This post contains spoilers from CS1-Reverie, including Reverie’s post-game content.
Disclaimer: The analysis portion of the Background section contains discussion of mental illness. I am not an expert in mental health, or any health field for that matter. I’m just a guy applying his own perception, lived experiences, and surface-level knowledge to interpreting Rean’s arc. I probably don’t even need to be making this disclaimer, but I felt like it.
Last year, I made this post asking how the members of this sub felt about Cold Steel’s protagonist: the one and only Rean Schwarzer. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of engagement it got, as well as the diversity of opinion expressed in the comments. There were those who loved him, those who were neutral on him, and a few who just couldn’t stand him. At the time, I had just finished CS2, so there was a ton about Rean I wasn’t privy to. However, now that I’ve played Reverie and am fully caught up with the first half of the series, I have a much fuller picture of him. Since so many of you were kind enough to offer up your takes on Rean back then, I figured I’d express my own thoughts on him in the form of a proper analysis. Without further ado, let’s begin!

Background

Rean Schwarzer (born Rean Osborne) is the main protagonist of Trails of Cold Steel I, II, III, and IV, as well as one of the three main protagonists of Trails into Reverie. He was born in S.1187 to Erebonian commoners Brigadier General Giliath and Kasia Osborne. Rean’s father was a brilliant leader and strategist, but his commoner status made him an enemy of the military’s nobles. This led to Giliath’s home being attacked by jaegers when Rean was five, resulting in Kasia’s death and Rean’s heart being punctured by shrapnel. In a desperate bid to save his son’s life, Giliath made a deal with Ishmelga, the Ebon Knight, to become its Awakener and used its power to transplant his own heart into Rean’s body. Due to his deal with Ishmelga, Giliath was forced to give up custody of Rean, entrusting him to the care of Baron Teo Schwarzer. As a result, “Rean Osborne,” the son of a commoner military officer, became “Rean Schwarzer,” the adopted son of a minor noble family.
Although Rean’s new family was loving and supportive, his new life was not without struggle. The boy’s sudden, mysterious appearance in the Schwarzer household made the family - particularly Teo - the subject of gossip and controversy among other nobles. Some believed Rean was Teo’s illegitimate child, while others openly lambasted Teo for his willingness to potentially allow a commoner into the nobility’s ranks. Teo essentially became an outcast among his noble peers, his family’s name tarnished by rumor. Rean, for his part, came to believe he was at fault for this situation, and the subsequent guilt would plague him for many years.
Rean’s self-worth was further challenged by another, more personal problem that arose during his childhood. At age nine, Rean watched an unknown monster attack his younger sister, Elise, and the stress caused an innate “ogre power” within him to manifest. Rean fell into a blind rage, savagely killing the monster. When he returned to his senses, Rean was traumatized by the scene he had left behind, and by the discovery of this new, violent side of him he could not control.
Two years later, Rean became an apprentice of the legendary swordsman Yun Ka-fai, founder of the Eight Leaves One Blade school, hoping to learn how to control his ogre powers. Despite showing great promise as a swordsman, Rean was unable to develop control over his ogre power, and Yun was eventually forced to cut short Rean’s training for unrelated reasons. Although the beginner-rank Rean continued to train on his own, the damage to his psyche was too deep-seated for him to fix alone. He believed he was nothing but a burden and a monster, undeserving of love or happiness. This guilt and self-loathing spurred him to always put others’ needs and well-being above his own, believing himself less important than anyone else. This self-sacrificial behavior became a recurring problem for Rean over the course of his adolescence and early adulthood.
In S.1204, at age 17, Rean enrolled at the prestigious Thors Military Academy in eastern Erebonia. He, along with eight others, became part of Class VII, Thors’s first socially integrated graduating class. Although he still struggled with low self-worth, Rean thrived in this new environment, quickly befriending his classmates and discovering his natural-born ability as a leader. By this time, Rean’s real father, Giliath Osborne, had become Chancellor of Erebonia and was being targeted for death by the Imperial Liberation Front - an anti-Osborne terrorist group. The ILF was a recurring presence in Class VII’s lives during their first school year, and the two groups clashed frequently. At the end of the year, Rean’s life took a dramatic turn when he unexpectedly became the Awakener for the Divine Knight Valimar before watching the ILF - led by his friend Crow Armbrust - seemingly assassinate Osborne and spark a nationwide civil war. Thors came under siege by Crow shortly thereafter, and in the chaos, Rean was forcibly separated from his classmates.
One month later, Rean awoke in the Eisengard Mountain Range outside his adopted hometown, Ymir. Now armed with Valimar’s power, Rean rendezvoused with his family and set out to reunite Class VII. Although he succeeded, Rean was later captured by the Noble Alliance and was held captive alongside Erebonian princess Alfin Reise Arnor. With Alfin’s encouragement, Rean freed the two of them using his ogre powers and rejoined Class VII onboard the imperial family’s airship Courageous. Thanks to Alfin and his bond with his classmates, Rean learned to stop fearing his ogre powers and started opening up more to those closest to him. Using the Courageous, Class VII successfully led a mission to retake Thors before ultimately confronting the Noble Alliance’s leader, Duke Cayenne, and stopping his plan to use the Infernal Castle to win the war. At the same time, new drama entered Rean’s life: Shortly after stopping Duke Cayenne’s plan, Crow unexpectedly died and Osborne was revealed to still be alive - and Rean’s real father. Rean, for his part, was formally recognized by the imperial government for his role in ending the war and became a national hero. This was, however, merely a ploy to pressure Rean into obeying Osborne’s wishes, and it succeeded, as Rean subsequently became an operative in Erebonia’s conquest of Crossbell. It was during this time that he became acquainted with Crossbell Special Support Section leader Lloyd Bannings.After Crossbell’s annexation, Rean fought in the Northern War, which resulted in Erebonia annexing North Ambria. He partook in the siege of Haliask, where he fought archaisms using Valimar. During this stretch of the war, Rean lost control of his ogre powers and was rendered unconscious for three days. As a result, he once again lost faith in his ability to control himself, and swore off the use of his ogre power.
In April S.1206, roughly 1.5 years after the civil war’s end, Rean started a job as instructor of a “new Class VII” at Thors’s new branch campus in western Erebonia. At the branch campus, Rean bonded with his students and fellow faculty while also taking on assignments from the imperial government. It was also during this time that Osborne’s plan to trigger the Great Twilight started unfolding, causing Rean, his students, and his comrades to regularly butt heads with jaegers, Ouroboros, and powerful cryptids. Ultimately, however, Osborne outmaneuvered all attempts by Rean, Olivert, and others to stop him; the Courageous was destroyed by a bomb with Olivert still onboard, Rean’s forces were spread thin through various battles, and Rean himself was forced to watch as Millium Orion was killed and turned into a Sword of the End. Finally at his wit’s end, Rean suffered a mental breakdown and was consumed by his ogre powers, causing him to violently trigger the Great Twilight himself before being taken captive by Osborne and Ishmelga.
After a short period of captivity, Rean was freed by Class VII and their allies. He, along with the SSS and the Liberl Bracer Guild, declined to become part of Musse Egret’s Operation Mille Mirage, instead choosing to oppose Osborne their own way. Rean, as Valimar’s Awakener, decided to partake in the Rivalries to reform the Great One, in hopes of defeating Ishmelga’s curse. He gradually defeated and absorbed power from the other Awakeners until, finally, during Operation Jormungandr, he defeated Osborne and Ishmelga, becoming the pilot of a corrupted Great One. It is at this time when two different futures unfolded: In one, Rean flew the Great One beyond Zemuria’s atmosphere to remove Ishmelga from the continent. In the other, Rean used the power of the Holy Beast of Earth to give Ishmelga’s curse a corporeal form, allowing him and his friends to destroy it. It was this latter future that became Zemuria’s reality, while the former remained hypothetical and unrealized.
Many months after Ishmelga’s defeat, in S.1207, Rean became involved in the incident involving Crossbell and Elysium. While combating enemy forces in the Nord Highlands, Rean started undergoing assimilation with Ishmelga-Rean, an alternate version of himself created by Elysium based on the unrealized timeline from when Ishmelga was first beaten. Later, during the final confrontation with Ishmelga-Rean, the real Rean saw visions of his other self’s sacrifice and finally grasped the devastating effects his past martyr-like behavior had on those he loved. He vowed to make a change before eliminating Ishmelga-Rean, stopping the assimilation.
Sometime after the clash with Elysium, Rean visited Longlai in eastern Calvard with his family, secretly hoping to track down Yun while there. Instead, he encountered members of the Ikaruga jaeger corps, who informed him that Yun was not in Longlai before departing. Rean has since contented himself with his current life as a Thors instructor, sensing that the next incident to befall Zemuria will involve not him, but an entirely different group of heroes.
Analysis: From even a cursory glance at Rean’s story, it is clear he endured much distress and trauma at a young age, and in my view, the result was deep-seated mental illness - namely depression. I am not a psychologist, but I would wager that the violent manner in which his five year-old self lost his home, his mother, and, almost, his own life, was horrific enough for his mind to block all memory of that period as a defense mechanism. This would help explain how Rean did not remember his real parentage until his encounter with Osborne in CS2 jogged his memory. Further stressing Rean were the controversies surrounding his adoption, which were not at all his fault but still interpreted as such by him, and the sudden, gory manner in which he learned of his ogre power. With such a potent combination of stressors burdening his young mind, it is no surprise to me that it took Rean such a long time to overcome his feelings of guilt and worthlessness. He was saddled with depression during the most formative period of his life, and like any mental illness, depression cannot be overcome with just one or two instances of positive reinforcement. It is often something people have to live with for many years, with periods of relative difficulty and relative ease. Looking at it this way, it makes sense for Rean’s arc to have taken as long as it did.
Side note: Obviously, Rean’s story is not the most realistic depiction of depression in fiction, but the manner in which it unfolds and is presented is still enough for me to take it seriously as a journey of struggling with mental health. When Rean receives support or encouragement from his friends and family, it helps in the short-term, but does little to erode the larger problem because that simply isn’t enough. Further, Rean’s progress is not linear, but is marked with occasional setbacks: In CS2, he finally learns to stop fearing his ogre power, but in CS3, we see that he is still vulnerable to losing control of it, and he does so during the Northern War and in the finale of that game. He receives a pendant (“meds?”) and training (“therapy?”) to control said power in CS3, but he still struggles with it. In CS4’s “bad” ending, even after everything he has gone through, Rean falls back into his old habits of self-sacrifice, because that’s how “baked-in” his problems are; he doesn’t even see the issue because he’s lived that way for so long. It is CS3’s finale that is the most striking part of Rean’s journey to me: In my eyes, it is the same as Rean having a mental breakdown, too overcome by his own emotional turmoil to control himself. He becomes consumed by his own demons, literally and figuratively, and it takes the collective effort of his loved ones in CS4 to bring him back to stability.
It is also fitting that Rean’s big turning point - the moment in Reverie where he sees the pain his martyr-esque behavior causes others - is as dramatic as the instances that facilitated Rean’s internal struggle to begin with. What I particularly appreciate about this chunk of Rean’s arc is that it is presented as Rean finally realizing the change he needs to make, rather than him being instantly cured of his ailments. It is simply him resolving to change his outlook on himself and his relationships, and that feels more grounded to me than any alternative route the writers could have taken.

Personality

Rean is a kind, courageous, selfless individual who greatly cares about those around him. Despite his own low self-esteem, he is a gifted speaker and possesses the spirit of a natural-born leader. It is this charisma that quickly made him the de facto leader of Class VII, as he often served as an intermediary for the interpersonal clashes between his other classmates (see: Machias/Jusis and Fie/Laura). He often goes out of his way to help his peers solve problems or make their lives easier. This behavior is propelled by his own feelings of worthlessness, which causes his generosity to often escalate to self-sacrificial activity. On the occasions when Rean is unable to help someone, he often feels guilty, even if the problem at hand was not his fault or was out of his control (examples include his inability to stop Vulcan and Crow from dying in CS2).
Rean is also extraordinarily perceptive thanks to his Unclouded Eye technique, which he learned from Yun Ka-fai. This allows him to set aside any preconceived notions or prejudices he may have and accurately discern a person’s true nature. His training also allows him to notice things others may not, such as objects moving at high speed or unseen people/creatures in his vicinity. At the same time, there are things he struggles to pick up on, namely when it comes to others’ feelings regarding him. Rean often fumbles when it comes to romantic/intimate interactions with the girls in his life, either unintentionally flustering them or failing to understand how deep their feelings run. Rean also fails to understand how his martyr behavior hurts those he cares about, despite numerous incidents ending with people refusing to abandon him and calling him out for perceived recklessness.
Analysis: One thing I’ve always appreciated about Rean is that, despite his serious personal problems, he never comes off as whiny, annoying, cringe, etc. He knows how to compartmentalize and portray an air of confidence and amicability; I would attribute this to his noble upbringing, as we see similar behavior in other noble characters like Laura and Jusis. His natural ability as a speaker and leader are reminiscent of Osborne’s, as is his penchant for self-sacrificial behavior; Osborne was, after all, willing to bond with Ishmelga, literally give his heart to his son, and turn himself into a villain for the sake of his people.
There are considerable differences between Rean and the three protagonists who preceded him. He is almost the antithesis of Estelle: She is lively, spontaneous, and unafraid to open up to others emotionally, Rean is more reserved and measured, and is initially guarded, though he does learn to express himself over time. While he does share similar backstory details to Kevin, their outward personalities are starkly different, with Kevin being suave and laid-back and Rean being more serious and passive. As for Lloyd, while Rean does share his kindness, perception, and leadership ability, the two do have their differences as well. Lloyd’s arc is about starting from nothing and overcoming barriers, gaining strength along the way. He is driven by a commitment to justice and a zealous patriotic spirit. Rean, on the other hand, starts out with great power at a young age but struggles to control it, making his journey more internal and personal than Lloyd’s. Additionally, his fighting spirit comes not from burning passion, but from steely nerve and trust in his companions. And, of course, he is not morally gray like his successor, Van.

Relationships

Due to the sheer number of people Rean becomes involved with, I will only address his more notable relationships. Many will be in clusters, with only a select few individuals receiving their own entries.

• Old Class VII: Old Class VII is Rean’s core friend group through the entire Cold Steel arc. They are the ones who fight by his side during the arc’s major events, including the Erebonian civil war, the Great Twilight, and more. Although Emma Millstein was class president during their student years, Rean gradually becomes Old Class VII’s’ de facto leader in the field due to his good rapport with all its members and his role in helping them bond with each other. By the end of CS1, he is very much the proverbial glue that holds Old Class VII together, and Rean executes this role flawlessly in CS2 by bringing their scattered members back together again. Despite his love for his classmates, Rean largely hesitates to seek them out for emotional support due to his low self-worth, and it isn’t until he sees their heartbroken reactions to his “death” in Reverie when he realizes how much he means to them.
• New Class VII: Rean is New Class VII’s teacher at Thors’s branch campus starting in CS3. Over the course of the game and its sequels, he forms a unique bond with each of his five students: A father-like figure for Altina, a tough-love mentor for Ash, a source of confidence for Kurt, a role model for Juna and… uh… maybe I shouldn’t discuss Musse. Anyway, the wisdom Rean imparts on New Class VII helps them all mature into capable young adults, particularly Juna, who essentially fills Rean’s shoes in CS4 Chapter 1 and leads the charge to rescue him from Osborne.
• Schwarzer family: Rean’s adopted parents and sister. Rean cares deeply about the Schwarzers, to the point where seeing them being physically threatened causes his ogre powers to manifest uncontrollably in CS1-2. At the same time, despite having the Schwarzer’s unconditional love and support, Rean feels like a significant burden to them for much of his young life, particularly to Teo. This matter is eventually settled by the end of CS2. There is also the matter of Elise, his younger sister, who develops feelings for him as they age (writing that did not sit well with me at all, but the show must go on…). Rean, for his part, is exceptionally protective of Elise until she finally rebuffs this part of him in Reverie, arguing that she is strong enough to take care of herself.
• Crow Armbrust: If any one member of Class VII, new or old, deserves an individual mention, it is unquestionably Crow. Crow and Rean share a unique, dynamic relationship that evolves considerably over the four Cold Steel games. In the beginning, Crow is Rean’s rival and superior in many ways. He is older, more cunning, and a stronger Awakener than Rean (at least when piloting Ordine). But over time, Rean gains strength and confidence, which allows him to beat Crow in CS2, and then defeat him again in CS4, at which point he essentially becomes Crow's lord and retainer by sparing his life.
  • The two are very much foils for one another, with similarities and differences: Both are young men who are descended from political leaders (who were themselves bitter enemies). Both are Awakeners guided by witches - Crow by the mighty Vita and Rean by the fledgling Emma and Celine. At the same time they are almost total opposites as people, with Crow being cocky, deceptive, and rebellious, while Rean is modest, honest, and upstanding. Even their hair colors contrast! In that sense, Crow also serves as a benchmark for Rean's growth, as their relationship roles essentially switch in CS4, with Rean gaining dominance over Crow.
• Yun Ka-fai: Because there is still much mystery surrounding Yun Ka-fai, it is difficult to dissect him in the context of this write-up. However, we do know that Rean was Yun's last discipline - the last of four. Rean also receives correspondence from Yun at various points in the story, largely to give life updates and confer higher ranks onto Rean (Is this the Trails equivalent of Zoom classes? No, wait, they have actual tech for that…). From the content of his letters, Yun seems to think highly of Rean as both a person and a swordsman. Despite not being present for Rean's final few years of training, Yun understands Rean's journey intimately, to the point where he feels comfortable making Rean a Divine Blade through a proxy in CS4. This begs questions: How does Yun know so much? Does he possess some form of the Unclouded Eye that lets him detect such things in his students? Is he basically Yoda? Or is someone watching Rean on Yun's behalf? Furthermore, in his letter to Rean in CS3, he says he will impart his final teachings onto Rean “when” they meet again. This might be reading too much into it, but Yun seems quite confident he will see Rean again. My guess is that Yun has something planned, if not for Rean, then for all of his disciples. And I suspect that that plan was part of why Yun chose to promote Rean to Divine Blade when he did. The timing, right before the final battle at the Duatha de Danann, is too convenient for me to ignore. Either Yun wanted to help Rean reach peak form in time, or he had some other motive. Or both.
• Giliath Osborne: Osborne is Rean's biological father. Despite coming off as callous at first, it becomes clear in CS4 and Reverie that Osborne truly loved his son and was willing to sacrifice everything for him, including his heart (literally) and his humanity. Rean inherited a number of traits from Osborne, including his charisma, leadership ability, flawed selflessness, and strength of spirit. The two share an innate need to put others’ happiness over their own, albeit for different reasons, and both suffered in silence for years because of it. This is part of why, despite having the same goal, Rean and Osborne both fought each other with all they had during the final Rivalry: Neither wanted to see the other inherit the curse's full power, Osborne because he didn't want to see Rean suffer any longer and Rean because he essentially accepted that he was the curse's Sacrifice. After CS4, Rean learns more about Osborne's inner thoughts and motives, developing a deep admiration for his father and a desire to make his sacrifice worthwhile.
• Lloyd Bannings: Lloyd and Rean are quite comparable. They are the main protagonists of their respective arcs, both are leaders in their own right, both embody aspects of the “dense male protagonist” trope, and both are overall kind, perceptive (outside of romance), overall heroic young men. But like Crow, Lloyd is a foil for Rean, and this is apparent from their very first meeting, in CS2's Divertissement. Lloyd and Rean's circumstances were polar opposites: Lloyd was a vigilante, relegated to the shadows, with only a skeleton crew for support, while Rean was an Erebonian national hero with a Divine Knight and the full power of his country behind him. At the same time, Rean had no agency during this time, as he had been manipulated by Osborne into accepting such status and becoming part of a reprehensible operation. Lloyd, on the other hand, was a free agent, uncompromising in his ideals and fighting tirelessly for true justice. In short, Lloyd was powerless but free, while Rean was powerful but trapped. In that moment, it is obvious that Rean respected Lloyd's convictions and may have even envied him. Fortunately for the two, they find themselves on the same side in CS4 and a proper friendship between the two forms.
• Patrick Hyarms: Patrick and Rean’s relationship had an uneasy start. Although Patrick initially tried to ingratiate himself with Rean, he was rebuffed due to his elitist attitude towards commoners and other non-nobles. Patrick was quick to change his disposition towards Rean, treating him with disgust due to his unknown origins and lack of noble blood. After being humiliated by Rean and the other non-noble men of Class VII, Patrick starts to reassess his mindset and eventually becomes more accepting of non-nobles. This, in turn, leads to Rean and Patrick becoming friends, and in CS3, the two are shown to be trusted partners in certain areas. The friendship is somewhat complicated by Patrick’s romantic interest in Elise, of whom Rean is especially protective.

Future

As a main series protagonist, Rean is basically guaranteed to return in a future game. Whether or not he will be playable or have a significant role in said game is difficult to ascertain, but given his lengthy period of stardom in the Cold Steel games and Trails’s treatment of other past protagonists, my guess is that he will take more of a side role. Since Rean was looking for Yun Ka-fai after Reverie, and Yun is set to appear in Kai no Kiseki, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Rean in that game at all - at least in flashback form. Failing that, Rean will surely appear in or close to the series finale. Of this I am certain.

