Silver bullet pocket hose 100 ft
Few things that bug me about the game **SPOILERS**
2023.06.02 13:36 DependentPurple5455 Few things that bug me about the game **SPOILERS**
First of all, when you enter Dexs car at the start the door opens the wrong way.
When Guro pulls you out from the scrapyard he's a 100% honest to god Arasaka suit yet in the space of a few minutes he's being attacked by them, what happened in the car that made him a target?
As Corpo V you see Frank lead the saka suits to you at Lizzies yet when he calls later in game V initially sets out to help him, Surely a top brass counter Intel agent at arasaka saw Frank no more than 10 feet away from you.
When Jackie gets injured during the heist V doesn't try to help Jackie AT ALL, doesn't try to heal his wounds or better yet doesn't even look at the injuries or buy enough time for Jackie to reach a ripper in time, Mama Welles even says Jackie got shot 3 times in the chest and survived and can't help but think that would've been a worse injury, V is a bad friend.
When Vik checks V out at the beginning he installs a basic Kiroshi optic and low level ballistic processor and yet its €$21,000 ?
And finally, the one that really gets me, when Dex shoots you, Vik said you got lucky because it was small calibre shot however when you find Dexs body and get his gun it doesn't shoot bullets at all it shoots MONEY vik clearly pocketed the cash he pulled from your skull and wrapped a random bullet he had lying around into that chain misty gave you.
Amazing game though on my 3rd playthrough 😁
submitted by DependentPurple5455 to cyberpunkgame [link] [comments]
When Guro pulls you out from the scrapyard he's a 100% honest to god Arasaka suit yet in the space of a few minutes he's being attacked by them, what happened in the car that made him a target?
As Corpo V you see Frank lead the saka suits to you at Lizzies yet when he calls later in game V initially sets out to help him, Surely a top brass counter Intel agent at arasaka saw Frank no more than 10 feet away from you.
When Jackie gets injured during the heist V doesn't try to help Jackie AT ALL, doesn't try to heal his wounds or better yet doesn't even look at the injuries or buy enough time for Jackie to reach a ripper in time, Mama Welles even says Jackie got shot 3 times in the chest and survived and can't help but think that would've been a worse injury, V is a bad friend.
When Vik checks V out at the beginning he installs a basic Kiroshi optic and low level ballistic processor and yet its €$21,000 ?
And finally, the one that really gets me, when Dex shoots you, Vik said you got lucky because it was small calibre shot however when you find Dexs body and get his gun it doesn't shoot bullets at all it shoots MONEY vik clearly pocketed the cash he pulled from your skull and wrapped a random bullet he had lying around into that chain misty gave you.
Amazing game though on my 3rd playthrough 😁
2023.06.02 13:18 the_kermitator I kinda feel bad
 | Up da booty submitted by the_kermitator to theHunter [link] [comments] |
2023.06.02 11:50 Erwinblackthorn Drawn Together: A Postmodernist Martyr Pt1
Part 2
Recently, I have been hit by a writing bug for a story I’m working on, where the entire thing will be a combination of Warehouse 13 and Kingdom Hearts. I want the story to be a critique of both how postmodernism functions and how it destroys contemporary culture by trying to subvert that which works and that which people enjoy. In order for me to write this story, I am required to study both postmodernism and satire of postmodernism, which has strangely led me to a little cartoon from the middle of the 2000s known as Drawn Together.
It ran for 3 seasons, had a direct-to-DVD movie, and vanished from the face of the Earth after that. Nobody dares to mention it and yet there are tons of youtube clips of it that are filled with praise in the comments. People love the show, yet nobody can mention its name without social backlash from the woke left. Why is that? Well, let’s get into what the show even is to begin with.
Like every chick who dresses as Harley Quinn for Halloween, it has some severe issues that are treated as normal.
Postmodernism was already popular by the time we hit the 2000s, and by this time we have had postmodernist media for about 40 years. An entire generation worth of rejecting modernism. With this, we gained a lot of different media styles and new genres. The internet was growing into something capable of creating flash cartoons, movies like Fredy Got Fingered popularized shock comedy and neo dada, we started to have shock jocks take over the airwaves with uncensored satellite radio, and soap operas for the ladies were being replaced with reality TV.
Postmodernism allows for a blending of media and real life to create a hyper reality where we can’t see where media begins and reality ends. Media is part of our lives, all day every day, in this highly connected and social media focused postmodernist era. Even now, we wake up to our pop music alarm clock that holds notifications to our social media and the only way to escape media is to leave society and never read anything. That’s impossible for most of us, so we’re stuck in this hyper reality where we’re always watching others and we ourselves are always being watched. We’re at a point in history where people can become popular by just filming themselves making a goofy sound, vomiting, or taking off their clothes.
Usually it’s all three.
This should concern everyone, yet we tend to embrace the absurd reality that is postmodernism and reality tv. Despite common belief, reality TV began with Candid Camera, a show from 1948 where people would be filmed while being at the butt end of a prank. This kind of filming was a look into how real people provide real reactions to things when they aren’t expecting certain situations, which is actually in relation to the neorealism film movement that was inspired by the poetic realism french film movement. We enjoy seeing pranks being done because we get to see a real person provide real emotion and it’s no different than seeing a fight break out in real life, or seeing a car crash. It’s that train wreck mentality that keeps us glued to the scene as shit gets real.
Or was it the shit that glues us to the train as our real mentality gets wrecked?
It’s the same reason we love to see game shows and court shows and Jerry Springer. Add in some sexual exploitation like busty Ukranians and you have Naked Funny, which is a show people search for without caring about any words being said, since it’s a show with zero dialogue but plenty of mouth watering mammaries. Have the exploitation be where people are horrifically injured or do something sensational, and you have Jackass. Have a bunch of people pretend to be outraged and engage in scripted events while living in a single house, and you have The Real World.
That’s right: it’s a show with fake situations and it’s called The Real World.
This type of “reality” TV caused a massive issue in media because it allowed incredibly fake situations to pass as real, and there was no way to counter it because people were convinced it’s real. Just like professional wrestling, just like any show featuring a magician and a paid audience, just like any porno, there is a mix of real things and fake things that create this ambiguous state of hyper reality. Yes, a person can actually be hit by a chair or a sledgehammer, but there’s no way someone is going to be trying to win a match by holding their hand over the head of the sledgehammer and lightly tapping the other guy with it. Obviously, they don’t want to hit their co-worker, unless they’re in a porn shoot with a white woman. That’s when it’s fair game.
Postmodernism is a term that postmodernists try to avoid defining, because of the main doctrine of postmodernism: there is no such thing as a truth that can be verified by human experience. This means that anything being stated must be an opinion and thus everything being stated is completely disconnected from one another. A postmodernist is unable to make a clear and definitive statement that is true, because it goes against their doctrine. Everything must be vague and open-ended. Everyone has an equally valid interpretation. With that kind of mentality, art can be anything we want to call art. Rules are there to be broken, especially if they are rules of a broadcasting network. The R rating, the X rating, the unrated, these are products of postmodernism, due to the intention to break rules.
Subjectivity, blurring of genres, juxtaposition, playfulness, skepticism of a grand narrative, intertextuality, irony, pastiche, appropriation; all of these things are what makes postmodernism appealing to the masses. There is no desire to make something good, so the goal is to do something else, like be blindly entertaining or blindly propagandist. There is so much art before postmodernism and so much established through modernism, like science, that the goal of the postmodernist is to deconstruct all of that and make it feel like none of it matters.
Despite all of the deconstructionism and subversion that comes with postmodernism, media still has to appeal to an audience, and an audience reacts well to archetypes. We don’t know who to cheer for if we don’t know who is the heel and who is the good guy. There can’t be drama if there isn’t some red haired succubus or pampered shrew to throw a wrench in the circle of hotties. And at the same time, we can’t have all of them being that type of person, or else there’s nobody to root for. In the most ironic way possible, postmodernism is required to appeal to archetypes even more than modernism, due to the demand for audience retention and interaction.
Every reality show had to have at least one of every archetype, but remember: it’s totally real, everyone. It just so happened that there’s only one sneaky bitch and there’s only one cool guy and there’s only one innocent girl and there’s only one slacker. It was by random, totally not on purpose, and you’re crazy if you think producers are controlling the environment of these shows in any way. Same goes for dating shows like Next. It’s obvious that these people with their one liners and bad acting are being honest with all of us.
If you didn’t get it by now: I’m being sarcastic, these shows are faker than lady boy tits and the apologies from Bud Light for advertising with such fake tits. And yet, people can’t stop watching these pointless shows. Even I enjoy it, because of how dumb it is. A big part of my life after school was relaxing late at night with MTV and watching stupid reality tv shows. Even respectable ones like Cops were dumb because the entire show was about police officers finding people breaking the law. The entertainment comes from people ruining their day or their entire life with one dumb act after another.
You’re probably wondering: What does any of this have to do with Drawn Together?
Well, imagine all of these reality shows mixed into a cartoon and then each cartoon archetype is from a different type of cartoon. That’s Drawn Together, and the show gets more insane from that point on. The eras of cartoons are represented by the cast members who are to live in one house, as a satire of things like The Real World and as parody of cartoon archetypes. You have Princess Clara(a parody of the Disney Princess), Foxxy(a parody of 70s mystery solving cartoons like Scooby-doo), Xandir(a parody of 80s Nintendo and action cartoons), Wooldoor(a parody of 90s style Nickelodeon shows like Spongebob), Ling-Ling (a parody of anime like Pokemon), Spanky(a parody of internet cartoons from the early 2000s), Toot(a parody of 1930s black and white cartoons like Betty Boop and Popeye), and Captain Hero (a parody of 90s superhero cartoons like Batman Animated Series and Animated Superman).
These character types are all based on their known stereotypes when it comes to appearance, with their appearances never really mixing since these are all different types of cartoons from different styles. You never see a Pikachu with a Batman, or a human unmasker talk to a video game character, or a human princess from a fairy tale talk to a farting pig from the internet. These things never happen in their environment because these things don’t mix. Then the show puts all of these unrelatable characters into a single house to provide random challenges in the same way reality tv does in order to juxtapose the genres.
The art styles also are juxtaposed. Captain hero is drawn with a square jaw, while Toot is drawn incredibly circular and with a giant head. Woldor has giant white eyes while Foxxy only has pupils. Xandir and Claira are drawn rather similar, but even they have their differences with colors and the thickness of the outline. To the untrained eye, these are easy to miss, but to the artist, these are great homages to the very style something is drawn in. An important part to note is that these are all based on other things and are meant to represent them as symbols. There’s no reason for any of this, yet the show does it anyway.
This is what postmodernism is all about: doing things for the sake of doing it. Juxtaposition is a big part of postmodernism. Blending genres and mixing them around is a big part of postmodernism. Subverting tropes to claim originality is a big part of postmodernism. Non-sequitur is a big part of postmodernism. This entire show is one of the most postmodernist things you can find out there and I love everything about it.
You might be thinking “Is Erwin sick? He talks day and night about how postmodernism sucks and then says he loves Drawn Together. Is this an imposter?!”No, it’s me. I’m simply able to understand the purpose of the show, and I love the meta attempt in all of it: the show is a postmodernist attack on… postmodernism. Everything in the show is designed to be a massive middle finger to how postmodernism functions, by being the dysfunctional postmodernist mess it is. From how meaningless the challenges are, to how characters can never die all the way, to how 4th wall jokes stop the show, to how there is a mundane message tacked on at the very end. Everything in this show is a jab at postmodernism, but at the cost of the show’s own integrity.
In the story I’m working on, I would be required to present postmodernism in it so that I can critique it. But, if my entire story revolves around only that, then I would be presenting postmodernism the entire time, which means I can’t separate the thing that I’m attacking from my work, just how a story about the evils of racism would have to feature a racist. Postmodernists attacking postmodernists is the same as a racist saying “racism is fine, but only in the way I do it.”
But is all postmodernism really the same? The show is hated now, after all, right?
Yes, it’s hated now, because it(ironically) went against the grand narrative that postmodernists currently hold, but it was part of the narrative that was held during the early 2000s. Barely 20 years ago, less than half of a generation, millennials were being raised by exploitation. I know that the postmodernists hate it when I use this word to describe nearly all of postmodernism, but by definition, it’s exploitation. You can blame the 80s for this, because once home media became popular, we had movies that went straight to VHS and then later DVDs that were able to push the envelope.
That’s what postmodernism started as: a way to push the envelope.
South Park and Simpsons didn’t do things that were part of the status quo. They went against it to then become the status quo right after. In fact, there’s an amazing joke from the show Bevis and Butthead(another example of postmodernism) that captures this phenomena perfectly, where the two go to a radio show because they were the only caller, and then they influence the radio show by saying stuff sucks and stuff is stupid.
Their own stupidity and negativity was seen as a sort of punk culture by the viewers and so they demanded the radio host, who was angry at them, to do the same. And so, the next day, the radio host does exactly what he threw Bevis and Butthead out for doing. This complete hypocrisy that somehow there are rules, but they can be broken if the money is there, is something Drawn Together also tackled.
The entire first season was all about having pointless challenges with a character called Jew Producer, who was a parody of both Richie Rich and Donald Trump. How did they connect these 3? Easy: Donald Trump had a show called The Apprentice, Richie Rich was a cartoon, and a Jewish producer is a Hollywood cliche that's entirely true. A lot of Jewish people produce Hollywood stuff and TV shows. I don’t know why this is a controversial statement or why the left always gets insulted by that fact, but they constantly freak out the second someone mentions that someone like Harvey Winstein exists.
While I’m talking about controversies, Adam Carolla, the voice of Spanky, was blacklisted by Hollywood because he decided to do the cardinal sin of… demanding free speech in a country with free speech as a constitutional right. I know, how dare he! It shouldn’t surprise us that the former hippies who ran Hollywood on the backbone of free speech and demanded freedom of expression are now against… freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Meanwhile, Tara Strong, a proud jewish woman, voices a character like Princess Clara, with Princess Clara being a racist, homophobic, anti-semite who is also in a sexual relationship with her father.
So, let’s recap: a jewish woman is able to do the voice for such a terrible thing, yet an Italian male comedian is not able to ask for the acceptance to joke about such topics.
Why is this even a thing?Well, at first it really puzzled me, but like when we saw the left defending drag queen acts in front of children, it finally clicked. The problem in Hollywood isn’t that something terrible is said or written or put in a show. A white princess saying terrible things is normal to them, because that’s how they view white people. Their fear is that something might make a non-white person look bad. Something might make the LGBT look bad. There might be an “uncomfortable truth” revealed in a chain of unregulated jokes.
One of the most profitable postmodernist comedians around, Dave Chappelle, was canceled over making trans jokes, despite being a good friend of a trans person who killed themselves after… trans advocates hated the trans person due to being friends with Dave Chappelle. The woke are disgusting people, to put it bluntly. Zero people were harmed by Dave’s comedy, yet the woke harassing people has a death toll that’d make Pol Pot take notes on their efficiency.
So the difference between Tara and Adam is that Adam wants to make jokes about anything, while Tara is just doing her job and reading the script. The free thinker is the threat, while the obedient follower is not. That’s why Tara still gets jobs and Adam is off doing a podcast and somehow still making millions. I’m sure he’s wiping his tears with gold bullion over the thought of no longer being able to do voices for farting animated pigs.
But what exactly makes Drawn Together hated?
To be honest, I didn’t even know someone could hate the show until I was around 20 or so. Some online people I chatted with told me how offended they were by the show and I never understood what offended even meant until that era. I watched the show throughout my teen years without a care in the world. To me, it was another adult animated show that tried to do anything offensive and it was funny all around. Some of the subject matter, contains but is not limited to:
And this is where we find the split in postmodernism. When postmodernism began as a means of subverting modernism and regulations, it quickly became a cesspool of creative INABILITY thanks to the woke taking over. We went from freedom of expression to being required to advocate, which is a detriment to comedy. Recently, we had a controversy over a show called Big Mouth, which was hated by the right for being considered pedophilic and indoctrination, because the characters were teenagers dealing with puberty monsters and were depicted as being sexualized.
This is one of the many areas the right is losing the battle on, because so many of them are trying to be Platoist or Mohism, meaning they want some kind of hyper utilitarian and aesthetic free environment due to a hatred of art. Plato believed that art was an “imitation”, that it was a “copy of a copy of a form”. It was a corruption and perversion of reality, thus he saw art as evil. Mo-Zi, a Chinese philosopher who shared a lot of his views, also saw art as a pointless distraction because it’s not the responsibility of the government. These kinds of “right wingers” are accidentally falling for philosophies that pave the way for socialism, so it’s hard to take their positions on art seriously when they can’t see how brainwashed their approach is.
I’m going to go with the Jews on this one and say that art is very important, and so is freedom to make art.
Big mouth is not a show that I will say is one of my favorites, but it’s nothing as how the right wanted to depict it as. Obviously these are just people who wanted the next Cuties outrage and they had a swing n’ a miss. The left, on the other hand, is able to say something like Drawn Together is offensive to them and so it must be canceled. And lo, we have the tumblr people unable to reblog about it, we have reddit radio silent about it, we have twitter people afraid to meme with it, but then it’s still prospering in places like youtube.
People want to watch it, but nobody is brave enough to talk about it in fear of being canceled.
The show is a Martyr in two ways:
He then straight up tells her that she’s not their audience, so her opinion doesn’t matter on whether or not the show is good. And he’s right, if you aren’t the audience for something, why should anyone listen to your opinion on the thing you instantly don’t like? It’s like if I had an opinion about which sports team is better. I am 100% uninformed about anything sports related, and the only sport I ever willingly watched was professional wrestling. That’s a sport, right?
Either way, the show is aware that it’s offensive. It’s proud to be offensive. Each character has their own way of offending, both when it comes to a group and when it comes to art itself. This is when postmodernism kicks in and subversion is used to create a surreal environment suited for satire and parody.
As a quick reminder: Satire is when a subject is critiqued and parody is when a subject is used for a joke. An example of this would be where satire is when Scream uses movie tropes to figure out a murder and parody is when the alien from Signs pees with his finger in Scary Movie.
Princess Clara is the Disney princess. Usually a Disney princess seeks a prince to live happily ever after, and she is pure of heart. They subvert this by attaching a bit of reality to the word “princess” and have her in a sexual relationship with her father because princesses would sometimes do that to keep royalty in the family. She’s also a racist and Christian, because royalty in Europe was Christian and it’s “old fashion” for a rich white girl to be racist. Although they keep her desire to sing, the lyrics are still going to hold her views about people, so the humor comes in how she delivers terrible things with a cheery tone. Her character is meant to make fun of traditionalist people, all while using the Disney princess as a face.
With the way wokeness is going, I don’t see a difference between Clara and the current Disney princess now.
Foxxy Love is the Hanna-Barbera style mystery character who is meant to solve crimes, most likely inspired by Valerie Brown from Josie and the Pussycats. She suberts the role by causing crimes and being a degenerate all over. She is a slut, she acts ghetto, she constantly has abortions, you know the deal. This juxtaposition comes from the fact that Valerie is meant to be a hippie musician, and black women on reality TV are depicted as ghetto thanks to shows like Flavor of Love. And for those who don’t know, hippie musicians are usually promiscuous and incredibly loose, with zero regard for decency or sticking to one sex partner because they are all about second wave feminism.
Again, ironically the woke have caused this subversion to be their intentional norm for a lot of black female characters, only they see it as virtuous instead of comical.
Wooldoor Sockbat is the Nickelodeon style hyperactive loony toon who is meant to be both stupid and gullible. There’s not much subversion here with personality, but it’s all with how far he’s willing to go with his zany humor, such as randomly threatening to suck someone’s dick and having giant tits out of nowhere, which he will then squish into the camera while crying. He’s meant to be loud and random, just like Spongebob or Stimpy. However, with the way Spongebob has become after their first movie, the only thing separating Wooldoor from something like Spongebob is direct word usage.
Plus, Ren and Stimpy had their adult party cartoon reboot made by the creator, so doing something gay and entirely disturbing is nothing new for that kind of character. I still can’t believe that it came out in 2003. In fact, I can’t believe Ren and Stimpy was on Nickelodeon with the stuff they put in there. But, that’s the appeal of Wooldoor, because he does the stuff people have been doing with characters like him for years. I would even say he’s not much of a satire since he’s so close to the content he’s meant to make fun of.
Xandir Wifflebottom is the 80s action cartoon parody, as well as early video game cartoons. During the 80s and 90s, we had a lot of Nintendo shows like Legend of Zelda, which took after plot scripts like Transformers, GI Joe, He-Man, and other product placement shows during that time. Only a few episodes of Drawn Together make fun of these simple action plots, but this connection between the merchandise advertising shows and video game cartoons is important, since they are the same thing, and it’s a product of postmodernism. Shows during the 80s and 90s that were simply there to sell something with the show, whether it was a game or a toy, were part of this media and real life blur. His gayness comes from how people viewed both He-Man and Link, since Link was a feminine looking elf and He-Man was a muscular dude who didn’t wear a shirt when he’s fighting.
This one is kind of interesting since it touches on the subject of queer coding. The left is so desperate to feel like the LGBT is represented, they will declare something is gay because it “feels gay”. This feeling is based on whoever is attracted to a fictional character, so if gay men are attracted to He-Man, or if they like his outfit, then that means he’s totally gay. Link is a character who has sadly been considered a “gay icon” by websites like Polygon, all because the designers made him rather gender neutral in later games in order for him to appeal to a female fanbase that was growing. And when they say gender neutral, they mean “he’s not muscular and he has a pretty face”, similar to practically any 00s alt rock band memeber.
Apparently, having that and then having gay people make gay fanfics about the character instantly means the character is gay. The show made fun of this queer coding nonsense by making Xandir a raging homosexual that is constantly killed like a Mortal Kombat character.
Captain Hero, my favorite character, is the comic book show hero that we all know and love. He’s meant to save the day from evil villains, but they subvert his role by having him be entirely useless and usually the cause of mass destruction. He has superpowers, but he’s so stupid and useless that he doesn’t use them most of the time, like when he is immune to bullets but he still grabs a random woman to use her as a “hero shield” when getting shot at. His character makes fun of how postmodernist super heroes try to depict the classic hero as a terrible monster or some kind of morally warped anti-hero. This is due to how Batman went from whacky detective to psychotic nut job during the transition from the 60s to the 80s, thanks to influences like Alan Moore’s Watchman and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. His character is more like a Superman, which the Bizzaro Superman comics have covered that kind of thing to make way for a super powered idiot who has sex with corpses.
Why does he have sex with dead bodies? Well, because he’s “alien” to us, the point of the joke is that he’s so super powered that he can do whatever he wants, and uses his powers to have sex with something that can’t fight back. Kind of a “he can have any woman he wants, but he would rather have sex with a rotten corpse” kind of thing. Or maybe it’s making fun of how Superman cares about Lois Lane even though she might as well be a rotten corpse to him, because she’s a human and he’s an alien. Either way, it covers a big problem we started to get in the 90s where superheroes were quickly becoming hyper violent assholes who do anything disgusting for the sake of shock value.
Ling-Ling is basically a Pikachu, but here he will battle with anything and cause gory deaths upon his opponent. The joke is that kid shows featuring these little monsters, like Pokemon and Digimon, will have zero blood, and yet the attacks they do are strong enough to cause giant explosions. Thankfully, these go past the typical Dorkly joke and Ling-Ling will also have jokes centered around being Asian and have a made up language that sounds Japanese because he says “kitowa” a lot.
Just like Xandir, Ling-Ling is treated like a punching bag by the others in nearly every episode, and I think it has to do with the video game relation, since Pokemon began as a video game and the show was there as a way of advertising the product. Plus, during the 00s, there was little respect for something like anime, no matter how much someone knew about the golden age of 80s anime.
Spanky Ham is something I’m not really sure what influenced him, but it’s said it might be an early flash cartoon called Evil Piggies. However, there is a flash cartoon from 1997 made by John K, the creator of Ren and Stimpy, called The Goddamn George Liquor Program, that seems more in line with Spanky’s scat fetish. Early internet cartoons usually had people’s faces done in a South Park style, where the mouth moved by cutting the bottom half off and moving that up and down. When I went on Newgrounds during that time, all I would see were stick figures, parodies of existing cartoons, and something like Ctrl+Alt+Del where the characters were drawn as humans in that typical web comic style. He might have also been inspired by Happy Tree Friends, which first came out in 1999, so the idea of cute animals dying randomly, and the crude humor of The Goddamn George Liquor Program might have caused a farting pig to come into fruition.
The joke is that he’s a pig who likes to drink and have sex, as well as be disgusting, but then somehow he’s also like Ren where he has schemes to make money. I forget if there is a word for this kind of character, but he’s the Squidward type who always gets harmed by his own greed. There is also a lot of Fritz the Cat in his character, which was an animated movie based on an underground comic about a cat who would go on sexual escapades. This “cartoon animal doing adult stuff” has been a joke since the 60s, and even Howard the Duck had issues with what Nostalgia Critic calls “duck boobies”. Speaking of adult ducks, there is even a show called Duckman that was made by the same company that made Rugrats.
People treat Bojak Horseman as this hip new thing when it’s simply part of a long line of animated foul mouth farm animals wearing suits.
Finally, Toot Braunstein is the representative of silent cartoons. Betty Boop was seen as sexy for being curvy, and the joke is that Toot is just plain fat and old, with her body hair and repulsiveness, as well as her tits always sagging to her cankles. She is always harming herself because of a self-esteem issue, caused by her weight and age, which is joined by an alcoholic problem due to her being from the roaring 20s. The joke is that she’s that girl in every reality TV show that is completely disgusting to look at, but she’ll see herself as a hot chick despite hitting the wall so hard that illegals can pour through the cracks. Plus, people believe Betty Boop was based on Clara Bow, who was a flapper “it girl” who suffered from hard drug use, schizophrenia, and was constantly rejected for being too fat.
Toot is the only one in the list who’s not directly a product of postmodernism, but there was a particular charm to rubber hose animation(gained its name for how limbs acted like rubber hoses) that continued onward to create things like Ren and Stimpy, Loony Toons, Tom and Jerry, and even some movies that tried to revive properties of the 30s. The Popeye movie is a great example as to how studios in the postmodernist era tried to desperately mix live action with cartoons, and same goes with Who Framed Roger Rabbit with how it was a movie that mixed live action with rubber hose animation.
Part 2
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Recently, I have been hit by a writing bug for a story I’m working on, where the entire thing will be a combination of Warehouse 13 and Kingdom Hearts. I want the story to be a critique of both how postmodernism functions and how it destroys contemporary culture by trying to subvert that which works and that which people enjoy. In order for me to write this story, I am required to study both postmodernism and satire of postmodernism, which has strangely led me to a little cartoon from the middle of the 2000s known as Drawn Together.
It ran for 3 seasons, had a direct-to-DVD movie, and vanished from the face of the Earth after that. Nobody dares to mention it and yet there are tons of youtube clips of it that are filled with praise in the comments. People love the show, yet nobody can mention its name without social backlash from the woke left. Why is that? Well, let’s get into what the show even is to begin with.
Like every chick who dresses as Harley Quinn for Halloween, it has some severe issues that are treated as normal.
Postmodernism was already popular by the time we hit the 2000s, and by this time we have had postmodernist media for about 40 years. An entire generation worth of rejecting modernism. With this, we gained a lot of different media styles and new genres. The internet was growing into something capable of creating flash cartoons, movies like Fredy Got Fingered popularized shock comedy and neo dada, we started to have shock jocks take over the airwaves with uncensored satellite radio, and soap operas for the ladies were being replaced with reality TV.
Postmodernism allows for a blending of media and real life to create a hyper reality where we can’t see where media begins and reality ends. Media is part of our lives, all day every day, in this highly connected and social media focused postmodernist era. Even now, we wake up to our pop music alarm clock that holds notifications to our social media and the only way to escape media is to leave society and never read anything. That’s impossible for most of us, so we’re stuck in this hyper reality where we’re always watching others and we ourselves are always being watched. We’re at a point in history where people can become popular by just filming themselves making a goofy sound, vomiting, or taking off their clothes.
Usually it’s all three.
This should concern everyone, yet we tend to embrace the absurd reality that is postmodernism and reality tv. Despite common belief, reality TV began with Candid Camera, a show from 1948 where people would be filmed while being at the butt end of a prank. This kind of filming was a look into how real people provide real reactions to things when they aren’t expecting certain situations, which is actually in relation to the neorealism film movement that was inspired by the poetic realism french film movement. We enjoy seeing pranks being done because we get to see a real person provide real emotion and it’s no different than seeing a fight break out in real life, or seeing a car crash. It’s that train wreck mentality that keeps us glued to the scene as shit gets real.
Or was it the shit that glues us to the train as our real mentality gets wrecked?
It’s the same reason we love to see game shows and court shows and Jerry Springer. Add in some sexual exploitation like busty Ukranians and you have Naked Funny, which is a show people search for without caring about any words being said, since it’s a show with zero dialogue but plenty of mouth watering mammaries. Have the exploitation be where people are horrifically injured or do something sensational, and you have Jackass. Have a bunch of people pretend to be outraged and engage in scripted events while living in a single house, and you have The Real World.
That’s right: it’s a show with fake situations and it’s called The Real World.
This type of “reality” TV caused a massive issue in media because it allowed incredibly fake situations to pass as real, and there was no way to counter it because people were convinced it’s real. Just like professional wrestling, just like any show featuring a magician and a paid audience, just like any porno, there is a mix of real things and fake things that create this ambiguous state of hyper reality. Yes, a person can actually be hit by a chair or a sledgehammer, but there’s no way someone is going to be trying to win a match by holding their hand over the head of the sledgehammer and lightly tapping the other guy with it. Obviously, they don’t want to hit their co-worker, unless they’re in a porn shoot with a white woman. That’s when it’s fair game.
Postmodernism is a term that postmodernists try to avoid defining, because of the main doctrine of postmodernism: there is no such thing as a truth that can be verified by human experience. This means that anything being stated must be an opinion and thus everything being stated is completely disconnected from one another. A postmodernist is unable to make a clear and definitive statement that is true, because it goes against their doctrine. Everything must be vague and open-ended. Everyone has an equally valid interpretation. With that kind of mentality, art can be anything we want to call art. Rules are there to be broken, especially if they are rules of a broadcasting network. The R rating, the X rating, the unrated, these are products of postmodernism, due to the intention to break rules.
Subjectivity, blurring of genres, juxtaposition, playfulness, skepticism of a grand narrative, intertextuality, irony, pastiche, appropriation; all of these things are what makes postmodernism appealing to the masses. There is no desire to make something good, so the goal is to do something else, like be blindly entertaining or blindly propagandist. There is so much art before postmodernism and so much established through modernism, like science, that the goal of the postmodernist is to deconstruct all of that and make it feel like none of it matters.
Despite all of the deconstructionism and subversion that comes with postmodernism, media still has to appeal to an audience, and an audience reacts well to archetypes. We don’t know who to cheer for if we don’t know who is the heel and who is the good guy. There can’t be drama if there isn’t some red haired succubus or pampered shrew to throw a wrench in the circle of hotties. And at the same time, we can’t have all of them being that type of person, or else there’s nobody to root for. In the most ironic way possible, postmodernism is required to appeal to archetypes even more than modernism, due to the demand for audience retention and interaction.
Every reality show had to have at least one of every archetype, but remember: it’s totally real, everyone. It just so happened that there’s only one sneaky bitch and there’s only one cool guy and there’s only one innocent girl and there’s only one slacker. It was by random, totally not on purpose, and you’re crazy if you think producers are controlling the environment of these shows in any way. Same goes for dating shows like Next. It’s obvious that these people with their one liners and bad acting are being honest with all of us.
If you didn’t get it by now: I’m being sarcastic, these shows are faker than lady boy tits and the apologies from Bud Light for advertising with such fake tits. And yet, people can’t stop watching these pointless shows. Even I enjoy it, because of how dumb it is. A big part of my life after school was relaxing late at night with MTV and watching stupid reality tv shows. Even respectable ones like Cops were dumb because the entire show was about police officers finding people breaking the law. The entertainment comes from people ruining their day or their entire life with one dumb act after another.
You’re probably wondering: What does any of this have to do with Drawn Together?
Well, imagine all of these reality shows mixed into a cartoon and then each cartoon archetype is from a different type of cartoon. That’s Drawn Together, and the show gets more insane from that point on. The eras of cartoons are represented by the cast members who are to live in one house, as a satire of things like The Real World and as parody of cartoon archetypes. You have Princess Clara(a parody of the Disney Princess), Foxxy(a parody of 70s mystery solving cartoons like Scooby-doo), Xandir(a parody of 80s Nintendo and action cartoons), Wooldoor(a parody of 90s style Nickelodeon shows like Spongebob), Ling-Ling (a parody of anime like Pokemon), Spanky(a parody of internet cartoons from the early 2000s), Toot(a parody of 1930s black and white cartoons like Betty Boop and Popeye), and Captain Hero (a parody of 90s superhero cartoons like Batman Animated Series and Animated Superman).
These character types are all based on their known stereotypes when it comes to appearance, with their appearances never really mixing since these are all different types of cartoons from different styles. You never see a Pikachu with a Batman, or a human unmasker talk to a video game character, or a human princess from a fairy tale talk to a farting pig from the internet. These things never happen in their environment because these things don’t mix. Then the show puts all of these unrelatable characters into a single house to provide random challenges in the same way reality tv does in order to juxtapose the genres.
The art styles also are juxtaposed. Captain hero is drawn with a square jaw, while Toot is drawn incredibly circular and with a giant head. Woldor has giant white eyes while Foxxy only has pupils. Xandir and Claira are drawn rather similar, but even they have their differences with colors and the thickness of the outline. To the untrained eye, these are easy to miss, but to the artist, these are great homages to the very style something is drawn in. An important part to note is that these are all based on other things and are meant to represent them as symbols. There’s no reason for any of this, yet the show does it anyway.
This is what postmodernism is all about: doing things for the sake of doing it. Juxtaposition is a big part of postmodernism. Blending genres and mixing them around is a big part of postmodernism. Subverting tropes to claim originality is a big part of postmodernism. Non-sequitur is a big part of postmodernism. This entire show is one of the most postmodernist things you can find out there and I love everything about it.
You might be thinking “Is Erwin sick? He talks day and night about how postmodernism sucks and then says he loves Drawn Together. Is this an imposter?!”No, it’s me. I’m simply able to understand the purpose of the show, and I love the meta attempt in all of it: the show is a postmodernist attack on… postmodernism. Everything in the show is designed to be a massive middle finger to how postmodernism functions, by being the dysfunctional postmodernist mess it is. From how meaningless the challenges are, to how characters can never die all the way, to how 4th wall jokes stop the show, to how there is a mundane message tacked on at the very end. Everything in this show is a jab at postmodernism, but at the cost of the show’s own integrity.
In the story I’m working on, I would be required to present postmodernism in it so that I can critique it. But, if my entire story revolves around only that, then I would be presenting postmodernism the entire time, which means I can’t separate the thing that I’m attacking from my work, just how a story about the evils of racism would have to feature a racist. Postmodernists attacking postmodernists is the same as a racist saying “racism is fine, but only in the way I do it.”
But is all postmodernism really the same? The show is hated now, after all, right?
Yes, it’s hated now, because it(ironically) went against the grand narrative that postmodernists currently hold, but it was part of the narrative that was held during the early 2000s. Barely 20 years ago, less than half of a generation, millennials were being raised by exploitation. I know that the postmodernists hate it when I use this word to describe nearly all of postmodernism, but by definition, it’s exploitation. You can blame the 80s for this, because once home media became popular, we had movies that went straight to VHS and then later DVDs that were able to push the envelope.
