For the next three weeks, the police surround the junkyard, demanding that the No Siders come out with their hands up, and the mayor unharmed.
Meanwhile, Makko, who is completely healed from his injuries, is taken to The Dampener, where he meets up with the Red Rider.
Red introduces his fellow No Sider to his Puritan friends.
The Dampener is built with magic to keep superpowered and magical beings locked up. The police are high-level wizards, so there is very little fighting in The Dampener. Most of the murder which occurs in The Dampener is done at night when everyone is sleeping, or in the showers when the guards aren't looking.
"So, Makko, what's going on with my niece?" Red asks.
Makko, with his Hawaiian accent, tells Red Rider that Power Fist is leading the team in his absence. "She's amazing; a true leader," Makko says.
Instead of a prison jumpsuit, everyone wears a tank top, and black cargo shorts. The are over one thousand gangs in The Dampener. Each of them controls their own section of the prison, and each one will fight to the death to protect their property. The Dampener is the size of three football stadiums, and the top of The Dampener is a glass dome which stretches the length of the prison.
One of the gang leaders meets with Diamond Mine, and asks him to join in an attack against an up-and-coming gang; the new gang on the scene are the Red Rockets.
Diamond Mine agrees to march with his thousand-strong Puritans to aid Gold Rodger, and his Gold Diggers, in the fight against this new gang.
The Gold Diggers have about five hundred and fifty men in their gang.
A few members of the Raggedy Andies are in the shower. When Red Rider and Makko head to take a shower, the two of them walk in, and stand next to two men, both with long, curly, red hair, and purple hats.
The two men wear white, pancaked make-up like clowns, and one of the two men has the edges of his mouth sown closed into a smile of sorts.
While showering, one of the Andie's pulls a sword out of his body, and cuts off one of Makko's fingers.
The fish man transforms, and the other Andie attacks him from the back.
Red Rider grabs the sword from the Andie, and he cuts the other Andie's head off.
The Andie who lost his sword tries to run, but Makko gobbles him up.
Spitting up a hairball made of pubic hair, Makko regrows his finger, and leaves the showers with Red.
As they are leaving, a group of wizard guards arrive, and demand to know what has just happened.
The shower is like something out of the movie Carrie, or Psycho, but Red just explains that they were attacked by the Andies, and that they were just trying to take a shower.

***

Inside his hideout, The Know It All has built a robot version of the mayor in order to impersonate the man. He has just finished creating a layer of human skin which he can harvest from a creature which he created that looks like a giant toad.
The Know It All has to wait for a few days to harvest his skin frog’s sheddings.

***

It takes a month for his mutant frog to shed enough skin, and after that, Brain Drain is tasked with fitting the skin onto the robot. Once he completes his task, the machine is sent above ground to deal with the superheroes, and to install his villains to watch over the city.
Two weeks after sending his robot mayor into the city, The Know It All has commanded his creation to install a new chief of police, a man of his own choosing. The new chief of police is a mutant named Steel Radial: a villain who has the power to turn into a giant tire, and to flatten anyone who gets in his way.
Over the next few months, veteran police officers are replaced by supervillains, and evil mutants, all of them created by The Know It All.
The city is descending into chaos as the police themselves are extorting, and robbing anyone who crosses their path.
One night, while sitting in the junkyard, Power Fist and Metal Mouth watch as the strange cocoon hatches, and a six-foot-tall, green-skinned, squid-headed Alonzo steps out of the cocoon; he and Alliver have merged to become one. The two of them call themselves Alonzo the Alien, and they tell Power Fist that they can fix the mayor, but that it’ll take time, and spare parts which they will have to send for from their home planet.
"It might take us a few weeks to get the parts we need delivered, but, hopefully, we can get the parts before The Know It All causes too much damage," Alonzo the Alien says, using his wristband computer to send a signal into deep space.
Just outside of the energy dome which Power Fist created, Officer Jones, and his partner, Jessie Quick, wait with a bunch of police officers, and citizens, for the barrier to lower.
"How long do we have to wait for this barrier to come down before we get in the junkyard?" One of the officers asks.
As the barrier comes down, Power Fist and Metal Mouth fly off in the Justice Van, and head to Crimeville to recruit a group of former heroes to help them to patrol the streets.
Crimeville, and downtown Bainbridge, called Whites Alley, are the two safest places in the city as the heroes who patrol those parts of the city were never forced to stop.
Toilet King, and the Chicken Crew, agree to join Power Fist, and her team. No one has seen, or heard, from the League of Heroes since the robotic mayor took over the city.
Three more teams agree to join the fight against the mayor and his goons after Power Fist tells them that she has the real mayor in the junkyard.
Of the five teams which join the fight, the most powerful are the Skull Crackers, and Leaping Lizards. Each of the groups were given their name from the League of Heroes, and Castle Man, and Speed Demon, each came from one of the respective teams.
One of the new cops on the street, called Chrysalis, leads a group of meta-humans, and crooked cops, down the street to intercept the heroes coming their way. Chrysalis has the power to create crystal energy shields around himself and others, and she can fly with her butterfly wings.
Chrysalis traps Toilet King in one of her energy shields as he comes flying overhead to warn Power Fist and the rest of their group what's ahead.
The energy shield hardens like glass, and Toilet King comes crashing to the ground in his glass prison.
Power Fist hurls her gauntlets- one at Toilet King's prison, and the other at Chrysalis, who dodges it with ease.
The two sides clash with one mutant who has the power to turn into goop, enveloping three members of the Leaping Lizards, and a creature with wings called Fly-By grabs a handful of heroes, and lifts them into the air, tossing them to the ground, killing them.
One of the Leaping Lizards, Quick-Fast, knocks Fly-By out of the sky with an artic blast from his super speedy hands.
Another of the heroes, Cold Front, freezes the goop monster, and a purple-skinned, red-haired, witch-looking mutant which can change its shape.
A hero named Strong Arm- a man in a black jumpsuit with one muscular arm, and one skinny arm- punches the ground, creating a large crack, and many of the villains are swallowed up by the giant hole.
Another member of the Skull Crackers called Muscle Man, who has a bowl cut, and a muscle-tee, grabs a three-headed bird man called Tweedie, and bashes in each of his faces with his fist.
Chrysalis chases down Power Fist, who is trying to make her way through the crowd with Metal Mouth, and Toilet King flaking her on either side.
Chrysalis, and three of her goons, block the path ahead to keep Power Fist from advancing. She orders her men to kill the heroes, and to bring their bodies back to the mayor.
A six-armed goon with a bald head, and gold tooth, tries to grab Power Fist, but she ducks out of the way.
Grabbing one of his arms with her gauntleted fist, Power Fist is able to pull off two of the goon's arms on his right side.
The goon collapses to the ground in a bloody heap, and as he tries to get up, Power Fist knocks most of his teeth out with one punch from her gauntlet.
Toilet King attacks a strange, Howard-the-Duck-looking mutant who fires a laser gun at him.
Toilet King shrinks himself down, and jumps into the duck's mouth, before growing to his normal size, and tearing the duck's bill off.

