Chinese food near little rock ar

Fast food news, reviews, and discussion

2008.06.15 19:41 Fast food news, reviews, and discussion

The /FastFood subreddit is for news, reviews, and discussions of fast food (aka quick-service), fast casual, and casual restaurants -- covering everything fast food from multinational chains, regional and local chains, independent and chain cafeterias and all-you-can-eat restaurants, independent and chain diners, independent hole-in-the-wall restaurants, convenience store and gas station prepared food, food trucks and food carts, the neighborhood taqueria, street vendors, etc.
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2011.05.24 00:59 SlackOverflow Hot Springs, Arkansas

For all things related to the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the surrounding area.
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2023.05.30 17:00 _call-me-al_ [Tue, May 30 2023] TL;DR — This is what you missed in the last 24 hours on Reddit

If you want to receive this as a daily email in your inbox, you can now join at this link

worldnews

French minister threatens to ban Twitter if it doesn’t follow EU rules
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25 to 32 drones attack Moscow: 2 buildings damaged, people evacuated
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Groundbreaking Israeli cancer treatment has 90% success rate
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news

At least 16 dead, dozens injured in shootings across the U.S. over Memorial Day weekend
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Third nuclear reactor reaches 100% power output at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle
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Man with Nazi flag who crashed U-Haul near White House praised Hitler
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science

New DNA testing technology shows majority of Australian dingoes are pure dingoes, not hybrids, challenging the view that dingoes are in decline due to crossbreeding with domestic dogs
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Free prescription drugs could reduce overall health-care costs in Canada: study
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Researchers have developed a self-administered mobile application that analyzes speech data as an automatic screening tool for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease with 88% to 91% of accuracy
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space

One-third of galaxy's most common planets could be in habitable zone
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China will send three astronauts to its Tiangong space station on Tuesday, putting a civilian scientist into space for the first time as Beijing pursues plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by the end of the decade
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The United Arab Emirates Is Heading for the Asteroid Belt
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Futurology

Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost. Two nuclear reactors in Georgia were supposed to herald a nuclear power revival in the United States. They’re the first U.S. reactors built from scratch in decades — and maybe the most expensive power plant ever.
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Inflation Reduction Act Sparks a Rural Clean Energy Revival. The USDA announced $11 billion in new funding for rural clean energy projects, with part of the program described as “the single largest investment in rural electrification since FDR signed the Rural Electrification Act into law in 1936.”
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Japan will try to beam solar power from space by 2025
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AskReddit

Whats something attractive people can do, that ugly people cant?
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What's an unspoken rule on a first date?
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What actor or actress ruins a movie for you?
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todayilearned

TIL that the early 2000s Nickelodeon children's show, "LazyTown", was not only filmed in Iceland but also one of the most expensive children's show ever made (each episode cost nearly $1 million to make)
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TIL that George Washington only left the present-day United States one time in his life, when he traveled to Barbados with his brother in 1751.
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TIL in 2018, a middle school in Dallas organized an event called “Breakfast with Dads,” but saw that not all of the students have fathers or father figures to attend the event with. So, they put up a post on Facebook seeking around 50 volunteers. On the day of the event, 600 men showed up to help.
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dataisbeautiful

[OC] Three years of applying to PhD programs
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Chart of Mountains & Rivers -- published in 1862 in Johnson’s New Illustrated Family Atlas
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[OC] Forbes List of Highest-Earning Musicians: 1987 to 2021
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Cooking

What’s your cooking tax?
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Really weird question. But if I use the same amount of ingredients but half the amount of water for a soup, then add back the normal amount of water after cooking, would that be the same if I’d just cooked everything together?
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I finally tried using a hand mixer to shred crockpot chicken. Holy crap! It was amazing! Just took a few minutes! Then, in a moment of inspiration, I used a salad spinner, think it’s been used once before in 8 years, to get the extra juice out!
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food

[Homemade] Hot Honey Chicken Sandwich, Garlic Fries, & Kimchi Ranch
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[I ate] Cheesy Chicken Quesadilla
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[Homemade] Spaghetti Carbonara
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movies

Raiders of the Lost Ark Is Perfect In Its Simplicity
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White Men Can't Jump (2023) .... WTF.
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‘The Little Mermaid:’ This 1976 psychedelic live-action film could be the best adaptation to date
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Art

Wooded path, paintwithbram, oil, 2023
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Sonny, Sasquatchinheat, paint markers, 2023
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Untitled, SxDayz me , digital painting,2023
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television

Streaming services are removing tons of movies and shows — it’s not personal, it’s strictly business
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‘Scrubs’ — Sam Lloyd’s “Hey Ya”
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‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ EP & Director Deborah Chow: “This was conceived as a limited series, it is closed”
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pics

Dinner at a homeless shelter (Sioux City, IA)
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dinner at a homeless shelter
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Please buy new sunblock if you haven't recently. It can expire (pic of when I learned the hard way)
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gifs

Tomb Of Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses VI In The Valley Of The Kings [Year 12th Century BC]
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Funny ass horse trot
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I drew this pixel art animation and called it "Artist fire" [OC]
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educationalgifs

Burrito fold
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The eggs of the newts form algae underwater on their surface to produce oxygen, as the embryos require a continuous supply of oxygen to survive. Without the formation of algae, the embryos would not receive enough oxygen, which could lead to their death.
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mildlyinteresting

This unused casket left outside for trash pickup.
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This oddly shaped egg that my chickens laid
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This House on Top of A Warehouse in Syracuse, NY
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interestingasfuck

Gorillas make vocalisations to express satisfation when they enjoy their food...they are also in a permanent state of flatulence because their food is almost exclusively fiber(a lot of it)
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Iceland, the land where the sun will never set
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Japan’s transparent restrooms hope to dispel stereotypes of dirty public toilets
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funny

Summer in the UK
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Never lose your girlfriend
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This is why you always bring your glove
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aww

She thinks she’s looking through a window so she keeps going to look for the dinosaurs in the backyard 🥹
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His One Ear Is Tuned In To His Favorite Words
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Our 3.5mth-old puppy meeting our 9yr-old bunny for the first time.
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Get this as a daily email!
submitted by _call-me-al_ to RedditTLDR [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:53 InsuranceAway4133 What dentist could diagnose a complicated issue?

Not asking for medical advice but wondering if a puzzling problem in the mouth can be diagnosed?
Severe pain, burning and aching in gums in between a healthy tooth and a molar implant. No visible signs of inflammation, 3d negative for anything except minor bone loss, Previous hx of ill fitting crown, perio pocket surgery, root canal, extraction 4 years ago) pain returned and dentists have no idea why I’d be in so much pain.
Suggested neurologist and he still thinks it’s a dental issue. Oral surgeon who did the implant says it’s fine. Endo sees no sign in healthy took, perio said maybe go get laser surgery to regenerate bone. Only thing visible is little bone grafts near the gum, a little gray around the implant, tori bone a little larger and more vascular. Touching the gums with tongue, toothbrush, floss or food sends it into oblivion.
Why is this so difficult? Any suggestions on next steps please and thank you.
Deeply grateful to anyone who has any idea.
submitted by InsuranceAway4133 to DentalSchool [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:52 Orphandestroyer98 Handle with Care 1

[Next]
Memory transcript subject: Lani, Venlil Gardner Date: [standardized human time] October 25th 2136
Great Lani what have you gotten your family into they would say, why would you let a predator into your home they say.
“Alright I think that’s all” I look over at Chris. After the Federation bombed the Earth lots of humans were without parents. I decided I would let one into my family, I think it would be good experience for my daughter Vila. You know Vila and Chris apparently are near the same age so they should be able to go to school together if possible.
“Alright I’ll leave you to set up your room, call me if you need anything” I walked towards the door to exit the room shutting it behind me. When I adopted Chris the human in charge of the exchange program said that Chris was special, apparently there were people like Chris with something called autism, apparently it’s some kind of genetic thing with the brain such as their not as good with social situations but are better at problem solving or that they can get hyper focused on something and like to keep a schedule the same.
I talked it over with Vila and she agreed with it. She was scared at first but hopefully she and Chris can get to know each other better in the coming paws.
“HEY IM DONE SETTING MY ROOM” I got up from my seat and walked over to Chris’s room and opened the door. Chris had somehow set up the bed all on his own. Their was also this Tv with what I think was what humans called an Xbox. Their was also this table near the closet with a glass box with sand, rocks and twigs and a jar with what I think is dirt and plants.
“Looks good doesn’t it?” Chris stared at me my body shifted a bit, I was still kinda getting used to humans. “Hey Chris what are these things over here?” I pointed to the glass box and the jar.
“Oh those are just my pets and a terrarium I had” I looked over to Chris “a what?” .
“A terrarium is like a closed space where it’s a simulated environment, this one is in a jar and I have these plants in their with some springtails and isopods” I looked closely at jar and I could these little bugs moving around the on the dirt.
“Ok so what about that glass box with the sand?” Chris than walked over and kneeled down near the table. “This box is an enclosure for blue death feigning beetles, I keep them in this box because I just love to see what they do” I walked over to Chris and watched the beetles moving around on the rocks and wood.
“That is wonderful Chris hey what do you say you,me and Vila have something to eat alright?” I looked over to Chris and then he looked over to me “sure I am starved after all this” we then got up and head to the kitchen.
submitted by Orphandestroyer98 to NatureofPredators [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:52 Commander_Oganessian I've not had as much motivation to work on my fanfics, but Nonetheless here is The Trials and Tribulations of a 'Traitorous' HiveWing Chapter 3

Once he starts to wake up he feels a comforting warmth around him. Opening his eyes his vision is still dark. Once his vision clears he realizes he's looking at a black claw.
Following the claw he finds Palinurus snuggled against his back, her face settled in a peaceful bliss.
'This feels nice,' muses Crabron, making sure not to move and wake her, 'But should it? She's my friend and this is a very intimate pose.'
'What if you became more?' asks another train of thought, 'You could be happy.'
'But what if she doesn't want anything more,' questions Crabron.
'Of course she does, think back a little bit, she wasn't looking for guards she was looking at you. Need proof? Her flustered response is all you need, or how about when you mentioned dating and she hastily backtracked?'
As he is arguing with himself Crabron notices that her smile has turned to fear and her breath quickens, as she mumbles, "No, Crabron! No, no, no!"
'She must be having a nightmare!' thinks Crabron as he shakes her awake, "Palinurus, Palinurus, wake up. I'm alright."
With a gasp she jumps awake. Wrapping his wings around her he whispers, "It's okay Palinurus. It's okay. I'm right here. I'm alright."
"Thank the moons!" Exclaims Palinurus, "I dreamt that you never woke up from Sheyleyong's attack. I was thinking about what I would do. If, if you died. I was thinking about how I could even live with you gone," she starts to panic. "I couldn't bear the thought of living without you and all the things I would never say. What I would miss out on!"
As she rambles an he carefully shuts her mouth with a gentle claw silencing her worries.
In the sudden silence he speaks, "You don't need to worry about that, ever. I'll always be here when you need me, even if it means leaving a mission. You've been at my side for as long as I can remember. Hell I don't even remember how we met, just that you've been there for me just as I have for you. Some stuck up, slaving, honey snorter, won't change that."
She looks at him with tears in her eyes, "But you nearly died. When you were out it was like you were gone, no matter what I did you never even flinched, you had two dislocated ribs and you'd lost a lot of blood."
"Looks like Clearsight hasn't decided to accept me." Comments Crabron with a smug but gentle smile, "And a couple dislocated ribs certainly won't kill me."
A look of sudden remembrance crosses her face, "Ooh, that reminds me, to fix your ribs you need to relocate them yourself."
"How am I supposed to do that?" Asks Crabron.
"According to Viceroy, the doctor who lives here, you need to take a deep breath and try to blow it out without opening your mouth and plugging your nose." Crabron tries and gasps in pain.
Palinurus places a comforting claw on his shoulder, "Keep at it until you feel them pop back into place. If you black out I have some hartshorn."
After a few painful attempts he finally feels them relocate with a relieved sigh, "Wow, I never thought it was that hard to breathe. Where are we?"
"Viceroy's house, in the Bloodworm Hive SilkWing District. I told you that." Says Palinurus with a disapproving look, "Viceroy didn't mention brain damage."
Crabron smiles as he pushes aside the entrance curtain, "That you did, but where in the district?"
"Just outside the Plaza of the Hope for Peace." Says Palinurus as Crabron lays eyes on a large, vividly painted statue depicting Monarch, Wasp, and a rather monochromatic LeafWing, each working together to hold up a crown. "How is that thing not tearing through the silk?"
In reply a voice comes from the street as Grayling steps through a line of SilkWings, "It's made from treestuff and it's hollow, as such it's a lot lighter than it looks."
"Hello again Grayling," Crabron suddenly remembers something, "Did I miss the handout?"
"No, I fact you're just in time," he motions to the line he just walked through, "These are the ones who showed up. Come with me. Palinurus, you too."
Grayling leads him to a row of tables overflowing with baskets full of various goods with yet more still in the crates behind it, "How much did y'all get?"
"Three quarters of the entire warehouse." Answers Leafcutter as she flicks her tail at a table, "You'll be there with Palinurus, your father and I will be asleep at home. However before I go," she grabs a curious scabbard off a table and hands it to him, "I do believe this is yours."
Looking at it he notices that it seems to be made out of long strands of grass. Wrapping one loop before his wings and the other just behind his wings Crabron asks, "What is it?"
"Sheyleyong's sword," answers Leafcutter, "I took the liberty to procure a new scabbard from my contact. Apparently she had to steal this one from another group that doesn't share their opinion. When her daughter was told to get it they had a big argument. I have never seen such a dysfunctional family. But I get it, she was hiding someone."
"If she's hiding it, how'd you know?" Asks Crabron.
She points to her eyes, "Her eyes, it was just for a split second, but it was there. The same look I always hid during my experimentation phase, before I met your father."
"You experimented? With who?" Asks Crabron.
"Well, I say it's time to stop wasting these family's days, and get me some sleep. Each family gets one basket and try not to vandalize anything." Dismisses Leafcutter as she rushes away calling behind her, "He's in charge guys!"
"You'd think she 'experimented' with my mother with how she rushed away," muses Palinurus, "How is the sword not slicing through those grass fibers?"
"Maybe it's lined with something?" Asks Crabron as he gives the scabbard a light squeeze, feeling something hard as steel between the wrappings and sword, "I'll have to ask my mom."
Stepping behind the table he calls out, "I can help the next family!"
A few families down the line Crabron hears a squeaky voice, "That's him! That's the Hiveing that saved me!"
As a familiar purple dragonet runs up, his mother close behind, Crabron smiles, "If it isn't Dusky, the toughest dragonet I ever met. Have you shown your friends your awesome new scar?"
"Not yet, he has construction work today," says the dragoness accompanying him, presumably his mother.
"It's Friday shouldn't he be at school?" Asks Crabron.
She gives a sad nod, "Yes, but after his father died he was expected to pick up his shifts, Thursday nights and Friday to Monday days."
A look of horror crosses Palinurus' face, "He's a dragonet! He deserves an education!"
Dusky's mother sighs, "I know, but Lady Bloodworm won't allow it."
"I'll see if I can change her mind," growls Crabron.
"How?" Asks Palinurus.
"Enough threats can change any mind." Hisses Crabron before taking on a kind look, "Say, little Dusky, what is your favorite fruit?"
"Bananas!" Chirps Dusky.
Taking an extra bushel of bananas from the crates behind him Crabron places them and an extra loaf of bread into a basket before handing it to Dusky's mother, "Have a wonderful day."
Once the line diminishes Crabron looks over the still remaining food and tells the other SilkWings that were helping him pass out baskets to help themselves to the food.
"Your parents say you killed Vinegaroon's son last night," prefaces Grayling, "Is it true?"
"Who?" Asks Crabron.
"Lord Sheyleyong is, or rather was, Vinegaroon's youngest son." Supplies Grayling.
"Oh, him." says Crabron, "I did."
"How'd you do it?" Asks Grayling.
"Nothing too hard," says Crabron with a shrug.
"Not too hard?" Exclaims Grayling, "In Vinegaroon hive every HiveWing is expected to start training in combat at five and serve for three years minimum. However, the most skilled Dragons are placed under Sheyleyong, yet you killed him!"
"I wouldn't say those soldiers were skilled," scoffs Crabron.
"What armor were they wearing?" Questions Grayling.
"Leather." Says Crabron.
"Then those were probably peasants sent along with him." Dismisses Grayling, "Vinegaroon's Midnight Sons wear plate armor coated in a black lacquer, with the exception of Sheyleyong himself."
Crabron's mind flashes back to that night as he once again hears Sheyleyong, "My son has cared for Valeriophonus, that's the dragoness you just murdered, for years. He was sure he would marry her, but now that will never happen."
'Valeriophonus must've been a peasant,' Thinks Crabron, 'By Clearsight! That might've been her first mission, and I killed her!'
"Crabron? Asks Palinurus a concerned tone in her voice, "Are you okay?"
"I killed her." Breaths Crabron, "It was probably her first mission and I killed her."
"Who? Who did you kill?" Asks Palinurus
"One of the soldiers sent on what was supposed to be a simple investigation last night was a peasant girl named Valeriophonus. She was no older than five or six, probably on her first mission, a-and I killed her," her terrified face flashes through Crabron's eyes causing an involuntary shiver to race down his spine, "I saw her face, I saw the light leave her eyes. She was terrified."
Palinurus gives his shoulder a comforting squeeze, "I'm sure you didn't have a choice."
"But did I?" Asks Crabron, "We could've tried to talk our way out of it, or escaped after they arrested us, but my mom decided to kill one of those innocent peasants in cold blood. Not to mention she feigned surrender, now whenever one of the Chrysalis actually tries to surrender the guards won't trust them!"
"Crabron," says Grayling with an understanding look, "Killing will never get any easier, but unless a HiveWing's eyes are white then that HiveWing chose to attack. That's what gets me through fights."
"And if their eyes are white?" Questions Crabron.
Grayling shrugs, "Then it's not them, it's Wasp forcing them to fight."
“Y-yes of course,” says Crabron before changing the subject, "Does Lady Bloodworm ever leave Bloodworm Place?"
"Not without, at the absolute least, a dozen guards," answers Grayling.
"Rest up, we have a night trip to make," states Crabron before nodding to Palinurus, "You too."
"Where are we going to sleep?" Asks Palinurus, "This isn't our hive."
"I have a place," says Grayling.
"What would your pare- mother say?" Asks Crabron.
"She didn't handle the death of my brother and father very well." Answers Grayling before mumbling, "Now I live alone."
"I'm so sorry," apologizes Palinurus, "It must be hard on you."
"Don't be," says the gray Silkwing with a smile. "It gives me more resolve."
Once they arrive at Grayling's house Crabron spies writing materials on a desk, "Before I sleep I'll need to write a letter to my parents, telling them my plan so they don't panic."
Taking his newly written scroll he finds Codling and passes the scroll over with a kind request to deliver it to Leafcutter.
Re-entering Grayling's house he curls up beside Palinurus quickly falling asleep.
After a brief stop to steal a pair of spears, support straps included, and basic armor for his SilkWings as well as a roundel dagger and armor for himself he leads his group to Bloodworm Place. Sneaking to the windows Crabron spies Bloodworm sitting at an overflowing table with her courtiers.
"She has that much food yet her SilkWings are starving!" Cries Palinurus, "That's perverse!"
Yanking Palinurus into the nearby bushes Crabron hisses, "Lower your voice! We are trying not to be discovered." At her meek nod he continues, "Good now we have to find all possible entrances and exits and where Bloodworm sleeps. So somebody needs to track Bloodworm through the windows while the others examine the outside."
"I'll track Bloodworm," volunteers Grayling, "However there are areas without windows so I'll have to track her from inside."
"That seems risky," says Palinurus.
"My family has always been Hive Drones." Grayling waves, "I just have to act like one if I get caught."
"As soon as things seem dicey, run," orders Crabron, "I don't need to lose anyone."
"Yes, sir!" Snaps Grayling as he removes his gambeson and kernel helm.
"You make me sound like some old, grizzled guard," muses Crabron as Grayling slips in through a window and worms his way into the serving staff.
"This is your mission," says Palinurus, "It makes sense for you to be the leader."
She picks up his chin and whispers in an attempt of a sultry tone, "Besides it leaves us alone."
"If I'm the leader, as you say, then I think you should study the bottom floor and I'll use my wings to study the upper floors. Keep track of any potential exits and remain unseen." says Crabron missing her insinuation.
If Crabron had looked behind him he would've seen Palinurus smack a fist onto the ground with a hiss, "I came on too strongly."
After searching the exterior he spies Grayling on the topmost floor balcony waving him in, swooping around to pick up Palinurus he drops her and Grayling's armor on the balcony, "Did you find her?"
"Yes, she is protected by two guards at her door." Reports Grayling.
"What about in the hallway leading to it?" Asks Palinurus.
"None," answers Grayling, "Hell I haven't seen a guard, except those two, since I came in!"
"Didn't you say she's paranoid?" Asks Palinurus.
"Maybe she feels safe in her home." Shrugs Crabron, "Though we're about to shatter that illusion."
"Something doesn't feel right about that." Says Palinurus as a visible shudder runs down her back, "Grayling, I think you should don your armor before we head in."
"Relax, it's just nerves," dismisses Crabron, a confident smile on his face, "We'll be in and out before they can spring any traps. Grayling if you will?"
"Right this way." Stopping just short of a three way intersection, Grayling motions to the intersecting hall, "Just at the end of that hallway is her room, be careful though the hall is rather empty."
Glancing around the corner he sees a long, wide hallway painted with a vivid scarlet red, the columns painted a vibrant and contrasting yellow. The floor is covered with a plush high pile, purple carpet trimmed with golden flamesilk.
At each column is a statue of various important HiveWings, including Bloodworm herself, each supporting a flame silk lantern, half of which are covered by silk darkening the hall.
The gaps between the columns are occupied with shallow pools and elaborate fountains, where there isn't a doorway. Looking to the other side of the hall the space between columns is occupied with huge and nearly invisible panes of crystal glass leading to the night outside.
Following the colors up he sees an arched glass ceiling that is completely invisible against the night sky, giving the impression of being outside without the wet of the monsoon rains that have just started up.
At the end of the hall stands two guards, just as Grayling reported, eerily staring straight ahead with empty, glowing white eyes and spears at the ready to intercept any intruders.
Dipping back around the corner, Crabron digs his talons into the tree stuff wall and climbs up to the darkened arch of glass, not willing to risk his wingbeats being heard. After examining the slick gold-plated girders supporting the glass he determines that they are too flush to utilize as claw holds. Opting to use his claws, Crabron slowly inches along the top of the wall until he is above a guard. Watching a lightning bolt in the distance he counts it out until the thunder strikes. When another strikes at a similar distance he drops, fist balled at the ready, and lands on one of the guards just as the thunder hits, overwhelming what little sound his strike made.
Hooking his arm around the other's throat he waits until he stops struggling. Motioning to his friends they run up the hall, claw taps silenced by the rug.
"What'd I tell you?" Smiles Crabron as he removes the key ring from one of the guards and starts trying them on the door. "Easy. We'll be in and out lickety split."
"We still should be quick," warns Palinurus, "Who knows when these guards will wake up."
"Of course." calls Crabron as the lock gives a quiet click and he pushes open the door revealing what could be the definition of luxury.
The color scheme and carpet match the hall with a sunken pit in the floor surrounded by various lounge cushions and squat tables, all facing a stone fire pit. Looking around the room he sees various highly detailed tapestries depicting HiveWing triumphs and SilkWing suffering hung between curtained doorways to different rooms.
"I didn't take Bloodworm as the devout type," whispers Palinurus.
Following her eyes through a slightly open curtain Crabron sees a large, regal portrait of Clearsight writing her book of prophecies while nestled within the wings of her primary husband, Sunstreak, though she is far more prominent. Below the painting is a short wooden desk cluttered with various offerings, from jewelry to food to a small statuette of Clearsight, between unlit incense lamps.
Entering the room, Palinurus picks up a finely detailed egg carved from jade from the shrine to admire it.
"Woah, woah, woah!" Calls Crabron trying to keep his voice at a whisper, "Put that back now!" Startled, she quickly puts it back. Sitting down in front of the shrine he closes his eyes, keeping his head down, "Forgive her Clearsight, for she didn't know."
"What the hell was that!" Cries Palinurus.
"Stealing from a shrine is the surest way to be denied by Clearsight's doormen. Being left to wander the void as a twisted shade," says Crabron.
"I just thought it was a pretty color," mumbles Palinurus.
"I'll see about buying you some jade knick knacks." Suggests Crabron.
"Like that one?" Asks Palinurus pointing to the egg.
"I'm sure you don't want a fertility charm," dismisses Crabron.
"A what?" Asks Palinurus.
"A fertility charm," repeats Crabron, "You keep it where eggs come from and pull it out when you're about to make eggs. Pretty common with Lady Jewel's crowd."
Her confusion turns to horror, "Ew, ew, ew! I had it in my claws! I eat with those!" She rushes towards the curtain separating the shrine from the common area, still somehow keeping her voice down, "I need a sink, now!"
“Is she alright?” asks Grayling, catching his eye through the swinging curtain.
Crabron shrugs as he leaves the shrine room, “She was holding a Jade egg and just learned what they're used for."
"She had to learn somehow," he holds out a mask of Odorata, messenger of Clearsight and a guide for lost souls, "There's a black table cloth over there."
"Brilliant!" Calls Crabron with a pat on Grayling's back, "Bloodworm is obviously devout so she'll listen if she thinks Odorata is after her! We need to turn that tablecloth into a hooded cloak, can you sew?"
He smiles, "Of course, I have been living alone after all. I think I saw sewing supplies in a side room."
By the time Palinurus re-enters the room Crabron is already wearing his makeshift costume as Grayling finishes his stitches, "There you are. Looks like we have a plan! Now I need you on standby as Clearsight if I need it, Grayling you will be a look out after you wake Bloodworm. Understood?"
With two simultaneous salutes Crabron goes through the only wooden, yes wooden, door in the suite revealing a giant bed with silky, see through curtains. Stepping up on a chest at the end of the bed he points from Grayling to Bloodworm before pointing from Palinurus to the shadows at the corner of the room where her dark scales render her nearly invisible.
Getting the message, Grayling taps her on the thigh until she starts to stir, prompting Grayling to sprint out the door.
Striking an intimidating pose he glares down at her with his wings wide. With a start Lady Bloodworm shoots up her back against the headboard, "W-who are you."
As lightning flashes lighting up his skull mask Crabron speaks with a deep projecting voice, "Madame Clearsight is hurt that you don't recognize her one and only messenger!"
Recognition spreads across her face, "You're Odorata, am I dead?"
"Not yet," hisses Crabron, "But you will be if you don't heed my mistresses warning. She told me that you must not allow dragonets to work on school days or a figure, scales dark as night, will send you to Clearsight early."
"I'll get right on that!" Says Bloodworm with a sarcastic tone.
"Are you questioning Clearsight?" Asks Crabron.
"Of course not," says Bloodworm with a shake of her head.
"I don't believe you," says Crabron before he gets an idea, "In fact Clearsight wants to give you a reminder."
Drawing his sword he slashes it across the side of her snout, digging deep enough to surly leave a scar, "Let that be a reminder of Clearsight's warning. If you do not obey, a matching gash will adorn your throat. Now I must take my leave. May you live long."
Making his escape he finds Grayling at the door to the hallway. Spotting him out of the corner of his eye, Grayling starts to walk down the ornate hall outside Bloodworms suite before speaking up, "How'd it go?"
Taking the hood off he lets the Odorata mask hang around his neck, "Optimistically it went well. Realistically I might need to pay her a visit out of costume."
Grayling rolls his eyes, "Knowing her, that's a definite revisit."
Crabron's reply dies on his tongue as a voice booms from the hallway they had just started down, "Intruders, identify yourself!"
"Shit," hisses Crabron, reversing direction just to see another group cutting them off at the other side of the intersection.
Thinking quickly, Crabron rips a painting from the wall and hurls it through the nearby window, shattering it. Without needing instruction Grayling leaps through the window and into the pool below it, however Palinurus hesitates at the window.
Avoiding a slash from a guard, Crabron calls out, "Go!"
"Not without you!" Exclaims Palinurus, her helmet narrowly deflecting a blow.
"No time to discuss this!" Hisses Crabron as he headbutts Palinurus hard enough to knock her through.
Nursing a cut claw, Palinurus surfaces to see Crabron draw both of his blades and rear up onto his back legs, his escape now blocked by a guard.
submitted by Commander_Oganessian to WingsOfFire [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:45 NickelTheWise WILDLIFE CH. 1-2

