Cawthon, Scott. The Bobbiedots Conclusion: An AFK Book (Five Nights at Freddy’s: Tales from the Pizzaplex #5). Scholastic Inc, 2023. 

Cawthon, Scott. The Bobbiedots Conclusion: An AFK Book (Five Nights at Freddy’s: Tales from the Pizzaplex #5). Scholastic Inc, 2023. 

How I Wonder What You Are by Al Bruno III

I’ll know the time is right when the howling begins. It will be after sundown of course, the Mothers and Fathers of Jebsen only scream after sundown, and only on the clearest of nights.
There is no town of Jebsen listed on any map, even in its heyday of the 1940’s it was too small to be worthy of notice. It’s nothing more than a collection of buildings at the end of a dead end road. On one side it is bordered by long untended corn fields, on the other the swampy remains of Lake Campbell. The most noticeable of the town’s buildings is a red brick edifice with a wide domed roof of fractured glass. The rest is just barns and single story homes. Along the border of the swamp is row after row of barbed wire and bear traps.
I’ll let them scream for an hour or so, let them become tired. Even now it amazes me how I had learned to pick out the individual voices in the cacophony. The Widow Toth tires easily but the Garrets will be at it until dawn.
And what will I be doing while every able-bodied adult is on the rooftops? I’ll be slipping these pages into this mason jar and sealing it lid in place with the wax from a melted crayon. The Children of Jebsen won’t miss just one, especially not purple.
Twenty-five years ago a calamity befell the town of Jebsen. The authorities blamed it all on the after effects of an experimental insecticide but the Old Book the town elders read from every Sunday said otherwise. It told the citizens of Jebsen that a curse was carried by those twinkling dots in the sky. A malevolence traveling at 186,000 miles per second that would twist their Children into nightmares should a glint of it ever touch their skin.
That is why they scream at the starlight; hating it, cursing it, raging at it.
You can’t see what their Children have become and not feel the same way. The changes are heartbreaking and horrifying all at once but after you spend time with them you feel differently. There is mockery in the mis-set eyes that peer from those mollified skulls.
They know secrets. On quiet, cloudy nights I would put my ear to one families’ basement door or another and hear them murmuring and giggling as they writhe in their basement styes.
I think of their weeping mouths and soft teeth and remember that day half a decade ago the ill-advised shortcut and along the neglected county route 99. I remember approaching the train bridge and seriously considering turning around, it looked decades out of repair and I half suspected it would collapse as I passed under it.
But I didn’t turn back, my ego wouldn’t let me. I was right and the road was wrong so I drove under the train bridge, momentarily marveling at the strange and elaborate graffiti that covered it.
I was just past the structure when a small, bent figure ran out from the long grass.
The sounds are what I really remember; the squeal of the brakes, the thud of the body on the hood of my car, the thick crack of laminated glass.
I would later learn the name of the child I had hit was Julius McCarty but all I knew then was that there was an emaciated, bloodied shape lying halfway through my windshield.
Human instinct made me reach out, to see if the little boy was alive. When my fingers brushed his skin he twisted around to face me. His mouth lashed out proboscis-like and nuzzled into the flesh of my arm.
Pain bristled out from where the boy had latched on to me. I screamed, thrashed. I shoved the car door open and tumbled out onto the asphalt. The boy coughed once and died.
At first the wound held all my attention. How could it not? I had expected to see torn flesh and blood but instead the boy’s distended mouth had left behind a cluster of thick, festering ulcerations.
But then I became aware of the men making their way out of the tall grass. These were the Fathers of Jebsen understood immediately what had happened.
They had brought everything they might need to bring one of their Children back home to its basement; rope, bandages and cudgels. It was also everything they needed to make a captive of me.
They, dragged me away from the accident site, through the tall grass and over the collapsed remains of a chain link fence to leave me in the care of the Mothers of Jebsen. Those gaunt women had cudgels of their own and I was a mass of bruises and welts by the time the hole in the Earth had been made to their standards.
The menfolk returned carrying the child wrapped in a linen shroud. They dropped it roughly into the ground. There were no ceremonies, tears or headstone. It was well after dark by the time I had filled the grave back in.
Now here it is years later and I’ve had to dig a dozen more graves, one by one the Mothers and Fathers are dying out, it’s always a surprise when it happens. Every mother and father of Jensen is withered and white haired but every year a few more die in their sleep, or at work in the fields or at prayer in their red brick observatory.
The Children are dying too, not a one has ever lived past seventeen. One by one they waste away, except of course for the occasional accident like the one that trapped me here.
Despite these curse that has befallen them the people of Jebsen continue to reproduce, each mother convinced that this time she will give birth to the Great Redeemer as was foretold in the Old Book. Each time they fail and each time the result is locked away in it’s family’s basement.
You can’t imagine those basements, the smell of rotten meat, the ankle deep fecal matter and the perfectly clean toys. They draw equations on the walls, gold and silver crayons are their preferred color. Every Tuesday I have to visit each of those cellars and scrub the theorems and postulations away.
The youngest of the Children is a newborn, still angry from the womb, the oldest is seventeen and nearly rotted away. No matter the age they all taunt me as I work, sometimes with bites, sometimes with maledictions. Both have left unimaginable scars.
So many scars now, I’m marked, I could never walk among the people I’d known before. They’d refuse to recognize me and insist I was a stranger
The Widow Thoth says this is my penance for the death of Julius McCarty, she even went so far as to cite chapter and verse on the subject from Old Book itself. The Mothers and Fathers of Jebsen, base every aspect of their lives on that thick volume of prophecies and homilies.
I wonder if anyone will notice me as leaving. I doubt it, even when they’re not screaming their heads off a long dead suns they barely notice my comings and goings.
As I said before, the Mothers and Father’s of Jebsen have become so sure of me. Some families think I’ve become a true believer, the rest think the cinder block chained to my ankle is enough to keep me in my place.
I don’t know who you are or when you’ll find this message. My only hope is that you will believe me. If you do, please bring this document to the proper authorities. Don’t let my death be for nothing.
I go to the bottom of the swamp with two regrets. One is that I won’t be there when the town of Jebsen is discovered and burned to the ground.
The other is that six months ago I accepted Father Garett’s invitation to join in their celebrations. I went willingly with them to the old brick observatory. I prayed with them. I danced with them. I partook in all of their debasements.
And for a little while, perhaps an hour, I was happy.
They even asked me to give reading from the Old Book. I eagerly stopped up to the podium and began flipping through the thick volume.
Everyone waited for me to choose a passage and speak but all I did was shake and weep at what I beheld. My knees buckled. My mind shut down. I had to be carried out and put to bed.
You see, the Old Book was blank from cover to cover. You’re even holding some of those pages in your hands now.
I used them to write my story.

How I Wonder What You Are by Al Bruno III

I’ll know the time is right when the howling begins. It will be after sundown of course, the Mothers and Fathers of Jebsen only scream after sundown, and only on the clearest of nights.
There is no town of Jebsen listed on any map, even in its heyday of the 1940’s it was too small to be worthy of notice. It’s nothing more than a collection of buildings at the end of a dead end road. On one side it is bordered by long untended corn fields, on the other the swampy remains of Lake Campbell. The most noticeable of the town’s buildings is a red brick edifice with a wide domed roof of fractured glass. The rest is just barns and single story homes. Along the border of the swamp is row after row of barbed wire and bear traps.
I’ll let them scream for an hour or so, let them become tired. Even now it amazes me how I had learned to pick out the individual voices in the cacophony. The Widow Toth tires easily but the Garrets will be at it until dawn.
And what will I be doing while every able-bodied adult is on the rooftops? I’ll be slipping these pages into this mason jar and sealing it lid in place with the wax from a melted crayon. The Children of Jebsen won’t miss just one, especially not purple.
Twenty-five years ago a calamity befell the town of Jebsen. The authorities blamed it all on the after effects of an experimental insecticide but the Old Book the town elders read from every Sunday said otherwise. It told the citizens of Jebsen that a curse was carried by those twinkling dots in the sky. A malevolence traveling at 186,000 miles per second that would twist their Children into nightmares should a glint of it ever touch their skin.
That is why they scream at the starlight; hating it, cursing it, raging at it.
You can’t see what their Children have become and not feel the same way. The changes are heartbreaking and horrifying all at once but after you spend time with them you feel differently. There is mockery in the mis-set eyes that peer from those mollified skulls.
They know secrets. On quiet, cloudy nights I would put my ear to one families’ basement door or another and hear them murmuring and giggling as they writhe in their basement styes.
I think of their weeping mouths and soft teeth and remember that day half a decade ago the ill-advised shortcut and along the neglected county route 99. I remember approaching the train bridge and seriously considering turning around, it looked decades out of repair and I half suspected it would collapse as I passed under it.
But I didn’t turn back, my ego wouldn’t let me. I was right and the road was wrong so I drove under the train bridge, momentarily marveling at the strange and elaborate graffiti that covered it.
I was just past the structure when a small, bent figure ran out from the long grass.
The sounds are what I really remember; the squeal of the brakes, the thud of the body on the hood of my car, the thick crack of laminated glass.
I would later learn the name of the child I had hit was Julius McCarty but all I knew then was that there was an emaciated, bloodied shape lying halfway through my windshield.
Human instinct made me reach out, to see if the little boy was alive. When my fingers brushed his skin he twisted around to face me. His mouth lashed out proboscis-like and nuzzled into the flesh of my arm.
Pain bristled out from where the boy had latched on to me. I screamed, thrashed. I shoved the car door open and tumbled out onto the asphalt. The boy coughed once and died.
At first the wound held all my attention. How could it not? I had expected to see torn flesh and blood but instead the boy’s distended mouth had left behind a cluster of thick, festering ulcerations.
But then I became aware of the men making their way out of the tall grass. These were the Fathers of Jebsen understood immediately what had happened.
They had brought everything they might need to bring one of their Children back home to its basement; rope, bandages and cudgels. It was also everything they needed to make a captive of me.
They, dragged me away from the accident site, through the tall grass and over the collapsed remains of a chain link fence to leave me in the care of the Mothers of Jebsen. Those gaunt women had cudgels of their own and I was a mass of bruises and welts by the time the hole in the Earth had been made to their standards.
The menfolk returned carrying the child wrapped in a linen shroud. They dropped it roughly into the ground. There were no ceremonies, tears or headstone. It was well after dark by the time I had filled the grave back in.
Now here it is years later and I’ve had to dig a dozen more graves, one by one the Mothers and Fathers are dying out, it’s always a surprise when it happens. Every mother and father of Jensen is withered and white haired but every year a few more die in their sleep, or at work in the fields or at prayer in their red brick observatory.
The Children are dying too, not a one has ever lived past seventeen. One by one they waste away, except of course for the occasional accident like the one that trapped me here.
Despite these curse that has befallen them the people of Jebsen continue to reproduce, each mother convinced that this time she will give birth to the Great Redeemer as was foretold in the Old Book. Each time they fail and each time the result is locked away in it’s family’s basement.
You can’t imagine those basements, the smell of rotten meat, the ankle deep fecal matter and the perfectly clean toys. They draw equations on the walls, gold and silver crayons are their preferred color. Every Tuesday I have to visit each of those cellars and scrub the theorems and postulations away.
The youngest of the Children is a newborn, still angry from the womb, the oldest is seventeen and nearly rotted away. No matter the age they all taunt me as I work, sometimes with bites, sometimes with maledictions. Both have left unimaginable scars.
So many scars now, I’m marked, I could never walk among the people I’d known before. They’d refuse to recognize me and insist I was a stranger
The Widow Thoth says this is my penance for the death of Julius McCarty, she even went so far as to cite chapter and verse on the subject from Old Book itself. The Mothers and Fathers of Jebsen, base every aspect of their lives on that thick volume of prophecies and homilies.
I wonder if anyone will notice me as leaving. I doubt it, even when they’re not screaming their heads off a long dead suns they barely notice my comings and goings.
As I said before, the Mothers and Father’s of Jebsen have become so sure of me. Some families think I’ve become a true believer, the rest think the cinder block chained to my ankle is enough to keep me in my place.
I don’t know who you are or when you’ll find this message. My only hope is that you will believe me. If you do, please bring this document to the proper authorities. Don’t let my death be for nothing.
I go to the bottom of the swamp with two regrets. One is that I won’t be there when the town of Jebsen is discovered and burned to the ground.
The other is that six months ago I accepted Father Garett’s invitation to join in their celebrations. I went willingly with them to the old brick observatory. I prayed with them. I danced with them. I partook in all of their debasements.
And for a little while, perhaps an hour, I was happy.
They even asked me to give reading from the Old Book. I eagerly stopped up to the podium and began flipping through the thick volume.
Everyone waited for me to choose a passage and speak but all I did was shake and weep at what I beheld. My knees buckled. My mind shut down. I had to be carried out and put to bed.
You see, the Old Book was blank from cover to cover. You’re even holding some of those pages in your hands now.
I used them to write my story.

How I Wonder What You Are by Al Bruno III

I’ll know the time is right when the howling begins. It will be after sundown of course, the Mothers and Fathers of Jebsen only scream after sundown, and only on the clearest of nights.
There is no town of Jebsen listed on any map, even in its heyday of the 1940’s it was too small to be worthy of notice. It’s nothing more than a collection of buildings at the end of a dead end road. On one side it is bordered by long untended corn fields, on the other the swampy remains of Lake Campbell. The most noticeable of the town’s buildings is a red brick edifice with a wide domed roof of fractured glass. The rest is just barns and single story homes. Along the border of the swamp is row after row of barbed wire and bear traps.
I’ll let them scream for an hour or so, let them become tired. Even now it amazes me how I had learned to pick out the individual voices in the cacophony. The Widow Toth tires easily but the Garrets will be at it until dawn.
And what will I be doing while every able-bodied adult is on the rooftops? I’ll be slipping these pages into this mason jar and sealing it lid in place with the wax from a melted crayon. The Children of Jebsen won’t miss just one, especially not purple.
Twenty-five years ago a calamity befell the town of Jebsen. The authorities blamed it all on the after effects of an experimental insecticide but the Old Book the town elders read from every Sunday said otherwise. It told the citizens of Jebsen that a curse was carried by those twinkling dots in the sky. A malevolence traveling at 186,000 miles per second that would twist their Children into nightmares should a glint of it ever touch their skin.
That is why they scream at the starlight; hating it, cursing it, raging at it.
You can’t see what their Children have become and not feel the same way. The changes are heartbreaking and horrifying all at once but after you spend time with them you feel differently. There is mockery in the mis-set eyes that peer from those mollified skulls.
They know secrets. On quiet, cloudy nights I would put my ear to one families’ basement door or another and hear them murmuring and giggling as they writhe in their basement styes.
I think of their weeping mouths and soft teeth and remember that day half a decade ago the ill-advised shortcut and along the neglected county route 99. I remember approaching the train bridge and seriously considering turning around, it looked decades out of repair and I half suspected it would collapse as I passed under it.
But I didn’t turn back, my ego wouldn’t let me. I was right and the road was wrong so I drove under the train bridge, momentarily marveling at the strange and elaborate graffiti that covered it.
I was just past the structure when a small, bent figure ran out from the long grass.
The sounds are what I really remember; the squeal of the brakes, the thud of the body on the hood of my car, the thick crack of laminated glass.
I would later learn the name of the child I had hit was Julius McCarty but all I knew then was that there was an emaciated, bloodied shape lying halfway through my windshield.
Human instinct made me reach out, to see if the little boy was alive. When my fingers brushed his skin he twisted around to face me. His mouth lashed out proboscis-like and nuzzled into the flesh of my arm.
Pain bristled out from where the boy had latched on to me. I screamed, thrashed. I shoved the car door open and tumbled out onto the asphalt. The boy coughed once and died.
At first the wound held all my attention. How could it not? I had expected to see torn flesh and blood but instead the boy’s distended mouth had left behind a cluster of thick, festering ulcerations.
But then I became aware of the men making their way out of the tall grass. These were the Fathers of Jebsen understood immediately what had happened.
They had brought everything they might need to bring one of their Children back home to its basement; rope, bandages and cudgels. It was also everything they needed to make a captive of me.
They, dragged me away from the accident site, through the tall grass and over the collapsed remains of a chain link fence to leave me in the care of the Mothers of Jebsen. Those gaunt women had cudgels of their own and I was a mass of bruises and welts by the time the hole in the Earth had been made to their standards.
The menfolk returned carrying the child wrapped in a linen shroud. They dropped it roughly into the ground. There were no ceremonies, tears or headstone. It was well after dark by the time I had filled the grave back in.
Now here it is years later and I’ve had to dig a dozen more graves, one by one the Mothers and Fathers are dying out, it’s always a surprise when it happens. Every mother and father of Jensen is withered and white haired but every year a few more die in their sleep, or at work in the fields or at prayer in their red brick observatory.
The Children are dying too, not a one has ever lived past seventeen. One by one they waste away, except of course for the occasional accident like the one that trapped me here.
Despite these curse that has befallen them the people of Jebsen continue to reproduce, each mother convinced that this time she will give birth to the Great Redeemer as was foretold in the Old Book. Each time they fail and each time the result is locked away in it’s family’s basement.
You can’t imagine those basements, the smell of rotten meat, the ankle deep fecal matter and the perfectly clean toys. They draw equations on the walls, gold and silver crayons are their preferred color. Every Tuesday I have to visit each of those cellars and scrub the theorems and postulations away.
The youngest of the Children is a newborn, still angry from the womb, the oldest is seventeen and nearly rotted away. No matter the age they all taunt me as I work, sometimes with bites, sometimes with maledictions. Both have left unimaginable scars.
So many scars now, I’m marked, I could never walk among the people I’d known before. They’d refuse to recognize me and insist I was a stranger
The Widow Thoth says this is my penance for the death of Julius McCarty, she even went so far as to cite chapter and verse on the subject from Old Book itself. The Mothers and Fathers of Jebsen, base every aspect of their lives on that thick volume of prophecies and homilies.
I wonder if anyone will notice me as leaving. I doubt it, even when they’re not screaming their heads off a long dead suns they barely notice my comings and goings.
As I said before, the Mothers and Father’s of Jebsen have become so sure of me. Some families think I’ve become a true believer, the rest think the cinder block chained to my ankle is enough to keep me in my place.
I don’t know who you are or when you’ll find this message. My only hope is that you will believe me. If you do, please bring this document to the proper authorities. Don’t let my death be for nothing.
I go to the bottom of the swamp with two regrets. One is that I won’t be there when the town of Jebsen is discovered and burned to the ground.
The other is that six months ago I accepted Father Garett’s invitation to join in their celebrations. I went willingly with them to the old brick observatory. I prayed with them. I danced with them. I partook in all of their debasements.
And for a little while, perhaps an hour, I was happy.
They even asked me to give reading from the Old Book. I eagerly stopped up to the podium and began flipping through the thick volume.
Everyone waited for me to choose a passage and speak but all I did was shake and weep at what I beheld. My knees buckled. My mind shut down. I had to be carried out and put to bed.
You see, the Old Book was blank from cover to cover. You’re even holding some of those pages in your hands now.
I used them to write my story.

I tried to write down every single movie available on my flights in March 2024. I handwrote some of my notes to pass the 13 hours which is why there are ??? when I couldn't read my own writing/abbreviations. Note that not all titles were available on all flights, and my list is missing a chunk of them (especially titles beginning with "S" for some reason). Hope someone finds it useful! Maybe someone will get to creating a Letterboxd list of them all before me! [Posted this in movies and thought delta users might find it useful too]

