Bulge stories

We have a 9 year old 60lb German shorthair pointelab mix who I think is between grade (or stage?) 2-3. We just put him on strict crate rest yesterday but I think he’s been struggling for longer than we realized, which makes me feel awful. He hasn’t didn’t drink anything yesterday and nothing today so far and will only eat the sausage we hide his meds in, and chicken. We have had a family vacation planned for a long time next week and I’m worried about him declining more while we are gone. My sister, who absolutely loves dogs and especially our dog is going to take care of him while we’re gone but won’t be able to be with him the whole time.
The whole story, for anyone who is interested/has had a similar experience and can offer advice- A few months ago we noticed our dog would yelp when lifting his head sometimes. But then he would act totally normal for a while. Then sometimes he began avoiding lifting his head, but then would seem normal. We also started noticing a tiny limp/one paw sounded heavier when walking, but overall seemed normal sometimes. We finally made an appt with or vet but had to wait 3 weeks for the appt. Then a few days before his appt we think he hurt himself badly getting out from under our bed (his absolute favorite place), to go bark at the door (our room is on the second floor too). He seemed in pain and was shaking and whining at me and I told my husband I think we need to take him to an urgent care vet. The vet tested his feet/leg reflexes and I think one paw was very slow to fixing itself but the others seemed ok. We got him on a muscle relaxer, carprofen, and gabapentin, and immediately barricaded our bed so he couldn’t go under it. The meds seemed to help him a lot. But then we noticed he was getting more wobbly so we still took him to his vet appt. The vet tested his reflexes again and it seemed like left front and back leg were struggling and he said he probably has a bulging disc in his neck and to keep doing the carprofen and gabapentin and have him rest. Fast forward to yesterday and we made an urgent care appt with our vet because he seemed to be getting even worse (falling over while going pee and poop). Now it’s effecting all of his legs with his rear right one being the most responsive. He didn’t even fix any of the other ones himself 😢. We did the first session of laser therapy yesterday and started the strict cage rest. I really wish the first vet, or even our normal vet last week would have specified strict cage rest. I think the vet visit yesterday aggravated things more because now he both doesn’t want to/is having an even harder time standing up and coming out of the crate. I bought a full body harness to help take him outside for potty, and I’m hoping it helps but also worried it will be hard for my sister to get him to come out of the crate and even get it on. I’m getting very overwhelmed and stressed and anxious and can’t stop googling and researching and thinking about anything else. We also have 4 kids (who looove him), one of which has severe non speaking autism. Life pretty much always feels stressful, which feels somewhat normal to us, but I think the upcoming trip is adding pressure and stress to the whole situation. How can I help him drink? I’ve tried putting the bowl in his crate, holding it in front of him and my husband even tried using a syringe to give him water last night which our doggo did NOT like. He can still stand and walk and pee and poop on his own, other than needing support to stay in position.

Previous Part
My eyes darted around the room, still shocked from the brutality I just witnessed from Shaoni. Katrina had strutted out of view and when my eyes turned to where Brooke’s crumpled form should’ve been he was gone to. At some point both Robert and John had run off towards the growing sounds of gunfire. Shaoni and I still stood in the coliseum, shaken to our cores but both for very different reasons.
*CLANG*
The sudden noise startled me, the sound of metal on metal. The sound came again, this time I heard it clearly and turned around to face the noise only to be met by a few familiar faces.
“Don’t mean to bother you but their shootin up the place, could ya let us the hell in!”
Rocco shouted as he beat Brookes stolen lighter against the metals bars that closed off the back entrance to the coliseum. Bianca gave me a sheepish wave as I looked over their faces again. Frank, Stein, and Tuck were with her. They must have come through the same way Bianca and I had a few days before.
“NOW!”
Rocco shouted in irritation as my brain finally kicked into gear and I ran over to let them through the barred metal gate.
“What’s going on up there?”
I wondered out loud, concerned by how shell shocked they all looked.
“I’d guess something involving the government, with equipment like that I doubt it would be anyone else. Just as we got to the hole Bianca mentioned several men in black tactical gear came out of the forest at our sides. When we didn’t clear out like they demanded they started firing so we dove in.”
Stein explained.
“I take it that’s Shaoni?”
He added, pointing towards where she lay, hunched over and taking shaky breaths on the ground.
“Is she alright?”
Bianca chimed in, craning her neck to get a better view of her past everyone else.
“The hell should we care!? Isn’t it her fault we’re doin’ any of this in the first place?”
Rocco grumbled up at us as he laid back on the ground. Glad to see he wasn’t taking things to seriously. Tuck just stared at Shaoni with this intense anger in his eyes, he didn’t say a word.
I know I shouldn’t care what happened to her at this point but a part of me just couldn’t leave Shaoni like this. Sure, she probably didn’t deserve the sympathy but I couldn’t help feeling a little bad for her now that the anger had passed. When I made my way over to her I got the sense I was seeing the real Shaoni for once. I was seeing someone who witnessed her people rise and fall, saw the country we live in change and grow as it became what we know today. Someone who’d lived countless lifetimes as a piece that just didn’t quite fit the puzzle anymore. I thought about everything Bianca had learned about Shaoni, how she was given her powers, no, her burden in the first place. Suddenly I had a pretty good idea of what exactly she brought everyone here for.
“Shaoni?... Are you… uh, you ok?”
I said like I was trying to comfort a dying animal. The closer I got the more I could hear, she was crying. It was that held back sort of crying right before the dam breaks into full on sobs. She was cracking but still trying to put on a tough face, still trying to be every bit as imposing as she had been the first night I saw her. But she wasn’t, now she just looked pitiful.
“You… you’re right you know Keith. I’m not Justice anymore… I…I don’t think I have been for a very long time.”
She choked out through tears that flowed freely down her face as she rose to her feet.
“I don’t know why I brought you here… I was just so desperate to…”
She trailed off but that was alright, I already knew what she was going to say.
“To escape? Pass on your burden? This whole thing was to chose someone to pass the Thunderbird spirit onto wasn’t it?”
I asked, sure that I was right.
“Yes, this is what I wanted from the start, to give my burden to one of you. At first I wanted the trials to help me make my decision but by the time all of you arrived I just wanted a way out. I wanted to finally live a real life. I’ve lived too long… I just want to live simply before the end that should’ve come so long ago.”
Shaoni cried, more controlled now as she finally started to get a hold of herself.
“So what? You’d just give it to someone else! What about what that would do to them?”
“I just wanted out Keith! I know it was selfish, I don’t care! I just want the nightmare to be over!”
Shaoni screamed out at me. She was hysterical enough that I saw Stein’s hand shoot towards his belt. I’m sure he had that gun I saw yesterday waiting there so I held out my hand to signal him to wait.
“We did good once, in the beginning. But that changed, the wars the injustice I just couldn’t stand by and let that happen so I fought back. I spread the idea that fighting to the death was better than compromising for peace, compromising to save lives. That’s when we… I went wrong. I lead them astray! I was responsible for their deaths! Every! Single! One! I was bitter and resentful for years and I took it out on anyone I thought was guilty. I’ve lived with that for centuries! Do you think I don’t know I’ve become a monster Keith?!”
Shaoni finished with a look of profound shame on her face.
I never thought I’d see the day when I actually felt bad for Shaoni. Not some spur of the moment there’s a full on shootout going on above us and I probably shouldn’t let her die, feeling bad. No, I genuinely felt sorry for her after hearing her talk about the past with total honesty for once.
“You could come with us.”
I offered, looking back to everyone who’d gathered around her at that point. The looks on their faces all told me they weren’t fans of that Idea but only Tuck protested.
“I won’t help her crawl outta the bed she made! Keith, do you honestly think she doesn’t deserve everything thats comin’ to her?!”
“No, but I think she’s suffered enough. Besides, I really don’t want to leave someone down here to die knowing I could’ve done something about it.”
“You know what, fine! You care to much about this Keith, she deserves it! But if you want to take her with us don’t be surprised when she goes on and stabs ya in the back! Now come on, we should get moving.”
Tuck finished, throwing his hands up in the air in an act of frustrated surrender.
“So you realize we’ve got to go out there right? We’re not climbing back out the way we came in so heading out the main entrance is our only option at this point.”
Frank said bluntly as we watched Rocco scurry out of the hole they had dropped in from. We’d all collectively decided we were better off sending Rocco back home. Frank was right though, and even though the sounds of gunfire had started to sound a little farther away I still wasn’t a fan of getting anywhere closer to them.
“I might be able to help with that.”
Shaoni replied, getting to her feet with an air of determination.
“Stay behind me and move when I tell you to.”
We all fell into line behind Shaoni without another word. I guess all of us realized the the sobbing mess we’d seen before also just so happened to be the same Thunderbird that reduced most of Imalone to ashes. So despite how we felt about letting her lead us around it was probably our best chance at the moment.
I was a little surprised that none of… whatever was happening out there hadn’t spilled into the mine and made its way to us. We found out why just as soon as the single file line behind Shaoni made it out of the mine. The camp was devastated, what wasn’t on fire or covered in bullet holes was smashed or ripped to pieces. The ground was littered in bodies and shell casings. A few hundred feet in front of us a small group of Shaoni’s followers where taking shots at the men in black tactical gear Stein had mentioned. There was maybe ten of them but it looked like those ten had slaughtered nearly all of the followers that had made up this camp.
I threw up on the spot, I was so shocked by the scene in front of me I didn’t even manage to bend over, it just kinda waterfalled out of my mouth. I heard Bianca groan in disgust from behind me. I didn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t reacting the same way I was. As I came back to my senses after a minute or so I took off my now vomit covered jacket and felt the cool air through my shirt. Shaoni had instructed us to move and I must’ve moved on my own. All of us were gathered behind a small rocky outcrop near the entrance to the mine.
“You doing alright?”
Bianca asked quietly from behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. I turned to look at her and noticed the jewel encrusted dagger from before was clutched in her hand, twinkling with reflections from her now glowing blue eyes.
I could barely hear Bianca over the sounds of gunfire. Which almost certainly meant the last of the survivors were being wiped out. I couldn’t watch anymore death today so I just ducked lower behind our cover.
“You hear me Keith? Are you ok?”
Bianca persisted with a little more concern in her voice. I was still trying to pretend I hadn’t just seen dozens of dead bodies but I couldn’t really ignore her forever.
“No not…not really.”
I said, my voice coming out silent as a church mouse.
“Was it the-”
I cut her off
“I’ve never seen a dead body before, I mean I have but not like… not like that. The one guy his jaw was just…. Just gone. How do you guys do it? How do you just look at that and not react?”
Bianca sighed and looked me in the eyes. There was a kind of recognition in them, like she was seeing a little bit of herself in my situation.
“We’ve all seen a lot of horrible stuff in our lives, we’re used to it. Still it doesn’t make it feel normal to see… this. Do you think you can hold it together a bit longer or do you want me to…”
Bianca trailed off but it was obvious to me what she meant. Bianca was offering to soothe that terrified part of me with her powers again.
“Thanks but no, I’ll be alright I’ll probably be seeing this in my dreams for weeks though.”
I answered, trying to make a stupid joke to lighten the mood. Bianca cracked a hint of a smile and that was enough for me.
While we’d been talking everyone had failed to notice Shaoni was gone. She had stood up and was walking straight towards where those men in black gear where picking through what was left of her followers. She was glowing though, every single tattoo glowed with an intense white light and then in a flash she was gone, and the Thunderbird was in her place. Frank and Stein stared in awe of the huge beast in front of them. The Thunderbird looked exactly as I remembered. The blue feathers and steel gray beak reflecting in the light from its crackling white eyes.
“That’s it, That’s the god damn bird!”
Tuck yelled like we couldn’t see what was right in front of us. I think he was just surprised to see the Thunderbird again. Even after years of swearing to get back at “the bird” for the friends he lost I don’t think he ever thought he’d come face to face with it again. Seeing it must be bringing up more than a few memories he’d rather forget.
“Don’t do anything you’ll regret! She’s been helping us Tuck, at least put your differences aside until we’ve gotten all this figured out.”
Stein yelled over an ear splitting screech from the massive bird as Tuck began to tense up. Every muscle in his body looked like it was about to pop, they were bulging to an inhuman degree. With a long exhale he loosened up and the swelling went down.
“Damn it… fine! But only till we got things settled here, after that I need to have a “conversation” with that… thing!”
Tuck shouted in begrudging agreement.
The men in front of us all turned toward Shaoni, her new form towering over them. Then I heard a familiar voice shout out,
“You wanted it gone, You’re looking at it! What’re you all waiting for!”
A commanding voice rang out from one of the people in front of us. I didn’t take long to spot the platinum blonde hair poking out from under the armored black helmet the woman wore, not just any woman, Katrina. I didn’t have much time to let that sink in before Katrina made a fist, stuck two fingers up in the air and shook them forward at us. After that, all hell broke loose.
The men behind Katrina rushed forward, guns drawn. Stein drew his own pistol and cocked it, taking aim at the approaching men. Tuck tensed up again and this time he didn’t hold himself back. Bones cracked and skin shifted to accommodate the inhuman muscles he now possessed. Hair sprang up all over his body and under it his face became more angular, his nose almost snout-like. Tuck looked something like a werewolf but definitely not the wolf man I expected. He looked more like an extremely hairy, unnaturally muscular feral person than any wolf man. Frank, Bianca, and I all hunkered down behind the outcrop, waiting for the worst to happen. Shaoni took to the sky with a flap of her massive wings as the gunfire started.
Nothing ever really prepares you for how loud a gunshot actually is, especially a whole bunch of them from fully automatic weapons. There’s nothing quite like being shot at either, at some point you just have to accept the fact that at any moment one of those things flying around you is going to hit you and just get ready for it. That doesn’t actually do anything to calm you down though, at least it didn’t for me. I was huddled behind that little outcropping like a puppy hiding from fireworks on the fourth of July. Wind gusted all around us as Shaoni flapped her wings furiously. The wind coming from her winds was so intense it blew the bullets being fired at her off course. Lead rained all around us as I listened to the cracks of even more bullets being fired. I heard growling as something roughly Tuck sized tore forwards toward the gunfire.
