Bumps on soft palate above uvula

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

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

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

Club Vlad sat near the confluence of Central Avenue and Washington Avenue, Albany’s two main thoroughfares. Two stories with blackout windows and a box office from when it used to be a movie theater, it was swarmed with people when Dom first spotted it ahead. He was somewhat familiar with it: He passed it every day on his way to work, and it was always busy around his time of evening, even on weeknights. Part of him always wanted to go inside and be a part of the scene, but he never did.
The man in sunglasses - his name was Joe - led Dom toward the club, and even before Joe spoke, Dom somehow knew that it was their destination. “There,” Joe said. “We’ll go around back.”
Dom and Joe had been walking for what seemed like an hour but couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes. Dom stuck as close to Joe as possible as if for protection, and had become accustomed to his pungent smell. It was noticeable only at extremely close range, part sickly sweet and part…something else, something Dom could not place but still somehow recognized. They were two blocks from the club, maybe three, and Dom could hear the pulsing techo/house/whatever music as clearly as if he were standing in the middle of the dancefloor. He could hear the chatter of the people inside, or at least he imagined he could. He could smell them too: Beneath the odors of perfume, desperation, and spiritual rot was something richer, something blissful. Dom realized for the first time that he was parched - so parched - and drool filled his mouth.
A crowd of people waited outside Club Vlad, talking and laughing; some vaped, some stared down at their cellphones like Gollum with his precious ring. Dom’s first reaction was to avoid them. Perhaps sensing this…or perhaps feeling it himself…Joe ducked into an alleyway two doors down from the club. “We’ll go in the back,” Joe explained.
The back entrance to Club Vlad was a single door underneath a bare bulb. The music was so loud that Dom’s head began to throb. Inside, a dark hallway terminated in an archway filled with throbbing white light. Dread filled Dom as they approached it - he didn’t want to be around people - but thankfully they went into a room off the hall instead. An office. A cramped desk, a filing cabinet. A set of stairs disappeared into shadows.
“Sit,” Joe said.
Dom obeyed, sitting in the swivel chair.
Joe went up the stairs and Dom was alone. The deep coldness that had long settled into his bones made itself known again, and Dom leaned forward, wrapping his arms around his chest for warmth. The muffled music vibrated in his skull, setting his teeth on edge, and the various smells wafting in from the main room assaulted his senses. He was alternately repulsed and aroused by the crashing din of scents: The good, the bad, and the mouth watering. A sharp pain cut through his stomach like the killing edge of a knife, and Dom hugged himself tighter. Had his throat always been this dry? His throat felt like sandpaper; his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and getting it unstuck hurt so badly that tears sprang to his eyes.
Dom rubbed his arms with his hands and tried to still his chattering teeth. He looked around for a blanket, a discarded jacket, something to cover himself with, but there was nothing. Only drifts of glitter on the floor and walls. He supposed it came from a party or something. He’d never been to a night club but it seemed fitting.
A sound drew his attention to the door leading back into the hall. A woman - no older than a girl - stood there, looking confused and unsteady. She was dressed in black, wore glow sticks around her wrists and neck, and held a red solo cup. “I have to pee,” she said drunkenly and laughed. “I thought this was the bathroom.”
A cold wind washed over Dom, and Joe was standing next to him. “The bathroom’s up here,” he said.
“Oh, good,” the girl laughed, “I thought it was here but I didn’t know. This is my first time here.” She held her cup aloft. “Take me to it.”
Joe glanced at Dom. “Come on.”
They formed a party as they climbed the stairs, Dom in the tear and Joe at the head. The girl stumbled and held onto the railing, talking incessantly. Her voice hurt Dom’s head, but the hot smell wafting from her was intoxicating. Drool coursed down his chin and his breathing came in short, hot bursts. Another sharp pain rent his stomach, and he winced.
At the top of the stairs, where the lights were cold and white, a woman in black stood by a doorway, her back ramrod straight and her eyes vacant. Her face was gaunt, her white flesh pulled tight across her skull. She wore a black dress and her black hair long and straight. Dom only caught a glance at her before looking away again.
She looked like a ghost.
“Show her the bathroom,” Joe said.
The woman’s eyes slowly, ponderles, went from Joe to the drunk girl. Her expression, like Joe’s, was dead. She had no expression. “This way.”
She and the drunk girl disappeared down the hall, and Joe led Dom into a room. Though it was pitch black, Dom could still see; not very well…but he could see. Suddenly, a blinding white light flicked on in front of him, causing him to stop and fall back a step. Ahead, through an archway, sat a vaulted chamber, at the center of which sat a man. To Dom’s light dazzled eyes, he seemed a proud king perched upon a throne, the skulls of his many enemies piled around him. Dom blinked and turned his head slightly to the side. His eyes began to adjust, and the world came into focus.
The man was not, as it had first seemed, sitting on a throne. Instead, he was esconded in a motorized wheelchair. The piles of skulls were actually various pieces of machinery, the kind you’d find in a hospital room. A clear tube extended from one of them to the side of the man’s neck: Yellow liquid flowed from the machine and into the man. Another tube, this one in the other side of his neck, filtered out a mixture of what looked like yellow pus and black sludge. An infected malodor filled the air, and the machines whirred softly as they worked.
As for the man himself, his appearance was normal at first glance, Dressed in a flowing red velvet robe, a blue and green blanket with a plaid pattern draped over his shoulders, he was portly, about fifty, and had shoulder length grayish hair with a bald spot in the middle. If the local theater put on a production of Hamilton, they could cast a worse Ben Franklin than him.
On closer inspection, he was not normal at all. His complexion was yellow and waxy, like a statue, and his body was lumpy, misshapen, resembling an overfilled trash bag stuffed with cotton. His eyes were sick and yellow, and something about his posture seemed…off. It didn’t make sense, but the only thing Dom could think was: He looks impossible.
Joe stopped at the edge of the shadows, where the line between light and darkness lay. He seemed to stand up a little straighter, a general greeting his king. “Here he is,” Joe said.
The man squinted slightly against the glare of the light and motioned with one gnarled hand. “Step into the light,” he said. His voice was soft and kind, that of a senile though loving grandmother. Dom imagined he felt a pull toward the man, and did as he was bidden, wincing as the light stung his eyes.
For a moment, the man stared at him, his waxen features frozen fast as stone. Then, a subtle look of compassion flickered across his face. Dom did not believe in God, but he suddenly felt like a man standing before God, his every thought, feeling, and transgression laid bare. He had never felt so naked in his life, so exposed. He had the sense that the man before him could see everything, knew everything.
“You’ve been through a lot,” the man said. It was not a question, but a statement.
Everything Dom had been through over the past couple of days came back to him in a rush, and hot tears filled his eyes. He nodded.
The man nodded slightly, more to himself than to Dom. “Kneel down,” he said, “I want to look at you.”
Dom knelt without question.
The man lifted one hand and touched Dom’s face, tilting Dom’s head from one side to the other like a farmer appraising a horse. His fingers were long and bony, his nails ragged and unkempt; his touch was like ice. He brushed his knuckles over the purple bruise on Dom’s cheek, and there was such gentleness in that one act that Dom broke down sobbing. He leaned into the man’s touch like a cat and gave voice to his misery.
“Shhh,” the man said, “it’s all over now.”
“W-What’s happening to me?” Dom asked.
In his heart of hearts, however, he already knew.
“You died,” the man said patiently. “And you came back.”
Hearing it stated so plainly, Dom cried even harder.
“Only a handful of people throughout history can claim to have defeated death,” the man said, stroking Dom’s hair, “and you’re one of them. You should be proud.”
“How?” Dom asked between sobs. “What am I?”
The man stroked Dom’s cheek. “You’re the same thing I am.”
At that, Dom looked up at the man. “What are you?” he asked.
A little, knowing smile touched the man’s lips, and when he spoke, his canine teeth were longer and sharper than before. “I’m a vampire.”
“No,” Dom moaned and shook his head, “no, no, no.” He grabbed the man’s hand and held tight, his tears coming faster. He trembled like a frightened animal and squeezed his eyes closed, as if by doing so he could escape the hell his life had become.
But there was no escape.
“You have a lot of questions,” the man said, monologuing now rather than speaking directly to Dom, “I had the same questions when I was your age. I have spent the last forty-two years of my life trying to answer them, but every answer I find leads me to still more questions. There’s one thing I’m certain of, though.”
Dom blinked the tears from his eyes. The last of them had been squeezed from his dead tear ducts and he had no more to give. He simply stared into space, trying to come to grips with his situation.
“There is freedom in death,” the man said. “Death is easy. It’s simple. Once it’s over, you feel no pain, no sadness, no grief. It’s living that’s hard.”
As he spoke, he brushed his long nails across Dom’s scalp. It was a soothing feeling, and served to calm him. “People have so many troubles.” A note of revulsion crept into his voice. “So many needs, so many desires. People are complex but we’re not. We’re easy to please. A vampire wants only two things: A little blood and one more night.”
The combination of his touch and his voice had pacified Dom to the point of almost tranquility. “I’m scared,” Dom heard himself mumble.
Nodding almost reluctantly, the man said, “Fear is one of the only emotions a vampire can’t escape. Everything feels fear. Do you want to know a secret?”
Dom nodded.
“I’m afraid too,” the man confessed. “I’m afraid of death. Well…death as it were. I’m terrified that my body will rot away and leave me a pile of bones somewhere, unable to move but still aware”
A shudder went through Dom.
“As I’m sure you’ve seen yourself, the movies lied. We rot just like any other dead thing. Our flesh decays, our organs turn to sludge, and we go from rational men to monsters whose only thought is feeding.”
Now it was his turn to shiver.
“But…you’re not like that,: Dom said.’
The man smiled. “I’m lucky, I guess” A thin yellow fluid began to drip from his nostrils. He did not seem to notice. “What is your name?”
“Dominick,” Dom said.
“I’m Merrick,” the man said, “and this is my family.”
Dom realized that they were now surrounded by others, ten in all. They stood ramrod straight, their eyes vacant and their faces devoid of humanity. They were mainly men, though one was a woman. Some were pale, others were blue or black, and one was little more than a skeleton clad in withered brown skin, a white button up and jeans hanging from its frame.
A thought occurred to Dom. “You said my brain was going to rot…”
“Not necessarily,” Merrick cautioned, “though it’s possible.”
“Am I going to be…?”
“Like them?” Merrick asked. “Braindead and staring?”
Sheepishly, Dom nodded.
“Maybe,” Merrick allowed. “But these people are free of everything that troubles humanity. You were human just a short time ago. I’m sure you remember all too well what it was like. The constant politics, the moral quandaries, the philosophical pontificating. Human beings - and make no mistake, we are humans - were not meant for all of that. We’re animals. We were made to hunt, fuck, and sleep. Somewhere along the way, we got pretentious and started complicating things.” He looked at Dom, sizing him up, seeming to read him. “Things that animals take for granted, people work their entire lives to achieve. If an animal wants to fornicate, it fornicates. If a man wants to fornicate, he needs to be tall, handsome, rich, funny, progressive when it suits women but traditional when it doesn’t. If a man wants a home, he has to work thirty years for it. An animal has only to dig a hole in the ground.”
Every word struck a chord with Dom.
Because every word was true.
“Unfortunately, the living won’t allow us to live that freely, so we have to hide. These people here - my children - need a guiding hand, a protector, someone who can lead them. And I, an old man, need help.” Here he smiled playfully and patted his bulging stomach. “My body is mostly sawdust and cotton balls at this point, so I can’t do much. I share my wisdom and my knowledge with them, and they take care of me.”
“Why haven’t you…rotted?” Dom asked.
“Embalming fluid,” Merrick said. “Blood doesn’t sustain you. Embalming fluid does.” He smiled at Dom. “It can sustain you as well. If you’ll stay with us. We’re not the most attractive bunch, but we’re a family, and we really wish you’d join us.”
A family.
Dom’s parents had broken up and he lived with his mother. He had never had a family before, and had always wanted one, a real one, like in the movies. Even as a grown man, he sought the love, acceptance, and belonging that a family brings. He sought it in the wrong ways, but that - and not sex, not romantic love - is what he had really wanted all along.
This is what he had wanted all along.
“I want to,” Dom said.
Working quickly, Merrick slashed his wrist open with his thumbnail. An ugly mixture of stale blood, siphoned from someone else, and embalming fluid leaked out. “If you choose to drink, my blood will be in you. You will be my son and I will be your father. You will obey me as your father. You will do whatever is asked of you for this family, as this family will do for you. You will not reveal the secrets of this family to anyone outside of it. You will protect this family from all threats, both inside and out. Do you accept?”
He held his bleeding wrist out to Dom.
Dom did not question, nor did he hesitate. He grabbed the hand of his father, brought it to his mouth, and drank from the seeping wound. The fluid was cold, thick, and vile.
It tasted like belonging.
“Have you fed yet?”
“No,” Dom said.
“Before you do, I have a question for you. Who did this to you? Who made you?”
Dom thought. Everything was hazy. “Was it someone in this room?” Merrick asked.
Dom shook his head. “Her name is…” he wracked his brain. “Heather.”
Merrick nodded. “So there’s another out there.” He looked at Joe. “Did you turn her?”
“Yes,” Joe said.
Merrick looked annoyed. “I’ve told you not to go out and feed on your own. You have no self-control. You drink too much and create others, which creates headaches for the family. Tomorrow night, I want you and Dom to find her and bring her here.” “Okay,” Joe said.
Merrick looked over Dom’s shoulder. “Jess? Can you come here?”
The black haired woman from earlier came out of the shadows, the drunk girl with her, arms tied behind her back. The girl looked dazed. “Max,” Merrick said to the skeletal corpse-thing, “help her.”
Max, Jessie, and another vampire named Matt tied chains around the girl’s ankles and hoisted her aloft via a pulley system. Upside down, she swung back and forth. Merrick instructed the others to leave the room. “Max,” he said.
On his way out, the corpse-thing produced a knife and dragged it across the girl’s throat, slicing her skin; blood spurted out. Max leaned in to taste it, but Merrick shooed him away. When he and Dom were alone, Merrick told Dom, “Go to her.”
But Dom was already on his feet, his eyes transfixed by the crimson life flowing from her pumping throat. The hot, rich smell filled his nostrils and tantalized his senses. Saliva filled his mouth and his stomach panged with hunger. Some small, human part of his decaying brain screamed at him to stop, but he did not listen to it. He had been human for almost thirty years, and he had been miserable. Now, in this chamber of the undead, he gave himself over to his dark thirst. Like a man in a dream, he shuffled to her, inhaled the sweet scent of her blood, and shivered. He was so lost in lust that he hardly noticed the strange, cumbersome feeling of his descended fangs.
“Drink,” Merrick said.
Opening his mouth wide, Dom sank his teeth into the girl’s neck. Her blood filled his mouth and splashed down his throat. Warmth thawed the ice in his marrow and spread through him. His dead heart began to flutter, then to pound. His knees shook, his body trembled, and his mind rolled away on a tide of ecstasy.
As it was his first meal, he couldn’t drink much. Before long, his stomach was hard and distended and his body burned with fire. He collapsed to a heap on the floor and twitched as random nerve endings, stimulated by the blood, began to misfire. He felt full, warm, and drunk. He closed his eyes and let himself drift.
Dominick Mason had died.
And this…
This was heaven.
***
With all that was happening in the city of Albany, the last thing Bruce Kenner needed on Thursday morning was a visit from Bertha the bitch, but that’s exactly what he got. She flew into his office like she owned the place and instantly started in on him. Young man this and have you talked to Joe Rossi that. You’d think she was his boss. And if she were his boss, he’d quit and find another line of work. He heard McDonald’s was hiring.
Bruce almost snapped at her. He’d been up most of last night riding around Albany and looking for Dominick Mason. He and Vanessa expected him to drop dead somewhere close to the medical examiner’s office, but if he had, he’d done so in a super secret location.
“I’ve been busy,” Bruce said, “but I’m going to go by his place of work today.”
Tired and still confused over that bullshit from last night, he had no energy to argue with the old crone. He could spare a few minutes to talk to Joe Rossi, he figured. He assumed that Jessie was safe but he owed it to her to check. If he found the girl, he’d take her back to her grandmother (sorry, kid, really) and try to avoid arresting the guy. Unless he came off as a creep, then he’d bust his ass. See, people assumed that an older guy with a younger girlfriend was some master manipulator hell bent on evil deeds. Sometimes they were, but hell, his grandparents married when his grandpa was twenty-one and his grandma sixteen. They were married for fifty-five years and loved each other to the end. Maybe it was innocent, maybe not. It wasn’t his job to judge either way. Just gimme the girl so I can get her grandma off my back and no one gets hurt.
“It’s about time you started doing your job,” Bertha said, “I heard on the police scanner last night that you people lost a body. What kind of town is this? Your coroner is a drunk who makes up stories about bodies walking away. He probably sold it to black people.”
Bruce couldn’t help it; he snorted laughter.
“Now what would black people want with a dead body?”
“Probably to use it as a prop in one of their rap videos.”
Bruce didn’t know much about music videos, but he was pretty sure that the people who made them didn’t like the smell of corpse any more than the rest of us. “I’ll be sure to round up all the local rappers for questioning. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Luckily for him, there was not, and Bertha left shortly thereafter. Alone and able to hear himself think, Bruce sat back in his chair and went over his mental checklist for the day. First order of business, go to Club Vlad. Second, find Dominick Mason. There were others, but that was the most important. He wanted the body found so someone could get to work explaining this whole weird thing. There had to be an explanation. The thought that there wasn’t, that a dead guy literally rose from the grave and disappeared into the night, deeply disturbed Bruce, and the more this whole thing remained ongoing, the more disturbed he would become.
Needing some fresh air, he decided to hit up Club Vlad.
Outside, the day was hot and sunny. Waves of heat shimmered from the pavement and not a single breath of air stirred in the whole world. Bruce slipped on a pair of sunglasses and drove over to Club Vlad. It occurred to him that the place might be closed during the day; it was the only place Joe Rossi was associated with. His address in the computer system was Glens Falls, far to the north. The messages he sent Jessie indicated that he lived onsite at Club Vlad.
The build, wedged between a corner store and a check cashing place, was as grimy and dumpy looking as it had always been. The front windows were blacked out and covered with posters and fliers for punk concerts, house bands, and far left political organizations: The Albany Social Justice Center, something called Bash the Fash 2025, and Bruce’s favorite. ACAB. He caught some kid spraying that on the side of the police station once, and under extreme police torture (ie, a good tongue lashing), the kid told him it meant All Cops Are Barnacleheads.
Bruce shot the kid on the spot and planted a gun on him.
How's that for barnaclehead?
Calm down, he didn’t really do that. He made him clean the graffiti off with a toothbrush. LOL he was out there for hours.
The sidewalk in front of the former theater was empty save for some little. The box office was abandoned. There was no open sigh, but then again, there was no closed sign either. He parked his cruiser at the curb, killed the engine, and got out, sweat instantly springing to his brow.
To his surprise, the door opened. Inside, a couple steps led down to a dance floor. A bar lined the wall to his right, and a couple more sets led up to a railed platform filled with tables. Above, a huge balcony looked down on him. A giant disco ball hung from the ceiling like a pair of glittery nuts and there were cages here and there. Presumably where girls danced go-go style. Oh yeah, nothing hotter than a woman behind bars. Why do you think Bruce became a cop in the first place?
Speaking of glittery nuts, there was glitter everywhere. On the floor, on the tables, on the bar. It twinkled like flecks of diamond and swirled around your feet when you walked. Bruce imagined big buckets of the stuff raining down on the dance floor at midnight and he shuddered. Imagine having glitter stuck in your hair. That shit would never come out.
Music played from the sound system, not as loud as it would be during operating hours. It sounded like ‘80s metal, not exactly what he expected from a place like this.
Some say life she's a lady
Kinda soft, kinda shady
I can tell you life is rich
She's no lady, she's a bitch
Being morning, the place was deserted except for a man behind the bar, busy at cleaning the countertop in anticipation for the night’s events. He was tall, Hispanic or Italian, and feminine, with a single earring and a tank top.
Bruce moseyed over to the bar and the barkeep looked up, missing a beat when he realized the fuzz was here. He sat down his rag and walked over. “Can I help you?” he asked in a whispy voice.
“Yeah,” Bruce said, “I’m looking for Joe Rossi. Is he here?”
“I don’t know,” the bartender said. He looked nervous. “I can check.”
Before Bruce could answer, he scurried off, leaving him alone.
They suck my body out
But friend there is no doubt
I'm gonna pay the devil his dues
Cause I'm sick of being abused
Bruce looked around, his fingers absently drumming on the countertop. Club Vlad was a clashing mix of grunge and glam that made his head hurt. He imagined what the place must be like at midnight, packed and noisy, and nodded to himself. Yeah, this was the spot, he guessed, the place all the cool kids went, if they went anywhere anymore. Hell, if he was thirty years younger, he might come here.
He had been waiting for almost twenty minutes when a voice spoke behind him. He turned with a start, and beheld the strangest man he had ever seen in his life. Short and plump - lumpy, even - he sat in a wheelchair, a red blanket draped over his shoulders and his hands resting on his knees. He was about fifty with sparse gray hair falling to his shoulders and a plastic-looking face. He looked like a wax statue of Ben Franklin come to life, and a deep sense of disquiet stirred in the pit of Bruce’s stomach.
Just can't fight the temptation
It's become my inspiration
Gonna get myself an axe
Break some heads, break some backs
It was only then that Bruce noticed the sickly sweet smell of death.
It seemed to come from the man in waves.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” the man said, “my name is Merrick Garvis and I own Club Vlad. Maybe I can be of assistance.”
Bruce grew up in the south where manners and saving face were paramount. His mother and his grandmother both taught him that it was impolite to stare. Maybe he'd been in New York so long that he’d forgotten himself, or maybe Merrick Garvis was just the strangest looking man in the world. Either way, Bruce couldn’t help gaping at his strange appearance. Recovering, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, I -”
Merrick smiled and waved one hand. Why was it so goddamn skeletal? “Don’t worry. I was injured in a fire a long time ago and this is the best they could do for me. To be honest, I’d stare too. What can I help you with, officer?”
“I’d like to talk to Joe Rossi,” Bruce said. “I understand he works for you.”
“He did,” Merrick said, “but I had to let him go. Did he do something wrong?”
Bruce sighed. “Well, yeah, he’s shacked up with a sixteen year old runaway.”
A look of concern crossed Merrick’s features, such as they were. “Oh, my, that is concerning. I haven’t seen him in several days. I assume he went home. He lives in Glens Falls.”
Bruce nodded, his mind working. If Rossi really was in Glens Falls, that meant the whole mess was someone else’s problem. He could send Bertha up there to bother some other poor barnacle head and be rid of her. Yet…he didn’t think Rossi was in Glens Falls. Bruce had a knack for knowing when people were lying, and he was certain that Merrick Garvis was doing just that. It couldn’t be a facial tick, as his features were largely unmoving, like clay. Maybe it was something in his cloudy eyes. Maybe it was the tone of his voice. Or maybe Bruce had the shining and knew things just for the hell of it. In any event, the certainty that Merrick Garvis was lying grew stronger with each passing second.
“Why’d you fire him?”
“He got drunk and hit one of the customers.”
“What did he do?” Bruce asked. “What was his position?”
“He was a bouncer.”
“Aren’t bouncers supposed to hit people?”
Merrick fumbled. “Well…not to punch them in the face for bumping into them.”
“How long did he work for you?”
“Six months.”
“Did you ever see him with an underage girl?”
“Of course not,” Merrick said, “you have to be twenty-one to get in. I make sure everyone’s ID is checked at the door.”
“What if she had a fake ID?”
“Then I guess she’d get in, but I’d assume she was of legal age.”
“You said he shoved someone, when did this happen?”
“Last week,” Merrick said.
“I thought you said he hit someone.”
Merrick again fumbled. “I did.” Now his face seemed to darken a little. A strange yellowish liquid, too thin to be snot, began to drip from his nostrils. Bruce barely suppressed a smear of disgust. “I understand you have a job to do but playing mind games with me isn’t going to solve anything. I can give you his address. Other than that, I can’t help you further.”
“Fair enough,” Bruce said. “But I’d like to see your ID please.”
Merrick glared at him. “I suppose you want my name, rank, and serial number as well.”
“Actually, yeah, I’d love that.”
Merrick drew a deep sigh. “Okay.”
In five minutes, Bruce had Merrick’s ID, social, and all other relevant information. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have bothered, even though he was well within his rights to ask for this information from someone he was questioning. But something about Merrick Garvis was off, and not just his weird face or strangely bulbous body. Bruce was just smart enough to realize that something was going on here, but not quite smart enough to even begin to imagine what.
When he had everything he needed and saw no reason to stick around, Bruce bid Merrick farewell and left the club. Before he could do anything else, he got a call from dispatch: Officer needed assistance in Pine Hills. Bruce slipped behind the wheel and went forth to help, momentarily putting Merrick Garvis out of his mind.
But soon or later, he would get back to him.
Oh yes he would.

