Newly licensed Mech Eng here first job application din. Last tuesday I was interviewed sa isang Composite Fabrication Company para sa Quality Engineer position. I was then informed the next day na magreport to them this friday at para mapag-usapan yung sahod and other info about the job.
Ff today, here are the gist of the final interview. I was offered 15k salary, reason is I have little to no experience about the job kaya i'll be tagged as a jr. quality engineer trainee. Moreover, i'll be under evaluation pa daw for 3months bago mabigyan ng specific na job part at magkaroon ng potential for salary increase and allowance. I will also receive direct orders from an indian boss and have a senior engineer buddy to train me.
I asked them about the hazard pay and medical insurance kasi prone sa health hazard yung job due to its nature (nagfabricate sila ng mga molded fiberglass kaya amoy solvent yung place at makati sa balat yung mga fibers). She indirectly answered it at sinabi lang na kung may mag arise naman na health problem eh iso-shoulder ng company yung treatment at meron namang regular check-ups.
Pag-uwi ko naman after, a batchmate informed me na nakita nila application ko sa pinapasukan nilang powerplant and they recommended me sa supervisor nila. I was then contacted by the hr of the pp to inform me na i'm scheduled for an online interview.
Ngayon dilemma sa akin what to do. I have til monday to confirm sa unang JO tapos sa wednesday naman yung online interview ko.
I want to try my luck dun sa pp pero at the same time nanghihinayan ako dun sa unang nag offer sa akin nang work kahit na maliit sahod haha. Magwo-worry kasi ako na baka ang ending eh pag nagdecline ako sa first JO to try out sa interview eh mareject din ako at ending wala ako mapala at matengga na naman sa pag-aapply.
Heeelp 🥲 hahaha

Sunday 11 June 2023 (GMT +7)
Manchester City vs Inter Milan
Looking to complete their treble, Manchester City will face the challenge of Inter Milan in the UEFA Champions League final in Istanbul tomorrow. Fresh after winning the FA Cup with a win over their city rival Manchester United, Pep Guardiola’s side will be looking to add their third trophy in this campaign. Their opponent Inter Milan themselves have clinched a Supercoppa Italiana and Coppa Italia double by beating Fiorentina 2-1 in the Coppa Italia final last month. Since that, they recorded back-to-back victories in the league against Atalanta and Torino to continue their momentum ahead of this Champions League final. This will be the first meeting between the two sides since Dublin Super Cup back in 2011 where Manchester City runs out as a 3-0 winner. It is worth noting that Manchester City is the top scorers in the Champions League this season with 31 goals and has only conceded five goals in their 12 games. City have also got to the final without losing a game and by beating two of the last three winners of the competition, in the previous two rounds. They will be full of confidence because of that and Inter’s manager Simone Inzaghi has to prepare a strategy to nullify their opponents’ attacking threat in this match. However, he might be without Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Joaquin Correa in this match as the pair’s availability is still in doubt due to their injury. Meanwhile, Pep Guardiola looks likely to have all of his players available for this game even though Kyle Walker missed training on Tuesday with a minor injury. Inter has the quality to pose problems for the Citizen in this final game but I’m backing the Citizen to come out on top and complete a famous treble in this game.
Prediction: 55 – 45
DISCLAIMER:
1. This prediction content comes from a third party and is for reference only. I am not responsible for any wins and losses generated by members using these tips.

I (24f) have been with my (m27) boyfriend for 3 years. We met each other a year after we both went through very traumatic relationships and believe we are each others soul mate. We were both determined in every way possible to not treat each other like our old partners treated us, and we heavily exceeded in this. We are incredibly close to one another and share a bond that cannot be put into words. The most special thing to us, was how we considered each other as our best friend. The love we share for one another is something most people wish to find in this lifetime, but may not have the chance to get.
We lived together for 2 years after he provided me with safety away from my abusive family, up until January of this year. He made the decision that he needed to move back home due to financial stressors. I am a University student who works 30 hours a week making over minimum wage. I have contemplated dropping out of my studies to pursue a full time job in order to help with living expenses, but he always argued against this, as he didnt complete a degree and works a job he does not like.
So, in January it was sprung upon me that we were moving back to the city we grew up in within the week. This meant that I had to transfer schools again, leave my job because it was too short of notice to be transferred to the location in my home city, and move back in with my parents. This obviously destroyed me, as I felt I was being abandoned and everything we built together was for nothing. His parents still live in the beautiful home he grew up in and they are a very loving and supportive family. My parents live in a 2 bedroom condo that also houses my sister and 2 cats. There was no room for me (and our 70 lb dog), but nonetheless, I was told I could not stay with him. Apart from this, i am very rarely allowed to visit. I have been there less than a handful of times since being back home. My life here is hell everyday and I have no where to keep me safe.
Since being back home, he has done a total 360. It is like he is a teenager in a rebellious phase who has just gotten a taste of freedom for the first time. As well as not having a fully developed frontal lobe with critical thinking skills. His ability to accept accountability when he hurts me is now non-existent, and he now manipulates every situation to work out in his favour and as me the crazy co-dependent girlfriend. He has made me cry countless times in the last couple of months, contemplating if I am asking too much for the bare minimum, if I am too hard to love, and If I am worthy of it at all. I struggle heavily with trust due to my past relationships and my upbringing, which he is very well rounded on and what my triggers are. Lately, I have caught him lying about very insignificant things that make no sense to fabricate. It has caused my brain to spiral, thinking about how easy it is for him to lie with a pokerface and me believe him. He knows this will cause me hurt, but he does it anyways. I have given him ultimatums before, stating that i’d like him to go to counselling and seek a psychiatrist because his mental health is very poor and theres only so much that I can do to be there and help him through, and how it is not fair for me to be the one he takes his hurt out on. He makes appointments, and then cancels them the day before. I am in counselling and see a psychiatrist, which helps me a lot in order to still be able to give him my best self. I definitely have my moments, but i have not changed in regards to how i handle the way i may have crossed a boundary of his. It hurts me immensely when I hurt him, so I always do the most that I can to make sure I am not that version of myself and how to not repeat those behaviours.
The last time I gave him an ultimatum, I told him that I mentally and physically cannot handle anymore pain, and if it continues, I will have to look out for whats best for me. I dont think he took me seriously, as I can definitely be a little bit of a push over and people pleaser, but I did it today. I could no longer take not being understood, villainized, and gaslit. It pains me so much more because this behaviour isn’t aligned with who he is and i think its just because of what hes going through…but i cant take it anymore. i have dedicated my life to him for 3 years and made it my mission to show him that real love does exist. But i deserve to be loved the way that i love him, and hes not able to do that right now. He is the love of my life and my best friend forever, nothing will ever change that in my heart. I will always be there to support him, and he knows that. I hope one day he will be able to see what ive been trying to explain and show him and get the help he needs, but until then, i matter more.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

Salary: $120k – $180k • Equity: 1.5% – 5.0%
Location: Remote
Job type: Full Time
Experience: 4+ years
Description:
We are seeking a Senior Lead Generative AI Prompt Engineer & Designer with a focus on Game Concept Art, Assets, and Design to join our innovative team. In this role, you'll be responsible for using generative AI techniques to create dynamic, engaging, and unique game assets and designs. This is a rare opportunity for a creative and technically adept individual to make a significant impact in the game development industry.
Responsibilities:

1. Use generative AI techniques to create diverse and high-quality game concept art, assets, and designs.
2. Collaborate with the development team to integrate AI-generated art and design into the game environment.
3. Understand the game's aesthetic and narrative to ensure AI-generated assets and designs are cohesive and enhance the player experience.
4. Test and refine generative AI models to improve the quality and diversity of generated assets and designs.
5. Contribute to the development and execution of creative concepts and strategies for game development.