WILDLIFE by nickel
​
Story 1- Stone and Grass
Chapter 2- Behaviors
​
Emergency rooms were trained to be ready for any arrivals at any time of the day or night, but the strange cases that were arriving had the nurse practitioners baffled. Three had arrived at a little past 2am, and a further single was arriving presently. The ambulance had pulled away seconds after they'd carefully unloaded their unconscious cargo at the emergency entrance and were wheeling them inside, keeping an eye out for any changes. The lead of the two, a fox named Maxwell Forscythe, was handing over the paperwork for the patient and pre-planning the routes for the trauma center room to park them in.
"Student, male, early 20s, comatose, irregularities in BP and bodily temperature, is that all that could be gleaned on the ride over?" asked the nurse on duty. Maxwell's partner nodded. "We checked him as much as we could without disrobing him, not a scratch, just low core temp and a weakened pulse for someone his age, possible arhythmia maybe?" "No way to be sure 'til he's seen by the staff, and have the cardiologist have a look. Wheel him into Obs G202, it should be open." "Should be, Paul?" asked Maxwell. Paul looked up, half-awake. "It's open, okay? This place is going a little bananas after the previous patients, y'know."He grimaced at him and signaled his partner so they could move the gurney. The ward was a bit of distance, but there was no immediate danger as of yet. His partner, a human woman named Grisholm, was peering closely at the inert body. "See anything?" "Look, I'm not saying we need to check the patient's neck again, but this feels--" "Good grief, Griz, we already looked, he hasn't been sucked off by a vampire." Her face went very pink. "That's not what its called, it's 'drained'! and it can be anywhere, sure, but the neck or the leg, I mean... this is exactly how it goes, unless the person is just ripped to pieces." The fox sighed, using his mag-badge to open the double doors ahead. "Well, I'm pretty sure this guy wasn't ripped to pieces, but vampires, Griz? In Canada?" "The world is a mighty strange place sometimes, and small places are just where shit like this tends to go down. I'm just saying we should keep our eyes open today, that's all." "Just in case our friend here rises in the night to suck someone else off, yeah?" he teased, knowing exactly how to needle his friend. Grisholm was at a lack for words, just making half-syllables in protest as they reached the elevator. "I read that book you lent me, y'know, I see why you like this stuff so much." Grisholm looked deflated until she caught Max's eyes, one of which was winked with a grin. "It's alright, Griz... I do it too." Her friend looked a little placated, helping to push the patient into the lift and pressing the next floor button. "Let's just not rule it out yet, okay? Now, come on, game-face time, the day's already started."
​
Hours later, after an alarm deep in the Deckard Forest Range's only unnatural home had gone off and Kari had finished washing and getting dressed, the message was finally reported over the news, which she was watching on her phone with apt attention, her pupils widened in curiosity while automatically eating her breakfast.
"Hospital authorities are preparing a statement at this time, but have denied these mysterious cases as any sign for panic over unproven conditions, Jeremy?" Jeremy Cole was the on-site reporter, who the feed switched to, the hospital in the background full of activity from police standing watch, to people showing up to mill around as they often do. "That's right, Grace, the only details being released in surety, so far, point to the victims being discovered within our local favorite, Mt. Loyal University. They began arriving as early as 2 this morning, and the scenes have been under careful scrutiny. Whether or not these are scattered cases of extreme fatigue, or the beginnings of another infection sweeping the country is still no one's guess to make. Jeremy Cole, reporting live in Calgary, BCB News." "Thank you, Cole, we intend to keep this story updated as the facts are confirmed. Follow the progress on Flitter at--" Kari backed out of the video feed, thinking on the details that took place in the classroom yesterday, and of her gruff teacher. 'He wouldn't just succumb to weariness just like that, he would've gone to the teacher's lounge and caught a nap like he does,' she thought, getting up to pace a little, 'which means it was a sneak attack, practically untraceable, and enacted on the state of being for-" Her eyes widened again as she came to a stop, putting together some details towards a possible answer. Who was a restless-looking passerby that was headed in the direction of chemicals, many of which can be used to trigger invisible manners of attack? Who was passing the scene of the incident and looking particularly smug about something? Who smelled of sharp ethanol that could've been a fumigation bomb scent? "It was HIM!" she squawked suddenly, looking around as if a timebomb had just begun to countdown, hurrying over to get her shoes and jacket on, along with the standard wallet-phone-keys trifecta being pocketed. If anything, classes would be off or postponed during this weirdness, but she'd call on the drive over just to make sure. 'He's either here to steal some expensive artifacts, or... looking for someone, and either way doesn't look good.' She thought as she got onto the road to town, rolling her window down to catch the fresh, cold air of the morning.
The small lifeform had been moving around through the garden all day before heading towards a number of weird smells nearby. A long soil path led to a burnished wooden door, which the creature easily walked under. Within was a rainbow of enticing scents, and its sensors went wild probing all over the place to find small specks of food to chew up. Gradually, it found its way up to a huge, breathing creature of some kind, heaped in a pile in the corner of the chamber. The climb all over its body was an interesting journey for the intruder, but when it stepped onto an expanse lighter gray, the giant tensed up and awoke, turning its colossal head to slowly open huge eyes like golden boulders. It froze under this monstrous gaze, trying to look uninteresting, but a huge pair of digits picked it up, and its fate was sealed as it waited for the end.
"Hey, no visitors at this hour." said Tom, licking the small beetle off his finger to munch it up and lay back down, trying to let the blessed sleep come back, but he'd looked at his phone and seen the time, too late now. With a long exhale, he got up and began looking for a clean shirt, coming up empty except for the shirt he had on, so the day's errand was clear. "Well, thank god the plants don't have any clothes to take care of, I gotta feed them and see to their good health already." he said brightly, secretly picturing what the main garden would look like with the garden-life all sporting tiny sweaters and hats with a grin. A large knapsack was full of his clothes, the shirt and Jacket from yesterday were on, his shoes were worn, and he was carefully out back into the world, locking the Door behind him with the finesse of a safecracker. He put on some earbuds and began walking towards the main street, knowing he'd seen a laundromat there the day before. It felt like a good day to get something done; the weather was the pleasant side of chilly on the cloudless day, and folks seemed to be out walking the main street. Tom was in a rather good mood, also knowing of the beers in the knapsack to help the early afternoon chore along. And so, there he was 20 minutes later at 24 Laveuse, beginning the large load of laundry and setting back on the plastic seats, moving his tail so he didn't squash it. The place was a little empty and the small fenced area on one side of the parking lot made for good hiding, so he stepped outside to carefully get down to libations to pass the time. Traffic came and went like it usually did, one car taking the nearby right turn kind of harshly but otherwise nothing else of notice. There was a wandering guy with the air of a bum about him, sort of haunting the crossroads, and Tom privately hoped he would carry on before attracting police. Strangely enough, another short parade of cars was going thru the town, looking like a gangsta's funeral procession. Tom stared vacantly until they were gone, and he was starting to wonder just what this town's deal was. It was at this moment that the hands emerged silently from behind and seized his arms tightly, hauling him back with sudden urgency before he could panic properly. "What the fuck?! You wanna... god, wha-?" he barked, only to be hauled back harder into the side alley by the building, and out of sight. "Careful, dammit, there's a beverage here-" The tall can was smacked out of his hand. "Hey! what's your damage, guy?" Tom demanded as he was turned around roughly, only to meet those same blue eyes and red hair from yesterday. "Oh, wait, it's you fro--" Kari got her best threat display face on and poked a claw to the underside of his chin, which managed to inescapably encourage his silence."Now, answers, spill 'em, what were you really up to yesterday?" she now demanded. "I don't know what you're talking about, I was just looking for my friend to return a phone charger." "You didn't say that." "You didn't ask." he replied mildly, averting his gaze in a condescending manner. Kari growled in her throat and tightened her grip on his shoulders. "Watch it, wise-ass. Did you see or hear anything before the disturbance yesterday?" "What disturbance, I was already on my way when people found him." Her face went almost sideways in an accusative scowl. "Don't play dumb, I saw your ass drifting thru that crowd, and you saw me looking at you, captain salute." Tom's face contorted in regret. "You saw that, huh." "Yeah, I did." she grunted before slamming him roughly to the wall and releasing him. Tom looked as angry as he could without looking confrontational; something about her strength and methods did not point to a fight with any outcome but a grievous loss on his side. "Alright," he said, stepping back one step to opt for a cigarette from his fresh pack and turning from her to light it, "So I was near the scene, what else have you got?" Her angered look softened a micrometer and she took a few steps, mostly to get away from the rich smoke. "The guy from yesterday, the unconscious one? He was a good man, good teacher, and now his life might be in danger. You were at least in the hallway over there, did you see or hear anything that'd help out with finding the culprit?" "Help out?" he said, plucking the cig from his lips, "Look, Ms. Conrad, I-" "Conniff." "Whatever! I was just passing thru and it just felt like you got stuck having to deal with the cops, alright? It was rude to snark you, I apologize, I thought you were just in trouble or something. Apart from my friend, there wasn't really anybody on that side of the building that wasn't behind doors." Kari looked him over, trying to get a read on his intentions, and he seemed to notice this with disdain. "What's your deal anyways, apple-polisher, you some sort of local hero or something?" Tom continued, dragging on the smoke while shooting her a look. She frowned this time, an expression without anger that was a different face entirely. "He's a friend of mine, one of the few I have. You would do the same if it was someone you cared about, wouldn't you?" Tom almost answered honestly, but he was too mad to focus on polite truths. "No, I wouldn't, and I don't think you would either." he snapped, "I'm a pragmatist, number one's the only thing I came into this world worried with, and it's the only number I'll need." "Wow, okay, I thought you were just a sneaky guy before, but now I can see you're just an asshole." "And so are you, Ms. Confit, and I can't stand people that pretend to care." "Who's pretending? Frankly, *I* can't stand little shits like you who think their lousy life is free license to take everybody down with them." Tom was really mad now, and was almost considering lighting the fire in this fulminating argument, but he just sneered and flicked his cigarette ahead, stepping bitterly on it as he left. "You don't have anything I need, nor do I have anything you need, we're even. Now leave me alone, will you?" Kari wanted to kick his ass so badly in that fury-soaked moment. "I don't think anyone needs anything you've got, Mr. Blackberry, least of all YOU.. and it's CONNIFF, you son of a bitch!" she snarled at the retreating raccoon. "Actually, I can think of something I need from someone." he said, turning suddenly. "Yeah, and what's that, a chemical shower?" "No, you owe me a beer, kitty cat!" They were easily half a foot from each other now, staring daggers into daggers. The snow leopard spat harshly on the ground and left in a weaponized huff, tail twitching madly behind her. Tom felt the heat in his ears still peaking. "I better not see you again, or it'll be too soon!" he called after her, "And I smell bad because of my dirty laundry I carried, not because- well, I meant to put this shirt in with.. ohhhh, god DAMMIT!" and he kicked at the wall of the building before stomping back to check his clothes. "Bitch..." he muttered, trying to leave the incident behind.
submitted by NickelTheWise to u/NickelTheWise [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:36 xDictate Trip report - One week in Portugal

My wife and I took a trip to Portugal early December of 2022, and we had a really solid time. The food experiences were amazing and getting to take in so much old-world architecture was awe-inspiring.
Focus: Our main focus was lazy tourism and fine dining between Porto and Lisbon. We ended the trip with a 9 hour layover in Toronto, which we used to visit friends and some of our favorite Toronto spots.
Weather: The week was mostly sunny with some rain interspersed, and average temperatures seeming to be mid-teens. Toronto at the time was cold and snow-covered.
Accomodations: We ended up doing hotels as they were rather cheap.
Some photos below, along with some detailed notes of the packing list. Photos may be missing some things due to last minute substitutions, tried to note that.
Bag of choice:
Worn clothing:
Packed clothing:
Outer Layers:
Electronics:
A quick note on my charging setup: The whole setup for charging with my InchargeX allows me to charge two devices overnight AND my battery off a single 30w slim wall adapter. This is about as close as I can get to a perfect tiny charging setup. The iPhone plus the battery is plenty enough to get me through even the heaviest of days, into a second day.
Toiletries:
Everything else:
What Worked: Overall I think my packing list is cohesive enough and walked the line between casual and nice enough for a good restaurant. I've been working with a lot of this clothing for a while so it's been tested heavily through the rigors of daily wear, and I was very confident in my choices going in. The massive standout was the wool utility cloth - I think more people need these!
What could have been improved: I overpacked on a few things like pants and shorts, which really are just small things. The Pontos were awesome for the trip, but I feel like I would have done better with a pair of Blundstones or a similar Chelsea style boot. I also wish I could find a more casual looking "technical" jacket for daily wear, but the options are limited from what I can find. I think I could have dropped the iPad too, although it didn't take up a whole lot of space and was great for editing photos in downtime or reading on the plane. The Mijia shaver was okay but not amazing.
submitted by xDictate to onebag [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:27 ChampionshipClear322 After almost 100 hours and beating the game, here are my thoughts on it.

