For anyone who wants to see how things began.
https://www.reddit.com/HFY/s/S97b2fqIjx
“In what universe would I ever do you a favor? “ I say, sweeping the floor of the reinforced barn.
“It’s not a favor, it’s a trade, bud.
What do you want in return? “ Trenchcoat asks from within the coffin-like cage.
“To be back home, 8 months ago. “ I reply.
Over the past few weeks I’ve managed to integrate myself into the day to day life on the farm. Things are still a grim, horrifying slog, but with every day it gets a bit easier to deal with.
“Give me something I can do. “ The creature pleads.
“Why, so I can wind up on the end of another ‘ Gotcha’ moment? I’m good. “ is my answer.
A few minutes of silence go by, Augustus breaks it.
“I don’t know many secrets of the universe. Facts, not really my bag. But I know a couple.
How about I share one with you?
No one, not the pope, not my brother, not the shit-bird perched on the highest branch of my twisted family tree, knows what happens when you die.
Some of us never will, of course. Others have ways of avoiding it, but at the end of the day, when the lights truly go out, we know next to nothing.
We do know one thing though. There is judgement, by who? Who knows? Why? Not important.
But at the end of the day, if your battery can’t be recharged, you really want to be thinking about how many marks are on each side of the ledger. “
I don’t reply, and for the next hour or so I ignore the pleading and hinting Trenchcoat does.
But that night, as I sip acidic tea, and try to get a handle on how in the fuck old televisions function, his offer is at the forefront of my mind.
He wants to kill, specifically 6 teenagers who, according to him, have been murdering classmates yearly in a twisted ritual.
He wants me to think this is some kind of noble act, he frames it as almost superheroic. The evil prick knows how I feel, knows that I see the blood on my hands every day, and would kill ( possibly literally) for some way to atone.
Is it a play? I honestly don’t think so, something about how eager the twisted thing is, about how he’s treating the situation as a buyer’s market makes me think something about this makes it important to him.
He offers me everything besides safety and protection. I’m desperate for help, but I have no way to hold him to any agreement.
So the thought rolls around in my mind, staving off the few hours of sleep I get.
“Okay, so, I have it on good authority that tea is supposed to taste better over here. What the hell is wrong with this? “ I say, sitting around an outside table with Sylvia, Dafydd and Colin.
Sylvia smiles, “ Barium, calcium, and a touch of castor oil. “
I look at the brew, then at her.
“If I had told you when you got here you need to drink that to mitigate the effects of working with void touched objects and creatures, you’d have assumed the worst, and found a way to avoid drinking it.
Good to see you becoming more perceptive though. “ Sylvia explains.
“That’s called paranoia, Syl. “ I reply.
She laughs, lighting a cigarette.
“Do you know why I’ve let you figure things out on your own? “ The ancient woman asks.
“Accepted? Yes. Understood, not in the slightest. “ I answer, wondering what sadist invented the scone.
“It’s because I need a leader. Someone who can understand, not a boy who puts his head down and listens to orders.
Someone who can make their own decisions when the time comes.
And I think that time is coming soon. “ Her statement feels like a question.
“If I chose to be here I’d be honored.” I counter.
“That attitude on the other hand… needs work.
Nikolas, today, we talk about what’s really going on.
We play a role in a much larger organization, us, and other families like us, are the ‘boots on the ground’ so to speak.
Our job is not to capture creatures, or horde esoteric goods. We do not foil the schemes of demons, nor blind those who look too deeply into the abyss.
We’re given information about events that could steer the path of humanity into a brick wall. And our job is to make sure they don’t happen. “ Sylvia reveals.
“Something is happening with these fights? “ I ask.
“As I said, perceptive.
Yes, it could be next week, it could be in a decade or two. Right now, we know very little about it, other than when it happens, it would be in our best interests to be of a high standing in the pits. “ She replies.
I absorb the information, and t drug laced tea in equal measure. As I do, I feel something, I feel I’m a part of what’s going on.
This is going to sound dumb as hell, but up until this point I hadn’t been taking things seriously. Don’t get me wrong, death is on the table, and I was trying to avoid that. But I was just treading water, hoping something or someone came by and to get me out of this situation.
But as Syl lays things out, I start to think of my place here, what I can be doing to better my state.
“Here is the part where you avoid telling me why you couldn’t have used anyone around here. “ I prod.
I keep her gaze, Colin and Dafydd shift uncomfortably.
“Augustus, he’s a tricky one. But a very lucky find for us.
I’ve tried 2 others. A boy and a girl, both I practically raised.
Marco, he was a warrior. But the demon got in his head. There was nothing that could be done beyond end his suffering.
Zelma, I won’t talk about.
That thing, it has a way of turning someone’s best traits against them. You, are a blank slate, but you’re family. You’re my best guess as to how we can use him to our advantage.
And this is why I need you, not to listen, but to understand. To see what’s happening, and make your own decisions. If I were to give you my knowledge, if I were to arm you with the best weapons, and the most powerful esoteric objects I know. He’d just have more to turn against you. “ Sylvia’s revelation scares me and puts a massive weight on my shoulders all at the same time.
Confidence and fear are both dangerous emotions. The two of them are almost like drugs in a way.
After eight months of mainlining fear, the tiny line of confidence Sylvia gave me, went straight to my head.
Trenchcoat told me where to find a video file. And after a couple of weeks of running it through every possible test I could, to check for any kind of manipulation, supernatural or otherwise, I watched it.
I was confident that the world would be much better off without the people committing the vicious acts contained in those twenty minutes of footage.
A teenage view of morality, I admit. But what do you want, I’m a teenager.
We watch the abandoned house from across the street. It’s a dingy, urban blight affected suburb, that being said, how no one seems to notice the seven foot freak with me, I have no idea.
The kid inside smoking stolen cigarettes and illegally supplied booze is a husky young guy of about 14. The half dozen kids that show up a couple hours later look closer to my age, last couple of years of high school I’m guessing.
The way they get into the house tells me they’ve done this before. The backpacks they all carry tell me they’re there for a purpose.
“How fucking funny would it be if I just killed you here and took off? “ Trenchcoat says, looming behind me.
I tense.
“It’s a joke. Out of my whole rotten family, Art and I, are close. I’m not going anywhere.
Unfortunately for you. “ Trenchcoat shoves me to the ground as he walks toward the house.
We get in through a basement window, I fit easily, Trenchcoat contorts his body to fit through the thin opening, somehow doing so silently.
I keep hearing Sylvia in my head. Telling me how she needs someone that can make his own decisions.
As I stand in the litter strewn basement, beside a creature with child murder on it’s mind I question the decision that I made.
At first the illumination is dim, nothing more than scraps of moonlight filtered through splintered wood. But with an industrial click, suddenly a half dozen lightbulbs bathe the basement in harsh, yellowish light.
Harsh, but not harsh enough to cause the reaction I see from Trenchcoat.
He squints and tries, unsuccessfully to turn away from the lights. Something about them is causing him discomfort. I get my hopes up for a moment he’s going to burst into flame or turn into dust or something, but no dice.
The sight of the walking nightmare looking pained and confused makes me panic. But before I can think of how I fucked up, I hear a voice.
The room, by the sounds of it, the entire house, has been rigged with speakers. Cleverly recessed in sconces and corners.
“Augi, long time no see. And I see you brought a little Renfield fella with you. “ The voice is modulated, Trenchcoat looks curious for a moment.
“Who, is this? You that clown that’s been fucking with Art?” He guesses.
The voice laughs, “Nope.
Who I am, is a guy who managed to find a few boxes of lightbulbs from ’93.
Then again, with eBay, that could make me just about anyone. “
Trenchcoat turns and looks toward the window we came in. He reaches a hand toward it, stopping a few inches away.
“That’s fucking interesting. “ He says, eyes darting around the room.
“Isn’t it though? “ The voice replies, clearly hearing the creature’s whisper, “ Tonight you get the pay for centuries of the worst shit committed by man or beast. I’ve made sure of that. No one in this house is going anywhere for the next 8 hours.
I’m sure the rest of the houseguests are pretty confused as to what’s going on. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so let me give you the Cliff’s notes.
You kids have been killing a monster a year for half a decade. You were the perfect bait, and I have faith you’ll be able to outwit Augi long enough to make it out of here.
If not, you’ll still have helped kill one of the worst things to walk the face of the earth. “
“What the hell is he talking about? “ I ask, a sinking feeling in my gut.
“That’s what you’re worried about right now?
Yeah, these kids are more Scooby gang than Manson family. Don’t blame me for the fact it only took an out of context exorcism video and some promises of making things right with the universe to get you on board with killing them. “ Trenchcoat spits.
I feel afraid, stupid and small. Which is to say, lately, business as usual.
I begin to break lightbulbs, I notice no runes, or anything else that would indicate they have any kind of supernatural origin.
As the basement dims, Trenchcoat starts to breathe easier.
“What’s going on, what stopped you from leaving? “ I ask.
“This little shit is playing The Game. “ Trenchcoat says to himself as much as to me. He looks deep in thought, inspecting the glass from the bulbs.
“What are you talking about? “ I say, my voice cracking slightly.
I hear noises upstairs, frantic foot falls. Indecipherable shouting.
Trenchcoat turns to me, exasperated and filled with anger.
“You’ve heard of ‘Rules’ right? All that ‘Don’t turn left on East street at 3:24 am kind of shit? “ The creature starts, “More and more of them popping up lately. Can’t miss the things.
Well, your kind seems great at finding them, but fucking awful at figuring out what they are. It’s not someone’s new job, or creepy school. The answer is so damned simple, but all of you’ve missed it.
It's a game. It’s, The Game.
It’s ran by the thickest branches of my family tree, and the stakes are high enough even I don’t really understand.
And whoever has us here, he’s weaponized it. The crazy fuck. “
“Call on your family for help then. “ I say, starting to deal with the fear and confusion.
“You first. “ Is Trenchcoat’s reply.
I get his point, and for a twisted, shitty moment, I find myself relating to the murderous thing I’ve been saddled with.
“So what’s the plan? “ I ask.
“Get my hands on whoever’s been stalking me. Between A and B, probably kill those little do-gooders upstairs out of spite.
