Lopro camera bags

Someone posted about it 2 years ago but I wanted to follow up since I JUST NOW discovered the joy of a hip pack. Now I can’t imagine living without one.
I have everything in a small 2 liter REI bag: keys, earplugs, headphones, phone, kindle, notebook, pen, pocket camera, dad’s ashes, cash, etc… I don’t really have to remove anything other than my phone and camera whether I’m hiking or going out. And everything has a home in the pack.
Backpacks worked well when I lived in NY, but hip packs are genius for LA and other places that are more car centric. I have zero interest in doing slings- the hips is where it’s at! And it’s in that grey area where people can’t tell if it’s stylish or not - so if you have the balls to rock it, it becomes instantly stylish.
Anyway: for others with ADHD who use them, which do you use? How have they helped? Any tips or thoughts?

Hi everyone, I want to share my experience being a professional photographer in NYC who, for the past 4 years, shoots exclusively Leica. I’ve been a pro in New York City for the past 12 years, and in 2022 and 2023, shot almost 180 days per year. A mix of banded events, social campaigns and content, a lot of BTS on big commercial sets, and also have a business shooting families and weddings with a business partner. All in all, I will be honest and say that I believe I land on the side of being slightly rougher with my gear. Not to the point of abusing it, per se, but I will often have 2 to 3 cameras on my neck and on my shoulders that will swing into each other occasionally. Dings, scrapes, scratches, are all pretty normal and apparent on my gear, but nothing out of the ordinary for someone who uses their gear extensively and often.
Let me first start with my Q2. I’ve owned the Q2 and shot with it extensively for events over the past three years. I was an early adopter into the Q event shooting craze in New York and I am at this point pretty married to this camera for on camera flash GQ party style event coverage. About a year of owning the Q2, both strap lugs came loose due to a lack of Loctite (apparently) being applied during the assembling process. The first strap lug came loose during a branded event shoot for a hotel where my camera came loose and almost hit the floor. This was remedied by Leica in five weeks of them having it in for repair and I had to pay close to $1000 in repair fees, since it was not under warranty as I was the second owner, and their warranty is non transferable. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough that the Q2 has remained the most solid of my Leica cameras and continues to be my main workhorse for events.
Moving onto my SL2S, which is my main body for longer manual focus lenses only (50 and 75) , natural light portraits, and details at events and weddings. I have been using this camera for three years with a broken shoe that won’t fire any flash that I mount to it. It has been a strictly natural light body only. The idea of Leica needing this for 6 weeks to repair has kept me from sending it in. They have consistently told me that loaner cameras are not available. This issue has been present for the past 2 years and I continue to accept the limitations of this being a natural light only camera.
Moving on to a 35 Summicron (latest, non APO version) this lens came back from 6 week focus ring repair in Jan, and two weeks after receiving it back, was in my camera bag and was set down on a concrete floor (inside the padded compartment of the bag!) and locked up so hard that the focus ring wouldn’t turn at all. This was sent back to Leica right away and has been at headquarters for three months saying that the part they need to replace it is out of stock. Again, they told me there are no loaners available. Same story. I’ve been waiting with no updates from them unless I actively reach out.
Fast forwarding to my M10R, I adopted it about two years ago. I love the workflow of this camera, the simplicity and the tactility of rangefinder focus and the form factor. I mainly use this camera as natural light cocktail hour and event coverage and family shoots, all this all mainly at slower shutter speeds in general. I rarely shoot above 1/2000s, even in broad daylight. This being said, the fact that I haven’t shot much at 1/4000s since I bought the camera made me oblivious to an issue that was shipped with the camera when I first purchased it new in 2022. That at speeds of 1/3000, and becoming more noticeable at 1/4000, about 15% of the frame along the vertical long edge of the image is about a stop underexposed. I’ve noticed in the past and at first have thought it was a camera LCD problem. The fact that I rarely shoot this fast meant that I hadn’t seen the issue much and wasn’t able to properly identify it until now. This past Sunday I was shooting on a super bright and overcast day where parts of the sky were uniformly white and close to blown out, and in this scenario, while shooting relatively wide open and at 1/4000s second shutter, it’s by the most noticeable it’s ever been. I’ve reached out to Leica but dreading the response.
I love Leica gear, and while I will always keep shooting these cameras, especially the M and Q for specific jobs, I’m coming to the conclusion that I can’t recommend Leica for most photographers who use their gear professionally. It becomes very hard to shoot Leica without owning a duplicate backup of every piece of gear. Because each piece of gear has such a specific use case for me, and because Leica doesn’t have a pro services decision, it becomes impossible to repair anything without owning two of everything.
In eight years prior to being an exclusively Leica shooter, I shot both Nikon and Canan and throughout my ownership both of these brands, (save for the rubber grip falling off of my D780) I never had any issues with any gear from Nikon or Canan. And if I had, it brought me peace of mind knowing that the pro services they offer would’ve lent me gear until mine was repaired. I deeply regret and am sad that I may need to move away from Leica as my main workhorse. I’m not looking for any solutions here necessarily, or hoping that a Leica rep notices this post and gives me some special treatment or something. I’m just sharing my experience while also needing to vent a little bit. Thanks so much for reading.

Growing up, I was always wheeling and dealing. To me, this wasn’t an entrepreneurial upbringing but just something fun. I am of course the son of a cereal-entrepreneur, and the grandson of, “A man who could sell ice to a polar bear” but even in all of this, I never realized the skills I was acquiring along the way.
Recently, while listening to the My First Million podcast, the guest mentioned a rule they follow: “I never work with founders who didn’t own a lemonade stand when they were young”. Though not literal in this medium of business, it got me thinking about my own past.
As far back as I can remember, around 5th grade, I was on eBay.
My first Power-Seller account, to which they sent me a certificate we framed, was under my father's name, but I ran it exclusively. I remember taking photos on our family digital camera, transferring them to our desktop, and spending hours selling odds and ends.
What I don’t remember however is what I was selling, or really where in my world I got these things from. I do however wager it was flea markets, antique shops, and places of this sort as I do remember spending a great deal of time in each of them as a kid.
One of my biggest successes was purchasing an RC Cola Machine from a city auction for $5 - cash. After spending the rest of the weekend cleaning and scrubbing down the insides I discovered its coin operator mechanism was broken, meaning I couldn’t enjoy beverages on demand.
But the cooling system worked well, and after a little research, I found out there were parts that could be purchased to bypass this for home use.
I think the evening I found this out, it went up for auction on eBay. Set for “Local Pickup”, featuring a compelling story about how great this piece would be in a basement, man-cave, or den and a $50 reserve to ensure I at least 10x’d my investment, the auction went live.
I couldn't tell you how much it sold for, but about 10 days later what I can remember is loading it into my Dad's truck for the second time, a little more gently this go around, and meeting a man in the parking lot of a gas station off the highway.
I also remember Dad, perhaps in disbelief or out of real pragmatic fear, telling me this person might not be real and this could be too good to be true. Neither was the case, and with goods delivered, and payment safely secured via the platform, my love for the process was cemented.
In 8th grade, I turned a school project on the Alaskan Iditarod into a candy-selling business. As part of the project, we placed bets in the form of bags of candy, on the competition.
In my wisdom, I had researched all the competitors the night before and at the end of the race, had won something like 20 bags of candy from the class.
After winning bets in the form of candy bags, I sold them piece by piece from my locker, making a nice profit over the semester and somehow being inconspicuous enough to never attract attention from the teachers, which might have ended with a trip to the principal's office and a cease-and-desist to this little venture.
In 9th grade, while at a friend’s house, I found a pizza oven sitting in his garage. This particular pizza oven was quite dirty but stood out as a unique item with an oven at the bottom, and 4 pizza turning racks on top.
I remember asking his mom if it worked and her not knowing, and saying I could have it if I wanted, to which I accepted.
A few hours of work that weekend to get it cleaned up, and a quick test revealed it not only worked but had lights on top of the turning rack and a display sign.
Back to eBay yet again, I remember, semi-reluctantly as I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, selling that as well.
The process of finding, fixing, and flipping items became a routine that I thoroughly enjoyed, though I never had the heart to tell my friend I had sold it, and I don’t remember for how much it went either, but I do remember it was purchased via ‘Buy-It-Now” quite fast.
While at the Boy Scouts of America National Jamboree the summer before I graduated high school, I collected limited-edition daily collectable patches that were available. The big gimmick with these patches was that only 2010 of each were made, and scattered across the various stores for thousands of scouts who had attended the event to track down and purchase.
The night I got home from the event I had them uploaded onto eBay and watched as these patches, of which no one was really selling, soared in live auction to somewhere around $650, paying for the entire trip.
I think one of the reasons I remember this one so well is because the timing and luck involved in this sale taught me the importance of seizing opportunities.
Days after this set of patches sold and was delivered to a satisfied buyer, completing the transaction, the Boy Scouts of America - because of patch collectors' outcry over the limited inventory, re-released these sets. Effectively, collapsing the market for all but the collectors who cared for ‘First Print” - which could not be proved.
When I went off to college, my focus shifted from selling items to designing things. I channeled my creativity into digital art and graphic print design, working as a freelance graphic designer.
Over the years, I’ve created logos, brandings, graphic prints, and even worked for a yacht apparel company creating graphics of some of the world's most expensive boats, negotiate contracts, and creating art that to this day is still in the public domain.
However, my first business failure came during this period. Relying solely on word-of-mouth marketing, I struggled to make ends meet.
Walking away from my attempts to run a graphic design business was tough, both personally and financially. It took years to bounce back, but this experience taught me about resilience and how to identify priorities, set your own schedule, and perhaps most importantly remain productive outside the confines of a traditional workday, or boss.
When you are an entrepreneurial type, often you can find yourself rubbing people the wrong way. I believe it is these things that make us almost ‘unemployable’, as I like to call it.
At my core, I have always sought to identify problems and seize opportunities and after an abrupt end to my time in the corporate world due to politics and personal differences, I set out to build Workflow Secrets, and later, the Systems Accelerator Manager (SAM).
SAM is an AI-powered tool designed for real estate agents, helping them build systems and content tailored to their business needs. The journey from selling items on eBay to creating an innovative software solution has been driven by my entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to help people create a better life.
Reflecting on my journey, I see how each step, from a 5th grader working to craft the perfect description to draw attention to SAM, has been a natural progression of my entrepreneurial DNA.
Each venture, success, and failure has shaped my approach to business, and I am excited to continue this path of innovation and growth. How I see it, this story only grows from here, perhaps this next chapter will involve you.
Thanks for reading.
Cody Stepp
Co-Founder Workflow Secrets