Obviously, spoilers on the entire game here. For context, I have been playing Zelda since 2014 with Twilight Princess as my first game. Since then I have played Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild, Link's Awakening, and I am about halfway through Ocarina of Time. Because of my obvious bias towards more traditional 3D Zelda games (I enjoyed Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess the most) I will try to be as impartial as possible.
I tried so hard to like this game. I had my doubts at the beginning, but after watching the new trailer it sold me on the game. I didn't like some aspects of Breath of the Wild, but after seeing the new enemies and hopefully a return to a more traditional zelda game that people missed while keeping the awesome open world of Breath of the Wild I really thought it was going to be great. And some parts of it were, but some parts of it I did not like.
Firstly, I would like to congratulate Nintendo because the physics relating to the Ultrahand mechanic blew everyone away, including me, and it is clear that Tears of the Kingdom has some of the best physics and building of any video game out there. The amount of creativity that has sprung from this game is mindblowing, and I don't think any of us expected for there to be simply so much to do. Not only are there almost 30 devices you can obtain each with their own unique purpose, you can also combine them with almost anything you can find in the game. Want to make a stupidly long bridge that can get you around the temple of time at the start of the game? Why not? Want to skip the main puzzle in the shrine by haphazardly building a flying machine that just barely makes it to the end? Go right ahead. Ultrahand allows for so much creativity and makes the new shrines ten times more enjoyable than the ones in Breath of the Wild. Because of this, there is an infinite amount of replayability in this game and the community will always be finding new things to do with this. Judging from how you all pushed Breath of the Wild to its limits, I can't wait to see what will be done in this game. Ultrahand gets a 20/10.
Additionally, Fuse and Recall are also insanely fun and useful abilities that add so much to the game. While I miss the Stasis rune in particular, Recall and Ultrahand can be used in a similar way if done correctly, and it's so much more satisfying when you do it correctly. While Recall doesn't have as many uses as Fuse and Ultrahand, the game still finds great ways to use it, such as sending a Stone Talus' boulders back at it, or knocking those horrible Horriblins down from the cave ceiling. Additionally, I am extremely happy with how Nintendo fixed Durability with the Fuse mechanic. While the durability annoyed me less than some of the others who played Breath of the Wild, my main complaint was wasting several of my good weapons on an enemy like a Silver Bokoblin or Lynel that had a huge healthbar, and only getting one (or sometimes none) good weapons in return. However, with the guarantee that you will usually be able to get an equally powerful or sometimes even better weapon after killing an enemy by fusing their horns to any random "sturdy stick", I don't hesitate to fight Silver enemies or Lynels anymore and I feel much more free to do so. Both of these abilites get a 10/10.
My third compliment goes to the game's shrines. I disliked Breath of the Wild's shrines. I found them tedious and annoying to do, and often skipped them or looked up the answers online. Especially when your only reward was a piece of heart or tiny fraction of a stamina wheel, I just clicked on them to save them as a travel checkpoint and moved on. Even their design was ugly to me. However, the new shrines are much better. While they are easier than Breath of the Wild's shrines, the rewards are a little less lucrative to balance it out and they are so much more fun to do because of how they creatively use the new abilites and allow for a multitude of different ways to solve problems. Many people do not like the "Proving Grounds" shrines, but I absolutely love them because they are a real challenge and I don't have to worry about losing 50 bomb arrows or several good weapons for a "Guardian Sword ++" and some ancient screws. Even if I die five times trying to complete them, I still have fun. And aesthetically they are so much better, the look of the temple, the texture of the lights of blessing, even the music feels a lot less claustrophobic and drab like the ones in Breath of the Wild did.
Fourthly, the Great Sky Island was absolutely amazing and I loved every second of it. It felt just like it did when I played Breath of the Wild for the first time, being plunged into an unknown and untouched environment and having to learn the mechanics of this new game. The Zonai Constructs don't carry the same fear level as Guardians did, but they were still cool enemies to fight with drops that were actually helpful unlike the Ancient Screws and Springs which only became helpful late-game. I obviously can't go through every part of the island, but the parts I enjoyed the best were crossing the huge lake to the west, climbing the snowy mountain to get to a shrine where I unsuccessfully attempted to craft a hovercraft out of logs, going on Minecarts around the island, and fusing random crap to sticks to make the most ridiculous weapons possible.
My last compliment goes to the introduction of Gloom into the game. When it is first introduced, the Gloom is absolutely frightening, and plunging into the depths for the first time was beyond scary. Malice was an annoying obstacle that you just jumped across until you got to where you needed to be and ate a few foods, but you are forced to avoid the Gloom in this game because you know that it will be catastrophic if you walk in it for too long because the only cure is an extremely rare flower that can only be found in the sky. I just wish that the lightroots either weren't so common, or didn't heal your healthbar, because it kind of subtracted the fear aspect a little bit. The way it actually destroyed your heart containers in the final battle against Ganondorf instead of rendering them unusable for a little while was another surprise I did not expect, and killing the Demon Dragon with a single heart was the best moment of the game for me.
Some other minor things I liked:
Now that I've talked about what was great about Tears of the Kingdom, here is the stuff I disliked about the game. While I think that the people who call this game an "overpriced DLC" are not arguing in good faith, I can see their point. Much of Breath of the Wild's structure was carried over into Tears of the Kingdom and it felt like I was redoing the same things I did in the old game, just with a new texture and a slightly different story.
Because of how insanely complicated it must have been to put Ultrahand in the game, it was clear that that was what Nintendo spent most of their time on when making Tears of the Kingdom, going for a more creative approach rather than a return to the traditional like I had hoped. And while this was a perfectly valid thing to do that clearly made a lot of people happy, it just wasn't what I wanted, and the final trailers for the game feel like they were marketing a different game than they were actually selling. When they went above and beyond with Link's new abilities, it left other aspects of the game such as combat, story, gameplay, and the structure of the game itself lacking and awfully familiar, if not the same, as Breath of the Wild.
My biggest issue with this game is the story. I disliked almost every part of it. We start out with a very solid intro scene where we meet shriveled Ganondorf and Zelda disappears. Then we see her disappear as she steals our half of a master sword at the end of the Great Sky Island. However, the game then leads us into a wild goose chase to find Zelda for almost the entire game until near the end when we go inside Hyrule Castle. This was fine in Skyward Sword because Zelda was much more likable and it only took up half of the game. I felt like "I have to save Zelda. I have to." in SS and in Tears of the Kingdom I was like "Let's just get this over already." Additionally, the Upheaval which is apparently the placeholder of the Calamity in BOTW just feels like not a threat at all. The castle rose into the air and a few meteors came down and crashed into Kakariko village. The mud in the water doesn't seem to be affecting the Zora much at all, the Gerudo seem relatively unharmed by the Gibdos, only retreating into an underground bunker, and we have almost no time to see how the rock roast affects the Gorons before Yunobo is saved. The only place where I felt any sense of urgency was in Rito Village where the town was starving and abandoned the children to their fate because they're the worst parents ever or something. I enjoyed saving Rito village. The others not so much. And let's not even talk about the Sages. 3/4 of them we had already interacted with heavily in the previous games, which was another reason I liked the Rito quest so much. Yunobo is still as weak and annoying as ever, nothing has changed with Riju, and Sidon is so boring and lifeless comparing to the other game. As we go into the dungeons we have four conversations that are, quite literally, copy and pasted into each one voiced by the blandest sages ever.
"Come, Come" (Random Sage)
"Did you hear that voice?" (Yunobo, Sidon, Riju, Tulin)
and when we get to the end of the dungeon
"X, I am your ancestor from a long time ago. I was the sage of x. Descendant you make me proud. The monster you killed tried to stop you from obtaining my secret stone. Once upon a time there was a great war where the Demon King tried to kill us and Rauru gave us all secret stones but he was too strong so Rauru sacrificed himself to seal him away. And then Zelda appeared to me and told me that it was the duty of the x to aid you Link."
"So it's my duty to... help you? Now take my scary ghost form with a useless ability (besides tulin) to follow you around the rest of your journey!"
These cutscenes weren't disappointing. I hated them. As a person who loves the story so much they never skip a single cutscene these I physically couldn't watch. Everything about them was awful. The completely dry, lifeless, unneccesary sages which don't even have a name or a face and talk like NPCs or someone from an awful anime episode and say the exact same thing four times over, the empty void we are surrounded in, the cutscene we have to watch four times over, the robotic responses that come from the sages, everything about it was horrible and it feels like Nintendo was trying to reinsert the champions in the game but these are such a worse downgrade from them. At the end of the game I was like "ok... I give this a 7/10" and then the horrible after-credits scene with the four sages came in where they repeated the robotic speech from one of the memories and if that was supposed to be a meaningful scene it certainly was not.
Zelda's sacrifice probably would have meant so much more to me if the rest of the story hadn't frustrated me so much. But it feels like it meant nothing since the Demon King is such a non-threat compared to Calamity Ganon. Calamity Ganon devastated Hyrule, destroying most of the villages and probably killing half of the people there, and murdering 4 of the best characters in Zelda history who meant so much to their people that statues were built for them. In comparison, Ganondorf levitated a castle in the air and added some poo to Zora's domain. It ruins Zelda's moment so much because it would have been so beautiful if it felt like she was sacrificing herself for something meaningful. It frustrates me to no end because Ganondorf was a villain I was so hyped about and he's shriveled about 90% of the game and only appears three times, once in the beginning, once as a vision in Hyrule Castle, and once at the end, and only one of them is fully revived Ganondorf. In fact, we only see this version of Ganondorf for a third of the final bossfight. We need more Ganondorf! At least add a sixth dungeon to the game below Hyrule Castle where Ganondorf appears after, or maybe he appears before we get the Master Sword. We just needed more of Ganondorf and more of him being a threat to Hyrule.
Another complaint are the sages. I already stated that three out of the four sages had already been fleshed out in a previous game and not much was added to their personalities this time around. Why couldn't we have gotten new people? Maybe make Muzu a sage, we always like having an old man around, or give Barta/Bullaria some importance for the Gerudo and hand over the torch to one of those young Gorons that always follow Yunobo around. It would have been so much fun to have new characters. The sages add absolutely nothing to the experience of this game besides showing up in the awful cutscenes and it just feels like they're trying to repeat what they had in the last game. If they're going to do that, at least do it with someone new so it doesn't feel like I have to replay the game again. We already helped these people with their character growth in the last game. We know that Riju is insecure about her place as the Gerudo chief, and we helped her be more respected after retriveing the Thunder Helm and calming Naboris. We know that Sidon feels a sense of duty to his domain after what happened to his sister, and we spend time with him getting shock arrows, obtaining the Zora armor, and travelling around Lanayru with him until we got to Zora's domain. We helped Yunobo gain his confidence after he accompained us by firing himself at Rudania. These characters went through almost no development except for Tulin (again showing what Nintendo did right with Rito Village) because he's a new character.
Finally, the memories. Why did there have to be memories again. It would have been such an easy shift from Breath of the Wild, to give us a new main quest. While I was not a big fan of the time travel arc that Zelda went through, it was still workable, but there was no reason to have these stupid memories again. We saw so much of past Ganon and so little of present Ganon. I don't care what happened to the Goat Man and how the Kingdom of Hyrule was formed. Half of those memories were not essential to the plot and were just filler content. In particular, the one with Mineru just spoils Zelda's sacrifice altogether. Mineru as a whole just feels like such an annoying character and I would have much rathered a sheikah sage or even a korok.
While I criticize much of this game for remaining the same as BOTW, the story was one of the only aspects where it was a clear downgrade. So much of what was shown in the trailers hyped this game to be an impactful, story-filled game and many of these scenes are from memories, which I absolutely hate, and one of the scenes with Ganondorf wasn't even in the actual game, just a scene melded together from a memory and the speech at the end!
Another issue I have with this game is Ascend and how it affects our experience in the dungeons. I liked the Lightning Temple, the Fire Temple and Wind Temple were okay, and the Water Temple was just plain awful. I saw a post about someone complaining about the puzzles in TOTK being too hard and I saw someone respond "If they think these puzzles are hard, I can't imagine them playing Twilight Princess." And I wholeheartedly believe that. While I'm not trying to make this review a comparison to Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, games which are completely different from this one, the puzzles in this game were either super easy or required us to do something that no one would have thought of. I was stuck in the Lightning Temple on two different points, one where the mirrors seemed to reflect to nothing in particular (what you had to do was grab a spare mirror from another room and fuse it to the statue so that it would face the right way which was a random solution that I didn't expect but I actually enjoyed) and another where I had no idea how to get to the last terminal and I looked around for 20 minutes until I looked it up online and found that I ascended into a place I wasn't supposed to and I actually had to teleport out of the temple to a nearby shrine, travel back to the temple on foot, go through another entrance I hadn't gone through, go through a really long tunnel to get to the terminal I should have gone to first. In a game which prioritizes open world exploration and being able to do anything you wanted, this haphazard "linearity" inside the lightning temple really ruined the experience of a dungeon I otherwise enjoyed. Which leads me to my point on Ascend. While Recall, Fuse, and Ultrahand add to this game in so many amazing and dynamic ways, Ascend just feels like something they added because they needed a fourth ability and a way to get out of caves. It allows so many dungeons to be cheesed and using it in the Lightning Temple made the experience so much more complicated than it needed to be. Apart from caves, every other place where you needed to use ascend could have been done with Revali's gale (rest in peace) or a bonfire + hylian pine cone, or any of the other devices that came with ultrahand. The uses made for it in the Great Sky Island and in other places felt forced and the developers could have easily come up with another creative way to do this without ascend. I just wish that Ascend and Autobuild were disabled inside temples because it would have made things so much better. The companions also make the temples much more annoying because half the time all you're doing is waiting for Riju or Sidon to stop standing in a random corner and walk up to you. Especially in the Water Temple where your ability was on a time limit, this was especially annoying. The Water and Wind Temples felt like big sky islands and not dungeons. The Snowpeak Ruins in Twilight Princess and the Sandship in Skyward Sword are both excellent examples about how to turn something unconventional into an excellent dungeon, but these temples fail in so many ways. Not only is it so easy to get around the entire dungeon with a paraglider and Tulin that makes it possible to complete the dungeon in under 30 minutes on your first playthrough, the puzzles were so easy and the Wind Temple's boss in particular was so easy to kill despite it looking so fearsome. The Mud Octorok was actually a great boss that I have no complaints about, but the rest of the temple was really awful, with most of the puzzles simply being chalked up to "redirect this floating water bubble somewhere else so you can get to a terminal." The terminal thing returning was also something that was a huge letdown. There was no reason to continue it from Breath of the Wild, especially when the Divine Beast dungeons were such a huge complaint, when they could have added a system of small keys, miniboss, maybe even a new ultrahand ability similar to the ones we got from the sages to replace having a companion with you that you would be able to use across the dungeon. This would have turned the Lightning Temple from a 7/10 dungeon to an easy 9/10 or even 10/10 and would have improved my outlook on the other dungeons a lot more, particularly the fire temple, which was so great aesthetically but the gameplay and puzzles simply were not. While I liked the Lightning Temple and to a lesser extent the Fire Temple and the bossfights were much better, I found myself enjoying the Divine Beasts more than the Wind and Water Temples, and many of the bosses were such pushovers. The dungeons in this game get a 4/10.
I have a number of other smaller complaints. First is that I really wished there were more food and armor options. A return to the "meat skewers" and "fried wild greens" let me down a bit as I was hoping for more variance on food, especially after they added new items like stambulbs and tomatoes that I thought would replace the existing items. I mean, we had a whole sidequest dedicated to discovering Cheese and there's only three recipes for it! (as far as I know) Additionally, I wouldn't have been upset if they gave us the same effects for armor as before, just with a new name and texture. Like maybe they could have slightly updated the look of the Hylian set like they did with the Champion's tunic, or we could have the full Sheikah uniform instead of the Stealth armor, or a Lightning Helmet that actually looked different instead of one that reused the exact same texture as the thunder helm. New monsters such as Horriblins, Aerocudas, and Boss Bokoblins added some great new fights to the game, and I wouldn't have even cared if they reused the same enemies, but the way they attack is the exact same as in Breath of the Wild, which left the combat a little predictable and I was able to kill a Gloom Lynel first try. The only battles that really challenged me were against the Gleeoks, one of the best bosses in all of Zelda history.
My last issue with this game is that I really don't understand what vibe they were going for. Majora's Mask was twisted and disturbing. Twilight Princess was dark and gloomy. Skyward Sword was bright and hopeful. Breath of the Wild was free and really emphasized nature. But with Tears of the Kingdom, they really seem to be doing five things at once and accomplishing none of them. They try to put an emphasis on the creative aspect by adding things like Zonai Tech to the beginning and adding new technologies like the batteries, factories, skyview towers, and other. Then they also try to make this game dark and scary by introducing some horrifying things like chasms, gloom hands, and underground areas. They made the game seem bright and sunny like Skyward Sword in the beginning with the Great Sky Island and the bright yellow color palette. Then they also try to keep the open-world aspect of Breath of the Wild by keeping this massive open world, but with nothing to do inside it since we've already seen most of the stuff in this game's nature areas apart from the new caves. I don't understand what the developers were trying to make this game feel like, and it feels like they tried to do too many things at once and failed to flesh out all of them. I would have loved to see a restored Hyrule that we could explore and I would have also loved to have a nature-filled world like in BOTW with new plants, foods, caves, animals, and areas to explore, but the Hyrule in TOTK seems like a haphazard mixture of both.
There's no incentive to explore this time around with only 3-4 new plants and animals in the overworld and only a few caves that only have Brightbloom seeds, bomb flowers, and bubblefrogs. I love the caves, but they seem a bit same-y over time and I have no intention to find them all. I can't even ride around Hyrule on a horse like in BOTW or in a car like the developers seem to want us to do because I run into those stupid Zonai rocks that are littered around every 5 seconds for no particular reason. All they do is make transportation annoying and I wonder why they went through the effort to put all of the sky island materials on the overworld by these ugly rocks instead of actually having more sky islands like we wanted. The Great Sky Island was undoubtedly the most solid part of Tears of the Kingdom's Hyrule, so why did they deincentivise sky exploration by having most of the sky materials on these fallen rocks?
All in all, Nintendo outdid themselves with the coding in this game, especially putting a massive title like this on the six-year-old Nintendo Switch. However, it was clear that they spent most of their time coding in these new mechanics and the writers clearly phoned in this time around with the worst story and dialogue I have seen in any Zelda game so far. Maybe putting in a completely new game on Breath of the Wild's massive world was too much to ask, but so much of Tears of the Kingdom either directly copies Breath of the Wild (four dungeons in the exact same lands, the exact same food, combat, armor, and people) or takes the same structure and retextures it (four terminals in a dungeon, memories, shrines, a quest to rebuild a village from scratch, "champions" that pass on their abilities to their successors, and those cursed Korok seeds) that I really found no reason to play this game after 100 hours because there was nothing new left to do besides a multitude of side quests that I didn't feel like doing because I had no attachment to this Hyrule like I did in Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, Link's Awakening, and Breath of the Wild. Maybe I would have liked it more if I was a new player and hadn't played BOTW before, but the amount of content that was unnecessarily copied from the last game into this one really ruined the experience for me. All in all, this Zelda is a C+ for me, a 6.5/10. While it was more fun than the linear and small world of Link's Awakening, it couldn't compare with the story aspect of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword or the feel of Breath of the Wild.
TLDR: While Nintendo went above and beyond with the new Ultrahand, Fuse, and Recall mechanics, it ultimately wasn't enough for me to save a game that had an extremely lacking story, underwhelming content and dungeons, and a multitude of side quests that was basically repeating everything you had done in 2017. If you're going to argue with me in the comments, please actually read the whole thing first.
submitted by ChampionshipClear322 to tearsofthekingdom [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:20 DarthMekt My Trauma Came Up Again In A Weird Way

A little background: I (24M) was raised by Chinese immigrants in Alabama. I have one older brother who is 10 years my senior. For the first 6-7 years of my life, my family faced a lot of food insecurity, and what food we had my father and my brother would eat the lion's share of and I would get little to nothing to eat. In hindsight, I don't blame them, but neither did they seem to care. In fact there were many times my brother would actively compete with me for food. Many times as a child I would go to bed hungry and pissed off cuz I had to watch my brother eat all the food in front of me. I qualified for the free school lunch program and I remember purposefully eating by myself in a corner with my arms around my tray cuz I was so excited to have this much food to myself and afraid someone would take it. Our financial situation got much, MUCH better thank God, but this always made me rather touchy and uncomfortable about sharing food, especially with people I would regard as strangers. These days if I can help it, I usually just order for myself at a restaurant if its a group dinner type deal cuz I start to get a little paranoid that if I don't order food for myself, I'm not gonna be full and people are gonna eat everything before I can.
So flash forward to the present day. I've been a martial artist for the past decade and my master organized a trip for us to compete in a tournament being held in California. He rented a van and booked a hotel for us all and drove us all out there. He even treated us all to dinner while we were out there and ordered for us all, but I insisted on ordering my own food and have a separate check that I paid for. My master's office manager, who helps run the majority of the business god bless her soul, asked why am I ordering for myself? I explained my past, and she said that as an adult now, I should understand that my master would never let me starve. Plus he's known me since I was a teenager, and will always try to take care of his students. I maintained that this is just how I do things due to my past, but they told me that it can be taken as a bit selfish and disrespectful.
I get that in this instance, I should trust that my master would never let me go hungry on his watch, but it just makes me feel much more at ease to order for myself. Idk, thoughts?
submitted by DarthMekt to AsianParentStories [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:18 Hile85 You can't park there!