I need you to circumvent rules we come across. Humans need to agree to follow the rules, it’s why people encounter them in jobs and schools so much. I’m not human, if you haven’t noticed. I don’t get a choice. “ I’m shaking my head as Augustus relates his plan.
“We’re not hurting those kids. “ I say defiantly.
“I’m sure you’ll have no problem with that.
But I’m a God damned child killing monster, bud! How long is that going to take to sink the fuck in?
Me not doing what I do, isn’t like giving up smokes. Think of it like not having a slash for months on end. Sooner or later, like it or not, I’m either finding a bathroom or pissing my pants. “ the rant scares me, but it makes me think.
Something about Augustus, it seems very, 90’s. Whoever was on the speakers was talking about the lightbulbs being from ’93. I’m picking up on a very distinct pattern.
I file that information with the rest of the disconnected lore I’ve managed to find on Trenchcoat as I follow him up the steep, narrow set of stairs.
He whips the thin wood door open, taking an aggressive, lurching step into the livingroom beyond. Surely ready to dispense too far quips and limitless violence, as per usual.
But that doesn’t happen, his rage filled scowl turns into a look of resignation, “Fuck”, is the monster’s last word before he disappears.
I cautiously walk up the loose splinter ridden stairs, expecting Augustus to be waiting around the corner, or engaged in combat with some other horror.
But once I get to the top, there’s nothing more sinister than a livingroom covered in dust and graffiti strewn with old bottles and new stains.
I know my chance when I see it. The particle board sealing the bay window is rotten, the glass long since broken.
No monster, no crazy family, I’ll take my chances with the streets of the U. K.
I tap the crumbling wood with a foot, it rattles, it won’t take much to make a hole.
I line up a kick, freedom no more than a quarter inch of rotten wood away.
“I wouldn’t do that. “ Says a voice behind me, male, around my age I’d guess, but with a confidence that makes me listen, “ Rigged with a load of C4 in the window frame.
Don’t take my word for it, guy wasn’t very subtle. ”
Sure enough, I see small wires running along the edges of the frame and embedded in the particle board.
I turn around, the six people standing in front of me have a vibe I can only describe as severe.
“Are we going to have issues? “ a slight, dark skinned guy asks.
“You making threats? “ I reply.
“No, he isn’t. “ it’s the same voice that warned me about the explosives. It belongs to a squared jawed kid with short black hair, he’s wearing a grey hoodie, and separates himself from the group. “ Call me Kent, and I’m in charge of making threats.
Sid, he’s our people person, he’s just trying to see if you’re someone we need to worry about. “
“We don’t have time to figure this kid out, leave him. “ a short, ginger girl says.
“Ami, why don’t I stay out of equipment, and you and Kent let me figure this kid out?” Sid says.
“I’m Nik. “ I volunteer.
“Good to meet you Nik. “ Sid says, walking around Kent, “Didn’t mean to start things off on the wrong foot.
We’ve just gotten used to doing these kinds of things in our own way over the past bit. We get a little… weird around this time of year if I’m being honest. “
I nod, apprehensive at giving any kind of detailed response.
“Derik” says a tall, pale guy, “ Research. “
“Liam. “ a tanned boy in a flannel shirt and deep blue jeans tells me, “ Oxford doesn’t talk, accident a couple of years back. I’m logistics, he figures spooky shit out. “
Oxford is thin and bald, his face looks much older than it should. Like he’s the victim of some kind of wasting disease.
Telling these kids the truth would be, complicated. And something about their war vet demeanor, makes me want to keep things simple.
So I give them a version of the truth. One where I was plucked from my room by Trenchcoat, and brought here for a slow death.
They buy it. I think.
“Well, I don’t know what this Jigsaw wannabe has planned, but trust me when I say, it can’t be much worse than the things we’ve went through. “ Kent says, trying to be reassuring.
“Just, one more thing. “ Sid begins, “ Why all the scars? “
I know I’ve won most of the group over, but I don’t like the look Sid is giving me.
“Work on a farm, on top of that, the family owns an auction. Lots of bent steel and splinters, what can I say? “ I say, trying to sound casual.
“Fair enough, that accent though. “ Sid’s look becomes almost predatory as he talks.
“Immigration my guy. What’s with the third degree? “ I reply.
“We’ve just met and I’ve only asked three questions.
Humor me here though.
You get taken in the night by that thing that winked out of existence.
Seems pretty nice of him to let you put on shoes. “ Sid lets his statement hang.
Kent turns, I don’t like where this is going. Panic and fear start to well up.
“What’re you thinking Sid? “ Kent asks.
“Kid’s lying. But he’s good at it. “ Sid answers.
“You saying this has turned into a, me, situation? “ Kent’s question starts a deep pit in my stomach.
“I don’t know if we need to go that far. But I don’t like the idea of him having seen our faces. I think this is a Liam situation. “ As Sid says this I look to Liam, who already seems deep in thought.
“Local cops will back our story, but he could go beyond them.
We tie him up until all of this is done, and we get some video of him putting a blade into the body upstairs. He goes telling any stories, it’s us and the locals versus some Yank on video stabbing the kid. “ Liam suggests.
I tried to fight, it went, embarrassingly. Kent had me on the ground in some kind of arm lock in about a second.
I’m bound to an old wooden chair with electrical cords, dragged into a room on the second floor where the chubby kid from before lays face down in a coagulated pool of his own blood. Surrounded by the trappings of misspent youth.
The door locks, and I stare at the corpse, wondering what in the hell went on up here, and in what universe are these psychopaths anything other than what they seemed on screen.
Time becomes almost malleable. I’m terrified to the point where every moment seems to stretch out forever.
Then, I hear it. A wet, organic noise. It starts below the body, and slowly starts to spread.
After a minute or two, the body starts to jerk and twitch. The room is dim as hell, but some kind of ropey, flesh-like substance, is sealing off the door.
I watch as the corpse clumsily gets to it’s feet. It’s skin pale, it’s throat slit to the point of near decapitation.
The head falls backward, obscenely with a small spurt of thick blood.
I scream, I thought I’d been getting used to being face to face with monsters. But fully bound, inches away from a kid that seems to be filled with a twisting mass of barbed, writhing, intestine like tentacles, I realize I’m not used to shit.
The ropey mass forms the barest suggestion of features, a shifting, lumpen mass of ever moving tendrils coming from what used to be the kid’s neck.
The sound spreads more, cracks in the floorboards and walls begin to show hints of the tendrils filling them in like spray foam.
No one is hearing my screams, or if they are, they have no interest in helping.
Ever wonder how you’d handle torture? I think if you’re the kind of person to be reading this, it’s likely you have.
I started by pissing myself.
The second the thin tendril touches my hand, I feel a blinding, flensing pain. I can do nothing but watch, as thousands of nearly hair thin spines tear and consume my flesh. As it slowly, almost, curiously makes it’s way up my arm, it leaves a bloodless, scarred furrow about an eighth of an inch deep.
My second reaction was to lose any pretense at defiance or dignity. I thrash and scream, beg and offer. All of this turning into choked sobs as the thing starts to do much of the same with another tendril.
It felt like I was in hell, every inch of me nothing more than a canvas for this artist of misery.
But pain, it can only go so far. Whether we’re talking about my tolerance, or this thing’s interest.
Mutilation, the brutal wedding of pain and loss. That was it’s next step.
A thick, almost centipede like tendril sits on my pinky like a hot iron. I can only watch in horror as I see fat, then muscle, then bone, then, nothing.
My voice shreds, I tear my wrists and ankles trying desperately to break the expertly tied wires.
My mind is at the breaking point, the creature in front of my makes a terrible, high pitched keening I assume is laughter.
My body is a roadmap of scarred pits and lines. My hand sports a cleanly severed finger. Fuck me, I wish things ended there.
Of all the important parts of the human body, the eye, tends to feel the least pain. Which isn’t to say, as I watched the greedy, grasping claws slowly take pieces of one of mine, it didn’t hurt, but the worst part, was knowing what was happening.
The vision in my left eye begins to distort at first, the edges getting blurry, then going dark. Bit by bit, chunk by irreplaceable chunk, the creature takes half my vision.
I can feel the shifting air on the bare socket, to call what I’m doing screaming, would be understating things to the point of absurdity.
My brain reels at what has just happened. I can feel my grip on reality begin to loosen, pain, worse than can bare, loss of half my sight, it’s too much.
My brain feels filled with static, for a few brief moments I swear, I can hear someone, a voice, trying to tell me something.
But then, a smell hits me. Something so foul, so alien, it yanks me back from the brink of disassociation. I gag and choke, as the air becomes thick with the rotten, chemical reek.
Then, I see it, I see, him.
As randomly as he disappeared, in an instant Trenchcoat is in the room.
He’s torn apart, wounds so deep and ragged, I can see the door on the other side of the room through the worst of them.
One arm is a twisted, broken mess, the flesh jacket torn to shreds of necrotic tissue.
The look on his face is panic, paranoia. A rictus grin of someone that has been kept on his toes for entirely too long.
He trembles and heaves, looking like he could fall over at any second.
He points his good arm at the tendril creature, who I notice has a too familiar eye suspended in it’s shifting features.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the motherfucker who just made me kill my favorite cousin, would you? “ Trenchcoat asks, his voice cracked, and strained.
He gets a confused keening in response.
“Bad day for you then. “ Augustus says.
There is no style to his violence, Trenchcoat grabs the shifting mass, his wicked, claw tipped fingers angling themselves in tendrils. As he lifts the thing, floorboards break, and it’s torn free from the root-like system it was creating in the room.
Three brutal slams cover me in ichor and pieces of creature. Trenchcoat tosses the mewling, twitching pile in a corner and looks at me with disgust.
“You let that thing do this to you? Fuckin’ pathetic, bud.
And who tied you up? “ The nightmare I’ve been cursed with chides me.
“The kids downstairs. “ I say only now realizing I’ve still been sobbing.
One handed, Trenchcoat snaps the wires, then stumbles backward, slowly sliding down the wall.
He coughs, grey, bloody phlegm hitting the ground.
“So, what’s the play here? If this shit broke you, I could use the spare parts, if not, well, you know what the Bible says.
An eye for an eye. “ Trenchcoat grins as he talks, nearly on the brink of death.
And that’s where I think I’m going to leave things. Because, honestly I don’t know what I’m choosing.
I’m mutilated, half blind, using too much of my energy typing to strangers online about things because, I’m so fucking alone here.
If you hear from me again, I hope I made the right move. If not, take this as a lesson on what happens when you screw around with the occult.