10 Things I Hate About You
101 Dalmatians
12 Angry Men
13 Going on 30
17 Again
2001: A Space Odyssey
27 Dresses
500 Days of Summer
80 for Brady
A Beautiful Mind
A Bug's Life
A Cinderella Story
A Compassionate Spy
A Fantastic Woman
A Few Good Men
A Good Year
A Haunting in Venice
A League of Their Own
A Room with a View
A Separation
A Simple Plan
A Simple Wish
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Abominable
Adam's Rib
Airheads
Akeelah and the Bee
Aladdin
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Alvin and the Chipmunks
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
American Graffiti
American Street Kid
Amores Perros
An Inconvenient Truth
Anatomy of a Fall
Angels in the Outfield
Aquaman
Assassin Club
Asteroid City
Avatar: Way of Water
Avengers: Infinity War
Back to the Future
Bad Company
Barb and Star: Vista del Mar
Barbie
Batman
Batman Begins
Batman Returns
Batman vs. Superman Dawn
Battle of the Sexes
Beauty and the Beast
Beetlejuice
Being Mary Tyler Moore
Bend it Like Beckham
Better Luck Tomorrow
Big
Big George Foreman
Billy Elliott
Birds of Prey: Harley Quinn
Birthright Outlaw
Blackberry
Blade
Blade II
Blade Runner 2049
Blade Trinity
Blended
Blinded by the Light
Blue Beetle
Bolt
Bottoms
Brave
Brazil
Bridesmaids
Bridget Jones' Diary
Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason
Bring It On
Brown Sugar
Buoyancy
But I'm a Cheerleader
Call Me by Your Name
Carmen Jones
Central Intelligence
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Cheaper by the Dozen
Chevalier
Chicken Run
Child's Play
Children of a Lesser God
Chinatown
Cinderella
Clifford the Big Red Dog
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Clueless
Colossal
Condor's Nest
Cool Hand Luke
Coraline
Couples Retreat
Crazy Rich Asians
Crazy Stupid Love
Creed
Creed II
Crooklyn
Cruella
Chr. G
Dark Waters
Darkest Hour
Dawnland
Dazed and Confused
DC: League of Super Pets
Dear White People
Dee. Boys
Delivery Man
Desperately Seeking Susan
Despicable Me
Despicable Me 2
Despicable Me 3
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Dret ard
Dr. Doolittle
Down with Love
Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who
Dr. Seuss The Grinch
Dr. Grinch The Lorax
Dreamgirls
Drop Dead Gorgeous
Drumline
Due Date
Dumb and Dumber
Dumb Money
Dune
Dunkirk
E.T.
Edge of Tomorrow
Eggs Over Easy
Elemental
Enter the Dragon
E????
Erin Brockovich
Eternals
Evan Almighty
Everest
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Evil Dead Rises
Expendables 4
F9: Fast Saga
Fallen
Fantastic Beasts
Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindewald
Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore
Fargo
F&F: Hobbes and Shaw
Fast X
Father of the Bride
Feramana???
Ferner????
Field of Dreams
Finding Dory
Finding Nemo
First Man
Focus
Following
Fools Rush In
Forrest Gump
Freaky
Freaky Friday
Freelance
Frida
Friday
Frozen 2
Frozen River
Game Night
Gangster Squad
Garfield
Garfield: Tail of 2 Kitties
Get Smart
Ghostbusters
Glass
Glory
Godzilla vs Kong
Going in Style
Good Morning Vietnam
Gosford Park
Grand Torino
Gran Turismo
Gravity
Grease
Grease 2
Gremlins
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3
Guy Richie's The Covenant
Hacksaw Ridge
Half Nelson
Hanna
Happy Death Day
Happy Feet 2
Harlan County USA
Harold and Kumar: White Castle
Harry Potter 1-8
Haunted Mansion
He's Just Not That Into You
Her
Hereafter
Hocus Pocus
Honor Society
Horrible Bosses
Hotel Transylvania
House Party
How to Be Single
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
How to Train your Dragon
Hypnotic
I Am Legend
I Didn't See You There
I, Tonya
Ice Age: Collision Course
Ice Age: Continental Drift
Ice Age: Dawn of Dinosaurs
Ice Age: Meltdown
Ice on Fire
If Beale Street Could Talk
In the Heart of the Sea
In the Heights
In the Name of the Father
Inception
Incredibles 2
Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny
Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom
Insidious: The Red Door
Insomnia
Instructions not INcluded
It
Jerry & Marge Go Large
Jersey Boys
John Wick
John Wick 2
John Wick 3
Joker
Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Judas and the Black Messiah
Jules
Jumanji
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Jurassic Park
Jurassic World
Just Married
Just my Luck
Kazaam
Kit Kittredge
Kramer vs Kramer
Kubo and the Two Strings
Kung Fu Panda
Kung Fu Panda 2
Kung Fu??????
La La Land
Labyrinth
Lady in the Water
Lakota Nation vs United States
Legally Blonde
Liar Liar
Life of the Party
Lightyear
Lilo and Stitch
Lion
Little Women
Living
Lo------
Lone Survivor
Love and Basketball
Love Again
Love Jones
Ma-d_____ ?
Madagascar
Madagascar Escape
Made of Honor
Mafia Mamma
Magic Mike's Last Dance
Malt------
Momma's Boy
Mamma Mia
Mamma Mia Here We Go Again
March of the Penguins
Mat------
Mean Girls
Meet the Parents?
Memento
Michael Clayton
Milk
Minions
Minions: Rise of Gru
Misery
Miss Congeniality
Missing Link
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning
Mississippi Masala
Moana
Monster In Law
Monsters Inc
Monsters University
Moonlight
Mortal Enemies
Mr. Malcolm's List
Mulan
Mummies
Murder by Numbers
Murder on the Orient Express
Muriel's Wedding
My Animal
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
My Family
My Girl
National Lampoon's Vacation
Neighbors 2
Neruda
New Year's Eve
News of the World
Nights in Rodanthe
Nine Queens
No
No Country for Old Men
No Murches Frida??
Nomadland
Notting Hill
Ocean's 8
Ocean's 13
October Sky
Of tn age??
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Onward
Oppenheimer
Origin
Over the Hedge
Pacific Rim
Pandas
Pan's Labyrinth
ParaNorman
Paris is Burning
Past Lives
Paw Patrol: Mighty
Paw Patrol: More
Pee Wee's Big Adventure
Perfect Strangers
Persepolis
Phantom Thread
Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
Pitch Perfect
Pitch Perfect 3
Planes
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
Practical Magic
Pride and Prejudice
Primal Fear
Priscilla
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
Puppy Love
Puss in Boots
Queen and Slim
Radical
RRadi--- Wwi?/
Raging Bull
Ra the Breata?
Rat Race?
Ratatouille
Ready Player One
Real Women Have Curves
Red Tails
Reforge
Renfield
Repo Man
Rocky
Ruby Gillman
Rumor Has It
Rush Hour 2
RV
Róise & Frank
Sacfint??
Saving Face
Saving Private Ryan
School Daze
Scoob!
Scooby Doo
Scrapper
Scream VI
Searching
Selena
Selma
Semi Pro
Seven
Shaft
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
Significant Other
?
?
Skyfall
Smallfoot
Smoke?
Snowpiercer
?
Something's Gotta Give
?
?
Soul Surfer
Space Jam
Space Oddity
Sp Ra ????
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse
Split
Spy Game?
Spy Kids
Stone and D????
Ste W s5t?
Stomp the Yard
Storks
Sweet Home Alabama
Tag
Talk to Me
Tangled
Tee as Go!??
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Tenet
The Adia Prse?
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
The Baby-Sitters Club
The Best Man
The Big Lebowski
The Big Short
The Biggest Little Farm
The Bird Cage
The Blind Side
The Blues Brothers
The Bodyguard
The Boogeyman
The Book of Life
The Boss Baby: Family Business
The Bourne Identity
The Boxer
The Breakfast Club
The Bucket List
The Caine Mutiny
The Campaign
The Castle
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Chronicles of Narnia 2
The Chronicles of Narnia 3
The Creator
The Croods New Age
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight Rises
The Dark Side
The Dead Don't Die
The Dry?
The Equalizer
The Exorcist: Believer
The Fabulous Filipino Brothers
The Fast and Furious (#1)
The S Heartbeats?
The Has???
The Gentlemen
The Good Nurse
The Goonies
The Great Wall
The Guard
The Harvest (La Cosecha)
The H????
The Hobbit
The Hobbit 2
The Hobbit 3
The Holdovers
The Hunger Games: Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games 2
The Hunger Games 3
The Hunger Games 4
The Hunt for Red October
The Huntsman: Winter’s War
The Incredibles
The Intern
The Invention of Lying
The Iron Giant
The Island
The Jungle Book
The Karate Kid
The Kids are Alright
The Lake House
The Land Before Time
The Last Out
The Last Samurai
The Lego Batman Movie
The Lego Movie
The Lesson
The Lion King
The Lion King
The Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid
The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship
The Losers
The Man from UNCLE
The Marsh King’s Doughter
The Marvels
The Matrix: Resurrections
The Mitchells vs The Machines
The Mummy
The Neverending Story
The Nice Guys
The Nun II
The Odd Life of Timothy Green
The Other Zoey
The Outsiders
The Peanuts Movie
The Persian Version
The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything
The Place Beyond the Pines
The Popes Exorcist
The Pre--?
The Purge: Election Year
The Replacements
The Ring
The Secret Garden
The Secret Life of Pets
The Silence of the Lambs
The S --------
The ?
The ?
The ?
The ?
The ?
The Take
The Time Traveler's Wife
The True Cost
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The Un---- Country
The Usual Suspects
The ???
The ????
The ?????
The Wedding Singer
The Wizard of Oz
The Wood
The Zookeeper's Wife
Theater Camp
Them---?
There Will Be Blood
Thurs?
Titanic
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tooooo?
Tom ??
Tommy Boy
Top Gun
Top Gun: Maverick
Toy Story 2
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 4
Train to Busan
Training Day
Transformers Rise
Trolls
Trolls World Tour
Troy
Tully
Turning Red
Umami
Us
??
V for Vendetta
V????
VeggieTales: Abe and the Amazing Promise
VeggieTales: Merry Larry and the True Light of Christmas
Vindicta
Vivo
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
War Dogs
We Were Soldiers
We're the Millers
Wedding Crashers
West Side Story
Wet Hot American Summer
Where the Wild Things Are
Wildhood
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Winters Bone
Wonder
Wonder Woman 1984
Wonka
Wreck It Ralph
Yes, Man
Yesterday
Young Punx: A Punk Parable
Zombieland

I tried to write down every single movie available on my Delta flights in March 2024. I handwrote some of my notes to pass the 13 hours which is why there are ??? when I couldn't read my own writing/abbreviations. Note that not all titles were available on all flights, and my list is missing a chunk of them (especially titles beginning with "S" for some reason). Hope someone finds it useful! Maybe someone will get to creating a Letterboxd list of them all before me!

10 Things I Hate About You
101 Dalmatians
12 Angry Men
13 Going on 30
17 Again
2001: A Space Odyssey
27 Dresses
500 Days of Summer
80 for Brady
A Beautiful Mind
A Bug's Life
A Cinderella Story
A Compassionate Spy
A Fantastic Woman
A Few Good Men
A Good Year
A Haunting in Venice
A League of Their Own
A Room with a View
A Separation
A Simple Plan
A Simple Wish
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Abominable
Adam's Rib
Airheads
Akeelah and the Bee
Aladdin
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Alvin and the Chipmunks
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
American Graffiti
American Street Kid
Amores Perros
An Inconvenient Truth
Anatomy of a Fall
Angels in the Outfield
Aquaman
Assassin Club
Asteroid City
Avatar: Way of Water
Avengers: Infinity War
Back to the Future
Bad Company
Barb and Star: Vista del Mar
Barbie
Batman
Batman Begins
Batman Returns
Batman vs. Superman Dawn
Battle of the Sexes
Beauty and the Beast
Beetlejuice
Being Mary Tyler Moore
Bend it Like Beckham
Better Luck Tomorrow
Big
Big George Foreman
Billy Elliott
Birds of Prey: Harley Quinn
Birthright Outlaw
Blackberry
Blade
Blade II
Blade Runner 2049
Blade Trinity
Blended
Blinded by the Light
Blue Beetle
Bolt
Bottoms
Brave
Brazil
Bridesmaids
Bridget Jones' Diary
Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason
Bring It On
Brown Sugar
Buoyancy
But I'm a Cheerleader
Call Me by Your Name
Carmen Jones
Central Intelligence
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Cheaper by the Dozen
Chevalier
Chicken Run
Child's Play
Children of a Lesser God
Chinatown
Cinderella
Clifford the Big Red Dog
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Clueless
Colossal
Condor's Nest
Cool Hand Luke
Coraline
Couples Retreat
Crazy Rich Asians
Crazy Stupid Love
Creed
Creed II
Crooklyn
Cruella
Chr. G
Dark Waters
Darkest Hour
Dawnland
Dazed and Confused
DC: League of Super Pets
Dear White People
Dee. Boys
Delivery Man
Desperately Seeking Susan
Despicable Me
Despicable Me 2
Despicable Me 3
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Dret ard
Dr. Doolittle
Down with Love
Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who
Dr. Seuss The Grinch
Dr. Grinch The Lorax
Dreamgirls
Drop Dead Gorgeous
Drumline
Due Date
Dumb and Dumber
Dumb Money
Dune
Dunkirk
E.T.
Edge of Tomorrow
Eggs Over Easy
Elemental
Enter the Dragon
E????
Erin Brockovich
Eternals
Evan Almighty
Everest
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Evil Dead Rises
Expendables 4
F9: Fast Saga
Fallen
Fantastic Beasts
Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindewald
Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore
Fargo
F&F: Hobbes and Shaw
Fast X
Father of the Bride
Feramana???
Ferner????
Field of Dreams
Finding Dory
Finding Nemo
First Man
Focus
Following
Fools Rush In
Forrest Gump
Freaky
Freaky Friday
Freelance
Frida
Friday
Frozen 2
Frozen River
Game Night
Gangster Squad
Garfield
Garfield: Tail of 2 Kitties
Get Smart
Ghostbusters
Glass
Glory
Godzilla vs Kong
Going in Style
Good Morning Vietnam
Gosford Park
Grand Torino
Gran Turismo
Gravity
Grease
Grease 2
Gremlins
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3
Guy Richie's The Covenant
Hacksaw Ridge
Half Nelson
Hanna
Happy Death Day
Happy Feet 2
Harlan County USA
Harold and Kumar: White Castle
Harry Potter 1-8
Haunted Mansion
He's Just Not That Into You
Her
Hereafter
Hocus Pocus
Honor Society
Horrible Bosses
Hotel Transylvania
House Party
How to Be Single
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
How to Train your Dragon
Hypnotic
I Am Legend
I Didn't See You There
I, Tonya
Ice Age: Collision Course
Ice Age: Continental Drift
Ice Age: Dawn of Dinosaurs
Ice Age: Meltdown
Ice on Fire
If Beale Street Could Talk
In the Heart of the Sea
In the Heights
In the Name of the Father
Inception
Incredibles 2
Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny
Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom
Insidious: The Red Door
Insomnia
Instructions not INcluded
It
Jerry & Marge Go Large
Jersey Boys
John Wick
John Wick 2
John Wick 3
Joker
Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Judas and the Black Messiah
Jules
Jumanji
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Jurassic Park
Jurassic World
Just Married
Just my Luck
Kazaam
Kit Kittredge
Kramer vs Kramer
Kubo and the Two Strings
Kung Fu Panda
Kung Fu Panda 2
Kung Fu??????
La La Land
Labyrinth
Lady in the Water
Lakota Nation vs United States
Legally Blonde
Liar Liar
Life of the Party
Lightyear
Lilo and Stitch
Lion
Little Women
Living
Lo------
Lone Survivor
Love and Basketball
Love Again
Love Jones
Ma-d_____ ?
Madagascar
Madagascar Escape
Made of Honor
Mafia Mamma
Magic Mike's Last Dance
Malt------
Momma's Boy
Mamma Mia
Mamma Mia Here We Go Again
March of the Penguins
Mat------
Mean Girls
Meet the Parents?
Memento
Michael Clayton
Milk
Minions
Minions: Rise of Gru
Misery
Miss Congeniality
Missing Link
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning
Mississippi Masala
Moana
Monster In Law
Monsters Inc
Monsters University
Moonlight
Mortal Enemies
Mr. Malcolm's List
Mulan
Mummies
Murder by Numbers
Murder on the Orient Express
Muriel's Wedding
My Animal
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
My Family
My Girl
National Lampoon's Vacation
Neighbors 2
Neruda
New Year's Eve
News of the World
Nights in Rodanthe
Nine Queens
No
No Country for Old Men
No Murches Frida??
Nomadland
Notting Hill
Ocean's 8
Ocean's 13
October Sky
Of tn age??
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Onward
Oppenheimer
Origin
Over the Hedge
Pacific Rim
Pandas
Pan's Labyrinth
ParaNorman
Paris is Burning
Past Lives
Paw Patrol: Mighty
Paw Patrol: More
Pee Wee's Big Adventure
Perfect Strangers
Persepolis
Phantom Thread
Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
Pitch Perfect
Pitch Perfect 3
Planes
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Pokemon: Detective Pikachu
Practical Magic
Pride and Prejudice
Primal Fear
Priscilla
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
Puppy Love
Puss in Boots
Queen and Slim
Radical
RRadi--- Wwi?/
Raging Bull
Ra the Breata?
Rat Race?
Ratatouille
Ready Player One
Real Women Have Curves
Red Tails
Reforge
Renfield
Repo Man
Rocky
Ruby Gillman
Rumor Has It
Rush Hour 2
RV
Róise & Frank
Sacfint??
Saving Face
Saving Private Ryan
School Daze
Scoob!
Scooby Doo
Scrapper
Scream VI
Searching
Selena
Selma
Semi Pro
Seven
Shaft
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
Significant Other
?
?
Skyfall
Smallfoot
Smoke?
Snowpiercer
?
Something's Gotta Give
?
?
Soul Surfer
Space Jam
Space Oddity
Sp Ra ????
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Homecoming
Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse
Split
Spy Game?
Spy Kids
Stone and D????
Ste W s5t?
Stomp the Yard
Storks
Sweet Home Alabama
Tag
Talk to Me
Tangled
Tee as Go!??
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Tenet
The Adia Prse?
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
The Baby-Sitters Club
The Best Man
The Big Lebowski
The Big Short
The Biggest Little Farm
The Bird Cage
The Blind Side
The Blues Brothers
The Bodyguard
The Boogeyman
The Book of Life
The Boss Baby: Family Business
The Bourne Identity
The Boxer
The Breakfast Club
The Bucket List
The Caine Mutiny
The Campaign
The Castle
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Chronicles of Narnia 2
The Chronicles of Narnia 3
The Creator
The Croods New Age
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight Rises
The Dark Side
The Dead Don't Die
The Dry?
The Equalizer
The Exorcist: Believer
The Fabulous Filipino Brothers
The Fast and Furious (#1)
The S Heartbeats?
The Has???
The Gentlemen
The Good Nurse
The Goonies
The Great Wall
The Guard
The Harvest (La Cosecha)
The H????
The Hobbit
The Hobbit 2
The Hobbit 3
The Holdovers
The Hunger Games: Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games 2
The Hunger Games 3
The Hunger Games 4
The Hunt for Red October
The Huntsman: Winter’s War
The Incredibles
The Intern
The Invention of Lying
The Iron Giant
The Island
The Jungle Book
The Karate Kid
The Kids are Alright
The Lake House
The Land Before Time
The Last Out
The Last Samurai
The Lego Batman Movie
The Lego Movie
The Lesson
The Lion King
The Lion King
The Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid
The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship
The Losers
The Man from UNCLE
The Marsh King’s Doughter
The Marvels
The Matrix: Resurrections
The Mitchells vs The Machines
The Mummy
The Neverending Story
The Nice Guys
The Nun II
The Odd Life of Timothy Green
The Other Zoey
The Outsiders
The Peanuts Movie
The Persian Version
The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything
The Place Beyond the Pines
The Popes Exorcist
The Pre--?
The Purge: Election Year
The Replacements
The Ring
The Secret Garden
The Secret Life of Pets
The Silence of the Lambs
The S --------
The ?
The ?
The ?
The ?
The ?
The Take
The Time Traveler's Wife
The True Cost
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The Un---- Country
The Usual Suspects
The ???
The ????
The ?????
The Wedding Singer
The Wizard of Oz
The Wood
The Zookeeper's Wife
Theater Camp
Them---?
There Will Be Blood
Thurs?
Titanic
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tooooo?
Tom ??
Tommy Boy
Top Gun
Top Gun: Maverick
Toy Story 2
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 4
Train to Busan
Training Day
Transformers Rise
Trolls
Trolls World Tour
Troy
Tully
Turning Red
Umami
Us
??
V for Vendetta
V????
VeggieTales: Abe and the Amazing Promise
VeggieTales: Merry Larry and the True Light of Christmas
Vindicta
Vivo
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
War Dogs
We Were Soldiers
We're the Millers
Wedding Crashers
West Side Story
Wet Hot American Summer
Where the Wild Things Are
Wildhood
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Winters Bone
Wonder
Wonder Woman 1984
Wonka
Wreck It Ralph
Yes, Man
Yesterday
Young Punx: A Punk Parable
Zombieland

Hello! Here we are again, back for another ATLA commentary.
Before we get started I do want to point out that I’m numbering and labeling episodes according to how they appear on Netflix. Episode 12, as I understand it, is actually two episodes. However, since they’re presented as one thing here, that’s how I’m watching it.
Brief update on other projects: I thought I’d try watching the first Harry Potter movie, but realized it’s two and a half hours long. That’s, at the bare minimum, five hours of commentary writing. So… yeah, we’re gonna hold off on that lol I’m also considering watching a superhero/comic book show called The Boys, because I accidentally caught part of a trailer for it that my girlfriend was watching and it looks very interesting. I’ll be doing the new Game of Thrones commentary next, not sure when exactly.
Okay, let’s go!
Episode 12- The Secret of the Fire Nation

1. Well that’s a heck of a title! I hope we learn something juicy!

It’s nice to see Aang and Katara bending for fun, thought I’m surprised Aang is so willing to encase himself in a block of ice. You’d think he’d have some trauma from that lol But also, I love Katara’s hair when she lets it down.
Yeah… I’m kind of surprised Aang is taking Appa’s loss as well as he is, considering how he reacted last episode. Since Sokka is talking about walking to Ba Sing Se, I take it they’re not going to be spending time looking for him? But then, didn’t the sandbenders say they sold him to a merchant from Ba Sing Se? Maybe he’s there, and Aang’s banking on that hope.

1. I know I keep applying real-world logic to a cartoon show, but wouldn’t Ba Sing Se get awfully crowded if they’re constantly taking in refugees from the rest of the Earth Kingdom? Iroh put the city under siege for almost two years. What if the Fire Nation does that again? More mouths to feed makes starvation quicker!

Iroh and Zuko are refugees. I still can’t get over that irony lol Hey, it’s Jet! My goodness, he’s onscreen for less than ten seconds and he’s already planning a robbery. He and Zuko are going to get along just fine, aren’t they?
The cabbage merchant! Always a delight to see him and his cabbages! Also hilarious that a bunch of people are impersonating Aang (thought it probably would be less hilarious if any of them met Azula). If passports are necessary, how did Zuko and Iroh get tickets? Also, good on Toph for taking advantage of her privilege lol
Hey! I think that’s Suki! Her eyes are drawn really distinctively and her voice sounds familiar! Two seconds after pressing play: it is Suki! Don’t you just love my long winning streak of figuring things out right before they let us know? Lol

1. Glad to see ATLA Suki appreciates Sokka’s muscles just as much as NATLA Suki lol

Someone took the pregnant family’s tickets and belongings. Is that how Zuko and Iroh got their tickets? Zuko’s robbed families before, so I wouldn’t put it past him.
Well damn, Suki got her armor and makeup on real quick, didn’t she? Hm… Sokka’s worried about her. I think Suki’s going to interpret that as him being sexist again but he’s probably traumatized from losing Yue. He’s been through way too much to still be sexist. If he still had a misogynistic bone in his body, Toph would have beaten it out of him by now.

1. Well the Serpent’s Pass looks terrifying. Also, this pregnant lady took one look at some scratched graffiti saying “Abandon Hope” and immediately started crying, saying “How can we abandon hope? It’s all we have!” Like… come on, lady lol Just because you see graffiti telling you to do something doesn’t mean you have to, otherwise I would have called quite a few people for a good time by now.

Hope is a distraction, huh? I guess I can see the logic of that from a practical application perspective. But it’s kind of a depressing philosophy for a monk to have.
Holy shit! Nope, I would not be walking along a cliff path that narrow! I will build a rowboat and paddle my way to Ba Sing Se.
Toph is really carrying the team (and some refugees too) this episode.

1. There’s a fine line between being protective and being smothering and Sokka has hopped, jumped, and skipped right over it.

Zuko’s not wearing his blue spirit mask. Not that he needs it, he and Jet work together like cogs in a machine. Ironic lol
Ow! Geez, that rejected hug hurt me lol Katara’s right though. Bottling up emotions just makes them worse in the long run. You have to allow yourself to feel bad sometimes. Granted, you can’t fly off the handle like he did last episode, but that’s a reaction. You can control your reactions, but you can’t control your feelings.
“It’s a beautiful moon.” “Yeah, it really is.” Okay, I know Sokka said last episode that Yue is the moon, but he was tripping on peyote. Does he actually believe that Yue is the moon now? Is Yue the moon now? I interpreted her death as he sacrificing herself to bring the moon spirit back to life, not to become the new moon spirit.
“Who is this guy? Is he taller than me?” Dude, we were having a moment. Damn it, just kiss her! Well actually, the moon’s right there so if Yue really did turn into the new moon spirit, it might be a tad awkward to kiss in front of her. But what’s he gonna do, only ever show intimacy during the day?

1. Um… I’m probably reading too much into this Smellerbee scene with Iroh and Longshot and I’m almost hesitant to say what I’m thinking because I can just imagine the backlash I could get for voicing it. And it’s not like ATLA has had great LGBTQ representation up to this point, so… Yeah, I’m probably just seeing things that aren’t there.

You know, I’ve never really cared a lot about Jet as a character (in fact, I’m kind of surprised to see him again. I figured he’d be a one-off character) but I am really enjoying his scenes with Zuko and Iroh. They have so much in common, which is probably the point of this whole juxtaposition. If he only knew who they really were lol
Of course Iroh believes in second chances. He’s the best. And also, he’s living proof that some people deserve a second chance.

1. Uh… Katara parting the sea while leading refugees to safety invokes a certain comparison, doesn’t it? But can I just say that I love how her solution to crossing the gap is to literally walk through the ocean instead of making a raft out of ice and floating across. She just never misses an opportunity to flex on everyone, does she? Lol

Momo continuing his pattern of trying to kill every small animal he sees is something I’ve come to treasure.
Is that the unagi?! I think that’s what it’s called/spelled but I haven’t seen that episode in a while. It would be fitting if Suki and the sea serpent both share the same episodes lol No that’s not the unagi. It’s a different color. Um… what exactly was Sokka planning to do if the sea serpent actually accepted his offer and ate Momo? Considering how he reacted to losing Appa, I don’t think Aang would be too happy with him.
Oh, now she’s making an ice bridge. Not as much of a flex as maintaining an air bubble so they plumb the depths but it is faster. Oh, Toph can’t see on ice. And she can’t swim? An earthbender not being able to swim feels like a stereotype for some reason, even though I have absolutely no reason to think that lol
“You can go ahead and let me drown now.” That’s gonna be a favorite joke of mine, I just know it lol And I’m pretty sure this is probably a jumping point for a Sokka/Toph ship. What does the community call that? Soph? Tokka? (How old is Toph, anyway? Probably Aang’s age, right? That’s… probably not an appropriate ship then)

1. Why does Ba Sing Se’s wall remind me of The Wall from Game of Thrones? Obviously not made of ice though lol

Okay, time for ATLA’s viewers to experience the miracle of childbirth!

1. Like I said earlier, ATLA isn’t heavy on the LGBTQ representation, but I swear I’m picking up on some tension and chemistry between Jet and Zuko (Juko? Jeko? Zet?). And now half of Jet’s little group is an LGBTQ allegory for me lol Even the dialogue between Jet and Zuko in this scene is slightly suggestive.

So… can Katara waterbend the baby out or…
Baby Hope, eh? Probably not a super common name in this world.
Oh? Was that Aang’s way of telling Katara he loves her without actually saying it? Aww. And hey, he’s heading off on his own to search for Appa. Which… honestly kind of feels like he should have been doing that this whole time lol
Yes! Get some, Sokka! Wait, nevermind. I fucking hate that line. Ugh No! I’m not gonna be a bitter old lady on this watch-through! They’re kissing and it’s very sweet and I love that for them!
Um… there’s a giant metal dildo on the way to penetrate Ba Sing Se! Lol but seriously, how technologically advanced is the Fire Nation? A giant mobile drill of that scale would be a marvel of engineering even by our modern standards.