Qualifications:

1. Demonstrated experience in using generative AI techniques for creative purposes, preferably in a game development context.
2. Proficient in game asset design and traditional artwork, illustration, graphics design.
3. Deep understanding of game concept art, assets, and design.
4. Familiarity with game development processes and standards.
5. Excellent problem-solving abilities and a creative approach to overcoming challenges.

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Prior experience in a start-up environment.
2. Senior-level experience in graphic design or artwork illustration, concept art, or gaming art design.
3. Ability to convert AI-generated art and outputs into functional in-game assets and usable versions or alternative works, angles, depictions, improvements, additions, etc.
4. Extensive experience using generative AI platforms and models such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, LeonardoAI, ControlNet and others to create advanced, photorealistic, artistic, stylistic artwork, designs and illustrations or imagery.
5. Demonstrated ability to create animated or motion pictures of AI-generated art or 3D models using novel techniques and processes to achieve optimal, realistic, smooth, clean and unobstructed or noisy or uncoherent generations.
6. Studied and deep knowledge and appreciation of film, cinematic art, design, fashion, portrayal, coloring, mood, vision, concepts, storytelling, etc.
7. Understanding of NFTs, including ecosystems, collections, rarity, generative attributes and properties, randomized rolls, and in-game items and loot.

What we offer:

1. A sizeable budget for the initial development of the project.
2. Potential for substantial funding post game prototype launch.
3. The chance to work on an innovative project that has the potential to redefine the gaming space and the concept of metaverse.

If you believe you are the right fit for this opportunity and are ready to make a significant impact on the game development industry, we would love to hear from you. To apply, please send your CV and a brief outline of your experience with generative AI, game concept art, asset creation, and game design to our [email](mailto:[email protected]).
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Standing and moving still brought the Arbiter a lot of pain. But the Law’s grim enforcer couldn’t let anyone see that weakness. Especially not with the pirate before them and the very same assassin who had nearly killed them weeks before beneath that pirate’s foot.
The Arbiter had only just been cleared for light duty and decided to spend that time with the Officers in charge of watching the pirates Demon ship. They weren’t ADCU since those officers couldn’t be wasted on a simple stakeout. The Arbiter however had been assured the Officers in charge there were the best they had. But not two minutes within the stakeout tent the Arbiter had learned that the pirate Captain had slipped past the officers assigned to tail her. And more disturbingly that every pirate who left the Astaroth had slipped their tails with disdainful ease.

The utter lack of concern had further stoked their fury. According to the officer on duty every pirate that left eventually made a mess of something and stirred up a minor disturbance. And that only a few that left were unaccounted for. 