For anyone who wants to see how I got into this situation.
https://www.reddit.com/nosleep/s/R0DAycoVIm
“In what universe would I ever do you a favor? “ I say, sweeping the floor of the reinforced barn.
“It’s not a favor, it’s a trade, bud.
What do you want in return? “ Trenchcoat asks from within the coffin-like cage.
“To be back home, 8 months ago. “ I reply.
Over the past few weeks I’ve managed to integrate myself into the day to day life on the farm. Things are still a grim, horrifying slog, but with every day it gets a bit easier to deal with.
“Give me something I can do. “ The creature pleads.
“Why, so I can wind up on the end of another ‘ Gotcha’ moment? I’m good. “ is my answer.
A few minutes of silence go by, Augustus breaks it.
“I don’t know many secrets of the universe. Facts, not really my bag. But I know a couple.
How about I share one with you?
No one, not the pope, not my brother, not the shit-bird perched on the highest branch of my twisted family tree, knows what happens when you die.
Some of us never will, of course. Others have ways of avoiding it, but at the end of the day, when the lights truly go out, we know next to nothing.
We do know one thing though. There is judgement, by who? Who knows? Why? Not important.
But at the end of the day, if your battery can’t be recharged, you really want to be thinking about how many marks are on each side of the ledger. “
I don’t reply, and for the next hour or so I ignore the pleading and hinting Trenchcoat does.
But that night, as I sip acidic tea, and try to get a handle on how in the fuck old televisions function, his offer is at the forefront of my mind.
He wants to kill, specifically 6 teenagers who, according to him, have been murdering classmates yearly in a twisted ritual.
He wants me to think this is some kind of noble act, he frames it as almost superheroic. The evil prick knows how I feel, knows that I see the blood on my hands every day, and would kill ( possibly literally) for some way to atone.
Is it a play? I honestly don’t think so, something about how eager the twisted thing is, about how he’s treating the situation as a buyer’s market makes me think something about this makes it important to him.
He offers me everything besides safety and protection. I’m desperate for help, but I have no way to hold him to any agreement.
So the thought rolls around in my mind, staving off the few hours of sleep I get.
“Okay, so, I have it on good authority that tea is supposed to taste better over here. What the hell is wrong with this? “ I say, sitting around an outside table with Sylvia, Dafydd and Colin.
Sylvia smiles, “ Barium, calcium, and a touch of castor oil. “
I look at the brew, then at her.
“If I had told you when you got here you need to drink that to mitigate the effects of working with void touched objects and creatures, you’d have assumed the worst, and found a way to avoid drinking it.
Good to see you becoming more perceptive though. “ Sylvia explains.
“That’s called paranoia, Syl. “ I reply.
She laughs, lighting a cigarette.
“Do you know why I’ve let you figure things out on your own? “ The ancient woman asks.
“Accepted? Yes. Understood, not in the slightest. “ I answer, wondering what sadist invented the scone.
“It’s because I need a leader. Someone who can understand, not a boy who puts his head down and listens to orders.
Someone who can make their own decisions when the time comes.
And I think that time is coming soon. “ Her statement feels like a question.
“If I chose to be here I’d be honored.” I counter.
“That attitude on the other hand… needs work.
Nikolas, today, we talk about what’s really going on.
We play a role in a much larger organization, us, and other families like us, are the ‘boots on the ground’ so to speak.
Our job is not to capture creatures, or horde esoteric goods. We do not foil the schemes of demons, nor blind those who look too deeply into the abyss.
We’re given information about events that could steer the path of humanity into a brick wall. And our job is to make sure they don’t happen. “ Sylvia reveals.
“Something is happening with these fights? “ I ask.
“As I said, perceptive.
Yes, it could be next week, it could be in a decade or two. Right now, we know very little about it, other than when it happens, it would be in our best interests to be of a high standing in the pits. “ She replies.
I absorb the information, and t drug laced tea in equal measure. As I do, I feel something, I feel I’m a part of what’s going on.
This is going to sound dumb as hell, but up until this point I hadn’t been taking things seriously. Don’t get me wrong, death is on the table, and I was trying to avoid that. But I was just treading water, hoping something or someone came by and to get me out of this situation.
But as Syl lays things out, I start to think of my place here, what I can be doing to better my state.
“Here is the part where you avoid telling me why you couldn’t have used anyone around here. “ I prod.
I keep her gaze, Colin and Dafydd shift uncomfortably.
“Augustus, he’s a tricky one. But a very lucky find for us.
I’ve tried 2 others. A boy and a girl, both I practically raised.
Marco, he was a warrior. But the demon got in his head. There was nothing that could be done beyond end his suffering.
Zelma, I won’t talk about.
That thing, it has a way of turning someone’s best traits against them. You, are a blank slate, but you’re family. You’re my best guess as to how we can use him to our advantage.
And this is why I need you, not to listen, but to understand. To see what’s happening, and make your own decisions. If I were to give you my knowledge, if I were to arm you with the best weapons, and the most powerful esoteric objects I know. He’d just have more to turn against you. “ Sylvia’s revelation scares me and puts a massive weight on my shoulders all at the same time.
Confidence and fear are both dangerous emotions. The two of them are almost like drugs in a way.
After eight months of mainlining fear, the tiny line of confidence Sylvia gave me, went straight to my head.
Trenchcoat told me where to find a video file. And after a couple of weeks of running it through every possible test I could, to check for any kind of manipulation, supernatural or otherwise, I watched it.
I was confident that the world would be much better off without the people committing the vicious acts contained in those twenty minutes of footage.
A teenage view of morality, I admit. But what do you want, I’m a teenager.
We watch the abandoned house from across the street. It’s a dingy, urban blight affected suburb, that being said, how no one seems to notice the seven foot freak with me, I have no idea.
The kid inside smoking stolen cigarettes and illegally supplied booze is a husky young guy of about 14. The half dozen kids that show up a couple hours later look closer to my age, last couple of years of high school I’m guessing.
The way they get into the house tells me they’ve done this before. The backpacks they all carry tell me they’re there for a purpose.
“How fucking funny would it be if I just killed you here and took off? “ Trenchcoat says, looming behind me.
I tense.
“It’s a joke. Out of my whole rotten family, Art and I, are close. I’m not going anywhere.
Unfortunately for you. “ Trenchcoat shoves me to the ground as he walks toward the house.
We get in through a basement window, I fit easily, Trenchcoat contorts his body to fit through the thin opening, somehow doing so silently.
I keep hearing Sylvia in my head. Telling me how she needs someone that can make his own decisions.
As I stand in the litter strewn basement, beside a creature with child murder on it’s mind I question the decision that I made.
At first the illumination is dim, nothing more than scraps of moonlight filtered through splintered wood. But with an industrial click, suddenly a half dozen lightbulbs bathe the basement in harsh, yellowish light.
Harsh, but not harsh enough to cause the reaction I see from Trenchcoat.
He squints and tries, unsuccessfully to turn away from the lights. Something about them is causing him discomfort. I get my hopes up for a moment he’s going to burst into flame or turn into dust or something, but no dice.
The sight of the walking nightmare looking pained and confused makes me panic. But before I can think of how I fucked up, I hear a voice.
The room, by the sounds of it, the entire house, has been rigged with speakers. Cleverly recessed in sconces and corners.
“Augi, long time no see. And I see you brought a little Renfield fella with you. “ The voice is modulated, Trenchcoat looks curious for a moment.
“Who, is this? You that clown that’s been fucking with Art?” He guesses.
The voice laughs, “Nope.
Who I am, is a guy who managed to find a few boxes of lightbulbs from ’93.
Then again, with eBay, that could make me just about anyone. “
Trenchcoat turns and looks toward the window we came in. He reaches a hand toward it, stopping a few inches away.
“That’s fucking interesting. “ He says, eyes darting around the room.
“Isn’t it though? “ The voice replies, clearly hearing the creature’s whisper, “ Tonight you get the pay for centuries of the worst shit committed by man or beast. I’ve made sure of that. No one in this house is going anywhere for the next 8 hours.
I’m sure the rest of the houseguests are pretty confused as to what’s going on. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so let me give you the Cliff’s notes.
You kids have been killing a monster a year for half a decade. You were the perfect bait, and I have faith you’ll be able to outwit Augi long enough to make it out of here.
If not, you’ll still have helped kill one of the worst things to walk the face of the earth. “
“What the hell is he talking about? “ I ask, a sinking feeling in my gut.
“That’s what you’re worried about right now?
Yeah, these kids are more Scooby gang than Manson family. Don’t blame me for the fact it only took an out of context exorcism video and some promises of making things right with the universe to get you on board with killing them. “ Trenchcoat spits.
I feel afraid, stupid and small. Which is to say, lately, business as usual.
I begin to break lightbulbs, I notice no runes, or anything else that would indicate they have any kind of supernatural origin.
As the basement dims, Trenchcoat starts to breathe easier.
“What’s going on, what stopped you from leaving? “ I ask.
“This little shit is playing The Game. “ Trenchcoat says to himself as much as to me. He looks deep in thought, inspecting the glass from the bulbs.
“What are you talking about? “ I say, my voice cracking slightly.
I hear noises upstairs, frantic foot falls. Indecipherable shouting.
Trenchcoat turns to me, exasperated and filled with anger.
“You’ve heard of ‘Rules’ right? All that ‘Don’t turn left on East street at 3:24 am kind of shit? “ The creature starts, “More and more of them popping up lately. Can’t miss the things.
Well, your kind seems great at finding them, but fucking awful at figuring out what they are. It’s not someone’s new job, or creepy school. The answer is so damned simple, but all of you’ve missed it.
It's a game. It’s, The Game.
It’s ran by the thickest branches of my family tree, and the stakes are high enough even I don’t really understand.
And whoever has us here, he’s weaponized it. The crazy fuck. “
“Call on your family for help then. “ I say, starting to deal with the fear and confusion.
“You first. “ Is Trenchcoat’s reply.
I get his point, and for a twisted, shitty moment, I find myself relating to the murderous thing I’ve been saddled with.
“So what’s the plan? “ I ask.
“Get my hands on whoever’s been stalking me. Between A and B, probably kill those little do-gooders upstairs out of spite.
