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Faerie Tale - Eighth Entry
2023.03.23 21:52 HeadOfSpectre Faerie Tale - Eighth Entry
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Journal of Camille Lambert - April 13th (Part 2)
The mist rolled in from the edge of town, swallowing buildings, tents, and trucks as the klaxon alarm sounded. I looked up and saw the sky beginning to fade into absolute darkness, even though it should have been hours before dusk.
“Fascinating…” I heard Dr. Di Cesare say beside me, although she was the only one who seemed to think so.
Milo stared into the mist with a look of dread as flashes of gunfire began to go off deep inside, briefly illuminating the moving shadows as the screams of dying men and impossible monsters filled our ears.
“Kallas, Valentine, the refugees! Get them out!” He ordered. Neither of them needed to be told twice. The words were barely out of his mouth when they took off at a sprint toward the tents, guns already drawn.
“Gretchen, how do we drive them off?”
“They circumvented my runes… how…” She said under her breath, sounding more annoyed than anything else.
“Gretchen!” Milo snapped, and she seemed to be pulled out of her train of thought.
“Uncertain. I need to get back to my lab. Everything I could use would be there!”
She took off like a shot, and as she ran, the mist overtook us, turning her into little more than a shadow ahead of us.
“Stay close!” Milo ordered, going for his pistol, although we could barely see him through the mist either. I felt Dom reaching for my hand and looked over to see his shadow, pistol drawn and trying to keep up with Milo and Gretchen. Her white RV hadn’t been parked that far away, but it might as well have been miles.
The chorus of gunfire and screams roared in my ears. I could hear inhuman screeches as men were torn limb from bloody limb. As Dom led me behind Milo, I couldn’t help but look over and pray that our people were managing, somehow. Through the mist, I could see a shadow racing toward us. At a glance, I almost thought that it might be a man on a horse but… no. The sigil of an eye burned onto its forehead made that very clear.
“LOOK OUT!” I called in the moment before the horseman raced toward us. I could see Milo diving out of the way while Dom pulled me back. He fired two shots at it, and though I did not get a good look at the creature before us, I saw enough to know that it wasn’t a horse and a rider… it was one creature. A pale, blood soaked thing with claws like scythes and eyes crowned around its head like a wreathe. It slashed at Dom who dove out of the way, before rearing up on its hind legs and unleashing a scream that sounded like a man in pain.
I could see Milo firing at it as well, but the bullets might as well have done nothing to it. Just like the last Sigiled Nightwalker, it barely even seemed to notice.
“You made your choice to stay here…” A raspy voice echoed from the creature, and I knew that it was Calhoun speaking to us. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”
The Nightwalker came for me next, and I dove to the ground, scrambling away as its claws raked against the asphalt road. The red eye sigil focused on me, and on the creature's face I could see a gaping maw underneath that eye, dripping with wet saliva and filled with long, jagged teeth.
It reared up again, and I could do nothing but wait to be crushed beneath its hooves when the deafening echo of a gunshot rang out. The Nightwalker screamed. Chunks of its head were ripped away from it and a new, pinkish steam rose from the mess that was left. It collapsed onto its side, still twitching in death.
I looked over to see the shadow of Dr. Di Cesare, holding that revolver of hers.
“Most interesting… assuming direct control over certain Nightwalkers.” She said. “Come There are certainly more.”
Dom helped me to my feet and we took off toward the RV again.
Through the mist, I could see the RV up ahead. Dr. Di Cesare threw the door open and quickly ushered us inside. As soon as it was closed again, I watched her take a knife from her coat and roll up her sleeve. Without so much as a wince of pain, she drew the blade across her hand, then using one finger, began to hastily draw a sigil on the door.
“Should keep them out… should…” She murmured, and once she was done she tore past us, deeper into the RV.
There seemed like she’d been using it as some sort of makeshift lab. I could see counters littered with old books, jars full of strange ingredients, and a small altar with scattered journal pages laying around it. I could see photos and diagrams of strange flowers that seemed to be every color at once and none of them at the same time, and crude anatomical sketches of flower-headed creatures.
On a small work desk pressed into one corner, I heard a walkie talkie crackle to life.
“Can you hold them back? We’re still loading the trucks!”
I recognized the voice on the other end as Kallas.
“Well move your fucking ass! We’re losing ground here!” Came the reply and it sounded like it was coming from Nina.
Milo ran toward the desk, grabbing the radio off of it.
“Valentine, Kallas, what’s going on out there?” He demanded.
“Everything’s gone to shit!” Valentine replied, “We’re falling back to the Church!”
“Already?” Milo asked, breathless. “Gretchen, how long before you can-”
“And who’s this I’m hearing now?” A new voice asked. It sounded like an older man, although I knew it wasn’t Calhoun.
I looked over at Dom, wondering if maybe he recognized it. Judging by his expression, he did.
“Who the hell is this?” Milo demanded.
“I’m the man watching you folks get your asses beat. It’s kinda funny, actually. You people come in here, throwing your weight around all high and mighty only to crumble the moment we give you anything more than a little love tap. Name’s McClellan. I suppose you could say that I’m the Sheriff around these parts.”
“Oh for fucks sake, are they on our goddamn channel?” Nina asked.
“Thought I’d tune in, see how things were going. Governor Calhoun was kind enough to spare me and my boys the hassle of dealing with you personally. Least we can do is enjoy the show.”
“Oh God… he’s monologuing!” Nina whined.
“You folks have kicked the beehive. Now you’re gonna get stung.” McClellan crooned. Everything he said ended in an upward inflection and it had already gotten annoying.
“The Governor wasn’t too happy to have to clean out the other towns, but you forced his hand. And what he’s gonna do next… you should be held accountable for that too.”
“Next?” Milo asked warily although before he could get his answer, something hit the RV, rocking it violently from side to side. Dr. Di Cesare almost fell over, before bracing herself against the counter and going through her books. She glanced at one of the flower diagrams before violently shaking her head and tossing it aside. Over the radio, I could hear McClellan laughing.
“Gretchen?” Milo asked, “Please tell me you’ve got something!”
“Patience…” She urged, “Extant research only addresses killing these things one at a time, not as an army.”
The RV rocked again and I ran to the window to look out. I could see something move past, something a hell of a lot bigger than the one the Doctor had just killed. Through the mist and the darkness, I could see the glow of a fire flare to life somewhere in the distance. Somehow, I got the feeling that Nina was behind it.
“Just tell me what we need to do to kill these goddamn things!” Milo snapped as the RV was hit again. I saw something in the opposite window, vacant black eyes and flat, chitinous mandibles that clicked together, only barely hiding the incomprehensible mouth behind them.
“I can’t just cast a spell and kill them all!” Gretchen replied, “I need more time! Maybe if I can open a door to another pocket we can at least get out of here, but I need time to find a safe one!” I could hear something scraping against the metal roof of the RV and saw it begin to buckle near the corner. Jagged spikes broke through it as whatever was outside began to pry open the RV like a can of soup.
“We don’t have time!” Milo warned.
Dom watched as the Nightwalker began to pry at the roof before looking over through the window and noticing its shiny black eye. Without a moment of hesitation, he fired at it, shattering the window and cracking it like an egg. A thick, black goo dribbled out of it and the Nightwalker shrank back, letting out a screech of pain. It briefly retreated, holding its spikey, crablike claws in front of it defensively. I could hear it making an irate clicking noise and it waited for a moment as Dom fired a few more rounds at it although this time, they just bounced uselessly off its armor.
“Five trucks out. Confirmed that two are at the Church!” I heard Kallas say over the radio, “Six, seven and eight almost loaded. Those are the last ones!”
“You might get these ones out… but there’ll always be more.” McClellan said, “I’ll admit that this has all been a bit of a setback, but there’s a lot of little towns just ripe for the picking out there. And once he gets the rest of the 5000 souls he needs… well, if you think this is bad, wait until you see what he’ll be able to do then.”
“Truck six is away! Three is at the church!” Kallas said, trying his damnedest to ignore McClellan.
“Double time it!” Milo snapped, “Valentine, what’s going on out there?”
“Fire’s keeping them at bay but they’re getting brave!” She warned, “We’re heading back toward the refugees. Milo, where are you now?”
“I’m in Di Cesare’s lab, with Dominic and Camille.”
“We’re gonna need to fall back to the church. Can you meet us there?” Nina asked.
Milo looked over at me.
“Get to the driver's seat, keys are in the ignition. Get us out of here.” He said. I just nodded and did what he asked, listening as he went back to Nina.
“We’re en route!”
Just like Milo had promised, I found the keys in the ignition and turned them. The engine roared to life. Through the mist, I could see the shadows of other Nightwalkers and my blood turned to ice in my veins as I saw the sigils on their foreheads. Crimson eyes, more than I could count at a glance, and each of them watching me.
The RV shook again and from the corner of my eye, I saw a massive claw coming for me. I threw myself to the ground as it shattered the driver's side window. The claw ripped through the cabin of the RV, before prying the roof off completely and tossing it aside.
I watched the Crab Thing as it approached the ruined cabin. One spiky leg came down on the hood of the RV. The Crab’s one remaining eye seemed to fixate on me as it reached for me with a claw, and I scrambled backward, only barely avoiding it. I looked back just in time to see Milo with a look of utter horror on his face. He grabbed me by the arm, pulling me deeper into the RV as the Crab Thing began trying to pry the roof off again.
Behind it, I could see other Nightwalkers drawing near.
There was no running from this.
“Gretchen, either shoot this goddamn thing or do something!” Milo cried, looking over at Gretchen. She glanced away from her research with wide eyes. I saw her reach for her revolver, only to hesistate when she noticed the other Nightwalkers watching us from behind the Crab Thing. I could see her doing the math in her head. Four shots left… not enough to kill the Crab and the Nightwalkers. The gun couldn’t save us. Her eyes settled on the flower diagram she’d cast aside earlier. I saw her grimace before running toward the back window.
“Shaal forgive me…” She said under her breath as she pressed a finger into the cut in her hand and began to hastily paint another sigil on the glass.
“Everybody get under something. It will go for the Crab first. As soon as it does, run. Do not stop.”
“What are you gonna do?” Dom asked.
“I’m opening another door… you’re not going to like what’s about to come through,” She replied and grabbed something off of the counter, hesitated for a moment, and dusted it carelessly on the blood she’d marked the window with. Then, as if she’d just thrown a live grenade she dove under her desk.
Milo scrambled behind a chair, while I pulled Dom behind one of the counters. The Crab Thing peeled the roof up, leaving us completely exposed and for a moment, I wondered if Dr. Di Cesare’s plan had failed.
Then I heard the sound of shattering glass. I looked to see that something had just launched itself through the window. It landed gracelessly on the ground, before stumbling around on coltish legs. It almost resembled a person, or maybe even one of the smaller Nightwalkers. But there was something very different about it. Its skin was an unusual shade of pinkish green, strange luminous flowers like the ones in the photographs Dr. Di Cesare kept in her lab, and moss seemed to bloom from its skin, and I swore that I could see pale yellow eyes in the center of those flowers. Its body seemed to ripple and change. Its hands twisted into gripping claws as it let out a raspy hiss.
Every single eye on it focused on the crab, which paused for a moment before reaching for the new creature. The claw closed around it, and the creature writhed and screamed, its flesh twisting and morphing into sharp tendrils that it slid between the gaps in the Crabs chitin, earning a fresh cry of pain from it. The new creature's head seemed to be split open, sort of like a flower blossoming, unleashing a shimmering payload of what looked like spores into the Crab’s face.
From his position behind the chair, I saw Milo’s eyes wide with terror as he watched this unfold. It was the kind of terror I’d never seen before. Something so deep in his soul that it must have took everything he had not to scream.
Dr. Di Cesare scrambled out from under her desk. She snatched the radio from Milo and without so much as a moment of hesitation ran for the door of the RV.
“Move!” She said, with an urgency that I knew better than to ignore. The three of us abandoned the RV and took off into the mist.
“Mr. Kallas, as soon as the trucks are through, kill the bonfire at the church! Cut off all access to the Calhoun Pocket!”
“What, why?” Kallas demanded.
“The situation has worsened, we need to enact full quarantine measures!” Dr. Di Cesare said, “Do it now!”
“What the hell did you just do?” Nina demanded, “Gretchen, where’s Milo?”
“We’re heading for the refugee area, on foot! Do not wait for us! I repeat, do not wait for us!”
I had no idea what the hell the Doctor had just done, but I didn’t think I’d ever hear fear like that in her voice. It was the first time she hadn’t sounded completely composed. The fire was growing closer, and seemed to have spread to most of the town. Buildings burned around us, as did tents. I could see the shadows of other Nightwalkers silhouetted against the inferno, bringing back memories of the last time Puriysk had burned. Up ahead, there was gunfire and I saw one of the refugee trucks skidding onto the road, and away toward the church.
Looking back, I could see shapes pursuing us in the mist. I couldn’t make out what they were, but the sigils on their foreheads told me enough. They were gaining on us, and I could only pray to whatever God was listening that they wouldn’t catch up.
Beside me, I saw the fire grow taller and almost fell over, trying to get away from it. The fire seemed to rise up into the sky before coming down on some of the Nightwalkers that pursued us. I looked over to see Dr. Di Cesare, a hand outstretched and a frantic look on her face. She moved her hands again, pulling more of the inferno onto the road to cover our tracks.
“Don’t stop!” She said, “Keep running!”
And I did exactly what she told me to do.
I could see another car up ahead, an SUV this time tearing onto the road, although, unlike the truck before it, it turned toward us and skidded to a stop just up ahead. Milo reached the SUV first, throwing open the passenger door and getting in. Dom and I were second, with Dr. Di Cesare being the last.
From the driver's seat, I could see Nina looking back at us, making sure that everyone was there before making a sharp U-turn and speeding toward the church, leaving Puriysk and the Nightwalkers behind.
“Are you genuinely insane?” Milo demanded, looking back at Dr. Di Cesare. “Do you have any idea how stupid that was!”
“It was the only spell I could think of that would yield immediate results,” She said. “Every time you open that door, something always comes through.”
“Yes, and there’s a very good reason you don’t open that door, Gretchen! You’re lucky we’re not all dead right now! For Gods sake, you may have just killed us all anyway!”
“What the fuck did she just do?” Nina asked, confused.
Her question went largely ignored.
“We were out of options!” Dr. Di Cesare replied, “We are up against an opponent who will resort to any means to dispose of us! Any means. It is therefore necessary that we do the same!”
“And that gives you carte blanche to unleash that? For Gods sake, we weren’t even equipped to deal with that! That wasn’t even part of the goddamn discussion until you pulled it in!”
“Can somebody just explain to me what the hell just happened?” Dom snapped.
Milo looked over at him, then back to Gretchen.
“There are countless other pocket realities in the vast expanse of the void,” She said. “Many serve as havens for various Gods and their followers… I simply opened a door to let one of them in.”
“I wouldn’t call that thing a God, I’d call it a plague!” Milo said.
“Hive mind,” Dr. Di Cesare corrected, “The Prince of Rosen Spring operates as a singular consciousness, it has more in common with fungi than a virus or pathogen.”
“I’m sorry, did you just summon The Fucking Rosen Prince?” Nina asked, and again she was ignored.
“Whatever it is, we have a standing order to burn any trace of that thing we come across,” Milo said. “Why the hell do you even know how to summon it?”
“I don’t work for you!” Dr. Di Cesare replied harshly, “I’m allowed to research whatever topic captures my interest!”
“Well do me a favor and warn me the next time you’re about to unleash a Class 5 Apocalyptic entity!”
“You wanted something that would get them off of us, I delivered! We were exposed and outnumbered, there were no other viable options!”
“Can we go back to the part where you called that thing an ‘Apocalyptic Entity?’” Dom asked. “What the hell did you just bring in?”
“It’s a sort of hive mind,” Dr. Di Cesare explained. “It infects other entities, absorbs them into its shared consciousness, and uses the bodies either as drones, or organic material to construct new bodies for itself.”
“Oh my fucking God…” Nina said under her breath, “And you just pulled that out of your ass? You didn’t try shooting your fucking magic gun?”
“We do not have the munitions to just mindlessly shoot everything that poses a threat! At minimum… the Rosen Prince should distract Calhoun and his Nightwalkers long enough for us to complete the evacuation!”
“Yeah, by absorbing this entire place!” Milo spat. “At this point, Calhoun’s already dead… let the Rosen Prince take care of him!”
“That’s not a gamble we should be willing to take,” Dr. Di Cesare said. “We are not dealing with a man who is trapped here. If this situation becomes untenable, I have zero doubt that he will simply abandon this place and begin again elsewhere, at which point it may become impossible to find him again. Even if we did, factoring in the recent sacrifices, it’s highly probable that he would be exceedingly harder to kill. If you want this man dead, then our window of opportunity is now and it is closing very rapidly!”
“Hey… this may be a stupid question but what happens if the Rosen Prince assimilates Calhoun or the Eldest?” Nina asked.
Both the Doctor and Milo fell silent. Milo’s head slowly turned to look at her.
“Yes, Gretchen. What happens then?” He asked.
Dr. Di Cesare was silent for a moment.
“All the more reason to kill Calhoun first,” She finally said.
Up ahead, I could see the ruins of the church, although the moment I saw them, it was already clear to me that something was wrong. The church was dark. There was no light from the bonfire inside and as we drove past the metal poles that marked the doorway, I noticed no change in the forest around us.
“Oh no…” Nina said under her breath, “Fuck, fuck, fuck fuck…”
She tried to steer the car through the other doorway, but nothing changed.
The doors were closed.
“Good, Mr. Kallas has ensured that nothing can escape."
“Yeah and that includes us, dumbass!” Nina snapped.
“That’s of no concern. I can open another, smaller door. We should shore up inside that church. We’ll get out the same way you did before,” Dr. Di Cesare said.
Nina swore under her breath before driving toward the ruins of the church.
She skidded to a stop, and Dr. Di Cesare was the first one out.
“We need to move quickly, get anything you can burn and get it now. Time is short,” She said.
Nina went around the back of the SUV and pulled the trunk open, taking out a can of spare gasoline before following Dr. Di Cesare inside the church.
“There’s one more in there,” She said to me and Dom. “Grab it!”
I figured that since I had the idlest hands, it might as well be me. I grabbed the gas can from the back of the SUV and took a parting look at Puriysk, which burned brightly behind us. The fire seemed to have consumed everything, and though the sky was dark, the glow from the inferno made it look like twilight. It was both the most beautiful and horrible thing I’d ever seen.
Even from where I stood, I could still hear the screams coming from Puriysk, only now they weren’t the screams of men being slaughtered by monsters… they were the screams of monsters slaughtering each other. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in that town… and realized that it might be better if I didn’t know.
I didn’t linger, I took the gas can into the church, following Nina. She was already beginning to dump the contents of the can on the charred ashes of the bonfire. Milo was right beside her, tossing some of the extra firewood that the others had collected to keep the fire alive onto it, to try and give it some new life.
“There’s headlights down the road, somebody’s coming!” Dom called from the doorway of the church.
“More refugees?” Milo asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Milo swore under his breath.
“Gretchen, can you finish up?”
“I need a minute,” She said. “We undid the old runes and ritual circle when we expanded it outside the church. I need to repair them.”
Milo growled in frustration before storming over toward the Church door. Nina tossed her empty gas can aside and went to follow, blowing past Dom and Milo and heading back out to the SUV. I watched her pull open the drivers side door and take something out. It took me a moment to recognize exactly what it was.
It was a rifle. She hastily checked the magazine before looking out at the oncoming headlights. I could make out three cars, most of them older and more worn than the ones Milo’s people drove although the one at the front was a clean, polished muscle car.
I’d seen that car before, and I knew that Dom had too.
It seemed that Sheriff McClellan was here to deal with us personally.
The cars slowed to a stop before us, and the four of us stood at the ready. I reached for the .22 I’d kept holstered, and felt a little guilty for the small sense of relief I felt that my gun might actually be useful for a change.
The doors of McClellan’s car opened, and I saw him stepping out of the driver's seat. I could see other men getting out of the cars behind him.
“Hell of a mess you’ve caused us…” McClellan said. His black boots sank into the mud beneath him. His wispy white hair seemed to flutter in the wind. I could see a chrome revolver sitting on his hip. “And yet you just refuse to die.”
“You must be the Sheriff,” Milo said coldly.
“And you must be the dumb motherfucker who thought he’d mess around with Governor Calhoun… how’s that working out for you.”
“Well despite everything, I’d say we’ve probably taken fewer losses than you have,” Milo replied. McClellan actually cracked a half smile at that.
“You’re a cocky little shit, I’ll give you that.” He said. “Not sure what the hell you assholes did back there… but I’ve never seen Nightwalkers claw each other to pieces like that before… either way, the fight’s over. And from where I’m standing it looks like you’re running outta here with your tail between your legs.”
“And from where I’m standing, you look like a dead man walking,” Milo replied. “If you’re smart, you’ve come here to leave with us. I don’t know if you realize what’s just been unleashed here, but mark my words in a few days time this place will be nothing but a graveyard.”
“Oh, I can promise that whatever you think you did, isn’t gonna change a damn thing,” McClellan said. “You can run if you’d like. I’ll even let you do it. Either way, once he’s got the rest of the souls he needs the Governor will hunt you down like the rats you are and-”
A volley of gunshots came from beside us as Nina started shooting. I saw a couple of the Sheriff’s Boys behind McClellan go down, while others dove for cover. McClellan himself moved behind his car with surprising speed, only narrowly avoiding Nina’s trigger happy rampage.
“These people talk too fucking much…” She said under her breath as we hid behind the stone walls of the church.
“Open fire boys, let’s clean this up!” I heard McClellan bark from behind his car.
I saw a couple of the Sheriff’s Boys try to peek out from behind one of their cars, and took aim at them, firing blindly. One window of the car shattered, and one of the Boys had time to pull his head back. The other wasn’t so lucky. His head jerked back and he hit the ground dead.
I felt my heart skip a beat, as I realized that I’d been the one who killed him… although there was hardly time to process what I’d just done. The gunfire around me saw to that.
“Reserve units, move in on the Church! We need some backup!” McClellan said, presumably speaking into a radio and not talking to himself. I saw the door of his car open as he tried to crawl back inside. Milo seemed to see it too and fired at the driver's side of the windshield. He only got off a couple of shots before McClellan’s retort blew a fresh hole through the glass.
I heard Milo cry out in pain and hit the ground, clutching at his shoulder. Nina’s eyes widened as she watched him fall, and I ran to his side to check on him. He pressed a hand against the wound, gritting his teeth and trying not to scream.
“I-I’m alright…” He lied, but I knew that he was out of the fight.
“Motherfucker…” Nina spat, before directing her fire at McClellan’s car, putting bullet after bullet through his windshield. I could hear a pained scream from inside and heard the engine turn over. McClellan’s car was launched backward, going in full reverse and slamming into one of the other Sheriff’s Boys cars. It knocked the car back against the boys hiding behind it, forcing them out of cover. A move that Dom was quick to punish. His gun spoke three times, and I saw two men fall, one dead and the other wounded.
McClellan hit the gas again, still in reverse and desperately trying to flee. He only succeeded in pushing the car he’d just hit over the wounded man.
I could see more headlights in the distance, driving through the flaming ruins of Puriysk toward us, although against the fires I could see the shadow of what used to be the Crab Thing coming to intercept them. I watched as it impaled one car on one of its sharp legs and caught another in its pincers, dutifully tearing at it to get to the meat inside. Tendrils like vines seemed to hang off of its body now, and I watched them slither inside the broken car. I consider myself lucky that I didn’t have to witness what they did to the people inside.
With most of McClellan’s group dead, Nina stepped out into the open, firing again at his car. I saw the driver's side door open and watched as McClellan tumbled out, his body bloody and broken.
“Motherfucker…” Nina spat, advancing on him with a bitter, determined purpose. I saw one of the last of the Sheriff’s Boys coming out of cover. Nina raised her rifle at him, but Dom shot first.
It was just Nina and the Sheriff now. She regarded the corpse of the last of the Sheriff’s Boys out of the corner of her eye, before making a beeline for McClellan. I watched as he tried to stand, only for his legs to give out from under him.
“Wait…” McClellan rasped, “Wait…”
Before he could say another word she’d taken aim at him and pulled the trigger, putting four more bullets into his chest.
“Shut up,” She said coldly, before turning away and going back to the church. McClellan lay on the ground, not quite dead but past the point of surviving. He twitched and wheezed out his final breaths before finally going still.
The moment Nina was through that door, she was at Milo’s side again.
“How bad is it?” She asked.
“I’ll live…” He rasped, “It’s… just a flesh wound. Help me up.”
Nina helped him stand, before looking over toward the center of the church.
“Gretchen, how’s that door looking?” She asked.
“Runes are in place… ritual circle is set, I’m almost ready!” She called back.
“Let’s go,” Nina said, dragging Milo over to the columns.
Gretchen set the bonfire alight and as we passed through the columns, I could see that the doors were open again. Faded figures of soldiers and refugees stood by anxiously. I could even see Kallas among them, pacing about with a worried look on his face. The moment he saw that the fire had started again, he looked up, seeming both relieved and even more anxious at the same time.
“I was never much good out in the field…” Milo grunted, “Should’ve stayed on the other side.”
“Don’t talk,” Nina said. “You’re still alive, right? That counts for something.”
He chuckled.
“Suppose it does,” He said.
Dom and I watched as Nina guided him toward the bonfire, then out through the right set of columns, into the version of the church where we could actually see the night sky overhead. As Nina brought Milo through, Kallas was right there to meet her.
“Take him,” She said. “He’s hurt but he’ll live so long as you patch him up right away.”
“Understood,” Kallas said, “Come on, let’s get you through and put that fire out.”
Nina just shook her head.
“No, we’ve still got work to do in here. I’ll hang back with Gretchen until we’ve confirmed that Calhoun’s dead.”
“No can do, Dr. Di Cesare ordered full quarantine measures. We need everyone out!"
“Not until we confirm the kill,” Dr. Di Cesare said. “I require someone with more experience in these things than I have. Take Mr. Durand and get him taken care of. We’ll connect with you later.”
Kallas grimaced and looked over at Milo.
“Do what she says,” He rasped, and I saw a quiet resignation cross over Kallas’ face.
“What about you two?” He asked, looking at me and Dom, “If we close this door, you’re not getting out until Valentine and the Doctor do.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “We still have unfinished business.”
Kallas just shook his head and turned to leave, letting Milo lean on him for support as he did. Milo looked back at us, or more specifically he looked back at Nina.
“Valentine…” He said, “Make me proud.”
She gave him a single nod, before letting him go.
Once she was past the columns, Dr. Di Cesare gave a single wave of her hand and the bonfire flickered and died.
The Church went dark. And we were alone again.
“Doctor, how much can you do to keep those things in Puriysk out of here?” Nina asked.
“Given ten or twenty minutes to modify some of the extant runes, quite a bit,” She replied. “It won’t be foolproof, but-”
“Just do it. Let’s dig in here, wait for the fires to die down, and see if we can’t scavenge anything from the ruins in the morning. The more we can get, the better cuz as soon as we’re set, we’re going to Parsons.”
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Second Entry
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Seventh Entry
Journal of Camille Lambert - April 13th (Part 2)
The mist rolled in from the edge of town, swallowing buildings, tents, and trucks as the klaxon alarm sounded. I looked up and saw the sky beginning to fade into absolute darkness, even though it should have been hours before dusk.
“Fascinating…” I heard Dr. Di Cesare say beside me, although she was the only one who seemed to think so.
Milo stared into the mist with a look of dread as flashes of gunfire began to go off deep inside, briefly illuminating the moving shadows as the screams of dying men and impossible monsters filled our ears.
“Kallas, Valentine, the refugees! Get them out!” He ordered. Neither of them needed to be told twice. The words were barely out of his mouth when they took off at a sprint toward the tents, guns already drawn.
“Gretchen, how do we drive them off?”
“They circumvented my runes… how…” She said under her breath, sounding more annoyed than anything else.
“Gretchen!” Milo snapped, and she seemed to be pulled out of her train of thought.
“Uncertain. I need to get back to my lab. Everything I could use would be there!”
She took off like a shot, and as she ran, the mist overtook us, turning her into little more than a shadow ahead of us.
“Stay close!” Milo ordered, going for his pistol, although we could barely see him through the mist either. I felt Dom reaching for my hand and looked over to see his shadow, pistol drawn and trying to keep up with Milo and Gretchen. Her white RV hadn’t been parked that far away, but it might as well have been miles.
The chorus of gunfire and screams roared in my ears. I could hear inhuman screeches as men were torn limb from bloody limb. As Dom led me behind Milo, I couldn’t help but look over and pray that our people were managing, somehow. Through the mist, I could see a shadow racing toward us. At a glance, I almost thought that it might be a man on a horse but… no. The sigil of an eye burned onto its forehead made that very clear.
“LOOK OUT!” I called in the moment before the horseman raced toward us. I could see Milo diving out of the way while Dom pulled me back. He fired two shots at it, and though I did not get a good look at the creature before us, I saw enough to know that it wasn’t a horse and a rider… it was one creature. A pale, blood soaked thing with claws like scythes and eyes crowned around its head like a wreathe. It slashed at Dom who dove out of the way, before rearing up on its hind legs and unleashing a scream that sounded like a man in pain.
I could see Milo firing at it as well, but the bullets might as well have done nothing to it. Just like the last Sigiled Nightwalker, it barely even seemed to notice.
“You made your choice to stay here…” A raspy voice echoed from the creature, and I knew that it was Calhoun speaking to us. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”
The Nightwalker came for me next, and I dove to the ground, scrambling away as its claws raked against the asphalt road. The red eye sigil focused on me, and on the creature's face I could see a gaping maw underneath that eye, dripping with wet saliva and filled with long, jagged teeth.
It reared up again, and I could do nothing but wait to be crushed beneath its hooves when the deafening echo of a gunshot rang out. The Nightwalker screamed. Chunks of its head were ripped away from it and a new, pinkish steam rose from the mess that was left. It collapsed onto its side, still twitching in death.
I looked over to see the shadow of Dr. Di Cesare, holding that revolver of hers.
“Most interesting… assuming direct control over certain Nightwalkers.” She said. “Come There are certainly more.”
Dom helped me to my feet and we took off toward the RV again.
Through the mist, I could see the RV up ahead. Dr. Di Cesare threw the door open and quickly ushered us inside. As soon as it was closed again, I watched her take a knife from her coat and roll up her sleeve. Without so much as a wince of pain, she drew the blade across her hand, then using one finger, began to hastily draw a sigil on the door.
“Should keep them out… should…” She murmured, and once she was done she tore past us, deeper into the RV.
There seemed like she’d been using it as some sort of makeshift lab. I could see counters littered with old books, jars full of strange ingredients, and a small altar with scattered journal pages laying around it. I could see photos and diagrams of strange flowers that seemed to be every color at once and none of them at the same time, and crude anatomical sketches of flower-headed creatures.
On a small work desk pressed into one corner, I heard a walkie talkie crackle to life.
“Can you hold them back? We’re still loading the trucks!”
I recognized the voice on the other end as Kallas.
“Well move your fucking ass! We’re losing ground here!” Came the reply and it sounded like it was coming from Nina.
Milo ran toward the desk, grabbing the radio off of it.
“Valentine, Kallas, what’s going on out there?” He demanded.
“Everything’s gone to shit!” Valentine replied, “We’re falling back to the Church!”
“Already?” Milo asked, breathless. “Gretchen, how long before you can-”
“And who’s this I’m hearing now?” A new voice asked. It sounded like an older man, although I knew it wasn’t Calhoun.
I looked over at Dom, wondering if maybe he recognized it. Judging by his expression, he did.
“Who the hell is this?” Milo demanded.
“I’m the man watching you folks get your asses beat. It’s kinda funny, actually. You people come in here, throwing your weight around all high and mighty only to crumble the moment we give you anything more than a little love tap. Name’s McClellan. I suppose you could say that I’m the Sheriff around these parts.”
“Oh for fucks sake, are they on our goddamn channel?” Nina asked.
“Thought I’d tune in, see how things were going. Governor Calhoun was kind enough to spare me and my boys the hassle of dealing with you personally. Least we can do is enjoy the show.”
“Oh God… he’s monologuing!” Nina whined.
“You folks have kicked the beehive. Now you’re gonna get stung.” McClellan crooned. Everything he said ended in an upward inflection and it had already gotten annoying.
“The Governor wasn’t too happy to have to clean out the other towns, but you forced his hand. And what he’s gonna do next… you should be held accountable for that too.”
“Next?” Milo asked warily although before he could get his answer, something hit the RV, rocking it violently from side to side. Dr. Di Cesare almost fell over, before bracing herself against the counter and going through her books. She glanced at one of the flower diagrams before violently shaking her head and tossing it aside. Over the radio, I could hear McClellan laughing.
“Gretchen?” Milo asked, “Please tell me you’ve got something!”
“Patience…” She urged, “Extant research only addresses killing these things one at a time, not as an army.”
The RV rocked again and I ran to the window to look out. I could see something move past, something a hell of a lot bigger than the one the Doctor had just killed. Through the mist and the darkness, I could see the glow of a fire flare to life somewhere in the distance. Somehow, I got the feeling that Nina was behind it.
“Just tell me what we need to do to kill these goddamn things!” Milo snapped as the RV was hit again. I saw something in the opposite window, vacant black eyes and flat, chitinous mandibles that clicked together, only barely hiding the incomprehensible mouth behind them.
“I can’t just cast a spell and kill them all!” Gretchen replied, “I need more time! Maybe if I can open a door to another pocket we can at least get out of here, but I need time to find a safe one!” I could hear something scraping against the metal roof of the RV and saw it begin to buckle near the corner. Jagged spikes broke through it as whatever was outside began to pry open the RV like a can of soup.
“We don’t have time!” Milo warned.
Dom watched as the Nightwalker began to pry at the roof before looking over through the window and noticing its shiny black eye. Without a moment of hesitation, he fired at it, shattering the window and cracking it like an egg. A thick, black goo dribbled out of it and the Nightwalker shrank back, letting out a screech of pain. It briefly retreated, holding its spikey, crablike claws in front of it defensively. I could hear it making an irate clicking noise and it waited for a moment as Dom fired a few more rounds at it although this time, they just bounced uselessly off its armor.
