I was 15 and oh so cool I had a 21 year old boyfriend. He was also my first actual boyfriend past the carry my books and hold my hand kind of thing.
For years I pushed it away. Even after I hit adulthood I excused it. I was more mature and responsible than most at 15. I had to be. Due to childhood abuse I had been raising my little brother (10 years difference) for 5 years. It was school and him only. I took him with me when I babysat for money because I had been buying my own school supplies and clothes since 12. I got home from school, waited for him to get home, then went about my day. He would get off the bus and we would walk down the road to the 3 kids I watched (3:30 pm to 5pm on school days, 6am to 5pm when there was no school, and every other Friday night 7pm to midnight for their parents date night, something I had started doing when I was 11). I would make dinner over there for the 3 kids and their parents getting it on the table just as they were getting home, my brother and I would walk home and I would make dinner for him and my younger sister once we got there.
Then I would set about cleaning the house. There were 6 of us but my older sister was the golden child. She was frequently out with friends or doing after school extra curriculars (something I never had the time or money for) and my younger sister was "too little" to do chores which wasn't true.
After that I would do my homework and I still managed to take honors courses and graduate early. So you see, I genuinely believed I was not the same.
When I became an adult and had my first child I refused to think about it. I refused to remember much about my teenage life. It was awful so why should I? On top of that I didn't have time. I worked 60-80 hours a week, spent every free moment I had with my husband and children (which wasn't enough). Even with my work schedule I managed to go on field trips, always have some baked goodies around, I was a sticklier for the 45 minute tucking the kids in routine I had (talking about their day, picking a couple songs to sing, reading, etc). My house was spotless, we were always going somewhere (petting zoo, regular zoo, fishing, swimming, movies, etc).
I have 3 children now, I'm in my 40s, and unfortunately i have been waylaid by a host of chronic conditions. I sit at home, on the couch, I do as much as I can with the kids to still make their childhood full of memories as I did their sister (10 year age gap between #1 and #2 due to my fertility issues), but it is not nearly as much as I am unable to. A lot of it is reading together, talking together, or me sitting outside while they enjoy themselves running around or riding a bike.
This leaves me with an inordinate amount of time to think. And think I do. For awhile I dwelled on what was so wrong with me that I was the scape goat for my family. Why I was so unloved. And I fought thinking about that.
Recently I have been thinking about how I was absolutely groomed. And groomed so hard that when he dumped me after 6 months his 24 year old friend was able to step in and I never saw an issue with it. I so much so did not see an issue with it that years later, when I was 17, I ran into both of them in a completely different area (the odds right) and I started seeing the one that had been 24 when I was 15 again. So now I was 17 and he was 26. And I was not just shy of being 18. I was just turned 17 (was no longer living at home, had been tossed away as though I meant nothing).
I was groomed so hard that I could stand up and yell it to the streets that it is grooming. That I would hurt someone for so much as thinking like that about my daughters, and in the same breathe tell you what happened with me was fine.
Only it wasn't fine. More than 25 years later I am finally putting it into perspective, and it was not fine!
The worst part is, at one point, a friend (also roommate) convinced me to make a police report about it. Even though I would insist it was fine. It was still within the statute of limitations. I was 17, she had convinced me to stop seeing the 26 year old and to file a report. I was sitting on the couch and an officer arrived. I think I might have taken it seriously but the officer did not. He commented "oh so this is like a revenge report because the guy dumped you". I told him the guy did not dump me, i broke things off because everyone else insisted it was grooming. It started when I was 15 and he was 24 and since it is statutory rape my friend insisted on calling. The cop berated me for wasting his time and left. I shoved it way down after that. I was a waste of time.
I keep thinking about it now. I have panic attacks thinking about it. I thought about counseling, but when I tried to file that report all those years ago I was berated like that. I don't know if I am making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe it really wasn't that big of a deal and because I have so much time to dwell on it I am making it into this huge thing.

I I guess I'm looking for validation that this is textbook, and I am looking at this correctly. I guess that is the effect of being gaslit - you don’t know your reality is really your reality. But I am here, and asking for help, because I will need to see him for the next 12 years (our kids go to the same school). This will be in passing and at events, but I am traumatized, still recovering, and just scared. I am looking for some insights because I spent about 2 months trying to fit my story into a box of emotional and narcissistic abuse…. But it's not that....I see that now. If you are able to share tidbits of knowledge, or point me in the direction of more clarity, I would appreciate it so much. Thank you so so much.
I am going to write out the cliff notes. I imagine a lot of you can fill in the parts I leave out as from what I read on here, it’s typical.
I met him walking my kid to school. He walked the same way every day. Over time, we became friends, and I learned he was trying to leave his marriage. Once he did, the relationship happened fast – too fast. He seemed so 100 percent sure of me and it was odd. I often looked disheveled walking to school and tired….I am not sure what he saw in me. But, I felt sure of him too, but wanted to go slower. I tried to slow it down, but at the same time, didn't. I am responsible for that. I felt like a hamster on a wheel after a few weeks and was able to tell him that I need the weekdays for myself, for my work, and for my kid. He seemed to respect that.
But he often romanticized the first few weeks together....even in the last days.
Quickly, I started to notice the emotional dysregulation. There was a lot going on for him: moving out, going through the divorce, parenting, work….so I understood it. I was also still getting to know him. Then severe trauma responses and triggers started happening. They would lead to these large child-like reactions with a lot of tears and anger. I didn't understand it but knew enough to know he had trauma to work through, and perhaps was feeling it for the first time. Each time this happened, there was nothing I could say to help or get him out of it, he would blame me a lot and say I was the cause, and he expected me (without saying it) to be there for him 110% even though I couldn’t. And truthfully, I didn’t want to….I wanted him to be able to handle that for himself or realize it was an issue. I didn't have the tools to deal with it and suggested he try deeper therapy. He agreed.
When he first met with the therapist, she told him it is like a virus takes over his brain and he is convinced in those moments. That was music to my ears at the time. But that is the last time I felt that way.
After a few months of this cycle continuing, I started detoriating. First my mental health, and then my physical health. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like we couldn’t go a few days without him reacting to something small. I wrote in my journal many times “there's no amount of validation I can give this person.”
I didn't point it to excessive adoration and validation, I could not see that really, but if he texted me 5 things and I responded to all 4 logistical ones and ended with "love you too" I was chastised. If I was driving and did not respond to an “i love you,” I was called out for it. At the end of October, I told him I needed the weekend to clean my apartment. It happened to be 60 degrees that day and of course, I would have preferred to be outside, but I am an adult and could not blow off my commitment to myself to clean. That day he messaged me 18 times that me missed me. He kept inviting me out. I kept asking him to stop, because clearly I would prefer to do something else than clean, but needed to. The missing was excessive. I didn’t even know what he meant. We lived next door to eachother. That night, I had to work, and he was upset with me because to him, it was optional and I should have chose to see him.
There were so many moments when he wanted so much comfort I couldn't provide. We were both single parents. That kind of affection goes to my kid....and I couldn't give it to him in that way. He would even want the affection when he hurt me.
He would see my daughter freak out at me and then say that I don’t love her enough, and he would joke they are the same….
It wasn’t a joke?
As time went on, and his therapy went on, and he felt validated by the therapist, the blame came on more and never left. It started in August, and even when I'd get an apology, it would be for the impact (what I'm responsible for) and not his intent. He'd argue with me over seeing his intent clearly. I'd say I don't care about your intent, you're killing me. It didn’t matter, nothing did.
I never felt like we could repair any incidents. As the blame went on, I really questioned myself. I wondered if he was right. What if I don't love enough? What if I don't receive love well? I've been in therapy for 20 years and know I have limitations but I'm not an asshole…
I felt coerced a lot of the time.
I felt he wanted me to change a lot....he wanted me to be less blunt, more loving, more balanced, work less even though he was awful with money, have sex when sick, injured or mentally dead from the day, always be happy to see him, don't be affected by the trauma responses and don't try to talk to him about it, don't take space and if I do, prepare for some kind of punishment, love him and miss him endlessly, do everything together, if I am dysregulated, he wanted me to regulate with him….
I noticed I started taking precautions to keep myself dafe. I didn’t realize I was setting boundaries to prevent the abuse but I was. I’d say I was busy when I wasn’t. I wouldn’t accept or ask him to get me from the airport, knowing I would not be 100% happy after a flight and that would cause a fight (as it did). I didn’t ask for help, and when I did ask for help, I would expect the help to not happen. I did not communicate anything he did “wrong” (like, you said you would drop off quarters for laundry on monday….do you have them?)
There were a lot of moments we would have deep conversations and I felt like we were getting somewhere, that he heard me.
I'll fast forward to the end because this is already way longer than I wanted….and it’s sad that I know it could be so much longer.
In the last month, he reacted and blamed me for everything. There were at least 5 major incidents. After the last one, I told him I was done. It was really bad and left me spending $50 to uber home in the snow, when I could barley walk as is (I had a herniated disc in my back and could barley walk). That month, I lost health insurance, and after begging for time to just take care of the injury, he told me we need intensive couples counseling. I had asked to just continue our therapist until we could change. That wasn't enough. The next weekend he asked me to go to a Gottman weekend. I said I couldn't leave my kid to do that right now and needed to take care of my help.
After that snow episode, that was really bad, laced with blame in the unpacking, I said I'm done, I can't do it. I was crying uncontrollably. I was scared. I really did not know who I was speaking to. After an hour, right when I needed to leave, he snapped out of whatever mindset he was in and told me he'd do anything, that he would work on anything, to please stay. I had to go, I could not think anymore. So in desperation, the only thing I asked for was to go alone on a trip with my daughter. He was scheduled to come with us. I said I needed time just with her. He agreed.
And honestly, he held up his end of the bargain....until he didn't.
3 days before the trip everything fell apart. I worked 12 hours that day and at the end of the day, went to pour water in a cup at home. It was the only time we had together before I left for the week. He hugged me from behind while I was pouring the water (....remember herniated disc in my back). I asked him to please stop and just let me have a second to pour the water.
He said "there's no turning back from this" and got his stuff to leave. I was floored. I was so upset because I knew where this was going - the blame game. He left, wouldn't come back, and then continued to blame me for the next 2 days about how I was an asshole the days before, only spent time with him out of obligation (not true), and rewrote history. I had a stomach bug all weekend and could not eat, but still tried to hang out as much as I reasonably could, and that was not enough.
The water incident was Wednesday, Thursday he had therapy and reinforced the blame, and I ended up leaving without saying goodbye. It was a week. I wanted to believe this relationship could survive a week. But I was clear with him days before: I am working up until I need to leave Friday so I can have real time off with my kid. He was upset I did not find him to say goodbye, even though he made no attempt to make peace earlier. But of course, my fault.
That night, he claimed down. Was nice. But it was a trap. After 12 hours of him being nice in text he said he was only doing it hoping I felt remorse and realized how wrong I was. He told me over and over he wouldn't see it differently. He said he read the transcript of our texts to 2 therapists and his friends and it’s clear: I am wrong. May be important to name here that we are both in our late 30’s.
I said that I want to work this out and I'll talk when we can actually discuss it and I'm willing to hear his side but not willing to blindly take all responsibility. He nailed me on every response, telling me how wrong my response was and what I should have done differently.
I was with my kid and could not talk. When I said "why are you doing this now, you know I can’t really respond" he told me to stop avoiding.
That night, he ghosted me for the first time in the relationship and I panicked. I called him a few times. No answer.
The next day, despite him never doing that to me before, he called me controlling for calling.
At 7am the next morning he told me our relationship was over in a text. This man, who 7 days before was professing his love and understanding of me ended the engagement in a text. This of course continued with a back and forth. I asked him to please stop. To please pause and talk to me when i'm back in 5 days. He told me to fight for the relationship or it was over. I said “I am just waking up with my 7 year old, in a hotel, please stop.” I asked him to attend couples therapy in 3 days to talk this out. He said “you accept all responsibility and change your behavior or we are done.” I asked if he was willing to talk and he said the problem was my perception and that it's wrong, so unless I change we are done. I knew this wasn't ok but I was so blindsided I did not know what to do. He agreed to go to couples therapy Thursday. We barley talked. There were a few more messages of him telling me he needs to know I can live a drama free life and celebrate his love and see it all as beautiful (almost verbatim). At this point, all I wanted to do is keep the dial down. I pushed back saying, “I cannot teach my daughter that someone can just tell her that her emotions and feelings are wrong, I hope you will be willing to talk and we can get on the same page.”
He agreed to go to couples therapy, and then didn't show up. He texted me 10 minutes before saying he was not going. I begged and pleaded. But he had the couples therapist to tell me he wasn't going to go. He had her tell me. I lost it. I lost my mind. I had been reeling for days. Not sleeping. Putting on a fake smile all day with my kid while I was dying inside. Staying up late to cry, process, read, figure out wtf was going on…
I called him about 10 times and of course, he told me it was inappropriate. He then picked up and gave me 10 minutes. He again wanted me to take all responsibility for everything. I was so shaken, I just fawned. I said ok. When I'm back I hope we can talk but if you want me to accept blame for now, fine.
Everything was calmer for 2 days until we were heading back and he texted me something along the lines of "don't fool me" I was like wtf? He said "there's no turning back. There's no other chances." I was like wait what? And then it was "don't make me look like a fool" I had no idea what was going on. I was like "um what is this?" He essentially was reinforcing his stance: I am to blame for everything in the present and past. If I try to talk to him about his side I'm wrong. I need to repent and one wrong move (defined by him) is a misstep and there's no room for error (his words). I was like....I will be in a relationship based in reality, and I will own my part and parts, but i will not be in something that i'm to blame for everything. That is not healthy. I have also been in abusive relationships before.
He then stopped messaging me. Didn't care that we got into flight issues. Didn't care we made the flight back. That night he came over and was a victim. Claimed in the 5 days I was gone he found himself. That he wasn't focused at work because of me and now he is. He wanted to try to be together. I had no idea what reality I was in. We slept together. He left. And told me we'd talk the next day. All of this felt so weird but I was just hoping he would snap out of this and back to reality and we would be able to talk. But I also knew this had to end at this point.
The next day, he didn't answer me all day. This was the opposite of behavior I ever experienced from him. Did not respond to texts or pick up the phone. We had a training appointment and he had the trainer tell me he wasn't coming. I broke down in tears. I begged him to just answer a text. He didn't. He drove by me while walking the dog and did not stop. I emailed him, expressing my confusion, telling him this is not what we agreed to. He blocked me. That night I got an email from him letting me know he was moving 10 min away. He lived next door in another apt building. He actually assured me the day before he “was not going anywhere.” In that email, he listed out the calls and texts I sent and how inappropriate it was. He never said we were done. He said taking space, needing space…so in my head I was confused but see it now.
I was inconsolable. I didn’t respond.
But here is the issue I am still in: I needed to see him dropping his kid at school the next day. I will need to see him for the next 12 years unless I move.
The following Friday he stood next to me at a school event. I purposely stood in the back to have space and be able to leave if I needed to. He went next to me. When I told him he should sit, he said he didn't want to make it obvious to his ex wife. I asked him to speak that Friday. He said ok but he was moving. I cried instantly. Already? I said ok.
On Saturday am, I saw the truck pull up and left the house. I called him that Saturday. I was blocked.
The next wednesday he asked me for a series of logistics in a text. None of which I handled yet. Wanting me to cancel flights and settle up money spent together. No mention or responsibility for all the money wasted on tickets we will never use. But then…in the text, asked for my engagement ring back.
I responded to logistics. Not the ring
He then called me 3 hours later because something went really wrong in his legal case. He wanted me to understand and validate him. I did....I just turned off my feelings for a moment. At the end he said, so about the flights. Can you handle it? "If i cancel it for you and your son i also have to do it for me and my kid. It's all on the same reservation" "well if you can go and not make sexual advances on me then we can try to go together.” I was like wtf? I could not have sex for months due to my injury. But he wanted to. Was this way of setting up blame that if we DID sleep together I would be to blame? I was like “I will cancel it for all of us.”
He then ran down more logistics and I said honestly you didn't seem done. I don't understand what you're doing. He said "im done" i hung up the phone.
He asked me for the ring again that night in a text. I said no, I need time to process this.
Everything since then has been a transaction. If i have a genuine emotion, he gets upset that i have it at all. He continues to sit next to me at school events because he claims he does not want his ex-wife to think we are done (this is insane to me….). I realize now that if it is a “good” interaction he is happy. If I am sad, then it is a “bad” one.
He never told his son we broke up, and shamed me for telling my daughter.
Recently he asked me a question and I was annoyed, and he said "can you not be mad at me?" I said “no, I can't not be mad at you…”
In the last 3 months, he’s said "I don't want to confuse things" has come up a lot. I don’t know if he is saying that to me or himself.
I have been so stuck trying to understand how I could not take space at all from him, to being totally discarded. I know he went back to spending, and drinking, but I don’t think he is seeing anyone.
He only responds when he wants to. He ignores other things. I never was able to get an MRI for my back because the claim went through a DR he set up for me and he never sent me the info when I asked.
I got the money back he owed me, but still lost so much money.
He told me he missed me one time.
I don’t know who this person is.
I will have to see him for the next 12 years while the kids are in school unless I move. I am not going to move just to avoid him, but I need to heal so I can be strong enough. I don’t know if he is going to try to come back. I have been in therapy and am getting clearer about what brought me into this in the first place.
Any clarity you can help me with, on this, and what may come from here, would be really helpful. It will help me direct some of my searches and begin to piece things together to process in therapy. I have severe anxiety when I run into him at school.
I have never had to heal from something like this before. At first, I thought it was healing from a narcissistic discard….this feels like so much more.
Does it sound like he will want to come back?
Is there ever closure?

I 33(f) have been best friends with my friend I’m not going to use her real name so we will call her Ashley who is also 33 for almost 15 years. She and her boyfriend are expecting a baby and their having a baby shower in a month I looked on the registry and most of her items are over a hundred dollars. They have yet to purchase anything significant for the baby assuming they will get it in gifts such as a baby stroller the one they want is $300.00, car seat $700.00 that becomes a stroller, baby bassinet $300, and a lot more items above that most her six items she needs is around $100-200. I asked her why is everything so much she said that’s what they want which is okay but 20 people are coming to the shower may not be able to afford that much in this economy as inflation has been hitting people hard. I then asked if someone finds it cheaper somewhere else if that was okay like on another site or same one but different cheaper brand she said that was okay but they will not be accepting anything used. Now we’re in a fight because I said there’s nothing wrong with getting used gifts as long as they’re in good condition no stains and cleaned before. I found the exact bedside baby bassinet on Facebook marketplace for $50 dollars barely used the lady said she used it once basically brand new no marks flawless condition and I figured I could get her a few other items on her list that she needs that are new such as a breast pump. She discussed with her partner she flat out stated they don’t want used even if it’s in brand new condition. I told her she is being selfish because not everyone can afford everything on her registry and most people can’t afford the things she wants and people will buy other things for her that’s not on the registry. She assumes everyone will buy her these things. That they won’t have to buy a lot which we have common friends and I know most can’t afford that much for gifts she has been gifted a used baby bed but everything else cannot be used which makes no sense.
I have tried helping the best I can from a distance because she’s not allowed to have people over without notice such as trying to get her to go to parenting classes because she’s very I’ve babysat before I know how to raise a child mentality and trying to break through that to make her aware it’s not like babysitting. She refuses any kind of advice because her boyfriend dated two other women before he that had babies that aren’t his. Having your own is different then babysitting.
Mind you I will give you a backstory she lives with her boyfriend and has two other male roommates one is her boyfriend’s brother and the other owns the house they live in. The baby doesn’t have her own room she will be sharing a room with her parents. Which is cramped they are not allowed to have baby things down in the livingroom, she has no room to put all of her baby things in their room. The other room up there is filled with storage which they have no plans to make a nursery. They claim so it’s cheaper. There is a plan for them to move to another state in two years. So the baby will be living with them in that room til then. I have talked to her that maybe she should find a place of their own because whenever we talk on the phone they have an issue with her and cuss her out I explained if they can’t handle her talking how can they handle a baby crying? I don’t think they’ve put much thought into having a baby she’s due early August of 2024. I am a mother to a 14 year old daughter myself so I know babies need room. AITA?

Some context:

• I (36M) (throwaway account)
• Wife (45F)
• Daughter (3.7 yo)
• Married since 2017, we were together since 2008 (the year we first met)
• I did the big/huge/monster mistake to continue this relationship despite this obvious problem that you're going to read about. I think I did that because I was deeply physically attracted to her, she was the first love of my life (girlfriend then wife) and because I always believed I could bring back the person she was in 2008, where she was so present, so in touch with me, always available to talk and have deep discussions (but that was just the honeymoon phase of a first love and I didn't know this because it was my first experience)
• I think that with the baby's arrival all the things that didn't work before the arrival, only exploded because of the amount of stress we went through
• I'm not searching for advice or anything, I just want to share my pain with you

--- The letter ---
Dear Wife,
It is with great sadness that I write this letter, but also with great joy for having finally understood what is wrong between us and what the definitive solution is.
Every single day of my life, from July 2009 to today, I have spent time trying to establish a dialogue with you and get your attention without success.
You are always there in body but never in mind.
When I'm able to talk to you, you are present for only a few moments, briefly respond, and then retreat into your beloved thoughts to converse with yourself instead of with me, or to do something else (important or not).
I have tried hundreds of times to express to you how all this makes me feel, how much it hurts me, how I long with all my heart to be in contact with you like we were in 2008, but there was no way to make you understand.
Thus, for all these years of our life, the following scheme has gone on:

1. I try to establish contact with you multiple times during the day.
2. You don't pay attention / you respond with monosyllables / you are not involved in the conversation / you respond rudely.
3. I feel rejected because you don't want to talk to me; I understand that I can't talk to you, I'm not important to you, and by necessity, I shut down because there is no communication and sharing (what you call a long face). You notice the long face and do everything to get me out of it because you hate it, but not what you should do (i.e., insist on asking what’s wrong to establish the contact that was not established before, and then be available to talk the next times). Lately, your solution has been to attack me verbally or physically to force a change in me (e.g., "Enough with these damn long faces! Smile, damn it! Don't sit there like a fool"). This is devastating for me because not only can I not talk to the person I love, but I am also insulted when I expose the problem.
4. When you want to spend quality time, as you call it, on weekends when you are calmer and more relaxed, you are fine, but I am devastated and no longer want to spend quality time with you because I don’t feel well and am upset with you.

If by chance I manage to start a conversation, after a few interactions, you are already back in your head thinking about your things.
This has existed since that July of 2009, as I was telling you, look here: (some email screenshots from 2011) Further examples below (other screenshots)
These are some of the emails I’ve recovered.
It’s useless to say:

• Now there's the baby.
• Before it was work.
• Before it was something else.
• Before it was another thing.

The lack of communication from you towards me is invariant to the things that have happened in our lives.
Look the other day:

• I gave you 1 hour to rest asking you if we could talk.
• I start talking and you get up to take your medicine (because in your head it’s always "oh, he's talking, so meanwhile I can take care of something else"), and after I start talking about this problem, you start telling me "With all the damn problems we have, you have time to talk about this nonsense?" and then told me "Don't you know that people can do other things while you're talking and still be present, hear you and have a conversation with you?"

I have studied it all for a long time, meditating on everything, and I simply believe that, besides no longer being interested in me, you have a mind that works as follows:

• You are perpetually distracted, absorbed in your head and your thoughts, you have a much deeper level of introversion than mine from which you can't easily emerge, you create situations, conversations, battles, etc.
• You think in terms of projects and things to do: in 2011 (I remembered) you were working respectively on 3 different projects (a crazy amount). Obviously, I was getting the leftover attention from this combo. Now there’s the baby, and I am just a satellite orbiting around the two of you, only useful to procure food and necessary things.
• You get very stuck on things and don't want to let go of your fixations. It's likely that you have the hyperfocus of people with ADHD, read more about it here in detail. Regarding the last point, I'll copy and paste the most relevant parts: Hyperfocus in an adult with ADHD allows one to concentrate attention on a single task, often achieving extremely high productivity at the expense of everything around, such as a family member talking or a pot on the stove.