You can't park there!
A little backstory... a few weeks ago near where I live, someone was launching a boat alone into the Susquehanna River. The river was really high at the time and somehow the truck and trailer ended up rolling backward into the river. It wound up (sans trailer) about half a mile downstream wedged on a rock.
There are no roads or access areas nearby to get it with a towing/recovery truck and the river is generally too low for a barge with a crane. I'm thinking a helo is probably the best solution at this point.
This happened, as I said, probably a month-month and a half ago and my buddy just took these pics today while kayaking and it's still there. It,s a 2022 Toyota Tacoma, so yeah, that looks expensive.
submitted by Hile85 to ThatLookedExpensive [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:17 Black_Hazard_YABEI Tentative Plot Preview of my Amourshipping fic (Pokemon A/S) Version 1.3 (Part 1)

Version 1.2: https://www.reddit.com/useBlack_Hazard_YABEI/comments/13vifky/tentative_plot_preview_of_my_amourshipping_fic/
Fanfic name: Pokemon A(sh)/S(erena)
--------------------Continuity and Placement-----------------
After 1 years of MPM Epsiode 11
For Liko and Roy: Somewhere After Pokemon Horizon Epsiode 6-8 and it's subject to change
--------------------Character settings--------------------
Protagionist: Ash and Serena (Of course)
Main Cast: Clemont, Bonnie, Misty, Brock, Gary Oak
Everyone will receive the Mega Evolution
Gary Oak become Professor before the fic starts.
May become Top Caoordinator before the fic starts. (I might consider to make the Advancedshipping side story of how May become Top Coordinator by defeat Dawn)
Dawn will become Top Coordinator by defeat May and Serena on Screen.
May and Dawn will become Serena's rival.
Chloe is May, Dawn and Serena's apprentice
Pokemon Master scaling from best to worst: Ash >>>> Leon > all 6 Masters
Pokemon Coordinator scaling from best to worst : May >= Dawn > Serena > Chloe > Miette > Drew = Zoey
Pokemon Performer scaling from best to worst :Serena > May > Dawn > Aria > Chloe > Miette> Jessie
--------------------Change from Anime in this fanfic--------------------
-Ash:
​
**-**Serena:
​
-While Bond Transformation is exclusive to Greninja in anime ,in this fanfic bond transformation can also be accessed if the Trainer have unusual high relationship with their Kalos Starter (might subject to change in future) such as Serena-Delphox and Clemont-Chesnaut
-Clemont's Chespin will evolve to Chesnaught because of some Lab accident which also blow up the Prism Tower(lol!)
-Up to 6 on hand Pokemon Limit still applys here, but can use some device to replace members in their party as they wish before entering battle, and it can be bypassed by simply befriend with other pokemon rather than caught them in pokeball
-Introduce various of team finisher move which will not be considered as one of the "4 moves"
-4 moves limit are still applies here, but trainers can bypass it by create their very own charge move on their pokemon
-Trainers can use all 6 pokemon at the same time
-Features tons of OC enemy, pokemon or the antagionist that are neither Pokemon nor Humans.
-Bonnie will become part of the team instead of Tagalong Kid and use squishy to help saves the day more often.
-Clemont will become more successful Scientist because he now got the more competent assistant (Clembot MKIII and his Chesnaught)
-Clembot will be upgraded to Clembot MKIII in this fic
-Arceus become way more loyal to Ash into the point that will makes Arceus angry enough to personally
--------------------Miscellaneous--------------------
Everyone will have their official age +1, except Ash who is still stucking at 10 years old (There'll be the story arc which explains why Ash was still 10 years old)
Team rocket trio will be sent to jail at ending of Team Rocket Arc because I feels like they're superfluous in the fanfic. But they might return if I can make use of them and appears as reformed person because they're not entirely bad person I think
Liko and Roy will appear as side characters
Greninja will be actively used, but there'll be few chapter where Ash didn't bring his greninja in his party
Almost everyone will get Mega evolution
Serena will move to Pallet Town and live with Ash, while Clemont, Bonnie and Meyer will temporary living with Ash as well
Calem will appears in this fanfic as cameo alongside with Serena's Game counterpart) , who will appears with Anime Serena at the same time
I might consider to make the Pearlshipping Side Story which will take place before
--------------------------------------Season 1--------------------------------------
--------------------Arc 1: The dream begins and reunion (ep 1-6)--------------------
Type: Storytelling, Action, Romance, Amour
Featured Characters: Ash, Serena, Clemont, Bonnie, Miette, May, Dawn
Ash recieved the invite that will makes him reunite with his girlfriend, but he must deal with the plant from giant rock which will eventually not only makes him reunite with his girlfriend, but also reassamble the entire XY cast and makes the story looks like XY sequel (lol!)
Episode 1: Story begins with Ash saw the nightmare where the world being destroyed and even Arceus unable to do anything about it. Then Ash wake up and he just realized that he was invited to see the Pokemon Contest final (Serena Vs Aria) in Kalos, but when Ash went to Kalos, he saw his Greninja being unconscious because of being overworked for cutting wood so many years non stop without taking any break (Lol!)
Episode 2: It's only 1 hours before Pokemon Contest final starts, Ash had sent his Greninja into Pokemon center. Meanwhile Bonnie and Clemont calls Ash that the plant from Giant Rock had nearing the Luminse City. Ash and Lucario attempt to sense where's the source of those plant are but unable to. Meanwhile at this time, Greninja had been fully recovered and returns to Ash!
Episode 3: Greninja had been recovered! With Greninja's help, Ash was finally able to find the source of the Giant Rock- on underground. Clemont used the newly devloped drill to make the tunnel so that Ash (with Pikachu, Lucario and Greninja), Clemont (with Luxray) and Bonnie (With squishy) will able to reach the underground and saw the core of those plants. With the combined effort of Pikachu, Lucario, Greninja, Luxray and Squishy, they was able to destroy the core and stopping the Giant Rock plant once and for all.
Episode 4: After the Giant Rock Plant Core had been Destroyed, Ash had found that the Pokemon Contest final had already begin. Ash was tried to reach Pokemon Contest as soon as possible. At first, Aria's excellent Contest skills makes Serena begin to self-doubt if she could made it, but Ash was eventally managed to arrives and cheers Serena, allowing Serena to unlock Bond Transformation on Her Delphox to become Serena-Delphox and become Kalos Queen (Yes, I made her Kalos Queen that early because I have struggle to write Pokemon Contest chapters)
First Appearance of Dawn
Episode 5: At last, Ash and Serena had finally reunion! To celebrating Serena become Kalos Queen, Ash was going to buy the new clothes for Serena as suprise gift so that Serena can put her Blue Ribbon back on her chest, but Ash have struggle to do so because Ash know nothing about clothing style, but thanks to Diantha's help, Ash was eventally able to find the clothes that fits Serena and fits her Blue Ribbon.
Episode 6: Ash and Serena say goodbye to Miette, Diantha and May as they moved to Pallet town. But at the next day, they found themselves had been trapped inside the crowd as both are now become the celebrity and all of the billboard had their own face! Diantha will teach Ash and Serena must find the way to move around in public
--------------------Clemont single chapter (ep 7)--------------------
Featured Characters: Clemont, Bonnie, Meyer
Featured Antagionist: Xerosic
Type: Storytelling, Action, Humor
I made this chapter so that I can give Clemont bond transformation form
Clemont's Chespin evolved into Chesnaught, first appearance of Clemont-Chesnaught and they have to move to Ash's house because Prism Tower had been damaged
Episode 7: Clemont was devloping the devloution device which allows the Pokemon to devolve if they accidentally evolved against their will. However, like most of Clemont's device, his devlution device went malfunction and begin to explode and accidentally fully evolved his Chespin into Chesnaught as well! Everyone was managed to escape, but the explosion was so huge that it blows half of the Prism Tower, leaving them homeless and have to temporary move to Pallet town to live with Ash until the Prism Tower had been fully restored. Meanwhile, Xerosic managed escaped from jail and separated Clemont from Bonnie and Meyer. Xerosic's power protector easily overpowers all of his pokemon and his chesnaught! Xerosic was teasing that Clemont's science is terrible, but Clemont determination that the science was supposed to be used for justice allows his chesnaught to unlock the bond transformation to become Clemont-chesnaught, allowing Clemont to defeat Xerosic and sent Xerosic back to jail. Unfortunately, Xerosic was managed to damage the Prism Tower which forcing Clemont, Bonnie and Meyer to living in Ash's house temporarily until the Prism Tower had been rebuilt.
-------------------Ash pidgeot single chapter (ep 8)--------------------
Type: Action
First appearance of Mega Pidgeot
Featured Characters: Ash, Misty, Serena
Featured Antagionist: Tons of Fearows
Despite Ash's pidgeot had officially returned to Ash, it's another questions of how long can his pidgeot live with his trainer.....
Episode 8: Tons of Fearow had invaded and caused the huge chaos in Pallet town and steals Serena's blue ribbon! Ash's Pidgeot had found that those Fearow are came from Viridian Forest. Ever since Pidgeot had reunited with Ash, those Fearow had rapidly reproduce, quickly take over the Viridian Forest and begin to spread out of nowhere! Those Fearow demands Ash's Pidgeot in exchange for those Pidgey and Pidgeotto's life and the Blue Ribbon. Ash and Pidgeot arrived Viridian Forest but those Pidgey and Pidgeotto told them not to leave his Pidgeot here because they thinks that the Pidgeot was belong to Ash and Ash refuse to leave his Pidgeot here. Those Fearow now attempt to hurt those Pidgey and Pidgeotto and ate the Blue Ribbon! Ash Mega Evolved his Pidgeot to fight against those Fearow but being slowly outnumbered by those Fearow. On the verge of Ash's Pidgeot's defeat, those Pidgey and Pidgetto had evolved into Pidgeot and helps Ash's Pidgeot to defeat those Fearow and give Ash back the Blue Ribbon, ending those Fearow's threat once and for all! Ash and his Pidgeot was bid farewell to those Pidgeot and give the Blue Ribbon back to Serena, now Ash's Pidgeot can live with Ash forever!
--------------------Ash single chapter (ep 9)--------------------
Type: Adventure
Featured Characters: Ash, Misty, Serena
Ash will caught Dunsparce in this episode
Epsiode 9: After 27 years of failure, Ash had finally caught his most longed wanted Dunsparce ! (which will later evolve into the rare 3 segment dundunsparce by TM him Hyper Drill)
--------------------The Muted Princess of Hoenn Arc (ep 10-12)--------------------
Type: Adventure, Humor
May, the Princess of Hoenn had been diagnosed spasmodic dysphonia and become inability to speak like Red) did! Meanwhile, Ash and Serena being sent to Hoenn in very funny way and reunited with May and Max! This epsiode also features
Featured Characters: Ash, May, Max, Serena, Molly
Featured Antagonist: Team Rocket Trio (Epsiode 10 only)
Epsiode 10: Team Rocket trio caught Ash's Pikachu once again! Ash jump to the Team Rocket ballon to save Pikachu while having Serena caught his feet, but Ash had end up makes the Team Rocket ballon explodes and sent Ash, Pikachu and Serena to Hoenn! (lol!). May and Max meet Ash and Serena once again and was surprised why Ash would hugging Serena so tight and lying on the ground (lol)! Ash and Serena attempt greets May and Max but May didn't speak and respond with sign language! Max then told Ash and Serena's sad news about May become inability to speak because of the spasmodic dysphonia! Knowing that Jirachi will took 980 years to become useable again, Max decided to find which pokemon can cure May.
Serena will get Absol in this epsiode
Epsiode 11: While May and Max was staying at their home to find if there's any pokemon to makes May can speak again, Ash and Serena went outside and saw the Absol laying down outside and end up seriously injured.
Epsiode 12: After Serena caught Absol, Max had found that the only way to makes May can speak again is to find the Unown, and Molly is the only person who can use Unown to make May speaks again. Ash, Serena, May and Max went to greenfield and found Molly to use unown to spell "May Speak" so that May can speak again
------------------Arc 3: Team Rocket invasion (ep 13-21)--------------------
Type: Action
Featured Characters: Ash, Misty, Brock, Gary Oak, Serena, Clemont, Bonnie, Professor Oak, Korrina, Alain, Diantha, Mewtwo, Lugia, Butch and Cassidy (Flashback)
Featured Antagonist: Giovanni, Domino , Dr. Namba (With Artifical Shadow Lugia), team rocket trio (Redeemed in ending), various of unnamed Team Rocket Grunts and Artifical Pokemons
XY/XYZ cast had finally reassambled! But let's not forget about that they must deal with the very first and longest lasting villain organization-Team Rocket!
Epsiode 13: Gary had reunited with Ash, where former had become the Pokemon Professor. Gary brings Ash and Serena to visit the extension of Professor Oak's laboratory (Clemont and Bonnie was here too!). Meanwhile, Giovanni had arrived the laboratory and defeated Professor Oak. Gary came out and fight against Giovanni once again and.....lose once again. Meanwhile, the Team Rocket Grunts kidnapped Professor Oak while they're battling and Giovanni had left the laboratory!
Epsiode 14: Giovanni kidnapped Professor Oak to Team Rocket base to make Professor Oak works for him. Ash and Gary was thinking about how to save Giovanni. Meanwhile, the Team Rocket trio appears once again and attempt to steal his Pikachu, but Misty and Brock arrives and saves Ash's Pikachu. Ash respond with a heavy heart as Ash aware that this might be their last time to prepare for trouble as Ash had decided to destroy Team Rocket once and for all (Yes, he feels sympathy for those Team Rocket Trio because he aware that Team Rocket Trio have heart) and Ash's pikachu sent Team Rocket Trio flying once again like usual!
Epsiode 15: Thanks to Clemont's science, Ash, Misty, Brock and Gary was able to track down the location of Team Rocket base. Clemont gives Ash the device which allows Ash to freely switch his Pokemon party anywhere and anytime. Ash, Misty, Brock and Gary went to Team Rocket base while leaving Serena, Clemont and Bonnie at Ash's house. Ash, Misty, Brock and Gary charging towards Team Rocket Base and begin the final battle against Team Rocket!
Epsiode 16: Ash, Misty, Brock and Gary fight against thousands of Team Rocket Grunts who "Welcomed" them. They managed to clean the way and proceed, but Domino appears and blocked their way! Misty and Brock decided to stay here to fight against Domino to let Ash and Gary reaching Team Rocket Base! Meanwhile, Professor Oak had been tied into the chair which extract his knowledge about the pokemon.
Epsiode 17: Ash and Gary was finally managed to find Giovanni and Professor Oak. Giovanni transfer his consciousness into the Armored Mewtwo (this Mewtwo is different from the first movie one and it's nothing more than Giovanni's new body) while Gary was going to save Professor Oak. Serena, Clemont and Bonnie saw the news about Ash is fighting Armored Mewtwo and decided to head to Team Rocket base together with the help of met Korrina, Alain and Diantha. Meanwhile, Ash had been defeated by Giovanni and being tied outside the Team Rocket base!
Epsiode 18: Clemont, Bonnie and Serena met Korrina, Alain and Diantha to rescue Ash, but being interrupted by the artifical pokemon army and Dr. Namba. Korrina, Alain and Diantha decided to fight against Dr. Namba while Clemont, Bonnie an Serena stay to fight against those artifical pokemon to clean their way to save ash. Meanwhile Giovanni was about to end Ash's life, but being stopped by Gary. Inside Ash's mental world, Aaron was teaching Ash to master Aura power. After Ash mastered the Aura power, Ash breaks free with his newly mastered Aura power and team up with Gary to fight against Giovanni.
Epsiode 19: Thanks to Ash and Gary's excellent teamwork, in addition of Ash's mastered Aura power, Giovanni had been easily defeated and Giovanni's mewtwo armor had been teared apart. At the same time, Misty, Brock had finally defeated Domino while Korrina, Alain and Diantha managed to defeat Dr. Namba and the artifical Lugia thanks to the Real Lugia (the one from M02) , while Serena, Clemont and Bonnie had defeated all of those artifical pokemon army. They all reunited with Ash and Gary. Meanwhile, Giovanni still refused to give up, he used the knowledge that being extracted from Professor Oak to create the gigantic ultimate pokemon called Chimera. Giovanni insert his consciousness into Chimera and razed half of Pallet Town into ground!
Epsiode 20: Despite the combined effort of Ash, Gary, Misty, Brock, Serena, Clemont, Bonnie, Korrina, Alain , Diantha, Chimera was proven too much for those heroes to handle! Chimera then begin to cover the entire sky with the black smoke which will slowly turns all pokemon all over the world into shadow pokemon! Seems there's nothing to stop him, the real mewtwo appears and team up with Lugia to helps those hero to fight against Chimera. Meanwhile, Ash's Greninja was managed to use his extrasensory to emulate almost all of Pokemon moveset while his Lucario's aura power had been enchanced which allows his Lucario to create the spirit bomb sized aura sphere. Ash, his pikachu, Greninja and Lucario eventally able to blown Chimera to pieces and sent Giovanni's consciousness back to his human body. Ash came in front of Giovanni and about to kills him with Aura sphere, but Serena, and later the newly arrived Team Rocket Trio pleding Ash not to. Following Giovanni, Team Rocket Trio and rest of Team Rocket member being arrested, Team Rocket had finally being taken down for good. Korrina, Alain and Diantha say goodbye to Ash, Gary, Misty, Brock, Serena, Clemont and Bonnie as Korrina, Alain and Diantha head back to Kalos. Ash and Team Rocket Trio made the promise that they'll be travel together once the Team Rocket Trio served their sentence
Epsiode 21: Few days after Team Rocket being taken down, Ash, Gary, Misty, Brock, Serena, Clemont and Bonnie made the celebration for that.
--------------------------------------Season 2--------------------------------------
--------------------Arc 4: Ash being dense shell (ep 22-24)--------------------
Type: Storytelling, Action, character building, emotion
The world had back to it's peace following the shut down of Team Rocket. However, Ash's dense shell kick in ane he'll will learn the the hard way about what will happen for being dense shell
Epsiode 22: Ever since Ash become much stronger since the Team Rocket fight, he begin to become arrogant and addicted in Pokemon Battle! (Yes, typical dense shell Ash for ya) He begin to refuse other people's help and even end up having Quarrel with Serena! Ash ragequit his house and being attacked by Damian, who is looking for revenge of his charamder's betrayal. Despite Ash become lot stronger since they last met, Damian's newly obtained Psychic power and his Charizards army (Mega charizard X and Y, Gigantmaxed Charizard and Shadow Charizard that Damian created with his Psychic power) was proven even more ahead of Ash, but Ash's bond between pokemon quickly turns the table! While Ash was about to defeat Damian, his Pikachu suddenly unleashed the large amount of power and went berserk!
Epsiode 23: Having his pikachu went berserk, Ash had slowly realized that he's only care about Pokemon and become megalomaniac had corrupted his bond with pikachu! He begin to feels sorry about how he treat his friends especially Serena. Ash was later apogoized to Serena and his friends and slowly reconcile with each other and discuss how to bring his pikachu back to control. With the combined effort of Serena and his friends, Ash was eventually able to bring his pikachu back to sense.
Episode 24: Those evil Malamar had finally returned to present and attempt to brainwash Ash and Serena once again, but Clemont used his device to prevent the brainwash from happening! **Ash and Serena was quickly blows those evil Malamar into ashes but the energy crystals absorbs those evil Malamar's body and activated and quickly defeated all of their pokemon except Pikachu. That energy crystals attempt to shoot laser on ground and Ash have only pikachu left to stop that energy crystal! Ash's feelings resonance with pikachu which allows pikachu utilized that power once again to **create the deadly new move for pikachu: Ragnerok!
--------------------Single Pokeshipping chapter (ep 25)--------------------
Type: Story telling, Action
Misty must find the balance between traveling with Ash and her gym.
Episode 25: Misty had been tired of her having to do all three jobs from her 3 Irresponsible sisters, which making her leave her gym behind and went to Ash's house. Ash was suprised how Misty would willing to give up her gym for that Meanwhile, Damian hijacked Misty's gym and kidnapped Daisy, Lily, and Violet, to demands Misty in exchange her gym and her sisters. Ash and Misty worked together to defeat Damian and saved all 3. Misty's 3 sisters apogoized for over-reliance the gym operation to Misty alone and promised Misty that they'll become more responsible for their gyms. Misty give her gym back to her sisters and says goodbye to them.
--------------------------------------Alola Arc -------------------------------------
Ash,Serena, Misty, Clemont, Bonnie and Brock will go to Alola and meet Ash's classmates.
Lillie will merge with the Shiny Nihiliego with same name#Lillie) in this Arc
Ash's Dunsparce will learn Hyper Drill and evolve into 3 segment dundunsparce in this Arc.
Ash,Serena, Misty, Clemont, Bonnie and Brock went to Alola for vacation and reunited with Ash's classmates. Meanwhile, the parallel version of Lusamine (from Pokemon Sun and Moon game) had went to this universe using the Ultra Wormholes and kidnapped the Shiny Lillie#Lillie) for parallel Lusamine's evil deed! Ash and his Alola classmate must find the way to recuse the Shiny Lillie and stop the Alola from being invaded by the Ultra Beast army!
--------------------------------------Planned Future story Arc:--------------------------------------
Pokemon Contest Arc (Mittie vs Serena) or:
Features with May vs Dawn, but I don't know who should win the contest. If May wins, Serena will encounter May and if Dawn wins, Serena will encounter Dawn. Serena will lose either way.
Wallce Cup Arc(May vs Dawn, Chloe vs May, Chloe vs Dawn, Dawn vs Serena) or:
countine the romance amour with Ash arc: (Should I? But I really suck at writing those)
--------------------------------------Oizys Arc (adopted from this one shot): --------------------------------------
Type: Action, Deconstruction Fic, drama, passion, Original Story, Fantasy, Meta
Warning: Starting at this Arc, the typical Amour and even anime Pokemon logic will be thrown out the window and replaced with the original plot that you might not asked for!
Warning: This Story Arc features with full of ridiculousness, rather dark story, in-face towards TPC and filled with heavy irony and even fourth wall break etc. Please watch at your discretion! If you want something closer to Pokemon Anime, skip to Paldea Arc.
Ash teachs Goh how to take care of Pokemon, but Goh's dark side came to manifest as its own entirely separate, physical entity called Oizys, Goh's evil counterpart who is the psychopath pokemon hunter (a parody of many chinese amourshipping fic features with Goh as antagionist), Goh was paralyzed with fear after witnessing his evil counterpart's cruelty and end up in coma for a while. Oizys steal all Serena's pokemon, all Ash's ace (including his Greninja) and almost managed to steal his pikachu but his pikachu managed to free all of Ash's ace and Serena's pokemon, Ash and Serena got the upper hand and defeats Oizys, but Ash being posessed by Oizys in front of Serena's eyes and defeated almost every single Ash's traveling partner, all 7 Pokemon Masters , Gary Oak and Serena. But Serena was eventally managed to free Ash from Oizys control. After defeating Oizys, Goh finally wake up and learned the harsh lesson about how to take care of his pokemon.
--------------------------------------Season 3--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------gossip Arc (adopted from this one shot): --------------------------------------
Type: Deconstruction Fic, drama, Original Story, Break Fourth Wall, humor
Warning: Another original plot which full of ridiculousness, filled with heavy irony and even fourth wall break sans Action. Please watch at your discretion! If you want something closer to Pokemon Anime, skip to Paldea Arc.
Ash and Serena must find a way to debunk various of the fake news (like Liko is Ash and Serena's daughter) that damaging their reputations and free Liko from being cyberbullied. In addition, they'll also met Nemona marks the first appearance in this Arc and will join Ash's team!
--------------------------------------Paldea Arc 1--------------------------------------
Ash and Serena finally went to Paldea for first time, Liko, Roy and Necoma finally join Ash's team in this Arc.
Ash, Serena, Roy, Liko and Nemona will meet Steven to obtain the Tera Orb to Terastalize their Pokemon.
Ash will also caught the Paldea flying type Pokemon here
--------------------------------------Kalos Queen defend Arc --------------------------------------
First appearance of terastallize
The new season of Pokémon Showcase begins! Can Serena Defend her Kalos Queen title?
--------------------------------------"Shipping War" Arc (adopted from This one shot): --------------------------------------
Warning: This Story Arc features with full of ridiculousness, rather dark story, in-face towards TPC and filled with heavy irony and even fourth wall break etc. Please watch at your discretion! If you want something closer to Pokemon Anime, skip to Paldea Arc.
Type: Deconstruction Fic, drama, Original Story, Break Fourth Wall, humor
After The giant blue bird had makes Serena and Misty , all Ash's female travel companion and even all humans in pokemon kills each other until there's only 1 left against their will! Ash was able to free all of his friend before any tragic happens but that giant blue bird absorbed Serena and begin to spread all over the world! The only way to save Serena is to have Ash insert the feelings toward Serena into the water shuriken to open the hole out of Twitter's physical body so that Ash can save Serena.
--------------------------------------Season 4--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------Ash's 10 years old truth Arc Prequel (adopted from this one shot**):**--------------------------------------
Type: Deconstruction Fic, drama, Original Story, Amour, Break Fourth Wall, romance, character building, Action
Warning: Another original plot which full of ridiculousness, rather dark story, in-face towards TPC, filled with heavy irony and even fourth wall break! Please watch at your discretion! If you want something closer to Pokemon Anime, skip to Paldea Arc.
After Ash and Serena discovered the truth about Ash's being cursed with eternal 10 years old which might potentially eventally wipe away his character development and revert him back to the 10 years old stupid dense shell like in Uvona, Ash and Serena got psychological shadow and escape from reality by living in their own dream and refuse to wake up. However, Ash and Serena would eventually overcome their fear and . It'll also features with the cameo appearance of Calem and Game Serena.
--------------------------------------Fanfic Flashback Special Single Epsiode--------------------------------------
Type: Crossover, Flashback
After Calem being freed from Camel's possessing, Ash, Serena, Calem and Serena (Game) will meet each other and share their life experience before sending Calem and Serena (Game) back to their own universe.
--------------------------------------Paldea Arc 2--------------------------------------
Ash, Serena
--------------------------------------Tobias Arc:--------------------------------------
Type: Deconstruction Fic, drama, Original Story, Amour, Break Fourth Wall, romance, Amour, character building, Action
Warning: This Story Arc features with full of ridiculousness, rather dark story, in-face towards TPC and filled with heavy irony and even fourth wall break etc. Please watch at your discretion!
Tobias was revealed to be the "Ash's dream crusher", so strong that not even the combined effort of 7 Pokemon Master can stop him! This Arc features with the return and the final battle against Oizys and Damian.
--------------------------------------Ash's 10 years old Arc: --------------------------------------
Type: Deconstruction Fic, Original Story, Amour, Break Fourth Wall, romance, Humor
Warning: This Story Arc features with full of ridiculousness, rather dark story, in-face towards TPC and filled with heavy irony and even fourth wall break etc. Please watch at your discretion!
Last Story Arc where Ash is still 10 years old
Ash finally defeated Tobias, but Ash's 10 years old curse had finally reverted Ash back to the tough dense shell. Ash's friend and Serena must find the way to break that curse to stop Ash from being 10 years old and bring the mature Ash back.
--------------------------------------Oshi no Ko crossoveIdol industry dark truth Arc:--------------------------------------
Type: crossover, drama, Break Fourth Wall, Humor
Warning: This Story Arc features with full of ridiculousness, rather dark story, heavy irony, fourth wall break etc. Please watch at your discretion!
Ash finally grown up! Serena was being invited to went to Japan for the performance but eventually rejected after she discovered the shocking, ugly truth of the idol industry in Japan. Officer Jenny gives the secret mission for Ash, Team Rocket Trio (served their sentence), Latias and Team Rocket Trio's Ditto will camouflage as Serena, Dawn, May and Chloe to sneak into those idol industry and debunk the dirty act in idol industry in Japan, while the real Serena, Dawn, May and Chloe will appeals to her fans all over the world to boycott such dirty act in idol industry in Japan.
--------------------------------------TBA Arc--------------------------------------
submitted by Black_Hazard_YABEI to u/Black_Hazard_YABEI [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 16:12 dbrreddits 200 mg SR, 2-month update