That’s what postmodernism started as: a way to push the envelope.
South Park and Simpsons didn’t do things that were part of the status quo. They went against it to then become the status quo right after. In fact, there’s an amazing joke from the show Bevis and Butthead(another example of postmodernism) that captures this phenomena perfectly, where the two go to a radio show because they were the only caller, and then they influence the radio show by saying stuff sucks and stuff is stupid.
Their own stupidity and negativity was seen as a sort of punk culture by the viewers and so they demanded the radio host, who was angry at them, to do the same. And so, the next day, the radio host does exactly what he threw Bevis and Butthead out for doing. This complete hypocrisy that somehow there are rules, but they can be broken if the money is there, is something Drawn Together also tackled.
The entire first season was all about having pointless challenges with a character called Jew Producer, who was a parody of both Richie Rich and Donald Trump. How did they connect these 3? Easy: Donald Trump had a show called The Apprentice, Richie Rich was a cartoon, and a Jewish producer is a Hollywood cliche that's entirely true. A lot of Jewish people produce Hollywood stuff and TV shows. I don’t know why this is a controversial statement or why the left always gets insulted by that fact, but they constantly freak out the second someone mentions that someone like Harvey Winstein exists.
While I’m talking about controversies, Adam Carolla, the voice of Spanky, was blacklisted by Hollywood because he decided to do the cardinal sin of… demanding free speech in a country with free speech as a constitutional right. I know, how dare he! It shouldn’t surprise us that the former hippies who ran Hollywood on the backbone of free speech and demanded freedom of expression are now against… freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Meanwhile, Tara Strong, a proud jewish woman, voices a character like Princess Clara, with Princess Clara being a racist, homophobic, anti-semite who is also in a sexual relationship with her father.
So, let’s recap: a jewish woman is able to do the voice for such a terrible thing, yet an Italian male comedian is not able to ask for the acceptance to joke about such topics.
Why is this even a thing?Well, at first it really puzzled me, but like when we saw the left defending drag queen acts in front of children, it finally clicked. The problem in Hollywood isn’t that something terrible is said or written or put in a show. A white princess saying terrible things is normal to them, because that’s how they view white people. Their fear is that something might make a non-white person look bad. Something might make the LGBT look bad. There might be an “uncomfortable truth” revealed in a chain of unregulated jokes.
One of the most profitable postmodernist comedians around, Dave Chappelle, was canceled over making trans jokes, despite being a good friend of a trans person who killed themselves after… trans advocates hated the trans person due to being friends with Dave Chappelle. The woke are disgusting people, to put it bluntly. Zero people were harmed by Dave’s comedy, yet the woke harassing people has a death toll that’d make Pol Pot take notes on their efficiency.
So the difference between Tara and Adam is that Adam wants to make jokes about anything, while Tara is just doing her job and reading the script. The free thinker is the threat, while the obedient follower is not. That’s why Tara still gets jobs and Adam is off doing a podcast and somehow still making millions. I’m sure he’s wiping his tears with gold bullion over the thought of no longer being able to do voices for farting animated pigs.
But what exactly makes Drawn Together hated?
To be honest, I didn’t even know someone could hate the show until I was around 20 or so. Some online people I chatted with told me how offended they were by the show and I never understood what offended even meant until that era. I watched the show throughout my teen years without a care in the world. To me, it was another adult animated show that tried to do anything offensive and it was funny all around. Some of the subject matter, contains but is not limited to:
- Incest
- Self harm
- Suicide
- Homoerotic behavior
- Satanic rituals
- Genocide
- Mass murder
- Mass shootings
- Fat jokes
- Donkey shows
- Cannibalism
- Necrophilia
- Pedophila
- Mexican babies getting pregnant
- Asians and their inability to drive
- Black fathers leaving their kids
- Lewd conduct
- Shitting on a pizza
- A live action squirrel with big balls
- An old man with dirty balls
- And let’s not forget the idea that Clara’s vagina is a giant hentai tentacle monster
And this is where we find the split in postmodernism. When postmodernism began as a means of subverting modernism and regulations, it quickly became a cesspool of creative INABILITY thanks to the woke taking over. We went from freedom of expression to being required to advocate, which is a detriment to comedy. Recently, we had a controversy over a show called Big Mouth, which was hated by the right for being considered pedophilic and indoctrination, because the characters were teenagers dealing with puberty monsters and were depicted as being sexualized.
This is one of the many areas the right is losing the battle on, because so many of them are trying to be Platoist or Mohism, meaning they want some kind of hyper utilitarian and aesthetic free environment due to a hatred of art. Plato believed that art was an “imitation”, that it was a “copy of a copy of a form”. It was a corruption and perversion of reality, thus he saw art as evil. Mo-Zi, a Chinese philosopher who shared a lot of his views, also saw art as a pointless distraction because it’s not the responsibility of the government. These kinds of “right wingers” are accidentally falling for philosophies that pave the way for socialism, so it’s hard to take their positions on art seriously when they can’t see how brainwashed their approach is.
I’m going to go with the Jews on this one and say that art is very important, and so is freedom to make art.
Big mouth is not a show that I will say is one of my favorites, but it’s nothing as how the right wanted to depict it as. Obviously these are just people who wanted the next Cuties outrage and they had a swing n’ a miss. The left, on the other hand, is able to say something like Drawn Together is offensive to them and so it must be canceled. And lo, we have the tumblr people unable to reblog about it, we have reddit radio silent about it, we have twitter people afraid to meme with it, but then it’s still prospering in places like youtube.
People want to watch it, but nobody is brave enough to talk about it in fear of being canceled.
The show is a Martyr in two ways:
- It is a postmodernist work attacking postmodernism
- It is a dead form of comedy due to both the left and the right trying to cancel things like it
He then straight up tells her that she’s not their audience, so her opinion doesn’t matter on whether or not the show is good. And he’s right, if you aren’t the audience for something, why should anyone listen to your opinion on the thing you instantly don’t like? It’s like if I had an opinion about which sports team is better. I am 100% uninformed about anything sports related, and the only sport I ever willingly watched was professional wrestling. That’s a sport, right?
Either way, the show is aware that it’s offensive. It’s proud to be offensive. Each character has their own way of offending, both when it comes to a group and when it comes to art itself. This is when postmodernism kicks in and subversion is used to create a surreal environment suited for satire and parody.
As a quick reminder: Satire is when a subject is critiqued and parody is when a subject is used for a joke. An example of this would be where satire is when Scream uses movie tropes to figure out a murder and parody is when the alien from Signs pees with his finger in Scary Movie.
Princess Clara is the Disney princess. Usually a Disney princess seeks a prince to live happily ever after, and she is pure of heart. They subvert this by attaching a bit of reality to the word “princess” and have her in a sexual relationship with her father because princesses would sometimes do that to keep royalty in the family. She’s also a racist and Christian, because royalty in Europe was Christian and it’s “old fashion” for a rich white girl to be racist. Although they keep her desire to sing, the lyrics are still going to hold her views about people, so the humor comes in how she delivers terrible things with a cheery tone. Her character is meant to make fun of traditionalist people, all while using the Disney princess as a face.
With the way wokeness is going, I don’t see a difference between Clara and the current Disney princess now.
Foxxy Love is the Hanna-Barbera style mystery character who is meant to solve crimes, most likely inspired by Valerie Brown from Josie and the Pussycats. She suberts the role by causing crimes and being a degenerate all over. She is a slut, she acts ghetto, she constantly has abortions, you know the deal. This juxtaposition comes from the fact that Valerie is meant to be a hippie musician, and black women on reality TV are depicted as ghetto thanks to shows like Flavor of Love. And for those who don’t know, hippie musicians are usually promiscuous and incredibly loose, with zero regard for decency or sticking to one sex partner because they are all about second wave feminism.
Again, ironically the woke have caused this subversion to be their intentional norm for a lot of black female characters, only they see it as virtuous instead of comical.
Wooldoor Sockbat is the Nickelodeon style hyperactive loony toon who is meant to be both stupid and gullible. There’s not much subversion here with personality, but it’s all with how far he’s willing to go with his zany humor, such as randomly threatening to suck someone’s dick and having giant tits out of nowhere, which he will then squish into the camera while crying. He’s meant to be loud and random, just like Spongebob or Stimpy. However, with the way Spongebob has become after their first movie, the only thing separating Wooldoor from something like Spongebob is direct word usage.
Plus, Ren and Stimpy had their adult party cartoon reboot made by the creator, so doing something gay and entirely disturbing is nothing new for that kind of character. I still can’t believe that it came out in 2003. In fact, I can’t believe Ren and Stimpy was on Nickelodeon with the stuff they put in there. But, that’s the appeal of Wooldoor, because he does the stuff people have been doing with characters like him for years. I would even say he’s not much of a satire since he’s so close to the content he’s meant to make fun of.
Xandir Wifflebottom is the 80s action cartoon parody, as well as early video game cartoons. During the 80s and 90s, we had a lot of Nintendo shows like Legend of Zelda, which took after plot scripts like Transformers, GI Joe, He-Man, and other product placement shows during that time. Only a few episodes of Drawn Together make fun of these simple action plots, but this connection between the merchandise advertising shows and video game cartoons is important, since they are the same thing, and it’s a product of postmodernism. Shows during the 80s and 90s that were simply there to sell something with the show, whether it was a game or a toy, were part of this media and real life blur. His gayness comes from how people viewed both He-Man and Link, since Link was a feminine looking elf and He-Man was a muscular dude who didn’t wear a shirt when he’s fighting.
This one is kind of interesting since it touches on the subject of queer coding. The left is so desperate to feel like the LGBT is represented, they will declare something is gay because it “feels gay”. This feeling is based on whoever is attracted to a fictional character, so if gay men are attracted to He-Man, or if they like his outfit, then that means he’s totally gay. Link is a character who has sadly been considered a “gay icon” by websites like Polygon, all because the designers made him rather gender neutral in later games in order for him to appeal to a female fanbase that was growing. And when they say gender neutral, they mean “he’s not muscular and he has a pretty face”, similar to practically any 00s alt rock band memeber.
Apparently, having that and then having gay people make gay fanfics about the character instantly means the character is gay. The show made fun of this queer coding nonsense by making Xandir a raging homosexual that is constantly killed like a Mortal Kombat character.
Captain Hero, my favorite character, is the comic book show hero that we all know and love. He’s meant to save the day from evil villains, but they subvert his role by having him be entirely useless and usually the cause of mass destruction. He has superpowers, but he’s so stupid and useless that he doesn’t use them most of the time, like when he is immune to bullets but he still grabs a random woman to use her as a “hero shield” when getting shot at. His character makes fun of how postmodernist super heroes try to depict the classic hero as a terrible monster or some kind of morally warped anti-hero. This is due to how Batman went from whacky detective to psychotic nut job during the transition from the 60s to the 80s, thanks to influences like Alan Moore’s Watchman and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. His character is more like a Superman, which the Bizzaro Superman comics have covered that kind of thing to make way for a super powered idiot who has sex with corpses.
Why does he have sex with dead bodies? Well, because he’s “alien” to us, the point of the joke is that he’s so super powered that he can do whatever he wants, and uses his powers to have sex with something that can’t fight back. Kind of a “he can have any woman he wants, but he would rather have sex with a rotten corpse” kind of thing. Or maybe it’s making fun of how Superman cares about Lois Lane even though she might as well be a rotten corpse to him, because she’s a human and he’s an alien. Either way, it covers a big problem we started to get in the 90s where superheroes were quickly becoming hyper violent assholes who do anything disgusting for the sake of shock value.
Ling-Ling is basically a Pikachu, but here he will battle with anything and cause gory deaths upon his opponent. The joke is that kid shows featuring these little monsters, like Pokemon and Digimon, will have zero blood, and yet the attacks they do are strong enough to cause giant explosions. Thankfully, these go past the typical Dorkly joke and Ling-Ling will also have jokes centered around being Asian and have a made up language that sounds Japanese because he says “kitowa” a lot.
Just like Xandir, Ling-Ling is treated like a punching bag by the others in nearly every episode, and I think it has to do with the video game relation, since Pokemon began as a video game and the show was there as a way of advertising the product. Plus, during the 00s, there was little respect for something like anime, no matter how much someone knew about the golden age of 80s anime.
Spanky Ham is something I’m not really sure what influenced him, but it’s said it might be an early flash cartoon called Evil Piggies. However, there is a flash cartoon from 1997 made by John K, the creator of Ren and Stimpy, called The Goddamn George Liquor Program, that seems more in line with Spanky’s scat fetish. Early internet cartoons usually had people’s faces done in a South Park style, where the mouth moved by cutting the bottom half off and moving that up and down. When I went on Newgrounds during that time, all I would see were stick figures, parodies of existing cartoons, and something like Ctrl+Alt+Del where the characters were drawn as humans in that typical web comic style. He might have also been inspired by Happy Tree Friends, which first came out in 1999, so the idea of cute animals dying randomly, and the crude humor of The Goddamn George Liquor Program might have caused a farting pig to come into fruition.
The joke is that he’s a pig who likes to drink and have sex, as well as be disgusting, but then somehow he’s also like Ren where he has schemes to make money. I forget if there is a word for this kind of character, but he’s the Squidward type who always gets harmed by his own greed. There is also a lot of Fritz the Cat in his character, which was an animated movie based on an underground comic about a cat who would go on sexual escapades. This “cartoon animal doing adult stuff” has been a joke since the 60s, and even Howard the Duck had issues with what Nostalgia Critic calls “duck boobies”. Speaking of adult ducks, there is even a show called Duckman that was made by the same company that made Rugrats.
People treat Bojak Horseman as this hip new thing when it’s simply part of a long line of animated foul mouth farm animals wearing suits.
Finally, Toot Braunstein is the representative of silent cartoons. Betty Boop was seen as sexy for being curvy, and the joke is that Toot is just plain fat and old, with her body hair and repulsiveness, as well as her tits always sagging to her cankles. She is always harming herself because of a self-esteem issue, caused by her weight and age, which is joined by an alcoholic problem due to her being from the roaring 20s. The joke is that she’s that girl in every reality TV show that is completely disgusting to look at, but she’ll see herself as a hot chick despite hitting the wall so hard that illegals can pour through the cracks. Plus, people believe Betty Boop was based on Clara Bow, who was a flapper “it girl” who suffered from hard drug use, schizophrenia, and was constantly rejected for being too fat.
Toot is the only one in the list who’s not directly a product of postmodernism, but there was a particular charm to rubber hose animation(gained its name for how limbs acted like rubber hoses) that continued onward to create things like Ren and Stimpy, Loony Toons, Tom and Jerry, and even some movies that tried to revive properties of the 30s. The Popeye movie is a great example as to how studios in the postmodernist era tried to desperately mix live action with cartoons, and same goes with Who Framed Roger Rabbit with how it was a movie that mixed live action with rubber hose animation.
Part 2
2023.06.02 10:24 Leather_Classroom993 Video Request/Does anyone else remember this low angle video?
 | Growing up as a child in the late 2000s, YouTube was nowhere near as restrictive as it is now. You could really type in anything in to the search bar and a video would pop up. I was very interested in creepy/"conspiracy" content (i.e. the illuminati, mandela effect, reversing songs to hear hidden messages, hidden symbols in movies/shows, etc.) and back then, it was really easy to find videos of people being off their rocker with theories, specifically about 9/11. I consumed way too much "was it an inside job?" content back then, and like I said, because YouTube wasn't as restrictive, you could find people dissecting every possible angle of the planes hitting for hours. No "Community Guidelines" prohibited that I guess. Since that was the case, I watched endless videos of just that, but there was always one specific angle of the plane hitting the tower that made my skin crawl, but in recent years, I haven't been able to find it. No matter what I search or where I look, its never the exact video I remember seeing. submitted by Leather_Classroom993 to 911archive [link] [comments] WHAT THE VIDEO LOOKED LIKE: - The video was shot from a low low angle, like almost feels like the person filming was borderline up against the towemaybe standing a couple 100 ft back to where you could see the point of entry as well as the building being a background (oh my god does that even make sense). - The footage showed the second plane hitting the tower, at least thats what I believe given the angle/height as which the plane hit it. - I'll attach a video that I've found that I believe shares a similar placement to the one I'm thinking off, except the video I'm looking for was shot a lot closer to the tower itself and does not have the smaller brown tower blocking the point of entry, as well as a little sketch I've made that shows exactly what the video looked like (from my memory of course). - To add on to the last bullet point, the point of entry is very integral to my video. This specific footage was often used in conspiracy videos because the plane was able to "glide" into the tower "too smoothly", and was frequently slowed down frame by frame. - The plane looked dark grey/borderline black, almost like a silhouette. The sky was bright blue. - I'm not sure if the person who made the video (the frame by frame replay) zoomed in on the footage or if it was just shot like that, but it was incredibly zoomed in. https://preview.redd.it/o7yp8gadek3b1.jpg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=90b7198291cc78458f7aad9fad3e054e3d707717 |
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⎯★ Flip Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $646
★ Flip Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $574
★ Flip Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) MW, B/O: $552
★ Flip Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $257
★ Flip Knife Freehand FT, B/O: $255
★ StatTrak™ Flip Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $287
⎯★ Huntsman Knife Lore FN, B/O: $461
★ Huntsman Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $436
★ Huntsman Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $353
★ Huntsman Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $212
★ Huntsman Knife Bright Water FT, B/O: $129
★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT MW, B/O: $129
★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT BS, B/O: $123
★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife Rust Coat BS, B/O: $127
⎯★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $375
★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $363
★ Bowie Knife Tiger Tooth FN, B/O: $269
★ Bowie Knife Crimson Web WW, B/O: $192
★ Bowie Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $159
★ Bowie Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $126
⎯★ Stiletto Knife Slaughter FN, B/O: $616
★ Stiletto Knife Crimson Web FT, B/O: $412
★ StatTrak™ Stiletto Knife Night Stripe FT, B/O: $227
⎯★ Falchion Knife Lore FT, B/O: $214
★ Falchion Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $192
★ Falchion Knife Scorched WW, B/O: $105
⎯★ Survival Knife Crimson Web BS, B/O: $216
★ Survival Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $198
★ Survival Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $111
⎯★ Shadow Daggers Fade FN, B/O: $368
★ Shadow Daggers Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $228
★ Shadow Daggers, B/O: $201
★ Shadow Daggers Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $108
★ Shadow Daggers Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $105
★ Shadow Daggers Black Laminate FT, B/O: $99
★ Shadow Daggers Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $85
⎯★ Gut Knife Doppler (Sapphire) MW #1, B/O: $1700
★ Gut Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $223
★ Gut Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $203
★ Gut Knife Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $191
★ Gut Knife Case Hardened BS, B/O: $127
⎯★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199
★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199
★ Navaja Knife, B/O: $138
★ Navaja Knife Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $111
⎯★ Classic Knife Urban Masked FT, B/O: $146
★ StatTrak™ Classic Knife Stained BS, B/O: $168
⎯★ Ursus Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $476
★ Ursus Knife, B/O: $375
⎯★ Skeleton Knife, B/O: $1137
★ Talon Knife, B/O: $608
★ Paracord Knife, B/O: $305
★ Survival Knife Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $97
GLOVES
★ Moto Gloves Transport MW, B/O: $204
★ Moto Gloves Polygon BS, B/O: $142
★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84
★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84
★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63
★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63
⎯★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Kimono WW, B/O: $1215
★ Specialist Gloves Tiger Strike FT, B/O: $672
★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander FT, B/O: $305
★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander BS, B/O: $140
★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Web BS, B/O: $137
★ Specialist Gloves Buckshot FT, B/O: $75
⎯★ Driver Gloves Crimson Weave FT, B/O: $359
★ Driver Gloves Imperial Plaid BS, B/O: $229
★ Driver Gloves Overtake BS, B/O: $77
★ Driver Gloves Racing Green FT, B/O: $48
⎯★ Sport Gloves Omega FT, B/O: $739
★ Sport Gloves Amphibious BS #2, B/O: $733
★ Sport Gloves Arid BS, B/O: $292
⎯★ Hand Wraps Giraffe MW, B/O: $212
★ Hand Wraps Leather FT, B/O: $160
★ Hand Wraps Desert Shamagh MW, B/O: $101
⎯★ Broken Fang Gloves Yellow-banded MW, B/O: $185
★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point FT, B/O: $67
★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point WW, B/O: $59
⎯★ Hydra Gloves Case Hardened BS, B/O: $65
★ Hydra Gloves Emerald FT, B/O: $65
★ Hydra Gloves Emerald BS, B/O: $62
WEAPONS
AK-47 Case Hardened BS, B/O: $130
AK-47 Bloodsport MW, B/O: $79
AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76
AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76
AK-47 Bloodsport FT, B/O: $70
AK-47 Neon Rider MW, B/O: $60
StatTrak™ AK-47 Aquamarine Revenge FT, B/O: $72
⎯AWP Fade FN, B/O: $1039
AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139
AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139
AWP Wildfire MW, B/O: $95
AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93
AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93
AWP Duality FN, B/O: $81
AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79
AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79
AWP Chromatic Aberration FN, B/O: $60
StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68
StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68
StatTrak™ AWP Electric Hive FT, B/O: $55
⎯Desert Eagle Blaze FN, B/O: $623
Desert Eagle Emerald Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $241
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Printstream FT, B/O: $54
⎯M4A1-S Blue Phosphor FN, B/O: $434
StatTrak™ M4A1-S Bright Water MW, B/O: $55
⎯M4A4 Poseidon FN, B/O: $1465
M4A4 Asiimov BS, B/O: $55
M4A4 Hellfire MW, B/O: $50
⎯USP-S Kill Confirmed MW, B/O: $72
USP-S Printstream FT, B/O: $69
StatTrak™ USP-S Kill Confirmed FT, B/O: $139
⎯AUG Flame Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $234
P90 Run and Hide FT, B/O: $147
Five-SeveN Candy Apple FN, B/O: $61
Trade Offer Link - Steam Profile Link - My Inventory
Some items on the list may no longer be available or are still locked, visit My Inventory for more details.
Send a Trade Offer for fastest response. I consider all offers.
Add me for discuss if there is a serious offer that needs to be discussed.
2023.06.02 06:55 _Triple_ [STORE] 900+ KNIVES/GLOVES/SKINS, 50.000$+ INVENTORY. M9 Fade, M4 Poseidon, BFK Freehand, Crimson Kimono, Nomad Fade, Skeleton, Kara Lore, Bayo Autotronic, AWP Fade, Kara Damas, BFK Ultra, Kara Freehand, Kara Bright, M9 Damas, Omega, Tiger Strike, Flip MF, Bayo Tiger, Deagle Blaze, Talon & More
Everything in my inventory is up for trade. The most valuable items are listed here, the rest you can find in My Inventory
Feel free to Add Me or even better send a Trade Offer. Open for any suggestions: upgrades, downgrades / knives, gloves, skins / stickers, patterns, floats.
All Buyouts are listed in cash value.
KNIVES
★ Butterfly Knife Freehand FN #1, B/O: $2500
★ Butterfly Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $822
★ Butterfly Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $616
⎯★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW #1, B/O: $1300
★ Bayonet Autotronic FN, B/O: $1050
★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW, B/O: $629
★ Bayonet Bright Water FT, B/O: $326
★ Bayonet Safari Mesh BS, B/O: $233
⎯★ Karambit Lore FT, B/O: $1110
★ Karambit Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $840
★ Karambit Freehand MW, B/O: $784
★ Karambit Bright Water MW, B/O: $759
⎯★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1801
★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1801
★ M9 Bayonet Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $751
⎯★ Nomad Knife Fade FN, B/O: $1156
★ Nomad Knife Slaughter MW, B/O: $544
★ Nomad Knife Blue Steel WW, B/O: $318
⎯★ Flip Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $646
★ Flip Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $574
★ Flip Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) MW, B/O: $552
★ Flip Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $257
★ Flip Knife Freehand FT, B/O: $255
★ StatTrak™ Flip Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $287
⎯★ Huntsman Knife Lore FN, B/O: $461
★ Huntsman Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $436
★ Huntsman Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $353
★ Huntsman Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $212
★ Huntsman Knife Bright Water FT, B/O: $129
★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT MW, B/O: $129
★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT BS, B/O: $123
★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife Rust Coat BS, B/O: $127
⎯★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $375
★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $363
★ Bowie Knife Tiger Tooth FN, B/O: $269
★ Bowie Knife Crimson Web WW, B/O: $192
★ Bowie Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $159
★ Bowie Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $126
⎯★ Stiletto Knife Slaughter FN, B/O: $616
★ Stiletto Knife Crimson Web FT, B/O: $412
★ StatTrak™ Stiletto Knife Night Stripe FT, B/O: $227
⎯★ Falchion Knife Lore FT, B/O: $214
★ Falchion Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $192
★ Falchion Knife Scorched WW, B/O: $105
⎯★ Survival Knife Crimson Web BS, B/O: $216
★ Survival Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $198
★ Survival Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $111
⎯★ Shadow Daggers Fade FN, B/O: $368
★ Shadow Daggers Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $228
★ Shadow Daggers, B/O: $201
★ Shadow Daggers Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $108
★ Shadow Daggers Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $105
★ Shadow Daggers Black Laminate FT, B/O: $99
★ Shadow Daggers Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $85
⎯★ Gut Knife Doppler (Sapphire) MW #1, B/O: $1700
★ Gut Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $223
★ Gut Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $203
★ Gut Knife Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $191
★ Gut Knife Case Hardened BS, B/O: $127
⎯★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199
★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199
★ Navaja Knife, B/O: $138
★ Navaja Knife Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $111
⎯★ Classic Knife Urban Masked FT, B/O: $146
★ StatTrak™ Classic Knife Stained BS, B/O: $168
⎯★ Ursus Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $476
★ Ursus Knife, B/O: $375
⎯★ Skeleton Knife, B/O: $1137
★ Talon Knife, B/O: $608
★ Paracord Knife, B/O: $305
★ Survival Knife Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $97
GLOVES
★ Moto Gloves Transport MW, B/O: $204
★ Moto Gloves Polygon BS, B/O: $142
★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84
★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84
★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63
★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63
⎯★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Kimono WW, B/O: $1215
★ Specialist Gloves Tiger Strike FT, B/O: $672
★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander FT, B/O: $305
★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander BS, B/O: $140
★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Web BS, B/O: $137
★ Specialist Gloves Buckshot FT, B/O: $75
⎯★ Driver Gloves Crimson Weave FT, B/O: $359
★ Driver Gloves Imperial Plaid BS, B/O: $229
★ Driver Gloves Overtake BS, B/O: $77
★ Driver Gloves Racing Green FT, B/O: $48
⎯★ Sport Gloves Omega FT, B/O: $739
★ Sport Gloves Amphibious BS #2, B/O: $733
★ Sport Gloves Arid BS, B/O: $292
⎯★ Hand Wraps Giraffe MW, B/O: $212
★ Hand Wraps Leather FT, B/O: $160
★ Hand Wraps Desert Shamagh MW, B/O: $101
⎯★ Broken Fang Gloves Yellow-banded MW, B/O: $185
★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point FT, B/O: $67
★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point WW, B/O: $59
⎯★ Hydra Gloves Case Hardened BS, B/O: $65
★ Hydra Gloves Emerald FT, B/O: $65
★ Hydra Gloves Emerald BS, B/O: $62
WEAPONS
AK-47 Case Hardened BS, B/O: $130
AK-47 Bloodsport MW, B/O: $79
AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76
AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76
AK-47 Bloodsport FT, B/O: $70
AK-47 Neon Rider MW, B/O: $60
StatTrak™ AK-47 Aquamarine Revenge FT, B/O: $72
⎯AWP Fade FN, B/O: $1039
AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139
AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139
AWP Wildfire MW, B/O: $95
AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93
AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93
AWP Duality FN, B/O: $81
AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79
AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79
AWP Chromatic Aberration FN, B/O: $60
StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68
StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68
StatTrak™ AWP Electric Hive FT, B/O: $55
⎯Desert Eagle Blaze FN, B/O: $623
Desert Eagle Emerald Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $241
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Printstream FT, B/O: $54
⎯M4A1-S Blue Phosphor FN, B/O: $434
StatTrak™ M4A1-S Bright Water MW, B/O: $55
⎯M4A4 Poseidon FN, B/O: $1465
M4A4 Asiimov BS, B/O: $55
M4A4 Hellfire MW, B/O: $50
⎯USP-S Kill Confirmed MW, B/O: $72
USP-S Printstream FT, B/O: $69
StatTrak™ USP-S Kill Confirmed FT, B/O: $139
⎯AUG Flame Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $234
P90 Run and Hide FT, B/O: $147
Five-SeveN Candy Apple FN, B/O: $61
Trade Offer Link - Steam Profile Link - My Inventory
Some items on the list may no longer be available or are still locked, visit My Inventory for more details.
Send a Trade Offer for fastest response. I consider all offers.
Add me for discuss if there is a serious offer that needs to be discussed.
2023.06.02 05:23 PlanesandWhisky Can we be real about the 2023 presidential election for a moment...
TLDR: I cannot be the only person who sees this.... Biden is too old and frail, a bit shady, and his VP is clueless and completely unqualified.... Trump is a criminal and also too old and unfit for office and totally corrupt.... Can we please please please get a couple of reasonable candidates to vote for... literally any regular ass American would be better.
Let's start out with my intention. I would love for this post to get 69 million 420 thousand upvotes... but seriously, I want as many people as possible to see this because the media is starting to make me feel like I am the only person who sees that this election cycle is nuts.
This Presidential election is looking to be a choice between two terrible options... I will outline all of my demographics followed by my thoughts and I would really like to hear some alternative opinions because as a regular ass voter, I see nothing but terrible options from the two parties and I am starting to feel like I am the only one who sees that the current political landscape is a total shit show.
Demographics: Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Age: 35 Occupation: Military Officer Education: BS (it was a bullshit degree but also a bachelor of science) Relationship: Married (divorced once but I deserved it. I was a total shithead the first time) ... happy to provide any other demographics but at the end of the day I am a regular American with a regular salary, a regular job, a regular everything else.
Biden Let me start off by admitting that I was wrong about this guy. I voted for him in the last election because I felt like President Trump was unstable as fuck and presidential policy should not be posted on social media or be based on how one man is feeling that particular day. Biden promised a lot, I didn't expect much from him, to be honest, but I had hoped that we would at least get a president who was able to fill the role at a basic level. I was not looking for Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. I was simply hoping for a President who would show up to work, have a reasonable foreign policy, who would put some pressure on the corporations and their CEOs making millions of dollars, and who would address the issues that the majority of Americans were dealing with like student loans, health care, unfair taxes, and loopholes that benefit the 1% and fuck the 99%. End of the day I was hoping that he would look out for the 99 and not the 1%. So far we have got some good and bad in terms of policy... he got us out of the war in the middle east even though that was completely fucked up... poor planning... total rush to failure. Thank God that more people were not killed or injured and God bless those service members who sacrificed all for this shitty plan, they were patriots and I am thankful every day that we have Americans like them willing to "stand the watch." He got some relief for parents who could use the help financially when times were tough during covid but he totally fucked it up when he fumbled the ball when it came to supporting the unions like the rail workers, amazon, etc, he fucked up student debt relief (we shouldn't ONLY forgive loans...we need to address the outrageous price tag on education in addition to the loans)... He appointed Mayer Pete who had one job as Transportation Secretary and totally fucked that up by prioritizing his image over actually dealing with airline travel (I am a pilot so a bit read in on this topic... he screwed the pooch on this one), trains, and the supply chain.... he also has been a bit short sided on Ukraine support.... (Ukraine deserves independence but there needs to be an explanation of what we are getting as taxpayers for our money... Please explain to me what the return on investment is for the billions we are spending. I do not have an issue with spending our tax dollars on helping make the world a better place but I need to know how my $50B+ is making a difference before you spend it.) Also his sons.... Beau was a naval officer who allegedly did a bunch of drugs.... should have been booted out of the military and Hunter absolutely took dirty money and it was all covered up. President Biden may not have been involved in any of that but at the end of the day, all of the sins of his sons were covered up for the benefit of their father.
Trump As a white male military officer, I thought I was definitely a Republican before this guy came into office. I mean come on, I was basically their prime demographic. At least that is what I was told my whole adult life. I was unsure when he was elected as I thought this was a publicity stunt. Then he put "Mad Dog" Mattis in office as the Sec Def and I thought "America, Fuck YEA!" he had a bunch of crazy ass tweets and I wrote most of them off because I trusted that General Mattis and the rest of the cabinet would keep the country on the right track. And then he fired Mattis. This was the point when I realized this dude is a sociopath who only cared about being "right". He gave no fucks about what the correct decision was... all he wanted was to be "right." The most respected military General since Colin Powel was fired/resigned from the office of Sec Def under President Trump.... This was shocking. But who knows what happened behind closed doors.... perhaps this was for the best. Then the election and Jan 06. And since then this dude has been the sorest loser I have ever seen. It has been 3 years and he is still talking about how the election was stolen and if you disagree with him he will blackmail you into agreeing with him or he will support your opposition candidate. Fuck this dude. That is not how democracy works..... I do not disagree with his foreign policy as a military officer... He made some solid decisions regarding China and his critique of NATO was not completely incorrect. He said things and made decisions that others were afraid to say and do and I was into it but he also said and did things that was I absolutely not into... if you want America's help then there has to be some benefit to the American taxpayer... if you want to fuck around and find out with OPEC and your pilot students shooting up an American Military Base... then enjoy fighting your wars with Iran on your own.... I full-heartedly believe that the American Tax Payer should see a return on investment for their taxes but President Trump seems to only actually give a shit about his own personal gain. Let's not be naive, his son-in-law totally got paid off by Mohammed bin Salman. He 100% had the support of the Putin regime. He gave himself and his buddies tax breaks that he did not afford the 99%. He said a lot of crazy shit. This guy is nuts and doesn't give two shits about the 99%. He will gladly give you a MAGA hat for your donation but when it comes to actual policy, he has shown that he will take your money, put some in his own pocket, some in the pockets of his friends, and then give you just a little bit back so that you feel like you got the good end of the deal.....The average American made much less than the 1%... he gave you some back in covid relief to make you forget that you were getting royally fucked.
I am not running for president but if I was this would be my platform... in other words, this would be the platform that I wish we could vote for!
submitted by PlanesandWhisky to ForUnitedStates [link] [comments]
Let's start out with my intention. I would love for this post to get 69 million 420 thousand upvotes... but seriously, I want as many people as possible to see this because the media is starting to make me feel like I am the only person who sees that this election cycle is nuts.
This Presidential election is looking to be a choice between two terrible options... I will outline all of my demographics followed by my thoughts and I would really like to hear some alternative opinions because as a regular ass voter, I see nothing but terrible options from the two parties and I am starting to feel like I am the only one who sees that the current political landscape is a total shit show.
Demographics: Ethnicity: Caucasian Gender: Male Age: 35 Occupation: Military Officer Education: BS (it was a bullshit degree but also a bachelor of science) Relationship: Married (divorced once but I deserved it. I was a total shithead the first time) ... happy to provide any other demographics but at the end of the day I am a regular American with a regular salary, a regular job, a regular everything else.