Misc. Notes/Commentary

• Funnily enough, Rean’s final struggle with his powers in CS3-4 reminds me somewhat of the finale of Steven Universe Future, which similarly ends with the protagonist losing control of his powers and turning into a raging monster. It is only through the love and reassurance of Steven’s friends and family that he is able to return to normal, and like Rean, he is not necessarily “cured” of anything; he simply has a newfound resolve to get better.
• For those curious: I did not include discussion of Rean’s “harem” in this analysis because I do not see it as a core part of his character. The dating sim aspect of the Cold Steel games is just a silly fanservice gimmick and has no bearing on Rean’s growth or development. While it might have indirectly limited the interpersonal relationships the female characters of CS could form with other males, it did not have a similar effect on Rean.
  • Ftr, I romanced Alisa in CS2 and Sara in CS4.
• Rean’s two big “power of friendship” moments in the series - unlocking Spirit Unification in CS2’s Intermission and snapping out of his ogre rage in CS4’s Fragments chapter - both involve him being faced with a golden crystal which symbolizes his many loving relationships. This is a minor detail, but I do appreciate the parallels at work here.

This isn’t so much petty revenge as much as it is petty delight in comeupance for a couple who tried to do us dirty. Maybe petty revenge by proxy.
There is this pretty cool island about 20 miles outside of the city I live in. It has one major road that goes around the whole island and a bunch of beaches, you pick berry farms, farm stands and wild life. And my friend and I wanted to bike around the island for a day. The island is such a great little day trip without having to go far out of town.
The way to do this was to bike 5 miles to the edge of town to catch a bus that goes to the island. The bus only runs once an hour. We get to the bus stop about 25 minutes early. We lock our bikes to the bus stop pole. I go into a coffee shop and get a cup of coffee and my friend starts chatting with a couple of people sitting at café tables on the sidewalk. About five minutes before the bus is supposed to arrive I unlock our bikes from the bus stop pole. As I’m doing this a couple bike up and get off their bikes and wait next to me. As soon as the bus pulls up, the guy runs to the front of the bus with his bike, pulls down the bike rack and sticks his bike on the front. And his girlfriend follows suit. Despite our protests that we were there first the couple just ignored us.
There are only two spaces for bikes on the bus. We were clearly there waiting for the bus before they were. They got on and sat down in the back and my friend and I politely ask the bus driver if we could please bring our bikes inside. This normally isn’t allowed, but the only other people on the bus was the couple. The bus driver said OK and we brought our bikes on the bus. We thanked him profusely and set off to the island.
We had such a lovely day, biking around the island, a little swimming at the beach, a nice picnic lunch, berry picking and doing the whole loop around the island. We get back to the bus stop around 6 o’clock and have a half an hour to wait for the next bus.
About 10 minutes before the bus is supposed to arrive that same couple shows up at the stop. They sat about 10 or 15 feet away from us as we were sat right in front of the stop. The bus pulls up and my friend and I put our bikes on the rack and board the buss. As we are taking our seats, the guy is begging the bus driver to let them bring their bikes inside the bus. The driver is having none of it, and keeps telling them no. There isn’t anyone else on the bus except me and my friend and the driver still tells him no. The driver shuts the bus doors and starts to pull off and dude is pissed. Arms flailing and yelling.
My friend and I were laughing so hard. They would have another hour to wait for the bus. They had no issue when he tried to put us out for an hour.

So, let’s say every fight the main patroller is in, their powerscaling is equal across the races they can be as it wouldn’t make sense for one to be weaker than the other but still achieve identical feats. Now, let’s assume they use transformations and which ones they use are based off when it makes the most sense for them to unlock while also saying it goes in order of powerscaling (kaioken-super saiyan-potential unleashed and so on).
Prior to unlocking PU, earthlings have the strongest base form out of any avatar since they don’t have any amped states they can use (a cloud and a stick aren’t amps, just gear and tools). After PU is unlocked, all races equalize except saiyans, who then have the weakest base form. They gain access to god forms and yet they achieve the same feats as the other races that lack forms with equal power to the god forms prior to beast form, which means they equalize with PU earthlings, PU majins, PU Friezas, and PU nameks when they themselves are going god-blue-evo.
When they all achieve beast, the saiyans immediately catch up to everyone in base form so the amp from beast would be equal across them.
reminder that golden is only a giant amp for Frieza’s family due to their mutation, so for the normal members of the frieza race, it’s mostly just a super Saiyan equivalent. When Friezas snag PU, it’s by proxy gonna be stronger than golden. I’m willing to bet that PU doesn’t use god ki even if the user has access to god ki in any way shape or form, but beast possibly does.
Before anyone says beast is weaker than the god forms due to the stats it gives, do I need to bring up how PU and kaioken x20 have an identical damage buff and said buff is weaker than ssj3 strike and BA damage as well as sv2 blast and BB damage, while beast form LOWERS DEFENSE WHEN IN THE MOVIE IT BOOSTS IT? Or, of course, how beast suddenly made gohan near our favorite carrot head’s white hair dye state if not stronger? If that isn’t enough, there’s also UI. We can just say UI instead of beast whenever I brought it up before this paragraph and nothing really changes.
this is all happening in the same game where base Buu saga vegeta final flashes an SV Janemba to death in a basegame story cutscene, and a “much stronger” bardock that can fend off the patroller in a dlc story mission is FULL NELSON’D BY A BASIC FRIEZA GRUNT AND CANNOT BREAK OUT WITHOUT ASSISTANCE. Take this post with a truck full of salt and recognize that I just REALLY wanna make sense of the patroller’s powerscaling whenever I can.

hi
What is the optimal way to join these 2 searches in order to check logon type of RunasUser?

#event_simpleName = /ProcessRollup2/ FileName = runas.exe CommandLine = /.*user\:(?\S+)/ splitString(field=RunasUser, by="\\\\", as=RunasUser , index=1) UserMatch := if((UserName == RunasUser), then=1, else=0) test(UserMatch == 0) select([@timestamp , aid , ComputerName , UserName , RunasUser , UserMatch ,ParentBaseFileName , CommandLine , TargetProcessId]) #event_simpleName=UserLogon case { LogonType = "2" LogonType := "Interactive" ; LogonType = "3" LogonType := "Network" ; LogonType = "4" LogonType := "Batch" ; LogonType = "5" LogonType := "Service" ; LogonType = "6" LogonType := "Proxy" ; LogonType = "7" LogonType := "Unlock" ; LogonType = "8" LogonType := "Network Cleartext" ; LogonType = "9" LogonType := "New Credential" ; LogonType = "10" LogonType := "Remote Interactive" ; LogonType = "11" LogonType := "Cached Interactive" ; LogonType = "12" LogonType := "Cached Remote Interactive" ; LogonType = "13" LogonType := "Cached Unlock" ; * } 

I tried using this function but it exceeds the maximum number of rows (100000) I believe I should use something like earliest to focus on logs close to the timestamp but i can't find any reference on this in CS GitHub

 join({#event_simpleName=UserLogon rename(field=UserName , as="RunasUser")}, field=[aid, RunasUser], include=LogonType , mode=left) 

This Face...
So first off this post will have minor spoilers for of course one thing... Harmony Traileblazer.This post as you can probably see if pretty long but it will be separated in to parts to make it easier to navigate. And lastly this post is meant to both be a sort of guide to help people bc I haven't seen anyone make a post like this yet and to tell the tale of how I spent So long trying to pay this sentient comp-clock.

The Story.

So >be me (Just go along with the 2nd person pov amd you can skip this) you finished the Story got Harmony Trailblazer(Which will be the last time I'll blank that out because by now you probably already know or knew what I'm talking about) and your thinking about getting more than just E1 because of all the 100k damage showcases you've seen in like the first week. You look at his character menu and tap on any of their Eidolons to see where to get them and you see the Clockie statue. You think this will just be like getting max Physical and Fire Tralblazer... then you see that you need level 50 Clockie statue and your heart sinks, but you go along with It anyway cause "how Bad could it Be"

InItal Info

Some things that I should probably say before hand is that I started this whole thing at Statue level 25-30 and the story was finished.
and I was left with 70 bucks by the end of the whole ordeal
which leads into how LONG this took being around I duno... 10-15+ hours over 2 days. ya know a bit of time. Ill get in to how I Feel about this later but just know about this before fully committing
Oh and btw you can't get E6 by the time of me writing this... just E5. can't wait for 2.3 : ' )

Puzzles

https://preview.redd.it/sb4frd01r30d1.jpg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c2efe95e66366f076e76a186a91dc34dc33bd38
So remember those dream tickers and Dream Jigsaws littered through out the maps. well I hope you like them because you have to do All of Them. Ok ok that's a bit of hyperbole you don'y have to do All of the... you can skip a couple but that just means more chests. all the Dream Jigsaws are all pretty easy and marked on the map so this is probably the easist part of the grind outside of the story I can only remember like 2 Dream Tickers that I couldn't solve legitimently. These also probably contribute some of the most to the over all Jade total by the end so that another thing going for them.

Elites

https://preview.redd.it/j2eltzkbr30d1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=244cfe452b7c1f8854b8027c6d8be1f7ff32baa4
So theses Guys are just kinda annoying. like its not hard to just go IPC Concert and go all Geno route on them but again ALL of the must perish (ps if you have Acheron this is the easiest part) I remember one Specific fight with two waves of TV guys which draged on for YEEARRSSS but outside of that just use your strongest team and guide these guys back to the waking world.

Chests

I Love This Women
Ok I know what your thinking. You think im gonna say that you need Every Single Chest in penacony right. Well.... you don't but that's going to make another part harder. the way it worked out for me I got the Achivement for opening 300 Chests if that says something. a couple things to know Dream Jigsaw and Eliets don't count towards the overworld chest count but it does count towards total chest open and I THINK The sub worlds in the Grand Theater don't count either but idk. you get 60/120/180 buckes per chest depending on the rareity and probably gives The most jades out of everything here. So pull Topaz pull Topaz pull Topaz pull Topaz pull Topaz pull Topaz pull Topaz pull Topaz pull Topaz pull Topaz

Quests

https://preview.redd.it/xvd8o3s1160d1.jpg?width=360&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=35a759668b7575512cf1082210bb667edc3b3f8a
You knew it was coming side quests. Do them their should be a couple in the quest menu that give 360 bucks and then theirs also the all the fate atlus ones which also give the same amount. btw doing all of these takes a couple Hours and that's with mashing sooo yea clear up your Saturday or wait like a week to finish these up. one more thing I didn't pay attention to the stories of all of them but I did for the ends of them so here's what happens in like 4 of them One of the people almost comits ALT f4 in their emo scape :( one of them was a tyrannical ruler in belebog in some form and one of them was a former geinus society member.

Emo-gencies

https://preview.redd.it/juovqonn360d1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dcba99a4f93cbc83b5bc9501bf1661325da44b5a
Now these are the last two thing really Grind my Gears (like the word play im going for yea I know it sucks) but seriously tho these suck so around the safe sections of the maps theirs these people with wrenches where the clockwork symbole should be and that means their having an Emo-gency. there spred out so its hard enough to find some of these flipper floppers but... you remeber how the emotion gears yea you need the coresponding gear to even start the quest and these are basicaly a mini side quest with normally like one or two things you need to do. these each give 180 bucks which means save these for the end of the marathon, like 10 or less statue levels remaning.

B.I.R.D.S

https://preview.redd.it/r0alreko560d1.jpg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3fc493ee9014acb02bd8af085ca84ce0509d7fad
Now... I HATE THESE FUCKERS now I know thats harsh their cute and sometimes gives a funny little quip of dialog that may make you exhale out of your nose a bit. But After 90 OF THEM you start to go a little mad silly even. I hope you were looking for these pidgons during the story like I didn't because you need to colect ten in each of the 9 maps in the Dream Scape for a Grand Total OF 1,620 bucks... which if you didn't notice is NOT EVEN THREE LEVELS and the worst part is if you skip one of these you have to subsitute the 180 your missing out on with an Emo-gency or like 3 more chesets on top of the 300 you alredy got...
some tips the gambaling tokens you can buy (the ones firefly gave you) can be given to the biggest birds to drop a pin on a birds location and turn your sound affect volume and music down because the small birds make a little chirping sound. look up alot because these savages like hiding in high places. and if you have Acheron, Sparkle, Fu xuan, Seele, the Watch Maker, Huo Huo, Dr. Ratio, and Robin in that order of priority USE THEM because your going to wish enemies didn't exsits while surching for these """Birds""" oh and one last thing one of these on Dew Light Pavilion is locked behind a quest : ) (Edit: the quest also has like 9 chest in it that All give clockie bucks that aren’t marked on the map… for some reason. Talk to the dude near the red door on second floor to the right and he’ll unlock it and start the outsourcer quest)

The Results

https://preview.redd.it/o909syoxa60d1.jpg?width=225&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eb0be80937bfbfe02da2d651b10de46cb9a9bd72
So (again 2nd person) You spent Hours scrougung up all the money in the world to fully level Clockie Statue...what do you get well first off you get the thing you started this all for E.. 5 you also get a [SHOT] ton of Relic lightcone and character levelup matz and.. MOST importantly around 20-40 pulls depending on how much of this was alredy done before hand. ANNNNNNNDD THATS IT

MY OPINON!!!!!!

I see the vision but this SUCKS bro like I get it in the last two reagions it was pretty easy to get like E3 or 4 by the end of the Story if you didn't spend it on fucking credits or something like that and they want you to interact with the World of Penecony and the world is nice... BUT 10 HOURS WORTH OF INTERACTING IS NOT OK and its not like you get exclusively E5 see the section above but you get those by PROXY of doing every thing and remeber 10 HOURS FOR E5 and im not saying I HAATTEED my time but it just dragged on for HOURS AND HOURS that after it was done I wanted to just go for a walk... But becaues it was like 9:00 I started writing this up insted.
So I Hope this helped and may your Giathra Triclops Close her Eyes Thrice.

I'm not great at titles, sorry. Im kind of concerned. I'm just looking at everything thing she does as narcassitic because I've lived with this kind of shit on a constant. How did I miss this for so long?
Does anyone else know that NMom constantly LECTURE or talks or just wordddddsss. Sometimes stuff I've said or we've already talked about, and she's repeating PASSIONATELY again. And if I'm not a captive audience, she gets kind of shitted off.
Examples.
Even if we've debated a subject before and AGREED on its she will basically force it at me again at a later date. Days or a weeks later.
I used the keys to open the back shed and brought them back inside. She found that shed door unlocked. She came in to tell me how I hadn't remembered to lock the back shed last time I was here, and it was open. I told her that no, I had just unlocked it. I still have a "nice" 15-minute reminder of the consequences of leaving it open. "You know what could happen around here."
If she finds a subject I don't know about she will tell me about it. These conversations can last up to half an hour, if not longer, depending on the setting and the subject.
Often she will talk and if I try to correct her on something or try to add not even interject just generally have conversation and she would again get kind of angry or irritable and just shut the conversation down and kind of let me know by her foul as hell face or that she went dead silent for me to be like "sorry continue" for her to finish. She doesn't do this to anyone else as fsr as I can see.
She used to have long pauses in her lecture when I was a kid and I was never sure if she was finished because emany times I thought I could talk or leave and she would get a second wind.
She also seems to start talking before I go to leave for things.
My sister called her for mother day and she repeated back to Me what my sister had already told me the week before basically with some minor updates and she started repeating it and saying what she advises and what she would do in my sisters situation. I can't agree with it, but I'm trying to sort of debate but compromise on the best possible solution because my sister has asked me to handle some of it when I visit. When my sister first asked me to go, my mom was like, "Only you?" Eyebrow raise, and now 2 weeks later, my Mom seems to think it should be handled by a church man and not a woman given the subject matter. She's also doing other subtle things, like delaying a trip, that I feel like maybe I'm just paranoid now, and I'm just seeing it EVERYWHERE.
Also, is it normal to struggle and feel weird about spending your own money on yourself? I feel like I shouldn't be doing it or if it's wrong somehow or a waste. Sorry for the long post. Just feel like maybe I'm doing some sort of confirmation bias against my Mom and looking at everything as a trait cause I'm angry about stuff. Thanks all.
Edit. Additionally, I can't seem to talk to her about friends or troubles or issues as she either gets too negative or tells me what she thinks they should do. Giving me the advice as a proxy. Or asking me questions about the situation like it's me and I know all the answers. Not listening when I say "I don't know." Then speculates and still gives advice.

Preamble:

I ranked subjects on universal usability, so if they have a very important role in one mode or gameplay style but are borderline unusable in the rest, they can still have a decent ranking. This is all my opinion, and I'd like to hear yours since there are several things on this list that I'm contentious on, and despite having completed this game I still have a decent bit to learn.

Ranking:

D Tier

1. Dagger - Infinite range is no longer unique to Miriam and Soul Vision was mega buffed, eliminating the competition.
   
2. Hand Grenade - Has almost zero use cases. Just barely edges out Dagger in terms of WP/dmg efficiency but gets swamped by everything else. Too expensive to be a regular weapon and too weak to be a DPS powerhouse.
   

C Tier

1. Partisan - Easily the best coverage of any upwards style sub, but otherwise very underwhelming. Hitting with one partisan does less than 1 damage per WP, and hitting with both does less than 2. It's best unique use is blocking Gremory's orbs in a solo run due to it's infinite pierce, but Drake Cannon can do that, too. Otherwise, it can come in clutch for hitting important targets high up, but almost every other character has a subweapon that does the same thing but cheaper, faster, and stronger.

C+ Tier

1. Impact Lance - Has only a few use cases throughout the entire game, but is very good when those use cases occur. One is to skip the vertical platforming sections in level 8 during the locusts swarms on episode 1 and solo runs. Another few are the final bosses in episodes 1/solo, and the final episode. She can use it during both fights to get above the bosses final phases and pogo on them for a long time. The flaws include it's bad hitbox, slow speed, and liability against the bosses as both have attacks that will knock her off them and deal major damage. The shortcuts it can take are nice but are far from exclusive to Dominique (Robert can canon-jump, Alfred can create platforms from frozen entities, and Gebel can fly)
   
2. Ball and Chain - This is where weapons start to get genuinely good. The larger screens in the game mean the formerly good-enough range on this weapon doesn't quite cut it anymore, and while it has good raw power and decent efficiency, it's pretty slow and precise for what it does. The real crux of this weapon is the fact it takes up space for other sub weapons for Zangetsu, who (unlike other characters) has other sub weapons that are so good they completely outclass this one even considering it's unique function. Also it's completely worthless on Ultimate Zangetsu unlike his other subs.
   
3. Rising Wind - This weapon is incredibly strange to rank. It's not bad by any means - fundamentally it's actually pretty amazing. It's efficient, cheap, powerful, and has almost screen wide range. However, being somewhat slow, inaccurate, and lacking coverage aren't it's biggest problem's (although they are considerable) - it's competition. It is HARD outclassed by other options on Dominique - not just other sub weapons, but her regular attacks. Someone like Zangetsu or Alfred would potentially give up one of their existing subs for that, but Dominique has anti-air combat baked into her character due to her upward stabs. It's not a spot Dominique can afford to waste, either due to her other amazing subs.
   
4. Electro Crawler - Completely annihilates the ending of stage 6 (one of the hardest parts of the game if left uncountered) and chunks bosses above her, but like impact lance is a little too situational and outclassed by her default kit. Is incredible for a solo run, but ranges from great to useless everywhere else.
   
5. Sickle - Unlike Daggers, this is a piercing weapon with half-decent power, especially on multi-hit. Its pseudo-infinite range blends well with its piece as it can cut through projectiles like archer barrages and ninja shurikens, allowing Miriam to either camp back and keep throwing or kite the projectiles to finish the enemy off herself. Its main issue is raw efficiency and consistency - If it only hits once (which isn't uncommon due to the necessity to use it defensively from fullscreen as it's too slow to use up close) it's incredibly inefficient with its WP/dmg ratio, especially if you can't catch it on return. That, combined with its overall middling power and lack of any solo shortcut usage keeps it from being any higher.
   
6. Explosive Chain - It's a small boost to Ball and Chain, but it makes a world of difference. It's efficiency is definitely higher up on the list of weapons but again it's outclassed not just by other options but the possibility of Ultimate Zangetsu's charge slash (or even the ever-presence of helm splitter in Soul Eraser and Daizangetsuto runs). The extra range allows it to hit enemies it couldn't before (both with and without jumping) but it still retains the slowness. Like Dominique, it's also a sub-slot on a character that absolutely can not afford to waste it.
   
7. Soul Vision - The best sub weapon for Solo Alfred runs - completely useless everywhere else. It increases range, it's safe on usage, it increases DPS, enemies will target it instead of Alfred, it can collect multiple power ups (which are absolutely essential for solo Alfred runs), and it makes you use your normal attack which regenerates WP, making it essentially free. It absolutely carries Alfred solo runs - but that alone doesn't warrant a higher placement.
   

B Tier

1. Healing Fruit - Inefficient for what it is, but what it is (is) incredible. It's best used for focusing on a single, essential character's health regeneration as focusing on multiple is too expensive. It can also be used in both normal and solo runs as a pogo-boost as the fruit is bounce-able for a short moment after spawning, allowing for certain power ups to be acquired. Very good.
   
2. Demon Essence - Does great damage boosting on paper, but the only things it would make big damage against on are big enemies (which will die before the damage boost really cumulates) or bosses (which won't stay still/vulnerable long enough to allow for several melee attacks anyway). In that same situation, it's also much worse on anybody that isn't Zangetsu since they attack so slow that it won't get the chance to rack up damage. It's true best use is passing damage thresholds against mid-strength enemies, turning 2 hit kills into 1 hit kills, but this depends on the character and power ups acquired. For example, if an enemy has 6 HP, even with Demon Essence only Hachi can one-hit kill it while everyone else still 2 shots (boosted or not). Meanwhile, if you have the attack glove upgrade, everyone besides Robert and Alfred (without the wind spell) one-shots when boosted. In short, it has good potential, but requires a ton of game knowledge to use to it's fullest.
   