I pulled a good deal of this from a prior comment, and am updating it to today and giving it its own post, in case it's of any help to anyone. I was a mess before I started this medication, an even worse mess right after I started it thanks to physical and mental side effects, and am in a much better place now, happy I pushed through the side effects. Details below.
So, the first two weeks:
Some things that helped:
26 days into it:
About 2 months into it, with increase in dosage: 150 mg SR to 200 mg SR
submitted by dbrreddits to bupropion [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 15:44 ExistentialOcto My players just found and hatched a dragon egg, a decision I will make them come to regret 😈

I'm running an Old-School Essentials module called Willow (part of the "The Toxic Wood" series of zines) and there's a part where the players can find a dragon's egg just outside of the titular town. The thief and the cleric of the party couldn't resist touching it and caused the egg to hatch (in reality, the egg was ready to hatch when just about anyone came near it) into a little green dragon wrymling.
It immediately imprinted on the thief and cleric (inheriting their chaotic alignment) and considered them to be its mums. This was massively exciting for the players and, arguably, exactly what they had hoped would happen.
However, they soon started to see some issues:
  1. The dragon reacted with hostility to party members who weren't present at the hatching i.e. anyone who wasn't its mum.
  2. The dragon showed great interest in stealing all the party's magical items for itself (and was able to innately cast detect magic to find them).
  3. It was ravenously hungry, swallowing the thief's rations and a full meal of smoked fish in short order.
  4. It seemed ok with the presence of the neutral-algined wizard of the party, but the two Lawful warriors? They may as well have been enemies.
  5. It reacted with extreme annoyance when the thief attempted to fashion a leash for it out of rope - apparently it considered any attempt to restrain it as insulting.
Further problems will reveal themselves in due time.
  1. The dragon will want constant excitement (which in this case amounts to hunting and recreational forest fires).
  2. The dragon will want constant feeding (being a literal newborn with a lot of growing to do, its appetite will far outstrip any of the human PCs).
  3. The town of Willow will not be happy about a fire-breathing monster waddling around their town.
  4. The wrymling will not be able to distinguish between wild animals, livestock, or people in any meaningful way: they are all just meat.
  5. The dragon will want to play-fight with its mums, which wouldn't be a problem if said mums were huge scaled beasts themselves. Being soft, squishy humans, they might be in serious danger if their child gives them a playful scratch or bite or three. Especially considering that this particular dragon's tail hides a deadly paralytic poison.
  6. The PCs do not know about the poison.
All this being said, I want it to be possible (yet challenging) to get this dragon under control and teach it to behave well - or at least learn to restrain itself and work alongside the party for a common goal. How would you run this sort of thing? How fast should a baby dragon learn to cooperate and/or communicate with humans? IMO dragons learn pretty quickly, so I'd say that within a few days it should be able to talk a little bit on the level of one-word sentences like "Food!" and "Kill!" or "Hug?" or "Night-night!" to communicate its thoughts.
What else should I consider? How fast should it progress? What sort of skills or behaviours should I be paying attention to?
Thanks for any help you might be able to provide! And please, if you have any stories of your players rearing a dragon I would love to hear them!
submitted by ExistentialOcto to dccrpg [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 15:37 thapanther Coffee spots in Little Rock

Going to be in Little Rock, AR Thursday morning and would like to get some espresso and possibly a pour over while there. Any recommendations?
submitted by thapanther to espresso [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 15:18 Guilty_Chemistry9337 Hide Behind the Cypress Tree (Part 1)

(owing to the reddit character limit, I'm posting this in two parts, but it's one contiguous story)
There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.
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2023.05.30 15:18 holliequ How-to Worldbuilding Part 1: Building Blocks

Welcome one and all! Some of you may remember me mentioning the idea of this series a while ago in the Daily Discussions, and now, many moons later, we’re finally here. Worldbuilding is one of my passions and one of the things that keeps my brain playing with fanfiction, so I’m here to share my dubious expertise. Remember though that these are just my methods and preferences, and if you can find something different that works for you, that’s great! I hope at the very least this series of posts will provide a decent basis for people to develop their own skills and style of worldbuilding.
The goal of this first post is to get you acquainted with some fundamentals of worldbuilding, things that apply to both original fiction and fanfiction, and we’ll to expand on how to apply these ideas in the next post.

First Principles

Back in my younger days in uni, I spent a while exploring the interaction of history and anthropology, which meant I learnt a little about anthropology as well. I’m far from an expert, so if you have actually studied anthropology in any depth, you may have to hold your nose through this section, but I want to stress that this is not necessarily a commentary on anthropology as a discipline, but on what I took away from it as a useful way to think about fictional societies.
Okay, disclaimer done. Broadly speaking, we can talk about two major approaches to analysing the rituals and practises of societies: as symbolic or functional. A symbolic understanding of a society will take the approach of focusing on the, well, symbolic meaning of rituals, essentially having them stand in for something bigger. Functional analyses, meanwhile, will focus on what purpose a certain ritual may serve in a society, which may not necessarily be what it appears to be on the surface.
(“Ritual” is another bit of anthropology speak here: rituals aren’t necessarily religious or virgin-sacrifices-under-the-full-moon (that’s only the fun ones), but can just be shared traditions. For example, singing ‘happy birthday’ could be considered a celebration “ritual” in our society.)
Now, “symbolic” and “functional” reasons can overlap and even be different ways of understanding the same thing. For our purposes, we want to remember that every bit of detail we introduce about a society should serve at least one of these functions in order to feel realistic. If you’ve ever seen an obvious Bad Guy Nation that worships Evil God Bob who regularly demands human sacrifices and puppy kicking and rolled your eyes, it’s probably because these rituals failed to establish symbolic or functional meaning, and thus society felt shallow and unrealistic.
What purpose do the human sacrifices serve? Perhaps those sacrificed are symbolic methods of bridging the gap between the people and their god: by spilling innocent blood, the people grow closer to their god’s power and incorporate some of it into themselves. Or, perhaps those sacrificed are criminals, and thus the function of the ritual is punishment and as a focus for the community’s anger against those who have transgressed social norms or broken laws. Just because a nation is full of bad guys doesn’t mean their society can’t have sensible meaning in it’s rituals.
Symbolic or ritual or both? This question is worth asking yourself as you build your society. Of course, you should feel free to work backwards if you come up with some really cool shit. This is fiction after all: “because it’s cool” is half the point.

Society Load-Bearers

Now that we’ve considered our intellectual starting point, it’s time to consider our pragmatic starting point: the shit that actually makes up “a society”. You could probably make an argument for multiple things to be included here, but I have boiled this section down into what I believe are the three most important elements to consider. These three are: landscape, religion/beliefs, and people.
#1: Landscape
To a certain extent, this list is in priority order, not necessarily because one is more important to consider than the other, but because certain things on the list will necessarily limit what you can do with other parts of your worldbuilding. Nowhere is this more true than with the landscape of your society. The land your people are in will dictate what kinds of foods they can eat, what methods of travel they most commonly use, weather patterns… unless of course you use your Author Fiat Wild Card and declare an exception because of Reasons(tm), but we’ll get into that later.
Let’s say you want to write a pirate story. This means that you have excellent taste because pirates are awesome, but it also means your story necessarily takes place on islands or the coast: the rhythms are a sea are going to be a major part of your characters’ lives, and therefore of your story. Sea travel means you need to think about the preservation of food and water on a ship, hazards that could overcome your characters, and the space on the ship itself, cramped cabins, et cetera, and this will be where you want to focus your research in order to make the “landscape” around your characters feel realistic, even if they’re fighting mythical sea monsters.
In general, knowing the “landscape” of your story is very important, and I recommend having a map, or several maps depending on the number of locations in your story, for your own personal reference. This doesn’t mean you need an epic fantasy style map with detailed illustrations and every river, wood and village named. But having a rough sketch of the area your story takes place in won’t hurt and allows you to keep the areas of your world consistent. This applies to contemporary or science-fiction worlds too! Whether it’s planets in a system or the bus route your main character takes to work, just knowing how your characters move through “their” landscape will make your story feel more real, and allow you put in road blocks (maybe literal, in the case of the bus route) that your audience will understand all the better because of how this landscape has already been established.
#2: Religion/Beliefs
The next most critical element is what people in your society believe. This will guide social norms, relationships, character motivations, systems of government, all of that jazz. This sounds like a broad and complicated category, and it is, but you can simplify development in this area by focusing on one (1) major guiding principle for your society, then adding nuance as you expand through the other parts of the world. You can also, as with the previous example, work backwards from what your end goal to be.
Let’s say for example that you want to build a pseudo-medieval world, but one where gay relationships are completely normal and accepted. To make this work for your society, you might say, okay, let’s set up a society which values individual freedom. The god(s) of your medieval tech society value freedom and love, giving you a culture which puts emphasis on free choice in marriage, regardless of anyone’s gender. Since freedom is a staple of the culture, you probably don’t have a monarchy in this medieval world; instead, perhaps you have something more like the early democracy of some of the Greek city states, with limited numbers of citizens who can vote for representatives. This, again, would play into the individual freedom that was your starting point.
So we have our basics of this society down. But this sounds a bit happy and low on conflict. Here’s where we add the nuance. A society which places a religious emphasis on love puts pressure on people to be in relationships, which is bad for ace and/or aro folks, or for those who simply don’t want to be in a relationship—there could be a character story in this! Similarly, perhaps a society which values freedom also struggles to find reasonable limits on that freedom, meaning that blunt honesty (and hurt feelings resulting) are a norm. People who are more sensitive may find themselves looked down on for not being able to meet societal norms of tolerating others’ freedoms. And a democracy in a low-tech society may be slow to respond to crises (because speedy transport options are limited, slowing communication before you get into group discussion) or troubled by corruption (because it’s difficult to make tamper-proof voting methods)… not to mention those who may not get to vote.
There you go! From a really simple premise we built a pretty decent society and thought of ways its norms might pose problems to characters, whether as internal conflict in character arcs, or external conflict with plot issues. More detail, such as in specific rituals, days of celebration, and so on, will add more depth to this society, but if you’re stuck on this point, you can always go back to your central premise: what sort of things would a society that values freedom celebrate? What religious festivals might there be if their gods that value freedom and love in all forms? (You can try this as a worldbuilding exercise by leaving some ideas in the comments!)
#3 People (or: Movement)
I went back-and-forth on what I wanted to call this part, but in the end settled on ‘people’ because that expresses what I mean better, I think. Anyway, the main point of this society is to remember that your society is made up of multitudes of different people, hundreds or thousands of individuals. You can generalise about values your society might have, just as you can with any modern society – but just like the world we live in today, no society is a monolith. People will push back against their cultural norms in various ways, and even folks who accept cultural norms may participate in norms to different extents, with varying levels of enthusiasm.
As a parallel, think of people who take part in religious festivals like Christmas as a part of their religion, and people who do it as a cultural norm without serious religious elements, or without actively believing in Christianity at all. Those people are participating in the same cultural norm, the same “ritual”, but they aren’t all doing it in the same way. To make the world of your society feel truly alive, you should attempt to show something similar.
Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t have to be something that you dedicate masses of space to. In fact, generally it’s more realistic if there isn’t one “counter-cultural” character who all questioning or negativity about aspects of the culture is pushed onto. I’m talking about things such as, people who leave a cheering crowd because they’re not interested or disagree with a public speaker, a store owner who doesn’t ask questions about these strangers whilst others in the street blatantly stare at them, various levels of enthusiasm in the major religion, the presence of religious or ethnic minorities. You can tie this into your main story by using it as part of character arcs or subplots, too, to get characters to question their prejudices, beliefs, or generalisations they’ve made because of past experiences.
Another thing to remember about building a society of various individuals isn’t just how they “move” through the space culturally (...you can see why I felt “movement” didn’t really work), but how they move through the space of your world physically.
This is partly covered under ‘landscape’ for things like travel (if you have to teleport people around your continent, keep it subtle, yo) and what food is readily available, but it’s worth thinking about more specifically too, how your society will show, physically, that it has a multitude of people living in it. For example, if your character goes to a city, they should probably see signs of different periods of architecture, rich and poor areas of the city—and if they’re not seeing that, there has to be some reason for it. (There could be an interesting story in that idea!)
Think about the ways people will live in a period of your tech level and how that will make the space around your character feel ‘lived in’. Are the city streets clean? Where do children play? What do people do to celebrate festivals? As a modern example: even though I don’t really follow football (soccer), I always know when England are playing, because people start putting England flags in their windows… and then flags of other nationalities start appearing as well, because no society is a monolith! I hope this example also shows that worldbuilding doesn’t have to be complicated or about elaborate rituals. You can add lots of depth to a society with really simple touches like this, things that you may not even think of as “worldbuilding” because it’s so normal. But adding touches of normal is precisely what makes a fictional society feel natural!
So, that’s u/holliequ’s three major points to remember when building a world. My area of expertise, and hence most of my examples, is in (pseudo-)historical societies, but this doesn’t just work for building pre-modern or pseudo-historical societies! Let’s say that the “society” you’re building is a more modern neighbourhood instead: you can go through the list above in order in a similar way.
For “landscape” here, you’d want to think about urban vs rural communities (or a place where those communities mix, such as at a school), which country or area of the world they’re in (weather, basic patterns of life). Let’s say you want a ‘fish out of water’ story with classism themes, so you pick a rich urban neighbourhood for your main character—someone from a poorer, rural background—to move into.
Now depending on the area of the world you’re in, the urban neighbourhood may not be very religious, but they may have certain sets of beliefs already, such as homeowner’s associations which expect certain standards in the neighbourhood, or just shared assumptions about what ‘people like them’ do and how they act: for example, maybe in this affluent neighbourhood they’re used to hiring people to do housework for them, and so when they see the main character working in the garden, they assume the MC is ‘hired help’.
Lastly, people: even if your character encounters classism or snobbery from some of their new neighbours, not all of them are going to be the same kind of classist. The neighbour who mistook them for a worker, not someone who lived in the area, for example, may have made an honest mistake because of being raised with certain classist assumptions. Other characters may be explicitly hostile to the newcomer, whilst still others might be genuinely friendly and welcoming of different perspectives. In a smaller-scale “society” like this neighbourhood, which of these attitudes is dominant depends on exactly what kind of story you want to tell and there’s a bit less room for generalising than there is when developing a whole country, but as you can see, the principles work basically the same.