***

The fight lasts for three hours before reinforcements for the villains arrive, including Robo Wrecker. Power Fist and her group are forced to retreat to the junkyard, and, with the last of her energy, Marcy is able to put up the energy shield, and stop the robot mayor's men from following them.
Upon entering the junkyard, Power Fist discovers that it is full of people, and former police officers. She demands to know what they are doing in her home.
"We didn’t have any place else to go. The Fortress of Justice is sealed shut, and most of the former heroes are in hiding, or they've left the country. It would seem that you and your friends are our only hope to save this city since the mayor's gone crazy" Officer Jones says.
"I don't understand. Why would the League of Heroes shut themselves up in their fortress instead of helping to save the city?" Power Fist asks.
It's Jessie Quick who steps in, and tells Power Fist that the League is believed to be dealing with a group of outer space aliens which are trying to invade the planet.
Power Fist laughs, and tells the officer that aliens invaded a few months ago, and the League of Heroes didn’t do shit about it.
The two girls argue for a while until Officer Jones tells them that it doesn’t matter where the league is; they aren't here to help, and there's nothing that anyone can do about it.
As men and women begin settling in around the junkyard, a group of children are playing with Metal Mouth, and Alonzo the Alien has rigged up a type of TV for the kids to watch. The junkyard doesn’t have much food, but Alonzo is working on a teleporter which can send small groups of people as far as the supermarket and back.
Jessie Quick spends her days trying to help people to find a place to sleep as there are only four bunk beds. Both Alonzo and Power Fist give up their beds to the seniors living in the junkyard, but there still aren't enough beds for everyone, and people can usually be found wandering around aimlessly at night.
It takes Alonzo three days to finish creating the teleporter, and once he's done, he sends a group of people to the local Stop-and-Go to get him a frosty slurp, and some chips.
The group returns from their trip with enough food for everyone, including a melon banana frosty slurp for Alonzo, and some onion and ranch chips.
Everyone is given something to eat. The police and heroes eat last- except for Alonzo, as it’s his invention.
After everyone's eaten, Power Fist grabs herself a burrito, and a Dr. Zipper- a popular soda from the 90s- and goes to sit by Metal Mouth.
No one has seen Old Man Gus since the hero teams were disbanded, and Alonzo thinks that he might be dead, but Power Fist holds out hope that the poor old man is still kicking.

***

Outside of the energy shield, the city is descending into chaos as gangs which have long been at war with each other over their individual turf are now terrorizing each other's neighborhoods.
The president of Marwick declares a state of emergency in the city of Bainbridge, and he orders the army to enter the city, and to begin dealing with the villains before they destroy Bainbridge, and the surrounding cities.
As the tanks and soldiers begin advancing into the city, The Know It All orders Brain Drain to release a swarm of nano wasps to inject the soldiers with his techno virus.
As the soldiers advance farther, they begin to spread the virus to anyone whom they come across.
After a few days, the techno virus begins to take shape inside of the soldiers, as well as many of the people whom they've infected. It isn't long before the CDC declares the city on lockdown.
"Everything is going to plan, Brain Drain, but I still need to make sure those heroes who locked themselves in the junkyard won't be a problem. Send word to the League of Heroes that I'm willing to meet with their leader if he's willing to do me a favor" The Know It All says.
The next day, Tiger Man arrives at The Know It All's lair with Castle Man, and Mr. Invincible at his side.
"Welcome, gentlemen. I was hoping we could talk for a bit. I was also hoping that Tiger Man would come alone, but the rest of you are always welcome," he says. "Now, then. It’s my hope that we can come up with a plan to deal with these trouble-making heroes that have been ruining my plans as of late.”
“I understand that you're having problems, Phill, but you can't drag us into this. We agreed to stay out of this fight so you wouldn’t take our powers away, but you can't force us to help you kill. We're superheroes, for god’s sake!" Tiger man says.
"I understand, but all I'm asking is for you to tell me everything you know about a group of nobodies called the No Siders.”
After talking with Tiger Man, and his team, The Know It All decides to come up with a new plan to deal with the No Siders.
The Know It All commands Brain Drain to hack into The Dampener's cells, and to free the Red Rider, and Makko, sending a group of giant, robotic eagles to capture them.

***

Back in the prison, Red is sitting in his cell when the door opens. He assumes that the time is now to do battle with the Red Rockets.
As he, Chewy, and Makko head to the lower level of the prison, the group finds the leader of the Red Rockets: a villain named Jet Streak. The big man has the power to scream like a jet engine, and as he yells, his men begin coming out of their cells to attack Red, and his friends.
Hearing the sounds of a fight, the Gold Diggers, and the Puritans, come running to help their friends as well.
As the fight starts, both sides clash, and hit each other hard. Diamond Mine, and a villain called Baboon Ben- a man with a gorilla chest, and hairy, red ass- attack Jet Streak, who uses his sonic sound waves to crack Diamond Mine's skin.
Baboon Ben uses his gorilla fists to bash Jet Streak across the face.
Red Rider is fighting a villain named Big Boss: a man so fat that he causes earthquakes just by walking.
The big man tries to step on Red, but the speedster is able to vibrate fast enough to phase through the big man's leg, removing one of his bones as he passes through him.
Just as the fight starts to die down, The Know It All's robotic eagles arrive, grabbing Red Rider, and Makko.

***

News of the Red Rider's escape reaches Power Fist, and the rest of the No Siders. Alonzo has just finished rebuilding the mayor, and after adding a special, electronic brain with what Alonzo calls a master chip, the mayor is now up and running again.
Mayor Billingsley- who is now able to walk, and talk again- asks to speak with whoever is in charge.
Both Power Fist, and Officer Jones step forward.
"I believe the mayor wanted to speak with a member of the police department, not some D-list superhero," Officer Jones quips.
Power Fist reminds the officer that, if it wasn’t for her, and her fellow “D-list heroes,” he'd be dead.
"Don't fight; I want to speak with both of you because we need to come up with a plan to take back this city," Mayor Billingsley says.
The Mayor asks about what's been happening in his city since he went missing, and Officer Jones explains everything which the robot mayor has been doing.
"Why hasn’t the governor stepped in to put a stop to this madness?" Mayor Billingsley asks.
Power Fist explains that the army attempted to retake the city, only to become victims of something called the techno virus. "I think we might be able to find a cure for the virus if we’re able to capture one of the infected people, and contain them nearby," Power Fist says.
Alonzo builds a containment pod which will allow him to capture one of the infected people. He and his team- made up of Metal Mouth, and Toilet King- then leave the safety of the junkyard in search of someone infected with the techno virus.
The streets of Bainbridge are littered with the bodies of the infected; none of those infected happen to be a superhero, as it appears that their kind are immune to the virus.
The men and women infected with the techno virus have a pattern of green and black computer circuits all over their faces and bodies. The dead bodies of the infected quickly begin to decay, leaving very little behind for doctors to study, and to learn more about the virus.
As they search the city, Alonzo and his team run into gangs of looters made up of hungry citizens just trying to survive.
Many of the infected have trouble with impulse control; some are left with white hair, and gray eyes. These people are no more violent, or crazy, than they ever were, but they are still infectious.
As they search the city, Toilet King and Metal Mouth spot a doctor with white hair, and gray eyes. This man, with his computer circuit face, tries to inject something into one of his fellow infected.
Alonzo walks up to the man, and captures him, bringing him back to the junkyard, where Alonzo questions what the man was doing to that infected person sleeping on the streets.
"My name is Doctor Tomas King, and I have been working on a cure for this virus since I became infected with it myself," he says.
Doctor King asks why he's being held inside of a containment pod, and Alonzo explains that he has been chosen as a test subject for them to use to find the cure to the techno virus.
Doctor King is both excited, and pleased to hear that he will be receiving the cure for this illness.
Tomas asks Alonzo if it would be possible for him to help with the cure, as he himself has been working on trying to save the city since this virus first started to spread.
"Tell you what, Doctor King: if you're willing to let us experiment on you to find the cure, we will allow you to help us develop the cure by allowing you access to our research. You can even leave whatever notes you might have for us," Alonzo says.
Alonzo moves Doctor King's pod to the far side of the junkyard, and puts up an energy barrier to keep everyone out. He also builds a lab which he can use for his research.
Doctor King tries to convince Alonzo that the secret to curing the infected lies with superhero DNA as superheroes cannot be infected.
Alonzo agrees, but worries that using superhuman DNA might result in meta-humans, or more villains running around the city.