1. Well hey, there’s the title card letting me know when the next episode starts.

Woah, the way the drill moves is so cool! I’m legitimately wondering if such a thing would actually be possible in our world with our physics. I don’t know why we would want to, but still. And of course Azula’s leading this attack. She gets all the best opportunities. And she’s smart too! The war minister guy is dismissive of the earthbenders, believing his drill to be impervious to earthbending attacks. You can practically smell the hubris. But Azula leaves nothing to chance and she sends her girls out to neutralize any potential threat.
And this is why we love Azula. She’s not just a scary villain, she’s a competent villain.

1. And the Earth Kingdom general shares the War Minister’s hubris. Why are the people in charge always the worst people to be in charge? Also, I love that Toph is the one to point out that Iroh broke through the wall.

So the Earth Kingdom’s elite Terra Team force were taken out by two teenage nonbenders from the Fire Nation in about twenty seconds. How have they lasted this long? Lol (I say two, but let’s be honest. Ty Lee’s doing the heavy lifting here)
Yes! I love that they acknowledge Sokka as the “Idea Guy”!
Iroh has got rizz for days lol I’m kind of surprised he only ever had one son. Jet wants to recruit Zuko. I’m totally down for that! They’re such an interesting pair!

1. I really love that Katara, whose probably the best waterbender in the world at this point, respects Ty Lee enough to recognize how dangerous she is. And Sokka had an idea! They’re going to take down the drill from the inside. Because how the hell else are they going to stop something that big?

Again with the underestimation! I swear Azula’s the only competent person in the entire Fire Nation military since Iroh retired.
Okay, engineer Sokka figured it out. It’s all a little too easy, isn’t it?

1. Ah shit, Jet just realized the truth, because Iroh used firebending to heat up his tea lol I think he’s getting a little too relaxed.

Okay, just the fact that they slice through metal with water at all is pretty impressive. And the drill has reached the wall, and Azula still doesn’t look impressed.
Oh yeah, I guess this is a pretty high stakes battle for them, huh? If they lose Ba Sing Se, they basically lose the entire Earth Kingdom, right? Omashu’s already fallen, the smaller villages and whatnot have no real defense. Ba Sing Se is the last big puzzle piece to world domination (aside from the water tribes, but they’re so isolated they’re not really a threat).
I love that Toph’s nickname for Aang is Twinkle Toes. Also I laughed at the War Minister’s face when he was side-eyeing Azula just then. +That’s the face of a man who’s about to be punished!

1. lol Sokka’s the only one with more rizz than Iroh! Maybe a legitimate battle strategy here would be to woo Ty Lee into switching sides? Aside from Azula she seems to be the most dangerous one. No offense to Mai, but she is kind of the odd woman out here.

Oh please let me get Aang and Azula 1v1! I really badly want to see how he fares against her without everyone else helping him. He’ll probably have to use the Avatar State to defeat her.
Ty Lee dives into the slurry after Katara and Sokka while Mai refuses. Yeah, Mai is the weak link here in Ozai’s Angels (I love that name, by the way).

1. Did Aang seriously think the general was going to hear him from that high up? Lol Toph’s helping Katara bend the slurry (how convenient that it’s both water and earth!). Ty Lee’s still trapped in it and the drill is about to blow. If I hadn’t learned my lesson on the last post, I’d probably be worried she might die in the explosion. But this is a kid’s show, she’ll be fine.

Here we go! Aang vs Azula! Her fighting style is so elegant. Every move she makes feels on purpose, if that makes sense. Like, whenever Aang fought Zuko, Zhao, or NPC firebenders their style is a little more chaotic and fearsome and rawr, you know? But Azula’s totally calm. Everything she’s doing feels calculated, and it’s working! If she hadn’t had to dodge that boulder after blasting Aang back she might have been able to deliver a finishing blow!
She beat him! He’s unconscious! Okay, well not anymore lol See… that right there was hubris (actually, it was kid’s show writing but whatever)! He was out for like fifteen seconds. She should have roasted him where he lay instead of picking him up and gloating.
Another fight with Azula ends in a draw with neither one beating the other! I’m starting to get a little peeved with all this edging lol but that was great! Azula is an absolute beast!

1. Okay, the way Aang hammered that rock spike into the drill was pretty epic. Mai’s “We lost” (and thank you for your contribution to the fight, Mai lol) is interesting. It’s true, they did lose. Not in the combat sense, Aang couldn’t beat Azula, but he didn’t have to. He just had to hold her off. Maybe that’s kind of a metaphor for the Fire Nation military in general. It’s very powerful, but it’s also marred by incompetence and weaknesses. Many of its generals are prideful and blind to their own weaknesses, or just outright incompetent. Look at this fight: even Mai just kind of gave up halfway through. If Ty Lee wasn’t trapped in the slurry, she might very well have been able to beat Katara, Sokka, and Toph, especially since they don’t Appa this time to bail them out. And if Mai had been with her, she might have been to break Katara’s concentration with a thrown weapon, thus freeing Ty Lee from the slurry.

I wondered how the Earth Kingdom lasted so long and maybe that’s just it. They can’t beat the Fire Nation, but they don’t have to. They just have to hold them off and the Fire Nation’s own shortcomings will end up beating themselves. It’s a hundred year stalemate.

1. Looks like Jet’s going to be causing a problem for Iroh and Zuko. I wonder if his relationship with them is what’s going to finally let him realize that not all Fire Nation people are inherently evil?

Hey, that’s Baby Hope! And Iroh gets to fawn over her too and I love that for him. You know, if Aang defeats the Fire Nation in a timely manner, Hope might actually get to grow up in a world at peace. Well, kind of. I’m sure there’s going to be massive issues with racism from generations of propaganda painting the other side as inhuman, huge demands for reparations, not to mention the territories the Fire Nation currently occupies. It’s been so long that there must be at least two generations of Fire Nation citizens who were born in and grew up in the Earth Kingdom, and I’m sure there’s been interbreeding with the Earth Kingdom people, because that’s what always happens with colonizers. Once they become established, genocide is pretty much the only way to get rid of them, and I doubt the Avatar is going to allow that.
So Hope’s probably going to grow up in pretty interesting times!
Um… is Ba Sing Se a city or is it a little walled country? Cuz all I see are farms and plains!
Katara, I love you, but you’re wrong. Team Avatar is going to catch on because it’s awesome, and that’s that.
Episode 13- City of Walls and Secrets

1. Oh, there’s an inner wall. So Ba Sing Se is kind of like the country in Attack on Titan! Oh yeah, in all of the excitement I almost forgot about Appa. Seriously, how many episodes has he been missing now? Damn, now that’s a city!

Yeah… something’s up with Joo Dee.
Walls inside that help maintain order? You mean walls that protect the rich and elite from the dirty poors? Lol Oh, Katara just confirmed it. They pen up all the poor people into a walled ghetto.

1. lol when Iroh’s talking about someone bringing home a lady friend, does he mean himself? Or Zuko? It is really interesting how their views of Ba Sing Se differ though. Iroh’s talking about getting a home, socializing, building a life, and he’s even found them jobs! Zuko sees the same situation as a prison.

Well, I’m glad Jet’s turning over a new leaf by letting the authorities handle things. Too bad I don’t trust the authorities to be any better.
Toph knows what’s up. Joo Dee is purposefully brushing Sokka off and distracting the group. I’m not sure why at the moment, but something is clearly up.

1. Of course they’re going to work in a tea shop! Lol Zuko’s right btw, all tea is hot leaf juice. Well, except for the teas that are hot root juice.

The cultural authority of Ba Sing Se, who guard their traditions and are called the Dai Li. Yeah… maybe it’s my conservative religious upbringing but when I hear about people “guarding their traditions” I immediately think of abuse, propaganda, and oppression. Generally people who are obsessed with traditions tend to be conservatives, who by their very nature cannot allow progress or improvement.
Someone important is trying to keep them under constant surveillance and prevent them from seeing the Earth King. In NATLA, there were spies in Omashu. Since Ba Sing Se is much bigger and more important, I imagine it’s riddled with Fire Nation spies as well, and somebody high ranking might be a traitor.

1. Joo Dee is kind of scary lol and clearly the citizens are terrified of her. But what’s interesting to me is that she’s preventing them from giving information about Appa, which suggests that whoever is stopping them from seeing the Earth King also has Appa. But why? What would be the point of keeping Aang away from Appa? Is it to restrict his mobility and make him easier to capture?

So people aren’t allowed to talk about the war, and the Dai Li seem to be responsible. But why? If everyone knows there’s a war going on anyway, why keep people from talking about it?
It’s lucky that Iroh borrowed his neighbor’s spark rocks, but why would he refrain from firebending in what he assumes is privacy? Unless he knows he’s being watched.

1. Huh, is the king’s pet bear the first normal animal on the show? Lol I am digging this undercover plan though.

I love that this show lets its characters try on different looks from time to time, even if they are mostly the same outfits. Katara and Toph’s high society get-ups are gorgeous!
The lost boys- I mean, freedom fighters are turning on Peter Pa- I mean, Jet. The weird thing is… he’s right! They are firebenders! But his behavior still isn’t healthy!

1. Okay, let’s go! Jet’s hurling accusations and attacking them in public! And now Zuko’s fighting back with swords. It’s the duel of the dual-wielders! Honestly, this is probably good for Zuko. He needs to blow off some steam after everything he’s been through.

Well how about that? Security at the palace is actually competent and Toph can’t bluff her way in.
This Long Feng guy is cultural minister to the king, which means he’s probably the bad guy! And also we haven’t met any other high ranking government officials with names, so he’s currently the only option lol

1. Geez, Zuko straight up intended to decapitate Jet right there. If Jet were a little slower, he would have! Man, I hope they do this fight scene in NATLA.

Uh-oh, scary lady Joo Dee is the scared one now. But can I just say how much I like her facial expressions?
Yeah… can’t blame them for arresting Jet. He did look like a crazy person.
The Dai Li’s specific brand of earthbending is very cool! It almost doesn’t seem like bending at all, if that makes sense. The stones they use are like a part of their own body. And of course Long Feng is their leader.
Okay I get the king is just a puppet and Long Feng is the real rule of the country, but I still don’t understand why he doesn’t allow mention of the war in the city. I mean, it’s common knowledge! A significant portion of their population are literally refugees fleeing war! Who doesn’t know
Oh… is it the king? Does the king just not know there’s a war happening and Long Feng keeps it from him so he can stay in charge? I mean, that’s still a stretch but it would explain why he doesn’t want Team Avatar talking to the king.

1. Jet is being hypnotized. Also, I do want to point out that I have seen “There is no (whatever) in Ba Sing Se” many times in the wild lol it’s nice to see where it comes from!

Ah… Long Feng is holding Appa as leverage over Aang.
I didn’t think Joo Dee could be any scarier but here we are! This episode almost has horror movie vibes.
Concluding thoughts: This was a fantastic couple/throuple of episodes! I loved seeing Suki again, and I really enjoyed how the refugee subplot ties so perfectly in with Iroh and Zuko. The whole drill sequence was probably the best “action” the show has had thus far and that’s saying something. It’s also nice to have my suspicions that the Earth Kingdom has its own corruption problems and bad guys confirmed.
I have a new theory to replace my “Iroh’s going to die theory”. They’ve been showing us all season how Zuko isn’t really cut out for life on the run, whereas Iroh embraces it. I think they’re driving to a separation between Zuko and Iroh. He may not have died, but narratively speaking Zuko and Iroh have to part ways permanently or semi-permanently for his character to grow. Iroh has been propping him up and supporting him this whole time, now it’s time for Zuko to leave the nest and become his own person.
My new theory is that Iroh will enjoy his new life in Ba Sing Se so much that he elects to stay there permanently, whereas Zuko is too restless to do so. He can’t go back to the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom will not accept him, so his only choice is to join Team Avatar, where he will likely end up teaching Aang firebending.
And to expand further on a previous theory of mine, which was: Azula will kill or depose Ozai. I’ve accepted at this point that death is off the table. Kid’s show and all that. But I noticed something… lots of people were quick to say that Azula would never kill Ozai. But not one person has said she wouldn’t depose him in those refutations (unless I’m misremembering but I don’t think I am). Since you all know not to hint at things or spoil them, I think your eagerness to point out that she won’t kill Ozai is an attempt to mislead me into thinking the whole theory is wrong so I’ll be surprised when she ends up deposing (not killing) him. I mean, I could be wrong but I have a strong feeling that the final villain is going to be Fire Lord Azula, with Ozai in exile somewhere (that would be fitting! The man who banishes his own son ends up being banished himself!).
Maybe that will even be the conclusion of Zuko’s arc! While Aang goes off to save the world from Azula, Zuko splits up to confront Ozai himself! Where we are in the show right now, it really does feel like Azula is Aang’s primary antagonist whereas Ozai is Zuko’s primary antagonist.
By the way, from here on out, no confirming or denying my theories either way, okay? Let it unfold naturally, and let me figure things out on my own. I mean, where’s the fun in just giving me the answers?
And also, some of you could be a little nicer with your criticisms. I had to block someone last time I posted and I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s fine to disagree with me, it’s fine to explain why you disagree with me. Hell, most of you do! I don’t mind that, I like that we all have different views of things even if I don’t agree. It makes things interesting! But don’t talk down to me, don’t use belittling language, don’t be disrespectful. Whenever I don’t like something about ATLA (or like something about NATLA) some of you seem to take it as a personal insult or something.
Just be polite, that’s all I ask.
Okay, I’ll see you same time next week probably!

Hello! Here we are again, back for another ATLA commentary.
Before we get started I do want to point out that I’m numbering and labeling episodes according to how they appear on Netflix. Episode 12, as I understand it, is actually two episodes. However, since they’re presented as one thing here, that’s how I’m watching it.
Brief update on other projects: I thought I’d try watching the first Harry Potter movie, but realized it’s two and a half hours long. That’s, at the bare minimum, five hours of commentary writing. So… yeah, we’re gonna hold off on that lol I’m also considering watching a superhero/comic book show called The Boys, because I accidentally caught part of a trailer for it that my girlfriend was watching and it looks very interesting. I’ll be doing the new Game of Thrones commentary next, not sure when exactly.
Okay, let’s go!
Episode 12- The Secret of the Fire Nation

1. Well that’s a heck of a title! I hope we learn something juicy!

It’s nice to see Aang and Katara bending for fun, thought I’m surprised Aang is so willing to encase himself in a block of ice. You’d think he’d have some trauma from that lol But also, I love Katara’s hair when she lets it down.
Yeah… I’m kind of surprised Aang is taking Appa’s loss as well as he is, considering how he reacted last episode. Since Sokka is talking about walking to Ba Sing Se, I take it they’re not going to be spending time looking for him? But then, didn’t the sandbenders say they sold him to a merchant from Ba Sing Se? Maybe he’s there, and Aang’s banking on that hope.

1. I know I keep applying real-world logic to a cartoon show, but wouldn’t Ba Sing Se get awfully crowded if they’re constantly taking in refugees from the rest of the Earth Kingdom? Iroh put the city under siege for almost two years. What if the Fire Nation does that again? More mouths to feed makes starvation quicker!

Iroh and Zuko are refugees. I still can’t get over that irony lol Hey, it’s Jet! My goodness, he’s onscreen for less than ten seconds and he’s already planning a robbery. He and Zuko are going to get along just fine, aren’t they?
The cabbage merchant! Always a delight to see him and his cabbages! Also hilarious that a bunch of people are impersonating Aang (thought it probably would be less hilarious if any of them met Azula). If passports are necessary, how did Zuko and Iroh get tickets? Also, good on Toph for taking advantage of her privilege lol
Hey! I think that’s Suki! Her eyes are drawn really distinctively and her voice sounds familiar! Two seconds after pressing play: it is Suki! Don’t you just love my long winning streak of figuring things out right before they let us know? Lol

1. Glad to see ATLA Suki appreciates Sokka’s muscles just as much as NATLA Suki lol

Someone took the pregnant family’s tickets and belongings. Is that how Zuko and Iroh got their tickets? Zuko’s robbed families before, so I wouldn’t put it past him.
Well damn, Suki got her armor and makeup on real quick, didn’t she? Hm… Sokka’s worried about her. I think Suki’s going to interpret that as him being sexist again but he’s probably traumatized from losing Yue. He’s been through way too much to still be sexist. If he still had a misogynistic bone in his body, Toph would have beaten it out of him by now.

1. Well the Serpent’s Pass looks terrifying. Also, this pregnant lady took one look at some scratched graffiti saying “Abandon Hope” and immediately started crying, saying “How can we abandon hope? It’s all we have!” Like… come on, lady lol Just because you see graffiti telling you to do something doesn’t mean you have to, otherwise I would have called quite a few people for a good time by now.

Hope is a distraction, huh? I guess I can see the logic of that from a practical application perspective. But it’s kind of a depressing philosophy for a monk to have.
Holy shit! Nope, I would not be walking along a cliff path that narrow! I will build a rowboat and paddle my way to Ba Sing Se.
Toph is really carrying the team (and some refugees too) this episode.

1. There’s a fine line between being protective and being smothering and Sokka has hopped, jumped, and skipped right over it.

Zuko’s not wearing his blue spirit mask. Not that he needs it, he and Jet work together like cogs in a machine. Ironic lol
Ow! Geez, that rejected hug hurt me lol Katara’s right though. Bottling up emotions just makes them worse in the long run. You have to allow yourself to feel bad sometimes. Granted, you can’t fly off the handle like he did last episode, but that’s a reaction. You can control your reactions, but you can’t control your feelings.
“It’s a beautiful moon.” “Yeah, it really is.” Okay, I know Sokka said last episode that Yue is the moon, but he was tripping on peyote. Does he actually believe that Yue is the moon now? Is Yue the moon now? I interpreted her death as he sacrificing herself to bring the moon spirit back to life, not to become the new moon spirit.
“Who is this guy? Is he taller than me?” Dude, we were having a moment. Damn it, just kiss her! Well actually, the moon’s right there so if Yue really did turn into the new moon spirit, it might be a tad awkward to kiss in front of her. But what’s he gonna do, only ever show intimacy during the day?

1. Um… I’m probably reading too much into this Smellerbee scene with Iroh and Longshot and I’m almost hesitant to say what I’m thinking because I can just imagine the backlash I could get for voicing it. And it’s not like ATLA has had great LGBTQ representation up to this point, so… Yeah, I’m probably just seeing things that aren’t there.

You know, I’ve never really cared a lot about Jet as a character (in fact, I’m kind of surprised to see him again. I figured he’d be a one-off character) but I am really enjoying his scenes with Zuko and Iroh. They have so much in common, which is probably the point of this whole juxtaposition. If he only knew who they really were lol
Of course Iroh believes in second chances. He’s the best. And also, he’s living proof that some people deserve a second chance.

1. Uh… Katara parting the sea while leading refugees to safety invokes a certain comparison, doesn’t it? But can I just say that I love how her solution to crossing the gap is to literally walk through the ocean instead of making a raft out of ice and floating across. She just never misses an opportunity to flex on everyone, does she? Lol

Momo continuing his pattern of trying to kill every small animal he sees is something I’ve come to treasure.
Is that the unagi?! I think that’s what it’s called/spelled but I haven’t seen that episode in a while. It would be fitting if Suki and the sea serpent both share the same episodes lol No that’s not the unagi. It’s a different color. Um… what exactly was Sokka planning to do if the sea serpent actually accepted his offer and ate Momo? Considering how he reacted to losing Appa, I don’t think Aang would be too happy with him.
Oh, now she’s making an ice bridge. Not as much of a flex as maintaining an air bubble so they plumb the depths but it is faster. Oh, Toph can’t see on ice. And she can’t swim? An earthbender not being able to swim feels like a stereotype for some reason, even though I have absolutely no reason to think that lol
“You can go ahead and let me drown now.” That’s gonna be a favorite joke of mine, I just know it lol And I’m pretty sure this is probably a jumping point for a Sokka/Toph ship. What does the community call that? Soph? Tokka? (How old is Toph, anyway? Probably Aang’s age, right? That’s… probably not an appropriate ship then)

1. Why does Ba Sing Se’s wall remind me of The Wall from Game of Thrones? Obviously not made of ice though lol

Okay, time for ATLA’s viewers to experience the miracle of childbirth!

1. Like I said earlier, ATLA isn’t heavy on the LGBTQ representation, but I swear I’m picking up on some tension and chemistry between Jet and Zuko (Juko? Jeko? Zet?). And now half of Jet’s little group is an LGBTQ allegory for me lol Even the dialogue between Jet and Zuko in this scene is slightly suggestive.

So… can Katara waterbend the baby out or…
Baby Hope, eh? Probably not a super common name in this world.
Oh? Was that Aang’s way of telling Katara he loves her without actually saying it? Aww. And hey, he’s heading off on his own to search for Appa. Which… honestly kind of feels like he should have been doing that this whole time lol
Yes! Get some, Sokka! Wait, nevermind. I fucking hate that line. Ugh No! I’m not gonna be a bitter old lady on this watch-through! They’re kissing and it’s very sweet and I love that for them!
Um… there’s a giant metal dildo on the way to penetrate Ba Sing Se! Lol but seriously, how technologically advanced is the Fire Nation? A giant mobile drill of that scale would be a marvel of engineering even by our modern standards.

1. Well hey, there’s the title card letting me know when the next episode starts.

Woah, the way the drill moves is so cool! I’m legitimately wondering if such a thing would actually be possible in our world with our physics. I don’t know why we would want to, but still. And of course Azula’s leading this attack. She gets all the best opportunities. And she’s smart too! The war minister guy is dismissive of the earthbenders, believing his drill to be impervious to earthbending attacks. You can practically smell the hubris. But Azula leaves nothing to chance and she sends her girls out to neutralize any potential threat.
And this is why we love Azula. She’s not just a scary villain, she’s a competent villain.

1. And the Earth Kingdom general shares the War Minister’s hubris. Why are the people in charge always the worst people to be in charge? Also, I love that Toph is the one to point out that Iroh broke through the wall.

So the Earth Kingdom’s elite Terra Team force were taken out by two teenage nonbenders from the Fire Nation in about twenty seconds. How have they lasted this long? Lol (I say two, but let’s be honest. Ty Lee’s doing the heavy lifting here)
Yes! I love that they acknowledge Sokka as the “Idea Guy”!
Iroh has got rizz for days lol I’m kind of surprised he only ever had one son. Jet wants to recruit Zuko. I’m totally down for that! They’re such an interesting pair!

1. I really love that Katara, whose probably the best waterbender in the world at this point, respects Ty Lee enough to recognize how dangerous she is. And Sokka had an idea! They’re going to take down the drill from the inside. Because how the hell else are they going to stop something that big?

Again with the underestimation! I swear Azula’s the only competent person in the entire Fire Nation military since Iroh retired.
Okay, engineer Sokka figured it out. It’s all a little too easy, isn’t it?

1. Ah shit, Jet just realized the truth, because Iroh used firebending to heat up his tea lol I think he’s getting a little too relaxed.

Okay, just the fact that they slice through metal with water at all is pretty impressive. And the drill has reached the wall, and Azula still doesn’t look impressed.
Oh yeah, I guess this is a pretty high stakes battle for them, huh? If they lose Ba Sing Se, they basically lose the entire Earth Kingdom, right? Omashu’s already fallen, the smaller villages and whatnot have no real defense. Ba Sing Se is the last big puzzle piece to world domination (aside from the water tribes, but they’re so isolated they’re not really a threat).
I love that Toph’s nickname for Aang is Twinkle Toes. Also I laughed at the War Minister’s face when he was side-eyeing Azula just then. +That’s the face of a man who’s about to be punished!

1. lol Sokka’s the only one with more rizz than Iroh! Maybe a legitimate battle strategy here would be to woo Ty Lee into switching sides? Aside from Azula she seems to be the most dangerous one. No offense to Mai, but she is kind of the odd woman out here.

Oh please let me get Aang and Azula 1v1! I really badly want to see how he fares against her without everyone else helping him. He’ll probably have to use the Avatar State to defeat her.
Ty Lee dives into the slurry after Katara and Sokka while Mai refuses. Yeah, Mai is the weak link here in Ozai’s Angels (I love that name, by the way).

1. Did Aang seriously think the general was going to hear him from that high up? Lol Toph’s helping Katara bend the slurry (how convenient that it’s both water and earth!). Ty Lee’s still trapped in it and the drill is about to blow. If I hadn’t learned my lesson on the last post, I’d probably be worried she might die in the explosion. But this is a kid’s show, she’ll be fine.