“Five trucks out. Confirmed that two are at the Church!” I heard Kallas say over the radio, “Six, seven and eight almost loaded. Those are the last ones!”
“You might get these ones out… but there’ll always be more.” McClellan said, “I’ll admit that this has all been a bit of a setback, but there’s a lot of little towns just ripe for the picking out there. And once he gets the rest of the 5000 souls he needs… well, if you think this is bad, wait until you see what he’ll be able to do then.”
“Truck six is away! Three is at the church!” Kallas said, trying his damnedest to ignore McClellan.
“Double time it!” Milo snapped, “Valentine, what’s going on out there?”
“Fire’s keeping them at bay but they’re getting brave!” She warned, “We’re heading back toward the refugees. Milo, where are you now?”
“I’m in Di Cesare’s lab, with Dominic and Camille.”
“We’re gonna need to fall back to the church. Can you meet us there?” Nina asked.
Milo looked over at me.
“Get to the driver's seat, keys are in the ignition. Get us out of here.” He said. I just nodded and did what he asked, listening as he went back to Nina.
“We’re en route!”
Just like Milo had promised, I found the keys in the ignition and turned them. The engine roared to life. Through the mist, I could see the shadows of other Nightwalkers and my blood turned to ice in my veins as I saw the sigils on their foreheads. Crimson eyes, more than I could count at a glance, and each of them watching me.
The RV shook again and from the corner of my eye, I saw a massive claw coming for me. I threw myself to the ground as it shattered the driver's side window. The claw ripped through the cabin of the RV, before prying the roof off completely and tossing it aside.
I watched the Crab Thing as it approached the ruined cabin. One spiky leg came down on the hood of the RV. The Crab’s one remaining eye seemed to fixate on me as it reached for me with a claw, and I scrambled backward, only barely avoiding it. I looked back just in time to see Milo with a look of utter horror on his face. He grabbed me by the arm, pulling me deeper into the RV as the Crab Thing began trying to pry the roof off again.
Behind it, I could see other Nightwalkers drawing near.
There was no running from this.
“Gretchen, either shoot this goddamn thing or do something!” Milo cried, looking over at Gretchen. She glanced away from her research with wide eyes. I saw her reach for her revolver, only to hesistate when she noticed the other Nightwalkers watching us from behind the Crab Thing. I could see her doing the math in her head. Four shots left… not enough to kill the Crab and the Nightwalkers. The gun couldn’t save us. Her eyes settled on the flower diagram she’d cast aside earlier. I saw her grimace before running toward the back window.
“Shaal forgive me…” She said under her breath as she pressed a finger into the cut in her hand and began to hastily paint another sigil on the glass.
“Everybody get under something. It will go for the Crab first. As soon as it does, run. Do not stop.”
“What are you gonna do?” Dom asked.
“I’m opening another door… you’re not going to like what’s about to come through,” She replied and grabbed something off of the counter, hesitated for a moment, and dusted it carelessly on the blood she’d marked the window with. Then, as if she’d just thrown a live grenade she dove under her desk.
Milo scrambled behind a chair, while I pulled Dom behind one of the counters. The Crab Thing peeled the roof up, leaving us completely exposed and for a moment, I wondered if Dr. Di Cesare’s plan had failed.
Then I heard the sound of shattering glass. I looked to see that something had just launched itself through the window. It landed gracelessly on the ground, before stumbling around on coltish legs. It almost resembled a person, or maybe even one of the smaller Nightwalkers. But there was something very different about it. Its skin was an unusual shade of pinkish green, strange luminous flowers like the ones in the photographs Dr. Di Cesare kept in her lab, and moss seemed to bloom from its skin, and I swore that I could see pale yellow eyes in the center of those flowers. Its body seemed to ripple and change. Its hands twisted into gripping claws as it let out a raspy hiss.
Every single eye on it focused on the crab, which paused for a moment before reaching for the new creature. The claw closed around it, and the creature writhed and screamed, its flesh twisting and morphing into sharp tendrils that it slid between the gaps in the Crabs chitin, earning a fresh cry of pain from it. The new creature's head seemed to be split open, sort of like a flower blossoming, unleashing a shimmering payload of what looked like spores into the Crab’s face.
From his position behind the chair, I saw Milo’s eyes wide with terror as he watched this unfold. It was the kind of terror I’d never seen before. Something so deep in his soul that it must have took everything he had not to scream.
Dr. Di Cesare scrambled out from under her desk. She snatched the radio from Milo and without so much as a moment of hesitation ran for the door of the RV.
“Move!” She said, with an urgency that I knew better than to ignore. The three of us abandoned the RV and took off into the mist.
“Mr. Kallas, as soon as the trucks are through, kill the bonfire at the church! Cut off all access to the Calhoun Pocket!”
“What, why?” Kallas demanded.
“The situation has worsened, we need to enact full quarantine measures!” Dr. Di Cesare said, “Do it now!”
“What the hell did you just do?” Nina demanded, “Gretchen, where’s Milo?”
“We’re heading for the refugee area, on foot! Do not wait for us! I repeat, do not wait for us!”
I had no idea what the hell the Doctor had just done, but I didn’t think I’d ever hear fear like that in her voice. It was the first time she hadn’t sounded completely composed. The fire was growing closer, and seemed to have spread to most of the town. Buildings burned around us, as did tents. I could see the shadows of other Nightwalkers silhouetted against the inferno, bringing back memories of the last time Puriysk had burned. Up ahead, there was gunfire and I saw one of the refugee trucks skidding onto the road, and away toward the church.
Looking back, I could see shapes pursuing us in the mist. I couldn’t make out what they were, but the sigils on their foreheads told me enough. They were gaining on us, and I could only pray to whatever God was listening that they wouldn’t catch up.
Beside me, I saw the fire grow taller and almost fell over, trying to get away from it. The fire seemed to rise up into the sky before coming down on some of the Nightwalkers that pursued us. I looked over to see Dr. Di Cesare, a hand outstretched and a frantic look on her face. She moved her hands again, pulling more of the inferno onto the road to cover our tracks.
“Don’t stop!” She said, “Keep running!”
And I did exactly what she told me to do.
I could see another car up ahead, an SUV this time tearing onto the road, although, unlike the truck before it, it turned toward us and skidded to a stop just up ahead. Milo reached the SUV first, throwing open the passenger door and getting in. Dom and I were second, with Dr. Di Cesare being the last.
From the driver's seat, I could see Nina looking back at us, making sure that everyone was there before making a sharp U-turn and speeding toward the church, leaving Puriysk and the Nightwalkers behind.
“Are you genuinely insane?” Milo demanded, looking back at Dr. Di Cesare. “Do you have any idea how stupid that was!”
“It was the only spell I could think of that would yield immediate results,” She said. “Every time you open that door, something always comes through.”
“Yes, and there’s a very good reason you don’t open that door, Gretchen! You’re lucky we’re not all dead right now! For Gods sake, you may have just killed us all anyway!”
“What the fuck did she just do?” Nina asked, confused.
Her question went largely ignored.
“We were out of options!” Dr. Di Cesare replied, “We are up against an opponent who will resort to any means to dispose of us! Any means. It is therefore necessary that we do the same!”
“And that gives you carte blanche to unleash that? For Gods sake, we weren’t even equipped to deal with that! That wasn’t even part of the goddamn discussion until you pulled it in!”
“Can somebody just explain to me what the hell just happened?” Dom snapped.
Milo looked over at him, then back to Gretchen.
“There are countless other pocket realities in the vast expanse of the void,” She said. “Many serve as havens for various Gods and their followers… I simply opened a door to let one of them in.”
“I wouldn’t call that thing a God, I’d call it a plague!” Milo said.
“Hive mind,” Dr. Di Cesare corrected, “The Prince of Rosen Spring operates as a singular consciousness, it has more in common with fungi than a virus or pathogen.”
“I’m sorry, did you just summon The Fucking Rosen Prince?” Nina asked, and again she was ignored.
“Whatever it is, we have a standing order to burn any trace of that thing we come across,” Milo said. “Why the hell do you even know how to summon it?”
“I don’t work for you!” Dr. Di Cesare replied harshly, “I’m allowed to research whatever topic captures my interest!”
“Well do me a favor and warn me the next time you’re about to unleash a Class 5 Apocalyptic entity!”
“You wanted something that would get them off of us, I delivered! We were exposed and outnumbered, there were no other viable options!”
“Can we go back to the part where you called that thing an ‘Apocalyptic Entity?’” Dom asked. “What the hell did you just bring in?”
“It’s a sort of hive mind,” Dr. Di Cesare explained. “It infects other entities, absorbs them into its shared consciousness, and uses the bodies either as drones, or organic material to construct new bodies for itself.”
“Oh my fucking God…” Nina said under her breath, “And you just pulled that out of your ass? You didn’t try shooting your fucking magic gun?”
“We do not have the munitions to just mindlessly shoot everything that poses a threat! At minimum… the Rosen Prince should distract Calhoun and his Nightwalkers long enough for us to complete the evacuation!”
“Yeah, by absorbing this entire place!” Milo spat. “At this point, Calhoun’s already dead… let the Rosen Prince take care of him!”
“That’s not a gamble we should be willing to take,” Dr. Di Cesare said. “We are not dealing with a man who is trapped here. If this situation becomes untenable, I have zero doubt that he will simply abandon this place and begin again elsewhere, at which point it may become impossible to find him again. Even if we did, factoring in the recent sacrifices, it’s highly probable that he would be exceedingly harder to kill. If you want this man dead, then our window of opportunity is now and it is closing very rapidly!”
“Hey… this may be a stupid question but what happens if the Rosen Prince assimilates Calhoun or the Eldest?” Nina asked.
Both the Doctor and Milo fell silent. Milo’s head slowly turned to look at her.
“Yes, Gretchen. What happens then?” He asked.
Dr. Di Cesare was silent for a moment.
“All the more reason to kill Calhoun first,” She finally said.
Up ahead, I could see the ruins of the church, although the moment I saw them, it was already clear to me that something was wrong. The church was dark. There was no light from the bonfire inside and as we drove past the metal poles that marked the doorway, I noticed no change in the forest around us.
“Oh no…” Nina said under her breath, “Fuck, fuck, fuck fuck…”
She tried to steer the car through the other doorway, but nothing changed.
The doors were closed.
“Good, Mr. Kallas has ensured that nothing can escape."
“Yeah and that includes us, dumbass!” Nina snapped.
“That’s of no concern. I can open another, smaller door. We should shore up inside that church. We’ll get out the same way you did before,” Dr. Di Cesare said.
Nina swore under her breath before driving toward the ruins of the church.
She skidded to a stop, and Dr. Di Cesare was the first one out.
“We need to move quickly, get anything you can burn and get it now. Time is short,” She said.
Nina went around the back of the SUV and pulled the trunk open, taking out a can of spare gasoline before following Dr. Di Cesare inside the church.
“There’s one more in there,” She said to me and Dom. “Grab it!”
I figured that since I had the idlest hands, it might as well be me. I grabbed the gas can from the back of the SUV and took a parting look at Puriysk, which burned brightly behind us. The fire seemed to have consumed everything, and though the sky was dark, the glow from the inferno made it look like twilight. It was both the most beautiful and horrible thing I’d ever seen.
Even from where I stood, I could still hear the screams coming from Puriysk, only now they weren’t the screams of men being slaughtered by monsters… they were the screams of monsters slaughtering each other. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in that town… and realized that it might be better if I didn’t know.
I didn’t linger, I took the gas can into the church, following Nina. She was already beginning to dump the contents of the can on the charred ashes of the bonfire. Milo was right beside her, tossing some of the extra firewood that the others had collected to keep the fire alive onto it, to try and give it some new life.
“There’s headlights down the road, somebody’s coming!” Dom called from the doorway of the church.
“More refugees?” Milo asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Milo swore under his breath.
“Gretchen, can you finish up?”
“I need a minute,” She said. “We undid the old runes and ritual circle when we expanded it outside the church. I need to repair them.”
Milo growled in frustration before storming over toward the Church door. Nina tossed her empty gas can aside and went to follow, blowing past Dom and Milo and heading back out to the SUV. I watched her pull open the drivers side door and take something out. It took me a moment to recognize exactly what it was.
It was a rifle. She hastily checked the magazine before looking out at the oncoming headlights. I could make out three cars, most of them older and more worn than the ones Milo’s people drove although the one at the front was a clean, polished muscle car.
I’d seen that car before, and I knew that Dom had too.
It seemed that Sheriff McClellan was here to deal with us personally.
The cars slowed to a stop before us, and the four of us stood at the ready. I reached for the .22 I’d kept holstered, and felt a little guilty for the small sense of relief I felt that my gun might actually be useful for a change.
The doors of McClellan’s car opened, and I saw him stepping out of the driver's seat. I could see other men getting out of the cars behind him.
“Hell of a mess you’ve caused us…” McClellan said. His black boots sank into the mud beneath him. His wispy white hair seemed to flutter in the wind. I could see a chrome revolver sitting on his hip. “And yet you just refuse to die.”
“You must be the Sheriff,” Milo said coldly.
“And you must be the dumb motherfucker who thought he’d mess around with Governor Calhoun… how’s that working out for you.”
“Well despite everything, I’d say we’ve probably taken fewer losses than you have,” Milo replied. McClellan actually cracked a half smile at that.
“You’re a cocky little shit, I’ll give you that.” He said. “Not sure what the hell you assholes did back there… but I’ve never seen Nightwalkers claw each other to pieces like that before… either way, the fight’s over. And from where I’m standing it looks like you’re running outta here with your tail between your legs.”
“And from where I’m standing, you look like a dead man walking,” Milo replied. “If you’re smart, you’ve come here to leave with us. I don’t know if you realize what’s just been unleashed here, but mark my words in a few days time this place will be nothing but a graveyard.”
“Oh, I can promise that whatever you think you did, isn’t gonna change a damn thing,” McClellan said. “You can run if you’d like. I’ll even let you do it. Either way, once he’s got the rest of the souls he needs the Governor will hunt you down like the rats you are and-”
A volley of gunshots came from beside us as Nina started shooting. I saw a couple of the Sheriff’s Boys behind McClellan go down, while others dove for cover. McClellan himself moved behind his car with surprising speed, only narrowly avoiding Nina’s trigger happy rampage.
“These people talk too fucking much…” She said under her breath as we hid behind the stone walls of the church.
“Open fire boys, let’s clean this up!” I heard McClellan bark from behind his car.
I saw a couple of the Sheriff’s Boys try to peek out from behind one of their cars, and took aim at them, firing blindly. One window of the car shattered, and one of the Boys had time to pull his head back. The other wasn’t so lucky. His head jerked back and he hit the ground dead.
I felt my heart skip a beat, as I realized that I’d been the one who killed him… although there was hardly time to process what I’d just done. The gunfire around me saw to that.
“Reserve units, move in on the Church! We need some backup!” McClellan said, presumably speaking into a radio and not talking to himself. I saw the door of his car open as he tried to crawl back inside. Milo seemed to see it too and fired at the driver's side of the windshield. He only got off a couple of shots before McClellan’s retort blew a fresh hole through the glass.
I heard Milo cry out in pain and hit the ground, clutching at his shoulder. Nina’s eyes widened as she watched him fall, and I ran to his side to check on him. He pressed a hand against the wound, gritting his teeth and trying not to scream.
“I-I’m alright…” He lied, but I knew that he was out of the fight.
“Motherfucker…” Nina spat, before directing her fire at McClellan’s car, putting bullet after bullet through his windshield. I could hear a pained scream from inside and heard the engine turn over. McClellan’s car was launched backward, going in full reverse and slamming into one of the other Sheriff’s Boys cars. It knocked the car back against the boys hiding behind it, forcing them out of cover. A move that Dom was quick to punish. His gun spoke three times, and I saw two men fall, one dead and the other wounded.
McClellan hit the gas again, still in reverse and desperately trying to flee. He only succeeded in pushing the car he’d just hit over the wounded man.
I could see more headlights in the distance, driving through the flaming ruins of Puriysk toward us, although against the fires I could see the shadow of what used to be the Crab Thing coming to intercept them. I watched as it impaled one car on one of its sharp legs and caught another in its pincers, dutifully tearing at it to get to the meat inside. Tendrils like vines seemed to hang off of its body now, and I watched them slither inside the broken car. I consider myself lucky that I didn’t have to witness what they did to the people inside.
With most of McClellan’s group dead, Nina stepped out into the open, firing again at his car. I saw the driver's side door open and watched as McClellan tumbled out, his body bloody and broken.
“Motherfucker…” Nina spat, advancing on him with a bitter, determined purpose. I saw one of the last of the Sheriff’s Boys coming out of cover. Nina raised her rifle at him, but Dom shot first.
It was just Nina and the Sheriff now. She regarded the corpse of the last of the Sheriff’s Boys out of the corner of her eye, before making a beeline for McClellan. I watched as he tried to stand, only for his legs to give out from under him.
“Wait…” McClellan rasped, “Wait…”
Before he could say another word she’d taken aim at him and pulled the trigger, putting four more bullets into his chest.
“Shut up,” She said coldly, before turning away and going back to the church. McClellan lay on the ground, not quite dead but past the point of surviving. He twitched and wheezed out his final breaths before finally going still.
The moment Nina was through that door, she was at Milo’s side again.
“How bad is it?” She asked.
“I’ll live…” He rasped, “It’s… just a flesh wound. Help me up.”
Nina helped him stand, before looking over toward the center of the church.
“Gretchen, how’s that door looking?” She asked.
“Runes are in place… ritual circle is set, I’m almost ready!” She called back.
“Let’s go,” Nina said, dragging Milo over to the columns.
Gretchen set the bonfire alight and as we passed through the columns, I could see that the doors were open again. Faded figures of soldiers and refugees stood by anxiously. I could even see Kallas among them, pacing about with a worried look on his face. The moment he saw that the fire had started again, he looked up, seeming both relieved and even more anxious at the same time.
“I was never much good out in the field…” Milo grunted, “Should’ve stayed on the other side.”
“Don’t talk,” Nina said. “You’re still alive, right? That counts for something.”
He chuckled.
“Suppose it does,” He said.
Dom and I watched as Nina guided him toward the bonfire, then out through the right set of columns, into the version of the church where we could actually see the night sky overhead. As Nina brought Milo through, Kallas was right there to meet her.
“Take him,” She said. “He’s hurt but he’ll live so long as you patch him up right away.”
“Understood,” Kallas said, “Come on, let’s get you through and put that fire out.”
Nina just shook her head.
“No, we’ve still got work to do in here. I’ll hang back with Gretchen until we’ve confirmed that Calhoun’s dead.”
“No can do, Dr. Di Cesare ordered full quarantine measures. We need everyone out!"
“Not until we confirm the kill,” Dr. Di Cesare said. “I require someone with more experience in these things than I have. Take Mr. Durand and get him taken care of. We’ll connect with you later.”
Kallas grimaced and looked over at Milo.
“Do what she says,” He rasped, and I saw a quiet resignation cross over Kallas’ face.
“What about you two?” He asked, looking at me and Dom, “If we close this door, you’re not getting out until Valentine and the Doctor do.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “We still have unfinished business.”
Kallas just shook his head and turned to leave, letting Milo lean on him for support as he did. Milo looked back at us, or more specifically he looked back at Nina.
“Valentine…” He said, “Make me proud.”
She gave him a single nod, before letting him go.
Once she was past the columns, Dr. Di Cesare gave a single wave of her hand and the bonfire flickered and died.
The Church went dark. And we were alone again.
“Doctor, how much can you do to keep those things in Puriysk out of here?” Nina asked.
“Given ten or twenty minutes to modify some of the extant runes, quite a bit,” She replied. “It won’t be foolproof, but-”
“Just do it. Let’s dig in here, wait for the fires to die down, and see if we can’t scavenge anything from the ruins in the morning. The more we can get, the better cuz as soon as we’re set, we’re going to Parsons.”
2023.03.23 21:52 HeadOfSpectre Faerie Tale - Eigth Entry
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Seventh Entry
Journal of Camille Lambert - April 13th (Part 2)
The mist rolled in from the edge of town, swallowing buildings, tents, and trucks as the klaxon alarm sounded. I looked up and saw the sky beginning to fade into absolute darkness, even though it should have been hours before dusk.
“Fascinating…” I heard Dr. Di Cesare say beside me, although she was the only one who seemed to think so.
Milo stared into the mist with a look of dread as flashes of gunfire began to go off deep inside, briefly illuminating the moving shadows as the screams of dying men and impossible monsters filled our ears.
“Kallas, Valentine, the refugees! Get them out!” He ordered. Neither of them needed to be told twice. The words were barely out of his mouth when they took off at a sprint toward the tents, guns already drawn.
“Gretchen, how do we drive them off?”
“They circumvented my runes… how…” She said under her breath, sounding more annoyed than anything else.
“Gretchen!” Milo snapped, and she seemed to be pulled out of her train of thought.
“Uncertain. I need to get back to my lab. Everything I could use would be there!”
She took off like a shot, and as she ran, the mist overtook us, turning her into little more than a shadow ahead of us.
“Stay close!” Milo ordered, going for his pistol, although we could barely see him through the mist either. I felt Dom reaching for my hand and looked over to see his shadow, pistol drawn and trying to keep up with Milo and Gretchen. Her white RV hadn’t been parked that far away, but it might as well have been miles.
The chorus of gunfire and screams roared in my ears. I could hear inhuman screeches as men were torn limb from bloody limb. As Dom led me behind Milo, I couldn’t help but look over and pray that our people were managing, somehow. Through the mist, I could see a shadow racing toward us. At a glance, I almost thought that it might be a man on a horse but… no. The sigil of an eye burned onto its forehead made that very clear.
“LOOK OUT!” I called in the moment before the horseman raced toward us. I could see Milo diving out of the way while Dom pulled me back. He fired two shots at it, and though I did not get a good look at the creature before us, I saw enough to know that it wasn’t a horse and a rider… it was one creature. A pale, blood soaked thing with claws like scythes and eyes crowned around its head like a wreathe. It slashed at Dom who dove out of the way, before rearing up on its hind legs and unleashing a scream that sounded like a man in pain.
I could see Milo firing at it as well, but the bullets might as well have done nothing to it. Just like the last Sigiled Nightwalker, it barely even seemed to notice.
“You made your choice to stay here…” A raspy voice echoed from the creature, and I knew that it was Calhoun speaking to us. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”
The Nightwalker came for me next, and I dove to the ground, scrambling away as its claws raked against the asphalt road. The red eye sigil focused on me, and on the creature's face I could see a gaping maw underneath that eye, dripping with wet saliva and filled with long, jagged teeth.
It reared up again, and I could do nothing but wait to be crushed beneath its hooves when the deafening echo of a gunshot rang out. The Nightwalker screamed. Chunks of its head were ripped away from it and a new, pinkish steam rose from the mess that was left. It collapsed onto its side, still twitching in death.
I looked over to see the shadow of Dr. Di Cesare, holding that revolver of hers.
“Most interesting… assuming direct control over certain Nightwalkers.” She said. “Come There are certainly more.”
Dom helped me to my feet and we took off toward the RV again.
Through the mist, I could see the RV up ahead. Dr. Di Cesare threw the door open and quickly ushered us inside. As soon as it was closed again, I watched her take a knife from her coat and roll up her sleeve. Without so much as a wince of pain, she drew the blade across her hand, then using one finger, began to hastily draw a sigil on the door.
“Should keep them out… should…” She murmured, and once she was done she tore past us, deeper into the RV.
There seemed like she’d been using it as some sort of makeshift lab. I could see counters littered with old books, jars full of strange ingredients, and a small altar with scattered journal pages laying around it. I could see photos and diagrams of strange flowers that seemed to be every color at once and none of them at the same time, and crude anatomical sketches of flower-headed creatures.
On a small work desk pressed into one corner, I heard a walkie talkie crackle to life.
“Can you hold them back? We’re still loading the trucks!”
I recognized the voice on the other end as Kallas.
“Well move your fucking ass! We’re losing ground here!” Came the reply and it sounded like it was coming from Nina.
Milo ran toward the desk, grabbing the radio off of it.
“Valentine, Kallas, what’s going on out there?” He demanded.
“Everything’s gone to shit!” Valentine replied, “We’re falling back to the Church!”
“Already?” Milo asked, breathless. “Gretchen, how long before you can-”
“And who’s this I’m hearing now?” A new voice asked. It sounded like an older man, although I knew it wasn’t Calhoun.
I looked over at Dom, wondering if maybe he recognized it. Judging by his expression, he did.
“Who the hell is this?” Milo demanded.
“I’m the man watching you folks get your asses beat. It’s kinda funny, actually. You people come in here, throwing your weight around all high and mighty only to crumble the moment we give you anything more than a little love tap. Name’s McClellan. I suppose you could say that I’m the Sheriff around these parts.”
“Oh for fucks sake, are they on our goddamn channel?” Nina asked.
“Thought I’d tune in, see how things were going. Governor Calhoun was kind enough to spare me and my boys the hassle of dealing with you personally. Least we can do is enjoy the show.”
“Oh God… he’s monologuing!” Nina whined.
“You folks have kicked the beehive. Now you’re gonna get stung.” McClellan crooned. Everything he said ended in an upward inflection and it had already gotten annoying.
“The Governor wasn’t too happy to have to clean out the other towns, but you forced his hand. And what he’s gonna do next… you should be held accountable for that too.”
“Next?” Milo asked warily although before he could get his answer, something hit the RV, rocking it violently from side to side. Dr. Di Cesare almost fell over, before bracing herself against the counter and going through her books. She glanced at one of the flower diagrams before violently shaking her head and tossing it aside. Over the radio, I could hear McClellan laughing.
“Gretchen?” Milo asked, “Please tell me you’ve got something!”
“Patience…” She urged, “Extant research only addresses killing these things one at a time, not as an army.”
The RV rocked again and I ran to the window to look out. I could see something move past, something a hell of a lot bigger than the one the Doctor had just killed. Through the mist and the darkness, I could see the glow of a fire flare to life somewhere in the distance. Somehow, I got the feeling that Nina was behind it.
“Just tell me what we need to do to kill these goddamn things!” Milo snapped as the RV was hit again. I saw something in the opposite window, vacant black eyes and flat, chitinous mandibles that clicked together, only barely hiding the incomprehensible mouth behind them.
“I can’t just cast a spell and kill them all!” Gretchen replied, “I need more time! Maybe if I can open a door to another pocket we can at least get out of here, but I need time to find a safe one!” I could hear something scraping against the metal roof of the RV and saw it begin to buckle near the corner. Jagged spikes broke through it as whatever was outside began to pry open the RV like a can of soup.
“We don’t have time!” Milo warned.
Dom watched as the Nightwalker began to pry at the roof before looking over through the window and noticing its shiny black eye. Without a moment of hesitation, he fired at it, shattering the window and cracking it like an egg. A thick, black goo dribbled out of it and the Nightwalker shrank back, letting out a screech of pain. It briefly retreated, holding its spikey, crablike claws in front of it defensively. I could hear it making an irate clicking noise and it waited for a moment as Dom fired a few more rounds at it although this time, they just bounced uselessly off its armor.
“Five trucks out. Confirmed that two are at the Church!” I heard Kallas say over the radio, “Six, seven and eight almost loaded. Those are the last ones!”
“You might get these ones out… but there’ll always be more.” McClellan said, “I’ll admit that this has all been a bit of a setback, but there’s a lot of little towns just ripe for the picking out there. And once he gets the rest of the 5000 souls he needs… well, if you think this is bad, wait until you see what he’ll be able to do then.”
“Truck six is away! Three is at the church!” Kallas said, trying his damnedest to ignore McClellan.
“Double time it!” Milo snapped, “Valentine, what’s going on out there?”
“Fire’s keeping them at bay but they’re getting brave!” She warned, “We’re heading back toward the refugees. Milo, where are you now?”
“I’m in Di Cesare’s lab, with Dominic and Camille.”
“We’re gonna need to fall back to the church. Can you meet us there?” Nina asked.
Milo looked over at me.
“Get to the driver's seat, keys are in the ignition. Get us out of here.” He said. I just nodded and did what he asked, listening as he went back to Nina.
“We’re en route!”
Just like Milo had promised, I found the keys in the ignition and turned them. The engine roared to life. Through the mist, I could see the shadows of other Nightwalkers and my blood turned to ice in my veins as I saw the sigils on their foreheads. Crimson eyes, more than I could count at a glance, and each of them watching me.
The RV shook again and from the corner of my eye, I saw a massive claw coming for me. I threw myself to the ground as it shattered the driver's side window. The claw ripped through the cabin of the RV, before prying the roof off completely and tossing it aside.
I watched the Crab Thing as it approached the ruined cabin. One spiky leg came down on the hood of the RV. The Crab’s one remaining eye seemed to fixate on me as it reached for me with a claw, and I scrambled backward, only barely avoiding it. I looked back just in time to see Milo with a look of utter horror on his face. He grabbed me by the arm, pulling me deeper into the RV as the Crab Thing began trying to pry the roof off again.
Behind it, I could see other Nightwalkers drawing near.
There was no running from this.
“Gretchen, either shoot this goddamn thing or do something!” Milo cried, looking over at Gretchen. She glanced away from her research with wide eyes. I saw her reach for her revolver, only to hesistate when she noticed the other Nightwalkers watching us from behind the Crab Thing. I could see her doing the math in her head. Four shots left… not enough to kill the Crab and the Nightwalkers. The gun couldn’t save us. Her eyes settled on the flower diagram she’d cast aside earlier. I saw her grimace before running toward the back window.
“Shaal forgive me…” She said under her breath as she pressed a finger into the cut in her hand and began to hastily paint another sigil on the glass.
“Everybody get under something. It will go for the Crab first. As soon as it does, run. Do not stop.”
“What are you gonna do?” Dom asked.
“I’m opening another door… you’re not going to like what’s about to come through,” She replied and grabbed something off of the counter, hesitated for a moment, and dusted it carelessly on the blood she’d marked the window with. Then, as if she’d just thrown a live grenade she dove under her desk.
Milo scrambled behind a chair, while I pulled Dom behind one of the counters. The Crab Thing peeled the roof up, leaving us completely exposed and for a moment, I wondered if Dr. Di Cesare’s plan had failed.
Then I heard the sound of shattering glass. I looked to see that something had just launched itself through the window. It landed gracelessly on the ground, before stumbling around on coltish legs. It almost resembled a person, or maybe even one of the smaller Nightwalkers. But there was something very different about it. Its skin was an unusual shade of pinkish green, strange luminous flowers like the ones in the photographs Dr. Di Cesare kept in her lab, and moss seemed to bloom from its skin, and I swore that I could see pale yellow eyes in the center of those flowers. Its body seemed to ripple and change. Its hands twisted into gripping claws as it let out a raspy hiss.
Every single eye on it focused on the crab, which paused for a moment before reaching for the new creature. The claw closed around it, and the creature writhed and screamed, its flesh twisting and morphing into sharp tendrils that it slid between the gaps in the Crabs chitin, earning a fresh cry of pain from it. The new creature's head seemed to be split open, sort of like a flower blossoming, unleashing a shimmering payload of what looked like spores into the Crab’s face.
From his position behind the chair, I saw Milo’s eyes wide with terror as he watched this unfold. It was the kind of terror I’d never seen before. Something so deep in his soul that it must have took everything he had not to scream.
Dr. Di Cesare scrambled out from under her desk. She snatched the radio from Milo and without so much as a moment of hesitation ran for the door of the RV.
“Move!” She said, with an urgency that I knew better than to ignore. The three of us abandoned the RV and took off into the mist.
“Mr. Kallas, as soon as the trucks are through, kill the bonfire at the church! Cut off all access to the Calhoun Pocket!”
“What, why?” Kallas demanded.
“The situation has worsened, we need to enact full quarantine measures!” Dr. Di Cesare said, “Do it now!”
“What the hell did you just do?” Nina demanded, “Gretchen, where’s Milo?”
“We’re heading for the refugee area, on foot! Do not wait for us! I repeat, do not wait for us!”
I had no idea what the hell the Doctor had just done, but I didn’t think I’d ever hear fear like that in her voice. It was the first time she hadn’t sounded completely composed. The fire was growing closer, and seemed to have spread to most of the town. Buildings burned around us, as did tents. I could see the shadows of other Nightwalkers silhouetted against the inferno, bringing back memories of the last time Puriysk had burned. Up ahead, there was gunfire and I saw one of the refugee trucks skidding onto the road, and away toward the church.
Looking back, I could see shapes pursuing us in the mist. I couldn’t make out what they were, but the sigils on their foreheads told me enough. They were gaining on us, and I could only pray to whatever God was listening that they wouldn’t catch up.
Beside me, I saw the fire grow taller and almost fell over, trying to get away from it. The fire seemed to rise up into the sky before coming down on some of the Nightwalkers that pursued us. I looked over to see Dr. Di Cesare, a hand outstretched and a frantic look on her face. She moved her hands again, pulling more of the inferno onto the road to cover our tracks.
“Don’t stop!” She said, “Keep running!”
And I did exactly what she told me to do.
I could see another car up ahead, an SUV this time tearing onto the road, although, unlike the truck before it, it turned toward us and skidded to a stop just up ahead. Milo reached the SUV first, throwing open the passenger door and getting in. Dom and I were second, with Dr. Di Cesare being the last.
From the driver's seat, I could see Nina looking back at us, making sure that everyone was there before making a sharp U-turn and speeding toward the church, leaving Puriysk and the Nightwalkers behind.
“Are you genuinely insane?” Milo demanded, looking back at Dr. Di Cesare. “Do you have any idea how stupid that was!”
“It was the only spell I could think of that would yield immediate results,” She said. “Every time you open that door, something always comes through.”
“Yes, and there’s a very good reason you don’t open that door, Gretchen! You’re lucky we’re not all dead right now! For Gods sake, you may have just killed us all anyway!”
“What the fuck did she just do?” Nina asked, confused.
Her question went largely ignored.
“We were out of options!” Dr. Di Cesare replied, “We are up against an opponent who will resort to any means to dispose of us! Any means. It is therefore necessary that we do the same!”
“And that gives you carte blanche to unleash that? For Gods sake, we weren’t even equipped to deal with that! That wasn’t even part of the goddamn discussion until you pulled it in!”