***
The Red Rider and Makko are being carried above the city skyline by The Know It All's eagle drones when Red using his super speedy hands, and rips the guts out of the eagle carrying them.
Falling from a great height, the two heroes are forced to grab onto each other in hopes that Red can save them both before they come crashing to the ground.
Using his super speed, Red Rider is able to create a whirlwind with his hands which slows him and Makko before they hit the ground.
The two heroes find themselves in the middle of downtown Bainbridge with gangs of infected terrorizing the city. Red and Makko need to get off of the streets before they end up in the belly of some savage with his teeth filled down.
"Hey, Makko, you're going to need to transform into your shark form while we're walking around on the streets," Red Rider says.
Makko, turning into his tiger shark form, takes the lead.
With the eagle drones still searching the area for them, Red and Makko are forced to hide in back alleys, and break into abandoned homes of the dead, looking for food and a place to sleep for the night.
Breaking down the door to a loft downtown, Red is punched in the chest by an old woman in her 70s with short, gray hair, cut into a bob. As he lies on the ground, struggling to breathe, Red begs God to end his life, and stop the pain. Even as his crushed chest is healing, Red Rider is still unable to breathe.
Makko takes a bite out of the old woman, but his teeth- which are as hard as diamonds- are crushed by the woman's tough skin.
The old woman demands to know why the two men broke into her loft, and, as his teeth grow back, Makko explains that he and Red Rider thought that the loft was abandoned.
Looking up at a couch, Red sees Oldman Gus struggling to breathe. The old man has been infected by the techno virus, and he appears to be dying.
Red Rider and Makko ask Gus's wife to please let them stay the night as they have no place to go, and the streets are littered with bodies, and crime.
"I'll let you stay the night, but you and your friends will have to do something for me. My grandson went outside a few hours ago to fetch some food for me, and Gus- my poor Gussy hasn’t eaten in almost two days. If you can find little Gus, and bring him home, you can stay as long as you like," Mrs. Winston says.
Red and Makko agree to find Little Gus, and the two heroes head to the boy's last known location- the Big Easy Supermarket- where they find a group of infected attacking a group of survivors.
Red doesn’t see little Gus anywhere, and as he searches the area, he vibrates at super speed until he's able to generate lightning.
Throwing the lightning at the group of infected, Red watches as they seem to short circuit, and explode. Some of the infected are members of the national guard, while others are just infected citizens who've come out to feed on the flesh of the living.
As he and Makko check the bodies of the dead infected, Red sees scorch marks on their teeth, and faces.
Walking up to the supermarket, Makko, in his shark form, knocks on the door. He waits for someone to open it, and when no one does, he rips the door off of its hinges, the people inside zooming out in terror.
As they look around the store, Red and Makko see little Gus- or Hard Body, as he calls himself- eating some fresh fruit in the corner. The man appears to be in some kind of a trance, and as he eats himself to death, Red and Makko are forced to try to stop him before he eats enough to explode from the inside.
Hard Body is stuffing his face with a pineapple, and some plums, when Makko knocks the fruit out of his hand, and Red Rider destroys the fruit stand.
Once he finally stops eating, little Gus keels over from hunger pains, and demands more food. "FEED ME…FEED ME…FEED ME!” He yells.
As he collapses from his hunger, Red and Makko are forced to take him to the junkyard.
Bringing some food for themselves and little Gus, the two men steal a car, and race to the junkyard.
As they reach the junkyard, little Gus is beginning to go into anaphylactic shock. With no other choice, Red uses his speed to phase through the energy barrier protecting the junkyard.
Everyone in the junkyard comes running as the car smashes into a bunch of junk cars piled on top of each other.
Pulling Makko and little Gus out of the car, Red sees his niece, and asks her where her alien friend is, to which she explains that Alliver and Alonzo are now one, and that they’re now working on finding a cure for the techno virus.
"It's an emergency; Gus is dying. There's something wrong with him. If he stops eating, he dies, and now he's gone into shock. We need to help him,” Red says.
Power Fist uses her powers to open up little Gus's throat, and the man is able to breathe again. He tells Power Fist that a witch called Blue Genie- a completely blue woman- used magic against him, and forced him to become incredibly hungry.
Little Gus is incredibly fat from eating so much, and as she looks at his body, Power Fist comes up with a plan. Collecting as much power in her gauntlet as possible, she smashes Gus in the belly until he vomits up everything from his stomach, and the magic which is controlling him breaks.
Little Gus- who now weighs some four hundred pounds- finds moving difficult, and has trouble breathing. The heavy man thanks his new friends for helping him, and then asks if they've seen his grandparents at all.
"Who do you think sent us to go and look for you?" Red asks.
Little Gus is hungry, and asks for something to eat. He asks Red to drive him home to his grandparents' house.
Power Fist tells little Gus that she'll drive him home in a few minutes once she talks to her uncle.