Here we go! Aang vs Azula! Her fighting style is so elegant. Every move she makes feels on purpose, if that makes sense. Like, whenever Aang fought Zuko, Zhao, or NPC firebenders their style is a little more chaotic and fearsome and rawr, you know? But Azula’s totally calm. Everything she’s doing feels calculated, and it’s working! If she hadn’t had to dodge that boulder after blasting Aang back she might have been able to deliver a finishing blow!
She beat him! He’s unconscious! Okay, well not anymore lol See… that right there was hubris (actually, it was kid’s show writing but whatever)! He was out for like fifteen seconds. She should have roasted him where he lay instead of picking him up and gloating.
Another fight with Azula ends in a draw with neither one beating the other! I’m starting to get a little peeved with all this edging lol but that was great! Azula is an absolute beast!

1. Okay, the way Aang hammered that rock spike into the drill was pretty epic. Mai’s “We lost” (and thank you for your contribution to the fight, Mai lol) is interesting. It’s true, they did lose. Not in the combat sense, Aang couldn’t beat Azula, but he didn’t have to. He just had to hold her off. Maybe that’s kind of a metaphor for the Fire Nation military in general. It’s very powerful, but it’s also marred by incompetence and weaknesses. Many of its generals are prideful and blind to their own weaknesses, or just outright incompetent. Look at this fight: even Mai just kind of gave up halfway through. If Ty Lee wasn’t trapped in the slurry, she might very well have been able to beat Katara, Sokka, and Toph, especially since they don’t Appa this time to bail them out. And if Mai had been with her, she might have been to break Katara’s concentration with a thrown weapon, thus freeing Ty Lee from the slurry.

I wondered how the Earth Kingdom lasted so long and maybe that’s just it. They can’t beat the Fire Nation, but they don’t have to. They just have to hold them off and the Fire Nation’s own shortcomings will end up beating themselves. It’s a hundred year stalemate.

1. Looks like Jet’s going to be causing a problem for Iroh and Zuko. I wonder if his relationship with them is what’s going to finally let him realize that not all Fire Nation people are inherently evil?

Hey, that’s Baby Hope! And Iroh gets to fawn over her too and I love that for him. You know, if Aang defeats the Fire Nation in a timely manner, Hope might actually get to grow up in a world at peace. Well, kind of. I’m sure there’s going to be massive issues with racism from generations of propaganda painting the other side as inhuman, huge demands for reparations, not to mention the territories the Fire Nation currently occupies. It’s been so long that there must be at least two generations of Fire Nation citizens who were born in and grew up in the Earth Kingdom, and I’m sure there’s been interbreeding with the Earth Kingdom people, because that’s what always happens with colonizers. Once they become established, genocide is pretty much the only way to get rid of them, and I doubt the Avatar is going to allow that.
So Hope’s probably going to grow up in pretty interesting times!
Um… is Ba Sing Se a city or is it a little walled country? Cuz all I see are farms and plains!
Katara, I love you, but you’re wrong. Team Avatar is going to catch on because it’s awesome, and that’s that.
Episode 13- City of Walls and Secrets

1. Oh, there’s an inner wall. So Ba Sing Se is kind of like the country in Attack on Titan! Oh yeah, in all of the excitement I almost forgot about Appa. Seriously, how many episodes has he been missing now? Damn, now that’s a city!

Yeah… something’s up with Joo Dee.
Walls inside that help maintain order? You mean walls that protect the rich and elite from the dirty poors? Lol Oh, Katara just confirmed it. They pen up all the poor people into a walled ghetto.

1. lol when Iroh’s talking about someone bringing home a lady friend, does he mean himself? Or Zuko? It is really interesting how their views of Ba Sing Se differ though. Iroh’s talking about getting a home, socializing, building a life, and he’s even found them jobs! Zuko sees the same situation as a prison.

Well, I’m glad Jet’s turning over a new leaf by letting the authorities handle things. Too bad I don’t trust the authorities to be any better.
Toph knows what’s up. Joo Dee is purposefully brushing Sokka off and distracting the group. I’m not sure why at the moment, but something is clearly up.

1. Of course they’re going to work in a tea shop! Lol Zuko’s right btw, all tea is hot leaf juice. Well, except for the teas that are hot root juice.

The cultural authority of Ba Sing Se, who guard their traditions and are called the Dai Li. Yeah… maybe it’s my conservative religious upbringing but when I hear about people “guarding their traditions” I immediately think of abuse, propaganda, and oppression. Generally people who are obsessed with traditions tend to be conservatives, who by their very nature cannot allow progress or improvement.
Someone important is trying to keep them under constant surveillance and prevent them from seeing the Earth King. In NATLA, there were spies in Omashu. Since Ba Sing Se is much bigger and more important, I imagine it’s riddled with Fire Nation spies as well, and somebody high ranking might be a traitor.

1. Joo Dee is kind of scary lol and clearly the citizens are terrified of her. But what’s interesting to me is that she’s preventing them from giving information about Appa, which suggests that whoever is stopping them from seeing the Earth King also has Appa. But why? What would be the point of keeping Aang away from Appa? Is it to restrict his mobility and make him easier to capture?

So people aren’t allowed to talk about the war, and the Dai Li seem to be responsible. But why? If everyone knows there’s a war going on anyway, why keep people from talking about it?
It’s lucky that Iroh borrowed his neighbor’s spark rocks, but why would he refrain from firebending in what he assumes is privacy? Unless he knows he’s being watched.

1. Huh, is the king’s pet bear the first normal animal on the show? Lol I am digging this undercover plan though.

I love that this show lets its characters try on different looks from time to time, even if they are mostly the same outfits. Katara and Toph’s high society get-ups are gorgeous!
The lost boys- I mean, freedom fighters are turning on Peter Pa- I mean, Jet. The weird thing is… he’s right! They are firebenders! But his behavior still isn’t healthy!

1. Okay, let’s go! Jet’s hurling accusations and attacking them in public! And now Zuko’s fighting back with swords. It’s the duel of the dual-wielders! Honestly, this is probably good for Zuko. He needs to blow off some steam after everything he’s been through.

Well how about that? Security at the palace is actually competent and Toph can’t bluff her way in.
This Long Feng guy is cultural minister to the king, which means he’s probably the bad guy! And also we haven’t met any other high ranking government officials with names, so he’s currently the only option lol

1. Geez, Zuko straight up intended to decapitate Jet right there. If Jet were a little slower, he would have! Man, I hope they do this fight scene in NATLA.

Uh-oh, scary lady Joo Dee is the scared one now. But can I just say how much I like her facial expressions?
Yeah… can’t blame them for arresting Jet. He did look like a crazy person.
The Dai Li’s specific brand of earthbending is very cool! It almost doesn’t seem like bending at all, if that makes sense. The stones they use are like a part of their own body. And of course Long Feng is their leader.
Okay I get the king is just a puppet and Long Feng is the real rule of the country, but I still don’t understand why he doesn’t allow mention of the war in the city. I mean, it’s common knowledge! A significant portion of their population are literally refugees fleeing war! Who doesn’t know
Oh… is it the king? Does the king just not know there’s a war happening and Long Feng keeps it from him so he can stay in charge? I mean, that’s still a stretch but it would explain why he doesn’t want Team Avatar talking to the king.

1. Jet is being hypnotized. Also, I do want to point out that I have seen “There is no (whatever) in Ba Sing Se” many times in the wild lol it’s nice to see where it comes from!

Ah… Long Feng is holding Appa as leverage over Aang.
I didn’t think Joo Dee could be any scarier but here we are! This episode almost has horror movie vibes.
Concluding thoughts: This was a fantastic couple/throuple of episodes! I loved seeing Suki again, and I really enjoyed how the refugee subplot ties so perfectly in with Iroh and Zuko. The whole drill sequence was probably the best “action” the show has had thus far and that’s saying something. It’s also nice to have my suspicions that the Earth Kingdom has its own corruption problems and bad guys confirmed.
I have a new theory to replace my “Iroh’s going to die theory”. They’ve been showing us all season how Zuko isn’t really cut out for life on the run, whereas Iroh embraces it. I think they’re driving to a separation between Zuko and Iroh. He may not have died, but narratively speaking Zuko and Iroh have to part ways permanently or semi-permanently for his character to grow. Iroh has been propping him up and supporting him this whole time, now it’s time for Zuko to leave the nest and become his own person.
My new theory is that Iroh will enjoy his new life in Ba Sing Se so much that he elects to stay there permanently, whereas Zuko is too restless to do so. He can’t go back to the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom will not accept him, so his only choice is to join Team Avatar, where he will likely end up teaching Aang firebending.
And to expand further on a previous theory of mine, which was: Azula will kill or depose Ozai. I’ve accepted at this point that death is off the table. Kid’s show and all that. But I noticed something… lots of people were quick to say that Azula would never kill Ozai. But not one person has said she wouldn’t depose him in those refutations (unless I’m misremembering but I don’t think I am). Since you all know not to hint at things or spoil them, I think your eagerness to point out that she won’t kill Ozai is an attempt to mislead me into thinking the whole theory is wrong so I’ll be surprised when she ends up deposing (not killing) him. I mean, I could be wrong but I have a strong feeling that the final villain is going to be Fire Lord Azula, with Ozai in exile somewhere (that would be fitting! The man who banishes his own son ends up being banished himself!).
Maybe that will even be the conclusion of Zuko’s arc! While Aang goes off to save the world from Azula, Zuko splits up to confront Ozai himself! Where we are in the show right now, it really does feel like Azula is Aang’s primary antagonist whereas Ozai is Zuko’s primary antagonist.
By the way, from here on out, no confirming or denying my theories either way, okay? Let it unfold naturally, and let me figure things out on my own. I mean, where’s the fun in just giving me the answers?
And also, some of you could be a little nicer with your criticisms. I had to block someone last time I posted and I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s fine to disagree with me, it’s fine to explain why you disagree with me. Hell, most of you do! I don’t mind that, I like that we all have different views of things even if I don’t agree. It makes things interesting! But don’t talk down to me, don’t use belittling language, don’t be disrespectful. Whenever I don’t like something about ATLA (or like something about NATLA) some of you seem to take it as a personal insult or something.
Just be polite, that’s all I ask.
Okay, I’ll see you same time next week probably!

FYI, this is a story COLLECTION. Lots of standalones technically. So, you can basically start to read at any chapter, no pre-read of the other chapters needed technically (other than maybe getting better descriptions of characters than: Adam Vir=human, Krill=antlike alien, Sunny=tall alien, Conn=telepathic alien). The numbers are (mostly) only for organization of posts and continuity.
OC Written by Charlie Stastarrfallknightrise,
Typed up and then posted here by me.
Proofreading and language check for some chapters by u/Finbar9800 u/BakeGullible9975 u/Didnotseemecomein and u/medium_jock
Future Lore and fact check done by me.
The plot thickens!
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The Rundi pilot maneuvered his ship around a chunk of space debris, cutting low as he watched the slow and leisurely path of the rocket as it began on its trajectory towards the moon. Radar was almost impossible to use in the deadly debris field these humans called an orbit, so it was up to his eyes to make out any incoming hostiles.
They circled low and then wide around the slow-moving rocket, keeping their distance while also keeping an eye out. It was easy enough, as the drone was covered in cameras and sensors, which allowed them to see from almost every angle. A human might have been better at this, but right now they were the only ones they could trust.
[…]
A green folder rested atop the lectern as the President of the UN gave her halting, and to the chairwoman it seemed, unenthusiastic speech. The humans down below didn't seem to notice, making her wonder if she was simply imagining things, though a part of her said that was not the case.
She had been suspicious of the UN president from the very beginning, the very beginning when she was given power after the first launch of the enterprise, and they had been forced to deal with her during treaty negotiations. At every step there seemed to be some sort of obstacle, something wrong, some reason that the humans could just not accept. It went on behind closed doors and in quiet whispered conversations. But luckily for them, people like Adam Vir and Admiral Kelly had been there to smooth things over between the two factions.
The chairwoman knew better than most, that there were only a few humans in the galaxy holding everything together.
And the last thing she wanted was bad relations, or to go to war with this species. It would be a nightmare.
She shifted in her seat as she listened to the speech. The valley below her still had traces of smoke let off by burning so much fossil fuel at once. She imagined that such a stunt wasn't entirely great for the atmosphere of the planet, though as far as she knew humans tended to run on sustainable clean energy these days.
The Chairwoman stepped down from the little podium and into the back where she could not be seen, leaning in so she could hear the words whispered from her assistant,
"The drones are deployed, and so far we have not met any resistance.”
She nodded slowly,
"Good work, keep an eye out."
[…]
The UN president felt her fingers digging into the soft paper of the green folder. The red one was lying discarded under the lectern, and she was having trouble concentrating, forcing herself to remember that this wasn't over. She glanced into the crowd, expecting to see that strange white face staring up at her from the throng of people, but there was nothing.
Had she seen it as in her imagination, or did she really see an alien face staring back at her?
She glanced upwards, towards where the rocket had vanished, only half paying attention to the practiced words that dribbled from her mouth. She finished her speech and the people below clapped and cheered heartily, though she didn't much feel like clapping with them.
She turned on her heel and walked down to the back of the stage to where her entourage was waiting for her. Admiral Massie was sitting on one end and Admiral Kelly was sitting at the other, the two of them doing their damndest to ignore each other at all costs.
She sat down next to Admiral Massie, arms crossed over her chest as he leaned in to speak with her.
"That didn't exactly go as planned."
He muttered softly.
"It will if your men are ready."
She snapped back, her palms cold and sweaty.
Admiral Massie nodded,
"Of course, they should come out when they reach the densest part of the debris field, that way we can make it look like some unexpected collision."
He glanced towards the lectern,
"So I would keep a hold of that red folder of yours."
On the other set of chairs, Admiral Kelly was giving them a sidelong glance. Everyone knew that she was in Admiral Vir's camp, licking his boots at every opportunity. It would be within their best interest to keep silent when she was around.
The UN president leaned back in her seat,
"You should be on your way, Admiral. We will have time to talk later."
He stood and nodded slowly,
"Of course madame president."
He turned to walk away, catching the eye of Admiral Kelly as he stepped past. The two of them didn't much like each other, though as the head of the OGI (Office of Galactic intelligence) Admiral Massie had enough pull to keep Kelly in her place.
The UN president turned her head away. Not wanting to draw attention to herself.
[…]
Admiral Kelly glanced over at the UN president as Admiral Massie passed by. There was something about those two spending time together that she didn't like. Granted it was more than likely the two of them were having some sweaty, wrinkly liaisons out of hours which she didn't really want to think about, but if that was the case then he could easily be pressing his planetary isolationist views off on her.
Kelly did not think highly of the UN presidency. Right now, it seemed mostly concerned with power and political favors with the people, rather than doing the right thing. Plus, she found the president herself to be superficially charming, but easily manipulated by the wrong people. Fear mongering worked the best on her, which is why she worried about Massie and his effect on her to begin with.
She found herself digging her nails into her palms as she thought about it.
”Please help us.”
Admiral Kelly shot up in her seat looking around as she tried to find the source of the noise, or the voice. She turned in her seat expecting to find someone whispering in her ear, but there was nothing. She pressed at the implant along the side of her neck wondering if someone had called her and she just hadn't noticed?
”Look up.”
Jolted again, lifting her eyes towards the sky and the burning sun. She threw up a hand to block her vision, and as she did, she thought she saw a shape floating there against the backdrop of the sun.
She squinted hard trying to make it out but was having trouble.
”Now look into the crowd.”
She turned her head down, still not sure where the sound could be coming from, but as she looked into the crowd, she saw a strange sight. One of the people was wearing a dark hoodie, and was turned away from the direction which the rest of the crowd was facing. Their hood was pulled low, but ever so subtly, they lifted their head to reveal a porcelain white face, with large dark eyes.
Admiral Kelly went very still as she stared at the starborn.
“Not a starborn, a halfbreed. My name is Eris, I am Admiral Vir's... daughter”
Oh... oh, yes she had heard about the starborn hybrid from one of his reports.
"What do you want."
She mouthed quietly.
“We need your help, the UN president is planning to have Admiral Vir Killed, and Admiral Massie is on his way to make the order, please, you have to do something."
Admiral Kelly jolted to her feet, very quickly glancing at the UN president in shock and horror before she was able to capture her emotions. The UN president looked up to her sudden movement, and Admiral Kelly had to fight to keep her face neutral as the woman looked up at her.
"Are you feeling well Admiral?”
She could feel the sweat dripping down her face and the nape of her neck, but she remained as calm as possible as she took a deep breath,
"I... Am suddenly very dizzy. I think it's the heat."
"You should sit down, have someone bring you some water."
The woman said, her voice calm and clear as if she hadn't just ordered the murder of Adam Vir.
"No I... I think I need to walk for a minute and find some shade. You will excuse me?"
The UN president shrugged and turned back to staring at the sky, giving Admiral Kelly time to step forward and hurry after General Massi's retreating figure.
[…]
General Massie stepped into mission control and walked down the blank empty corridors. No one was here, they were all either in the control room or out celebrating the successful launch. It had been a sight to see, two-thousand-year-old technology working for one more time, but personally General Massie saw it as completely obsolete and a useless waste of government capital.
That was something they could have been using to help fortify earth's defense nexus. Out of all the useless things Admiral Vir had supported, at least he had agreed that they needed SOME form of defense against extraterrestrial attack.
General Massie made a face…
Though he wouldn't doubt Admiral Vir would have been totally fine leaving their planet with its pants down in order to let those Xenos fuck them over.
Everyone and their dog knew that Admiral Vir preferred alien cock over his own kind.
The thought made Admiral Massie cringe.
It was a well-kept secret among the UNSC, but the man wasn't nearly as secretive as he liked to think he was. Rumors of his infatuation with the stupid blue beetle alien had reached command almost as soon as it began. The only reason they didn't allow it to leak was that it would make the UNSC look bad to the rest of earth.
And Jupiter how he hated that man.
Stupid, juvenile egotistical xeno fucker!
Today was the day all of that came to an end!
He cut right, just before the doors to mission control and walked down two more hallways, finally opening a small side door into, what might have looked from the outside, like an equipment closet. He stepped over a mop and bucket and sat down at an old console, which he fired up with the flick of a button.
"Flight 1 this is Earth 1 over."
"Roger earth one this if slight one, in position over."
He turned on the screen, giving himself time to look the radar over, as twenty dots appeared on screen. Those were twenty Thunderhawks they had slowly appropriated over the intervening year.
With a place as big as the universe to cover, it was pretty easy to lose a few jets in the shuffle. He could see them now, illuminated as little green dots on his screen, hiding in the debris.
"Flight one this is Earth one, Operation “After Apollo” is go. Now remember boys and girls, make it look like an accident. Over."
*"Roger that Earth one. Over and out."
[…]
"You TRAITOR!"
Admiral Massie spun in his seat, eyes wide and wild as Admiral Kelly stood in the doorway. She could feel her skin growing hot with absolute rage as she stalked forward over the open floor. In one hand she held up the small recording device Conn had handed to her outside the building, and on it held proof of this man's order. On the screen behind him twenty little dots burst to life.
She was too late.
The man slowly got to his feet as Kelly aimed her handgun at him, her grip steady, her aim true.
"Call off your dogs."
She snarled,
Admiral Massie slowly lifted his hands, before slowly leaning forward in his seat towards the intercom button. She stepped forward, watching him intently as he leaned over the console pressing down on the button.
"Flight one this is earth one..."
Her eyes flickered up to the screen waiting to see them pause.
But before she knew what was happening an elbow came up striking her on the hand and causing the gun to spin out of her grip. Admiral Massie turned and tackled her to the floor, his nearly 300 lb body crushing her to the floor.
The wind was knocked out of her and she gasped as he struggled to pin her to the ground.
Her hat had flown off and her bun became undone as he drew back a fist to punch her. She was able to block it with her forearms as he raged and went for her face. The blows rained down on her from above with an onslaught of power she wasn't expecting but should have.
She took another gasping breath, and then with a surge of adrenaline she bucked, throwing him forward where she grabbed one of his arms and bucked again, forcing him to his side and onto his back. Still gripping his arm, she threw herself sideways, throwing her legs over his chest and struggling with his arm to pull it flat.
He kicked and grabbed at her legs with his other hand painfully gripping her calves as his nails dug into her skin and drew blood. The pain was incredible, but she finally got his arm down tucked tight to her chest, her legs across his chest, and then she jerked her hips sharply upward.
Admiral Massie screamed as his elbow snapped backwards.
She let go of him and scrambled towards the console, but at the last moment he grabbed her by the foot and hauled her back to the ground, one arm hanging limp and useless at his side. He clawed at her with one hand, and she rolled onto her back, kicking up at his face with her boot catching him square in the chin.
He staggered back as she crawled to the console and reached to adjust the frequency, ready to call in lunar support.
There was a sharp click behind her, and she froze, turning in her seat to find Admiral Massie standing behind her gun held in his good hand.
Blood leaked from his nose and down onto the front of his uniform, staining the grey fabric red,
"Nice try, Kelly."
[…]
Donovan Red waited, spinning slowly as he watched the progress of the distant rocket. Inside his helmet his breathing was cold and calm as, ranging all around him, his other men and women waited as well. Their ships had been outfitted with proper weapons as they had ridden here in the cargo hold of the Omen. The group of them weren't soldiers or trained fighter pilots, so he didn't imagine this would be easy, but it was going to have to do.
"Red, this is Apollo 11 do you copy?”
"Yeah Cinderella, I copy."
"See anything?"
"Nope not a..."
He paused,
"Wait..."
There was something, something he thought he saw detach itself from another piece of space junk,
"Hold that thought Apollo."
He detached from his own bit of space junk and inched forward.
A thunderhawk? What would one of those be doing here?
It began to accelerate.
He accelerated after it.
Up ahead the rocket was growing larger and larger in his view.
“Thunderhawk has made lock.”
The cool female voice said from his console.
"Oh shit, Admiral r-“
He didn't have time to finish his sentence as a small ball-like-silver ship came pelting down from nowhere, blasting the Thunderhawk in the wing with a sharp burst of laser fire. It's wing exploded and it went careening in the opposite direction as the silver ball whizzed past.
"What the fuck!?"
He turned to fly after it, but was stopped.
"Red, this is Wendy, stand down that's a Rundi UAV."
"Rundi? I thought it was the Rundi we were worried about!?”
He called in confusion.
"Yeah, but that thunderhawk had locked in on Apollo 11. It looks like the Rundi are helping."
He grunted and cursed under his breath,
"Boys and girls, if you see a silver ball stand down, those are on our side."
Just then another Thunderhawk shot over his head. He cursed again and pulled himself into a sharp upward turn cutting after the Thunderhawk and locking on. His lock cut off their attempts to shoot down the rocket, and they were forced to dive under as he followed after. He followed, spinning right and left around debris as the Thunderhawk attempted to escape.
It cut upward, just in time for a bright pink jet with graffiti words on the side to shoot out of nowhere.
The Thunderhawk exploded in a cloud of debris as Wendy roared by.
"Good shot, girl!”
He said over his radio.
"Thanks boss. Now let’s give them hell!"
[…]
Admiral Vir floated before the console, knuckles white and unable to do anything. A silent explosion flashed in his vision to the right as quickly as it had begun. Richards and Chavez started with wide eyes and dropped mouths.
"Admiral what the hell is going on!?”
Adam took a deep breath,
"It seems as if we are under attack."
The two of them exchanged glances,
"From who? What the fuck!?!"
Adam turned where he stood to look at the two of them,
"I am sorry I got you two into this mess, but the isolationists have been gunning for me for a few months now, and it seems as if now things have come to a head.”
"What are we going to do!"
"Radio Houston."
Chavez hurried to do as ordered, but when she did, they heard only static,
"Shit... Something is jamming our coms."
Adam took a deep breath,
"Well I guess all we have is Donovan to protect us. Lets' hope they do it right."
[…]
Admiral Massie laughed,
"You're as dumb as you look Kelly."
She stood, slowly wiping blood from her cheek as she turned to look down the barrel of the gun. Her own gun.
She didn't generally tend to agree with Massie, but this time he did have a point. Surprisingly though she was very calm,
"You aren't going to get away with this."
She glanced over to where the little silver recording device lay in the shadows under one of the chairs.
Massie was too amped to notice.
"Doesn't matter. I will have done my duty to my planet and my people, saving them from alien lovers like you and that bastard Vir."
"Whose Idea was this, the President or yours?"
She held her hands out to the side.
"Do you think that dipshit was smart enough to come up with a plan like mine?"
Kelly raised an eyebrow,
"Is it wise to incriminate your friends along with you?"
"That bitch? Heh, I could care less. And if I am going down, she is going down with me. The president may think it was all her idea, but it was mine all along, she was following my orders, whether she believes it or not, and once Adam Vir and YOU are dead, then it doesn't matter what we did, because diplomatic relations will dissolve, and it will be all over."
He lifted the gun to her face,
"Goodbye Kelly."
She remained very still as the shadow fell over him from behind,
"May I say one last thing?”
He paused.
"Turn around."
"Very funny!”
He lifted the gun again and pulled the trigger.
There was a sharp crack and thud as metal hit metal. Kelly flinched and held up her hands, but opened her eye after a moment as no pain came.
Admiral Massie lay on the floor face down.
Kelly reached down quickly to grab her gun, looking up to where Sunny was standing in the doorway holding her pearlescent white spear. Behind her floated the starborn Conn and the hybrid.
She took a deep breath,
"Great timing you three.”
Sunny nodded,
"Anytime."
Admiral Kelly turned and lunged for the comms, switching the frequency to the lunar station only to find she couldn't get through,
"Damn it."
She cursed, turning to look at Sunny and the others,
"I was too late, the ships have already been deployed."
She paused and looked down, grabbing the recording device from off the floor tossing it to the hybrid who caught it with some difficulty,
"Run that to one of the media outlets, convince them it is important and leak it as soon as you can. We don't want her to have time to cover her own ass."
Eris nodded and shot off in the other direction.
Sunny knelt down to help her restrain Admiral Massie.
Just then the sound of feet came thundering up the hall and they looked up to see the Chairwoman of the GA and her assistants skid around a corner. Sunny's eyes narrowed as she crouched low leveling her spear.
"Did you catch him?"
The Chairwoman asked,
"No thanks to you."
Sunny snarled, but the chairwoman waved her off,
"I lost contact with my drones, but they should be out helping to protect Admiral Vir. I am sorry I couldn't do more, but it was all I could do not to show my hand too early."
Admiral Kelly stood slowly,
"You knew about this?"
The charwoman shook her head,
"Not this specifically, but I have been trying to find the source of the assassination attempts on Admiral Vir's life. I've had discreet escorts on him for the past few months while I tried getting in contact with my people in the criminal underworld and I called the hit on him with those pirates, knowing who Captain Kell was, hoping that he could get more information out of the pirates that I could."
Sunny stared at her rage flickering across her face,
"You called a hit on him!"
The charwoman did not seem perturbed,
"Those pirates couldn't have... How do the humans say... Hit their way out of a paper bag. I have been attempting to come in contact with the leader of the anti-alliance for the past few months. I have been trying to convince them I am on their side, and that was part of my ruse, as well as knowing Admiral Vir was captain Kell. During my investigation it became clear that someone within the UN was involved though I couldn't have said who."
"And why should we believe you aren't just covering your own ass?”
The chairwoman hissed,
”Do you really think I want to make an enemy out of the strongest species in the galaxy!? Not on your life! I am not stupid. Besides, I owe Admiral Vir my life. I admit I have done some irreparable things in order to keep the alliance going, but those moves were calculated, and Vir was always protected.”
[…]
One of the silver UAV's exploded and Red had to dodge to the side to avoid the flying debris. He cut right and then left keeping as fast as he could possibly go as he cut up through the chunks of metal and locked onto the back of a Thunderhawk. There was a sharp click and then a silent explosion which he rolled out of the way to avoid. He had sent one of his men off to make contact with earths forces for backup.
They were good, but these men and women were made for combat, and despite their best work only four out of twenty of them had been destroyed, and their numbers were dwindling fast. He cut right before one of the Thunderhawk’s, forcing it to turn away from the rocket and cut down in another direction. He could only imagine the fear of those inside the rocket as they watched helplessly at the fight raging on around them.
He spun down and under, cutting off another Thunderhawk coming in the opposite direction.
There was no way they were going to keep up with this for long.
Their only chance was earths forces reacting quickly.
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OC-whole collection
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Thanks for reading! As you saw in the title, this is a cross posted story written by starrfallknightrise and I'll just upload some of it here for you guys, if you are interested and want to read ahead, the original story-collection can be found on tumblr or wattpad to read for free. (link above this text under "OC:..." ) It is the Empyrean Iris story collection by starfallknightrise. Also, if you want to know more about the story collection i made an intro post about it, so feel free to check that out to see what other great characters to look forward to! (Link also above this text). I have no affiliations to the author; just thought I’d share some of the great stories you might enjoy a lot!
Obviously, I have Charlie’s permission to post this and for the people already knowing the stories, or starting to read them: If you follow the link and check out the story you will see some differences. I made some small (non-artistic) changes, mainly correcting writing mistakes, pronoun correction and some small additional info here and there of things which were not thought of/forgotten or even were added/changed in later stories (like the “USS->UNSC” prefix of Stabby, Chalar=/->Sunny etc). As well as some "biggemajor" changes in descriptions and info’s for the same stringency/continuity reason. That can be explained by the story collection being, well a story collection at the start with many standalone-stories just starring the same people, but later on it gets more to a stringent storyline with backstories and throwbacks. (For example Adam Vir has some HEAVY scars over his body, following his bones, which were not really talked about up till half the collection, where it says it covers his whole body and you find out via backflash that he had them the whole time and how he got them, they just weren't mentioned before. However, I would think a doctor would at least see these scars before that, especially since he gets analyzed, treated and goes shirtless/in T-shirts in some stories). So TLDR: Writing and some descriptions are slightly changed, with full OK from the author, since he himself did not bother to correct these things before.