Should i buy canon 600d for 150€ as a first camera? It comes with the basic canon 18-55mm lens and then 75-300mm f1.8 canon lens. Plus a bag, a memory card for the camera and the charger.
Thanks in advance for all the opinions!

So I'm living near to an ASDA car park in the UK and every now and then some local lads show up revving their engines in their punto or their clio for 5 or 10 minutes at a time 3 or 4 times a night. They're fine, we've all been that age showing off to your mates, trying to impress the girls, not my cup of tea and I haven't personally done it this way but whatever..
This last 2 weeks, a new batch of dickheads have shown up in what appears to be spaceships that make the LOUDEST put-put sound every time their car does ANYTHING. This is an absolute new breed of trash bag. 11am through till 3am most nights i can expect these fucking little pricks to show up and just cause as much fucking noise as they can.
I'm pretty sure the car park has cameras up everywhere so with that in mind, how can I fuck these little dickheads tin cans up without obviously getting caught or causing any unnecessary damage to any innocent parties property in the process?

I'm a lifelong backpack-wearer, but my wife and I recently spent two weeks in Japan, which changed my outlook on EDC. I never wanted to wear the heavy/bulky backpack, so I spent most of the trip with a canvas tote, while my wife used her Uniqlo crescent sling. The trip has made me want to convert to the sling lifestyle, but I'm having a hard time picking one for my needs after reading a ton and watching lots of reviews.
Normal/at-home EDC

• iPhone 13 mini
  
• Airpods
  
• Slim/card wallet
  
• Chapstick
  
• Maybe a charging cable/dongle or two
  
• Possibly a small water bottle
  
• Also have a kid on the way, so this will probably soon expand to a diaper or two
  

While traveling or on longer outings

• The real challenge - Fujifilm XT30 ii; currently I just have the kit lens which I know is all-but impossible for anything smaller than 6-8L, but I intend to buy the 27mm pancake lens, so consider my options according to that form factor
  
• Passport
  
• Spare cash
  
• Anker 20k mAh power bank
  
• Possibly small umbrella or rain jacket
  
• Hand sanitizer
  
• Small plastic bags for trash
  

I'm personally less interested in "pocket clearing" and would be open to some things being outside the sling e.g. phone/wallet/chapstick or umbrella. To me, it's more about carrying the "extras" like the camera, airpods, cables, powerbank, etc. that would need to go in a bag regardless of form factor.
I've basically narrowed it down to three bags, (but am open to suggestions otherwise):

• Aer Day Sling 3 (tight fit, but seems like it would conceivably work and provide the sleekest/smallest form-factor)
  
• Bellroy Venture 6L (also tight fit, but reviews seem like it could work and I don't really want to get any bigger due to size/bulk/weight)
  
• Patagonia Atom 8L (seems like a good compromise of aesthetics and overall room, at the cost of less organization; also don't love the single-shoulder design, but strap seems the most comfortable)
  

Some of the priorities I'm looking for in the bag itself:

• Sleek/small form factor - I don't want a big/bulky/square bag. I'm looking more for the aesthetics of like Japanese/Korean fashion than "messenger bag, but worn on the back." I also have a small frame (5'6" 130lbs, male) and don't want to be dwarfed by the bag.
  
• Top priority for capacity is probably fitting the "normal" EDC plus camera for street photography
  
• Comfort/fit - I'd like it to be comfortable for all-day wear, especially with heavier items like the camera or water, I'd prefer it not to slide too much (i.e. stay on my back when walking), and ideally I can switch between shoulders, though I can part with that if the Atom or similar is truly the best choice.
  
• Organization - I love how the Aer and Bellroy have lots of organized, separated pockets while still retaining the large main pocket, but again, I can probably give this up if something like the Atom is the best choice
  

TL;DR: For EDC plus XT30 ii with pancake lens, plus possibly a few other small things, should I go with the Aer Day Sling 3, Bellroy Venture 6, or Patagonia Atom? Or something else?

To start a little background. My husbands family and I aren’t extremely close but I try to have a good relationship with them as they are not only my husbands family but my children’s as well. However over the years I have noticed my SIL has become more and more demanding over the years of help, favors, etc from my husband and I.
Now to the issue. My grandmother passed away 4yrs ago and left her and my grandfathers lake house to me ( installed a ring camera about 2months after I inherited it). My husband and I go up there on avg twice a yr a year as it’s about a 6hr drive. When we do we’re there for two weeks roughly. My sisters often go up with their families ( spouse and children) as well with my permission. Last yr we invited my in-laws for part of our visit and had a great time. My sister in law got engaged about 3months ago and called my husband asking if we can host the engagement party at the lake house. He discussed it with me and I told him that was fine. Unfortunately I found out the weekend she wanted was the weekend my best friend is getting married and I am her M.O.H. so I told my husband that it wouldn’t work as we’re going to be on the west coast that weeekend( we live on the east coast). Sister in law called MIL complaining. And I got a call from MIL, saying that I am not supporting her( SIL’s) relationship. If it was just his family and hers I’d be fine with them going without us as I am close to all of them. But they want to bring the entire wedding party plus their s/o’s ( 4 couples other than them plus BILS parents and MIL&FIL.) and I only know one of the bridesmaids and her husband( kinda). I told my MIL she can use it another weekend and invite everyone when either I or my husband are there as the mass majority are strangers to me and barely know my husband. So if she wants that weekend it MUST be family only. Otherwise she’d have to pick a different weekend. She called me selfish and said I guess we have to do what the “master” says. A month later my mil and fil stopped in for a visit as they happened to be close by for an event they were attending. Which went really well.
FAST FWD to this past Thursday. I am getting ready to get on the plane to fly out to my best friends wedding when I got a notification from ring. Look at it and it’s none other than my mil and SIL standing on the porch with keys in hand and bags of stuff in the other. I was fuming that I called my sister and asked her to go up and kick them out.(she’s only 2hrs away.) which she promptly did after work. When she showed up there were almost 18people total ( 6 I knew) sitting by/on the porch chatting. She called me and told me what was going on and I asked to speak to my Fil. ( retired probation officer) I asked him why they were there, n his impression was I had changed my mind and given the keys to mil when they stopped by. Obviously that wasn’t the case. She took them and eventually admitted it. I told her and sil they have 10min to get everyone / thing out or I will be contacting the police. They obviously left. An hour later sil called my husband and demanded we pay for everyone’s hotel since I kicked them out and it was to late for all of them to drive home. Am I wrong for laughing at her request? Should I still press charges? I don’t want the people who didn’t know to get in trouble but I think it’s fair to say SIL asked mil to take the keys and she obliged and I want them to face a consequence. My husband is leaving it up to me since it’s my property