“Can somebody just explain to me what the hell just happened?” Dom snapped.
Milo looked over at him, then back to Gretchen.
“There are countless other pocket realities in the vast expanse of the void,” She said. “Many serve as havens for various Gods and their followers… I simply opened a door to let one of them in.”
“I wouldn’t call that thing a God, I’d call it a plague!” Milo said.
“Hive mind,” Dr. Di Cesare corrected, “The Prince of Rosen Spring operates as a singular consciousness, it has more in common with fungi than a virus or pathogen.”
“I’m sorry, did you just summon The Fucking Rosen Prince?” Nina asked, and again she was ignored.
“Whatever it is, we have a standing order to burn any trace of that thing we come across,” Milo said. “Why the hell do you even know how to summon it?”
“I don’t work for you!” Dr. Di Cesare replied harshly, “I’m allowed to research whatever topic captures my interest!”
“Well do me a favor and warn me the next time you’re about to unleash a Class 5 Apocalyptic entity!”
“You wanted something that would get them off of us, I delivered! We were exposed and outnumbered, there were no other viable options!”
“Can we go back to the part where you called that thing an ‘Apocalyptic Entity?’” Dom asked. “What the hell did you just bring in?”
“It’s a sort of hive mind,” Dr. Di Cesare explained. “It infects other entities, absorbs them into its shared consciousness, and uses the bodies either as drones, or organic material to construct new bodies for itself.”
“Oh my fucking God…” Nina said under her breath, “And you just pulled that out of your ass? You didn’t try shooting your fucking magic gun?”
“We do not have the munitions to just mindlessly shoot everything that poses a threat! At minimum… the Rosen Prince should distract Calhoun and his Nightwalkers long enough for us to complete the evacuation!”
“Yeah, by absorbing this entire place!” Milo spat. “At this point, Calhoun’s already dead… let the Rosen Prince take care of him!”
“That’s not a gamble we should be willing to take,” Dr. Di Cesare said. “We are not dealing with a man who is trapped here. If this situation becomes untenable, I have zero doubt that he will simply abandon this place and begin again elsewhere, at which point it may become impossible to find him again. Even if we did, factoring in the recent sacrifices, it’s highly probable that he would be exceedingly harder to kill. If you want this man dead, then our window of opportunity is now and it is closing very rapidly!”
“Hey… this may be a stupid question but what happens if the Rosen Prince assimilates Calhoun or the Eldest?” Nina asked.
Both the Doctor and Milo fell silent. Milo’s head slowly turned to look at her.
“Yes, Gretchen. What happens then?” He asked.
Dr. Di Cesare was silent for a moment.
“All the more reason to kill Calhoun first,” She finally said.
Up ahead, I could see the ruins of the church, although the moment I saw them, it was already clear to me that something was wrong. The church was dark. There was no light from the bonfire inside and as we drove past the metal poles that marked the doorway, I noticed no change in the forest around us.
“Oh no…” Nina said under her breath, “Fuck, fuck, fuck fuck…”
She tried to steer the car through the other doorway, but nothing changed.
The doors were closed.
“Good, Mr. Kallas has ensured that nothing can escape."
“Yeah and that includes us, dumbass!” Nina snapped.
“That’s of no concern. I can open another, smaller door. We should shore up inside that church. We’ll get out the same way you did before,” Dr. Di Cesare said.
Nina swore under her breath before driving toward the ruins of the church.
She skidded to a stop, and Dr. Di Cesare was the first one out.
“We need to move quickly, get anything you can burn and get it now. Time is short,” She said.
Nina went around the back of the SUV and pulled the trunk open, taking out a can of spare gasoline before following Dr. Di Cesare inside the church.
“There’s one more in there,” She said to me and Dom. “Grab it!”
I figured that since I had the idlest hands, it might as well be me. I grabbed the gas can from the back of the SUV and took a parting look at Puriysk, which burned brightly behind us. The fire seemed to have consumed everything, and though the sky was dark, the glow from the inferno made it look like twilight. It was both the most beautiful and horrible thing I’d ever seen.
Even from where I stood, I could still hear the screams coming from Puriysk, only now they weren’t the screams of men being slaughtered by monsters… they were the screams of monsters slaughtering each other. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in that town… and realized that it might be better if I didn’t know.
I didn’t linger, I took the gas can into the church, following Nina. She was already beginning to dump the contents of the can on the charred ashes of the bonfire. Milo was right beside her, tossing some of the extra firewood that the others had collected to keep the fire alive onto it, to try and give it some new life.
“There’s headlights down the road, somebody’s coming!” Dom called from the doorway of the church.
“More refugees?” Milo asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Milo swore under his breath.
“Gretchen, can you finish up?”
“I need a minute,” She said. “We undid the old runes and ritual circle when we expanded it outside the church. I need to repair them.”
Milo growled in frustration before storming over toward the Church door. Nina tossed her empty gas can aside and went to follow, blowing past Dom and Milo and heading back out to the SUV. I watched her pull open the drivers side door and take something out. It took me a moment to recognize exactly what it was.
It was a rifle. She hastily checked the magazine before looking out at the oncoming headlights. I could make out three cars, most of them older and more worn than the ones Milo’s people drove although the one at the front was a clean, polished muscle car.
I’d seen that car before, and I knew that Dom had too.
It seemed that Sheriff McClellan was here to deal with us personally.
The cars slowed to a stop before us, and the four of us stood at the ready. I reached for the .22 I’d kept holstered, and felt a little guilty for the small sense of relief I felt that my gun might actually be useful for a change.
The doors of McClellan’s car opened, and I saw him stepping out of the driver's seat. I could see other men getting out of the cars behind him.
“Hell of a mess you’ve caused us…” McClellan said. His black boots sank into the mud beneath him. His wispy white hair seemed to flutter in the wind. I could see a chrome revolver sitting on his hip. “And yet you just refuse to die.”
“You must be the Sheriff,” Milo said coldly.
“And you must be the dumb motherfucker who thought he’d mess around with Governor Calhoun… how’s that working out for you.”
“Well despite everything, I’d say we’ve probably taken fewer losses than you have,” Milo replied. McClellan actually cracked a half smile at that.
“You’re a cocky little shit, I’ll give you that.” He said. “Not sure what the hell you assholes did back there… but I’ve never seen Nightwalkers claw each other to pieces like that before… either way, the fight’s over. And from where I’m standing it looks like you’re running outta here with your tail between your legs.”
“And from where I’m standing, you look like a dead man walking,” Milo replied. “If you’re smart, you’ve come here to leave with us. I don’t know if you realize what’s just been unleashed here, but mark my words in a few days time this place will be nothing but a graveyard.”
“Oh, I can promise that whatever you think you did, isn’t gonna change a damn thing,” McClellan said. “You can run if you’d like. I’ll even let you do it. Either way, once he’s got the rest of the souls he needs the Governor will hunt you down like the rats you are and-”
A volley of gunshots came from beside us as Nina started shooting. I saw a couple of the Sheriff’s Boys behind McClellan go down, while others dove for cover. McClellan himself moved behind his car with surprising speed, only narrowly avoiding Nina’s trigger happy rampage.
“These people talk too fucking much…” She said under her breath as we hid behind the stone walls of the church.
“Open fire boys, let’s clean this up!” I heard McClellan bark from behind his car.
I saw a couple of the Sheriff’s Boys try to peek out from behind one of their cars, and took aim at them, firing blindly. One window of the car shattered, and one of the Boys had time to pull his head back. The other wasn’t so lucky. His head jerked back and he hit the ground dead.
I felt my heart skip a beat, as I realized that I’d been the one who killed him… although there was hardly time to process what I’d just done. The gunfire around me saw to that.
“Reserve units, move in on the Church! We need some backup!” McClellan said, presumably speaking into a radio and not talking to himself. I saw the door of his car open as he tried to crawl back inside. Milo seemed to see it too and fired at the driver's side of the windshield. He only got off a couple of shots before McClellan’s retort blew a fresh hole through the glass.
I heard Milo cry out in pain and hit the ground, clutching at his shoulder. Nina’s eyes widened as she watched him fall, and I ran to his side to check on him. He pressed a hand against the wound, gritting his teeth and trying not to scream.
“I-I’m alright…” He lied, but I knew that he was out of the fight.
“Motherfucker…” Nina spat, before directing her fire at McClellan’s car, putting bullet after bullet through his windshield. I could hear a pained scream from inside and heard the engine turn over. McClellan’s car was launched backward, going in full reverse and slamming into one of the other Sheriff’s Boys cars. It knocked the car back against the boys hiding behind it, forcing them out of cover. A move that Dom was quick to punish. His gun spoke three times, and I saw two men fall, one dead and the other wounded.
McClellan hit the gas again, still in reverse and desperately trying to flee. He only succeeded in pushing the car he’d just hit over the wounded man.
I could see more headlights in the distance, driving through the flaming ruins of Puriysk toward us, although against the fires I could see the shadow of what used to be the Crab Thing coming to intercept them. I watched as it impaled one car on one of its sharp legs and caught another in its pincers, dutifully tearing at it to get to the meat inside. Tendrils like vines seemed to hang off of its body now, and I watched them slither inside the broken car. I consider myself lucky that I didn’t have to witness what they did to the people inside.
With most of McClellan’s group dead, Nina stepped out into the open, firing again at his car. I saw the driver's side door open and watched as McClellan tumbled out, his body bloody and broken.
“Motherfucker…” Nina spat, advancing on him with a bitter, determined purpose. I saw one of the last of the Sheriff’s Boys coming out of cover. Nina raised her rifle at him, but Dom shot first.
It was just Nina and the Sheriff now. She regarded the corpse of the last of the Sheriff’s Boys out of the corner of her eye, before making a beeline for McClellan. I watched as he tried to stand, only for his legs to give out from under him.
“Wait…” McClellan rasped, “Wait…”
Before he could say another word she’d taken aim at him and pulled the trigger, putting four more bullets into his chest.
“Shut up,” She said coldly, before turning away and going back to the church. McClellan lay on the ground, not quite dead but past the point of surviving. He twitched and wheezed out his final breaths before finally going still.
The moment Nina was through that door, she was at Milo’s side again.
“How bad is it?” She asked.
“I’ll live…” He rasped, “It’s… just a flesh wound. Help me up.”
Nina helped him stand, before looking over toward the center of the church.
“Gretchen, how’s that door looking?” She asked.
“Runes are in place… ritual circle is set, I’m almost ready!” She called back.
“Let’s go,” Nina said, dragging Milo over to the columns.
Gretchen set the bonfire alight and as we passed through the columns, I could see that the doors were open again. Faded figures of soldiers and refugees stood by anxiously. I could even see Kallas among them, pacing about with a worried look on his face. The moment he saw that the fire had started again, he looked up, seeming both relieved and even more anxious at the same time.
“I was never much good out in the field…” Milo grunted, “Should’ve stayed on the other side.”
“Don’t talk,” Nina said. “You’re still alive, right? That counts for something.”
He chuckled.
“Suppose it does,” He said.
Dom and I watched as Nina guided him toward the bonfire, then out through the right set of columns, into the version of the church where we could actually see the night sky overhead. As Nina brought Milo through, Kallas was right there to meet her.
“Take him,” She said. “He’s hurt but he’ll live so long as you patch him up right away.”
“Understood,” Kallas said, “Come on, let’s get you through and put that fire out.”
Nina just shook her head.
“No, we’ve still got work to do in here. I’ll hang back with Gretchen until we’ve confirmed that Calhoun’s dead.”
“No can do, Dr. Di Cesare ordered full quarantine measures. We need everyone out!"
“Not until we confirm the kill,” Dr. Di Cesare said. “I require someone with more experience in these things than I have. Take Mr. Durand and get him taken care of. We’ll connect with you later.”
Kallas grimaced and looked over at Milo.
“Do what she says,” He rasped, and I saw a quiet resignation cross over Kallas’ face.
“What about you two?” He asked, looking at me and Dom, “If we close this door, you’re not getting out until Valentine and the Doctor do.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “We still have unfinished business.”
Kallas just shook his head and turned to leave, letting Milo lean on him for support as he did. Milo looked back at us, or more specifically he looked back at Nina.
“Valentine…” He said, “Make me proud.”
She gave him a single nod, before letting him go.
Once she was past the columns, Dr. Di Cesare gave a single wave of her hand and the bonfire flickered and died.
The Church went dark. And we were alone again.
“Doctor, how much can you do to keep those things in Puriysk out of here?” Nina asked.
“Given ten or twenty minutes to modify some of the extant runes, quite a bit,” She replied. “It won’t be foolproof, but-”
“Just do it. Let’s dig in here, wait for the fires to die down, and see if we can’t scavenge anything from the ruins in the morning. The more we can get, the better cuz as soon as we’re set, we’re going to Parsons.”
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Seventh Entry
Journal of Camille Lambert - April 13th (Part 2)
The mist rolled in from the edge of town, swallowing buildings, tents, and trucks as the klaxon alarm sounded. I looked up and saw the sky beginning to fade into absolute darkness, even though it should have been hours before dusk.
“Fascinating…” I heard Dr. Di Cesare say beside me, although she was the only one who seemed to think so.
Milo stared into the mist with a look of dread as flashes of gunfire began to go off deep inside, briefly illuminating the moving shadows as the screams of dying men and impossible monsters filled our ears.
“Kallas, Valentine, the refugees! Get them out!” He ordered. Neither of them needed to be told twice. The words were barely out of his mouth when they took off at a sprint toward the tents, guns already drawn.
“Gretchen, how do we drive them off?”
“They circumvented my runes… how…” She said under her breath, sounding more annoyed than anything else.
“Gretchen!” Milo snapped, and she seemed to be pulled out of her train of thought.
“Uncertain. I need to get back to my lab. Everything I could use would be there!”
She took off like a shot, and as she ran, the mist overtook us, turning her into little more than a shadow ahead of us.
“Stay close!” Milo ordered, going for his pistol, although we could barely see him through the mist either. I felt Dom reaching for my hand and looked over to see his shadow, pistol drawn and trying to keep up with Milo and Gretchen. Her white RV hadn’t been parked that far away, but it might as well have been miles.
The chorus of gunfire and screams roared in my ears. I could hear inhuman screeches as men were torn limb from bloody limb. As Dom led me behind Milo, I couldn’t help but look over and pray that our people were managing, somehow. Through the mist, I could see a shadow racing toward us. At a glance, I almost thought that it might be a man on a horse but… no. The sigil of an eye burned onto its forehead made that very clear.
“LOOK OUT!” I called in the moment before the horseman raced toward us. I could see Milo diving out of the way while Dom pulled me back. He fired two shots at it, and though I did not get a good look at the creature before us, I saw enough to know that it wasn’t a horse and a rider… it was one creature. A pale, blood soaked thing with claws like scythes and eyes crowned around its head like a wreathe. It slashed at Dom who dove out of the way, before rearing up on its hind legs and unleashing a scream that sounded like a man in pain.
I could see Milo firing at it as well, but the bullets might as well have done nothing to it. Just like the last Sigiled Nightwalker, it barely even seemed to notice.
“You made your choice to stay here…” A raspy voice echoed from the creature, and I knew that it was Calhoun speaking to us. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”
The Nightwalker came for me next, and I dove to the ground, scrambling away as its claws raked against the asphalt road. The red eye sigil focused on me, and on the creature's face I could see a gaping maw underneath that eye, dripping with wet saliva and filled with long, jagged teeth.
It reared up again, and I could do nothing but wait to be crushed beneath its hooves when the deafening echo of a gunshot rang out. The Nightwalker screamed. Chunks of its head were ripped away from it and a new, pinkish steam rose from the mess that was left. It collapsed onto its side, still twitching in death.
I looked over to see the shadow of Dr. Di Cesare, holding that revolver of hers.
“Most interesting… assuming direct control over certain Nightwalkers.” She said. “Come There are certainly more.”
Dom helped me to my feet and we took off toward the RV again.
Through the mist, I could see the RV up ahead. Dr. Di Cesare threw the door open and quickly ushered us inside. As soon as it was closed again, I watched her take a knife from her coat and roll up her sleeve. Without so much as a wince of pain, she drew the blade across her hand, then using one finger, began to hastily draw a sigil on the door.
“Should keep them out… should…” She murmured, and once she was done she tore past us, deeper into the RV.
There seemed like she’d been using it as some sort of makeshift lab. I could see counters littered with old books, jars full of strange ingredients, and a small altar with scattered journal pages laying around it. I could see photos and diagrams of strange flowers that seemed to be every color at once and none of them at the same time, and crude anatomical sketches of flower-headed creatures.
On a small work desk pressed into one corner, I heard a walkie talkie crackle to life.
“Can you hold them back? We’re still loading the trucks!”
I recognized the voice on the other end as Kallas.
“Well move your fucking ass! We’re losing ground here!” Came the reply and it sounded like it was coming from Nina.
Milo ran toward the desk, grabbing the radio off of it.
“Valentine, Kallas, what’s going on out there?” He demanded.
“Everything’s gone to shit!” Valentine replied, “We’re falling back to the Church!”
“Already?” Milo asked, breathless. “Gretchen, how long before you can-”
“And who’s this I’m hearing now?” A new voice asked. It sounded like an older man, although I knew it wasn’t Calhoun.
I looked over at Dom, wondering if maybe he recognized it. Judging by his expression, he did.
“Who the hell is this?” Milo demanded.
“I’m the man watching you folks get your asses beat. It’s kinda funny, actually. You people come in here, throwing your weight around all high and mighty only to crumble the moment we give you anything more than a little love tap. Name’s McClellan. I suppose you could say that I’m the Sheriff around these parts.”
“Oh for fucks sake, are they on our goddamn channel?” Nina asked.
“Thought I’d tune in, see how things were going. Governor Calhoun was kind enough to spare me and my boys the hassle of dealing with you personally. Least we can do is enjoy the show.”
“Oh God… he’s monologuing!” Nina whined.
“You folks have kicked the beehive. Now you’re gonna get stung.” McClellan crooned. Everything he said ended in an upward inflection and it had already gotten annoying.
“The Governor wasn’t too happy to have to clean out the other towns, but you forced his hand. And what he’s gonna do next… you should be held accountable for that too.”
“Next?” Milo asked warily although before he could get his answer, something hit the RV, rocking it violently from side to side. Dr. Di Cesare almost fell over, before bracing herself against the counter and going through her books. She glanced at one of the flower diagrams before violently shaking her head and tossing it aside. Over the radio, I could hear McClellan laughing.
“Gretchen?” Milo asked, “Please tell me you’ve got something!”
“Patience…” She urged, “Extant research only addresses killing these things one at a time, not as an army.”
The RV rocked again and I ran to the window to look out. I could see something move past, something a hell of a lot bigger than the one the Doctor had just killed. Through the mist and the darkness, I could see the glow of a fire flare to life somewhere in the distance. Somehow, I got the feeling that Nina was behind it.
“Just tell me what we need to do to kill these goddamn things!” Milo snapped as the RV was hit again. I saw something in the opposite window, vacant black eyes and flat, chitinous mandibles that clicked together, only barely hiding the incomprehensible mouth behind them.
“I can’t just cast a spell and kill them all!” Gretchen replied, “I need more time! Maybe if I can open a door to another pocket we can at least get out of here, but I need time to find a safe one!” I could hear something scraping against the metal roof of the RV and saw it begin to buckle near the corner. Jagged spikes broke through it as whatever was outside began to pry open the RV like a can of soup.
“We don’t have time!” Milo warned.
Dom watched as the Nightwalker began to pry at the roof before looking over through the window and noticing its shiny black eye. Without a moment of hesitation, he fired at it, shattering the window and cracking it like an egg. A thick, black goo dribbled out of it and the Nightwalker shrank back, letting out a screech of pain. It briefly retreated, holding its spikey, crablike claws in front of it defensively. I could hear it making an irate clicking noise and it waited for a moment as Dom fired a few more rounds at it although this time, they just bounced uselessly off its armor.
“Five trucks out. Confirmed that two are at the Church!” I heard Kallas say over the radio, “Six, seven and eight almost loaded. Those are the last ones!”
“You might get these ones out… but there’ll always be more.” McClellan said, “I’ll admit that this has all been a bit of a setback, but there’s a lot of little towns just ripe for the picking out there. And once he gets the rest of the 5000 souls he needs… well, if you think this is bad, wait until you see what he’ll be able to do then.”
“Truck six is away! Three is at the church!” Kallas said, trying his damnedest to ignore McClellan.
“Double time it!” Milo snapped, “Valentine, what’s going on out there?”
“Fire’s keeping them at bay but they’re getting brave!” She warned, “We’re heading back toward the refugees. Milo, where are you now?”
“I’m in Di Cesare’s lab, with Dominic and Camille.”
“We’re gonna need to fall back to the church. Can you meet us there?” Nina asked.
Milo looked over at me.
“Get to the driver's seat, keys are in the ignition. Get us out of here.” He said. I just nodded and did what he asked, listening as he went back to Nina.
“We’re en route!”
Just like Milo had promised, I found the keys in the ignition and turned them. The engine roared to life. Through the mist, I could see the shadows of other Nightwalkers and my blood turned to ice in my veins as I saw the sigils on their foreheads. Crimson eyes, more than I could count at a glance, and each of them watching me.
The RV shook again and from the corner of my eye, I saw a massive claw coming for me. I threw myself to the ground as it shattered the driver's side window. The claw ripped through the cabin of the RV, before prying the roof off completely and tossing it aside.
I watched the Crab Thing as it approached the ruined cabin. One spiky leg came down on the hood of the RV. The Crab’s one remaining eye seemed to fixate on me as it reached for me with a claw, and I scrambled backward, only barely avoiding it. I looked back just in time to see Milo with a look of utter horror on his face. He grabbed me by the arm, pulling me deeper into the RV as the Crab Thing began trying to pry the roof off again.
Behind it, I could see other Nightwalkers drawing near.
There was no running from this.
“Gretchen, either shoot this goddamn thing or do something!” Milo cried, looking over at Gretchen. She glanced away from her research with wide eyes. I saw her reach for her revolver, only to hesistate when she noticed the other Nightwalkers watching us from behind the Crab Thing. I could see her doing the math in her head. Four shots left… not enough to kill the Crab and the Nightwalkers. The gun couldn’t save us. Her eyes settled on the flower diagram she’d cast aside earlier. I saw her grimace before running toward the back window.
“Shaal forgive me…” She said under her breath as she pressed a finger into the cut in her hand and began to hastily paint another sigil on the glass.
“Everybody get under something. It will go for the Crab first. As soon as it does, run. Do not stop.”
“What are you gonna do?” Dom asked.
“I’m opening another door… you’re not going to like what’s about to come through,” She replied and grabbed something off of the counter, hesitated for a moment, and dusted it carelessly on the blood she’d marked the window with. Then, as if she’d just thrown a live grenade she dove under her desk.
Milo scrambled behind a chair, while I pulled Dom behind one of the counters. The Crab Thing peeled the roof up, leaving us completely exposed and for a moment, I wondered if Dr. Di Cesare’s plan had failed.
Then I heard the sound of shattering glass. I looked to see that something had just launched itself through the window. It landed gracelessly on the ground, before stumbling around on coltish legs. It almost resembled a person, or maybe even one of the smaller Nightwalkers. But there was something very different about it. Its skin was an unusual shade of pinkish green, strange luminous flowers like the ones in the photographs Dr. Di Cesare kept in her lab, and moss seemed to bloom from its skin, and I swore that I could see pale yellow eyes in the center of those flowers. Its body seemed to ripple and change. Its hands twisted into gripping claws as it let out a raspy hiss.
Every single eye on it focused on the crab, which paused for a moment before reaching for the new creature. The claw closed around it, and the creature writhed and screamed, its flesh twisting and morphing into sharp tendrils that it slid between the gaps in the Crabs chitin, earning a fresh cry of pain from it. The new creature's head seemed to be split open, sort of like a flower blossoming, unleashing a shimmering payload of what looked like spores into the Crab’s face.
From his position behind the chair, I saw Milo’s eyes wide with terror as he watched this unfold. It was the kind of terror I’d never seen before. Something so deep in his soul that it must have took everything he had not to scream.
Dr. Di Cesare scrambled out from under her desk. She snatched the radio from Milo and without so much as a moment of hesitation ran for the door of the RV.
“Move!” She said, with an urgency that I knew better than to ignore. The three of us abandoned the RV and took off into the mist.
“Mr. Kallas, as soon as the trucks are through, kill the bonfire at the church! Cut off all access to the Calhoun Pocket!”
“What, why?” Kallas demanded.
“The situation has worsened, we need to enact full quarantine measures!” Dr. Di Cesare said, “Do it now!”
“What the hell did you just do?” Nina demanded, “Gretchen, where’s Milo?”
“We’re heading for the refugee area, on foot! Do not wait for us! I repeat, do not wait for us!”
I had no idea what the hell the Doctor had just done, but I didn’t think I’d ever hear fear like that in her voice. It was the first time she hadn’t sounded completely composed. The fire was growing closer, and seemed to have spread to most of the town. Buildings burned around us, as did tents. I could see the shadows of other Nightwalkers silhouetted against the inferno, bringing back memories of the last time Puriysk had burned. Up ahead, there was gunfire and I saw one of the refugee trucks skidding onto the road, and away toward the church.
Looking back, I could see shapes pursuing us in the mist. I couldn’t make out what they were, but the sigils on their foreheads told me enough. They were gaining on us, and I could only pray to whatever God was listening that they wouldn’t catch up.
Beside me, I saw the fire grow taller and almost fell over, trying to get away from it. The fire seemed to rise up into the sky before coming down on some of the Nightwalkers that pursued us. I looked over to see Dr. Di Cesare, a hand outstretched and a frantic look on her face. She moved her hands again, pulling more of the inferno onto the road to cover our tracks.
“Don’t stop!” She said, “Keep running!”
And I did exactly what she told me to do.
I could see another car up ahead, an SUV this time tearing onto the road, although, unlike the truck before it, it turned toward us and skidded to a stop just up ahead. Milo reached the SUV first, throwing open the passenger door and getting in. Dom and I were second, with Dr. Di Cesare being the last.
From the driver's seat, I could see Nina looking back at us, making sure that everyone was there before making a sharp U-turn and speeding toward the church, leaving Puriysk and the Nightwalkers behind.
“Are you genuinely insane?” Milo demanded, looking back at Dr. Di Cesare. “Do you have any idea how stupid that was!”
“It was the only spell I could think of that would yield immediate results,” She said. “Every time you open that door, something always comes through.”
“Yes, and there’s a very good reason you don’t open that door, Gretchen! You’re lucky we’re not all dead right now! For Gods sake, you may have just killed us all anyway!”
“What the fuck did she just do?” Nina asked, confused.
Her question went largely ignored.
“We were out of options!” Dr. Di Cesare replied, “We are up against an opponent who will resort to any means to dispose of us! Any means. It is therefore necessary that we do the same!”
“And that gives you carte blanche to unleash that? For Gods sake, we weren’t even equipped to deal with that! That wasn’t even part of the goddamn discussion until you pulled it in!”
“Can somebody just explain to me what the hell just happened?” Dom snapped.
Milo looked over at him, then back to Gretchen.
“There are countless other pocket realities in the vast expanse of the void,” She said. “Many serve as havens for various Gods and their followers… I simply opened a door to let one of them in.”
“I wouldn’t call that thing a God, I’d call it a plague!” Milo said.
“Hive mind,” Dr. Di Cesare corrected, “The Prince of Rosen Spring operates as a singular consciousness, it has more in common with fungi than a virus or pathogen.”
“I’m sorry, did you just summon The Fucking Rosen Prince?” Nina asked, and again she was ignored.
“Whatever it is, we have a standing order to burn any trace of that thing we come across,” Milo said. “Why the hell do you even know how to summon it?”
“I don’t work for you!” Dr. Di Cesare replied harshly, “I’m allowed to research whatever topic captures my interest!”
“Well do me a favor and warn me the next time you’re about to unleash a Class 5 Apocalyptic entity!”
“You wanted something that would get them off of us, I delivered! We were exposed and outnumbered, there were no other viable options!”
“Can we go back to the part where you called that thing an ‘Apocalyptic Entity?’” Dom asked. “What the hell did you just bring in?”
“It’s a sort of hive mind,” Dr. Di Cesare explained. “It infects other entities, absorbs them into its shared consciousness, and uses the bodies either as drones, or organic material to construct new bodies for itself.”
“Oh my fucking God…” Nina said under her breath, “And you just pulled that out of your ass? You didn’t try shooting your fucking magic gun?”
“We do not have the munitions to just mindlessly shoot everything that poses a threat! At minimum… the Rosen Prince should distract Calhoun and his Nightwalkers long enough for us to complete the evacuation!”
“Yeah, by absorbing this entire place!” Milo spat. “At this point, Calhoun’s already dead… let the Rosen Prince take care of him!”
“That’s not a gamble we should be willing to take,” Dr. Di Cesare said. “We are not dealing with a man who is trapped here. If this situation becomes untenable, I have zero doubt that he will simply abandon this place and begin again elsewhere, at which point it may become impossible to find him again. Even if we did, factoring in the recent sacrifices, it’s highly probable that he would be exceedingly harder to kill. If you want this man dead, then our window of opportunity is now and it is closing very rapidly!”
“Hey… this may be a stupid question but what happens if the Rosen Prince assimilates Calhoun or the Eldest?” Nina asked.
Both the Doctor and Milo fell silent. Milo’s head slowly turned to look at her.
“Yes, Gretchen. What happens then?” He asked.
Dr. Di Cesare was silent for a moment.
“All the more reason to kill Calhoun first,” She finally said.
Up ahead, I could see the ruins of the church, although the moment I saw them, it was already clear to me that something was wrong. The church was dark. There was no light from the bonfire inside and as we drove past the metal poles that marked the doorway, I noticed no change in the forest around us.
“Oh no…” Nina said under her breath, “Fuck, fuck, fuck fuck…”
She tried to steer the car through the other doorway, but nothing changed.
The doors were closed.
“Good, Mr. Kallas has ensured that nothing can escape."
“Yeah and that includes us, dumbass!” Nina snapped.
“That’s of no concern. I can open another, smaller door. We should shore up inside that church. We’ll get out the same way you did before,” Dr. Di Cesare said.
Nina swore under her breath before driving toward the ruins of the church.
She skidded to a stop, and Dr. Di Cesare was the first one out.
“We need to move quickly, get anything you can burn and get it now. Time is short,” She said.
Nina went around the back of the SUV and pulled the trunk open, taking out a can of spare gasoline before following Dr. Di Cesare inside the church.
“There’s one more in there,” She said to me and Dom. “Grab it!”
I figured that since I had the idlest hands, it might as well be me. I grabbed the gas can from the back of the SUV and took a parting look at Puriysk, which burned brightly behind us. The fire seemed to have consumed everything, and though the sky was dark, the glow from the inferno made it look like twilight. It was both the most beautiful and horrible thing I’d ever seen.
Even from where I stood, I could still hear the screams coming from Puriysk, only now they weren’t the screams of men being slaughtered by monsters… they were the screams of monsters slaughtering each other. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in that town… and realized that it might be better if I didn’t know.
I didn’t linger, I took the gas can into the church, following Nina. She was already beginning to dump the contents of the can on the charred ashes of the bonfire. Milo was right beside her, tossing some of the extra firewood that the others had collected to keep the fire alive onto it, to try and give it some new life.
“There’s headlights down the road, somebody’s coming!” Dom called from the doorway of the church.
“More refugees?” Milo asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Milo swore under his breath.
“Gretchen, can you finish up?”
“I need a minute,” She said. “We undid the old runes and ritual circle when we expanded it outside the church. I need to repair them.”
Milo growled in frustration before storming over toward the Church door. Nina tossed her empty gas can aside and went to follow, blowing past Dom and Milo and heading back out to the SUV. I watched her pull open the drivers side door and take something out. It took me a moment to recognize exactly what it was.
It was a rifle. She hastily checked the magazine before looking out at the oncoming headlights. I could make out three cars, most of them older and more worn than the ones Milo’s people drove although the one at the front was a clean, polished muscle car.
I’d seen that car before, and I knew that Dom had too.
It seemed that Sheriff McClellan was here to deal with us personally.
The cars slowed to a stop before us, and the four of us stood at the ready. I reached for the .22 I’d kept holstered, and felt a little guilty for the small sense of relief I felt that my gun might actually be useful for a change.
The doors of McClellan’s car opened, and I saw him stepping out of the driver's seat. I could see other men getting out of the cars behind him.
“Hell of a mess you’ve caused us…” McClellan said. His black boots sank into the mud beneath him. His wispy white hair seemed to flutter in the wind. I could see a chrome revolver sitting on his hip. “And yet you just refuse to die.”
“You must be the Sheriff,” Milo said coldly.
“And you must be the dumb motherfucker who thought he’d mess around with Governor Calhoun… how’s that working out for you.”
“Well despite everything, I’d say we’ve probably taken fewer losses than you have,” Milo replied. McClellan actually cracked a half smile at that.
“You’re a cocky little shit, I’ll give you that.” He said. “Not sure what the hell you assholes did back there… but I’ve never seen Nightwalkers claw each other to pieces like that before… either way, the fight’s over. And from where I’m standing it looks like you’re running outta here with your tail between your legs.”
“And from where I’m standing, you look like a dead man walking,” Milo replied. “If you’re smart, you’ve come here to leave with us. I don’t know if you realize what’s just been unleashed here, but mark my words in a few days time this place will be nothing but a graveyard.”
“Oh, I can promise that whatever you think you did, isn’t gonna change a damn thing,” McClellan said. “You can run if you’d like. I’ll even let you do it. Either way, once he’s got the rest of the souls he needs the Governor will hunt you down like the rats you are and-”
A volley of gunshots came from beside us as Nina started shooting. I saw a couple of the Sheriff’s Boys behind McClellan go down, while others dove for cover. McClellan himself moved behind his car with surprising speed, only narrowly avoiding Nina’s trigger happy rampage.
“These people talk too fucking much…” She said under her breath as we hid behind the stone walls of the church.
“Open fire boys, let’s clean this up!” I heard McClellan bark from behind his car.
