It's been over a year now since. Highschool sweethearts, love of my life since I was 16 and he was 18. Even then I knew there were red flags, but he was an 18 year old and I told him exactly what I wanted and he agreed. We were good for the most part, at least I thought so. He always had his inconsiderate moments but Wes work it out - or rather I'd just move by because I wanted to nurture the relationship.
He broke up with me several times before. Once because of health thing I couldn't control. Another because he was supposedly having job and money issues he wanted to figure out alone. Another because I moved in with him and his grandma after a house fire and he got tired of me being in the same room as him when I didn't move out quick enough because my family struggled to find a home. There were a couple other occasions I know I missed. Each time I let him go with love and wished him the best, but told him I was sure he was my person. He always came back. Despite the fact that for years he wanted to sow his oats, explore, see what was out there. I encouraged him to do what he needed but he assured me that he wanted to be with me.
I knew when he was having doubts. He'd get hot and cold, grow distant at odd times. He liked sexy pictures of girls online - and when I saw him doing it I worked up the courage to say that it made me uncomfortable and he was defensive at first before apologizing. He did it again a year later and had no remorse. And used the opportunity to tell me he'd been thinking about breaking up with me around my birthday. He admitted that to me on other occasions too. He pushed me to take a job in another state because he knew it would be an excuse to leave me. And he always discussed doubts about our relationship with other people, one of those people being one of my best friends since I was in middle school.
He broke up with me this last time a month before our 8 year anniversary. He said he didn't want to live together and struggled to see a future. He wanted to get numbers and show up his friends with no game. He said he didn't know who could satisfy him emotionally, mentally, sexually (except maybe a threesome ((his words))). But he wanted to be single. Unlike the last time he announced it to our friend group in a prewritten message, changed his status, removed our pictures, and went out to the bar two days later and asked for a mutual friend's number.
He did a lot to continue to hurt me. Including trying to come back out of jealousy.

• asked for the mutual friends number
• liked my mom's provocative pictures on Instagram
• he didn't remember the year I was born
• he only treated me like a friend in group settings
• he never knew how to comfort me
• didn't defend me to his grandma who called me a gold digger even though I never asked him for a penny
• always used me to gauge his feelings
• got a 21 year old girlfriend
• called me crying to say he could only envision a future with me, but then said he actually wanted to be with the new girlfriend and that he actually didn't feel anything romantic for me despite all he said during our 6 hour in person talk
• hit on his "best friends" ex and got nudes from another one

He wants to come back, and I've been able to tell him no despite him saying everything he knows I want to hear. But I know I dragged out the pain for a year. My dog had passed last week and I just went silent (which I was prone to doing with him) and he finally blocked me I wasn't responding how he wanted. And I know it's for the best and I should have blocked him myself but I love him so much. I'm grieving all over again. I just want some advice I suppose. Or get reassurance. Or be told I'm stupid and need to get over it.
Sorry this was so long. I left out so many things. Just feeling really anxious today and wanted to get it out. I really just want to know how everyone has coped with their breakups, even if the person did bad things.

G,day everyone
So about 12 months ago i did everything to make my house as smart as i could that was worth doing. With google home.
One issue i keep having is devices like google mini will just disconnect from the network and wont re connected even after a reboot, i have to reboot the router and the mini to restore it, but geez its annoying having one device not connected i can be in another room with its own mini and the one that isn't working goes of its head again.
But my reason for this post is i bought about 18 Lenovo smart bulbs for the whole house, all top of the line colour changing one's, Now one has blown its connected to wifi but no lights on. Tried everything to reset it but failed. One bulb isn't the end of the world. But when i tried to buy a new one i couldn't find any one that sold them. So i called Lenovo tech support and they said yes they no longer make smart home products, so i would be unable to buy another one of any kind. Very helpful Lenovo, they did say if i sent it back i would get a refund but that does not help me. And i also had the issue of my Samsung fold 5 would not open the lenovo app, would just say there is a bug in the software and closing it. I think that because their old shitty app hasn't been updated in years that it now doesn't support new devices. So i had to get my old shitty tablet just to remove the device from the app. But then when i tried the app on the tablet it kept saying server is busy try again later, took me about 10 goes before i could get in once, just to remove that one light. And i can no longer control the app or settings on my new phone.
So i bought a Tp link bulb to replace it and a cool little ptz camera they also made and both claim to work with google home.
After unlinking the lenovo app to remove just one device i added the new TP link light bulb and it works ok now but the colour temps are different, its bright white is different to the Lenovo light next to it. So I've got different colour lights now next to each other, so that's a pain, or start replacing them all with TP link bulbs.
The camera connects to the google home app ok but when you go to view the camera or do anything with it, you just get a notification that you cannot view or control the camera in google home, has to be a separate software or has to be display screen like chromecast or a nest device. Is it really that hard for google to show me whats going on within the app? All the other cameras work on with google like the doorbell camera why cant it show another camera.
Sorry rant over.
TLDR: Lenovo have stopped making smart products so tough luck if you need something replaced, and TP link stuff doesn't work well with google home.

first
Luna VI query: Set the source to the leaked files of the first reconnaissance operation of Irisa.
Done!
Luna VI query: What did Nathan do during the first hour of the war?
***
From the instant he opened his eyes, Nathan's morning was chaotic. It all began with the ground shaking beneath him, jolting him into a state of awareness. He then was greeted by the sight of Amara. She was leaning against a corner, covered in purple from head to toe as she screamed at someone through an earpiece that she was pressing with one of her claws.
His good morning was overhearing one piece of bad news after the other.
The rest of Amara's group had been ambushed early in the morning; many were dead, injured, or missing.
A war had erupted in the sky and her allies were trying to push back the enemy forces, but the battle persisted; the outcome was uncertain.
Zara was being brought to them, but Amara had lost contact with Igmila's group who was bringing her, only receiving confirmation from another group that a rescue pod was spotted at a distance.
And when he thought that things couldn't get any worse, he heard a bang followed by the AI reporting that Ryo had shot down a drone somewhere near their position.
"Open the tent!" Red had conquered Amara's body.
None of the scenarios Nathan had contemplated the previous night had prepared him for such a chaotic morning. "Give me a second."
He only wanted a chance to get his gun from his backpack and explain why he had it in the first place, even though he suspected Amara was already aware he had it. But she didn't let him. "Now!"
She had never felt so distant to him as the moment she said that single word, which led him to just comply as he stood up and followed her in silence. But this frail silence only masked his morning grumpiness, magnified by the dire circumstances and her cold demeanor toward him.
Nathan had barely caught a glimpse of Ryo and Elysira at a distance when he muttered. "It wouldn't have been so hard to say a few words to fill me in, you know."
Amara's eyes were transfixed on the smoking pieces of the drone when she whipped her head around, glaring at him with her orange eyes. "My people are fighting a war and dying. How can you demand my time when Yelara is hurt and barely escaped alive?"
"Oh, come on, I'm not demanding anything." He scoffed, shaking his head. "I just don't think it would have been so hard to tell me what you intend to do in the next five minutes."
The tip of her tail pressed against his chest, as red and purple coexisted on her skin.
"I am heading up the mountain to find Igmila." She spoke in a detached voice, pulling her tail back and turning around, and then she sprinted in the gap between himself and the tent.
He caught a glimpse of gray on her neck and all his grumpiness was gone, replaced by a cold shiver running down his spine. With his arms moving faster than his thoughts, he grabbed her by the tail, preventing her from going anywhere.
"You absolutely can't do this Amara." Nathan looked down at the tail he held with both hands and swallowed a lump of saliva in fear of her reaction. But that still didn't prevent him from finishing what he had to say, "It's too dangerous."
Amara's eyes sought his, causing him to suspect she would demand to be released or try to free herself by force, but she did something else. "All of this is because of you. Had I not come to your tent, I would be there to assist them."
Nathan caught a glimpse of green around her back spots, which let him know that there was a hint of guilt in her words. But did that justify blaming everything on him and running into danger without thinking?
If not for the awful night followed by an awful morning, Nathan might have just taken the blame and hugged her. But he too had his limits, "How is that fair? Blame me all you want, but nothing will change that you had all the chances in the world to go back and you didn't. I'm not saying that you could have done anything abo-"
"Indeed." Gray flashed for a moment before red flowed among her black spots. "This night was a waste of time." His grip faltered at her words and she pulled her tail back from among his fingers. "I should have stayed with Yelara to help her tend to her wounds."
Nathan bit his lips in frustration. How was it possible to agree with her words, yet still feel the sharp sting in his heart?
And if that was not enough, Ryo had to step in to rub salt in the wound.
Clap.
Clap.
Clap.
With Elysira’s tail wrapped around his wrist as she averted her eyes from Amara, Ryo spoke, "Please don't tell me you're mad because the plant lover couldn't get it up."
Nathan blinked fast not believing his eyes. Ryo was not only shirtless but there were a lot of scratches on his neck and below. Elysira’s long strands were also a mess, but even without that, their physical closeness alone would be enough of a hint of how much fun they had at night.
When Nathan glanced at Amara to gauge her reaction, she had already crossed her arms, looking at him angrily. Which immediately made him feel as if Ryo’s not-funny joke was true although he knew it wasn't.
It took Nathan a considerable amount of self-retainment to not walk up there and rearrange Ryo's handsome face with his fist, or at least attempt to do so.
A few seconds passed before he said, "Why are you here?"
Ryo didn't even bother to look at him, his eyes focusing solely on Amara. "Information. I want her to tell me what she knows about this war."
Amara didn't look pleased to help, but she still informed him about the ambush and even alerted him that even their current position would soon be unsafe.
As If things weren't already bad enough, Ryo frowned and hurried to instruct Elysira to get his things as soon as Amara had finished talking. Nathan felt like he was in a war movie where everything was happening too fast for his emotions and reason to follow.
It was only when he saw Ryo raising his gun skywards that Nathan’s anger subsided, contained by the prospect of how bad their situation was. Ryo movements were fluid and methodical, but he never pulled the trigger on the many drones that appeared high above and, instead, retreated to take cover behind a tree.
Only now the seriousness of the situation sank in for Nathan.
He didn't even care that he hadn't explained to Amara why he had a gun yet, rushing inside the tent after exchanging a glance with her.
After crossing the circular door, he found only a few items on the ground: a pair of boots, his sleeping bag, and his backpack with all his equipment inside.
Nathan was quick, wearing his boots first before retrieving his belt, knife, and holster from the backpack. With a sequence of swift movements, he strapped the sheathed knife and holster to the belt and cinched it around his waist, securing it in place before closing the backpack and dashing out the door with his gun in one hand and the backpack in the other.
Already outside, Nathan found it weirdly reassuring that Ryo was in the same spot as before, but that only lasted until he tried to find Amara, but found nothing no matter where he searched for her.
He dropped his backpack, feeling at a loss. How could he have allowed her to venture beyond his sight when he knew that guilt was clouding her judgment?
Only when he had already cupped his hands around his mouth to scream her name that he felt a touch right above his heel—her tail.
"Psst..."
Wiping his head, Nathan saw Amara's whole body mimicking the colors of his tent, making herself quite hard to spot.
"I thought you were gone." He joined her, stooping down beside the tent as relief washed over him.
"It might be too late to join my soldiers." She didn't allow her colors to change, but the translator conveyed a hint of sadness. "I lost contact with all the teams who were coming here."
"Amara I-"
Nathan was about to attempt to make things right with her when Ryo’s assertive voice reached him. "Listen up, those fuckers are jamming our comms and they will be here at any time. Take the MLBCS and find a clearing to use it, I doubt they can interfere with the laser. Just don't forget that your immediate safety comes first or else you might not be among the living when the pod arrives."
Ryo ran back to his tent as soon as he was done speaking, leaving Nathan questioning his own intelligence. How come he had never even considered leaving the planet? A single glance at Amara and he knew why. But did he have any other option?
Staying and fighting to hold his position was something he briefly considered. But did he have a chance when even Ryo decided to leave after seeing the drones?
Mission control might give him other options, so Nathan decided to try his luck despite Ryo’s warning.
Unable to establish a two-way connection.
He confirmed the interference with the communication with a single thought, kicking his backpack in frustration even though it was expected.
Why did it have to be so hard to accept that Ryo was right and leaving the planet was his best option?
But would Ryo truly leave the planet and leave Elysira behind?
Nathan forgot Amara who was beside him and screamed, not allowing this question to stay in his mind, "Wait, what are you gonna do?"
Ryo replied as he waited for Elysira, "I'm not leaving the planet unless mission control finds a way to save Ely too."
Nathan's eyes widened, feeling like an idiot as he brought up a pop-up window showing the schematics of the rescue pods. They were designed to be fast vehicles capable of transporting a single person to the space station, but Earth's government hadn’t skimped on the design, which included various components that could be discarded, such as medical supplies and search and rescue equipment.
He used the AI to run the calculations and found that Amara would likely be able to go with him, that is if they wedged themselves into the vehicle and discarded everything else.
Nathan was about to share his findings with Ryo when he caught a glimpse of him and Elysira disappearing into the woods, abandoning their tent behind as they ran away.
A sense of urgency struck him at that moment, but it was easily forgotten when Amara's voice struck even harder, "You should go."
"What do you mean?" He sought her eyes, but she avoided his gaze, facing to the ground.
"Do what Ryo suggested." She took a small pause before she went on. "Leave the planet."
"The hell I will!" He punched the tent. "Not without you." He could only assume she was saying this because she didn't know she could leave with him. "You'll come with me, and the pod will take us to the space station."
"Your species will refuse to take me." He saw a hint of purple on her neck. "Before the mission started your people told us you humans will not get involved in our wars." She finally made eye contact, and the purple on her skin intensified. "My best chance to survive this is to hide in the mountains and wait for reinforcements."
"You don’t understand, Amara." He didn't have time for a full explanation of what humans considered not getting involved. "No one in mission control will want to leave you here to die just because of some stupid rule." He then spoke his heart out without a care in the world. "And even if they do, they will take you anyway if say I won't go anywhere without you."
A hint of yellow could be seen among her camouflaged skin, but before she could say what she would do, her tail wrapped around his neck and he felt a strong pull to lower his head and bend his knees for cover.
"The rebels are here," she whispered as her ears twitched.
Nathan was tall enough to see the slope on the other side of the tent by just standing, but Amara struggled to see from above the structure, requiring her to stretch her full height and still take little jumps to take peeks.
And it was after doing so that she dropped her camouflage entirely, letting purple run free among her black spots.
Nathan took interest in what she had seen that had caused such a reaction, and he leaned cautiously against the tent and raised his head slowly, prepared to find a few armed Irisians hidden among the trees. But what he found instead was a never-ending line of Irisian advancing downhill at a fast pace towards them.
He understood Amara's reaction now, pulling back the harmer of the revolver as he stared at her. "I need to... do something."
He made up his mind, determined to shoot. But when activated the infrared view mode and took aim at Irisians descending the slope, Nathan froze for a second. This just lasted a moment, and when found the resolve to fire, he had already lifted the gun enough that it wouldn't hit anyone and it would just be a warning shot.
He fired once, twice, and went on until all six rounds were gone, then he noticed their organized marching had stopped, all of them having activated their camouflage. Some even broke the line and retreated uphill.
When he took cover again, Amara was protecting her ears with both hands, looking at him as if he were some sort of monster. Nathan ignored her and rifled through his backpack in search of more ammunition, finding the small box with shining metal bullets after he had searched for some long seconds.
It was only when he released the cylinder to reload the gun that Nathan noticed something.
His hands were shaking.
He ignored it and pressed the extraction rod the remove the cartridges from the cylinder to make room for the new ones, clumsily dropping a few of them as he reloaded.
Amara saw this and stopped him with her tail before he had filled all the chambers.
"I cannot go with you." Her body had been conquered by purple.
"You think I'll leave you behind?" He almost reached his breaking point when she replied.
"No." Her tail touched his cheek gently. "There are too many of them, Nathan." She pulled her tail back as a hint of gray appeared. "My brother will never let me go, he lost too many ships and soldiers to give up without his prize." The gray intensified, squeezing her black spots. "If you die with me on this planet, your species might abandon Irisa forever.
"My chances of hiding in the mountains are slim, but they exist... and even if I fail I will distract them long enough for you to flee."
Her body blended with the surroundings again and Nathan felt that she was about to do something stupid, but he moved faster and grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to bend her legs and join him on the ground as she stared at him with wide eyes.
"To hell with this self-sacrifice bullshit." Nathan finally decided what he would do. "Do you think I will die that easy? Guess what, you’re wrong." His hands moved from her shoulder to her back and he embraced her. "Let me tell you what we'll do, we take the MLBCS, we find a clearing, and we go to the space station." He released her and added, almost crazily. "You go with me even if I have to drag you by the tail as you scratch me, you hear me?"
He was not kidding; he grabbed her tail with his left hand, leaving her exterior filled with colors ranging from purple to yellow.
Amara was about to reply when the tent produced a thud noise, sounding as if someone had knocked on a cardboard box. When they turned to the side, there was a tiny hole in the tent dangerously close to Amara's head.
She touched the hole with her finger, and then her whole hand pressed against the side of her head, staring at him without saying a word.
Nathan's heart skipped a beat when he realized what had just happened, and consumed by a rage like he never felt before, he pressed the cylinder of his revolver back into place with just the four bullets inside, pulling back the harmer.
This time there was no hesitation, he quickly stood up and used the infrared view mode to survey the now organized groups of Irisians who had taken a defensive formation, choosing as target an Irisian who had climbed a tree and was pointing a long gun at them.
In just a moment Nathan aimed and pulled the trigger, firing one round after another. The first two missed completely, but the others hit the tree right above the target, making this Irisian panic and release his claws from the wood, only to welcome an ugly fall on the rocks below from several meters above the ground.
He took cover again immediately, but this time noise as if he was facing heavy rain under an umbrella struck his eardrums moments after he had taken cover, making him wince every time he heard the distinct noise of a projectile going through one wall of the tent and stopping the other.
With her tail still among his fingers, Nathan and Amara exchanged several anxious glances as the shooting persisted, only calming down when the rebels realized they were wasting ammunition and the barrage of fire slowly started to lose momentum.
Nathan's heart was racing and she was going through all tones of purple when she broke the silence.
"Fine!" She spoke fast. "If you are being so adamant about tying our fates together, we can do it your way." Her tail escaped his grip, but instead of pulling it back, she coiled it around his wrist. "But we are weaker together, Nathan. I will be a burden to you when you run, and you will be a burden to me when we hide."
"Oh, to hell with that too." Despite his harsh words, just knowing that they were on the same page now was enough to give him some hope. "Sorry. I do all the running and you do all the hiding, does that work for you?"
He didn't wait for her reply and loaded the gun again, this time doing it very fast even though his hands were still shaking.
"You do all the running? I fail to understand you." She said as she stood up to take a peek at the enemies, just to recoil in fear and add, "Explain yourself fast, they are losing the fear of your loud gun."
"Sure." He grasped his backpack bottom and overturned it, emptying its contents in a quick motion. With all the items on the ground, Nathan only took the MLBCS and the little box with his drones that he promptly stored in his pocket. "We won't need any of that, which means my back will be free."
"Are you crazy, I am too heavy f-"
"You're not." Nathan was 6′3″, and he had the nanites ensuring he was as healthy as a human could be. This meant that the short Amara—the top of her head only reaching a little below his shoulder—was not a challenging weight for him to carry given her slender body.
Noticing the doubt in her gaze, he lowered his body even more, turning his back towards her in a way it would be easy for her to climb, hoping this would be all the push she needed.
"You take pleasure in testing my trust, do you not?" The tone of her voice hinted at her reluctance, but she still draped her arms over his shoulder, securing her grip in a way her claws wouldn't hurt him.
Even though they had a plan now, Nathan still felt a chill down his spine at the thought of what he would have to do. And despite knowing that he had taken everything he needed, he anxiously patted down his pocket the make sure the box with the drones was there and remembered to take a handful of bullets, filling up his pockets as some of them fell to the ground.
"Ready?" He asked, trying to sound confident.
"See for yourself." Her tail wrapped around his belly, full of tiny black spots surrounded by purple as far as he could see.
Nathan took a few deep breaths and stood up, getting a glimpse of the many groups that were advancing from both sides, trying to surround them.
It didn't even take him a full second before he started firing his revolver indiscriminately at them while his legs moved on their own, not even waiting for his eyes to decide which path he would take.
Amara's weight escaped his thoughts completely, replaced by the fear evoked by the faint noise of metal breaking the sound barrier around them as soon they left the protection of the tent.
He didn't spare a single glance behind, running downhill at full throttle with bursts of adrenalin fueling his speed. He outran the reach of their guns quite fast, hurdling fallen brunches and putting not only distance but also several tree trunks between them and the hostile force behind.
With Amara's solid grip and occasional shifting of her weight to prove that she was fine, Nathan kept his pace as his muscles burned with exertion.
For a little over ten minutes he kept going, jumping over protruding roots and ducking beneath low-hanging branches. But this couldn't go on forever and eventually, he stopped to catch his breath, bending forward and letting go of items in his hand as Amara released her grip to stand on her own two feet.
His breath was coming in ragged bursts, but that didn't keep him from starting to laugh as he stared at her, whose eyes were gentle and her entire body was filled with hints of yellow.
In a split-second though, her whole demeanor changed, all the yellow giving way to purple and red.
She asked a single question, "Is that device of yours supposed to release smoke?"
The tip of her tail was pointing at the MLBCS, which now had a small hole in it from where a whisp of smoke curled upwards, just like a candle after its flame had been extinguished.
Nathan shook his head and touched his forehead; a single word left his mouth, "Fuck."
***
This was an account based on what Nathan did during the first hour of the war. The previous narrative is based on the events of the morning of the twentieth day of the exploratory mission of Irisa. According to your current settings, no queries will be suggested.
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My parents are generally caring folks who have admittedly gone above and beyond for their three kids, more so than the vast majority of parents I think. But they aren't flawless and refuse to acknowledge their imperfections, some of which I deem as abusive. So tell me, Reddit, based of this list, are my folks abusive or not?
Had a small chair smashed over my head by Dad for getting into an argument with my sister.
Woken up in the middle of the night by Mum and had the living shit beaten in me in bed after she went through my phone and saw me exchanging mild terrorist jokes with my friend on WhatsApp.
Belted several times by Mum, such as for talking to two strangers about my personal life due to "Stranger Danger" when I was about 10.
Belted several times by Dad, such as for getting into arguments with my siblings.
Smacked in the head by Mum multiple times, such as for accidentally miswriting something on a homework report or being unable to tell the time in my preteens.
Pinched multiple times by either of my parents for various misdeeds, such as not wanting to take my shirt off during a family outdoor activity in the spring or innocently behaving inappropriately as a kid.
For various other misdeeds, I've been kicked, violently shaken like a rag doll, beaten with a wooden spoon, had something thrown at me, forced to kneel on the floor and raise my arms up in the air until told otherwise, made to stay outside the house in the wind wearing a shirt and shorts and I don't remember who said exactly, but I think I recall one of my folks threatening that they might not be able to control themselves if they're sufficiently pissed off.
If I showed a hint of resistance towards Mum's physical discipline by reflexively protecting myself, she'd guilt-trip me by saying, "So now's come the time when the son does the abusing, eh?" even though I would never and was nowhere to retaliating on Mum, only shielding myself. Even at age 21, when I confronted her about unwarranted physical discipline, she defended herself by claiming that I only focused on the negatives and never the positives of their parenting and she doesn't regret anything she ever did to me and that even if I was aged 24, she would still dole out the physical punishment if she wanted to. When I said I won't let her touch me, she once again asked me if this meant I was going to start beating her back. I said I'd never lay a hand on her nor had I even thought of doing so, it's just that I wouldn't let her touch me, that's it. She asked what if she were to throw a shoe at me, would I throw the shoe back at her and I said no, I'd just keep a distance from her and she lost all control and started berating me for being an ungrateful son, etc
Mum was continually interrupting my conversation with Dad over the phone, causing me to tell her that I'm trying to talk on the phone, but which she misinterpreted as me telling her to shup up or something, resulting in her immediately getting physical with me.
Mum was continuously making fun of something I wrote in a book, causing me to smack the book out of her hand in anger, which she beated me for and locked me up in my room.
Had Dad being angry and yelling at me to stop crying during shower time as he doused me with cold water (which I absolutely hated) when I was about 5-6 after we actually enjoyed a sweaty game of football with some local kids, which soured the experience for me and made me reluctant to play football outside again since the only way I could play was if I had either of my folks with me.
One summer vacation, we were at the beach in the sea, and Dad was trying to take me to the deeper levels despite me being very uncomfortable as I couldn't swim properly yet, resulting in me almost drowning when he left me to it.
In my later teens, Dad would frequently get me to help him out in incredibly strenuous activities which would often completely physically drain me, both at the house refurbishment and our up-and-coming shop, to the point where the neighbouring shopkeepers who saw how tirelessly I worked for him expressed concern by telling him to go a bit easy on me and at least pay me for my efforts, which he addressed by asking me "Don't they know you're my son?" I never once complained or declined his requests to help out since I knew we were tight on money and Dad was making use of all the free help he could get. My only issues were some instances of potential abuse, such as when he got angry and started yelling at me to perform a task that I genuinely didn't understand how to do. I remember pleading with him to help me understand, but he just continued to get frustrated and scaring the shit out of me. Or this other time where after a hard day's work at building our shop, I didn't immediately acknowledge something Dad said to me, leading him to berate me for my supposed social blunder. When he just wouldn't let up, I then proceeded to remind him of a social blunder he once committed, causing him to punch me in the face and berate me more until we got home. When we arrived home, I was offered dinner which I declined solely because I was uncomfortable being around him and so wanted to immediately go to bed, but he forced me to sit right next to me while he shot a death glare at me, which I interpreted as him asserting his dominance over me.
Dad could be very short-tempered and erratic on occasion, to the point where I would feel like I was walking on eggshells around him at times, such as when I woke up one morning and greeted him with a casual "Hellooo" that had a bit of a drawl to it and he suddenly froze up and looked at me with a death glare and I quickly apologised, scolding me for laying my sizeable head back on the sofa while he spoke to me, scolding us if me or my siblings said "Excuse me" if he was in our way in the house since apparently that was too formal and not something you'd say to a family member (especially a father), or if we forgot to say "Good Morning" to him after waking up. I've actually had to appeal to Mum to ask him to control his temper on a couple of occasions and as a result I feel like I can never truly relax around him.
On multiple occasions, I've been forced to eat something even if I didn't want to.
I had a bedwetting problem for most of my life. One time when I was about 5, Dad woke me up in the middle of the night to discover that I'd once again wet the bed. He angrily told me to get up, told me to face the wall and remain in that position in my piss-stained clothes as punishment while he changed my bed and made me go back to bed again.
I have noticeable bumps on my foreheads which I remember where obtained from hitting my head on the ground as a toddler but which Mum claims are just natural or something, which I interpret as gaslighting.
Mum accused Dad of cheating on her, but he proved he wasn't. Years later when I enquired as to what their fight was about she told me the truth (that it was a misunderstanding over his fidelity) which I suspected. When I brought it up again later, however, she totally lied about it for some reason, which I again see as gaslighting.
When Mum caught me watching porn for the first time ever, she berated me by asking whether this also means I would like to see her or my sister naked.
When I was a kid, Dad tried to manipulate me one time when I told him I wanted to make cartoons in the future and he said that job was for a software engineer.
A lot of their advice was to turn myself over to God. Thing is, I no longer believe in God so that advice was falling on deaf ears and I am scared of coming out to them as an atheist.
After deceiving my parents for two years about my online learning, while it was justified to an extent, Dad really let me have it, telling me in no uncertain terms every opportunity he had how extremely let down he was, how he'd never seen anything like this happen anywhere in his entire life (he was 55 at this point) and how my deception and failure were among the two biggest tragedies/disappointments in his life, the other being the civil war raging in our homeland Ethiopia. Mind you this civil war resulted in the genocide of thousands upon thousands of our ethnic tribe the Tigrayans. He would also say that he's so angry but he can't beat me to let it out because I'm an adult now (I was 20 at the time), so he's forced to stew helplessly in his own anger.
They were pretty strict, restrictive and judgmental folks and could be overbearing. Mum would never let me visit another person's house without them having visited ours first, as she explicitly explained so herself and even that was a moot point because she didn't want any peer of mine coming over anyway, so none of my peers came over to my house (until I was 18 and that was because I showed up home with him unexpected and practically begged her to let him come in) and I'd never been to anyone else's house (apart from Sasha's and that was without her knowledge or consent). She forbade all social media apart from WhatsApp and even that I always used in secret when texting people since I knew she'd find some way to be judgemental about it. She wouldn't let me go play football with my friends if she didn't drive me over there herself so she would know the location and even that was reluctantly expressed. Throughout our teens, she forbade TV on the weekdays save for Friday, which she would brag about to her friends, and very rarely let me hang out with others after school for a social outing, discounting the after school badminton club on Thursdays in my mid teens which took place at school Though I guess this could once again be chalked up to being money-conscious, but also being overly distrustful of everyone in the UK. Dad could also get like this, such as making us do school work on Friday after school or insisting on cutting my fingernails even as he was making me bleed .
They both generally either discouraged or outright forbade any interest in fantasy, which included things like Mum eventually forbidding me from reading Harry Potter, berating and almost getting physical with me for watching a Bond film with my siblings when I was about 14 and just when I thought she couldn't possibly find an angle to criticise on me watching My Little Pony she reproached me for a kiss scene that took place. This trait of theirs got completely overblown after my little brother's nervous breakdown, causing Dad to completely ban our former interests in comic books and Naruto, reprimand me for watching 13 Going on 30 and disapprove of us playing FIFA, to the point where I genuinely felt like I couldn't enjoy anything when around them. They would also criticise us a lot for relatively minor things and their lectures could be excruciatingly long, spanning hours. They also had next to no concept of privacy, entering our rooms without ever knocking (unless they knew we were changing) and confiscating our phones a couple times for no real reason whatsoever.
All this has led to me being incredibly sneaky about what I do. I never let them see me with my phone, only ever using it out of their eyesight and I routinely deleted shit stored up on it in case they randomly needed my phone, which they would. I also became adept at lying as well as identifying footsteps. I think due to the sort of parenting they employed, I was very anxious and scared during these particular events:
My primary school teacher once lent me her Harry Potter DVD box set and I didn’t even get past the first film from great fear that Mum would catch me watching it and get angry
During one summer vacation back to our homeland the plan was that Dad would remain in the UK for a bit while the rest of us would go to our country before he joined us. I knew that Harry Potter would be running on some of the TV channels in the UK and throughout the portion of the summer holiday where Dad was still in the UK, which was several weeks, I was deathly afraid of him watching the films and finding out that this was what I liked.
If I remember correctly, I also recall being taught how to masturbate by my babysitter when I was about 3-4 (which I've been doing ever since and I'm now 21), which I've never told anyone and would count as sexual abuse, right?
My little brother has also experienced the below:
Got the living shit beaten out of him by Mum after he was tricked by his friends into writing "fuck" on a whiteboard. He didn't even know what it meant, but I could hear his pitiful wails and screams coming from the bedroom where Mum was beating him.
He accidentally tripped and broke a stair pillar while we were organising the shoe room once, causing Mum to lose it and get physical with him. When I brought this up with Dad years later, Mum either lied about the events or didn't recall it well, the former which I interpret as another round of gaslighting.
He's also been pinched and smacked on the head several times.
So... what do you think, Reddit?
EDIT: I've noticed a few posts calling my parents monsters and to get as far away from them as possible. Thing is though, Reddit, even with all the aforementioned in mind, I can't bring myself to fully hate them because of all the good they have also done, which I think I should write out so I can see whether people change their tunes about labelling them as monsters:
I'm currently 21 and living in the UK but I was born in the African country of Ethiopia and Dad anticipated that our country would one day blow to hell so he worked his ass off to move us to Italy (where racism was rampant), before finally moving us to the UK while he worked abroad. He worked himself to the bone for torturous hours in several different countries, some war-torn and with civil wars raging all around him, potential death, without seeing his children for months on end for 7 years, all so that they could have a better life than he ever had, where he and his dad suffered the aftermath of a devastating civil war that destroyed their livelihood and lost everything when he was our age. And during those 7 years, Mum singlehandedly raised us as a lonely housewife with virtually no employment while her husband worked abroad trying to make ends meet. She dutifully made us breakfast, lunch and dinner practically every single day for those 7 years and I can admit we barely had to household chores in our preteens and early teens as she was basically doing everything so you could say we were spoiled to an extent. She never had a problem expressing her love for us and would do her best to emotionally support us if we needed her. Same with Dad, he usually had no problem telling us he loved us and officially quit his job when I was 16 so he could start a business, which he won't get to operate that long anyway since he's in his mid 50s and planned to leave everything in our hands for us to profit from. So, Reddit, can you really call them monsters?