Former Colorado G/F Cody Williams, a McDonald's All American and top 5-10 recruit in the 2023 class, entered the NBA Draft and is all in: https://twitter.com/wojespn/status/1782484315122614490 Cody missed 13 games this season with wrist, eye, and ankle injuries and after a very strong start to his season, which saw him skyrocket to the top 5 of mocks with some flirtations with the #1 overall pick, he cooled down and has seen his stock mostly sit from around the end of the top 10 to mid-teens.
Williams measured in at 6'6.5 without shoes and 7'1 wingspan at the combine. He's about 6'8 in shoes, and combined with his awesome wingspan and reach, is fantastic size for a combo forward. His wingspan is central to some of his biggest strengths as a prospect. On the downside, he only weighed in at 178. He's a thin guy with a thin frame and he'll likely always be on the thinner side. Strength is a big concern of his as a prospect, both as a player and in terms of his ability to remain durable throughout an 82 game season.
Williams is a good athlete. His athleticism is a little distinct from many. He's very fluid and light on his feet as an athlete. He has very good body control in the air. He can really jump with a little space and when on the move. But he doesn't have tremendous pure burst/explosiveness from a standstill. He has good quickness and accelerates through the gears quickly and the fact he's light on his feet and has good timing as a driver makes his first step a decent one, but he doesn't have an elite top gear.
Williams not having elite burst and being on the frail side means he's not too much of a pure self-creator at the moment. When he gets to the rim, it's usually in translation, off rips from the perimeter, out of DHO/PNR's on ball, or off curls and screens off the ball. He gets to the rim off designed actions and he gets to the line at a decent rate on these actions, but not much off his own creation.
Williams was a fantastic finisher at the rim this year. He gets great extension around the rim. He takes long strides as a driver. He's really light on his feet as a driver. He will change speeds, give a defender a hesitation move before attacking out of the PnR and does a good job slithering his way to the rim. He's decisive when he decides to catch and rip from the perimeter and has really good timing as a driver. His timing, his stride length, solid quickness and fluidity makes him hard to contain when he's catching and taking it to the rim off spot ups, he's a fantastic finisher on these plays, and he's very good off curls/screen actions designed to get him downhill; his size, his strides/quickness, timing, means he's usually gaining advantages on defenders he faces. The extension he gets around the rim, and his very soft touch with floaters and hooks around the rim, gives him a lot of range around the rim to finish. He has fantastic ability to adjust in the air. Very good body control. He can finish with up and unders around the rim. He can start his flight to the rim from pretty far out and he generates contact that way...it makes his shots difficult to contest around the rim.
Williams is also an awesome cutter. A lot of his cuts for baskets were off designed plays. He does a great job reading when his defender is ball watching, does a great job manipulating defenders into creating opportunities for himself for cuts to the basket, and he dives quickly to the basket. He has great instincts as a cutter and find his way into a few easy baskets a game.
He has mismatch potential in the post with his size/length. He has nice footwork in the post. He likes turning into the basket and taking a hook/floater and his touch is also excellent on these shots. This is a part of his game that could be leveraged a bit more at the professional level and as he gains strength.
Williams isn't an awful ballhandler but he's not a great one either. He can handle in transition and he can bring the ball up and facilitate. He's not that great when handling the ball in tight spaces and can be insecure. He doesn't have a tremendous amount of shake. He does have a deceptive crossover that allows him to gain space but he doesn't have a ton of shake outside of that. He has a nice spin move and has some impressive possessions breaking free from a defender with the spin move, but he can overuse it. He's right hand dominant as a driver and will spin back to his right on left drives. He gets stripped using the spin move or stripped looking to drive down the middle of the lane quite a bit. He will get cut off on drives because he's unable to gain separation. The combination of his only average handle, lack of strength, and pedestrian burst I think is partially responsible for his passivity on the offensive end. He doesn't have a ton of middle game at this point; he's a mediocre pull-up shooter. He's fantastic in transition with his athleticism and his ability to both push it with the ball and be a play finisher, but he's just not a halfcourt self-creator. The question is whether or not people feel this is a part of his game that he can develop in the years ahead. Because his ceiling on the offensive end hinges quite a bit on this part of his game taking a jump.
He does get to the rim out of the PnR. As said above, he does a nice job slithering to the rim out of the PnR. Plays under control and is able to maneuver his way to the basket. He finds rollers out of the PnR and he can make the skip pass. He is a fair drive and dish option. He's not an advanced playmaker or passer but has some flashes. He moves the ball well and he does a pretty good job getting his team into offensive sets as a facilitator. He will find cutters as a facilitator from the key. He turned the ball over too much...had a fair few miscommunications with teammates, lazy/poor passes, and he's not strong enough with the ball right now. He will get bumped off spots when looking to drive and not be able to get to the rim. He gets pushed away from the rim on drives a decent amount but his length still allows him to finish on a lot of these drives; but it also makes him more vulnerable to turnovers as defenders can take away his air space and force him into picking up his dribble.
Williams has a mechanically sound shot and 41.5% from 3 but only on 1.5 attempts. He shot 71% from the FT line. He is elite in the C&S. He's someone who needs a little space to gather his footwork but he does a good job at making himself a presentable target from the perimeter and hitting the open looks. He's not the most dynamic shooter currently, but I do think the C&Sing is for real, and combined with his secondary creation ability and ability to make plays off closeouts, he's someone who's a solid option as an off ball scorer.
Williams is not much of a rebounder for a 6'8 player. This is another red flag that many have regarding his desire to take on contact, lack of aggression and lack of physicality. He was a good defender anyway at Colorado this year....he flips his hips very fluidly. He is very light on his feet. Moves really well laterally overall, although he doesn't always react to initial moves as well as he needs to. His wingspan is of big benefit to his ability to recover when beat and contest shots. He has urgency/quickness in recovering when he's beat, but he can be beaten a little too often.
Screens can really bury him at times, but he's not a disaster in dealing with traffic/navigation. It's not a positive for him at the moment overall, which further illuminates the necessity in he gaining muscle going forward. He will at times shy away from contesting shots around the rim. He isn't super active off the ball defensively. He does a good job using his length to deter passes in passing lanes but he's not a ball hawk and he plays a pretty contained brand of defense. You appreciate the fundamentally sound nature of his defense but also believe there's defensive playmaking ability there that's gone untapped.
Cody will get pushed back on ball defensively against guys who drive into his chest. He's a really good isolation defender, and also a strong PnR defender where his length really comes to fore, he does a good job rotating and has strong overall defensive instincts, but he will give up buckets to drivers going downhill off DHO's/screens. He can't wall them off. He can be pretty jumpy on rotations...he bites on fakes and flies out of plays too often. He has moments of discipline but too many mistakes. Ball watches too often on defense. Freshman mistakes. His defense overall was good, and the upside is excellent on this end as/if he gains strength, but he can certainly be better than he was this season at Colorado.
Cody Williams had his ups and downs as a freshman at Colorado, but remains a very intriguing prospect with his physical tools, versatility on the offensive end, and ability and upside on the defensive end. I think he was clearly a bit oversold as a #1 pick. He's too much of a project on the offensive end and is simply not enough of a finished product to be a #1 selection even in a class like this. He has a lot of upside on both ends of the floor and simply gaining strength would be a huge boon for him as a player, but there are questions surrounding his mentality and whether he's someone who has the mental makeup of a star. There are questions surrounding how much strength he'll be able to add. Even with all of the questions, many view him as one of the highest ceiling prospects in this draft class. If it all comes together, you could see why that is, this season at Colorado.
Are you all Thumbs Up, Down, or Across on Cody Williams?
Note: Gonna make a post on all three Colorado prospects coming up. Everyone has their scouting report and personal opinion. I wanna cut to the chase...are you all down or up on these three. First things first with the highest rated of the three.

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A couple of years ago I tried writing my own version of Stones Abbigale. I never got past the first couple scenes, but I'm considering returning to it. I wanted to basically rewrite and change up a lot of things, mainly focusing on Abbi and Davis and changing some elements. Let me know what you think!

1
It's almost four in the morning and Seth is threatening suicide again. Good. Fuck him. I hope he does it. I don't text him that because I read about this girl who told her boyfriend to kill himself. The irony was that when he actually did it she got charged with second degree murder. My life is fucked as it is I don't need to make it worse. I’m shivering under my comforter because we’re halfway through November. I think about the turkey that won't get made this year and the family I won't see. I think that's swell. Seth is still texting.
Its like u dont even care after everything that happened and after everything we did together i saved ur life and i stayed with u when u cried and i hugged u and i did everything for u but that wasn't enough was it? i try so hard and all u ever are is a bitch to me that's not fair u want me to die and u hate me and u dont even care and im sick of it abbi why is is so hard for u to care about me?
I don't respond. I don't like how I feel about this. This should be easy. He won't actually do it. He won't. He’s too self involved to kill himself. I put my phone face down on my bed. The sheets shake around it as he sends message after message. I was sleeping on a ticking bomb so I got off of it. My feet stick to the floor, I struggle to step. I might as well have been standing barefoot on ice. I trudge to my window so I can see my street at night.
Winter is really coming. You can't hear as many birds as you used to. They've all gone. They've all flown away. I can see three streetlights from where I’m standing. If you look from right to left, you can see the concrete fracture into the sand. I open my window and brace for the chill. I stick my head outside. The ocean is not far away. I hear it hitting the shore over and over. Waves of water splashing incessantly, almost beating out my text notifications.
The street lights flicker. I think of last summer. When Seth and I got really high after the news broke. I was making out with that bong. Emptying bowl after bowl, clanking the glass on the road to empty it out. Just thinking about it makes me feel the street pole against my back again. I was laughing and crying. Seth leaned in and hugged me. “I’m a sure thing,” he said. “I love you and I always will.”I caught my reflection in his sunglasses. I looked awful. I shiver at the memory.
My phone is still buzzing. I try to catch my breath. I shut my window and start to walk back to my bed. A room always looks different in the dark. Maybe you think you know where you are, but there is always something that can jump out at you on the floor. Like a ghostly paper bag or a vengeful shoe. Objects that seem to move on their own with the sole drive of tripping you.
I crawl back into bed. There's the phantom of Dad’s snoring . I know he's not sleeping in his room, he fell asleep on the couch after finishing his seventh fifth. Sometimes my brain fills in the gaps so I can hear it everywhere. Funnily, I haven't actually heard him snore since Mom left. That's the one thing I ever heard them fight about. Before she turned out to be a whore, I guess.
BZZT.BZZT.BZZT.
I can't bring myself to read any of his messages. They're coming so fast all the paragraphs are lost to motion blur. Seth’s arms wrap around me and I think about the beating of his heart and the warmth of his lips against my skin. I open up the texts, ready to respond.
I love you
I text this over and over until I fall asleep.
Davis was the only senior on the bus. Somehow, everyone else had a car or a ride. It’s all right, though. James would probably give him one if he had a car, but he skated to school every morning. That's why he barely ever rode the bus with him. The bus thumped along the under paved roads. Davis forgot his earbuds at home, so the only music that accompanied him was his racing thoughts. Two sophomore girls popped their heads over.
“Ohmigod, Davis!” One of them shrieked.
“As I live and breathe,” he smiled. “Nice,” she said. “I’m so excited to see your finished painting.”
Davis took the lower level art class for a requirement. Like most things, he's not taking it very seriously. For their pop art unit, he's painting a portrait of the art teacher with a warthog face. It's one of his funny disruptions. He knows Mrs. Stanley is going to have a real field day with it, but it doesn't matter. Artistic liberties, he’d profess.
“She's such a bitch, isn't she?” The sophomore girl turns to her compatriot, who only nods in response.
“She's just jealous,” Davis says. “It must be depressing to teach art and see the youth soar above her.”
“For sure,” the girl doesn't get it. Class clown is a semi-heavy burden. Davis doesn't really feel like talking to these girls, but his position demands it. Comedy informs everything about him. To the giant thrift store jeans, to the loud Hawaiian shirt. He and James are the ultimate combination, at least he likes to think so. Quiet brooding begs for bright distraction.
The girl is still trying to talk to him and Davis is saying his preprogrammed lines. The bus stops in front of James’s street. Surprisingly, James is standing there.
“Like I’m this close to just filling my hydroflask with vodka, yaknow?” says the chick. Maybe she's just trying to get a rise out of him.
“Better be prepared to give me more than a sip,” Davis is watching James grumble towards the bus.
The sun is beating down on the forming ice puddles. James stomps through them with small shattering steps.
James turns up the bus aisle and plops in the seat next to Davis. Davis’s smile is genuine now, but he fights it from getting too wide.
“Crash your vehicle?” Davis asks.
“Something like it,” there's something off with him. Davis doesn't want to push it.
“Well damn, hope insurance covers it,” Davis wants James to break and laugh. Is it just another mood or did something actually happen this time?
“It won't, I got bad credit,” James grins and it's like heaven. “What's the move for you today?”
“Surviving art and physics for me,” says Davis. “Those bastards love to keep me down.”
“Who doesn't,” James eyes the girls who have since returned to whatever they were doing before. It's the judgement stare, as Davis calls it. James likes to observe his peers like a zoo-goer. Breaking them down to taxonomic types. Davis likes to think that James doesn't do this to him, but he knows he probably does.
“It sucks you decided to be bad at school and take baby art,” James is still dissecting the sophomore girls down to their tropes. “We could have done Art II together.”
“I wouldn't want to get between you and Alex. I know how you love it when people piss in jars next to you.”
“That's disgusting,” James breaks his glare at the girls.
“It's performance art, it's beautiful,” Davis gets up out of his seat to yell. “Everyone witness the wonderful work of Alex Madov! Disengage yourself from the shackles of capitalism by shouting with me: Poopy, pee pee, poop!”
Davis gets a few chuckles from the other kids on the bus.
“Sit down, fatso,” mumbles the bus driver.
“I will not be silenced! I’m a messenger of the good word, sir!”
"More of this shit and I’m skipping your stop!” “Fine, but I will make Alex remember on the day of judgement,” Davis sits back down. James is full belly laughing.
“You're so retarded,” James wheezes. Davis can't even come back with a response. He's high off of it.
The bus pulls into the school lot with a short stop. The mobs get up and begin to race out. Davis follows James down the line.
“You know Abbi?” James asks. Davis feels a little pit form in his stomach, but he doesn't change his expression.
“Vaguely, what about her?”
“She's in my art class,” James begins. “And I think … well you know, I’m going to talk to her.” He walks down the steps and out the door.
“Doesn't she have a boyfr-” before Davis can descend the driver's arm blocks him.
“I’ve had enough of your shit, kid,” he says. “If you keep being obnoxious, I’m gonna find a way to make you pay for it.”
James looks back, but he can't stay. Davis knows that he's gotta get to class. James does a little wave goodbye and Davis salutes him. “Are you even listening to me?” the bus driver seethes.
“Yes, sir. Divine retribution, got it.” Davis ducks underneath his arm and exits the bus. James has already disappeared into the crowd.
I pass the bong to Ashley. She starts another bowl. She’s the transport and I provide the material. The little things that keep our friendship afloat. I look at the clock in her car.
“It's 8:45,” I pick a piece of bagel out of my teeth.
“So that's it, we officially missed first period,” Ashley tops it off.
“They won't mark us, you know. It's a study.”
“Yeah, but when's the last time we signed in? I heard they're changing the policy again. Do you still have the lighter?”
I toss it to her. I don't get it. It's always her idea to pick me up so we can smoke before school, why now is she suddenly caring about attendance?
“We're pretty girls, we can get out of it. I’m next,” I tap on the clock. “Are you sure it's not fast?”
She shakes her head as she takes a snap. We're parked in the pond area a block or two from the school. It's our designated smoking spot. I like it, even at the end of fall it's pretty. I’m so engrossed that I don't realize her tip out the bowl and put it back in the cup holder.
“I don't know if it's wise to keep up the activity, we should probably get going soon,” she starts up her car again.
“Okay,” I say.
She reverses and swings out of the lot. We lean into the silence and it's super weird.
“Seth texted me last night,” I wait for her reaction.
“Oh,” she grimaces. “What did you say?”
“That I loved him.” Silence again. Ashley's trying to put together something well-meaning while understanding that I’ll probably ignore whatever she has to say.
“Abbi, I’m not trying to tell you how to run your life, but …” Her expression is now quizzical. She's said what she is about to say a number of different ways all ready. She thinks and thinks and decides to say nothing. Good call, I would have screamed at her. Not because what she thinks about my situation isn't true, I’m just in a ‘screaming at people mood’ because of it.
“I’m going to dye my hair again,” she changes the subject to avoid conflict. Classic Ash.
“Oh yeah? What color this time?”
“I don't know,” she checks her reflection in the rear view. “The red has faded out, maybe blue or pink this time.”
“You should go with a softer pink,” I say. “Since you're a soft spring.”
“Yeah, maybe.” We enter the school lot. “Listen, do you want to get together when I do it? Maybe you can dye your hair too.”
“I don't know, I might be busy,” I say. “Seth might want to do something,” I pause for her to protest. “Okay,” she says. She parks and we get out.
I barrel into art class. I don't care if I reek, out of all the teachers I can tell Mrs. Stanley smokes the most. It would be hypocritical of her to care. It looks like I’m the first one. Weird. I check my phone. It's 8:45. Well, fuck. Looks like Ashley needs to fix her clock. Mrs. Stanley is at her desk. She looks at me knowingly.
“Eager to create today, Abbi?”
I just nod and sit at my desk. I’m really feeling it. I open up my precalc notebook and just start sketching. Birds, eyes, trees, whatever. Kids start coming in. Their chatter echoes around me, I try to focus on what I’m doing. Someone bumps into my table. I look up. It's this lanky blonde kid, I think his name is James. He presses his hands underneath the desk as he leans up to talk to me.
“Eww!” He shouts. Some kids turn and laugh. I don't. I just stare at him. James goes red and sits next to the kid who pissed in a jar. Once an adequate amount of students are in the room, Mrs. Stanley starts her lesson slideshow. On the screen is a dirty urinal.
“How many of you are familiar with this work by Marcel DuChamp?” she asks. At this point, Jason, the designated meathead jock, enters the room.
“Sorry I’m late, Mrs. S,” he booms. He looks at the slide. “We building bathrooms today?” Mrs. Stanley glares at him.
“Wouldn't you like that? Considering you spend all of your time in there.”
“Whatever,” Jason brushes his mullet behind his ears.
“No, not whatever. Would you like me to move you into the sophomore class with Davis? Believe it or not he's getting much better marks than you are getting in here.”
Jason rolls his eyes and takes his place in the chair next to me.
“Up to a little extra curricular activities before art, Abbi?” he motions a joint in his fingers. I scoff and go on my phone. There's another text from Seth.
sorry about last night
and
im reading it all right now that was fucked im sorry
I start to respond, but before I can Mrs. Stanley outstretches her hand.
“Give me your phone, Miss Hagerty. I’m sick of giving you warnings.” I don't have the energy to fight, I just give it to her. “You can pick it up at the end of the day.”
My jaw actually drops. Jason must have really set her off, she's not usually such a cunt to me.
“Anyways, found art. What is it? Well, found art is the use of everyday objects to convey an altered meaning. It can be something you find on the street or something that once held value to you. For example, My Bed by Tracey Elim.” She pulls up a picture of a messy bed that looks suspiciously like my own. “So for your final unit of the quarter, you will be making your own found art. I really want you to take this project a little more seriously than most of you have been taking this class. I’m giving you the privilege of picking your own partners, but I’d like to remind you to be thoughtful with your choice. This will be worth more for your grade.”
I look around. I don't have any friends here. I toy around with the idea of asking Jason for convenience and he looks like he's about to pull that move. Behind me there's that James guy. He’s sheepishly looking at me. He seems kind of nice. Okay. I don't feel like getting up so I just turn around in my chair.
“Hey James, wanna be partners?” He balks a bit and then smiles at me.
“Yeah, totally,” He's beaming and it's somewhat endearing. Alex and I switch seats and now I’m next to him.
“I’m gonna be real with you …” I begin. He stops and shifts a little. “I have no idea what we're supposed to be doing for this.” He regards me oddly. Like he's trying to piece me together. It doesn't bother me.
“She said we have to bring in an object that's special to us and present it artistically basically,” he rubs his chin. Damn, I must be baked to hell. I didn't hear her saying that at all. “So got any stuffed animals we can cut up and make Lovecraftian monstrosities out of?”
“I got a hamster cage, hold the hamster,” I say. It comes out kind of weird and I probably sound stupid, but he doesn't seem to care. “Let's make a fucking zoo.”
“Perfect!” He’s kind of cute actually. In a way. Something about this feels fun. I realize the bell will ring soon.
“So um,” I rip out a page of my precalc notebook, still fresh with my drawings. I scrawl out my number and push it to him. “Call me so we can figure out the project some more.” I pack up all my stuff and start to head out. I can feel him watching me and it's not that bad.
“I sure will,” he says. Everything feels really groovy. There's a lightness now. I’m halfway out the door when I remember my phone. I can't believe that I just forgot about Seth. I think about begging for my phone, but I feel too above that. Still, something shakes the good feeling as the bell rings.

