The article will show analogies between Domain-Driven Design and mathematical modeling

Mathematical modeling

Students are introduced to mathematical modeling in a school. Roughly speaking, it is the translation of a problem from informal human language into the language of mathematics for subsequent solution.
(1)
John and Bob ate three apples at dinner. John ate twice as many as Bob. How much did each eat?
(2)
Let x be the number of apples that John ate Let y is the number of apples that Bob ate.
Then:
(3)
x + y = 3 x = 2 * y
Solving the system of linear equations:
x = 2, y = 1
(1) - problem statement in the domain area
(2) - mathematical modeling
(3) - mathematical model
Another example from the world of physics - we need to calculate how much fuel is needed to fly to the Moon and back. There are Newton's Laws of motion of celestial bodies, there are data on fuel, the vehicle, the mass of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the calculated trajectory and other information.
The whole power of the mathematical apparatus is the absence of semantics. It doesn't care whether it's counting apples or the trajectory of a rocket. It is a formalized system that operates with soulless symbols according to established rules. Arithmetic has its own rules, algebra has its own rules, Euclidean geometry has its own rules.
The achievements of the natural sciences depend on how accurately and completely they construct mathematical models for their problems. If the mass of the moon is not specified, it will be impossible to give an answer to the above problem. On the other hand, if the proposed trajectory is mathematically unattainable, physicists will have to change it.
A mathematical model is a general projection of the problem to be solved from the physics side and the math side into some "common" space.

Domain-driven design

This methodology was proposed 20 years ago by Eric Evans in his famous “big blue book”: Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
For many, DDD is when if you are, for example, making an online store, you must have Product, ShoppingCart, etc. classes, i.e., entities in the code must correspond to business entities. This is not really about DDD.
The main goal that Eric Evans set when creating his methodology was to enable you to create a program architecture in such a way that you can satisfy the client's requirements with maximum probability and build a clear, maintainable and extensible system. Get a quality and successful program product.

Comparison of design methods

DDD is mainly aimed at complex non-typical tasks with vague/varying requirements, to minimize the risks of spending a lot of time and money and not getting something usable in the end.
In cascade development (waterfall), the client gives clear requirements to the business analyst, the system architecture is built according to them, and programmers make code according to it.
In agile development (agile, XP, iterative) the client gives general requirements, a prototype of the system architecture is built on them, programmers make code on it, the system is shown to the client, corrections are made, the next version is released, etc. in a circle.
In case of DDD the joint work between domain area specialists and programmers goes all the time of development. The link between them is the domain model and ubiquitous language. For the first few chapters of the book, Eric Evans talks only about them and their importance.
The main point of the domain model is to be a constant projection of the problem being solved from the client side and the developer side into some common space. Everything in the domain model should be reflected in the program architecture. And vice versa - if a programmer discovers that some business rule cannot be applied or it is better to do it differently, he is obliged to open a discussion about it and initiate changes in the domain model, without making attempts to simply code it in “the right way”.
The domain model itself lacks semantics, it is written using UML diagrams and formal documentation. Semantics is given to it by a ubiquitous language in which the whole team (including the client) communicates. Each term of the domain model must be understood equally by all participants.

Parallels

Analogy to the space flight example above: - math model = domain model - physics = ubiquitous language - mathematical apparatus = software development - mathematical modeling = domain model development process
From this we can draw the corollary that just as in the first case, mathematicians' deviation from the supplied mathematical model will easily lead to wrong/unnecessary results, so in the second case, developers' deviation from the domain model can lead to failure in the end.

In his book, Eric Evans gives the following real-life example. Internet Explorer used to save “Favorites” as files with names corresponding to page names. When the user tried to specify his name, he sometimes got an error “Invalid file name”, although it was not obvious what files had to do with it. This was because the developers were using their own model and the client wanted something different.

Summary

Thus, there is a strong idea of mathematical modeling behind DDD

I am not the OOP. The OOP is u/Throwra_JessComeOn posting in AITAH
Concluded as per OOP
2 updates - Long
Original - 17th April 2024
Update1 - 19th April 2024
Update2 - 13th May 2024
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AITAH For breaking my Number 1 sex rule with a handicapped guy?
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Obviously throwaway, I don’t need anyone here seeing my regular account. Also I’m in the US and English is my first language, any discrepancies are because I suck at typing on my phone.
So TL/DR for the “give me the bare bones, I don’t have all day to read on the shitter” crew: My #1 sex rule since high school has been no sex before the third date. I recently broke that rule with a handicapped guy, and now my childhood best friend is pissed and grossed out because she thinks I have some weird kind of fetish.
Context/full story: I’m a 28f. My childhood best friend we’ll call Jess is also 28f. To put it simply, I don’t think I’m any kind of prude, I just don’t really feel comfortable with casual sex, never have. My best friend knows this and has teased me about it lightly in the past. She’s been in a long term relationship for the last 3 years, I’ve mostly been single while working on my degree and starting my career. Jess lives in another state with her boyfriend, so we don’t hang out much anymore.
So about a month ago I had a first date with a guy I’d been talking to for a bit, thought it was going places, but he gave a WEIRD vibe on the date and I cut and ran early. On my way home I stopped at a local pub, figured I’d have a drink to unwind and people watch till it wore off. (Tipsy driving is still drunk driving IMO.) I get there and it’s pretty packed, Friday night and all, and there was no seating room at the bar. Took my drink and looked around, most of the “restaurant” side of the pub was someone’s birthday party, but there was a small table with a seat open off to the side, with a guy reading a book there. So I say eff it, I’m a social person and what’s the worst thing that happens, he says no? So I ask if I can sit there for a bit, I promise we don’t have to talk or anything.
At this point I feel like I’ve fucked up because this guy up close is the hottest man I have ever seen. But he just smiled at me and gave an enthusiastic “Sure!” A few minutes later of me sipping in silence and he says “I don’t mind talking, if you want to.” (Yeah I want to are you kidding me right now?) We talk for a bit and it turns out Mike (fake name) is 29, just finished his master’s degree in some kind of computer learning field (“I program computers to program computers”) and he’s living on his own for the first time. He apparently stops by the pub after work because he’s right around the corner, and he’s not used to the silence yet after living so long with a half dozen siblings.
We talked for a good two hours, about everything from dating (which he said he’s basically given up on) to hobbies and tastes, and we have a near total eclipse of a venn diagram on this stuff. I eventually sort of blurted out that I don’t know why he’d give up on dating, this is the closest thing I’ve had to a good date in forever. (Shooting my shot obliquely here lol.) He gets kind of an odd look on his face and says “Tell you what, I have to go to the bathroom, but when I come back I’ll ask you out for real.” Weird, but okay?
Then it all clicks, because he doesn’t get up to walk away, he just rolls. In his wheelchair. And I’m thinking “oh my God he wanted to give me a chance to back out of this without making it awkward how cute can this guy BE.” He grinned like crazy when he got back and saw I was still there, and I basically tripped over myself saying something to the effect of “So I’m free all weekend, what did you have in mind?”
Another hour later, we’ve got plans for Saturday, and he told me he has a neuromuscular disorder I can’t remember the name of (my degree isn’t in STEM lol) so his legs work, but the signals from his brain get misinterpreted so he doesn’t have the balance or coordination for walking or standing. The pub starts switching over to the youngerowdier crowd and he asks if I’d like to go back to his place for coffee to continue our conversation.
As you have probably long since realized, I did not get any coffee or conversation till the next morning and I have ZERO regrets. We’ve been dating since and I know it’s still early but I really feel like this might be the one.
Onward to yesterday afternoon, my friend Jess (remember Jess?) is in town, and we go out for coffee to catch up on things. I’m gushing about Mike, but when I get to how we met she just sort of got weird and edgy. I don’t remember any exact words but she essentially said that I must have a fetish for the handicapped since I broke my #1 rule and it’s the best physical relationship I’ve ever been in. Like it’s good for me because he uses a wheelchair, not because the guy puts in effort in bed??? She said I’ve “changed” as a person and left without even saying goodbye. 15 years of friendship and I’ve never seen her like that.
So here I am, asking the most objective people online (haha) if I’m an asshole or weird for being super attracted to a guy who uses a wheelchair and basically putting out immediately.
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Comments
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RefrigeratorHot3859
Firstly, you are allowed to change the rules that you made for yourself. Secondly, I do not get from anything you wrote that you have a “fetish” for the handicapped. Her comments are weird.
Sounds like you need to keep Mike and drop Jess. Good friends will be happy for you, and from what I can gather, that ain’t her.
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dubh_righ
She's got a weird fetish - for super hot guys who are kind, and well spoken, and fuck like a hero. What a weirdo. (sarcasm, in case it's not obvious)

OOP: Okay, yeah this made me laugh for real. Seriously, what a weeeeird fetish I have!

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brelywi
Hey that’s my fetish too! Here I was thinking I was the only one.
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ShottsSeastone
oh fuck that friend. i read this whole thing.

• you have 0 fetish.
• the guy is hot
• the guy is intelligent
• the guy lives on his own
• the guy has his shit together
• THE MAN GAVE YOU THE DOOR TO LEAVE
• Love comes in all shapes and sizes.

OOP: That shit floored me. He's so considerate in so many ways. His stories about his sibs are also hilarious, I can't wait to meet them. We're trying not to rush things just because it all seems so great, but they have a BBQ in May that he'd like me to come to and I am so there. He was raised around a lot of love and it shows.

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Update - 2 days later
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My first ever update! Yay! Uh, so if you were hoping for some terrible drama, I hate to break it to you that I don’t roll like that. No pun intended. So I do have an update on Jess and shit finally makes perfect sense. And I have a slightly NSFW but funny story about Mike, because this guy is just the best, y’all.
Okay, so first, I finally messaged Jess yesterday and said basically “I’m still hurt by what you said, but after 15 years of friendship I’d never forgive musif I didn’t at least ask why you snapped at me like that.” She replied immediately, “I’m so fucking sorry, I didn’t mean any of that, can we have a do over on lunch?” So I agreed cautiously and took a half day to meet with her today.
Turns out that those of you who said she was jealous, and that she might have something else going on, and especially the person who said something might be going on in HER relationship….. gold stars. She’s in town because she’s job hunting, because she’s moving back in with her parents for a while since her relationship ended. Apparently they have been having a ton of small problems adding up, but the biggest one? Sex. The guy she’s been with was apparently never great but it’s gotten to the point where he makes no effort at all for her to enjoy herself and then gets pissed when she isn’t in the mood.
She tried talking with him about it, making suggestions but he told her recently that it’s “emasculating” being given sex advice by a woman. The straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back, however, was that her boyfriend has always had a thing for Asian women. She’s caucasian, but she does have long black hair. After weeks of fighting over their sex life, he suggested that they spice things up….by her dressing in a kimono and pretending to be Asian. She lost it on him and is absolutely disgusted by the racist fetishism and ended it right then.
So she had allllll of this bottled up and was hoping to talk to me and finally be able to put it down….. and I missed every hint that she had something big to discuss because I was gushing about Mike. So to her it felt like I was just twisting the knife by bragging about how great our sex was. She snapped, and somewhere between what I was saying and what she wanted to talk about some wires got crossed and she said something incredibly dumb.
She left without saying goodbye because she was mortified and ashamed as well as irrationally mad at me. Something to know about Jess, she’s an awful liar and she and I were the co-founders of our high school’s “foot-in-mouth” society, so I do believe her. I told her I forgive her and I’m sorry I didn’t realize she wanted to talk about something bothering her, and she said I was too stupidly nice and have nothing to apologize for, so I think we’ll be okay. For the time being I’m not ready for her and Mike to meet, because I don’t want to make things feel worse, and she agrees. But she’s really really happy for me. Hopefully this is just a funny story we can look back on someday.
So, on to how Mike almost killed me, lol. Last night we were talking about the reddit post and he gets this funny expression that I’m starting to recognize. And he goes “How do we know you don’t have a fetish if we haven’t at least tried it in the chair?” And I’m like “are you serious lol”. He said he’s never attempted it, because (cue tears) he’s never felt so comfortable with a partner before. Well.
His chair has what is essentially like a parking break thing. Or it should, it’s unfortunately broken and apparently getting them fixed is an expensive pain in the ass. He doesn’t use it that often so he hasn’t made it a priority. And there’s this thing called Newton’s third law, you know how every action has an equal and opposite reaction? As it happens, when you’re trying to, ah, get the motion of the ocean going, in a chair with wheels that aren’t locked, there’s a sort of counter motion that starts and fucks it all up. So we were going nowhere fast except for inching along the floor in his bedroom. And laughing at the silliness, which isn’t helping. Eventually he just stops and says “Maybe we can get some of those wooden block things they use to keep little planes from rolling away, like in Indiana Jones you know?”
I absolutely lost it. Like laughing so hard I’m in tears, he’s giggling half at the situation and half at my reaction, and everything just keeps setting me off again. FINALLY I get it under control, doing some deep breathing exercises and shit, and I look at him again. And he pulls the straightest face he can, and says, for the love of god, “Golly. This sure is uncomfortable.” Folks if I had asthma I would have fucking died right there. I laughed so hard I think I pulled a rib. Like wheezing and not even laughing anymore so much as weeping and making this awful “heeeeee” noise when I could catch my breath. While he’s laughing and rubbing my back and saying he’s sorry, he couldn’t resist.
So yeah, confirmed, no fetish here, and this magnificent bastard’s comedic timing might actually kill me.
I doubt I’ll update again, because there’s really nothing I can see needing to share given everything sort of worked out. And in the end, the real assholes were the….friends we made along the way? Idk. Thanks for all the lovely comments on my last post and for coming along with me on this absurd but brief drama in my life, lol.
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Comments
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Rustymarble
Obviously, Jess needs to have a twin with a mother-in-law invade her home with ummm....dog poo...and somehow there's a tree dropping leaves and and a 7 year old brat threw an ummm...apple? And then the cops came and everyone clapps!

OOP: And everyone's phones blow up! Genius, I'll finally go viral and get all those internet dollars I assume people are raking in, LOL
I probably will post an update on this account, but I don't necessarily want to bog down AITAH with my silly shit. I'm so excited and nervous. It's apparently a Mother's Day BBQ! which I didn't know because my parents and I are estranged and I never even seriously thought about having kids before meeting Mike. But apparently it's a lot of people and a lot of food and apparently everyone knows he's bringing me. Also, can I just say FUCK YES about his mom? They apparently have a huge one floor rancher and she just assumed we'd be sleeping together in his old room. Like none of that weird "you aren't married so you get separate rooms" shit. I already adore them and we haven't even met yet.

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Forward-Two3846
I think Mike updates are essential to AITAH 😆. I am so excited for you and I hope you have the time of your life.

OOP: Oh there is one coming. Oh my God his family, lol. I am exhausted already and it's only 1 here, and we have another day of this ahead! They are amazing and he is glowing like a fireball, the side of him when he's with family is so bright I need sunglasses to look at him.

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Update - 1 month later
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Hello again! I was going to post this on my own page but a few people mentioned that they think it’s nice to read on AITAH, so fuck it, here’s the “met Mikes family” update. And it's a doozy, or at least felt like it at the time for a girl who grew up with a small, dysfunctional family.
So first up, you know what people (at least me) don’t think about when dating a guy who’s always sitting? Height. I know he’s taller than me because we cuddle a lot, and he’s taller sitting on the couch, but I didn’t reeeeeeally get it. So we drive up Friday night after work (actually south and west, lol, but to my brain it’s always up) in his vehicle, which is modified to be driven entirely using his hands. Neat, right? He’s a really good driver too. One more green flag. We get to the house, and it’s…. It’s huge you guys, LOL like not a mansion, just kind of a sprawling one floor rancher. Real estate was wild back in the day.
Anyway we get out, and I meet his mom. I’d like to point out I am no slouch, I’m 5’-friggin-7. His mom is TOWERING over me. But she was the nicest lady ever. We go inside and I meet his dad (who funny enough is apparently the only short one in this family) and his youngest sister, who is living there with his one year old niece. She gets up to hug me and SHE IS ALSO REALLY TALL. It’s already a bit late then, so we eat and head to bed, I get to see his cute as shit room from when he was a teenager, and I casually ask “hey, so uh, I don’t know how this works and stuff, but how tall are you?” and Mike is all “I dunno, like a bit over 6’4? Been a while since I checked.” A BIT OVER 6’4. “So, is everyone in your family tall?” “…..kinda?”
We met the Nordic Basketball team he calls a family properly the next day. (Actually they’re Irish, but they’re blond and tall so it conveys the idea better.) The ONLY one of reasonable height, and still taller than me, was his oldest sister, lol.
They are also LOUD. Like not really shouting or anything usually, just, PRESENT. Mike is a lot different around them, but in the cutest way, like he just beams all the time and you can see how happy he is to be home. One of his brothers put him in a headlock and gave him a dang NOOGIE as a greeting, and got elbowed in the side for it, and all of them laughing. And his mom smacked one of his brothers with a rolled up magazine for putting his feet on the table. More laughing. Just… intimidating but in the happiest way imaginable. I’ll admit I was a little shut down for a bit, but Mike kept checking in with me to make sure I was okay, and they were all really nice, so I got into the spirit after a bit.
I mentioned this in another comment, but Mike has a special sports wheelchair he uses for, well, sports. And he and his siblings play basketball. And he is GOOD. Apart from just having a hell of an arm, he’s quick as hell. And this magnificent bastard that I love will absolutely, purposefully, GLEEFULLY run someone’s toes over. He AIMS for it. They all have this yank-back-the-foot maneuver that’s hysterical to watch.
So it was this crazy day of loud people playing and having a blast, nieces and nephews running around, and just noise. My ears are still ringing. The food was catered in advance because his mom “had seven babies, all I make on mother’s day is margaritas.” They also have a pool, it’s a bit chilly still but the pool is HEATED so we actually all got to swim, which was a lot of fun because I got to show off that I too am athletic…. I can do a backwards somersault off a diving board! Yeah. I’m a real catch lol. They at least pretended to be impressed.
We all stayed up late drinking and bitching that it was too overcast to see the aurora (boo) and I had the worst hangover I’ve had in a while on Sunday. We slept in a bit late, and then joined Mike’s family for the BBQ part of the BBQ weekend. His dad can GRILL, people. And he’s fast, food coming off the grill at lightning speed. I asked Mike about it and he laughed and said “there was seven of us to feed. Ever see a nest of baby birds? He had practice.” Which, fair enough.
I don’t have much experience with babies, but I got to hold his youngest niece (the one living at home with his sis until her husband gets back from deployment) and we had a light talk about kids in the future. I told him that I never put much thought into it but if they were going to grow up in a happy home like his and not how I grew up, I’m pretty sure I’d be open to having them with him someday. But later. I need him all to myself for a while first. He seemed really really happy about that, which makes ME feel all goofy and happy. I’m sappy.
We had to drive home Sunday night, but before we went his mom hugged me and said she’s NEVER seen her son like this, and thanked me for taking good care of her baby. And asked if we’d be back for the 4th of July or if we were doing something with my family. And I tried to be all “haaaa no we’ll be here if you don’t mind, I don’t see them much” and I think she caught on that there’s more to the story so she just hugged the shit out of me (vikings, all of them I swear) and told me she can’t wait to see me again.
My ears are still ringing from all the noise and chaos, but it was an absolute blast and I can’t wait to see them again in July. Also, pretty much sure Mike is the man I’m going to marry. I literally can’t think of a single reason why I would ever let him get away.
Anyway thanks for reading, hope you all had a lovely weekend, and those of you who got to see the aurora I’m happy for you but you suck, lol.
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Comments
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ERVetSurgeon
NTA. sounds like you have found a happy family to join. Good for you and good for Mike.

OOP: It's still pretty surreal. The other in laws that were there were all like that smiling hanging guy meme, "First time?" It was a great weekend.

Stormy8888
This story is so heart warming it belongs on BestofRedditorUpdates.
Congratulations, at some parts I felt like I was reading about the Roarke Family's dynamics in one of Nora Robert's JD Robb's Eve Dallas Novels, the whole Irish family vibes were just there. So lovely.

OOP: Ahahaha I don't think it's interesting enough for that, but I am glad people are enjoying it.

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I am not the OOP. Please do not harass the OOP. Please remember the No Brigading Rule and to be civil in the comments

Art by u/United_Patriots, Go check his work out, he himself has a pretty good AU series called Nature Of Orion.
A Music track I wrote, Inspired by the contents of this chapter.
Back to the present, (future?) Ahh whatever, that special october 2154! Do you ever wonder why I chose that date? Well, October 13th is my birthday, and it’s the start date of dark cuts! Also yes, in fifteen whole chapters, we’ve only reached midnight on the second day.
As always, thanks to u/Ben_Elohim_2020, u/VeryUnluckyDice, and u/JulianSkies for proofreading. Those three have been a wonderful help as always.
Last but not least, thanks to u/EdibleGojid, my wonderful co-writer, without him, none of this would’ve been possible.
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[First]-[Previous]-[Next]
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Memory transcription subject: Taran, Investigator
Date [standardised human time]: October 14, 2154
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At that moment, more than anything, I wanted to peel my eyes away from the display. The vile scene… I knew how it would play out, how it would end. I did everything I could to rip myself away from the screen, but I just… couldn’t.
The footage coming in from the classroom had me enraptured in the worst way possible; equal parts fascinating and horrible. Morbid curiosity kept me watching as the drunken arxur hunted the clone, which Selik’s mind presently occupied.
“Youhhh… hehhh… put up a better fight than that kolshhhh did… I’ll give you that much!” Vriss gloated, already assured of his victory as the skalgan tried futilely to claw herself free from his vice-like grip.
So long as Vriss was boasting, he was spilling the information we needed. We couldn't afford for Selik to tap out just yet, we needed more time, more answers.
Glancing at the machine monitor, toward the vital diagram, it reminded me just what kind of pressure Selik was under. Red flashed out along the tail and chest regions and the heart rate monitor threw up several warning lights. It was strange to realise that it represented real pain she was experiencing right now.
Hastily, I tapped out a message on the software pager, ‘Keep him talking.’
The pager was our only line of communication with Selik even though, in reality, she was no more than a meter away, hooked up to this amalgam of wires that posed itself as medical engineering. She couldn't hear us or respond to any form of contact; Prauva had explained that the device blocked all incoming and outgoing information.
I gave a short glance to Selik. Her body looked still and restful; all except for her chest, which rose and fell rapidly, mirroring the clone’s laboured breathing.
“Whhh… What did you do to him?” Selik wheezed, the arxur’s grip on her was so tight that it took great effort to squeeze out the words. I feared her ribcage might just collapse under the arxur’s raw strength.
It had been a while since I had been reminded of the terrifying strength the aruxr were holding back. Muscles designed for the hunt evolved to overpower weaker prey… a description that applied to almost everyone.
“Ehhh… nufin… sadly… he’s not mine to kill… but youuu are.” Vriss’ tongue slipped over the words. We were lucky that he stopped drinking when he did, much more in his system and he might have ended up impossible to interrogate at all.
The arxur opened their maw, dragging their long tongue over the back of the skalgan’s head, they took their time, savouring the moment, not the flavour. They wanted to draw even more fear from their prey. A terrified whine emitted from the clone, to the arxur's apparent delight.
In the back of my mind, I had expected him to… go feral or something. That without his inhibitions he might start randomly killing anything in his path. I knew that wasn’t how predator instincts worked, but prejudice was hard to shake.
It was worse somehow, knowing that as he did it he actually had the control to stop himself, but didn’t want to.
I had seen similar things before.
I’ve watched security footage of the worst of the worst; rape, brutal murders and even sadistic torture. I’ve had them rewatched over and over for me to analyse each and every detail. The times when such scenes would replay themselves in my nightmares had long since passed. There were few things I wasn't utterly desensitised to.
I was plenty familiar with the aftermath of arxur raids too.
My mother's hand in mine, cold, waiting for rescue- I killed the thought before it could overtake me.
But this…
The room was a near-perfect recreation of an old skalgan classroom, with a holo-projector at the front showing the benign math equations a child of the federation might be taught. It was uncannily familiar to me, though the details were muddled; chairs built to the gojid format, not venlil, propaganda posters out of place, not quite belonging to the setting. ‘The Krakotl Exterminator Forces Need YOU!’
Not that Vriss cared about such historical inaccuracies as he tossed the venlil across the classroom, effortlessly breaking her over the teacher's desk. Blood quickly spread out from where a rib had punctured her skin, the orange seeping through her wool.
…This was something else.
The skalgan’s legs fell limp, no longer flailing. She was utterly helpless now. Without any chase left to be had, the arxur would soon claim his kill.
Glancing over to the clone monitor, the lower half of the diagram had turned from red to grey, indicating that the system could no longer connect to that area.
“Shame her spinal cord got severed, broken legs hurt like hell.” Prauva mused from over my shoulder. She looked somewhat entertained by the sight. I frowned, she had a callous attitude towards Selik all night and it rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn’t going to get on anyone's case for harbouring distrust for the killers, but something about her seemed off.
Somehow, Selik maintained her questioning, some hidden source of determination keeping her going. One by one she spat out the pained words, “Where is he going?”
Watching it all in real-time, knowing it was real, happening only a few meters away with nothing you could do to stop it. It was deeply, viscerally, terrifying. My scales were displaying their sickly green, broadcasting my current state of mind to Prauva, and at this point, I couldn't care to suppress it.
“Sssame place I am, the Kaal estate, for his hatchlings uuh…. coming of age.” Vriss finally answered.
The Kaal estate
Three words told us so much more than just where Klien was going, it told us who the boss was, Kaal. The CEO and founder of a small arms company based here in the city of District Three. Ironically my revolver was one of their products. With that information, all I had to do was look up Kaal’s information in a database, use that to find his daughter’s info, and I’d know exactly when this ‘coming of age’ would be. With a little help from Selik's knowledge about arxur culture, we would be set to, not only save Klien but to decapitate the entirety of Shattered Claw.
Mentally, I had written Klein off as dead without even realising it, but now there was a chance. There was hope.
Selik pushed herself off the desk, flopping on the ground behind it with a heavy thud. Her eyes darted around before widening in realisation at what she had done. She was cornered, nowhere left to run.
The arxur crouched over her, smug satisfaction evident in the very way he moved, “It'sss time you stopped asking questions you aren't supposed to knowhh… you’re gonna be a gooood girl and die quietly.”
I winced as he wrapped his claws around her neck. Her eyes looked like they were trying to escape her skull as he squeezed. A sickening, popping, crunch reverberated through the room as her vocal chords crumpled, fragile tissue and cartilage breaking under the pressure. She gurgled in pain, no longer able to scream as blood bubbled out of her mouth.
“Brutal, Isn’t it?” Prauva asked casually, unbothered by the sight.
I turned an eye to the skalgan, the way she… didn't care, It was one thing to be desensitised, which was common in former cattle or those who were unlucky enough to survive multiple arxur raids… this was different. Her eyes met mine, I could swear I spotted a glimmer of some sort of sick satisfaction in them before she looked away.
“This is my life. Every single day, I get to die. Over, and over and over.” She spoke with flat intonation, her sassy facade falling away.
Vriss released Selik from his grasp, looking proud of his work before reaching for her arm, pulling it towards him and clamping his jaw around it. With a twist, he wrenched it free from her body. He waved the severed limb in front of her, giggling with depraved joy.
“Just… food; a plaything to these monsters.”
She continued to talk, taking my lack of a response as permission to carry on.
“Some like to fuck after feasting you know? Have you ever seen that? Someone taking your dismembered corpse and shoving their rancid cock into it?”
I didn't even want to think about it. There wasn't any way I would be able to live with myself if I let this place continue to exist and exploit these people.
“No one should go through that. I promise, we’ll shut this place down and get you out of here.”
Prauva laughed, devoid of actual humour, “It’s… not so simple. I can't just leave. Even if somehow you get rid of Shattered Claw? It wouldn't change a thing as long as they’re still around.”
As Prauva spat those words out, she pointed at Selik. Her idle body remained on the bench, vulnerable and still, like a patient under anaesthesia during an operation, waiting for someone to pull her out.
Vriss tossed aside the severed limb and began to lap up the blood as it gushed out of her wound. “Hmmm, tastessss just like Iron Fffive… fuuuuck… how much did you drinmk-?”
Selik gurgled.
“Mhm don't answer that.”
My mind was finally made up. This was fucked up. I had fucked up, no matter what the arxur had done, nothing could justify putting her through this. “She shouldn’t be going through that. How do we disconnect her?”
“You can’t, no way out while the clone’s alive…” She explained, though I knew it was a lie. She had woken herself up just earlier.
“...Besides, isn't this nice, to turn the tables for once?”
Something churned in me, her rhetoric felt familiar. Things I've felt. Hatred I had kept deep inside. I never trusted the arxur, never liked them, but somehow… Those thoughts and feelings, when repeated to me from her mouth… They felt radical, deranged even.
I glanced toward arxur on the screen, now covered in orange, and saying his last farewell to the venlil below him. “It's beeen fffuhn… I’ll definitely recommend you to the othhherrsss.”
After everything I lost to the arxur, everything they did, and everything they continued to do I had every reason to hate them; To utterly despise them for what they had done, and I did.
I looked back at the arxur in the seat. She had barged in on my case, somehow managing to convince Ketsim to allow her to take it despite my objections. Her very presence infuriated me. What right did a killer like her have to be a cop anyway? What bumbling idiot thought arxur could be capable of anything other than violence and murder?
I could read people well. I knew she had to be concealing some sort of darker motive. There had to be something. Feasting on the crime scenes? Some grand deception; a trap she was luring people into?
Or at least so I thought; no matter what happened, that facade simply refused to crack.
She seemed to hate eating flesh going so far as to shovel plant matter down her throat when she thought I wasn't looking. She was ashamed of her scars, hiding them under human garments, using the weather as an excuse for wearing them. This whole place disgusted her just as much as it disgusted me.
Here Selik was taking the punishment for her species’ crimes just to save one kolshian she called a friend. She didn't have to do that. There was no benefit, nothing to gain. Not unless she genuinely cared.
I couldn’t find a crack in the facade, because there was none.
The arxur on the screen began to tear into the clone with his claws, ripping flesh, bones and organs. Splattering himself with orange, bellowing with glee as he murdered her.
That monster and Selik couldn't be the same. It was irreconcilable, that a creature capable of such cruelty could also be capable of such selflessness.
Whatever terrible rule the arxur followed, she was an exception. She had to be. Maybe she was just one of those so-called ‘defectives’, a concept I would have otherwise laughed at, but it was the only explanation.
I faced Prauva and my scales flickered red in anger for a brief moment before I took back control.
“Turn the tables? Is this what it's about?” I demanded answers, what justification she possibly had for what she’d convinced Selik to do.
Prauva wasn't intimidated. “They raided my world, killed my family, but I hid, I survived, and it didn't make any difference. I still ended up as their cattle. Only now, every time I get to relive that moment, wishing I could die. But every time, I wake back up on that chair. Every time, regretting the one time I survived. This time, I finally got the chance to do something back. It’s one, tiny, fraction of what they did to me. One death for hundreds of mine. So yeah, it's nice to see one of them suffer for once.”
The arxur, alcohol finally catching up to him, slumped over what little remained of the clone.
“How do I wake her up?” I repeated the question.
“Why should I tell you?” She replied, without a hint of empathy for Selik.
“I need her help, We’re trying to save an innocent father's life you know?”
“Really? One good deed is all it takes for you to side with them? She gets what she deserves”
I couldn't take it, I didn't care what they had done to her, she was just blindly exacting punishment on whoever she could. It didn't matter what justification she had, it was cruelty all the same; sick and twisted.
I reached for the cable that connected Selik and the computer, my fingers wrapping around it tightly. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I pulled her out suddenly, but it was getting clear that I needed to make a choice. I just hoped it wouldn’t cause any irreversible damage to her mind.
“Wait! If you do that… it’ll kill her!” She yelled, a feeble lie made up on the spot to try and stop me. With her attitude, I doubted she would have cared for Selik’s life. The vindictive skalgan would’ve probably done it herself.
“I don't believe you.”
I yanked on the cable, disconnecting all the wires from the computer in one go. I was rewarded by a sudden gasp as Selik shot up out of her seat. Her eyes darted around the environment, taking in the dimly illuminated facility, glazing over when she looked at me or Prauva. She didn’t seem to register our presence at all.
Shakily, she wrapped her claws around her neck, laughing weakly as she verified it was still there. As her surprise at being alive faded, she went limp, rolling sideways off the seat and curling herself into a ball on the floor, shivering.
She had cheated death, Unscarred, but not unscathed.
Looking at her lying there like that. It sparked some genuine empathy for the arxur, that memory again. I wanted to rid myself of it, bury it, kill it.
I had stashed myself in a cupboard, hiding myself away from… them. Clutching to all I had left of her… all that was left of her.
I turned my back on her. Wiping it from my mind, Selik was an arxur, she didn’t need my empathy.
My eyes returned to the footage from the classroom. Vriss looked like he wasn’t in particularly good shape, he was still slumped over the clone, but his eyes were open darting all over the place and he was shivering, twitching. He hadn’t just passed out, he was overdosing.
“Shit…” I muttered, and Prauva noticed too. We couldn't call help, that would give us away. I couldn’t exactly sneak a body out of here without being caught and I needed Vriss alive if I was gonna ask more questions. I had to go in there and figure out how to keep him alive without revealing myself to him either.
“Fuck, fuck, FUCK! If he dies before he gets out of here, my employer is gonna dock my pay.” the skalgan exclaimed under her breath so as to not be overheard by anyone nearby as we rushed down the hallway.
“Is that seriously what you’re worried about?” I hissed.
“If I don't pay off their so-called ‘debt’ they'll have me here forever.”
It didn’t surprise me, working for a business like this must be worse than death, so it would have been an empty threat. Instead, dangling the hope of freedom at just a paw's length away. That’s how they kept people trapped. People would do so much more for the promise of life, than under the threat of death.
I burst into the classroom, nearly slipping on the bloodied floors but I managed to adjust my stance and keep myself from falling
Vriss twitched and seized, rolling off the clone onto his back. I stood over him as his eyes briefly flicked to me, unable to comprehend what was happening to him. He reached a hand towards me in a bid for assistance.
“Shit, what do I do!” Prauva mumbled under her breath before looking at me accusatorialy “You did this! You have to help me!”
Selik stumbled in, her eyes set on the remains of the clone. She fell to her knees, staring at her clawed hands as if she'd killed it herself. Pain evident in her eyes as she mourned the non-person.
Something snapped inside of me.
My scales darkened all the way to black, matching those of the arxur.
We didn't need Vriss anymore; in fact, if he disappeared now, there wouldn't be any more risk of our involvement getting out. Alcohol poisoning in a club? Just a simple accident. That's if there even would be anybody to find it. Clones were too expensive to waste, no doubt they simply dumped the leftovers into a meat grinder, made burgers out of them and fed them back to their clients or something else equally fucked up.
Monsters like Vriss deserved no empathy.
What a miserable creature one must be, to derive pleasure from another's suffering…
“Why should I help you?” I echoed her words back to her.
“What!?” She stared at me, wide-eyed in shock.
“He deserves this, doesn't he?” I quoted her again.
The arxur’s belly twitched, orange puke leaking from the corners of his mouth before falling back into his airways, blocking them. I watched as he began to drown in the blood he’d spilled, choking down his last meal.
“But what about me? You have to help me!” She begged, her words falling on deaf ears.
“Word of advice, clean up his body before anyone notices.”
“You think you can just get away with this? I’ll tell the-”
“Who would you tell? Your boss? The gang? I’d keep your mouth shut and your head down if you want to live long enough to watch me burn this place to the ground.”
As Selik sobbed, and Vriss suffocated, I remained silent, watching.
A thought bubbled up, strange next to all the angry, hateful, confused and conflicted emotions I felt. A question, sober, but no less cold in its delivery.
“You ever wonder what it would be like if you were born an arxur? Who you'd be? Would you still be the same person, or… would you be like every other arxur?”
Prauva had the audacity to scoff, my meaning failing to penetrate her thick skull. “Are you gonna tell me that I’d be just like her?”
“No,” I said flatly.
I stepped toward Selik, who had gotten a fair bit of blood on her. I’d have to take her through the showers before we left, I put a hand on her good shoulder. Selik, claws shaking, let go of the body, wordlessly understanding my order. It was time for us to leave.
The monster at my feet finally became still. I felt nothing as it died, eyes silently begging me for mercy as the life faded from them.
I turned away from Prauva.
“You'd be just like him.”
—
[First]-[Previous]-[Next]

