
Suddenly I hit my head against the seat in front of me. Of course, I wasn't wearing my seatbelt. The last thing I saw was Gurb waking up in panic from his drunken stupor. One by one, I started losing my senses. It started with the feeling in my fingers. For a brief moment, everything wasn't quite black, and I could only see a vague pattern of colors repeating inside my eyelids. You could compare it to the brief moment after the commercial break before the movie starts in the cinema. The movie was about to begin.
I knew I wasn't dying. At least not yet. Not like this. Not after an overall mediocre night out in Berlin. I found comfort in the image I forced myself to see. It was all in my head. There I was, unconscious.
I saw myself in a third-person point of view. It wasn't like I was actually leaving my body. More like there was a webcam hanging in one of the upper corners of the taxi.
As a child, I used to dream a lot about death. Nights spent awake.
At some point, I developed a kind of compulsive behavior. I kept swaying my torso from left to right with my hands under my head. It became almost like a workout before bedtime. Every night.
I called it dream shuffling. Just like I had learned to shuffle puzzle pieces or playing cards. Making things a little exciting for yourself. But what I almost never told anyone was that I was scared. I was afraid of burglars, who were very agile and muscular.
Especially afraid that they would murder me. I really wanted to know what death was like. It scared me.
These fear visions originated during an all-inclusive vacation in Turkey. I was 6 years old and already in bed. There was a big old TV in our hotel room, so I could secretly watch TV from bed. Every evening, my parents sat on the balcony. Here they discussed their day while enjoying a glass of alcohol. There was a Japanese animated series on TV. In the few seconds that I watched, I saw a scary creature climbing a sort of apartment complex via the balconies. The creature had hundreds of teeth and blond hair. It quickly entered to decapitate the people, then drained them and, as a final insult, robbed them. Dozens of carcasses of dead people were scattered around the apartment complex. The complex on TV resembled the resort where we were in reality, and the TV world merged with my surroundings. I became part of it. I saw people watching. No matter how loudly I screamed for help, they didn't react. The sun became very bright, and the people turned into nothing more than shadows. As the intensity of the sun increased, something became clear to me. These were not people. They had a sort of orange skin. Where I had previously thought it was their nose and mouth, it turned out that these shadowy figures did not have such physical features. They simply had three holes in their heads. The police tried to do something, but in vain. Since then, we always kept the light on in the hallway outside my bedroom. By rocking back and forth, from left to right, I could glance fleetingly at the beam of light under the door. That bit of light, escaping from the hallway into my room, gave me an advantage. It allowed me to stay one step ahead of the burglars. Pretty smart, right?
"From Jamaica to the world!
It’s just love. Why must the children play in the street?"
It was Bob Sinclar with "Love Generation" speaking to us through the taxi's speakers. We were stationary. I was conscious again, but I didn't feel alive at all. "How long was I out?" I asked Louis.
I could tell by his expression that he was relieved. Relieved that I was back. "One minute," he almost apologized. Louis gave me a pat on the shoulder. Gurb, on the other hand, was sleeping. He slept like a baby cub.
I put my right index finger on my forehead. It felt wet, but it wasn't blood. Blood feels different. Meanwhile, I kept hearing whistling.
"Be the love generation! Oh yeah!" It was still that same song by Bob Sinclar.
The earlier scent of alcohol had now been replaced by the smell of incense. It smelled like the same incense I had in my room. Sold to me as Tibetan 39 incense. I had bought it at a coffee shop in Rotterdam. I pulled up my notes on my phone. "Who lights incense in a CAR????" I let Louis read from my screen. He took the phone from my hands and started typing as well.
"Look at Gurb >>>" Gurb was so deeply asleep that his head drooped. His seatbelt held his torso in place, but his head ended up on the driver's shoulder. The man didn't mind. He didn't move. I made eye contact with the driver through the rearview mirror, and soon I found him. He winked at me.
We arrived at the hotel. Gurb awakened from his alcoholic hibernation. "Who's going to pay for the taxi?" I asked. Clearly rhetorical. I already knew I would take this one for the team, as usual. I refused to use Louis's money. It was uncomfortably quiet. "By card please," I said.
"I'll always protect you, Louis. You really need to know that. I care about you like my own little brother. I'll always try to help you. But you have to be honest with me. Can you do that?" Louis didn't hesitate.
"Yes. Yes, I can. I'll show you. It's really in the Mini." Meanwhile, the taxi driver's card machine indicated that I had insufficient funds. That couldn't be right. Maybe I had withdrawn too much that evening.
"I have cash in the hotel room," Gurb said to me. Gurb informed the driver in broken English that he would go get his cash. The driver agreed. Money is money, whether it comes now or later. As long as it feels good in your hands.
Louis and I got out of the taxi. "You're not going to light a cigarette now, are you?" Louis wanted to smoke. "Especially for stress. That's really for people who can't handle pain. You need to feel pain. Pain needs to brand you for the rest of your life so you finally learn not to do such stupid things." It fell silent again. My blood boiled. All pots were on the stove. I felt like Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen. "Show me then. Do it."
Louis remained silent and walked around the corner of the hotel. Towards the parking lot. I followed him. "You're not going to find much," said Louis.
"Why not? Are you a magician?"
"No. Just. Not much."
"So there's suddenly magically nothing in Gurb's car?"
"Stop. Get out. Get out of my head!" Louis shouted. Louis had had enough. He was done with the parade. Normally we dealt with hypothetical stories. Only this time it wasn't a joke. I was sure now. Louis had dropped his mask. The revolution had begun. The government had fallen and the dikes had broken. The people were in charge. "You shouldn't freak out like this. Always wanting more. Sweet boy, think about yourself."
After Gurb gave the money to the driver, he came to us. He had a smile on his face, lit a cigarette, and exclaimed, "Brothers!" Once with us, he hugged me. He started laughing. "Maybe I haven't been entirely honest either." Sometimes Gurb seemed like a 38-year-old man. In a positive way. He exuded confidence in a way I didn't often see. Affectionate, with a hint of authority.
We stood in the middle of a large parking lot. "Look. We've reached a point where I might not even care anymore. You guys are teasing me." It did matter to me. Maybe more than ever. I was supposed to be two steps ahead of them, but I couldn't figure it out. "I give up."
The delightful silence returned. Louis and Gurb looked at each other. "You guys win. Apparently, I'm not to be trusted as a friend."
From Louis's expression, I could tell he disagreed with this. "Not true. Come to the car."
We arrived at the car. Louis unlocked it and searched for the trunk button. Gurb had started his third cigarette. "It's a corpse, isn't it? Say it now. I can still help you. I can still help us. I can book a ticket for you. We can get you out of here," I said to Louis.
"Just wait. Nutcase."
"Why won't you accept my help?"
Louis started laughing nervously. Or at least it seemed that way. Perhaps a sly laugh too. Had Louis killed someone? "It's not a corpse. That can't be. You wouldn't be stupid enough to use their ID. You're smarter than that. So it must be something stolen. Haven't you found that button yet?"
Suddenly, we heard a click. Louis had found the button. Somewhere, I didn't want to know. Shouldn't I just trust Louis? Wasn't that the whole point of friendship?
Finally, the moment had arrived. I placed my right hand in the slot of the rear hatch. Something in me doubted. Still. I still doubted. Louis looked dead serious. "You wanted to know, didn't you? Then you also have to be man enough to accept it." Louis was clearly not joking. Or was he acting again? "Pussy," Louis said. I looked away. "You're afraid of what's inside, huh? You're afraid of the real Louis." He began to laugh manically. "Open that thing, man. Nutcase!"
I started laughing too. Why did I make such a big deal out of it? Sweat broke out from every pore in my body. It was even a bit damp in the no man's land between my scrotum and my anus. A tropical climate. It had been quite an adventure the whole evening. I took my hand off the rear hatch and first gave Louis a hug. Not some half-hearted birthday wish. No, a real hug.
"It's okay, buddy," Louis said to me. I had no idea what he meant by that. It fit the moment though.
It was really time now. I opened the rear hatch.
"Where is it?"
"In front of you," said Louis.
"In some secret compartment?"
There was nothing in the trunk. Absolutely nothing. An empty trunk. For an empty evening, in an empty Berlin, with an empty group of guys. I didn't get it.
"You won, man," I whispered. "You finally fucking done did it."
I couldn't believe my eyes. Empty? There was still nothing in the car. Louis just stood there. Emotionally, I was a wreck. I had felt every emotion this evening. Seen every color and smelled every scent. I was done. My body was ready. No longer needed. My mission was complete.
"But why did you do this?" I asked Louis, laughing.
He scratched his chin. It felt like the end of a bad movie.
"I sold our Playstation. Wanted to tell you only after I had sorted everything out again. I terminated my lease. Had some debts, and I also wanted to have some money for once. Once not empty-handed in the club. Once not dependent on my best friends. This is not who I am... I know how much that Playstation meant to you. It was ours together. I should have just told you."
"… and how does Gurb actually make his money?"

The first rays of rosy-fingered dawn climbed their way over the Macedonian hills and fell like arrows to glint upon the racing bronze of the Scythian raiders. Death clattered and rang among the early morning light as they made their way across the plateau towards the waking village. Gleaming in the rosy light, but obscured by the mist, they seemed like comets cast as Olympian arrows. Their horses' breath clung in the air as they dragged behind them chariots of bronze and chariots of iron. Each carried two men. Those with bronze carried a driver and an archer with bow bent, while those with iron carried a man with a mighty cleaving axe. Each driver also carried for himself a leather shield and bronze short sword. Behind the chariots came footmen equipped like the drivers, and at their flanks rode horsemen carrying one-handed axes, javelins, and wooden shields covered with leather. Thus the horde came down the valley towards the village, cloaked in the fog, but vastly beyond what their victims could hope to muster.
Then, the fog parted like the curtain of a theater. Before the coming horde stood arrayed a sturdy phalanx, a wall of bronze shields and forest of spears aimed towards the invaders. Behind them, men stood with bows bent and arrows knocked. At their center, a man sat astride a white-faced bay mare. Shining in his steel armor, he drew his bow and fired. An arrow sped into the eye of the foremost driver, and a moment later another caught his axeman in the throat. He roared with a voice like a trumpet. “MEN OF MACEDON, SET YOUR HEARTS ABLAZE!” Thus cried Leonidas Kygniois, keen eyed hunter, and with one voice his men answered him. “WOE! WOE! WOE TO THE WICKED!” At those a volley of arrows was loosed from behind the phalanx and fell among the Scythians. Many died, as Leon bid his aide unfurl the banners. Across the field each unit raised up two banners. Below was the banner of the unit, and above the sun with sixteen rays. Besides Leonidas arose his own banner, the white wolf on the blue field, under the black dragon’s wing.
The foremost forces of the Scythians were caught in the charge, unable to pull away. They crashed into the wall of shield and spear with the terrible sound of breaking bones, shearing bronze, dying horses and dying men. All the while arrows continued to rain, and the slaughter was brutal. But then, swift as a winding river, the Scythians turned and wheeled away. The chariots of bronze sent forth arrows of their own, coated in serpent’s venom. The phalanx raised their shields, and covered themselves. Even so some struck through, and the venom wrought a terrible toll on the men. Even so, the phalanx began to march forwards, stepping over the dead with their grim chant. “WOE! WOE! WOE TO THE WICKED”. With this chant they kept their stride, and advanced as a seamless wall. The wounded fell back, helped by their brothers. The archers helped guide them back, and reservists stepped forwards to replace them. Thus the army advanced.
The Scythians pulled back, and danced at the range of the archers. They sought a weakness, or to create a weakness. The bronze chariots formed into a circle and spun like a wheel. Each man turned and fired, and slipped out of range. It was troublesome to target and gave each Scythian plenty of time to line up his shot. In their midst was one most terrible, their chief in gilded chariot. Shining was their armor, brilliant as the sun, head hidden behind a helm like a lion. Their bow was strong and eye keen. Whenever they loosed, a Hellene fell dead.

At the same time, the chariots of iron gathered on the left, and with them the horsemen of the left. The army of the Hellenes had deployed on the flat ground before the village, with a forest on their right to guard that flank. For a flanked phalanx was a doomed phalanx, and the flat ground was optimal both for maintaining a unified line, but also for the chariots and horsemen to maneuver. So the scythians gathered on the left, and sought to envelop the Hellenes there. Their chief suspected their enemy might have hidden horsemen in the mists, and so the wheel turned. They drew forth arrows set with whistles and fired them into the flank. The arrows screamed with a terrible sound to spook horses and sunder morale. Then forwards the flanking force drove to envelop the foe, or else slip behind them to wreak ruin among the archers.