How you mismanaged things with me in the past:

• Manipulation: "Oh, come on, you're the one who's fixated, of course we talk, what are we doing now, excuse me?"
• Insult: "These damn things again? Do you want the truth, Husband? You're a pain in the ass."
• Ultimatum: "If you want, you change, I won't change" "I'm going to the lawyer"
• When cornered: sex and that's it

The only times you are mentally present are when we argue, then you are definitely there.
The only moment I feel connected to you is during sex, but that's 20 minutes every how many days? Does that seem normal to you? When we're older and without sex, won't we even look at each other anymore?
With the baby's arrival, all this has come out like a frog from a boiling pot. Our Daughter sees it, senses it, perceives these dynamics, and it hurts her.
I'm sorry but I have reached my limit.
You are the only person I can't talk to, but with whom I desperately want to talk, share ideas, opinions, thoughts, etc., even 24 hours for 30 consecutive days (like we did in 2008).
You are the only one who brings out the long faces; my best friends, my grandmother, other friends, and former colleagues bring out smiles, jokes, the best of me.
This is our main problem.
If you had managed to maintain communication with me over time as in 2008, you would have a very close person, who would treat you like a queen, who would do everything to keep you happy, but you continuously reject and despise me.
Besides all this, in recent years, there have also been:

• Heavy insults
• Constant threats
• Spits in the face
• Kicks and slaps

You have no respect for me anymore, zero.
The affection has totally disappeared; I'm writing now after more than 8 days without receiving a kiss, a cuddle, a caress from you (yes I count them).
Wife, in a loving couple, this has no place, it’s not normal, it’s not a demonstration of love. It’s totally out of the question. There has never been a time when you said: Wow Husband, you're right, I sincerely apologize, now for the next 2 hours I will put down the phone, this, that, and talk to you. NO.
You don't even think of that.
I am telling you that for me, we have reached the end. You don't listen to me and don't talk to me.
You don't care about the problem; everything is okay for you, and I have to solve it on my own.
I have been fighting for years; in recent months, I have written over and over again, but nothing.
As Biden in February 2022 left no room for compromise with Putin regarding the Ukraine issue, forcing him to proceed, I do the same.
I want divorce and I do not want to live with you anymore.

After 10 years of me (F 28) begging my partner (M28) to stop soliciting sex behind my back I am finally leaving. I don’t have an ounce of trust left for him and honestly I get the worst feeling he’s been sleeping with other people behind my back. He’s become so sneaky and honestly just a liar. He lies about everything so you can’t take word for anything. I’ve finally had enough. My self esteem is in the trenches but I have to leave for my kids and my sanity. I deserve better and I realize that his behavior is not normal nor should I live an anxiety filled life constantly trying to catch him cheating. I’ve caught him on dating apps, posting naked photos, messaging other men and women, looking for escorts and even messaging them to meet up, leaving in the middle of the night and he’s lied about his location so I’m pretty sure he has met them. I usually make excuses for him, stay, and take his word about seeing therapy or whatever he feeds me but he never follows through and just keeps doing the same things. I’ve allowed him to really run me into the ground just so he could do these things. I felt at times he was just doing the bare minimum to say he was a good person against these allegations. I’ve been a wonderful mom and partner to him and his family. I did it sleep deprived, tired, hungry, spent my last dollar on him constantly going above and beyond for birthdays and holidays and constantly got bare minimum from him. I’ve allowed him to make me believe I wasn’t good enough for far too long. And I just don’t deserve how he’s done me. Someone who truly loved me wouldn’t be looking for sex outside their relationship constantly. It’s a struggle a lot to do on my income alone but I am picking up a second job to make sure I can care for kids and myself. I’m afraid how the kids will feel about us separating but it’s necessary for us to do so. I’ve strapped a metal rod to my spine and just keep repeating all the bad things to remind myself to not give in or go back on my word.
TL;DR After 10 years of my partner cheating behind my back by being on dating apps, posting naked photos, messaging people for sex men and women,lying about his location and asking to meet up with escorts I am finally leaving. And just constantly lying. I have finally realized I deserve better and cannot keep allowing him to tear my self esteem down.

"Explain your past, Musa" the gov'ness walks at my right, shielding my from the piercing sun as we walks with the caravan. After the trench was dismantled, we are walking by foot to reach the capital, as the trench-line have been pushed far into our homeland.
"I was a cook when the war started, gov'ness" and now I am left wondering why did she chose me from anyone else in the caravan, there's the sergeant, the whom she asked to see earlier today.
"You have been trusted to cook rations for your company, as early as the war?" her baroque companion, similarly donned in her armor, walks close by ours, but never overtook us.
"No, gov'ness, I was a 10 years old when the war started, the war went for seven years and I fought for the last two" before she came, with weapons of the stars that could've decimate my trench instead of theirs
"Such a young man you are, seven years ago, the Emperor grants me audience, revealing that I was his progenitor"
This talk about an "imperium" across the stars and the deified emperor has gotten me worried. Is that her reason for talking to me, to ease my pain before sending me to the stars far from here? Or simply an act of pity?
The meager town came into view, and was it not for the ancient structure, we would've thought this was anywhere but the capital. Gray skies and beaten earth have become the synonym for the heart of Nagorow.
"I must say, this was not our expectation when your leader came into contact with my ship, begging for salvation" the gov'ness depart from me, and my instinct was to follow her, but who am I to her? And so I stay put and follow the rest of the caravan back to the main camp.
"You're lucky to have an audience with the Lady, runt" one of gov'ness' companion knocked me to the dirt, assuming that he's doing it out of spite and jealousy. I can see him walking to gov'ness
"I apologize for my companion's doing" another of gov'ness', as he extends his fingers that allowed me to stand to my feet "Lucius was indeed jealous, he was our best melee combatant and our Primarch haven't even bat an eye for him"
"Is that a rare thing?" Lucius and the gov'ness seems to enter the structure, doing their business there. I quickly glance at my watch, the gray sky seems to be forever, and it shows 1641. And I quickly look back at the gov'ness companion
"It is, perhaps Mother saw something within you, perhaps yours was interesting at the moment" the giant release his helmet, letting his bronze hair free from the confine "I am Rylanor, pleasure to meet you, Musa"
"As is mine, gov'nor"
The Sejm was delightful in seeing Fulgrim and her companions, as well as the news of the apparent victory on the frontlines. Such delight warrants them to spent their moneys on a grand feast right at the capital, inviting everyone within range to attend, with the guest of honor being the gov'ness herself.
"I would have thought you are with Mother, Musa" Rylanor brought two plates in his palm, the plate whom was enough for me was made miniscule by his hands, each contained meager food they could thrown
"Thanks, gov'nor" the feast gives us chair to sit, yet here I stand with him, outside of the building. Somehow the gov'nor chose to make a companion out of me, whilst gov'ness over there busy herself with her empire in the suns.
"I almost forgot what a food taste, Musa, back in the campaign, we would be served liquid ration with occasional starch" I took a look at him, and his plate was already cleaned
"You should try my cooking then, I cook better"
We let a simple laugh from the situation, from a soldier to another, from a human to another too. The door barges open and whom I thought to be Lucius emerge, escaping the feast.
"It's obnoxious inside, Rylanor, if you wish to see me, then don't, I'm heading to the nearest landing coordinate" and went he goes, somewhere place only he, gov'nor and gov'ness know. Something that I would not understand no matter how much gov'nor taught me.
"I have to agree with dear Lucius there" and speak of the gov'ness, and she shall came, looking at the horizon "they barely separate the nobility and the peasant"
I didn't mean to stare, but gov'ness wore something fine, something you'd see from paintings high in temple's ceiling, an ascendant of man. Looking carefully, it seems she wore old Nagorovian dress and modify it to suit her stature, or rather, her figure. She need not a corset, it seems.
"The food is delectable, Mother" Rylanor already took my plate without my knowing, something that I relent
"Every food is delectable when you are starved of them, dear Rylanor"
We all watched as a star suddenly rose at the horizon, perhaps something to do with Lucius and his departure. I suppose this is our future, being shackled by another uncaring emperor to fight the dangers of mankind.
"Say, Rylanor, but does that star seems approaching us?" and behind Lucius' ascend, a second star indeed looks as if its getting nearer. Just before I respond, nor gov'nor did for that matter, the air raid sirens blare and screech
"It is too late to dodge the missile, Mother, and I am the only one still wearing my armor, I would suggest taking a shield behind me" Rylanor easily stood and tower over us. I didn't even wait as I quickly take cover.
"Don't be ridiculous, Rylanor, these brutes couldn't even muster the technology to weaponize simple nuclear reaction" Rylanor didn't wait and cover me with his entire figure, and I just prayed that whatever nuclear is nor what reaction it cause would not be as devastating as I'd fear.
The moment of impact was blurry, but there was an apparent pain riddled to it, as the temperature rose akin to a sun blasting us with the heat. Like what was drilled into my head, I quickly wrap my entire face with anything, covering up the assuredly loud aftermath and the shrapnel flying around. I couldn't hear
And I wish I wouldn't hear
By the time the air around began to cool, my throat was hoarse, as if I have been shouting the entire time. It wasn't until I noticed the spasmic movement on my mouth that I realized, I have been barking around.
"At ease, gov'nor, at ease lads" I chanted
"It seems it was a nuclear explosion, Mother, albeit a primitive version of it" Rylanor seems to ignore my rant, addressing the gov'ness instead. He then release me, before coughing up liquids right at my face "apologies" he mumbles
"Be damned your humor, Rylanor" I hear the gov'ness, rasping in breath as I slowly gather my senses "Musa, you lived it seems" my eyes were blinking rapidly, due to the heat and the dust it caused "oh Rylanor, I apologized for your condition".
When my eyes fully recovered, I saw only desolation. No Man's Land was gentler than this, water and mud found refuge within them after all. But what I saw was beyond it, ruins and dry earth, trees and building charred, and people would likely evaporate. Peoples, on whom I was fighting with and fighting for, for two damned years. I couldn't take it anymore, first Maria and now this? Fate was far too cruel
Liquid barge through my mouth, followed close by every air in my lungs and waters in my eyes. There was no rythym, only that I was doing it in instinct, lying on all fours at the stairs near the gov'nor and gov'ness.
Only then did I brave to stand up, looking at them and the impact it caused. Gov'nor seems to be stuck in his place, unable to move as his hair rotted away and flesh melts to his armor. Now I understand why did he puke. The gov'ness was way less impacted, as her clothing burnt with the flesh on her skins, with her lying on her back.
"Cease your staring, Musa" she quickly commanded
"Yes ma'am" I quickly slap my cheek, a soldier need to finish his duties until the bitter end, and the enemy was no better after all "orders, gov'ness?"
"You're waiting for my orders?" she slowly sat herself, throwing out blood from her mouth while her arms sizzle and creates smoke "so it seems, help me get to one of landing coordinates" when she did sat, she saw her own legs, crushed from the debris of the railings and burnt to crisp "it seems I would have to relegate the matter of combat to you"
"Private Musa at the ready, gov'ness" so soon to serve this faraway empire, and my first duty is to escape the chaos that will ensue. And first, I need to find a cart or I will be carrying the giant on my back
"Musa, before you go" Rylanor rasp and wheeze as he reach for something, before he carved it with letters and numbers "you are familiar with latitudes and longitudes of your planet, I assume, and if not then you can ask Mother for direction" he gave me the knife, on which he have engraved numbers.
"And what will happen to you, gov'nor?" I took the knife and pocket it, then looking back at the gov'ness
"I will be fine, Musa, all I ask is that you deliver Mother there to the place, and rest assured that you will be awarded"
I ignore the last part, something about the futility in wealth and glory that I realized, living as a cook my entire life before becoming a soldier taught me that. I quickly strip my clothing, and though I have to face the cold soon, finding the gov'ness means of transportation is more valuable. I quickly wrapped the gov'ness legs with a shirt, then I cut another of my shirt into pieces before I wrapped it at her so I can carry her off, my suspender helped in holding her together too
"Something tells me I won't enjoy the journey" Fulgrim murmurs as she rest on my shoulder
"Be safe Mother, I pray that Musa will be sufficient to you"

I've been receiving treatment for about 7 months now and I feel better for 12/14 days, which is pretty good! The harsh reality is that I have become dependent on the treatment and will slide if I delay treatment/one or two days prior to treatment. This is not a major issue as I have learned how to limit myself in the lead up to treatment.
After transitioning to homecare, my schedule has shifted to allow for me to work and receive Nexviazyme. I also transitioned from the max dose of IV Benadryl to Claritin, no delirium the following day. This has been awesome for me. I had to delay treatment for 5 days and that was a miserable experience, I've never felt so weak in my life. I survived and found ways to help myself to get through. Advice is to really limit movement those days, if I moved too much I worsened the next day, for example I walked a 5k after 3 days no treatment and that made it worse for me but I finished in under 1 hour!!!
With the transition to homecare the only issue I had was finding nurses that had late availability, 3:30-9 or 10pm, so I had a bit of an inconsistent schedule for a while, but now we should be consistent for the remainder of 2024. The reason it is not 5 hours is because of the mixing at home being harder than in the hospital due to the difference in environment and training for this medication. We try to treat our nurse like they are a friend visiting. Try to provide food and coffee, watch a show, allow them to do what they need to do, etc. By making the home welcoming, it should help retain those nurses. I'm excited to smoke a brisket, pulled pork, and grill for my nurse this summer.
I am playing more and more pickleball, trying to golf at some point this season but pickleball has been so fun. I hope those that read this can take something away from this. There is a lot of negativity out there about Pompe disease, and it sucks to have, but we have to focus on the wins.

Today I want to tell my story of how I self-advocated and what I did to achieve that goal. I'm telling my story to help those who are in a similar position to what I was in and to inspire those to self-advocate.
To recap from my earlier posts. I have ADHD and fell under the "multiple disabilities" characterization. My high school teacher claimed that I have autism (Not diagnosed). I personally don't believe I have autism or at the very least I have a high functioning autism. Throughout most of my school career, I was in a self-contained classroom with kids with severe disabilities. Even if I was in the general population I had a paraprofessional or peer tutor. I never believed that I should have been in that position. As a consequence, I never really learned any social skills, I was segregated, and felt like that people didn't want anything to do with me because I was sped. The reason why I ended up in this position was probably a combination of me having the "multiple disabilities'' characterization and me testing low in three year revaluation tests. If you want more info on this then feel free to search my profile. This is an alt account and is primarily used to ask questions about special ed so It's really easy to find stuff about me.
Before I get into my story I just want to make it clear that I'm not against special ed. There's good and bad people in every profession. I believed I was in danger for myself and for my future. I don't believe that my teacher was evil and had the best of intentions but he was putting me in a position that was hurting me and I had to act. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to let me know in the comments. Another thing is that this post has been really hard to make. It opened up some old wounds and as a result took several days to write.
Here's my story: So in late middle school I was tired of the placement that I was in. I was tired of not having friends, Not being able to socialize with my peers, not being able to date. I also was thinking about what my life will look like after high school, I was concerned that I was going to never have friends, Never be in a relationship, and not have the social skills to make those friends. I was generally very concerned for my future. So I decided that for my 8th grade year (2017-2018) I would do my absolute best for both my behavior and academics. Throughout the year nothing changed. I was hoping that me doing well would show that I didn't need any support but at the end of the year I still had paraprofessionals in most of my classes and was being pulled out for tests. In the summer between middle school and high school all I can think about is I want high school to be different. I wanted friends, I wanted a relationship, and I had dreams of me in the student council. When I got into high school I had peer tutors along with paraprofessionals (Peer Tutors are general ed students who sign up as an elective to help special needs kids. They basically serve the role as paraprofessionals with less responsibility). I did everything again and had the exact same result. In January of 2019 (freshmen year) I decided that my current strategy wasn't working. They also started making the peer tutors fill out behavioral checklists for their student(s) by grading them on how well they behaved/followed directions and gave them badges that say "peer tutor" which made me feel singled out. Because of that the peer tutors felt more like babysitters then someone that is an equal. So I went to my special ed teacher and asked him to remove the paraprofessional and the peer tutors. He told me no and said that I needed them. I changed my strategy again and I was going to ask for the Peer Tutors to be gone first, then focus on removing the paraprofessionals. I was more concerned about the peer tutors over the paraprofessionals because I was concerned that since they were part of the student body that this was going to affect me when I was running for the student council. I was worried that they'd tell others I was special needs then people would think I was incompetent. So every 2 weeks I would ask him again to remove them and each time he would give me a different excuse on why I couldn't be alone. Here's some of the excuses he gave me: "The peer tutors need to be there to collect data", "You need to prove that you can do the work yourself", "It's not up to me. It's the general education teacher that decides if you need a peer tutor or an aide", "Peer Tutors are supposed to represent a trainer for a job. If you refuse training then you're going to get fired". I brought it up again during my yearly IEP which took place in March. Once again my teacher said no, bringing up another excuse. As far as I can remember, my parents were neutral about the aide situation. Later one peer tutor was removed, what happened is that the peer tutor moved to a different town and they didn't bother on sending a substitute. A win is a win so I celebrated it. At the end of my freshman year I was pretty much defeated and didn't achieve the goal of being 100% independent. Over the summer I took a look at my situation and decided that my current plan is not working. I knew that when my sophomore year of high school starts I will have aides and peer tutors in classes. I knew that if I wanted to get what I wanted I would have to do something big. I knew that I would have to put up a fight, and put in a lot more effort. Over the summer I developed a war mindset inspired by two quotes from Sun Tzu:
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I knew that I can't be going into sophomore year blind, so I started drafting a plan. I created a Google doc outlining my goals and what I wanted to accomplish. I knew that I won't be able to win every battle and that I need to choose which fight is worth fighting for. I thought to myself, “Well the peer tutors we're given training on the first day of school and probably have strategies to deal with poor behavior but what about planned well organized protests?” So I began researching strategies on how paraprofessionals/peer tutors dealt with negative behavior and reverse engineered those tactics. I read forms, I Watched YouTube videos and found as much information that I could find. For the peer tutors I didn't know too much about them. I didn't know if it was something that only my school did or if other schools did it. I did some research and found out that other schools had a peer tutor program and some have uploaded training videos on YouTube. Some peer tutors told me that they did babysitting and did nanny work so I looked up babysitting tips. I reverse engineered all of those tactics and came up with strategies to counter those techniques and put all that information that I learned into a google doc that I can use for future reference. During this time I also researched how to become a better negotiator and started learning a little bit of psychology. The plan was to first negotiate and if that doesn't work I will protest and make demands and negotiate. Over the summer I got really good at negotiating and practiced a lot on my father and my sister (they were totally oblivious). To this day I use those negotiating tactics. After I created my document and was satisfied with all the information, I went to bed that night and knew that I have already won and that my sophomore year will be my last year that I 1-1 peer tutor or aide.
Fast forward to the first day of school, as expected I had peer tutors and aides assigned to me in classes. My sped teacher had a chalkboard On the back wall full of sticky notes that had everyone's schedules and a name of someone was assigned to that student for each class. This time around I only had one peer tutor outside of the special ed classes. This is a big improvement over the three I had before but I still have my original goal of having none. For the paraprofessionals I had 2 in Gen classes.The goal was to first remove the peer tutors then the paraprofessionals. Even though this seems to be an improvement I continued with the plan. Since this was the first day, the peer tutors were in another classroom learning policies and other stuff they needed to know so I was alone for the day. I walked over to my special ed teacher and ask him one final time to remove the peer tutor he says no and then I asked him to let me be alone for 2 weeks so I can prove I don't need help and he still denies me. I then tell him that I will allow the peer tutor for 2 weeks and after that she needs to go. My teacher doesn't respond. (To add context the peer tutor that I had, she was a peer tutor in my math class in the prior semester so I already know who she was. We used to talk a lot and was surprised when I saw that she was assigned to me.)
For 2 weeks she mostly left me alone with her occasionally checking up on me. For those 2 weeks I purposely close my self off and adopted a body language that would subconsciously discourage her from approaching me. I did this by keeping my head low and staying as focused as possible. The only thing she did was confront me when I start packing up 2 minutes before the bell rings. She tells me that I shouldn't be packing up and to pull my stuff out again. I tell her no and hold my ground. She writes in my planner that I packed my stuff up early and refuse to pull it out. That happened like 2 or 3 times. On Thursday on the second week my class was tasked to create a PowerPoint. FYI this was a mythology class, while I was doing this PowerPoint I decided instead of manually trying to type in the locations and people from this mythology which the names were very long and complicated. I decided would be easier just to copy and paste them in. My peer tutor sees me doing this and doesn't say anything. At the end of class she writes that I plagiarized in my planner and tells my special ed teacher in person what happened. My sped teacher pulls me out of class (I had his math class right after mythology) and starts telling me that my peer tutor has seen me copy and pasting paragraphs and goes on this lecturing on why plagiarizing is bad. I explained to him that I wasn't copying paragraphs It was only copying names and locations and explain my reason for it. He didn't believe me but he didn't make me retake the assignment. After that I was pissed off and the next day I confronted her about it. I forgot what her reasoning for not telling me was but I told her that she needs to look into things before she makes false reports. After that incident, I decided to wait a week before I ask my teacher to remove her. Also during those first 3 weeks I turned down help from peer tutors and paras if possible In the special ed classroom. I did this to prevent sending any mix signals. I personally didn't mind if I had to work with a peer tutopara or not In the actual sped classroom. I only cared if it was in any of the general education classes. I just thought it would look contradictory if I was accepting help in the sped class and then requesting peer tutors to be removed from my gen classes.
At the beginning of the fourth week I went to school early and went to my sped teacher's class before first hour starts and then I again asked him to remove the peer tutor and the paraprofessionals. He says no again and brings up that I was being academically dishonest by plagiarizing. I tell my side of the story once again on what happened and he still doesn't believe me. At this point I leave and more pissed off. At this point negotiations didn't work so I started small protests by preventing the peer tutors from filling out my planer and the behavioral checklist. Most of them didn't care since there was other students they can fill out and they only need to fill out one to be graded for the day. One peer tutor gave me the puppy dog eye treatment and I eventually cave and let her fill it out. I still let the one peer tutor that was assigned to me in the gen class due to me being the only student and my intention wasn't to ruin, her grade. During the fourth week I began brainstorming ideas on how I can do a massive protest.
On Thursday of the fourth week of school, a walk into the mythology class and it started out like any other day. Class started and my teacher starts talking. I pull up my phone to respond to some messages and my peer tutor sees me. She asks me to hand my phone over to her and I tell her no. She tells me that I can't be on my phone and I tell her okay but I'm still not giving it to you. She then pulls out her phone and puts it on the table. She then tells me to put my phone on the table. I tell her no again. A few minutes past and the teacher finishes up talking. She passes the assignment and immediately my peer tutor begins to try and help by reading the questions. I slide the packet over closer to me and start ignoring her. I was hoping that she will get the hint and leave me alone. She doesn't so put on my hoodie and tried to mentally block her out. I don't remember what she said during all this since I was blocking it out but I do remember her touching me and the general ed teacher coming over and start assisting the peer tutor. It was a lot of pressure and I was actually about to give up because it was too much. But they both gaved up before I did and I was very relieved. After that, the class was pretty much quiet. The peer tutor wrote an entire paragraph on what happened. I walked to my math class and sat down. I then see my peer tutor walking into class and ask for my sped teacher. I already knew it was about me. I see them talk for 2 minutes and sure enough I see my teacher calling me over. I walked outside the classroom and me and the teacher begin to go at it. We end up saying the same things we have said before. However, my teacher this time mentioned that if I keep up my behavior that he's going to call in a meeting with my parents. The rest of math class was pretty much the same. However, my English class with the same teacher he went on a rant about using accommodations seeing that he had a disability growing up which was tourette's and he were love to have a peer tutor. I was quiet for the whole class since I was already exhausted because of everything else that had already happened. For the rest of the weekend, I've been coming up with plans on how I would be able to pull off a massive protest.
Now for the good news. On the fifth week of school, I noticed that my peer tutor was missing. My teacher pulled me aside again and told me that he decided that he was going to pull her for 2 weeks to see how well I would do without her. I told him thank you, that's what I wanted since the beginning of the school year. After those 2 weeks he didn't reinstate her and I didn't have a peer tutor or paraprofessionals in gen classes since. The deal moving forward was as long as I had a D or better he wasn't going to send any support unless I asked for it. My relationship with that sped teacher also had improved significantly. Later in my Junior year of high school I ran in my school's election and won. I was given the social media position.
In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't have to pull off a big protest. But the same time I wish that this situation could have ended in a different way.
Everything that I just told you is only the tip of the iceberg. There's so much detail that I had to leave out just to make this story shorter. Lot of it I'm still processing even though I found great strength in myself fighting back against a system that I believe was ruining my life. That war mindset hasn't left my mentality yet. I'm still dealing with the consequences of me being in special ed. Everything I told you happened 5 years ago and I'm still living through it like it just happened. I'm mentally recovering and eventually I will recover. Right now I'm in therapy and I'm writing down everything I can in a Google doc to process everything emotionally. Maybe one day I'll give that story to a writer and make a book out of it.
If you have any questions feel free ask them, I would love to answer them.