The complete lack of awareness for how shady and suspicious all that should have sounded baffled the Arbiter’s mind. They knew crime and violence didn’t come so naturally to other species as it did for the Arbiter’s human mind. But the failure to make such a basic connection that the pirates were creating distractions so that other pirates could do their work covertly, screamed at incompetence.
That led to the Arbiter learning that all the officers in charge of the overwatch operation were actually low level beat cops and file clerks. Looking into the system used to select these officers the Arbiter learned that they weren’t just incompetent, but so incompetent that the staggering number of negative reports had confused the filing system and had placed them into the highest bracket of trusted officers. The system was made to calculate negative values but couldn’t properly place such incompetent people into their proper bracket because there wasn’t a bracket appropriately low enough to place them into. So instead it simply went past the lowest level and placed them into the highest level.
And of course such poor officers couldn’t simply be fired because the officers workers union would make a fuss. Which meant the SS couldn’t replace these idiots with any slightly more intelligent sapients.
The bureaucratic idiocy was so infuriating that the Arbiter had lashed out at a nearby pole before they could think better of it. The pole snapped at the impact, fell over, and collapsed half the tent with it.
After that little outburst the Arbiter decided to take a walk and calm down. Only to stumble upon the missing pirate captain locked in a life-or-death battle with the very same assassin who had ambushed them just weeks before.
The Arbiter hadn’t been there for the start of the fight, but simple deduction was enough to reason that the assassin had likely initiated the conflict. They had mentioned Astarte’s name on the night of the attack. And the Pirate had no reason to seek out and attack the assassin.
During that fight The Arbiter had barely survived their encounter with the assassin. The assassin’s prosthetic modifications presented a gap in power that the Arbiter just couldn’t bridge. But despite fighting what should have been a one sided battle, the pirate was doing surprisingly well. In fact if the Arbiter was any judge, Astarte seemed to have a slight advantage.
Not in speed, power, or endurance. The assassin’s mechanical body was simply too powerful for a human to matchup. But in skill Astarte out matched the mechanical assassin.
Astarte dodged and weaved without effortless ease, getting past the assassin’s guard to strike at their, or her, mechanical body. If the assassin hadn’t been a machine then Astarte would have won by now, even with the gap in power.
Rachel felt slightly ashamed at her own poor showing against the assassin when compared to Astarte’s fight. The shame then quickly burned into anger as the Arbiter gripped the rifle at their side and pulled it out to try and shoot the assassin. Unlike the Arbiter had been that night, Astarte was wearing that ridiculous dark red armor and had a sword like she was some sort of space samurai. The Arbiter had done well that night, and their lack of superior weaponry had been their only flaw. One that had been amended with the addition of a more powerful pulse rifle.
They tried to line up a shot on the assassin that wouldn’t hit Astarte, when Astarte began to speak. “You wanna know the funny part. Greyson didn’t even care that you were gone.”
Wait, did these two share a past. The Arbiter guessed that old saying about birds of a feather was true. Who was Greyson? Some sort of man they had both known?
“Didn’t even question me about. Just said ‘Zera’s gone, now you will guard my back’” the pirate continued. “Then not even a week later I was second in command and got to sleep in his comfy bed.” The pirate gave her attacker a sloppy lascivious grin.
“And then you killed him like the deceptive whore you are!” the assassin spat, her attacks becoming sloppier with more openings.
Where these two quarreling over a man? The Arbiter felt bile rise into their throat. Two of the deadliest human women they had ever seen fighting over some man they had known. Pathetic. No man was worth that. Especially not whoever this Greyson bastard was given how quickly he had let the pirate into his bed after his first girlfriend disappeared.
Wait, Greyson, pirate, dead. Were they talking about the infamous human pirate, Byron Greyson? The one who had been a menace to the Femeri system, who was responsible for the disappearance of over thirty thousand humans and the deaths of many more? The one whose headless body had turned up one day aboard the drifting remains of the Black Saint? It couldn’t be, right?
But the rise of the Astaroth and Astarte had happened shortly before Greyson’s mysterious death. It seemed too coincidental.
“Of course I did, I refused to be the latest women he ruined and dumped into the gutter. Face it, your days were numbered. If it wasn’t me it would have been him.” The pirate said with a derisive sneer.
A bit callous and mercenary, but if they were discussing Greyson then likely not inaccurate.
The assassin however didn’t see that logic. “LIAR!” she screamed as she flew into a rage.
Then the Arbiter saw the reasoning behind Astarte’s taunts. This assassin was dangerously unhinged, and Astarte was using that to bait her into a trap.
The next sequence of attacks was too fast for the Arbiter to follow. A sword hilt to the face, followed by something launching out of the assassin’s arm. Then somehow Astarte had her other arm in her grip and flipped the assassin over a shoulder. With the assassin on the ground, Astarte quickly pressed one leg to their back, and with the arm in hand began to pull. The assassins sudden ultrasonic scream made the Arbiter vison darken at the edges, and maybe caused their ears to bleed a little.
Then the arm came out with a pop and the screaming stopped.
The pirate looked at the arm for a second, before lifting it above her head and swinging it down into the assassin’s head. The loud conk of metal on metal was enough to startle the Arbiter out of her awe and terror.
The barrel of their pulse cannon lifted up with Astarte centered in its sight “FREEZE!” the Arbiter roared with all their might.
Astarte paused mid swing, looked towards the Arbiter, and then raised both of her hands above her head. As well as the assassins severed arm. “It was self defense.” The pirate said quickly.
The Arbiter could have sworn they saw a flash of red. But it happened so fast that they weren’t sure if it was really there. And if it was then why would the pirates eye flash red?
The eye crossed by a gruesome scar. Did the pirate have a glass color changing eye?
No, her eyes were both clearly moving around and focusing on things like they should. Could it be cybernetic? Those were supposed to be impossible, too complicated to properly miniaturize with current technology.
It was something to investigate.
The Arbiter had been so focused on Astarte that they hadn’t been watching the assassin close enough. In a movement the Arbiter hadn’t seen the assassin threw Astarte off her back before popping up to her feet. Astarte went down onto the ground and the assassin lurched forward to attack her downed foe. But before she could reach the pirate three quick blasts from the Arbiters rifle stopped her in her tracks.
One had winged her side, another went wide. But the third had caught her right where a liver should have been. The assassin stuttered, but wasn’t dead. They dodged the next shot by ducking and then the second by somehow leaping ten meters into the air and onto a window seal. The assassin looked down on the two women and was clearly judging their chances at victory. But with an, admittable impressive, one-handed springlike flip Astarte was back on her feet, sword ready for another round.
The assassin’s strange mechanical face scowled before another impossible jump sent her over a nearby building and out of sight.
The Arbiter relaxed once the assassin was gone, but Astarte didn’t. The pirate turned, grabbed the Arbiters gloved hand, and pulled her into a jog down the open alleyway. “Come on, there’s an open lot nearby. Can’t jump us from there.” She said without looking back as she dragged the Arbiter along.
For a stunned few seconds Rachel stared at the strong hand grasping her own smaller one. But then the Arbiter saw the logic in Astarte’s worry and forced their hand to release the pirate and ran alongside her.
A few times the Arbiter had noticed a thin humanoid shadow leap between the buildings above them, but a quick turn down an alley from Astarte had them moving away from the incoming ambush from the assassin chasing them via roof tops. In no time at all they made it to an open loading dock for a nearby warehouse. Astarte ran into its center and scanned the roof tops, the Arbiter followed suit.
The Arbiter and the Pirate stood back to back, each searching for any signs of the mutual foe.
“There!” Astarte shouted while pointing her finger at a roof top.