So, I've been feeling really bored of a lot of the Pokemon showing up in events and raids lately. I really just want to save my coins up for Global Go Fest, since I love the Eeveelutions, and want to shiny hunt those in raids. I play for free though, so my only way to do that is coins. I know each area has a "cell" in the game or something right? and in that area, if it has a certain amount of stops, one has to be a gym. So why have the locations of the gyms be set like that? I know people vote for locations, but that doesn't really matter when after all these years, people play gyms just as toxic as when the game first came out. I'm a team Instinct player, and some days I get less than 20 coins, because team Mystic players still have no manners as a collective I guess, I spend a long while taking out their tanky Pokemon that have been in there for a full day, start walking away, and 5 mins later, they have reclaimed it. People with a gym right by their apartment building instantly knock me out whenever I take it even though they live there. One time someone in there even cheated, glitched out the gym, turned it white so I couldn't add Pokemon with the "gym currently being attacked" message, stayed like that until near midnight when of course it turned blue again!! The library has a gym and I've never ever seen it any colour other than blue and it's always full of 6 tanky mons that are berried up at all times. Why do players like this get full monopoly and a fixed gym location? It really makes gym control impossible for certain teams in certain areas. I really think to counter this gyms should randomly generate new Pokestop locations once a month or so. especially in more residential areas.
thoughts on this? I know Niantic probably won't change a core mechanic that has been there since launch but it's still nice to throw ideas around I suppose!

I smile and laugh, play, and joke around, but I also cry a lot, especially at night. I feel like a balloon that's been overinflated, ready to burst. I see no hope for the future, no motivation, no confidence, and no self-love. When I try to envision my future, I see myself stuck in the same place.
This started when I was 12, after 6th grade, and worsened at 14. Since I was 11, I've been babysitting my little brothers a lot. I love them and understand why I had to do it—my parents were struggling and working to keep a roof over our heads. It's not their fault, and I don't blame them. But for the past seven years, babysitting has been my daily routine. When my parents were home, they were either resting, spending time with my younger siblings, or doing family activities. Emotionally and mentally, I felt they weren't there for me. I never felt comfortable talking to them about how I felt. And I thought they had bigger worries than me, so I kept everything to myself but there was like three times were I’ve opened up to them . For temporary happiness, I turned to video games, the internet, and my dog. These distractions kept me happy for a while, but over time, they stopped working. I had no friends and stayed home all day. After sixth grade, I did online school for two years, which meant I spent my days playing video games, eating, and staring at screens. Without social interaction, I forgot how to socialize and developed social anxiety, insecurities, self-hatred, and no confidence.
I was isolated for two years, which severely affected me. When I returned to school in 9th grade, I couldn't make friends. I was always quiet, couldn't ask for help in class, and struggled to hold conversations. When someone talked to me, I got dizzy, experienced blurred vision, tunnel vision, and shaking. I kept my head down because I was so insecure about my face and body. Everything I'm typing is how I still feel.
When I was 15, we moved. For two or three months, I didn't go to school, staying in my room all day, watching my younger brothers, sleeping, eating, and browsing the internet. I was socially isolated again. When I finally started school, I met a girl who talked to me first. We became friends, and I felt a bit happier, though still insecure and sad. Eventually, I made three more friends, and we ate lunch together. However, as soon as I got home from school, my parents left for work, and I watched my siblings until late at night. This pattern continued, though they didn't leave as often as they used to. I had some alone time when two of my younger siblings started school, but I still had responsibilities, like picking them up from the bus stop and again watching them until like 10 or 11.
After more moving and struggling, we settled into a nice house, which I'm grateful for. But despite the change in living conditions, I still feel the same—full of self-hate, lacking confidence, feeling hopeless and unmotivated. I'm 17 now, not in school, have no friends, and feel worse than ever. I want to tell my parents, but I fear they won't understand, and nothing will change. No matter how many times my mom tells me to love myself or sends me motivational videos, I feel numb. Deep down, I can't imagine ever loving myself, feeling motivated, or escaping this hopelessness. I believe nothing will ever change. Am I wrong? Are my feelings even valid? Every single day, I deal with crying, fighting, and my name being called constantly. I can't do this anymore—it's overwhelming and exhausting. I'm bed rotting all the time, unable to take care of myself properly. I'm neglecting myself. Basic tasks like brushing my teeth, showering, and cleaning feel useless to me. Why take care of myself when I feel so low?
Don't get me wrong; I have days where I feel better and think I should take care of myself and dog, but those feelings only last a few days at most. Then I go right back to neglecting myself. I still get up to take care of my brothers, make them food, and clean up after them because I have to—otherwise, my mom would be upset, and I just don't want to hear it.
On especially hard days when I'm feeling more down than usual, I reach a point where I just don't care anymore. I won't clean up, though I still make food for my brothers because I would never let them starve. Other than that, I can't find the motivation to do anything else. Is this just me being lazy? Or is it something else? I lack the motivation to just do it. Are my feelings valid? I don't feel like they are. I don't know anymore—I just can't.
I feel so awkward around my parents and barely talk to them, especially about my feelings. It’s just never been that way. Three times, I tried to open up to them, but nothing changed. Instead, I felt like they were invalidating my feelings with comments like, "What do you have to be stressed about?", "When I was your age, I didn’t have anybody," "Growing up was hard; you're lucky," and "Depression isn’t real."
I'm grateful for everything my parents do for me and my siblings, but these comparisons to their past make me feel even worse. It makes me question whether my feelings are valid. Once, I told them I thought I had an eating disorder, and they just looked at each other, shook their heads, and laughed. That was me trying to open up, and it made me feel terrible.
I'm sorry if this seems jumbled; I just have a lot to say. I want to understand what’s going on with me. Are my feelings valid, or am I over-exaggerating, being dramatic, or having a victim complex?
Also I love my parents so much like I just wish things were a bit different and I’m grateful for everything they’ve done for us I really am I don’t want to seem disrespectful but I’m sorry if I’m coming off as disrespectful or ungrateful I don’t know.

So here we are at last. Hurrah. (In pirates voice )The end. Part 4. As it were. (Laugh at them) I'm just sayin I'm insane!
If I can even think i can change anything at this stage of the game, I must be insane. And yet I do believe. Because I believe in the goodness of us. And the reason I believe in the goodness of you, is because even within a world wot currently, externally, places so little value, on goodness, I still observe, the goodness shared between friends and good strangers alike. 100 times a day. More, if I pay closer attention.
And so by mine own eyes, the whitless witness, I believe in the goodness, I see in you, pretty much all o' you. But every day. And because I believe wot I see, so yet I have hope for us. So yea, that's me insane then! Ho hey, hey ho. And on we go.
So, dearly beloved we are gathered here today to confront the spaces we have allowed to grow between us.
To confront the void, from which our current sense of hopelessness, wot we are all stuck in together, but feeling alone with, eminates.
Look at them seriously Stevie.... challenge them to think about it with just your eyes.
The truths waiting in t'wings to be rediscovered to replace the bollockshit lies we have come to believe about each other, on t'other side. And each other, of course, is just another, way, of saying ourselves? Right?
For no matter how much, both sides doth protest of each other too much
We only are, ourselves. Together.
Just us lot. Making it up as we go along, and trying to not let on, together.
Right?
For better or worse.
Because only together can we rediscover and so reconnect with the common ground that we hadn't even realised was at stake, at the time, ways back when, which it woz. And which we then lost; gave up, infact. We had to; couldn't hold the common ground and prove each other wrong, so away we all trouped, and we didn't stop, until either side could no longer hear t'others poisoned lies.
And so our problem right now, is found within the truth of the words ’we can only do this together. And we certainly can't do this against each other. Because the truth of the this is only to be found listening to the words of each other. The thing we can only do together. Upon our common ground. Cumon. It's time to find our way back. Try to remember.
I told you before. Remember! Trust me, its going to get harder, but then you will Remember. Just stick with it a little longer. It will get better.
A moment in time for us to shine approaches..... Become stronger.
Cuz these strange days is the time of EitheOr. Transition Time, and we've been here before. Many times in fact. The only time in fact, to heal, the break, whilst it's actually a'breakin, round us. And us! Cuz once the spirit of our goodness is crushed, once we no longer feel reciprocation within our wider world, so we are forced into darkness to reset, allowing the break to go unfixed and the faulty cycle to complete, and so we are then forced to repeat, these crazy times again. And again. And again. Just Cuz we didn't learn the lesson in time, in time. This time around.
This bit in which we find ourselves right ere right now in fact, this bit in which we can't see the woods for the trees.... But still. I tell you buddy, woods are just full'o trees. Cumon. It's become time to remind yerself to think clearly again.
You are it's measure. We are, together. The measure of this bit, our time, these days, right now.
Just sayin
And this journey we all have to choose to take, to achieve all of this, can only begin when you start to believe in the goodness of enough of us again, and really I mean, when you choose to see, that just as on your side, some of those on t'other side of your particular divide, are gooduns too. Some notsomuch. Ja mais vu. But this is the truth that unites all sides, the truth that for us, will ever be, our humanity. (Dah dah dahhh) (Start rubbing head) And that journey can only begin after you have confronted the void buddy. A moment deep down, in some ways, some of us have always known would be waiting, didn't we. Haven't we. Known. That at some point in our future. A moment...... Just like this one.......
Well your future has arrived buddy. All of our futures have. Cuz Its time.
But you can do this. I believe in you.
REWRITE So firstly buddy we have to see what we have come to see. You and me. To first peer, into the void, and then you have to choose to steer, into the void. To first feel what its oppresivity has allowed us to become to each other. Because this is what we do to each other, when we are blinded by fear, surrounded by darkness, and feeling so alone, so desperately alone, that we allow ourselves to be forced to conform by contorting to fit the faulty framework. Which secondly is just a fancy rhyming pants way o'sayin, when our fear gets our better, and drives us to hide, alone, but actually all together, huddled inside, the void.
(Master you) Too much (tap head)
So we're going to choose to confront the void, and then we are going to choose to go into the void, and then we're going to pull ourselves out.
And you are going to resist.
So you have to be the strong one in all this.
But trust me. I promise, with my love, I won't let you go.
Breathe. Even if you do feel silly, please, do it for a buddy, buddy. Breathe. And..... then breathe again. This time just a lil deeper, a lil slower. Breathe comfortably once more and you may notice that whereas at times in our recent past, you may have found yourself struggling for breath, so now just notice how easy your breathing is.....see. You're looking for your old rhythm now... Remember, before the anxiety set in ... Try to Remember what it felt like, when you breathed freely.
To breathe normally.
And breathe.
Normanly!
And as you settle into your old groove, then take a few more comfortable breaths, just because, you know, you can again....
And breathe.
Now, with yer focus on yer Eupnea, yer trying to look fer, the sliver of a moment bein the bit after y'exhale has ended, but before y'inhale begins. (Do it here) That one teeny tiny point which exists for just a tiny instant, but again and again, within us, moment by moment, breath by breath, each turn of your own lifecycle: all of us connected, by this shared moment, wether we choose to believe it or no, by this thinest delicatist moment we are all connected by , right up til our penultimate breath. Just sayin.Just notice it, as you reach it, each time, in time, its time comes around. (Here)The individual lustre of a moment between moments when everything hangs in the balance....
Without rushing your comfortable breathing, when its time comes round, this is the moment you now aim for each time it comes around. (HERE)
And now Notice it's depth, even as it all too briefly fleets past, you can yet perceive great depth, within the slither. (Here)

And now next time, or maybe the next time after your breathing reaches this moment, cast your minds eye , like a fisherman casts their fly, aiming into the very heart of that fleeting moment each time it passes by. (Here) Again and again each time it's time comes, you cast, until more often than not your aim meets it's mark. (Here) Until eventually you feel confident enough with your aim, in that fleeting moment inside, so to try, to flip your view from micro to macro. So still tho a fleeting moment, you begins to discern it's brilliance, each time, from within. And so now as this moment appears, each time within your own personal timeline: rush to reach deep inside it to look for and then to find the tiny seed of peace, deep within the heart between each moment. Each and every time, between each and every breath now you look for this moment and you find it. Let its momentary cyclical pulse of sweet peace become familiar to you. It is, after all, a part of the cycle of you. And so now as you continue to comfortably breathe, Anticipate it..... This beautiful moment between breaths, between times, you are trying to elongate it.. to stretch it out, and now not this time, but maybe the next time, or maybe the next next time, anticipate that beautiful moment, then experience that beautiful moment, and then take an extra moment, elongate that moment: hold time in your mind as you hold your breath for just a slight moment lond itger, (HERE) and then without really you thinking about it, as you then get picked up by the cycle of time again, you just become uncoupled. And so now you are ready. Just simply drop out of time. It's ok. Let go. I've got you. 

(Here, or not) Booof!
There you go. Just for a minute. Just you and me buddy. Connected by just our love. And how amazing is that! And I promise I won't let go.
Ive brought you here cuz you needs to feel what it does to you buddy. Cuz wot it does, is why we then allow ourselves to do, wot we then do, to each other, and the kiddies. Why it makes us bring out the worst in each other. So we can realise how to stop bringing out the worst in each other. And to confront it we needs to understand what its oppressive hopeless energy feels like, discrete from our own personal burdens. Which is why you needs to confront it out of time. See. You need to learn it's discrete burden so then you know what it is you need to choose to ignore, when this moment ends and you go back to feeling it all. So that it can then begin to heal for us all. So we all can..... Before we all can, move on .......or at least just enough of us. I hope that makes sense. I wish I had better words for it to make better sense.
All the pain you feel in your heart right now, out of time, is just the void.
You can feel it, can't you. Good. That's just what it feels like when we are in needing of healing is all. The thing we can only do for each other, with our love.
And now we've found this space outside of time together. It's time, together, to steer into the void. A trick I learnt from an organisation I'm passionate about. A long time ago. To see, wot we needs to see.
REWRITE Do you remember that seed of imagination we set loose and slowly sent way down, until It slipped from memory, at the beginning of part 1? And if you don't, and I'm right, then it doesn't actually matter anyways. Hey ho. The dreams worth of hope we set loose to plumb our depths. Well hopefully it has now fulfilled it's purpose. Because now all you needs to do is just follow it's trail, that starts exactly where you stopped thinking bout it, in your mind, as deep as you stuck with the thought, begin your search there and once you find its end, just simply allow yerself ter zoom along it's length like data along a fibre optic cable - and then popping out the end. And if you didn't do the thing in part 1, it's ok, then just pretend 😁
Booof!
And if you did do the thing in part one. when you arrive, if you notice a bloke with a unicorn, don't worry about it.
And so we have arrived, now, you and I, but now you have to choose to steer Into your own personal deepest darkness. The place only you know exists inside of you, where your own lil bit of our void resides. Turn to face it, and then just start Pushin through in your mind. The resistance, with the fear, will pass.
Keep pushing through the fear, and when it subsides, allow yourself to chill out for a while whilst you adjust to this deeper darkness. And then so acclimatised. in your mind, just keep pushin on. And what feels so close around you, all around you, suffocatingly so, is just the pain of the void.
Keep calm and you will acclimatise to it's cyclical waves of intensity. The sickness feeling will pass, hopefully.
Try to think It's like entering lake water
Breathe comfortably still. Remember. I'm here too.
And when you feel the resistance subside and so the moment of panic passes, you have arrived, close both your actual eyes and your minds eyes, and then just use your love to probe around in the darknes, to discover where it hurts the most. And once you are confident it's truly the most hurty place, then simply hold your hands out, open your eyes and look down and you will see yourself. The scared you. The afraid you. Be strong, I've got you two. They/you reach up with grateful eyes, and desperate hands and with tears in your own, take theirs, and lift them up, reach around to support them - they are weak, but you will grow stronger. And then reunited again, shuffle round, 180 degrees like really bad salsa dancers, on your heels, in your mind and then facing away from the pain, take one purposeful step, together, back out of the void.
Not a giant step. But a confident step. Nonchalantly, and with just a touch of swagger if you can manage it😁
Cuz fuck it. You know.
See I knew I was right about the time thing.
We all know that time is the key that unlocks the future, but it can also be used to seal the past. But only once enough of us are ready to give enough of us a second chance. Which really just means a new path. A new perspective, and all that really means is are you ready to move on? To create an anchor point in time, together, from which to pivot our path, and so then to face what wos always going to becoming our ways anyways, our generations veritable ecological destiny, from the very start of time. Think about that! But now think about it, together.
And so finally, before time notices we are AWOL, and so before this moment passes, (leaving you to wonder if it ever really happened....long pause, look at em all)
There's just time for a quick sandbox reality experiment!
Imagine yerself a world, a facimily of this one, but yer made-up world is made up of good folks, who thanks to a reality flash realised, together, that the only true value to their continued existence was to be found in the community of each other. All of em, together. Or not at all.
Eitheor.
Just that.
And these good folks, not dissimilar to ourselves infact, realised that if they could help each other get their shit together, they could change their future together, and if they came up with a good enough framework, framework 2.0 as it were, that that change, could be, forever.
And because they did, so they did.
In your sandbox reality, Imagine what it feels like, being the good folks who achieved all that, in our near future, and then all you needs to do , is just take here, now, today as your starting point, and then just work out how to become them. And that's the journey just enough of us have to take, if we want things to go differently from this, for us. From now on.
I don't make the rules, and you get to choose your own path. But know, that whether you realised this moment as a choice or no, in these changing times, a choice, by us all, will be made.
And as time finally looses patience with us, so our moment out of time, as all moments, in and out of time, must, transitions.
So finally.... There is a moment in our future where all this has already happened. I know this, because I have been there and I have felt what it feels like to be apart of. Its beautiful beyond my megre words, like turds, will ever be able to express.
And every generation that comes after those heroes of humanity, blesses the very day, the very hour, minute and second that their forebares finally chose to choose. Better. for each other, and all I'm sayin is why not us. Why not here, why not now, today. The moment when humanity finally realised the truth of the words; that it doesn't have to be this way.
StevieP Mar- apr 2021 and then April onwards 2022. Re picked up apr 24 I watched kid goats frolicking, a long time ago now, with a friend, at a farm. Happy memories indeed!
And now another year has gone by, and here I am again, believing that Ive given my very best, hoping it will become enough and eagerly awaiting the chance to try to begin our Summer Of Love 2022.
Well May 24 today and that shit didn't happen! Heya ho. And on we go. Onwards and upwards. And once more with pasta.
That doesn't sound right.