There they found the strongest of the Hellenes. Beneath a banner showing serpent-haired Medusa, they stood clad head to toe in steel. No arrow could find purchase against these immortals, and no blade of bronze could wound them. They turned with grim purpose, spears tracking the foe as the mist lifted. The flanking scythians found themselves with no cover, facing no exposed flank, but the royal elite of the Macedonian army.
Then out from their midst stepped a dark-haired woman with piercing blue eyes. She pulled back her cowl to reveal a diadem, and opened her thumb on a bladed ring. She reached into her cloak and drew forth iron shavings, a magnetic stone, and rose thorns. Then she spoke words of power and imposed her sovereignty over reality.
“Apaangan
Loha
Kaante”
Then she blew the iron over the field. From the bones of the earth, iron answered. It erupted like a field of nails under the feet of the horses. They screamed in pain and stumbled. They fell and cast their riders on the thorns, or else were slowed in their stride. Thus the charge was stalled and the pace ruined. Then spoke the witch again and the air stank of ozone.
“Trisula.
Munhatod
Bijalee chamakana.”
By these words she called forth lightning. It came as a brilliant trident to her bloodied hand. Her hair came alight into the air with static, her diadem gleamed in its light. The enemy saw her and beheld the dread heir of Olympus, last and mightiest of the demigods, Queen Cassandra of the Macedonians. She hurled forth her trident into the air. There it broke and a storm cloud formed over the battle. The fury of Heaven rained down on the chariots of the Scythians. Their chariots of iron were brought to ruin. Their men fell bloodied, deafened, and burned. So Cassandra brought ruin to her enemies.
Thus, the enemy retreated from the hellene lines, and fled from the wrath of Cassandra, daughter of Zeus. For her fury was terrible, and her deeds were mighty. Thus they came back around their chief, and escaped the ruin that had come upon them. They withdrew, step by step, and runners were sent further back to the baggage train to make ready. On the Hellenes came against them, but they were slow in step and cautious. Leon watched the canny chief of the Scythians, and never did his eye wander. The chief in turn watched him, and both put hand to bow, though they did not loose at one another. The range was wrong, but each made ready for their duel.
At length, the Hellenes pushed the Scythians back beyond the extent of the forest, and so their left became exposed. Their chief launched a probing attack with their horsemen, who drew near and threw their javelins into the midst of the Hellene line. The line recoiled, pulling back and inwards, bunching up. At this sign of weakness, at once the chieftain struck. The chariots closed in for the kill. Likewise, the horsemen circled and lowered their spears. As one they would drive into the exposed flank of the Hellenes and drive them from the field.
Then the forest vanished. It had not all been an illusion of it, but enough of it. The chieftain turned, the world seemingly slowing to a crawl. Out of the fading shadow ran bold men armed with long spears. They crashed into the flank of the charging horde and into the midst of the chariots. They drove their spears into the wheels of the chariots, and ground them to a stop. They thrust upwards at the horsemen, who’s mounts reared away from the danger. The charge had been utterly disorganized by this sudden surprise attack, and the advantage was to the Hellenes.
Valiantly the Scythians fought, and most valiant was their chieftain. They lashed about themselves with axes and swords. Their chieftain hefted high a mighty flax; a reverse-edged blade held in two hands. Down the falx fell, and a Hellene that drew too near was all but split in two. The surprise was sudden, but for their charge the Hellenes had forsaken shield and heavy armor. As surprise faded, the battle seemed to shift in favor of the Scythians. Yet the chieftain lifted up their eyes, and saw that they were in danger. The Hellene cavalry finally made its move. Slipping in behind and around the bulk of the Scythian force, with Leonidas at their head, they made to encircle and destroy the Scythian mobile element.
Then the tide truly turned against the Scythians, as a roar sounded out of the mist. A shadowy blur, nearly the size of an elephant, was among them. It snatched the wounded out of the jaws of death, and threw aside chariot and horse with ease. Axes struck at it, and bounced. Spears thrust and were broken. A few bold horsemen charged towards the black mass in the mist, then she raised up her head. Great wings split the mists aside, and her majesty froze horse and rider alike in terror.
Her body was like that of a panther or other great cat, covered in interlocking scales like a serpent. Her four limbs were long and powerful, ending in mighty claws gleaming white as ivory. A tail like a scorpion lashed, a glaive-headed blade at its tip, sharp enough to split a man in twain, swifter than arrows. A long neck terminated in a head a bit like a horse, a bit like a viper, and a bit like a bird of prey. Plated black scales overlapped across her body, gleaming in the dawnlight, sturdier than steel, yet flowing like water. Blue fire lapped around the edges of a mouth full of teeth like daggers. Two great wings eclpsed heaven behind her, leathery like a bat. Long white scars from battles past covered her throat, as eyes like amber froze men like trapped bugs.
Seramis of Achaea, the Dragon Princess, entered the battlefield.
The chieftain saw this doom amongst their men, but watched with wisdom. Though Seramis wielded terror as her weapon, roaring with flame and talons drawn, she wielded only terror. She might have slain many easily, but she used the Gehennan flames as only a firewall. Her tail lashed and claws struck, but they slapped rather than slashing. The dragoness certainly broke bones, but that was more a function of mass than malice. Her priority was the wounded, and she struck those that got in her way.
“Avoid the dragon! Do not strike the wounded, nor stand to capture them! Slay them in a single blow, or wound them and move away before the dragon intervenes!” The chieftain cried, and while the Hellenes could not understand her, Seramis did. The Diluvian princess turned her head and looked toward the lion-helmed Scythian. The pair shared a look of understanding, before the tumult of battle resumed their attention.
Seramis continued her work, all the easier for the lack of interference. Acting as both medic and ambulance, she rescued the wounded, Hellene and Scythian alike. Following in her shadow came a creature a bit like a ram, with seven horns of lapis lazuli. This was her familiar, a spirit of knowledge she called Elijah. He acted as her diagnosticator, identifying wounds and ailments to aid her work. Sera cast spells of healing, not complex work but quick and efficient. Bleeding stalled, bones were set, and pain was soothed. Then she would take the wounded and lash them to her side and back with tendrils of shadow. Once she had gathered a full load of men, she retreated back behind the Hellene lines. There she deposited them with the healers, and leapt forth to rescue yet more.
With the dragoness identified as less a threat, and more a mobile hazard, the Scythians returned their focus to the Hellene cavalry. Their own cavalry had been Leon’s primary target during the initial confusion of the charge, and he had made good use of the opportunity. Many a Scythian horseman had been slain in those first few moments, and no less than thirteen by the prince of marathon’s own hand. The white-feathered shafts of his steel-tipped arrows were seen planted in throat, eye, and heart, a testament to the prince’s deadly aim and fearsome bow. For he was wolf to ringbearers, and the strength of his bow and the superior metal of his arrows pierced breastplates of bronze, even the scale mail of the Scythians.
Even so, while the Hellenes had bled the Scythian horse fiercely, they had less success against the charioteers. The chariots provided additional cover from Hellene javelins, and space to evade their lances. Moreover, their sturdy construction made them perilous to the Hellenes horses, as a swinging wheel could easily break a leg. Finally, the simple fact that each chariot was a two-man team allowed for greater resilience. One man focused on driving, and the other on fighting. If either was wounded so they could not do their work as well, they could switch. Even if the driver was outright killed, the other could take over and use the mass of the chariot as a weapon. So, though the play gave the Hellenes the advantage, the Scythians were far from out of the fight.
So, with fury, their chieftain rallied their men about them and led a fierce counterattack. With the superior durability of the chariots and their mighty chief at their head, the Scythians reaped a bloody retaliation on their foes. Leonidas ordered his men back, to gather themselves anew. Each side had been bloodied, and both sought a retreat. Then with a cry, he took his personal guard back in, aimed directly at the enemy general. His bow was drawn, and fired.
The Scythian general stepped to the side of their chariot, dodging the shot. They drew their own bow, aimed, and fired. Leon evaded, but he wasn’t the target. Instead, his horse was. The white-faced bay mare took the Scythian’s arrow in her flank. The wound was minor, but the poison was not. She ran on seven steps, then seized, and fell down dead. Leon leapt from his dying steed, and landed in a roll. He came up with shield and spear at the ready, as the Scythian chief turned their chariot towards him.
The two general’s bodyguards whirled in a melee as the Scythian and Hellene commanders faced each other in single combat. The Scythian forsook their bow, knowing their poisoned arrows could not pierce the prince’s steel armor. Instead they raised high their fell falx, as their chariot closed in. Leon readied himself as the chariot closed to trample him. Then, at the last moment he sprang aside, unusually agile despite his heavy armor. Still, the lion helm tracked him, and down the falx came. Leonidas raised his shield and set his feet. The shield was steel, and sturdy enough to shatter a blade of bronze such as the falx falling upon him. But it struck true, and carved the steel shield, then kept going. Leon pulled back, but he’d braced himself and couldn’t maneuver. His steel armor parted, and he came away with a serious gash in his arm. He felt the blade hit bone, and realized that if he hadn’t been so well equipped, that blade would have taken his left arm off, cutting straight through the bone.
Still, though he bled, he did not quail. He threw aside his ruined shield and took his spear in both hands. While his foe had the mass and momentum of a charging chariot, the physics of metallurgy dictated that their blade should have broken against him. Curved blades were more fragile, a trade-off for their superior cutting power, and a bronze blade should have no chance against steel. If physics were being violated, it meant sorcery was at play. The enemy’s blade was enchanted.
Again came the chieftain with their blessed blade. Their horses panted heavily in the air, adding to the rattle of the chariot. Chaos swirled around them, but Leon silenced it. The world reduced to simply himself, his enemy, and the vanishing space between. He set his target, and waited for the space to entirely vanish. The beat of the horse’s hooves were set like a metronome. Then, at the precise beat, he shattered the rhythm. He drove his spear forwards into the knee of the Scythian horse. The spear’s wooden haft shattered from the force, but so did the stallion’s leg. It collapsed in a bloody heap, tangling its partner. The chariot crashed into its steeds, slaying both brutally. The chieftain and their driver were staggered, but grasped hold of the chariot and were not thrown.
Leonidas took fourteen calculated steps, moving around the wreck of the chariot, then stepping aboard. In a single motion he drew his blade and cut upwards. The driver fell back as a spray of blood erupted from his throat. He slumped over the front of the chariot, blood flowing to mingle with the horses. Leon whirled on the chieftain as a shout of rage came to their lips. He stepped in close, too close for his foe to swing their great blade effectively. Here, his short blade had the advantage, and the chariot cornered his target. He drew the blade back to his hip like he was knife-fighting, and thrust upwards towards the foe’s beast. The scaled armor of the Scythians was legendarily hard to slash through, but the overlapping scales that caused such strength were vulnerable to this exact kind of upwards thrust. But his canny foe knew the armor’s weaknesses just as well, and pivoted with agility to rival the warrior prince.
They slashed with their great falx, but the range was awkward, so Leon evaded. He then pivoted, taking his blade in both hands. Gritting through the pain of his wounded arm, he wheeled with a mighty blow. He put his back, legs, and both arms into a murderous strike too quick to evade. The Scythian chief recognized it, and ducked their head. Rather than suffering a decapitating blow, they took the hit on the crown of their helm. The gold gilding it deformed and parted, but this was by design. By using a coating of deformable gold above the bronze, the helmet could better absorb slashing attacks. The gold twisted as it was cut, catching the blade and altering the edge alignment. Leon cut though, but rather than burying his sword midway into his target’s skull, he cut apart the helm and left a relatively shallow wound along his foe’s scalp, running down their forehead and across their face. The lion helm split, and fell away. Leon looked the enemy general in the eye for the first time, and hesitated.
The helm fell away, and out spilled long, golden hair, now matted in places by blood. A fair face, with piercing blue eyes looked up at him. A warrior’s snarl covered her face, as the Scythian Queen recovered. She snapped up and slammed the hilt of her falx into Leon’s eye. The prince staggered back, blinking to recover, as she took a step back in turn. With this, she obtained her range, and cut down with her falx. Leon raised his sword to block, but the reverse curve of the unusual weapon made it difficult. His wound caused his arm to spasm, and the curve came around the sword. The enchanted blade bit ito the common one, then cast it away. Leon’s wrist was wounded in the exchange, and blood began to fill his gauntlet.
Leon realized his peril, and stepped in swiftly. He caught his foot behind hers, and pulled back as he slammed his shoulder into her. The queen fell back, but caught herself on the edge of her chariot so she did not fall. Leon pressed in, pinning her arm with his his hand so she could not swing. He drew his hunting knife, and it was at her throat in a moment. His grip was unsteady, as his wrist was wounded, and he felt an utter brute to have a knife at a woman’s throat. “Yield. I do not wish to harm you.” He ordered, uncertain if she could even understand.
The Scythian Queen laughed in his face. “You do not wish to harm me?” She asked through a thick accent. “Then you should never have come to the battlefield! Know that I am Tamur, Queen of the Scythians, no soft flower of the south that you might bruise with your breath. I am here to that I might crush my enemies, drive them before me, hear the lamentations of your pathetic women, and reap from your ruin the prosperity of my people. Slay me now you coward, or else you must yield, for I will slay you without mercy.” Clear and clarion was her voice, as Athena upon the battlefield or Artemis on the hunt. She feared neither death nor injury, and laughed in spite of the carnage all about them.
Leon held his ground and was not moved by her laughter or insult. “Hear me then, oh Queen of the Scythians. What is greater cowardice? To be slain for principle, or to breach principle for fear of being slain? You are a mighty warrior; this I cannot deny. But this is my principle, that no man is any man that slays a woman, even if she is a warrior. I bid you now yield, that we might bring peace between our people and an end to this meaningless conflict you have brought about.” He spoke with all respect due to a fellow warrior, and with the resolve of his own indestructible soul.
“Far be it from meaningless, warrior of the Hellenes. Would you not do anything, even go beyond the bounds of the earth for your people? Hear now my principle, that my people shall conquer that we might not be conquered. For you who are blessed with so much shall not offer a pittance to our meager tents. So we shall take, for this is the nature of things, that the prosperity of one must always be at the expense of another. This is the balance of the world, and it belongs to he who carries the sword.”
Then she snapped her head forward, and impacted with Leon’s helm. Headbutting a steel helmet with your bare, already wounded head is generally not a good idea. But she was braced, and he was not. The maneuver would have opened her throat, but Leon had held back his knife for his soul rebuked him to harm a woman. Needless to say this principle, while generally noble, was extremely foolish in this instance. Chivalry was certainly not on Tamur’s mind as she pushed him back, and kicked him in the balls.
Leon was wearing armor and greaves, but about his waist was more of a plated skirt than a codpiece. The introduction of a bronze boot to that region inflicted less damage than it might, but this was in the sense that his family line could continue, rather than full nullification. He staggered further back, agility shattered. Tamur lashed out with her falx, and Leon wisely rolled away.
Leonidas began pushing himself back to his feet, but a Scythian archer circled. Whether by skill or by luck, they let fly their arrow and it struck true into the gash their queen had torn in the prince’s armor. Leon gasped briefly in pain as the arrow hit under his shoulder plate and pierced the meat of his back. It went through to the rib, and cracked it. He felt his blood already burning as the poisoned arrow delivered its deadly payload into his veins. The meat of muscle across his back began to scream and spasm, dropping him back to the earth. He saw Tamur approaching, and grit his teeth to rise through the pain. He was too slow, the falx came up…
Then there was a rush of wind, a smell of sulfur, and the sound of bronze ringing against talon, then scraping against scale. Seramis had intervened. She swooped in, and her talon met the falling flax. The two mighty women’s blades rang against one another, then Tamur shifted the blade. She cut across the dragoness’s palm and wounded her, drawing blood as the enchanted weapon carved scale. Seramis retaliated by coiling her tail, then striking forth with it like a whip. The foot and a half long blade at the end of the tail met the barbarian queen’s guard, and drove her back. The blade of the falx shook and sang like a tuning fork.
Seramis lowered her head, and spoke with a voice tinged with fire. She spoke in the Scythian’s own language, a growl deep in her throat and fire on her tongue. “Have you not heard, queen of the Scythians, that one should not trifle with a dragon’s hoard? If not, then I will educate you. Come not between a daughter of Tiamat and her treasure. This is folly, and will be your ruin should you persist.”
Tamur heard the words of the dragoness, and looked once to the blood on her sword, and once to the flames in the maw before her. She saw the damage the hellenes had wrought on her vanguard, and the advance of their phalanx. She stepped back, and ordered a retreat. Scythian and Diluvian locked eyes as the queen boarded a new chariot, and swiftly they retreated from the battlefield.
Sera breathed a sigh of relief, and quickly turned to her prince. Leon had kept trying to get up, and managed to stagger to his feet. Gently, she took him in an unwounded claw, and bore him away. “Leon, please tell me you can hear me.”
“I can. Ow.” Leon replied, breathing slowly, and deeply, to keep his face and voice from twisting in pain. “What did you say to her?”
“Just a bit of theater to make her leave, don’t worry about it. You focus on not dying, oh chivalrous fool mine.”
“Hah. Tease me when I’m not dying, would you kindly? It hurts too much to laugh.”
“Maybe next time, don’t be such an idiot then.”
“Ah, but then how would you have an excuse to rescue me?”
“Please, we both know I don’t need an excuse to steal you away. I’ve done it before.” Sera teased, and Leon smiled through the pain.
Even as two of the trio of royals retreated, Cassandra remained. She saw the Scythians trying to quit the field, and that the ambush had not been successful enough. They had mauled the Scythian mobile element, but not utterly broken it. She sent an order for caution, for if they overpursued the wily Scythian general, she might turn and crush them in turn. Still, she would not allow her enemy to escape her wrath so easily. She cast again, and thunder boomed across the clear morning.
“Avataar”
“Poorvaj”
“Rosh”
The mists of early morning fled from the Hellenes, and ran down the Scythians. The retreating barbarians turned, and saw the mists gather together into a humanoid figure. Long curls of smoke came down from a scowling face, almost akin to hair. Winds howled like limbs to throw men from horse and chariot. Tamur quickly evaded as the growing titan of mist swung, clear blue eyes gleaming amongst the artificial cloud. Then the avatar drew back its hand, and lighting crackled into being. The heir of Olympus and last daughter of Zeus hurled down lighting bolts at the Scythians, reminding all why even with the thrones of Olympus long empty and ashen, they were still remembered in myth and legend.
Bolts of lightning mauled man and horse alike. Chariots fell away twisted and burning. Thunder terrified men and horses. Cassandra watched from the eyes of her avatar as she delivered the wrath of an angry god upon then. “I am the dread Queen of Macedon. I am the miracle of destruction. I am mankind’s answer to dragons, and you dare, YOU DARE! Come to my home, my kingdom, and hurt my people, and now you think you can simply run away?” The whisper grew to a roaring fury, bolts of lightning leaping from her eyes to slay yet more.
Then Tamur cried a loud challenge, and bid her driver turn the chariot. She charged at the avatar of mist and storm, raising her blade high. In rage, Cassandra cast down another bolt of lightning, but Tamur raised up her sword. The bolt caught the bronze blade, but did not rip down through into the queen. Instead, she turned and set herself, then cut the air. Lighting ripped back into the avatar, and cut it from crown to groin. There was a clap of thunder, and the avatar was banished.
Cassandra went flying back, caught by her men, but left dazed. A wound, thankfully shallow, had sprung from no apparent source, from her crown down the center of her body, even under her armor. She staggered upright, hands shaking violently. She reached for magic, but it was like a man who was concussed. It was there, but unstable, difficult to control, unreliable. The clean, efficient control she prided herself on eluded her. She drew in a breath, and clenched her fists to stop her shaking hand. Showing no pain from her wound, she watched as the scythians slipped out of her grasp.
“Where in the world did she get a sword that can cut the soul?” Cassandra wondered aloud. Then, heeding the insistence of her men, she retreated, and ordered the army to retire from the field. She growled as she made her way back towards the medical tents. “I hate dealing with other miracles.”

i’m honestly pretty curious to hear everyone’s takes on this. i don’t really consult many people about this situation. but about 5 years ago, my friend made a really dumb move while driving that resulted in my side of the car getting hit at 60mph head on. (i decided to join him and his family for a show that day, and if i didn’t go and wasn’t in the front seat, i’m pretty positive he would have killed his sister in that accident since she’s MUCH smaller than i am.) at first, due to shock, i didn’t think i was THAT injured. like yes, my body was hurting, but i think i was just amazed i was still able to walk & talk that i didn’t think it was going to ruin me like it has. i went to the hospital and was mainly neglected, i clearly had gashes on my head but no further testing was done. i was just sort of given an ibuprofen and sent on my way. a month later, i went back to find out i’ve been suffering brain bleeds. my friend kind of started to distance himself from me. i went to his place and his dad got me alone and started to question me if i was really injured. he was coming up with conspiracy theories on how i wasn’t really injured. and it honestly was starting to sound like my friend was starting to think i was lying too. and at that time, (and to this day), i was in severe pain. my back is constantly hurting, i feel sharp and debilitating pains in my chest, i have neurological issues that makes it hard to move my limbs, i get tunnel vision if i move too much, and i lost most of my strength in my left arm. i’ve gained so much weight because of this. and he just seems to jab at me because of this. it’s almost like he doesn’t even want to see me. there’s been times where i found out he was talking to my friends about not believing me. and to rub even more salt in the wound, he decided to become an 18 wheeler driver. he failed his test multiple times and passed the last possible time he could without getting disqualified. since then, he’s almost completely ghosted me. and while he’s out on the road, i’ve just been finding more and more worse news about my condition and what i’m going to have to deal with for the rest of my life. i’ve never once made him feel bad for what he did to me. i just wanted him to believe me. i still don’t even hate him. i’m just hurt. i guess i don’t know if i should let him know, or just leave him be.