Today I want to tell my story of how I self-advocated and what I did to achieve that goal. I'm telling my story to help those who are in a similar position to what I was in and to inspire those to self-advocate.
To recap from my earlier posts. I have ADHD and fell under the "multiple disabilities" characterization. My high school teacher claimed that I have autism (Not diagnosed). I personally don't believe I have autism or at the very least I have a high functioning autism. Throughout most of my school career, I was in a self-contained classroom with kids with severe disabilities. Even if I was in the general population I had a paraprofessional or peer tutor. I never believed that I should have been in that position. As a consequence, I never really learned any social skills, I was segregated, and felt like that people didn't want anything to do with me because I was sped. The reason why I ended up in this position was probably a combination of me having the "multiple disabilities'' characterization and me testing low in three year revaluation tests. If you want more info on this then feel free to search my profile. This is an alt account and is primarily used to ask questions about special ed so It's really easy to find stuff about me.
Before I get into my story I just want to make it clear that I'm not against special ed. There's good and bad people in every profession. I believed I was in danger for myself and for my future. I don't believe that my teacher was evil and had the best of intentions but he was putting me in a position that was hurting me and I had to act. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to let me know in the comments. Another thing is that this post has been really hard to make. It opened up some old wounds and as a result took several days to write.
Here's my story: So in late middle school I was tired of the placement that I was in. I was tired of not having friends, Not being able to socialize with my peers, not being able to date. I also was thinking about what my life will look like after high school, I was concerned that I was going to never have friends, Never be in a relationship, and not have the social skills to make those friends. I was generally very concerned for my future. So I decided that for my 8th grade year (2017-2018) I would do my absolute best for both my behavior and academics. Throughout the year nothing changed. I was hoping that me doing well would show that I didn't need any support but at the end of the year I still had paraprofessionals in most of my classes and was being pulled out for tests. In the summer between middle school and high school all I can think about is I want high school to be different. I wanted friends, I wanted a relationship, and I had dreams of me in the student council. When I got into high school I had peer tutors along with paraprofessionals (Peer Tutors are general ed students who sign up as an elective to help special needs kids. They basically serve the role as paraprofessionals with less responsibility). I did everything again and had the exact same result. In January of 2019 (freshmen year) I decided that my current strategy wasn't working. They also started making the peer tutors fill out behavioral checklists for their student(s) by grading them on how well they behaved/followed directions and gave them badges that say "peer tutor" which made me feel singled out. Because of that the peer tutors felt more like babysitters then someone that is an equal. So I went to my special ed teacher and asked him to remove the paraprofessional and the peer tutors. He told me no and said that I needed them. I changed my strategy again and I was going to ask for the Peer Tutors to be gone first, then focus on removing the paraprofessionals. I was more concerned about the peer tutors over the paraprofessionals because I was concerned that since they were part of the student body that this was going to affect me when I was running for the student council. I was worried that they'd tell others I was special needs then people would think I was incompetent. So every 2 weeks I would ask him again to remove them and each time he would give me a different excuse on why I couldn't be alone. Here's some of the excuses he gave me: "The peer tutors need to be there to collect data", "You need to prove that you can do the work yourself", "It's not up to me. It's the general education teacher that decides if you need a peer tutor or an aide", "Peer Tutors are supposed to represent a trainer for a job. If you refuse training then you're going to get fired". I brought it up again during my yearly IEP which took place in March. Once again my teacher said no, bringing up another excuse. As far as I can remember, my parents were neutral about the aide situation. Later one peer tutor was removed, what happened is that the peer tutor moved to a different town and they didn't bother on sending a substitute. A win is a win so I celebrated it. At the end of my freshman year I was pretty much defeated and didn't achieve the goal of being 100% independent. Over the summer I took a look at my situation and decided that my current plan is not working. I knew that when my sophomore year of high school starts I will have aides and peer tutors in classes. I knew that if I wanted to get what I wanted I would have to do something big. I knew that I would have to put up a fight, and put in a lot more effort. Over the summer I developed a war mindset inspired by two quotes from Sun Tzu:
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I knew that I can't be going into sophomore year blind, so I started drafting a plan. I created a Google doc outlining my goals and what I wanted to accomplish. I knew that I won't be able to win every battle and that I need to choose which fight is worth fighting for. I thought to myself, “Well the peer tutors we're given training on the first day of school and probably have strategies to deal with poor behavior but what about planned well organized protests?” So I began researching strategies on how paraprofessionals/peer tutors dealt with negative behavior and reverse engineered those tactics. I read forms, I Watched YouTube videos and found as much information that I could find. For the peer tutors I didn't know too much about them. I didn't know if it was something that only my school did or if other schools did it. I did some research and found out that other schools had a peer tutor program and some have uploaded training videos on YouTube. Some peer tutors told me that they did babysitting and did nanny work so I looked up babysitting tips. I reverse engineered all of those tactics and came up with strategies to counter those techniques and put all that information that I learned into a google doc that I can use for future reference. During this time I also researched how to become a better negotiator and started learning a little bit of psychology. The plan was to first negotiate and if that doesn't work I will protest and make demands and negotiate. Over the summer I got really good at negotiating and practiced a lot on my father and my sister (they were totally oblivious). To this day I use those negotiating tactics. After I created my document and was satisfied with all the information, I went to bed that night and knew that I have already won and that my sophomore year will be my last year that I 1-1 peer tutor or aide.
Fast forward to the first day of school, as expected I had peer tutors and aides assigned to me in classes. My sped teacher had a chalkboard On the back wall full of sticky notes that had everyone's schedules and a name of someone was assigned to that student for each class. This time around I only had one peer tutor outside of the special ed classes. This is a big improvement over the three I had before but I still have my original goal of having none. For the paraprofessionals I had 2 in Gen classes.The goal was to first remove the peer tutors then the paraprofessionals. Even though this seems to be an improvement I continued with the plan. Since this was the first day, the peer tutors were in another classroom learning policies and other stuff they needed to know so I was alone for the day. I walked over to my special ed teacher and ask him one final time to remove the peer tutor he says no and then I asked him to let me be alone for 2 weeks so I can prove I don't need help and he still denies me. I then tell him that I will allow the peer tutor for 2 weeks and after that she needs to go. My teacher doesn't respond. (To add context the peer tutor that I had, she was a peer tutor in my math class in the prior semester so I already know who she was. We used to talk a lot and was surprised when I saw that she was assigned to me.)
For 2 weeks she mostly left me alone with her occasionally checking up on me. For those 2 weeks I purposely close my self off and adopted a body language that would subconsciously discourage her from approaching me. I did this by keeping my head low and staying as focused as possible. The only thing she did was confront me when I start packing up 2 minutes before the bell rings. She tells me that I shouldn't be packing up and to pull my stuff out again. I tell her no and hold my ground. She writes in my planner that I packed my stuff up early and refuse to pull it out. That happened like 2 or 3 times. On Thursday on the second week my class was tasked to create a PowerPoint. FYI this was a mythology class, while I was doing this PowerPoint I decided instead of manually trying to type in the locations and people from this mythology which the names were very long and complicated. I decided would be easier just to copy and paste them in. My peer tutor sees me doing this and doesn't say anything. At the end of class she writes that I plagiarized in my planner and tells my special ed teacher in person what happened. My sped teacher pulls me out of class (I had his math class right after mythology) and starts telling me that my peer tutor has seen me copy and pasting paragraphs and goes on this lecturing on why plagiarizing is bad. I explained to him that I wasn't copying paragraphs It was only copying names and locations and explain my reason for it. He didn't believe me but he didn't make me retake the assignment. After that I was pissed off and the next day I confronted her about it. I forgot what her reasoning for not telling me was but I told her that she needs to look into things before she makes false reports. After that incident, I decided to wait a week before I ask my teacher to remove her. Also during those first 3 weeks I turned down help from peer tutors and paras if possible In the special ed classroom. I did this to prevent sending any mix signals. I personally didn't mind if I had to work with a peer tutopara or not In the actual sped classroom. I only cared if it was in any of the general education classes. I just thought it would look contradictory if I was accepting help in the sped class and then requesting peer tutors to be removed from my gen classes.
At the beginning of the fourth week I went to school early and went to my sped teacher's class before first hour starts and then I again asked him to remove the peer tutor and the paraprofessionals. He says no again and brings up that I was being academically dishonest by plagiarizing. I tell my side of the story once again on what happened and he still doesn't believe me. At this point I leave and more pissed off. At this point negotiations didn't work so I started small protests by preventing the peer tutors from filling out my planer and the behavioral checklist. Most of them didn't care since there was other students they can fill out and they only need to fill out one to be graded for the day. One peer tutor gave me the puppy dog eye treatment and I eventually cave and let her fill it out. I still let the one peer tutor that was assigned to me in the gen class due to me being the only student and my intention wasn't to ruin, her grade. During the fourth week I began brainstorming ideas on how I can do a massive protest.
On Thursday of the fourth week of school, a walk into the mythology class and it started out like any other day. Class started and my teacher starts talking. I pull up my phone to respond to some messages and my peer tutor sees me. She asks me to hand my phone over to her and I tell her no. She tells me that I can't be on my phone and I tell her okay but I'm still not giving it to you. She then pulls out her phone and puts it on the table. She then tells me to put my phone on the table. I tell her no again. A few minutes past and the teacher finishes up talking. She passes the assignment and immediately my peer tutor begins to try and help by reading the questions. I slide the packet over closer to me and start ignoring her. I was hoping that she will get the hint and leave me alone. She doesn't so put on my hoodie and tried to mentally block her out. I don't remember what she said during all this since I was blocking it out but I do remember her touching me and the general ed teacher coming over and start assisting the peer tutor. It was a lot of pressure and I was actually about to give up because it was too much. But they both gaved up before I did and I was very relieved. After that, the class was pretty much quiet. The peer tutor wrote an entire paragraph on what happened. I walked to my math class and sat down. I then see my peer tutor walking into class and ask for my sped teacher. I already knew it was about me. I see them talk for 2 minutes and sure enough I see my teacher calling me over. I walked outside the classroom and me and the teacher begin to go at it. We end up saying the same things we have said before. However, my teacher this time mentioned that if I keep up my behavior that he's going to call in a meeting with my parents. The rest of math class was pretty much the same. However, my English class with the same teacher he went on a rant about using accommodations seeing that he had a disability growing up which was tourette's and he were love to have a peer tutor. I was quiet for the whole class since I was already exhausted because of everything else that had already happened. For the rest of the weekend, I've been coming up with plans on how I would be able to pull off a massive protest.
Now for the good news. On the fifth week of school, I noticed that my peer tutor was missing. My teacher pulled me aside again and told me that he decided that he was going to pull her for 2 weeks to see how well I would do without her. I told him thank you, that's what I wanted since the beginning of the school year. After those 2 weeks he didn't reinstate her and I didn't have a peer tutor or paraprofessionals in gen classes since. The deal moving forward was as long as I had a D or better he wasn't going to send any support unless I asked for it. My relationship with that sped teacher also had improved significantly. Later in my Junior year of high school I ran in my school's election and won. I was given the social media position.
In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't have to pull off a big protest. But the same time I wish that this situation could have ended in a different way.
Everything that I just told you is only the tip of the iceberg. There's so much detail that I had to leave out just to make this story shorter. Lot of it I'm still processing even though I found great strength in myself fighting back against a system that I believe was ruining my life. That war mindset hasn't left my mentality yet. I'm still dealing with the consequences of me being in special ed. Everything I told you happened 5 years ago and I'm still living through it like it just happened. I'm mentally recovering and eventually I will recover. Right now I'm in therapy and I'm writing down everything I can in a Google doc to process everything emotionally. Maybe one day I'll give that story to a writer and make a book out of it.
If you have any questions feel free ask them, I would love to answer them.

What’s in the closet, Kirsty?
He knew I hid a secret.
I smiled, tried to look confused.
He waited, crossing his arms.
I worried that he'd already seen. He had.
What else could he think about the pile?
His wife’s a cheater. She has another life. Another husband. Children.
He’d never believe the truth: I’m not a cheater; there’s no other life; no other man; I don’t know who the children are who visit me at night.
But I did have a secret. And maybe it’s fair to say another life, even if was smaller and against my will.
I should have destroyed those frames, burned the photos within. Now it looked like I saved them, cherished them. The truth couldn’t be farther. I feared to touch anything to do with… whatever they are…with one exception.
“It started last Halloween,” I said to George, my husband, my real husband.
He stopped packing for a moment, working out the impossibility of this statement. “I’m taking the girls to my parents.” He resumed the tossing of shirts, pants, etc. into our big suitcase.
“It’s true,” I said, but weakly. The children in the picture are at least six and four respectively. They were born six months ago.
“They’re not… my kids,” I said of the boys in the photos. They’re not kids is what I almost said.
George stopped and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Kirsty,” he said slowly, “there are baby pictures. I saw them.”
“That’s-”
He quickly raised his finger, exasperated, angry, done.
“The first picture is you holding a newborn, and…” He swallowed painfully, his throat gone dry. It always does when he’s upset. “And the father in that picture, with his arm around you, isn’t me.”
When I couldn't deny it, he nodded like he knew all along our marriage would end.
We were happy. We really were. George and I had managed to overcome the typical breakdown that often comes with raising children. Only since last Halloween had distance been made by me.
I should have told him as soon as it started.
“Girls!” he called as I followed him down the stairs to the front hall of our lovely home. We’d scrimped and sacrificed to buy and keep this place, our dream by the lake. He’d been so proud. I couldn’t tell him I wanted to leave the first night sleeping there.
Cara and Ella protested through play, ignoring the adults, continuing to jump on an old box they’d long since flattened. Rays from the western sun placed my daughters into an inspired, hallowed light, and I started to cry. He was going to take my babies away.
George opened the door, intending, I’m sure, to drop the suitcase in the car before returning to physically carry the girls out.
But he hesitated in the doorway.
“George?”
The suitcase fell with a solid thud on the floor. “There’s no way,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s no way,” he said, with emphasis on the last word, “you would have had time for…this…”
Not defining "this" as cheating was progress. “Yes!”
He glared, quieting my desperate enthusiasm. I wasn’t off the hook. “Tell me. The truth.”
“I can’t.”
He reached for the suitcase.
“No, not because I don’t want to,” I protested. “I don’t know what’s happening!” I sat on the carpeted steps and stared through blurred vision at my trembling hands. The shriek I’d filled the house with - “happening!” - had put a halt to the box's obliteration. Cara and Ella hesitated for a few seconds before leaping into action.
Cara, the oldest, six, punched her dad in the buttocks. “You have to be nice!”
Ella, four, sat beside me and patted my trembling hands. “It’s okay, mummy.”
Such lovely daughters. Nothing like the boys in those photos when they were this age.
George grasped Cara's wrists and gently walked her back into the house, using his foot to kick the suitcase from the swing of the front door.
"It's alright, girls," he said with weak resolve. "Go and play."
"No!" Cara shouted. She kicked at her father and he pulled her close into a bearhug. Gradually, the girls calmed and were convinced to return to the box in the front room.
"Kirsty," George said, "you have to tell me." He sat down on the step beside me. "Please." I would do anything to take away the hurt in his eyes. "Please."
"I can't. But… I can write it down. Maybe." I took out my phone. We shared Google Drive. When I made a new document, he reluctantly started his phone. The man was a dream. He watched his screen, and waited patiently for my words to appear.
Without preamble, I returned to the awful moment when it all began: a strange and disturbing dream. Words came like an infection from beneath a torn scab. The wound had been opened. Nothing could stop this now.
Sex with another man has never been a desire of mine. I love George. He loves me.
Plus, the man in my dream was a stranger, and not particularly handsome. He has a plain face set to unwavering boredom and unkempt male pattern baldness. Our dream sex felt obligatory, just something we had to do.
I awoke on the wrong side of midnight. November 1st and I was craving ice cream instead of the girls' gathered candy. The freezer left by the previous homeowners came with unopened ice cream. Freezer burned or not, I wanted some.
After retrieving a spoon from the kitchen, I intended to destroy a brick of neopolitan. He waited in his flannel pajamas, barefoot on the concrete floor. His arms were crossed.
"Cravings?" he said.
I dropped the spoon. It clattered down the basement steps. Before I could run away, he disappeared like someone had erased him from head to foot in one clean sweep.
Had to be a dream. That's what I told myself. The spoon stayed in the basement until daylight. Ghost or nightmare, there was laundry to do the next day.
I crossed the concrete floor fast and only felt safer when I'd closed the door to the more modern laundry room. Never thought builder's grade tiles and track lights would make me feel anything but sad.
His voice caught me sorting.
"Kirsty!"
I dropped the cup of detergent all over the floor.
"Shit."
I came out of the laundry room, figuring George had been looking for me in uncharacteristically rude fashion. He hated speaking between rooms. Shouting throughout the house was highly impolite. It must have been important, I figured.
As soon as I stepped onto the bare concrete, however, deep sadness, the kind that seems to physically leech the strength from your body, dominated the room.
"Hello?" I don't know why I said that. The basement is a low ceilinged rectangle. There are no hiding spots except for the laundry room I'd come from. After a deep breath, I walked briskly to the stairs.
"Any day now," a raspy voice breathed into my ear. I jolted and slipped forward, falling and clipping my chin off a step. It made my teeth click painfully. Nobody there, of course. I ran upstairs and George had gone outside with the girls to play hide and seek.
I wanted to tell him. He looked so happy. It's hard to convey in words the kind of smile he showed me through the window. Imagine contentment mixed with unreserved joy and hope. Yes, it's difficult to picture. So few of us can ever have such a moment. Sort of like finding a natural view completely untouched by humanity. Beyond rare and precious.
I’m rambling now to avoid writing about what followed. The point is I couldn’t tell him. I hoped it’d go away and stop.
But, of course, it didn’t, and things got much worse.
I awoke in a great deal of pain. Having already given birth to children, the feeling was familiar. Despite getting up and gasping, George continued to snore in our bed. He’s a deep sleeper, but a quick and early riser. I’ve never heard him complain about getting out of bed either, especially when there’s an emergency.
I might have woken him up but I was disoriented and confused. Part of me believed I was still pregnant with Ella. It wasn’t until I’d gone all the way to the kitchen to avoid waking up the girls, that my brain caught up: Girls. Plural. Ella was asleep in her bed upstairs.
“Ohhhhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiit.” I knew the signs of labour. This couldn’t be happening. “Ohhhhhhhhh.”
I was definitely going to wake everyone up if this continued.
My phone was upstairs by my bedside table. We don’t have a landline. I should have called 911. I should have woken up George.
Instead, I went downstairs where I could vocalize pain without disturbing anyone. Such a pathetically passive response. But that’s how I was raised. Keep it down, don't you frown.
His hands seized mine as soon as I descended the last step. Serious and bald without dignity is how to best describe his physical appearance. Cold and cruel is what he is. The lights turned off and, in the perfect darkness of the basement, he was all that I could see.
He produces a red light from his body somehow but his touch is literally frosty.
"Kristy, it's time," he said. No joy there. Just straight facts. Something was coming. I was going to give birth to it. In the dull red glow of his being, the first boy came.
"His name is Hadad," the man said, placing a large, infant boy with a lot of hair and, I swear, a hint of beard, on the bare concrete. Hadad looked like a three month old they use as newborns on TV. He didn't cry. He hardly seemed to breathe as his dark eyes roamed the darkness. His light resembled the man's, a less intense red.
I felt another contraction, and winced.
"She comes next," the man said.
I felt so weak. "Who are you?" I asked him.
At last, he smiled and I wished he hadn't. It made me feel small, insignificant, and beneath his concern. "You know who I am," he said. "I'm your husband."
Pain wracked my entire body. Something didn't feel right. The birth of Cara and Ella had been without difficulty.
"Push," my "husband" ordered. "She is upset with you, and will kill you if you don't get her out now."
"It has to be a nightmare," I told him. Sweat poured in streams down my face. The unborn "she" in question writhed and damaged my insides. I screamed. I couldn't help it.
"Push!"
I obeyed and the second boy spilled onto the bare concrete, coated in blood and dust.
"It's a boy," I said.
The man looked displeased. "The body is male. She is Hebat. No wonder she is angry." Like the other infant, Hebat appeared aware of her surroundings and had far too much motor control for a newborn. The light pouring from her body was dull silver. Her eye sockets were two pits of concentrated despair. I had to look away.
The babies were pressed into my arms.
The man stretched out beside me. "Open your eyes and smile." I resisted. "Do it. Now." What choice did I have? The flash from his cell blinded me. They were all gone by the time my sight recovered. Only the sweat remained as evidence of the ordeal.
It had to have been a hallucination. Some very bad food poisoning maybe. The source could be as simple as an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. I had been stress eating since we'd moved in. I stood up and took some comfort in a Charles Dickens' reference.
"More of gravy than of grave about you," I said. My words seemed consumed by the dreadful weight of the air. "Whatever you are."
Whatever you are: something bad in any case. At best, I'd hallucinated prolonged and traumatic labour and needed medical attention. Yet, when I limped up the basement stairs, all thoughts of waking George vanished. There on the kitchen island sat a propped frame containing the photograph taken only moments ago.
The man looked happy. Only Hadad appeared in this picture, which meant another one was somewhere. I didn't panic. I worried more about what George would think if he saw the photos. I had to find them all.
Hebat and his father and I were mounted in a dark wood frame by the master bedroom. It'd be the first thing anyone saw if they woke up. I plucked it off the wall and, together with the first photo, tucked it under some blankets in the dresser we'd shoved in the small walk-in closet.
You might not believe this, but I went straight to sleep after. I climbed under the blanket in my sweaty pajamas, shut my eyes, and didn't have enough time to deny what had happened. I was unconscious until morning.
George placed a coffee on my nightstand. That's what I remember. He rubbed my feet while I slowly awoke. The girls were watching TV downstairs, munching on apple slices. There was forty minutes still before we had to seriously consider getting ready to take Cara to school.
George would drop her off on his way to work downtown. He chose his hours and always chose convenience for his wife and kids. Ella and I planned to spend the morning gardening. Then we would nap much of the afternoon away until George and Cara returned. A life so perfect is so very rare.
I didn't want to spoil things with a very convincing nightmare. Besides, I felt fine. Not so good that I wanted to look in the dresser to see if those photos really were there, but not ill. So I remained silent again.
November started fine. Idyllic days and nights filled with laughter and joy and television. Just as I started to believe in the dream we'd made, they came again.
The wail of a child's hunger is a powerful call for a parent. When it's a chorus, even of two, it cannot be ignored. Only I awoke to Hadad and Hebat's cries for their "mother" from the basement.
Half asleep, I drifted into the kitchen and searched for their milk bottles. When no bottles could be found, I remembered they were newborns. Milk swelled in my breasts and made my nipples ache. Just like when Cara or Ella would awaken in the night. It was a relief to feed them.
But what the fuck was I doing?
I was acting like the man in the basement and the devil babies were mine. It'd been less than a week since Halloween and that horrible nightmare illusion. I had already taken on the beleaguered newborn mother role without question.
Their cries intensified and flayed the weak resistance of exhausted reasoning.
Don't wake George. Don't wake my babies, my real babies.
"What took you so long?" the man critized, his voice monotone, the question unrhetorical.
"I… was sleeping. I went to the fridge first." Under his severe gaze, I stopped in the midst of the dark room. Hadad had quieted. Hebat cooed as if laughing at her own joke. I couldn't see them because the lights were off. They liked the dark better. Somehow I knew that about them and him.
"You should sleep down here," he said. "A mother should always be close to her babies."
The statement was nonsense but not altogether wrong. I wanted to be close to my babies, the daughters sleeping in bliss upstairs, away from the evil fermentation in the basement.
"Kirsty," he said. "Are you listening?" His hand touched the small of my back. The gentleness surprised me. I squawked and flinched away. "What’s wrong with you? They're hungry." He pressed on my shoulders until I sat on the cold floor.
They came from the shadows, already walking. I wanted to go, but I knew he wouldn't allow it. He pulled my cat t-shirt off over my head and their fierce mouths suckled, relieving the pressure of excess breast milk quickly. It felt physically good and psychologically alien.
I looked down at them once and immediately regretted it. Their emanated light had intensified to a point where perception of them hurt.
Each time I blinked my eyes were drawn to some isolated part of their bodies. The vision got closer to the point of disgust. Everything is gross if you're close enough. There is no beauty under a microscope. If you think there is then you're not using the right magnification.
Hebat's eye drew me in. At first, I saw the dark sphere, and then the strands of her eyelashes. Her gravity kept pulling until the creatures that live in eyelashes were revealed: Demodex folliculorum. I looked the microscopic horrors up.
The babies had more parasites than any child should. They wanted to show me and could somehow do so.
I asked him about it. "Why are they showing me these worms?"
He smiled, contemptuously as usual. "Trying to impress mother. Neither of them understand your horror and insignificance. You are the ant who knows they're an ant. Lucky you. They think you will be proud of the life their corporeal forms produce and host. Give them a few hours. It will pass."
"Why are you doing this to me?"
"I'm not sure what you mean. We're married. Now, prepare to smile." His cell reappeared and I noted the lack of features; it might have been a singed rectangle of spent firewood. He frowned when I failed to smile. "Smile, Kirsty. These are your children."
I managed to stave off the tears and hold the babies close. The smile was more difficult. In the inevitable aftermath of their sudden disappearance, the frames depicted an exhausted, wrinkly woman smiling painfully. It took a second to recognize myself.
The things in the basement sapped my strength. I looked dehydrated, beleaguered. The scale in the bathroom said I'd dropped six pounds. I'd weighed myself the morning before.
"Whoa, you've lost weight," George noted, thinking I'd be pleased. "This place has been so good for us, eh?'
To produce another smile proved as draining as the previous night. "Y-yes," I stuttered too late for him to ignore.
"Hey," he said, touching my forearm.
I flinched.
"Whoa, you okay? What's wrong?"
I should have told him. "Nothing. Bad sleep. A nightmare. I'll be fine."
A lie is an agreement. George wanted to agree, I think. He wanted life to be fine because he was happy for once. We struggled so hard before we came to Bridal Veil Lake. It was supposed to be our dream.
Guilty if I told him the truth. Guilty because I didn't. I began to resent his happiness, though he had done nothing but be the wonderful man he'd always been.
To Cara and Ella I became a body in motion, No brain left to guide them away from harm or answer their questions about nature and the universe.
"I don't know." That's what I told them often.
So they began to treat me like a kind of butler.
"Can I have some juice, please?"
"Sure, sweetheart."
"Mommy, can I have a snack?"
"Of course." And I'd run off to fetch it.
"Cookies."
"Yes, dear."
When Christmas came, I had two and they induced the same level of joy. Visiting the basement to feed and nurture Hebat and Hadad became a nightly occurrence. I'd learned to awaken, if I could get to sleep at all, and go quietly.
He berated me severely if I missed a night, and there were subtle threats made casually.
"I may have to squash you yet," he said, his tone as deep and cold as always.
"It won't happen again," I promised. "They’re getting big." In fact, they were no longer infants. Both had grown to the approximate age of six or seven in a few months. Still, they never spoke. Their dark eyes watched me as they ate food from the kitchen upstairs, food I'd hidden from my family.
"More meat," the man demanded.
"Of course." And I ran to the freezer and gave them frozen sausages in the package. They never complained or demanded the food be prepared a different way. No objections from my "husband" either.
Hebat tore the styrofoam and plastic wrap away and flattened the row of sausages stuck together between powerful molars. Hadad contented itself with licking them like a popsicle.
I'd stay until the photo. Then they'd release me by vanishing. Always with an exhausted breath, I'd trudge up the stairs and search for the frames and hide them in the same place.
They only smiled in the pictures. At no other time did they express any kind of emotion unless indifference counts.
My own children and husband weren't doing much better. Their concerns about my fatigue and ruminating slowly ceased as I repeated the excuse: I’m just tired. It'll pass.
Of course, I did not know when the nightmare would stop.
"When will it end?" I asked him one night, while Hebat and Hadad exercised like they had a mission.
"What do you mean?" he said.
I was surprised he answered. He usually didn't. "This. This. When can I go back to normal and not come down every night? I'm so very tired."
He frowned and I thought some punishment must be coming. Instead, he looked more confused. "I don't understand. You aren't happy? Your children grow into power and strength and will take their place in the world. They will be great and you - you, of all the tiny things, made that happen. Ask yourself what you want out of life, and see if Hebat and Haddad aren't your answer."
Too many words, all at once, for an exhausted mother. I didn't speak for the rest of the night. The infernal trio vanished, and the latter moments of the ritual I carried out with his challenge in mind.
I want my children to be strong, happy, and safe.
"Juice," Cara demanded the next morning, a Saturday, while she watched cartoons.
"Get it yourself!" I hissed, from tired to angry in a second.
"But I can't," Cara accurately pointed out. She didn't look away from the TV. Looking at me wasn't safe, and she knew it. Her and Ella held hands and sat a little straighter. It broke my heart. What had I done?
George came downstairs, attracted by my shouting. "What’s going on?"
Empathy became sadness, and the constant burden rekindled to anger swiftly. "Just children treating me like a servant."
He smiled. "Ah, yes, and how are the royal princesses this morning?"
His levity irked me. "You would know if you didn't sleep in so much."
The smile vanished from his face, and instead of the fight I seemed to want, he mumbled a quiet apology and joined the girls. They climbed onto him as he wrapped them into a cuddle.
"What are we watching?" George restarted his smile, his calm, for the girls. I hated myself. It had to end. Tonight.
After another dreary day of going through the motions, and the girls and George had fallen asleep, I went to the kitchen and chose the knife I thought sharpest.
"Kirsty," he said, his voice a whisper rising from the depths of the house.
"Coming," I whispered back.
"Mom," said another voice, a girl's, and I knew that Hebat had, at last, found herself and the wholeness of her being had been corrected.
I started to cry. I went downstairs and there she was with her brother and her father. He looked tired but some of the grimness had cracked to allow the first real contentment I've ever seen him express.
"Is that for the cake?" he asked. "We already have one."
I remembered the sharp knife. "Meat," I said. "There’s ham in the freezer."
He nodded, seeming to accept the answer.
"Mom," Hebat said, "Do you think I'm…" She gestured to herself, her face, and her body, and I understood the question, born from doubt and a desire to be validated.
I pulled her close. "You are the most beautiful girl in the whole world." We cried together. Hadad cut into a poorly made, asymmetrical cake by the light of his aura. No one cared that he did so on the floor. I brought out the ham from the fridge and we ate slices with our hands.
"It's almost done," he said. "They’re nearly grown. They are strong, and they are happy. You've done a good job, Kirsty." He watched our children fight to smear icing on each other's faces. "I'm sorry if I was mean. Or cold. I've never done this before." And he meant raising children. "It was the hardest, scariest thing anyone can try. I shouldn't have blamed you for… Hebat… It wasn't your fault."
Before I could pat his hand, he and the kids vanished. Darkness so familiar couldn't extinguish a new fear. I went upstairs and found the last frame. I held my daughter in the photo, my beautiful Hebat. He must have taken the photo without my notice.
I took it upstairs but couldn't bring myself to hide it.
I didn't see that one, George wrote into the document.
I forgot he was watching.
He typed again: Are you saying there is something in the basement?
Yes, I replied.
He stirred in the living room. I hadn't moved from the stairs, but I could tell by his stomping how angry he'd become. All of his negative, violent traits he saved for those in the world who would harm his family. George the Protector was fearsome to behold.
But he had no chance against my other husband.
"Come out! Come out you coward!" George bellowed. At first, nothing happened. The moment before calamity, even when the specific consequences aren't known, is still in slow motion. He carried on shouting. The girls rushed into the hall and didn’t hesitate to investigate.
"No!" I shouted. "Cara! Ella!"
Their feet padded down the steps. A violent commotion followed, screams and raging voices, both deep and childishly shrill.
The most unsettling quiet followed.
I chewed through the fear and the horror tearing me apart and finally moved.
No evidence of violence could be seen from the top of the stairs. The concrete looked bare and dusty and the light revealed nothing more. They were gone, all of them.
"Hebat," I whispered. "Cara? George?"
Him, I thought of, the nameless husband and felt no hint of his presence. He'd always been there. I know that now. It had nothing to do with the house. His absence was felt more than his insidious presence. Yet, I felt no relief. George and the girls were gone. I sat on the floor and cried for all my missing children.
When I finally emerged from the basement, the whole house had been filled with night. Their photos were everywhere. The others were upstairs. I gathered them on the kitchen island. How could I explain any of this to the police?
I needed help. I called my parents. It took twenty minutes before my father picked up.
"Kirsty? What's wrong?"
"Dad," I whimpered. "George is gone. Cara. Ella."
"What? What did you say?"
"They’re gone, dad. George. The girls are gone."
I heard his bed springs protest as he rolled out of bed. My mom said something I couldn't hear, and he shushed her.
"Kirsty," he said, "are you alright? Are you hurt? Are you in danger?"
Why was it so hard to understand? "Dad. George is gone."
"Kirsty, who the hell is George?"
It was my turn to be confused. "He's my- you know him. My husband…"
"Kirsty," he said very slowly, "are you on drugs? Did you take something?"
"No. Are you?"
"Excuse me?"
I hung up.
I have their photos. I have all of their photos. That's what I brought to George's parents before the sun rose. They wouldn't open the door and spoke to me through an intercom.
"George is gone," I said.
"We'll call the police."
"This is your son. These are your granddaughters."
I heard my mother-in-law say, "Who is she?"
"We don't have a son," my father-in-law said. "Go away."
I left.
Back to the house. Our dream sat empty and I live there, but none of the people in my family photos are my family.
I remember but the world never does. My parents think I'm ill and that I used AI to create the family I apparently never had.
How did I buy the house without a job or income? With deep concern for my mental health, they showed me a news story. I had won the lottery the day I turned eighteen.
His influence there, payment for services rendered.
A lie is an agreement.
What had I agreed to? I'm afraid I know the answer: I never wanted a family.
God help me. God help them.
I don't know what to do with these pictures.