PART ONE THOUSAND AND THIRTEEN
[Previous Chapter] [The Beginning] [Patreon+2]
Sunday
Lucas tapped the flat of his finger twice on the partially open door, more to let Boyd know he was coming than actually requesting permission to enter. He pushed it open and strode through as the somewhat welcoming grunt came from within.
“Hey, sexy,” he said, crossing the two rooms to zoom in on Boyd sitting at his bench. On the spinner before Boyd was a larger figure than he had ever done before: an eighteen-inch figure of a woman with an hourglass figure wearing a form-fitting formal gown that flowed to the floor, swaying as if she’d just stepped to her right. Her hands were curled as if she were holding something or someone, but that part was missing.
“Ooooh,” Lucas said, resting his head on Boyd’s shoulder to examine the piece closer. “She’s pretty.”
“She’s also the viscount’s granddaughter, who I think is married to a prince somewhere in Eastern Europe. I’d have to pull out her details again, but she’s already got two kids, and she still looks this good.”
“She doesn’t look old enough to have two kids.”
“That’s what happens when you marry when you’re still a teenager.”
“Please tell me it wasn’t an arranged marriage.”
Boyd did a slow pan to level an annoyed look at him.
“What? They used to.”
“Slavery was a thing in America back in the day, too.”
Lucas made a deflating raspberry. “If you want to get technical,” he grumbled.
Boyd twisted his seat to face him, loosely curling his arms around Lucas’ waist. “Where are you off to, Mister Soon-To-Be-Masters?”
Oh-ho. Someone’s feeling playful. “I thought you were going to become a Dobson,” Lucas countered, leaning in to give him a quick morning kiss.
“Yeah, but then I was reminded I do have family that I care about.”
“None of which are Masters. Your mom and Aunt Judy are sisters who changed their names when they married. If you were going to take any of their names, we’d both be changing to Davenport.”
Boyd looked down at where their abdomens rested against each other.
“Hey,” Lucas said, sliding his hand under Boyd’s chin and lifting it so he could see those beautiful baby blues focusing on him. “What’s going on, love?”
Boyd opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He tried twice more. “Ten years,” he finally croaked. “They took me in and gave me a home within the family for nearly two years, and I repaid them by cutting them out of my life the second I could. Who does that to their own?”
“Somebody with a lot of fear,” Lucas answered honestly. "And that somebody isn’t you anymore. You’ve invited Emily to be our accountant, and personally, I hope you know what you’re doing there…”
“Emily has always been good with money. The only time she’s ever been off is when she borrows money from you, and you go to get it back. By the time she’s finished explaining all the financial movement around the transaction, you end up owing her twice as much, and she’s really convincing. Computerised flow charts and everything.”
Lucas hoped he was exaggerating. If Emily had been that quick and deceptive to separate Boyd from his money when she was a teenager, she might have been even more cunning now. Lucas would remain attentive until she proved herself because the love of his life had earned this break. “Okay,” was all he said since he didn’t want to argue.
Boyd nipped the tip of his nose. “Don’t you ‘okay’ me in that tone of voice.”
Lucas pulled back and rubbed the back of his hand against his nose. It hadn’t hurt, but it was weird. No one had ever done that before. “I’m a cop, love. In my world, it’s guilty until proven innocent.”
“Getting back to my original question. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to go and get some supplies for Levi and Maddy. The dumbass has been worrying himself sick over where he can leave Maddy on short notice if he and Austin get called out to a fire together. They can’t waste up to an hour each way getting over to Queens and Brooklyn.”
“Tell him she can stay with us,” Boyd said without hesitation. I’ll be here all the time, and if I’m out and it’s an emergency dump-and-run, I can drop whatever I’m doing and call someone to teleport me back.”
Lucas leaned in and kissed him again. “And that’s just one of the many reasons I love you,” he said once they parted. “Charlie will be here too, which means Robbie won’t be far away either. Levi still wants to run it past Llyr since it’s his place, but so long as we keep her on our side and away from Miss W, it won’t be a problem.”
“You’ll need to remember to lock up your guns when she’s here.”
Lucas nodded thoughtfully in agreement without speaking. It would devastate everyone if Maddy somehow managed to get her hands on one of his work firearms and fire it. He’d need to get a thumbprint safe – something that he could get at very quickly in a crisis.
“How is she with beds?”
“What?”
“Don’t little kids have those hospital guardrail things, so they don’t roll out of bed and hurt themselves? I mean, your bed isn’t that far from the floor, but if you’re getting supplies, you might want to think about some of those things to keep her in.”
Lucas hadn’t thought about that. “Okay, then it’s going to be a bigger shopping trip than I thought, but that’s alright. Levi and Maddy are going to chill in the apartment until I get back.”
“Do you want me to check in on them?”
“Nah, it should be fine. Levi knows where Charlie’s office is, and if he’s going to annoy anyone while they’re at work, it should be our sister.” Lucas turned Boyd back to his carving and leaned his head on Boyd’s shoulder. “You keep outdoing yourself, you know that, right?”
“These tools are magic. I can’t do a thing wrong with them.” With a slight grimace, he added, “Hey, have you ever heard the story about the kid who gets the magic piano?”
Lucas squinted warily. “Am I going to like this story?”
“It’s a cautionary tale. This kid finds a magic piano, and all he has to do is work the pedals, and the piano plays itself. No one notices it’s not the kid, and the kid’s ego grows with each performance until he’s an international sensation. Then, he has a fight with the piano over who the star really is. The following night, the piano refuses to play, and the kid is booed off the stage. His family is left financially ruined.”
“I will beat you within an inch of your life if you equate that to you.”
Boyd looked at him. “How can I not? I mean, when I relax and just let the tools do what they’re made to do, the pieces come out flawlessly—every time. But the second I worry, minor defects creep in. Nothing I can’t counter and fix, but still…”
“If it concerns you that much, why not do a piece every now and then without the divine tools to prove to yourself that the skill is yours and the tools are just tools?”
Boyd looked over the divine toolset, then back up at the shelf where his older tools were. “That’s a good idea,” he admitted.
Lucas lightly kissed him on the lips and stepped out of his grasp. “I’ve been known to have them now and again. Oh, and don’t forget we’re going to Angus’ this afternoon. Just the six of us.”
Boyd raised his left hand in acknowledgment, but his focus was back on the carving even as his right hand picked up a scalpel of some kind and drove it across the carving’s middle. The blade was then smoothly passed to his left hand to make an incision from that side while his right reached for a new tool.
As he’d said, his motions were flawless, with chips and shavings flying at the speed of a professional wood chopper. Lucas could watch him work all day, but if he was going to make it to Angus’, he needed to leave now.
He let himself out and headed for the main front door to the level.
A little over an hour later, after grabbing several sets of clothes in his brother’s size, Lucas was standing in the middle of the children’s clothing section, blinking in confusion at all the options. He would go to touch one, then back away, unsure.
He must have looked pitiful because a staff member in her mid-thirties took pity on him and approached with a warm smile. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah, this is crazy,” he answered, gesturing to the millions of clothes options before them. “My brother asked me to look after my niece in an emergency, and I want her to have whatever she’ll need at my place in case he doesn’t have time to take her home.” He looked at all the clothes. “Whatever that entails.”
“That’s really sweet. Is your brother a doctor?”
“Fireman.”
The woman gave Lucas the once over. “I can see that.”
Lucas chuckled. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before. Between him, Levi and Mav all sharing their dad’s muscle, they’d always caught people’s eye. “Anyway,” he said, wanting to move this along. “My niece is three going on four, and she’s about this high,” he said, showing her height as an inch or two under his hip.
“Does she have any favourite TV shows?”
“Spongebob,” Lucas said, incredibly grateful for his conversation with Levi over breakfast. He’d have never had that answer otherwise. “And if you’re not doing anything after we get her clothes sorted, my fiancé mentioned something about bed rails since she’ll be sleeping in my old queen-sized bed. This is an all-in shopping trip for her, and I have no idea what to get.”
“Do you have any toys for her? And no, I’m not pushing for a commission here. Little minds need to be kept stimulated, or little hands will end up in places they have no business being. If this is your first time looking after her, you’re going to want a few toys, books, and things to keep her busy.”
“My brother is already nagging me about buying her the basics. What would you recommend that won’t make it seem like I’m trying to buy her affection?”
“Are you okay with electronics, or are you trying to steer her away from that?”
“It doesn’t faze me. It’s more the cost. I don’t want to buy her what my brother hasn’t or can’t afford. I’ve been into too many households where kids have every version of PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo and every known game that goes with them. Those kids appreciate nothing, and that’s not something I’m okay with.”
“You see a lot of people’s houses?”
“I was a beat cop for over eight years before my promotion.”
“A policeman and a fireman? I’m sure there's a joke involving a bar in there somewhere.”
“If there were, the third person would be an ice hockey player,” Lucas chuckled again, already liking this woman. As they wandered through the aisles, she added things to his cart. Clothes were first, but they quickly moved on to toys. A couple of generic soft toys. and the board game “Candyland”. Lucas grabbed ‘Hungry, Hungry Hippos’, as that was one he and his brothers had played when he’d been Maddy’s age. Then came two large boxes of Duplo.
Not once did it feel like the sales assistant was pushing an agenda. She even paused to consider the options as if she were buying them for her own kids. Lucas really appreciated that.
As they were walking the isles, Lucas came to a screeching halt and stared at a range of doctor, nurse and vet play sets. Two jumped out at him. One had a plastic pet carrier with a handful of bulky instruments, and the other came in a bright blue bag with red handles and a white pawprint on the side. It had a comprehensive range, including toy bandages, pill bottles, cream jars, syringes, a stethoscope and even a cone of shame. Both went into the cart after he checked to make sure the two soft animals would fit in the carrier.
Mason’ll have a field day showing her exactly how to simulate using all this stuff, he thought to himself with a grin.
“You’re really very thoughtful,” the woman said after he explained why they both had to be purchased.
Lucas specifically asked for books after that. Real books with paper pages. He was sure his mother (as a high school English teacher) would murder him in his sleep if he didn’t buy Maddy at least ten books ranging from ones she could memorise and pretend to read (which, in her grandmother’s eyes, taught her word structure and was the first step in learning to read), with ones he could read to her. And that, of course, required Spongebob bookends to hold them together.
“Your fiancé is a lucky woman if you’re willing to do all of this for your niece,” she said once the cart was full and they were heading back to the checkouts.
“Yes, he is,” Lucas agreed, deliberately sliding in Boyd’s gender without making a huge issue of it.
Her eyes widened in horror. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Wow, I really shouldn’t make that assumption anymore, and I apologise.”
Because this was New York. “Apology accepted,” Lucas said, waving it aside. Boyd might have been embarrassed, but thankfully, he wasn’t here. “Thanks again for all your help.”
* * *
((Author's extra-long note:
Heya guys! Just letting you know I need to take a week off. [It’s nothing to do with the community here, I promise! I love writing this, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.]
In fact it's … you know what? Stuff it. You guys might as well know. Remember how I mentioned earlier this year we were fighting for more care for my special needs daughter?
That’s the issue.
Our support coordinator has our written authority to act on our behalf. Yet we’ve been told in writing from the government department that if she doesn’t back off, the whole request, including thousands of dollars of specialists interviewing our daughter and reporting their findings, will be deleted, and our request, including all-new interviews and reports, will have to start all over again.
I’m almost at the point where I’m not sleeping, but our support coordinator has promised us to fight because, in her words, “This is getting ridiculous.”
I’ve been really struggling to write this week with everything going on in the background. I’ve finally admitted I need to pull back (just for one week—I mean it when I say how much I love this writing and the little community we’ve formed) to focus on sorting out the mess, so that my writing isn’t tarnished by the battlelines that are being drawn up in the background.
(I already scrapped a page and a half because my anger at things [I bounce between anger and depression] had people who were usually very chill (Robbie) acting in a very aggressive manner that simply wasn’t them. Because of this, I’ve already used up several of my backlog this week and I loathe to lose any more, given how hard they were to build up. (The thought of using them up without others to take their place was also adding to my stress.)
And I was told by my beta reader, ‘Given you’ve been doing this for over three years, and you’ve only had the occasional day off due to sickness, take the week and regroup, stronger than ever.
I agreed. This means my next post will be on Monday, the 27th, Australian Time.
I hope with all my heart that you’ll all still be with me when I return next week.
Karen. ))
((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I’d love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work, including WPs: Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