Killer Grips: Anne Maria, Brick, Jasmine, Justin, Millie
Screaming Gaffers: Chase, Izzy, MK, Ripper, Scott
Episode 8: One Flu Over the Cuckoos
"Last time, on Total Drama Action! Imprisoned in a world they didn't create. Forced to ingest deadly foods, and even to taste them twice!"
"Nonetheless, the two courageous teams clawed their way to freedom! And... a lonely Chef made a new friend."
"But prison is no place for law abiding citizens. Even athletic ones. So at the end of the day, it was goodbye, Sky, hello... Izzy?" The camera panned back to show Chris lounging in the control tent. "Yeah. Izzy. That girl is eight shades of nutty. Will she drive everyone else crazy too?"
The scene flashed to a close-up of Chris standing in front of the cast trailers, the camera pulling back with each word of the show's title. "Find out now, on Total! Drama! Action!"
(Theme Song)
The scene faded in to a shot of an owl hooting on a tree branch at night until a few sparks erupted from it and its head popped off on a spring. The camera panned down and to the left, catching the castmates as they made their way back to their trailers; the Gaffers were in front, and the Grips were in the back, though Brick was noticeably absent.
“Everything is so much smaller than I remembered!” Izzy said while looking around.
"I can't believe that you guys eliminated Sky," Chase said as the camera focused on the Gaffers. "She would have continued to help carry us to victory if she was still here."
“I remember that bush! I remember that tree!” Izzy continued to observe her surroundings until she tripped onto the floor, only to get back up. “Oh, I remember that rock! Hey rock!”
“You know,” Scott spoke up, “with Sky gone and Izzy being back, it's like we didn't lose a player.”
“That may be because the teams are still evenly matched,” MK claimed.
"Good night everybody," Millie told the contestants in a tired tone as she took the steps up to the girls' trailer. "I really need to get some rest." She grabbed the door handle and habitually moved to open it, but it didn't budge and she slammed face-first into it.
"First they lock us in," Ripper said as the camera cut over to him pulling on the door handle of the guys' trailer, "and now they're locking us out!" He grunted as he kept trying to open it, but he failed to move it at all.
"Wait, wait," Izzy said from off-screen, "let me try it!" Ripper quickly stepped aside just as Izzy rammed the door and bounced off of it without making a dent.
A loud siren started up as tense music began to play in the background.
“Cops!!!” Izzy panicked soon after getting up and ducked out of the way.
Seconds later, an ambulance drove past, stopping in front of them just long enough for the back doors to open and a covered stretcher to fall out. Siren still blaring, the ambulance drove off and the castmates hesitantly approached its former cargo.
"What is that? A dead body?" Anne Maria asked nervously.
"Or an undead body," Ripper guessed.
Whatever was on the stretcher sat up, and the cover fell away to reveal Chris McLean lying on a colorful stack of books. The castmates gasped and murmured at the dazed-looking host. "...Boo!" the handsome man said suddenly, earning a blank look from MK.
The host then cleared his throat. "Calm yourselves. No one's dead yet," he said with a smile, holding up one of the books. "I'm here to prep you plucky ducks for our most awesome challenge yet! These textbooks hold the sum total of eight years of med school, and each one of you gets one," he explained before tossing the book in his hand to Anne Maria who raised an eyebrow once she caught it, "cause tomorrow, we're gonna play Doctor!" A few deep and tense notes played as Anne Maria rolled her eyes.
Confessional: Anne Maria
"I don't have anything against doctors," Anne Maria confessed. "It is their job to put scalpers and needles onto people, and give advice like “Don't break your leg because you were out late skateboarding,” but playing doctor isn't really in my wheelhouse.”
Confessional: Brick
"If I wanted to, I could be a doctor," Brick explained to the camera. "I've been to the doctor's office countless times because of my many injuries, like a twisted wrist, a joint thumb, bruised ribs, or even my leg getting bit by a dog." He shuddered. “Don't ask. But the military is my top priority.”
Confessionals End
"To win this challenge," Chris said as the footage cut back to him and the castmates, each of whom now held a textbook, "you're gonna want to memorize the entire contents of these textbooks. By morning."
"But it's already late," Millie protested.
"You got that right," Chris answered as a golf cart drove up with a giant pizza slice on the roof and a large stack of pizza boxes in the back. The driver was Chef, who had a pizza delivery hat on. As soon as the cart stopped, Chef got out and carried the comically large stack of pizzas over to Chase. "What med school all-nighter would be complete without pizza?" Chris asked.
Chase was shown dropping his textbook as he accepted the stack in awe, and a harp played in the background as he and Izzy gave it a sniff. He let out an approving sigh as Izzy smiled happily. "Pizza," the daredevil said.
"This has to be a trick," Millie said.
"More like method acting," Chris told them as he walked over to the golf cart and hopped onto the back. "Med school interns consume 850% more pizza than the average human. So, dig in! Cause there's plenty more where that came from!" The cart sputtered away, leaving the castmates by themselves.
Jasmine opened the top box and took out a slice. "Looks okay, smells okay," she said before finally taking a bite. "Tastes...great!"
"How is that even possible?" Anne Maria asked.
The scene flashed over to an unfinished pizza getting tossed into the air, the camera following it as it fell into Brick's hands. The table he was standing at already had four other pizzas on it, and they looked to be complete.
The camera panned right over to Chef with four cooked pizzas at his table as he held a can of parmesan. "Keep 'em comin'," Chef ordered. "I'll add the final cheesy touch," he said deviously while sprinkling the can on one of the pizzas.
"I'm pretty sure my team is going to question where I am," Brick complained.
"Not as long as they're eating, they won't!" Chef got up in Brick's face. "So hush up and spin that dough. Spin like the wind." As Chef went back to his station, the camera zoomed in on Brick's worried face.
The scene flashed to the five Gaffers sitting in chairs by a fire in front of the cast trailers, eating pizza and reading textbooks. The camera focused in on Izzy and Ripper, who were in the two leftmost seats.
"Y'know," Ripper said, "one time me and my brothers ordered ten boxes of pizza in order to see who can eat the most without using their hands." He chuckled. “You should've been there watching us splatter sauce on each other.”
“Let's pretend I was!” Izzy tossed away her book. “Here!” She sprung off her chair, landed next to the pizza box in front of the team, and began to scarf on the pizza without using her hands.
“My three brothers would be jealous to see you do this quicker than them,” Ripper commented.
Grabbing a pizza with her teeth, Izzy started to shake it around like a rabid animal, splattering sauce onto everybody.
“My hat!” MK exclaimed.
“My shirt!” Scott shouted.
“My pizza!” Chase cried out dramatically.
Confessional: Izzy
“I am so glad to be back,” Izzy said. “I was top of my pre-med class before the RCMP started chasing me, so this should be a snap! On the other hand, I'll tone down my impressions since it bothered Ripper the last time I was here, and he's my friend so I'll try to put his feelings into consideration.”
Confessional: Ripper
“It's amazing that Izzy is back in the game, and unlike the first time it happened, I'm around to witness it,” Ripper chimed. “She better not make us call her E-Scope though. That was really bugging me out.”
Confessionals End
The scene moved to the inside of the craft services tent, where four of the Killer Grips were studying at one of the tables. Millie and Anne Maria were on one side of the table, with Justin opposite them and Jasmine standing away from them.
Justin noticed Jasmine's unhappy expression and decided to go over and press the matter. “Is something wrong?” the eye candy asked.
Jasmine was startled by the question and regained her composure. “I'm completely fine. Nothing's bringing me down.”
“Just tell me. I don't blab about secrets,” Justin continued.
“If you must know, Brick's been spending less time with us lately,” Jasmine confessed. “Usually before the challenge, we never even see him.”
“I've noticed as well,” Justin nodded. “And this is bringing you down because?”
“Me and him have a special bond going, and it may lead into something more than that, but how are we supposed to know each other more if he's avoiding us?” Jasmine wondered.
“Brick'll probably explain what's going on to us, but don't badger him,” Justin advised. “It'll most likely cause him to lie.”
“That's a good idea. If there's one thing I do not like, it's when someone is lying to me,” Jasmine admitted.
“Interesting…” Justin mused to himself.
Confessional: Justin
“Jasmine's concern plus Brick's disappearances equals an opportunity for me to cause a little bit of turmoil between them,” Justin calculated. “That way, I could get one of them eliminated with Anne Maria and Millie's help.”
Confessional Ends
"Man, is this pizza delicious or what?" Anne Maria said as she took a bite out of the slice she was holding. "I wish Chef could cook more food like this for us every day."
Jasmine took a bite of her slice and saw Millie focused on reading rather than eating. "Are you not going to nibble at least one slice, Millie?"
Millie looked up from the book she'd been studying and blinked.
Confessional: Millie
"With the challenge that we're going to get, I have to focus on studying all the contexts of that textbook so I won't forget a single detail," Millie told the camera. "And plus, I'm not really a big fan of pizza."
Confessional Ends
A close-up of an open pizza box was shown as Justin reached in to grab one of the last remaining pieces. "If you don't want any pizza, then that means there's more for us," he said.
“Hold on. Brick hasn't had any,” Jasmine interrupted.
"Where is he anyway?" Anne Maria asked.
Brick then peeked out of the counter, and he ducked down, crawled under the table, and popped up in order to act like he just arrived. "Sorry I'm late. I had an urgent bathroom emergency," he said.
"Here's your pizza," Jasmine slid the open box to the end of the table.
Brick picked up a slice, took a bite, and smiled as he chewed it. "My cooking skills are great!"
"I'm stuffed," Anne Maria said as she stood up. "And with tomorrow being a reward challenge and all, I can just go back to my trailer. Good night!" She began to leave.
"I study better when I'm by myself. Nothing personal," Millie told the team and left the tent as well.
Confessional: Jasmine
"I could make them stay," Jasmine said in the make-up trailer, "but there's no point in doing so. Millie is already educated enough to not read the textbook, and Anne Maria is as tough as an untamed crocodile when it comes to talking with her."
Confessional Ends
The scene moved to Anne Maria and Millie as they walked through the film lot to get to their trailer.
"I thought you'd still be studying back at the tent," Anne Maria casted a suspicious look at her teammate. “Why are you following me?”
"I still want to read the textbook. I just want to do it someplace quiet," Millie replied. “What about you?”
“Like I said, I'm going to sleep,” Anne Maria said. “There's no need to give it my all if the challenge won't have an elimination.”
“You may be wrong about that. Chris is very unpredictable when it comes to episodes having eliminations or not,” Millie argued. “Did you at least read some pages of the textbook?”
“Yeah, and I don't want my head to be egg headed like yours is, brainiac,” Anne Maria claimed.
This got a glare from Millie. “Hey, just because I'm smart, doesn't mean I don't have any more depth to me,” the writer scolded.
“If all we're gonna do is argue, then let's keep to ourselves for the rest of the night,” Anne Maria rebutted.
“That's fine by me,” Millie agreed with the tanned girl.
The scene faded forward into a shot of the numbered studios the following day. The camera cut inside, showing the ten castmates lined up in a small room facing a double door, all but Millie and Anne Maria looking exhausted.
"So tired," Jasmine groaned.
"My brain has never been this full," Ripper mumbled.
"You guys should've turned in for the night like I did if you didn't wanna look like zombies," Anne Maria stated, making the others groan at her.
"Morning, competitors!" Chris said in a chipper tone as he slid in through the door. "Or should I say...DOCTORS!" He pulled out a large gun from behind his back, eliciting a gasp from the teens as he pointed it at them. He fired it at them starting with the Gaffers, and the camera focused on Izzy and Scott at the far end of the line as stethoscopes and reflector headband landed on them. Chase, MK, and Ripper were the next to get hit and MK fell to the ground after impact. Brick and Millie followed, then Anne Maria, Jasmine, and Justin.
"Ready for today's big challenge?" Chris asked them with a smile.
“We pulled an all-nighter studying for this," Scott grunted. "Why wouldn't we all be?"
"If only teenagers were as dedicated to their studies as you guys are!" Chris said with a light laugh. "Let's take it inside." He started backing into the room he'd come out of, the castmates following after him.
The camera cut to a close-up of a large compound stage light before zooming out to show the cast assembled in a large room, each team standing by a large green vat of bubbling slime, a ladder leading up to a high dive, and a sort of slanted platform with a person-shaped indent in it.
"Today's challenge is called," Chris said as the background music became low and tense, "Visiting Hours. And only one member of the winning team will get to enjoy the reward." A few drum beats played, and the camera panned over to the Grips on the left.
"Hold up," Anne Maria asked. "Why're we doing this in teams if only one of us gets to win?"
"I guess it's one for all and all for one this time," Jasmine said.
"But who gets to be the one?" Brick wondered aloud.
"Let's leave it to the one who contributes the most," Millie told them.
Confessional: Millie
"Which will likely be me," Millie added in the confessional trailer.
Confessional Ends
"So what is the reward, Chris?" Chase asked.
"You're very perceptive, Chase," Chris told him. "Let's see if that helps you and your team assemble a CADAVER!" A game show jingle played as he made the announcement.
"You're talking about a dead body, right?" Izzy asked.
"No," Chris corrected as the game show jingle played again, "I'm talking about a giant dead body!" The shot zoomed out further than it had before, revealing that the slanted platforms were attached to chains leading up to a reel in the ceiling and two strange devices on mounted either side just below.
"These tanks contain the dismembered parts of two identical cadavers," he explained over an elevator music-like tune. "Each player will climb their respective team ladder, strap on the bungee cord," the shot cut from his close-up to a bungee harness dangling in front of the Gaffers' diving board, "and jump into the tank with hopes of retrieving a body part." The camera panned down to the tank, then over to the slanted platform. "Any parts you find will be snapped in place on the platforms. Use those chains to raise them all the way to the roof," he continued as the camera followed the chain up to the strange device on either side of the gap in the ceiling as a jolt of electricity stream between them, "where they'll be reanimated by a blast of lightning!"
"First team to bring a Franken-Chris back to life wins," the host told them. "First crack goes to the team who can tell me how to treat someone with a bean stuck up their nose." He tapped his nose, and the camera panned over to the Gaffers.
MK was the first to open her mouth. "Administer two ccs of pain meds and probe the affected area with a sterile swab."
"Correctomundo!" Chris said, giving her a pair of finger pistols.
"Yes!" MK cheered.
The footage flashed forward to the AV girl on top of her team's diving board, the bungee harness already secured. She jumped off with a scream and plunged into the vat, popping back up a moment later as she was electrocuted by the electric eel she was now holding. She let the fish go at the peak of her trip back up, and grabbed on to the edge of the diving board. "What the heck was that?!" she asked in shock.
"Oh yeah," Chris said, "I forgot to mention the electric eels. Three zaps for each turn and you're out!"
With a hesitant look on her face, MK allowed herself to drop back into the vat. She emerged holding a grayish and slime-covered leg. "Got it!" she called as the camera cut to Ripper who was standing by the Gaffers' platform with his arms out to catch. He caught the limb, then turned around and fit it into place.
"Okay, next question!" Chris announced. "Your patient has an itchy red inflammation on their butt! Diagnosis?"
"Diaper rash," Brick spoke up first. "Apply salve repeatedly to achieve humectant dispersion."
"Yes!" Chris said, and Brick smiled.
The footage cut forward to him diving off the board and into the vat. He sprung back out holding an eel, and it shocked him. "Sorry!" he said before plunging back down. He came back up a second time, now holding two eels. "Sorry again!" he told them, falling once more after getting shocked. He popped out holding a hand, which he quickly tossed to his team.
"Don't let it touch my hair!" Justin fumbled with the hand a few times before tossing it over to Jasmine, who rolled her eyes and put it in the right-hand slot.
"Next question!" Chris said. "Your patient's got a white tongue, red eyes, and they're oozing gooey crud! Diagnosis?"
"If I'm not wrong, that should be Pinkus Eyeicus," Chase answered. "Treat with two rounds of floppity jibbits."
"Absolutely correct!" Chris told him. The camera zoomed in on him as he slyly added "I messed around with some of the terms in the textbook."
Chase looked down at the vat, then jumped. He fell without a sound, but when he came back up with an eel in each hand, he shrieked and got electrocuted. He plunged back down, and this time came up with another leg. "Hey, I got one this time!" he said with a smile before tossing the limb over to Scott.
Scott jumped for it, then turned around and slammed it into place.
"Smells like ear wax?" Chris asked next, rushing up to Jasmine with a grin on his face.
"Pineapple-itis," Jasmine answered before low-fiving the host.
Jasmine was shown jumping down, and sprung back up to diving board-level seconds later with three eels on her body; she screamed as she was shocked.
"Fur between the toes?" Chris asked, bending down to point at his bare feet, one of which had a tuft of brown hair growing out of it.
"Stick two horse feathers up the whizzbang!" Izzy answered when the host turned to her.
Izzy was shown dropping into the vat and coming back up with a torso and a smile on her face.
A montage of parts getting added was shown next. Millie was first, putting a leg into her team's platform. Second was Chase, slotting one of his team's arms in. Brick added a waist for the Grips, and the clips transitioned to other parts of the challenge.
"Waka-waka two-by-four!" Scott answered.
Anne Maria was shown listening to Chris's chest with her stethoscope before enthusiastically saying "Sissypants McGee!" to the host's brief approval and sudden discomfort.
Ripper was shown trying to strangle one of the eels as it shocked him, then Justin was shown being electrocuted thrice by the eels before eventually holding up a Chris head. He tossed it to Anne Maria, who was sitting on Jasmine's shoulders, and the two turned around to put the piece in – all they were missing now was the left arm and hand.
"The Grips ahead by...a head!" Chris announced, the camera cutting over to the Gaffers' platform and the five teens giving it nervous, annoyed, and uncertain looks – aside from the head, all they were missing was the right arm and hand.
"Alright Gaffers, next question!" the host said as he slid over to the other team. "Your patient's feeling tired, has spongy gums, and a bunch of spots on their thighs. Diagnosis?"
"Scurvy," Ripper said. "Treated with an increase of dietary vitamin C."
"Correct!" Chris announced excitedly.
The footage cut forward, focusing on the Gaffers' vat as Ripper dived into it. He emerged moments later with his team's hand, and threw it over to Izzy who quickly put it into place.
Confessional: Ripper
“I'm not sure if what we studied are actually real life symptoms and diagnoses, but who am I to know?” Ripper shrugged uncaringly. “I'm not one to study for this sort of stuff unless there's a million dollars on the line.”
Confessional Ends
Another skip forward showed Millie plunging into the vat and coming back out with the arm. "Alright, last piece coming your way!" she said excitedly before tossing it to her off-screen teammates.
It was Justin who caught the piece and put it into the only remaining indentation on the platform. "The Grips have their cadaver!" Chris announced in a close-up. "Time to start yanking some chain, and be quick about it 'cause the Gaffers are right behind you!"
Jasmine and Brick began to pull on their team's chain while Anne Maria moved the slanted scaffold out from under the platform and Justin and Millie watched in anticipation as the cadaver-containing platform was rising quickly.
The camera cut over to the Gaffers as Izzy dangled from the bungee harness covered in slime. “I got it! I got it!” She tossed the Chris head over to MK.
MK stopped in front of the platform and drew back her arm, tossing it up to Chase who had climbed the back of the platform in preparation. The daredevil caught it and slotted the part in, then dropped to the ground.
"Now we pull!" MK ordered as Chase joined Ripper and Scott at the chain.
"Heave!" Ripper said as the three started to pull in rhythm. "Ho! Heave!"
"The Gaffers are still in this," Chris told the camera in a close-up. "Whose cadaver will hit the roof first?" he asked with a shrug. "Make sure you come back for all the Total! Drama! Action!" he finished excitedly.
(Commercial Break)

I (18F) love my mom (44F) but we've been through a rocky path. she comes from an extremely troubled household and background and we have an history of abuse and an array of mental illness in the family. for example, I was talking to her and it seems we have a big prevalence of depression (specially women) in the family. both her and my aunt hold little to no contact with my grandfather. she also got out of her relationship with my bio dad who was quite literally an abusive psychopath given what she tells me and what I know.
she started abusing me psychologically and physically at a very young age. things were specially bad in middleschool, while I was simultaneously feeling academically pressured, being bullied at school and receiving severe abuse from my mother. it wasn't all the time, but it was often enough I can barely remember my relationship with her outside abuse at the time. but I don't think it was particularly pretty, she tells me I was insufferable as a tween so that means I wasn't willing to act too sweet with her. she was also very controlling my whole life and had very high expectations for me. I think the most accurate representation of my mother I can think of is lavona harding in I, tonya.
I don't know exactly what happened, but she started getting better somewhere around the pandemic/post pandemic. I think it might've been the church. we were always catholic but she didn't raise me in a very religious setting. she reconnected with church recently and I know at some point she started confessing some things (like hitting me) to the father and he would reprimand her about it. my stepfather also started trying to keep her from hitting my little brothers (his sons) and that kind of bled into me too.
physical abuse happens very few times a year now. psychological abuse happens in different degrees when she's stressed out about something. of course, I mostly learned to tiptoe out of her angers' way too and keep myself in a favorable light. she still can be very controlling and strict. while everyone is congratulating me for becoming an adult, she tells everyone (half joking) I'm not an adult, I don't work and I'm not even in uni, and I'm "17.5" until I pass.
she doesn't allow me to drink under the argument it will harm my studies and argues with anyone who tells me I shouldn't stress so much about entrance exams. naturally I'm not allowed to go to parties and clubs and I'm barely allowed to go out with my friends. this impacts my ability to make and keep friends. I have more freedom to move around the city on my own now that I study downtown and commute to school (mix between a college and a prep-school) but she requires me to report to her where I'm going, even if it's going to the mcdonalds down the street. I'm not allowed to see a therapist.
I'm allowed certain things like staying home alone when my parents travel (though I'm expected to not leave the house or have anyone over unles given permission). my mom supports me on taking my driver's license once I have enough time for the classes and supports me on taking some gigs every now and then. she doesn't like the idea of me moving out (it's not common for kids to move out so early anyways unless they study far away which pretty much already is my case, but will probably be worse), but I'm dead set on it and told her that might not happen in my first year but will happen as soon as I can. she supports me in getting a job once I'm in uni. she's not a good listener but I feel she respects my input more now and recognizes I often know what I'm talking about. most of the time we have a good relationship.
idk what to think of this. my only metric is comparing our relationship and our behavior to what it was before, which is way better now. but I don't know how okay is our situation now and if I should be taking any action. when I was younger my plan was to move out and go nc as soon as possible but now I don't know what to think.I wanted to her what you guys have to say.