3. Rapier - The best upwards focused sub weapon in my opinion. It has the coverage of Robert, the cheapness and power of Zangetsu, and the speed of Dominique. It can create just enough room to walk at the end of stage 6 and has enough range to kill all of the heads on the wall of boss 6 in a single throw - do it twice (which costs nothing due to the WP drops) and the boss is toast. That's not to mention it's so fast and powerful (if all 3 daggers hit) that it's essentially a superior main DPS option to any normal attack by any normal character.
   
4. Axe - It was the undisputed second (arguably first) best subweapon in the first game, but it doesn't hold up as well this time around. Not only was it nerfed in damage, but the environment of this game is a lot less friendly to it. Bosses have a lot more health so using it as your primary DPS is too expensive to one-cycle, and it's now outclassed by Drake Canon for that role against things like the 5th Boss. Good news is that she can unlock Hachi exclusive shortcuts since it pierces armor, and it (+ frostcalibur) is still arguably the second best way to beat bosses despite the nerfs, so it's still very powerful. Voltaic Ray absolutely outclasses it even with frostcalibur.
   
5. Magic Charm - The second most efficient sub in the entire game. Does great damage, puts enemies in hitlag, and even blocks low projectiles. It's slow and has pitiful range on the ground, but is overall strong nonetheless.
   

A Tier

1. Drake Canon - Slaughters boss 5, slaughters every normal enemy (besides stage 7 mechs, but those die in 1-2 hits afterwards), is decent burst DPS against every boss besides 6, and can even be used as a second mid-air jump. That last part sounds innocuous, but can allow for multiple powers the be acquired that some other characters can't get, and is essential for Solo mode. Plus, it can allow for shortcuts to be taken that Robert and other characters aren't supposed to be able to access, and it can even theoretically clutch up as a last-resort double jump if you mess up platforming.
   
2. Void Charm - Essentially a catch-all subweapon. It's only weakness (although it is a massive one) is that every route's final boss is basically immune to it. Every enemy and most other bosses dread it, however.
   
3. Frostcalibur - Kills every unarmored enemy in one hit, can stunlock bosses to death with Axe, and can be used for platforming with sickle. It's heavily reliant on Drake Canon or Axe to beat bosses and is almost useless in a solo run, so it's too limited and situational for S Tier.
   

S Tier

1. Devil Essence - Zangetsu's jump attack becomes the best source of targeted, inexpensive DPS in the game. It's only limit is it's range making it dangerous to use against bosses like Gremory and Beelzebub, and the fact you need to keep using it instead of having a one and done attack, but it's practically nuclear otherwise.
   
2. Rapid Scarf - Beats almost every boss (besides the final one in the final episode and the 5th one), beats every normal enemy, and is less expensive than Drake Cannon despite hitting harder. Also unlimited range ftw.
   
3. Resurrection Anthem - It can heal up to 56 HP and revive 6 characters if used correctly. It also costs 0 WP and essentially gives you as many as 6 more tries on any boss. It's slow, rare, and is almost useless on a solo run, but otherwise gamebreaking. If it could be used more than once, even if it cost ALL of your WP, it would be the best in the game. It's a lot weaker on legendary difficulty since you can't lose a single character, but if you spread your damage across everyone it still has a good use case.
   
4. Flame Sphere - It's damage was nuked into the ground but it's utility remains intact. There's at least two or three ssections in every stage that become cakewalks with this, and legendary mode ghosts are a nightmare without it. It's a little expensive but still FAR more affordable over time than Invincible Iron. Both the Sarcophagus Boss and Gremory are also hard countered by this subweapon, to the point where this dude (https://youtu.be/u8-4aTJuJS8?si=yPkBHkfn55OmQbhJ&t=87m) beat Gremory with Solo Alfred, the worst solo character, in ONE TRY. Just have someone to handle other bosses and the game is essentially won. Outside solo runs it's absolutely game breaking. (Edit: I counted, and assuming we count clones as separate enemies since they appear in different stages and have slightly different behaviors, there are over SEVENTY enemies and hazards that Alfred checks, counters, or is straight up immune to with this, not even counting things like the boulders and possibly tail lasers [I need to test] from boss 5, the fire rain from boss 3, the ice spikes and enemy spawns from boss 4, the slam gas/projectiles/enemy spawners, from boss 2, the everything of boss 6, and Gremory's f$&#+ orbs.)
   

SS Tier

1. Immortal Metamorphosis - Skips every platforming section. Also gets ~80% of all upgrades by itself. It's only limit is that Flame Wheel in acquirable in every run that Gebel is except solo, but that doesn't heal it's user, bypass strong enemies, and sometimes cheat death on hit, so this is still viable. Extremely niche in boss rush, but almost imperative everywhere else.
   
2. Voltaic Ray - Skips every boss (outside solo runs), and bosses are (IMO) the hardest part of this game.
   
3. Invincible Iron - Skips every platforming section AND boss!
   

Characters Ranked

C Tier

1. Base Zangetsu - He can't collect a single power up on his own, he can't heal, he can't skip platforming sections, he doesn't have the good boss killers, his DPS options aren't always viable to use and are outclassed, his range is bad, he doesn't get bonus WP like Alfred, Gebel, or Hachi, and he doesn't have any platforming advantages or even good range, regardless of subweapon. He has solid fundamentals, but he's outclassed everywhere else.
   
2. Robert - He's cool AF, but he literally doesn't have a single unique-to-him upgrade, and actually misses out on a lot of secrets (health and point bags) because he can't break walls. His range is amazing, but his damage and subweapon costs (minus the Scarf, and possibly Drake Cannon for upgrades) are the worst in the game. He's pretty good all around even in solo mode, but he's an honest character in a game where boss nukes, flight, invulnerability, and mass revival are things. An honest character in a dishonest game.
   

B Tier (interchangeable)

7/6. Upgraded Zangetsu - He's a walking nuke, and really hard to rank since he's the only character without anything resembling a solo mode dedicated to him (since the final episode and/or legendary difficulty sort of count for Ultimate Zangetsu). I feel he's still held back by his lack of versatility and upgrades, but he'd be A Tier if he could collect any of them. He hits harder than any other character (that isn't a secret bonus), but still has a hard time with things like platforming and bosses like stage 6's, episode 1's finale, the normal final episode final boss, and Gremory's hard version. He's the opposite of characters like Miram, Hachi, and Dominique: He has 1 trick, and that trick is killing everything that gets close to him. He is mostly bad at everything else.
6/7. Miriam - She's a genuinely good character all around, but she also suffers from "fair character" syndrome. She's arguably even stronger than she was in the first game, but this game isn't designed around her like the last one was, so she's worse off overall. Bosses take WAY more damage to kill in this game than in the first and her axe was actually nerfed in damage slightly. Furthermore, since this game requires a lot more upwards attacking in platforming areas for ghosts, frogs, hanging mouth spitters, floating head ceiling spawners, etc. she's going to be using a lot more WP on her upwards throwing dagger, which hurts her longevity and consistency. Everything near the end of every run also hits a decent bit harder, so her formerly "close 2nd best" HP isn't quite so insurmountable (or 2nd best) anymore. She also seems to suffer from subweapon limitations more than other characters, as she doesn't always get the necessary tools for the job (a good example being how you can't get the Axe in Level 1 even though it would help immensely against the boss due to armor piercing.) Despite ALL of this, she's still pretty good. She can't 1 cycle every boss, facetank everything, effortlessly beat platforming sections, or have the unique trait of infinite range (with subweapons) anymore, but she's still strong enough to get plenty of power ups for solo and final runs and is more than than strong enough to fall back on in group modes if a top tier dies.

A Tier

1. Gebel - He gets all but 4 power ups on his own, self heals, and skips every platforming section. He's redundant with Alfred's fire shield and Hachi's invulnerability being nearly as good at platforming and he's the worst character in boss rush mode, but otherwise he has a strong role in just about every other mode; Especially the final episode - he is THE star character of that mode, since he collects almost every power up regardless of it being a group or solo run (the latter works because there is a trick that allows you to bring him to other stages without beating his stage and bringing him to the final level, allowing you to boost Zangetsu with many power ups that wouldn't otherwise be available.)
   
2. Dominique - The game is designed around her. She has subweapons for every situation, and even if they're not always the best, she's also one of the few characters inherently strong enough to, with enough skill, handle every situation on her own - High jumps for good platforming, pogo for low enemies and niche shortcuts, an upwards attack for huge versatility, occasional self healing if necessary, and sub-weapons that boost any one of these traits on a whim. She's essentially a 7 in every situation, but she also has the completely unique ability to do a full party heal and resurrection, which is a 10/10 trait only she has. She has a use case in every mode, and a strong one at that. Her biggest downside is her solo damage/durability ceiling, but that's only a single mode and even then she's versatile enough to get by most situations and grab most power ups. She wouldn't likely be as powerful (relatively, since she'd be the same character) in the first game since it's not designed around her (with things like less characters to heal, no lanterns for resurrection anthem, not being able to slide, there being almost nothing to bounce off of or super jump to, lower solo damage against bosses, etc) - it's like a reverse Miriam situation.
   

S- Tier:

1. Alfred - He essentially gets to choose between Hachi's invincibility for 1/10 the cost or skipping every single boss in the entire game. He's the worst character solo, but (IMO) top 2 everywhere else. If his subweapons didn't carry over to other characters he'd easily be the worst, but all you have to do is pop off a subweapon then switch to another character and suddenly any situation you have to deal with is solved. He'd be #1 if he could carry 2 subs at once even though he sucks solo, but his boss vs. platforming and bad solo mode inconsistencies keeps him from being a true top tier. Also pseudo-infinite WP ftw.

S+ Tier

1. Hachi - A master of all trades. He has the best health, pierces enemy armor, the easiest (although less objectively good than Gebel and Ulti-getsu's) platforming, bonus WP from lanterns, he can get several power ups, squash low enemies, and has a get out of jail free card in every situation. His only weaknesses are his big hurtbox and his low attack speed(and by proxy DPS sorta), which aren't issues with patience and pattern knowledge. He's one of 2 characters that's good in every single game mode, regardless of difficulty or allies.

SS Tier

1. Ultimate Zangetsu - He's the only character so strong that he doesn't even need subweapons, unlike Hachi, Gebel, and Alfred who are good specifically because of their subs. He has some of the best platforming, some of the best upgrade and shortcut access (high jump + long jump + armor piercing + floor smashing), the best speed, some of the best survivability (since he dodges better due to his dash, so it makes up for his lower health than Hachi, and he kills most things before they threaten him so he doesn't need invincibility), the best range, and the best damage. He's great solo because he's the strongest character and ridiculously versatile, he's great in main playthroughs because he's so strong without subs that other characters don't have to waste WP helping him, and he's even great in boss rush because his unrivaled mobility, range, and damage allow him to dodge stuff and hit almost every single boss in situations when nobody else even comes close. Even in the shoot em' up section of the final episode, he comes pre-packaged with the ability to get every other character's ship weapons. He is truly the Akuma of this game: De-centralized, high skill with high reward, extremely versatile, and purposefully overpowered.

He spins around right 'round, baby, right 'round. Like a record, baby, right round, 'round, 'round
Previous part: 6.
Like always, I've missed some sort of controversy happening in the FNAF community. But this time I had something to say about it as it relates to the lore side of things!
A week ago... Before Scott came and revealed that The Talbert Files were all fake and he had never seen nor written them. I was late to the party this time but next to I'll be on time!
But to boil down what I said, The Talbert Files has outdated information and is unusable to us theorists. Do not use anything in this book to make a point in the current story of the games.
Oh and of course, this controversy came from Twitter or X or whatever. If these past few games have told me anything, it's that being connected to a network for any long periods of time is very bad for your mental health and safety~
And basically, that was the gist of what would've been probably the longest intro ever.
For those new to this series or who have lost which part or place they're on, check out The Jonsie Burrows: Help Wanted 2: Tables of contents to find where you want to go! If you haven't seen any of my stuff before then...
Hello, this is something you might have missed in Help Wanted 2.
Previously Post Interesting things:

1. Our main character, HW Jeremy, Cassie's dad, is already wearing the Security Mask before we even start the game. This means Glitchtrap has access to his mind and body. As for what that entails...
2. Help Wanted 2's AMask-on version of the FNAF6 Pizzaria might be based on Micheal's canonical look for it near the end of Pizzaria Simulator.
3. After completing each minigame, a party hat, plate, and cup will appear on the table next to you. Whose party are we attending as a guest?
4. The protagonist of Help Wanted 2 is HW Jeremy, discovered through the color blue items which are prominent in the game and used for his name and shirt in Ruin. Jeremy was a former employee of Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental and may have been present during the events of Sister Location.
5. In the First Aid minigame of Help Wanted 2, the "GET WELL SOON!" drawings depict Baby's life as seen through Vanny's eyes, hinting towards the game's secret ending. These drawings also reveal that Baby's data card from Sister Location was inside Helpy in Pizzeria Simulator and survived the fire. As a result, her programming was eventually absorbed into the Pizzaplex's Network, leading to her appearance in Help Wanted 2.
6. Glitchtrap may have collected the souls and memories of the original dead kids into the Pizzaplex's Network and in this game, Jeremy is going into Glitchtrap's memories.
7. Help Wanted 2's Fizz Faz minigame's location is the same but different location in Security Breach. They both have identical objects placed in the exact place as each other, giving evidence to the fact that Jeremy is physically moving to certain locations in the Pizzaplex when clicking on the minigames.
8. Helpi in this game is indeed Glitchtrap in disguise. Unlike Ruin, Helpi is not his own entity in this game because we're not connected to the V.A.N.N.I. network due to being in the FNAF6 pizzeria. The V.A.N.N.I. network only covers the entire Pizzaplex but doesn't go past the door to the underground in Roxy Raceway. Glitchtrap has a preference for using proxies and decoys to communicate with the unsuspected to get them to do what he wants.

Now back to our unregularly scheduled series!
​
"The carousel is broken. Fix it!" That was what greeted you in the void along with a pictograph of a carousel. It sounded very simple but you knew better now.
"Fix all the broken fuses, then replace any broken switches and turn on the power."
"Repair the circuit board. Don't forget to solder in new wires with the soldering gun." Were the rest of the instructions given to you for this task, hovered over the "START" button but before you pressed it, a new sound reverberated in the void.
There was always a noise, a certain ambiance in this place of darkness. Whether it be the sound of blowing air or some distant jingle, there was always something to occupy the ears. But this was different.
It was like the noise of someone pulling a wire along a corner very fast, like the sound of something struggling to play out of a static radio, a blare of a machine in motion that started malfunctioning. Whatever description one wanted to use, it didn't change the fact that it was getting increasingly louder.
But before you hear more of it or even figure out what it was. Your hand betrayed you and completed the motion of pressing the "START" button. Whisking you off to your next destination over the cover of darkness.
​
Okay, that's it! I've got to find this ambiance in the Help Wanted 2 soundtrack! It's driving me nuts! Alright, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that I found the exact track that plays in the void! It's called Main Menu Ambiance or as its file name refers to it, ambience_main_menu. The bad news is that this sound I'm hearing is not there.
This means one of two things, this track has a different variant of it somewhere in the soundtrack, or the sound belongs to some animatronic or creature in the game.
Personally, I hoping for the former as that's much, much easier to find as the latter requires me to rip open the game for the sound. What makes this even more difficult is that it might be randomized to play while in the void and pretty much everyone doesn't stay in the void any longer than to read the instructions, claim their prizes from the claws, or press the "RESTART" button in the "GAME OVER" void.
(Although I haven't gone over the "GAME OVER" void yet in this series, I have heard it play in there too on my searching through other people's playthroughs of the game.)
Time to go back to searching for this mysterious sound.
I can't find it. I've searched YouTube but there aren't a lot of people uploading the entire soundtrack to this game and the one who has doesn't have it listed in their playlist of 769 videos. Oh, joy! It looks like we have our first Help Wanted 2 mystery! What a coincidence considering my last post.
So for now, I'm going to leave the research for this until I write out Help Wanted 2 Mysteries: The Mysterious Sound in the Void. But to leave you all hanging and confused about what exactly I'm hearing, I'll give you the timestamp of the walkthrough I heard it from right here.
Now, let's see what awaits us at the Carousel.
"Attention, This Carousel is out of service and will require repairs before we open tomorrow."
The Daycare Attendant, Sun, spoke from somewhere close by in this new environment you found yourself in. You were standing inside a Carousel in a dark room, the only light source seemed to be a light from above as you faced an open panel on the central pillar in the middle of it. Inside the panel, live currents of electricity crackled and popped as they ran across and through yellow wires into two out of six fuses that the wire ran through.
The fuses were in two vertical parallel rows, and the yellow wire ran in and out of one row and went back through in the next until the very last row where it came out of the last bulb and disappeared into the side of the panel. Judging by how the two fuses were lit as the electric current went through and the other four were unlit with no visible electric current going through them, you bet a greasy pizza that you'll need to replace those four fuses.
"That is the end of my instruction. If I had been programmed with the knowledge to fix it, it would have already been done." That would've been nice, but you think they would've just gotten another broken carousel for you to fix.
During your listening to his speech, you figure that "Sun" was only just a recording as his voice had a sort of radio-like quality to it that sounded much like it was recorded at an earlier date.
To your left was a stand with three hatches opened, showing off items within them while what looked to be colorful wires sat on a small divot in the stand.
To your right, was an interesting set of items that seemed very out of place to you. There was a small rectangular haystack that sat on the right side of the pillar, with a skinny pumpkin and an oil lantern. What are they doing here? (What indeed, but perhaps there's a clue around here.)
A brief look around showed you that the area outside the carousel was blindingly dark, but grabbing the flashlight that sat on the tool cabinet-like stand on your left and flicking it on, revealed what was hidden in the darkness.
Further from you, were the carousel seats that took after the appearances of some of the classic Freddy's animatronics. You see with the help of your flashlight, you see a classic (FNAF1) Bonnie seat, a classic (FNAF1) Chica seat, a classic (FNAF1) Mr. Cupcake, Toy Freddy, and Toy Foxy? Weird, you've usually seen Toy Foxy in their mangle variant rather than their fixed state.
(Despite the darkness and the unmangled form of this white foxy, you can actually tell which of the closely resembling Foxys it represents. While Scott did make Funtime Foxy, (From Sister Location, not FNAF World) very similar to Mangle/Toy Foxy. He did make them slightly distinct from each other in the coloring department besides their different structures.
The official model of Funtime Foxy(Sister location) actually has dark pink cheeks while Mangle/Toy Foxy has rosy-red cheeks just like the rest of their Toy companions. So this carousel is really repping FNAF 2-era, I wonder why...)
You thought you saw balloons at the edge of your flashlight, but before you could verify it, something spoke close by from where you were standing.
"The merry-go-round broke down." The slightly hoarse, raspy voice ended with a snicker as you struggled to find the source of it. Something was definitely in the dark room with you. (Hey Moon!)
You the source continued to elude you before you gave up and focused on the problem in front of you. Waisting time to find the voice was a fool's game, your best bet was to quickly fix this problem within the panel before the voice became a problem for you.
Still, you felt that you knew that voice.
Out you pulled the broken fuses and set them on the side, in went the new fuses you took from the hatch in the stand one by one as they came out of the hatch. Once you put the final new fuses, the pillar in front began to spin, and dozens of mini yellow lightbulbs lit up on its side.
Lights in the distance flickered on and music from the carousel started playing. (Carousel: Doomsday Ride Phase 1.) The pillar came to a stop on its next side but the outer ring full of rides of the carousel continued to spin clockwise around you. It's there where you spotted the one behind the voice and finally put a name to the foggy figure in your memory, Moon, the Daycare Attendant's other personality.
And the most difficult one to deal with. But you knew how to deter this side of him, you thought as you pointed your flashlight at his face as he rode a Bonnie seat in the outer ring of the carousel.
"What makes you so special?"
You heard him say as he started to shake his head from the brightness of the light, but you handled your flashlight well to keep the light on his face before he fell off the Bonnie seat with a frustrated and agony-filled growl from overexposure.
​
And there it is! The most important line in this game! This line is a hint at the hidden ongoings within Help Wanted 2, a hint towards our mysterious protagonist's identity, and a hint that things are not what they seem in this game.
Or at least that's the excitement I would've felt when we finally got to this line in the game if I hadn't already spoiled everything during the Circus Baby and Helpi discoveries in the First Aid minigames!
Now, I really don't have much to say regarding the "What makes you so special?" line or any new thoughts about it. Maybe that'll change in the future, but for now, let's focus on another unexpected return in the form of the villainous side of the Daycare Attendant.
Yep, that's right. Just like Circus Baby, this is the actual Moon from Security Breach and Ruin! Unlike Circus Baby though, we have a precedent from Ruin for the Daycare Attendant to be able to appear in the Network, which this "game" is connected to, even in the FNAF6 pizzeria.
Honestly, I probably wouldn't I gotten that far in uncovering as much as did in Help Wanted 2 if I hadn't discovered that little hidden tidbit about Sun and Moon's network switched mechanic thing they have going on.
But for those who don't remember or don't know what I'm talking about you can read where I first talked about it in the fourth section of my "Roxy's true purpose" post. But to summarize it for those who don't want to click the link and go more in-depth about it for those who do, one of the oddest and unexplained moments that occurs in Ruin, is Sun talking to Cassie in the AR world while Moon speaking in the real world.
Back then, It always puzzled me when Sun said "Not me! The other me!" when approached by Cassie with the mask on to reboot him. And afterward, when the Daycare Attendant has been rebooted into Eclipse, Cassie could hear Sun say "thank you" in the real world after Eclipse left her outside of the daycare, even though he should've been gone with the reboot.
But the missing pieces to figure out this Daycare Attendant puzzle come in three, the Security Mask, the Faz-Wrench, and the Network. It is very important to remember what the first two actually do in Ruin and to not forget how the AR world exists.
The Security Mask lets you view the Pizzaplex through Augmented Reality, a digitally altered perception of reality influenced and dictated by Fazbear Entertainment (and Glitchtrap) and by the sub-network of the main network of the Pizzaplex.
That mask also has another function it, which is hinted in the name of its sub-network, V.A.N.N.I. or Virtual Augmented Neural Network Integration Unit. The Security Mask, with your consent under normal circumstances I presume, implants your brain with an occipital transponder. This implant allows you to retain some visual perks of V.A.N.N.I. like Helpi the onboard assistant who could still show up to assist you without the mask.
But this implant is a double-edged sword in truth. This implant is permanently attached to your brain and is constantly feeding information from and to your brain to the network. The Pizzaplex's Network holds a lot of information, like guest profiles for those who enter the Pizzaplex, the security system that safeguards and watches over everything, the various data collection regarding each location within the Pizzaplex, and is connected to every single animatronic/bot within the Pizzaplex.
The Network is a valuable tool for the employees and Fazbear Entertainment, providing plentiful assistance in various tasks. However, the situation regarding the implant would not have been grave had there not been a sinister entity lurking within the network. Glitchtrap now has complete access to a person's brain without their knowledge, posing a significant unknown threat to those who have it.
If you want to know what Glitchtrap is capable of doing to someone implanted with the occipital transponder, just read my Security Mask and Cassie being controlled post.
This leaves us with the unassuming Faz-Wrench, a tool that almost goes unnoticed by practically everyone. But like any tool, it will shine best when used for its purpose. That is besides being used as a simple tool for the simple conduit puzzle, it's a powerful tool to connect, activate, and deactivate everything connected to the Network.
So applying everything I've said to the Daycare Attendant situation in Ruin, then you can figure out many secret things about him that were unsaid.