A story I might let go, or not. A story that would make you understand why I am who I am. If God think this is the way I can move forward from it, I will tell, I will send it, I will print it, I will let go of this fear, I will not hide and silenced anymore.
I want to have one last cry about this, I wanna move on now, I don't want this to kept haunting me anymore. I don't wanna kept coming back to this place. I want to actually heal this time.
I was abused. Back when I(Around 9 or below years old) was too young to know anything, I was sexually abused and manipulated. The twist is that those people started telling people about it, and making it looked like I want it and the one who started it, when I don't even know what is happening or what happened as a young boy. Like what is sex to me at that time? I don't know.
I was talked by my parents about it, I don't think I said anything, as I really don't know at that time what was happening, all I could remember is that I was stitting at our bedroom both of them infront of me, and they said "You should never do that again." In a calm way, maybe something the lines of it is wrong. And still, I don't know what was happening.
It got out into our whole barangay, I would hear the adults gossiping while I was playing at the street, heard it from older kids gossiping, confronted and bullied by it by other kids, even the close ones switched side as they found out. And the abusers? got multiplied. Like I have this sort of aura that, says they are allowed to do it. That even if I was told I should not be their, what can I do at that time? who can I run to? They already think it was my fault.
Oh God, you should've seen their eyes, while growing up, starting to realized what their words mean, what is sex, what it means to let others touch you and touch someone else. How they looked at me, while buying stuffs at a sari-sari store or playing outside, some of the kids at school who knew or heard it from someone else. (Or maybe it was myself, that exaggerate how they looked at me everytime they see me, and learning what happened meant).
School, yes, I don't wanna go to that place everyday. Only to find myself getting bullied or threathened by other kids who knew my story, but I can't really skip my school, my parents made sure that I finish it, and me not saying anything, a total silence everytime they asked why I don't wanna go (I know I really made it hard for them at this point, and I am really sorry and thankful for their hardship, just to make me finish school). So It became my goal before Hishschool, to enter a school that no one knew me, or near my home.
And I did it, I entered hishchool, and no one knew me from Elementary days. I thought it was gonna be okay at that point, but no. That is when the time you'll figure out who you are really attracted to, in which I know I am not normal anymore,and I already know at a young age that what I'll become is wrong, it was already been encoded to me before I understand it, before I become who I am, someone else is already encoded to me. And the past? it haunted me everyday, dreaded by the thought that maybe tomorrow someone will know all about me, and the whole school will know. That whatever I am building on highschool would crumble by my past.
So, yes, I tried, I tried to live up to that who I am that will be accepted. Got lost on it, I even really believed that the me that should be is wrong, no one is needed to say that to me anymore, I am already the one saying it to myself at this point. It got worse and worse, I made friends (I am very thankful to my hishchool classmates) and my family is okay about the me I am showing, but I am not really okay with it. Cause I know deep inside, that the one they love is not real, and this time it is not their fault, I am the only one making it, at this point.
I am still afraid of my past, I can't open up, I can't let anyone know, I don't wanna ruin what I have, hide, be silent, keep it inside... Everyday, was just like that, till I myself, neglected who I really am. I don't accept me, I can't change I tried, I can't accept this... A constant inside battles everyday and every sleepless nights...
Then I finished highschool, I have no plans what's next, I am really tired at this point, hopeless, I don't wanna continue anymore, I don't wanna interact with anyone anymore, I don't wanna build anything anymore, I just wanna be at my room, hide, get what little of this life could offer, at my room I don't have to pretend, I don't have to be so dishonest with anyone. Here, I can be anyone I want without hurting or pretending to anyone.
Again it got worse, I can't stay at that room forever. And I lost a lot of time there, years. I don't know what to do anymore, my parents yes, I made it too hard for them, I really made it way too much for them to understand me, as I don't say anything, I can't say anything, I fear the thought of them finding out, I was afraid to be abandoned, I was afraid they'll never accept me.
So I entered college, in ~~~. No one knew me, no one will ever know my past, far away from anyone who might know my story. I got close to my classmates, too close, that I myself told them what is my story. I slowly became who want to be, the mind in which I am not afraid cause they accepted me for who I am, and I am very thankful. But yes, it is still there, my behaviour, encoded at the back of my mind, still have that engraved on me, that I am still afraid with strangers, I still can't look in their eyes, afraid for someone else seeing me. I kept changing it, I kept improving myself, I kept supporting myself on the inside, and I made progress, I know. Then college days, ended.
Time to go home. Hopeful for the changes I made, for the progress I did that only me knows, yes, I can go to places now, alone. Thinking, I am looking forward to try this when I go back to my hometown, hopefully I might do it this time. Reality came, I went home. It's still there, I can't go pass our front door, its hard to be seen, still. The thought that I will go outside alone, still there, same people, same place, still there. Each day, no one knew, I tried to go out alone, but my feet won't let me do it, it's still there, I am still afraid or what, my hope seems like a candle that time that slowly, burned out. Then the same old me came back, Always in my room, Days, Weeks, Years passed again.
This time, I don't want it anymore really, I don't really want to continue anymore, each day thoughts of just going away, end this all would come. I tried once again, I went away my hometown again, one more try, another candle, let's light it up one more time...
But this time, I had to face strangers... This time I am really alone... Voices are still there, keeps getting louder and louder each day still no progress on myself, progress I did at college days seemed to have gone... "Oh God, I wanna end this, I don't see the point of doing all of this now, I want this to end now, I can't do it, I can't do it anymore... you know I tried but, I am tired of this now." days just went with that voice... There are days that I don't really feel safe anymore with myself.
Those days was the hard one, to feel not safe even to yourself, it was beyond painful. To be unsafe to the person you should be safe... It was different, like I am betraying myself, that even to myself I can't count on him. But I just kept convincing myself that there's no good to think of it that way. Til, I ended up writing this at the most hard moment of my life.
So why I am writing this? I used to not hate anyone. I just kept saying to myself that those people, I will let it to God what will happen to them. I grow up thinking I should never hate, cause hate is just too much to bare for so long, it will only hurt me more. So I kept saying to myself to let it all go, to let everythinf that hurts go, and I should just continue with what I need to do to myself. But at the moment I wanna end it all, it came to me... for the first time, it came to me...
WHY I should be the one to feel guilt and shame? WHY I should be the one to hide and silenced? WHY I should be the one afraid and suffering? WHY I should be the one crying and slowly dying? WHY I should be the one haunted and dreading? It came to me, NO! I can't end this life like this! I can't, for 29 years, NO, I can't end this life like this! NO! I CAN'T END THIS LIFE LIKE THIS!
I want to be an open book now, I wanna let this go and heal and move forward now. I want it to end haunting me. I won't let it again. But to those who love me, especially family, I really can't do it alone, for 29years I tried to do it alone, I can't. I am very sorry for lying who I am or not even saying anything or not opening up to this point. So I admit, I am GAY, and all the story I said here, is the side of my story of what happened, and I need help. I really need help, I can't do this two image of me anymore, alone. I don't wanna be afraid anymore of losing anyone just because I am not true to myself and anyone, I need help. So I wanna ask you, after all I have said, would you still accept me? would you be willing to support me on this? I need it as I can't do it alone, not anymore, I tried.
I wanna find reason why I am doing this now, cause if the one I love doesn't accept me anymore, I don't think I will be able to continue anymore. I can't run anymore, I lost track now why I am fighting alone, and I need you. Will you help me?

I saw someone else did something like this recently and thought that I might have something to add to the discussion to help people figure out whether they think this program is right for them, or for people currently in the program to help them plan out classes.
My background is very heavy in statistics and finance (I'm an actuary), so my grounding in calculus, statistics, linear algebra, and business topics was considerably better than most of the other people I interacted with in this program. Conversely, I'm sure my programming skills were probably about average or maybe a little bit below compared to someone with a more targeted background towards those skills.
I started in Fall of 2020 and just finished up this month, Spring 2024. I started out just taking one class a semester and never changed up that plan, would highly recommend doing the same if you're working full time alongside; there's no reason to rush this program. I got a 4.0 GPA overall, although I never really stressed that much about it and definitely did not shy away from "harder" classes in order to bolster GPA. I did this to learn, not to get good grades. The classes I took, in order (my memory of some of the earlier ones might be a bit jumbled as so much time has passed):

1. CSE 6040 - I mentioned how my programming background was weaker relative to my mathematical background. However, reflecting on my experience in this class, it was probably still pretty strong. This class is focused on generalized programming skills, you don't really get into the analytics and modeling that much; it's more of a primer on things like functions, recursion, computer memory management, etc. It's been a few years, but I don't remember struggling with this class at all, and most of the concepts covered (object oriented programming, things like byte encoding, hexadecimal forms, recursion, etc.) were things I was already familiar with in another programming language (this class was in Python) or was relatively easy to pick up. From what I remember, the assignments were auto-graded and you had unlimited attempts, not to mention the fact that most of the prompts were to produce some predetermined result... and, as long as you were able to verify that your code produced that result, you got full points. I didn't miss a single point in this entire class. I believe there were "final exams" which were really just timed window coding assignments much like the homework, and you could do the assignments at any point during a 4-day window or something like that.
2. ISYE 6501 - This class was R-based and focused on basic analytics models. The material was much more applied than 6040. Similarly, the material was not difficult, and I was familiar with a lot of the basic models already (such as GLMs) from having worked with them in my job. The grading was done on a peer-grading framework; based on who anonymously is assigned your homework to grade, you can get someone who's a stickler for every point on the guide, or people who are a bit more lenient. I never really worried much about how things were graded in this class; yeah, I did miss some points arbitrarily, but nothing that made that much of a difference. If you generally put in the work and understand the material, your peers will recognize that. I found this a bit more interesting than 6040 because, rather than a deterministic "right answer", there was some more creativity implied here to solve each problem. There was a final project for this class where you walked through a hypothetical analytics problem and explained how you would go about solving it. I found this an interesting thought exercise and enjoyed this class. The pacing felt a little fast, as you basically had an assignment due each week, but the assignments were small. Like 6040 I found this class to be quite easy but I didn't 100% it due to the peer grading thing.
3. MGT 8803 - I almost applied to be exempt from this class, as my background intersects a lot with the material. The accounting and finance modules for this class literally did not teach me anything new. Supply chain was new for me and I found it interesting. I'm trying to remember what the other module was. I think it was marketing? I didn't like it. Overall I found this class quite easy for the aforementioned reasons, however I've heard from a lot of the other folks without business backgrounds that this class was pretty tough so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Taking this in the summer cut out one of the modules, normally there are 5 but in Summer there are 4. I figured this made sense to take during the truncated semester because I was unlikely to cover that much new material, and it turns out I was right about that. Each module lasted 2 weeks (I think in a normal semester it lasts 3) and has a timed multiple-choice test at the end. A lot of people didn't like this format compared to ISYE 6501 and CSE 6040; I'm not really sure how else this material could've been covered. This class was OK, the material is not really that deep but it's a pretty good primer on a large number of business topics.
4. ISYE 6740 - The first class I took that was actually pretty challenging, which makes sense considering the first 3 courses were just the basic core. This is pretty much an intro to machine learning as a discipline, and the first time I remember digging into academic papers that discuss some machine learning topic and attempting to recreate the results (this is something we did a lot in the more advanced classes going forward and incidentally now that I have graduated is probably one of the best ways to go about learning a new topic). I remember this class as having a format similar to ISYE 6501/CSE6040 in that you had large programming assignments to do, as well as open-book "exams" which were really just timed programming assignments. Assignments are not auto-graded; TA's review each one and thus the assignments have much more of a focus on explaining your findings than producing the exact expected output (unlike 6040). Some of the theory questions have you applying complicated matrix algebra rules that I'm not surprised a lot of people struggled with. The TA responsiveness in this class was pretty good from what I remember, but your mileage may vary. I remember getting 3 weeks to do each assignment but I also remember not thinking that was a lot of time, these assignments are very extensive, have many parts, and take a long time to get through. Like with 6040 I ended up not missing a single point in this class but I did find it difficult and spent significantly more time working on it than in prior classes, probably 10-15 hrs a week, give or take.
5. ISYE 6644 - I was familiar with maybe 50% of the material we covered due to my extensive statistics background, however I was not aware of the exact mechanics of random number generation or the concept of a batched mean, for example. I remember this class having several "check your understanding" quizzes that focused on the mathematical foundations. Didn't struggle with this much in terms of difficulty and found the material very useful. Setting up custom simulation environments is very useful and arena is pretty cool even if it's unlikely you'll ever use it. Some assignments feature similar tools in Python (simpy). There might have been some coverage of R in this as well, or at least the accommodation for people that wanted to use it. There was a project for this class, but you didn't have to come up with the topic on your own, you could pick from a list, and you could do your project on your own if you wanted (which, given the option, was always the choice I made, due to the inherent randomness in picking the right members of a group). However you can do a group project if you want.
6. MGT 6203 - The first of the classes I took that required a group project. I recommend you are proactive in putting together groups in situations like these, posting threads on Ed/whatever the forum is as soon as the class begins. My group was alright; not everyone in it was great, but we had enough going overall to make up for the weaker group members. The project has some arbitrary guidelines from what I remember - you need to put together a midterm report and video presentation that is no more than ~2 minutes long or something like that (if it's 2:01 you get penalized) and the final report is 5 minutes or less, and everyone in the group needs to speak. I honestly don't remember much else about this class, it was pretty forgettable, but not horrible. Not overall that difficult, another business class so a lot of topics I was already familiar with, but there was more new here than in 8803.
7. CSE 6242 - Another class with a group project. Again, I was proactive, and again, overall, my group was... okay. Some people who were really good, some who were... not. This class is characterized by a lot of assignments that are autograded, like 6040, but the assignments are a bit more difficult. Overall not that difficult with the exception of the D3 assignment, but that's more due to the fact that I'm not really sure how the autograder works for that; it tries to determine based on some internal structure of your html code whether or not you're fulfilling the requirements. I got a perfect score on all of the assignments, and they give you the chance to score over 100% on I believe either assignment 1 or assignment 2. A lot of people bombed the D3 assignment (I think it's assignment 2) but still did well in the class because it's not that hard to do well on everything else, so keep that in mind. This class does a great job of exposing you to a lot of new technologies, but there isn't that much depth to it. That's not really the point of this kind of class though, it equips you with the tools to explore things deeper if you so choose.
8. ISYE 8803 - I was a big fan of this class. It's taught in MATLAB but you can use Python if you so choose, you'll see in reviews of this class that you should really just use MATLAB since a lot of the sample code etc. is not in other languages, so that's what I did. However, they must've recently added Python and R code for sample solutions, so feel free to use what you want. MATLAB was interesting, there were parts of one assignment I also used R for (grouped lasso in R is a lot more straightforward). This class is all about high dimensional data and representing it in a more simplified and comprehensive way, think about something like sonar which might have datapoints separated by milliseconds and thus a very dense representation of a signal captured over a short period of time. After ISYE 6740, I found this to be the class that taught me the most up to this point.
9. CS 7642 - Taking this class in summer is kind of rough. There's 6 homework assignments that are autograded, similar format to CSE 6040. There are 3 projects which are much larger programming assignments for which you'll write papers explaining methodology, results, etc. These projects take a while, particularly project 3. I did well on projects 1 and 2 and decently on 3, although I spent the most time on 3 by far; it involves reinforcement learning to simulate a soccer environment and train agents how to play against an AI developed externally. The AI baselines are hard to beat, and I didn't manage to beat them, but I wrote a decent paper explaining what I did. The final exam for this class should be dropped as it doesn't add value to the class, people regularly score extremely low on it, the average score in the class was something like a 45%. I scored a bit lower than average but still got an A in the class because it was heavily curved. Reinforcement learning is a very interesting topic, though, and I would highly recommend this class as a primer on the material. It's probably a good idea not to take it in the summer, though.
10. CS 7643 - This class was pretty difficult but I still think 6740 was tougher. The material is extremely dense. There are parts of programming assignments that are autograded, but also short answer portions that are reviewed by TAs. Grading on those were pretty subjective. This is the only class I can remember really needing to discuss things with TAs to understand what was being asked a little better. Unfortunately, the TAs in the semester I took this weren't the best. They seemed more concerned with unintentionally giving away a bit too much information in any of their responses. I can understand this, but it came off as intentionally opaque most of the time. There was a group project for this course as well, and my group was excellent, probably the best experience I had with a group in this program. I can imagine how much this course would've sucked if I would've had a mediocre/bad group. Based on discussions with my group, some of the grading seemed highly arbitrary, with some TAs grading similar responses to the same question differently. Like I said above, though, I never really worried about this. I never once in this program ever disputed a grade, and I continued with that in this class as well.
11. CSE 6748 - Practicum and final class. For this class you get to choose between a number of pre-determined Georgia Tech sponsors, or form your own project for your own employesome external entity. It was a lot more work to do this, so I just went with one of the pre-determined GTech ones. I really enjoyed this one, I had constant communication with the sponsor as I developed my project and came up with something that I was quite proud of. I wanted to explore a natural language processing task, so I picked a project that I thought would allow me to do this, and was very satisfied with the result. There's a number of videos you have to watch that explain some overarching aspect of analytics that were pretty interesting as well, you can watch all of these in a single day and then focus on the project if you like. It's possible to finish the entire semester's work in just a few weeks, I was able to do the entire project and write the final paper in about a month's time, at which point I coordinated with the sponsor to tailor the work I did to a format that they would be able to implement for their business problem if they wanted to.

I can't comment on the job placement prospects of this program, as I just finished it and was actively employed the entire time I was in it. As an actuary there's not much this program does that my exam certification process didn't in terms of career prospects. However, it did position me much better within the context of the expanding role of data and analytics in insurance going forward, and also opens me up to similarly mathematical roles with a firmer grounding in big data and also some business elements (quantitative finance/data science roles). There were also things I learned in this program that I was able to apply directly to my day-to-day work. If you're considering this program, I would recommend you think about a few things:

1. I'm pretty shocked at how many people I saw during my program who didn't really think that much about why they're doing this. I get that the barrier to entry is low, but it's a serious commitment if you're actually trying to graduate. Most of the people who start this program don't finish, so consider whether you're ready to spend almost 4 years going to school part-time, or if you're able to double up on classes for some of the semesters. Most of the people I know in the program doubled up at least once, I never did but I was never in a hurry. If you must double up, don't make it your first semester. Dip your toe in the water, see how it is, and then reassess. But, above all else, think about why you want to do this, and use that as your guiding goal to bring you through to the end.
2. Something I tended to see pretty much without fail in most of my classes - a lot of the graduate students in this program spend way too much time worrying about minute, particular details that don't really matter. Maybe it was just my philosophy that I would probably never dispute a grade, or that I was never really that concerned with getting a perfect GPA, etc. but I was always marveling at what I saw asked in Ed posts. People would ask whether they could use a certain programming language for an assignment, what packages they were allowed to use, would post screenshots of bugs and ask for TA's to help walk them through it, etc. Generally, without fail, the TAs would respond along the lines of: use whatever programming language you want, as long as you can display your output/submit it in a way that we can verify by running ourselves, we'll make the effort; use the debugger to step through your code to find the problem; etc. Generally, in most cases, the assignments and questions are designed in a way to teach you something, to get you to realize/understand some pattern or data concept that has some underlying logic that makes sense. For example, the idea of saliency maps on image processing takes the 3-channel RGB color pixel shading representation of an image and condenses it into a single channel, and, as a result of that, loses some resolution in suggesting parts of the image driving a model result that might be different depending on the channel; i.e., an image with a very heavily blue-shaded part that detracts from a certain result, but with a red-shaded part somewhere else that increases the probability of the modeled result. This was part of a conceptual question on how saliency maps differed from other pixel influence attribution methods in Deep Learning, and is part of what you should logically understand since it reduces the channels of the image representation from 3 (R, G, B) to 1 (usually grayscale). I think people tend to run to the TA the second they have difficulty with something and don't stop for a second to think it through, one exercise I might recommend is to consider: if you ran into this problem out in the world and you didn't have a TA/managesome other authority figure to explain the answer to you, what do you think it might be? Does the answer even matter? If it still matters and you have no idea how to solve it, maybe then you can go to the TA.
3. In every single group project I worked on, we had an initial planning session where we determined the scope of what we wanted to do. For most of the projects, this was an essential deliverable in addition to the final paper. However, in almost every case, someone in the group was always playing some game of runaway scope where they kept on wanting to add methods/questions to exploration beyond what was initially planned in ways that I intuitively knew would be impossible to manage in just one semester. I often had to say something along the lines of "if we have time we'll do that" or "when we write up our paper, we can put that in the avenues for future exploration section" or something similar. It turns out that we never had time to look into these things, and our initial scope was usually well-defined considering the time we had. I'm not sure why this was always so front-and-center in my focus, maybe since I used to work in consulting and project budgeting/scoping is so unbelievably important in that context. Whatever the case may be, understand that you won't be able to change the world every time you do a project. Make some incremental improvement, reflect on the results, and then include some notes in a "potential avenues for future exploration" section. I was pretty surprised at how many people had so much trouble putting the pencils down at the end. I can practically guarantee that, for the classes where I did a project on my own, I probably did substantially less work than other individual groups for precisely this reason. In general, you probably don't have to do as much work as you think you do.

So, would I recommend the program overall? Absolutely. It's not perfect, I found some of the formats annoying - CS 7642 has no business having that final exam, it adds nothing to the class at all, is arbitrarily extremely difficult and the class is good enough and complete enough with the removal of that exam that its inclusion to me appears to be the result of some arbitrary quota somewhere. I also don't really like the group project format and profoundly disagree with the reasoning that GTech and most other academic institutions give as to why group projects are even good or necessary, however I do acknowledge that from a logistics and resource standpoint it's unmanageable to grade individual projects for every single person in a given class and group projects do decrease the number of papers that TAs will have to read. Considering the scale of what GTech has managed to do, and how many students enroll each year, I'm surprised the program is as well-managed as it is. Yes, it does require a lot of self-teaching, but in most cases you can actively engage with TAs multiple times a week if you're struggling with topics and from what I've seen they were very responsive.
Anyways just wanted to give my perspective as someone who just finished this program and still thinks it's worthwhile despite its flaws.

Paramount: Deal Rumors Aside, What About The Operations? Can The Company Turn A Profit?
May 21, 2024 2:41 PM ET
Summary
Paramount Global remains my worst investment, but I still believe in its potential for success.
Paramount's "lack of scale" is not the reason for its underperformance as it spends about as much on content as industry leader Netflix.
Paramount's loss last year was largely the result of one-off writedowns, both domestically and internationally. These losses will not repeat going forward.
Paramount's streaming operation suffers not from lack of scale, but an abundance of overload waste, which may be alleviated under new management.
The sports slate remains best-in-class, and CBS is still the leader in broadcast scripted. CBS Television City in Los Angeles, Ca, USA. JHVEPhoto/iStock Editorial via Getty Images
Paramount Global (NASDAQ:PARA) (NASDAQ:PARAA) remains my worst investment. Let's just get that clear from the start. I said two years ago it was madness not to buy Paramount. That was wrong, wrong, wrong. The fact that I recommended against buying the new Warner Discovery at the same time, and heeding that warning saved a lot of money, makes me feel a little better, but not much.
And no, the fact that Warren Buffett made the exact same mistake as me doesn't help much, either. Mr. Buffett and I are about to part ways, anyway. He is now completely sold out of Paramount, while I am hanging in. Yes, I am still buying. Get all the ribbing out of your systems, and then read on.
Although a few rounds remain to be played in the game, it is no longer inconceivable that none of the various deal permutations that have been put forward for Paramount will pan out, and that it will continue as an independent company. Essentially, Redstone will block a deal with Apollo Global Management, Inc. (APO) and Sony Group Corporation (SONY) and the 'B' shareholders will litigate a Skydance deal to death.
Because so many Seeking Alpha articles are already offering a blow-by-blow analysis of the deal talks - and I absolutely encourage you to read them - I wanted to turn back for just a minute to a more in-depth look at Paramount's actual operations. If it stays independent, can it turn itself around?
Scale Is Not The Issue I'm angry. Usually, when an investment goes wrong, I can manage to be philosophical or even dispassionate about it. Risks of the trade, can't win 'em all, pick your maxim.
But this one is really getting to me. I'm sure part of that is simply the sheer amount of my portfolio that has suffered - I bet a lot more on Paramount than I did on my typical investment, so sure was I that it had the tools needed for success. Fortunately, some of my other media investments have worked out much, much better, or I'd really be hurting. In fact, my Netflix buy has repaired all the damage my Paramount buy has done.
Still, I'm unusually angry, partly because of the sheer amount lost. But it's also that I still don't believe there is anything wrong with Paramount, at its core. It has become quite commonplace to speak of Paramount's "lack of scale" as the reason for its apparent impending demise, or at least subsumption. But I would still argue that that isn't born out by the numbers. Paramount spent roughly $16 billion on content in 2023, the same total as 2022, when $4 billion of it was spent on streaming. That is only slightly less than Netflix, Inc. (NFLX) which leads the industry in market cap and performance, if not in spending. While the gap with other studio peers is larger, I'm not sure spending at Netflix levels equals a "lack of scale."
What's more, a lot of that extra spending by other traditional industry players like Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. (WBD) and The Walt Disney Company (DIS) is not spending that investors should necessarily cheer. As I've explained before, Paramount's lower spending total is almost entirely accounted for by its far more profitable approach to sports rights; a lot of that extra spending that Disney and Warner are doing isn't particularly profitable or even sensible.
What then, does account for Paramount's underperformance?
Stock Performance That depends on which underperformance you're talking about. First, the stock price. Paramount cut its dividend in spring 2023. That announcement, with its Q1 earnings, was enough to cause half of the past-year decline in a single day. Paramount went from $21 to $16 with the dividend cut and was still at $16 as late as December.
Since then, the other half of the decline has reflected the increasing evidence that Paramount is more or less ready to throw in the towel, and intends to be a distressed seller to another studio or private equity firm soon. More specifically, it is actually Shari Redstone, who exercises control over Paramount through her 77.3% share of Paramount's Class A voting stock, who is ready to call it quits. The perception that she has no leverage and will be forced to accept a fire sale offer has driven the stock lower.
Operations All that, however, merely explains the stock market decline; what is the operational explanation for Paramount's troubles? The company reported a $600 million loss for full year 2023. How is it that one of the Big Five movie studios, with the most popular of the Big Four broadcast networks, the most popular show on cable (Yellowstone) and the only profitable sports slate in American television, can't make money?
Accounting Element First, we need to acknowledge that there are some accounting factors in that 2023 loss. Paramount took a "programming charge," i.e., a write-down of the value of programming assets, of roughly $2.4 billion in Q1 and Q2 last year. That is money that would ordinarily be amortized over a period of years - it's mostly streaming originals, which Paramount usually amortizes over a 4-year period - that instead saw its red ink taken all at once. Had it been amortized normally, Paramount would have reported an operating profit of roughly $1.2 billion, more or less identical to 2022, instead of reporting an operating loss of the same amount.
Still, that write-down reflects the fact that the content isn't performing well, so those losses were always going to happen, and they're quite real; the accounting change is simply a timing issue. So Paramount is operationally deficient, even if perhaps not quite as operationally deficient as this one-time write-down makes it look. We cannot dismiss Paramount's operational issues by putting them down to accounting distortions.
TV Scripted Content Difficulties Paramount did not break down the programming charge, but outside reports have about half of it owing to the integration of Showtime in Paramount+ as a single service. It's not entirely clear which side of the ledger those losses are coming from; one of the less understood things about merging services is that it potentially makes content on both sides less valuable as it is replaced by more popular content from the other side. Showtime's Q1 2023 viewership was very top-heavy, with just two shows, Yellowjackets and Your Honor constituting 30% of all viewership. Presumably, those two shows reduced the value of some Paramount+ existing content while the rest of Showtime's library may have suffered from competition with P+ content.
Regardless of the exact source, Paramount's content is not performing. That's a little surprising considering that, as I said, CBS content is actually quite popular on the linear side. In fact, in the earnings call following the annual report now-former CEO Bob Bakish reported that CBS had the top 16 scripted programs and 18 of the top 20 in the first week of post-strike broadcasts. Paramount has disclosed in the past that CBS content makes up roughly half of the viewership on Paramount+; and this is despite the fact that P+ isn't even the sole beneficiary of CBS content; roughly $600 million per quarter of Paramount's licensing revenue comes from CBS shows as well.
One possibility that I perhaps did not consider sufficiently was the chance that the unique characteristics of CBS would make it harder for that channel to transition to streaming than its other broadcast peers. CBS is the most popular of all broadcast networks, but that popularity owes disproportionately to more elderly viewers; in the demo, it is actually Comcast Corporation's (CMCSA) NBC which takes the top crown.
With elderly viewers both less appealing to advertisers and less likely to make the transition to streaming, it is perhaps not so surprising that CBS is continuing to perform well on linear but having trouble translating that to streaming.
International Shortfall The damage isn't through yet, either. Paramount disclosed that it took another $1.2 billion impairment charge on content in the first quarter. This one has to do with the international side; a few years ago Paramount commissioned 150 new, original international shows and movies to try to boost international growth. Now, Paramount reveals that even international consumers spend no less than 90% of their time streaming Hollywood content; the local originals aren't doing very much for growth or retention.
About the only good thing that can be said about this complete and utter debacle is that it is a one-off; unlike Paramount's US content spending, which is ongoing and therefore must be made more efficient if Paramount is to survive and thrive, Paramount is gradually exiting International production. In fact, to help cover the losses on its international originals it is selling its share in Viacom18, the network that formerly served as Paramount's onshore operation in India, to its partner Reliance for a little over $500 million.
Where Are The Children? Yet another factor is children's programming. While many have essentially written off Paramount's entire cable channel group, and I agree the prognosis for MTV and Comedy Central is rather grim, I have argued that Nickelodeon remains a real asset, as one of the top two children's channels in linear TV. I believed that would be a powerful subscriber acquisition tool, alongside sports, as the streaming transition continued.
It hasn't worked out. Surveys consistently show the Big 3 for parents with children are Netflix, Disney, and the third is Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) of all things. Neither Paramount+ nor Warner Discovery's Max make the cut, despite ownership of top children's linear platforms/libraries Nickelodeon and Looney Tunes, respectively.
The prognosis here isn't entirely grim. Paramount has reported that half of their streaming subscribers touch kids' content regularly, so clearly Nickelodeon does mean something to the subscribers. It's possible it helps with retention, even if it doesn't drive acquisition. Paramount owns the number one brand for pre-school kids, Paw Patrol.
Paramount has shut down the separate Noggin streaming service and will presumably be amplifying the kids content on P+ as a result, so perhaps this trend will yet turn around. With so many other things going wrong, though, the inability to make kids content more central to the strategy is a painful blow.
The Mismanagement Of Streaming I suspect, however, that Paramount's single biggest defect over the past few years has been the competency of its management. In a streaming world, success hinges overwhelmingly on the efficiency with which a content budget is deployed. That efficiency, in turn, requires avoiding the trap of "overload," something cable doesn't have to worry about but which can kill a streaming service.
What Is Overload? In brief, overload is when a streaming service spends money on content that appeals primarily to those subscribers who were already subscribed and intending to remain subscribed, even without that content. Because revenue does not increase with more viewership, such spending is essentially wasted money. I have been arguing for several years that some economic models of streaming profitability fail to take account of this significant element.
Paramount seems to have had a lot of overload in the last few years. Specifically, its single most broadly appealing piece of content is the NFL, which Paramount is an anchor broadcaster for. Because NFL fans are accustomed to spending upwards of $100 a month on cable just to watch the NFL - over 10% of cable subscribers say that the NFL is the only reason they're still subscribing - Paramount's $6-$12 a month fee for streaming really doesn't need anything more than NFL games to attract these 40-50 million fans.
The Earnings Jaw-Dropper And yet, it seems that's where a lot of the extra streaming money has been going. On the Q2 earnings call last year, CEO Bob Bakish, watching the stock price steadily decline, seemed to be eager to reassure he had a handle on the situation and began describing some of the changes he'd be making. It started out well enough, really; he told investors that NFL viewers churn drops dramatically if they also engage with entertainment titles, which is what you'd expect.
But then, he stunned me and I expect just about everyone listening when he said, "we probably need to do less for [the NFL viewer] in the fall, and more outside the fall because we can rely on the NFL." Compounding the almost Looking Glass-feeling, he then went on to reassure everyone he would be "fine-tuning" the content strategy to address that point in the years to come.
It was, frankly, stunning. Both me and I suspect just about every analyst who was modeling Paramount had just assumed it went without saying that of course, any entertainment content targeted at retaining NFL viewers should drop in the other half of the year when the NFL wasn't playing on TV. My own calculations of the profit margin on CBS's NFL deal had always incorporated that.
And while that was bad enough, it also raised the concern that a management team that didn't understand that going in might have put a lot of other overload in other categories as well. Suddenly, it wasn't so hard to see how the best-scripted shop with the most profitable sports contracts was having trouble making money. Double-loading for 50 million households would be a major drag on the financial performance for streaming.
Light At The End Of The Tunnel Despite all of this, I still think there are bright spots in the Paramount picture, even without a merger. Its operations, as well as its merger discussions, don't seem to lack potential.