***

“Questioning elicited the information that he feels almost as if there is a veil between him and other people through which they cannot reach him, but he prefers this veil to remain intact.”
—
Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. There’s no end in sight. When he needs something, a report or transcript, anything, any level of difficulty, he simply has to ask. The Curator is quick to respond, firm in his insistence on forwarding precisely the right document in an area of research marked by ambiguity and error, by political bias, systematic fantasy. But not just the right document, not just an obscure footnote from an open source. The Curator sends him material not seen by anyone outside the headquarters complex at Langley, material that includes the results of internal investigations, confidential files from the Agency’s own Office of Security.
—
Knowledge was a danger, ignorance a cherished asset. In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing in Leader 4, or even what they were talking about, or muttering in their sleep. The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horrors were not for their ears. Details were a form of contamination. The Secretaries were to be insulated from knowing. They were happier not knowing, or knowing too late. The Deputy Secretaries were interested in drifts and tendencies. They expected to be misled. They counted on it. The Attorney General wasn’t to know the queasy details. Just get results. Each level of the committee was designed to protect a higher level. There were complexities of speech. A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. There were pauses and blank looks. Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons, to be pondered, solved, ignored.
The members of the committee would allow only generalities to carry upward. It was the President, of course, who was the final object of their protective instincts. … The White House was to be the summit of unknowing. It was as if an unsullied leader redeemed some ancient truth which the others were forced to admire only in the abstract, owing to their mission in the convoluted world.
But there were even deeper shadows, strange and grave silences surrounding plans to invade the island. The President knew about this, of course—knew the broad contours, had a sense of the promised outcome. But the system still operated as an insulating muse. Let him see the softer tones. Shield him from responsibility. Secrets build their own networks, Win believed. The system would perpetuate itself in all its curious and obsessive webbings, its equivocations and patient riddles and levels of delusional thought …
—
“The invasion failed because high officials didn’t examine the basic assumptions. They got caught up in a spirit of compelling action. They were eager to accept other men’s perceptions. There was safety in this. The plan was never clear. No one was ever responsible. Some of them knew a disaster was in the works. They let it ride. They put themselves out of reach. They wanted it over and done.”
—
“Some things we wait for all our lives without knowing it. Then it happens and we recognize at once who we are and how we are meant to proceed. This is the idea I’ve always wanted. I believe you’ll sense it is right. It’s the high risk we need. We need an electrifying event. You’ve been waiting for this every bit as much as I have. I believe that or I wouldn’t have asked you to come here. We want to set up an attempt on the life of the President. We plan every step, design every incident leading up to the event. We put together a team, leave a dim trail. The evidence is ambiguous. But it points to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate. Inherent in the plan is a second set of clues, even more unclear, more intriguing. These point to the Agency’s attempts to assassinate Castro. I am designing a plan that includes elements of both the American provocation and the Cuban reply. We do the whole thing with paper. Passports, drivers’ licenses, address books. Our team of shooters disappears but the police find a trail. Mail-order forms, change-of-address cards, photographs. We script a person or persons out of ordinary pocket litter. Shots ring out, the country is shocked, aroused. The paper trail leads to paid agents who have disappeared in Venezuela, in Mexico. I am convinced this is what we have to do to get Cuba back. This plan has levels and variations I’ve only begun to explore but it is already, essentially, right. I feel its rightness. I know what scientists mean when they talk about elegant solutions. This plan speaks to something deep inside me. It has a powerful logic. I’ve felt it unfolding for weeks, like a dream whose meaning slowly becomes apparent. This is the condition we’ve always wanted to reach. It’s the life-insight, the life-secret, and we have to extend it, guard it carefully, right up to the time we have shooters stationed on a rooftop or railroad bridge.”
—
Historic names, pen names, names of war, party names, revolutionary names. These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room. They felt it and waited.
The books were struggles. He had to fight to make some elementary sense of what he read. But the books had come out of struggle. They had been struggles to write, struggles to live. It seemed fitting to Lee that the texts were often masses of dense theory, unyielding. The tougher the books, the more firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others.
He found enough that he could understand. He could see the capitalists, he could see the masses. They were right here, all around him, every day.
—
Pocket litter. Win Everett was at work devising a general shape, a life. He would script a gunman out of ordinary dog-eared paper, the contents of a wallet. … They wanted a name, a face, a bodily frame they might use to extend their fiction into the world. Everett had decided he wanted one figure to be slightly more visible than the others, a man the investigation might center on, someone who would be trailed and possibly apprehended. Three or four shooters would vanish completely, leaving scant traces of their affiliation. … Then one other figure, one slightly clearer image, perhaps abandoned in his sniper’s perch to find his own way out, to be trailed, found, possibly killed by the Secret Service, FBI or local police. Whatever protocol demands. This kind of man, a marksman, near anonymous, with minimal known history, the kind of man who surfaces in murky places, disappears, is arrested for some violent act, is released to drift again, to surface, to disappear. Mackey would find this man for Everett. They needed fingerprints, a handwriting sample, a photograph. Mackey would find the other shooters as well. We don’t hit the President. We miss him. We want a spectacular miss.
—
It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that’s what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.
—
Somewhere in his room of theories, in some notebook or folder, Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively dead. In 1979 a House select committee determined there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate among those who were connected in some way to the events of November 22. Branch accepts this as an actuarial fact. He is writing a history, not a study of the ways in which people succumb to paranoia. There is endless suggestiveness. Branch concedes this. There is the language of the manner of death. Shot in back of head. Died of cut throat. Shot in police station. Shot in motel. Shot by husband after one month marriage. Found hanging by toreador pants in jail cell. Killed by karate chop. It is the neon epic of Saturday night. And Branch wants to believe that’s all it is. There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.
Still, the cases do resonate, don’t they? Mostly anonymous dead. Exotic dancers, taxi drivers, cigarette girls, lawyers of the shopworn sort with dandruff on their lapels. But through the years the violence has reached others as well, and with each new series of misadventures Branch sees again how the assassination sheds a powerful and lasting light, exposing patterns and links, revealing this man to have known that one, this death to have occurred in curious juxtaposition to that.
—
“U-2 planes. The planes that spotted the missiles the Soviets were putting into Cuba. We used to call the photos pornography. The photo interpreters would gather to interpret. ‘Let’s see what kind of pornography we pulled in today.’ Kennedy looked at the pictures in his bedroom as a matter of fact. … Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world. … I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.”
—
He would put someone together, build an identity, a skein of persuasion and habit, ever so subtle. He wanted a man with believable quirks. He would create a shadowed room, the gunman’s room, which investigators would eventually find, exposing each fact to relentless scrutiny, following each friend, relative, casual acquaintance into his own roomful of shadows. We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He would show the secret symmetries in a nondescript life.
An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisioned teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics.
—
Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history.
—
Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id.
—
Two weeks later he followed directions to a house in the Sanya district of Tokyo. He made his way through a ragpickers’ village built with material scavenged from other parts of the city. Old women jogged through the alleys carrying empty bottles, broken chair legs, pieces of indefinable junk. Houses were shoulder-high, made of old packing crates and strips of sheet metal, the walls stuffed with cardboard and rags. There were lines of people selling blood at mobile units, people who seemed hollow-bodied, so small, in such collapse. It would never bottom out. No matter how far down you went into the world, there were distances still to go, worse things to see and experience. He made it a point not to hurry through the area. He wanted to see what was here.
—
It produced a sensation of the eeriest panic, gave him a glimpse of the fiction he’d been devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world.
—
Nicholas Branch has unpublished state documents, polygraph reports, Dictabelt recordings from the police radio net on November 22. He has photo enhancements, floor plans, home movies, biographies, bibliographies, letters, rumors, mirages, dreams. This is the room of dreams, the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms.
Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.
Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. He has his forensic pathology rundown, his neutron activation analysis. There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.
Everything is here. Baptismal records, report cards, postcards, divorce petitions, canceled checks, daily timesheets, tax returns, property lists, postoperative x-rays, photos of knotted string, thousands of pages of testimony, of voices droning in hearing rooms in old courthouse buildings, an incredible haul of human utterance. It lies so flat on the page, hangs so still in the lazy air, lost to syntax and other arrangement, that it resembles a kind of mind-spatter, a poetry of lives muddied and dripping in language.
Branch doesn’t know how to approach this kind of data. … It is vital to his sense of responsible obsession that everything in his room warrants careful study. Everything belongs, everything adheres, the mutter of obscure witnesses, the photos of illegible documents and odd sad personal debris, things gathered up at a dying—old shoes, pajama tops, letters from Russia. It is all one thing, a ruined city of trivia where people feel real pain. This is the Joycean Book of America, remember—the novel in which nothing is left out.
Branch has long since forgiven the Warren Report for its failures. It is too valuable a document of human heartbreak and muddle to be scorned or dismissed. The twenty-six volumes haunt him. Men and women surface in FBI memos, are tracked for several pages, then disappear—waitresses, prostitutes, mind readers, motel managers, owners of rifle ranges. Their stories hang in time, spare, perfect in their way, unfinished.
Photographs. Many are overexposed, light-blasted, with a faded quality beyond their age, suggesting things barely glimpsed despite the simple nature of the objects and the spare captions. ... But Branch feels there is a loneliness, a strange desolation trapped here. Why do these photographs have a power to disturb him, make him sad? Flat, pale, washed in time, suspended outside the particularized gist of this or that era, arguing nothing, clarifying nothing, lonely. Can a photograph be lonely?
This sadness has him fixed to his chair, staring. He feels the souls of empty places, finds himself returning again and again to the pictures of the second-floor lunchroom in the Texas School Book Depository. Rooms, garages, streets were emptied out for the making of official pictures. Empty forever now, stuck in some picture limbo. He feels the souls of those who were there and left. He feels sadness in objects, in warehouse cartons and blood-soaked clothes. He breathes in loneliness. He feels the dead in his room.
—
It was his goodbye to Russia. It signified the official end of a major era in his life. It validated the experience, as the writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events.
Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mess of composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not able to record it properly.
Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.
He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.
Limits everywhere. In every direction he came up against his own incompleteness. Cramped, fumbling, deficient. He knew things. It wasn’t that he didn’t know.
Even in the rush of filling these pages, he was careful to leave out certain things that could be used in legal argument against his return to the U.S. Yes, the diary was self-serving to a degree but still the basic truth, he believed. The panic was real, the voice of disappointment and loss.