My relationship doesn't have passion. I [27f] have been dating my bf [34M] for almost three years, living together for 2.5 years. We are best friends and almost never argue. We can talk about anything and sort through any disagreement with time and conversation. I love him very dearly and I see a life with him being very happy--we want the same things, want to live in the same places have the same lifestyle with travel and kids. BUT I don't feel any passion anymore after years of being shutdown when bidding for sex.
I have always had a higher sex drive than him. My ideal amount of sex would be 1-2 times weekly & his is about 1-2 times monthly. We usually have an average of 1x per month. Part of this is due to crazy schedules, I work full time and am in school part time and I sometimes travel for work, and part is that every time I bid for sex, he's not in the mood. He says that sex (specifically ejaculation) makes him tired for the next few days--this being due to his age. I find that hard to believe, as I know of others his age with great libido, but everyone's bodies are different and I am not a man in my 30's, so what do I know?
He claims we only have sex when he is the one that initiates bc he claims I never initiate sex, but that is blatantly not true. I make very clear and pointed attempts to turn him on and he just laughs me off. I've stopped trying in the last 1.5 years and I'm just happy whenever he initiates. He has even asked me why I stopped trying and I told him bc he shuts me down. I offset this with solo masturbation whenever I'm feeling horny, which he is okay with and even suggested.
In the last year, we have had many conversations about this and we have been trying different sex toys and other things to work on the issue together. I don't feel it's working very well. I think I am putting in most of the effort (finding toys, reading books, trying things to be sexy for him). Sometimes I think he feels it's a me problem, not a him problem, therefore I should put in more effort, or he just doesn't care enough.
Honestly, when we do have sex at this point, I think of other people who have been good lovers in my past. I would never cheat on my partner, but my imagination is not at all loyal. I once had a sex dream while on an airplane about the person sitting next to me.
I love him so much and I don't want to lose my very best friend, but I'm afraid I will never be fully happy in the relationship despite the mountain of amazing qualities he has and our overall compatibility. I'm afraid he has some emotional blocks about sex due to a strict catholic upbringing in Mexico.
There is the added layer that I am bisexual but I have limited experiences with women. I would like to explore that more, but I was willing to put that on pause when I started dating my bf because of how fast and hard I fell for him. He's suggested threesomes could help, but I think that would stress me out because I'm a people pleaser and I would be too anxious worrying if everyone else was having a good time. I don't think he'd be willing to let me explore that on my own, but I haven't asked due to him having a bad reaction to a tentative question about open relationships early on.
I feel terrible because we've been planning our life together. I own our house but he puts a lot of effort into maintaining and doing house work. We get along with each other's families really well and he hangs out with my mom to help her on the farm whenever he can. He's older than me and I think the pressures of age & starting a family weigh on him heavily.
Is it normal to feel this way in a long term relationship? Is his age really to blame for the lack of libido? Or are we better off experiencing heartbreak now to find something better down the road? How do I bring this up again?
I am young(ish) and hot. I want to feel worshipped in the bedroom, not like I have to work for both of our pleasure.
tl;dr My [27F] bf [34M] of 3 years claims he's too old to be having sex more than 1-2x per month & I have a high sex drive. Should we keep trying to find ways to make our bedroom spicier or just move on despite our amazing comparability in literally every other area?