1. When one of the Daycare Attendant's personalities is dominant or in the foreground, the subservient one will still be active in the background and is still aware of what's happening around him. Yes, this means that Sun knows about Vanny, Moon, and Glitchtrap, and what happens to Moon's victims. I still wouldn't label him a villain, just complacent, because he still hasn't hurt or harmed anyone even with all the information we've gained from the books and games.
2. If Cassie had used the Faz-Wrench while wearing the mask, she would have deactivated the Sun persona and disconnected the Daycare Attendant from the Network. This might've led to him completely shutting down and deactivating as The Daycare Attendant is connected to a lot of things within the network. If not, it would just leave Moon as the dominant personality. (For those thinking this would be a good thing for the villains, remember that Moon would still be severely sensitive to light and useless in any lit environments. Eclipse was the best option for villains regarding the Daycare Attendant.)
3. The Daycare Attendant is active in the Network at all times when functional. In fact, I believe that the Sun and Moon weren't exactly removed from the Daycare Attendant's data once Eclipse was made the dominant personality from the reboot as the fact that Sun can still communicate with Cassie even after Eclipse takes over backs this up. I'll even go as far as to say that Sun and Moon are still around but can only interact with anyone through the network.

This brings us back to Help Wanted 2's carousel minigame and Moon's presence within it. If you had no doubt guess with all the information above about how Moon here, is actually Moon, then let me spell it out for those struggle to make sense of what I'm saying.
The Moon that's appearing here is the same Moon we first met in Security Breach. As for how? The Daycare Attendant is much more connected to the Network than all other animatronics as he is the only one who can actually talk to someone through it rather than playing past voice lines as we see from the other Glamrocks in the AR world.
And it's here in Help Wanted 2 that it's revealed that he's fully conscious enough to travel through the networks and sub-networks and interact with anyone and anything integrated into it, i.e. Vanny, Cassie, Jeremy, and Glitchtrap.
Oh, and as for why he has a physical body here, this is just a digital form created by whatever program that "Help Wanted 2" is in-universe as Ruin showed us through the M.X.E.S. Entity and M.X.E.S. program that digital entities can appear to have a physical form through their programs and can be viewed the Security Mask.
If Moon didn't the "Help Wanted 2" program to help create a digital body, he would most likely appear as a motionless digital creation like that Giant endo in Fazbear Theator or probably wouldn't even have a form and be like an invisible ghost that you can only hear. (That sounds like a great idea for an enemy in a future game. Steel Wool if you're reading this, I have no ownership over this idea, so it's free to use!)
However, I don't think before the reboot into Eclipse, that both Sun and Moon could be in the Network at the same time. One of them has to occupy their physical body while the other waits for their turn in the network.
In Ruin, Moon was occupying the body most of the time while Sun was stuck and talking to Cassie through the network, and at no point did we hear Moon talking through it.
So since Help Wanted 2 is a prequel to Ruin and in turn pre-Eclipse. The opposite must be happening here with the Daycare Attendant in regards to who occupies the body and whose in the Network, because from what I remember from the entire game, Sun gives not a single hint that he's the real one rather than a simple digital recreation.
This means that during the entirety of Help Wanted 2, Sun is presently occupying the Daycare Attendant's body while Moon is present in the Network and interacting with/observing Jeremy while following Glitchtrap's, and secretly Vanny's, orders.
Which then begs the question, is this Moon in the carousel minigame the same one in the Arts and Crafts and Foxy Log Ride minigames? Or to rephrase it, are the other minigames' Moons just digital recreations?
I'm not sure, but it's something to look out for in the future when we get to those minigames. But for now, I'm going to hold off on making any Moon "Prove it!" post until we cover those minigames. Now, let's finish this minigame.
​
The Pillar had stopped to show a new panel for you to solve that had three dial knobs and a missing one from top to bottom, alternating from side to side with three wires running through all of them.
Already having an idea of what to do, you quickly turn the first two dial knobs and watch electricity flow through them. But when you got to the third one it came off as soon as you touched it, falling to the ground and out of sight.
Oh no! What could you do now?! Panic started to creep in as Moon's laughter reached your ears. This time sounding a lot closer than before. Quickly looking around for both Moon and another way to fix the panel, you spotted a spare dial knob in one of three hatches on the stand beside you. Grabbing it and another for the knob-less fourth one, you speedily attached them and turned them for the electric current to go through all of them.
Snatching up your flashlight, you desperately searched for Moon as more of the carousel ride became alive with more moving seats, more lights, and more energetic music to accompany it. FF(Carousel: Doomsday Ride Phase 2.)
You even saw more of the seats that were obscure in the darkness before. There was a Toy Bonnie seat, a Toy Chica seat, a Classic (FNAF1) Freddy seat, and finally balloons in a barrel seat which is where you found Moon ridding before you flashed your light at him, causing him to scream and fall off it.
(Hmm... No FNAF1 Foxy. Oh! And just to clarify, I'm referring to these seats as 'classic' because they are likely modeled after the original withered animatronics, rather than the restored ones we met in FNAF1.")
Returning to face the new problem panel on a different side of the pillar, you were met with a circuit board with frayed wires, with a small display screen on top of it and a big red button underneath it. There was also some kind of blue gun beneath all of that, in a holster built into this side of the central pillar.
Luckily, it seems that someone thought to help you out on what you were supposed to do here as there was a clipboard board hanging on the side of the pillar with a paper attached to it. The paper titled "SOLDERING INSTRUCTIONS" was exactly as the title said, showing what you want to do with the circuit board.
It didn't look like you could use the one on the pillar, so you took it off and grabbed a new one that you spotted in the third hatch and put that on the pillar swiftly. You grabbed a couple of wires that were sitting on the stand and pulled out what you previously thought was a blue gun that was actually the smoldering gun and quickly went to work as Moon ominously snickered from somewhere very close around you.
"Naughty Naughty."
One, two. Only two wires you managed to solder onto the circuit board before you pushed your luck to your breaking point and grabbed the flashlight in one smooth motion as turned around and looked for Moon. The goodness you found him immediately, the bad news is he's just one seat away from where you're standing.
Acting quickly before he could move close and bring death along with him, you flashed your light at him, sending him over the seat in agony. Not even bothering to see him completely go over the seat, you finished soldering the last wire and smacked the big red button underneath it.
And loud alarm sounded throughout the area as the pillar stayed put this time, but the closest seats around you started to spin with the rest of the carousel and the music became jumbled. (Carousel: Doomsday Ride Phase 3.) A timer lit up and started counting down from 1 minute on the screen above the circuit board along with the following words: Time Until Reset.
Let like you need to survive until the reset happens as there is nothing else for you to fix. So grabbing your flashlight again, you prepared yourself as could be to last 1 minute of Moon's onslaught. During this terrifying minute, sparks shot out from beneath the ceiling of the carousel as all the lights inside it turned all. But if Moon wasn't enough to deal with, a fire appeared at the farthest end of the area you were in as the lights flickered off and on while the carousel continued to dangerously spark from different places on the machine.
(Hmm... Could this be the event that gave the Daycare Attendant his Ruined appearance?! This actually might be it!)
As machinery grind and screeched, the fire multiplied, the sparks became numerous, and Moon was relentless, but eventually... The carousel came to a stop after you repelled Moon with your light once again as another alarm sound rang out. Turning around you saw the timer was at zero, meaning your work here was finally done. The last thing you heard was another Sun recording shouting "Ho, ho!" before darkness whisked you away and dropped you into the "GAME WON!" void.
Immediately, under the usual children's congratulations scream, your ears picked up that mysterious sound you heard earlier. The unknown sound, similar to that of an old radio distortion, lingered in the void until it faded away, leaving the usual ambiance of the void.
(What. Is. IT?!)
With no answer for the mysterious sound and no way to discover it, you pushed its existence to the back of your mind and pressed the claw machine button to claim your hard-earned prize. But before you grabbed your capsules out of the machine you heard a new sound... (What?)
It sounded like middle c on a Xylophone, maybe a bit deeper than that. It repeated itself in a quick 1, 2, beat in the same pitch then repeated itself an octave higher in the same pattern before disappearing.
(Am I being prank? Maybe there's something wrong with the video I'm watching, I don't remember hearing this anywhere else. Then again, the other YouTubers I'm watching talk a lot or just quickly move on when in the void. This requires further investigation. Okay, I've just checked a completely different Youtuber and found that, yes, this is a real sound in the game and not an edit. If you would like to hear this, I timestamped it here. It goes by very quick, so listen closely.
But on the sound itself. I don't why but I'm getting Daycare vibes from this. I might need to take another look at that place in Ruin and maybe even Security Breach for some kind of clue. After all, we do find Jeremy's shirt in the Daycare for some reason...)
The prize this time was a Carousel Toy which was fitting to you as you pressed the "RETURN TO HUB" button and were blinded by darkness and found yourself back at the restaurant. A quick survey of around you, showed that nothing has changed, except for something new sitting on the red-clothed table next to Mystic Hippo. It was your carousel toy that you've won.
You picked it up and gave it a once over, noticing Classic Freddy, Bonnie, and Freddy as the only seats to it and that it had a Sun & Moon theme appearance. (Not the Daycare Attendant but the actual Sun & Moon.)
You sat the toy back down, glanced at Mystic Hippo, and then returned to the computer in the middle of the room. (I'm still not sure about Mystic Hippo but I go over that at a later date.) You clicked the Ticket Booth folder and found that the last two files were unlocked for it. Captn. Foxy's Log Ride and another glitched and broken file.
What? I thought that there was another Carousel minigame! Well, I guess I'll talk about some of the other stuff I was going to research for now, instead of later. First, let's talk about the carousel itself, I can only remember one game that had a carousel in it and that's FNAF 2. And that's before I saw that the seats were making references to it too.
However, looking through all the locations in that game reveals that while there is a carousel in it, it's hilariously skinny compared to the one here. That's not even going into how it looks completely different. In fact, I think it might be a non-functional prop. So that's a dead-end.
And finally the haystack and the pumpkin, not much to say about it besides being another hint to this FALL FEST thing going on in the new era games. Now, the lantern on the other hand was something that stood out to me as there were a couple of lanterns that stood out to me in Ruin. The one in Vanny's room and the one in Roxy Raceway pt 2. Unfortunately, neither of them was a match for the lantern in the carousel minigame.
This leaves us with one last place to look for a match, Help Wanted: Dreadbear DLC. Oh? I think we might've found something! In the hub world for the DLC, the lamppost lanterns have a remarkably similar design to the lantern in Help Wanted 2. Of course, the Dreadbear lamppost lanterns are too far away to truly know if they're truly one and the same, but maybe we can find something else in this DLC.
I know exactly the one more place we can check to find a lantern, the secret basement containing the Vanny you unlock in the Corn Maze minigame. And "Ding, ding, ding ding!" We have a match! Now what it means for the carousel minigame is unknown to me at this date in time.
Possibly, there's a connection here to the Dreadbear DLC. Maybe this "game" was also a DLC to the original Help Wanted in-universe. Or maybe this scenario happened around the sametime as Dreadbear DLC depicts its FALL FEST in, 1983.
But like I said, I need to sit on this and see if I can find some other connections. Other than that, scoping through the Dreadbear DLC has given me some thoughts about certain things. I'll discuss it in the next part, so let's wrap this up.
So it's the only one available to do, you clicked on Capt. Foxy's Log Ride and saw what its pop-up window had to show you. "Set sail for adventure with Capt. Foxy! Pillage and plunder a town of Wild West landlubbers!"
What a mashup of settings were your thoughts before you clicked on TUTORIAL and were whisked away again by darkness and found yourself in the void.
Well, that unexpectedly took a while. But heads up, I'm going to be a bit busy with work so the next part is going to be slower to complete. Yet there are lots of interesting things going on here in this one to tie you all over, including a brand-new mystery for all of us to solve! Just goes to show that Help Wanted 2 just seems to have even more things for us to discover!

SO!
I have zero idea what I'm really doing, and hoping the kind people of the internet can aid me.
​
I'm trying to run 1.20.6, as you do, with the following mods: - BetterF3-10.0.0-Fabric-1.20.6.jar
- cicada-lib-0.7.2+1.20.5-and-above.jar
- inventoryhud.fabric.1.20.6-3.4.21.jar
- iris-1.7.0+mc1.20.6.jar
- sodium-fabric-0.5.8+mc1.20.6.jar
- voxelmap-1.20.6-1.12.19.jar
- do_a_barrel_roll-fabric-3.5.6+1.20.6.jar
- fabric-api-0.97.8+1.20.6.jar (I have also tried this is the 0.98.0 version, no difference..)
I have concluded through trial and error that the issue lies between Do a barrel roll (DABR) and iris and sodium. Loading them independently of one another results in minecraft loading fine, no issues whatsoever. It's only when I try run them together that problems arise.
If anyone is able to help, please send me your wisdom. It is much appreciated :D
Here's the crash report: ---- Minecraft Crash Report ----
// Who set us up the TNT?
​
Time: 2024-05-11 11:14:33
Description: Initializing game
​
java.lang.BootstrapMethodError: java.lang.RuntimeException: Mixin transformation of net.minecraft.class_757 failed

at net.minecraft.class\_4668.(class\_4668.java:126) at net.minecraft.class\_8538.method\_51643(class\_8538.java:22) at net.minecraft.class\_377.method\_2012(class\_377.java:176) at net.minecraft.class\_7191.bake(class\_7191.java:53) at net.minecraft.class\_377.method\_57038(class\_377.java:65) at net.minecraft.class\_377.method\_57036(class\_377.java:54) at net.minecraft.class\_377.method\_2004(class\_377.java:49) at net.minecraft.class\_378.method\_27540(class\_378.java:66) at net.minecraft.class\_156.method\_654(class\_156.java:506) at net.minecraft.class\_378.(class\_378.java:66) at net.minecraft.class\_310.(class\_310.java:561) at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main([Main.java:223](https://Main.java:223)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch([MinecraftGameProvider.java:470](https://MinecraftGameProvider.java:470)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.Knot.launch([Knot.java:74](https://Knot.java:74)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClient.main([KnotClient.java:23](https://KnotClient.java:23)) 

Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Mixin transformation of net.minecraft.class_757 failed

at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.getPostMixinClassByteArray([KnotClassDelegate.java:427](https://KnotClassDelegate.java:427)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.tryLoadClass([KnotClassDelegate.java:323](https://KnotClassDelegate.java:323)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.loadClass([KnotClassDelegate.java:218](https://KnotClassDelegate.java:218)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassLoader.loadClass([KnotClassLoader.java:119](https://KnotClassLoader.java:119)) at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass([ClassLoader.java:526](https://ClassLoader.java:526)) ... 15 more 

Caused by: org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.throwables.MixinTransformerError: An unexpected critical error was encountered

at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinProcessor.applyMixins([MixinProcessor.java:392](https://MixinProcessor.java:392)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClass([MixinTransformer.java:234](https://MixinTransformer.java:234)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClassBytes([MixinTransformer.java:202](https://MixinTransformer.java:202)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.getPostMixinClassByteArray([KnotClassDelegate.java:422](https://KnotClassDelegate.java:422)) ... 19 more 

Caused by: org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.throwables.InjectionError: Critical injection failure: Redirector iris$applyBobbingToModelView(Lorg/joml/Matrix4f;FFFF)Lorg/joml/Matrix4f; in mixins.iris.json:MixinModelViewBobbing from mod iris failed injection check, (0/1) succeeded. Scanned 1 target(s). No refMap loaded.

at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.postInject([InjectionInfo.java:468](https://InjectionInfo.java:468)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTargetContext.applyInjections([MixinTargetContext.java:1384](https://MixinTargetContext.java:1384)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.applyInjections([MixinApplicatorStandard.java:1062](https://MixinApplicatorStandard.java:1062)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.applyMixin([MixinApplicatorStandard.java:402](https://MixinApplicatorStandard.java:402)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.apply([MixinApplicatorStandard.java:327](https://MixinApplicatorStandard.java:327)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.TargetClassContext.apply([TargetClassContext.java:422](https://TargetClassContext.java:422)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.TargetClassContext.applyMixins([TargetClassContext.java:403](https://TargetClassContext.java:403)) at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinProcessor.applyMixins([MixinProcessor.java:363](https://MixinProcessor.java:363)) ... 22 more 

​
​
A detailed walkthrough of the error, its code path and all known details is as follows:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
​
-- Head --
Thread: Render thread
Stacktrace:

at net.minecraft.class\_4668.(class\_4668.java:126) at net.minecraft.class\_8538.method\_51643(class\_8538.java:22) at net.minecraft.class\_377.method\_2012(class\_377.java:176) at net.minecraft.class\_7191.bake(class\_7191.java:53) at net.minecraft.class\_377.method\_57038(class\_377.java:65) at net.minecraft.class\_377.method\_57036(class\_377.java:54) at net.minecraft.class\_377.method\_2004(class\_377.java:49) at net.minecraft.class\_378.method\_27540(class\_378.java:66) at net.minecraft.class\_156.method\_654(class\_156.java:506) at net.minecraft.class\_378.(class\_378.java:66) at net.minecraft.class\_310.(class\_310.java:561) 

​
-- Initialization --
Details:

Modules: ADVAPI32.dll:Advanced Windows 32 Base API:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation COMCTL32.dll:User Experience Controls Library:6.10 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation CRYPT32.dll:Crypto API32:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation CRYPTBASE.dll:Base cryptographic API DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation CRYPTSP.dll:Cryptographic Service Provider API:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation ColorAdapterClient.dll:Microsoft Color Adapter Client:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation CoreMessaging.dll:Microsoft CoreMessaging Dll:10.0.19041.3930:Microsoft Corporation CoreUIComponents.dll:Microsoft Core UI Components Dll:10.0.19041.3636:Microsoft Corporation DBGHELP.DLL:Windows Image Helper:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation DEVOBJ.dll:Device Information Set DLL:10.0.19041.3996 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation DNSAPI.dll:DNS Client API DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation GDI32.dll:GDI Client DLL:10.0.19041.3996 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation GLU32.dll:OpenGL Utility Library DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation IMM32.DLL:Multi-User Windows IMM32 API Client DLL:10.0.19041.3996 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation IPHLPAPI.DLL:IP Helper API:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation KERNEL32.DLL:Windows NT BASE API Client DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation KERNELBASE.dll:Windows NT BASE API Client DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation MMDevApi.dll:MMDevice API:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation MSCTF.dll:MSCTF Server DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation MpOav.dll:IOfficeAntiVirus Module:4.18.24030.9 (cd8105518e5571788ee3b6a178bae8fbcdf461a8):Microsoft Corporation NLAapi.dll:Network Location Awareness 2:10.0.19041.4123 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation NSI.dll:NSI User-mode interface DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation NTASN1.dll:Microsoft ASN.1 API:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation OLEAUT32.dll:OLEAUT32.DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation Ole32.dll:Microsoft OLE for Windows:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation OpenAL.dll:Main implementation library:1.23.1: POWRPROF.dll:Power Profile Helper DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation PROPSYS.dll:Microsoft Property System:7.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation PSAPI.DLL:Process Status Helper:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation Pdh.dll:Windows Performance Data Helper DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation RPCRT4.dll:Remote Procedure Call Runtime:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation SETUPAPI.dll:Windows Setup API:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation SHCORE.dll:SHCORE:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation SHELL32.dll:Windows Shell Common Dll:10.0.19041.4123 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation TmAMSIProvider64.dll:Trend Micro AMSI Provider Module (64-Bit):8.55.0.1074:Trend Micro Inc. UMPDC.dll USER32.dll:Multi-User Windows USER API Client DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation USERENV.dll:Userenv:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation VCRUNTIME140.dll:Microsoft® C Runtime Library:14.29.30139.0 built by: vcwrkspc:Microsoft Corporation VERSION.dll:Version Checking and File Installation Libraries:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation WINHTTP.dll:Windows HTTP Services:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation WINMM.dll:MCI API DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation WINSTA.dll:Winstation Library:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation WINTRUST.dll:Microsoft Trust Verification APIs:10.0.19041.4291 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation WS2\_32.dll:Windows Socket 2.0 32-Bit DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation WTSAPI32.dll:Windows Remote Desktop Session Host Server SDK APIs:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation Wldp.dll:Windows Lockdown Policy:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation amsi.dll:Anti-Malware Scan Interface:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation bcrypt.dll:Windows Cryptographic Primitives Library:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation bcryptPrimitives.dll:Windows Cryptographic Primitives Library:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation cfgmgr32.dll:Configuration Manager DLL:10.0.19041.3996 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation clbcatq.dll:COM+ Configuration Catalog:2001.12.10941.16384 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation combase.dll:Microsoft COM for Windows:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation cryptnet.dll:Crypto Network Related API:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation d3d11.dll:Direct3D 11 Runtime:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation dbgcore.DLL:Windows Core Debugging Helpers:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation dinput8.dll:Microsoft DirectInput:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation drvstore.dll:Driver Store API:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation dwmapi.dll:Microsoft Desktop Window Manager API:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation dxcore.dll:DXCore:10.0.19041.3996 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation dxgi.dll:DirectX Graphics Infrastructure:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation extnet.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft fwpuclnt.dll:FWP/IPsec User-Mode API:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation gdi32full.dll:GDI Client DLL:10.0.19041.4239 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation glfw.dll:GLFW 3.4.0 DLL:3.4.0:GLFW icm32.dll:Microsoft Color Management Module (CMM):10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation imagehlp.dll:Windows NT Image Helper:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation inputhost.dll:InputHost:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation java.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft javaw.exe:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft jemalloc.dll jimage.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft jli.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft jna10656940529470050046.dll:JNA native library:7.0.0:Java(TM) Native Access (JNA) jsvml.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft jvm.dll:OpenJDK 64-Bit server VM:21.0.3.0:Microsoft kernel.appcore.dll:AppModel API Host:10.0.19041.3758 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation lwjgl.dll lwjgl\_opengl.dll lwjgl\_stb.dll management.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft management\_ext.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft mdnsNSP.dll:Bonjour Namespace Provider:3,0,0,10:Apple Inc. msasn1.dll:ASN.1 Runtime APIs:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation mscms.dll:Microsoft Color Matching System DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation msvcp140.dll:Microsoft® C Runtime Library:14.29.30139.0 built by: vcwrkspc:Microsoft Corporation msvcp\_win.dll:Microsoft® C Runtime Library:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation msvcrt.dll:Windows NT CRT DLL:7.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation mswsock.dll:Microsoft Windows Sockets 2.0 Service Provider:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation napinsp.dll:E-mail Naming Shim Provider:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation ncrypt.dll:Windows NCrypt Router:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation net.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft nimdnsNSP.dll:National Instruments Zeroconf Namespace Service Provider:215.0.3f0:National Instruments Corporation nimdnsResponder.dll:National Instruments Zeroconf Library:215.0.3f0:National Instruments Corporation nio.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft ntdll.dll:NT Layer DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation ntmarta.dll:Windows NT MARTA provider:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation nvapi64.dll:NVIDIA NVAPI Library, Version 512.78 :30.0.15.1278:NVIDIA Corporation nvldumdx.dll:NVIDIA Driver Loader, Version 512.78 :30.0.15.1278:NVIDIA Corporation nvoglv64.dll:NVIDIA Compatible OpenGL ICD:30.0.15.1278:NVIDIA Corporation nvspcap64.dll:NVIDIA Game Proxy:3.21.0.36:NVIDIA Corporation nvwgf2umx.dll:NVIDIA D3D10 Driver, Version 512.78 :30.0.15.1278:NVIDIA Corporation opengl32.dll:OpenGL Client DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation perfos.dll:Windows System Performance Objects DLL:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation pnrpnsp.dll:PNRP Name Space Provider:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation profapi.dll:User Profile Basic API:10.0.19041.4239 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation rasadhlp.dll:Remote Access AutoDial Helper:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation rsaenh.dll:Microsoft Enhanced Cryptographic Provider:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation sechost.dll:Host for SCM/SDDL/LSA Lookup APIs:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation shlwapi.dll:Shell Light-weight Utility Library:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation sunmscapi.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft textinputframework.dll:"TextInputFramework.DYNLINK":10.0.19041.4239 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation ucrtbase.dll:Microsoft® C Runtime Library:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation uxtheme.dll:Microsoft UxTheme Library:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation vcruntime140\_1.dll:Microsoft® C Runtime Library:14.29.30139.0 built by: vcwrkspc:Microsoft Corporation verify.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft win32u.dll:Win32u:10.0.19041.4291 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation windows.storage.dll:Microsoft WinRT Storage API:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation winrnr.dll:LDAP RnR Provider DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation wintypes.dll:Windows Base Types DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation wshbth.dll:Windows Sockets Helper DLL:10.0.19041.3636 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation xinput1\_4.dll:Microsoft Common Controller API:10.0.19041.1 (WinBuild.160101.0800):Microsoft Corporation zip.dll:OpenJDK Platform binary:21.0.3.0:Microsoft 

Stacktrace:

at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main([Main.java:223](https://Main.java:223)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch([MinecraftGameProvider.java:470](https://MinecraftGameProvider.java:470)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.Knot.launch([Knot.java:74](https://Knot.java:74)) at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClient.main([KnotClient.java:23](https://KnotClient.java:23)) 

​
-- System Details --
Details:

Minecraft Version: 1.20.6 Minecraft Version ID: 1.20.6 Operating System: Windows 10 (amd64) version 10.0 Java Version: 21.0.3, Microsoft Java VM Version: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (mixed mode), Microsoft Memory: 111540224 bytes (106 MiB) / 503316480 bytes (480 MiB) up to 2147483648 bytes (2048 MiB) CPUs: 16 Processor Vendor: AuthenticAMD Processor Name: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics Identifier: AuthenticAMD Family 25 Model 80 Stepping 0 Microarchitecture: Zen 3 Frequency (GHz): 3.19 Number of physical packages: 1 Number of physical CPUs: 8 Number of logical CPUs: 16 Graphics card #0 name: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU Graphics card #0 vendor: NVIDIA Graphics card #0 VRAM (MB): 4096.00 Graphics card #0 deviceId: VideoController1 Graphics card #0 versionInfo: 30.0.15.1278 Graphics card #1 name: AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics Graphics card #1 vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Graphics card #1 VRAM (MB): 512.00 Graphics card #1 deviceId: VideoController2 Graphics card #1 versionInfo: 30.0.13002.19003 Memory slot #0 capacity (MB): 8192.00 Memory slot #0 clockSpeed (GHz): 3.20 Memory slot #0 type: DDR4 Memory slot #1 capacity (MB): 8192.00 Memory slot #1 clockSpeed (GHz): 3.20 Memory slot #1 type: DDR4 Virtual memory max (MB): 37702.57 Virtual memory used (MB): 21407.67 Swap memory total (MB): 21926.52 Swap memory used (MB): 1786.43 JVM Flags: 9 total; -XX:HeapDumpPath=MojangTricksIntelDriversForPerformance\_javaw.exe\_minecraft.exe.heapdump -Xss1M -Xmx2G -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:G1NewSizePercent=20 -XX:G1ReservePercent=20 -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=50 -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=32M Fabric Mods: betterf3: BetterF3 10.0.0 cloth-config: Cloth Config v14 14.0.126 

cloth-basic-math: cloth-basic-math 0.6.1

 fabric-resource-loader-v0: Fabric Resource Loader (v0) 1.0.5+c5f2432cff cicada: CICADA 0.7.2+1.20.5-and-above do\_a\_barrel\_roll: Do a Barrel Roll 3.5.6+1.20.6 fabric-permissions-api-v0: fabric-permissions-api 0.2-SNAPSHOT mixinsquared: MixinSquared 0.1.1 fabric-api: Fabric API 0.97.8+1.20.6 fabric-api-base: Fabric API Base 0.4.40+80f8cf51ff fabric-api-lookup-api-v1: Fabric API Lookup API (v1) 1.6.59+e9d2a72bff fabric-biome-api-v1: Fabric Biome API (v1) 13.0.25+be5d88beff fabric-block-api-v1: Fabric Block API (v1) 1.0.20+6dfe4c9bff fabric-block-view-api-v2: Fabric BlockView API (v2) 1.0.8+80f8cf51ff fabric-blockrenderlayer-v1: Fabric BlockRenderLayer Registration (v1) 1.1.50+80f8cf51ff fabric-client-tags-api-v1: Fabric Client Tags 1.1.12+7f945d5bff fabric-command-api-v1: Fabric Command API (v1) 1.2.45+f71b366fff fabric-command-api-v2: Fabric Command API (v2) 2.2.24+80f8cf51ff fabric-commands-v0: Fabric Commands (v0) 0.2.62+df3654b3ff fabric-content-registries-v0: Fabric Content Registries (v0) 8.0.4+b82b2392ff fabric-convention-tags-v1: Fabric Convention Tags 2.0.3+7f945d5bff fabric-convention-tags-v2: Fabric Convention Tags (v2) 2.0.0+2b43c5c8ff fabric-crash-report-info-v1: Fabric Crash Report Info (v1) 0.2.27+80f8cf51ff fabric-data-attachment-api-v1: Fabric Data Attachment API (v1) 1.1.15+2a2c66b6ff fabric-data-generation-api-v1: Fabric Data Generation API (v1) 19.0.6+7f945d5bff fabric-dimensions-v1: Fabric Dimensions API (v1) 2.1.68+94793913ff fabric-entity-events-v1: Fabric Entity Events (v1) 1.6.8+e9d2a72bff fabric-events-interaction-v0: Fabric Events Interaction (v0) 0.7.6+c5fc38b3ff fabric-game-rule-api-v1: Fabric Game Rule API (v1) 1.0.50+80f8cf51ff fabric-item-api-v1: Fabric Item API (v1) 8.1.1+17e985d6ff fabric-item-group-api-v1: Fabric Item Group API (v1) 4.0.38+aae0949aff fabric-key-binding-api-v1: Fabric Key Binding API (v1) 1.0.45+80f8cf51ff fabric-keybindings-v0: Fabric Key Bindings (v0) 0.2.43+df3654b3ff fabric-lifecycle-events-v1: Fabric Lifecycle Events (v1) 2.3.4+c5fc38b3ff fabric-loot-api-v2: Fabric Loot API (v2) 3.0.4+97f703daff fabric-message-api-v1: Fabric Message API (v1) 6.0.10+109a837cff fabric-model-loading-api-v1: Fabric Model Loading API (v1) 1.0.12+80f8cf51ff fabric-models-v0: Fabric Models (v0) 0.4.11+9386d8a7ff fabric-networking-api-v1: Fabric Networking API (v1) 4.0.8+0dca0349ff fabric-object-builder-api-v1: Fabric Object Builder API (v1) 15.1.3+c5fc38b3ff fabric-particles-v1: Fabric Particles (v1) 4.0.0+c5fc38b3ff fabric-recipe-api-v1: Fabric Recipe API (v1) 5.0.3+c5fc38b3ff fabric-registry-sync-v0: Fabric Registry Sync (v0) 5.0.15+f1240ba7ff fabric-renderer-api-v1: Fabric Renderer API (v1) 3.2.12+97f703daff fabric-renderer-indigo: Fabric Renderer - Indigo 1.5.12+80f8cf51ff fabric-renderer-registries-v1: Fabric Renderer Registries (v1) 3.2.61+df3654b3ff fabric-rendering-data-attachment-v1: Fabric Rendering Data Attachment (v1) 0.3.46+73761d2eff fabric-rendering-fluids-v1: Fabric Rendering Fluids (v1) 3.1.3+2c869dedff fabric-rendering-v0: Fabric Rendering (v0) 1.1.64+df3654b3ff fabric-rendering-v1: Fabric Rendering (v1) 4.2.4+b21c00cbff fabric-resource-conditions-api-v1: Fabric Resource Conditions API (v1) 4.0.1+74e2f560ff fabric-screen-api-v1: Fabric Screen API (v1) 2.0.21+7b70ea8aff fabric-screen-handler-api-v1: Fabric Screen Handler API (v1) 1.3.72+b21c00cbff fabric-sound-api-v1: Fabric Sound API (v1) 1.0.21+c5fc38b3ff fabric-transfer-api-v1: Fabric Transfer API (v1) 5.1.6+c5fc38b3ff fabric-transitive-access-wideners-v1: Fabric Transitive Access Wideners (v1) 6.0.10+74e2f560ff fabricloader: Fabric Loader 0.15.11 mixinextras: MixinExtras 0.3.5 inventoryhud: Inventory HUD + ${version} iris: Iris 1.7.0+mc1.20.6 io\_github\_douira\_glsl-transformer: glsl-transformer 2.0.0-pre13 org\_anarres\_jcpp: jcpp 1.4.14 org\_antlr\_antlr4-runtime: antlr4-runtime 4.11.1 java: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 21 minecraft: Minecraft 1.20.6 sodium: Sodium 0.5.8+mc1.20.6 voxelmap: Voxelmap 1.20.6-1.12.19 Loaded Shaderpack: ComplementaryShaders\_v4.5.1 Profile: Custom (+1 option changed by user) Launched Version: fabric-loader-0.15.11-1.20.6 Launcher name: minecraft-launcher Backend library: LWJGL version 3.3.3-snapshot Backend API: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2 GL version 3.2.0 NVIDIA 512.78, NVIDIA Corporation Window size:  GL Caps: Using framebuffer using OpenGL 3.2 GL debug messages: Using VBOs: Yes Is Modded: Definitely; Client brand changed to 'fabric' Universe: 404 Type: Client (map\_client.txt) Locale: en\_AU CPU: 16x AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics 

🚀 Unlock Exclusive Insights on QQQ: Get deeper analysis and expert views on QQQ's latest market trends before you read on. Click Here to Dive In 🌟
Technical Analysis
The Invesco QQQ Trust (Ticker: QQQ) closed at $441.02 on May 9, 2024, a slight increase by 0.22% from the previous trading session. Notably, the ETF's price movement has been confined within a relatively narrow range with a high of $441.6 and a low of $438.46. This can be indicative of consolidation, suggesting potential volatility in the near term. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) stands at 75, which typically signals that the ETF is currently overbought. This could imply a short-term pullback.
Further insights from technical indicators reveal a negative Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) value at -5.69. This divergence suggests that downward momentum may be building despite the recent gains. The Average True Range (ATR) of 1.42 indicates moderate volatility.
With the ETF trading above both its 50-day moving average (DMA) of $436.70 and 200-DMA of $399.97, the long-term trend appears bullish. However, the immediate resistance at $441.11 and support at $439.02 define a very tight trading band suggesting that any significant breakout or breakdown could dictate the direction for the next trading sessions.
Fundamental Analysis
QQQ, a proxy for the Nasdaq-100 Index, carries a market capitalization of approximately $173.77 billion and a Price to Earnings (PE) ratio of 36.05, reflecting a premium valuation relative to broader indices. This can be attributed to its heavy weighting towards technology and growth stocks, which have historically commanded higher PEs.
The recent news underscores a shifting sentiment towards dividend growth potential in tech-heavy ETFs, previously not known for high yields. This could enhance the attractiveness of QQQ for income-focused investors if this trend materializes. Furthermore, the reported increase in retail trading activity in zero-day-to-expiration options on QQQ indicates heightened retail interest, which could impact short-term price dynamics due to increased trading volume and potential speculative activity.
Performance Prediction and Investment Potential
Considering the technical overbought condition and the fundamental strong growth orientation, QQQ might face short-term volatility with potential downside adjustments. In the longer term, the underlying strength of the tech sector and its impact on the ETF suggests a robust growth potential, particularly if the trend towards recognizing dividend capabilities materializes further.
For the next trading day (May 10, 2024) and the coming week, the immediate focus should be on the ETF's ability to hold above its support level of $439.02. A break below this could see a test of lower levels, particularly with the heightened volatility indicated by recent trading options activity. Conversely, overcoming resistance at $441.11 may set the stage for attempts to approach the year's high of $449.34.
Intrinsic Value and Long-Term Potential
In the long run, the intrinsic value of QQQ is largely tied to the performance of its constituent companies in the technology and consumer services sectors. Given the reliance on growth factors, changes in company earnings growth rates and broader economic indicators like interest rate changes can significantly influence its value. The trend towards potential dividend growth could add a new dimension of valuation support for these types of ETFs.
Overall Evaluation
Considering the ETF’s current technical position, fundamental strengths, and the potential volatilit [...]
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Ok to monetize, but don't paywall. Links to the previous parts: 1 2 3 4 5 and 6. The next part is technically the finale, but I love these two, so I'm probably not going to end it there. Also I got a bit carried away mixing in my Erinyes Arbiters lore and had to cut out like 400 words because it was a complete tangent lol. In other words, I'm probably going to get back into more Erinyes Arbiters scripts soon, but we'll see. The Terra Nova series is on hold for a bit because I noticed a plot hole in the next part and I have to rewrite it before I release it.
(Muffled through a door)
[Angel]
Oh my god, Teo! I'm not going to hold your fucking hand for this! You're perfectly capable of socializing without me!
[Teo]
But I have no idea what to talk about! I've never spoken to him one-on-one.
[Angel]
And you never will if you don't try! He's not going to hate you. He already cares about you by proxy.
Come on. You're good at this. I'm not. Show me up, asshole. I dare you.
[Teo]
But—
[The door opens and Teo yelps]
[Angel]
(Failing to stifle a laugh)
Perfect timing, Smiles! Get in here. I'll be in my art studio. Don't bother me until you've spent some time hanging out.
[He runs off]
[Teo]
Uhhhh… How much did you overhear?
…
Of course I'm nervous. He loves you. And I… I know I said a lot of pretty bold things a few weeks ago when we invited you to live here, but I also… I'm not as good at this as Angel thinks. Not when I have to be myself.
…
When I throw parties, it's so easy to put up a front of being the kind of guy people expect to host massive parties in a mansion. But right now, I'm just me and I… I don't really know who that is when Angel's not around.
…
He was… he was my only friend in a time when everyone treated me like shit. I don't think he knows just how bad it was for me.
…
I hated myself back then. You wouldn't know it by how I acted, but that was because my parents only paid attention when they were disappointed in me. And disappointment has always hurt so much more than being ignored. I pretended I was fine, and maybe I even believed it sometimes. When I was bruised from being pushed down a flight of stairs, I bought foundation and covered it up. When a bully broke my jaw, I pretended it was just me being silly ol' Matteo, tripping and slamming my face into a locker. I was so scared of being a… a tattletale.
…
Angel was always so… pissed off. He was terrifying. When I was paired with him on a group project, I basically offered to do the entire thing for him, but he just… he stared at me like I was an idiot. He said I shouldn't be so nice. That it'd get me hurt. And he was right. It already had gotten me hurt.
…
Well, I didn't tell him that. I didn't know how he'd react. But at some point, he saw me getting mocked by a group of assholes. I don't remember it very clearly, but I remember how he told me I should let myself get mad about it.
…
I was mad about it. It just didn't look like it. I was always pretending to be completely unfazed by everything until it was too late.
…
Well, I didn't know how to react when he told me to get mad, and that pissed him off enough that he started yelling at me.
(Doing an impression of Angel)
"Get mad! Stop being so nice! Come on!"
Uh, sorry, I'll stop imitating his voice.
…
You really thought it was funny? Okay, Smiles.
I told him to stop, and I don't know if that gave him the idea or if he just lost his temper, but he started to talk shit on me.
(A slight hesitation before doing his Angel impression again)
"You want me to stop? Make me!"
And before I could stop myself, I had him pinned to the wall.
…
He went really quiet, and… Well, in retrospect, maybe I awakened something in him.
…
(He laughs awkwardly)
Yeah, uh, anyway… I let him go. Apologized and everything. But he started laughing. And he told me—
…
(Laugh)
Okay, Smiles. I'll do my Angel impression one more time.
(Angel impression)
"I knew you had some anger in you. Glad I got you to get serious for once."
…
You get it, don't you? He thinks I saved him. But he saved me first.
…
Smiles, stop me if I'm overstepping with this psychoanalysis, but uh… Is the reason you fell for him because you see yourself in him? Is that why you felt the need to save him?
…
(Soberly)
Yeah. I thought so.
…
It's the way you look at him sometimes, when he's not looking back. You look like you just… see him. In a way most people don't.
…
Yeah, I guess that's true for me too.
…
Um, if you ever need something that you'd rather not go to Angel about, you've also got me. If you're having relationship issues or if you and Angel are both having a bad day or if you just wanna hang out with someone platonically.
…
[Awkward silence.]
(Self-consciously)
Uh, do you think we've talked enough that we can go get Angel again?
…
Aw, come on, Smiles. I just bared my very soul for you. Doesn't that count for something?
…
Casual conversation is hard, Smiles.
…
Hooking up at parties is easy. I just have to find someone who seems horny and flirt a little. I don't really… socialize… with anyone other than Angel.
…
I mean, I have one or two friends I message online, but they're not people I talk to regularly or anything.
…
Well, it's easy with Angel. We go way back, after all. We don't even have to talk. Just being in the same room is usually enough.
…
I guess I just… don't know how to talk to people casually.
…
What do you normally talk about with Angel? It's not always serious shit, right?
…
(Chuckling)
Aside from flirting, you goofball.
…
Wait, Angel never said you also paint.
…
Oh, you meant his painting. Yeah, that makes sense. I don't really have an eye for art, myself.
…
Oh, uh… Do you play any video games?
…
(Gradually getting more and more excited)
I'm really into this one MMO. Have you heard of Erinyes Arbiters? It's, um, it's based on Greek mythology, set in the Underworld. The Furies— they're basically the three avenging spirits of Greek mythology— they turned against each other over conflicting views on morality, and the Underworld is split into three factions fighting endlessly, because no one can die again. And…
(Deflating)
And you probably don't care. Sorry, it's…
…
You really think it sounds interesting?
…
Oh, um, yeah, it is really fun. It's a team-based competitive action game with RPG elements, and so far, the only paid aspects have been for character customization, but you can get most of that for free if you're really committed to grinding Obols— that's the in-game currency. I already unlocked almost all of them, but I've spent a lot on it.
…
Upwards of… 500 bucks? I mean, money's no object for me. If you want, I can even pay for some Obols for you, if that sweetens the deal.
…
You're interested in it? Yes!!!
…
Oh, You should totally join the Valkyries of Alecto. That's the faction I chose. The other two are fine, but you won't get to see General Hellen of Greece nearly as much if you choose one of the other factions. And she's such a good character.
…
Hellen of Greece, yeah. She wasn't from Troy. The whole reason for the Trojan War was because she was kidnapped and forcibly wed to the Trojan prince Paris even though she was already married.
…
The other generals are fine, but Icarus has more screen time than Hellen in cutscenes already. And while Orestes and Pylades are about as neglected as Hellen so far, they're in the Witch-Hunters of Tisiphone, and that faction has the worst headquarters music. So unless you want to deal with that, then—
[Door opens loudly. Teo yelps]
[Angel]
(Snickering at how startled Teo is)
Are you two getting along okay or is it awkward as hell?
[Teo]
(A bit annoyed)
We're fine, dude. He's going to get into Erinyes Arbiters.
[Angel]
Oh no. No, please, I'm begging you, Smiles. If you get into it, he's going to make us cosplay the furries.
[Teo]
Dude, for the last time, they're the Furies. Not furries.
[Angel]
(Flustered)
…
I, um… you really think I'd look cute in cosplay? Uh… O-okay then. I, um, yup. Perfectly fine.
…
I'm, uh, glad you two bonded. It's nice, knowing that my, uh, two favorite people like each other. It's good, or whatever.
[Teo]
Just kiss already. I know you wanna~
[Kissing noises begin]
Awww, so cute togeth—OW! Angel!!!
Fine, I'll leave you two alone to make out.