Biden Let me start off by admitting that I was wrong about this guy. I voted for him in the last election because I felt like President Trump was unstable as fuck and presidential policy should not be posted on social media or be based on how one man is feeling that particular day. Biden promised a lot, I didn't expect much from him, to be honest, but I had hoped that we would at least get a president who was able to fill the role at a basic level. I was not looking for Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. I was simply hoping for a President who would show up to work, have a reasonable foreign policy, who would put some pressure on the corporations and their CEOs making millions of dollars, and who would address the issues that the majority of Americans were dealing with like student loans, health care, unfair taxes, and loopholes that benefit the 1% and fuck the 99%. End of the day I was hoping that he would look out for the 99 and not the 1%. So far we have got some good and bad in terms of policy... he got us out of the war in the middle east even though that was completely fucked up... poor planning... total rush to failure. Thank God that more people were not killed or injured and God bless those service members who sacrificed all for this shitty plan, they were patriots and I am thankful every day that we have Americans like them willing to "stand the watch." He got some relief for parents who could use the help financially when times were tough during covid but he totally fucked it up when he fumbled the ball when it came to supporting the unions like the rail workers, amazon, etc, he fucked up student debt relief (we shouldn't ONLY forgive loans...we need to address the outrageous price tag on education in addition to the loans)... He appointed Mayer Pete who had one job as Transportation Secretary and totally fucked that up by prioritizing his image over actually dealing with airline travel (I am a pilot so a bit read in on this topic... he screwed the pooch on this one), trains, and the supply chain.... he also has been a bit short sided on Ukraine support.... (Ukraine deserves independence but there needs to be an explanation of what we are getting as taxpayers for our money... Please explain to me what the return on investment is for the billions we are spending. I do not have an issue with spending our tax dollars on helping make the world a better place but I need to know how my $50B+ is making a difference before you spend it.) Also his sons.... Beau was a naval officer who allegedly did a bunch of drugs.... should have been booted out of the military and Hunter absolutely took dirty money and it was all covered up. President Biden may not have been involved in any of that but at the end of the day, all of the sins of his sons were covered up for the benefit of their father.
Trump As a white male military officer, I thought I was definitely a Republican before this guy came into office. I mean come on, I was basically their prime demographic. At least that is what I was told my whole adult life. I was unsure when he was elected as I thought this was a publicity stunt. Then he put "Mad Dog" Mattis in office as the Sec Def and I thought "America, Fuck YEA!" he had a bunch of crazy ass tweets and I wrote most of them off because I trusted that General Mattis and the rest of the cabinet would keep the country on the right track. And then he fired Mattis. This was the point when I realized this dude is a sociopath who only cared about being "right". He gave no fucks about what the correct decision was... all he wanted was to be "right." The most respected military General since Colin Powel was fired/resigned from the office of Sec Def under President Trump.... This was shocking. But who knows what happened behind closed doors.... perhaps this was for the best. Then the election and Jan 06. And since then this dude has been the sorest loser I have ever seen. It has been 3 years and he is still talking about how the election was stolen and if you disagree with him he will blackmail you into agreeing with him or he will support your opposition candidate. Fuck this dude. That is not how democracy works..... I do not disagree with his foreign policy as a military officer... He made some solid decisions regarding China and his critique of NATO was not completely incorrect. He said things and made decisions that others were afraid to say and do and I was into it but he also said and did things that was I absolutely not into... if you want America's help then there has to be some benefit to the American taxpayer... if you want to fuck around and find out with OPEC and your pilot students shooting up an American Military Base... then enjoy fighting your wars with Iran on your own.... I full-heartedly believe that the American Tax Payer should see a return on investment for their taxes but President Trump seems to only actually give a shit about his own personal gain. Let's not be naive, his son-in-law totally got paid off by Mohammed bin Salman. He 100% had the support of the Putin regime. He gave himself and his buddies tax breaks that he did not afford the 99%. He said a lot of crazy shit. This guy is nuts and doesn't give two shits about the 99%. He will gladly give you a MAGA hat for your donation but when it comes to actual policy, he has shown that he will take your money, put some in his own pocket, some in the pockets of his friends, and then give you just a little bit back so that you feel like you got the good end of the deal.....The average American made much less than the 1%... he gave you some back in covid relief to make you forget that you were getting royally fucked.
I am not running for president but if I was this would be my platform... in other words, this would be the platform that I wish we could vote for!
- National policies
- Politicians are public servants - Elected officials are elected to serve the American public, not themselves. Stop being greedy!
- If you hold a political office, you are allowed to only buy the total US stock market index. -This would force politicians to be financially vested in the US economy and prevent them from insider trading with specific companies.... if you want to serve in public office you need to sacrifice some autonomy. No one should use political office to benefit themselves personally. You were elected to enrich the lives of your constituent, not your own personal net worth.
- Term Limits - Congress and Senate should not be allowed to serve more than 10 years.
- Lobbyists - Lobbyists serve a purpose or so am I told but they should not be allowed to contribute any money at all to any political agenda.... period. Nothing. They can voice their opinions like any other voter but that is it.
- There should be a public fund to pay for political campaigns. That fund should be standard for each candidate. They all get the same amount. I am not certain what the right move here is but it is not currently an equal playing field. Someone from the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder against someone from the top run should have the same chance. The candidate with the policies that best represent the people they stand for should win.
- Abortion
- This is a state issue. Allow states to vote on their own policy..... if California wants to allow abortion then let them. If Georgia wants to ban abortion then let them... If you live in a state that does not share your personal beliefs on this then you are welcome to move and become a resident of another state that does share those same principles. There is no reason why every state needs to be the same. Some can be conservative, others can be liberal. Use your vote to voice your opinion in your individual state elections. This should not be a federal decision.
- Taxes
- Taxes should be fair - There is no logical reason why Warren Buffet or the rest of the 1% should pay less than 99%. - Close the tax loopholes that allow the wealthy to pay less taxes than the average American. A consumption tax is the most practical policy here although it does unfairly tax lower income until you begin to factor in luxury taxes. I am cognizant that there is not an easy solution to this issue but that does not mean it is impossible. Cap taxes for basic necessities like food, utilities, housing (Under $1M for 1st house), and vehicle (under $100k) at 0%. Elevate taxes for luxury items (houses over $1M, second homes, Vehicles over 100K, personal jets, restaurants, etc) to 25%, and everything else at a flat 10% sales tax. Adjust income taxes to reflect average incomes and tax the lowest 50% at 0-15%, tax the top 25% of income at 15-20%, and tax the top 25% at 20-25%. Capital gains tax remains the same as that is an equal playing field... you hold the stock for 365 days or more and only pay 15%....This may or may not be the best tax policy but at least it is considerate of those who need the tax relief most. The more you spend on nonessentials the more taxes you pay. I am definitely open to some conversation/deviation here but this is a hell of a lot more fair than what we currently have and a consumption tax also generates some tax income for travelers and illegal migrants who currently do not pay any taxes but often receive free or reduced healthcare over tax-paying Americans (looking at you California).
- Immigration
- This is a core tenant of our nation. We need an immigration policy that protects our citizens but also allows others to come to this country to contribute to our success. There is a tough balance here to navigate but not impossible. Let's fund the applicable departments and ensure they have highly qualified agents to sort those who would add value to our nation and those who would cause problems. We have the most robust intelligence apparatus in the world. I am sure that if we focus our attention on external threats instead of internal threats we could figure out who to recruit to our team and who to pass on, all while making our country more productive and safe.
- Education
- This is a big one... Our children are our future... and we are failing them! Parents get 4 years with their kids before they head off to start school. That is the last time that we get 100% of their attention before they start receiving input from other adults and peers. We are doing them a disservice by not recruiting the best and brightest to mold them into tomorrow's workforce. Teaching is like every other career field. If we paid teachers the same as we paid CEOs, athletes, celebrities, etc. We would get more applicants than we would know what to do with. We could then choose the best and brightest to spend 8 hours a day teaching our children to invent the next best thing.... Obviously, we cannot as a nation afford to pay every teacher $25M a year but you get the point. Let's make a starting salary for a teacher $100k and choose the best applicants to teach our children. Teachers should be the best of society and should be regarded as such.....
- Now let's talk about college. A college degree is overrated as fuck currently. A bachelor's degree from a state school should not cost you more than what you make for the first 5 years of working. There needs to be a cap on what colleges can charge. It's great that we are looking into student loan repayment and I absolutely think that we need to help even the scales there but first, we need to stop the bleeding. A college degree from a state school receiving federal funding should not cost a student more than $50k for a 4-year degree. If you want to go to a private school then you are all on your own but let's give everyone an option to go to school for a reasonable price. We should not have to spend our lives repaying a loan for education. This is only going to discourage young men and women from attending these storied institutions. It is criminal what these schools are charging.
- Healthcare
- First, let me start out by saying fuck all of these people at the top. I am looking at the corporate fat cats, the insurance companies, the Sacklers. Healthcare is out of control even worse than education. We need to put limits on what they can charge, limits on what medications cost, and very strong quality assurance in the FDA to make sure that these drug companies are not poisoning us. Healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. We all deserve quality healthcare. Make it happen POTUS.
- Equal Opportunity
- Everyone deserves equality of opportunity... not equality of result. We all deserve the ability to succeed but success should not be given just because of our race/gendeethnicity/sexual orientation/economic resources. I personally do not care what color you are, what gender you are, or what you like to do with your free time. I only care about what you contribute. Black, Brown, White, or any other color of the rainbow, gay, straight, or anything in between, none of it matters. All that does actually matter is results and we should all have the same opportunity to succeed regardless of the details because, at the end of the day, we are all people striving for a "more perfect union"!
- Defense
- Completely UNSATISFACTORY that the Pentagon cannot pass an audit. We talk about our defense spending like it's a badge of honor but there is no mention of the efficiency of our tax dollars. If we give the DOD $2T then we should know what our return on investment is! The budget should not increase for defense spending until the DOD can pass an audit. This is Ludacris! I see fraud, waste, and abuse daily but there is nothing that can be done about it. We do not need to spend millions of dollars on a base right next to another base because they are "historic." We do not neet do complete training exercises spending thousands of dollars per hour just to say that we have done the thing that we will never actually do in war. There is absolutely no reason we need to pay millions of dollars for program overruns just because have already contributed so much to that project. We need to hold the DOD and the defense contractors accountable and to be honest we need to account for every penny that is spent.... With that said, Veterans have sacrificed a lot and we owe it to them as a country to compensate them and ensure that they are taken care off after they have sacrificed their future for the good of the republic. Many of our veterans will live much shorter lives than their civilian counterparts due to their service and the least we can do is ensure that their sacrifice is noticed and compensated for. How much is a year of your life worth? Ask yourself that next time you think veterans shouldn't receive healthcare or disability after their service is complete.
- Conscription..... this one is going to be controversial so buckle up.... I think every VOTING American should be required to contribute to the nation as a whole. This does not necessarily mean military service although this is inside of my "defense" bullet. But think about it for just a moment. If you first two years out of high school you were required to contribute to the public good, either through military service or through social service. You could be a bus driver, firefighter, work for public parks, or for your county. There are infinite ways to serve your local community. You serve your community, draw a reasonable paycheck, learn a skill, and earn the right to vote. You are giving back to the society that you are a member of and getting a skill and a couple of years to mature before being sent off into the world on your own. We could tie education benefits to this in a similar fashion to the way the military does. If you give two years to public service then you get two years of state college paid for....If you decide that you absolutely do not want to contribute to your nation then that is fine, we will not arrest you or revoke your citizenship, you just will not be afforded the opportunity to have an opinion on policy as you have no skin in the game. You don't get to vote until you contribute.
- Politicians are public servants - Elected officials are elected to serve the American public, not themselves. Stop being greedy!
- Foreign policy
- Russia - They are bullies.... We have been the world police since the end of WW2 and this needs to change. Every country needs to take some ownership of its own sovereignty, however, like the comics say "With great power, comes great responsibility." We, as the dominant world power, have an obligation to balance the scales. Russia needs to stop picking on the weak and if the weak cannot defend themselves then it is our obligation to assist them but that does not mean that we need to fight the battle for them. Ukraine has done a great job of standing up for itself but the rest of Europe needs to continue to provide support in this war if they care about the outcome. End of the day, Russia is a dying country and we only really need to wait them out. We should not buy their exports, we should not sell them our exports, and we should make it very clear that we will evaluate our relationship with any country that does not feel the same way we do.
- China - They WERE a rising power. China is doing its best to continue to the illusion that they are rising to the top but at the end of the day they do not have the internal infrastructure or resources to become the dominant world power. They would like the world to view them as pacifists but in reality, they are antagonists. Their actions within the "9-dash line" make it very clear what they want. They want security. Once they have that security then they want influence. But they cannot possibly hold that security or influence for very long if they continue to be opposed in their values to the USA and our allies. USA, Japan, and Australia alone pose a significant challenge to China's power for as long as we remain united. That does not even factor in the other allies that the US has in the region like the Philippines, or India who both pose significant defense challenges to CCP. Our policy towards China should be "Play nice or you don't get to play at all." This policy will be painful for us as we may have to pay more for some of our consumer goods but it will be even more painful for them if they do not play along. We hold all the cards for as long as we are willing to sacrifice just a little. The POTUS should just be honest with us and we will as a nation, will understand. "We will have to pay more for some things but in the long run the world will be better off because we held strong to our ideals and the world will be a more fair place."
- Ukraine - Happy to send them aid but that aid should have an audit. Let's make sure that the money and equipment we are sending them is going to the place we intend for it to be sent. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
- NATO - NATO is necessary until the remnants of the USSR are completely destroyed... but the other members of NATO need to hold up their end of the bargain and POTUS needs to hold Europe's feet to the fire until they pony up what they agreed to. End of the day the USA's sovereignty does not need NATO to exist to remain whole. We have all the resources we need and are well-defended. There is no need for us to defend them for the sake of trade anymore. NATO needs us more than we need them so if they would like to continue to receive the benefits of our alliance then they need to make it worth our while and it's POTUS's job to ensure that happens.
2023.06.02 03:41 harry-jg Best VPN for Bard AI
In a world gripped by the fever of AI, tech behemoths are scrambling to unleash their latest chatbot brainchildren. In this mad dash, Google declared its entrant in the race, Bard, in the sprouting days of March 2023. A mere two months later, Bard started its digital tour, gallivanting across a whopping 180 regions. However, a slight snafu occurred in the grand plan – European nations were nowhere to be found on Bard's travel itinerary. Every EU dweller hoping for a tête-à-tête with Bard would instead receive the digital equivalent of a "Sorry, we're closed" sign: “Bard isn’t currently supported in your country.
But every dark cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining here is the ease with which one can invite Bard into the EU. Google plays Sherlock Holmes, investigating your IP address to discern if you're browsing from an EU country. So, with the right digital props, you can impersonate an IP address from an approved location, tearing down Bard’s regional walls as easily as one might tear a page from a book.
Enter stage left: Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs. These services have the magical ability to convince Google you're sunning yourself on a beach in Miami, not trudging through snow in Stockholm. Not just a one-trick pony, VPNs also encrypt your online activities, turning them into unintelligible gibberish to any nosy parkers or the too-helpful owners of your favorite cafe's Wi-Fi. This guide is your backstage pass, your secret map, your golden ticket to getting access to Bard within the EU.
The Great Bard Caper: Tricking Google's Chatbot into Thinking You're Anywhere But Here
Want to invite Bard into your digital living room regardless of where you're sipping your coffee in the real world? Here's a simple step-by-step choreography to the Bard dance:
First things first, cast a discerning eye over the VPN market and select a service that values your security as much as a squirrel values acorn. NordVPN frequently stars in our recommendations, but you're the director of this little performance.
With your chosen VPN in hand, proceed to download, install, and log in. It's a bit like getting the key to a secret clubhouse, only this clubhouse allows you to be anywhere in the world at the click of a button.
Next, choose a server from your home country (or whatever non-EU location is nearest). It's like choosing a costume for a masquerade ball – you want to pick something that conceals your identity, but doesn't make you stand out too much.
By doing this, you'll be switching your IP address and thereby pulling the wool over Google's eyes, who would otherwise deduce that you're beyond the boundaries of Bard's jurisdiction.
Last but not least, waltz on over to Bard’s website. As soon as you accept the terms of use, you should be able to chat away with Bard as freely as a kid discussing his superhero aspirations. And there you have it, a magical, yet practical guide to using Bard from wherever your heart, or rather your physical self, is located.
NordVPN
Playing hide-and-seek with Google's Bard from some sun-soaked piazza in Europe? Let NordVPN step into the role of your savvy accomplice. Boasting servers in a not-too-shabby 60 countries, some even pulling the late shift to dodge the stringent barricades of online blocking, this is the VPN equivalent of a digital Houdini.
Not only does it take the top podium spot in the sprint race of VPNs, posting a cheetah-esque average speed of 190 Mbps in our stopwatch trials, but NordVPN also juggles a laundry list of streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+. Plus, it's got a heart big enough to secure up to six of your devices simultaneously. And should you ever find yourself in a pickle, NordVPN has round-the-clock customer support standing by like a digital cavalry.
A VPN's raison d'etre is to make your online activities as clandestine as a classified operation. NordVPN rises to the challenge with a potent mix of encryption that would put Fort Knox to shame, an array of digital shields like leak protection and a kill switch, and a no-logs policy as stern as a Victorian headmaster. True, it stashes away advertising IDs on mobile gadgets, but it kindly gives you a cheat sheet on how to wipe them clean. Toss in some fancier gizmos like Onion over VPN servers, automatic tracker-blocking, and a MeshNet tool for securely linking your devices even if they're scattered across different continents, and you've got yourself a swanky VPN package.
No matter your device's operating system - Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android, or iOS - NordVPN has an app for it. And for those wielding a router, it's got a manual setup guide to turn it into a NordVPN conduit. All in all, NordVPN is like a digital chameleon, helping you blend into the online world while you enjoy your chat with Bard from wherever you might be.
SurfsharkVPN
In the aquatic realm of the VPN universe, Surfshark swishes its digital tail among an impressive crowd of 3,000+ servers, dotting the map in 100 countries, many of them lounging comfortably outside the EU's borders. Unlike many of its compatriots in the digital ocean, this service boasts a swanky resume of geo-blocked platforms it has conquered: Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Amazon Prime Video, to name a few. So, the challenge of sneaking into Bard's restricted zone is about as difficult as eating a piece of cake for Surfshark.
Blessed with Olympian speeds and an open-door policy for the number of devices you can connect (an online cornucopia, if you will), Surfshark is the perfect digital wingman for families who have a thing for streaming. And with a customer support crew buzzing with activity 24/7, you're never more than a few clicks away from your digital life-raft.
Surfshark is a veritable digital fortress when it comes to safeguarding your data, equipped with encryption that would give Alan Turing a run for his money, a kill switch that would make MI6 proud, and leak protection that is about as watertight as the Titanic was supposed to be. It also takes its no-logs policy seriously, a claim verified by independent auditors. Plus, it’s adept at swatting away ads, trackers, and malware like pesky digital flies, and can even switch up your IP address every so often to keep your online identity as elusive as Bigfoot. Toss in an antivirus, a privacy-focused search engine, and a data-breach monitor (not part of the basic subscription, mind you), and you've got a serious contender for your VPN affections.
With apps crafted for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, and Linux, Surfshark is ready to hitch a ride on any device. And for the router-savvy among you, a manual installation guide stands ready at your disposal. Surfshark really is the ideal VPN: a veritable Swiss Army Knife in a digital ocean of butter knives.
ExpressVPN
ExpressVPN, a steam-powered engine in the digital realm, whizzes along the virtual track at astonishing speeds, gracefully bypassing servers in more than 90 countries. Not only can it poke a hole in Bard's geo-restriction bubble, but it can also cloak your torrenting antics, offer a secure browsing tunnel in the deepest trenches of online restrictions, and stream your beloved TV series from all corners of the globe. With a user interface as uncomplicated as a three-piece jigsaw puzzle and a support team that never sleeps, ExpressVPN is the perfect travel companion for any VPN newcomer, or for those who simply prefer their digital services without a surplus of bells and whistles.
As a digital toolkit for accessing Bard, ExpressVPN carries everything you'd need: The Fort Knox of encryption methods, 256-bit, a kill switch (which abruptly halts data traffic if your connection acts like a petulant teenager and drops), and safeguards against DNS, IPv6, and WebRTC leaks. It also boasts the ability to give certain apps a hall pass to sidestep the VPN, or to switch on auto-connect when on a network you don't recognize. ExpressVPN doesn't jot down any data that could unmask you and has undergone an audit to vouch for this. And for those digital privacy enthusiasts who wish to pay in Bitcoin, ExpressVPN gladly accepts your digital gold.
From iOS to MacOS, Android to Windows, and not forgetting Linux, ExpressVPN has an app for almost any device. Moreover, it's the only top-tier provider with its own blueprint for router firmware, simplifying the process of fortifying every device on your network with a VPN shield. ExpressVPN: like the bullet train of VPNs, only without the pesky physical limitations.
Behind the Curtain: Unveiling the Bard VPN Selection Saga
Deeming which VPNs are the cream of the crop for specific endeavors is akin to navigating through a digital labyrinth. A myriad of services, all wearing similar façades, are in reality, as different as chalk and cheese when you pop their hoods. That's why, to shine a light on the most reliable contenders, we rolled up our sleeves, delved into a plethora of providers with Bard, and subjected them to a battery of tests. We meticulously examined their offerings across a spectrum of categories:
Geographic Mettle: Bard is a bit of a wallflower in EU countries, meaning providers must offer a healthy sprinkling of locations that give it the green light, such as the US and the UK. We also rummage through the closets of providers using virtual servers since these can muddle the waters about which country's legalities preside over your data.
Speed and Sturdiness: Our stopwatch is always at the ready to see which VPNs have their running shoes on, and how their sprint has altered over time. A hat trick of tests per provider (three locations at thrice different times) helps us strike an average, curbing some of the fickleness and ensuring services with unflinching speeds lead the pack.
Versatility: Despite your primary hunt being a VPN to unblock Bard, your digital pursuits might expand to secure streaming, torrenting, or gaming. Hence, we conduct a variety of tests that mirror the average Joe's usage, giving the boot to any VPNs that can't keep pace.
Security and Privacy: One of our key missions is to ensure that VPNs come equipped with the digital arsenal necessary to keep your traffic concealed from digital peeping Toms. We search for encryption that would baffle even the most cunning of codebreakers, safety nets like a kill switch, and any superior tools such as stealth mode. We also scrutinize their logging policies and audit history, so you're not left taking a company's privacy claims on a wing and a prayer.
User-friendliness: We have a soft spot for VPNs that roll out the red carpet for newbies. This entails offering a multitude of apps, transparently described settings, and an accessible customer support hotline. Other cherries on top include task-dedicated servers, a lack of connection restrictions, and auto-connection gadgets.
Pricing: Although it shouldn't be your North Star, price is a worthy compass. We pit services against their similarly priced adversaries, while also keeping an eye out for any money-back assurances, free trials, or seasonal discounts, so your digital wallet doesn’t feel any unnecessary strain.
submitted by harry-jg to topvpn [link] [comments]
But every dark cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining here is the ease with which one can invite Bard into the EU. Google plays Sherlock Holmes, investigating your IP address to discern if you're browsing from an EU country. So, with the right digital props, you can impersonate an IP address from an approved location, tearing down Bard’s regional walls as easily as one might tear a page from a book.
Enter stage left: Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs. These services have the magical ability to convince Google you're sunning yourself on a beach in Miami, not trudging through snow in Stockholm. Not just a one-trick pony, VPNs also encrypt your online activities, turning them into unintelligible gibberish to any nosy parkers or the too-helpful owners of your favorite cafe's Wi-Fi. This guide is your backstage pass, your secret map, your golden ticket to getting access to Bard within the EU.
The Great Bard Caper: Tricking Google's Chatbot into Thinking You're Anywhere But Here
Want to invite Bard into your digital living room regardless of where you're sipping your coffee in the real world? Here's a simple step-by-step choreography to the Bard dance:
First things first, cast a discerning eye over the VPN market and select a service that values your security as much as a squirrel values acorn. NordVPN frequently stars in our recommendations, but you're the director of this little performance.
With your chosen VPN in hand, proceed to download, install, and log in. It's a bit like getting the key to a secret clubhouse, only this clubhouse allows you to be anywhere in the world at the click of a button.
Next, choose a server from your home country (or whatever non-EU location is nearest). It's like choosing a costume for a masquerade ball – you want to pick something that conceals your identity, but doesn't make you stand out too much.
By doing this, you'll be switching your IP address and thereby pulling the wool over Google's eyes, who would otherwise deduce that you're beyond the boundaries of Bard's jurisdiction.
Last but not least, waltz on over to Bard’s website. As soon as you accept the terms of use, you should be able to chat away with Bard as freely as a kid discussing his superhero aspirations. And there you have it, a magical, yet practical guide to using Bard from wherever your heart, or rather your physical self, is located.
NordVPN
Playing hide-and-seek with Google's Bard from some sun-soaked piazza in Europe? Let NordVPN step into the role of your savvy accomplice. Boasting servers in a not-too-shabby 60 countries, some even pulling the late shift to dodge the stringent barricades of online blocking, this is the VPN equivalent of a digital Houdini.
Not only does it take the top podium spot in the sprint race of VPNs, posting a cheetah-esque average speed of 190 Mbps in our stopwatch trials, but NordVPN also juggles a laundry list of streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+. Plus, it's got a heart big enough to secure up to six of your devices simultaneously. And should you ever find yourself in a pickle, NordVPN has round-the-clock customer support standing by like a digital cavalry.
A VPN's raison d'etre is to make your online activities as clandestine as a classified operation. NordVPN rises to the challenge with a potent mix of encryption that would put Fort Knox to shame, an array of digital shields like leak protection and a kill switch, and a no-logs policy as stern as a Victorian headmaster. True, it stashes away advertising IDs on mobile gadgets, but it kindly gives you a cheat sheet on how to wipe them clean. Toss in some fancier gizmos like Onion over VPN servers, automatic tracker-blocking, and a MeshNet tool for securely linking your devices even if they're scattered across different continents, and you've got yourself a swanky VPN package.
No matter your device's operating system - Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android, or iOS - NordVPN has an app for it. And for those wielding a router, it's got a manual setup guide to turn it into a NordVPN conduit. All in all, NordVPN is like a digital chameleon, helping you blend into the online world while you enjoy your chat with Bard from wherever you might be.
SurfsharkVPN
In the aquatic realm of the VPN universe, Surfshark swishes its digital tail among an impressive crowd of 3,000+ servers, dotting the map in 100 countries, many of them lounging comfortably outside the EU's borders. Unlike many of its compatriots in the digital ocean, this service boasts a swanky resume of geo-blocked platforms it has conquered: Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Amazon Prime Video, to name a few. So, the challenge of sneaking into Bard's restricted zone is about as difficult as eating a piece of cake for Surfshark.
Blessed with Olympian speeds and an open-door policy for the number of devices you can connect (an online cornucopia, if you will), Surfshark is the perfect digital wingman for families who have a thing for streaming. And with a customer support crew buzzing with activity 24/7, you're never more than a few clicks away from your digital life-raft.
Surfshark is a veritable digital fortress when it comes to safeguarding your data, equipped with encryption that would give Alan Turing a run for his money, a kill switch that would make MI6 proud, and leak protection that is about as watertight as the Titanic was supposed to be. It also takes its no-logs policy seriously, a claim verified by independent auditors. Plus, it’s adept at swatting away ads, trackers, and malware like pesky digital flies, and can even switch up your IP address every so often to keep your online identity as elusive as Bigfoot. Toss in an antivirus, a privacy-focused search engine, and a data-breach monitor (not part of the basic subscription, mind you), and you've got a serious contender for your VPN affections.
With apps crafted for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, and Linux, Surfshark is ready to hitch a ride on any device. And for the router-savvy among you, a manual installation guide stands ready at your disposal. Surfshark really is the ideal VPN: a veritable Swiss Army Knife in a digital ocean of butter knives.
ExpressVPN
ExpressVPN, a steam-powered engine in the digital realm, whizzes along the virtual track at astonishing speeds, gracefully bypassing servers in more than 90 countries. Not only can it poke a hole in Bard's geo-restriction bubble, but it can also cloak your torrenting antics, offer a secure browsing tunnel in the deepest trenches of online restrictions, and stream your beloved TV series from all corners of the globe. With a user interface as uncomplicated as a three-piece jigsaw puzzle and a support team that never sleeps, ExpressVPN is the perfect travel companion for any VPN newcomer, or for those who simply prefer their digital services without a surplus of bells and whistles.
As a digital toolkit for accessing Bard, ExpressVPN carries everything you'd need: The Fort Knox of encryption methods, 256-bit, a kill switch (which abruptly halts data traffic if your connection acts like a petulant teenager and drops), and safeguards against DNS, IPv6, and WebRTC leaks. It also boasts the ability to give certain apps a hall pass to sidestep the VPN, or to switch on auto-connect when on a network you don't recognize. ExpressVPN doesn't jot down any data that could unmask you and has undergone an audit to vouch for this. And for those digital privacy enthusiasts who wish to pay in Bitcoin, ExpressVPN gladly accepts your digital gold.
From iOS to MacOS, Android to Windows, and not forgetting Linux, ExpressVPN has an app for almost any device. Moreover, it's the only top-tier provider with its own blueprint for router firmware, simplifying the process of fortifying every device on your network with a VPN shield. ExpressVPN: like the bullet train of VPNs, only without the pesky physical limitations.
Behind the Curtain: Unveiling the Bard VPN Selection Saga
Deeming which VPNs are the cream of the crop for specific endeavors is akin to navigating through a digital labyrinth. A myriad of services, all wearing similar façades, are in reality, as different as chalk and cheese when you pop their hoods. That's why, to shine a light on the most reliable contenders, we rolled up our sleeves, delved into a plethora of providers with Bard, and subjected them to a battery of tests. We meticulously examined their offerings across a spectrum of categories:
Geographic Mettle: Bard is a bit of a wallflower in EU countries, meaning providers must offer a healthy sprinkling of locations that give it the green light, such as the US and the UK. We also rummage through the closets of providers using virtual servers since these can muddle the waters about which country's legalities preside over your data.
Speed and Sturdiness: Our stopwatch is always at the ready to see which VPNs have their running shoes on, and how their sprint has altered over time. A hat trick of tests per provider (three locations at thrice different times) helps us strike an average, curbing some of the fickleness and ensuring services with unflinching speeds lead the pack.
Versatility: Despite your primary hunt being a VPN to unblock Bard, your digital pursuits might expand to secure streaming, torrenting, or gaming. Hence, we conduct a variety of tests that mirror the average Joe's usage, giving the boot to any VPNs that can't keep pace.
Security and Privacy: One of our key missions is to ensure that VPNs come equipped with the digital arsenal necessary to keep your traffic concealed from digital peeping Toms. We search for encryption that would baffle even the most cunning of codebreakers, safety nets like a kill switch, and any superior tools such as stealth mode. We also scrutinize their logging policies and audit history, so you're not left taking a company's privacy claims on a wing and a prayer.
User-friendliness: We have a soft spot for VPNs that roll out the red carpet for newbies. This entails offering a multitude of apps, transparently described settings, and an accessible customer support hotline. Other cherries on top include task-dedicated servers, a lack of connection restrictions, and auto-connection gadgets.
Pricing: Although it shouldn't be your North Star, price is a worthy compass. We pit services against their similarly priced adversaries, while also keeping an eye out for any money-back assurances, free trials, or seasonal discounts, so your digital wallet doesn’t feel any unnecessary strain.
2023.06.02 03:26 ArchiveSlave Commander's Rounds 116: Purity of Allegiance
(All of my stuff is here)
Purifier was sitting outside of the lab, having decided to try her luck with one of the vending machines that was on the base. She was aware of what ships and humans ate, but there were some things that still boggled her (often underused) positronic brain.
At this point, her yellow eyes were fixed on one of the items in a vending machine that was imported from the Sakura Empire.
What was sparkling coffee? And more importantly, why was sparkling coffee?
The only way she was going to find out about that was by forking over the cash to find out herself, so she just resigned herself to the tyranny of money instead of just ripping the vending machine open herself. It’s not like it would hurt her to punch a speed hole into the machine, but that kind of thing did make other people upset with her and would lead to long, long lectures she didn’t want to sit through.
So, sparkling coffee it was.
It was just espresso mixed with carbonated water and some kind of fruit juice, so she didn’t see what the big deal was, trying to make it all fancy-sounding, so she drank it while squatting by the machine like the delinquent she liked to play at being.
It was then that her phone rang, and she grumbled to herself, as she wondered what Yuubari might suddenly want now.
Her eyes widened, and her pupils narrowed as her phone struggled to process the incoming caller, but eventually the Caller ID settled on something.
ANTIOCHUS GROUP ARMS LABORATORY
Her hand slowly raised the phone up to her ear. “Hello?”
“This is no time for pleasantries, Purifier.”
Purifier looked around. “Ummm… Sorry, I’m not interested in talking about my car’s extended warranty.”
“Purifier, this is no time for you to test my patience.”
Purifier stood up. “Uhhh… New phone who dis?”
“Purifier.”
Purifier squeaked. “All right, Alpha… First off, how did you even get this number?”
“You use it to secure your account on your InstaFans page. The one where you pretend to be a girl who’s cosplaying as Purifier in numerous… Compromising… positions… Why do you even have one of those, anyway?”
“My job is part-time and doesn’t pay that well. Girl’s got her get her top dollar somehow!”
Purifier smiled as she heard an exasperated sigh from the other end. “…There are serious matters to discuss, and I know you don’t mind talking when the right questions were asked. However, you gave your survival away when Tester was killed, because you are the only one who could have relayed that information to them. You have caused us a great deal of trouble.”
“I guess so!” Purifier said, with a smile. “It looks like you just sorta found out that the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed! Yeah, I served up Tester for them on a silver platter, and don’t start acting high and mighty about it- This is what it took for you to start taking me seriously when you wouldn’t give me the time of day. And don’t act like you didn’t run me through the brain laundromat at least once!”
There was a moment of silence. “…You gave them that information when you knew that killing Tester was one of the possible results.”
“Naw.” She said. “I gave them that info because I knew they’d do it, and that it’d be one of the only things that’d wake you up. Did you ever stop and think about why the Anomaly and KAN-SEN found it so easy to pull the trigger on Tester? Do you even know what we have done to these people?”
There was silence at the other end, and Purifier had begun to wonder if Observer Alpha had hung up. But then, “…I would offer you a chance to return, but you know what awaits you if you come back. A fresh wipe and modifications to your program. Even if you have a change of heart, you can never return to us.”
“The chance of that is so fat that it needs its own mobility scooter.” She pouted. “Besides, I like it here more. Did you know about sparkling coffee?”
“I was aware.” Observer Alpha replied. “…You are determined to remain where you are?”
“There’s no bribe you can offer me to make me go back.” She said. “…Besides, I should be asking you and the others to come over here before things get ugly. No matter what Empress spouts out of her pie hole, even Zero will have nowhere to run once the hammer comes down.”
“You believe that Zero’s suspicions may be correct?”
“Yeah.” She said. “And the rest of you, especially the Tarot Tag Team, need to start thinking about what that means. Because if Zero is right, then it’s only a matter of time until we’re no longer daddy’s favorite, and you’re not going to be able to control the power Zero wants to let loose. If that happens, then you’re the ones who’re going to be the live-fire test subjects, and they’ll want to fire off a lot of rounds.”
“…Purifier. I managed to find the calculations Tester did. All of them were perfect- They accounted for every permutation of the combat scenario she devised. There wasn’t a single error- She accounted for all capabilities of every observed Kansen the Anomaly had available. Before I finish, know this- I do not believe the error that cost Tester her life lay in her math.”
“Oh?” Purifier went reading Alpha’s meaning immediately. She giggled. “All right, talk to you never, Dr. Octagonapus.”
The call ended.
----------
Purifier brought the results of her call directly to the commander. Or she would have, if she hadn’t gotten distracted along the way.
“Puri~” Went Anchorage. “…Oh, are you here to see the baby, too?”
“Nah, I was just going to talk to your teacher. Something came up that he’s gonna know about.”