Hi,
I'm looking for a tote that you can carry as a backpack or a roll-top backpack, around 20-ish litres. I currently use Mystery Ranch 2 Day Assault almost daily and have MR Hip Monkey and North Street Pioneer hip packs.
I'm looking for something in the middle, as the 2 Day is overkill capacity-wise and the looks are a bit too military-y, but the hip packs get small fast if I'm carrying my camera, water bottle or any layers.
I live in Helsinki and it's either raining or snowing for about 10 months a year, so weathersealing is a must. Sleeve for a laptop is plus, same for couple smaller pockets, but I'll rather carry pens and notebook in a pouch than have a separate spot for everything.
I've been looking at Chrome, Mission Workshop and few others, but haven't found anything that quite matches what I'm looking for
Current options:

• Chrome Barrage: no organization, would need something, but the Bravo is 30+ litres
• MW Helix: small, no organization, MW backpacks nearing that overkill territory?
• ATD Supply ARB Tote seems nice, but no option for backpack carry
• Ancoats Tote looks kinda nice, no idea about the brand
• LBB Transition same as above
• Braasi Roger same as above

Any and all thoughts and recommendations are welcome, thanks.

To part 1
Last part (two-parter)
/Biological Parable/
Part 40: Getting answers above a god.
\niirssk-k-k* narshh\*
The metallic hands closed and opened in the vacuum of space only audible though the vibrations of the body, that was hurtling towards the moon at a record speed.
\niirssk-k-k* narshh\*
If the emotions of Samantha Everest could be visualized, she'd have a whirlpool of blind rage and questions atop her head.
Whatever the case was with the ghosts, she had to make sure Myrion wasn't twisted enough to orchestrate all of her life. How deep did it even go?
It just couldn't be. It was like Myrion’s head had always been in the clouds, yet with all that had been happening here recently she'd just have to just cope with it.
There need not be more thoughts and monologues, as she devoted all her thoughts to that rage she rarely had in her.
In a few hours she had installed the ‘Freebird’ cybernetics left by Myrion. Glass-like exoskeletal skin with copper inlays, the internal organs for light conversion and the four miniature Riftdragger engines for free 360 movement through space.
A whirlpool of emotions descended onto the dark side of the moon at supersonic speeds.
She had the moon’s map to direct her to the Lunar Palace.
The whirlpool curved towards the colourful palace, lit by the stars.
There was no time to consult with the crazy people at the guarded entrance.
The four Lunar cultist guards wielding shotguns watched in confusion as the flying woman flew over them and into the entrance of the inner chamber. Shotgun shells fired in muted silence, the few pellets ricocheting off Samantha's new skin.
To the shock of the Lunar cultists, the inner chamber’s massive floor entrance rumbled to life, despite it not being a full moon and the strange woman didn't hesitate to dive in.
As Samantha saw the entrance open for her the true dread and further anger set in of change that the ghost's words could be true.
‘A damn puppet… a puppet… and I'm going straight to where he wants…’ She needed to think of something but it all just made her hate Myrion and her life even more.
The rainbow molded alien metal cracked as the whirlpool’s fist got directed at the mesh-wall.
The glass skin was spotless. The whirlpool’s attention moved from her hand to the one opening door in the hall lined with doors, urging her to continue. Samantha bit her teeth together and doubled her speed though the winding halls.
Doors opened and closed for her in the labyrinthine chambers of the inner Luna at the increasing pace the whirlpool took.
‘This place is massive…’ Another type of dread started to crawl on her head of the implications this palace and the ghost could mean.
The rainbow molded walls flew past her to increasingly cleaner and darker chambers deeper in.
At some point there was a sudden change in gravity to zero-g but with her flying it hardly mattered.
Then there was the last chamber that opened to oxygen rich air.
The largest by far, an icosahedral shaped chamber with a smaller identical icosahedra floating in the middle of the giant chamber.
As she started to head towards the center she realized the scale of the thing. It was hardly getting any bigger at the current speed.
With calculations coming from her brain computer the central icosahedra was the size of the entire moon itself.
The rage of the whirlpool started to fade into confusion and her dread into terror as she increased her speed through space.
The whine of the zero-g air on her speeding glass skin disturbed her as the noise echoed hauntedly in the giant chamber.
Finally landing onto the massive icosahedra she looked around but didn't see an opening. The thing under her feet was made out of something iridescent and metallic, casting strange mirages and colours.
At the center of one of the triangular faces of the icosahedra, was a blood splatter and what looked to be a gun of some sort and a blood and gunk covered cylinder.
‘What the hell??...’ Samantha was very confused, but as there wasn't anything else to go off of she first picked up the gun.
It was a weird looking thing, a modified glock-9 as the brain computer quickly analyzed.
But Samantha saw what her camera eyes couldn't see, Myrion. Ghouled, emaciated man in a lab coat that seemed to flutter in an unseen wind, but it was Myrion, she knew.
‘’... Samantha. Glad you could make it in time…’’ Myron's apparition looked calm, the voice as ethereal as it was haunting.
The whirlpool suddenly stopped, before redoubling its momentum. ‘’Myrion!’’ The gun in Samantha's hand made its way to point at the apparition. Samantha would need to just cope with this all or that she had gone insane at some point.
‘’You installed the whole ‘Freebird’, good, good.’’ Myrion’s hollow eyes stared down the gun barrel pointed at him.
‘’D-Did you kill my parents?!’’
‘’Oh, no, no. Heavens, why'd you say such a thing?... That isn't how you say hello to the dead.’’ Myrion's expression remained emotionless.