Hi everyone, we are a group of web-based developers and we generally suffer of a common headache: website testing. It's a labyrinth of downloads and setups, configurations and try-n-errors, also extremely expensive. Well, I've got a game-changer in hands.
Challenge: Testing websites can feel like a marathon of downloads and configurations.
Innovation (maybe): Imagine a platform where you can conduct end-to-end tests directly from your browser, thanks to an ingenious proxy system. No downloads, just seamless testing.
Features we propose:

• Browser-based testing: Forget downloads. Test effortlessly from your browser.
• Budget-friendly: We're keeping costs low, possibly even offering free options thanks to client-side only computation (and web mirroring).
• Reusable test cases: Efficiency is our mantra. Reuse test cases to craft user guides and documentation.
• AI autohealing: Oh, did I mention? Our platform harnesses AI to automatically heal test cases, ensuring they stay robust and effective.

Monetization: We aim to keep access to basic functionalities affordable, or even free. For advanced features and enhanced functionality, we're considering a subscription model. Subscribers would unlock premium tools and enjoy an ad-free experience, empowering them to test with greater efficiency.
Thus...
Thoughts? Would this revolutionize the workflow? Any suggestions?

Hi everyone, we are a group of web-based developers and we generally suffer of a common headache: website testing. It's a labyrinth of downloads and setups, configurations and try-n-errors, also extremely expensive. Well, I've got a game-changer in hands.
Challenge: Testing websites can feel like a marathon of downloads and configurations.
Innovation (maybe): Imagine a platform where you can conduct end-to-end tests directly from your browser, thanks to an ingenious proxy system. No downloads, just seamless testing.
Summarizing the key features:

• Browser-based testing: Forget downloads. Test effortlessly from your browser.
• Budget-friendly: We're keeping costs low, possibly even offering free options thanks to client-side only computation (and web mirroring).
• Reusable test cases: Efficiency is our mantra. Reuse test cases to craft user guides and documentation.
• AI autohealing: Oh, did I mention? Our platform harnesses AI to automatically heal test cases, ensuring they stay robust and effective.