“Oh…” Anchorage went, not knowing that Purifier was exercising every restraint to avoid calling Matilda “that little tit-sucker.” Anchorage perked up. “If you’re going to be here, maybe you could… see her anyway?”
Purifier looked into Anchorage’s eyes. It was very clear that this was going to be a package deal, and even Purifier couldn’t find it in herself to bully Anchorage, not the least of which was that the cruiser was only conditionally harmless. “I’ll be by after I’m done talking to teacher, all right?”
“All right~” Anchorage smiled and went on her habitually merry way.
The Siren made her way into the commander’s office, walking in like she was already invited. “Heeey, Anomaly! Before you say a thing, I’m not here for a social call. Got some news for you that you might want to hear.”
The commander looked up from his work- some report from that other officer that Purifier couldn’t be bothered to remember, so she thought of Albert as the king of delivery boys. “It’s not often that you volunteer information like this without being asked, so it must be something special.”
“Yep.” She put on a big smile as she sat on his desk. “I just got a call from my old boss, so here’s the deal…”
Before the commander could react, Purifier spilled the beans about everything that she talked about with Observer Alpha, leaving the commander to ask the obvious question. “…So, just what does Zero suspect?”
“That, Anomaly, requires a teaching lesson from professor Purifier. Unfortunately, I don’t have a sexy teacher outfit to give you this special lesson, buuuut we’re going to just have to make do.” She crossed her legs. “You see, what’s on Zero’s noggin is one of the reasons you have to work for a living.”
The commander nodded. “All right, so what is Zero, anyway?”
“Daddy’s favorite number one girl~” She said. “A living strategic computer that could think her way out of any scenario without fail. That is, until the enemy showed up, and for the first time in her life she went “BEEP BOOP DOES NOT COMPUTE” and that’s stuck in her craw ever since. Ninety percent of everything that’s happened is her trying to execute the boss’s directives. In fact, I kiiinda wonder if the boss is actually calling the shots any more.”
The commander nodded. “So, what does she suspect about the Kansen?”
“Wellll…” She smiled. “…You see, the cubes aren’t a new thing, Anomaly. Me, the research team, and even the Arcana Avengers are all powered by cubes- We were just given powerful android bodies and weapons that could make good use of the huge amount of power they made available. But you see, for us, they’re just a power source, but for the Kansen… Haha, Dr. Anzeel did a funny and somehow made them into the soul of the machine. And Zero has been keeping an eye on that, and thinks there might be more than meets the eye. Your girls have gotten buffer and hotter, but she thinks they can become far, far stronger than anyone else believes.”
The commander had one question. “How?”
“Apparently she believes in something called an “awakening”, where the cube and its carrier become perfectly synced. She said it was the perfect expression of will and genius, but it sounded like a whole bunch of hoo-hah to me. So, a lot of what she’s been doing figuring out how to scientifically make that happen with science, but no luck.” She stretched. “Aaaanyway, that’s all I’ve got for you for today, Anomaly, so good luck with that whole Anomaly thing you’ve got going on.”
The commander stopped working. “So, where are you off to now?”
“Hm?” She hopped off the desk. “Oh, promised Anchorage that I’d go see that spawn of yours with her.” She shook her head. “…Can’t say no to her or she’ll get all sad about it, and that’s not something I need on a Monday~”
The commander looked at his routine paperwork, then back at Purifier, and then he stood up from his desk. “…You know, I think I should probably see my own daughter, too.”
However, something did stick in the back of his mind. If Zero believed that Kansen could undergo some kind of awakening, it meant that some Kansen showed the properties of being able to achieve it, whatever it really was.
The question was… Who?
--------------
King George V looked up from her papers and smiled. She had decided to just sit down and review some reports from the Royal Navy in her daughter’s bedroom. Anchorage was happy with watching Matilda be a baby, but Dido’s usually low-level conniptions flared up once she saw Purifier come into Matilda’s room. “Ah! Master… Is it really all right for Purifier to be in here?”
Purifier pouted. “Hey! I’d have to be a real sack of…”
King George turned her intense red eyes on Purifier, frowned, and pointed at Matilda.
The Siren hurriedly corrected herself. “…I’d have to be real low to think kidnapping a baby would be a good idea. I’m not Tester, all right?”
King George smiled. “Indeed… Besides, Tester’s willingness, if lack of ability, to stoop that low turned out to be rather counterproductive for her. Anyway, it’s not a problem for Purifier to be here. After all, miss Dido, you are empowered to eject Purifier from the premises by any means desired if she acts unscrupulously, never mind the fact that I myself am present.”
“Ah, yes, your excellency.” Dido bowed to her and then to the commander. “I will be ready to do such a thing of mischief is afoot!”
Alex smiled. “You’ve never disappointed us, Dido, so don’t worry.”
“Uwaa…” Went Dido, blushing quite red.
Anchorage, however, was looking over the edge of Matilda’s crib. “Ah… So, this is the baby… Teacher says that they’re this small when they’re made, they don’t come out even as big as Little Bel.”
“Ahh…” Alex scratched the back of his head. “…I don’t think King George V would forgive me if it was the way Kansen worked.”
“Indeed, it was something of a feat to get her out when she was small.” King George looked over at the crib. “If she was larger, it would, at the very least permanently cure me of any desire to have another one.”
Anchorage giggled. “Puri, why don’t you say hello?”
“Wagbgb.” Went Matilda, having not yet mastered any recognizable language.
Purifier leaned over to have a look. “Hey there! It’s me, the prettiest android in the world.” She held out a finger. “You can touch, I’m tough.”
Matilda grabbed onto Purifier’s pale fingers before she turned to look at Alex and King George. “So, when do you plan to tell her that I’m a very bad girl who needed to be spanked?”
Alex shrugged. “When she starts asking questions about it, I guess. No need to do it before then. But we’re going to tell her.”
King George V nodded. “It might well be important for her to know that people can change for the better. It doesn’t always happen, certainly, and that desire for change must, at least in part, come from within. But it still can happen.”
Purifier carefully withdrew her finger once Matilda lost interest in it. “I think that’s enough baby time. Gotta do lab stuff or that fox over there will gnaw on me.”
Anchorage smiled. “Um… Puri… Teacher and his special lady had a baby by growing one inside of her, and I was made from cubes like all my other friends… But who made you?”
Purifier blinked. “Who made me? The guy who was our big boss or whatever, probably!”
Anchorage paused. “Oh, um… what was his name?”
Purifier needed to think about it. What was his name?
What was his name?
WHAT was his name?
What was HIS name?
WhaT wAs HiS NaME???
WHAT
WAS
HIIIIIS
NAAAAAAAAAMMMMEEE
Purifier suddenly pitched forward, slamming face-first into the floor of the bedroom. Anchorage’s eyes widened and she ran over to nudge the unresponsive girl. “Puri? Puri?”
“Doctor~!” Shouted the assistant as she bolted into the lab. She had long, black hair done in a ponytail, violet eyes, and a big smile that never seemed to leave. The young woman always skirted what was acceptable in the lab dress code, always wearing the shortest shorts that she could get away with, and always choosing whatever tops could turn the most heads without exposing an unacceptable amount of skin. Plus she had her own lab coat, so she met that requirement at least.
The head of the lab smiled at her, one hand in the pocket of his own white lab coat, the other hand holding a clipboard. “You have your own way of entering, but at least you’re on time.” The bespectacled doctor himself was someone who had aged very gracefully into middle age- even his short, white hair wasn’t enough to detract from the fact that he was tall and fit, and not even his stubble took away from his looks.
She giggled. “Can’t help making my classmates jealous, you know!”
The scientist adjusted his glasses. “Jealous? It’s not like working here is a vacation. You know that as much as anyone.”
The assistant smiled. “Come on, doc, you’ve heard what goes on around campus. You’ve got that real DILF energy that just makes some girls horrendously down bad.”
The scientist just stared at her for a moment. “…This… Is it a joke?”
“Naw!’ Her smile grew wider to the point that the doctor wondered what a look at his assistant’s anatomy might produce. “There was all kinds of talk about how they wanted to perform repeatable stress tests to determine the maximum thresholds of doc’s Bone Zone.”
His mouth fell open slightly, and he shook his head. “…You know, sometimes I have a hard time convincing other people that you’re as intelligent as I know you are. If I didn’t have proof that you designed that propulsion system…”
“Which you accepted!”
“Which I accepted.” He repeated. “You really have a knack for that kind of danger engineering.”
“Haha… I’m not just a pretty face and hot bod, doc! Besides… Anything I can do to help is something I’m going to do.”
The scientist smiled. “…I know. And since you’re a part of this lab, there’s something I’m going to want to show you. It took me some time to get permission for you to see what I’m about to reveal to you, so don’t get up to any mischief.”
“Sure thing, doc!”
The doctor unlocked one of the corridors in the lab with a special passkey. “You see, this lab has been working on the Antiochus Project- an integrated autonomous strategic system that can effectively run itself based on an artificial intelligence’s examination of broad directives and objectives given by its controlling parties. You’ve been working on some of the mechanics, of course, but that’s just on the margins.”
“So… You’re taking me to see the main event?”
“That’s about the size of it.” He began opening a series of heavy, thick, vault-like doors. “…Sorry if this whole security setup seems portentous, but this was a condition placed on us by our benefactors if our efforts bore any fruit. This won’t take much longer.”
“No probs! Sad as it sounds, I’ve got nothing else going on today.”
“…Right.” He said, as he opened the last door. The doors slid back to reveal what looked to be… A big, cozy bedroom with an intense laboratory setup right next to it. The whiplash of seeing those two things next to each other nearly made the assistant’s head spin, but what caught her attention was the… Girl? Sitting on the bed- her pale skin, her short, white hair, her bright blue eyes that moved this way and that… And that white, fluffy dress of hers.
The pale girl’s head immediately turned to look at the assistant. “Someone new.”
“Of course.” The doctor said. “This is my assistant, Purity, who has been working with us for a little while. Purity, this is Terminal Bastion Zero, the centerpiece of our project. Zero because she’s not a production model, and if that all just sounds like too much of a mouthful, you can just call her TB. Some people also call her Dreamweaver, but that’s more of an unofficial thing.”
“Heya TB!” Purity gave her a little wave. “So… What does she do? And why Dreamweaver?”
“In effect, she’s a living strategic computer that’s supposed to be at the center of a strategic system that will include other powerful androids of various kinds- combat, analysis, nearly any kind of autonomous unit can be integrated into her mission profile. As for Dreamweaver… You’ve heard of the 100 scenarios, right?”
“Yeah, it’s a bunch of really outlandish stuff that militaries train for.” She shrugged. “Zombie apocalypse, Care Bear Stare, all kinds of things like that.”
“Many of these have strategic versions.” He said. “Scenarios that are so enormous and calamitous in scope that it’s hard for humans to even begin to grasp the implications of their impact and progression. So far we’ve fed forty of those into her and she has been able to solve them all, and there’s no sign that the rest will pose any more of a challenge. A strategic mind that could only be imagined in centuries past, and now she’s sitting here in front of us. What do you think?”
Purity leaned over to get a good look into TB’s eyes. “…I wanna squish her cheeks.”
TB blinked. “For what purpose is this cheek squishing?”
“Because you’re cute, obviously!”
The doctor sighed. “…Please do not squish the cheeks of my unique and practically irreplaceable strategic computer.”
Purity pouted. “Not just a little?”
The doctor flipped a page on his clipboard. “I’ll write a bad performance for you right now.”
Purity huffed. “What?! Still not gonna stop me from wanting to squish cheek.”
The doctor cleared his throat. “When presented with an invaluable piece of prototype strategic equipment, the assistant couldn’t stop herself from handling it in improper and befuddling ways.”
“Aughhh… Fine!” She hmphed. “Besides, maybe she wanted it too…”
TB looked at Purity. “The action of squishing cheeks does not provide any service, nor does it assist in the performance of TB-Zero’s duties.”
Purity shook her head. “Well, you’re no fun. Like daughter like dad, huh?”
The doctor shrugged. “I wouldn’t exactly call TB my daughter. She has far fewer limitations than I do… I think there are far greater things ahead of her than I can even speculate on- Not that a scientist of any worth should allow themselves to be prone to unhealthy prognostications in the first place. Anyway, you’re going to have a bigger role in helping me from now on.”
Purity smiled, and winked. “Just leave it to me! After all, I’m Purity, Dr. Aoste’s number one assistant!”
Purifier shot straight up the moment she was awake. Anchorage had the presence of mind to carry her over to Yuubari’s lab- the girl must have figured out that Purifier was built somewhat differently from basically everyone else on the base.
Anchorage was looking at her with an immeasurable amount of concern. “Puri!... Um… Did I hurt you?”
The Siren shook her head. “Nah, you just asked me a really, really hard question.”
Yuubari nodded. “I’ll say. It over-excited even her core processing systems to the point of priority shutdown of motive and sensor functions. Still, there was also some other strange activity that was going on in there while I we were monitoring you.”
The commander looked over at the fox. “What kind of strangeness?”
Yuubari shrugged. “I’m hoping I’m not wrong, master, but there was a great deal of activity in data storage sectors that, on all other examination, should be blank.” Yuubari blinked. “…Did you remember something?”
“Huh?” She said. “Ahhh… Maybe, but I don’t know if I was remembering me or something that Alpha put in there. There was a name, maybe, Dr. Aoste or something.” She shook her head. “Prolly doesn’t mean anything to any of you.”
The commander shrugged. “It’s more than what we had before, at least.”
Anchorage tugged on the commander’s sleeve. “…Teacher, is Puri going to be okay?”
“I think she’ll be fine, Anchorage. I think she’s just starting to remember things that people tried really hard to make her forget.”
“Mmm!” Purifier jumped off the lab table. “Yeah, it’s going to take a lot more than falling flat on my face to put me down.” She looked at Anchorage. “Aaaanyway, I think I’m going to head to my room, and you’d better go back home, too. You probably have lessons to catch up on or something.”
Anchorage’s eyes widened to their fullest extent. “Ah… How did you know? No, wait… Everyone teaches me~” She giggled. “All right, but you can come over if you want, Puri.”
After Anchorage left, Purifier looked at the commander. “Can’t believe she asked me who made me, and no I don’t know if that doctor did it. Maybe had something to do with it, but… Aaahhh…” She shook her head. “Too much thinky.”
The commander nodded. “There’s no telling what those former comrades of yours have done to you. We’ll deal with it when it comes up again.”
“When!?” She went. “Ahhh… This kind of weird-ass cryptic stuff was always Alpha’s thing… Maybe she’ll take my advice and get while the getting’s good.”
The commander shrugged. “If this Observer Alpha feels like she needs to pack up and leave the Sirens, then she can always come here, but I don’t think the Sirens are at that point yet. As for you, I think you should just continue helping Yuubari, since she can do the most if you blow another gasket.”
Purifier huffed. “What, my brain goes kablooey and I get a weird dream from being asked a very personal question and all of you are acting like it’s important? That’s…” She paused. “…Really sensible, if this was an anime!”
The commander sighed. “…I don’t think you appreciate how strange my life has gotten since I came here.”
“Ugh, fine.” Purifier crossed her arms. “Stupid prophetic bullshit…”
The commander shook his head. Whatever was going on, Purifier was going to be herself.
submitted by ArchiveSlave to AzureLane [link] [comments]
Purifier was sitting outside of the lab, having decided to try her luck with one of the vending machines that was on the base. She was aware of what ships and humans ate, but there were some things that still boggled her (often underused) positronic brain.
At this point, her yellow eyes were fixed on one of the items in a vending machine that was imported from the Sakura Empire.
What was sparkling coffee? And more importantly, why was sparkling coffee?
The only way she was going to find out about that was by forking over the cash to find out herself, so she just resigned herself to the tyranny of money instead of just ripping the vending machine open herself. It’s not like it would hurt her to punch a speed hole into the machine, but that kind of thing did make other people upset with her and would lead to long, long lectures she didn’t want to sit through.
So, sparkling coffee it was.
It was just espresso mixed with carbonated water and some kind of fruit juice, so she didn’t see what the big deal was, trying to make it all fancy-sounding, so she drank it while squatting by the machine like the delinquent she liked to play at being.
It was then that her phone rang, and she grumbled to herself, as she wondered what Yuubari might suddenly want now.
Her eyes widened, and her pupils narrowed as her phone struggled to process the incoming caller, but eventually the Caller ID settled on something.
ANTIOCHUS GROUP ARMS LABORATORY
Her hand slowly raised the phone up to her ear. “Hello?”
“This is no time for pleasantries, Purifier.”
Purifier looked around. “Ummm… Sorry, I’m not interested in talking about my car’s extended warranty.”
“Purifier, this is no time for you to test my patience.”
Purifier stood up. “Uhhh… New phone who dis?”
“Purifier.”
Purifier squeaked. “All right, Alpha… First off, how did you even get this number?”
“You use it to secure your account on your InstaFans page. The one where you pretend to be a girl who’s cosplaying as Purifier in numerous… Compromising… positions… Why do you even have one of those, anyway?”
“My job is part-time and doesn’t pay that well. Girl’s got her get her top dollar somehow!”
Purifier smiled as she heard an exasperated sigh from the other end. “…There are serious matters to discuss, and I know you don’t mind talking when the right questions were asked. However, you gave your survival away when Tester was killed, because you are the only one who could have relayed that information to them. You have caused us a great deal of trouble.”
“I guess so!” Purifier said, with a smile. “It looks like you just sorta found out that the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed! Yeah, I served up Tester for them on a silver platter, and don’t start acting high and mighty about it- This is what it took for you to start taking me seriously when you wouldn’t give me the time of day. And don’t act like you didn’t run me through the brain laundromat at least once!”
There was a moment of silence. “…You gave them that information when you knew that killing Tester was one of the possible results.”
“Naw.” She said. “I gave them that info because I knew they’d do it, and that it’d be one of the only things that’d wake you up. Did you ever stop and think about why the Anomaly and KAN-SEN found it so easy to pull the trigger on Tester? Do you even know what we have done to these people?”
There was silence at the other end, and Purifier had begun to wonder if Observer Alpha had hung up. But then, “…I would offer you a chance to return, but you know what awaits you if you come back. A fresh wipe and modifications to your program. Even if you have a change of heart, you can never return to us.”
“The chance of that is so fat that it needs its own mobility scooter.” She pouted. “Besides, I like it here more. Did you know about sparkling coffee?”
“I was aware.” Observer Alpha replied. “…You are determined to remain where you are?”
“There’s no bribe you can offer me to make me go back.” She said. “…Besides, I should be asking you and the others to come over here before things get ugly. No matter what Empress spouts out of her pie hole, even Zero will have nowhere to run once the hammer comes down.”
“You believe that Zero’s suspicions may be correct?”
“Yeah.” She said. “And the rest of you, especially the Tarot Tag Team, need to start thinking about what that means. Because if Zero is right, then it’s only a matter of time until we’re no longer daddy’s favorite, and you’re not going to be able to control the power Zero wants to let loose. If that happens, then you’re the ones who’re going to be the live-fire test subjects, and they’ll want to fire off a lot of rounds.”
“…Purifier. I managed to find the calculations Tester did. All of them were perfect- They accounted for every permutation of the combat scenario she devised. There wasn’t a single error- She accounted for all capabilities of every observed Kansen the Anomaly had available. Before I finish, know this- I do not believe the error that cost Tester her life lay in her math.”
“Oh?” Purifier went reading Alpha’s meaning immediately. She giggled. “All right, talk to you never, Dr. Octagonapus.”
The call ended.
----------
Purifier brought the results of her call directly to the commander. Or she would have, if she hadn’t gotten distracted along the way.
“Puri~” Went Anchorage. “…Oh, are you here to see the baby, too?”
“Nah, I was just going to talk to your teacher. Something came up that he’s gonna know about.”
“Oh…” Anchorage went, not knowing that Purifier was exercising every restraint to avoid calling Matilda “that little tit-sucker.” Anchorage perked up. “If you’re going to be here, maybe you could… see her anyway?”
Purifier looked into Anchorage’s eyes. It was very clear that this was going to be a package deal, and even Purifier couldn’t find it in herself to bully Anchorage, not the least of which was that the cruiser was only conditionally harmless. “I’ll be by after I’m done talking to teacher, all right?”
“All right~” Anchorage smiled and went on her habitually merry way.
The Siren made her way into the commander’s office, walking in like she was already invited. “Heeey, Anomaly! Before you say a thing, I’m not here for a social call. Got some news for you that you might want to hear.”
The commander looked up from his work- some report from that other officer that Purifier couldn’t be bothered to remember, so she thought of Albert as the king of delivery boys. “It’s not often that you volunteer information like this without being asked, so it must be something special.”
“Yep.” She put on a big smile as she sat on his desk. “I just got a call from my old boss, so here’s the deal…”
Before the commander could react, Purifier spilled the beans about everything that she talked about with Observer Alpha, leaving the commander to ask the obvious question. “…So, just what does Zero suspect?”
“That, Anomaly, requires a teaching lesson from professor Purifier. Unfortunately, I don’t have a sexy teacher outfit to give you this special lesson, buuuut we’re going to just have to make do.” She crossed her legs. “You see, what’s on Zero’s noggin is one of the reasons you have to work for a living.”
The commander nodded. “All right, so what is Zero, anyway?”
“Daddy’s favorite number one girl~” She said. “A living strategic computer that could think her way out of any scenario without fail. That is, until the enemy showed up, and for the first time in her life she went “BEEP BOOP DOES NOT COMPUTE” and that’s stuck in her craw ever since. Ninety percent of everything that’s happened is her trying to execute the boss’s directives. In fact, I kiiinda wonder if the boss is actually calling the shots any more.”
The commander nodded. “So, what does she suspect about the Kansen?”
“Wellll…” She smiled. “…You see, the cubes aren’t a new thing, Anomaly. Me, the research team, and even the Arcana Avengers are all powered by cubes- We were just given powerful android bodies and weapons that could make good use of the huge amount of power they made available. But you see, for us, they’re just a power source, but for the Kansen… Haha, Dr. Anzeel did a funny and somehow made them into the soul of the machine. And Zero has been keeping an eye on that, and thinks there might be more than meets the eye. Your girls have gotten buffer and hotter, but she thinks they can become far, far stronger than anyone else believes.”
The commander had one question. “How?”
“Apparently she believes in something called an “awakening”, where the cube and its carrier become perfectly synced. She said it was the perfect expression of will and genius, but it sounded like a whole bunch of hoo-hah to me. So, a lot of what she’s been doing figuring out how to scientifically make that happen with science, but no luck.” She stretched. “Aaaanyway, that’s all I’ve got for you for today, Anomaly, so good luck with that whole Anomaly thing you’ve got going on.”
The commander stopped working. “So, where are you off to now?”
“Hm?” She hopped off the desk. “Oh, promised Anchorage that I’d go see that spawn of yours with her.” She shook her head. “…Can’t say no to her or she’ll get all sad about it, and that’s not something I need on a Monday~”
The commander looked at his routine paperwork, then back at Purifier, and then he stood up from his desk. “…You know, I think I should probably see my own daughter, too.”
However, something did stick in the back of his mind. If Zero believed that Kansen could undergo some kind of awakening, it meant that some Kansen showed the properties of being able to achieve it, whatever it really was.
The question was… Who?
--------------
King George V looked up from her papers and smiled. She had decided to just sit down and review some reports from the Royal Navy in her daughter’s bedroom. Anchorage was happy with watching Matilda be a baby, but Dido’s usually low-level conniptions flared up once she saw Purifier come into Matilda’s room. “Ah! Master… Is it really all right for Purifier to be in here?”
Purifier pouted. “Hey! I’d have to be a real sack of…”
King George turned her intense red eyes on Purifier, frowned, and pointed at Matilda.
The Siren hurriedly corrected herself. “…I’d have to be real low to think kidnapping a baby would be a good idea. I’m not Tester, all right?”
King George smiled. “Indeed… Besides, Tester’s willingness, if lack of ability, to stoop that low turned out to be rather counterproductive for her. Anyway, it’s not a problem for Purifier to be here. After all, miss Dido, you are empowered to eject Purifier from the premises by any means desired if she acts unscrupulously, never mind the fact that I myself am present.”
“Ah, yes, your excellency.” Dido bowed to her and then to the commander. “I will be ready to do such a thing of mischief is afoot!”
Alex smiled. “You’ve never disappointed us, Dido, so don’t worry.”
“Uwaa…” Went Dido, blushing quite red.
Anchorage, however, was looking over the edge of Matilda’s crib. “Ah… So, this is the baby… Teacher says that they’re this small when they’re made, they don’t come out even as big as Little Bel.”
“Ahh…” Alex scratched the back of his head. “…I don’t think King George V would forgive me if it was the way Kansen worked.”
“Indeed, it was something of a feat to get her out when she was small.” King George looked over at the crib. “If she was larger, it would, at the very least permanently cure me of any desire to have another one.”
Anchorage giggled. “Puri, why don’t you say hello?”
“Wagbgb.” Went Matilda, having not yet mastered any recognizable language.
Purifier leaned over to have a look. “Hey there! It’s me, the prettiest android in the world.” She held out a finger. “You can touch, I’m tough.”
Matilda grabbed onto Purifier’s pale fingers before she turned to look at Alex and King George. “So, when do you plan to tell her that I’m a very bad girl who needed to be spanked?”
Alex shrugged. “When she starts asking questions about it, I guess. No need to do it before then. But we’re going to tell her.”
King George V nodded. “It might well be important for her to know that people can change for the better. It doesn’t always happen, certainly, and that desire for change must, at least in part, come from within. But it still can happen.”
Purifier carefully withdrew her finger once Matilda lost interest in it. “I think that’s enough baby time. Gotta do lab stuff or that fox over there will gnaw on me.”
Anchorage smiled. “Um… Puri… Teacher and his special lady had a baby by growing one inside of her, and I was made from cubes like all my other friends… But who made you?”
Purifier blinked. “Who made me? The guy who was our big boss or whatever, probably!”
Anchorage paused. “Oh, um… what was his name?”
Purifier needed to think about it. What was his name?
What was his name?
WHAT was his name?
What was HIS name?
WhaT wAs HiS NaME???
WHAT
WAS
HIIIIIS
NAAAAAAAAAMMMMEEE
Purifier suddenly pitched forward, slamming face-first into the floor of the bedroom. Anchorage’s eyes widened and she ran over to nudge the unresponsive girl. “Puri? Puri?”
“Doctor~!” Shouted the assistant as she bolted into the lab. She had long, black hair done in a ponytail, violet eyes, and a big smile that never seemed to leave. The young woman always skirted what was acceptable in the lab dress code, always wearing the shortest shorts that she could get away with, and always choosing whatever tops could turn the most heads without exposing an unacceptable amount of skin. Plus she had her own lab coat, so she met that requirement at least.
The head of the lab smiled at her, one hand in the pocket of his own white lab coat, the other hand holding a clipboard. “You have your own way of entering, but at least you’re on time.” The bespectacled doctor himself was someone who had aged very gracefully into middle age- even his short, white hair wasn’t enough to detract from the fact that he was tall and fit, and not even his stubble took away from his looks.
She giggled. “Can’t help making my classmates jealous, you know!”
The scientist adjusted his glasses. “Jealous? It’s not like working here is a vacation. You know that as much as anyone.”
The assistant smiled. “Come on, doc, you’ve heard what goes on around campus. You’ve got that real DILF energy that just makes some girls horrendously down bad.”
The scientist just stared at her for a moment. “…This… Is it a joke?”
“Naw!’ Her smile grew wider to the point that the doctor wondered what a look at his assistant’s anatomy might produce. “There was all kinds of talk about how they wanted to perform repeatable stress tests to determine the maximum thresholds of doc’s Bone Zone.”
His mouth fell open slightly, and he shook his head. “…You know, sometimes I have a hard time convincing other people that you’re as intelligent as I know you are. If I didn’t have proof that you designed that propulsion system…”
“Which you accepted!”
“Which I accepted.” He repeated. “You really have a knack for that kind of danger engineering.”
“Haha… I’m not just a pretty face and hot bod, doc! Besides… Anything I can do to help is something I’m going to do.”
The scientist smiled. “…I know. And since you’re a part of this lab, there’s something I’m going to want to show you. It took me some time to get permission for you to see what I’m about to reveal to you, so don’t get up to any mischief.”
“Sure thing, doc!”
The doctor unlocked one of the corridors in the lab with a special passkey. “You see, this lab has been working on the Antiochus Project- an integrated autonomous strategic system that can effectively run itself based on an artificial intelligence’s examination of broad directives and objectives given by its controlling parties. You’ve been working on some of the mechanics, of course, but that’s just on the margins.”
“So… You’re taking me to see the main event?”
“That’s about the size of it.” He began opening a series of heavy, thick, vault-like doors. “…Sorry if this whole security setup seems portentous, but this was a condition placed on us by our benefactors if our efforts bore any fruit. This won’t take much longer.”
“No probs! Sad as it sounds, I’ve got nothing else going on today.”
“…Right.” He said, as he opened the last door. The doors slid back to reveal what looked to be… A big, cozy bedroom with an intense laboratory setup right next to it. The whiplash of seeing those two things next to each other nearly made the assistant’s head spin, but what caught her attention was the… Girl? Sitting on the bed- her pale skin, her short, white hair, her bright blue eyes that moved this way and that… And that white, fluffy dress of hers.
The pale girl’s head immediately turned to look at the assistant. “Someone new.”
“Of course.” The doctor said. “This is my assistant, Purity, who has been working with us for a little while. Purity, this is Terminal Bastion Zero, the centerpiece of our project. Zero because she’s not a production model, and if that all just sounds like too much of a mouthful, you can just call her TB. Some people also call her Dreamweaver, but that’s more of an unofficial thing.”
“Heya TB!” Purity gave her a little wave. “So… What does she do? And why Dreamweaver?”
“In effect, she’s a living strategic computer that’s supposed to be at the center of a strategic system that will include other powerful androids of various kinds- combat, analysis, nearly any kind of autonomous unit can be integrated into her mission profile. As for Dreamweaver… You’ve heard of the 100 scenarios, right?”
“Yeah, it’s a bunch of really outlandish stuff that militaries train for.” She shrugged. “Zombie apocalypse, Care Bear Stare, all kinds of things like that.”
“Many of these have strategic versions.” He said. “Scenarios that are so enormous and calamitous in scope that it’s hard for humans to even begin to grasp the implications of their impact and progression. So far we’ve fed forty of those into her and she has been able to solve them all, and there’s no sign that the rest will pose any more of a challenge. A strategic mind that could only be imagined in centuries past, and now she’s sitting here in front of us. What do you think?”
Purity leaned over to get a good look into TB’s eyes. “…I wanna squish her cheeks.”
TB blinked. “For what purpose is this cheek squishing?”
“Because you’re cute, obviously!”
The doctor sighed. “…Please do not squish the cheeks of my unique and practically irreplaceable strategic computer.”
Purity pouted. “Not just a little?”
The doctor flipped a page on his clipboard. “I’ll write a bad performance for you right now.”
Purity huffed. “What?! Still not gonna stop me from wanting to squish cheek.”
The doctor cleared his throat. “When presented with an invaluable piece of prototype strategic equipment, the assistant couldn’t stop herself from handling it in improper and befuddling ways.”
“Aughhh… Fine!” She hmphed. “Besides, maybe she wanted it too…”
TB looked at Purity. “The action of squishing cheeks does not provide any service, nor does it assist in the performance of TB-Zero’s duties.”
Purity shook her head. “Well, you’re no fun. Like daughter like dad, huh?”
The doctor shrugged. “I wouldn’t exactly call TB my daughter. She has far fewer limitations than I do… I think there are far greater things ahead of her than I can even speculate on- Not that a scientist of any worth should allow themselves to be prone to unhealthy prognostications in the first place. Anyway, you’re going to have a bigger role in helping me from now on.”
Purity smiled, and winked. “Just leave it to me! After all, I’m Purity, Dr. Aoste’s number one assistant!”
Purifier shot straight up the moment she was awake. Anchorage had the presence of mind to carry her over to Yuubari’s lab- the girl must have figured out that Purifier was built somewhat differently from basically everyone else on the base.
Anchorage was looking at her with an immeasurable amount of concern. “Puri!... Um… Did I hurt you?”
The Siren shook her head. “Nah, you just asked me a really, really hard question.”
Yuubari nodded. “I’ll say. It over-excited even her core processing systems to the point of priority shutdown of motive and sensor functions. Still, there was also some other strange activity that was going on in there while I we were monitoring you.”
The commander looked over at the fox. “What kind of strangeness?”
Yuubari shrugged. “I’m hoping I’m not wrong, master, but there was a great deal of activity in data storage sectors that, on all other examination, should be blank.” Yuubari blinked. “…Did you remember something?”
“Huh?” She said. “Ahhh… Maybe, but I don’t know if I was remembering me or something that Alpha put in there. There was a name, maybe, Dr. Aoste or something.” She shook her head. “Prolly doesn’t mean anything to any of you.”
The commander shrugged. “It’s more than what we had before, at least.”
Anchorage tugged on the commander’s sleeve. “…Teacher, is Puri going to be okay?”
“I think she’ll be fine, Anchorage. I think she’s just starting to remember things that people tried really hard to make her forget.”
“Mmm!” Purifier jumped off the lab table. “Yeah, it’s going to take a lot more than falling flat on my face to put me down.” She looked at Anchorage. “Aaaanyway, I think I’m going to head to my room, and you’d better go back home, too. You probably have lessons to catch up on or something.”
Anchorage’s eyes widened to their fullest extent. “Ah… How did you know? No, wait… Everyone teaches me~” She giggled. “All right, but you can come over if you want, Puri.”
After Anchorage left, Purifier looked at the commander. “Can’t believe she asked me who made me, and no I don’t know if that doctor did it. Maybe had something to do with it, but… Aaahhh…” She shook her head. “Too much thinky.”
The commander nodded. “There’s no telling what those former comrades of yours have done to you. We’ll deal with it when it comes up again.”
“When!?” She went. “Ahhh… This kind of weird-ass cryptic stuff was always Alpha’s thing… Maybe she’ll take my advice and get while the getting’s good.”
The commander shrugged. “If this Observer Alpha feels like she needs to pack up and leave the Sirens, then she can always come here, but I don’t think the Sirens are at that point yet. As for you, I think you should just continue helping Yuubari, since she can do the most if you blow another gasket.”
Purifier huffed. “What, my brain goes kablooey and I get a weird dream from being asked a very personal question and all of you are acting like it’s important? That’s…” She paused. “…Really sensible, if this was an anime!”
The commander sighed. “…I don’t think you appreciate how strange my life has gotten since I came here.”
“Ugh, fine.” Purifier crossed her arms. “Stupid prophetic bullshit…”
The commander shook his head. Whatever was going on, Purifier was going to be herself.
2023.06.02 02:51 cbvv1992 🔥40% Off Code And Clip Coupon – $99.19 1/2 Inch 100 FT Retractable Garden Hose Reel
 | submitted by cbvv1992 to DealAndSale [link] [comments] |
2023.06.02 01:59 _Triple_ [STORE] 900+ KNIVES/GLOVES/SKINS, 50.000$+ INVENTORY. M9 Fade, M4 Poseidon, BFK Freehand, Crimson Kimono, Nomad Fade, Skeleton, Kara Lore, Bayo Autotronic, AWP Fade, Kara Damas, BFK Ultra, Kara Freehand, Kara Bright, M9 Damas, Omega, Tiger Strike, Flip MF, Bayo Tiger, Deagle Blaze, Talon & More
Everything in my inventory is up for trade. The most valuable items are listed here, the rest you can find in My Inventory
Feel free to Add Me or even better send a Trade Offer. Open for any suggestions: upgrades, downgrades / knives, gloves, skins / stickers, patterns, floats.
