"Be excellent to each other... and party on dudes!"

He is Bill S. Preston, Esq.! And he is Ted "Theodore" Logan! And together, they are Wyld Stallyns!
To everyone else in late-80s/early-90s San Dimas, California, Wyld Stallyns may look like the impossible dream of two slackers with no skill in anything else. But in truth, the music of Wyld Stallyns is so bodacious, so non-heinous, so excellent that it brings about an era of prosperity, both across the earth and to the stars beyond, and technological advancement so advanced that even time can be accessed as freely as a 10-digit phone number from the nearest payphone. Because of this, agents from the future utopia have sent back a time-travelling phone booth as well as information about the future to make sure that Bill and Ted are able to continue having most excellent adventures and fulfill the destiny of Wyld Stallyns.

Key

Movies:
^EA = Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
^BJ = Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
^FtM - Bill & Ted Face the Music
Shows:
^CSxEy = Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures (DiC Animated Series); Season X Episode Y
^LAEx = Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures (Fox Live Action Series); Episode X
Comics:
^M#X = Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book (Marvel Comics) Issue #X
^BVx#y = Boom! Studios Comics; Volume X, Issue #Y

Vol. 1 = Bill & Ted's Triumphant Return
Vol. 2 = Bill & Ted Go To Hell
Vol. 3 = Bill & Ted Save the Universe
BV1#xS = Boom! Studios Comics; Side Story

^DH#X = Dark Horse Comics (Face the Music Compliant) Issue #X
Games:
^AL = Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (Atari Lynx)
^NES = Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure (NES)
^WS = Wyld Stallyns (Mobile Game)
Live Show:
^EHAyy = Bill & Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure; 19YY/20YY

Bill and Ted

Strength

• Twist around several amps while running as a blur. ^CS1E7
  
• Run straight through several tentpoles. ^CS1E7
  
• Hold themselves against the winds created by a giant monster that toss around buses and tanks. ^CS2E5
  
• Push around large stone slabs. ^AL
  
• A version of Bill and Ted from a bad future become super jacked and help curbstomp a robot. ^FtM
  
• [Limitation] Struggle to do push-ups. ^BJ
  

Speed/Agility

• Dodge a stone discus launched hard enough to embed into a marble pillar, and a falling chandelier. ^CS1E2
  
• Dodge around weapons swung by Roman gladiators. ^CS1E3
  
• Dodge a speeding horse and a flying coffin. ^CS1E9
  
• Able to dodge a frog mid-jump. ^CS1E11
  
• Run off fast enough to kick up a trail of dust. ^CS2E1
  
• Intercept a cannon shot. ^CS2E1
  
• Dodge a cannon shot just before it hits. ^CS2E3
  
• As babies, able to run off hidden behind a cloud of baby powder. ^CS2E7
  
• Duck underneath a swinging pendulum. ^AL
  
• Very good at jumping really high. ^NES
  
• Dodge a booth as it falls from time jump. ^LAE2
  
• Disguise themselves as a doctor and a cadaver in the time it takes for a woman to leave a room. ^LAE3
  
• Scale up the snout of a large, metal dragon. ^BJ
  
• Attempt and almost succeed at intercepting a bullet, moving a good distance in the time it takes to go from a gun to a person feet away. ^EHA08
  
• Outrun several species of dinosaur. ^M#2
  
  • Outrun a T-Rex running fast enough to kick up large rocks in its wake. ^BV1#3S
• Dodge a superhero sent flying hard enough to leave a comet trail behind him. ^M#10
  
• Dodge around machine gun fire. ^M#11
  
  • Again. ^BV1#5
• Able to see the two drivers in a high speed chase. ^BV1#2S
  
• Hit a button that causes the spaceship they're in to lurch forward fast enough to send everyone inside tumbling, then run off before anyone else can catch their bearings. ^BV3#1
  

Durability

• Get tossed across a bar, their heads smashing through a thin wood wall. ^EA
  
• Fall from a second floor balcony into some bushes and walk it off. ^FtM
  
• Has Death thrown at them bodily and get back up. ^DH#3
  
• Crushed under a mountain of falling china. ^CS1E1
  
• Are sent flying back by their amplifier's exploding to little ill effect. ^CS1E1
  
• Have a stove dropped on their heads. ^CS1E2
  
• Launched through a window and fall a story down into a stone fountain. ^CS1E2
  
• Fall from the top of a three-story building into some bushes. ^CS1E4
  
• Get slammed into a brick wall hard enough to indent. ^CS1E7
  
• Get launched into the air by their inflatable shoes and then fall back down. ^CS1E9
  
• Get kicked out of a stadium hard enough to send them flying, toppling a food cart. ^CS1E9
  
• Get blasted high into the air by a jet of water strong enough to blow away a stone statue, then land in a river. ^AL
  
• Get blasted back by the explosion from this huge gun. ^M#8
  
• Punch themselves. ^M#11
  
• Get zapped in a clash between Darth Vader and Gandalf and walk it off. ^EHA02
  
• Fall down a trap door a dozen feet and get up fine. ^BV3#1
  
• Hit a button that causes the spaceship they're in to lurch forward fast enough to send everyone inside tumbling, then run off before anyone else can catch their bearings. ^BV3#1
  
• Take hits from the Death Quills of Koloko IV, the Lightning Web, the Fire Bones of Kykartian Dragodon, the Cyberwasps of the Robot Zoo Planet, and the Lavaspin of Sector 487. ^BV3#2
  
• Roll into a snowball then crash into a building hard enough to demolish it. ^DH#3
  
• [Limitation] A long fall from the top of this cliff is enough to instantly kill them. ^BJ
  

Skill

• Easily bat in a baseball game one-handed while focusing on other things. Ted even throws the bat so that it spins hard enough to hit the ball without him holding it. ^CS2E3
  
• Jump from an upper banister and swing down on ropes, knocking out two guys and stealing their weapons in the process. ^LAE6
  
• Briefly hold their own in a duel, despite neither having any dueling experience. ^M#1
  

Intelligence
Yes, really.

• Can comprehend and utilize stable time loops. ^EA
  
  • Leave a recording device hidden in the corner of a room with a timer to use as a distraction. ^EA
  • Leave a typed message for themselves at a printer with instructions to duck at just the perfect time. ^EA
  • Sets up a trash can to fall at the right time to trap Ted's father. ^EA
  • Outwit De Nomolos, setting up not only a sandbag and cage to fall at just the right time and place to disarm and trap him, but also set up a key for the cage and fake gun to trick him into believing that he would win the encounter. ^BJ
  • When they don't have access to a booth, they go back in time to ask Station to build one so that he's done in time for them to go back and ask. ^BV1#1
  • Loosen a chandelier just so that it falls on Vlad the Impaler's head while he's cornered them. ^BV3#1
• When they're being pursued by versions of them from a bad future, who remember everything they're about to do, they do something they can't possibly remember doing to escape. ^FtM
  
• Able to somewhat fix the booth's broken antennae with some fudge cans and a large wad of chewed gum. ^EA
  
  • Able to somewhat fix the booth's broken antennae with a magazine and a shoelace. ^LAE1
  • Able to more or less fix the booth's broken numpad by copying what they remember Station doing to fix it. ^BV1#3S
• Survive a long fall from within the booth by jumping at the last second. ^CS1E8
  
• Rig up a lever to launch Dracula out of the booth and onto a bed. ^CS1E9
  
• Make functional guitars out of laundry and string. ^CS1E12
  
• Make a castle display out of water sealant cans and boxes. ^LAE2
  
• Rewire a jukebox to play music from a walkman. ^LAE5
  
• Their advice helps their music teacher move on from heartbreak and live peacefully where before she was bitter and angry at everyone. ^LAE7
  
• Outwit Einstein, tricking him into delivering his speech about the Theory of Relativity instead of his bad stand up routine. ^LAE8
  
• Able to escape from Death with a Melvin. ^BJ
  
• Trick Evil Robot Bill and Ted into thinking they're the real good Bill and Ted. ^M#7
  
• Escape from a future prison by starting a fire to set off the fire alarm. ^M#8
  
• Impress Socrates with their philosophizing. ^EA
  
• Are able to convince Hyper-World, a planet who's entire society is predicated on comic book violence, to stop fighting... for a few seconds. ^M#10
  

Rockitude
Skill

• Wyld Stallyns' music eventually becomes good enough that it ushers in interplanetary peace. ^EA
  
  • Their music apparently brings about post-scarcity, or at least post-the need for money. ^CS1E12 ...NOT! ^M#8
  • Post-training and with full band backing, a televized broadcast of their performance is able to cause people of multiple different cultures around the world to jam. The newspapers of the following years also state that their touring schedule causes crops to grow in the American midwest and peace to come to the Middle East, that rumors of their split cause the stock market to plummet and when those rumors are disproven the stock market surges. ^BJ
• Seduce a pair of medieval babes with some off the cuff lyrics. ^EA
  
• Jam with Little Richard and a young Mozart. ^CS1E2
  
• Rock with Angus Young. ^EHA01
  
• Shred with James Hetfield. ^EHA06
  
• Tear it up with Fall Out Boy. ^EHA13
  
• Demolish with Axl Rose and Slash. ^EHA14
  
• Fuck it up with Kurt Kobain. ^EHA15
  
• Play the guitar very well with Freddy Mercury. ^EHA17
  
• Play a pocket organ well enough that the surrounding Roman guards are too busy dancing to notice them. ^AL
  
• Can play basically any instrument placed in front of them. ^FtM
  
• Calm an agitated baby dinosaur. ^BV1#3S
  
• Able to build guitars out of random debris in a gladiatorial death pit in a matter of seconds, then play well enough to pacify a rampaging alien monster who is also the most esteemed music critic in the galaxy. ^BV3#3
  
• Able to rouse a crowd of people from a society so downtrodden that the ability to smile has atrophied out of the gene pool. ^BV1#5
  
  • Writing one song is enough to uproot the entirety of said society and motivate Death to bring them back after dying even though he had lost the ability to do so. ^BV1#6
• Even God and Satan are fans. ^BV2#4
  
• Alien cultures that don't even speak English and who's entire cultures are predicated around war are brought to peace by hearing their music. ^BV3#1
  

Power

• Consistently blow out their amps while playing. ^EA
  
  • Blow out an amp and cause it to catch fire. ^LAE1
• Defeather a bird. ^CS1E1
  
• Shatter a porcelain cup. ^CS1E1
  
• Knock dozens of objects off of a nearby shelf and shatter windows. ^CS1E7
  
• A single resonant note is enough to knock out the Black Knight. ^CS1E7
  
• Even when hooked up to a boombox, are able to blow away people and tables. ^CS2E5
  
• After Bill rewires the amp, it causes Ted's guitar to melt through the floor. ^CS2E7
  
• After Station alters the amps a little, cause any avalanche. ^DH#4
  
• Destroy robots with their riffs alone. ^WS
  

Ghost Bill and Ted

• People can pass right through them, though it causes some unnerving (though not totally unpleasant) sensations. ^BJ
  
• Can possess the bodies of the living. ^BJ
  

Other

• Build the Great Wall of China in a couple days. Although not particularly well. ^CS1E1
  
  • They arrive in China on Saturday and have finished and leave before Monday. ^CS1E1
• Summon rain with an Incan rain dance. ^CS1E3
  
• Play a single player game co-op and one-handed. ^CS2E7
  
• Are able to beat Death at Battleship, Clue, Electronic Football, and Twister. ^BJ
  
  • And Monopoly. ^M#5
  • And Rock, Paper, Scissors. ^EHA17
• Can fly after being zapped by the F-Ray, which only convinces the brain that it is capable of flying, thus allowing it to fly. ^M#10
  
• Spend a week without sleeping and only eating snack foods trying to devise a plan to save Abraham Lincoln. ^M#11
  
• Are temporarily given God's divine enlightenment, able to see everything past and future, and on a micro and macro scale. ^BV2#4
  
• Surf on a black hole. ^BV3#3 They're obviously going through some form of spaghettification, but also given the size of the black hole, the audience, and the official helping them do it, it's likely that this black hole has been altered to be safe to surf.
  
• Have sex. ^BV1#1
  
• Do drugs. ^EHA00
  

Bill

Strength

• Knocks over the Liberty Bell with an elbow. ^CS1E5 The Liberty Bell weighs over 2000 lbs.
  
• Easily pitches and bats cannon balls that Ted had difficulty handling. ^CS1E9
  
• Knocks Ted into the air with an accidental headbutt. ^CS1E9
  
• Floors Monomonop with a yo-yo. ^M#8
  

Speed/Agility

• Pulls Ted out of the way of a flail. ^CS1E3
  
• Snatches a flying chip bag out of the air. ^CS2E2
  
• Bats a baseball pitched hard enough to leave a trail of flames. ^CS2E3
  
• Escapes from being grappled by swinging on a noose while the floor is dropped from under him. ^EHA92
  
• Ducks a bullet at close range. ^EHA08
  

Durability

• Takes a punch from Evil Robot Bill. ^M#7
  
• Takes a punch from Ronda Rousey. ^EHA16
  

Skill

• Spars with Joan of Arc. ^EA

Other

• Strong poker face. ^EA
  
• Folds a paper hat into a to-go box. ^CS1E1
  
• Rewires an amp which causes it to melt Ted's guitar through the floor. ^CS2E7
  
• Beats up the Invisible Woman using dark force powers gained as Darth Bogus. ^EHA05
  
  • Force chokes a man to the ground in an instant. ^EHA05
• Save nearly 70 people from being used as a virgin sacrifice. ^EHA13
  

Ted

Strength

• Knocks out a man in a leather helm with one strike. ^EA
  
• Accidentally sends Marco Polo flying with the swing of a broom. ^CS1E1
  
• Flicks a paper football hard enough to knock an apple into the air. ^CS1E2
  
• Breaks a wooden plank off on the T-800 Terminator, then knocks him into a well using a skateboard. ^EHA92
  

Speed/Agility

• Takes a tumble down the stairs hard enough to knock him out of his metalplate suit and somehow hides before anyone notices. ^EA
  
• Flip jumps to the top of the booth. ^CS1E5
  
• Dodges a swipe from behind from Vlad the Impaler. ^BV3#1
  

Durability

• Takes a tumble down the stairs hard enough to knock him out of his metalplate suit. ^EA
  
• Takes a headbutt to the chin that knocks him off of his feet and into the air. ^CS1E9
  
• Takes a full punch to the gut from Officer T. J. Hooker and brushes it off. ^EHA98
  