On using your Author Fiat 'Get-Out-of-Jail-Free' card

The above is a rough guide to building a society which functions more-or-less on the same principles as our own. But what if you don’t want to build a society that functions like our own? What if you aren’t working with humans, but aliens? Or your society has magic? Or it’s set in the future with some cool science-fiction technology?
This is when you pull out your Author Fiat card to handwave away any of the issues we’ve talked about. (This is also for occasions when you want something to just Be and don’t want to explain it, like “yeah this medievalesque society isn’t sexist. why? it just isn’t ok” but you know… this is a worldbuilding post, so we’re gonna assume you want to do some explaining here.)
For example, you probably need to think about how your characters move around the world, roughly how long it would take to get them from place-to-place with various methods of travel, the distance between stars, etc. Unless you Author Fiat declare there is an element which can make ships travel between solar systems in almost no time at all. (Hello, Mass Effect!) Unless you Author Fiat declare that giant birds can quickly taxi people around the country. (Hi, Pokemon!) Unless you Author Fiat declare that magic lets people teleport, or create gateways between different parts of the world, or… you get the picture, you always have a special ability to say “yup, it is that way because of magic and/or science”.
That said, there are consequences to using your Author Fiat card. If you have a world in which teleportation magic is a thing, then you need to think harder about ways to explain why your characters can’t get to a place: you will lose your audience if you have to resort to explanations like ‘they forgot about teleporting because they were so panicked!’ or ‘this never-before-established way of blocking teleportation magic happened!’ and erode the willing suspension of disbelief.
This is when it becomes necessarily to build probably THE most famous bit of worldbuilding… a magic system! jazz hands Or a sci-fi piece of tech. (A tech system? I guess tech systems can be a thing too.) At its most basic, the idea behind a magic/tech system is to give the audience an understanding of the rules so that things such as “magic that can block teleporting” don’t appear to come out of nowhere. By delivering these explanations early, and keeping to them consistently, you can use them to create tension later when the audience realises that a critical system in the starship is about to fail, or the main character doesn’t have the ability to cast the teleport spell right now, or whatever.
There are two approaches to building magic/tech systems: hard or soft. (Stop that smirking. Stop it now!) You may already know about the distinction between “hard” (scientifically realistic) and “soft” (scientifically plausible-ish, mostly, sometimes) sci-fi, but this can also be applied to magic systems, “hard” magic systems being popularised as a concept by Brandon Sanderson. Essentially, a hard magic system is simply one with more detailed explanations or formulas for how the magic works, giving concrete limitations, whereas soft magic systems may rely on more vague limitations such as “lack of energy” or “magic supply depleted”.
Neither of these is necessarily a better approach than the other, and mainly it’s about what kind of story you want to tell. If you believe Sanderson’s First Law, it’s easier to get your audience to buy characters solving problems with magic if they can understand, as it were, how the magic trick was done, but you may not need this sense of detail in your magic system if the issues faced by your characters are personal, or plot problems that can’t be solved with magic.
There’s not really room in the scope of this post to discuss building magic/tech systems (it’s long enough already!) but in general, unless you really enjoy making these things for their own sake, I recommend building your system backwards, starting with a vague idea of your plot and what kind of issues your characters will need to run into, and then building flaws or limitations into your system that facilitate that. For example, limit the time the character can be in the mech suit without taking brain damage, heightening the tension of the long finale you have planned, or invent some kind of magic rock that blocks teleportation magic, so your villain can have deposited a bunch of it in Plot Critical Location to prevent your heroes just teleporting there to stop them.

Resources

One last thing I did want to discuss was, in my opinion, the best way to improve your confidence and ability to worldbuild your own societies: learn about other societies! So to that end I’m going to discuss a some places where you can increase your knowledge and help your worldbuilding :D
The first one is probably an obvious one for writers, which is read widely. Fiction stories are a great resource for improving your writing, especially ones that have in-depth worldbuilding themselves. Some of the books I’ve enjoyed most over the past year from a worldbuilding perspective are Judy I Lin’s A Magic Steeped in Poison, These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong, and The Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal, respectively a China-inspired fantasy setting, 1920s Shanghai with supernatural elements, and a sci-fi alternate history of the 1950s and 60s—so quite a wide range! A Magic Steeped in Poison also has one of the freshest and most interesting ‘soft’ magic systems I’ve encountered if that’s to your interest as well.
If we want to learn about societies, though, there is an entire profession that have dedicated themselves to learning about past societies! I keep telling everyone that my history degree comes in very useful for writing >D However, I do realise that getting into historical non-fiction can be a bit intimidating if you don’t have the degree, as history books are not always accessible. What I recommend if you do want to read more non-fiction is to look into books aimed at a popular audience rather than academic works. Two particular accessible recommendations I’ve read over the past year would be Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides series (particularly useful as they cover all kinds of elements of historical life, from religion to clothing to how people greet each other) as well as The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, which goes into great detail about working class Victorian life through the lens of biographies of the five victims of Jack the Ripper.
If you are willing to tackle more academic sources, when it comes to specifics, I recommend Jstor which allows you to make a personal account and access free articles each month. Trust me, some historian has DEFINITELY written something very specific on your area of interest at some point. Outside of that, I would suggest looking for books that are collections of multiple authors, since these are often designed to give a broad overview of the period from multiple historians’ specialities/perspectives. For example, I finished relatively recently Japan Emerging edited by Karl F. Friday, which was a great introduction to Japanese history from the perspective of someone mostly completely unfamiliar with the topic, and the bibliographies of books like this are an excellent starting point for doing more detailed research.
Apart from these “edited by” collections, series that are designed to be a comprehensive history on the topic can be very useful. I’ve been making my way through the Penguin History of Britain series and two books in particular, Britain After Rome by Robin Fleming (covering c. 400-1070AD) and The Struggle for Mastery by David Carpenter (1066-1300ish), stood out for their excellent attention to detail and the amount of ground they managed to cover.
(If you want any other recommendations, feel free to ask me! My best areas of knowledge are probably early modern and modern Britain and Europe, but I’ll see what I can do for any other periods or topics of interest!)
Non-fiction books are not the only way you can learn about societies either, especially for those of you who struggle to find time for books. Historical documentaries can be a great and accessible way to find out more about a particular era – my favourite documentary of all time is Victorian Bakers which is a BBC series available on DVD where bakers from the modern day try out different methods of baking throughout the Victorian era, starting with stone ovens and all the way up to industrialisation. Since bread has been a staple food for most of European history, it’s a really valuable perspective, as well as fun! (And yes, I am the kind of person who has a favourite documentary of all time, lol.)
There are also plenty of youtube series out there talking about history, but do try to find reliable perspectives if you can, particularly people who actually share their sources with you (and even if you don’t want to read the source itself, you can google it to check out the reviews). Some historians are now putting their work online to try to reach a wider audience, and one historian’s blog in particular which has been useful for me is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Brett Deveraux which even has an entire section for resources for world-builders, looking at things such as what do pre-modern cities look like, how do people make clothes, etc.
Now I really have talked for long enough, so I’ll leave it there. I hope you all learnt something from this post, even if it’s just “I don’t like this, so I’m going to do everything the opposite way”. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback in the comments as I may consider posting a revised version of this on AO3 at some point.
There is one more post planned in this series. The next one will cover how to apply these worldbuilding concepts to fanfiction in a more direct way (i.e. when you’re not building a world from scratch, but expanding around existing concepts) and how to actually put all this worldbuilding into your story. Look out for that some time in the next week or so!
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2023.05.30 15:14 Better-Surround3564 The man at the mall

My name is Madeleine, this happened in April of 2016, three months after I turned 19. I now live in Castle Rock, but at the time I lived in southern Denver with my family, meaning my mom, step-dad, little brother, little sister, and little, little brother, my little brother's 7th birthday was coming up and at the time I had been studying abroad in Vienna, so I hadn't got the chance to get him a present, but I had the weekend off just to go home and see my family specifically for his birthday, My mom also asked me for Chipotle, and the mall we went to had a huge food court so I accepted. At this time it was about 7:00 at night, and I needed to catch up on some homework that day. and it wasn't that sunny out, so it wasn't necessarily the ideal time to shop, especially since it was a Tuesday so most people either didn't go shopping that day or had already left the mall. As soon as I left my car, I noticed a man.
The man was white with curly black hair and visible stubble on his face, he was wearing a navy blue t-shirt, grey sweatpants, and Adidas socks and shoes, I noticed he was coming out of a white van that had a lock at the back of it, He looked at me one from what I saw, but as I was heading towards Dillard's I noticed he was sort of following me, I thought little of it, thinking he was just getting a present for his wife or something, but as I left Dillard's and entered the main portion of the sparsely populated mall, I noticed he was staying on my trail, I picked up my pace a little bit and headed towards Disney Store to get my brother his present. As the cashier was ringing me up, she, for whatever reason, turned to look at the front of the store briefly and looked more than a little uneasy. I asked her what was wrong and she said something that gave me chills, she whispered, "That guy over there at the entrance, he comes in often and he rarely buys anything, he just walks around looking at the girls shopping or working." This made me really uncomfortable. I told her to be safe for the rest of the night and left the store, I just needed to go to Chipotle, so I went up the escalator and into the food, where most people at the mall were. This calmed me down a little bit because he actually ordered something from the food court, but not that much. I got my mom's Chipotle and walked out of the mall, but things only went downhill from there.
As I was in the parking lot, heading toward my car, the man kept following me. I was starting to shit bricks and I was so scared. But, as I mentioned, the man was driving a white van with a small space for him and a passenger, and a big storage area in the back. I couldn't shake the feeling that there were girls, my age or younger, in the back of the van, so I made the best and bravest decision of my life, I took a picture of his license plate. The man must have seen me take a picture because the next thing I knew, he sprinted toward me as fast as he could, I dropped my bag and food and immediately sprang into action, I ran toward him and kicked him in the family jewels as hard as I could. He instantly fell to the ground, howling in pain, I grabbed my stuff, ran to my car, and drove like a maniac to the police station.
When I got to the police station, I called my mom and told her to get there as fast as possible, I entered the police station and once my mom got there, I showed them the license plate, As they were sending out people to search for the car, I fell asleep at the police station, the police escorted me and my mom home and they stayed with us for the night. The next morning, the police told me something that made my heart jump into my stomach, the police caught the man and searched his car, in the back of the van, they found three girls, my age, 16 and 13, in the storage area of the van. The three girls were returned to their families alive, but after further investigation, they found that the man was involved in many trafficking cases in Denver, some of the girls he and his accomplices kidnapped, had either been killed or had been taken across the Mexican border to be sold by the man and his accomplices into sexual slavery, however after they found the three girls in the van, they found 16 other girls, ranging from a girl my age to a 6-year-old, in the man's basement. I'm glad that 19 girls were found, but I still feel bad for the girls who were killed or sold in Mexico, who will probably never be found. I'm happy that I was able to stop him and his accomplices before more girls got kidnapped by him, but I sometimes think, what would have happened if I didn't tackle him when he started running toward me, I never want to know.
submitted by Better-Surround3564 to Horror_stories [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 15:11 Pretty-Broken93 How do I process this? First time being around people in nearly 5 years (festival/vacation meetup gone incredibly wrong)