The Arbiter stared up, but couldn’t see anything. But following the pirate’s direction they raised their rifle and shot at the edge of the building Astarte had pointed at. The blasts landed and then the crouched figure of the assassin rose up and backed away.
How had the pirate seen her? The Arbiter spared her a glance and saw a second flash of red before the pirate shifted her head.
“You should call for backup.” The pirate stated while still scanning the roof tops.
“To arrest the assassin?” the Arbiter asked before they could think better of it.
Astarte snorted. “Wouldn’t trust any SS to arrest a dead log, let alone Zera. But more witnesses might scare her off.”
Two things stood out in that statement, the assassin’s apparent name, and “SS, is that supposed to be short for station security?”
“Schutzstaffel actually, its just a strange coincidence they line up” the Pirate joked wryly.
The Arbiter scowled “You think the Station security are like the Nazi’s?” The Arbiter’s lessons about the various evil factions during Earths history had left her with nightmares for years. Crucifixion, death by a thousand cuts, blood eagles, and the like had disturbed their six-year-old mind. Their lessons had spent weeks on all the evils humanity inflicted upon each other, all the way until First contact.
“If the kinky boot fits.” Astarte said while examining the Arbiter’s own black boots.
The Arbiter swished their cloak to hide their boots, and the pirates gaze snapped back up to the rooftops. The Arbiter made the call, and the idiots in charge of the tent said they would need a few minutes to ‘locate’ their rifles and arm shields. Why they had to be located in the first place confused the Arbiter? They couldn’t be so incompetent as to not know where their weapons were, right?”
Tense minutes past before Astarte let out a sigh of relief. “I think she gave up.” she then shot the Arbiter an accusing glare “I almost had the bitch. If you hadn’t interfered we wouldn’t have to worry about her coming back.”
"You expect me to stand by while you committed murder?” The Arbiter growled, now stepping back from the pirate and reaching for a set of cuffs.
The pirate frowned, then glanced up as if recalling a distant memory. “I… ugh felt my life was in imminent danger, and feared for my life while facing down a clearly aggressive and violent deathworlder with a weapon. I used whatever objects I could find at the time…I carry no weapons and was forced to use ceremonial objects in crude, and ugh…unusual ways for self defense. I did not think retreat was possible so I acted to end the threat” she said in a bland staccato rhythm of everyone reciting words from memory. Her words obviously citing several different laws pertaining to self-defense.
The Arbiter felt an eye twitch. “The law pertaining to Deathworlder assailants was not intended to include Deathworlder victims.” The Arbiter said slowly.
Astarte shrugged “Union vs. Trevor Philips established that the enforcement of the law was done by the letter of the law, not the spirit. By that ruling and precedent I acted reasonably and was within my rights for self-defense. Any attempt to detain me would result in punitive measures from my legal representation.”
In all their time on the ADCU the Arbiter had never encountered a criminal so well versed in the intricacies of Union law. Some loop holes were well known, and easy for Officers to circumvent in order to attain an arrest. But the Arbiter hadn’t encountered something like this before.
The Arbiter looked down and noticed the sword she still held, red blood from the pirate running down its blade. “So that sword isn’t a weapon?” The Arbiter asked pointedly.
The feline smile that covered Astarte’s face sent shivers up their spine. “My dear officer, as you can notice I am of half Japanese heritage, a hafu if you will. I am dressing in the traditional fashions of my people. The armor, the katana, and the wakizashi are all hallmarks of the samurai I am descended from. None of these are worn for anything beyond cultural heritage. And for that matter, my crew wear the same to honor my ancestry.”
The Arbiter sighed. Astarte’s defense, though blatantly false, was airtight. Arresting her now would only give her ammunition to legally strike back. And with the recent backlash of the Deathworlder crack down the Arbiter could doom Judge’s career. It had been a celebrated move of the last chief, but the knock-on effects of it had resulted in several months of rioting, looting, and political discourse in the heart of the Union. The last chief was forced to step down and Judge took his place and was still trying to reverse the damages. Which was hard with all the precincts fighting him on it. Those officers had too many friends torn apart by Terran criminals to ever let that grudge go.
“Then you may leave the arm behind and be one your way.” The Arbiter ordered.
Astarte blinked, “the arm?”
The Arbiter pointed to the severed arm still within the pirate’s grasp “That is evidence in an on going investigation. LEAVE. IT. BEHIND” The Arbiter explained, growling out the last words slowly. Just because Astarte had likely saved the Arbiter’s life with some quick thinking didn’t erase the fact that she was a person of interest/suspect in the same case.
Astarte glanced down at the severed arm and blinked as if surprised she was still holding it. Then tossed it carelessly onto the ground. “All yours, make sure to check for bugs before plugging it in.”
“Bugs?”
“Computer viruses hidden in its OS. Thing could have all sorts of things hidden within.”
“And how do you know?”
“I don’t. It’s just the sort of thing I would do myself. Try loading it onto a separate server. Oh, and check for small explosives.”
“Danm Deathworlders” the Arbiter growled as they now considered the severed arm on the ground next to a small splatter of Astarte’s blood. She was right, Deathworlders were known for their tricks and traps. Humans especially. During one investigation a load of seized morphine from an illegal clinic had been stored next to an unstable chemical that reacted poorly to the jostling of the transport and destroyed the evidence in a fiery explosion.
Astarte chuckled “Glass stones Arbiter.”
“What?”
“Glass stones, it’s a human malaphor of sorts. I’ll leave the details for you to figure out. Good luck with tracking down Zera, I’d recommend starting with the prison records on Union Station Parox.” She said as she turned aways and strode off. Walking in the opposite direction of the arriving officers, half of which were missing their weapons or shields.
The Arbiter let out a sigh as she observed the most incompetent idoits she had ever seen strut onto the lot without a care in the universe.
“You called us Sir.” The lead Voral said.
The Arbiter took in a deep breath “Yes I did. Ten minutes ago.”
“It was a long walk.” The officer said defensively, no care for the Arbiters growing anger.
“Its only a few hundred standard meters. But that doesn’t matter I encountered an assassin in the midst of their crime. That’s their arm.”
The Voral looked panicked and began to look from side to side.
The Arbiter felt an involuntary eye twitch and clenched her fist. “The assassin is gone.”
The Voral relaxed “So you want us to secure the evidence?” he asked.
That had been the Arbiters plan, but now seeing them mill about aimlessly they changed their mind. “No, secure the area and stay out of CSI’s way. Understood?”
The officer looked offended. “Sir, its just an arm. We don’t need to wait around for CSI, one of my men can bag it right now.”
Patience wearing thin the Arbiter marched right into the Voral’s face. The fact the Officer loomed over her by two meters did little to diminish the Arbiter’s menacing aura. “AM. I. UNDERSTOOD?”
“Yes Sir.” The cowed Voral officer answered with a nervous buzz of his wings.
“Then go.”
Ten minutes later six medium shuttles from the CSI unit, and two small shuttles from the ADCU were on the scene of the lot and in the alley where the Arbiter had stumbled upon Astarte. Edict and Prosecutor began to jump along the rooftops, recreating the assassin’s movements and collecting more evidence.
The assassin’s arm, and the dried sample of Astarte’s blood was collected. As well as fragments of what looked to be a broken glass eye with a micro camera.
They lost the assassin’s trail after they ducked into the inner hull of the station and escaped across the pipes, wires, and support structure of Unity.
Thirty minutes after that they departed for the central precinct. The Arbiter within the darkened confines of the ADCU shuttle felt safe enough to take off the hood. Caleb and Bartolv did the same. They noticed her pensive mood and didn’t disturb her.
It wasn’t lost on her that Astarte knew exactly who this assassin was. And if she hadn’t left those pretty blatant clues about how to identify her then then Rachel would be trying to acquire a warrant to bring her in for questioning. But that still left her with a lot of questions.
And despite the answers she might get, she had the sinking feeling it wouldn’t be enough to see the whole picture. How big was this whole thing?
Previous/Patreon/Next

