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Season 10 “Days of Fury” - Episode 2 “Visiting Omen”

He had hoped for a boring day. Boring days are good at work, and Santos was already expecting to not have many of them for a while.
The first couple of days were boring, as usual- Blackriver is a small town, and the worst that had happened was Nila and Kessa making a few wellness checks after worried calls from neighbors. A couple of people in denial, a few ashamed at their own violent outbursts and a stern warning to Tamm about painting others’ properties without asking first.
This morning, however, began with an all-hands meeting. There were no meeting rooms in the office, so they made do in the general workspace room, they all stood there at the center while Keya looked them over.
“We have received a report from a neighboring city about a convoy of protestors making its way to Blackriver” she describes without tone. At this point nobody bothers interrupting.
“This convoy is comprised of approximately four hundred and seventy eight individuals of multiple species, primarily human and venlil but with operationally relevant representations of the entire spectrum of size and mobility types” her paws are behind her back, her ears focused directly ahead, her eyes centered to keep the entire team on the core of her focus “They have crossed multiple cities already, generally engaging in verbal sparring with any figure of authority, parading signs and banners denouncing all manners of authorities as well as occasionally engaging in physical altercations with officers.”
“They are also known to engage in vandalism. Though primarily aimed at exterminator and police precincts as well as public offices, they have already caused considerable collateral to others they have identified as ‘collaborators’” there’s a single heartbeat of waiting for breath before she continues “They have, however, not shown to be an incredibly organized group or one with a clear goal and objective. The convoy appears to contain only extremely emotionally charged people with no clear overarching goal.”
“We are incapable of dealing with the situation should they turn aggressive, as such we will be simply maintaining watch and relocating the populace should they become a problem.” Then, she picks up her holopad and passes it to Lunek beside her “They can only follow one path with the entire convoy, the central street, therefore I have divided it into four sectors. One of each will be assigned to a sector.”
First her ears turn to the first target “Lunek, sector one at the entrance. As the most approachable member of the precinct your task is to give an initial image of harmlessness. Do not engage first, do not take initiative against them. Ensure the members of the herd in the area are warned of their approach. If they become aggressive, retreat and focus on the escape of the herd.”
She tilts her head a little bit, turning her ears the other way “Marik, sector two. Mostly the commercial area, your task is ostensive protection to lower the chances of them initiating aggression. Whereas protection of the herd is first priority your second priority is ensuring Tenve’s Hardware Store as well as Sunbreeze Meals and Watchful Café remain capable of providing anyone whose residences become damaged.” suddenly, she turns her head entirely to face Marik “Ostensive protection means dissuasion, ensure that they know they are not under threat and as long as those specific areas are not engaged, do not provoke”
Next in her line of fire is Santos “As our human officer you will be in sector three, nearby the precinct. They are liable to become most agitated in this area and your presence may serve to calm them. You are not to engage, if deemed necessary the precinct’s materials are considered expendable, do not attempt to stop them”
“Sector four, the exit of town, will be with me to ensure that they have fully left Blackriver and will not attempt to turn back” then she tilts her ears again “Aren, you will gear up with a CCG and remain out of view range, your task will be quick emergency response should the need arise.” she then points her tail at the last three officers “Vess, your task will be to inform the herd and ensure a clear path for the convoy while Nila and Kessa will gather all of our medical supplies and set a staging area out of the convoy’s range. Organize ambulance assistance from Striped Hill and Everrain”
Then, she turns her ears around to focus each one in turn “As any attempt at aggression will end only in negative consequences, and in order to reduce the apparent levels of threat you will be unarmed. The estimated time of arrival is a third of a claw, ready yourselves and be at your post in time. Dismissed.”
“Not sure if I like or I don’t that we had the cold bastard right now” Aren says, as soon as Keya had left the room “Maybe we should move in closer when the convoy gets to sector four?”
“Probably a good idea to be nearby” Santos adds with a sigh “They might take umbrage with her demeanor, hopefully they won’t be set off too hard.”
And with silent signs of agreement all of the officers of Blackriver depart for preparations. The first ones to leave the precinct are the ones in charge of support, the two girls set off early to find someone willing to permit usage of their lawn as a possible impromptu field hospital and a little while later Aren leaves with a heavy CCG.
Slowly, the clock ticks to the appointed claw… And soon enough, Lunek can see in the distance the incoming omen of people. At first a distant line in the horizon, slowly the dark mark on the road coalesces into distinct shapes, the shapes of hundreds of vehicles slowly rolling down the road.
When the first few get close to the initial buildings of the main street, the entire convoy slows down. Their process of preparation is seemingly laborious, each vehicle houses multiple people at a time, smaller cars full to the brim, flatbeds with more people on their cargo space than can safely be contained, even buses conscripted for the effort. They carry with them signs, flags, a multitude of symbols as they dismount their vehicles and start spreading out to fill the street.
They seem to naturally form two distinct yet highly mixed groups, at its most distinctive is the pack of humans who keep a good distance from each other. But they are not alone in this group as takkan, mazic, yotul, zurulian and even drilvar form this central group. But flowing around them, not avoiding their presence but never infringing in their space is the grey mass of venlil, packed tight together, and mixed in there adding color to the monochromatic flux are krakotl, tilfish, sulean, iftali, sivkit and even a seemingly very confused duerten.
And at the very core of the moving group are their vehicles, which gently start rolling forward again as the group starts moving. Lunek simply waits, silently, by the side of the road, his ears attentively swiveling from one side to the other, expression having given way to function. Before the first of the convoy even arrives close he turns to the side, making a pointing sign with his tail. A woman who had been watching from her yard flicks her right ear and runs back inside.
He continues to wait, scanning around at all times for the presence of… Anything. The street is empty of locals when the first visitors start to alight. The convoy is loud, their symbols carry a loudness of colors and their vehicles make as much noise as they can to draw attention, but those who walk seem content in allowing their tools to speak for them, for now. Lunek tries to make sense of the banners and signs, but the messages are disparate as the group- Some speak of injustices against their people, some speak of anger at invaders, some speak of betrayal.
“Fuck off, fireman!” comes the harsh bark of a human, causing Lunek to flinch. But flinch is all he does, he simply starts walking alongside the moving convoy.
The exterminator’s attention is drawn to the details of the few people he can distinguish amongst the mass. Something tickles at his pattern-recognition but he cannot quite ascertain what for a while, until a lightly limping mazic makes her way to the edge of the mass “Want to finish the job?!” she trumpets, her form towering over his.
“I’m just observing, ma’am.” Though the tremor of his voice is noticeable, he remains stoic. But her proximity makes him notice something about her body, marks in her wrists, neck and feet. Though mazic have powerful wrists and knuckles upon which they support the front half of their weight, her left wrist seems completely incapable of it, giving her a limp particular to a three-point walk. “To make sure there’s no impediment on your path” he notices the leathery skin around her left wrist is deeply blackened.
“Oh, ‘no impediment’ is that it? So everyone that lives here is an impediment?!” her voice booms.
“Ma’am” still, he does not yield nor does he break his pace following the convoy “We have not done anything other than inform our people of your presence…” for a half second all he hears is the sound of his own heart “We can’t do anything else.”
Those words, then, sealed his fate. The first shout to echo in his direction was a yotul howling “Yeah you’re useless!” and soon the avalanche came in multiple voices and languages “Can’t do shit!” “You’re just here to hurt people!” “Useless crap!” “Idiot!” and many more.
With every step and twitch the very average exterminator puts all of his focus on just being there. He lets himself cower a little bit, against the barrage it is difficult not to, but he continues to accompany. A few curious coats step out from their houses to watch, but the front of the convoy seems far too focused on the sole exterminator in view to bother anyone else.
A few steps ahead, an older venlil with a cane has moved the closest to the convoy as any watcher has up to now. Seeing her proximity to the increasingly rowdy crowd causes Lunek to speed up, quickly approaching her “Leva-”
But his words are stalled when she puts a paw on his shoulder, she gently puts her head against his for just a second “You’re doing good pup, keep at it” she mutters to him before breaking contact and turning around to walk back inside. He can spy her grandchildren looking on through the door. Lunek looks back at the still-shouting moving convoy, takes a deep breath, and continues to accompany them forward. A small pawful of them, however, seem to have fallen silent.
Once having reached the limit of his assigned zone, however, Lunek stops. He watches the convoy move forward, past the houses, now noisier than before. The initial hollering at him had turned into disjointed screams at some indistinct foe- Though the herd had been noticed of a foe, it was yet unaware of who, or what, said foe was. So for now it howled at the ineptitude of… Someone. And as the last of the convoy passes beyond the imaginary line of his duty, Lunek lets out a deep sigh and allows himself to sit down on the ground.
He stays there for a moment, without thought, simply letting the tension, confusion and fear permeate his body until a gentle paw touches his arm. He doesn’t need to look to identify it, he lets his lover use her strength to prop him up, raising him to his feet “Keina you shouldn’t-”
“Neighbor’s looking over Tiss” his wife wraps her arms and tail around him “I’m not leaving you alone.” she stays like that for a second, before breaking off “Do you need to go after them?”
“No”
Marik stalks through the sidewalk, moving with energy. His speed outpaces the movement of the convoy, his paws twitch to grasp at something that isn’t there and a deep and intense motion makes his short fur stand on end. He had let the convoy’s head move in front of him, simply standing still as he assessed as many as he could in the mass, and now he had begun to move towards the front again.
As he stalked forward he focused his sight on every member of the convoy that seemed of interest. A human whose clothes seemed suspiciously loose, a venlil whose movements were far too stiff, a gojid who kept his claws behind his back. He stared at each like they were his quarry, analyzing every piece of movement they made for threats, and yet aside from the challenge in the human’s gaze he saw no danger arise.
Tenve had closed his shop, so as the convoy moved forward Marik simply continued to follow along, scanning the crowd for threats. But the next point of interest arrives, and he rushes ahead placing himself in front of the only restaurant of the town. Sunbreeze Meals wasn’t a very common sort of restaurant, Blackriver did not have enough visitors for a normal restaurant to be profitable and was small enough most people had their meals at home, it most often served takeout for those farmers who’d spend so long in the field they would return home without the energy to feed themselves.
Sparing a look inside at the only five tables, Marik couldn’t keep a small thought away from his mind. How most who got their meals from Sunbreeze these days did so because they enjoyed the cooking rather than their need of work, ever since the sunspeck population has been brought under control and the maintenance of the fields had become much smaller. He feels the presence long before he can recognize what led him to feel it and turns to stare at a group of six that approach the entrance: Two humans, a tilfish, two gojids and a takkan had broken off from the convoy and approached the restaurant.
He traces his color band over each in turn, and they all bristle at his stare. One of the humans hesitates before continuing to walk inside, and Marik simply remains by the door with his arms crossed, left ear twisted as far back as he could to listen to the inside.
“What have you got here?”
“W-we mostly ha-have ready ma-made meals to go or- or- Or you can look over the menu”
“There’s no need to stutter, y’know”
“So-sorry-”
“Really, after everything y’all are still with this predator crap?”
The chimes on the door echo for the second time in sequence as Marik makes his way inside. The tilfish had started to lean over the counter while the other five had arrayed themselves behind her. They all turn their attention to him as he enters, including the venlil manning the counter. Marik keeps his gaze directly on the tilfish for a few uncomfortable seconds, before looking at the man behind the counter and making a simple sign with his tail, a short vertical bob with the tip and a slow horizontal swipe. It’s meaning simple: >Safe<.
After a few seconds someone else appears from the kitchen. The tall venlil carries a large stack of plastic boxes in his arms, all of them seemingly designed to attach to themselves so as to be carried with ease. He puts them down with a resounding crash on the counter, and opens up his voice with ice “Farmer’s Pots, good meal when you’re working and can’t go home.” With each word the owner of the restaurant and main cook comes closer and closer to the tilfish, until the last “Ten credits each.”
Nobody moves for a couple of seconds, and then one of the humans steps closer and brings a holopad over to the credit reader. There’s a noise indicating payment, and then the owner raises his head and tilts it to focus his favored eye and both of his ears at the man who paid “Now,” he shifts register in his voice and the language he speaks in “fuck off” he finishes.
With no small amount of surprise the group of six retrieve the stack of packaged meals, carefully walking out and back into the convoy. Marik stays behind for a moment “Didn’t know you spoke human”
“Pup’s enamored with their languages. Of course, first greek words he learns is swearing.”
Outside, Marik stalks further ahead to the next point of interest. He moves faster than the convoy, and has time to move in front of it. For a few meters the street is still clear as he arrives to find a group of people standing in front of the Watchful. Standing there were all of its employees, and even all of its regulars, twenty people total standing there as if they were having the most normal day. If not for their raised ears tracking every noise coming from down the street and their swaying tails swinging about like angry beasts.
One of them simply points his tail at the other side of the street as Marik comes closer, and the hunter doesn’t need a second command to understand the meaning. They have this, he has a less practical but just as important duty. He crosses the street quickly before the convoy starts coming closer, and heads towards the park.
As the regulars of the Watchful had feared, it took little time until a large group had broken off from the convoy. With the town on alert about the convoy they had found themselves bereft of prey and now this group had set out to find some, anyone who might be willing, or not, to listen to their grievances. And what is clearly a place designed for people to congregate looked most appetizing.
Marik shadowed the group as they moved through the park, but they were accompanied by nothing but silence. It wasn’t until they ran into the centerpiece of the park that he took initiative, stepping ahead of the group and simply… Standing there a distance away from the tree of many scions, between it and the group.
“What’s so important over there, fireman?” it was a venlil who asked, but his usage of an english word was not lost on Marik.
“A place you will respect” the exterminator has his arms crossed, the one good portion of his gaze set on the man who asked “This is a grave.”
Though the group that now prowled was large, those who heard were taken aback. One such, however, approaches closer. He was a venlil whose fur shifted between a soft, brownish color and a dirty white “A tradition of the tenets right? One of those family trees?” The man would have been distinctive in any other group due to his missing patches of fur around neck, wrists, even portions around his head. But such signs of long term damage were common in the convoy.
Interest. They had shown true interest, or at least one of them had. “No, but similar… The forgotten tree is a grave for the forgotten.” He felt like these people, at least the ones before him, could probably understand the meaning of this place “It is of no tradition. Someone, a long time ago, wanted to honor someone who was gone but whose name was not meant to be remembered. Someone who had disappeared in the system… So they borrowed on another’s tradition, and added a scion to this tree, with something in their memory. Others have done so similarly, until it became… A grave for the forgotten”
“Didn’t think you’d be worried about this kind of place” it’s a human that speaks up this time
“Our duty is to protect this town, what you think-” but Marik’s words are interrupted by that same venlil who had asked before. His demeanor suddenly shifts, his ears perk up and his entire body shifts forward for a moment. He hesitates, for a second everyone’s focus is on him, and then he runs towards the tree.
Marik follows behind, stopping just by the man’s side as he finds himself at the base of the tree. The man makes a direct line to somewhere, something he had found from the distance, as if it had called him. He finds a thick and heavy branch that had been bent down by the weight of its scions and memories, near its base and speaking of a memory left behind long ago is a braid of fur made of three colors, a dirty white, a soft brown and a dark grey, bound by the braids are two beads.
The man raises up a paw, but does not touch it. As if cradling it, he recites the words engraved in one of the beads “I will cross every star to return home” others have come closer to listen to the man’s hoarse voice “There will always be a home for you” he reads of the second one. The names on the beads have been scratched out. The man falls on his knees “S-she kept her promise and… I couldn’t keep mine…”
Marik steps back as he watches two others come closer to comfort the man. He looks as a few others approach with more caution, looking up at the tree with a bit more reverence than they had before. Then, he turns around and starts heading back towards the main street.
Gazing out as the convoy gains a new flux, some leave it as it passes to move towards the park while others leave the park to rejoin the convoy, Marik simply stays there at the side of the street looking as stern as he could. Though the noise of the convoy remains great, here in this portion it seems to die down a little. A thought crosses his mind as he turns an ear as far back as he can, a thought he can’t help but voice “I wonder how many are looking at their own graves…”
As the convoy progresses, Santos simply stands by the front of the precinct, hands in his pockets. He watches the convoy arrive, heart beating fast, constrained hands the only reason he hasn't started shaking quite yet. He starts tapping his right foot as he watches the first few people cross by without noticing what this place is yet, everyone knows where the precinct is, so aside from the words printed on the sign by the entrance there is no other marker of what this building’s purpose might be.
Of course, it is impossible for nobody to notice. The entire convoy seems to stop as soon as a zurulian riding on the shoulders of a human points a claw at the building and says something. A large group breaks away at the command, all of them holding disparate signs and messages. They turn on the building with enough roars that whatever they are attempting to transmit is lost on him.
Santos is thankful his hearing isn’t nearly as good as his coworkers’, as the cacophony is already overwhelming him. He changes stances slightly, taking his hands out of his pockets and crossing his arms. This prompts a small group to turn their looks at him, the focus easily identifiable with the humans in their midst, focus which made the hair in the back of Santos’ neck stand on end. Living in this place had refined his sense of danger, but he didn’t need that to realize what could happen.
It was a group of five that approached, four humans and a venlil. “Didn’t think they’d be letting humans live out here in the boonies” said one of his kin.
Santos just shrugs “Got hired to work here. Honestly, rural folk get a needlessly bad reputation, most of the time they just don’t care as long as you’re not bothering them”
“Really? In my-”
Santos interrupts the man “Cut it out” there are many ways in which humans make themselves obvious, many of which are their eyes. Santos did understand the fear of them and why it was primal, it was not the fear of the eyes but the fear of attention, it was knowing you were under the scrutiny and judgment of another that set off that emotion. It was rarely the eyes that showed this attention for most species, but for humans it was, and the man’s clear gaze on his badge made the entire situation clear to him “Stop beating around the bush and say it already.”
Someone else is who speaks. The tall woman starts not with words, however, but by spitting on Santos’ uniform “You fucking traitor” her voice is both fierce and cold at the same time. A very emotional coldness.
“There we go” he sighs “Just… Move on. We’re not getting anything out of this conversation”
“Why?” It was the venlil in the group that started this time “These people hate you, they hate you for what you are! Why do you work for them?!”
Santos rubs his eyes and sighs “Because someone has to. Change only happens when you make it happen, simple as that”
“Change?!” another one of the humans howls “Do you think those people can change?! You know the truth, those fuckers have never done anything good!”
“You know, if you had read your history books…” Santos stares at the one who had just had their outburst “You’d remember that we once thought the very same about the police” there’s the sound of glass breaking, but he doesn’t reaction “And a lot of us still do”
The human staring him down shifts their gaze slightly at the broken window of the precinct, then back at Santos “A broken window is easy to fix” he shrugs “As I was saying. Same shit.” he crosses his arms again “There’s a role those people play, a role that needs to be played because it’s important. Different name, different problems, still the same shit. Gotta fix this, I’m doing my part” he then stares at the venlil in the group “You do yours. Simple as that.”
“Role?!” the venlil of the group steps closer “What role could they possibly have?! They only exist to hurt people!”
Santos steps back, and raises his eyes a little bit. Of course, the classics had shown themselves in this instance. With as many humans as there are in the crowd there were now quite a few objects in the air, most clearly aimed at the precinct behind him. Though given the failed arc of some of them it was clearly not just the humans indulging in such a tried and true method.
“I used to be a wildlife preserve ranger” Santos then focuses his gaze on the aggravated venlil “This is a frontier town, if you walk in the brushes with shorts you’ll walk out with your ankles numb. The athai out there are rather harmless, but they keep the sunspecks under control.” He takes another step back “Since coming here I’ve been pest control, had to catch an exotic animal set loose, investigated a murder, helped stop a child from taking her own life, stopped large scale fights, helped a dozen people avoid being arrested for self defense and helped break a fucking siege”
Santos cracks his knuckles “There’s roles. Jobs that need done and there is one fucking organization doing it all. That is a problem.” Then, he sighs and takes a few more steps to the side, offering indifference from this point on “There’s nothing I can say that would make you calm down.” he says one final time “Just make sure not to injure yourselves in the process, alright?” His words seemed to be enough to make the small group cease trying to interact, as the convoy had begun moving again. Though the one human who had called him a traitor gets one final parting shot at the precinct “Where the hell did you get an egg in this planet…” Santos says with a raised eyebrow as the projectile impacts the front door.
Keya stands by a large sign, the same one that welcomes you into Blackriver on one side and sees you out at the other, the official limit of the town. Her arms behind her back, her attention directly towards the front of the convoy as they march. Something gains the whole of her attention, the car in the front. Someone draws her focus, a human with a megaphone on top of the car. The man shouts words of encouragement at the people behind him with the megaphone before turning to his holopad, then he bends over downwards to discuss something with the driver.
She simply remains there, waiting for the convoy to pass. But instead of moving on out of the city, here the convoy stops completely. Keya observes as the further end of the convoy starts to slowly compact upon itself, and her ears pick up something “Alright everyone, start getting ready, next town over is more than a claw away, make sure you’ve left nothing behind” the words were not meant for her, nor for anyone too far. They come from the same man she had seen standing on top of the car, but he had now climbed down and was talking with a group of multiple species.
It is clear they have some degree of leadership, though the convoy does not stop cleanly nor does it begin to organize with alacrity they do respond to the group’s organization. So Keya keeps her focus on them as they point, wave and talk between themselves, others and devices. But at least one of them has noticed her attention, a gangly and light-skinned human with fire-red hair, the man that was atop the car. He starts walking in her direction, before turning around for one final set of commands as he walks backwards “And make sure the guys at the back got all the crap! We’re here to be heard, not to trash the city!” he says before turning back again to head towards her. A venlil with pure white fur erupts from inside the car he was riding, quickly dashing to his side as they notice where he was going.
In a few moments both have come up to her, the human looking down at her with the venlil bristles at his side “Saw anything interesting, fireman?”
“What are you doing here?”
“What? Isn’t it obvious?!” it was the venlil that roared a response “You saw all of it! You know what they’ve done to us! What they’ve done to everyone! And you still work for those brahking monsters! It’s like you’re thankful they made you a cripple!”
The human puts a hand on the venlil’s shoulder, calming her demeanor just a little bit “We’re here because honestly, we’re all too tired of being fucking ignored is what. So what the fuck are you gonna do?!”
“I have put the wrong emphasis” Keya says with her lack of tone. She can see the human shiver just a little bit “My task is to ensure the safety of this town. Your convoy is a danger. We have eight field-capable officers, we cannot ensure the safety of the residents against a group like yours. People will take actions for reasons, you have broadcast your reasons clearly. You have chosen this place for a reason which I cannot ascertain.”
She makes sure her ears are trained towards both the human and the venlil, an action which causes the venlil to cower behind her partner “We do not house government agencies. This is a farming town of little note. The local precinct is a simple precinct, we have no regulatory or command authority. The town population is approximately double that of the number of your convoy. We have no individuals of appreciable social or political reach. There is nothing in Blackriver of interest to people attempting to change government policy, nor have there been actions taken here that I can identify as being cause for retaliatory actions within the context of your message.”
“I must ensure this does not happen again and the only way of doing so is minimizing our attractivity as targets. A logical assumption of your choice of quarry would be a town with the presence of politicians, a large city with constant news coverage, cities housing important government agencies or those containing the Regional Firebases”
“So I ask again. What are you doing here?”
The two remain silent for a few seconds, before the human turns around with a mouth noise “Whatever, I don’t need to explain myself to someone that won’t listen. Come on!” he starts to stalk back towards the car, but stops once he notices his venlil companion wasn’t moving.
The snow-white venlil has their focus on Keya, who offers a simple low forward swipe of her tail, a sign to proceed. Still, the venlil seems frozen in place until the human comes back and grabs hold of their paw with a gentle touch. At which point both finally return to the convoy.
Keya remains at the side of the road, watching as the convoy readies itself again to leave. People get back inside cars, they hop on the back of trucks and load themselves into buses. She continues to watch as the convoy takes its time riding out, making their way out of the town.
Once it is finally gone, multiple footsteps sound behind her. When she turns around she meets her officers, having returned from their assigned positions “They have left. I expect your reports of what happened in each sector by the end of your shifts” she states plainly, before looking at Santos “They did not appear to have a specific reason for targeting Blackriver.” The question remains unspoken.
The human officer just shrugs “Sometimes, you don’t know what you’re doing. We’re just a little town, I doubt they even know what exactly they’re angry about.” He looks at the tail end of the convoy as it leaves “Town was probably just a place they felt safe going to.”
“D-do you think we might get more like that” Lunek says, at the back of the group.
“Who knows…” Santos sighs “But if human history applies anywhere here… This is just a sign of worse things to come”
[ [FIRST] [NEXT>]
And thus the omen passes by. Feelings, emotions of all sorts, without a plan or a reason other than just their own rage and distress.
Did any of these even know what they were doing? And how much worse can it be when they do?

Article text due to paywall:

World’s Biggest Construction Project Gets a Reality Check

Saudi Arabia’s plans for twin 105-mile-long skyscrapers have lost momentum amid spiraling costs and construction glitches

*By Elliott Brown and Rory Jones
The engineers saw a mountain-sized problem.
For weeks, thousands of trucks and diggers had worked 24 hours every day, scooping millions of cubic feet of sand at the world’s biggest construction project known as Neom in Saudi Arabia. But the workers had dumped the massive pile of dirt—now hundreds of feet wide—in the very spot where architects planned to dig a waterway out to the Red Sea.
So, the trucks and diggers went back to work, picking it all back up and making a new mountain of sand nearby in a costly hiccup that epitomizes the Saudi project’s turbulent journey from an audacious concept to a sprawling operation that has faltered in its execution.
Defying skeptics, Saudi Arabia is barreling ahead with hundreds of billions of dollars in projects at Neom, a built-from-scratch region the size of Massachusetts, typified by sci-fi architecture, an arid ski resort and a laundry list of flashy projects meant to attract a population larger than New York City’s.
None is more brazen than a multitrillion-dollar pair of skyscrapers taller than the Empire State Building designed to run 105 miles long and house nine million people, the flagship development dubbed “The Line.” Its champion, Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, has likened the project to Egypt’s Great Pyramids.
The kingdom in recent months downsized the Line’s first phase, facing the reality of costs at a time the country is spending far more than it is taking in. Now organizers plan to initially build around 1.5 miles of the structure by 2030, rather than the roughly 10-mile first chunk that had previously been envisioned, multiple people briefed on the plans said. Still, even that truncated section would be by far the world’s largest building, the equivalent of more than 60 Empire State Buildings of square footage.
Asked in a CNBC interview last month about a Bloomberg report on the scaled-back first phase, Saudi Minister of Economy and Planning Faisal Al Ibrahim signaled the long-term ambitions for the Line remain the same.
“There is no change in scale—it is a long-term project that is modular in design,” he said, adding that “today, the economy in the kingdom is growing faster, but we don’t want to overheat it.”
The stakes for Saudi Arabia are as outsized as Mohammed’s ambition. Neom is the ultimate symbol of his plans to transform the kingdom’s economy, reduce its dependence on oil revenue, and make it a magnet for money and talent from around the world. But he risks squandering much of the country’s cash on an unprecedented experiment in city building that could prove too difficult to deliver.
“Mohammed bin Salman is gambling here,” said Madawi al-Rasheed, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and a member of a group calling for democratic reform in Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy.
“Spending so much money should in theory generate a tangible leap in the Saudi economy,” she said, but much of the cash so far was spent on foreign consultants and architects.
A mountain of challenges lies ahead. More than 100,000 additional construction workers must be housed in a barren corner of the kingdom’s vast desert, two hour’s drive from any sizable city. Neom’s needs for steel, exterior glass and other materials are so massive they may push up global prices and be difficult to source. Planners worry the unique central concept of the Line, a vertical city housed in twin skyscrapers the length of Delaware, could prove to be an unappealing place to live.
At the same time, the scaled-back plans for the Line put a spotlight on Neom’s enormous bill for what is now poised to be a midsize city. Neom executives now expect fewer than 200,000 residents in the project’s first phase—the population of Knoxville, Tenn.—a current and former employee familiar with the plans said. Yet Neom is spending on vast infrastructure intended for millions of people, including a giant airport, a high-speed train running through a 20-mile mountain tunnel, massive desalination plants and large civic features in the Line such as an opera house, the former executive said.
The price tag keeps rising. The projected cost of a ski resort in the region’s arid mountains has more than doubled over two years to $38 billion as of October, according to Neom documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Real estate advisory Knight Frank estimates more than $237 billion of construction contracts have already been commissioned at Neom.
Even for one of the world’s largest exporters of crude oil, Neom might just be too expensive. Its official cost estimate is $500 billion, 50% more than the country’s entire federal budget for the year and more than half the value of its sovereign-wealth fund.
Executives working on the project dismiss that number as unrealistically low. The first 1.5 miles of the Line alone is estimated internally to cost more than $100 billion, two people familiar with the plans said.
If it were fully built, Neom employees expect the true price of the Line would be well in excess of $2 trillion. Construction costs per square foot are more than double what is standard on other Middle East towers, they said.
This makes it unlikely Neom will attract significant private investment to fund future phases of the Line, they say. It has been funded thus far by the Saudi government.
Neom is the centerpiece of an overhaul of Saudi Arabia’s economy and identity that Mohammed began in 2015 when his father ascended the throne. Then 29 years old, the son of King Salman outmaneuvered potential heirs and rapidly consolidated power.
Hungry for change, Mohammed allowed more Western cultural norms and eliminated restrictions that forbade mixing of sexes, women drivers and cinemas. He also put even tighter limits on speech, crushing dissent over the rapid change.
The plan, Vision 2030, called for an array of new non-oil industries such as entertainment and technology and building mega-sized real-estate developments to help it become a global tourism hub.
Mohammed’s team sought proposals from the world’s top architects for ideas to design Neom. The avant-garde Los Angeles designer, Morphosis Architects, headed by Pritzker prize winner Thom Mayne, pitched a city that was 100 miles long and 1.2 miles—or two kilometers—wide, with buildings spread across the ground.
The prince had a different idea.
“I told the team, how about if we take that two kilo and we flip it to two towers to the whole line,” he said in a Discovery Channel documentary last year, clapping his hands together vertically like someone closing a book.
The idea of the skyscraper city was born.
Architects got to work designing a pair of parallel towers 650 feet apart, shrouded in a shimmering mirror glass coat that reflects red desert sand and azure blue sea. At their highest, the towers are slated to rise 1,640 feet above the desert floor, although they will be less tall in spots depending on the terrain they are traversing.
Internal documents from 2021 call for more than seven billion square feet of floor space—29% larger than all of the buildings in New York City put together and the size of more than 2,000 Empire State Buildings. Apartments, offices, schools, police stations, museums and a royal palace would be peppered inside.
Stunning—and costly—architecture is a priority. Mohammed told Neom executives he wants a sense of “zero gravity” with features appearing to defy physics and float, former executives said.
A linear city has long captivated urban planners. In 1882, Spanish architect Arturo Soria y Mata proposed an elongated urban development that inspired the “Ciudad Lineal” district of Madrid. The Line has been compared internally to Epcot Center, a former Neom executive said, the 1960s-era complex at Disney World that was intended to be a futuristic city dependent on high-speed rail. It was abandoned after Walt Disney ’s death. Epcot later became a theme park.
A linear city as big as the Line is at odds with how humans have developed cities for millennia: naturally building outward in a circular manner, typically around a core.
“It’s battling against the entire history of the way cities are founded and grow,” said John E. Fernandez, professor in the department of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Even supporters say it is an experiment that could easily fail in practice.
In a planning document under a heading of “Key Concerns,” an employee said four different times that by fixating on building miles-long skyscrapers, Neom had turned the normal design process inside out. “USE would usually drive DESIGN. We are using DESIGN to drive USE,” the anonymous comment said.
The shape has added to challenges.
In 2020, before Mohammed unveiled the project, he asked employees to move the Line’s western end a few miles because he preferred the terrain, said people familiar with the request. Designs had to shift slightly across the entire 105 miles, causing months of extra work.
Architects have struggled to find the best ways to mix sunlight and open space in the interior. Internal documents show they wrestled with how to differentiate neighborhoods so as not to create a monolithic block—opting to build distinct half-mile sections with a different look and feel. They worried about drab living conditions at the base of the interior, given that the height of the towers would allow little light down low.
According to planning documents, designers proposed leaving gaps atop the modules to “bend” the structures around the curvature of the earth, which arches about 8 inches per mile.
Planners fretted over the billions of birds that fly on a migration route—a less-than-ideal location for a 1,600-foot-tall glass mirror.
“It is inevitable that a significant number of birds will perish,” designers wrote, with an illustration of a dead northern flicker, a woodpecker.
Looming over Neom is an inauspicious history of city-building projects, which typically die on the drawing board. Those that are built are usually scaled down, and often considered sterile.
One of modern history’s largest is Brasília, the Brazilian capital that strained the country’s finances when it was constructed in the late 1950s. After opening, residents complained of lifeless streets and a lack of neighborhood feel in the curated modernist center, which today holds less than half its expected population of 500,000. Instead, far more residents live in and around satellite towns initially built for its construction workers.