Previously, on Hell’s Kitchen…
The final 10 were given a challenge not seen in over a decade, creating their own menus in the revival of Red vs Blue Menu Night. While the blue team worked together, with a strong concept provided by Melody, the red team found themselves being led by Thomas, whether they liked it or not. However, as the chefs were returning to the kitchen to begin cooking their dishes, disaster struck, as Travis re-injured his ankle, and had to be taken to the hospital. Despite being down a man, and Grace feeling shortchanged by not getting anything on the menu, the blue team’s cohesive selection still managed to impress Ramsay and his special guests: three previous winners of Hell’s Kitchen. The red team’s menu had mixed results, which led to friction between Thomas and some of his teammates
In service, the blue team’s menu had the edge in popularity, but thanks to poor communication between Grace and Carole, the kitchen ground to a halt multiple times. Meanwhile, the red kitchen managed to push out their food in a timely manner thanks to strong teamwork on entrees. With the red team named the winners of service, it was time for the blue team to nominate two chefs to send home.
At elimination, though, everyone was in for a shock when Travis, who had been one of the early favorites, returned and announced that due to injury, he would be leaving Hell’s Kitchen for good. Ramsay still insisted on hearing from the blue team’s nominees, who were Grace, Carole and Melody after they failed to come to a consensus. But with Travis’ dream of becoming the next head chef at Gordon Ramsay Steak in Vancouver, British Columbia already having come to a heartbreaking end, Ramsay gave everyone another chance to show him why they were the chef he was looking for, but assured them that he was not taking any more excuses from now on.
https://reddit.com/link/1ctwn9g/video/oifsieupww0d1/player
And now, the continuation of Hell’s Kitchen…
After witnessing the shocking withdrawal of Travis from the competition, no one was in a celebratory mood as Ramsay dismissed them to the dorms for the night. Carole said in her confessional that he had been the main one supporting her in the blue team, and now it felt like she was truly on her own. As the blue team returned to the dorms, a very upset Melody unleashed her frustration, saying that Travis did not deserve to go home tonight over either Carole and Grace, and they needed to cut the bullshit and start thinking and working as a team. Lauren said in her confessional that it seemed like something snapped in Melody tonight, as she was well and truly fed up with the drama, which definitely made two of them. Even so, after noticing that Melody was sitting alone and nearly in tears, Lauren went over to comfort her, as Melody admitted that she hated to have to talk that way to her teammates, but she was sick and tired of the drama. Lauren assured her that it had to be said, and was proud of her for stepping up. Meanwhile, Grace said in her confessional that Melody seemed to be losing her composure, and would hopefully go down in flames soon.
On the red team’s side of the dorm, Faye was also feeling sadness over the way Travis had gone out, as she admitted to Michael that it reminded her too much of her own exit last season, only at least she had made the choice to walk away, while Travis never had one. Meanwhile, another chef had mixed feelings on the sudden turn of events, as Thomas said in his confessional that Travis had been a strong chef and a good person, and while losing him would cut the competition down, he would have rather seen him go out with dignity. Ramona and Everett, meanwhile, continued to stick closely together, with Ramona saying in her confessional that it felt good to have the security of the immunity pass, because she and Everett were definitely the most likely to be nominated if service went wrong, though she admitted she would feel some guilt if he went out because of it, but this was her career and future at stake. Everett said in his confessional that he couldn’t afford to worry about what might happen if he went up on the chopping block, and was just focused on trying to help the red team win.
The chefs were still trying to take in all the events of the night, but finally, tiredness overtook them, and they turned in for the night.
Challenge
The next day, the final 9 came downstairs to find Ramsy waiting for them, as well as a detailed diagram of a cow. Ramsay explained that he still had not forgotten the disaster that was Steak Night, and that was why, for this next challenge, he wanted to give both teams a chance to prove how far they had come by preparing dishes using five cuts: ribeye, top sirloin, hanger, flank, and striploin. Thomas said in his confessional that the red team had no business fucking this up, as they had several chefs who were strong on the meat station in services, while Lauren was nervous in her confessional, as she wasn’t sure about Grace or Carole. Since the blue team had one less member, one chef would have to prepare two dishes, which Lauren volunteered to do. With their instructions having been given, Ramsay told the chefs that their time started now.
The chefs rushed into their respective kitchens and quickly tried to sort out who would be responsible for which cuts of steak. In the blue kitchen, Lauren decided to take on the hanger and flank steak, while Grace took the ribeye, over Carole’s objections, and Carole was left with the striploin, while Melody took the top sirloin. Grace said in her confessional that she fought for this ribeye and she was going to carry her team to victory whether they liked it or not, while Carole said she would’ve felt much safer if anyone else were cooking the ribeye besides Grace. While Carole still seemed undecided on which direction to go with her New York Strip, at least one chef already had her dish planned out, and that was Melody, who went into detail in her confessional on how she wanted to plate her top sirloin. Meanwhile, Lauren was working hard to manage two separate cuts of meat, saying in her confessional that taking on the extra workload could either make her look really good in front of Chef Ramsay or totally blow up in her face.
In the red kitchen, Thomas was on the top sirloin, Ramona had the ribeye, Faye had hanger steak, Michael had flank steak, and Everett had striploin. Ramona said in her confessional that she had to deliver on the ribeye, as she already had the most losses of any chef here, and didn’t need to add any more to her resume with black jackets approaching. Thomas was confident that he could handle the top sirloin, as he said in his confessional that no one still here should have any issues cooking meat, and he would be disappointed in himself if he didn’t achieve perfection on this dish. Michael noticed Ramona seemed to be having some trouble with her ribeye, and tried to offer some advice, but Ramona said in her confessional that she had to do this alone, and told him she had it under control. Michael was annoyed, saying in his confessional that this was still a team effort, and it was no time to let egos get in the way. Meanwhile, Faye and Everett were seemingly in good spirits, with Everett saying in his confessional that meat was where he felt the most at home, and if he failed at this challenge, he might as well go home now, while Faye said in her confessional that it was nice to see Everett so energetic, and she hoped his dish could match that.
With the time nearly up, the chefs put the finishing touches on their dishes as Ramsay called out the final seconds and told the chefs to bring their plates to the pass. Ramsay then announced that he would be joined by a special guest judge for this competition, who was a familiar face to viewers of MasterChef: Ramsay’s former co-host on that show, Graham Elliot. The chefs were starstruck, with Melody saying in her confessional Graham was the best, and easily her favorite judge on MasterChef…after Ramsay, of course. After exchanging a warm greeting, Ramsay said it was time to get down to business, starting with the battle of the flank steak. This round would pit Lauren against Michael, with Michael saying in his confessional that this was his first time going against Lauren in a challenge, and he knew it wouldn’t be easy to take her down, given how consistently strong she had been. After tasting Lauren’s dish, both Ramsay and Elliot had high praise, saying the meat was tender and nicely cooked, although Elliot did say he might have done something different for the garnish. Lauren was second-guessing herself in her confessional, but In the end, both judges gave it four stars out of five. Michael said in his confessional that as expected, Lauren put up a good dish, but he was confident in his as well. Indeed, Michael’s flank steak was also found to be nicely cooked, and despite the somewhat simple presentation, Ramsay said this was a great start for both teams, as again, both he and Elliot each gave it a four.
With the score tied at 8, it was time for the battle of the hanger steak. Lauren stayed where she was while Faye brought her dish up to the pass. Elliot was impressed that Lauren had cooked two dishes for the challenge, although he noted that the hanger steak could’ve used a little more cooking time, which Ramsay agreed with, saying that was the one thing holding it back, and Lauren kicked herself in her confessional, as she said she should have been able to stay on top of it. Elliot only gave it a three due to the undercooked steak, though Ramsay said it still delivered enough flavor to get a four. Faye’s dish also got mixed reviews, as both chefs praised the cook of the meat, but questioned her garnish choices, with Ramsay pointing out that the presentation seemed slightly off. Elliot said she got the most important part right though, and gave it a four, to which Ramsay agreed, which put the red team ahead 16-15. In the third round, the teams’ ribeye dishes went head to head, for which Ramona and Grace stepped forward. Unfortunately for Ramona, her ribeye was badly overcooked, and Ramsay took her to task for serving something practically inedible to him and his guest. Ramona groaned in her confessional, as she couldn’t believe she had fucked up this badly. Both judges gave her a one, and Ramsay said she was lucky to get even that. Grace’s dish got mixed reviews, with Ramsay saying the presentation was shocking, while Elliot noted that the ribeye again was overcooked, though not nearly as much as Ramona’s. Ramsay said this was not what he expected from these chefs at this stage of the game, and gave Grace a one, but Elliot was more generous and gave it a two, as at least it had some flavor.
With the scores now tied at 18, it was time for the battle of the top sirloin, as Thomas and Melody brought their dishes forward. Melody’s dish earned praise for it’s stylish presentation and garnish, and after tasting the steak itself, Ramsay noted that it was cooked perfectly, and said this dish was a strong four, but Elliot went a step further and said it deserved a five, which made Melody giddy in her confessional, as she never could have imagined hearing those words before. Next was Thomas, with Elliot again noting the stunning presentation, and after tasting, he said that these two had really raised the bar today. Ramsay agreed and said it was the best pair of dishes yet, and this time, he would be giving out a five. Elliot agreed, giving Thomas a perfect score, which he took with a calm smile in his confessional, as he said Melody gave him a good run, but he never had any doubts. With the red team now back in the lead 28-27, it was time for the final round, as Everett and Carole would face off in the battle of the New York Strip. Everett went first, with Elliot saying, after a long pause…that the strip was absolutely delicious. Ramsay agreed, also praising the presentation, and said this was one of Everett’s best dishes yet in Hell’s Kitchen, as that deserved a very strong four. Elliot gave the same score, bringing the red team’s total up to an impressive 36, meaning Carole needed close to a perfect score to keep the blue team in it. Everett was absolutely fired up in his confessional, saying this was just the boost that he needed, and there was no stopping him now. Meanwhile, Carole presented her dish, which got good marks for presentation, but as Elliot sliced into the strip, he said it looked undercooked, to which Ramsay agreed, and said it was a great shame. Though it was only a formality, both Elliot and Ramsay gave the dish a two, giving the red team a 36-31 win.
Reward / Punishment
Ramsay thanked Elliot for helping him judge the challenge, and once he had left, Ramsay turned back to the chefs and congratulated the red team on winning the challenge, in particular praising the efforts of Everett and Thomas. He then said they were in for a fun reward, as he was sending all of them off for a day of paintball, followed by dinner at an exquisite LA steakhouse. Ramona was relieved in her confessional, as she knew she could have blown it for the red team with her ribeye, while Everett was ecstatic to have redeemed himself in this challenge, as he said in his confessional that he was still a beast at cooking meat. While the red team ran off to get changed, Ramsay turned his attention to the blue team and said that for today’s punishment, he had decided to put it towards a good cause by volunteering them for community service, which meant picking up trash on the side of the road. Grace moaned in her confessional, as she said that they always seemed to save the worst punishments for her. Ramsay reminded Melody that she still had that punishment pass, and offered to let her use it. Melody replied that she was never a paintball type of girl, and would rather help out the environment. Ramsay accepted her choice and told the blue team that they too would be changing…into their stunning orange uniforms.
The red team came back downstairs, and Michael joked in his confessional that it looked like Hell’s Kitchen had turned into a prison, while Faye apologetically said goodbye. While on the way to the paintball ground, the red team talked amongst themselves in the car, with Thomas saying that no one else was going home from the red team, and Michael agreed, saying they were all getting black jackets. Faye wondered aloud who their biggest competition might be from the blue team, but everyone quickly agreed that Lauren was the strongest. Ramona said in her confessional that she knew everyone was sleeping on her, but she would simply have to prove them wrong in service. Later, the chefs arrived at the paintball ground, and Faye said she hoped none of them would go easy on her just because she was a woman. Everett joked that she had nothing to worry about there, and the team ended up having an enjoyable afternoon, with Ramona and Everett trying to team up against Thomas, but he was able to shoot both of them. Michael said in his confessional that it felt great to just get outside and let loose without having to do some exhausting punishment. As evening approached, the red team were then taken to dinner, which Everett said in his confessional was some of the finest quality steak he had ever tasted, though not quite as good as the home cooking back in Oklahoma, which got some laughs from the others. Faye said that the next winner was sitting right here at this table, to which the others enthusiastically toasted, and the chefs continued to bond as a team over their meal.
While the red team were living the good life, the blue team were working in the hot sun to ensure that the environment could do the same. While the others tried to get on with their task, though, Grace’s constant complaining quickly got on all of their nerves, as Carole said in exasperation in her confessional that they were all well aware of the fact that Grace didn’t want to be here, and she didn’t need to broadcast it every five seconds. Lauren joked with Melody that she wouldn’t mind going on that paintball reward just to take a few shots at Grace, which Melody said in her confessional was tough to argue with, as even her optimistic outlook was being challenged right now by Grace’s incessant whining. Carole said in her confessional that she and Grace were definitely the most vulnerable on the team, but as long as Grace kept this up, she was making the decision easy for everyone, and as far as Carole was concerned, that was perfectly fine. Despite having their patience tested, the blue team worked through their physically exhausting community service and, for the most part, left feeling that at least some good had come of it.
Back in Hell’s Kitchen, the blue team arrived first and tried to unwind in the dorms until the red team returned later in the night. Grace quickly became annoyed with the red team talking about their reward, while Ramona said in her confessional that she didn’t mind rubbing it in her old rival’s face a bit. Lauren said in her confessional that the red team could have this one, as she was keeping her eyes on service. As the night dragged on, another topic came up, that being Travis, as everyone on the blue team aside from Grace admitted to missing him, and Lauren jokingly said even the punishments just weren’t the same now. Faye sympathized, as she said it was tough to watch a chef who had put everything on the line and pushed through an injury go out like that, even if this was a competition. Thomas agreed and said that everyone here deserved a chance to fight for their dream, as for these chefs, it was a potentially life changing opportunity, and he knew he would be devastated to lose it. Michael said in his confessional that it was no time for fucking around anymore, as they all needed to cook like it was their last night in Hell’s Kitchen.
The chefs chatted amongst themselves for a while longer before finally trying to get some sleep.
Pre-Service
The next day, the chefs went downstairs to begin prep, as Ramsay said that this was the stage in the competition where he wanted to see the best begin to shine, and warned that there would be nowhere to hide for chefs who were struggling to keep up. With that, he told the blue team that despite being a man down, he expected absolutely nothing less than a stellar performance, and told the red team not to get too comfortable with their challenge win, as they still needed to be locked in for service. With all nine chefs seemingly read to go, Ramsay allowed them to get started on prep.
In the blue kitchen, Melody and Lauren were in good spirits, though Melody admitted she still missed having Travis here, despite the fact that the blue team was all women now. Carole said in her confessional that the ladies should have no problems taking this service, as while she didn’t mind the format change, having all girls on one team was how it was done in the old days, and it would be even better if Grace was gone. Grace, meanwhile, seemed to be in a bad mood after her ribeye flopped in the challenge, as she said in her confessional that it couldn’t have been as bad as Ramsay said, as much as she respected his opinion, and refused to acknowledge Melody’s attempts to talk to her. Melody said in her confessional that nobody wanted Grace here, but the least she could do was try to reach out, as futile as it seemed. Lauren said in her confessional that in order for the blue team to win tonight, they needed Carole and Grace to step up big time, as she and Melody couldn’t do all the work here.
While the blue team was hoping for a miracle, the red team seemed loose and ready to go, with Michael saying that he had a good feeling about tonight, as there were no excuses for losing to the blue team now. Ramona said to Everett that this was their redemption night, with Everett agreeing and saying they were going to kick some culinary ass, and Faye said it was great to see both of them committed to bouncing back and leading the red team to another win. Everett replied that Grace was going home tonight for sure, which got some laughs from the others, as Michael said in his confessional that this was the one thing he was sure literally everyone else could agree on. Thomas, though, said in his confessional that everyone being this hyped up actually worried him, as he hoped they weren’t getting distracted and forgetting that they still had to earn the win. Michael encouraged him to lighten up, as they had a virtual all-star team here, but Thomas still maintained his serious demeanor, with Ramona saying in her confessional that this guy seriously needed to get a hobby.
Ramsay reminded the chefs again that he was looking for these chefs to show him why they deserved to become the head chef of Gordon Ramsay Steak, and with that, he called out to Marino and told him to open Hell’s Kitchen.
Dinner Service
Guests began to enter Hell’s Kitchen by the dozens, as it was once again the center of the culinary world for tonight, filled to the brim with celebrities and Hollywood elites. It was not long before orders began to make their way back to both kitchens.
In the blue kitchen, they were looking to Grace on appetizers and Carole on fish to give the blue team an early edge, while Lauren was on garnish and Melody was on meat. Early on, Grace managed to successfully deliver her first table of lobster tail risottos and capellini, with nicely cooked tails from Carole along with an acceptable order of scallops. Carole said in her confessional that they absolutely needed to keep this up, as both of them were effectively cooking for their lives right now. Unfortunately, communication issues cropped up again, with Grace not talking to Carole and bringing up her dishes without waiting for Carole’s scallops. Ramsay called out for the scallops, saying food was dying at the pass, and demanded to know why the fuck they couldn’t just work together as a team. Carole did eventually bring up the scallops, but they were raw, much to Ramsay’s disgust, and Grace said in her confessional that Carole just needed to get out of here as she clearly wasn’t cutting it. Despite these issues, and an overly salty risotto from Grace, the blue team did manage to finally start getting appetizers out into the dining room, with Ramsay even praising Grace’s risottos at one point, and telling her that’s what she could do if she would focus more on cooking than starting shit with her team. The blue team did eventually complete appetizers and began working on entrees.
In the red kitchen, Everett was working appetizers, while Michael was on fish, Ramona was on garnish, and Thomas and Faye were together on meat. Everett was glad to be working closely with Michael again, as he said in his confessional that they made a good team in the last service on meat. Early on, that familiarity seemed to be paying off, as Everett and Michael worked in sync with each other on the first few tickets and got their orders out in a timely fashion. Things did get bumpy, however, when Everett served mushy, overcooked capellini, and started dragging on orders, while Michael served overcooked scallops due to them getting mixed up on their times. Michael said in his confessional that they needed to get it together quickly, as they couldn’t afford to be falling behind so early in service. Meanwhile, Ramsay wanted to know where the energy was, as right now, Everett was going quiet and not responding when asked for times, and nothing was going out. Michael urged Everett to wake up and fight through it, and Everett did manage to get his next attempt at the capellini accepted. In his confessional, Everett said he was trying his best to keep it together, and admitted he had been thrown off his game, but he was far from done. With Everett’s newfound determination, the red kitchen finally had some life again, and after Ramsay praised both Michael’s scallops and Everett’s risottos, the two of them managed to get their rhythm back and serve the rest of their tables.
In the blue kitchen, they looked fo Melody to lead the way from the meat station, and thanks to strong communion between her, Lauren on garnish, and Carole on fish, they managed to get their dishes to the pass for the first table, but Carole’s turbot was undercooked, which left the entire order waiting for her, but she was able to recover quickly on her second attempt. On meat, Melody said in her confessional that it was pretty overwhelming to have to serve all of the blue team’s customers by herself for the first time, but despite dragging a bit on orders, she managed to push high quality Wellingtons and New York Strip out into the dining room consistently. Lauren, meanwhile, seemed at home driving tickets from the garnish station, and the blue team was finally starting to settle into a groove. Melody did serve a rare New York Strip, while Carole served raw turbot, but both were able to bounce back, and entrees were soon flying out to grateful diners. Melody and Lauren once again had no problems communicating and working in sync from their stations, with Lauren saying in her confessional that she and Melody could probably run the kitchen by themselves. But it was Carole who once again held up the kitchen when she inexplicably fired off halibut despite it not being on the ticket, which got her schooled by Ramsay for not paying attention to the ticket when he was standing less than five feet away. Despite this, the blue team managed to complete the rest of their entrees, and were soon ready to get started on desserts.
The red team was starting on entrees with Thomas and Faye on the meat station, and Faye said in her confessional that with meat being a station she felt comfortable in, she hoped tonight could be the night she stood out for the red team. On the first ticket, she and Thomas managed to serve beautifully cooked Wellingtons and New York Strip, along with nicely cooked turbot from Michael, but Ramona was holding the table up by dragging on garnish. Though she eventually managed to bring it up, Ramona would continue to drag on her section, frustrating her team, but especially Ramsay, as he kept calling out for times, with Ramona becoming flustered and not responding to her team. Ramona said in her confessional that the nerves were absolutely getting to her right now, and she seriously needed to bounce back. Meanwhile, Faye ran into some trouble on her Wellingtons, as she undercooked them for one table and said she would need several minutes for a refire, though she was able to recover. Thomas also had a rare mistake as he served undercooked New York Strip, and Ramsay said he didn't expect that from the executive chef. Thomas kicked himself in his confessional, saying that could not happen again, and he did manage to serve a beautiful New York Strip on his refire. However, on the next ticket, Ramona served a pot of runny mashed potatoes, and also seemed lost on what was actually going, as she couldn’t recall the ticket when Ramsay asked her. Ramsay had seen enough and took her into the pantry, asking her what the fuck she was doing, and if it was some kind of joke to her. Ramona insisted it wasn’t and said it was just nerves, but Ramsay replied that she needed to shake those nerves right now, or he would send her out the front door, immunity pass or not. Ramona said in her confessional that it was do or die, and she did manage to finally serve acceptable garnishes. Faye was still dragging on Wellingtons, which frustrated Ramsay, but finally, the red team managed to complete their remaining entrees.
Both teams finished their desserts in good time, and Ramsay told them to clear down.
Post-Mortem
Ramsay had the teams line up and started by saying that this was still not the complete performance he had been looking for. For the blue team, appetizers had been underwhelming, but they improved on entrees. For the red team, it was a decent start on apps, followed by a nightmare on entrees. However, he noted that one team in particular had a slight edge, and that was the blue team, as despite their issues, their customer comment cards gave them a satisfaction rating of 90%, to 84% from the red team. Ramsay said that the fiasco on entrees cost the red team this service, and told them to think long and hard about which two should be going up for elimination tonight. With that, he dismissed both teams to the dorms.
Back in the dorms, the red team’s deliberations were kicked off by Thomas, as he said he hoped everyone could agree that Ramona had dropped the ball tonight on garnish. The others seemed to agree, with Michael saying it was her worst performance in a while. Ramona only half-heartedly fought back, as she said she was better than this, and knew she still deserved to be here, but said if they wanted to put her up, it was their choice. In her confessional, she said she knew that immunity pass wouldn’t last forever, and it was better to get her bad service out of the way now, than during black jackets. With the first nominee having been an easy choice, the second would be more challenging, as Everett acknowledged that Michael and Thomas both had great services despite each having a mistake, and didn’t deserve to go up, which left either him or Faye. Thomas said that he felt Faye had struggled on meat, and that Ramsay rightfully had high expectations of both of them, due to his experience and her being a past chef, so he would vote for her. Michael, though, said that he had to vote for Everett, as he was just too inconsistent at this stage. Faye seemed torn but said she had to vote for Everett, even though they were friends, as he had struggled the most of the available options. Ramona was left with the deciding vote, and said in her confessional that it was impossibly difficult, as Faye had been a mentor for her here, while she had also bonded with Everett.
On the blue team’s side of the dorm, everyone was pleased to have won service and avoided having to send anyone home…well, almost everyone. Lauren admitted to Melody that it sucked having to put up with Grace for another day, while Melody tried to get her to think more positively, as if they were winning with Grace on their team, Ramsay definitely had to be taking notice. Lauren smiled and said she was definitely right about that, and the two of them continued chatting together while Carole sat off by herself and pondered her future in Hell’s Kitchen, In her confessional, she said she was damn lucky that the blue team won tonight, as she and Grace would have gone up otherwise, and that could have been it for her and her dream. Meanwhile, Grace felt that she had done well, and could have done even better without Carole getting in the way, saying in her confessional that it would be nice to get rid of dead weight, but she would settle for seeing someone from the red team go home.
Elimination Ceremony
The red team entered the dining room anxiously and lined up before Ramsay, who said that this was supposed to be the best five on the red team, but instead, it looked like two completely different teams, and while he didn’t know what the hell was going on, he was going to get to the bottom of it. With that, he asked Thomas for the red team’s first nominee and why. Thomas announced that the red team had nominated Ramona, due to her terrible performance on garnish, and being the weakest chef on the team. Ramsay asked for the second nominee and why. Thomas hesitated briefly before announcing that…the red team was nominating Everett, due to his declining performances and up and down service on appetizers. Before getting to any elimination pleas, though, Ramsay told Ramona to step forward and had her hand over the immunity pass. As she did so, Ramsay said that if not for the pass, Ramona would have gone home tonight, and urged her to take advantage of this second chance, before sending her back in line. Ramona appeared visibly shaken as she went to rejoin the red team. Ramsay said that the red team now had 30 seconds to talk amongst themselves and come up with another nominee. In the huddle, the chefs quickly determined that Faye would go up, as she had been their other consideration. As they broke the huddle, Thomas announced that Faye was the red team’s new nominee. Ramsay accepted this and told Everett and Faye to step forward.
Deliberation music
First, Ramsay asked Faye why she should stay in Hell’s Kitchen.
Faye: “My time away from Hell’s Kitchen gave me a whole new perspective on cooking, it made me realize why I’m doing this. It’s for my family, it’s for me, I can’t imagine doing anything else. That’s why I’ll never give up on myself or my team.”
Ramsay asked Faye if she thought she was a better chef than Everett.
Faye: “...Everett is a fighter, chef, and a good teammate, but yes, I do believe I’m stronger than him in terms of consistency and leadership.”
Ramsay moved on to Everett, asking him why he should stay in Hell’s Kitchen.
Everett: “This competition is a marathon, chef. I’ve had my ups and downs, I’ve had my stumbles, but I feel like I’m just on the cusp of hittin’ my stride.”
Ramsay said he had been waiting and waiting for Everett to emerge, and it seemed like he was trending downwards.
Everett: “I’ve had a slump, chef, I ain’t gonna deny that. But I’m fightin’ through it. I know I can be your next head chef.”
Ramsay asked Everett if he thought he was a stronger chef than Faye.
Everett: “Chef…”
Dramatic music
Ramsay waited on Everett’s answer, and after a tense moment, he finally spoke…
Everett: “Chef…at this time, no, I can’t say that I am.”
Faye glanced over at Everett in shock, as did everyone else from the red team, and even some of the blue team.
Ramsay: “I appreciate the honesty. Please, give me your jacket, your time is done in Hell’s Kitchen.”
Elimination music
Everett handed over his jacket and shook Ramsay’s hand.
Everett: “Thank you so much for this opportunity, chef.”
Ramsay: “Let me tell you something, young man, you have so much passion and fightback within you, I’ve seen it throughout this competition. Unfortunately, I didn’t see enough of it in service, or just now, but I hope you can find it again, because you are bloody talented. I wish you all the best.”
Everett thanked Ramsay again and waved goodbye to his team as he exited Hell’s Kitchen.
Everett’s comment
“Oh man…when I first entered Hell’s Kitchen, I never thought I’d be walkin’ out the door like this. I thought I was headed straight for the top, no problem. Each day was like this crazy mixture of anxiety, thrills, and drama. I fought, and I fought, and I fought for my place, until, I guess I just couldn’t fight no more. I’ll always have good memories of my time here, but I sure as hell wouldn’t do it again! (laughs)

With Everett’s elimination, Ramsay told Faye to get back in line, and addressed the chefs collectively as the final 8, saying that tonight should be a reminder to each of these chefs that a downward spiral at this point was unacceptable, as things were not going to get any easier. With that, Ramsay told them all to get some rest, because tomorrow, he was going to start separating the chefs from the cooks.
As the chefs went back to the dorms, several of them had confessionals. Thomas said that Ramona was definitely a bigger liability than Everett, but hopefully losing her immunity would wake her up. Michael said that it sucked that Everett left when he was far from the worst tonight. Ramona was clearly still shaken from the experience, as she said she felt awful about Everett going home when she had a worse performance, and knew she had to bounce back tomorrow or it would all be over for her. Melody said that between Travis and Everett, watching their fellow chefs go home was just getting more and more difficult, but she knew there were still seven more between her and the grand prize. Grace said none of these chefs were on her level, and she was going to keep being herself and kicking ass in the kitchen, regardless of her team’s hate for her. Lauren said that with only four on each team, there was nowhere left to hide, and everything they had done up until now was just the warm up for the real tests that lay ahead.
​Placement
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Jackie West glanced between the bars and boards on his windows, seeing the sky redden. He set about taking inventory of everything in the one-room cabin. Fresh light bulbs: check. Radio: check. Animal traps under the windows: check. Medical supplies: check. Guns: check. He emphasized the last with a satisfying pull on the slide of his shotgun, checking the chambers of his revolver, then sat in the chair facing the door and per his new routine, he waited.
He began to ponder what had happened for it to come to this. He thought back to the first Eclipse, three months before. It had been a regular day in the small town of Red Leaf, AL. “Town” might have been too generous; it was little more than a small collection of houses, shops, and a tiny police station connected by a crumbling road running through it. One would need to go well out of their way to get here.
Jackie had gone into town to purchase more hunting supplies for the oncoming winter and exchanged small talk with the kindly store clerk, Roger Orson. The clerk had asked Jackie if he’d heard the news about the eclipse that was set to occur. Jackie hadn’t, so Roger advised that he stay inside when it began to get dark; according to the papers, it was set to be a rather long eclipse, lasting at least five hours.
The Shades had appeared soon after the Eclipse came. It had cast an odd dark-red glow over the town. Jackie had gotten back to his cabin a mile and a half away from the town proper, only to find Red Leaf beset by a host of living shadows. Before long, screams erupted from the homes, followed by ghastly, inhuman screeches, the sound of vehicles being destroyed, and ghoulish laughter. His poor townsfolk had been claimed by the Eclipse.
Jackie’s focus snapped back to the present when the radio began to buzz with static. Soon enough, a chorus of distorted, fiendish words began. Whether he was a paragon of willpower or a shameless coward, he couldn’t say, but all he knew was that he never opened up for the creatures.
Five hours, he instructed himself as always. You just need to wait five hours and you’re home free until next time. He kept his eyes trained on the door. There were only a couple of other boarded windows in the cabin, so they didn’t concern him as much as the Shades deciding to barge in head-on, which he knew they could if they wanted. All of a sudden, he heard it. The crackling of leaves underfoot, the sound of objects dragging across the ground, heavy breathing from distorted throats. His grip on the shotgun tightened. Once again, the Shades had come for him.
Looking around, Jackie noted, not for the first time, that the sturdiness of his cabin was matched only by its restrictiveness. He could—and had—held out for a long time in this cabin. However, for all of its safety, he felt as if at any moment, it could squeeze him to death like a boa constrictor. The one-room nature of the structure could only offer so much peace of mind, as it gave him fewer places to check but also fewer places to escape if need be.
As if summoned by this thought, he heard the first of them at his door. The creature began its usual performance of wheezing, snarling, and chittering in a distorted voice. The radio quickly did its duty and broadcast the beast’s message.
“Jackie?” called the twisted, two-toned voice of Roger. “Jackie, open up, bud. I think it’s starting to clear up out here.” Even with the windows boarded, Jackie knew it was lying. He could see rays of the reddened sun slashing through the cracks, rays he dared not enter. He just stuck to watching the door as the radio continued to speak for the beasts. They all spoke with the voices of his neighbors, his friends, just as they always did, except they used a horrific parody of their voices. They always coaxed, begged, screamed, and threatened with the same goal: making him leave the house.
Then another voice chimed in, and as soon as he heard it, he knew that tonight was going to be different.
“Mr. West?” asked the timid, tearful voice of Ken Edwards, once an outgoing, happy-go-lucky young boy who never failed to say hello to Jackie when he came into town. “Can you please let me come in, Mr. West? I don’t like it out here. It’s scary, and something’s wrong with Mama and Daddy.”
The radio’s sadistic interpretation made his heart sink. Each time, there had been some kind of tell, a distortion to the voices that gave off the impression of it belonging to a Shade. But Ken’s voice, though filled with static, sounded as normal as ever.
“Mr. West?” the voice called again, sounding more desperate. “Mr. West, please.” He trailed off in a series of sobs, then continued through them, “Everyone out here’s gotten real mean. Mama and Daddy started fighting, and she hurt Daddy with a knife, then he hurt her with an axe. He kept hitting her over and over again. He grabbed me and…” Fresh terror took the boy’s voice as he began screaming, “Please, let me in! I see him! It’s Daddy, but it’s not! Why won’t you open the door?! Please, Mr. West! He’s gonna hurt me! He—”
The voice was cut off by the sound of a blade striking flesh, followed by choking and failed attempts at screaming in agony as the axe hit the boy again and again. Jackie listened to all of this, feeling bitter tears running down his cheeks. By now, he was feeling sorely tempted to go out there and shoot as many of those bastards as he could, but he remained steadfast. It was an illusion. Then the boy’s voice came back over the radio, only now it was a malicious, croaking cackle.
“You knew about it, Jackie! You knew about the Sun, and you didn’t even warn anybody! Just so you know, it took a lot longer for the boy to die than this. You should have seen the look on his face, Jackie. It was exquisite.”
Growling, Jackie began reaching for the radio, keeping his eyes on the barricaded door.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the voice sang tauntingly. Curious, Jackie looked at the radio, only to find that he was not reaching for the device but now his hand was reaching into the steel jaws of one of the bear traps he had set up. He tumbled out of his chair to pull his hand away from the steel teeth as they just barely missed his hand. The shock of what had just happened seemed to paralyze him as he realized his chair was in a different position than he had initially set it. Then he heard the wild, raucous cackles over the radio and outside as the beasts mocked his mistake. Jackie tried to ignore them, but he was still quite shaken up as he stood the chair back up to face the door.
All of a sudden, the radio fell silent. Then he heard something strike the door hard enough to shake it. He jumped back in shock, then took aim with the shotgun. It shook again and again. Jackie slowly backed up before it burst open. There they were: three deformed, mutilated figures with long, crimson strings attached to their bodies that pulsed like veins and seemed to stretch to the sky. The one on the right carried a pickaxe, the one on the left held a claw hammer, and the middle one held a hatchet. They all grinned madly at him, though even now he wasn’t sure if they were grinning because of the curse or because of how disfigured their faces were at this point. Outside, the moon gazed down on Red Leaf, having taken on the shape of a lidless scarlet eye with a colossal, black pupil. It glowered at Jackie, causing horrific images to flash through his mind. He was nearly taken off his guard as the intruders began their assault.
The middle Shade charged at Jackie in an attempt to swing the hatchet, only for Jackie to blow its leg off with a blast from his shotgun. Blood sprayed everywhere, coating the foyer in a grisly shower of vermillion. It showed no pain, just continued to try and stand on the remaining leg, whereupon Jackie pulled back the slide, ejecting the shell, and shot it in the head. The veins it was covered in seemed to absorb its corpse with a horrid slurping sound.
The other two attempted to do the same as their fallen compatriot, Jackie just barely dodging the pickaxe swinging for him as it lodged itself in the wall. He capitalized on this by pumping the shotgun again and firing at the Shade’s head. Then the monster with the hammer rushed at him, receiving the same treatment. Their ocular puppeteer in the sky slurped them back up.
That was when Jackie heard the chainsaw.
He whirled about in horror as the sound of the tool at one of the rear windows, then he saw the tool cut through the boards. Swiveling his head from his door to the window, he tried to keep himself calm despite knowing that at any moment, he could receive another ambush at the door. He was just hoping that the Shade’s entry through the window would have the results he was hoping for.
Once the boards were cut open, the Shade, a hulking brute of a man, stepped through. Before it could charge at him with the saw, it was halted by one of the bear traps which had bitten into its ankle. Without hesitation, it began to saw away at the leg, but Jackie stopped it with a shot in the chest, then the head.
More Shades began appearing, all bearing makeshift weapons and pierced with the same veins as their predecessors and all receiving the same treatment from his weapon. Now they were getting more aggressive. After killing at least ten more, he aimed for another swinging a large plank of wood, only to hear it click. The Shade swung the plank into Jackie’s left shin. He cried out in pain, but frantically dodged as it tried to bring it down for a finishing strike. Jackie grabbed the hatchet one of the first three had been carrying, then slashed at the veins. An enraged roar sounded from the sky, though whether it was because of control over its puppet being severed or from pain, Jackie couldn’t tell. Either way, it seemed to shake the confidence of the being somewhat, as the Shades suddenly ceased their siege of the cabin.
Jackie stared out at them, confused. He still kept his distance from the red beams of moonlight. Then something new happened. A figure descended from the sky. The Shades all parted, then knelt before it. From a distance, it looked like a man. As it approached, however, Jackie could see the sheer inhumanity of the thing. It too had veins sticking out of it, but unlike the Shades, it only had one vein attached to the moon. Furthermore, all of the veins seemed to run from it into the Shades. The multitude of eyes that coated its sexless, nude figure all resembled the moon, and they all turned their gaze on Jackie before the images raced through his mind again. Then it began addressing him.
Return to us what is ours, thief, it spoke into his mind with soft yet vicious authority. Give to us, the Sanguine Eye, what you have taken, and we shall yet allow you to retain your will. We will let you take the place of this Shade as our Seer. There is no greater honor or pleasure to be found. All you need to do is give us our rightful property.
For an appalling moment, Jackie thought the offer over. Then that moment passed as he saw the moon beginning to move out of the eclipse. It was getting desperate. It was running out of time, so it had resorted to bargaining with him. He responded by removing his revolver, aiming at the Seer and firing at one of the eyes on its torso. It burst open with a cascade of blood and other fluids.
The Seer clutched at the remains of the optical organ in pain, letting out a howl of agony, followed by fury. It pointed a finger at Jackie, then all of the Shades leaped to their feet and charged at the cabin. Jackie began counting the seconds. Just as the Shades entered the cabin and one was about to bring a lead pipe down on his head, the red light from the moon vanished, along with the Shades and their Seer. Sunlight bathed the town of Red Leaf, and Jackie sighed as he lay down, then groaned as he remembered the blow to his leg.
Once he had bandaged his leg, which was thankfully not broken, Jackie headed into the cellar, seated himself at his desk, and took the book out. The design of the hateful, scarlet eye on the cover watched him, judged him. He flipped to the pages with diagrams of an eclipse and hoped the bizarre trance would come over him again, illuminating some means of reversing things. He knew he was responsible for all of this. If he had just left that damn book alone, he wouldn’t have been possessed by the knowledge of what to say to call down the Sanguine Eclipse, as the book referred to it. This was his penance: staying in Red Leaf, surviving the attacks by his former neighbors. The force behind this book, the Sanguine Eye, made no attempt to leave town. Whatever it wanted, it would be incomplete without him. Without the one who summoned the Shades, the “collection” was incomplete. What’s more, it was getting desperate, and he thought he knew why. The book spoke of an event that had always occurred within a year of the Eclipse: the Azure Sun. Evidently, it was the equal and opposite reaction to the Sanguine Eclipse, a force that would cleanse the world of its doings. As long as he drew breath, he was going to make sure the Shades and their master stayed confined to Red Leaf. If he could no longer defend the cabin before the Azure Sun, he would burn it down with him and the book inside. He owed his neighbors that much.