He knew there were discrepancies, messed-up dates. No one could expect him to get the dates right after all this time, no one cared about the dates, no one is reading this for names and dates and spellings.
Let them see the struggle.
He believed religiously that his life would turn in such a way that people would one day study the Historic Diary for clues to the heart and mind of the man who wrote it.
—
Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempests in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred across the sky. He worried about the deathward logic of his plot. He’d already made it clear that he wanted the shooters to hit a Secret Service man, wound him superficially. But it wasn’t a misdirected round, an accidental killing, that made him afraid. There was something more insidious. He had a foreboding that the plot would move to a limit, develop a logical end.
—
He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history.
—
“It’s the job of an intelligence service to resolve a nation’s obsessions. Cuba is a fixed idea. It is prickly in a way Russia is not. More unresolved. More damaging to the psyche. And this is our job, to remove the psychic threat, to learn so much about Castro, decipher his intentions, undermine his institutions to such a degree that he loses the power to shape the way we think, to shape the way we sleep at night.”
—
It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.
—
He’d stopped commenting on this oddness of hers. She said the news clippings she sent to friends were a perfectly reasonable way to correspond. There were a thousand things to clip and they all said something about the way she felt. He watched her read and cut. She wore half-glasses and worked the scissors grimly. She believed these were personal forms of expression. She believed no message she could send a friend was more intimate and telling than a story in the paper … Because these are the things that tell us how we live.
—
In the Old Senate Caucus Room they asked him to name the members of the Real Control Apparatus. This is like naming particles in the air, naming molecules or cells. The Apparatus is precisely what we can’t see or name. We can’t measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can’t get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover. This doesn’t mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives.
—
On his fourth day with Castro he shot a government scout, aiming through a telescopic sight. It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.
—
The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat. There are photographs of skulls with the right cranial portion blown away. There are bullet-shattered goat heads in close-up. Branch studies a picture of a gelatin-tissue model “dressed” like the President. It is pure modernist sculpture, a block of gelatin layered in suit and shirt material with a strip of undershirt showing, bullet-smoked. There are documents concerning exit velocities. There is a picture of a human skull filled with gelatin and covered with goatskin to simulate a scalp.
—
He sends an actual warped bullet that has been fired for test purposes through the wrist of a seated cadaver. We are on another level here, Branch thinks. Beyond documents now. They want me to touch and smell.
—
The Oswald shadings, the multiple images, the split perceptions—eye color, weapons caliber—these seem a foreboding of what is to come. The endless fact-rubble of the investigations. How many shots, how many gunmen, how many directions? Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies. The simple facts elude authentication. How many wounds on the President’s body? What is the size and shape of the wounds? … [Branch] concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.
He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.
—
“Signs that you exist. Evidence that Lee Oswald matches the cardboard cutout they’ve been shaping all along. You’re a quirk of history. You’re a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly. They lose you, here you are. There’s a pattern in things. Something in us has an effect on independent events. We make things happen. The conscious mind gives one side only. We’re deeper than that. We extend into time. Some of us can almost predict the time and place and nature of our own death. We know it on some deeper plane.”
—
“Think of two parallel lines,” he said. “One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.”
—
The Agency forgives. There wasn’t a man in the upper ranks of the four directorates who didn’t understand the perils of clandestine work. They would be pleased by his willingness to cooperate. What’s more, they would admire the complexity of his plan, incomplete as it was. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, of moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes. He was never more surely an Agency man than in the first breathless days of dreaming up this plot.
—
To Nicholas Branch, more frequently of late, “Lee H. Oswald” seems a technical diagram, part of some exercise in the secret manipulation of history.
—
Street by street the crowd began to understand why it was here. The message jumped the open space from one press of bodies to the next. A contagion had brought them here, some mystery of common impulse, hundreds of thousands come from so many histories and systems of being, come from some experience of the night before, a convergence of dreams, to stand together shouting as the Lincoln passed. … They were here to surround the brittle body of one man and claim his smile, receive some token of the bounty of his soul.
—
The media crowds collected and rocked in the corridors. They were waiting for the prisoner to come down to the interrogation room here on the third floor of the Police and Courts Building. TV cameras sat on dollies and there were cables slung over windowsills, trailing through the offices of deputy chiefs. Nobody checked credentials. Reporters took over the phones and pushed into toilets after police officials. Total unknowns walked the halls, defendants from other parts of the building, witnesses to other crimes, tourists, muttering men, drunks in torn shirts. It was a roughhouse, a confoundment. Every rumor flew. Disk jockeys arrived to fill in, blinking, flinching, wary. A reporter wrote notes on a pad he balanced on the back of the chief of police.
Hours going by. Blank faces arrayed against corridor walls. Men crouched near the elevators waiting. They sensed the incompleteness out there, gaps, spaces, vacant seats, lobbies emptied out, disconnections, dark cities, stopped lives. People were lonely for news. Only news could make them whole again, restore sensation. Three hundred reporters in a compact space, all pushing to extract a word. A word is a magic wish. A word from anyone. With a word they could begin to grid the world, make an instant surface that people can see and touch together.
—
Whenever they took him down, he heard his name on the radios and TVs. Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounded extremely strange. He didn’t recognize himself in the full intonation of the name. The only time he used his middle name was to write it on a form that had a space for that purpose. No one called him by that name. Now it was everywhere. He heard it coming from the walls. Reporters called it out. Lee Harvey Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald. It sounded odd and dumb and made up. They were talking about somebody else.
—
They took him back to the cell. He stripped to his underwear and sat on the bunk, thinking, feeling the noise of the assembly room still resonating in his body. A cell is the basic state, the crude truth of the world.
He could play it either way, depending on what they could prove or couldn’t prove. He wasn’t on the sixth floor at all. He was in the lunchroom eating lunch. The victim of a total frame. They’d been rigging the thing for years, watching him, using him, creating a chain of evidence with the innocent facts of his life. Or he could say he was only partly guilty, set up to take the blame for the real conspirators. Okay, he fired some shots from the window. But he didn’t kill anyone. He never meant to fire a fatal shot. It was never his intention to cause an actual fatality. He was only trying to make a political point. Other people were responsible for the actual killing. They fixed it so he would seem the lone gunman. They superimposed his head on someone else’s body. Forged his name on documents. Made him a dupe of history. He would name every name if he had to.
—
Lee Harvey Oswald was awake in his cell. It was beginning to occur to him that he’d found his life’s work. After the crime comes the reconstruction. He will have motives to analyze, the whole rich question of truth and guilt. Time to reflect, time to turn this thing in his mind. Here is a crime that clearly yields material for deep interpretation. He will be able to bend the light of that heightened moment, shadows fixed on the lawn, the limousine shimmering and still. Time to grow in self-knowledge, to explore the meaning of what he’s done. He will vary the act a hundred ways, speed it up and slow it down, shift emphasis, find shadings, see his whole life change.
This was the true beginning.
They will, give him writing paper and books. He will fill his cell with books about the case. He will have time to educate himself in criminal law, ballistics, acoustics, photography. Whatever pertains to the case he will examine and consume. People will come to see him, the lawyers first, then psychologists, historians, biographers. His life had a single clear subject now, called Lee Harvey Oswald.
He and Kennedy were partners. The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live.
—
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.
But maybe not. Nicholas Branch thinks he knows better. He has learned enough about the days and months preceding November 22, and enough about the twenty-second itself, to reach a determination that the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like.
The stuff keeps coming. The Curator sends FBI surveillance logs. He sends a thirty-five-hour film chronology of unedited network footage shot during the weekend of November 22. He sends a computer-enhanced version of the Zapruder film, the 8mm home movie made by a dress manufacturer who stood on a concrete abutment above Elm Street as the shots were fired. Experts have scrutinized every murky nuance of the Zapruder film. It is the basic timing device of the assassination and a major emblem of uncertainty and chaos. There is the powerful moment of death, the surrounding blurs, patches and shadows.
(Branch’s analysis of the film and other evidence leads him to believe the first shot came much sooner than most theories would allow, probably at Zapruder frame 186. Governor Connally was hit two point six seconds later, at Zapruder 234. The shot that killed the President, crushingly, came four point three seconds after that. Even though he has reached firm conclusions in this area, Branch will study the computerized version of Zapruder. He is in too deep to stop now.)
The Curator sends a special FBI report that includes detailed descriptions of the dreams of eyewitnesses following the assassination of Kennedy and the murder of Oswald.
There are worrisome omissions, occasional gaps in the record. Of course Branch understands that the Agency is a closed system. He knows they will not reveal what they’ve learned to other agencies, much less the public. This is why the history he has contracted to write is a secret one, meant for CIA’s own closed collection. But why are they withholding material from him as well? There’s something they aren’t telling him. The Curator delays, lately, in filling certain requests for information, seems to ignore other requests completely. What are they holding back? How much more is there? Branch wonders if there is some limit inherent in the yielding of information gathered in secret. They can’t give it all away, even to one of their own, someone pledged to confidentiality. Before his retirement, Branch analyzed intelligence, sought patterns in random scads of data. He believed secrets were childish things. He was not generally impressed by the accomplishments of men in the clandestine service, the spy handlers, the covert-action staff. He thought they’d built a vast theology, a formal coded body of knowledge that was basically play material, secret-keeping, one of the keener pleasures and conflicts of childhood. Now he wonders if the Agency is protecting something very much like its identity—protecting its own truth, its theology of secrets.
The Curator begins to send fiction, twenty-five years of novels and plays about the assassination. He sends feature films and documentaries. He sends transcripts of panel discussions and radio debates. Branch has no choice but to study this material. There are important things he has yet to learn. There are lives he must examine. It is essential to master the data.
—
He believes people are distorting his words even as he speaks them. There is a process that takes place between the saying of a word and when they pretend to hear it correctly but actually change it to mean what they want.
—
He is miscast, or cast as someone else, as Oswald. They are part of the same crime now. They are in it together and forever and together.
—
The camera doesn’t catch all of it. There seem to be missing frames, lost levels of information. Brief and simple as the shooting is, it is too much to take in, too mingled in jumped-up energies.
—
There was something in Oswald’s face, a glance at the camera before he was shot, that put him here in the audience, among the rest of us, sleepless in our homes—a glance, a way of telling us that he knows who we are and how we feel, that he has brought our perceptions and interpretations into his sense of the crime. Something in the look, some sly intelligence, exceedingly brief but far-reaching, a connection all but bleached away by glare, tells us that he is outside the moment, watching with the rest of us.