‘’The recordings! Y-you!’’ Samantha's whirlpool was making a barrel roll inside her head, she nearly pulled on the trigger then and there.
‘’Won't you sit down with me and let's talk about the future, shall we? We have a bit of time.’’ The apparition sat down next to the splatters of blood.
‘’What the hell is going on…’’ Samantha didn't let go of the trigger, standing still.
‘’Well, you have to be more specific, because a lot of this are happening or are going to happen very, very soon…’’ Myrion mock tapped on his skeletal elusive hand’s wrist to show the time.
‘’Th-that recording, you sent me… it looked like it wasn't edited all the way… you're a madman if those things are true.’’ She needed to know.
‘’...Hmm. Right, that-... Would you believe me if I said I didn't plan anything and just went with a feeling?’’ Myrion shook his head while laughing.
‘’What? Seriously?’’ Samantha broke a tooth from biting too hard on it. She didn't even care, staring coldly down at the dead man. ‘’You seriously think I'm that gullible…’’
A deranged, disbelieving smile crept onto her lips. ‘’Thou maybe you're just insane, hehe. NO! Tell, me, the truth, you sick old man.’’
Myrion smiled sadly, his head swaying and eyes wandering for the right words. ‘’I'll tell you what I know, but I know it won't satisfy anything.’’ The skeleton gestured generally to the air.
He gestured for Samantha to sit down, which she gingerly did, still pointing the gun at the apparition.
‘’Firstly… Do you believe in destiny?’’ Myrion started, staring into somewhere else.
Samantha narrowed her eyes at Myrion. ‘’Sigh Fine, let's play along… With how things are now with the ghosts, I wouldn't pass it off as nothing anymore.’’
Myrion nodded. ‘’Hah… yes… When I was born in the Lunar commune, or as it was then in the 2020ths known as the Children of the Moon.
I was prophesied to be the incarnation of the founder of the cult, destined to be the hand and mouth of the Lunar Goddess when the end times would start… But it never did start, at least the disaster-decade wasn't as the scriptures had told it, so there was debate in the cult of what it all ment…’’
‘’Alright… are you getting to the point?’’ Samantha shoved the gun forwards, as there was a pause.
‘’Yes. At that time I had already started moving away from the church, doubting my prophecy, getting more into science… I felt I wasn't enough, so I compensated so I could still save the planet and humanity another way… But-... I started to have prophetic dreams.’’
The stumbling whirlpool’s grip on the trigger tightened and the world before her went white, as the gun fired at the old skeleton.
Samantha blinked, not at first realizing what she did, as fire raged in front of her.
‘no… no, No! I NEED Answers!!’ The whirlpool turned to despair.
Samantha muttered in her rage, dead eyed at the exploding air.
She came back to her wights as she heard Myrion’s voice, continuing like nothing had happened.
‘’And sometimes during the day there were unignorable gut feelings… I drove me crazy, but I’m finally rid of them.’’
The whirlpool blinked, before rage took hold again. ‘Damn, ghost!! How am I going to kill him…’
Myrion seemed to have a slight smirk at her antics as he continued. ‘’I saw it all in my dreams, what would happen if I didn't do certain things. Like once I bought a bag of oranges, instead of apples like in the dream and somehow there was a car crash with seven dead, because someone had thrown that bag of apples on to the car's windshield…’’ Myrion shook his head and sighed.
‘’It started small like that, everyday things. Then it got into my hobbies one at a time with bigger consequences… Science most of all…’’
‘’You know the super-plastivore. In the dream it went exactly as it did in reality, but this time I couldn't do anything about it. Everything somehow slipped from my hands to land on the right keys and buttons to genome code the part I was responsible…’’
‘’I tested it with everything I got. Either I'm the luckiest man in history, guessing everything right with 100% accuracy or the unluckiest, messing things up so bad that the whole world is affected…’’
‘’And I tried everything to get it from affecting more of my science by taking up a lot of hobbies. Not just for old boredom, but for that too.’’
‘’Aether tech was something I didn't expect… After I saw it in my dream I couldn't help but see the world differently with new solutions to problems we were facing at the moment… Things clicked into place. Everything worked.’’ The ghost had at this point gotten up and walked in circles as he explained his thoughts.
Samantha couldn't believe it. Flat out, it was insane. This wasn't what she wanted to hear, even more than that of an admission of guilt for her parents' deaths would’ve been.
‘’For the past few decades I was afraid of not following the dreams. Something worse could've happened…’’
‘’... So… what is this place? What happens now?’’ Samantha swallowed the whirlpool of emotions under her skin for now.
‘’I don't know about this place, but here under us is a trapped god, imprisoned and wanting to be set free…’’ Myrion looked down on the central icosahedra.
‘’I just can't believe any of this…’’ Samantha dropped the gun and it floated in the zero-g air.
Myrion stayed silent for a moment.
‘’In the dream I killed it… But then the whole universe ended there… And it is going to break out soon, if we don't do anything… I don't know what it'll do, but it can't be good… I have the control of the palace's alien AI. We have about ten hours before near everything here breaks from lack of maintenance, and there’s no way I can fix it all when I understand about this place even less than about the dreams… There’s- other secrets here as well… But you’ll need to be careful about keeping them a secret if you want to find them, until you're sure humanity can handle the truth.’’
‘’W-what…’’ Samantha just couldn't believe any of this was actually happening. ‘’What do we d-do?’’
Myrion smiled sadly and said. ‘’I have a gut feeling.’’ Pointing at the bloody cylinder next to where the gun had been.