I was born in 1996. to a very unstable mother who had all sorts of childhood trauma and borderline personality disorder as a result. what a ride.
I have an older sister from a different father only 2 years older than me. My mom and her father got divorced. A very messy one.
my father an Irish catholic man who doesn't think emotions exist. he left mom when I was 2. He already had 3 daughters and wife before my mom.
I went into foster care age 2. my sister went to live with her father, who is a wonderful man. my mom was sectioned and my dad disappeared. my mom says it's the worst thing to ever happen to her and she feels guilty about it everyday.
she got me back when I was 4 but my attachments are shattered. my mom met my step dad and things I thought were normal. I was diagnosed with ADHD and always knew something didn't feel quite right. my step dad would often shout at me even burned me with a cigarette on my hand while walking next to me one time, and claims it was an accident and I shouldn't of walked to close to him.
I was gaslit by my mom for years her telling me my childhood wasn't that bad and I was naughty.
My mom was so emotionally absent from me, I think she resents me for causing her so much grief. we never spent any time together, I often was caught in her cycles of abuse and then apologising and trying to over compensate. we fought almost every day. I have two younger brothers from my step dad and they can do no wrong.
I didn't know who my dad was my mom told briefly about him when I started asking questions. I had no idea who I was. Then out of blue my mom magically found my dad again when I was 12 and thought this might magically save our relationship she kept destroying. she started sleeping with him before I could get to know him properly.
I started petulant attempts a suicide.
my dad would punish me and shout at me and one time even psychically abused me. one time I was in hospital for an episode and told me I was just playing games.
I tried to go and live with my aunt once in this abuse cycle. I became off the rails and rebelled against everyone and everything I was pushed around from pillar to post. and eventually went back into foster care. This destroyed me. my worst fear happened. I became mean and angry, in all honesty. but I ave such a good heart.
I became distant from everyone I hated my parents and the whole world. I didn't want to be here. my mom would often call me drunk asking if I wanted to go home, I would baby sit for her trying to get some appreciation and validation and she would just use me and tell me she was going out to AA meetings and shed be meeting different men.
she would often have episodes of being drunk and calling everyone and when I was 23 my sister even told me my mom threatened her with a knife to her neck. which I struggle to come to terms with today.
I started drinking at a young age and partying, getting myself involved with all kids of people that took advantage of me.
after leaving foster care I lived in a half way house for homeless people after one of my friends moms sublet me a place and soon gave up on me for my behaviour and weed smoking with my flat mate in the house.
I met my first proper boyfriend at 19. he kind of clung on to me and some how I fell in love with him. he stuck by me and was my rock through navigating life after foster care. I think it was a place for him to get away from his parents and smoke weed and do graffiti. which I ask him to help me get into.
things go very abusive after we started living together. I had my own flat from the council and let him move in (stupid I know). We were verbally and psychically aggressive towards each other, I was depressed and he told me I made him feel like less of a man.
he saw me self harm. I hate myself for this.
we broke up. and I had a break down. I admitted myself to hospital multiple times. I knew I couldn't keep living like this after being on benefits and having dead end jobs. I trained as a hairdressing something I said id never do as my mom did it for a while but I was convinced id be more of a woman that she ever was.
I was a good hairdresser. I still am. I really tuned my life around. I moved out my council flat. bounced around a little bit. trying too find my feet still.
had a few rocky unstable relationships, many anti depressants and failed attempts at finding therapy.
I moved to London after covid to pursue a better hair career than in my home city. however I got bored and dated too many coworkers. ah yes the self destructive patterns persist.
I didn't speak to my mom for 7 years and even longer with my dad after I walked out of his wedding. cause I had a panic attack. my three older sisters were there that ive never met.
I did something extraordinary, I went to uni. I now study fashion. im now in my first year.and im finally financially table enough that ive now been in therapy for 6 months. I write this im now discovering who I am. and I may in fact have BPD myself now, I show many traits as you might of picked up. and struggle with relationships, substances and identity disturbance.
im on journey of self discovery and trying to shake this sense of entitlement and victimhood my childhood has given me. I speak to my mom again however she won't do therapy with me and Im now learning to set some boundaries with her. My dad could be on another planet. good news I guess.
me and my sister have always been close although at times our relationship is very strained due to my bpd traits. and her feeling like she needs to overcompensate because of my mom. I even often resented her for having her father support her unconditionally. she often resents me cause she feels like she has had to mother me :(
Im currently thinking to go to an AA meeting because the shame I feel after drinking is huge even if I didn't do anything that bad. just get blackout every time. in therapy im learning to handle my emotions better. and let go of old trauma. Im realising all my resentments and working through them! if it wasn't for therapy I don't think I could even write this.
I can see myself becoming just like my mother if things don't change. I will end the cycle. im just learning to sit with all the ugly truths about myself that are my defence mechanisms from trauma.
its okay to not be okay. people will still love me even if I have emotions. not everything will result in abandonment.
thank you for taking the time to read my story.

To be upfront, I'm not from the US, so maybe there really are people and places like in Gilmore Girls, and maybe I'm totally wrong! But at least in the UK, I can't imagine anything even close to the universe of GG. Also, I've not been on this subreddit long, so I'm sorry if this is rehashing points that other people have made already.
Ok...
I'm on my first rewatch as an adult, and I so firmly believe that the original series is how Rory wrote her book from AYITL. It's a combination of "starry eyed naïve childhood memories" and "glossing over the bad life stuff". Every character and setting is a complete caricature and fictionalised version of real people/places, and it just seems it all belongs on paper and make believe!
....
Rory - it's not enough to be a decent, hardworking kid, you have to be the town's darling and be the best and most intelligent kid EVER.
Lorelai - it's not enough to be a decent young/single parent, you have to be the coolest and most understanding and perfect parent.
Lane - you can't just like music, you have to love music and be all about music.
Paris - you can't just be ambitious, you have to be the ambitious to the point that you do nothing else and enjoy nothing else and work towards nothing else.
Sookie - you can't just be a chef, but you have to be over the top and extremely fussy about your ingredients and menus, and you make ridiculous dishes at the drop of a hat.
Every student - absolutely lives for education and is extremely intense about learning and extra curriculars.
Every Stars Hollow resident - loves the town more than anything else, is a perfect neighbour, cares extremely deeply about town matters.
Kirk - I don't even need to go into Kirk 😅 I feel like he's just an combination of every background person in town who doesn't become a main character in the book.
Chilton - no school is that intense, and children do not enjoy studying that hard or that long. (To be fair, I was not privately educated, so I'm taking a guess. But 16 year olds are probably not that enthusiastic to this extent.)
Stars Hollow - an entire town that knows eachother, has constant seasonal town events, never has any real problems (destructive graffiti, violence, teen pregnancy, abuse), and is just too quaint....?
....
In terms of "glossing over the bad stuff"... (Although, all props to a character who got pregnant as a teen and raised a daughter all by herself - I don't hate her, although writing all this out makes it sound like I do 😅)
They used to live in a potting shed. In the show, it's very cute and quaint, but in real life - they were probably right on the poverty line and suffered quite a lot.
Lorelai doesn't cook or prioritise good nutrition, and opts to order in or go out. It's not a stretch to see how a young girl would romanticise this as fun and exciting, and how great it is that they get to eat pizza every night.
Times where Rory was "so excited" to do her own laundry, or Lorelai hadn't done any of the washing/shopping - in the show, it's funny and endearing, and "isn't Rory such a good girl). In real life, it's not a positive point - Rory probably had to grow up very young and "learned" to enjoy doing chores. And also manages to never blame her mother for leaving this things to her. (Lorelai is still young in the OS, and it's not bonkers that she wants to go out and have fun and be carefree, since she couldn't do it when Rory was a baby.)
Rory cheats on pretty much every boyfriend she has, but in the OS show(/book) she never really comes across as the bad guy. Only in AYITL does she come across as kind of a dick for it, and finally meets some consequences.
Lane gets a pretty crap ending in the OS (Justice for Lane), but never seems to mind that she gave up on her long time dreams/aspirations. But it would make sense that Rory writes her as not seeming to mind, and seems happy on the outside.
....
Having the OS be a fiction and based on Rory's book would also account for inconsistencies in the timeline, and makes up for changes in people's characters. It's all about how Rory sees it, and how Rory sees people - and considering how entitled and spoiled she is in AYITL, it's not crazy to think that she never really pays attention to other people lives.
....
Ok, this was a really long post.

I was born in 1996. to a very unstable mother who had all sorts of childhood trauma and borderline personality disorder as a result. what a ride.
I have an older sister from a different father only 2 years older than me. MY mom and her father got divorced. A very messy one.
my father an Irish catholic man who doesn't think emotions exist. he left mom when I was 2. He already had 3 daughters and wife before my mom.
I went into foster care age 2. my sister went to live with her father, who is a wonderful man. my mom was sectioned and my dad disappeared. my mom says it's the worst thing to ever happen to her and she feels guilty about it everyday.
she got me back when I was 4 but my attachments are shattered. my mom met my step dad and things I thought were normal. I was diagnosed with ADHD and always knew something didn't feel quite right. my step dad would often shout at me even burned me with a cigarette on my hand while walking next to me one time, and claims it was an accident and I shouldn't of walked to close to him.
I was gaslit by my mom for years her telling me my childhood wasn't that bad and I was naughty.
My mom was so emotionally absent from me, I think she resents me for causing her so much grief. we never spent any time together, I often was caught in her cycles of abuse and then apologising and trying to over compensate. we fought almost every day. I have two younger brothers from my step dad and they can do no wrong.
I didn't know who my dad was my mom told briefly about him when I started asking questions. I had no idea who I was. Then out of blue my mom magically found my dad again when I was 12 and thought this might magically save our relationship she kept destroying. she started sleeping with him before I could get to know him properly.
I started petulant attempts a suicide.
my dad would punish me and shout at me and one time even psychically abused me. one time I was in hospital for an episode and told me I was just playing games.
I tried to go and live with my aunt once in this abuse cycle. I became off the rails and rebelled against everyone and everything I was pushed around from pillar to post. and eventually went back into foster care. This destroyed me. my worst fear happened. I became mean and angry, in all honesty. but I ave such a good heart.
I became distant from everyone I hated my parents and the whole world. I didn't want to be here. my mom would often call me drunk asking if I wanted to go home, I would baby sit for her trying to get some appreciation and validation and she would just use me and tell me she was going out to AA meetings and shed be meeting different men.
she would often have episodes of being drunk and calling everyone and when I was 23 my sister even told me my mom threatened her with a knife to her neck. which I struggle to come to terms with today.
I started drinking at a young age and partying, getting myself involved with all kids of people that took advantage of me.
after leaving foster care I lived in a half way house for homeless people after one of my friends moms sublet me a place and soon gave up on me for my behaviour and weed smoking with my flat mate in the house.
I met my first proper boyfriend at 19. he kind of clung on to me and some how I fell in love with him. he stuck by me and was my rock through navigating life after foster care. I think it was a place for him to get away from his parents and smoke weed and do graffiti. which I ask him to help me get into.
things go very abusive after we started living together. I had my own flat from the council and let him move in (stupid I know). We were verbally and psychically aggressive towards each other, I was depressed and he told me I made him feel like less of a man.
he saw me self harm. I hate myself for this.
we broke up. and I had a break down. I admitted myself to hospital multiple times. I knew I couldn't keep living like this after being on benefits and having dead end jobs. I trained as a hairdressing something I said id never do as my mom did it for a while but I was convinced id be more of a woman that she ever was.
I was a good hairdresser. I still am. I really tuned my life around. I moved out my council flat. bounced around a little bit. trying too find my feet still.
had a few rocky unstable relationships, many anti depressants and failed attempts at finding therapy.
I moved to London after covid to pursue a better hair career than in my home city. however I got bored and dated too many coworkers. ah yes the self destructive patterns persist.
I didn't speak to my mom for 7 years and even longer with my dad after I walked out of his wedding. cause I had a panic attack. my three older sisters were there that ive never met.
I did something extraordinary, I went to uni. I now study fashion. im now in my first year.and im finally financially table enough that ive now been in therapy for 6 months. I write this im now discovering who I am. and I may in fact have BPD myself now, I show many traits as you might of picked up. and struggle with relationships, substances and identity disturbance.
im on journey of self discovery and trying to shake this sense of entitlement and victimhood my childhood has given me. I speak to my mom again however she won't do therapy with me and Im now learning to set some boundaries with her. My dad could be on another planet. good news I guess.
me and my sister have always been close although at times our relationship is very strained due to my bpd traits. and her feeling like she needs to overcompensate because of my mom. I even often resented her for having her father support her unconditionally. she often resents me cause she feels like she has had to mother me :(
Im currently thinking to go to an AA meeting because the shame I feel after drinking is huge even if I didn't do anything that bad. just get blackout every time. in therapy im learning to handle my emotions better. and let go of old trauma. Im realising all my resentments and working through them! if it wasn't for therapy I don't think I could even write this.
I can see myself becoming just like my mother if things don't change. I will end the cycle. im just learning to sit with all the ugly truths about myself that are my defence mechanisms from trauma.
its okay to not be okay. people will still love me even if I have emotions. not everything will result in abandonment.
thank you for taking the time to read my story.

I was born in 1996. to a very unstable mother who had all sorts of childhood trauma and borderline personality disorder as a result. what a ride.
I have an older sister from a different father only 2 years older than me. My mom and her father got divorced. A very messy one.
my father an Irish catholic man who doesn't think emotions exist. he left mom when I was 2. He already had 3 daughters and wife before my mom.
I went into foster care age 2. my sister went to live with her father, who is a wonderful man. my mom was sectioned and my dad disappeared. my mom says it's the worst thing to ever happen to her and she feels guilty about it everyday.
she got me back when I was 4 but my attachments are shattered. my mom met my step dad and things I thought were normal. I was diagnosed with ADHD and always knew something didn't feel quite right. my step dad would often shout at me even burned me with a cigarette on my hand while walking next to me one time, and claims it was an accident and I shouldn't of walked to close to him.
I was gaslit by my mom for years her telling me my childhood wasn't that bad and I was naughty.
My mom was so emotionally absent from me, I think she resents me for causing her so much grief. we never spent any time together, I often was caught in her cycles of abuse and then apologising and trying to over compensate. we fought almost every day. I have two younger brothers from my step dad and they can do no wrong.
I didn't know who my dad was my mom told briefly about him when I started asking questions. I had no idea who I was. Then out of blue my mom magically found my dad again when I was 12 and thought this might magically save our relationship she kept destroying. she started sleeping with him before I could get to know him properly.
I started petulant attempts a suicide.
my dad would punish me and shout at me and one time even psychically abused me. one time I was in hospital for an episode and told me I was just playing games.
I tried to go and live with my aunt once in this abuse cycle. I became off the rails and rebelled against everyone and everything I was pushed around from pillar to post. and eventually went back into foster care. This destroyed me. my worst fear happened. I became mean and angry, in all honesty. but I ave such a good heart.
I became distant from everyone I hated my parents and the whole world. I didn't want to be here. my mom would often call me drunk asking if I wanted to go home, I would baby sit for her trying to get some appreciation and validation and she would just use me and tell me she was going out to AA meetings and shed be meeting different men.
she would often have episodes of being drunk and calling everyone and when I was 23 my sister even told me my mom threatened her with a knife to her neck. which I struggle to come to terms with today.
I started drinking at a young age and partying, getting myself involved with all kids of people that took advantage of me.
after leaving foster care I lived in a half way house for homeless people after one of my friends moms sublet me a place and soon gave up on me for my behaviour and weed smoking with my flat mate in the house.
I met my first proper boyfriend at 19. he kind of clung on to me and some how I fell in love with him. he stuck by me and was my rock through navigating life after foster care. I think it was a place for him to get away from his parents and smoke weed and do graffiti. which I ask him to help me get into.
things go very abusive after we started living together. I had my own flat from the council and let him move in (stupid I know). We were verbally and psychically aggressive towards each other, I was depressed and he told me I made him feel like less of a man.
he saw me self harm. I hate myself for this.
we broke up. and I had a break down. I admitted myself to hospital multiple times. I knew I couldn't keep living like this after being on benefits and having dead end jobs. I trained as a hairdressing something I said id never do as my mom did it for a while but I was convinced id be more of a woman that she ever was.
I was a good hairdresser. I still am. I really tuned my life around. I moved out my council flat. bounced around a little bit. trying too find my feet still.
had a few rocky unstable relationships, many anti depressants and failed attempts at finding therapy.
I moved to London after covid to pursue a better hair career than in my home city. however I got bored and dated too many coworkers. ah yes the self destructive patterns persist.
I didn't speak to my mom for 7 years and even longer with my dad after I walked out of his wedding. cause I had a panic attack. my three older sisters were there that ive never met.
I did something extraordinary, I went to uni. I now study fashion. im now in my first year.and im finally financially table enough that ive now been in therapy for 6 months. I write this im now discovering who I am. and I may in fact have BPD myself now, I show many traits as you might of picked up. and struggle with relationships, substances and identity disturbance.
im on journey of self discovery and trying to shake this sense of entitlement and victimhood my childhood has given me. I speak to my mom again however she won't do therapy with me and Im now learning to set some boundaries with her. My dad could be on another planet. good news I guess.
me and my sister have always been close although at times our relationship is very strained due to my bpd traits. and her feeling like she needs to overcompensate because of my mom. I even often resented her for having her father support her unconditionally. she often resents me cause she feels like she has had to mother me :(
Im currently thinking to go to an AA meeting because the shame I feel after drinking is huge even if I didn't do anything that bad. just get blackout every time. in therapy im learning to handle my emotions better. and let go of old trauma. Im realising all my resentments and working through them! if it wasn't for therapy I don't think I could even write this.
I can see myself becoming just like my mother if things don't change. I will end the cycle. im just learning to sit with all the ugly truths about myself that are my defence mechanisms from trauma.
its okay to not be okay. people will still love me even if I have emotions. not everything will result in abandonment.
thank you for taking the time to read my story.