This has been bugging me for awhile now, and I think I have some pictures up on an old post showing me pulling skin off my neck/jaw area (and note: it got even worse since). My doctor gave me a referral for a dermatologist, but I still have some time before the appointment.
As I stated above, I can pull my facial skin almost like I have EDS; however, I have no other symptoms of EDS, and the skin laxity ends around my shoulders/collarbone. EDS was the first thing my doctor said before I showed her I did not have the same laxity on my forearms.
I’m only 27 (and male, 5’10”, 225lbs— probably useful info), but I’m becoming horribly prematurely aged, and it’s killing my confidence. The bizarre thing is, though, is that my skin quality is actually looking really good. Red light therapy has made my complexion look better than it has in years, cleared old scar tissue from pimples I popped, and gotten rid of all but a few stubborn forehead wrinkles I’ve developed from raising my brows to keep my vision clear of excess skin and my nasolabial folds. My skin is soft and thick, almost too thick, and it’s like almost like everything underneath the skin has melted. I really think that’s the problem— the fat and muscles that once held my face together are either disappearing or dropping, and I’m left with one amorphous, gelatinous blood pooling into my jowls and neck. Despite being overweight, I can feel every last bump and crevice in my cheeks, around my eyes, along my jaw and brow, etc. Yet the skin just covers over all of it like a mask, and it just makes me look fat (and as I just said, I am overweight, but my upper body does not look horribly so. I have massive legs, so people often think I’m a good 20-30lbs less than I really am). But it’s like all the fat has drained off my face and is sinking downward.
I’m at a loss. I keep thinking it can’t get worse, but it does. It’s affecting my vision, it makes my head feel heavy, I can feel my skin fold with every movement of my neck. Obviously, it’s destroyed my confidence and desire to be in public or date. And now as I read about stuff like acquired cutis laxa, I’m worried it could even be tied to stuff like cancer.
It’s worth noting that these symptoms really took off after a COVID infection. My case was very mild, but it was afterwards that things got bad. Tremors, spasms, heart palpitations, blood pressure spikes, brain fog, joint pain, muscle strains, you name it, I probably had it. I lost fat passing in my hands and wrists as well (strange thing to notice, but very evident as a powerlifter, golfer, and baseball player. Things start feeling different in your hands, your gloves stop fitting right, stuff like that). The tremors, heart palpitations, and all that cleared up last November after I upped my water intake from about a half gallon to at least one gallon a day, and all labwork was normal, if not better than before I was sick (no more vitamin D deficiency, testosterone up as my prolactinoma was finally under control after several years), except for positive antihistone antibodies. The rheumatologist said not to worry about it for now because everything else was normal, and he expected I had had an inflammatory reaction to the virus and the flare up was over.
I’m at my wit’s end. This is ruining my life, and not one doctor aside from my PCP seems to care because they dismiss it as a cosmetic concern.

(Now there are some parts in this chapter that actually happened in real life, the French revolution and incidents that happened during it. But pretty much the story is a work of fiction.)
Chapter 1: Recollection- I stood and watched the droplets of rain slide down the window pane. This should be a festival, or some type of holiday, as we rarely get any rainfall. I focused my gaze on the neon signs below. The rain falling around them seemed to enhance their luminosity. It is amazing that rainfall can make such a filth-riddled city like this seem almost; normal. After a little while, the rain slowly stopped falling. The dark clouds quickly dissipated and the twin moons cast their brightness, like two large spotlights in a prison yard. The city that was briefly hidden by the rain showed its ugly face. New Grimes City, the place where ‘good people’ are the stuff of legends. Gangsters, thieves, murderers and prostitutes are just some of the people who call this place home. Not a day goes by where you have to watch for wandering fingers reaching for your pockets. Although if you’re someone like me, you have more than just pickpockets to look out for. Being a private investigator has brought a slew of negative attention my way. There have been multiple assassination attempts made against me. But there’s a reason why all who have challenged me have failed.
Being a vampire has its perks, especially in a place like this. That’s the reason why I was sent here in the first place. Back on Earth things like me weren’t allowed in society, in fact anyone who put a single toe out of line was doomed to be sent here. The group known as “The cult of order” saw to that. No one knew of their existence, until the meteor struck. “The cataclysm of 2223”, the year that everything changed. After the meteor fell and single handedly wiped out most of the population of Earth, the remaining survivors needed a leader. The cult of order came to power, and established a "one-world government". sometimes I still can see the events of that fateful day as if it were a movie being played on repeat. I can still see the distant trail of the meteor as it plunged to Earth, see the towering wall of sea water as it came rushing towards the land, and being consumed by it. People who were fortunate enough lived in Strato-houses, or had some type of SHRV (Space Habitation and Recreational Vehicle) to get them out of harm's way. The rest of us weren’t so lucky, I would wager that half of the Earth’s population died that day. I remember as I was underneath the waves watching the many lifeless bodies being dragged along, I didn’t have to worry about drowning but I didn’t want to be stuck under the water. I tried to fight my way to the surface but the weight of the water and raging current made that near impossible. As I still kept trying to fight my way to the surface, I felt a sharp stinging pain in my stomach. A long metal rod had pierced straight through me like a knife through warm butter. When my blood started to mingle with the water that’s when I started to panic, if I didn’t get out of the water soon I would die. I hadn’t eaten in months up until that point, so I was already weak as it is. Bleeding out is kind of an ironic fate for a vampire, and one that I really wanted to take a rain check on. I started reaching out, desperately trying to grab onto something, anything that I could hold onto. If I was lucky, maybe it would be something buoyant enough to get me to the surface. I was so desperate that I started trying to grab hold of the bodies that were being tossed along the current above me. “I can’t die! I won’t die here!” were the thoughts racing through my head. Suddenly; as if some divine force heard my thoughts and felt my desperation, the current started to slow down.
A brief feeling of euphoria hit me as I felt myself just floating in the vast waters that surrounded me. However I knew I wasn’t safe just yet, I was getting weaker from the blood loss, so much so that I couldn’t use any of my magical abilities. With one more desperate reach, I grabbed onto the hand of one of the bodies. It was a young woman who looked to be in her early twenties. Her long black hair floated in the water, it made me think of me and my fiancée swimming in the lakes at Versailles. I hadn’t thought about her for ages it seemed, up until that point. She died a very long time ago, and I’ve tried to forget about it. Those were very dark times, even darker than the present I believe. It was at that point where I felt as if I wasn't going to make it up to the surface, I was too weak.Well if I was going to die, I wanted those thoughts of my fiancée to be my last. I remember hearing a beautiful song and the feeling of something embracing me. I surrendered to the warm feeling of it and closed my eyes, I'm pretty sure I smiled.

 I woke up; I was curious as to whether I was still alive, or had died and this was the afterlife. I felt as if I was laying on a bed, or possibly in a coffin with a soft interior. That's when a figure approached me, I couldn't clearly see who it was. I blinked a couple times to try and adjust my vision. It was a man, the thing that struck me was his pale skin. It seemed almost translucent. His piercing hazel eyes glowed brightly in the dark room. Then he smiled; he was a vampire just like me. "W-where am I?" was all I could say. "You are in a sanctuary, for our kind. This place used to be packed to the ceiling, but now it's very rare to see vampires. Alexandre and I have been the only inhabitants of this place for some time, so it's good to see another vampire." the man said. He grabbed my hand and slowly lifted me up. “How did you know I was a vampire?” I asked. “Oh, aside from the pale skin and fangs? No human could truly survive that.” “How did I get here?”, the man before me giggled a little at that question. “ You were rescued by a mermaid, if only I were so lucky,” the man said. “What was she like?” I couldn’t help but wonder, I didn’t realize mermaids were still alive, they are an ancient and resilient species. Also very beautiful, I saw a mermaid resting on a rocky cove a long time ago. Her hair was long and the color was like the stars on a clear night, the scales on her tail were navy blue that transitioned to a silver hue. When she saw me, we just stared at each other for a few seconds. She blew me a kiss and dove underneath the ocean waves. Mermaids do have that reputation for being seductresses, I wouldn’t have minded being tempted for one bit at that time. “Oh she was a thing of beauty, orange hair, sky blue scales, a high-born mermaid for certain.” “High-born?” I asked him, as I didn’t know there were different kinds of Merfolk. “High borns are part of the royal lineage of Merfolk, they can live for at least two-thousand years if all goes well. They are also born with special abilities, such as healing powers.” When I heard him say that I quickly lifted up my shirt, as I had remembered being pierced by that metal rod. To my shock and amazement, the rod and the wound were gone. “I remembered being impaled by a metal rod, and losing blood, did she really save me?” I thought to myself. “She must have, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking right now, would we?” he said. Of course, telepathy. He can read my thoughts, he must be pretty strong for a vampire. “I'm surprised you haven’t learned to read people’s thoughts yet, with you being around for as long as you have.” “Well I never really thought about honing my skills, I’m just trying to exist pretty much.” I said in response. “You need to learn your powers in order to truly survive, you almost died. A vampire almost dying from bleeding out! It’s an oxymoron personified!” The vampire started laughing uncontrollably. “Anyways, let me show you where you will be living. In the meantime I will teach you all you need to know.” The man snapped his fingers, the candles in the room lit up bringing light to the darkness. I saw the man more clearly, his garb was that of the aristocratic kind we wore back during the old regime. His long brown hair tied back into a ponytail. "Were you alive during the reign of the Bourbon?" I asked him. "Yes indeed, those were the days, I miss the gilded halls of Versailles, the large parties and the women, mostly the women." "Sir, may I introduce you?" A voice suddenly spoke, I looked over in the direction of the voice. It was another man, holding a tea tray. The top portion of his head was bald, he had pale skin, and was tall and quite burly. He looked like a rather stern man. If the emotions of happiness and joy were physical beings, they would run away in terror from his intimidating gaze. He was wearing fancy clothing however it was a little less extravagant than the former's, he was most likely a valet. "Yes you may, my dear Alexandre." the vampire said. 

"Very good sir", Alexandre put the tea tray on a little table, stood upright and took two steps forward. "May I present to you, the Chevalier de Castellane!" Alexandre spoke loudly. "You know my dear Alexandre, you don't have to be so dramatic when introducing me." The Chevalier spoke. "I'm sorry sir, but old habits die hard and even though it's true millennia have passed, I still remember introducing you like this at the parties and salons at Versailles." Even though his demeanor was rigid, and his gaze cold, I could see in his eyes a longing for the ways of a time long since forgotten. Sometimes I find myself wishing the same, before the revolution life was paradise. I was due to be married to the woman I loved, I had wealth and status, I would relive that time over and over again if I could. "Please forgive me sir, but I would like to keep my introductions the same as they have always been." Alexandre lowered his head a little, "We don't get many visitors as it is, so may I be allowed to do so?". "Yes you may Alexandre, if it brings you happiness then so be it!" The Chevalier said with a huge grin on his face, he turned and looked at me “You can call me Philippe, it makes things easier.” Alexadre glanced at me, “May I be allowed to introduce you, sir?.” “Oh! Y-yes you may, Alexandre.” The last time I was introduced by a valet was on the night of the last Royal Gala. It was not as extravagant as the other parties I've attended, but it was still a good time. Before; myself, my wife, our friends and family members were imprisoned and killed. “I need your name sir so I am able to.” Alexandre said with a hint of sarcasm. I glanced over towards Philippe, he was pouring himself a bumper of wine. I could smell it from the coffin I was in, Turin Rose Solis was the brand. My personal favorite, I could feel myself salivating. “Sir! Please may I please have your name?”, Alexandre said, this time sounding a bit more frustrated. “My name is È’tienne De la Croix.” I said. I could hear Philippe gasping. I quickly turned my head, I watched as the full glass of wine fell out of his hands. I was expecting it to hit the floor with a crash. However in the blink of an eye, Alexandre was standing next to Philippe. Glass of wine in hand, and the same rigid expression. I looked down to the floor in between the pair, not a single drop spilt. “Sir you have to be more careful, this wine is one of the two bottles we have left of the Turin Rose Solis. It would’ve been such a waste if this were spilled, please do be more careful next time.” The sight made me giggle a little, the Chevalier de Castellane, a nobleman, getting scolded by his valet. I was so distracted by the introductions and conversations, that I didn't look at my surroundings. We were in a cave, I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I thought it would be like a crypt or an old 19th century home. "Did you do the decorating yourself?" I asked, Philippe snickered a little. "No but you can take it up with Alexandre, he thought this place would be convenient for our purposes. But you did say that your name was É'tienne de la Croix, right?". "Yes I did, have we met before?" I asked, he did not seem familiar to me at all. "Yes we did meet, but only briefly. We were both imprisoned at the Hotel de la Force, I remember you being with your fianceé. A beautiful and noble woman I must say, what was her name again?". I could feel my heart breaking all over again, I looked down at the floor. "Genevieve de Lyon", it felt like I was regurgitating little blades trying to say her name. "She was, and still is the love of my life. It's been a very long time, and yet I still can't forget about her. She was an angel personified, a kind and beautiful soul." I could feel tears start to run down my cheeks. "Those revolutionary brutes defiled her, and forced me to watch. After they were done with her they proceeded to torture me. They ended up slitting my throat. They drug her away and left me for dead". After I said those words Philippe piped up, "Alexandre, give him my glass, he looks like he is in urgent need of some wine." "Right away my lord," as soon as Alexandre said those words, the glass of wine was being held in front of me. Alexandre is very good at his job, no wonder Philippe chose him as a companion. I took the glass of wine, "Thank you Alexandre," I said softly, "You're welcome sir." Alexandre quickly took back his place beside Philippe. I took a sip of the wine, if words could describe how delicious it was. I felt brave enough to continue, "The only thing I remember is someone coming to me, and offering me an escape from death and a chance at revenge, I said yes,". I looked up to see Alexandre pouring Philippe a glass of wine, Philippe looked back at me, "Do continue E'tienne, say what you need to say." I wiped the tears streaming down my face, and took another sip of wine. "When I was turned into a vampire, the person told me to wait until everything calmed down. They told me to blend into the crowd and feed to get stronger, to save the real prey for last." Before I could say another word, Philippe spoke. "Evil-doer's blood tastes better when they are afraid," Philippe said. My eyes widened, those were the exact words said to me when I was being told what to do. "Did you read my thoughts again Philippe?" I asked. "No, I was the one who turned you," Philippe said with a bit of pride. He continued to speak, "I'm honestly surprised you didn't remember me, although to be fair I forgot about you as well. I can understand though. The memories seem too much for you to handle. Though I do have a couple of questions in mind, did you find the men? Did you find your wife?"
I was flabbergasted, not only by the fact that I had just met the vampire who made me, but also the fact he could pose such delicate questions so casually. "W-well yes I did, I found both my wife, and the men who hurt her," I shuddered and looked away. "I took some clothes from a dead revolutionary, and escaped under the cover of nightfall. I hid in an abandoned apartment near the prison. When the day broke, I watched as the revolutionaries brought out the dead and the dying from the prison. That's when I saw my wife being dragged into the courtyard, beaten and bloodied beyond belief. A man stood in front of her, accusing her of being a traitor to the revolution, wanting to bring back the monarchy. The punishment was death, and as quickly as he said that, someone came behind her with a sword. With one swift motion of the blade, her head was no longer attached to her body.” The tears started streaming down my face again. Philippe came and sat by my side, “Please È'tienne forgive me for being so intrusive, but I need to know if you made those brutes suffer”. I took a minute to compose myself and wiped the tears from my face, “You're damn right I did-”.
The sudden ringing of the telephone shook me out of my recollections. I quickly look around, I'm still here in my office in New Grimes city. I sighed and walked over to my desk. “Hopefully this is a job opportunity”, I think to myself. I clear my throat and pick up the phone, “This is È'tienne speaking, how can I help you?”. A very familiar voice comes through, “È'tienne my old friend, I need to meet with you at once. There is an issue of grave importance we need to discuss, don't worry this will be a paid job. Meet me at the usual spot, there is someone here who is very anxious to meet you. Hurry, this is the type of man who doesn't like to be kept waiting very long”. With that, the man hangs up the phone. “This is unlike Guillaume, I have to get there right away!” I said out loud. I quickly throw on my overcoat and hat, and slip my pistol into its holster on my hip. I bolt out of my office, I run so fast that I almost bump into my secretary Jenny, who is carrying a load of paperwork. She yelped and stopped in her tracks and braced for impact. Thankfully I stopped just in time otherwise it would've been raining documents of various kinds. “Sir what's the rush?! You almost ran me over!” Jenny shouted at me. “I'm really sorry Jenny, I finally have a job opportunity and I have to get there as soon as possible!” Jenny quickly stood out of the way, “Good for you sir, are you going to Stonehaven?” She asked with a gleeful tone. “Yes, do you want the seafood capellini?” I asked her, trying to speed up the conversation. “You know me so well thank you sir, I'll get your dinner the next time.” she winked at me. I turned and walked towards the door. “Please be careful sir!” Jenny shouted as I closed the door behind me. I'm really grateful for her kindness and her loyalty. Even though business has been slow, she still comes in when she is scheduled. I start making my way towards Stonehaven, the most exclusive vampire watering hole in the city. There are many others, but Stonehaven requires you to be of royal lineage to even be considered a potential member. Thankfully I am of royal lineage, so I am allowed in without any hassle. As I get closer to Stonehaven, I start to feel very uneasy. I feel like something isn't right at all, all of my senses are telling me to run the other way. I start to wonder, why did Guillaume call me after so long? Why did he sound so nervous? There's only one way to find out, I hope my instincts are wrong on this.
(Please tell me what you think about this first chapter, and that if anything can be done different.)