I figured I’d share this analogy that I thought of while watching F1. To me it seems like there’s a lot of people on here who spend a ton of time at the range trying to improve (me included). What I’ve concluded is if you go to the range with the same swing every time and the intention to hit straight, you’ll only become a better swinger of that swing. It’s basically like learning how to drive a really cruddy car really well.
If you’re the best driver of a Prius, you’re more than likely going to lose to any driver driving a Ferrari. Go get lessons and “buy” a Ferrari, then learn how to drive by going to the range.
Hope this analogy helps.

Heartbreak.
That’s what got me, well, out of my funk. In a sense, at least. I was in a rut. Knew it. She did too. Guess we were in a rut, really. Ran its course. Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell, but, well, sometimes stories end, you know?
So I did my piece. Curled up into the fetal position and fucking bawled. Days went by. Go to work. Go home. A zombie. Drank a lot more. But time wore down the edges eventually. And one day, I said “fuck it.” Packed my car, quit my job, and fucked off across the country. That was the plan anyway. Heading home. Maybe with my tail between my legs. I wasn’t sure.
It was a long drive. From the West Coast to the depths of the Midwest. From the shimmering, golden shores to undulating, aureate waves of grain. Radio stations fading in and out. Long stretches of static. Data dropping fucking everywhere. Sometimes I twisted through the AM band. Hellfire and brimstone. Vast conspiracies that always lacked imagination. What happened the fun stuff? Lizard people. Time travelers. Area 51. Not anymore. Everything’s a fucking angle. Propaganda. Switch it off.
I took a long way. Choosing county routes over the interstate. I had time to kill, so why not? Might as well see some of this country. The back parts. Dark parts. Quiet parts. Flyover parts. The “you don’t see anyone other than the locals and lost” and kinda parts. And I guess I was lost, right? In a sense. Though, I was hoping I wouldn’t become physically so. God knows I didn’t need to slip through the cracks of the Earth somewhere out near Kearney, Nebraska.
But things did get strange–shouldn’t that be expected out in these less-traveled places, though?--somewhere around Sheldon, South Dakota. I was at a rest stop, pulled over for a break, trying to get the last Clif bar to break free of the piece of shit vending machine, when I saw a black semi roll up.
Now, when I saw black, I mean completely. Utterly. Entirely. A pitch black cab with tinted black windows pulling a matching black trailer. Even the rims were black. It stood out like a oozing sludge against the golden, baked landscape. I stood there, by the vending machine, waiting for a while to see who would emerge. Of course I was curious. BUt…no one did. It just sat there–this beast of a vehicle–idling. I figured the driver must have been pulling over to take a nap or to call it quits from his shift–they can only drive so long, right? But you’d think they’d want to step out and stretch their legs.
Eventually, I managed to hit the plastic of the machine just right to free my Clif bar. I tore it open, took a bite, and returned to my car. Back on the road. I had places to be.
It was strange, though. I kept seeing the black truck after that. It passed me–somehow–on the highway a few dozen miles from the rest stop. But I caught up, a few miles outside of Sioux City. I passed right alongside it, my eyes straining to see who was driving. Naturally, the windows were tinted too and I couldn’t see a damn thing. I just couldn’t put it out of my mind. Such an odd sight. This big, beastly, pitch black truck barreling across the dull Midwest. It didn’t even have any markings. No company logo. No indication of what it was delivering, who it belonged to, or where it might be going. Well, it did have plates. Washington. But there was no way to know where it originated from.
After passing by it and getting through Blue Earth, I saw it again at a rundown motel. The Cozy Inn. I had pulled off a few hours earlier, deciding to spend the night. I was exhausted, had pulled a 10 hour day and could barely keep my eyes open. The clerk put me up in some grimy room that looked like the set of more than one true crime series. Stained sheets. Peeling wallpaper. A bathroom sink more inclined to spit out brown gunk than drinkable water.
My window faced the parking lot. I sat up for a while, curtains drawn, vaguely watching the television–playing one of those trashy true crime shows I feared I might end up on–and the parking lot. Cars occasionally came and went. I saw some of my neighbors, who looked mostly like travelers or perhaps vagrants. While a police officer was detailing a particularly gruesome scene on Murder Comes Home, I saw the black semi roll into the parking lot.
Once again, it sat there idling, headlights blazing through my window. I grew irritated. I almost got up to go outside. As I was contemplating the possible dangers of such a decision, a woman approached the monstrous truck. She looked beautiful in a miserable way, with a short fluorescent pink skirt and heels too high for the pock-marked parking lot.
She opened the passenger side door and climbed in, disappearing into the tinted darkness. The headlights went off and for a while I watched, silence save for the exploitative program murmuring in the background:
Her limbs were buried in separate spots along the roadside ditch…
My heart–broken though it was–thumped in my throat.
Her head was never recovered…
I walked outside, suddenly very concerned. I stood on the pavement in my shorts and t-shirt, facing the truck, no idea what I might do.
The door opened.
The woman stepped out.
Blood was running down her neck.
I ran up to her, “Miss, hey, Miss, are you okay?! You’re bleeding. Should I call an ambulance?” I was frantic, my eyes darting between the blood on her neck, trying to ascertain the source and the thumping truck.
“Oh, I’m fine. Just swell. Fucking grand.” Her voice was dreamy. Her eyes were glazed over as though she was in a daze.
I grabbed her arm, “I really don’t think you’re–”
She suddenly became more cogent, grasping my hand, “You don’t wanna get fucking involve in this, kid.”
I thought that was an odd thing to say–she was younger than me.
“I’m just trying to–” The headlights went on, illuminating us like a spotlight on a stage. The woman darted off, swaying as she did.
I stood there–stupid–not moving. All the lights in the parking lot went out and all I could hear was the engine idling. The driver’s side window rolled down. For a while–what seemed like an eternity, really–nothing happened. But then a hand emerged, casually, finger curling backwards, calling me over. And so I walked. What was I going to do? Be rude?
I couldn’t see inside the cab, but a voice emerged. It was deep, bone-shaking. It didn’t feel like it traveled through the air. More like it vibrated my eardrums, bouncing around my skull.
“You’re hurt.”
It took me a moment to gather myself, “Hurt?”
“Deeply. Wounded. Lost. Like a stray dog.”
I squeezed my hands together and could feel tears welling up in my eyes, “I’m just–”
“I can help.” The voice pushed inside me.
“You can?”
“Get in. Come take a little ride. You’ll feel better. Free. Happy. Complete.”
I stood in hesitation, my eyes on the hand, which was a deathly pale. It was almost translucent, but seemed so soft, gentle. I wanted to feel it on my cheek.
“Okay.”
I walked to the other side of the cab, pulled open the heavy metal door, and climbed into the plush, black seat. As soon as I pulled it shut I felt hands all over me. In my hair. On my neck. Roaming along my collarbones. Grasping my shoulders. I couldn’tj tell how many. Four? Six? Eight? Soft and gentle and cold.
I closed my eyes. I sank into the darkness. The headlights went out as the cab rumbled, pulling back onto the deserted county route.
And I felt good. So good.
Now, I don’t feel anything at all. Not scared or sad or hurt or lost. I’m found. Just like you could be found. So if you ever see a pitch black semi rolling along the highway, think about flagging it down.
And then, like me, you’ll never have to die again.

My car was hit while parked on the street in September. I filed a claim through the other drivers policy and a claims adjuster came out and inspected the body damage and I was paid out by check for the repairs, which I had done. This month I discovered a coolant leak that ultimately required a full radiator replacement at the tune of 2k. My mechanic noted that it was damaged from being hit which lines up with that prior accident. My question is, how do I go about getting a new claim or adding this to the old (closed) claim. Has it been too long? What can I do?

Hey everyone, I'm planning on visiting Slovenia in June and I'm planning a trip to Lake Bled and the Postojna caves for a day each. I know that the easiest way to get to Bled from Ljubljana is by bus, and I was wondering how tourist-friendly the buses are. Will they announce each stop, and will they announce it in English? In my city they don't announce the next stop, you need to know when and where you're getting off at so you can hit the buzzer. Same with the trains, I'm planning on getting a train to Postojna, are they fairly simply as well?
Also is it better to buy tickets at the station or from the bus driver?

Hey everyone, I'm planning on visiting Slovenia in June and I'm planning a trip to Lake Bled and the Postojna caves for a day each. I know that the easiest way to get to Bled from Ljubljana is by bus, and I was wondering how tourist-friendly the buses are. Will they announce each stop, and will they announce it in English? In my city they don't announce the next stop, you need to know when and where you're getting off at so you can hit the buzzer. Same with the trains, I'm planning on getting a train to Postojna, are they fairly simply as well?
Also is it better to buy tickets at the station or from the bus driver?

https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2024/05/18/old-genocide-joe-has-got-to-go-by-philip-giraldi-17-may-2024/
Embracing Netanyahu does not constitute a foreign policy
It is extremely difficult to discern what might be the thinking behind the clueless President Joe Biden and his Blinken-Austin-Mayorkas foreign-policy-plus national security team. Or rather, the problem is that there does not appear to be any thinking about it at all if one measures it by what benefits it brings to the American people. It all actually seems to derive from a desire to construct a narrative that will win the presidential election coming up in November, which will fortunately be run against a deeply flawed GOP candidate named Donald J. Trump. But look at what is on the Biden record: the country’s southern border with Mexico is a porous as a Swiss cheese, allowing literally millions of illegal immigrants into the USA since Biden took office; Washington is both de facto and de jure simultaneously fighting and losing two unnecessary wars involving nuclear powers which has cost a nearly bankrupt Treasury well into the hundreds of billions of dollars; and the White House is needlessly sanctioning non-hostile competitors like China while also making illegal popular social media sites like TikTok which have committed the sin of reporting and disseminating accurate narratives about good old “best friend and closest ally” Israel. Predictably, neither of the assertions about the value of the Jewish state is true, nor is it a democracy, but who cares when you’re having fun shooting people and spending someone else’s money?
Oh, and just try to exercise your first amendment free speech rights by demonstrating against Israel’s slaughter of upwards of 40,000 Palestinian civilians using US provided weapons and you will be hit on the head by a cop, possibly arrested, and even expelled from college! If you want to see where this is all going, check out reports of the recent FBI detention and interrogation of distinguished Israeli historian Ilan Pappe seeking to enter the US through the Detroit International Airport. Pappe is a critic of the Netanyahu government and of US policy so he was held, questioned in detailed about his contacts, and had his phone copied before being allowed to proceed. Meanwhile, a group of top federal judges have signed a letter stating that they will strike back against the demonstrating students by refusing to hire any graduates of Columbia University Law School as law clerks. And there even is a bill currently before Congress that would empower the government to label the foreign protesters “antisemites and terrorism supporters” and deport them, with some going to Gaza with the expectation that they would be killed, possibly by the mighty Israel Defense Forces (IDF)! It would be a startling new development to punish those whose crime consists mostly of trespass even given the rather loose ethical boundaries established by the war on terror and the Antisemitism Awareness Act! Or indeed one might follow the Senatorial route led by a chirping Lindsey Graham who recommends dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza to kill everyone who has survived the Israeli onslaught. The area then might be developed after the radiation dies down for those splendid seaside villas for Jews only suggested by the esteemed Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
To be sure, Joe sometimes mumbles something that might just be viewed positively, like his recent blocking on humanitarian grounds of a consignment of bunker buster bombs on their way to Israel due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that, no matter what, he would invade Rafah to completely destroy Hamas and whoever else might happen to get in his way. Joe predictably reversed that decision last Tuesday, approving a $1 billion supply of munitions after he came under pressure from the Israelis and their many friends in the US, to include a host of Israel-loving GOP congressmen who have carried their fight on behalf of the Jewish state to The Hague, where the International Criminal Court (ICC) is being directly threatened with American wrath lest it try to punish Israeli leaders for their genocide in Gaza. As Bill Astore put it “Last week, President Biden appeared to have strapped on a temporary spine in delaying shipments of ‘offensive’ weaponry to Israel for its murderous invasion of Rafah in Gaza. That spine had a short duration as Biden announced [Tuesday] renewed shipments of tank and mortar rounds to Israel.” Congress has also gotten into the game with the GOP controlled House of Representatives having passed a bill that would compel the White House to continue all arms shipments to Israel. Joe might also be thinking of political contributions, as American Jews donate the majority of Democratic Party funding, as well guaranteeing a friendly media in his campaign as they dominate both the news and the entertainment industries. See, Joe can figure some things out all by himself every once in a while!
Here’s the problem with Joe, apart from the roughly $12 million in gift-donations from Jewish/Israeli sources that he has obtained in his political career. His tactical thinking does not extend beyond his personal interests, to include his corrupt children, a trait very much like that which is possessed by his good buddy Netanyahu who is facing corruption charges of his own in Israel. Joe believes he is much cleverer than he actually is and thinks that an occasional mild verbal criticism of the Israeli behavior will convince his target audience of voters that he really is concerned about the continuing death toll in Gaza, where the Israelis have already been taking initial steps in their attack on Rafah by using their tanks to penetrate into the targeted zone to destroy and kill.
And as for the reported completion and initial functioning of the floating pier connected to Gaza constructed by US military engineers, it will not dramatically change reality on the ground even though Biden is claiming that it will enable the entry of much needed food and medical aid. Israel will still “security” control what is allowed to enter into Gaza proper while Netanyahu is seeing the pier as a bridge to nowhere, usable primarily to export excess Palestinians to foreign lands that are either willing or unwilling to accept them. And its existence creates some interesting possibilities. As it presumably will be logistically supported on the pier itself by US-based personnel, Netanyahu might well be tempted to stage a false flag attack blamed on Hamas to kill a few Americans and lock Biden into Israel’s right-wing Gaza policies from now on. Bear in mind that, in reality, Biden could care less if all the Palestinians might be “disappeared” just as he would like to see any and all critics of Israel be subjected to the harshest punishments, including prison and denial of basic rights as well as being stripped of government benefits. He has called the protesters “lawbreakers” and spreaders of “chaos” and congress is currently investigating the alleged “subversive organizers” of the “anti-Israel terrorists.”
Biden and company, as well as Trump, who is advising the Israeli government to “finish the job” with the Palestinians, clearly have no actual red lines that must not be crossed when it comes to Israel. The war of extermination of the Gazans has been accompanied by a more hidden war being conducted by the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, which has been largely under Israeli occupation since 1967. The frequently armed settlers have been attacking unarmed Palestinians, destroying their homes and businesses, ruining their crops and vineyards, and even killing them on occasion. Israeli police and army standing by do nothing to stop the fun and even frequently participate themselves by arresting and beating Palestinians who are guilty only of being Palestinian. Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested without charges apart from “preventive detention” since the troubles began in October and the jails are overflowing. The clear intention, verbalized without any shame by senior Israeli government officials like Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, is to produce a Greater Israel cleansed of Arabs. And Biden, who pretends to favor a two-state solution to the unrest, helps the process along by vetoing UN resolutions that would help create separate sovereignty for Palestine.
Some of the most outrageous recent developments have been the settlers’ interfering with shipments of food and medicines entering into Gaza, a point that a faux-sympathetic Biden stresses repeatedly when pontificating regarding bringing aid to the starving people who are trapped with nowhere to go inside the enclave. The Israel clampdown even includes the Mediterranean Sea being blocked off by the Israeli navy which shoots any desperate Gazans who try to go close to the water so they can fish for food. In the most recent incidents, observed by the standing-by but inert Israeli army and police, truckloads of food were blocked, the drivers and aid workers removed and beaten, and the food was destroyed and burned before the trucks were treated likewise. In another incident settlers dumped huge boulders on one of the access roads to a checkpoint leading into Gaza, rendering it impassible and blocking any aid. Journalists and aid workers are meanwhile being killed by the army to prevent any reporting of what is going on while the US State Department refuses to condemn the activity. Biden called the interference with assistance convoys “outrageous” but has done nothing whatsoever about it, nor has he followed up on pledges to sanction Israelis who attack Palestinians or their property on the West Bank.
The whole problem is that Israel is a monster, an apartheid state that somehow feels it is empowered by God and the United States to kill all its neighbors and rob the American taxpayer to pay for and equip the slaughter. Israel is backed by an all-powerful US domestic lobby that includes unlimited Jewish money and activist Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) led by the hideous Jonathan Greenblatt and the venerable American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), both of which are now busy raising money to defeat all congress critters who have ever criticized the Jewish state. ADL and AIPAC are also linked to “that old time religion” knucklehead Christian Zionists concentrated in the Republican Party who have their Scofield Bibles firmly embedded between their ears where their brains are supposed be. A partial solution would be to make the Jewish-Zionist groups register as foreign government agents directed by Israel under the the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is exactly what they are, but that will never happen. President John F. Kennedy tried to register the predecessor group to AIPAC and many believe he paid the ultimate price for that affront as well as for his bid to stop Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
So, my fellow Americans, what should we do? Well, we should do whatever we can, which includes speaking out about how we have been sold out by our leaders and opinion makers, and we should continue to do that even knowing that they will try to silence us by destroying free speech in this country. It is all we have left and we should continue to oppose what is happening. The first step however, is to get rid of politicians like Joe and Donald, who have been completely corrupted by more than fifty years in the “system” and are totally sold out and irresponsible in their behavior. There are honest politicians and journalists out there and we just have to find them, support them and get them elected and in positions where they will be able to bring about change in how things are done in Washington! One might call it the New American Revolution to restore our rights and free us from foreign oppression!