• Gets tackled to the ground and waled on by General Thade. ^EHA01
  
• Doesn't seem bothered touching a lightsaber with his bare skin. ^EHA05
  
• Gets smashed over the head with a guitar hard enough to crack it in half. ^BV1#4
  
• Thrown across the room onto the coffee table and is back on his feet shortly. ^BV2#1
  

Skill

• Flicks a paper football in such a way so that it flies around and knocks an apple off of Bill's head from the side. ^CS1E2
  
• Lassos the Black Knight while he's riding a horse full speed. But then forgets to keep a hold on the other end of the rope. ^CS1E7
  
• Briefly holds his own against an Italian fencer. ^LAE6
  

Other

• Reads the time and place text. ^CS1E1
  
• Starts a fire by rubbing George Washington's wooden teeth. ^M#8
  
• In a bad future where Ted was sent to military academy, he was able to double bust a corrupt cop by posing as a drug dealer. ^LAE4
  
• Kicks the Sith out of Darth Bogus. ^EHA05
  
• Gets with Taylor Swift. ^EHA13
  

Good Robot Bill and Ted

Robots created by the most brilliant mind in the universe, Station, to combat the powerful Evil Robot Bill and Ted. ^BJ

• The can be controlled via remote control but also seem to be capable of autonomous movement. ^BJ

Strength

• Punch through a brick wall. ^BJ
  
• Decapitate Evil Robot Bill and Ted with a punch, then cause their bodies to explode with a second punch. ^BJ
  
  • Evil Robot Bill and Ted no sell a punch to the chin from Bill and walk off crashing through a window and into a brick chimney. ^BJ
• Chew up a phone reciever. ^M#3
  
• Punch out the demonic Colonel Oats when the princesses couldn't faze him with their strikes. ^BV2#1
  
  • The princesses were smashing up musical equipment and sending other women flying with their strikes. ^BV1#6S
• High five each other hard enough to destroy each others' hands. Keep the Evil Robot Bill and Ted scaling in mind. ^DH#1
  
• Walk through a wall. ^DH#4
  

Durability

• Still functioning while demolished down to just their heads. ^M#7
  
  • Or arms. ^BV2#3
• Robot Ted gets blasted through several brick walls. ^BV3#4
  

They Run On Car Batteries

• They do. ^BV1#1S
  
• Electrocute two men to death when they try to stab them with rapiers. ^M#1
  
• Cause the booth to randomly jump when they electrocute it after touching some slushie material. ^M#12
  

Other

• Have tape recorders built in. ^M#3
  
• Can receive temporal emails, and promptly get a virus from this. ^BV1#1S
  
• Their code is written in a form of binary compose of "Bill"s and "Ted"s. With a source code constructed entirely of Van Halen references. ^BV1#1S
  
• Become presidents of the United States. ^BV1#2
  

Mecha Bill & Ted

• Rocket away from San Dimas to Scandinavia. ^DH#4
  
• Transforms from houses into humanoids form, piloted by Good Robot Bill & Ted. ^DH#4
  
• Beat up and send flying giant mountain trolls. ^DH#4
  

Mobile Suit Bill & Giganto-Ted

• Burst out of the sewers and through the streets, creating a massive tremor that could be felt from blocks away. ^BV1#6
  
• Disarm an entire crowd of guards with powerful magnets. ^BV1#6
  

The Time Booth

Time Travel

• A time machine that can travel to any place and time on earth after dialing a specific number. The number for each time and place is listed in an attached directory which catalogues most important points in history. ^EA
  
  • If Bill and Ted don't know what time or place they're looking for, they can ask the operator for help identifying a landmark. ^CS2E1
  • Can travel all the way back to the big bang. ^M#2
  • Is able to travel to and from "the center of time" which seems to exist outside of the regular timeline. ^M#6/7
• It is stressed multiple times throughout the series that even while time travelling, the clock in San Dimas is running, so Bill and Ted still have a limited amount of time to accomplish their goals while time travelling. ^EA This isn't well supported by other events and usages of the booth in the series, but it is a consistent concern regardless.
  
• Bill and Ted can use the Phone Booth to interact with themselves in the past, giving themselves needed equipment or advice. ^EA
  
  • Find a note of advice from themselves and then go back and leave the same note without having to even write it. ^AL
  • Get called to go forward from a few minutes beforehand to help out their future selves. ^EHA06
• Allow Bill and Ted to leave and then return to the exact same point in time, with 16 months of training in between. ^BJ
  
  • Further emphasizing that they can return to any point they want and San Dimas time doesn't matter. ^CS2E1
• A trip through spacetime can be cut short and will cause the booth to reappear at a median point. ^CS1E2
  
• A trip can also be reversed, allowing the booth to return to from where it just came. ^CS1E9
  
• A trip can be rerouted mid-stream without too much issue. ^CS1E10
  
• While this is not usually the case, as most time travel trips result in loops, drastically changing past events can lead to alternate present timelines. ^CS2E5
  
  • Bill and Ted use the booth to go back 15 minutes and redo a botched conversation resulting in a different outcome. ^LAE1
  • A closer to canon example. ^M#11
• Time travel 2 seconds into the future to catch an evil robot off guard. ^BV1#3
  
• Falling into the wormhole behind the phone booth can let someone travel through the circuits of time with it. ^EA
  
  • Rufus is able to follow a different phone booth using a grapple electric guitar, despite not being anywhere close to it when it time travels. ^BJ
  • The black knight and his horse are able to follow the booth. ^CS1E7
• Able to travel and be gone in the time it takes for a killer robot to aim and fire a vaporization beam. ^FtM
  
• Can travel to a point in time and space selected by an actual phone number in use at the time. ^CS1E8
  
• Can travel to a different point in space without changing time. ^CS2E8
  
• Elizabeth and Joanna apparently use the booth to travel to alternate timelines, though this mostly happens off screen. ^FtM
  
• Can travel to alternate dimensions entirely. ^M#10
  
• Travels to heaven. ^M#11
  
  • And hell. ^BV2#1
• Teleports from heaven to the earthly timeline, all the way to the Boomerang Nebula, and back in a matter of seconds. ^BV2#4
  
• Using the infinity button, allows the occupants to be multiplied infinitely to interact with all points in space and time simultaneously. ^FtM
  
• The booth can't travel if all of the circuits of time are currently occupied. ^CS2E5
  
• Travelers through the circuits of time can see other travelers in the same area. ^M#2
  
• The booth can seemingly track individuals in a specific time frame as shown by the fact that the future Bill and Ted were able to trick Bill and Ted into thinking they were rich and successful by being in the right place at the right time. ^FtM
  
• Rufus gives Bill and Ted a new booth that can trace the calls of other booths, though it tends to show up a little late. Also it's a rotary phone. ^M#2
  
• Rufus gives Bill a mobile phone which can call back the booth with the correct number. The first time its used however, it calls Doc Brown's Delorean instead. ^EHA92
  
  • Shown here actually working. ^EHA96
• When Ted uses a magazine to try and fix the antennae Bill and Ted end up going inside of the world of the magazine by accident. ^LAE1
  
  • By connecting the booth to a cable box, they're able to enter the worlds of television broadcasts, though it's entirely dependent on what the tv is currently turned to. ^LAE3

The Squint System
An upgraded directory that allows the booth to travel to fictional settings, including books, CDs, movies, and games. ^CS2E2

• Use the booth to enter an episode of Leave It to Badger. ^CS2E4
  
  • Can also use the booth to skip around within the episode. ^CS2E4
  • Once the episode ends, every person in it, including Bill and Ted, disappear. It looks like this. ^CS2E4
  • Foreign objects can persist between episodes, if they're plot relevant. ^CS2E4
• Can bring characters from the fictional world to the real world. ^CS2E4
  
• Characters in the fictional world are fully aware that they're fictional. ^CS2E4
  
• Altering the interior of the fiction does change how the fiction appears in the real world. Also might cause that fiction to become unavoidable? ^CS2E4
  
• Showing places that aren't supposed to be there reveals static. ^CS2E4
  
• Shrinks Bill and Ted down to smaller than a bottlecap when they forget to put the 1 in front. To reverse this effect, they simply dial 9. ^CS2E2
  

Durability

• [Limitation] When the booth's antennae get smashed by a knight's flail it can still travel fine but where and when it lands becomes uncontrollable. ^EA
  
  • [Limitation] A thrown frisbee knocks out the antennae, preventing the booth from time travelling. Ted is able to partially fix this with a magazine and a shoelace, though it causes the jumps to become uncontrollable again. ^LAE1
• Crash lands upside down and works perfectly fine. ^CS1E2
  
  • Tears through the roof of a tent, crash lands upside-down, and then falls onto its side. ^CS1E5
• Slides along the ground, crashing into a horse hard enough to launch it into the air, taking no damage. ^CS1E2
  
• Gets knocked off a crow's nest with a cannonball and tumbles to the deck of the ship without damage. ^CS1E4
  
• Gets run over by a train. ^CS1E8
  
• Tanks a fall from the top of Big Ben's clock face. ^CS1E8
  
• In a cabin as its demolished by a cannon, and protects the people within. ^CS1E9
  
• Smashes up the wooden walls of a log flume. ^CS1E11
  
• Takes several blasts of energy weapon fire and isn't damaged until one hits the antennae. ^LAE4
  
• Gets shot up by Billted 1.0's machine gun arm and has enough in it to make a trip before collapsing. ^BV1#4
  
• Vlad the Impaler has trouble breaking the glass with the hilt of his sword. ^BV3#1
  
• [Limitation] The floor breaks falling onto a bear's head. ^CS1E13
  
• [Limitation] Destroyed by a large boulder falling on it. ^BV2#3
  

Landing Strength

• [Limitation] While operating normally, it doesn't land hard enough to seriously harm an old man. ^CS1E5
  
  • But it did harm this guy. ^LAE1
• While malfunctioning however, digs a hole into the earth in a second. ^CS1E5
  
• Still while malfunctioning, crashes up through some wooden floorboards, knocking aside a dresser. ^CS1E5
  
• Demolishes a small kennel. ^CS1E6
  
• Smashes through a thick wooden roof. ^CS1E10
  
• Smashes through the deck of a ship. ^CS2E3
  
• Sends Columbus ricocheting around the Santa Maria. ^CS2E5
  
• Sends two cowboys a distance away flying from the shockwave. ^EHA92
  
• Smashes Billted 1.0 which is capable of flying straight through walls and windows without damage. ^BV1#3
  
• While malfunctioning, lands hard enough to crater concrete. ^BV1#4
  
• Smooshes a pair of demon spawn. ^BV2#4
  

Other

• Can still make a trip while on its side and is able to land normally. ^CS1E11
  
• It also works while water-logged. ^CS1E1
  
• Sideways AND waterlogged. ^S1E12
  
• It hovers in the air for unsaid reasons while malfunctioning. ^CS1E4
  
• Has some video recording and playback functions, though seemingly a preset one for display purposes. ^FtM
  
• When their regular booth gets blown up, Rufus lets them use a payphone on a stand to much the same effect. ^EHA02
  
• Can sometimes require coins to make calls with. ^NES
  
• It can also make regular calls. ^EA
  

"Catch ya later Bill and Ted!"