Scant progress

Seven years after launch, little has been completed other than Neom’s film studios and a sprawling new royal complex that boasts giant palaces, a golf course and at least 10 helipads, satellite images show.
Beyond the Line, Neom has a bevy of superlative-packed projects, all of them complex.
Neom is so big it has its own large-scale construction projects simply to prepare for bigger projects. A port is needed to receive materials, and Neom is spending more than $5 billion to build housing for construction workers, according to the Middle East business-trade publication MEED, which tracks Neom contracts.
Engineers and administrative workers live in a handful of Neom-built communities with schools, basketball courts, a Burger King, a Starbucks and a Hampton Inn where rooms run above $400. The first such camp already needs to be partially demolished: After a design change, the Line is now due to run right through the community, where housing is already at capacity, former employees said.
Despite being billed as zero emissions, Neom recently sought contractors to build two gas power plants totaling 800 megawatts to power the region until greener energy is sourced.
To demonstrate progress to the crown prince, engineers started putting in the foundations for the Line a couple of years ago even before architects had figured out what would go above—an unusual way to build such a massive development, engineering experts said.
Architects soon decided the first phase should be built somewhere else, leaving the Line’s initial foundations abandoned for now, said people familiar with the matter.
For over a year, the bulk of the work has been a digging operation—the world’s largest, Neom says. Four-lane makeshift construction roads are clogged with lines of dump trucks; diesel fumes from trucks and generators permeate the air.
Significant digging work has gone into swaths that even before the recent pullback weren’t scheduled to be completed for decades. Satellite images show a 60 mile gash through the desert.
The current focus is a seaside middle section, where Prince Mohammed wanted the building constructed atop a new marina that could hold the world’s biggest cruise ships. Workers are digging a hole 50 feet below sea level, over 450 acres in size. It was there that workers had excavated a small mountain of dirt, only to find it was in the wrong place.
Once foundations are laid, a key test will be if and when Neom awards the costly contracts to start vertical construction—a crucial milestone that makes it difficult to turn back.
Another question is height. Numerous executives working on Neom have questioned the need for a 1,600-foot-tall building—which carries extra engineering challenges, higher costs and makes evacuation difficult in an emergency.
Renowned British architect Peter Cook, who is involved in the Line, called the project’s height “a bit stupid and unreasonable,” according to comments published in the U.K.-based Architect’s Journal. In a later documentary, Cook, who is overall praiseful of the project, called the Line “puzzling even to those who are involved in designing it.”

Good evening, recently the new legislation to allow for people 16 and over has just hit the floor of the House of representatives, as it is currently being debated. While the allowing for a change of gender on documents is the centerpiece of the legislation, it also seeks to resolve to protect those that work at gender clinics and other practices engaged with transgender people and abortion clinics by creating a area designated to allow for those to have a safe distance between protestors and those working or are patients at the clinics, which in turn also protects the privacy of the patients, this is enforced by a penalty of 1 year imprisonment should someone deliberately violate the designated area during a protest.
Aside from this progressive legislation, with the RSLs still maintaining the ban on Trans veterans, I will direct the Attorney General to begin with legal proceedings and open a case of discrimination based on gender. Along with this, the "Social Decency Protectors" and the "Sovereign Protectors of Democracy" shall be investigated on harassment and incitement of violence charges by the Australian Federal Police.
Thank you and good night.
SmugDemoness, Prime Minister.

This question came up in a recent OP and I started to answer, but because of length decided to make it an OP on its own.
GoldenReggie wrote:

I can no longer remember what I thought the Ramseys’ motivation was for faking a kidnapping. If they knew they were going to end up dying on the hill of intruder murder, why not make that the cover story from the outset? Why waste an hour drafting a playful fake ransom note when you could use that time and that creative energy faking a break-in?

This is a good question.
Crime scene staging is a product of the stager's imagination. Why didn’t the Ramseys create an intruder story from the very beginning? Why pivot from kidnapper, to employees, to intruder, to friends? Especially when the kidnapper scenario stated the victim was removed from the home, when in fact there was a body in the basement.
1. The Ramseys had solid reasons for writing the note the way they did. Whether it makes sense to us, it must have made sense to them when they made their staging plan.

• The RN was the written form of their narrative, it was a very critical part of their crime scene staging.
• The ransom note was never a playful piece of fun for the Ramseys.
• It was the powerful centerpiece of their staging plan.
• The RN was very serious, with the goal of making sure no Ramsey was arrested for the SA and murder which occurred in their home.
• In the RN the Ramseys lay out the reason their child will be found missing, how they are going to move the body, and why she will be found dead.
• It served to control and manipulate the police once they arrived on the crime scene, along with the verbal Ramsey narrative, creating confusion and chaos.
• The staging forced the police out of the home, looking for intruders and kidnappers.
• Every hour the Ramseys were not interrogated, and no crime scene evidence gathered, increased the odds of them never being apprehended.
  2. An initial intruder narrative would not have allowed them to create a written staging document.
  
• In crime scene staging, the crime scene is altered to prevent law enforcement from determining the truth of what happened, so the perpetrator goes free.
  
• This is done by altering the physical evidence, and often providing a written and verbal false narrative to the police. The Ramseys used all three methods of staging.
  
• For example, in terms of the written staging, in the domestic murder of a teen or adult, the family member who committed the crime will often write a fake suicide note, pretending it was written by the victim.
  
• Of course with the SA, bludgeoning and strangulation murder of a 6 year old, the Ramseys could not pretend it was a suicide or that a young child could write a lengthy note.
  
• An intruder does not usually leave a lengthy written document at the crime scene.
  
• So the Ramseys chose a fake kidnapping scenario which allowed them to write a ransom note to further their staging goals.
  3. I believe the Ramseys originally planned to move the body and needed a cover story to do so.
  
• This is common sense. You do not invent a kidnapping scenario where the live victim is being held elsewhere for ransom, when in fact the victim's body is in your basement.
  
• Also, the plan to move the body was spelled out in paragraph #2 of the Ramsey RN, the longest and most carefully thought out part of the RN.
  
• Bring a large attache (suitcase) to the bank. Move the money to paper bags. Be well rested, it will be a long trip.
  
• An intruder narrative would not provide cover for moving the body under the pretext of going to the bank to get the ransom money and delivering the money to the kidnappers.
  
• (But something happened to cause them to change their minds about moving the body. This will be another OP.)
  4. Lockheed Martin
  
• John’s corporate owner at the time of the murder was Lockheed Martin, a very powerful civilian military defense industry with connections to high level federal officials, politicians, and federal departments (DOD) and agencies.
  
• LHM most likely had an emergency protocol in place in the event there was a foreign terrorist kidnapping of any employee.
  
• I think this is why the Ramseys invented the "foreign faction" kidnapping story in their ransom note.
  
• We happen to think this was a cheesy, over the top part of their plan, but John had a reason for doing it this way.
  
• In the RN, the fake kidnappers invented by the Ramseys state that they like John, but his business is the reason for the kidnapping.
  
• John was trying to draw in the power of Lockheed Martin to assist him in the cover up?
  
• At some point after the police arrive at the crime scene, the Boulder Chief of police instructs his officers to treat the Ramseys as victims, not suspects.
  
• This is an extraordinary directive, in essence telling his officers at a crime scene to stand down. The case was extremely compromised due to this call.
  
• Why did the Chief of Police make this very unusual call to his officers? Did someone contact him? Lockheed Martin?
  
• Did the FBI comments then get back to LHM? Shortly after the body is found, FBI agents take one look at the RN and say "look at the parents." The FBI were said to be frustrated that no charges were made in this case.
  
• At any rate, subsequently it appears that LHM quickly sized up the situation and put John on a leave of absence and never employed him again.
  
• I think it unlikely Lockheed Martin would stick their necks out long term to help cover up the domestic crime committed by a Ramsey family member. The Ramseys were a liability to LHM.
  
• But LHM may have helped the Ramseys the day after the murder, and it was crucial help.
  

5. Would the kidnapper narrative help cover up the SA committed at the time of the murder.

• The Ramseys were insistent on covering up the SA part of the crime. They wiped down and redressed the body carefully, and destroyed the SA weapon.
• They denied there was a SA at time of the murder despite the autopsy report to the contrary.
• They were obviously trying to cover up the SA of their child.
• So the Ramseys staged the crime as a business financial crime, not a personal one.
• Side note: This was an amateur staging mistake. The Ramseys didn't realize the autopsy would reveal that this was a very personal crime, not a business financial one.

6. Creating a number of scenarios, blaming as many other people as possible was part of the Ramsey staging strategy.

• The Ramseys were using a scattergun approach by naming so many different possible suspects.
• They write a fake ransom note indicating foreign terrorists, but then tell the police it is an "inside job." They name the housekeeper, next an ex-employee, and eventually work down the list of all their friends. And then claimed an intruder had done the crime.
• They hoped to get control of the crime scene from the minute they started staging it.
• They wanted to control the police when they arrived that morning.
• It was critical for the police to scatter outside the home looking for suspects.
• Every hour the Ramseys had control of the crime scene and caused the police to leave the home, they had one more hour of successful staging and a lowered chance of being arrested.
• They thought the police leaving the home would give them an opening to move the body.
• It would give the Ramseys chance to get out of town. And to hire and set up the legal defense team which John did just hours after the body was found.
• Side note: Narcissists have a very difficult time taking responsibility for their problems. They tend to blame others. So this probably came naturally to both Patsy and John. It obviously did not bother them, they continue blaming others to this day when it serves no purpose.

7. Why didn’t they stage a break in?

• Whether it was an intruder or kidnapper, there should have been some evidence of a break in.
• Did they run out of time? We don't know when the Ramseys found the body, how much time did they have to do all the staging?
• Were they afraid they would be detected by neighbors? To stage a break in, wouldn’t they have to go outside the home and break a window or door with the glass or wood falling into the house? John read enough murder and crime scene stories to know this.
• Breaking wood and glass makes noise and might bring unwanted attention. Neighbors seeing one of the Ramseys breaking windows or damaging the outside doors would look suspicious.
• We know Patsy and John appeared risk adverse in some of their staging, it appears they did not want to do anything to bring attention to themselves with the staging.
• Perhaps the Ramseys realized their mistake in not staging evidence of a break in. They were amateurs and made mistakes.
• The Ramseys then tried to pin the murder on someone with a key. John and Patsy made a big deal about who had keys to the home. The housekeeper had a key.
• Maybe their plan was an evolving one. As they realized some of the inherent problems with the original plan, they would go in another direction.
• This scattergun approach also served the function of keeping the police confused and off guard. And each officer seemed to latch onto their favorite scenario.
• Another side note. This is why even an amateur stager can fool detectives. There is a cognitive error known as threshold diagnosis, which leads to tunnel vision. Some investigators decide what must have happened as soon as they arrive, which tends to anchor them in their hypothesis. They fail to notice items that might discount their notions, or discount them

In the past two days, the Biden-Harris administration has announced a wide range of new rules to protect ordinary Americans.
Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the administration has finalized two new rules affecting patients in nursing homes and receiving home care, as well as the workers who care for them. The first sets minimum staffing requirements for facilities funded by Medicare and Medicaid, and the second concerns how home healthcare companies account for Medicaid funding.
In a speech at the Hmong Cultural and Community Agency in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Harris noted the extraordinary value of healthcare workers. She also explained that about 1.2 million Americans live in federally funded nursing homes, which make up about four fifths of the nursing homes in the country. But the majority of those homes—about 75% of them—are understaffed. This is dangerous and isolating for patients and demoralizing for workers, who have high rates of burnout and turnover.
Now, nursing homes that receive federal funding will have to provide at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident every day, less than the 4.1 hours the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services advocate but enough to require the hiring of about 12,000 registered nurses and 77,000 aides, at an annual cost of almost $7 billion.
Consumer organizations and labor unions pushed for the new rule, but nursing home operators strongly oppose the new mandate, saying it will force facilities to close because of a shortage of nurses. In response, Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra told Tami Luhby of CNN that no one should live in facilities that are unsafe or should receive inferior care. Luhby noted that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in September launched a $75 million campaign to increase the number of nurses in nursing homes.
The second rule the vice president announced had to do with home health aides. Medicaid currently pays about $125 billion a year to home healthcare companies, which employ hundreds of thousands of workers providing services for elderly and disabled Americans. These companies have never been required to report how that money was being spent. Now they will be required to spend 80% of the federal dollars they receive on workers’ salaries rather than administrative overhead.
Also yesterday, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a final rule that strengthens the HIPAA medical privacy rule for people from states that ban abortions who seek reproductive health care in states that permit them. In response to threats by Republican state officials to charge women who cross state lines to obtain abortion, contraception, or fertility treatments, the new rule prohibits health care providers, health plans, and other entities from disclosing patients’ reproductive health care records to state officials when they are being sought to investigate or charge patients, doctors, or others.
Today, the Labor Department announced a new rule that would guarantee that salaried workers who make less than $59,000 a year are compensated fairly for overtime work. The Trump administration set the salary threshold for those who did not have overtime protections at $35,568. As of July 1, 2024, the threshold will be $43,888, and on January 1, 2025, it will rise to $58,656. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), former chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, said the change could affect 4 million workers.
“Too often, lower-paid salaried workers are doing the same job as their hourly counterparts but are spending more time away from their families for no additional pay,” acting secretary of the Department of Labor Julie Su said. “That is unacceptable. The Biden-Harris administration is following through on our promise to raise the bar for workers who help lay the foundation for our economic prosperity.”
Also today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted 3–2 along party lines to ban the noncompete agreements that prevent workers from minimum-wage earners to top executives from changing jobs within the industry in which they work; senior executives can still be bound by such agreements. Initially used to protect trade secrets, noncompete clauses have expanded to cover what the FTC estimates to be 30 million people—one in five U.S. workers. They take away workers’ ability to improve their wages and conditions by quitting their jobs and moving to another company or starting their own. The FTC estimates that the end of such clauses could add almost $300 billion a year to workers’ wages.
“Robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. Neil Bradley, head of strategic advocacy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, countered: “If they can issue regulations with respect to unfair methods of competition, then there’s really no aspect of the U.S. economy they couldn’t regulate.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to sue over the rule.
A CBS News/YouGov poll released Monday found that, although Biden and Harris have made addressing climate change a centerpiece of their administration, only 10% of the people who say they think climate change is a very important issue had heard or read a lot about what the administration has accomplished, and 49% said they had read not much or nothing about it. When told some of the things the administration has done, a strong majority of those who care about addressing climate change support those policies.
“Even people who feel the administration has done too little on climate change support these policies,” reporters for CBS News note. They conclude that the disconnect “may be more about Mr. Biden needing to get his message out there than having to convince this ‘climate constituency’—those who call the climate issue very important—of the substance of his policies.”
Meanwhile, today is the fourth anniversary of the press conference in which former president Donald Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to get rid of Covid, prompting the maker of Lysol to warn people not to use their disinfectant cleaning products internally. Four years later, Trump spent the day in a Manhattan courtroom, where his former friend David Pecker, who ran the company that published the National Enquirer tabloid magazine, testified for the prosecution.
Legal analyst Lisa Rubin summarized Pecker’s testimony, noting that the big takeaways were that Trump and Pecker were transactional friends for decades and that “the agreement they struck in 2015 went way beyond the ‘catch and kill’ aspect of the scheme that has been known for years.” Together, they not only killed stories damaging to Trump, but also pushed fake stories about Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, who were running against him for the 2016 Republican nomination, as well as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
As the trial grabs headlines, Trump’s power seems to be diminishing. He is demonstrably not in power in the courtroom, where he must do as the judge tells him and reporters say he has often fallen asleep, and none of his family members have shown up to support him.
Trump seems aware that his power is waning. Early yesterday, he called for supporters to “RALLY BEHIND MAGA,” but only a handful of people gathered outside the courthouse. Today he claimed that the turnout was low because police had “completely CLOSED DOWN” the streets around the courthouse. That was a lie: the streets, the sidewalk, even the courthouse have remained open to the public.
Pennsylvania’s primary election today revealed Trump’s real electoral weakness. He won about 83.5% of the Republican votes, but Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race in early March and has not campaigned since, won 16.5%. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, the so-called “collar counties,” Haley won closer to 25% of the Republican vote.
Biden, meanwhile, took the fight against MAGA Republicans to Trump’s home state of Florida. There, an extreme abortion ban signed into law by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will take effect on May 1, but in November, Florida voters will have the option to add protections for abortion before fetal viability to the state constitution, returning the state to the standards it had before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That measure is expected to energize Democrats in the state.
And then, tonight, by a vote of 79–18, the Senate passed the $95 billion national security supplemental bill that provides funding, mostly for military supplies, to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific and humanitarian aid for war-torn countries; requires the sale of TikTok; and permits confiscating Russian assets. MAGA Republicans are still adamantly opposed to aid for Ukraine, but a strong bipartisan majority has finally gotten the chance to weigh in.
As soon as the measure passed, Biden issued a statement, saying: “Tonight, a bipartisan majority in the Senate joined the House to answer history’s call at this critical inflection point. Congress has passed my legislation to strengthen our national security and send a message to the world about the power of American leadership: we stand resolutely for democracy and freedom, and against tyranny and oppression.”
—
Notes:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/04/22/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-roundtable-discussion-on-nursing-home-care/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/22/politics/nursing-home-minimum-staffing-rule/index.html
https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20240423-0
https://thehill.com/business/4616050-new-biden-rule-extends-overtime-to-millions-of-salaried-workers/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ftc-noncompete-agreement-ban/
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/04/22/biden-harris-administration-issues-new-rule-support-reproductive-health-care-privacy-under-hipaa.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/04/22/abortion-medical-records-patients-biden-hipaa/
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4614746-just-10-percent-in-new-poll-have-heard-a-lot-about-biden-climate-action/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-policies-biden-poll/
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/ftc-bans-noncompete-clauses-that-restrict-job-switching-984d2187
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime/rulemaking
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/04/23/congress/congress-passes-ukraine-israel-aid-taiwan-senate-00154006
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/04/23/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-senate-passage-of-the-national-security-package/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/us/politics/trump-trial-protests.html
https://ballotpedia.org/Florida_Amendment_4,_Right_to_Abortion_Initiative_(2024))
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/results/2024/04/23/pennsylvania-primary/
Twitter (X):
BidenHQ/status/1782802410034872377
lawofruby/status/1782810010512146666
jaketappestatus/1782955881849557131
​
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-23-2024