I worked as a general manager for a subway about 4 years ago. They paid me crap and I couldn’t afford anything. I quit after 3 months as I couldn’t survive off the pay anymore. During the last month I stole so much food and I’m not just talking 2 sandwiches here and a bag of chips there. I had control to the cameras and would turn them away from the parking lot when I did this and the district manager never noticed as he rarely watched the cameras anyways. There was 15 stores in his area anyways. I would take packs of salami, pepperoni, lettuce, cookies, boxes of chips etc., whatever I could eat at home. My food costs went up some, but I didn’t care. My district manager didn’t ask me about it until a few days before I planned on quitting. I had a meeting with my crew about watching their waste (knowing damn well they weren’t).

To part 1
Last part (two-parter)
/Biological Parable/
Part 40: Getting answers above a god.
\niirssk-k-k* narshh\*
The metallic hands closed and opened in the vacuum of space only audible though the vibrations of the body, that was hurtling towards the moon at a record speed.
\niirssk-k-k* narshh\*
If the emotions of Samantha Everest could be visualized, she'd have a whirlpool of blind rage and questions atop her head.
Whatever the case was with the ghosts, she had to make sure Myrion wasn't twisted enough to orchestrate all of her life. How deep did it even go?
It just couldn't be. It was like Myrion’s head had always been in the clouds, yet with all that had been happening here recently she'd just have to just cope with it.
There need not be more thoughts and monologues, as she devoted all her thoughts to that rage she rarely had in her.
In a few hours she had installed the ‘Freebird’ cybernetics left by Myrion. Glass-like exoskeletal skin with copper inlays, the internal organs for light conversion and the four miniature Riftdragger engines for free 360 movement through space.
A whirlpool of emotions descended onto the dark side of the moon at supersonic speeds.
She had the moon’s map to direct her to the Lunar Palace.
The whirlpool curved towards the colourful palace, lit by the stars.
There was no time to consult with the crazy people at the guarded entrance.
The four Lunar cultist guards wielding shotguns watched in confusion as the flying woman flew over them and into the entrance of the inner chamber. Shotgun shells fired in muted silence, the few pellets ricocheting off Samantha's new skin.
To the shock of the Lunar cultists, the inner chamber’s massive floor entrance rumbled to life, despite it not being a full moon and the strange woman didn't hesitate to dive in.
As Samantha saw the entrance open for her the true dread and further anger set in of change that the ghost's words could be true.
‘A damn puppet… a puppet… and I'm going straight to where he wants…’ She needed to think of something but it all just made her hate Myrion and her life even more.
The rainbow molded alien metal cracked as the whirlpool’s fist got directed at the mesh-wall.
The glass skin was spotless. The whirlpool’s attention moved from her hand to the one opening door in the hall lined with doors, urging her to continue. Samantha bit her teeth together and doubled her speed though the winding halls.
Doors opened and closed for her in the labyrinthine chambers of the inner Luna at the increasing pace the whirlpool took.
‘This place is massive…’ Another type of dread started to crawl on her head of the implications this palace and the ghost could mean.
The rainbow molded walls flew past her to increasingly cleaner and darker chambers deeper in.
At some point there was a sudden change in gravity to zero-g but with her flying it hardly mattered.
Then there was the last chamber that opened to oxygen rich air.
The largest by far, an icosahedral shaped chamber with a smaller identical icosahedra floating in the middle of the giant chamber.
As she started to head towards the center she realized the scale of the thing. It was hardly getting any bigger at the current speed.
With calculations coming from her brain computer the central icosahedra was the size of the entire moon itself.
The rage of the whirlpool started to fade into confusion and her dread into terror as she increased her speed through space.
The whine of the zero-g air on her speeding glass skin disturbed her as the noise echoed hauntedly in the giant chamber.
Finally landing onto the massive icosahedra she looked around but didn't see an opening. The thing under her feet was made out of something iridescent and metallic, casting strange mirages and colours.
At the center of one of the triangular faces of the icosahedra, was a blood splatter and what looked to be a gun of some sort and a blood and gunk covered cylinder.
‘What the hell??...’ Samantha was very confused, but as there wasn't anything else to go off of she first picked up the gun.
It was a weird looking thing, a modified glock-9 as the brain computer quickly analyzed.
But Samantha saw what her camera eyes couldn't see, Myrion. Ghouled, emaciated man in a lab coat that seemed to flutter in an unseen wind, but it was Myrion, she knew.
‘’... Samantha. Glad you could make it in time…’’ Myron's apparition looked calm, the voice as ethereal as it was haunting.
The whirlpool suddenly stopped, before redoubling its momentum. ‘’Myrion!’’ The gun in Samantha's hand made its way to point at the apparition. Samantha would need to just cope with this all or that she had gone insane at some point.
‘’You installed the whole ‘Freebird’, good, good.’’ Myrion’s hollow eyes stared down the gun barrel pointed at him.
‘’D-Did you kill my parents?!’’
‘’Oh, no, no. Heavens, why'd you say such a thing?... That isn't how you say hello to the dead.’’ Myrion's expression remained emotionless.
‘’The recordings! Y-you!’’ Samantha's whirlpool was making a barrel roll inside her head, she nearly pulled on the trigger then and there.
‘’Won't you sit down with me and let's talk about the future, shall we? We have a bit of time.’’ The apparition sat down next to the splatters of blood.
‘’What the hell is going on…’’ Samantha didn't let go of the trigger, standing still.
‘’Well, you have to be more specific, because a lot of this are happening or are going to happen very, very soon…’’ Myrion mock tapped on his skeletal elusive hand’s wrist to show the time.
‘’Th-that recording, you sent me… it looked like it wasn't edited all the way… you're a madman if those things are true.’’ She needed to know.
‘’...Hmm. Right, that-... Would you believe me if I said I didn't plan anything and just went with a feeling?’’ Myrion shook his head while laughing.
‘’What? Seriously?’’ Samantha broke a tooth from biting too hard on it. She didn't even care, staring coldly down at the dead man. ‘’You seriously think I'm that gullible…’’
A deranged, disbelieving smile crept onto her lips. ‘’Thou maybe you're just insane, hehe. NO! Tell, me, the truth, you sick old man.’’
Myrion smiled sadly, his head swaying and eyes wandering for the right words. ‘’I'll tell you what I know, but I know it won't satisfy anything.’’ The skeleton gestured generally to the air.
He gestured for Samantha to sit down, which she gingerly did, still pointing the gun at the apparition.
‘’Firstly… Do you believe in destiny?’’ Myrion started, staring into somewhere else.
Samantha narrowed her eyes at Myrion. ‘’Sigh Fine, let's play along… With how things are now with the ghosts, I wouldn't pass it off as nothing anymore.’’
Myrion nodded. ‘’Hah… yes… When I was born in the Lunar commune, or as it was then in the 2020ths known as the Children of the Moon.
I was prophesied to be the incarnation of the founder of the cult, destined to be the hand and mouth of the Lunar Goddess when the end times would start… But it never did start, at least the disaster-decade wasn't as the scriptures had told it, so there was debate in the cult of what it all ment…’’
‘’Alright… are you getting to the point?’’ Samantha shoved the gun forwards, as there was a pause.
‘’Yes. At that time I had already started moving away from the church, doubting my prophecy, getting more into science… I felt I wasn't enough, so I compensated so I could still save the planet and humanity another way… But-... I started to have prophetic dreams.’’
The stumbling whirlpool’s grip on the trigger tightened and the world before her went white, as the gun fired at the old skeleton.
Samantha blinked, not at first realizing what she did, as fire raged in front of her.
‘no… no, No! I NEED Answers!!’ The whirlpool turned to despair.
Samantha muttered in her rage, dead eyed at the exploding air.
She came back to her wights as she heard Myrion’s voice, continuing like nothing had happened.
‘’And sometimes during the day there were unignorable gut feelings… I drove me crazy, but I’m finally rid of them.’’
The whirlpool blinked, before rage took hold again. ‘Damn, ghost!! How am I going to kill him…’
Myrion seemed to have a slight smirk at her antics as he continued. ‘’I saw it all in my dreams, what would happen if I didn't do certain things. Like once I bought a bag of oranges, instead of apples like in the dream and somehow there was a car crash with seven dead, because someone had thrown that bag of apples on to the car's windshield…’’ Myrion shook his head and sighed.
‘’It started small like that, everyday things. Then it got into my hobbies one at a time with bigger consequences… Science most of all…’’
‘’You know the super-plastivore. In the dream it went exactly as it did in reality, but this time I couldn't do anything about it. Everything somehow slipped from my hands to land on the right keys and buttons to genome code the part I was responsible…’’
‘’I tested it with everything I got. Either I'm the luckiest man in history, guessing everything right with 100% accuracy or the unluckiest, messing things up so bad that the whole world is affected…’’
‘’And I tried everything to get it from affecting more of my science by taking up a lot of hobbies. Not just for old boredom, but for that too.’’
‘’Aether tech was something I didn't expect… After I saw it in my dream I couldn't help but see the world differently with new solutions to problems we were facing at the moment… Things clicked into place. Everything worked.’’ The ghost had at this point gotten up and walked in circles as he explained his thoughts.
Samantha couldn't believe it. Flat out, it was insane. This wasn't what she wanted to hear, even more than that of an admission of guilt for her parents' deaths would’ve been.
‘’For the past few decades I was afraid of not following the dreams. Something worse could've happened…’’
‘’... So… what is this place? What happens now?’’ Samantha swallowed the whirlpool of emotions under her skin for now.
‘’I don't know about this place, but here under us is a trapped god, imprisoned and wanting to be set free…’’ Myrion looked down on the central icosahedra.
‘’I just can't believe any of this…’’ Samantha dropped the gun and it floated in the zero-g air.
Myrion stayed silent for a moment.
‘’In the dream I killed it… But then the whole universe ended there… And it is going to break out soon, if we don't do anything… I don't know what it'll do, but it can't be good… I have the control of the palace's alien AI. We have about ten hours before near everything here breaks from lack of maintenance, and there’s no way I can fix it all when I understand about this place even less than about the dreams… There’s- other secrets here as well… But you’ll need to be careful about keeping them a secret if you want to find them, until you're sure humanity can handle the truth.’’
‘’W-what…’’ Samantha just couldn't believe any of this was actually happening. ‘’What do we d-do?’’
Myrion smiled sadly and said. ‘’I have a gut feeling.’’ Pointing at the bloody cylinder next to where the gun had been.