1: My Usual Paramount Bull Argument: Sports Profits

One thing that continues to go right is sports content. A few years ago, I wrote that Paramount was a strong contender to become a sustainable streaming business because it had the only profitable sports slate in the business. The stock hasn't gone where I wanted it to go, but that is the one part of my thesis that has been definitively borne out. In fact, many now say that it is CBS's sports deals, at least as much as Paramount's film/TV studio, that the prospective buyers of Paramount are after.
I've covered these in other articles already. The March Madness deal runs until 2032 and the NFL deal runs until 2033, although the NFL has an opt out after 2029 that it will probably exercise given the utterly ludicrous bids the NBA is receiving, so the last four years of that deal might have to be chopped off the profit projections. Even so, Paramount can probably generate $1.25 billion a year in profit just off of those two deals for the next six years.
Those are probably the biggest, but it doesn't stop there. Almost every sports deal Paramount has is profitable. For all the flak management has deservedly taken, Paramount continues to show discipline and focus on sports. You won't find Paramount throwing $2.5 billion a year at the NBA's 'B' package, which is more money than the NFL gets for its 'B' package despite having 10x the viewership.
For all its many, many missteps, a Paramount that can just manage to stay afloat long enough for some of these ludicrous sports bets at other companies to blow up may yet find itself with cards to play later in the decade.

2: Recouping Write-downs Via Preferred Conversion

Another small boon has been the official conversion of the preferred shares. The Paramount mandatory convertible formerly trading under the PARAP ticker was capped at 0.85 shares per common share. Given the initial price of the convertible at $100 per share, that effectively means that a preferred share that was carrying a $100 liquidation value has just been converted into 1.1765 shares of a common stock currently trading around $12. A total value per preferred share of around $14.
And they sold for $1 billion, so that's basically $860 million back into the common equity that management was able to get at the peak of the boom. That actually repairs almost all of the red ink from Paramount's doomed international originals push on its own.

3: An End To Streaming Waste

Finally, a lot of the waste in streaming may soon be ending. Bob Bakish was finally fired a few weeks ago, and while I never want someone to lose their job, he frankly had looked overmatched for a while. Bakish was a lifetime cable executive who seemed to be having trouble making the transition to a streaming-world mindset. Frankly, if I knew about it in 2021, the CEO has no business fine-tuning it into the strategy in 2023.
With international originals no longer draining the coffers and overloaded entertainment programming shifted to months of the calendar where it can be more productive, streaming may yet turn the corner.
Investment Summary I recognize fully that each fall in Paramount stock makes my bullish optimism seem ever more out of step. I do believe, however, that Paramount's failures are more failures of execution than lack of scale or structural disadvantage. Paramount CEO Bob Bakish simply wasn't up to the job. Ironically that wasn't what got him fired; Bakish was almost certainly fired for opposing Redstone's plan to enrich herself at the expense of other shareholders, probably the most competent thing he did in the last few years of his whole tenure.
Paramount has everything it needs to be successful; profitable sports contracts, which is just unbelievable in this day and age, a thriving scripted TV operation, and a viable, if recently somewhat mismanaged, streaming service. An end to overload waste, the continued exploitation of its favorable sports slate, throttling back unhelpful international originals and boosting kids content engagement may yet produce a different streaming picture going forward. Should older viewers start to get more comfortable with streaming going forward and following their favorite programs to Paramount+, that would just be icing on the cake.
It's been a depressing ride the last few years, but I'm sticking with Paramount.

Okay, so for this post there are a lot of people involved (this has been going on for a while) so I'll list up here who's who. This is my wife's family. I'll be using code names when appropriate:
Father-in-law - FIL
Mother-in-law - MIL
Wife(oldest daughter) - Wife
Second daughter - Sarah
Third daughter - Lana
Fourth daughter - Ruth
Second daughter's husband - BIL
Third daughter's fiancee - Karl
My daughter - daughter
Second daughter's older son - Danny
Second daughter's younger son - Aaron
And me as me
I know this is long but bear with me TL;DR Brother-in-law has snapped the last straw for the family and we are all starting to cut ties with him

 BIL's family has their own side of the story that I'm barely familiar with, so it won't be brought up here. We first met BIL way before they got together; Sarah bought a house as a group of friends with her boyfriend at the time, and BIL and his second wife at the time. We didn't interact with him much. We just heard a few stories about him from their friend group. Eventually this situation broke down and BIL and his second wife left and vandalized Sarah's home on the way out. They let their dogs poop all over the floor, stole some miscellaneous items, poured water in their lawn mower gas tank, etc. He did this to Sarah, his future third wife. We thought this guy was out of our lives forever. Sarah eventually came to stay on my couch after she sold the house. She lived with me and my wife for roughly 3 months. Then she went and rented an apartment a few miles away. No sooner than a few weeks did we find out she was dating future BIL, and a few weeks after that we found she was pregnant. He met the family and stated that he wanted to be a part of it. He blamed all his past transgressions on his second wife. We questioned him at the time if he was still with his second wife. He said no, and that he was officially divorced. My wife looked up the public court records and found out that he didn't file divorce papers until 11 days after we asked that question. A small lie but considering our history of knowing him it was concerning. BIL is a big gun enthusiast. About 1 months after they told us Sarah was pregnant, while cleaning a gun at home he shot himself in the hand. Again, we were concerned but Sarah assured us he was a changed man and this was just an unfortunate accident. His hand healed but he didn't do his physical therapy that seriously so his hand is still kind of jacked up. I feel this is important because he kind of has a history of not following through on what he says. During Sarah's pregnancy we found out that BIL seriously beat one of their dogs back when they bought the house together. We also figured out he diagnosed himself with bipolar, but refused to go to a doctor to get an actual diagnosis. The whole family at the time was distracted by all of this because during Sarah's pregnancy my wife went through a major medical struggle that resulted in multiple surgeries and a months-long stay in the hospital. We were so focused on that the BIL details just kind of came and went at that moment. Sarah gave birth to Danny during COVID lockdown. We were so excited and we all were very active in Danny's life. Time would pass and we just kind of got used to BIL being despite the fact that he often would miss family events. BIL and Sarah would move into a house on my in-laws property just down the road from in-laws house. MIL became their primary caregiver as she could work it around her job and still make decent money. As 4 years have passed my MIL, FIL, Lana, my Wife and I all take shifts of watching their now 2 kids for them, for free. MIL also watches my daughter but significantly less that their son's. 2 years would pass after Danny was born and everything seemed OK. There would just be hints in they way he talked about who he really was. He would say something in casual conversation like "man, there seems like there are too many black people in commercials these days" or "I don't know why we are forcing women's sports to be a thing." Bigoted stuff like that, but veiled enough so there was plausible deniability. I would often call him out on it, so he really grew to not like me. This all changed at his 30th bday. He had a big party with a lot of alcohol and weed with dozens of friends. My wife and I didn't go because we are not party people. Lana and Ruth went to the party. Sarah was also there. During this party BIL went outside and decided to "mud" his jeep through the creek beside their house. This was possibly with Karl but I'm not sure of that to this day. Karl has recently come into the picture prior to this event and was previously friends with BIL for a long time. The jeep got stuck and flooded for obvious reasons. After trying to get it out of the creek by multiple means, they gave up and left it there. I believe it took almost 2 days to get it out. He went back to the party and as everyone got progressively drunk and high, my 2 sister-in-laws Lana and Ruth (I believe) criticized BIL for getting his car stuck in a creek while playing. BIL verbally assaulted them and demanded they get out of his house. They left in tears. They drove separately, and Lana had gotten buzzed so they both got in Ruth's car and drove to my house. They sat and vented to my wife and I for a while, and eventually I offered that we should go do something fun to take their minds off of it. My wife and I drove them to Taco Bell and we got some food and drove around town for a while and made jokes in the car. After they cooled off and were in a better mood they said that Lana needed to go get her car from the party. In a flurry she accidentally left her keys inside her sister's and BIL's house. We drove them over just in case anything sketchy happened but Lana and Ruth didn't want us to go inside, so we waited out in the car. She didn't think it would be a big deal to walk in, but as her and Ruth did BIL immediately got in her face and demanding she gets out or else. Ruth went to talk to someone else at the party and didn't notice this at first. BIL shoved Lana against a wall and held her there. Everyone apparently stood in stunned silence as this happened. He then shoved her to the ground, grabbed her around the ankles and started pulling her across the floor. As he was threatening to do even worse, Ruth ran up and jumped on his back and gave him a head lock. She screamed at him to stop but before BIL could anything about this everyone finally woke up and pulled them apart. Ruth helped Lana up and they ran out of the house onto the front porch sobbing. My wife saw this and got out of the car and yelled at them to get back in our car. We drove up to the in-laws house. By then it was past midnight. MIL was about an hour away working her job and FIL was up in his room asleep. The sisters went and woke him up and explained the situation through tears. They also called MIL to inform her of the situation. He got ready and ask me to go with him down to the house to get some answers. The sisters stayed up at the house. We drove down in his car and when we got out the entire party was ready for us and greeted us at the car. Literally over a dozen people, most of whom I did not recognize started screaming what happened at both of us simultaneously. Everyone was clearly very drunk. FIL looked overwhelmed, so I raised my hands and tried asking everyone to stop for a second and go one by one telling their bit of the story. BIL stopped me mid sentence and pointed his finger in my face. I noticed he had his other hand on a holstered hand gun. He yelled out "You don't have a say here! You're barely even part of this family." For context, I had been with my wife for over 11 years at that time and he hadn't even married Sarah yet and had been there about 2 1/2 years. FIL backed up and told me that I need to stop talking and that I was being a problem. I backed off and went over the yard to Sarah and Karl. I asked Sarah what happened and she told me that she didn't see what happened and that she wasn't very aware of what was going on now. Karl would barely answer the same question. I walked back over to FIL but he told me to back off and that I really wasn't needed there. Admittedly I felt pretty insulted and just decided to walk back to his house and get my car and go home with my wife. We eventually left after FIL came back to the house. We found out later that BIL had pulled his gun out and threatened to kill himself if FIL didn't leave. Out of fear of what he would do, my in-laws were pretty afraid to take action at this point. A lot of the situation was his word against someone else's and Sarah went on a tour around to the friends and convinced them not to take any of this to the police. She then tried to smooth things over with the family and offered that BIL would apologize to everyone. He then refused, stating that Ruth was the real aggressor and that she assaulted him. He eventually agreed to apologize to just FIL for causing a problem and I think some half-hearted apologies to Lana and Ruth. The whole situation was swept under the rug but an unease has existed over the family since then. He stopped coming to family events pretty much altogether. About 4 months after this situation, prior to my daughter being born, he told MIL he was going to bring Danny up to their house so she could watch him for a few hours while he took a nap. His job works long hours so this wasn't out of the ordinary. However, he didn't show up for a while and my MIL started questioning what going on. She called but there was no answer. She drove down to his house and knocked but there wasn't an answer, only Danny crying in the background. She let herself in and found BIL asleep on the couch with Danny actively trying to wake him up. MIL tried to wake him up but nothing for a few minutes. She gave up and wrote a note to let him know where Danny was. BIL didn't notice Danny was gone for 2 hours. He finally woke up, drove up to in-laws house, and yelled at my MIL for just taking Danny without informing him. He took Danny and then left. A few months after that, after my daughter was born, He fell asleep while watching Danny again. This time we found out because when he woke up the front door was open and Danny was gone. He called in-laws for help finding him. My in-laws have a large property (about 200 acres) with a ton of it forested. Danny wandered 1/4 of a mile into the woods and I believe it took roughly a little over an hour to find him. Family questioned him hard this time but he just recoiled back into their house and didn't talk to us much. Sarah continued to defend him and said it was just an accident. Again the police were not notified about any of this. There was always this idea that if we went to authorities about any of this they would just run for it. They would then surprise everyone with the news that they were pregnant again, despite the fact that Sarah had used the morning after pill. This whole time they hadn't married yet. They announced that they were getting married but Sarah told Lana that it was mostly just to help BIL not have to go through bankruptcy a second time. I wasn't sure if this would do anything to help that situation, but that's what Sarah said at one point leading up to the wedding. About a month before the wedding, however, he threatened Sarah that if she insisted on inviting my wife to the wedding he would demand to invite a friend of his that Sarah hated. This friend also used to date BIL I believe. This was his ploy to force Sarah to not invite my Wife or me. The 2 other sisters and MIL all stood in solidarity with us and said that they would also not go if we weren't invited. He eventually relented and they got married a little before Aaron was born. As more kids were added, MIL's childcare duties got much harder. Eventually my wife and I started paying her (not much but something at least. $150 a month) to watch our daughter, but we also did chores for her, bought her food often, and eventually my Wife started taking a few shifts to watch all 3 children. To date, BIL and Sarah have never compensated any of us for our work. It's a little frustrating but we've tried to understand because Sarah and BIL seem to be bad with money. They objectively make more than us yet can't afford to pay MIL anything. Last Thanksgiving, in the middle of dinner, Sarah and BIL decided to have an "intervention" and talk about how we were not treating BIL fairly. They addressed everybody but really honed in on me specifically. This seemed to be because the rest of the family kind of dance in eggshells around them, while to be frank I'm pretty honest about how I feel about them. They seemed to think I was causing the family to turn against him and questioned why I would do that. I told him he lacked humility. He said he didn't understand. I told him that if he admitted to his mistakes and actually apologized about any of the stuff I previously wrote, instead of blaming everyone and everything else then the whole family would feel a bit different about him. A lot of talk was about the 30th b-day and other times when I just ignored him and how he had already apologized about the party. I reminded him that he didn't apologize to most of the family and he blamed Ruth. He then stated that Ruth was the cause of a lot of the problems at that party. He also made a big deal about how the family doesn't trust him with my daughter and kept emphasizing how he has never held her. We finally tried to come to an agreement. I told him I would try to talk to him more and try to understand him better and he said he would try to come to family events more. He also wanted more of a relationship with my daughter. We left and my wife and I were skeptical but we said that if this is who Sarah really wanted to be with, as long as BIL wasn't perceived as a threat he could have more contact with our daughter. We have had way more of a relationship with his kids than he has had with our daughter so I tried to sympathize with that imbalance. Karl also stated later that having known BIL for a long time, he thought he was very sincere. To date, BIL has not asked or tried at any family events to spend any time with my daughter, despite having numerous opportunities. Now to the current situation. About a month ago Lana and Karl announced that Lana was pregnant. This was a revelation due to Lana having a medical condition that made it harder to get pregnant. A lot of excitement was brewing in the family because of this. Karl has been seeming like a good partner to Lana, and proposed to her a little before the pregnancy happened. This is especially pertinent because Lana and Karl moved into a house together right beside BIL and Sarah. A few days ago they were over at Sarah and BIL's house when an argument broke out between Sarah and BIL. BIL demanded that Sarah wasn't an "obedient enough wife" and that if she wanted there marriage to work then she was going to have to get better at serving him. She was upset and they weren't coming to an agreement so he was going to leave, but apparently he was very high so Sarah refused to give him the keys to his car. He got extremely mad and then got a gun, held it to his head, and threatened to kill himself if she didn't hand over the keys. Fortunately, Danny and Aaron were taking a nap during all of this. Sarah called the police during this whole exchange and the operator heard a lot of what BIL said over the phone so based on that they arrived at the house. He apparently drove away and it took the police a bit to find him but once they did he turned himself over. They admitted him to a mandatory 72-hour stay at a psychiatric ward for a mental health assessment. Sarah then came up to the rest of the family (not me or my Wife) and gave them Danny and Aaron. She then went and confided with Lana and Karl about how abusive BIL had been and how life was just miserable right now. A lot of us, especially Karl and my in-laws, were telling her that she needs to leave BIL and file for emergency custody of her children. She seemed to be listening to us and turning a corner, but inexplicably the psychiatric ward allowed BIL to have a phone call with Sarah and they had a long conversation. Suddenly, Sarah shut us all out and completely changed her story. She started defending BIL again. BIL was then let out of the psychiatric ward a day early. Since Karl was working at the time, Lana came to stay with us and then over at her in-laws. We are especially concerned about her safety around BIL due to her being pregnant. They have since cut nearly all contact with us for 4 days now. They have only told Karl that they were getting a new TV because the old one mysteriously broke somehow. They have continued to post on social media like nothing has happened. They have spent 2 days with BIL's family so we aren't sure what their opinion of this is, though we do know a sibling of his has also told Sarah to leave him prior to this latest situation. We don't know what their plans for childcare is because they are wholly reliant upon us. Lana is very reluctant to ever be home alone. Ruth is as well. There are so many other details I haven't mentioned. There have been holes in walls they've had to fix. There is some evidence that BIL is cheating on Sarah, but that evidence is somewhat inconclusive. The bigoted comments for a while now have gotten increasingly misogynistic. It's a lot of 'we need to respect proper gender roles' kind of stuff. There's just too much and I've already written a book on here. I don't really know what to do at this point. Because a lot of this stuff has been swept under the rug it's hard to tell how seriously CPS or police would take our claims. FIL has threatened to kick them out of their very cheap rental they're in now. Who knows what they would do in that scenario. I know this post is detailed and because of that BIL or Sarah might see it, but at this point I wonder if I even give a shit. They've already eluded to keeping their sons from us in the past and the vibes we are getting now is that they are already doing it. And from the bottom of my heart, fuck BIL. 

We met online with a 1.5 hour commute between us - It was lovebomb at first sight. The first date (june 2023) was magic spending 10 hours at the beach in the water. I had a feeling after just a week of knowing him... facetimes or texts every 3-5 hours, seeing each other every other weekend. It was lovely to have such an incredible connection with someone so quickly and crave them every moment of everyday. I really felt like this was it with the amount of attention/affection he gave me, we would surf and skate together. he said his dream was always to skate with a girl. he told me how important it was to have the same interests as your partner and we also were both into taking film photos and have really special memories captured.
The distance started to take a toll on us 3 months (September) in. It was our first sort of argument he picked about it being almost noon and we hadn't left the house yet to do what we said we would do I was ready and waiting for him to be done playing guitar. But this was all due to him waking up late per usual and his ADHD is so severe he has no idea how quickly time goes by while He will do 4 things at once and then complain about not enough time in the day.
We ended up breaking up because he kept saying "I don't Know" when I Would ask him what he wants. We both crying I packed all my things and then I said why don't we enjoy the day and do what we said we would do and then I'll go home. We ended up enjoying the afternoon and he cried to me about how he can't lose me and how foolish he was to start an argument.
OK fast forward 2 weeks in September we had plans to go camping for the weekend, I booked a dog sitter. the night he was planning to come over he cancels on because there is a rat in his house (he has 3 roommates and the kitchen and pans and cabinets were never cleaned). so I end up taking my oldest dog on the camping trip and leaving the younger one with the sitters. this was my first sign from the universe that things happen for a reason... keep reading.
Then in end of October. My old boy is sick I drive to Mexico for vet care and he offered to come with me both times and then said he had too much work. Mind you, he wakes up at 9am, clocks in from his bed, does his morning routine and doesn't start to work until 11am usually. He will go run errands in the middle of the work day, play guitar and complains about not being a good worker. He even told me a friend called him out for it because he had mentioned it to them a year prior. So he had been knowingly a poor worker for more than the time I have known him. I brushed it off since my dog was #1. 2 weeks later I take the second trip to Mexico which also happened to be the day after I had been put under for a broken finger from a surf accident. he did not come for my surgery to support me and i expressed concern on lifting my 80 lb dog with my finger freshly put back together with a metal plate. yeah he couldn't come he has work. I spend 8 hours in mexico going to 5 hospitals for my sick dog to find answers. while he ended up going to the skatepark after work. I went to stay at his house that night which was nice he setup a bed for me to lay next to my dog on the floor.
the next morning was Friday. I said ok I have to put my baby down this weekend he is so sick. he said ok I am coming over right after work to be with you. that evening he calls me. his friends brother is in town and he is going to go surfing in the morning (saturday) with them and come over right after. I said ok whatever. I was screaming inside.
he comes its fine. sunday I put my dog down. I have the vet come, before hand I had frequencies playing for my baby on spotify and he has the audacity to change it to youtube video to show my cousin a skate clip. I called him out and he dismissed me.
a week after my dog is put down we have another (many not even mentioned because its painful) butting heads episode of him telling me knitting is not faster than crocheting and he has the experience since he was around it when his friends crocheted so i should listen to him. mind you I have been crocheting for 10 years i have never knitted so i mentioned i was going to start knitting and he told me how much slower it is and i just genuinely don't know so i said oh I didn't know and I don't know what to expect and because I didn't say I believe you it was this terrible icky feeling in my gut I didn't even wanna talk to him anymore. I was telling him how excited I Was about something and he would always shoot me down. so I called him later that evening after work to discuss it and of course he is driving to the skatepark and he says he needs to go skate and feels bad energy after me calling him to talk about the knitting crocheting mishap and he goes "your life has been so depressing lately" and I was just so taken back by that and hurt I don't even remember what my response was but I should have hungup and never talked to him again. I don't remember what happened but I let it go.
then a couple weeks later (November) its 2 weeks from Thanksgiving, he says his roommate is making a fried turkey and invites me i am so excited because I am 2,000 miles from my family so I begin to prepare what meals I want to make. a week before Thanksgiving he facetimes me and says he has exciting news that hes going to mexico for thanksgiving to surf with his friends. I was so sad, I asked him why he would make plans in place of what we planned and he just said it was a special opportunity and so I felt i had no choice and didn't fight it. i realize at this point of typing all of this I enabled alot of this behavior.
that evening I sent a video message to him about how hurt I was and how inconsiderate he is of my feelings and the fact that I am his girlfriend and his friends and what he wants to do comes before me always. the next morning he apologizes via text and then is quite throughout the day which is very odd because he texts every 3 hours pretty much. I ask how his day is going and he says it started off shitty because of the message he received from me that morning, it wasn't the "best way to start the day". so again I am dismissed for sharing my feelings. and I let it go again.
Thanksgiving comes and I take my other dog camping to the spot I took my recently passed dog. Fast forward December he was visting at my house and I have been working on training my younger dog he has leash reactivity. I say "here" and treat dog when we pass other dogs so he associates quiet still behavior with a reward in this moment. Ok so then he suggests I teach dog a different word that would associate a dog is coming and that my dog needs to behave............ I said that is exactly why I say "here". He continues and starts to raise his voice, "you aren't listening to me, teach him a different word like leave it" and I said ok but he still isn't good with "here" so why would i give him another word to learn? it turned into an explosive fight. we broke up the next night and he is bawling his eyes out and so am I. a week goes by we get back together because I can't help but think he has potential to be this amazing partner he talks about all these things he wants out of someone and I check every box but he just would pick this random little arguments and then be so indecisive of what he wants to break up or not.
I told him how I wanted to do yoga teacher training he says "theres already a lot of yoga teachers". I told him I was going to costa rica with my girlfriend for a surf trip and he says "why would you go with her and not me? how long have you known her? your level of surfing isn't even at the par to go to costa rica" but he had already gone on 2 surf trips with friends. he would dismiss me time and time again. he would criticize everything I do. even telling him something I saw happen he would qualify everything I said and question what I saw was true.
His birthday comes in January and prior to this I told him how excited I am and important it is to spend brithdays together and shower each other. I make him a cake the night before and set up my dog for daycare. I drive to work keep his cake in the fridge and then after pick up dog from daycare and drive 2 hours to see him and celebrate. He then tells me he booked a trip to skate in Spain with his friends over my birthday. I was so heartbroken I wanted to throw up I asked him if he takes me seriously and he said yes of course and we both cry I am so furious I should have left but I didn't. I then tell him how disgusting his house and its been 8 months and hes never bought me flowers. the next day he brings flowers to the coffee shop I went to work at. I went back to his house after and broke up with him yet again. I burned a picture of him he gave me. I really tried to move on. he hurt me so much and would dismiss me all the time.
I don't know why but we got back together again. he started watching dharma talks I would send him (mindfulness talks, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass kind of stuff) because he knew how selfish and self centered he was and he admited it every time we broke up but made no effort and this last break up he really did seem to make an effort.
we didn't see each other for 40 days and he came over in April for a weekend we went to the art museaum he was in the middle of a story and we were getting kicked out I asked him if he can take my picture quick and he flips, "I can never finish a story it takes forever all the time" he takes my picture and then I stop being silent. I tell him you are the storyteller all the time I never tell you stories because its always about your stories I remind him I haven't been to an art museum in ages and i want a photo in that moment and your story already happened so why cant it wait a moment??? he then woke up a little and saw my perspective. and then the next day we went to surf, the surfboards are in the car we go thrifting and he says oh we can't be in there for even 30 minutes someone will steal the boards he had all this concern on the surfboards and I was like why did we come here then...? lets just leave but no we go inside and of course 15 min in he says ok! 15 more min! and then later that night I said why did you make such a big fuss and then you don't even live the truth you say? he says yeah I wanted to come apologize to you but I didn't and I am like are you kidding?! come on please I need you to take accountability for your actions this is part of being an adult!! and then he admits to being a "whiny baby" and I was like yes you are a huge baby and youre a grown ass man! anyways it was a very nice talk while I was actually able to talk and he was listening very well.
Ten days ago was my birthday, I went camping with my dog. He told me he would facetime me on my birthday he only sent a text in the morning from spain mentioning "I wish I could be with you" whatever crock of s*/t. he never called me. I saw his friends posting on IG though so I know they had Wi-Fi. I sent a picture of my camp and said "we made it, thanks for calling like you said you would :(" that was my last text to him.
the next morning he gave every excuse, "sooooo sorry I didn't get to facetime you" we were so busy blah blah blah. its like if you wanted to make the effort you would? sends another text asking how camp was and what are we doing that day and then another one 8 hours later apologizing saying how truly bad he feels and hopes I am willing to speak with him but could understand how I wouldnt want to and says he blew it.
I never responded. He never even tried to call me to apologize just 4 total texts. I blocked him from seeing my IG stories. I am so heartbroken that I spend a year thinking I was with this wonderful person who wants the same things as me to learn that all he wants is to skate and surf and not do any hard work or put any effort into life he has not made any growth the entire almost year I have known him.
I have made so many advancements in my own life. I sold my motorcycle, rented out my garage, laid brick in my yard by myself never offered to help, I starting selling all of my vintage at pop ups I did 3 and he never came to any. I broke my finger and put my dog of 11 years down. I have a really wonderful job and I also stick to my word and do what I Tell people I am going to do.
I can't help but be missing him. Wanting to work it out. I act impulsively quite often but I know in my gut this man would not stand up for me if times got tough like he hasnt this whole year. can people really change? do I owe closure to him?