https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2024/05/18/old-genocide-joe-has-got-to-go-by-philip-giraldi-17-may-2024/
Embracing Netanyahu does not constitute a foreign policy
It is extremely difficult to discern what might be the thinking behind the clueless President Joe Biden and his Blinken-Austin-Mayorkas foreign-policy-plus national security team. Or rather, the problem is that there does not appear to be any thinking about it at all if one measures it by what benefits it brings to the American people. It all actually seems to derive from a desire to construct a narrative that will win the presidential election coming up in November, which will fortunately be run against a deeply flawed GOP candidate named Donald J. Trump. But look at what is on the Biden record: the country’s southern border with Mexico is a porous as a Swiss cheese, allowing literally millions of illegal immigrants into the USA since Biden took office; Washington is both de facto and de jure simultaneously fighting and losing two unnecessary wars involving nuclear powers which has cost a nearly bankrupt Treasury well into the hundreds of billions of dollars; and the White House is needlessly sanctioning non-hostile competitors like China while also making illegal popular social media sites like TikTok which have committed the sin of reporting and disseminating accurate narratives about good old “best friend and closest ally” Israel. Predictably, neither of the assertions about the value of the Jewish state is true, nor is it a democracy, but who cares when you’re having fun shooting people and spending someone else’s money?
Oh, and just try to exercise your first amendment free speech rights by demonstrating against Israel’s slaughter of upwards of 40,000 Palestinian civilians using US provided weapons and you will be hit on the head by a cop, possibly arrested, and even expelled from college! If you want to see where this is all going, check out reports of the recent FBI detention and interrogation of distinguished Israeli historian Ilan Pappe seeking to enter the US through the Detroit International Airport. Pappe is a critic of the Netanyahu government and of US policy so he was held, questioned in detailed about his contacts, and had his phone copied before being allowed to proceed. Meanwhile, a group of top federal judges have signed a letter stating that they will strike back against the demonstrating students by refusing to hire any graduates of Columbia University Law School as law clerks. And there even is a bill currently before Congress that would empower the government to label the foreign protesters “antisemites and terrorism supporters” and deport them, with some going to Gaza with the expectation that they would be killed, possibly by the mighty Israel Defense Forces (IDF)! It would be a startling new development to punish those whose crime consists mostly of trespass even given the rather loose ethical boundaries established by the war on terror and the Antisemitism Awareness Act! Or indeed one might follow the Senatorial route led by a chirping Lindsey Graham who recommends dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza to kill everyone who has survived the Israeli onslaught. The area then might be developed after the radiation dies down for those splendid seaside villas for Jews only suggested by the esteemed Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
To be sure, Joe sometimes mumbles something that might just be viewed positively, like his recent blocking on humanitarian grounds of a consignment of bunker buster bombs on their way to Israel due to Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that, no matter what, he would invade Rafah to completely destroy Hamas and whoever else might happen to get in his way. Joe predictably reversed that decision last Tuesday, approving a $1 billion supply of munitions after he came under pressure from the Israelis and their many friends in the US, to include a host of Israel-loving GOP congressmen who have carried their fight on behalf of the Jewish state to The Hague, where the International Criminal Court (ICC) is being directly threatened with American wrath lest it try to punish Israeli leaders for their genocide in Gaza. As Bill Astore put it “Last week, President Biden appeared to have strapped on a temporary spine in delaying shipments of ‘offensive’ weaponry to Israel for its murderous invasion of Rafah in Gaza. That spine had a short duration as Biden announced [Tuesday] renewed shipments of tank and mortar rounds to Israel.” Congress has also gotten into the game with the GOP controlled House of Representatives having passed a bill that would compel the White House to continue all arms shipments to Israel. Joe might also be thinking of political contributions, as American Jews donate the majority of Democratic Party funding, as well guaranteeing a friendly media in his campaign as they dominate both the news and the entertainment industries. See, Joe can figure some things out all by himself every once in a while!
Here’s the problem with Joe, apart from the roughly $12 million in gift-donations from Jewish/Israeli sources that he has obtained in his political career. His tactical thinking does not extend beyond his personal interests, to include his corrupt children, a trait very much like that which is possessed by his good buddy Netanyahu who is facing corruption charges of his own in Israel. Joe believes he is much cleverer than he actually is and thinks that an occasional mild verbal criticism of the Israeli behavior will convince his target audience of voters that he really is concerned about the continuing death toll in Gaza, where the Israelis have already been taking initial steps in their attack on Rafah by using their tanks to penetrate into the targeted zone to destroy and kill.
And as for the reported completion and initial functioning of the floating pier connected to Gaza constructed by US military engineers, it will not dramatically change reality on the ground even though Biden is claiming that it will enable the entry of much needed food and medical aid. Israel will still “security” control what is allowed to enter into Gaza proper while Netanyahu is seeing the pier as a bridge to nowhere, usable primarily to export excess Palestinians to foreign lands that are either willing or unwilling to accept them. And its existence creates some interesting possibilities. As it presumably will be logistically supported on the pier itself by US-based personnel, Netanyahu might well be tempted to stage a false flag attack blamed on Hamas to kill a few Americans and lock Biden into Israel’s right-wing Gaza policies from now on. Bear in mind that, in reality, Biden could care less if all the Palestinians might be “disappeared” just as he would like to see any and all critics of Israel be subjected to the harshest punishments, including prison and denial of basic rights as well as being stripped of government benefits. He has called the protesters “lawbreakers” and spreaders of “chaos” and congress is currently investigating the alleged “subversive organizers” of the “anti-Israel terrorists.”
Biden and company, as well as Trump, who is advising the Israeli government to “finish the job” with the Palestinians, clearly have no actual red lines that must not be crossed when it comes to Israel. The war of extermination of the Gazans has been accompanied by a more hidden war being conducted by the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, which has been largely under Israeli occupation since 1967. The frequently armed settlers have been attacking unarmed Palestinians, destroying their homes and businesses, ruining their crops and vineyards, and even killing them on occasion. Israeli police and army standing by do nothing to stop the fun and even frequently participate themselves by arresting and beating Palestinians who are guilty only of being Palestinian. Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested without charges apart from “preventive detention” since the troubles began in October and the jails are overflowing. The clear intention, verbalized without any shame by senior Israeli government officials like Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, is to produce a Greater Israel cleansed of Arabs. And Biden, who pretends to favor a two-state solution to the unrest, helps the process along by vetoing UN resolutions that would help create separate sovereignty for Palestine.
Some of the most outrageous recent developments have been the settlers’ interfering with shipments of food and medicines entering into Gaza, a point that a faux-sympathetic Biden stresses repeatedly when pontificating regarding bringing aid to the starving people who are trapped with nowhere to go inside the enclave. The Israel clampdown even includes the Mediterranean Sea being blocked off by the Israeli navy which shoots any desperate Gazans who try to go close to the water so they can fish for food. In the most recent incidents, observed by the standing-by but inert Israeli army and police, truckloads of food were blocked, the drivers and aid workers removed and beaten, and the food was destroyed and burned before the trucks were treated likewise. In another incident settlers dumped huge boulders on one of the access roads to a checkpoint leading into Gaza, rendering it impassible and blocking any aid. Journalists and aid workers are meanwhile being killed by the army to prevent any reporting of what is going on while the US State Department refuses to condemn the activity. Biden called the interference with assistance convoys “outrageous” but has done nothing whatsoever about it, nor has he followed up on pledges to sanction Israelis who attack Palestinians or their property on the West Bank.
The whole problem is that Israel is a monster, an apartheid state that somehow feels it is empowered by God and the United States to kill all its neighbors and rob the American taxpayer to pay for and equip the slaughter. Israel is backed by an all-powerful US domestic lobby that includes unlimited Jewish money and activist Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) led by the hideous Jonathan Greenblatt and the venerable American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), both of which are now busy raising money to defeat all congress critters who have ever criticized the Jewish state. ADL and AIPAC are also linked to “that old time religion” knucklehead Christian Zionists concentrated in the Republican Party who have their Scofield Bibles firmly embedded between their ears where their brains are supposed be. A partial solution would be to make the Jewish-Zionist groups register as foreign government agents directed by Israel under the the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is exactly what they are, but that will never happen. President John F. Kennedy tried to register the predecessor group to AIPAC and many believe he paid the ultimate price for that affront as well as for his bid to stop Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
So, my fellow Americans, what should we do? Well, we should do whatever we can, which includes speaking out about how we have been sold out by our leaders and opinion makers, and we should continue to do that even knowing that they will try to silence us by destroying free speech in this country. It is all we have left and we should continue to oppose what is happening. The first step however, is to get rid of politicians like Joe and Donald, who have been completely corrupted by more than fifty years in the “system” and are totally sold out and irresponsible in their behavior. There are honest politicians and journalists out there and we just have to find them, support them and get them elected and in positions where they will be able to bring about change in how things are done in Washington! One might call it the New American Revolution to restore our rights and free us from foreign oppression!

Did you know that memories aren’t real? No? Not really, you can misremember or change a memory without ever knowing you have. It’s a sinisterly important fact for me, some would be worried but I find it freeing, I can share this memory without fear or shame. I most likely haven’t remembered what happened as it happened, and considering what happened on the 9th of May all those years ago, I’d say it’s likely I don’t remember. It’s a relief really that memories aren’t real; I have always hated talking about my memories, about myself in general. In my experience, people are not interested in what I have to say, unless it relates to them or it makes me look less than them. Maybe it’s all in my head, everything is really. I’m not the most people friendly these days, I think you could call me a cynic, I call myself a cynic, but I’ll try and keep true to this memory, without the influence of hindsight and my cynicism.
It’s about that puddle and the 9th of May. Why the specifically the 9th of May? Well I don’t actually know why that day, it could have easily been the 8th, the difference is hours. I do wish I could change the setting; it’s almost poetic, I could always be misremembering, it was a long time ago, and I have been told many times since that I have a flair for the dramatic. A dark and rainy night, with the wind howling, well that’s a backdrop I can enjoy.
I’m sorry. Let me start at the beginning for the sake of clarity, otherwise I’ll never finish what I start to say, and I’ll never say what I need to say.
Once upon a time I went to a party. I enjoyed drinking back then, a healthy amount for most people, but for me, a dangerous amount, I had a tendency to get inside my head when I drink.
No again I’m sorry, that’s not the memory I want to share, I want to tell the 9th of May, I think this memory will be harder to tell than I first thought.
It was a birthday party for a friend, well a friend of a friend, I knew two people there, I was speaking my wisdom at the party, normally people would just nod and slide away from that kind of wisdom, but this was during the university days, everyone is intelligent, insightful and understanding at university. We few were the self-proclaimed leaders of the future, and so understood all, my green wisdom spewed with no start or finish was always well received. I remember some of what I said, you can walk into any pub or club and listen to the drunkest person in the room, they would have spewed the same wisdom, wisdom that I thought at the time was original and wise, but really was just old sentiment repeated with new words. Despite what I wanted at the time, wisdom comes with age, not self-assurance.
But this time was my spring years, that sweet age just before I faced reality, the real harsh reality of life, I had just begun to explore the world inside my bubble, and my exploration lead me onto the well-trodden path of clubbing and drinking, the respectable rebellion. I began as I always did, by talking, talking of going to some event, a lecture, a monument, an underground pub, of all the things I could do that evening, the places I could go, I and the other future leaders of the world, the potential was ours to squander. This ended as it always would, in that night club, the very same one I would always go to, my slice of reality. Apologies my dear reader, I have a cynical mind, it’s hard to keep at bay, I’ll admit that I haven’t really tried to keep it from being an influence here, I can’t seem to help myself, but this next part of the memory is less clear, but I can relay it with a real, shame filled joy. This part of the memory feels more like a dream now, I don’t have the energy to do what I did that night, I don’t have the energy for much these days, I think that makes the memory more fond to me, drinking, dancing, worry free. Maybe fond was the wrong word to use here, jealous is more fitting, jealous of the innocence and time I wasted. The power of a drink back then was incredible; I miss the feeling, that burn in the mouth, the after taste, the saliva, the heat in your chest, and that feeling of being unstoppable. Of course drink has more than one effect, and while I’d like to believe my cloudy memory is caused by false and misremembered facts, or by the merging of a hundred single nights into one endless night, that’s too poetic. No, the memory is clouded by the amount I drunk that night, and many years after as I tried to forget this very memory.
Yet despite this, even now, the fragments still makes me smile, whether it’s because I enjoy the memories of the innocence I held then, or I’m jealous of them I cannot say, I’m a self-proclaimed cynic, not a philosopher or a psychologist, I’ll leave the analysis to better men than me. Instead I’ll try to give you an idea of what happened in the club without my opinions bleeding through. This night in the club was no different from all the others, they all start the same. Moving around the club in a daze, my head feeling big and unsteady, but also incredibly light and empty, my fingertips warm, my feet numb, I remember dancing to songs, dancing on tables, screaming out lyrics, smoking outside, stealing a bottle of champagne, fixing my hair in a mirror, buying a round of drinks, the lights flashing, the bass thumping, fog spewing, standing on my own staring at the old chandelier, crawling on the floor looking for money, I remember walking out the club and how quiet everything seemed in comparison while I tried to keep standing in the night air, looking at my hands, how bright the lights were, how blurry the world seemed and how beautiful the moon was that night. Here, here the memory starts to come back into focus, the bright street lights and night air always helped me to sober up at night, plus I’ve always enjoyed being outside in the dark night or under the moonlight, I find it comforting to stand under the moon, it’s as if I’m suddenly alive.
As I came to my senses my memory sharpened, but that’s all, my drunkenness remained. I was with a couple of friends, some who I had been at the party with and some who I met in the club, we got food, and we spent such a long time talking, our conversations were mixed, some happy, some sad, all just more green wisdom. Much later on, me and my friend, maybe the one I went to the party with (it might have been someone else, who’s to say?), walked back towards our homes not because we wanted to walk as we said over and over to our screeching friends, but because the taxi was expensive and we couldn’t afford it, we lived in different places but close enough that we could walk together. Its funny to think of this moment, back then I had the money for a taxi, but I wouldn’t spend it on a taxi, now that I’m a poor man, I’ll spend money I don’t have on taxis I don’t need, apparently the youthful idiot I was, was wiser than I am now in some regards after all.
I don’t remember walking with my friend, or rather, I know where we went, how long it took and what we probably talked about, I had walked this walk so many times before this night, and so many after, they are all the same memory to me now, I enjoyed the walking in the night, the exhilaration of that has stayed with me more than the company on those walks. I always used to break it down into three segments, and so that’s how it comes back to me now. Leaving the club, past the library, past the race track, over the river across the bridge, up the steep hill, past the first university gates (which were actually the back gates), round the campus on the public roads, to the second gates (which are the main gates), a long walk with company, a painfully short one with alone. He was still living on the Campus my friend, I lived about ten minutes away from the campus, I said goodbye and goodnight, we agreed to speak in the morning if we survived. He went through the back gates and headed towards the halls, I continued on my way, onto the second segment of the walk past the gates.
I was on my own for the rest of the walk; this happened a lot, both during my university days and many years after. I lived on the opposite side of the campus to most of my friends so this part of the walk was always mine alone, even when I started the night with the people I lived with. I didn’t mind, it was nice to enjoy the feeling of being drunk without having to show I was drunk, a few assured moments of peace under the moon light. I never deviated from my path, round the outside of the campus, opposite some housing estates, till I got next to a little shop that sold cheap, bottles of spirit. I would always stop for a moment to wish that shop was open.
Then it was down that straight road, the final part of my walk, big houses on either side, well-lit but not busy. It looked like it was a five minute walk but once you started it felt like it was never ending, and at the end of the night, in the night air, it was never ending. Sometimes I would run, sprint to see if I could make it to the end of that road without stopping, something to break the monotony of walking, other times to tire myself out so I could fall straight to sleep, and sometimes just because I wanted to run. Nearly every day for two years I walked down that road to go clubbing shopping or studying, to go for a meal, see a film, meet a friend, it was a constant part of my life, an unwanted companion and witness. Walking down that road, reader I don’t think I’m able to describe how I hated that road, but I always walked down that road, there were other ways I could walk, quicker ways, but I always took that road.
This particular night, actually at this point I suppose it was the morning. I was walking down that road in the rain and dark between the streetlights, bitterly cold staring straight into a street light walking on the right hand side. I’d always walk on the right hand side, I’m not sure why, whenever I walked on the left I had a bad day. Except for on the 9th, the 9th is the one exception.
I have no clue where the car came from; I didn’t see it until after the jump, just a blurred headlight, a door, a wing mirror. The driver, the make, the model, even the color is a mystery. It appeared and left like a phantom. There was no thought, I moved forward, but I don’t recognize that I was the one who leapt forward.
I remember the fall. I fell backwards. As if my strings had been cut and I fell limp into the puddle, there was no splash as I landed in that puddle.
The feeling I felt in that puddle, it was something I had never felt before or since, an overwhelming pull I was powerless against, I pray to never to feel it again.
Should I describe it? How to describe it? I have to describe it. I can describe the fear it inspired, but not yet, it’s easier to describe fear, but this isn’t meant to be easy, this memory never is. No the actual feeling, that’s harder, It wasn’t a happy emotion, not a powerful emotion, not a sad emotion. Hopelessness? Yes it was hopelessness. Nothing more, nothing less. No hope for the future, no point to anything, I think it is possibly the only time I felt hopelessness. You can’t live without hope.
I couldn’t stand could I? No, I wouldn’t have laid there if I could, to begin with I didn’t want to, didn’t care to, my legs wouldn’t move, arms were like stone, every muscle in my body cramped, I could feel everything. My eyes were open, rain hitting them, rain dripped from my lips to my chin, it tickled. The fingertips were warm, hair moved, stand by stand off my face. Puddle water lapped against my cheek, socks soaking up water, shirt getting tighter and heavier, jacket sleeves filling up with water, keys and wallet resting on my leg. I just lay there staring at nothing, seeing nothing.
I think to begin with I was gone; that everything I held myself up to and was trying to achieve, had suddenly left me, except my memories, memories that weren’t real. For the longest time that’s how I was, empty, even down to my emotions there was nothing I laid there empty. I could feel my body, but I couldn’t move it, I wasn’t welcome, I felt awkward, out of place.
I’m not sure how long I lay there, dead (I had to be dead because I had no hope), it could have been a minute; it could have been hours, days or years.
The light was wrong. It was dark, only the light seemed to come from a streetlight, the sky was empty, the moon had left me.
Some portion of my mind came back, I started crying, I had failed, failed at even this simple task, I lay for a long time waiting, waiting for something else to come, I should have gotten up, but I just lay there waiting, I was muttering my secret . If that had been my mind for the rest of my days, I would have spent those days in that puddle unmoving; declared brain dead on the spot. The moment raises such disgust in me, I grieved my most important failure, hated my greatest success.
I’d like to lie here, to say anything other than the truth, to save myself the pain and the shame, but I said I would try to tell this memory as it was, not as I wish it, so while I’d like to say I had a vison, a burst of strength, that hope returned to me, I can’t, because in reality it was two words that saved me.
Two words. The Two words that cut through it all. I’m still not sure if I just heard them from somewhere else, said it myself or imagined it afterwards. “Get up” it was angry, disgusted, the words were almost spat out, “Get up”. Those words have burned themselves into my mind, and affected me every day since. The fear and inspiration it awoke in my mind, throat pricked and butterflies in my stomach, anxiety. Next to the hopelessness it seemed like life had spoken, with a voice that wielded fear.
I took control of my body then……
No dear reader I didn’t…. I am almost finished, I have to be true to the memory, I can’t spare myself now, it’s too late for me to take it back. I didn’t take control, I wasn’t there yet, it took me such a long time to regain control again, but it gave my eyes back to me for I had seen nothing long before the fall. I watched as fear drove me, took the strings of my life and moved them, dragging my shell in the dust, screaming.
I cursed everyone and everything, hated myself for what had happened, Oh and the fear, fear of the voice, fear of dying, the fear that someone would see me at this moment, see me and misunderstand me, I didn’t want to die,(I don’t want to die now) I was terrified that I had tried to die, terrified I didn’t know where that urge came from, that moment of energy and intention that was actioned without the consent of my mind, that I was powerless against.
Fear drove me, commanded me out of that puddle. I’d gone insane, truly, completely, utterly mad, I was dragging myself to the curb, screaming, crying, laughing, I ripped my finger nails out, shredded my palms and hands into bloody messes my knees into bruised pulp, my head and face cut by being dragged along.
I heaved up that curb fucking curb, shaking. I started to stand and scramble forward, to escape that spot, that puddle on that road. I stood up hunched and bent, buffet by the wind, laughing, crying, waving my hands in all directions spitting, shouting, wiping blood on my jeans, I was staggering side to side shaking, soaked to the bone, I was mad, insane, disgraced and humiliated.
Why say more? I won’t go further, there is so much more but to understand it…. This was not the place for such memories. That moment all those years ago, was not the eureka moment, the next day I turned this into a joke, a story to tell.
To this day, I cannot tell you what really happened that night all those years ago, as I sit here writing and rewriting the words over and over. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. I wonder what would happened if I could relive that night again, doing everything again now.
This was the time that my bubble began to burst and the real world hit me like a wave. Perhaps it was just a moment of growing pains. I’ve said it before, I’m only a cynic, all I have left is the memory of the 9th of May, a memory I visit daily.