To part 1
Last part (two-parter)
/Biological Parable/
Part 40: Getting answers above a god.
*niirssk-k-k* *narshh*
The metallic hands closed and opened in the vacuum of space only audible though the vibrations of the body, that was hurtling towards the moon at a record speed.
*niirssk-k-k* *narshh*
If the emotions of Samantha Everest could be visualized, she'd have a whirlpool of blind rage and questions atop her head.
Whatever the case was with the ghosts, she had to make sure Myrion wasn't twisted enough to orchestrate all of her life. How deep did it even go?
It just couldn't be. It was like Myrion’s head had always been in the clouds, yet with all that had been happening here recently she'd just have to just cope with it.
There need not be more thoughts and monologues, as she devoted all her thoughts to that rage she rarely had in her.
In a few hours she had installed the ‘Freebird’ cybernetics left by Myrion. Glass-like exoskeletal skin with copper inlays, the internal organs for light conversion and the four miniature Riftdragger engines for free 360 movement through space.
A whirlpool of emotions descended onto the dark side of the moon at supersonic speeds.
She had the moon’s map to direct her to the Lunar Palace.
The whirlpool curved towards the colourful palace, lit by the stars.
There was no time to consult with the crazy people at the guarded entrance.
The four Lunar cultist guards wielding shotguns watched in confusion as the flying woman flew over them and into the entrance of the inner chamber. Shotgun shells fired in muted silence, the few pellets ricocheting off Samantha's new skin.
To the shock of the Lunar cultists, the inner chamber’s massive floor entrance rumbled to life, despite it not being a full moon and the strange woman didn't hesitate to dive in.
As Samantha saw the entrance open for her the true dread and further anger set in of change that the ghost's words could be true.
‘A damn puppet… a puppet… and I'm going straight to where he wants…’ She needed to think of something but it all just made her hate Myrion and her life even more.
The rainbow molded alien metal cracked as the whirlpool’s fist got directed at the mesh-wall.
The glass skin was spotless. The whirlpool’s attention moved from her hand to the one opening door in the hall lined with doors, urging her to continue. Samantha bit her teeth together and doubled her speed though the winding halls.
Doors opened and closed for her in the labyrinthine chambers of the inner Luna at the increasing pace the whirlpool took.
‘This place is massive…’ Another type of dread started to crawl on her head of the implications this palace and the ghost could mean.
The rainbow molded walls flew past her to increasingly cleaner and darker chambers deeper in.
At some point there was a sudden change in gravity to zero-g but with her flying it hardly mattered.
Then there was the last chamber that opened to oxygen rich air.
The largest by far, an icosahedral shaped chamber with a smaller identical icosahedra floating in the middle of the giant chamber.
As she started to head towards the center she realized the scale of the thing. It was hardly getting any bigger at the current speed.
With calculations coming from her brain computer the central icosahedra was the size of the entire moon itself.
The rage of the whirlpool started to fade into confusion and her dread into terror as she increased her speed through space.
The whine of the zero-g air on her speeding glass skin disturbed her as the noise echoed hauntedly in the giant chamber.
Finally landing onto the massive icosahedra she looked around but didn't see an opening. The thing under her feet was made out of something iridescent and metallic, casting strange mirages and colours.
At the center of one of the triangular faces of the icosahedra, was a blood splatter and what looked to be a gun of some sort and a blood and gunk covered cylinder.
‘What the hell??...’ Samantha was very confused, but as there wasn't anything else to go off of she first picked up the gun.
It was a weird looking thing, a modified glock-9 as the brain computer quickly analyzed.
But Samantha saw what her camera eyes couldn't see, Myrion. Ghouled, emaciated man in a lab coat that seemed to flutter in an unseen wind, but it was Myrion, she knew.
‘’... Samantha. Glad you could make it in time…’’ Myron's apparition looked calm, the voice as ethereal as it was haunting.
The whirlpool suddenly stopped, before redoubling its momentum. ‘’Myrion!’’ The gun in Samantha's hand made its way to point at the apparition. Samantha would need to just cope with this all or that she had gone insane at some point.
‘’You installed the whole ‘Freebird’, good, good.’’ Myrion’s hollow eyes stared down the gun barrel pointed at him.
‘’D-Did you kill my parents?!’’
‘’Oh, no, no. Heavens, why'd you say such a thing?... That isn't how you say hello to the dead.’’ Myrion's expression remained emotionless.
‘’The recordings! Y-you!’’ Samantha's whirlpool was making a barrel roll inside her head, she nearly pulled on the trigger then and there.
‘’Won't you sit down with me and let's talk about the future, shall we? We have a bit of time.’’ The apparition sat down next to the splatters of blood.
‘’What the hell is going on…’’ Samantha didn't let go of the trigger, standing still.
‘’Well, you have to be more specific, because a lot of this are happening or are going to happen very, very soon…’’ Myrion mock tapped on his skeletal elusive hand’s wrist to show the time.
‘’Th-that recording, you sent me… it looked like it wasn't edited all the way… you're a madman if those things are true.’’ She needed to know.
‘’...Hmm. Right, that-... Would you believe me if I said I didn't plan anything and just went with a feeling?’’ Myrion shook his head while laughing.
‘’What? Seriously?’’ Samantha broke a tooth from biting too hard on it. She didn't even care, staring coldly down at the dead man. ‘’You seriously think I'm that gullible…’’
A deranged, disbelieving smile crept onto her lips. ‘’Thou maybe you're just insane, hehe. NO! Tell, me, the truth, you sick old man.’’
Myrion smiled sadly, his head swaying and eyes wandering for the right words. ‘’I'll tell you what I know, but I know it won't satisfy anything.’’ The skeleton gestured generally to the air.
He gestured for Samantha to sit down, which she gingerly did, still pointing the gun at the apparition.
‘’Firstly… Do you believe in destiny?’’ Myrion started, staring into somewhere else.
Samantha narrowed her eyes at Myrion. ‘’*Sigh* Fine, let's play along… With how things are now with the ghosts, I wouldn't pass it off as nothing anymore.’’
Myrion nodded. ‘’Hah… yes… When I was born in the Lunar commune, or as it was then in the 2020ths known as the Children of the Moon.
I was prophesied to be the incarnation of the founder of the cult, destined to be the hand and mouth of the Lunar Goddess when the end times would start… But it never did start, at least the disaster-decade wasn't as the scriptures had told it, so there was debate in the cult of what it all ment…’’
‘’Alright… are you getting to the point?’’ Samantha shoved the gun forwards, as there was a pause.
‘’Yes. At that time I had already started moving away from the church, doubting my prophecy, getting more into science… I felt I wasn't enough, so I compensated so I could still save the planet and humanity another way… But-... I started to have prophetic dreams.’’
The stumbling whirlpool’s grip on the trigger tightened and the world before her went white, as the gun fired at the old skeleton.
Samantha blinked, not at first realizing what she did, as fire raged in front of her.
‘no… no, No! I NEED Answers!!’ The whirlpool turned to despair.
Samantha muttered in her rage, dead eyed at the exploding air.
She came back to her wights as she heard Myrion’s voice, continuing like nothing had happened.
‘’And sometimes during the day there were unignorable gut feelings… I drove me crazy, but I’m finally rid of them.’’
The whirlpool blinked, before rage took hold again. ‘Damn, ghost!! How am I going to kill him…’
Myrion seemed to have a slight smirk at her antics as he continued. ‘’I saw it all in my dreams, what would happen if I didn't do certain things. Like once I bought a bag of oranges, instead of apples like in the dream and somehow there was a car crash with seven dead, because someone had thrown that bag of apples on to the car's windshield…’’ Myrion shook his head and sighed.
‘’It started small like that, everyday things. Then it got into my hobbies one at a time with bigger consequences… Science most of all…’’
‘’You know the super-plastivore. In the dream it went exactly as it did in reality, but this time I couldn't do anything about it. Everything somehow slipped from my hands to land on the right keys and buttons to genome code the part I was responsible…’’
‘’I tested it with everything I got. Either I'm the luckiest man in history, guessing everything right with 100% accuracy or the unluckiest, messing things up so bad that the whole world is affected…’’
‘’And I tried everything to get it from affecting more of my science by taking up a lot of hobbies. Not just for old boredom, but for that too.’’
‘’Aether tech was something I didn't expect… After I saw it in my dream I couldn't help but see the world differently with new solutions to problems we were facing at the moment… Things clicked into place. Everything worked.’’ The ghost had at this point gotten up and walked in circles as he explained his thoughts.
Samantha couldn't believe it. Flat out, it was insane. This wasn't what she wanted to hear, even more than that of an admission of guilt for her parents' deaths would’ve been.
‘’For the past few decades I was afraid of not following the dreams. Something worse could've happened…’’
‘’... So… what is this place? What happens now?’’ Samantha swallowed the whirlpool of emotions under her skin for now.
‘’I don't know about this place, but here under us is a trapped god, imprisoned and wanting to be set free…’’ Myrion looked down on the central icosahedra.
‘’I just can't believe any of this…’’ Samantha dropped the gun and it floated in the zero-g air.
Myrion stayed silent for a moment.
‘’In the dream I killed it… But then the whole universe ended there… And it is going to break out soon, if we don't do anything… I don't know what it'll do, but it can't be good… I have the control of the palace's alien AI. We have about ten hours before near everything here breaks from lack of maintenance, and there’s no way I can fix it all when I understand about this place even less than about the dreams… There’s- other secrets here as well… But you’ll need to be careful about keeping them a secret if you want to find them, until you're sure humanity can handle the truth.’’
‘’W-what…’’ Samantha just couldn't believe any of this was actually happening. ‘’What do we d-do?’’
Myrion smiled sadly and said. ‘’I have a gut feeling.’’ Pointing at the bloody cylinder next to where the gun had been.