My name is Joey. I’m 24 now and I believe it’s time I share something that's been haunting me for the last 7 years. Things have just gotten to the point I can’t handle it by myself anymore. I need closure. Obviously you read the title in my post here. That I found a journal years ago. Before I get ahead of myself I need to start from the beginning and what's been going on.
I remember when I was a dumb 17 year old kid, long hair and boisterous. I worked at an Arby’s at the time as a manager, this boosted my confidence making a sweet 8.15$ a hour back in 2017. I was also obsessed with the occult and abandoned building hunting. This fit my personality at the time as a rebellious teen making “tons of cash” and the thoughts of being oppressed fresh in my head. However, I still couldn’t afford a car even with “all the money” I had. I was adventurous with my friends nonetheless. One of my closest friends at the time, Austin, was the only one with a car between the 4 of us. Austin, Michael, Ben, and me. We had promised not to talk about it or what we found. With summer coming up and us going into senior territory next year this meant this was the last summer we would enjoy before adulthood. We had to make the most of it this year. I never realized just how memorable those moments would be.
The idea started at one of our classic boy sleepovers. Snacks, video games and the occasional chat about girls or what the Game of the Year will be this time around. Michael was the first to bring up an idea of us going up to a place abandoned he saw while his family was driving through a town up north on the I-15. It has been slightly destroyed with graffiti / outside damage and mostly left abandoned. Michael had said something about it looking like some vagrants had made it their home. Ben, his brother, had confirmed Michaels statements with nothing but a quick smirk and head nod. Vagrants weren’t something we feared as its pretty common place when exploring these places. A quick just looking around usually calmed their minds and they’d leave us alone. Austin usually had a pocket knife or butterfly blade on him, which we found cool at the time but in reality it was probably a way to make him look better for not having a complex personality. He really didn’t need the knife due to the size of him. He was nearly 6 feet tall and a larger guy around 200 something pounds.
Ben had some words while we were chatting about the location and what to do if there were vagrants around. “I mean, I really don’t know if this is something we can do in a day. Even though it was far away, I'm pretty sure it was a 2 or 3 story building.”
“Stop being a little bitch Ben” Michael said afterward.
“I’m just saying…asshole” Ben retorted.
“Dude’s stop bitching and we’ll figure it out when we get there. It’s like an hour and half away and if we leave after lunch we can have most of the day to check it out and see what we can find!” I said after all their bickering. This was the last thing said before we all solidified the plan. Austin always looked like he had something to say but he never did. Instead we assured him we’d pay for dinner and some gas. The next day was spent preparing and getting ready for August 17th, a Wednesday. We took snacks, chips ahoy and potato chips. Waters and some rope. I was the only one that was agile enough to climb and lift myself over ledges and such. This was another boost in my otherwise confident self. It always meant I was first however. This never failed to make me nervous as I had a light fear of the dark. Though the last things we packed were some sleeping bags and blankets just in case what Ben said was true and we’d have to spend the night there. The rest of that night was us talking and playing games. The next night was our adventure of course.
The morning light hit my face from the floor of Michaels room and my joy was unbreakable. I woke all the guys up like a kid excited for christmas morning. They all rolled out of bed and they all began to get ready and showered while I moved quickly to get things into Austin’s car trunk. After about an hour or two I managed to get everything into the car trunk as the guys barely started to pile in. “Dude you haven’t eaten anything yet, you sure you’re ready to go? Need a protein bar or something?” Austin asked me, giving me a look of concern. Something I knew all too well as he was the dad figure of the group. I remember only nodding as I hopped in the back with Ben. Michael always took the front seat shotgun. We never really know why he needed it so badly, he would fight us if Ben or me ever sat there first. We chalked it up to him just being an idiot. The drive was long and boredom set in quick as we started. We stopped at some random Burger King and got some mediocre nuggets and burgers before we hit our destination a half hour later. This was something even today I still miss having. The monotone lull of calm as we drove miles together as brothers more than friends. Low quality music playing in the background relaxing before a big adventure. Haven’t had another since then.
“Yo guys! We’re here.” Austin shouted from the front in a sort of slightly shaky voice.
“Finally, I’ve been so fucking bored since we left.” Michael said with some eagerness in his voice.
“What do you think is inside? Obviously besides the homeless dudes.” Ben said with a devious smirk on his face. Just poking fun at us seeing if Austin would cringe in fear. To which he winced slightly. Never being a fan of confrontation with them.
After we arrived on the highway I-15 we saw what looked like a broken 3 story home. Some notable graffiti and damage was just as Michael and Ben described. This time around the vagrants weren’t either noticeable or at the residence when we got there. It looked like a mansion in size as we approached from the locked car we left on the highway. Large flowering grasses riddled the land around the home. The Utah mountains in clear view with a small pond to the right of the mansion. The closer we got, the more grand the building was. Intricate designs engraved in the wood of the front porch were whittled away by the wind and elements. As we approached the front porch however, we saw something we never expected. It was clean compared to the rest of it. We were so used to cobwebs and satanic graffiti around the outside like what we saw before. Just some basic looking spray paints names on the outside. “Doctor is in” was one in particular we saw and joked about. Other ones we saw on the way in were “Charley X Marley”, “Cher”, “Mikey”. Again, just names lost to time with their memory forever painted on the side of a building. Of course once inside it was nothing like the outside. The outdoors being broken down and shoddy in appearance.The inside was pristine. As if someone had upkeep on the building inside. Immediately the Mormon in Austin yelled out “Guys are we in somebody's house right now? I think we should leave before someone gets home or calls the cops.”
“Dude, nobody lives here. My dad checked online with the housing association stuff. You know the thing with him selling houses and stuff. Said no one lived here and the water, gas and electric have been shut off for like 100 years or something. History wise my dad said that the last guy to live here was a high class loser. Died in 1930 something. So no, dumbass, no one lives here.” Michael said this with a mean gaze towards Austin almost condescending. “Now let's check out the back. I really wanna see that pond.” He finished telling the group.
What we saw was fairly gross. A couple dead geese in the pool that had rotted long ago. Making the water turn a disgusting brown and green mixture. The pond was covered in large vines and the stench of death. As we approached we saw nothing but groups of rat, geese and cat bones surrounding the area. Scattered around like somebody was throwing them around. Seeing what abomination could be created by doing so. We only stood there for a small while before coming back inside. Ben and Austin made audible disgust upon coming back in. As soon as our feet touched the floor we heard footsteps run up the stairs. We all jumped only to be calm within seconds. “Probably that homeless dude we saw earlier.” Ben stated as we all began to head up to approach them. We were all silent as we got up to the 2nd floor. Oddly we didn’t find one on the second floor despite the immediate climb after the footsteps were heard.
The second floor felt off. It was blacked out. We quickly flashed our phone lights and found the floor covered in the area we expected. Cans, bags, chalk drawings, trash and spray paints scattered about. The final thing we saw on the second floor I personally found. Something I'd regret in my later years. A simple locked notebook about the size of an average book with damage to its face and back. Having some chain from face to back. Most likely a lock that was lost to time. No writing was found on either side. “Nice! You think we can sell it to the museum or something?” Ben said. The moment he said this it scared me shitless as I wasn’t prepared for sounds to be made.
“Dude! Fuck you. You scared the absolute shit outta me. Austin, Michael, you wanna go see if that guy is upstairs?” I said as I stood there inspecting the book. They simply looked at me and flipped me off in tandem. I put the book away and stuck it inside my ripped jean pocket. We headed up to the 3rd floor but were met with a door. Surprisingly the door was fairly intact. So much so that even the lock worked. “Motherf-ugh. They locked themselves in.” I knocked hard. “Hey asshole, we're not here to take your house. We just wanna explore.” After about 2 minutes of no reply the door unlocked. I ended up opening the door almost immediately “Thanks dude. We don’t wanna intrude. We’re just adventurous. That was really cool of y-” Before I could finish my sentence the room was completely empty. My brothers were just as silent. The room on the 3rd floor was bright due to the hole we saw earlier in the roof portion of the house. By this time it had been somewhere around 5 PM MST. We happened to stop in the middle of the room as Austin whipped out the knife in case someone were to jump out. “Ok dude. If you happened to hide somewhere like the closet please don’t jump out, we don't wanna hurt you or something.” I was almost screaming this but tried to keep my composure with my voice. So my brothers wouldn’t feel scared. I was sure they were.
Austin crept around the closet with Ben and me as we were prepared to jump if someone attacked. He flew the doors open and as we were ready to jump and grab someone we saw a chute instead. We were more terrified of this than if we just found the person inside. Michael came over and threw a rock he took from the pond area and watched as it fell for what seemed like a few minutes. It was more than 3 floors high for sure. Ben walked off at this point and locked the door so no one could get in. Afterward we started to search the room long into the night. After this Ben was the one to find a key. It didn’t fit any locks or anything from the remaining furnishings and dressers. He kept it in his pocket until later.
Reluctantly we knew we had to get back to the car to at least get our stuff or drive off and go to sleep. All of us talked about renting a motel and coming back the next day. Michael, Austin and Ben were of similar mind so we went to a motel 8. The front desk guy couldn’t have been much older than us. He never even checked id’s or anything. That night we all looked inside the notebook. However the first thing we noticed was that it had a note card glued to the 1st page. We carefully tore it off but we did end up ripping a bit off the 1st page. Opening this was probably the first thing that sparked my unhealthy habit of wanting to search the rest of the house.
“To my love, Dr. Prestine. I can’t feel my legs anymore since the last time we met in your basement. Your love has done so much to improve my life and you send shocks through my body with the way you touch me. I can’t move forward without your love. I know you’re leaving by tomorrow. This is my last letter to you! Please take me with you! I love you and I can’t see you finally leaving this place. After taking care of me for so many years. - Love Evie”
This was something I found amazing! My brothers however, couldn’t give two shits. They fell asleep soon after the reading as we promised each other to see more in the morning. Especially this suspicious basement in the note and the chute. The homeless person we saw sure would leave after the first of daylight. I kept reading all into the night. I could tell Austin was annoyed as we shared the floor of the motel together. The next few pages of the notebook were fantastical and romantic. They ended abruptly. The 1st page we ripped a bit we pieced together early and said something odd to say the least.
“May 19th 1930. Today I purchased this lock and key book to detail my final days. Pneumonia. My father sent over a Doctor to come help me. Father said he met him around the town selling some medicinal herbs from far up north in Oregon. He should be here soon but I don’t believe he can help me. My body is too far gone and everything hurts. The coughing and the blood seem never ending.” The page had already sent me into a heart ache immediately. It could've been the fact that she signed her name and age into the inside of the face. “Evie Jonstan 15” or maybe it was the pain she wrote about. The Page after was a bit afterward but a good read.
“July 2nd 1930. The Doctor has been here for a couple months and the miracle of life has blessed me. In our basement he took me and gave me an elixir that cured me in 2 days. I felt so much better! Only thing I can’t understand is why father makes him watch me overnight. It feels unnecessary now that I'm better. The Doctor must have some love for me. His care is around the clock. The way he stares at me makes my heart skip a beat. I might enjoy the time we have together until its his time to leave.” This entry made me feel odd but understanding of the situation. There's some smaller entries within the first page detailing why she was in the home alone in the first place. “April 13th 1930. Father put me here so I couldn't infect my sister.” These simple lines are usually unnecessary but the first entry sent me. Something sad. I couldn’t imagine being the age I am now, alone. Nothing but the wind as a friend. That would haunt me at night and would be lonely beyond anything I could ever imagine. She must’ve gone through so much pain both emotionally and physically. The 3rd page only brought me in more so.
“January 1st. 1931. You’ve been with me close to 8 months. I’ve been pretending to be sick the whole time. By placing the thermometer under the lamp at night and using salt water as fake sweat. Painting on some paleness for more effects. I’m assured that father would feel so appreciative that you’ve kept me happy. The basement treatments have been more odd but he must love me. He puts me to sleep to get more and more done to fix me! Sometimes I wake up and I hurt. But I would stay doing this everyday just to keep you here to take care of me. If only I could tell you how I feel. The idea of you leaving eventually gives me anxiety and pain.” How could I read this and not feel something drop inside me. It was at this point a fear began taking over as she began to hold him hostage by omission. Staying “sick” to keep someone there, just so you’re not lonely. I still couldn’t blame them as if I were in their shoes I might do the same. This story only got stranger as I realized a few pages were torn out. It was at this point I read one more page and noticed that it was the last in the series.
“December 25th 1936. Yesterday you took me into the basement for our last time. I;ve been touched by you for the last 6 years. Love has truly touched my heart. I’ll be writing a letter to confess my love. Merry Christmas my love. The basement has been the happiest time of my life. Although the sleeping agent gets longer and longer. I know you must be giving me love so that you don’t hurt me when you leave. I see the marks you leave everytime and I think of them all the time I haven't been able to see for some time. You told me it was the medication but you leave my eyes bandaged. I can’t wait for the surprise you promised me! I can’t feel my legs so it must also be part of the effects. My face I'll bring up to you tomorrow. As it feels odd. Numb? Ever since you took my mirror I've been patiently awaiting the reveal you have ready for me. You must have something huge for our anniversary coming. Perhaps that new nose we’d talked about from before. I’m so excited. I love you so much Dr!” This final entry made me pale. What had this Doctor been doing? It was extremely late by this time. My brothers beside me are completely asleep. I stayed awake that night until they got up to go back to the house. I needed to know what happened.
The next day my eyes were sunken. I felt my head move on a swivel every everytime we stopped. But the adventurer inside of me had to know about the basement. As we made our way inside the room felt odd. We all felt the hair on our arms stick up. Austin pulled out his knife immediately. Michael, Ben and I looked around the building and after getting to the stairs. We saw a shadow run up to the second floor. We left it alone this time and heard the sliding of a person down a metal slide. It sent a shudder down our spines. Much of this time we spent inside the group had been silent. Scared to death. Not soon after we found the door to the basement. Boarded heavily. We found it and my body felt sick. We all looked at one another and wondered. How this homeless person got up and down the 90 degree slide. Even the thought of them crawling back up made us all want to run. I somehow managed to convince the group we have numbers. Compared to one of them. We started pretty easily tearing it down. The wood had been rotted for some time. I opened the door and a stench of rot flooded our nostrils.
“I’m gonna fucking puke dude. I’m pretty sure these motherfuckers have been shitting in here.” Austin blurted out unexpectedly.
“Yeah Joey this is just disgusting I think we should leave before we get too far.” Ben said and honestly I should’ve listened. Because I again convinced them to move forward so we could be done and maybe find the rest of the pages. I also assured them early on before we left if we got the rest we might make some money from the discovery.
“Look guys lets just find this guy or whatever the fuck animal this could be and just look around for the pages.” It was then something shook me to my core unfortunately. It was heard in the middle of the room underneath a surgeon's table placed crookedly.
“Give it back…” The voice of an elderly woman echoed through the foul smelling basement. Our flashlights shone through the darkness to reveal jars and vials filled with clotted blood and molds. To our surprise no fecal matter or vomit had been seen. Just clotted moldy blood vials broken and splattered throughout the room. It was then as we shot multiple beams around we saw her. An elderly woman, her face completely disfigured. Her eyes were gone alongside her nose. Her mouth is elongated by slits from each corner from ear to ear held together by loose stitching. Her legs were unsightly. Rotted away. Bones were peeking out from them like they’ve been mistreated and gone for so long. Her arms looked frail but the most disgusting was the two extra appendages attached by the elbow. Moving like they were second nature. From this split second of sight Ben and Michael vomited on the floor and ran.
Austin and I were frozen. Stuck in place and by this time she spoke again in a strange painful rasp “Give it back you fucking filth…” Her breathing became heavy and she began to bleed through the stitching on her mouth. Austin grabbed me hard, So hard I had bruises for weeks. The last thing I remember I threw the journal to her and tried saying her name
“Evie?” The elderly woman looked at me and through the crinkle of her face showed me nothing but anger. She ran towards Austin and me. He stood in front of me and jabbed at the woman. We ran and only heard screaming from within. He left the knife and never turned back. Soon the screaming stopped once we left. I am sure she had died. Me and my group left at such speeds we eventually got pulled over by an officer on I-15. Austin's first ticket. We left after but I could tell the Officer was intrigued by the ghost white teenagers he had pulled over. He asked if we were ok and was sure he followed us back to Michaels house. Our stomachs and eyes were peeled for the next week. Austin was never the same. He became more outgoing and unhinged. He seemed to leave his innocence behind. I don’t think he’ll ever get over the possibility he killed that woman. Michael and Ben weren’t around enough to know what we did. They still can’t ever look at those abandoned places without feeling violently ill. I, however, went back in 2018. I couldn’t find the body or the blood. She wasn’t inside although I looked and poked around. Ben gave me the key the year prior and I kept it. I checked the basement after I began my extensive search and found not only the now bloodied notebook but a drawer that the key fit.The only page that was found inside was horrific. A lost ending page that I have to share with all of you.
“February 15th 1937. Dr.Prestine you brought me flowers. You told me how much you cared about me. I never got to give you my final note. The smell made me feel free. You’ll never leave me again. Our love was forged by God himself. You still insisted that you would leave. I had kept convincing you to stay since Christmas. You told me you’d be back. I found something in our basement that made me upset. A set of underwear. It wasn’t mine. It hurt me a lot Charles. But you won’t leave me. I felt sad to use the basement on you. I turned the valve off when you were going to put me to sleep again. I think I did well. Without my eyes or legs it made it difficult. I know you were upset with me after you woke up. Soon you calmed down and didn’t say much after. It made me sad to know you sleep so much after my surgery with you.
March 22nd 1937. I can’t find the town on my own even though I’m off the medication you had for me. I’ve been cleaning while you sleep. I’ve gotten good at hunting. I hear the animals really well. Some are easier than others. The geese that sleep on the pond have been absolutely delicious! Of course for another night you refused to eat! You’re so silly dear. I love you though. You needed a shower for a while. So I gave you one and you were so hard to move. I washed you but you were running through the mud. So much gunk fell off from you. I put you back in the room and we slept together again. You were so much colder than I was. So I knew you needed my warmth. I love you. I’ve been doing so well. I love you so much my husband. Charles you’ve become my whole world. I wish you were more talkative like before when you’d stand at the foot of my bed and tell me how good I made you feel. I love you Charles.
August 17th 2000. Some robbers came into our dream home. I tried to scare them into leaving but they said they only wanted to explore. I don’t believe them. I kept them running around. They left after searching and tearing our room apart. I was so scared. Charles I knew I had to take care of you. Nothing can separate us. They never checked the bathroom on the second floor where I hid you. The hunting grounds had been disturbed and all of our stuff has been scattered around. I kept this paper and pen in the drawer to write the final days. My heart is becoming tired. Charles It's been so long since you touched me. I’m terrified. The day was spent getting the basement ready for them to come back. Everything was so scrambled and I was so scared. My heart almost couldn’t take it. I will always protect you Charles.
August 18th 2000. The burglars came back. I think they’re here to steal our valuables. They already took my notebook! Charles I can’t believe it. Those hooligans! They’ve taken so much already without ever giving us a break. Let us go back to our quiet life. Charles I love you and I’ll make sure we're safe. They’ll be sorry if they enter our sanctuary in the basement. I’ll make sure they leave.If I have to kill them to save our livelihood I will.
This is it. I really hurt charles. They got me. I love yo charles. I lov you charles. I will cleen and get things redy chelys. Cold. I’m coming to bed charles.”
The last segment bothered me the most. After reading it I left immediately and never came back.It ran my blood cold for years.
“I love you sweetheart. Don’t worry about cleaning up Evie. I left this note for the burglars when they made it back. You should’ve seen Evie before my treatments. She was gorgeous. You could never understand our love. If you need to know where the last pages are. Check the restroom on the second floor. Come find us. I know you’ve been curious. I love you too, stranger. Come see us in the second floor bathroom.”
My curiosity was no longer there. I left and no longer went back. The house was clean. The smell of rot reeked heavily from upstairs. A small puddle started to bubble from the ceiling in the kitchen which I passed to get to the basement. I had no questions about what it could be. I had to tell this story. My brothers Michael, Ben and Austin never speak about what happened that day. Nor do I blame them. Ever since I went back I felt something more sad and horrific. These people were delusional. The Dr. and Evie were forever locked in this house. Did their love come from the Doctor's horrible experiments over countless years or Evies tragic ending where she herself took Charles' ability to leave. This was truly a painful thing to see. Yet somehow beautiful. My mind needs to post this for closure reasons. It’s been 6 years. I’m married. Have 2 cats and have a thriving business! Yet this experience took my sleep away for years. The haunting image of this old woman Evie’s body has forever burned into me. I stay awake at night and tell my wife random bullshit excuses. She has no idea that this happened. If she happens to find it she can read it. Before questions I have to apologize. The Notebook was given to the local Lehi museum and after giving it they never gave us money. They probably threw it out by now. The pictures I had on my Iphone have been lost for a long time. I transferred phones years ago and unfortunately never kept the sim card. I had this written out for years just as a draft. I hope you can forgive me. I can only hope you believe me as well.

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.

I had originally designed these units as part of next year's subreddit April Fool's, but then I decided to go with a slightly more ambitious idea instead. I didn't want to let these go to waste though, so I figured I might as well post them anyway. Please enjoy, and don't take anything too seriously!

Starstruck - four fans aiming to learn why their beloved band faded into obscurity.

Leo/need, an up-and-coming band that suddenly disappeared from the spotlight. Every fan has their own theories as to why, yet it's only when Kaname's phone receives a mysterious song that answers begin to appear...
"I can't afford to back down here. If anyone deserves to live on, it's them!"
Fan Name: Starstruck Observer
Main Cast:

Kaname Otori

"I won't ever forget that melody..."
The daughter of Phoenix Wonderland's owner, whose bright and cheerful personality is reminiscent of her mother. One day, having heard Leo/need's vocalist Ichika Hoshino performing in the park and learning of her past, Kaname was left confused as to why she would settle for such a small stage.

Haruki Yuuma

"With a body like this... who said they had a choice?"
The son of Leo/need's keyboardist Saki, who married a boy she met during her time at the hospital. Suffering from the same health issues that plagued his parents, he believes that Leo/need disbanded for the sake of Saki's health.

Mizuru Tanaka

"Without restraint, without regret - that's the only way to live."
The daughter of Leo/need's drummer, Honami. Impulsive and always willing to take a risk, she believes that her mother's indecisiveness led to her choosing to open a restaurant instead of carrying on with Leo/need.

Sayaka Kishine

"Do you truly call this passion? What a laughable joke."
Miyamasuzaka's Class 1-A Representative and a passionate fan of Leo/need's bassist, Shiho. Demanding consistent effort from those working with her, she believes Leo/need didn't survive because they couldn't keep up with Shiho's dedication and skills.

The Library SEKAI

A traditional library filled to the brim with books on music. It seems to be built from feelings of nostalgia and longing.
​

BREAK OUT! - an eclectic group stuck in their parents' shadows searching for their own kind of music.

Four teens, for all their lives, have been burdened by the fame of their parents. Can they create an identity beyond their legacy? Can they carve a whole new path for themselves?
"I want to feel it... A thrill like nothing else!"
Fan Name: BREAK OUT! Rebel
Main Cast:

Rina Kiritani

"I'm not sure what I'm looking for... but it's out there, I know it!"
One of a pair of twins adopted by legendary idols Minori and Haruka Kiritani. Without any sense of direction in life, she eagerly searches for something that can make her heart pound the same way her mother Minori claimed Haruka made hers.

Tsubomi Kiritani

"Right here, right now - I'll burn these words into your memory!"
The second of a pair of twins adopted by legendary idols Minori and Haruka Kiritani. left unamused by the constant comparisons to her mothers, tales of Vivid BAD SQUAD's legendary performances lured her into the world of rap.

Izumi Kubo

"Is it so wrong, to find beauty in the past?"
The daughter of Leo/need's Shiho, a bassist who gained renown after touring the world as a guest at STANDOUT's concerts. A fan of traditional Japanese music, she feels embarrassed and old-fashioned because of her lack of interest in rock music.

Koutarou Kamishiro

"I might not be able to help you directly but... I'll support you all the way."
A silent and solemn boy who mainly speaks through a voice synthesizer. Born to Rui and Nene Kamishiro, who became icons in their field of directing and singing respectively, he fears being judged for his voice and instead devotes himself to learning various instruments.

The Museum SEKAI

A run-down museum dedicated to legendary musicians. it seems to be built from feelings of awe and admiration.
​

Ashita no Kaze - A talented street unit built from three strangers, brought together by a girl looking for her destined partner.

In front of Better Together's baristas, Mirei makes a promise: She'll find her other half and shake the streets like they once did. Who will accompany her on her rise to the top of the concrete jungle?
"My destined partner... Yeah, I like the sound of that!"
Fan Name: Ashita no Kaze Partner
Main Cast:

Mirei Kuwahara

"Sometimes, you've just got to follow your heart."
An innocent singer who hides behind a streetwise persona, she became a regular at Better Together, a cafe and music venue run by Kohane and An Azusawa. Inspired by the duo and the incredible feats they achieved, she sets out on a mission to find someone who might work just as well with her.