The sky was turning an enraged black and rain had already started to fall in sheets. Lightning struck the ground every so often as well, to close and regular to be natural. I peaked up over the outcrop at one point. I was just in time to see one of the men get struck by a bolt of lightning and tense up as he fell to the ground. As the men kept firing at Shaoni some of their shots started to hit home. The bullets that didn’t get turned away with the wind glanced off her massive form. Whatever those feathers were made off seemed to stop most of the bullets dead in their tracks but it was becoming obvious Shaoni couldn’t keep this up. From our position behind the outcrop Bianca and I both felt the beats of her wings and the gusts of wind that came with it coming slower and slower. We shared a glance for just a second, from the look in Bianca’s eyes, I felt certain we were doomed. More and more of the bullets seemed to be hitting Shaoni and her movements became slower still until eventually it happened.
With a shrill cry she fell from the sky, her blue features stained red in places. Shaoni hit the ground with an earthshaking crash and lay still. Katrina screamed something I couldn’t hear in the violent storm that still raged all around us. When I inched my way up to take a look I saw Katrina and her men charging toward Shaoni guns drawn. Behind them I caught sight of Tuck’s muscular figure getting back up from the ground. I hadn’t been keeping an eye on him before but it looked like he’d seen better days. He hesitated a bit before me moved, looking back to the outcrop where we were and over towards where Shaoni lay. He looked once, twice, then shook his head, mind apparently made up and ran at the men on all fours.
They didn’t hear him coming from behind over the storm and as they raised there weapons Tuck pounced. With one swipe of his humongous hand he sent one of the men flying off towards the forest. Even Katrina was surprised by Tuck’s sudden attack. The time provided by everyone taking a moment to decided who to point their gun at gave Shaoni just enough time to act. She shot one wing out, glancing off everyone near her and knocking them to the ground. One of them men’s helmets flew off with the hit and Stein quickly lined up a shot and fired, hitting the man in the top of the head. The look in his eyes was devoid of any emotion as he ducked back down behind the outcrop. I got the sense this wasn’t the first time Stein had killed, not surprising considering his time in Germany. Still, there was something unsettling about that look in the old scientists eyes.
As Katrina and her men got their bearings again and started firing at Tuck bullets plinked off the outcrop. Apparently they hadn’t forgotten we were there. I stole a quick glance over to where Shaoni had fallen but the Thunderbird was gone revealing a hole in the ground created from the impact of her fall.
“TUCK!”
I screamed out to get his attention for a moment. Tuck’s head swirled towards me just long enough for him to see my outstretched hand pointing to the hole in the ground. I grabbed Bianca’s hand and pulled her to her feet, making a mad dash to the hole. Frank and Stein saw what we were doing and followed after us. Stein fired wild shots off towards Katrina and her men while Tuck kept harassing them.
By some miracle Tuck was still going even as I saw bullets tear into him, he was an animal. He tossed the men around like rag dolls and at one point I turned to see him bring his now claw-like fingernails arching upwards. The head of the man he’d hit was bent back at a sickening angle, he was dead there was no question but Tuck didn’t even stop to spare a thought for the man. Seeing one of their comrades killed in front of them seemed to get the attention of the entire group of them. I hated to admit it but it was exactly the distraction we needed.
As we ran past the chaos of the fight I heard a mix of screams of agony and determination. At one point one of the men’s broken bodies flew over the four of us and hit the ground with a wet crunch that sent a shiver down my spine. We just kept running though, everyone following behind me because I looked like I had a plan. To be fair I did, it was just a bad plan, more of a feeling honestly. I thought if we could get into that hole Shaoni made we might find a way out, a real long shot but it was the best I could do right now.
By the time we reached the hole and I jumped in Tuck had thrown just about every one of Katrina’s men all over the little clearing we were in. Some where very clearly dead but some where rolling around and groaning. Katrina was still standing though, just before I fell deep enough into the hole I got a quick glance at her as she took aim at Tuck who seemed to finally be feeling all the punishment he’d been taking.
I didn’t even have time to scream a warning before my feet hit the hard rock below me and everyone else fell in on top of me.
“Sorry… sorry”
Bianca squeaked out as she pulled herself out of the pile of bodies we’d become. Frank, Stein, and Bianca seemed alright but my ankle was definitely sprained, badly.
“Can you walk on that?”
Bianca asked, examining my ankle in the strange blue light that emanated from further down the chamber we’d fallen into.
“Maybe? Here can I just lean on you?…. yeah, yeah that’ll work.”
I told her, using her to pull myself to my feet and leaning on her for support.
“What are we looking for Keith?”
Frank wondered out loud, a little fear creeping in to his voice as he looked around the chamber.
“I’m not actually sure, I was hoping we’d find Shaoni down here, maybe a tunnel out.”
I grunted out honestly, still reeling form the pain shooting up from my ankle.
“Wait where’s Tuck?”
“If he didn’t make it down we have to assume the worst. We can’t afford to wait now.”
Stein answered, quickly and professionally like someones life wasn’t at stake.
“He never had to come out here for me! We can at least wait for him, give him a chance-”
Stein cut me off
“None of us had to come here for you! We knew the risks so did Tuck. If we wait here now his sacrifice means nothing!”
Stein yelled at me. He was right, none of them needed to be out here but I still didn’t like leaving someone behind. As Frank and stein trudged forward Bianca and I hesitated a bit.
“I don’t want to leave him either but Stein’s right. Just lean on me and lets keep moving, we can come back later and look for his…”
Bianca trailed off before she could say body but I got the message, and if Bianca was moving forward I really didn’t have much of a choice.
We didn’t have to go far to find Shaoni, her usual deerskin clothing was ripped and stained with blood in places. All in all she didn’t look as bad as I thought she would. The light we saw at the entrance was coming from her tattoos as every one glowed brightly with blue light. The same light glowed faintly from four Thunderbird totems placed in the corners of the huge room.
“Welcome to my nest.”
Shaoni said with a dry chuckle, extending her arms out to her sides before immediately clasping them back over a wound in her side.
“Shaoni, are you… are you going to be alright.”
I asked, but before I could get any sort of answer I was interrupted by snarky laughter and a cocking gun.
“Well thanks for leading me right to where I wanted to be Keith.”
Katrina remarked as she walked into the room.
Bianca’s eyes glowed that all to familiar blue but Katrina was a step ahead of her.
“Yeah I wouldn’t try that if I were you. Sure you could force me to walk right out of here but it’s going to take a second to break me, longer than it would take me to pull this trigger.”
Katrina responded with a sneer, turning the gun on Bianca. Bianca jumped back like a scared cat. Ducking under my arm and putting all my weight back on my sprained ankle.
“Wait Don’t!… Argh!”
I cried out at her just before I fell to the ground.
“Ok, ok just… don’t.”
Bianca conceded, putting her hands up and backing away as the blue glow faded from her eyes. When he saw what Katrina was doing Frank wrestled Stein’s gun out of his hands and pointed it straight at Katrina, finger trembling on the trigger.
“Don’t you dare hurt her!”
Frank shouted, face turning red with fury.
“Well thats cute…”
And with an earsplitting bang Katrina turned and shot Frank in the leg. He fell to his knees, dropping the gun he’d been holding as Stein scrambled to hold him up.
“Don’t get in my way, don’t threaten me, and I won’t have to hurt anyone. Now Shaoni, where were we?”
Katrina cooed with murder in her voice as she took a step forward. I tried to pull myself up to my feet, only succeeding in making a pitiful cry as I fell back down again. Bianca flinched towards me but backed up fast when Katrina’s gaze shot her way.
“Keith, you’re still alive? I don’t know how you keep getting mixed into things but you’ve gotta learn when to just give up. I was supposed to kill all of you down there after the third trial. I gave you an out and you just stuck around. Tell you what though, you can still walk away cause I feel bad you got dragged into this in the first place. I have no idea what she was thinking, roping you into this with no idea about the supernatural at all.”
Katrina addressed me, pointing over at Shaoni after helping me to my feet. It hurt to stand but I was getting used to the pain.
“Above everything else I was supposed to kill the Thunderbird and thats what I’m going to do, after that you all can walk out of here.”
Katrina took slow steps toward Shaoni who simply glared at her. She didn’t try to run though, something told me she was ready, no matter how the next few minutes played out. But I had one more trick up my sleeve as I limped over, putting myself in between Shaoni and Katrina.
“She just wants out of all this Katrina! You have to know about where she came from, everything she’s been through!”
I yelled through gritted teeth, biting back the white hot pain shooting up from my ankle.
“I know enough It’s sad sure, but everyone’s got a sad story these days. She’s been flying around taking out whole towns to use as havens for people who want to follow this ass backwards sense of justice she’s got. I don’t want to become that person who’s hunting down supernaturals like her no questions asked just because I was ordered to. But in this case she’s responsible for hundreds of deaths. The “accidents” that happen in those towns are all her fault, and not all of them are as nice as Eagles Peak. The kind of people a town outside of any real form of government or law attracts aren’t the people you want to be neighbors with. She’s got to die Keith, so do you if your going to try and stop me.”
Katrina explained as she stalked closer to me. I really didn’t want to do what I knew I had to do next but I couldn’t watch anyone else die today.
“Alright, I guess there’s no other way then, Shaoni I’ll take on your burden.”
The whole room exploded into a chorus of “what” in varying degrees of shock but my mind was made up. I turned to Shaoni as she asked,
“Are you sure Keith?”
“Yes.”
Before anyone could recover from the shock of what I was about to do she reached out and grabbed my hands. I took hold of her’s and she said something in a language I couldn’t hope to understand as my vision went white.
When I could see again I was… somewhere else. Lightning flashed intermittently overhead and a grassy field extended out forever around me. In front of me stood a misty grey form of a bird it was huge, easily twice the size of the form I’d seen Shaoni take. Through its shifting misty form I could see Shaoni. The bird seemed to be talking to her but I couldn’t make anything out, I could only guess it was a Thunderbird spirit. It seemed to nod to Shaoni before it turned to me and stared me dead in the eyes. Its beak didn’t move, actually no part of it moved but I still heard its voice in my head as its eyes continued to boar into me.
“My chosen, Justice, claims she has lost her way, is this true?”
I couldn’t begin to describe how this voice sounded, powerful is the only word that came to mind. I didn’t feel like I was in any danger though, in fact I felt calmer than I ever had.
“She has.”
I got the sense that quick simple answers were probably best here.
“Justice spoke very highly of you. You offered to succeed her if she is to be believed.”
“I did, but how exactly do we-”
But I was cut off with a bow from the spirit who evaporated all around me. My vision blurred and everything went white again as I collapsed into the soft grass.
I came to on the floor next to Shaoni, it couldn’t have been that much later because neither of us had any new bullet holes in us.
“What did you just do?”
Katrina asked standing above me and looking absolutely stupefied.
“The Thunderbird is dead.”
Was my simple, potentially completely bullshit answer. Katrina looked from me to Shaoni and back again, eyes growing wide as the realization dawned on her.
“You know what? That works for me, just don’t cause us any trouble and we can just forget this whole thing ever happened. Oh, I like the new eyes by the way.”
With that Katrina walked off and climbed a rope ladder she had attached to the ground outside the hole we fell through.
Everything else that happened was a blur, we went back out and found pretty much all of Katrina’s men dead. Tuck was shot several times and barley breathing when Shaoni of all people found him. She called us over and Stein assured us he’d be alright if we got him back to the lab soon. We carried Tuck’s hairy form over to one of the SUV’s and raced back into town. On the way we drove past Katrina who’d also taken one of the SUV’s and was heading out of town. Bianca made a comment at some point that I looked different. When we got back to the house I looked in a mirror and saw my eyes where the same shade of grey Shaoni’s had been.
Speaking of Shaoni we took her with us, she followed us over to the car after she found Tuck. She looked a bit like a lost puppy at that point if I’m honest. I guess finally being able to live your life free of some strange sense of duty after hundreds of years will do that to you. Shaoni hasn’t actually said much since we settled back in at Bianca’s house. She eats and goes through the motions of normal life, she’ll even shoot you a warm smile if she catches you staring at her. I’m still not used to seeing her with green eyes though. I think she just feels lost but I’m ready to help show her the ins and outs of normal-ish life when she’s ready to ask for help.
Frank and Stein went back to doing their normal experimenting pretty fast. The whole thing past them by like a particularly eventful weekend. Even Frank’s bullet wound was quickly forgotten about. Pretty much as soon as he treated it it was like it never even happened to him. Tuck got back on his feet with a lot of help from Frank and Stein. He walks with a permanent limp now but other than that he’s fine. Richelle just about had a conniption when we told her what happened and she hasn’t left Tuck’s side since. She seemed surprised when we described his transformation and we came to find out he never told her about his, “Condition”. That may be why they’ve been so inseparable lately, she just wants to help him however she can and he sure isn’t complaining about that.
Tuck and Shaoni have been getting along as well. I never thought I’d see the day those two sat down and just talked but after a tense first few weeks they came to an understanding. They aren’t old friends now by any means but I’ve walked in on them both talking about their pasts. Maybe sharing stories helps them deal with living such long lives.
As for me and Bianca we started dating and thats been… well that’s been just great. I think its good for both of us cause after everything that happened at the old mine I was just a bundle of nerves. Having someone like her to talk to, someone who gets it, who’s seen so much worse helps put things in perspective. She finally has someone to really talk to in town too. Theres not a whole lot of trouble for us to get up to but we’ve started making a habit of pouring over Frank and Stein’s notes on the supernatural. Not the most riveting idea for a night in but I like learning more about whats really out there.
I still don’t feel any different after taking on Shaoni’s “burden”. Maybe that sense of duty she felt really was just all in her head, a promise to her people that she never let go. Honestly I haven’t tried to use whatever powers might come with my own condition. I just don’t feel like I need to. Like I told Katrina, the Thunderbird is dead. I’m sure not going to be the next Shaoni or anything like that but maybe It’ll help us find Brooke.
Thats the one thing that keeps Bianca and I up at night, we never found Brooke’s body. The two of us went up to the old mine a week or so after everything happened to look around for any sign of him but we didn’t find a trace. In fact the whole thing was cleaned up and the entrance to the mine was collapsed. I’m willing to bet whoever Katrina works for came back to try and wipe away any traces they may have left here. Maybe they found Brooke out there and dealt with him themselves, maybe he’s still out there somewhere. But for now everything’s been pretty calm, even normal around here.
Rocco is still a menace, Tuck still leaves the Eagle’s Roost door unlocked at all hours of the day, and theres still next to no people living here. Without Shaoni and her trials looming over me life is actually pretty good here. So that’s my story, how a storm and a huge bird dragged me halfway across the country and I started dating a succubus…right after I became the Thunderbird. It still seems crazy when I say it like that. Maybe I’ll dig up something on Brooke but for now I think I’ve finally found my new normal out here in the curiously named town with no Eagles and no Peaks.