I (24f) have been with my (m27) boyfriend for 3 years. We met each other a year after we both went through very traumatic relationships and believe we are each others soul mate. We were both determined in every way possible to not treat each other like our old partners treated us, and we heavily exceeded in this. We are incredibly close to one another and share a bond that cannot be put into words. The most special thing to us, was how we considered each other as our best friend. The love we share for one another is something most people wish to find in this lifetime, but may not have the chance to get.
We lived together for 2 years after he provided me with safety away from my abusive family, up until January of this year. He made the decision that he needed to move back home due to financial stressors. I am a University student who works 30 hours a week making over minimum wage. I have contemplated dropping out of my studies to pursue a full time job in order to help with living expenses, but he always argued against this, as he didnt complete a degree and works a job he does not like.
So, in January it was sprung upon me that we were moving back to the city we grew up in within the week. This meant that I had to transfer schools again, leave my job because it was too short of notice to be transferred to the location in my home city, and move back in with my parents. This obviously destroyed me, as I felt I was being abandoned and everything we built together was for nothing. His parents still live in the beautiful home he grew up in and they are a very loving and supportive family. My parents live in a 2 bedroom condo that also houses my sister and 2 cats. There was no room for me (and our 70 lb dog), but nonetheless, I was told I could not stay with him. Apart from this, i am very rarely allowed to visit. I have been there less than a handful of times since being back home. My life here is hell everyday and I have no where to keep me safe.
Since being back home, he has done a total 360. It is like he is a teenager in a rebellious phase who has just gotten a taste of freedom for the first time. As well as not having a fully developed frontal lobe with critical thinking skills. His ability to accept accountability when he hurts me is now non-existent, and he now manipulates every situation to work out in his favour and as me the crazy co-dependent girlfriend. He has made me cry countless times in the last couple of months, contemplating if I am asking too much for the bare minimum, if I am too hard to love, and If I am worthy of it at all. I struggle heavily with trust due to my past relationships and my upbringing, which he is very well rounded on and what my triggers are. Lately, I have caught him lying about very insignificant things that make no sense to fabricate. It has caused my brain to spiral, thinking about how easy it is for him to lie with a pokerface and me believe him. He knows this will cause me hurt, but he does it anyways. I have given him ultimatums before, stating that i’d like him to go to counselling and seek a psychiatrist because his mental health is very poor and theres only so much that I can do to be there and help him through, and how it is not fair for me to be the one he takes his hurt out on. He makes appointments, and then cancels them the day before. I am in counselling and see a psychiatrist, which helps me a lot in order to still be able to give him my best self. I definitely have my moments, but i have not changed in regards to how i handle the way i may have crossed a boundary of his. It hurts me immensely when I hurt him, so I always do the most that I can to make sure I am not that version of myself and how to not repeat those behaviours.
The last time I gave him an ultimatum, I told him that I mentally and physically cannot handle anymore pain, and if it continues, I will have to look out for whats best for me. I dont think he took me seriously, as I can definitely be a little bit of a push over and people pleaser, but I did it today. I could no longer take not being understood, villainized, and gaslit. It pains me so much more because this behaviour isn’t aligned with who he is and i think its just because of what hes going through…but i cant take it anymore. i have dedicated my life to him for 3 years and made it my mission to show him that real love does exist. But i deserve to be loved the way that i love him, and hes not able to do that right now. He is the love of my life and my best friend forever, nothing will ever change that in my heart. I will always be there to support him, and he knows that. I hope one day he will be able to see what ive been trying to explain and show him and get the help he needs, but until then, i matter more.