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Chapter 168 – The moment to live and the moment to die
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„Jumping!“ an Ensign announced loudly as the Sun's view-windows very briefly flickered into a dark black only to go back to a full view of the ongoing battle basically instantly, having barely shifted the ship's position at incomprehensible speed. „Shot clear of allied ships.“
Vice-Admiral Kazadi tapped his finger on one of the armrests of the Commander's seat that still felt anything but comfortable for him to sit in as the tight grid of flashing lights reflected in his eyes within the twilight of the bridge.
“Fire,” he then ordered. Not even a blink later, a burst of colorful light broke into his view from the side of his very own ship, lighting up the entirety of the bridge even through the automatically tinting windows that absorbed a lot of the harmful light so the crew wouldn't flashbang themselves with each shot.
The relativity canon fire tore through the enemy ship at an almost literal instant with any travel time barely being conceivable to a mortal mind. In a large unload of energy that left almost the entire stern-side of the zodiatos ship as a molten mass of dispersing slag, the main propulsion was taken out. Simultaneously, the two accompanying cruisers had also taken their shots; with the 'Civil' taking out the engine of one more enemy vessel while the 'of the roses' had instead used its shot to disperse one of the enemy projectiles in order to buy their own hunter ships more freedom of movement. Those huge ones didn't go down easy from one of the hunters' smaller shots, so using one of the large canons to dispatch it took some of the heat off them.
Meanwhile, smaller targets on the enemy vessels, such as their own canons, were gradually taken out by said hunters, whose own fire – while able to be quite destructive if intended no doubt – could be used in a far more precise manner. With more and more of their canons failing, the protective volleys the coreworld terrorists could fire to hide themselves away also became less and less effective.
“Send the fallback-beacon,” Kazadi then ordered, since close quarter attacks became less and less necessary.
It seemed that the zodiatos had a hard time adjusting to the combat style of the human unkindnesses, however that didn't mean they should take any unnecessary risks. Even if a pilot could've been able to avoid all enemy attacks in a perfect world, he knew that his pilots were only human.
Casualties of their own had been comparatively minimal so far, however as if to prove him right about his thoughts, he could see on his surveillance screen how, just in that moment, one of their ships was taken out by an enemy craft.
He grimaced to himself and let out a mild sigh. One more family who would never see one of their own again...
It took a moment before all the ships were reached by the beacon. Due to the nature of their own combat strategies, as well as the particular nature of hyperspace, it was entirely impossible to effectively contact any of their ships directly while they were out in the battle. Therefore, the order to fall back had to be broadcast as a general signal, that each of the pilots could individually pick up as soon as they would keep still for long enough so that it could reach them.
By now, the battle was already won. None of the zodiatos' weapons were able to match the relativity canons in effective range and without the larger ships to back them up, their small hunters wouldn't be able to launch an offensive – shields or not. They could just stay back and fire until surrender now. As the signal was picked up, one of their ships after another disappeared in one last flash of hyperspace as they joined back up with the larger vessels in an enclosing formation.
“Prepare for the retrieval of some of those projectiles,” the Vice-Admiral then ordered as he hoped they would be able to track some of those spent shots their enemies had fired. They would have to figure out what kind of tech that was.
In such a small-scale conflict, it was more than manageable to face it. However, it could offer some difficulties in larger fleets – especially since they didn't know how far this kind of tech could possible be expanded and refined. It was quite possible this was just some form of prototype.
While that order was followed, one of his Lieutenants suddenly spoke up.
“Sir, we have an incoming transmission from the planet. Civilian. Not encrypted, but they seemingly had an access code,” they related quickly.
“Is the earlier interference cleared up?” he immediately asked back, to which the answer was positive. “Put it through then,” he immediately ordered as soon as he heard that.
He rubbed one of his tight braids between his fingers as he waited for contact to be established. Once the line was clear, things remained quiet for a moment.
“What are we best at?” he then asked the silent line, his chest tightening ever so slightly, even if he didn't have to wait long for a reply.
“Topping from the bottom,” a very familiar voice replied from the other end, sounding incredibly strained but most certainly alive.
The code phrase was an old in-joke about something that had been said back during humanity's first contact with the tonamstrosites due to a slightly choppy translation. However, it more than sufficed here to tell Kazadi that the person on the other side of the line was not only genuine, but also not in any immediate distress – at least none that was brought onto her by someone else.
“Good to hear your voice Ma'am,” he greeted the Admiral after taking a brief moment to allow his heart to settle.
“The pleasure is all mine, Celestin,” Admiral Krieger replied in between heavy breaths that sounded like a combination between being ready to collapse and absolutely willing to tear anyone's throat out at a moment's notice. “Excuse me for the unorthodox contact, my own means of communication have all been destroyed. Update me.”
A brief smile played on the Vice-Admiral's lips.
“No problem, Ma'am. Things are under control up here, but multiple allied coluyvoree ships were destroyed and we suffered some casualties of our own which I will take full responsibility for,” he quickly complied. “By now, the enemy crafts have been largely disabled and our fighters are falling back. What's the situation on your end?”
There was a bit of a grunt from the other side of the line that seemed unrelated to the ongoing conversation.
“I'm sure you did everything by the books,” Krieger then replied a moment later. “Down here the situation is precarious but momentarily under control. We have an unconfirmed number of casualties after an attack with an unknown weapon. All squads are either KIA or unresponsive. We took down six enemy combatants but can't confirm if there's more. I'm going to need clean up, rescue teams, as well as pickup for me and two large offworlders asap.”
Celestin nodded.
“We're in a stable position, so we'll jump teams down right away. Hold out just a minute more,” he assured her while already signing in the necessary order to the troops they had on standby. “How bad are your injuries?”
There was another groan of pain from Krieger's side.
“Crushed cranberries,” she replied after a long moment that sounded like she needed to catch her breath.
“Copy that,” Kazadi replied with a grimace. “Sending muti-team with the evac.”
“Copy that,” Krieger confirmed. “Krieger out.”
With that, the call was hung up. On his screen, Celestin could see how the preparations for dispatch of the requested teams was already well underway. Jumping towards a planet at FTL was generally discouraged by the Galactic Community. However, this was an emergency. They couldn't wait for normal re-entry.
After watching the reported progress for just a moment, his eyes returned to the ongoing battle. He watched the enemy ships as they hovered dead in space, unable to maneuver.
They seemed to have recalled their own fighters back in order to form some sort of protective wall around the 'mother ships' with their own small shields. Obviously it wouldn't be very effective, so it seemed like needless cruelty to make their own soldiers get in the way of the incoming fire. Something within Kazadi told the Vice-Admiral they weren't going to stand down.
“Sir, we're getting some strange hyperspace-readings,” his Lieutenant suddenly announced, making him look up.
“Weapon-grade?” he immediately asked, knowing they had less than a moment to react if it was. However, he also figured there would've been more urgency to their voice had it been so.
“No, Sir. Travel-grade,” the Lieutenant quickly replied. “However the readings are unusual. It seems like they are creating a stretch solely around themselves.”
Kazadi's lips shifted a bit as he took that in and he briefly ran a hand over his mouth in thought. “Prepare to collapse,” he ordered. “Maybe they will attempt some sort of running start. We can't let them get away.”
Right then, the light of what was happening had not yet caught up to the spacial distortion that their sensors were detecting, meaning the ships still looked perfectly normal – if damaged – when he looked at them. However, they were planning something. And that made them appear all the more ominous.
His mind quickly went through their own protocols. The U.H.S.D.F. employed hyperspace in nearly all its possible facets in their tactics. If it was even close to sensible, they would have something that was akin to the maneuver their foes were attempting to execute right now.
A bubble of hyperspace solely around their ships...a dodge? Hardly, there was nothing to dodge like that. An attempt to hide away? No, they knew human ships could collapse hyperspace from the outside easily.
Before him, the windows of the ship once again automatically dimmed, protecting the crew's eyes as the colorful light of the created hyperspace-bubble finally reached them.
“Hyperspace collapsed!” the Lieutenant then suddenly announced, causing Kazadi to blink in surprise as his eyes shot up to his screen. He hadn't given any order to collapse it yet. But indeed, it was gone. For a moment, he thought that the stress had caused his officer to use the wrong term in haste, however no, they had been completely right. It had not been dispersed in a controlled manner. It had collapsed.
In a mild 'thud', the Vice-Admiral's fist descended on the armrest, hand firmly clenched into a fist.
“Those cowardly ba-” he began to growl but then bit his tongue and released a low, almost grunting exhale while his fist quivered from momentarily clenching tighter. “Prepare to search for survivors,” he instead said in a much more controlled manner a moment later. “Preserve lives.”
“Yessir,” multiple of his officers echoed back as he looked out of the window, where he could still see the ghostly afterimage of the hyperspace bubble linger for a bit longer. It was always a strange feeling, seeing someone in the distance who was already dead...
–
With her view darkened and her goggles momentarily pulled off her eyes, Shida stared at the glowing bubble of impossible colors. Her sensors had already told her what was about to happen at any moment now, however her eyes still heavily constricted as they finally witnessed what unfolded themselves.
In what could be described as nothing else than a 'snap' , the light of the hyperspace-stretch instantly condensed down into its original size as the universe all at once remembered that the laws of physics were a thing that existed and brutally forced space to conform to them once again – no matter what may have been in between it and its original form.
Anything within the strange, round stretch was mercilessly ripped along with the convulsion, forcing all the injected warships and fighters into the single, small point that the stretch had been generated from. Though not even a faction of a second later, it all exploded outwards again as the megatons of mass realized that they could not all exist in the same place at once, since the energy of the event was not quite potent enough to press it all into a neutron star or singularity.
No longer recognizable blotches of undefined, white-hot matter were instantly scattered in all directions like some sort of micro-supernova that accentuated the sometimes still burning nano-stars that the earlier battle had created from the opposing fighters.
It was almost pretty...but still, Shida couldn't help but let her ears hang as she wondered how many of the enemy combatants had known about the decision to end things this way. Had any of them even been asked?
Even if it was the far more disturbing answer in a way, Shida almost hoped that this had actually been one mutual suicide-pact instead of the decision of one single commander to choose death over dishonor. Especially while sitting in a ship that was technically under the command of someone else herself, that was certainly the less immediately petrifying option – even if it would probably spell far worse things in the long run.
As she said there, the 'shockwave' of the collapsing hyperspace suddenly hit her, spreading out through space even without any medium to carry it and rocking her ship gently while also penetrating all throughout her body. Of course the earlier relativity fire had already caused similar ripples and she was therefore quite used to the feeling, however these ones sure felt a bit more severe than those of the U.H.S.D.F.'s own canons. It was like she felt her own body distort while also remaining perfectly in palace – almost like she was a stiff container full of water that someone had given a heavy smack from the side, riling up the liquid without it actually having any place to plash to.
According to everything they knew, this phenomenon felt incredibly odd but was entirely harmless to living beings – which was instinctively very hard to believe when one felt it on their own body.
However, her dwelling thoughts were, perhaps luckily, interrupted as she – or more precisely one of her scanners - picked up on a peculiar signature that one of the scattered debris pieces was sending out.
Well, it was 'peculiar' to her that there was a signal at all at first, however then she quickly realized what it actually was. This particular signal was hammered into any pilot's head six ways to Sunday, and so she reacted relatively quickly when she glanced at the grid and realized that she was the closest ship to it. Firing up her engines, she turned her ship on the spot in a slight drift before activating her generator and making a jump right behind the flying object.
Once there, she allowed her computer to take aim for a second before firing out a harpoon that quickly struck the flying debris and latched her ship onto it through a long cable, allowing her to pull the thing along with her after slowly using her backwards thrusters to disperse its speed little by little. Pressing the indicator of her communication, she then spoke up.
“Scratches to Sun,” she announced. “I just recovered a black box. Permission to return for inspection?”
The black boxes of modern ships truly were among the most ridiculous pieces of tech out there, in Shida's humble opinion. Built to withstand almost everything that would likely take a ship out through a combination of brilliant engineering and extremely flexible material that only worked in its indented manner on very small scales. Well, very small compared to the ships they were built into. The things were about half the size of Shida in the end. For many years, armies of scientists had attempted their very best to make this same sort of defense useful in ways that could maybe be used to protect actual people from catastrophic events – but to no avail so far. For now, the only thing those little marvels could allow to survive even something as ludicrous as hyperspace collapsing was information.
“Permission granted, Lieutenant-Commander,” the answer came almost immediately. “Return to hangar three.”
“Copy,” Shida replied. “Scratches out.”
With that, she moved her ship around and prepared for her jump back to the Sun. Hopefully this thing would give them some answers on what exactly this whole thing was meant to accomplish...
–
Far away in another part of the galaxy, a pair of mildly glowing red eyes was laser-focused on a large screen that was just one of many that had merged all over Nedstaniot-Station to broadcast the breaking news to anyone willing to lift their eyes at a slight angle to look at them.
An attack on a coreworld. And not just any coreworld. Gewelitten itself. Something like this hadn't happened in...well, Curi didn't even know how long.
Details seemed to still be incredibly fuzzy as the battle so close to the coluyvoree homeworld had either just happened or was still happening at the moment of the broadcast, however what few details were known were already repeated on end in an endless scroll of text that was meant to catch as many people up to speed as was at all possible through the medium of television. Obviously the same emerging details could already be looked up on the net as well to find them in a more digestible format than the endlessly moving text next to the not exactly top quality footage of the occurring conflict.
However, despite the speed with which it went by, Curi had no problem following the scroll as they stared at the screen intensely.
“Attack was unannounced. Multiple Gewelitten fleet ships destroyed. Official sources confirm: Humanity NOT the aggressor. Attacking ships presumed to be of zodiatos origin. Unknown weapon technology deployed during the attack. U.H.S.D.F. ships engaged in combat after aggression. Myiat delegation ship confirmed unharmed. Attack on government facility on planet simultaneous to spacial attack. Councilman-Candidate Aldwin confirmed unharmed. Status of U.H.S.D.F. General Krieger unknown. Status of Gewelitten Governor H. Cierrophai unknown. Status of Acting-Councilman Afuéhner unknown. Allied coreworld defense fleets activated and inbound. General alert level raised to 8. Hyperspace-travel shut down around the system.”
“Mother, oh no...” Mueen said with absolute shock in his eyes, both of his hands clasped over this mouth as his wide pupils quivered in fear from what they witnessed.
Curi could understand his worry. Though Moar had supposedly been with James, so she would probably be fine. The cyborg was certainly more than just a little relieved that James was already confirmed to be safe. Though the idea that Admiral Krieger's situation was unknown was more than just a little disconcerting.
Though despite the supposed lack of their commanding officer, it seemed like the humans had decisively won out in the battle outside of the coreworld's atmosphere; unknown technology or not.
Given the sub-par footage that some drone was likely recording from quite far away from the actual conflict, it was very hard to tell just what sort of weapon the unknown but presumed to be zodiatos attackers had unleashed there. It looked like some sort of emanating energy that destroyed what it came into contact with but also interacted with it as if it had a physical presence.
Curi had never seen anything remotely like it before – not even in their wildest theories – and their mind immediately wanted to go wild with speculations and ideas about how such a thing might work now that they knew for a fact that it was possible from seeing it with their own eyes.
However, the cyborg pulled themselves together and successfully forced the briefly almost overwhelming desire to focus on nothing else down as they shifted their gaze slightly away from the screen to look over at their other currently nearby company.
Then again, as much as they knew they couldn't let their guard down around him, Reprig's eyes were just as immovably attached to the large screen as Mueen's were as he witnessed the unfolding battle with quivering horror.
His trunk was wiggling wildly in his face and one of his hands nervously scratched over the plate of the table they were all sitting and standing at and on, right next to a piece of paper with a hastily drawn sketch of a spring-like mechanical leg that was inspired by what humans called 'running blades'. The Warrant Officer's weapon also laid on the table, pushed a but further away from his hand so he wouldn't be able to easily reach it.
Though despite his focus, Curi couldn't quite help but speak up after a moment of watching him. “A coreworld attacking another coreworld,” they said to the man, who they knew either had to know far more than they did about this – or would be far more invested in it unfolding. “This is unprecedented.”
Reprig seemed to notice that they were talking to him, however he still remained silent and stared a good few moments longer before finally pulling his gaze away from the screen.
As his eyes met theirs, he looked a bit sick. It almost reminded the cyborg of one of the first interactions they had with the man, back when they nudged him slightly to hand his spy-device back to him after he tried to hide it in James' cabin. Though this time, the cyborg was quite sure that they were not the reason why the man seemed like most of his blood was currently rushing into his stomach.
Could he actually be shocked about what was happening? Was this not part of the plan?
“Unprecedented doesn't even come close to describing it...” he mumbled and couldn't hold the cyborg's gaze for long, looking down to the table's plate instead. “And these aren't just any coreworlds. Osontjar and Gewelitten have been allied for an unimaginably long time. The thought that they would even think of attacking each other...what sort of madness could've caused something like this?”
Curi was the first to admit to themselves that they were far from the best at reading people. If someone with even a modicum of skill in acting wanted to make them believe something untrue about the person they were talking to, they would never deny that there was a good chance of that person succeeding.
Still, Reprig's reaction felt...genuine to them. As if he had actually never expected something like this to happen. Not in a million years.
Maybe it was just skillful acting. And Curi knew that they should have been suspicious like that. However, despite everything he had done, they couldn't quite bring themselves to suspect that he was lying at that moment.
“I know it is unlikely you will give me an honest answer, but-” Curi began to say, however Reprig was more than able to anticipate what they were going to ask and replied long before they were finished.
“No. No. Never,” the sipusserleng said, shaking his head heavily and standing his trunk up while making a denying gesture with his hand that was so brash that he actually knocked his crutch off the small outcrop in the table it had been laid down on. “This must be some absolutely deranged people, no two ways about it. To attack a coreword...”
Curi noticed Reprig's gaze briefly twitching down, his eyes jumping onto the personal assistant strapped to his lower arm as if he suddenly got the urge to use it for something.
Curi suspected he likely wanted to call someone; question them to make extra sure that they had, in fact, nothing to do with this. Though the sipusserleng suppressed the urge and pulled his eyes away, bringing them back up to the screen.
Just at that moment, the implosion of collapsing hyperspace suddenly lit up the footage moments before the glowing remnants of what once had been the zodiatos ships were scattered across the star-system.
Mueen mumbled something in his home's language as his eyes remained affixed to the screen. Curi couldn't even begin to guess what he was saying. However, his voice sounded pleading.
“Suicide instead of surrender?” Reprig meanwhile mouthed breathlessly as his nervous tick of excessively licking his trunk began to show.
Although he had often been otherwise employed in recent times, Curi could see it in the man's eyes that he was still, in a way, military at heart. He knew the general values and doctrines that were conveyed to the soldiers of the Communal Military, both inside and out. And the idea of someone choosing death like this...it seemed to rock him to his very core.
Slowly, he turned his gaze over to Curi. His eyes were almost pleading with the cyborg, even if they seemed to already know that his next question would be asked in vain.
“Could it maybe have been the humans and their-” he began, but this time, it was Curi's term to cut him off after anticipating what was coming.
“While humans very much employ the collapsing of hyperspace as a tactic in war, the process is not invisible – or even subtle. Had the human ships caused that collapse, it would've been noticeable,” they explained succinctly. “It could've still been a mere unexpected failure of the hyperspace generation, of course. However, with the rarity of such events, the timing seems...unlikely.”
“They weren't even trying to generate a real stretch...” Reprig concurred dejectedly and left his head hanging, his trunk also sinking down limply. “I can't even imagine- Well...I hope they will at least find peace now, away from the madness.”
Curi paused for a long moment, staring at the Warrant Officer some more. Admittedly, the cyborg was a bit confounded at something. They knew for a fact the man had put his own life on the line for his orders, with a very real chance that they would lead to his death, more than just once. And yet the idea of being ordered to die seemed to disturb him. They couldn't quite figure out the difference that led to the results in reaction being so incredibly different, however it was still very clear that there was one.
And it seemed to hit the man hard.
Self-admittedly, Curi didn't exactly pity the man. They didn't quite have the capacity to. They knew about so many horrible things he had done that simply seeing him distressed was far from enough to stir such deep empathy for him within them.
Yet still, they weren't left entirely cold by it either – and if it was only because he seemed to be affected by these events in the ways a, for a lack of a better term, 'normal person' would be. He was shocked at the sudden, seemingly senseless violence, and concerned about the people involved.
Granted, it was likely only because they were people he considered worth being concerned about, yet still, the reaction was so...'normal', in a way they didn't quite expect from someone with such a capability for unceremonious acts of cruelty and violence. Even this person who had tried to kill them, or at least had been entirely comfortable with them getting killed, was capable of such a reaction.
And Curi...wasn't sure if that made things better or worse, if they were being honest.
It felt better because there was the capability for empathy there, however...it felt worse because they felt how they had been and likely still were willingly denied said empathy.
He could have cared...he just didn't want to.
Curi shook their body heavily, causing mild sounds from the engines running their legs' movements from the sudden force as they tried to shoo away emotions that they really didn't want to be feeling at that exact moment.
The thing that mostly kept them from following up on some of their uncomfortably aggressive thoughts at that moment was the fact that Mueen was still with them, the worry for his mother written across his features like a deep engraving in a metal plaque. He did not need anything like that around him right now, that much was clear.
Slowly, they moved over to him and reached up one of their long legs to run it along his arm while he still covered parts of his large face with both hands.
“She will be alright,” Curi then assured the dark-furred rafulite, switching from their usual voice box to their more “melodic” one to put on a gentle, calming tone. “She is stronger than she seems.”
Inhaling deeply as his nostrils flared, Mueen closed his dark eyes and swallowed heavily, taking his gaze off the large screen for the first time in many minutes while slowly hanging his head down.
“Yeah,” he said, seeming to force hopefulness into his tone. “Yes, she'll be fine. She made it his far. This won't get to her.”
Curi nodded with their entire body and continued to run the tip of their leg along his arm.
“She will be,” they repeated, both to the man and themselves as their own eyes moved upwards, their gaze falling back on the battlefield riddled with burning remnants of matter. “I'm sure of it.”
–
Never in his life had James felt so drunk and so sober at the same time. His mind was entirely clear, running a light-year a minute as it desperately tried to simultaneously process all the admittedly little information that he had in his current situation AND to not absolutely freak out while doing so somehow – a task he was ludicrously failing at. And it did NOT help that his body could barely keep itself on his own two feet.
He had avoided completely fainting by a hair earlier after reminding himself that, instead of being terrified for Shida's life, it would be much more fair towards her to simply focus on trusting in her skills to carry her through. However, that was barely a little patch on an enormous crack in his facade as he couldn't help but go over and over and over the fact of how much worse the situation that she needed to jump into here had been for her simply because it was his damn birthday and they wanted to indulge over it. He should've stopped that, but noooo, he just had to go and let himself be swayed so damn easily, as if he was still that little boy following Koko around whenever she visited the compound to try and get some attention.
Of course, a quiet voice in the back of his head tried to politely remind him that Shida had, in fact, not only taken part in the festivities as well but also encouraged him to do so, however it was easily overpowered by the screaming rest of his mind.
He briefly glanced over at the only somewhat conscious Commander. When she said that they should match each other's drinks, that should've been the moment he stopped. She was like half his weight, what the hell was he thinking?
His mechanical hand shot up, heavily gripping a fist full of hair as he tried to force himself to focus. What's done is done. There's no changing it. He should focus on anything else right now.
Though as he painfully pulled on his hair like that, his eyes suddenly went wide as he noticed something. Or, more precisely, didn't notice something.
When had the alarm stopped? Just now? Or had it been out and he just hadn't noticed?
Letting go of his hair, he lifted his face and looked around. If the alarm was over, then that meant...
The uncoordinated movement of soldiers reaching for their phones and radios with different speeds went through the room, and after brief confirmation, the uniformed forces began to move, having seemingly gotten new orders other than guarding the safe-rooms. Apparently, the threat was over.
James quickly fumbled for his own phone, his barely coordinated hands struggling extremely with the simple task of trying to call one of his contacts – much to the frustration of his already cleared mind. His finger trembled as he swiped it across the screen, trying to get it to the right damn place to make a simple god-damn call.
However, he froze in the motion at a quiet sound that was immediately followed by a sudden stir behind him as multiple people seemed to move quickly. And after just a second, James was among them as well.
Nearly tripping over his feet, he damn near threw himself onto the sickbed that didn't stand too far away from him, his phone momentarily forgotten and eyes wide open as they stared over at an endlessly familiar dark face, that however had life in it for the first time in what felt like an eternity at that moment.
Slowly and twitchy, Nia's eyes fluttered open as she let out quiet groans while mildly stirring in place while her doctors and nurses hurried around her and quickly began to take her vitals.
After flinching heavily as a flashlight was quite suddenly shone into her eyes to test her photopupillary reflex, she began to move even more. Meanwhile, James and Tuya were basically pressed shoulder to shoulder close to the foot of her bed, the only thing keeping them from dashing right up to her face being just enough awareness to not get in the doctor's way.
Still, although her movements were very slow, stiff, and groggy, Nia eventually lifted up her head, looking around with still somewhat hazy and half-closed eyes. But that didn't stop her from smiling when her gaze fell onto the two who so nervously stood at her bedside there.
“Hey,” she said in a quiet, croaky, but still very much cheerful voice as her unkempt hair fell down both sides of her face.
Though James didn't see much more than that, because just about at that moment, his vision was entirely taking away by welling-up waters sweeping him along.