Previous
So, if you’re just joining us, I work at a haunted zoo now. Since I’ve gotten some rest, it feels like I’ve got my head on straight, at least, so I’d like to continue where I left off.
I sat on the floor in the office after meeting the ghost until I’d settled my rattled mind (and realized I’d forgotten to ask her name, how rude is that?). I took a deep breath and got up off the floor. Walking over and falling into the rolling chair in front of the large screen of camera views, when I brought up the camera that covered the area in which I’d spotted her, she was still there, and it seemed she hadn’t moved an inch.
Sitting there, at a loss, I continued to watch her. The ghost hung around for another five minutes or so, appearing to look at a few things off-screen, though I’m not sure what. Then she walked off into the forest and left the view of the cameras. I wasn’t sure if she vanished into the ether or if she’d gone looking into the trees to look for something.
But that wasn’t the end of the job interview, so let me jump back there. It continued into what kind of animals the zoo had, with Andrew asking me how much experience I had with dangerous animals.
I took a moment to consider the question. “So, ah…I’ve been going hunting and fishing with a neighbor since I was sixteen,” I told him. “We always have to keep an eye out for gators, bears, and hogs. Then there’s snakes, of course…snapping turtles… Since I’ve lived here my whole life and been aiming for a job with wildlife for a long time, I know a lot about the animals in Arkansas in general. But good advice for all of the above is avoid them, so I’ve had encounters, but I don’t know if you’d say I have experience with them.”
“That’s fine,” Andrew said, nodding. “That’s an answer I’m satisfied with. Now, the ghost was the appetizer, Ripley; here’s the main course. To start with, the pay isn’t twenty-five an hour. It’s fifty.”
Staring in shock for a moment, I asked, “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. But that’d be weird to post online considering what applicants think we need, so I halved it.”
“That’s… Okay, why?”
“The animals are already here. You just can’t see them.”
I stared at him for a long moment, some disbelief worming its way into my expression, before saying, “Sorry, what?”
“There’s a chance you’d naturally never see them, or at least some of them,” he continued casually. “It depends on both your genetics and how long you stay on the job. I can naturally see six of them, but that’s it. Suzanne can see all of them, and more. Some are what people would label demons or ghosts. Or magic. Mostly you’d call them cryptids. The ghost was just a warm-up; I mentioned her first because it never takes more than a week to see her if you work the night shift. If you manage to handle her okay, soon you’ll be able to see the animals too. The more time you spend on the grounds, for weird reasons,” he said, wiggling his fingers in the direction of the back door, “the more you’ll be able to see.”
“So, this…this is a zoo for cryptids,” I echoed slowly. He nodded once, waiting to find out what kind of reaction I would have. I gestured vaguely around the room. “If this is a hidden camera show, will you cut me a check for showing up and participating?”
Andrew coughed out a chuckle and shook his head. “No joke. There are a ton of stories out there that have been written to death, pulverized until they’re not the Grimm stories of old and instead they’re Disney films. A lot of those stories come from what some humans have seen. There are dozens of other worlds pressed up against ours, and occasionally things come through by accident. If they’re smart, they’ll lay low and then make their way back when they can. If not, they become local folklore until someone helps them back. I’m just from London, but Suzanne is from somewhere else. She hires people like us for this zoo. Humans.”
Sighing, I shook my head. “That makes no sense. Why would she hire a muggle for a magic zoo?”
Andrew burst out laughing at that, and then waited to gather himself before he continued. “Fair point, but this is less about magic and more about animals, and you’re missing some information that will explain it. First of all, if I misjudge an employee, and they think they can make bank by outing the endangered and valuable animals we have, it’s easy to relocate the zoo.”
“Because magic?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he replied, ignoring the thread of skepticism in my tone. “That means it isn’t the end of the world if that happened, though it is a pain in the arse. But second…let me ask you a question. Speaking of reality shows, say the Discovery Channel put out a call to replace Steve Irwin when he passed. Imagine they had a line out the door,” he said with a gesture, “of people who thought they had the skill and natural talent to replace him, to take on everything he’d been doing his whole life. How many do you reckon would lose an arm, a leg, or their life, by the end of the day?”
My lips parted in surprise and I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re saying people from…wherever…they’re just as dumb as humans, but they’re worse, because they actually think they can handle these things.”
Andrew pointed the pen at me. “Things. Exactly. You called them things. Suzanne and her friends grew up with them and would call them animals. These animals have dispositions and temperaments that we’ve studied for as long as there have been scientists. Where Suzanne’s from, they know the weaknesses of these animals, and also they’re in enclosures here, even if you and I can’t see the walls because they’re invisible things called ‘wards’. If I hire someone who’s got magic on top of all that, they’ll have almost no instinctive fear.
“Everything here is nocturnal, and every one of them is a hunter. Some of these things? Humans see them and they pass out. Not that I want you passing out, but I need someone who is scared of these things, who knows to stay out of the enclosures no matter what. Not someone who thinks they can train them to do tricks, who gets close enough for them to grab a mouthful of hair and drown them. Once, we had a night shift manager injured, and once killed, because they didn’t take these animals seriously enough.”
Thinking back to the Sea World orca incident I knew he’d been referencing, I remembered wondering how someone at that level of her profession could be so careless as I watched the video on YouTube. It made sense when he explained it like that. I hesitated before mentally throwing my hands up and going all in. “So, why put this place here, then? If they’re endangered and also dangerous, why have a zoo at all instead of just a small reserve?”
He pursed his lips, looking disappointed in me. “Ripley. You know that already. You already said as much.”
Thinking back through our conversation, I said, “The rich humans who pay top dollar to see supernatural animals.”
“Not humans,” he told me. “But people, yes, and they are rich, and they’re making donations and spending their money on a ticket here because everything we have is endangered.”
“So…”
I just let my voice trail off and my mind started to drift. Andrew remained silent, letting me do so. There’s that thing people say, ‘I believe that you believe it,’ which is just a kinder way of saying, ‘Bullshit.’ Parents say it about closet monsters. Psychologists say it to people who say they’ve been abducted and probed by aliens. I wanted to say it to Andrew.
But I also wanted a job. If it meant working overnight at an empty zoo, that was fine. When it came down to it, especially when I took the tone of our conversation into account, this was a zoo specifically focused on preserving endangered ‘animals’, and it was allegedly doing important work. Also, if this turned out to be the real deal and I started seeing the animals, I would deal with it, just like I would deal with an enclosure that had a lion or tiger or gorilla. If it came with a ghost and invisible creatures, I really didn’t see what the difference was, if I couldn’t go in the enclosures either way.
On that note, I’d like you to imagine a kid who looks at a roller coaster, watching everyone screaming and grinning as they go up and down and all around and they’re like, ‘Heck, I could do that! That looks like a blast!’
Then they get on, the first drop hits, and they realize they’ve made a terrible mistake.
“All right,” I sighed. “I can’t say I’m going to turn down a job just because it’s going to be scary. Especially not one with this paycheck.”
Andrew smiled. “Awesome. There’s an adjustment process for anyone working here, similar to a dog that gets adopted, actually. I know the general guidelines of, ‘three days, three weeks, three months’ in terms of milestones, until they finally feel they’re where they’re supposed to be,” he told me, “and you can think of your time here along those lines. I really think you’re a great fit, and once you reach the milestone of working here for three months, I’ll officially consider you our new night shift guard. And I hope you’ll stay with us for many years.”
I nodded and smiled at the flattery of an employer wanting me to work a great job for them for a long time. I’d never had a dog, but those milestones were well-known among anyone who knew animals, especially dogs. The first three days, the dog is getting to know its new digs, exploring, and decompressing. At three weeks, they’ve gotten used to their environment and are starting to get comfortable with their surroundings and the routines of the humans they live with. By three months, they know the rules and follow them, they trust you, and they feel they are where they’re meant to be. I could only hope to be so lucky.
I saw the ghost two days ago and she has yet to make another appearance (for those who are curious, I asked, and her name is Leila), and I still hadn’t seen any animals. I did hear one, though, I feel compelled to note. A growling roar sounded from the lake on occasion, echoing across the vast zoo, sending a shiver down my spine. Whatever that animal was, it sounded gigantic.
Andrew said there was apparently a group that wanted to visit for a birthday and they were offering a huge donation, so he let me know they were making an exception and that this group would be walking through the park that night. That meant I’d be watching people watching animals that, as far as I could tell, weren’t there.
It was anticlimactic. Even the three people who came for the tour just looked like people, not like aliens or something eldritch from another dimension, and I stayed in the security office the whole time. Andrew was the one giving the tour. I watched them spend about five minutes at each enclosure, the hour or so that they were there passing without incident. It was clear that they were able to see all the animals, though, since they motioned excitedly at each enclosure and spoke to Andrew, who presumably answered any questions they had.
If they could see the animals, that was that. There was still that niggle in the back of my head, from my twenty-three years of life never encountering anything like ghosts or cryptids, telling me that this was ridiculous. Waiting for someone to knock on the door, a camera mounted on their shoulder, to tell me that it was a big joke and they wanted to see how long I’d play along. But from all I saw, this was a real place with real, invisible animals.
I do carry a taser and pepper spray in my capacity as a security guard. Though it isn’t for the animals, since they’re in the enclosures; they’re actually for the rare instance of a break-in. Andrew mentioned that it had happened several times it the past, someone trying to steal an animal in the hopes of selling it on the black market. They’d been successful before, but apparently my predecessor Roger was good at his job, and mostly they left in handcuffs.
I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of confrontation, but my job was to call Andrew and then confront the person, not kick their ass. That’s what the police were for, or rather, the people Andrew would call in lieu of police in certain situations.
Fifty bucks an hour. That’s the key here.
Andrew hadn’t set up direct deposit, since he was sticking with a strategy of waiting to see if I’d continue to work there once I found out myself dealing with the animals (I’ve decided I am going to just call them animals). Instead, I got an old-fashioned check after my shift every Friday. The number on the first check was delightful. I went out that evening and had a big dinner at the local diner, order my most expensive favorites on the menu and a big slice of pie for dessert.
When it came to the paychecks in general, though, I had this weird feeling of not wanting to tell my dad and brother about the fact that it was actually $50/hr. I previously mentioned that my dad, his name’s Nathan if you’re curious, works at a local grocery store. Our town has a couple food franchises, but I think its size is just short of whatever threshold Walmart uses to decide where to open. He earns $14/hr. and that’s after the tiny raises he’s gotten over the past thirteen years.
That’s not to say he’d feel bad about not making as much as me. On the contrary, he would be ecstatic for me and really proud. But, like me, he’d be suspicious. That hourly rate was the biggest hint that this was more than just a private zoo for cryptids. And as soon as that fat check cleared without problems, my dad wouldn’t be satisfied with reassurances; he’d want to come visit the zoo and look around.
I’d told him it’s a private preservation with scheduled (expensive) visits only and that it had only eleven animals, so he’d been appeased by me brushing off the idea of a visit. Also, I took a few photos of my workplace; one of the security room, one of me sitting in my chair, one photo of the many screens I watched, and a selfie where I was feigning sleep out of boredom, slouched in my chair with my mouth open in a faux snore. That let him feel like he knew where I was and what I was doing, and that I was safe.
But if I told him I was making double what he thought, my father would practically order me to quit. No job was worth my safety, he’d tell me. I was quite of the opposite opinion, however, considering how crucial any and all conservation efforts were these days. Especially with the steep extinction levels due to humans competing with other animals for space, not to mention climate change. Working in any job that helped preserve species and keep ecosystems in balance, or put them back in balance, was so important.
Then again, my father would also point out something I had realized right away: the fact was that I was working with endangered species that were not from Earth. I wasn’t helping my planet. To be honest, though…that didn’t matter to me. Especially after that talk with Andrew about why he hired a human for this job, I figured whichever dimension these animals came from had the equivalent of us, razing forests to the ground, clouding the planet with pollution, and leaving the animals with no avenue of recourse when yet more land was taken from them.
I really do hope to keep working here for a long time, though, and not just because of the money. I can’t help it; I want to know what these things were, and I want to work with them, to do the job of a zookeeper. The same way you go up to the chain-link fence to get close to a carnivore on the other side who thinks you’d make a nice afternoon snack. You just want to be closer to them, to experience that incredible, daunting feeling of being in their presence.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before I got what I wanted.
The day after we had the tour go through, I was doing my sweep when I saw the ghost again. She was sitting on a small boulder in the same area I’d seen her the first time, looking identical, blood covering the front of her slashed shirt, the wounds visible underneath. I stopped and stood there for a moment before I decided to raise my hand in a small wave.
The young woman cocked her head at me and raised a hand in the air in an imitation of my gesture, her expression showing a bit of curiosity.
She was low-key, seemingly not concerned with my presence, looking at me as a novel phenomenon in her world. I wondered what that world consisted of. Was she always here, sometimes visible and sometimes not? Or did she have another world next to ours, in the ether, where she left everything in this world behind and floated in her disembodied form? Did she still feel emotions? Was that really curiosity on her face, or was I projecting? Did she feel happiness? Fear? Did she have the option of moving on, or was she stuck here?
Many questions that I might never get the answers to. And that was assuming Andrew knew the answers, since I’d never met Suzanne Cooper and he hadn’t even mentioned that possibility. This place was clearly her baby, but I’m sure running it was a lot of work. Plus, if she was rich enough to own it, she was rich enough to have other businesses and charities to run.
When it comes to the enclosures, they’re all wrapped by a barrier of some kind, though never one that seems adequate. There was not a single place with the ugly metal weavings of a chain-link fence, and no stretches of circular razor wire. Instead, there are nice fences. Black iron, or wrought steel fencing in a similar style to the one circling the perimeter of the zoo, just shorter and with different patterns. Or a spaced picket fence, the wood stained in some tone of brown, or a split two-rail fence. As if to say, ‘This is the border of your enclosure, but we’re just letting you know out of courtesy.’
When I started to pass enclosure number seven last night, a young woman’s voice spoke, “Hello.”
I startled, unaware that I hadn’t been alone. “Oh. Hi,” I said, staring at her standing a few yards in.
She had been next to a large tree and I hadn’t seen her. This enclosure was behind a picket fence, and she walked through the large area of wild grasses and flowers that stretched across the other side of the fence. There were fewer tall grasses closer to the fence, which I guessed was because it had been tromped down by her regular pacing along it when there were visitors, or if she wanted to see the various enclosures of the zoo. Her sudden appearance was a bit weird, considering I had been expecting to see a cryptid and instead I was looking at, it seemed, an attractive Asian woman.
She wore a black kimono, the soft silk robe draped gently over her body, with beautiful patterns of cherry blossoms, more so over her left side, and red and blue birds with their wings spread. A sash wrapped around her abdomen, she wore socks and sandals on her feet, and her hair was up in those rolls that gave volume to the style.
I was no expert on any fashion, much less that of another country, so I just assumed it was all traditional Japanese clothing. Most likely, the visitors who came liked to see a certain time-honored style and that’s what she stuck with. Or maybe she played on stereotypes. That would be amusing.
“I’m Yui. It’s nice to meet you,” she spoke, arriving at the border of the fence and holding out a hand for me to shake.
I’d been standing about three yards away from her, and I’ll be honest, muscle memory tried to kick in. But I only made it two steps, my hand starting to rise, before I froze, the hand falling limply at my side. “Nice to meet you, too,” I answered, my voice quiet.
Damn. I wonder how many times that honey trap works back where she comes from.
The pleasant look on her face faded, and she lowered her hand. “You won’t shake hands with me? Isn’t that rude?”
“I mean, I kind of like my hand where it is. You know, attached to me.”
Her demure smile widened into something more amused. “I would never do something so revolting.”
Looking her up and down, as if more visual information would give me more knowledge of what she was, I asked her, “What would you do?”
“I would be less wasteful,” she said softly.
A finger of ice trailed down my spine, and I had the sudden image in my head of her grabbing my outstretched hand in an iron grip and yanking me over the fence, leaving me to sprawl on the ground. Then killing and consuming me efficiently, without a single careless step, the same way humans slaughtered pigs, using everything from the hog but the squeal. I was struck with a shiver at the idea of her consuming everything from me but my screams.
Slowly, I took one step further down the path, then another. Just as I got to a walking pace, though, I realized the woman had started walking too, in the same direction. I’d have eventually gotten to the end of her enclosure and keep going, leaving her behind, but she spoke up. “Are you leaving?”
I came to a stop, meeting her gaze again. “My job is to walk the zoo every hour. Then I’ll get back to the security room and stay there until my next walk.”
“Have you met the others yet?”
I hesitated before saying, “Just Leila.”
She blinked languidly. “That means nobody welcomed you here.”
“Andrew did.”
She didn’t reply to that. Instead, she slowly started to lean forward, and I flinched backward a few steps further as I saw insect legs start curling out from her back.
No. Not insect. Arachnid.
The eight legs ended in small ‘paws’ with tiny claws, a layer of hairs covering the leg from top to bottom, like any typical tarantula. I took two more slow steps back and my mouth went dry as the jointed legs just kept lengthening, until they were large enough to lever her off the ground.
My gaze had been on the spider legs, but my heart skipped a beat as I realized her human legs had melded together and turned into a bulging abdomen. Her skin was shifting to a carapace, eventually all the way up to her shoulders and down her arms, her fingers elongating and her nails stretching to claws. From there down, her body was that of a pale tarantula with pedipalps the size of my arms and piercing fangs in her jaws that looked like they could take my head off.
There was a moment, my vision blurring, where I was worried that I might piss myself. The part of my brain that still had its humor intact in that moment told me that I should keep an emergency set of clothes in my car, or at the very least, start wearing Depends to work.
“I show you my true form,” she said softly, her voice now raspy like an eighty-year-old after a lifelong smoking habit. “Welcome to Suzanne Cooper’s zoo. The night shift guard for many years was Roger, before he retired and the zoo moved, and I miss him dearly. What should I call you?”
I choked on my words. There was no way my throat was going to cooperate enough for me to clearly get a sentence out. Instead, I realized my legs had taken control of the situation themselves, unsatisfied with my conscious brain’s decision to stand and stare, taking steps backward. I backed up a yard, then five yards, then ten.
My mind focused on the fact that spiders don’t waste anything, and pictured my demise. I’d be wrapped in a cocoon, killed, and made nice and mushy before she had me for dinner.
The whole time, my brain was a frenzied mess, my pupils were probably the size of dimes, and I was staring at that tiny, pathetic fence between her and me. There was so much adrenaline pumping through my body that I felt like my bones were vibrating. The fence was, to my eyes, the only thing between us. The only thing keeping her from tackling and killing me. My only hope was that she’d do it quickly.
But she didn’t move. As I absorbed her innocent, polite words, the look on her face was calm, and I wondered if this was typically the way a conversation went before she devoured her prey. I wondered how many people she’d eaten. Not humans, not people from Earth, but the ones from where she came from. The fact that she doesn’t scare the shit out of those people means they’re staggeringly dumber than humans.
Finally, I rounded a corner, both relieved at having her out of my sight and worried that she would take that moment to come find me. When she’d been within eyeshot, I had at least known where she was and could run in the other direction. But I didn’t hear the sound of faint footsteps moving rapidly toward me. All was quiet, in that deep, smothering way that only an empty business in the middle of the night in small town America could be.
My hands trembling, I barely paid attention to anything but the confirmation that my surroundings were free of the colossal spider as I finally got back to the door. Grabbing the handle and letting my eyes dart around for about ten seconds and my ears prick for the slightest sound, I finally swiped my key card across the pad and went inside, shutting the door behind me and engaging the backup deadbolt.
Maybe that was why they had decided on keycards. If I was running from something and panicking, using an actual key or inserting the card like at a hotel would keep me from getting to safety considering my hands were shaking enough to mix a margarita.
Walking over to my chair, I fell into it, letting my body flush itself of terror as I looked up at the cameras. There she was, still in arachnid form, exactly where I’d left her behind that rinky-dink fence, casually looking around and slowly pacing back and forth. I stared at her as my racing heart gradually slowed, and a minute or so later she turned on her eight legs and walked back into the trees.
Whatever invisible fences the enclosures have apparently work, which is nice, because I wasn’t keen on getting killed by one of the creatures here. And that’s what brings me here, spilling out everything that’s happened so far. Because nearly passing out from terror isn’t something I wanted to deal with at work, obviously, but I keep going over what she did in my head again and again, and I feel like I reacted like a child who spotted a wolf spider on their bed. I started to worry for my overactive sense of self-preservation, at least in my capacity as an employee here.
The spider didn’t even try to hurt me, and so I was feeling a bit foolish. Even annoyed, actually, at the fact that I’d freaked out so hard and took off instead of trying to engage in at least basic conversation. I got the sense that she wasn’t at human-level intelligence, but I was never going to be able to hold any level of conversation with an alligator.
Sure, she did mention that she wouldn’t be so crass as to yank off my hand because she’d rather just have my entire corpse, but wouldn’t a wolf do the same if it was hungry? Wouldn’t any carnivore? Actually, they probably would’ve been satisfied with one of my hands. The fear here was from the fact that she turned into a giant spider. If she’d turned into Clifford, I would’ve reacted the same way, if not better than, meeting Leila.
With that, I decided I’m staying on the job. Considering how frustrated I can get with foolish people, it’s a bit hypocritical, and I’m being a bit of an idiot. But…there are definitely wards keeping them in their enclosures. Also, I signed up for creatures for another dimension, whether or not I believed in them at the time, and I will not let encountering my first one in an objectively boring way be the reason I quit.
The money is a factor, I’ll grant you. Of course it is. And I can’t spend it if I’m dead, but all signs point to surviving as long as I don’t do anything dumb. Also, yes, I’ll admit there’s a not-so-little voice in the back of my head that’s desperate to know what else is here. I never thought I’d do something like this, but finding out these things are real, I honestly do want to learn more about them.
Still, though, I decided to call Andrew at the end of my shift to ask if the pepper spray and taser I carried worked on a certain spider, as well as the other animals I’d yet to meet.
Previous