Hello! I have a bunch of old Humble Bundles and some other keys up for trade. I have them organized 2 ways: 1) by specific humble bundles, 2) alphabetized at the very bottom. Hopefully that makes it easier to find what you are looking for!
I'm mostly interested in trading with people who plan to activate immediately instead of retrading later.
Humble Non-Choice Bundles :
In Your Face VR
Superfly
Battle Group VR
Zenith: The Last City
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Star Trek: Bridge Crew
Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality
Humble VR Emporium Leftovers
House Flipper VR
Zero Caliber VR
Scary Games to Play in the Dark
Propnight
The Blackout Club
Them and Us
SCP: 5K
Amazing Adventures
Beyond a Steel Sky
Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo
Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot The First Cases
Resident Evil Decades of Horror
Resident Evil HD Remaster
Resident Evil 0 HD Remaster
Humble Capcom
Strider
Bionic Commando
Street Fighter V
Ultra Street Fighter IV
Humble T1D
Walking Dead Saints and Sinners
Bartlow's Dread Machine
Super Meat Boy
Rad
Pine
Gauntlet Slayer Edition
Humble Extras
Oxenfree
Vikings Wolves of Midgard
Gabriel Knight 3
Battalion 1944
Deadbeat Heroes
Octahedron: Transfixed Edition
Oh My Godheads
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To the Moon
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Sims 3 High End Loft Stuff
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Burnout Paradise Ultimate Box
Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 Uprising
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“Three years to build a mech with specs that only a year ago I would have called impossible within this century? Would you like any other miracles while I’m preying to every deity I know of?” – [CLASSIFIED] Head of [CLASSIFIED] development, after being presented with the project’s requirements.
----
First, Previous, Next.
----
‘Diagnostics complete. Error zero-zero, reactor output is nil. No other errors detected. Unit 0012 is unable to perform upcoming operation. I am sorry Sustain. You will be scratched from the roster.’
Anna ‘Sustain’ Finand started swearing, first in United Earth common, then English and lastly in Arabic. Fortunately for her career and general standing among her peers, her mech’s cockpit was still sealed tight, preventing the small army of engineers and maintenance personal swarming her mech from hearing.
She swore about the ridiculousness of a reactor design that could fail with no discernible reason at the drop of a hat. She cursed about the mountain of corners which had been piled up at the feet of the killing machine that refused to power on. Lastly, she just screamed as three years of built-up frustration poured out of her lanky body.
Sustain had been a mech pilot for far longer than she cared to admit, having began by piloting her Dad’s farming mech during planting season. She would start her shift in the mech-tractor after schooled finished, and work until midnight while her Dad slept. Then she would catch some much-needed rest, only to wake up early the next morning for school and do it all over again. She never resented her Dad for the strain the season would place on the two of them, but curiously she had always found herself angry at her mother; who had left when she was only five.
When she had signed up for the military, she had told the interviewing officer that she could pilot a mech in her sleep. She hadn’t been bragging. They’d thrown her into a simulator to see what she could do, and when she told her father that she’d barely passed the exam, she’d been lying. She hadn’t wanted him to worry about the possibility of her being hand picked for the special forces, which is exactly what had happened a few months later. Sustain remembered the fight between herself and her father after that, it had been legendary, and was still something they joked about to this very day.
Still, Sustain was as stubborn as her dad, and when her special forces service had paid for his space flight to and apartment on Earth he’d admitted that he was glad to have lost that fight. Thinking about her father, and Earth, only intensified the extreme frustration Sustain was currently experiencing.
The Algeen’s had pulled in as many species as they possibly could to fight off the Tide, but they hadn’t seen fit to give humanity the same offer. It was only five years ago that humanity had learnt about the existence of the Tide, as the inter-galactic wall that had been the Algeen republic, exhausted beyond all measures, crumbled away.
It still pissed her off to think about. Had the Algeen’s included humanity and it’s six hundred worlds at the start of the war, hell even halfway through it, they would have been able to fight with the numerical advantage. But instead, the Algeen’s had kept the Tide and their war from them a secret. No one knew why but Sustain could sure as hell guess: In the past Humanity and the Algeen’s had their fair share of conflicts.
No doubt the Algeen’s had wanted to present a facade of strength, out of fear that humanity would seek to capitalise on their weakened state.
Sustain could easily see humanity negotiating favourable terms for their aid, terms which may very well have seen them rise as the dominate power in the galactic region. Much like America in comparison to England after WWII. However, by seeking to prevent this from happening, the Algeen’s may have doomed humanity in the process.
Once they knew of their existence Humanity had tried to open diplomatic talks with the Tide and had been violently rebuked. With the Algeen’s crashing down before their very eyes humanity’s leadership had realised with horror that they now had to fight a considerably more powerful enemy, and only had five years to prepare for it.
Three years ago, that same leadership had finally convinced the Algeen’s to share their technology with their new allies of circumstance, and the flood gates had poured open. That’s when Sustain had gotten involved in the cluster fuck.
Humanity knew from their past that their technology was a few years behind that of the Algeen’s. However, they also knew that their tactics and general understanding of warfare was significantly greater. But now they had to compete with the Tide, who’s technology surpassed even that of the Algeen’s, and half measures weren’t going to cut it. Humanity had set out to build a brand new mech, one which could match the Tide machines (even if it wouldn’t beat them) by combining human and Algeen technology.
Sustain had signed on as a test pilot for the project, one of a thousand such pilots. Calling them the best of the best was considered an insult to many of the test pilots. While Sustain didn’t agree with such an arrogant attitude she wasn’t so humble as to be unable to admit the truth: They weren’t the best. Or the best of the best. They were one thousand out of a billion such pilots. They were Elite in the truest meaning of the word.
But none of that would mean anything if they didn’t have any machines to pilot.
Having taken a moment to calm herself, Sustain popped the seals on her cockpit, and opened the heavy door to the clammer of voices and machinery that was the drop hanger of the Swan. The Swan was a orbital insertion carrier, designed to launch its cargo onto a planet without succumbing to gravity or weapons fire alongside them. In just two short hours they would be deploying onto Algeen Prime, one battle which made up the many overseen by operation “Sucker Punch”.
For humanity to survive it needed to push the Tide back as quickly as possible while they were still dealing with the many losses, they had suffered during the Algeen war. For humanity to survive it needed to bloody the nose of those who dared to threaten the continued existence of mankind, and countless others. What better place to do that then where the most noses were located?
Algeen Prime and its surrounding systems were swarming with Tide ships and mechs, as their long conflicted was slowly ground to a pulp. Human intelligence suggested that the Tide in these locations would be running low on supplies, manpower and equipment. It was into this exhausted army that operation sucker punch would strike. It was up to Sustain and the Algeen-Human experimental mech program to be the tip of that spear. No pressure.
Sustain’s maintenance chief cut through both the volume of the hanger and her anxious recount of the events leading up to this situation.
“Sorry Captain, this one’s given up the ghost. I don’t know what is so cursed about this reactor design but when I find whoever made the mistake that causes this headache, I’ll throw the unlucky sod your way eh?”
Despite the situation the Chief’s gruff voice and jokes were enough to force the ghost of a smile onto Sustain’s face. The old, balding man reminded her of a friend of her fathers. The one who’d help occasionally with odd maintenance jobs around the house that her father was too busy to attend to. Only instead of repainting the living room he was fine tuning the most advanced fighting machine currently known to mankind. An odd idiosyncrasy to be sure, but like her the Chief was Elite.
“You’d deprive yourself of that satisfying revenge for me Tomlinson?” Sustain replied.
“Well better you go to prison then me, and I trust you to really twist the knife while you gut the fella.”
“Ah, fair.”
An awkward silence stretched between the two of them. A deep dark abyss that neither really wanted to descend into. Sustain took the plunge first.
“How many others like mine?”
Tomlinson’s eyes said all she needed to know. But he spoke anyway.
“About half of em. We’re hoping to get that down to a quarter but the timing ain’t looking so great. I hope you don’t mind me saying I’m glad yours isn’t showing any signs of life, if we got her started now we’d have to skip so many safety procedures to be ready in time that it ain’t funny… Well, it’d be a little funny. But only if you didn’t explode.”
Sustain grimaced. The constant issue with the experimental mechs was their power source. Everything else had been shaped up over the frantic past three years, but the reactors were a hurtle that seemingly couldn’t be overcome. Once they were running, they were fine. In fact, they were better than fine. Once running the reactors were a considerable improvement to their Algeen basis. It was getting them started that was the hard part.
Three years of Elite scientists and engineers working on the problem, and still it was a crapshoot as to whether the reactors would startup properly or destroy itself in doing so. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that the reactors were only designed to be run for a month before needing to be powered down for a maintenance once over.
Sustain’s mech had its maintenance once over a week ago. She would have preferred delaying the operation to ensure that all the one thousand Elite had operational machines, but replacing the reactor in the experimental mechs took weeks to do. Apparently command just didn’t have that kind of time.
Sustain spook to Tomlinson again.
“Alright, well good effort team. Looks like the training machine’s up.”
The training machines were highly customised but otherwise unmodified Algeen machines. With the experimental one’s being so finicky the Elite had needed reliable machines to hone their skills in. The trainers had never been intended to be taken into battle, however the situation left little room for anything else. They were capable machines, and the Elite pilots were very familiar with them. Tomlinson helped her down with an odd look on his face. After a moment Sustain realised: it was a potent mix of apprehension and guilt.
“I-I” The usually steadfast chief choked on his words. Pausing to take a deep breath before continuing. “I’m sorry it had to be this way ma’am. I didn’t want to let you down.”
Sustain was surprised by the words, but a cocky smile soon found it’s way to her face.
“Don’t worry Chief, I like a challenge. I thought you would have known that about me by now.” She said with a wink.
That same smile danced on her face once more, as two hours and one Tide mech later she was on the battlefield in her trainer mech. The taste of victory like Ambrose in her mouth. The ranged heavy Tide mech was fighting its salvo at her, but rather then attempted to doge the incoming missile or deploy her energy shield, Sustain kept her mech perfectly still. Closing her eyes and increasing the rating on her neural lace; merging her mind closer and closer to the heart of the machine.
When she opened them again everything was slowed to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. She concentrated on the first missile, its trajectory appearing on her HUD, and lined up a trajectory of her own. The spikes the Algeen had noted on her mechs shoulders were indeed grenade launchers – not designed for offensive operation and most certainly not designed to be used as anti-missile fire. But Sustain had been training against the Elite for over three years now, most of them in this very machine, together they had all learnt more then a few tricks.
With the overclocking ability of her neural lace, (a development that neither the Algeen’s nor the Tide had access to), Sustain was able to launch the smoke canisters with unnerving accuracy directly into the path of the oncoming Tide fire. To Churk, who was watching the fight take place in real time, it appeared as though every canister had fired at the same moment. But to Sustain each and every canister had been individually targeted and fired.
The massive shockwave of so many missile denotating at once pounded into the surrounding area, causing the ground to shake, trees to shiver and Churk and his team to grab their helmets and take cover. One moment Sustain’s Algeen mech had been charging across the grassy field towards the Tide heavy, the next the entire field and some of the forest the Tide heavy was taking cover in was filled with smoke.
At first both Churk and the Tide pilot believed the smoke to be coming from the destroyed carcass of Sustain’s mech. Both were equally surprised then when with the quick flash of a blade the smoke, (and the Tide’s missile launcher,) were spilt in two.
The smoke in question was electro chemical in nature and caused odd pixelation and glitches to flare up in Sustain’s mechs sensors, as the scrambling effects of the smoke began to hit full force. Of course, Sustain’s mech was programmed with these effects in mind, and so was shielded from the worse of the interference. The same cannot be said for the Tide mech, who’s pilot now had to battle one insanely capable human and their own systems in order to survive. It was a battle that the mech pilot would not be able to win, however that doesn’t mean they were going to go down without a fight.
The Tide mech swung the ruined launcher at Sustain’s mech, and she used her left shoulder to block the blow, causing the frame of her machine to shake with the force of the heavy blow. In return she struck with her sword, finding the elbow joint on the Tide machine’s left arm, and slicing for everything her mech was worth. Her sword ran up the length of the Tide mech’s arm, under the heavy armour, and into the shoulder joint, whereupon (with a flick of her wrist) Sustain was able to deprive the Tide mech of its entire arm.
The Tide mech swung again with the now very pulped launcher, Sustain ducked the blow and thrust forward with her blade, intending to skewer the Tide machine on her sword. She was partially successful in doing so, creating a large and jagged rent in the chest armour of her enemy. The enemy (who was not unskilled) twisted away, preventing Sustain from penetrating the top-quality armour and causing her mech to overbalance. Instead of stepping forward to overt her fall Sustain sent her mech’s anti-gravity pods into overdrive and activated her jump jets. The mech rolled forward smoothly, in a movement that would have shredded a machine of its size and weight if not for the advanced technology of the pods.
As Sustain rolled free from her opponent’s follow up strike (an overhead blow that would have caught her on the back of her machine) smashed into empty air and then dirt. Not letting the sudden evasion get the better of them however, the Tide pilot dropped the useless and crushed launcher remains and pulled their mech’s coil gun from its thigh holster. The coil gun looked like a pistol in the mechs hand, but was powerful enough at this range to punch directly through the chest of Sustain’s mech.
The Tide pilot never got the chance to fire it.
Sustain bounced back from her roll with a speed that, even with the gravity pods maxed out, sent creaks throughout her entire machine. Her jump jets were still firing, and she leapt towards the Tide mech as it pulled its coil gun from its holster. Facing a weapon, she could not deflect with smoke grenades or armour, her only defence was speed and accuracy.
Like a shark about to earn a round of drinks by throwing their last dart, Sustain hit the bullseye at the last possible second. The Tide machine’s armour, already comprised by her previous pass, finally failed as the full weight of Sustain’s mech was forcefully shoved against it. The force concentrated through the point of her brutally simple sword and sliced deep into vulnerable inners of the machine to hit the only thing that truly mattered onboard a mech: The pilot.
----
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Oh boy here comes another downvote marathon
So, the Magical Turnabout is the first case 2 that pulls a 1-day investigation and 1-day trial. I think this is actually good because it makes the godawful case end faster.
No but really, making it only 1 day was a terrible idea. The pacing was absolutely trash in this case. Since there's only one investigation, they have to cram every character into it, and the whole evil-Bonny thing failed to make any impact because there was zero buildup. Also, the threat of bankruptcy was a pretty lame attempt to add stakes to the trial, like pretty much the rest of SoJ. Idk why it felt the need to go "win the trial or the universe implodes" in every case.
Although I will admit, maybe they had to make case 2 short like case 4 because the Khura'in plotline is stretched between those and the game needs the player to remember what's happening with Wright without taking too long in the filler cases. Another example of why the Spirit of Justice pacing sucks.
The revelations in the trial itself also were very meh. The "two Bonnys" revelation completely fell flat because, again, zero buildup. This is why there needs to be two trial days. All the character revelations are very impactful if the game can pace its trial day 1 properly, such as the identity of the Amazing Nine-Tails. Honestly, Monstrous had really good pacing and is probably the 2nd best case 2, just behind Reunion, but that's a different war to wage. With two trial days, the Bonny twist can maybe work in the first trial day near the end of the trial, but either way, it happens way too soon in the actual game.
Also Retinz was the most obvious "mistaken identity" case 2 character. No shot anyone didn't see him and go "wow it's Mr. Reus". The Great Mr. Reus, as a whole, is also a pretty bad added-on backstory to the Troupe Gramarye saga. Like, each character in Troupe Gramarye symbolized one of the four poker card suits. Given the significance of playing cards and reading/perceiving poker faces in AJ (one of the reasons AJ is good is how all the themes and imagery are connected), I find it really irking that they just tack on another guy who has nothing to do with cards to shatter the perfection of the poker imagery. He could have been the Joker card, I feel like if they had made his design more jester-like and pushed the Joker card a bit more, but they didn't. No, the mask doesn't count because there was no Joker broach. So it may not feel like retconning Troupe Gramarye, but it did not do it any favours either.
Plus the flanderization of Trucy's character by making her cry in front of everyone was the worst characterization in the game. One of her most compelling character traits was her stoicism in AJ. This completely ruins that just for an "awwww" moment. Even worse than Phoenix Wright in Revolution.
I think AJ as a whole is just too tightly-knit and, for lack of a better word, perfect on its own. Any attempt to bring an AJ plotline outside the game fails. Capcom seems to understand that, given how they don't touch the Jurist system or Wright's mastermind persona, but then they go and pull a stunt like Magical.

I recently had a conversation/debate with my mom about top surgery. I was able to stand my ground against most of what she said and basically shut her down, except for one thing she said: "if we start letting people just chop off whatever body parts they want because they don't 'feel right', what's to stop someone from getting an arm or a leg cut off because it doesn't 'feel right'?"
I know that there is an actual mental illness where people feel disassociated from certain body parts and want them removed, but I don't think this is a fair comparison and I'm not sure how to articulate why. She kept saying it was "the same thing" and that people who want to get surgery are mentally ill and should get help/learn to "accept themselves".
I'm scheduled for surgery in a little over two months (yay!!!!) and I'm dreading this conversation coming up again with her. Does anyone have any advice on how to shut down these kinds of arguments??