Yuuki Tomari

"We all have our own unique styles. Life would be too bland otherwise."
A cosplayer who looks up to the designs of Yoake no Kyoyu, a prestigious clothing brand run by Ena Shinonome and Mizuki Akiyama. Worldly and wise, they can often be found at various performances offering to design costumes for people (Whether they want them or not).

Riku Higurashi

"Come now, what's a little light teasing between friends?"
A sly fellow who charms anyone he comes across without ever making an actual friend, he can be commonly be found bearing some sort of gift or freebie to placate people. Always ready to de-escalate a conflict, many come to him so he can mediate their arguments.

Sei Katsuragi

"It's just like something out of a fairy tale."
A bookworm obsessed with romance who can often be found at Better Together, constantly scribbling in her notebook. A fan of writing poetry, she'll often take inspiration from the lyrics sung around her and combine them into new and unique verses.

The Lighthouse SEKAI

An isolated lighthouse looking out into a foggy distance. It seems to be built from feelings of desire and anxiety.
​

Shingeki Stage - A theatrical music troupe that was born from an empty drama club and the ones attracted to it.

In a quiet corner of Kamiyama lies the last member of the drama club... until three eccentric hopefuls barge in to see it revived. Could this be some sort of nightmare? or the beginning of a beautiful dreamlike youth?
Fan Name: Shingeki Stage Extra
Main Cast:

Shiki Tenma

"Even a single smile would be enough for me."
The daughter of beloved actor Tsukasa and nationally adored idol Shizuku who came across a near-empty drama club. Excited at the opportunity to show off what she learned from her parents, she sets out to try and revitalise the club and put on an unforgettable show.

Botan Toubaru

"Want a good reaction? Then just press that Botan!"
A rambunctious tomboy aiming to rule the variety show world just like her idol Airi once did. She joins the drama club and Shiki's efforts in hopes of getting scouted, even if her reactions can come off as a little bit forced at times.

Suiren Sonozaki

"Oh my, how interesting. Let's see how this will turn out..."
A lackadaisical and lazy girl, she remains as the last member of the drama club so she can use its clubroom as a napping area. Startlingly good at remembering the crazy dreams she has, she'll often write them down for use as potential script material to keep the teachers off her back.

Karin Endou

"One day, somebody will want to remember me as much as them. I swear it."
A class clown who moonlights as ENDROLL, a graffiti artist whispered about in Vivid Street who dedicates art to recently retired musicians. However, wanting to be remembered for her work instead of her subjects, she's drawn to the drama club when Shiki requires a prop designer.

The Garden SEKAI

An endless expanse of greenery surrounding a beautifully maintained Garden. It seems to be built from feelings of hope and pride.
​

Nightcord NEXT - a mysterious music circle formed by ghosts of the past, brought to life by those who chanced upon an abandoned account.

"The only one who can decide your future is you." With that declaration in mind, Akiko finds herself lost, pondering how to become an independent and capable lady like her parents. It isn't until an unknown hacker takes over their group's Nightcord accounts and a mysterious song appears on her phone that Akiko gets an idea...
"If I could walk a mile in your shoes, could I finally stand at your side with pride?"
Fan Name: Nightcord NEXT Listener
Main Cast:

Akiko Yoisaki

"I'll do my best to live up to your expectations."
The adopted daughter of Kanade and Mafuyu Yoisaki whose alter egos K and Yui are spoken about with reverence in the underground music scene. Desperate not to make the mistakes of Mafuyu's mother, they encourage her to carve her own path, leaving her unsure on how to proceed without their guidance. Hoping that emulating her parents might provide a hint and learning of Yuzue's act, she takes on the title of lyricist Yuki.

Mio Chiba

"Everything I am - everything I want to be - resides within this song."
An amateur musician who was inspired after seeing a show performed by the BAD DOGS. However, an intense level of stage fright prevents her from even considering performing in person. Eager to compose a song that even the BAD DOGS would be proud of, she takes on the title of composer K.

Yuzue Yamamoto

"This'll be a cinch! Just have faith, okay?"
Cocky and carefree, her desire for rapid and easy fame leads her to hack into Nightcord's old accounts so she can spread her work under their name. Once she learns of Akiko's plight, she takes on the title of MV artist Amia.

Rioko Tachibana

"Let's be clear - I can't promise you anything."
One of the top students in her art classes, she can near-instantly utilise any technique presented to her. However, an unspoken event convinced her that she is only capable of plagiarism and she longs to create something she can finally call original. At Yuzue's request, she takes on the title of artist Enanan.

The Haunted SEKAI

A mysterious manor containing all sorts of secrets. It seems to be built upon feelings of uncertainty and fear.
​
Those who seek answers, those who seek purpose, and those who seek companionship. Please look forward to how their stories unfold.

[First] [Previous] [Next]
Winters are cold in Saüle. Cold and rainy, really, but today I had the good luck of going out on a not so terrible day. Clouds covered the entirety of the sky, giving the whole place this gray and depressive tone, one I am probably never growing to appreciate. I always thought that people with depression liked these sorts of times… then again, my knowledge of depression before actually being diagnosed with it was inaccurate and biased.
The city’s residential district was soon far away, as the taxi I called took me straight into the Independence Plaza. Or, as many of us call it, The Pit. The place is a beautiful, open space divided into four quadrants, each with a water fountain, surrounding a big, barricaded patch of concrete that has been graffitied over and over again.
That’s where they covered the hole.
I slowly leave the taxi, being very careful not to slam the door behind me, and then turn to see the Plaza and the many stores surrounding it. To think there was once a gigantic tower in the center of it all… it’s kind of strange, really. I’ve always thought that the so called ‘Pillar of the Heavens’ was just another building back in the day, and the old people just like to mythify it.
Whatever the case, it fell into the depths of the planet over a hundred years ago, so it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?
It’s already four in the afternoon and I once again get that strange feeling of eyes locking on me, chasing me no matter how fast I walk. The loud trumpets of some random ska song keep me relatively animated and, what’s better, they keep the thoughts low. All I could think about as I walked were the vague situations I could put my characters through, mostly following the rhythm of the music.
It’s easy to get lost in such things, daydreaming about what makes life a bit easier to live through, but I feel like I’ve developed a bit of a ‘autopilot’ for these situations. My body moves slowly, trying not to become a nuisance for someone else in the way, while my brain flies up, trying to collect ideas for a book I’ll never write.
It’s been a while since I've actually created something… the prospect of trying again, this time with renewed motivation and purpose, pushes me to walk a little faster, maybe even skip a few steps as I move in front of the many stores around the plaza. I don’t have infinite money to just buy everything I want, so I’ve decided I’ll bite the bullet and go for a single book today.
“Ahhh, remember the last time we went book hunting? It’s such a fun feeling, moving silently through the bookshelves, stalking the titles, sneaking glances at the fronts…”
I do remember, but I also do remember the tendency of the biggest bookstore in town to put new releases first and foremost, often leaving treasures hidden in their obnoxiously bad registration system. I doubt they have fixed that…so, to not waste time digging over the many, many new books I wont read, maybe I should set my focus elsewhere.
“Don’t be so dismissive of new things. Some of them are authors just like you, trying to get by.”
…I guess I’ve grown a little cynical. Not everything is a cash grab these days, no. I need to be solidary with my fellow writers!
Or… future fellows? Considering I haven’t written anything to completion yet.
“None of that. Focus. We’re getting a new book today! Where are we getting it?”
Well, solidarity or not, I am not feeling like going to the big bookstore today… my feet take a turn, going through one of the many secondary streets that are born from this plaza. Not too far from there, in a darker corner of the city… there’s an old concrete house, completely painted yellow. The sign above its front door reads “Ricardo’s Stash: Antiques”, and oh how I missed it. I even turn off my cellphone’s music out of respect.
Looking through the shop window, my lips curl into a smile as most of the items I remembered being there are gone. Probably sold, good for old Ricardo really! Although the bronze typewriter is still there, taunting me with its excessive price… Good Saints above, give me strength to not succumb to my earthly desires!
“You already have a pretty good computer, you don’t need a typewriter. Be strong.”
The door has one of those bells that ring when it is opened, so there’s no way I can avoid miss Pelafina’s watchful demeanor as I enter. The old lady was sitting right behind the register, small but regal, dignified, with her black dyed hairs tied back in a single ponytail. Looking at her, seeing how well time has really treated her, it is easy to believe the rumors that say she used to be an olympic athlete for a country in the West before settling down with mister Ricardo.
The woman looked at me, before fixing her glasses in place and smirking with complicity.
“Well well well, if it isn’t our favorite customer.” I am convinced she says this to every youngun who wanders in, but I don’t have the guts to challenge the lady. “Long time no see! Had a hard time with your studies?”
“A little bit…” I smile slightly, trying not to be too awkward. “Any new books in your storage?”
“Plenty! You’ve been gone so long, we’ve stocked on some very interesting ones! But you give it a look! You’ve always been good at finding the good stuff among the rubble.”
All this praise is really bad for my health. I smile like an idiot, rubbing the back of my neck for a moment before walking deeper into the store, muttering a soft ‘Hi, Mister Ricardo’ to the old man sleeping on a wheelchair by the register. Ricardo’s is a huge, squared room turned into a labyrinth of shelves and showcases, piles upon piles of old toys, furniture, mementos and, of course, books! All at honestly pretty reasonable prices, considering the age of some of these items.
Last time I was here, Ricardo even swore that some of these items come from the fabled Pillar! But I feel that was just him trying to secure a sale.
I see old tomes of detective work, some poetry compilations, old classroom books and other curiosities, but nothing really catches my eye. I’ve seen these before, I want something new to read! Well, not ‘new’, I am in an antique shop, but uh, something unexpected. Uncommon. Rare, even! It’s not like I am a connoisseur of book rarity or anything but, when you are holding something special, you just know it in your bones! You can feel it, the excitement of having something very few others have had.
Maybe I am being a little too demanding though, because no matter how many books I keep checking, pulling and dusting in this store, the feeling never comes to me. What if the books are not the problem, but myself…?
“The light in you hasn’t died yet.”
I try to tell myself that very often. That there’s still hope and creativity in my heart, despite it all. That I can still see the beauty of the world despite this depression… and I honestly, desperately try to believe it. I cling to this feeling. Mostly because I know that the moment I truly give up, the instant that light in me really fizzles out…
… I don’t want to think about that.
“Having trouble there, boy?”
The whiplash of hearing a new voice forces me back to reality. I am holding an old math book in front of me, and probably I’ve been in this position for long enough to attract old Ricardo’s attention. The man even wheeled all the way over here to check on me. I immediately feel the guilt stab my back.
“A-Ah, no no. I am just… looking.” I offer my typical service smile, but Ricardo isn’t buying it. I can see it in those opaque eyes of his. Despite the huge glasses and the cataracts, I can feel a bright light in that look of his, rationality and youth that refuse to die out.
“Can’t quite find something you’d like to read?” The old man smiled, knowingly. He thought he understood… and I couldn’t help but think the same. There’s something about Ricardo, a weird air of experience, that convinces you that he really does know what he’s talking about. I gently nod. “Uh huh. Have you thought of what sort of things you’d like reading this time, youngun?”
“I… admit I have not. I am mostly guiding myself by feeling here. Seeing if something sparks my curiosity…”
There’s a bright glimmer in the man’s eye as he signals for me to follow him. He seems to have precisely what I am looking for; either that or he has something curious he simply hasn’t been able to sell yet.
We pass by shelves full of little figurines and old collector items, careful not to push the boxes full of ancient magazines and comic books, until we reach the front of the store. Right beside the desk, there stands a full set of ancient Cipangian armor, restored and shiny, complete with a kabuto and a red oni mask. Ricardo and Pelafina love that thing, it’s pretty much the main symbol of the store. They call it ‘Akai-san’.
“I got something special right here.” Said Ricardo, keeping his voice low as if he was sharing a secret with me. He smiled, carefully sliding a hand under the kabuto and pulling a small, yet thick leather bound book. The thickness of the bind and the yellow of the pages made it clear that one was older than what you usually see in the store. “Take a look at this…!”
It was a matter of holding the book to just feel electricity jolt through my back. Excitement? Curiosity? The cover was rough, a bad work of tanning clearly meant for a notebook more than a commercial product. My finger gently caressed the uneven black surface before I opened the book right in the middle.
The yellow pages were completely covered by black, thin scribbles, made in a language I have never seen before. Each character in the pages looked like some sort of runes, symbols without meaning to me, ordered in long vertical rows… I honestly have no idea how to even start this! In which direction should I read this? Is it even readable at all? I go back in the pages, discovering not only more of those runes but also some illustrations, rough drawings made with a coal piece… each with a little letter underneath it. What? This book has *annotations* on it?
My eyes focus. The pages, they are numbered! In Eastern numbers, to be precise, written with a blue pen. Clearly these notations were made recently, or at least more recently than the book itself was written.
“Check the later pages.” Ricardo said with a smirk, probably catching my bewilderment and interest.
I do as the man says and quickly pass the pages. There comes a point where the runes end, immediately replaced by latin alphabet written with the same old blue pen. A little arrow tells me to read columns of letters from top to bottom, from left to right, in columns. Once I reached the end of a column, the arrows then pointed me to start reading from bottom to top, alternating from each column I passed… it’s a bit unintuitive but, I manage to make sense of it, words start to appear from the jumble. It’s not gibberish, there’s something here, meaning to be discovered…
Most curious of all though, was the fact that the very last page of it all had a little text in some language that I was able to recognize. Maybe roman? Or portuguese? I couldn’t read it, but I could certainly know this one was translatable for sure.
“Maybe what you need is not reading material, but a challenge.” Ricardo said with a big smile. “I got that book a long time ago, some old lady came and sold it to us for a pittance.”
“You say that as if you weren’t an old man, dear.” Pelafina chuckled, covering her mouth.
“Oh shut up!” The man coughed a little bit. “But yeah. I tried to read it but couldn’t get too far… maybe you can properly translate it?”
“I am not a translator…” I quickly admitted, but I was not letting go of that book. Not anytime soon. “... But I will do what I can. How much for it?”
“Twenty thousand Empires.” Ricardo said with the brightest of smiles.
For reference, that’s not that expensive when it comes to books. You could find a regular book (you know, no hardcover) for around E$15.000. It is a little more than I would normally pay for a used book though, but urgh. Look at that man! Look at that smug look in his eyes. Even Pelafina is smirking.
They know. They know this is a sale for certain.
After struggling a little bit I just sigh, shaking my head and putting the two bills of 10 thousand on the desk.
“Fine.”
“Atta boy! I’m sure you can handle this. But keep us informed on what you find!” Ricardo chuckled.
“Please do. Ricky here has been pacing for days over it.” Pelafina added with a wink. “But take it at your own pace, okay? You’re not a translator, after all.”
“I will do my best.”
With a little bow, I walk out of the store with the book between my arms. The giddiness on my step hasn’t faded yet, I actually think it’s a bit worse now. I need to control myself, try not to make a scene right here and now… but it’s been so long since I’ve felt this motivated! This intrigued! This stimulated!
“Never forget this feeling. Strive to always feel this way.”
Now that’s unrealistic, but wouldn’t that be wonderful? Just… feeling the fire inside of me burning this brightly every day? I would die for something like that. I even smile thinking about it for a moment, as I raise my hand and try to call a taxi. Hells, I won’t even care if there are people sitting beside me today. I am excited!
“Maybe we can even take public transportation then!”
Let’s not get crazy.
Baby steps, alright?
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the time I arrive home it’s already six. The sun is starting to set, and students everywhere peek out of their hiding spots with excited, yet tired smiles on their faces. Vacation time, huh? That meant people would start celebrating soon enough… good thing I don’t live close to the city’s party side, or else I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all tonight. Not with all the music and the people just drunkenly singing in the streets.
I wave at the guard when passing him by, going straight for the elevators while the old man barely acknowledges me. I sometimes wonder if he remembers me at all… I can’t just assume he doesn’t, all things considered, so I can’t really do anything strange without him (and by consequence, my dad) knowing about it. Not that I’d ever invite anyone to the disaster that is my apartment.
Normally this is the part where I’d start torturing myself with those thoughts… but today I feel excited. The book between my hands has captured my whole interest, to the point where I even started trying to decipher it while sitting in the taxi. The symbols could have some alchemical significance? Some of them did look similar to arrows and such, so maybe this was supposed to be read like that!
The words on the latter pages were, as far as I knew, a romanization of the symbols. Was it accurate? Or just a wild guess? For all I know, the former translator of this work could have been making everything up.
Last chapter is in roman! Or, maybe some other romantic language!?
What if I am being racist and this is not roman at all!? Saints damn it!
The elevator can’t go fast enough. I don’t even care about the shaking of the metal box or even the unnerving sounds of old gears doing an effort to lift me. My eyes are glued to the book.
All until I arrive at Floor 8 and rush to the second door, closing behind me and sitting at the table.
For a moment I consider taking all the job over to my comfortable not-reclinable couch, but no. This is supposed to feel like work, so I can’t just do it in the messy comfort of my bedroom.
“Alright, how should we start…”
“Get a notebook, first of all!”
Right. I need somewhere to work on! But, wait, can’t I just do it all on my computer?
“You can’t take your computer everywhere. And besides, doesn’t it feel kind of romantic? To have a journal to keep up with your progress…?”
All my attempts to keep up a journal up to this point in my life have failed, I simply don’t have the discipline or focus for that sort of work.
“What if this time is different?”
I can’t help but smile a little bit. I get it, you really want to try and do a journal for this one, huh? I can feel Her stirring and shifting behind me, embarrassed to be called out like that but not really denying it. With a sigh, I get up and walk over to the old bookshelf to check, pulling out an old and badly bound notebook. The covers were made with bright green cardboard and messily cut, to the point where you could see the paper peek from behind it in some parts.
“Oh my Saints.”
This will do.
“Oh. My Saints. Why do you still have that?”
What? You don’t like the fruit of your own effort?
“Please, put that away. I beg you, the embarrassment is too much!!”
I had made this notebook myself during the “Bookbinding” class I went to for a while when I just started college. I still remember the looks the other girls gave me when I first arrived, none of them expected a law student or a man to join the class, not one.
“This is torture, do we really not have any other notebooks to work with? None at all??”
Is this or nothing, homegirl.
“Sigh.”
I pull one of my many pens from my backpack, sitting back by the computer and then, with a crack of my knuckles, I start writing.
I do not know who may read this. Honestly, I am not even sure if I will read it myself after I finish writing it, but whomever is picking up this torn and ugly book? This is dedicated to you.
“Pretentious and needlessly emotional.”
Ah, there you are. I was starting to miss you. With a sigh, I shake the thoughts off and keep writing.
I found the original version of the text I’m working through in the old antique shop “Ricardo’s”, where the titular man himself had been keeping this book for…
I honestly have no idea how long Ricardo had been clinging to this one. It couldn’t be that long, right? Ricardo said ‘a long time ago’, but that’s all the reference I have. Urgh.
…for a while. The book was originally written in a set of symbols similar in function to hieroglyphs, with each symbol representing a different word. Luckily for me, my predecessor left me with transcriptions to the latin alphabet, and a final chapter written in a language I am yet to identify and translate.
I am still placing my bets on roman, but honestly, I feel less and less confident about that with every second that passes.
I will record my findings in this book and then share them to all who may be interested.
Please bear with me.
After writing that messy introduction, I focus back on my computer and start my investigation by opening Gaggle Translations. I input the first words I find in the book… and beg.
Asu tlo’ikovithiio
The translator suggested Kauaian, but changing it to that language showed no results whatsoever. It’s not Kauaian..
I then tried all the permutations I could come up with in the search. I tried “Asu”, “Tlo” “Ikovithiio”, “kovithiio”, and beyond the Arizona State University and some western guy called Vito Iio, I had no better luck. That pretty much confirms my suspicions of this being a code, a sort of new language, or just plain nonsense.
What differentiates a language from a code anyways? Intentionality?
I smack my head for a moment there, trying to keep myself focused. Now that the easy solution was not available, I had to get resourceful, and before I started working with the final chapter, Gaggle still had one tool on its sleeve. It’s still a bit of an experimental feature, but by taking a picture of these runes I can actually search the internet for similar things…!
Rune 1
So I quickly copy one of the symbols on the page, the one I see repeating itself the most, take a picture of it with my phone and just wait for the best.
The result? A bunch of unfiltered stickmen, some of them with dicks. Because of course, Gaggle’s image searching is still a new tool and it needs plenty of work to properly function. With a sigh, I debate for a moment if I really should bother to check image per image… until I decide to just check the first two pages before abandoning all hope.
“Stickman, stickman, stickman with a dick, another stickman…”
“Stickmen animations and games really have boomed these years huh?”
“I guess so… another stickman…”
I promised to myself I wouldn’t go beyond the second page of results… and yet here I am, going deeper and deeper, trying to find anything at all.
It’s dark outside already… and that only means that the pills will stop working soon.
“Not that they ever really worked to begin with. Have you stopped feeling sad since you started taking them?”
There it is.
With a loud sigh, I set my computer down and stop messing with the search.
Maybe I just picked a bad symbol. Maybe if I pick another, I will get actual results.
“Or maybe you won’t get anything at all. You’re no translator, and you can’t start pretending to be one now, you know?”
I breathe in deeply, holding it inside for a good few seconds before letting it out. With that, I stand from my chair and pick up my computer. I’ll leave it for tonight…
“Yeah. Just leave it like you leave anything: incomplete. It’s not like you ever finish anything anyways. You may as well toss it to the side and ignore it until you forget about it.”
“But we were so excited about it… Come on, don’t give up now…”
“Let’s just leave it. It’s vacation time anyways, right? Let’s just play some videogames until your body can’t take any more. I promise I’ll be quiet while you do so! Let’s play some King of Legends”
I don’t even like that game…
“But it passes the time, doesn’t it? Precious time, so full of suffering too. You don’t even notice death encroaching ever closer while you have something to do.”
“You only rage in that game, it’s not good for you. Come on, please?”
“Just lay down and sleep then…”
… No.
“Hmmm?”
You know what? No. I am not sleeping tonight.
“Let’s not go to the extremes!”
Alright then, I am sleeping, but not now. Not until I get through some of this book!
I set the computer back down on the table and get myself a glass of soda, sitting down and cracking my knuckles with renewed determination. Spite can be quite the fuel, even if it’s spite for your own inner voices.
“I am not letting a stupid book defeat me.” With a grin, I open my notebook to start transcribing. “Let’s do this!!”