I need you to circumvent rules we come across. Humans need to agree to follow the rules, it’s why people encounter them in jobs and schools so much. I’m not human, if you haven’t noticed. I don’t get a choice. “ I’m shaking my head as Augustus relates his plan.
“We’re not hurting those kids. “ I say defiantly.
“I’m sure you’ll have no problem with that.
But I’m a God damned child killing monster, bud! How long is that going to take to sink the fuck in?
Me not doing what I do, isn’t like giving up smokes. Think of it like not having a slash for months on end. Sooner or later, like it or not, I’m either finding a bathroom or pissing my pants. “ the rant scares me, but it makes me think.
Something about Augustus, it seems very, 90’s. Whoever was on the speakers was talking about the lightbulbs being from ’93. I’m picking up on a very distinct pattern.
I file that information with the rest of the disconnected lore I’ve managed to find on Trenchcoat as I follow him up the steep, narrow set of stairs.
He whips the thin wood door open, taking an aggressive, lurching step into the livingroom beyond. Surely ready to dispense too far quips and limitless violence, as per usual.
But that doesn’t happen, his rage filled scowl turns into a look of resignation, “Fuck”, is the monster’s last word before he disappears.
I cautiously walk up the loose splinter ridden stairs, expecting Augustus to be waiting around the corner, or engaged in combat with some other horror.
But once I get to the top, there’s nothing more sinister than a livingroom covered in dust and graffiti strewn with old bottles and new stains.
I know my chance when I see it. The particle board sealing the bay window is rotten, the glass long since broken.
No monster, no crazy family, I’ll take my chances with the streets of the U. K.
I tap the crumbling wood with a foot, it rattles, it won’t take much to make a hole.
I line up a kick, freedom no more than a quarter inch of rotten wood away.
“I wouldn’t do that. “ Says a voice behind me, male, around my age I’d guess, but with a confidence that makes me listen, “ Rigged with a load of C4 in the window frame.
Don’t take my word for it, guy wasn’t very subtle. ”
Sure enough, I see small wires running along the edges of the frame and embedded in the particle board.
I turn around, the six people standing in front of me have a vibe I can only describe as severe.
“Are we going to have issues? “ a slight, dark skinned guy asks.
“You making threats? “ I reply.
“No, he isn’t. “ it’s the same voice that warned me about the explosives. It belongs to a squared jawed kid with short black hair, he’s wearing a grey hoodie, and separates himself from the group. “ Call me Kent, and I’m in charge of making threats.
Sid, he’s our people person, he’s just trying to see if you’re someone we need to worry about. “
“We don’t have time to figure this kid out, leave him. “ a short, ginger girl says.
“Ami, why don’t I stay out of equipment, and you and Kent let me figure this kid out?” Sid says.
“I’m Nik. “ I volunteer.
“Good to meet you Nik. “ Sid says, walking around Kent, “Didn’t mean to start things off on the wrong foot.
We’ve just gotten used to doing these kinds of things in our own way over the past bit. We get a little… weird around this time of year if I’m being honest. “
I nod, apprehensive at giving any kind of detailed response.
“Derik” says a tall, pale guy, “ Research. “
“Liam. “ a tanned boy in a flannel shirt and deep blue jeans tells me, “ Oxford doesn’t talk, accident a couple of years back. I’m logistics, he figures spooky shit out. “
Oxford is thin and bald, his face looks much older than it should. Like he’s the victim of some kind of wasting disease.
Telling these kids the truth would be, complicated. And something about their war vet demeanor, makes me want to keep things simple.
So I give them a version of the truth. One where I was plucked from my room by Trenchcoat, and brought here for a slow death.
They buy it. I think.
“Well, I don’t know what this Jigsaw wannabe has planned, but trust me when I say, it can’t be much worse than the things we’ve went through. “ Kent says, trying to be reassuring.
“Just, one more thing. “ Sid begins, “ Why all the scars? “
I know I’ve won most of the group over, but I don’t like the look Sid is giving me.
“Work on a farm, on top of that, the family owns an auction. Lots of bent steel and splinters, what can I say? “ I say, trying to sound casual.
“Fair enough, that accent though. “ Sid’s look becomes almost predatory as he talks.
“Immigration my guy. What’s with the third degree? “ I reply.
“We’ve just met and I’ve only asked three questions.
Humor me here though.
You get taken in the night by that thing that winked out of existence.
Seems pretty nice of him to let you put on shoes. “ Sid lets his statement hang.
Kent turns, I don’t like where this is going. Panic and fear start to well up.
“What’re you thinking Sid? “ Kent asks.
“Kid’s lying. But he’s good at it. “ Sid answers.
“You saying this has turned into a, me, situation? “ Kent’s question starts a deep pit in my stomach.
“I don’t know if we need to go that far. But I don’t like the idea of him having seen our faces. I think this is a Liam situation. “ As Sid says this I look to Liam, who already seems deep in thought.
“Local cops will back our story, but he could go beyond them.
We tie him up until all of this is done, and we get some video of him putting a blade into the body upstairs. He goes telling any stories, it’s us and the locals versus some Yank on video stabbing the kid. “ Liam suggests.
I tried to fight, it went, embarrassingly. Kent had me on the ground in some kind of arm lock in about a second.
I’m bound to an old wooden chair with electrical cords, dragged into a room on the second floor where the chubby kid from before lays face down in a coagulated pool of his own blood. Surrounded by the trappings of misspent youth.
The door locks, and I stare at the corpse, wondering what in the hell went on up here, and in what universe are these psychopaths anything other than what they seemed on screen.
Time becomes almost malleable. I’m terrified to the point where every moment seems to stretch out forever.
Then, I hear it. A wet, organic noise. It starts below the body, and slowly starts to spread.
After a minute or two, the body starts to jerk and twitch. The room is dim as hell, but some kind of ropey, flesh-like substance, is sealing off the door.
I watch as the corpse clumsily gets to it’s feet. It’s skin pale, it’s throat slit to the point of near decapitation.
The head falls backward, obscenely with a small spurt of thick blood.
I scream, I thought I’d been getting used to being face to face with monsters. But fully bound, inches away from a kid that seems to be filled with a twisting mass of barbed, writhing, intestine like tentacles, I realize I’m not used to shit.
The ropey mass forms the barest suggestion of features, a shifting, lumpen mass of ever moving tendrils coming from what used to be the kid’s neck.
The sound spreads more, cracks in the floorboards and walls begin to show hints of the tendrils filling them in like spray foam.
No one is hearing my screams, or if they are, they have no interest in helping.
Ever wonder how you’d handle torture? I think if you’re the kind of person to be reading this, it’s likely you have.
I started by pissing myself.
The second the thin tendril touches my hand, I feel a blinding, flensing pain. I can do nothing but watch, as thousands of nearly hair thin spines tear and consume my flesh. As it slowly, almost, curiously makes it’s way up my arm, it leaves a bloodless, scarred furrow about an eighth of an inch deep.
My second reaction was to lose any pretense at defiance or dignity. I thrash and scream, beg and offer. All of this turning into choked sobs as the thing starts to do much of the same with another tendril.
It felt like I was in hell, every inch of me nothing more than a canvas for this artist of misery.
But pain, it can only go so far. Whether we’re talking about my tolerance, or this thing’s interest.
Mutilation, the brutal wedding of pain and loss. That was it’s next step.
A thick, almost centipede like tendril sits on my pinky like a hot iron. I can only watch in horror as I see fat, then muscle, then bone, then, nothing.
My voice shreds, I tear my wrists and ankles trying desperately to break the expertly tied wires.
My mind is at the breaking point, the creature in front of my makes a terrible, high pitched keening I assume is laughter.
My body is a roadmap of scarred pits and lines. My hand sports a cleanly severed finger. Fuck me, I wish things ended there.
Of all the important parts of the human body, the eye, tends to feel the least pain. Which isn’t to say, as I watched the greedy, grasping claws slowly take pieces of one of mine, it didn’t hurt, but the worst part, was knowing what was happening.
The vision in my left eye begins to distort at first, the edges getting blurry, then going dark. Bit by bit, chunk by irreplaceable chunk, the creature takes half my vision.
I can feel the shifting air on the bare socket, to call what I’m doing screaming, would be understating things to the point of absurdity.
My brain reels at what has just happened. I can feel my grip on reality begin to loosen, pain, worse than can bare, loss of half my sight, it’s too much.
My brain feels filled with static, for a few brief moments I swear, I can hear someone, a voice, trying to tell me something.
But then, a smell hits me. Something so foul, so alien, it yanks me back from the brink of disassociation. I gag and choke, as the air becomes thick with the rotten, chemical reek.
Then, I see it, I see, him.
As randomly as he disappeared, in an instant Trenchcoat is in the room.
He’s torn apart, wounds so deep and ragged, I can see the door on the other side of the room through the worst of them.
One arm is a twisted, broken mess, the flesh jacket torn to shreds of necrotic tissue.
The look on his face is panic, paranoia. A rictus grin of someone that has been kept on his toes for entirely too long.
He trembles and heaves, looking like he could fall over at any second.
He points his good arm at the tendril creature, who I notice has a too familiar eye suspended in it’s shifting features.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the motherfucker who just made me kill my favorite cousin, would you? “ Trenchcoat asks, his voice cracked, and strained.
He gets a confused keening in response.
“Bad day for you then. “ Augustus says.
There is no style to his violence, Trenchcoat grabs the shifting mass, his wicked, claw tipped fingers angling themselves in tendrils. As he lifts the thing, floorboards break, and it’s torn free from the root-like system it was creating in the room.
Three brutal slams cover me in ichor and pieces of creature. Trenchcoat tosses the mewling, twitching pile in a corner and looks at me with disgust.
“You let that thing do this to you? Fuckin’ pathetic, bud.
And who tied you up? “ The nightmare I’ve been cursed with chides me.
“The kids downstairs. “ I say only now realizing I’ve still been sobbing.
One handed, Trenchcoat snaps the wires, then stumbles backward, slowly sliding down the wall.
He coughs, grey, bloody phlegm hitting the ground.
“So, what’s the play here? If this shit broke you, I could use the spare parts, if not, well, you know what the Bible says.
An eye for an eye. “ Trenchcoat grins as he talks, nearly on the brink of death.
And that’s where I think I’m going to leave things. Because, honestly I don’t know what I’m choosing.
I’m mutilated, half blind, using too much of my energy typing to strangers online about things because, I’m so fucking alone here.
If you hear from me again, I hope I made the right move. If not, take this as a lesson on what happens when you screw around with the occult.