If you are working up in an attic, or cutting boxes/cans into a ceiling, which do you prefer and why?
Obviously batt insulation is better than both, in my opinion, but for blown-in which do you prefer?

So my godparents probably have an animal in the attic. I'm 90% sure. Outside of their house I can see woodpecker hole that may or may not go through the attic. I've heard noises up in the attic through the year of what I can best describe as falling wires. Some said maybe it's from the top of the roof. But, idk. something could be there.95% of the time there is no noise. But, randomly I hear something. Not animal sounding noises though? so that's good cause that would freak me out lol.
I'm just not sure who to call first. The attic #1 is unfinished with insulation up there( they had new insulation put in 10 years ago and the workers said it was the cleanest attic they have seen) and people need to be careful walking on the floorboards. And, the area of the attic opening is so STUPID. the builders of the house must have been high when putting it in. They put it in one bedroom closet above a shelf! a shelf! They could have put it in the huge hallway. But, no!
If there is any animals of any kind( that scares me so much lol) then should I call animal removal? Or, should I call someone to patch up the hole first? And, what professional is this called? If there is an animal up there would they be scared of it and catch it? lol. My grandparents are older so I dont want them looking up in the attic. Cause their thinking is if they go up in the day and see light then there is a hole for sure. But, then the thought of animal being up there scares me. Do you see a pattern lol
if the animal removal people come 1st and there is an animal.... then the hole will still be open( if there is one) so any other animals could get in there while we wait for the hole fixing person to come.
I'm beyond confused and want to get this taken care of asap. Its already been a year.

I need to insulate my ceiling in my detached garage I am converting into a living space.
The ceiling is 2by8 joists below a mostly flat roof with a slight pitch. It's a tarred rolled roof.
I was just going to use fiberglass batts and vapor barrier poly but my uncle said that moisture could build up in the ceiling causing mold/rot and I should have it spray foamed instead.
Is moisture enters the ceiling somehow from the roof, wouldn't it just exit the same way?
People use fiberglass batts in their walls and it doesn't cause moisture to build up. Why would the ceiling be any different?
Is he wrong or is this a serious concern?
I don't have money for spray foam.

I need to insulate my ceiling in my detached garage I am converting into a living space.
The ceiling is 2by8 joists below a mostly flat roof with a slight pitch. It's a tarred rolled roof.
I was just going to use fiberglass batts and vapor barrier poly but my uncle said that moisture could build up in the ceiling causing mold/rot and I should have it spray foamed instead.
Is moisture enters the ceiling somehow from the roof, wouldn't it just exit the same way?
People use fiberglass batts in their walls and it doesn't cause moisture to build up. Why would the ceiling be any different?
Is he wrong or is this a serious concern?
I don't have money for spray foam.

#verified
Monster Hunter Stories is Verified!

Pre-Purchase Offer

Limited Bonus Pre-order to get Navirou's "King" and "Queen" Outfits!
*Customers who purchase by 11:59 p.m. (EDT) on Thursday, June 13, 2024 are eligible. *This content may be made available separately at a later date. *These outfits are purely cosmetic and only change Navirou's appearance. 

About the Game

Note: Value-priced bundles that include this product and Monster Hunter Stories 2 ~Wings Of Ruin~ will be available from the release date. *The limited bonus of both titles will be available to anyone who purchases the bundle by August 31st, 2024.
Monster Hunter Stories is an RPG that takes the world of Monster Hunter and expands upon it in new and exciting ways! No longer are you hunting monsters, but raising them! In this deep story featuring heroes known as Monster Riders, you will live alongside monsters and form lifelong bonds with them.
 The first installment of the Monster Hunter Stories series returns, fully voiced in Japanese and English, with additional features such as a new museum mode where you can listen to music and view concept art, allowing you to dive even deeper into the world of Monster Hunter Stories.
Story:  As the hero of the story, you were born in a village of Riders who raise monsters for a living. You’ll overcome trials and tribulations as you grow as a Rider, and leave your village to embark on an adventure. Your destination: the world of Hunters, who make their living by hunting monsters. Although their lifestyles are vastly different, you must learn to live and work together with Hunters, and in turn, bring the world of Hunters and Riders ever closer.
 Things take a dark turn as a calamity known as the Black Blight appears, threatening the entire world and upending peaceful lives that were taken for granted... Both Riders and Hunters alike will be put to the test in order to challenge this threat.
The keys to saving the world are the Kinship Stone and its hidden power, along with the truth of the “Legend of Redan,” which describes the long-kept secret of the Riders’ origins! Along your epic journey, you will discover the true meaning of Kinship, which grows as your bonds deepen! A story of friendship and triumph await you—ride on into the world of Monster Hunter Stories!
Game Features: ■ A turn-based RPG set in the world of Monster Hunter!  Monster Hunter Stories features a strategic battle system which is easy to get the hang of, even for those who struggle with action games. Use Power, Speed, and Technical attacks to guess and overcome your opponent's attack patterns to inflict heavy damage and win head-to-head battles! Build up your Kinship Gauge to use skills or try your Monsties' unique Kinship Skills!
■ Turn popular monsters from the series into your Monsties!  Explore the field using Monstie abilities, hatch eggs that you find along the way, and turn various monsters into Monsties! This game features many popular monsters from the Monster Hunter series, including Zinogre, Nargacuga, and Lagiacrus.
 The Rite of Channeling is a ritual that awakens dormant abilities in your Monsties, allowing you to raise original Monsties and take on powerful enemies!
■ Online Features Create a powerful party with the Monsties you have raised and enjoy battles with other players!
New Features: ■ Fully voiced in Japanese and English! The narrative is even more immersive with full Japanese and English voices!
■ Bonus Museum content  Enjoy more than 200 pieces of concept art, including some which have never been seen before, and numerous music tracks. Some tracks are being featured in surround sound for the first time!
■ All updates are included 