First Previous
Memory Transcription Subject: Tresn, Arxur Defector
Date [Standard Human Reckoning]: 2136-10-22
After the encounter with the disdainful zurulian, Elangkasa led me to another section of the medical complex. We navigated through the makeshift path until we arrived at a building. The painted sign marked this as "Recovery Center".
Inside I found a hive of movement and noise. Humans filled the space and engaged in different activities meant to acclimate them to their prosthetic limbs. Sounds of encouragement and determination echoed in the room. A unique mix of scents filled the air, warm metal, the clinical smell of antiseptic, and the underlying current of human sweat.
One side of the room housed various forms of mobility training. Here, individuals learned to walk again, their new legs carrying them across varieties of terrains from flat platforms to uneven rocky surfaces, all designed to mimic real-world conditions. The patients stumbled, recovered, and started to find their footing.
In a separate section, people sat around tables with an array of tactile puzzles and dexterity tools strewn around. Their faces scrunched in concentration, brows furrowed and lips pursed as they manipulated small objects or practiced precise movements with their acquired hands. The mechanical digits moved with a jerky grace but grew more fluid with each passing moment. A chorus of patient encouragement followed the quiet clinks and clatters of dropped objects.
A human figure clad in the typical uniform of the facility came toward us. An intricate headgear on their head concealed their mane.
"Ah, is this the arxur?" My translator assigned her feminine voice. "Hi, I'm Ida."
"Hi Ida," Elangkasa shared a formal nod with the other human. "This is Tresn."
"Thanks, Coordinator," Ida responded with another nod. "I can handle it from here."
After a quick farewell, Elangkasa left me in the capable hands of Ida. I looked around the bustling hall, my gaze sweeping over the flurry of activity.
"So... this is where you train people to adapt to their new limbs?"
"Yeah. Do you have your prosthesis?" Ida inquired, her voice carrying a professional tone laced with underlying warmth.
"Sure," I responded, reaching for the bag slung over the back of my wheelchair. From its depths, I extracted the mechanical feet.
"Hmm, interesting. This doesn't resemble an arxur foot at all," Ida observed, her dark eyebrows arching as she scrutinized the unconventional prosthetic.
"Indeed, I drew inspiration from your planet's creatures," I replied, a hint of pride slipping into my tone. "You have a species related to your kind, yes? I believe they're referred to as monkeys?"
"I see..." Ida murmured, a thoughtful expression wrinkling her forehead. I felt a slight apprehension in her voice. "But can you control such a thing?"
"Watch this!" Excitement coursed through me as I manipulated the intricate prosthetic. With a flex of my thoughts, the prosthetic responded, the claws moving with surprising fluidity, much like an additional set of hand paws.
"Excellent!" Ida exclaimed, her face lighting up in a wide smile. She clapped her hands together.
With practiced ease, the human-assisted me in attaching the prostheses. She produced a sturdy belt, custom-made to secure the prostheses and ensure they stayed attached. As the weight of my body pressed onto the artificial limbs, I felt a dull throbbing at the ends of my stumps. The sensation felt odd, not quite pain, but rather, a constant reminder of the foreign appendages now attached to my body.
For starters, I had a simple exercise, designed to introduce my body to a new way of movement. I had to walk between two parallel bars. My arms took some of the weight as I grabbed the bar and attempted to maneuver my prosthetic feet. I tried to replicate my usual gait, letting the claws on my new limbs ripple and flex in what I hoped was a natural manner.
However, it became apparent that just manipulating the claws of my prostheses didn't suffice. I needed to master the motion of bending the wrist and ankle analogs, a detail I hadn't considered before. My first steps came out as awkward and clumsy, a far cry from the graceful movements I had imagined.
Our rehabilitation session continued until a sharp, persistent ache at the base of my stumps signaling me to stop. Back in my wheelchair again, I maneuvered my way to the comfort of my assigned habitation unit. With my friends engrossed in their volunteer duties, I only had myself. The silence in the room reminded me back when I had to stay hidden in the camp. In those quiet moments, my thoughts strayed to my predicament, wishing for a rapid recovery that would free me from my solitude and allow me to stand beside my companions, contributing to helping humans.
Amid my reflection, my mind wandered back to a previous interaction with a human acquaintance named Jagomerah. I remembered his offer to meet up if I ever found myself in Purwakarta, prompting me to revisit our old messages on social media.
"Hi there, Jagomerah," I initiated the conversation, my fingers tapping out the words on the screen. "I've made it to Purwakarta, Sector Twelve to be precise."
He sent a swift and enthusiastic response, "No way! Alright, meet me at Sector Ten's plaza at 16:00 then."
"Looking forward to it," I typed back, a flicker of anticipation sparking within me.
As the time neared the fifteenth hour, my human friends returned, their faces flush with the day's exertion. To pass the time while waiting for our remaining companions, we played a game of human cards.
Bolad and Vani appeared a half-hour later, their arrival completing our little circle. With everyone present, I proposed an expedition to Sector Ten and I was met with eager nods and enthusiastic agreement. Thus, our band of six ventured, weaving through the intricate maze of sectors within the camp. I met several arxur on my way, always giving me a look of disapproval. Upon reaching the bustling plaza of Sector Ten, I shot a quick message to Jagomerah, notifying him of our arrival. It didn't take long for our gaze to meet each other.
To my surprise, Snop already knew this Jagomerah person. She referred to him as a "scalie", an apparent misnomer given the absence of any discernible scales on his skin.
A sharp voice cut off our introduction. "Have you no shame?" The words came from the female arxur who had been standing behind Jagomerah. Her eyes glared at me with a chilling reproof. "Wasting resources like this, when others are clinging to life."
Jagomerah, the human with a mane of untamed curls, turned back to meet Lovaz's scathing gaze. "What are you talking about?" he asked. His voice was a gruff contrast to her icy disdain.
With an indignant huff, Lovaz gestured at me, her clawed hand sweeping in my direction. "Look at him! He's nothing more than a drain on society now."
"Lovaz," Jagomerah said in a stern voice. The curly-maned human squared his shoulders and met the arxur's gaze with unwavering defiance. "What do you do to an injured arxur?"
"We do nothing." She snapped, her tail lashing with irritation. "It is the responsibility of the impaired to stop being a burden to our society."
"In human society, it's the responsibility of the society to care for the impaired," Jagomerah retorted, his dark eyes never leaving Lovaz's.
"This weakness," Lovaz spat out the word with such venom, "is why all this happened to you, human."
Jagomerah's gaze hardened. With a swift movement of his left arm, he pulled his armband aside, revealing a metallic ring. His fingers moved over the surface of his arm, found a hidden latch, and with a quick twist, the arm detached. The purpose of his armband became clear to me in that instant. The fabric covered the prosthetic limb's attachment point.
"See this?" Jagomerah held up his detached arm. "This hand can crush your windpipe. Not so weak now, huh?"
Modern arxurs only understood the language of strength and violence. From what I had learned about humans, a display like Jagomerah's could escalate into a fight. Yet the arxur woman just chuckled, her sharp teeth gleaming in a predatory grin. "Okay… I see your point."
"Hey...Tresn wasn't it?" Jagomerah said, his voice had a note of regret in it. I inclined my head in response. "I must apologize for my earlier suspicion."
I looked at his arm, or rather, the empty space where they should have been. "So...uh, what happened to your arm?"
"Well, see, I'm a firefighter," Jagomerah began, his voice steady but tinged with a hint of long-held sadness. The metal arm detached from his body was held in his remaining hand. "When you're fighting a beast of fire, sometimes it bites back. Burning debris can fall, and sometimes it traps someone whose means of escape is for his comrade to make a tough call because the fire is spreading."
As Jagomerah talked, his fingers worked on his mechanical limb. The sight fascinated me, the gleaming metallic end, the intricate design, and the way the parts clicked into place with a satisfying sound. Each movement reflected countless repetitions and a depth of familiarity that looked almost second nature.
His gaze turned to me, a question hanging in the air between us. "What about you? How did it happen?"
"Grenade," I replied, the single word packed with echoes of a past I wasn't quite ready to delve into.
"My shift has started, but I have time before I have to go to Greater Jakarta for the next twenty hours. Maybe I can show you around?"
I looked at Lovaz's whose hard gaze still didn't escape me. I met her glare with a smile, feeling a touch of defiance rise in me.
"Why do you care so much about this defective one?" Lovaz spat.
Jagomerah shrugged "He seemed nice. You don't have to come along with me. Just…reconvene at the meeting point at 18:45"
The tension between us hung palpably in the air as Lovaz lingered, shooting one last look of contempt my way before she walked away, her tail slapped against Jagomerah's leg.
"Well… that was something," Johan murmured. "The arxurs aren't one for much for socialization, are they?"
Feeling an odd kinship with the human, I decided to explain, "The only necessary relationship in the Dominion is between you and the State. Some arxurs would take a mate, but it's always in the service of the State. A mate could keep an eye on you in the field and administer first aid if needed."
"If you have a mate," Vani began. "what would he do if the incident with the farsul happened?"
I looked down at my lap, my scales catching the low light. "He would leave me to die." My voice sounded heavy with a bitter truth.
Everyone fell silent for a moment.
"Let's not dawdle," Jagomerah interrupted, shifting the atmosphere with a few words. "Follow me."
As we moved, I found myself questioning the cyborg. "What are you doing here?"
Jagomerah stopped, turning back to me. "Wait... you do have the concept of disaster relief... right?"
I blinked, my mind racing. "Uh... the closest thing we have is asset recovery," I said, embarrassed. "Your description on social media says you fight the fire, right? Do you put out conflagration?"
"That's right," he walked away again, his mechanical limb gesturing for us to continue following him.
As we moved, Jagomerah began to explain his role. It went beyond just putting out raging fires but it also involved pulling out survivors or bodies, clearing away the debris, and ensuring the remaining structures had enough integrity for rebuilding to commence. Their dedicated work created the foundation on which the rest of the humans could begin reconstructing the city.
After navigating the winding alleys of Sector Ten, we arrived at a prefabricated building near a wide road that allowed for the movement of large vehicles. Indeed, several huge vehicles bordered the building. Jagomerah led us through one of the gates in the building into a cavernous room. Inside, we saw a massive vehicle with dimensions larger than Johan's already big van. Humans moved around it in coordinated chaos, packing the vehicle with an assortment of tools and supplies.
All sorts of rescue gear adorned the walls. Some of them looked familiar to me, hoses coiled, axes with their blades shining under the overhead lights, ladders arranged according to size, and sledgehammers. There were also some that looked more complicated, from the design, I guessed that it uses hydraulics to help prop something or force something to open.
Lockers, each personalized with a human name, added a touch of individuality to the otherwise functional room. The heavy scent of rubber and metal hung in the air. Dominating the far end of the room, a large digital display showcased a detailed map of Greater Jakarta. The multitude of markings and notes told a silent story of planning, strategic thinking, and past operations.
A human woman approached Jagomerah, her greeting a bark, "Hey, Agni!"
Agni? Perhaps that was his other name, just like Snop was also known as Kirani. I found myself a little puzzled, having to familiarize myself with the concept of people using multiple names for everyday social life, not for espionage.
The human's skin was a deeper shade of brown, her hair coiled and secured into a neat bun. Her gaze turned to me, her eyes widening in surprise. "Whoa… what happened to that guy?"
"Grenade," Jagomerah replied, the single-word explanation heavy with unspoken stories.
Her eyes narrowed, "You're not replacing Lovaz with them, are you?"
"No," he assured her, his tone calm and clear. "Lovaz should arrive after breaking the fast. I'm taking this arxur and his friend here to look around."
We introduced ourselves with Johan kicking off the process. When my turn arrived, I said to myself with a touch of embarrassment, "My name is Tresn, right now… I'm not able to contribute."
A man, his face marked by burn scars that halted the growth of facial fur, chimed in, "Of course, you can't. No one in the right mind would ask you to work. Focus on your healing first."
Jagomerah then guided us through the process of their preparation. He explained what each item in the stacks of supplies was for. Besides the collection of essentials like food and water, and medical kits it also featured an impressive array of construction tools. I watched as teams worked together, loading supplies into vehicles, and checking and double-checking their lists. I saw clusters of team members in huddled discussions, their focus on tablets displaying complex documents. I watched them practice procedures, going through the motions of first aid, victim search, debris clearing, and evacuation protocols.
At one point Jagomerah introduced us to one of the drones that would help them. It looked like a human if a human was made out of blocks. The drone excited Johan and Cynthio and the two humans began interrogating the machine.
The buzz of activity that had characterized this place began to fade as the time for meal approached. People moved away from their tasks, converging towards the dining halls, the scent of food replacing the scent of rubber and metal.
Jagomerah and his team brought me towards the carnivore dining hall, a part of the camp designed to accommodate species with diets like us. My roommates, meanwhile, wandered off towards the herbivore hall. There were many arxurs present, and though I could feel their glances on my scarred form, none approached me.
The dining area was divided into two queues. One led to a spread of raw meat where the arxurs could pile their trays high with a selection of proteins. The second queue catered to a more human palate, featuring cooked dishes.
When I joined the line for the human food, Jagomerah looked at me in surprise. But he nodded in approval after I explained that I prefer cooked meat now. He told me that the dish for the night was Rawon, a delicious black soup cooked with a special kind of plant that contains hydrogen cyanide.
"Wait...what?"
"Yeah, but the plant has been processed to remove that toxin away. See... this is why we process food and cook them." He looked at the line of arxurs helping themselves to the blocks of meat. "I can't imagine eating them, so chewy and bland, even our raw meat dishes have seasoning in them."
That remark intrigued me. "Wait, you have raw meat dishes too?"
"Sure, we have-"
"Next!" The human server shouted. Our discussion had made a large gap between us and the last human.
"Okay, let's get this rawon first."
I noticed that the humans also have white plant matter called 'rice' to go with the rawon. For me, I would have just the soup, rich, aromatic, and packed with chunks of meat. To my delight, the meal also came with boiled eggs. Settling down with humans felt different from the stern, disapproving arxur tables back at the fleet. Here, Jagomerah and his team shared jokes, stories, and smiles as we ate. As we tucked into our meals, I shared my own tale, the official version of my crash landing.
Jagomerah listened, his gaze serious. When I finished, he took a moment before speaking. "When Lovaz says… I'm sorry… 'defective'… she's referring to more than just your physical condition, right?" He paused, recalling our earlier conversation. "You said the same to me when we chatted."
"Yeah... us Arxurs aren't supposed to be like... this." I gestured towards myself.
"I'm glad that you're like this," Jagomerah patted my shoulder. I didn't think he said that in pity, but rather understanding, and acceptance.
A soft chiming sound echoed from his wrist, drawing our attention. Jagomerah glanced down at the device strapped around his wrist, his eyes scanning over the display.
"Ah, duty calls," he sighed. I could feel a certain heaviness in his tone. "Our mission is about to start and we'll be in Greater Jakarta for the next twenty-four hours."
"Do what you need, human," I responded, a hint of a smile on my face.
"But feel free to message me, okay?" He proposed. Giving me a chance for us to continue our discussion. Perhaps it could lead to something more, I hoped.
After saying our goodbyes, I watched Jagomerah and his team depart. The herbivore dining didn't expect an Arxur like me and it would cause problems if I popped up there. Instead, I decided to wait in the plaza. I found a quiet corner and parked myself, my mind wandering back to Jagomerah and his team. The brief time I'd spent with them passed, unlike anything I'd experienced before. I felt a sense of acceptance and togetherness that felt...right.
For the first time, I felt like I belonged.