My last post went over surprisingly well, that said you should check out my new subreddit Talesofzippy for more content, because I'm definitely going to posting in more places around reddit and I'll be cross posting them in the tales sub for more people to enjoy!
With that, I don't remember any good stories about Zippy, but the place I work at is fucking filled with loonies, so tonight I'm going to introduce you to Katniss.
Katniss is about 63, tiny, and absolutely loved to talk about how good her guns are, even if she can't shoot or generally understand how they work. She tried to tell me that her Girsan was a high quality gun because the barrel is pinned in place.
I'm a competitive shooter, I grew up shooting and learning about guns.
When a pistol fires a round, a floating barrel will be pointed at an upward angle at the end of the stroke, while a pinned barrel doesn't. The floating barrel doesn't effect accuracy in any meaningful way because it is held in place by several seers, and doesn't begin to move until well after the bullet is out of the gun.
I tried to explain that, she didn't listen. She also can't shoot. Katniss.
She also wears boomer shirts about "snowflakes" and shares memes about the good old days when you could say whatever you want and be offensive.
This gets funny later.
Katniss and I worked together running gas pumps, and we generally got along great, in fact for a year I considered her to be a friend.
And then my dad killed himself.
I got the call at work and got a ride home as quickly as possible. Katniss was on shift with me and Yawn, who is the most chill person you can imagine.
They were incredible, Katniss broke into my apartment (at my request) and took my shotgun for safe keeping. She also took my keys and made me wait for a family friend to pick me up.
I called the night manager and told him I was going home and why, He offered me a ride.
I came into work three days later and stuck my head into my boss (Elk Daddy's) office. He simply said "how long do you need?"
"Two weeks."
"Okay."
I mention this because Anything less than this is a cancerous work environment. If a manager tries to negotiate with you when you've experienced a true tragedy, they're not a manager, they're a slave driver.
I had severe PTSD, nightmares, the whole shabang, for months I would stand at the desk and hear my mom's voice telling me my dad was dead, the first night back at work I witnessed some dumb janitorial drama (not zippy) and I started smelling the sickly sweet smell of human brain before I ran home and had my first panic attack.
(I'll tell the story of Elk Daddy, and make good on a promise I made my dad as a bonus at the end.)
Six months passed, my PTSD wasn't even beginning to heal, and she pulled me aside.
"Okay. It's time to stop now."
"Stop what?"
"This, you're in a rut, and you need to get out of it. It's high time you moved on and stopped being sad and moved on. See my sister was in a car accident and went into a coma when I was about 20, and I had a dream about her getting up and walking out of her hospital room and saying "it's about fucking time." The next day her heart gave out and she finally died. It was this freeing thing for me, because I felt like she was finally free of the broken body and the pain."
"Katniss I just don't feel like I'm... There yet. I'm still hurting, and I really don't feel like I'm ready to let him go. Things aren't that easy."
She didn't like that answer.
At the time I just felt broken, and just laid there and took it, but today I'm genuinely angry about it.
I was hurt, and now that I've rebuilt myself I realized how truly broken I was as a person.
She had no right to say anything to me about how it was time to stop. I'm still healing four years on.
That was when we stopped being friends.
Last year I was going through stickers for our local pride, the second one our community has ever had! I had come out as bi the year before, and had a side project that had grown large enough to have a booth at the local event. I was showing off some cool and funny stickers to Yawn, another cashier.
Yawn is great, he has no blood pressure, everything is just really cool and chill, and he really just wanted to be friends with everyone.
Genuinely nice person. I always get him a Christmas gift and he's always grateful, no matter what it is.
I turned around and handed a sticker to Katniss that said "be gay, so crime" with a little picture of a fabulous criminal goose on it.
She took one look at it and just went "No" rather forcefully, so I just backed off and moved on.
The next day my boss, Elk Daddy, calls me over.
"Op, you handed Katniss a sticker yesterday, and I just want to tell you. Stop talking to her. Please. For me."
"She really complained about that?"
"No, she threatened to go to HR because you "assumed her orientation" and tried to give her a sticker."
It is at this point that I'd like to add that Elk Daddy is gay. Like... Really gay. Him and his husband both donate their time and money to pride, and have been instrumental in making it happen. They are the gay uncles that stepped up to be dads for their nephews when Elk Daddy's brother couldn't.
He knows Katniss, and both of us know her HUSBAND.
So. We didn't talk outside of necessary conversations, and haven't really said anything to each other for any reason.... Until I transferred to my current department and ran out of pens.
I walked over to the cashier desk "hey Katniss, can I get a handful of pens? I ran out."
"I gave three to morning shift last night, what happened to those?"
"I don't know, and it doesn't matter, can I get some?"
Yawn walked over to the drawer where we keep the pens and opened it, while Katniss sighs and opens up her drawer and drops a pen on the counter.
"Come on Katniss, I need more than that."
"I don't have that many pens, they're not giving them to us, here, this is all I have."
She angrily throws down two more pins on the counter as Yawn retrieves an entire box of pens from the drawer and begins walking over. She sees him and motions for him to stop."
"Don't fucking bullshit me Katniss, I see Yawn with the box. Just give me some pens."
She drops six more down on the counter, I take them and walk off. "Thank you."
Ten minutes later she comes over to the deli and slams a box of pens down on the counter for me
"Don't ask me for pens again."
"Wouldn't have it any other way."
She then told the MOD that I cussed her out. I told my side, and several people in the management chain pointed out that she wore tee shirts under her uniform that said more offensive things, one of them even saying "don't fucking bullshit me."
She is no longer allowed to wear her tee shirts.
She's also had it pointed out to her that she says "don't fucking bullshit me" all the time, and management has gently reminded her that she should not swear.
A few weeks ago she very dejectedly told me that she was done trying to help people, and I had to bite back a "good, we don't need it."
And here we are... End of another post about the weird boomers I work with.
BONUS STORIES!
As for Elk Daddy.
My boss has only ever taken his husband out hunting one time. When they did, they ended up trekking across the country on deer trails and through the brush. After 12 hours of being dragged through the brush and not shooting anything, his husband said something to the effect of "I hate this. I can't keep up with you and you just disappear all the goddamn time." He took my boss's phone, logged in, and yells "in fact HEY SIRI, FROM NOW ON CALL ME ELK DADDY."
nickname earned. He has it monogramed on his wallet.
And finally, my dad, who was another Boomer, used to love taking me out camping.
He was an electrical engineer, and was most certainly on the spectrum. He was brilliant in his own way, but absolutely unhinged when it came to teaching things.
A lecture from my dad could cover cleaning the stove (with diagrams on proper wiping techniques) to the finer points of building and firing a nuclear weapon. (With math included. No mercy.)
He tried to teach me calculus when I was six. It didn't work.
Anyway, on this particular camping trip he pulled me aside and said "op, I want you to make me a fire using nothing but two sticks, your knife, a match and the chainsaw"
Now. I knew where he was coming from, he wanted me to make a fuzz stick. I knew because he had only brought up the topic of making a fuzz stick every night for the past three days of camping. He then very helpfully added "and the chainsaw is a distraction."
Uh huh. Okay dad.
I Start cutting up the wood and making a teepee fire, and I hear a little "hmph" I look up and I see the smile. The grin he used to get as he started planning one of his little lectures. He was picking out the right words, deciding if he needed to demonstrate or just use a pen and paper.
I then opened up the gas tank on the chainsaw, dumped in a tablespoon of gas, lit the match and "whoof"
Fire.
Then the argument began.
"I said you couldn't use gas!"
"You said I could use the chainsaw, that includes the gas tank!"
"The chainsaw was a distraction!"
"Still gave it to me!"
"You cheated!!!"
"How?"
Long pause.
"I won, admit it. I beat you in a way you didn't expect. You will never live this down. I'll tell this story at your funeral!"
And I did. Three years later I tore up my hastily scribbled notes and told a group of the friends, neighbors and coworkers that he knew and loved about the time I finally beat him. We laughed.
I think he'd be proud, and a little indignant.
I miss you dad.

My last post went over surprisingly well, that said you should check out my new subreddit Talesofzippy for more content, because I'm definitely going to posting in more places around reddit and I'll be cross posting them in the tales sub for more people to enjoy!
With that, I don't remember any good stories about Zippy, but the place I work at is fucking filled with loonies, so tonight I'm going to introduce you to Katniss.
Katniss is about 63, tiny, and absolutely loved to talk about how good her guns are, even if she can't shoot or generally understand how they work. She tried to tell me that her Girsan was a high quality gun because the barrel is pinned in place.
I'm a competitive shooter, I grew up shooting and learning about guns.
When a pistol fires a round, a floating barrel will be pointed at an upward angle at the end of the stroke, while a pinned barrel doesn't. The floating barrel doesn't effect accuracy in any meaningful way because it is held in place by several seers, and doesn't begin to move until well after the bullet is out of the gun.
I tried to explain that, she didn't listen. She also can't shoot. Katniss.
She also wears boomer shirts about "snowflakes" and shares memes about the good old days when you could say whatever you want and be offensive.
This gets funny later.
Katniss and I worked together running gas pumps, and we generally got along great, in fact for a year I considered her to be a friend.
And then my dad killed himself.
I got the call at work and got a ride home as quickly as possible. Katniss was on shift with me and Yawn, who is the most chill person you can imagine.
They were incredible, Katniss broke into my apartment (at my request) and took my shotgun for safe keeping. She also took my keys and made me wait for a family friend to pick me up.
I called the night manager and told him I was going home and why, He offered me a ride.
I came into work three days later and stuck my head into my boss (Elk Daddy's) office. He simply said "how long do you need?"
"Two weeks."
"Okay."
I mention this because Anything less than this is a cancerous work environment. If a manager tries to negotiate with you when you've experienced a true tragedy, they're not a manager, they're a slave driver.
I had severe PTSD, nightmares, the whole shabang, for months I would stand at the desk and hear my mom's voice telling me my dad was dead, the first night back at work I witnessed some dumb janitorial drama (not zippy) and I started smelling the sickly sweet smell of human brain before I ran home and had my first panic attack.
(I'll tell the story of Elk Daddy, and make good on a promise I made my dad as a bonus at the end.)
Six months passed, my PTSD wasn't even beginning to heal, and she pulled me aside.
"Okay. It's time to stop now."
"Stop what?"
"This, you're in a rut, and you need to get out of it. It's high time you moved on and stopped being sad and moved on. See my sister was in a car accident and went into a coma when I was about 20, and I had a dream about her getting up and walking out of her hospital room and saying "it's about fucking time." The next day her heart gave out and she finally died. It was this freeing thing for me, because I felt like she was finally free of the broken body and the pain."
"Katniss I just don't feel like I'm... There yet. I'm still hurting, and I really don't feel like I'm ready to let him go. Things aren't that easy."
She didn't like that answer.
At the time I just felt broken, and just laid there and took it, but today I'm genuinely angry about it.
I was hurt, and now that I've rebuilt myself I realized how truly broken I was as a person.
She had no right to say anything to me about how it was time to stop. I'm still healing four years on.
That was when we stopped being friends.
Last year I was going through stickers for our local pride, the second one our community has ever had! I had come out as bi the year before, and had a side project that had grown large enough to have a booth at the local event. I was showing off some cool and funny stickers to Yawn, another cashier.
Yawn is great, he has no blood pressure, everything is just really cool and chill, and he really just wanted to be friends with everyone.
Genuinely nice person. I always get him a Christmas gift and he's always grateful, no matter what it is.
I turned around and handed a sticker to Katniss that said "be gay, do crime" with a little picture of a fabulous criminal goose on it.
She took one look at it and just went "No" rather forcefully, so I just backed off and moved on.
The next day my boss, Elk Daddy, calls me over.
"Op, you handed Katniss a sticker yesterday, and I just want to tell you. Stop talking to her. Please. For me."
"She really complained about that?"
"No, she threatened to go to HR because you "assumed her orientation" and tried to give her a sticker."
It is at this point that I'd like to add that Elk Daddy is gay. Like... Really gay. Him and his husband both donate their time and money to pride, and have been instrumental in making it happen. They are the gay uncles that stepped up to be dads for their nephews when Elk Daddy's brother couldn't.
He knows Katniss, and both of us know her HUSBAND.
So. We didn't talk outside of necessary conversations, and haven't really said anything to each other for any reason.... Until I transferred to my current department and ran out of pens.
I walked over to the cashier desk "hey Katniss, can I get a handful of pens? I ran out."
"I gave three to morning shift last night, what happened to those?"
"I don't know, and it doesn't matter, can I get some?"
Yawn walked over to the drawer where we keep the pens and opened it, while Katniss sighs and opens up her drawer and drops a pen on the counter.
"Come on Katniss, I need more than that."
"I don't have that many pens, they're not giving them to us, here, this is all I have."
She angrily throws down two more pins on the counter as Yawn retrieves an entire box of pens from the drawer and begins walking over. She sees him and motions for him to stop."
"Don't fucking bullshit me Katniss, I see Yawn with the box. Just give me some pens."
She drops six more down on the counter, I take them and walk off. "Thank you."
Ten minutes later she comes over to the deli and slams a box of pens down on the counter for me
"Don't ask me for pens again."
"Wouldn't have it any other way."
She then told the MOD that I cussed her out. I told my side, and several people in the management chain pointed out that she wore tee shirts under her uniform that said more offensive things, one of them even saying "don't fucking bullshit me."
She is no longer allowed to wear her tee shirts.
She's also had it pointed out to her that she says "don't fucking bullshit me" all the time, and management has gently reminded her that she should not swear.
A few weeks ago she very dejectedly told me that she was done trying to help people, and I had to bite back a "good, we don't need it."
And here we are... End of another post about the weird boomers I work with.
BONUS STORIES!
As for Elk Daddy.
My boss has only ever taken his husband out hunting one time. When they did, they ended up trekking across the country on deer trails and through the brush. After 12 hours of being dragged through the brush and not shooting anything, his husband said something to the effect of "I hate this. I can't keep up with you and you just disappear all the goddamn time." He took my boss's phone, logged in, and yells "in fact HEY SIRI, FROM NOW ON CALL ME ELK DADDY."
nickname earned. He has it monogramed on his wallet.
And finally, my dad, who was another Boomer, used to love taking me out camping.
He was an electrical engineer, and was most certainly on the spectrum. He was brilliant in his own way, but absolutely unhinged when it came to teaching things.
A lecture from my dad could cover cleaning the stove (with diagrams on proper wiping techniques) to the finer points of building and firing a nuclear weapon. (With math included. No mercy.)
He tried to teach me calculus when I was six. It didn't work.
Anyway, on this particular camping trip he pulled me aside and said "op, I want you to make me a fire using nothing but two sticks, your knife, a match and the chainsaw"
Now. I knew where he was coming from, he wanted me to make a fuzz stick. I knew because he had only brought up the topic of making a fuzz stick every night for the past three days of camping. He then very helpfully added "and the chainsaw is a distraction."
Uh huh. Okay dad.
I Start cutting up the wood and making a teepee fire, and I hear a little "hmph" I look up and I see the smile. The grin he used to get as he started planning one of his little lectures. He was picking out the right words, deciding if he needed to demonstrate or just use a pen and paper.
I then opened up the gas tank on the chainsaw, dumped in a tablespoon of gas, lit the match and "whoof"
Fire.
Then the argument began.
"I said you couldn't use gas!"
"You said I could use the chainsaw, that includes the gas tank!"
"The chainsaw was a distraction!"
"Still gave it to me!"
"You cheated!!!"
"How?"
Long pause.
"I won, admit it. I beat you in a way you didn't expect. You will never live this down. I'll tell this story at your funeral!"
And I did. Three years later I tore up my hastily scribbled notes and told a group of the friends, neighbors and coworkers that he knew and loved about the time I finally beat him. We laughed.
I think he'd be proud, and a little indignant.
I miss you dad.

PART ONE THOUSAND AND ELEVEN
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Sunday
“Daaaaddy!”
Levi groaned, for the shouting whine from his bedside dragged him kicking and screaming out of sleep in a way no other alarm could. Only two other sounds garnered a faster reaction from him: someone vomiting right beside him or his baby girl screaming in either pain or fear.
He opened one eye, wondering if someone had ever made an alarm that sounded like either of those last two. Parents everywhere would never sleep in again, so maybe not.
A blurry red-headed vision was so close that he could smell her morning breath as it tickled his nose. “Heeey,” he yawned, pulling away enough to bring her back into focus. “What’s up, Peaches?”
He didn’t recognise the room they were in. Not even a little bit. He sat up fast and looked around, causing Maddy to let out an ‘eep’ of fright. “Daddy! You made some come out!”
And then the events of the night before came crashing in: the party, the knowledge that his roommate was going to have the kind of company Maddy didn’t need to see, the invitation to stay in Luke’s old room, and Maddy’s late-night escapades after he’d dropped like a rock after doing a double shift to make it to the party.
He saw Maddy’s uncomfortable wiggle-dance and the strained look on her face and remembered he’d locked the door. “Oh!” He flew out of bed, scooping her up in the process. If he ended up getting peed on, it was his own fault for not setting an alarm for his baby girl’s tiny bladder.
He unlocked the door and dove around the corner, willing to go through the shut bathroom door if he had to, but thankfully found the room open and vacant. Then he flipped the toilet lid before depositing her on the ground in front of the toilet. He immediately pivoted away, not because he was embarrassed by her but because Maddy had grown old enough not to like him watching her go to the toilet. She was starting to get antsy about her bath, too, but until she could adequately bathe herself and not merely play with her bath toys the whole time, that was a hard ‘don’t care’ line.
“Do you want to have a bath, baby, or wait until we get home?” he asked, crossing the room to hold the door almost shut to prevent anyone else from seeing her either.
“I don’t got clothes, Daddy,” she answered like he was an idiot.
Word choice aside, the sentiment was true. They’d borrowed the shirt she was wearing from Charlie. “Well, we need to figure something out, Peaches, because you are not leaving this house in only a nightgown and no underwear.” He’d send Charlotte out to buy her some clothes if he had to.
He heard the toilet flush and Maddy move up behind him, and turned long before she could touch him. “Three guesses what I didn’t hear, young lady?” he asked with a paternal frown. He pointed at the vanity when she looked up at him without a clue.
“But I can’t reach!”
“Then what are you supposed to do?”
Her shoulders slumped. “Daddy, c’n you help?”
He then smiled. “Better.” He put a hand on top of her head and spun her towards the vanity before guiding her forward. After they crossed the room, he loosened the faucet without turning it on and curled his hands around her waist, lifting her high enough that she could lean over the sink. She washed her hands, rinsing them thoroughly, then scooped the water and let it fall over the faucet before turning it off. Not that water alone would wash away the ‘germs’ of the initial contact, but the sentiment was there. Her mother had been a nurse, after all.
“Is Mister Larry still here?”
“I don’t know, baby. But how about we go and see if we can track down either Aunty Charlotte or Robbie and figure out where we’re at, okay?”
“We’re in Uncle Luke’s and Aunty Charlotte’s home,” she said, again like he was an idiot.
That had been a rather stupid thing to say to a three-and-a-half-year-old. “Alright, Miss Smarty-pants. And what are we going to eat for breakfast in Uncle Luke and Aunty Charlotte’s home if we can’t find them to ask them, hmm?”
“Food, silly.”
Clearly, he was going to have to up his game in parental rhetorical questions. Gone were the days when she’d take him at his word, and she was only three. Thirteen was going to be fun. “Right,” he muttered, shaking his head as he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.
While holding Maddy’s hand, he peeked in the open door across the hall from the bathroom and saw a very plain bedroom in terms of the rest of the apartment’s décor. At first, he’d thought it was a guest room until he remembered the teenage kid Robbie had recently adopted. This was probably his room.
He’d seen Charlotte and Robbie’s room the day they moved Charlotte in here, so a quick glance to confirm the room was empty was all he needed on that score. That left two doors on the right. And since both were close together, with the one on the left barely a couple of feet from the other and the front wall separating the living room, Levi was willing to assume the second one was a half-bath or a powder room or something. He went to the second door and knocked.
“Yeah?” Mason called from inside.
Levi opened the door and poked his head inside. “Hey, you wouldn’t by any chance happen to know where Robbie or Charlotte are, would you?”
Mason was at his desk, drowning in paperwork, it seemed. “Robbie, no,” he said, shaking his head. "As for Charlie, I’d try her office next door, between us and Boyd’s studio. She has a massive garage refit happening soon, so last I checked, she was in there getting things ready.”
The emphasis on his sister’s preferred name wasn’t lost on him. A sharp, jarring motion to his right caught his eye, and he saw something that really belonged in a space program somewhere.
“What the hell is that?” he demanded, ducking down low enough to see Robbie’s adoptee with his eyes glued on whatever was going on overhead and his fingers typing in a blur of speed.
“Naughty word, Daddy!”
Mason snickered at Levi’s slow blink. “It’s a gaming system courtesy of Robbie’s family. The damn thing is very addictive, though, and I haven’t told Brock that there’s a screen you pull down from inside the headset to cover your eyes that takes the game into 3D playing.”
Levi whistled. “I don’t even want to know how much that costs.”
“I know, and this Sectra table here is up there too,” Mason agreed, gesturing at the electronic display beside him. “But it certainly makes learning a lot more fun.” He tilted his head forward. “Isn’t that right, bunny?”
Bunny?
Maddy leaned into Levi’s leg, but she was grinning ear to ear when she nodded. “I wanna be a vert when I grow up,” she declared, looking up at him.
“Vet, baby,” Mason corrected. “We’re vets. Sounds like “bet’ and ‘get’ and ‘set’.”
“Vet,” Maddy repeated.
“There ya’ go. Step one is getting the name right.” He glanced up at Levi, his cheeky grin on full display. “Step two is getting Daddy to save up for the rest of his life to pay for the classes.”
“I hate you,” Levi whisper-smirked, and Mason pursed his lips in a cocky air-kiss.
Still shaking his head, Levi waved at Mason and left the room, leading Maddy through the kitchen and living room and into the hallway outside. For so many years, his baby brother and their friends had crushed themselves into that ninth-floor horror show, and no amount of pleading from everyone would budge Luke. Not pressure from their parents nor peer guilt from his brothers, who refused to bring their families over to the cramped space.
Charlo—Charlie was the only one who visited regularly, and at the time, he’d put it down to her being skinny, single with no kids, so she could squeeze into whatever gap she found. He knew who she was really visiting now, and Robbie had better be ready for the mother of all guilt trips coming from the family to make an honest woman of their sister. Nascerdios descended or not, he’d be a dead man if he broke her heart.
Thinking about his little brother’s relationship with all these men, it was like Luke knew the payoff was just around the corner. People like them didn’t live like this.
Well, Maverick kind of did, but he’d worked hard for what he had and could rattle off his list of sporting injuries to prove it. Robbie and Sam had simply taken a running dive off the world’s highest diving platform and landed in the kind of wealth the rich and shameless could only dream about.
Luke—Lucas was lucky in a different way. Yes, his friendship with Robbie and Sam had certainly opened the right doors financially, but what Levi had seen of Boyd’s work yesterday, the big guy was well on his way to becoming his own type of rich; much like Mav did for his family. And like Marley, Lu—ucas wouldn’t have to work a day again in his life if he didn’t want to. (Though he had just made detective and loved his job, so Levi couldn’t see him quitting anytime soon.)
He knocked on the closed door. “Come in,” Charlie called, proving Mason right. And like Mason, she was sitting behind a desk covered in paperwork with a phone cradled against her shoulder.
“Aunty Charlotte, we’re hungry!” Maddy declared, and Levi closed his eyes to hide from his sister’s evil chuckle.
“Well, we can’t have that, sweetie,” she said, and he heard the phone click as it was dropped onto the receiver. "Daddy gets very grumpy when he’s hungry.”
“It’s not the only reason he gets cranky,” he said, opening one eye a slit to give his baby sister the stink eye.
Charlie cackled and slid out from behind her desk. “C’mon. Robbie has your breakfast all ready for you in Voila.”
“We didn’t want to start going through things and guessing what we could eat,” Levi explained as they backtracked to the main apartment.
“That’s fine. Grab a seat—any seat,” she said, gesturing to the line of kitchen barstool chairs as she moved through the living room. She headed around the island and over to the box under the window without checking if they had.
Levi wasn’t thrilled about the height of the barstool chairs off the floor. “Do you have a belt or something I could use to tie Maddy in?”
Charlie swung around to him. “Oh! Oh, yeah! Hold on.” She slipped around the island and down her side of the apartment, coming back from her room with the kind of square booster seats that could be found in a restaurant. “Robbie ducked out and got this for her this morning.”
Levi scratched his head as the booster was attached to the second chair along the front of the island. “Where’d he get that from at this hour?”
Charlie looked at him derisively. “This is Robbie, bro. You know he’s got connections all over the place.”
It killed Levi not to ask for more details, but given it was probably either connected to the Nascerdios or, more likely, a wealthy former client in the city that still looked favourably upon Robbie, he hadn’t wanted Maddy to overhear the specifics of the latter. Too many times, his little girl had asked Robbie about different ‘gifts’ he’d been given by clients and how she had wanted to do whatever he did to get presents like that. ‘Over my dead body’ had been his mental declaration.
Maddy was pulling on his boxers. “Up, Daddy,” she said, holding her hands over her head for him.
Levi lifted her into the seat, and then buckled her in. In the meantime, Charlie went back to that wooden box, lifting the lid. “Robbie has this gift with food, so assume everything in the place is for you to eat, because it probably is.”
“Not everything,” Levi countered at Maddy’s wild squeal of delight. He gave her hand a firm squeeze. “Do not take anything without asking, young lady, or you’ll be in big trouble.”
“But Daddy…”
“It’s Daddy’s call, Maddy,” Charlie said, backing his play. She turned, holding a plate with two fist-sized Minnie Mouse-shaped waffles (the bow between the ears made it Minnie) with some type of white marshmallow fluff spread across them and a honey drizzle that drew perfect facial features on each. “Here’s breakfast for one cute-as-a-button Dobson,” she said with a flourish, sliding the plate in front of Maddy and pulling out a children’s stubby fork from the cutlery drawer.
“It’ll have to be cut u—” The words died in Levi’s throat as Maddy stabbed the nearest piece, and it broke into a small, bite-sized piece that Maddy happily popped into her mouth.
“Imma bi’ ’irl,” she said, in and around her food.
Levi tapped her nose. “Big girls don’t talk with their mouths full, Peaches.”
When he glanced at Charlie, she’d gone back to the box and returned with a dinner plate of fluffy scrambled eggs on two pieces of toast with cheese and bacon, and three sausages cut almost in half longways on the side. She nodded at the seat beside Maddy, then slid the plate into the empty spot at the end. “Siddown, bro.”
He might have whimpered a little on the first bite as Charlie went and poured them both a glass (technically, Maddy got a plastic tumbler) of citrus juice (not orange), leaving the jug on the bench between them. “Help yourselves to as much juice as you want. Even if you wipe this whole jug out, there's plenty more.”
“This is really awesome, Charlie. Thanks.”
Charlie placed her hand on her brother’s shoulder as she moved around the island into the hallway. “Anytime, Levi. But now I’ve gotta love you and leave you. There’s a mountain of work to get through in my office, so are you good here?”
“Totally. Thanks again, sis.”
As she walked out the door, Maddy held out a piece of her waffle to him. “Try?”
Waffles were usually too sweet for his blood, but this was the game he’d set up with her a long time ago to make her at least attempt to eat new foods. He couldn’t very well expect her to eat what he wanted her to if, now and again, he didn’t reciprocate the motion.
The honey and marshmallow whip (which tasted nothing like the jar-bought type) melted into the perfectly heated/not-too-hot waffle, giving it a sweet crunch as if it had just come out of the waffle iron. His surprise must have been written all over his face, for Maddy giggled, and he grinned. “That’s yummy.”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” she hummed, just as he always had when a new food passed the initial taste test.
[Next Chapter]
* * *
((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I’d love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work, including WPs: Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

hi!! i’ve never posted anything here before and im not very well-versed in reddit so im sorry about any mistakes. i quite like understanding things through diagrams so i thought i would make on explaining how the mbti cognitive functions work(or at least how i understand them so far). i will attach a photo of my diagrams and explain what im trying to get across with each one. i apologise for the length!!!!
the drawings are in fact ridiculous looking but hopefully you can see my intention behind it. so! the basic idea of all of them: 1. the extroverted functions are enclosed in this eye-like shape. this is to emphasise the users of these functions looking outward, into the external world. 2. the introverted functions are enclosed in a brain-like shape. this is to emphasise the users looking inward, into the internal world. this is not to mean that introverted functions cannot see or experience the external world or the extroverted functions don’t have an internal world. it is simply where their attention lies. 3. outside of these shapes i have scribbled. this is to describe a blurred inner and outer world respectively. their attention does not lie outside of their shapes. 4. i repeat a couple shapes as they represent different concepts. the question marks mean like ideas, abstract concepts, theories. whereas the bin(trash can), dog and person represent physical objects, beings, tangible experiences etc.. the hearts, stars, clouds and other shapes are representations of impressions of harmony and discord felt by certain experiences and people. 5. lastly number 5, i forgot to dry draw the internal thinking part within the Fe block but just imagine its in that blurry part of it oops
okay so each type: Si- rely on inner experience and IMPRESSIONS informed by blurred external ideas and concepts
what did you see yesterday? Si forms a impression the dog, what in particular sticks out to Si about the dog and unclearly generates ideas of what the dog could look like or what the colour the dog may like to look at. what features Si sees COULD mean. (Si thinking of the answer) this is a TINY dog, this is a TIRED dog, this is a THIRSTY dog. it focuses on the impressions of it, and what Si WANTS to focus on. (Si answering) a little dog doing quite poorly
Se- rely on an UNCHANGED experience of reality and the tangible external world informed by blurred previous personal ideas and meanings
Se sees the entire dog objectively and unclearly fits any meanings it has to reality or things the dog could possibly do. it is an objective experience of the dog. so what did you see yesterday? (Se thinking of the answer) it is a tiny DOG, it is a tired DOG, it is thirsty DOG. the unclear ideas of what it could be(tiny, tired, thirsty) are picked up unknowingly and are only noticed when really focused on or compared with another object. it’s next to another dog that is clearly bigger so THEN is becomes the SMALL dog. but the important part is- (Se answer) a dog.
Ni- rely on inner, PERSONAL meaning and ideas informed by blurred scope of external world
Ni consciously connects meanings and possible implications off of a broad blurred scope. the inverse of Se. what did you see yesterday? (Ni thinking of the answer)it is thirsty, must’ve been hot that day, i smelled wet dog, there was a red sign with a monetary fine if you don’t do something. so it’s PROBABLY a dog? not too sure, but that makes the most sense with all that information. the important part was the ideas of what the thing might have been or done to become what is physically was. (Ni answering) ummm…. a dog….?
Ne- rely on POSSIBLE meanings and ideas informed by blurred impressions of reality
Ne intentionally generates many ideas off of previously lived but unclear reality. this dog gives me a lot of ideas because it’s different from dogs i’ve seen before… probably. so what did you see yesterday? (Ne thinking of the answer) a dog that was thirsty, or maybe it was trying to speak, or maybe it is a deaf dog and thought it was barking but really its mouth was just open, maybe it’s got locked jaw?? maybe i should tell the person asking me this all of the possibilities of what the dog was doing so maybe we could get to the bottom of this. (Ne answering) insert either long explanation or simply- a dog.(because they found something else that caught their eye in the middle of thinking and want to get this convo over fast enough to ponder the other thing)
i’m not very sure how to explain the thinking and feeling functions in these terms as they don’t really ‘perceive’ reality but just exist in it and inform the decisions you make in it. so i won’t as getting it wrong makes me want to throw up
Fi- rely on EXPERIENCED impressions informed by a blurred objective system Fe- rely on OTHERS’ impressions informed by a blurred experienced system Ti- rely on a decided UNDERSTOOD framework informed by an objective shared atmosphere Te- rely on adherence to a universal and FUNDAMENTAL working of reality informed by a personal impression of peace
if you find things i’ve missed or have just gotten completely wrong please let me know. i know this isn’t particularly useful to everyone but i thought maybe some people may understand things in the same way i do and maybe this will help them.