I saw a couple of the Sheriff’s Boys try to peek out from behind one of their cars, and took aim at them, firing blindly. One window of the car shattered, and one of the Boys had time to pull his head back. The other wasn’t so lucky. His head jerked back and he hit the ground dead.
I felt my heart skip a beat, as I realized that I’d been the one who killed him… although there was hardly time to process what I’d just done. The gunfire around me saw to that.
“Reserve units, move in on the Church! We need some backup!” McClellan said, presumably speaking into a radio and not talking to himself. I saw the door of his car open as he tried to crawl back inside. Milo seemed to see it too and fired at the driver's side of the windshield. He only got off a couple of shots before McClellan’s retort blew a fresh hole through the glass.
I heard Milo cry out in pain and hit the ground, clutching at his shoulder. Nina’s eyes widened as she watched him fall, and I ran to his side to check on him. He pressed a hand against the wound, gritting his teeth and trying not to scream.
“I-I’m alright…” He lied, but I knew that he was out of the fight.
“Motherfucker…” Nina spat, before directing her fire at McClellan’s car, putting bullet after bullet through his windshield. I could hear a pained scream from inside and heard the engine turn over. McClellan’s car was launched backward, going in full reverse and slamming into one of the other Sheriff’s Boys cars. It knocked the car back against the boys hiding behind it, forcing them out of cover. A move that Dom was quick to punish. His gun spoke three times, and I saw two men fall, one dead and the other wounded.
McClellan hit the gas again, still in reverse and desperately trying to flee. He only succeeded in pushing the car he’d just hit over the wounded man.
I could see more headlights in the distance, driving through the flaming ruins of Puriysk toward us, although against the fires I could see the shadow of what used to be the Crab Thing coming to intercept them. I watched as it impaled one car on one of its sharp legs and caught another in its pincers, dutifully tearing at it to get to the meat inside. Tendrils like vines seemed to hang off of its body now, and I watched them slither inside the broken car. I consider myself lucky that I didn’t have to witness what they did to the people inside.
With most of McClellan’s group dead, Nina stepped out into the open, firing again at his car. I saw the driver's side door open and watched as McClellan tumbled out, his body bloody and broken.
“Motherfucker…” Nina spat, advancing on him with a bitter, determined purpose. I saw one of the last of the Sheriff’s Boys coming out of cover. Nina raised her rifle at him, but Dom shot first.
It was just Nina and the Sheriff now. She regarded the corpse of the last of the Sheriff’s Boys out of the corner of her eye, before making a beeline for McClellan. I watched as he tried to stand, only for his legs to give out from under him.
“Wait…” McClellan rasped, “Wait…”
Before he could say another word she’d taken aim at him and pulled the trigger, putting four more bullets into his chest.
“Shut up,” She said coldly, before turning away and going back to the church. McClellan lay on the ground, not quite dead but past the point of surviving. He twitched and wheezed out his final breaths before finally going still.
The moment Nina was through that door, she was at Milo’s side again.
“How bad is it?” She asked.
“I’ll live…” He rasped, “It’s… just a flesh wound. Help me up.”
Nina helped him stand, before looking over toward the center of the church.
“Gretchen, how’s that door looking?” She asked.
“Runes are in place… ritual circle is set, I’m almost ready!” She called back.
“Let’s go,” Nina said, dragging Milo over to the columns.
Gretchen set the bonfire alight and as we passed through the columns, I could see that the doors were open again. Faded figures of soldiers and refugees stood by anxiously. I could even see Kallas among them, pacing about with a worried look on his face. The moment he saw that the fire had started again, he looked up, seeming both relieved and even more anxious at the same time.
“I was never much good out in the field…” Milo grunted, “Should’ve stayed on the other side.”
“Don’t talk,” Nina said. “You’re still alive, right? That counts for something.”
He chuckled.
“Suppose it does,” He said.
Dom and I watched as Nina guided him toward the bonfire, then out through the right set of columns, into the version of the church where we could actually see the night sky overhead. As Nina brought Milo through, Kallas was right there to meet her.
“Take him,” She said. “He’s hurt but he’ll live so long as you patch him up right away.”
“Understood,” Kallas said, “Come on, let’s get you through and put that fire out.”
Nina just shook her head.
“No, we’ve still got work to do in here. I’ll hang back with Gretchen until we’ve confirmed that Calhoun’s dead.”
“No can do, Dr. Di Cesare ordered full quarantine measures. We need everyone out!"
“Not until we confirm the kill,” Dr. Di Cesare said. “I require someone with more experience in these things than I have. Take Mr. Durand and get him taken care of. We’ll connect with you later.”
Kallas grimaced and looked over at Milo.
“Do what she says,” He rasped, and I saw a quiet resignation cross over Kallas’ face.
“What about you two?” He asked, looking at me and Dom, “If we close this door, you’re not getting out until Valentine and the Doctor do.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “We still have unfinished business.”
Kallas just shook his head and turned to leave, letting Milo lean on him for support as he did. Milo looked back at us, or more specifically he looked back at Nina.
“Valentine…” He said, “Make me proud.”
She gave him a single nod, before letting him go.
Once she was past the columns, Dr. Di Cesare gave a single wave of her hand and the bonfire flickered and died.
The Church went dark. And we were alone again.
“Doctor, how much can you do to keep those things in Puriysk out of here?” Nina asked.
“Given ten or twenty minutes to modify some of the extant runes, quite a bit,” She replied. “It won’t be foolproof, but-”
“Just do it. Let’s dig in here, wait for the fires to die down, and see if we can’t scavenge anything from the ruins in the morning. The more we can get, the better cuz as soon as we’re set, we’re going to Parsons.”
2023.03.23 21:51 SingularWorks Planting and Pacing - How to prevent open world from becoming open season on neurons
 | The path of design for Escape from Norwood was one of learning a trade and breaking preconceptions. I had so many biased ideas that I could write a lot of these posts, but let’s focus here one the open-worldliness of the game. submitted by SingularWorks to EscapeFromNorwood [link] [comments] It's the numbers, stupid!This comes back to the MUD roots of Escape from Norwood: in the world of MUDs, just like in their MMORPG grand-children, content is a key driver of player interest and retention. Keep the players fed with new locations, new quests, new items, new challenges, and they will keep playing, sometimes paying.So I set out to put a lot of content into Escape from Norwood, and was quite sad when I did the numbers and realized I could only include so much if I wanted the build phase to be a matter of months and not of years. I was lured by the magical appeal of numbers: that many quests, that much geography, such a gigantic number of hours of fun and play… I thought players would meh me if I could not boast impressive figures in that category. It figures (early version of the website) I also thought that this heap of content should be flaunted early on in the game to make the players want more and see how rich the game was. Everything, everywhere, all at onceI had settletd on an open-world (or should I say « open city »?) design: I have personally loved open worlds back from the days of Arena and Daggerfall: the feeling of being able to go anywhere at anytime is sweet to the Explorer dominant in my player personality. I was not totally insensible, so I chopped down the game map in areas that would be more or less hard to reach and explore. The goal was to match the pace of players' discovery with the advancement of the story and its various acts. Obviously, this included exceptions and shortcuts depending on the order in which they did their quests and solved riddles.Yet I thought that if a quest triggered in the beginning area it should be immediately available to taunt players. Even though it could only resolve after hours of play and unlocking new zones, it was sitting there on your diary from the first hour of play. Does it not beg for exploration? And I built it, and it was fast, and it was rich… and the first alpha tester spent 100 hours completing the game (without requesting hints; but still…). That particular player did not mind, but I thought something was clearly wrong. Then more feedback came from testers about the difficulty to understand what to do next and to discriminate between a quest that was legitimately blocked due to a place / ability they could not discover yet and quests they should really focus on solving because they had everything they needed right there. Easier, Better, Slower, StrongerSo I reworked the pacing through three means:
Dear old Baruk originally had a trigger for this quest during Act 1 A way out of the infodumpThe same treatment was done regarding the plot: I wanted to show all stakes at once, shoveling an overwhelming heap of exposition in the early stages of the game. Since a fair chunk of this would only become relevant further down the line, it was cluttering the diary and memory real estate of the players.So I kept the main plot elements early on to set the stage, albeit in a more subdued way, and pushed whatever was not immediately necessary later in the game. Discover who you are, where you are, learn about people, economics and social order before you are thrown in the middle of conspiracies and learn inconvenient truths about your past, then about the Empire itself. Wait, who is Ahad? The result is far more elegant, even if still not perfect. As the game relies on acute observation and thinking, players can still feel lost as to what to do next and enter crunch mode of trying the same thing in less and less obvious circumstances (or, even worse, give up on the game). This « 90’s point'n Click » flair may not be the most adequate to modern gaming and modern players, and I would probably be more lenient and branching should I do it all again. Still, I hope this makes Escape from Norwood an enjoyable ride, if you are a fit for this style of game or not the one to shun an occasional peek at the game’s walkthrough on this sub. |
2023.03.23 21:38 katerinara The ugly duckling
My dad always told me I was his ugly little duckling. He said he hoped I would grow up to be prettier like my sisters are, but until I did he wouldn't love me as much, and he showed it. I would get less dinner because I was "chubby". I had to sleep on the floor of the second and third ungliest sister's room. He treated us based on beauty and Selina was his favorite. She would get gifts, he would get her favorite foods, I would even have to cook for her and bring it to her in bed! She had a big beautiful room all to herself, but most important of all, she got the most of his love.
It went in this order: Selina, Tiana, Crystal, Jessica, Yasmine, and ugly stupid me. Crystal and Tiana shared a decent room with nice beds and soft mattresses, while Jessica and Yasmine have the smallest room. At least Jessica has a bed, and Yasmine has a mattress on the floor. I just get a blanket and a pillow. It's not fair. I just want daddy to like me. That floor is cold and hard and I hate sleeping there. It makes me desperate! Last night I snuck into Tiana and Crystal's room and "accidentally" knocked a vase over on Tiana's face. I ran away and daddy blamed Crystal for it. Unfortunately Tiana only got light scarring and she was still prettier than me, so she got Yasmine's bed. Lucky Jessica got to move up to Crystal's bed. Daddy said Crystal's jealousy wasn't enough to make her ugly, and that made me realize he wouldn't care what I did to be the best.
That's when I decided the only way to get through this and win daddy's love is to be the prettiest. Selina is in that room all by herself like a princess, but I have to cook her food and bring it to her. I took some of daddy's sleeping pills and put them in her spaghetti. When I knew she was deep asleep I snuck into her room with the filet knife. Skinning her face took time and precision, so I'm really glad the pills were strong. When she woke up from the pain enough to make noise I just put the rag over her face with the mixed cleaning products I prepared ahead of time. Thankfully videos are all over the internet about how to do certain things like make homemade chloroform. After I got her face off I had to do the hardest thing ever. Pain killers just didn't help much, but I got through it. Wearing her face is a little weird, but hopefully daddy will understand. She has my ugly face and I have her pretty one. She'll have to sleep on the floor and I'll get all of daddy's love and she'll know what it's like to not be cared about. Now I'm the prettiest sister, and she's the ugly duckling.
submitted by katerinara to Katerinara_Horror [link] [comments]
It went in this order: Selina, Tiana, Crystal, Jessica, Yasmine, and ugly stupid me. Crystal and Tiana shared a decent room with nice beds and soft mattresses, while Jessica and Yasmine have the smallest room. At least Jessica has a bed, and Yasmine has a mattress on the floor. I just get a blanket and a pillow. It's not fair. I just want daddy to like me. That floor is cold and hard and I hate sleeping there. It makes me desperate! Last night I snuck into Tiana and Crystal's room and "accidentally" knocked a vase over on Tiana's face. I ran away and daddy blamed Crystal for it. Unfortunately Tiana only got light scarring and she was still prettier than me, so she got Yasmine's bed. Lucky Jessica got to move up to Crystal's bed. Daddy said Crystal's jealousy wasn't enough to make her ugly, and that made me realize he wouldn't care what I did to be the best.
That's when I decided the only way to get through this and win daddy's love is to be the prettiest. Selina is in that room all by herself like a princess, but I have to cook her food and bring it to her. I took some of daddy's sleeping pills and put them in her spaghetti. When I knew she was deep asleep I snuck into her room with the filet knife. Skinning her face took time and precision, so I'm really glad the pills were strong. When she woke up from the pain enough to make noise I just put the rag over her face with the mixed cleaning products I prepared ahead of time. Thankfully videos are all over the internet about how to do certain things like make homemade chloroform. After I got her face off I had to do the hardest thing ever. Pain killers just didn't help much, but I got through it. Wearing her face is a little weird, but hopefully daddy will understand. She has my ugly face and I have her pretty one. She'll have to sleep on the floor and I'll get all of daddy's love and she'll know what it's like to not be cared about. Now I'm the prettiest sister, and she's the ugly duckling.
2023.03.23 21:37 Ravenredd65 The Outcasts Ch. 10
Hello all and welcome to a (I assure you) totally wholesome episode of The Outcasts! Another week, another step forward for the lives of Evra, Jessie, Ref, and Kikri as they try to settle into a steady rhythm after all the excitement recently. So stay tuned and I hope you enjoy!
As always thanks to u/Bluefishcake for the universe, and thanks to u/roboticstatic, u/shneekeyTheLost, u/catsintrenchcoats, and everyone on the Discord server for helping with editing! Without further ado, Chapter Ten!
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Kikri watched as Jessie fell into slumber beside them and her sisters, a somewhat troubled expression on Jessie’s face as they dreamt. Then, taking a hand and lightly caressing Jessie’s face, Kikri let out a small mewl of sadness that their mate was still suffering from night terrors, albeit less severe now. She had been watching Jessie closely these past several days because she enjoyed watching them and keeping an eye on their mental state, having been terrified when Jessie regressed after the first night they spent in bed with the polycule. Kikri could tell Jessie was trying to deal with their repressions, but she could also know that it wasn’t going well despite how it looked. Better, most definitely, but not the best.
Jessie’s scent had been changing as well since the incident. The tinge of constant fear was still there in Jessie’s pheromones, but a new addition, smelling almost sickly, had appeared and been growing since. The smell reminded Kikri of her first kill on Dirt, but she could not place why. Certainly, Jessie was physically healthy, so the scent wasn’t a precursor to some disease, and yet, when the smell flared up in Jessie’s scent, it made her uneasy, just like during the incident on their date. When that happened, her instincts would always tell her one thing.
Death.
Despite this, Kikri held Jessie close and dear to her, as did Ref and Evra. And Jessie held them just as dearly, Kikri assumed from their pheromones. Which is why the Rakiri was worried. She was well aware of her species’ penchant for ‘losing themselves’ to their urges during courtship and feared that with Jessie’s issues and things moving too quickly to be safe, in her mind, her being with Jessie first would undoubtedly cause problems. So, after making sure Jessie was indeed asleep, she called her sisters over to the table to have a small girlfriend meeting. Prying themselves free of Jessie was no small task, with how heavily Jessie began clinging to them in their sleep. After a few moments, however, Ref, Evra, and Kikri gathered. With a deeply held breath, Kikri looked to her sisters and said the words that instantly made them stiffen their postures.
“We need to talk about Jessie.”
The previously sleepy Ref and Evra instinctively bolted upright with concern. Neither of them doubted Kikri’s nose for things like this, her having been proven right so many times before boring any distrust of her senses out the window. So instead, the Helkam and Nighkru waited for their Rakiri sister to continue, the former’s ears twitching while the latter fidgeted with her hands.
“Is everything okay with her?” Evra asked, glancing back at Jessie for a moment. It had been less than a week since Jessie had broken down on that couch, and the incident was still fresh in her mind. ‘Jessie is the nest now. We have to protect Jessie.’ Her thoughts were easily readable on her face when she returned to looking at her sisters.
“Nothing worse. I wouldn’t say that Jessie is fine, but perhaps on the way there now,” Kikri explained, causing both Ref and Evra to look at her in confusion. But, of course, if everything were fine, Kikri wouldn’t call for a little meeting like this for no reason.
“If things are improving, what should we be concerned about?” Ref said, wiping her eyes clean. She had been just about to follow Jessie to the world of dreams when Kikri called for them, and it showed, despite her upright posture.
“That’s precisely why we should be. Jessie is pushing herself far faster than is normal. I’m not sure why, but we need to be prepared for if things get more..intimate,” Kikri slowly explained, choosing her words carefully enough that neither girl would mistake what she meant.
Two bright blushes appeared on the girls’ faces as their minds presumably imagined such a scenario. Neither looked concerned, and Kikri had to snap her Nighkru sister out of it, sensing she was losing herself in another fantasy.
Since Jessie moved in, getting alone time has been difficult. Jessie’s scent having more masculine pheromones and feminine ones had made things difficult for Kikri and Evra, who were more susceptible to such traits. As such, Ref frequently had to cover for them so they could get away and recover themselves at times without Jessie knowing. Evra, however, always came back just a bit more frustrated than relieved.
“S-should we really be discussing this?!” Evra whisper-yelled, but Ref instead put a hand to her cheek, thinking.
“Kikri’s right, we do,” Ref spoke evenly after a long pause. "If Jessie makes a move to progress our relationship, we need to be careful with the order. Kikri’s conscious that her species tends to go overboard. Meaning you or I should ideally be first."
“Wha…t-then you’ll be his first time, Ref?!” Evra said, causing Kikri and Ref to look at her quizzically.
“Jessie would need someone affectionate and positive for their first time due to what they’ve been through. I am neither, so no.” the ever-clinical sister explained, while Kikri simply sat neutral, letting them hash it out.
“W-wait, that means….” Evra started, utterly shocked at this turn of events.
“You were the one who calmed their episode and knew to call Dr. Amelia. And Jessie often says you are very ‘bubbly.’ So you are the ideal choice, Evra.” Ref continued.
‘Oh no, no, no, no.’ Evra’s mind repeated the sentence over and over. So she would have to be Jessie’s first?!
But she had no experience!
-Two Days Later-
‘Don’t be nervous. Don’t be nervous. Don’t be nervous.’
Jessie’s inner voice said as they rode in the transport. Jessie, Ref, Kikri, and Evra were on the way to Shau’tari Marine Base as their leave was up. Kikri and Ref would take the first rotation to work on base, while Evra and Jessie would drop them off and return home. At least, that’s what Jessie took the conversation yesterday to mean. Right now, Jessie was too busy gripping Kikri’s and Ref’s hands in each of hers, having developed a bit of anxiety about leaving the apartment now since the past couple of times ended up in attacks. Cold sweat dripped on the nape of Jessie’s neck, her leg bounced incessantly, and even her eyes moved around quickly as if on high alert.
‘Almost there. Then drop Ref and Kikri off, then head home. No biggie. I can do this, I can…Shit, there’s the gate.’
As they pulled up to the building gate, a small box beside a metal gate complete with built-in sensors, Kikri signaled Evra to stop there and drop them off. Jessie inhaled deeply as they pulled over to the side, where the drop-off area was. A relatively well-maintained tarmac parking lot, with several vehicles or transports parked there, most likely the vehicles from those fortunate enough to live off-base.
“ It’s alright, Jessie. We’ll be fine. We aren’t going on deployment but staying on base. Ref is helping out in medical, and I’ll be in the armory.” Kikri said kindly, her arm reaching out to gently cup Jessie’s face.
“You okay?” Evra asked, glancing over at Jessie with a slightly concerned look, her own hand gingerly moving to rub the outside of Jessie’s thigh, more out of support emotionally than anything else.
“I’ll be fine. Just nerves, is all.” Jessie’s hands moved to cup each of their girlfriends’ hands in turn, putting on a brave smile for them. But, truth be told, the idea of Kikri and Ref not being home terrified Jessie.
“You know you don’t have to hide your anxiety with me, Jessie. I get it too.” Evra said comfortingly. Jessie knew she did, but that thought did little to comfort the nauseating feeling in their stomach at the moment. Kikri and Ref gave a longing look at Jessie, but time waited for no sapient, so they, unfortunately, had to leave. As the two stepped out, however, they each gave a knowing look to Evra, entrusting Jessie’s safety and care to their Nighkru sibling.
“I know. Let’s just..head home? Being out here gives me a bad feeling.” Jessie managed to eke out without showing too much of the discomfort they were feeling. The disquieting pause afterward and the slight change in Evra’s face were as far from imperceptible as one could get.
“Alright. But Kikri and Ref will be gone until Shel. So why don’t we try working on your anxiety a bit?” Evra asked as she turned the transport, heading back home. Jessie didn’t really give her an answer as they stared out the window to their right. Ordinarily, the passing sights of New Orleans would be a comfort, but right now, it just felt…bleak, as if someone took a grainy, overexposed photo and set the color and brightness to zero. Even the weather seemed to agree as it again began to rain.
A little while later, they were back home, with Jessie visibly relaxing inside the safety of the apartment. It was still morning, and as this was one of the few days Jessie had a training break, they settled on the couch. Flipping through the channels on the omni-tv but not finding much worth watching, Jessie instead glanced to see Evra go to take a shower with a particular curiosity. Nighkru bathing was a slight issue regarding their algae, as certain cleaners were quite harmful to them even though they were subdermal. Still, Evra always seemed to take longer than anyone else in the bathroom, and Jessie’s curiosity sometimes made them want to ask why it took so long, among other things, ashamedly. Of course, they never would, but they wanted to.
‘Monster.’
‘Shut up, Derrick.’
Derrick’s voice still occasionally popped up, but it was quieter and easier to tell off. Jessie wondered if it was the medication or the girls who were a more significant impact. They had already saved Jessie multiple times and asked Jessie out on a date after knowing Jessie’s past. Not to mention the essentially numerous confessions several days ago…or had it been a week already. Jessie wasn’t sure as time had become a bit of a fog around the girls now.
‘Freak.’
‘Shut up, Derrick.’
Still, the only times Derrick was truly silent was during training and the “snuggle fests” afterward. And depending on how stressful Jessie’s day had been, it could get harder to tell that voice off. Right now, it was particularly tiring due to emotional stress, so Jessie decided to busy herself with something nice to do for Evra. So, naturally, it was making a meal.
Standing up from the beanbag-like couch, Jessie walked a few feet over to the kitchen and began looking through the pantry/fridge. Most of their biology study on Nighkru basic had been finished, so Jessie had a rough understanding of what most Nighkru liked to eat flavor-wise. Picking out a few ingredients, Jessie grabbed an apron to put on and began preparing a meal.
‘Small knife for trimming, large for butchering meat, and that one for the veggies,’ Jessie thought to herself as they began preparing the meal. Nothing too complex, as they weren’t exactly a professional chef, but something like a grilled meatball salad with scallion and shaved cheese was doable. Though as they thought about it, a steak and tomato salad would probably be better. They began cooking by grabbing some Angus thick cuts, fresh cherry and heirloom tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, an avocado, and some wine vinaigrette.
One of the few things Jessie did grab from their apartment or instead had Kikri seize the other day was a set of cast-iron pans their mother used. No Louisianian worth their salt would cook without a well-seasoned cast iron, and Jessie was no different. Trimming up the steak, Jessie made a blend of garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and various other seasonings to make a good rub for the meat and set it aside, Letting the flaked salt draw out the moisture to mix with the seasoning and be reabsorbed for better flavor. At the same time, they worked on the other ingredients.
Taking an onion, they chipped it up into long, fine strands and threw it into the skillet with butter and bacon fat. It turns out Kikri really liked bacon, almost as much as any human. Jessie had plenty of flavorful fat to use as a medium for sauteing onions. While that was going, they began cold-soaking the lettuce and chopping up tomatoes.
By the time Evra came out of her shower, Jessie had begun cooking the steaks, filling the apartment with a beautiful aroma. Evra looked at Jessie cooking in the kitchen with a practically voracious expression, even having to wipe away a bit of drool, which Jessie found adorable. The lithe space elf with horns and freaky eyes had certainly grown on Jessie, especially after saving them from their own mind during an episode. Since then, however, Jessie had been having conflicting feelings about her and the other girls in general. Jessie definitely felt closer to them, but the closer they became, the more worried Jessie became and the more confusing their feelings became. Jessie felt like they wanted to be even closer to them, but the only way she could think to do so involved…that, and Jessie wasn’t sure if they could, if Derrick had ruined them from ever being able to be…intimate.
‘Weak little abomination’
‘Shut. It. Derrick.’
‘Not like a monster deserves happiness. End it before you hurt them, too.’
‘I said, SHUT IT!’
“Wow, Jessie. I didn’t know you could cook like this. It smells amazing! What’re those yellow plants?” The adorable Nighkru asked, looking at the finished salad with a particular hunger. Jessie froze, her face showing her puzzlement as she stopped what she was doing. It took Jessie a moment to figure out what she was talking about since the color was off, but then she remembered Nighkru couldn’t see red. Taking the steaks over to a cutting board, Jessie began cutting them into thin strips to add to the salad.
“Those are tomatoes. Ordinarily, they’d be tart with a slight bitterness, but they should be a bit sweeter and a little zesty in this salad. Those light shavings are avocado, the leafy stuff is lettuce, and the cooked brownish stringy stuff is grilled onions. Once the steak is done, I’ll toss it all with a light champagne vinaigrette, and then it’ll be ready.” Jessie explained, particularly proud of figuring out food they liked that most of their girlfriends could eat too. Kikri would have a bit of an issue from so much roughage, but Ref and Evra should be okay with this. Evra seemed rather shocked at not only the fact that Jessie could cook but that Jessie had already taken into account the increased appetite she and her sisters had based on the portions she was making.
“Why're you acting so surprised? I lived alone for years. I had to learn to cook for myself, you know.” Jessie asked curiously as they returned to cutting the steak. Stealing a glance at Evra, Jessie had to admit. She was rather striking today. It certainly didn’t help that the black undergarments she was wearing, and only that, were as tight as spandex leaving little to the imagination. A bit of water still glistened on her skin, giving her an almost ephemeral appearance. Jessie quickly had to turn their gaze back to the steak out of fear of getting distracted and cutting themselves.
“Jessie, you may not know it, but for those of us in the rest of the galaxy, seeing a guy in an apron cooking in a kitchen is like..like… Goddess, it’s so hot.” Evra started to explain but couldn’t find the right word. Jessie wasn’t sure why they were talking about the temperature, though; it was relatively cool despite the cooking. It was a pregnant pause before Jessie, with a bright blush they attempted and failed to hide, realized what she meant.
“Well, half a guy, I guess,” Jessie mumbled, moving the steak into the salad bowl with the other ingredients and adding the vinaigrette to toss the salad. Evra moved around the corner she was leaning against and walked over to Jessie, softly placing a hand on their forearm and breaking Jessie’s thoughts. She leaned over, breaking their vision that had been concentrating on the food with her face, alight with a warm smile.
“You’re not half anything, Jessie. You’re you. I’m unsure if you have seen our males, but human males are very different. They’re built more like women than our males are. So you being lithe like you are and androgynous enough to appear like both? It doesn’t detract anything in the slightest. To most in the Imperium, you’d be quite the catch!” Evra said, not really making much sense to Jessie, but they knew she was trying to cheer them up. Rather than respond directly, Jessie, for some reason, blurted out a somewhat out-of-character line.
“Quite a catch, huh? And what do you think, Evvie?” Jessie teased before realizing exactly what they’d said. A bright blush appeared across both Evra's and Jessies faces as Jessie immediately started stumbling over themselves to apologize, the salad tossing wholly forgotten.
“I-I’m sorry, Evra. I don’t know why I said that. It was stupid and childish of me to say, and I shouldn’thavebutIdidand-”
“Jessie,” Evra said, interrupting them and giggling from seeing Jessie so flustered. “It’s fine, really. It was kind of cute, actually, almost as adorable as you. Very boyfriend-ish. Oops, I mean girlfriend…Um...actually, which do you prefer?”
“Oh, um..uh..ahem,” Jessie started, giving thought to her question before mumbling a response, though it was too quiet for Evra to hear.
“What did you say? I couldn’t understand you, Jessie.”
“I said, erm...” Jessie trailed off with another mumble, awkwardly trying to play it cool as they covered their blush with one hand.
“Um, Jessie, I can’t hear you if you hide your mouth with your hand and mumble like that.”
“I...I said Mate, okay? Kikri said it, and um...I um…So yeah, that one.”
Evra giggled, leaning closer to Jessie, close enough that Jessie could feel her warm breath on the side of their face. Then, whispering in their ear, Evra said in an out-of-character and rather sultry voice.
“Thank you for the meal, my wonderful mate.”
Jessie froze, blood rushing to her face and other places as Evra giggled and grabbed the salad bowl for herself. She gave Jessie a quick kiss on the cheek, leaving them further stunned and causing Evra immense joy as she watched Jessie’s brain try to restart several times.
Jessie wasn’t ready for that step yet, though, much as they, and their body, wanted to be, so they instead gave Evra a quick kiss on the cheek and sat down to eat. Evra was kind enough not to point out the ‘perkiness’ Jessie’s body was showing, and Jessie was kind enough not to point out the faint gray blush forming on Evra’s cheeks. Neither really knew how to continue the conversation after that, and so chose to spend the meal in quiet silence, letting the flames die down a bit, so to speak. Afterward, the two romantics ended up cuddling on the couch, watching some Shil movie about a warrior prince.
“I’m sorry, I’m not ready for that yet, Evvie,” Jessie finally broke the silence as they held her close, Evra’s head resting against Jessie’s shoulder and both holding hands in a gentle, loving manner.
‘Coward.’
‘Shut it, Derrick. It’s your fault.’
Always hiding behind someone else, Jessie.’
“It’s okay, Jessie. Take your time. Don’t try to rush it for our sake, okay? Evra replied, squeezing Jessie’s hand just a bit tighter as if to emphasize her point. Jessie said nothing in response, but the look of conflict on their face was worrisome to Evra. Deciding not to speak of it anymore, Evra returned her attention to the movie, enjoying her one-on-one cuddle session with her ‘mate.’ Petting Jessie’s head gently, a very different kind of turmoil was brewing within the young Nighkru…
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“This is turox-shit,” Kikri said with a growl. So rather than having them go out with other pods for patrol, somehow Kikri got assigned to helping out logistics with inventory while Ref was pulled for hospital duty. Kikri didn’t like this at all. Seeing the explosives in the long warehouse, having to get into a bucket-of-bolts exo-suit, having to handle the explosives…It reminded her of the bombs she failed to deactivate back in Washington, reminded her of the kids on the bus, and reminded her of the carnage afterward.
The warehouse itself wasn’t much to write home about. Around 400 meters long by 300 wide, the thermocast-reinforced concrete building offered little in the way of beauty. It was essentially a large rectangle, with a requisitions office at one end, completely closed off by a gate made of steel and, once again, that purple alloy. The inventory racks went up to the ceiling as if they barely even fit. They were all loaded with various supplies such as extra power cells, medication, uniforms, essential needs, and weapons, too much for the relatively diminutive armory.
Setting down the explosive her suit was holding and placing it into its rack slot, Kikri breathed relief. Truth be told, she had avoided demolition duties. Just seeing an explosive was enough to trigger a flashback, and each time it hurt. Still, she was a warrior, a Rakiri, a marine. So she grit her teeth and bore it, moving one explosive after another and saying nothing. Speaking out would not do any good here.
“Oh look, it’s that Rakiri!” A shill pointed out. Kikri already didn’t like her. She smelled of pompousness and decadent lifestyle, scents Kikri usually flagged as ‘people to avoid because they are so annoying.’ Still, this one was rather large, even by Shil’vati standards, at over eight feet tall and all muscle. Kikri had to wonder if it was natural or some illegal gene mod. She could already tell the girl had gotten at least one to get that strange blue hair.
“So, Rakiri, how does it feel to have to be protected by a male? A primitive one at that!” The girl snickered, but Kikri ignored it. As much as she wanted to bare tooth and claw to the girl, the repercussions of such an action made it less than ideal as far as Ideas go.
“Jessie has the spirit of a fighter and is wise beyond his years. Your attempt to shame me through him will not work, only make me prouder in my choice of mate, Shil,” Kikri said in response, moving the old, orange-colored exo down the line to continue her next explosive.
“I don’t know. He seemed pretty weak. I bet I could beat him.” The Shil spoke, still trying to get a rise out of Kikri, smiling and snickering at her own words.
“You are welcome to try if you find him,” Kikri said, focusing on her job. This next crate of explosives was particularly finicky and dangerous, so she wanted to take her time with it.
“Maybe I will then. Then, maybe afterward, I’ll steal your mate, Rakiri. He looks like the kind who likes to get…’ physical’ during sex. Think I should give him a punch or two while we do the deed?”
Kikri tried to ignore the comment, but blood was boiling in her veins. A mere pup who had yet to wet her claws was threatening her mate, and every instinct in her told her to use her own to extol the price in blood and flesh.
‘How dare an impudent bitch insult Jessie like that! And how dare she insinuate she would beat him.’
Releasing the exo, Kikri dropped to the ground, her limber five-foot eleven-inch frame now on full display. She did not posture herself, acting every bit like this was a standard process.
“And you’re a runt too! Haha, No wonder that male had to-guh”
Kikri calmly walked over to the woman, not letting on her intentions. Like the attack of a serpent, however, her arm lunged out and grabbed the girl by the throat before she could respond. She smiled in the satisfaction that her claws, now extended, drew a bit of Shil blood from pricking the bitch’s neck. Then, pinning her against one of the racks, Kikri used her free hand to grab her thermocast knife and put it to the woman’s face.
“Say whatever you wish about me, clawless whelp, but speak ill of Jessie again, and I’ll start with the face before removing your fingers and shoving them up your clam! Are we clear!” Kikri growled, fanged mouth showing as the girl struggled for a breath. Her fur stood on end, making her look larger than usual, not that it was needed. The Shil girl evidently hadn’t expected Kikri to get so aggressive, and honestly, Kikri couldn’t believe she was so quick to do it, either. Then she thought of this Shil actually trying to do what she insinuated to Jessie, causing doubt in her actions to disappear.
“T-threaten all you want; we both k-know you wouldn’t risk your sisters for it,” The girl managed to spout out before Kikri dropped her hold and put her blade to the woman’s throat. For half a moment, she imagined running the bitch through and spilling more of her ugly blue blood on the floor for threatening Jessie. But, barely holding herself back, she instead used her words.