The time has come.

Our first official trailer is live and the community Discord is open, and of course this was only the beginning! As the foundations are laid we want to make two policies very clear, Content Creation and Dev Comms, and they’re not as scary as they sound.
Read on!

Content Creation

This policy is for 3D Art, 3D printing, AMVs, API Tools, App Development, Archive Curating, Artwork, Audiobooks, Blogs, Bonsai, Chainsaw Sculptures, Comedy Skits, Cosplay, Crafting, Digital Art, Drink Recipes, Educational Materials, Fan Merch, Fan Products, Fanfics, Food Recipes, Gif Making, Graffiti, Guides, Index Building, Infographics, Interactive Apps, Knife Wood Carving, Let's Plays, Live Content, Live Crafting, Lore Readers, Memes, Modding, Music, Music Remixes, Podcasts, Pre-Recorded Content, Programming, Sheet Music, Slice of Life Skits, Story Analysis, Story Writing, Streams, Traditional Art, Tutorials, Videos, Voice Acting, Websites, Wiki Makers, Zen Gardening, and pretty much anything you can think of…
There are only 3 rules:

1. It’s original content you made.
2. There is a point back to Volok Games and/or Chimera CUSTOM XG.
3. No NFTs or AI generated content, ever.

Some examples:

• Heather designed some really cute pins and sold them online. It is her artwork, her storefront, and in the item description she has “from Volok Games”. This is totally fine.
• Alex made traditional art from the game’s weaponry and turned it into a print to sell at a convention in their Artist Alley booth. It is their artwork, at their booth, with the price sign saying “Chimera CUSTOM XG’s [weapon name]”. That is completely acceptable.
• Parker traced the community emotes from the Discord server and put them on stickers to sell. This is not okay since technically he didn’t make the artwork himself.
• Tina took The Team profile artwork, cut out the characters in a program, and put them on shirts to sell. This is also not okay since it is still official artwork. Not cool, Tina.

It’s really that simple. You make it, you share or sell it, you point back. The justification is that it gives fairness across the board, we don’t want to stifle creativity in the least. Why does a streamer or youtuber not have that many restrictions but artists are met with rules and limitations? Not here, not with us. More than likely we’ll be picking up fan merch on our own here and there, we might even work alongside creators in the future, who knows!
That’s it, that’s the whole policy. So go forth, go create.
If you still have questions don't be nervous! We have a channel in our Discord specifically for Content Creation related questions.
Join us by clicking here!