Seriously, don't even attempt to trivialize it. It's not about waking you up at 3:00 am for mundane reasons like running out of milk or needing your Wi-Fi password. This entity, whatever it may be, operates outside our reality's bounds, and its motives are far from benign. I learned this the hard way recently, which is why I'm cautioning you all against making light of it. But before delving into specifics, let me offer some context, as sleep paralysis is a recent phenomenon for me.
One of my earliest memories of sleep disruption traces back to my grade school days. With my mother on an early shift unable to drive me to school for its 8:00 am start, she would drop me off at my aunt's house. Here, she ensured I was fed, dressed, and ready for school. Most mornings, I had just about an hour left to sleep before needing to rise. Often, I'd find myself in a half-asleep state from the moment my mom roused me until she tucked me into my aunt's spare bedroom.
On one of those mornings, as I lay down, teetering between wakefulness and sleep, I experienced a peculiar sensation. It felt as though my body began to rise, hovering about two feet above the bed, before swiftly plummeting back down. Startled awake, I assumed my mother had thrown me back onto the bed, only to find the room empty upon opening my eyes.
I hadn't encountered any other experiences quite like that, but it was during this time that I distinctly recall a notable surge in the frequency of the nightmares I was experiencing. The nightmares were generally the same, some cloaked being hiding in the recesses of my vision, always there, always watching. I felt as though each passing night terror that it got closer and closer to me, but always just out of reach. At times, I found myself trapped in a dark room, enveloped by an overwhelming sense of malevolence that seemed to saturate the air—and a fear entirely foreign to my waking experiences.
Then I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time.
It occurred at my mother's house, marking the initial instance where I experienced the sensation of my body being effectively immobilized while my mind remained active. I recall attempting to move my eyes and then my body, but all efforts were futile. As I struggled to regain autonomy, it sounded as though a gathering had convened in my kitchen, voices carrying in muted tones. None of the which resembled those of my parents; I even detected snickering and laughter at one point. The conversation seemed to be aimed at me, as my name was uttered several times, yet the other words remained indecipherable. The episode concluded with me returning to sleep without any further disturbances.
As the instances of sleep paralysis became more frequent, they culminated in another peculiar experience. Shortly after moving into my first apartment, still in the midst of unpacking and assembling furniture, the second incident occurred. I lay on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by unassembled bedframe pieces, when I awoke to find myself imprisoned within my own body once more. In the darkness, I heard a faint sound—a presence moving softly over each piece of furniture. Panic gripped me as I strained to turn my head towards the noise, but every effort proved futile. With each passing moment, the unseen entity drew closer until it reached the bedside. Helpless, I closed my eyes, bracing myself for whatever awaited.
Meow?
Relief washed over me as I realized it was just my generously proportioned feline friend making his way around the room. I could hear him moving about, stepping on more furniture and emitting a few disgruntled meows, presumably chastising my laziness for not assembling it yet. As I began to drift back to sleep, I was abruptly startled awake by a chilling sound.
Snnn-orrrff
A primal, guttural snarl pierced the silence, its menacing resonance echoing through the room like a thunderous roar. I struggled desperately to move my limbs, silently screaming in my mind, yet only managing a feeble whimper as I sensed the beast drawing near. Despite my efforts, my body only twitched, while in my imagination, I leapt up and fled. As a mischievous chuckle erupted, I felt hot, pungent breath on the back of my neck. I suddenly awoke, screaming, kicking and punching. I jerked my head to the side and was met only with darkness. I jumped up and turned the light on, a quick scan of the room revealed there was nothing there. Exhausted and recognizing my inability to function effectively, I reluctantly resigned myself to lying back down with the light on until morning. I called into work, knowing that in my current state, I wouldn't be of much use to anyone.
Days passed and soon, it was that time of the month again for my regular check-in from mom. I hesitantly answered the call. After a few minutes of conversation, we eventually broached the topic of my sleep paralysis.
"Honey, it's probably all the stress." she reasoned.
My job had me grinding away tirelessly, but despite my efforts, all I got was a tiny bump in pay. To add to the mix, my landlord decided it was the perfect time to raise the rent. It's safe to say, the stress was really getting to me. "I don't know, it's been happening my whole life, Dad ever had any issues with sleep?"
There was a noticeable pause as she contemplated her reply. "He's definitely had his share of nightmares, he'd wake me up a lot of the times, poor thing would be in tears."
"Jeez, I never knew, but Mom I gotta…" I endeavored to conclude the conversation, as my allotted chat time was expiring, however my mother promptly interrupted me.
"Sweetie, why won't you join us at church? It might help?"
I released a sigh. I staunchly opposed the notion of going to church; I'd rather watch a documentary on the history of paperclips. "Thanks, but I'm not feeling that right now."
"Please, just do it for me?" She pleaded.
Eager to bring the call to a close. "I'll think about, but, alright I'm going to go ahead a hop off here."
"Alright, I miss you, call me later okay?"
"I will, love you, bye."
I concluded the call with a sigh of relief, grateful for its conclusion.
For a stretch, life seemed to fall into place: My job noticed the disparity between my increased workload and pay and offered me a new position that significantly improved my financial situation. Thanks to this new position, I crossed paths with my wife, and we swiftly eloped. She was one of the top account managers, earning a substantial income, which enabled us to afford a nice house together. During this period, the night terrors and bouts of sleep paralysis took a hiatus, granting me a reprieve. Yet amidst the tranquility, a gnawing sense of foreboding lingered, as if a tempest loomed on the horizon, urging me to savor the calm while it lasted.
During this period, my wife and I had been eagerly anticipating the arrival of our first child. We were overjoyed as she reached the sixth month of her pregnancy, carrying our long-awaited daughter. However, my suspicions proved tragically correct. I'll never forget the heart-wrenching phone call from my wife, her voice choked with tears, informing me of the terrifying sight of blood. Hastening to the emergency room, we raced against time, but our efforts proved futile. We lost our precious daughter that day. The journey back home was a blur, engulfed in a suffocating sense of loss that seemed to consume us both. It felt as though a part of me had died alongside our daughter, and the profound grief only served to widen the chasm between us as time passed, transforming our once intimate bond into a hollow semblance of what it once was.
Sleep paralysis and nightmares began to resurface, as if some malevolent force was exploiting my already troubled state, and my ability to sleep dwindled. Additionally, minor habits and disparities in the early stages of our marriage, once insignificant, began escalating into cataclysmic arguments. By now, I'm certain even my breathing would agitate my wife. Despite experimenting with various medications, none proved effective. Even vigorous physical exercise failed to exhaust me enough for uninterrupted sleep. The situation escalated to the point where my wife banished me from the bedroom due to my incessant tossing and turning, disrupting her rest. Consequently, I found myself relegated to the couch. Resorting to alcohol became a regular occurrence, partly to numb the discomfort of the couch but also as a means of coping with my grief.
We barely conversed, even though she mentioned marriage counseling, I rebuffed the idea, convinced it wouldn't benefit us. Frequently, I'd discover her in tears, cradling the sonogram of our daughter, yet I would quietly withdraw, allowing her solitary moments of sorrow. She had her unique methods of grieving, just as I had mine.
"I can't keep doing this, we're drowning in debt, and you're just pushing us further into it with every bottle." She pointed to the glass in my hand.
"Oh, come on! I work hard for us, I deserve to unwind a bit!" In a moment of animated expression, I inadvertently spilled some of my beverage onto the floor.
"Unwind? You call draining our savings and neglecting our future 'unwinding'!?"
"Look, just let me sleep in my own bed tonight."
She crossed her arms, and for a moment, silence enveloped us before she finally spoke.
"I just—I feel like I'm living with a stranger." Her eyes begin to shimmer with emotion.
"I'm here, aren't I? What more do you want from me?!" My voice rising in volume.
She attempted to delicately take my drink away, her touch then shifting to gently grasp my hand. "I want us to be a team again, not just two people sharing a bed."
But the moment I felt her touch, I instinctively shoved her hands away from me. "We haven't been a 'team' since we lost—" My voice quivered, then exploded into rage. "You pushed me out! You did this! You don't talk to me about anything anymore! Just get the hell out!" I pointed to the door.
I stood in the open doorway, watching her car pull out of the driveway. With a final sip, I closed the door behind me. Met with silence, I sensed the weight of tension hanging heavy in the air. Deciding one more bourbon was in order, I made my way to the kitchen, intent on pouring myself one last drink. In a bid to ensure a restful night, I opted to accompany my indulgence in alcohol with a hefty dosage of sleeping pills. A reckless choice, I'm aware, but perhaps death was in fact the ultimate form of slumber. I settled onto the couch, flicking through channels until my libation was drained. Feeling sufficiently relaxed, I decided it was time for bed. Ascending the stairs, I stumbled and collapsed onto the master bedroom's mattress. Sleep enveloped me swiftly that night, yet trouble was never far behind.
I recall waking during the night and noticing that the hallway light remained illuminated. It struck me as odd since I distinctly remember switching it off before retiring to bed. However, given my inebriated state from the copious amounts of alcohol I had consumed, I surmised that I must have simply forgotten. I'd just get up and switch it off, but a wave of unease washed over me. Despite my intentions, I found myself paralyzed, trapped within my own body once again. I found myself transfixed on the door, illuminated by the soft glow seeping in from the hallway. In that moment, I discerned a shadowy figure lurking behind the door.
I hoped it was my wife, but a gut feeling told me otherwise; this time felt different, suffocated by an eerie malevolence. The doorknob rattled violently, as if something were struggling to open it. Yet, amidst the noise I caught a sinister snicker. The relentless jiggling of the doorknob reached a fever pitch, threatening to wrench it free from its socket at any instant. Then, as abruptly as it began, the tumult ceased, leaving an ominous silence hanging in the air. The door then creaked open with a slow, foreboding motion.
A sinister, shapeless presence loomed in the doorway, defying gravity as it hovered above the ground, its shadowy form exaggerated by the eerie glow seeping in from the hallway. I whimpered, struggling to stir my limbs in a futile attempt to awaken my body, but they responded only with slight twitches. My gaze remained fixed on the form before me, immobilized by fear. Suddenly, a sinuous appendage extended from the specter's face, resembling a long, black tentacle. It elongated and snaked toward me, prompting me to instinctively shut my eyes. Sensing its proximity, I remained frozen, an icy chill grazed my forehead, jolting me awake in an instant. Sleep eluded me for the rest of the night, so I opted for an early morning, brewing a pot of coffee to chase away the lingering unease.
For the following weeks, my routine remained monotonous: work, microwave dinner, then numbness induced by sleeping pills and bourbon until I could no longer keep my eyes open. I received a text from my mother-in-law stating that my wife wanted to reconcile, but insisted on therapy and my attendance at AA meetings. I refused, firmly convinced that all I desired was to reclaim my bed, and that her reaction was excessive. I contended that the alcohol provided comfort, a gesture I hadn't received from her in quite some time. My mother-in-law and wife were both displeased with my response; it became apparent that divorce was now the inevitable solution.
At this juncture, I experienced sleep paralysis on a daily basis, even in the absence of the entity. Each night, I would awaken multiple times, unable to move, only freeing myself to find dread awaiting the next episode upon returning to sleep. There was one rare night when I slept soundly, only to be abruptly awakened by a late-night call from an old friend. We had a bond stretching back to our middle school days, and were inseparable back then. However, this call wasn't one of nostalgia; it was about money. He needed a bailout for his mortgage, promising a swift repayment.
I moved to the edge of my bed, frustration mounting as I started to rub my forehead. "I can't, I just can't right now, I need to get back to sleep good—"
He interrupted me. "Please, I don't want to lose the house."
I found myself raising my voice in frustration as irritation crept in. It appeared he was wholly incapable of learning from his mistakes. "Look, it isn't my responsibility to bail you out every time you're in trouble!"
"I know, I know, please, at least do it for Eli, Chelsea left me all alone and it's been hard man." His voice starting to crack.
My voice raising to a near scream; "He isn't my responsibility either! You should have been careful! I told you she wasn't good for you and you didn't listen! Sort your own shit out from now on!"
I ended the call and slammed the phone onto my nightstand. So much for a good night's rest, thanks a lot, friend.
As my life spiraled further into chaos, I realized I needed to explore solutions beyond relying on alcohol and sleeping pills to combat sleep paralysis. Perhaps a spiritual approach was necessary. While I knew my mother would be pleased with this consideration, I'm certain what I had in mind would be vehemently discouraged. My mother firmly believed in the existence of demons, warning against interacting with them outside of 'God's protection'. Perhaps she was right, but I grew desperate for a solution. At this stage, I was willing to do anything for peace of mind, regardless of the consequences. So, I concocted a masterful plan:
I'd simply ask it what it would take to make it stop.
Each morning was fraught with dread, pondering whether the entity would manifest itself. I ensured to kickstart my day with a potent drink, maintaining a steady buzz throughout, perhaps to stave off any wavering doubts about my decision. My patience bore fruit one fateful night as I found myself immobilized once more.
This marked the initial instance when the entity directly addressed me, and its words seared into my memory with chilling permanence. It uttered abhorrent, repulsive, unfathomable insults about me, branding me a failure, devoid of worth, as insignificant as a microbe. It dissected my existence, critiquing my choices, appearance, and demeanor with a cruelty I had never encountered. It seemed to possess an uncanny ability to strike at the core of my being, as if it wielded a weapon honed to annihilate my spirit. And then, its merciless laughter echoed relentlessly.
In that moment, I recognized it as my opportunity to retort. However, the barrage of insults stoked a fire within me, igniting a fury that overpowered my intentions. What did this entity presume to know about me? It was entirely mistaken, and that infuriated me. Against my better judgment, fueled by indignation, I deviated from my plan and impulsively blurted out: "What's so damn funny?!"
As the words echoed in my mind, the laughter abruptly ceased, leaving behind an eerie silence. Relief flooded through me as I dared to hope that I had put an end to the ordeal. Yet, my premature celebration was cut short when an indescribable dread enveloped me. A black ichor oozed onto the floor beside my bed, signaling the beginning of a hellish spectacle. From the viscous sludge, a dark figure emerged, coated in sticky tar, yet defying gravity as it ascended, hovering above the ground.
Above me, it loomed, its weighty presence palpable as thick sludge cascaded onto the bed, it halted directly over me. Its head inclined, scrutinizing me with unseen gaze. Tears welled in my eyes, hot and unrestrained, as I braced for the inevitable embrace of death. The figure gradually descended, its feet pressing into my chest with an icy chill coursing through me. As its waist aligned with my sternum, a frigid sensation enveloped me. With a swift motion, it plunged its hand into my chest, seizing my heart, and darkness consumed my senses.
I felt a terrifying pull downward, as if gravity itself had gone haywire. My stomach churned with a sickening weightlessness, reminiscent of a plummeting elevator. As my descent abruptly halted, the sound of wind rushing in my ears gave way to a sudden explosion—a resounding burst, resembling the opening of a parachute. That's when I sensed something coiling around my waist, though invisible to my eyes. Desperate to break free, I reached out, only to recoil in horror as my fingers brushed against scaly, rough skin.
Simultaneously, the air filled with the echoing beat of what seemed like enormous wings, while I experienced the unsettling sensation of being lifted and dropped. Though I had a suspicion about what gripped me, disbelief held me back from fully acknowledging it. So, resigned, I surrendered to my captor's will, allowing them to transport me to an unknown destination. As the darkness yielded, a faint glow emerged beneath us—a jagged line emanating an eerie orange-red light. The creature descended, revealing a sight that churned my stomach: bubbling lava. Its faint glow barely illuminated what seemed to be a cavern.
As I descended further into the cavern's depths, the beast veered close enough for me to sense the searing warmth of the lava beneath my feet. Gradually, our descent stabilized, and my gaze shifted forward, revealing a massive door-like structure. Its design echoed the grandeur of ancient Gothic architecture, adorned with pointed arches and intricate buttresses. The edifice appeared crafted from a peculiar variety of marble, possessing a beauty tinged with an unsettling aura. Its construction defied convention, evoking a sense of unease; never before had anything been wrought in such a manner.
As the creature descended once more, carrying me firmly, we passed through the doorway, revealing the true scale of the chamber. Beyond the threshold, a vast expanse unfolded, illuminated by a solitary spherical light source, casting an unsettlingly dim glow upon a colossal, otherworldly mechanism. It resembled a colossal pillar, stretching upward into the darkness of the cavern, its details obscured by the dim light. Within its intricate workings, gears, wheels, and chains rotated at a languid pace. Amidst this mechanical labyrinth, my attention was drawn to a swirling mass of gray at the base of the mechanism, slowly undulating. The beast appeared to be steering us directly toward it.
As we drew nearer, we sailed past what appeared to be a platform, upon which perched a colossal beast. Its form resembled that of a massive reptilian creature, akin to what one might envision as a dinosaur. Yet, it stood upright on two legs, its powerful limbs chained firmly to the platform. With each short, sharp inhalation, it unleashed a deafening roar that reverberated through every fiber of my being. I couldn't help but notice the protrusion of its jugular vein, roughly the size of my upper thigh, expanding with each thunderous cry. As we approached the swirling mass of gray, a sudden wave of horror washed over me as I comprehended its true nature.
A sea of people.
I observed that they were all bound together by chains, encircling their arms, legs, and necks. These chains converged at the towering pillar, linking each individual to the mechanism. The mass of people moved in a circular motion, driving the turning of the cogs. Their pallid complexion suggested an absence of life, as if all vitality had been drained from them. Their agonized screams pierced the air, mouths devoid of tongues. I witnessed an individual collapse to their knees, only to be forcefully yanked upright by some unseen power, rest was an elusive notion in this place. To my horror, amidst the throng of young adults and the elderly, I saw children swept along by the relentless current of the crowd.
As the creature positioned me amidst the multitude, I pleaded desperately, but it was futile; the chains had already ensnared me. With each movement of the mass of people, I felt the tug on my own chain, pressed in on all sides without an inch of space to spare. The towering figures around me obscured any view beyond their heads, leaving me engulfed in a sea of bodies.
My voice pierced the chaotic symphony of screams, rising in a desperate plea for escape.
"Please! I don't belong here! I just wanted to sleep, this is a mistake!"
As I cried out, the orb of light began to shift, seemingly in response to my desperate appeals. As it drew closer and closer, a sense of dread gripped me. Hovering ominously above, it revealed itself as a grotesque monstrosity, casting a sickly glow that chilled me to the bone. I fought the overwhelming urge to collapse, my knees weakening with each passing moment. What loomed overhead defied any attempt at human description; it resembled a cluster of intertwining tubes, swirling and spiraling in a mesmerizing dance that transcended the bounds of reality. Bathed in a sickly blue light that pulsed like molten lava beneath its tendrils.
The light wrought a profound transformation within me, granting a clarity of self-awareness unlike anything I had ever known. In its piercing illumination, I was confronted with the raw truth of my being, stripped of illusion or denial. It was a sobering revelation, an awakening to the most authentic understanding of myself I had ever experienced.
I belonged here.
I had systematically driven away my friends, neglecting their presence and refusing to open up to them. Even my own mother's attempts at connection felt burdensome, our conversations reduced to mere obligations. But perhaps the greatest tragedy lay in the chasm that had formed between my wife and me—a divide entirely of my own making. I was the architect of my own downfall, responsible for the ruin of my life, with no one else to blame but myself. Every word the entity had uttered about me held a painful truth.
From this vantage point, my life appeared almost sweet in retrospect, bathed in the stark light of self-awareness. Yet, any semblance of hope quickly dissolved, for in this desolate realm, hope found no foothold, no sanctuary to thrive.
With my head bowed low, I trudged forward, the weight of my chain pulling me inexorably onward. In a moment of unprecedented vulnerability, I found myself offering a prayer. Despite my awareness that it would likely go unanswered, I embraced the grim reality of my fate, accepting it with a heavy heart.
God, have mercy on me…
Suddenly the sound of chains breaking shattered the air as I was yanked upward with astonishing velocity. In a sudden blur, the scene below shrank rapidly beneath me. The rush of wind buffeted me, and I sensed another presence, an arm wrapped around my waist. Clutching onto it tightly, I braced myself as the cavern's light faded into absolute darkness, squeezing my eyes shut against the unknown.
With a jolt, my rapid ascent came to an abrupt halt, my back colliding with something soft. Gradually, I realized I was back in the familiarity of my own bed. At the foot of the bed stood a figure, its features obscured by a radiant glow emanating from its form, resembling molten glass. The brilliance bathed the entire room in an ethereal light. For a fleeting moment, we locked gazes, suspended in a silent exchange. Then, as swiftly as it had appeared, the figure began to ascend, leaving my room cloaked once more in shadows.
I sat in silence for a while, grappling with the enormity of my experience. To dismiss it as a mere nightmare or hallucination would be a gross understatement; whatever transpired felt hauntingly more vivid and tangible than my current reality. It would take me months of introspection and contemplation to begin to make sense of it all, to reconcile the surreal with the mundane, and to find a semblance of peace within myself.
Although the experience didn't trigger an immediate transformation, its impact lingered, nudging me towards a path of change. Despite my ongoing struggle with alcohol addiction, I made a conscious decision to seek help. I began prioritizing regular hangouts with my best friend and even accompanied my mom to a few church visits. While I remained uncertain about my own connection to religion, witnessing her joy brought a sense of fulfillment that warmed my heart. In making her happy, I found a newfound source of happiness within myself.
As time passed, a sense of progress gradually infused my life. Achieving a year of sobriety marked a significant milestone on my journey, celebrated amidst the supportive community of AA. Even my wife took notice of my efforts towards self-improvement, leading us to embark on marriage counseling together. Before long, her return to our home signaled a hopeful new chapter in our relationship.
Not a trace of sleep paralysis had haunted me since that fateful night when I was guided from the depths of despair. I'm not entirely sure if it was an angel, or God, but whatever it was, it spared me, and for that, I'm grateful. And now, the most joyous news of all: my wife and I are expecting our first child next week. The doctors assure us of her perfect health, filling us with anticipation and gratitude. As for her name, I already have the perfect one in mind:
Grace

Hi Wagooners! This is my first review and it was a doozy! I hope I get the classic "well done you!" from the admins, but also let me know if I need to add more detail.
Today I am reviewing The Row’s Black Soft Margaux in 10” and 15” sizes, both in the more expensive leather, black smooth leather that is supposed to mark up and age nicely. As the title says, this review is 100% REP SCIENCE. Same bag, same model, different size, different factories, all from the same seller!
Author Expertise:
Fashion college graduate, 20 years in NYC, with good friends who are VP’S at top Fashion houses, including The Row. I have owned, borrowed, and touched many auths. I have owned a handful of reps. I have purchased reps on Canal Street (in early aughts), Panda buy (wegobuy), and lone wolf Reps in China.
I now full-time buy reps and not Auths because of the buyer's remorse. They just aren’t worth that much money and like a car, the value goes down once we walk out that door.
I tend to choose simpler designed bags, in easy to replicate colors, and I avoid hardware as much as possible. So, this brought me to The Row’s Margaux 10 and Margaux 15.
Disclosure (and interesting to note!):
Amelia, my seller, is aware I am doing this review, but did not give me any incentive (nor would i ever accept one!). I DID tell her that I intended to do a Wagoon Review (hoping that would help make sure she sends me the absolute best), which (I think) resulted in her bringing Other Factory into the mix to help promote OF. As I understand it, we think The Row is the latest line to be added to Other Factory.
Seller Contact:
Whatsapp Ameila. I chose Amelia because she checked off all the boxes for me: Fast Communication, no fluff or niceties, and I happen to prefer fast and direct people. Her packages tend to get to people faster than other sellers (when I did a deep dive reviewing the other sellers in this sub), she reps the best factories for the brands I like.

1. Paid 4.12.24
2. QC Photos: 4.25.24
3. Shipped 4.26.24
4. Arrived at my doorstep: 5.09.24

Price Paid for Item:

• Black Soft Margaux 10 = 1,140 CNY
• Black Soft Margaux 15 = 1,980 CNY
• Shipping = 980 CNY (BUT, this was for an order of FOUR total bags that ranged from medium to large size)
• Paid via wire transfer, but my bank connected to WISE automatically, one step click. I didn’t have to fill out all these forms or log into a wise account.

Factory:
Amelia automatically sourced from two different factories without asking me. She DID tell me after I wired the money. I decided to just “trust the process” and as one redditor in this group suggested to me “do it for the REP SCIENCE”. When I asked her if there was a difference in quality she said “very little”. When I did research of OF in our sub, I saw that it had a good reputation for their leather quality, but no review for THE ROW.