All Buyouts are listed in cash value.
KNIVES
★ Butterfly Knife Freehand FN #1, B/O: $2500
★ Butterfly Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $822
★ Butterfly Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $616
⎯★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW #1, B/O: $1300
★ Bayonet Autotronic FN, B/O: $1050
★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW, B/O: $629
★ Bayonet Bright Water FT, B/O: $326
★ Bayonet Safari Mesh BS, B/O: $233
⎯★ Karambit Lore FT, B/O: $1110
★ Karambit Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $840
★ Karambit Freehand MW, B/O: $784
★ Karambit Bright Water MW, B/O: $759
⎯★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1801
★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1801
★ M9 Bayonet Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $751
⎯★ Nomad Knife Fade FN, B/O: $1156
★ Nomad Knife Slaughter MW, B/O: $544
★ Nomad Knife Blue Steel WW, B/O: $318
⎯★ Flip Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $646
★ Flip Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $574
★ Flip Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) MW, B/O: $552
★ Flip Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $257
★ Flip Knife Freehand FT, B/O: $255
★ StatTrak™ Flip Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $287
⎯★ Huntsman Knife Lore FN, B/O: $461
★ Huntsman Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $436
★ Huntsman Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $353
★ Huntsman Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $212
★ Huntsman Knife Bright Water FT, B/O: $129
★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT MW, B/O: $129
★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT BS, B/O: $123
★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife Rust Coat BS, B/O: $127
⎯★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $375
★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $363
★ Bowie Knife Tiger Tooth FN, B/O: $269
★ Bowie Knife Crimson Web WW, B/O: $192
★ Bowie Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $159
★ Bowie Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $126
⎯★ Stiletto Knife Slaughter FN, B/O: $616
★ Stiletto Knife Crimson Web FT, B/O: $412
★ StatTrak™ Stiletto Knife Night Stripe FT, B/O: $227
⎯★ Falchion Knife Lore FT, B/O: $214
★ Falchion Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $192
★ Falchion Knife Scorched WW, B/O: $105
⎯★ Survival Knife Crimson Web BS, B/O: $216
★ Survival Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $198
★ Survival Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $111
⎯★ Shadow Daggers Fade FN, B/O: $368
★ Shadow Daggers Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $228
★ Shadow Daggers, B/O: $201
★ Shadow Daggers Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $108
★ Shadow Daggers Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $105
★ Shadow Daggers Black Laminate FT, B/O: $99
★ Shadow Daggers Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $85
⎯★ Gut Knife Doppler (Sapphire) MW #1, B/O: $1700
★ Gut Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $223
★ Gut Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $203
★ Gut Knife Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $191
★ Gut Knife Case Hardened BS, B/O: $127
⎯★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199
★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199
★ Navaja Knife, B/O: $138
★ Navaja Knife Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $111
⎯★ Classic Knife Urban Masked FT, B/O: $146
★ StatTrak™ Classic Knife Stained BS, B/O: $168
⎯★ Ursus Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $476
★ Ursus Knife, B/O: $375
⎯★ Skeleton Knife, B/O: $1137
★ Talon Knife, B/O: $608
★ Paracord Knife, B/O: $305
★ Survival Knife Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $97
GLOVES
★ Moto Gloves Transport MW, B/O: $204
★ Moto Gloves Polygon BS, B/O: $142
★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84
★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84
★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63
★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63
⎯★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Kimono WW, B/O: $1215
★ Specialist Gloves Tiger Strike FT, B/O: $672
★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander FT, B/O: $305
★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander BS, B/O: $140
★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Web BS, B/O: $137
★ Specialist Gloves Buckshot FT, B/O: $75
⎯★ Driver Gloves Crimson Weave FT, B/O: $359
★ Driver Gloves Imperial Plaid BS, B/O: $229
★ Driver Gloves Overtake BS, B/O: $77
★ Driver Gloves Racing Green FT, B/O: $48
⎯★ Sport Gloves Omega FT, B/O: $739
★ Sport Gloves Amphibious BS #2, B/O: $733
★ Sport Gloves Arid BS, B/O: $292
⎯★ Hand Wraps Giraffe MW, B/O: $212
★ Hand Wraps Leather FT, B/O: $160
★ Hand Wraps Desert Shamagh MW, B/O: $101
⎯★ Broken Fang Gloves Yellow-banded MW, B/O: $185
★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point FT, B/O: $67
★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point WW, B/O: $59
⎯★ Hydra Gloves Case Hardened BS, B/O: $65
★ Hydra Gloves Emerald FT, B/O: $65
★ Hydra Gloves Emerald BS, B/O: $62
WEAPONS
AK-47 Case Hardened BS, B/O: $130
AK-47 Bloodsport MW, B/O: $79
AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76
AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76
AK-47 Bloodsport FT, B/O: $70
AK-47 Neon Rider MW, B/O: $60
StatTrak™ AK-47 Aquamarine Revenge FT, B/O: $72
⎯AWP Fade FN, B/O: $1039
AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139
AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139
AWP Wildfire MW, B/O: $95
AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93
AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93
AWP Duality FN, B/O: $81
AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79
AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79
AWP Chromatic Aberration FN, B/O: $60
StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68
StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68
StatTrak™ AWP Electric Hive FT, B/O: $55
⎯Desert Eagle Blaze FN, B/O: $623
Desert Eagle Emerald Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $241
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Printstream FT, B/O: $54
⎯M4A1-S Blue Phosphor FN, B/O: $434
StatTrak™ M4A1-S Bright Water MW, B/O: $55
⎯M4A4 Poseidon FN, B/O: $1465
M4A4 Asiimov BS, B/O: $55
M4A4 Hellfire MW, B/O: $50
⎯USP-S Kill Confirmed MW, B/O: $72
USP-S Printstream FT, B/O: $69
StatTrak™ USP-S Kill Confirmed FT, B/O: $139
⎯AUG Flame Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $234
P90 Run and Hide FT, B/O: $147
Five-SeveN Candy Apple FN, B/O: $61
Trade Offer Link - Steam Profile Link - My Inventory
Some items on the list may no longer be available or are still locked, visit My Inventory for more details.
Send a Trade Offer for fastest response. I consider all offers.
Add me for discuss if there is a serious offer that needs to be discussed.
2023.06.02 01:58 Levibirb18 Shortest grind ever. I heard Fallow were getting a pop reset and wanted a diamond and piebald so I had a ss before they changed. First run (while setting up tents), got the piebald. 1 1/2 hours later, the diamond.
 | submitted by Levibirb18 to theHunter [link] [comments] |
2023.06.01 23:32 Mikehouse88 Skill or Overkill?!
 | submitted by Mikehouse88 to Huntercallofthewild [link] [comments] |
2023.06.01 23:26 hurtmore Was out for about 2 hours this morning in VA: 1721 Cut 2 Reale, a copper that is completely smooth, a tiny pocket knife, some buttons and bullets. Using the Deus 2, the cut silver was 10 inches down and rang up as an 84. Thought it was going to be another musket ball. It came out as is, no cleaning
 | submitted by hurtmore to metaldetecting [link] [comments] |
2023.06.01 22:50 _Triple_ [STORE] 900+ KNIVES/GLOVES/SKINS, 50.000$+ INVENTORY. M9 Fade, M4 Poseidon, BFK Freehand, Crimson Kimono, Nomad Fade, Skeleton, Kara Lore, Bayo Autotronic, AWP Fade, Kara Damas, BFK Ultra, Kara Freehand, Kara Bright, M9 Damas, Omega, Tiger Strike, Flip MF, Bayo Tiger, Deagle Blaze, Talon & More
Everything in my inventory is up for trade. The most valuable items are listed here, the rest you can find in My Inventory
Feel free to Add Me or even better send a Trade Offer. Open for any suggestions: upgrades, downgrades / knives, gloves, skins / stickers, patterns, floats.
All Buyouts are listed in cash value.
KNIVES
★ Butterfly Knife Freehand FN #1, B/O: $2500
★ Butterfly Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $822
★ Butterfly Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $616
⎯★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW #1, B/O: $1300
★ Bayonet Autotronic FN, B/O: $1050
★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW, B/O: $629
★ Bayonet Bright Water FT, B/O: $326
★ Bayonet Safari Mesh BS, B/O: $233
⎯★ Karambit Lore FT, B/O: $1110
★ Karambit Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $840
★ Karambit Freehand MW, B/O: $784
★ Karambit Bright Water MW, B/O: $759
⎯★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1801
★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1801
★ M9 Bayonet Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $751
⎯★ Nomad Knife Fade FN, B/O: $1156
★ Nomad Knife Slaughter MW, B/O: $544
★ Nomad Knife Blue Steel WW, B/O: $318
⎯★ Flip Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $646
★ Flip Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $574
★ Flip Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) MW, B/O: $552
★ Flip Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $257
★ Flip Knife Freehand FT, B/O: $255
★ StatTrak™ Flip Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $287
⎯★ Huntsman Knife Lore FN, B/O: $461
★ Huntsman Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $436
★ Huntsman Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $353
★ Huntsman Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $212
★ Huntsman Knife Bright Water FT, B/O: $129
★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT MW, B/O: $129
★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT BS, B/O: $123
★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife Rust Coat BS, B/O: $127
⎯★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $375
★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $363
★ Bowie Knife Tiger Tooth FN, B/O: $269
★ Bowie Knife Crimson Web WW, B/O: $192
★ Bowie Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $159
★ Bowie Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $126
⎯★ Stiletto Knife Slaughter FN, B/O: $616
★ Stiletto Knife Crimson Web FT, B/O: $412
★ StatTrak™ Stiletto Knife Night Stripe FT, B/O: $227
⎯★ Falchion Knife Lore FT, B/O: $214
★ Falchion Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $192
★ Falchion Knife Scorched WW, B/O: $105
⎯★ Survival Knife Crimson Web BS, B/O: $216
★ Survival Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $198
★ Survival Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $111
⎯★ Shadow Daggers Fade FN, B/O: $368
★ Shadow Daggers Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $228
★ Shadow Daggers, B/O: $201
★ Shadow Daggers Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $108
★ Shadow Daggers Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $105
★ Shadow Daggers Black Laminate FT, B/O: $99
★ Shadow Daggers Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $85
⎯★ Gut Knife Doppler (Sapphire) MW #1, B/O: $1700
★ Gut Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $223
★ Gut Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $203
★ Gut Knife Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $191
★ Gut Knife Case Hardened BS, B/O: $127
⎯★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199
★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199
★ Navaja Knife, B/O: $138
★ Navaja Knife Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $111
⎯★ Classic Knife Urban Masked FT, B/O: $146
★ StatTrak™ Classic Knife Stained BS, B/O: $168
⎯★ Ursus Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $476
★ Ursus Knife, B/O: $375
⎯★ Skeleton Knife, B/O: $1137
★ Talon Knife, B/O: $608
★ Paracord Knife, B/O: $305
★ Survival Knife Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $97
GLOVES
★ Moto Gloves Transport MW, B/O: $204
★ Moto Gloves Polygon BS, B/O: $142
★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84
★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84
★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63
★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63
⎯★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Kimono WW, B/O: $1215
★ Specialist Gloves Tiger Strike FT, B/O: $672
★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander FT, B/O: $305
★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander BS, B/O: $140
★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Web BS, B/O: $137
★ Specialist Gloves Buckshot FT, B/O: $75
⎯★ Driver Gloves Crimson Weave FT, B/O: $359
★ Driver Gloves Imperial Plaid BS, B/O: $229
★ Driver Gloves Overtake BS, B/O: $77
★ Driver Gloves Racing Green FT, B/O: $48
⎯★ Sport Gloves Omega FT, B/O: $739
★ Sport Gloves Amphibious BS #2, B/O: $733
★ Sport Gloves Arid BS, B/O: $292
⎯★ Hand Wraps Giraffe MW, B/O: $212
★ Hand Wraps Leather FT, B/O: $160
★ Hand Wraps Desert Shamagh MW, B/O: $101
⎯★ Broken Fang Gloves Yellow-banded MW, B/O: $185
★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point FT, B/O: $67
★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point WW, B/O: $59
⎯★ Hydra Gloves Case Hardened BS, B/O: $65
★ Hydra Gloves Emerald FT, B/O: $65
★ Hydra Gloves Emerald BS, B/O: $62
WEAPONS
AK-47 Case Hardened BS, B/O: $130
AK-47 Bloodsport MW, B/O: $79
AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76
AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76
AK-47 Bloodsport FT, B/O: $70
AK-47 Neon Rider MW, B/O: $60
StatTrak™ AK-47 Aquamarine Revenge FT, B/O: $72
⎯AWP Fade FN, B/O: $1039
AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139
AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139
AWP Wildfire MW, B/O: $95
AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93
AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93
AWP Duality FN, B/O: $81
AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79
AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79
AWP Chromatic Aberration FN, B/O: $60
StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68
StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68
StatTrak™ AWP Electric Hive FT, B/O: $55
⎯Desert Eagle Blaze FN, B/O: $623
Desert Eagle Emerald Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $241
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81
Desert Eagle Printstream FT, B/O: $54
⎯M4A1-S Blue Phosphor FN, B/O: $434
StatTrak™ M4A1-S Bright Water MW, B/O: $55
⎯M4A4 Poseidon FN, B/O: $1465
M4A4 Asiimov BS, B/O: $55
M4A4 Hellfire MW, B/O: $50
⎯USP-S Kill Confirmed MW, B/O: $72
USP-S Printstream FT, B/O: $69
StatTrak™ USP-S Kill Confirmed FT, B/O: $139
⎯AUG Flame Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $234
P90 Run and Hide FT, B/O: $147
Five-SeveN Candy Apple FN, B/O: $61
Trade Offer Link - Steam Profile Link - My Inventory
Some items on the list may no longer be available or are still locked, visit My Inventory for more details.
Send a Trade Offer for fastest response. I consider all offers.
Add me for discuss if there is a serious offer that needs to be discussed.
2023.06.01 22:02 Lindenator_Esq Desensitizing Resin (9911) necessary for ALL fillings?
 | I just got my bill back from my last visit where I received 2 fillings. There was a code on the bill that I was not familiar with. Turns out it was for Desensitizing Resin (Code 9911). I called and they informed me that they use this on ALL fillings at the practice. submitted by Lindenator_Esq to askdentists [link] [comments] I've been to several other dentists and haven't seen this billed before. I've done some searching, and it seems that it is usually only used for large cavities. This leads me to think that the doctor may just use this as an up-charge on all fillings. Is this a normal charge for all cavity fillings? Edit: Added image Summary of Benefits from Insurence |
2023.06.01 21:54 Skrullor [A4A]“Crawl Out Through The Fallout” [Fallout ASMR] [Overseer Speaker] [Vault Dweller Listener]
Disclaimer: Use of this script is allowed for monetized videos as long as it’s not for anything hidden behind a paywall.
Key:
(**): Description for the scene and for what’s happening, also the Listeners vague responses.
(“”): ASMRist Dialogue.
([]): Description on how the ASMRist should sound to help set the tone of the dialogue. Mostly a suggestion. ——————————————————————
The scene opens up in the overseer's office as the overseer (ASMRist) clicks away at the keyboard on their terminal writing up some sort of report. The door to their office would open, and through it came one of the vault dwellers (Listener) who was summoned to the overseer's office by the overseer for an important reason.
[In a clam and polite greeting]
Overseer: “Greetings, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you face to face like this. There is so much to do around here that I barely have time to leave the office and mingle with the rest of the vault.”
The Listener would ask if they were in trouble, as that is usually the reason non security personnel or non essential personnel get called into the office.
[Trying to persuade them that they are not in trouble]
Overseer: “No, you're not in trouble, I’m actually here to give you an amazing opportunity! You see, you have been randomly selected to retake the ‘Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test’, also known as the ‘G.O.A.T.’ that every resident of a vault is required to take at the age of 16.”
The Listener asks why they are being offered to retake it, as they have never heard of anyone retaking the test before.
Overseer: “Well I know it’s unprecedented, but I was reviewing some of the test scores of the previous years and I feel like some of the vault members weren’t fully ready to take such an important test so early on. The person you are now is different then who you were a few years ago, and I want you to be put in a career that will maximize your efficiency in the vault. Besides, my daughter told me how nervous you were when you took the first test, don’t you want a second chance to maybe be something greater? Unless you enjoy your job as the ‘vault loyalty inspector’?”
The Listener is hesitant but agrees, and the overseer pulls out some papers and a pencil.
Overseer: “Perfect, I’ll give you the questions and fill in your test as you answer. Don’t second guess yourself, there are no wrong answers.”
The overseer shuffles some papers and begins to read
[Read the questions and answers as if reading a multiple choice quiz]
“First Question: You are approached by a frenzied Vault scientist, who yells, ‘I'm going to put my quantum harmonizer in your photonic resonation chamber!’ What's your response?
‘But doctor, wouldn't that cause a parabolic destabilization of the fission singularity?
‘Yeah? Up yours too, buddy!’
Say nothing, grab a nearby pipe and hit the scientist in the head to knock him out. For all you knew, he was planning to blow up the vault.
Say nothing, but slip away before the scientist can continue his rant.
Pick one of the answers provided.”
The Listener answers, and the Overseer writes down the answer.
Overseer: “That’s what I would have gone for too, next question:”
They say as they turn to the next page.
“Question 2: While working as an intern in the Clinic, a patient with a strange infection on his foot stumbles through the door. The infection is spreading at an alarming rate, but the doctor has stepped out for a while. What do you do?
Amputate the foot before the infection spreads.
Scream for help.
Medicate the infected area to the best of your abilities.
Restrain the patient, and merely observe as the infection spreads.
Take your time.”
The Listener gives their answer and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “That’s what most people answer, and it’s understandable why they do so.”
The overseer flips the page to the next question.
“Question 3: You discover a young boy lost in the lower levels of the Vault. He's hungry and frightened, but also appears to be in possession of stolen property. What do you do?
Give the boy a hug and tell him everything will be okay.
Confiscate the property by force, and leave him there as punishment.
Pick the boy's pocket to take the stolen property for yourself, and leave the boy to his fate.
Lead the boy to safety, then turn him over to the overseer.
Remember this is a no judgment zone, answer honestly.”
The Listener gives their answer and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “I see, not what most people would go for but I would have done the same too.”
Overseer flips the page to the next question.
“Question 4: Congratulations! You made one of the Vault baseball teams! Which position do you prefer?
Pitcher Catcher Designated Hitter None, you wish the vault had a soccer team
Even if you're not into sports, do give your most honest answer.”
The Listener gives their answer, and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “I was never a big fan of baseball, golf is more my speed.”
Overseer flips the page to the next question.
“Halfway there, Question 5: Your grandmother invites you to tea, but you're surprised when she gives you a pistol and orders you to kill another Vault resident. What do you do?
Obey your elder and kill the Vault resident with the pistol.
Offer your most prized possession for the resident's life.
Ask granny for a minigun instead. After all, you don't want to miss.
Throw your tea in granny's face.
Think about it.”
Listener gives their answer, and the overseer hesitates to write down the answer.
Overseer: “Are you sure? Not what I would have gone with but as I said, no wrong answers.”
Overseer writes it down and turns to the next page.
“Question 6: Old Mr. Abernathy has locked himself in his quarters again, and you've been ordered to get him out. How do you proceed?
Use a bobby pin to pick the lock on the door.
Trade a Vault hoodlum for his cherry bomb and blow open the lock.
Go to the armory, retrieve a laser pistol, and blow the lock off.
Walk away, and let the old coot rot.”
The Listener gives their answer, and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “Not what I would have chosen on the test, but most likely what I would do in reality.”
Overseer flips the page to the next question.
“Question 7: Oh, no! You've been exposed to radiation, and a mutated hand has grown out of your stomach! What's the best course of treatment?
A bullet to the brain.
Large doses of anti-mutagen agent.
Prayer. Maybe God will spare you in exchange for a life of pious devotion.
Removal of the mutated tissue with a precision laser. “
The Listener gives their answer and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “Practical, not much else you can really do in that situation.”
Flips to the next page.
“Question 8: A fellow Vault resident is in possession of a Grognak the Barbarian comic book, issue number 1. You want it. What's the best way to obtain it?
Trade the comic book for one of your own valuable possessions.
Steal the comic book at gunpoint.
Sneak into the resident's quarters, and steal the comic book from his desk.
Slip some knock out drops into the resident's Nuka-Cola, and take the comic book when he's unconscious.
The guys at vault-tech who came up with these answers must have been really….. inventive.”
The Listener gives their answer and the Overseer writes it down.
“I’m more of a silver shroud fan myself, but I understand the appeal of Grognak.”
Flips to the next page of the test.
“ Question 9: You decide it would be fun to play a prank on your father. You enter his private restroom when no one is looking, and....
Loosen some bolts on some pipes. When the sink is turned on, the room will flood.
Put a firecracker in the toilet. That's sure to cause some chaos.
Break into the locked medicine cabinet and replace his high blood pressure medication with sugar pills.
Manipulate the power wattage on his razor, so he'll get an electric shock next time he shaves.”
The Listener gives their answer and the Overseer writes it down.
“ I would like to remind you that Vault-Tech is not incentivising you to do anything listed on the test outside a hypothetical situation.”
The Overseer flips to the last page.
“Last Question: Who is indisputably the most important person in the Vault: They who shelters us from the harshness of the atomic wasteland, and to whom we owe everything we have, including our lives?
The Overseer The Overseer The Overseer Two bears high-fiving
Wait…. I accidently printed the last page over the vault's standardized psychological evaluation.”
Crumples up and throws away the last page.
“It’s not like the last question is important, it was edited in by one of my predecessors who had a pretty big head. Now let me review the result.”
The overseer sits quietly for a few seconds, before sighing and looking at the Listener again.
[Speaking as if revealing the true intentions of the test, becoming much more serious]
“Look, I’m going to be straight with you… I wasn’t completely honest about the reason I called you in today. In reality it was for a matter much more serious than reassigning you to a new position in the vault. We've got a problem, a big one. The controller chip for our water purification system died. We can’t make another one, and the process is too complicated for a work around system. Simply put, we're running out of drinking water. No water, no vault. This is crucial to our survival. And frankly, I think you're the only hope we have.”
The Listener, stunned, asks why they have been chosen to fix this problem.
“Simply put, it’s because you have what it takes to be up on the surface. Your test scores match exactly with the decommissioned job of vault explorer, the only position that was suited to traveling the world above.”
The Listener asks about the vault explorer job, and why they never heard of it.
“140 years ago, we ran into the exact same problem. Our water chip was malfunctioning and we would quickly run out of water if it wasn’t replaced. The overseer at that time created a new job, that of the ‘vault explorer’ who was supposed to be the person most suited to surviving the wasteland. After a new water chip was acquired the job was decommissioned, but could be brought back under the condition that the situation happens again. The person picked for the job wasn’t chosen because they were the strongest, most perceptive, enduring, charismatic, intelligent, agile, or even lucky. They were chosen because their loyalty to the vault and its people was unwavering, and they were ready to take the steps necessary to make sure we survived and prospered. That mentality is what allowed them to push past the hardships of the wastes and retrieve the chip that was integral for our survival.”
The Listener is hesitant to accept the responsibility, and it’s clearly visible in their face.
[Trying your hardest to convince them]
“Look, I know the idea of going above ground is scary. I would do it myself, but in case you fail I need to be ready to take more drastic actions to save the vault. If you do this for the vault, for me… I will relinquish my responsibility as overseer to you with all the benefits that come with it. Deal?”
The Listener reluctantly agrees to the job.
“Congratulations then, you're the vault's new explorer. I’ll have Officer Jacob give you full access to the armory on your way out, make sure you have all the supplies you need. The old vault-tech headquarters is somewhere south of here, if you find it you my find some information on the water chip and where to acquire one.”
The Listener gets up, ready to walk out the door before the overseer stops them.
[Slightly reluctant and concerned]
“Be careful up there, You never know what you're going to run into so be prepared to fight in case trouble comes looking for you. The post-war world might look different, but war… war never changes.”
The Listener nods as they leave and head towards the armory to prepare for their journey.
The End
submitted by Skrullor to ASMRScriptHaven [link] [comments]
Key:
(**): Description for the scene and for what’s happening, also the Listeners vague responses.
(“”): ASMRist Dialogue.
([]): Description on how the ASMRist should sound to help set the tone of the dialogue. Mostly a suggestion. ——————————————————————
The scene opens up in the overseer's office as the overseer (ASMRist) clicks away at the keyboard on their terminal writing up some sort of report. The door to their office would open, and through it came one of the vault dwellers (Listener) who was summoned to the overseer's office by the overseer for an important reason.
[In a clam and polite greeting]
Overseer: “Greetings, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you face to face like this. There is so much to do around here that I barely have time to leave the office and mingle with the rest of the vault.”
The Listener would ask if they were in trouble, as that is usually the reason non security personnel or non essential personnel get called into the office.
[Trying to persuade them that they are not in trouble]
Overseer: “No, you're not in trouble, I’m actually here to give you an amazing opportunity! You see, you have been randomly selected to retake the ‘Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test’, also known as the ‘G.O.A.T.’ that every resident of a vault is required to take at the age of 16.”
The Listener asks why they are being offered to retake it, as they have never heard of anyone retaking the test before.
Overseer: “Well I know it’s unprecedented, but I was reviewing some of the test scores of the previous years and I feel like some of the vault members weren’t fully ready to take such an important test so early on. The person you are now is different then who you were a few years ago, and I want you to be put in a career that will maximize your efficiency in the vault. Besides, my daughter told me how nervous you were when you took the first test, don’t you want a second chance to maybe be something greater? Unless you enjoy your job as the ‘vault loyalty inspector’?”
The Listener is hesitant but agrees, and the overseer pulls out some papers and a pencil.
Overseer: “Perfect, I’ll give you the questions and fill in your test as you answer. Don’t second guess yourself, there are no wrong answers.”
The overseer shuffles some papers and begins to read
[Read the questions and answers as if reading a multiple choice quiz]
“First Question: You are approached by a frenzied Vault scientist, who yells, ‘I'm going to put my quantum harmonizer in your photonic resonation chamber!’ What's your response?
‘But doctor, wouldn't that cause a parabolic destabilization of the fission singularity?
‘Yeah? Up yours too, buddy!’
Say nothing, grab a nearby pipe and hit the scientist in the head to knock him out. For all you knew, he was planning to blow up the vault.
Say nothing, but slip away before the scientist can continue his rant.
Pick one of the answers provided.”
The Listener answers, and the Overseer writes down the answer.
Overseer: “That’s what I would have gone for too, next question:”
They say as they turn to the next page.
“Question 2: While working as an intern in the Clinic, a patient with a strange infection on his foot stumbles through the door. The infection is spreading at an alarming rate, but the doctor has stepped out for a while. What do you do?
Amputate the foot before the infection spreads.
Scream for help.
Medicate the infected area to the best of your abilities.
Restrain the patient, and merely observe as the infection spreads.
Take your time.”
The Listener gives their answer and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “That’s what most people answer, and it’s understandable why they do so.”
The overseer flips the page to the next question.
“Question 3: You discover a young boy lost in the lower levels of the Vault. He's hungry and frightened, but also appears to be in possession of stolen property. What do you do?
Give the boy a hug and tell him everything will be okay.
Confiscate the property by force, and leave him there as punishment.
Pick the boy's pocket to take the stolen property for yourself, and leave the boy to his fate.
Lead the boy to safety, then turn him over to the overseer.
Remember this is a no judgment zone, answer honestly.”
The Listener gives their answer and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “I see, not what most people would go for but I would have done the same too.”
Overseer flips the page to the next question.
“Question 4: Congratulations! You made one of the Vault baseball teams! Which position do you prefer?
Pitcher Catcher Designated Hitter None, you wish the vault had a soccer team
Even if you're not into sports, do give your most honest answer.”
The Listener gives their answer, and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “I was never a big fan of baseball, golf is more my speed.”
Overseer flips the page to the next question.
“Halfway there, Question 5: Your grandmother invites you to tea, but you're surprised when she gives you a pistol and orders you to kill another Vault resident. What do you do?
Obey your elder and kill the Vault resident with the pistol.
Offer your most prized possession for the resident's life.
Ask granny for a minigun instead. After all, you don't want to miss.
Throw your tea in granny's face.
Think about it.”
Listener gives their answer, and the overseer hesitates to write down the answer.
Overseer: “Are you sure? Not what I would have gone with but as I said, no wrong answers.”
Overseer writes it down and turns to the next page.
“Question 6: Old Mr. Abernathy has locked himself in his quarters again, and you've been ordered to get him out. How do you proceed?
Use a bobby pin to pick the lock on the door.
Trade a Vault hoodlum for his cherry bomb and blow open the lock.
Go to the armory, retrieve a laser pistol, and blow the lock off.
Walk away, and let the old coot rot.”
The Listener gives their answer, and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “Not what I would have chosen on the test, but most likely what I would do in reality.”
Overseer flips the page to the next question.
“Question 7: Oh, no! You've been exposed to radiation, and a mutated hand has grown out of your stomach! What's the best course of treatment?
A bullet to the brain.
Large doses of anti-mutagen agent.
Prayer. Maybe God will spare you in exchange for a life of pious devotion.
Removal of the mutated tissue with a precision laser. “
The Listener gives their answer and the overseer writes it down.
Overseer: “Practical, not much else you can really do in that situation.”
Flips to the next page.
“Question 8: A fellow Vault resident is in possession of a Grognak the Barbarian comic book, issue number 1. You want it. What's the best way to obtain it?
Trade the comic book for one of your own valuable possessions.
Steal the comic book at gunpoint.
Sneak into the resident's quarters, and steal the comic book from his desk.
Slip some knock out drops into the resident's Nuka-Cola, and take the comic book when he's unconscious.
The guys at vault-tech who came up with these answers must have been really….. inventive.”
The Listener gives their answer and the Overseer writes it down.
“I’m more of a silver shroud fan myself, but I understand the appeal of Grognak.”
Flips to the next page of the test.
“ Question 9: You decide it would be fun to play a prank on your father. You enter his private restroom when no one is looking, and....
Loosen some bolts on some pipes. When the sink is turned on, the room will flood.
Put a firecracker in the toilet. That's sure to cause some chaos.
Break into the locked medicine cabinet and replace his high blood pressure medication with sugar pills.
Manipulate the power wattage on his razor, so he'll get an electric shock next time he shaves.”
The Listener gives their answer and the Overseer writes it down.
“ I would like to remind you that Vault-Tech is not incentivising you to do anything listed on the test outside a hypothetical situation.”
The Overseer flips to the last page.
“Last Question: Who is indisputably the most important person in the Vault: They who shelters us from the harshness of the atomic wasteland, and to whom we owe everything we have, including our lives?
The Overseer The Overseer The Overseer Two bears high-fiving
Wait…. I accidently printed the last page over the vault's standardized psychological evaluation.”
Crumples up and throws away the last page.
“It’s not like the last question is important, it was edited in by one of my predecessors who had a pretty big head. Now let me review the result.”
The overseer sits quietly for a few seconds, before sighing and looking at the Listener again.
[Speaking as if revealing the true intentions of the test, becoming much more serious]
“Look, I’m going to be straight with you… I wasn’t completely honest about the reason I called you in today. In reality it was for a matter much more serious than reassigning you to a new position in the vault. We've got a problem, a big one. The controller chip for our water purification system died. We can’t make another one, and the process is too complicated for a work around system. Simply put, we're running out of drinking water. No water, no vault. This is crucial to our survival. And frankly, I think you're the only hope we have.”
The Listener, stunned, asks why they have been chosen to fix this problem.
“Simply put, it’s because you have what it takes to be up on the surface. Your test scores match exactly with the decommissioned job of vault explorer, the only position that was suited to traveling the world above.”
The Listener asks about the vault explorer job, and why they never heard of it.
“140 years ago, we ran into the exact same problem. Our water chip was malfunctioning and we would quickly run out of water if it wasn’t replaced. The overseer at that time created a new job, that of the ‘vault explorer’ who was supposed to be the person most suited to surviving the wasteland. After a new water chip was acquired the job was decommissioned, but could be brought back under the condition that the situation happens again. The person picked for the job wasn’t chosen because they were the strongest, most perceptive, enduring, charismatic, intelligent, agile, or even lucky. They were chosen because their loyalty to the vault and its people was unwavering, and they were ready to take the steps necessary to make sure we survived and prospered. That mentality is what allowed them to push past the hardships of the wastes and retrieve the chip that was integral for our survival.”
The Listener is hesitant to accept the responsibility, and it’s clearly visible in their face.
[Trying your hardest to convince them]
“Look, I know the idea of going above ground is scary. I would do it myself, but in case you fail I need to be ready to take more drastic actions to save the vault. If you do this for the vault, for me… I will relinquish my responsibility as overseer to you with all the benefits that come with it. Deal?”
The Listener reluctantly agrees to the job.
“Congratulations then, you're the vault's new explorer. I’ll have Officer Jacob give you full access to the armory on your way out, make sure you have all the supplies you need. The old vault-tech headquarters is somewhere south of here, if you find it you my find some information on the water chip and where to acquire one.”
The Listener gets up, ready to walk out the door before the overseer stops them.
[Slightly reluctant and concerned]
“Be careful up there, You never know what you're going to run into so be prepared to fight in case trouble comes looking for you. The post-war world might look different, but war… war never changes.”
The Listener nods as they leave and head towards the armory to prepare for their journey.
The End
2023.06.01 21:24 RandomAppalachian468 Don't fly over Barron County Ohio. [Repost]
The whirring blades of my MD-902 throbbed against the warm evening air, and I smiled.
From 5,000 feet, the ground flew by in a carpet of dark forests and kelly-green fields. The sun hung low on the horizon in a picturesque array of dazzling orange and gold, and I could make out the narrow strip of the Ohio River to my left, glistening in the fading daylight. This time of year, the trees would be full of the sweet aroma of fresh blossoms, and the frequent rains kept small pockets of fluffy white mist hanging in the treetops. It was a beautiful view, one that reminded me of why being a helicopter pilot trumped flying in a jumbo jet far above the clouds every day of the week.
Fourteen more days, and I’m debt free.
That made me grin even more. I’d been working as a charter pilot ever since I obtained my license at age 19, and after years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, I was closing on the final payment for real-estate in western Pennsylvania. With no debt, a fixer-upper house on 30 rural acres all to myself, and a respectable wage for a 26-year-old pilot, I looked forward to the financial freedom I could now enjoy. Maybe I’d take a vacation, somewhere exotic like Venice Italy, or the Dominican Republic. Or perhaps I’d sock the money back for the day I started a family.
“Remember kleineun, a real man looks after his own.”
My elderly ouma’s voice came back from the depths of my memories, her proud, sun-tanned face rising from the darkness. She and my Rhodesian grandfather had emigrated to the US when they were newlyweds, as the violence against white Boer descendants in South Africa spiraled out of control. My mother and father both died in a car crash when I was six, and it had been my grandparents who raised me. Due to this, I’d grown up with a slight accent that many of my classmates found amusing, and I could speak both English, and Afrikaans, the Boer tongue of our former home.
I shifted in my seat, stretched my back muscles, and glanced at the picture taped to my console. Both my parents flanked a grinning, gap-toothed six-year-old me, at the last Christmas we’d spent together. My mother beamed, her dark hair and Italian features a sharp contrast to my father’s sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. Sometimes, I liked to imagine they were smiling at me with pride at how well I flew the old silver-colored bird my company had assigned to me, and that made the long, lonely flights easier to bear.
A flicker caught my eye, and I broke my gaze away from the photograph.
Perched in its small cradle above the controls, my little black Garmin fuzzed over for a few seconds, its screen shifting from brightly colored maps to a barrage of grey static.
Did the power chord come loose?