Dev Comms

This is not as scary or as limiting as the title makes it out to be, this policy is simply a guideline for how player to dev and vice versa interactions should go.
“The devs are to be treated fairly and respectfully in all forms of communication. Personal attacks, belittling, purposefully redundant questioning, unwarranted negative comments, threats of any nature, doxxing, and all other forms of abusive communication will not be tolerated in any form, duration, or aspect regardless of the player’s community standing, social media follower count, stream/youtube subscriber count, game hours played, products purchased, ect.”
Note that “being passionate” is never a good excuse for this kind of behavior. This same stance is taken for player to player interactions, to ensure we’re building an inclusive, positive space from the start. That is our gold standard because we value the mental health of our dev team and the general health of the community in its many facets
There is no space for toxic behavior and anyone who brings it will be removed.

Epilogue

The launch of the beta of course doesn’t mean we only fix a couple things, fully launch, and then never touch the game again. We want you, the community, to come on this journey as the game continues to grow. This isn’t the only chapter of Chimera Custom XG either so now is the perfect time to get in on the ground floor.
Don’t forget to wishlist on Steam!
Welcome aboard, CUSTOM soldier.
Sincerely, ~Team Volok

My friends Jose, Luke, and I always search for new things. We invented challenges and explored every inch of our hometown. Not long ago we discovered geocaching. The three of us downloaded this app on our phones and set out. Filling our backpack with miscellaneous junk to replace any “treasures” we found, we rode out on our bikes. We didn’t find too much. A panda pencil hugger and a 2 dollar bill were among our top finds.
Soon, the app leads us off the beaten path. In between our neighborhood and the next, there’s a dead end road that leads to a power plant surrounded by the woods. Through said woods, a dirt path lined by massive power lines.
“Should we be worried about, you know, electrocution?” I say as we pull up to the spot.
“Nah, we’re fine,” says Jose. We search and search. This geocache is nowhere to be found. I mean, we’ve scoured everywhere except for the more dangerous spots.
“Bro, it’s not here. Somebody already got it,” said Luke.
“Yeah, they must have forgotten to replace it.” Jose says.
We call it quits, walking back up towards the road.
The following day, our trio is hanging out as usual. Luke’s little brother Gary comes to join us. This is unusual, because he’s, well, a hermit. I don't believe he’d seen the sun since last summer. This kid plays computer games from dusk till dawn. We tell him of yesterday’s Geocaching experience, and he wants to try it himself. We agree, we’re still curious and excited.
Gary rides on Luke’s handlebars because he’s small enough. We make it to the dead end, he's having a blast.
“Hey, we didn't try searching the woods yet.” Jose says. On second thought, not a great idea. Our attire most certainly does not suit a venture into the woods. Thorns, bugs, more thorns, it’s awful. Wanting to give up, but something stops us. A lone white shed.
“Woah, what the heck? Why’s that out here?” Jose says.
“Hmm. Maybe it’s for hunting deer or something?” I say.
“Here? By the power plant? We’re not even that deep into the woods.” Luke points out.
“Good point. That is odd.” I say.
“Wanna go see it?” Jose says, motioning in its direction.
“No way dude.” Luke says “Are you crazy?”
“Let's go.” I say pointing towards the out-of-place building.
Busted windows and black graffiti. Expecting the usual vulgar phrases and dick drawings, it’s safe to say we were caught by surprise.
Sure, it was graffiti alright, but it was... different. One phrase.
“What is this?” Jose blurted out.
“Follow the power,” it read. The words were not too legible. A can of rusted black spray paint lay on the ground.
“Maybe... it leads to the geocache?” Jose said.
“You can’t be serious.” I replied. He shrugged.
We looked at each other. This went on for minutes. We pondered what to do.
Curiosity got the better of us.
Outside of the gravel of the power plant, in between the woods, lay a vast trail lined by massive power lines. Hesitantly, we followed the trail.
It stretched on forever. An endless plain running through the vast woods. I’m not sure how long we walked. Maybe hours.
The sun was now beginning to set and our parents were worried. All of us received non-stop calls and texts from them, we eventually silenced our phones.
The trail stopped, and the woods began again. Seemingly another dead-end.
“Should we keep going?” I asked.
“Well, we followed the power lines, but I see nothing.” Jose said.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this. What are we gonna tell our parents?” I said.
“I don’t know, man. We made it this far. We might as well keep going.” Luke said.
I nodded, and we stepped into the woods. It was dead quiet. Only broken up by the crunching of leaves and snapping of twigs beneath our feet. We trudged onward, trying our best to be quiet. We didn’t know what we’d find. Much less what we were looking for. Curiosity is a powerful thing.
We had grown uneasy, beginning to smell an indescribable stench. Something felt wrong. My stomach churned.
Then we reached a clearing. We froze, for before us stood an inexplicable sight. A group standing in the clearing. Adorned in coats made of dark brown fur.
Their attire was the least of my concerns. Those faces. I can still picture them clearly. They were missing their eyes and mouths, yet they still had noses. It was as if God forgot to add those features when creating them.
“What the fuck?” Jose whispered to me. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end and my heart rate increased. We were not supposed to be here. Everything in me wanted to run, but I was petrified. I just stared ahead. Could they see me? I shuddered. And what were they doing here?
Something else came out of the woods. A wolf or a coyote. Only... it was standing on its hind legs. In its grasp, a crude knife. It was something straight out of an archaeological dig. I’d seen nothing similar. Again, my fight-or-flight response was leaning towards flight, but my body just did not respond. None of us said a word to one another.
A lump formed in my throat. I anxiously expected what was going to happen. I could not look away. One by one, the wolf walked up to the faceless people and... began carving. It took its knife and carved into their faces. Soon, what felt like an eternity later, each of the beings, now had a face. Beady eyes and crooked mouths, they were even more terrifying than before. The wolf then strolled back into the woods, while those things just stood there...
By now, I had seen enough. The others must have had the same thought. My curiosity left and was replaced by survival. Slowly, we tiptoed backwards through the woods, clenching our teeth, hoping they couldn’t hear us.
“I think they’re looking at us.” Jose whispered through chattering teeth. A shiver went over my whole body. He was right, I could feel those black eyes staring right at us.
“Go, go!” I say in a scream whisper. We haul ass without looking back, disregarding the many thorns grabbing us.
Just as we're exiting the woods into the power plant. A loud mechanical noise cuts through the trees. Its roar shakes us to our core. Luke even throws Gary onto his shoulders. Grabbing our bikes as fast as possible, slamming those kick stands, we pedal back to civilization. Those things chased us the entire way, stopping only as we exited the power plant.
We walk with our bikes along the road, relieved that we escaped and no longer have anyone following us. The dim street lights illuminate our way. We take our phones off silent, bombarded with missed calls and texts from our families.
“Oh god, they must be so worried.” I say.
We then hear a siren coming from a police car. The red and blue lights come zooming around the corner.
“Our parents must have called the police. Guess we’d better go talk to them.” Jose says.
As we approach the vehicle, I felt everything will be alright. That is until I see the officer. Similar to those forest creatures, he lacks eyes and a mouth.
We run again, but the cop remains still. My friends and I make it home to our parents’ relief. We’re, of course, grounded for at least the next month.
Later that night, I lay in bed, my eyes wide open. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake that feeling. I kept trying to reassure myself. They couldn’t leave the woods, right? I mean, they stopped following us, so as long as we didn’t go back to the power plant, we’ll be safe. Why did they stop chasing us? But what about the cop?
I text Luke and Jose, checking if they’re okay, and relaying my thoughts to them, hoping they have more answers than I. No response from either.
I hear chiming dings of text tones. It’s coming from outside my window.
I peel back the blinds, peeking through them, my hands shaking. My friends on the other side stare, their eyes beady and animalistic, smiles jagged. I fear I soon will meet a similar fate.