[First] [Previous] [Next]
Edited by WaveOfWire
- - - - -
Two days… It had been two days that Tracy had gone to sleep while Harrison was working, only to come back in the morning to see him still in the workshop. She knew he was damn productive, sure, but that really couldn’t be healthy. Apparently, it had something to do with the weird bowl of orange… soup… that Cera gave him. No way was it just caffeine; any amount of the stuff would have been filtered out of his system by now. He mentioned a tingling feeling too…
Damn, she did not know enough about drugs to even start assuming what that massive alien had Harrison fucked up on. At least the scanner said he was ‘fine’—if you ignore the other glaring issues the machine brought up. Plus, he said he didn’t mind it. Either way, he managed to complete the weaving component and a few other electrical backbones of the fabricator last night, so the project was practically done, and after seeing the engineer work himself half to death, she was dead-set on finishing it.
She was currently tits-deep into the upper manufacturing portion of the towering machine. It took a tall step-stool—on top of the nearby desk—for her to push her small shoulders through the even smaller access panels high on the everything-printer. It was difficult to fit her torso in, but she managed, holding a flashlight between her teeth as she fiddled with a stubborn series of mechanical ‘hands.’ Nothing new. The situation reminded her of the ‘shop back on Mars; it had the same ever-present scent of copper and industrial sealant. All that was missing was her dad’s ancient tunes blasting through some shitty speakers… Hold on…
The modular component in her grip was successfully attached with a resonating thock. Tracy squirmed out of the dim wire-filled crevice, trying her best to not rip her only tank-top on any bolts or corners, and getting a face-full of the bright flood-lights illuminating the workshop. She scowled and blocked out the searing light with a hand, but she was a bit too late to avoid going half-blind.
“Are the mechanical manipulators in?” Harrison grunted, poking his head out underneath the printer’s floor-adjacent maintenance hatch. She looked down at him as she tried to blink off the spots in her vision. His hair was messy, barely kept in line by his habit of combing through it with his fingers. The areas around his eyes were dark and sunken… Guess that’s what two all-nighters did to a man. He’d be seeing the hat man or start hallucinating if he didn’t get any sleep soon… but then again, the two of them were so close to finishing the fabricator…
“You bet.” She gave him a thumbs up, slamming the panel cover closed. “Feel free to test it.”
He nodded and slid back underneath the machine. “Gotcha”
She gently stepped off the stool and slid off the side of the desk, stretching herself out. If her piss-poor sitting posture or her tank-top puppies hadn’t already fucked her spine up, bending over backward to build this fabricator sure as hell would. She sat down next to the panel where Harrison resided, resting her back against the fabrication tower. Her excited voice broke the muffled noises of the engineer’s work. “So… Harrison?”
“Hmm—”
“—Mind if I play some music?”
The sounds from the hatch stopped, followed by his muffled, shocked tone echoing from beneath the fabricator. “You have music!?”
She smirked at seeing the expression on his face when his head popped out again. “I sure do… Did you seriously not download any to your data pad?”
He slipped out from beneath the fabricator fully, huffing as he took a knee beside her. The scent of melded rubber, wire, and his liquid labor reached her nose not-so-unpleasantly. “You would not believe how much of a pain it is to repair an entire barracks without it… So, yeah, I didn’t.”
“Sooooooooo, whatcha wanna listen to? I’ve got almost everything on here—besides the super niche, of course.” She pulled her data pad out, swiping to the massive music folder
“You wouldn’t like the kinda music I listen to; It’s ancient.”
She gave him a lighthearted, annoyed glare. “Welcome to the club… Now what’ll it be?”
“It’s Old Earth kind of ancient… but alright” He looked up at the ceiling in thought, lips pursed. “Do you have anything from Styx or Sweet?”
She stared at him incredulously, her smirk turning into a fully-fledged smile. “Oh my God. You are an absolute dork! You actually listen to Golden Age music?”
His brows raised, accusatory. “And you somehow know exactly who those bands were and what age of Old Earth music they came from?”
She smugly leaned in closer. “That’s because I’m just as much of a nerd with that kinda music as you apparently are.” She quickly looked upward, addressing the workshop AI. “Sebas, connect nearby speakers to my data pad’s audio.” Tracy elbowed the engineer lightly as the PA system chirped its affirmation. “Now, Mr. Golden Age music, which albums do ya want me to queue up?”
- - - - -
The two of them listened to music for hours, tossing on songs they liked as they came to mind while they worked. Harrison had a ton of recommendations that spanned all over the Golden Ages and some twenty-first century classics. She didn’t even know half of them, but she was vibing either way, adding on her own taste by intermingling some older rock tracks and newer electronic beats. The playlist was steadily built up as the day went on. Thank God her dad showed her a vast array of tunes; she might not have been able to keep up with the engineer if her old man hadn't.
It made the work go by so fast, their conversations blurring as they jumped from topic to topic. They discussed whatever came to mind—old hobbies, old jobs, and old interests. A lot was left behind in Sol… At least she knew that the only other human on the planet was more interesting than a soulless workaholic. It turned out that he was a pretty big history buff, and he apparently read a lot about the colonization of the Sol system and the various wars of independence thereafter. Curious, she asked where the interest stemmed from, and he explained that his grandfather was an admiral in the Slavic-Europan deep-ice submarine fleet, which explained how Harrison’s mother was able to afford to immigrate to Mars from Europa.
He could also play an acoustic guitar, and, unfortunately for Tracy, he wasn’t even the slightest bit interested in printing one out, citing that it was a waste of time and material that would be better used elsewhere. That didn’t stop her from writing a note on her data pad to do so later, though. She hadn’t seen someone play one of those in years—the last time was probably in some old music video from the early twenty-second century. What a shame. She would have liked to hear some of the Europan songs his grandmother taught him.
On the bright side, the man seemed to take an interest in her odd hobbies. He brought up the folder of 3D models that she accidentally uploaded to the inter-module system and asked where she got the inspiration for what was in it. Boy, was he not ready for her ‘WarHalberd40k’ lore dump. Props to the guy for not standing up and leaving the workshop throughout her rambling. He even asked questions about the different factions and their weapons, which she was more than happy to talk about.
She also ended up going over the other franchises and hobbies she was interested in, such as robotics and the like. The only interruptions to their chat were the occasional Akula or Craftsman asking for insight regarding the various tasks he had allotted to them, or Shar coming in to check up on Harrison between guard shifts.
The new dynamic of the group was pretty interesting, to say the least. Tracy hadn’t been out to interact with the whole lot of Malkrin, but she definitely noticed how they treated the engineer. They’d started to look up to him in a way ever since he started showing off technology. In a little over two days, the man had shown them that he could provide the materials for a brick house, fine clothing—especially by the alien’s standards—armor, and delicious food. That wasn’t even mentioning the other benefits the technician heard a few of the ‘banished’ talking about over their meals: heating, electric lights, and other assorted machines.
She’d be feeling pretty happy about herself if she was in his position, having so many look up to him and be grateful at the same time. He seemed to view it a lot more robotically, however, only striving to get the basics done. Luckily for him, his basics were their luxury.
That wasn’t all there was to the topic; the engineer lamented about how the colony was going through food just as quickly as materials. The meals weren’t the direct issue he had, more that he had to start focusing on long-term resource harvesting rather than directly preparing for a literal horde of monsters—which wasn’t exactly ideal. It was a good thing that they just so happened to take on an influx of Malkrin then…
Either way, they finally finished the ‘totally legal modification’ for the fabricator, meaning they could at least partially address the latter half of his worries. The whole process of ripping out an old printer and replacing the parts for a new one felt a lot easier than she imagined… even if it took her at least forty-eight hours to complete it… with help from Harrison. Maybe that was why it felt so easy… She supposed the colony overseers didn’t choose the man for no reason, so his skills made sense.
“So… what do we want to print out first?” Tracy questioned, having finished testing the last major component.
The engineer stretched his arms up into the air and rotated his shoulders, then pulled back the desk’s chair and took a seat. “I’ve had just one thing in mind since the start of this whole project.”
Her brows raised in a mix of excitement and curiosity. She leaned forward, looking at the computer monitor from over his shoulder. “Oh? What’s that, then?”
A smirk formed along his cheek, the computer mouse rapidly clicking through the blueprint folder. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about what kind of firearm we need since I started dabbling in belt-fed weapon systems.” He opened one final file, a short loading bar preceding the exploded assembly view of… “An M2 Browning machine gun. It’s more than powerful enough to kill in one shot, while also being capable of fully-automatic fire, with a capacity of however many rounds we want in a belt-box.”
“Uh…huh…” She gave a skeptical nod and took a step back, not exactly sold on the idea. “It looks ancient. It’s kinetic, right? Why aren’t we using energy-based weapons? Don’t we have a gunpowder shortage coming up?”
He moved his chair off to the side to look back at her. “We just can’t; Simple as. We’ll need who knows how many more AI cores before we can get started on that level of equipment, Trace,” he huffed, returning his gaze to the specifications of the firearm. “This isn’t the most ‘modern’ weapon we can make, but its twenty-first century counterpart helps with an improved design… somewhat. And, as I said before, it should be more than capable of killing a bug in one shot, so Shar can just tap-fire it to save ammunition.”
Her head tilted quizzically. “Shar?”
“Yup,” he returned confidently. “It’s the perfect weapon for her.”
She raised a brow. “How so?”
He held his hand up, counting his reasons on his fingers. “She’s always on the front line with a shield, she can absolutely handle the weight and recoil, her four arms make reloading it simple, plus she’ll need something with range and power that isn’t a spear. So, why not? And, if for some reason, she doesn’t want to use it, we can just convert it into a turret—which is something I was planning on doing anyways with however more M2s we print out later.”
“I doubt she’ll say no to any gun you give her,” Tracy chuckled while shaking her head, inadvertently causing her bangs to cover her eyes.
“Fair enough,” he conceded with a bob of his head. “What do you think, then? What kinda weapons do you have in mind?”
She reapplied her goggles into an impromptu hairband, feeling a smirk cross her face. “Thought you’d never ask. What purpose do we need these guns to fulfill? Hordes I’m guessing?”
“That’s the idea, yeah. That doesn’t mean they all need to be machine guns, though.” He tapped the belt-fed shotgun beside him.
“Well, lemme see what we’re working with first.” She suddenly stepped forward, leaning over Harrison’s seat to access the keyboard and mouse. Her arms briefly rubbed against him, forcing him to roll his chair backward. She suppressed a giggle at seeing his incredulous frown.
Her eyes quickly traced the hundreds of individual files, clicking through all sorts of folders, each arranged from pre-twenty-first century ‘antiques,’ to more modern iterations of kinetics and particle weaponry. There was… a lot on there—almost too much to reasonably comb through. Why? Did the colony overseers just say ‘fuck it’ and put whatever they could find on here? Were they expecting the pioneers to make a museum of everything?
She sighed, standing up straight and facing Harrison. “Y’know, I’m actually impressed you managed to find that M2-whatever in there…”
He shifted in his seat, resting an elbow on the desk. “Yup, there’s a lot. I’m almost tempted to just make several of those machine guns and just call it a day, but I feel like that’d be too much of a strain on resources, no?”
“I don’t really know enough about how you fight those spider-crab things, or how to get more gunpowder, so… maybe?” She shrugged, biting her cheek in contemplation. “You might just wanna make a few smaller caliber weapons… like, uh… those old kinetic service rifles. If your pump-action shotgun works fine, I’m sure some normal guns would work just fine for now, right?”
He hardily gripped his firearm, hauling it up to his lap. “Depends on what you mean by ‘smaller caliber.’ The whole reason why the KS-23 here works—” he pulled out a massive shell from the ammo belt, displaying it on his palm. “—is because the twenty-three-millimeter round has enough energy transfer to mess up any bug's shell and insides. I’d say the smallest rounds we could use would be point-two-forty-three caliber to get any similar results.”
Brief flickers of grungy orange shells and gnashing teeth marred Tracy’s sight. She forcibly suppressed them, distracting herself with dry humor and a strained laugh. “Guess those fuckers can really take a punch, huh?”
He shook his head somberly. “I couldn’t imagine going up against them without a gun… Anyway, I like your idea of a standard rifle for now. Then, when we have some product lines up, we can go a little more in depth into personal weapons.”
“So are you gonna take one?” She hopped up on the desk, letting her legs swing off the side.
“Don’t think so, no. I’ll stick with my shotty.” The internals of the heavily modified weapon rattled as he held it up and inspected it. “Doesn’t mean I’ll keep it as is. I’m thinking of printing a laser aiming module so I can point-fire it accurately, and maybe a melee-oriented muzzle brake or a lighter chassis to reduce weight… Not sure though.”
She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees, her cheeks in her palms. “Melee-oriented? Oooooh, like a chain-sword or something?”
His short chuckle coerced a smirk to her face. “No, not like that. More something to use as a bludgeoning tool. Right before the blood-moon, I ended up getting just as much use out of this shotgun as a hammer than as a… well, a shotgun.”
“That’s pretty fuckin’ metal. So are you just gonna make the barrel into a giant bayonet?”
He nodded. “Not exactly a bayonet, but something more like a door-breaching break.”
A short silence settled on their conversation, the faint sounds of the fabricator’s hum and distant woodwork coming to light. Right, there was an outside world… She’d been too caught up talking to Harrison for however many hours it had been. She wondered how successful the fisherwomen were in collecting, and how things had been for the others working on the wood storage shack. Maybe it was already completed? The sun peered through the cargo bay door, proving that it was only about midday. What else would they work on today?
“Hey,” she ventured.
“Hm?” the engineer hummed, his eyes focused on the monitor beside the technician.
She scooted closer to his keyboard. “What’re we doing after this?”
“What do you mean?”
She leaned backward, propping herself up on two hands. “Project wise; what’s the next big thing?”
“Uhmmm…” he muttered, interacting with the computer for a few more seconds before finally meeting her gaze. “Well, I’ve just allocated the fabricator to print out the M2, three FALs—wood furniture, of course—then there’s the magazines and ammunition, so we’ve got a lot of time to kill. The next big thing is definitely going to be metal procurement, and— Oh, right!” Harrison stopped mid-sentence, reaching into his backpack and pulling out several finger-sized metallic cubes, a sudden fire in his eyes. “Okay, so a while ago, during an encounter with three colossi, Shar and Akula found a cave with some ‘surface’ metal deposits. I took a piece off to analyze, but never got the chance to until last night. Anyway, we don’t have any machines to examine the ore, so I made use of the recycler and broke it down to its baser components.”
She nodded along, seeing where he was going with his explanation. “I’m guessing those shiny cubes are the metals from the ore?”
“Sure is. So, as it turns out, we have a pretty damn close supply of not only iron, but also, zinc, sulfur, and a small amount of cadmium. I talked with Sebas about it and did a little research. We believe it’s something akin to sphalerite, given its composition and looks, which implies it’s a sedimentary exhalative deposit. That means there must have been some volcanic…”
Harrison continued talking about underwater deposits and ancient rock formations, bringing up some theories brought forward by the now 4-AI-core-powered Sebas, delving into the current land mass’ history and possible ore output. A lot of it went over the tradewoman’s head, but she still listened intently… Honestly, she could have listened to the man talk about finding metals for hours. It was sort of like the podcasts she used to listen to while completing colonist training, but even more personal and somehow easier to get lost in…
“…find some other minerals further down like silver, but it also might be an active lava zone. Again, these are all theories and this world could just throw the fundamentals of geology away as it does for physics. Anyway, sorry for going on for so long about that, just thought it’d be important for getting some metals in the future.”
“No, no,” Tracy assured, alleviating him of concern with a wave of her hand. “If there’s anything the colony overseers emphasized, it was farming and mineral acquisition. Don’t worry.” She smiled, pointing a thumb to herself. “I just wanna know how I can help.”
“Actually, I’ve a few things only you can do. I’d like to make use of your impressive drone-making expertise for a few applications, if you don’t mind.”
The task of keeping eye contact slipped into an impossible feat in the span of a singular second, planting a pang of embarrassment on her reddened face, forcing her to inspect her fidgeting hands. “I-I wouldn’t say ‘impressive’… b-but what do you have in mind?”
She could see him raise a brow out of the corner of her vision. “Well, after what you’ve shown me with the reconnaissance flyers, I’d like your help in setting up a more permanent ‘net’ of them to scour the meadow and parts of the nearby forest to look out for any approaching hordes. I don’t want to be snuck up on… again…”
‘Again.’
She noted his small frown and sunken eyes, both a little more exaggerated than they already were. It wasn’t like she’d deny his request, but the pangs of empathy over their shared situation all but solidified her resolve. It was the least she could do. She could help him. She would help him.
The technician exhaled slowly, taking on a more serious and understanding tone than before. “I… can do that. For sure. What else?”
“I appreciate it.” He gave a wane smile. “I’ll help you with whatever you need for the project. For the other drones, I’m thinking about a small exploration vehicle to map out caves around us and mark any minerals, as well as a submersible to look for potassium deposits in the ocean.”
“So… search bots?” She crossed her arms, confidence growing; those were her specialty. “Depending on how long the fabricators take and what kind of base drones are in the blueprint folders, I should be able to get those done in no time. All I need to know are the search cues for potassium and how many drones you want.”
He quickly shuffled a few folders on the computer, turning the monitor for her to see some scientific documents with various images and walls upon walls of text. “There’re plenty of resources for that on here for what to look for, and there’s always Sebas, so feel free to ask him since he can just sort through the data for you anyway. If you can, I’d like it if you could focus on the submersible after the reconnaissance drones.”
“Sounds good to me. I’ll be right on it, then.” She gave him a thumbs up, slipping off his desk and toward her own.
“I’ll bring you lunch in a bit. Imma go check on the others,” he called.
Her stomach grumbled at the mention, her head turning to give him an appreciative smile. “Oh! Thanks!”
\= = = = =
Avian creatures chirped from their perches in the trees nearby. The wind softly rustled red leaves as grass gently gave way to calculated footfalls. A warm sun laid its light on Shar’khee’s neck. It was surprisingly pleasant, were one to take the time to notice. The mainland was a confusing place for the paladin, with its disparate representations of nature contrasting so heavily. Some days were filled with blood and ravenous beasts, while others were left within the domain of simplicity and beauty. She was content to have the latter, yet it felt like a facade veiling the former—a soft exterior covering the maliciously spiked interior. Never could she leave herself to carelessness, no matter how welcoming it might be.
Hence why she worked to ensure the safety of the star-sent’s castles and their inhabitants, her days largely spent patrolling for any roaming swarms that may wish to cause them harm. She typically used the routine to think, but today offered little in the way of solitude. This time, she was accompanied by the previously banished guardswoman, and was tasked with instructing the new one, though the specifics of what such lessons should entail were vague. Still, Shar’khee did all that she could so as not to disappoint Harrison, so she could only attempt to meet his expectations of her.
She told the yellow-skinned female of the threats that the settlement faced, how one was to defeat them, and what to expect from the beasts. The guardswoman was directed to practice her form with the spear in both thrusts and throwing for some time afterward, proving herself to be well-built. Such was expected of her profession after all.
It was pleasing to have another capable of patrolling the settlement’s outskirts for swarms, as it would greatly impact how effectively the colony could react to such a threat. If her routine was to suffer for the colony’s well-being, she was happy to show the new one her patrol route and note what to look out for.
The guardswoman was not a perfect student, however. Shar’khee never addressed it directly, but the yellow-skinned female obviously discredited the danger posed by the abhorrent, not-so-subtly shrugging off any warnings.
…That was until they stumbled upon the ‘hyena-boars,’ as Harrison called them.
The beasts resided in a clearing not too far from the castles, carelessly meandering across the sea of tall grass. Shar’khee quickly crouched, dragging the guardswoman down with her. Once she assessed that the creatures were not an imminent danger, she decided it would be an excellent opportunity to show the new one how to properly engage a threat. She was about to propose the idea, yet her speech was silenced just as swiftly.
Orange flashes darted through the trees around the glade. Taloned feet and gnashing teeth tore across the ground toward the unsuspecting beasts at the center. It was much too late for them. They were slow. Surrounded. Unaware. It was as quick as it was vicious, the forest’s reds turning a deeper crimson hue in a moment's notice underneath the abhorrent’s brutality.
Gangly monstrosities gnawed and ripped at the dead creatures, brief glimpses of raw flesh and white bone protruding from the small spaces between the clumped-up beasts. Repulsive wet splatters of blood and gore overlapped the calm noises of the forest, the grisly scene serenaded by the softest of nature’s symphonies. It was a sickening juxtaposition.
Shar’khee bit back the unease and steeled herself. They were within twenty paces—close enough to smell the abhorrent’s vile stench of rot and bile, yet far enough so as not to be noticed. She briefly considered backing away and retreating, her focus bouncing between the different avenues of escape, or how to cover her footst—
Crack.
Several sets of feral, eyeless maws snapped in their direction, the blood dripping off freshly dampened teeth. The guardswoman gasped, Shar’khee’s gaze following to see the mistake: a singular broken branch crinkled as a yellow-colored foot raised off the splintering twig.
The paladin exhaled sharply and smoothly stood up, brandishing two spears and her shield. Her glare settled on the still crouching guardswoman. “You are to stay behind my shield and let them appr—ch. Rem—ber what I have told you. Aim for their maws when you thrust y—r lance.”
The other female nodded, shakily pulling out her own weapons with unsteady placement hampering her grip. There was an obvious nervousness to her gaze. Hesitance. That would not do.
Shar’khee faced the prowling abhorrent her knuckles shifting hue as she prepared for their advance, for there was no chance that they wouldn’t. True to her experience, the stalking turned to a gallop with several clicks of grotesque tongues, the swarm bolting toward her as one. She snarled and slammed her bulwark into the ground, letting the approaching beasts skewer themselves amongst its spikes.
There were only ten—a paltry amount. She had defended against magnitudes more, and yet she still stood. What is more, they were mindless. Uncoordinated. They would be but stains in the cloth she used to clean her armor. Perhaps, if they were fortunate, they might leave a furrow in her shield to remember them by. Her arms tensed as the first leapt.
One by one, the abhorrent fell, their repulsive green blood splattering under her thrusts. Each awaiting corpse tore across the grove’s grass, lunging to their deaths with gaping maws and unfeeling hunger, yet she did not yield. Their shells were crushed by her shield and impaled by her Goddess-blessed spears, becoming but one more smear across their surface. Ten motionless lumps lay before her, seeping their ichor into the soil, none having passed the barrier she became. Dead, just as the Creator intended. She remained vigilant for a few moments longer, watching for any more of the disgusting creatures.
None showed themselves, finally allowing blood to flow to her fingers once again. The shield’s heavy presence weighed down her back, the blood flicked off of her spears before she returned them to their place.
“Are y–u well?” Shar’khee addressed the frozen Malkrin, wiping away the splatter on her bracers. The guardswoman stared at the small pile of deceased creatures, her heavy breaths and widened eyes moving from the spear from her singular kill. The paladin huffed. “We are fort—ate that there were so few.”
“F-Few? God help us…” Her horrified, stunned gaze slowly met the paladin’s. “Y-You said there were hundreds on the crimson nights? H-How do you… They were s-so fast.”*
”As I h–ve warned,” Shar’khee affirmed.
“You are a paladin! You all exaggerate your feats… I thought it was just a facade!”
“I have no r—son to lie,” she returned tersely, shrugging off the insult to her station and shaking her head. “The mainl—d is far more dangerous than ten gnash—g beasts; more so than that of your island hamlet. Pick yourself up. We m—t inform the others of this incursion.”
The yellow-skinned female snarled, furrowing her brows at the ground in frustration. At whom…? Shar’khee? Herself? Regardless, the female promptly gathered her composure, pushing air through clenched jaws. A step forward had her feet splash in the small pool of blood, the Malkrin nodding toward the paladin to continue back to the castles.
“…for the village.”
Shar’khee paused in her stride and faced her, frowning at the determination and anger leaking through the intent. “W—t was that?”
Her question was returned with honesty, a huffed voice marred by vexation. “Paladin, how am I to defend my village-mates as I am now?”
“‘As you are now?’ What do you m—n?”
The guardswoman stared down at her spear, wood creaking under her grip. “I have faltered before what you deem a paltry threat, and the thought of an even greater one sows dread deep within my bones. I wish… I wish to be better prepared to defend those of my village. I cannot help but see their faces on those of the furred creature in the clearing, and yet, even if I am so close, I am just as unable to protect them.”
Shar’khee stared down the yellow female, a long gaze taking in a rare showing of sincerity. “Y—r fears are one we all share, new one. Do not be ashamed of them. All t—t matters is that you do not let them rem—n mere fear, but make them your strength. So tell me, do you wish to impr—e? To ensure they do not fall while you are support—g them?”
The yellow-skinned female released a shuddering breath that bled off the worst of her indecision, a newly invoked flame flaring within her visage. “I do, paladin. I seek to protect and to be of use.”
“Then, if you wish to make y—rself resilient in the face of all that opposes us, it would be my undertak—g to forge you anew. Fortunately, Harrison has ordered such already, and his guidance shall prove ever useful, should you pursue it.”
The guardswoman shuffled in place at the star-sent’s mention, her eyes slipping downwards. “He is of a great many resources, but I would rather receive your teachings than those of a craftsman… or that of a male, deity-sent he might be.”
She placed a palm on the female’s shoulder. “He is far more than you might ever k—w. Regardless of if you ac—pt his guidance, I commend your conviction. However—” Her hand gripped tighter, though not enough to instill hostility. “—understand that you are protecting more than just your vi—age-mates.”
The new one nodded, staring up at the paladin with stallwart resolve. “Of course. I shall be in your tutelage, then.”
Shar’khee smiled. “T—n let us begin.”
\= = = = =
Akula was becoming increasingly certain that she knew how her parents once felt. The green-skinned fisherwoman was currently rotating between the many tasks placed upon her, guiding the newcomers through the minutia of their tasks so they might live up to the potential Harrison saw within them. She was gratified to have her own talents recognized by the Creator, but it also placed a great many responsibilities in her talons. Of course, she handled each new addition with finesse befitting her heritage, never once balking from the increasing demands. If anything, she felt validated; it was required of her as a female anyway, was it not? The more feminine-appropriate labor and management one undertakes, the higher authority they were granted.
It began with a simple assignment to oversee the chef’s introduction to the star-sent’s provided cooking appliances. As fascinating and convenient as utilities were, she held no interest in preparing any more food than she already had, but teaching another to operate the machines would alleviate such requirements of her. She reluctantly accepted the task when it was proposed, especially considering the fact that Harrison was much too busy with his other projects to bother with something as benign as cooking. His work was more valuable elsewhere.
The task itself went well, and the pink-skinned chef was quick to pick up on the use of the various kitchen devices, as well as the smoker. A grin had grown when she considered the possibility of all males understanding such domestic things readily, yet her mirth at removing the masculine job required of her was short-lived. Despite the newly initiated Malkrin’s success, Harrison had Akula frequently return to oversee the numerous cooking operations being conducted. That was in tandem with the back-to-back fishing trips made by both herself and the newly acquired females.
…Which was something else the green-skinned cycle-worshipper was ordered to oversee.
She had left the chef to his devices after producing another batch of partially seasoned meals, returning to the Creator with hopes of a break. He applauded her efforts with a nod and tersely spoken appreciation, then quickly pushed two spearguns into her hand and directed her to the ocean, where the twins were ‘working with jack shit,’ as the busy male said. She was to give the fisherwomen the tools and make sure they were used properly, and offer additional assistance in acquiring ‘enough fish to have us fed for a little bit.’
So, she left to complete the given task, feeling somewhat appreciative that her speargun was of superior quality to those she would be delivering—the newcomers were only afforded the lesser, roped-bolt version. It was only natural that she was in possession of their greatest assets, of course; the star-sent saw her as the only one capable of wielding such fantastic ammunition, showing trust that was rightfully placed in her. That did not mean the gray-skinned females were unsatisfied with their own gifts, however. The twins were swiftly caught up on the ‘manual of arms’ and sent to work, somehow managing to keep up with Akula in spite of their land-based origins. The two were fast enough to outpace the cycle-worshipper in sheer speed, but their lack of numerous winters spent traversing deeper waters meant they required frequent rests, breaking the ocean’s surface after every third captured fish or so.
Still, she had to appreciate their dedication to their task. They never complained about Akula pushing them further to reach the star-sent’s vague objective. Such a task was entrusted to her—and by proxy, the other two—and thus it would be completed, no matter how much her comfortable bed… couch called her tiring muscles.
The group of three hauled net after full net of fresh meat to the chef—and sewist, who later joined him—forcing him to relegate much of the catch to long-term storage as the kitchen simply could not deal with the surplus. At least three-quarters of the fish were put to slow cook in the now Malkrin-sized smoker. The craftsman had upgraded it with a kit provided by Harrison, who had recycled much of the dining room and workshop furniture to accommodate it. The Creator’s showcased urgency to gather materials was clearly not unfounded… It was admirable how he used what little he had left to ensure food would not be scarce. Additionally, the apparatus exuded an excellent scent for all the survivors to enjoy, the earthy aroma drawing in some of the other Malkrin for their breaks or meals.
Those were not the end of the cycle-worshiper’s tasks, however. She was also required to report on Shar’khee’s progress in training the guardswoman—helping to recycle the small swarm of abhorrent they cleared earlier—as well as the wood storage building’s progress. Indeed, she was advising and assisting however and wherever applicable. To say she was seen all around the settlement would be an understatement.
Nevertheless, she was appreciative to see her efforts bearing fruit by sundown. The processing of their meals from sea to plate was quite efficient, and those that Akula taught were now well-practiced in their duties. The twin fisherwomen dove from wave to wave, bringing fish back to the barracks, where the cook and sewist swiftly worked to transfer the meat to pans and smoker hooks alike. Then, the remnants of the Sea Goddess’ aquatic gifts would be subsequently recycled and given purpose anew as biofuel or perhaps future fertilizer.
The endless onslaught of duties and responsibilities had enlightened her, in a way. She could see where Harrison came from now; having a working project go from one point to another without input nor difficulty was a sight to behold, and it made her swell with pride. It was a surmountable feat to teach the barbaric ground-worshippers to do something properly.
…Well, they were not horrible Malkrin, so perhaps simply calling them ‘uninitiated’ was a more apt descriptor…
No matter the tribulations faced, and no matter how draining her new authority might be, her rest at the end of the day would be one that was well-earned, and it would be had with a sense of satisfaction. She deserved it, and perhaps that extended to the rest of the settlement as well.
- - - - -
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Next time on Total Drama Anomaly Island - Mine! Mine! Mine!