I like to do random book reports on wrestlers and such I post in other subs and was curious if anyone here would appreciate these stories? If not let me know and I won't post here again.
It's one of the few wrestling books not presented in chronological order, so if you think it's odd this because I had to put it all in order myself. Each chapter is just random stories that jump back and forth from 1999 - 2015, so it was admittedly not easy to follow. I try to do all these reports in chronological order, though, so I did my best in that regard. But be warned, I may have messed up the timeframe on one or two occasions. I hope you can find something interesting...
Brian makes a quick joke about nepotism, but it's clear he kinda benefited from it. His uncle Howard Gerwitz is a moderately successful TV writer and producer with a ton of credits to his name from the 80s and 90s. Howard got Brian some of his early gigs, and while Brian tries to present himself as a naive kid who was giving good ideas and jokes to other writers, his uncle had to sit him down and tell him Brian needs to step up and that a lot of other writers would kill for his opportunities.
After several failed tv show writing credits, Brian found himself out of work and collecting unemployment for nearly a year. Until his sister, who worked at MTV, called him up, saying MTV is producing a ton of vignets for the SummerSlam 1999 ppv, and she got him the gig as writer for the vignets
While working those MTV vignets, he heard MTV wasn't happy that their exclusive match was just Hardy Boyz vs. Edge and Christian. I guess MTV got to air a match exclusively on their network and felt cheated when they didn't get Undertaker vs. Stone Cold.
Brian got to work with a ton of stars like Hardyz, Edge/Christian, Mick Foley, and Triple H, who he immediately got on the wrong side of. Brian didn't know Chyna would be there and so hadn't written anything for her. Brian says Triple H was very professional but was obviously annoyed and asked why Chyna had no lines.
Brian says he met The Rock for the first time here and kick-start a 2 decade-long partnership from here. Brian remembers how Rock read what Brian wrote for him, liked it, but then said the same thing he would say every single time Brian presented Rock material, "This is great, but how can we make it better?"
Brian says The Rock asked him to consider writing for the WWF and got him an interview. The first interview was basic "get to know you" with human resources. The next interview was with Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara. Brain calls Ed friendly, but he says Russo clearly just wanted it over with asap.
His next interview was with Shane McMahon, and while Brian says Shane is one of the warmest and nicest men he knows, his first impression was the opposite of that. Brian also remembers saying something about the Mets, to which Shane responded with "I'm a Yankees fan."
His final interview was with Vince McMahon, and Brian said they hit it off immediately, and it was like 2 old friends talking. Vince told Brian that the WWF would make him an offer he couldn't refuse. The offer was to write for their website, and Brian refused it.
Brian instead went to work on the show "Big Wolf On Campus" for the Fox Kids channel. (Side note: as a Canadian who grew up with YTV and Fox kids, this show was something of a guilty pleasure of my 11 year old self. Of course, Brian worked on it. I even did a dumb reddit post on it on the ytv retro subreddit group, lol.
After Russo and Ferarra jumped to WCW, Brian got a call back from WWF, and this time, as a writer for their tv shows.
Brian's first day was November 1st, 1999, and he remembers sitting in the production meeting and being uncomfortable because Vince didn't introduce him and about 60 wrestlers were staring at him and wondering what he was doing there.
The only other writer on staff was Tommy Blacha, and he took Brian under his wing. They had zero writing assignments, so they walked around with a pen and paper and asked random wrestlers if they needed help with a promo.
Brian remembers Tommy introducing him to everyone and even commenting on some people like, "No one knows what Sgt Slaughter does here."
After the show, he drove to the next town with Tommy, and the McMahon's, Shane driving, Vince in passenger, and Steph in the back with Tommy and Brian.
At one point, Vince said, "This is where we would dump your body if you did a bad job," and for some reason, Brian stupidly said, "Is that what happened to KoKo B Wear?" Brian said what followed was a very awkward and long silence.
Brian makes a note on the difference between writing WWE now and back then. He said he and Tommy would meet with Vince and Shane in Vince's hotel room the morning of the show and write the whole thing. Brian says Stephanie's job was to take food orders and say she wasn't a writer, but within a year, she would be head of creative.
Brian says if they were back in the hotel room on Monday night, they would put on WCW Nitro to laugh at while they planned the next show. He remembers Vince quoting a line from Nitro as hilariously bad whenever someone had a bad idea.
Brian remembers how one time Vince McMahon randomly said in a meeting, "What kind of name is AL Snow? That's awful!" And no one was talking about or bringing up Al Snow.
Brian remembers Vince once telling him that there was nothing funnier than someone stepping in dog shit, and if he could film an entire show of just that, he would.
Brian says in January 2000, Shane insisted on the writers learning what it's like to take a bump. They did a bit of basic stuff like a flat back and running the ropes, but Brian tapped out after 10 minutes. He says later, Bubba Ray Dudley gave him a powerbomb from the second rope as a bunch of wrestlers stopped watching. He says it knocked the wind out of him bad.
Brian says he got some of the boys to participate in Royal Rumble pools, where each guy would put $10 in the pot and pick a royal rumble number. If their number won, they would win the pot. At the 2000 Rumble, Al Snow was told he would be coming out at number 20, and Brian remembers Al just getting pissed off because number 20 was his Rumble Pool number. Brian remembers Al saying, "Ah shit, there goes $10 down the drain."
Brian says he got into a heated argument with Vince McMahon on Wrestlemania weekend in 2000 and was later told by Kevin Dunn to learn how to eat shit and like it.
One time, Brian used Vince's private office bathroom and accidentally locked himself in, missing a production meeting.
Brian remembers one time going over a promo with Degeneration-X and saying to them all, "Does anyone have any questions?" To which Billy Gunn replied with, "Yeah, who the fuck are you?"
Brian says he came up with the idea for The Rock to mock Triple H's speech cadence with the "uuuuhhh's" at the end of every sentence. He says Rock brought him to Triple H and Vince to suggest the idea and when it came time to demonstrate, Rock made Brian do it, saying, "Come on you do it like you did in the hallway, everyone was laughing!" Brian says his impression got a big laugh from Vince and nod from Triple H, but he could see the look on Triple H's face suggested otherwise.
Brian says he noticed Triple H started dropping the "Uuuhhh" pattern from his promos and thinks he deserves an apology. This is kind said tongue in cheek.
Brian says that Michael Cole would say the word "now" so much on air that Vince McMahon ended up fining Cole everytime he said the word, until Cole cut it out.
Brian says Triple H hated him from the start, and thinks the jokes about Stephanie McMahon that Brian wrote for Rock and Chris Jericho played a part in that. Brian remembers when Triple H was booked to lose to Brooklyn Brawler, that Triple H marched up to Brian backstage and said "This had to be you!"
Stone Cold didn't like Brian from the start, because Stone Cold left for a year the month that Brian started, and by the time Stone Cold came back, Vince was relying more on writers and Stone Cold even said in an interview with WWF Magazine that he wouldnt be taking orders from "some kid straight out of sitcom school."
Brian says most writers meetings would start with the question of "How is Stone Cold going to raise hell this week?" And Brian came to hate this because it felt forced. Vince wanted Brian to have a good relationship with Stone Cold but Steve was resistant at every turn. Austin would tell other guys like Bruce Pritchard and Micheal Hayes or later on Paul Heyman why he disagreed with an idea, but with Brian he would just say "Nope." And that was it.
Brian worked with The Rock on his legendary imitation promo leading up to the six man Hell in a Cell at Armageddon 2000. Brian said the promo pissed off the imitated guys quite a bit. In fact, he said Rock's exact words to Brian were, "Hey, great promo last night. By the way, the boys are fucking pissed!" After confirming with with Kurt Angle, whom Brian says he was friends with from the start, Brian realized he pissed off 5 top guys in one fell swoop. (I'd just say he pissed off 4 top guys and Rikishi)
Brian says he was known from that point on as a "Rock guy" and had a hard time working with other top stars like Stone Cold or Triple H.
Brian says Micheal Hayes and Bruce Pritchard joined the creative team in Feb 2001, though they worked in other roles prior to then. In JR's book, he describes Bruce as on the creative team as early as 1996 or 1997. Brian says Bruce was in Talent Relations prior to this, but according to JR that was only for a couple weeks between JJ Dillon and JR in the mid-90s.
Brian says he came up with the hilarious match finish where William Regal hit Big Show with the brass knuckles, only for Show to fall ontop of Regal and get the win.
Brian says he and Bruce Pritchard had to come up with backstories and personalities for all the XFL cheerleaders.
Brian remembers working on these awful vignents he and Bruce filmed with a bunch of XFL cheerleaders and players, saying he is still haunted by how bad they were.
Brian recalls an incident when Hayes and Pritchard tried to rib Brian, saying they are gonna tell Rock and Kurt Angle that Brian was bad mouthing them. An enraged Brain ended up slamming a hotel chair up against a wall. Stephanie told him the next day to take a couple days off. Brian says working nonstop on Wrestling and XFL stressed him to this point
In 2001, shortly after Wrestlemania that year, Brian remembers one day Edge gave him an action figure if The Flash superhero, but after Hardcore Holly saw this, the rumors started swirling that Edge & Christian were bribing writers for TV time. So Brian, Edge and Christian were hauled into "Wrestlers Court" to plead there case. "Wrestlers Court" was a silly concept where the boys would police themselves if someone backstage violated some unwritten rule, like a writer being friends with some of the boys. Brian found out about his "Wrestlers Court" hearing an hour before it happened.
Brian was warned by Stephanie McMahon that he should bring pizza and beer to "Wrestlers Court" so he got 1 large pizza and a six pack. Brian was shocked to find over 100 people present for "Wrestlers Court" including all the wrestlers, producers and even seamstresses and other random backstage officials.
One particular face present really pissed Brian off. It was fellow writer Jamie Morris, someone who started six months after Brian. Brian said this pissed him off so much, and so he marched up to Stephanie and told her Jamie has to leave. Brian said he would take his punishment but he won't have some asshole writer snickering in meetings and telling new writers about this. Brian said he was legit ready to quit. Brian says that to Stephanie's credit, she saw he was serious he was and had Jamie removed from the room.
Brian saw Triple H shaking his head in disgust at him as he sat next to Edge and Christian, with Brian trying to hide the 6 pack of beer under his chair. JBL was playing the role of "prosecution," Kane was the "baliff" and Undertaker was the "judge." JBL started by purposely mispronouncing Brian's last name trying to piss him off. Brian took the bait and told JBL to pronounce it right and then called this trial a sham. He expected a round of applause but instead was met with awkward silence and an even more pissed off Undertaker and Triple H.
Brian says Edge and Christian had been given a heads up because they had prepared a fake book as a gift titled "Edge and Christian's guide to kissing ass" and they got a big laugh from everyone. Brian was upset that they didn't warn him or invite him into their plan, because now all the heat had fallen on him.
Brian remembers Perry Saturn "testifying" at "Wrestlers Court" giving examples of all the times Brian failed to say hello or didn't shake Saturn's hand. Brian says he later imitated Saturn's testimony and that led to his moppy character arc. Brian says the moppy gimmick wasn't punishment of any kind and he genuinely thought it would get Saturn over.
Brian remembers XPac speaking as well and yelling a bunch of insults at Brian before Kane had to physically restrain XPac. Brian says he and XPac never got along, and again assumes it's because he wrote jokes for wrestlers to use against XPac in promos. Brian remembers one time he entered the male locker room and got yelled at by XPac because Brian wasn't talent. Brian remembers another time XPac yelled at Brian because Brian didn't recognize legend Lez Thatcher backstage once.
Hardcore Holly and Pat Patterson also testified with Holly detailing how he saw Edge give Brian the Flash toy and Pat screamed about Brian changes finishes to matches.
Paul Heyman testified about how Brian once said he didn't have to shake Funaki's hand. Brian explains how he had already greeted Funkai earlier that day but it didn't matter, it seemed like the writer was big shotting a beloved jobber.
Brian said he noticed Kurt Angle shaking his head in disgust because he was friends with Brian, but when JBL asked if Kurt wanted to speak, Kurt said no. Brian felt that was a betrayal. Brian said he also noticed Stone Cold get up and walk out of the room around this time. He thinks Stone Cold saw himself as above this silliness.
Undertaker dismissed the trial and afterwards Vince had a good laugh when he asked Brian how it went. Brian said it took him a while, but eventually he saw the honor in being the first writer ever sent to wrestlers court, that this is how the boys brought you in closer.
Pat Patterson later apologized to Brian for his remarks, with Pat saying he thought it was all a silly rib and didn't realize how upset some guys genuinely were. Paul Heyman later told Brian that the Dudley Boys had overheard their conversation about Funaki, so Paul felt like he had to say it first.
Brian would later ask Hardcore Holly if they were cool, to which Holly said "Fuck no!" And stormed off.
Brian quickly mentions how the guy who was managing the WWE restaurant in New York, actually stole over $400,000 while running the place until it closed down.
In 2002, after The Rock cut a scathing promo on NWO, where he called Kevin Nash, "Big Daddy Bitch" Brian says that Kevin Nash and Scott Hall were both pretty upset by the promo. Brian remembers how later when Nash got physical in the ring with Rock, there is a spot where he shoves Rock into the corner and screams in Rocks face, "Who's the bitch now!" Brian says Nash was legit hot over insult.
Brain seemed shocked when WWE announced a brand split and said there would be 2 creative teams, one headed by Paul Heyman, and one headed by Brian. Brian says he and Paul butted heads over everything and Paul would tell Brian, "It's okay we fight, I was hired to fight with you."
Brian and Paul heard the rosters for each show and considering how close Brian was to all the guys on SmackDown, he assumed that would be his show. All the guys on RAW were close with Heyman, so both guys were shocked when Vince gave RAW to Brian and SmackDown to Heyman. Brian thinks this was Vince trying to get each writer to get out of their comfort zones.
Brian said he pitched Stone Cold vs Brock Lesnar on free TV, citing how Hogan vs Andre at Shea Stadium in the early 80s didn't take away from their match at Wrestlemania 3. He says Vince and all the writers/ agents and producers debated this before Vince decided it was the right call. Obviously Stone Cold hated it and it was the breaking point to him walking out on the WWE. I've never heard it mention that it originally came from Brian though.
One time on a plane, Paul Heyman got so upset with Brian that he offered Brian 3 free punches to Paul, so long as Paul got just 1 free one after. Brian declined, despite an excited Shane McMahon offering to show Brian how to punch.
Brian says he was on a RAW conference call when someone randomly dropped out of the call. Everyone was accounted for so someone extra was listening in. The call was traced back to Paul Heyman's number, though Brian says Paul denies it was him.
Brian says he would mock and imitate Paul Heyman on those calls, and wonders how many times Paul was listening in. He also suggests that Paul was feeding dirt sheet websites disparaging information on Brian.
Brian says one time he pissed Paul off so much that Paul lunged at him and had to be pulled off. Stephanie McMahon ended up suspending both men for a week, with pay. Brian says Micheal Hayes tried to stick up for him and tell Stephanie that the incident was all on Paul.
Brian says he and Paul Heyman agreed that bringing back Vince Russo in summer 2002 was a mistake. Brian said he didn't think it relevant for his book, but lately Russo told a deranged version of the story where he met with "20 nameless and faceless writers" who all "buried me to Vince afterwards." In truth, Russo met with Brian, Heyman, Hayes, and Pritchard and pitched several bad ideas that Vince McMahon ended up hearing about and hating. Brian says Vince said to the writers, "I'm sorry I brought back that asshole." Brian says they didn't bury his ideas, but presented them as Russo did, and Vince hated them all.
Some of Russo's ideas included "bringing in Eric Bishoff to fued with Shane McMahon because everyone knows their real life heat." As well as "Stripping The Undertaker of his WWE Championship "because he isn't hip or cool and then having a tournament that RVD should win." He also suggested turning top heel Triple H babyface by reforming DX and bringing back Chyna. Russo didn't know the main event of Mania that year was Triple H vs. Chris Jericho and asked the writers what they thought of those 2 working a program together.
Vince wanted a big "cliff hanger" ending for the RAW Roulette episode in 2002, so he told the writers, "What if Triple H comes out after Kane wins the TLC match and calls him a murderer to end the show?" When they asked Vince what happens next, it sounds like Vince channeled his inner Ole Anderson when he said,"I don't know, you're the writers, you figure it out."
Originally Kane was to have "killed" a young developmental star named Shane Vick, but when Vince deemed Shane too green, they kept the name Vick, but used it on a fictional character whom they called Katie.
Brian remembers Triple H asking a million questions about the angle and telling everyone how stupid he thought it was.
Brian remembers seeing Kane, who is a pro and always 100% on board with ideas, die inside as they explained this new backstory to him where he had a high school girlfriend and he accidentally killed her. Brian says Stephanie was assigned to write the big promo that explained it and says she looked shell-shocked all day with that assignment.
Brian says he tried to point out in meetings how this new backstory contradicted Kane's previous backstory, but Vince blew those concerns off.
Brian also remembers how Vince was strangely obsessed with the idea of using Kane's semen in the story and promo.
Brian says no one objected when Vince pitched the idea of Triple H imitating Kane and having sex with a corpse. Brian said no one stood up to object, but everyone one of them should have.
Vince apparently wanted the segment to end with Triple H scooping some goop out of Katie's head and flinging it at the wall, before saying, "I just fucked your brains out!" Wow.
When they filmed the segment at a real funeral home, there was a real legit funeral happening down the hall. Brian says Triple H and Bruce Pritchard tried to save face by attempting to do it as over the top and silly possible, but Vince insisted on it being 100% serious.
Bruce Pritchard was the one who pitched Roddy Piper interfering in Hulk Hogan vs Mr McMahon match at Wrestlemania 19.
Brian remembers how tense Roddy and Vince got in rooms together, saying while they respected one another, it was clear they drove each other insane while talking anything over.
Brian says Rock turned heel after getting a lukewarm response to a prepared video he sent in when RAW celebrated the best Superstar of the decade by fan vote. Brian says Stone Cold winning the vote also helped push Rock towards deciding on the heel turn.
Brian says the Hurricane/ Rock stuff from 2003 was his idea and something he pushed after he bonded with Hurricane over their mutual love of comic books. Its stuff like this that leads credence to Hardcore Holly's issues with Brian imo.
In 2003, the night after Wrestlemania 19, Brian was working with The Rock and Goldberg, going over their planned confrontation for the show that night. Brian remembers how hesitant Goldberg was to do anything that someone else did before him. First, Brian and Rock pitched Goldberg and Rock standing face to face to soak in the crowd, but Goldber said, "I ain't Hulk Hogan." Then Brian pitched Goldberg starting on the ring to say his line, but Goldberg said, "I ain't Chris Jericho." So they settled on the two men circling each other in the ring because no one else had really done that one with The Rock before.
Brian says he was the one who pitched the lame Goldust/ Goldberg backstage segment where Goldust put his wig on Goldberg. Brian says that's an example of an idea looking better on paper than in real life.
Brian says Goldberg resisted almost every idea and kept asking them to just do what WCW did with him.
Brian remembers one time, Michael Hayes legitimately asked him "Do Jews celebrate Thanksgiving?"
Brian says he got to write the first Pipers Pit Segment in over a decade, with Vince as the guest. Brian says it was done old school, with guys going over a few points before calling it all on the fly in the ring. Brian remembers how Vince legitimately pissed Roddy off by pointing out his big gut, so Roddy responded by pointing out Vince's failures and said the only thing Vince was succesful at was the thing his daddy handed to him. He also called Vince "Junior" which Vince hated.
During the infamous "Diss the Diva" segment of the 2003 Diva Search Competition, one of the contestants called another girl a "cum-burping gutter slut" on live TV. (look it up, its fucking amazing they let these women loose on the mic like that) Brian says a few guys backstage were upset because they can't even call someone a "bitch."
Brian was put in charge of writing two segments at Wrestlemania 21, the Hulk and Eugene confronted by Muhammed Hassain and the Pipers Pit with Stone Cold. He quickly wrote up the Hogan slot before devoting all attention to the Pipers Pit segment.
Vince gave Brian 2 directives for the Wrestlemania 21 Pipers Pit segment, Brian was to keep them within their alloted time and Brian was to ensure no one swore. Roddy promised not to, but almost immediately he screamed "Bullshit" at the crowd. Brian and Vince were at Gorilla Position with headsets on when this happened. An irate Vince jumped up and yelled at Brian, "Did you know he would do that!?" When Brian said no, Vince slammed his own headset on the table and screamed "Fuck!"
Vince told Brian he had to scold Roddy afterward, and when Brian tried to, Roddy asked if "bullshit" was even a swear word before laughing it off.
In 2005, Brian was asked by Vince to write a full movie script for Eugene. They wanted it to be like "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" but with the wrestler Eugene. Brian said he spent months writing the first draft and finished up around SummerSlam 2005. That was the event where Eugene got squashed by Kurt Angle and the fans boo'd the shit out of the babyface. Plans for the movie were scrapped immediately.
Brian said he would try to avoid Wrestlemania after parties because as a writer, he would usually spend the whole party being cornered by various drunk wrestlers who were pitching ideas that would never make it to air.
Brian says when he pitched Edge slapping John Cena's dad, Cena just smiled and said, "So your gonna get a taste of Johnny Fabulous huh? Have fun." When Brian Googled John Cena Sr, he was shocked to find the man already worked the independents as "Johnny Fabulous" an over the top manager. When they filmed at the house, they couldn't get John Cena Sr to act normal, he just kept cutting over the top promos about beating up Edge with lines like "sending you over the moon with a baking spoon!" The next day when they showed Vince the footage, he honestly said, "This might be the worst thing we have ever done."
Both Brian and Bruce Pritchard produced the segment, but when Vince saw it, he just said to Bruce, "I'm very disappointed in you Bruce." Brian knew it was wrong, but he kept his mouth shut and let Bruce take all the blame.
Brian says he pitched Roddy Piper and Ric Flair winning the tag titles in 2006, because he wanted to see his childhood hero Piper with a title. He said it's the only time he pitched something just because he wanted to see it as a fan.
Brian also backs up everyone else's claim that the Cyber Sunday/Taboo Tuesday voting was 100% legitimate and something Vince insisted on, while plenty of people backstage thought they should rig the voting.
Brian says he was the one who pitched Mike Adamle as RAW GM in 2008. Brian says he pitched it as opposed to a heel or babyface GM, Mike was supposed to be the clueless, in over his head and maybe a tad offensive boss. Brian essentially pitched it like Micheal Scott from The Office being GM of RAW. The only issue? Mike Adamle wasn't a comedic actor nor near as talented as Steve Carell.
After Adamle was out, someone suggested the idea of a rotating GM position with various names and Stephanie McMahon pitched an idea of it maybe being a celebrity. Vince's eyes lit up as he said, "what about a new celebrity GM every week!" And thus, the terrible "Guest GM Era" of RAW was born. Vince wanted mainstream exposure from the concept.
Brian remembers being told by Jeremy Pivon's team prior to him coming in to host, that Jeremy wanted a big entrance and big pink robe. They later heard back that Jeremy Pivon hated everything they pitched in the script, including the pink robe.
Ken Jeong was worried about the bump he had to take where Cena would toss him from the ring into a bunch of wrestlers. Ken was assured that he would be caught, but of course his head hit the mat so hard he needed stitches. Ken was thrilled about it though and wore the stitches like a badge of honor backstage, showing them to everyone.
Brian says the day they brought Mike Tyson in as guest host, Tyson actually went missing for an hour or so very close to showtime. Turns out he was just getting stoned and didn't want to do it around his kids who he brought with him.
A writer at the time named Erik was a huge old school fan and had a magazine from the 80's which featured both Hulk Hogan and Mike Tyson on the cover with a hypothetical dream match being the centerpiece of the magazine. Erik brought it to the show after seeing Tyson signed a glove for Brian, and Erik asked Tyson to sign this 20+ year old magazine. Tyson flipped out when he saw it and said, "Oh my God! The magazine with me and Hogan! I've been looking for this for years! You don't mind if I keep this do you? Okay bye!" And Tyson walked off with the magazine before the writer could even respond. Brian says he feels bad but calls this one of the funniest things he was ever present for.
Brian remembers Vince McMahon and Michael Hayes being very excited when they got Cheech and Chong to come guest host.
Brian is a self admitted massive Price is Right fan so he was thrilled to write all the Price is Right segments. Bob Barker was there to promote his book and his animal charity. Vince made sure to have the book all over the screen and advertised, but initially pushed the segment promoting his animal charity group to WWE website instead. Bob wasn't happy with this and called them to his hotel when he made it clear this was a deal breaker. Brian called Vince and they got the segment back on the air.
Brian remembers Bob Barker being impressed by Brian who actually read his book.
Brian said Chris Jericho needed to be convinced on the idea of wearing his Price is Right nametag on his bare chest.
Brian says no one had anyone idea who the Anonymous RAW GM would be, with Vince just saying they will figure it out eventually. There was no end game.
One time Brian pitched the Anonymous GM speaking but using a Stephen Hawking type voice, but Vince McMahon had no idea who Stephen Hawking was. After Brian tried and failed at explaining the voice, Vince made Brian do the voice for the show and just imitate a robot. It sounded bad but Brian had fun with it and it made him appreciate how tough it is for the guys to follow the script and not improvise. Brian makes a comment here saying he hopes fully scripted promos just go away in the future and that the bullet point apporach is better. Not something you expect from a writer tbh.
Brian remembers one time Chris Jericho got NFL star Terrell Owens confused for rapper Ney-O and was upset that Owens didn't want to talk music with him.
When Stephanie McMahon was moved into a higher management role in 2010, Brian got her job but essentially crashed pretty hard. He couldn't handle the responsibilities of it as well as with it while also still trying to write. He ended up blowing off an important meeting so he could write, which resulted in him losing his new gig and being back to just writing the show.
At Survivor Series 2010, Brian had a line for Miz but Vince thought it was too sports related and they argued over it. It was a heated argument where they kept tension between Brian and Vince for weeks until Brian tried to bury the hatchet by pointing out the perception of the other writers. Vince reasoned with "Fuck them and fuck you too."
Eventually he and Vince sat down to discuss the issues and it was a heated hour long talk where Vince accused Brian of not being a team player and just trying to get his own shit in. Brian later found out that Vince started looking for Brian's replacement after that meeting, but also says he started looking for work elsewhere as well.
In 2010, The Rock called Vince and said he wanted to come "give back" to the WWE. Vince suggested a match and Rock said no. Hilariously enough, when Vince suggested a 3 year Wrestlemania main event story with a couple of matches, Rock said yes immediately. Brian doesn't say it, but it sounds like Rock's position on the Mania card was a big factor in whether or not he was coming back.
When The Rock came back to WWE in 2011, Vince said to Brian, "You get to work with The Rock on his promos. It's the easiest job in the world."
Vince didnt want to leak that Rock was coming back so they didn't mention his name in production meetings and Rock wasn't on the RAW call sheet for the night he came back. Apparently, John Cena wasn't even told that Rock was coming back.
Brian worked with Rock for his big promo when he came back and while he can't confirm this, he suspects John Cena wasn't too happy with it. He isn't sure whether it was the promo itself or how John wasn't told about the 3 year Mania plan beforehand.
A week after John Cena cut a rap style promo on Rock, the plan was to spoof a recent "Funny or Die" skit (the ome where Will Ferral gets insulted by a toddler) and have a 10 year old kid rap a bunch of insults at Rock and Cena. This was filmed the day before it was set to air, but when it came time to film, the father of the kid refused to let him say anything. So Rock improvised his own promo that came off as a little harsh towards Cena. Vince McMahon wasn't thrilled with the end result either.
Brian makes it a point to say that outside of WWE, he calls The Rock "DJ" but when they are at WWE shows, he calls him "Rock" like everyone else. I think Brian wants us al to know how close he and The Rock are.
Brian says Rock came up with all his catchphrases, except one. Brian said he thought of "The People's Stroudle," but it's clear Brian is mocking himself here.
Brian stresses that The Rock doesn't use scripted promos, but Brian and Rock come up with some fun lines and bullet points. Brian says he would stand behind the camera in backstage promos with "cue cards" of lines or bullet points for the Rock. The Rock wore shades, so you couldn't tell he was reading.
At a live event in Australia that year, Cena cut a blistering promo on Rock, calling him a liar for coming back and then leaving again. This legit pissed The Rock off, so he cut a scathing promo on Facebook and this legit pissed Cena off. Vince was pissed and told both guys to go radio silent on the other until they were back in the same ring together.
At Survivor Series 2011, the Rock sang a song backstage and had Brian hold the words up behind the camera for him. Brian fucked up and held the cards the wrong way so Rock had to remember the lines off the top of his head. It was nearly a disaster because it was a live promo at Madison Square Garden.
The first night Cena and Rock were in the same locker room together since Survivor Series a few months earlier, Cena and Rock went over their promos and Brian remembers it being cordial. Rock went out first, and in Gorilla, John was waiting for his cue when he spotted lines written on The Rock's arm, but Brian didn't think this was a big deal since Roddy Piper had done that back in 2003 when he returned. Cena figured because the lines were visible on the monitors, that it was fair game to talk about. Brian thinks Cena went too far by mentioning the lines in the promo, and while Rock played it off as cool, Brian knew Rock was pissed.
Brian says that after Cena called out Rock on live TV for the lines being on his arm, they stopped meeting beforehand to go over their promos or what would be said. Brian said it was his job to be the middle man and relay what each guy was planning to the other.
Brian criticizes Cena for undercutting Rock's seriousness in the ring with kids jokes and by smiling and laughing (no selling) everything Rock said. Brian said Cena only got serious on the mic once Rock left the ring.
One week when Rock couldn't be there, he cut a tapped promo, so Cena doctored his own custom Rock shirt that said "Bring It ... Via Satellite." When Cena got backstage he alledgedly whipped the tshirt at Brian who was sitting Gorilla. Brian says he still has the shirt.
When Cena did his Thugganomics rap, Brian sat watching with Rock, who smiled and said what he had planned that night would be better. Later that night The Rock did one of his Rock Concerts performances and Brian remembers watching from Gorilla and hearing Cena yell, "That's the Rock I've been wating for!" With a huge grin on Cena's face. Cena waited in Gorilla for Rock so he could personally congratulate Rock on the segment. Brian says the tensions cooled a bit following that night and the rest of their program went off with no issues.
Brian knew Rock was going back to Holywood after Wrestlemania 28 and he wanted to go with him. He reached out to Rock's business partner and heard of a production company they were starting soon. Brian was invited to be part of it when it was ready to go.
In October 2012, RAW got one of its lowest ratings of all time, so Vince panicked and wanted change across the board. They offered Brian 2 options, he could resign from WWE or take a consulting role with a reduced salary. Considering how Brian was just waiting for Rock's production company to start, he took the reduced salary role.
Brian takea a moment to dispute dirt sheet claims on him being forced out, how his consultant role was meaningless and how he had no say. He refutes all claims. He says Vince used a lot of his ideas or suggestions in this time.
Brian notes how the Cena/Rock return program in 2013 was a lot more cordial and enjoyable for all involved, with all that past tension and animosity gone. Cena and Rock have been friends ever since, according to Brian.
Brian says he wrote the Kane and Daniel Bryan therapy session segment from 2013, and it was inspired by Dr Evil's therapy session from the Austin Powers movie.
Brian says that Vince was paranoid about leaks going into Wrestlemania 30 with Hogan, Rock, and Austin all coming up to start the show. So he didn't tell Hogan about Rock or Austin coming out, just told Hogan to react appropriately to whomever interrupts him. Hogan had no idea that Rock and Austion would join him at Mania 30, according to Brian.
Brian remembers Stephanie McMahon once saying to Brian that she wished Vince listened to her, as he did to Brian.
Brian said one time Vince McMahon told him he loves confrontation so much that he looks forward to being pulled over by a cop.
Backstage at Wrestlemania 30, before the show started, The Rock told Brian that he heard Brock Lesnar would be ending the streak. It's interesting that Rock knew hours beforehand and was telling people, and it didn't leak.
Brian says that Triple H/ Stephanie vs Ronda Rousey/ Kurt Angle was originally planned with Rock as Rousey's partner with the seeds planted at Wrestlemania 31 where all 4 had a confrontation at the show. Rock's movie schedule put the nix on that, and eventually, they went with Kurt.
After spending several years working side jobs for Rock's production company, in mid-2015, Brian finally got the call that the production company is ready for him to come on full time. Brian's last day with WWE was June 29, 2015. Vince told Brian that he loved him when they said their goodbyes, and Brian was genuinely taken back by that.
Every wrestling book has several pictures included, Brian's book is the first and only book I've seen where one of these pictures is just a screenshot from a 2016 Reddit post on that Squared Circle sub (That I'm banned from) Someone made a post theorizing that Brian Gewertz wasn't a real person, and Brian found this funny. The post in question
Brian briefly shades Jim Cornette, who has publicly criticized having "comedy writers" in wrestling, since Jim got in trouble for making a bad racist joke on Tv a couple years before the book came out.
Brian spent 16 years working in WWE and was called the "Hollywood Guy" the entire time, now that he is back in Hollywood and working on shows like "Young Rock" he is known as the "Wrestling Guy."
Brian is greatful for his time in WWE because in Hollywood everyone always tries to act tough and intimidate you, but after a decade and a half of fighting with Vince McMahon, Brian feels like he can't be intimidated anymore.
Fun book, but not nearly as self-aware as I was hoping. I don't know if I'd recommend it, to be honest, but I'm glad I read it.