The twin suns of the alien planet were high in the sky outside your window. Birds with four wings chirped and flitted between shoulder high blades of purple grass. Outside your kitchen window a brook babbled quietly between enormous trees twice the size of the giant sequoias of Earth. In the distance you could hear a few of your fellow colonists chatting cheerily. The BUZZ of your communicator interrupted the moment. It read:

Congratulations! The Colonial Supercomputer has located a suitable mate for you. He will arrive in fourteen (14) standard days. His information is as follows:

Category	Specifications
Name	Dr. Paul Stevens
Age	29
Education	PhDs in Astronomy, Astrometrics, and Physics
Height	6'6
Weight	195
Flaccid Length	6.9''
Average Seminal Emission (Volume)	testing error
Average Seminal Emission (Frequency)	3.2 Per Standard Rotation

Paul enjoys nature, good food, a good book, and everything to do with the stars. Please prepare for your mate's arrival. Contact the Colonial Authority if you have any questions.

A picture of a ruggedly handsome man with wavy, dirty blond hair, green eyes, and just a bit of stubble followed the message. His eyes were warm and friendly, as was his soft smile.
Aboard the colonial transport starship, Ares, Paul and a few hundred other male colonists had woken from cryosleep just a few weeks ago. It had taken Paul a few days to adjust, but the anti-atrophy system that had been developed a few years ago was really working wonders. He felt stronger than ever. He was playing Spaceball with his friends in the gym when he got the notification.
"Here! Pass!" His friend Tom shouted. Paul threw him the ball. Tom dodged by one opponent, turned as he was blocked by another, and then through the ball back to Paul who was now in full sprint. Paul caught the ball in midair and immediately threw it at full speed toward the goal. The BUZZ of the goal sounded almost at the same time as Paul's communicator. Paul wiped sweat from his forehead as he high fived Tom and looked down at his communicator. His heart skipped three beats. He had been matched. His heart pounded more and more as he read your profile. His jaw visibly dropped when he got to your photo.
"Hey man! What's up?" Mark, another friend, walked up to Paul and clapped him on the back as he looked over Paul's shoulder. He immediate saw what was 'up' and he let out a dramatic. "Damn... son! Good for you!"
The rest of the guys ran up to peep over Paul's shoulder. Various comments filtered through. "She is fucking gorgeous," "Holy fucking shit dude," and "You lucky bastard," were some of them.
Finally the guys got back to the game, but Paul's mind never left the profile on his phone or the photo. His head was in the clouds and amongst the stars the rest of the day as he showered after the game, ate dinner, and worked half-heartedly on his usually consuming research.
Paul and the other three guys that he shared quarters with finally went to bed. He took one more glance at your profile as the lights went out and he tucked himself into his twin-sized bunk cut out from the wall. He drifted off peacefully to sleep to the gentle hum of the engines. He dreamed of the woman in his match message, his future mate. At around 2:00 a.m., the bulge between his legs swelled as he dreamed. The soft fabric of his pajama pants shifted and rose, and rose, and rose... Soon his bedsheets were a mountain in the darkness of the bed quarters. And Paul dreamed even more vividly of his mate. The bulging mountain tensed and shuddered visibly. And then again. And again even more powerfully. A moment later, wetness soaked his pajama bottoms and then the bedsheets over them. The wetness flowed and spread. More, and more and more, until it oozed to cover a large portion of the lower half of the bed. As it finished, the outline of a raging hard penis was clearly shown by the soaked bedsheet and pajamas that clung to it so tightly the thick veins would have been visible if there were a little more light in the dark room. Paul simply smiled in his sleep and rolled over. He would have to change, shower, and wash his sheets in the morning. He would also have to endure some playful teasing from his roommates. But Paul was the happiest man in the universe.
Two weeks later.
It was another beautiful day on the alien planet. It was the day Paul and the other male passengers of the Ares arrived. Paul waved goodbye to his friends as he followed the map on his datapad to your home. He passed an elk like creature with antlers almost the size of its body that was grazing between the huge trees. Paul's jaw almost never left the grown as his eyes passed from one alien wonder to the next. Finally he arrived outside your front door, his heart racing. He knocked twice. His deep voice followed. "Hello. It's Paul, Paul Stevens."
Hello! I thought it would be fun to set a smutty, romantic romp on an alien world.
I was also toying with the idea of our characters being somehow genetically enhanced to make them sexy as fuck, which explains Paul's absurd statistics early in the prompt. I am happy to discuss that though. Perhaps they are just hot from centuries of natural selection. Perhaps they were engineered from birth to be perfect space colonists, or perhaps they were given genetic treatment while in cryostasis on the journey, or we can totally ignore the issue and just have them be hot for hotness sake! I do like the idea of our characters being very attractive though. I also have to say I am a HUGE fan of big boobs and big booties.
I know I wrote your part in second person, and mine in third person. I am happy to write my character in either first or third person. I am also happy to write the parts of third party characters that flit in and out of our story, and I would be happy if you also share the burden!
Another idea that might be fun to explore is if additional "mates" are added to our "family" at some point. Not sure on this, happy to hear your thoughts if you are interested.
Some other kinks and interests that may work for the story: detailed writing, creative writing partners, fit characters, big tits, big butts, big cock, lots of cum, passionate fucking, outdoor sex, group sex (when it fits the story), voyeurism, exhibitionism, playful competition and comparison, and I am sure much more!
Limits: noncon, violence, poop, animals, underage, anything else gross or illegal.
Let me know your ideas, or feel free to just jump write in where I left off and answer the door!
I prefer to write by PM, by chat and discord also work. Hope to hear from you soon!

Thank you to all of you who have been following this story! Sorry about the delay in posting and responding to your messages, Matt and I actually had a weekend away together (chapter worthy material that I'll share down the road).
This chapter is another first for me, not for Matt. I had always been super self conscious about this one but Matt made it absolutely incredible and now a favorite part of our regular foreplay! I hope you all enjoy! As always, feel free to shoot me any feedback and critiques! ♡Avery
So this one kinda came out of no where. Not something we had really discussed because I was kinda self conscious about straddling a guy's face with my crotch, but I learned to get past all that. After work one Wednesday night...yes I remember the day because Matt and I had developed a routine at this point of alternating days at his house and days I spent in my barracks room. Anyway, one Wednesday evening, I had been driving Matt around on a convoy training mission all day. Alone in a truck with my hot as hell man crush boyfriend, and unable to do anything because we couldn't risk it at work. Of course he would spend it dropping little sly comments about "I bet you like xyz" or something like he doesn't know exactly what l like. Such a tease.
At this point, I've had enough and I just want him. I had showered and cleaned up before coming over, but the moment I walked in his door, I wanted to get dirty all over again. I pressed him up against the wall and pressed my lips to his. He grabs me by my petite waist and pulls me close as I wrap my arms around behind his neck and let my tongue intertwine with his.
I needed him. Like holy shit. I don't know what kind of mood he had put me in all day, but I needed my man and I needed to cum. He senses how frantic my kisses are becoming and he picks me up in his arms and carries me over to the futon in his living room. He lays me down and begins to suck on the soft spot of my neck, driving me wild as it's a mix of tickling and pleasure running through me. I run my fingers through his hair as I wrap my legs around his waist, pulling him down between my legs until his growing bulge is pressed against me.
He slips his fingers under my shirt and lifts my shirt and blue neon sports bra over my head in one swoop. My B cup breasts spill out as his tongue finds it's way to my rapidly hardening nipples and I let out a slight sigh of pleasure. I pull his shirt off, exposing his chiseled chest and abs and I reach up to plant soft kisses against my favorite spot to rest my head at night. His kisses soon trail down my ribs as he unzips my short jean shorts revealing a small green cotton thong that leaves very little to the imagination.
I raise my butt and he quickly removes both shorts and thong in the blink of an eye, tossing them to the side as he returns to kiss along the tan lines made by the one piece bathing suit I wore over the weekend. I'm fairly soaked at this point and I just want release. Instead of giving it to me, he sits up, slips off his shorts and lays back himself. He tells me he wants me to sit on his face but face away so he has access to everything.
I'm super self conscious about "down there" to start with. Oral laying on my back is awkward enough but this was a definite first. He takes my hesitant pause to reach and pull me by the thigh over his face. I keep my weight up on my thighs so that I don't crush his face (awkward sauce like I said). Softly at first I feel his tongue tracing my slit as the tip of his nose occasionally brushes against my butt. I let out a soft moan and fall forward, opening myself up as my lips spread at the shift in position and my butthole is exposed as I find myself inches from his rock hard 7 inch cock...quick note on size...no I don't want a monster cock, 7 is about all I can take without having to worry about not sinking down too deep and hurting myself on accident. So no, I don't want your 11 inch dick.
Anyway, back to my face next to his rock hard cock. He takes another taste between my lips and teases gently at my clit as I take him in one hand and lick along the back of his shaft from tip to base. He's shaved himself to match my completely smooth pussy and I lick again and again along his hard smooth shaft.
He begins to pay more attention to my clit as he spreads my buttcheeks wide with his hands, exposing both of my holes to the cold air of the room. I'm practically dripping at this point as I take the head of his cock into my mouth, swirling my tongue around, trying to encourage him to do the same on my clit.
I feel a finger and then a second hook their way into my tight hole, tickling at my g spot as he pulls me down lower onto his face, increasing pressure on my clit with his tongue. This drives me to moan with his dick halfway into my mouth, and he bucks his hips up, forcing his way deeper into my throat. I feel myself start to gag, but the pleasure between my legs over rides everything and I force myself to take more and more of him until he is all the way down my throat and my lips reach the base of his cock.
I'm practically drooling saliva on his shaft as he bucks his hips into me, with his cock buried in my throat. I hold it there as long as I can until his thumb finds it's way to my clit, finally threatening to through me over the edge of a massive orgasm that's been building as we've gone along. I pull my face away, a string of drool leading off my chin and grind my vagina into his face as his tongue presses in circles against my clit and his nose is against my bum. I take his shaft in hand and begin to stroke him, using my own saliva to lubricate him as i go faster and faster, trying to get him to experience the same release I'm on the brink of.
I'm fully raised up, with my pubic bone grinding into his mouth as I finally reach orgasm and cum slightly into his mouth (I'm not a huge squirter but I do cum). I moan his name as I continue to jerk him until he shoots a massive spray of cum of his own up towards my face, some landing on my cheeks while the rest sprays my chest and stomach before coming down and landing on him as well.
Covered in each other's release, I get up and kiss him passionately on the lips, thanking him for this introduction to a new found turn on. He takes me by the hand and we walk naked upstairs to the shower to clean off before dinner...and maybe another round(;
Thank you so much for continuing to follow my story! As always, feedback and critiques are more than welcome! Look for lucky #7 coming out in the next few days! ♡Avery

Hey guys, sorry it's been a few days! I'm finishing up clearing from the Army and moving in with Matt simultaneously so life has been hectic to say the least.
A little more background on us for those that are wondering, he and I have been dating for over a year now at this point, so we have a lot of material I could share. We have grown together sexually over our time together, so obviously the stories will get hotter as we go. I've thought about skipping ahead to a few things, but have decided to just keep going sequentially unless I get a totally negative response.
In this chapter, we find ourselves a few weeks into our relationship, and beginning to branch out in our love of fun in public-ish places. This time...the beach(; I hope you all enjoy! Avery♡
Matt and I had just wrapped up a busy week at work...I was kinda frustrated that he was commenting on how I'm so tired in the evenings and I'm kinda just like "well no shit sir, you had us out working on trucks all day". Not to be mean but when you're my platoon leader, you know why I'm too tired for sex every night. But I digress. He made up for it.
Saturday rolls around, and after letting me sleep in probably a little too late, Matt gently wakes me up with soft kisses and a little bit of tickles from his weekend scruff from where he dosen't have to shave on weekends (totally cute in my opinion). He wakes me up and asks me if I'd like to go relax at the beach. Duh. Its summer, I'm stressed, I have a muscular boyfriend and at a beach I've got an excuse to oogle him all I want. Yes I'm in, let me get dressed.
It dawns on me that hey, I've got no suit here (his house not my barracks room), so I throw on some jean shorts and a sports bra and decide I'm just gonna have to grab a suit at one of the shore shacks when we get there.
Matt drives us to the beach and I tease him the whole way there, lightly running my finger tips along his thigh to see if I can get a reaction. He tries to play it cool, but the bulge in his trunks gives him away. Yeah, I know you like this teasing Matt(;
We roll up to one of the surf shops and i decide to go for the summer's latest trends, "one piece revival". I go with a bright orange, reasonably modest suit that rides up fairly high in the leg opening, accentuating the V where my thighs come together, highlighting in bright orange my barely covered self, scoops low enough in the armpit to give a little tasteful sideboob without screaming "slut", and has just enough of a smaller cut in the butt to show off some cheek without being a thong. I think it's hot. Matt's stunned face and tightening trunks seem to agree.
We spend the entire afternoon alternating between lounging in the sun, playing in the water, boogie boarding, and all around just having fun in a completely nonsexual manner. With the exception of the fact that he looks like a fucking sex god that I just need (and can't believe I'm dating).
As the sun starts to set, a band starts to play on the boardwalk, with a crowd gathering around to watch. I get an idea to use the opportunity, while everyone is focused on the band to slip away into the waves with Matt to try to be a little more adventurous.
The music grows more up beat as the sun goes fully down and I'm dancing on Matt about knee deep in the water, splashing around as I grind my butt against him to the beat, and bend forward to shake my firm little butt at him, giving him quite the view of everything this suit barely covers.
As I back Matt into deeper water, and press my butt against his crotch, his hands are running all over my body, turning me on. He squeezes my B cup breasts sand pulls me back close to him. I turn back and my lips find his as his hands rove lower, teasing me through the front of my suit.
At this point I'm wetter than the ocean. Is making me and I want more. I take his hand and slide it into the thigh hole of my suit and guide him into my slit. He begins to tease my clit as I reach back and stroke his hardening cock as the tempo of the party on the beach grows into a greater frenzy.
With his fingers now teasing their way inside me, and my head leaned back against his chest moaning slightly, I ask him if he'd have the courage to just do me right here and now if I let him. He responds by pushing his two fingers all the way inside me up to the knuckle and I beg for him to give me more.
He spins me around and pulls me into his arms. I wrap my legs around him as he walks us to deeper water so that just our head and shoulders are out of the water. I feel him reaching between my legs to push my suit to the side and he lowers me slight until the tip of his cock is pressed against my entrance.
I feel myself start to relax against his pressure as he kisses me, and my vagina welcomes him tightly in as I lower myself down his shaft, allowing him to fill me completely. He takes one of my buttcheeks in each of his hands and spreads me wide as he begins to rock me up and down his shaft. My suit digs into my butt and soon my cheeky onepiece has collected itself so that its stretched taught, barely covering my butthole.
I bury my face in his neck, kissing him and hopefully leaving my mark as he picks up speed, bouncing me up and down his cock to the beat of the music in an ever more enthusiastic pace. Hi thumb reaches between my legs and begins to circle my clit as my orgasm builds and I begin to clamp down on the rock hard cock, buried deep inside me, and I beg him to cum for me.
With his muscular arms that I love so much, he lifts me nearly off his shaft and then forces me all the way down to bottoming out in one massive thrust as I feel him explode inside me. He keeps himself all the way inside me, pressed almost to my cervix as I feel spurt after spurt erupting in me as he kisses me, and to the casual onlooker, it appears that we're just two lovers making out in the waves.
Beneath the surface, I lift off of him and he helps me adjust my suit to some semblance of modesty. I feel him start to leak of of me and down the inside of my leg. I don't even care as we get back to our stuff, and head back to the car in the dark. Public sex? Another first checked off the list.
Thank you again for all the feedback recently! I promise I won't make you wait as long for an update this time(: I love all the interaction with readers so keep the critiques coming! ♡Avery

I know many of you would think in CRAZY if read long story so right below shorter version
SHORT VERSION of all this text for those who dont want to read my "cry for help": -I am in a flare and im scared and anxious. Cant relax because my mind is almost always on my pelvic floor. Everything I do I constantly think it causes me damage. So I avoid alot of stuff. Every time I feel even tiniest pain my brain goes crazy panic.
HOW TO DEAL WITH MENTAL ISSUES AROUND PELVIC FLOOR SUCH AS STRESS AND ANXIETY ?
-LONG VERSION (maybe someone can relate or just help ?)
Lately im having very hard time dealing with stress and anxiety and its all due to pain im currently having.
I dont know what triggered it but could be stomach issues that I have, maybe antibiotics im currently taking, 1 week ago I involuntarily strained a bit because of diarrhea caused by stomach issues but I felt better in between those days, anxiety, fear
Im aware of my pelvic floor almost 100%of the time, everything feels weird and im super careful about everything. When its tense or relaxed it feels weird. Because when my PF drops lets day when im in bed it feels like straining and I know its not. I avoid sitting as much as I can (I sit only when I drive a car and thats it)
I avoid certian moves, I have some back issues and weirdly getting into bed is my new fear because I dont know how to get in bed safely without damaging my back/discs. Scared to do core strenghtening and glute strenghtening because it flares me up. Everytime I feel just slight pain anywhere in my PF or penis (usually from certian moves or something) I just go into panic mode like "oh no that damaged my muscles/nerves". And ofc that leads to more tightness. Im constantly lookinf for reassurance and what is the root cause of my PFD.
I am even afraid to laugh freely because my core engages and I feel my PF working
Ive been to pelvic floor PT twice as its very expensive and likd 800 miles away from my home.
I developed severe fear of herniating or bulging my disc in lumbar spine because I think that would directly impact my issues even more.
Even worse is that exciting or fun things to do also give me strong tightness like playing video games or driving fast with a car or just stuff I need to put my focus on, my pf just decides to lock up so I havent done any of these in a very long time now. I literally lost most of the stuff I loved to do before I got this... I cant even hit the gym and that was my life saver back in the days I loved it so much.
And ofc catastrophizing thinking most of the time. Like I will never get better, Im weak, I know I have quite weak core, also some suicidal toughts when things get bad and so on.
And Im 2 years so I often think im never getting rid of this. In this 2 years Ive had alot of ups and downs. I would say around 40-50% of the time I had this I was nearly pain free and sometimes even pain free. But last few months I just cant get back theres always some other new issue that stops my progress.
But now im just constantly scared of everything and aware. Like theres no single thing I can do without thinking of my PF and its ruining my life.