"Wade! Good to see you back buddy!" Nathan said aloud as he and F approached Wade and Tina, the two breaking their embrace before looking to their friends.
Wade chuckled a bit as he responded to Nathan's greeting, Tina giving a pleasant smile as she stood behind him. "Same to you, man. How're things here?"
"Better than any words I could use for the situation!" Looking behind him, he gazed at a group of the worker drones that were rescued from the factory, having been brought aboard in order to transport them to a safer location. Their faces were of varied gratefulness and smiles as they made conversation with some of the troops onboard. "The rescue-ees are happy to be out of that place, far as I can tell!"
"They sure look like it." Wade said with a pleased smile, admiring the success of his and the Coalition's efforts as Nathan's friend Kurtis came over to the four.
Catching sight of Tina, the veteran drone gave a sly look as he correctly guessed the identity of Wade's accomplice. "Oh, and I see you found your girl you were telling me about."
The drone in question gave a blush of embarrassment as Wade held her hand, chuckling smugly as he introduced Tina. "Ah, yeah. Nathan, Kurtis, F, this is my girlfriend Tina. She's one of the best pilots I've met and known in my life, along with her sister Jasmine."
Tina's blush intensified heavily at Wade's words, a laugh breaching her mouth as she spoke to Wade's colleagues. "Well, I don't like to boast, but my sister and I DID fly for the military a while back."
Nathan and Kurtis gave impressed laughs as F chuckled at the amusing meeting, the former of the duo speaking as he shook Tina's hand. "Heh, well it's a proud pleasure to meet you, Miss Tina! You've got quite the partner with you, I'd say. He helped save F and Gerard from an accident during our time on Ceres."
Tina raised a hand to her mouth in shock as she looked to Wade, surprised by the news of his heroics at his new job before chuckling. "Well, it's not too surprising, I'd probably be dead if he didn't come in to help us." Remembering that F was involved in her rescue too, she glanced to the disassembly drone before quietly adding, "You too, darling."
F gave a thankful smile at the pilot drone as Wade spoke up on Tina's statement on her rescue. "Well, I'd also be done for if you didn't save me back there, with that disassembly drone squad." Tina nodded as Nathan looked to the drone couple in surprise at their stated feat.
"More of them? How many? Three? Fo-" The miner drone asked as Wade answered him mid-sentence.
"Three, and they put up a nasty fight. One almost got me before Tina shot at her with one of those guns these militia guys brought. A trooper must've dropped it during the fighting." Nathan gave an uncomfortable look of shock as Wade added, "One of them looked kinda like you too."
Tina pulled out her gun before holding it at attention, Nathan nodding in admiration of her efforts as she spoke up. "Think I could keep this one? We pilots usually carry sidearms like these, but I lost mine when they kidnapped me aboard the station in orbit."
Nathan and Kurtis looked to each other before nodding in agreement. "Sure, gonna need a holster though. Wouldn't want it to fall out that nice coat there, would we?" While Nathan gave his answer, Kurtis was already heading to the storage bays at the back of the ship, planning on grabbing the sizable holster wrap for Tina's weapon.
"Of course." Tina replied as Kurtis grabbed the desired gear, shutting the cargo door as he returned to the group. Taking the holster in her hand, she handed the pistol to Wade before speaking in between her efforts to attach the holster to her upper leg. "Thanks for the compliment, by the way."
"Don't mention it." Nathan replied back as F stepped up in between the group, wanting to add her own praise as the group looked to her.
"Glad to see so many together in arms here, especially when it's work colleagues like the boys here." Looking to Tina, she continued. "And Nathan's right, Miss Tina. Your partner is quite the guy, I'm a little surprised he didn't join the service. Him and his brother would've made great men if they fought in the ranks."
The positive air was quickly shattered upon the mention of Ron. Nathan, Wade, and the others all looked to F as her eyes became golden rings, the warrior drone realizing her mistake too late as she began to raise a hand to her face.
"...Yeah. Yes, we sure would have." Wade said solemnly, nodding lightly with a slight smile in his attempt to lighten the comment and, in turn, the mood. His smile faltered once again as he saw the others still frowning in sorrow, Wade joining them shortly after before remembering something. "Uh... Nathan? You did bring his body back here, right?"
Nathan nodded hesitantly as he glanced to the cargo bays at the back of the ship. "Yeah, I uh... We put him near the others we managed to recover before we left."
Tina listened with concerned eyes as she held tightly onto Wade's hand, the former worker drone tightening his own grip while speaking further to Nathan. "Good. Maybe, after this is all over, we can... Make preparations for a service. Ron deserves that at the least."
"So... h-he's in one of... those?" Tina asked dreadfully, observing the body bags lying next to each other in front of one of the cargo bay doors before looking back to Nathan, who looked down at the floor before replying.
"...Yep." Initially, Tina started to move, morbidly concerned over Ron's exact fate before stopping herself, still holding Wade's hand as she stood next to him again. Catching a glimpse of her attempt to see Ron, Nathan raised a digital eyebrow at her. "You, uh... want to see him?"
Wade looked down to Tina, who returned the gesture as they pondered over the uncomforting idea. She admittedly didn't want to see Ron, fearful of seeing what was left of him after that battle, but in a twisted way, knowing Wade wouldn't lie to her about a close relative like Ron being dead, she desperately felt the need for even the slightest sense of closure.
Looking to each other, Tina finally built her strength up, giving the faintest nod to Wade as her answer. Accepting her willingness, Wade slowly looked to Nathan, who needed no further gestures or words as he slowly walked over to the body bags, Wade, Tina, and their colleagues in tow. Upon reaching the bags, Nathan knelt down as his friends stopped behind him, Wade and Tina watching as he slowly unzipped the bag open. Despite her effort to be brave, Tina couldn't help but let out a horrified gasp upon seeing Ron's body, immediately noticing the large wound with dark, dried blood at his chest.
Nathan shook his head in dismay as he looked upon the sight of his fallen friend in the flayed bag. "It was when we made our second attempt in raiding the factory back there. We... We managed to pass through most of the halls without much trouble, but... we we're ambushed as we got close to the conversion room."
"G, the disassembly drone that helped the company abduct me, attacked us, along with several other troopers he brought with him." Wade added, him and Tina holding each other tightly as he continued. "We fought them off well enough, but G got an upper hand on me. He almost killed me, but.... Ron got in the way." Tina felt herself beginning to cry as she collapsed into Wade's chest, the former worker drone embracing her ever more tightly as she wept for their friend.
F shook her head in dismay, disappointed in herself as she spoke up. "I could've saved him, if I hadn't let myself get beat down like that. I-"
"F!" Wade said sternly, F ceasing her self-degrading as he tried to ease her guilt. "We did the best we could. If anything, it could've gone a lot worse."
Kurtis patted F on her back as he spoke up on his co-worker. "He was a good man, tried to bring out the best in people. Taught Wade that ideal well, too." He looked to Wade with a smile, the drone taking the compliment with the same gesture as he lightly patted Tina on her back too.
"*sniff* Y-Yes... He d-did try to make life brighter with his actions." Tina croaked as she slowly lifted her head up off of Wade, wiping the digital drops off her face as she added, "He... Him and Wade did well to so many with their farm they had back home, Jasmine and I helped transport their harvests all across the colonies."
The group gave looks and nods of admiration at the labor Tina described, Wade nodding in affirmation as he added, "Yeah, we held that place up for a long while. But if it weren't for the recent storms that ran through this place, we probably would still be farming." He began to chuckle slightly as he noted the events after the storm. "Heh, then again, we probably wouldn't have gone to Ceres if that was the case. So, I'm quite glad life changed our course on that endeavor."
Nathan was about to speak on the matter, but was stopped as Kelly walked out of the cockpit area, speaking to Wade specifically. "Mr. Wade? Our operative and her boss wants to see you and some of your team, says it's about the trouble you and the others went through."
Wade and Tina looked to each other with raised eyebrows before looking to their friends, F raising a hand as she spoke to the couple. "Well, you heard her. Let's get up there." Looking to Nathan, she motioned for him to follow her before glancing to Kurtis, who nodded to her before kneeling down to seal Ron's body bag.
Turning back to Wade and Tina, F smirked at them as they quickly made their way up to the small bridge of the ship, Tina speaking to Wade about the interior and where to go. "I do remember these ships a bit, now that I think about it. There should be a smaller room at the top above us. Come on."
Holding her hand, Wade and Tina made their way into the cockpit, F and Nathan close behind as the four walked up the small steps to the pilot seats. Right next to the ascending steps were another set of such steps, albeit going the other way into another room as Tina mentioned. The lover drones walked up the second set of steps as they entered the room, catching the sound of a conversation in their ears.
"Yeah Tess, they did a number on the security forces from what I've been told by Mr. Kurtis. He seems quite pro-" J stopped as she heard a startled gasp coming from the entrance near the cockpit, spotting her requested visitors as they took notice of her.
Wade, however, was immediately in shock, Tina also spooked by the familiar face as her love drew a sword before holding it out defensively. F and Nathan looked to the two in surprise as the former raised her arms slightly as to calm down Wade, knowing this J wasn't an enemy.
"Whoa there, easy now." The human hologram said with her hands raised as Wade and Tina gave a faint glare at J, who stared unamused with her hands to her hips.
Easy, Mr. Wade. I'm a friend." J stated as Wade kept his blade trained at her.
"Didn't we just kill you out there earlier?" Tina asked as she held onto Wade's arm, J smirking as she took in the amusing detail.
"Oh, yes. I believe you must've taken out one of my clones, not surprised. I killed a few myself back there." The corporate drone replied as Wade lowered his sword, surprised at J's words as she looked to him.
"Clones?" Tina said in bewilderment, confounded by the idea of multiples of the same drone running around.
"So, there's more of you?" Wade asked as he swapped his sword back for a hand.
"Indeed there are, Mr. Wade. Effective disassembly drones get cloned more often." J answered as she cringed slightly, remembering part of the reason she ended up here. "Though, admittedly I wasn't efficient enough recently. I'm a clone of one of the old units dispatched about two decades ago, before the Disassembly Division was officially instated."
Tina raised an eyebrow at J's explanation. "Recently? If you were away all that time, what could've possibly stopped you now?"
The murder drone groaned in slight annoyance as she reluctantly explained her answer. "Well, the colony we were supposedly sent to wipe out was quite persistent. During one of our raids, some brat with a ray gun blasted me in two." Regaining her composure, J flicked her hair with a smirk. "Then again, my clones should be better than they are, the Administrator seems to have a dislike towards me, as far as I can tell."
Wade and Tina glanced at each other as they took in the news, perplexed at the story they were hearing as the former spoke up. "Well, I sure hope so. Your clone didn't put up as much of a fight as I was expecting."
"Right..." J said with a look of disappointment before clearing her throat. "But besides that, we don't have time for THAT kind of backstory. We've got a lot of talk to do, Mr. Wade."
The holographic human raised a finger, drawing Wade and Tina's attention as she spoke. "Say, didn't J tell me about a human friend you had? A 'brother' guy?"
J nodded as she now also became curious over their missing acquaintant. "Ah yes, Ron, I believe. Do you know where he is, Wade?"
The two drones looked down in sorrow as Wade answered in dismay. "He uh... he didn't make it."
J allowed a concerned look to breach her shield of confident pride as her human friend spoke up, sounding sad at the news. "Oh, I uh, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. W- er... Carter."
"It's alright," Wade replied as he held Tina's hand, looking up to J and the hologram before continuing. "at least he's not hurting anymore."
"My... condolences, Mr. Carter." J said, calling Wade by his last name now as she recovered from the tragic news. "But, it seems you've found someone else important. Who's your friend?"
Wade perked up a bit as he prepared to introduce Tina again. "Ah, yes. This is Tina Fowley, my girlfriend. She was among those captured by the company, I got her out before they could turn her, however."
"She's a pilot too." Nathan chirped from behind Wade, J and her boss stifling laughs as they took in the amusing description of Wade's partner.
"Well, she's quite the cutie, I'll say." The holo-human said in amusement, Tina blushing at the compliment as J spoke as well.
"Indeed she is, good find, Mr. Carter." Chuckling to herself, she remembered that she hadn't even formally met Wade earlier, prompting her to return the effort. "Well, now's as good a time as any to introduce ourselves." Looking to the hologram, J spoke. "Though you probably know who I am, name's J. And this is my boss, Tessa."
Looking to the human girl with a pleasant smile, he spoke to her. "Well, pleased to meet you, Mrs. Tessa."
"Good to meet ya too, Wade!" Tessa replied energetically before bringing herself back to a more serious stance, Wade and Tina feeling a bit surprised by the change of air as she spoke further. "And as much as I hate to cut the pleasantries so short, J and I have some important things to brief you on. So, take a seat and get comfy, everyone."
Noting the pair of chairs in front of the small table J and Tessa were standing on the other side of, the couple took them as Nathan and F stood behind them, simply listening in as J began to explain the matter at hand. "So, you both are probably wondering what this whole mess was all about, correct?"
The two drones nodded as Tina spoke up. "I heard it was having to do something with being recruited for the Disassembly Division, that group you spoke of a second ago. Why did they need to steal me away from my sister up there?"
"Well, the thing is, they didn't." Tessa answered, putting her hands to her hips as her companion explained further.
"Indeed, a simple memory transfer and body scan would've sufficed, but it seems the Administrator was in a bit of a rush." Crossing her arms, J continued in disgruntlement. "From what we gathered, this was done by her as per request by the company CEO, Mr. Jenson. He wanted the Administrator to recruit more drones under a new model of disassembly drone, with slight upgrades that would presumably remove most of the persistent issues each of us have." Shaking her head in disappointment, J finished with, "But, it's clear she cared little for how they were acquired, and way too far overboard with her efforts."
Wade held back his anger as he felt his certainty on the ones responsible grow with J's explanation. "So, it's true? Your people did all this? Got my brother and countless others killed for us?"
The corporate drone seemed to give a sluggish wave of her hand as she replied to Wade. "Well, you see, this whole ordeal is much more complex than it seems." Readying a holo-projector from her hand as it showed the image of a worker drone, dressed in a maid uniform. The hair was silver, two strips of it going down the sides of its head, as well as bearing a bow at the top of it all. Though the hologram made it hard to tell certain details, the drone's eyes appeared faintly as yellow through the blue hue from the hologram light.
Wade, Tina, and their companions eyed the seemingly innocent worker drone in puzzlement as J spoke again. "Now, you should count yourselves lucky, cause what I'm about to tell you is something corporate wouldn't let me spew out to anyone under certain statuses." Looking to Tessa, she continued with a sly smirk. "Then again, it'd probably be forced out of us anyway later on even if we didn't decide to tell you. So, now would be the best time to give you a run-down of the truth we have to share."
"Truth?" Wade asked with a raised hand, J nodding in affirmation before replying.
"Yes." Clearing her throat, J began. "You see, the Administrator was not a creation of JCJenson. At least, not in the way they intended. In fact, she was once a normal worker drone, just like you and I were." Wade raised an eyebrow as J's holo-projector shifted to show a building, a large, very old looking manor that went up a couple of stories high. As Wade and his cohorts observed the structure, J continued her story about her and this Administrator's origins.
"A long time ago, at this place we'll call Elliott Manor, my boss, who was still a child at the time, brought in a few worker drones left outside in a dump near the mansion, mostly composed of scrapped worker drone bodies. Upon bringing us in, Tess would fix us up so we could be her friends. I myself, along with three other drones, were her closest companions. Her family weren't so keen on having us around, but, to keep their daughter happy and to make us useful, Mr. and Mrs. Elliott put us to work keeping the place tidy." The disassembly drone's projector shifted again to show J and her three fellow workers, dressed in the same maid attire J was shown in earlier. Wade and Tina stared at two of them, as they resembled the disassembly drones they fought earlier, most notably N and V.
"Among the four of us here, THIS one would be the biggest problem." The hologram zoomed into the worker drone displayed earlier, postured in a strange, slouched over posture.
"Her name is Cyn, and, unlike J, V and N there, she was more broken than I had surmised back then. Spoke like some old artificial voice generator thing." Tessa stated, pointing at the highlighted drone before Tina decided to speak up on the backstory.
"How broken? Was there something wrong with her coding?" She said as she put a hand to her core.
J nodded lightly as she gave her answer. "Most likely. Do you remember the protocol tape for proper disposal of worker units? Seen it at all?"
Tina and Wade shivered a bit as they thought of the presumed tape J spoke of, dread creeping in from their memories of seeing it as the latter of the duo answered. "I think so, once during a little maintenance time I had years back. I think it was called... 'Zombie Drones'?"
"That's exactly the one." J said with a nod before continuing. "Well, if you saw it all the way through, the pie chart diagram points out the outcomes for OS complications should a worker core be improperly terminated. Out of those outcomes, the smallest, least likely one was 'potentially hazardous mutations'." Pointing to Cyn on the hologram, J continued further. "As for Cyn here, she befell said mutations, and they would come to not only affect her, but all of us at the manor too."
Tina's eyes went wide as she started to click the pieces together, recalling herself reading up on the incident J was hinting at years earlier during a class she took at the college she and Wade attended. "Wait... You, you don't mean SHE was the one who caused the Elliott Gala Massacre?"
J nodded in affirmation as Wade spoke up, confused at the revelation. "Wait, I remember looking into that too. Didn't the news say it was some mass murderer that did it?"
"That they did." Tessa replied as she added to the story. "However, that was a cover-up by the company to hide part of what really happened."
Pulling up what appeared to be a large room full of people inside, J explained the tragedy shown on the projector. "Tessa's parents didn't treat the drones under their service well, and Cyn seemed to despise them for it. On that day during a gala hosted by the Elliotts, Cyn, utilizing the mutations I mentioned, slaughtered the entire attending party there." Glancing to Tessa, J finished with, "Tess and I tried to stop her, but... it was too late."
Holding their hands to their mouths, Wade and Tina looked on in horror, Nathan and F sharing similar dismay as the four looked to Tessa. Knowing their desire to hear how she was spared, Tessa spoke to them. "Despite seeing her kill my parents and everyone in that room with my own eyes, Cyn spared me from the carnage. Took me away to some place so I could be kept quiet."
Raising a hand, F spoke up. "Well, wait a minute, how did Cyn join the company after all that?"
"Good question." J replied, pulling up an image of Cyn and a man, whom Wade recognized as Halloway before the corporate drone explained. "Upon the arrival of law enforcement and agents sent by the company, they found Cyn, who had already turned me and the other worker drones from the manor into the first disassembly drones. After some chatter between the two, Dr. Edgar Halloway, a simple materials recovery officer at the time, struck a deal with her. Talking with the authorities, they managed to convince them to keep the incident on the down low while they took Cyn and her drones in for study. Through said study, addition of protocols and official installation of Cyn into higher company positions, not to mention the creation of the Disassembly Drone Division, the rest is history."
The four drones looked on in stunned shock, taking in Tessa and J's story with unease as Wade spoke up. "So, this new body, the crazy shit that we just went through... it's all cause of this Cyn being? And those who are helping her?"
"That's right." J answered as Tina raised a finger, still concerned over the capabilities of the Administrator as she spoke.
"But, how did she convert you all into what you are now? What were these 'mutations' exactly?"
Tessa sighed a bit as she prepared to explain the origins of this horrible program. "Well, from what information I could gather before I got out of Cyn's clutches a while back, the researchers put to work studying Cyn and her abnormalities came to regard the latter as some kind of program, which grew stronger and more capable quite fast as it was kept under the company's leash. Eventually, they gave it a name: AbsoluteSolver." Pulling out what looked like a smartcomm, Tessa flicked her finger over it as she explained further. "Despite all logic, the AbsoluteSolver program, or, Solver, could generate various things out of thin air, as well as manipulate objects and living beings in many ways. To be blunt, it's like some kind of freaky magic powers for drones.
"Seeing that they could learn a lot from this program, as well as use Cyn's abilities to wring out all kinds of products and items for them to sell and use, the company instated the Solver Project, a research group dedicated to understanding the AS and its potential." Raising a finger, Tessa looked to Wade as she finished her explanation on the Solver. "Said program has been branched out to several other planets over the years, helping to spread this virus as far as possible for purposes we're certain aren't good, given that one of those planets got devastated by an experiment one of the teams did involving the virus."
The news that this infection brought harm to one of the colony worlds didn't sit well with the lover drones, both of them looking on in dismay as J gave more details. "And with that in mind, this recent effort has only cemented our belief that Cyn is up to something sinister. So once we reach the base here in Nevada, we have to make preparations for bringing this Solver Project to a halt... BEFORE it can harm any more people."
Smirking deviously, Tessa raised a finger as she glanced to Wade, who looked to her with concern as she spoke. "By the way Mr. Carter, that Halloway guy you ran into earlier? He leads one of the main teams working on the project."
Wade scoffed in annoyance he was reminded of that man. "Doesn't surprise me, seemed like he was really close to the Administrator from what I saw." Then, thinking on the reason for this briefing he was attending, Wade looked to J and Tessa curiously. "Why are you telling us this?"
J crossed her arms as she explained. "Because, Mr. Carter, YOU are the only disassembly drone we managed to recover from that place. And, given your exceptional performance there, your help would be much appreciated in our mission."
"Mission?" Tina said with a raised eyebrow. "So we're not done yet?"
"For us, not in the slightest. We've got some explaining to do with the government officials stationed at the base we're heading to. As for you all," J answered before looking to the four, all of them returning the glance as she continued. "...that depends on what you all have to say. Can you lend us a hand?"
Glancing to each other, Wade and Tina gazed into one another before nodding in agreement, turning back to J and Tessa before giving their decision. "Well, after what I just went through, and what happened to my brother... I'm sure as hell gonna bring those bastards to justice in one form or another."
"Yes, Wade and I have some talking to do with this 'Dr. Halloway' fellow before this is all over." Tina added, her and Wade holding each others hand as J gave a smirk at their vigorous determination.
"I'm glad to hear you two feel the same on the matter." J said as Tessa put her hands to her hips, slumped slightly as she spoke in a disappointed tone.
"Unfortunately, it may be a minute before we see some action. Once we reach the base, you all will find a place to rest for the time being. Since it's a military base, it should be safe from any major retribution attempts by those blokes at the company." Pulling out her smartcomm again, she continued once more. "As for us, we'll talk to the leaders there and see what their decision will be on the matter."
The quartet seemed to grow concerned over that last part, Nathan raising a hand before speaking his mind. "So, if they say no? Does that mean...?"
J and Tessa glanced to each other before the former answered the veteran drone. "Well, in that case, while it will be harder without official military support, the Coalition will take us wherever we need them to in order to put a stop to the Administrator. Shouldn't be much to worry about."
Taking this somewhat comforting news to heart, Tina and Wade nodded in understanding before the latter spoke to the operatives. "Well, that's good to hear. Whenever you do get an answer, give us a heads up."
"We will, Mr. Carter." J replied to Wade before shifting in her stance, Wade and his friends standing up together as their disassembly drone superior spoke once more. "With all that said, you're all dismissed. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask."
"Thanks for clearing this up, Mrs. J. You too, Tessa." Wade said gratefully before turning to the exit, Tina walking with him as F and Nathan walked over to the operatives.
"Wade? Do you mind coming down to the bay below? I... I have something to show you." Wade nodded to her before they made their way down, the four people behind them continuing the chatter as the couple went to have their long overdue privacy.
Stepping out of the cockpit behind them, Wade and Tina sighed in comfort as they saw the troops busy with their tasks, not giving a glance to the two as they walked close to the sealed door of the transport. Admiring the enormous view the large window in the door gave for a moment, the two drones looked to each other as Tina dug into her pocket. "I was hoping to do this when we got back home, but... I got this from Eridanus while I was visiting." Finding her token of love to Wade, she pulled out the small box she showed off on the call earlier, opening it to reveal her present.
Wade admired the blue gemstone with wide eyes as Tina pulled it out with great care. "Wow... It's beautiful."
Tina chuckled as she extended the gem's necklace band out. "I knew you would, I just happened to stumble upon it while exploring the forest during a tour." Putting the two necklace bands around Wade's neck, she clipped the present together before pulling her arms back, adoring Wade's new add-on as she finished her sentence. "I felt it would be something nice for you to remember me by, while we're away from each other."
Wade smiled at Tina as he expressed his appreciation for the gift. "It certainly will." Stiffling a chuckle, the former worker drone held Tina's hand holding the box as he spoke further. "But, no matter how far apart we are, nothing could fill the space you hold in my heart."
"Same in mine, dear." Tina replied as she gazed into Wade's eyes, noting the faint green in his yellowed visor as she looked on in hopeful amusement. "And yet, even after all they did, I can still see those eyes. Changed from the soft, cool grass to the warmth of a blazing sun." She said while putting the box away, then placing a hand onto Wade's face as he looked off with a blush.
"Tina, I..." Wade began, unsure of how to put his thoughts to words as he tried to find them. "I don't know what they did to me, but I won't let it ruin our relationship." Holding her shoulders, Wade spoke to Tina further. "You're the most beautiful being I've seen in the whole universe, your warmth, your flight prowess... I want to protect that. I want to protect you."
"Oh, Wade." Tina murmured as the two touched their heads to one another, holding each other close in their efforts to provide affection. Such affection intensified as the two joined their metal lips, sharing a long kiss as they enjoyed their moment of awkward romance together.
...
Location: New Nellis Staryards, Nevada
The Chameleon transports zoomed over the large military air base as they arrived at their destination, several A-20 planes flying about over the base as they either carried out flight sorties or, more likely, investigated the arriving craft coming towards the base. After about an hour of flying over the country, the Coalition-USN task force finally arrived at the designated area to begin unloading their rescued drones to an area they could be protected more efficiently.
As the transport began to descend, Wade, Tina, and their friends observed the sight outside the window, spotting several landed aircraft and even a few docked warships. They admired the many ships resting for repair and refurbishment while they prepared to land and disembark for the base outside.
In the small bridge of the dropship, one of the two pilots tapped a button on the control panel, putting a microphone to their mouth before speaking into it. "Base Control, this is Transport Chi-729-B, we've got assets from the recent op lead by Captain Preston aboard. Request permission to land."
"Permission granted, Chi-729. Welcome back." The officer on the other end replied as the transport descended further, two lightningrod jets breaking off as they permitted the craft to land on their grounds below them.