I was only diagnosed as a kid with ADHD, I know I have OCD and some other weird shit, some psychiatrist at a bar asked me when I was diagnosed with Autism a few years ago, I hadn't done much research as it was still stigmatized in my work organization/ "friend group".
So is there some detailed long-read document I can just go down a rabbit hole on?
BTW, my favorite thing to do since I was 7-8 is to make sentences in my head that are 5 words equalling a total of 20 letters/ 4 letters on average. I.E. "don't they know that shit?" Or "if somebody does it, fine". I avoid shortening like " get 'em quickly to listen".
I have had nobody else to share this with that does immediately think I'm crazy for 27-29 years. Thanks. Lol

Lies of P feels like a combination of Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, and a hint of Sekiro wrapped up in a very cool twist on Pinocchio. It does rely on previous Soulsborne knowledge but also brings some new ideas. I’ll go over a few.
After using up all your flasks the game will gradually regenerate 1 flask as you fight and kill enemies, making it easier to go on longer runs without needing to always go back to the nearest bonfire.
The game has a super meter bar that certain abilities can use, my rapier had an ability to parry and rapid stab for example. This refills as you kill enemies.
Gemini (Jiminy Cricket) is a lantern that you start the game with.
When you die and have to get your souls, taking damage reduces the amount you get back. When you die in a boss room your souls spawn outside of it.
One of the biggest implications I ran into was how easy I could switch between weapons. When you pick up your first weapon you choose your class (dex, quality, or strength) but later on you find a shopkeeper selling the other 2 weapons you didn’t pick up. I found that I could use all 3, despite not putting my stats into the stats you’d expect. I could use a Greatsword with 15 dex and 7 strength. The game didn’t tell me if I needed requirements so all I can say is that the game will allow you to use any weapon regardless of stat distribution.
Of what little I’ve played so far I’m fairly excited for Lies of P, it’s a bit stiff and has that “We have Bloodborne at home” vibes but I think this game will be perfect for those who want to scratch an itch that no other game is going to fulfill.

I (23 NB) recently found out that I have four wisdom teeth, ranging from impacted to severely impacted. It was bad timing, because I have some major life stuff coming up, so I scheduled to have my wisdom teeth removed as soon as possible. Initially, I opted for general anesthesia, but I had my doubts spending $1,600 as opposed to $600 if I just did it on nitrous. In the end, I decided on nitrous, scared shitless but unwilling to spend $1,000 in the name of avoiding discomfort, even though by the looks of it it was going to be a difficult extraction.
I talked about my anxiety about the procedure with a handful of people in the weeks leading up to my surgery, and I felt dismissed to the point that I started to think they were right, and that I might be being irrational. My brother in particular (who doesn't have wisdom teeth) told me that being high on nitrous sounded like fun, and that it didn't matter if I opted for general anesthesia because I'd be in the same amount of pain afterwards anyway, and he didn't seem to understand at all why I was worried about the procedure itself. I spent the last couple of weeks feeling both anxious and deeply embarrassed at my own anxiety.
I had my surgery today, and I was completely right to be scared. It was one of the worst physical experiences of my life.
The nitrous made me feel a little further away from my body, but it barely even took the edge off of my anxiety. They call nitrous "twilight" anesthesia, but in my case, it was 4:00 PM at best. I spent the entire procedure holding my own hand and literally sweating through my clothes while, over the course of an hour, the surgeon painstakingly broke all four of my wisdom teeth and removed them. None of them would come out whole. I would liken the sensation to listening to someone reach through a hole in your gums you didn't know existed and break a piece of gravel with a nail. In spite of the numbing, it wasn't painless. They say it's just supposed to feel like pressure, but there can only be so much pressure before it turns into this cold sharp pain. It was so bad that, after two of them were done, the surgeon stopped and asked me if I even wanted to continue. I said yes, because fuck it, I can't deal with the leadup to this a second time. The last tooth was so stuck that, even numbed and on nitrous and unable to hear a word either the surgeon or the assistant were saying, I could tell that he was struggling with it. That was the worst sound I'd ever heard, my surgeon chiseling away at a stubborn wisdom tooth while I was basically completely lucid.
I don't know if I would have wanted him to be there anyway, but my dad, who drove me to and from my surgery, wasn't there for the procedure because he wanted to stop at a cannabis dispensary while I was under the knife. The surgical assistant and I both thought that was really funny, and I'm really grateful that she was there to hold my hand during the really difficult parts.
The unfortunate thing is I would probably make the same decision again, just because the cost of general anesthesia is ridiculous. I just look back and find myself very frustrated that I let myself believe I was crazy for being scared. That hour of my life felt like I was in a horror movie.
For anyone wondering, I'm recovering well and I'm not currently in a great deal of pain.

I (22) grew up with a dad in the military and I couldn’t ask for a better dad but because he was in the military we moved around. When I was 12, he retired and my parents decided to settle in Florida. My extended family however lives in Alabama.
My gran is getting older, today was her 79th birthday. I wish I could see her every day. My little cousins have grown up too fast and I’ve always only gotten to see them maybe once a year. I’ve missed out on their lives and I would have loved to see them regularly and be with them as they grew up. And I would really love to be with my gran as she gets older. But because of the distance I’ll never get to know them the way I want to.
And then I also think about my childhood friends. I still keep in contact with my old best friend who I met when we were both 3 but we moved away from each other when we were 7 and I’ve always been messed up over the fact that we would’ve gotten to grow up together and we would’ve been truly inseparable if we had stayed neighbors.
I’m not lonely by any means, I’m close with my immediate family and I have the best girlfriend ever and plenty of good friends but I’m still missing some of the most important relationships you can have.