“I’ve killed many more than you have counted, shellsucker. And if you EVER threaten MY MATE or my kho-sisters again, I will make you wish you had met the deep so quickly you’ll be gone before you hit the floor. It will be long, slow, and painful. I will take your mind to deny your deepminder. Your family won’t even have anything left to bury, and your goddess won’t have anything left to free. You will slowly waste away, knowing you weren’t even worth enough for me to take a trophy from. And if by some miracle I am caught, I will make sure to tell the truth that you were a man-beater and a coward. You begged for death in your last moments, powerless and helpless. Your service will be stricken, and your records will be struck from the annals of history. You will become a ghost no one remembers, never having achieved anything. Now leave.” Kikri’s voice was low, growling almost like an animal. A heavy grinding sound from gritting her teeth from wanting to bite this bitch’s skull in half only added to the intensity. This wasn’t a threat, and it wasn’t even a statement. It was a fact. Should she continue pushing this, Kikri would make good on her word; no Rakiri would make such a promise idly. And the Shil bitch knew it.
The Shil nodded, fear strongly present in her scent as Kikri let her go. The Shil marine began scrambling her way up and running out of the warehouse as quickly as possible. After all, Kikri had a reputation on this base, and most of the women here knew it. She sighed, watching the Shil ran off, even stumbling a time or two, evidently from the liquid residue of her fear... This was going to lead to more paperwork for her. Again.
She grabbed the mop to go clean up the mess.
------
“Have the preparations been made for the operation?” Lieutenant Commander Derval asked, sitting in her office while looking at an omnipad. There were various shuttle paths, flight plans, and inventories for inbound and outbound system traffic. Derval’s face was more tired than last time, having been pulling multiple all-nighters for the past few weeks in order to bring everything together for this plan of hers.
“Yes, Lt.Commander Derval. The bribes have all been accepted as of 0643 today. The teams are prepping for the exercise and have all been sworn to secrecy. In addition, we’ve implanted the stolen Consortium designs as well. So there is no risk of leakage.” A voice, gruff and low, said over the pad. Sergeant Xixian was a competent leader and an excellent soldier, Derval’s right-hand woman. She had personally volunteered for this mission even after knowing the stakes.
“Good. Make sure there are no survivors. And make sure nothing points back to us. Once the mission is over, activate the implants.” Derval said resolutely, leaving no room for argument.“I…Yes, Ma’am, I understand.”
It would be a loss having to give up valuable pawns from the DHC candidate course, even if they had been dropouts. Still, Derval was flying under the radar for both sides, and it was best to leave no loose ends. The fact she would lose Xixian from this mission also weighed painfully on her chest, especially since Xixian didn’t know she had an implant. Still, this was the job of a commander in war, and with a grim face, Derval accepted it.
‘Soon, you will cease being a problem, Jessie Reider.’
PREV FIRST NEXT
submitted by Ravenredd65 to Sexyspacebabes [link] [comments]
As always thanks to u/Bluefishcake for the universe, and thanks to u/roboticstatic, u/shneekeyTheLost, u/catsintrenchcoats, and everyone on the Discord server for helping with editing! Without further ado, Chapter Ten!
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Kikri watched as Jessie fell into slumber beside them and her sisters, a somewhat troubled expression on Jessie’s face as they dreamt. Then, taking a hand and lightly caressing Jessie’s face, Kikri let out a small mewl of sadness that their mate was still suffering from night terrors, albeit less severe now. She had been watching Jessie closely these past several days because she enjoyed watching them and keeping an eye on their mental state, having been terrified when Jessie regressed after the first night they spent in bed with the polycule. Kikri could tell Jessie was trying to deal with their repressions, but she could also know that it wasn’t going well despite how it looked. Better, most definitely, but not the best.
Jessie’s scent had been changing as well since the incident. The tinge of constant fear was still there in Jessie’s pheromones, but a new addition, smelling almost sickly, had appeared and been growing since. The smell reminded Kikri of her first kill on Dirt, but she could not place why. Certainly, Jessie was physically healthy, so the scent wasn’t a precursor to some disease, and yet, when the smell flared up in Jessie’s scent, it made her uneasy, just like during the incident on their date. When that happened, her instincts would always tell her one thing.
Death.
Despite this, Kikri held Jessie close and dear to her, as did Ref and Evra. And Jessie held them just as dearly, Kikri assumed from their pheromones. Which is why the Rakiri was worried. She was well aware of her species’ penchant for ‘losing themselves’ to their urges during courtship and feared that with Jessie’s issues and things moving too quickly to be safe, in her mind, her being with Jessie first would undoubtedly cause problems. So, after making sure Jessie was indeed asleep, she called her sisters over to the table to have a small girlfriend meeting. Prying themselves free of Jessie was no small task, with how heavily Jessie began clinging to them in their sleep. After a few moments, however, Ref, Evra, and Kikri gathered. With a deeply held breath, Kikri looked to her sisters and said the words that instantly made them stiffen their postures.
“We need to talk about Jessie.”
The previously sleepy Ref and Evra instinctively bolted upright with concern. Neither of them doubted Kikri’s nose for things like this, her having been proven right so many times before boring any distrust of her senses out the window. So instead, the Helkam and Nighkru waited for their Rakiri sister to continue, the former’s ears twitching while the latter fidgeted with her hands.
“Is everything okay with her?” Evra asked, glancing back at Jessie for a moment. It had been less than a week since Jessie had broken down on that couch, and the incident was still fresh in her mind. ‘Jessie is the nest now. We have to protect Jessie.’ Her thoughts were easily readable on her face when she returned to looking at her sisters.
“Nothing worse. I wouldn’t say that Jessie is fine, but perhaps on the way there now,” Kikri explained, causing both Ref and Evra to look at her in confusion. But, of course, if everything were fine, Kikri wouldn’t call for a little meeting like this for no reason.
“If things are improving, what should we be concerned about?” Ref said, wiping her eyes clean. She had been just about to follow Jessie to the world of dreams when Kikri called for them, and it showed, despite her upright posture.
“That’s precisely why we should be. Jessie is pushing herself far faster than is normal. I’m not sure why, but we need to be prepared for if things get more..intimate,” Kikri slowly explained, choosing her words carefully enough that neither girl would mistake what she meant.
Two bright blushes appeared on the girls’ faces as their minds presumably imagined such a scenario. Neither looked concerned, and Kikri had to snap her Nighkru sister out of it, sensing she was losing herself in another fantasy.
Since Jessie moved in, getting alone time has been difficult. Jessie’s scent having more masculine pheromones and feminine ones had made things difficult for Kikri and Evra, who were more susceptible to such traits. As such, Ref frequently had to cover for them so they could get away and recover themselves at times without Jessie knowing. Evra, however, always came back just a bit more frustrated than relieved.
“S-should we really be discussing this?!” Evra whisper-yelled, but Ref instead put a hand to her cheek, thinking.
“Kikri’s right, we do,” Ref spoke evenly after a long pause. "If Jessie makes a move to progress our relationship, we need to be careful with the order. Kikri’s conscious that her species tends to go overboard. Meaning you or I should ideally be first."
“Wha…t-then you’ll be his first time, Ref?!” Evra said, causing Kikri and Ref to look at her quizzically.
“Jessie would need someone affectionate and positive for their first time due to what they’ve been through. I am neither, so no.” the ever-clinical sister explained, while Kikri simply sat neutral, letting them hash it out.
“W-wait, that means….” Evra started, utterly shocked at this turn of events.
“You were the one who calmed their episode and knew to call Dr. Amelia. And Jessie often says you are very ‘bubbly.’ So you are the ideal choice, Evra.” Ref continued.
‘Oh no, no, no, no.’ Evra’s mind repeated the sentence over and over. So she would have to be Jessie’s first?!
But she had no experience!
-Two Days Later-
‘Don’t be nervous. Don’t be nervous. Don’t be nervous.’
Jessie’s inner voice said as they rode in the transport. Jessie, Ref, Kikri, and Evra were on the way to Shau’tari Marine Base as their leave was up. Kikri and Ref would take the first rotation to work on base, while Evra and Jessie would drop them off and return home. At least, that’s what Jessie took the conversation yesterday to mean. Right now, Jessie was too busy gripping Kikri’s and Ref’s hands in each of hers, having developed a bit of anxiety about leaving the apartment now since the past couple of times ended up in attacks. Cold sweat dripped on the nape of Jessie’s neck, her leg bounced incessantly, and even her eyes moved around quickly as if on high alert.
‘Almost there. Then drop Ref and Kikri off, then head home. No biggie. I can do this, I can…Shit, there’s the gate.’
As they pulled up to the building gate, a small box beside a metal gate complete with built-in sensors, Kikri signaled Evra to stop there and drop them off. Jessie inhaled deeply as they pulled over to the side, where the drop-off area was. A relatively well-maintained tarmac parking lot, with several vehicles or transports parked there, most likely the vehicles from those fortunate enough to live off-base.
“ It’s alright, Jessie. We’ll be fine. We aren’t going on deployment but staying on base. Ref is helping out in medical, and I’ll be in the armory.” Kikri said kindly, her arm reaching out to gently cup Jessie’s face.
“You okay?” Evra asked, glancing over at Jessie with a slightly concerned look, her own hand gingerly moving to rub the outside of Jessie’s thigh, more out of support emotionally than anything else.
“I’ll be fine. Just nerves, is all.” Jessie’s hands moved to cup each of their girlfriends’ hands in turn, putting on a brave smile for them. But, truth be told, the idea of Kikri and Ref not being home terrified Jessie.
“You know you don’t have to hide your anxiety with me, Jessie. I get it too.” Evra said comfortingly. Jessie knew she did, but that thought did little to comfort the nauseating feeling in their stomach at the moment. Kikri and Ref gave a longing look at Jessie, but time waited for no sapient, so they, unfortunately, had to leave. As the two stepped out, however, they each gave a knowing look to Evra, entrusting Jessie’s safety and care to their Nighkru sibling.
“I know. Let’s just..head home? Being out here gives me a bad feeling.” Jessie managed to eke out without showing too much of the discomfort they were feeling. The disquieting pause afterward and the slight change in Evra’s face were as far from imperceptible as one could get.
“Alright. But Kikri and Ref will be gone until Shel. So why don’t we try working on your anxiety a bit?” Evra asked as she turned the transport, heading back home. Jessie didn’t really give her an answer as they stared out the window to their right. Ordinarily, the passing sights of New Orleans would be a comfort, but right now, it just felt…bleak, as if someone took a grainy, overexposed photo and set the color and brightness to zero. Even the weather seemed to agree as it again began to rain.
A little while later, they were back home, with Jessie visibly relaxing inside the safety of the apartment. It was still morning, and as this was one of the few days Jessie had a training break, they settled on the couch. Flipping through the channels on the omni-tv but not finding much worth watching, Jessie instead glanced to see Evra go to take a shower with a particular curiosity. Nighkru bathing was a slight issue regarding their algae, as certain cleaners were quite harmful to them even though they were subdermal. Still, Evra always seemed to take longer than anyone else in the bathroom, and Jessie’s curiosity sometimes made them want to ask why it took so long, among other things, ashamedly. Of course, they never would, but they wanted to.
‘Monster.’
‘Shut up, Derrick.’
Derrick’s voice still occasionally popped up, but it was quieter and easier to tell off. Jessie wondered if it was the medication or the girls who were a more significant impact. They had already saved Jessie multiple times and asked Jessie out on a date after knowing Jessie’s past. Not to mention the essentially numerous confessions several days ago…or had it been a week already. Jessie wasn’t sure as time had become a bit of a fog around the girls now.
‘Freak.’
‘Shut up, Derrick.’
Still, the only times Derrick was truly silent was during training and the “snuggle fests” afterward. And depending on how stressful Jessie’s day had been, it could get harder to tell that voice off. Right now, it was particularly tiring due to emotional stress, so Jessie decided to busy herself with something nice to do for Evra. So, naturally, it was making a meal.
Standing up from the beanbag-like couch, Jessie walked a few feet over to the kitchen and began looking through the pantry/fridge. Most of their biology study on Nighkru basic had been finished, so Jessie had a rough understanding of what most Nighkru liked to eat flavor-wise. Picking out a few ingredients, Jessie grabbed an apron to put on and began preparing a meal.
‘Small knife for trimming, large for butchering meat, and that one for the veggies,’ Jessie thought to herself as they began preparing the meal. Nothing too complex, as they weren’t exactly a professional chef, but something like a grilled meatball salad with scallion and shaved cheese was doable. Though as they thought about it, a steak and tomato salad would probably be better. They began cooking by grabbing some Angus thick cuts, fresh cherry and heirloom tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, an avocado, and some wine vinaigrette.
One of the few things Jessie did grab from their apartment or instead had Kikri seize the other day was a set of cast-iron pans their mother used. No Louisianian worth their salt would cook without a well-seasoned cast iron, and Jessie was no different. Trimming up the steak, Jessie made a blend of garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and various other seasonings to make a good rub for the meat and set it aside, Letting the flaked salt draw out the moisture to mix with the seasoning and be reabsorbed for better flavor. At the same time, they worked on the other ingredients.
Taking an onion, they chipped it up into long, fine strands and threw it into the skillet with butter and bacon fat. It turns out Kikri really liked bacon, almost as much as any human. Jessie had plenty of flavorful fat to use as a medium for sauteing onions. While that was going, they began cold-soaking the lettuce and chopping up tomatoes.
By the time Evra came out of her shower, Jessie had begun cooking the steaks, filling the apartment with a beautiful aroma. Evra looked at Jessie cooking in the kitchen with a practically voracious expression, even having to wipe away a bit of drool, which Jessie found adorable. The lithe space elf with horns and freaky eyes had certainly grown on Jessie, especially after saving them from their own mind during an episode. Since then, however, Jessie had been having conflicting feelings about her and the other girls in general. Jessie definitely felt closer to them, but the closer they became, the more worried Jessie became and the more confusing their feelings became. Jessie felt like they wanted to be even closer to them, but the only way she could think to do so involved…that, and Jessie wasn’t sure if they could, if Derrick had ruined them from ever being able to be…intimate.
‘Weak little abomination’
‘Shut. It. Derrick.’
‘Not like a monster deserves happiness. End it before you hurt them, too.’
‘I said, SHUT IT!’
“Wow, Jessie. I didn’t know you could cook like this. It smells amazing! What’re those yellow plants?” The adorable Nighkru asked, looking at the finished salad with a particular hunger. Jessie froze, her face showing her puzzlement as she stopped what she was doing. It took Jessie a moment to figure out what she was talking about since the color was off, but then she remembered Nighkru couldn’t see red. Taking the steaks over to a cutting board, Jessie began cutting them into thin strips to add to the salad.
“Those are tomatoes. Ordinarily, they’d be tart with a slight bitterness, but they should be a bit sweeter and a little zesty in this salad. Those light shavings are avocado, the leafy stuff is lettuce, and the cooked brownish stringy stuff is grilled onions. Once the steak is done, I’ll toss it all with a light champagne vinaigrette, and then it’ll be ready.” Jessie explained, particularly proud of figuring out food they liked that most of their girlfriends could eat too. Kikri would have a bit of an issue from so much roughage, but Ref and Evra should be okay with this. Evra seemed rather shocked at not only the fact that Jessie could cook but that Jessie had already taken into account the increased appetite she and her sisters had based on the portions she was making.
“Why're you acting so surprised? I lived alone for years. I had to learn to cook for myself, you know.” Jessie asked curiously as they returned to cutting the steak. Stealing a glance at Evra, Jessie had to admit. She was rather striking today. It certainly didn’t help that the black undergarments she was wearing, and only that, were as tight as spandex leaving little to the imagination. A bit of water still glistened on her skin, giving her an almost ephemeral appearance. Jessie quickly had to turn their gaze back to the steak out of fear of getting distracted and cutting themselves.
“Jessie, you may not know it, but for those of us in the rest of the galaxy, seeing a guy in an apron cooking in a kitchen is like..like… Goddess, it’s so hot.” Evra started to explain but couldn’t find the right word. Jessie wasn’t sure why they were talking about the temperature, though; it was relatively cool despite the cooking. It was a pregnant pause before Jessie, with a bright blush they attempted and failed to hide, realized what she meant.
“Well, half a guy, I guess,” Jessie mumbled, moving the steak into the salad bowl with the other ingredients and adding the vinaigrette to toss the salad. Evra moved around the corner she was leaning against and walked over to Jessie, softly placing a hand on their forearm and breaking Jessie’s thoughts. She leaned over, breaking their vision that had been concentrating on the food with her face, alight with a warm smile.
“You’re not half anything, Jessie. You’re you. I’m unsure if you have seen our males, but human males are very different. They’re built more like women than our males are. So you being lithe like you are and androgynous enough to appear like both? It doesn’t detract anything in the slightest. To most in the Imperium, you’d be quite the catch!” Evra said, not really making much sense to Jessie, but they knew she was trying to cheer them up. Rather than respond directly, Jessie, for some reason, blurted out a somewhat out-of-character line.
“Quite a catch, huh? And what do you think, Evvie?” Jessie teased before realizing exactly what they’d said. A bright blush appeared across both Evra's and Jessies faces as Jessie immediately started stumbling over themselves to apologize, the salad tossing wholly forgotten.
“I-I’m sorry, Evra. I don’t know why I said that. It was stupid and childish of me to say, and I shouldn’thavebutIdidand-”
“Jessie,” Evra said, interrupting them and giggling from seeing Jessie so flustered. “It’s fine, really. It was kind of cute, actually, almost as adorable as you. Very boyfriend-ish. Oops, I mean girlfriend…Um...actually, which do you prefer?”
“Oh, um..uh..ahem,” Jessie started, giving thought to her question before mumbling a response, though it was too quiet for Evra to hear.
“What did you say? I couldn’t understand you, Jessie.”
“I said, erm...” Jessie trailed off with another mumble, awkwardly trying to play it cool as they covered their blush with one hand.
“Um, Jessie, I can’t hear you if you hide your mouth with your hand and mumble like that.”
“I...I said Mate, okay? Kikri said it, and um...I um…So yeah, that one.”
Evra giggled, leaning closer to Jessie, close enough that Jessie could feel her warm breath on the side of their face. Then, whispering in their ear, Evra said in an out-of-character and rather sultry voice.
“Thank you for the meal, my wonderful mate.”
Jessie froze, blood rushing to her face and other places as Evra giggled and grabbed the salad bowl for herself. She gave Jessie a quick kiss on the cheek, leaving them further stunned and causing Evra immense joy as she watched Jessie’s brain try to restart several times.
Jessie wasn’t ready for that step yet, though, much as they, and their body, wanted to be, so they instead gave Evra a quick kiss on the cheek and sat down to eat. Evra was kind enough not to point out the ‘perkiness’ Jessie’s body was showing, and Jessie was kind enough not to point out the faint gray blush forming on Evra’s cheeks. Neither really knew how to continue the conversation after that, and so chose to spend the meal in quiet silence, letting the flames die down a bit, so to speak. Afterward, the two romantics ended up cuddling on the couch, watching some Shil movie about a warrior prince.
“I’m sorry, I’m not ready for that yet, Evvie,” Jessie finally broke the silence as they held her close, Evra’s head resting against Jessie’s shoulder and both holding hands in a gentle, loving manner.
‘Coward.’
‘Shut it, Derrick. It’s your fault.’
Always hiding behind someone else, Jessie.’
“It’s okay, Jessie. Take your time. Don’t try to rush it for our sake, okay? Evra replied, squeezing Jessie’s hand just a bit tighter as if to emphasize her point. Jessie said nothing in response, but the look of conflict on their face was worrisome to Evra. Deciding not to speak of it anymore, Evra returned her attention to the movie, enjoying her one-on-one cuddle session with her ‘mate.’ Petting Jessie’s head gently, a very different kind of turmoil was brewing within the young Nighkru…
------
“This is turox-shit,” Kikri said with a growl. So rather than having them go out with other pods for patrol, somehow Kikri got assigned to helping out logistics with inventory while Ref was pulled for hospital duty. Kikri didn’t like this at all. Seeing the explosives in the long warehouse, having to get into a bucket-of-bolts exo-suit, having to handle the explosives…It reminded her of the bombs she failed to deactivate back in Washington, reminded her of the kids on the bus, and reminded her of the carnage afterward.
The warehouse itself wasn’t much to write home about. Around 400 meters long by 300 wide, the thermocast-reinforced concrete building offered little in the way of beauty. It was essentially a large rectangle, with a requisitions office at one end, completely closed off by a gate made of steel and, once again, that purple alloy. The inventory racks went up to the ceiling as if they barely even fit. They were all loaded with various supplies such as extra power cells, medication, uniforms, essential needs, and weapons, too much for the relatively diminutive armory.
Setting down the explosive her suit was holding and placing it into its rack slot, Kikri breathed relief. Truth be told, she had avoided demolition duties. Just seeing an explosive was enough to trigger a flashback, and each time it hurt. Still, she was a warrior, a Rakiri, a marine. So she grit her teeth and bore it, moving one explosive after another and saying nothing. Speaking out would not do any good here.
“Oh look, it’s that Rakiri!” A shill pointed out. Kikri already didn’t like her. She smelled of pompousness and decadent lifestyle, scents Kikri usually flagged as ‘people to avoid because they are so annoying.’ Still, this one was rather large, even by Shil’vati standards, at over eight feet tall and all muscle. Kikri had to wonder if it was natural or some illegal gene mod. She could already tell the girl had gotten at least one to get that strange blue hair.
“So, Rakiri, how does it feel to have to be protected by a male? A primitive one at that!” The girl snickered, but Kikri ignored it. As much as she wanted to bare tooth and claw to the girl, the repercussions of such an action made it less than ideal as far as Ideas go.
“Jessie has the spirit of a fighter and is wise beyond his years. Your attempt to shame me through him will not work, only make me prouder in my choice of mate, Shil,” Kikri said in response, moving the old, orange-colored exo down the line to continue her next explosive.
“I don’t know. He seemed pretty weak. I bet I could beat him.” The Shil spoke, still trying to get a rise out of Kikri, smiling and snickering at her own words.
“You are welcome to try if you find him,” Kikri said, focusing on her job. This next crate of explosives was particularly finicky and dangerous, so she wanted to take her time with it.
“Maybe I will then. Then, maybe afterward, I’ll steal your mate, Rakiri. He looks like the kind who likes to get…’ physical’ during sex. Think I should give him a punch or two while we do the deed?”
Kikri tried to ignore the comment, but blood was boiling in her veins. A mere pup who had yet to wet her claws was threatening her mate, and every instinct in her told her to use her own to extol the price in blood and flesh.
‘How dare an impudent bitch insult Jessie like that! And how dare she insinuate she would beat him.’
Releasing the exo, Kikri dropped to the ground, her limber five-foot eleven-inch frame now on full display. She did not posture herself, acting every bit like this was a standard process.
“And you’re a runt too! Haha, No wonder that male had to-guh”
Kikri calmly walked over to the woman, not letting on her intentions. Like the attack of a serpent, however, her arm lunged out and grabbed the girl by the throat before she could respond. She smiled in the satisfaction that her claws, now extended, drew a bit of Shil blood from pricking the bitch’s neck. Then, pinning her against one of the racks, Kikri used her free hand to grab her thermocast knife and put it to the woman’s face.
“Say whatever you wish about me, clawless whelp, but speak ill of Jessie again, and I’ll start with the face before removing your fingers and shoving them up your clam! Are we clear!” Kikri growled, fanged mouth showing as the girl struggled for a breath. Her fur stood on end, making her look larger than usual, not that it was needed. The Shil girl evidently hadn’t expected Kikri to get so aggressive, and honestly, Kikri couldn’t believe she was so quick to do it, either. Then she thought of this Shil actually trying to do what she insinuated to Jessie, causing doubt in her actions to disappear.
“T-threaten all you want; we both k-know you wouldn’t risk your sisters for it,” The girl managed to spout out before Kikri dropped her hold and put her blade to the woman’s throat. For half a moment, she imagined running the bitch through and spilling more of her ugly blue blood on the floor for threatening Jessie. But, barely holding herself back, she instead used her words.
“I’ve killed many more than you have counted, shellsucker. And if you EVER threaten MY MATE or my kho-sisters again, I will make you wish you had met the deep so quickly you’ll be gone before you hit the floor. It will be long, slow, and painful. I will take your mind to deny your deepminder. Your family won’t even have anything left to bury, and your goddess won’t have anything left to free. You will slowly waste away, knowing you weren’t even worth enough for me to take a trophy from. And if by some miracle I am caught, I will make sure to tell the truth that you were a man-beater and a coward. You begged for death in your last moments, powerless and helpless. Your service will be stricken, and your records will be struck from the annals of history. You will become a ghost no one remembers, never having achieved anything. Now leave.” Kikri’s voice was low, growling almost like an animal. A heavy grinding sound from gritting her teeth from wanting to bite this bitch’s skull in half only added to the intensity. This wasn’t a threat, and it wasn’t even a statement. It was a fact. Should she continue pushing this, Kikri would make good on her word; no Rakiri would make such a promise idly. And the Shil bitch knew it.
The Shil nodded, fear strongly present in her scent as Kikri let her go. The Shil marine began scrambling her way up and running out of the warehouse as quickly as possible. After all, Kikri had a reputation on this base, and most of the women here knew it. She sighed, watching the Shil ran off, even stumbling a time or two, evidently from the liquid residue of her fear... This was going to lead to more paperwork for her. Again.
She grabbed the mop to go clean up the mess.
------
“Have the preparations been made for the operation?” Lieutenant Commander Derval asked, sitting in her office while looking at an omnipad. There were various shuttle paths, flight plans, and inventories for inbound and outbound system traffic. Derval’s face was more tired than last time, having been pulling multiple all-nighters for the past few weeks in order to bring everything together for this plan of hers.
“Yes, Lt.Commander Derval. The bribes have all been accepted as of 0643 today. The teams are prepping for the exercise and have all been sworn to secrecy. In addition, we’ve implanted the stolen Consortium designs as well. So there is no risk of leakage.” A voice, gruff and low, said over the pad. Sergeant Xixian was a competent leader and an excellent soldier, Derval’s right-hand woman. She had personally volunteered for this mission even after knowing the stakes.
“Good. Make sure there are no survivors. And make sure nothing points back to us. Once the mission is over, activate the implants.” Derval said resolutely, leaving no room for argument.“I…Yes, Ma’am, I understand.”
It would be a loss having to give up valuable pawns from the DHC candidate course, even if they had been dropouts. Still, Derval was flying under the radar for both sides, and it was best to leave no loose ends. The fact she would lose Xixian from this mission also weighed painfully on her chest, especially since Xixian didn’t know she had an implant. Still, this was the job of a commander in war, and with a grim face, Derval accepted it.
‘Soon, you will cease being a problem, Jessie Reider.’
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2023.03.23 21:30 suspendedsolitude Strange experience with an aggressive and unprofessional prospective employer - Opinion
I will leave identifying details out for all the reasons...
I have been applying for jobs that require a specific set of skills I possess. A few companies contacted me and I have been doing interviews. With this one company, I had a couple of interviews that went well, and it came out that I could help them within other departments as well, due to previous work experience. Saving them from having to hire yet another person to do that (even if just part-time). By the end of the second interview, they said they wanted to hire me and to expect an official offer soon. I will call them Company Q.
The offer came the next day. Terrible offer! Bad salary - 20% below market average in Germany, Minimum statutory vacation days (Mindest Gesetzlicher Urlaubsanspruch) - no overtime pay... the only thing that made it somewhat attractive was the 100% work from and to be a digital nomad (even if for short periods) - which I hadn't confirmed with them.
I replied that I was happy to hear about their offer, asked some questions about things that weren't clarified in the interviews, and asked if they could improve their offer (citing that it was so much below average). Boy oh, boy did I hit a nerve!
Meanwhile, I have received three other job offers and am negotiating and considering which position suits me best, while still doing other interviews and consulting as a freelancer.
But this man, from the above-mentioned job offer, wrote me an email yesterday that irritated me so much. He called me stupid for not clarifying my questions in the interview (mind you, none of the questions was about anything serious or would influence the decision-making on either side - they were just curiosity on my side - to try to create a picture of the workflow). Then he asked, "who do you think you are to imply that due to the fact that I have the skills they are seeking + am able to cross over and take work from another department, I deserve to earn the average salary?". - of course, this is a free translation, as all communications are in German.
I don't mind people being direct and saying I should have asked questions during the interview. Even though my experience is that no one asks all the questions at once, not even the interviewers; this has never been a problem in my working life. They (from company Q) even said at the end of the last interview: "if you have any other questions, feel free to contact us".
Obviously, at this point, there is not a chance in hell that I would take this job at all! But I am really annoyed and the lack of professionalism and aggressiveness of this guy.
I am truly a hothead and I tend to tell things as they are. While I strive to be professional in professional situations, this one crossed the line for me. I want to answer on the same level and point out some obvious truths about his behaviour and lack of professionalism. The person who answered me is not the employer, but a "recruiteconsultant" (hired by the company. Not like I sent my profile for him to find me a job). I do not feel he can *harm* me professionally at all, neither now nor in the future. So I am writing a really well-worded reply, being as polite as one possibly can while making a point to point out what I said above.
What I am curious about is, what would you do as German? Since this is happening in Germany and in German and the job offer is from a German company - how would you as a German feel and react? I am really interested to know.
submitted by suspendedsolitude to AskAGerman [link] [comments]
I have been applying for jobs that require a specific set of skills I possess. A few companies contacted me and I have been doing interviews. With this one company, I had a couple of interviews that went well, and it came out that I could help them within other departments as well, due to previous work experience. Saving them from having to hire yet another person to do that (even if just part-time). By the end of the second interview, they said they wanted to hire me and to expect an official offer soon. I will call them Company Q.
The offer came the next day. Terrible offer! Bad salary - 20% below market average in Germany, Minimum statutory vacation days (Mindest Gesetzlicher Urlaubsanspruch) - no overtime pay... the only thing that made it somewhat attractive was the 100% work from and to be a digital nomad (even if for short periods) - which I hadn't confirmed with them.
I replied that I was happy to hear about their offer, asked some questions about things that weren't clarified in the interviews, and asked if they could improve their offer (citing that it was so much below average). Boy oh, boy did I hit a nerve!
Meanwhile, I have received three other job offers and am negotiating and considering which position suits me best, while still doing other interviews and consulting as a freelancer.
But this man, from the above-mentioned job offer, wrote me an email yesterday that irritated me so much. He called me stupid for not clarifying my questions in the interview (mind you, none of the questions was about anything serious or would influence the decision-making on either side - they were just curiosity on my side - to try to create a picture of the workflow). Then he asked, "who do you think you are to imply that due to the fact that I have the skills they are seeking + am able to cross over and take work from another department, I deserve to earn the average salary?". - of course, this is a free translation, as all communications are in German.
I don't mind people being direct and saying I should have asked questions during the interview. Even though my experience is that no one asks all the questions at once, not even the interviewers; this has never been a problem in my working life. They (from company Q) even said at the end of the last interview: "if you have any other questions, feel free to contact us".
Obviously, at this point, there is not a chance in hell that I would take this job at all! But I am really annoyed and the lack of professionalism and aggressiveness of this guy.
I am truly a hothead and I tend to tell things as they are. While I strive to be professional in professional situations, this one crossed the line for me. I want to answer on the same level and point out some obvious truths about his behaviour and lack of professionalism. The person who answered me is not the employer, but a "recruiteconsultant" (hired by the company. Not like I sent my profile for him to find me a job). I do not feel he can *harm* me professionally at all, neither now nor in the future. So I am writing a really well-worded reply, being as polite as one possibly can while making a point to point out what I said above.
What I am curious about is, what would you do as German? Since this is happening in Germany and in German and the job offer is from a German company - how would you as a German feel and react? I am really interested to know.
2023.03.23 21:29 derbuhhlerb [WTS] [US-PA] [H] Sennheiser HD 800 S + ZMF suede / Hart XLR [W] Paypal or local cash/zelle
![[WTS] [US-PA] [H] Sennheiser HD 800 S + ZMF suede / Hart XLR [W] Paypal or local cash/zelle](https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/iTGmSXNDc2ol1YmXOeR5crK9RojHpuy3EpXRzjxmSPY.jpg "[WTS] [US-PA] [H] Sennheiser HD 800 S + ZMF suede / Hart XLR [W] Paypal or local cash/zelle") | submitted by derbuhhlerb to AVexchange [link] [comments] |
2023.03.23 21:28 SlimyPunk93 On leftist culture in todays universities
I recently wrote an article on leftist culture in the universities. Thought I will put it here:
************************************************
Mich Haus was founded in 1932 as Michigan socialist coop house at UofM campus. It is one of first and many coops on the UofM campus and among many similar coops across the country and many other college campuses. Apart from the smell of weed, there you will find people who believe in and fight for equal rights for people, be it women, minorities including racial minorities, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and more. It has provided safe spaces for discriminated people when it wasn't fashionable and stood for them.These coops embody the spirit of the left that pervades many University campuses across the country and attracts many right-minded people. There are truly inspiring stories from such coops such as when a black person in the 1940s went out to get a haircut and was refused service (at the time of segregation) and the whole coop went with him to get him a haircut. Who in their right minds wouldn't agree that there are huge inequalities in our society and while there are big businesses who only care about their profit, that there are people who are at the receiving end of racism, that LGBT people have been and still are to a good degree discriminated and have a much higher rate of mental illness and suicides, that women haven't been and still aren't given equal pay and opportunity, and all these groups don't have enough representation in the positions of power and role models for the younger generation.
In that respect, the left has been the champion of equal rights and has done much good in society such as pushing for equal rights for everyone at the institutional level such as civil rights, striking down the defense of marriage act (DOMA), and many more. Apart from advocating for less government and being economically right ( which are legitimate political issues), conservatives in the US i.e. the republican party are driven by the nonsensical bible belt and unlike the left, they don't have any intellectual ideological basis to support their agenda (nobody in today's world can legitimately take an ancient illogical religious document as a basis to live and govern life). The left at least embodies some rational principles that people can agree with.