That guy who made that horrible hate post (u/Buyer999) made a pretty cool concept so I decided to fix it up. “But isn’t that disrespectful?” Yes… (btw sorry if my grammar isn’t the best)
1: ALCATRAZOUTBREAK (this name is fine so I’m keeping it like this) plot: in the Montyverse Alcatraz was contained but the death of the Martian Serpent released energy that Alcatraz consumed which made it powerful enough to escape and releases more TDMDs
2 goes from EIFFELTOWERPARASITE to PARISPARASITE: plot: it starts out with a interview with (I forgot his name) and then plays the palm parasite video. After that it shows a diagram of the inside of the Eiffel Tower (like in LIBERTYLURKER) and lastly it does one of the class creature reveal which shows some people infected with the parasites
3 goes from MOUNTFUJIDISASTER to FUJIFRAGMENT: plot: it starts out with a interview with Quinn Arnoldson (since we know what his sister was doing in the Montyverse at the time) where he talks about going to Japan for work and saw a large fragment of Mount Fuji shoot out and a heart (I’m talking about a heart like the one in White House heart) came out of the mountain. After this it shows that event happening. Then it shows a diagram of the inside of Mount Fuji which shows the hearts within and smaller hearts called fairies and ends off with playing the beautiful fairies video
4 goes from WASHINGTONCURSE to AMERICAAFTERMATH: this is basically just here to elaborate on America’s true self which was confirmed to be the “ecosystem” of TFMDs. In the QnA Alex only talks about the 4 in Trinity Desk but this would also talk about other TFMDs and how they fit into this “ecosystem” by the prospective of a government worker going through files about America’s true self
5 goes from DISNEYLANDMADNESS to MONSTERMADNESS: and this is here to elaborate on MONUMENTMYTHOLOGY, the effects of Alcatraz, and why trump started crying blood (btw I just wanted to say: this connecting to that one creepypasta is stupid as fuck)
6 goes from PYRAMIDWALKER to DEMONDEMOCRACY: I put this here to talk about the other side of the coin, the debate demon. And also talks about what parts of MONUMENTMYTHOLOGY are real and what’s not
7 goes from THE TRINITY BOMB TEST to CRESCENTCORNERS: plot: it would be in the same style as ARNOLDSONALONE showing drawings made by a Lunarian going across universes until making it to the robverse (btw this Nixonverse isn’t the same one from the Nixonverse)
8 goes from CORNERDOOR to CORNERCAT: plot: uhhhh… i don’t know just put the original idea for CORNERCAT
9 goes from THE NATURE OF THE DEANVERSE to LAUREN BEFORE AND AFTER (sorry for the shitty name, this is a interesting idea I had so I wanted to make this fit) plot: it shows the true last upload from Doctor Disturbing which shows what happened to his sister, Lauren. What happened to her is that she was sent into the Venus serpent metastructure by Alcatraz (I know in a QnA it’s said that Alcatraz isn’t intelligent and just wants to grow but idc) because the horned serpent is getting in Alcatraz’s way to grow into the horned serpent metastructure, so Alcatraz turns Lauren into the Venus serpent to kill the horned serpent
10 goes from THE HOUSE AND AN KING to THE MODERN DAY: plot: it’s a re-upload
11 goes from WONDERLAND, ALWAYS to AMERICAATTACKED: plot: it goes over how since Alcatraz escaped all of the TFMDs has been going crazy (like how all of that crazy shit happened in 2003 in the deanverse). This episode would be similar to GIZAGUARDIAN in the way that it goes over a lot but with one main theme, in GIZAGUARDIAN it’s freedom and here it’s the Venus serpent
12 goes from THE HORNED SERPENT APOCALYPSE to the start of a world: plot: it would be a shorter episode but that is because this is meant to set up season two. It starts out with Cthonaut A telling us about what’s happened and how Everett’s freedom’s and the angel’s sacrifice was for nothing. After going on about this for a while he says “I can’t let that happen, i can’t let that act of true kindness go to waste. This is for you, Everett, Thomas, Nina, the men, for everyone” it then cuts to two glowing spheres of light combining into one and the text “the Montyverse and the Nixonverse are now one. Mister A will give them all a better life”
Thanks for reading all of that and if I got anything wrong or if you have a better idea for some of these things please tell me! Thanks again and have a wonderful day

Hi everyone!
Here are my cycle results applying to both the US and Canada. I did not apply to many schools in Canada because it would have been the equivalent of burning money with my stats (would have been auto-rejected and screened by all other schools outside of the ones I applied to this year). I ultimately decided to withdraw my US acceptance because it was just too expensive with the lack of a scholarship ($600k CAD in the US vs $100-200k CAD here at UBC). I didn't find the education to be worth triple the price of learning here despite the potential opportunities that UCLA may have been able to provide (the weather and location would have been amazing though ngl). It was a really expensive cycle with all the applications I did (spent a few thousand dollars applying).
Here is a previous post I made about my cycle and experiences as well: https://www.reddit.com/premedcanada/comments/1aqd7x2/for_those_thinking_of_applying_to_the_us_my_cycle/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Overall, I am SUPER happy and excited for the fall and can't wait to meet many of y'all :)))))))
Good luck to those in future cycles and those still on waitlists - my heart goes out for you.
Here is my Sankey diagram: https://imgur.com/a/yMYItyk

I'm trying to get better asap. So far I'm not getting any better. I'm looking at all the diagrams I can, all the videos I can, all the online instructions I can of drawing heads and faces. Now I'm just getting stressed out again to the point I'm sitting here scribbling my trash sketches with my heart rate being about 157 bpm cause if this stress. I'm always stressed about everything and I want to be good enough to draw good art. I just don't know what to do. There's so many videos and diagrams of diffrent ways to draw a face or a head you have no idea which one will work or which one is good enough. I can't draw what I see. (Even flipping the subject upside-down doesn't help) I can draw a head 1000 times and it's not getting better. I draw a couple good heads one day and the next it's like everything I leaned just the previous day is gone even though I try so hard and put so much work into it. I don't want to drift back to the cycle of me destroying my own artwork and sketch books potentially hurting myself cause I'd get so pissed off at myself and stressed out. I desire to create and draw. I want to draw characters and comics and graphic novels so bad but I can't till I'm good enough to do so. Practice doesn't make perfect cause if it did I would be getting better.

EDITED TO ADD: WRONG TITLE. ITS FOR COMBINED SCIENCE ONLY
Okay so here are the questions that I remember from my biology paper :) (could and could not be in order)
A company produces a drink with fructose instead of glucose. Fructose is sweeter than glucose.

• 2(?) marker - Give two reasons why the company would use fructose instead of glucose in their drink
• 3 marker - state the test that would be done for glucose in the drink

Test_________________________
Positive result_______________

• 2 marker - State the test that would be done for protein in the drink

Test_________________________
Positive result_______________

• 3 marker - plot the results from table two onto the graph. Only plot the results from 0.2 to 1.0. Draw a line of best fit. One result has already been plotted.
• 1 marker - Find the concentration of salt in solution Z in cm^3/ dom.
• 4 marker- smoking can impact the lungs (?) DIAGRAM HERE

Person B is a smoker while person A is a non-smoker. Explain why Person B breathes bettefaster during exercise than person A.

• 1 marker - something about where do plants new cells come from - answer is MERISTEM
• 5 marker - magnification question (im cooked) Diagram HERE calculate the magnification.
• 6 marker - proteins and fats from the drinks (the company thing AGAIN) are digested by our digestive system(?). Explain how they are digested (?)

In your answer, you should:

• mention what enzymes are used
• (something else that i forgor)
• 1 marker - what type of pathogen causes measles?
• 2 marker - Explain how to reduce the spread of measles. Do NOT mention vaccines in your answers.

1_________
2_________

• 3 marker - Explain the difference between a prokaryotic cell and a eukaryotic cell.

1_________
2_________
3_________

• 2 marker - A gardener is growing tomatos ??? greenhouse??? (anyways) the temperature is set to 15C. A heater can increase the temperature to 25C. Explain why a heater should not be used in the greenhouse. Do NOT refer to cost in your answers

1_______
2_______

• 3 marker - Explain how vaccines can help patients/ people build immunity against measles/ the measles pathogen.
• 3 marker - Percentage question. Something about a table with with results and you had to calculate the percentage increase of X.
• 6 marker - Angina causes chest pain and tiredness. (something about how it is related to Coronory Heart Disease). Explain how (???). In your answer, you should include: Symptoms + causes of angina, How to reduce its symptoms.

4 marker - Explain all four stages of mitosis on the diagram. Diagram HERE
1 marker - Which type of microscope was used to see the (cell???) explain why it was used.
1 marker - (multiple choice) which formula/reaction is photosynthesis?
2 marker - Measles is a virus that will make you ill. Explain how a pathogen / virus can make you ill.
I will continue updating while I remember the rest of the questions :). If there's any ones anyone can remember then please do tell me so i can add them. Also tell me if there is any mistakes in these questions.
These are only from memory, so wording will not be 100% correct :)

🪞 “It's much easier to get in that it is to get out,” Emilie Autumn used to say. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.1 - Part 4.2
She was not wrong. Welcome back to the Asylum write-up!
In this installment, we're finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of the enmity between EA and her fans.
It's time for war. It's time for blood. It's time... for tea. 🎵

THE PRESENT DAY: “ASK ME ANYTHING (WELL, NOT QUITE)”

​

"Ask me anything" titles are catchy, and that’s why I’m using one. But, obviously, don’t ask me anything, by which I mean that, if you think I wouldn’t answer it, you’re probably right. Ask me something really good. I’d love to answer you. I’d love to have comments on these posts, in fact, so that I could answer questions there regularly and ask you things as well, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or so Einstein is supposed to have said, and attempting to create yet another interactive online venue after every previous attempt has ended in heartbreak—forums, facebook groups, social media accounts—it would indeed be insanity to think that this time would be any different. So there are no comments. This too is heartbreaking in the sense that, and you may not realize this, but I desperately want to connect more completely with you—to be able to intelligently converse and share and exchange. We can do that in person, of course, because the wrong people never show up in person. Isn’t that funny… So, perhaps we’ll have to arrange that;). I’ll start you off with an example question I’d want to know if I were you (I can almost guarantee that you do not want to know this). Q. Hey EA, how do you keep your wireless bodypack transmitter secure when you are leaping about in skimpy costumes and doing frequent costume changes? Also, dye your roots. A. Fantastic question, EA, and I just dyed my roots thank you very much. ... (Deleted blog post followed by a year of radio silence, 2022 📝)

Sooo. For the past five-ish years, the vibe in the Asylum has been that of a protracted Christmas dinner where everyone is tensely moving their food around in their plate, bracing themselves for whatever will trigger the screaming match. Wondering what it's going to be this time. Weary old-timers make small talk about the food because no other topic feels safe. Every glance, every forced smile, is fraught with eons-old grudges and unspoken regrets; every nervous pleasantry sounds like a thinly-veiled accusation. Aunt Emilie always insists on hosting, but not-so-secretly hates having people over. Sooner or later, she finds a way to get all of these assholes out of her house. Most of the adult children are daydreaming about going no-contact.
Everyone ready for some dysfunctional family history?
CW for discussion of bullying, online harassment, mental illness stigma.

YE OLDEN DAYS: CUCKOOS OF A FEATHER NEST TOGETHER

In the beginning, it was beautiful.
EA had the excellent instinct to start banking on her online presence📝 long before MySpace was even a thing. She had a website, several online stores, an active LiveJournal and a ProBoards forum right from the turn of the millennium.
In 2004, she attached an official forum to her website; the earliest archive shows 74 registered users. By the time Opheliac came out in 2006, that number had grown tenfold. And it was, by most accounts, a pretty dope place to be! (I should specify that this write-up focuses on the anglophone side of the fandom: there were also thriving fan-run communities in at least German, French, and Spanish. Because EA doesn't speak any of those languages, the lucky bastards were mostly left alone.)
Forum users enjoyed interacting with some of EA's closest IRL friends and associates – and with the mistress of the house herself (user flair: PsychoFiddler), when she occasionally responded to comments under her own posts. But that wasn't even the main appeal for many. For a long time, on top of all EA-related topics, the official forum had very active “Off-Topic” subforums, with lively and friendly conversation on a variety of subjects. (There was even a “Filthy Libertines (18+)” sub for a while, which was closed due to preemptive concerns about minors.) Swear words (not slurs) were allowed and encouraged, and moderation was overall pretty loose beyond basic enforcement of civility. There was a lot of mutual support, creativity, and solid banter going around.

It wasn't just about Emilie on the forums. People could chat about almost anything with near free reign, making connections and lifelong friends. ... This community mattered SO MUCH to people. They felt included, accepted, and understood within the walls of the Asylum. People invested their time and creative energy into keeping the forums a vibrant, active community, and made sure that carried over into the real world. ... I've never seen anything like it in a fan space. I doubt I ever will again. (@Asylum_Oracle - “Fandom History” Instagram highlight 🔍📝, which contains most of the sources for this segment.)

And it did, indeed, carry over into the real world. There were numerous meet-ups – a few organized by EA, many more spontaneous. People who didn't know any other EA fans in real life, or were just excited to add new Plague Rats to their friend group, would regularly connect with other forum users from their area to meet up and hang out before EA shows. “Who else is dressing up??”
In 2008, for instance, EA held an afternoon meet-up at Lincoln Park in Chicago. 📺 The event was free to attend; it featured live acoustic music and a reading from EA's upcoming book, the intriguingly-titled Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.
On the appointed day, EA rolled up in a fabulously tousled red wig, bedazzled white corset and steampunk-altered wedding dress. She had brought friends alongs. Sporting blue hair and a pink bustle and corset was her Chicago bestie, the main forum admin. Rocking a guitar and a top hat was EA's sound engineer, the soft-spoken wizard behind the Victoriandustrial sound, who was also a forum mod. The photographer from the original Opheliac cover art was there as well; he was formally introduced by EA and got his own round of applause.

People who would never normally be involved in an artist's fanbase were in EA's world. And not only were they known – they were respected and incredibly active with the fanbase. These people who managed an online message board were willing to engage in real-world meet-ups (with no security??) because of how tight-knit the community they had built was. People turned out to this event. People traveled to go to this event. It was a short reading of a book that hadn't been released yet, and wouldn't be for some time. Why? Because not only was it a chance to meet Emilie and listen to parts of the new book, but it was also a chance to hang out with their friends from the Asylum. ... The fandom really was a family for a lot of people. (@Asylum_Oracle)

“SERIOUSLY, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.”

It all started with The End.
The End Records, that is! Quick refresher: in 2009, after three years or so with Trisol, EA split from the label over allegations that the owner was embezzling money from ticket sales. A few months later, she signed with The End Records. Understandably, EA still wanted to sell the album that had made her famous, and to which she had smartly retained the rights – which meant a brand new, “Deluxe” release of Opheliac. (Remember, from part 3? The one you could pre-order as a bundle with the book? Some projects are just cursed, I guess.)
At that point, Opheliac had been released three times already, as recently as the year before, with only slight variations in format and tracklist. (Yes, that is a theme in this story.) The End Records version would feature new cover art and a handful of new tracks, but overall, it was... you know... the same album.
(The following paragraphs are largely sourced from this excellent recap 🔍📝, which also provides potato screenshots for all quotes.)
One fateful day of August 2009, a user started a thread entitled “Opheliac US edition deluxe re-release??” in the “EA News” subforum. In the thread, some people were kind of balking at the re-do, pondering whether to buy the “new” Opheliac or sit this one out. Some expressed that after three years, they were jonesing for a new album. Others shared what B-sides or dream covers they would have liked to see included on the bonus disc. Just... fans being fans, in a fan discussion space.
And then EA jumped out from behind the curtains.

Fan: Okay. Before I start, I just want you to know that I think it's very good that EA is getting more popularity, and that she can release lots of albums, but - are 5 editions of the same album really needed? You may say now “ah, it's not the same, it has 2 bonus tracks” or whatever, but I mean: it's not new material. Now don't get me wrong. I'm happy for it, maybe I'll even buy it, but I'm just wondering if she shouldn't keep herself busy with other (maybe more important) stuff? * hides * EA: Nobody's forcing you to buy it. Thanks.

Record scratch.

Fan 1: is this Opheliac release version number 4? lol If she's recording NEW tracks, then surely they deserve to be sold by themselves, otherwise people are going to have to buy an album that they may have already bought twice (like me!). But... alas, I am a fool and adore everything this woman does... im buying it lol Fan 2: exactly – if it was just reissuing the last version of Opheliac to tap into new markets that would be fine (...) but if they start adding extra bits of material to albums people already have then the true muffins are going to feel obliged to buy new copies (...) EA: How exactly are you obliged to buy anything? Nobody is forcing you to spend a fucking penny, my dears. I suppose it would make more sense to you to simply not have my records available any more as the old label I just escaped from will no longer be distributing them? Forgive me for adding extra tracks. No obligation necessary.

...Okay, so I'm pretty sure that we can see both sides of the argument here. Fans are annoyed at the idea of spending money on barely-anything-new, because they love EA and buy every single CD she releases. EA is exasperated by fans acting like she's twisting their arm and somehow resenting the inclusion of new material, when she was just ensuring that her album would remain available for purchase and trying to keep things interesting.
But maybe we can also agree that those replies should have been screamed into a pillow rather than typed out on a keyboard.
EA was getting increasingly (and, I'll just say it: disproportionately) sarcastic and defensive in her replies. Enter poor FantineDormouse.
FantineDormouse meant well, I think. Maybe she thought, she's spiraling. Maybe she thought, friends don't let friends go down that road. Granted, FantineDormouse probably should have known better than to phrase it the way she did. Or to assume that EA perceived her as a friend.
Either way, at some point, FantineDormouse jumped in and posted the comment that finally made EA lose it. THE comment which, overnight, ended the honeymoon period of the Asylum, triggering a doomsday domino effect from which the fandom would never truly recover. Are you comfortably seated?

FantineDormouse: Uhm, Emilie, love, I don't mean to sound rude or anything... but maybe you should have a cup of tea and relax a little.

...
* sound of archduke getting shot *

EA: Excuse me? You can throw this onslaught of absolute cruel bullshit at me and those I work with in my own space that I own, and I can't say anything back? How fucking patronizing. Relax? Are you fucking kidding me? Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? FD: I'm not trying to piss you off even more, Emilie. And trust me, I have to deal with it myself, and as much as I would really love to punch the cunts I have to deal with in the face, I don't. You're pissed off, I get it. You're bipolar, which makes it 10x worse, I get that. I'm just not the person to stand around and do nothing when a fight where I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of regret is going on.

Famous last words. Literally! Immediately after EA delivered her irate closing statement – which includes one of my all-time favorite EA zingers, bolded...

EA: I cannot believe this... You just don't stop, do you? So just because I've shared the personal information with you all that I happen to be bipolar, I can't get pissed off at all of you being perfectly awful in the very space that I pay fuckloads a month to have up (has it ever occurred to you all that I pay dearly for this space you play around in?) Why not just tell me that I must be upset because it's my time of the month? Seriously, get the fuck out of my house. You are unbelievable, and your level of patronization is almost criminal. Don't make me write another book. With muffins like you, who needs enemies? Nothing I say or feel is legitimate, not ever ever ever because I'm bipolar... discredited before I begin... unbelievable...

...FantineDormouse got permabanned.
Jaws dropped. After days of infighting between white knights, detractors, and crossfire negotiators, several mod resignations, and general mayhem surrounding the ban, EA made a post entitled “In Which: I Invite You to Make a Fucking Choice.” 📝 For brevity's sake (cue laugh track), I can't reproduce it in all of its righteous splendor, but it's quite a read. It runs the gamut from fair and articulate points about how mental illness shouldn't be used to discredit someone's legitimate anger... to histrionic commands that “deserters to the cause” should “turn in their weapons” if they can't handle her way of doing things.

To those of you who appear not to understand why said posts, most especially those of the banned party, were offensive to me, I give you the option to either educate yourselves on your own time and in your own space (because please never forget that this is my space that I share with all of you at my own expense, and in which I generally give you all the freedom I would wish for myself), or to resign your posts in the Asylum Army – this is not the place for you, and I humbly suggest that you turn your attention and support towards other artists of a more placid, non-controversial, and less opinionated nature; there are more than enough of them out there, and I’m sure they all have forums of their own.

Some fans did leave. Most stuck around, whiplashed. Soon, the storm quieted down, and business as usual resumed on the forum. But something had been damaged beyond repair. The FantineDormouse fiasco had erected walls and drawn lines in the sand, both around EA and among her fans; its sad specter would haunt every Asylum crisis that spiked up forever after. “Fucking Patronizing Fucking” or “FPF” 🔍 became memetic shorthand in the fandom for overreaction and self-righteousness. 🐀
...And now you understand why, in the following years, some fans were so delicate and diplomatic in voicing their very legitimate complaints about messed-up orders, unsigned books, and puzzling lies... while unofficial platforms like Tumblr flourished with pent-up resentment and snark. 🦠

A NOTE ON HARASSMENT: “MAD GIRL, CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO YOU?”

Wouldn't they stop When you asked them to leave you alone? (“Mad Girl”, 2008 🎵)

Now, let's be clear, because it should not be minimized: EA has also been the target of genuine online harassment. Based on the simple fact that she is a woman with a public presence on the internet, I have zero doubt that EA has received (and perhaps continues to receive) more than her share of truly vile, bigoted, creepy and threatening messages – and, knowing what I know about the darker recesses of the Asylum, a terrifying amount of emotional blackmail and obsessive projection from people who hold her to punitively high standards. I'm also inclined to believe that it started way before she ever did anything that warranted any backlash. And that fucking sucks. It's repulsive and inexcusable, and the people who harass her should crawl into a hole and live among the worms.
Notwithstanding. In my decade-plus of following EA drama, the public comments on EA's own platforms (where people knew she was likely to be reading) have been, for the most part... civil and nuanced, and relatively mindful of the human? Even very confrontational comments (some clearly written from a place of anger and desire to shame) rarely resorted to outright name-calling or cruelty. When abusive or bigoted language did crop up, it was often promptly shut down by other fans as gross and uncalled for. In short: I have, with mine own two eyes, in real time, read some of the comment sections that EA described as cesspools of blind rage and odious attacks, and... I just couldn't see it.
If anything, for a long time, a lot of the angry comments directed at EA during any given controversy read more like break-up letters to an ex-best friend: harsh, curt and targeted in a way that cuts deep.... but also kind of screams how much love you still have for this person, against your better judgement.
Not that it wouldn't mess a person up to get hundred of those in a matter of hours, even if they don't individually qualify as “abusive”.
It's worth noting that prior to becoming semi-famous and regretting it, EA was also (by her own account and among other forms of abuse) a victim of intense childhood bullying. It feels like the two situations are closely connected in her mind when her focus seamlessly transitions from one to the other. 📺 I don't think that tremor in her voice is put on.
Based on her writings, I get the feeling that over the years, EA has developed a very black-and-white view of two monolithic groups of people. There's (an idealized vision of) her “real audience”, well-dressed, well-read, kind-hearted, and Asylum-savvy, who she fully trusts to “get it” – and buy it, and love it, unquestioningly, whatever “it” may be at any given time – because that is the true measure of love and loyalty. These are the people she makes art and merch for, the people she writes heart-emoji-filled newsletters to, and desperately longs to see in person again.
And then there's the lynch mob, those who really don't “get it”: the trolls, the faceless creeps, the basement-dwelling mouthbreathers, the ones who stalk her every move obsessively, waiting for any chance to spam her with vicious abuse and slander and obscenities. The latter only exist online (they are manifested into arbitrary existence by the internet itself, not by anything EA said or did), and there is zero overlap between the two sets of people. That seems to be the official narrative.

The "public eye" isn't an [enviable] place to be, and the closer I've come to it, the more horrified I've been. Because, for starters, who is "the public?" Is "the public" my audience? Hell no. My audience is special. They are not the general public. If they were the general public I would be a lot wealthier. The "public eye" means getting stalked, harassed, viscously judged, and put in danger. If I do things in the future that gain notoriety, I will do them in spite of fame, not because of it. I am out for world domination, but not fame. (Interview for The Moaning Times, 2014 📝)

In real life (well, mostly online, but I mean: on this shared plane of existence), things play out slightly differently. The Venn diagram of “true blue fans” and “people who criticize EA" and "people who know way too much about EA” is a circle. The call is 100% coming from inside the Asylum, and I think EA rationally knows that. But here's the thing: no matter how many shows and meet-and-greets you've dressed up for, how many loving and supportive comments you've left, or how many family heirlooms you once pawned to purchase a copy of the not-for-sale 2003 DJ pressing of Enchant... the instant EA feels attacked, everyone is a saboteur and a bully until proven otherwise, and suspected treason is dealt with on the spot. One strike, you're out. Unfortunately for everyone involved, her threshold for bullying seems to be “any remotely thoughtless opinion from any stranger on the internet”.
It makes for outstanding human-interest entertainment... but it also sounds an awful lot like the unhealthy patterns of a person suffering from all sorts of PTSD. 🔍 So, please bear that in mind as you read through this write-up. It's easy to make EA out to be the sole villain, a paranoid and delusional drama queen, based on her extreme reactions to things that often “weren't that bad”. Anything can, in fact, be “that bad” when you're thrown back into the very worst moments of your existence every time your brain decides that the situation is even remotely similar.
PTSD takes over your rational mind and actively distorts your perception of reality. That can be how a person ends up impulse-reacting to “a few people expressing an unfavorable opinion” as if the entire internet had just ganged up on them with knives. Which makes their audience feel unjustly accused, which makes them hostile, which gives the person actual good reason to feel attacked... and so the cycle of hurt continues.

You know the games I play And the words I say When I want my own way You know the lies I tell When you've gone through hell And I say I can't stay You know how hard it can be To keep believing in me When everything and everyone Becomes my enemy, and when There's nothing more you can do I'm gonna blame it on you – It's not the way I wanna be I only hope that in the end You will see: It's the Opheliac in me... (“Opheliac”, 2006 🎵)

And YES, it is extremely regrettable to have this as a trigger, when you're a public figure and you're bound to receive more negative feedback than the average citizen. “It's what she signed up for”, “it comes with the territory” and all that jazz. I really don't think EA was unaware of that fact when she decided to become a musician, share her personal life, and form an intense parasocial bond with her audience. But maybe she underestimated how hard it would be to process and recover from.
Just because you expect something unpleasant to happen, doesn't mean your psyche will be ready to handle it when it does – or that you'll pick the best and most effective strategy to deal with it.

A MADHOUSE UNDER MARTIAL LAW: MARCHING INTO THE FORUM WARS

There are two sides to every story... except for this one! (“If I Burn”, 2012 🎵)

You may have noted the military imagery in EA's “Make a Fucking Choice” response post – “resign your post in the Asylum Army”! What do psychiatry and the military have in common? They're both institutions of top-down social control. 🔍 EA's mixed metaphor may be a bit clunky, but it did foreshadow the evolution of the Asylum – in terms of aesthetics and power dynamics – in the years that followed the FantineDormouse incident and the release of The Book.
EA's next big release after the Asylum book came in 2012. It was a new album, an outline of the soon-to-be Asylum musical, called Fight Like a Girl (FLAG for short). As the name suggests, the main mood was bellicose. Incidentally, in the interim years, EA's communication style generally became noticeably more combative, incendiary, and (within her own spaces) controlling.📝 You remember those quirky word filters on the forum, that would change “fan” to “muffin” and “bra” to “teacup holder”? They kind of took on a Nineteen-Eighty-Four-burlesque flavor when you realized that one filter automatically changed “Fischkopf” to “Liddell” - and that circumventing the rule to address her totally real last name would get you banned, as would any discussion of her family. (“Wikipedia, random internet sites and heresay are not credible sources.” - Mod reminder of forum rules, 2010.)
Also, you try sustaining a serious, grown-up conversation among concerned fans about how Emilie Autumn should “take ratsponsibility for her mistakes out of ratspect for her muffins”. Thus, the official Asylum forum kept a tight grip on overt criticism of EA's claims and actions.