Before starting to meditate, it is absolutely necessary to relax your nerves. However, "relaxing" is quite a challenging task. The more you try to relax, the more stress you are subconsciously creating, making you more tense. This is because stress operates in synchrony with brain activity. As soon as the brain becomes more active, stress also increases, making it impossible to achieve true relaxation. That's why even when you trying singing or sleeping, it's still difficult to completely relax. All thanks to the strong buddy connection between your subconscious stress and your active brain.
The best time in the day to do meditation should be immediately after waking up after a good night's rest. Compared with any other time of the day, this early morning session should be the most comfortable of all sessions. Pay attention to whether you are shrugging shoulders when meditation, cause if you are, that is an indication that you did not sleep well the night before and there is already stress and tension when you started your practice. You may not even be aware of this kind of stress, as it may be chronic or a congenital condition. If this is the case, you need to gradually understand and manage your own conditions. When you start your meditation session, as you settle in, it's important to shake your shoulders and relax yourself. No sooner after some people sit and start their meditation session, they start to tilt and slant to one side, they start clinching their hands together, or pinching their fingers, and then start intensely chanting! If you're body has already started slanting and tilting, that means your spine is misaligned, and your stomach and intestines will also be all twisted. Can you imagine how you will feel if you tried to maintain sitting in this position for two hours? Therefore, you must take things slowly and learn to be aware of your own body condition.
To relax your nerves before starting your meditation session, you can softly recite some sacred verses, chant praises, repeat mantras, say a prayer, or sing a song. If you need to do it a few times to feel more relaxed, go for it! These practices can help you calm down and achieve tranquility, thereby naturally making your nerves relax.
Hopes this helps any beginners out there. Namaste 🙏

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Memory transcription subject: Captain Sovlin, United Nations Fleet Command
Date [standardized human time]: January 15, 2137
It wasn’t my imagination; our triangular shuttle was sinking like a stone. Water bobbed up against the cockpit windows, entombing us beneath the waves. Hull integrity would eventually give out and allow water to flood the compartment. The predators were just watching it happen, with not nearly enough panic showing in their binocular eyes. They made no attempt to inflate a life raft and escape, while we could still get the doors open.
The craft had tipped forward at a slight angle, and the airborne vehicle began to sink nose-first toward a watery grave. A feeling of immense claustrophobia gripped me, as the nightmare scenario came to fruition. My claws wrapped around Samantha’s arm before I could stop myself; the human looked at me with sheer disbelief, and pushed me away. Her nose was scrunched in an obvious sign of distaste. Carlos would’ve definitely been more amenable to my desperate outreach for support.
Samantha heaved a sigh. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just fucking do that, but it better not ever happen again.”
“Please! We’re sinking!” I croaked.
Onso snickered. “Sinking? You don’t feel the engines running? It’s a submersible aircraft.”
Upon closer listening, I could feel the quiet hum of the engines. Somehow, the combustion drive was still running underwater, and pushing us in a controlled manner further into the ocean. There were no signs of leaks seeping through the walls, despite being encased in the depths. I’d never heard of a plane that could fly underwater, but I should’ve gleaned our safety from the predators’ calmness.
If a human is running or terrified, that’s when it’s time to assume our deaths are imminent.
Sam wasn’t the least bit amused by me latching onto her arm, but Tyler and Carlos were both masking smirks. I dipped my head in shame. How had the Yotul known of technology which was unfathomable to the wider galaxy? Until today, I wouldn’t have thought such devices would ever have a use. It was embarrassing that the primitive kept his head better than me around novel technology, though I tried to push that egoistic thought out of my mind.
“Do the Yotul have this kind of technology, Onso?” I prompted the reddish-furred marsupial to answer, though I knew the reply would be in the negative. “I’ve never heard of such things, so I’m surprised it’s old news to you.”
“Well, I took it upon myself to read up on the specs; they were included with our briefing notes. Never know when shit’s gonna break, and someone’s gotta fix it. The Yotul have a saying, ‘Everything can break, so assume it will do so today.’”
“That’s valid. Every spacecraft crash is due to a ‘one-in-a-billion’ mechanical failure; unlikelihood upon unlikelihood. Uh, anyhow, I’m a little out of my element here, clearly nothing like you.”
“I don’t mind the water, Sovlin. Mama had a sailboat, which she’d take around the harbor. It was a little disappointing to hear human water activities involve hunting. There’s so many beautiful things to see; it’s the last untamed frontier. Even after space is explored, the oceans still hold so many mysteries and unique lifeforms!”
“Plenty of humans agree with you, even ones who enjoy fishing like Tyler. We’ll go snorkeling or scuba diving just to explore reefs and view marine life,” Carlos chimed in. “No boat, nothing but a basic breathing apparatus.”
“There’s water sports too. Surfing, where you try to ride massive waves on a board.” Samantha made odd gestures with her hands, as though conveying a series of hills. “Parasailing, up in the sky tied to a boat. White water rafting, where you go down turbulent, rocky rapids in an inflatable.”
I groaned. “Why…are any of those not mortally dangerous?! What is wrong with you predators? I thought you evolved from the fucking trees!”
“It’s all in the spirit of fun, a memorable experience. Don’t tell me none of it sounds like something you want to try once.”
“No, those stunts sound horrible. This is horrible. I can see the depth meter going up…it’s double digits! I can’t see the sky!”
“Quit being a baby.”
“Quit being a predator! I hate humans; I can’t stand you! Onso, back me up.”
“The surfing sounds totally badass. I can imagine riding a wave up to its crest, and trying not to fall,” the Yotul answered. “We should try it together, old man. Conquer your fears, do things you think you can’t.”
“I am not doing that. No way on the cradle.”
Tyler sported a devilish grin. “Hey, it could be worse, Sovlin. You could be doing shark cage diving.”
I offered the blond human a blank stare. Through the cockpit behind him, I noticed orange-striped fish swimming clear of the aerosub. There was a dark shadow in the murky depths below, which filled me with palpable unease. What if it was some sort of massive predator which hid in this oceanic range? Chewing at my claws with anxiety, I tried to parse through what he said.
Cage diving? That can’t be what it sounds like; locking yourself in a cage and jumping into the water…not trying to escape. What’s a shark?
We moved closer to the ambiguous shadow within the turquoise ocean, which I tried to ignore. The humans would freak out if there was reason for alarm; I couldn’t make a fool of myself again. Plastering a look of confusion on my face, I flicked a claw at Tyler for an explanation. His blue eyes twinkled with amusement, and my former guards watched with interest.
“Ah, you’re wondering what that is.” Officer Cardona tapped his fingers against his holopad, and noticed that his Yotul exchange partner was intrigued too. He showed a picture to Onso first. “I’d say it’s self-explanatory. Oh, and, yes, they have side-facing eyes, but sharks are predators. Humans have movies about them eating us, even though that’s uncommon in reality.”
Tyler turned the device toward me, and I flinched away with disbelief. Sure enough, a pack of Terrans were suspended in a metal cage below the water. “Sharks” circled them with predatory intent, serrated teeth visible. From what I’d learned about Gojids being omnivores, I’d trust the primates on binocular eyes not being necessary to eat living food. However, deciphering human behavior was a maddening endeavor. Was this some twisted way of reasserting their dominance as apex predators, against animals that dared to prey on them?
“You just said it was in fucked-up human movies…it’s CGI! That’s not a real fucking thing!” I screamed. “I thought we were keeping it professional, huh? You all are definitely saying, and making up, predator nonsense on purpose, at this point!”
Tyler flashed his teeth. “It’s real. We don’t need to make anything up; humans will go to great lengths for thrills.”
“That seems to be tempting fate. I’ve always believed in respecting nature, though it would be cool to see these animals up close,” Onso said.
“Good news: you can see them in aquariums too.”
I thought humans would think water decorations were stupid…wait, what did he just say?!
My spines were bristling. “You have aquariums, like the Kolshians on Aafa?”
“Yep,” Tyler affirmed.
“And instead of sea plants, you keep dangerous predators in them?”
“Yeah? They’re cool to look at, man.”
“Protector, I don’t care if we’re in the middle of the ocean. I want off this sinking boat!”
Carlos stifled a laugh. “Well, your wish is about to be granted. This puppy isn’t meant to dive deeper than 100 meters. The UNS Deep Core is up ahead.”
The foreboding shadow had grown larger in my periphery, and my eyes swiveled back to the viewport. It was a submersed ship, but one that was so large, its breadth faded into the murky distance. There was no way this wasn’t in the triple digits of meters long; the all-black, undecorated exterior would cause an observer to mistake it for a shadowy patch of water. There was a tower affixed to its spine, which perhaps housed an equivalent to a bridge.
“The humans must’ve snuck this ship here days ago. How long has it been lurking?” I murmured to myself. “They couldn’t have airdropped it from too high up either…I don’t think.”
Samantha rubbed her hands together. “If you think this is the only one sent, think again. We’re told as much as we need to know, Sovlin, but it’s a blast to fill in the blanks.”
Our aerosub glided down to the bottom of the Deep Core, before flipping over and latching onto to a watertight door. It was similar to how a spacecraft would dock for boarding; my concerns were assuaged a little, noticing some familiarity. Packing such a large crew into a metal tube must be stressful for any land-dwelling species, but the humans were insane enough to tuck their senses aside. There could be enough predators aboard to compose a small village.
I disliked the fact that I was hanging at a ninety-degree angle, though I didn’t voice my complaints. The humans awkwardly dismounted, with Tyler helping Onso down. Carlos hoisted me to my own two feet, and I took a steadying breath. Our own watertight hatch, which I mistook for an emergency exit when I thought it was a sane vehicle, was on the right exit. There was a click, as human personnel opened the circular door from the other side.
The five of us were helped up through the threshold into the submarine, and we admired the metal inner workings of our surroundings. The tunnels were narrow, with small doorways leading between compartments; many required a slight step up to clear. One Terran greeted us at our docking point, though he wore a different uniform than the getup I was used to. I wasn’t sure what to expect from land predators who operated underwater, but the ample facial hair checked out with my mental image.
“Welcome aboard the Deep Core. I’m Commander Fournier; your presence is requested on the bridge,” a gruff voice greeted us.
I blinked in confusion. “May I ask why…sir?”
“First aliens to step foot on a submarine. You’re VIPs; it’s a good photo-op, you could say. Follow me.”
Of course, the humans are worried about optics as we’re descending to an outlandish location. Sometimes, they’re awfully predictable.
Claustrophobia threatened to flare up, with the cramped passages and lack of direction. Onso showed no such uneasiness, forcing Tyler to ensure that the Yotul studied objects with his eyes, not his paws. The primitive seemed enamored with any machinery or design quirks, even basic things such as hinges. I was really trying not to look down on him, but when he was gawking at simplistic nails, it was difficult. At least his dimwitted curiosity was a distraction from our present environment.
The bearded commander led us to a steep stairway, and communicated for us to follow his lead. There was a thunderous bark of “up ladder!” before the human-in-charge popped open a hatch. Tyler waved a hand at me and Onso, signaling for us to climb after Fournier first. I ensured that my balance was steady, hustling up the rungs. There was a railing surrounding the hatch, along with a safety chain that our guide was unclipping.
“Sir, may I ask how much air we have left?” I couldn’t resist asking, despite being out of breath from the short ascent. “I presume you’ve been submerged a few days. Even spaceships can only carry a few weeks of oxygen, and I don’t see any tanks, um…”
Fournier issued a throaty laugh. “Scared of submarines, Gojid?”
“A little, uh, yes…sir.”
“Don’t be. We have as much air as there is water in the ocean.”
Onso bounded after us. “The Terrans use electrolysis to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen in seawater they collect, then use that O2 to ventilate the ship.”
“Why, I like this one!” the commander bellowed. “Read up on subs, haven’t ya?”
“It drew me in…like a vortex of knowledge. I always liked machines.”
“Then I take it you’re an engineer? I can see that kid-like glee in your eyes.”
“A rocket engineer. The unchanging rules, the complex order, the concreteness and the planning: it speaks to me. Having a new class of machines to study really lit that fire, for the first time since the Federation killed my passion. Not even studying your weaponry truly scratched that itch. It’s just, I never dreamed I’d discover a new alien boat!”
“Well, well! I’m no engineer, but I’ll be happy to share what I know. Feel free to ask any questions; we love talking about what we do, to someone who really wants to hear it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Commander Fournier led us into a stout compartment, where a vast array of gadgetry and screens covered a wall. Humans were examining a green circle on display, with a rotating line and labeled angles. Data feeds were also listed there, which led me to conclude it was a sensors equivalent. Navigations was at the front, at least from the appearance of several control columns. Some predators appeared to be acting as officers or supervisors, peering over others’ shoulders and issuing commands.
This isn’t that dissimilar to a starship, but where is the viewport? How can they see?
I cleared my throat. “Sir, where is the viewport? There’s no windows!”
“We don’t need windows,” Fournier explained. “We use sonar, because sound travels further in water than light. Glass or transparent materials are just a weak point in the hull, and a potential source of leaks if we take a hit.”
“Okay. Then why did the submersible craft we took here have windows?”
“Because it needs to be a spacecraft too, and you need to see when you’re flying. It’s useful enough to outweigh any concerns,” Carlos chimed in.
“This is so cool!” Onso bounced on his digitigrade hindlegs, and the commander fortunately didn’t take offense to his excess excitement. “The sonar doesn’t need to see at all. It just…listens.”
Fournier nodded. “Precisely. I saw you examining the bearings on our machinery, and I’ll impress upon you the importance of noise reduction down here. We keep everything detached from the hull frame to avoid vibrations…even dropping a wrench can give you up to an enemy. Sonar receptors pick up the slightest vibration, and then, they know you’re there.”
“That explains why your engines have to be so quiet. I was reading about how you try to avoid cavitation…you know, where the vacuum pressure caused by the propeller makes water boil. The bubbles pop and give off noise.”
“You don’t need a rundown at all, Yotul; you already know everything. We have a speed range where we can operate silently.”
I was growing bored of the technical explanations, and Onso, a primitive, was outshining my knowledge to the humans. Perhaps the Yotul was desperate to prove himself as an academic equal, but he didn’t need to prattle on about science like he was reading a textbook. While there were impressive feats of engineering on display here, I agreed with Samantha’s assertion of naval obsolescence. What good was fighting in the water, except in this extraordinary circumstance?
The predators can hide far away from any targets or locations of value forever. How ingenious. They’d be unseen altogether if the other human tribes realized this theater was irrelevant in a war.
I suppressed an irritated huff. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“Granted,” Fournier replied, a curious twinkle in his eyes.
“Respectfully, sir, I do not see the purpose of putting all this time into submarine development, at least for military aims. You’re a spacefaring species, and you’re incredible at ground assaults. What use is it to hide so far away from civilization…from the action? Maybe you sink a few ships that are using an outdated method of moving resources, but I don’t get it. You have better weapons.”
“You really don’t know? To use your word, these ships are masterful predators; nearly undetectable, capable of hearing the slightest sound, and able to surface anywhere in the world. But it goes far beyond that. The destructive power housed here is a hell of a deterrent. That’s why we’d never actually trade nukes like ya Feddies thought we did.”
“Nukes? I’m not following.”
“There’s tens of nukes stuffed onto just one of these things. We can hang off the shore anywhere, and fire missiles while underwater. Not that we have to be close to our target; we can shoot ICBMs halfway around the world. You never know where we are, if it’s right down your neck or prowling distant shores. We’re waiting to strike, anywhere and everywhere, with the technology to end civilization itself, even after command is destroyed on land. Obsolete, my ass.”
I gulped with discomfort, wishing I could recede into the ship walls. That declaration was so calm yet predatorily destructive; there were chilling implications for the extent of human aggression. It suddenly made sense why Earth tribes were intent on sniffing these predators out of the ocean’s recesses, and why the subs tried to remain undetectable at all costs. Should the current battle go awry, Talsk could be devastated by an unseen arsenal of epic proportions.
As Commander Fournier took his post, I tried to understand why humans would devise such machinations, for use against their own civilization. The Federation’s “irradiated Earth” could’ve been a reality; these capabilities shouldn’t exist in any culture. I didn’t understand why my kind-hearted friends would even think of such predatory weaponry. Surely, understanding the apocalyptic consequences of these vehicles should’ve convinced them not to build them.
My therapist could’ve elaborated further on the full heights of Terran aggression. Humans didn’t enjoy killing, yet they brainstormed and actualized the optimal ways to kill every human in existence? It was a paradox. Perhaps their predator nature factored into their decision-making in a manner they didn’t understand. Orders were issued to begin our descent, and for all sailors to report to battle stations. I felt the submersible tilt down, so I tried to clear my head of what the primates were capable of.
I have to believe that they will never actually do something like that…that their goodness will prevail. They didn’t snap after Earth, right? I trust their better judgment.
“W-well, if there’s really a base at the bottom of the ocean, the Farsul are fucked,” I murmured to my posse.
Samantha’s fist tightened, as her smirk returned. “I’d say they are.”
The numbers on the depth meter continued to escalate, as the submarine navigated the ocean which spanned below us. Locked inside a steel tube with predators, and knowing the potential of its onboard weaponry, my nerves were anything but quelled. The submarines somehow eclipsed even the worst starships in its dastardly capabilities. The Farsul wouldn’t be prepared for this predatory contraption, should we stumble across any of their flotilla.
I was glad that the humans were on the same team as me; there was no telling where their capacity for annihilation ended.
---
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Hi guys
This is the first half/first two acts of a serial killers thriller-horror I'm redrafting, based loosely on the Golden State Killer. The premise is that a young couple in the year 1980 relocates to California from the deep south. While the couple faces marital issues, homesickness, and a mounting sense of nameless dread, their new neighborhood is plague by violent middle-of-the-night home intrusions by an unknown man who has recently escalated to murder.
I'm wondering if the first half -- which focusses solely on the perspective of the young couple, and doesn't feature any of the serial killing (that comes in the latter half), has enough of the simmering and intrusive dread to hook readers/viewers? My ideal reader is someone who comes to the script completely blind of the premise and experiences the same shock halfway through the characters do, with the sudden explosion of violence.
Link to opening 50 pages here
Any feedback is helpful, no matter how little or much you read! Happy to look at exchanging reviews for someone else posting here.
Thanks babes