To part 1
Last part (two-parter)
/Biological Parable/
Part 40: Getting answers above a god.
*niirssk-k-k* *narshh*
The metallic hands closed and opened in the vacuum of space only audible though the vibrations of the body, that was hurtling towards the moon at a record speed.
*niirssk-k-k* *narshh*
If the emotions of Samantha Everest could be visualized, she'd have a whirlpool of blind rage and questions atop her head.
Whatever the case was with the ghosts, she had to make sure Myrion wasn't twisted enough to orchestrate all of her life. How deep did it even go?
It just couldn't be. It was like Myrion’s head had always been in the clouds, yet with all that had been happening here recently she'd just have to just cope with it.
There need not be more thoughts and monologues, as she devoted all her thoughts to that rage she rarely had in her.
In a few hours she had installed the ‘Freebird’ cybernetics left by Myrion. Glass-like exoskeletal skin with copper inlays, the internal organs for light conversion and the four miniature Riftdragger engines for free 360 movement through space.
A whirlpool of emotions descended onto the dark side of the moon at supersonic speeds.
She had the moon’s map to direct her to the Lunar Palace.
The whirlpool curved towards the colourful palace, lit by the stars.
There was no time to consult with the crazy people at the guarded entrance.
The four Lunar cultist guards wielding shotguns watched in confusion as the flying woman flew over them and into the entrance of the inner chamber. Shotgun shells fired in muted silence, the few pellets ricocheting off Samantha's new skin.
To the shock of the Lunar cultists, the inner chamber’s massive floor entrance rumbled to life, despite it not being a full moon and the strange woman didn't hesitate to dive in.
As Samantha saw the entrance open for her the true dread and further anger set in of change that the ghost's words could be true.
‘A damn puppet… a puppet… and I'm going straight to where he wants…’ She needed to think of something but it all just made her hate Myrion and her life even more.
The rainbow molded alien metal cracked as the whirlpool’s fist got directed at the mesh-wall.
The glass skin was spotless. The whirlpool’s attention moved from her hand to the one opening door in the hall lined with doors, urging her to continue. Samantha bit her teeth together and doubled her speed though the winding halls.
Doors opened and closed for her in the labyrinthine chambers of the inner Luna at the increasing pace the whirlpool took.
‘This place is massive…’ Another type of dread started to crawl on her head of the implications this palace and the ghost could mean.
The rainbow molded walls flew past her to increasingly cleaner and darker chambers deeper in.
At some point there was a sudden change in gravity to zero-g but with her flying it hardly mattered.
Then there was the last chamber that opened to oxygen rich air.
The largest by far, an icosahedral shaped chamber with a smaller identical icosahedra floating in the middle of the giant chamber.
As she started to head towards the center she realized the scale of the thing. It was hardly getting any bigger at the current speed.
With calculations coming from her brain computer the central icosahedra was the size of the entire moon itself.
The rage of the whirlpool started to fade into confusion and her dread into terror as she increased her speed through space.
The whine of the zero-g air on her speeding glass skin disturbed her as the noise echoed hauntedly in the giant chamber.
Finally landing onto the massive icosahedra she looked around but didn't see an opening. The thing under her feet was made out of something iridescent and metallic, casting strange mirages and colours.
At the center of one of the triangular faces of the icosahedra, was a blood splatter and what looked to be a gun of some sort and a blood and gunk covered cylinder.
‘What the hell??...’ Samantha was very confused, but as there wasn't anything else to go off of she first picked up the gun.
It was a weird looking thing, a modified glock-9 as the brain computer quickly analyzed.
But Samantha saw what her camera eyes couldn't see, Myrion. Ghouled, emaciated man in a lab coat that seemed to flutter in an unseen wind, but it was Myrion, she knew.
‘’... Samantha. Glad you could make it in time…’’ Myron's apparition looked calm, the voice as ethereal as it was haunting.
The whirlpool suddenly stopped, before redoubling its momentum. ‘’Myrion!’’ The gun in Samantha's hand made its way to point at the apparition. Samantha would need to just cope with this all or that she had gone insane at some point.
‘’You installed the whole ‘Freebird’, good, good.’’ Myrion’s hollow eyes stared down the gun barrel pointed at him.
‘’D-Did you kill my parents?!’’
‘’Oh, no, no. Heavens, why'd you say such a thing?... That isn't how you say hello to the dead.’’ Myrion's expression remained emotionless.
‘’The recordings! Y-you!’’ Samantha's whirlpool was making a barrel roll inside her head, she nearly pulled on the trigger then and there.
‘’Won't you sit down with me and let's talk about the future, shall we? We have a bit of time.’’ The apparition sat down next to the splatters of blood.
‘’What the hell is going on…’’ Samantha didn't let go of the trigger, standing still.
‘’Well, you have to be more specific, because a lot of this are happening or are going to happen very, very soon…’’ Myrion mock tapped on his skeletal elusive hand’s wrist to show the time.
‘’Th-that recording, you sent me… it looked like it wasn't edited all the way… you're a madman if those things are true.’’ She needed to know.
‘’...Hmm. Right, that-... Would you believe me if I said I didn't plan anything and just went with a feeling?’’ Myrion shook his head while laughing.
‘’What? Seriously?’’ Samantha broke a tooth from biting too hard on it. She didn't even care, staring coldly down at the dead man. ‘’You seriously think I'm that gullible…’’
A deranged, disbelieving smile crept onto her lips. ‘’Thou maybe you're just insane, hehe. NO! Tell, me, the truth, you sick old man.’’
Myrion smiled sadly, his head swaying and eyes wandering for the right words. ‘’I'll tell you what I know, but I know it won't satisfy anything.’’ The skeleton gestured generally to the air.
He gestured for Samantha to sit down, which she gingerly did, still pointing the gun at the apparition.
‘’Firstly… Do you believe in destiny?’’ Myrion started, staring into somewhere else.
Samantha narrowed her eyes at Myrion. ‘’*Sigh* Fine, let's play along… With how things are now with the ghosts, I wouldn't pass it off as nothing anymore.’’
Myrion nodded. ‘’Hah… yes… When I was born in the Lunar commune, or as it was then in the 2020ths known as the Children of the Moon.
I was prophesied to be the incarnation of the founder of the cult, destined to be the hand and mouth of the Lunar Goddess when the end times would start… But it never did start, at least the disaster-decade wasn't as the scriptures had told it, so there was debate in the cult of what it all ment…’’
‘’Alright… are you getting to the point?’’ Samantha shoved the gun forwards, as there was a pause.
‘’Yes. At that time I had already started moving away from the church, doubting my prophecy, getting more into science… I felt I wasn't enough, so I compensated so I could still save the planet and humanity another way… But-... I started to have prophetic dreams.’’
The stumbling whirlpool’s grip on the trigger tightened and the world before her went white, as the gun fired at the old skeleton.
Samantha blinked, not at first realizing what she did, as fire raged in front of her.
‘no… no, No! I NEED Answers!!’ The whirlpool turned to despair.
Samantha muttered in her rage, dead eyed at the exploding air.
She came back to her wights as she heard Myrion’s voice, continuing like nothing had happened.
‘’And sometimes during the day there were unignorable gut feelings… I drove me crazy, but I’m finally rid of them.’’
The whirlpool blinked, before rage took hold again. ‘Damn, ghost!! How am I going to kill him…’
Myrion seemed to have a slight smirk at her antics as he continued. ‘’I saw it all in my dreams, what would happen if I didn't do certain things. Like once I bought a bag of oranges, instead of apples like in the dream and somehow there was a car crash with seven dead, because someone had thrown that bag of apples on to the car's windshield…’’ Myrion shook his head and sighed.
‘’It started small like that, everyday things. Then it got into my hobbies one at a time with bigger consequences… Science most of all…’’
‘’You know the super-plastivore. In the dream it went exactly as it did in reality, but this time I couldn't do anything about it. Everything somehow slipped from my hands to land on the right keys and buttons to genome code the part I was responsible…’’
‘’I tested it with everything I got. Either I'm the luckiest man in history, guessing everything right with 100% accuracy or the unluckiest, messing things up so bad that the whole world is affected…’’
‘’And I tried everything to get it from affecting more of my science by taking up a lot of hobbies. Not just for old boredom, but for that too.’’
‘’Aether tech was something I didn't expect… After I saw it in my dream I couldn't help but see the world differently with new solutions to problems we were facing at the moment… Things clicked into place. Everything worked.’’ The ghost had at this point gotten up and walked in circles as he explained his thoughts.
Samantha couldn't believe it. Flat out, it was insane. This wasn't what she wanted to hear, even more than that of an admission of guilt for her parents' deaths would’ve been.
‘’For the past few decades I was afraid of not following the dreams. Something worse could've happened…’’
‘’... So… what is this place? What happens now?’’ Samantha swallowed the whirlpool of emotions under her skin for now.
‘’I don't know about this place, but here under us is a trapped god, imprisoned and wanting to be set free…’’ Myrion looked down on the central icosahedra.
‘’I just can't believe any of this…’’ Samantha dropped the gun and it floated in the zero-g air.
Myrion stayed silent for a moment.
‘’In the dream I killed it… But then the whole universe ended there… And it is going to break out soon, if we don't do anything… I don't know what it'll do, but it can't be good… I have the control of the palace's alien AI. We have about ten hours before near everything here breaks from lack of maintenance, and there’s no way I can fix it all when I understand about this place even less than about the dreams… There’s- other secrets here as well… But you’ll need to be careful about keeping them a secret if you want to find them, until you're sure humanity can handle the truth.’’
‘’W-what…’’ Samantha just couldn't believe any of this was actually happening. ‘’What do we d-do?’’
Myrion smiled sadly and said. ‘’I have a gut feeling.’’ Pointing at the bloody cylinder next to where the gun had been.