After stumbling across two old posts targeting me (I avoid direct linking to prevent brigading but the title of those posts is reflected in my post title), I thought I'd dismantle them, their representation of my comments, and their discussion of the sources they mention.
A question I discussed with an apologist in the past is if Jahiliyyah narratives are correct in depicting the Jahiliyyah as largely illiterate. The apologist claims the "Jahiliyyah" only refers to late pre-Islamic Arabia (though many traditionalist definitions put it much further back). For the sake of argument, we'll look at literacy in the late pre-Islamic Hijaz. During this conversation, I brought up a statement made by Ahmad Al-Jallad:

The abundance of written records in Arabia suggests that writing was widespread among both settled people and nomads (Figure 7.2); however, its function among both groups was quite different. Macdonald (2009: vol. 1; 2010) established an important distinction between literate societies and non-literate societies based on the role of writing for the functioning of society. Ancient South Arabia exemplifies a literate society. Its officials set up thousands of public inscriptions, recording their deeds, dedications to deities, legal decrees, and so on. The existence of public inscriptions, however, cannot stand as witness to widespread literacy among the general population, as they reflect the work of professional scribes and highly skilled masons. As Stein has pointed out, the wording of even the most personal letters suggests that the sender did not compose the text himself himself, and that recipients were not expected to read them. To explain this, he hypothesized the existence of scribal centres where documents were composed on the behalf of their authors. On the other hand, Macdonald draws our attention to another category of inscriptions in South Arabia that intimates widespread knowledge of reading and writing graffiti. Unlike commissioned inscriptions, graffiti are informal works of individual expression, and as such, must be carved by the author. The existence of thousands of graffiti in South Arabia, always composed in the monumental and only rarely the minuscule script, suggests that a sizable segment of the population could employ writing for informal purposes. The use of the monumental script rather than the day-to-day script of the wooden sticks could have been symptomatic of the medium and need not imply that knowledge of the minuscule hand was more restricted. The evidence for the major oasis towns of North and West Arabia is not as plentiful. Nevertheless, after a close and skillful analysis of the material, focusing mainly on the appearance of inforrmal letter forms and ligatures in the inscriptions, Macdonald concluded that the settled populations of these areas also belonged to literate societies and, as in South Arabia, large segments of the population knew how to write, and presumably, read (2010: 9 –15). (Al-Jallad, "The Linguistic Landscape of Pre-Islamic Arabia," pp. 116–117)

Takeaways:

• Where literacy prevalence is high, MacDonald and Al-Jallad distinguish literate from non-literate societies based on the institutional role played by writing in that society.
• South, North, and West Arabia meet the criteria for being classified as literate societies according to this scheme.

The apologists response was to this reference was to assure me that Al-Jallad (the worlds top authority in this field) is misunderstanding the earlier work of MacDonald (keep in mind that MacDonald was Al-Jallad's mentor and they're in direct contact with each other). He says MacDonald's real opinion is that "Arab culture was in all important respects fundamentally oral" — just like in the Tuareg tribe (!), where the ability to write is widespread but only employed for informal purposes. He goes on and on — but as it turns out, Stephen Shoemaker made the same mistake as this apologist did in his book Creating the Quran. For this reason, we turn to a correction from another paper: Marijn van Putten: "The Development of Hijazi Orthography," Millennium (2023). This is a major and original study demonstrating pre-Islamic Hijaz was a "literate" society in MacDonald's sense:

a number of idiosyncrasies ... all point to a single conclusion: Not only has the Arabic script had a long and storied history, it is clear that there was a formalized system of scribal practice with significant sophistication and idiosyncrasy that must have been present and developed already in the pre-Islamic period. This challenges the notion that the pre-Islamic Hijaz was a “non-literate” society as for example Stephen Shoemaker would have it.⁷⁰ Neither the Quran, nor the pre-Islamic inscriptions of the centuries leading up to the rise of Islam, show the kind of ad hoc non-literate literacy as one sees among the Tuareg or may hypothesize for the nomadic pre-Islamic Arabic writers that employed the Safaitic script. Instead, there was a formalized scribal practice that required formal education to properly execute according to the existing norms.⁷¹ (pp. 125-126)

So Van Putten finds that the late pre-Islamic Hijaz was literate and Van Putten is clear that his conclusion is meant in terms of MacDonald's categorization of a literate society and not just widespread ability to write but only employed for informal purposes like with the Tuareg tribe. Van Putten goes on in fn. 70: "[Shoemaker] cites Michael Macdonald to make this point. But one must stress that Macdonald is not talking about the Hijaz of the 6th century but rather the Nomadic writers in the South Arabian scripts. See Macdonald 2010: 5–28; Shoemaker 2022: 125." In other words, the Tuareg analogy is irrelevant and at best concern nomadic Arab tribes until the 4th century.
The user also made a second post with roughly the same title. He claims I misunderstood Juan Cole's comments about literacy in the late pre-Islamic Western Arabia because Cole was describing Islamic-era 7th century inscriptions. Yet Cole specifically concluded: "the Believers were keeping the suras as parchment or papyrus pamphlets even in the time of the Prophet", implying an established practice of writing already existed. Since the apologist fails to grasp the relevance of these and similar 7th-century inscriptions, I quote fn. 71 of the earlier paper by Van Putten:

One may further note Petra Sijpesteijn’s observation that early Islamic Arabic administrative formulae from the very beginning of Islam are distinct from the Greek ones (even in bilinguals) and are not calques. This seems to suggest an already established administrative practice. See Sijpesteijn 2020: 468.

Al-Jallad similarly says:

Thus, the growing body of pre- Islamic evidence strongly indicates that the use of Arabic for administration in the early Islamic period does not reflect an ad hoc invention, but the continuation of an established tradition of administration in Arabic which must have its origins in North Arabian and Syrian scribal practices. ("The Linguistic Landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia," pg. 119)

From the recent AMA event this subreddit has had with Hythem Sidky, we have the opinion on this subject now by yet another significant expert. I asked Sidky: "What are your thoughts about literacy in the pre-Islamic Hijaz?" Sidky responded:

It's hard to put concrete numbers on it. But based on both the cursive nature of the script itself and the inscriptions, they were literate in the ways the matter. Also, Quranic codices don't strike me as that community's first attempt and producing a book. And if you look at the text of the Quran itself (in contrast to hadith), there are verses that strongly suggest we're looking at a sufficiently literate culture. Emphasis on writing down deeds and contracts, etc..

In another comment, Sidky also wrote: "I think the Meccans had a scribal school."
And that concludes this post. The late pre-Islamic Hijaz was a literate society, so-defined as a society with an established tradition of writing that is employed in fulfilling formal societal functions. Thus, Jahiliyyah characterizations late pre-Islamic Arabia as illiterate or even with MacDonald's category of non-literate are historically inaccurate.

Since I made two OC's for the other two Fleet inherited techniques I decided to make the third one.
Name: Galen Fleets Age: 22 Grade: Between 1st and Special Grade History: Galen is the youngest sibling of the three fleets' children. Galen is a very unconventional sorcerer, the way he uses his inherited technique is very different from the past users, so for that reason many of the older retired sorcerers of the Fleets family dislike Galen. His older siblings Aurelia and Jade don't mind this behavior though. Galen is very much a free spirit and he goes and does whatever he wants.
Cursed Technique

• Name: Finger Painting
• Type: Inherited
• Description: Galen can cover the index finger on his dominant hand in black cursed energy (Black CE for short). If he writes a word with that cursed energy then whatever was written comes true. The words have to be written on a Canvas and depending on the type of Canvas then different words can be written. Living Canvas (Ex: Humans, Curses, Sorcers) can have action words (Ex: run, stop, cry) and inanimate Canvas (Objects) can have modifying words (Burning, Gigantic, Unbreaking). If the canvas has cursed energy, if the canvas has more cursed energy than Galen, then the words won't work as well as if the canvas has less cursed energy than him. The longer the words take effect on the canvas, the more cursed energy will be drained from Galen. Galen mainly uses this to use his surrounding objects to control the surroundings to his advantage.

Extension Technique

• Action Paint: A basic technique that allows Galen to fire the Black CE from his finger. The CE is fired very fast and has some power behind it, similar to a bullet fired from a handgun. This does not require a lot of CE to use, so the user can use it multiple times. The user could build up the CE to increase the power and speed but the charge-up time is very noticeable.
• Graffiti Explosion: Very similar to how Choso uses Supernova with Blood Manipulation, Galen can separate a portion of black CE from himself and compress it into an extremely dense sphere, and then he can release that built-up pressure to create a CE explosion.
• Hand Paint: Galen can cover his entire hand in Black CE, this "stains" the target when hit with an unarmed attack. This stain will stick to the target's body making it harder to reinforce that certain part of the body where the stain is. This would increase the amount of CE the targets need to properly reinforce the body.
• Oil Spill: By using Oil Spill with the same reasoning as his Maximum technique, Galen can use Oil Spill on the air instead of on a surface. This would allow him to create something similar to a Curtain barrier. Galen would have more control over the size and strength of it though.
• Tattoo: Galen can write a word on a canvas and instead of the word just being on the canvas, the word is now a part of the canvas. When Galen does this the time that the word affects the canvas is now very long. The time could be hours, days, weeks, etc but the longer the time the more CE needed. If the canvas is a living canvas and uses RCE then the word will disappear, or if they cut off that part of the body that has the word on it.
  • Quote: This extension allows Galen to not force the literal meaning of the word but use the word for another meaning. Galen writes a phrase as a Tattoo, the phrase is the chant he uses for his Action Paint extension. This allows him to always the Action Paint extension at 120% output.
• Whiteout: Galen holds his finger with the Black CE on a canvas and they completely cover the canvas with their Black CE. When they are covered in this way, it completely hides the canvas's cursed energy, and sorcerers or cursed spirits will only be able to sense his cursed energy and not the canvas'.
  • Resketch: When Galen uses Whiteout on a cursed spirit the curse can be controlled by the user and act more as a shikigami than a regular curse. Along with controlling the curse, the curse will look completely different than before, they will resemble a small squid shikigami that can shoot black CE, like ink, and have multiple tentacles. The squids float in the air, and in the water, the squids are very fast. Galen can only use this technique on curses that are much weaker than themselves, a rough estimate would be that he can only use this technique on curses that are 3 grades lower than himself.