Let me start off by saying I have always been extremely reclusive and the past nearly five years have been nothing short of me going to great lengths to avoid people at all costs outside of work (which had been mostly remotely since the pandemic) and going to the grocery store. I only recently managed to start to be able to go to the gym again to try to gain some strength back to help with my uneasiness after I was r**** around 4 years ago. It was so bad that I would pull up to the gym and see one guy there and then just leave, or try to wait in my car for them to leave first. When I lived in an apartment I even waited to take out my trash til the middle of the night so I didn’t have to see or interact with anyone. If I opened my door and someone was in the hallway, I’d go back inside until they were gone then leave. I generally will not exit my car if there are people around either. Finally at the gym, I slowly but surely got myself to start going in and have been fairly consistent. I used to never be scared of people I just never liked being around them. Adding that aspect really changed a lot of things for me. Recently I let some online friends all convince me to go to a massive music festival (500,000 attendees?) that I was in no way mentally (or otherwise) prepared for and I’m just at a loss on how to move forward from here. Leading up to the vacation I was in all sorts of bad shape medically going through various things with trying new medications for migraines and dealing with stomach ulcer issues, etc... high stress with my job and a particular friendship with one of the other people in the group who would be attending with us, things like that. I kept mentioning to everyone including that friend I was struggling with that I don’t think I should come. I tried to stress how hard this was going to be for me and I didn’t want to be a bother to anyone else but I don’t think they understood or tried to understand. To be honest, as bad as it feels, and I’m not sure, this could just be in my head, I feel like they didn’t care because we both had wanted to meet each other for a long time and had been past just being simply friends but weren’t dating so they may have just wanted to sleep with me. I don’t want to think that but I can’t be sure and although I brought it up later on in the trip they never clarified - more on that later. Anyway, any time I mentioned I shouldn’t come, I would either be treated like I was using this as a threat/to take something away from/be mean to my friend who I was having high tensions with OR met with reassurance that I’d be in a safe place with people who cared about me. Which made it very confusing and in the end I did go. A couple things to mention I have a lot of other trauma from my childhood and I do not function normally at all, I have C-PTSD, severe anxiety, and a lot of of other things that I think I will have to see a specialist for because really simple things tend to be hard for me. I ended up meeting with my long time friend I’d been having a rocky time with a day later than planned and after having missed a flight and being up 36+ hours the day before and working a 10-hour shift the day prior too. Everything was chaotic and I felt like the worlds biggest mess. I’ve never looked worse or felt more scatterbrained in my life. For the sake of the rest of this story I’ll call my friend: S. I’d known this person online since covid, so for about 3 years and we had been extremely close off and on. I have so much love for this person which is crazy because I usually do not care for people much or find it very hard. In the beginning of our friendship they were very caring and attentive but there were also drugs and alcohol involved and at the time I don’t think I realized a lot of the things they told me that meant a lot to me were probably when they were on drugs like molly. At the time I was pretty unfamiliar with that. I barely drank. Also probably worth mentioning S may have some issues of their own, behavioral or developmental and so they’re not “normal” like everyone else which is why I think we got along so well. We both could talk about the strangest things all day and have very particular interests and just really enjoyed spending time together prior to getting more heavily involved when arguments became more frequent. Back to the vacation: I was so nervous to be flying but finally got off my last plane and S was there to meet me near my baggage claim. I couldn’t believe I was finally meeting him. There were some definite differences I noticed in what I imagined or thought he would be like in person compared to what I’d seen from him online. He definitely had a cool, calm demeanor online but felt a bit more dorky in person which I actually loved. He was sweet and helped me with my bags and I nervously rambled about what I mess I was and how I’d already been having a difficult time. We talked about not doing anything sexual but sure enough at the hotel he was already making advances to get on my bed (we had two beds). I think my conversation and my obvious attentiveness to what he was doing kept him from actually moving to my bed without asking. Eventually he did ask to cuddle and we did have sex. Not really shocking considering I’ve always been extremely into him and vice versa. Between that day and the next we just got to enjoy each other’s company, sight-see, and got great food then eventually checked out of the hotel to meet up with everyone else in our group, get situated in our camping spot/the rv and get ready for the music festival. This is when it started going sour. I don’t think S was in any way prepared for how much comfort I needed around this amount of people. I come from a very rural area with towns that have around 1,200 occupants. The closest city has 70,000 and again I am not comfortable being around people regardless. Not sure if this trauma related or if I am on the spectrum with aspergers or autism but being around people gives me this extreme discomfort that I would liken to ripping my skin off. I don’t really know how to explain it. I’ve found that drugs and or alcohol can help or being around someone who makes me feel safe can help but it’s just so unsettling. So I try my best the first day, I’m quite stiff the whole time. We all had done some acid but I only did a half tab because I knew it could make things much worse, at best it might allow me to loosen up a bit. It didn’t. It made me nauseous. Uneasy. More needy. I convince S to go back with me to a place I know I can get some molly (not from strangers) so I am less tense and don’t have a meltdown. I know using drugs especially like molly is not a good answer for what I was going through but I felt like I was about to have some psychotic episode to be honest. I was so out of my element and S was having the time of his life - he absolutely LOVES music and I don’t think I could have a proper conversation with him to explain how I was feeling or get him to understand/care so I felt like it was my only option unfortunately. Anyway, it did help the night go a bit more smoothly. I let myself relax... a little. I had some fun. Not much which is sad because this was an extremely expensive festival to attend but I was having so much trouble getting out of my head. So many negative thoughts and weird emotions were rushing over me the entire time and I couldn’t get them to stop. The second night I was more prepared. Again, I did molly but nothing else. My friends had brought other things but I knew I had to be careful not to put myself in a position to have a bad trip or to make things worse. Molly is pretty straight forward and can more or less force a good time and me to relax to I kept with that instead. This was a common theme the duration of the 3-day festival. So the second day was the only day I could actually say I truly had fun. I enjoyed the music so much. Watching S have fun made my heart feel so full. He loves to dance and I took tons of videos of him enjoying himself. Other than me having to constantly get water and go to the restrooms it was pretty great. We were the last ones back to the rv and we messed around a bit since everyone was asleep and in a different part of the rv where they couldn’t heasee us. He fell asleep with me for a bit then went to get up and go to his bed but for some reason opened the rv door and left it wide open? It was so effing hot out and my bed was in the dining area where all the heat was coming in so I get upset... mostly because I can’t get the door to close. Idk why but we all had issues with this rv door the whole time we had it. Not sure if it was broken or what, half the stuff listed on the rv was broken so wouldn’t surprise me. So I just try to hold the door closed, super exhausted but perched near the stairs inside of the rv and after 5-9 minutes of S being gone he comes back and I kind of go off on him. I don’t know how bad, I don’t think I said anything hurtful just like, “Why would you leave it open? I’m tired but I had to sit here and hold the door closed because it’s so hot...” but my tone was rough and I could see a sad, disappointed look in his face. Like we just had so much fun and that’s the last thing he experienced before going to bed. The next day I was hoping would be the best day because I was hoping I’d get more relaxed around people but about 2 hours into the night we get stuck at these really great sets and S is up front literally fist bumping one of the DJs that he adores and completely euphoric. I stay back and take videos of him because I know people will be taking videos and I don’t want to be up there and have attention on me or be touching bodies with so many people. Just a really uncomfortable situation for me. Over an hour passes and I really have to pee, I don’t want to bother S and he hasn’t come over to check on me once so I test the waters by walking away to throw something in the trash. I think to myself that maybe I can find a bathroom. I go back to my original spot, see S and then think again that I really don’t want to bother him and it will make me uncomfortable to go up there and also to try to shout in his ear that I need to use the restroom. We had to wear earplugs this whole time and he really wasn’t listening to me or paying much attention to me at this point because he was so lost in the music. To be honest there’d been a few times he completely dismissed me trying to talk to him already during the festival so I weighed the options and felt like it wasn’t worth me being so uncomfortable just for him to most likely wave me off and not listen to me anyway. So I go to try to find the bathrooms on my own. 45 minutes later and I still haven’t found them. I don’t know how. There’s just so many people, I’m kind of short and my eyesight is shit and I just have no idea what I’m doing. I keep ending back by where S was so I go back to where I was standing originally and still see him. Finally I go up to him and just shout, “I’m leaving,” thinking he would follow far enough out of that tightly packed crown in front of the DJ that I could say more. He shouted back he wasn’t leaving. I think I went back and said it a second time then started walking away and waited 30-45 seconds to see if he followed. He didn’t. Probably didn’t help there was a mostly naked chick dancing right next to him up there either. At this point I can tell I’m the last thing on his mind. I think he actually scowled at me when I was trying to talk to him like I was definitely bothering him at this point. In the past he told me he likes to do things alone and he’s even told me I get in the way (you choose the context, you’re right either way) so I know he’d reached his limit with me. It sucks because he promised he’d be with me the whole time and convinced me to come when I didn’t want to based on telling me I’d be safe and yadda yadda but he literally wouldn’t even give me the time of day if I asked. Doesn’t hurt to mention throughout this whole festival ($700+ tickets btw) that I never got to see anyone I wanted to see. It was just him dragging me to every set he wanted except for ONE which was a set he wanted to see anyway. Regardless, I had to leave again and try to find the restroom. I eventually did then found my way back. He’s gone even after saying he wasn’t leaving. I can’t get in touch with him he has no reception or data at this place. He’d been asking me to hotspot so he could’ve asked somebody else but he didn’t. I tried to contact the rest of the group in our rv but no one gets back to me for several hours. I couldn’t enjoy the music at this point because I’m having a panic attack in a sea of people I don’t want to be around, completely sober at this point, lost the one person I care about in a way where I know he will blame me, and can’t get ahold of anybody. I basically power walked around by myself for 3-4ish hours just to keep myself occupied and then eventually was able to meet up with some other people from our group. S is with them. I was so hurt. I know none of them understood what I was going though but they convinced me to come and left me alone and didn’t even care. I felt used by S too. I felt like his whole goal was just to get me here to sleep with me and he didn’t care about the rest or treating me decent, especially because our friendship leading up to this point had been so rocky and he completely just started tuning me out. Lots of mixed signals and lies to be honest, while also accusing me of lying when I wouldn’t be and saying he doesn’t trust me. I have so many things running through my head. Unfortunately two of our group separate to go meet up with some other people they met earlier that night and leave S and I alone again. I don’t know where I’m going or what to do again. S asks me if I’m going back to the rv and I stupidly just don’t respond. I found that he stonewalls me so much, sometimes for hours or days that I started doing it back here and there and it never goes well. If I don’t respond to him he obviously just gets pissed and walks off. I realize I don’t want to be left alone again and try to follow after him but he’s super tall and I have a really hard time keeping up plus I think he’s intentionally trying to lose me because he starts weaving in between rvs and I think hid behind one for a moment. I saw him come back out and look around but must not have seen me. So I got lost once when he did that but then found him again but then got lost a second time because I just couldn’t keep up. Anyway I make it back to the rv and he’s not there, no one is and it’s locked but I have one of the two keys. I probably should have unlocked it? But being in high anxiety mode I think I was more worried about leaving all our valuables unattended especially when one of the previous nights somebody was trying to get into our rv multiple times even with it locked. So I left it locked and walked towards the camp bathrooms to see if S was there. Not sure why I was looking for S, I guess I just didn’t want to be alone. Didn’t find him there so walk back to the rv again and find 3 of our group had just walked up so I unlock it and we go in. 2 others go shower and S gathers his things to shower and walks out. While he’s gone I go to grab his dab vape from his bag because I knew exactly where it was and I thought it would calm me down because I don’t need much. I grab the whole vape because I wanted to sit on my own bed and hit it. Anyway apparently he wasn’t going to shower and he returned while I had it and was looking for it and asked me where it was. Again, stupidly I don’t answer or at least not how he wanted. I answer his question with another question, “why?” Just being difficult. Honestly I recognize how toxic this is on its own in hindsight but at the time I think in my head I was just thinking about all the times he would ignore me for hours or days and I wasn’t able to ask a simple question or get a simple answer so I thought this was somehow justified based on those previous interactions which is ridiculous. In any case this goes over VERY badly. When some of our other group comes back he goes to one of them and tells them I went through his bags, implying all of them, and stole (yes, called me a thief) his entire vape. Not just a hit. Which by the way I was never even able to get hit off the vape because for some reason either I was doing something wrong or it wasn’t working/was dead/empty. I saw S hitting it later so no idea what I was doing wrong but I’d used it earlier and it wasn’t like it was complicated. Anyway not only that S who also always had a way of making an argument out of nothing also started accusing me of lying about walking back to the rv and seeing him there the first time I got back and just not unlocking the rv for him. Maybe he was hiding around the side of it? But I truly didn’t see him. He just starts calling me a thief and a liar on these grounds in front of or to, since he’s not really talking to me, our mutual friends. Somewhere in all of this I think I had said some pretty terrible things to him like having wished I never met him, nobody would ever want to be with him (he is not affectionate or caring but it’s not my place to say something like that so while I may feel like there’s some valid reasoning for it it’s obviously not okay), and some other things I regret. We also had another part of vacation planned just the two of us after the festival where we were to split off from the rest of the group and at some point I told him I felt like he completely tricked me into coming without caring about me at all and that I no longer wanted to go the rest of the trip with him or would pay him for our room we stayed together in previously because I may need that money to book something else. Which that part was just stingy. My portion of the room was $110. I think I was just thinking of how I spent $2500 (minimum, closer to $3,500 at this point) to go on a vacation where I had a massive extended panic attack the whole time, got abandoned, and didn’t get to enjoy much of what I wanted while he got everything he wanted. We barely talked the next day. We were supposed to leave the following morning (2 days after the horrible last day of the festival) to continue our vacation. Our more financially blessed friend got a hotel for everyone that hadn’t left yet so we could relax before the rest of us head home or elsewhere. While everyone else goes to the pool and to check out the casino I tried to talk to S about what was going on. Said I would pay but I need to know he isn’t lying about plans. He’d gone back and forth on a couple things and I felt like I might not have a place to stay at one of our next locations since it was with one of his friends, not a hotel. He refused to answer any questions, per usual. Even just me asking, “will I have a place to stay?” At this point he wanted me to pay him for the hotel we stayed at previously and for all of our other accommodations upfront but would not tell me if I was actually going to have somewhere to stay the entire time or would need to get another hotel on my own. I’m in panic mode, with everything going on and even simple things being hard for me I needed to know this but he wouldn’t tell me. The only thing he would say about every five minutes was, “pay me or leave me alone,” and he’d slip in, “thief,” here and there. This goes on for two hours. At one point I notice he’s recording me as I’m telling him I can’t pay him for everything if I don’t know that I’m going to have somewhere to stay. He could cancel plans and completely screw me over. This is important because he does in fact, cancel plans. But at the time he won’t say anything but to pay him. Eventually one of our group members come back and reluctantly gets involved and obviously tells me that I should pay for the room we stayed in which I do agree (even though I should’ve mentioned I paid for all our expensive meals while we were there) and that S should apologize which is what I was asking of him so that I could take it as the smallest sign he could be trusted not to screw me over, I’d pay him, and we could get on with everything. I ask for S’ PayPal and even though he recorded himself telling me to pay him and what seemed like me saying I wouldn’t (without knowing I’d have somewhere to say) it was odd because he was trying to refuse to give it to me, asking, “why?” I said, “why do you think I’m asking for your PayPal? You wanted me to pay you.” And then then he’d say he didn’t trust me with it. We still weren’t sure if we were going to continue with the trip and he asked me to leave the room so he could talk to our other friend. I knew he was going to show him the video/recording. I went to the other hotel room and unfortunately fell asleep. Our plane was supposed to be leaving in <6 hours so this was all incredibly rushed timing. I wake up and he had sent me a text message asking what room I’m in so we can talk. I reply I’m tired and just go to their room instead. By then everyone is back so we talk in the hallway. He says meet him at 6:30 am in the hall and be ready to go. He finally sends me the email associated with his PayPal and I send a test amount to make sure it goes to the right place. It shows his full name and doesn’t say anything about the email being unconfirmed. Back in my room I fall asleep on accident again and wake up to a message from him saying he didn’t receive anything and not to send anything else, and another message saying he doesn’t trust me and he’s sorry but he’s cancelling his flights and the accommodations. I catch him leaving at 6:30 on his own. I was crying and tried to talk to him but he just looked at me with a blank face and told me it’s my fault. We haven’t spoken since and it’s been about a week. It’s worth mentioning in our friendship leading up to this that he would often start problems when there were none just to say he had a reason to not want to talk to me and would ignore me for days at a time which is part of why I didn’t want to go on the vacation to begin with on top of me severe issues with everything else. I know that my anxieties and the hurtful things I said were or should have been in my control and I feel terrible about that but I can’t help but think he had this planned. Especially with recording him telling me to pay him then refusing to give me his PayPal. In fact for days after I messaged him to get his PayPal with no response, tried contacting his friend he was with to ask for it as well or to see if I could send the money to them and they could send it to S but they just said they’d pass the message on and never got back to me. I know he showed that video to people and tried to say I wouldn’t pay him and then refused to allow me to pay him to make me look bad and I don’t understand that. In the end he had to pay our friend (who initially covered the rv) his portion for the rv, so I had that friend forward my money to S on PayPal since he had him in his contacts after that. I even overpaid S, almost double to help with the ubers and for a vape since he may or may not think I tried to steal his. I guess now I’m just left with trying to process everything. Are we at equal fault? Is it more one person than the other? Is it forgivable? I have a hard time with boundaries and I don’t make lots of friends so this person means a lot to me. I’m worried about potentially getting sucked back into something that’s bad for me but also not caring about myself enough to stop it, I guess. For added context S and I quit talking once before and he even told me that we, “were never even really friends,” even though we’d spend 13 hours together a day just talking or playing games. It makes it hard to rationalize what’s real or what’s not. I think I need therapy. Does anyone have anything to offer here?
submitted by Pretty-Broken93 to offmychest [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 15:03 Recent-Development10 [A Terran Space Story: Lieutenant Saga] - Chapter 117

The attack continues and an opportunity presents itself. Does it work? Or does it have the opposite affect? I hope you enjoy!
Well, today is my last day of vacation. And with any luck my AC will get fixed. The last couple days has been most unpleasant without it. The next chapter will be out on Saturday!
Terran Space Story: The Lieutenant Saga
Academy Days First Previous Next