• The Row Margaux 10 - Kata
• The Row Margaux 15 - OF aka Other Factory

Quality of your rep from your factory:
Kata Factory Margaux 10
Leather: The leather is thick, but very very soft and will have a nice slouch over time, right now it feels sturdy in quality. Smells great, feels great, feels expensive..will break in nicely…if only I hadn’t also received Other Factory’s Margaux 15 on the same day!
Stitching: Clean stitching except one area. There is a knot, which seems small and inconspicuous enough, but I really hope it doesn't undo and unravel. We shall see.
Hardware: just “fine”, passable, but could be better. The feet had scratches after the first day (and didn’t take it out of the house). I wish the hardware were just about 30% heavier.
Overall finishing: The finish and brand stamps are good and clean. I saw in another thread showing a Margaux AUTH with messy edge finishing on the seams, so I made sure to take close attention to mine. There is one spot that has a white line that I can’t get rid of, but since it’s on the bottom, it doesn’t bother me. Inside pocket looks clean.
Lining: Perf, no complaints here.
Other Factory Margaux 15
Leather: When reviewers in this sub said the leather from this manufacturer was REALLY GOOD, they weren’t kidding. OF is the winner here. The leather seems much better oiled or conditioned. The leather is thick and sturdy-ish and will break in nicely and will no doubt have a good slouch.
Stitching: Clean stitching
Hardware: just “fine”, passable, but could be better. I wish the hardware were just about 30% heavier.
Overall finishing: The finish and brand stamps are good and clean. Edge and seam finishing is very clean and well done. Inside pockets and zipper are great.
Lining: I can’t tell if it’s just me, but the lining does not fit perfectly in once small section. This is me being nitpicky. To a naked eye and if I were to hand this to someone, they probably wouldn’t tell. But, with my fashion school eye, it’s not fitting perfectly.
ACCURACY:
Extra curricular: Good blog post on how to spot a fake The Row
Pics:
Rep vs Factory

• Margaux 10 - rep vs factory (Kata)
• Margaux 15 - rep vs factory (OF aka Other Factory)

Rep vs Auth

• Margaux 10 - rep vs auth
• Margaux 15 - rep vs auth

Additional Rep photos (different angles and details):

• Margaux 15 - Extra rep photos
• Margaux 10 - Extra rep photos

Dimensions:
Margaux 10:

• Auth Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 7.5
• Rep Dimensions: 10” x 7” x 7.26”

Margaux 15:

• Auth Dimensions: 15 x 11 x 9
• Rep Dimensions: 15.5” x 10.5” x 9.25”

Accuracy write-up:
I do not own the AUTH nor have I ever touched The Row’s Margaux. Based on countless auth Margaux reviews, here is a breakdown on both factory’s:
Leather: Other Factory wins this round, the leather is far superior to Kata’s. They both smell incredible, I can’t stop sniffing the smokey leather, it smells rich. I can’t compare the leather to the real thing since I haven’t held an auth, but from pictures and review videos, they both look the same.
Foil Stamp: Kata wins here - the foil stamp is supposed to be a bit faded, like the authentic version. Other Factory’s foil stamp has no fading, but since I like to beat up my bags, I don’t think it will be hard to wear in OF’s foil stamp. Other Factory’s stamped logo has a font that is slightly more spaced out, but nothing too noticeable and because i don’t have an auth in person to compare it to, it’s hard for me to say which factory wins here.
Handles push test (see blog post above): The authentic handles are supposed to be soft and pass the “push test” (again see the blog post above). Both handles are soft, but Kata wins here, as the handles are softer.
Edging: The edging is supposed to be “perfect” and skinnier than fakes, however we have seen a picture of an authentic Margaux with terrible edging, so I am less worried about this. However, when I inspected both, the edging width seems to be on par with an authentic version and there were no bumps or tears. This being said the Kata had a slight white line (a very small nick!) on the bottom of the bag, but so small that it doesn’t bother me and nobody will ever see it. I could easily cover it up, but I don’t care enough.
Metal hardware: I can say with confidence that both versions fail here. Don’t be deterred, I have yet to find a rep from any factory of any brand pass my metal test. Nothing is ever as substantial as the real thing. It looks to me that they have the same metal material and both set of feet have already gotten some subtle scratches. Both versions have their branded feet facing each other, the correct way. Other Factory’s versions, like their gold stamp, have a font that has a spacing that is slightly wider. Hard to notice, IMO and since I don’t have an auth to compare it to in person, hard for me to say who wins out here.
Lining: Both have good quality lining that is the same color as the auth, but because I haven’t held the auth, hard to say if they are 100%. I will say that the OF version’s lining isn’t perfectly fitted, but hard to notice and I wouldn’t care if a friend went through my bag because they would never notice.
Pockets & Zippers: The zippers are never as good as the auth and I am guessing the same here. However, since I think everyone should lower their expectations when it comes to reps, I think the zipper on the Margaux 15 is very decent. Margau 10 does not have a zipper. Pockets are great on both. Functional, fits a phone on the bigger one.
Dust Bags: Both dust bags look authentic, shape, label, and the wide ribbon (vs the more narrow ribbon NS store uses). That being said, they are the thinnest dust bags of all the dust bags I've ever had in my life, if this matters eve.
BONUS:
Other Factory wins this round! The leather is just better, slightly softer, slightly more oiled in. This being said, if I had only received the Kata factory version, I would have been over the moon and I am over the moon and as you see in my review, Kata wins in other categories.
Rep Satisfaction (required)
Very, very, very happy with both. I can't stop smelling both of them (they have that rich leather smell). They look close enough to the correct thing that I am wearing them out and about daily, without thinking about. IT DOES SCRATCH MY AUTH ITCH, I am just as excited, proud, obsessed with my bags as if they were Auths. The same feeling I remember from buying my Auths! The small discrepancies don’t bother me as I don’t think anyone would be able to notice them, unless it were a SA doing a very close inspection, bright lights, magnifying glass, and all.
Seller Satisfaction (required)
Very happy with the seller Amelia. I saw that Wagooners received items from Amelia within 2-4 weeks and this was true for me too. I know people complain about how Amelia is cold and to the point, but I find her to be really fast and to the point in her communications. She is efficient and I like her services so far. Without asking, she made sure to source from the best factories for quality. I am still a bit confused as to why she sourced two different factories, except to get the word out on Other Factory making The Row. And well done, Other Factory DOES make great Row Reps. I guess if you are from NY, NJ, Boston, Asia, Eastern Europe go with Amelia. If you are from the Southern US states, TX, or California, find another rep! There’s no pleasantries with Amelia!
The Wrap Up (required)

• I would wear these anywhere and show them to almost anyone. I would wear these to anyplace that sells The Row, however, I would not let a SA handle mine. The discrepancies seem small, for this style of bag. The measurements are ½” off here and there. The Row’s logo is so small, so while I am sure the logos are a tiny bit off, it doesn’t worry me. The leather is amazing, better than many of my auth brands. I haven’t handled the Row’s Margaux and wondered if they have a different weight or feel, but it’s good enough to me and it replicates the same sort of smooth, soft looking finish.
• WIMB Margaux 10 & 15
• Wear and Tear: I like to beat my bags up. That means put heavy stuff in them, wear them while I bike around town, hug them, wear them in the rain etc. I have only done this with the Margaux 10 (6 bike rides so far around town!) and it has held up well. No scratches, easy to clean off, rained on and fine

Sionia
Chapter12
Map First Previous Note: Reddit Tech support fixed map bug. Use mouse wheel/ button to zoom and navigate
Standing inside the opulent chamber of the forth tower alone, I made sure nothing was left behind. Heading down to a parking area for carriages and carts off to the right of the main entrance to the keep where my people where gathered. They were mostly settling who could ride where and seeing to their personal gear and supplies. I had a cart specifically for baggage for my people with my cart only for my items and food supplies.
I shocked myself with realization that I had fully adopted a nobility's frame of mind as I now referred to those before me as my people. Looking over as Evito came trotting up slightly out of breath, I gave him a slight nod.
“Come as I must do as I was commanded.” Evito stated as he saluted me with a half bow before leading me to the ornate carriage.
The carriage was well made and really just needed a good coat of paint and some polishing as it showed signs of neglect and years of unuse. The Duke”s insignia had been removed which looked rough where it was sanded off. Evito opening the door motioned me inside.
Closing the door and making a grand show of the door lock before lifting up a metal reinforced window shade. Once the window shades on one side were up and locked into place, Evito then lowering another set above the windows that were louvered that allowed light inside the carriage but had a cheese cloth type of covering matching the deep maroon color of the inside of the carriage so no one could peer outside easily.
“The window shields should be used when under attack. You can open the upper view slots for light and can peer out without showing yourself. As you can see, there is even these three here where you can give orders to the driver. The back two you can give orders to the servants on the tiger perch. If you lift up the seat here in the back, you have storage space as you can see your property there. Here in the front is slightly different. You will notice when you lift up the seat, it looks the same as the back. However, if you reach here,this opens up and you can store high valuables. I would recommend storing your riding gear and overcoats in the front storage. Your Lordship should get a strongbox from the tradesman's guild and put about three silver, four sceats, twenty five koper and a few pelano and some mites in it. Store that strong box in the storage area of the back bench. All bandits and raiders know a noble has money. If you are caught and forced to submit, you can hand over this chest and not lose a fortune.” Evito explained the intricacies of the carriage Duke Boasag gifted me.
“I see. Very good advise. Thank you, Evito.” I said with gratitude.
Closing the upper louvers and then opening the windows, Evito then flipped a switch and lowered the glass window next to the back bench.
"All the windows have this lever as you can see. Slide the lever like this and you can lower the window for more air. Should you wish to close the window, just lift the window up and slide the lever back to keep window in place. You will notice two sword hangers set on each side of the carriage and a shield holder up there. I would recommend you get swords for them and not hang your personal one. Up in the front corner there is your personal water cask and silver cup. It it is strapped to the front right corner of the carriage where only the spigot shows inside. I have seen that it is already filled. Lastly, if you lift these two panels and flip the leg here, it becomes a travel bed. That is all I have to to show and have fulfilled my duty.” Evito stated with a salute and a bowing nod then opened the carriage door where he returned to the keep.
I stepped out and called to my soldiers, Razor and Meowth. I spoke to Lars asking him to place the guard around our party and to make a plan for when we would have two more carriages and two more carts by the time we left Trikath. I then spoke to Razor and Meowth asking them to take up position in the tiger stand of the front two carriages. I then asked Razor to inform the wolf kin brothers to take the tiger position on the third carriage as they would be responsible for guarding that carriage while traveling on the road. Lastly, Pamba was being spoiled by Rina and would be riding with her for the time being.
With everyone saddled and settled, I called out to Lars to head directly to Trikath's tradesman's guild as I entered the carriage. I immediately lowered two of the windows, the side louvers and one back louver as it was a warm day. About twenty minutes later, we entered through the gates of Trikath that looked like any typical medieval city in Europe back on earth. The only difference was that the city streets were much cleaner with a well drained baked brick road.
The tradesman's merchant's guild was similar to Id but larger. Once there, I was met by a thirty something man with black hair and blue eyes.
“Welcome to the Green Trading Company and tradesman's guild. Master Porgisl owner and Guild Master. I am Fronz the manager of this branch. You must be Count Wyatt. I have been informed by Evito to procure items and will help with any other transactions.” Fronz introduced himself with a formal bow and salute.
“Nice to meet you Fronz. I would like to get two more fully fitted out carts without florses. I also will be needing things from the storefront.” I requested with a slight nod.
"As you wish" Fronz stated as he led the way to the storefront.
In the merchant's building storefront, I had Tiana and Rana get the things they would need to do their work. I also had my head cook Big Jake an imposing man come with me. It seemed that size mattered with cooks as a sign their food was good. Anyway, I had Big Jake select cook and service ware for travel and six water casks which he was to fill and install on the carts and the two new carriages. I had Gus and Lorna select some personal grooming items along with towels, linens and mattresses for the Order of Knights that would fit in a cart. I also had them get any other basic items for the road trip that they could think of.
I picked up a very high quality strongbox that was longer but not wider or deeper with four keys. While there, I also picked up a couple of blank keys. Seeing some really nice looking padlocks which were definitely more advanced than what was expected, I bought the entire lot of ten which came with four keys each. Finally, I got several large soft marking chalk blocks with a slate board that was about a foot square.
Finished with shopping, I asked Fronz my wish to hire two stable hands, three drivers and a blacksmith since I did not see those trades previously when I was hiring servants. A little over a half an hour later, I hired two teenage boys and a very well muscled late twenties man named Luke Smith with blonde hair and green eyes. Luke's occupation oddly enough matched the meaning of his surname. The stable boys were both brown haired and brown eyed and around fifteen years old. The first was Brad and the other was Tim. Both were orphans and had no surname. All three were to care for and look after all the florses which I had a total of forty one now. Luke loaded up his anvil, toolbox and bellows in the back of the last cart the baggage one for our party. Both Brad and Tim would be riding a florse making sure the strings of florses were alright and deal with any issues that might arise on that front. The drivers were Matt a twenty four year old young man with brown hair and eyes. Doug a twenty five year old with lite brown hair and green eyes and Jace a twenty eight year old with red hair and green eyes. They were trained to drive carriages and carts for the merchants and guild and now would be driving the carriages with my footmen learning on the fly with the two new carts.
Back at the dock about an hour and half later since I arrived, Fronz approached me as he was writing on a type of clipboard that had a small inkwell attached to it.
“Lord Wyatt, your total bill will be twenty one eight six dinari.” Fronz stated as he read from his invoice.
“Very good.” I replied and took out three silver coins and handed them to Fronz.“Here is eight erytho and fourteen koper.” Fronz stated as he gave my change from his strongbox.
“Great and thank you Fronz.” I replied with a smile and pocketed the change as I was wearing my bluejeans.
“It is a pleasure to be at your assistance Lord Wyatt. We welcome your business anytime.”Fronz stated with a salute and a deep bow.
I then sorted our party again as I had the new carts fitted with mattresses for the Order of Knights. Old Maude would ride in the cart with Reagan and Guntar with apprentice doctors with Sir Jas and Cleef. I had my extra florses put onto four strings where two strings would be tied to the baggage carts. The girls were split up equally between the two new carriages with Lorna assigned with Freya, Illya and Rina in their carriage and Wynna, one of my chambermaids, in the other. The rest of my servants would split up to ride in carts except the cart with my earth items. Big Jake would drive my cart that had food rations that Evito provided and Luke would drive the baggage cart.
Retrieving my tool box, the power station, two swords and my shield which was transferred to my carriage. I also placed a padlock on the five crates that belong to myself that stored all the earth items. I ordered Big Jake to tie my crates down with rope so they would not shift while traveling.
Once everyone was sorted, I called everyone to load up with a grand gesture. However, I insisted Gus riding on the drivers bench with Jace rather than with me as would be normal for the first leg of the journey. I just did not want him to see and ask questions or what I planned to work on.
With a wave of my hand out the carriage door to Lars, our party began traveling out of Trikath and heading straight south on the King's Highway. While we were traveling, I transferred the strongbox contents to the new one as the old strongbox was almost over flowing as I had placed the contents of Shu's box into mine leaving that box with documents for the guild to deal with. Putting my new strongbox along with the power station in the the cubby hide just like my cart had but better crafted as the cubby was a false floor type rather than a blocked off section. I then began working on making a key for the first strongbox with a couple of files from earth. I cut a chalk block into thick pencils which I shaved for dust and used the slate board to help identify the key slot locations and depth.
“I am the man!” I cheered as I turned the key in the lock and it clicked after an hour and a half of work.
Placing in the strongbox five erythro, five sceates and four koper where I locked it up. It was unfortunate that I had no mites but I would resolve that later. I then secured the strongbox under the back bench and the toolbox in the cubby under the front bench. With a satisfied sigh, I drew the curtains of the carriage and laid down as I was still quiet tired from not enough sleep since I arrived in Sionia. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to peacefully nap.
A knock on the door wakened me where I raised up and pulled the curtain back.
“Lord Wyatt we have arrived at a good place to camp for the evening meal.” Announced Lars with Gus standing next to him.
“Very good.” I stated as Gus opened the door to let me out.
“Lord Wyatt, Lady Freya Thor requests to dine with your this evening.” Gus stated with a salute and bow.“ I see. Very well. Please inform the lady of acceptance.” I stated as Rana and Tiana came up.
“Would you like to wash up?” Asked Tiana with a flick of her left ear.
“Yes,that would be nice Tiana.” I answered with a nod.
“Would you like to change into something more comfortable, Lord Wyatt?” Asked Rana as she was seeking to be of service.
“Yes, I would like that. The dark green outfit would do nicely" I answered.
“Lord Wyatt, what kind of meal would you like this evening?” Asked Big Jake with expectancy.
I sighed and shook my head.
“Listen Big Jake, just be responsible with the rations we have. We are expected to be on the road for fifteen days. Just make sure that you do not cause us to run out of food. If we need to buy more or something else, then we will. If you need meat, ask Lars over there to have one of his men go hunting. Just show me what you can do with the rations we have. OK?” I explained as I was not expecting to have to directly deal with this kind of minute detail.
“Yes, Lord Wyatt. I so sorry to upset you!” Big Jake said with his lower lip quivering as he bowed deep.
“I am not upset. You are a very good cook. I would call you a grand chef given your qualifications. As to food questions, I do not know what rations we have. So, making any demand now is not something I should do. In time, you will learn what I like and do not like. But for now, just make the meals as good as you can but do not waste the rations as we have a long journey.” I explained hoping not to cause the gentle giant of a man to cry.
“Thank you, Lord Wyatt. No one has ever allow me to just make anything without direction. I promise to make you an amazing meal.” Big Jake said with pride.
“Very good. Will be looking forward to it. Oh, Lady Freya will be joining me and perhaps Ladies Illya and Rina too. Keep that in mind if the rations provided are to be divided. I would prefer that everyone eats the same general meal. Though, you can vary it for my guests and myself.” I continued to explain my preferences.
“Yes, Lord Wyatt. I will get to work right away.” Big Jake replied and scurried off toward where the cooking fires were lit.
Lukas and Stephan set up a walled curtain enclosure bought by Gus to allow bathing and dressing while on the road that sat between the first two carriages. This was done so the girls group could wash up in privacy. While Freya was washing up, I decided to check on Sir Jas and the knights and see to my own constitutional.
“How are you doing Sir Jas, Cleef, Gunthar and Reagan.” I stated as I walked up to where they were lying before a fire.
“Actually not too bad. We thank you for the mattresses. It was a godsend for us. We rode very comfortably.” Sir Jas stated with a smile and a salute from his lying position.
“Yeah, it is more than what we would have gotten from the Order.” Reagan stated with sour look and a salute.
“He is not wrong. We thank you.” Stated Guntar with a nod and Salute from where he was sitting.
Cleef just made a grunting yes nodding of his head, mouth and cheeks were still swollen and speaking was excruciatingly painful.
“I am glad. Let me know if you need anything.” I stated as I rose from my squatting position near Sir Jas.
“Wait, Lord Wyatt.” Pleaded Sir Jas as I was about to leave.“Yes, what is it?” I replied with curiosity.
“We have all been talking and how we are now traveling confirms our decision. We would like to join your House as Knights. We will have to ask his Grace Duke Avondale who is Lord Marshal for transfer. General Bondi who is over all of the Knight Orders is away in the east reinforcing and insuring the defenses at Caladan, Norrbotten and Red Keep with the third, forth and fifth Order of Knights.” Sir Jas requested with a salute and nod which all the others did as well.
“I am touched. However, you know I do not have any lands or manor. I cannot in good conscious accept.” I replied with a shake of my head and sad look.
“Should you be awarded with a manor or lands would you accept?” Asked Sir Jas hopefully.
“If and I do mean “IF” and I have enough room and can support you properly, then yes, I will accept your vows of fealty.” I promised with a smile.
“We look forward to serving you for we are certain you will be amply rewarded.” Stated Sir Jas with another nod and salute.
After meeting with the Knights, I talked with Old Maude who was resting as the apprentices from doctor Zalzworth were doing most of the work. I allowed her to see to my wounds and apply the elven salve. Next, I sought out the guards to insure the posting of the watch so that everyone had a break and ample time to eat. After this, I met with the wolf kin brothers Conan and Connor. The only way to tell them apart was their eye color. Conan had gray eyes and Connor had olive eyes. I asked them to take the watch equally over the females to ensure no one bothers them. With Razor and Meowth, they said they would stretch their legs then head back to get food and rest up a bit which I agreed with.
Back at my carriage, I was met by Tiana who had set up a bronze bowl next to my carriage and proceeded to remove my shirt and wash my upper body with heavily scented water and soap. When finished, Tiana applied a similarly scented oil with extra attention to my underarms. Rana brought me the green outfit with excitement. Gus and Tiana helped me donned the outfit and Rana quickly went to wash my shirt for it to be ready in the morning. Gus combed my hair and placed the beret hat on my head. I then belted on my sword and gun belt and headed to a table set aside for me to eat the evening meal.
Just as Freya and the girls were finishing up and streaming out of the enclosure, Meowth came jogging up.
“Meow Lord Wyatt, do not be alarmed but there is three people watching our group. Razor Tom is keeping close watch on them. They are made up of a tom kitten, an old tomcat and a meowther. They are in the trees before the fluff fields.” Meowth said as she nodded toward the forest belt and the cotton fields beyond.
“Good to know. Where is Razor?” I asked as I stood up and was waving at Lars to get his attention.
“Razor Tom is over there up in the big meowoak tree, meow Lord Wyatt” Meowth said with a flick of her right ear and stiff tail that actually was pointing in the direction of Razor.
“Well done. Keep watch on the women and restrict them to near the carriages until we sort these guests out. Let Lady Freya know so she can keep the rest calm.” I ordered with a slight nod of my head.
“Purrrfect, meow Lord Wyatt.” Meowth replied as she jogged off to speak with Freya.
“How can I be of service, Lord Wyatt?” Lars asked as he approached followed by a short bow, salute and chest bump.
“My body guards Razor and Meowth spotted three people watching our group. Razor is up in the big oak tree behind me keeping close watch on them.” I stated and paused because of the horrified shocked look on Lars' face.
Lars took a knee with a deep bow of his head said, “I apologize for my failure along with the men under my command. Our first day to be so tainted! I beg for your forgiveness.” Lars said as he groveled before me.
“There is no harm done this time. See that you post your men better and have them do a proper scouting of the area in the future. Last thing I want is to have to go into battle from a surprise attack that was preventable.” I admonished with a stern look and a pointing finger.
“Yes, Lord Wyatt. We your house guards will show you our true worth from this day forward!” Lars promised with a double fist bump to the chest and a salute.
“Good enough. Now, have six men flank them and find out who they are. If they are locals, ask them to return home. If they are not, bring them to me but do not harm them unless they become violent.” I replied with my orders.
“At your command, Lord Wyatt.” Lars said with fist chest bump with salute and immediate ran to where five of his men were relaxing before a fire.
Lars with the five men split up into two groups of three. They then made a very wide circle to get behind the trio watching our party.
Big Jake at this point brought some warmed up bread and a type of green herb dip along with sliced apples and some lamb slices mixed with onion, garlic, two types of squash and a variety of herbs.
“Lady Freya, I am glad you are here. Lady Illya and Lady Rina you too are most welcome.” I stated with a formal bow and sweeping arm as the ladies approached.
“Thank you, Ryan for this little pleasure.” Freya said with a nice smile.
“Yes, we thank you too.” Said Illya quickly also speaking for Rina.
We then seated ourselves and began to eat the bread with the herb dip that was incredibly delicious as Lorna and Gus were pouring a nice sweet vinqua made from berries. The herb dip was amazing as it appeared to be a butter, garlic and herb mixture. However, it also had the undeniable taste of olive oil too.
Just as Tiana was plating out the main dish for our group, Lars approached with the trio. The first was a middle aged man of lite brown hair that was beginning to gray. The second was a late forties to fifties woman with heavily graying hair. The last was a boy of about six to seven years old with brownish red hair and bright green eyes.
“These are the ones watching our camp, Lord Wyatt.” Said Lars with a double fist chest bump and a salute.
“Very good. Well done.” I replied with a nod and a return double chest fist bump salute.
The trio looked very scared especially the boy who was beginning to tear up to cry.
“I am Count Ryan Wyatt. Who are you and why were you spying on our party?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I am Robert Duffy. I was chamberlain and steward to Count Charles Appleton who was assassinated by rogues. This is Hazel Radcliff Housekeeper for Avalon fortress. The little Lord here is Charlie Appleton the rightful heir to the title of Count of the Avalon Western Region and the fortress of Avalon. We humbly ask for your protection." Stated Robert with the begging request.
“I see. Well now. Who is specifically after the young lad?” I asked for this intrigue was something I did not want.
“I suspect the House of Skafhoggr but not the Viscount himself. He is, well, not a person who can strategize. It is more than likely his wife Lady Ludmilla or his mother in law Dowager Baroness Grogda Wode. Their home was Fossberg a small mountain village east of Red Keep that was destroyed by the Empire. They were staying with Viscount Skafhoggr at his manor in Dorn before they came to Fortress Avalon. Viscount Skafhoggr married Lady Ludmilla after only one month introduction. Almost two months after they arrived at Fortress Avalon, my Lord Avondale fell ill after drinking vinqua and died within a half span. Only poison kills a healthy and strong man as my lord was in such a short span. Two days after my lord's death, Lady Beatrice Appleton also fell ill and died within a span. A week later, the young master was attacked and his bodyguard fought to the death to protect him. Hazel grabbed our young lord and fled into city. I received word and joined them. We were attacked again by a mercenary known to do assassinations. I was able to wound him but not before the young lord was stabbed. We fled the city and have been on the run these past three months. It was only a week ago we learned that Viscount Skafhoggr was awarded the title to Fortress Avalon. Please, I beg of you! Help and protect us!” Robert explained with his pleading request.
“ I see.” I said as I sat quiet for a moment to consider what I should do.
“That is clawful!” Said Meowth with her tail straight and hair raised in an angry display.
Pamba jumped out of Rina's lap and climbed onto my shoulder where she whined and rubbed her check against mine. Looking over at Freya, who had the look of fury in her eyes, made my blood run cold. I suspected Freya wanted to kill whoever would harm a child. I also had the urge to do extreme violence against these villains.
“Very well. I Count Ryan Wyatt grant you protection. However, know what you see here is all the retainers I have. I have no home or lands because of the Empire. I am now on my way to see the King who summoned me to appear as soon as I can get there. I must go to Avalon and present myself to Viscount Skafhoggr to see if I have any new messages from the King.” I stated my travel plans to the trio who had the look of horror.
“We can not return to Avalon. The young lord would be killed on sight.” Protested Robert with Hazel clutching the boy tightly as he began to cry.
“Lord Wyatt. You can not take them to Fortress Avalon. It would almost certainly bring attack and more attempts of assassination. I know you can win a battle against a small force. However, you can not protect against an arrow from an assassin who creeps in the shadows unseen.” Freya stated as she breathed her anger despite a calm voice.
“You are correct. However, I have no intention on taking them to Fortress Avalon. I believe that they should travel through the city in a cart with guards where we will catch up to them within a day. Know, I will not stay in Avalon more than one night as etiquette requires as Viscount Skafhoggr will host me for a night's rest from travel.” I stated the plan and I saw Freya sigh a bit of relief with Pamba making a quiet approving barking noise.
“Tell me Robert, do you know of an adventurer party that is honorable in Avalon that I could hire for this journey? I have the feeling that I will need more fighting men. I do not want to select mercenaries as they are only loyal to who pays the highest coin and I can not compete given my circumstances.” I asked as I looked toward Lars with Razor now standing beside him.
“Yes, Zack Talley's party. He is an A ranked adventurer with seven members mostly C ranked with two B ranked.” Robert stated as he recollected the party I had requested.
“What do you think about hiring them to protect the cart you will be riding in disguised as commoners traveling south to the capital? You three would have to change into clothing of commoners with the story of fleeing from the devastation of the Empire. Maybe say you are going to relatives near or in the capital. Could you do this?” I asked explaining my plan further.
“Yes, that would work. I do not think Zack Talley would recognize me as I have only met him twice. His reputation is very good.” Robert stated with renewed hope and relief.
“Alrighty then. That will be the plan. Will need to send a floxis message. Can we do that in Trino?” I asked Robert.
“Yes, there is a small adventurer guild office there. They will take the request and can have them meet you a few millo outside Avalon's main north bridge barbican. The cost of hiring is expensive of at least an erythro maybe as much as a silver if they have recently completed a difficult job.” Robert explained.
“I see. That is good to know. Now, get you something to eat. Once finished, you and Hazel ride in the third cart. Charlie, you can ride in the carriage with me after Hazel cleans you up.” I stated with a sigh and was thankful for the information Robert provided.
Freya took it upon herself to look after Charlie and made sure he had plenty to eat. Charlie was enthralled with Pamba as he fed her some lamb pieces. After dinner, I had Old Maude check on Charlie's wound that turned out to be a deep cut between his side and under his left arm at the bottom of his armpit. Old Maude cleaned the wound and redid the stitches as they were too loose and was the cause for the wound to not been healing.
About an hour later, our party was back on the road. The travel was quiet and Charlie fell asleep with Pamba curled up next to him. Over three hours later, we arrived long after dark in Trino. We went to the inn called the Resting Unicorn where they had walled enclosures for large parties to camp and be well protected. I forbid all from going into the tavern but allowed the tavern owner to bring a cask of ale of and some mutton stew as some in the party stated they did not eat much at the last stop. Lars impressed with setting the guard as he was making sure nothing else would go wrong. I set up the bed platform where I could stretch out to sleep. Gus slept sitting up with his feet up next to Charlie on the front bench. When I laid down, Pamba came and rubbed my cheek with hers before curling up in the crook of my arm. It was easy to fall asleep as I was mentally and physically tired.