I’m on mobile so please excuse any formatting errors. Thanks! I (18F), a senior in high school, was leave school last Friday when my car broke down. It’s not really relevant, but I’ll note it’s technically my parent’s car- they just let me drive it for school commutes. We’ve been having issues with the battery recently, so I figured I only needed a jumpstart, and called my dad (49M) who didn’t pick up right way. Instead I called some friends to help jumpstart it (the battery was indeed dead and I just found out there’s been a recall on the model I drive for this issue.)
We’ve got a dealership only a mile from my high school, so once my dad saw my voicemail and my friends got the car started my dad and I drove to the dealership to get the car looked at. They helped us quickly and sent us with a number to the waiting room where I, my dad, and six or so others were crammed to wait for our cars.
Everything was going well so far: I’d aced a quiz in my German class, made plans for the weekend, my dad was reading emails and showing me bad Facebook memes, and I was actually having a decent day. The issue stems from a comment my dad made out of the blue.
The dealership’s waiting room had a tv across from the table we were sitting at, and I was glancing up at it occasionally while picking out some music to listen to while we waited. An ad for bras started playing, the kind that smooth out that space just under your armpits where skin usually bunches.
I wasn’t really paying attention to it until my dad looked up and, not quietly at all, said “Hey look, a bra to get rid of all those fatty wrinkles,” while pinching the skin in question. I was genuinely shocked and didn’t say anything for a good ten seconds, just staring at him after jerking my side away. After I processed what he said I responded, “That was weird,” because that is a really weird thing to say to your teenage daughter. Then I told him that maybe they’d show an ad for hair loss products next, because he needed those more (he’s gone white and is actively balding.)
After a few minutes of him acting like what he said was absolutely normal and of me trying not to get emotional, I went to the bathroom and just stood there alone for a good ten minutes. I was and still am upset by what he said to me. I feel like he was trying to humiliate me for some reason, because not only did he grab me and insult my weight and body, but he did it loudly in a small room full of people.
I know for a fact some people turned and looked, and part of the reason I went to the bathroom afterwards (besides trying not to cry) is because I have a diagnosed social anxiety disorder. It gets really bad when I’m in large groups of unfamiliar people, and unbearable when the attention is on me. My hands got really sweaty and my chest started to hurt, and I had to stand alone in a grimy uncleaned bathroom until I calmed down so I wouldn’t freak out in front of the whole room. It was an awful experience all around and it definitely reopened some thoughts about myself and my appearance that I haven’t actively had since freshman year. My dad also knows I have this disorder, but from what I’ve gathered he believes it’s a crutch that I use because the ‘new generation is weak and wants to be victims and doesn’t take accountability.’ I thinks it’s reasonable to note that my mom, his wife, is diagnosed and medicated for the same anxiety disorder that I am. The only reason I bring this up is because I think it’s relevant to explain why I think this was such a shitty thing to do.
Another reason why I’m upset: I’ve always been insecure about my weight, specifically because of him and some comments he’s made in the past. He once told me at the age of ten that I was ‘getting a bit of a belly’ and ‘needed to eat better’ as if I was the one deciding what food came into the house and onto my plate. I know those comments alone don’t sound bad, but regardless of how he meant it I ended up crying in my room because all I heard was my dad telling me I need to lose weight. This is the most vivid time I remember him commenting, but he’s done this a lot throughout my childhood. He knows I’m insecure about my weight, but regardless I feel like it’s unspoken that you shouldn’t make comments about someone’s body like that, especially your own daughter.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a few pounds heavier than I should be for my height, but I’m no where near obese or even fat. I’ve got softer features because of it, and I know I could lose a bit if I exercised a bit more, but case in point in a healthy and very average weight. He, on the other hand, has a beer gut and weights well over 280 pounds.
That was all the premise, and this is where I might be the asshole. When I got home I locked myself in my room and my dad went off to go shopping and pick up my sisters from their afterschool activities. I’d made plans to sleep over with a friend, and while waiting for her to arrive and pick me up my mom came home and we ended up chatting for a while about nothing. I was still pretty put off by my dad’s comment and once our conversation had ended I piped back up and asked “Can I ruin the mood?”
I told her the story I told here, that we were waiting and say the ad, that he pinched my side and made the comment, and my mom’s eyes physically bulged when I told her what happened. In short, she was pissed. She’s always been in my corner and she was appalled that he’d made this comment, and was even more upset and a bit angry when I told her there were other people present, too. She told me that it was an absolutely inappropriate thing for him to say and do, and that she has no idea why he would say that to me, and reassured me that I wasn’t fat in the slightest. I really appreciated it, and she actually pointed out another thing made the whole situation more odd.
She said it was extremely out of character for him, and also didn’t make sense because I don’t show off my figure whatsoever. I was wearing baggy jeans and a t-shirt a few sizes too big at the time, and a large jacket over top of it that I had just tied around my waist before he made the comment. I hate dressing provocatively or showing off my body, and even wear swim trunks and a tank top when swimming. All this to say there wasn’t a single hint of a wrinkle or any skin showing on my torso- he had to go out of his way to grab a chunk of my skin and mock me.
My mom hugged me and said she’d talk to him for me, and when my friend arrived I left and got dinner. We ended up sleeping over at my place (against my will but whatever) and once she left the next morning my dad came up to me and we talked. I had made breakfast for my friend and I and hadn’t felt like eating much even though I was hungry, and my dad accused me of trying to make him feel bad for making ‘a joke.’ I told him it wasn’t a joke because it was just mean, and he didn’t apologize for hurting my feeling, and told me I’d made a scene with Mom for no reason and she was pissed at him. He said I was starting problems and being immature and taking things too seriously. I just put in my earbuds and cleaned up the kitchen.
One huge reason his ‘joke’ hurt me specifically is because he’s very vocal and adamant that for any joke to be funny it has to be rooted in truth. I can’t emphasize this enough; any time he makes a joke, whether it’s genuinely funny or just off color and sort of derogatory, he makes the same comment about humor being rooted in truth. These are genuinely the only types of jokes he ever makes. You can see why this would upset me then, because he’s made it very clear that he believes his ‘jokes’ are all true on some level. Either he made the first exception to this rule of his life, or he was calling me fat to my face (and the entire waiting room full of people) and is trying to play it off like I’m overreacting when I have every reason to think he wasn’t.
On the other hand, maybe I’m reading way too far into this and he’s right. Maybe I was an asshole to bring my mom into this and upset her, and get him into trouble. Maybe I am being too sensitive and what he said wasn’t as bad as I feel like it was. Please let me know what you think.
TLDR: My dad made a loud comment implying I was fat in a small crowded room, then got mad that I told my mom and got him in trouble. He claims it was a joke I misinterpreted but I think he was trying to humiliate me.

I don't like badmouthing businesses. I have run one for many years and it's rough. You can never please everyone all the time, and it absolutely kills me emotionally (though perhaps it shouldn't) to have an unsatisfied customer.
But I must tell others about this so that perhaps they can be spared the financial and emotional frustration that this dealership has caused us, and likely will continue to cause us.
This is a companion post to my post in CreditScore , but will focus more on our experience with the dealership than the impact to our credit scores.
My story begins as follows:
We bought a travel trailer a bit ago. It's been nearly a month now since our first interaction with the dealership, Great American RV Superstores.
We went to this dealership (one of many, actually) looking for a travel trailer that would suit our needs well, with as little modifications as possible-- I'm busy, and wanted to use the thing for vacations and such, not have another project to work on.
The sales experience was fine. The salesman was happy to show us around, offer us drinks, tell us about the travel trailers they had, even show us ones that were kind of outside of our intended scope just since we were curious about them. Very reasonable experience, overall. I have to temper my expectations here, since my partner and I absolutely hate interacting with strangers in a sales environment. Overall it was fine, though I do feel sales was pushy, and financing (which we'll get to in a moment) even more so.
Over the course of a week or so, we eventually came back and settled on a Jayco trailer they had-- it was mostly what we wanted and would need the least modifications to be what we wanted to become our 'dream RV' for what I felt was a reasonable price, compared to building the entire thing from the ground up out of a utility trailer shell-- it would even be cheaper, not to mention save me time.
This is unfortunately the end of the 'good' part.
We figured we'd put the trailer on credit for a month or so while we sold off some stuff, avoided early withdrawal penalties, etc.. I did the math, it would be cheaper like this than paying fees to move money faster, and we wanted the trailer for an upcoming trip.
Excited, we gave them a deposit [they accepted a credit card for this] of $1000.
Now, they originally tried to request $5000, and I looked at them like they were nuts. That's more than 20% the purchase price. The deposit on my truck wasn't anywhere near that much, despite having a much higher sticker price than the trailer. This should have been my first red flag.
We came back the next day (we had stuff on our schedule, literally did not have time for 2 hours of paperwork that I was confident would ensue).
The dealership did not want to take a credit card for the non-cash portion, which I understand but was kind of annoying. It's not that much, and I can't just bounce a check or credit card charge on a registered vehicle and just get away and get to keep the thing-- It's not like you can hide an RV trailer that well; the thing is nearly 30 feet long.
No worries, they said they could offer financing, and all it'd cost me was one credit pull. The salesman and financing manager went away, and came back a few minutes (well, ~20 minutes) later.
There was, at that point, as they said, a credit pull for both me and my partner.
They came back with an insane interest rate, something like 19%. I told them that I wouldn't sign something so insane, and we'd come back later in a few weeks or so and buy the RV if it was still available in cash, no financing. This should have been my second red flag, but of course, me being bad at and stressed during social interactions, I ignored this one, too.
They really didn't like the idea of us not buying the thing asap (duh), and said they could see about getting us a better rate. I told them that if they wanted to offer something else, to just call me. [Important, no additional papers, etc. were signed at this point. I did not sign any 'loan application' papers.]
The next day they came back with an offer for an interest rate of about half that, which while still bad imho, was fine enough and within the realm of reason given what interest rates are right now.
We went back to sign the paperwork... more problems ensued.
We drove ~1 hour to get there, and waited for like 2 hours, and then they told us they could not get us the paperwork to sign as the bank was closed, so we'd have to come back the following week.
What. The. F***.
Now, I understand that this is not common perhaps, but I assume more common for people buying RVs-- our time is very valuable, and I don't mean just in terms of what we bill people (though, that too in a lot of cases). We're short on time, have too much we need to get done almost always, and wasting an hour or so of our time in an area with basically no cellphone reception and being unable to accomplish any work or spend this time effectively on something we wanted is not something we were pleased with, and has a very real dollar cost for us. We effectively wasted 4 hours of both our time going there, waiting, and driving back-- 8 man-hours for what? Nothing.
Regardless of our over-inflated time valuation, I don't think anyone should have their time wasted like this. We would not require this of a customer of ours, regardless of their salary or status, it's just disrespectful.
This should have been our third red flag.
Anyways, we were promised a $200 gift card and they seemed genuinely apologetic, saying their head finance manager was out today and they were doing their best to carry on without them, and had just been unaware that the bank was closed at that point and thus couldn't produce the documents.
Okay. Fine. We left again.
We returned the next week, and finally they had paperwork to sign-- a lot of it... holy sh*t I have never seen so much paperwork to buy something. This was more paperwork than there was for our house, I am not kidding. Over 100 pages probably if you include other documents referenced by these. I read them all, I insisted, before signing. The guy did not appear pleased with this-- I realize his time is valuable, but who in their right mind signs something without reading it? It had all sorts of things that would, if we were not in the position we are, potentially be devastating. (Example, they were not very forthcoming on the fact that there was a 'demand function' on the loan-- the bank can just demand it be paid right away, in other words, because they feel like it.)
Again, that should have been another, and the final red flag. We should have walked away. But, I'm here writing this, so that's not what happened. Sunk cost fallacy and all, I guess.
So, we finally get through several hours of reading things, asking them questions, etc.. They lied a bunch through their teeth I'm sure, but this post is already too long to even start listing the things I worry about.
Once we had actually managed to get the thing purchased, they had some guy take us back and do a walkthrough of the travel trailer to prove everything was working on delivery, etc.. Honestly, I feel this walkthrough should have been it's own day given how many things there are on the trailer, and how many involve things that you have to wait on to see if they're really working properly-- like an oven, an air conditioner / heater, that sort of thing; but it's not like this lasted more than 10 minutes of the guy turning things on, asking me if I knew propane was flammable, etc..
Walkthrough guy was nice, didn't have a problem with him, but he (especially for someone who works in maintenance) didn't seem well informed. He advised me, for example, despite the travel trailer's converter / battery charger being rated for use with a Lithium replacement battery, not to do this, because it could 'blow up the electrical system'. While I am confident that the trailer's 'auto detection' feature isn't really that, and have since inspected the battery charger and it's workings, I assure you a compatible lithium replacement battery would not 'blow up' the electrical system.
He didn't even know where the circuit breakers, etc.. were, didn't know what size the water tank was, where it was, what certain ratings were, when I asked. At this point, I was mostly testing to see if they had any idea how this thing was put together, because I'd become suspicious. The guy, while nice, failed the test horribly.
This was all very disconcerting, because they are the only Jayco partnered dealership in range of our home.
We hitched up the trailer with the help of the sales guy, who incorrectly instructed me on how to hook up the break-away safety cable, and left with the trailer.
When we got it home, we hooked it up to power, water, and sewer, to go run through our actual bunch of tests.
The following things do not function correctly on this trailer:
1) The roof-mounted solar panel and charge controller for the 12v system. Completely non-functional upon arrival, and during the walkthrough (though we were told it was because there wasn't enough sun during that time). I eventually went and troubleshot this enough to determine that the entire ground wire from the charge controller was completely disconnected from the 12v system, which of course made it useless. I fixed this, but I should not have had to spend this time doing so.
2) The oven. The pilot light requires you to hold the knob in after sparking it for ~5 minutes before it will stay lit. The instructions say it should take ~5 seconds. Oven is basically useless, no one has 5 or 10 or 20 minutes to fight with it to get it to keep the pilot light lit. The walkthrough person did not check oven function, just asked, if I knew how to use it. (Yes, I do, I've owned RVs before. In fact, the Jayco travel trailer from 1985 that I use as a storage shed presently, the oven in there STILL works just as it did when new.) I have /no idea/ how to fix this, and the dealership has ignored me when I've asked them. They say they'll get back to me, they do not.
3) The air conditioner / heater. They start up, sure, but they don't stay going. The AC seems to cut out any time there's a slight voltage fluctuation on the 12v system that powers the thermostat, etc., and this happens regularly of course when you turn a light on or off or something. To get the AC to restart, you have to completely power off the system at the thermostat, and wait ~1 minute, and then power it back on. I've not solved this yet, but I'm sure I likely can... by reverse engineering the thermostat control standard and replacing it with something else, and/or stabilizing the power supply to the appliances using some electronics... but still, why should I have to do this? The thing's brand new.
4) The water pump. It rattled SO MUCH and was not screwed down properly that it almost dislodged the piping when we fired it up during testing. Eventually after some back and forth with the service guy over the phone, I settled on a solution which he admitted would not in any way void the warranty-- pipe insulation to keep the rattling down throughout the trailer (I just purchased this from Home Depot and put it on), and some extra rubber and foam, and a slightly thicker screw to hold the pump in place properly.
5) The shower plastic shroud. The backing is incorrectly / poorly installed, bulged up, etc., around the bottom, making it harder to clean. I should have noticed this but, again, with only a ~10 minute walkthrough... :/ I'm sure they'd also say it 'met standards' and was fine. I guess I'll have to fix this, too.
6) Several of the lights, after being on for a bit, 'flicker'. This is extremely odd because they're DC lights, and while one might expect the typical 60Hz flicker from a cheap LED AC light, a DC light should have no flickering. It's definitely that the light is getting hot and has a bad solder joint or something. Yet another thing that, while on it's own isn't a huge deal for me to fix, it's not on it's own. I'll have to replace a number of these light fixtures I guess, too. -_-
7) Upon crawling under the trailer, the underbelly that is supposedly 'enclosed' is hardly that. It's got so many gaps and holes that I'm genuinely worried about what will have nested in there by the time I get around to fixing it. Good thing we have so many cats around, I guess. Would some spray-foam have killed Jayco?
Now, we're not even done with the BS.
Somehow, over the next few weeks, we've gotten (both my partner and I) about a dozen credit pulls from random lenders. Like, holy crap. And of course, because they're not all at the same time and nor are they even from the same 'type' of lenders, our scores have dropped like a rock.
I don't know who over there at Great American RV Superstores is pushing some button, but this needs to stop... we're at the point where we are considering freezing our credit, because this is insane. Credit pulls from AFTER we picked up the RV? Excuse me? Why? This is borderline identity fraud.
Overall, the sales experience was fine, but everything else was bad. Logistics, financing, paperwork, service... they all dropped the ball.
I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone buy from this dealership chain, nor can I recommend at this point anyone buy a Jayco travel trailer-- apparently their build quality (like seemingly everything from everyone these days) has taken a nosedive since the 80's.
Oh, and the $200 gift card they promised us for wasting our time? No where to be found. -_- We asked about it, they dismissed it saying they would contact us when they 'got approval from management'; in other words, they just promised us something they weren't authorized to give us.