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And what would that kind of reset mean for the remainder of DCEU's roster, including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the rest of the Justice League, Suicide Squad, Shazam and so on.As Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse neared theaters, though, Johnson clarified that statement in a recent sit-down with Yahoo Entertainment (watch above). “I feel like this is our opportunity now to expand the DC Universe and what we have in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which I think is really cool just as a fan, is we introduce five new superheroes to the world,” Johnson tells us. Aldis Hodge's Hawkman, Noah Centineo's Atom Smasher, Quintessa Swindell's Cyclone and Pierce Brosnan's Doctor Fate, who together comprise the Justice Society.) “One anti-hero.” (That would be DJ's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.) “And what an opportunity. The Justice Society pre-dated the Justice League. So opportunity, expand out the universe, in my mind… all these characters interact. That's why you see in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, we acknowledge everyone: Batman , Superman , Wonder Woman, Flash, we acknowledge everybody.There's also some Easter eggs in there, too.So that's what I meant by the resetting.Maybe 'resetting' wasn't a good term.only one can claim to be the most powerful superhero .And Johnson, when gently pressed, says it's his indestructible, 5,000-year-old Kahndaqi warrior also known as Teth-Adam, that is the most powerful superhero in any universe, DC, Marvel or otherwise . "By the way, it's not hyperbole because we made the movie."And we made him this powerful. There's nothing so wrong with “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” that it should be avoided, but nothing—besides the appealing presence of Dwayne Johnson—that makes it worth rushing out to see. spectacles that have more or less taken over studio filmmaking, but it accumulates the genre's—and the business's—bad habits into a single two- hour-plus package, and only hints at the format's occasional pleasures. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” feels like a place-filler for a movie that's remaining to be made, but, in its bare and shrugged-off sufficiency, it does one positive thing that, if nothing else, at least accounts for its success: for all the churning action and elaborately jerry-rigged plot, there's little to distract from the movie's pedestal-like display of Johnson, its real-life superhero. It's no less numbing to find material meant for children retconned for adults—and, in the process, for most of the naive delight to be leached out, and for any serious concerns to be shoehorned in and then waved away with dazzle and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” offers a moral realm that draws no lines, a personal one of simplistic stakes, a political one that suggests any interpretation, an audiovisual one that rehashes long-familiar tropes and repackages overused devices for a commercial experiment that might as well wear its import as its title. When I was in Paris in 1983, Jerry Lewis—yes, they really did love him there—had a new movie in theaters. You're Crazy, Jerry."Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse " could be retitled 'You're a Superhero, Dwayne'—it's the marketing team's PowerPoint presentation extended to feature length. In addition to being Johnson's DC Universe debut, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is also notable for marking the return of Henry Cavill's Superman. The cameo is likely to set up future showdowns between the two characters, but Hodge was completely unaware of it until he saw the film. “They kept that all the way under wraps, and I didn't know until maybe a day or two before the premiere,” he recently said Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) FULLMOVIE ONLINE Is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Available On Hulu? Viewers are saying that they want to view the new TV show Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse on Hulu. Unfortunately, this is not possible since Hulu currently does not offer any of the free episodes of this series streaming at this time. the MTV channel, which you get by subscribing to cable or satellite TV services. You will not be able to watch it on Hulu or any other free streaming service. Is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Streaming on Disney Plus? Unfortunately, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is not currently available to stream on Disney Plus and it's not expected that the film will release on Disney Plus until late December at the absolute earliest. While Disney eventually releases its various studios' films on Disney Plus for subscribers to watch via its streaming platform, most major releases don't arrive on Disney Plus until at least 45-60 days after the film's theatrical release. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has finally ended the box office blues. It will be a Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse call, but based on the estimates, the year's biggest opener remains Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness with its $187 million start. Nonetheless, Wakanda Forever's $180 million opening is a huge one, being the biggest ever for the month of November (beating the $158 million of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire), the second biggest of the year, and the 13th biggest of all time (though it could go up or down a few slots once the actuals come out). It led an overall weekend box office of $208 million, which is the fourth biggest of the year and the biggest by a long shot of the past four months, with no other weekend since July 8 -10 even going above $133 million. This isn't the $202 million opening that we saw from Black Panther in February 2018, nor should we expect the amazing legs that were able to get that film to an astonishing $700 million. With that said, expect it to perform strongly throughout the holiday season, likely repeating the five-weekend number-one streak that the first film had, and it shouldn't have any trouble becoming the second-highest-grossing film of the year so far, beating the $411 million cume of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The audience response is strong, with the A CinemaScore falling below the first film's A+ but bouncing back from the B+'s earned by Doctor Strange 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder, which ranked among the worst for the MCU. an improvement over the recent franchise installations, with the aforementioned films coming in at 74% and 64% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes, both at the lower end for Marvel films, while Wakanda Forever's 84% is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verser to franchise norms, though not meeting the high bar set by the first Black Panther' s 96%. The sequel opened to $150 million internationally, which Disney reports is 4% ahead of the first film when comparing like for likes at current exchange rates. Overall, the global cume comes to $330 million. Can it become the year's third film to make it past $1 billion worldwide despite China and Russia, which made up around $124 million of the first film's $682 million international box office, being out of play? It may be tough, but it's not impossible. Legging out past $500 million is plausible on the domestic front (that would be a multiplier of at least 2.7), and another $500 million abroad would be a drop of around $58 million from the original after excluding the two MIA markets. It'd be another story if audiences didn't love the film, but the positive reception suggests that Wakanda Forever will outperform the legs on this year's earlier MCU titles (Multiverse of Madness and Love and Thunder had multipliers of 2.2 and 2.3 respectively). As for the rest of the box office, there's little to get excited about, with nothing else grossing above $10 million as Hollywood shied away from releasing anything significant not just this weekend but also over the previous two weekends. When Black Panther opened in 2018, there was no counterprogramming that opened the same weekend, but Peter Rabbit and Fifty Shades Freed were in their second weekends and took second and third with $17.5 million and $17.3 million respectively. That weekend had an overall cume of $287 million compared to $208 million this weekend Take away the $22 million gap between the two Black Panther films and there's still a $57 million gap between the two weekends. The difference may not feel that large when a mega blockbuster is propping up the grosses, but the contrast is harsher when the mid-level films are the entire box office as we saw in recent months. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which is the biggest grosser of the rough post-summer, pre-Wakanda Forever season, came in second with just $8.6 million. Despite the blockbuster competition that arrived in its fourth weekend, the numbers didn't totally collapse, dropping 53 % for a cume of $151 million. Worldwide it is at $352 million, which isn't a great cume as the grosses start to wind down considering its $200 million budget. Still, it's the biggest of any film since Thor: Love and Thunder, though Wakanda Forever will overtake it any day now. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse came in third place in its fourth weekend, down 29% with $6.1 million, emerging as one of the season's most durable grasses and one of the year's few bright spots when it comes to films for adults. The domestic cume is $56.5 million Fourth place went to Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, which had a negligible drop of 5% for a $3.2 million sixth weekend and $40.8 million cume., in fact ) , which isn't surprising considering it's the only family film on the market, and it's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse to grossing four times it's $11.4 million opening. Still, the $72.6 million worldwide cume is soft given the $50 million budget, though a number of international markets have yet to open. Finishing up the top five is Smile, which had its biggest weekend drop yet, falling 42% for a $2.3 million seventh weekend. Of course, that's no reason to frown for the horror film, which has a domestic cume of $103 million and a global cume of $ 210 million from a budget of just $20 million. The one new specialty title of note comes from a filmmaker we don't typically associate with the specialty box office: Steven Spielberg. The Beard's semi-autobiographical family drama Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse opened in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles to $160k, a $40k average. The film expands to 600 theaters the day before Thanksgiving, and it has the potential to break out in a way that none of the other season's awards contenders have. We're also seeing very solid numbers from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which grossed $1.7 million this weekend for a seventh-place finish, bringing its cume to $5.8 million.Alhamdulliah

I've shared fiction here before and it didn't go altogether too poorly, so I'm going to press my luck and do it again. This was written about a year ago, and I'm tired of trying to peddle it to lit magazines. Might as well share it here, know that it met a few eyeballs, and have done with it.
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.

There are only a few posts in this sub about Neveldine-Taylor so it's time to rekindle the flame of these dirtbags.
I've only seen Gamer and some of Crank, but Gamer impressed me so much I'm at least going to try Crank 2 and Ghost Rider 2. Gamer has a great aesthetic that successfully encapsulates the 2009 era in which it was made.
https://letterboxd.com/floorit/film/game

It's absurd to me that this aesthetic was likely planned before Speed Racer (2008) came out. This was the zeitgeist. If anything, it doesn't go far enough. ... The frantic cuts and zooms you see even in dialog scenes (the TV interview) are less common towards the end. What's there is awesome and unhinged.

A mini on these two would be 7ish episodes if you follow both short solo careers. There's a new Hellboy that Taylor just finished shooting so you could coincide a series with that. It's just 4 movies in the Neveldine-Taylor canon.
Without doing research, it appears these two either got small-budget blank checks, or turned down more expensive work before getting Gamer, a fairly expensive ($80M today) blank check, and Ghost Rider 2 ($80-$100M today). Then they part ways and make their own stuff. Their only critical success is when one of them abandons the reality show quick-cut wild aesthetic.
https://www.reddit.com/blankies/comments/axuum5/the_case_for_including_neveldine_and_taylor_in/

Okay, okay, hear me out: Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have one of the most interesting runs as Blank Check directors in modern action history after the Wachowskis and maybe Nolan, and it's only four movies long. A duo that immediately made a name for themselves with a tight-budget action thriller that was a moderate success and made a decent amount back gets a short string of blank checks to do absolutely whatever they wanted (which, of course, meant making two of the most unnecessarily intense, terrible-in-a-sort-of-glorious-way action movies of the past several decades) before landing a high profile job on Ghost Rider 2, a movie which did fine and immediately ended their combined career for some reason. Neveldine directed the Vatican Tapes, a movie that managed to flop on a 13 million dollar budget, and Taylor directed Mom and Dad (the only film with any hint of the Neveldine/Taylor structure to be critically well-received and an excellent bonus episode), but they haven't worked together since Ghost Rider 2. Everything else about the two is also sort of incredible - they invented the Roller Dolly because they knew they'd need a rig that allowed them to shoot while roller-blading(!?), Taylor is still technically tapped to direct a feature adaptation of the video game Twisted Metal, and Neveldine lives on a farm and spent two years smartphone-free so he could focus on hunting and farming "somewhere in New York." Overall, these specific two friends seem like the absolute definitive vulgar auteurs, and even when their movies aren't very interesting, the directors themselves seem to have enough going on to fill a single, month-long miniseries with truly compelling episodes.