Timestamp: https://imgur.com/a/V1a3h2C
In dire need of some funds to hold me over until I start my new job. It pains me to let go of some of these but c’est la vie!
Open to reasonable offers and bundle discounts!
GEAR 1 GEAR 2
-Hoptlite (LTC rebrand) 26135 10 x 12 Multi Curve Level IV - Single plate Brand new plate coming in at 6.7lbs. Never mounted or dropped and just stored as a spare. I have another one in a carrier and it’s very comfortable. LTC is top notch! - $215
-FDE Streamlight TLR-1 HL 1000 Lumens With “ear.” Brand new in package. Comes with everything (new batteries and all keys). I don’t even think I opened this yet! -$120 STILL AVAILABLE SOLD
-House Party Distro x WRMFZY x War Club Clicker Bundle That Last of Us drip 💦 Tee is sz L, BNIB and includes four stickers. Willing to split, but would rather keep as a bundle! - $90 $85
-Surefire SF3P 1/2-28 Catch and release. Some salt on wrench flats and base from previous owner - looks like it was pinned and welded and then reversed. A little ugly but not noticeable once installed. Threads are in perfect condition and it installed right on without issue. No rounds from me, unknown round count from previous owner but the prongs themselves are pretty minty. -$80 SOLD
-GrovTec QS 2-Point Sentinel Sling - Multicam Brand new with tag, though it has been slightly cannibalized for a project. It came with QD swing swivels stitched in place, but those were removed. All the webbing is included and just has to get new QD’s stitched in. Offering at a nice discount. -$45
-Loogu Fast PJ Military Helmet - Coyote Strictly Chinesium here. Like new, bough for an event to mount a GoPro but it was too hot to wear so barely worn (and not sweated in). Makes a decent enough bump. -$45
-SOG Flash II Assisted Opening Knife - Black Was a daily carry for a while. Some salt and could probably use a sharpening but still in great shape. One of SOG’s best knives, light and carries well, very responsive assist. Also has a locking mechanism. -$40
-Viktos Wartorn Gloves M Brand new, never worn. These gloves feel great. Nice combination of materials with knuckle protection. I took the Velcro patches off but they are included. -$35
-Vortex Optics Rangers Quarter-Zip BNIB, sz M long sleeve pullover top. Has reflective logos and a rangers design on the arm. - $40 $35 -$30
-Worksharp Guided Pack Sharpener Brand new! Nice and handy little system to sharpen on the go/camping/etc. -$30
-Citizen Gear Co Cast Iron Sling in Sand Storm Brand new. Nice sling, padded with plastic hardware. Comes with unknown swing swivels. -$30
-5.11 LV6 (Low Vis) Sling Pack - OD Green I ran this sling pack for a while and it was awesome. Lots of good storage and a hidden Velcro compartment near the rear. Enough space to store a Glock 19 and extras. Some slight salt but this thing held up and looks still almost new. -$25
-Champion Passive Ear Pro w/ Bonus Loaner Pair Used as extra pairs, some salt on the Champions but in good shape. Extra set has some separation in the earmuff but still works. -$25
-Mossberg Synthetic Stock - 12 gauge Light salt. Thought I was gonna use this but ended up going a different route. Includes all hardware. -$30 $25 $20 SOLD
-Mystery Ranch Forager 2.5L Hip Pack - Coyote Great little pack from MR. Decent storage and comfortable. Work less than 5 times. -$20 SOLD
-J. & A.H. English Enfield Sling x2 Picked this up a while back thinking it would work for something but alas, it did not. Like new. Comes with another with jacked up mounting clips. $20 $15
-Milspec Endplate and Castle Nut Minimal salt, really good condition. $20 $15 SOLD
-Vanguard QS-60 V2 Quick Shoe Release Plate - Arca Compatible Brand new, never used. $20 $15
-Perroz Designs Side Wing Multicam Single pouch, very light use and in great shape. Great addition to carry a radio, extra mags, or skittles. -$15 SOLD
-Weaver Multi-Slot Base System 417T - for Mossberg 500 Mounted with a red dot and saw about 20 rounds, then removed. Slight salt. -$15
-Carbine gas tube Don’t remember where this came from. Shows some use. -$15 SOLD
-Glock and Desert Eagle Keychains The Glocks are plastic and really nicely made and accurately detailed. The Deagle is made of metal and heavier and not as detailed. -$15
-Rock Exotica RockD Screw-Lock Carabiner Like new. Clipped to a bag and never used. -$15
-Savior Equipment 9” x 5” Admin Pouch w/ Molle Unused by me. Looks brand new. Nice pouch with lots of storage, allows desk setup. -$15
-BCM Keymod QD Sling Mount Catch and release. Good condition, includes hardware. -$15
-Unknown Brand 2 Point Bungee Sling Catch and release. Comes with clash hook hardware and “sleeves” for the bungee sections. In good condition. ~$15
-12” x 7.5” Organizational Elastic Loop Velcro Panel Catch and release. Looks well made, don’t know the brand or manufacturer. -$15 $12 $10
-Jeep Admin Pouch Admin pouch might be a stretch but it’s OD green and works for storing stuff.-$15 $10
-Milspec Sling Adapter Endplates Catch and release. Unknown use. Some salt but they look decent. -$10 each / $15 for both.
-GrovTec Mil-Force Swivel Single swivel. Brand new in package (only needed one). -$10
-Port Authority C865 Flexfit Cap - Multicam Brand new, never worn. Poly-weave spandex assures you get the perfect fit with stretch fit closure. -$10 SOLD
-FDE B5 SOPMOD Buttpad Takeoff from another stock. Minor scuffing but in great shape. Has the cutout for the Multitasker M:4 tool. -$10
-A2 Flash Hider Catch and release. Salty but still in good shape. Comes with crush washers. -$10 SOLD
-LMT Crush Washer 3 Pack Brand new from LMT. -$10 SOLD
-BCM AIR Rail Panels Catch and release. These are soft panels, non-rigid. They seem to be unused. -$10
-USGI Army First Aid or Compass Pouch - ALICE Compatible - OD Green Catch and release. Vintage pouch. In good shape. -$10
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Thanks!

Later that night, while everyone was asleep, Himiko was in her magic room, preparing a spicy love potion. As she did, she recalled the moment Kokichi had his arms wrapped around her that morning, and how he murmured in her ear. She replayed that moment in her mind over and over again all day, so much that she couldn't even focus on her schoolwork. She squealed to herself with excitement as she added Kokichi's hair into the cauldron. When she stirred, the water in the pot became the same rich purple it did before, indicating that it was time to pour it into a potion bottle. After she did, she glanced back at her spellbook at the hot and steamy love potion. At first, she thought against making one, but curiosity got the best of her. She washed out her cauldron and filled it up with water again to boil it. After labeling the sweet love potion bottle and the spicy love potion bottle, she got to work on the hot and steamy love potion. After she added the ingredients and Kokichi's strand of hair, causing the potion to turn purple, she poured it into a bottle and labeled it.
"Nyeh...all done," she said to herself, dusting her hands off with satisfaction. She poured the spicy love potion into a cup and added the magical sleeping powder. Before drinking it, however, she went up to her and Tenko's room. She placed her cup on her nightstand and tiptoed quickly and quietly over to Miu and Kaede's room to get some duct tape from Miu's desk. She rushed back to her room and started duct taping Tenko's wrists to the railings of her bed's headboard so she wouldn't interrupt Himiko's dream this time. Fortunately, Tenko was a heavy sleeper, so Himiko was able to get the job done without fear of Tenko waking up. Then, she duct taped Tenko's mouth in case Tenko decided to call out for help in the morning after realizing she couldn't move her wrists. Feeling satisfied with her handiwork, Himiko went over to her bed and snuggled underneath the covers before drinking her potion. Then, she drifted right off to sleep.
Himiko opened her eyes. She was lying on the floor. Around her was darkness, save for the lone spotlight that was shining down on her. She heard subtle music playing. It sounded like pop, but with a flamenco twist to it. She sat up slowly and gasped at what she was wearing. A large, red, ruffled flamenco dress with the skirt parted from the top of her right thigh. Her shoulders were exposed, and covering her chest was a long, ruffled collar. On her feet were a pair of black heels. She reached up to touch her hair, which was adorned with a large, deep red rose. Attached to her ears were a pair of large hoop earrings.
"I've never seen anything more beautiful in my life," murmured a familiar voice that made Himiko's heart pound with excitement. She gasped and turned her head in the direction of the voice. As she squinted through the darkness, she could see the figure of someone leaning against a wall. The figure was gazing back at her with mysterious violet eyes that glowed seductively in the darkness.
"Kokichi..." Himiko breathed, placing her hand on her chest. She didn't know how or why, but she didn't feel like her normal shy and timid self. She felt rather flirtatious and playful. Did the potion alter some of her personality, too, or was she simply feeling more comfortable with herself in her dreams than she did in real life? She placed her hands on the floor behind her, leaning back on them. She lifted her right leg and rested it on her left knee as if inviting Kokichi over to her. Kokichi grinned and glided over to her, swiveling his hips as he did so. Himiko could see he was wearing a white, long-sleeved collared shirt with the top buttons opened, exposing part of his chest. He was wearing long black pants and shoes. Himiko coquettishly lifted her hand for Kokichi to take it. He pulled her up and held her close to his chest, resting his hand on her waist. He gazed into her eyes with fiery passion. Himiko matched his gaze, practically begging him to sweep her off her feet.
Kokichi twirled her and released her hand, leaving Himiko to twirl away on her own. Right as she finished, Kokichi twirled and gestured to her with a flourish. Parting her skirt, Himiko flashed her leg to him. Then, she strutted over to him with cat-like grace, swaying her shoulders flirtatiously. Kokichi glided over to her and grabbed her hand while holding her waist again. Himiko placed her other hand on Kokichi's shoulder. They locked intense, passionate eyes with each other before gliding together across the dance floor. Still holding onto her hand, Kokichi swung Himiko forward away from him, the same way one might brandish a sword. Then, he twirled her back into his arms. Her back was pinned against his chest. With the hand he was holding, he held out Himiko's arm. Himiko's heart pounded against her chest as Kokichi began to kiss her arm all the up to her shoulder, and then to her neck. She gasped with elation as she turned to face him. She pressed her chest against him, and lifted her bare leg up to his waist. Kokichi caressed her thigh with his hand, slowly making his way down the rest of her leg. Himiko bit her lip rapturously and threw her head back, pressing her hands against her collar and slightly lowering it. Kokichi kissed her neck, moving his lips down her chest. Himiko frowned at him and scolded him with a seductive slap.
Kokichi twirled her, making her back press against him again. Himiko stuck her arm out to her side, her other hand placed sassily on her hip. Kokichi took Himiko's outstretched hand, and placed his other hand on Himiko's waist. Together, they strutted across the dance floor. Feeling particularly playful, Himiko released herself from his grasp. She twirled around and bumped him out of the way with her butt. Eyeing him with her intense gaze, she twirled her wrists around each other, moving them all the way up above her head. She then brought them back down, grabbing hold of her skirt, and lifting her head to Kokichi. With one hand, she gestured to him with her finger to come closer. Reemerging from the darkness, Kokichi danced back into the spotlight towards her, swiveling his hips. This time, he had a rose in his mouth. Himiko opened her mouth and tapped it, pretending to yawn with boredom. Kokichi raised a seductive eyebrow at her, as if accepting her challenge to make things more interesting.

He then grabbed her hand, twirled her, and pulled her close to his chest. Himiko batted her eyelashes and swayed her shoulders, beckoning to Kokichi to follow through with his next move. He dipped her while staring deeply into her eyes. Himiko stared back at him with excitement as he pressed his lips against hers. Himiko felt her heart hammering. His lips were soft and warm, just like she'd always dreamed they'd be. She gasped and moaned softly when she felt his tongue brush against hers as he transferred the rose into her mouth. Himiko wrapped her teeth around the rose's stem. Kokichi lifted her back up. Keeping his eyes locked with hers, he pressed his chest against Himiko's and swiveled his pelvis against hers as he danced with her. Himiko followed suit, caressing his face with her hands.
Kokichi grabbed one of her hands, and twirled her one last time, sending her spinning across the dance floor. He ran up to her right as she finished twirling and tossing the rose aside. He pressed his forehead against hers as he pulled his shirt completely open, ripping off the remaining buttons and exposing his chest. Chests heaving, they gazed longingly and intensely into each other's eyes.
"I love you, Himiko," Kokichi breathed, pressing Himiko's chest against his.
"Nyeh...I love you, too, Kokichi," Himiko panted as Kokichi pulled her into a passionate kiss. She pressed her hands against his chest, which felt warm and firm. Kokichi kissed her cheek before tucking her hair behind her ear to murmur into it.
"I love you so much," he said in a low, seductive voice. He slowly caressed her hair, letting it run across his fingers before kissing it softly. Himiko uttered a happy squeal before Kokichi tore himself away from her. He twirled and struck a pose before clapping his hand one time. A puff of smoke surrounded him, and when it dissipated, he had vanished.
Himiko woke up. Her room was still dark, but light was streaming in through her closed window. Morning had come, but Tenko hadn't opened the window to let the the sunlight in, yet.
"Mmmphh!! Mmmmphhmmm!!" came the sound of a muffled voice. Himiko turned to see Tenko frantically calling out to her through the duct tape with her wrists still tied to the headboard. Himiko's plan had worked! She was able to get through a dream with Kokichi successfully without Tenko interrupting it. She sighed happily and looked up at the ceiling.
"Nyeeeh...life is good," she murmured to herself.
Part Six
Himiko cruised through school in a great mood. She even found herself skipping through the hallways, which is something she rarely did. She was on her way with Angie and Tenko to one of their classes.
"Himiko, even though you're the purest, most innocent girl in the world and I forgive you, all you had to do was ask me not to wake you up," Tenko mumbled. "I didn't think you'd resort to taping me to my bed! See?! This is why you shouldn't like degenerate males like Kokichi! He's a bad influence on you!"
"I didn't do it because of Kokichi's influence," Himiko said. "I did it because if I told you the night before not to wake me, you would have forgotten about in the morning, and you would have woken me up anyway."
"You do have a set routine, Tenko," Angie agreed. "You do things automatically right as you wake up!"
"Well, I would have remembered for Himiko," Tenko muttered.
"I couldn't take that chance," Himiko said. "That's why I had to do what I did." Suddenly, Himiko paused. "Nyeh...you guys go on ahead. I'm gonna go get a drink of water." Angie and Tenko continued to walk to class as Himiko leaned over the water fountain and pressed the button. As she drank the water, she noticed someone lean on the wall right next to the fountain. When she looked up, her heart skipped a beat. It was Kokichi.
"Nee-heehee...well, you're in a good mood today," he remarked. Remembering her dream last night, Himiko surprisingly felt emboldened.
"Nyeh...that's right," she said. "What's it to you?" Kokichi raised his brow in amusement.
"Ohhh...someone's also feelin' a bit sassy today, too!" he said.
"Do you have a problem with that?" Himiko asked.
"Nope! I like sassy Himiko!" Kokichi replied.
"Nyeh...lemme guess...that's a lie," Himiko said.
"Is it?" Kokichi replied with a mysterious grin. "Do you want it to be a lie...Himiko? Or...would you like that to be the truth?" Himiko's heart started pounding, and her hands became clammy. There he went, making her weak at the knees again, just by saying her name. Her bold exterior began to slip.
"Uh...I, um..." she stammered, her mouth feeling dry. She clenched her fists, forcing herself to remain calm. "W-Why does that matter to you?!"
"Because I know your seeecret," Kokichi teased. Himiko rolled her eyes.
"Nyeeeh...this again?!" she groaned. "I-I don't have a secret already! Just drop it!"
"Nee-heehee...wow! You're really persistent, aren't you?" Kokichi said. "But that's okay! I'll make you reveal your secret to me one day, Himiko."
"I don't...have...a secret," Himiko growled, inching closer to his face. She was too nervous to realize how close to his face she was. Kokichi smirked at her.
"Whatever you say...Himiko," he murmured softly, giving her a quick kiss on the nose, and sauntered off before Himiko could have a chance to respond. She squeaked and blinked her eyes rapidly in shock. A blush formed on her face as she processed what just happened.
"He...kissed me," she breathed to herself. "Nyeeeh...he k-kissed me! On the nose!" She squealed and bounced around, happily kicking her feet. "Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh!" She clutched her head in disbelief. Many thoughts were going through her mind. Does he actually like me, too?! Is he lying?! Does he actually want me to confess my feelings for him?! Does he actually know about my crush on him?! What would happen if I told him?! Would he be okay with it?! Would he be disgusted?! She didn't know the answers to any of those questions, but she knew one thing for sure: "Nyeeeh...I'm never washing this nose again!" she exclaimed, skipping off to class.
***
Later that evening, Himiko was in her magic room, replaying the "kissing scene" between her and Kokichi in her mind. She squealed and smiled to herself each time she thought about it. The last potion she had to use was the hot and steamy love potion, but she had to admit, she was still scared of using that one. She didn't want to think of herself as a naughty girl. If her spicy love dream contained Kokichi kissing and touching parts of her she never thought would be touched or kissed by him, she couldn't imagine what the hot and steamy love dream would contain. She was surprised at herself for making a hot and steamy love potion in the first place, let alone a spicy love dream potion. Did she have it that bad for Kokichi? Maybe she did, but she felt rather dirty for admitting it. Instead, she decided to test the hot and steamy love potion on someone else. And she knew the perfect person to test it out on.
***
The girls of Casa V3 were having their monthly slumber party, this time in Maki and Kirumi's room. Himiko volunteered to pour the drinks, while Kirumi made the food and snacks. Himiko made grape juice so that when she gave her potion to her test subject, they wouldn't know the difference between their drink and everyone else's. Himiko had to admit that she felt a little mischievous, as if she were pulling a prank. Kind of like how Kokichi would pull a prank on someone. She felt that he'd be proud of her if he knew what she was doing. The thought gave her warm, fuzzy feelings. Himiko poured the potion into a pink glass cup so that she'd know which cup the potion was in. Right after she poured in the sleeping powder, she then headed upstairs and joined the other girls.
"Nyeh...grape juice for everyone!" she announced.
"Seriously?! Grape juice?!" Miu spat. "That ain't the proper drink for a slumber party, titless!"
"It's fine," Maki said. "At least we have something to drink." Everyone thanked Himiko as she handed each of the girls their glasses. Himiko handed the cup of her potion to Miu. Miu scoffed and snatched the cup from her.
"Nyeh...don't worry, Miu," Himiko assured. "You'll like it."
"Oh, yeah?" Miu said. "I'll bet it tastes like shit!"
"I added extra sugar to it," Himiko lied. "Why don't you taste it and find out?"
"Fine," Miu grumbled. She took a sip of the potion, then licked her lips. "Huh...hey, this is actually kinda good! You musta added so much sugar that it feels kinda fizzy...like grape soda!" She then downed the entire potion before letting out a satisfied belch. "Hey, half-pint! That was actually really good! Guess just because ya don't have any tits doesn't mean ya don't know you're way around the kitchen!"
"Nyeh...that's the power of maaagic!" Himiko replied mysteriously. She then waited as the effects of the potion started to kick in.