(If this type of content isn't for this sub, let me know, and I won't post here again. In the past, I posted here about The Young Bucks book, and it got some fun responses, but I understand this may not be the same)
Hey y'all, I love to do random wrestling book reports, and my latest one is someone this Sub may have an opinion on. The Rock's personal stooge/ writer, Brian Gewirtz, who worked for WWE for over 15 years.
It's one of the few wrestling books not presented in chronological order, so if you think it's odd this because I had to put it all in order myself. Each chapter is just random stories that jump back and forth from 1999 - 2015, so it was admittedly not easy to follow. I try to do all these reports in chronological order, though, so I did my best in that regard. But be warned, I may have messed up the timeframe on one or two occasions. I hope you can find something interesting...
Brian makes a quick joke about nepotism, but it's clear he kinda benefited from it. His uncle Howard Gerwitz is a moderately successful TV writer and producer with a ton of credits to his name from the 80s and 90s. Howard got Brian some of his early gigs, and while Brian tries to present himself as a naive kid who was giving good ideas and jokes to other writers, his uncle had to sit him down and tell him Brian needs to step up and that a lot of other writers would kill for his opportunities.
After several failed tv show writing credits, Brian found himself out of work and collecting unemployment for nearly a year. Until his sister, who worked at MTV, called him up, saying MTV is producing a ton of vignets for the SummerSlam 1999 ppv, and she got him the gig as writer for the vignets
While working those MTV vignets, he heard MTV wasn't happy that their exclusive match was just Hardy Boyz vs. Edge and Christian. I guess MTV got to air a match exclusively on their network and felt cheated when they didn't get Undertaker vs. Stone Cold.
Brian got to work with a ton of stars like Hardyz, Edge/Christian, Mick Foley, and Triple H, who he immediately got on the wrong side of. Brian didn't know Chyna would be there and so hadn't written anything for her. Brian says Triple H was very professional but was obviously annoyed and asked why Chyna had no lines.
Brian says he met The Rock for the first time here and kick-start a 2 decade-long partnership from here. Brian remembers how Rock read what Brian wrote for him, liked it, but then said the same thing he would say every single time Brian presented Rock material, "This is great, but how can we make it better?"
Brian says The Rock asked him to consider writing for the WWF and got him an interview. The first interview was basic "get to know you" with human resources. The next interview was with Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara. Brain calls Ed friendly, but he says Russo clearly just wanted it over with asap.
His next interview was with Shane McMahon, and while Brian says Shane is one of the warmest and nicest men he knows, his first impression was the opposite of that. Brian also remembers saying something about the Mets, to which Shane responded with "I'm a Yankees fan."
His final interview was with Vince McMahon, and Brian said they hit it off immediately, and it was like 2 old friends talking. Vince told Brian that the WWF would make him an offer he couldn't refuse. The offer was to write for their website, and Brian refused it.
Brian instead went to work on the show "Big Wolf On Campus" for the Fox Kids channel. (Side note: as a Canadian who grew up with YTV and Fox kids, this show was something of a guilty pleasure of my 11 year old self. Of course, Brian worked on it. I even did a dumb reddit post on it on the ytv retro subreddit group, lol.
After Russo and Ferarra jumped to WCW, Brian got a call back from WWF, and this time, as a writer for their tv shows.
Brian's first day was November 1st, 1999, and he remembers sitting in the production meeting and being uncomfortable because Vince didn't introduce him and about 60 wrestlers were staring at him and wondering what he was doing there.
The only other writer on staff was Tommy Blacha, and he took Brian under his wing. They had zero writing assignments, so they walked around with a pen and paper and asked random wrestlers if they needed help with a promo.
Brian remembers Tommy introducing him to everyone and even commenting on some people like, "No one knows what Sgt Slaughter does here."
After the show, he drove to the next town with Tommy, and the McMahon's, Shane driving, Vince in passenger, and Steph in the back with Tommy and Brian.
At one point, Vince said, "This is where we would dump your body if you did a bad job," and for some reason, Brian stupidly said, "Is that what happened to KoKo B Wear?" Brian said what followed was a very awkward and long silence.
Brian makes a note on the difference between writing WWE now and back then. He said he and Tommy would meet with Vince and Shane in Vince's hotel room the morning of the show and write the whole thing. Brian says Stephanie's job was to take food orders and say she wasn't a writer, but within a year, she would be head of creative.
Brian says if they were back in the hotel room on Monday night, they would put on WCW Nitro to laugh at while they planned the next show. He remembers Vince quoting a line from Nitro as hilariously bad whenever someone had a bad idea.
Brian remembers how one time Vince McMahon randomly said in a meeting, "What kind of name is AL Snow? That's awful!" And no one was talking about or bringing up Al Snow.
Brian remembers Vince once telling him that there was nothing funnier than someone stepping in dog shit, and if he could film an entire show of just that, he would.
Brian says in January 2000, Shane insisted on the writers learning what it's like to take a bump. They did a bit of basic stuff like a flat back and running the ropes, but Brian tapped out after 10 minutes. He says later, Bubba Ray Dudley gave him a powerbomb from the second rope as a bunch of wrestlers stopped watching. He says it knocked the wind out of him bad.
Brian says he got some of the boys to participate in Royal Rumble pools, where each guy would put $10 in the pot and pick a royal rumble number. If their number won, they would win the pot. At the 2000 Rumble, Al Snow was told he would be coming out at number 20, and Brian remembers Al just getting pissed off because number 20 was his Rumble Pool number. Brian remembers Al saying, "Ah shit, there goes $10 down the drain."
Brian says he got into a heated argument with Vince McMahon on Wrestlemania weekend in 2000 and was later told by Kevin Dunn to learn how to eat shit and like it.
One time, Brian used Vince's private office bathroom and accidentally locked himself in, missing a production meeting.
Brian remembers one time going over a promo with Degeneration-X and saying to them all, "Does anyone have any questions?" To which Billy Gunn replied with, "Yeah, who the fuck are you?"
Brian says he came up with the idea for The Rock to mock Triple H's speech cadence with the "uuuuhhh's" at the end of every sentence. He says Rock brought him to Triple H and Vince to suggest the idea and when it came time to demonstrate, Rock made Brian do it, saying, "Come on you do it like you did in the hallway, everyone was laughing!" Brian says his impression got a big laugh from Vince and nod from Triple H, but he could see the look on Triple H's face suggested otherwise.
Brian says he noticed Triple H started dropping the "Uuuhhh" pattern from his promos and thinks he deserves an apology. This is kind said tongue in cheek.
Brian says that Michael Cole would say the word "now" so much on air that Vince McMahon ended up fining Cole everytime he said the word, until Cole cut it out.
Brian says Triple H hated him from the start, and thinks the jokes about Stephanie McMahon that Brian wrote for Rock and Chris Jericho played a part in that. Brian remembers when Triple H was booked to lose to Brooklyn Brawler, that Triple H marched up to Brian backstage and said "This had to be you!"
Stone Cold didn't like Brian from the start, because Stone Cold left for a year the month that Brian started, and by the time Stone Cold came back, Vince was relying more on writers and Stone Cold even said in an interview with WWF Magazine that he wouldnt be taking orders from "some kid straight out of sitcom school."
Brian says most writers meetings would start with the question of "How is Stone Cold going to raise hell this week?" And Brian came to hate this because it felt forced. Vince wanted Brian to have a good relationship with Stone Cold but Steve was resistant at every turn. Austin would tell other guys like Bruce Pritchard and Micheal Hayes or later on Paul Heyman why he disagreed with an idea, but with Brian he would just say "Nope." And that was it.
Brian worked with The Rock on his legendary imitation promo leading up to the six man Hell in a Cell at Armageddon 2000. Brian said the promo pissed off the imitated guys quite a bit. In fact, he said Rock's exact words to Brian were, "Hey, great promo last night. By the way, the boys are fucking pissed!" After confirming with with Kurt Angle, whom Brian says he was friends with from the start, Brian realized he pissed off 5 top guys in one fell swoop. (I'd just say he pissed off 4 top guys and Rikishi)
Brian says he was known from that point on as a "Rock guy" and had a hard time working with other top stars like Stone Cold or Triple H.
Brian says Micheal Hayes and Bruce Pritchard joined the creative team in Feb 2001, though they worked in other roles prior to then. In JR's book, he describes Bruce as on the creative team as early as 1996 or 1997. Brian says Bruce was in Talent Relations prior to this, but according to JR that was only for a couple weeks between JJ Dillon and JR in the mid-90s.
Brian says he came up with the hilarious match finish where William Regal hit Big Show with the brass knuckles, only for Show to fall ontop of Regal and get the win.
Brian says he and Bruce Pritchard had to come up with backstories and personalities for all the XFL cheerleaders.
Brian remembers working on these awful vignents he and Bruce filmed with a bunch of XFL cheerleaders and players, saying he is still haunted by how bad they were.
Brian recalls an incident when Hayes and Pritchard tried to rib Brian, saying they are gonna tell Rock and Kurt Angle that Brian was bad mouthing them. An enraged Brain ended up slamming a hotel chair up against a wall. Stephanie told him the next day to take a couple days off. Brian says working nonstop on Wrestling and XFL stressed him to this point
In 2001, shortly after Wrestlemania that year, Brian remembers one day Edge gave him an action figure if The Flash superhero, but after Hardcore Holly saw this, the rumors started swirling that Edge & Christian were bribing writers for TV time. So Brian, Edge and Christian were hauled into "Wrestlers Court" to plead there case. "Wrestlers Court" was a silly concept where the boys would police themselves if someone backstage violated some unwritten rule, like a writer being friends with some of the boys. Brian found out about his "Wrestlers Court" hearing an hour before it happened.
Brian was warned by Stephanie McMahon that he should bring pizza and beer to "Wrestlers Court" so he got 1 large pizza and a six pack. Brian was shocked to find over 100 people present for "Wrestlers Court" including all the wrestlers, producers and even seamstresses and other random backstage officials.
One particular face present really pissed Brian off. It was fellow writer Jamie Morris, someone who started six months after Brian. Brian said this pissed him off so much, and so he marched up to Stephanie and told her Jamie has to leave. Brian said he would take his punishment but he won't have some asshole writer snickering in meetings and telling new writers about this. Brian said he was legit ready to quit. Brian says that to Stephanie's credit, she saw he was serious he was and had Jamie removed from the room.
Brian saw Triple H shaking his head in disgust at him as he sat next to Edge and Christian, with Brian trying to hide the 6 pack of beer under his chair. JBL was playing the role of "prosecution," Kane was the "baliff" and Undertaker was the "judge." JBL started by purposely mispronouncing Brian's last name trying to piss him off. Brian took the bait and told JBL to pronounce it right and then called this trial a sham. He expected a round of applause but instead was met with awkward silence and an even more pissed off Undertaker and Triple H.
Brian says Edge and Christian had been given a heads up because they had prepared a fake book as a gift titled "Edge and Christian's guide to kissing ass" and they got a big laugh from everyone. Brian was upset that they didn't warn him or invite him into their plan, because now all the heat had fallen on him.
Brian remembers Perry Saturn "testifying" at "Wrestlers Court" giving examples of all the times Brian failed to say hello or didn't shake Saturn's hand. Brian says he later imitated Saturn's testimony and that led to his moppy character arc. Brian says the moppy gimmick wasn't punishment of any kind and he genuinely thought it would get Saturn over.
Brian remembers XPac speaking as well and yelling a bunch of insults at Brian before Kane had to physically restrain XPac. Brian says he and XPac never got along, and again assumes it's because he wrote jokes for wrestlers to use against XPac in promos. Brian remembers one time he entered the male locker room and got yelled at by XPac because Brian wasn't talent. Brian remembers another time XPac yelled at Brian because Brian didn't recognize legend Lez Thatcher backstage once.
Hardcore Holly and Pat Patterson also testified with Holly detailing how he saw Edge give Brian the Flash toy and Pat screamed about Brian changes finishes to matches.
Paul Heyman testified about how Brian once said he didn't have to shake Funaki's hand. Brian explains how he had already greeted Funkai earlier that day but it didn't matter, it seemed like the writer was big shotting a beloved jobber.
Brian said he noticed Kurt Angle shaking his head in disgust because he was friends with Brian, but when JBL asked if Kurt wanted to speak, Kurt said no. Brian felt that was a betrayal. Brian said he also noticed Stone Cold get up and walk out of the room around this time. He thinks Stone Cold saw himself as above this silliness.
Undertaker dismissed the trial and afterwards Vince had a good laugh when he asked Brian how it went. Brian said it took him a while, but eventually he saw the honor in being the first writer ever sent to wrestlers court, that this is how the boys brought you in closer.
Pat Patterson later apologized to Brian for his remarks, with Pat saying he thought it was all a silly rib and didn't realize how upset some guys genuinely were. Paul Heyman later told Brian that the Dudley Boys had overheard their conversation about Funaki, so Paul felt like he had to say it first.
Brian would later ask Hardcore Holly if they were cool, to which Holly said "Fuck no!" And stormed off.
Brian quickly mentions how the guy who was managing the WWE restaurant in New York, actually stole over $400,000 while running the place until it closed down.
In 2002, after The Rock cut a scathing promo on NWO, where he called Kevin Nash, "Big Daddy Bitch" Brian says that Kevin Nash and Scott Hall were both pretty upset by the promo. Brian remembers how later when Nash got physical in the ring with Rock, there is a spot where he shoves Rock into the corner and screams in Rocks face, "Who's the bitch now!" Brian says Nash was legit hot over insult.
Brain seemed shocked when WWE announced a brand split and said there would be 2 creative teams, one headed by Paul Heyman, and one headed by Brian. Brian says he and Paul butted heads over everything and Paul would tell Brian, "It's okay we fight, I was hired to fight with you."
Brian and Paul heard the rosters for each show and considering how close Brian was to all the guys on SmackDown, he assumed that would be his show. All the guys on RAW were close with Heyman, so both guys were shocked when Vince gave RAW to Brian and SmackDown to Heyman. Brian thinks this was Vince trying to get each writer to get out of their comfort zones.
Brian said he pitched Stone Cold vs Brock Lesnar on free TV, citing how Hogan vs Andre at Shea Stadium in the early 80s didn't take away from their match at Wrestlemania 3. He says Vince and all the writers/ agents and producers debated this before Vince decided it was the right call. Obviously Stone Cold hated it and it was the breaking point to him walking out on the WWE. I've never heard it mention that it originally came from Brian though.
One time on a plane, Paul Heyman got so upset with Brian that he offered Brian 3 free punches to Paul, so long as Paul got just 1 free one after. Brian declined, despite an excited Shane McMahon offering to show Brian how to punch.
Brian says he was on a RAW conference call when someone randomly dropped out of the call. Everyone was accounted for so someone extra was listening in. The call was traced back to Paul Heyman's number, though Brian says Paul denies it was him.
Brian says he would mock and imitate Paul Heyman on those calls, and wonders how many times Paul was listening in. He also suggests that Paul was feeding dirt sheet websites disparaging information on Brian.
Brian says one time he pissed Paul off so much that Paul lunged at him and had to be pulled off. Stephanie McMahon ended up suspending both men for a week, with pay. Brian says Micheal Hayes tried to stick up for him and tell Stephanie that the incident was all on Paul.
Brian says he and Paul Heyman agreed that bringing back Vince Russo in summer 2002 was a mistake. Brian said he didn't think it relevant for his book, but lately Russo told a deranged version of the story where he met with "20 nameless and faceless writers" who all "buried me to Vince afterwards." In truth, Russo met with Brian, Heyman, Hayes, and Pritchard and pitched several bad ideas that Vince McMahon ended up hearing about and hating. Brian says Vince said to the writers, "I'm sorry I brought back that asshole." Brian says they didn't bury his ideas, but presented them as Russo did, and Vince hated them all.
Some of Russo's ideas included "bringing in Eric Bishoff to fued with Shane McMahon because everyone knows their real life heat." As well as "Stripping The Undertaker of his WWE Championship "because he isn't hip or cool and then having a tournament that RVD should win." He also suggested turning top heel Triple H babyface by reforming DX and bringing back Chyna. Russo didn't know the main event of Mania that year was Triple H vs. Chris Jericho and asked the writers what they thought of those 2 working a program together.
Vince wanted a big "cliff hanger" ending for the RAW Roulette episode in 2002, so he told the writers, "What if Triple H comes out after Kane wins the TLC match and calls him a murderer to end the show?" When they asked Vince what happens next, it sounds like Vince channeled his inner Ole Anderson when he said,"I don't know, you're the writers, you figure it out."
Originally Kane was to have "killed" a young developmental star named Shane Vick, but when Vince deemed Shane too green, they kept the name Vick, but used it on a fictional character whom they called Katie.
Brian remembers Triple H asking a million questions about the angle and telling everyone how stupid he thought it was.
Brian remembers seeing Kane, who is a pro and always 100% on board with ideas, die inside as they explained this new backstory to him where he had a high school girlfriend and he accidentally killed her. Brian says Stephanie was assigned to write the big promo that explained it and says she looked shell-shocked all day with that assignment.
Brian says he tried to point out in meetings how this new backstory contradicted Kane's previous backstory, but Vince blew those concerns off.
Brian also remembers how Vince was strangely obsessed with the idea of using Kane's semen in the story and promo.
Brian says no one objected when Vince pitched the idea of Triple H imitating Kane and having sex with a corpse. Brian said no one stood up to object, but everyone one of them should have.
Vince apparently wanted the segment to end with Triple H scooping some goop out of Katie's head and flinging it at the wall, before saying, "I just fucked your brains out!" Wow.
When they filmed the segment at a real funeral home, there was a real legit funeral happening down the hall. Brian says Triple H and Bruce Pritchard tried to save face by attempting to do it as over the top and silly possible, but Vince insisted on it being 100% serious.
Bruce Pritchard was the one who pitched Roddy Piper interfering in Hulk Hogan vs Mr McMahon match at Wrestlemania 19.
Brian remembers how tense Roddy and Vince got in rooms together, saying while they respected one another, it was clear they drove each other insane while talking anything over.
Brian says Rock turned heel after getting a lukewarm response to a prepared video he sent in when RAW celebrated the best Superstar of the decade by fan vote. Brian says Stone Cold winning the vote also helped push Rock towards deciding on the heel turn.
Brian says the Hurricane/ Rock stuff from 2003 was his idea and something he pushed after he bonded with Hurricane over their mutual love of comic books. Its stuff like this that leads credence to Hardcore Holly's issues with Brian imo.
In 2003, the night after Wrestlemania 19, Brian was working with The Rock and Goldberg, going over their planned confrontation for the show that night. Brian remembers how hesitant Goldberg was to do anything that someone else did before him. First, Brian and Rock pitched Goldberg and Rock standing face to face to soak in the crowd, but Goldber said, "I ain't Hulk Hogan." Then Brian pitched Goldberg starting on the ring to say his line, but Goldberg said, "I ain't Chris Jericho." So they settled on the two men circling each other in the ring because no one else had really done that one with The Rock before.
Brian says he was the one who pitched the lame Goldust/ Goldberg backstage segment where Goldust put his wig on Goldberg. Brian says that's an example of an idea looking better on paper than in real life.
Brian says Goldberg resisted almost every idea and kept asking them to just do what WCW did with him.
Brian remembers one time, Michael Hayes legitimately asked him "Do Jews celebrate Thanksgiving?"
Brian says he got to write the first Pipers Pit Segment in over a decade, with Vince as the guest. Brian says it was done old school, with guys going over a few points before calling it all on the fly in the ring. Brian remembers how Vince legitimately pissed Roddy off by pointing out his big gut, so Roddy responded by pointing out Vince's failures and said the only thing Vince was succesful at was the thing his daddy handed to him. He also called Vince "Junior" which Vince hated.
During the infamous "Diss the Diva" segment of the 2003 Diva Search Competition, one of the contestants called another girl a "cum-burping gutter slut" on live TV. (look it up, its fucking amazing they let these women loose on the mic like that) Brian says a few guys backstage were upset because they can't even call someone a "bitch."
Brian was put in charge of writing two segments at Wrestlemania 21, the Hulk and Eugene confronted by Muhammed Hassain and the Pipers Pit with Stone Cold. He quickly wrote up the Hogan slot before devoting all attention to the Pipers Pit segment.
Vince gave Brian 2 directives for the Wrestlemania 21 Pipers Pit segment, Brian was to keep them within their alloted time and Brian was to ensure no one swore. Roddy promised not to, but almost immediately he screamed "Bullshit" at the crowd. Brian and Vince were at Gorilla Position with headsets on when this happened. An irate Vince jumped up and yelled at Brian, "Did you know he would do that!?" When Brian said no, Vince slammed his own headset on the table and screamed "Fuck!"
Vince told Brian he had to scold Roddy afterward, and when Brian tried to, Roddy asked if "bullshit" was even a swear word before laughing it off.
In 2005, Brian was asked by Vince to write a full movie script for Eugene. They wanted it to be like "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" but with the wrestler Eugene. Brian said he spent months writing the first draft and finished up around SummerSlam 2005. That was the event where Eugene got squashed by Kurt Angle and the fans boo'd the shit out of the babyface. Plans for the movie were scrapped immediately.
Brian said he would try to avoid Wrestlemania after parties because as a writer, he would usually spend the whole party being cornered by various drunk wrestlers who were pitching ideas that would never make it to air.
Brian says when he pitched Edge slapping John Cena's dad, Cena just smiled and said, "So your gonna get a taste of Johnny Fabulous huh? Have fun." When Brian Googled John Cena Sr, he was shocked to find the man already worked the independents as "Johnny Fabulous" an over the top manager. When they filmed at the house, they couldn't get John Cena Sr to act normal, he just kept cutting over the top promos about beating up Edge with lines like "sending you over the moon with a baking spoon!" The next day when they showed Vince the footage, he honestly said, "This might be the worst thing we have ever done."
Both Brian and Bruce Pritchard produced the segment, but when Vince saw it, he just said to Bruce, "I'm very disappointed in you Bruce." Brian knew it was wrong, but he kept his mouth shut and let Bruce take all the blame.
Brian says he pitched Roddy Piper and Ric Flair winning the tag titles in 2006, because he wanted to see his childhood hero Piper with a title. He said it's the only time he pitched something just because he wanted to see it as a fan.
Brian also backs up everyone else's claim that the Cyber Sunday/Taboo Tuesday voting was 100% legitimate and something Vince insisted on, while plenty of people backstage thought they should rig the voting.
Brian says he was the one who pitched Mike Adamle as RAW GM in 2008. Brian says he pitched it as opposed to a heel or babyface GM, Mike was supposed to be the clueless, in over his head and maybe a tad offensive boss. Brian essentially pitched it like Micheal Scott from The Office being GM of RAW. The only issue? Mike Adamle wasn't a comedic actor nor near as talented as Steve Carell.
After Adamle was out, someone suggested the idea of a rotating GM position with various names and Stephanie McMahon pitched an idea of it maybe being a celebrity. Vince's eyes lit up as he said, "what about a new celebrity GM every week!" And thus, the terrible "Guest GM Era" of RAW was born. Vince wanted mainstream exposure from the concept.
Brian remembers being told by Jeremy Pivon's team prior to h8m coming in to host, that Jeremy wanted a big entrance and big pink robe. They later heard back that Jeremy Pivon hated everything they pitched in the script, including the pink robe.
Ken Jeong was worried about the bump he had to take where Cena would toss him from the ring into a bunch of wrestlers. Ken was assured that he would be caught, but of course his head hit the mat so hard he needed stitches. Ken was thrilled about it though and wore the stitches like a badge of honor backstage, showing them to everyone.
Brian says the day they brought Mike Tyson in as guest host, Tyson actually went missing for an hour or so very close to showtime. Turns out he was just getting stoned and didn't want to do it around his kids who he brought with him.
A writer at the time named Erik was a huge old school fan and had a magazine from the 80's which featured both Hulk Hogan and Mike Tyson on the cover with a hypothetical dream match being the centerpiece of the magazine. Erik brought it to the show after seeing Tyson signed a glove for Brian, and Erik asked Tyson to sign this 20+ year old magazine. Tyson flipped out when he saw it and said, "Oh my God! The magazine with me and Hogan! I've been looking for this for years! You don't mind if I keep this do you? Okay bye!" And Tyson walked off with the magazine before the writer could even respond. Brian says he feels bad but calls this one of the funniest things he was ever present for.
Brian remembers Vince McMahon and Michael Hayes being very excited when they got Cheech and Chong to come guest host.
Brian is a self admitted massive Price is Right fan so he was thrilled to write all the Price is Right segments. Bob Barker was there to promote his book and his animal charity. Vince made sure to have the book all over the screen and advertised, but initially pushed the segment promoting his animal charity group to WWE website instead. Bob wasn't happy with this and called them to his hotel when he made it clear this was a deal breaker. Brian called Vince and they got the segment back on the air.
Brian remembers Bob Barker being impressed by Brian who actually read his book.
Brian said Chris Jericho needed to be convinced on the idea of wearing his Price is Right nametag on his bare chest.
Brian says no one had anyone idea who the Anonymous RAW GM would be, with Vince just saying they will figure it out eventually. There was no end game.
One time Brian pitched the Anonymous GM speaking but using a Stephen Hawking type voice, but Vince McMahon had no idea who Stephen Hawking was. After Brian tried and failed at explaining the voice, Vince made Brian do the voice for the show and just imitate a robot. It sounded bad but Brian had fun with it and it made him appreciate how tough it is for the guys to follow the script and not improvise. Brian makes a comment here saying he hopes fully scripted promos just go away in the future and that the bullet point apporach is better. Not something you expect from a writer tbh.
Brian remembers one time Chris Jericho got NFL star Terrell Owens confused for rapper Ney-O and was upset that Owens didn't want to talk music with him.
When Stephanie McMahon was moved into a higher management role in 2010, Brian got her job but essentially crashed pretty hard. He couldn't handle the responsibilities of it as well as with it while also still trying to write. He ended up blowing off an important meeting so he could write, which resulted in him losing his new gig and being back to just writing the show.
At Survivor Series 2010, Brian had a line for Miz but Vince thought it was too sports related and they argued over it. It was a heated argument where they kept tension between Brian and Vince for weeks until Brian tried to bury the hatchet by pointing out the perception of the other writers. Vince reasoned with "Fuck them and fuck you too."
Eventually he and Vince sat down to discuss the issues and it was a heated hour long talk where Vince accused Brian of not being a team player and just trying to get his own shit in. Brian later found out that Vince started looking for Brian's replacement after that meeting, but also says he started looking for work elsewhere as well.
In 2010, The Rock called Vince and said he wanted to come "give back" to the WWE. Vince suggested a match and Rock said no. Hilariously enough, when Vince suggested a 3 year Wrestlemania main event story with a couple of matches, Rock said yes immediately. Brian doesn't say it, but it sounds like Rock's position on the Mania card was a big factor in whether or not he was coming back.
When The Rock came back to WWE in 2011, Vince said to Brian, "You get to work with The Rock on his promos. It's the easiest job in the world."
Vince didnt want to leak that Rock was coming back so they didn't mention his name in production meetings and Rock wasn't on the RAW call sheet for the night he came back. Apparently, John Cena wasn't even told that Rock was coming back.
Brian worked with Rock for his big promo when he came back and while he can't confirm this, he suspects John Cena wasn't too happy with it. He isn't sure whether it was the promo itself or how John wasn't told about the 3 year Mania plan beforehand.
A week after John Cena cut a rap style promo on Rock, the plan was to spoof a recent "Funny or Die" skit (the ome where Will Ferral gets insulted by a toddler) and have a 10 year old kid rap a bunch of insults at Rock and Cena. This was filmed the day before it was set to air, but when it came time to film, the father of the kid refused to let him say anything. So Rock improvised his own promo that came off as a little harsh towards Cena. Vince McMahon wasn't thrilled with the end result either.
Brian makes it a point to say that outside of WWE, he calls The Rock "DJ" but when they are at WWE shows, he calls him "Rock" like everyone else. I think Brian wants us al to know how close he and The Rock are.
Brian says Rock came up with all his catchphrases, except one. Brian said he thought of "The People's Stroudle," but it's clear Brian is mocking himself here.
Brian stresses that The Rock doesn't use scripted promos, but Brian and Rock come up with some fun lines and bullet points. Brian says he would stand behind the camera in backstage promos with "cue cards" of lines or bullet points for the Rock. The Rock wore shades, so you couldn't tell he was reading.
At a live event in Australia that year, Cena cut a blistering promo on Rock, calling him a liar for coming back and then leaving again. This legit pissed The Rock off, so he cut a scathing promo on Facebook and this legit pissed Cena off. Vince was pissed and told both guys to go radio silent on the other until they were back in the same ring together.
At Survivor Series 2011, the Rock sang a song backstage and had Brian hold the words up behind the camera for him. Brian fucked up and held the cards the wrong way so Rock had to remember the lines off the top of his head. It was nearly a disaster because it was a live promo at Madison Square Garden.
The first night Cena and Rock were in the same locker room together since Survivor Series a few months earlier, Cena and Rock went over their promos and Brian remembers it being cordial. Rock went out first, and in Gorilla, John was waiting for his cue when he spotted lines written on The Rock's arm, but Brian didn't think this was a big deal since Roddy Piper had done that back in 2003 when he returned. Cena figured because the lines were visible on the monitors, that it was fair game to talk about. Brian thinks Cena went too far by mentioning the lines in the promo, and while Rock played it off as cool, Brian knew Rock was pissed.
Brian says that after Cena called out Rock on live TV for the lines being on his arm, they stopped meeting beforehand to go over their promos or what would be said. Brian said it was his job to be the middle man and relay what each guy was planning to the other.
Brian criticizes Cena for undercutting Rock's seriousness in the ring with kids jokes and by smiling and laughing (no selling) everything Rock said. Brian said Cena only got serious on the mic once Rock left the ring.
One week when Rock couldn't be there, he cut a tapped promo, so Cena doctored his own custom Rock shirt that said "Bring It ... Via Satellite." When Cena got backstage he alledgedly whipped the tshirt at Brian who was sitting Gorilla. Brian says he still has the shirt.
When Cena did his Thugganomics rap, Brian sat watching with Rock, who smiled and said what he had planned that night would be better. Later that night The Rock did one of his Rock Concerts performances and Brian remembers watching from Gorilla and hearing Cena yell, "That's the Rock I've been wating for!" With a huge grin on Cena's face. Cena waited in Gorilla for Rock so he could personally congratulate Rock on the segment. Brian says the tensions cooled a bit following that night and the rest of their program went off with no issues.
Brian knew Rock was going back to Holywood after Wrestlemania 28 and he wanted to go with him. He reached out to Rock's business partner and heard of a production company they were starting soon. Brian was invited to be part of it when it was ready to go.
In October 2012, RAW got one of its lowest ratings of all time, so Vince panicked and wanted change across the board. They offered Brian 2 options, he could resign from WWE or take a consulting role with a reduced salary. Considering how Brian was just waiting for Rock's production company to start, he took the reduced salary role.
Brian takea a moment to dispute dirt sheet claims on him being forced out, how his consultant role was meaningless and how he had no say. He refutes all claims. He says Vince used a lot of his ideas or suggestions in this time.
Brian notes how the Cena/Rock return program in 2013 was a lot more cordial and enjoyable for all involved, with all that past tension and animosity gone. Cena and Rock have been friends ever since, according to Brian.
Brian says he wrote the Kane and Daniel Bryan therapy session segment from 2013, and it was inspired by Dr Evil's therapy session from the Austin Powers movie.
Brian says that Vince was paranoid about leaks going into Wrestlemania 30 with Hogan, Rock, and Austin all coming up to start the show. So he didn't tell Hogan about Rock or Austin coming out, just told Hogan to react appropriately to whomever interrupts him. Hogan had no idea that Rock and Austion would join him at Mania 30, according to Brian.
Brian remembers Stephanie McMahon once saying to Brian that she wished Vince listened to her, as he did to Brian.
Brian said one time Vince McMahon told him he loves confrontation so much that he looks forward to being pulled over by a cop.
Backstage at Wrestlemania 30, before the show started, The Rock told Brian that he heard Brock Lesnar would be ending the streak. It's interesting that Rock knew hours beforehand and was telling people, and it didn't leak.
Brian says that Triple H/ Stephanie vs Ronda Rousey/ Kurt Angle was originally planned with Rock as Rousey's partner with the seeds planted at Wrestlemania 31 where all 4 had a confrontation at the show. Rock's movie schedule put the nix on that, and eventually, they went with Kurt.
After spending several years working side jobs for Rock's production company, in mid-2015, Brian finally got the call that the production company is ready for him to come on full time. Brian's last day with WWE was June 29, 2015. Vince told Brian that he loved him when they said their goodbyes, and Brian was genuinely taken back by that.
Every wrestling book has several pictures included, Brian's book is the first and only book I've seen where one of these pictures is just a screenshot from a 2016 Reddit post on that Squared Circle sub (That I'm banned from) Someone made a post theorizing that Brian Gewertz wasn't a real person, and Brian found this funny. The post in question
Brian briefly shades Jim Cornette, who has publicly criticized having "comedy writers" in wrestling, since Jim got in trouble for making a bad racist joke on Tv a couple years before the book came out.
Brian spent 16 years working in WWE and was called the "Hollywood Guy" the entire time, now that he is back in Hollywood and working on shows like "Young Rock" he is known as the "Wrestling Guy."
Brian is greatful for his time in WWE because in Hollywood everyone always tries to act tough and intimidate you, but after a decade and a half of fighting with Vince McMahon, Brian feels like he can't be intimidated anymore.