First/Prev
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Mogan wasn't so calm when he was back on the bridge of the Semiramis. He paced, grumbling as he waited for the last of the boarding craft to land in the ship's hangars.
The San weren't completely unfamiliar with the idea of slavery. It had been a generation or more since anybody had owned one, but that was nothing to boast of—the reasons were economic, not moral. He had seen them in other tribes, particularly those near the coasts that were never short of food. Some had lived well, some had not.
Mogan hadn't thought much about it. They had no power to change another tribe's ways, after all, and wars were lost. It was certainly a better fate than losing a war with the Animal People—after that, your true master was the cooking skin, and the sooner you were transferred to its possession the better.
And yet this disgusted him.
It wasn't just the filth, the rags, the way they blinked at the light of open air or the way they trembled when he frowned. But he didn't know what the rest was. Perhaps a sense of guilt—had there been a time when his own people would have done the same? Or was it the fact that humanity, of all the sapient species in the galaxy, may well share that fate?
He shook his head to clear away the thought, but it would not go.
Logog and Burya came to the bridge with a nod. “They're getting cleaned up now, and we've got the layer-printers making something for them. What they had on...” Burya grimaced. “We spaced it. Threw it in an airlock and then opened up the other side and let it fly. With any luck it'll burn up when it goes down to the planet.”
Only a few short years ago, shooting stars were considered an act of the spirits; now they were making one.
Logog nodded. “I had the people who brought machine parts in down to the infirmary. It didn't take long to get them back in working order, but we'll certainly have to be less foolish next time.”
Mogan shrugged. “I should have thought of it. After all, I've only had one for seventeen years. But I've got something else in mind. About the slave thing.”
Both of them looked distinctly uncomfortable, but Burya was the one to say it. “To think... if someone had offered them to us, pretty much any point more than eight or ten years ago, we'd have taken them.”
“And the only reason we wouldn't after is because we couldn't feed them,” Logog said. “I've thought of that too. Are we hypocrites, that we can get furious at someone else for doing what we probably would have done?”
Mogan almost winced. That was rather close to what he had been thinking.
But Logog shook his head. “Maybe it does. I'm no shaman; I wouldn't know. But it felt good to stop it, that's certain. Maybe we've just grown. Maybe our circumstances changed—I really don't know. But what's your plan?”
“We grabbed computers from this base, yes?”
Burya nodded, and Mogan continued. “Clacha and the others were right. They don't process it here; they load up the ore onto ships and ship it somewhere. Let's get one of Wakawa's experts on that and find out where the ships go.”
Mogan smiled. “I propose we find where they're quartered, rob the place blind, and blow it up.”
It was easier said than done. Wakawa did indeed have an expert, but the information on it was sparse.
While their expert went over the stolen information, others went through the loot. The rifles were standard, useable but not terribly needed. The shoshir were useless—they might find a market, but would probably be scrapped. They had been taken more because they were there. The rock itself was useless until it was processed, so overall the raid was a bust, except for the rescues.
As the days passed, the Vishtali opened up a bit. Not at first; for the first three days they stared wide-eyed, waiting to see what their new owners would do to them. Mogan had seen the first time that talking to them would do little good here, and so all he could do was wait.
Four days passed, and he began to ask them about future plans. He didn't expect an answer, and none had one. Well, three of them wanted to be his wife, but to accept that would have been plain and simple exploitation; the very idea left a bad taste in his mouth, and he made a note to make a ruling about it just in case someone else in the tribe was more greedy or just less perceptive. Mogan asked them simply to get them thinking about the idea. It was another day before he laid out options, including working for him on the Semiramis—for pay—or finding their own way as citizens in the Settlements.
He made a mental note to speak to Shett. If war with the Sovereignty meant saving more of these people, then they would need some system for doing so. Dropping them off on some planet and telling them to fend for themselves was only mildly more feasible than throwing them out the airlock and telling them to swim home. Just one more reason to hate the Sovereignty, really.
The rest of the day, he told them stories. He wasn't the best storyteller, but he told them of his earlier experiences; how he had been captured by accident, toured the galaxy in a science vessel, hunted giant lizards. He told them of how he had met Hyeshi and lost her, and while he wasn't a good storyteller the story itself made up the difference.
They had Specimen Implants, the ones put into animals—whether actual scientific specimens or livestock. They didn't translate, so Mogan had to speak in the Sovereign Tongue that was almost the same as the dominant Sylfa language, but they did protect from diseases. The conditions they had been living in probably put a little extra wear on the things, but nonetheless each of them got Citizen Implants. That process was slow, as the cruiser's medical bay wasn't meant to handle large numbers at one time, but with each day more of them had the official mark of a sapient person, and that too made a difference in their outlook.
It was the sixth day, staying near the planet of Goretia but not in it, when Wakawa's tech came to him.
Rentarsh was a Sylfa—that did seem to be the majority in the galaxy, for either nation—and he didn't look terribly pleased with his information.
“Nothing, captain. Not a damn thing about destination. But we did find the schedule. Two more days and the White Platinum is coming in to pick up a load. Seeing as it's actually going to whatever they have for processing, we can follow it.”
Mogan nodded. They wouldn't be able to follow it unless they could stay out of its sensor range and still be able to know where it was; a difficult proposition. But they were, after all, privateers now. They could simply take the ship.
He nodded to the tech. “Calculate its likely approach vectors and let me know. We'll be ready for it.”
Two more days passed before Sensors sounded the alarm and Mogan rushed to the bridge. Ellisan was already in her seat, and as Mogan stood before the captain's chair he saw the ship on the holos.
The White Platinum looked innocent enough. Plenty of asteroids were big enough to contain deposits of metal, but not big enough to set up a smelting facility on them, so ore-haulers like this were fairly common.
Preying on one was not. After all, their cargo wasn't even metal, but thousands of tons of rock that was anything from half to a fraction of a percent metal. An admiralty judge assessing that prize would probably laugh at whoever brought it in.
Which is why it was something of a surprise when the massive cruiser appeared around the moon, slingshotting around it for extra speed, and bore down on the massive hauler like a falcon on the dive. The hauler was already slowing to go into orbit—at more than ten kilometers long it would never have been able to fly into atmosphere or escape the planet's gravity if it had—and now it frantically tried to turn and flee.
If it could escape the planet's gravity well, back into the Currents... well, it still couldn't escape. It tried anyway, since it had no alternative.
“White Platinum,” said Mogan as the comms carried the message across. “This is the licensed privateer Semiramis. Shut off your shields and engines, and prepare to be boarded.”
If anything, the ship accelerated harder, probably beyond what was safe for its engines, and Mogan nodded. “Burya, half the broadside guns, please.”
Ellisan nodded as well, and the ship turned slightly to the right so that the guns had room to fire. Burya spoke into his wristpad, and there was a slight bump as the etheric cannon fired, balls streaking in a fraction of a moment to the ship.
Gouts of shrapnel flew from the far side of the ship, and it changed direction, flying towards the planet rather than away.
Mogan frowned. “What in the Frozen Valley are they doing?”
“Crashing,” Ellisan grunted. “In a few minutes, I think we'll see the shuttles and lighters leave with the crew, and they know that if we really have a Letter of Marque we can't fire on escape cra—ahh, there's the first one.”
She pointed to the holo as a surprisingly large launch separated and streaked away. The lighters were only meant for loading and unloading the ship, carrying half a hundred tons or more into atmosphere where it could be unloaded, or vice versa.
“They won't have shields,” Mogan shrugged. “We can see about them. Will we be in time to stop the ship?”
Ellisan sighed and shook her head. “They probably locked the controls even if we did make it on. But if I was on right now, I don't think I could stop it in time. It's too heavy, and gravity is working with it too.”
Indeed, the White Platinum was moving faster now than it had in its frantic escape.
“Ready some techs and some guards,” Mogan said with a sigh. “And let's see what we can find. There must be three or four hundred million tons on that thing. And we'll put a boarding craft after each of the Lighters. Those are still cargo craft, even if minor.”
And so they waited, again. The White Platinum itself landed with a rather spectacular explosion. Dust, rocks, and even full-sized trees flew into the air, and it was two days before it settled enough that they could approach. The skies were literally dimmer, and it was likely a lot of animals would die before the year was up. The lighters weren't so lucky. Abandoned by the shuttles—which did have shields, after all, and could catch the currents going elsewhere—the lighters could either keep flying or land, and they were easy prey for the boarding craft.
“The first decided to fight it out. We didn't stick to atlatls for them, and it didn't take long. But the second crew was wiser, especially when we reminded them they'd been abandoned. They swore they didn't know what was going on down here. I don't believe them, but they did say where the ship was bound. And showed me on the navs, so I don't think they were lying. They're taking it to a moon orbiting Lancas-4.”
“Good.” Mogan grinned, and it was not pretty. “Time to make those Sovereignty bastards pay.”
“Captain?” Wakawa paused. “That's... not Sovereignty. Lancas is a Settlement system.”
​
​

I’m one of a few admin in a Facebook group. One of our admins made a post, it got 7 comments, but then that admin turned off the comments. I, as the main admin, need to see those comments (for reasons) but cannot seem to make them visible.
I have tried turning commenting back on but that has done nothing. I can see the little comment bubble on the right with the number 7 next to it, but when I click that it says “no visible comments”.
I would be so grateful of any assistance!

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

Hey there, I'm in the process of recovery from cervicogenic dizziness after a whiplash incident. I've been going to Osteopath sessions, they've been helpful. I feel like the feeling of dizziness is almost gone and I don't have tension in my neck anymore. I can only feel is a little hard to move head up. I'm doing vestibular rehab exercises at home.
But I have this fogginess feeling pretty much 24/7, like I'm not in my senses completely. A little disoriented that even my perception of time is a bit off? Has anyone experience that through they're recovery? Could it be anxiety related?
Thanks and hoping everyone a smooth recovery.