He waited to call me, he literally thought about my sleep and that he’d called to wake me up a couple times already this past week so he thought no I’ll let her sleep and call at a more normal time. Is he not the most thoughtful thing? My baby. He woke me right out of a dream, it was an odd one which I cbf going into, but I was making a friend in it, I don’t know who but the dream was partly me trying to be friends with this other girl. Maybe it’s a sign I’ll find a new friend soon :) Anyway so he called and we chatted while he finished making up his keyboard. It sounds so good, like sooooo good. Like creamy marbley rain drop goodness. It’s funny because I thought his last keyboard sounded delicious, but in comparison to the new one the old one makes me envision large spiders tip tapping along a corrugated iron roof. Whereas the new one sounds like sitting by a fire with a hot chocolate with marshmallows and being read a story while the rain pitter patters outside. I wonder if this new one will sound like spiders whenever he makes a newer one? I’m truly such a fickle thing. They all sound good though, obviously. He said how when we live together he’ll make one for me! Or rather he’ll guide me through the process, because I need to pick the sounds and colours and feelings out. I’m not sure what I’d like it to be like, I’ll have to start thinking. I flip between wanting something cute, like a pink one with strawberries and hearts and glitter and then a sleek, profesh looking one. A light one? Or a dark one? And I have no idea about the sounds, but he’ll help me. And then we can make it up together! It sounds so fun, I really can’t wait. Anyway so he called and it’s still my favourite way to wake up.
Then we hung up and I was laying in bed debating whether I should get up or doze and I ended up having dirty lil thoughts about him… twice. I can be so boring with my lil fantasies now, I can’t entirely remember now what I thought about but it was just us two. I think he thinks I think about someone else involved more than I do, I definitely do but nowhere near as often as just him. I sound like a total creepy perve but I’ve even thought about just him… but I’ll be dead and buried before I ever tell him that. And that saying something because I think I’d like to be cremated… TBD on that. But so anyway, thinking about just me and him is always my favourite and works the fastest every single time. My honey baby handsome man.
I truly have a life full of first world problems, it makes me feel so guilty sometimes. I say sometimes because I only think about how lucky I am sometimes, which makes me feel even more guilty. There are SO many horrible awful things happening in the world to people who absolutely do not deserve a hair on their heads touched.. and here I am lambasting my cuticles for being in good condition after I bought some products to tidy them up. I just caught myself out before, I was looking at my cuticles and was negatively thinking about how clean they look lately - I’m not surprised I found a way to be negative about something good. They definitely need some nourishment and cuticle oil and things, but they’re so clean and neat? Why? I haven’t done anything? Anyway I caught myself looking at them thinking ffs why do they look nice I need to fix them - firstly that makes no sense and secondly it hit me a second later how terrible it was. And then the guilt washed over me and there are children dying across the world for no reason and here I am critiquing my cuticles. I truly don’t think I deserve the air I breathe sometimes. More than sometimes. I know I’m not a person that adds anything to this world, if anything I just take from it by worsening the health of the planet with the plastic, travel etc etc I do. I do my best to save bees who look sickly? That’s about it. I don’t bring joy to anyone else - I mean I make Andy miserable, I probably stress and worry my parents… I think the only one I bring any semblance of joy to is pups because I play with him and take him for walks and cuddle him and I won’t move an inch if he’s comfy and I’m not. Other than that… I offer nothing. So like I said, I am drenched in guilt. I wonder how I can change it? Or how I can offer more? I just feel like I have nothing to actually offer, even if I gave everything up. I guess physical labour…? But even then, I’m not strong and my hand skin is so sensitive so I can only really do so much before it hurts and gets bad. But I guess if I wasn’t being selfish I would ignore my skin, wouldn’t I? I would really like to volunteer. I used to a bit here and there, before I really got bad with my mental health. Not a lot but sometimes. I’d like to make it more of a regular thing - it’s something I’ve talked about in therapy about it being a part of the life I’m working towards. I’m thinking once every three weeks or so, so still nothing impactful but it’s something? I think I’d like to volunteer at an animal shelter, I wouldn’t mind even cleaning up their little areas and things, idk why but I don’t find animal stuff gross whereas I do people stuff. Then again I’ve only had to clean up after an animal I love with my whole heart so maybe it would be different for other ones, I could do it though. Or I’d like to volunteer at a retirement home, or visiting elderly people at their own homes. Just spend time with them, it makes my heart hurt to think of how lonely some of them can be and coming from someone who feels extremely lonely I would want to lessen that - especially in their final years. They’re the main places I’d like to volunteer. I’ve done time in “soup kitchens” here and in the UK, which I enjoyed, I only worked in the kitchen though helping prepare things and cleaning up - every time I wasn’t allowed out the front to serve, which is weird because I have LOTS of experience with that sort of thing? The way they implied it was that I was a young woman, but still? I guess 99% of those visiting there would be fine but maybe 1% wouldn’t be? Still though. Anyway I’d like to volunteer more. I need to learn to be comfy leaving the house first, maybe get my social anxiety under control a little more but I don’t need to be perfect because doing these things will help my issues. What else could I do? I donate to charities and have for years, sometimes I’ve had monthly deductions, sometimes I just donate on a whim. Like that fresh water one, I can’t remember the name off the top of my head but every few months I impulsively donate $100 or so. It’s not enough though, I should be better. I just get suss of the charities themselves and I don’t know how much actually goes to the cause, like I know they need to fund admin costs which makes sense but anyway. I just don’t have any skills, so other than vague stuff there’s not any real impact I can offer. Andy for example, he’s so talented and clever and creative, I bet he would have ways to make an impact. Like if he was to visit elderly people it would be SUCH a success as he’s so chatty and personable and kind and lovely and everything that’s good, so he would keep them entertained and ask the right questions. Whereas I’m not a talker so I would be awkward and quiet and they would have to lead the conversation and they likely don’t want that, unless I asked to be paired with chatty kathys of course. My nana was like that, you ask one question and she won’t stop talking for an hour. At least from memory, I don’t remember so well as I was littler. Hm. Anyway. I just feel like I’m a big time detractor of the world. That’s kind of a good villain name, The Detractor. Another way I can offer more is to be better, for example if I’m better then I don’t make Andy miserable which means he would feel more encouraged to live his life happily which would therefore positively affect everyone who comes into contact with him, which I know happens now anyway but maybe if he has a supportive loving girlfriend it will be even more so? Like I can be a lil battery for him, because I don’t really like interacting with others too much, or I do but I don’t like to be an active member, I like to listen and observe and chime in every now and then. None of this makes sense. But if I’m better then that has a positive effect on people around me. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m always polite though, like if I take the bus I always say thank you when I hop off, I always say thank you when a waiter refills my drink or puts down my cutlery or whatever else. Even when I don’t want to talk at all and an Uber driver clearly does I will chat away even though my social battery is running on fumes because I don’t want them to feel rejected and maybe they need to chat, even if it’s about nothing. I always put supermarket trollies back into their homes. I never litter. I hold doors open for people, but only when it means they won’t have to do an awkward run for it because that’s not polite that’s annoying. So I think I’m polite, but a polite person does not make a good person - and I am not a good person. Or a worthwhile one.
So far this morning I have chatted to Andy, got up and made a strawbs smoothie, did a lil kitchen clean/tidy up, went back to lay on my bed but not IN bed and I read for a little bit, I journaled the bit up there and now I’m watching some YT. I’m really trying to stretch out my read time of this book, I’m excited to get into HP after this one but I also don’t want to let go of this world and these characters yet, even though it’s a reread. I’d like to have a productive day but I’m also going to let myself do whatever I fancy… I hope I fancy being productive.
I wound up reading/watching about those body and face types again, because a YT video came up as suggested. Anyway, so apparently you can be more yin or yang and I’m a definite yin. Yang is more angular, sharp and blunt whereas yin is soft, rounded and curved. I also feel like I’m a yin person, I was reading about that recently, I think I need to actively work to have more yang in my life in order to be more balanced? I mean these descriptors? Negative, passive, feminine, dark, cool, soft, reflective, still, calm, nurture, quiet, introspective, prefers solitude, cautious etc. Hellllllllllllo. Whereas yang is more embodied by words like active, light, warm, outgoing/sociable, masculine, direct, expressive, loud, restless, productive, growth, passion etc. Things that don’t really describe me. So I think maybe in that sense I’m imbalanced. It seems I’m imbalanced in everything, so that’s great. Excellent, even. I feel like Andy is 100% the yang to my yin. Maybe that’s a factor in why we work well? We balance each other? I think he has a mix of both though, he’s much more balanced. I was about to write “he’s perfect” but I am also a biased, love sick girl soooo… but I think we balance each other well, no? Anyway I’m reading more about yin vs yang and I definitely need more Yang in me because these are all yin:
Signs of “excess” in yin: * Oversleeping * Overthinking * Slow thinking * Sluggishness * Laziness * Compulsive behaviour * Lack of motivation * Apathy * Overeating :(
Versus yang that lists things like anger, restlessness, violence, frustration, inability to relax & let go, insomnia, addictions, need for constant stimulation, regular headaches etc.
And “personality traits” in yin: * imagination * peacefulness * wisdom (not for meee) * relaxation * satisfaction (?) * persistence (only with some things) * introversion
Versus yang that lists things like action, ambition, courage, adventurousness, extroversion, getting things done etc.
And “activities” for yin: * yoga * tai chi * slow walking * golf * qi gong * weight lifting * stretching
Versus yang that lists things like cardio, running, fast dancing, wrestling, hiking, swimming, biking etc.
Anyway I know this is all just one of those things, but also it makes total sense. But this reminds me of the therapy lesson where I learned I like these sorts of things, similar to the Myers Briggs thing etc, because I don’t really know who I am and so I find being grouped into a category really affirming and makes me feel less… outsidey. Which is a thing for me as I don’t easily click with people, I can get along fine with more or less anyone but I don’t genuinely enjoy the company of just anyone and I find it very difficult to be myself with just anyone, I have some form of a wall up with everyone bar a couple of people like my parents, Andy, M and K to an extent. But it also depends, if I don’t spend time with someone for awhile my walls go back up. It’s a huge reason why I don’t really enjoy social things, if it’s a one on one thing I can but in a group? Even with the girls from work who I know well, but I can’t relax and I don’t enjoy myself at all. I try to but I just feel like I’m outside of the bubble. But so anyway all that is why I gravitate towards these groupings of personality, even looks like the fact I was watching a video about face/body types which is why I started this paragraph. I like being able to see examples and do a quiz and find out I’m whatever and then seeing similarities in others who are in the group. It makes me feel included and less alone. It basically all comes down to the fact I always feel like I’m on the outside, of everything. I don’t feel included in anything really. Which comes back to my self esteem/self worth… or lack thereof. I’m wondering when I’m meant to be getting more of that btw, like WHEN? It’s the root of all my issues. Mostly.
I’ve been wondering if I should consider lightening my eyebrows… that sounds kinda crazy, well crazy in the land of eyebrow stuff, but idk. I have warm brown hair… but basically black eyebrows? It’s weird and I’ve always hated it. I know eyebrows always lean cooler than the hair on your head, so that’s natural, but idk, it’s just my hair is so warm and my brows so cool - it’s always irked me. I’ve never quite realised it was that though, I just always thought something was off, but I’m now starting to wonder if my brows should be ever so lightened. I never even thought of it as a potential solution til I saw some girl doing it and it gave her a much softer look. I know they also need to be darker by a shade or two, well they don’t NEED to be but that’s generally the natural look and I only want a natural result. So a deep brown? Because right now they’re damn near black. And I find the black jarring against my fair skin too, I like having dark brows - I would hate to have light/fair brows, and dark brows are supposedly wanted because they make the person with them appear younger, or rather fair brows can age a face. So I like that mine are dark… I just want them MAYBE a fraction lighter. But the idea scares me! Because if you bleach them then anything you add on top will likely lean super warm and idk. So idk how I’d even go about it. The woman I watched doing it on YT just used an at home bleach kit or something and she used it several times so I guess it won’t do much but still… I’m scared :(
I set up my new monitor!!!!!!!!!!! By myself!!!!!!! I know how tiny it is but I’m still so pleased with myself. I felt so embarrassed telling Andy, or less embarrassed and more silly/stupid I guess. Like it’s such a nothing thing but idk, I was nervous and I wrote out a step by step list to work through so I wouldn’t get overwhelmed and things while doing it. And when I say step by step I literally mean:

1. Unwrap the boxes and take each item out
2. Make sure to keep them in their own little areas and don’t mix them up
3. Clear my desk of everything
4. Clean my desk
5. Set up the new monitor with the stand
6. Place both monitors on the desk
7. Plug both monitors into power source
8. Put laptop on the desk
9. Put the HDMI connector usb into the laptop
10. Put one monitor HDMI cable into the laptop, as normal
11. Put the other monitor HDMI cable into the connecter
12. Connector should be connected to laptop with only one external HDMI a cable inside
13. Turn on my laptop and see if they all connect up - don’t stress if they don’t
14. Play around/google/ask Andy if any issues
15. Arrange my new desk! Try use the cable tidy things and make it nice.

So I mean, an absolute step by step. It didn’t cover all the steps as I forgot about the mouse parts and things. But anyway I did itttttt. I need to move the stuff around though because they’re too far apart but I’ll do that tomorrow. I also need to work out how to add an extra plug so I can charge my laptop too as there’s not enough plugs.
I asked him if he wanted to watch Bridg erton and I wish I hadn’t because he feels weird about it. I only asked because idk, wishful thinking? I want to watch it with him :( From season one, obviously. Idk I know he doesn’t want to so I won’t push it, but I want to show him shows I love too. I just like regency era stuff like this and idk. I shouldn’t have asked, now he thinks I want to watch with someone else? Like… who? I guess mum or M. But why get suss about that. Anyway. I guess I’ll watch it by myself, like I expected. I can’t wait for the music. And the costumes!!!!!!!! My favourite. Anyway idk. I just want to share things I love with him the way he does with me.. but maybe I just don’t like anything he’ll like?
I want the Laura Mercier strawberry blush a lot :( But I’m really trying to not buy makeup I don’t need and I already have 30-odd blushes which I don’t get enough use out of, including LM ones. But it’s such a pretty colour!!!!!!!!!!!!! I wish I had a trillion dollars so I could have all the colours and formulas my little heart desired. But also in saying that I love the idea of being one of those women who have one makeup bag and everything fits inside, and they have maybe one or two shades or blush/lip colour and the rest is just one. It seems so easy and simple and I would really like to be like that but I am definitely not like that at all. I’m slowly learning to be more like that with skincare because that’s how it should be, but makeup…? Even though I don’t wear a lot I just love having it and looking at it. Like I just swiped some highlighter on my hand the other day to look at how shimmery it was, I didn’t apply it to my face, I just had a tiny swipe on my hand and I’d just look at it now and then. I only do that with highlighter though obviously and I love shimmery glittery sparkly things. Mum has always called me a magpie for a reason.
He’s asleep. I miss him. I can’t wait til we live together and when he’s asleep and I’m not and I miss him I can just go snuggle in next to him for a while. But not too close, as he gets too hot. I also don’t want to wake him. The idea of him doing the same with me makes me feel like floating on a cloud. And the time he said he’d still cuddle me to sleep even when he was on a different sleep cycle to me??????? Still obsessed. I wonder if that was a turning point in when my feelings were developing? I know I already fancied the hell out of him, I did from the beginning and I fell so hard and so fast for him. But I wonder if when he said that it was one of those moments that cemented him as the kind of man he is? Or rather the kind of partner he’d be? Because I’ve always wanted someone that cares about what makes me happy and I mean let’s not beat around the bush, I’ve not had a relationship where that’s been a priority to them. So the fact he knows I love being held and cuddled and I would sometimes miss it when he slept differently but if I wanted it he’d come to bed and stay with me til I fell asleep or close enough. And the fact he didn’t see it as anything special, it was just a normal thought to him?! It’s such a minor thing in comparison to everything else he has done for me and everything he has been to me and everything he’s helped me through, but it’s just a little thing that means everything. Anyway.
I watched wish with M tonight, it wasn’t good. I just can’t get on board with the latest movies of theirs lately, they’re just so bleh. The music isn’t right - there’s nothing magical about it and I wonder if it’s because they seem to hire pop music people not composers and things now? And the animation is never 2D anymore, which tbh I understand and that’s purely nostalgia of mine than anything bad but the animation doesn’t feel magical either anymore. Apart from some of the scenes were beautiful. Anyway.
I think I’ll stop now. It’s 9:30 so it’s too late for to start BT so I think I’ll read for a lil bit then go to sleep soon. Night night