(Sorry about the formatting...I don't know why the first ones copied appropriately and this one did not).
Back in the hallway I turn away from the white-tiled hall without another thought. I’m shaking, my arms limp from pulling so tightly on that rope, the memory of John—the love of my grandmother’s life—swinging from the rafters of the loft apartment where he died.
Where my grandmother and great aunt killed him.
I don’t know whose room it was—my grandmother’s or my aunt’s. Or if it belonged to both. I can’t imagine anything worse happening to either of them. And I don’t see how so much terror can be tied up in one family that we should need a place like the Hoffman House to store them all. I jog to the end of the hall and take a right this time, then a left, and another right, and the halls just keep coming, the doors continuing one after the other in infinite lines.
I visit the magenta room where I reach down cousin Agatha’s throat and tear out her tonsils to stop her from screaming at the clown with the big teeth that dances in front of her at the circus. The polka dot room where I endure a tea party with a skeletal version of a relative who died many years before I was born. The room with purple flowers where I sing another unknown relative to sleep. The roadside at night where, in the glow of cousin Frank’s broken headlights, I down a flask in the ditch and watch the woman I hit with a car bleed out on the pavement.
After playing fetch with a mangy dog behind Uncle Otis’s hunting cabin, I collapse on the hall carpet and bow my head. I’ve lost track of how many rooms I’ve entered, how many ghosts I’ve met or become. I just keep swinging open door after door, catching the occasional glimpse of the Roamer dashing down the hall, hoping that one of these doors leads the way out, and isn’t filled with some nightmare version of my family’s torturous pain.
But every time I satisfy one room, I find myself in the white-tiled hall again.
Chlorine-drenched fingers curl around my ankle, pulling me toward the depths of the unspeakable terror that waits at the end to skin me alive, so I haul myself to my feet and shake them off, turning to choose yet another door down the endless hall—
I gasp when I see the hallway has stopped short. All of the doors have disappeared except for one directly in front of me.
Hope, foolish and ignorant, swells. This is the end. I’m sure of it. I’ve finally done enough.
I turn the knob and find the Roamer on the other side, smiling up at me.
He’s not here to help you.
No. This is wrong. I know it. He motions for me to come inside while primal instincts warn me not to follow. I don’t want to go wherever he wants to lead me, but the only alternative, the only other place left, is the white-tiled hallway.
Since that’s not an option, I step forward. The Roamer’s smile widens and he backs up, allowing me to enter. I realize my mistake fully as the door closes behind me, sealing me inside the kitchen.
My breathing hitches up as I take in the gleaming white cupboards and walls, the fluorescent lights, the stainless-steel appliances, and…the chef. Tall, portly, clad head-to-toe in white, the apron across his ample midsection stained in blood—the brightest color in the room, save for the Roamer’s unkempt hair.
He’s not here to help you.
Of course he isn’t, because no one wants to find themselves face-to-face with the chef. The instructions for the kitchen are simple: never refuse the chef’s generosity. No matter what he puts in front of you, eat it. You don’t want to end up like Aunt Sherry.
“Ah, welcome,” the chef says heartily. “Please, have a seat.”
He gestures to the shiny steel stools in front of the counter where he’s working. The Roamer sits, never taking his eyes off me. I know better than to refuse the chef, so I sit beside the Roamer, noticing the dark circles under the boy’s eyes, the gauntness of his frame.
“You must be famished. How many rooms have you visited?” The chef nods to the Roamer, “Have you been keeping track, little Johnny? Ten? Twelve? She’s trying to set some kind of record.”
The chef chuckles and the Roamer nods eagerly. Little Johnny. Something about him is familiar.
“Too many,” the chef declares, shifting his attention to me, a giant carving knife in his hand. “You clearly haven’t figured out how it works.” He pauses, chews on the fat inside his cheek. “Or maybe you have, and you just think you can outrun it. You wouldn’t be the first.”
The white-tiled hall fills my mind’s eye and I shake it away. It’s always there. Always waiting. I decide I don’t care. I’ll get out eventually—and it won’t be because I finally gave in.
“Stubborn beast, aren’t you?” the chef shrugs, slamming the blade of the knife into the cutting board on the counter between us. “Your funeral.”
My funeral. I think of cousin Wes, cousin Mary, Aunt Sherry—the ones who never made it out. I can die here. I can become one of the ghosts. But they aren’t all ghosts. They’re not all real. The more rooms I enter, the more…beings I encounter…the less I understand about the Hoffman House. I scroll through my memories, all the tidbits offered about the chef, and something cousin Suzie mentioned on the phone last night might help me.
As long as I don’t refuse his offerings, the chef is not averse to questions while he cooks.
I look down at what appears to be a perfectly normal bowl of spaghetti noodles that the chef is sprinkling with herbs and spices, and ask him:
“How do people die here?”
He doesn’t look up from the bowl. “Only one way to die in the Hoffman House: by not following the rules.”
I glance at the Roamer, little Johnny, who is quiet beside me, his elbows on the counter and his chin resting on his fists.
“Is that what happened to the people trapped here? The ghosts?”
“If you mean little Johnny, he’s not a ghost,” the chef says, tossing the pasta within the bowl to mix it.
“Then what is he?”
“The essence of a sad child, someone who was never offered a place on the outside.” He chuffs, “We would never keep a child, for goodness sakes. We’re not monsters.”
“Are they all essences then? Not actual ghosts?” I ask.
The chef uses a pair of tongs to grab pasta from the bowl, twisting it into the center of a waiting white plate.
“Some are real ghosts. Some of the rooms are just memories imprinted within the walls of this very special house. Some—as I’m sure you guessed—are purely fiction. Purely…fun.”
“Fun for who?” I ask quietly.
He leans in close enough for me to see the rot around his teeth.
“Fun for us.”
The chef stands back and lifts two plates of finished pasta, setting one in front of the Roamer with a flourish, and a second in front of me. The food, surprisingly, looks good and smells appetizing. Not at all the guts and gore I am expecting. Aunt Sherry was always a picky eater, but there is nothing outwardly offensive about what I’ve watched him prepare.
I’m about to ask the chef what happened to Aunt Sherry when she refused his food when he bends his head to the Roamer.
“Mama Ruth used to make you this every Saturday, didn’t she lad?”
Mama Ruth. I’m transported back to the red room and suddenly understand why the boy, Aunt Ruth’s illegitimate son, roams the halls looking for his place. No one talks openly about the reasons behind the rift between Grandma Louise and her younger sister—even if they’ve visited the red room themselves. I knew of Aunt Ruth only from faded photographs and the occasional hushed whisper. In one of those whispers, I’d heard she had a child. A boy who was sickly and didn’t live long.
Little Johnny.
The Roamer. The Hoffman who never had a place in this family, his essence cursed to roam the halls of the Hoffman House forever…
Dolling out punishments.
“Oh! I almost forgot the finishing touch!” the chef exclaims. “Hold on a moment.”
The chef turns and opens a tall, commercial-grade freezer. At first, I can’t process the form taking up all the space inside…the person who isn’t the color of a person anymore. Slowly I focus on the icy blue hue of frozen skin, the glazed, open eyes, the lips wide in a silent scream.
As the chef snaps off one of Aunt Sherry’s frozen fingers, I swear one of her open eyes flicks to me before he slams the freezer door in her face. I’m still staring, still seeing that twitch of her eye and wishing like hell I imagined it, when the chef holds the finger above the Roamer’s plate of pasta, running it over a microplane so tiny flecks of skin coat little Johnny’s noodles like parmesan cheese.
I’m not breathing as the chef then holds the finger above my plate with a grin.
“Tell me when.”
I watch the shavings dust the pasta and fight to find my voice. I cannot refuse the chef. I will not refuse the chef. But I can tell him to stop shaving my aunt’s finger over my food if I can just remember how to speak. The Roamer has already dug into his plate when I finally breathe, “When.”
With a fork curled between my fingers, I spin the noodles around the tongs and shove a bite into my mouth. If I didn’t know it was flakes of my aunt Sherry’s finger I was eating, it might have tasted good. But I do know, so every bite is like cardboard scraping against my dry tongue, every swallow slowly crawling to the pit of my stomach where it fights to climb back up again. After a few forkfuls, my mouth is coated in the flowery aftertaste of Aunt Sherry’s hand lotion.
“You must be thirsty,” the chef observes as I choke on a swallow. He grabs a glass off the counter and brings it to the sink. Instead of filling it from the faucet, he dips it into the sink itself and comes up with a glass full of dirty dishwater, setting it in front of me with a smile.
Bits of swollen noodles, parsley leaves, grizzly morsels of colorless meat, and flecks of unidentifiable vegetables slowly swirl in the gray water before settling at the bottom of the glass. I don’t think there is anything worse than eating Aunt Sherry’s finger skin until the chef pushes the glass closer and I smell the tang of soap and food particles I am expected to put down my gullet because you do not refuse the generosity of the chef.
If I hadn’t seen my aunt in a freezer, I might’ve ignored that rule. Since I can still taste her lotion in my mouth, I take the glass and chug.
Sitting in the white-tiled hall, I vomit. Again. And again and again. I’ve never thrown up as much as I have since entering the Hoffman House. There is a door in front me, still another way out—but not a way out because there was only ever one true exit.
Down the white-tiled hall.
As my guts settle and I spit chunks of food from between my teeth, I marvel at the courage of Aunt Helen who faced her own white-tiled hall without having to visit ten or twelve other rooms first. No one ever leaves with an exact count, except Aunt Helen.
Just one—her own.
I take the door in front of me instead and find myself in the pink room.
I don’t know anything about the pink room, except for something in my letter from the maître d’—a note on the new addition I’d forgotten until now.
No one leaves the pink room.
Shit. Shit. Shit. I’ve fucked up again. There is no wisdom, no information, no familial instructions in my memory banks about the pink room, because no one has ever left it to tell the tale. This isn’t just a bedroom, it’s a nursery. Pink carpets, pink stuffed animals, pink shelves with pink toys, and, in the center, a pink basinet draped in lace.
The dread is thick here—not as thick as the white-tiled hall, but palpable still. And it’s hot. A sheen of sweat has already collected on my forehead and upper lip. The basinet is the brightest thing in the room, a lure so whatever is inside can suck me in and devour my soul because no one leaves the pink room. The weight of the air and the bright, awful color press against my skin, nearly as suffocating and oppressive as the walls that closed in on me when I first walked inside the Hoffman House. I was a fool—my mother an even bigger one—to think a Swiss army knife would’ve helped me here. What do ghosts or essences or real monsters care about petty human weapons? What could’ve saved me from the chef or protected me against whatever horrors wait inside the basinet?
A vial of acid? An arsenic pill?
I approach the basinet only because there’s nothing else to do. I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to prove the maître d’ right or break another rule and meet the Roamer, little Johnny, outside this door to lead me to yet another grotesque punishment. I want out, so I’ll do it. I’ll look in the goddamn basinet if it kills me because I don’t know the rules of this room and someone has to learn them and I have no choice if I hope to survive. Step by agonizing step, sweat dripping off my face, my head beginning to ache from the heat, I inch closer to the room’s pink-chiffon centerpiece. I reach out a hand to pull back the lace covering the top of the basinet when I see movement across the room. In a corner that I’m certain was empty before, is a man in rocking chair cradling a small bundle in a pink blanket.
I haven’t seen him since last Christmas, but I recognize him right away.
“Wes,” I sigh.
He nuzzles his face into the pink bundle.
Wes isn’t an essence of someone who once lived. He’s a ghost trapped in his own private hell. I don’t know what I’ll tell my Aunt Kris if I make it out, but I’m grateful she won’t have to see this because she took her turn in the Hoffman House before I was born. I inch around the basinet in Wes’s direction, and when I’m a few feet away, he lifts his head. His eyes are red, glazed, and puffy like he’s been crying for a very long time. The bundle in his arms isn’t moving and I wonder if the baby is sleeping.
Then I remember what happened a few months before his visit to the Hoffman House. Nobody in the family likes talking about that either—a tiny life snuffed out too soon, the negligence, the agony, the divorce, the pending trial that Wes would never attend. He said it was an accident. You’ve never seen a man more broken.
I don’t think it’s my imagination that the room is growing hotter still. I am sweating under my arms and down my back, every breath is heavier and harder to draw than the last.
I wonder why Wes ended up in the pink room—why it was a room at all, instead of a blue van baking in the midday summer sun. It was ninety degrees outside that day; the police said it only took minutes for the van to become like an oven. The pink room wasn’t the van but it was going to cook us alive.
Wes stares at me through the glaze in his eyes. He shakes his head and I can almost hear him telling me like he’d sworn to the police and reporters over and over again: I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry. I’m so—
Hot. I’m so hot. It’s happening fast. Ninety degrees outside, an oven in here. My skin is turning red. I don’t even know if I’m sweating anymore. Every breath drags like hot talons down my throat, into lungs that beg for more. For the first time since entering the Hoffman House, I think I should’ve gone down that white-tiled hall.
I dash to the room’s only window and pull aside the pink curtains. Outside is the parking lot of the Best Buy store Wes had been shopping in when he forgot his baby girl was still in the car. Twenty minutes, he’d said, and surveillance tapes confirmed. Twenty minutes was all it took.
No one leaves the pink room.
I pound on the glass. The room is so impossibly hot I can’t think. Hot on my lips, my skin, my eyes. I’m so weak and dizzy, and the heat saps the will to live from my body. Out. Out. Out. It’s all I can think. A small fire starts in the far corner of the room. Then another. Little fires closing in, engulfing the basinet in bright pink flames that reach for me, lick me, and spark another fire underneath the wooden rocking chair where cousin Wes still cradles his quiet bundle.
Lost to his own delirium, he keeps singing to his baby girl, and I see myself and the flames surrounding me reflected in his glasses before the lenses melt down his face, and I begin losing my mind to the inescapable heat, to the window I can’t open that doesn’t really lead to the Best Buy parking lot, to the floor rushing up to meet my face as I fight for one last breath before flames sear my throat and my skin bubbles and the pink room turns to black—
Then I’m gasping on my back, staring up at a white-tiled ceiling. I draw humid air that is cool by comparison into my aching lungs. Chlorine coats my nose and tongue while smoke slowly swirls around me, coming off my skin.
It takes a few more breaths to realize that I haven’t died.
I survived the pink room.
I understand the maître d’s warning then: no one ever leaves the pink room because no one had yet. The only person to go in had been Wes, and he would fulfill the room’s requirement for all eternity: comfort the baby.
I sit up. Another door beckons. Aunt Helen had the courage to face her room, her terror, right away, when I’ve run like hell in the other direction—into other people’s bodies and deaths and nightmares. I don’t want to die anymore. I thought nothing could be worse than washing down Aunt Sherry’s finger with a glass of rancid dishwater until I was cooked alive.
My knees are shaking, my skin finally starting to cool, when I stand. It knows I’m coming. A plume of green chlorine settles around my shoulders like a burden. My burden. I force one toe forward. My bones are battered with opposing forces—one that insists I turn around and another that knows there’s no other way out of this hell house. I push another forward, draw in a thick, humid breath from the devil’s own lungs.
The chlorine gets thicker, the air warmer and wetter with every jerky step that my shaking body sputters forward. Nearly at the end, what looks like a solid wall of white tile isn’t the end at all. To the left, in a gap in the tile, the space opens on an indoor swimming pool. My eyes don’t recall this place, but my cells remember. Something in my soul knows why this room is mine.
There’s a man in the pool. Tall, with a thick mane of graying hair, and wrinkles sagging around the muscles of a body that still looks strong. He’s watching the opposite wall, so I don’t see his face.
No, not the wall. He’s watching a door on the other side of the pool. A closet. And inside it, I’m trying to be quiet. From a crouched position underneath a shelf, I’m willing my four-year-old self not to cry.
I have such little feet, such short legs, and I’m wet and cold. Water drips from my hair down the back of my swimming suit. Where is my mother? I never go anywhere without her. Why isn’t she here? I’m shaking from the cold and…something else. Something I don’t yet have words for. More than mere fear, I’m overwhelmed with bone-hardening terror. He knows where I am. He watched me run across the wet tiles by the pool and into this closet. I can’t see anything through the slats in the door besides the floor just outside my hiding place. I think—I hope—that if I can be quiet enough, he’ll forget about me.
At least long enough for Mommy to find me.
Water sloshes, falling away from the man climbing the steps out of the pool. His feet slap on the tile in slow, steady steps toward me. I try to make myself smaller. My heart pounds so furiously, it forces the breath from my lungs in wild, shallow huffs. I’ve pulled my knees up to my chest. I’m tucked in the back among the soft towels. Maybe he won’t see me underneath them.
“Come on now, Lyla,” his voice croons. “Why’d you go running off like that?”
A surge of vomit climbs up my throat, but I shove it back down. He stops when he’s close enough for me to see his feet through the slats in the closet door. But it’s too much. Too much for my little heart and it beats so hard, so loud it blots out the sound of anything else he says, and I choke as my lungs close, refusing to take in anymore air.
And then…nothing.
For a moment I exist outside of time. Then, I make a nauseating swing from the closet to my feet. Different feet. Bigger. And I’m taller. And instead of looking out through the slats of the darkened closet, I am standing behind Uncle Chip, a man who’d been so attractive in his day, so devilishly charming, it was no wonder why Aunt Annie chose him.
A handsome, sweet-talking nightmare.
He doesn’t notice me since he’s so intent on the whimpering behind that closet door. There’s something in my hand. Something small and metal.
A Swiss army knife.
Only I’m not the one really holding it. It’s my mother. I recognize the shape of her nails and the silver ring etched in flowers on the middle finger of her right hand—the one gripping the knife.
I hurry the last few steps—there’s no room for hesitation now—and plunge the blade into Uncle Chip’s side. He screeches, his body contorting against the sudden pain, but my mother isn’t done. I’m not done. I pull the blade out. He staggers, his blood already dripping and swirling into the puddles on the wet floor. When he’s about to turn and face me, I plunge the knife in again—this time, at the base of his skull.
This time, I twist it.
The noise that erupts from his body is almost inhuman, and blood pours from the wounds and onto my hand that clutches the hilt of that tiny but effective knife. Uncle Chip manages to spin on his unsteady feet to look at me. His eyes widen and his mouth falls open in a silent protest. This was not how it was supposed to happen, those eyes say. He was the predator. And predators aren’t taken down by their prey.
I let him fall in a sickening splat on the wet tile. Blood rushes out from underneath him, mixing with the pool water in swirling eddies that quickly disappear. I drop the knife and open the closet door. I see the girl, frozen in terror among the towels, and then I am her again as she is scooped up into her mother’s arms. She hauls me out of the closet and tells me to close my eyes.
When I open them again, I’m on my back on the ground. Twigs and rocks and dry leaves scratch against my palms. The sky above is the deep blue that comes just after sunset. I bolt straight up, sucking in a sharp breath of cool night air that clears the chlorine from my nostrils, and I realize I’m wearing the jacket I arrived in that I surrendered to the maître d’. I’m about to jump to my feet and scour my memory for what room this could possibly be, when I look to my right and see it.
Weathered white paint, two unassuming windows with a door between. I blink once. Again. Then it hits me.
I made it out of the Hoffman House.
I swing my head to my left just as the back door of the white limousine swings open. I force myself to stand and slowly drag my feet through the forest floor to my waiting ride. I don’t know if I’ve been inside the Hoffman House for one day. Two. A week. Or maybe just a few minutes. It felt like an eternity. I doubt I need whatever is in the glass of water on the console to help me fall asleep, but I know I must drink it because we must follow the instructions provided by the Hoffman House.
Except, I realize, when we are meant to break them. The maître d’ said I’d get my Swiss army knife back at the end, and he was right. But, as I reach for the glass, I wonder if the knife would have been in my mother’s hand in the white room if I hadn’t brought it with me in the first place. I have no childhood memory of what happened in the pool, beyond the terror that took root in my cells, and my mother has never spoken of it. Much like the red room that entwined both Grandma Louise and great Aunt Ruth, I don’t know if the white room is my mother’s or mine…or ours. Or if it happened in real life at all. Like John, great Uncle Chip was little more than a memory unwritten from our history. Did my mother really kill him for what he’d done to me? Had he done anything at all?
Or was it all a fabrication, some extravagant version of what could’ve happened if the worst had happened because the Hoffman House contained within its ever-shifting walls our deepest fears, our darkest nightmares—some so horrible they couldn’t be real…could they? I think of my cousin Wes and know that for him it was real enough to die for—and die horribly—every single day for the rest of eternity.
I don’t know if I’ll ask my mother about Uncle Chip. I don’t know if I want to know. But I am certain of the instructions I will give whoever enters next. It might mean a little pain at the beginning, a claustrophobic nightmare to serve as punishment—however brief—but it’s worth it if it means saving the girl in the closet from a terrible fate.
In case you find yourself in the white room with the pool, don’t forget to bring the knife.