Ever since Stasis, there have been a lot of discussion about what other two was gonna be, and Strand made it obvious each one is complete opposite of a Light subclas.
Solar is heat/energy ----Stasis is cold/ lack of energy
Arc is mobility, not being stopped ---- Strand is stopping everything in its tracks.
By that comparison, Void is consumation, destruction of something down to the atomic level, so i think last Darkness subclass is gonna be something about creating things. But less like creating walls like Stasis, instead more like creating existence. Bungie have been adding more summonable things since Beyond Light, strand turrents, threadlings and the hunter strand knife etc so i bet that we are gonna get some kind of summonner kind of subclass.

Firstly - If anyone from the Brave New Dawn Campaign comes across this post, stop reading now or I'm gonna kill Sven - I am not joking. (And for Erilaz who doesn't care about Sven, I will give you negative 5 Strength for the rest of the campaign and every attack will be with disadvantage).
Right, on to the question.
So for Curse of Strahd I have been reading the main book, Raising the Stakes, and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. I have also been looking online for insight.
Anyway, I've come to understand Strahd a bit as a character, and I know he is driven by 3 things - Tatyana, finding a consort, finding an heir. I also know he has one hell of an ego and likes to flaunt himself in front of the characters (There's Vasili, which I want to expand upon). Through various tidbits of information, I've learnt that Tatyana's soul has been reincarnated various times, and in my headcanon, Strahd has tried to take her multiple times : - by force, abducting her as a child and raising her, through stockhold syndrome, by fear...etc and every time she still dies before he is able to turn her (The Dark Powers have a twisted sense of humour it seems, and love to see Strahd suffer above anyone else). In some instances, he has even gone so far as to leave Tatyana's reincarnation alone, and yer the girl still always dies. In his head, therefore, Strahd has convene himself that he is the only one able to save her.
So, this time, he wants to make her fall in love with him and come to him willingly. Maybe that would break the curse? (No, it doesn't, but his self importance knows no bounds, and the idea of him not being able to possess something drives his mad).
What I've noticed a lot in various artworks of Strahd is that he is a lot older and not what I'd call *conventionally attractive*, so I've decided to use that to my advantage - whenever anyone sees *Strahd*, he is using an illusion to make himself look old, gaunt, bony and rather frail, despite the overpowering aura. But in fact, Strahd is quite youthful and a very beautiful man (hence the ego coming in; he's beautiful and he knows it). Yet he never allows anyone to really see his real self because he quite likes to walk among the populace, and even approach travellers who intend to *kill Strahd*. He finds it amusing and likes toying with adventurers. (Think of it as the Strahd persona being the illusion whilst Vasili is what he actually looks like).
My players will meet Strahd under a guise (Not Vasili) because Ireena is with them, and he kind of join their party, trying to get to know them, find out their weaknesses, befriends them, and try and make Ireena fall in love with him. My problem is that I am not 100% which *guise* I should play. I have 2 in mind, and I am torn between which one.

1. As a Barovian native called Aleksei who is an administrator dealing with the wills of people after death. Because heirs and family are a little scattered, he is often travelling between Barovia and Vallaki. They meet him initially at the Blood on the Vine, but later he joins them when they *save* him from a wolf attack on their way to Vallaki. He comes across as meek and reserved, but is able to fill them in on a lot of Barovian lore, and enforces this view of Strahd being this old and crusty vampire in his castle. He can also speak about the various adventurers before them who have tried and failed to kill Strahd.
   
2. As a former adventurer called Nathaniel whose party tried to kill Strahd and failed, leaving him the only survivor. Strahd would've gathered information about the outside world from former adventurers and his vistani spies, enough to create this persona whose false goals align with the party's, and they welcome him in. He is then able to explain that he has been unable to escape the mist and has been stuck in Barovia for a few years, and has defaulted to working odd jobs. He is cocksure and very charismatic, and is able to bridge the divide between Barovia and the Outside world.
   

I want my Strahd to BE IN THEIR FACES, I want him to befriend them, to lull them into a false sense of security, I want them to trust him and see him as one of their own, all the while he is collecting information, data, and doing everything he can to fuck with them from behind the scenes. His ego knows no bounds and he has been BORED beyond belief in his castle, but is now intrigued by these new heroes, particularly the Lawful Good Divine Soul Sorcerer Aasimar, who he so badly wants the Dark powers to corrupt, and he wishes to see it first hand; oh how he will relish that view. And of course, the twist will be, when the team comes to face Strahd, it will be their friend, and it will be the question of whether or not the *real* Strahd is this vampire overlord, of if Nathaniel/Aleksei is who he really is deep down.
Also, I'm homebrewing the ending because I don't like the idea that even if they defeat Strahd, he will eventually come back, and currently one of my players - unbeknownst to them - is in possession of Sergei's Journal, which will, if it all goes to plan, finally break the cycle, culminating in a battle against the Dark Powers themselves. But that's for another day.
I want to know, from DMs who have DMed CoS before, if this could be played well, and if so, any idea which of the two I should go for, and any tips on how I can make it even more devastating to my players? I wanna squeeze their hearts with this one.
Thank you, and I apologise if I'm doing anything wrong. I am a new DM, but I love worldbuilding and writing ._.

"Where the hell is that ass," the woman grumbled. In her right hand, she twisted an old-fashioned coin through her fing"Where the hell is that ass," the woman grumbled. In her right hand, she twisted an old-fashioned coin through her fingers while her other ran through her shimmering hair.
"Nice trick," commented the man next to her, "I've rarely seen such old money." The woman snorted. "Save it. In this neighborhood, every other business is still paid in cash." She turned her head and eyed the guy like a predator eyes its prey. Gaunt, with worn clothes and burned-out smile, the stranger sat next to her, a green-and-blue drink in front of him. Not her target. She relaxed a little.
Anzio took big sip. The bounty hunter was better trained than expected, but didn't see through him yet. Still, the plan needed to be changed.
Unobtrusively, he tapped his left wrist three times. Now two of the three dots next to the woman's photo were red in his augmented eye. "Seren, another round," he said aloud. The robot behind the counter immediately began swirling the bottles around in his half-dozen arms.
"If you're going to hit on me, you're going to have to come up with a better line. I'm here on business, after all," the woman said, pulling up one corner of her mouth in a slightly demanding manner. Anzio laughed softly. "I don't have a better one. My name is Ley." "Not your real name," the bounty hunter grinned. Anzio resisted the urge to look elsewhere.
She could conceal her weapon, but not the predatory look.
"Hardly," he said instead, possibly a little too quickly. The bounty hunter's gaze hardened a shade. "But," he followed up emphatically slowly. "... I would also like to know your false name."
"Xola," the woman replied slowly. She flipped the coin up one last time, then put it in a pocket. "I'm looking for someone."
"Anyone in particular?" echoed Anzio playfully. He knew exactly who she was looking for.
"Yes." the woman replied, picking up her glass. She hadn't drunk from it in minutes.
Anzio relaxed his muscles, ready to pounce. If she drew her gun, his chances would be extremely slim. But in this dive, she would hardly dare. Everyone here was armed, guests and staff alike. And ready to draw.
"Unless I'm your target, I'd lay off the predator look," Anzio joked. Brutal honesty was deceiving more often than one would think.
The bounty hunter smiled faintly. "Maybe you're my target."
Anzio tilted his head.
"But not in the way you think," the woman followed up, now smiling ambiguously.
"What happened to your business now, anyway?" gasped Anzio as the woman broke away from his lips for once. "Fuck business," the bounty hunter replied, breathing heavily and fiddling with his shirt.
"Good," Anzio said with a change in tone. The woman looked up, just in time to see the tiny injection device in his left hand.
With a tiny prick, she was injected with the nerve agent. In less than sixty seconds she died, in the hands of her target.

I'm a 60F, mother of two. We can do this. I'm 2+ years AF after a million Day 1s. There were so many reasons to quit but the one that really clicked was the dread of continuing to embarrass my children and not setting an example for them. Too painful to think about. Nothing was worth that.
IWNDWYT.