Chapter 120 The spectators continued cheering and whistling even minutes after the fight had come to an end. Zaon had caught the crowd by surprise. He was going to be the talk of Farcrest for the rest of the week. The perfect underdog, classless, orphaned, a bit awkward even, coming up victorious against the tyranny of levels. But that was only part of the picture. Zaon had demonstrated the vast difference in skills between him and a combatant nine levels ahead of him.
The victory put us seven points ahead, but what mattered the most going forward was the three points Zaon had lost. Team Nara’s Soldier might not be half as a competent fencer as Zaon but his proficiency with Quick-Step had given him three undisputed points. The Soldier knew when to use the skill to reap the most benefit, and I assumed all our opponents would be the same going forward.
The more skills our opponents had, the harder it would be for the kids.
“Contenders, please enter the arena,” the Master of Ceremonies’ voice echoed over the crowd’s roar. “Ilya the Hunter versus Arel Nara the Warrior!”
Despite Zaon’s victory, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. The Warrior class had a better skill pool than the Soldier class. Ilya grabbed my hand, cutting my musings short.
“Something wrong?”
I examined her face, but she just gave me a nonchalant wink and pulled me to my feet.
“Play along,” Ilya muttered as we walked to the weapons rack holding hands. “Act as if you are choosing a weapon for me. Give me the same sword as Zaon.”
Ilya was trying to fool her opponent even before the match started.
I played along and walked Ilya to the weapons rack like a father dragging his daughter to the dentist. She took the bit about ‘all war is based on deception’ too seriously, but I couldn’t blame her. Ilya had to gather every slight advantage she could if she wanted a chance in a world of average-height people.
Her act worked because Arel Nara seemed to smell her weakness as soon as we reached the weapons rack.
“Have you lost your bravado, little Gnome?” Arel Nara said as he casually grabbed an arming sword with a broad blade from the rack. The boy had the same vulpine expression as Lord Nara, but unlike his lord, his yellow and black fencing uniform revealed his strong arms and legs.
Ilya cowered behind me without letting my hand go. The System should’ve given her the Actress or Spy Class.
“Just what I thought,” Arel Nara laughed. He had grabbed a round shield and an arming sword. “It seems I won’t need this,” he added, leaving the shield back on the weapons rack and strolling into the arena with a carefree demeanor.
Lord Nara, who until that moment was furious due to the first combat, seemed to relax after seeing Ilya cowering behind me.
“Your sword is longer than his, Ilya. Aim for his hands and feet, and don’t let him close the distance. Don’t let him disarm you,” I whispered as I put the slim longsword in Ilya’s hand. “And don’t let him get under your skin.”
Ilya grunted.
“I already know, Mister Clarke! I’m used to having the reach disadvantage and to that sort of comment. I know how to fight against stronger opponents, and he isn’t half of a trash talker as Holst was,” Ilya said with an evil smile. “I got this.”
“Teach him a lesson,” I replied with a smile.
Ilya nodded and gave me her best ‘I’m-on-the-verge-of-tears’ face before turning around and walking to the center of the arena. Despite her tailor-made uniform and the longsword on her shoulder, Ilya looked completely out of place, like a small bird caught in a storm. With a shaky smile, she stood before Arel Nara, raised her chin, and squared her shoulders. I made a mental note telling her to keep her acting shenanigans to combat.
I returned to the bench, avoiding Elincia’s glance. The Fortifier applied the barriers around Ilya’s body. As before, the work wasn’t bad; it was just sloppy on the edges. The difference would be too subtle to catch for anyone without a good grasp of mana detection. Even if I complained now, the Fortifier could brush me off, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t brewing a plan.
“She’s using that technique, uh?” Firana said.
“What technique?” I asked, sitting on the bench and patting Zaon’s shoulder. The boy leaned back with a towel on his face, still trying to control his accelerated heartbeat.
“Shu has been helping Ilya with her acting skills.”
I massaged my temples, worried. The news wasn’t at all surprising. I was already familiar with the little harpy shenanigans. Shu might already be a genius of manipulation at the young age of seven, but I didn’t foresee the little harpy teaching her dark arts to others.
Arel Nara greeted the crowd, his perfect smile reeking of overconfidence. Then, he walked to the Prince’s box with sluggish movements and bowed deeply. Arel Nara might be a braggart, but not a complete fool. He deliberately stalled combat as much as possible while Ilya trembled like a leaf with her longsword tight against her chest.
The Master of Ceremonies let the performance continue for a few seconds, unaware of the fact the battle had already started.
“Combatants, to the center!” He finally announced.
Arel Nara strolled back to the center of the arena, mindlessly swinging his sword and stretching his shoulders. Ilya remained still.
“The fight will end when one of the participants runs out of barriers. There will be no pause between barrier breaks. If you want to give up, raise your hand,” the Master of Ceremonies repeated the rules, looking at Ilya. “On guard!”
Ilya imitated Zaon’s guard, the pflug, not giving her opponent a single hint of the skills she had on her sleeve.
“Fight!”
Ilya stepped forward and swung at Arel Nara’s shin. The boy raised his leg out of the way and countered with a jumping attack that landed on Ilya’s chest. The girl fell on her back, but instead of going for the following attack, Arel Nara turned his back to Ilya and riled up the crowd.
Ilya used her sword to stand up. When she raised her guard, Arel Nara spun around, pushing her sword to the side. Ilya answered with a choreographed thrust, but Arel Nara dodged with enough time to get to Ilya’s side and deal a powerful blow with the pommel of his sword.
Ilya slammed the ground again, her uniform and face covered in dust. The crowd was ruthless, cheering for the strongest warrior. The underdog concept didn’t seem to exist in this world, which wasn’t surprising considering that underdogs, lesser Classes, had marginal opportunities to win against a more powerful opponent.
Ilya was two barriers down.
“You chose the wrong Class, Gnome. Your kind belongs to a workshop, not the battlefield.” Arel Nara taunted Ilya. “I don’t know what lies your Caretaker whispered in your ears, so let me be clear. You are falling short of the mark.”
Ilya separated her feet and adopted the vom tag guard, angering her opponent.
“You asked for it,” Arel Nara grunted as a wave washed over the Warrior’s body, and with a mighty cry, he cast a fortifying spell.
Ilya assessed the situation instantly and channeled her power but didn’t use any skill. She remained vigilant. Arel Nara performed a jumping thrust followed by a quick slash. Ilya parried the first attack and ducked in time to dodge the follow-up.
The crowd yelled for blood, but Ilya used her longer blade to keep Arel Nara at bay, aiming at his hand instead of his body. It was a clever tactic. She not only had the reach advantage, but a longsword packed the power of both arms, unlike the arming sword used with a single hand. Arel Nara burned his mana trying to break Ilya’s defense, but the girl was used to fighting against Wolf and Firana.
Being the ‘worst’ student had its benefits. During sparring, Ilya always fought larger, stronger, or more skillful opponents, and she had developed a system to make up for the difference in body span. Ilya’s defensive style was perfect for zoning out aggressive opponents. Moreover, Ilya was a smart fighter.
Arel Nara burned his mana to get a hit, but Ilya defended like a porcupine. The more Arel Nara approached, the more chances he had of getting stung, and he wasn’t willing to lose a single barrier against Ilya. Not taking a shield was costing him dearly. Longswords had a bad matchup against an arming sword paired with a shield.
Arel Nara attacked once more, unleashing a flurry of strikes. Ilya retreated, dodging and blocking, but the fortifying spell wasn’t in vain. Arel Nara pushed Ilya’s sword aside and seized the opening on the girl’s defense. With a quick step forward, he secured a clean slash across Ilya’s chest. The girl tried to riposte, but he retreated before she could hit.
Ilya was three barriers down and hadn’t broken a single one yet.
Arel Nara’s assault was relentless, and Ilya was starting to breathe heavily; dust and sweat covered her, and even her stance was getting sloppy at times. Ilya was a more skilled fighter, but Arel Nara’s stamina was superior; a prolonged fight would only benefit him.
“Not that good without a bow, are you?” Arel Nara taunted. “What are you going to do? Cast Piercing Shot with a sword?”
“I’m not the one running out of mana,” Ilya spoke for the first time in the combat.
Her words were a slap against Arel Nara’s face, who instantly interrupted the fortifying skill.
“You need four times your mana for that skill to have any effect in this fight,” Ilya taunted him. “You should try something else. Quick-step? Puncture, maybe? No? Even a Level 5 Soldier should have two or three skills at their disposal. Don’t tell me you decided to participate in the tournament with a single skill, please.”
Ilya’s taunt worked. Despite being three barriers down, she had made Arel Nara work hard for them.
“You asked for it,” Arel Nara said, channeling mana around his sword.
Ilya raised his guard, with the hilt of her sword at eye level and the point of the sword aiming forward. Ochs. She braced for the attack, but Arel Nara remained still. Then, he let the sword go, but it didn’t fall. Instead, the sword floated by his side, pointing menacingly at Ilya.
“I’m not a Soldier. I’m a Warrior,” Arel Nara grunted.
The sword flew in a straight line like a bullet, but Ilya blocked it. What she didn’t expect was Arel Nara running forward. The boy channeled mana and cast Iron Skin around his leg as he threw a high kick. Ilya leaned back, dodging by millimeters, but before she could counter against her unarmed opponent, Arel Nara’s sword flew back at her, stabbing her shoulder blade and breaking the fourth barrier.
Arel Nara smirked.
“Your choice, getting kicked or stabbed,” he said. “Forget that. For a Gnome, getting kicked might be more appropriate.”
Ilya smirked back. “That’s it? If you have any hidden skill, I warn you, this might be the moment to use it.”
The arming sword came back to life, spinning and circling Ilya, threatening to attack at any moment. Ilya remained impassive. She had prepared a plan. Mana surged from her chest, and just as the blade launched forward, a thick vine shot from the ground. The sword pierced the vine from side to side, but before Arel Nara could yank it back, the vine coiled around the blade like a boa constrictor.
Arel Nara strengthened his body and made a run for the sword, but Ilya stood in his way.
“Did you lose something, idiot?” She grinned as she thrusted.
Arel Nara cast Iron Skin and blocked Ilya’s blade with his forearm. The skill shrouded his barriers, preventing them from breaking, but the girl didn’t stop. She weaved a series of attacks and feints in a single fluid movement. Arel Nara retreated, casting Iron Skin around his arms and legs to block Ilya’s blows. Each time Ilya swung the sword, a chunk of Arel’s mana was blasted into the air until the signs of Mana Exhaustion started to show. Ilya ran him down, and the boy’s movements became erratic.
In a desperate last attempt to recover his sword, Arel Nara channeled all his remaining mana into the blade and tried to overpower Ilya’s vine; however, the girl effortlessly countered with her much bigger reserves. Sword and vine fought, but in the end, the vine imprisoned the blade against the ground.
“Your choice, surrender or get stabbed by a Gnome,” Ilya mockingly said.
[Awareness] brought Ilya’s words to my ears. A quick lesson in sportsmanship might be needed, but I decided to leave it for later. Ilya was making a statement. Not only was she a competent fencer, but she was also an intelligent fighter. The best part: she only used a fraction of her power.
Arel Nara gestured to raise his hand, but Ilya smacked it down with her sword before he could completely raise it: one barrier down, nine to go. Arel Nara opened her eyes in surprise. Ilya pressed the attack, breaking barrier after barrier until Arel Nara was left with only one. The spectators changed sides the moment the tides turned, roaring every time Ilya penetrated a barrier.
Arel Nara was trapped against the arena wall.
“I care very little about what you say about me, but I will not tolerate any ill comments against Mister Clarke. Idiot.” Ilya said, lowering her sword. “You have two options now. You can surrender or make a further fool of yourself trying to retrieve your sword.”
It had been a while since one of my students made me blush.
Arel Nara unenthusiastically raised his hand and returned to the pavilion with his head down before the Master of Ceremonies could announce his defeat. Ilya retrieved Arel Nara’s sword, or rather made the vine do it for her, and walked to the Prince’s box. She performed a gracious bow and saluted the spectators with an innocent smile. I couldn’t decide if the crowd was happy for Ilya or gloating at Arel Nara’s defeat.
Among the seats of the high nobility, Ginz leaned over the handrail with half of his body outside the box. A member of the royal army frantically grabbed him by the belt to prevent him from falling into the arena. Ginz would’ve made a great English hooligan if he had been born in London or its surroundings. I couldn’t help but share the feeling, but my position required me to maintain a certain level of composure.
Ilya skipped toward Ginz and high-fived him before returning to the pavilion.
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Chapter 1

Concept art for Sybil
Of Men and Ghost Ships, Book 1: Chapter 21
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As Carter walked onto the bridge, he was surprised that only the girl was present, but he decided to shrug it off. Maybe they were having fun observing their new toy ant colony or whatever the vixen would call the cockroach equivalent. Instead, he spoke to the Sybil who was present. "Well, now that everyone's settled in, so to speak, how do we go about unloading them?"
Instead of adjusting her glasses and launching into an analytical assessment as he expected, the girl looked at Carter with a raised eyebrow. "You want to get rid of them so soon? After being stuck with us for the last few weeks, I figured you'd be with them, enjoying some human company."
Carter shrugged. "This may surprise you, but despite seeking out the glamorous lifestyle of a solo cargo hauler, I'm not much of a people person. I'm not saying I'm a huge fan of empty halls and dust-filled rooms, but I'm not looking into making several dozen new friends, either."
The girl shrugged. "As you prefer, though these may very well be the last people you'll have a chance to get to know."
When Carter didn't say anything, she continued. "Well, unloading them isn't as easy as flying to a space station and dropping them off. It may have been a while, but I'm sure the local governments still have at least some record of all our pirate activity over the years. It might be better to wait until we come across a cargoship of some kind and drop them off there."
Carter laughed. "Yeah, I'm sure any captain would be delighted to take on a whole extra crew's worth of mouths to feed when they have little to offer in return. Not to mention the difficulty of even getting someone to stay and listen long enough to ask. Maybe the new guys never heard of you, but almost anyone who's been in the game long enough to become a captain will know of the stories and rumors about the Sybil. As soon as we show up, any sane captain will either run or shoot first and ask questions later!"
The girl smiled, though this smile would probably be more at home on the vixen's face. "Yes, that has been our general experience as well. So what is it you suggest, Captain?"
Carter stopped and thought about it a moment. "Well, you need to hunt ships to repair and maintain yourself anyway, right? If we take one in good enough condition, we could just give it to them and let them fly off on their own..."
The girl looked bemused. "Quite generous of you to just let them have an entire ship just like that."
Carter shrugged. "Listen, I'm not saying we give them a battleship or some state-of-the-art freighter, but pirates tend to convert anything they can get their hands on into some sort of fighting vessel, whether it's in good shape or a junker. We can probably find some old, beaten-down freighter that's not worth the resources to consume and let them have that. It won't be glorious, but it should get them to a nearby colony or station, and they can figure it out from there."
Now, the girl seemed inscrutable. "So, you want us to become pirate hunters now? Like some sort of do-gooders from a children's cartoon?"
Carter shook his head, then stopped and thought about it. "No... Well, not quite, anyway. Listen, I'm not looking to take on any more than we can chew, and I'm definitely not interested in risking life and limb for a bunch of people I've never met, but this way, we can satisfy everyone's needs and not take it out on a bunch of people who are just trying to get by same as us. It'll get you the resources you need, get the pirate the fight he craves, and let the vixen torment lowlifes to her heart's content. It's what we call a win-win...win."
The girl looked bemused again. "The pirate and...vixen..?"
Carter sighed and rolled his eyes. "Hey, I gotta call you all something other than Sybil. You might all share one mind and memory, but you're all very different people to me. What did you want me to do? Call you all Sybil? That would get confusing real quick!"
The girl laughed. "I suppose, given your... limited perception, that makes sense. So, what's your little nickname for this version of me?"
Carter wondered briefly if he was talking to the vixen in disguise, but despite her choice of words, it lacked the edge or condescension she usually had. Instead, he decided to just answer. "The girl, I suppose."
This time, the girl looked mildly offended. "'The girl?' Really? I'm almost surprised you didn't choose something really witty like four eyes or bookworm!"
Carter grinned. "I didn't know you liked books!"
It was the girl's turn to roll her eyes. "Not the point!"
Carter decided to take pity on her. "Well, what would you like me to call you then?"
That seemed to stump the girl. "What? Do you want me to come up with a name for myself? I already have one. I'm Sybil!"
Back where he started, Charter shrugged again. "Hey, that's fine. I respect that. But given my 'limited perception,' I still have to differentiate you somehow. I can just stick with the girl, pirate, and vixen if you prefer."
The girl shook her head. "No...I'll think about it..."
Carter grinned. "That's all I ask! For now, anyway. And while you do that, I'll go enjoy some 'human company' and have a word with our guests about what we're gonna do with them. Maybe they'll have an idea or two to offer."
-
Alen had just finished eating and was trying to think of some way to pass the time that didn't involve exercising, eating, or sleeping, which seemed to be the only three things available for the crew when Captain Carter walked into the mess hall. He looked around for a bit, then upon seeing Erik, Vanessa, and Alen, who'd taken to eating together, he seemed to brighten slightly and approach the table.
Unsure of what the Captain would want but nonetheless curious, Alen found himself interested, but after Carter laid out his plan, Alen was suddenly less interested. "You want to pick a fight with a bunch of pirates to get us a ship? Are you insane? There's got to be some backwater colony you can drop us off at!"
The Captain shrugged. "Any colony backwater enough to not have records on this ship or be a threat to us is gonna be too small to handle your crew being suddenly dumped on them without notice. Besides, this way, you all can sell the ship, and you won't be starting from nothing!"
Alen shook his head. "We won't be able to sell anything if you get us killed before you unload us! This just sounds like suicide the hard way!"
The Captain didn't seem dissuaded. "Listen, this ship has been feared for hundreds of years for a reason. We were running on fumes in that last fight and still gave them a run for their money. Next time, we won't be on the back foot. I think we'll have that ship for you sooner rather than later!"
Alen shook his head. This guy had clearly lost his mind.
Of course, that was when Erik decided to offer his two cents. "Will we be able to have any fun, or would you be doing all the fighting?"
Alen fought the urge to slam his forehead into the table. Of course, the viking alien wanted to fight. Carter seemed thoughtful. "Well, if we take any ship intact enough to give to you all, it'll probably have to be cleared out the hard way, so I imagine you'd get to get your hands a little dirty."
Erik laughed and slapped the table. "I LIKE this plan!"
Commander Reid, who'd been walking past, looked interested in their discussion. "What's this about a fight?"
Erik grinned at the smaller man. "The Captain here wants to capture a pirate ship to give to us! But we'll have to clear the decks once the Sybil has disabled it!"
The commander took a seat at their table. "What kind of weaponry and support can you give us? What kind of a ship are we talking about? What's the crew compliment?"
Alen felt the last shreds of hope fading. This was not what he'd signed up for. When he'd managed to secure an officer position aboard the Trader's Vigilance, he'd thought he'd lucked into a nice, steady gig that would give him the experience and training he'd need to one day be captain of his own trading vessel. However, instead, he'd gotten a ship full of pirate-hunting lunatics, recruited an insane alien whose whole definition of entertainment seemed to begin and end with pirate hunting, and ended up aboard a pirate-hunting ghost ship. He was in a giant floating insane asylum and surrounded by madmen. He could only hope his family would be able to find his life insurance policy and get some use out of it...
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Well, sounds like almost all of the characters have gotten to know each other. Now to see how well they all get along!
My Wiki has all my chapters and stories, including the short series and stories that I write for an occasional change of pace or style!
As a reminder, "Of Men and Dragons" Books 1 and 2 are available to purchase in e-book or physical form. (Both softcover and hardcovers are available!) Book 3 is almost done being edited, so I'll just have to get the cover art and formatting done, and it will be available to purchase as well! Hopefully, in no more than a month or two! (Barring more Amazon drama like last time... fingers crossed!)
OMAD Book 1: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NCPP3PP
OMAD Book 2: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQ7FQ1ZJ

The following is the first two chapters from my first fantasy novel. It's an almost Lovecraftian, dark fantasy inspired by the likes of Berserk, Attack on Titan and One Piece. I had originally thought to try and do a graphic novel. After realising the amount of effort that might take, I'll try it in prose form first.
Hope you enjoy
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At the beginning there was only the Source.
The source energy of all things made from pure consciousness, an omnipresent higher being. Fated to be everything and nothing forever in an eternity of self reflection and loneliness, Source felt an eternity of despair. From that despair it gave birth to two new separate beings. Source's soul now divided into two entities.
Order and Chaos were born.
Source divided itself up equally between Order and Chaos and became all the life that that now wandered the world of Eve.
For a time, Order and chaos existed in balance. But Order, in it's increasing desire to control life, soon sought to banish chaos...
Our story begins long after Chaos and his followers have been mascaraed in an ancient war. A small village near the edge of the world is all that remains of them. In their desperation they cry out to their lord and begged Chaos for it's aid. Chaos also fearing it's extinction reached out to them. It would embed a portion its power upon one child born in precisely 9 months time. Created in to defeat Order, it is the last hope for Chaos and all of it's followers. It would defeat Order and the one who ruled in it's name. The leaders of the village David and Fae would give birth to the child of Chaos, it's power blessed upon the newborn. David and Faye named him Guy. Born to defeat Order and kill it's leader, the sorceress of Order. Chaos tells the villagers the child will be the one to rid the world of Order, and restore Chaos into the world. Soon Guy was born and the village held it's breath.
Guy always knew he was different. From his earliest memories, he sensed wasn't like the other children. Whilst they played together he trained alone. Harnessing his skills in combat.
Why do I do this? The thought was always stalking him.
"It is too much to burden you with" Guy remembers his mother telling him. "One day we will tell you everything and you will understand. You're everything our people have waited for. You're special Guy".
I don't want to be special. I just want a friend. I want to be normal...
Ten days before his 8th birthday, in the height of a winter storm, he heard his parents arguing. Every now and again the storm would drown our their voices. The next day they told him he was finally old enough to learn the truth about his birth and his destiny. All the ordeals and training would finally make sense.
Two days before his 8th birthday Guy watched the other kids celebrating one of theirs. Whilst his parents were away for a village meeting, he snuck out to join them. Guy asked if he could play too. The other children went silent. They quickly made excuses to leave. When Guy returned to his house he saw the other kids come back out again.
The next day he was once again practicing his combat skills with his wooden dagger. His father watched on.
Guy's form slipped for just a moment.
"Again Guy?." His father slapped the back of Guy's head . "How many times have I told you to concentrate!?"
Guy dropped his dagger.
"I don't want this anymore. I just want to be normal!!
Guy runs into the woods until, eventually, his father's scream disappeared into the gathering wind. Guy lies still, sobbing beside an old oak tree. A few minutes pass and exhaustion begins to creep in as his eyes turn bloodshot.
"I swear I won't come back this time" Guy muttered to himself.
The sound of thunder can be heard. Guy bolts up right and hears a scream coming from the village. He rushes to his feet and runs in it's direction. The screaming grows louder and louder as thick smoke begins to gather.
I knew shouldn't of ran away, its my fault this has happened! The words hung heavy in his mind.
He arrives back at the village. Hostile unfamiliar voices can be heard in the.
A cold voice fills the air.
"The child where is he?" Guy's father hovers in the air, his feet several feet above the ground, before a hooded figure. The hooded figure was tall and wore dark black and purple robes, his face shrouded in shadow. He carried a long body-length staff stretched towards Guy's father, a blue light shining towards his father's face at the very tip. Guy stops and watches as he sees the life slowly being choked out of him, his fathers eyes just visible through the thickening smoke.
"Tell me where he is!" the figure bellows
"I told you I have no child" David gasped
Guys eyes tremble and he holds back tears. His father's eyes meets his own for a second and then fades . Guy turns and runs. He doesn't stop. He runs for miles till the screams can no longer be heard. The only voices be could now hear was his fathers and his own as they swirled inside his head.
I have no son - He heard his father's voice
Why didn't I save them - He thought
I told you
Its all my fault. Its my fault Its all my fault Its my fault
I should of never have fled
I told you. I HAVE NO SON
Guy, aged 18, wakes up in the present day from the same nightmare. He is sleeping in a makeshift leather tent in the woods, his sweaty hand gripping his steel dagger. The full moon is high and bright but will soon be covered by thick cloud. Guy gets up and takes out his dagger and begins moving towards the nearby tree. He lunges in with it pointed just about touching the tree with the tip, just as he was taught to as a child. As the sun rises we can see that even in the gloom almost all of his strikes to tree were on target. There hundreds of incisions and pieces of tree missing, all laser focused on one spot just a few mm thick and wide.
The sunlight illuminates his lifeless eyes. He stares at the tree and wonders again, what is his purpose. His hand grips his blade as he lunges once more at the tree.
----------------
Chapter 1
Luna
Capital city
The grand temple of Order
Luna's heart danced with excitement as she walked hand in hand with her mother, her bright green-blue eyes sparkling with anticipation.
"Did you tell them I wanted white daffodils when I return to this plane? That's how I always imagined it!"
"Yes Luna, now we must hurry" her mother replied with a forced smile. Luna (7 years old) loved flowers but especially dafodils.
As they approached the grand hall, Luna's breath caught in her throat at the sight before her. The doors swung open to reveal a spectacle more magnificent than anything she had ever imagined.
Three magical orbs floated gracefully in an orbit around the hall, casting a soft, ethereal light that bathed everything in a blue mystical glow.
The religious, military, civil leaders and royal family members watched on in hushed silence as Luna and her mother entered the hall, the blue light only just bright enough to illuminate their eager faces as they watched on. It was so dim Luna could not see very far beyond the limited light the orbs cast. The distant edges of the hall still lay in shadow.
She had dreamed of final seeing the grand Hall and finally becoming a sorceress . Surrounded by white daffodils and the admiration of her family, she would emerge as the greatest sorceress ever. Luna inhaled deeply. She wondered if she'd be like the wise sorceress of the rebellion era who saved Eden from the dark one. Or perhaps the current sorceress , her great aunty Adel, whos powers would soon pass to Luna. As she approached the alter at the center of the oval hall, she looked around to see hooded figure at all side. Most held staffs with glowing blue orbs at the tip, all raised up towards the spheres that hovered in the air. A soft chant could be heard. A choir of hooded girls sang an almost forgotten ancient tongue towards the alter. Known only to a few, Luna couldn't remember what they called the language. Her mother had told her aside from a chosen few, no one remembered the name.
All as was designed by Order in his great plan. She thought
The song rose slightly as she reached the center. Luna walked up a stone step and kneeled before the alter just as she was told to do so. The grand priest, a tall balding man dressed in brilliant white robes cleared his throat and bellowed
"We begin this ceremony to welcome a new vessel to our saviour and light in the dark years. Great Lord of Order who banished Chaos to the night long ago. May we rid the heavens and Eden of all of his kin, so his name too will be lost to time" He cleared his throat again before continuing
"We the disciples of Order eagerly follow his path. Soon we will join him in the promised land"
Luna's mother whispers in her ear
"Be brave, Mother loves you" Luna didn't understand why there was a little sadness in her voice. Her mother squeezed her hand one last time then leaves her side to join her father who's eyes glared fiercely back at her.
Luna looked at her feet. I have to make him proud. Be a good daughter. Be a good sorceress
The grand priest began to speak
"So as the new eve approaches so we cast aside the old and begin anew. The final vassal and saviour." The room echoes these words with him. She could feel her heart beating in her ears
A hooded figure approaches her and removes her brilliant dark purple hood. The sorceress Adel, her great aunt and current ruler of Eden.
White haired and ancient, her passionless eyes stares down at Luna. She nods gently at Luna to begin. Now Luna needed to assume her rightful place before her and kneel. The center sphere turned blue and the air seemed to change. The great priest raises his arms and the chanting grows louder before coming to a sudden stop. Luna could sense a new presence among them. . She took a deep breath. The great priest passed a goblet of shining blue liquid to Luna. She drank a sip of the water and passed it to Adel. Adel was trembling too, even more than Luna. Adel took a sip before passing the goblet back to the grand priest.
A moment passed. From the corners of the hall a shadow moved quickly. The blue light of the spheres began to shiver and twist as the shadow passed though it. The shadow reached out and sank into Adel. She screamed as light bellowed from her mouth.
An unearthly voice rang
Do you accept me child
There was silence
Luna couldn't find her voice. She opened her mouth gasping for the words. Looking over Adel's shoulder. She saw her father's eyes glaring from the shadows. Luna's heart skipped a beat.
"Yes I I accept"
The light blasted out of Adel and hit her head on. Luna screamed as the Adel fell to the floor.
She felt the light tear into the very fabric of her soul and bury itself there. For a moment Luna no longer knew who she was, where she was, or have memories of ever being alive. Her soul was ripped out her body and flung far, far away. There she felt the pure terror of eternity gaze at her. She knew Order was with her now. Waiting, watching. For a moment she thought she could see what was almost an eye, or window of perception. Flashes of light began to appear from it. Each flash was a moment in time. The future. It began to unravel itself in her mind. Her soul screamed out as the future became a part of her. Now every moment of her life, her was as burnt into her memory and it began to unfold one second at a time.
She opened her eyes and saw clapping.
"Arise sorceress Luna."
Tears streamed down her face she took a step forward.
It was just the same as she had foreseen. It was just the same as she had foreseen. It was just as she had foreseen..! The words tormented her.
Everything is the same. No this can't be real. This can't be... Her eyes met Adel's Adel looked back at her with a sad smile.
"I love you Luna. Be strong"
"It hurts. please, please help me, please" Luna begged
"Promise me you won't give up. I believe in you" Adel replied. Luna looked at her feet.
I can't let them see me cry.
She looks up and sees her aunt collapse and lay motionless. The blue light fades and colour returns to the hall.
Luna reaches to cover her eyes as more tears began to form. She already knew what would happen next, but she couldn't prevent it. The tears kept appearing.
Stop stop, please Stop
Her father grabs her her arms away from her face and thrusts them to her side. He kneels and whispers.
"If you don't stop crying and bringing shame to out family.. to our LORD. I will no longer have a daughter. Am I understood?"
"Yes father"
"As you were, child". He glares and pushes her towards the head priest before returning to his seat.
"Continue" he bellows. Everyone who was for a moment frozen in place by his fury jolt back to their positions. All was all just as she had seen. Burnt into her mind . It was like walking through a familiar tunnel. A tunnel of her life. And then came the next moment, and the next. Like she foreseen. Like she had foreseen like she had foreseen...
Her heart slowed.
Who am I now. Please help me Aunty
She saw the daffodils she had requested dancing in the air as she walked through an applauding crowd. She grabbed one and stared at it. Onlookers sobbed and hugged each other in joy. The choir resumed, right at the precise moment she expected it would. She opened her hand and looked at the white daffodil. It was just a dead flower, nothing special.