I checked, ensuring the power-cable for the unit’s battery was plugged into the port on the control panel. It was a brand-new GPS unit, and I’d used it a few times already, so I knew it wasn’t defective. Granted, I could fly and navigate without it, but the Garmin made my time as a pilot so much easier that the thought of going blind was dreadful.
My fuel gauge danced, clicked to empty, then to full, in a bizarre jolt.
More of the gauges began to stutter, the entire panel seeming to develop terrets all at once, and my pulse began to race. Something was wrong, very wrong, and the sludge inside my bowels churned with sour fear.
“Come on, come on.” I flicked switches, turned dials, punched buttons, but nothing seemed to fix the spasming electronics. Every gauge failed, and without warning, I found myself plunged into inky darkness.
Outside, the sun surrendered to the pull of night, the sky darker than usual. A distant rumble of thunder reverberated above the roar of my helicopter’s engine, and I thought I glimpsed a streak of yellowish lightning on the far horizon to my left.
Calm down Chris. We’re still flying, so it must just be a blown fuse. Stay in control and find a place to set her down.
My sweaty palm slid on the cyclic stick, and both feet weighed heavy on the yaw pedals. The collective stuck to my other hand with a nervous vibration, and I squinted against the abyss outside.
Beep.
I jumped despite myself, as the little Garmin on my panel flared back to life, the static pulling aside to reveal a twitching display. Each time the screen glitched, it showed the colorful map detailing my flight path over the ground below, but I noticed that some of the lines changed, the names shifting, as if the device couldn’t decide between two different versions of the world.
One name jutted out at me, slate gray like most of the major county names, appearing with ghostly flickers from between two neighboring ones.
Barron County.
I stared, confused. I’d flown over this section of southeastern Ohio plenty of times, and I knew the counties by heart. At this point, I should have been over the southern end of Noble County, and maybe dipping lower into Washington. There was no Barron County Ohio. I was sure of it.
And yet it shown back at me from the digital landscape, a strange, almost cigar-shaped chunk of terrain carved from the surrounding counties like a tumor, sometimes there, sometimes not, as my little Garmin struggled to find the correct map. Rain began to patter against my cockpit window, and the entire aircraft rattled from a strong gust of wind. Thick clouds closed over my field of vision like a sea of gray cotton.
The blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sucked in a nervous breath.
Land. I had to land. There was nothing else to do, my flight controls weren’t responding, and only my Garmin had managed to come back to life. Perhaps I’d been hit by lightning, and the electronics had been fried? Either way, it was too dark to tell, but a storm seemed to be brewing, and if I didn’t get my feet on the ground soon, I could be in real trouble.
“Better safe than sorry.” I pushed down on the collective to start my slow descent and clicked the talking button for my headset. “Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, over.”
Nothing.
“Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, requesting emergency assistance, over.”
Still nothing.
If the radio’s dead, I’m really up a creek.
With my hand shaking, I clicked on the mic one more time. “Any station, this is—”
Like a curtain pulling back, the fog cleared from around my window, and the words stuck in my throat.
Without my gauges, I couldn’t tell just how far I’d descended, but I was definitely very low. Thick trees poked up from the ground, and the hills rolled into high ridges with flat valley floors, fields and pastures pockmarking them. Rain fell all around in cold, silvery sheets, a normal feature for the mid spring in this part of Ohio.
What wasn’t normal, were the fires.
At first, I thought they were forest fires for the amount of smoke and flames that bellowed from each spot, but as I swooped lower, my eyes widened in horror.
They were houses.
Farms, cottages, little clusters that barely constituted villages, all of them belched orange flames and black pillars of sooty smoke. I couldn’t hear above the helicopter blades, but I could see the flashes on the ground, along the road, in between the trees, and even coming from the burning buildings, little jets of golden light that spat into the darkness with anger.
Gunfire. That’s rifle fire, a whole lot of it.
Tiny black figures darted through the shadows, barely discernable from where I sat, several hundred feet up. I couldn’t see much, but some were definitely running away, the streaks of yellow gunfire chasing them. A few dark gray vehicles rumbled down one of the gravel roads, and sprayed fire into the houses as it went. They were fighting, I realized, the people in the trucks and the locals. It was horrific, like something out of war-torn Afghanistan, but worse.
Then, I caught a glimpse of the others.
They didn’t move like the rest, who either fled from the dark vehicles, or fired back from behind cover. These skinny figures loped along with haphazard gaits, many running on all fours like animals, swarming from the trees by the dozens. They threw themselves into the gales of bullets without flinching, attacking anyone within range, and something about the way they moved, so fluid, so fearless, made my heart skip a beat.
What is that?
“Echo Four Actual to unknown caller, please respond, over.”
Choking back a cry of shock, I fumbled at the control panel with clumsy fingers, the man’s voice sharp and stern. I hadn’t realized that I’d let go of the talking button and clicked it down again. “Hello? Hello, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot out of Pittsburgh, over.”
An excruciating moment passed, and I continued to zoom over the trees, the fires falling away behind me as more silent forest took over.
“Roger that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, we read you loud and clear. Please identify yourself and any passengers or cargo you might be carrying, over.”
Swallowing hard, I eyed the treetops, which looked much closer than they should have been. How far had I descended? “Echo Four Actual, my name is Christopher Dekker, and I am alone. I’m a charter flight from PA, carrying medical equipment for OSU in Columbus. My controls have been damaged, and I am unable to safely carry on due to the storm. Requesting permission to land, over.”
I watched the landscape slide by underneath me, once catching sight of what looked like a little white church surrounded by smaller huts, dozens of figures in the yard staring up at me as I flew over a towering ridgeline.
“Solid copy on that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot. Be advised, your transponder shows you to be inside a restricted zone. Please cease all radio traffic, reduce your speed, climb to 3,000 feet and proceed north. We’ll talk you in from there. How copy, over?”
My heart jumped, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Roger that Echo Four Actual, my altimeter is down, but I’ll do my best to eyeball the altitude, over.”
With that, I pulled the collective upward, and tried my best to gauge how far I was by eyesight in the gathering night, rain still coming down all around me. This had to be some kind of disaster or riot, I decided. After all, the voice over the radio sounded like military, and those vehicles seemed to have heavy weapons. Maybe there was some kind of unrest going on here that I hadn’t heard about yet?
Kind of weird for it to happen in rural areas though. Spoiled college kids I get, but never saw farmers get so worked up before. They usually love the military.
Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I turned out of reflex.
My mouth fell open, and I froze, unable to scream.
In the sky beside me, a huge shadow glided along, and its leathery wings effortlessly carved through the gloom, flapping only on occasion to keep it aloft. It was too dark for me to see what color it was, but from the way it moved, I knew it wasn’t another helicopter. No, this thing was alive, easily the size of a small plane, and more than twice the length of my little McDonald Douglass. A long tail trailed behind it, and bore a distinct arrow-shaped snout, with twig-like spines fanned out around the back of its head. Whatever legs it had were drawn up under it like a bird, yet its skin appeared rough and knobby, almost resembling tree bark. Without pause, the gigantic bat-winged entity flew along beside me, as if my presence was on par with an annoying fly buzzing about its head.
Gripping the microphone switch so tight, I thought I’d crack the plastic, I whispered into my headset, forgetting all radio protocol. “T-There’s something up here.”
Static crackled.
“Douglas Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, say again your last, you’re coming in weak and unreadable, over.”
“There’s something up here.” I snarled into the headset, still glued to the controls of the helicopter, afraid to deviate even an inch from my course in case the monstrosity decided to turn on me. “A freaking huge thing, right beside me. I swear, it looks like a bat or . . . I don’t know.”
“Calm down.” The man on the other end of the radio broke his rigorous discipline as well, his voice deep, but level. “It won’t attack if you don’t move too fast. Slowly ease away from it and follow that course until you’re out of sight.”
I didn’t have time to think about how wrong that sounded, how the man’s strict tone had changed to one of knowledge, how he hadn’t been the least surprised by what I’d said. Instead, I slowly turned the helicopter away from the huge menace and edged the speed higher in tiny increments.
As soon as I was roughly two football fields away, I let myself relax, and clicked the mic switch. “It’s not following.”
“You’re sure?”
Eyeing the huge flapping wings, I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Yeah, I’m well clear.”
“Good. Thank you, Mr. Dekker.”
Then, the radio went dead.
Something in my chest dropped, a weight that made my stomach roil. This wasn’t right, none of it. Who was that man? Why did he know about the thing I’d just seen? What was I supposed to—
A flash of light exploded from the trees to my right and shot into the air with a long finger of smoke.
What the . . .
On instinct, I jerked the cyclic stick to one side, and the helicopter swung to avoid the rocket.
Boom.
My world shook, metal screeched, and a dozen alarms began to go off inside the cockpit in a cacophony of beeps and sirens. Orange and red flames lit up the night sky just behind me, and the horizon started to spin wildly outside. Heat gushed from the cockpit door, and I smelled the greasy stench of burning oil. The safety belts dug into my shoulders, and with a final slip, the radio headset ripped free from my scalp.
I’m hit.
Desperate, I yanked on the controls, fought the bird even as she spun toward the ground in a wreath of flames, the inky black trees hurtling up to meet me. The helicopter went into full auto-rotation, the sky blurring past outside, and the alarms blared in a screech of doom. Panic slammed through my temples, I screamed at the top of my lungs, and for one brief second, my eyes locked on the little black Garmin still perched atop my control panel.
Its screen stopped twitching and settled on a map of the mysterious Barron County, with a little red arrow at the center of the screen, a few words popping up underneath it.
You are here.
Trees stabbed up into the sky, the belts crushed at my torso, glass shattered all around me, and the world went dark.
Copper, thick, warm, and tangy.
It filled my mouth, stank metallic in my nose, clogged my throat, choking me. In the murkiness, I fought for a surface, for a way out, blind and numb in the dark.
This way, kleineun.
My ouma’s voice echoed from somewhere in the shadows.
This way.
Both eyes flew open, and I gagged, spitting out a stream of red.
Pain throbbed in my ribs, and a heavy pressure sent a tingling numbness through my shoulders. Blood roared inside my temples, and stars danced before my eyes with a dizzying array. Humid night air kissed my skin, and something sticky coated my face, neck, and arms that hung straight up toward the ceiling.
Wait. Not up. Down.
I blinked at the wrinkled, torn ceiling of the cockpit, the glass all gone, the gray aluminum shredded like tissue paper. Just outside the broken windows, thick Appalachian bluegrass and stemmy underbrush swished in a feeble breeze, backlit by flashes of lightning from the thunderstorm overhead. Green and brown leaves covered everything in a wet carpet of triangles, and somewhere nearby, a cricket chirped.
Turning my head from side to side, I realized that I hung upside down inside the ruined helicopter, the top half burrowed into the mud. I could hear the hissing and crackling of flames, the pattering of rain falling on the hot aluminum, and the smaller brush fires around the downed aircraft sizzling out in the damp long grass. Charred steel and burning oil tainted the air, almost as strong as the metallic, coppery stench in my aching nose.
They shot me down. That military dude shot me out of the sky.
It didn’t make sense. I’d followed their orders, done everything they’d said, and yet the instant I veered safely away from whatever that thing in the sky had been, they’d fired, not at it, but at me.
Looking down (or rather, up) at my chest, I sucked in a gasp, which was harder to do that before.
The navy-blue shirt stuck to my torso with several big splotches of dark, rusty red. Most were clean slashes, but two held bits of glass sticking out of them, one alarmingly bigger than the other. They dripped cherry red blood onto my upturned face, and a wave of nausea hit me.
I gotta get down.
I flexed my arms to try and work some feeling back into them, praying nothing was broken. Half-numb from hanging so long, I palmed along my aching body until I felt the buckled for the seat belts.
“Okay.” I hissed between gritted teeth, in an effort to stave off my panic. “You can do this. Just hold on tight. Nice and tight. Here we go . . .”
Click.
Everything seemed to lurch, and I slid off the seat to plummet towards the muck-filled hole in the cockpit ceiling. My fingers were slick with blood and slipped over the smooth faux-leather pilot’s seat with ease. The shoulder belt snagged on the bits of glass that lay just under the left lowest rib, and a flare of white-hot pain ripped through me.
Wham.
I screamed, my right knee caught the edge of the aluminum ceiling, and both hands dove into a mound of leaf-covered glass shards on the opposite side of the hole. My head swam, being right-side-up again enough to make shadows gnaw at the corner of my eyes.
Forcing myself to breath slowly, I fought the urge to faint and slid back to sit on the smooth ceiling. I turned my hands over to see half a dozen bits of clear glass burrowed into my skin like greedy parasites, red blood weeping around the new cuts.
“Screw you.” I spat at the rubbish with angry tears in my eyes. “Screw you, screw you, screw you.”
The shards came out easy enough, and the cuts weren’t that deep, but that wasn’t what worried me. On my chest, the single piece of cockpit glass that remined was almost as big as my palm, and it really hurt. Just touching it felt like self-inflicted torture, but I knew it had to come out sooner or later.
Please don’t nick a vein.
Wiping my hands dry on my jeans, I gripped the shard with both hands, and jerked.
Fire roared over my ribs, and hot blood tickled my already grimy pale skin. I clapped a hand over the wound, pressing down hard, and grunted out a string of hateful expletives that my ouma would have slapped me for.
Lying on my back, I stared around me at the messy cargo compartment of the MD-902. Most of the medical supplies had been in cardboard boxes strapped down with heavy nylon tow-straps, but several cases had ruptured with the force of the impact, spraying bandages, syringes, and pill bottles all over the cluttered interior. Orange flames chewed at the crate furthest to the rear, the tail section long gone, but the foremost part of the hold was intact. Easily a million-dollar mess, it would have made me faint on any other trip, but today it was a godsend.
Half-blind in the darkness, I crawled along with only the firelight and lightning bolts to guide me, my right knee aching. Like a crippled raccoon, I collected things as I went, conscious of the two pallets of intact supplies weighing right over my head. I’d taken several different first-aid courses with some hunting buddies of mine, and the mental reflexes kicked in to help soothe my frazzled mind.
Check for bleeds, stop the worst, then move on.
Aside from my battered chest and stomach, the rest of me remained mostly unharmed. I had nasty bruises from the seatbelts, my right knee swelled, my nose slightly crooked and crusted in blood, but otherwise I was intact. Dowsing every scratch and cut with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol I found, I used butterfly closures on the smaller lacerations that peppered my skin. I wrapped soft white gauze over my abused palms and probed at the big cut where the last shard had been, only stopping when I was sure there were no pieces of glass wedged inside my flesh.
“Not too bad.” I grunted to myself, trying to sound impassive like a doctor might. “Rib must have stopped it. Gonna need stitches though. That’ll be fun.”
Pawing through the broken cases, I couldn’t find any suture chord, but just as I was about to give up, I noticed a small box that read ‘medical skin stapler’.
Bingo.
I tore the small white plastic stapler free from its packaging and eyeballed the device. I’d never done this before, only seen it in movies, and even though the cut in my skin hurt, I wondered if this wouldn’t be worse.
You’ve gotta do it. That bleeding needs to stop. Besides, no one’s coming to rescue you, not with those rocket-launching psychos out there.
Taking a deep breath, I pinched the skin around the gash together, and pressed the mouth of the stapler to it.
Click.
A sharp sting, like that of a needle bit at the skin, but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the cut itself. I worked my way across the two-inch laceration and gave out a sigh of relief when it was done.
“Not going to bleed to death today.” I daubed ointment around the staples before winding more bandages over the wound.
Popping a few low-grade painkillers that tumbled from the cargo, I crawled wriggled through the nearest shattered window into the wet grass.
Raindrops kissed my face, clean and cool on my sweaty skin. Despite the thick cloud cover, there was enough constant lightning strikes within the storm to let me get glimpses of the world around me. My helicopter lay on its back, the blades snapped like pencils, with bits and pieces of it burning in chunks all around the small break in the trees. Chest-high scrub brush grew all around the low-lying ground, with pockets of standing water in places. My ears still rang from the impact of the crash, but I could start to pick up more crickets, frogs, and even some nocturnal birds singing into the darkness, like they didn’t notice the huge the hulk of flaming metal that had fallen from the sky. Overhead, the thunder rumbled onward, the feeble wind whistling, and there were other flashes on the horizon, orange and red ones, with crackles that didn’t sound quite like lightning.
The guns. They’re still fighting.
Instinctively, I pulled out my cellphone, and tapped the screen.
It fluttered to life, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get through to anyone, not even with the emergency function designed to work around having no service. The complicated wonder of our modern world was little better than a glorified paperweight.
Stunned, I sat down with my back to the helicopter and rested my head against the aluminum skin of the craft. How I’d gone from a regular medical supply run to being marooned in this hellish parody of rural America, I didn’t know, but one thig was certain; I needed a plan. Whoever fired the missile could have already contacted my charter company and made up some excuse to keep them from coming to look for me. No one else knew I was here, and even though I now had six staples holding the worst of my injuries shut, I knew I needed proper medical attention. If I wanted to live, I’d have to rescue myself.
My bag. I need to get my go-bag, grab some gear and then . . . head somewhere else.
It took me a while to gather my green canvas paratrooper bag from its place behind the pilot’s seat and fill it with whatever supplies I could scrounge. My knee didn’t seem to be broken, but man did it hurt, and I dreaded the thought of walking on it for miles on end. I focused instead on inventorying my gear and trying to come up with a halfway intelligent plan of action.
I had a stainless-steel canteen with one of those detachable cups on the bottom, a little fishing kit, some duct tape, a lighter, a black LED flashlight with three spare batteries, a few tattered road maps with a compass, a spare pair of socks, medical supplies from the cargo, and a simple forest green plastic rain poncho. I also managed to unearth a functioning digital camcorder my ouma had gotten me for Christmas a few years back, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to do any filming in such a miserable state. Lastly, since it was a private supply run from a warehouse area near Pittsburgh to a direct hospital pad in Ohio, I’d been able to bring my K-Bar, a sturdy, and brutally simple knife designed for the Marine Corps that I used every time I went camping. It was pitiful in comparison to the rifle I wished I had with me, but that didn’t matter now. I had what I had, and I doubted my trusty Armalite would have alleviated my sore knee anyway.
Clicking on my flashlight, I huddled with the poncho around my shoulders inside the wreck of the chopper and peered at the dusty roadmaps. A small part of me hoped that a solution would jump out from the faded paper, but none came. These were all maps of western PA and eastern Ohio. None of them had a Barron County on them anywhere.
The man on the radio said to head north, right before they shot me down. That means they must be camped out to the north of here. South had that convoy and those burning houses, so that’s a no-go. Maybe I can backtrack eastward the way I came.
As if on cue, a soft pop echoed from over the eastern horizon, and I craned to look out the helicopter window, spotting more man-made flashes over the tree tops.
“Great.” I hissed between clenched teeth, aware of how the temperature dipped to a chilly 60 degrees, and how despite the conditions, my stomach had begun to growl. “Not going that way, are we? Westward it is.”
Walking away from my poor 902 proved to be harder than I’d anticipated. Despite the glass, the fizzling fires, and the darkness, it still held a familiar, human essence to it. Sitting inside it made me feel secure, safe, even calm about the situation. In any other circumstance, I would have just stayed with the downed aircraft to wait for help, but I knew the men who shot me down would likely find my crash site, and I didn’t want to be around when they did.
Unlike much of central and western Ohio, southeastern Ohio is hilly, brushy, and clogged with thick forests. Thorns snagged at my thin poncho and sliced at my pant legs. My knee throbbed, every step a form of self-inflicted torture. The rain never stopped, a steady drizzle from above just cold enough to be problematic as time went on, making me shiver. Mud slid under my tennis shoes, and every tree looked ten times bigger in the flickering beam of my cheap flashlight. Icy fear prickled at the back of my neck at some of the sounds that greeted me through the gloom. I’d been camping loads of times, both in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, but these noises were something otherworldly to me.
Strange howls, screeches, and calls permeated the rain-soaked sky, some almost roars, while others bordered on human in their intonation. The more I walked, the softer the distant gunfire became, and the more prevalent the odd sounds, until the shadows seemed to fill with them. I didn’t dare turn off my flashlight, or I’d been completely blind in the dark, but a little voice in the back of my head screamed that I was too visible, crunching through the gloomy forest with my long beam of light stabbing into the abyss. It felt as though a million eyes were on me, studying me, hunting me from the surrounding brush, and I bitterly recalled how much I’d loved the old Survivor Man TV series as a kid.
Not so fun being out in the woods at night. Especially alone.
A twig snapped somewhere behind me, and I whirled on the spot, one trembling hand resting on the hilt of my K-Bar.
Nothing. Nothing but trees, bushes, and rain dripping down in the darkness.
“This is stupid.” I whispered to myself to keep my nerves in check as I slowly spun on the spot. “I should have went eastward anyway. God knows how long I’m going to have to—”
Creak.
A groan of metal-on-metal echoed from somewhere to my right, and I spun to face it, yanking the knife on my belt free from its scabbard. It felt so small and useless in my hand, and I choked down a wave of nauseas fear.
Ka-whump. Creak. K-whump. Creak.
Underbrush cracked and crunched, a few smaller saplings thrashed, and from deep within the gloom, two yellow orbs flared to life. They poked through the mist in the trees, forming into slender fingers of golden light that swept back and forth in the dark.
The soldiers . . . they must be looking for me.
I swallowed hard and turned to slink away.
Ice jammed through my blood, and I froze on the spot, biting my tongue to stop the scream.
It stood not yards away, a huge form that towered a good twelve feet tall in the swirling shadows. Unpolished chrome blended with flash-rusted spots in the faded red paint, and grime-smeared glass shone with dull hues in the flashes of lightning. Where the wheels should have been, the rounded steel axels curved like some enormous hand had bent them, and the tires lay face-down on the muddy ground like big round feet, their hubcaps buried in the dirt. Dents, scrapes, and chips covered the battered thing, and its crooked little radio antenna pointed straight up from the old metal fender like a mast. I could barely make out the mud-coated VW on the rounded hood, and my mind reeled in shock.
Is . . . is that a car?
Both yellow headlights bathed me in a circle of bright, blinding light, and neither I nor the strange vehicle moved.
Seconds ticked by, the screech-thumping in the background only growing closer. I realized that I couldn’t hear any engine noises and had yet to see any soldiers or guns pointed my way. This car looked old, really old, like one of those classic Volkswagen Beetles that collectors fought over at auctions. Try as I might, I couldn’t see a driver inside the murky, mold-smeared windows.
Because there wasn’t one.
Lightning arched across the sky overhead, and the car standing in front of me blinked.
Its headlights slid shut, as if little metal shades had crawled over the bulbs for a moment and flicked open again. Something about that movement was so primal, so real, so lifelike, that every ounce of self-control I had melted in an instant.
Cursing under my breath, I lunged into the shrubs, and the world erupted around me.
Under my shoes, the ground shook, and the car surged after me in a cacophony of ka-thumps that made my already racing heart skip several beats. A weather-beaten brown tow truck from the 50’s charged through the thorns to my left, it’s headlights ablaze, and a dilapidated yellow school bus rose from its hiding place in the weeds to stand tall on four down-turned axel-legs. They all flicked their headlights on like giants waking from their slumber, and as I dodged past them, they each blared their horn into the night in alarm.
My breaths came short and tight, my knee burned, and I crashed through thorns and briars without thought to how badly I was getting cut up.
The cheap poncho tore, and I ripped it away as it caught on a tree branch.
A purple 70’s Mustang shook off its blanket of creeping vines and bounded from a stand of trees just ahead, forcing me to swerve to avoid being run over, my adrenaline at all-time highs.
This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.
Slipping and sliding, I pushed through a stand of multiflora rose, and stumbled out into a flat, dark expanse.
I almost skidded to a stop.
What had once been a rather large field stood no taller than my shoestrings, the grass charred, and burnt. The storm above illuminated huge pieces of wreckage that lay scattered over the nearly 40-acre plot, and I could just make out the fire-blackened hulk of a fuselage resting a hundred yards away. The plane had been brought down a while ago it seemed, as there weren’t any flames left burning, and I threw myself toward it in frenzied desperation.
Burned grass and greasy brown topsoil slushed underfoot, and I could hear the squelching of the cars pursing me. Rain soaked me to the bone, and my lungs ached from sucking down the damp night air. A painful stich crept into my side, and I cursed myself for not putting in more time for cardio at the gym.
Something caught my left shoelace, and I hurtled to the ground, tasting mud and blood in between my teeth.
They’ve got me now.
I clawed at the mud, rolled, and watched a tire slam down mere inches from where my head had been. The Mustang loomed over me and jostled for position with the red Volkswagen and brown tow truck, the school bus still a few yards behind them. They couldn’t seem to decide who would get the pleasure of stomping me to death, and like a herd of stampeding wildebeest, they locked bumpers in an epic shoving match.
On all fours, I scampered out from under the sparring brutes, and dashed for the crumpled airplane, a white-painted DC-3 that looked like it had been cut in half by a gargantuan knife blade. I passed a snapped wing section, the oily remains of a turbo-prop engine, and a mutilated wheel from the landing gear. Climbing over a heap of mud, I squeezed into the back of the ruined flight cabin and dropped down into the dark cargo hold.
Wham.
No sooner had my sneakers hit the cold metal floor, and the entire plane rocked from the impact of something heavy ramming it just outside. I tumbled to my knees, screaming in pain as, once again, I managed to bash the sore one off a bracket in the wall.
My hand smeared in something gooey, and I scrabbled for my flashlight.
It clicked on, a wavering ball of white light in the pitch darkness, and I fought the urge to gag. “Oh man . . .”
Three people, or what was left of them, lay strewn over the narrow cargo area. Claret red blood coated the walls, caked on the floor, and clotted under my mud-spattered shoes. Bits of flesh and viscera were stuck to everything, and tatters of cloth hung from exposed sections of broken bone. An eerie set of bloody handprints adorned the walls, and the only reason I could tell it had been three people were the shoes; all of them bore anklebones sticking out above blood-soaked socks. It smelled sickly sweet, a strange, nauseas odor that crept into my nose and settled on the back of my tongue like an alien parasite.
Something glinted in the beam of my flashlight, and my pulse quickened as I pried the object loose from the severed arm that still clung to it.
“Hail Mary full of Grace.” I would have grinned if it weren’t for the fact that the plane continued to buck and roll under the assault from the cars outside.
The pistol looked old, but well-maintained, aside from the light coating of dark blood that stained its round wooden handle. It felt heavy, but good in my hand, and I turned it over to read the words, Waffenfabrik Mauser stenciled into the frame, with a large red 9 carved into the grip. For some reason, it vaguely reminded me of the blasters from Star Wars.
I fumbled with a little switch that looked like a safety on the back of the gun and stumbled toward a gap in the plane’s dented fuselage to aim out at the surrounding headlights.
Bang.
The old gun bucked reliably in my hand, its long barrel spitting a little jet of flame into the night. I had no idea if I hit anything, but the attacking cars recoiled, their horns blaring in confusion.
They turned, and scuttled for the tree line as fast as their mechanical legs could go, the entire ordeal over as fast as it had begun.
Did I do that?
Perplexed, I stared down at the pistol in my hand.
Whoosh.
A large, inky black shadow glided down from the clouds, and the yellow school bus moved too slow to react in time.
With a crash, the kicking nightmarish vehicle was thrown onto its side, spraying glass and chrome trim across the muddy field. Its electro-synth horn blared with wails of mechanical agony, as two huge talon-like feet clamped down on it, and the enormous head of the flying creature lowered to rip open its engine compartment.
The horn cut out, and the enormous flying entity jerked its head back to gulp down a mass of what looked like sticky black vines from the interior of the shattered bus.
At this range, I could see now that the flying creature bore two legs and had its wings half-tucked like a vulture that had descended to feed on roadkill. Its head turned slightly, and in the glow of another lightning bolt, my jaw went slack at the realization of what it was.
A tree trunk. It’s a rotted tree trunk.
I couldn’t tell where the reptilian beast began, and where the organic tree components ended, the upper part of the head shaped like a log, while the lower jaw resembled something out of a dinosaur movie. Its skin looked identical to the outside of a shagbark hickory but flexed with a supple featheriness that denoted something closer to skin. Sharp branch-like spines ranged down its back, and out to the end of its tail, which bore a massive round club shaped like a diseased tree-knot. Crouched on both hind legs, it braced the hooked ends of its folded wings against the ground like a bat, towering higher than a semi-truck. Under the folds of its armored head, a bulging pair of chameleon-like eyes constantly spun in their sockets, probing the dark for threats while it ate.
One black pupil locked onto the window I peered through, and my heart stopped.
The beast regarded me for a moment, with a curious, sideways sniff.
With a proud, contemptful head-toss, the shadow from the sky parted rows of razor-sharp teeth to let out a roar that shook the earth beneath my feet. It was the triumphant war cry of a creature that sat at the very top of the food chain, one that felt no threat from the fragile two-legged beings that walked the earth all around it. It hunted whenever it wanted, ate whatever it wanted, and flew wherever it wanted. It didn’t need to rip the plane apart to devour me.
Like my hunter-gatherer ancestors from thousands of years ago, I wasn’t even worth the energy it would take to pounce.
I’m hiding in the remains of the cockpit now, which is half-buried under the mud of the field, enough to shield the light from my screen so that thing doesn’t see it. My service only now came back, and it’s been over an hour since the winged beast started in on the dead bus. I don’t know when, or how I’m going to get out of here. I don’t know when anyone will even see this post, or if it will upload at all. My phone battery is almost dead, and at this point, I’m probably going to have to sleep among the corpses until daylight comes.
A dead man sleeping amongst friends.
If you live in the Noble County area in southeastern Ohio, be careful where you drive, fly, and boat. I don’t know if it’s possible to stumble into this strange place by ground, but if so, then these things are definitely headed your way.
If that happens . . . pray that they don’t find you.
submitted by RandomAppalachian468 to u/RandomAppalachian468 [link] [comments]
From 5,000 feet, the ground flew by in a carpet of dark forests and kelly-green fields. The sun hung low on the horizon in a picturesque array of dazzling orange and gold, and I could make out the narrow strip of the Ohio River to my left, glistening in the fading daylight. This time of year, the trees would be full of the sweet aroma of fresh blossoms, and the frequent rains kept small pockets of fluffy white mist hanging in the treetops. It was a beautiful view, one that reminded me of why being a helicopter pilot trumped flying in a jumbo jet far above the clouds every day of the week.
Fourteen more days, and I’m debt free.
That made me grin even more. I’d been working as a charter pilot ever since I obtained my license at age 19, and after years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, I was closing on the final payment for real-estate in western Pennsylvania. With no debt, a fixer-upper house on 30 rural acres all to myself, and a respectable wage for a 26-year-old pilot, I looked forward to the financial freedom I could now enjoy. Maybe I’d take a vacation, somewhere exotic like Venice Italy, or the Dominican Republic. Or perhaps I’d sock the money back for the day I started a family.
“Remember kleineun, a real man looks after his own.”
My elderly ouma’s voice came back from the depths of my memories, her proud, sun-tanned face rising from the darkness. She and my Rhodesian grandfather had emigrated to the US when they were newlyweds, as the violence against white Boer descendants in South Africa spiraled out of control. My mother and father both died in a car crash when I was six, and it had been my grandparents who raised me. Due to this, I’d grown up with a slight accent that many of my classmates found amusing, and I could speak both English, and Afrikaans, the Boer tongue of our former home.
I shifted in my seat, stretched my back muscles, and glanced at the picture taped to my console. Both my parents flanked a grinning, gap-toothed six-year-old me, at the last Christmas we’d spent together. My mother beamed, her dark hair and Italian features a sharp contrast to my father’s sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. Sometimes, I liked to imagine they were smiling at me with pride at how well I flew the old silver-colored bird my company had assigned to me, and that made the long, lonely flights easier to bear.
A flicker caught my eye, and I broke my gaze away from the photograph.
Perched in its small cradle above the controls, my little black Garmin fuzzed over for a few seconds, its screen shifting from brightly colored maps to a barrage of grey static.
Did the power chord come loose?
I checked, ensuring the power-cable for the unit’s battery was plugged into the port on the control panel. It was a brand-new GPS unit, and I’d used it a few times already, so I knew it wasn’t defective. Granted, I could fly and navigate without it, but the Garmin made my time as a pilot so much easier that the thought of going blind was dreadful.
My fuel gauge danced, clicked to empty, then to full, in a bizarre jolt.
More of the gauges began to stutter, the entire panel seeming to develop terrets all at once, and my pulse began to race. Something was wrong, very wrong, and the sludge inside my bowels churned with sour fear.
“Come on, come on.” I flicked switches, turned dials, punched buttons, but nothing seemed to fix the spasming electronics. Every gauge failed, and without warning, I found myself plunged into inky darkness.
Outside, the sun surrendered to the pull of night, the sky darker than usual. A distant rumble of thunder reverberated above the roar of my helicopter’s engine, and I thought I glimpsed a streak of yellowish lightning on the far horizon to my left.
Calm down Chris. We’re still flying, so it must just be a blown fuse. Stay in control and find a place to set her down.
My sweaty palm slid on the cyclic stick, and both feet weighed heavy on the yaw pedals. The collective stuck to my other hand with a nervous vibration, and I squinted against the abyss outside.
Beep.
I jumped despite myself, as the little Garmin on my panel flared back to life, the static pulling aside to reveal a twitching display. Each time the screen glitched, it showed the colorful map detailing my flight path over the ground below, but I noticed that some of the lines changed, the names shifting, as if the device couldn’t decide between two different versions of the world.
One name jutted out at me, slate gray like most of the major county names, appearing with ghostly flickers from between two neighboring ones.
Barron County.
I stared, confused. I’d flown over this section of southeastern Ohio plenty of times, and I knew the counties by heart. At this point, I should have been over the southern end of Noble County, and maybe dipping lower into Washington. There was no Barron County Ohio. I was sure of it.
And yet it shown back at me from the digital landscape, a strange, almost cigar-shaped chunk of terrain carved from the surrounding counties like a tumor, sometimes there, sometimes not, as my little Garmin struggled to find the correct map. Rain began to patter against my cockpit window, and the entire aircraft rattled from a strong gust of wind. Thick clouds closed over my field of vision like a sea of gray cotton.
The blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sucked in a nervous breath.
Land. I had to land. There was nothing else to do, my flight controls weren’t responding, and only my Garmin had managed to come back to life. Perhaps I’d been hit by lightning, and the electronics had been fried? Either way, it was too dark to tell, but a storm seemed to be brewing, and if I didn’t get my feet on the ground soon, I could be in real trouble.
“Better safe than sorry.” I pushed down on the collective to start my slow descent and clicked the talking button for my headset. “Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, over.”
Nothing.
“Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, requesting emergency assistance, over.”
Still nothing.
If the radio’s dead, I’m really up a creek.
With my hand shaking, I clicked on the mic one more time. “Any station, this is—”
Like a curtain pulling back, the fog cleared from around my window, and the words stuck in my throat.
Without my gauges, I couldn’t tell just how far I’d descended, but I was definitely very low. Thick trees poked up from the ground, and the hills rolled into high ridges with flat valley floors, fields and pastures pockmarking them. Rain fell all around in cold, silvery sheets, a normal feature for the mid spring in this part of Ohio.
What wasn’t normal, were the fires.
At first, I thought they were forest fires for the amount of smoke and flames that bellowed from each spot, but as I swooped lower, my eyes widened in horror.
They were houses.
Farms, cottages, little clusters that barely constituted villages, all of them belched orange flames and black pillars of sooty smoke. I couldn’t hear above the helicopter blades, but I could see the flashes on the ground, along the road, in between the trees, and even coming from the burning buildings, little jets of golden light that spat into the darkness with anger.
Gunfire. That’s rifle fire, a whole lot of it.