Includes all the monsters added in updates to the original game, such as Kushala Daora, Teostra, and Rajang, as well as expanded endgame content and additional character editing parts, making this the complete package!

Links: ⚫ View Monster Hunter Stories ⚫ 16,93 € - Buy Now
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I got a good price from a good contractor to insulate my attic (I had vermiculite removed). The only problem is they only do cellulose for blown in.
I despise cellulose insulation (I’ve done a decent amount of work in attics) and would rather have blown-in fiberglass (or batts, but that’s expensive). I plan to cut in some can lights at some point down the line, as well as do some rewiring via the attic, and while fiberglass makes a big mess, cellulose makes a huge mess and sticks all over your body and clothes (you inevitably get pretty sweaty working in an attic).
Am I wrong about this preference? Is it not worth the trouble finding someone else to do it who can do fiberglass? I’d appreciate some other perspectives.
Also, if I do get cellulose I’m considering making a causeway down the middle of the attic for easy movement through it. Any ideas of how to pull this off without significantly compromising the r-value of the insulation? I could lay down a 2’ wide strip XPS or EPS rigid foam insulation (would need a few layers to get to R-49) on top of the attic joists and then lay plywood over it (also could install 2x side rails for the plywood to secure to). Overkill? Other ideas?

First Chapter Next Chapter> (Coming soon)
Thanks a ton to whoever participated in the poll, and helped me answer questions about NoP! I’m having a ton of fun writing this story, and I look forward to writing even more chapters.hipeo

Credit to u/SpacePaladin15 for original idea, setting, and characters of NoP.

Thanks a ton to the beta readers!
u/Cooldude101013
u/Golde829

Big thanks to my editors!
u/ErinRF

________________________________________
The entire command center bursts into action.
Captain Carbali immediately begins issuing orders, the alarms ringing overhead, unmistakable, and accompanied by the alternating, wailing tones of the red alert alarm.
“Get me targeting data on their engine blocks! I want three LRMs for each of the bastards, ready to launch at my command!”
Commander Geary begins issuing orders for the small flotilla to maneuver.
“All ships, assume formation Kilo Three. Alter course up six zero degrees. Increase speed to zero point five LS. Red alert. This is not a drill. Prepare to immediately engage the enemy.”
The Dauntless, along with its few escorts, begins to gain speed, while pivoting upward. In the innards of the Dauntless, three missiles slide into place, the hatches in front of them ready to pop open and release the disciples of death that lie within. Commander Geary opens a comm link to the Arxur craft.
“Attention, Arxur craft. This is Fleet Commander Geary. You are ordered to shut down your engines, weapons systems, and prepare to be boarded. Any attempt to flee, charge weapons, or resist my marines in any capacity will end in your demise. Surrender now, or be destroyed. This is your only warning. To the honor of our ancestors. Geary, out.”
Athena speaks once more.
“Enemy craft maneuvering. The enemy is attempting to flee out of our maximum weapons range.”
Geary strides into the CC with purpose, before Officer Campbell speaks up, followed by General Falco.
“Designating enemy flotilla as Alpha, and enemy craft as Alpha 1 through 7.”
“They are pushing their engines to max. Sensors indicate severe strain in their engine cores. We will easily overtake them. Estimated time to intercept is five minutes and fifteen seconds.”
Geary replies.
“Good. Launch fighter squadrons Gamma, Alpha, and Beta. Order them to engage based on their discretion. Tell them to aim to disengage.”
Back down in the launch bays, Daisy’s comm in her suit emits three light beeps before a voice speaks.
“Squadron Gamma, listen up! We’ve got seven enemy craft out there. I want everyone to form up on me after launching, and then we’ll be going for the enemy craft marked as Alpha 4. We’ve been ordered to disable. That means turrets and engines! Prepare to launch!”
A low thrumming fills the air.
Daisy slows her heartbeat, staring directing into the hatch, the one that is so many meters away. The humming reaches a high. Daisy begins checking her suit seals, and pressurizing her helmet. Everything is in place. Athena pipes in.
“Launching in, 3, 2, 1, mark.”
Daisy is thrown back into her seat as she activates her engine. She clears the ship, before scanning the horizon, and then moving into formation with the rest of her squadron. The rumbling of her engine fills the air, before she checks in.
“This is Gamma three, reporting in to Gamma Lead. In formation.”
“Copy that. Gamma squadron is in formation. All fighters, follow my lead.”
The five fighters gracefully curve around the huge and blocky hull of the Dauntless, joining their brethren. More and more fighters fly out of the hangers, with a wave of fighters forming up. Upon first glance, it appears to be chaotic, but a pattern emerges. Three groups, each a different type. Lumbering and damaging bombers form Alpha, swift and pinpoint interceptors make up Beta, and the standard fighters like Daisy’s are Gamma. Alpha squadron begins firing their long ranged anti-ship missiles, and the two other squadrons join in, locking their weapons systems on the enemy craft. A wall of gunfire slams into the enemy ships. Alpha 2, a frigate, loses their shields from the gunfire, only for a missile to slam an EMP pulse into its backside, throwing it off course with no way to get back into formation. The Arxur craft finally begin to open fire, point defenses throwing whatever they can into the air. A few fighters are downed, but they reach them.
Like ants to honey, the missiles home on in. The fighters fly over the ships, throwing long ropes of high-velocity rounds right into the hulls of their enemies. The bomber’s turrets track and hit the enemy ships with pinpoint laser fire, while the interceptors of Beta weave a path of destruction, the internal compensators pushed to max. Rounds thicker than her arm fly out, each one punching a hole in the armor plating of her target.
As she holds down the trigger, her entire body vibrates, before she lets go, and switches to missiles. She targets a point-defence turret, before letting them fly. The turret starts to track the missiles, and Daisy realizes her mistake, switching to her gun again-
It’s too late.
The quad turret fires a burst of gunfire, with the rounds destroying her missiles, and by the time she’s started firing again, it's already put several holes into her ship. Countless alarms beep incessantly, her fighter in a tailspin. Daisy takes a deep breath, before hitting her eject button. Her whole world is thrust up, the alarms and everything going silent. Everything except for her breathing.
In, and out.
In, and out.
Just like her flight instructor taught her.
Daisy’s ejection chair is slowly rotating, round and round, giving her a full view of the battle. The fighters are chewing through the enemy ships, with two having been disabled. Smaller secondary explosions ripple through their turrets and power systems. The automated distress beacon pops off, producing a light beep every few seconds. Daisy speaks into her comms system, now having gained a moment.
“This is Gamma three to Flight command, do you read me? Over.”
Static is her only answer. She repeats herself in the same clipped tones.
“This is Gamma three to Flight command, do you read me? Over.”
This time, a fragmented voice speaks, punctured by bursts of noise.
“Ple- *static* -eat iden- *static*”
Daisy replies.
“Please repeat. Please repeat.”
Only static remains. Daisy begins checking her suit and oxygen levels. All is green and clear. Her suit is sealed, her equipment is all there, but the comms array is showing yellow. She turns on her arm cam, and points it at the three small antennas mounted on top of her backpack. Two are missing, slammed off by the odd angle of her ejection, leaving just the short range comms.
With nothing else to do but wait, she pulls up the distances to each ship.
ALPHA 1: +2,551m
ALPHA 2: +2,332m
ALPHA 3: -134m
ALPHA 4: 2,026m
ALPHA 5: 1,938m
ALPHA 6: +1,895m
ALPHA 7: +1,767m
Daisy read the readout once, taking in the data before staring back into space. Out of the corner of her eye, something moves.
ALPHA 3: -133m
In a flash, she realized what was happening. Alpha 3 had been disabled, and now she was floating towards it. She pulls the location up on her HUD, before using her maneuvering thrusters to spin around to face Alpha 3. Smoke pours out of holes across the wreckage, and no turrets can be seen. Light flicker, and the engines are ripped to shreds. As she scans over the destroyed ship, an idea pops into her head.
She begins to maneuver towards the ship, growing larger and larger as she gets closer and closer. Eventually, the display reads:
ALPHA 3: 1m
She reaches out with her foot, before a soft clank echoes through her suit, the magnet boots activating. She clicks the seat down onto the metallic and silvery hull, before moving to the back and opening the survival pack. The backpack, loaded with supplies and equipment, is designed to help a downed pilot survive alone for up to a week. She detaches the rifle, a standard MK-171, and clicks it to burst fire. She checks her equipment, pulling out three more battery packs for the rifle onto her suit’s magnetic holders, and sliding a magazine into place. She turns the rifle on, a slight whine increasing in frequency, until she cannot hear it.
She looks around the hull, before spotting a hole leading into the damaged ship. Aiming her rifle, she slowly walks up to the entrance, scanning the damaged hole leading deep into the ship. Red emergency lights flicker, before she drops into the corridor. She looks around, her suit lighting up the area with two bright lights, and a third mounted on her rifle, along with a red dot. The hallway is clear.
She begins moving up, stopping occasionally to see if she can feel any vibrations that might indicate an enemy nearby. She turns the first corner, only to be greeted by a gruesome sight. An Arxur floats in the zero gravity of the destroyed ship, little particles of metal floating around their body. The emergency door beside them is locked, and claw marks cover the walls and door, a testament to their final moments. Worst of all, they seemed to have clawed their own throat out rather than asphyxiate. Their eyes are rolled back, and their skin is covered in a light layer of frost. Frozen chunks of blood float around the scene, and chunks of flesh remain embedded in their claws.
Daisy stares at the corpse, the red dot from her rifle wavering as she looks over the scene. She takes a deep breath, calming herself, and steels her nerves. She can’t let this get to her. She continues onward, deeper into the ship. She stops again for a moment. Vibrations. A figure rounds the corner, its back turned to her. Daisy raises the rifle, aiming it into the Arxur’s center mass. Her finger tightens on the trigger. It stops for a moment, pulling out a datapad, and tapping on it before turning around, only to come face-to-face with Daisy. It's an Arxur, clad in a spacesuit similar to her own, but with a cracked visor. Their hands shoot up. Daisy can see their mouth move. Are they trying to talk to her, or reporting an intruder?
Her question is answered moments later as a new alarm begins to sound. The Arxur still remains motionless. Daisy aims her rifle, over the head this time, clicking to a 24-hour stun charge. A bolt between the eyes, and the Arxur is down for the count. Daisy places a prisoner beacon on the back of his suit. Daisy places the Arxur’s still limp body against the wall, before continuing onward, the alarm still blaring. The hall in front of her is obscured by smoke, the red laser cutting through it.
Daisy takes a deep breath, before walking into the unknown.
First Chapter Next Chapter> (Coming soon)