When someone is near-sighted, we give them glasses. When someone can’t walk, we give them a wheelchair. But when someone has trouble planning, we make ‘em try harder. At least, that’s what it felt like when I got diagnosed and started at the ADHD Treatment Center. After weeks of no progress with planning and organising tasks, my kind therapist kept encouraging me to try again, but I just kept walking into a wall. I couldn’t do it. At first I cried a lot, because after a lifetime of failing at things that seem simple for everyone else, it stung that I couldn’t even follow the therapy program specifically made for people with ADHD. But then it occurred to me: what if tech could replace some of the executive processes I struggle with, essentially outsourcing the task, giving me a piece of the brain ‘normal’ people have?
The relief when I got an auto-scheduling tool working for me… I can’t even describe it. I use a calendar now. Me! With an actual planning that’s automatically up-to-date the whole time. I know this wouldn’t be a big deal for anyone with normal executive functions, but I’ve never had this. I still felt like the stupidest kid in ADHD-class that I couldn’t do it the ‘normal’ way though, so I just said something offhand to my treatment coordinator at the Center, like: “Oh, by the way, the executive functioning coaching, I just couldn't do it, so I’m having AI do it for me now.” Waving a hand in the air, rolling my eyes at my own silly shortcomings, adopting this apologetic tone I often find myself using, basically saying; I’m sorry that I’m such an idiot I couldn’t even do X, Y or Z, and sorry to be cheating on your program, it’s me, not you, I’m just incapable of doing anything correctly. (Yeah, ADHD did a number on my self-esteem, which was one of my main reasons for seeking help.) To my horror, she told me she had a crying girl in her office recently who quit therapy because she, like me, ‘just couldn’t do it’. In fact, patients with ADHD regularly get so desperate that they give up.
Then I spoke to the psychologist giving the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to ADHD-patients and she estimated roughly half of her patients genuinely can’t learn to plan by themselves. HALF! So I’m not some strange outlier at all. When I told her about auto-scheduling, her eyebrows shot up. “We’ve been teaching people to plan manually, but if what you’re saying exists… maybe we shouldn’t anymore.”
So here’s the thing. I want this information to be out there on the internet for people like me, because we need it the most. And because most of the information on relevant planning tools that I found was written by and for neurotypicals. Neurotypicals seemingly like holistic approaches and pretty apps, sitting down with matcha tea or coffee in the morning for 15 minutes to plan their day. Good for them, but that option is a non-starter for my ADHD-brain. After 4 months with dexamphetamine, I’ve also become a prescriber to the thought that ‘pills don't build skills’. I love my meds, they help so much with focus and they calm down my overactive chipmunk-like brain, but they’re not made of actual magic. Pills can’t give you an extra frontal lobe or a personality transplant. My executive skills are still weak or non-existent. Some of my issues are remarkably similar to people who experience brain damage after an accident, and when you think about it like a disability (like needing glasses, crutches or a hearing-aid) there’s only so much that ‘trying harder’ or ‘talking about how that makes you feel’ can realistically accomplish.
IN SHORT (TL;DR) Yes, auto-scheduling tools can take over the brain-process of planning and I believe this can be helpful for the ADHD-brains struggling with planning, task management and knowing where to start. Of all the tools out there for tasks and planning, I found only 5 that promised to take over for my brain and think for me, namely: Motion, Trevor, Atlas, Reclaim and Skedpal. I looked at all these apps, tested 4 of them, and found that my brain is currently only compatible with Reclaim. YMMV though; there are very good reviews from people with ADHD for Skedpal and Motion as well. I highly recommend auto-scheduling for people with ADHD who are spinning their wheels trying to learn how to plan.
MY HISTORY WITH PLANNING AND MY EXPERIENCE TESTING THE TOOLS To explain how AI bridges the gap between what my brain can and can’t do, I will describe the 4 steps of standardised executive functioning training that I received as part of my ADHD-treatment and what worked for me. There are huge differences in how ADHD manifests. Not everyone struggles to the same degree with the same things. Below, I’ll describe my history with planning, the trouble I ran into in my life and therapy and the upper limits of what my brain can manage. Getting a feel for my type of ADHD should help to determine in what sort of situations auto-scheduling can be helpful. If my story doesn’t spark recognition, some other tool might be a better fit.
Below the 4 therapy-steps, I describe my experience testing the 5 different tools and some of their specs/features. (Sorry, the first section is so long, skipping and scrolling down to the test-section is an option.)
Step 1: Pick a calendar and start using it. I felt a little uneasy when therapy started with this, because it reminded me of the first time I had to use a calendar in high school. I was almost 12 years old. The class-tutor handed out a bunch of papers with assignments from our teachers and told us to plan our homework in accordance with our schedule. Everybody grabbed their cute pocket diaries with pictures of ponies and cars, and started writing. Except for me. In the silent classroom, I tried to grasp what my classmates were doing, what they were looking at and how they all seemed to know what to write down, but I couldn’t figure it out. Eventually, I shoved the papers away and leaned back in my chair. The tutor looked up, surprised. “What are you doing? You need to plan your homework,” he told me. I shrugged and said: “I’ll just remember it.” He got angry, but I felt too embarrassed to admit that I was the only one who didn’t *understand* the assignment, especially with the whole class listening.
In the end, I never learned how to plan, forgot assignments, didn’t do the homework and was late a lot, which led to near-endless punishment for tardiness during my 6 years of high school. I cleaned the whole school more often than I can count and always thought that I would somehow get everything under control as I got older, but my last year was the worst by far. That year, a new ex-military headmaster digitised the system for recording lateness and ordered a crackdown. Teachers had to refuse entrance into the classroom if you were even a second late and if your school ID got scanned more than 5 minutes after the start of class, you were not allowed to enter anymore. The only scanner was attached to a computer all the way on the ground floor of the main building, so I always had to run there, find someone to operate and they had to start the system, which often led to time maxing out and me missing class. The first day of the crackdown, I got written up (well, scanned) SIX times. Dumbstruck, the headmaster asked how I’d managed to do it. Truthfully, I had no idea. I just spaced out a lot and was surprised every time the bell rang and everyone stormed out of the classroom. Everyone, except for me. I still had to figure out how to declutter my little desk, how to fit everything in my backpack again, where I needed to go after that, not walk off in the wrong direction, that sort of thing.
The new rules led to a sharp drop in my attendance, which turned out to be illegal. Without ever meaning to, I was suddenly violating compulsory education laws and the government threatened community service for me and financial sanctions for my parents. The headmaster often had me called away from classes later in the day as well so I could receive new punishments that steadily grew in severity and duration from hours, to days, to weeks, to months and eventually to more daytime hours than were still left in the school year.
This all made sense, because if you punish a kid enough, they’ll eventually learn how to plan, use a calendar, get more organised and be on time... right?
Wrong. I was missing so much class I was barely being taught anything anymore. Suddenly I found myself taking tests I never saw coming about subjects I never even heard about. I had to invent so many answers on the spot that one teacher started reading my 'hilarious' tests to his wife to make her laugh. My grades plummeted. I basically had to be on the school premises from dusk till dawn for all my detention-hours, even though I had to cycle to school for over 15 miles (and back) and had to work in the evenings. I stopped having breakfast, had no time for dinner before work, was always home late again and couldn’t sleep enough because I had to get up in the middle of the night to report for duty in the headmaster’s office long before sunrise. Somewhere in the meantime, I had to try and intercept the threatening letters from the government so I could hide them from my parents. Exhausted, I started daydreaming and messing up even more, which led to more threats, punishment, missed classes, forgotten assignments, bad grades, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to improve. Even though I desperately wanted to. It was a Catch-22 situation.
The pressure was absurd and it’s become a point of reference for me. If my brain had been capable of planning and getting organised, surely I would have learned then.
Instead, I was in serious danger of not graduating at all, after a while. By that point, I was running around half-dressed, cycling in a skirt with bare legs and wet hair in the middle of winter, always in a panic, pale, underfed, with dark circles under my eyes, until a couple of teachers seemed to decide that enough was enough. One by one, they defied the headmaster by pretending they couldn’t see me opening doors after the second bell and insisting my homework was suddenly always done (it wasn’t). I had an excellent memory, so the simple act of letting me stay in their classrooms during the lessons catapulted me to the top of those respective classes. I graduated, but only thanks to their mercy.
I had to keep showing up for punishment daily until I was excused a couple of weeks before the national final exams. Nobody ever seemed to question whether I was unorganised on purpose or if I *deserved* to be the kid who was punished more than anyone else in the school. It only seemed to confuse the obvious punks who were sometimes in detention with me for things like using graffiti on an outbuilding, sabotaging a teacher’s car or building a bomb in an empty can of Pringles to blow up a toilet. The boys asked skeptically what boring little me could possibly have done that was so bad and their questions made sense; I was this polite girl in a skirt who would never even attempt to stick chewing gum under a desk. But I didn’t know why or how everything went wrong all the time. Teachers had been punishing me ever since I was 5 when I regularly had to stand in the hallway outside the classroom for being late or loud, staying after school because my handwriting was supposedly bad on purpose, not trying hard enough to learn how to tie my shoes and failing, drifting off without finishing something, etc, etc.
When I went to college for my bachelor’s degree, I met the first person who realised I simply needed help. He also was a student and commented on my near-empty pocket diary; I’d only scribbled in the games and training sessions with the sports team I’d joined. He suddenly understood my repeated questions to the tune of ‘Wait, what assignment? A deadline? TOMORROW?!’ As the son of two psychologists, he connected my chronic lateness, the daydreaming, the clumsiness, the chaotic demeanour and the way I never seemed to stop moving with my bare dayplanner and he sat me down behind a computer to sign me up for Gmail and Google Calendar. He also introduced me to Wunderlist. He thought it would help with me losing and forgetting things all the time. It helped somewhat, especially when emails pertaining to events automatically started showing up in the Calendar. It was better than nothing, but it didn’t change my style of dumpster-fire-management to ‘plan’ my day. (Or, more accurately: have the day happen to me in a blur.) Students with ADHD in college also started diagnosing me (almost from across the room sometimes) and spontaneously offered their Ritalin. They were an awesome bunch. Unfortunately, methylphenidate made me fall asleep in the middle of the day, so I thought it was a dead end.
After college, I believe I was supposed to install and configure iCal for 2 separate professional jobs? I never got around to it. (The quality of my work was always good, so people thought it was odd, but nobody complained.)
Through the years, I started using Google Calendar more for birthdays, other recurring items, Facebook events, weddings, funerals and vacations. I tried to practise with appointments and reminders. This was a little hit and miss, especially because I still forgot to actually open Google Calendar and I also tended to not prepare for these happenings until the last minute. My husband, who met me when I was 25, attached his calendar to mine pretty soon in the relationship to help out, put things on my calendar and remind me of stuff. It didn't hurt that he has a top psychologist in his family, who noticed my ADHD without me even mentioning anything. Around the same time my husband heard an item on the radio about ADHD in women and called from the car yelling: “You have ADHD! You have all the symptoms! Everything! If you don’t have it, I’ll eat a hat. I’ll eat a store filled with hats.” I still didn't see the point of treatment then, but he’s been operating as if I were already diagnosed ever since. In the years that followed, two of my siblings got diagnosed before me.
So that's my natural level of executive functioning. Technically, I have a calendar, and a husband who helps me use it. Mission accomplished. (Not really though).
Step 2: Gather all your tasks in one place. So my therapist thought it was suboptimal for me to keep writing down tasks on my hand, in a few notebooks, in two separate bullet journals, on random pieces of papers lying around like envelopes and receipts, in Todoist, in Google Tasks and on post-its in many shades stuck everywhere. Go figure. She wanted me to pick 1 place. I glared at her. But the concept made sense.
It really happens too often that I lose a task because I throw away a piece of paper, a gust of wind blows an old post-it behind my desk or I accidentally use hand sanitizer dissolving the ink on my hand. That’s just too silly. And that's in addition to the issue that I forget tasks simply because it's in a notebook I haven't opened in two weeks.
So I picked Todoist, because I already use it to make sense of small shared projects and I like it. I put most of my tasks in there (it’s a lot). I also installed a large widget on my phone to quickly enter tasks in the inbox as soon as I think of them. It's been working pretty well.
Step 3: Add a simple 1-2-3 priority and deadlines to your tasks This is where I started to feel nauseous. I’ve never distinguished between tasks by different levels in priority. I only added an exclamation mark to a list every now and again, for tasks that needed to happen ASAP (so, last week).
To my surprise, and maybe thanks to the dexamphetamines I’ve been prescribed, it wasn’t as undoable as I thought. Turns out, Todoist has different colors for priorities (I vaguely noticed the feature before, but never used it). Grey for no priority, blue for Priority 3, orange for P2 and red for P1. The colors make sense to me. Gauging the priority of a task seems hard, but I can tell you what color a task is. I also know when a task has a real deadline and when one doesn’t. It took some effort and I struggled a bit with focus and decision fatigue, but I got it done and was quite proud of myself. Until step 4.
Step 4: Each morning, review the priorities you’ve assigned to your tasks, change priority levels, and plan your day and week accordingly. I had the biggest Error404. She wanted me to whatnow? I gave it a try. Stared at the list. Stared at the calendar. Went to get tea. Tried again. Got distracted for the rest of the day. Had to start over the next day because time had passed in which I’d officially planned to do something else. Spent half the day trying to ‘review the priority of tasks’ to plan, but got distracted by a related tasks that I thought I could knock off quickly, but it took much longer than I anticipated and I ended up not doing what I should have done that day. Gave up. Showed up empty handed at the ADHD Treatment Centre after one week.
The second week yielded essentially the same result. After the third week, I hadn’t even gotten around to giving it another go. My therapist was all encouraging words, reassuring me that setbacks were normal and that I just had to keep trying. But I already knew that this bar was too high. I felt resigned. I had such high hopes for ADHD-therapy and medication. I thought it would magically solve my problems and that somebody would finally tell me the secret to an organized life that had eluded me for all these years. Instead, the instructions were... very basic. And dexamphetamine did not enable me to sit down each day and just ‘review’ tasks and ‘plan’ my day and add ‘time blocks’. Like it’s easy, instead of a mind bendingly complicated puzzle that would consume a considerable amount of mental energy at the start of each day. (Which is how I know it’s never going to happen. I’ve learned that I need something simple enough that I can do it on my worst day.)
After 5 weeks without progress at the ADHD Treatment Centre, I mentioned that I sometimes use Goblin Tools to break down tasks. It helps me to figure out what has to be done, and it helps me get started. Goblin Tools was new for my therapist, so I heard myself explain it was just this website with AI that helps to break down tasks or figure out what to eat or how long something takes. I have it listed in my bookmarks bar in Google Chrome. When I left her office, I thought to myself that I needed a goblin ánd a pixy on my shoulder to tell me what to do. I stopped walking. What if pixies existed already as different AI tools?
Testing AI scheduling tools There are many organisational apps, some of which are very sleek and advanced, like Monday, Sunsama and Akiflow. However; they still require you to plan your day manually and that’s precisely the thing I struggle with. Which left me with Atlas AI, Trevor AI, Skedpal, Motion and Reclaim AI. (Purists will tell you that some of the software has as much to do with AI as the original Roller Coaster Tycoon, but for all intents and purposes, I’m going to refer to it as AI because that’s what we call it now even though it’s technically not artificial intelligence. Before ‘AI’ became a hype people would just refer to this as auto-scheduling or smart scheduling.)
Atlas AI This really is the most AI-rich of the selection. It looks promising for a lot more than schedule automation because its aim is to replace a real assistent, but it’s still in beta and I found that my ‘assistant’ didn’t always follow through. For instance, it can set timers, but it forgot to remind me when time was up, even though it said it would. It also planned only half of the appointments in Google Calendar that it said in black and white it would schedule. When I asked why this was the case, it replied that maybe it was my internet connection? Nice try, robot assistant who clearly learned everything from humans, including lying. Maybe next year or when it’s not in beta anymore I'll give it another go, but right now, I can’t afford for tasks and appointments to just disappear. (It’s also going to be quite expensive and geared towards business use, not personal organisation, so it was a long shot anyway.)
This left the 4 candidates more clearly dedicated to auto-scheduling my tasks on Google Calendar; Trevor AI, Skedpal, Motion App and Reclaim AI.
Trevor AI Trevor is the official ‘AI’ partner of Todoist, so it made sense to try this one, but I thought integration wasn’t that smooth. The ‘smart scheduling’ only happened after I accepted suggestions and that worked only for things I’d attached a date to. I often don’t add a solid deadline to tasks, so Trevor suggested that I buy a present for Fathers Day come June ASAP even though the task had no (=grey) priority attached and I did have much more pressing tasks at the time (this was back in april). I tried to get auto-scheduling to work, but found that I just had to drag tasks in myself to get what I wanted. I also couldn’t really figure out how it would automatically adjust my schedule after, you know, life happened, even though that’s listed as a feature. I got frustrated. Part of my tasks seemed to be missing. I actually tried twice and also removed Trevor twice.
If you prefer dragging tasks into a schedule yourself and only smart-schedule some items, or smart schedule by hand, this might be a decent option. But in that case, there are many other apps who assist with that, like Sunsama. A big part is also my brain. I couldn’t intuitively use Trevor and kept clicking on the wrong things, had to undo scheduling, that sort of thing. My biggest issue was that I couldn't get fully automated scheduling to work, but that could be my fault. It’s my impression Trever wasn’t originally meant to do that though, it’s more of a smart tool to help you see your tasks and your calendar side-by-side and decide what goes where, with some suggestions from Trevor.
Trevor is relatively affordable. You can use a basic version for free, or upgrade for smart features all the Pro-features for $3.99/mo or $36/year.
Skedpal Skedpal is reasonably (medium) priced software for smart scheduling with a wide array of options and great reviews. Project management is one of the extra attractive features. But I also noticed the interface looks a little bare bones and dated. The instruction videos are 5 years old and the blog was deserted 2 years ago. I found some old information on an app that made it seem like it wasn’t being updated? Skedpal is asking for 15 dollars a month or 10 dollars per month with a yearly subscription, which is decent, but not cheap. Ideally, you’d pick the yearly option in this case, but the idea of paying 120 dollars up front for a tool that might have been quietly abandoned or won’t receive updates anymore made me pause. If I’m going to invest money and the time to learn how to use a tool, I’d like to be able to trust that it’s going be around in the coming years. So I put Skedpal on my Plan B-pile.
However, I checked this today, to make sure, and noticed there were actually some recent tweets on X by Skedpal and also a message about beta-testing for Skedpal 3 last Januari. Skedpal is probably alive and well.I found various reviews for Skepal on social media, including from someone with ADHD, who said Skedpal worked better for them than Motion. This is saying something because there seems to be a consensus amongst reviewers that Motion is the best auto-scheduling tool on the market. It wasn’t for me though.
Motion AI After reading all the positive reviews about the high price tag that was deemed to be worth it (34 dollars a month, or $19 p/m when billed annually), my expectations were high as well. I really spent time trying to get Motion to work for me in the trial week, installing Zapier, importing tasks, getting several different apps integrated, but I found Motion to be annoyingly glitchy. I'm not the only one complaining about it either, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't my computer this time.
I ran into a particularly frustrating bug and I tried everything to solve it. I even changed the times in which tasks could be scheduled to free space to put something in, but it still wouldn’t schedule it and kept showing a ‘scheduling-conflict’ for no reason. I could solve all the other ‘scheduling conflicts’ easily enough, but this block of 2 hours just wouldn’t click into the free space for 2 hours and I couldn’t find out why. I spent hours and hours, watched videos in an effort to troubleshoot, some twice, kept asking the AI on the Motion website what could be the problem and I really, really couldn’t get it to work for me. (My frustration boiled over at one point; it wasn't pretty.)
The options on paper are amazing and endless. The task management feature is like Monday, with projects moving through stages, and it's automatized. Or you can star an important e-mail in Gmail, which can trigger Zapier to send it as a task to Motion, then Motion automatically puts it on your Calendar. (However, you could also add the e-mail to Google Tasks or Todiost via the buttons or plug-ins, and if those task managers are connected to any of the auto-scheduling tools listed here, the email would also show up on you Calendar.) It's enough to make anyone salivate.
Motion is not a match for my brain though, in part because of the bug, but it also felt a bit rigid. The system prefers that you put tasks straight into Motion directly, which makes sense and is possible, but auto-schedulers obviously require information on a task, like priority, how much time you estimate a task would take and a deadline. In Motion, a task without that information won’t be scheduled at all. But I know that I’m the kind of person who shoots a half-finished thought in the Todoist inbox without adding details until later (though I could forget) and I also don’t believe that every task needs those details (for instance, because it’s low priority and would roughly take me an hour, which should be default). I also couldn’t download/import tasks from Todoist and Google Tasks directly; only new ones or solo tasks came through with Zapier, and I spent a lot of time on that as well to get the prompts working. In the end, the tool was too hard for my brain to use and I also thought it wasn’t worth the high price point for me. However: the price is considerably lower for teams and that’s supposedly where Motion shines, also because of the project management with stages feature. I think it’s not originally geared towards personal use.
Reclaim AI I was flabbergasted that Reclaim immediately worked for me, I didn't think it was going to happen anymore. It hadn’t made the top of the list for me for several reasons. The look didn’t appeal to me much, the only app is a web-app and reviewers online consistently declared Motion the better app. I also read on the internet in older posts that people were missing certain functions that Motion had, like automatically re-scheduling tasks you haven’t marked as completed, or theming days for certain tasks, or how the program would prioritise longer tasks over urgent ones. So I'd written Reclaim off. But as soon as I tried Reclaim anyway, I stumbled across all the supposedly missing functions in the settings and instruction videos. Maybe the tool has been improved recently? Reclaim does still have an issue with recurring tasks from Todoist though. I didn't have those, so it wasn't an issue for me, but it probably is for a lot of people. Reclaim also leaves the big task management to other, existing apps and just plans everything. Motion and Skedpal do also incorporate project management within the tool. Reclaim seems to be geared a little more towards personal planning and also incorporating habits during the day, like taking a walk outside.
How visually attractive it is, is also easily adjusted (I’d assumed you were stuck with hip shades of purple), but it's actually irrelevant. I’m starting to feel like that’s almost the best thing about it. Reclaim is much more a tool doing the thinking for you in the background, unseen. I don’t really need to change my behaviour much. I’m still using my own task manager to braindump in and Reclaim schedules everything in Google Calendar. Because the connection goes both ways, I technically don't have to open Reclaim at all. I’ve taken to adding the estimated time a task will take in Todoist itself, but you can also do it in Reclaim or in Google Tasks if that's your task manager (Reclaim automatically sends you the shorthand when you connect Google Tasks). You can also change the default duration of tasks.
For the first time in my life, I have a fully planned schedule, exactly as I need it, in the time slots where I need it. Every day. Like a proper adult. I'm almost giddy. (Sure, I’m still severely underestimating how long tasks will take, but I can just add time or the machine will automatically reschedule it for me. I’ve set automatic rescheduling to after 1 day in the settings. Default is 3 days or only when time is added.)
I know what to do and when. I can stop worrying about that thing that I’m probably forgetting that I should really do first, because it’s all there in Google Calendar. And whenever I disagree with the planning, I can change the priority in Todoist/Google Tasks, go to Reclaim directly and drag the task to where I need it, or bump the task down the list showing the order decided by Reclaim. So that's pretty flexible. If tasks need more time to complete, I can just add time or click on the + button. When I add an appointment in Google Calendar, Reclaim automatically reschedules my whole calendar. When I add a task in ToDoist or Google Tasks, it’s automatically added to Google Calendar based on the priority and/or deadline I’ve added to the task.
When life happens and I only manage half the planned tasks that day (or much less), I used to have a brain-error and think ‘oh no, I did all that hard work making a planning for the week for nothing, EVERYTHING IS RUINED’. Seriously. But Reclaim just re-plans those tasks for the next day and shuffles everything else down the line. It’s just so nice to not have to think about it myself. To actually see tasks planned in time-frames, making visual what I could achieve that week (and what is definitely outside of the realm of possibilities because time is a limited resource, no matter what my brain says). Having a schedule that's always up to date makes using a calendar a lot easier.
I guess it was time, too. A long list of tasks never indicated anything to me anyway. Everything could be 5 minutes long or 10 hours long. Who knew? It felt abstract, even when I tried the Alastair Method in Bullet Journal. (Still my favourite way to do it manually on paper though, I just can't keep it up for more than 2 weeks.) Seeing all the tasks scheduled gives me more of a feeling of urgency that a static list doesn't. So not only do I know where to get started, on what and when, I actually get more done because I don’t wake up thinking ‘ooooh, another saturday… nothing planned… let’s learn to make homemade blocks of soap even though I still have 10 bottles of shower gel left!’
You can use Reclaim for free, surprisingly. I think it’s currently the only one on this list that auto-schedules for free. Free use is possible with a few basic apps like Google Calendar and Google Tasks, which makes auto-scheduling accessible for students with ADHD as well. Use with more specialised apps, including Zapier and Todoist, or extra scheduling links (for booking online meetings with clients, for instance) require a subscription starting at $10 a month or $8 when billed yearly.
I went back to my therapist and could tell her I made progress in a way I didn’t think possible. So if this is you, don’t give up hope yet and hold off on quitting therapy. See if there is a tool for you out there and how far it takes you.
Any auto-scheduling tool will definitely have a learning curve for most people, and you do need to look at the settings to determine what you want the program to do. It will cost time to set up, so it's smart to get a feel whether or not a tool would work for you, if you'd be able to add a level of priority or deadline to tasks at some point and what you'd need the tool to do. But there are plenty of tutorials on the internet, both long and short to help you get started. Goblin Tools is also free and nice to use for breaking down tasks to help get started some more (I’ll just put the links in a comment below). I hope that tools like these will continue to develop, so people who struggle with executive functioning can really lean on them. Just like glasses, a hearing aid or crutches.
I hope this helps someone out there. Thanks for reading this insane amount of text.
P.S. For simple recurring daily routines, I like the app Tiimo and a smart watch. But that’s a different story. :)