Just another fun little story idea I had. I am still working on Humans are the violent ones but I like to bounce around and experiment with ideas to see what I really like. I also suck at writing more casual stories, as they give me severe writer's block as I try to map out how to make a scene feel genuine in my head, but I promise I'll update that soon. If you like this story and want to see more, then like and comment. I'll gladly continue this series as well.
Start of Personal Log
Humans don't like being told what to do. They don't like being commanded, put in their place, or snubbed. It was an inexorable, inalienable trait of humans, at least any noteable humans, to go against any authority that they believed was against their interests.
Humanity would not fit amongst the stars. Few ever did. It was a trait of most successful species to be willful, ambitious, and to desire more. But once they reached the stars the new (and simultaneously very old) pecking order either quashed any spirit such species had or simply eradicated them. Countless tomb worlds and diaspora served as painful reminders of what became of the nails that chose to stick out. The hammer of order would always strike. There could be no compromise, the very soul of the authority that held the Jurisdiction together relied on a show of unmatched power, or at least the illusion of item.
In reality, the Jurisdiction was an old, fat, and lazy beast. It filled its belly on the corpses of empires far and wide, and sated its bloodlust on the shattered dreams of hopeful cubs. It had every right to, for none could challenge it: there were no new frontiers to explore, nor were there any other enemies to conquer. The Milky Way, as humans had so strangely dubbed our cradle galaxy, as well as Andromeda, had long since been warred over and settled for millennia before humanity had arrived, bright-eyed and with familiar yet otherwise foolish dreams of cooperation and prosperity. The Jurisdiction did not cooperate, nor did it ensure prosperity. Oh, it claimed it did, but in reality it simply took. The rest was just the peace that came with not being the direct target of the biggest fish in the pond. The humans didn't like that, but they had no choice.
Slavery was a common tribute. The Jurisdiction had no use for other resources: it simply took. No, it wanted those who could facilitate that unequal exchange, those raised in a world where the only morality was the one set by your lord. The Jurisdiction was held together by expectations, obligations, and dury more than any kind of shared dream, so when you were ordered to take you did so without question. Humanity was new: they had no niche or value that set them apart, but they had a penchant for killing and taking, so the Jurisdiction gave them a taste of how the galaxy worked. They killed and they took. The humans didn't like that, but what choice did they have?
Humans were strange. They learned, but not in the way most species learned. Most species learned to adapt in a passive way, to adhere to the world around them. They flowed like water, moving past and around obstacles and confirming to the boxes they were assigned too. Humans didn't confirm, nor did they adapt: they made their circumstances fit their desires. They would not move around obstacles, but rather smash through them, and they refused to stay in one box for too long. The Jurisdiction merely saw them as a particularly loud nuisance, but those who faced their wrath knew better.
It is said that when a beast seeks to make an example, it shall humble its rival by killing it's cubs. Children were one of those universal constants that brought entire communities together: the Sok’klar saw their hatchlings as gifts, shaped by the fruitful currents of the universe in perfect harmony. The Yarrack saw each and every newborn whelp as an uncut gemstone, ready to be shaped into something magical. Humanity oftentimes referred to their offspring as angels, or spirits of unbridled good sent by the gods themselves. Children were seen by most of the galaxy as gifts.
The Jurisdiction saw them as a lever to inflict suffering. It had become quite effective at enacting psychological punishments on those that stood up and spoke out. You dare to disobey? You believe you can speak out? Your gifts shall be taken from you, and you shall be without joy.
Humans didn't like this, but the Jurisdiction would have their pound of flesh, and humankind would kneel. And they did. But humans were patient creatures: most species who retained that trait of willful spit also lacked patience.
I had long since become desensitized to the Jurisdiction’s actions: it was simply how the universe worked now, as if it were a constant akin to gravity. Cruelty was the unspoken rule of this seemingly unending age, where our lives never appeared to move forward or backwards, only lay dormant. The Jurisdiction had been the unyielding authority that ruled the galaxy for thousands of years, venerable yet feared all the same.
And for the longest time I was just another cog in its wheel. My name is Kalnuracht Sedjuur-Noumar VII, and was the scion of the noble house Sedjuur-Noumar. I was born into what most would describe as veiled apathy, living a life that could be attributed to the privileged class of feared scribes that enacted the will of those above. I was an administrator and nothing more. And now I am doomed to be far less than that in the eyes of my former constituents within the endless administration. I am the only scion, as is tradition, and without an heir I am the last of my house, our name to be scrubbed from the records, worthless, meaningless, and forgotten.
I am merely Kalnuracht, nothing else and nothing more. I have seen from their eyes, the eyes of the downtrodden, and it makes my crimes of association with the Jurisdiction feel all the more damning on my worthless soul. I am worthless to the world, and this is my story.
End Personal Log #1
Start of Neural Lace Narrative Log #1
They came from the black like carrion birds in the night, encircling our convoy as if it were a dying animal ready to be picked clean without remorse. There was no warning, no list of demands sent out as civilized peoples did, nor was there either any requirement for unconditional surrender nor chance to parlay, as was done so under letter of marque: this was an unmistakable call for violence and nothing else. They sought to reduce us to slag and scavenge the rest.
So, as one would expect, the entire bridge of the ship was nearing a panicked state. This was not the actions of those practicing civility, but rather the common behaviors of despoiling barbarians, the kind that tore their way through the dark reaches of the galaxy as if they owned it.
“Wayfinder, what do your probes see?” Shouted the ship’s sovereign. He was an older Kar’Rowmach, an amphibious cephalopod species with a venerable history within the Jurisdiction going back thousands of years. Normally one such as him would be above me if it weren't for the fact that I was under the authority of the Jurisdiction’s seal of office. He didn't like me very much, but most of his kind shared the same sentiment.
“All dark, honorable Sovereign: the sensor arrays are wailing but the feedback we're reviewing is beyond incomprehensible,” the wayfinder replied with a certain restrained temper in his voice. The Sok'klar wayfinder swayed gently, his tentacled limbs grasping different metallo-liquid braille output arrays, the liquid gallium flexing and reshaping unnaturally to allow him to to take in multiple different sources of sensory output at once, with the primary navigation computer plugged into the cybernetics surrounding his opaque, gelatinous head and plugging directly into his tube-shaped brain.
The Sovereign cursed in Loskat and pointed to his bridge crew while I simply sat in the back, near the Sovereign’s symbolic throne. “Prepare countermeasures and spool up the warp drive, we cannot allow the amanuensis to be taken! He carries sensitive information that only he can translate and transcribe!”
As the bridge crew nodded and began fiddling with their own systems, I preened my feathered hide anxiously. I wasn't a fighter: us nobles of the cloth were the educated minority above all else, not those who waged war or partook in hard labor. Special cybernetics in my brain allowed me to translate triple-encoded messages that usually took a ducal signet codekey or above to parse, but even without that I was a skilled mathematician and logician. I had terabytes worth of knowledge stored within the hardware installed in my head, all well protected of course, but if I were to die it would still be a waste. I could only imagine the damage any malcontenders could do with it if they were able to get their filthy hands on me.
Suddenly, the ship rocked, and the gallium overhead display began to form crescendos like I'd never seen before. “Sovereign, decks A-3 through C-12 are venting atmosphere and our coolant systems have been obliterated,” the Wayfinder spoke in an almost serene voice, as if he was completely unconcerned by current events. I knew they were simply incapable of tonal displays, but it was unnerving nonetheless. “Once we jump, we will not be able to risk another until the vacuum of the void can reduce temperatures to acceptable levels within the plasma capacitors.”
“Damn them,” the armored nautiloid hissed, his barbed feelers coiling in frustration, “May the currents take them. What are our options? what can we see? This fleet cannot fall to the void today, not with such vital cargo.” My hackles rose lightly at the Kar’Rowmach referred to me as some object rather than an esteemed amanuensis of the Jurisdiction, but I bit my forked tongue. Now was not the time to squabble with the sovereign over who was what and what titles I deserved, not while he was so desperately attempting to keep what semblance of order within his fleet that he had left.
I could not blame the crew for being panicked either: wars were practically mythologized now, having been long since rendered obsolete with the rise of the Jurisdiction, and that felt like an eternity ago. Now, either being levied into or joining a ducal naval force was simply another career, more akin to serving as an officer of the law rather than a fully fledged soldier. Minimal training was required, most of it being the technicals of one's duty rather than any kind of combat conditioning, so expecting a fleet to actually be prepared for a combat scenario in a universe where peace was the norm was laughable.
“We are practically blind, Sovereign,” stated the Sok'klar Wayfinder, “our probes are offline, and shipboard graviton displacement sensory arrays have been rendered unreliable at best.”
“What about the particle emission array? Has there been a spike in radioactivity where we were hit?”
The Wayfinder seemed to think for a second, his gelatinous form flexing and morphing a bit before answering. “Affirmative, a jump from negligible to forty billion becquerels along decks A through E-5 on our starboard side.”
“Torpedoes…” the Sovereign hissed, stroking his barbed feelers, “Human Torpedoes. Only those primitives would rely on crude nuclear warheads.” He then turned to his militant leaders on the ship. “Noddos, Rel’ads: organize your phalanxes and prepare to repel boarders. We are bound to be assailed by those rancorous primates, and I want their skulls piled at my feet if they dare set foot on our ship.”
“Your wish is our command, Sovereign,” the two militant commanders spoke as one. Noddos, a large bipedal with multiple sets of curved spines running down his back, a pair of graceful horns sprouting from his head, and multiple rows of sharp teeth in his snout, bowed first, followed by Rel’ads, a marsupial with long saberteeth and thick fur. They both must have been fierce warriors in their own right to each lead a phalanx. They wore thick, semi-powered armor and held dueling polearms alongside their usual plasma casters, and seemed completely unfazed by the situation we were in. As they stomped out of the brightly lit bridge, I let out a quiet squawk of discontentment. “Sovereign, why haven't we jumped again? We are wasting precious time.”
“I am working on it, you spineless beaurocrat!” He warbled back, his feelers tensing in anger, “besides, it's not as if you're the one who will be spilling blood today, amanuensis, so flatten your wretched beak or I shall weld it shut with a plasma torch.
I was about to reply with something indignant, but the ship rocked again, this time causing the lights to flicker and the air to become… thick. The skin under my feathers began to blister, and I became lightheaded and confused. “Seal the damnable vents, initiate radiation scrubbers, and activate secondary life support!” Shouted the Sovereign, “Their nuclear weapons are rendering the ship inhospitable!”
I coughed up magenta blood accidentally, and I could feel more seeping from under my eyes. Some of the crew was in a similar position, but others were more resistant to radiation than I. The Sok'klar seemed completely at ease as he ran his tentacles across his morphic braille arrays before calmly announcing the ship’s status. “I've regained some control over our probes: ten, twelve, and seventeen are active and fully functional, the rest are either still malfunctioning or permanently inoperable. A rapid rise in localized radiation is also interfering with the detection of graviton displacement; we can't sense photon redirection, thus readings will remain inconclusive.
“Wayfinder, damn you, get me some kind of out here! We're easy prey until we can respond in kind!”
“Negative, something has gone awry with our processing hub, I am attempting to troubleshoot-”
And with that, the Wayfinder’s bulbous head exploded in a cascade of opaque lavender blood, covering the front half of the deck crew like a morbid art piece. Some of the crew screamed and shouted in terror before removing their cranial adaptors and choosing to interact with their displays manually. Others died just as quickly, unable to unplug in time as their brain stems fried or their blood boiled. It was a horrible way to go, having your insides neutralized by your own cybernetics, so I was glad I wasn't connected to the system.
“Cybernetic warfare! All systems are to be considered compromised, switch to manual settings or you'll be killed!”
The lights in the bridge flickered again, and the displays went haywire. The bridge crew, which obviously weren't acquainted with working without being hard-linked into the mainframe, moved at a much slower pace.
“Launch missile pods A through F and set to self-target after five hundred kilometers, then rely on their ballistic coordinates to begin firing broadsides! If we can't see the humans due to their meddling, we'll just have to feel them.” Shouted the Sovereign, “and got me a detailed report on the ship’s diagnostics readings. I need to know if this flagship is still capable of escaping or if we'll have to scuttle it and retreat on another.”
“Acknowledged, Sovereign, launching now,” affirmed another deck officer as he swiped across his own gallium output array. I could hear the dull thunk, thunk, thunk of missiles pushing out of their pods before racing off to their intended targets, then the mechanical whirring as the pods rotated to be reloaded by slaves in the lower decks. I was regaining my bearings as the many horrible sensations of being overwhelmed by radiation poisoning were beginning to subside, but I still felt as if I had been microwaved. The air was stale, the crew was horribly sick as well, and even the sovereign himself seemed to be on his last leg. I was beginning to believe that I might die here.
“Sovereign, a message from the lower decks,” shouted a communications officer, his chitin scraping against itself as he turned quickly, “they're requesting reinforcements, something about being overrun.”
“Impossible,” the Sovereign hissed out in a vain attempt to exude confidence, “We must outnumber the humans, they always go for bigger targets out of arrogance.”
“I've received reports that it's not just humans: the primates seem to make up only a third or so of the assailing force, along with some Phaeldaer and Vrex.”
The commander slammed his clawed hands down on his own output array in a fit of rage, obviously overwhelmed by the circumstances, “Then this wasn't just a typical assault, but something more sinister!” The nautiloid warbled, blood seeping from his shell as the full effects of the radiation took hold, “Get Rel’ads on the line, have him divert all spare lances to the lower decks or else we'll lose the only offensive capabilities we can use.”
“Rel'ads has gone dark, Sovereign, his vitals are critical.”
“Then either get me Rel'ads tail-leader or get me Noddos!” He screamed in rage, “don't give me this nonsense! If we don't pick it up we're all going to die, is that what you want?”
“No, Sovereign, I'm simply overwhelmed-”
“We're all overwhelmed! By the tides, I'm dying of radiation poisoning you nincompoop! Get me something I can work with!”
The officer didn't even acknowledge the Sovereign after that, simply turning back to his display. Eventually, the Sovereign was able to get Noddos on the line.
“Sovereign, two thirds of my phalanxes have been decimated by combat with the primitives and the radiation, the rest are in shambles. We must retreat and fortify elsewhere!”
“Then the ship is compromised! Rel'ads is unresponsive and the lower decks are swarming with intruders. We must evacuate the amanuensis to another ship.”
Just as the Sovereign spoke, I heard several gentle thumps rattle against the bridge’s door, and it made me uneasy. Some of the bridge crew seemed to feel the same, as they looked incredibly nervous and some even drew their sidearms. Just as the sovereign turned to give further orders, the door blew inward with a deafening explosion, followed by shouting and gunfire. Several of the bridge officers were dispatched quickly, brain matter and blood splattering against the delicate electronics. Others were shot in the legs, the torso, or in any other exotic yet non-vital body parts. The humans poured in, brandishing primitive ballistic firearms and jury-rigged energy weapons while wearing scavenged, legion-grade powered armor.
The Sovereign was the next to go, but he wasn't afforded an honorable death. He was shot along the arm with a particularly potent plasma caster, burning off his clawed hand and cauterizing the wound, the acrid smell of roasting chitin filling the already hot and cramped bridge. He fell back against his output array, the gallium reaching new highs and lows as more diagnostics and casualty reports were delivered, and he clutched his stump angrily. “I'll burn every last one of you in the foundries! I'll tie you to stakes, cover you in wax and set you alight! Your screams will be broadcasted all over the galaxy!”
One human warrior stomped up and slammed the butt of his rifle into the sovereign’s face, shattering his facial plates and causing blue blood to splatter across his section of the bridge. “Shut the fuck up, you mutant lobster,” the human said before dragging him by both antennae towards the center of the bridge and receiving a stained breeching axe from one of his comrades. “Emmanuel, start recording. We need proof.”
The other human nodded and pressed a button on his armor before lifting up his gun again. The rest of the humans fanned out, holding everyone else at gunpoint. I tried to get up and sneak out, but a human grabbed me by my neck and nearly wrung it out as he forced me to my knees and pointed a sidearm to my skull. “Get down, you piece of shit, before I blow your brains out too.”
“Damnable primate,” I hissed, but he bashed me in my skull with the base of his sidearm’s grip and sent me sprawling, making my already pounding headache worse. Another human shouted at him in a language I didn't recognize, but he sounded furious. The first brought me back up to my knees again, and I complies with a hiss and a groan, blood still leaking from my eyes and mouth and my world was spinning.
The Sovereign struggled, but he was weak from the radiation poisoning and he couldn't exactly resist on account of his lost arm. The human with the breaching ax kicked the Sovereign down and forced him to kneel before lifting up the breeching ax and splitting his chitinous head down the middle with one powerful swing, sending more blood and brains across the floor. “Execution confirmed, take his antennae just in case and we've got ourselves a bounty. Now all we need is that ugly cat’s teeth and the fat hedgehog-thing’s grimy spines and we'll be in business. Although, they do have skulls… we might as well just take their heads.”
The real horror of the situation dawned on me at that moment: they were going to kill us all, or maybe worse. They mentioned a bounty for the commanders, and multiple of the higher ranking ship officers were already dead, their brains splattered against the walls or their bodies torn apart by gunfire. I wasn't dead yet, but that didn't mean much since I wasn't an immediate threat.
“Alright, round them up and bring all the grunts to the hanger bay, then kill the rest,” the leader of the humans said in such a lackadaisical manner that his complete disregard for life almost made me sick… almost. I had seen worse from the Jurisdiction before, but usually that was from me delivering some kind of ordered judgment on a world that had sinned against order. I might have simply been the messenger, but I had seen many of the outcomes. “And make sure to collect whatever proof of bounties you can, we'll need to deliver them to the office to get cashed out. Don't let this be a repeat of last time where Juarez fucking forgot to take a few heads and it ended up cutting our profits in half, the fucking retard.”
Some of the humans chuckled at that as they dragged more of the senior officers away, out of the room and into the hall,where I heard gunshots. The rest of the bridge crew froze in place, different fear instincts kicking in. The remaining Sok'klar corralled together into what seemed to be a singular, semi-congealed mass as if to try and trick the humans into believing that they were much bigger and much more threatening than they actually were. The one Thei’chi on the bridge, an ensign who had clearly thought this would be a simple mission, bore her curved fangs at the humans and growled as they approached, her hackles completely vertical and her eyes dilated. They quickly muzzled and bound her before beating her over the head with a gun stock, sending her sprawling onto the ground. Many others simply cooperated, eyes wide and yet simultaneously empty, as if they couldn't quite process that the ship had been taken and the commanding officers were being executed as the rest were escorted to the hangar.
“Get the damn messenger down to the hanger as well, we need whatever data's in his ugly lizard head, then we can decide on what to do with him.”
I spat at him in spite, as if to try and seem brave, but it was clearly an empty gesture. “You won't get anything, primate! You couldn't possibly crack the encryption!”
The human holding me seemed to wind up for another swing, but the commanding officer simply held up his hand to stop my tormentor before strolling over to me. He knelt down and removed his helmet, revealing a beige-colored face covered in scars, wiry black hair cut down to the scalp, and multiple tattoos. “You're really fucking mouthy for a hostage,” he said before punching me across my beak faster than I could register. I heard a sharp crack as his fist connected, and my head spun again as the metallic taste of blood pooled into my mouth. “I'd advise you to shut up, but I'm sure you won't listen: you aristocratic types are so full of yourselves. Maybe I should have you flogged in the public square until your vocal chords give out once we rip those cybernetics from your head, huh? How's that sound?”
“It won't matter… it won't change anything… the Jurisdiction will hunt you down.”
“Maybe, but I doubt it will happen for some time: they really suck at doing anything that requires effort, even when they're mad enough. They just keep sending their rabid lapdogs to try and smoke us out, and they always end up full of holes,” the human officer said with a smirk, his yellowish-white teeth and green eyes sending shivers down my spine as he drew his knife. “They're just horrible at their job, you know? You've all gotten so lazy and incompetent after being able to just take what you want without resistance, and now that you've met people who are angry and crazy enough to fight back you act as if we're committing some grave injustice,” he placed the knife against my throat, the flat just underneath my now bent beak, “No, we just took a few pages out of your book, ‘cept we've got standards. No kids, for one…” he seemed to look off into the distance as his sneer deepened, “but it's more than that, we don't attack the defenseless in general and we still win against you all in fair fights.”
I went to say something else snarky, but he quickly grabbed my thin tongue with his fingers and yanked it out, blood from my mouth pulling to the floor as he held the blade of his knife against it. “No no, none of that. Say one more thing and I'll cut that rancid little tongue of yours out of your mouth and feed it to you,” he hissed at me, pressing the blade down just hard enough to draw blood. “Do you know what it's like to see a planet turn into a tomb?" he asked me, gritting his teeth, “Do you know what it's like to see everything you've ever known crumble to ash and glass, all the life and the green stripped away leaving nothing but bones? I do. I've seen it happen to countless worlds, and my grandfather always told me stories of how you bastards did it to Earth. He still prays in its direction five times a day, to Mecca, but he knows the Kaaba is gone now, or maybe it's still there, buried in the bones of those who sought refuge there.”
I didn't care for the human’s nonsensical beliefs, but I did care to correct him. “I've seen it before, and I'll see it again. And so will you, it's inevitable. The Jurisdiction will always have its judgment fulfilled, there is no alternative.”
“One day, I hope we can rectify that,” he said, then he sheathed his knife and slammed my head against the metal floor with enough force to nearly knock me out. As I lost consciousness, I could hear him speak. “Take him to the Chop Doc, and make sure the cybernetics don't get damaged: they're supposedly more valuable than any bounty on this ship.”
Warning: Severe radiation poisoning detected. Flush system immediately.
Warning: Neural Lace removal detected, chance of neurological damage high. Proceeded with caution.

Hi all,
First of all, this subreddit has been hugely insightful, I've loved reading the success stories and gauging what I can in terms of Financial Independence and early retirement. I was raised in a poor, what some may even consider financially reckless, environment. Therefore, everything I have / have learnt, has been achieved by moving away from the "live for today, and hope for tomorrow" MO I was raised with.
For context, I am a 37yo male. I have a good income, c£164k per year. My wife-to-be (getting married in a month) has an income of c£33k (including commission). Our outgoings total about £4k per month, though, we're expecting this to drop in the next few years. We were late-comers to the housing ladder, only getting our first home ~2 years ago. I've recently enrolled in a Salary Sacrifice EV scheme as a way to mitigate the stupendous amount of tax I pay per year, so that will effect my income in about 3 months... at which point, I'm expecting my net income to drop by about £1k per month (though, a portion of the loss will be offset by the fact the car I currently lease can be returned in favour of the SS EV). With that drop, our total household income per month will be about £11k.
I should also note, the £4k per month outgoings also includes ~£1k for "float", I.e., money which isn't directly tied to bills, but to allow for luxuries, unexpected outgoings etc. This leaves us about ~£7k per month (which will drop to ~£6.5k per month in 3 months' time after the SS EV kicks in and the current lease is handed back) for savings, investments or anything else.
So, to my questions:

1. We're considering investing in holiday homes, particularly in Eastern Europe where they are relatively cheap, but also have a good potential for year-round occupancy. Ideally, we will save for the next few years to buy these outright, as opposed to an Interest-only mortgage. Our rationale: this will afford a secondary income stream, and an asset from which we can leverage to accrue further properties, thus expanding our portfolio and increasing the net income from said income stream. Do you agree that this would be a sensible investment? Is buying outright a preferable option than an I-O Mortgage, especially considering the additional time required to save, and, as a result, the "loss" of that income stream for the additional period we are saving? Does anyone have any experience they could lend to make sure we don't fall foul of any gotchas?
   
2. We don't want to put all our eggs in one basket, so are also considering investing in Stocks, Shares, and ISAs alongside the above venture. Can anyone offer any advice on how best to go about this? Is there any key considerations we should be aware of? Are there any gotchas, or caveats that we should try and avoid?
   

A key note is that, thus far, we have no investment portfolio (I have accrued ~£80k in Workplace Pension pots, scattered around various providers, but aside from this, the only "asset" we have is a mortgaged property).
In terms of retirement, I'm not sure when that will be, though, I'm hopeful for mid-50s. That being said, it's almost impossible to outline a particular age as everything is so foggy when it comes to how best to invest and get the returns to enable an early retirement.
Again, big thanks to this community for the expertise provided thus far, and further thanks for any input anyone can provide in relation to the above.

please share your thoughts!!!!!!!
alright, ive finished the game around a month ago but have spent the past month LIVING off of hl memes and ominis content, so i still remember most of the game vividly.
i think theres foreshadowing to a sequel, here's why:

• if you dont turn in sebastian and talk to him, he'll understand your pov on the goblins and listen. if you do hand him in, ominis will talk to him and report that this has only made him angrier (..for whatever reason). this made me curious, because, well, by the time you do this quest it should be almost endgame, hell for some people they do the 'in the shadow of the...' quests AFTER endgame. it just seems an odd detail to add rather than 'oh yeah i talked to sebastian and he understands and hes sorry, the end'. maybe the devs set this up for a conflict point in the future, if you hand him in, for a sequel (or more likely a dlc).

-anne sees what sebastian has done to solomon, and this deathly sick (!!!) girl runs away to... where, exactly? again we get conflict that hasnt been resolved.
-less glaringly important but we get almost nothing about ominis. in the house cup bit hes just sitting down despondently because hes just lost his only friend and has to go back to his abusive family, who used crucio on him. also, ominis is quite vague about said family. leaves an open space that can be filled in with a sequel, because i would actually give my right eye to learn more about the gaunts ;)
-the MOST obvious plot hole - sebastian, in his usual delusions, seems to convieniently forget our emotional undercroft heart-to-heart about 'ill use ancient magic to save anne', before he goes and harnesses the power of a dark relic that causes only desctruction. (i ADORE seb but ominis is just so much better im sorry ;-; )YES i know theres the whole 'theyll become husks with no emotion if you take away pain', but sebastian hasnt been TOLD that. for all he knows, WE are the answer!! but nooo he must control the inferi because he is a teenage edgelord and nobody understands him. so yet again, unresolved conflict that could be saved for another time!!
-another huge plot thing - i personally went mostly goodie-goodie (except the unforgivables because come on!) in my first playthrough as a slytherin (going as an evil gryffindor next, lol). so this means i left the power of the resevoir alone. BUT! i have seen playthroughs where the resevoir is taken for the players own personal gain. is there any difference?... ...literally no. which is just ??? so maybe in additional gameplay, we could learn to 'hone' whatever new skills this grants us (more sequel-worthy than dlc-worthy, imo.)
-more a dlc thing, but quidditch. need i say more?
my thoughts:
there is enough material here to make a worthy sequel.
not only did hl DESTROY its sales expectations (even with the boycott), its been so popular that it has a subreddit with over 300k people (thats where we are now weee), which is kinda insane for a 'spin-off' game.
they would be stupid NOT to make a sequel or dlc, considering the absolute bank they made from this one + they now know what people want, meaning the next game would be even better.
the plot could be-

• you start 6th year as normal. you'd probably be on the train because no special entrance for you! you're slumming it with the normies now. if youve handed sebastian in last game then hes not here and you can skip anything to do with him until i say so.

-if you didnt, seb is still here. he thanks you for all you've done, blah blah blah, and acknowledges the goblins innocence. hes worried sick for his sister who has ran away and wants to find her. you are dumb and havent learned your lesson (duh), so no matter what you say he'll convince you to help once you've found your feet in sixth year.
-ominis walks into your compartment. he looks terrible. you ask him if he's alright and he slips some gaunt lore about his family and on their.. ideas of fun, because come on i have a mad obsession with this dude, and if im the one writing this plot, we're getting ominis angst, suck it up. if youve handed in sebastian, itll just be you two. there'll be a train cutscene and boom, you're at school.
-this is where it gets tricky.
IF youve handed in sebastian. he'll be in prison. youll probably get some angsty moments and npc quotes along the lines of 'he seemed like such a good kid'.
if you HAVENT handed him in, the story gets weird, because a) more awkward time with seb because hes free and 2) he knows the goblins are mostly good. the actual hl doesn't have this big of a rift, so its hard to say what happens. however, its good because it gives us loads of choice, the lack of which in hl caused a lot of complaints.
-if he's in prison, sebastian escapes,(not azkaban, gotta keep with the canon. maybe because he is a minor he is sent to a lesser facility.) still blaming the goblins and holding such a hatred for them now that in his eyes, they escaped punishment and that it's his job to kill them all while extorting the cure for anne OR finding us to cure her.
-if he's free, we can either have a storyline of him NOT learning his lesson and maybe going to prison then instead of after he commits uncle-cide (dark magic go brr, because sister is gone) or some other storyline that would be more about our magic (!) and ominis' story.
-for the latter to happen, we'd have to have taken the resevoir's power. OR we can make up a rowling-worthy excuse of 'well MC was exposed to the resevoir power for too long so even though they left it alone it still diffused into them or something! [happy]'. i honestly dont know, this is why i want YOUR THOUGHTS!!!
-to make the selection pool shallower, lets go with the excuse. this will allow us to have seb's story, our magic story and also some ominis story (i am obsessed.)
-whether seb escapes or is already free matters, but in the end its the same result - hes not in prison. the only difference is that free seb doesnt hate goblins, and isnt on the run, and vice versa for escapee seb. both want to find anne and cure her. both now remember you have the capacity to do so (but they dont know about the taking-away-pain-turns-them-into-living-husks thing).