I’m planning on installing underfloor insulation (retrofitting batts and foil), and when I go looking I occasionally see things said by people about foil insulation and electrical hazards. My first guess is that a distracted installeDIYer might put a metallic staple through a cable, but I guess it’s also possible that if you put a flexible panel of conductive material somewhat close to a bunch of current-carrying cables, you might manage to induce a voltage in the foil?? Are both of these possible, or is it mostly the former? Is there a guideline distance I should stay away from any cable? Thanks in advance folks.

As Lake County homeowners, staying on top of regular maintenance is crucial for protecting your investment and ensuring your home operates efficiently and safely. With our area's diverse weather patterns and unique landscaping needs, there are some special considerations to keep in mind. Here are some essential home maintenance tips tailored for Lake County homeowners:
Exterior Upkeep

• Roof Inspections: Have your roof professionally inspected annually and after any major storms. Our mix of sunshine, rain, snow, and wind can take a toll. Replace missing or damaged shingles promptly.
• Gutter & Downspout Cleaning: Clean gutters and downspouts at least twice a year to prevent backups that can lead to water damage around the foundation. Consider gutter guards to cut down on maintenance.
• Landscaping: Stay on top of tasks like pruning trees/shrubs, removing dead vegetation, aerating the lawn, and applying mulch. Proper landscaping helps manage runoff and discourage pests.
• Deck & Patio Maintenance: Reseal decks and clean/repair patios yearly to prevent deterioration from our freeze/thaw cycles.
• Driveway & Walkway Repair: Seal asphalt every 2-3 years and repair cracks in concrete to stop further cracking and crumbling.

Interior Maintenance

• HVAC Inspection: Have an HVAC professional inspect and maintain your heating and cooling system annually for efficient operation and safety.
• Plumbing Checkup: Inspect pipes, faucets, the water heater, and other plumbing annually. Insulate exposed pipes before winter.
• Fire Safety: Test smoke and carbon monoxide detectors monthly and replace batteries every 6 months. Have furnaces and fireplaces inspected yearly.
• Attic Inspection: Check attics and crawl spaces annually for proper ventilation, moisture, pests, and insulation issues.
• Clean Appliances: Vacuum refrigerator coils, clean dryer vents, and descale washing machines regularly for efficiency and fire prevention.

Do a Deep Clean

• Windows & Doors: Clean windows (inside and out) and door tracks at least annually to allow full visibility and operation.
• Kitchen & Bathrooms: Give tile, grout, sinks, tubs, toilets, and appliances a deep cleaning 2-4 times per year.

Be Proactive

• Start a Home Maintenance Calendar: Schedule routine tasks to stay organized and develop good habits.
• Inspect Monthly: Do quick interior and exterior inspections monthly to catch issues early before they become costly repairs.
• Hire Professionals: Some maintenance requires specialized tools and knowledge. Hire licensed contractors when needed.

Staying on top of routine home maintenance will add years of enjoyment and value to your Lake County home investment. An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure when it comes to protecting your property!

Recently purchased a home and inspector noted poor ventilation in the attic. This was a result of the soffits being closed off with batt insulation (I do have a ridge vent). I was able to install baffles from the outside by removing the soffit covers and sliding the baffles in. Now I am going to reinstall the soffit vent covers, but got to thinking if the covers I have are the best style to use. Here are the style of covers that were previously installed.
Would these covers suffice in improving the ventilation to the attic? If so, how important is it that the vented section lines up directly with the baffles?