I'd originally posted in another thread, and some of the commentors ( u/one85fortunes and u/Jeciew) had asked for elaboration as to the incidents that happened in my house.
I'll try to fill in as much as possible. This will probably be ridiculously long, so strap in.
My SO and I moved into this house a little under 2 years ago. It's an average looking rancher, built in 1990. We're the second owners of the house. The original owner was an older man, who'd cared for his wife after she had a stroke. She ultimately passed away (not in the house, but in hospice) and being in his late 70's he'd decided to move to Florida. We met him briefly during one of the inspections, and he wasn't creepy or anything. Nothing in the house seemed off. No signs of satanic rituals, etc. All jokes aside, I add these details because I assume some of these questions will come up.
There was a hurricane the night we moved in. Rushing back and forth from the AirBnB to get situated with our two cats that first night was stressful to say the least. We basically throw down an air mattress, got out the litterbox, cat food, and other basics and then passed the hell out.
When I woke up the next morning my cat Oscar was dead. As he was only 7, and not knowing if a danger existed that would harm his brother Max or us, I rushed and had an autopsy done. The vet said he basically threw a clot, probably because of the stress of the move. I miss him, he was a hell of cool cat. I think he's still around - his spirit or whatever, and I am almost positive he visits and plays with Max some nights. Just seeing Max start chasing (literally nothing) around, the way they used to chase each other. I'm probably crazy but I feel better believing it.
One of the first weird things that occurred was a few weeks in. I was in my office building some shelves. An idiot proof kit, with hardware in bags numbered, you open them depending on the step you're on. I was on the last step, which involved hammering in these four feet.. each one similar to a giant thumbtack. Just big enough to keep the shelf system from scratching up the floor. I hammered in the first 3, and the 4th was just gone. I stood up, searched the room. Searched the hallway (no clue how it could have moved, I was sitting immobile on the floor but who knows). It's nowhere. I check Max, he's a Maine Coon so maybe it got stuck in his hair. After an hour of tearing apart most of the house, I give up and stack some quarters where that foot would have gone. Told my SO to keep an eye out for it. We then found it 3 days later on the top shelf of my coat closet, under a ballcap. It's about this point I should mention it's just the two of us, no one else lives in the house, at least not full time. We do have a room over the garage that one of the kids calls home when she's not in college. As this was all around early October, she was away at school.
We'd start hearing things. The amount of times (to this day) we'll rush into one of each other's rooms only to find neither of us called each other, but one of us at that time had distinctly heard someone yelling for us, well it's not even scary anymore just annoying. Maybe the entity wants me to lose some weight and get my steps in *shrug*. Other times we'll hear crashing sounds. In the early days, with boxes and things scattered and being unpacked, I figured the cat just knocked something over. I'd go check and find nothing amiss.
Lights would start being on in rooms we hadn't used. Again, we chalked a lot of this up to confusion, or carelessness. It's a new house, neither of us had our routines yet, it was all a bit of a hot, sleepless mess, and I can't always swear I didn't go into that back bedroom and maybe turn the light on while on autopilot (even though I totally didn't). I'm a big fan of horror (post history proves that) and I don't spook easily. I'm also pretty pragmatic and realistic, so I'll try to find a rational reason for most things before jumping to the paranormal and metaphysical concepts.
Eating dinner one night we heard a weird noise, and we got up to investigate to find the bathtub running at full blast. Around this time we'd also find oddities like pictures on the walls being askew. Overall things started escalating. My SO and I promised to each other, on penalty of ending the relationship, that neither was pranking the other. That pact holds to this day.
At this point in the game, I'd started looking into metaphysical things that I could do to help. I'm talking amethyst and obsidian pieces in the house, saging, stuff like that. I honestly don't believe in it, but I also don't NOT believe, so what can it hurt. It didn't really do much that I could tell. Things continued to happen.
Twice in the same day, at vastly separate times and in different bathrooms, we both experienced an incredibly loud pounding in the attic over the bathroom as we were doing our business. I assume the ghost doesn't like whatever we ate that week. My bad, homie.
The locks had been changed at this point. I started looking throughout the house, wondering if someone was phrogging. I've seen a few horror movies about it. Nothing out of the ordinary. The attic has two entrances, one needs a ladder from the hallway, and the other is through an opening in the eaves, which you can get to from the FROG (Finished Room Over Garage). I stacked things in front of that eaves door, just to make sure nothing was coming and going. I did come to the realization that the attic was FULL of stuff from the previous owner. Luggage, clothes, random stuff. I still haven't cleaned it out, so maybe something up there is tied to an entity. No clue.
I've never felt anything malicious from the entity/spirit/energy/demon/whatever. My other half is terrified of it. Came home from the store one day to find the last rites crucifix in the bedroom turned sideways and half opened. Also felt every hair on my body stand up when I went in the room. The hair-on-end happens often when activity is spiked, I can't tell if it's energy literally raising my hair, or just me being creeped out.
I went to check the aforementioned stacked items in the FROG one night to find that all the LED strips the girl had put up were blazing red. She hadn't been home in weeks and never uses that color. I was up there just a few days prior and all the lights were off.
Halloween was fun. Giving out candy, talking with the cul-de-sac neighbors. One cute kid, maybe 4 years old turns to look to his right (my garage) and says you have a goblin in your garage. We didn't have any decorations on that side of the house. I'm sure just random kids being weird kids, right?
I have a habit of being flippant, and I started talking to the entity. SO also tried it once. At this point we'd started hearing breathing in the dark sometimes. One night she's in the hall, cleaning the cat litter. She felt something behind her, heard breathing. She calmly said "I'm busy right now, please leave me alone". The feelings and sensations instantly left, then all the doors in the hallway slammed shut. We both started wearing amethyst and obsidian jewelry, just in case.
I noticed movies I'd leave up on my computer (I watch stuff while I'm working) would be playing, or finished when I know I had them paused. I thought maybe if you are a ghost you're bored af, so I spoke to the ghost and setup a dozen books in the back bedroom. A mixture of my stuff and my SO's, not knowing what the thing might be into. I'm nothing if not a gracious host. The next day one of the books was turned upside down and opened, as if being put down after being read. I kept more books out but it never happened again.
For Xmas we had 6 different mini-nativity scenes throughout the house (yes, she has a problem lol). We found various pieces from the nativity scenes moved into scenes they didn't come with. We also had these little xmas gnomes that we sat on the curtain rods, we found one sitting upright in the middle of the couch one morning, a good 12 feet away from where it was before.
One night we were sitting out front having a smoke, came inside and heard music. There was a snowglobe that was playing music. It was an old heirloom, she'd forgotten it also could wind up and make music.
A box of kleenex that we keep on the living room end table was found in the garage one day.
One night, she sends me a video while I'm out - We have a first gen Alexa, that was playing Bad Habits by Ed Sheeran. She came inside from having a smoke and recorded it blasting away. I had unplugged it earlier that day when our new toaster arrived. FYI, first gens dont' have battery backups.
Another night we came back inside to find one of our butcher knives on the kitchen floor, instead of in the knife block.
One evening while getting ready for bed I noticed an earring on my night stand, it was part of a set her grandmother had left her, the other part was buried in a box under some clothes in a drawer.
One night I woke up to hearing knocking at the front door. I could see through the glass it was a decoration we had hung outside, beating against the door. I opened the door expecting to see a storm brewing but the night was completely calm, the trees weren't even swaying. No wind whatsoever.
The previous house owners smoked in the house at one point, that much we know. Weirdly, sometimes when you go into the back bathroom it'll smell like someone is actively smoking a cigarette.
There's been a crazy amount of times we've been outside and see movement, what appears to be a person in a window out of the corner of our eye. Friends and family who visit have also noticed this kind of stuff.
Things go missing, and reappear in random places far too often.
So those are most of the big things. I'll try to pre-emptively answer the common questions.

• No, we don't have cameras inside. We've considered it. Feels like a lot of work to maybe catch something moving. Having video proof of any of this isn't going to sway a non-believer either (anything can be faked on photo/video imo). That said I do have photos and videos of some of the events (the alexa, the music box, the butcher knife).
  
• The neighbors filled me in a bit about the familial history of the home. The father worked hard, his kids were drug addict shitbags who trashed the place and partied a lot. No one died in the house that I know of, nor were there any other weird activities. Could they have gotten drunk and sacrificed a cat on a ouija board? Sure, I dunno.
  
• We considered getting the church to bless the home, but she was raised very catholic and I'm more of an agnostic mutt so I haven't jumped on board the idea. Again, I don't believe but don't NOT believe when it comes to most spirituality, mysticism and religion.
  
• I did look to see if there were any paranormal investigators nearby, and it doesn't look like there are any local ones. The activity in the house is so intermittent that I can't justify offering someone to come down when there are months that go by with nothing, then a bunch of stuff for a week straight. I thought maybe it was cyclic, tied to an event, hell even the phase of the moon, but so far I've got no clue. I also really have no interest in paying someone to investigate.
  

Last thing that might be worth mentioning, my SO is 95% positive her grandmother was a witch. The bonafide, keeps their baby teeth hidden away in a box so you can't be cursed, type witch. She often dreams of her when things start acting up in the home. It was HER jewlery mentioned before, and HER last rites crucifix. I don't know if that changes things or not, I've done some reasearch but I honestly learn more from episodes of Supernatural than what I find on the internet most days lol
If you've gotten this far thanks for reading, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Tom took another look at the dwindling encampment as his dismay began to fade away. "Whoever's left to hang out with are the most committed to the cause" he thought to himself. "If anything, I'll have more fun than I did before." And after all, they had a good lineup of activists scheduled to visit in the next few days, and an anarchist band had even agreed to play this afternoon. He had definitely noticed a rapid drop in the number of campers since the end of the semester, and had even begun to doubt that they would be able to get any sort of concessions out of the university. But his thinking had changed after hearing the speeches that morning.
First to speak was Tom's friend and comrade, Eric. His impassioned indictment of the Israeli government reminded Tom of the importance of their activism. Then came the married grad students, the Trotskyist Abdou and the pan-Arabist Farida. They were international students studying English and anthropology, respectively. Or was it anthropology and sociology? Abdou lectured on the university's connection to the military-industrial complex. His speech was filled with threats to the administration that Tom was sure the limp-dicked Trot had no means of fulfilling. Even so, he had to admit that despite all his other inadequacies, Abdou was a powerful speaker. Finally came Farida. Tom had always considered her the best speaker of them all, but frankly he had a hard time taking his eyes off her whether she was speaking or not. He had tried flirting with her before, and he got the feeling that Abdou was even more into it than she was. Thinking about it now, he couldn't quite remember what her speech had been about, but it had certainly improved his spirits.
As the "Bacon Brigade" began setting up their instruments, Tom decided to make a point of dancing with Farida that afternoon. As the average tent now held two campers rather than five, he even thought he might get a chance to enjoy some of the newfound privacy.
...
When there was a break in the music, Tom sauntered over to the table where Abdou was sitting. As an ML, Tom could hardly stand Trotskyists, but he put on a smile for the sake of "left unity."
"She's a good dancer isn't she?" said Abdou.
"Oh yes, the best," agreed Tom. He was trying to think of a way of progressing his slow seduction of this Muslim woman and decided to be bold. "Look Abdou, the band will be winding down soon, why don't you both come back to my tent and I'll show you some comradely hospitality. I also have some suggestions that I know you'll love."
Abdou's mind was racing with the possibilities of the situation. Would this be the chance to see his wife seduced and taken by this big stud? Supposing Farida won't agree? Before he could engage his brain Abdou found himself agreeing to Tom's offer. "Wonderful, wonderful," beamed Tom and he could feel his big cock twitch at the thought of bedding Abdou's beautiful wife.
Just then Farida reappeared. "What are you two talking about?" she said.
Before Abdou could say a word, Tom said "Well my dear, your husband has kindly accepted my invitation of hospitality at my tent."
Farida didn't know what to say. She had thought Abdou would whisk her off back to the hotel and give her the fucking she desperately needed. Rubbing up against Tom's manhood had taken its toll. "Well I suppose we could come and see where you camp," she said, "but we mustn't stay too late must we Abdou?"
"What? I err no, I suppose not," stammered Abdou as Tom rose and offered Farida his arm.
And the three of them found themselves heading off to tent where the lives of Abdou and Farida would be changed forever. As they walked along Abdou held one of Farida's arms and Tom the other. However, after a while Abdou consciously let go of his wife's arm and stepped behind Tom.
This was not lost on the big white and he put his big protective arm around Abdou's wife as if to say to everyone "she's mine." If Farida hadn't been so dazed by the afternoon's events, she might have noticed various other white students smiling at Tom with knowing grins. They had recognized the situation immediately; a Muslim couple with cuckold husband following on as a big powerful white man led the wife to his cot.
Soon they reached Tom's tent and both Abdou and Farida were pleasantly surprised at how spacious it was. "Let me get you some coffee," said Tom as both Abdou and Farida collapsed onto a big sleeping bag.
Having sorted the drinks, Tom put some music on, and crawling over to Farida he said, "Can we have another dance Farida, you're such a good dancer?"
Before Farida could answer she felt her husband pushing her up. "Go on Farida, you know how much you enjoy it."
Abdou secretly wanted to see his wife in the arms of this Adonis again and who knows maybe more. Having no real reason to object, Farida agreed and as she accepted Toms hand she couldn't help but feel a shiver at the thought of being reacquainted with his penis, albeit covered by his trousers. However, as they left the tent she had a suspicion that he wasn't wearing any under garments since his penis had seemed so clearly outlined earlier.
As he clasped her to himself Tom could feel his big cock twitch once again. He moved one hand down to the small of her back, just to test the waters and meeting no resistance after another minute or so he moved his hand onto her sexy bottom. He could feel through the thin dress that Farida wasn't wearing thick pants, or perhaps only very skimpy ones and he couldn't wait to see her naked.
Farida felt lost in a different world as she circled round with this big man. Not only could she feel his penis growing hard against her once more, but she felt his big hand on her bottom pulling her onto his hardness. When she looked at her husband (still sitting in the tent), she noticed that he was just rubbing his own penis through his trousers. "My goodness," she thought, "he's getting turned on watching us. Supposing I flirt a bit more and show him what he's missing?"
With that Farida deliberately started to open her legs and let Tom's muscular leg rub against her inflamed sex.
This change in Farida's demeanor was not lost on Tom. As he led her back to the tent, he let his hands roam all over the back of this sexy hijabi Muslim wife and he leaned down to kiss and nibble her neck and ears. He heard Farida sigh and knew that he was close to capturing this sexy wife. "Fatima, let's give Abdou a show to remember shall we?"
Farida was brought back from her dreamlike state by Tom's question. "What do you mean?" she asked.
Almost in a whisper Tom said, "You know, a bit of thesis-antithesis-synthesis."
He had already found the zipper that ran down the back of Farida's dress and he had it in his hands as he spoke to her. He slowly started to pull the zipper down and it was half way down her back before Farida realised what was happening. "Wait Tom, we can't do this, I'm married."
"So what of it, Abdou wants me to undress you, don't you Abdou?"
Abdou had no hesitation in replying in the affirmative. This is what he had wanted for so long.
Caught in the confusion and surprise of hearing her husband say that he wanted to see another man, undress her, Farida just lay there while Tom pulled the zipper right down and then eased the dress off her shoulders. Suddenly she realised that she was lying in only her stockings, garter belt, and thong panties.
As she looked up at Tom she saw something that she hadn't seen in a man for years and that was undisguised lust. This man was lusting after her, this married women! She should have felt ashamed at her feelings but she didn't. Having got half-naked, she realised that she was enjoying the attention of this muscular white man. In fact she decided to crawl around in front of him as if to say 'look at what my husband has and you haven't'.
This might have been a foolish act, but it merely served to confirm what both men knew. For Tom it confirmed that Farida was absolutely gorgeous, the sexiest Muslim woman he had ever seen and that she needed to be loved sexually. For Abdou as he fingered his painfully erect cock, he knew that he was just a few steps away from pushing his wife into a sleeping bag with another man. He was close to realizing his fantasy.
Tom pulled Farida to him, lifted her face to his and he kissed her. Farida would always remember that first kiss since it was both passionate but more significantly the precursor to her crossing a line that could not be re- crossed, and to setting in motion events that would last her and her husband a lifetime. She accepted his big tongue into her mouth and her tongue fenced with his. She could feel his big hands roaming all over body now.
In her trance-like state it seemed quite natural that Tom should start to remove his clothing. Both Farida and Abdou watched as the big man removed his shirt to reveal a hugely-muscled chest and then he dropped his trousers and just as Farida had suspected he wore no underwear. His big cock reared up in all is magnificence and Tom was gratified to hear both husband and wife express surprise at his size.
Tom crawled over to the sleeping bag where Farida was sitting and crouched in front of her, his big cock semi erect. He remembered that Eric had told him that the cops were closing in, and he knew he would have to move quickly if he wanted to finish before they cleared the encampment. Farida's head was at the same level as the big man's groin and she was amazed at the whole size and muscularity of this man. Her trance-like state was broken by Tom who said softly "Take my cock into your mouth."
Farida was aghast, "I can't! It's dirty and I've never done that before."
Tom laughed to himself. This wife was indeed naive and yet he was gratified that he would be the first man to have his cock sucked by her. Lifting her face so that she could look into his eyes, Tom said, "As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few years gone through an unparalleled revolution. The decomposition of the Hegelian philosophy, which began with Strauss, has developed into a universal ferment into which all the “powers of the past” are swept. In the general chaos mighty empires have arisen only to meet with immediate doom, heroes have emerged momentarily only to be hurled back into obscurity by bolder and stronger rivals. It was a revolution beside which the French Revolution was child’s play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi [successors of Alexander the Great] appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years 1842-45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries.
"All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought.
"Certainly it is an interesting event we are dealing with: the putrescence of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this caput mortuum began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances. The industrialists of philosophy, who till then had lived on the exploitation of the absolute spirit, now seized upon the new combinations. Each with all possible zeal set about retailing his apportioned share. This naturally gave rise to competition, which, to start with, was carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion. Later when the German market was glutted, and the commodity in spite of all efforts found no response in the world market, the business was spoiled in the usual German manner by fabricated and fictitious production, deterioration in quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of labels, fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and a credit system devoid of any real basis. The competition turned into a bitter struggle, which is now being extolled and interpreted to us as a revolution of world significance, the begetter of the most prodigious results and achievements.
"If we wish to rate at its true value this philosophic charlatanry, which awakens even in the breast of the honest German citizen a glow of national pride, if we wish to bring out clearly the pettiness, the parochial narrowness of this whole Young-Hegelian movement and in particular the tragicomic contrast between the illusions of these heroes about their achievements and the actual achievements themselves, we must look at the whole spectacle from a standpoint beyond the frontiers of Germany.
"Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular: German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy. Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined to this – each extracts one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted by the others. To begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as “substance” and “self-consciousness,” later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as species “the Unique,” “Man,” etc.
"The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions. [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] claiming to be the absolute redeemer of the world from all evil. Religion was continually regarded and treated as the arch-enemy, as the ultimate cause of all relations repugnant to these philosophers. The critics started from real religion and actual theology. What religious consciousness and a religious conception really meant was determined variously as they went along. Their advance consisted in subsuming the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, moral and other conceptions under the class of religious or theological conceptions; and similarly in pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as religious or theological, and the political, juridical, moral man – “man” in the last resort – as religious. The dominance of religion was taken for granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced a religious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the State, etc. On all sides it was only a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas. The world was sanctified to an ever-increasing extent till at last our venerable Saint Max was able to canonise it en bloc and thus dispose of it once for all.
"The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by attributing to it religious conceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation, while the other extols it as legitimate.
"Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.
"It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.
"First Premises of Materialist Method: The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.
"The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.
"Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.
"The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
"This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production.
[continues in comment]

Hi,
Recently I RGH 3’d a 4gb Corona console. Everything went smoothly and worked first attempt. I got the CPU key, wrote everything to the nand, & it booted instantly with no issues. Once I had the RGH 3 install finished I cleaned the flux off the 4gb nand pads with IPA and installed an LED strip inside the console. The LED strip worked fine, however, the console instantly showed an RROD 0010. I tried powering it on a few more times but then suddenly the console did not react at all when the power button was pressed.
I took the motherboard out and cleaned it with IPA. The console did not turn on BUT my power supply would now instantly show a green LED (rather than orange) as if it were powered on immediately after being plugged in. A few days later I tried powering it on again and the power supply would flicker green and the fan would spin for a split second before turning orange and the fan turning off like normal - now the console powered on once again with an RROD of 0010. I cleaned it with IPA again (hoping it was just some debris or flux causing a short or something) and at first the power supply would instantly show green and the fan would spin at full speed when plugged in (no led in front of console or beep) but now the console acts normal when plugged in (orange light, no fan spinning) and still powers on with an instant RROD 0010 error.
I’ve removed the RGH 3 install, changed RF boards, power supplies, and checked the resistors that are known for going bad. The only thing I haven’t tried is rewriting the nand although I doubt that would do anything as it booted fine prior to RROD-ing. Also, I am pretty confident the RGH 3 install was not the issue as I’ve done this several times now and everything was super solid.
I don’t know the history of the console but it was in pretty rough shape. I’m not sure what the likelihood is of the southbridge(?) dying randomly right after RGH’ing it but I’m wondering if these symptoms are familiar to anyone? I’ve had consoles give a 0010 error after cleaning the flux off the board with isopropyl alcohol but they all went away soon after it dried (I also don’t know why this happens sometimes if anyone knows please lmk). Any advice on how to diagnose this or things I should try is appreciated. Thanks.
I took a quick picture of the board in case I am blind there's something obviously wrong with it: https://imgur.com/a/NiVa8WY