So, it was on this sub that I first read about NUCCA, and it was after getting a CINE MRI that showed nothing unusual, so I was feeling really hopeless and willing to try, literally, anything.
I had two back to back NUCCA appointments the first day, which took four hours. I have never had any health care provider be so thorough. He took of bunch of imaging, did some tests, and then did an adjustment at the end.
First of all, he showed me the misalignment in my cervical spine - it pulls to the left, and explained how that was tugging and pulling on certain areas, MOST INTERESTINGLY, he confirmed that I do have low-lying tonsils AND that the amount of tension in my neck could have actually caused them, putting so much downward pressure on my spine and skull that it tugged them downward. He also pieced together some of my other symptoms that no doctor or specialist, ever, has been able to explain in a way that made complete sense.
After the first adjustment, I had some of the side effects he had mentioned like sore muscles and a headache at the base of the skull, but, unfortunately, I started my cycle immediately after the appointment which always gives me insane migraines and neck pain, so I didn’t notice a difference otherwise.
Hoooowever. I went back a week later for a second appointment, and after some tests he told me my posture was 70% better than the first time I came in. He did another adjustment (if you don’t know anything about NUCCA, you just lie on your side and they very gently poke your neck. I have no clue how this shit works).
Almost immediately after the appointment, I could tell I was in less pain. Fast forward a week, and I realized that I hadn’t had to take pain meds that week. At all. Fast forward another week, and it’s now been 14 days since I’ve had to take ANY pain medication. I used to have migraines every single day. I have not had a single one.
I still have to move positions frequently and have some non-pain symptoms that can be disabling, but for contrast, even when I was on a preventative migraine med that worked really, really well, I was still taking excedrin or a prescription abortive med at least every other day, often every day. I absolutely can’t fathom that I haven’t even had to take ibuprofen for two weeks now.
Now, let me preface this by saying, I have no clue how well this would help with Chiari-caused symptoms. But I wanted to share this here because I know EDS, cranial-cervical instability, and neck/head trauma are often co-occurring and can exacerbate Chiari symptoms.
I have an old whiplash injury, cervical kyphosis, two bulging discs, low-lying tonsils, and hypermobility/lose ligaments in my neck, and I honestly can’t believe two sessions has minimized my pain so drastically for these two weeks.
I am not trying to give medical advice, but I do want to share my experience here because even though NUCCA clearly can’t cure Chiari, if you have co-morbidities specifically around your neck and head… maybe it could be kind of miraculous for you too.
Unfortunately, I live in a rural area so I have to drive five hours there and back for every appointment, and beforehand I was sure that I’d make an effort to go maybe once a month, likely every two months. Now, I’m digging through my network to see if there is a way I can stay in the city for a week at a time and get more frequent treatments. Because if two sessions helped this much, what could regular sessions do?? I’m really blown away tbh.
A final note to add that I read some stories on Reddit about really sketchy, skammy NUCCA practices. I have no doubt they exist, so if you ever do consider going, I recommend checking out the directory at www.nucca.org, always read the reviews of the business (even do a Google search to find websites with 3rd party reviews) and Google the chiropractobusiness name and click the “News” search option, just to make sure they’re not doing anything sketchy.

44F who has yo-yo’d in weight over the years. In my early 30’s I was 135-140 and a size 4-6. Now I hover around 155bs (the past three years) and a size 8. . Prior to that I was pushing 185…left a bad relationship which reduced stress and incorporated much healthier diet. I hate going to the gym so have only ever done yoga here and there over the years. Problem is my stomach is large. Even at a size 4, I had a tummy/tire bulge. I’m a size 8 now but always a tire roll. If I size up it’s too big. I love my dresses but boom - stomach. It’s like I’m pregnant but not. Never had kids so not a baby belly.
At the point where I genuinely enjoy yoga, feel energized and the local studio is “hot yoga” focused and offers hot vinyassa, core fusion flow, hot Pilates, birkham style, yoga Indra, etc.
While I could stand to loose 10 pounds the story of my life is always a stomach that seems to be a size bigger than my pant size. Is there hope for me? Will doing the cardio heavy classes 4x a week help my stomach?

Context:The Ushmengar are a Chaos warband dedicated to Vashtorr. They were initially part of the Astral Claws, but when Huron was defeated during the Badab War, they ended up getting lost in the warp and they dedicated themselves to Vashtorr. These Space Marines in particular were some of the first Astral Claws that the Executioners slaughtered during the Badab War, and the Warband was formed by the survivors of their rampage.
In this short story, the Executioners, having just finished a Penitent Crusade, were hunting for the Ushmengar. They had managed to pinpoint them to a Mechanicum forgeworld, and the Death Speaker (Executioner's version of a Chaplain) of the chapter, an Astartes named Razel, a Librarian named Igikura, and a group of Bladeguard descended onto the planet. When they found the Chaos lord of the Ushmengar, named Kagal, this is what happened

The Chaos Space Marine cocked its head to one side, eyes boring into Razel’s. When the Death Speaker was within reach, it nodded and spread its arms wide. The Executioner swung his crozius. The fractal form of the Heretic Astartes shivered as Sharur connected with it. There was the roar of a vast furnace underscored by the shriek of overtaxed bellows, the clanking of gears and the hammering of pistons, and the Ushmengar vanished like smoke blown in the wind, leaving only a chorus of trailing screams.

After this, Razel and his men continued to go deeper into the Manufactorium and ended up fighting a bunch of Ushmengar

The Death Speaker swung his crozius, but the Chaos Space Marine dodged the attack. The strike went wide, cracking the side of the furnace. Razel punched out with his pistol and sent his opponent’s bolter flying off. Undeterred, the Ushmengar ripped off a piston hammer from a slain ogryn and arrested Razel’s downward swing. Muscles strained, his sinew coils contracted and he drove the Heretic Astartes onto one knee. The Ushmengar’s composure broke and he roared at the Death Speaker. With a burst of vigour he regained his footing and shook Razel off. Burst fire from the Executioner’s pistol stitched an arc across his helmet, which cracked, exposing his metallic face beneath. The delineation between the organic and inorganic had become blurred to the extent that they had become one and the same. Oil bled from ruined armour and unclean flesh-metal.
Razel swung the hammer, only to have it kicked from his hand. The Chaos Space Marine charged at Razel and tackled him from his midriff, pushing him backwards into the bulging blowpipes of the blast furnace. Wedging the absolver pistol in the seal between helmet and gorget, the Executioner emptied the magazine into the traitor’s neck. The Ushmengar’s grip slackened, and Razel pushed him backwards before gripping the crozius with both hands and bringing it down with all his might on his hated foe’s head. It burst in a shower of metal and burning blood oil.

After this, the Executioners then proceed to go deeper into the Manufactorium

A storm had broken out at the end of the hall. Lightning flashed, lancing out from furnace to furnace as a rain of brimstone fell. An unholy radiance pulsed in the penumbral gloom, accompanied by the skirling of bronze horns lining the altar. The light rose out of the chancel of the command fane and drifted towards the Death Speaker and the Epistolary, who had advanced ahead to the binary-etched plaza. Within the pulsing storm was Kalag.
Molten metal was siphoned off the blast furnaces, forming fiery wheels into an armillary sphere spinning around the floating Ushmengar. The skitarii shrieked in binharic as they were lifted from the raised walkways, torn towards the eye of the churning storm. They were disassembled, their flesh withering into ash whilst their bionics melded into the spinning rings upon which bleeding eyes had formed. As Kalag moved towards Razel and Igikura, a forge-vault vast beyond imagining spread out behind him, the hellish vision overlapping the reality of the manufactorum. There was the roar of colossal furnaces, the heave and gasp of monumental bellows, and the clang of countless hammers, thudding pistons and clanking gears, underpinned by the screaming of tortured souls fuelling the forges.
Whereas Kalag’s form had been ephemeral before, a charcoal sketch jumping in and out of focus, now it was wholly corporeal. His armour was burned black, running with unclean oils and unguents. Mechadendrites writhed from between the plates like fungal growths, straining for some dire unity with the emergent daemonic mechanism. Around him were the rings of the armillary sphere, which were both armour and a mechanism to unravel reality, spinning faster until they were a blur as the warpsmith approached them
Up ahead, Igikura stood alone, defiant. The crystalline matrix of his axe blazed, focusing his power before it lanced upwards into Kalag. For a moment, the spinning rings slowed and fire raged down upon the Epistolary, enveloping the Executioner. The apotropaic sigils upon his armour shone migraine-bright as they earthed the worst effects of the warpsmith’s attack. The Librarian’s mind was in the throes of a fever dream, the backwash of the Ushmengar’s barrage bruising his soul.
Sensing his brother’s agony, Razel rose and swung, striking again. A resonant peal shivered through the armillary sphere to no discernible effect.
Kalag, whose attention had been thoroughly upon Igikura, glanced at him, his quasar-like gaze boring into Razel’s own. A high-pitched screech preceded the obliteration of Razel’s helm display. His armour felt heavier. The fibre-bundle muscles tensed and servos halted, keeping him upright. Straining, he raised his hands and took off his helmet. When he beheld the ashes of penitence streaking down Razel’s defiant face, the warpsmith sneered. ‘Lapdog of the False Emperor.’ His voice thundered like the hammer of a god striking an anvil
Razel bared his teeth in response, glistening with blood. ‘You were supposed to die at Badab.’ ‘Oh but you see, I did die. We were marooned in the immaterium after our warp drives failed. Bereft, betrayed by a rotting Imperium and an unkind god bedecked in fool’s gold. Where was Lufgt Huron then? His promises and his lies? We no longer need him, nor your carrion god. We have a new divinity to serve!’ Kalag turned towards the growing portal behind him, his arms encompassing the hellish scene and the towering daemonic figure with scythe-like wings who was looking down at the Executioners with an amused interest. ‘Behold the Arkifane! Our salvation! We will deliver this forge-temple of Mars to him!’
"Brother…" Igikura’s voice was straining with titanic effort. "I will not make it to the end." The Death Speaker growled. The Librarian forestalled him. "Spare me your protestations. I will distract him and hold the rings, but I am not strong enough to make the final blow. That falls to you. May your own Penitent Crusade be over after this."
Igikura’s mind soared in the warp like the rising sun. He burned with immaterial energies. Coruscating lightning cascaded down his limbs and flared off him in streamer arcs, with a branching spark earthing itself in the Death Speaker’s crozius. One last parting gift from brother to brother.
Razel wasted no time. With the warpsmith’s attention upon the Epistolary, his armour was free. He trudged forward, pausing only to pick up Igikura’s axe whilst hefting his crozius. Breaking into a run, he leapt upon one of the stilled rings. Razel hurled the force axe. It spun, blazing, still saturated with Igikura’s psychic might and sacrifice. The blade wedged fast into Kalag’s breastplate, tendrils of darkness slithering out of the wound. A few moments later, Razel was upon him with Sharur, imbued with a shred of the Epistolary’s empyric strength. The warpsmith raged, blocking the Death Speaker’s strike with a cog-toothed, daemonic axe. Mechadendrites speared through Razel’s armour, biting deep into his flesh. Gurgling blood, the Executioner drew the mace back and slammed it forwards, again and again, shattering his foe’s armour in a frenzy until his corrupt essence could no longer be contained. The unravelling of Kalag was like that of a collapsing star. The death throes screamed out from his unwinding body, black flame rising between the plates, his flesh unmade into ash.

As far as I'm aware, since Vashtorr was introduced to the setting a year ago, this has been the first mention of an Astartes warband dedicated to him. This is a really cool depiction of them, and I hope we get to see more in the future

Hello I have had two losses one at 18 weeks in July and my recent loss at 21 weeks with my 18 week loss we caught my IC real late this pregnancy I had a preventative but around 18 weeks my cervix was starting to shorten by my next appointment I was dilated with bulging membranes we aren’t sure why I started dilating I have an appointment over phone with Dr.Thorp tomorrow as I seen so many success stories about his TVCIC now my Question how many of you had a TVC fail before doing TVCIC I know it’s not talked about much because most can’t do it my doctors are trying to go straight to TAC but I’m not really there yet

I just wanna tell a story.
I was covering for a 9th grade art class recently. They had a project. Choose an artist - any visual artist - and make a poster that met the following conditions: it had facts about the artist, and it had five miniature replicas of their work that you drew. To someone who likes art, this is a fun and easy project. To someone who doesn't, this is still a project that doesn't require much effort, and could still get some fun squeezed from it.
What I ended up witnessing: three of about 14 students chose Leonardo Da Vinci, most likely because he's what shows up if you just Google 'artist'. Three more chose the same artist that was used in the example in the instruction sheet.
I strolled around the room to see what people were up to. I point to a kid's poster, and read a line out loud. "Leonardo was an illegitimate child, fortunately." Now just what the HELL does that mean? I ask the kid. "I don't know," he says. "Okay but first of all, do you know what an illegitimate child is?"
"A child who isn't legitimate?"
"Well, yeah, no, it's a child whose parents weren't married and maybe we don't know who one of the parents were. But more to the point, why is that fortunately?"
"I dunno. I just copied it off the site."
Another student cuts in: "Yeah, I found the same site. That's how it's written."
"Well didn't you read the rest of the paragraph?"
He turns his computer to me, and indeed that line in the bolded heading for a paragraph. A bulging ad that refuses to fully load interrupts the paragraph, so I can't see how the paragraph ends or what makes Leonardo's illegitimacy fortunate.
I probably could have had a small sliver of fun doing this project, but they sure weren't having any. It definitely resonated with the common complaint on this sub where kids will say "Why don't we do anything fun?"
Because you do everything the least fun way possible.

I overwhelmed with happiness, and so I thought I’d share my story, and in hope I can help at least one person. To start, I have four bulge disc. L1-L2, L3-L4(10mm bulge), L4-L5, and L5-S1. Short back ground, I’ve been dealing with bulge disc since 2018, started when I went to a chiropractor, and the next day and had to go to the hospital. Meaning, I was carried by seven firefighters down a flight of stairs while I was crying my face off because I could not walk and was in so much pain.
This year two more disc gave out over a stupid sport accident. Believe it or not curling, my hip gave out. And well it pissed my back off.
Okay rehab. I did 5 massages, three physio, three acupuncture. Was not helping. At least my physio called it big time and the MRI confirmed it.
In 2021 I started disc decompression, it helped a lot but the chiropractor was charging a lot. So in 2024 I was hesitant, but I found another place that charged less because I understand you have to go for at least 12 or more to make an impact on the disc. Well I finished my 12 and have three more to go. Yes I do believe it is helping.
What I have learned this year is about 5% dextrose given I natural Path doctors. Possibly MD as well but I’m seeing a NP.
I received it today and within 4 hours my pain in the inside and outside went away. In Canada it seem impossible to find a doctor that does Interdisc PRP. Im so happy I went for the epidural, just to have very little pain at this moment is a small victory. I’m hoping with creating a healthy environment via the disc decompression, and introducing the 5% dextrose, and of course will go for a few more, then add prp to my post exterior muscle will save me.
FYI I went to the surgeon in 2021 when I had drop foot and the doctor did not want to operate, so I’ve had to make pain management a huge part of my life.
I’m not a doctor, I just want to share because, no one will say do everything to get better, they may just believe in what they are pushing.
I’m hoping that if I can help just one person I’m happy. Because I’ve been in pain for three past 14 weeks, and I’m finally able to feel like I’ve make progress.

call me names.
I lock myself in a room, small dusty room - the dust is mostly dirt blows in through the open windows. pollen. it makes you sneeze, me sneeze, even after I close the windows, when it's getting too cold. call me 'sniffles', that's a name you could call me.
someone is afraid, long time they've been afraid and their fear makes them called 'fraidy cat'. they're shuddering. i look over at them in the corner and they shudder harder - i step closer, they shudder harder - like excited atoms, the friction, they start to glow. fire is burning in the corner of the room with them, in them, around them, and now the wallpaper (pale blue with little pink roses here and there) is charred black. hold out a hand (to offer them comfort), but the time is past (for comfort) and the soot blackens your fingertip. i wrote something in the soot like a dirty or a foggy car window (outside or inside, warm or cold). the wall was warm from their little inferno fire burning fire fire but it was years ago (the two steps across the room were years) and your finger doesn't burn, cold like a wall is cold. close the windows. the ashes make sniffles sneeze.
call yourself something big: you can be 'ace' or 'joe cool' or 'the fonz' or 'bullit' or 'brainy smurf' or 'indiana jones' or 'mr. creosote', point is that you've got a lot to give. I'm you. I know i'm you because in mirrors you look me right in the eye. I look over your shoulder. I push a boulder. The moon is like a boulder in space, weightless, and the earth and the sun are pushing it together. One does more work than the other. Rumor has it the moon's just an affectation the earth came up with to impress the sun. instead of reading this you should read that calvino story about the moon.
anyway, the moon's something big. all the dogs howl at it - of course they would. they're just a piece of the earth same as all of us, so it's a kind of arrogance then, the moonhowl, it's look-at-me look-how-great-I-am. I have some barbed wire too, the two dogs on opposite sides, one that's free and the other that isn't, the free one gets stuck below in the middle of the night and bleeds to death, the unfree one runs in circles pointlessly, digs a rut in the ground that matches the fence - the clever observation would be that the one with the name, 'fido' or 'rex' or 'killer', that despite being trapped in the boundary of the fence he's the one who's really free, and the one who has no name (he never had any use for one) is imprisoned in his own way, not by the fence but by his exclusion from the things that matter, the naming of things, etc. that's what you might write if you were trying to be clever.
instead of being clever, you could write the most obvious thing in the world. you could recite it, out loud, in public. you could read and write and recite to delight, the light that burns twice as bright, scribble with some graphite, at night. the persistent rumor (as advanced by the koyannisqatsi guy (that word, so mysterious and alien, of course actually just swiped like everything else from the people it once belonged to, belongs to him now)) that television rots children's brains has little basis in reality. i spent half my life watching television. if i remember correctly the gimmick in this film of his was that the kids were all zombies staring at the television, and the television was showing the disney adaptation of pinnochio or something. maybe it was dumbo. these are both films about being a prisoner. (sniffles might have been that disney dwarf, call him 'sneezy')
the thing i was getting at is that the cathode ray tube is where electrons go. your brain, your personality, it's all the same thing, electrons. they're stuck in your brain. some people believed that x-rays or gamma radiation or something were leeching out of the CRTs and this was why everyone was 'getting dumber', and they believed also that the programming itself was to blame, that if only we made the television more Moral and Upright and Proper things would finally fall into place. it never occurred to them that television was downstream of society itself, that is, them and their actions, the ones they do on purpose as well as the ones they do without thinking. in the cartoon, the wolf goes bananas because of how much of a hard-on he has for red riding hood, everyone is laughing when a train whistle comes out of his head or his eyes bulge out of their sockets, or his tongue is suddenly 50 feet long and unrolls like a red carpet, they laugh and the thought process which produces this hilarious moment is "sometimes desire is like your tongue unrolling like a carpet", "sometimes sex is like steam coming out of your ears", "sometimes your heart beats and every pump it's jutting ten feet out of your chest"
more and more quietly you walk up some stairs. they're creaky and you don't want to wake anyone. i say more and more because the first time you climb them, many years ago, it's too loud and you make the neighbors angry, and even though they don't tell you about it with words, you get the message. (one day you'll build a house with stairs that never creak or stairs that always creak, and this will solve the problem once and for all) the same goes for the heart-beats. heart beats too loud or too quietly. softly the heart beats. beats me.