Sorry for the delay. Time’s become one of the many things in my life that I can no longer keep a firm handle on.
It’s been what? Maybe a fortnight since that first Sauna Club.
A week after that was the whirlwind of events that changed my life beyond recognition.
The day that Andy went missing & the night in which I came so close…so damn close to saving Jen’s life.
All I wanted to do was lose a bit of weight…and now I have. I’ve nearly shed everything in my life that was weighing me down.
After today you won’t be hearing from me again.
I’m truly sorry.
The morning after Jen died I woke up in a state of shock. Standing up I had to peel myself from the bedsheets. My back was a mess of burst blisters and pustulated skin. The rest of my body was pink all over except my feet. They were black…The soles looked like dried lava, charred to a crisp but with dark red veins cutting through. And for how hideously burned I looked I was freezing. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering.
“Look at you” I’d wheezed at my reflection. Even my voice was wrecked. That world had stolen everything from me. But it didn’t matter. I’d get it back.
I called my wife and told her that I’d just tested positive for Covid.
“You sound terrible Mike” She’d said with a sigh, but she didn’t really care.
“I feel terrible. Maybe you should stay away a few days until I’m in the clear?”
“You sure?” feigning sympathy…her trademark.
“Yeah…I’ll be fine. Call you when I’m on the mend.” I hung up then. The first time in my life I’d ever cut her off. I didn’t really care what she had to say any more. My heart beat for someone else now. Only Lydia and I understood the truth of this world, and that strange world beyond. I’d made her a promise. I was going to finish my sauna and together we’d go back.
I spent the rest of that day googling, watching youtube videos and chatting with strangers on reddit about how to put the finishing touches to my sauna.
The next day I left my house for the hardware store.
I hadn’t realised how much people would stare…gasp even when they saw the ruins of my skin. At least I was finally losing weight though. Nothing fit any more. The steam in that world was washing me away. I didn’t care. Soon I’d have Lydia by my side and then what would anyone else’s judgement matter.
Finishing the sauna took the best part of a week. I’ve never been a practical guy. In that week I heard more from Lydia than my wife. She checked in daily to see how I was getting on and when we’d be ready to return to that world of fire and fate.
I insulated the small wooden shed as best I could so that it would contain the heat and smoke, built a small fire bin to contain the coals, bought a bucket for the water, 2 small benches and a sand timer for the wall. I roughly laydown paving and put in a grate for drainage.
It wasn’t much to look at, but it would do the job. For days I soaked the wood until the whole thing was saturated enough not to go up in flames with us inside the moment I sparked the coals.
And then last night I text Lydia to say we were good to go.
An hour or so later she arrived. For a moment she stood on the doorstep staring at me and I had no idea what she was thinking. It wasn’t the same face of shock and disgust that everyone else gave me now but…something else…Something that makes more sense now.
She was changed too.
She had been so bloodied the last time we left the Sauna. Bleeding from a hundred scratches all over. She had healed but the scars were everywhere. She was no longer the perfect blond gym girl I’d met two weeks ago…she was better…she was mine.
I knew that it was cheating the first time I laid eyes on her, the first time she’d touched my leg. What difference would it make if we fucked in my marital bed? So we did.
As we lay there afterwards I traced my fingers along the scars on her perfect body and wished that it was her I’d married…her that was pregnant…carrying MY baby.
It was then we heard the car pull up on the driveway. My wife was home.
“I’ll meet you out there” I said calmly. Lydia nodded and left the bedroom making her way towards my sauna. I wanted my wife to catch her in the kitchen…to see her naked body and KNOW that both of us could fuck up this marriage if we wanted to.
But Lydia managed to slip out of the house just as my wife arrived.
“Mike?” she whispered tentatively in the kitchen “Whose car is that?”
“I’ve got a friend round. We’re trying out the sauna.”
“What? You don’t have-” she flicked the kitchen light on and gasped as she caught sight of my face.
“WHAT THE FUCK?” She screamed. The state of my burnt swollen face bringing tears to her eyes, whatever love she still had left for me draining away. That was fine. Whatever love I had for her had died on the backseat of my car.
I looked at her swollen bump and knew we were finished.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’m busy now” I said coldly and I could see my words rattled her. She didn’t recognise me any more. I hardly recognised myself.
“What happened?“ she kept repeating and I just shrugged.
“Go to bed.” For the first time in my life she actually listened to me. She slipped away into the dark of our room and closed the bedroom door. Too scared and disgusted to be around me any longer.
I took off my robe and followed Lydia out into the garden. If she was worried about the state of my DIY sauna she didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything at all. We both knew why we were here and what had to happen next.
Spin the sand timer.
A ladle for each of us.
And then the smoke engulfed us. I was surprised at how well this small hotbox shed was working. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe the magic wouldn’t follow us here. That maybe I’d missed a step or that maybe the whole thing would just go up in flames.
But it worked.
I was alone travelling through that thin film of white heat that separated our world from the sauna place. Perhaps that was the nature of the ritual: That it has worked for so many people throughout the centuries if you have the fire in you and believe.
As I waited for the smoke to clear I tried to hold in my mind why I was coming to this dangerous world once more.
For Lydia – to find out what kept her coming back here again and again and what it was that was tearing apart her body.
For Andy – to find out what had happened to him and why he now seemed to belong to this place.
For myself – To steal something, anything…some divine knowledge from this place as vengeance for Jen. And get away with it.
The smoke cleared and I knew we’d arrived. It was different though, in all the ways I thought it would be. Just like the Sauna in the gym had become a warped reflection of itself, so had my DIY shed. The only difference was the door to the outside world. There was no poolside view, no horrible visions of those watchers and their nets, just the sound of a ruined world rushing by and screams. So many screams. Through them all I could hear the voice of Jen.
‘HELP…PLEASE HELP MIKE. THEY’RE HURTING ME.’ Her old voice cried endlessly. This place had already tricked me once though...so I turned my back to the door.
Lydia was already several steps up and about to leave.
“Lydia wait” I wanted to stop her so we could come up with a plan for how we would manage this visit “I want to help you.”
Lydia gave me a weird smile that I couldn’t read and with a shrug she disappeared into one of the corridors.
“Wait!” I called again and followed her up a few steps not knowing why she would just leave like that…
I could feel again how different this place was. The gym steps had been hot but still had a smooth varnish finish. These steps were rough and splintered. I starred into the corridor and gulped. Remembering what had happened last time I faced this gauntlet alone. There was no sign of Lydia and the corridor was dark but I set off anyway. I’d found Jen, I could find Lydia.
The tunnel twisted and turned, with more tributaries than last time, more maze like. Stairs leading up and down, passages to crawl through or clamber over, tight spaces to squeeze into and long painful drops.
The passage forked and forked and forked and at each junction I had to guess at the right direction but in truth I was lost and all the while the steams grew thicker around me, until it was like I was wading through them.
Then I heard the sound.
A sort of rhythmic creaking and groaning and a woman gasping. I realised that it was coming from the passage parallel to me. Like how Andy had helped me before…
The sound grew louder and then multiplied. Another groan coming from below me…and then another to the right.
I pushed my face the slats and tried to peer through to see the cause of the noise but in my heart I already knew. I knew that groan and that voice…and I’m man enough to know the tell-tale sound of creaky springs and a rickety bedframe.
It was my wife.
And when I peered through the gap I could see myself and her wrapped up in each others arms. Some how on the other side of this wall was my bedroom at university and I was seeing into the past. I was seeing the first time the two of us had sex. It was drunk and fumbling but even then I’d known she was special.
I moved to the other side of the room and through the slats saw a different past. Our honeymoon suit and the sex we’d had there.
I pulled away, confused why the mists were showing me this… things I already knew to be true. Below my feet I could hear more sounds, more groans more pleasure…but less familiar to me. Sounds of enjoyment that I’d never made my wife elicit. I ducked down into the swirling mists that had gathered around my waist and crawled on my belly across the wooden floor. I pressed my eye down to the slat, dangerously close to the splinters and peered until I could see the shapes writhing.
My wife and…
My brother. The two of them pounding away in my bedroom. In my bed.
I wrenched away, unable to watch it, gasping…and as I gasped I felt hot white tendrils of smoke crawl down my throat.
There were so many new sounds to hear…all across the floor before me…more pockets of sound and I couldn’t help myself. I crawled on, listening at each new noise and then seeking out the shape of the next man who would make me a cuckold.
My wife and her boss.
My wife and a man I’d never seen before.
Another stranger
And another.
Each time I gasped…each time sucked in more white heat.
I stood up gasping for air. If these visions were true…how many other men had my wife slept with? I’d known in my heart for a while that the child she was carrying wasn’t mine but…I thought always thought that in this place I might find out who the father was and have satisfaction in that…have revenge with that knowledge but…
Did she even know? In her nights out in the town, night after night she made a joke of me. A joke of our vows.
Did she even care who the father was, so long as it wasn’t me! How little satisfaction did I give her that she would fuck ANYONE.
I wretched and thin coil of steam coiled out of my mouth and into the world.
How long had I been here? Breathing in these mists.
This place was getting inside me.
Clouding my judgement.
This room had broken my heart and given me no satisfaction…Only more doubt, more betrayal, more confusion…more resolve to find Lydia. To save Lydia and start my future anew with her.
I pushed on blindly down tunnel after tunnel, hell bent on finding her before the time ran out.
“MIKE!” Lydia’s voice screaming, loud, hurt and close by.
“Keep calling Lydia…I’m coming. I’ll find you”
She did “Mike, Mike, Mike” as rhythmic as the groans of my cheating wife. Finally I turned a corner and found her.
Lydia lay with her back against the wall of a terracotta chamber. The sight of room not made of wood took me aback.
I ran to her.
Deep gashes covered her body, like something had sliced deep into her arms and legs and across her stomach. I couldn’t bear to look but I knew that the gauges were dangerously deep. Lydia was bleeding more than a human body could take.
“What happened!” My eyes tried to take in the room quickly looking for the source of the danger, seeking out an attacker in the darkness. My brain remembering what Lydia had said the first time we’d come here. “Every maze has its minotaurs.”
“My brother Mike…I came here to get him back.” Lydia spoke slowly, her words slurred and woozy.
“Where is he?” I cradled her, not knowing which gash to try to stem.
“Dead…he died so young…my piece of shit dad…” the thoughts tumbled out of her mouth erratically “But I can get him back…I just need to…feed the flames…”. Lydia raised an arm to point at a large black pit in the middle of the room.
I’d ignored it at first, taking it for just another one of the sauna’s coal pits, but this one seemed different. Set into the stone work of the floor and surrounded by a selection of craftman’s tools: pliers, hammers, blades, tongs, scalpels, ancient looking drills. Rudimental but efficient and delicately laid out on a piece of linen.
This was a Smiths room, and in the centre was the furnace. The coals inside blazed but they weren’t black…they were a crimson red, and they throbbed like organs…and they seemed to be swimming in a small pool of-
I heard a crack and then I felt the pain that belonged to it and collapsed to the floor.
I looked down and saw that my knee was no longer where it should be.
Lydia had a mallet in her hand that I’d some how missed before and with a violent twist she had stroke me across the leg. Now she was trying to push herself to standing above me.
“But I can’t give the fire all the ingredients it needs…not alone…I’ve been feeding it blood…every time…but…I can’t give it my bones…my skin…my eyes…I can’t give it that and still be there to love him…to love him in all the ways that SOME ONE SHOULD HAVE” Lydia screamed and the words echoed down the corridor.
Her body shook with the exertion and every time her muscles clenched a fresh squirt of blood oozed from her wounds. There was a mad glint in her eyes
I understood now.
I understood why someone as beautiful as her had been showing an interest in a fat idiot like me. She’d just been fattening me up for the slaughter.
She didn’t love me. Just like my wife…I was just another useful stooge to her.
For a moment I lay there, waiting for the mallet to come down on my head…I thought about just rolling over and letting the fire pit have me. At least in death I could be useful to someone. At least Lydia would get her brother back…
Then a fury rolled across me, a rage I never knew I had inside. Like all the mists I’d swallowed were bubbling up inside me and I decided then that I didn’t want to die.
Not yet.
“Fuck you.” I grabbed the nearest implement to me and flung it at Lydias head as hard as I could. The pliers caught her in the temple with a hard crack and I watched her teeter backwards towards the furnace. She caught her balance on the very edge and as she wobbled I saw a long dribble of blood cascade from the cuts in her arms and into the fire pit. The cloud of red mist exploded into the room curls of crimson smoke snaked their way upwards like tentacles.
Standing was harder than I’d anticipated with my knee on the wrong side of my leg, but I had no choice. Not if I wanted to live. Leaning hard against the wall I stumbled away as quickly as I could. Back out into the corridors and away through the maze, with no mind on getting back just getting away!
I paused when I reached the first crossroads. Breathing hard and checking behind me to see if Lydia was following but there was no sign of her.
I leaned against a wall trying to catch my breath and wondered if there was a way I could set my knee.
The blade entered my back and I don’t know how deep it travelled before I realised what was happening. I peeled myself off the skewer and turned around. Through the slats in the wall I could make out Lydia on the other side. She had stabbed through the partition with a long ceremonial blade.
“Come back to the room Mike. I can fuck you while you die?”
I blinked in disbelief and pain, trying to work out whether she had already killed me…
“It was going to be Sak…that fucking himbo…but he went and killed himself before I could” Lydia let out a weird little giggle. “So it’ll just have to be you…come on Mike…Look at you…you’ve got plenty of body to spare…do something good for once in your life and die…die so my brother can live.” Lydia plunged the sword again through the slats as hard and fast as she could and the tip buried itself in my gut. Shallow, but enough to hurt.
The sword was long and could reach me through the wall. I had to run.
This time Lydia was following. Alternating between screaming and laughing. Matching me step for step on the other side of the wall. Periodically she would thrust the sword again, opening up a new nick on my body, but her aim was bad. Neither of us could move quickly…both of us were bloodied and hurt as we moved down the corridors.
I thanked the stars for this small wall between us but was already wondering what I’d do if these corridors merged? If I rounded a corner and found myself face to face with the girl I had once loved…who had now become the very minotaur I’d most feared. Could I kill her before she killed me? Did I have that in me…
The corridor forked the other way and my relief was immeasurable. I ran and found Lydia’s voice growing fainter away from me. I ran, ignoring the grating sensation in my leg and the blood pumping out of my back.
I ran until I found myself back in the chamber where this all began. I ran so quickly that I couldn’t stop myself. I stepped out and realised that there was nothing below my foot apart from a cavernous drop down to the stone floor below. A bone breaking drop that would have proved fatal were in not for the arm that grabbed me.
I dangled for a moment…one foot out over the abyss before the person pulled me backwards.
Before I could thank my saviour I heard Lydia’s voice again and my blood froze.
“Please Mike…no one will ever love you like I do…Who else would want to fuck that flabby burnt body of yours…please? Let’s be broken together…” Lydias voice fluttered down from the end of the tunnel and I realised she had caught up with me.
Her body came exploding out of the mists as she charged at me like a bull…the ceremonial blade outstretched and ready to run me through.
I was too tired to save my life any more but again the hand pulled me backwards in the nick of time.
The sword carved through the spot where I had been standing moments before, followed by Lydia…her momentum carrying her over the edge. I could see the shock on her face as she realised there was no more floor and then she fell. Down past the arena like steps on all sides…a drop that there was no surviving. Her head bounced on the penultimate step and her spine curved around until she kicked herself in the face and then the jumbled mess that had once been Lydia crashed to the floor.
The crunch was terrible, even from up here.
I peered out over the ledge at the ruined remains of Lydia’s once perfect body.
“Muh…Mi…ke…mmmm…Miiiii….Mike. Mike…Muh” the sound drifted up…as her mouth moved and the remnant of her brain tried to make a final thought. Her limbs were contorted at impossible angles, bones poking through the skin, a shattered wreck. It seemed cruel that the universe would so thoroughly break something that had once been so beautiful. Lydia was now a twitching blob, just waiting for death to take her.
And it did.
As I watched the door to the sauna opened and in walked one of those cloaked watchers. The sight of them struck a fear in me. I didn’t realise they could come in here…I had thought that this world would keep us safe from them…but it had no interest in me.
The watcher entered, hand in hand with a small boy…a child no older than 5 years old…with the same sandy blonde hair and mousey features as his sister.
The boy looked up at me for a moment and the same look of mad hatred that Lydia had given me crossed his little features. Then his hand made contact with the coal pit and he was gone. Back to the living world. Lydia had got what she’d always wanted…but it had cost her everything.
The watcher scooped up her decimated body, her mouth still uselessly trying to make words, her eyes desperately roaming around the room…still not certain that she was dead.
The watcher took her all the same. Out and away through that exit that didn’t belong to us…out into a sandstorm of red winds beyond…and then the door closed and Lydia was no more.
Andy touched me gently on the arm and with a sad nod began to climb up and away.
I watched him go…I hadn’t seen him properly in a fortnight, but he looked so different.
Older. Less sinewy…and more barrel like. Somehow more…stately. There was no mistaking that it was Andy, but he was no longer the retiree that took care of his body…he had someone how become one of the sad ailing old men who spend their lives basting themselves and cooking in a…
He looked like a roman emperor
“Are you coming?” He said in a voice that had changed as well. The cheeky fun all gone and replaced with a strange solemnity.
“Coming where?”
“Up” Andy smiled.
“What’s up there?” I asked dumbly.
“A group of men…much like me…we sit and chat…and watch the world go by. But we really see it Mike. We see it all…this world, and more…their pasts, presents and futures…we sit at the top of the sauna and we pass our judgements and where we can…we help.” Andy looked at me sadly “we try our best. You’ve lost so much Mike…so much weight…there’s barely anything tethering you down any more…you’ve done well. There’s a seat up there for you. If you want it.”
I stood. Not knowing what to do or say…I tried to picture the summit. The top of this upside down pyramid of steps and the committee of fat old men who sat there.
A group of men who had stepped out of time to stare down into the mists below and see the world go by. A ring of men with wrinkled skin and withered dicks.
Is that what I wanted to become?
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course.” Andy smiled “you know where to find us.” And up he went…away into the darkness.
I went back down, down to the coals even though the timer had long since run out.
I touched the coals and found myself in my home DIY sauna again…the walls and ceiling on fire…Lydias corpse on the floor, burning away gently, and clutched in her hand that long ceremonial blade, beginning to glow red.
I left quickly and closed the door behind me.
Smoke billowed into the night air as my Sauna turned into a bonfire.
And now I’m here. Letting you know how all this ends.
I think I’ve got another few more moments before my little sauna collapses…enough time to spin a timer one last time, pour a ladle on what remains of the coal pit and get back to that other world…
I’ve been on the bottom of life for so long…just another one of you fucking losers and I’ve had enough. I’m going to join the men who sit at the top…those men who sit in judgement on all things…
But before I go back I’m going to pass judgement here. My unfaithful wife is still asleep in the room next door and now… she’ll never wake…her nor the bastard inside her.
I’ll have my revenge on her for…and all the women who tried to take from me.
Lydia’s ceremonial sword is still hot on my lap…I’ll wake her just before I do it. I want to see the look in her eyes.
All I wanted to do was lose a bit of weight…and she’s the last thing to go.

When will everyone stop sleeping on BILMURI
Nothing but top tier BANGERS, never misses! Bilmuri is the entire package wrapped up into one FUN experience. I mean what even is genre when it comes to this band? They bring it all to the table with a core of core and exceed the box of genre all while not being forced. Blending it all seamlessly. Grooves, laughs, emotions, breakdowns, choruses and hooks that you can’t stop singing in your head all day. It’s always pure joy when something new drops, and they never fail to surprise me with how much each new addition to their collection SLAPS. Their two newest singles Boutta Cashew and All Gas are incredible, and each infuse a country twist into the mix. Never been a country fan, but gd how the fvck did they manage to make me fall in love with these tracks like this!? They were on repeat ALL DAY yesterday. The fan base they have garnered are all silly af and kind as can be. Last year I took my 4yr old son to a show and everyone protected us from the pit next to us. They made a barrier of love and kept smiling at us. At the end I walked past Johnny Franck with my son sleeping in my arms and he knucked me and said “your son is a legend”. I mean c’mon, does a show get anymore cool than that? If you’ve been sleeping on Muri ya best get to it folks. I PROMISE you will not be disappointed. If you’re into heavier stuff just let them cook and you’ll soon realize just how happy they make you feel. Next thing you know you’ll be smiling through their tracks and having a laugh at how much the breakdowns randomly fit so perfectly. Enjoy friends!