Left in one of its purest forms is Marxist communism which is a collectivist ideology based on altruistic morality where each person lives for the group (as opposed to any individualistic ideology where each person lives for themselves). Another form of left that has sprung up in the past decades is postmodernism which broadly says that our lives are built around these artificial power structures such as big companies in a capitalistic framework, cis white heteronormative masculinity, all their intersections, and anything in power, who determine the life of the masses based on their whims. They claim these power structures exploit the marginalized people and the people at the bottom aka the working class, LGBT people, and the disabled. And the main goal of this left is to fight against these power structures to achieve more equality where equality in their framework means a lack of any hierarchy and power structures in the society aka an anarchist state.As mentioned before, most people don't go to this extreme of ideas but then they, while being benign, are not being truly consistent, as true consistency of these ideas leads to one of these extreme radical left-wing ideologies.
Both of these ideologies are irrational and like anything irrational they are bound not to work, and worse, they hurt people's rights to their life and property. Left in general is a framework that is built on feelings where empathy, kindness, and compassion are the highest virtues often at the cost of logic, justice, and resourcefulness. One can still in the right mind fight against injustice to any human being and stand and fight for equal rights and equal treatment for all kinds of minorities including racial, LGBT, gender-based and more, as these ideas are derived from logic and it is respectable to live and fight for a society that doesn't discriminate.
But the leftist agenda goes much beyond rights: it is instead built around an ideological framework that doesn't revolve around achieving the highest in a human being, in creating, building, in working hard to make something worthwhile of your own life (while supporting rights of others), rather it views the world as this evil tyrannical place and revolves around dedicating your life towards not just fighting for, but lowering your standards and customizing the world for the lowest on the social hierarchy, be it the most marginalized groups, physically or mentally handicapped, and so on, and more than that, in perpetuating the ideas that instead of living for yourself, living for and finding happiness in others is the right framework. Their version of the ideal world is not built around human achievement but built around the less privileged and the more marginalized.
Their altruistic morality is the morality of self-sacrifice i.e. a system where a person places the needs, desires, and life of other people above oneself, and is one of the most evil concepts for which the world has seen the disastrous consequences of, such as the death of millions of people and destruction of economies of the whole countries in many places, be it communist Russia, Cuba, erstwhile east Germany and very recently in Venezuela. On the other hand, any country that has become rich on its own has done it based on capitalist ideas be it the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Germany, Ireland and many many more which also lead to the most peaceful times in the history of mankind. Communism and dictatorship go hand in hand as the left needs the force of a big authoritative government to implement their ideas, as they do even in socialist countries since their ideas don't involve voluntary consent of people; no sane person would voluntarily self sacrifice. On the other hand capitalism and democracies go hand in hand as both are based on individual freedom and individual rights (for clarification, capitalism means the right of people to trade freely without external control. The way believing in freedom of speech doesn't mean you agree with what every person says, believing in capitalism doesn't mean you endorse every business, but rather their right to do business freely).
The empirical evidence that leftist ideas don't work in practice is overwhelming. You can't prove a theorem or run a business by shouting your skin color, your gender identity, your lack of talent, the intensity of your need, your marginalized status and your trigger warnings. Reality demands active rational thinking, integrity, character and talent to create value in this world. And incidentally reality doesn't discriminate against anyone based on race, gender, sexual orientation etc. However, the real critique of the left is not based on the utilitarian arguments that they don't work in practice (although it is true and can indeed lead us back to the stone age, see Venezuela), but rather on the matter of rights, that they don't preach the right morality and don't have the right to impose their ideas on others through force i.e. through the government. Left is ideologically an illogical framework because it discredits the idea that an individual has the right to and should live for themselves and in pursuit of their happiness as the most important thing. If one can find a common thread with everything wrong in this world be it Nazism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, or any such form of collectivist ideologies where individuals are put together in groups and treated based on some unearned group identity, it is that these ideologies are irrational. And so is left.
The way Nazis justified their existence and gave racism and homicide of Jews an intellectual justification by propagating the idea that the Aryan race is superior and individuals should serve the state for the greater good, the left gives irrationality of altruistic morality an intellectual framework by arguing that self-interest is bad and (stronger, powerful, privileged) people should self-sacrifice for others and the masses, which is their notion of equality. They perpetuate these ideas and make people believe that rights to one's life and property don't exist, that reality is made up (as postmodernists say) and logic isn't important, rather feelings and experiences are the most important basis to adjudicate a person or a situation, that being rich and successful are not virtues but vices that people should be attacked for, that people's values such as honesty, character, resourcefulness don't matter but it's their marginalization status is the most important criterion, that we should tax the wealthy because the need of the common people supersedes the ideas of justice and property rights.
They assume a sense of moral rectitude and superiority not based on logic and achievement, but on the basis of how much they cater to the poor and the marginalized. It is a collectivist ideology where they don't see people as individuals but rather as a bag of identities and their intersectionalities. In their hierarchy, the more privileged you are the lower you are as a human being and the more marginalized you are the better you are. While real olympics have been a platform to show the highest a human being can achieve, the recent wave of wokeness has re emphasized the left ideas where in their inverted world there is a new oppression olympics based on who is oppressed more, who is suffering more, and thus deserves more brownie points. In their inverted world built around the less incapable and the marginalized, they still need someone to keep running the show and they do it by preying on the producers, the achievers; by taxing them, by free riding on them. Their whole ideology is like a new mind virus that takes away any sense of rationality and alignment of human values to reality, and instead presents a new framework that is antithetical to reality and human growth. Since you can't cherry-pick two contradictory ideas, most often the left comes with a whole paradigm of illogicality tied together, where they are anti-western civilization and would find virtues in ancient and tribal cultures, are anti meritocracy and anti-capitalism, anti-individualists and pro communities, and as a consequence of all these, are anti-individual growth, anti-human growth and anti life.
But neither a spacecraft nor a human life can run on illogical ideas. And while the privileged people can still have a concoction of illogical ideas and somewhat run their boat, incidentally it is the very marginalized people who get attracted by the leftist ideas and whom the left hurts the most, where instead of preaching them rationality, rational selfishness and an attitude of working towards making their own lives better despite their heavy baggage, the left disarms them by incepting in them a victimhood mentality and make them fight other people's baggage as a primary goal instead of fighting their own. This destroys them psychologically and doesn't move them any forward in their lives. In nature, there are kinds of fungi that hijack the brains of their prey which make them kill themselves and spread the spores that help in further proliferation of that fungi. In our society, the left acts like that fungus that psychologically infects people's mind by incepting in them wrong ideas and disorienting them in life, which is one of the worst things you can do to a person.
Today it is these ideas that are permeating the ethos of the Universities, are corrupting the consciousness of the masses and actively destroying the very foundation on which a good part of our civilization is made. It is quite an unfortunate fact that we live in a world where some people are treated unequally and there is discrimination in society and we should fight against all of these. However, there is a logical way to address these inequalities in a way that doesn't involve cowering down, that doesn't advocate self-sacrifice, that still allows and encourages individual freedom, self-interest and selfish human growth as rights and the most important ideas for life to flourish, something that is far from the approach that the left has taken up, where left is not the solution but part of the problem.
submitted by SlimyPunk93 to berkeley [link] [comments]
************************************************
Mich Haus was founded in 1932 as Michigan socialist coop house at UofM campus. It is one of first and many coops on the UofM campus and among many similar coops across the country and many other college campuses. Apart from the smell of weed, there you will find people who believe in and fight for equal rights for people, be it women, minorities including racial minorities, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and more. It has provided safe spaces for discriminated people when it wasn't fashionable and stood for them.These coops embody the spirit of the left that pervades many University campuses across the country and attracts many right-minded people. There are truly inspiring stories from such coops such as when a black person in the 1940s went out to get a haircut and was refused service (at the time of segregation) and the whole coop went with him to get him a haircut. Who in their right minds wouldn't agree that there are huge inequalities in our society and while there are big businesses who only care about their profit, that there are people who are at the receiving end of racism, that LGBT people have been and still are to a good degree discriminated and have a much higher rate of mental illness and suicides, that women haven't been and still aren't given equal pay and opportunity, and all these groups don't have enough representation in the positions of power and role models for the younger generation.
In that respect, the left has been the champion of equal rights and has done much good in society such as pushing for equal rights for everyone at the institutional level such as civil rights, striking down the defense of marriage act (DOMA), and many more. Apart from advocating for less government and being economically right ( which are legitimate political issues), conservatives in the US i.e. the republican party are driven by the nonsensical bible belt and unlike the left, they don't have any intellectual ideological basis to support their agenda (nobody in today's world can legitimately take an ancient illogical religious document as a basis to live and govern life). The left at least embodies some rational principles that people can agree with.
Left in one of its purest forms is Marxist communism which is a collectivist ideology based on altruistic morality where each person lives for the group (as opposed to any individualistic ideology where each person lives for themselves). Another form of left that has sprung up in the past decades is postmodernism which broadly says that our lives are built around these artificial power structures such as big companies in a capitalistic framework, cis white heteronormative masculinity, all their intersections, and anything in power, who determine the life of the masses based on their whims. They claim these power structures exploit the marginalized people and the people at the bottom aka the working class, LGBT people, and the disabled. And the main goal of this left is to fight against these power structures to achieve more equality where equality in their framework means a lack of any hierarchy and power structures in the society aka an anarchist state.As mentioned before, most people don't go to this extreme of ideas but then they, while being benign, are not being truly consistent, as true consistency of these ideas leads to one of these extreme radical left-wing ideologies.
Both of these ideologies are irrational and like anything irrational they are bound not to work, and worse, they hurt people's rights to their life and property. Left in general is a framework that is built on feelings where empathy, kindness, and compassion are the highest virtues often at the cost of logic, justice, and resourcefulness. One can still in the right mind fight against injustice to any human being and stand and fight for equal rights and equal treatment for all kinds of minorities including racial, LGBT, gender-based and more, as these ideas are derived from logic and it is respectable to live and fight for a society that doesn't discriminate.
But the leftist agenda goes much beyond rights: it is instead built around an ideological framework that doesn't revolve around achieving the highest in a human being, in creating, building, in working hard to make something worthwhile of your own life (while supporting rights of others), rather it views the world as this evil tyrannical place and revolves around dedicating your life towards not just fighting for, but lowering your standards and customizing the world for the lowest on the social hierarchy, be it the most marginalized groups, physically or mentally handicapped, and so on, and more than that, in perpetuating the ideas that instead of living for yourself, living for and finding happiness in others is the right framework. Their version of the ideal world is not built around human achievement but built around the less privileged and the more marginalized.
Their altruistic morality is the morality of self-sacrifice i.e. a system where a person places the needs, desires, and life of other people above oneself, and is one of the most evil concepts for which the world has seen the disastrous consequences of, such as the death of millions of people and destruction of economies of the whole countries in many places, be it communist Russia, Cuba, erstwhile east Germany and very recently in Venezuela. On the other hand, any country that has become rich on its own has done it based on capitalist ideas be it the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Germany, Ireland and many many more which also lead to the most peaceful times in the history of mankind. Communism and dictatorship go hand in hand as the left needs the force of a big authoritative government to implement their ideas, as they do even in socialist countries since their ideas don't involve voluntary consent of people; no sane person would voluntarily self sacrifice. On the other hand capitalism and democracies go hand in hand as both are based on individual freedom and individual rights (for clarification, capitalism means the right of people to trade freely without external control. The way believing in freedom of speech doesn't mean you agree with what every person says, believing in capitalism doesn't mean you endorse every business, but rather their right to do business freely).
The empirical evidence that leftist ideas don't work in practice is overwhelming. You can't prove a theorem or run a business by shouting your skin color, your gender identity, your lack of talent, the intensity of your need, your marginalized status and your trigger warnings. Reality demands active rational thinking, integrity, character and talent to create value in this world. And incidentally reality doesn't discriminate against anyone based on race, gender, sexual orientation etc. However, the real critique of the left is not based on the utilitarian arguments that they don't work in practice (although it is true and can indeed lead us back to the stone age, see Venezuela), but rather on the matter of rights, that they don't preach the right morality and don't have the right to impose their ideas on others through force i.e. through the government. Left is ideologically an illogical framework because it discredits the idea that an individual has the right to and should live for themselves and in pursuit of their happiness as the most important thing. If one can find a common thread with everything wrong in this world be it Nazism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, or any such form of collectivist ideologies where individuals are put together in groups and treated based on some unearned group identity, it is that these ideologies are irrational. And so is left.
The way Nazis justified their existence and gave racism and homicide of Jews an intellectual justification by propagating the idea that the Aryan race is superior and individuals should serve the state for the greater good, the left gives irrationality of altruistic morality an intellectual framework by arguing that self-interest is bad and (stronger, powerful, privileged) people should self-sacrifice for others and the masses, which is their notion of equality. They perpetuate these ideas and make people believe that rights to one's life and property don't exist, that reality is made up (as postmodernists say) and logic isn't important, rather feelings and experiences are the most important basis to adjudicate a person or a situation, that being rich and successful are not virtues but vices that people should be attacked for, that people's values such as honesty, character, resourcefulness don't matter but it's their marginalization status is the most important criterion, that we should tax the wealthy because the need of the common people supersedes the ideas of justice and property rights.
They assume a sense of moral rectitude and superiority not based on logic and achievement, but on the basis of how much they cater to the poor and the marginalized. It is a collectivist ideology where they don't see people as individuals but rather as a bag of identities and their intersectionalities. In their hierarchy, the more privileged you are the lower you are as a human being and the more marginalized you are the better you are. While real olympics have been a platform to show the highest a human being can achieve, the recent wave of wokeness has re emphasized the left ideas where in their inverted world there is a new oppression olympics based on who is oppressed more, who is suffering more, and thus deserves more brownie points. In their inverted world built around the less incapable and the marginalized, they still need someone to keep running the show and they do it by preying on the producers, the achievers; by taxing them, by free riding on them. Their whole ideology is like a new mind virus that takes away any sense of rationality and alignment of human values to reality, and instead presents a new framework that is antithetical to reality and human growth. Since you can't cherry-pick two contradictory ideas, most often the left comes with a whole paradigm of illogicality tied together, where they are anti-western civilization and would find virtues in ancient and tribal cultures, are anti meritocracy and anti-capitalism, anti-individualists and pro communities, and as a consequence of all these, are anti-individual growth, anti-human growth and anti life.
But neither a spacecraft nor a human life can run on illogical ideas. And while the privileged people can still have a concoction of illogical ideas and somewhat run their boat, incidentally it is the very marginalized people who get attracted by the leftist ideas and whom the left hurts the most, where instead of preaching them rationality, rational selfishness and an attitude of working towards making their own lives better despite their heavy baggage, the left disarms them by incepting in them a victimhood mentality and make them fight other people's baggage as a primary goal instead of fighting their own. This destroys them psychologically and doesn't move them any forward in their lives. In nature, there are kinds of fungi that hijack the brains of their prey which make them kill themselves and spread the spores that help in further proliferation of that fungi. In our society, the left acts like that fungus that psychologically infects people's mind by incepting in them wrong ideas and disorienting them in life, which is one of the worst things you can do to a person.
Today it is these ideas that are permeating the ethos of the Universities, are corrupting the consciousness of the masses and actively destroying the very foundation on which a good part of our civilization is made. It is quite an unfortunate fact that we live in a world where some people are treated unequally and there is discrimination in society and we should fight against all of these. However, there is a logical way to address these inequalities in a way that doesn't involve cowering down, that doesn't advocate self-sacrifice, that still allows and encourages individual freedom, self-interest and selfish human growth as rights and the most important ideas for life to flourish, something that is far from the approach that the left has taken up, where left is not the solution but part of the problem.
2023.03.23 21:26 Doalotta PIP for ADHD when self employed and my social media looks like I’m having the time of my life?
I work from home as a content creator after years of struggling in an office. No matter what employed job I do, I reach breaking point because of my adhd.
I’ve been let go, I’ve ended up signed off for long periods, I miss deadlines, make costly mistakes and I’m constantly exhausted. My RSD means any type of criticism sends me into a depressive spiral. I have two degrees, I should be earning more then what I earn now (less then 10k last tax year) but I can’t because of my adhd.
So for the past 2 years, I’ve worked as a content creator at home, predominantly for food and drink brands. It’s certainly far from thriving. I don’t pitch, advertise, I go months without work, and one job that’s meant to take me a day takes a week. But I just about manage it, film some videos, and get paid. I don’t earn enough to even move out of home and pay rent though. But I have a public, online ‘portfolio’ on social media that could easily look like I don’t qualify for PIP.
Examples such as:
Preparing food/taking nutrition:
What my social media shows: I have a digital portfolio of recipes I’ve made, videos of me making them. Healthy, nutritious and complex recipes.
The reality: I make one of those a month, if took me 2 attempts, 3 trips to the shops because I forgot stuff, a bin full of gone off ingredient’s and I’ve cooked it for a job, not to look after myself. Day to day, my dinner might involve a packet of crisps, 3 slices of toast and I’ll go 2 weeks without eating a vegetable because I can’t get motivated to cook, and/or I haven’t been organised and don’t have anything in my fridge. I burn food, I forget to close the fridge door and have to throw things away, I get distracted and cut myself with a knife often.
Washing/bathing:
What my social media shows: A well put together woman with makeup and hair done. Looking very presentable.
The reality: I have body dysmorphia dysphoria so I go to great lengths if and when I leave the house to look nice. Does it mean my underwear is clean? No. Have I been sleeping in my contact lenses for 3 weeks? Yes. Are my thighs covered in boil scars from poor hygiene? Yes.
Engaging with people face to face:
What my social media shows: Photos of jobs or events I have had to physically go somewhere to do. Sometimes the events are client dinners or press events and I post about them as this amazing, fun, social experience.
The reality: In the past year, I’ve attended 7 out of home events/jobs. That’s it. The rest of my job is at home, liaising with clients via emails that I have to start with ‘sorry for the delay’. I have lost several jobs and income because they’ve asked for a call, or to meet for a coffee or I just don’t respond. I can’t deal with the social side of working in an office or being part of a team. I have crippling anxiety too and I get so nervous I won’t talk. And any social interaction I have, especially work events, means days and weeks after spent decompressing, being on edge and emotional.
How exactly is anyone going to give me PIP when i have a social media that I’ve worked hard to convince people I’m fine?
submitted by Doalotta to ADHDUK [link] [comments]
I’ve been let go, I’ve ended up signed off for long periods, I miss deadlines, make costly mistakes and I’m constantly exhausted. My RSD means any type of criticism sends me into a depressive spiral. I have two degrees, I should be earning more then what I earn now (less then 10k last tax year) but I can’t because of my adhd.
So for the past 2 years, I’ve worked as a content creator at home, predominantly for food and drink brands. It’s certainly far from thriving. I don’t pitch, advertise, I go months without work, and one job that’s meant to take me a day takes a week. But I just about manage it, film some videos, and get paid. I don’t earn enough to even move out of home and pay rent though. But I have a public, online ‘portfolio’ on social media that could easily look like I don’t qualify for PIP.
Examples such as:
Preparing food/taking nutrition:
What my social media shows: I have a digital portfolio of recipes I’ve made, videos of me making them. Healthy, nutritious and complex recipes.
The reality: I make one of those a month, if took me 2 attempts, 3 trips to the shops because I forgot stuff, a bin full of gone off ingredient’s and I’ve cooked it for a job, not to look after myself. Day to day, my dinner might involve a packet of crisps, 3 slices of toast and I’ll go 2 weeks without eating a vegetable because I can’t get motivated to cook, and/or I haven’t been organised and don’t have anything in my fridge. I burn food, I forget to close the fridge door and have to throw things away, I get distracted and cut myself with a knife often.
Washing/bathing:
What my social media shows: A well put together woman with makeup and hair done. Looking very presentable.
The reality: I have body dysmorphia dysphoria so I go to great lengths if and when I leave the house to look nice. Does it mean my underwear is clean? No. Have I been sleeping in my contact lenses for 3 weeks? Yes. Are my thighs covered in boil scars from poor hygiene? Yes.
Engaging with people face to face:
What my social media shows: Photos of jobs or events I have had to physically go somewhere to do. Sometimes the events are client dinners or press events and I post about them as this amazing, fun, social experience.
The reality: In the past year, I’ve attended 7 out of home events/jobs. That’s it. The rest of my job is at home, liaising with clients via emails that I have to start with ‘sorry for the delay’. I have lost several jobs and income because they’ve asked for a call, or to meet for a coffee or I just don’t respond. I can’t deal with the social side of working in an office or being part of a team. I have crippling anxiety too and I get so nervous I won’t talk. And any social interaction I have, especially work events, means days and weeks after spent decompressing, being on edge and emotional.
How exactly is anyone going to give me PIP when i have a social media that I’ve worked hard to convince people I’m fine?
2023.03.23 21:20 Wetzilla Need a recommendation for a new santuko knife
Style? - Japanese. Specifically looking for a santuko, as my wife prefers those to western style chef's knives Steel? - stainless or carbon clad in stainless. Carbon is great, but I'm looking for something a little lower maintenance Handle? - Doesn't really matter. I'm used to western style handles but am willing to give japanese style handles a shot. Grip? - ideally something that can be used for both, I use pinch and my wife uses the handle. Length? - Around 7 inches Use Case? - Home kitchen for people who cook a lot. We cook most nights, a variety of different meats and vegetables. Care? - I currently have a honing rod and a multi stage electric sharpener I use on some cheaper knives. I tried learning to use a whetstone but just couldn't get the angle consistent enough. I'll probably just end up paying someone to do it professionally. Budget? Ideally between $75-$150. Willing to go a little above that if it's really worth it. Region? US Knives owned/have tried? Victorinox Chef's knife, low end Chicago Cutlery set, and a Misono 11 inch carbon steel chef's knife. Knives Considered? Really considering any santuko, just want a good knife that's going to hold up well and doesn't have terribly high maintenance.
2023.03.23 21:16 Knife-Nerd1987 Projects!
 | submitted by Knife-Nerd1987 to knifeclub [link] [comments] |
2023.03.23 21:14 Life-Razzmatazz4858 Post pics of your personal hobbies and art. First successful tries, only. Things you just like despite the flaws, not what is "technically" best. Comments should be feelings based.
- Oil pastels on a canvas board. The pastels were cheap and I just drew/doodled it to try them out. I'm not sure how to describe why I like it with words. It looks better in person, a dawn landscape from somewhere else. I really like the idea of oil pastels, because they never dry. The inconvenience that it will always be smudgeable is funny.
- Oil paints on a canvas, 14x11. Smaller copy of starry night. I painted it years ago, but haven't had the nerve to do the cypress tree and lower right town. I don't want to mess it up.
- Knife and sheath I made. Mild steel, very thinly case hardened in charcoal. Accidentally made the black carbon/enamel coating, that feels like ceramic. Handle is braided Paracord, wood, and epoxy. The edge is a little soft, most of the hardened part was filed away. But it easily goes through several layers of thick fabric, point first.
- Disassembled focusable blue laser pointer. It could instantly burn through a cardboard notebook cover with an audible pop. Burn high heat paint off a grill. Without the laser safety glasses, light reflected of a wall 30ft away left a temporary spot in your vision. I still have a little white scar on the back of my hand when I tested it to better understand just how dangerous it was. I took it all apart because it was just too dangerous to play around with.
- Picture I took in hot springs Arkansas. A stop on a solo road trip I took down to New Orleans. Arkansas isn't as bad as Mississippi, but this picture was it's only redeaming qualities.
2023.03.23 21:03 Fair_Actuator3770 Munich’s Ausländerbehörde is effectively preventing me from attending my bestfriend’s wedding
Hi guys, I just really need to vent out. I’m an Ausländer and have been living in Germany for almost 10 years, having recently moved to Munich. I have studied and worked in Germany for my whole adult life and I would say my German speaking skill is above average for a typical foreigner because I have been using it since my bachelor days. I am also employed at a job where it is required to communicate in German the whole time. Recently, I had to change my passport because it would expire in around 8 weeks. I have a EU blue card and as many of you know, the validity of the blue card is bound to the (old) passport. So currently I don’t have a valid work permit. I have submitted an online application to the Munich ABH to transfer the validity of my blue card to my new passport.
Here’s the problem: they say it’s going to take 8-12 weeks before I got the appointment. But I have to attend a wedding of my best friend in the UK also in around 8 weeks - in fact, I would be her bridesmaid - and I simply cannot afford to wait that long. Not to mention I need to apply for a separate UK visa. When I used to live in other German cities, they used to give us Fiktionsbescheinigung as a temporary visa until the new residence permit is issued, which will allow us to travel outside Germany. So I called the ABH asking if I can get a Fiktionsbescheinigung (because in Munich ABH you can get an emergency appointment) and they straight out said no because “a wedding is not an emergency” (emergency for them would be: business trips, deaths/lethal sickness of a family member, etc.) When I asked the nice lady from the phone in a nice, friendly way, if there is anything I could do to get a Fiktionsbescheinigung, she cut me mid sentence, said no in a really demeaning tone, and hung up on me. And I had the whole conversation in German, and I made sure my German was polite so not to piss off anyone.
I am completely crushed. My best friend and I promised to be each other’s bridesmaid since we were 12. I am so frustrated that because of a stupid bureaucracy, now I apparently won’t only miss being a bridesmaid, but I probably will not be able to attend the wedding at all. I will miss my bestfriend’s most important day of her life because of the ABH. I had done everything right, but the system fucks me over. I even changed my passport as soon as I could (my home country’s regulation forbid us to extend the passport earlier than three months before expiration date, and it took me 1 month to get a new one, leaving me with only 8 weeks before the wedding). I felt so helpless that I can’t do anything to change this. This feels so unfair. Any tips? :(
submitted by Fair_Actuator3770 to germany [link] [comments]
Here’s the problem: they say it’s going to take 8-12 weeks before I got the appointment. But I have to attend a wedding of my best friend in the UK also in around 8 weeks - in fact, I would be her bridesmaid - and I simply cannot afford to wait that long. Not to mention I need to apply for a separate UK visa. When I used to live in other German cities, they used to give us Fiktionsbescheinigung as a temporary visa until the new residence permit is issued, which will allow us to travel outside Germany. So I called the ABH asking if I can get a Fiktionsbescheinigung (because in Munich ABH you can get an emergency appointment) and they straight out said no because “a wedding is not an emergency” (emergency for them would be: business trips, deaths/lethal sickness of a family member, etc.) When I asked the nice lady from the phone in a nice, friendly way, if there is anything I could do to get a Fiktionsbescheinigung, she cut me mid sentence, said no in a really demeaning tone, and hung up on me. And I had the whole conversation in German, and I made sure my German was polite so not to piss off anyone.
I am completely crushed. My best friend and I promised to be each other’s bridesmaid since we were 12. I am so frustrated that because of a stupid bureaucracy, now I apparently won’t only miss being a bridesmaid, but I probably will not be able to attend the wedding at all. I will miss my bestfriend’s most important day of her life because of the ABH. I had done everything right, but the system fucks me over. I even changed my passport as soon as I could (my home country’s regulation forbid us to extend the passport earlier than three months before expiration date, and it took me 1 month to get a new one, leaving me with only 8 weeks before the wedding). I felt so helpless that I can’t do anything to change this. This feels so unfair. Any tips? :(
2023.03.23 21:02 Educational_Farmer98 WTS PRICE DROP Borka blades Spyderco Protech Emerson
Hello knife swap! Today I have these three knives up again with a price drop. Will ship UPS Ground today or tommorow, US sales only please. I am the first owner of all three knives, all come with original packaging as well. Not really interested in trades but may be interested in GECs... Let me know if you have any questions!
Timestamp: https://imgur.com/a/njVEOML
Borka blades SB1: https://imgur.com/a/tajWqBl
Borka blades SB1, Basicly a fixed blade microtech stitch, carried a few times and never used. M390 blade steel, made in italy by fox knives. Super comfortable ergos, comes with kydex sheath with tek lok installed. Was $350 now $300.
Protech/Emerson Custom CQC 7: https://imgur.com/a/4phCLNF
Absolutley beautiful knife. One off cqc 7 with custom g carta scale and mosaic push button. Knife has been carried and very lightly used. The knife came with a very small gap in middle of mosaic button if you look closley. Chisel ground two toned 154cm tanto blade. Made in USA by Protech. Was $170 now $150
Spyderco Tasman Salt 2: https://imgur.com/a/jox5yGe
Brand new Spyderco tasman salt 2. Bought this a couple years ago and totally forgot I had it till we found it while moving. H1 blade steel in a hawkbill shape. Was $80 now $60
Thanks for checking out my post!
submitted by Educational_Farmer98 to Knife_Swap [link] [comments]
Timestamp: https://imgur.com/a/njVEOML
Borka blades SB1: https://imgur.com/a/tajWqBl
Borka blades SB1, Basicly a fixed blade microtech stitch, carried a few times and never used. M390 blade steel, made in italy by fox knives. Super comfortable ergos, comes with kydex sheath with tek lok installed. Was $350 now $300.
Protech/Emerson Custom CQC 7: https://imgur.com/a/4phCLNF
Absolutley beautiful knife. One off cqc 7 with custom g carta scale and mosaic push button. Knife has been carried and very lightly used. The knife came with a very small gap in middle of mosaic button if you look closley. Chisel ground two toned 154cm tanto blade. Made in USA by Protech. Was $170 now $150
Spyderco Tasman Salt 2: https://imgur.com/a/jox5yGe
Brand new Spyderco tasman salt 2. Bought this a couple years ago and totally forgot I had it till we found it while moving. H1 blade steel in a hawkbill shape. Was $80 now $60
Thanks for checking out my post!
2023.03.23 20:58 yousuff_18 How is Rajagiri School of Engineering and Technology?
I have heard reviews about the classes being strict, education taking priority over sports, strict dress code etc.
I am not the usual "I want a cool college life and wanna get a placement" kinda person
I went to a pretty strict school, strict dress code and English speaking were a huge deal. Education took priority over sports, my school even started special classes during summer vacation to prepare kids for 10th boards etc.
I am not really the kinda person to make a lot of friends or "adichupoli" with friends, I like to be by myself, I am an extremely friendly person whom everyone likes according to all my friends, they consider me a very down to earth person and really really weird
(I have ADHD and I probably belong somewhere on the autism spectrum because of how I neurodivergent functioning I am, I get excited over niche things like nuclear fusion technology breakthroughs and finds science really intresting, I find it hard to "deal" with people and only vibe with people who are similar to me)
I don't mind adhering to strict dress codes or maintaining good attendance as it's something I am used to. I don't want to go out and drink or go on bike trips, I simply fail to relate with people here tbh. I grew up in another country for half my life but I am well aware of how things are here.
I really want to go to a college with really good infastructure, environment, library, nice faculty, and most importantly professors who would encourage projects and paper publication. I've heard RSET has a good IEEE group and other facilities etc.
I am not at all into sport (to give you an idea, the only sport I am into is Formula 1 and the major reason is that the technology used to manufacture those cars fascinates me)
I've heard about their good placement records but I genuinely don't care much about it because I prefer moving out and working somewhere else or straight up going for MSc in Germany (my preffered pathway tbh), I find research works to be more fun than regular EEE jobs and is considering an academia lifestyle (not sure about it yet)
Would RSET fit me well?
I just want professor who would appreciate my work, encourage and help me publish papers, good lab facilities, quality education etc.
I genuinely apologize if this life seem boring or dull to some of y'all (I've had people tell me that) but I just can't be like a regular dude, I know this sounds cuckoo but things like Physics, projects etc. Excites me. I just have to have something constantly on my mind and can't spend a second with it (thanks, ADHD) I simply never connected much with the culture or people here.
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Miscellaneous info:
If you're wondering if I am the type of kid to spend life just studying or mugging? No, love reading fictional works, mythology, cooking, playing video games, watching Hollywood movies etc. I am not a class topper but an above average student ig. I have a okay portfolio of working on projects, made a working model of hydroelectric dam and some other cool projects and likes a hands on experience. I have a pretty good electronic lab setup (srsly needs an upgrade as the equipments are old and outdated)
I like people who talk obsessively about their interests regardless of topic as it reminds me of me (yea, I sometimes talk way too much about something I am obsessed with and hyper focus on it)
I just wanna know if the faculty are unfair and would punish you for just existing, I've heard of some government engineering College professor being extremely egoistic and cutting internal marks. I also would prefer an English speaking environment (I can talk Malayalam without any issues but I still struggle with writing, counting and knowing the names of each days in a week, I am kinda tired of people making fun of that yk)
submitted by yousuff_18 to Kerala [link] [comments]
I am not the usual "I want a cool college life and wanna get a placement" kinda person
I went to a pretty strict school, strict dress code and English speaking were a huge deal. Education took priority over sports, my school even started special classes during summer vacation to prepare kids for 10th boards etc.
I am not really the kinda person to make a lot of friends or "adichupoli" with friends, I like to be by myself, I am an extremely friendly person whom everyone likes according to all my friends, they consider me a very down to earth person and really really weird
(I have ADHD and I probably belong somewhere on the autism spectrum because of how I neurodivergent functioning I am, I get excited over niche things like nuclear fusion technology breakthroughs and finds science really intresting, I find it hard to "deal" with people and only vibe with people who are similar to me)
I don't mind adhering to strict dress codes or maintaining good attendance as it's something I am used to. I don't want to go out and drink or go on bike trips, I simply fail to relate with people here tbh. I grew up in another country for half my life but I am well aware of how things are here.
I really want to go to a college with really good infastructure, environment, library, nice faculty, and most importantly professors who would encourage projects and paper publication. I've heard RSET has a good IEEE group and other facilities etc.
I am not at all into sport (to give you an idea, the only sport I am into is Formula 1 and the major reason is that the technology used to manufacture those cars fascinates me)
I've heard about their good placement records but I genuinely don't care much about it because I prefer moving out and working somewhere else or straight up going for MSc in Germany (my preffered pathway tbh), I find research works to be more fun than regular EEE jobs and is considering an academia lifestyle (not sure about it yet)
Would RSET fit me well?
I just want professor who would appreciate my work, encourage and help me publish papers, good lab facilities, quality education etc.
I genuinely apologize if this life seem boring or dull to some of y'all (I've had people tell me that) but I just can't be like a regular dude, I know this sounds cuckoo but things like Physics, projects etc. Excites me. I just have to have something constantly on my mind and can't spend a second with it (thanks, ADHD) I simply never connected much with the culture or people here.