"You gotta know that there's an art to it, Ezra," Hitch said, cutting another piece of duct tape.
The sleeves of his weather-beaten coat were shoved all the way up his arms, to stop the fabric from falling over his knuckles while he was working, and goosebumps lined his skin. He was strapping a rubber chicken to the back of his truck, over the lens of the shattered backup camera, with the legs pointing down so that they hung a couple inches above the ground. There were dents in the hood from the crash last week, and scratches along the door from scraping into a curb. The chicken, hopefully, would keep him from breaking anything else.
"You can't go cheap," Hitch said. "The cheap rubber chickens only make noise when pressure lets go. That's no good. As soon as I back up into something, I want this chicken to be screaming like it’s in the depths of hell."
“Sure thing,” I said in a monotone, leaning against the side of the truck.
There were scrambled electronic parts piled in the back of the truck, the innards of a radio, a broken computer, tangled wires, a couple loose pairs of earbuds. He found the parts in alleyways or bummed them off his friends for a couple bucks or stole them from the vacation homes that were left empty for most of the year. Then he sold them for a profit at the scrapyard. Hitch had bounced between minimum-wage jobs for a while after high school, spending a couple months as a bagger at the grocery store or as a seasonal worker at the farm two hours down the highway. He'd never stuck with it. At the very least, the scrapyard got him enough money to eat and occasionally spend a night in a motel when he got tired of sleeping in his car.
Hitch pressed the last piece of tape in place and grinned up at me. "I've got something for you, duck."
The nickname came from when I’d broken my leg as a child and waddled around in a cast until it was healed. I hated it with a burning passion, and I glared at Hitch with the ease of twenty-one years of practice. He had a duck tattoo at the base of his thumb that he’d gotten in a back-alley shop as a teenager. He said that he’d gotten it to remind him of me, and the fact that I hated the nickname was just a bonus. It was shaky-lined, with an uneven face, but he loved it anyway.
The handle stuck when Hitch tried to open the door, a consequence of the rust collecting in the crevices of the car and running down the sides like blood from a cut. The car groaned when the door finally popped open, a metal against metal screech that had me flinching away. Hitch dug through the cluttered fast food containers in the passenger-side footwell, eventually coming up with a crinkly paper bag. He waved away the flies buzzing around the opening of the bag and held it out to me.
The last time Hitch had brought me food, I’d gotten food poisoning because he’d left it out in the midday sun for two days. The donut was squished slightly, and the icing was stuck to the bag. I still ate it, grimacing at the harsh citrus flavor. Taking Hitch’s food was an instinct engraved from the days when Dad had given us a can of kidney beans for dinner and Hitch had drank the juice, leaving the beans for me.
I rarely went hungry anymore, three mostly square meals a day and granola in my pockets just in case, but habits didn’t die easy.
These days, Hitch only brought me food when he wanted my help, like when he saw a place he wanted to hit but was worried about doing it alone.
I got in the car, like I always did.
We drove past the cluster of seafood-themed restaurants with chipped paint decks, the beachfront park where there were always shifty-eyed men sitting under the slide, the single room library where all the books had been water damaged in the flood last year. The change was quick as we drove across Main Street, heading closer to the beach. The roads were freshly paved, the concrete a smooth black except where the sun had already started to pick away at it. The three-story homes lining the sides of the street were crouched on elegant stilts, with space underneath for a car or three. Most of the garages were empty, with the lights off and curtains drawn in the house. Come summer, the streets would be swarming with tourists and vacationers, but until then, most of the buildings nearest to the beach were unoccupied.
Hitch stopped as the sun started to go down at a house that was leaning precariously out towards the beach, tilted ever so slightly, the edge of its foundation buried in the shifting sand of the beach. It certainly looked deserted, with an overgrown yard and blue paint peeling off the door in sheets.
Hitch took his hammer out of the backseat, hoisting it over his shoulder. It was two feet of solid metal with rags wrapped around the head to muffle the sound of the hits. Hitch squared up, bending his knees and holding the hammer like a baseball bat. Before he could swing, though, the door creaked open on its own, the hinges squeaking. The house beyond was dark enough that I could only make out general shapes, glimpsing the curve of a sofa to the left, what was maybe the shimmer of a chandelier on the other side.
Hitch lowered his hammer, looking vaguely disappointed that he didn’t get to use it. “That’s…weird as hell.”
“Maybe the deadbolt broke, maybe they forgot to lock it, it doesn’t matter,” I hissed, checking our surroundings for other people again. “Just hurry up and get inside before someone calls the cops.”
Hitch flicked the lightswitch on the wall, and the lights flickered on. They were dim, buzzing audibly and blinking off occasionally. The walls were plastered with contrasting swatches of wallpaper and splattered with random colors. There was neon orange behind the dining table, a galaxy swirl in the kitchen, and on the ceiling there was a repeating floral pattern covered in nametag stickers. Each of the stickers was filled out with The Erlking. Chandeliers hung in every room, three or four for each, and rubber ducks sat on every table. A miniature carousel sat in the corner along with a towering model rocket.
Sand was heaped on every surface, at least a couple inches everywhere. It was piled in the corners and stuck to the walls, and it covered the floor in a thick blanket. Our hesitant steps into the house left footprints clearly outlined in the sand.
Hitch took a cursory look around and headed immediately for the TV mounted on the wall. “Look out the windows and tell me if anyone is coming.”
I shook the sand out of the blinds and pulled them open, then had to brush sand off of the window before I could see anything.
Hitch was quick, practiced at finding and appropriating the things that were worth taking. He came back to me with an armful of electronics and chandeliers, dumping it at my feet before turning to head deeper into the house again.
There was a thump, somewhere upstairs, and then footsteps, slow and deliberate. Hitch froze at the threshold of the room, then ran for the door with me just ahead of him, sand flying out from under our feet.
My hand was almost brushing the doorknob, close enough that I could see the light from the streetlamp outside streaming in through the cracks in the door. My fingers touched the wood and it gave under my touch, becoming malleable and warm. I yelped, stumbling backwards, and the door started to melt. The paint ran down in thick drops, pooling at the bottom of the door, and the wood warped like metal being welded. The soft edges of the door ran into the walls until there was no sign of an exit ever being there.
“Well, well, well,” said a cultured voice with just an edge of snooty elitism. “What do we have here?”
The man was well over eight feet tall, with long black hair covering his eyes. He was wearing a yellow raincoat with holes cut out of the hood to accommodate the deer antlers jutting upwards from his head. There was sand settled on his shoulders and hovering around his head like a halo.
“Who the fuck are you?” Hitch said, inching towards a window.
He smiled, just a little bit, and his teeth shone in the dim light. “I am the Erlking.”
Hitch nodded, and seemed about to respond. I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him towards the window. I could feel sand in the wind roaring against my back as the Erlking growled in anger, the grains scraping harshly against my cheeks.
We were almost to the window when Hitch was ripped away from me, and I came to a startled halt. The sand had formed long grasping arms that pressed Hitch against the floral wallpaper. His wrists were held tight, and as I watched, a sandy hand wrapped around his mouth and forced its way between his teeth. He gagged, and sand trickled out of the corners of his mouth.
The Erlking strolled towards him, not seeming to be in any sort of rush. “You know, I’m not very fond of your yapping.”
He made an idle gesture and the sand wrapped around my ankles, tethering me in place.
“I yap all the time,” Hitch said. “Three-time olympic yapper, that’s me. Best to just let me go now and save yourself some trouble.”
The Erlking tapped a manicured nail against Hitch’s mouth, hard enough to hurt, judging by the way he flinched away. “But why would I ever let you go when I’ve gone to this much trouble to catch you and your sister? It’s so hard, these days, to find people that no one will miss.”
Hitch struggled against the sand, trying to escape and failing. “What do you want with us, then? You just said it, we’re nobody.”
“I’m fae, dear one,” the Erlking said. “I get my power from my followers. And I think that you two will make lovely additions to my flock.”

He flicked Hitch's nose and Hitch gasped. Feathers started to form on his arms, popping out from under his skin in a spray of blood.
Hitch pushed off the wall, using his bound hands as a fulcrum, and his knees crashed into the Erlking’s stomach. The Erlking fell backwards, wheezing, and the sand around my ankles loosened.
Hitch made desperate eye contact with me as feathers shot up his neck and jerked his head towards the window. The message was obvious. Run.
The last thing I saw before crashing out the window and into freedom was Hitch’s body twisting, his arms wrenching into wings and feathers covering every inch of his skin. By the time I landed on the concrete outside, he was a small black bird, held tightly in the Erlking’s hands. The whole building was sinking into the ground, burnished-gold sand piling up over top and streaming from the windows.
Thirty years later, I saw Sam’s Supernatural Consultation and Neutralization written in neat, looping handwriting on a piece of paper taped to the door. The tape was peeling at the corners and the paper was yellowed with age, but there was obviously care put into the sign, in its perfectly centered text and looping floral designs drawn over the edges in gold marker.
I knocked, hesitantly, drawing my woolen coat closer around my shoulders. I’d bought it as a fiftieth birthday gift for myself, and I took comfort in the heavy weight of it over my shoulders.
“Coming!” someone called from within the depths of the office.
There were a couple crashes, and the sound of paper shuffling. Eventually, the door was opened by a young woman with ketchup stains on her shirt and pencils stuck through her hair.
“Hi, I’m Sam, I specialize in supernatural consultation and hunting, how may I help you today?” Sam said, customer-service pep in her voice. She stood in the doorway, solidly blocking entry into the office.
“My name is Ezra, I’m for a consultation. I emailed you but you didn’t respond?” I shifted in place, suddenly feeling awkward.
“Oh! Yeah, I lost the password for the email ages ago. Sorry for the bad welcome, I get lots of people thinking I’m crazy or pulling a prank and harassing me.”
She ushered me into the office, clearing papers off one of the chairs to make room for me to sit down. There was a collection of swords along one wall, all of them polished to perfection, several with deep knicks in the metal which indicated that they’d been used heavily.
“So what can I help you with?” Sam asked again, more sincere this time.
“Thirty years ago, my brother was turned into a bird,” I started. I’d told this story so many times that it barely felt ridiculous to say anymore. I was used to the disbelieving looks, the careful pity. But Sam just nodded along, face open and welcoming.
“I’ve almost given up on finding him, at this point,” I said. “But I saw your ad in the newspaper, and…here I am, I suppose.”
“Here you are,” Sam echoed, smiling. She pulled one of the pencils out of her hair and took a bit of paperwork off of one of her stacks, turning it over so that the blank side sat neatly in front of her. “Tell me everything.”
I told Sam everything, and she wrote it all down, pencil scratching along the paper.
The last part of the story was always the hardest to tell. “I left him there. I ran and I didn’t look back.”
I had been to dozens of detectives and investigators over the years, once the police had dropped Hitch’s case. I’d been to professional offices with smartly-dressed secretaries and met scraggly men in coffee shops. All of them had given me the same look, pity and annoyance all mixed up into a humor-the-crazy-lady soup. Sam, though, just seemed thoughtful.
Sam leaned forward and put a hand over mine, carefully, like she thought that I would pull away. “Sometimes you have to leave people behind.”
I tightened her hold on Sam’s hand and drew it towards me, like I could make Sam listen if only I squeezed tight enough. “But that’s why I’m here. I don’t want to leave him behind.”
“Okay then. I’ll do my best to help you.” Sam agreed, finally. Then she paused, and said softly, “You know…I think I met your brother once. He might have saved my life. He’s certainly why I started in this business.”
“Really? What happened?” I asked.
This is the story that Sam told me, related to the best of my abilities:
It was a new moon, so the only illumination came from the stars gazing idly down and distant porch lights shining across the scraggly brush of the dunes. Sam’s neighbors were decent people who cared about baby turtles, so the lights were a low, unobtrusive red, and the ocean sloshed like blood. Sam walked on the beach almost every night, drawing back the gauzy pink curtains and clambering out her bedroom window. She didn’t often bother to be quiet; her mama worked the late shift and came home exhausted. As long as Sam got home before the sun, her mama would never find out that she paced the shoreline and dreamed of inhaling sand until her lungs became their own beach.
The sky was lightening. The sun would come up soon, and that meant Sam’s time on the beach was over. She needed to get back to her real life, go to her fifth grade class and stop that nonsense, as her mother would say. Her mother loved to say things like that, pushing Sam into her proper place by implication alone.
“She’s a good kid, of course, but she’s a bit…” Her mother would trail off there, usually getting a commiserating expression from whoever she was talking to. Sam always wondered how that sentence would have finished. She’s a bit strange, maybe. She’s a bit intense. She’s a bit abrasive. She’s quiet enough but when Jason tried to steal her pencil in math class, she stabbed him in the hand so hard that the lead tattooed him.
Her mother was better, for the most part. The days of her stocking up the fridge, and leaving a post-it note on the counter, and leaving for days at a time were gone. But Sam still stepped around the place on the kitchen tile where her mother had collapsed and caved her head in, even though the bloodstains had been replaced with new tile.
“Your auntie got an abortion, you know,” her mother had said from her place on the couch, slurring her words. “Pill in the mail and then bam, no more baby.”
She had clapped her hands together to illustrate her point. Her mother jerked forward and grabbed Sam by the wrist, then, staring up at her until Sam met her eyes.
“I love you, you know? But sometimes I wonder…” She settled back onto the couch. “Yeah. I wonder.”
She’d gotten up, then, back to the kitchen. She’d been stumbling, a shambling zombie of a woman. The ground in the entryway of the kitchen was raised, ever so slightly, and her mother went down hard. Her head cracked against the tile, chin first, and she didn’t move.
Sam had been the one to call the ambulance. She had stared at the scattering of loose teeth on the ground while she waited, and considered what her life would be like with a dead mom. Not so bad, she thought, and immediately felt guilty for it.
Her mom was better, now, for the most part. But Sam still stepped around the place on the kitchen floor where she had collapsed. There was still a matchbox hidden under her bed with the gleaming shine of her mother’s lost teeth, two canines and a molar. It was nice, having a piece of her mom to keep. Even if she left again, Sam would still have part of her.
Sam sighed, and turned away from the ocean. As she faced towards the low dunes further up the beach, she saw a sandcastle sitting nestled among them. It was such a strange sight that her eyes skipped over it at first, almost automatically, disregarding it because it was so out of place.
Sam found sandcastles out on the beach sometimes, usually half-collapsed and on the verge of being washed away by the waves, but she had never seen anything like the sandcastle in front of her. It was life-sized, something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Scottish highlands, with spires shooting up above her head and carefully etched out bricks lining each side. The front wall was dominated by an arched set of double doors, twice her height, with a portcullis nestled at the top, ready to be dropped. All of it was lovingly detailed, down to the rust on the tips of the towers and the wood grain of the door. It was made out of wet, densely-packed sand, held together impossibly. It had not been there two hours ago, when she had come to the beach.
There was a bird sitting on the overhang of the door, small and black.
As soon as she took a step towards the sandcastle, the bird shook out its feathers and swooped down towards Sam, landing at her feet with a little stumble.
“Hey, kid, get out of here,” said the bird.
Sam closed her eyes, very deliberately. When she opened them, the bird was still there. Sam considered herself a very reasonable person, so she immediately drew the most logical conclusion. The bird was, she was almost certain, a demon.
“Trust me, you don’t want to run into Mr. Salty, the queen bitch himself,” the bird said.
“Mr. Salty?” Sam inquired, polite as she knew how to be. She edged to the side, trying to get a good angle to kick the bird like a soccer ball.
The bird did something similar to a wince, all its feathers fluffing up then settling back down. “Ah, don’t call him that. He’d turn you into a toad.”
The bird gestured with its head, towards the looming sand structure. “That’s his castle. He’s in there, probably scuttling along the ceiling or some shit because that’s the sort of weirdo he is.”
Sam nodded, encouraging. She pulled back her foot and lined up her shot, the way she’d seen athletes do on TV. She aimed right for its sharp beak and let loose. The bird saw it coming, its beady eyes widening, and it cawed in distress. It flapped away, avoiding her kick only to fall backward into the sand in a scramble of wings.
“What’s your fucking problem?” it squawked. “I was trying to help you!”
“I don’t need the help of a demon,” Sam yelled, trying to remember the exorcism that her mama had taught her once, because her mama believed in being prepared for anything.
“I’m not a demon,” the bird said indignantly.
It was at about that moment that Sam gave up and just decided to roll with it.
“What are you, then?” Sam asked.
The bird shuffled its clawed feet, looking about as awkward as it could, given that it didn’t really have recognizable facial expressions. “Technically I’m a familiar of the Erlking, prince of the fae, but I prefer to be called Hitch.”
“You can’t blame me for assuming, though,” Sam said. “Ravens do tend to be associated with murder.”
“Hey, excuse you,” Hitch said. “I’m a rook, not a raven. Ravens are way bigger.”
“Sure,” Sam said, not really paying attention. Her eyes had caught on the details of the sandcastle, and she was transfixed by the slow spirals of the sand, the strange beauty of it. She found herself stepping towards the great doors, lifting a hand to knock, and as she did, the sand warped in front of her eyes, heaving itself towards her with bulging slowness. The door creaked open before her, revealing a vast, empty room. Just before she stepped inside, she felt a piercing pain in her foot, and she yelped, leaping backwards.
Hitch pecked her again, really digging his beak in. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Sam glared at him, rubbing her foot. About to retort, she finally really took in the room inside the sandcastle, and her words died in her throat.
There was a body just past the threshold of the door, face down and limbs hanging limp at its sides. Long hair splayed out in a halo around its head.
“Don’t,” Hitch warned, suddenly serious. “Just leave, kid, I mean it. I’ve seen too many people go down this road and you don’t want to be one of them.”
Sam ignored him. She made her way across the beach, slipping with every step. The sand felt deeper, piling up around her feet in silent drifts. She picked up the nearest stick and poked the body with it through the door, ready to leap back if anything went wrong, staying firmly outside of the sandcastle.
This close, Sam could tell that it used to be a woman. Her head wasn’t attached to her body. It hadn’t been a clean amputation, either. Her upper body was bruised, with chunks taken out of it, and the bones in her neck hung mangled, not connected to anything.
“Well, I warned you,” Hitch said, defeated. “I did warn you.”
Sam nudged the head with the end of the stick, nudging it over so that she could see the face. Her mother stared back at her, torn to pieces, breath still wheezing from her lungs. She wasn’t blinking, just gazing forward with glazed eyes. Sweat dripped down from her hairline.
Sam screamed and dropped the stick, tripping over herself in her haste to get away.
Her mother’s eyes were wide and pleading, and she was mouthing desperate words at Sam. Her vocal cords were broken to bits, and the only sound that came out was a strained groan.
The head rolled, inching closer to Sam like a grotesque caterpillar.
Her mother gasped for air, torn lips fluttering. Finally, comprehensible words came out. “Help. Help me, daughter.”
“That’s not your mother,” Hitch said, quiet.
Sam knew that. Her mother was sleeping back at home, and anyways her mom had never asked for her help. She had an aversion to accepting charity, as she put it.
“Okay,” Sam said, shaking all over. “Okay.”
She backed away from the sandcastle, not looking away.
“Failure,” her mother hissed as she stepped away. “I never wanted a daughter like you.”
The sun came up over the horizon. The sandcastle, Hitch, and her mom all disintegrated into sand as the light hit them.
The beach, the next night, was almost exactly how I remembered it. The beams of our flashlights sent light bouncing across the dunes, illuminating the waves, and I imagined faces in the foam of the waves.
“I’ve been back here a hundred times. There’s nothing left,” I said.
Sam took the car key out of her purse and pointed it at the sand, adjusting the sword slung over her shoulder in order to do it. The key had belonged to Hitch; Sam had requested an item of his, and it was the only thing I had left. She rested the key on the sand and drew a circle around it, inscribing symbols around the borders.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Sam shrugged. “Not much, really. I’m…I guess you could say that I’m knocking.”
The key laid inert on the sand for long enough that I was just about to give up and go home, admit to myself that Hitch was dead and that I was a fool to believe that Sam could actually help me. Then a building started to take shape, flickering in and out like it was struggling to get away. With a pop of displaced air, the sandcastle settled into existence.
Sam banged on the entryway. Nothing happened. She did it again, harder, and scowled when the door still didn’t open.
“We demand entrance, under your honor,” Sam yelled. There was a hard rush of wind, and I gripped Sam’s arm to keep my balance, but the doors cracked open reluctantly.
The inside of the sandcastle consisted of one enormous hall, the roof arching up out of sight. Rafters crisscrossed from wall to wall, and a cobbled path led further into the building, but other than that, it was completely empty, except for the birds. There were thousands of them, perched on the rafters or hopping along the ground. They parted in front of Sam and I, and reformed behind us, leaving us in a small pocket of open space. They were all black-feathered, with sharp beaks and beady eyes.
The Erlking sat on a throne at the end of the hall, lounging across it with his feet up on the armrest. He watched them as they came forward, the soft caw of the birds the only sound.
“I am here to bargain for the life of my brother,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, before the Erlking could say anything.
The Erlking ignored her, tilting his head to look at Sam. “I remember you. I almost got you, once.”