The Emilie Autumn forum is a dystopian hell. Truth be told, when I decided to leave you could not do anything but gush about Emilie. Otherwise all of her extremist arse kissing fans will be down your throat, ripping you apart in seconds, if you so much as questioned her behaviour. So much for freedom of opinion, let alone the idea of creating a harmonious community for ‘outcasts’. Hahaha. (2014 🐀)

The word filter thing really wasn't a big deal – I'm just pointing it out as one goofy expression of EA's need to control the narrative and rhetoric, which became especially noticeable in those post-book, pre-FLAG years. By that point, EA's fuse had been shortened by near on half a decade of non-stop touring / recording / writing / promoting / adjusting to the pressure and demands of an ever-growing fanbase, while also dealing with a horrorshow of personal turmoil and health issues behind the scenes. In other words: she was done taking any shit, in any form, or humoring anyone's ridiculous feedback regarding anything.
To be fair, it was never her forte to begin with. Will it come as a shock if I tell you that EA doesn't have the greatest track record for successful collaborative work? Let's do a quick-cut montage!
EA's very first corporate sponsor was her mother's “Enchant Clothing & Costume” online store 🔍; she went on to claim that her mother was dead. She sessioned for Billy Corgan, that went super well. 🎵 She liked Courtney Love for a minute, but that didn't work out because she felt that Courtney only valued her for her pee. 📝 (It probably didn't help that in early 2006, while EA was recording her post-break-up-tell-all album about Corgan, C-Love was recording her post-rehab-redemption album with Corgan. 🔍 Either way, EA didn't seem to like Courtney anymore after that. Courtney likes her, though! 📝) The one artist EA has ever approached for a duet (and by approached, I mean she recorded a demo and threw the CD on stage when he played Chicago in 2004) was, of all people, Morrissey. That never came to pass, thank mercy 🔍 – this fandom has suffered enough. In 2005, EA recorded some haunting vocals and violins for a potential collab with the frontman of Attrition. When, three years later, they were used on one track 🎵 of Attrition's All Mine Enemies Whisper, she alleged 📝 that the recordings had been obtained from her under the false pretense of a different project, then hideously altered to sound “out of tune”, and used without her permission. She enlisted her fans to boycott the album and the band, and threatened legal action. Meanwhile, on LiveJournal and Attrition's message boards, band associates were appalled: according to them, EA had been aware of the project's nature from the start... and had been completely unreachable, even through her label, during the months of its development. (Besides, Attrition is a semi-obscure English darkwave band from the 80s, whose micro-distributed albums don't even have their own Wikipedia pages... so I wonder what EA was hoping to get out of that theoretical lawsuit. These people own nothing but vintage gain pedals!) The song “Cold Hard Cash” 🎤 by Angelspit (who contributed a remix to one of her EPs in 2008) may or may not be an EA diss track. 🐀 Back when indie jewelry brand RockLove (which now has licensing deals with Disney, Marvel, and DC) was still someone's bedroom project, their first drop was an EA-inspired collection 🔍, which appears in many early Opheliac photoshoots. The partnership was terminated on bad terms, for unclear reasons; the RockLove owner shared in a statement that EA had “drunk the cool-aid” of Trisol Guy's shady business practices, and that the two of them had been spamming her with “crazed angry message[s]” for days.
Why am I talking about this? Because it was precisely one such ill-fated business partnership that triggered the Great Asylum Secession.
One fine day of spring 2010, the owner of vegan make-up brand Aromaleigh popped onto the Asylum forum to announce that they were cutting ties with EA, with damning receipts of copy-pasted emails (lost to time). Basically, the brand had been sponsoring her for half a decade, and while Aromaleigh had been actively promoting her music and tours, EA hadn't exactly been returning the favor. (Indeed, the extent of EA's sponcon seemed to have been a banner link to their website on her front page, and a single “random drunken endorsement” LiveJournal post that kind of reads like satire📝, from 2005.)
EA responded by banning the owner's account, deleting the thread, and posting this flippant statement a few days later:

Dearest Plague Rats, To be honest, I have no idea of what the hell happened with Aromaleigh, and I don't care to find out – the whole drama is a complete mystery to me, as I've been away for months touring and have not been in contact with anyone. All I know is that I've been promoting the company for ages and have not asked them for anything in years. (...) Please focus on more interesting things. I am. (“Save the Drama...” forum post, March 2010)

Posts questioning her good faith in the conflict were deleted from the forum. Shortly thereafter, citing how prolific and labor-intensive the Asylum forum had grown, EA shut down all non-EA related subforums – which, among many other topics, included a pretty active thread about Aromaleigh products.
So one Plague Rat decided to create a separate, members-only forum 📝, where users could recreate some of the now-defunct off-topic threads... and also freely voice their critical opinions of EA's behavior without fear of backlash from mods or rabid stans. Thus, “The Reform” was born. (Reform [n]: amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved.)
For a few weeks, the two-state solution seemed to work fine. And then word spread among forum mods and other diehard fans that there was this horrid other forum, where obsessive haters gathered to spew disgusting lies and vitriol about EA... and soon enough, it was bedlam in the Asylum.
Any explicit mention of the Reform was forbidden on the Asylum forum. Suspicion of participation in the Reform would get you banned. The party line was that The Reform was the enemy 🐀 – even though a number of people were active on both forums, because they liked freedom of expression almost as much as they liked EA. Double agents would lurk on the forum and report back with snark material; sycophants would infiltrate the Reform to identify traitors – much to the amusement of the “haters”, who mocked them and their ilk for “licking EA's pink sparkly boots”. There was no containing the seething, or the sass, among Asylum ranks.
Pretty soon, the insubordination spread to Tumblr. There was the “Ask the Reform” Q&A blog, where questioning fans could interact with “Rebel Rats”, get more details on past drama, and make up their own minds about the people EA called bullies.
And then, there were the “confession blogs”, which published anonymous submissions about EA, positive, negative or neutral, with little censorship. Finally, you didn't even have to pick a throw-away username on a private forum to voice your hottest / strangest / most controversial EA takes. Fans could vent, rant, lament, wonder, shitpost to their heart's content, anonymously. Obviously, given the context of frustration and censorship in the fandom, a lot of the first waves of confessions were EXTREMELY negative.
EA's acolyte Veronica managed to get the first one shut down. If memory serves, she misunderstood the confession blog format, and may have believed that all the posts on “Emilie Autumn Confessions” came from one or a small group of individuals. She was genuinely devastated, and wrote the blog admin to let them know that they were a terrible person who said terrible things. The admin was mortified, apologized profusely and deleted the blog of their own initiative. (Which goes to show that the concept did not come from cruel and malicious anti-fans, as detractors often claimed.)
But a new blog sprung up almost immediately, with a different mod team, and did not surrender. And much like in EA's own book, once the Plague Rats found out that they possessed the gift of speech... well, they really took to it.
Established in 2011 and passed on through generation after generation of mod teams to the present day, Wayward Victorian Confessions would turn out to be the longest-lived institution in the EA fandom. For over a decade now, through all the bleakest nights and dankest debacles of the Asylum, and despite its initial reputation as a troll den, WVC has acted as a kind of neutral ground and vox populi for the active fanbase and anti-fanbase. (The last nominally-active EA fansite to date, She Fights Like a Girl, is actually an offshoot of WVC: one of the old admins created it as a database to answer “frequently asked questions” about EA.)
Wayward Victorian Confessions has now outlived every other EA platform, official and unofficial. Were it not for the continued existence of the “troll den”, what little fan community survives in 2024 would be non-existent, plain and simple. To quote from late 20th century Canadian philosophy: isn't it ironic?

I feel like [WVC] is the only place I feel any of that old Asylum community kind of feeling I felt before EA got so focused on the book. It sucks that it’s so full of unhappiness, and I wish she hadn’t poisoned the sanctuary she claimed to have built. It’s just kind of fallen apart, like a crumbling building. (🐀 2016)

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

• How old are you? What's your gender? Give us a general description of yourself.
I am 24, female
• Is there a medical diagnosis that may impact your mental stability somehow?
I have been suffering from anxiety all my life.
• Describe your upbringing. Did it have any kind of religious or structured influence? How did you respond to it?
My family was fairly religious and I did not mind it all that much because I loved listening to all the myths and stories but I wouldn't call myself religious. In fact, I would describe myself as an atheist or an agnostic but my family doesn't care all that much. Since, I belonged to an Asian family there was always this immense pressure to perform and be the best at everything as failure was not an option. Even though my dad had no money he always earned money for us somehow to make sure we lived as comfortably as possible. Our mother on the other hand used to straight up emotionally (sometimes even physically) abuse us to make sure we made our dad proud because of everything that he has been through. Our father suffered from a heart attack when I was 8 and thankfully survived but since then, the stakes have been always high to earn money as quickly as possible to take care of my family, me being the eldest and all.
• What do you do as a job or as a career (if you have one)? Do you like it? Why or why not?
I am a medical student almost done with my under graduation and I partly chose this career due to pressure from my parents and since I was relatively good at science in school, I eventually came to fall in love with it. Although I don't like helping the humanity part all that much, I do love, love the subjects and came to appreciate the art of medicine and the thrill of a diagnosis and the vast amount of knowledge it requires to just be good at a surface level.
• If you had to spend an entire weekend by yourself, how would you feel? Would you feel lonely or refreshed?
I would feel absolutely amazing and recharged.
• What kinds of activities do you prefer? Do you like, and are you good at sports? Do you enjoy any other outdoor or indoor activities?
I love reading- I used to enjoy fiction and fantasy a lot when I was a kid but now I want to read about philosophy and the universe and the meaning of it all. I am relatively good at sports and I played badminton professionally and I absolutely love swimming. I prefer indoor activities to outdoor ones as I feel like I just get drained from all the stimulation.
• How curious are you? Do you have more ideas then you can execute? What are your curiosities about? What are your ideas about - is it environmental or conceptual, and can you please elaborate?
I would definitely describe myself as curious as I really want to learn how things work and what they mean and why do they work the way they do and I keep wondering how the human mind often creates or reinvents things that have always existed or perhaps didn't. I wish I had the time and energy to learn more about everything. I often find myself thinking about what I need to do in a day and how to do it efficiently when I am under pressure but if I were to let my mind roam freely then I find myself having various opinions on random things or concepts or people's behaviors.
• Would you enjoy taking on a leadership position? Do you think you would be good at it? What would your leadership style be?
Even though I do not like taking up leadership positions, there have been incidences in the past which might have implied I would be good at it and the reason is because I always, always kept my colleagues well being a priority and made sure I stood up for them when needed and appreciated the sense of camaraderie and the feeling that the work that everyone put into mattered and benefited the group as a whole.
• Are you coordinated? Why do you feel as if you are or are not? Do you enjoy working with your hands in some form? Describe your activity?
I always find myself having a difficult time to catch on to things where hands are required. Its not that I am clumsy but I find myself staring at my hands clueless what to do, despite being repeatedly told to use them a certain way. But once I get the hang of it I do enjoy it because I get the feeling that I mastered something that I find difficult.
• Are you artistic? If yes, describe your art? If you are not particular artistic but can appreciate art please likewise describe what forums of art you enjoy. Please explain your answer.
I am not artistic, however, I appreciate art and the purpose it serves. Be it music, ''art'' art, literature, sculptures, architecture of ancient ruins etc., they always have something to say about the human nature and progression of mankind and I like how they make you question in what instance and circumstance an artist came to the said idea and how they executed them. I specifically enjoy art forms that paint a picture about the past and all the lives humans have lived because they, in a way, make you question about the future as to how the humans will be/progress.
• What's your opinion about the past, present, and future? How do you deal with them?
The past, I think, is important to find answers because I believe that sometimes that is where clues lie to certain puzzles but other than that it is quite annoying when people dwell on the past, be it myself, or others. Pardon me for sounding pretentious but the present is quite overrated but calming, the future, on the other hand, I think leaves a little blank in my head because I don't know if I have to think and worry about my future or the humanity's. But I do find it comforting to think that in the end, nothing matters haha.
• How do you act when others request your help to do something (anything)? If you would decide to help them, why would you do so?
I immediately help only if I think I should. If I suspect any ill intention or an ulterior motive then I refuse immediately as I have low tolerance for bs. I came to learn that kindness is important for the society to function but it comes at a high cost and I help a lot of people minimally but if they require a lot of my time and energy then usually its a big no unless it benefits me as well or its my loved ones or those I think deserve- then I try and give all of it.
• Do you need logical consistency in your life?
Yes and no.
• How important is efficiency and productivity to you?
They're very important to me because that's how you get ahead in life, however, its quite exhausting. I used to beat myself up if I did not finish a task on time and now I am not as harsh on myself.
• Do you control others, even if indirectly? How and why do you do that?
NOOO, I hate when people try to control others as everybody is subjected to their own actions and emotions.
• What are your hobbies? Why do you like them?
I just draw up a random article about a random thing online and read about it haha. Other than that I really have no energy to keep up with the various things I am interested in. If I do have the time and energy I would like to swim, learn a language watch a tv show and read a a book on the universe/ neuroscience/ philosophy and teach myself physics and math because I suck at them. And I love trying food at various restaurants.
• What is your learning style? What kind of learning environments do you struggle with most? Why do you like/struggle with these learning styles? Do you prefer classes involving memorization, logic, creativity, or your physical senses?
When I learn about something I tend to obsessively get stuck at a point and research about it in depth unless I knew everything about it. I just get obsessed with the details and go nowhere which is why I know the most random things in depth and nothing else. I absolutely suck at thinking logically and often find myself having ''brain fog'' if anything even remotely requires analytical thinking. I cannot get over this brain fog unless I put it on paper to make sense of things slowly. I am quite good at memorizing things, average at creative thinking. Whenever I learn something I like to interpret it myself rather than having someone break it down for me and often prefer diagram/ models/ pictures to text.
• How good are you at strategizing? Do you easily break up projects into manageable tasks? Or do you have a tendency to wing projects and improvise as you go?
I see how strategizing can be efficient but its exhausting to plan and execute so I wing it as I go. I hate rigid schedules because there is no room for improvisation!
• What are your aspirations in life, professionally and personally?
I want to create/ invent something and contribute something to the world and make use of my existence. It can be a machine, a drug, a theory- anything. Still waiting for that "aha" moment haha. It doesn't necessarily have to be revolutionary but if it contributes to something then my existence will be meaningful.
• What are your fears? What makes you uncomfortable? What do you hate? Why?
I fear losing my dog. Eff humans but my dog is the most precious thing to me in the world. Also fear getting Alzheimer's and losing my sense of self or being dependent on someone for the rest of my life. I hate people who are narrow minded, unempathetic, manipulative, have no sense of right or wrong and those who harm animals. And those who follow the crowd without using their brain. And financial instability.
• What do the "highs" in your life look like?
A high would be a peaceful morning and a productive day.
• What do the "lows" in your life look like?
Lows are being stuck in a state of anxiety, stress, burnout and being financially unstable.
• How attached are you to reality? Do you daydream often, or do you pay attention to what's around you? If you do daydream, are you aware of your surroundings while you do so?
I am often present in the reality and daydream rarely.
• Imagine you are alone in a blank, empty room. There is nothing for you to do and no one to talk to. What do you think about?
I will think about.....all the things I would do if I get out of that room. I would also enjoy the quite and peace if its for a short time.
• How long do you take to make an important decision? And do you change your mind once you've made it?
I am very decisive and opiniated and also quite stubborn about it.
• How long do you take to process your emotions? How important are emotions in your life?
I tend to quickly process my emotions without thinking and act on them- only if I am at home or in front of my family. Emotions are important to me even though I try not to get them the best of me.
• Do you ever catch yourself agreeing with others just to appease them and keep the conversation going? How often? Why?
Yes but if it is happening too often and I don't like it/them, I just leave.
• Do you break rules often? Do you think authority should be challenged, or that they know better? If you do break rules, why?
As much as I detest authority, I still follow the rules for the sake of it. I would love to overthrow everything that is corrupted if I have the power, energy and the opportunity.

Hopefully this guide can serve as an exciting primer for people who know nothing about Gnosticism, but it's meant to delight and entertain even those who already gnow. I wrote it as the opener for an upcoming Gnostic novella, a malicious post-Sethian fantasia coming out in June.
*
Everyone has a body, a soul, and a spirit. The body rots and the soul kills itself, but the spirit is particular, peculiar, special. The spirit is the yolk in our self’s egg. It is the reality amid this dream. It is our vivifying cosmic light, holy and normally immortal, and in fact did not originate in our puny human selves but was borrowed from God and trapped inside our body’s prison, our soul’s hole. Yet our spicule of divine light is not safe. If we don’t arrange its heavenly escape through gnosis—that is, through secret knowledge of spiritual mysteries—then when we die, we vanish forever, our sharp sparks of holy spirit pulled down guttering into oblivion along with the material that cages us.
Or so an ancient Gnostic might have explained to a willing Catholic, circa 250 CE. A few midnight meetings later, he might let slip that the Trinity is slightly more extended than certain naïve believers imagine, and that our bodies are patterned on the Cosmic Man. I imagine his eyes flicking from side to side, before he unwraps a bundle of scrolls, pushing aside The Archangelic Book of Moses the Prophet in favor of a painstakingly detailed diagram illustrating the 365 angels of the solar year and their one-to-one correspondence to the parts of the human body—and incidentally, he says, did you know that there is a soul of hair, a soul of bone, a soul of skin? A psychical body that overlies our physical body? He’s started smiling, slowly putting down his inhibitions, for the Catholic has been plying him with date wine, and anyway the Gnostic is just so relieved to have found a friend, a fellow traveler fascinated in secret knowledge, in true salvation, in escaping their hostile world… Unfortunately, the brotherly-faced Catholic is planning to denounce him first thing tomorrow, and his valuable scrolls will be destroyed, and on some level the Gnostic senses it and ends up nearly whispering his secrets, implicitly pleading. Adam was androgynous, you see. The Holy Spirit is the Triple Male. Material is evil. Material is the portion of corruption nailed to our spirits. Like a satanic Jesus of darkness it suffers from our purity. We have been fettered with forgetfulness and deafened by death. Also: maybe not everyone has spirit. Only some do; the other humans are just creations. And as for the fellow called God, well he uh. Has a few dark secrets... “Oh, don’t look so uptight,” the Gnostic might say, anxiously chuckling: “Remember, I’m a Christian too!”
And he’d be right. Back in his day, the Church hadn’t entirely cornered power, clamped down on all other doctrines, and crushed the mindbending diversity of early Christianities in the Wild Wild Near-East. All around our Gnostic, there fumed and flowered a largely unpruned, rampant garden of sects and types and lifestyles, whose swarms of heaven-hunting believers spread out into hundreds of groups, used dozens of gospels, and disagreed on the most basic elements of doctrine, their beliefs resembling one another yet differing like the dialects of a diverging spiritual language. Within this ferment already shadowed by the upraised boot of the Church, the groups we refer to as the Christian Gnostics—actually Sethians, Valentinians, Thomasites, Cainites, Ophites, Carpocratians, Borborites, and many others—merely represented particularly spicy and syncretic Christians, a sort of semi-exclusive and avant-garde R&D tendency, their adepts intent on hidden knowledge, personal enlightenment, and the occasional rapturous ascent. Many believed in Jesuses, in an unfolded Trinity, in a higher baptism… it’s just that they also happened to mistrust the Abrahamic God and his world; to differ on the meaning and status of Jesus; to draw ideas from Platonism, Neopythagoreanism, Zoroastrianism, and possibly their dreams; and to ground salvation not in the problem of sin but on the pursuit of gnosis, their writers regularly soaring into metaphysical flights of rhetoric that portrayed our world as a cosmic mirage, an intoxicating nightmare from which the inspirited seeker must only awake.
Against such mystics, the Church had every advantage. It had party loyalty, centralized discipline, and a soberer, slightly more realist Christianity, with a message aimed at everyone and not just the self-selected few. It had simplicity, organization, and ruthlessness, grace and very sharp knives. The Church Fathers would put the Gnostics to great use, in part defining their own orthodoxy through the expulsion of Gnosticism, and the destruction of its texts… which is a shame, for many eccentric, beautiful, unique and surprising ideas must have disappeared forever into graves and clerical fires. Before the Church’s iron gate whanged shut and the flames ignited, the Gnostics were carting around wheelbarrowfuls of secret books, glittery kaleidoscopic treasuries of scripture—treatises, cosmogonies, incantations, prophecies, apocalypses, some of which were masterpieces of mystical rhetoric, offered original answers to notorious theological conundrums, or upended mainstream Abrahamic stories and embroidered them with conceptual rhinestones. Flip through the fraction of texts that’ve survived—scriptures like The Tripartite Tractate, The Secret Book of John, The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, Eugnostos the Blessed, Pistis Sophia, or The Gospel of Judas—and you’ll meet the female Holy Spirit, Judas as a double agent working for the side in white, the snake in Eden as a hero bringing the gift of enlightenment, and Jesus as the Word laughing on the cross because his real body, his spiritual body, is uncrucifiable. You’ll hear the cross itself speak. You’ll be treated to ritual glossolalia and cryptic hints at a baptism called the Five Seals. You’ll read prayers for secret power, lyrical visions of cosmic churches, of the abolition of illusion and the death of death, of how Error, with power and in beauty, made a substitute for Truth. You will be told that humans ate of two trees, the Tree of Enlightened Insight, and the Tree of Life, which cursed our spirits to forget eternity: now we “have been bound with dimensions, times, and seasons, and fate is master of all.”
But the most audacious and churchshaking of all Gnostic myths—the myths that brought the Church Fathers’ meteors down upon their heads, the myths that finally sent our hypothetical Catholic shouting into the cold desert night, cursing our Gnostic to the Devil—have survived in great detail and in many forms. I alluded to these already: I mean the shocking creation stories which claimed that the Jews and Christians had all the details upside-down, backward and darkly, that the Abrahamic God was not what naïve Abrahamites believed, that Genesis told only half the story, and that the Question of Evil, that perennial puzzler and atheist-maker, had the simplest answer imaginable.
See, many Gnostics split the Abrahamic God in two.
They had an upper God of unmitigated goodness, the great invisible spirit, the transcendent Middle Platonic God, the God of Jesus and of Paul, you know him: he’s the ineffable, unknowable, taciturn and enigmatic Father of Justice, to be kneeled under with utmost humility. This omnipotent self-originator was the first maker and the source of all spirit, and he created through thought, forming ideas which solidified into autonomous beings. First he emanated the rest of the Trinity—at least in some texts—but then he branched like a cosmic river into a flowing family tree of divine attributes, emanations both separate and a part of him, plural and one, grooving interlocked in a higher-dimensional bliss of mutual adoration. This perfect Father—especially in the myths of Jewish Gnostics called Sethians—had no direct role in the creation of evil or our world, and bore absolutely no responsibility for our suffering.
No, evil and our world only appeared when the youngest emanation, called Wisdom, or Sophia, struck out on her own and committed a catastrophic spiritual crime. The nature of the crime varies from text to text, but usually she attempted to create by herself, without her partner, or to comprehend the upper God—either way, she violated the cosmic order, acting in presumption and deficiency, out of unspeakable pride. And from her pride was born a monster.
This was the lower God, an evil deity called Yaldabaoth or the Demiurge, a mid-powered craftsman-God adopted from Platonism but mutated by Sethians into an insecure, fucked-up loser. This cack-handed cretin woke up alone in darkness, concluded that he had made himself, and then—since he was ultimately a cracked mirror of the great invisible creator—set about slapping our unreal world together, making it from shadows and dreams and other spare illusions. As he worked, he unconsciously copied heavenly forms and hierarchies… and did a terrible job. He might have been evil, he might have created a million styles of suffering, but Yaldabaoth was not at all a Christian Satan, not some diabolically intelligent heavy-metal pain-lord looming over his earthly hellscape; no, this moody, jealous punisher, this embodied sacrifice-sniffer, this amateurish meddler roving up and down and flinging lightning bolts at his own people, demanding ceaseless slaughter and sacrifice, was the God of the Old Testament, revealed not just as a murderous jerk but as a dumb, talentless hack, his mediocre world like a child’s drawing blotched with red-crayon scribbles of blood, a moldy, stinking parody of all goodness and worth.
Worse, Yaldabaoth suffered under his own inferiority and lashed out when he felt challenged. When we humans threatened to surpass him by enlightened insight, he shackled us to fate and locked us into death, so that we would forget our greatness which made him feel so subpar. Imagine: billions of people have died in the mostly ghastly conceivable ways, all because our gnosis wounded his ego. A petty tyrant writ cosmically large, he would have been pathetic, even pitiable, if he weren’t the showrunner of our lives, the petulant orchestrator of all pain, bitchily yanking at the puppet strings of the theater of torture that we think of as our world—that colossal junkyard of illusions where people reel around confused by death, dazzled by materiality, blinded by the daily phantasmagoria of horrors, having abandoned their inner wells of living light, though their flesh-buried sparks of spirit are ever tantalized by the rapturous fragrance of the All, though their darkened minds always sense on some level that they do not belong here, that it is possible to wake up from this nightmare, that reality is not real, existence does not exist, and to be is not to be.
We must picture our early Catholic, in the moments before his noisy flight, staring with nauseated horror at the Gnostic. That bloodhound of enlightenment hasn’t looked up in a while, retelling his creation story with awe and trembling, mesmerized and moved all over again by this heady doctrine which contains the solution to his suffering, the explanation for his pain, for his fears and feelings about the world, about being watched, toyed with, persecuted, about being misled and betrayed and hated, about truth being concealed and difficult to find, about the somnolence of the masses. The demonic pains in his gut, the death of his infant daughter, the idiots in charge everywhere at all times, the staggeringly high victory-rate of the forces of darkness, the godawful, unforgivable suffering of innocents—all this finally made sense. Our Gnostic found an elegant answer to the Question of Evil, and had the Churchites been able to bear it, they might have saved themselves millennia of defensive oratory on the perennially red-eyed and heart-rending question of why innocents suffer. Ask the Catholic why a good God made evil, and you’ll get that familiar rigmarole about how we are granted free will in order to be tested, to sort good from evil and place our salvation in our own hands; ask a darkened luminary like Dostoevsky, if you want to be informed that we need to suffer to be able to choose Jesus, and if necessary the poor must starve and die. All those blameless children who get beaten, diddled, napalmed? They’re collateral damage in the great sorting of souls, victim of someone else’s wrong choice, destroyed by a design some call intelligent. But why, precisely, did a good God have to make evil? Why cancer, why brain parasites? Why boil us in the tar pit of time? The Gnostic shrugs sadly, expansively, with thick maroon smudges under his eyes, and, idly rotating a lamp he’s staring into, with little lights dancing in his pupils, reveals the truest thing he knows: that innocents bleed, the rapacious rule, and our lives are carnage incarnated, because our world is a psychotic prison made from pride and pain, a ceaseless cycle of suffering dreamed down by a colossal lion-headed wanker. Our world was created by a counterfeit, a ravener and a ravisher, a violent and childish dumb-ass, and we may confirm the bad news with this insight from the Gospel of Phillip:
“God is a man-eater, and so humans are sacrificed to him.”