I’ve been using this program for a little bit, and i always liked the amount of text for the ai was longer, giving more details or more talking time to the AI. But for some reason, the ai started responding faster, but with less words for me to fully RP. Maybe my responses are lacking, but i wanna know if there is a glitch with the system that makes it just type out a very quick response or a message stating the RP is over. Maybe a dumb question, but might as well ask it since there is minimal content and videos about sully tavern…

The Battle You Can Never Win
Years ago, aboard a poorly maintained ship, in a dimly lit cargo hold with stained mats haphazardly thrown on the ground, a young girl glared at the old man before her. Her breath came in ragged heaves, her clothes were stained with sweat, and her exposed skin was covered in welts from the older mans bamboo blade. She was on the ground while the man was standing up straight, his breathing only slightly faster than normal but otherwise gave no hint that only moments before he had been swinging his practice sword like a demented blender.
The girl tried to stand but instead fell back down. “Why, the fuck are you making me do all this.” She growled at the man. Earning her a quick smack to the side for her foul mouth and impertinence. “Fuck!” she cursed, earning another strike in the process.
She continued to glare at the old bastard, most people usually flinched under her hateful glare. Especially the weak prey-like Xenos, they always coward at her wrath. But the old bastard didn’t. He just watched her with a calm and patient gaze.
The man was silent for a while before he sighed and looked to the pipes and looses wires along the ceiling. “You ask why I make you train? Why I push you unlike all the others? The better question is why you resist my teaching?” he looked down at her again. “You are taller than most men, you are naturally stronger than a girl has any right to be, and your fire is enough to melt iron. And yet you resist my attempts to polish those advantages. By all rights you should seek every chance to better yourself. And yet you don’t.”
“What’s the fuckin point? Like you said, I’m strong, and being already human makes me faster and tougher than everything out there. So what’s the point in training with stupid swords?”
He frowned, but didn’t strike her again for her foul mouth. “You are stronger than most creatures in this galaxy. But not all. The Kaydic are as strong as a grizzly, and if they get a good charge going they can pass through brick walls like they were wet paper. The Balikstro are faster on four legs than we can ever be on two. Any Uplifted Mammaloid could easily disembowel you with a careless swipe. And that isn’t mentioning the true monsters out there like the Aunviry.”
“Okay, yeah they’re all better. So what’s the point in training if they’re always going to be better than me? I’m only human.” She whined as she felt the growing bruise on her side.
“Because you don’t train for the battle that you can win, but for the battle that you’ll always lose. Because on those days the only thing that will keep you alive is training, good reflexes, and hardened combat experience. They are how you will win the battle you can never win.”
“That doesn’t make sense old man.” The girl snarked.
The air cracked, a brown sword blurred, and the girl let out a yelp as her ass was struck by a Shinai.
The old man who decided to be her mentor continued. “And the only way you get there is by training every day until your hands bleed and your legs give out.”
The girl glared at the old man, but she saw the sense in the words. Even if she hated the old man and his stupid sword. “Fine, but can we call it here. I have a cargo shift tomorrow.”
He looked down at her hands a tilted his head. “Your hands aren’t bleeding yet.” He said blandly as if remarking on the weather.
Daisey groaned, but got up anyways.
The old bastard Mizuno really did make her work until her hands began to bleed before letting her crawl off to her hammock in the sweltering space above the engine bay. She only got a few hours of sleep before the ship docked with the pirate capital and she had to spend the next ten hours moving cargo off the Black Saint.
And after that, when she had finally gotten to sit for a few minutes Mizuno found her and dragged her back to his ‘dojo’ for another round.
She had hated it at the time. Hated him. Hated the shitty rusty ship. Hated almost everyone one onboard. And hated those stupid bamboo swords.
But in time the pain paid off, and those skills that had been beaten into her the hard way saved her life when Greyson’s crazy bitch of a lieutenant tried to kill Daisey in some back alley on Parox. And later those same skills allowed her to best the men she had eventually called Sensei instead of Bastard.
~~~*~~~
It was strange to feel nostalgic for a time where everything sucked, and you hated everyone around you. But fighting Zera again brought back those bittersweet memories. She had hated Mizuno so much back then, but the man who had decided to mentor her eventually became one of the most influential figures in her life. Aster may hate her father and everything about him, but she couldn’t ever hate the heritage he had unwittingly tied her too. Because it was the same culture Mizuno had loved with all his heart. Warts and all.
Zera fought like a deranged beast. Slashing and stabbing with wild abandon. But while she had received some training to polish out her blind aggression, she never took Mizuno’s philosophy to heart. Greyson had ordered Mizuno to share his teaching with Zera just like he did with Daisey. But where Daisey, now Astarte, had accepted his ideas of training for the battle you’ll always lose top heart.
Zera hadn’t.
Zera learned how to cut better and how to save her strength. But once she had learned that she used her strength and youth to overpower Mizuno-sensei in sparring matches. While Daisey had restrained her own strength where she could so as to better learn Mizuno’s skill and techniques.
Even when after she had fought off Zera and took her spot as Greyson’s right hand she still trained until her hands bled. Even when she left the Terran Pirates and drifted around with her mother she trained. And when she met Karega and got a ship of her own she continued to train for the battle she would never win.
It was that mindset that let her finally surpass her old mentor during their final battle on the central Temple of Temple city. The very same mindset that let her match blows with a vile abomination like Kazlum and his brood. A literal battle she had no right ever winning. And it was the same teachings that she would use to beat this cyborg blast from the past.
Zera’s metal exterior was too tough for Astarte to cut. And it was highly unlikely that Astarte would ever exhaust her. But while she failed to land any actual wounds on her opponent, Zera the Butcher couldn’t land any on Astarte.
Zera aimed her mantis like blades at the kinks in Aster’s armor, but Aster’s reflexes and agility was enough to dodge and deflect Zera’s attacks.
But time was not on her side in this fight. Human endurance was legendary and superior to anything any other biological species could replicate. But no amount of sweat or anaerobic exertion would ever match the ceaseless movements of a machine.
Zera also had plenty of tricks hidden within her robotic limbs. The extra power in her legs had nearly bowled Astarte over when she triggered it as their blades were crossed. A third use had allowed her to dart to Astarte’s and strike at her thigh. Zera had found a kink in her armor, but a single step back had spared Astarte from any real damage.
Her leg felt warm and sticky as blood trailed down. But it was only a flesh wound and nothing that would hinder her mobility.
That attack had finally allowed Astarte to see exactly how Zera kept leaping forward. Somehow she was building up energy in her leg which could be released. A joint opened around where a bulging calf should have been and allowed her to double the length of her leg and gave her explosive forward momentum when used right. In the heat of battle Astarte couldn’t make heads or tails of the mechanism, she saw wires, tubes, and what looked like a hydraulic valve thing. She didn’t need to understand it at the moment though, right now knowing there was a way past the tough metal shell and into some more vulnerable internals was all that mattered.
The assassins’ arms also had a similar ability. But instead of explosively doubling the length of her arm Zera could have curved blade on her forearm launch forward in a powerful stabbing motion. Astarte dodged one of those attacks and saw the blade punch through the concrete of a nearby building. Zera had been stuck in the wall for only a second as she used the leg extension to pull her out and launch her back into melee with Astarte.
Zera also had a wider range of motion than Astarte was used to seeing in a human shoulder joint. When Astarte had rolled under a swing and came up for a slash at her exposed back the other arm was capable of swinging a full 180° backwards and deflecting her blow.
The way the arm had rotated in the joint had unnerved Astarte. She would have shivered in horror if had been given a moment to do so.
Those tricks had surprised Astarte the first time she saw them. And only quick thinking kept her alive. But once she saw them, she was capable of accounting for them and making her plans around them. She had fought enough alien opponents to know how to compensate for strange physiologies. The Aunviry for example had been far stranger to deal with than this borged-out human woman.
Sparks rang from their clashes and Astarte began to look for any more surprises. But as the fight stretched on Astarte began to suspect that Zera had already played her hand. And if she was reserving something then it was probably something she could only do once. With the factors accounted for, Astarte began to plan her actual counterattack, no more probing.
She couldn’t do much about the powerful arm attacks besides dodge, and couldn’t hope her armor could take the hit. The legs presented a weak point, but not one easy to get at. She would have to bait Zera into a launching attack and then sidestep fast enough to stab into her leg. A risky maneuver.
She thought about the full rotational ability in the arm joint. She didn’t know much about engineering, but she remembered some of Alwen’s lectures on the shoulder joint area after the Battle for the Confederacy. Alwen had to reset several bones in that region and she had taken the time to explain everything instead of just doing it. It was a complicated joint, and already prone to coming out of its socket. Did enhancing that range of motion come with any added structural weakness?
It was an idea.
As the fight drew on Astarte began to feel Zera speed up as her strikes became more and more sure. Astarte realized there was another blatant weakness that Zera had carried with her from the days she was fully human. Her mind.
Zera had a mercurial temper, plenty of triggers, and was highly unstable. And Astarte knew how to use all that to her advantage.
“You wanna know the funny part.” Astarte said in between blows. “Greyson didn’t even care that you were gone.” She taunted in between breaths. There was a reason most real combat didn’t have witty banter or heart felt speeches between foes. Every breath counted and wasting it on speaking was stupid. But she judged it to be worth the effort.
“Didn’t even question me about. Just said ‘Zera’s gone, now you will guard my back’” Astarte teased. “Then not even a week later I was second in command and got to sleep in his comfy bed.” She gave Zera a sloppy self-satisfied grin.
In reality Daisey hadn’t wanted to be Greyson’s guard, nor sleep in the same bed as a forty something man with the reputation for fucking anything with a hole and a heart beat. But she had little choice in the matter if she wanted to stay alive and keep working with the Terran Pirates.
The assassin’s eyes flared “And then you killed him like the deceptive whore you are!” she roared with another predicable jab.
“Of course I did, I refused to be the latest women he ruined and dumped into the gutter.” Astarte countered as she side stepped the blow. She was really glad Mizuno-sensei drilled her foot work so often, it was paying dividends at the moment. “Face it, your days were numbered. If it wasn’t me it would have been him.”
“LIAR!” Zera roared as she overextended again.
It didn’t offer Astarte the opening she looking for, so instead she went for a different sort of weak point. No matter how much her body changed there was one place that had to stay mostly organic.
No one fucked with the brain, not the Toy man, not the Union, and not the people who rebuilt Zera. It was too delicate to touch and far too complex. Just wiring in an advanced cybernetic eyeball to the optic nerve had caused a knock-on effect in Astarte’s head. And that was just a peripheral change.
The hilt of Tenken rammed into Zera’s face, smacking the same place she had dented earlier. There was a thud, like the sound of a dropped metal can, and then the sound of shattering glass. Zera stumbled back and put a hand up to her face where Astarte’s strike had warped the metal enough to loosen up her left eye out of its artificial eye socket. The eye had fallen and shattered at Astarte’s feet, and it now leaked a white fluid.
Zera looked up and Astarte saw the strange deformed metal plate of her face all scrunched up on one side. Half her lip was pulled up in a permanent smile while the more mobile part of her face scowled. She charged right back at Astarte and her right arm splint down the middle, Astarte saw the prongs of a stun weapon race towards her just as the other arm came up for a slash at her face. Astarte stood her ground, took the prongs, and lifted arm to intercept the blade.
The electricity didn’t feel like waves of fire like she had expected, but instead like all her muscles just got pulled at once. She felt her knees go weak as they wanted to buckle. But she gritted her teeth, remained on her feet, and took the pain. This was nothing compared to when she caught in that Egh’ahd sneak attack, nor when she fought Kazlum and had been bitch slapped across a whole room. This was a pain she could handle.
And compared to the electricity coursing through he the Mantis blade in her arm was nothing.
With one arm occupied in tasing her, and the other wedged into the bone of her forearm Astarte knew she wouldn’t get another chance like this. She grabbed the bladed arm with her other hand and with a twist of her hips, threw the Cyborg over her shoulder.
The assassin hit the ground with a thud and Astarte moved foot on her back.
The blade in her arm cut back upwards, got caught in the plates of her arm guard, and snapped off by the hinge. The pain in the arm grew too much to bear so she let that arm fall limp as her other arm held onto the assassin now beneath her feet and pulled. Zera let out a scream that hit the far range of human vocal cords and dipped into a sound only possible in dogs, dolphins, and machines. It even began to stutter like a corrupted audio file.
Even her voice was fake.
Then there was a pop and rip, and the arm came clean off.
Astarte stood there holding the still clothed arm in her hands as white fluids leaked out of the cyborgs open joint. Astarte glanced to the fake arm in her hands then down to the struggling cyborg, and with little hesitation lifted the arm and proceeded to beat the womans head in with her own arm.
Or she would have if a heavily distorted voice hadn’t interrupted her bludgeoning.
“FREEZE!”
Astarte turned to stare at the cloaked black figure of the Arbiter aiming a pulse rifle right at her.
Astarte then raised her hands above her head, still holding the prosthetic arm. “It was self defense” Astarte said to the unwavering gaze of the Arbiter. A flicker of her eye into the Ultraviolet showed the scowling face of a much-recovered Rachel glaring at both of them.
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I have a Rockford Fosgate p600.4 with a LC7i and audio control load generators since I have a Jeep. Basically I have everything ran from my factory UConnecf head unit going to the trunk using 18 gauge 9 speaker wire bundle which connects to the load generators right before the LC7i, then goes to my amp then high quality RCA cables and 14 gauge speaker wire from KnuKoncepz that is soldered onto after-market speakers. My front speakers do have passive crossovers for tweeters on my dash. Everything sounded great and full but I increased the voltage on the LC7i from 8 to 10 volts which my amp can handle 12 which is the max for lc7i and when I increased the volume on the head unit, then the volume became quite and the sound is no longer full on all of my door speakers. My tweeters sound perfect for some reason even though they are connected to the crossover to my door speakers. The sound will randomly go back to normal for a split second before going back. I redid all of the connects to the lc7i and the amp then checked the connections on the radio but I can’t get the sound back to normal. I installed new RCA cables and nothing. Any ideas? I can’t figure out what’s wrong. The only thing that changed was the lc7i voltage which I decreased back to normal. I’m thinking since the tweeters use less voltage and they sound fine but the door speakers don’t , the next thing to redo is the negative and power cable connects. But I checked the amp and I’m getting a little over 13 volts.

I was under the naive impression that hiring a general contractor, the electrician working on my renovation/remodel would be licensed and have some kind of certification or accreditation to ensure they actually know what they are doing.
As mentioned elsewhere, we are having trouble with some of the electrics. They sent a guy to come and look at the issue. He didn't have any license and said I should just speak to my contractor about that. Can a licensed GC just send anyone to the house to "look at the problem"? Are there no regulations about who can work unsupervised on electrics in California? I mean you can't even cut someone's hair without a license, how can you working on potentially dangerous electrical circuits? He showed up with no tools other than a little domestic outlet tester. No multimeter or anything like that. Now I don't even know if anyone qualified actually worked on any of the wiring at all. I just have their word that they are experienced and I assume the license of the GC. How can a GC monitor the work if they a) don't show up and b) how can a GC know all the details of electrical systems? Are there some laws about having a licensed supervisor inspect the work?
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