Chapter 117: Failed to Take the Bait

Minutes Later. March 4th, 2267. 16:35 Paximus System –Outer Asteroid Belt
The CNS Ugley had already racked up twelve pirate kills. Her Captain was aggressive in their push against the pirate forces here. No missiles had yet been expended, just the main rail gun and the other secondary batteries. Against another proper Naval warship that would be a recipe for disaster, but against the pirates in this system the handicap didn’t seem to be affecting them that much.
Her attitude changed dramatically. Her bow flipped up nearly two hundred degrees as she maneuvered hard to port. The main gun snap fired at the right moment. The large tungsten and ceramic mass shot out from the tip of its barrel. To add insult to injury they were firing high explosive rounds. As if piercing the hull at insane speeds wasn’t enough lethality the added explosive charge adds insult to injury.
The fired round’s aim was true. Moments later it intercepted one of the larger pirate vessels on the port side. It was an old Corvette from sixty-some years ago, so heavily modified it barely resembled its past self. Not that those modifications meant a thing to the round that just struck mid-ships.
The ceramic layer and tungsten penetrator easily pierced through the hull armor plates. The round then exploded somewhere in the second deck, after a nearly imperceptible amount of time passed. The damage to the ship’s spine couldn’t hold it together. The poor Corvette was bisected in two by the round.
Meanwhile, the Waukesha was continuing its dreadfully accurate and brutal assault on the pirate base. Two-thirds of the docked ships were killed before they had a chance to join the fight. Over three-quarters of the base's anti-ship defensive weapons have been destroyed.
“Captain, I suggest adjusting our orbit to cross the rings at a perpendicular angle. The poles of that rock still contain defensive weapons,” Ingrid said.
“Rex, do as the lady says,” John said.
“Adjusting course,” Rex said as he keyed in the adjustments to their orbit.
Just as the ship began to angle the forward kinetic shields flared up. The sound of sacrificial relays frying themselves could be heard by the bridge crew. A pirate had gotten a lucky rail gun shot off. Were it not for the angle of the ship and the kinetic shields it was very possible the Waukesha could have suffered noticeable damage.
“Find whoever did that and blast them out of the void,” John said with a clenched fist, “Good thing the bridge is buried in the ship.”
“With pleasure,” Chester said.
“You are not wrong Captain,” Ingrid said, “That round could have made it into one of our forward missile rooms.”
“Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good,” Rex said with a chuckle.
“I’d rather be good than rely on luck to see me survive a battle,” John said dryly.
“Can’t hurt to have some luck,” Chester said, “Where the fuck is that little fucker that shot at us?”
“Sorry Lieutenant, it’s a mess out there. The target is a Shrike-class attack shuttle. Sending you the designators,” Walter said from operations.
“Walter, how many enemy ships remain?”
“The Ugley just splashed another Corvette. All they have left is modified shuttles.”
Chester then added, “And all the weapons batteries left on the station.”
“Them too.”
“Rex, make sure our course and speed are adjusted on the fly. Make it harder for their targeting systems to get a good read on us,” John said leaning back in his chair.
“Consider it done.”
The Waukesha’s variable course setting would cause it to roll and pitch at random intervals and speed up or slow down. It wasn’t a guarantee to prevent damage to the ship. But it makes being struck by enemy fire significantly less likely to occur.
The Confederate Navy learned that lesson the hard way in a conflict against the Alliance. From that point on the variable course settings had proven to be a valuable deterrent in avoiding enemy fire. Not to mention keeping the lives of those inside the ships safe.
“And down goes that Shrike. Fucking punk,” Chester exclaimed from the weapons console.
“Incoming fire from remaining weapons platforms on the station are limited to those that are being manned in person. We may have cut systems or power to them,” Walter said.
“Verify that. Chester, continue eliminating the asteroid’s defenses,” John said, “Am I reading this tactical output correctly?”
“That is an affirmative,” Tess said, “CNS Ugley reports all pirate ships have been eliminated. They are steaming back to assist in the base assault.”
“Continue with the bombardment. Have the CAG refocus the drones on the docking bays. I want a full scan of defensive systems before the Marines set foot there,” John stood up then walked towards the front screen, “Tess, have we received any transmissions from the base?”
“The pirates are broadcasting a general distress call, but it is going unheeded. No commercial or unidentified traffic is heading this way,” Tess shrugged as she answered her captain’s question.
“More than that,” Walter said, “Traffic is avoiding this region altogether. If there are pirates out there, they are ‘noping out’ of this fight.”
John walked over to Tess’s console and pressed the button to hail the Marines onboard, “Captain Taylor. Load your men up. We’ll be launching the step in this assault within the next thirty minutes.”
“Not that I want to be Debbie Downer, sir,” Ingrid spoke cautiously, “But was this attack really expected to draw out the Icarus?”
“Nope. Not directly. But it’s going to generate a hell of a lot of chatter amongst their circles. Plus,” John smiled as he looked back at Walter, “Walter, find me a pirate ship that is currently dead but could potentially be reactivated.”
“Sure thing, sir,” Walter looked very confused as he looked up from his console, “Dare I ask why?”
“Well, if you go out fighting you need a lure to catch a fish.”
Walter immediately put two and two together and determined what his captain was planning, “Say no more. I’ll find a wreck that will work.”
Two more orbits were all that it required to finish eliminating the station defenses. As a result of the two engagements, all lances would need to be replaced. Because of the change of tactics, their lifespan was shortened to just two engagements.
Marty and his team would grumble about doing spacewalks and replacing them but their discomfort and annoyance was a small price to pay to ensure the Waukesha had sufficient missiles should the Icarus appear. John did make a mental note to pay for a good meal or drinks for the engineering team, even if their actions resulted in good practice for maintaining the ship systems.
The Marines from both the Waukesha and Ugley boarded the pirate station at the bottom of the hour. Fighting initially was intense. A great number of pirates never made it onboard the ships the Waukesha had killed while intercepting the base. The pirates had numerical superiority, not to mention fighting on familiar ground.
Unfortunately for the residents of that station, the Marines were wearing power armor. Every last Marine was equipped with a suit. More than half were wearing Broadsword heavy-power armor. The pirates ran into an immovable object in the Marine’s relentless and calculating advance. Morale on the pirate’s side broke after the second engagement.
The few who continued to fight were mercilessly cut down by the Marines. Those that did lay down their arms were treated relatively well, like any prisoner of the Confederacy. Though their fate likely would result in lengthy prison sentences, if they were lucky then they would still have a chance at life.
Multiple prison transports were required to ferry everyone they had captured. The trio of Confederate ships stayed on site for two full days after the engagement began. Six transports were loaded full of women and children, and their destinations were reeducation camps, though the mothers of the children could still be tried for crimes depending on what the investigations come up with. Three more transport ships were used to house the known pirates.
John didn’t really care where they were being sent to be tried. That was a feeling shared by his fellow captains in his squadron. Once everyone had been transported off the pirate base the Waukesha and Ugley commenced a calculated bombing of the asteroid. Dozens of armor-piercing rail gun rounds were fired. The asteroid cracked into several pieces. Gravity would eventually pull them back together in a few hundred years, but the base was forever broken.
Step two of the mission was now complete. It was a long shot, but John sincerely hoped the next step would lure out the Icarus. But what it would do, if his calculations were correct, is inflame the pirate’s mood. He needed them to act irrationally and put an undue amount of pressure on the Icarus. But John was getting ahead of himself in thought. The bait first had to be tossed out into the sea of stars.
7 Days Later. March 11th, 2267. 03:00 Paximus System – Outer Asteroid Belt
John walked onto the bridge just as the shift change had begun. The outgoing shift not only looked but felt bored. Even more bored today than the previous days since the attack. That wasn’t all that surprising though, normally the ship was getting into all sorts of action. Waiting wasn’t the crew’s forte, that was doubly true for their captain.
Brian smiled as he saw John walk onto the bridge, “Before you ask, fuck all happened. The ship is still running quietly and isn’t bleeding any signals still. Engineering really wants to get on the move within seventy-two hours.”
“Thanks, Brian. Did they say why the hurry?”
“Something about fusion balance or some such,” Brian waved his hands as he walked past his captain, “You’ll want to reach out to them to get the specifics.”
“Understood. I doubt we’re going to be able to stay out here for another couple of days anyway. Fleet Command is likely going to order us to move on to a new location soon.”
Brian stopped at the bulkhead and looked back at John, “Don’t suppose it’ll be a nice warm planet with sunshine and beaches?”
Deb laughed as she walked by, “I could use some work on my tan. I’m a little pasty.”
“Sadly no. If the rumor is true, then we’re heading to a system with a bunch of mining bases. Won’t be going near the primary settlement which is on an airless hunk of rock.”
Deion could be heard in the hallway, “God damn, that sounds depressing as hell.”
“You take us to such nice places,” Deb laughed as she headed towards the mess hall.”
“Agreed,” Brian shrugged, “At least this system is the command’s decision and not yours.”
John grinned, “Would that make much of a difference?”
“Yes, yes it would,” Brian turned and waved behind him, “Cya tomorrow.”
“Alright, folks let’s get at her. How does our bait look?”
“Lonely and unfulfilled,” Chester said sarcastically.
“Should we increase the power to the broadcast system?” Tess asked, “We might get a nibble that way.”
John nodded, “Work with engineering on that. We don’t want it to be too obvious.”
The Ugley had managed to find a shuttle that suffered a simple through and through. While a simple wound that resulted in superficial internal damage it was catastrophic as all atmosphere was lost to the void. The crew had no chance to survive such a wound.
To make their bait look more accurate there were a couple of armor plates crudely welded over the wounds. The shuttle never lost power, but the engineering team from the Waukesha was able to get the life support systems operational once again. While on the shuttle they also enabled the communication systems and slaved it back to the Waukesha’s control systems.
Several devices were left behind in the ship to fool any friendly sensors into thinking there was still life onboard the ship. John didn’t know what ship they would lure in, but a bigger pirate vessel would definitely be able to perform rudimentary scans of the shuttle. They needed something to temporarily trick those initial scans.
As for the Confederate ships, the Basilone did what it does best and was stealthily sneaking around in the void undetected. The Ugley and the Waukesha both had found crevasses in a nearby asteroid. Both ships were rigged for silent running. The only way they were able to communicate with one another is direct beam communication, a frustrating system in this day and age but is perfectly silent to outside viewers unless you cross the path of the beam.
Because these large naval ships were hiding in places that weren’t designed for warships to go, a properly janky solution was in place. Several reflectors and amplification devices were carefully spread out on the asteroid's surface. The likelihood of a pirate ship crossing the beam and discovering their hidey-hole was thought to be impossible.
Despite being rigged for silent running, they were able to receive general broadcasts from commercial and civilian ships. The Basilone, along with the rest of the Navy for that matter, could contact the ships directly. Responding to those messages would give their positions away to the more advanced pirate ships. Their prey would undoubtedly be able to detect those types of transmissions.
“What are the odds that the Icarus shows up here?” Tess broke the silence on the bridge.
“Somewhere between zero and zero,” Walter said.
“Not happening,” Chester said, “Getting a nibble from anyone seems pretty unlikely at this point too.”
“Captain, your thoughts?” Tess asked innocently.
“Well, it would be nice if we did lure our that great white whale,” John sighed, “I had hoped we’d get some interest from a pirate ship that we could get some intel from. It’s not looking great at the moment.”
Chester leaned back in his seat and swiveled to look towards the front of the bridge, “What’s the pirate’s reaction going to be to our raids?”
“Impotent rage,” John said, “We’ve been capturing their children and wives for seventy-plus years and besides some gnashing of teeth they’ve not been able to do anything about our policy.”
The universe must have heard John’s sardonic comment. At the precise moment he stopped speaking sensors were triggered. A slip space rupture was forming.
“Holy shitballs, we’ve got a ship translating to real space,” Walter said, “Can’t make out the ship type.”
“CNS Basilone reports slip space rupture danger close to the bait shuttle,” Tess said, “They successfully identified the ship as the Basilisk, formerly an old Alliance cruiser.”
“I want all systems back online, maximum thrust out of here,” John commanded.
“That will take thirty to sixty seconds to online everything,” Chester said, “But already on it, sir.”
As the bridge crew began working furiously to bring their ship back online, John was staring at the tactical readout. Something was off about the Basilisks' energy readouts. Normally there was a brief surge of power output when a ship transitions back into real space, but that power draw remained.
Without warning the Basilisk opened fire on the hapless shuttle. It exploded in a bright green fusion blast. The ship had been entirely atomized in the blast. The squadron was successfully able to bait a pirate into their trap. Unfortunately, the pirates seemed to be prepared for precisely that.
“Systems are fully restored, engines are primed and ready for use,” Ken said over the comms from his spot in Engineering.
“Helen, get us…”
John was unable to finish his sentence. He was watching the tactical readout. Someone, he wasn’t paying attention to who was speaking, was calling out what was happening. John saw the ship abruptly flip over and head directly back to the slip space rupture, which was curiously still active.
The pirates were a step ahead, of sorts, this day. The bait was successful. The pirates thought to put their comrades out of their misery. Or maybe they were enemies. It didn’t really matter; the lure was successful to a point. But no one in the squadron had thought of this tactic.
Hell, John didn’t even know that this was possible. The Naval guidelines surrounding slip space generators forbade such maneuvers from happening. In fact, if you transition from one space to another the Navy requires one to discharge the generators properly which takes two to three hours. What the pirates did was risk blowing up those generators and getting stuck in a place they didn’t want to be.
Though it didn’t seem like it mattered if the pirates gave a damn about Confederate Naval policies. Just as soon as the pirate ship appeared they were back through the portal from whence they came. The bait shuttle was destroyed, and John succinctly summed up their operation.
“Well… Shit,” John slunk into his chair and was forced to taste the bitter pill of defeat.
2 Days Later. March 13th, 2267. 14:00 Slip Space – En Route to the Altair system
John was soundly asleep and getting some much-needed rest. The paperwork following the letdown of their trap made the days challenging. But the final after-action report on both attacks on the pirate bases had been submitted. He had largely shirked his normal duties to resolve the paperwork.
The crew wouldn’t openly tell him this, but they didn’t mind when he hid away in his ready room to do paperwork. That was paperwork that they didn’t have to do. They appreciated John taking one for the team.
“Captain, apologies, but you are needed on the bridge immediately,” Brian said over the comms.
“Be there in a jiffy,” John yawned as he stepped out of bed.
He didn’t bother getting dressed appropriately for a shift. He found a clean T-shirt and quickly threw that on. A pair of gym shorts lay on the ground which he also put on before he looked around for some sandals that he had left in his room someplace.
After eventually finding footwear John made his way to the bridge. His appearance, combined with the rubbing of his eyes and yawning, was a clear sign that he wasn’t expecting to be awake. Or wanting to be awake at that time. The crew members that did see John that morning said nothing but giggled internally at seeing their captain in such a light.
The doors to the bridge opened and John saw through yawns, “What’s up?”
“Play it again please,” Brian said.
Deb keyed a few things into her console. The tactical screen then split into two. A newsfeed began playing back on the right-hand side of the screen.
“This massive pirate fleet, led by the infamous Folly of Icarus, attacked a munitions plant in the Outer Regalia system this morning. Early reports are a bit scattered, and the Confederate Navy has not yet released an official statement, but it appears that a fleet of well over two hundred pirate vessels, the vast majority being heavily modified retired military vessels, led a successful raid on a military installation.”
The newscaster paused for a moment to collect herself.
“The loss of life is estimated to be in the low thousands. Three orbital facilities were utterly destroyed and the primary station, and the space bridge connecting it to the surface, were also destroyed. Loss of life on the surface was minimal as the bridge is located in a coastal region that is lightly populated.”
The video then switched to one the pirates had sent the newscasters. Rene appeared dressed as flamboyantly as he normally did. But gone was the aura of aloofness. His eyes were hardened. John was used to seeing that look, one full of hate and contempt for one’s enemies. In this case, the enemy was clearly the Confederacy as a whole.
“The pirates sent this message. We have not been able to independently identify this pirate. They are claiming to be the spokesperson for the pirate alliance.”
“For too long the local powers have abused and attacked those that wish to live a life of freedom without their interference. Our brothers and sisters get callously murdered by an uncaring government bureaucracy. For those unfortunate to survive such a fate all of the powers use us as slave labor. Our children, infirm, wives, nieces, and nephews get taken from us without due process. They are sent to re-education camps to be indoctrinated into believing the lies espoused by the major powers. All of you are guilty of war crimes against those that simply want to live lives free of influence from such tyranny,” Rene paused and stared at the camera, “The grand pirate alliance struck three installations simultaneously, one in each of your nations. Until such prosecutions cease and our loved ones are returned to us, the grand pirate alliance will commence hit-and-run attacks on commerce. We will grind your lovely systems to a halt. When you finally taste that which you’ve dealt us perhaps you will come to the bargaining table and ask for forgiveness from us.”
John walked over to Deb’s console and pressed a red button to halt the replay. He turned and looked at his bridge crew. They in turn looked at him. All present knew their actions over the past couple of years had fermented this new rebellion.
“Kid gloves are coming off. It’s time to grind another enemy beneath our heels.”
submitted by Recent-Development10 to HFY [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 15:02 scare_in_a_box [HR] Gaia's Decay

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.
submitted by scare_in_a_box to shortstories [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 14:59 scare_in_a_box Gaia's Decay

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.
submitted by scare_in_a_box to scarystories [link] [comments]

2023.05.30 14:59 jtosss Is this Kitten Abandoned?

So I found a kitten that was underneath a parked car meowing loudly for hours. She seems to be fed, but her belly doesn't look full. She's able to run and jump very well. She didn't seem dirty. I'm assuming she's between 4-5 weeks old. She was very scared of me and I (pretty stupidly) got a hold of her and put her in a little cat bed I had which she seemed to like, but was still defensive. Upon doing some research, I realized that she could have been calling out for mom while she is out getting food. I put her back near where I found her and she went right back under the truck. So I figured she might know what she's doing. The next day I haven't heard a peep from her, assuming mom came and took care of her. That night I heard the loud meowing again, she's very hoarse at this point, and went to the truck and sat down next to it. Eventually she got comfortable with my presence and allowed me to pet her. Now she's following me home and meowing loudly under my car. I left her some water and the cat bed where I originally found her. This morning she is still meowing loudly under my car getting more hoarse- so I gave her some food, water, and shelter. She's very fearful. My question is: when can I assume she's been abandoned and start to find her some care? TLDR: Little kitten (assuming 4ish weeks old) has been meowing loudly under cars for days. Is she abandoned? When do I intervene?
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2023.05.30 14:58 scare_in_a_box Gaia's Decay

a comic page for this story
Sometimes the greatest horrors start with the smallest complaints. Only one thing was missing from Lonnie’s life and his wife never let him forget it. They had a lovely house, money enough to feel secure and have new things, food to eat, and friends to socialize with. But Sarah and Lonnie did not have a child. After trying for years, even going through rounds of IVF treatments, they still had no child.
Had this been a choice they made, perhaps Lonnie and Sarah could have come to terms. But Sarah never made the choice not to have a child. It was all she wanted. And honestly, Lonnie wanted it too. They’d even selected their house on the basis of the lovely positioning of the nursery within.
The day that nursery was converted into a home gym, caused a huge shift in their life.
For a while, Sarah fell into a depression and then she adopted a cat. It was old and had lived a hard life. Sarah seemed to like the idea of caring for it. Lonnie thought that was the end of the baby problem.
Then, one day as they sat on their porch staring out at the sunset, Sarah stopped petting the cat in her lap and turned a darkly serious expression toward Lonnie. “I’m going to get pregnant, darling.”
The odd spark in her eye kept Lonnie awake late that night. He kept picturing her speaking. What new plan had she hatched and how could he get her to talk to him? Over the next weeks, Sarah began making similar unsettling remarks.
“Darling,” she would say, her voice tinged with a disturbed tone. “It will be soon. I’m going to be pregnant. You’ll see.”
Lonnie feared that his beloved wife was losing her grip on reality. Still, life went on and he went to work in the mornings and came home in the evening. As a physicist, he didn’t make what he considered tons of money, but it was enough to support their little household. And that meant, to him, plenty of time for Sarah to find something that gave her life purpose. He imagined painting or gardening. With so much time spent apart, he could almost convince himself that Sarah was normal when she wasn’t making her proclamations.
One evening, after a long day at work, Lonnie arrived home to an eerie sight. A cable-like object extended from the ground and snaked its way into the house. He took a closer look and the material appeared to be organic. Though part of him wanted to inspect the place this cable emerged further, the bigger part of Lonnie instantly thought about Sarah inside the house with this thing, and of her odd statements of late.
The cable reminded him in a way he didn’t like of a giant umbilical cord.
Lonnie hurried inside to find the cable snaked through the house toward the back where the stair up to the upstairs bedroom were. He followed it. At the base of the stairs, Lonnie discovered their cat perfectly still, with the cable attached to its belly. Before Lonnie could react and reach out for the creature, the cable twitched and a pulse of energy rolled out on the air.
The cat began to shrink. With each pulse of energy, time seemed to roll backward for the feline. First all the gray left its whiskers. Then instead of a chubby middle-aged housecat, it instead looked like a lean feral creature, and then it was a kitten, then a smaller kitten, eyes shut as if they’d never opened. Lonnie stared as the last change took place and he was staring at a fetal feline lying at the foot of the stairs.
“Holy…” Lonnie said.
Then, in a jerky movement, something pulled both the cord and the fetus up the stairs.
This was only the beginning.
\***
Lonnie’s life now had almost nothing he would want. The world had almost nothing he would want. Including the awful stench that lay heavy on the air.
And as he strapped his diving helmet on, the stench retreated enough for him to think. He reasoned that the complete lack of anything to live for was all the more reason he needed to do something. He’d found the old model diving suit he wore at a local thrift store and left money on the counter for it—though no one was there to take the payment, Lonnie had a delusion of his own now.
“This can be undone. Someone can be saved.”
Sometimes he even managed to believe.
Lonnie hopped onto a road bike and made sure his prize possessions were secured: a chainsaw and an underwater scooter. With these things in place, Lonnie took off toward what he considered the center of this new monstrous world. A huge swell rose from the ground just outside town; this thing looked like nothing more than an overgrown pregnant belly, right down the red stretch marks and veins that peered out through its “skin”. From the apex of this belly grew a towering corpse flower, larger than any naturally grown flower and with a stink grown to match its size.
If only this mound had been ornamental and the stench had been the worse crime. But that was not true. The monstrous belly, with a towering corpse flower atop it, claimed all forms of life. In a few short months, it had reduced the world to a barren wasteland devoid of plants, animals, and people. Men, women, children, animals, plants… anything with life had been drawn into this horror.
Lonnie was seemingly the only survivor, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that his presence was spared because of his connection to Sarah.
He blazed on his bike across the landscape and glanced behind him at the back of the bike where the last item of vital value rested: a handheld container marked with the word “Atonement.”
It might be too late already to rebuild or repair, but atonement was always possible. Or so, Lonnie hoped as the rotting sweet smell of the corpse flower drew nearer. He could smell it even through the partially sealed suit—he hoped once fully sealed and using canned oxygen, the suit would be able to lock that out.
As he rode toward the bloated mass, pregnant with all the life it had been able to steal, he took strength in a memory. It was not a pleasant recollection, perhaps even just a creation of his own mind, though Lonnie didn’t think so. He recalled a dream.
In this dream that had come to him only once, the night before, Sarah appeared before him, her voice echoing through his mind. “The birth of the Second Desecration is near, darling.”
This cryptic message left Lonnie both bewildered and filled with dread. Determined to confront the abomination that had consumed the world, he steadied his path along the deserted highway.
Not that this had been a deserted highway a year before. He’d driven on it with Sarah plenty of times, usually stuck in traffic jams with only her soft, cool, voice keeping him from raging. Now that same voice drove him on in a very different way.
Now Sarah was part of the monster. But even if could save nothing else, maybe he could save her. The fact he was alive implied she was still in there and still cared. That had to mean something.
Driven by love and a glimmer of hope, Lonnie approached the monstrosity on the horizon. The giant pregnant belly, rooted in the ground, appeared ominous and foreboding. The sickly-sweet stench of decay filled his lungs and stung his eyes. As he drew nearer, he could see the giant boulders that had been tossed aside like pebbles as the belly emerged. Now they lay around the base like bubbles in the worst bubble bath ever. Lonnie contemplated his options and the weight of the responsibility he bore. His wife’s essence resided within this abomination, and he alone could determine its fate.
Summoning his courage, Lonnie hooked up the air to his suit. It cut out the awful scent, at least for a moment. Lonnie almost wished it hadn’t since with that oppressive rot gone from his lungs, he had to face his next task. He had to get inside this monstrosity.
He carefully set a hand on the “Atonement” sticker and then pulled his equipment down from the road bike. The chainsaw came first.
He turned it on and listened for a moment to the sound of its blade, half expecting the horror in front of him to respond. It did not. The rest of the world was still—no, still was too light a word. The rest of the world was dead. He walked on the bones of a corpse, begging for vengeance.
Lonnie swung the chainsaw against the mottled flesh of the belly. It squished and oozed, slicing easily. Red fluid leaked out along with a slimy yellowish substance. Some splashed against Lonnie’s helmet, giving the world a blotchy red sheen. He didn’t stop. There was no turning back, and nothing to turn back toward. In short order, Lonnie had opened a gap in the monstrous belly using his chainsaw.
For a long moment, he stood, chainsaw in hand, and stared into this pathway into the unknown. He had predictions for what lay inside, but this was uncharted territory. To know anything, he’d have to go in. Lonnie turned the chainsaw off and set it on his road bike. He doubted he’d see either tool again, but if his was the last living hand to affect the face of the earth, he’d leave as neat a mark as he could.
His hand tightened around the handhold of the “Atonement” container. All his hope was there.
Then hoisting the water scooter, Lonnie took in a deep breath of canned air and ventured inside the demonic swell. Darkness covered him. Encased in this tomb, Lonnie moved slowly at first, with only his headlamp to guide him. As his eyes adjusted to the eerie reddish light that filtered in through the skin and muscle of the belly, he saw more of his new surroundings. The interior revealed a cavernous expanse of flesh arching above and in meaty walls around him. He traveled with an eye to get to the center. He had an idea of what was there.
After all, Sarah had promised him a pregnancy, and a pregnancy implied a fetus.
Here inside the cloying heat of the belly, Lonnie could not even pretend that anything he did could bring the world back. There was nothing to restore. He’d always known that. For the first time, he truly accepted it. This was all there was, and he was headed toward the center of that evil.
Sure enough, he came to a central lake filled with amniotic fluid. It was too dark to see anything within the vast waters, yet small waves lapped out, implying some sort of movement within. Without hesitation, Lonnie plunged into the fluid, utilizing the underwater scooter to navigate swiftly through the watery depths.
He kept a firm hold of his “Atonement.”
The air inside his helmet tasted stale. Lonnie was sure he had time left before he ran out of air, but not endless time. And he was certain that breathing the air in this place would be death. He couldn’t afford fear or indecision.
The fluid clung around him, hot and thick. Much thicker than water, more like swimming through blood, though it was clear as water. Clear enough to see the bones that floated mixed in the fluid and the vines.
At the lake’s bottom, he encountered the abomination—the twisted fusion of human, animal, and plant—known as the Second Desecration. Sarah had uttered those words to him. He only believed them. Yet somehow, he’d expected it to be horrid, a creature from the deep recesses of depravity. Perhaps it was, but in its way, the Second Desecration was also a baby, though nearly four times as large as Lonnie already. Its facial features were almost human: large eyes, a human nose, and a mouth. Extra appendages grew from its back and sides. But its limbs still had the frail look of a fetus. This monstrosity was not yet fit to live outside its womb.
Now was the only moment.
Drawn closer by a mixture of curiosity, desperation, and love, Lonnie clutched the container tightly. Within it lay something dreadful and oddly wonderful. Something that had only been possible through his work in physics—a devastating mass destruction device—the first anti-matter bomb. It was a weapon he had never desired to see made real. Yet now he saw its potential as a means to reshape the impending reality.
He’d come to destroy this thing as it had destroyed his world and his life.
Amidst the grotesque scene, a thought penetrated Lonnie’s mind. If his wife had transformed into the vessel for the Second Desecration’s birth, could this creature, in some unfathomable way, be the son she had always longed for? That Lonnie himself had always wanted. Images of the world as it once was flooded his thoughts, a world already lost irretrievably.
Ending the Second Desecration now would not bring that world back.
But to do nothing would have consequences. He imagined the horror that would unfold if he allowed the Second Desecration to come into existence—a nightmarish realm akin to hell on Earth.
In the midst of his contemplation, Lonnie understood the precipice before him. The only thing that remained was to decide: should he release the destructive force within the container, returning everything to the void? Or should he permit his “son” to live, thereby allowing the birth of a distorted and contorted new world?
Either act was an end for Lonnie, an end for the world. In the end, Lonnie didn’t have anything except for a choice.
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