Monetization: We aim to keep access to basic functionalities affordable, or even free. For advanced features and enhanced functionality, we're considering a subscription model. Subscribers would unlock premium tools and enjoy an ad-free experience, empowering them to test with greater efficiency. Thus...
Thoughts? Would this revolutionize the workflow? Any suggestions?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.
Being a PI sucks. It’s not what you think. It’s pretty much harassing women. Men hire PIs to go harass their wives and girlfriends and once in a blue moon you get asked to find a missing dog, or to harass a man instead. But that’s it, really. Sometimes I’m looking for hard evidence of infidelity, but a lot of the time my clients just want to rattle the soon-to-be-ex. To make them paranoid and jittery and less reliable in a courtroom, or less likely to pay attention to small print agreements that stiff them out of the holiday home. So that’s my job. I’m a pawn and it is almost always on behalf of the kind of men who think women reading a book in public are secretly looking for male attention.
I don’t have an office. I did for a short while. But things are tough, as I’m sure many of you know, and PI work isn’t exactly lucrative. I don’t know why I’m still doing this job, except to say I’m my own boss, and it’s not easy out there. I went into this with vastly different expectations. If anyone wants to hire someone who was convicted of insurance fraud while training to be a police officer, let me know. Otherwise I’m on my own, following people in cars and sleeping in dingy motels. So when someone reached out looking for a guy to stalk them, I just figured it was a fetish thing. I got a nephew who went to art school and makes big bucks painting cartoon characters doing fucked up stuff. He ain’t painting the Sistine Chapel, but he pays the bills and looks after his family. I figure if that work is good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.
So I met the woman and was surprised at how normal she looked. It was in a public place, a park with a nice bench. And even though it was starting to rain a little we didn’t let it bother either of us. We sat there, two tape recorders running, and hashed it out. She said she liked me. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have gotten out of her car. That was flattering coming from her. Good looking woman. Professional. I didn’t know at the time but I’d quickly figure out she was a forensic accountant.
Anyway, we got talking. She never gave me her motivation, but I would later come to understand her as an amateur narcissist. She was new at loving herself. She was smart, accomplished, and actually rather beautiful provided you didn’t spend a great deal of time agonising over things like symmetry or eyebrows, and instead paid attention to how a smile reaches the eyes, or how laughter sounds when it catches someone by surprise. But she grew up dirt poor and spent her teen years unable to visit the dentist, or access a gym, or even just eat home cooked food that wasn’t microwaved. Plump frame, blotchy skin, hair she kept short with a pair of scissors because her and her mother relied on the shampoo and soap they stole from the motel where they shared cleaning shifts. When she fumbled awkward questions at some of the better looking boys in her class, she rarely met with success. That’s not to say she was an outcast, either. She had a social life. It’s just poor kids have to grow up early. Prom’s a luxury. Eating isn’t. If you know, you know. Otherwise you might be surprised by just how fucking tough it can be for some kids in this country. Anyway, she got out of that hole, fought tooth and nail, got an education, a good job, and by the time she finished her victory lap and took stock of her life she was thirty-five years old and a thousand miles from the trailer she was raised in.
And she looked good. The woman in the mirror was a stranger that she wanted to get to know. I think hiring me was an act of self-love. I think if she could have, she would have sat in a car and watched herself get a cup of coffee, spying closely at the professional looking woman doing a little half-run half-skip to get out of the rain. The way she stood in line rocking back and forth on her heels to the music in her airpods thinking no one’d notice. She wanted to admire herself, but unable to time travel or clone herself, she instead resorted to hiring me as a kind of proxy.
I had my own boundaries, of course. They covered anything that was gonna get me in trouble. The gist of the contract, after a nice week spent meeting after work and talking, was that I was to follow her as often as I could and just… observe her. Photos. Videos. Secret recordings. Occasionally a little bit more. Nothing physical. For example, one time I inventoried her handbag after she left it in a taxi by accident. I’m not a photographer, but something about all those knick knacks laid out on a motel bed snapped with a black and white polaroid, it looked good. Like something you’d see in a fancy gallery. Avant garde my nephew would say. She loved it. Paid me a bonus for it and everything.
Anyway, this carried on like this for about six months. They were… interesting times. Tailing her across train stations, racing across open parking lots to install a tracker on her car, standing on a bridge and dropping an air tag in her bag as she walked past. It was a little bit like being a spy. She even paid for me to buy high end equipment. Crazy stuff. One camera, I could sit on my balcony and read the texts on her phone from a block away. Occasionally there were days where I couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up the required intensity. Stalking requires a lot of cardio. When that happened, when I didn’t feel like following her into a crowded place, or sprinting half-way around town following her car, I’d do research. I’d investigate who this woman had once been. I created fake Facebook profiles and tracked down old school friends, spoke to former teachers, lovers, all of that. The whole job was a matter of mapping her out, like she was a country, you know? And a country isn’t just hills and rivers and borders. Countries have history.
She was happy with my initiative. The text she sent me when I showed her the research folder was a glowing commendation. First one I’d had in a long time. It was nice, someone telling me good job. She had a real way of making me feel like a kid getting a gold star. I didn’t realise at the time, but I was putty in her hands. Head over heels, bless my stupid heart. Of course I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I’d had just enough time to grow over confident. I made the mistake of thinking that I wasn’t gonna find anything in her past that’d give me trouble sleeping.
Boy did I get that one fucking wrong.
Her mother. That’s where things took an odd turn. Now I knew from news reports the mother died in their trailer while her daughter was off staying at some boyfriend’s place for a few days. Natural causes, it read. I wanted to know a little more about what natural causes they were. Figured if there was a congenital thing, it seemed like maybe I ought to know. You’d think the way the trailer park owner reacted to me asking about it, I’d tried asking the Russian government for proof of a democratic election. Thin reedy little woman who gave me hell the moment I mentioned a name. What do you wanna know that for? Who’s asking? Who’s paying you? Why you wanna dig this shit up?
Oh she ripped me to pieces. I put it down to the natural sprinkling of crazies in the standard population and took a different tact. Started calling up the older folks in the park. Residents. Every single one of them put the phone down on me the second I mentioned her name.
Well, all of them except one.
Some people wanna talk and this old bastard was one of them. He had a lot to say about everything from the president to social media and I let him ramble on before starting to press my point. Told him at the start I was a historian looking into the local area, that made it so it wasn’t too suspicious when I began asking about this and that. Slowly making my way to the death of a fifty-three year old woman a couple trailers down from him some years ago.
Again, soon as I mentioned her name, there was a change in the air, even over the phone. For a second I thought this old guy was gonna hang up just like the others. Could hear him smacking his dry lips as he mulled it over.
“Francine didn’t deserve what happened to her,” he said after a while. “She wasn’t a good woman. Didn’t treat her daughter too good neither. But didn’t deserve what happened. Maybe if they’d found her earlier, some of those fellas in white coats could’ve got more evidence, put that little wretch of hers away. But from what I understand, weren’t much left of her at all.”
Then he hung up, leaving me with a whole lot of questions.
This frustrated me. I had, until now, had a fair bit of luck at this new profession of mine. They say be careful what you get good at. Sad truth was, I was getting good at stalking and this was my first real roadblock. I remembered the way I felt when she told me good job and it bothered me I couldn’t really say much about this critical part of her life. That and, well, maybe I still got a chip on my shoulder about being a failed policeman. If you give me a problem, I can sometimes drive myself crazy looking for a fix.
So I hopped in my car and drove to the trailer park, damn near on the other side of the country. Don’t know I was hoping to find. No way the trailer was still there, and it wasn’t. But what I found odd was the lot hadn’t been replaced. There was a hole in the ground, about the right size, and nothing else. Just an empty spot where the trailer had once stood. And the trailers on either side weren’t occupied either. I could tell by politely and legally looking through the windows. Most of them were cleared out, but a few weren’t. They still had plates and other knick knacks left hanging around, like the owners had left without bothering to pack.
“You shouldn’t hang around there, mister.”
The girl who appeared stood a good twenty feet away, shouting over the wind so as to be heard.
“Smell can make you awful sick.”
I wrinkled my nose, aware of the odour she was talking about. Had been since I approached the empty lot. A faint musty smell that made me think of an exotic pet shop.
“What do you mean?”
“Smell makes you sick,” she said like it was self-explanatory. “Woman who died there left behind an awful stench. Made the neighbours sick. And the neighbour’s neighbours, and so on for a couple trailers in a row. No one likes to live there now. Still can’t. Had a couple move in a year or two back and they got sick too. Daddy says it’s a bad one. Not even rats go near that hole.”
The smell wasn’t pretty, but this trailer park looked like the kinda place where hubcaps went missing regularly. Figured they would’ve been used to bad smells. What made this one so special?
I looked over at the girl.
“Where is your dad?”
Few minutes later and I was stood outside a trailer waiting pensively. The little girl had disappeared inside to fetch her father and since then I’d been sat listening to the quietest trailer park in the whole world. Crickets and silence. Traffic on a distant highway. Place was dying, that much was clear.
When the father finally did make an appearance, he said nothing for the first few minutes. Lit a cigarette, offered me one. I refused on account of having quit some time back.
After a while he spoke up.
“I’d invite you in but if you been hanging around that old lot, not sure I want you inside my home. No offence.”
“None taken,” I replied.
“Sally says you’re a historian.”
The man wasn’t terribly old. Mid-thirties, at a guess, but he looked me up and down like I was a teenager caught throwing eggs at his house.
“What’re you really?”
“PI,” I replied.
“Ha now that makes sense. Some relative looking for answers? Heard the Hendersons had a sister with money.”
“That’s exactly it,” I lied. “She didn’t buy the official story.”
“Nor should she,” he replied. “Henderson was fit as a fiddle day he moved in. Weren’t no justice in what happened to those who got sick. And poor Francine… They say she died of natural causes. Man even back then I knew it was shit and I was just a lil kid. The smell alone. Think it’s bad now but at the time, before they came in with a crane to lift the trailer up whole and move it to the dump. Shit it was something awful. There was talk of moving the whole park. Course no one gave enough of a shit about us to go ahead and actually do it.”
“What did she die of?”
“Don’t know. Only thing I am sure of is that that girl of Francine’s lied. Said her mother was live and well when she left before the weekend and they was all on good terms, but that was bullshit. We heard ‘em fighting for weeks before, for one. And of course the body, state that was in, ain’t no way it’d been rotting for just a few days.”
He offered me another cigarette. I refused. He lit it up instead. Second one in what felt like just a few minutes. Made me itchy just to see. I wanted to say something, anything to get a little bit more. But I’d told a big lie pretending to be there on someone else’s behalf, and didn’t want to catch myself out, so I just sat and listened to the quiet buzz of his little patio light.
After the second cigarette was done he reached into his back pocket and took out an old photo.
“I hope you find justice for Henderson and the rest of them,” he said. “Only real bit of proof I ever had something fishy went on.”
He handed me the picture. Wasn’t easy to see what I was looking at. Pile of old leaves, maybe. Mulch. I squinted at it for a few good seconds but couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“What…?”
“Took that the day they arrived to get rid of the trailer. Had to stand on my friend’s shoulders just to reach.”
“What is it?” I asked, my skin starting to crawl as I picked out details. Whatever I was looking at, it was slumped on a sofa with floral wallpaper in the background. It was about the size of a man, but riddled with holes and cavities the size of golf balls. In my whole life, I’d never seen something that looked like that.
“Why that’s Francine,” he said. “Or at least what was left of her.”
He let me keep the photo. At a guess, that was the only interesting thing that’d ever happened to that man and he’d been waiting to share it with someone. All I had to do was give him an excuse. He seemed to take some pleasure in passing it on. Certainly found my reaction to it amusing. I must’ve gone pale as I grappled with thoughts of what had happened to make a body go bad like that. Back in the hotel, under a good light, I checked that picture again and again. Something about it made me deeply uncomfortable. Knowing a woman was under all that… all those holes and crevices must’ve been made in her flesh. And what’d happened to her skin that’d turned it such a funny texture? Looked furry, like the kinda thing that grows on top of a long-forgotten cup of coffee.
A part of me considered asking my client about this, but I knew that wasn’t the way to go. First, she probably wouldn’t tell me good job if I had to ask. She hired me to do a certain thing and that didn’t involve politely requesting information right from the source. Second, well… I’d read the police reports, what was publicly available, anyway. And she’d made it clear she’d left on the friday and came home on the Monday and…
Well what if that guy was right? Did she really leave her mother alive and well? I mean, people kill. Not just psychos. People like you and me. We do it every day and sometimes we even pull it off. Only half of US murders get solved. That’s a fact. If anyone could be in the right half of that equation, it’d be her. She was smart as hell, my client. Even at seventeen she would’ve been a clever one. Clever enough that she might easily have been able to cover her tracks. Gone over to some boyfriend, twisted his arm into giving her an alibi. Sure, I could see that.
I just needed to figure out what the fuck was going on with that crime scene in the trailer. Thankfully I got some friends still on the force, one of which I even have a bit of leverage on. At first he couldn’t find much on the actual mother, but then I asked him to see if he could take the photo I had, show it around, and see if anyone had seen something like it before. That proved a lot more fruitful. Few days later he came back with a strange one, but straight away I saw the connection.
I’ll spare the details. Old man was found in a tub, all sorts of fucked up, in some old apartment building. It had since been condemned on account of the body which is fairly weird since bodies don’t usually cause that much fuss, but less weird when you realise that said body was in such a bad state it made three people sick and caused long-lasting structural damage. Whatever happened to this guy, it ate through the tub he’d been lying in and seeped into the floors and walls below. Turned plasterboard to shit and apparently even caused some trouble for the sturdier elements like steel and concrete. I don’t know how that works exactly, but that’s what the file said and going by the photos, I didn’t feel like anyone was lying.
As for the pictures? What can I say? Made my fucking skin crawl. No blurry little polaroid snapped by a kid. These were professional crime scene pictures that showed something in a bathtub that didn’t register as human until my eyes went looking for details. He looked like a hairy paper-wasp’s nest, only there were fingers and nipples and other little things that made it clear it had been built using a person as the framework. No face though. Just a head like a pile of used paper plates. Looking at those photos made me learn a new word just to describe how I felt. Trypophobia.
Wasn’t just the one guy either. Building was linked to the disappearance of the ground floor tenant. Some computer geek. I didn’t worry about him too much. But what did catch my eye was there was only one woman living in the whole place. Second floor apartment. The registered name was… somewhat familiar. Close enough to a certain someone’s that it raised the hairs on my neck. Police at the scene managed to get a photo of her and sure enough, there she was. My client going by a different name. Clearly something fishy was going on or else why the pseudonym? I figured it possible she’d maybe offed her own mother. Parents and spouses make the most common victims. But what connection was there to that second corpse, and what about the missing guy?
It was like a horror movie was following her around and she was just blissfully unaware. Condemned buildings and festering trailers made for a far cry from the professional accountant who enjoyed oat milk lattes and used sweetener instead of sugar to spare her teeth. But there was no denying she was the connection. There was photographic proof she’d lived in that building. If I wanted to get ahead of this, to really understand what was going on, I had to figure out what had happened to those bodies. I’d pretty much exhausted my favours with the police and truth was they didn’t know any more than I did. But it turned out the building was still standing. Condemned, but they hadn’t demolished it, partly because no one wanted to take responsibility, but I reckon it might have had something to do with the biohazard warnings slapped on every single window and door.
Good thing I’d brought a gas mask. I waited for sunset, geared up, and entered through the unlocked door. First thing that hit me as the door swung open was the smell. Similar to the trailer park but full pelt and hot as hell. Made me think of lizards and poorly kept terrariums. Strong enough to make my eyes water even through the mask. One thing was clear as I took a look around the hallway - the building was diseased. Not just rundown or decrepit like the usual urban decay. This was something else. Looked like the inside of a clogged pipe. You know how limescale fills it up? It was a bit like that. This oily rust coloured fluid had seeped down the walls and left them glistening and soft. Ropey stalactites of the stuff hung down from the ceiling like old party banners, and I edged around them afraid of what might happen if one touched me.
Best guess was that stuff was digesting the place. Anything soft or organic was going or gone. Old umbrella frames were left standing in one corner, the fabric burnt or dissolved away. The carpet was reduced to just a few patches no bigger than my hand. And a bunch of old cardboard boxes piled up under the stairs had turned squat and half-liquid, almost flowing down and around each other. The worst came when I took a look in the back room. More of a broom closet, I guess. Wouldn't have gone in but something caught my eye. A well-worn shoe that wasn’t covered in that oily shit. Sign of recent activity. That and the way the door was ajar just raised my suspicions, so I took a look.
Even now the timeline eludes me, but someone, a vagrant most likely given the way they were dressed, died a nasty death in there. Chemical burns come to mind. They were balled up in one corner, eyeless, looking up at me as I pushed the door open to take a closer look. Pink flesh threaded with red blood vessels, yellow bones poking through here and there. From the looks of things they’d been trying to work the door open. You could see a history of their escape attempts left by bleeding hands. Rust coloured finger streaks ran all along the door’s edges, special attention paid to the hinges. And he’d broken the only window and tried hauling himself up there only to realise it was barred from the other side. The jagged glass that still clung to the frame was covered in old blood. His palms must have looked like grated cheese. Eventually he’d given up and lain down in that shit and the thought of it made my chest feel heavy and tight. I’d only been in the building a few minutes and that shit was already eating through my shoes. I could hear the thick rubber soles sizzle and pop with each step. But that guy had been forced to sit down in an inch deep puddle of the stuff, likely because exhaustion had left him no choice but to tough it out. So how long had he tried staying up right?
Hours? Days? Weeks?
Him getting stuck in there had to be deliberate. I was sure of it. A feeling in my gut. Someone had locked the door behind him and left him to die slowly. God only knows why, but did that mean they were still hanging around and waiting for a chance to get to me? Looking around, I sure didn’t feel safe or alone. The shadows seemed too deep and the steady drip drip drip of that rancid oil oozing out of every surface was too monotonous. Someone or something lived in that filth and chances were they’d been responsible for that poor vagrant’s agonising death.
That meant getting out of that shithole was a priority, so I made for the stairs and started the climb. If there were any answers in that place, it’d be in the apartment where that old man died. The crime scene tape was still hanging off the door frame when I found it, and the TV and sofa, or what remained of them, stood in the same place as in the photos. Back in the day the old man had been a hoarder and I was surprised crime scene hadn’t cleared all his shit out. It was all still there, only what had once been a chest high maze of papers and magazines was now just a kind of hardened pulp, almost like magma dried mid-flow. Whole fucking place was covered in the stuff like a coral reef, growing up the walls and even patches of the ceiling. Looked a hell of a lot like a wasp’s nest, and it looked to be the source of that oily looking fluid. You could see it sweating out of every crease and fold in that strange hive. It was almost hypnotic to look at. Glistening amber beads oozing out of papery sheets that flowed like rock striata. There was a gentle, barely perceptible rhythm. Hypnotic.
I don’t know why but I reached out and ran the tip of my finger as gently as I could along the surface. It felt like the underside of a mushroom. All those papery gills. Gossamer thin. Soft and inviting. I wore no gloves and the brief moment of contact had deposited a single bead of that strange syrup on my fingertip. It caused a tingling sensation that was not entirely unpleasant. Even the blood that trickled down my knuckle felt warm and wet, like testing a hot bath with your hand. I liked it. I liked it and I wanted more.
I went to reach out and push my arm into the nest when a hand burst out of the nest and gripped my wrist. I was so surprised I didn’t even make a noise, but instead wordlessly fell back as the hand pushed me away from the nest. A very nearly skinless forearm followed and soon after a face emerged from the papery nest like a grime covered nightmare. Black eyes and a lipless mouth. It was a man that could have passed for a corpse, like a half-digested piece of meat. Terrified, I struggled to my feet and realised that this person had broken damn near every bone in my wrist with that single grip.
“Your meat smells raw,” he growled before heaving himself out of the nest in a disgusting parody of childbirth.
My sanity flickered and the next thing I knew I was on the ground floor with bleeding eyes and both hands frantically pulling at the door handle. My mind returned in pieces. I blinked red tears away but didn’t stop trying to open the door. I felt it, that urgent need to leave, like a suffocating man feels the need to breathe. But I’d fucked up bad. I’d sniffed out the closet and saw the trap laid there, but hadn’t seen the larger one set for me. There was only one way in and out of that building and I hadn’t jammed the door open! Now it was shut and nothing I did could get it open. With more time maybe I could’ve pried the jamb or even kicked it down, but my heart was racing and my vision blurring. I wanted out of that place. A hot primal need to get the hell out. The air was too hot. My mask too stifling. Sweat condensed on the inner plastic and made it damn near impossible to see. And the pain in my wrist was a throbbing explosion that made sensible thought impossible. I’d realised early on into my little foray that I was underprepared, but the scale of what that meant eluded me until I was there wrestling with thoughts of exposure and contagion and disease, fumbling at a greasy doorknob with a broken hand while suppressing thoughts of what might be crawling up my leg or back or neck. Panic threatened to consume me. The world and all the normality it represented was right fucking there. I could hear it. The distant hum of traffic. The amber glow of streetlights that lit up the biohazard posters. Not thirty minutes ago I’d been there. Safe and far away from this waking nightmare.
I was being reduced to a prey animal. Even in the moment I could sense it happening to me. Being made into something lesser, but it was like my actions were no longer my own. When I finally gave up on the front door, I turned around and saw the shadows way back at the hallway begin to shift as something descended the stairwell. There was no other way out. No door. No window. Just me, a long corridor, and a nightmare coming right at me.
Something inside me gave up. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m still not sure if it was that building and that strange fluid that seemed to warp my own thoughts, or maybe there’s just too much one person can go through. But I could practically hear the thin membrane of my sanity tear as I fell backwards into the door and slid down onto my ass, breathlessly awaiting my terrible fate. I almost contemplated turning off my light but by then it was too late. I could see him coming towards me. He was legless. Nothing from the waist down except blackened viscera trailing up the stairs behind him. He pulled himself towards hand over hand with hungry eyes. Before I knew it he was on top of me, one hand gripping my mouth with a salty palm, the other stroking my hair.
And then in an instant his demeanour changed. He pulled back with a terrified cry and scrambled away like I’d just stuck him with a blade.
“No no no no no,” he muttered. “No no you should have said you should have said I didn’t know I thought you were another one I didn’t know I thought you were here for me I didn’t know you were hers.”
He cowered away, pedalling on both hands backwards while keeping his eyes fixed on me.
“Tell her I did not know you were hers I could not smell until I was close very close if I hurt you I am sorry tell her I am sorry I did not mean to hurt you it is just I do not get to eat often and am always hungry.”
With a rapid gesture he threw the key for the door at me. It skittered across the floor and fell just short of my feet.
“Tell her I did not know.”
“W-w-w-what are you?” I stammered.
He looked at me curiously, stopping his retreat only briefly to gauge my expression.
“She likes to be seen but I looked without asking and I got what I deserve.”
“Who are you talking about?” I asked.
He very nearly laughed, but with such deformities it was mostly a drooling guffaw.
“You know!” he gasped. “Don’t be stupid. You’re in love with her. Just like me. But different. You got permission. I didn’t. But she was good. She left me an old nest to live in. And I have permission to eat anything I kill or trap myself. Hard now that people know to stay away but sometimes I get lucky.”
His eyes flicked to the closet with sickening hunger.
“What has this got to do with her?” I asked.
“What colour are her eyes?” he replied, almost manic with excitement. “Answer. Answer. Tell me. Tell me. What colour are her eyes?”
“G–”
I stopped. The word felt wrong in my mouth.
“Bl–
“Bro–”
“No no,” he chittered. “None of those.”
Seemingly excited but afraid, he raced forward momentarily and gripped my lapels with twisted glee.
“Compound,” he hissed with such forbidden pleasure. “Her eyes are compound. She’s jealous of us, you know?
“Jealous we get to love her.”
And then he disappeared into the darkness and something inside me gave way entirely and I passed out.
I don’t know much of what came after, exactly. I was found a few hours later in my car, idling at a traffic light. I’d made some effort at getting away on my own but didn’t get very far. No surprise here but I got sick as a dog going in that place. A deep chest infection. The kind that scares everyone at least once in their life. Only fair given how fucking stupid I was. But forgive me, I hadn’t anticipated nightmares beyond human comprehension. I challenge anybody to think that fucking far ahead. You think junkies. You think flies. Squatters. But that guy… that man slipping out of the nest and barrelling towards me on two hands. My mind going sizzle pop along with the soles on my boots. In real life, shit like that always sneaks up on you.
So I paid the price. Six months. Jesus. Six long months. I got every fever you can think of. Sepsis. Kidney failure. Liver failure. Month after month drowning in my own fluids, coughing up shit that made the nurses gag and leave. I asked the doctor what the long term effects will be and he winced before reading a list of things that didn’t leave much hope for a happy retirement. And if it was hard on my body, it was even worse on my mind. Those fever dreams… doctors say what I remember in that building, that was all just part of the sickness. Say I spent a good three days in a coma and strange dreams are the norm. Which I might accept if it weren’t the fucking skin graft still healing on my right hand. No one can explain that.
My client visited. Just the once. There are universally sad moments in life and one of them is realising someone you have a lot of affection for doesn’t have it back. They have some. Just not the same amount. It was always one way though, wasn’t it? I saw her every single day but if I was doing my job right, she only saw me once a month for our meetings. Our arrangement ended not long after, so I hope anyway. She left like it was nothing but me… ah Jesus it felt like someone excavated my heart right out. Even after what she told me why she was there, even after what I did, I could barely stand up straight I was so heartbroken. There were times after that I wished the sickness would just take me. Maybe that defeatism is why it got so bad. Who knows?
She came to me looking for a recommendation, of all things. She wasn’t cold. Far from it. But there was a sense of disappointment as she sat beside me and eyed me up.
“I liked the initiative,” she said after a while. “But the results leave me unimpressed.”
“What the fuck happened in that place?” I asked, and even though I could barely hear my own voice, she seemed like she heard every word. For a moment, the way she contemplated it, I thought I was gonna get a straight answer.
“You know my mother said men don’t see ugly women. They know they exist but they just poof them right outta their mind. Like a magic trick. She said we worked better being a little plain. Good enough to take home for a night. Any more and we’d start to leave problems everywhere we go. That guy was a problem. She was trying to warn me about the dangers of attention but silly me, I went and got addicted. I hoped with you there might be a degree of… separation. Infatuation on a contractual basis.”
She took a deep breath like she’d had a long hard day.
“I don’t know. Maybe Mom was right. It’s ridiculous, I suppose. The fly shouldn’t admire the spider. It either sees it and fears it, or doesn’t know what’s coming until it’s too late. I think Mom was telling me to go for the latter. It’s no fun being invisible though. You spent all that time looking at me. Following me. What did you see?”
I looked at her until my eyes watered and something throbbed in my skull.
“I don’t know,” I tried to lie.
“Be honest.”
She looked right at me and something in the air changed. I don’t know what. Hot. Jesus it was hot. Like looking at the sun. I remember the heart rate monitor going nuts and then… then I remember gossamer wings and serrated chitin. A tick on the inside of your cheek. A leech on your tongue. A horsehair worm that won’t leave the skin. And then an instant later my eyes refocused and there was just a normal woman in front of me.
“Someone I could have loved,” I answered, unable to stop the words spilling like vomit. “Someone who I thought deserved love.”
“See,” she said. “Who wouldn’t like your version better?”
I was crying again. Heart racing. World like butter, going soft at the edges. Whatever she did, it was like undergoing brain surgery in real time.
“I’d like a recommendation,” she said after another minute or two of silence. “I’d like to see myself. I look in the mirror and I don’t see what you do. I’d like an artist to paint me. A version of me, at least. It won’t be easy on them. All this time you’ve probably looked directly at me for no more than five, ten minutes in total. Just didn’t realise it. Always the back of my head or my hair obscuring just so. That won’t do. I want a portrait. I want to know what you see.”
“What will you do to them?”
“I won’t do anything. Not intentionally. But if you ask someone to paint the sun, expect them to go blind. Whoever paints me will be painting the sun in their living room. Going blind is the least of their problems. Now, fess up. You know someone. You mentioned them once in passing. A cousin, maybe. An artist in need of cash. I’m sure of it.”
“Why would I tell you anything?”
“Because you love me,” she said. “And because despite everything you will get better and you will come back to me. Year or two, I think. You are adamant I have no hold on you, and you will think that for a long time. And this period of freedom, you’ll enjoy it only by my good grace and mercy. You did a good job. Better than any before. I’ve read your notes and reports over and over and seen details of myself I didn’t even know were there. It’s a thing of beauty, what you did. And one day soon you’ll come back to me with some excuse for why you want the contract to continue.”
I tried to spit the word never but managed, at best, a weak shake of the head. Something that put a most peculiar smile on her face.
“It doesn’t work like that. It’d be like trying to brute force your way through Alzheimer’s. You’ll be back. Even now you’re mine. All mine. I’m just being gentle. And you’re going to give me the name and number of this artist because even though you know I could no more love you than a spider loves the fly, you are desperate to please me. Because when I broke the man in that apartment building. When I tore him in two and told him that he would live for as long as I desired, writhing without air for years and years, drowning in sickly fluids and trapped helplessly in a hive he is determined to maintain even though I wouldn't be caught dead going back there. He was grateful. And, with time, you’ll be grateful too.”