Credit to u/SpacePaladin15 for the NOP Universe.
Hey, I hope everyone's doing well!
Today we return to the namesake of this fic, an actual lesson about animals. This one focuses on Koalas! One of Australia's most recognisable critters. I hope you enjoy.
It's hardly worth mentioning, seeing as I'm an infrequent poster at the best of times, but I'll not have another chapter out for a few weeks due to limited free time and devoting most of my writing time to an upcoming ficnapping. Be sure to look out for that!
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Memory transcription subject: Rysel, Venlil Environmental Researcher
Date [Standardised human time]: 8th September 2136
“Koalas!”
Bernard’s energised voice boomed through the air as the classroom's monitor flickered into life, images of this paws lecture topic popping up one after the other until the entire screen was filled with a collage of furry quadrupeds.
Squee! I’ll never get tired of this, it’s all so cool!
As usual the sight of something new stirred immediate discussion, hushed murmurs swelling into vibrant discourse in little more than a heartbeat. Most of the class swiftly huddled together into small herds to bounce ideas around while the rest opted to stick to the solace of their own thoughts as they took in the display.
I’d be quite happy in either situation, though seeing as Sandi had already sunk into deep concentration and Kailo had peeled off to talk with Ennerif and Solenk, it seemed the decision had been made for me on this occasion. Wasting no more time on idle inspection of the people around me, I focused my full attention forward, eager to form first impressions before the lesson began in earnest.
Now then, time to make some educated guesses. What traits does this animal have? I wonder if I’ll get any right this paw?
Professional assumptions went paw-in-paw with the lectures, examining and coming up with hypotheses about the specimens was only natural. Recently however, I’d started to make a little game of it to make things even more interesting than usual. A veritable bonfire of ideas had been set ablaze within me, fueled by my newfound knowledge of Earthen wildlife. Every flash and spark of the flame was a fresh theory I could try to apply to the lectures. It was an invigorating exercise that further stoked my unceasing wonderment.
So far I’d only done this once during the previous class and, to my disappointment, I’d not done too well.
I was right when I guessed that chickens were omnivores, but wrong in my assumption that they could fly. And that red thing on their head, the um… what was it called? The comb! Yes, the comb. I thought that was to attract mates, but it regulates body heat instead. It’s fascinating. Oh! Stars damn it I’m rambling!
I bapped my tail against my leg, the soft thud being just enough to snap me back from my runaway thoughts before I went completely wall-eyed. I was becoming more and more accustomed to getting lost in my own head while remaining conscious of the fact; it was happening so frequently now that it was pretty much impossible not to. Now I was able to pull myself back to the world around me without having to rely on someone else shaking me out of it. Most of the time anyway.
Sandi still keeps an eye on me, and Kailo even decided to help out once without being too snide about it. Anyway where was I? Oh yeah, Koalas.
Glancing at the furred animals, two things immediately stood out. Firstly, their eyes were in a more central position on their face. And second, all the images showed them being on or close to trees. There were other noteworthy observations of course, such as the Koala’s prominent nose and rounded features, but they fell to the wayside as I honed in on these points first.
Hmmm… ok. I already know to discount the idea that they’re predators just from eye position, so let’s get that thought out of here. Maybe omnivorous? Herbivore? Agh no, I can’t just guess that for the sake of guessing, that’s the same problem! Hrm, it’s tough making these assumptions now that everything I thought I knew has been turned on its head.
Nevermind, I’ll focus on the other thing. All the trees make me think they’re arboreal, that seems to be a reasonable assumption. I wonder what else they-
Clearing his throat, Bernard broke my concentration, his call for attention silencing the murmuring conversation and redirecting everyone's focus to the lecturer's podium.
His gaze panned across the room as he waited for everyone to settle, a beaming smile lighting up his face, “As ever I’m delighted to see you all get so into the subject matter from the get go. I’m looking forward to hearing what you were discussing should you wish to share. For now though, how about we get started, hm?”
A chorus of merry bleats rang out from across the audience, ears and tails flicking happily in agreement. Bernard's grin grew in tandem with the class's fervour, clasping his hands together enthusiastically as he launched into the lesson, “Excellent! Then let’s get started.”
The pictures on screen dissolved away until only one remained, enlarging to cover the entire monitor with the fluffy grey face of a Koala peacefully reclining in the crook of a tree.
“Ah, there we are,” Bernard’s baritone timbre drifted through the room as he looked up at the image, his own tone reflecting the relaxed attitude of the animal on screen, “He looks so comfortable doesn’t he? Perfectly at peace with the world, not too surprising considering they sleep almost 20 hours a day. A full paw!”
A wave of beeps and gasps rippled through the herd, punctuated by a single yawn-dressed comment from Rova, “A full paw? Hwuuu… jealous.”
Her drowsy remark elicited several whistling giggles from the herd, Bernard's own jovial chortle joining them as he turned to face her, “Late evening Rova?”
I twisted a little in my seat, panning an eye in Rova’s direction just in time to see her bleary eyes bulge open and her ears shoot up, now intensely aware of the fact she hadn’t been as quiet as she thought she had.
Sitting up abruptly, she hastily tapped down errant tufts of wool that’d flared in surprise as she composed herself, though her nervousness at becoming the centre of the class's attention was still plain for all to hear, “Uh- I um… achem, a little bit yes, um- …sorry. Lokki dragged me out to a movie viewing in the rec centre. It went on pretty late.”
A melodramatic bray from the other side of the room drew everyone's ears away from Rova to the now aghast Lokki, paw splayed across his chest in faux indignation, “Dragged you? Well excuse me for trying to broaden your horizons with human movies. That’ll be the list time I- …Ahaaaa…”
Lokki’s theatrics were cut short by a heavy yawn of his own, a swell of whistling laughter rolling through the herd as vibrant bloom lit up his snout, a sight that elicited a particularly amused bleat from Rova.
Turning away from the duo I looked back at Bernard, pleased to see that he was chuckling along with us. Behaviour like Lokki’s would never have been tolerated in my school and university days but, in stark contrast, Bernard revelled in it, the liveliness of his students fueling his own bombastic style of teaching. It was a pleasant change of pace having a teacher who let us all be ourselves in class; provided we weren’t too disruptive to the lesson plan.
Speaking of which.
His laughter still rumbling through the air, Bernard clapped his hands to pull everyone's focus back to him, “Ok, ok, let’s get back to it then shall we? Rova. Lokki. Hopefully the two of you can stay awake long enough until you can grab yourselves a coffee.”
As the class settled down and the last few giggling beeps petered out, Benard pointed a hand to the screen, “So, the Koala. Let’s start simple shall we? They are herbivorous marsupials native to the eastern and southern coasts of Australia. Easily recognised the world over, they are a well known and beloved symbol of their homeland, along with other animals such as the Kangaroo and the Emu. The former of which you might remember from one of our earlier lectures.”
Indeed I did remember, along with how angry Bernard had gotten after some speh-head had derided the Yotul after he explained how he held specific disdain for such attitudes.
Uuuggghh… I never want to see him angry again. So chilling.
I shook my ears in an effort to dismiss the unpleasant memory, panning my eyes back to the monitor to try and distract myself by inspecting the Koala’s physical appearance once more. Thankfully, by some Star's blessed intervention, Bernard had the exact same idea.
“Koala’s are rather squat in stature, ranging around sixty to eighty-five centimetres in length and weighing little more than fifteen to sixteen kilograms at their full size. As you can see, the fur of this fellow before you is a lovely silvery grey, but their fur can also sport a chocolaty brown hue as well. Arguably the most distinctive part of their appearance is their head, being rather large for their body size and having rounded ears, a large nose, and a pair of small eyes. These are often brown but variations do occur.”
It didn’t slip past my notice that Bernard didn’t bother to point out that the Koala’s eyes were forward facing. I didn’t think he’d simply forgotten, so perhaps he just felt it wasn’t necessary given that he’d already stated it was herbivorous. Either way, no one stuck up a paw or tail to question him.
“Now this will hardly be surprising considering how long they sleep, but Koala’s are largely sedentary and it’s rather easy to see why when you have a look into the contents of their diet.”
With the press of a button the Koala on screen was replaced by images of vibrant green vegetation. Soaring trees and flowering shrubbery weaved together across landscape framed pictures pulled admiring trills from the herd, the diversity of the plant life being shown standing as a reminder that it wasn’t only animal life that flourished on Earth.
After giving everyone the chance to take in the picturesque scenes, Bernard casually hammered that point home, “This is eucalyptus or, more accurately, a choice selection of more than 700 plants belonging to the eucalyptus genus, though the Koala itself favours 30 of them in particular.”
700!? Stars…
Realising that my ears had drooped in my momentary awe, I twisted them back to tune into the lesson, only for them to splay out in shock at the next words to come out of Bernard's mouth.
“The leaves of these plants are the primary food source of the Koala and there are a couple things worth mentioning when talking about these plants. For starters they do not have much nutritional or caloric value, leading to the Koala’s low-energy lifestyle. Additionally, they contain toxic compounds.”
A shiver instantly ran through the herd, ears flicking rapidly in confusion and alarm followed by a few quizzical whispers. It didn’t take long for someone to decide to give a proper voice to the murmuring.
“Excuse me Doctor. Did we hear that right? Their diet is made up of toxic flora?” Vlek’s grumbling incredulity cut through the herd's mutterings with ease. Until Kailo’s recent change of heart, the fifty something rotation old blonde Venlil had been a close second in terms of scepticism. Mercifully his rebuttals had always been relevant questions as opposed to ranting diatribes, so he at least remained on topic if nothing else.
Bernard nodded in confirmation, smiling back at Vlek while absentmindedly twirling the end of his moustache, “You heard me right, they do indeed consume plants that are toxic. Just not to them.”
Any worry or uncertainty still clinging to the herd was swept away by the provision of the glaringly obvious answer, leaving me chuckling inwardly at the oversight.
Ah of course! The plant might be poisonous but they’ll have evolved to deal with that. Stars… I’m so used to expecting the unexpected with Earth that I didn’t even consider the simplest solution.
“I see, thank you Doctor,” Vlek replied, a tinge of interest still audible in his tone, “I assume they’ve developed some adaptation to become immune to the harmful effects?”
The question immediately evoked a smirk from our teacher, but he hurriedly suppressed it while bobbing his head, “They have indeed. There are several factors that aid in their digestion of eucalyptus leaves without succumbing to the plant's baleful properties. The first is a part of the intestinal tract called the cecum. It contains a microbiome that allows the Koala to digest the eucalyptus. Coupled with this is an enzyme in the Koala’s liver that helps them break down the toxins. They are also capable of sniffing out the plants with the least amount of toxins, ensuring that they ingest as little as possible.”
Pausing for a breath Bernard looked back at the screen before turning to face us, another grin curling at the edges of his mouth as he continued with his explanation, “This is mostly for adult Koala’s, because while their young also possess these same adaptations, they don’t just go straight to munching through foliage right after being born. No, they need a little help making that jump and getting a stomach full of all that good gut bacteria. It’s nothing bad, but those of a sensitive stomach may wish to prepare themselves for this next part.”
Bernard’s assurances did little to assuage the concern that his warning had foisted upon us. Having been exposed to so much of the weirdness Earth had to offer everyone always ended up on edge whenever Bernard gave advice like this, even if he did say it in jest.
What strange nonsense thing do Koala pups do then? Judging by the way he’s acting it probably isn’t something as simple as drinking milk from the mother. Hmmm…
“So,” Bernard began, snapping us from our pensive stupor, “Young Koala’s, known as joeys, have a gestation period of thirty-five days on average, which is approximately forty-two paws. Once born they travel from the birth canal to a pouch in their mother so that they can continue to develop and grow. In the pouch the joey finds and latches onto one of two teats and these provide the newborn with a steady stream of nourishing milk. It spends the next six to seven months growing in the pouch, its eyes, ears, and fur all developing as time goes on.”
Okay, interesting. But this is exactly how I thought it’d go. What’s different?
The unexpected normalcy of the Koala’s birth and growth cycle had calmed everyone's nerves, only to be replaced with an air of suspicion as we waited with rapt attention for Bernard to drop the other claw and upend our expectations like he always did.
Not wanting to keep us in further suspense he forged ahead, the tempo of his voice picking up as the smile started to crease his face once more, “Now to make the switch from milk to eucalyptus, the mother also feeds the joey a substance called pap. It comes from the cecum I mentioned earlier, and contains all the gut bacteria required to help the young Koala in making the switch to eucalyptus.”
He stopped and looked around, searching us for a reaction to what I felt was a rather bland statement of fact. What was it he was saying without actually saying? Koala pups drink milk to mature and then include this pap substance so that they can start eating plants. I don’t see what-
The cecum is part of the intestine.
I blinked.
I blinked again, the intrusive interruption scouring my brain clean of any other thought bar the one it’d just implanted itself in the forefront of my mind.
Oh stars. They-
“They eat their own poop!?”
The shocked bleat shattered the peace of the room to reveal that most if not all of us had come to the same tail curling conclusion. As the hall filled with unrestrained vocalisations of disgust, an ‘Ugh’ over here and a ‘Blegh’ over there, Bernard’s own bellowing laughter joined the throng of voices.
“Ha! Everytime! Each and every time. Clearly it doesn’t matter if my students are Human or Venlil. Whenever someone learns about the Koala’s dietary development the reaction is the same!”
Pleased with himself beyond reason, Bernard chuckled away while the rest of us grappled with this ghastly reality. While there were plenty of animals that feasted on things that ranged from simply unappealing all the way to the stomach churningly grotesque, I’d never heard of an animal that actively consumed the excrement of its own species. Benefits aside, the prospect of having to do that to survive to adulthood sent a shiver of revulsion down my spine.
Ewww… Stars, I hope I forget this feeling by 2nd meal. They’re serving sturen and magamroot stew later. I was really looking forward to it.
With the herds mood beginning to temper Bernard tapped the podiums controls, removing the verdant collage of eucalyptus to display several similar yet distinct environments, still chortling merrily to himself in the process, “Ok then, with that little foray into their diet complete, why don’t we look at their habitat in more detail? As you might imagine given their diet and arboreal nature, Koala’s live in forested regions, and can be found in tropical and temperate zones. About a century ago they were classed as a vulnerable species, however efforts were made to turn this around and increase their numbers. Sadly the largest factor in their decline was human activity, as the fertile lands that gave rise to their bountiful forests were coveted farm land for our settlements.”
It was strange to hear Bernard so matter of factly admit to humanity's negative impacts on other species. He’d alluded to such things in the past but always with an air of caution, carefully pawing the line between honestly answering a question while not painting humanity as uncaring and destructive. AKA, the ‘predators’ we’d all initially expected them to be.
Perhaps his comfort in making such admissions was a reflection of the class's comfort with him, for no one so much as batted an ear. Even Kailo, who I would’ve expected to jump at the chance to use this as a prime example of predatory danger, only flicked an ear in stern yet silent concern.
A cough from Bernard drew my attention back, a new picture on screen that showed a forest from a bird's-eye view. Drawn across the image were around a dozen ringed areas, some bordering one another while others overlapped to some degree. It took me a moment, but I soon recognised that what I was looking at was a map, the rings representing what I assumed to be territories. And it didn’t take much effort to guess who each one belonged to.
“From habitats we move onto behaviours, so let’s start with territories. Koala’s are solitary animals. Yes, despite being herbivores. Considering they’re only awake for roughly four hours of the day I can hardly blame them. Lots to do and not a lot of time to do it. Jokes aside, once they mature they are quite independent, carving out a little slice of land for themselves, as displayed in this example, called a Home Range. That is not to say they go it alone and leave everything else behind however. Rather, as shown in the map behind me, they live in their own space while still being part of a larger social group.”
With another press of his pad the picture was updated to show one of two symbols in each segment, along with a key to the side of the map displayed in helpful Venlang. A quick glance told me that the symbols were representing whether the territory belonged to a male or female of the species.
“As you can see there is quite a bit of overlap between different Koala’s territories. It is in these areas that most of the socialising takes place between neighbours. The trees in these locations represent the few areas where intrusion across territories is acceptable for the sake of social interaction. Outside of that the Koala’s stick to their own territories for the most part, with the exceptions of Koala’s who are passing through, attempting to become part of the social group themselves, or dominant males who sometimes go off into another Koala’s range. But how do they know where one range begins and another range ends you might ask? Well, this brings us onto the next part of the lecture. How do Koala’s communicate?”
Wiping away the map from the monitor, Bernard loaded up a video of a Koala sitting in a tree and pressed play. Head held high, the Koala’s body shook as it belted out a reverberating call into the wilderness that could only be described as a garbled combination of a car engine failing to turn over mixed with the hiccups of someone with a particularly sore throat.
That’s how they sound? Oof that must be rough on the lungs.
I clearly wasn’t the only one to share such a thought, because I clocked Sandi tracing a paw along her neck as the noise went on, ears fluttering in discomfort at the noise.
Bernard himself cleared his own throat as the video came to an end, minimising it and replacing it with another image of a tree with a Koala rubbing up against the bark, “I think they’ve got me beat on who’s got the deeper voice!”
His joke garnered several amused beeps, a rare reaction that caused a beaming smile to shine across his face at lighting speed, “Oh you’re too kind. I’ll be here all week. Now where were we? Oh yes! Communication. As you’ve just heard, Koala’s are capable of loud low pitched bellows that can carry over vast distances. These express everything from ‘Hello I’m over here’ to ‘This is my turf, stay away’. Bellowing is more common in the males than the females, opting for shouting matches as opposed to outright fights when it comes to asserting dominance. Other vocal expressions include grunts, wails, and snarls if they’re acting particularly angsty. Mother and joey pairs also communicate through gentle clicking, squeaking, and murmuring sounds. And there’s one more thing worth mentioning. Something they have in common with Humans and Venlil when it comes to emoting.”
Really? They do something we do?
Curious, I pressed myself against the desk, straining as close as I could to once more scrutinise the Koala’s features. Not a lot stood out to me at first, the grey marsupial not sharing many similarities with a Venlil that I could identify.
Ok think. We show emotion with our ears, tails, and our wool on occasion. They don’t have tails so it’s obviously not that. Wool standing on end is more a reaction than a conscious expression. So it must be the ears then.
To my quiet satisfaction, my hunch was soon validated by Bernard, “As well as their vocalisations, Koala’s are very emotive through their facial features. Just like humans, they use their mouths and lips to show how they feel, but these tend more towards the aggressive side of the scale than what you might see on a human. Regarding yourselves however, Koala’s utilise their ears in tandem with their mouth movements when showing strong emotion.”
I was delighted to hear that my assumption was correct, a little happy flick twisting out through my tail and bapping against my chair with a muted thump against the plastic.
Hehe yes! Got one right!
“Now then, we are getting close to lunchtime so I’ll finish this segment off with something I think you’ll find particularly interesting. Diplomacy.”
Perplexed mutterings followed in the wake of the bizarre inclusion to the lecture, my own thoughts being dominated by bewilderment as I tried and failed to make sense of how the two could possibly be related.
Why would Koala’s, or any animal for that matter, be linked to diplomacy? Hmmm...
I could understand dispatching exterminators to deal with a predator issue as a show of goodwill, that at least includes animals, but Humans aren’t like that so I think I can safely scratch that off the list.
Maybe the humans who live in that region benefited from Koala’s in some way. Could they have gotten something from them? But what?
Hopefully not what the pups get from their mothers.
Agh no! Begone awful intrusive thoughts. Blegh! I don’t need that in my head.
As I wrestled with the short-lived revulsion inflicted upon me by my Star's damned subconscious, Bernard placed a new image on screen, one that was decidedly different from all that had preceded it.
On screen were more than a couple dozen pictures of humans. Some were pictured alone while others congregated in large groups while cameras surrounded them from all angles. Across all the images, I noted two common themes. First of all, a solid majority of the humans were wearing formal wear similar to what I’d seen worn by UN representatives on TV. If the gaggle of journalists in the background of the photos didn’t already confirm my suspicions, then it was this similarity which made me conclude they were all people of some importance. Likely politicians judging from context clues.
Secondly, each of the individuals was interacting with a Koala in some form. Some cradled one against their chests while others were feeding it eucalyptus leaves or pellets of some kind. One of the assumed politicians had become an impromptu bed for a snoozing bundle of fur, a gleeful smile spread across their face as they lovingly gazed down at the sleeping Koala in their lap.
As I continued to stare at the assorted photos something clicked into place, a sudden spark flickering into life. A burgeoning light of comprehension that flared and swelled with every wide-eyed breath I took. Some things still escaped me, things I hoped would soon be explained, but in staring at all of the humans happy smiling faces, I was struck with an instant of pure understanding.
If someone, say a Nevok for instance, offered to gift me a creature that was common to them but which might exotic and breathtaking to a Venlil, how could my feelings not be swayed? How could I walk away from that encounter and not have grown closer to them as a result?
“Koala diplomacy,” Bernard waved his hand up at the monitor, a slight reverence in his tone, “My favourite kind of soft power diplomacy. Where political leaders take photo ops with Koala’s and, on occasion, the Australian government loans Koala’s to other nations for a time to bolster positive relations. It certainly helps that Koala’s are a beloved animal worldwide, drawing large crowds and revenue for countries fortunate enough to host the adorable critters.”
The truly alien concept predictably sparked instant discussion in the herd, two polar opposite schools of thought swiftly cementing themselves as the most popular opinions. Simultaneously, I heard one voice trill excitedly while another scoffed at what they clearly saw as a ridiculous and offensive notion.
“Squee! That’d be so cool! I’d love to get the chance to see a Liri from Coila. Remember the Rainbow Boa? Think of that shimmering effect and colour but put it on a bird! Ah! I’ve only heard their song on video. It’d be a treat to hear it in person!”
Ooo! I’ve read about them! I’d love to get up close to one.
“Loaning. As if animals are property to be hoarded and traded? Pugh! Another predatory trait the humans don’t want to acknowledge for what it is.”
Ugh, typical. Jump right to the worst possible option.
However, despite my dismissal of their disparaging fumings, an uncomfortable thought pressed upon my mind. While it was plain to see how much humans cared for the Koala, it didn’t change the fact that humans did keep animals as property just as the scornful herd member had said.
This begged a rather important, disquieting question. Aside from keeping some animals as cattle, a stomach tightening minefield I had no desire to step a claw onto right now, how else did humans keep other creatures. And how did they treat them?
Before I was fully conscious of doing it my paw was in the air, the question primed on my tongue.
Noticing my elevated paw Bernard pointed at me, smiling warmly, “Yes Rysel? What’s on your mind?”
Sorry Bernard. I hope this one’s not too awkward for you to answer.
Flicking my ear in appreciation, and waiting for everyone to settle enough so that I could be heard, I voiced my concerns as neutrally as possible, “Thank you Doctor. I uh, just had a thought. We know that humans keep certain animals for… particular reasons, and we know why. From how you’ve spoken about Koala’s I think it's fair to say that the same cannot be said for them. However, this makes me wonder, what other reasons do humans have for keeping animals and how do you treat them?”
A flash of surprise blinked across Bernard's eyes but vanished so quickly that it felt like I’d imagined it. Had he not expected such a question? Maybe he was just shocked that it’d been me who’d ended up asking it?
Stars, am I so predictable that no one expects me to ask difficult questions?
Unfortunately, a quick glance at my deskmates seemed to prove that to be the case, as both Sandi and Kailo were looking at me with differing degrees of astonishment flapping in their ears.
Well speh.
“A very good point Rysel, certainly one that’s worth raising. Yet another example of you all anticipating what I have to say before I can bring it up myself.” Bernard tapped the podium, switching off the monitor before returning his focus to me, “We won’t be needing that. I’ve nothing prepared that I can show you and we’re heading to lunch in a few minutes anyway. Still, that’s plenty of time to give you a bit of an answer.”
A bit? What does he mean just a bit?
Made even more curious by Bernard's preempted admission that he wasn’t going to fully answer my query, I dialled both my ears on him, fixing him with an inquisitive stare as he started to explain with a tone that was noticeably more nonchalant than any of his previous explanations.
“So, animals in captivity for reasons other than what you already know. Honestly I would love to delve into other reasons regarding why we keep animals. However, I have a lesson plan in the works that I hope to share with you all in the not too distant future. Some of it touches upon this very topic and I’d quite like to bundle it all together. That said, I can tell you how animals in captivity are treated. In short, the answer is very well. There are a mountain of laws both on private and public interests that govern the standards and ethical treatment of animals, and breaches of these laws are quite severe even for relatively minor infractions.”
While I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed by the vague answer to what was really the bulk of my question, I was at least satisfied by Bernard’s assurances that animals in captivity, such as the Koala, were well looked after. Considering the barely subdued grumbling coming from some corners of the audience it was clear that several of the herd didn’t believe Bernard outright, but I trusted him to be honest. Additionally, the mention of an upcoming lecture focused on humans keeping animals caused quite the buzz.
I felt a mix of excitement and trepidation at exploring the topic further. He’d pretty much confirmed we wouldn’t be talking about cattle farms, for which I was relieved, but that still left a huge amount of uncertainty in what was to come.
Humans keeping animals as cattle was a forgone conclusion. As horrifying as that reality was, it was one I could understand from a detached and strictly clinical point of view. Being predators they ate meat and therefore they kept cattle. But the concept of keeping animals for any other reason baffled me.
What could be the purpose? The diplomacy thing makes sense now that I have context, but what other reasons could they have.
The class's discussions were interrupted by the recognisable ring of the break bell, the shift in attention eliciting a change in conversation from confused hypotheses to peppy conversation on how everyone was planning to spend their break and what they had in mind for 2nd meal.
“Well I can see everyone’s excited for lunch, and who am I to disappoint,” chuckling Bernard waved us all up from our seats, pocketing his pad from the podium and heading to open the classroom door for us, “Enjoy your break, get a good rest along with a hearty meal, and I’ll see you all back here at the usual time.”
As everyone else filed out I stayed behind, waving at Sandi and Kailo as they left, and pawing over to Bernard once he and I were the only ones left in the room.
Ears folded down and with an apologetic tinge in my voice I greeted him as I sidled up to him, “Hey Bernard, I uh… sorry if that last question was unexpected.”
Chortling in reply, Bernard waved a hand through the air in a sign I’d come to understand meant ‘not a problem’.
“No need to apologise Rysel. It was a good question and most certainly not a problem.”
Heh, called it.
I sighed, allowing tension I didn’t realise I’d been holding to relax itself from my shoulders, “Phew, that’s a relief. I’m glad. I’m curious to hear what this new lesson is you’ve got in store for us by the way.”
Bernard wagged a finger at me, throwing up his eyebrows in mock amazement, “Oh are you now? Well I’m afraid you’ll have to remain curious for the time being. It’s going to be quite the surprise if all goes to plan. But…”
He trailed off, glancing at me before looking to the door like he was making sure no one else was around.
Wait, is he going to tell me? Oh please yes let me know now!
Stopping myself from jumping on the spot in excited anticipation, and trying my damndest to stop my tail from wagging in equal measure, I stared up at Bernard as he stewed in his thoughts before turning back to face me.
“I can’t tell you the specifics, but I’m working with Alejandro and Tolim to get something together. A trip that’s not a trip as it were. And when it happens, I’m going to need a few of the more accepting members of the class to lend me a hand. I’m hoping you and a couple others will be able to help with that?”
A trip that’s not a trip? What does that mean? Agh who cares about that right now! Bernard’s relying on me to help out!
Still trying not to keep myself from bouncing around with pup like glee I swished my tail and nodded my head in joint agreement, happy to help with whatever Bernard had in store for us, “Of course! Anything you need I’ll be there to lend a paw. You can count on me!”
A broad warm smile lit up Bernard's face, a hand patting me on the shoulder in appreciation, “Thank you Rysel. I knew I could rely on you but it still warms my heart to hear it. And, as thanks for this and for the many times you’ve shown your support, the surprise includes a little something special I think you’d appreciate the most.”
If my earlier enthusiasm had been at a nine, then the implication of a supposed gift sent it rocketing all the way to a hundred in a heartbeat.
“Wait… WHAT!? What do you mean? What are you doing?”
As impossible as it seemed, Bernard's grin grew even wider as I almost lost myself in wool shaking exhilaration, “Call it my own form of Koala diplomacy. But I’m afraid that’s all I can say for now. Wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise even for you!”
“Oh you ass!” Whistling jovially I bapped my tail against Bernard’s leg in fake indignation, evoking a barking bellowing laugh from the man himself.
Still laughing, the two of us departed the class and made for the canteen, my rumbling stomach leading me on while my mind spun with fantastical thoughts as to what Bernard had prepared for us.
And what specifically he had in store for me.