[FIRST][LAST][NEXT]
After Action Report - Venlil Colonial Defense Force
Subject : Captain Farva
A gentle giggle rose from the foot of my bed. I curl up in my blankets at first not willing to be woken by the kids; Whatever they were up to; my mind still foggy from morning dreariness. I heard chief Donu exchanging excitedly with someone not far away in engineering speak, my tired brain could not parse. The tones of synthetic beeps, and electrical humming slowly entered my awareness. I raised my paw to wipe the morning dew from my eyes but I felt some kind of resistance to my paw. I sit up confused, I am not in my bedroom, or my quarters aboard my ship.
I am on a soft bed, with a soft blanket made of a finely woven material draped off my form. Around me is a curtain wall hung off of a curved metal pole which encompasses the entire bed, and I am flanked on both sides by medical equipment. Boxy screens display what I assume to be my vital signs accompanied by a strange blocky alien script. Inspecting my arm I notice an IV drip is inserted into the vein. Feeling a fading headache I reach up to my forehead where I feel a bandage covering a tender wound. Where Did I….
A sharp meep escapes my mouth. I am on the predator ship!
I quickly begin to tear at the IV line, not wanting whatever poisons the predators are feeding me to further enter my body. The room goes quiet, the curtain wall is disturbed, I focus on tearing away the bandage, panicking my coordination falters but I almost have it out when a paw reaches out to stop me. A cream colored venlil has rushed to my bed frantically batting at my arms in an attempt to stop me from saving myself.
“Captain, please let me help. I don't want you to hurt yourself!”
Not thinking, in full stampede mode I back hand the interloper with my paw.
A startle meep escapes her lips.
The IV is ripped out with the sudden motion.
Orange Blood begins to drip from the improperly removed IV.
This site further raises my heart rate.
The Venlil Recovers and I recognize her.
“Nurse Fila, What are you doing? what's going on?!”
“Farva you need to calm down, your going to be alright let me look at that arm”
“NO!”
I pulled my injured arm away. Jumping up to stand on the bed. Why was Fila working with the predators? What had they injected into my body?
“What are they holding over you! Why are you working with the predators! Where's Nyan?!”
“Captain Farva please calm down, These predators are different, they don't want to hurt us, you need to believe me”
It must have been some mind altering drug, these predators clearly have her under their spell! I needed to get out of here. I couldn't force her to come with me. I needed to escape and regroup, and pray to whatever gods will listen that I could get off this ship somehow.
I bolted from the bed crashing through the curtains, they did not move out of the way fast enough and my mass caused the curtain rods to be hoisted from their housings. I collapsed upon the floor, my movement hindered by the tangled mass of predatory linens. I struggled against the vile curtain entrapment. I had to use my claws to tear my way free of them. I looked up, predatory growls of surprise, and startled meeps echoed out from all around me.
My peripheral vision was filled with images of both predator and prey alike, I was surrounded on all sides. Nurse Fila was behind me stunned by my sudden actions. Donu looked towards me with concern, and I looked to the far end of the room to see Nyan, In the clutches of a blond haired predator. Digging her claws into his young flesh.
Donu gets up gesturing with her tail in a placating motion. “Easy now Farva, don’t do anything rash!” Donu speaks.
They have her too!
I bolt past her and the massive predator standing next to her. I go to grab Nyan, but he is pulled from my reach! The large predator turns her body to shield me from her catch.
“Hey easy now!” It barks, holding Nyan away from me.
Nyan reaches his paw out past the predator. A horrified look in his eyes.
With only the frantic strength a mother could conjure, I grasp his outstretched paw and pull him from the predator's grasp. With him once again in my arms I see the door to the pen we are in begin to open. Wasting no time, I bolt full sprint from the door. Only to be met by a large black mass. A tall impenetrable wall of muscle, cloaked in foot to shoulder black artificial pelts. Holding a colorful pink box, no doubt gaining that color from being caked in the blood of innocent prey animals. I raise my paw not holding Nyan to swipe at him, to rip my way past him. But before I can make contact my arm is grabbed by the predator's meaty digits. It holds me tight just below the paw where the wound from the ripped out IV sits. Blood dripped from the wound, no doubt triggering its bloodlust. I drop Nyan to free my other paw, I go to swipe the predator to free my arm but again I am stopped. I look to my right to see Donu restraining my arm.
“Donu let go!” I scream. “You're not of your own mind!”
“My mind is fine thank you!” She replies.
I turn to kick her away, striking her twice with quick kicks. Desperately trying to free myself from her deranged clutches. I wind up to kick a third time only for Nyan to wrap his whole body around my legs.
“Nyan Stop” I cry, my heart beating at a million light years per hour.
“Please…Don't hurt Teal’c and Donu” Nyan pleads.
I frantically wiggle my body desperately trying to regain autonomy from my traitorous captors.
“Im going to sedate her” proclaims my former ship nurse Fila.
Grabbing a Needle she stalks towards me, eager and willing to deliver me into the jaws of her captors.
“That will not be necessary” says the large predator holding my arm. He sets his package upon a nearby bed, and grabs my other arm from Donu, and then easily flips me around. And holds my arms behind my head, he then proceeds to kick my legs out from under me and forces me to the ground in a vice-like headlock.
“BE CALM CAPTAIN FARVA” It bellows “Further resistance will only cause more harm to yourself, and more worry from your crew, listen to them”
“Captain please just relax your safe, if they wanted to hurt you they could have a long time ago” Donu almost seems to try and trick me to the predator's side. But I see her glancing nervously towards the cut on my arms. Deep down I think she knows what that means. Nyan also pleads with me to listen. It's at this I begin to tear up at the hopelessness of it all. I wail out in despair frantically thrashing to free myself from the predator's death grip but to no avail.
I sit here once again, bested by predators, having failed those I love, but instead of rotting in a cattle pen or in the belly of an Arxurs stomach. They lie in a different kind of pen, their minds’ no longer theirs, as they fall victim to the predator's spell. Brainwashed to serve as the perfect compliant cattle.
Nurse Fila approaches a needle in her hand.
“I'm going to sedate her I need to look at that wound”
“Hold up a second” speaks the blond predator, she seems to be calming down.
The truth is I have no will left to fight, I have been bested time and again, there is only sorrow left and self pity. I only wish for a swift end now. I don't wish to live with the weight of this long string of failures weighing on my mind any longer. I go limp in the predator's arms.
“Please just… make it quick predator” I manage to say, sobbing making it hard to talk as I get out the words between snuffling breaths.
“It's okay Farva, please don't be sad” Nyan pleads as he clings tightly to my waist.
The predator holding me growls quietly into my ear. “I am going to release you now, do not attempt to harm nurse Fila as she is trying to help you now, do you understand?”. I tilt my ears in the affirmative, nothing happens for a moment until Donu signals to the predator who I guess whose name is Teal’c that I responded in the affirmative. My arms are slowly brought to my side. My left arm is released but not the wounded right one. Teal’c displaying some knowledge in medical etiquette seems to be intentionally applying pressure to the wound to prevent bleeding, I am led back to the bed.
Nurse Fila is about to attempt to fix my wound but is stopped by the blond predator.
“Allow me, this should go a lot more smoothly with this.” The blond predator produces a strange golden metal device, it appears like a strange wiry gauntlet, with metal claws and a strange crystal in the center. It emits a strange pulsing sound that I cringe at, but I am held firm by nurse fila, I can't look away as the strange glow it emits passes over my arms. The curtain of despair lifts for a moment, replaced by incredulousness as before my eyes the wounded artery in my arms miraculously seals itself, as elegantly as a flight suit being zipped up. My arm is left feeling slightly warm which soon fades, any sign of the wound is gone.
Fila speaks in an incredulous tone.
“It is endlessly baffling how your medical bay is stocked with simple alcohol based disinfectants and primitive bandages and sutures. Like something I'd see in a primitive yotul field hospital, while simultaneously containing healing tools so advanced they would make the finest Zurulian theoretical medical engineers sell their own tail.”
The blond predator lets out a high pitched broken chortle, which my translator pings as laughter. “I don’t know what a Zurulian is but compared to what we've seen this is nothing, this is a miniature version of the same technology used in a Goa'uld sarcophagus, which can reanimate dead tissue, bringing people back to life even after complete brain death.”
“Fascinating” Donu replied “what is the nature of this radiation”
“That technology itself is actually derivative of an ancient healing device created by our distant primordial ancestors the Alterans, which emitted subspace based healing radiation. We currently have the original device back in our home dimension being reverse engineered back in area 51” Spoke a third predator, who was standing up against the far wall.
He seemed to be holding onto himself quite fiercely, perhaps he struggled to hold in his bloodlust, unlike the two predators currently at my side.
“For predators they have such wondrous technology Farva” Donu says as she takes my paw and massages it gently in an attempt to ease my anxiety. “I almost wouldn't believe it if not for what they have shown us so far. Tell me, do you know how they got us off of our ship?”
A wave of realization washed over me as I sat dumbfounded in the bed. How did they get us off this ship? My brain had been in nonstop flight mode since the battle. I had been so occupied with survival I never stopped to contextualize my mere presence, on this ship, in one piece, why had we all seemingly awoken in this ship's hangar bay. No wait we didn't awaken, most of us were standing. Maybe we were drugged and removed, with no memory of the lost time. But that couldn’t be right. I was looking at the countdown to the core explosion. It had hit zero. I saw the flash myself.
“I was on the bridge holding Nyan in my arms, but after that I remember being in that hangar bay, with Nyan, in the exact same position.”
“The humans have a technology that allows them to break down matter at the atomic level, transfer it via an electromagnetic molecular confinement beam, and reassemble it at a different location completely remotely!” Donu excitedly proclaimed.
“You were teleported directly from the bridge to our ships hangar bay with your crew, and Donu to our infirmary due to her severe radiation poisoning.” Commented the blond predator.
Nyan finished crawling up the bed and snuggled into my side. “They fixed Donu, Samantha fixed her with her healing glove!” Nyan excitedly brayed, his tail wagging uncontrollably.
My stomach dropped, how had I forgotten, how did I let that slip my mind, Donu was subjected to at least 3.6 standard units of gamma radiation. Her presence here was a miracle. I hugged her tightly, my guilt for my actions only increased, how could I neglect the damage done to one of my oldest friends. Was I so predator diseased that I forgot to think of my herd?
The predator whose name was Samantha spoke ”Yeh sorry it took us so long, we cut it a lot closer than we wanted, but we had to adjust our transporter lock to account for the radiation flooding the ship, the levels experienced were harmless for the most part, but enough to cause problems.”
The fear chemicals were slowly draining from my mind, my head became clearer as I started to consider the actions of these predators so far. They had offered to help my ship while risking their own vessel, they had tried for peace before throwing themselves into battle, they had little reason to help us and little reason to try and take our technology as their capabilities seem to surpass ours in many ways so far.
I looked towards the blond haired predator, towards Samantha.
“Why did you help us? What do you hope to gain?”
She responded ”Well now we would like to maybe get some intel about this local region of space, we are not from around here and frankly we could do with some help securing some parts. But with that in mind we didn't really expect anything out of you when we first got your hail. We helped because you were in trouble, and your situation sounded dire.”
“And I'm just supposed to believe that! Prey ships would be waging pros and cons before even thinking about helping another ship under attack, especially with not knowing anything at all about the other ships capabilities”
Donu squeezed my paw and interjected. "These humans aren’t like normal predators, they are pack predators, they are very social, and even appear to feel genuine empathy, they even eat plants, they have been feeding us from their own reserves!”
“How is that possible?” I ask, having never heard of such a thing.
“Well where we come from” Samantah responded ”Omnivorous life is extremely common, not just on our home planet but nearly every one of the thousands of habitable planets we have visited contain omnivorous life in some form or another, It is an incredibly beneficial evolutionary trait.”
“Thousands! How can that be, our scientist have never encountered such a thing”
“That's the thing, they're not from this galaxy Farva, they're not even from this dimension!”
Donu gets into explaining the technical aspects of the Daedalus's faithful journey to our dimension, while Nyan, an always hungry growing boy, runs off during her explanation, to approach the large predator known as Teal’c.
“Can I have another donut?” he asks, pointing to the box that I now realize is not covered in blood but instead merely painted a gaudy pink.
“You may, but only after you have completed your grooming rituals, it is important for little ones such as yourself to learn and maintain proper hygiene practices” Teal’c spoke, his growls almost seeming to take up a fatherly aura.
He looks disappointed slightly but then his ears and tail perks up as he runs behind Samantha and out of sight, he remerges with a hairbrush and plops himself down on the predator's lap. To which she responds by snarling at him intensely.
“Donu” I shriek, interrupting the third predator's speech on the volatile nature of fourth dimensional space. Shocked at how quickly the predator could go from civility to volatility so rapidly. I was quickly calmed by Donu and Fila assuring me that this was merely an odd habit of the humans. The upturned teeth baring signaled happiness to them. Samantha made it clear to me that since her jaw was not clenched it did not indicate aggression. Her explanation sounded dubious, but after further observation, her following actions did not seem to indicate she wanted to harm the boy. Nyan offers her the brush once he sees that I am finished panicking.
She gives and odd closed mouth smile. "You have an almost PHD level knowledge of physics! don't tell me you don't know how to brush your own fur”
His tail gives a meek wag. ”I like when you do it, you have such nice flat nails and warm fingers!”
He makes his eyes go wide like a pup pleading for attention. The predator’s resolve immediately falters. ”Awh how could I say no to such a cute little angel”.
Samantha begins to help the boy detangle his fur, running her long grasping appendages through his fur in combination with the brush to gently pull apart the knots. He’s already clean from the grime that was present on him from when we were back on the heavily damaged ship, speaking of which I gesture to nurse Kila.
“Kila, how is the crew? How are they holding up? why aren't they here?”
“17 survivors including yourself, the humans have set up a triage center in their hangar bay, keeping the crew together and trying to give them some space, their stable but many of them are bedridden. They're quite scared naturally but,“ nurse Kila gives a look towards the humans “but I think we are going to be alright.”
“So what happens now?” I asked, “you aren't from this dimension and you said you were having drive problems, can you fix those? What are your plans for this dimension?”
The third predator stalked out from his isolated corner to address the room in a posture that emphasized the obvious restraint that was required to contain his instincts around us. “Hi ummm.. My name is Doctor Rodney Mckay, I think I can help with that question, simply put, our drive system uses a specialized quantum subspace field generator to warp 4th dimensional space in a way that allows us to track and catalog dimensional eddies as we call them, and track their specific frequencies which allow us to…….”
------- one long boring explanation later ------
“Ah So I see, you came to this dimension by mistake and need a replacement part that you cannot manufacture yourself to return home, but you think we might be able to manufacture a replacement with our industry?” I asked for clarification from Rodney.
“I discussed with your chief engineer earlier, we should be able to reproduce the part we need at what Donu described as a hyper fabricator, the meta materials available in your dimension you use for warp travel should be sufficient to recreate the part we need”
“In exchange I believe we can help you with your little arxur problem.” Spoke Samantha, running her grasping appendages through the fur of a contented Nyan, who was happily munching away at the strange circular Staryu-like treat the human Teal'c had presented him. Samantha proclaiming it to be sourced from his personal stash.
I was taken back by the revelation that they wanted to offer further assistance, when the predators first mentioned their damaged drive system, I thought they might try to leverage our place as rescued survivors as a means to get access to the part they needed to repair their damaged vessel. But now they were offering further assistance in exchange?
“I don’t understand, you've already done so much? Why would you help us more and risk more damage to your vessel?”
“Well if you want the reason we are going to put on paper, “Samantha said, ”it's to gather intel about a potential threat, and to ensure trust and cooperation of the locals to better expedite the procurement of mission critical drive components. If you want our real reason, its that no one deserves what has been done to you, we can't stay because we have responsibilities in our home dimension, but we don't see why we can’t help you while we are here.”
“So wait, are you proposing what I think you're proposing?”
“I am, from what we learned from your crew the arxur take a large portion of their abductees as cattle, we can track your subspace trails quite quickly and we think we have a good chance of hunting down the arxur transport ships.”
Nyan angled his head to look at both me and the human. Hope in his eyes, the idea of getting my family back would normally seem like an impossible dream, but here I was being comforted by predators, offering to risk their lives for a very lopsided trade in our favor. An ember of hope for the first time in many claws went alight in my chest.
I looked to Donu, who while trying to hide it, looked forlornly in Nyans direction. He was so happy to hear about a rescue plan and excited by all the predators' incredible technology, but while my family was young and fertile enough to be taken as cattle and potentially rescued. I had little doubt that if his family wasn't eaten, or killed in the bombing of the colony, the arxur would have no reason to hold a couple of such advanced age as cattle.
While I myself was a meek prey and a hopeless failure of a military officer, these Humans, despite obviously being fierce predators, had shown off an odd compassion. If anyone could; stand up to the arxur, and hunt them in return it was them.
I would help them anyway I could, they were unfamiliar with our foe, but they have shown themselves to be quite adaptable so far. Working together, we just maybe had a chance at making up for my failures. To set things right, and to save innocent prey from a fate worse than death.
“I think I may have to take you up on your offer kind predator”
Officer Report - Captain Caldwell
CLEARANCE LEVEL 5
Our interim chief engineer Dr.Mckay has successfully clamped open the 4th dimensional hole in space ; as he calls it; so we are clear to jump through this dimension freely without losing our path back to our home dimension. While my first impulse would be to jump to Earth, Unfortunately it seems that this dimension’s earth cold war went hot and it is currently a bombed out waste land. That being said carter and Mckay have struck a deal with the captain of the destroyed venlil defense frigate, in exchange for aiding in the rescue of captured civilians, they are willing to grant us access to the advanced manufacturing equipment needed to repair our Quantum drive.
While the antagonistic cannibalistic arxur are certainly an intimidating foe, they are not invincible and our ship stacks up favorably against theirs when specialized techniques are employed. The problem they cause for us is more unique. Carnivores are rare in this dimension and seemingly more so are omnivores. The Herbivore species known as the venlil are quite afraid of us, having dealt with these arxur for so long, and also due to a seemingly quite intense biological fear response, have been very wary to deal with us. Fortunately due to our admittedly unusually charismatic crew, and their admirable diplomatic efforts, we seem to have gotten them to calm down a lot since we initially transported them onto our ship. I am going to check up on the venlil crew and captain in the Medbay now, as they will be the most essential venlil to our efforts going forward.
As I walk in it seems that captain Farva is fast asleep, while Rodney appears to be using a Donut to explain the workings of a stargate to the aliens engineers.
“Okay so the stargate, you see this donut, imagine it's about 10 venlil tall, and made of metal” Rodney picks up another donut and hands it to the Child named Nyan. ”Okay first off don't eat that, secondly imagine you are a ancient alien race, and you want to get to point A to point B as fast as possible. Ftl isn’t quite fast enough so what if you could instead skip the trip and skip to the end. The stargate network allowed the ancient alternans to simply walk from planet to planet” Rodney used his finger to gesture from donut to donut in his explanation of the stargates, speaking about their functions as well as their dangers, mentioning some notable accidents associated with their use, like unwanted time travel, stellar poisoning and dimension hopping, the ladder being a large part of why we were here in this dimension to begin with. Most concerningly however, the venlil Nyan took a bite out of the donut when rodney finished his explanation.
Samantha was working quietly with nurse Fila and looked up from some chemical diagrams when she noticed I had entered the room. I asked if I could have a word, and took Her, Rodney, and Teal'c aside to have a meeting with them. We left the room due to the venlil’s exceptional hearing, as we had previously discovered when various medics made some inappropriate comments on how the venlil were “cute enough to eat '' thinking they were out of earshot.
Having taken them aside I spoke up. “I have already told this to Shepard and our medical staff in the hangar bay, and I would like to congratulate you on your remarkable progress on bridging the gap with the venlil. Going from shoot on sight in the hangar bay to literally eating out of your hands in a matter of hours represents some major diplomatic prowess.”
“Thank you captain” Samantha Said.
“There behavior is indeed most unusual” followed Teal’c
“But seemingly quite understandable given what they have been through with the wraith, Sorry! Arxur, Freudian slip.” chimed rodney.
“I would love to look at the biosphere of one of their planets, their ecology seems preposterous judging by the way they describe it. But they are a space faring species so they presumably know what they are talking about.” added Samantha.
“I myself am curious based on what you reported general, their dimension is quite odd but I suppose ours would be weird to them as well, but we have responsibilities back home.” I responded curtly. “I do have a question for you all though, The Venlil are a herbivorous species with intense emotional reactions and societal values pertaining to the consumption of meat, including animal products correct?”
Samantha answered ”We have been avoiding the subject of meat consumption as much as possible, focusing on our plant based foods for the venlil’s comfort, and they have been happy to keep that topic to a minimum after the initial introductions, but I don't believe they would respond well to the idea of consumption of…..” Samantha trails off with a worried look. “Oh god wait, please don’t tell me”
Teal’c looks confused, Rodney facepalms.
“You do know that donuts have eggs in them? Don't you.”

Grey’s Anatomy Narration
Season Three
Episode One: Time Has Come Today
Meredith Grey
In the O.R., time loses all meaning. In the midst of sutures and saving lives, the clock ceases to matter. 15 minutes, 15 hours…inside the O.R., the best surgeons make time fly. Outside the O.R., however, time takes pleasure in kicking our asses. For even the strongest of us, it seems to play tricks - slowing down, hovering…until it freezes…leaving us stuck in a moment, unable to move in one direction or the other.
Time flies. Time waits for no man. Time heals all wounds. All any of us wants is more time…time to stand up…time to grow up…time to let go…time.
Episode Two: I Am a Tree
Meredith Grey
At any given moment, the brain has 14 billion neurons firing at a speed of 450 miles per hour. We don’t have control over most of them. When we get a chill - goose bumps, when we get excited - adrenaline. The body naturally follows its impulses, which I think is part of what makes it so hard to control ours. Of course, sometimes we have impulses we would rather not control…that we later wish we had.
The body is a slave to its impulses. But the thing that makes us human…is what we can control. After the storm…after the rush…after the heat of the moment has passed…we can cool off and clean up the messes we’ve made. We can try to let go of what was…and then again…
Episode Three: Sometimes a Fantasy
Meredith Grey
Surgeons usually fantasize about wild and improbable surgeries - someone collapses in a restaurant, we slice them open with a butter knife, replace a valve with a hollowed-out stick of carrot. But every now and then, some other kind of fantasy slips in. Most of our fantasies dissolve when we wake, banished to the back of our mind. But sometimes, we’re sure…if we try hard enough…we can live the dream.
The fantasy is simple…pleasure is good…and twice as much pleasure is better…that pain is bad…and no pain is better.
But the reality is different. The reality is that pain is there to tell us something. And there’s only so much pleasure we can take without getting a stomachache. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe some fantasies are only supposed to live in our dreams.
Episode Four: What I am
Meredith Grey
At some point during surgical residency, most interns get a sense of who they are as doctors and the kinds of surgeons they’re going to become. If you ask them, they’ll tell you - they’re going to be general surgeons…orthopedic surgeons…neurosurgeons…distinctions which do more than describe their areas of expertise. They help define who they are. Because outside the operating room, not only do most surgeons have no idea who they are, they’re afraid to find out.
Episode Five: Oh, the Guilt
Meredith Grey
First do no harm - as doctors, we pledge to live by this oath. But harm happens…and then guilt happens. And there’s no oath for how to deal with that.
Guilt never goes anywhere on its own. It bring its friends doubt and insecurity.
First do no harm - easier said than done. We can take all the oaths in the world, but the fact is…most of us do harm all the time.
Sometimes even when we’re trying to help…we do more harm than good…and the guilt rears its ugly head. What you do with that guilt is up to you.
We’re left with a choice…either let the guilt throw you back into the behavior that got you into trouble in the first place or…learn from the guilt and do your best to move on.
Episode Six: Let the Angels Commit
Meredith Grey
To make it…really make it…as a surgeon…it takes major commitment. We have to be willing to pick up that scalpel and make a cut that may or may not do more damage than good. It’s all about being committed…because if we’re not…we have no business picking up that scalpel in the first place.
There are times when even the best of us have trouble with commitment. And we may be surprised by the commitments we’re willing to let slip out of our grasp. Commitments are complicated. We may surprise ourselves by the commitments we’re willing to make. True commitment takes effort…and sacrifice. Which is why sometimes…we have to learn the hard way to choose out commitments very carefully.
Episode Seven: Where the Boys Are
Meredith Grey
As surgeons, we’re trained to look for disease. Sometimes the problem’s easily detected. Most of the time, you need to go step-by-step, first probing the surface, looking for any sign of trouble…a mole or a lesion or an unwelcome lump.
Most of the time, we can’t tell what’s wrong with somebody by just looking at them. After all, they can look perfectly fine on the outside while their insides tell us a whole other story.
Not all wounds are superficial. Most wounds run deeper than we can imagine. You can’t see them with the naked eye. And then there are the wounds that take us by surprise.
The trick with any kind of wound or disease is to dig down and find the real source of the injury. And once you’ve found it…try like hell to heal that sucker.
Episode Eight: Staring at the Sun
Meredith Grey
Many people don’t know that the human eye has a blind spot in its field of vision. Theres a part of the world that we are literally blind to. The problem is, sometimes our blind spots shield us from things that really shouldn’t be ignored. Sometimes our blind spots keep our life bright and shiny.
Episode Nine: From a Whisper to a Scream
Cristina Yang
As doctors…we know everybody’s secrets - their medical histories…sexual histories…confidential information that is as essential to a surgeon as a 10-blade…and every bit as dangerous. We keep secrets. We have to. But not all secrets can be kept.
In some ways, betrayal is inevitable. When our bodies betray us, surgery is often the key to recovery. When we betray each other…when we betray each other, the path to recovery is less clear.
We do whatever it takes to rebuild the trust that was lost. And then there are some wounds, some betrayals that are so deep, so profound…that there’s no way to repair what was lost. And when that happens…there’s nothing left to do but wait.
Episode Ten: Don’t Stand So Close to Me
Meredith Grey
At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody…so this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other - it’s usually a load of bull.
So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to. And once we’ve chosen those people…we tend to stick close by…no matter how much we hurt them.
The people that are still with you at the end of the day…those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close…but sometimes that invasion of personal space…it can be exactly what you need.
Episode Eleven: Six Days: Part 1
[No narration]
Episode Twelve: Six Days: Part 2
[No narration]
Episode Thirteen: Great Expectations
Meredith Grey
No one believes their life will turn out just kind of okay. We all think we’re going to be great. And from the day we decide to be surgeons, we are filled with expectation - expectations of the trails we will blaze, the people we will help, the difference we will make…great expectations of who we will be, where we will go. And then we get there.
We all think we’re going to be great. And we feel a little bit robbed when our expectations aren’t met. But sometimes, our expectations sell us short. Sometimes the expected simply pales in comparison to the unexpected. You gotta wonder why we cling to our expectations because the expected is just what keeps us steady, standing…still. The expected’s just the beginning. The unexpected…is what changes our lives.
Episode Fourteen: Wishin’ and Hopin’
Meredith Grey
As surgeons, we live in a world of worst-case scenarios. We cut ourselves off from hoping for the best because too many times, the best doesn’t happen. But every now and then, something extraordinary occurs…and suddenly…best-case scenarios seem possible. And every now and then, something amazing happens…and against our better judgement…we start to have hope.
As doctors, we’re trained to give our patients just the facts. But what our patients really want to know is, will the pain ever go away? Will I feel better? Am I cured? What our patients really want to know is…is there hope? But inevitably, there are times when you find yourself in the worst-case scenario…when the patient’s body has betrayed them and all the science we have to offer has failed them. When the worst-case scenario comes true, clinging to hope is all we’ve got left.
Episode Fifteen: Walk on Water
Meredith Grey
Disappearances happen in science - disease can suddenly fade away, tumors go missing. We open someone up to discover the cancer is gone. It’s unexplained, it’s rare, but it happens. We call it misdiagnosis…say we never saw it in the first place…any explanation but the truth…that life is full of vanishing acts. If something that we didn’t know we had disappears, do we miss it?
Episode Sixteen: Drowning on Dry Land
Meredith Grey
Like I said…disappearances happen - pains go phantom…blood stops running…and people - people fade away.
There’s more I have to say…so much more. But…I’ve disappeared.
Episode Seventeen: Some Kind of Miracle
Meredith Grey
There are medical miracles. Being worshippers at the altar of science, we don’t like to believe miracles exist. But they do. Things happen. We can’t explain them, we can’t control them…but they do happen.
Miracles do happen in medicine. They happen every day. Just not always when we need them to happen.
At the end of a day like this, a day when so many prayers are answered and so many aren’t…we take our miracles where we find them. We reach across the gap…and sometimes…against all odds…against all logic…we touch.
Episode Eighteen: Scars and Souvenirs
Meredith Grey
People have scars in all sorts of unexpected places, like secret road maps of their personal histories, diagrams of all their old wounds. Most our wounds heal, leaving nothing behind but a scar. But some of them don’t.
Some wounds we carry with us everywhere, and though the cut’s long gone…the pain still lingers.
What’s worse, new wounds, which are so horribly painful…or old wounds that should’ve healed years ago and never did?
Maybe our old wounds teach us something. They remind us of where we’ve been and what we’ve overcome. They teach us lessons about what to avoid in the future. That’s what we like to think. But that’s not the way it is, is it? Some things we just have to learn over, and over, and over again.
Episode Nineteen: My Favorite Mistake
Meredith Grey
Surgeons always have a plan…where to cut, where to clamp, where to stitch. But even with the best plans…complications can arise, things can go wrong…and suddenly you’re caught with your pants down.
The thing about plans is, they don’t take into account the unexpected. So when we’re thrown a curveball whether it’s in the O.R. or in life…we have to improvise. Of course, some of us are better at it than others. Some of us just have to move on to plan B…and make the best of it.
And sometimes…what we want…is exactly what we need. But sometimes…sometimes what we need is a new plan.
Episode Twenty: Time After Time
Meredith Grey
A patient’s history is as important as their symptoms. It’s what helps us decide if heartburn’s a heart attack, if a headache’s a tumor. Sometimes patients will try to rewrite their own histories. They’ll claim they don’t smoke or forget to mention certain drugs, which, in surgery can be the kiss of death. We can ignore it all we want…but our history…eventually always comes back to haunt us.
Some people believe that without history, our lives amount to nothing. At some point, we all have to choose. Do we fall back on what we know? Or do we step forward to something new? It’s hard not to be haunted by our past. Our history is what shapes us, what guides us.
Our history resurfaces time after time after time. So we have to remember…sometimes the most important history is the history we’re making today.
Episode Twenty-One: Desire
Meredith Grey
As interns, we know what we want - to become surgeons…and we’ll do anything to get there. Suffer through killer exams, endure 100-hour weeks, stand for hours on end in operating rooms…you name it, we’ll do it. The tough part, though, is reconciling this huge thing we want - to be surgeons - with everything else we want.
Too often, the thing you want most is the one thing you can’t have. Desire leaves us heartbroken…it wears us out. Desire can wreck your life. But as tough as wanting something can be…the people who suffer the most…are those who don’t know what they want.
Episode Twenty-Two: The Other Side of This Life: Part 1
Meredith Grey
The dream is this - that we’ll finally be happy when we reach our goals. Find the guy, finish our internship - that’s the dream. Then we get there. And if we’re human, we immediately start dreaming of something else. Because if this is the dream…then we’d like to wake up…now, please.
Episode Twenty-Three: The Other Side of This Life: Part 2
Meredith Grey
At some point, maybe we accept the dream has become a nightmare. We tell ourselves the reality is better. We convince ourselves it’s better that we never dream at all. But the strongest of us, the most determine of us, we hold on to the dream. Or we find ourselves faced with a fresh dream we never considered. We awake to find ourselves…against all odds…feeling hopeful. And if we’re lucky, we realize…in the face of everything, in the face of life…the true dream…is being able to dream at all.
Episode Twenty-Four: Testing 1-2-3
Meredith Grey
A surgeon’s education never ends. Every patient, every symptom, every operation…is a test, a chance for us to demonstrate how much we know…and how much more we have to learn.
Episode Twenty-Five: Didn’t We Almost Have it All?
Richard Webber
Being chief is about responsibility. Every single surgical patient in the hospital is your patient, whether you’re the one who cut them open or not. The scalpel stops with you. You need to be able to look at a family…and tell them your team did everything they could to save someone’s child…their husband…their wife. You get caught up…taking care of other people’s families. And responsibility, it makes you…you take care of other people’s families…and you sacrifice your own.