She put the pen in my hand. She smiled, mouthed the word good boy, and God help me…
I gave her my nephew’s number.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.
Being a PI sucks. It’s not what you think. It’s pretty much harassing women. Men hire PIs to go harass their wives and girlfriends and once in a blue moon you get asked to find a missing dog, or to harass a man instead. But that’s it, really. Sometimes I’m looking for hard evidence of infidelity, but a lot of the time my clients just want to rattle the soon-to-be-ex. To make them paranoid and jittery and less reliable in a courtroom, or less likely to pay attention to small print agreements that stiff them out of the holiday home. So that’s my job. I’m a pawn and it is almost always on behalf of the kind of men who think women reading a book in public are secretly looking for male attention.
I don’t have an office. I did for a short while. But things are tough, as I’m sure many of you know, and PI work isn’t exactly lucrative. I don’t know why I’m still doing this job, except to say I’m my own boss, and it’s not easy out there. I went into this with vastly different expectations. If anyone wants to hire someone who was convicted of insurance fraud while training to be a police officer, let me know. Otherwise I’m on my own, following people in cars and sleeping in dingy motels. So when this new job came along, a craigslist ad looking for a guy to stalk them, I just figured it was a fetish thing. I got a nephew who went to art school and makes big bucks painting cartoon characters doing fucked up stuff. He ain’t painting the Sistine Chapel, but he pays the bills and looks after his family. I figure if that work is good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.
So I met the woman who posted the ad and was surprised at how normal she looked. It was in a public place, a park with a nice bench. And even though it was starting to rain a little we didn’t let it bother either of us. We sat there, two tape recorders running, and hashed it out. She said she liked me. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have gotten out of her car. That was flattering coming from her. Good looking woman. Professional. I didn’t know at the time but I’d quickly figure out she was a forensic accountant.
Anyway, we got talking. She never gave me her motivation, but I would later come to understand her as an amateur narcissist. She was new at loving herself. She was smart, accomplished, and actually rather beautiful provided you didn’t spend a great deal of time agonising over things like symmetry or eyebrows, and instead paid attention to how a smile reaches the eyes, or how laughter sounds when it catches someone by surprise. But she grew up dirt poor and spent her teen years unable to visit the dentist, or access a gym, or even just eat home cooked food that wasn’t microwaved. Plump frame, blotchy skin, hair she kept short with a pair of scissors because her and her mother relied on the shampoo and soap they stole from the motel where they shared cleaning shifts. When she fumbled awkward questions at some of the better looking boys in her class, she rarely met with success. That’s not to say she was an outcast, either. She had a social life. It’s just poor kids have to grow up early. Prom’s a luxury. Eating isn’t. If you know, you know. Otherwise you might be surprised by just how fucking tough it can be for some kids in this country. Anyway, she got out of that hole, fought tooth and nail, got an education, a good job, and by the time she finished her victory lap and took stock of her life she was thirty-five years old and a thousand miles from the trailer she was raised in.
And she looked good. The woman in the mirror was a stranger that she wanted to get to know. I think hiring me was an act of self-love. I think if she could have, she would have sat in a car and watched herself get a cup of coffee, spying closely at the professional looking woman doing a little half-run half-skip to get out of the rain. The way she stood in line rocking back and forth on her heels to the music in her airpods thinking no one’d notice. She wanted to admire herself, but unable to time travel or clone herself, she instead resorted to hiring me as a kind of proxy.
I had my own boundaries, of course. They covered anything that was gonna get me in trouble. The gist of the contract, after a nice week spent meeting after work and talking, was that I was to follow her as often as I could and just… observe her. Photos. Videos. Secret recordings. Occasionally a little bit more. Nothing physical. For example, one time I inventoried her handbag after she left it in a taxi by accident. I’m not a photographer, but something about all those knick knacks laid out on a motel bed snapped with a black and white polaroid, it looked good. Like something you’d see in a fancy gallery. Avant garde my nephew would say. She loved it. Paid me a bonus for it and everything.
Anyway, this carried on like this for about six months. They were… interesting times. Tailing her across train stations, racing across open parking lots to install a tracker on her car, standing on a bridge and dropping an air tag in her bag as she walked past. It was a little bit like being a spy. She even paid for me to buy high end equipment. Crazy stuff. One camera, I could sit on my balcony and read the texts on her phone from a block away. Occasionally there were days where I couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up the required intensity. Stalking requires a lot of cardio. When that happened, when I didn’t feel like following her into a crowded place, or sprinting half-way around town following her car, I’d do research. I’d investigate who this woman had once been. I created fake Facebook profiles and tracked down old school friends, spoke to former teachers, lovers, all of that. The whole job was a matter of mapping her out, like she was a country, you know? And a country isn’t just hills and rivers and borders. Countries have history.
She was happy with my initiative. The text she sent me when I showed her the research folder was a glowing commendation. First one I’d had in a long time. It was nice, someone telling me good job. She had a real way of making me feel like a kid getting a gold star. I didn’t realise at the time, but I was putty in her hands. Head over heels, bless my stupid heart. Of course I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I’d had just enough time to grow over confident. I made the mistake of thinking that I wasn’t gonna find anything in her past that’d give me trouble sleeping.
Boy did I get that one fucking wrong.
Her mother. That’s where things took an odd turn. Now I knew from news reports the mother died in their trailer while her daughter was off staying at some boyfriend’s place for a few days. Natural causes, it read. I wanted to know a little more about what natural causes they were. Figured if there was a congenital thing, it seemed like maybe I ought to know. You’d think the way the trailer park owner reacted to me asking about it, I’d tried asking the Russian government for proof of a democratic election. Thin reedy little woman who gave me hell the moment I mentioned a name. What do you wanna know that for? Who’s asking? Who’s paying you? Why you wanna dig this shit up?
Oh she ripped me to pieces. I put it down to the natural sprinkling of crazies in the standard population and took a different tact. Started calling up the older folks in the park. Residents. Every single one of them put the phone down on me the second I mentioned her name.
Well, all of them except one.
Some people wanna talk and this old bastard was one of them. He had a lot to say about everything from the president to social media and I let him ramble on before starting to press my point. Told him at the start I was a historian looking into the local area, that made it so it wasn’t too suspicious when I began asking about this and that. Slowly making my way to the death of a fifty-three year old woman a couple trailers down from him some years ago.
Again, soon as I mentioned her name, there was a change in the air, even over the phone. For a second I thought this old guy was gonna hang up just like the others. Could hear him smacking his dry lips as he mulled it over.
“Francine didn’t deserve what happened to her,” he said after a while. “She wasn’t a good woman. Didn’t treat her daughter too good neither. But didn’t deserve what happened. Maybe if they’d found her earlier, some of those fellas in white coats could’ve got more evidence, put that little wretch of hers away. But from what I understand, weren’t much left of her at all.”
Then he hung up, leaving me with a whole lot of questions.
This frustrated me. I had, until now, had a fair bit of luck at this new profession of mine. They say be careful what you get good at. Sad truth was, I was getting good at stalking and this was my first real roadblock. I remembered the way I felt when she told me good job and it bothered me I couldn’t really say much about this critical part of her life. That and, well, maybe I still got a chip on my shoulder about being a failed policeman. If you give me a problem, I can sometimes drive myself crazy looking for a fix.
So I hopped in my car and drove to the trailer park, damn near on the other side of the country. Don’t know I was hoping to find. No way the trailer was still there, and it wasn’t. But what I found odd was the lot hadn’t been replaced. There was a hole in the ground, about the right size, and nothing else. Just an empty spot where the trailer had once stood. And the trailers on either side weren’t occupied either. I could tell by politely and legally looking through the windows. Most of them were cleared out, but a few weren’t. They still had plates and other knick knacks left hanging around, like the owners had left without bothering to pack.
“You shouldn’t hang around there, mister.”
The girl who appeared stood a good twenty feet away, shouting over the wind so as to be heard.
“Smell can make you awful sick.”
I wrinkled my nose, aware of the odour she was talking about. Had been since I approached the empty lot. A faint musty smell that made me think of an exotic pet shop.
“What do you mean?”
“Smell makes you sick,” she said like it was self-explanatory. “Woman who died there left behind an awful stench. Made the neighbours sick. And the neighbour’s neighbours, and so on for a couple trailers in a row. No one likes to live there now. Still can’t. Had a couple move in a year or two back and they got sick too. Daddy says it’s a bad one. Not even rats go near that hole.”
The smell wasn’t pretty, but this trailer park looked like the kinda place where hubcaps went missing regularly. Figured they would’ve been used to bad smells. What made this one so special?
I looked over at the girl.
“Where is your dad?”
Few minutes later and I was stood outside a trailer waiting pensively. The little girl had disappeared inside to fetch her father and since then I’d been sat listening to the quietest trailer park in the whole world. Crickets and silence. Traffic on a distant highway. Place was dying, that much was clear.
When the father finally did make an appearance, he said nothing for the first few minutes. Lit a cigarette, offered me one. I refused on account of having quit some time back.
After a while he spoke up.
“I’d invite you in but if you been hanging around that old lot, not sure I want you inside my home. No offence.”
“None taken,” I replied.
“Sally says you’re a historian.”
The man wasn’t terribly old. Mid-thirties, at a guess, but he looked me up and down like I was a teenager caught throwing eggs at his house.
“What’re you really?”
“PI,” I replied.
“Ha now that makes sense. Some relative looking for answers? Heard the Hendersons had a sister with money.”
“That’s exactly it,” I lied. “She didn’t buy the official story.”
“Nor should she,” he replied. “Henderson was fit as a fiddle day he moved in. Weren’t no justice in what happened to those who got sick. And poor Francine… They say she died of natural causes. Man even back then I knew it was shit and I was just a lil kid. The smell alone. Think it’s bad now but at the time, before they came in with a crane to lift the trailer up whole and move it to the dump. Shit it was something awful. There was talk of moving the whole park. Course no one gave enough of a shit about us to go ahead and actually do it.”
“What did she die of?”
“Don’t know. Only thing I am sure of is that that girl of Francine’s lied. Said her mother was live and well when she left before the weekend and they was all on good terms, but that was bullshit. We heard ‘em fighting for weeks before, for one. And of course the body, state that was in, ain’t no way it’d been rotting for just a few days.”
He offered me another cigarette. I refused. He lit it up instead. Second one in what felt like just a few minutes. Made me itchy just to see. I wanted to say something, anything to get a little bit more. But I’d told a big lie pretending to be there on someone else’s behalf, and didn’t want to catch myself out, so I just sat and listened to the quiet buzz of his little patio light.
After the second cigarette was done he reached into his back pocket and took out an old photo.
“I hope you find justice for Henderson and the rest of them,” he said. “Only real bit of proof I ever had something fishy went on.”
He handed me the picture. Wasn’t easy to see what I was looking at. Pile of old leaves, maybe. Mulch. I squinted at it for a few good seconds but couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“What…?”
“Took that the day they arrived to get rid of the trailer. Had to stand on my friend’s shoulders just to reach.”
“What is it?” I asked, my skin starting to crawl as I picked out details. Whatever I was looking at, it was slumped on a sofa with floral wallpaper in the background. It was about the size of a man, but riddled with holes and cavities the size of golf balls. In my whole life, I’d never seen something that looked like that.
“Why that’s Francine,” he said. “Or at least what was left of her.”
He let me keep the photo. At a guess, that was the only interesting thing that’d ever happened to that man and he’d been waiting to share it with someone. All I had to do was give him an excuse. He seemed to take some pleasure in passing it on. Certainly found my reaction to it amusing. I must’ve gone pale as I grappled with thoughts of what had happened to make a body go bad like that. Back in the hotel, under a good light, I checked that picture again and again. Something about it made me deeply uncomfortable. Knowing a woman was under all that… all those holes and crevices must’ve been made in her flesh. And what’d happened to her skin that’d turned it such a funny texture? Looked furry, like the kinda thing that grows on top of a long-forgotten cup of coffee.
A part of me considered asking my client about this, but I knew that wasn’t the way to go. First, she probably wouldn’t tell me good job if I had to ask. She hired me to do a certain thing and that didn’t involve politely requesting information right from the source. Second, well… I’d read the police reports, what was publicly available, anyway. And she’d made it clear she’d left on the friday and came home on the Monday and…
Well what if that guy was right? Did she really leave her mother alive and well? I mean, people kill. Not just psychos. People like you and me. We do it every day and sometimes we even pull it off. Only half of US murders get solved. That’s a fact. If anyone could be in the right half of that equation, it’d be her. She was smart as hell, my client. Even at seventeen she would’ve been a clever one. Clever enough that she might easily have been able to cover her tracks. Gone over to some boyfriend, twisted his arm into giving her an alibi. Sure, I could see that.
I just needed to figure out what the fuck was going on with that crime scene in the trailer. Thankfully I got some friends still on the force, one of which I even have a bit of leverage on. At first he couldn’t find much on the actual mother, but then I asked him to see if he could take the photo I had, show it around, and see if anyone had seen something like it before. That proved a lot more fruitful. Few days later he came back with a strange one, but straight away I saw the connection.
I’ll spare the details. Old man was found in a tub, all sorts of fucked up, in some old apartment building. It had since been condemned on account of the body which is fairly weird since bodies don’t usually cause that much fuss, but less weird when you realise that said body was in such a bad state it made three people sick and caused long-lasting structural damage. Whatever happened to this guy, it ate through the tub he’d been lying in and seeped into the floors and walls below. Turned plasterboard to shit and apparently even caused some trouble for the sturdier elements like steel and concrete. I don’t know how that works exactly, but that’s what the file said and going by the photos, I didn’t feel like anyone was lying.
As for the pictures? What can I say? Made my fucking skin crawl. No blurry little polaroid snapped by a kid. These were professional crime scene pictures that showed something in a bathtub that didn’t register as human until my eyes went looking for details. He looked like a hairy paper-wasp’s nest, only there were fingers and nipples and other little things that made it clear it had been built using a person as the framework. No face though. Just a head like a pile of used paper plates. Looking at those photos made me learn a new word just to describe how I felt. Trypophobia.
Wasn’t just the one guy either. Building was linked to the disappearance of the ground floor tenant. Some computer geek. I didn’t worry about him too much. But what did catch my eye was there was only one woman living in the whole place. Second floor apartment. The registered name was… somewhat familiar. Close enough to a certain someone’s that it raised the hairs on my neck. Police at the scene managed to get a photo of her and sure enough, there she was. My client going by a different name. Clearly something fishy was going on or else why the pseudonym? I figured it possible she’d maybe offed her own mother. Parents and spouses make the most common victims. But what connection was there to that second corpse, and what about the missing guy?
It was like a horror movie was following her around and she was just blissfully unaware. Condemned buildings and festering trailers made for a far cry from the professional accountant who enjoyed oat milk lattes and used sweetener instead of sugar to spare her teeth. But there was no denying she was the connection. There was photographic proof she’d lived in that building. If I wanted to get ahead of this, to really understand what was going on, I had to figure out what had happened to those bodies. I’d pretty much exhausted my favours with the police and truth was they didn’t know any more than I did. But it turned out the building was still standing. Condemned, but they hadn’t demolished it, partly because no one wanted to take responsibility, but I reckon it might have had something to do with the biohazard warnings slapped on every single window and door.
Good thing I’d brought a gas mask. I waited for sunset, geared up, and entered through the unlocked door. First thing that hit me as the door swung open was the smell. Similar to the trailer park but full pelt and hot as hell. Made me think of lizards and poorly kept terrariums. Strong enough to make my eyes water even through the mask. One thing was clear as I took a look around the hallway - the building was diseased. Not just rundown or decrepit like the usual urban decay. This was something else. Looked like the inside of a clogged pipe. You know how limescale fills it up? It was a bit like that. This oily rust coloured fluid had seeped down the walls and left them glistening and soft. Ropey stalactites of the stuff hung down from the ceiling like old party banners, and I edged around them afraid of what might happen if one touched me.
Best guess was that stuff was digesting the place. Anything soft or organic was going or gone. Old umbrella frames were left standing in one corner, the fabric burnt or dissolved away. The carpet was reduced to just a few patches no bigger than my hand. And a bunch of old cardboard boxes piled up under the stairs had turned squat and half-liquid, almost flowing down and around each other. The worst came when I took a look in the back room. More of a broom closet, I guess. Wouldn't have gone in but something caught my eye. A well-worn shoe that wasn’t covered in that oily shit. Sign of recent activity. That and the way the door was ajar just raised my suspicions, so I took a look.
Even now the timeline eludes me, but someone, a vagrant most likely given the way they were dressed, died a nasty death in there. Chemical burns come to mind. They were balled up in one corner, eyeless, looking up at me as I pushed the door open to take a closer look. Pink flesh threaded with red blood vessels, yellow bones poking through here and there. From the looks of things they’d been trying to work the door open. You could see a history of their escape attempts left by bleeding hands. Rust coloured finger streaks ran all along the door’s edges, special attention paid to the hinges. And he’d broken the only window and tried hauling himself up there only to realise it was barred from the other side. The jagged glass that still clung to the frame was covered in old blood. His palms must have looked like grated cheese. Eventually he’d given up and lain down in that shit and the thought of it made my chest feel heavy and tight. I’d only been in the building a few minutes and that shit was already eating through my shoes. I could hear the thick rubber soles sizzle and pop with each step. But that guy had been forced to sit down in an inch deep puddle of the stuff, likely because exhaustion had left him no choice but to tough it out. So how long had he tried staying up right?
Hours? Days? Weeks?
Him getting stuck in there had to be deliberate. I was sure of it. A feeling in my gut. Someone had locked the door behind him and left him to die slowly. God only knows why, but did that mean they were still hanging around and waiting for a chance to get to me? Looking around, I sure didn’t feel safe or alone. The shadows seemed too deep and the steady drip drip drip of that rancid oil oozing out of every surface was too monotonous. Someone or something lived in that filth and chances were they’d been responsible for that poor vagrant’s agonising death.
That meant getting out of that shithole was a priority, so I made for the stairs and started the climb. If there were any answers in that place, it’d be in the apartment where that old man died. The crime scene tape was still hanging off the door frame when I found it, and the TV and sofa, or what remained of them, stood in the same place as in the photos. Back in the day the old man had been a hoarder and I was surprised crime scene hadn’t cleared all his shit out. It was all still there, only what had once been a chest high maze of papers and magazines was now just a kind of hardened pulp, almost like magma dried mid-flow. Whole fucking place was covered in the stuff like a coral reef, growing up the walls and even patches of the ceiling. Looked a hell of a lot like a wasp’s nest, and it looked to be the source of that oily looking fluid. You could see it sweating out of every crease and fold in that strange hive. It was almost hypnotic to look at. Glistening amber beads oozing out of papery sheets that flowed like rock striata. There was a gentle, barely perceptible rhythm. Hypnotic.
I don’t know why but I reached out and ran the tip of my finger as gently as I could along the surface. It felt like the underside of a mushroom. All those papery gills. Gossamer thin. Soft and inviting. I wore no gloves and the brief moment of contact had deposited a single bead of that strange syrup on my fingertip. It caused a tingling sensation that was not entirely unpleasant. Even the blood that trickled down my knuckle felt warm and wet, like testing a hot bath with your hand. I liked it. I liked it and I wanted more.
I went to reach out and push my arm into the nest when a hand burst out of the nest and gripped my wrist. I was so surprised I didn’t even make a noise, but instead wordlessly fell back as the hand pushed me away from the nest. A very nearly skinless forearm followed and soon after a face emerged from the papery nest like a grime covered nightmare. Black eyes and a lipless mouth. It was a man that could have passed for a corpse, like a half-digested piece of meat. Terrified, I struggled to my feet and realised that this person had broken damn near every bone in my wrist with that single grip.
“Your meat smells raw,” he growled before heaving himself out of the nest in a disgusting parody of childbirth.
My sanity flickered and the next thing I knew I was on the ground floor with bleeding eyes and both hands frantically pulling at the door handle. My mind returned in pieces. I blinked red tears away but didn’t stop trying to open the door. I felt it, that urgent need to leave, like a suffocating man feels the need to breathe. But I’d fucked up bad. I’d sniffed out the closet and saw the trap laid there, but hadn’t seen the larger one set for me. There was only one way in and out of that building and I hadn’t jammed the door open! Now it was shut and nothing I did could get it open. With more time maybe I could’ve pried the jamb or even kicked it down, but my heart was racing and my vision blurring. I wanted out of that place. A hot primal need to get the hell out. The air was too hot. My mask too stifling. Sweat condensed on the inner plastic and made it damn near impossible to see. And the pain in my wrist was a throbbing explosion that made sensible thought impossible. I’d realised early on into my little foray that I was underprepared, but the scale of what that meant eluded me until I was there wrestling with thoughts of exposure and contagion and disease, fumbling at a greasy doorknob with a broken hand while suppressing thoughts of what might be crawling up my leg or back or neck. Panic threatened to consume me. The world and all the normality it represented was right fucking there. I could hear it. The distant hum of traffic. The amber glow of streetlights that lit up the biohazard posters. Not thirty minutes ago I’d been there. Safe and far away from this waking nightmare.
I was being reduced to a prey animal. Even in the moment I could sense it happening to me. Being made into something lesser, but it was like my actions were no longer my own. When I finally gave up on the front door, I turned around and saw the shadows way back at the hallway begin to shift as something descended the stairwell. There was no other way out. No door. No window. Just me, a long corridor, and a nightmare coming right at me.
Something inside me gave up. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m still not sure if it was that building and that strange fluid that seemed to warp my own thoughts, or maybe there’s just too much one person can go through. But I could practically hear the thin membrane of my sanity tear as I fell backwards into the door and slid down onto my ass, breathlessly awaiting my terrible fate. I almost contemplated turning off my light but by then it was too late. I could see him coming towards me. He was legless. Nothing from the waist down except blackened viscera trailing up the stairs behind him. He pulled himself towards hand over hand with hungry eyes. Before I knew it he was on top of me, one hand gripping my mouth with a salty palm, the other stroking my hair.
And then in an instant his demeanour changed. He pulled back with a terrified cry and scrambled away like I’d just stuck him with a blade.
“No no no no no,” he muttered. “No no you should have said you should have said I didn’t know I thought you were another one I didn’t know I thought you were here for me I didn’t know you were hers.”
He cowered away, pedalling on both hands backwards while keeping his eyes fixed on me.
“Tell her I did not know you were hers I could not smell until I was close very close if I hurt you I am sorry tell her I am sorry I did not mean to hurt you it is just I do not get to eat often and am always hungry.”
With a rapid gesture he threw the key for the door at me. It skittered across the floor and fell just short of my feet.
“Tell her I did not know.”
“W-w-w-what are you?” I stammered.
He looked at me curiously, stopping his retreat only briefly to gauge my expression.
“She likes to be seen but I looked without asking and I got what I deserve.”
“Who are you talking about?” I asked.
He very nearly laughed, but with such deformities it was mostly a drooling guffaw.
“You know!” he gasped. “Don’t be stupid. You’re in love with her. Just like me. But different. You got permission. I didn’t. But she was good. She left me an old nest to live in. And I have permission to eat anything I kill or trap myself. Hard now that people know to stay away but sometimes I get lucky.”
His eyes flicked to the closet with sickening hunger.
“What has this got to do with her?” I asked.
“What colour are her eyes?” he replied, almost manic with excitement. “Answer. Answer. Tell me. Tell me. What colour are her eyes?”
“G–”
I stopped. The word felt wrong in my mouth.
“Bl–
“Bro–”
“No no,” he chittered. “None of those.”
Seemingly excited but afraid, he raced forward momentarily and gripped my lapels with twisted glee.
“Compound,” he hissed with such forbidden pleasure. “Her eyes are compound. She’s jealous of us, you know?
“Jealous we get to love her.”
And then he disappeared into the darkness and something inside me gave way entirely and I passed out.
I don’t know much of what came after, exactly. I was found a few hours later in my car, idling at a traffic light. I’d made some effort at getting away on my own but didn’t get very far. No surprise here but I got sick as a dog going in that place. A deep chest infection. The kind that scares everyone at least once in their life. Only fair given how fucking stupid I was. But forgive me, I hadn’t anticipated nightmares beyond human comprehension. I challenge anybody to think that fucking far ahead. You think junkies. You think flies. Squatters. But that guy… that man slipping out of the nest and barrelling towards me on two hands. My mind going sizzle pop along with the soles on my boots. In real life, shit like that always sneaks up on you.
So I paid the price. Six months. Jesus. Six long months. I got every fever you can think of. Sepsis. Kidney failure. Liver failure. Month after month drowning in my own fluids, coughing up shit that made the nurses gag and leave. I asked the doctor what the long term effects will be and he winced before reading a list of things that didn’t leave much hope for a happy retirement. And if it was hard on my body, it was even worse on my mind. Those fever dreams… doctors say what I remember in that building, that was all just part of the sickness. Say I spent a good three days in a coma and strange dreams are the norm. Which I might accept if it weren’t the fucking skin graft still healing on my right hand. No one can explain that.
My client visited. Just the once. There are universally sad moments in life and one of them is realising someone you have a lot of affection for doesn’t have it back. They have some. Just not the same amount. It was always one way though, wasn’t it? I saw her every single day but if I was doing my job right, she only saw me once a month for our meetings. Our arrangement ended not long after, so I hope anyway. She left like it was nothing but me… ah Jesus it felt like someone excavated my heart right out. Even after what she told me why she was there, even after what I did, I could barely stand up straight I was so heartbroken. There were times after that I wished the sickness would just take me. Maybe that defeatism is why it got so bad. Who knows?
She came to me looking for a recommendation, of all things. She wasn’t cold. Far from it. But there was a sense of disappointment as she sat beside me and eyed me up.
“I liked the initiative,” she said after a while. “But the results leave me unimpressed.”
“What the fuck happened in that place?” I asked, and even though I could barely hear my own voice, she seemed like she heard every word. For a moment, the way she contemplated it, I thought I was gonna get a straight answer.
“You know my mother said men don’t see ugly women. They know they exist but they just poof them right outta their mind. Like a magic trick. She said we worked better being a little plain. Good enough to take home for a night. Any more and we’d start to leave problems everywhere we go. That guy was a problem. She was trying to warn me about the dangers of attention but silly me, I went and got addicted. I hoped with you there might be a degree of… separation. Infatuation on a contractual basis.”
She took a deep breath like she’d had a long hard day.
“I don’t know. Maybe Mom was right. It’s ridiculous, I suppose. The fly shouldn’t admire the spider. It either sees it and fears it, or doesn’t know what’s coming until it’s too late. I think Mom was telling me to go for the latter. It’s no fun being invisible though. You spent all that time looking at me. Following me. What did you see?”
I looked at her until my eyes watered and something throbbed in my skull.
“I don’t know,” I tried to lie.
“Be honest.”
She looked right at me and something in the air changed. I don’t know what. Hot. Jesus it was hot. Like looking at the sun. I remember the heart rate monitor going nuts and then… then I remember gossamer wings and serrated chitin. A tick on the inside of your cheek. A leech on your tongue. A horsehair worm that won’t leave the skin. And then an instant later my eyes refocused and there was just a normal woman in front of me.
“Someone I could have loved,” I answered, unable to stop the words spilling like vomit. “Someone who I thought deserved love.”
“See,” she said. “Who wouldn’t like your version better?”
I was crying again. Heart racing. World like butter, going soft at the edges. Whatever she did, it was like undergoing brain surgery in real time.
“I’d like a recommendation,” she said after another minute or two of silence. “I’d like to see myself. I look in the mirror and I don’t see what you do. I’d like an artist to paint me. A version of me, at least. It won’t be easy on them. All this time you’ve probably looked directly at me for no more than five, ten minutes in total. Just didn’t realise it. Always the back of my head or my hair obscuring just so. That won’t do. I want a portrait. I want to know what you see.”
“What will you do to them?”
“I won’t do anything. Not intentionally. But if you ask someone to paint the sun, expect them to go blind. Whoever paints me will be painting the sun in their living room. Going blind is the least of their problems. Now, fess up. You know someone. You mentioned them once in passing. A cousin, maybe. An artist in need of cash. I’m sure of it.”
“Why would I tell you anything?”
“Because you love me,” she said. “And because despite everything you will get better and you will come back to me. Year or two, I think. You are adamant I have no hold on you, and you will think that for a long time. And this period of freedom, you’ll enjoy it only by my good grace and mercy. You did a good job. Better than any before. I’ve read your notes and reports over and over and seen details of myself I didn’t even know were there. It’s a thing of beauty, what you did. And one day soon you’ll come back to me with some excuse for why you want the contract to continue.”
I tried to spit the word never but managed, at best, a weak shake of the head. Something that put a most peculiar smile on her face.
“It doesn’t work like that. It’d be like trying to brute force your way through Alzheimer’s. You’ll be back. Even now you’re mine. All mine. I’m just being gentle. And you’re going to give me the name and number of this artist because even though you know I could no more love you than a spider loves the fly, you are desperate to please me. Because when I broke the man in that apartment building. When I tore him in two and told him that he would live for as long as I desired, writhing without air for years and years, drowning in sickly fluids and trapped helplessly in a hive he is determined to maintain even though I wouldn't be caught dead going back there. He was grateful. And, with time, you’ll be grateful too.”
She put the pen in my hand. She smiled, mouthed the word good boy, and God help me…
I gave her my nephew’s number.