Miscellaneous info:
If you're wondering if I am the type of kid to spend life just studying or mugging? No, love reading fictional works, mythology, cooking, playing video games, watching Hollywood movies etc. I am not a class topper but an above average student ig. I have a okay portfolio of working on projects, made a working model of hydroelectric dam and some other cool projects and likes a hands on experience. I have a pretty good electronic lab setup (srsly needs an upgrade as the equipments are old and outdated)
I like people who talk obsessively about their interests regardless of topic as it reminds me of me (yea, I sometimes talk way too much about something I am obsessed with and hyper focus on it)
I just wanna know if the faculty are unfair and would punish you for just existing, I've heard of some government engineering College professor being extremely egoistic and cutting internal marks. I also would prefer an English speaking environment (I can talk Malayalam without any issues but I still struggle with writing, counting and knowing the names of each days in a week, I am kinda tired of people making fun of that yk)
2023.03.23 20:58 DjangoWexler Wexlair March Patreon: Worldbuilding Deep Dive with Cass Morris
Over from the Patreon. If you haven't read Cass' Aven Cycle, it's really good stuff!
Today we're chatting with Cass Morris, author of the Aven Cycle, a historical fantasy set in an alternate Rome, and co-host of the podcast Worldbuilding for Masochists, an award-nominated podcast discussing the intricacies of worldbuilding in SFF. This means Cass is something of an expert on worldbuilding complexity in fantasy books, which is what I want to talk about today. SFF readers have a particular love of immersing ourselves in richly detailed worlds we can imagine ourselves in viscerally, but let's talk about how writers can actually bring that complexity of detail into focus without totally overwhelming readers.
So to start, I want to talk about political systems, because I love how you managed to make the deep sense of complexity on that front accessible. Ancient Rome: Not an uncomplicated governmental system! And that's before you introduce fantastical elements. People already have trouble understanding how our own governments work, so how do you teach the reader enough that you can play with that complexity for plot intrigue? How do you convey the sense of complexity so the reader understands it without totally bogging down the pacing with exposition?
CASS: Well, one big thing that helps is absolutely the editing process! I'm prone to going into far too much detail on the first try. Multiple pages of too much detail. An entire swamp's worth of getting bogged down. Laying out all the complexities helps me explain them to myself, but it's far more than a reader needs. After the first draft, I could carve out what was totally unnecessary, then simplify the rest enough to be comprehensible, just as, say, The West Wing simplifies the machinations of the White House and Congress without losing what's dramatically interesting about them.
Then, as with so many worldbuilding elements, I think you have to connect political worldbuilding to what a character needs and what's obstructing them. For example: Sempronius Tarren needs to win a certain election to get himself the right provincial posting to set up his longer-term goals. In seeing him make that plan, the reader learns a little about the hierarchy of offices and the powers endowed to each—not a full constitution's worth of details, but enough to understand why the office is desirable and valuable to this character in this moment. Then, the obstruction: His philosophical opponents don't want him gaining what they consider dangerous levels of power, so they throw legal challenges in his way, the same way the US Congress uses things like filibusters. Showing Sempronius' frustration at the block, followed by his own countermove to get around it, feeds the reader more information about how the system works, but through the more engaging lens of his thoughts and emotions.
CASEY: Ha, the existence of editing is a great point. I've done this the opposite way as well—drafted the bones of the story and then filled in later once I knew what kind of detail was called for. But I think the key that you bring up here is that you're focusing on what is relevant to the point-of-view character. They—and we, as the authors—might know and be familiar with all kinds of political nuances the reader isn't, but that doesn't mean you have to teach them all to the reader!
This can get tricky, because deep in the character POV they might notice all those signals, but the ones the reader needs are the ones that are directly relevant to the POV character's goal and its attending conflict. And moreover, it needs to be a specific goal, not something nebulous like, "I want to attain more power." You have a character who wants to accomplish something specific (e.g. win an election), and give them a limited number of people/obstructions who are the actual roadblocks—possibly not the person you'd expect to have the power to stop them, to indicate more nuance in a system, or you can mention in summary other contributing factors that are already in hand, things like that. But limiting the scope helps focus on a few areas to then flesh out in depth, which in turn creates the impression of more depth in general.
It's sort of counterintuitive, but in a way you have room to give more detail with fewer details. And I love how your approach bakes the exposition into the character's agency as they navigate their response to obstructions, because that is so helpful with pacing, too.
DJANGO: A good edit does indeed always help a lot!
For me the biggest barrier to depicting a complex government realistically is the sheer number of people involved. In any government of reasonable size there are hundreds, if not thousands, of potential decision-makers who might have impact on a plot. In a Roman context, beyond the actual elected officials (and there are plenty of those) you have all the other members of important families who didn'tget elected, or are planning to get elected next year, or who lend money to the candidates, or what have you. Thinking about the current US government, the number of characters I personally would recognize (as a more-or-less informed news reader) is both far less than the number who really matter and far morethen we can expect an average novel reader to keep track of.
There are a few techniques that have helped me in the past. The first is just an acceptable break from reality—power in novels tends to be way more centralized than it would "realistically" be. This is true even in very autocratic societies! To go back to my favorite example, in A Game of Thrones the number of major characters involved in the government is probably less than 20—the king, his family, the small council, and the seven Lords Paramount (Stark, Tully, Tyrell, and so on). This is enough that the book has a reputation for complexity and having a lot of characters, but compared to a real government of the type it depicts is probably an order of magnitude too low. GRRM wisely concentrates a lot of functions into personal rule because it works better dramatically for Mace Tyrell or Tywin Lannister to attend to stuff personally than having a hundred ministers and vassals all the time. (It's not a government, but in The Shadow Campaigns the army that the main characters are part of is under-officered in comparison to its historical counterparts—extremely so by British standards!—exactly because this means fewer named characters for everyone to keep track of.)
The other useful trick is to assign representatives—people who can stand in for a large bunch of similar people that we keep coming back to. If you need to write "someone convinces the members of Parliament to vote yes on something," and it doesn't work for there to be some single person who gets to make that choice, you can show the characters meeting with a small number of MPs, say three, and coming back to them several times. With the proper framing as a kind of montage, the reader understands that these are examples and extrapolates. This helps you depict the kind of thing that goes on in the government, which can be just as important as its formal structure. (For example, are you getting the MPs on-side by threats from the party whip, promises of future political favors, or payoffs and patronage?) Joe Abercrombie is particularly good at this, for example in his depiction of the Open Council in Before They Are Hanged.
CASS: Yeah, trimming down the number of people involved is definitely a big help. That's another place where I usually have far too many functionaries and side characters on the first go, then end up consolidating them in following drafts. You can also do a lot just depicting the literal halls of power—how full the building is, how many people are moving around, even the architecture itself can tell the reader a lot about the scale of the governing apparatus, in just a few words of description.
Trimming down the steps of a process also helps. If you look at something like how a bill becomes a law in the United States, it's a lot more complex than Schoolhouse Rock led us to believe! It's not just: 1. Propose Law; 2. Committee Debate; 3: Full Chamber Debate; 4: Vote; 5: Repeat in Other Chamber; 6: President Signs. There are many layers of hearings and markups and financial appropriations, and it's all recursive, because you might have to go through that several times! A little of that may prove interesting, if you can hang an exciting character moment on it or show a really neat procedural trick, but going through the full process will be torture for anyone but the wonkiest of policy wonks.
The Aven Cycle is a fantasy with a strong historical analogue, and I know you have a lot of experience with historical research, between your current dramaturgical work for Camp Halfblood and your formal academic training. So talk to me about how you use history to inform your worldbuilding without restricting your fictional playground with so much research the story becomes didactic. How do you choose what to focus on, and what to leave out? Since women are front and center in these books, I'd love to hear in particular how you focused their stories with a sense of historicity, and how much you could take or chose to invent based on your research.
CASS: I have always been hugely interested in social history: how people live their lives in a given place and time. Sometimes it's strikingly similar to how we experience life today, and sometimes it's so alien—and the same piece of history can be an example of both! I'm fascinated by all the pressure points a society faces and how we create both problems and solutions out of our dominant paradigms. Social history can be hard to uncover, though, because so many of our literary primary sources were composed by wealthy free men, which leaves out most of society. We generally see everyone else through the biased lens of those guys at the top of the heap—at least in what we think of as traditional source material. So, I like exploring less traditional sources.
In the early modern world of my academic training, we do have more surviving written work in the form of letters and journals, but we can also look to things like ecclesiastical records. I promise that's more fascinating than it sounds! Reading up on 17th century slander trials is wild, for example, because those record the exact words that people were using to insult each other—which in turn tells us a lot about what they considered virtuous and what was shameful. Or there's Henslowe's Diary, which gets into granular detail about the income and expenses of a theatre in the 1590s and 1600s.
In the ancient world, archaeology provides more information than words do. The layout of their houses, their furniture, their tools, their kitchen utensils, all of it shows us how people lived. Some of my favorite sources are funerary monuments. Thousands and thousands of these survive, and they document the lives of regular people. The majority, in fact, belong to soldiers or freedmen and their families. They used them to boast of what they'd made of themselves, proud that their children had been born free, proud of the businesses they built. The soldiers spoke about where they'd fought and what awards they won. Some of the most heartbreaking were set up by parents mourning for young children (putting paid to the myth that people didn't get attached to their kids because of high rates of child mortality). Each one is a declaration of the self in defiance of the oblivion of eternity, and I just find that so beautiful.
That's all a long way of saying: I look for the history that shows me people. Those are the details that I want to carry into the text: what they care about, what they value, and the material culture that attends those more abstract concepts. That's the history that ties to character, rather than just being an info-dump.
Even with all that archaeological information, though, we're still stuck with a dearth of information, particularly when it comes to the lives of women and other marginalized groups. So I've had to train myself to look at the absences, the gaps in the record, and try to fill them in, and to look at the sources written by men, then subtract out the biases those men held in order to get to something closer to truth.
It's like looking at the shadow of a tiger. It might give you an idea of the tiger's shape, but only from a particular angle. It may or may not tell you how big a tiger is. It won't tell you that a tiger has stripes, what a tiger sounds like, or what it eats. Examining the lives of marginalized groups in history is often trying to know them by their shadows.
What's clear, though, is that women exerted a lot of power "off-screen" in the ancient world. We have some gorgeous examples: Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, held up as a paragon of virtue; much-married Fulvia, who ran street gangs, had a feud with Cicero, and waged war against Octavius Caesar; Agrippina Major, popular heroine who gave an emperor so much grief that he had her assassinated; her daughter Agrippina Minor, mother of Nero, whose autobiography is the lost text I'd most like to see miraculously rediscovered. I could go on and on—but I borrowed a lot from all of them when crafting the women of Aven. They were smart and resourceful despite the confines of their society, and whether they played within the boundaries or dared to transgress, they made an impact.
DJANGO: For me this is all about using history to inform my worldbuilding, rather than define it.
I like to think of using history as a case study, an example, rather than a blueprint to be literally followed. If you have a fantasy situation—a type of warfare, an environment, a resource distribution—history provides you with examples of how real people adapted to it, made use of it, and generally applied their ingenuity. People, by and large, don't do obviously stupid things (at least not for very long) and so generally the fact that a society was set up in such-and-such a way and lasted for hundreds of years means that it worked pretty well! (In our modern times of plenty, this can be hard to comprehend; for most of human history, "everyone not dying of starvation" was a great accomplishment requiring constant, unrelenting work.)
This is not to say, of course, that it had to be that way, or that any other way is "unrealistic." The key is to use the historical analogy to understand the kinds of thingsthat were challenges for those people. If they live in, say, a desert, they will have adapted to it in every way: dress, food, shelter, etc. When you read about how they lived, the important thing isn't to copy it exactly, but to make sure that your fantasy people have answers to the same challenges—this is what gives the book verisimilitude!
What I generally find is that no amount of me sitting down and reasoning out the problems people face, a priori, goes even a fraction of the way toward actually understanding those problems; history inevitably throws up fixes that people invented for problems I would never have even considered. (In late medieval France, knife-sharpeners carried circular whetstones—we're talking big, 50 pound stones—on their backs as they went from village to village. The rest of their setup could be constructed from local wood, but big stones of sufficient hardness were very hard to find, and drilling a hole through the middle for the axle was a capital investment!) Lifting these little vignettes for my fantasy society gives it that feel of realism I crave, while still leaving sufficient room to change the aspects of the past that I'm not eager to replicate.
CASS: What gets really fun there is, if you are using a specific historical inspiration but want to make really significant changes, figuring out what happens when you flick the domino. I'm working on a new project now that's a secondworld fantasy instead of an alternate version of our world, but it's inspired by early modern London and the vibe of Shakespeare's theatres. I'm working from that base because I want that aesthetic—but I also want this society to have gender equity, I want them to be accepting of queer identities, I want them to be polytheistic, and the government is more like Venice than England. Those are some really big changes from London in 1600, even before adding magic to the equation!
So then I get to figure out what else in society those things touch: clothing, industry, family structure, bureaucratic structure, and so forth. How would these people, with their worldview, find similar or different answers to problems than the historical examples I'm inspired by? This is why I love worldbuilding, because I find that such a fun game. There are so many possible answers, and I tinker until I find the ones that best fit the story I want to tell.
CASEY: Oh, funerary monuments is a great tip. There's a newsletter called Ælfgif-who? on biographies of early medieval English women, and it's fascinating to see what the author can construct from a combination of records and artifacts and the biases involved, what's said and what's conspicuously not said, what she can guess versus what there's hard evidence for. As a fantasist, I love the possibility space those gaps create that I can fill in.
As Django points out, people have been problem-solving throughout history, and that's not limited to wealthy men. If the records don't talk about what women were doing, it doesn't mean they were sitting on their laurels all day or just accepting whatever men figured out, and you can often get a sense for the space they occupied in the gaps—and if you can't, those gaps can give you ideas for what space they couldoccupy—in history, or in a story.
I think it's also worth noting that historical research can give you a sense of what kinds of social systems go together. I remember reading a fantasy book with a setting inspired by Japan that had all these features that have existed in Japanese history but not at the same time. So it was this mess of things that didn't make any sense together, because the author hadn't paid attention to the historical context.
I don't write historical analogue settings, but even for secondary world fantasy I find it useful to pay attention to what features can work together, and that's especially important once you start changing aspects to suit your story. A society with cell phones is not going to work the same way as one with post. A society where most people can't read won't work the same either! And this matters because it determines what kind of plots you can write, but it's also not super efficient to consider every aspect of the worldbuilding. Like, in a given story I may not need to know how laundry works, or the sewers, or what toys children are playing with. (Sometimes, sure! But not every time.)
But I probably need to know what people are wearing so I can describe them, so it matters what kind of clothing their technology could make and what it costs. I need to know how they communicate with each other, because they're going to do that in pretty much any story.
So I start with a character and plot concept and work backward to build the world around what the story requires them to do, and I do it in this order because otherwise I am exactly the person who will get lost in a worldbuilding rabbit hole at the expense of actually writing the story. But once I start figuring out some of the tentpoles like, This person's unique education makes them critical to the plot (why do they have that education? what education is available to other people?), or more generally, Our heroes will not be able to call for help because the message won't arrive in time (how far does the message need to travel, and how long will it take, and how long to get a response?), that starts to tell you the kinds of things that will be important to put together to make a world that feels internally consistent and enablesyou to tell your story.
If your heroine is rebelling against an arranged marriage, it's worth asking how common arranged marriages are and why and for whom. Like, the whole culture of debutantes in regency England emerged out of economic changes! Social institutions are intertwined, you can't just treat them as piecemeal. But if you do it right, the research gives you more things to play with that inform your characters' histories and choices rather than restricting you based on what "really" happened. Then it's just a matter of focusing on the pieces that actually matter to the story you're actually telling or enhance it in some way.
Lastly, I would be remiss in talking to you specifically about focusing an audience without asking how you use rhetoric to do that very thing (you can find Cass' deep dive on rhetoric in Hamilton, backed by Lin Manuel Miranda himself, on her Patreon). A common piece of writing advice is to never actually write the impossibly dramatic speech in fiction, because it will never be as impressive to readers, and instead focus on the characters' reaction or experience. Do you agree? And are there particular rhetorical devices you like to use to help focus readers' attention on what you want them to notice, whether it's a part of an argument in dialogue or in conveying information in the narrative?
CASS: Oh, you've done a dangerous thing, opening the door of rhetoric for me!
I love rhetoric so much. It's gotten a bad reputation in modern parlance, since most people only ever hear the word in a negative context—political rhetoric, violent rhetoric, and so forth. But rhetoric is nothing more and nothing less than structuring your words to achieve a desired effect. It's deeply woven into everything writers do, whether or not you're the kind of ultra-nerd who memorizes the Greek names for a few hundred devices. I think some of the best writers (like Shakespeare and LMM) do it in part instinctively, because they have such a good ear for how people speak and for the cadence of language, but it's also a skill that you can hone and train.
Rhetoric serves many purposes, and a lot of it is about crafting a character's voice, both in dialogue and in their POV narration. It lends a lot of texture to the story, and it's something I find particularly useful in crafting multi-POV books. Subtle shifts in how characters use language can help center a reader within each individual POV.
In dialogue, I think about vocal quirks that are marks of character and tell you something about the speaker, then I use rhetoric to craft the effect. Who's prone to using more words than necessary, either because they like hearing themselves talk or because they're babbling (devices like pleonasm and accumulatio)? Who likes intricate descriptions (enargia), and who's a champion of deadpan understatement (litotes)? Who, in a state of excitement or eagerness, asks too many questions without waiting for an answer (pysma)? Who's so pompous or instructive that they answer their own questions (anythypophora)? Not that rhetoric is the only tool for playing with these things, of course, but it's the frame I personally like best.
It gets particularly fun when I get to write political arguments, because those speakers are conscious of their own devices to the point of weaponizing them. They'll ask lots of what we call rhetorical questions (erotema), where there's an obvious answer that they're looking for; they'll repeat their ideas in sets of three (tricolon), because that helps the audience to remember them; they'll seize on an important word their opponent used and twist it around some other way (asteismus). They're deliberately showing off, and following the minutiae of the argument often isn't as important for the reader as understanding that they're tweaking each other and trying to one-up each other. The rhetoric lets me communicate those character dynamics in fun ways—similar to the "Cabinet Battle" scenes in Hamilton!
Writers have rhetorical tics, too, which can sometimes become a vice, if you're not aware of them, but which are also part of each author's unique voice. I'm particularly prone to a certain combo of devices: zeugma plus anaphora/isocolon. Zeugma is when two or more words, phrases, or clauses are dependent upon the same other word (usually the main verb of a sentence), as in "I love you truly, madly, deeply." All three adverbs hang on the same main verb. Anaphora is repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, and isocolon is parallel structure. "I came, I saw, I conquered" is an example of both: the repeated "I" at the beginning and the structure of "I + [past tense verb]".
I then sometimes layer that combo with auxesis, a series of clauses or phrases that gradually ascend in importance. You make a list, and the most important thing is last. That's the traditional definition, at least, but I had a professor who argued that auxesis can also work in the opposite direction, where your series diminishes rather than growing, and I do think that can be equally impressive, especially when you want to narrow a reader's or listener's focus. So, the zeugma-anaphora/isocolon-auxesis combo move gives me the opportunity to show a character becoming more intense or more pointed as they're working their way through a thought. If that ends up being shaped like self-correction, then it's also epanorthosis. I recognize that I'm nerding hard at this point! But this is what I find so fun about rhetoric: the devices don't operate in isolation, but layer and intertwine to craft specific moments and that desired effect on the reader.
As to writing the Impossibly Dramatic Speech—I don't think it is impossible, but I do think it's something to use cautiously. You have to pick your moment, for one thing, and it's not always the moment you might think. Not all magnificent speeches are Henry V bucking up his followers on the eve of Agincourt. Sometimes, the magnificent speech is a lover pleading to be heard, a con artist deceiving a mark, a sister quietly giving advice. (See? I told you I'm prone to the zeugma-anaphora/isocolon-auxesis combo!)
It's easier to get away with the big speech on stage or film, because there, the actor is an essential component of the equation. On the page of a novel, the writing itself has a heavier load to carry. So I think you can get away with presenting a well-crafted Impossibly Dramatic Speech in a well-chosen moment, but not all in one block. Interposing the speaker's words with other elements helps to break it up and remind the reader why the speech matters. Maybe you cut away to show the audience's reactions; maybe you cut inside the speaker's head to show them nerving themselves up for it, or debating what to say next, or consciously choosing where they pause.
And here I'll throw another device at you: within a speech, choosing to pause is called aposiopesis. Mark Antony does it at the end of the first bit of his "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech, when he says he's been overcome with emotion, "My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me." Practically speaking, that gives the actor a break so they don't have to do 140 lines all at once, but it also gives the plebeians a chance to speak and the audience a chance to witness how Antony's words are having an effect. In a novel, a writer can effectively use aposiopesis in another way, breaking the speech up with descriptive elements, which helps to ground the lofty rhetoric back in the reality of the world and the immediacy of the moment.
CASEY: Rhetoric gives us so many tools to play with! Thank you for all those examples. I think it's worth highlighting your point that writers don't have to know what specific rhetorical devices are called to be able to employ them effectively. Adjusting sentence structure and word choice to match character or moment or the rhythm of the plot is doing exactly this work, paying close attention to howyour words are working.
Strategic repetition is a favorite of mine. I love repeating a structure multiple times in a row, particularly with paragraph breaks, because then the white space and alignment helps emphasize what I'm doing. That's something you can't do the same way in other mediums! I also love repeating a line a different character said and twisting its meaning in later dialogue—you have to in some way make sure the reader recognizes the reference, but there are lots of ways to do that.
With novels, we can't rely on visible reactions from the audience or an actor's delivery, but we can manage pacing with punctuation, with narration interspersed or removed. I also love doing the equivalent of an anime peanut gallery ("Did she do it?" "Yes, the attack landed!" "But look at her—now she's almost out of power; she only has one more shot. Will she last another round?") as a way to make sure the reader notices the undercurrents and how they're changing the stakes. And that works just as well in fraught conversations as fight scenes.
This can be especially important in scenes like political debates that are doing heavy interplay of character dynamics, but depending on the scene's goals, sometimes you can do this with telling, too, rather than showing—in The Hands of the Emperor,there's an anecdote about a character capping a joke perfectly; we never learn the joke or the reply, but the content of the words isn't what matters in this case as much as the context, that these characters having just met are able to match each other with no regard to the impropriety. That said, if we're instead in a romance where a plot beat hinges on one main character changing the other's mind, in almost all cases we're going to need that whole conversation to track the minute character shifts that drive romances at their core—and you can give those conversations extra impact by grounding them in the specific words they've said to and thought about each other before.
DJANGO: Rhetoric is an area where I don't have much training, I have to say, so I'll be the one who goes for "don't actually write the speech out." =) I do a fair bit of this in The Shadow Campaigns, in particular for Danton's magically-effective speeches in The Shadow Throne, which obviously aren't going to be replicated in text. In addition to the problems of being able to actually write a good speech—as Cass demonstrates, there's a lot more going on there then you might think!—it can also be hard to replicate the effect on an in-universe audience.
First of all, while the people in the book are hearing something delivered live, the readers are getting it written down, stripped of the power that a really good speaker can give it. Second, the diegetic audience are different people than the reader, with a different set of cultural assumptions and values. This can be as simple as feeling a stir of pride when language or music evokes national symbols, and goes all the way to complicated cultural markers and tropes. (What we'd today call memes!) The best rhetoric is often the most targeted at its specific audience, specifically because that can be so effective, but the result can leave modern readers cold. It's definitely one of those areas that depends on the author's strengths and the style of the narrative.
Cass, what have you been working on, and what's coming up for you next?
CASS: The Bloodstained Shade, Book 3 of the Aven Cycle, just released at the end of January. It's out in paperback and ebook now, and there's an audiobook coming in May. There will be a Book 4, someday, but at the moment I'm working on something entirely different—the secondworld fantasy inspired by early modern London that I mentioned earlier. That's still in drafting stage, and I'm so enjoying the ongoing application of everything I've learned about worldbuilding and writing craft in the past few years.
Event-wise, I'm doing a virtual workshop on developing magical systems for the Orange County Public Library on March 21st—open to anyone, whether you're an OCPL member or not! Then I'll be at RavenCon April 21-23 in Richmond, VA and at ConCarolinas June 2-4 in Charlotte, NC.
For more worldbuilding goodness, you can find me along with co-hosts Rowenna Miller and Marshall Ryan Maresca on Worldbuilding for Masochists, our two-time Hugo Finalist podcast! Available on all your favorite podcast platforms, with new episodes dropping every other Wednesday. We start our fifth year in June, and we'll be kicking off the season with a pretty exciting announcement!
I usually direct people to Twitter @CassRMorris as the best place to find me for general chatting, and while that's still the best place for now, with the increasing instability of the old bird, I'll also direct folks toward my LinkTree, which will always have the most up-to-date social media haunts, and my Substack, for major announcements and random acts of blogging.
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Today we're chatting with Cass Morris, author of the Aven Cycle, a historical fantasy set in an alternate Rome, and co-host of the podcast Worldbuilding for Masochists, an award-nominated podcast discussing the intricacies of worldbuilding in SFF. This means Cass is something of an expert on worldbuilding complexity in fantasy books, which is what I want to talk about today. SFF readers have a particular love of immersing ourselves in richly detailed worlds we can imagine ourselves in viscerally, but let's talk about how writers can actually bring that complexity of detail into focus without totally overwhelming readers.
So to start, I want to talk about political systems, because I love how you managed to make the deep sense of complexity on that front accessible. Ancient Rome: Not an uncomplicated governmental system! And that's before you introduce fantastical elements. People already have trouble understanding how our own governments work, so how do you teach the reader enough that you can play with that complexity for plot intrigue? How do you convey the sense of complexity so the reader understands it without totally bogging down the pacing with exposition?
CASS: Well, one big thing that helps is absolutely the editing process! I'm prone to going into far too much detail on the first try. Multiple pages of too much detail. An entire swamp's worth of getting bogged down. Laying out all the complexities helps me explain them to myself, but it's far more than a reader needs. After the first draft, I could carve out what was totally unnecessary, then simplify the rest enough to be comprehensible, just as, say, The West Wing simplifies the machinations of the White House and Congress without losing what's dramatically interesting about them.
Then, as with so many worldbuilding elements, I think you have to connect political worldbuilding to what a character needs and what's obstructing them. For example: Sempronius Tarren needs to win a certain election to get himself the right provincial posting to set up his longer-term goals. In seeing him make that plan, the reader learns a little about the hierarchy of offices and the powers endowed to each—not a full constitution's worth of details, but enough to understand why the office is desirable and valuable to this character in this moment. Then, the obstruction: His philosophical opponents don't want him gaining what they consider dangerous levels of power, so they throw legal challenges in his way, the same way the US Congress uses things like filibusters. Showing Sempronius' frustration at the block, followed by his own countermove to get around it, feeds the reader more information about how the system works, but through the more engaging lens of his thoughts and emotions.
CASEY: Ha, the existence of editing is a great point. I've done this the opposite way as well—drafted the bones of the story and then filled in later once I knew what kind of detail was called for. But I think the key that you bring up here is that you're focusing on what is relevant to the point-of-view character. They—and we, as the authors—might know and be familiar with all kinds of political nuances the reader isn't, but that doesn't mean you have to teach them all to the reader!
This can get tricky, because deep in the character POV they might notice all those signals, but the ones the reader needs are the ones that are directly relevant to the POV character's goal and its attending conflict. And moreover, it needs to be a specific goal, not something nebulous like, "I want to attain more power." You have a character who wants to accomplish something specific (e.g. win an election), and give them a limited number of people/obstructions who are the actual roadblocks—possibly not the person you'd expect to have the power to stop them, to indicate more nuance in a system, or you can mention in summary other contributing factors that are already in hand, things like that. But limiting the scope helps focus on a few areas to then flesh out in depth, which in turn creates the impression of more depth in general.
It's sort of counterintuitive, but in a way you have room to give more detail with fewer details. And I love how your approach bakes the exposition into the character's agency as they navigate their response to obstructions, because that is so helpful with pacing, too.
DJANGO: A good edit does indeed always help a lot!
For me the biggest barrier to depicting a complex government realistically is the sheer number of people involved. In any government of reasonable size there are hundreds, if not thousands, of potential decision-makers who might have impact on a plot. In a Roman context, beyond the actual elected officials (and there are plenty of those) you have all the other members of important families who didn'tget elected, or are planning to get elected next year, or who lend money to the candidates, or what have you. Thinking about the current US government, the number of characters I personally would recognize (as a more-or-less informed news reader) is both far less than the number who really matter and far morethen we can expect an average novel reader to keep track of.
There are a few techniques that have helped me in the past. The first is just an acceptable break from reality—power in novels tends to be way more centralized than it would "realistically" be. This is true even in very autocratic societies! To go back to my favorite example, in A Game of Thrones the number of major characters involved in the government is probably less than 20—the king, his family, the small council, and the seven Lords Paramount (Stark, Tully, Tyrell, and so on). This is enough that the book has a reputation for complexity and having a lot of characters, but compared to a real government of the type it depicts is probably an order of magnitude too low. GRRM wisely concentrates a lot of functions into personal rule because it works better dramatically for Mace Tyrell or Tywin Lannister to attend to stuff personally than having a hundred ministers and vassals all the time. (It's not a government, but in The Shadow Campaigns the army that the main characters are part of is under-officered in comparison to its historical counterparts—extremely so by British standards!—exactly because this means fewer named characters for everyone to keep track of.)
The other useful trick is to assign representatives—people who can stand in for a large bunch of similar people that we keep coming back to. If you need to write "someone convinces the members of Parliament to vote yes on something," and it doesn't work for there to be some single person who gets to make that choice, you can show the characters meeting with a small number of MPs, say three, and coming back to them several times. With the proper framing as a kind of montage, the reader understands that these are examples and extrapolates. This helps you depict the kind of thing that goes on in the government, which can be just as important as its formal structure. (For example, are you getting the MPs on-side by threats from the party whip, promises of future political favors, or payoffs and patronage?) Joe Abercrombie is particularly good at this, for example in his depiction of the Open Council in Before They Are Hanged.
CASS: Yeah, trimming down the number of people involved is definitely a big help. That's another place where I usually have far too many functionaries and side characters on the first go, then end up consolidating them in following drafts. You can also do a lot just depicting the literal halls of power—how full the building is, how many people are moving around, even the architecture itself can tell the reader a lot about the scale of the governing apparatus, in just a few words of description.
Trimming down the steps of a process also helps. If you look at something like how a bill becomes a law in the United States, it's a lot more complex than Schoolhouse Rock led us to believe! It's not just: 1. Propose Law; 2. Committee Debate; 3: Full Chamber Debate; 4: Vote; 5: Repeat in Other Chamber; 6: President Signs. There are many layers of hearings and markups and financial appropriations, and it's all recursive, because you might have to go through that several times! A little of that may prove interesting, if you can hang an exciting character moment on it or show a really neat procedural trick, but going through the full process will be torture for anyone but the wonkiest of policy wonks.
The Aven Cycle is a fantasy with a strong historical analogue, and I know you have a lot of experience with historical research, between your current dramaturgical work for Camp Halfblood and your formal academic training. So talk to me about how you use history to inform your worldbuilding without restricting your fictional playground with so much research the story becomes didactic. How do you choose what to focus on, and what to leave out? Since women are front and center in these books, I'd love to hear in particular how you focused their stories with a sense of historicity, and how much you could take or chose to invent based on your research.
CASS: I have always been hugely interested in social history: how people live their lives in a given place and time. Sometimes it's strikingly similar to how we experience life today, and sometimes it's so alien—and the same piece of history can be an example of both! I'm fascinated by all the pressure points a society faces and how we create both problems and solutions out of our dominant paradigms. Social history can be hard to uncover, though, because so many of our literary primary sources were composed by wealthy free men, which leaves out most of society. We generally see everyone else through the biased lens of those guys at the top of the heap—at least in what we think of as traditional source material. So, I like exploring less traditional sources.
In the early modern world of my academic training, we do have more surviving written work in the form of letters and journals, but we can also look to things like ecclesiastical records. I promise that's more fascinating than it sounds! Reading up on 17th century slander trials is wild, for example, because those record the exact words that people were using to insult each other—which in turn tells us a lot about what they considered virtuous and what was shameful. Or there's Henslowe's Diary, which gets into granular detail about the income and expenses of a theatre in the 1590s and 1600s.
In the ancient world, archaeology provides more information than words do. The layout of their houses, their furniture, their tools, their kitchen utensils, all of it shows us how people lived. Some of my favorite sources are funerary monuments. Thousands and thousands of these survive, and they document the lives of regular people. The majority, in fact, belong to soldiers or freedmen and their families. They used them to boast of what they'd made of themselves, proud that their children had been born free, proud of the businesses they built. The soldiers spoke about where they'd fought and what awards they won. Some of the most heartbreaking were set up by parents mourning for young children (putting paid to the myth that people didn't get attached to their kids because of high rates of child mortality). Each one is a declaration of the self in defiance of the oblivion of eternity, and I just find that so beautiful.
That's all a long way of saying: I look for the history that shows me people. Those are the details that I want to carry into the text: what they care about, what they value, and the material culture that attends those more abstract concepts. That's the history that ties to character, rather than just being an info-dump.
Even with all that archaeological information, though, we're still stuck with a dearth of information, particularly when it comes to the lives of women and other marginalized groups. So I've had to train myself to look at the absences, the gaps in the record, and try to fill them in, and to look at the sources written by men, then subtract out the biases those men held in order to get to something closer to truth.
It's like looking at the shadow of a tiger. It might give you an idea of the tiger's shape, but only from a particular angle. It may or may not tell you how big a tiger is. It won't tell you that a tiger has stripes, what a tiger sounds like, or what it eats. Examining the lives of marginalized groups in history is often trying to know them by their shadows.
What's clear, though, is that women exerted a lot of power "off-screen" in the ancient world. We have some gorgeous examples: Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, held up as a paragon of virtue; much-married Fulvia, who ran street gangs, had a feud with Cicero, and waged war against Octavius Caesar; Agrippina Major, popular heroine who gave an emperor so much grief that he had her assassinated; her daughter Agrippina Minor, mother of Nero, whose autobiography is the lost text I'd most like to see miraculously rediscovered. I could go on and on—but I borrowed a lot from all of them when crafting the women of Aven. They were smart and resourceful despite the confines of their society, and whether they played within the boundaries or dared to transgress, they made an impact.