Eleven days prior
The ten stealth pods were on their final approach after drifting for two days from the small moon orbiting their target planet. They were ejected from a nullship that flashed out of null space below the moon’s southern pole, taking advantage of the strong magnetic fields in that region to mask the exit flash and avoid detection by the insectoid ships in orbit around the planet. The planet and the moon were currently transiting through a large meteor stream that intersected their orbit around the sun three times a year. The command-pod AI ran billions of calculations per second as it started creating an atmospheric entry plan for the ten pods that would coincide with the trajectories of the numerous particles of dust and debris that would be entering the atmosphere for the next three days.
Selecting an area with a projected high concentration of small-diameter meteors in the next hour, the AI created a maneuvering program for the pods that activated a series of compressed-gas positional thrusters to guide the pods over to the entry point. The AI confirmed the calculations and initiated the final entry program as the ten pods fired their rear gas thrusters one last time and accelerated towards the planet. They were joined by over a thousand pieces of cosmic debris as they entered the atmosphere and streaked across the sky, flaring brightly as they dropped towards the surface with the other meteors.
Kepler-186f system
2^nd planet, Insectoid Builder World, 2174 A.D.
The special forces team had been on the planet for ten days without seeing any signs or indications of the presence of a queen on the planet. Lieutenant Diego could not believe the sheer number of drones he saw in the last nine days since they marched forty kilometers from their landing site towards an endlessly sprawling ground-based shipyard facility. Tens of millions of drones scurried about day and night as raw material was offloaded by massive aerial cargo ships that landed, were emptied, and flew off to reload in an endless procession. Diego found himself enthralled by their construction processes and the astonishing speed at which they built ships. In just the last five days, he saw ten insectoid cruisers go from a skeletal framework to fully completed and watched as they lifted off the surface and went into orbit. He was particularly impressed with how the tough ship hulls were created. A large percentage of the cargo being dropped off seemed to be organic in nature and was dumped into large tanks scattered throughout the shipyard.
A conveyor system comprising hundreds of thousands of worker drones connected all the tanks and would snake their way among the shipbuilding areas, carrying loads of the organic material on their backs and dumping it at the end of the lines. Other drones with smaller containers would fill them with material and bring them to waiting drones by the ships, dumping the contents on the ground in front of them, and then go back for more material. The drones in front of their piles would then start eating the organic material, swallowing it. After they ate the pile in front of them, they would scurry over to the ships and start regurgitating what they ate into their tarsal claws in small amounts and shaping them into round balls. They would then stack the balls in a row like bricklayers until they ran out of regurgitated material. They would then go back to eat more material, while teams of drones would take their place and wave a handheld apparatus that seemed to heat the balls, and they would melt, deforming from the treatment and filling in the gaps, turning into perfect hexagons.
Once a section was completed, a different team of drones would arrive with a large device and set it up. They would then turn the device on, and a god-awful screeching sound would emanate from the front of the device and be directed towards the still-soft sections of the hull. Within thirty seconds, that section of hull would start groaning, and the opaque, soft hexagons would turn jet black and harden into a tough, metal-like material. An Insectoid cruiser that was 360 meters long, 60 meters wide, and 120 meters tall would have its entire hull constructed and enclosed in forty-two hours.
An alert popped up on his HUD that it was time to insert another energy pack into the shrouding system that camouflaged his team and prevented detection. He keyed his throat mike and issued the command for everyone to replace their energy packs, and he turned to face the two civilian scientists to make sure that they received and understood the order. He was vehemently opposed to bringing them, but the admiral was adamant that they were to accompany the team, and Diego relented after some resistance. There was no way in hell he was willing to piss off the big man over a couple of civvies; there were better hills to die on.
As he watched them fumble about for their replacement packs, he smiled and had to admit that they were growing on him. During the two weeks it took them to get to the far side of Insectoid space, their wide-eyed enthusiasm and willingness to talk about their respective fields of study seemed to infect his team, and they became almost like little siblings to them. He chuckled to himself as he remembered how confused Dr. Ariti seemed to be by the fact that his team was able to process and retain the information she was telling them with ease. He was there when Dr. Masiello informed her that the eight-member team held over twenty PhD’s among them, and the look on her face was just the cutest thing he ever saw.
The sun was halfway down past the horizon, which meant they had just another hour of daylight before darkness would arrive. He signaled that it was time to pack up and move, and in a few minutes, they were headed back towards their base camp. He was grateful for the .7g gravity on the surface, as it made their daily hikes with equipment and the frequent relocations of their camp to avoid detection easier. It also gave his joints a welcome reprieve from their usual aches, a mercy he greatly appreciated. They arrived at base camp a half hour later, and everyone went about their assigned tasks and end-of-day routines before they all sat down around a red-light lantern in the middle of the camp to have dinner.
The combination of the eerie red light and the pitch blackness of their surroundings was something none of them could get used to, and it created an ominous atmosphere as they reluctantly opened their ration packs. The shrouding device could hide them effectively, but they enacted as many safeguards as they could against detection, such as only using red lights at night and eating foods that had been stripped of any scent and devoid of flavoring spices. The result of their security measures was that they felt like they were eating cardboard in hell. Diego had been sick before and felt like he couldn’t really taste his food when his nose was stuffed, but he always knew he was eating his mom’s chicken soup. As vague as the scent and taste of the soup might be, it was still there, and he could detect its essence. The food they were eating was on a totally different level, and he never realized just how important a component smell was to tasting food until he ate rations completely devoid of any scent or seasoning except for salt and potassium chloride.
As they choked down their dinner, he noticed Emily and Owen shooting furtive glances at each other, and they seemed agitated. He waited until they all finished eating and indicated that he wanted to talk to them alone. They walked 10 meters away from the red-light lamp and stopped right on the edge of the total blackness surrounding their camp. Emily and Owen seemed really distressed, and he knew something was seriously wrong. He didn’t have the time or the patience for their bullshit, and his internal alarms were going off wildly.
“What is going on with you two? Tell me, now.” He saw them cringe at his harsh manner, but he couldn’t afford to feel bad for them. Not on an enemy planet with almost thirty billion wasps that were five feet tall and armed with skull-cracking mandibles and twelve-inch serrated stingers coming out of their asses. They didn’t answer, and he stepped forward into their personal space and was just about to demand answers when Owen, in an uncharacteristic show of bravery, put himself in front of Emily as if to protect her.
“Lieutenant, I would appreciate it if you would direct your questions to me. There is no reason for you to speak to Emily like this. She is rightfully terrified, and I have spent the last ten days trying not to shit my fucking pants in front of all of you, so do me a favor and get the fuck out of our faces.”
Diego couldn’t believe the balls on this puke, and he almost gave in to his desire to punch the defiant bastard in the face before he realized how ridiculous it was. Here he was, squaring off with an entomologist who was telling him to fuck off, and the absurdity of it all and the pressures of the mission came crashing into him. He took a few steps back, turning around and breathing deeply, trying to calm himself. Owen, now in the throes of an uncontrolled adrenaline crash, waited a few seconds and then stepped next to him and put out a very shaky fist bump, offering an unsaid apology with his eyes. Diego bumped it, and he turned back to face Emily. “I apologize for the way I spoke to you; I am not used to having civilians on my missions. I hope we can reset and put this behind us.”
Emily nodded, and Owen walked back over and stood next to her. Emily looked at Owen and nodded, and Owen pulled out a data pad, set it on the floor, and pressed a button. A holographic map floated above it, and he pinched the display with his fingers and zoomed into the area where they were currently located. “Lieutenant, we are of the opinion that we are not going to locate a queen on the surface.” He expanded the map back out and swiped it sideways to an area over a hundred kilometers to the east. He zoomed back in and pressed an icon on the map that added a subterranean scan, and a massive underground structure popped into view, looking like an upside-down pinecone, with the narrow top of the structure expanding in size as it went deeper. Diego leaned forward to look at the numbers on the side of the structure and whistled softly to himself as the estimated dimensions were displayed. The structure was thirty-six kilometers deep and had a radius of twelve kilometers at its widest. It was a massive underground Hive, and there was a flashing question mark in the center of the Hive where there was a large chamber located. It seemed to be the nexus of the Hive, which was connected to the rest of the structure by six bridges or tunnels. Owen pointed towards the question mark icon. “This has to be the queen chamber, and if there is a queen currently on the planet, that is where she will be.”
Diego stared at the map, thinking about how to get her out of there. He keyed his throat mike and called for Sgt. Singh to join them at their location. A few moments later, he arrived, and Diego quickly brought him up to speed. Singh was the team’s engineer sergeant, and he thoughtfully stroked his beard as he looked at the display. “Obviously, we cannot infiltrate the Hive to root the bitch out. I have enough explosives and demo bots to severely damage some of the cruisers under construction; maybe that will get the queen to leave the Hive, if she is even in there.” He finished speaking, and Diego looked at the doctors to gauge their reaction to what he said. Emily spoke first. “I would not do that. We don’t know what their response to that will be. They might have soldier drones. We haven’t seen any here or found any evidence of them from the wreckage in the Eleani system, but that does not mean that they do not have a soldier or guard caste protecting their hives.”
Owen nodded in agreement and added, “We need to find a way to know for sure if there even is a queen here before alerting them to our presence. Who’s to say that the queens wouldn’t respond to such an attack by retreating to their primary world and staying there, depriving us of a chance to grab a queen ever again? I might have an idea, and the sergeant’s expertise and input would be welcomed.” Diego nodded, and both he and Singh took a knee as Owen played around with the map, highlighting an area of the shipyard almost fifty kilometers from their position.
He asked his AI assistant to access the geological and topographical scans that were taken from orbit before they landed on the planet and highlighted a five-square-kilometer section of crust under the outer edge of the shipyard. “The crust is extremely thin here, and there is a massive chasm underneath this area from the worker drones pumping out the aquifer for water. I think a series of properly placed sub-surface explosives will cause the thin roof of the chasm to weaken enough to collapse a small area, and the weight of this section of the shipyard will add further stress to the undamaged crust and collapse the entire area, causing all the ships and workers to fall into the chasm. It would seem to be a natural occurrence, and we can avoid having to give away our presence on the planet. I bet that will get the queen up here if she is in the Hive.” Owen then added markers indicating where he thought the explosives should go and their yields, and then looked at Singh, waiting for his response.
Singh quickly played around with the map, ran his own calculations on the placement and explosive yields, and looked at Owen with a growing respect in his eyes as his AI assistant verified the numbers. “Not bad, Doc; this is pretty good for a bug guy! Are you a geologist too?” Owen smiled widely at the praise from Singh and answered with obvious pride in his voice. “Actually, I did two six-month tours as an ore prospector in the Fomalhaut asteroid belts before my then-girlfriend threatened to break up with me. I was pretty good at figuring out the proper explosive placement to break up the asteroids while maintaining the integrity of the mineral deposits and cores. It was a fun job, and the money I made paid for my parents retirement home and my college.” Singh nodded approvingly and stood up, walking over to Owen and warmly shaking his hand. “It is always nice to make the acquaintance of an ore prospector; it’s a dangerous job and requires a lot of technical skill.”
Diego rolled his eyes and studied the map while the two of them continued talking about blowing crap up and zoned out the lovefest. Emily came over and sat down next to him. “I agree with Owen. If the queen is in the Hive, she would have to come out and oversee the worker drone response to the collapse. Do you think it is a good plan?” Diego grunted in response as he continued to think about the feasibility of the plan and the possible outcomes. He turned to her and nodded. “I do think it is a solid plan, and even if there is no queen here, then at least we can do some damage to their shipbuilding efforts for a short period of time. There’s what—almost two hundred cruisers in that area? At least we can strike a blow against them if we fail in our objective to capture a queen. Wiping out two hundred cruisers and a few million drones is a nice consolation prize, and we can exfil this planet with pride in that accomplishment.” Emily smiled at him and said, “It would be nice to get off the planet and go back home. I know I volunteered to come here for the mission, but I am tired of being scared all the time; it is exhausting.”
Diego reached out and lightly patted her on the shoulder. “You two are doing a fine damn job so far. I have to admit that the both of you have been far less trouble than I was expecting to have to deal with on this mission.” Emily smiled widely. “Thank you for that, lieutenant; that means a great deal to me.” Diego smiled in return and stood up, offering his hand to assist Emily. They walked back over to Singh and Owen, who were geeking out over the demo bot specs that Singh had pulled up on his wrist pad. “If you two lovebirds are about done, let’s head back over and quickly outline our preliminary plan to the rest of the team. We will work out the details, solidify a proper plan in the morning, and go from there.”
They all started walking back towards the red-light lamp, and Diego slowed his pace as he walked behind them, listening along as Owen was telling Emily and Singh about a time when he spent two days evading an ore pirate ship in a cat-and-mouse chase. His copilot was killed in the initial attack, and he managed to cripple their ship with mining charges when he laid a trap and led them into it. “Not bad for a puke.” He thought to himself as his previous estimation of the scientist rose considerably as Owen described how his damaged ship was almost out of air, so in desperation, he boarded the drifting ore pirate ship and single-handedly took the four survivors prisoners.
A little while later, after everyone had gone into their tents to sleep, Diego was just about to drift off when he heard a faint rustling sound outside his tent and sat upright, alarmed. The sentry bots and the perimeter sensor system did not activate the silent buzz alarm on his wrist pad, and he tapped it, accessing the video feed from the overhead sentry drone that was floating above their camp. From this bird's-eye view, he saw Emily finish tiptoeing across the camp and stop outside Owen’s tent. She looked furtively around the camp before pressing the entry seam control and quickly slipping into his tent before the seam closed back up behind her. He pressed a series of commands, and a few moments later, a backup shroud drone silently assumed position over the tent and activated, making it disappear from the visual feed. He broke the connection to the overhead sentry drone and laid back down, feeling a genuine smile form on his face. He closed his eyes and thought his last thought before sleep overcame him.
“Not bad at all, Owen.”