• we could go with the 'find escapee seb and convince him we're right and he believes us and everything goes back to normal' route, but boring.

-maybe escapee seb finds us, and ropes us into the same 'help-me-find-anne' crap free seb does to us on the train. yes, that means we dont have a choice, but there has to be SOME adventure. the goblin-hatred would def play in somehow - its too specific of a thing to include in the endgame to just leave it be like that! maybe his hatred causes him to do unforgivable things to some innocent goblins and he has a 'mAyBe Im ThE mOnStEr' epiphany moment, who knows. maybe it ties in to something bigger.
-the main story would then be along those lines. im still brainstorming the climax and ending but nobodys gonna read this anyway lmfao
-main quests would consist of lessons, sebastian-is-a-little-too-obsessed-with-anne-quests, and honing our magic.
-side quests would be mainly ominis-centric regarding his family/the gaunts, with a decent lot of poppy and garreth. we've already resolved natty's entire life at this point tbh💀💀💀.
-id like to think there's a happy ending. idk what will happen to escapee sebastian, will he go to prison or not?? this is literally the equivalent of a crackfic in my head, i WAS NOT expecting to write this much when i started writing this.
SO AGAIN GIVE ME YOUR THOUGHTS. PLEASE. ON EVERYTHING FROM THE PLOT TO MY SEQUEL THEORIES TO FEATURES AND INCONSISTENCIES. THANK YOU!!
nowww some features!:

• quidditch, because yes
• morality systems would be a bit null here considering we're literally helping an escaped convict. but uh, we can try! just, like, dont cast the unforgivables everywhere you go ;)
• friendship systems with all side quest characters. like going from ehhh... to hellooo! with a side character would be awesome. the one thing hogwarts MYSTERY of all things got right was this.
• friendship and enmity systems BETWEEN characters, like, every sebastian needs their ominis ok. plus i want to help ominis bully puffskien dunkein I BEG, you cant tell me they dont have some rivalry going on ;-;

-romance? idk, not a romance person, this is for you sebastian fangirls to figure out for yourselves
-prejudice. literally what made harry potter, harry potter. there is like ONE audio with a negative view towards muggle-borns, and ONE that uses the word mudblood to my knowledge. everyone's just ok with everyone now? do malfoys and other death-eater's grandaddies not go to school here??? hello??????? this could and SHOULD be a topic for discussion in game or maybe even a side quest or side quest chain.
-extra but when/if seb escapes it should be on the daily prophet that ominis will show us in the undercroft or smth, i dunno
inconsistencies with my plot:

• loads of things havent been planned out. this is like a professional crackfic. (still has better plot than the cursed child though lets be honest :3 )
• everyone is easily convinced 'oh ok lets find your sister even though youre a dangerous escaped convict!'. sorry.

-itll be hard to mash everything in. but a half-assed plot is still a plot <:
-since its a continuation of 5th year, we already know many spells. there arent many useful ones left. HOWEVER!!! we can consult the fandom spell page, take offensive spells and stat boost them more than the 5th year ones >:) ALSO YOU LEARN ABOUT DARK ARTS IN 6TH YEAR, SO. ominis is not gonna have a fun time with those ones 💀
-because we'll be searching for anne, like the actual hl game, less school time, :( sorry
-everyones just ok with us disappearing (if seb is an escapee). someone should pull a hermione and go 'hmm, MC starts disappearing shortly after sebastian escapes, and they never say what they're doing.'
probably ominis or poppy because a) favouritsm on my part and b) ominis knows us best and i headcanon poppy as knowing us well and knowing the dark arts and how theyre used a tad bit more than she gets credit for.

• since this wouldve been 5th and 6th year covered, it would be expected for a 7th year to happen. naturally, i have exhausted all my 3 brain cells writing this, so screw it, 7th year doesnt need to exist right now. i havent even figured out all of 6th.

-loads of other things i havent seen, SO

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SHARE THOUGHTS, THIS TOOK ME AN HOUR TO WRITE AND I ONLY WROTE IT TO SEE WHAT PEOPLE THINK! TYSM. (I SHOULDNT HAVE WRITTEN THIS, I HAVE FINAL EXAMS TOMORROW 💀)

youre all amazing yayayayayaya

I’m an 18 year old female and my parents won’t let me date the guy that I love. A bit of background this guy and I have been on and off since the beginning of last year and the reason we have been on and off is because as soon as my parents find out i’m seeing him they make me end things otherwise they don’t want me to live in their house if i continue to see him. I’ve tried to express to my parents that I love him but it doesn’t get my situation anywhere.
Basically they don’t approve of him because when I was 16 I had a huge birthday party with a close family friend, and as teenagers do they get drunk before a party. He got really drunk and was being a bit too friendly for my parents liking and ever since that day they have thought that he is a disrespectful person. I try to explain to them that its not his character to be that way, as he was very intoxicated and was young and didn’t know how to handle himself, as he hadn’t really drank alcohol before. Soon after my party we started talking and had told my mum that i was seeing someone and told her it was him and she told me i was not allowed to see him and to end things immediately.
Ever since then we have been speaking on and off and it’s a never ending cycle. I’ve tried to make myself hate him so i can forget about him but no matter how hard I try to hate him I can’t. I’ve also tried seeing other guys but nobody compares to him, he’s the only guy that hasn’t tried to get in pants and loves me for me. I truly think that we keep going back to each other because we never end things on our own terms or because we don’t want to be togther anymore, but because i’m forced to stop seeing him.
I’ve been seeing him since the beginning of this year and about three weeks ago I was sick and was at home alone and he had come past to drop me off some things to make me feel better and my dad got home from work early because he was sick and saw him in the house and it got extremely heated. Now this has happened they hate him even more and i feel like there is nothing i can do to make them accept him. I have said everything and done everything i can to try make them like him. I feel so hopeless at this point but i refuse to let him go because i am truely so in love with him and nothing can make me stop loving him.
I think im just going to tell my parents that their opinion of him is just an opinion and it doesn’t bother me if they like him or not because they aren’t the one dating him. My parents are the only people who don’t like him, every one of my friends love him and so do my siblings, so I feel like he is not the issue here.

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GLOSSARY This links to a post on the free section of my Patreon. Note: "Book 1" is chapters 1-59, "Book 2" is chapters 60-133, "Book 3", is 134-193, "Book 4" is CH 194-(ongoing)
When the three teens got up the next morning, they ate quickly before turning their attention back to the instrument.
With the soundboard ready enough, Derek's next task was to collect the string posts and such from some of the scrapped stringed instruments, but to do no more than clean them up if needed and set them aside for later.
While he was doing that, Shizoku was using one of the better instruments in the shop to make sure that Fuyuko had a solid concept of scales and octaves. During this, the luponi couldn't help but ask "Ya should be able ta hear as well as me, why are ya tryin' ta have me figure this out?"
"Well," the kitsune replied, "there's a few things involved. First, I have paid a lot more attention to my magical senses than my physical ones, so while my ears might be able to physically hear as well as yours, my mind isn't as attuned to working with that information. You have been used to pushing yourself to make the most of every sound." She hesitated a moment before adding, "There's something else involved with that, but I think it's best if someone more experienced teaches you, which Mordecai is probably going to do, so I am not going to even tell you what it's about. I just don't want you to think I hid something from you later."
After Fuyuko gave a slightly confused nod, Shizoku continued. "I am also giving you just enough information for you to get certain key concepts down. Once I do that, we can hunt for a fresh set of notes without the bias of the rest of my training. You'll understand when we are done."
Once she was satisfied with the taller girl's understanding, Shizoku began the next stage of the process. "Okay, now this instrument over here has some adjustable positioning with its tuning knobs, and we have some other pieces that were also still being prototyped. Fuyuko, what I want you to do is find a new note. We have a bunch of strings of different types, so you can play with it with different sounds. So you hunt down a note that you like, no, love. Deep or high or somewhere in between, it doesn't matter. Once we have a single note to work with, we can scale up or down as needed to get the matching ones, the only limitation is that it has to be a note Derek can hear. The notes I showed you are the notes I know, but technically a scale can be based on the harmonies of any frequency. Since you don't know all the systems that already exist, and you have really good hearing, you should be able to pick out a clean frequency to start with."
After Fuyuko got a hang of tuning strings, Shizoku had Derek follow her out of the workroom. "I don't want to disturb her concentration, and I don't want our reactions to influence her. I'm sure she's heard plenty of music before, but I doubt she's heard as much well-performed music as you have, so she won't know what sounds are supposedly wrong."
While Fuyuko was occupied, the pair explored the witch's island more, poking their noses into any unlocked buildings other than the main house. Some of them were storage, and some were other types of workshops. Shizoku wasn't certain if the wreck of an alchemy lab was the result of visitors or of Carmilla's own experiments, and decided it was best to not ask. But there were a lot of notes and a few books, so she decided to start browsing them and copying any new information she found. She also wrote on a couple of them to correct anything she saw that was clearly wrong.
Once the fox girl got distracted by her studies, Derek decided to practice channeling his elemental abilities more. The swamp was a fascinating mix of different types of elements and different ways elements could be seen. The concept of 'mud' was complicated enough that he was beginning to see it as its own thing, distinct from earth and water.
And then there was the way in which 'air' could be trapped in the muck, and even the more liquid stuff could prove difficult for air bubbles to escape readily. None of that was good quality air, at least, not if you needed to breathe, but it was air. Sort of.
He walked along the wooden walkways that wound around the island, probing as far as he could with his senses. Holding on to this state was tiring, but it was easier to keep doing this exercise when there was something new and interesting to puzzle out. He wasn't trying to manipulate or adjust anything right now, that seemed like a bad idea to mess with Carmilla's island, but there was enough here that was simply different from what he'd seen before to keep him occupied for a while.
So when Fuyuko had found the note she wanted to work with, she had to spend more time fetching her friends before they could continue. "So, as I was playin' with the notes, I kinda remembered some old songs my ma used ta sing ta me. They didn't sound the same as the songs people liked, and they ain't in common, so I ain't sung them in a long time, but I tried ta remember them as best I can, and then I figured out some strings that sounded like I remembered. I think these can work as part of a scale."
Shizoku was satisfied with the results. "It's not on any of the scales I know. Very good Fuyuko. Um, and maybe when we are done here, we can hear those songs. Now for the hard part. We have to find the harmonies. More specifically, we have to find the harmonies and how to create them with the available strings. This is going to be a lot of work, and most of it is still going to be based on Fuyuko's hearing, so our part is to make sure she has as many available strings and ways of adjusting them as possible."
It took several days in fact, including marking sections on the strings that could be used to change to a different harmonic note. Part of this was to create a lot of options, which they were going to need. Shizoku took a lot of notes during this, and Derek eventually had to go back to town to barter for some more strings. They had a lot more than they were going to use in the final product, but there were so many more possible notes than Derek had realized. And the tiny fox organizing their efforts was being perfectionist about having every possible option available. She'd also added "precise distance measuring tools" to his shopping list.
In the end, Derek had what she wanted, but he was pretty certain that he'd overpaid in at least one barter. At least he'd been able to get some more food supplies. The meals Udup got for them were fine, but a little repetitive and boring, so it was nice to get a change of pace. He also made sure to collect the items they had been storing in their room so that they didn't have to lug them around the swamp, as they had a place to stay on the witch's island.
And during all this Bip was amusing itself by learning to vibrate in tune with the various notes, and even showed off by making waves on its surface that matched the sound. Shizoku looked a little confused when she passed on what her familiar said, but to Derek that felt like an insight he needed to work on with his air attunement.
When their taskmistress was satisfied with their options, it was time to create the layout for their instrument. "We need a piece of wood the same size and shape as our instrument. We're going to figure out the best string order for what we want. This is going to involve a lot of moving things around, so we want to do the work here, and then copy that to the actual instrument when we are done."
This part went a lot faster but it still took most of a day to design their layout, and the next morning was used for their final assembly.
The instrument had a total of twenty-six strings, two octaves of thirteen notes each, with more notes available based on which of the raised ridges one pressed down on while plucking the string. Even with the tools that Derek had bought, measuring with enough precision was hard, but thankfully the tuning posts were all made to be used in experimental instruments so were easy to adjust.
After they had lunch, they got Carmilla to examine their work. "Huh," she murmured as she plucked each string, "yeah, that is a new sound. And this thing is cool, I need to find a name for it. Alright, you guys pass this stage, and with flying colors." She giggled, "Miss Kazoo says you did that the way hard way. It was thorough, but you should have been able to do it with about a third the work or less."
Shizoku scowled and said, "Well, she may have had a lot of music training, but I have had only so much, so I wanted to be sure I didn't miss anything." And then she blinked, "Wait, 'Kazoo'?"
Carmilla coughed. "Oops. I'm getting a scolding now from Mordecai. Um, maybe don't use that? Anyway, you guys did a great job and put a lot of creative and physical effort into this. That adds up, you know? So with this and all the other stuff you guys did before coming here, I only get to ask you for one more task. I want you to put on a performance for me. And I want it to include that instrument. You can practice with this one, Kazue will make a copy that is a bit more stable for the performance and for me to keep."
That elicited groans from the entire group, but Shizoku rebounded quickly. "Wait, I have an idea. Um, I think we need a couple of days of practice, and we need a drum as well."
The plan was pretty straightforward. Fuyuko was going to sing the songs she could remember, and teach them to Shizoku and Derek while also doing her best to play the notes on their new instrument. She wasn't really going to be very proficient at it in only a couple of days, but they were able to work out the simplest arrangement that would go with her songs.
Derek's job was to maintain a steady beat on the drum and sing along with the chorus of the song. Not knowing the language that Fuyuko was singing in made this part harder.
Shizoku's job was to adjust one of the dances she knew to the timing of Fuyuko's song. She even dug into one of her expanded space bags to bring out a very fancy looking kimono and a pair of fans that could be used to create a sharp snapping sound, which could be used to contrast the low sound of the drum that Derek was playing.
The resulting performance was far from professional. Fuyuko only had a small pattern of notes she could reliably reproduce while singing, and they were somewhat spread out as she couldn't play fast at all. Shizoku's fan dance also didn't really match the feel of the song despite the adjustments she tried to make, and Derek's reproduction of the chorus was far from perfect.
But they put sincere effort into it, and Carmilla was satisfied. "Oh, that will be a great start, and I think I am going to like playing this. Thank you, I think you three have put more real effort into this than most of the adults have. Oh, they have a special gift for you Fuyuko, they say you should have it now." A small book appeared in her hands, which she handed over to Fuyuko. "Part of the dungeon magic means they learned that language when you sang it. This is a copy of every song you sang and a translation. The writing for the original is sounded out using the common alphabet, they don't have a writing sample to learn the original script from. Um, they also think you should wait to read it until you guys are settled in for the night. I'll let you three through the swamp tomorrow, and you can collect your big prizes when you get to the end."
The reason for waiting became clear to Fuyuko when she did start reading later that night, and she began crying. "I remembered the words and the sounds, but it's been so long that I didn't really remember the meaning. They were lullabies. They were my clan's lullabies."
Shizoku and Derek did their best to comfort their friend, but her tears were both of pain and of joy. She was very happy to have this small bit of her past restored to her, even if the translations showed she'd forgotten a verse or two. She was going to do her best to remember them all and make sure they were written down.
She was much calmer by morning, and the three collected themselves and set off to make their way to the briar wall that blocked off the exit to the level. The passage through went fine, but the corridor after was not the straight path Fuyuko had expected. It was blocked off, and there was a single stair way splitting off from the corridor. "Um, guys. That's supposed ta be the way we go, it goes ta a big room ta watch the arena from. That's, um, one of the stairs down to the arena."
They didn't know what to make of this and made their way down very cautiously.
Mordecai was waiting for them, along with several bunkins and kobolds. "So, who is up for an optional bonus challenge?" He asked them with a grin.
<<Previous Start Next >>
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Hey everyone, this will be my first attempt at a serious post on this sub. I’m not exactly practiced in articulating my thoughts (I’m more of a fiction writer) so please bear bull with any mistakes and please correct me if I’m wrong. The last thing I want to do is spread misinformation, I’m not an expert (or a financial advisor) on any of this. I'm here to learn, not to teach.
This post will be the first in a series of me reading through the entire Diamond Handbook (2nd) and just commentating on points I find interesting or discussion worthy. I will be asking questions as well as giving my own personal thoughts based on my understanding of the events that have transpired. I became an ape right after the sneeze, and followed a lot of the discussions back then, but have been zen for a while so I haven't fully kept up with a lot of the new developments.
I haven't actually sat down and read DD in a long time, so I decided to give myself a refresher and actually look at the Diamond Handbook (2nd) for the first time. I had read a lot of these posts as they had come out, so I had never felt the need to look at the full PDF before. For the apes that haven’t read it either, I recommend giving it a read. You can find the full DD library in the pinned post of this sub, and the Diamond Handbook is the first one there.
As I have been reading it, I’ve quickly realized that some of the stuff is a little outdated. That can’t really be helped since so much DD has been done between then and now, but this brings me to the two reasons for this post. The Diamond Handbook is likely the first piece of DD a new ape will be recommended; I want to spark discussion to clear up some things that are misguided or outdated in this handbook. The second reason is more of a personal challenge. Whenever someone denies the legitimacy of the DD, an ape usually responds by saying something like “Well, read the DD and prove it wrong”. The average MOASS denier won’t do this though, in my experience they just think it’s ridiculous on a conceptual level, and won’t take the time to actually look through all the DD available and construct a proper debate. I can’t really blame them for this though, spending so much time on something you have no interest in doesn’t sound like a fun time.
But I have a lot of interest in this, and I am an aspiring author who writes 400K word fanfictions for fun. I’ve got the time and the writing willpower. I am very big into trying to understand how a reader will interpret a piece of my writing, so I’ll be looking through that lens and will be writing this with the assumption that you have already read the Diamond Handbook (2nd). Please take the time to respond/correct what I say here, I want to learn.
With all that out of the way, let’s get started.
​
The Mother of All Short Squeezes (MOASS) Thesis, Published on May 26, 2021, by u(slash)HCMF_MACEFACE
Before we even get into the meat of this section I already see a bit of an issue. A lot of the language implies that MOASS is imminent, take this section for example:

*“If you don't believe me, just look at the chart of GME which our DD (Due Diligence/research/analysis) has been forecasting for a while now. The below pattern has only preceded massive spikes in price, but this time, those on the other side of the trade are going to have a much harder time suppressing the price like they did in January and March. Thanks to the activity on 5/25, we have entered the end-game. The MOASS is beginning.”* 

I think most new apes will look at this, then look at the date of posting (three years ago), and think this is delusional thinking. They will say that MOASS did not ‘begin’ because it hasn’t happened yet. This would be pretty short sighted though, GME has always been a Deep Value investment, long positions are called long for a reason. ‘Buy and HODL’ is such a repeated mantra because that is the investment strategy most apes employ. Like most investments, it takes a long time to realize gains. Your retirement account will be growing for 40+ years before you cash that thing out, GME is my retirement plan so I don’t expect it to be much different.
Just because the sneeze happened in a week doesn’t mean MOASS will, in theory it should be a very long event as both the shorts and longs have a test of wills to see who caves first. However, the sneeze was the ‘beginning’ because it was exposed a lot of the fuckery that is going on in the market right now, I think that is the message that should be taken from this section.

*“These terms are key to understanding the theory and speculated value of a GME investment. Hyperlinks to Investopedia, "the world's leading source of financial content on the web", have been included for most market terms and concepts and it is recommended to check them out if they are not clear. We will be breaking down some of the more complex terms and concepts within the post and framing them within the context of GME.”* 

After the introduction, this post does a great job of explaining all the concepts of the stock market that are relevant to the MOASS thesis. However, I do wish it mentioned some other stock terms for the sake of new investors. Since none of the DD is supposed to be financial advice, I can’t really blame them for these omissions, but at the beginning the OP does say they wanted the post to be good for newer investors, so I think some more pointing in the right direction should’ve been provided. I do appreciate the link to Investopedia, but this DD is already a novel, and the average reader might forget about that link by the time they finish it. So an additional link should’ve been provided at the end.
The two big concepts I see missing are Options and Wash Sales/Stop-Losses.
Options are interesting because they create a different type of buying/selling pressure compared to just buying/selling stocks regularly. There are concepts like gamma ramps and stuff that can be relevant when discussing catalysts for price movement. However, options are pretty scary for most investors, I’ve only ever bought one, and forgot about it so it auto-exercised for me (lol), so it’s not a concept I would call essential. I just think it’s better to be educated than not.
The much more egregious omission is that of Wash Sales and Stop-Losses. Wash Sales are extremely dangerous to new investors who still make decisions based on emotions and are not used to the volatility that comes with GME.
If you are unfamiliar, a Wash Sale is when a person sells a stock at a loss, then buys the stock again within a short period of time. As an example, let’s say you bought a stock at $50, then the stock goes down to $40.00 and you no longer feel comfortable with your investment. You sell the stock at a loss. You lost $10.00 on this transaction, but it’s not all bad. When you go to do your taxes, you can report this $10.00 loss to the IRS. This is good because if you make a $10.00 profit off another trade, you now don’t have to take taxes out of that profit, since the IRS will see this as you breaking even in the grand scheme of your portfolio. You didn’t actually make any money, so they aren’t going to tax you for it.
A Wash Sale is triggered when you buy back the stock you sold in a short period of time, this can even apply if you buy a stock in the same sector. So if you buy a stock at $50.00, sell it at $40.00 then buy it again. That $10.00 loss you took can no longer be reported to the IRS as an actual loss. So when you make $10.00 on some other trade, the IRS won’t see you as breaking even, they will tax you on that $10.00.
For a stock as volatile as GME this can be very dangerous, I know people who brought in the peak, then as the price went back down they triggered a Stop-Loss (auto-sale you can program to trigger when a price falls), only to then buy back in when the stock dropped even lower, creating a wash sale that fucked their taxes.
We say “Buy and HODL” a lot, but I think the ‘why’ of it has been lost in the meme. I personally buy and HODL because averaging down is a lot better for me than accidently triggering a Wash Sale. I fucking hate the IRS and don’t want any of that smoke.

*“SPOILER: GME and \[Popcorn\] have tons of FTDs reported.”* 

I just kinda don’t like the mention of the Popcorn stock here, it has never been a deep value investment. If you are unfamiliar with the Deep Value investment strategy, please take a look at the old Roaring Kitty livestreams. In summary, Deep Value investing is defined by looking for stocks that are extremely undervalued and unpopular due to no fault of the company. These external factors that are making the stock undervalued can be anything, shorting, COVID, stuff like that. But what makes it a Deep Value investment is always strong management within the company. If the company is not mismanaged in any way, then it is very unlikely to go bankrupt, and will have opportunities to make a comeback. GME has Ryan Cohen leading, a proven successful businessman that has already taken precautions to ensure GameStop never goes bankrupt. Popcorn just doesn’t have that. It is very short-squeezable, but it’s not deep fucking value.