DJANGO: For me this is all about using history to inform my worldbuilding, rather than define it.
I like to think of using history as a case study, an example, rather than a blueprint to be literally followed. If you have a fantasy situation—a type of warfare, an environment, a resource distribution—history provides you with examples of how real people adapted to it, made use of it, and generally applied their ingenuity. People, by and large, don't do obviously stupid things (at least not for very long) and so generally the fact that a society was set up in such-and-such a way and lasted for hundreds of years means that it worked pretty well! (In our modern times of plenty, this can be hard to comprehend; for most of human history, "everyone not dying of starvation" was a great accomplishment requiring constant, unrelenting work.)
This is not to say, of course, that it had to be that way, or that any other way is "unrealistic." The key is to use the historical analogy to understand the kinds of thingsthat were challenges for those people. If they live in, say, a desert, they will have adapted to it in every way: dress, food, shelter, etc. When you read about how they lived, the important thing isn't to copy it exactly, but to make sure that your fantasy people have answers to the same challenges—this is what gives the book verisimilitude!
What I generally find is that no amount of me sitting down and reasoning out the problems people face, a priori, goes even a fraction of the way toward actually understanding those problems; history inevitably throws up fixes that people invented for problems I would never have even considered. (In late medieval France, knife-sharpeners carried circular whetstones—we're talking big, 50 pound stones—on their backs as they went from village to village. The rest of their setup could be constructed from local wood, but big stones of sufficient hardness were very hard to find, and drilling a hole through the middle for the axle was a capital investment!) Lifting these little vignettes for my fantasy society gives it that feel of realism I crave, while still leaving sufficient room to change the aspects of the past that I'm not eager to replicate.
CASS: What gets really fun there is, if you are using a specific historical inspiration but want to make really significant changes, figuring out what happens when you flick the domino. I'm working on a new project now that's a secondworld fantasy instead of an alternate version of our world, but it's inspired by early modern London and the vibe of Shakespeare's theatres. I'm working from that base because I want that aesthetic—but I also want this society to have gender equity, I want them to be accepting of queer identities, I want them to be polytheistic, and the government is more like Venice than England. Those are some really big changes from London in 1600, even before adding magic to the equation!
So then I get to figure out what else in society those things touch: clothing, industry, family structure, bureaucratic structure, and so forth. How would these people, with their worldview, find similar or different answers to problems than the historical examples I'm inspired by? This is why I love worldbuilding, because I find that such a fun game. There are so many possible answers, and I tinker until I find the ones that best fit the story I want to tell.
CASEY: Oh, funerary monuments is a great tip. There's a newsletter called Ælfgif-who? on biographies of early medieval English women, and it's fascinating to see what the author can construct from a combination of records and artifacts and the biases involved, what's said and what's conspicuously not said, what she can guess versus what there's hard evidence for. As a fantasist, I love the possibility space those gaps create that I can fill in.
As Django points out, people have been problem-solving throughout history, and that's not limited to wealthy men. If the records don't talk about what women were doing, it doesn't mean they were sitting on their laurels all day or just accepting whatever men figured out, and you can often get a sense for the space they occupied in the gaps—and if you can't, those gaps can give you ideas for what space they couldoccupy—in history, or in a story.
I think it's also worth noting that historical research can give you a sense of what kinds of social systems go together. I remember reading a fantasy book with a setting inspired by Japan that had all these features that have existed in Japanese history but not at the same time. So it was this mess of things that didn't make any sense together, because the author hadn't paid attention to the historical context.
I don't write historical analogue settings, but even for secondary world fantasy I find it useful to pay attention to what features can work together, and that's especially important once you start changing aspects to suit your story. A society with cell phones is not going to work the same way as one with post. A society where most people can't read won't work the same either! And this matters because it determines what kind of plots you can write, but it's also not super efficient to consider every aspect of the worldbuilding. Like, in a given story I may not need to know how laundry works, or the sewers, or what toys children are playing with. (Sometimes, sure! But not every time.)
But I probably need to know what people are wearing so I can describe them, so it matters what kind of clothing their technology could make and what it costs. I need to know how they communicate with each other, because they're going to do that in pretty much any story.
So I start with a character and plot concept and work backward to build the world around what the story requires them to do, and I do it in this order because otherwise I am exactly the person who will get lost in a worldbuilding rabbit hole at the expense of actually writing the story. But once I start figuring out some of the tentpoles like, This person's unique education makes them critical to the plot (why do they have that education? what education is available to other people?), or more generally, Our heroes will not be able to call for help because the message won't arrive in time (how far does the message need to travel, and how long will it take, and how long to get a response?), that starts to tell you the kinds of things that will be important to put together to make a world that feels internally consistent and enablesyou to tell your story.
If your heroine is rebelling against an arranged marriage, it's worth asking how common arranged marriages are and why and for whom. Like, the whole culture of debutantes in regency England emerged out of economic changes! Social institutions are intertwined, you can't just treat them as piecemeal. But if you do it right, the research gives you more things to play with that inform your characters' histories and choices rather than restricting you based on what "really" happened. Then it's just a matter of focusing on the pieces that actually matter to the story you're actually telling or enhance it in some way.
Lastly, I would be remiss in talking to you specifically about focusing an audience without asking how you use rhetoric to do that very thing (you can find Cass' deep dive on rhetoric in Hamilton, backed by Lin Manuel Miranda himself, on her Patreon). A common piece of writing advice is to never actually write the impossibly dramatic speech in fiction, because it will never be as impressive to readers, and instead focus on the characters' reaction or experience. Do you agree? And are there particular rhetorical devices you like to use to help focus readers' attention on what you want them to notice, whether it's a part of an argument in dialogue or in conveying information in the narrative?
CASS: Oh, you've done a dangerous thing, opening the door of rhetoric for me!
I love rhetoric so much. It's gotten a bad reputation in modern parlance, since most people only ever hear the word in a negative context—political rhetoric, violent rhetoric, and so forth. But rhetoric is nothing more and nothing less than structuring your words to achieve a desired effect. It's deeply woven into everything writers do, whether or not you're the kind of ultra-nerd who memorizes the Greek names for a few hundred devices. I think some of the best writers (like Shakespeare and LMM) do it in part instinctively, because they have such a good ear for how people speak and for the cadence of language, but it's also a skill that you can hone and train.
Rhetoric serves many purposes, and a lot of it is about crafting a character's voice, both in dialogue and in their POV narration. It lends a lot of texture to the story, and it's something I find particularly useful in crafting multi-POV books. Subtle shifts in how characters use language can help center a reader within each individual POV.
In dialogue, I think about vocal quirks that are marks of character and tell you something about the speaker, then I use rhetoric to craft the effect. Who's prone to using more words than necessary, either because they like hearing themselves talk or because they're babbling (devices like pleonasm and accumulatio)? Who likes intricate descriptions (enargia), and who's a champion of deadpan understatement (litotes)? Who, in a state of excitement or eagerness, asks too many questions without waiting for an answer (pysma)? Who's so pompous or instructive that they answer their own questions (anythypophora)? Not that rhetoric is the only tool for playing with these things, of course, but it's the frame I personally like best.
It gets particularly fun when I get to write political arguments, because those speakers are conscious of their own devices to the point of weaponizing them. They'll ask lots of what we call rhetorical questions (erotema), where there's an obvious answer that they're looking for; they'll repeat their ideas in sets of three (tricolon), because that helps the audience to remember them; they'll seize on an important word their opponent used and twist it around some other way (asteismus). They're deliberately showing off, and following the minutiae of the argument often isn't as important for the reader as understanding that they're tweaking each other and trying to one-up each other. The rhetoric lets me communicate those character dynamics in fun ways—similar to the "Cabinet Battle" scenes in Hamilton!
Writers have rhetorical tics, too, which can sometimes become a vice, if you're not aware of them, but which are also part of each author's unique voice. I'm particularly prone to a certain combo of devices: zeugma plus anaphora/isocolon. Zeugma is when two or more words, phrases, or clauses are dependent upon the same other word (usually the main verb of a sentence), as in "I love you truly, madly, deeply." All three adverbs hang on the same main verb. Anaphora is repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, and isocolon is parallel structure. "I came, I saw, I conquered" is an example of both: the repeated "I" at the beginning and the structure of "I + [past tense verb]".
I then sometimes layer that combo with auxesis, a series of clauses or phrases that gradually ascend in importance. You make a list, and the most important thing is last. That's the traditional definition, at least, but I had a professor who argued that auxesis can also work in the opposite direction, where your series diminishes rather than growing, and I do think that can be equally impressive, especially when you want to narrow a reader's or listener's focus. So, the zeugma-anaphora/isocolon-auxesis combo move gives me the opportunity to show a character becoming more intense or more pointed as they're working their way through a thought. If that ends up being shaped like self-correction, then it's also epanorthosis. I recognize that I'm nerding hard at this point! But this is what I find so fun about rhetoric: the devices don't operate in isolation, but layer and intertwine to craft specific moments and that desired effect on the reader.
As to writing the Impossibly Dramatic Speech—I don't think it is impossible, but I do think it's something to use cautiously. You have to pick your moment, for one thing, and it's not always the moment you might think. Not all magnificent speeches are Henry V bucking up his followers on the eve of Agincourt. Sometimes, the magnificent speech is a lover pleading to be heard, a con artist deceiving a mark, a sister quietly giving advice. (See? I told you I'm prone to the zeugma-anaphora/isocolon-auxesis combo!)
It's easier to get away with the big speech on stage or film, because there, the actor is an essential component of the equation. On the page of a novel, the writing itself has a heavier load to carry. So I think you can get away with presenting a well-crafted Impossibly Dramatic Speech in a well-chosen moment, but not all in one block. Interposing the speaker's words with other elements helps to break it up and remind the reader why the speech matters. Maybe you cut away to show the audience's reactions; maybe you cut inside the speaker's head to show them nerving themselves up for it, or debating what to say next, or consciously choosing where they pause.
And here I'll throw another device at you: within a speech, choosing to pause is called aposiopesis. Mark Antony does it at the end of the first bit of his "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech, when he says he's been overcome with emotion, "My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me." Practically speaking, that gives the actor a break so they don't have to do 140 lines all at once, but it also gives the plebeians a chance to speak and the audience a chance to witness how Antony's words are having an effect. In a novel, a writer can effectively use aposiopesis in another way, breaking the speech up with descriptive elements, which helps to ground the lofty rhetoric back in the reality of the world and the immediacy of the moment.
CASEY: Rhetoric gives us so many tools to play with! Thank you for all those examples. I think it's worth highlighting your point that writers don't have to know what specific rhetorical devices are called to be able to employ them effectively. Adjusting sentence structure and word choice to match character or moment or the rhythm of the plot is doing exactly this work, paying close attention to howyour words are working.
Strategic repetition is a favorite of mine. I love repeating a structure multiple times in a row, particularly with paragraph breaks, because then the white space and alignment helps emphasize what I'm doing. That's something you can't do the same way in other mediums! I also love repeating a line a different character said and twisting its meaning in later dialogue—you have to in some way make sure the reader recognizes the reference, but there are lots of ways to do that.
With novels, we can't rely on visible reactions from the audience or an actor's delivery, but we can manage pacing with punctuation, with narration interspersed or removed. I also love doing the equivalent of an anime peanut gallery ("Did she do it?" "Yes, the attack landed!" "But look at her—now she's almost out of power; she only has one more shot. Will she last another round?") as a way to make sure the reader notices the undercurrents and how they're changing the stakes. And that works just as well in fraught conversations as fight scenes.
This can be especially important in scenes like political debates that are doing heavy interplay of character dynamics, but depending on the scene's goals, sometimes you can do this with telling, too, rather than showing—in The Hands of the Emperor,there's an anecdote about a character capping a joke perfectly; we never learn the joke or the reply, but the content of the words isn't what matters in this case as much as the context, that these characters having just met are able to match each other with no regard to the impropriety. That said, if we're instead in a romance where a plot beat hinges on one main character changing the other's mind, in almost all cases we're going to need that whole conversation to track the minute character shifts that drive romances at their core—and you can give those conversations extra impact by grounding them in the specific words they've said to and thought about each other before.
DJANGO: Rhetoric is an area where I don't have much training, I have to say, so I'll be the one who goes for "don't actually write the speech out." =) I do a fair bit of this in The Shadow Campaigns, in particular for Danton's magically-effective speeches in The Shadow Throne, which obviously aren't going to be replicated in text. In addition to the problems of being able to actually write a good speech—as Cass demonstrates, there's a lot more going on there then you might think!—it can also be hard to replicate the effect on an in-universe audience.
First of all, while the people in the book are hearing something delivered live, the readers are getting it written down, stripped of the power that a really good speaker can give it. Second, the diegetic audience are different people than the reader, with a different set of cultural assumptions and values. This can be as simple as feeling a stir of pride when language or music evokes national symbols, and goes all the way to complicated cultural markers and tropes. (What we'd today call memes!) The best rhetoric is often the most targeted at its specific audience, specifically because that can be so effective, but the result can leave modern readers cold. It's definitely one of those areas that depends on the author's strengths and the style of the narrative.
Cass, what have you been working on, and what's coming up for you next?
CASS: The Bloodstained Shade, Book 3 of the Aven Cycle, just released at the end of January. It's out in paperback and ebook now, and there's an audiobook coming in May. There will be a Book 4, someday, but at the moment I'm working on something entirely different—the secondworld fantasy inspired by early modern London that I mentioned earlier. That's still in drafting stage, and I'm so enjoying the ongoing application of everything I've learned about worldbuilding and writing craft in the past few years.
Event-wise, I'm doing a virtual workshop on developing magical systems for the Orange County Public Library on March 21st—open to anyone, whether you're an OCPL member or not! Then I'll be at RavenCon April 21-23 in Richmond, VA and at ConCarolinas June 2-4 in Charlotte, NC.
For more worldbuilding goodness, you can find me along with co-hosts Rowenna Miller and Marshall Ryan Maresca on Worldbuilding for Masochists, our two-time Hugo Finalist podcast! Available on all your favorite podcast platforms, with new episodes dropping every other Wednesday. We start our fifth year in June, and we'll be kicking off the season with a pretty exciting announcement!
I usually direct people to Twitter @CassRMorris as the best place to find me for general chatting, and while that's still the best place for now, with the increasing instability of the old bird, I'll also direct folks toward my LinkTree, which will always have the most up-to-date social media haunts, and my Substack, for major announcements and random acts of blogging.
2023.03.23 20:57 Blacksomber 16M Just looking for some buddys since I have none
Hello! Id rather tell you my name in person but im here looking for someone that’s just looking for a friends aswell. I have two nationalities (Brazilian-german) and yes, watching the 7x1 on the world cup made me question things. I currently live in Germany but Im still “relearning it”.
I speak Portuguese,german and Spanish (and English, as you can see) I listen to every type of music and would love to hear something new. I play games, watch anime, read books (not just mangas), love automobile related stuff and play football. Im really opened to do any kinds of friends and talk about anything. 💪 cheers 🥂
submitted by Blacksomber to MakeNewFriendsHere [link] [comments]
I speak Portuguese,german and Spanish (and English, as you can see) I listen to every type of music and would love to hear something new. I play games, watch anime, read books (not just mangas), love automobile related stuff and play football. Im really opened to do any kinds of friends and talk about anything. 💪 cheers 🥂
2023.03.23 20:53 Tikller_1506 Looking for manga (Can't Remember name)
It's finished. It's Comedy and there no is way it's getting made into an anime. The author also made a detective manga with a highschooler
It's about a fat short guy that likes cross-dressing and got bullied his whole life. He goes to a forest to end it all and ends up finding a skeleton female blonde version of himself.
He takes her stuff and finds that she is rich and takes her place. Her ring is possessed by her spirit and forces him to go to work as a high school teacher in a bullying school with most students looking like animals. There is also a girl with a knife for a hand.
All in all, it was pretty good but ended shortly.
submitted by Tikller_1506 to manga [link] [comments]
It's about a fat short guy that likes cross-dressing and got bullied his whole life. He goes to a forest to end it all and ends up finding a skeleton female blonde version of himself.
He takes her stuff and finds that she is rich and takes her place. Her ring is possessed by her spirit and forces him to go to work as a high school teacher in a bullying school with most students looking like animals. There is also a girl with a knife for a hand.
All in all, it was pretty good but ended shortly.
2023.03.23 20:48 RobertPooWiener [WTS/WTT] Brown Cortex Prototype 001
All items are used and will be sold as is. Payments will be made via PayPal ff no notes and all items will be shipped USPS USA only. Yolo takes priority over chats but I reserve the right to choose who to sell to depending on the situation. Please send questions via chat. All prices are OBO. This knife is USED and all information available to me has been disclosed in this listing. All sales are final, and there will not be any refunds. I have not completely disassembled it and inspected every part under magnification, so I am not sure of the state of the internal parts. Looking to move these today so make an offer.
Pics
This Cortex is a catch and release for me. I received it in mint condition, it has been sitting in a safe. Never carried, used, or sharpened. It is far too nice to be in my collection of users. It is the first cortex out of about 400 that were ever sold. The action is incredible on this knife and I plan to get another brown knife in the future.
I am looking to get a larger knife similar in size to the Arius. My main trade interest would be something from jg, ad20s, SPK Lamia in vanax, rare sebenza 21s, starbenza, and other hard to find knives. However I would sell for the right price. Starting at:
SV/TV 1100 OBO
submitted by RobertPooWiener to Knife_Swap [link] [comments]
Pics
This Cortex is a catch and release for me. I received it in mint condition, it has been sitting in a safe. Never carried, used, or sharpened. It is far too nice to be in my collection of users. It is the first cortex out of about 400 that were ever sold. The action is incredible on this knife and I plan to get another brown knife in the future.
I am looking to get a larger knife similar in size to the Arius. My main trade interest would be something from jg, ad20s, SPK Lamia in vanax, rare sebenza 21s, starbenza, and other hard to find knives. However I would sell for the right price. Starting at:
SV/TV 1100 OBO
2023.03.23 20:48 hirudoraa The "Hunger Games" as classical example of a dystopia
Heres my little rant about the "Hunger Games" and their classification as a classic example of a dystopia. Im apologizing in advance for my english and my, presumably many, grammatical errors. Im an 18-year old student from germany and english is not my strongest subject, so please be kind.
The dystopian aspect of a dystopian novel is entirely dependant on the defeat of the protagonist, because when he doesn't lose, it undermines the power of the government or system over the individual. The whole point of a dystopian novel is to examine a dystopian society, draw parallelles to the current state of society and to recognize them and to abolish them. An important point is the extermination of people as individuals and the relationships, between them, like in "Brave new World", where "everyone belongs to anybody" and where something like a personal relationship, being married or being someones mother, is ostracized by society, or in "1984", where the family isn't abolished, but something as an intimate sexual relationship or desire is seen as abnormal and where children get indoctrinatet to spy on their parents and to denounce them to the thought-police. We see these systems as evil, because we have the perspective of an outsider and have another understanding of a functioning and stable society, so we experience it through a protagonist or a narrator. Through this comparison between our understanding of resistance and the actions, considered by the respective government as resisting are so different, that it is a perfect example of the control, that is exercised by the government. Through detailed examples and insights of the narrator, we fundamentally understand, how that system works and how the people are controlled, but especially, how the goverment maintains the power, that it has. When the protagonist forms their ideas and thinks about other cultures, the past, good and evil and all the things, that are wrong in its current situation, the reader relates to them to truly understand, why it is so important to abolish this government. But the protagonist loses every time, because they are destined to. A truly dystopian society can't be destabilized, because it was designed to remain and to maintain their stability, even when an individual may break out, he gets brainwashed or exiled to be reintegrated in society and to not be an indivual, but to be one of a system, that doesnt care about the individual, but remains their social structure as a machine, in which every gear is indistinguishable from another. The feeling, that one individual is able to destabilize a system, which entire purpose is to maintain and stabilize itself, is therefore a fallacy in itself and the protagonist adds, through their loss, another feeling, that is more important, than the fallacy itself. The protagonist is helpless and has to life in these system, not regarding their efforts. The whole requierment to get active and to prohibit these future is, not entirely, but remaining as an important part of it, the necessity to do something now, or either way it won't be possible to prevent that dystopian future from happening. The possibility of not being able to do something, to not even think anything other than what we are told to think, entirely made possible by a reflecting and memorizing reader is more terrifying than anything else, every physical torture, because we weren't in a similiar place, but the thought of our individuality being stripped away from us is terrifying, because we have been shown the difference.
"The Hunger Games", considered a good dystopia, therefore completely fails the point of a dystopian society. The indivual is free to think and the loss of the capitol, even in the first book by not letting Peeta and Katniss kill themselves with the berries. I understand, that it was a necessity to let them live to have a winner, but the argument still stands, that not just by thinking about action, but also attempting to act and to not be mercilessly stopped by the capitol undermines their authority and power and therefore completely the attempt to create that feeling of necessity to act by helplessness. One might say, that the violence of the capitol is enough to control them, but as seen in the books, the violence and poverty of the people only leads to a revolution and they have to be indoctrinated, because the districts are part of the capitol, not as the same social class or geographically, by supplying them with necessary goods to live. To be part of the economic part of society, they need to love the society so much, that they work for others unconditionally and that they are happy with it, like the lower cats in "Brave New World". I still think, that they are good YA-books and that their success is not unrightfully attained, they are still not my favourite book, but, as we read it in school this year in english, I think it should be replacedas the example of a dystopian novel by something like "Animal Farm", which is shorter to read, which boosts motivation,and focusses more on the dystopian part of the book.
submitted by hirudoraa to books [link] [comments]
The dystopian aspect of a dystopian novel is entirely dependant on the defeat of the protagonist, because when he doesn't lose, it undermines the power of the government or system over the individual. The whole point of a dystopian novel is to examine a dystopian society, draw parallelles to the current state of society and to recognize them and to abolish them. An important point is the extermination of people as individuals and the relationships, between them, like in "Brave new World", where "everyone belongs to anybody" and where something like a personal relationship, being married or being someones mother, is ostracized by society, or in "1984", where the family isn't abolished, but something as an intimate sexual relationship or desire is seen as abnormal and where children get indoctrinatet to spy on their parents and to denounce them to the thought-police. We see these systems as evil, because we have the perspective of an outsider and have another understanding of a functioning and stable society, so we experience it through a protagonist or a narrator. Through this comparison between our understanding of resistance and the actions, considered by the respective government as resisting are so different, that it is a perfect example of the control, that is exercised by the government. Through detailed examples and insights of the narrator, we fundamentally understand, how that system works and how the people are controlled, but especially, how the goverment maintains the power, that it has. When the protagonist forms their ideas and thinks about other cultures, the past, good and evil and all the things, that are wrong in its current situation, the reader relates to them to truly understand, why it is so important to abolish this government. But the protagonist loses every time, because they are destined to. A truly dystopian society can't be destabilized, because it was designed to remain and to maintain their stability, even when an individual may break out, he gets brainwashed or exiled to be reintegrated in society and to not be an indivual, but to be one of a system, that doesnt care about the individual, but remains their social structure as a machine, in which every gear is indistinguishable from another. The feeling, that one individual is able to destabilize a system, which entire purpose is to maintain and stabilize itself, is therefore a fallacy in itself and the protagonist adds, through their loss, another feeling, that is more important, than the fallacy itself. The protagonist is helpless and has to life in these system, not regarding their efforts. The whole requierment to get active and to prohibit these future is, not entirely, but remaining as an important part of it, the necessity to do something now, or either way it won't be possible to prevent that dystopian future from happening. The possibility of not being able to do something, to not even think anything other than what we are told to think, entirely made possible by a reflecting and memorizing reader is more terrifying than anything else, every physical torture, because we weren't in a similiar place, but the thought of our individuality being stripped away from us is terrifying, because we have been shown the difference.
"The Hunger Games", considered a good dystopia, therefore completely fails the point of a dystopian society. The indivual is free to think and the loss of the capitol, even in the first book by not letting Peeta and Katniss kill themselves with the berries. I understand, that it was a necessity to let them live to have a winner, but the argument still stands, that not just by thinking about action, but also attempting to act and to not be mercilessly stopped by the capitol undermines their authority and power and therefore completely the attempt to create that feeling of necessity to act by helplessness. One might say, that the violence of the capitol is enough to control them, but as seen in the books, the violence and poverty of the people only leads to a revolution and they have to be indoctrinated, because the districts are part of the capitol, not as the same social class or geographically, by supplying them with necessary goods to live. To be part of the economic part of society, they need to love the society so much, that they work for others unconditionally and that they are happy with it, like the lower cats in "Brave New World". I still think, that they are good YA-books and that their success is not unrightfully attained, they are still not my favourite book, but, as we read it in school this year in english, I think it should be replacedas the example of a dystopian novel by something like "Animal Farm", which is shorter to read, which boosts motivation,and focusses more on the dystopian part of the book.
2023.03.23 20:35 Princessleiawastaken Barbara Holik has been missing for 27 years. No evidence, no suspects, no updates. How did this woman seemingly vanish?
I just found out about this case from the excellent Trace Evidence podcast episode. I was shocked to see it hadn't been posted here since there's so much to discuss. This is a missing persons case where there's no evidence of a crime, but no evidence of the person leaving of their own volition. It's been 27 years and there's no progress in the investigation.
About Barbara
Barbara Holik was born in Rödental, Germany on March 24th, 1962. In 1989, Barbara emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Taos, New Mexico because of her great appreciation for the American West. From the Native American history, to the beauty of the land, Barbara was fascinated by all New Mexico had to offer. Her new environment inspired her art in jewelry making and pottery, which she sold at a local gallery, Taos Pueblo shop. She was so passionate about the place she now called home that she hosted tour groups for travelers.
Barbara was married for several years in the 90s, but divorced by the time of her disappearance. According to Taos News, the marriage may have been more out of a desire to become an American citizen rather than love. But, I can not find any accounts of Barbara being in danger of deportation. I also cannot find any accounts of the marriage/divorce being contentious or the ex-spouse being involved with her disappearance.
In June of 1995, Barbara was preparing for an old friend of hers from Germany to come visit. She lived alone in a duplex apartment in Taso. Barbara was described as both friendly and a loner. She was not dating anyone.
Last sighting
On June 23rd, 1995, Barbara was last seen at a bar having drinks with friends. At the time, the bar was called El Patio. Barbara wore a lavender blouse and ordered her usual, a few glasses of scotch, and left the bar, presumably walking home (as she often did) around 11 p.m. that night.
Nobody knows what happened to Barbara after that. She would never be seen again and her disappearance would not be noticed until June 26th when she failed to show up for work at the gallery.
Disappearance & Investigation
The proprietor of gallery, Sonny Spruce, became worried as it was unlike Barbara to miss work without any notice. He made several calls to Barabra's home which all went unanswered, so he went to check on her. When Sonny arrived, he found the door unlocked and her Ford Fiesta parked in the driveway. Nothing inside the apartment seemed unusual. Her things were undisturbed. Sonny left and hoped he'd see Barbara the next day at work.
When Barbara didn't show up for work again on June 27th, Sonny made another trip to her apartment to check on her. The apartment was just as it had been the day before. Sonny called police and reported Barbara missing.
Investigators noted that Barbara's purse, wallet, keys, passport, and cash were inside the apartment. The lavender blouse she was wearing when last seen was hanging in the bathroom. The apartment was clean and it did not appear any of Barbara's belongings had been taken.
But, there was one thing found that investigators thought were out of place: a pair of work gloves. One lay on the kitchen floor in the front of the refrigerator and the other was by the back door. Friends could not identify if the gloves were Barbara's or not.
There was no evidence a crime had been committed. But it was suspicious that Barbra was suddenly gone without money, ID, or a mode of transportation.
Investigators hit dead end after dead end. Car rentals were checked out by investigators and none had rented a car to Barbara. Phone records from Barbara's home phone (I could not find any info on if she had a cell phone) did not show any unusual or long distance calls. Local hospitals had not admitted Barbara. Border patrol agents did not have any records of Barbara crossing into Mexico.
The only potential clue in the case came from a maid who cleaned the other apartment in the duplex where Barbara lived. The maid (who is not named in any sources) reported to police that four business men had briefly rented the other apartment. After they'd left on June 24th, the maid found a number of odd things:
The four men who'd rented the apartment were eventually questioned at their company’s Albuquerque office by the investigator in charge of the case. Frustratingly, the investigator did not ask any of the men were about their whereabouts June 23rd. Instead, they were simply asked if they knew Barbara, which all of them denied. A few said they did not even see her during their stay in the apartment next door.
Taos Police Chief Neil Curran would tell media that he was disappointed with the interviews and felt that the men could've been "the key" to solving Barbra's disappearance. He stated he wished he's conducted the interviews himself. The men were never re-interviewed by Curran or other investigators. Police have never called the men suspects or persons of interests.
Chief Curran asked the public for help, sating "We have nothing to go on". Multiple tips have come in over the years, but none have lead to answers. Barbara is still missing after all these years and investigators believe foul play was involved.
Sources:
Charley Project
Trace Evidence episode
Taos News article
submitted by Princessleiawastaken to UnresolvedMysteries [link] [comments]
About Barbara
Barbara Holik was born in Rödental, Germany on March 24th, 1962. In 1989, Barbara emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Taos, New Mexico because of her great appreciation for the American West. From the Native American history, to the beauty of the land, Barbara was fascinated by all New Mexico had to offer. Her new environment inspired her art in jewelry making and pottery, which she sold at a local gallery, Taos Pueblo shop. She was so passionate about the place she now called home that she hosted tour groups for travelers.
Barbara was married for several years in the 90s, but divorced by the time of her disappearance. According to Taos News, the marriage may have been more out of a desire to become an American citizen rather than love. But, I can not find any accounts of Barbara being in danger of deportation. I also cannot find any accounts of the marriage/divorce being contentious or the ex-spouse being involved with her disappearance.
In June of 1995, Barbara was preparing for an old friend of hers from Germany to come visit. She lived alone in a duplex apartment in Taso. Barbara was described as both friendly and a loner. She was not dating anyone.
Last sighting
On June 23rd, 1995, Barbara was last seen at a bar having drinks with friends. At the time, the bar was called El Patio. Barbara wore a lavender blouse and ordered her usual, a few glasses of scotch, and left the bar, presumably walking home (as she often did) around 11 p.m. that night.
Nobody knows what happened to Barbara after that. She would never be seen again and her disappearance would not be noticed until June 26th when she failed to show up for work at the gallery.
Disappearance & Investigation
The proprietor of gallery, Sonny Spruce, became worried as it was unlike Barbara to miss work without any notice. He made several calls to Barabra's home which all went unanswered, so he went to check on her. When Sonny arrived, he found the door unlocked and her Ford Fiesta parked in the driveway. Nothing inside the apartment seemed unusual. Her things were undisturbed. Sonny left and hoped he'd see Barbara the next day at work.
When Barbara didn't show up for work again on June 27th, Sonny made another trip to her apartment to check on her. The apartment was just as it had been the day before. Sonny called police and reported Barbara missing.
Investigators noted that Barbara's purse, wallet, keys, passport, and cash were inside the apartment. The lavender blouse she was wearing when last seen was hanging in the bathroom. The apartment was clean and it did not appear any of Barbara's belongings had been taken.
But, there was one thing found that investigators thought were out of place: a pair of work gloves. One lay on the kitchen floor in the front of the refrigerator and the other was by the back door. Friends could not identify if the gloves were Barbara's or not.
There was no evidence a crime had been committed. But it was suspicious that Barbra was suddenly gone without money, ID, or a mode of transportation.
Investigators hit dead end after dead end. Car rentals were checked out by investigators and none had rented a car to Barbara. Phone records from Barbara's home phone (I could not find any info on if she had a cell phone) did not show any unusual or long distance calls. Local hospitals had not admitted Barbara. Border patrol agents did not have any records of Barbara crossing into Mexico.
The only potential clue in the case came from a maid who cleaned the other apartment in the duplex where Barbara lived. The maid (who is not named in any sources) reported to police that four business men had briefly rented the other apartment. After they'd left on June 24th, the maid found a number of odd things:
- A pair of black women’s shoes on a coach that friends would later identify Barbara's.
- The mattress cover on the bed had been removed along with a blanket and sheet.
- The cord between the handset and telephone had been cut.
The four men who'd rented the apartment were eventually questioned at their company’s Albuquerque office by the investigator in charge of the case. Frustratingly, the investigator did not ask any of the men were about their whereabouts June 23rd. Instead, they were simply asked if they knew Barbara, which all of them denied. A few said they did not even see her during their stay in the apartment next door.
Taos Police Chief Neil Curran would tell media that he was disappointed with the interviews and felt that the men could've been "the key" to solving Barbra's disappearance. He stated he wished he's conducted the interviews himself. The men were never re-interviewed by Curran or other investigators. Police have never called the men suspects or persons of interests.
Chief Curran asked the public for help, sating "We have nothing to go on". Multiple tips have come in over the years, but none have lead to answers. Barbara is still missing after all these years and investigators believe foul play was involved.
Sources:
Charley Project
Trace Evidence episode
Taos News article
2023.03.23 20:26 Elendel_Daily_Bot [Fantasy] Brandon Sanderson Is Your God
u_mistborn wrote:
I guess... I guess because I admitted to him I'm not a person who feels pain very easily, he thought he should see how deep the knife would go?
SnackTVBed wrote:
Hi, Brandon. This article was petty and needlessly cruel. I would like to ask what you meant by saying, "As I build books, God builds people." I have my own ideas but as this article was so poorly written, those ideas may be way off base. What was the context from your point of view, and can you expand on your thoughts?
Brandon commented:
Maybe? When he came back for the second round, at that Japanese dinner, he was REALLY interested in the Mormon angle. He pushed over and over and just circling back.
I think I was just talking about how I like that humans are naturally creative. That making things brings us joy. I have talked about this before in speeches: how I think all jobs are creative in some way. Not just traditionally "creative" jobs.
I mentioned this seems to be an echo of diety in us. God created the world, and we as people like to create. My creative outlet is books.
It's ironic that this made the story for him, as I don't really remember that point well.