Hey, so you ever get a birthday present that's so not your style, but you really can't return it because it'd be really awkward? Normally it's like, I dunno. Shoes, or shirts or something like that, right?
For me it was four fire-breathing horses.
Okay, so I should clarify. My dad didn't really give me four fire-breathing ponies to keep. It was more of a test for him to treat me like his son again.
See, I just recently got out of a Styx oath that would have led me to eternal damnation if I didn't fulfill it. It's a long story, but to keep it short: I swore an oath on the Styx to be a brave hero by my eighteenth birthday when I really should have just pinkie promised. But yeah. My dad, God of War and dad of the year took it well. …In that he pretty much said that I was a waste of space, disowned me and he'd personally hand me over to the Styx for eternal damnation.
Nice guy. Really should get into motivational speeches.
The night before, after riding the high of not having the threat of being sent to Super Hell I had a pretty bad dream. I mean, it wasn’t the normal David nightmare. It wasn't me killing endless hordes of monsters while my dad laughed at how pathetic I was.
Well, half of that. It was just my dad. To be honest, rather I’d take the monsters.
He was laughing at me, with that smug face of his, in that all-leather biker outfit with the shades that made him look even more like an asshole, as if that's hard to believe.
Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to cuss. Anyways yeah. Me and my dad. Not the best relationship, even by demigod standards.
He gave me a toothy grin, like a shark’s as he circled around me. I instinctively stood up straight, at attention. As much as I hate my dad, ticking off a god is a pretty dumb thing to do. Plus, I was pretty dumbfounded to see him here in my dream of all things.
“Well, color me surprised. To be honest, boy, I thought I'd end up taking care of this myself. So, congratulations on that front. But, sorry to burst your bubble, it might be good enough for ol’ Styxy but…it’s not good enough for me. But, you know, I'm a generous guy! Prove me you're a warrior. Do that, and I'll welcome you back in the family with open arms. I even got the perfect way for you to prove yourself.”
Without warning, he tossed me a set of keys with a miniature boar-headed keychain and a really big switchblade on the end of it. I fumbled with it before slipping it into my pocket.
“An oldie but a goodie. Used to let my sons prove themselves to me all the time with this one. Now, I'm sure once you see what I got planned you'll know the rules, considering you're a fuckin’ nerd. But in case you forget…”
He lowered his shades, revealing balls of fire as he glared right at me.
“Sundown. My temple. Don't be late or I'll toss you in the Styx myself. Well! Have fun, yeah? I'm looking forward to watching you fail this one, like your last quest. Now, get up. Clock’s ticking after all…”
“Gaah!”
I snapped my eyes open, falling out of my bed and onto the hard floor under me. As soon as I hit the floor, I could hear one of my many siblings start to stir from their sleep. Immediately, my sister Tiffany started to sigh as she shot up from her bed. I could see her pastel pink sleep mask perched on her head as she glared into the darkness of the early morning. She groaned in frustration, her words cutting through the quiet of the dawn.
"What the hell are you idiots doing?"
To be fair, I could see why she’d think that. Most of my siblings were fond of pranking each other every now and then. The chaos of the Ares cabin was unmatched from most cabins, except maybe Hermes. But, when you cut off her beauty sleep, the threat of an angry Tiff was usually was enough to make nighttime a truce. Usually.
My sister rubbed her eyes and looked down at me. I sheepishly gave a smile as I rubbed my head, still sore from when it hit the floor.
"Seriously, David?"
Tiffany got out of bed and silently made her way to me. She wordlessly held out a hand and I grasped at it as she pulled me up.
"Thanks Tiff. I had this dream, where Dad called me a nerd and was talking to me about testing me now that my Styx Oath is..."
I felt something hard and metallic poke against my leg, from my sweats pocket. I pulled out the unfamiliar object and to my surprise, there were the same keys from my dream. My eyes widened as I realized that my dream was a little bit more than usual demigod stuff.
"Oh. That...wasn't a dream."
She raised an eyebrow as she looked at the keys that sat in my hand. I played with the accessories, absentmindedly feeling the boar head and the switchblade knife. She leaned in, peering at the keys as the dawn started to rise.
"What the hell are those for?"
She looked to the keys, then back at my face, and then the keys again. She looked at me as if I just said that Kronos was about to come back and throw an ice cream party courtesy of the Titans.
"You're telling me Dad gave those to you or something? You're joking. Have to be."
I shook my head, but I could see why she thought so. I was pretty sure I was near the bottom, if not at the bottom of his list of favorite kids. If I was being honest, I was pretty sure he wanted me dead more than a few times.
"Tiff, you know that I'm not exactly Dad's favorite by a long shot. Why would I say something like that and risk him getting even mad more mad at me because of my lying? Dad disowned me, remember? He mentioned something along the line in my dream that if I pass his test I'd be treated as one of his sons again but he didn't mention what it..."
The gears started turning as I looked at the keys in my hands.
”A test…keys…sundown…oh no. Oh, no.”
I immediately pocketed up my keys and started putting on my shoes. No time for pants, sweats would do just fine, I just had to make sure to take my wallet with me, considering I was going to New York now. I had to be quick or this test was over before it even started.
"No. I...I think I know what it is. But if I'm right, then shoot I gotta get going then! Before our brothers take it."
In hindsight, I probably should have told Tiff a bit about my thoughts. But, the more I delayed the more issues that could have cropped up. I just had to make sure it was safe.
"Take what? Where the hell are you going?!"
I burst out of the cabin, staring at what was in front of our cabin. I felt a bit of nervousness bubble up as my thoughts were proven true. Tiffany was close behind me as she walked outside our cabin. I looked at her face and caught an expression of wonder as whatever she was going to ask me was forgotten. Parked in front of the cabin was a red and gold Harley. The seat was white leather and gave a sorta…humany vibe to it that I did not wanna think about. Only one thing came to mind, something I knew instinctively from the moment I saw it. Dad's War Chariot.
Or as the god of war would call it, his chariot.
"I...I think dad wants me to take his ride for a spin."
I ran my hand over the cold metal, and I realized what Dad meant about the “oldie but a goodie.” A while back, before the Second Titan war ended, and all of the children of the gods had to be claimed, there was a ritual all sons of Ares went through. It was something all my brothers did at fifteen. Drive around his Chariot and return it before sundown. It wasn't easy, my Godly siblings, Phobos and Deimos both loved to mess with whoever was in charge of the chariot at the time. And you had to deal with monsters too, but overall when it came to demigod stuff it wasn’t the most dangerous around. I dunno if that says a lot about how dangerous this life can get though.
But, shortly after the then-counselor Clarisse La Rue became the first girl to do it, Dad pulled the plug. I dunno if it was good ol’ sexism, someone totaling it, or dad not wanting to let all of his kids drive his ride, either way it wasn't super common nowadays. It wasn't like he stopped, but it was something given, not a right. Dad letting me do this was him at least giving me a chance to prove myself to be one of his kids, which was more than I expected to be honest.
I took a breath as I looked at Dad’s ride, feeling a pit of unease in my stomach as I started to climb in. If it wouldn't end up with me being tormented for the rest of my short life, I'd tell him no and go back to sleep. But, telling a god no, especially my dad is a neat way to be turned into a rodent. Or a fine red paste. Or a rodent that would be turned into said paste.
Tiffany's brows furrowed as she processed my words, a layer of disbelief on her face as she chewed over it.
You? He wants you to drive it? I...that...what the hell?"
I fought off a wince as she looked at me, then the ride, then back at me again. I could tell she was a bit annoyed. I mean, yeah from her perspective I was singled out by dad to do something she probably wanted to do for a while. I felt a pit of guilt in my stomach, it wasn't fair, really. But at the same time I had to do this.
"I mean, seriously? He must be out-"
She cut herself off. Calling my dad crazy was another way to get turned into a rat that would then be turned into a fine paste. Actually a lot of things carried the threat, my dad is kinda a jerk. I sighed, figuring I might as well tell her about why Dad was doing this. I didn't wanna hide it, but it's not like I like to talk about the fact that I've been disowned for two years. She knew, most of us did. But it's not something I like bringing up, because yeah. It sucks.
"I read a bit about previous Ares campers. He used to do this more often, at first only his sons did, but later his daughters could. I dunno why he stopped but, this isn't really like he's doing it because he's proud of me. I'm sorta disowned, remember? He said if I can drive the chariot, he'll take me back as one of you guys again. It's...more of a test to earn myself back into his good graces, I think.”
Tiffany listened to my explanation, not saying anything for a bit She looked a bit bothered about the fact that I was chosen to drive the Chariot, which again, not surprising.
"Ugh, I guess that makes sense."
I could hear the frustration in her voice as she crossed her arms. I winced again, preparing for her to resent or hate me. But to my surprise, I heard her add more in a softer voice.
"Well, don't get yourself killed trying to pass this stupid test, I don't want to have to explain to everyone why you're not coming back."
Her icy tone defrosted as she looked back at me with a bit of concern in her eyes. She seemed less annoyed and more worried about me, which was sweet. Not that I'd let her hear that. I hoped that maybe, dad would let her give it for a spin later down the road. If anyone deserved it, it would be her. I gave a nervous laugh as I took the keys out of my pocket.
"Of course, I passed my Styx Oath, didn't I? It'd be really dumb of me to die right after barely avoiding that, right? Oh, yeah. If Ellie asks for me, tell her about dad's little test he has for me. Hopefully it won't be too long but you know how it is with godly stuff. I should be back in time for us to hang out for the rest of my birthday once I do this for dad. I'll bring back something cool!”
I felt my trepidation fade away as I prepared to drive. Lots of my siblings dreamed of piloting the chariot. It wouldn't be right to reject the opportunity when it was given to me. And, who knows? Getting back in Dad's good graces (or as much as one can get in them) might help me out. At least I would have one less target on my back. As I sat down in the white leather seat, I put the keys in the ignition and instantly it began to morph.
OOC:Read this while listening to whats coming up
The front split apart into one steel horse that slowly split into two, and then four cream-colored horses that looked around with a cruel intelligence. The seat dipped, and warped before it became a horse-drawn chariot I was now standing in. The chariot was gold and blood red, adorned with the lovely images of people dying gruesome deaths, because Dad's taste in decor is somewhere between military surplus and serial killer, apparently.
“Okay…so, I need to get to Dad's temple before sundown. I don't know New York highways though, so how can I…oh hey! A gps!”
My fingers brushed against a touch screen set up on the chariot and punched The Intrepid into the coordinates. I gave one last wave to my sister before I lashed the horses and they immediately took off. I led them out of camp easily enough, but as we reached the highway they sped up to an impossible speed for a chariot. Their speed was even faster than any cars on the highway, rivaling the time that Aphrodite camper drove us to the beach once. I pulled back on the reins, trying to get them to slow down. Instead, they gave a rebellious snort and went even faster.
I would like to say that I embraced my inner Ares kid and relished the challenge. But I'm not going to lie, when you end up going past 80 MPH in a chariot, you tend to think you're going to die, fun fact. I screamed for most of the way, yanking and pulling at their reins so we could bob and weave through traffic.
It's a bit of a drive from Camp Half-Blood to New York City, I know it well, it’s a pretty common place for me to go for some monster slaying. But, up until now, I've been in the passenger seat while Argus drives. The speed of the horses really made the time go by faster. As we entered the city, the horses started to slow down and I felt a ray of hope as I started to steer them through the city. I gave a triumphant laugh as I looked down at my ETA. It was surprisingly quick, considering how congested New York can get. And I didn't see hide or hair of either one of my godly brothers, so I felt pretty good, all things considered.
“Huh. That's weird. There's not many cars today…my luck must be turning around!”
“Traffic update: Incoming Monsters. Rerouting. Cannot reroute.”
“Huh?”
Immediately, a massive boar the size of a garbage truck burst from a nearby alley way behind me. Behind the massive pig, two armored bank cars recklessly merged into traffic. One leaned out, revealing a gray-skinned human in body armor brandishing a shotgun.
“Of course! I had to open my big mouth! Is there anything that I’m going to have to deal with?”
“You are on the fastest route!”
“Well that’s just GREAT! Now I can be on the quickest way to the underworld!”
”Rerouting to: D.O.A. Records, Los Angeles.”
“Woah, woah, woah, no! Keep me on The Intrepid! The Intrepid!”
Seeing all these enemies together though, I started to put a thought in my head. They all had something in common, now that I saw them all in front of me. A boar was sacred to Ares, Spartoi too came from a dragon sacred to him. I put the pieces together as I saw the monsters come out of the woodwork and all to me. Now things made sense. The lack of Phobos and Deimos, the sacred beings to Ares, the lack of mortals on the street.
I didn't see my siblings because Dad wanted to mess with me personally.
Even now, I don't know if he wanted to test me in a Spartan way, or if he just wanted to get rid of me without kinslaying. Either way, I couldn't back down now. Not when I was so close. I snapped on the reins and the rebellious horses continued on their path, bickering and weaving left and right as they snorted and whinnied.
I heard the wiz of something traveling through the air and quickly moved out of the way. A metal feather hit the chariot, bouncing off the hull and onto the ground. I looked up and saw a few birds. They were black and crow-like, but their feathers had a metallic sheen, like iron. Their wings flapped and I heard the sound of metal on metal as they soared above me.
“Dad called in feather-shooters too? Come on!”
I steered left and right as I evaded the metal feathers shooting at me. The newcomers behind me quickly gained as I bobbed and weaved. I had to figure a way out of this, and fast. Problem was, I was quickly outnumbered and outmatched. I wasn't the best at archery, and my sword could shoot a blast of force, courtesy of the then Forgemaster. Main issue was it took a bit to charge, and I couldn't take them on so high up.
I couldn't run. I needed to fight out of this. But even if I could fight the two Spartoi and the big pig, the problem was the birds. I didn't have a ranged option…or did I? I looked to the horses, breathing embers as they huffed and pulled the chariot further on. Ares kids couldn't talk to horses, but these were godly horses. They seemed smarter than your average horse. Maybe I could talk them into behaving, the same way I got some of my siblings to listen to the plan during Capture the Flag.
“Hey guys, are you bored? I'm sure Dad and my brothers take all the good fights, huh? You know, if you guys continue fighting each other, I might lose this and you guys will miss out on a good fight.”
At first, I thought it fell on deaf ears. But then, they stopped their jostling and started to take a more unified path as we raced along the streets. Like I thought, they enjoyed a good fight as much as their owner did.
“That's what I like to see. Look, we're pretty surrounded right now. What do you say we rampage a bit before I take you guys home?”
An evil-sounding whinny came from the horses. I couldn’t really speak horse, but I took that as an okay and pointed at the birds above us. Did I feel stupid? Kinda. But as long as it worked, I couldn’t complain.
“See them? All yours. I'll cover you guys from the ground forces, and in exchange, you guys fall in line. Alright?”
A burst of fire came from one of the horses in response and I heard a loud squawk as it engulfed one of the feather-shooters. I breathed a sigh in relief as the rest of the birds started to scatter. They veered left and right in an attempt to avoid the flaming streams that were now sporadically being fired in their direction.
“Alright! Good job, I'll leave it to you!”
I gave a smile as I turned behind to my land-based foes, quickly gaining on me. I could hear the occasional woosh of fire as the horses fought the birds. One of the armored trucks caught up to my right and one of the spartoi leaned out of the vehicle. They aimed down the sights and pointed their shotgun at me.
“Sudden traffic in your area. You will be delayed by…five minutes. You are still on the fastest route!”
“Woah, that’s not fair! Come on Dad! A gun? Really!?”
I felt a tug in my stomach. It wasn’t something I could do a lot in a row without being exhausted, but I had some sorta pull when it came to weapons. When I gave a command, they were able to fall right out of their owner’s hands.
“Alright, let’s even the playerfield shall we?”
I held out my hand and they dropped it, the gun fell onto the ground, crushed by the wheels of the car. The second caught up to my left and once again, a spartoi leaned out of their car, weapon in hand.
“Another one!? Come on! How am I going to…”
I was jerked to the side as the horses suddenly veered right. At first, I thought it was the horses misbehaving again, but then a monstrous squeal came from behind me, rushing forwards.
Crash
I heard the sound of steel groaning as the boar rushed past the truck, pushing their truck out of the way as they aggressively charged forward. It was a good thing I managed to get out of the way, or else I would have been in trouble. I could see the spartoi shaking their fist as they spun out, their car massively dented with a massive gash in the armor. Now that I had to deal with two enemies, I decided to use the boar’s momentum to my advantage. I pulled back on the reins and the boar kept barreling on, too fast to stop as I made the chariot suddenly stop and then take a sudden turn away from the temple. The boar ran straight into a brick wall, seemingly dazed but otherwise okay.
”Rerouting...”
That temporarily took care of two of my enemies. Now that I had one to worry about, and my horses were pretty steady, I could start this fight in earnest. I kept one hand on the reins as I grabbed my Miku keychain. I unclipped it, and the keychain turned into a katana, with said keychain still on the bottom. It was my sword, Anime (I want to clarify, my friend Jules named it, not me). One of the Spartoi readied a spear and lunged at me. I parried it with my blade, and stabbed at their chest. I felt my blade plunge into their body. I pulled away at it, slashing at it again to tear it apart. To my disappointment though, the monster quickly reformed.
I don't know what I expected, to be honest. They wouldn't be much of an immortal soldier if they died after the first hit. But it bought me valuable time as we pushed forward. Almost as soon as its bones knit back together, it struck at me. I guarded once again, my sword starting to glow brighter and brighter with each strike. Our blades clashed and separated again and again for, I don’t know how long to be honest. I was putting up a good fight, but I just couldn’t gain the upperhand in that fight. For starters, if it was a monster or even a demigod it’d be ten ways to Tartarus at the moment. But, no matter how I sliced or diced it, the immortal soldier kept on coming back. Also, I just wasn't used to multitasking like that, I held on as tightly as I could, but the brief times I practiced Chariot combat with my friends Jules and Cel, I was either driving or fighting. Both at the same time was hard, and I was lucky that the horses were so cooperative.
I heard the whinny of one of the horses ahead as I looked back to the front. No sign of the birds meant that there was a few extra-crispy feather-shooters along the road somewhere, which was good news. But then, I looked out in front and realized that there was a big problem. One of the trucks we left behind somehow got in front of us, blocking the road with their car. Five spartoi were standing outside of the car, swords and spears drawn as they headed the chariot off.
At this moment, I knew I was screwed. I was too fast to just stop. And, even if I did stop, I’d have to deal with all the angry skeleton men chasing me down. I just winced, bracing for impact. But then, I heard a neigh as the horses pulling my chariot started to turn into steel and combined once more. The chariot started to shift, the creak of metal folding and turning. I quickly sheathed my sword as the reins turned into chrome handlebars which I gripped like my life depended on it. The chariot continued to morph until once again it was a motorcycle with flame patterns. I veered as left as I could, narrowly avoiding hitting the side of a nearby building as I sped past the skeletal blockade. I braked, motorcycle now turning back into the chariot form as I turned back and watched as the car that was chasing me slammed straight into the other.
The now pissed spartoi stumbled out of the wreckage and started to scream undead obscenities to each other. I couldn’t speak ghost, but whatever they said seemed to be pretty rude, because both sides started to unsheath their swords and get into an all-out brawl. One of the spartoi sliced the other in two, and they didn’t reform this time as their essence slid into their black sword.
Huh. Well, that was one way to deal with them.
“Whew! Good horses.”
I turned, ready to snap the reins once again, but I stopped as I saw what was waiting for me at the other end of the road. The boar, still very much on my trail stood in front of me. It pawed at the ground in front of it, and my horses started to do the same. I stared at the boar, unsheathing Anime once again as we stared off.
“Keep straight for…500 feet.”
The thing about boars is that they can be pretty deadly. They’re brutish and aggressive, and they go down fighting. You know the crossguard that’s near the pointy end of a spear? That’s so the animal doesn’t run up the spear to take you out with it. You don’t think them being that dangerous, but there’s a reason that dad’s symbol is a boar.
I had to make this quick, and efficient or I’d end up maimed, or worse. I snapped the reins one more time, and the horses started to dash down the street. The boar squealed as it barreled to me. I could see it get closer and closer. I grit my teeth, holding my blade in my right hand as it started to shine more and more brightly. My hand held onto the grip tightly, bracing for my next action.
I’d have one shot at this.
I miss, I’m dead.
I hesitate, I’m dead.
I don’t hit the vitals, I’m dead.
Time started to slow around me as I watched the boar rush at the chariot, enraged as it reached the point where there was no stopping it now. I could see the powerful muscles push and pull, the beast using all its power in an attempt to off me for good. I felt heat coming from the front as all four horses breathed a stream of flames at the swine. The boar kept on charging forwards, through the fire as the flames engulfed it. An angry squeal erupted from the inferno as it lept up from the sea of flames, still on fire as it used its strong legs to clear the horses and go straight for me.
Breathe in
I felt a sense of calm wash over me as I pulled my sword hand back. My blade shined brilliantly, even in the May sun. I watched it fall ever closer to me, the flames still eating away at the flesh. I stared into its ever-angry eyes, burning brighter than the flames surrounding it. I don’t falter. I’ve faced monsters that have crushed my bones. I don’t feel fear. I’ve fought creatures that could have killed me in five seconds. This is it. I need it to be perfect.
Breathe out.
SHING
I swung my blade and a rush of air followed it, making an arc that flew to the boar. I don’t doubt my skills. I simply watch, confident that this will end the monster once and for all. The blast, charged from my fight flew unimpeded. The beast’s chuffs turned into surprised squeal as it sliced the boar cleanly in two, bisecting it from the snout down. I sheathed my sword and put both hands back on the reins, eyes on the road as I barely watched what came next. The flaming boar started to fade into dust, still falling through the air until only a tusk was left. I held out my arm and caught it with my right hand.
“Oh hot, hot!”
I juggled it a bit with one hand before placing it down on the chariot floor. I grinned triumphantly as I realized what happened. Dad tried to test me, to see if I was “worthy” or he genuinely tried to kill me. Either way, I beat him this time, proving to him that I was more. That he underestimated me when we first met, that I was a brave warrior all along. In the end, I proved to him that I could fulfill my Styx oath even past what was expected of me. I laughed as I sped up, I felt pretty good about my victory. I wondered how his face would look, or if I could read his expression past his dumb sunglasses.
But as I rounded the corner, a terrifying sight came to my face as my glee turned to sorrow. I watched with horror as I realized Dad’s influence on the fight kept a more dangerous foe than any before at bay. Now that the fight was over, he had no reason to keep it around, and for once, I wasn’t sure if I could get through this unscathed. I gulped as I put my hands on the reins, not ready to face the impossible challenge alone. I hoped it wouldn’t break me as I prepared what little I had to fight this foe.
”There is an unusual amount of traffic in your area today.”
“Now you tell me…”
None other, than New York traffic.
I’d like to say that I did something else. Like I defeated an army of drakons on my way, or managed to fight off crazed demigods sent by my dad…but no. It was pretty much just traffic the rest of the way there. It was long and arduous, but I managed to make my way over to The Intrepid. After that traffic,I had to say, the amount of crazy drivers was almost San Francisco bad. I’d have taken as many spartoi and boars as dad could throw at me, if it meant I wasn’t drowning in the sea of cars. I drove down Pier 86, feeling a sense of relief as I got closer and closer to the aircraft carrier turned museum. As I got within eyeshot, I realized that dad said to take it to the temple, but not where to drop it off at.
It would be really stupid to end up failing just because I wasn’t sure where to leave dad’s ride. I got off the chariot, and was eyeing the prices of a ticket.
“Adults are thirty-six, Seniors and College Students…thirty four… Oh hey! Children of Ares get in free! Now, how do I wheel dad’s chariot through the front…”
Suddenly the side gate opened, lights flashing and clanging as it automatically retracted. The person standing in the booth waved me over and I hopped back onto the chariot, driving it by cautiously. They were dressed like a security guard, shades covering their eyes as they looked down onto their phone that they were absentmindedly playing with. Eyebrow piercings peeked out from behind the shades. They were tall, looked about early twenties, and seemed like your average bored museum guard, if not for that sorta godly aura I got from them.
“Take the chariot this way, Lord Ares will be at the end of Pier 86. Can’t miss him.”
I eyed the godling suspiciously. They seemed like one of those myriad younger and minor gods I saw when I was on Olympus. Not anyone I’d know, but if they wanted to stop me, it’d be annoying to get past them. They didn’t seem to be that dangerous, at least right now. But when you were a demigod, you learned to be wary of free handouts.
“Uh…look man, I’m going to be honest. I just got through some hellish traffic to get through here. So if like, you’re leading me into a trap or if my godly brothers are going to show up to try and take this, can you just start the fight and save me the trouble? It’s been a long morning, and I just wanna get this over with.”
I stared back at my reflection through their mirrored shades. Growing up, I always thought of myself as gangly and awkward. I could see my messed up hair, tousled from the wind. I stood tall, and although I wasn’t the buffest Ares kid around, you couldn’t call me skinny anymore. I looked almost heroic as I held the reins atop the chariot. Was that how I looked now? The godling shook their head as they chuckled, putting down their phone as they looked at me in the eyes.
“Kid, even for a god like Ares who likes conflict, you don’t do something like that in a temple. You can’t just attack his kid on his own grounds. Plus, it's part of the rules of war to respect neutralized zones. Trust me, you’re home free.”
“Oh. Um, thank you.”
He nodded and went back on his phone. I snapped on the reins and the chariot trotted along, even fire-breathing horses had to follow traffic laws apparently. I was on guard, not taking the godling’s words at face value. Mortals in a daze parted around the chariot, a few snapping pictures at me. I freaked out for a split second before I heard the tourists being in awe at what I heard to be a “vintage bomber”. Dumbfounded, I stopped for a brief second. It didn’t even have wings! But, I could see the mist shimmer around me and for a brief moment, see the silhouette of the plane around the chariot. It was an old fighter, a single propellor with flaming horse art on the nose.
“P-40B Warhawk? Alright, guess we’re working with that.”
I frowned a bit, trying to think if I knew that before this, from a school project or if it was more demigod shenanigans. I was never into fighter jets, but when you’re a demigod sometimes your parent’s godly influence shoves itself into your head and it’s always confusing when it does.
I drove the “plane” to the end of the pier, where I could see my dad sitting down on a barricade, blocking off a massive plane above him. It wasn’t used for war apparently, because I had no clue what type of plane it was. Looked cool though, it was really narrow around the nose end and the wings were all near the back end. He had a big wicked-looking combat knife in his hand that he used to clean his nails. He looked up at me, disinterestedly, before going back down to the knife.
“You’re alive.”
I couldn’t tell from his tone if that was a good or bad thing. It seemed… neutral. Like he was stating the sky was blue. But, overall I’d take that as a good thing, considering our last meeting. I spoke a bit warily, not sure if he was in a good or bad mood considering my victory.
“Uh, so Father. I’m finished with what you-”
“No. You’re not.”
“I’m not!? Do I need to do anything or-”
A moment of panic snuck up into my chest. For a brief moment I was afraid he was going to pull a twelve labors on me, but then he whistled and held out his hand.
“Not until you give me the keys kid, then it’s done.”
I hopped out of the chariot, the reins in my hand turning into keys as the horses went back into their motorcycle form. I somewhat clumsily tossed it to my dad, who grabbed it. He pushed himself off his perch, first making sure his motorcycle was unharmed. Then, he turned to me, eying me up and down as he circled around where I stood. I stood still, at attention as I felt my heart racing in my chest. I felt like a deer, cornered by a wolf just waiting to strike. Yet, the first pang of anxiety soon settled down. If he wanted to take care of me, he would have done so already. Or sent something more dangerous like a Drakon at me when I was driving. I felt my heart leap up into my throat as he clapped a big hand on my shoulder. The gesture wasn’t hostile, if anything, the motion seemed friendly. But his grip was anything but. His hand, like the claws of a tiger dug into my shoulder as he grinned at me.
“I have to say, I thought you were a lost cause, but look at you kid. Took you long enough, but I guess you have enough of me in you after all. Well, a late bloomer is better than being completely useless, but man! You were one of my most pathetic kids when you took that oath. I don’t think I had a kid as wimpy as you in a long time. Well, I’m glad my little nudge helped you keep that oath up after all. It would have been a waste of a perfectly good warrior if you didn’t shape up.”
I looked at him, dumbfounded. He helped me? He didn’t do anything! I wasn’t stupid enough to point it out, but I guess he knew what I was thinking as I felt his grip tighten as he growled.
“Come on, don’t give me that look, kid. Oh, don’t look so surprised. Tip of advice: don’t dip your toes into cards. You have a horrible poker face. Your mom was the same way. But, yes. I helped. Not that kids these days would understand. Parents these days are too soft, including most of us gods. Back in Sparta, we’d leave our kids to fend for themselves. Just give them barely enough food and let them hunt or steal the rest. If they end up dying in the hunt or starved, well that’s fine. They were too weak to do anything of note anyway. You should consider yourself lucky I was generous enough to just turn my back on you.”
He chuckled low, and my blood ran cold as he shook me. I shook my head, fighting off a wave of dizziness as he threatened to take off my arm.
“Oh, but that’s in the past! You passed your agōgē period, all by yourself. Now that is true strength.”
His evil grin widened as he gave me the closest thing to an approved look he’d ever given me. I furrowed my brow as I shook my head. This credit, it wasn’t mine to take, was it? Before I could think, I spoke what was on my mind.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t do this by myself. Everywhere I went, I had someone to help me out. If it wasn’t for the help from my friends, I don’t think I would be standing here. I didn’t-”
My dad’s good mood instantly soured as his grin warped into a snarl. His grip, although somewhat friendly now seemed dangerously tight as he frustratingly interrupted me.
“Oh for the love of! I’m complimenting you, kid. Look. I don’t care about those other twerps one way or another. Allies are fine enough in war, as long as you don’t make them do all the work. Kid, you’ve gotten strong all on your own, like a true son of mine. Don’t deny you and me the kleos you rightfully deserve ever again. Shut up and just take the honor.”
“I…uh…yes, Dad.”
I was surprised that all it accounted to was a mild scolding. My dad, too seemed to calm down after I agreed with his words, as he went back to a smile. He put his hand back into his pocket as he started to walk up to his chariot. He ran his finger across the chrome finish, taking out a cloth and cleaning off my fingerprints from the metal.
“About your joyride. Not bad, not bad at all. It took you a bit to embrace your birthright, but you ended up not even scratching my ride. Nice. Nice. Saves me the trouble of buffing it out. Now, if you could only stop complaining at everything that opposed you. You’re a man, aren’t you David? Start acting like it. If you think a bag of bones and a pig are hard, just wait until your future. The stronger a warrior gets, the stronger their foes get. Make sure you’re strong enough to stand up against them before you end up a stain on the pavement.”
I heard the engine rev as he got into the seat. He threw a bag at me that I clumsily fumbled with before I fully caught it. I opened it, and a few golden drachmas shined back at me.
“Since your agōgē finished up, consider yourself un-cut off. Even I’m not heartless enough to leave a son of mine stranded in New York. Keep the rest. Feel free to hang around my temple, and help yourself to the gift shop if you want, it’s on the house, happy birthday and all that. Just don’t go overboard.”
He turned the motorcycle, wheeling it around so he could leave the pier. He turned around, giving me a few more parting words he shouted over the roar of the engine.
“Don’t think you’re done yet, David. You got a lot more to grow. Especially now that you can receive my blessings again. What, did you think that taking a good hit was all you can do? You’ll see sooner or later. See ya kid! Don’t disappoint me.”
He revved his engine one more time and took off, leaving me behind on the pier. As I watched my dad leave, I realized that with that resolved, the last of what made my Styx Oath so suffocating was finally finished. A part of me felt that I’d always keep the consequences of it with me. Either dad would continue to disown me, or I’d be horribly injured from my jobs. But, to my surprise, everything worked out alright. I worked as hard as I could, and now everything was over, truly over. I…wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I mean, like obviously I didn’t wanna have them with me for the rest of my life. But, for all of my oath’s lifespan I had the deadline looming overhead, and my expectation was that something would happen to me as a result. I was glad to have it over with, but I never felt that I could relax until now. The feeling of not having the anxiety of my imminent demise was something I wasn’t familiar with, and to be honest I still have trouble relaxing. As he disappeared into the afternoon traffic, I realized that, so too did my previous life.
Maybe…maybe I could afford to enjoy my life now after all.
OOC: And there we have it! The final David storymode relevant to this storyline! I meant to have this yesterday but I didn't see the modmail that gave me the okay until literally an hour ago oop. Which means that yes, the Chariot and Ares both are approved from the mods.
Big thank you to Tiffany's writer, angelspoint for helping me with her parts, I had a blast working with them! Hope you enjoyed David's Victory lap!