Chapter 12
Log. 22675.g Finally. It has been a few months, but we did it. The most annoying part was disabling the GPS and all other self-sabotage programs. After that, it was, eh, simple. Well, as it’s said, I am the idea-person. It's amazing to see how they work as a team. In the beginning there was a lot of prejudice against the Programmer, but it’s wonderful to see organic and artificial humans working together, as equals.
After a few drinks, Bobbie seemed to forget about the secret in the boot, and started asking Séra — who was also a bit drunk, against physician’s orders — about mechanics and batteries. It didn’t take long before they were designing wind turbines to attach to the car. Ganen had to admit, it was a hard conversation to follow, but Séra would always pause and explain something when she noticed a very confused face.
When Séra asked how Bobbie had trained or studied for being able to create such an amazing bike, the Mailer told them she had grown up with the Mail Bikers, surrounded by the most amazing motorcycles, and so she learnt from the best. The main Post Offices had their own forges and labs, so it was easy to get the parts.
— My parents tried to ship me away as a baby. — Bobbie said. — The Bikers found me in a box with no return address, so they decided to keep me and raise me.
— Oi, those are some nasty parents, eh. — Séra wanted to get her bandages off. They were scratching.
— Ah, well, I guess it happens. — The Biker shrugged. — I couldn’t care less, really. How ‘bout yours?
— Parents? — Séra confirmed. — I don’t remember much of them, they died of an illness when I was young. My aunt pretty much raised me by herself.
— Oh, I’m sorry. Is it a sore subject? — Bobbie was hesitant.
— Nah, don’t ya worry about it.
— So, what do you know about Tree City? — Ganen changed the subject; Bobbie might have not noticed, but Ganen heard the discomfort in Séra’s voice. — We don’t get many bikers around there.
— I don’t know much, because, with all due respect, you guys refuse to cut down trees and make some roads! — Bobbie laughed, she was having a lot of fun with those two. She had always struggled with making friends outside the Mail system, never being in one place for long, but she wanted to know Ganen and Séra better.
— You’re more than welcome to visit, if you want. — Ganen raised her brows.
— I’d love to visit! —She got some pen and paper from her bag, and wrote some coordinates. — Do you have a map? I can mark where you’ll generally find me. — Her thin black eyes sparkled with excitement.
— It’s in the car, I’ll get it. — Séra got up and walked to the door; thinking about her parents brought up some memories, and contrary to Ganen, she didn’t know if she wanted to remember. Some fresh air would be good.
She sat on the passenger's seat and looked at the night sky. Stars blinked throughout the dark blue and the path of the Sun and the Moon was even brighter. It had a different name in the past, something related to milk, which was really funny. Séra imagined a ginormous baby crawling in the sky while their bottle was dripping.
After a deep breath, she got the map and went back inside. Her body was still sore and she was quite aware they would need longer pauses to rest, but she was eager to continue her conversation.
Log. 20657.s We did it! In the end, we didn't even need a distraction. A hysterical person entered the hospital and we were able to paralyse a Robot Physician. We turned it off right away and stuck it in the caravan. It's so much easier when we can press a button! Especially when we know where the button is! It‘s been decades since I’d done something so scary and exciting! Now we have to figure out how to break into this thing.
Bobbie ended up spending the night in the girls’ house, and wasn’t the first to wake up. She rubbed her eyes a few times and slowly recognized Ganen’s and Séra’s voices from the kitchen. She got out of bed and adjusted her t-shirt; her pants were nowhere to be found, and she didn’t really care. The perfume of coffee was the only important thing at that moment.
— You’re awake. — Ganen was the first to notice her. — Sit down, Séra is making wildberry pancakes. It’s a rare sight!
— Are berries hard to find? — Bobbie yawned.
— Not around here, so we’ve got a lot of them! — Séra flipped one in the air. — How do you like yours?
— Ahn… cooked?
— Okay! — Séra laughed; it was indeed bad having them raw.
Ganen poured some coffee for the three of them and mentioned Ahda wanted to give them a “thank you” basket for how they helped finding the cure for the grain water wasting, and that would probably cover the resources they would need for a while.
— I’d like to stop by Tara’s place before leaving, so we can say goodbye to them and Esha. — Séra added.
— Are you okay with leaving her with Tara and Ery?
— Yah, they’re good people. And I think she’ll be safer here than on the road with us.
Bobbie had heard the little girl’s story and, in the end, it wasn’t so different from hers — except for the whole almost getting killed part — and it was good to know she had also found a family for herself.
— I myself have to leave today. — Bobbie said. — There are a lot of letters to distribute.
— Oh! Are you going south? — Ganen bit her pancake.
— Yeah, and I think I might just personally deliver your letter to your aunt. — The Biker smiled. — I quite like the region. The plains are sooo good for riding! And some of the craters are large enough for a few spins.
Ganen looked a bit worried, even Séra stopped flipping pancakes and glanced at Bobbie. The Biker laughed, said it was easy; she’d been doing things like that since she was a child, so she had plenty of experience.
Breakfast was delicious and fun, Ganen and Séra promised to stop by the southern Post Office on their way back, to which Bobbie would look forward to.
— And if I’m not there, just wait a bit. — She grabbed a blue pin in the shape of an envelope from her bag and gave it to the couple. — Show them this if the Bikers give you any trouble. They’ll know it’s mine.
If they weren’t still hurting, they could have left together, but Séra needed a little more rest before hitting the road. They waved goodbye until Bobbie was out of sight, then walked slowly to Tara’s house.
Log. 20512.l We agreed that stealing a Robot Physician would be ideal.
Bobbie knew it was safer to ride with the visor down, but she loved the wind on her face, the green perfume of summer leaves, the landscape flying by her side. When she was on her bike, the world was hers to enjoy, and she felt free. A bird whose long wings could take her above the clouds to soar through the sky.
There was nothing better than sleeping below the stars, being awoken by the gentle morning sun, and enjoying the delicate dew drops on colourful petals. She liked meeting people — old and new — and seeing their smiles as they received their letters.
So when the farms started popping up around the fields, excitement filled her chest. She lowered the speed of her bike and stopped in front of a large wood and stone house. There wasn’t a Post Office in Mini Forest, so the Mail Bikers had to stop at each farm for their letters. Bobbie was one of the few who didn’t hate that area, so she knew the people quite well.
There was an old lady, Soña, who had the hairiest guinea pigs in the region, and her farm was famous for it. She always had many letters from her children, cousins, and siblings, and she would invite Bobbie for tea every time.
On her next stop, there was a child who would wait for her by the farm gate. A little boy, no older than 6 or 7, and he was excited to show her his first guinea pig: it had long wavy and rebel fur.
— Like your hair! — He pointed at Bobbie. — My mum said we can dye her fur blue, like your hair too! And I’ll name her Bluebie.
— That sounds adorable. — Bobbie laughed. — I used some indigo and henna to dye my hair, just test it first, to be sure it won’t give her any allergies.
— Okay! — He smiled, and his two front teeth were missing. The Mail Biker imagined if they would have grown by the next time she stopped there.
After the Mini Forest, there was a much bigger forest, and people had found it quite difficult to live there. If one was persistent, they could find a few people, mostly small families, who lived amongst the trees, but those would prefer to live unperturbed. It was a difficult path to go on foot or by vehicle, but Bobbie’s bike was designed for any terrain, and she ventured amongst the trees with no problem.
The travel rations were nutritious, but barely palatable, so when the biscuits Soña gave her were over, Bobbie stopped by a river to bathe and fish. The Mailers had trained her to be good at winging it, so it wasn’t hard improvising a fishing rod with some thread and a stick.
Even though unseasoned fish would taste better than the travel rations, Bobbie used to stock some seasonings in her bag — basil, rosemary, oregano, and salt — so her food was usually edible. Sometimes, it was even good! Not as good as Séra’s pancakes, though.
As the plains got closer, flowers started popping up more often, and she was forced to stop her bike, lay down on the grass, and smell the sweet little petals. Some people hated it, but she loved it. At night, myrtles opened their tiny white flowers and the air was thick with their fragrance. Bobbie could build a house there, and she would live happily ever after.
However, there was work to do, so she couldn’t laze around for more than a day. Back on her bike, she rode through the plains until craters started to change the landscape. It was said those holes on the ground were a result of the fight between the Sun and the Moon, when fiery chunks of the Sun fell and scorched the world.
Bobbie didn’t know whether the story was true or folklore, but she loved those craters nonetheless. They made cool ramps for radical manoeuvres. She liked riding in circles inside them until she could ride the walls of dirt and rock; the momentum would bring her out of it and back to the grass, then she would go to the next.
Eventually, someone from the Underground City would show up and get her letters, then she was free to ride back to the south Post Office. Bobbie wasn’t sure where the entrance to the city was, no outsider knew, and since she had to wait anyway…
— Time to find a large crater!
Some of them were large enough to make small lakes, they had fishes and frogs, a whole ecosystem. Some had moss and grass, insects, birds and rodents scattering around, and some were burnt so deep there was only burnt earth. Those were the ones Bobbie liked the most, and her eyes glistened when she found one much larger than she expected.
With a smile, she fastened her helmet, put down the visor, and sped her bike. Before she started, though, she thought it would be safer to leave her things behind — it wasn’t like anyone would show up and rob her — and she didn’t want her bags to open and let loose all her belongings and letters.
Once prepared, she sped up her bike and rode down the hole. The first spin was slow and careful, a test. The second was faster, the third had a flair and the fourth was full of little flourishes. There was no one to see, but she imagined Ganen and Séra would enjoy her show.
Thinking of them made her smile, Bobbie wanted to see the girls again, get to know them better and spend more time together. They were fun to be around. The Machine was terrifying, though, there was no way of being sure that thing wouldn’t just wake up one day and destroy the world, but she wanted to believe Ganen was right, the thing was broken and wouldn’t suddenly turn on.
And then her front wheel met a bump. Time seemed to slow down for a moment and Bobbie saw the edge of the crater too close for comfort. She had enough time to look back at the now unearthed rock before her bike crashed and the world disappeared before her eyes.
Log. 20508.o I still can't believe it, the Robot Physicians, the ones who should help us! It’s almost impossible to break into the network they use, because it’s an array network. It’d be possible to access some files, but ideally, it would be better to get one of the Physicians.
It had been about a week since Bobbie had left, and Séra was feeling up to driving again. She had fixed and reinforced the hasp in the boot, so that no one could break it, and Ganen’s arm was healing well, although the scar would probably be a bit gnarly.
Ahda had given them the thank-you basket, with enough food, drinks and water for about a week or two, depending on how they would ration it, now all that was left was saying their goodbyes. At the hospital, Ganen asked if they could take some penicillin for the trip — in case they had another situation — and Myra herself gave her a few flasks.
— We can make more on demand. — she explained. — And if it wasn’t for you, all of us would still be sick, so take as many as you need.
In their idle time, Séra also managed to attach a mini-cooling box into the car, so they could conserve the penicillin for longer and also have some fresh food and cold water every now and then. It would certainly make their trip more pleasant.
And when the sun rose on their last day in Bridge City, Séra and Ganen drove to Tara’s house for their goodbyes. The family had prepared a special lunch for them, and Esha had some trouble hiding her sad face while they were eating.
— Where are you two going now? — Tara asked.
— We’re headed south, so we’ll probably stop by Mini Forest for a day or two to rest, then continue. — Séra answered between mouthfuls.
— Are you coming back? — Esha whispered, her eyes almost didn’t reach Ganen’s.
— I believe so. Would you like us to stop by for a visit? — the woman answered with a soft, friendly tone.
Ensha nodded a few times, but there was still some sadness in her eyes.
After lunch, while Ery did the dishes, Séra asked Tara how the girl was doing, and her heart ached knowing that the kid was a bit insecure with both of them leaving. Ganen and her had talked about taking Esha along, but it would make their journey much more difficult. Besides, she was safer in Bridge City than in the middle of nowhere.
As they were about to leave, Esha held Ganen’s hand for a second and gave her a small, shiny crystal.
— What is this? — Ganen kneeled in front of her and asked with a sweet smile.
— It’s a present. Uhm, my mum, not Mrs. Tara and not the Immortal Mum, my real mum, she gave it to me when I was younger. It, uhm, it protects you. And I thought it was broken, because the Immortal hurt me, but then you two saved me, so I think it still works. — She looked into Ganen’s eyes and let out the shyest of smiles. — It’ll protect you.
— I’m sure it will. — Ganen hugged Esha and felt the girl’s little arms around her. — Thank you, Esha. If there is any problem, you can send us a letter, okay? It’s a bit expensive, but maybe if you talk to Bobbie she can give you a discount. — Ganen winked. — It’ll take a while for us to come back, but when we do, we’ll be sure to stop by, alright?
— Alright. — Esha nodded a few times, and her smile seemed real for the first time. — Thank you for saving me.
— Don’t worry about it, no child should go through something like that.
Esha hugged both Ganen and Séra one last time, and waved them goodbye until she couldn’t see the car anymore. It was Yigor who got her back in the house, when the boy asked if she wanted to play with the wooden cars and trucks. She nodded and Tara didn’t remind them of their homework; they could do it later that day.
They left in the afternoon, and once the city was far enough, Ganen plugged her music device into the car, and Séra smiled as they drove with lively old melodies. Ganen’s arm was still painful, but Séra’s cuts were mostly healed — and so were her guts.
They checked the map in order to follow Bobbie’s trail, and headed south. They wanted to stop by Mini Forest to talk to Ennath; in all honesty, Ganen wanted to see the mini-llamas once again. They were so adorable and fluffy, she even wondered if they could have one — a pet was much easier to care for than a young human.
The night came quicker than they expected, so Séra put up the tent whilst Ganen was fixing something to eat. She thought of how that whole experience was almost mystical. She had left her home more than two years ago without a date to return; at first, her goals were clear in her mind, she needed to escape her fate, but now, as she looked at Séra, there were more things Ganen wanted for her future than she could have anticipated.
— Whatcha looking at, love? — Séra sounded happy to have Ganen’s attention. — Is the tent crooked?
— Not at all, hun. — Ganen looked back to the food, she was embarrassed for being caught. — I like watching you work, that’s all. I want to remember every single thing.
— Every single thing sounds like a lot. — She hammered the last peg into the ground and looked at her job. It was good.
—It isn’t nearly enough, honey. — Ganen saw her lover walking towards her and closed her eyes in delight as she was hugged. — I love you so much.
— I love ya too. — Séra kissed her cheek. — And whatever you’re cooking smells amazing!
— I’m making a stew-soup-kind of thing. With the things that would spoil first. I hope it tastes as good as it smells.
— It’s usually how it works, ain’t it? — She got a bit confused.
— Have you ever eaten a flower? — Ganen got the pot out of the fire and set it on the floor. She had a curious and funny look as she waited for an answer.
— Not really. — Séra didn’t know what she was getting at.
— They don’t usually taste good.
Séra laughed and Ganen couldn’t help but laugh along; she was a child when she had a mouthful of tuberose. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. The dinner, however, was delicious; the meat chunks melted in their mouths and the vegetables still had a crunch to them.
They laid on the ground for a bit after eating, and the night was silent, the stars were their only company. Careful with her arm, Ganen rested on Séra’s chest and took a long breath, it was good being on the road again, without the fear of people finding the Machine — or being poisoned.
— Let’s clean up here, lock the car, and sleep in the tent? — Séra brought her back to reality.
— Yeah, let’s do that. I think the tent is more comfortable than the ground anyway. — Ganen’s laugh was interrupted by a long yawn.
— Go to the tent, I’ll lock the car and be right there with ya. — She gave her lover a tender kiss and pulled her up.
Log. 20465.k.b We need to find out why. Perhaps, if we find out the reason, we will be able to fix it! Sometimes it’s a system failure. If so... they call me a dreamer, but I think it might be possible! Who knows, even people’s memories might be there, somewhere...
Ganen’s eyes were closed, but her mind never stopped. Séra and her were old in her dreams, living in Tree City and walking around the tree-paths, then she looked around and couldn’t recognize anything. The trees, ever so familiar, were different and distorted, the sky was strange and the stars were not the ones she was used to.
She started looking for Séra, but the people didn’t have faces, their voices were unknown and their words, incomprehensible. Panic filled her chest and she started to scream, people grabbed her arms and tied her to a bed, she had no idea what was happening, where she was or who they were, until someone held her hand and called her “love”.
Ganen remembered one person, in the past, who would call her “love”, but it wasn’t the same person from the dream. She didn’t recognise those brown eyes, the freckles she used to know so well, or the dirty blonde hair around that face.
She woke up drenched in sweat, her heart was beating so fast it could jump out of her chest. At first, all around her was darkness and her panic grew until her eyes got used to the dim light. She saw Séra sleeping peacefully by her side and took a sigh of relief.
Biting her lip and trying her best not to cry, she laid down beside her lover once more and hugged her.
— I don’t want to forget you. — she whispered with tears in her eyes to the dead of night.
Hey, Bekah here! There's a little extra nsfw bit for this chapter in my Patreon, in case you feel like checking it out. You can also find the pdfs with proper formatting over there =)
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Hi! So my mom started snoring around the age of 60. She doesn’t know if it’s mouth or nose snoring, but the ENT doctor said she has some level of deviated septum. Does that mean it’s necessarily nose snoring? What is it usually when women start snoring at that age?
she is considering a septum surgery.. any success stories?
Also she was offered a laser procedure on the soft palate and the uvula. I personally don’t think it the right thing but who knows? So any success stories there?
Thanksss

Downstairs neighbor brought a pitbull-boxer mix last year around this time and we noticed incessant barking throughout the day. We asked nicely via text message that its barking for couple of hours straight and please keep him quiet. They ignored my message few times. I called the guy and he said he cannot talk. I got pretty angry as they do not answer the door as well and reported to them to the condo board, which they warned them they will get fined. Ever since the incident, they were very sour to us and ignoring us on when greeted and avoiding any bump-ins. I felt bad and brought them some fruits and cookies but they were very cold to us and they also bad mouthed us to other neighbors around the community. They also aggressively bang on their ceilings when my one year old start to run. Its hard to control her and we have spent over $2000 to put soft mats and rug on our entire condo. The dog was quieter for winter months but as the weather got warmer, they just let the dog bark again on the window and balcony at anything and everything, echoing throughout the neighborhood.
What should I do now? Should I report them again despite the fact that it will worsen the relationship more than what it is now? Other neighbors have noticed the dog barking but we are impacted more as we are directly above them.
FYI that this is Queens NY and moving is not an option as we purchased this place at a such a low rate and hard to give it up.
Update: it's a bit hard due to my two young babies, two year old and a toddler. They cry alot and they are loud. I know downstairs can hear them too but they haven't said much. I will sit on this for a bit and if any other neighbors want to complain together, I will go in with them. THANK YOU for all your suggestions

Himiko blinked her eyes excitedly. She looked around her and gasped softly with delight when she noticed that she was sitting on top of a pillowy, fluffy cloud in the bright blue sky. The sun was shining warmly down on her skin. She noticed her clothes had changed, as well. She was wearing a white dress with a red petticoat underneath, and a red sash around her waist tied up in a pretty bow. On her feet were a pair of red heels, and on her hands were a pair of white gloves.
"You look beautiful as always," murmured a smooth voice. Himiko looked up to see Kokichi sitting right across from her with a picnic basket placed in between them. She smiled at him.
"Nyeh...thank you," she replied bashfully with a soft blush on her cheeks. Kokichi stood up and moved over next to Himiko, sitting down right beside her so that he was now in between her and the picnic basket. He reached into the basket and pulled out a cupcake, handing it to her.
"Would you like a cupcake, muffin?" he asked, kissing her cheek. Himiko giggled at his joke and squealed happily as she took the muffin.
"Thank you," she replied, shyly biting into the muffin. It was the sweetest muffin she'd ever tasted. She sighed blissfully.
"Do you like it?" Kokichi asked.
"Yes. I do," Himiko replied with a nod. Kokichi kissed her hand.
"I'm glad," he said. "Because I made it specially for you. You deserve the best, Himiko." Kokichi gently kissed her hand again, this time, both front and back. At his warm touch, Himiko felt her heart soar. She was definitely on cloud nine. She finished her muffin and thanked Kokichi. Kokichi pressed his forehead against hers.
"You're welcome," he murmured. Himiko giggled goofily. She then covered her mouth.
"Oh! W-Was that too weird?" she asked abashedly. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be! I love your giggles," Kokichi said, pressing Himiko's hands against his chest. "Your giggles are lovely. But, not as lovely as your beautiful face." Himiko blushed like crazy. She was being complimented endlessly by Kokichi, and she loved it! And even though it wasn't the real Kokichi, she was at least enjoying herself. She found it a little easier to talk to him, as well.
"Kokichi?" she asked.
"Yes, my love?" Kokichi responded.
"Nyeh...would you...like to be my boyfriend?" Himiko asked with hope in her voice. Kokichi cupped Himiko's chin in his hands.
"Darling, I thought you'd never ask!" he cried.
"You mean...you've been waiting for me to ask you that?!" Himiko asked.
"Oh, sweetheart...I've been dying for you to ask me that!" Kokichi exclaimed, kissing both of Himiko's hands. Himiko stared at him in wonder. Part of her wanted to believe that the real Kokichi felt that way. But there's no way he could have. Himiko suddenly felt her heart drop. She was only in a fantasy after all. What was happening to her at that very moment was just an illusion. Kokichi in her dream was only telling her what she wanted to hear. And although she went in knowing that, it still didn't make the possibility of the real Kokichi not feeling the same as his dream counterpart vanish.
"What's the matter, my darling?" Kokichi asked. "Your eyes seem sad now."
"It's just that...you don't really feel that way about me," Himiko replied quietly, turning her head away from Kokichi. Kokichi gently turned her chin back to him.
"Of course I do, my lo-," he began.
"No...you don't," Himiko interrupted, turning her head away again, and lowering it despondently. "Nyeh...who am I kidding? This isn't how you really feel. I'm only...lying to myself."
"What do you mean?" Kokichi asked.
"It's just that...I can't help but think that maybe the way you feel about me is...is..." Himiko began, trying to hold back her tears. Kokichi gently took her hand in his.
"You think it's a lie. You want the way I feel about you to be the same way my real self thinks about you," he finished softly. Himiko turned to him and nodded her head. She thought it was strange how easily he was able to deduce that just like the real Kokichi would. "I see. And what makes me any different than my real self? You put a part of the real me in this dream after all." Himiko blinked in surprise. Was he talking about the strand of hair? If so, did putting that strand of hair into the potion add more than just Kokichi's image in her dream? Could she have added his feelings, too?
"But...you and your real self can't be the same person," Himiko reasoned. "You don't even act like the real Kokichi."
"I may not act the same as him, but how do you know we don't feel the same?" Kokichi asked with a mysterious smile. "I'm only acting this way because you've slightly altered my personality by creating a sweet love dream. But there's a part of me that's still true to the real me. After all, I saw your reaction to when I easily figured out what made you sad. Like the real me, I'm pretty good at reading people, riiiight?" Himiko looked at him in surprise. He was smiling back at her with that all-too-familiar mischievous, cheeky grin, replacing the sweet smile he had earlier. "My real self may feel the same way as I do about you, you know. You'll never know until you talk to him." He then gave her a wink. Himiko felt her hopes rising. Could it be true? Could Kokichi actually like her back?
"Nyeh...I don't like that you're giving me hope," she said hesitantly.
"Well, my job here isn't to fill you up with hope...but with love," Kokichi said, kissing the back of Himiko's hand again. She blushed as she smiled at Kokichi. Kokichi gently tickled Himiko's chin with his fingers. Himiko squealed and inhaled deeply. As she did, she began to float above Kokichi. As she exhaled, she landed slowly right into his arms, wrapping hers around his neck. Kokichi gave her gentle kisses on her cheek, causing Himiko to gasp softly with delight. She felt her heart beat faster as Kokichi pressed his forehead against hers and stared into her eyes.
"You really do have the most beautiful eyes, Himiko," he murmured. "I love the way they sparkle in the sunlight. And I bet they'd sparkle just as beautifully in the moonlight. I hope that, someday, I get a chance to see for myself. I could get lost in your eyes forever, my darling."
"Kokichi..." Himiko breathed. Kokichi then slowly inched his face closer to hers. Himiko gasped softly. He was going to kiss her! She closed her eyes, getting ready to be swept away by his soft, warm lips.
"Himiko!!" Kokichi said suddenly, but it wasn't his own voice coming out of his throat. It was...Tenko's?? Himiko's eyes flew open. She was back in her room. Daylight was streaming through the window that Tenko had opened. Tenko was at Himiko's bedside, shaking her awake. "Himiko! Wake up! It's time for school!" Himiko clenched her fists.
"TENKOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" she screeched.
Part Four
Himiko was grouchy that morning after having been waken up by Tenko before Kokichi in her dream could give her a kiss. Thinking about dream Kokichi, however, softened her mood a little. She smiled to herself as she brushed her hair, remembering the way his lips felt against her skin. After washing up in the bathroom, she went downstairs for breakfast. When she turned the corner to go into the kitchen, she bumped right into Kokichi.
"WAAHH!!!" she screamed, then covered her mouth immediately.
"Nee-heehee...that was a pretty intense reaction," Kokichi laughed with amusement.
"Nyeeeh...b-because you s-scared me!!" Himiko stammered, feeling the butterflies in her stomach flutter. "Watch where you're going, you idiot!"
"Idiot?!" Kokichi asked with fake surprise. "Gee, and all this time, I thought you liked me!" Himiko's eyes darted around, and she opened and closed her mouth frantically.
"L-Like you?! LIKE YOU?! Nyeeeh...w-well you th-thought wrong!!" she stammered. "Jeez, you're so annoying!! Now, j-just move out of my way already! Gosh!" Smirking, Kokichi stepped aside and let Himiko through. She shoved her way past him into the kitchen. When she felt safe, she clutched her chest with her hand and took a few deep breaths.
"Nyeh...that was close," she sighed, wiping sweat from her forehead. Suddenly, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She jumped out of her skin and whirled around to see Kokichi there. "AAAHHH!!" she screeched, flinching hard. Kokichi tossed his head back and laughed. Himiko balled her hands into fists. "Why are you sneaking up on me?!"
"Hahahaha...what was 'so close? '" Kokichi asked, making air quotes with his fingers.

"None of your business!!" Himiko snapped. "Now what do you want?!"
"Calm down, calm down," Kokichi replied with a cheeky grin. "I just wanted to tell you that if you wanted waffles, we're out of syrup."
"Yeah, yeah, thanks!" Himiko said testily. "Nyeeeh...are you done?!"
"Nee-heehee...why are you so on edge today?" Kokichi asked. "Does it have anything to with the nightmare you had?" Himiko blinked in confusion at him.
"Nightmare?" she repeated.
"Yeah. You woke up screaming this morning," Kokichi explained.
"O-Oh! Y-Yeah...that's right," Himiko lied. "Yeah, I had, um...a really bad nightmare."
"Oh? What was it about?" Kokichi asked with a sly grin.

"Nyeh! W-Why do you wanna know?!" Himiko asked nervously. Kokichi casually placed his hands behind his head.
"That must have been some nightmare to make you scream so loudly like that," he said. "I was kinda worried about you." Himiko couldn't help herself. She felt her cheeks grow warm as they turned a rosy pink.
He doesn't mean it that way, she thought to herself, trying to force down the warm, fuzzy feeling growing inside of her. He's only worried about you as a \friend!* He's probably actually lying about being worried in the first place! He doesn't care about you!* With that in mind, the warm, fuzzy feeling subsided, as did the blush on her cheeks. Her shoulders dropped.
"It was nothing," she mumbled. "It was actually a nice dream. I was just mad at Tenko for waking me up from it. It only became a nightmare when I realized I was back in the real world."
"I seeee!" Kokichi replied with a cheeky grin. "Sooo, what was your dream about?
"Ugh...why do you wanna know?!" Himiko scoffed. "It wasn't a bad dream, so you don't have to be worried about me anymore."
"Oh, that was a lie," Kokichi replied with a cheeky grin. "I wasn't worried at all. I just said that to get you to tell me what your nightmare was." Himiko stared at him in disbelief. She felt her heart drop. It was just as she thought. She knew it was too good to be true.
"A-HA!!!" Kokichi suddenly exclaimed, startling Himiko.

"W-What?!"

"That look on your face just now!" Kokichi said. "Why did you look so sad all of a sudden, Himiko? Did you want me to be worried about you, hmmm?"
"N-NO!!!" Himiko shouted. "It was just rude of you to say that!!"
"If you thought it was rude, you would have gotten angry at me, not sad," Kokichi pointed out.
"S-So! W-What's your point?!" Himiko stammered defensively as she nervously rubbed her arm. Kokichi inched his face closer to hers.
"You liiiike me, don't you, Himiko?" he teased. Himiko's cheeks turned bright red.
"N-NO!!! WHAT?!?! I ALREADY TOLD YOU I DON'T LIKE YOU!!!" she shouted.
"Well, when I mentioned it the first time, I meant that I thought you liked me as a friend," Kokichi said with a sneaky grin. "But, now, I'm saying that you like like me."
"WHAAAAT?!" Himiko roared, her cheeks turning deep red. "NO WAY!! THAT'S RIDICULOUS!!! I DON'T LIKE LIKE YOU!!! WHO SAID I LIKE LIKE YOU?!?! WHO WOULD EVEN LIKE LIKE YOU?!?! YOU'RE A J-JERK!!!" A very sexy jerk, she thought suddenly to herself. CUT THAT OUT!! STOP THINKING LIKE THAT!!!
"Then, lemme ask you this, how would you feel if I was actually worried about you?" Kokichi asked.
"Nyeeeh...you're not, so why does that matter?" Himiko asked, crossing her arms and turning away from Kokichi.
"Well...what if told you that I was lying about not being worried?" Kokichi asked, placing his hands on Himiko's shoulders. Himiko gasped softly, feeling his touch. It reminded her of her dream, of how Kokichi made her feel. Kokichi then wrapped his arms around her, pressing his cheek against hers. She closed her eyes, allowing herself to be held by Kokichi, if only for a few moments.

"How would you feel if...I actually did care?" Kokichi murmured softly in her ear. "Would you like that...Himiko? " Himiko uttered a shaky breath. Her heart pounded harder against her chest. She absolutely adored when he said her name, and he seemed to know it. She could hear the smirk on his face when he said it. "Would you confess your feelings to me, then, hmmm?" Himiko's eyes shot open. She couldn't let herself say anything to him. She threw his arms off of her.
"Nyeh...I don't like you!" she yelled. Before Kokichi could say or do anything else, she ran out of the kitchen and outside Casa V3. It was a little too early for her to go to school, but she couldn't be at home any longer. One more second and she would have confessed her feelings for Kokichi, and her life would have been over. She sighed in frustration, but also longingly. She loved the feeling of Kokichi's arms around her. She already missed his low, flirty voice in her ear. She loved how he made her heart pound. She wanted more. She decided that later that night, she'd try out a spicy love dream for a more daring experience with Kokichi.