Sam glared at him but didn’t respond.
“You want your brother,” The Erlking said to me, and he almost sounded amused. “Then go get him.”
As if by some sort of silent signal, every bird in the room took flight at once, and their cawing made me think of screams. I covered my head against the flapping of their wings, and my vision was quickly obscured by the chaotic movement of them. I found myself on my knees, just trying to escape them.
A hand met my shoulder. Sam urged me to my feet, and together we ran for the edge of the room, where the swarm was the thinnest. We pressed ourselves into the corner and the swarm spiraled tighter and tighter at the center of the room. It went on until there seemed to be no differentiation between the birds, all of them fused together into one creature.
When the chaos died down, the birds had become one mass, with wings and eyes and talons sticking out of its flesh, thrashing and chirping. Human body parts stuck out of it, bulging out from the feathers. It was hands, mostly, with a couple knees or staring eyes. The bird amalgamation had no recognizable facial features, but there was one long beak extending from the front of its head. Most of the body parts were concentrated around the beak, and they peeked out from where the beak connected with muscle, or grew from the tongue, nestled between the two crushing halves of the beak.
It turned its beak down and crawled forward, using the hands to balance. The fingers scrambled over the ground. I was afraid of centipedes as a child, and I felt that same crawling dread when it started moving.
“Holy shit,” Sam whispered, which was rather disappointing, because I had been hoping that at least one of us knew what to do.
The creature turned, a lurching movement that crushed some of the hands underneath it, and started heaving itself slowly towards our corner.
“Better hurry up!” the Erlking called from his throne.
It was blocking the exit, by then. The shifting body of it had moved to block us off. It ambled towards us and I tried to sink further into the corner.
As it approached, getting close enough that I could smell the stink of it, I saw a flash of a tattoo on one of the hands. I leaned in, trying to find it again, like looking for dolphins surfacing in the ocean. And again, I caught a glimpse of a duck tattoo, the tattoo that Hitch had gotten on his hand as a teenager.
I ripped away from Sam’s death grip and ran for the monster.
I fell to my knees in front of it, wincing as I impacted the ground, and reached into the nest of hands. I could feel them tearing at my forearms and ripping into me with their sharp nails, but I kept going. I pressed further in, up to my shoulder in a writhing mass of limbs, aiming for the spot where I had last seen that tattoo.
The hands were tugging at me, wrapping around my back and hair. They were pulling together, trying to draw me completely into the mass of them. I was aware of Sam at my side, anchoring me in place and bashing any hand that got too close with her sword or the sparks that leapt from her hands with muttered words. But I didn’t think it would be enough. They were too strong, and there were too many of them.
I was up to my waist in the hands when something grabbed my palm. I felt the way it clung to me, and the calluses on its palm, and I knew that I had found my brother.
I flung herself back. The hands didn’t want to let me go, and they fought the whole way, but slowly, I made progress. I kept hold of Hitch’s hand in mine the whole time, gripping it as hard as I could. I finally broke free, Hitch with me, and Sam was immediately charging the creature, able to use her sword with much greater strength without being worried about injuring Hitch. She swung it forward, and it sliced through the wrist of one of the hands. It fell without a sound, red sand flowing out of it. It deflated until it looked like dirty laundry, just a piece of limp flesh. The creature shrieked, scuttling away enough that the door was finally accessible. The three of us ran for it, Sam and I supporting Hitch between us.
I looked back as I left and found the Erlking staring right at me.
“Interesting,” he murmured, his voice carrying impossibly across the vast space between us.
The sandcastle collapsed behind us, the great walls falling in on themselves. We were out in the morning sun, the sandcastle disappearing as we watched. Hitch was on the ground in front of me, as young as he’d been thirty years ago, when he was captured. He started laughing, feathers puffing out of his mouth. He laughed until he cried and I hugged him in the way that he’d held me when I was young, in the times when my life had been defined by hunger and fear.
Hitch left, afterwards. He scratched at the pinhole scars covering his body, where feathers burst through his skin, and pulled his long sleeves down around his wrists. He didn’t know where he was going but he told me that he needed time
I had spent thirty years worth of time without him. I wanted to grab my brother by the shoulders and beg him to stay. But he flinched when I hugged him goodbye and he refused to go near sand and he stared distrustfully at the birds chirping in the trees. Hitch needed to go away and I loved him too much to stop him.
I sat out on the beach every morning. I felt the sun on my face and I waited for Hitch to come home.

I (m21) am concerned my brother (m18) might’ve put my dog's eye out at the end of May of last year as a result of conflict regarding a woman (f23). Some background: I initiated an unusual online relationship with a girl back at the end of 2020. We would respond to each other's Instagram stories with more stories, but then I stopped doing that because I became concerned that she had become involved with my brother. Then we started running into each other more and more on Omegle. We eventually had certain things we would say to identify each other, and we kinda had a situationship for a bit on there. Eventually, though, she lost her virginity to some other dude. Then, eventually, I think my brother and she might have had sex, and I had a mental breakdown, which brought it to the attention of my parents. They questioned my brother, but initially that night, he said he didn't know anything about it and walked away immediately. A little later, after I had gone back to my room, my parents questioned him again, and he got very emotional but said he didn't know what I was talking about. The next day, he made a point of waiting for me in the kitchen/living room area to ask me about what I thought he had done further. Then he came to talk to me and brought me a soda when I didn't come out of my room. My parents talked to me about it, but they didn't think it was a realistic concern. Later, I think she might have lost interest in my brother because she seemed to be increasingly interested in me sexually. Around that same time, I would often hear my brother yell out my name and not follow up and say things like “should we,” which I assume meant include me in playing some video game or a threesome. Then on August 12th, 2022, someone I'm fairly certain was the girl messaged me on Omegle in one of our conversations about being sexually assaulted by my brother twice. Six days later, she tweeted about a couple of bad experiences and no longer accepting the bare minimum. I think he might’ve been blackmailing her with statutory rape and using rape to control her. Skipping ahead, my dog lost his eye at the end of May 2023, on the night of a day where I'm pretty sure I heard my brother repeat something a few times when he first got home. It was either “(my name) could kick your ass” or “I wish (my name)would kick your ass.” Later that night, I was ranting to myself in the common room (the house is super tiny, so he definitely could hear me if he wanted to) about how I thought it made no sense for him to try to appear physically intimidating by hovering over me uncomfortably and trying to use his physicality in terms of martial prowess to appear attractive to a woman who knew that I was more competent in that regard. I went to sleep later that night. My dad said he heard my dog make a noise he'd never heard him make before, and the next morning, my dog's eye was bulging with no puncture wound or blood. So I guess my question is am I an asshole for thinking my brother might have done it?
Initial Symptoms (May 30, 2023): Discharge from the left eye for about 5-7 days. Owner suspected a possible attack by a feral cat. Dilated and non-responsive pupil, corneal edema, marked conjunctivitis, and chemosis. Increased intraocular pressure (48, 44, 44 mmHg). Follow-up and Recommendation for Surgery (June 7, 2023): No improvement, eye bulging, worsening condition. Diagnosis of glaucoma and luxated lens. Recommended enucleation (eye removal) due to the severity of the condition. Surgery (June 9, 2023): Pupil still dilated and non-responsive, corneal edema, marked conjunctivitis, chemosis, and luxated lens. No puncture wounds or signs of infection were noted by the vet.
TDLR: I'm (M21) worried my brother (M18) might have intentionally injured my dog, leading to his eye removal, due to conflicts involving a woman (F23) we both may have interacted with online. My dog's eye condition worsened quickly without any puncture wounds or signs of infection.

I feel like I've always had lower back pain on and off ever since I experienced (what I thought was) a pulled muscle when I was around 17 while rowing. I'm 35 now, and the pain this year has been so bad at times that it would wake me up, and spread to my left buttock and leg.
I had to stop my running routine. I decided to get it checked. Turns out I have DDD and bulges/herniation at L5-S1 and L4-L5 which is tugging on a few of my nerves. The spine DR pointed out that due to bone growth on top of one of the bulges it seems that I've already experienced herniation in the past... I'm guessing 18 years ago.
I'm currently on daily Ibuprofen and doing regular PT stretches, foam rolling, and exercises. The pain is bothering me, is on and off, but I'm trying to see if PT helps. I have a toddler and another one on the way, so reducing lifting or prolonged rest is not really an option.
I have more X-rays and surgical consult scheduled, and I'm also considering steroid injections. I've been reading stories about microdiscectomy and ADR here, and I'm trying to judge if this is something for me to undertake.
Anyone experienced something similar? Any stories about the pain going away through PT and exercise alone? I don't want it to get worse and I would like to "fix" it (yes, I know it might not be that simple, but I want to find the best option for me).
Attaching a bunch of MRI and DR results.
https://preview.redd.it/9oeld5p7n91d1.png?width=1292&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a8bf68e5a4cd384a7dbf0e033b87a1a23c70295
https://preview.redd.it/lsj4n4p7n91d1.png?width=3096&format=png&auto=webp&s=36a220d0d856bd83af0b72ac299acc13847daec4
https://preview.redd.it/8xp035p7n91d1.png?width=3028&format=png&auto=webp&s=524bed01c0a00612ca1e0a4fb296ea920f30a177

Narrative MRI LUMBAR SPINE WITHOUT CONTRAST ** HISTORY **: 35 years old, worsening chronic low back pain. ** TECHNIQUE **: MR images of the lumbar spine acquired without intravenous contrast. COMPARISON: None available. ** FINDINGS **: NUMBERING: Last fully formed disc space is designated L5-S1. SPINAL CORD: Normal conus. Conus terminates at the L1 level. DISCS: Multilevel disc dessication at L4-L5 and L5-S1. BONES: Normal vertebral alignment. Normal vertebral body height. Marrow signal is normal. SOFT TISSUES: Normal. T12-L1: No canal or foraminal stenosis. L1-L2: No canal or foraminal stenosis. L2-L3: No canal or foraminal stenosis. L3-L4: No canal or foraminal stenosis. Mild facet arthropathy bilaterally. L4-L5: Left asymmetric lateral disc bulge causing mild left neural foramen stenosis. Mild facet arthropathy bilaterally. L5-S1: Left asymmetric disc protrusion effacing the left lateral recess and compressing on the left S1 nerve root. No significant central canal stenosis or neural foramen stenosis. Mild facet arthropathy bilaterally. OTHER: None. 

Narrative MRI LUMBAR SPINE WITHOUT CONTRAST ** HISTORY **: 35 years old, worsening chronic low back pain. ** TECHNIQUE **: MR images of the lumbar spine acquired without intravenous contrast. COMPARISON: None available. ** FINDINGS **: NUMBERING: Last fully formed disc space is designated L5-S1. SPINAL CORD: Normal conus. Conus terminates at the L1 level. DISCS: Multilevel disc dessication at L4-L5 and L5-S1. BONES: Normal vertebral alignment. Normal vertebral body height. Marrow signal is normal. SOFT TISSUES: Normal. T12-L1: No canal or foraminal stenosis. L1-L2: No canal or foraminal stenosis. L2-L3: No canal or foraminal stenosis. L3-L4: No canal or foraminal stenosis. Mild facet arthropathy bilaterally. L4-L5: Left asymmetric lateral disc bulge causing mild left neural foramen stenosis. Mild facet arthropathy bilaterally. L5-S1: Left asymmetric disc protrusion effacing the left lateral recess and compressing on the left S1 nerve root. No significant central canal stenosis or neural foramen stenosis. Mild facet arthropathy bilaterally. OTHER: None. 

Please be a little patient with me. This is my first ever post on here. Anyways, back when I (26 non binary) worked at McDonalds for five years (unfortunately), I remember two ladies one right after each other. An absolute angel and the Karen. The angel was very patient and understanding, asking questions, and saying thank you. She paid and stepped as aide for the next customer. Before I could even get a word in this Karen looked at me and barked, ”I want exactly what I said the way I want it made or else I’m not paying”. Well okay then. She continues barking out orders to me giving me those crazy “I mean business eyes” while speaking. You know the ones where they look like they’re bulging out of their head. Anyway, she finally finished and stomped out of the way and I got to help make the orders. Then my rare petty brain kicked in and I had a plan. Both Angel and Karen had one item in common, the mocha frappe. A typical Frappe is the drink, whipped cream and chocolate drizzle. Any other topping will be an additional charge. So for Angel I added more chocolate drizzle in the cup in a fancy cool way, neatly poured the drink in the cup, added little more whipped cream then did the chocolate drizzle and caramel drizzle. Then I asked her if she would like some crushed Oreos on top which she declined. Then I handed it to her with the rest of her order and hoped she had a wonderful day. Then for Karen I made a normal frappe as is and handed it to her with the rest and also wished her a wonderful day. She. Was. Fuming! She demanded to know why the angel got all the extra condiments and hers was the way it was. I asked her if she would like the add ons and she yelled Uh Yeah”. So I ringed it up and told her it was gonna be an additional three fifty. Predictably she wasn’t happy about that. “I already paid i am not paying an additional three fifty”. ”Then unfortunately ma’am I can’t give you the extra condiments”. “WHY NOT!” I then happily used her line against her, “I gave you exactly everything you paid for”. As per usual she demanded the manager which is unfortunately where I end the story because I missed the exchanged as it was the end of my shift. Moral of the story, work with the employees, they will work with you. Act like a Karen, you will not get what you want. Ps thank you for all the laughs Charlotte!