*“Short sellers must eventually close, or cover, their short position.”* 

Ok, but why ‘must’ they? This is another point I think has been lost in the memes. There are two problems with just saying ‘shorts must close’ without providing context. The first is the simple fact that there isn’t a due date. Unlike a common car loan or mortgage, a short position doesn’t operate on a time table. They can wait forever to close, unless they get margin called.
This next part I’m a little shaky on, I’m probably getting some things wrong here:
Ok, well how are they going to get margin called? The problem I see is that these Short Hedge Funds (SHF) are making a lot of money by selling naked shorts. It’s really hard to get margin called when they are literally printing money, and since they don’t have to report these their books just look to be filled with an infinite amount of cash.
So, there are a couple solutions to this:
1, Government regulation. If the SEC puts a stop to naked shorting, these SHF can’t print money anymore. Eventually the interest from their positions will eat them alive, and they will get margin called. Unfortunately, MOASS has the potential to destroy the economy like in 2008, so they probably aren’t too keen on just doing this without creating some kind of safety net. So I can’t really count on them to help, because the government has a vested interest in keeping MOASS from happening. It’s just not something I believe will be the catalyst. Although they might just do it on purpose given the right reason, like pinning the economic collapse on a scapegoat, or by GameStop forcing their hand by exposing the fraud somehow. I’ve seen a lot of apes hoping for one of these reasons to come to pass, but for me, I don’t see enough motivation from the participating parties.
2, A price run-up. If the price of the stock can unbalance the books of the SHF enough then they could also get margin called. I’m not counting on this either, since the price is manipulated by the process of naked shorting. Sure, they are digging a bigger grave when they suppress the price like this, but it can also help smaller SHFs with exiting their positions with OTC stuff. Over-The-Counter trades are trades made off the lit exchanges, historically it was intended to kind of simulate a transaction between two individuals, like buying a video game from a buddy off the books, no taxes, no regulation. Unfortunately, this is abused by institutions and can’t even be used by individuals, making dark pools of trades full of fraud and undermines the free market. Smaller SHFs that are more at risk of getting Margin Called due to their lack of collateral, can make OTC trades with the big naked-shorting market makers to ‘close’ their positions using fake shares. Of course, this only passes the buck so to speak, but it’s a viable strategy for them since the big SHFs that take on these ‘bucks’ are less likely to get margin called. A lot of historic short squeezes happen because a small SHF gets margin called, then drives the price up and causes a bigger SHF to get called, and so on until they’re all in the grave. This is why I don’t really give a shit if the price goes up to $80 in a week, it’s not enough, the buck has been passed. (To be clear, I don’t have proof that this is the reason for the uptick in OTC transactions, it’s just a theory. If a smarter ape than I can get on this that would be great.) But, even if a price run-up itself doesn’t cause MOASS, it may give motivation for the true trigger:
3, Interest Rates. Here is the big one that I look at, that I believe will be the true cause of MOASS. Now please, correct me if I’m wrong again, I am just an ape who dropped out of college. So, from what I understand a Short institution has to pay a certain amount of interest to the people they borrow the stocks from. This is the cost of borrowing and is how these Lenders make money. For a long time, the interest rate was at like 1%, this means that selling one naked short could cover the cost of the interest 100 times over. However, let’s say that the interest rate becomes 110%, sounds crazy, but this would mean that borrowing the share would cost more than the share. This would destroy the balances of the SHFs and ensure they get margin called. Why would this ever happen though? Because these lenders want to make money. These lenders are the real winners of MOASS, and they aren’t talked about enough in my opinion. Lenders can’t sell the shares they’ve lent out, their income is in the interest rates, there has to be a balance here between it being more profitable to lend the shares or to sell them. If Lenders start to think that lending their shares aren’t making them more money than the alternative, they will raise interest rates to make these profits until SHFs can’t pay them, then the SHFs have to return the shares, causing MOASS with the massive buyback, then lenders can just sell the shares on the way down. Lenders have a monetary business interest in causing MOASS, so they are the most likely cause of it in my opinion.

*“This is the GME MOASS thesis. GME is a stock that stands to hit an unprecedented price point due to the fact that manipulators of the market have failed to bankrupt GameStop thanks in huge part to the Legendary Keith Gill AKA* u(slash)DeepFuckingValue*, Ryan Cohen, and all of the GME investors who took part in this saga. It may not be today, this week, or even this month, but one day soon, these toxic participants have no choice but to buy the stock to close out their short positions.”* 

I don’t think this is necessarily inaccurate, but I think it’s misguided, and the language here is a bit to emotive for my taste. I think the reason the company didn’t go bankrupt is because of the strategic share offering made by Ryan Cohen to build up more cash than the company’s valuation (at the time). All the other stuff was just dressing, DFV and retail did not make RC do this, this move by RC is what ensured the company literally can’t go bankrupt, until then (and at the time this was posted) it was still a risk in my opinion. So this huge thanks feels kinda like a pre-cum celebration, and I've never really liked putting Keith on a pedestal, he's just an individual investor, just like the rest of us.
​
FAQ, Published April 12, 2021, by u(slash)BYE_TRIANGLE

*“Why does Holding do anything?”* *“They need your shares to cover their short positions! They got greedy. Thinking GameStop would fail, the short sellers started Naked Shorting the stock. Long story short they created synthetic stocks with their special privileges as Market Makers. But they can’t cover a short with a synthetic share. So because of the Naked Shorting, the Short Sellers, multiple large greedy money managers, and Hedge Funds need a total number of shares greater than the number available to purchase. THEY NEED EVERY SHARE, EVEN YOURS CONAN!”* *“aRe YoU GuYs MaNipuLatIng THe MaRKeT?!”* 

Holding does something else that I think is really important. It proves that retail is not responsible for the manipulation of the price. You see it in the mainstream media every time the price fluctuates, they say that retail and Roaring Kitty is driving the price up for the memes, and that the ‘meme stock craze is dead’ whenever the price falls, claiming that retail is selling. However, it quickly becomes clear to anyone with the willingness to research that retail holds. Holding doesn’t move the price at all, so they literally can’t blame this sub for the fuckery that happens.
Now, on the flip side, I know people on the old sub to buy and sell with these fluctuations, they did it during the sneeze and I’ve seen comments claiming to do it last week. I think this is why Roaring Kitty really had to speak to congress about this, because a legitimate-seeming argument could be made that retail was buying and selling at high volumes. The loss and gain porn on the old sub could be presented as evidence. Here though, apes hold, we glaze purple doughnuts.
So when MOASS does happen, the massive price increase will be only due to buying pressure from SHFs, so they are the only ones that can take the blame for what happens next.

*“No one knows how high the squeeze could take the stock price. The best rational reasoning says that these numbers \[500k per share\] are possible through the laws of supply and demand. Furthermore, it is likely that the Short Percentage is a lot higher than reported, with many suggesting that the short-sellers, cumulatively, need more than 100% of the float to cover.”* 

A lot of naysayers will claim people are insane for thinking that phone number prices are possible. They will cite that it would make the company’s valuation higher than the amount of money in the world, which is true. However, with the nature of fraudulent naked shorts being fake, the price is fake too, and the valuation of the company doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole float will be sold at those prices. Yes, it shouldn’t be possible, by all accounts it wouldn’t make sense, but it is possible due to the naked shorting. Also, institutions that own shares likely won’t HODL out for the phone number prices, they will sell when they think it’s safe, and when they won’t get in trouble with the SEC for destroying the economy. The infinity pool (the shares that will be sold at these prices) will be a small fraction of the total amount even among retail investors. So the argument that I see against the possibility of this doesn’t hold a lot of weight.
Keep in mind that even though ‘buying pressure’ moves the price up, someone has to be willing to sell in order for someone to buy. So as the price creeps up from $100 to $1000 to $100000 to $8675309 someone will be selling on the way up to get there.

*“Synthetic long positions could be used to disguise their short positions as well, the mechanisms behind this practice utilize the options markets and could explain some of the crazy options activity that we have seen in GameStop the last few months.”* 

So uhm… I don’t understand ‘Synthetic Longs’ at all. Could an ape with more wrinkles elaborate on this? From what I can extrapolate, this may refer to an institution purchasing a naked shorted share from someone else?

*“While at the same time they employed the use of social engineering to slowly depress the positive sentiment for the stock on Reddit and elsewhere.”* *“You may have been called a Shill for one of a number of reasons. This community is very inclusive and open to everyone, but because of the blatant attacks this forum has suffered a lot of people are understandably paranoid. (Myself included). Please, unless you really are a shill, don’t take it personally.”* 

I want to address this, because there is a lot of misconception about SuperStonk. A lot of people will claim that this sub is just an echo chamber cult that can’t handle anyone questioning the narrative. This may seem true on the surface, but I think the reality is just that we’ve become hyper sensitive to the social engineering the old sub fell victim to, and I remember this sub being attacked with that as well. So whenever we see a post that has extremely emotive language, we become skeptical and down vote it. Emotions have no place in investing, that is a common rule touted in even the oldest investing books, so posts that try to incite an emotional response are shot down. Apes aren’t about to be manipulated again. That being said there are emotive posts that still get upvoted, ones with positive hype-filled narratives. Since these get upvoted and the negative ones don’t that sometimes gives the impression of an echo chamber. This is because the facts do support the MOASS thesis, so a hype title and opening paragraph is just more agreeable with the facts-based narrative. Some people are just scrolling on their phone and don’t have time to read the whole post.
However, if you go into the comments of these posts, there are apes investigating the profile history to determine if posters are bots, regardless of the pushed narrative. If you look past the upvote counter, apes are very skeptical of any post that isn’t based in fact or harmless memes. The comments rule the post, and I have to say I’ve very proud of this sub for staying vigilant in the wake of Reddit restricting moderation tools.

*“Ryan Cohen clearly believes in Gamestop, to the point of announcing that he will be taking equity as compensation. In fact, as of writing this all of the new Gamestop board members are going to be taking equity as compensation. This is seen as an incredibly bullish sign of the company's future success.”* 

This is one of the principles of Deep Value investing, I wish this was elaborated on more of why this is bullish. This means that the board, and more importantly Ryan Cohen, is tying their individual self-worth to the company. Due to this tie, they will essentially ‘go down with the ship’ if the company goes down. This means that the board and Ryan actually have an interest in the company doing well, instead of having an interest in making money off the company. You may think this sounds like the same thing, but it’s not. If RC cared more about money than the company, then he could destroy the company to make money (this is what’s happening to popcorn), but by tying his worth to the shares, the only way for him to become richer is for the company to flourish.
I don’t really like the language being used here, stuff like ‘clearly believes’ ‘seen as incredibly bullish’ are all pretty emotive and doesn’t actually explain why these are positive growth signs for the company, they are just saying it is ‘bullish’, the average new investor isn’t even going to know what that really means. Even though GME is extremely manipulated, causing Technical Analysis to become increasingly difficult to depend on, the investment is still rooted in fundamentals of deep value.

*“Below is a shortlist of some of the potential catalysts people are speculating about:* 

-A Stock Split, or some similar move from Gamestop that recalls shares
-Gamma Squeeze
-Gamestop’s Q1 Earnings Call
-Some speculate Gary Gensler (Newly appointed head of the SEC), may make some move that sets things in motion
-DTCC rule changes taking effect
-Appointment of a new CEO”
Yeah… this feels bad man. I’ve talked about this already, but we can rapid fire down this list.
The stock split didn’t work out, since those in charge of distributing the splits did it fraudulently. Gamma Squeeze is the kind of thing that could trigger a smaller hedge fund to get margin called and cause a domino effect, but I’ve shared my theory of the OTC action. Earnings are nice, but public sentiment has always been more tied to the media manipulation than actual facts. Fucking Gary.
On the subject of bringing in new talent, I do feel like a big move will happen soon. We’ve already seen a lot of job offerings from the Corporate side of GameStop so this could be the next phase of the plan. I really think that RC has spent these last few years taking precautions to make sure the company can’t go bankrupt, the last thing he wants is to turn out like Toys-R-Us. A lot of downsizing happened, so now he can start thinking about upsizing again.
I’m not necessarily saying that these things can’t trigger the squeeze, but I am saying that depending on something to start it is just inviting disappointment. I think the ‘no dates’ rule has been sorely forgotten lately with all the hype and speculation around Roaring Kitty’s tweets and stuff. I am a zen ape, it happens when it happens.

*“First of all, it is incredibly important to note your potential biases when determining if someone is just a shill trying to spread FUD. Not all FUD is invalid, someone may bring up a solid point against an otherwise great DD, and that could scare you. Remember that just because you do not like what someone is saying, doesn’t make it invalid. It is important users here work with constructive criticism to refine their theories.”* 

Damn, wasn’t I just talking about this? This critique isn’t going to just be wagging fingers, this is really good stuff that still applies today, and from what I’ve seen apes are doing a great job of distinguishing between FUD and legitimate criticism. I also want to take a second to thank the mod team, especially after their tools were restricted, they’ve been a great help.

*“…but since then retail investors have been buying on every single dip in the price… That's more than two whole months of buying-the-dip. Now, I will not speculate on numbers here, if you want to know more you will have to read the DDs on that.”* 

This is pretty outdated now. Apes have been buying for three years now, and with the advent of Direct Registering we have a much better idea of how much apes hold. I can say with confidence now that retail owns a floats worth of shares. Since there is so much naked shorting, a lot of institutions probably own their own floats too.
I glaze those purple doughnuts, yum.
​
Citadel Has No Clothes, Published March 14, 2021, by u(slash)ATOBITT
Ohhhh, this one is special to me, I read it when it first came out, first time I was there on release night. Let’s see how it hodls up.

*“TL;DR - Citadel Securities has been fined 58 times for violating FINRA, REGSHO & SEC regulations. Several instances are documented as 'willful' naked shorting. In Dec 2020 they reported an increase in their short position of 127.57% YOY, and I'm calling bullsh\*t on their shenanigans.”* 

58 times. I don’t actually know how much that number has gone up, but I’m sure it has. I am reminded of an old saying, that if the punishment for a crime is a fine, then it only a crime for the poor. The crime being done to GME is class warfare, it’s nothing less.

*“$295,347,948,000 of that is split into options (calls & puts), while $78,979,887,238 (20.52%) is allocated to actual, physical, shares (or so they say). The rest is convertible debt securities.”* 

This is why I’m skeptical that it’s even possible for Citadel to get margin called by a normal price run-up. Let’s do some math here. GME’s float is at 232 million-ish shares, let’s say they shorted 300% of that, just to be conservative (lmao), so that’s 696 million. To take what the first post said, Margins don’t get called unless an entities’ collateral becomes less than 80% of what they’ve borrowed. If they use their entire $384,926,232,238 portfolio as collateral, then GME would have to soar to a price of… divide by 4, multiply by 5… $691.32 per share. That may sound relatively reasonable, but I don’t think a normal catalyst would be enough for that. I really think interest rates are the key, think about it, if they have to pay like 30% interest on all of those shares, their portfolio will be reduced by that much (kinda) and we can find a much more reasonable midpoint. Now brace yourselves, I’m about to spend an unreasonable amount of effort on something that is probably wrong because I don’t know shit about fuck about margins or getting called (I have a cash account and I lack rizz).
In order to calculate that we gotta do one of those double equation variable bullshit things we all hated in school, I forgot what they were called but I remember how to do them.
So, we have a few variables:
C = Citadel’s Portfolio = $384,926,232,238
S = Shorted Shares = 696,000,000
I = Intrest = 0.30
X = Price Per Share
Y = Citadel’s new portfolio amount after paying interest
So, X and Y are undetermined, but we have two equations to work with
C – I(X*S) = Y
This one calculates how much money is going to be in citadels new portfolio after paying interest, we calculate the interest by multiplying the cost per share, by the amount of shorted shares, and multiplying that by the interest rate, then subtracting it from their total portfolio.
Y * 1.25 = X * S
This one calculates the total amount those shorted shares have to be in order for Citadel to get margin called, by multiplying their new portfolio by 5/4 and calculating the total cost of the shares.
X * S has a direct value; we can plug the left side of the second equation into the first to get
C – I(Y*1.25) = Y
Now we just gotta isolate Y on one side of the equation.
C = Y + 0.3(Y*1.25)
C = 1.3Y * 0.375
C= 0.4875Y
C * 0.4875 = Y
Y = $187,651,538,216.03
Now we gotta find X, we can just plug in the other stuff.
(Y* 1.25)/ 696,000,000 = X
X = $337.02 per share for shitadel to get margin called on 30% interest.
Holy shit, now that’s what I call reasonable. See how much interest can completely fuck a portfolio? They lost almost half of their portfolio value to a 30% interest to this. This is why the whole market will bleed red on the run up to MOASS, they will have to sell half of their portfolio just to pay the interest.
Citadel is probably not a good example of this, since they print the naked shorts themselves... so they would be paying interest to... themselves... when they borrow them? Citadel is so fucked up, I don't have enough wrinkles for this.
But hey, I think the concept of what I said is fine. High interest rates can reduce collateral and cause margin calls. Hey, just out of curiosity, how much is the borrowing interest rate looking now?
16.5%
SHF are fucked.
​
Anyway, I’m writing this on a Wordpad document so I’m not sure if I’ve come up on the character limit, but I think I’m getting close so I’ll end this part here. Please let me know what I’ve got wrong or any insights you want to share, I’ll be sure to talk about any interesting comments when I do a part 2!
TLDR: I am reviewing the Diamond Handbook (2nd) and seeing what has changed in the three years since it’s been compiled. I have a bias in thinking that high borrowing interest rates are what will cause MOASS, and that is shown here. This is not meant to be an impartial analysis, just my thoughts. Not financial advice.

AITA for cancelling Hangout plans because i didnt know when i would be home again?
My Friends and i are all around in Our late Teens and all still live at Home with Our Parents and because i live in a House and not a Apartment or Flat, my house kinda became the Hangout House.
I dont think its that big of a Problem to me but since most of the time i have to ask for Permission from my Parents to have 6 people at Our home because duh, my parents wanna relax on the weekend too and on this Day my parents had to go to sleep earlier because they had to wake up real early the next day PLUS on this Day i went to a Concert for which i didnt know when i would be home from (which turned out to be around 11:30 pm) i couldnt really make "plans" with my friends.
Okay so, around a week before that, a friend of mine sent a message to Our groupchat about hanging out together, but what i found kinda weird and arrogant was that He said that we could hang at MY house! A bit later He said only with permission of course but still. I'm a bit annoyed by that but not too much at that point.
The next Day we went to Hangout at a Fast Food Place to maybe discuss some Hangout plans. There i told them that i dont know when i would be home on that Day and since i would have NO clue what time that would be i said that MAYBE we could hang out if i was home early. End of Discussion on that Day.
A few days before the Concert and Maybe Hangout Day, my friends wrote in Our groupchat asking about the Hangout plans and since i still had no clue when i would be home that Day, because how would i know? I couldnt tell them when we could hangout. Here comes my mistake: i told them that maybe we could hangout if i was home early enough, but i of course didnt know when that would be.
So then they wanted a clear answer but since i kinda wanted to hangout but didnt know when i told them again, maybe we can hangout but i dont know when.
I'm just so annoyed by them because they Kind of treat themselves as the victim but they wanted to hangout at my place and expect me to make ALL the plans, yet when i asked some question i get memey pictures as answers, how am i supposed to "plan" anything?! And the same person who kinda "invited" himself into my Home made a backhanded comment about my Planing.
Anyway
AITA?

Confused, whether my ex was narcissist or I was doubting all along?
Hey, just wanted to come here and share my story. I am 20-year-old (F). Last year in July, I came across a guy (30M) on an app. We shared same ethnicity but he was living abroad for past decade. We matched, we clicked and I thought this was the man I had been looking for all my life. He seemed so sweet, fun to talk and charming. One thing that pulled me toward him was his respectful and polite attitude towards me (this was big for me since I am coming from a rough childhood), he used to call me 'Miss', respected my opinions, shared his own without making me feel uncomfortable and we were kind of cloning each other. Our beliefs and moral values seemed very similar.
We talked for about two weeks and it was a detailed discussion on life and how we view it. Later on, he told me he was looking for something serious and I, who is coming from traditional muslim culture, wanted nothing more than a serious relationship (marriage). So he sent a proposal my home, his family came and met my family (that is how it happens in our culture). My family was little hesitant because we did have some cultural differences but I wasn't too noisy about it. Long story short, we got engaged in the following September. He couldn't come so his mother fulfilled his duty that was to slip the ring on my finger. After the ceremony I video-called him, excited, and told him about the day and expressed how happy I am. I was expecting something, maybe a little spark in his eyes or something sweet to say but he wasn't reciprocating the enthusiasm. He only smiled and talked a few and that's it. Oftentimes I felt like he wasn't expressing enough but I never let my head go south. I always gave myself an explanation for his actions. Everything was going fine until he had to come to his home country for his father's surgery. During those times, I did my best to remain supportive, empathetic. I gave him space, stood beside him, cheered him up.
A few days before the surgery, he decided to meet me out of a blue and yes, this was first physical interaction. I was in uni when he told me and like every other girl, I wanted our first meeting to be special. For those who are unfamiliar of muslim traditions, it is not preferable to meet alone before nikkah (the marriage ceremony). So my family wanted someone with us and I wasn't much in favour of it. I knew my boundaries and just wanted to have some good time with him. Therefore, I asked him to reschedule so I can convince my family to allow us to meet in a public place. I was only 19 and considering my age, I didn't have much authority to take such decisions. He, on the other hand, got furious because I asked him to reschedule. I felt bad for breaking him as he said he was excited to meet me and he needed me the most in hard times like these. I felt guilty but the next day, we met. He came to my home to pick me up, had a chat with my family. My family (uncle and aunt since I'm living with them after my parents' divorce) allowed us to have dinner.
During the dinner date, I was nervous. My body felt shivers and I couldn't understand whether it was from excitement or anxiousness. He was driving quite rashly, I am also a driver so the reckless driving didn't scare me, i trusted him on this but I knew something about him was the reason behind my sweaty palms. I just couldn't spot it. We remained silent throughout the drive, I wanted to speak and I tried to initiate but he kept it short. Only music was filling the silence. We reached to a mall and I was observing whether he will open the door for me but to my surprise, he didn't. Instead he walked ahead of me. Watching him speeding off didn't leave a good feeling in my chest. He wanted a coffee so we went to get one. I didn't get anything for myself because all of a sudden I wasn't hungry anymore and also I forgot my wallet at home and my self respect didn't allow me to get anything. He ordered a burger for himself and shared some bites with me. I noticed he didn't pull out a chair for me nor did he let me step in and out of elevator first. Throughout the eating process, he remained silent and looked around. I felt awkward as I am lively person and this was the man I wanted to talk to the most. It was just an awkward silence that I wasn't expecting to be a part of our first date at all. He didn't feel like the man I was talking to on phone. That man was responsive, loving. This was just something else.
We went back to the car, again him leading and I following him in heels. Just when I was putting seatbelt on, he kissed me. It was my first kiss and he totally caught me off guard. Right after that he gave me a smug smile. He kissed me again and I was long lost to react on anything. It was a lot. I wanted to stop him but my feelings for him got a hold on me. I regretted that but I couldn't stop it. After dropping me home, he left a text "I had a great time with you". Whereas, I was convincing myself that I had a good time as well.
After that we didn't talk much about this dinner but a question remained in my mind, "how did he find me?" because to me, he was handsome and I was strongly attracted to him but I never got the clarity on how did I look to him, especially after spending time with him I got more curious. I offered him my support during the tough time and chose not to ask him the question. After his father's surgery, he kept forcing me to have lunches with him and i had without my family's knowing. After our every meet-up the question began eating my head a little more. Finally, after some days I decided to ask the question. To which he got mad. He blamed me for stressing him and accusing him of not liking me even though I just meant to ask him if he liked me. I needed reassurance but he got defensive and "warned" me that my fears and overthinking will ruin our relationship. That was the first stroke that hit my heart and I couldn't believe what happened with me. I felt horrible and cried myself to sleep The next day he acted completely normal and love-bombed me as if nothing happened. I remained silent to avoid conflict.
A few days later, he asked me to accompany him to his home that was in another city (his father's surgery took place in my city and they were in hospital). Now keeping the society where we both belong from, this was a big problem. I had to refuse him and over this he got furious again, blaming me for not wanting to spend time with him. I understood he lived his life in a western country but he knew his culture better than me, his family was far stricter in their customs than mine was and only if they had known that i visited their house before marriage alone with their son, it would have been a hell for me. It was wrong and I stayed with my decision. Later on, he asked me to meet him for the last time before he left. A day before the meeting, he started joking about having a fetish of having sex with a teenager. I kept brushing it as a joke until he directed it on me and when I asked him to wait for a year as we were to get married, he reasoned that I wouldn't be a teenager anymore and he could not wait that long. I confronted him about feeling manipulated and he got defensive. Long story short, he went back and after some times, he started noticing my silence. He asked me about it and I mustered courage and told him my worries. He listened to me quietly, didn't react like he normally did to my concerns but complained that I hurt him. For which I did feel bad as I never wanted to hurt him.
now the reason why I wrote this whole story was because he was a totally different man during the first third months of our conversation. He portrayed to be a knight in shining armour. His voice held so much meaning when he promised he would be the most understanding and patient person in my life. He felt like my saviour, my best friend and reason to live everyday. I suffered from parental neglect and absence and his promises healed me but when he acted contrary to his words, I used to get confused. I loved him, madly that even after five months of no contact I wake up to his thoughts. He has moved on and found someone else but I am back to my alone self, holding my broken pieces and working on my career. I felt like i was in a trauma bond but still again, sometimes I feel due to my past traumas, I lost a good man. He made me believe so with his love bombing. I got addicted to him as he was the only source of my happiness. but I knew it has to end because he disrespected my grandfather and mother because they saw the same signs in my father even though I didn't tell them enough. I didn't believe them until circumstances forced me to. Can you guys tell me what have you gotten from my story because I need to hear it from external sources.