I’m going to be blunt to keep this short!
I currently have a Nikon D5000, and have had it for 5 years now - and I’m ready to move onto stronger gear.
I like car photography, want to try sports photography, and otherwise used day to day, some portraits, but not a big bird photographer.
I’m about to go look at this used D610, that comes with this package:
Nikon D610 Full Frame
70-300mm 4.5-5.6 VR (edit: AF-S ED VR) 18-55mm 3.5-5.6mm DX 35mm 1.8 DX
Comes with Charger, Nikon Bag, Sony Lens Bag, 16 & 64GB SD Cards, Lens Cleaner
They’re asking $800 CAD, or $586 USD. ^ this is quite a bit of money for me (student)
Besides the fact that I’m very stressed that I might not notice something wrong the camera, as it’s more advanced than mine - do you think this is a good deal?
From what I’ve been researching, I feel like it’s a very good deal. (But the two lenses are not full frame, which isn’t great, right?)
Is it too good to be true, or do I think it’s better than it is? If it is too good to be true, what could be wrong with it 🚩 that I should look out for? Thanks!

Doug was what you'd call a not very good person. Growing up Doug lie and cheat, lying about how it was his sister's fault that their $2,000 vase to get her in trouble just to put a smile on his face. He'd beat up both his brother and sister and would always get away with it. As an adult Doug would only because a worse person, as he had no regard for anybody in the world but himself and his ego. Doug would berate, humiliate, and on a few occasions beat women, he'd cause fights at the bar just to see if he could win, but there was one thing that Doug would do something that would get him in a lot more trouble.
Doug made his living, besides a "bland" office job, by stealing other people's living. He would find the most wealthy targets through the dark web and sneak inside their house at night after disabling their alarms and cameras. Despite Doug's barbaric personality, he was incredibly smart when it came to knowing how to make someone's life a living Hell. But there was one way in the house Doug liked to go through due to his sleek figure, and that was the doggie door.
Doug heard of a new house being built down the block, down the left of his street at the end of the road. Doug seemed to think only he noticed the house as when asked around about in the town nobody knew anything about it. Despite this, once the home was completed and Doug found out it already had a family moved in he went to make his move.
Doug packed his favorite suppressed pistol, his flashlight, and his dufflebag to slide through his entryway and made it to the house. Doug noticed there was no car, which was odd as the people who lived here according to his new dark web partner, was a cardiologist and an accountant. "Maybe the accountant had a weekend call. Doesn't matter to me." Doug said out loud. He looked for alarms on his app he bought off the dark web but there were none, "Easy Pickens."
Doug slid his duffle bag through the doggie door then crawled on through it with ease before he grabbed his bag and took out his pistol to begin looting the house. A vase and an authentic 1945 vinyl record here, then an original 1885 sawed off shotgun and a see through case of gold 1700 coins there already earned Doug nearly half a million dollars. But this just wasn't enough to please greedy Doug.
As Doug was approaching the hallway, he noticed that all the doors were opened. But this wasn't what confused Doug but it was that he didn't hear anything when there was supposedly a German Sheppard size dog in the house with food and water bowls he was staring at. Doug shrugged and walked down the hallway and looked for the bedroom, finding it across the hall from the bathroom door. Doug went in opened the drawers to take the oddly placed valuables that already increased his profit to over a million dollars.
Doug smiled to himself and went to leave when he noticed that there wasn't a dog anywhere to be found. Then as Doug stood there he heard everything stop, by everything it included the sound of the running ceiling ceasing and was replaced by breathing. Doug exited the bedroom and went back into the living room where the breathing increased in volume and rhythm as if someone was hyperventilating. "Come out!" Doug shouted. And it did just that.
Twisted red eyes, a wide mouth that was pushing red mist out of it with undistinguishable liquids dripping out of it, long arms that were connected to massive hands with serrated fingers that clung onto the hallway's walls like a spider, all connected and apart of a caved in head and a body that was wrapped in liquid covered chains. It was the height of the ceiling and had a face that looked as if it had seen all of Earth's greatest tragedies while having a love for humanity.
Doug fired his pistol at the entity in its head and body but it didn't seem to affect the being. But as Doug did shoot the creature it let out a stream of liquid from its eyes, it was crying and letting out a disheartened sob as it bled profusely. "Put it back!" It howled as it dropped to its knees. "Put it back please!" The creature sobbed. Doug's pistol ran out of ammo and once it did he sprinted for the door he came in through with his duffel bag, pushing the bag through the door. "You'll be like me, you can't be like me!" Doug heard behind him as he struggled to get through the door. The doggie door curtain felt like it was a thousand pounds, but Doug pushed through it.
Halfway out of the doggie door Doug clung onto his duffel bag as he tried pulling himself out of the doggie door. Doug was about to get his legs through when they were pulled back through it, forcing Doug to hold onto the sides of the door. "Greed! Greed!" The creature bellowed as Doug screamed. CRUNCH CRACK, "You'll be damned like me, you can't!" The entity wailed. Doug screamed one last time before falling limp as he heard the monster cry, "You'll be like me, nobody can be me."
Doggie Door Doug was what he was known as. He was called that because he was found stuck in a doggie door, everything below his waist was crushed by a massive weight. Doggie Door Doug had everything he wanted in life, except for a good life.

Using a throwaway just in case. So I'm currently staying at my aunt's place for now because my current job doesn't pay alot.
I have an uncle who's a drug addict and a gambler who gambles mostly on his phone. The thing is, his attitude is getting a bit out of hand. I noticed that whenever his high or on drugs, he's always hyperactive, likes to thrash the place and tend to talk to his self loudly. If you also add his addiction to gambling, it tends to get scary. Whenever he "borrow" money from me, he always promise to give it back but never really do it. He already accumulated 23k in total from me, which I was planning to use for my camera. If I refused to give him, he'll either try to let me sleep first and steal my wallet from my bag or just whine loudly and thrash the place, the situation is the same for my aunt. ThoughI'm a bit worried since after moving from "borrowing" money from us, he shifted his eyes on my foreigner uncle. Which already lost about 7mil because of my drug addict uncle.
Recently his attitude is really getting scary, I don't know if it's withdrawals from the drugs but his behavior is getting a bit out of hand. I try to sabotage my uncle's "borrowing" by updating my foreign uncle on what the actual truth is. But it resulted in my aunt getting blamed by my drug addicted uncle. I don't know what to do. Can you help me?

This past weekend me (25F) and my boyfriend (36M) of one year went to an annual festival in our city that has high security. My boyfriend carries a knife on him for protection and also to help him out at work (he works in construction) and forgot to leave it in his car.
We get to the gates and they got metal detectors, cops everywhere and people checking bags like it’s an airport. There’s been a history of violent fights because it draws such a large crowd so they check people down like crazy before entry.
The security guard scans my boyfriend with a metal detector and my boyfriend told him he carries a knife on him for work and the dude was like “nah you guys can’t enter with that” then this other lady security guard came out kind of aggressively saying things like “you gotta go” “where did you park” “we got cameras we’ll be watching you” as if my boyfriend was about to stab someone right then and there. My boyfriend decided to tell the lady off as we turn around to leave.
As we keep walking the lady goes closer to the fence to watch us and keep telling us to leave and my bf was like “fuck off don’t fucking talk to me” gives her the finger and making a scene. I was like “babe chill out we’re going so let’s not get into more shit” then he goes off on ME like “stop being a pussy what are they gonna do”
I was pissed off and embarrassed. I’m trying to calm him down so he and I don’t get fucking tackled by a cop or arrested over bullshit and he decides to turn around and tell ME off?
He then tries to hug me as we’re walking back to his car like “I’m sorry babe” but I was too pissed. I didn’t speak to him at all for the whole ride back and I haven’t texted him much since then.
Is it wrong that I’m reconsidering whether I want to be with him anymore? I really did not like the way he conducted himself and I feel like it’s changed the way I see him.

This past weekend me and my boyfriend went to an annual festival in our city that has high security. My boyfriend carries a knife on him for protection and also to help him out at work (he works in construction) and forgot to leave it in his car.
We get to the gates and they got metal detectors, cops everywhere and people checking bags like it’s an airport. There’s been a history of violent fights because it draws such a large crowd so they check people down like crazy before entry.
The security guard scans my boyfriend with a metal detector and my boyfriend told him he carries a knife on him for work and the dude was like “nah you guys can’t enter with that” then this other lady security guard came out kind of aggressively saying things like “you gotta go” “where did you park” “we got cameras we’ll be watching you” as if my boyfriend was about to stab someone right then and there. My boyfriend decided to tell the lady off as we turn around to leave.
As we keep walking the lady goes closer to the fence to watch us and keep telling us to leave and my bf was like “fuck off don’t fucking talk to me” gives her the finger and making a scene. I was like “babe chill out we’re going so let’s not get into more shit” then he goes off on ME like “stop being a pussy what are they gonna do”
I was pissed off and embarrassed. I’m trying to calm him down so he and I don’t get fucking tackled by a cop or arrested over bullshit and he decides to turn around and tell ME off?
He then tries to hug me as we’re walking back to his car like “I’m sorry babe” but I was too pissed. I didn’t speak to him at all for the whole ride back and I haven’t texted him much since then.
Is it wrong that I’m reconsidering whether I want to be with him anymore? I really did not like the way he conducted himself and I feel like it’s changed the way I see him.