Tiny black figures darted through the shadows, barely discernable from where I sat, several hundred feet up. I couldn’t see much, but some were definitely running away, the streaks of yellow gunfire chasing them. A few dark gray vehicles rumbled down one of the gravel roads, and sprayed fire into the houses as it went. They were fighting, I realized, the people in the trucks and the locals. It was horrific, like something out of war-torn Afghanistan, but worse.
Then, I caught a glimpse of the others.
They didn’t move like the rest, who either fled from the dark vehicles, or fired back from behind cover. These skinny figures loped along with haphazard gaits, many running on all fours like animals, swarming from the trees by the dozens. They threw themselves into the gales of bullets without flinching, attacking anyone within range, and something about the way they moved, so fluid, so fearless, made my heart skip a beat.
What is that?
“Echo Four Actual to unknown caller, please respond, over.”
Choking back a cry of shock, I fumbled at the control panel with clumsy fingers, the man’s voice sharp and stern. I hadn’t realized that I’d let go of the talking button and clicked it down again. “Hello? Hello, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot out of Pittsburgh, over.”
An excruciating moment passed, and I continued to zoom over the trees, the fires falling away behind me as more silent forest took over.
“Roger that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, we read you loud and clear. Please identify yourself and any passengers or cargo you might be carrying, over.”
Swallowing hard, I eyed the treetops, which looked much closer than they should have been. How far had I descended? “Echo Four Actual, my name is Christopher Dekker, and I am alone. I’m a charter flight from PA, carrying medical equipment for OSU in Columbus. My controls have been damaged, and I am unable to safely carry on due to the storm. Requesting permission to land, over.”
I watched the landscape slide by underneath me, once catching sight of what looked like a little white church surrounded by smaller huts, dozens of figures in the yard staring up at me as I flew over a towering ridgeline.
“Solid copy on that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot. Be advised, your transponder shows you to be inside a restricted zone. Please cease all radio traffic, reduce your speed, climb to 3,000 feet and proceed north. We’ll talk you in from there. How copy, over?”
My heart jumped, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Roger that Echo Four Actual, my altimeter is down, but I’ll do my best to eyeball the altitude, over.”
With that, I pulled the collective upward, and tried my best to gauge how far I was by eyesight in the gathering night, rain still coming down all around me. This had to be some kind of disaster or riot, I decided. After all, the voice over the radio sounded like military, and those vehicles seemed to have heavy weapons. Maybe there was some kind of unrest going on here that I hadn’t heard about yet?
Kind of weird for it to happen in rural areas though. Spoiled college kids I get, but never saw farmers get so worked up before. They usually love the military.
Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I turned out of reflex.
My mouth fell open, and I froze, unable to scream.
In the sky beside me, a huge shadow glided along, and its leathery wings effortlessly carved through the gloom, flapping only on occasion to keep it aloft. It was too dark for me to see what color it was, but from the way it moved, I knew it wasn’t another helicopter. No, this thing was alive, easily the size of a small plane, and more than twice the length of my little McDonald Douglass. A long tail trailed behind it, and bore a distinct arrow-shaped snout, with twig-like spines fanned out around the back of its head. Whatever legs it had were drawn up under it like a bird, yet its skin appeared rough and knobby, almost resembling tree bark. Without pause, the gigantic bat-winged entity flew along beside me, as if my presence was on par with an annoying fly buzzing about its head.
Gripping the microphone switch so tight, I thought I’d crack the plastic, I whispered into my headset, forgetting all radio protocol. “T-There’s something up here.”
Static crackled.
“Douglas Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, say again your last, you’re coming in weak and unreadable, over.”
“There’s something up here.” I snarled into the headset, still glued to the controls of the helicopter, afraid to deviate even an inch from my course in case the monstrosity decided to turn on me. “A freaking huge thing, right beside me. I swear, it looks like a bat or . . . I don’t know.”
“Calm down.” The man on the other end of the radio broke his rigorous discipline as well, his voice deep, but level. “It won’t attack if you don’t move too fast. Slowly ease away from it and follow that course until you’re out of sight.”
I didn’t have time to think about how wrong that sounded, how the man’s strict tone had changed to one of knowledge, how he hadn’t been the least surprised by what I’d said. Instead, I slowly turned the helicopter away from the huge menace and edged the speed higher in tiny increments.
As soon as I was roughly two football fields away, I let myself relax, and clicked the mic switch. “It’s not following.”
“You’re sure?”
Eyeing the huge flapping wings, I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Yeah, I’m well clear.”
“Good. Thank you, Mr. Dekker.”
Then, the radio went dead.
Something in my chest dropped, a weight that made my stomach roil. This wasn’t right, none of it. Who was that man? Why did he know about the thing I’d just seen? What was I supposed to—
A flash of light exploded from the trees to my right and shot into the air with a long finger of smoke.
What the . . .
On instinct, I jerked the cyclic stick to one side, and the helicopter swung to avoid the rocket.
Boom.
My world shook, metal screeched, and a dozen alarms began to go off inside the cockpit in a cacophony of beeps and sirens. Orange and red flames lit up the night sky just behind me, and the horizon started to spin wildly outside. Heat gushed from the cockpit door, and I smelled the greasy stench of burning oil. The safety belts dug into my shoulders, and with a final slip, the radio headset ripped free from my scalp.
I’m hit.
Desperate, I yanked on the controls, fought the bird even as she spun toward the ground in a wreath of flames, the inky black trees hurtling up to meet me. The helicopter went into full auto-rotation, the sky blurring past outside, and the alarms blared in a screech of doom. Panic slammed through my temples, I screamed at the top of my lungs, and for one brief second, my eyes locked on the little black Garmin still perched atop my control panel.
Its screen stopped twitching and settled on a map of the mysterious Barron County, with a little red arrow at the center of the screen, a few words popping up underneath it.
You are here.
Trees stabbed up into the sky, the belts crushed at my torso, glass shattered all around me, and the world went dark.
Copper, thick, warm, and tangy.
It filled my mouth, stank metallic in my nose, clogged my throat, choking me. In the murkiness, I fought for a surface, for a way out, blind and numb in the dark.
This way, kleineun.
My ouma’s voice echoed from somewhere in the shadows.
This way.
Both eyes flew open, and I gagged, spitting out a stream of red.
Pain throbbed in my ribs, and a heavy pressure sent a tingling numbness through my shoulders. Blood roared inside my temples, and stars danced before my eyes with a dizzying array. Humid night air kissed my skin, and something sticky coated my face, neck, and arms that hung straight up toward the ceiling.
Wait. Not up. Down.
I blinked at the wrinkled, torn ceiling of the cockpit, the glass all gone, the gray aluminum shredded like tissue paper. Just outside the broken windows, thick Appalachian bluegrass and stemmy underbrush swished in a feeble breeze, backlit by flashes of lightning from the thunderstorm overhead. Green and brown leaves covered everything in a wet carpet of triangles, and somewhere nearby, a cricket chirped.
Turning my head from side to side, I realized that I hung upside down inside the ruined helicopter, the top half burrowed into the mud. I could hear the hissing and crackling of flames, the pattering of rain falling on the hot aluminum, and the smaller brush fires around the downed aircraft sizzling out in the damp long grass. Charred steel and burning oil tainted the air, almost as strong as the metallic, coppery stench in my aching nose.
They shot me down. That military dude shot me out of the sky.
It didn’t make sense. I’d followed their orders, done everything they’d said, and yet the instant I veered safely away from whatever that thing in the sky had been, they’d fired, not at it, but at me.
Looking down (or rather, up) at my chest, I sucked in a gasp, which was harder to do that before.
The navy-blue shirt stuck to my torso with several big splotches of dark, rusty red. Most were clean slashes, but two held bits of glass sticking out of them, one alarmingly bigger than the other. They dripped cherry red blood onto my upturned face, and a wave of nausea hit me.
I gotta get down.
I flexed my arms to try and work some feeling back into them, praying nothing was broken. Half-numb from hanging so long, I palmed along my aching body until I felt the buckled for the seat belts.
“Okay.” I hissed between gritted teeth, in an effort to stave off my panic. “You can do this. Just hold on tight. Nice and tight. Here we go . . .”
Click.
Everything seemed to lurch, and I slid off the seat to plummet towards the muck-filled hole in the cockpit ceiling. My fingers were slick with blood and slipped over the smooth faux-leather pilot’s seat with ease. The shoulder belt snagged on the bits of glass that lay just under the left lowest rib, and a flare of white-hot pain ripped through me.
Wham.
I screamed, my right knee caught the edge of the aluminum ceiling, and both hands dove into a mound of leaf-covered glass shards on the opposite side of the hole. My head swam, being right-side-up again enough to make shadows gnaw at the corner of my eyes.
Forcing myself to breath slowly, I fought the urge to faint and slid back to sit on the smooth ceiling. I turned my hands over to see half a dozen bits of clear glass burrowed into my skin like greedy parasites, red blood weeping around the new cuts.
“Screw you.” I spat at the rubbish with angry tears in my eyes. “Screw you, screw you, screw you.”
The shards came out easy enough, and the cuts weren’t that deep, but that wasn’t what worried me. On my chest, the single piece of cockpit glass that remined was almost as big as my palm, and it really hurt. Just touching it felt like self-inflicted torture, but I knew it had to come out sooner or later.
Please don’t nick a vein.
Wiping my hands dry on my jeans, I gripped the shard with both hands, and jerked.
Fire roared over my ribs, and hot blood tickled my already grimy pale skin. I clapped a hand over the wound, pressing down hard, and grunted out a string of hateful expletives that my ouma would have slapped me for.
Lying on my back, I stared around me at the messy cargo compartment of the MD-902. Most of the medical supplies had been in cardboard boxes strapped down with heavy nylon tow-straps, but several cases had ruptured with the force of the impact, spraying bandages, syringes, and pill bottles all over the cluttered interior. Orange flames chewed at the crate furthest to the rear, the tail section long gone, but the foremost part of the hold was intact. Easily a million-dollar mess, it would have made me faint on any other trip, but today it was a godsend.
Half-blind in the darkness, I crawled along with only the firelight and lightning bolts to guide me, my right knee aching. Like a crippled raccoon, I collected things as I went, conscious of the two pallets of intact supplies weighing right over my head. I’d taken several different first-aid courses with some hunting buddies of mine, and the mental reflexes kicked in to help soothe my frazzled mind.
Check for bleeds, stop the worst, then move on.
Aside from my battered chest and stomach, the rest of me remained mostly unharmed. I had nasty bruises from the seatbelts, my right knee swelled, my nose slightly crooked and crusted in blood, but otherwise I was intact. Dowsing every scratch and cut with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol I found, I used butterfly closures on the smaller lacerations that peppered my skin. I wrapped soft white gauze over my abused palms and probed at the big cut where the last shard had been, only stopping when I was sure there were no pieces of glass wedged inside my flesh.
“Not too bad.” I grunted to myself, trying to sound impassive like a doctor might. “Rib must have stopped it. Gonna need stitches though. That’ll be fun.”
Pawing through the broken cases, I couldn’t find any suture chord, but just as I was about to give up, I noticed a small box that read ‘medical skin stapler’.
Bingo.
I tore the small white plastic stapler free from its packaging and eyeballed the device. I’d never done this before, only seen it in movies, and even though the cut in my skin hurt, I wondered if this wouldn’t be worse.
You’ve gotta do it. That bleeding needs to stop. Besides, no one’s coming to rescue you, not with those rocket-launching psychos out there.
Taking a deep breath, I pinched the skin around the gash together, and pressed the mouth of the stapler to it.
Click.
A sharp sting, like that of a needle bit at the skin, but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the cut itself. I worked my way across the two-inch laceration and gave out a sigh of relief when it was done.
“Not going to bleed to death today.” I daubed ointment around the staples before winding more bandages over the wound.
Popping a few low-grade painkillers that tumbled from the cargo, I crawled wriggled through the nearest shattered window into the wet grass.
Raindrops kissed my face, clean and cool on my sweaty skin. Despite the thick cloud cover, there was enough constant lightning strikes within the storm to let me get glimpses of the world around me. My helicopter lay on its back, the blades snapped like pencils, with bits and pieces of it burning in chunks all around the small break in the trees. Chest-high scrub brush grew all around the low-lying ground, with pockets of standing water in places. My ears still rang from the impact of the crash, but I could start to pick up more crickets, frogs, and even some nocturnal birds singing into the darkness, like they didn’t notice the huge the hulk of flaming metal that had fallen from the sky. Overhead, the thunder rumbled onward, the feeble wind whistling, and there were other flashes on the horizon, orange and red ones, with crackles that didn’t sound quite like lightning.
The guns. They’re still fighting.
Instinctively, I pulled out my cellphone, and tapped the screen.
It fluttered to life, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get through to anyone, not even with the emergency function designed to work around having no service. The complicated wonder of our modern world was little better than a glorified paperweight.
Stunned, I sat down with my back to the helicopter and rested my head against the aluminum skin of the craft. How I’d gone from a regular medical supply run to being marooned in this hellish parody of rural America, I didn’t know, but one thig was certain; I needed a plan. Whoever fired the missile could have already contacted my charter company and made up some excuse to keep them from coming to look for me. No one else knew I was here, and even though I now had six staples holding the worst of my injuries shut, I knew I needed proper medical attention. If I wanted to live, I’d have to rescue myself.
My bag. I need to get my go-bag, grab some gear and then . . . head somewhere else.
It took me a while to gather my green canvas paratrooper bag from its place behind the pilot’s seat and fill it with whatever supplies I could scrounge. My knee didn’t seem to be broken, but man did it hurt, and I dreaded the thought of walking on it for miles on end. I focused instead on inventorying my gear and trying to come up with a halfway intelligent plan of action.
I had a stainless-steel canteen with one of those detachable cups on the bottom, a little fishing kit, some duct tape, a lighter, a black LED flashlight with three spare batteries, a few tattered road maps with a compass, a spare pair of socks, medical supplies from the cargo, and a simple forest green plastic rain poncho. I also managed to unearth a functioning digital camcorder my ouma had gotten me for Christmas a few years back, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to do any filming in such a miserable state. Lastly, since it was a private supply run from a warehouse area near Pittsburgh to a direct hospital pad in Ohio, I’d been able to bring my K-Bar, a sturdy, and brutally simple knife designed for the Marine Corps that I used every time I went camping. It was pitiful in comparison to the rifle I wished I had with me, but that didn’t matter now. I had what I had, and I doubted my trusty Armalite would have alleviated my sore knee anyway.
Clicking on my flashlight, I huddled with the poncho around my shoulders inside the wreck of the chopper and peered at the dusty roadmaps. A small part of me hoped that a solution would jump out from the faded paper, but none came. These were all maps of western PA and eastern Ohio. None of them had a Barron County on them anywhere.
The man on the radio said to head north, right before they shot me down. That means they must be camped out to the north of here. South had that convoy and those burning houses, so that’s a no-go. Maybe I can backtrack eastward the way I came.
As if on cue, a soft pop echoed from over the eastern horizon, and I craned to look out the helicopter window, spotting more man-made flashes over the tree tops.
“Great.” I hissed between clenched teeth, aware of how the temperature dipped to a chilly 60 degrees, and how despite the conditions, my stomach had begun to growl. “Not going that way, are we? Westward it is.”
Walking away from my poor 902 proved to be harder than I’d anticipated. Despite the glass, the fizzling fires, and the darkness, it still held a familiar, human essence to it. Sitting inside it made me feel secure, safe, even calm about the situation. In any other circumstance, I would have just stayed with the downed aircraft to wait for help, but I knew the men who shot me down would likely find my crash site, and I didn’t want to be around when they did.
Unlike much of central and western Ohio, southeastern Ohio is hilly, brushy, and clogged with thick forests. Thorns snagged at my thin poncho and sliced at my pant legs. My knee throbbed, every step a form of self-inflicted torture. The rain never stopped, a steady drizzle from above just cold enough to be problematic as time went on, making me shiver. Mud slid under my tennis shoes, and every tree looked ten times bigger in the flickering beam of my cheap flashlight. Icy fear prickled at the back of my neck at some of the sounds that greeted me through the gloom. I’d been camping loads of times, both in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, but these noises were something otherworldly to me.
Strange howls, screeches, and calls permeated the rain-soaked sky, some almost roars, while others bordered on human in their intonation. The more I walked, the softer the distant gunfire became, and the more prevalent the odd sounds, until the shadows seemed to fill with them. I didn’t dare turn off my flashlight, or I’d been completely blind in the dark, but a little voice in the back of my head screamed that I was too visible, crunching through the gloomy forest with my long beam of light stabbing into the abyss. It felt as though a million eyes were on me, studying me, hunting me from the surrounding brush, and I bitterly recalled how much I’d loved the old Survivor Man TV series as a kid.
Not so fun being out in the woods at night. Especially alone.
A twig snapped somewhere behind me, and I whirled on the spot, one trembling hand resting on the hilt of my K-Bar.
Nothing. Nothing but trees, bushes, and rain dripping down in the darkness.
“This is stupid.” I whispered to myself to keep my nerves in check as I slowly spun on the spot. “I should have went eastward anyway. God knows how long I’m going to have to—”
Creak.
A groan of metal-on-metal echoed from somewhere to my right, and I spun to face it, yanking the knife on my belt free from its scabbard. It felt so small and useless in my hand, and I choked down a wave of nauseas fear.
Ka-whump. Creak. K-whump. Creak.
Underbrush cracked and crunched, a few smaller saplings thrashed, and from deep within the gloom, two yellow orbs flared to life. They poked through the mist in the trees, forming into slender fingers of golden light that swept back and forth in the dark.
The soldiers . . . they must be looking for me.
I swallowed hard and turned to slink away.
Ice jammed through my blood, and I froze on the spot, biting my tongue to stop the scream.
It stood not yards away, a huge form that towered a good twelve feet tall in the swirling shadows. Unpolished chrome blended with flash-rusted spots in the faded red paint, and grime-smeared glass shone with dull hues in the flashes of lightning. Where the wheels should have been, the rounded steel axels curved like some enormous hand had bent them, and the tires lay face-down on the muddy ground like big round feet, their hubcaps buried in the dirt. Dents, scrapes, and chips covered the battered thing, and its crooked little radio antenna pointed straight up from the old metal fender like a mast. I could barely make out the mud-coated VW on the rounded hood, and my mind reeled in shock.
Is . . . is that a car?
Both yellow headlights bathed me in a circle of bright, blinding light, and neither I nor the strange vehicle moved.
Seconds ticked by, the screech-thumping in the background only growing closer. I realized that I couldn’t hear any engine noises and had yet to see any soldiers or guns pointed my way. This car looked old, really old, like one of those classic Volkswagen Beetles that collectors fought over at auctions. Try as I might, I couldn’t see a driver inside the murky, mold-smeared windows.
Because there wasn’t one.
Lightning arched across the sky overhead, and the car standing in front of me blinked.
Its headlights slid shut, as if little metal shades had crawled over the bulbs for a moment and flicked open again. Something about that movement was so primal, so real, so lifelike, that every ounce of self-control I had melted in an instant.
Cursing under my breath, I lunged into the shrubs, and the world erupted around me.
Under my shoes, the ground shook, and the car surged after me in a cacophony of ka-thumps that made my already racing heart skip several beats. A weather-beaten brown tow truck from the 50’s charged through the thorns to my left, it’s headlights ablaze, and a dilapidated yellow school bus rose from its hiding place in the weeds to stand tall on four down-turned axel-legs. They all flicked their headlights on like giants waking from their slumber, and as I dodged past them, they each blared their horn into the night in alarm.
My breaths came short and tight, my knee burned, and I crashed through thorns and briars without thought to how badly I was getting cut up.
The cheap poncho tore, and I ripped it away as it caught on a tree branch.
A purple 70’s Mustang shook off its blanket of creeping vines and bounded from a stand of trees just ahead, forcing me to swerve to avoid being run over, my adrenaline at all-time highs.
This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.
Slipping and sliding, I pushed through a stand of multiflora rose, and stumbled out into a flat, dark expanse.
I almost skidded to a stop.
What had once been a rather large field stood no taller than my shoestrings, the grass charred, and burnt. The storm above illuminated huge pieces of wreckage that lay scattered over the nearly 40-acre plot, and I could just make out the fire-blackened hulk of a fuselage resting a hundred yards away. The plane had been brought down a while ago it seemed, as there weren’t any flames left burning, and I threw myself toward it in frenzied desperation.
Burned grass and greasy brown topsoil slushed underfoot, and I could hear the squelching of the cars pursing me. Rain soaked me to the bone, and my lungs ached from sucking down the damp night air. A painful stich crept into my side, and I cursed myself for not putting in more time for cardio at the gym.
Something caught my left shoelace, and I hurtled to the ground, tasting mud and blood in between my teeth.
They’ve got me now.
I clawed at the mud, rolled, and watched a tire slam down mere inches from where my head had been. The Mustang loomed over me and jostled for position with the red Volkswagen and brown tow truck, the school bus still a few yards behind them. They couldn’t seem to decide who would get the pleasure of stomping me to death, and like a herd of stampeding wildebeest, they locked bumpers in an epic shoving match.
On all fours, I scampered out from under the sparring brutes, and dashed for the crumpled airplane, a white-painted DC-3 that looked like it had been cut in half by a gargantuan knife blade. I passed a snapped wing section, the oily remains of a turbo-prop engine, and a mutilated wheel from the landing gear. Climbing over a heap of mud, I squeezed into the back of the ruined flight cabin and dropped down into the dark cargo hold.
Wham.
No sooner had my sneakers hit the cold metal floor, and the entire plane rocked from the impact of something heavy ramming it just outside. I tumbled to my knees, screaming in pain as, once again, I managed to bash the sore one off a bracket in the wall.
My hand smeared in something gooey, and I scrabbled for my flashlight.
It clicked on, a wavering ball of white light in the pitch darkness, and I fought the urge to gag. “Oh man . . .”
Three people, or what was left of them, lay strewn over the narrow cargo area. Claret red blood coated the walls, caked on the floor, and clotted under my mud-spattered shoes. Bits of flesh and viscera were stuck to everything, and tatters of cloth hung from exposed sections of broken bone. An eerie set of bloody handprints adorned the walls, and the only reason I could tell it had been three people were the shoes; all of them bore anklebones sticking out above blood-soaked socks. It smelled sickly sweet, a strange, nauseas odor that crept into my nose and settled on the back of my tongue like an alien parasite.
Something glinted in the beam of my flashlight, and my pulse quickened as I pried the object loose from the severed arm that still clung to it.
“Hail Mary full of Grace.” I would have grinned if it weren’t for the fact that the plane continued to buck and roll under the assault from the cars outside.
The pistol looked old, but well-maintained, aside from the light coating of dark blood that stained its round wooden handle. It felt heavy, but good in my hand, and I turned it over to read the words, Waffenfabrik Mauser stenciled into the frame, with a large red 9 carved into the grip. For some reason, it vaguely reminded me of the blasters from Star Wars.
I fumbled with a little switch that looked like a safety on the back of the gun and stumbled toward a gap in the plane’s dented fuselage to aim out at the surrounding headlights.
Bang.
The old gun bucked reliably in my hand, its long barrel spitting a little jet of flame into the night. I had no idea if I hit anything, but the attacking cars recoiled, their horns blaring in confusion.
They turned, and scuttled for the tree line as fast as their mechanical legs could go, the entire ordeal over as fast as it had begun.
Did I do that?
Perplexed, I stared down at the pistol in my hand.
Whoosh.
A large, inky black shadow glided down from the clouds, and the yellow school bus moved too slow to react in time.
With a crash, the kicking nightmarish vehicle was thrown onto its side, spraying glass and chrome trim across the muddy field. Its electro-synth horn blared with wails of mechanical agony, as two huge talon-like feet clamped down on it, and the enormous head of the flying creature lowered to rip open its engine compartment.
The horn cut out, and the enormous flying entity jerked its head back to gulp down a mass of what looked like sticky black vines from the interior of the shattered bus.
At this range, I could see now that the flying creature bore two legs and had its wings half-tucked like a vulture that had descended to feed on roadkill. Its head turned slightly, and in the glow of another lightning bolt, my jaw went slack at the realization of what it was.
A tree trunk. It’s a rotted tree trunk.
I couldn’t tell where the reptilian beast began, and where the organic tree components ended, the upper part of the head shaped like a log, while the lower jaw resembled something out of a dinosaur movie. Its skin looked identical to the outside of a shagbark hickory but flexed with a supple featheriness that denoted something closer to skin. Sharp branch-like spines ranged down its back, and out to the end of its tail, which bore a massive round club shaped like a diseased tree-knot. Crouched on both hind legs, it braced the hooked ends of its folded wings against the ground like a bat, towering higher than a semi-truck. Under the folds of its armored head, a bulging pair of chameleon-like eyes constantly spun in their sockets, probing the dark for threats while it ate.
One black pupil locked onto the window I peered through, and my heart stopped.
The beast regarded me for a moment, with a curious, sideways sniff.
With a proud, contemptful head-toss, the shadow from the sky parted rows of razor-sharp teeth to let out a roar that shook the earth beneath my feet. It was the triumphant war cry of a creature that sat at the very top of the food chain, one that felt no threat from the fragile two-legged beings that walked the earth all around it. It hunted whenever it wanted, ate whatever it wanted, and flew wherever it wanted. It didn’t need to rip the plane apart to devour me.
Like my hunter-gatherer ancestors from thousands of years ago, I wasn’t even worth the energy it would take to pounce.
I’m hiding in the remains of the cockpit now, which is half-buried under the mud of the field, enough to shield the light from my screen so that thing doesn’t see it. My service only now came back, and it’s been over an hour since the winged beast started in on the dead bus. I don’t know when, or how I’m going to get out of here. I don’t know when anyone will even see this post, or if it will upload at all. My phone battery is almost dead, and at this point, I’m probably going to have to sleep among the corpses until daylight comes.
A dead man sleeping amongst friends.
If you live in the Noble County area in southeastern Ohio, be careful where you drive, fly, and boat. I don’t know if it’s possible to stumble into this strange place by ground, but if so, then these things are definitely headed your way.
If that happens . . . pray that they don’t find you.
2023.06.01 20:43 SeparateTechnician7 [Amazon] FIILPOW 1/2 Inch 100 FT Retractable Garden Hose Reel Slow & Safe Return System 38% Off ($99.19)
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2023.06.01 20:43 AuthorSJCochron D100 Trinkets list
##D100 Trinkets list
I'm building a list of trinkets for Morticians TTRPG. Trinkets in the game are superstitious items the players pick up to buff abilities. They also can be cursed items.
Currently, I have
submitted by AuthorSJCochron to d100 [link] [comments]
I'm building a list of trinkets for Morticians TTRPG. Trinkets in the game are superstitious items the players pick up to buff abilities. They also can be cursed items.
Currently, I have
- A Bead (Once per day, reroll a failed roll)
- Rainbow Earrings (Once per combat, reroll a failed roll.)
- A Button (+1 MD).
- Lucky Rabbit's Foot (Once per day -1d10 to any Skill check).
- A threadbare, bloodied patch that reads “Keep on Trucking,” but the Tr on trucking has been written over with a sharpie “F” (+1 to healing rate).
- Marble of Luck (+5 to Critical).
- Marble of Fate (Once per day, it will roll in the direction the owner should go.).
- A Quarter (Upon losing all HP, flip coin and call it to see if you are resurrected in full health. It cannot be used to reverse Infection stage death.).
- A half dollar that always lands tails up.
- Rad Shades (+10 to Speech).
- Lucky Rabbit's Foot
- Lucky Silver Coin (been kept in someone's pocket so long, all the markings have worn off. No one knows what the actual nationality or denomination of the coin is)
- a Bible (or Torah or Quran) that still has a bullet lodged in it from when it saved its owner's life.
- a Dream Catcher
- a Meteorite ore pendant necklace
- a Lock of Hair
- a Large Brass Key
- A travel guide that updates with the best restaurant, safest inn, best tavern, and points of interest/plot hooks for whatever city the players are in.
- A blanket that will keep them warm in any weather and provides resistance to cold damage.
- A stuffed animal that protects the owner from fear.
- A coin that always comes up tails.
- A pen that can mimic anyone's handwriting.
- Paper that, when folded into an airplane, never lands.
2023.06.01 18:22 TheScribe_1 [The Book of the Chosen] - Chapter Twelve - The Blacksmith's Boy (Part One)
Bonus chapter to celebrate 100 followers on Royal Road. Hopefully we're just getting started.
Previous Chapter - Read 10 weeks ahead on Patreon - Read the story so far on Royal Road
*
Chapter Twelve - The Blacksmith's Boy (Part One)
‘Lokk?’
Lokk glanced over his shoulder at the sound, frowning, and thought better of responding. Carel could manage without him a few moments longer.
‘Is someone calling you?’ The girl beside him asked, looking up at him with large eyes. Wanda, her name was, with a set of generous, pleasing dimples either side of a smiling mouth, freckled skin framed with a shock of crimson hair. His age. Maybe a year or so older. Who could tell? Who would care? Fifty men and women called Rindon home. Ten were close to his age. Four of them were women. Three of those weren’t his kin, and only one of those wasn’t already sick of the sight of him. Not yet, anyway.
‘Lokk?’ She asked him again, and he met her eye, brushing a strand of fair hair back from his brow.
‘They’ll wait.’ He told her, favouring her with a careless smile. ‘What were you saying? About your mother?’
‘Lokk!’ The call came again, louder this time, and accompanied by a loud clatter of pots through the kitchen door. He flinched, glancing up irritably. When he looked down again, Wanda was frowning, dimples dimpling into a polite, if apologetic, smile.
‘I… had best be going.’
‘Wait, Wanda, I...’ But she was already gone, hurrying off through the little maze of tables and chairs towards the Nest’s door. Lokk watched her go, not a little wistfully, ignoring a quiet smirk from one of the early arrivals. Then he sighed and went out through the door behind the bar, scowling.
The heat in the kitchen was thick with vapour. Steam poured out of a large pot hung swinging over the fire, steam that smelled of scavenged herbs and stale meat. Carel was standing beside it, stirring the contents with a ladle longer than her arm, pale hair tied back in a tight knot behind her head. On the counter beside her, the desiccated remains of a half-dozen different vegetables. The meat had left nothing behind.
‘What?’ He asked irritably, closing the door behind him.
‘What do you think?’ His sister replied, shooting him an irritable glance over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think me doing all the work whilst you drink our casks dry is what Da had in mind.’
‘I wasn’t just drinking.’ He told her. An apron was hanging up by the door, and he hung it sullenly over his shoulders, frowning. ‘Besides, you look like you were managing just fine without me.’
Carel snorted. ‘Someone had to.’
‘You’re much better at it than me, anyways.’ He added offhandedly, taking the ladle from her hands and sipping appreciatively from the little bowl of brownish broth. ‘Leave me to the casks. I’ll keep them company instead.’
‘I’m only better at it because Da taught me.’ Carel told him, scowling. ‘And he only taught me because he knew you’d be off trying to bed every girl in the village whenever his back’s turned. How is Maddy, by the way?’
‘Wanda.’ He corrected.
Carel snorted. ‘Anything that breathes, I suppose.’
Lokk gave her a hurt look. ‘Now, I’d hardly say anyth-‘
‘That’s actually my point.’ She interrupted him, snatching back the ladle. ‘You would say anything, if it got you what you wanted. Now make yourself useful and cut some bread.’
‘No need to be hurtful.’ He told her with a frown, going over to the counter and snatching up a knife. ‘Would be much simpler if I only had eyes for one someone. Not all of us have it so easy.’
He ducked just in time as part of a turnip crunched into the wall beside his head.
‘You’re right, I’m better off without your help!’ Carel told him, turning back to the pot. ‘Go back to your barrels.’
‘Thought you’d never ask.’ He shrugged the apron off his shoulders, and ducked through the door, just as another dismembered vegetable whistled past his ear.
Back in the common room, a few more of the villagers had assembled around one of the tables near the fire, making the early overtures of evening conversation around the edges of their ale mugs. Da had emerged from the Nest’s bowels, and was now skirting the table skilfully, fresh cask under arm. Lokk took his place behind the bar, doing his best to look busy. It was only then he noticed the other table. Further from the fire, this one. Quieter, too. Dark cloaks, dark faces. Lokk didn’t recognise them, and there wasn’t anyone in Rindon he didn’t know. As he watched, one of them looked up towards him with dark eyes, and he looked away, busying himself polishing a particularly stubborn mug.
‘You look busy.’
Da had appeared at his side, setting the cask down on the bar with a little sigh of effort. His rosy cheeks were rosier than ever, and his clothes smelt of pipe-smoke.
‘I am busy.’
‘I suppose your sister didn’t need your help?’ The innkeep smiled knowingly, taking his old pipe from a pocket in his shirt and rubbing it clean on his sleeve.
‘Said so herself.’
‘Course she did.’
‘I-’
‘Well, it was a fucking storm wasn’t it. Not every little shower gets farted out a wizard’s arse.’ Albin, the butcher, exclaimed from near the fire. Overtures done then. Time for an argument. Lokk might have smiled, had he not been so terribly bored by it all.
‘This is a long one. They’ll be here a while yet.’ Da told him thoughtfully, chewing idly at the nib of his pipe. He frowned. His Ma had hated that thing. But Ma was gone, and it wouldn’t do any good, thinking about her. ‘We’ll need another cask.’
‘Older the better?’
‘Oldest the best.’ The innkeep agreed, grinning at him.
Lokk nodded and turned towards the door, then hesitated.
‘I don’t know them folk.’ He said quietly, nodding towards the little group of dark figures sitting away from the fire. The innkeep caught his look and frowned.
‘Solen’s new hands. Lowlanders.’ He replied, tamping some weed into the end of his pipe with the end of his thumb. ‘Nosey bunch. He’s got a few more besides, I hears. Must be a busy season up at the mine.’
Lokk frowned. ‘Do mines have busy seasons?’
‘Damned if I know. Keep to ‘emselves, mostly, anyways. Been here best part of a month, I reckon. Had one of ‘em in here asking questions, few days back, nothing since.’ The innkeep stopped fiddling with his pipe for a moment, giving his son a sideways look. ‘Still, they pay their way. Up front. Which is more than I can say for most of this lot.’
Lokk stole one last look at the quiet table of strangers, then turned and went out through a side door and into the night beyond, leaving Da at the bar alone.
The cold air bit at his skin as he emerged into the dark, and he shivered, shrugging himself a little deeper into his shirt. Winter came quickly, this close to the Teeth, filling the rocks with the kind of deep, dark cold that lasted well into spring. Presently, a rumbling cloud of purpling rain was drawing in over the mountains, and the wind was picking up. Lokk shivered again, scowling. Just his luck to catch the rain.
He made his way around the side of the sloping roof of the inn, head low against the gathering whine of the wind. Another night, another cask. Another squabble over nothing by the fire. Another restless sleep, wrapped in cold blankets. Alone. Summer was bad enough, but winter in the foothills was slower than a monk in a brothel. The women, such as they were, stayed home, for the most part. Those that did make it to the Nest didn’t wait out the first mugs. Even Cal had stopped calling, this past month.
Overheard, a pale flash of light, followed by a distant rumble. Rain had started, somewhere off up the slopes. Lokk aimed another choice curse at no one in particular. No women, no friends. No money. It was a sorry state of affairs, if ever he’d seen one.
He reached the store and began fiddling with the lock with numb fingers, frowning. It was hardly Cal’s fault, he knew. That blacksmith was quite mad. Everyone knew it. Locked up in that old forge, hammering away, night and day. Lokk had seen him a few times. Fonder of glaring than talking. Wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but he certainly didn’t like him. Big tree of a man, arms thick as thighs, had to stoop to get through most doorways. And his eyes! Lokk shivered again. Felt like ice on your skin when he looked at you. Strays like Cal couldn’t be choosers, Lokk knew that well enough. But if he was him, he’d have run off years ago.