A button is pushed and the lift is summoned. It knows not whether it goes up or down; it only knows that it goes where it is not now; it is always going somewhere, when it is not at standstill. A pale young man stands before the gates of heaven and a glowing red button is at his fingertip.
As the lift wakes from its slumber a man on the fourth floor, the top floor of the building, stumbles drunkenly around, holding a bottle of cognac and a pen - he wears a white net T-shirt and blue pajama trousers with red stripes and incongrously a top hat, like someone coming from a New Years celebration, but it is not a day of any note in the calendar; just a humdrum Tuesday. His name is Kalinder Jones.
As soon as the button was pressed, the occupant of the first floor, a guardian angel to most, Cereberus to some, Mrs. Murgatroyd, looked out her spyhole with her beady left eye and looked to the lift; she listened to the movement of the lift, the swinging of the doors as others listened to the news of the stockmarket; was it going up or down? She saw the pale young man in his dark suit polishing his glasses nervously as the lift jumped into life and thought about old times in the country when the young men dressed in their best Sunday suits and came to the hall to dance the polka while the accordion swung in the big, horny hands of the swarthy foreigner.
The lift started to descend and on the second floor a young woman heard it between reps; she was lifting heavy weights, her huge biceps sweaty and glistening. She put the weights down and went to the sink and poured herself some milky gray water.
On the third floor was the elderly person whom the young man was going to meet. He was in front of the mirror attending to his moustache with fine scissors. He had a large magnifying mirror on one side of him and endeavoured to cut the moustache hair by hair to get the perfect shape, “so it would fly off the face” he always said. In front of him were big colourful jars with various waxes and smells; his moustache could smell like the bees of summer one day and the fir woods of winter another. Lieutenant Commander Wessex took care of his appearance.
But he put down his scissors as he heard the lift move and washed his face quickly and put on a puffed shirt and a uniform jacket with medals. Because now his fame beckoned and he wanted to look good.
According to Mrs. Murgatroyd‘s logs, later pored over by the police, she was still at the spy hole and saw the young man enter the lift. She kept a unofficial visitors log of the building where she wrote down particulars and theories and hypothesis about visitors and the people in the building. The police would find it invaluable but still it did nothing for them in the end.
“He walked slowly in, ponderously even, none of the quick stepping youthful exuberance for this youth, the anxious rush into life, just a slow step into the future and then he turned around as we all do, as the doors of the lift started to close and he disappeared completely from my view”, she wrote.
The weightlifter on the second floor, whose name was Deirdre Morningglory was taking out the trash to a small chute in the hallway and she heard the lift. Of course she had no idea who was in it, but she wondered briefly who was coming or going. The inhabitants of this building were not on a first name basis and couldn’t help forming theories and fantasies about each other when they briefly met at the postboxes downstairs. Murgatroyd was not alone in that but she was the only one who knew everybody.
Kalinder Jones took a sip of cognac and wrote a line of text on a yellow pad hanging on the wall. “Oh, Morningglory, how I would like to leisure between thy thighs in dusk‘s delight,” he wrote and then took a step back and tipped his top hat to the line. He then walked to a shelf filled with vinyl records, took out a well preserved copy of the Best of Lee and Nancy and put it on the turntable. Soon the strains of Some Velvet Morning filled the penthouse.
Deirdre Morningglory was not aware of Kalinder’s depth of feeling for her. She had hardly noticed him even though she had noticed that he seemed very postally inclined; he was very often down in the hall at the postboxes when she went down there. Once she had nearly attacked him as he stood behind her, lurking in a corner. She didn’t notice him until she turned around from her postbox with a sheaf of letters and was so startled she jumped towards him karate-style but realized just in time who it was and stopped herself. He apologized profusely but she noticed a glint in his eye. She was back from the chute and was just now looking through her accounts. She ran a bodyguard service.
Lieutenant Commander Wessex stood at attention inside his flat. His narrow face was lined but looked decisive, his large and thin nose leading the rest of the face into many a battle. Behind him was a large mirror beside the window and beside the mirror was a large collection of pictures of him in uniform on the various battleships he had served on. He listened intently; his hearing was legendary in the service, some said he could hear the humming of submarines and the whisperings of sonars; whether that was true or not, he felt he had an instinct for danger and was prone to retaliating proactively, sometimes beating unsuspecting “enemies” who were just enjoying their drink in a bar.
The lift opened and he waited for the knock on the door, the approach of providence, his just desserts, his wonderful ascension which in the end would lead to his appearance at Ascot, invitations to manors and palaces, his inclusion in the landed set.
But the knock on the door didn’t come. He had heard the lift close again. He wondered if the photographer cum journalist was waiting outside, composing himself before meeting the great and the good of the country, concentrated in his singular person.
But nothing happened so he opened the door himself, ripped it open really and peered into the hall. There was only one flat on each floor but there was a small space outside them for visitors coming from the lift and there the journalist should have been but was not.
Lieutenant Commander Wessex walked impatiently to the lift and pushed the button. The lift opened. It was empty.
He looked around even though there was no other way out except through the apartment.
He was puzzled. He went back in and called the newspaper. There a lady („receptionist? Journalist?“ he wondered (she was actually the editor), confirmed that the photographer cum journalist had indeed been sent to his place this morning, a man by the name of Axelrod. Wessex thanked her and slammed the phone down. He walked to the lift again, still puzzled and in the end decided to go downstairs where he knocked on Murgatroyd’s door. Before that he looked suspiciously around the lobby but couldn’t see anything amiss.
Murgatroyd opened. He looked down on her small but robust body, she looked like the middle Babushka in a set of three, her beautifully round face shone like a happy moon.
“Commander Wessex!” she said. “It’s been a while. You must come in and have some tea.”
He looked beyond her, at the colourful riot of parrots in her apartment, some sitting on the curtains, others on the back of chairs, none in their cages and declined brusquely, politely for him though.
“A man with a camera was coming to visit me at eleven hundred hours this morning. In fact, just ten minutes ago. Did you see him?”
“Oh yes,” Murgatroyd said, looking slightly unhappy that he didn’t want to come in but enlivened by being asked about a guest. A blue parrot flew over and sat on her shoulder and stared balefully at Wessex, as if accusing him of antagonism towards the whole parrot species, which was not far from the truth.
“Wait a minute,” she said and went, carrying the parrot towards a table in the hall, from where she took a notebook. She opened it and turned again towards Commander Wessex.
“He was young, tall, thin, with dark hair, balding on top, with a large potatolike nose and a receding chin. He had wireframe glasses on, wore a dark suit and he fidgeted while he waited for the lift. He had dandruff as evidenced by a white covering on the shoulders of his suit, there was a slight bulge in his left pocket and his trousers seemed half a number to small. His jacket seemed a number to big too and unfashionable. He had a small faux-leather box hanging by a strap from his shoulder.”
“That would have been his camera, yes it would,” said Commander Wessex forcefully and grabbed the top of the door with his large right hand and leaned in. “And did he enter the lift?”
“Yes, he did,” Murgatroyd said and continued reading from the book. “He entered the lift at precisely ten fifty five and did the turn and stared into the hallway. That’s when I noticed his nose and receding chin. And yes, he had thin dark eyebrows and bluish eyes. He pushed a button, which I estimated being the button to the third floor, that is your floor. Then the elevator door closed.”
Commander Wessex was getting rather impatient with Murgatroyd’s descriptions and slow pace of reading.
“And when did he come down again?”
“Well, that the thing,” she said. “I didn’t notice that.”
Wessex grumbled his thanks and went back to the lift. He stopped at the second floor, went out into the small hallway and knocked on Deirdre’s Morningglory’s door. She opened, holding a ledger. Her icy blue stare hit Wessex where he was weakest.
“M’am” he stammered.
“Yes, Commander Wessex.”
He looked at her thin and angular face, she looked she had been drawn with as few strokes as possible and the spaces not filled in except where the was a prominent purple birthmark on her chin. It looked like a submarine to his eyes, a Russian one. Akula-class. That‘s the one.
“Ms. Morningglory, a man was supposed to visit me this morning. Murgatroyd confirms that he entered the lift but he didn’t arrive at my floor. Did he by any chance knock on your door?”
“No.” And seeing Wessex look, “do you think I kidnapped him? Do you want to come in and search?”
Wessex looked beyond her at a very empty space with one table and one chair.
“No, of course not. Thank you.”
And he walked to the lift again and went to the top floor.
Kalinder heard the knock on the door as he was throwing up in his tophat. He lurched like a cat and out came the remains of his eclectic dinner from last nigh; he had cooked himself great heaps of pasta and as he didn’t have anything in his fridge he had added baked beans and Cocoa Puffs cereal which made for brownish vomit. He felt sick just watching it. He put the tophat away and walked to the door and opened.
Commander Wessex stood there, his nose twitching. Kalinder felt him look down at him. He had always thought Wessex disapproved of him in a general way and a specific way as well. He had once barged in on him as Wessex was in his bath. Kalinder had pressed the wrong button in the lift when he was high and walked into Wessex flat which was unlocked as Wessex had just put out his trash and had forgotten to lock the door. He was very startled when Kalinder barged in, wearing a suit and holding a statue he had won at the annual TV-producer’s ball for outstanding game show. That would be one thing and maybe excusable in the clear light of day but the thing was that Kalinder had seen that Wessex wore his Captain’s hat in the bath and had two toy battleships with him in the water. And he was drunk enough to make fun of Commander Wessex until the latter had risen from his bath like a paunchy Neptune and thrown him out.
Commander Wessex had avoided Kalinder since that episode and the few times they had met in the lift or in the foyer he became rather redfaced which was something he didn’t like at all. So it was clear that he was quite upset since he deigned to talk to the “burglar” as he called Kalinder. He had even darkly hinted that he would go to the police and charge him but for obvious battleship related reasons he hadn’t done so.
Wessex felt a terrible smell assail him as soon as Kalinder opened the door. He involuntarily took a step back and wondered what that scoundrel was cooking in there. He looked at the pale and ghostly thin man standing in front of him.
“Er… are you all right?” he found himself saying even though that definitely wasn’t his intention.
Kalinder was going to say he was all right but felt a stream of vomit entering his mouth and was silent.
Wessex waited for an answer but when none was forthcoming he asked:
“Listen, Kalinder. I know we have had our differences and all that but this is very important. A young journalist was supposed to come and interview me. This is no small matter, it is a matter of the security of our nation going forward.” He looked at Kalinder who was becoming very greeni. Wessex continued nonetheless.
“But the thing is that he disappeared! Murgatroyd saw him enter the lift but he never came out at my floor. So my question is…”and now he peered intently at the greenish Kalinder with his gaze of steel, which he had rehearsed in front of a mirror when he became commander…”have you seen him? A young man?”
Kalinder’s stomach lurched and he ran into the toilet leaving Wessex standing.
The centerpiece was a huge mural painted on the wall, showing Ms. Morningglory as a goddess during various times of history. Commander Wessex saw Athena, Freyja, Jean d’Arc, Helen of Troy, even Betsy Ross sewing the flag.
Wessex heard a click. Kalinder had locked himself in the toilet. Good, thought Wessex. That blithering idiot had nothing to tell him anyway. He looked into every room of the apartment. Every surface was covered by pictures of Ms. Morningglory.
He saw an old digital camera on a bookshelf in the living room. He took it and photographed the whole goddess gallery. All his shame about the battleships in the bath had dissipated and he basked in the joy of revenge.
Kalinder stayed in the bathroom. Good. Commander Wessex went out and closed the door.
Deirdre Morningglory was putting on her face on when someone knocked on the door again. She sighed in frustration and went and opened the door.
It was commander Wessex again, looking like a cat who had swallowed a whole creamery and kept some back for a rainy day.
“Yes!” she said, a bit more sharply than she had actually intended. She was well aware that half of her face was less painted than the other.
He smiled and his clear eyes seemed to declare that he was honest as the day was long.
“Ms. Morningglory,” he said. “As you know I was a captain in the navy. I commanded ships.”
She nodded.
“I became quite the connoiseur of people. And you strike me as a person of considerable resources.” He looked at her and for a second she could swear he winked briefly.
“That is true,” she said like she was giving evidence in court. Neither more, nor less.
“Could you please help me to find out what happened to that journalist?”
She sighed. “If that will give us some peace, maybe I will. I’ll call some people from my organization. Just wait until then.”
“What kind of people?” he asked eagerly.
“Investigative types,” she said.
He bowed and clicked his heels. “Much obliged, Madam” as the door closed.
She shook her head, made a phone call and continued painting herself.
Commander Wessex took the lift downstairs and waited impatiently in the lobby. He had prided himself on his patience during the long watches at the helms of his battleships, standing for hours in the wheelhouse and looking out at the foaming sea, but now he was antsy, paced every now and then around the lobby and opened the front door at random moments. He even went and knocked on Murgatroyd’s door to get some company but there was no answer. His anxiety was rising.
Finally the doorbell rang. He opened the door quickly. In front of him was a plump woman with blond curly hair, dressed in a wide lapel suit.
“What do you want?”. He tried not to shout but the sentence which started out low gained in volume as it went on and “want” was kind of a squeaky scream.
“Are you commander Wessex?”
He felt her green eyes looked at him with judgment he wasn’t altogether comfortable with.
“Yes,” he said.
“Ms. Morningglory called me. My name is Marley. I’m an investigator with her organization. Can I come in?”
He stepped away from the door and she walked in.
Ms. Morningglory wasn’t sure about all the details. Can you go over them with me?”
He told her about the journalist who was supposed to interview him about his stellar career and dire warnings about the situation of the country and what his investigation had turned up.
After his explanation, she said: “Well, let’s talk to Ms. Murgatroyd first” and he nodded and knocked on Murgatroyd’s door.
No answer.
“Hmmm,” said the blonde lady who said her name was Marley. “Is she wont to go out at this time?”
Commander Wessex couldn’t imagine Murgatroyd ever going out.
“No, I don’t think so. I’ve never seen her go outside.”
“OK,” Marley said. “Another thing then. What paper sent the journalist and what was his name?”
“His name was Axelrod, I think and he was from the Armed Forces Annual.”
She took her phone and called. She turned away from him as she talked to someone. Then she cut off the phone call and turned to him.
“She confirmed that they sent him.”
“I know all that! I called them myself! But where is he? Why did he disappear in the lift?”
Marley summoned the lift and looked inside. She entered and touched every surface in the lift, even the floor and the ceiling. Commander Wessex didn’t like seeing so many fingerprints on the surfaces of the lift but he curbed his disquiet.
She exited and turned to him.
“What about the other people who live here?”
“I have talked to them. There is Ms. Morningglory, whom you know and a punk called Kalinder Jones. He is not with them. I have searched their apartments.”
“OK. Then the only logical explanation is that he either left and Murgatroyd didn’t notice or that he is with her.”
“Her?”
“Murgatroyd.”
“Really?” Commander Wessex was puzzled. Why should he be with Murgatroyd?
Marley went to Murgatroyd’s door and knocked again. No answer. She took out a set of small lockpicking tools and started working on the lock. Wessex paced around the floor while she worked and then she opened the door and he moved to her side.
They entered and Marley called “Ms. Murgatroyd?” in a loud voice which disturbed the parrots who started squeaking so Commander Wessex covered his ears with his hands.
They moved through the small hall where Murgatroyd usually stood. Her notebooks were on a table. Marley moved into the living room and Wessex looked at the notebooks. It was as he suspected, clear descriptions of visitors.
He put it down and moved after Marley inside the apartment.
The parrots were in a high state, some flying around others on the curtains, still others on cupboards.
One yellow and blue one flew down and sat on Wessex’s head. He shook it irritably but it didn’t move. It locked its claws into his scalp. A scream started for form in his throat but he curbed it successfully and just moaned loudly.
Marley turned around and looked at him with disapproval. Then she flicked her finger at the parrot and it flew off. Wessex stroked his scalp and came off with blood on his hand. He looked around. There was not much in the living room. Just a small chair and a table and a TV.
They moved into the bedroom. It was small as well and in great disarray. Marley opened the cupboards. They were empty.
They heard a shriek from somewhere. Wessex thought at first it was a parrot but Marley was moving quickly through the living room and into the kitchen. There was a door there, beside the stove and she opened it quickly and moved in.
There a young man lay with his face covered in blood. Blood was flowing from a wound on his head. They looked at him, he looked at them and gurgled something.
“Move away!” Wessex said and took out her phone and called an ambulance.
Commander Wessex moved outside. Soon the foyer was filled with EMT’s and policemen and everyone was shouting and asking questions and he retreated to a corner.
Murgatroyd was never found but scores of bodies were found in her large walk-in freezer. The police surmised she knew the game was up when she saw the insistence with which Commander Wessex was investigating the case.
Commander Wessex never got his interview and had to be content with writing furious letters to the editor of the papers, some of which were published. Later he had his own Youtube-channel. Kalinder wrote a few screenplays about a female security consultant who got into various scrapes with the Russians and the Chinese. None of them was made into a movie. Both still live in the building. Ms. Morningglory sold her flat and some thought she had disappeared on a spy mission to the Urals but in reality she opened an ashram in Florida and retired a few years later.

Innocence and Punishment: The Aftermath of False Confessions - The Crime Report
Since the trial is coming up fast, and we know RAs supposed confessions will probably be a centerpiece of the State's case--possibly the only piece--I thought it might be a good idea to touch on some false confession cases in the past. Some of them are truly mind blowing.
“Only in America can I kill someone, and two people stand up and take the blame for it,” Keith Jesperson, also known as the Happy Face Killer, says matter-of-factly in a phone interview from Oregon State Penitentiary."
Laverne Pavlinac - Wikipedia This lady sees a news report about a murder on TV and calls the police to confess. To get her abusive boyfriend locked up. She apparently hoped she could arrange this so he would go to prison but not her, and the police played along.
(Her BF) Sosnovske always maintained his innocence, but out of fear of facing the death penalty, he pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 15 years to life. (This touches on one of the biggest red flag issues in American Justice today, even bigger imo than false confessions. The carrot and stick approach to convictions in this country puts a lot of innocent people in prison.)
Interestingly, when she confessed, she gave 'details only the killer' would know. Like, the location of the body. Something to keep in mind. That doesn't always mean what we think it does, ofc.
Bonus case, bc its mentioned in the above linked article:
Jeffrey Mark Deskovic - Wikipedia
False confession leads to sixteen years in prison even though the DNA didn't match him. (Sound familiar?). This guy got out and won ten million in settlement, which he used to become a lawyer and help others get freed from prison. A later official report:
"criticized police and the former prosecutor for failure to pursue other leads and for downplaying the DNA evidence that led to Deskovic's exoneration" Failing to pursue other leads? That sounds familiar, too.
Anyway, the Laverne Pavlinac story is one of the most famous cases of false confessions. I left a lot out of both cases but they are both very interesting to read in depth.

I know this will be very imbalanced in regards of postives and negatives but I really would like to know why it is seen as successful.
As I open this I will lead with my standpoint, but I am open for counter arguments as I actually enjoyed Ortega quite a bit.
OK, so what I liked

• The actress playing Wednesday, she did a relly great job and was carrying the show.
  
• The Thing.
  
• The visuals and music.
  
• The theoretical concept of Wednesday as a detective.
  

Now to what grinds my gears

• This is not an Addams family plot. Not because it focuses on Wednesday but because the characters are not Addams like.
  
• Morticia and Gomez are portrayed as nymphomaniacs, love-blind fools.
  
• Morticia should be elegant, charmant, direct and self-assured. This Morticia is elegant, arrogant, in doubt and secretive. I think the actress is good, but her character was awfully written. She might actually be a great Morticia given the chance.
  
• Does this Gomez have a personality? If so I wasn't able to detect it. Also the actor, well, okay. Perhaps he is a good Gomez given the chance, but I really don't know. I personally didn't like his performance but I really don't know if it is his fault.
  
• Pugsley is essentially a dog.
  
• Fester is off on all accounts, also the show would perfectly work w/o him ever appearing.
  
• Wednesday doesn't enjoy the morbidity of it all, even though that would be her natural instinct.
  
• Wednesday is one of the worst detectives I have ever seen. She should have aced with logical conclusions that make sense in her world. Instead she misjudges each situation and draws every false conclusion possible.
  
• The Addams family is obnoxiously aware of their ill-fitting place in the world, while they actually never have been or at least cared about.
  
• The morality of the Addams family is extremely obscured. Since when should anyone in this family have a problem that anyone could have committed a murder. If anything it would feel perfectly natural to them. Why would they be emotional about Wednesday going to this school? Why would Wednesday be so butthurt about anything their parents do? Why would she fight her parents (in this way)? This is all not very Addams-like.
  
• It's Hogwarts in cheap and doesn't even come anywhere near the charm of Hogwarts.
  
• Conversion camp for not "wolfing out". This is just a complete wow. Bringing the topic of late bloomer to a moral low as conversion camps is disgusting to say the least. Late bloomers have a problem in society (that's not what I want to dismiss here) but bringing it to a low as conversion camps is wrong on more than one level. Conversion camps were/are torture and traumatise people for their life. Speeding up a process unnaturally is not the same as conversion camps. It's not okay but man there are worlds between the moral implications of these two measurements.
  
• What's up with this painfully constructed conflict of her roommate not wolfing out, anyway? This was more obnoxious than actually engaging. It was just a lazily written conflict, pimped with over-the-top dramatic implications to justify that this conflict is acted out at all.
  
• Also why is the conflict of the only important syren and her mother not properly built in the story. This actually looked interesting. Instead this is useless info about this one character to make a lazy point that "everything is not as it seems". After this point was made, yeah okay this is enough. Now she is likeable because unspecified family drama.
  
• Also there are an awful lot of outcast types. None of them were really relevant, except for one wolf, one syren and one hyde.
  
• What was the job of the principal except for having an irritating rivalry with Morticia that seem to be unimportant but is portrayed like the elephant in the room?
  
• This has nothing to do with Tim Burton. It seems like they managed to be allowed to use his name even though he didn't actually work on this project, except for the parts he was obligated to.
  
• The plot is inconsistent at best.
  
• Since when does Morticia have visions? Why does Wednesday have visions? What's with fester being able to conjure electricity? Magic plays a role in the Addams family but not to an extent. It's more of the fitting side-chick that comes with the Addams family, not a centerpiece to evolve an ancestor that is able to take over the body of a currently living being and is actually from the wrong side of the family as related to Morticia (who hopefully was not an Addams before marrying Gomez. But that only on a side note, it's forgivable imo, it just adds to the inconsistency)
  
• The bad guy is over-the-top-powerful with magic (the same thing he despises) and at the same time not even worth the two scenes he appeared in.
  
• Out of place love stories and Wednesday, who would use every love interest as play toy is morally conflicted, partially, a bit, but not so much, if at all, but sure is. What's about this chaos she has to feel about her love interests? (Not the fault of the actress in my opinion, just of the director, writers and everyone responsible for this plot).
  
• The principal and Wednesday antagonising each other mindlessly was also a bit hard to watch. The character of the principal could have been so much more useful to story if those two would have been able to bond (in any way, good or bad). Instead they mistrust each other on a basis I wasn't able to grasp. I understand why Wednesday wouldn't like her (in the beginning). But I really don't see why the principal is being so stupid around Wednesday so much. The conflicts they had to fight were quite arbitrary and the principal would have had so much opportunity to sort things out. Either by plotting (which a real Wednesday would have loved) or by contributing (which this Wednesday would have respected).
  
• Then the principal and Wednesday try to fool the "normie" teacher and she actually is not prepared for a fight? Not even a little? Not the least bit? It comes as a complete surprise that this person is willing to leave bodies in her path? I really must have gotten sth wrong here, because I thought this was clear. But it obviously wasn't. Not only that. The weapon used against the principal is so powerful that it's not even worth TRYING to fight back. Essentially the principal could have had a heart attack in the next room and drop dead and it would have been the same effect. Why was she even there? Why did she have to die? She wouldn't even have been able to protect the school. Obviously she does not have any means (power or resources) to do so.
  
• Also seeing the Addams family actually considering to engage with psychotherapy. Who got that idea, and actually wrote it as if this family was conflicted so that a psychotherapist could engage? Their natural behaviour would have been to drive her crazy with their non-understanding of the "normal" world morality and just using their own morality as if it was the most normal thing in the world and ironically is for every Addams. This interaction should have left the psychiatrist in an existential crisis, not in a state of confusion where she still knows what's morally correct and what is not.
  
• Then a Morticia Addams that goes to the police because she is molested. In what (Addams) world would that have happened? Then a Wednesday asking why they didn't go to the police. Again... in what (Addams) world would she even consider to ask that??? An Addams family being devasted by the normal world is bs. They handle conflicts in their own world, if they even perceive a conflict and not outright ignore it because it is natural or irrelevant for them. Morticia removing an obnoxious obstacle permanently wouldn't even conflict any Addams for a second, not Morticia, not Gomez and for sure not Wednesday. I mean everyone who knows "The Addams family - Values", to recite Morticia (very very) loosely because I am too lazy to look up the exact text: "Ripping Fester from the family. Making him your obedient slave. Making him you willingless sex toy. I could have forgiven all that. But Rebecca, ... pastels?". And now someone wants to sell me that Morticia (or any Addams) would have lost a thought about a boy she murdered?).
  
• The villain was stupid.
  
• The monster was also stupid. It actually was a plot twist for me, but not one I was thrilled about. Might be that I missed some things, but there was no clue that he would bear this secret and then on top of it actually enjoyed it all along. The twist where he tells Wednesday that he knew and enjoyed it all along changed the plot twist from acceptable to obnoxious for me. Wow could this guy have had an inner fight about his nature where the audience would have been on their toes about how he will decide (and where Tim Burton could have made the decision that he decides to fall for the evil, nonetheless). But no, he played a game, and he was used (which doesn't bother him at all), and he enjoyed it from the first draw of blood (without regret). This is so boring.
  
• A monster that is undoubtable evil and a villain that is not just evil, but even more eviler than that. He is the evilest. Please leave no room for moral conflict. I mean even Sauron and Voldemort have more moral conflict and potential for redemption than this villain.
  

This is surely just my three pennies and very much my personal opinion but, even though I bizarrely enjoyed watching Wednesday, like literally Jenna Ortega, I was not impressed by the show, especially for the missing key elements that define what an Addams family is, like integrity, charm, conflicting morality and their inherent feeling that all that is just normal and not at all bizarre.
I heard somewhere that Jenna Ortega wasn't either very content and that she directs Season 2. If she does, I hope that she makes a proper thing out of the story. It has so much potential and I would actually enjoy a version from her, because I think she actually understands how the Addams family works and can make sth. great from it.
But perhaps I missed a few essential things. Please feel free to respond, I will really try to think about it even though I obviously have a very established opinion.
Edit: Thanks to those commentors who engaged with me in a nice manner. Nice to see that there are some people who are able to just have a conversation about things.

My brother Travis Ferguson was a hero.
He was also a bully. Not my bully. He let me trail in the footsteps of his worn sneakers and threatened kids with purple nurples if they dared to tease me about my glasses and freckles. He was a good brother, but a bad kid—the kind you avoided if you were anyone but me.
He was a villain in the seventh grade but a hero in this story about the Hungry Slide. Have you ever heard of it? The Hungry Slide?
No, probably not. In some places the lore has spun into a cautionary tale for children to mind their parents, but in the small town of Maus, Oklahoma where I grew up, the truth about the Hungry Slide is far more horrifying than any rumor. I should know. I was there when it ate its last meal.
The slide was part of Holiday Park. Yes, that Holiday Park, named for the notorious Holiday family and the ruins of their mansion that the playground was built upon. Reports of the gruesome murders flooded the news back in 2004 when the truth came out. I was only seven, so I don’t remember more than a few flashes on TV and conversations between my parents and their friends about the bodies. Since then, since my brother, I’ve done my research. Any unfortunate traveler who ventured too close to the Holiday home got caught in its sticky, blood-soaked web. The home was searched and the Holiday’s were questioned many times, but nothing was found and no arrests were made. Grandfather Holiday and his son Raymond were avid hunters, so their freezers were always full of carefully wrapped cuts of meat. Some say the police were too distracted by Grandma Holiday’s homemade meat pies and unctuous stews—all secret family recipes, if anyone asked—to notice that the rack of ribs in the refrigerator wasn’t from an Elk, the heart didn’t come from last winter’s bear, and the hindquarters didn’t belong to any deer.
The Holiday’s might still be snatching prey, always young people and always from out-of-town, if it wasn’t for the determined backpacker who, after watching his partner being drawn and quartered, decided he’d rather risk death on his own terms than become the centerpiece of Thanksgiving dinner, and set a fire that spread through the mansion, killing the eldest members of the Holiday family and revealing their deepest, darkest secrets buried within the walls. Behind the plaster in nearly every room were bones stacked atop bones, femurs and phalanges and skull caps covered in nicks and cuts from steak knives and the insistent canines that gnawed through flesh and grizzle. At least twenty individual bodies were identified within the ruins of the Holiday home. I’ve heard some people say the number is closer to a hundred, but I don’t believe that. Twenty is horrible enough.
Holiday Park opened one year after the fire. Building a playground on a site of so much death was a hard sell, passing the city council by a margin of one vote on the hopeful—albeit naïve—promise that the town could wash away one family’s sins with the innocent laughter of children, replacing screams of terror with shouts of joy. No expense was spared from the top-of-the-line materials to the famous playground architect hired to design the bridges, tunnels, rocks walls, and climbing ropes that my brother and I couldn’t wait to get our grubby hands on. But the park’s most impressive features were the slides—each different, each magnificent in their own right. There was the eight-foot slide, nearly straight down with low sides—my mother’s nightmare, she’d said, and my wildest dream—a giant twenty-foot slide with three runs side-by-side for racing, and a winding slide, the tallest of all, with a full one hundred feet of twisty, peppermint-colored tubing that spit you out cross-eyed and dizzy.
Then there was another that didn’t spit you out at all.
The smallest of all the slides at Holiday Park, and perhaps the most unassuming at a glance, what has become known as the Hungry Slide was tucked at the toddler end of the playground, a short red tube with no twists or turns. You could look up from the bottom and see clearly out the top. Nowhere to get lost or stuck. And yet…
It was two years to the day after the fire that destroyed the Holiday home, about one year after the playground itself was built, that the Hungry Slide ate its first meal. Many of the parents in Maus warned their children not to play there, but we didn’t listen. How could we resist a place full of such color and wonder, with delightful contraptions we’d never seen before that made the other local playground look cheap and rundown by comparison, promising splinters and scrapes and exactly the same fun we had every other summer? The free-rangers like Travis and me, latch-key kids with parents who worked and couldn’t afford babysitters, flooded Holiday Park, where my brother became an unlikely hero from his perch atop the Hungry Slide where he refused the small children—even me, much to my surprise—access to the small, red tube. How many lives he unwittingly saved, we simply cannot know.
But my brother wasn’t at the playground when a family from two towns over hosted a fiftieth anniversary party at Holiday Park. While the adults congratulated Ma and Pa Williams for five decades of marital bliss, the children ran and played with the reckless abandon of youth. Among those children was five-year-old Seamus Williams, grandchild to Ma and Pa Williams, who wasn’t the first to fling himself down the Hungry Slide but, on that day, he certainly was the last.
His parents heard the gurgled scream, a horrifying wail that was suddenly cut off as if the sound was swallowed by a cavernous throat. When everyone realized he was missing, one of the older cousins claimed they saw Seamus enter the slide. His parents climbed the length of the small, red tube even though their son clearly wasn’t inside. Every slide and tunnel were diligently searched, and the Maus police were called. Seamus’s mom and dad were inconsolable as they explained what little they knew of their son’s disappearance to the Maus sheriff. Nothing, other than the boy’s blue baseball cap that plopped out the bottom of the Hungry Slide covered in some kind of unidentified clear slime, was ever found.
A few weeks later, a couple passing through town who hadn’t heard the stories of the Holiday family or the recent disappearance of young Seamus Williams, stopped to stretch their legs and let their two-year-old daughter, Cassidy Baker, enjoy the elaborate playground. Cassidy’s mother, wild with hysteria, would tell the police that she only looked away for a second when her little girl waved from the top of the Hungry Slide. When she looked back, Cassidy was gone, her small, pink barrette dropping to the ground at her mother’s feet.
As with Seamus Williams, searchers combed the park and surrounding woods for any sign of the toddler, whose short legs couldn’t have carried her very far. The only curious clue was found beneath the Hungry Slide. Carved into the red plastic tube were the letters S.W. and beside the S.W. were the letters C.B.
Once this detail circulated around town, people came—teenagers in particular—to take pictures of the letters. Some—teenagers in particular—tried carving their own initials into the plastic but it didn’t matter how sharp their knives were or how hard they scraped, the slide would not accept any additional carvings. Even attempted graffiti bubbled up and sloughed off without a stain. The slide quickly became a place of myth and legend. Who would dare go down the Hungry Slide? There’s a rumor that the youngest victim was no more than a few hours old. Many years after the playground was torn down, I heard about sixteen-year-old Maise Hoffman who was nine months pregnant when she went for a drive one Friday afternoon, but when she came back two days later, she wasn’t pregnant anymore. Some people say she gave the baby up for adoption. Others, the most malicious gossips, claim she chucked the newborn down the Hungry Slide. We can’t ask Maise directly anymore because she killed herself a few months later. But to add fuel to the vicious rumors, the letters B.H. appeared beside the C.B. underneath the Hungry Slide—some thought for Baby Hoffman who no one in Maus ever saw with their own eyes.
The legend of the hungry slide spread. Brothers threatened to throw their sisters down the slide, parents—who didn’t really believe there was anything sinister about the slide—used it to get their children to clean their rooms or do their homework lest they become the Hungry Slide’s next meal. Twisted though it was, I think everyone was just trying to make light of the darkness that continued to cloud the town. The playground remained open despite the rumors because the children who disappeared weren’t from Maus, and it was just a slide after all. Besides, as most parents later claimed, local children—their children—didn’t play at Holiday Park.
Except we did. The last victim of the Hungry Slide was the very bully that saved so many other children from the same fate. Travis Ferguson, my brother, threw himself down the Hungry Slide one Tuesday afternoon on a dare. He hated looking weak in front of the other kids. Our dad was a bastard back then, always so hard on Travis. Always making sure my brother felt like he never measured up. The surest way to prove his worth to the other kids, and himself, was to survive the Hungry Slide, coming out the other end on his feet with a triumphant, shit-eating grin.
Only he didn’t.
I stood at the top of the slide with a few other kids who wanted a front row seat. Others waited at the bottom. All of them taunted and egged him on, but I…I fought back tears as I begged my brother not to go. I didn’t care if they teased him or called him a wussy or that he’d have to give about dozen knuckle sandwiches just to save face—it wasn’t worth the risk. He gave my shoulder a shove to keep me away from the slide and told me to stop being such a tit baby. A tit baby—exactly what our dad called him when he fell out of our treehouse and started crying before we realized he had broken his arm. I knew I couldn’t stop him then. He winked at me, like it would all be OK, flipped the other kids the bird with both hands, and flung himself down.
A second passed, then two. An eternity for me, waiting for my brother to come out the other end. He must’ve braced himself inside to give everyone a scare, to make everyone pay for taunting him. I walked up to the opening and saw…something. Something I couldn’t explain, but something I can’t forget. Then…I locked eyes with the slack-jawed kids looking up from the bottom. My brother was gone.
The other kids scattered, most leaving the park white-faced and screaming. I didn’t move from the top of the slide until that evening when my parents—having heard that something had happened at the park that day, even if they didn’t know what—came to collect me. I couldn’t tell them what I’d seen. That Travis had gone into the slide with a wink and the bird and gotten lost on the way down. Other kids told their versions to the police. This time there was no refuting the evidence since twelve-year-old Caty Lutz had captured the whole thing on her father’s digital camera. The video was grainy but showed Travis enter the slide at the top, and his shoes, a pair of ratty Nike sneakers from a secondhand store, fall out the bottom. The whole town searched for Travis, efforts that dwarfed the searches for Seamus Williams and Cassidy Baker. He wasn’t found. Some claim his initials appeared beneath the Hungry Slide beside B.H., but no pictures exist to prove it, and the slide, along with the entire playground, was dismantled a short time after Travis disappeared. The sound at the end of Caty Lutz’s video sealed the playground’s fate. It’s a detail no one who watches the video can explain, but that those of us who were there clearly heard. That I still hear at night when I think about my brother and can’t fall asleep.
When he didn’t come out the other end of the Hungry Slide, the kids at the bottom stuck their heads in, and as they did the slide let out a giant, satisfied belch.
And if that wasn’t enough of a nightmare, what I saw when I looked in the tube flashes before my eyes every time I close them. My therapist says it helps to put things on paper so I’m writing this story. I haven’t actually spoken since that day on the playground seventeen years ago. I can’t. Not after seeing what I now draw on construction paper, post-it notes, the fog on the bathroom mirror after a shower, and up and down the sidewalks in colored chalk at the institution for disturbed adults that I call home.
There isn’t a wall that surrounds me that isn’t covered in the horrific scratchings from my memory from when I peered into the Hungry Slide. Black, cavernous holes at the bottom of swollen red throats. Pink shreds of flesh stuck between sharp pointed teeth. And briefly, so quick that it might’ve been my imagination, my brother’s face, frozen in a silent scream.

(SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING UNTIL EPISODE 62, I KNOW I SAID 60 IN THE TITLE BUT I MENTION THE OTHER 2)
Previous post here.
Hello there. Cyanide's back with my commentary on the podcast.
I've been sick. Like properly very sick. I spent most of my time in bed just sleeping or looking at my phone. I'm doing a little better today so I can get back to my ramblings. I feel like this is my actual journal at this point. Just sharing my life with The Magnus Archives fans. "Tell us your theories, Cyanide" you cry as I tell you for the 10th time that I was driving aimlessly while watching the episode or that I decided to go for a walk like that's relevant.
First thoughts unrelated to the episodes themselves - if I have to hear about Seline one more time I'm going to rip my ears off and eat them. Something about that ad is so intently annoying I can't stand it. I think it's the man's voice. Takes me out every time, my ears are bleeding from it blasting x100 the volume of the actual episode.
I was surprised to hear a Fallen London commercial. I used to play it a bit when I was in highschool. Man the young me would've loved this series...
41: Too Deep
OK, so my man Jon is officially going off the deep end, completely paranoid. His voice sounds a little different too, less self-assured. He sounds really scared.
And he has a reason to be. It seems like something tried to attack him down in the tunnels. Poor dude, can't catch a break.
Him saying the institute looks the same as it did before the attack but he doesn't was sad. I know later on its mentioned he has to do physical therapy too. I relate. Had a bad fracture last winter and still do physical therapy. Hope he gets better. In my minds eye I imagine him walking with a crutch rn. Some of the bug scars have to be on his face or other visible area since the police lady from a few episodes later comments on them and I don't think he's going around in shorts and a tshirt. Anyway this was almost completely unrelated to the episode...
Maybe the tunnels create some kind of symbol when u look at them on a map in like in Fullmetal Alchemist or Good Omens lol. Probably not though. Probably there is something living there and it's similar to the situation in Lost in the Crowd (few episodes ahead).
42: Grifter's Bone
I love the fake urban legend made up for this episode. Very cool storytelling. For a second I thought its gonna be super corny and the guy would actually not have any ears lol.
I can't help but find the way Grifter said "encore?" endearing. He just wants to play!
I'm left wondering if Angela is the same one as in Piecemeal... but I assume there is more than one old woman with that name in London.
43: Section 31
Worldbuilding time. I really liked seeing all the little stories from the police woman. Also I want to point out that we again have someone using an old zippo lighter right before they're about to die. This has to be some kind of calling card.
I'm so sure I heard the name Daisy before but I can't quite place it. Obviously the police dude didn't kill himself but was a victim of the supernatural temperature thing.
Also going back to First Aid the guy who got burned mentioned that he was branded (possibly). Maybe that's what the lighter means. The fire the burns...
44: Tightrope
The first one of the Gertrude episodes. I enjoy them in a lore sense and also because I enjoy listening to her voice but it makes no sense to me why she would record it. I thought recording this was Jon's idea. Wait no. Maybe the recordings were there to replace the written files because of the eyes? U know? Probably just an inconsistency tho. It especially makes little sense she even had people give her statements directly (ep62) when the guy who predicted her death said he couldn't even tell her and had to write. Hm.
The episode itself is OK. We get more info on the circus mentioned in Strange Music, people being warped and replaced somehow are a running themed in TMA in general. The thought of the unfinished puppets was creepy but ultimately it kinda feels like nothing really happened. Lol.
45: Blood bag
A bit of a gross episode and the return of the collector dude. So another object with magic powers is brought to the mix. Possibly a lucky one instead of a cursed one this time. As always not super scared of bugs in this format but the scientist dying like that was insanely gruesome and the descriptions of the blood bags... ugh.
It was also pretty upsetting that the guy had to close the door on the mosquito killer dude. Sorry I keep referring to them in such vague terms, my memory for names is limited and I try to remember the relevant ones.
46: Literary Heights
Very fun episode. Yea I think that's what I'm deciding to call it. Lol.
As always I really enjoyed the character describing his random job and explaining what he does and how his day was going. I'm learning a lot about different careers listening to this podcast lmao.
We see the childhood friend of the last owner of the Ex Altiora show up. He's a mysterious character, already aware of the supernatural obviously. Reminds me a but of how Mary described young Leitner in 62 (I know I mention that episode a lot it's the last one I watched so far, I paused it actually, I'll finish after I'm done with this).
At first I thought he mightve been connected to the Michael creature. He appears to be hunted by some force and going by the fact that his scar was added to the book after this I feel vindicated in my predition about the book being made out of skin. Could he been somehow absorbed into it?
The story in the book as described by the main character is kinda insanely on point for one of my irrational fears. I have Megalophobia and the thought of something huge coming closer just to realize its even bigger than u thought... crazy. Scary.
47: The New Door
One of my favourites so far (this was written when i just finished this ep, recency bias? - future Cyanide). Terrifying idea and even more terrifying that no matter how smart she was the thing hot her in the end.
Michael appearing in the archives was a huge surprise and very exciting to me but I couldn't help but compare his voice to Michael Jackson lmao.
Jon getting injured again after trying to pick a fight with an eldritch abomination.
So Michael is probably some wild card who's not on any side of some conflict. Probably between the institute and that cult of the eye? There is at least a few powers at work here. But the institute might be evil too. It is most definitely lead by shady people.
I really liked Jon becoming a bit more gentle with the statement givers even admitting he believes this woman and then trying to save her.
Also I don't remember which episode it was but later on Martin (I like him now) remarks that Jon cut himself with a knife "accidentally" and refused to leave him alone around sharp objects... save this man. Everyone thinks he self harms.
48: Lost in the Crowd
This episode was kinda scary but most of the scary stuff was in the waiting. Like wondering what's gonna happen to them.
The theme her is losing your identity and individuality and I'm really glad it was confirmed at the end the main character decided to set out on her own again and didn't lose herself to this event.
Surprised to see Gerard here. Idk this one feels a bit disconnected from the rest so far. A lot of the episodes outside of the UK feel that way.
49: The Butcher's Window
A very fun episode to listen to. I liked the detective explaining his process of observing this guy and I'm pretty happy that he got his bag at the end. Even though he lost his arm.
The guy having to hide in a locker had me on the edge of my seat.
This episode set me straight on something I didn't realize before. I somehow didn't watch the fact that Jared actually survived as himself and was like doing this to people on purpose. Like torturing them. It cast a scarier light on the Bone Turner's Tale lmao. I really misread some stuff there.
Well I'm glad to see him anyway. Excited to see him create horrors beyond my comprehension.
50: Foundations
Oh god I hated this episode. Sorry my eyes just glaze over whenever they start talking about architects in this series. Also it wasn't very scary either so it felt kinda just like a pointless lore dump. No offense.
51: High Pressure
Simon Fairchild's back at it again. I assume he told the main character to "enjoy the sea" or something. Good thing she wasn't eaten by it. The huge hand underwater spoke to my deep fears but wasn't there long enough to really trigger it. Insane though.
I am just as scared of deep water as I am of caves but as I love water and swimming I can imagine myself descending to the depths way easier than going into any caves. It would be both beautiful and terrifying.
52: Exceptional Risk
The main character in this one was a piece of shit. I really didn't care for him. I guess this is the type of person to pursue a position like that.
This episode marks the return of Robert and elaborates a bit on him. That blind guest... must've been the cult member. And I think there is a reason for the blindness. Same as the guy from Schwartzwald. They can't see but also can somehow. And the cult is focused on darkness and uses the closed eye as a symbol. Maybe the members take out their eyes/blind themselves as some kind of ritual thing?
It's obvious there is something hunting in the dark. For bad members? For enemies of the cult? Does the cult serve it? Or is it under their command?
I imagined it as a big dog.
53: Crusader
Another one of Gertrude's tapes. The old man was a bit hard to understand at times but I managed. As always it's fascinating to hear about these characters' lives.
It's crazy how thus dude just saw an entrance and went in. Zero self preservation skills.
It intrigues me that Gertrude said the thing living underground mightve been an Archivist. What kind of fate awaits people on this position?
54: Still Life
Creepy.
It was pretty obvious the guy was gonna end up having the glass eyes, but what wasn't obvious is the insanely scary face appearing on the basement stairs. The way I imagine it at least it freaks me out a lot.
This guy doesn't even know how lucky he is.
I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the circus stuff since it also deals with turning people into dolls. Pretty similar concepts.
Jon breaking into Gertrudes apartment and even mentioning the police coming is crazy. This man has lost his marbles. The reveal of her cutting all the eyes off of the books makes me again think of the closed eye cult. Gertrude probably also felt watched. I love eye related imagery. I once wanted to put an eye cult in my story where priests had to cut their eyes out but it felt maybe a bit offensive towards the blind? Idk it was scrapped. But I'm fascinated by that kinda shit.
55: Pest Control
More bug stuff. As I said I'm not super grossed out by insects so these are consistently some of my least favourite/least scary episodes. But it's interesting to see another (maybe?) human Hive.
I was very happy to learn he was the guy from Taken Ill, I love connecting things into patterns. But also this means that the undertaker lady from that episode is probably dead or worse.
56: Children of the Night
HES BACK AND NOT DEAD. Which means maybe he was the one in Taken Ill.
I honestly was kinda annoyed he came up again cause like I got the gist of it when it came to Vampire stuff. But this time he's talking about a different creature. Something that can control people's minds. Children of the Night... the thing makes people leave at night and replaces them in their bed. Huh.
57: Personal Space
Conrad Lucas probably wanted that guy to die there. Or be taken by something or whatever. The Lucas family strikes again. I gotta say if he really wanted to kill himself he should've taken an easier path then starvation. For real. Very impractical. This is another episode of people being pulled into the huge nothingness alongside Freefall and High Pressure. They all tell very similar stories. And the Fairchild family is mentioned like in all of them. The same shit. They're all connected.
58: Trial Rations
This is a weird one. From beginning to end. It's very scary but also full of unanswered questions. I guess these two do go hand in hand. The cannibal dude was terrifying to me but went down like a chump. Lmao.
I can't connect this to anything I'm afraid.
59: Recluse
I was so excited when I heard this one. Finally some answers on the Halfway House thing. Turns out he girl was actually the one protecting people not hurting them which is great. She must posses some kind of powers (I'm already on like episode 62 writing this so spoilers for that) like the ones Mary mentions later.
The table introduced in its full glory, complete with the centerpiece. It seems to me like that's where the personalities of the people looking at the table were supposed to go and stuff but after the box was lost they started being taken... somewhere? Idk.
I was very put of by the scene where he was supposed to leave but was somehow brought back to the house. Did these people never think it was suspicious that the kids kept disappearing?
Turns out the man responsible for the House was some kind of spiderman which is completely out of left field. What does this mean??? Was he warped somehow like Gertrude said an Archivist of the past could've been? Is this connected to the tunnels? More questions...
60: Observer Effect
PLEASE DONT LOOK AT ME I DONT WANT TO BE OBSERVED
I don't like this. There is something pulling on my insides whenever I imagine it. I'm halfway through the episode and I'm sitting here with a torch on in my room cause I'm afraid of being watched by something.
But I often feel that way.
Oh, that part ended... with so much time to spare. I was pretty excited what's up with my favourite Archivist Jon. He's losing his mind as usual. I really liked how well the themes of this episode came together with the eyes watching her (The Cult obviously) and him losing himself to paranoia.
I'm curious why would she want to blow up the Magnus Archives. Maybe they have a hand in creating the monsters themselves or putting people in harms way for research purposes and they put her brother in contact with supernatural shit that maybe had a hand in his death.
Another thing about the eye. I recently saw someone had an "evil eye" song on a Magnus playlist and it got me thinking about the belief in that. It fits pretty nicely with the cult and the eye stuff. Wearing a protective symbol to save you from a malevolent (envious?) stare.
Ever since I was little I would sleep with my doors closed because I was too scared of being able to see past them just a sliver of an unknown figure. Just a bit of something that's not supposed to be there. That's why I prefer to keep the windows covered at night. I always expect to see a face behind them. And I'm less scared of it actually attacking then just them existing and me seeing them. What could be standing there unmoving, looking at me. That terrifies me. I don't want to see that.
If this series doesn't have at least one eye trauma moment I'll be a little disappointed. Someone has to loose at least one or gain at least one.
61: The Hard Shoulder
This episode was really weird. Jon didn't really sound like himself and acted strangely nervous. Is he afraid of interacting with the police? It was kind of satisfying to learn he was the main suspect for the murder after he's been accusing everyone else of it. Lol.
Finally I learn what's inside the coffin and honestly I would've never seen it coming. This doesn't really answer many questions in the end.
A lot of police brutality here lmao. The vampire stuff was genuinely kinda disturbing knowing that police could just do that to regular people if they wanted.
62: FIRST EDITION
I KNEW IT. I FUCKING SAID IT U SAW IT!
I predicted how the book worked! I was like listening to this episode and paused it to compose this post but when I got to that point afterwards I knew I had to edit these 2 episodes in here. It was so good.
I loved hearing Mary Keays and her story. I loved the criminal doctor and the details about how to use the book. Mary describing her fathers Razor was wonderful. Amazing episode. I need to edit my favourites list too after this.
The page at the end and Jon finding the stuff because of the floorboards leaves me hyped for what come next. A great place to leave this off on.
Here you'll find enclosed the real life notes created by my sick mind.
My favourite episodes from this batch were:

1. FIRST EDITION (edited lol) - amazing atmosphere and a look inside of one of the most iconic and mysterious character's mind. Both great episodic and serialised stuff. Genuinely amazing.
   
2. Observer Effect - the scariest one. Introduces new concepts and gives a lot of things an even more sinister feeling. The theme is very well explored, pushes forward the serialised story while also presenting a compelling episodic narrative.
   
3. Too Deep - a look ad Jon's new found mental state, pretty scary with danger happening near an important and beloved (by me) character.
   
4. The New Door - fun and really scary, first on tape Michael appearance. Very evocative.
   
5. Grifter's Bone - reminds me of Angler Fish. A simple urban legend type story. The kind that I love to death.
   

I got spoiled lately on random bits of the show so I'm trying to completely quarantine myself from TMA content aside from the podcast and transcripts. But I'll still be around to respond.
In other news I recently became the Rusty Quills patreon to look at some additional material. Very fun.
Anyway, see you in a week maybe? Idk when.

Auditory pareidolia. Phantom speech. Or just plain old hearing voices. Call it what you like. They say that the walls have ears, but no one knows about what the doors can do- no one, it seems, except me.
They started speaking to me when I was six years old. I got up to go to the bathroom one night, when I saw my father leave my big sister’s room. I wondered what he was doing there at so late an hour, but I was too tired to be surprised or shocked. He said nothing to me as he edged past me down the hall to the master bedroom, avoiding eye contact. My sister’s door was left open, enough for me to see her sitting on the bed, hands in her lap, shoulders slumped, her face in a blank, unfocused stare. She must be tired too, I wondered, being woken up from a sound sleep. The door swung back, closing on its’ noisy hinges. And just before it closed to obscure her from view, I heard it speak, with a voice a cross between a whisper and a moan:
“He raped her.”
I honestly didn’t know what that meant at the time. I knew that word meant something not nice to do to someone. But Dad would never do that to my sister, or any of us- would he? But the door kept repeating it to me, whenever I passed by my sister’s bedroom, whether it opened or closed. Then not just my sister’s door, but all the doors of the house. And then, as I went to sleep, after Mom said good night and shut the door behind her, I heard a new message:
“She knows.”
The doors didn’t say anything for awhile after that. Or rather, they just sounded like regular doors- old, worn-down wooden doors with squeaky brass hinges. It’s a large, old house we live in- myself, my parents, my older brother and sister, and one younger brother. Of course old houses creak and moan and make noises. But it seemed the doors were different. Even when they stopped speaking, I thought I could hear snippets of words and phrases, as if I was listening in to a conversation in mid-sentence. I used to think that houses like mine were haunted. Did the spirits of the dead inhabit the doors? Did they talk to each other every time someone opened or closed them?
Over time, thoughts of talking haunted doors faded from memory, as I grew older and focused more on school and making new friends. I never told anyone about the doors, but I heard stories about rituals some other kids did- like tuning into the static between radio stations at 3 am, or staring into a mirror in a dark room until you saw “Bloody Mary”. So I tried to do the same with the doors. I would stand at my bedroom entrance, swing the door open and let it fall back on its’ hinges, until one of my parents stuck their heads out to tell me to knock it off. Or one of my brothers. But never my sister, who always seemed so quiet and withdrawn. I had tons of questions on my mind, that I would sometimes whisper to the door as I swung it open, or just form in my mind and try to project onto whatever was in the door that made it speak. Will I pass the math test tomorrow? Am I going back to my favorite summer camp this year? Why does my sister always look so sad? The doors said nothing.
Until...when I was nine, and I went downstairs to the laundry room to get my clothes out of the dryer. Before I could enter, my older brother burst out of the room, leaving the dryer open behind him, its’ contents spilling on the floor. It annoyed me, how inconsiderate he was, and that I would have to get the dust off some of my clean stuff. He edged past me, not saying anything or making eye contact as he thumped up the basement stairs. The laundry room door closed as I went in, and that’s when I heard it:
“Panties in his pocket.”
I spun around with a shock, expecting to see someone in the room with me. But no, at long last, the door had spoken. I burst out of the room to the stairs, just as he was at the top, and I saw it- sticking out of his back pocket was a pair of my underwear.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Give that back!”
He giggled and threw the crumpled panties down the stairs and slammed the basement door shut. I was furious and embarrassed- why would he do such a thing? I could barely stand to hold them between two fingers; it felt like he made them dirty again. I walked back into the laundry room and threw them into the washer. But as I left the laundry room, the closing door said two words that froze me in my tracks:
“You’re next.”
I was fast approaching my twelfth birthday- the same age my sister was when I first heard the doors tell me what was happening to her. I felt more and more uneasy and suspicious of my family the more normal they acted about everything- except when it came to my sister. She always had a rebellious streak, but the closer she came to her 18th birthday the more she acted out, the more she tried to pick fights with Mom and Dad, or my big brother- as if she were looking for any excuse to be thrown out of the house. And one night, during dinner, less than a week before she turned eighteen, she found her excuse. I don’t know how it started, or who it started with, or even what was the issue that sparked it. I was too nervous to look up from my plate of barely-touched food and half-empty water glass. It eventually got to Dad that he threw down his fork.
“That’s enough out of you, young lady!”
“Then stay out of my goddamn room! Keep your stinking hands-”
Her words were cut short by Mom reaching across the table to slap her face. Hard. Almost throwing her off balance. Everyone at the table froze in place, all eyes on my sister, almost expecting her to pitch over and collapse to the floor- all except my father, who was looking down at his plate with an expression of shock, as if someone just pointed a gun at his head.
“Go to your room, right now.” Mom said in a cold, steady voice. My sister didn’t go to her room. She ran from the table straight towards the front door, throwing it wide open, and fled into the evening streets. No one went after her. “She’s stormed out before,” my older brother said no no one in particular. “She’ll be back.” Dad got up and gently closed the door. Not a word was spoken after that- except for the door. Twice it spoke, turning on its’ ancient hinges:
“Get out.”
Now I ran from the table towards the bathroom, dry heaving into the toilet.
My sister never did come home, nor could we find out where she went. For days afterwards the police came to our house to talk to Mom and Dad, but mostly Dad, and mostly outside the house in hushed huddles where they couldn’t be overheard. Dad is tight with the police, the police commissioner, the Attorney General- whatever arrangements they made about my sister they kept to themselves. Then the press came, with their vans and satellite dishes and video cameras- but the police kept them at a distance. My parents eventually spoke to them, at one press conference after another, explaining how she was mentally ill, how she needed help, and tearfully calling for her to come home. The photographers wanted us all in the shot at these conferences, but I refused to come out of my room. I would not come down to eat, barely go to the bathroom. I was so angry that it had come to this- but also afraid of hearing what the doors might say next.
Mom came in at night- the door, mercifully, stayed silent. She brought in a bowl of soup, placing it on the night table next to my bed. I wanted to throw it in her face, for how she slapped my sister, for all that she let my father do to her...but fear paralyzed me. Would she slap me also? Or give me over to my father? She sat down next to me on the bed, her hand resting its’ cold, dead weight on my shoulder. “Try to eat something, dear. We all have to be strong now.” She had left the door open, and Dad poked his head around the corner. He had never been in my room, at least not when I was in it. But my eyes darted around the room, looking for places to hide or exit. Thank God he made no attempt to come closer. “Remember, Uncle Jeffrey and his wife will be here soon for Thanksgiving,” he said. “He’s going to help any way he can. We’ll never stop looking for her.” Mom gave my shoulder a squeeze, got up and left the room, closing the door behind her.
“She’s already dead.”
The words gut-punched me so hard I slid off the bed to the floor. I wanted to tear that door off the hinges with my bare hands. Why is it telling me this? Why now? Why?
All the following day, the doors groaned and squeaked the same message, over and over. How did she die? Where’s her body? Did someone kill her- my father, my brother? I could have screamed these questions at every door I passed through, if only in my mind- but all they said was the same message. So finally I just screamed, collapsing in the bathroom, pounding the floor tiles, trying to drown out the voices of the doors. I don’t remember who came in and picked me off the floor, or who put me in the car, or to which hospital I was taken. Mom and Dad spoke to the doctors, filled out paperwork. I was put before doctors, nurses, psychologists and therapists, given pills to swallow. In one room I sat on a bed in a hospital gown, while a nurse took my pulse and temperature, took the empty paper cups that held water and my meds, and walked out. “I’ll be right back,” she said as the door swung open. For a brief moment I saw myself as if from the outside hall, looking almost the same as my sister did, when I saw her through the open door as Dad was walking out. Then the door swung shut.
“Do something,” it said.
It seemed to speak with a different accent than the doors at home- higher-pitched, a crisper tone- maybe because these doors are younger? I found myself wondering these things, not surprised to hear the doors speak outside my home. It almost felt comforting, that whatever made them speak, they followed me here. I dared myself to speak back. “Do what?”
The nurse came back, swinging the door open, and I had my answer:
“Thanksgiving.”
She asked more questions, did more examinations, filled out her checklist. I answered as expected- but my brain was already in gear, focusing on the weeks leading up to November 23, when my family would all be together, in one room. The plan was already jelling in my mind. I knew what to do. I played the perfect daughter and model patient-in-recovery, whatever it took to get me out of the hospital and away from the eyes of therapists, social workers, and my parents. The doors helped- they told me what I had to prepare for that day, what to say and when. They helped me to pretend to take my pills the doctors gave me, told me when the coast was clear to spit them out or flush them down the toilet. I wanted my mind and senses sharp for what was to come that night.
“Honey, where’s the carving knife?” Dad called to Mom from the kitchen.
“Didn’t you pick it up from the hardware store to get it sharpened?”
He certainly had. I saw him bring it into the house, take it out of the box, and plug it into the electric outlet in the pantry alcove. Now it was nowhere to be found.
“We’ll find it later, dear,” Mom said. “You’re brother Jeffrey is always late for Thanksgiving dinner anyway.” I knew this also- the doors told me he would be running at least 15 minutes late. Plenty of time to set things in motion.
I found Mom alone in the kitchen, pulling items out of the fridge and into the oven. I stood nearby until she noticed me. I swallowed hard, knowing that this step was crucial. I had to get them all in one room, the dining room to be specific. “Mom...I think we should all have a moment of silence for my sister. Let’s do it before Uncle Jeffrey comes- you know he’s not into those kind of things.”
She looked taken aback. “A moment of silence? But dear, you’re sister’s not-” she stopped abruptly, the last word caught in her throat. Go on and say it, you bitch, I screamed in my head. Dead. You must know she’s dead by now, just like you knew about all the times Dad raped her. But my face was frozen in a mask of angelic innocence. Mom’s voice got unstuck. “You’re right. Just something for the family to keep her with us.”
“I’m going upstairs to the bathroom,” I told her. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
I went upstairs, not to the bathroom, but to my bedroom, and reached under my bed where I hid the newly-sharpened electric carving knife, now fully charged. Through the carpeted floor I could feel and hear the shuffling of feet, scraping of chairs, and muffled voices. Perfect. They’re all in the dining room.
This house has two staircases leading to the bathrooms and bedrooms on the second floor. One comes up from the kitchen, then going down to the basement and laundry room. The other leads up from the living room past the dining room. At the top of that stair was a door that was never, ever closed. I closed and locked it, slowly that no one downstairs could hear it close. Even so, I still heard it whisper: “Do it.”
On the way down the back stairs and into the kitchen, I stopped by the pantry alcove from where I had stolen the knife. I opened the metal hatch to the circuit breaker. Even this little door had already told me the code for timing when the lights would turn off and back on again. A few minutes were all I needed. I peeked around the corner to see the back of Dad’s head, seated at the head of the table. There were only two ways of escape for them. One was through the living room and out the front door. The other was through the kitchen-and through me. And I made provisions for both ways.
I hit the button- and all the lights in the house went out.
First there were groans of exasperation and the sound of Dad’s chair scraping as he got up to check the circuit box. But I was fast- I was by his side before he could completely stand up. The next sound was the scream of the carving knife come to life as it sliced through his neck arteries and windpipe, and his garbled scream of pain before he collapsed on to the table. Now more screams came as chairs were pushed back and clattered to the floor. I made out Mom’s voice amid the noise, panicked and incoherent as she ran towards where her husband had sat. I homed in on that voice, ramming the moving blades into what I assumed was her open mouth. More garbled screams, the sound of bubbling blood, and the crash of a body hitting the floor.
I was afraid at first of my older brother- the one who stole my panties, and that time wasn’t the last. He was big and athletic, and physically capable of fighting off a 12 year-old girl with a knife. But the doors assured me that he was also a coward. He was throwing himself at the front door in a panic, jerking the big brass doorknob, fidgeting with the locks- not noticing the anti-break-in device I set in place at the bottom of the door when no one was looking. He swung with his right arm while his left hand kept working the knob, facing me squarely long enough to ram the knife into his crotch, and then the back of his neck as he doubled over, screaming.
One more voice was screaming, from under the dining room table, fading to whimpering as the noise died down. In the dim street light filtering through the closed curtains, I could see my younger brother cowering under the table. I walked towards him, unsure of what to do next. Now he crawled out from under the table and stood before me, sobbing and shaking, pleading over and over, please please please don’t kill me.
I was genuinely conflicted about this. He was so young, a few years after me. How much did he know? And what could he have done about it? Would he grow up to be like his brother? Or his father? Or would this night cure him of that permanently? But the doors...for half of my existence they have been speaking to me, guiding me, warning me- and they’ve never been wrong. I still don’t know who or what they are, or why I’m the only one who can hear them speak. But when they speak, I must listen. And every door I passed through and opened and closed for days before this night kept saying the same thing: “All. All of them.”
I plunged the screaming knife into his chest, and all pleading stopped.
The headlights of a car swung past the windows as Uncle Jeffrey parked his car in the driveway. I pulled my older brother’s body away from the door, disengaged the anti-break-in device, and opened the last of the door locks. I then sat down at my chair at the dining room, placing the gore-clogged knife in the center of the table- like a centerpiece. And I waited.
Uncle Jeffrey’s voice came through the door as he pounded on it. “Is everything okay in there?”
“Come on in,” I called to him.
The door swung open just as the lights came back on. I swear I heard it say, “Surprise”.
Sitting in the precinct interrogation room, I feel as numb as my sister looked, all those years ago. They ask me questions, I give them answers- until a lawyer comes in and tells me to stop talking. Uncle Jeffrey’s a lawyer too, and he’s tight with the authorities, just like Dad was. He’s been pulling strings to try to tone down the investigation, and send me back to the hospital. Anyway, no one wants to believe the obvious- that a 12 year-old girl from a well-off and well-connected family went on a murderous rampage. He tells me that once I’m out of the hospital, I’ll live with him and his wife, and they’ll be my legal guardians. But at this point I don’t care what happens to me. All that matters is that they found my sister. She was in a corner of an abandoned building even the homeless and junkies didn’t frequent- her way of evading the police, who would have eventually dragged her back to Dad. She had been dead for some time, victim of a suicide. She had also left an extensive letter in a notebook, detailing how both her father and brother had raped her over a six-year period, and how her mother had covered up for them. They tried to keep the details from me, but the doors hide nothing from me.
And now, as I’m set up in my new bedroom, glass of water and pills on the nightstand, I’m mulling over what I’ve heard so far. Uncle Jeffrey and his wife don’t have kids, but some doors I open in this house say things like, “He held her head down”, or “She made him watch them”. Other doors talk about money, using words I don’t understand. And one door, when it closes very slowly, keeps giving a set of numbers, like a combination. For what? A safe? A gun locker? A secret room somewhere?
I wish I could block out these voices I’m hearing. The pills don’t stop them, and I’ve stopped spitting them out. All I know is the doors speak to me everywhere now. And when they speak, I must listen.