Okay let me start off by saying I don’t mind kids playing basketball in the street. In fact I have my own portable basketball hoop that I put in the street and play(not that much as of recently, but I did do it). So a group of kids, some from the neighborhood and some not, like to go out and play basketball. About 4 or 5 months ago they took a hoop someone let them use and put in front of my house. I live on a corner. Well at first it was no big deal, but they did leave the basketball hoop in the street. So the peoples house they are directly in front of can’t park there anymore and they have 4 cars.
Well slowly they moved over and now they play directly in front of where I park. One night they played until about 10:45pm and when I went to work the next day, my driver side mirror was broken. Unfortunately there’s no cameras around so I can’t prove it was one of these kids, but I do think it was because the mirror has no marks on it. So I know a car didn’t drive into it or someone didn’t come and hit it was something. Someone either ran into it or pushed it and broke it purposely. I’ve seen those kids run into my car and hit it with the ball so it’s not like they’re careful. Unfortunately I have no proof so I didn’t push that further. It wouldn’t be so bad honestly overall if when they hit the cars they said sorry. My brother just got a brand new 2024 car less than 2 months ago. They hit his car and when he went to get out to see what’s up, they told him “just go back into your car” and when he said “well you just hit my car” they said “it’s your fault for parking there”. This is literally right in front of my house. Also when we come home they stand in the street and stare us down and when we either go from our house to the car or vice Versa we literally hear them talking crap about us.
So someone stole their basketball hoop and now they brought another one and are leaving it there again. I’ve asked the people whose hoop it is now why can’t they play in front of their house. They say it’s “too dangerous”, but some how in front of my house isn’t. Also this wouldn’t be also an issue if these people lived right next door to me. These people literally live about 8 houses down and if you’ve ever been in a neighborhood, 8 houses is literally a whole street away. I don’t know what to do. I recently got my car in 2022 and someone’s broken my mirror and when I go to work I see hands and ball marks all over my car. It’s not fair I have to park down the street just so these kids don’t mess with it.
I also want to say they started in front of the persons house that owns the newest hoop, then played in front of the house right next door to me and now play in front of my house. The other two houses the people straight up told them “don’t play in front of my house anymore” and they listened. I don’t know what to do. Just don’t want my car to be messed with. What sucks even more is all these kids didn’t live here like 6 years ago. They all recently moved in and now we deal with kids messing with our house all the time.

My boyfriend (20 UK) and I (21 US), have been dating nearly 6 months now. We met in the US while he was deployed here last year. He is now back overseas and is supposed to go on a 4-6 month patrol next month where we will be unable to speak or see each other.
He came to visit in April for a few weeks and we had lots of things planned, however on his 3rd day here, my car was hit by a distracted driver and totaled. I also suffered a mild spinal injury that limited my mobility for most of the time he was here. He was uninjured. For the most part, things were fine while he was here, I think he was most upset because the accident drastically affected our sex life. It was painful and always uncomfortable for me.
Now that he’s been gone nearly a month, I can see really how much this has deteriorated our relationship. I feel lost, hopeless, depressed. He doesn’t understand that I’m still affected severely by it. We also have a 5 hour time difference which limits our ability to communicate during the work week.
I feel like our relationship is strained but every time we really start to communicate about it, he gets upset and shuts down. I feel especially bad because he is always requesting nudes from me, specifically in positions that are difficult with my back injury. He sends me things, so it is especially frustrating for him. I just am not willing to do it right now.
I’m worried that we will not resolve this tension by the time he is set to leave on his patrol, and then we will not see each other until December or January. We will have been dating a year. I love him, I just can’t go on like this forever.

Wrt the Auto Collision Damage Waiver, Does anyone have advice or experience going through this process? Unfortunately, while traveling through Costa Rica (from the US) we were hit head on by a vehicle that veered into our lane. I’m sure both cars will be totaled, and I’m anxious for whats to come. The other driver was 100% at fault, but we don’t have dash cam footage or a reliable witness report, so we will have to wait and see what the police say. In the meantime I’m trying to figure out the order for which I should communicate with Alamo (the rental company), my personal car insurance, and Capital One/VISA (regarding CDW).
I read the benefits pamphlet (https://ecm.capitalone.com/WCM/card/benefits-guide/visa-benefits-guides/visa-infinite-english.pdf), and will contact them early tomorrow, but wondering if anyone has had experience dealing with this and any helpful advice for how to proceed.