The latch finally gave, and he swung the door open with a triumphant snort. He felt his way along the row of casks closest to the door, where the older ones were, fumbling in the dark. Behind him, the thunder crashed against the side of the hills, vibrating through his boots, and he flinched in spite of himself. If that mad blacksmith was going to keep Cal locked up like some trained animal, he’d have to get by without him. Not like Cal was the best company, anyway, these days. Always had been a strange one, but pale eyes had started getting far too clever for his own good, recently. More full of secrets than a Westri merchant. Sometimes he wondered if Cal saw the world the rest of them did, or one entirely his own. And then there was the Carel problem.
His hand settled on the cask closest to the far wall, and he dragged it grumbling from its place, wedging it under one arm. No, he could hardly blame Cal for any of it. He was just bored. Still, better bored at the inn than locked up in that damn forge with the cracked old blacksmith and his scarred face. He snorted under his breath, shivering at the thought. They’d been talking about leaving for years now. Going west. Arinath, maybe, Uldoroth, even. Men could make a good living in the white stones, so they’d heard. Makers knew they couldn’t stay here forever. Run the inn? Take up mining? No, they wouldn’t be here, forever. Maybe this year. Maybe next. But they’d get there. Tough place, the Lowlands, but they’d look out for each other. Always had. Besides, couldn’t be any tougher than these fucking hills. He wondered if Carel would follow them there, too. Who’d do the Nest's cooking, then?
He was halfway to the door when he heard it. The slow whisper of a thousand thousand breaths, brushes on the stones, rippling closer. He hesitated for a moment, then cursed, staggering for the door, cask slipping against his arm. The rain caught him on the doorstep, turning him silver with a layer of frigid water, and he spilled clumsily into the firelight beyond, nearly dropping the cask.
‘Easy!’
‘I’ve got it!’ He snapped back, straightening and setting it down on the bar beside the other. Da had got his pipe lit in the time Lokk had been outside, and the little twisting strings of smoke were curling upwards from his whiskered mouth. Carel was beside him, spooning her steaming brown broth into three small bowls on the bar.
‘Just in time for dinner.’ Da told him, sucking on his pipe.
‘As always.’ Carel murmured.
‘I-’
‘You look wet.’
‘I swear to-’
‘Get the door, will you. You trying to let the storm in?’
Lokk scowled, latching the door, and snatched up his bowl silently. He looked out at the rest of the common room, savouring the heat of the fire for a moment. Just as he left it. Of course it was. What would have changed?
‘What about Isandur, then?’ One of the villagers beside the fire was asking. Lokk snorted.
‘This one, again?’
‘It’s a good story.’ Da said quietly, blowing a little stream of smoke through his pursed lips.
‘Heard it a half-dozen times already, this month.’
‘Don’t let Godry hear you talking rot.’ Carel told him, taking up her own bowl and stirring it gently. ‘Wouldn’t want him giving it up. Albin would have to take over.’
Lokk’s eyes caught the little group of strangers again, sitting in the shadows away from the fire. Talking quietly amongst themselves. Dark cloaks and dour faces. At least that was new. They even looked like they might be more bored than he was.
Outside, the rain drummed down over the thatching, and the wind whined over the hills. He sighed, and took a mouthful of the steaming, tasteless stew, frowning to himself. Another night. Another boring fucking night.
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Previous Chapter - Read 10 weeks ahead on Patreon - Read the story so far on Royal Road
*
Chapter Twelve - The Blacksmith's Boy (Part One)
‘Lokk?’
Lokk glanced over his shoulder at the sound, frowning, and thought better of responding. Carel could manage without him a few moments longer.
‘Is someone calling you?’ The girl beside him asked, looking up at him with large eyes. Wanda, her name was, with a set of generous, pleasing dimples either side of a smiling mouth, freckled skin framed with a shock of crimson hair. His age. Maybe a year or so older. Who could tell? Who would care? Fifty men and women called Rindon home. Ten were close to his age. Four of them were women. Three of those weren’t his kin, and only one of those wasn’t already sick of the sight of him. Not yet, anyway.
‘Lokk?’ She asked him again, and he met her eye, brushing a strand of fair hair back from his brow.
‘They’ll wait.’ He told her, favouring her with a careless smile. ‘What were you saying? About your mother?’
‘Lokk!’ The call came again, louder this time, and accompanied by a loud clatter of pots through the kitchen door. He flinched, glancing up irritably. When he looked down again, Wanda was frowning, dimples dimpling into a polite, if apologetic, smile.
‘I… had best be going.’
‘Wait, Wanda, I...’ But she was already gone, hurrying off through the little maze of tables and chairs towards the Nest’s door. Lokk watched her go, not a little wistfully, ignoring a quiet smirk from one of the early arrivals. Then he sighed and went out through the door behind the bar, scowling.
The heat in the kitchen was thick with vapour. Steam poured out of a large pot hung swinging over the fire, steam that smelled of scavenged herbs and stale meat. Carel was standing beside it, stirring the contents with a ladle longer than her arm, pale hair tied back in a tight knot behind her head. On the counter beside her, the desiccated remains of a half-dozen different vegetables. The meat had left nothing behind.
‘What?’ He asked irritably, closing the door behind him.
‘What do you think?’ His sister replied, shooting him an irritable glance over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think me doing all the work whilst you drink our casks dry is what Da had in mind.’
‘I wasn’t just drinking.’ He told her. An apron was hanging up by the door, and he hung it sullenly over his shoulders, frowning. ‘Besides, you look like you were managing just fine without me.’
Carel snorted. ‘Someone had to.’
‘You’re much better at it than me, anyways.’ He added offhandedly, taking the ladle from her hands and sipping appreciatively from the little bowl of brownish broth. ‘Leave me to the casks. I’ll keep them company instead.’
‘I’m only better at it because Da taught me.’ Carel told him, scowling. ‘And he only taught me because he knew you’d be off trying to bed every girl in the village whenever his back’s turned. How is Maddy, by the way?’
‘Wanda.’ He corrected.
Carel snorted. ‘Anything that breathes, I suppose.’
Lokk gave her a hurt look. ‘Now, I’d hardly say anyth-‘
‘That’s actually my point.’ She interrupted him, snatching back the ladle. ‘You would say anything, if it got you what you wanted. Now make yourself useful and cut some bread.’
‘No need to be hurtful.’ He told her with a frown, going over to the counter and snatching up a knife. ‘Would be much simpler if I only had eyes for one someone. Not all of us have it so easy.’
He ducked just in time as part of a turnip crunched into the wall beside his head.
‘You’re right, I’m better off without your help!’ Carel told him, turning back to the pot. ‘Go back to your barrels.’
‘Thought you’d never ask.’ He shrugged the apron off his shoulders, and ducked through the door, just as another dismembered vegetable whistled past his ear.
Back in the common room, a few more of the villagers had assembled around one of the tables near the fire, making the early overtures of evening conversation around the edges of their ale mugs. Da had emerged from the Nest’s bowels, and was now skirting the table skilfully, fresh cask under arm. Lokk took his place behind the bar, doing his best to look busy. It was only then he noticed the other table. Further from the fire, this one. Quieter, too. Dark cloaks, dark faces. Lokk didn’t recognise them, and there wasn’t anyone in Rindon he didn’t know. As he watched, one of them looked up towards him with dark eyes, and he looked away, busying himself polishing a particularly stubborn mug.
‘You look busy.’
Da had appeared at his side, setting the cask down on the bar with a little sigh of effort. His rosy cheeks were rosier than ever, and his clothes smelt of pipe-smoke.
‘I am busy.’
‘I suppose your sister didn’t need your help?’ The innkeep smiled knowingly, taking his old pipe from a pocket in his shirt and rubbing it clean on his sleeve.
‘Said so herself.’
‘Course she did.’
‘I-’
‘Well, it was a fucking storm wasn’t it. Not every little shower gets farted out a wizard’s arse.’ Albin, the butcher, exclaimed from near the fire. Overtures done then. Time for an argument. Lokk might have smiled, had he not been so terribly bored by it all.
‘This is a long one. They’ll be here a while yet.’ Da told him thoughtfully, chewing idly at the nib of his pipe. He frowned. His Ma had hated that thing. But Ma was gone, and it wouldn’t do any good, thinking about her. ‘We’ll need another cask.’
‘Older the better?’
‘Oldest the best.’ The innkeep agreed, grinning at him.
Lokk nodded and turned towards the door, then hesitated.
‘I don’t know them folk.’ He said quietly, nodding towards the little group of dark figures sitting away from the fire. The innkeep caught his look and frowned.
‘Solen’s new hands. Lowlanders.’ He replied, tamping some weed into the end of his pipe with the end of his thumb. ‘Nosey bunch. He’s got a few more besides, I hears. Must be a busy season up at the mine.’
Lokk frowned. ‘Do mines have busy seasons?’
‘Damned if I know. Keep to ‘emselves, mostly, anyways. Been here best part of a month, I reckon. Had one of ‘em in here asking questions, few days back, nothing since.’ The innkeep stopped fiddling with his pipe for a moment, giving his son a sideways look. ‘Still, they pay their way. Up front. Which is more than I can say for most of this lot.’
Lokk stole one last look at the quiet table of strangers, then turned and went out through a side door and into the night beyond, leaving Da at the bar alone.
The cold air bit at his skin as he emerged into the dark, and he shivered, shrugging himself a little deeper into his shirt. Winter came quickly, this close to the Teeth, filling the rocks with the kind of deep, dark cold that lasted well into spring. Presently, a rumbling cloud of purpling rain was drawing in over the mountains, and the wind was picking up. Lokk shivered again, scowling. Just his luck to catch the rain.
He made his way around the side of the sloping roof of the inn, head low against the gathering whine of the wind. Another night, another cask. Another squabble over nothing by the fire. Another restless sleep, wrapped in cold blankets. Alone. Summer was bad enough, but winter in the foothills was slower than a monk in a brothel. The women, such as they were, stayed home, for the most part. Those that did make it to the Nest didn’t wait out the first mugs. Even Cal had stopped calling, this past month.
Overheard, a pale flash of light, followed by a distant rumble. Rain had started, somewhere off up the slopes. Lokk aimed another choice curse at no one in particular. No women, no friends. No money. It was a sorry state of affairs, if ever he’d seen one.
He reached the store and began fiddling with the lock with numb fingers, frowning. It was hardly Cal’s fault, he knew. That blacksmith was quite mad. Everyone knew it. Locked up in that old forge, hammering away, night and day. Lokk had seen him a few times. Fonder of glaring than talking. Wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but he certainly didn’t like him. Big tree of a man, arms thick as thighs, had to stoop to get through most doorways. And his eyes! Lokk shivered again. Felt like ice on your skin when he looked at you. Strays like Cal couldn’t be choosers, Lokk knew that well enough. But if he was him, he’d have run off years ago.
The latch finally gave, and he swung the door open with a triumphant snort. He felt his way along the row of casks closest to the door, where the older ones were, fumbling in the dark. Behind him, the thunder crashed against the side of the hills, vibrating through his boots, and he flinched in spite of himself. If that mad blacksmith was going to keep Cal locked up like some trained animal, he’d have to get by without him. Not like Cal was the best company, anyway, these days. Always had been a strange one, but pale eyes had started getting far too clever for his own good, recently. More full of secrets than a Westri merchant. Sometimes he wondered if Cal saw the world the rest of them did, or one entirely his own. And then there was the Carel problem.
His hand settled on the cask closest to the far wall, and he dragged it grumbling from its place, wedging it under one arm. No, he could hardly blame Cal for any of it. He was just bored. Still, better bored at the inn than locked up in that damn forge with the cracked old blacksmith and his scarred face. He snorted under his breath, shivering at the thought. They’d been talking about leaving for years now. Going west. Arinath, maybe, Uldoroth, even. Men could make a good living in the white stones, so they’d heard. Makers knew they couldn’t stay here forever. Run the inn? Take up mining? No, they wouldn’t be here, forever. Maybe this year. Maybe next. But they’d get there. Tough place, the Lowlands, but they’d look out for each other. Always had. Besides, couldn’t be any tougher than these fucking hills. He wondered if Carel would follow them there, too. Who’d do the Nest's cooking, then?
He was halfway to the door when he heard it. The slow whisper of a thousand thousand breaths, brushes on the stones, rippling closer. He hesitated for a moment, then cursed, staggering for the door, cask slipping against his arm. The rain caught him on the doorstep, turning him silver with a layer of frigid water, and he spilled clumsily into the firelight beyond, nearly dropping the cask.
‘Easy!’
‘I’ve got it!’ He snapped back, straightening and setting it down on the bar beside the other. Da had got his pipe lit in the time Lokk had been outside, and the little twisting strings of smoke were curling upwards from his whiskered mouth. Carel was beside him, spooning her steaming brown broth into three small bowls on the bar.
‘Just in time for dinner.’ Da told him, sucking on his pipe.
‘As always.’ Carel murmured.
‘I-’
‘You look wet.’
‘I swear to-’
‘Get the door, will you. You trying to let the storm in?’
Lokk scowled, latching the door, and snatched up his bowl silently. He looked out at the rest of the common room, savouring the heat of the fire for a moment. Just as he left it. Of course it was. What would have changed?
‘What about Isandur, then?’ One of the villagers beside the fire was asking. Lokk snorted.
‘This one, again?’
‘It’s a good story.’ Da said quietly, blowing a little stream of smoke through his pursed lips.
‘Heard it a half-dozen times already, this month.’
‘Don’t let Godry hear you talking rot.’ Carel told him, taking up her own bowl and stirring it gently. ‘Wouldn’t want him giving it up. Albin would have to take over.’
Lokk’s eyes caught the little group of strangers again, sitting in the shadows away from the fire. Talking quietly amongst themselves. Dark cloaks and dour faces. At least that was new. They even looked like they might be more bored than he was.
Outside, the rain drummed down over the thatching, and the wind whined over the hills. He sighed, and took a mouthful of the steaming, tasteless stew, frowning to himself. Another night. Another boring fucking night.
2023.06.01 18:21 TheScribe_1 [The Book of the Chosen] - Chapter Twelve - The Blacksmith's Boy (Part One)
Bonus chapter to celebrate 100 followers on Royal Road. Hopefully we're just getting started.
Series Page - Read 10 weeks ahead on Patreon - Read the story so far on Royal Road
*
Chapter Twelve - The Blacksmith's Boy (Part One)
‘Lokk?’ Lokk glanced over his shoulder at the sound, frowning, and thought better of responding. Carel could manage without him a few moments longer. ‘Is someone calling you?’ The girl beside him asked, looking up at him with large eyes. Wanda, her name was, with a set of generous, pleasing dimples either side of a smiling mouth, freckled skin framed with a shock of crimson hair. His age. Maybe a year or so older. Who could tell? Who would care? Fifty men and women called Rindon home. Ten were close to his age. Four of them were women. Three of those weren’t his kin, and only one of those wasn’t already sick of the sight of him. Not yet, anyway. ‘Lokk?’ She asked him again, and he met her eye, brushing a strand of fair hair back from his brow. ‘They’ll wait.’ He told her, favouring her with a careless smile. ‘What were you saying? About your mother?’ ‘Lokk!’ The call came again, louder this time, and accompanied by a loud clatter of pots through the kitchen door. He flinched, glancing up irritably. When he looked down again, Wanda was frowning, dimples dimpling into a polite, if apologetic, smile. ‘I… had best be going.’ ‘Wait, Wanda, I...’ But she was already gone, hurrying off through the little maze of tables and chairs towards the Nest’s door. Lokk watched her go, not a little wistfully, ignoring a quiet smirk from one of the early arrivals. Then he sighed and went out through the door behind the bar, scowling. The heat in the kitchen was thick with vapour. Steam poured out of a large pot hung swinging over the fire, steam that smelled of scavenged herbs and stale meat. Carel was standing beside it, stirring the contents with a ladle longer than her arm, pale hair tied back in a tight knot behind her head. On the counter beside her, the desiccated remains of a half-dozen different vegetables. The meat had left nothing behind. ‘What?’ He asked irritably, closing the door behind him. ‘What do you think?’ His sister replied, shooting him an irritable glance over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think me doing all the work whilst you drink our casks dry is what Da had in mind.’ ‘I wasn’t just drinking.’ He told her. An apron was hanging up by the door, and he hung it sullenly over his shoulders, frowning. ‘Besides, you look like you were managing just fine without me.’ Carel snorted. ‘Someone had to.’ ‘You’re much better at it than me, anyways.’ He added offhandedly, taking the ladle from her hands and sipping appreciatively from the little bowl of brownish broth. ‘Leave me to the casks. I’ll keep them company instead.’ ‘I’m only better at it because Da taught me.’ Carel told him, scowling. ‘And he only taught me because he knew you’d be off trying to bed every girl in the village whenever his back’s turned. How is Maddy, by the way?’ ‘Wanda.’ He corrected. Carel snorted. ‘Anything that breathes, I suppose.’ Lokk gave her a hurt look. ‘Now, I’d hardly say anyth-‘ ‘That’s actually my point.’ She interrupted him, snatching back the ladle. ‘You would say anything, if it got you what you wanted. Now make yourself useful and cut some bread.’ ‘No need to be hurtful.’ He told her with a frown, going over to the counter and snatching up a knife. ‘Would be much simpler if I only had eyes for one someone. Not all of us have it so easy.’ He ducked just in time as part of a turnip crunched into the wall beside his head. ‘You’re right, I’m better off without your help!’ Carel told him, turning back to the pot. ‘Go back to your barrels.’ ‘Thought you’d never ask.’ He shrugged the apron off his shoulders, and ducked through the door, just as another dismembered vegetable whistled past his ear. Back in the common room, a few more of the villagers had assembled around one of the tables near the fire, making the early overtures of evening conversation around the edges of their ale mugs. Da had emerged from the Nest’s bowels, and was now skirting the table skilfully, fresh cask under arm. Lokk took his place behind the bar, doing his best to look busy. It was only then he noticed the other table. Further from the fire, this one. Quieter, too. Dark cloaks, dark faces. Lokk didn’t recognise them, and there wasn’t anyone in Rindon he didn’t know. As he watched, one of them looked up towards him with dark eyes, and he looked away, busying himself polishing a particularly stubborn mug. ‘You look busy.’ Da had appeared at his side, setting the cask down on the bar with a little sigh of effort. His rosy cheeks were rosier than ever, and his clothes smelt of pipe-smoke. ‘I am busy.’ ‘I suppose your sister didn’t need your help?’ The innkeep smiled knowingly, taking his old pipe from a pocket in his shirt and rubbing it clean on his sleeve. ‘Said so herself.’ ‘Course she did.’ ‘I-’ ‘Well, it was a fucking storm wasn’t it. Not every little shower gets farted out a wizard’s arse.’ Albin, the butcher, exclaimed from near the fire. Overtures done then. Time for an argument. Lokk might have smiled, had he not been so terribly bored by it all. ‘This is a long one. They’ll be here a while yet.’ Da told him thoughtfully, chewing idly at the nib of his pipe. He frowned. His Ma had hated that thing. But Ma was gone, and it wouldn’t do any good, thinking about her. ‘We’ll need another cask.’ ‘Older the better?’ ‘Oldest the best.’ The innkeep agreed, grinning at him. Lokk nodded and turned towards the door, then hesitated. ‘I don’t know them folk.’ He said quietly, nodding towards the little group of dark figures sitting away from the fire. The innkeep caught his look and frowned. ‘Solen’s new hands. Lowlanders.’ He replied, tamping some weed into the end of his pipe with the end of his thumb. ‘Nosey bunch. He’s got a few more besides, I hears. Must be a busy season up at the mine.’ Lokk frowned. ‘Do mines have busy seasons?’ ‘Damned if I know. Keep to ‘emselves, mostly, anyways. Been here best part of a month, I reckon. Had one of ‘em in here asking questions, few days back, nothing since.’ The innkeep stopped fiddling with his pipe for a moment, giving his son a sideways look. ‘Still, they pay their way. Up front. Which is more than I can say for most of this lot.’ Lokk stole one last look at the quiet table of strangers, then turned and went out through a side door and into the night beyond, leaving Da at the bar alone. The cold air bit at his skin as he emerged into the dark, and he shivered, shrugging himself a little deeper into his shirt. Winter came quickly, this close to the Teeth, filling the rocks with the kind of deep, dark cold that lasted well into spring. Presently, a rumbling cloud of purpling rain was drawing in over the mountains, and the wind was picking up. Lokk shivered again, scowling. Just his luck to catch the rain. He made his way around the side of the sloping roof of the inn, head low against the gathering whine of the wind. Another night, another cask. Another squabble over nothing by the fire. Another restless sleep, wrapped in cold blankets. Alone. Summer was bad enough, but winter in the foothills was slower than a monk in a brothel. The women, such as they were, stayed home, for the most part. Those that did make it to the Nest didn’t wait out the first mugs. Even Cal had stopped calling, this past month. Overheard, a pale flash of light, followed by a distant rumble. Rain had started, somewhere off up the slopes. Lokk aimed another choice curse at no one in particular. No women, no friends. No money. It was a sorry state of affairs, if ever he’d seen one. He reached the store and began fiddling with the lock with numb fingers, frowning. It was hardly Cal’s fault, he knew. That blacksmith was quite mad. Everyone knew it. Locked up in that old forge, hammering away, night and day. Lokk had seen him a few times. Fonder of glaring than talking. Wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but he certainly didn’t like him. Big tree of a man, arms thick as thighs, had to stoop to get through most doorways. And his eyes! Lokk shivered again. Felt like ice on your skin when he looked at you. Strays like Cal couldn’t be choosers, Lokk knew that well enough. But if he was him, he’d have run off years ago. The latch finally gave, and he swung the door open with a triumphant snort. He felt his way along the row of casks closest to the door, where the older ones were, fumbling in the dark. Behind him, the thunder crashed against the side of the hills, vibrating through his boots, and he flinched in spite of himself. If that mad blacksmith was going to keep Cal locked up like some trained animal, he’d have to get by without him. Not like Cal was the best company, anyway, these days. Always had been a strange one, but pale eyes had started getting far too clever for his own good, recently. More full of secrets than a Westri merchant. Sometimes he wondered if Cal saw the world the rest of them did, or one entirely his own. And then there was the Carel problem. His hand settled on the cask closest to the far wall, and he dragged it grumbling from its place, wedging it under one arm. No, he could hardly blame Cal for any of it. He was just bored. Still, better bored at the inn than locked up in that damn forge with the cracked old blacksmith and his scarred face. He snorted under his breath, shivering at the thought. They’d been talking about leaving for years now. Going west. Arinath, maybe, Uldoroth, even. Men could make a good living in the white stones, so they’d heard. Makers knew they couldn’t stay here forever. Run the inn? Take up mining? No, they wouldn’t be here, forever. Maybe this year. Maybe next. But they’d get there. Tough place, the Lowlands, but they’d look out for each other. Always had. Besides, couldn’t be any tougher than these fucking hills. He wondered if Carel would follow them there, too. Who’d do the Nest's cooking, then? He was halfway to the door when he heard it. The slow whisper of a thousand thousand breaths, brushes on the stones, rippling closer. He hesitated for a moment, then cursed, staggering for the door, cask slipping against his arm. The rain caught him on the doorstep, turning him silver with a layer of frigid water, and he spilled clumsily into the firelight beyond, nearly dropping the cask. ‘Easy!’ ‘I’ve got it!’ He snapped back, straightening and setting it down on the bar beside the other. Da had got his pipe lit in the time Lokk had been outside, and the little twisting strings of smoke were curling upwards from his whiskered mouth. Carel was beside him, spooning her steaming brown broth into three small bowls on the bar. ‘Just in time for dinner.’ Da told him, sucking on his pipe. ‘As always.’ Carel murmured. ‘I-’ ‘You look wet.’ ‘I swear to-’ ‘Get the door, will you. You trying to let the storm in?’ Lokk scowled, latching the door, and snatched up his bowl silently. He looked out at the rest of the common room, savouring the heat of the fire for a moment. Just as he left it. Of course it was. What would have changed? ‘What about Isandur, then?’ One of the villagers beside the fire was asking. Lokk snorted. ‘This one, again?’ ‘It’s a good story.’ Da said quietly, blowing a little stream of smoke through his pursed lips. ‘Heard it a half-dozen times already, this month.’ ‘Don’t let Godry hear you talking rot.’ Carel told him, taking up her own bowl and stirring it gently. ‘Wouldn’t want him giving it up. Albin would have to take over.’ Lokk’s eyes caught the little group of strangers again, sitting in the shadows away from the fire. Talking quietly amongst themselves. Dark cloaks and dour faces. At least that was new. They even looked like they might be more bored than he was. Outside, the rain drummed down over the thatching, and the wind whined over the hills. He sighed, and took a mouthful of the steaming, tasteless stew, frowning to himself. Another night. Another boring fucking night.
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Series Page - Read 10 weeks ahead on Patreon - Read the story so far on Royal Road
*
Chapter Twelve - The Blacksmith's Boy (Part One)
‘Lokk?’ Lokk glanced over his shoulder at the sound, frowning, and thought better of responding. Carel could manage without him a few moments longer. ‘Is someone calling you?’ The girl beside him asked, looking up at him with large eyes. Wanda, her name was, with a set of generous, pleasing dimples either side of a smiling mouth, freckled skin framed with a shock of crimson hair. His age. Maybe a year or so older. Who could tell? Who would care? Fifty men and women called Rindon home. Ten were close to his age. Four of them were women. Three of those weren’t his kin, and only one of those wasn’t already sick of the sight of him. Not yet, anyway. ‘Lokk?’ She asked him again, and he met her eye, brushing a strand of fair hair back from his brow. ‘They’ll wait.’ He told her, favouring her with a careless smile. ‘What were you saying? About your mother?’ ‘Lokk!’ The call came again, louder this time, and accompanied by a loud clatter of pots through the kitchen door. He flinched, glancing up irritably. When he looked down again, Wanda was frowning, dimples dimpling into a polite, if apologetic, smile. ‘I… had best be going.’ ‘Wait, Wanda, I...’ But she was already gone, hurrying off through the little maze of tables and chairs towards the Nest’s door. Lokk watched her go, not a little wistfully, ignoring a quiet smirk from one of the early arrivals. Then he sighed and went out through the door behind the bar, scowling. The heat in the kitchen was thick with vapour. Steam poured out of a large pot hung swinging over the fire, steam that smelled of scavenged herbs and stale meat. Carel was standing beside it, stirring the contents with a ladle longer than her arm, pale hair tied back in a tight knot behind her head. On the counter beside her, the desiccated remains of a half-dozen different vegetables. The meat had left nothing behind. ‘What?’ He asked irritably, closing the door behind him. ‘What do you think?’ His sister replied, shooting him an irritable glance over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think me doing all the work whilst you drink our casks dry is what Da had in mind.’ ‘I wasn’t just drinking.’ He told her. An apron was hanging up by the door, and he hung it sullenly over his shoulders, frowning. ‘Besides, you look like you were managing just fine without me.’ Carel snorted. ‘Someone had to.’ ‘You’re much better at it than me, anyways.’ He added offhandedly, taking the ladle from her hands and sipping appreciatively from the little bowl of brownish broth. ‘Leave me to the casks. I’ll keep them company instead.’ ‘I’m only better at it because Da taught me.’ Carel told him, scowling. ‘And he only taught me because he knew you’d be off trying to bed every girl in the village whenever his back’s turned. How is Maddy, by the way?’ ‘Wanda.’ He corrected. Carel snorted. ‘Anything that breathes, I suppose.’ Lokk gave her a hurt look. ‘Now, I’d hardly say anyth-‘ ‘That’s actually my point.’ She interrupted him, snatching back the ladle. ‘You would say anything, if it got you what you wanted. Now make yourself useful and cut some bread.’ ‘No need to be hurtful.’ He told her with a frown, going over to the counter and snatching up a knife. ‘Would be much simpler if I only had eyes for one someone. Not all of us have it so easy.’ He ducked just in time as part of a turnip crunched into the wall beside his head. ‘You’re right, I’m better off without your help!’ Carel told him, turning back to the pot. ‘Go back to your barrels.’ ‘Thought you’d never ask.’ He shrugged the apron off his shoulders, and ducked through the door, just as another dismembered vegetable whistled past his ear. Back in the common room, a few more of the villagers had assembled around one of the tables near the fire, making the early overtures of evening conversation around the edges of their ale mugs. Da had emerged from the Nest’s bowels, and was now skirting the table skilfully, fresh cask under arm. Lokk took his place behind the bar, doing his best to look busy. It was only then he noticed the other table. Further from the fire, this one. Quieter, too. Dark cloaks, dark faces. Lokk didn’t recognise them, and there wasn’t anyone in Rindon he didn’t know. As he watched, one of them looked up towards him with dark eyes, and he looked away, busying himself polishing a particularly stubborn mug. ‘You look busy.’ Da had appeared at his side, setting the cask down on the bar with a little sigh of effort. His rosy cheeks were rosier than ever, and his clothes smelt of pipe-smoke. ‘I am busy.’ ‘I suppose your sister didn’t need your help?’ The innkeep smiled knowingly, taking his old pipe from a pocket in his shirt and rubbing it clean on his sleeve. ‘Said so herself.’ ‘Course she did.’ ‘I-’ ‘Well, it was a fucking storm wasn’t it. Not every little shower gets farted out a wizard’s arse.’ Albin, the butcher, exclaimed from near the fire. Overtures done then. Time for an argument. Lokk might have smiled, had he not been so terribly bored by it all. ‘This is a long one. They’ll be here a while yet.’ Da told him thoughtfully, chewing idly at the nib of his pipe. He frowned. His Ma had hated that thing. But Ma was gone, and it wouldn’t do any good, thinking about her. ‘We’ll need another cask.’ ‘Older the better?’ ‘Oldest the best.’ The innkeep agreed, grinning at him. Lokk nodded and turned towards the door, then hesitated. ‘I don’t know them folk.’ He said quietly, nodding towards the little group of dark figures sitting away from the fire. The innkeep caught his look and frowned. ‘Solen’s new hands. Lowlanders.’ He replied, tamping some weed into the end of his pipe with the end of his thumb. ‘Nosey bunch. He’s got a few more besides, I hears. Must be a busy season up at the mine.’ Lokk frowned. ‘Do mines have busy seasons?’ ‘Damned if I know. Keep to ‘emselves, mostly, anyways. Been here best part of a month, I reckon. Had one of ‘em in here asking questions, few days back, nothing since.’ The innkeep stopped fiddling with his pipe for a moment, giving his son a sideways look. ‘Still, they pay their way. Up front. Which is more than I can say for most of this lot.’ Lokk stole one last look at the quiet table of strangers, then turned and went out through a side door and into the night beyond, leaving Da at the bar alone. The cold air bit at his skin as he emerged into the dark, and he shivered, shrugging himself a little deeper into his shirt. Winter came quickly, this close to the Teeth, filling the rocks with the kind of deep, dark cold that lasted well into spring. Presently, a rumbling cloud of purpling rain was drawing in over the mountains, and the wind was picking up. Lokk shivered again, scowling. Just his luck to catch the rain. He made his way around the side of the sloping roof of the inn, head low against the gathering whine of the wind. Another night, another cask. Another squabble over nothing by the fire. Another restless sleep, wrapped in cold blankets. Alone. Summer was bad enough, but winter in the foothills was slower than a monk in a brothel. The women, such as they were, stayed home, for the most part. Those that did make it to the Nest didn’t wait out the first mugs. Even Cal had stopped calling, this past month. Overheard, a pale flash of light, followed by a distant rumble. Rain had started, somewhere off up the slopes. Lokk aimed another choice curse at no one in particular. No women, no friends. No money. It was a sorry state of affairs, if ever he’d seen one. He reached the store and began fiddling with the lock with numb fingers, frowning. It was hardly Cal’s fault, he knew. That blacksmith was quite mad. Everyone knew it. Locked up in that old forge, hammering away, night and day. Lokk had seen him a few times. Fonder of glaring than talking. Wasn’t exactly afraid of him, but he certainly didn’t like him. Big tree of a man, arms thick as thighs, had to stoop to get through most doorways. And his eyes! Lokk shivered again. Felt like ice on your skin when he looked at you. Strays like Cal couldn’t be choosers, Lokk knew that well enough. But if he was him, he’d have run off years ago. The latch finally gave, and he swung the door open with a triumphant snort. He felt his way along the row of casks closest to the door, where the older ones were, fumbling in the dark. Behind him, the thunder crashed against the side of the hills, vibrating through his boots, and he flinched in spite of himself. If that mad blacksmith was going to keep Cal locked up like some trained animal, he’d have to get by without him. Not like Cal was the best company, anyway, these days. Always had been a strange one, but pale eyes had started getting far too clever for his own good, recently. More full of secrets than a Westri merchant. Sometimes he wondered if Cal saw the world the rest of them did, or one entirely his own. And then there was the Carel problem. His hand settled on the cask closest to the far wall, and he dragged it grumbling from its place, wedging it under one arm. No, he could hardly blame Cal for any of it. He was just bored. Still, better bored at the inn than locked up in that damn forge with the cracked old blacksmith and his scarred face. He snorted under his breath, shivering at the thought. They’d been talking about leaving for years now. Going west. Arinath, maybe, Uldoroth, even. Men could make a good living in the white stones, so they’d heard. Makers knew they couldn’t stay here forever. Run the inn? Take up mining? No, they wouldn’t be here, forever. Maybe this year. Maybe next. But they’d get there. Tough place, the Lowlands, but they’d look out for each other. Always had. Besides, couldn’t be any tougher than these fucking hills. He wondered if Carel would follow them there, too. Who’d do the Nest's cooking, then? He was halfway to the door when he heard it. The slow whisper of a thousand thousand breaths, brushes on the stones, rippling closer. He hesitated for a moment, then cursed, staggering for the door, cask slipping against his arm. The rain caught him on the doorstep, turning him silver with a layer of frigid water, and he spilled clumsily into the firelight beyond, nearly dropping the cask. ‘Easy!’ ‘I’ve got it!’ He snapped back, straightening and setting it down on the bar beside the other. Da had got his pipe lit in the time Lokk had been outside, and the little twisting strings of smoke were curling upwards from his whiskered mouth. Carel was beside him, spooning her steaming brown broth into three small bowls on the bar. ‘Just in time for dinner.’ Da told him, sucking on his pipe. ‘As always.’ Carel murmured. ‘I-’ ‘You look wet.’ ‘I swear to-’ ‘Get the door, will you. You trying to let the storm in?’ Lokk scowled, latching the door, and snatched up his bowl silently. He looked out at the rest of the common room, savouring the heat of the fire for a moment. Just as he left it. Of course it was. What would have changed? ‘What about Isandur, then?’ One of the villagers beside the fire was asking. Lokk snorted. ‘This one, again?’ ‘It’s a good story.’ Da said quietly, blowing a little stream of smoke through his pursed lips. ‘Heard it a half-dozen times already, this month.’ ‘Don’t let Godry hear you talking rot.’ Carel told him, taking up her own bowl and stirring it gently. ‘Wouldn’t want him giving it up. Albin would have to take over.’ Lokk’s eyes caught the little group of strangers again, sitting in the shadows away from the fire. Talking quietly amongst themselves. Dark cloaks and dour faces. At least that was new. They even looked like they might be more bored than he was. Outside, the rain drummed down over the thatching, and the wind whined over the hills. He sighed, and took a mouthful of the steaming, tasteless stew, frowning to himself. Another night. Another boring fucking night.