Occasionally, I'll find that my players are basically shuttling from one combat to the next, with the fights being the centerpiece of the session and everything else being kind of interstitial. I was trying to mitigate this last session by adding some good stealth or social encounters.
Here's what I had planned initially: Last session, the players got a clue that would lead them to a police report in the city guard headquarters. They would bring the clue to their NPC ally, a very close friend of the party who they saved the city with earlier in the campaign and who is currently head of the city guard. The ally would give them the police report, which would have some interesting reveals about the story and would lead them to a dungeon where the session would begin in earnest.
And here's what I came up with: Their close friend and ally who now runs the town guard couldn't possibly give them the police report. It's against regulation and, as a city official, breaking regulation for her friends would cause a major scandal. She has no familiarity with the urgency of the mission the players are on, so they can fill out the equivalent of a FOIA request and wait 6-8 weeks like any other citizen. They players could try to persuade her, but it would be extremely challenging to get her to break her lawful good alignment and her obligations as a law enforcement official.
This all turned into a great encounter that involved lots of great social interactions with the captain, guards, and other staff at the HQ, a stealth operation, using spells in unconventional ways outside of combat, etc. All because they wanted to solve this problem without it coming to violence.
The main consideration for an NPC taking on a risk to help the players given in the DMs guide seems to be the NPC's disposition toward the characters, but I'd add that their disposition needs to be taken into consideration with their other wants and obligations, and how strongly they feel about those things. I think often, the characters standing in the players' way are enemies, so it often comes to combat. But when it's their close friends in their way, things can get more interesting.
Just a little thing that came up for me during prep last week that I thought I'd share. I hope it's helpful to someone.

Like many of you, I've been chasing toan since I was in my teens. Of course, that was a different times -- no cell phones, no social media, you weren't on camera 24/7. The internet was a wild place where you could type in "Cindy Crawford naked" and instead of 10 million porn links you would get one link to a person's angelfire site that they created as a shrine to Cindy Crawford with the centerpiece being that nude photo she had with the snake over her shoulders.
It was easier to get away with things. Unless you told on yourself, there was no evidence. So when the opportunity arose to pull maybe the greatest toan heist of all time, I knew I had to it.
The target? A Dumble Overdrive.
The heist went flawlessly, it took less than 2 minutes to have the coveted Dumble out a side door and into the back of my 1983 Pontiac Bonneville wagon, nestled between the two bazooka tubes under a blanket. In under an hour it was in my bedroom, and it would be two months before the greedy label even knew it was gone.
The catch? I couldn't tell anyone. I couldn't share my perfect toan. I had to continue gigging with a Line6 AX2 212 like a damn joke. I had to let the world think I was into solid state and modeling to diffuse suspicion and maintain my cover.
It was only when I was home alone that I could truly embrace the miraculous toan that came from my row of identical Les Pauls when any of those sweet ladies was plugged into the Dumble.
But alas, my folly eventually came into play.
As I began recording a new album, I thought, why not mic the Dumble? Why not give the world a taste of REAL toan? Why not share this light that I've kept hidden for so many years?
So I did use the Dumble, and I did indeed make the most toanful, best album of my life. An album so GOOD that once released, it hit the ears of none other than John Clayton Mayer -- the one guitarist who has always been jealous of my playing.
He instantly recognized the Dumble toan, and that was my downfall. I incorrectly assumed he would not be able to place it without the obfuscation of three pedal boards, but what I didn't know is that he placed a call that very same day to Joseph Bonamassa and asked him verify the toan was indeed a Dumble.
Listening together, the two of them were able to verify that it was indeed the Dumble Overdrive serial #42069 that had mysteriously gone missing in 1994.
Why would I sit here typing this as the police are knocking at my door?
To warn you. Don't be like me.
Believe the toan is in your fingers. Believe practice is enough. Believe all you need is a vintage Klon on a Fender Deluxe Reverb. Believe that not all strats sound exactly the same.
Because if you go chasing real toan, it will be the end of you. Just the way it has ended me.
There's nothing left for me but jailhouse rock.
P.S. John Mayer is narc.
​

Pas-de-Visage Domain of the Death of the Self
Darklord: Contessa Rosalind von Hahn Genres: Gothic horror, psychological horror Hallmarks: The marketplace of identity, con games and theft, hordes of faceless mannikin, yawning existential emptiness. Mist Talismans: A bloodless and still living human face, a crystal-glass bottle of powdered shame, a massive white moth.
Past the reach of the Forest of Moths, in the dark night of the soul, under a moon as round and serene as any mirror, there is a place which can make anyone precisely who they want to be. Rumors spread of Pas-de-Visage like blood over a plush carpet. There, it is said, one can do commerce in the discrete elements of the self, trading away the hateful portions of one’s body and mind and buying a new face, a new set of preferences, a new lease on morality. How many times has a soul gazed wistfully into an uncomprehending night, wishing to be someone else? There is a place for them in Pas-de-Visage, all of them, every part. Pas-de-Visage is beautiful under the ever-full moon. The city sits glimmering on the shores of Lac Devide, multicolored lanterns playing on marble and dark water, gilt scrollwork and patterned silk. Men and women and more besides - ageless, perfect amalgams of fanciful features - stroll champagne boulevards elevated with the music of dreamlike violins, listening to the enthralling stories of mystics and travelers. One always falls asleep just as dawn pinks the horizon and wakes just as the sun slips beneath. In the grassy countryside, pastoral farmhouses sit full and silent, flickering with candlelight as long-nameless laborers dig at long-forgotten foundations, hoping to forage enough gold to buy a mouth to eat with. The servantry is faceless, they are everywhere, and they are so, so hungry - but one pays no attention to them. These mannikins have hardly enough of themselves remaining to want for anything anymore. When there is nothing left, one has no choice but to become nothing at all - and in that true and terrible emptiness there is a monstrosity that becomes ideology. Freedom and servitude in awful balance. Pas-de-Visage is as wealthy as one could wish, and everywhere is the marketplace. How could it be anything else? Closet doors open at closed salons, revealing a senseless panoply of bodies and faces. Tastes and habits are traded in velvet boxes on cafe tables. Faith and conviction is won and lost in card games. Everyone has something to sell. The weary traveler, come so recently from the provinces, may be stopped by a dreaming socialite wondering from whom they bought their beautiful skin. Deaf and lipless wretches tug at passing hems, eager to sell their last remaining freckles. Everything is enhanced with mystique and story: scars were won when prising magic secrets from a recalcitrant angel, or pale hair bartered from a mothland dryad. Everything is undergirded with unspoken threat, a shame encouraged and catalogued by soulless agents of emptiness and used to wheedle away the last, valued vestiges of the self. These doppelgangers move, act, and exist according to an unspoken code. They can be anyone; the conspiracy knows no limitations. Their primary guiding principle is theft, and anything they take disappears, lost to total oblivion. At its heart, on the lake, the Von Hahn Estate sits spread like a butterfly on a board, open and welcome. Its mirrored pillars swim with the most singular servants and retainers; its wardrobe-dungeons swell with the stolen identities of thousands of lost lives. The Contessa waits on her divan in her open terrace swaying with silk and moonlight. There is nothing about a living person that she does not find beautiful. She will have it all, one way or another.
Noteworthy Features Those familiar with Pas-de-Visage know these facts: - The marketplace of identity is ever-present. One can always find someone to buy or sell any aspect of the self. But not memories. Never memories. They remain, cut off and rootless from the alien personality to whom they are now ruefully attached. - The wealth of Pas-de-Visage seems to come up, literally, from the ground. The gold of buried empires is found still glittering in forgotten ruins; the Forest of Moths gives silk and incense. There always seems to be a forgotten storeroom stocked with the best wine. But as this wealth is discovered, it is consumed. There is always more than enough, but nothing stays. - Order in Pas-de-Visage is maintained by the Whisper Police. Their mandate is enormous and their methods extreme. More than anything, they maintain the fairness of trade, enforcing contracts and ensuring property rights. They have an uncanny knowledge of the thoughts and intents of the people and they execute warrants swiftly and silently. They make excellent use of invisibility. - The wealth inequality in Pas-de-Visage is staggering and eminently visible. Those with nothing left to sell are reduced to selling elements of themselves. Unfashionable noses and out-of-date genders give way to the conspicuous lack of any of the same. The worst-off in both city and country have almost nothing of themselves anymore; they are a core of dim longing and colorless memory surrounded by a faceless, featureless shell. When all is sold, they disappear completely. - And yet, for each empty place where a person once was, something remains. These faceless things have nothing of themselves, but can take on any shape and personality. Any snippet of identity they con, wheedle or plead disappears into their ever-hungering nothingness. They take the faces of friend and family, celebrity and soulful beggar in their faithful service. These doppelgangers can be anywhere, anyone - and what they cannot grift they are more than happy to steal. - The Contessa openly encourages the marketplace of identity because she, more than most, benefits from it. She is an open ruler; access is permissive. Who would dare challenge her? She is an intensely puissant sorcerer with powers both subtle and overt. She sometimes disappears for an evening, a few weeks, or longer. She always returns greatly enriched.
Settlements and Sites Surrounding the whole of the domain is the Forest of Moths, a dense, benighted wood of twisted beech, willow, oak and mulberry. The moths that make its name are numerous, fuzzy white things the size of a human hand which flutter voiceless between the curled branches. Pale, dangling cocoons and cold wisp-lanterns hang from the damp branches in the hundreds, tended by mumbling hermits who live in tumbledown shelters, eating moss and boiled silkworm pupae. These half-goblinoid silktenders are often the first and only source of truth and honest help in Pas-de-Visage, though their long isolation from the rest of society makes their speech cryptic and halting and their tempers easy to inflame. They are often the only warning travelers receive of the dangers of the forest - lie-spitting imps in rat or raven form, drifting will-o-wisps that glint like lost gold, and the hunting barghests which can so often resemble mumbling, half-goblinoid hermits. They have nothing to say of the city - it is far more dangerous than anything the forest can produce. Beyond the Forest of Moths is the Paysage, the rolling grasslands drifting down to the city on the lake. Cool green orchards hang with apples, pears and peaches, and grassy pastureland is dotted with the calm bulk of napping cows and cloudlike sheep. Night is perpetual. There is no main road to the city on the lake but, instead, a half-hundred meandering dirt tracks that wheel around tree stumps and stubborn rocks. The thatch-tufted farmhouses look warm and inviting, but the people living within suffer some of the worst desperation in the Domain, for so many of them have sold so much of themselves to survive the fickle depredations of chance which fall so harshly on the poor. They are little more than faceless mannikins, voiceless and unnerving, and they enjoy gathering around those still blessed with eyes, skin, and personality to watch while they sleep. Doppelgangers work most openly in the Paysage, taking nameless mannikin and stealing away all that remains of them. It is as much sport as it is faith, a sacred hunt terminating in merciless theft and merciless birth. The eponymous Beau Ville de Pas-de-Visage sits, shining, on the northeastern edge of the Lac Devide. It is a sprawling place of roughly 50,000 inhabitants, welcoming with wide streets patterned in multicolored marble slabs and resplendent with bright, flower-crowned buildings illuminated in gilt and gemstone mosaic. All good things flow to the city, one way or another: wine and coffee, opera and incense. While gold is welcome in Pas-de-Visage, the marketplace of identity is strong here, and the discrete elements of self are worth far more. Many things can only be bought with identity. Here, doppelgangers operate with more discretion, appearing as close friends and family to wheedle marks of their selves - but the people act little different. Everyone has a scheme, a story, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have everything one could ever dream. And in the darkness of crowded alleys, in tumbledown houses bolted to the side of grand theaters and wisp-lighted galleries, are the poor: the servants and cooks, the laundresses and nursemaids, all faceless mannikin in hidden but staggering profundity. One’s tea is served by a body without a face or name, and this is not remarked - until one notices just how many of them there are. The Von Hahn Estate is an open and popular location, taking pride of place on the waterfront and lit perpetually by sweet-smelling, multicolored fires sustained by the Contessa’s exotic sorcery. The forward portion is open to the public, serving as display of the strange trophies the Contessa has acquired throughout her esoteric travels. Behind wide, closed doors there is always a party, a salon, a discussion, an event. Drifting figures are seen behind waterfront balustrades, releasing glowing irises to float on calm waters. The Contessa keeps her private quarters safe from public view, and it is known she keeps her more valuable treasures there, but the Whisper Police are present in terrible force. Their presence is both uniformed and public as well as secret and disguised: breaths of air waft past wide-eyed visitors as invisible bodies pass beside them. Troublemakers tend to disappear quietly, and are only seen piecemeal afterwards - their particular smile on someone else’s face, their notable laugh issuing from someone else’s throat. Beneath the Von Hahn Estate, in secret rooms built beneath the weight and shadow of the lake, is the Contessa’s personal wardrobe-dungeon. Few can even surmise how such a place is laid out. The rooms have no great arrangement or unity. Dusty vaults abut each other, carved from rough stone and crammed with all manner of forgotten finery. In the higher levels, nearest the surface, cluttered rooms filled with dusty brocade dresses, heavy tapestries and chests of tarnished jewelry sit waiting for a measured hand to pick through them. Beyond the heaped amphorae and twenty-foot portraits are the more esoteric collections: bottled emotions, bonds, habits and preferences. In the depths there is a great, mirrored room, and leading from its dozen hidden doors are the secret catalogues of bodies and faces, hairstyles and eyeballs, fingers and voices and hearts. The Contessa picks between these like anything else, standing in her mirrored room and gauging how other peoples’ skin fits her fey moods. Further below, it is rumored, are the black cells, where wretched things weep in darkness. And the lilting, invisible bodies that police the Estate walk here, too - wraithlike, vigilant, ever-guarding, ever-hunting. The Lac Devide is the stunning centerpiece of the entire Domain of Pas-de-Visage. Its dark waters glimmer with firelight; drifting birds sleep peacefully on its placid shores. Multicolored fish, all the hues of a starry midnight, break the surface to snap at lolling fireflies. It is common for those who pass its shores to throw a whimsical offering to the lake - a coin, a button, a sandwich, whatever one has to hand. But there is no bottom to the Lac Devide. The dark waters descend further than they ought, opening onto an existential nothingness that undergirds everything in Pas-de-Visage. No light can penetrate that great shadow and there is nothing so crude as breathable air. Dark bodies slide against each other soundlessly in the depths. The things in the Lac Devide are desperate to extinguish any trace of reality. They slip fingers into pockets, up shirts, into mouths, stealing away coins and lockets and teeth. To remain for any length of time in the darkness is to be stolen, piece by piece, until nothing remains. But sometimes divers spot something shining and ineradicable in the depths. Whether it is the greatest treasure in the Domain or the greatest illusion, none can say - none who ventured after that particular rumor have returned.
Contessa Rosalind von Hahn The woman who would become Rosalind von Hahn was born a refugee, fleeing one war directly into the arms of another. On the trail, between cities, chased by looters, monsters, and the arcane artillery of indiscriminate armies, she discovered both her prodigious sorcerous powers as well as a hidden noble lineage, one that promised her safety and wealth if she could just press through the conflict to her family’s ancestral estate. It was only by grit, cleverness, and personal bravery that she succeeded, and now she turns her attentions towards the neglected people of her long-lost land, bending her powers to their betterment. Or, no. How did it go? She was born in isolation in a monastic temple and spent her first decade of life in meditative silence. She traded all her lies to a star-haired hag and now only speaks the numinous truth of the living planes. She is the first mortal reincarnation of a slain deity, eager to experience the small pleasures denied to her once-divine self. She is one’s own long-lost sister; she knew one’s parents in schooling; she has access to such grandeur in distant lands and only needs a little help in reaching it. Whoever she was, the truth of her past is enmeshed in a nest of lies. She fabricates new identities whenever it is needed, wielding sympathy and greed like twin knives. It is second nature to her now, easy as breathing. To peel some manner of truth from the proceedings one must listen not to her private prevarications but, instead, make search of the public record. The Contessa Rosalind von Hahn arrived in Pas-de-Visage in a ragged chariot, pinned with crossbow quarrels and scorched by passing fires. She claimed refuge and took up residence in a small house on the waterfront, one that would eventually be expanded into her estate. Immediately the beleaguered Contessa made her moves into the social fabric of the city-state, illuminating the salons and sitting rooms with stories of strange, other landscapes and the passionate, unusual people who lived there. With her unplaceable accent and demonstrations of subtle powers, her presence quickly grew to a necessity in the city’s most prestigious parties and she acquired a great many close friends. In time, as her acclaim grew, so did her business. The distant country she had fled housed yet more beleaguered aristocrats, moneyed and interesting people who would be well willing to settle in Pas-de-Visage if they had a place of safety and comfort to lay their head. She began to set to work purchasing comfortable habitation for her distant peers, securing investment from the city’s elite for the promise of stranger fortunes being brought from abroad. The Contessa’s estate expanded, pushing out the smaller inhabitants of the waterfront and building her beautiful home on reclaimed land. Private fortunes were employed and the citizenry pressed to prepare for the arrival of this foreign nobility, but all would be well - the wealth of the city would be magnified, surely, once the Contessa’s plans came true. Then she vanished. Pas-de-Visage had a scarce few days to steep rumors and search through her abandoned effects. Stories began to spread of invested wealth expended to maintain appearances, secure further investment. The Contessa’s vaults were empty; nothing had, or would, come of her promises. Then the army came, the mechanized forces of a foreign occupying force, trampling through the city-state’s encircling forest and putting its pastoral people to forced labor. Their placements were too efficient, their strikes too precise, for their success to be anything like chance - they had inside information. The streets of the city screeched with sure betrayal by the time the first booted feet tramped on marbled streets. Then the Mists rose and all was well again. Pas-de-Visage was as wealthy as it always was. The Contessa was in her place, just as she always had been. New trade flourished as was always intended. It was true, and real, and good. And in the depths of the wardrobe-dungeons beneath the lake there is a little girl that no one sees and no one listens to. A pleading thing in total darkness that begs someone, anyone to see the truth of what has happened here. It wields the agony of a long-repressed truth: that the Contessa Rosalind von Hahn was a liar, a grifter, that she had stolen the wealth of the city and fled before selling it to the cruel, repressive regime that followed her. That she, a dirty waif with a lesser name and tear-reddened eyes, was the last vestige of truth that the woman known as Rosalind von Hahn possessed. That the woman above was a lie, that everything was a lie, that the city was built up and bleeding with lies, and that as the deception magnified and was traded daily for truth, it was done in the service of a growing emptiness that will consume everything and offer nothing. The Contessa rarely visits her. She is happy with her thousand guises, with the wealth and privilege she has won with empty promises. Only rarely does she gaze into the black cell where lingers the last vestige of her true self. It is good, sometimes, to remember that there is still something real of oneself even when everything else is fabrication. It is necessary, else the emptiness inside might consume everything that remains. Not everyone is so lucky.
Rosalind von Hahn's Powers and Dominion Contessa Rosalind von Hahn has the discrete portions of a thousand identities stored within her estate and can easily cobble together a body and personality for any grift, venture or affair. She prefers the feminine, but will take to any combination of gender and species in order to get what she wants. It takes little effort to appear as anyone she wishes. She is, indeed, a powerful sorceress - or so it seems. Her powers, like everything else about her, are but lies, but Pas-de-Visage is bedrocked on lies, and as such her own professed magic has a peculiarly sticky quality. For those that believe, Rosalind von Hahn’s spells are as sure and real as any other; they would burn in false fires, be transported through false teleportations, and be cursed by false utterances. Disbelief confers total immunity, but is difficult to achieve. When all the world is blinded by a light only they can see, it’s easier to doubt oneself than doubt the world - and in that doubt, why, one does begin to see that faint, now-undeniable glimmer. Contessa Rosalind von Hahn lives a double existence. Her true self is a waif-girl living in a black cell beneath her palatial estate - the body that walks the streets, entertains visitors, and maintains her numerous schemes is a fabrication so convincing that she has come to believe it is real. If the fabrication is slain, it reforms in three days, cobbling together an approximation of its previous self from the stockpiled faces within its wardrobe-dungeon. Only the death of the true body kills the Contessa for good - but then, so does releasing the child, believing her, and causing the city to believe her as well. Which is easiest? Which is possible? When Rosalind von Hahn closes the borders of her Domain, smoke and fog choke the branches of the Forest of Moths and the tramp of booted feet begin to echo through the trees. The grinding tread of war engines and echoing crash of felled trees thunder through the empty night, heralded by commanding speech in a language none can translate. Should a traveler persist, they will eventually run into these ghostly regiments and conflict is all but guaranteed. They are better-armed than anyone they come across, wielding arcane weapons that crack with captive thunder and kill instantly. They are cruel and decisive, barking incomprehensible orders and responding to anything other than immediate surrender with attack. Those who are taken captive are never seen again, subject to a private hell known only to the shadowy nightmares that live between the Mists.
Rosalind von Hahn's Torment Rosalind von Hahn lives in a tumbledown network of interconnected lies, and she knows it. Secretly, what she has always wanted was security, but as lies were her only tools, they have created around her a world where nothing is real, nothing is reliable, and any wealth or pleasure is temporary, sluicing downward toward inevitable loss. Rosalind von Hahn has little sense of who she is anymore. She can swap preferences, affections, tastes and habits as easily as any other part of herself, which has led to such a profound loss of identity that she teeters perpetually on the edge of a cognitive - and actual - abyss. Even emotions so powerful as love, pain, joy and hunger are as much a commodity as anything else. Absent that last, wailing spark of herself - the scared little girl that she perpetually denies and desperately needs - she would become the nothingness she fears and damn her Domain to inescapable oblivion. Rosalind von Hahn hears the weeping of her true self, constantly. She is linked irrevocably to the lost little girl down in the dark, sees whatever she sees, feels whatever she feels. The loneliness, abandonment, and squalid desperation of that neglected waif is in every way her own, more real than anything else she builds of herself. The more her true self is ignored, the more keenly she feels its pain. And she knows, in some panicked, uncertain way, that obliterating that keening mote will bring a death more true and complete than anything. She can only distract herself, and even then, not well. Rosalind von Hahn is a shrewd enough woman to notice the externalization of her torment, and it terrifies her. She is very aware of the actions of the doppelgangers throughout her Domain and further aware of the nothingness they serve. Everything that disappears down that yawning abyss is something she loses forever. She protects her true self so fervently because she knows that all it takes is an assassin’s knife to birth the singularity of nothingness that she fears is inevitable. Her projected confidence is little more than a scrabbling desperation to eliminate these doppelgangers as swiftly and totally as possible - a thing the Powers That Be will never let come to pass.
Roleplaying Rosalind von Hahn Contessa Rosalind von Hahn is everyone one wants to meet. She can become anyone, slip into any conversation. She can buy the likeness of one’s closest confidant and placidly absorb all the secrets and shame one has to share. As much as she has any capacity for personal pleasure anymore, she finds deception pleasurable, the perverse victory of lying to someone and having them believe her. She is grasping and acquisitive in every way that matters. She hungers as much for the physical trappings of wealth as the bartered elements of one’s personality. She is exceptionally charismatic and can easily use doubt, curiosity, outrage or pride as a lever to get what she wants. Most pleasing to her is when something is denied to her and then is acquired, discreetly, through another method. She enjoys inviting paupers to lavish parties, flaunting in front of them the lost love they sold for easy silver. Deep in the last, decaying remnants of her heart, Rosalind von Hahn has a distinct taste for drama, wealth and richness. As distraction is the only way to quiet the weeping of her true self, she engages in distraction with desperate fervor. Novelty is deeply appealing to her: songs she’s never heard before, faces she’s never seen, plays she’s never watched, stories she’s never heard. Visitors from afar, with their curious accents and habits, bearing such strange wealth from distant lands - this attracts her deeply, and she will want it, one way or another. Personality Trait: “The right words in the right ears and I can have, and be, anything I want.” Ideal: “Grandeur. People are at their best when they have something to believe in - it doesn’t matter if it’s true.” Bond: “I hate the girl in the dungeon. I hate that I need her.” Flaw: “One day my house of lies will crumble around me. What must I leave behind when I flee?”
Adventures in Pas-de-Visage - The travelers are approached while socializing by a richly-adorned, curiously-affected individual and invited to a private meeting with the promise of good food and brandy. They have a deal for the travelers: they have heard rumors of a secret entrance into the rooms beneath the Von Hahn Estate. They will tell the travelers this secret route in exchange for a promise: They want nothing from the teeming vaults beyond a single crystal-glass bottle containing a ruddy, sedimented liquor. This contains their love for their wife, something they traded away long ago. Anything else is theirs. - One of the travelers finds a close friend in a stranger’s salon, someone from their homeland, a place they haven’t visited in some time. They have a harrowing tale: The worst elements of their neglected nation have risen up and taken control of the government and they are here gathering material support for an eventual uprising. They beg for aid, claiming that they have already traded away everything inside of them except the love of their homeland, and lamenting that nothing is buyable in Pas-de-Visage outside of the marketplace of identity. They are a doppelganger and the traveler is their new mark. They will beg as much of the traveler that they have to give and, if anyone catches on, will mug them with a cadre of their fellows for the rest. - Wanted posters bearing the likeness of the travelers begin to appear, posted on lightpoles in the public squares. Witnesses swear to the stars that they’ve seen the travelers committing unspeakable acts - their faces, voices, and mannerisms were unmistakable. Society begins to close off to them. The Whisper Police gather in bands on street corners, eagle-eyed, fingering their weapons. Their movements are reported by former friends. The only refuge is in the unremarked multitude of the faceless mannikin servantry, who will conceal them in exchange for startlingly little aid. They will show the travelers the secret routes through the city, but only if they trade away their faces, which they claim is the only way to be safe from the hunt. - A disreputable knave corners the travelers in a bar and drunkenly shoves a sextet of grimy bottles into their hands. Some few weeks ago, he claims, he was roughed up by some former buddies and tossed in the lake - and there, deep in the darkness, he saw something shining at the very bottom. He’s certain it was an open door. The bottles are potions of water breathing, which he bought dearly, but is too terrified to make use of. Something stole from him down there and he dares not return - and as proof, he will morosely display his complete lack of teeth or toes. He only wants the travelers to come back for him once they find the way through. He cannot stand it here anymore. - When first entering Pas-de-Visage, the travelers spend a night in the rough hovel of a hermit in the Forest of Moths. Weeks later, they find her sitting by the fire in their private rooms. She claims to trust no one in the city but them. She has seen soldiers moving through her forest. They have weaponry she’s never seen before and have taken away what few fellow hermits she considers friends. They have nothing behind their eyes. Now they’re moving into the countryside, and she can point out a few farms they have taken as safehouses. Anyone else she tells grows speechless with terror and swears her to silence. She just wants her home back.
(Extra features below! And if you want a complete version, with better formatting, here it is ! My prose is literally purple and you don't know how happy that makes me.)