Maximum Technique

• Living Word: Similar to a barrierless domain, this technique allows Galen to paint on thin air. He creates an ink copy of himself, the copy is sentient and can think for itself, and they have the same personality and characteristics as Galen, but the copy is their own person so any binding vow the original user has does not apply to the copy. The copy knows this cursed technique as well and knows all the extension techniques, but can't use RCT, Maximum Technique, or Domain Expansion. The copy has an amount of cursed energy equal to the amount that Galen used to use this maximum technique. Once the copy has used all of their cursed energy then they vanish.
  • Living Portrait: Instead of creating a copy of himself, Galen could create a copy of another person/creature. He would need more time to paint the copy and the copy would not have access to any powers of who they were based on. In exchange for that, these kinds of copies do not require as much CE and their physical abilities are stronger.

Domain Expansion

• Name: Death Painting
• Appearance: The domain itself looks like an entirely black void with nothing else in it except for Galen, whoever was trapped in the domain, and also a small floating painting canvas that appears next to Galen.
• Ability: On the canvas, Galen can write on it and whatever Galen wrote on the canvas appears on whoever Galen chooses. Galen can also choose to draw a straight line on the canvas, this would make a cut appear on whoever Galen chooses. If someone destroys the canvas, then another one will reappear.

Heavenly Restriction

• Divine Mutilation: From birth, Galen was cursed with a Heavenly Restriction, he lost his left leg from the knee down, right arm from the shoulder, and left eye, and also he lost his ability to use RCE. In exchange for these massive disadvantages he was granted insane CE efficiency, so using his technique is next to nothing for him. One step down from Gojo's CE efficiency.

Prosthetics: In response to Galen's HR, he was given several cursed prosthetics.

• Left Leg: This prosthetic is a shikigami, it attaches to his knee and allows Galen to control it like an extension of his own body. The body of this shikigami is malleable, it can stretch/shrink itself. The shikigami kind of looks like the prosthetic leg that Mirko from MHA has, except it's a living thing. On the back side of the leg where the calf would be there is a large ridge of sharp bones coming out of it.
• Right Arm: This prosthetic is also a shikigami, it attaches to his shoulder and allows Galen to control it like an extension of his own body. The arm looks like a pitch-black regular arm, but at the elbow, the arm can split into two different arms when Galen chooses. Since this shikigami allows Galen to have two dominant right hands, he can use his Black CE on both hands at once.
• Left Eye: This fake glass eye is a cursed tool, it allows Galen to see through it just like a normal eye. The pupil of the eye resembles a pink heart. The cursed technique of this tool allows Galen to see someone through this eye and "lock on" to them. When someone is "locked on" to the eye won't let it out of its sight, no matter how fast it moves the eye will always move to constantly keep it in sight.

Other Techniques

• Black Flash: Galen is pretty capable of performing fairly regular black flashes. He can't perform them on command as much as Yuji but he can regular chain like 3 to 4 in a row if concentrating enough.
• Recoil: This technique allows Galen to reinforce a part of his body like his arm multiple times up to a total of 10 times. When Galen does layer his CE, his CE will become a darker shade. When Galen attacks with his multiple-layer reinforced arm, then depending on how many layers there are, the target of the attack will feel that many amount of impacts. The target will feel the impacts back to back not all at once. This technique could also be used to defend certain parts of the body, with multiple layers of CE reinforcement. Galen is not able to achieve a black flash while using this technique.

I recently went down a rabbit hole of learning about all the phases that the tomb of St. Peter has gone through over the centuries, but even with all the charts and diagrams and drawings and 3D reconstructions and descriptions available online, I still have a few specialized questions I'm hoping someone with specialized knowledge can answer:
1) at some point St. Peter's bones were moved from the original earthen grave to a niche in the base of the later "graffiti wall" supporting wall. When was this done? Under Constantine, presumably?
2) Constantine (similar to at the Holy Sepulchre) pretty much leveled the surroundings and left only the bit of the "Red Wall" and Tropaion aedicule shrine (with its later supporting walls including the "graffiti wall"). He then encased this in the marble box of the "Memoria." My question is if this originally encased the entire aedicule as depicted in drawings, or if the aedicule was (or had already been) "shaved back" to be more flush with the Red Wall before being encased by the Memoria. From what I can make out through the grille in pictures of the modern niche of the pallia, it seems like some of the pieces of the Tropaion are still there, but they seem mostly embedded in the Red Wall, not "sticking out" anymore, so I'm wondering when the full "sticking out" form with the little slab canopy was lost.
3) In Constantine's arrangement, sometimes I see a sort of rectangular door at the front of the memoria, and in other depictions a little arch (as later existed in Old St Peter's and still exists as the niche of the pallia to this day). Which is more accurate? Was this "portal" changed in shape at some point, or was it always the little arch?
4) I read one source saying that Constantine's arrangement did have an altar, but that it was sort of an afterthought hidden behind the memoria. Other sources mention no altar at all. Was there originally an altar? I know that Gregory the Great created the crypt chapel (essentially the Clementine chapel today) when he raised the floor of the apse, and that there survives an altar from his time (on a somewhat lower floor than the Constantinian floor), now covered by baroque marble (but a photo of the Gregorian one was taken during the excavations, so they must have disassembled and reassembled the Clementine altar at that point to view it). Does this Gregorian altar have any connection to an original Constantinian altar (if not in actual material, in location?)
5) the crypt chapel of Gregory the Great, beneath the raised apse floor, was where the skull of St. Peter was seen until it got moved to the Lateran. Is there any information about when or how skull was retrieved from the tomb itself. It seems like it would have been hard to do so after Constantine's memoria was in place, unless there remained some way afterwards to access the "necropolis level" beneath Constantine's flooplatform (I didn't know if that was possible before the excavations of the 20th century). I know this is where the back of the memoria can still be seen through a grille, although the floor of the crypt chapel is lower than Constantine's floor, which is why the strip of red porphyry just sort of floats in the middle; extra marble bust have been added beneath the old memoria back wall after the crypt floor was lowered.
6) when the apse was raised and the high altar put directly on top of the tomb, zconstantine's memoria was truncated. The upper part was removed and replaced with the altar itself, first of Gregory, and then Gregory's was encased by Callistus's in the Middle Ages. When this truncation of the memoria happened...what happened to the upper part of the red wall and "second level" of the aedicule? Were they simply discarded, or were they actually built into/encased in the high altar itself?
7) in the modern confessio, the niche of the pallia is slightly off-center. Is there a reason everything couldn't be built in such a way as to perfectly center that arch/niche/portal/porticule?
8) in the modern confessio, there are mosaics in the arch/niche/portal/porticule. What period are these from? They extend all the way to the bottom, so I assume they are either Constantinian, or added when New St Peter's was built, because the Gregorian sanctuary arrangement raised the floor here slightly, covering some of the bottom part of the portal in Constantine's memoria.
9) in the modern confessio, there's two layers of grilles above the niche of the pallia. Through the top one I believe you can see the callixtian altar, and through the lower one you can see what remains at this level of the the red wall, graffiti wall, and tropaion/aedicule. Below that is the niche itself with marble on either side. Is this marble new (ie, baroque), or does anything survive of the front wall of Constantine's memoria? (I know the marble beneath the niche must be later, because originally the floor level was right at the bottom of the archway).

People say Mirror's Edge Catalyst is bad because it changed its genre to openworld. I disagree. Considering how much the first game was railroaded and linear, Mirror's Edge was the perfect series to move to the openworld since its gameplay is about incentivizing the creative thinking in movement. The problem with Catalyst is that despite moving to the openwrold, the world doesn't feel "open" enough. It still feels restrained and
Game Maker's Toolkit made a great video of Mirror's Edge Catalyst, in which he compared its rigid openworld to Burnout Paradise's openworld. He criticized the game as an openworld being ashamed of being an openworld and making little use of it. The world gives the impression that it is huge and non-linear, but in reality, it is an illusion. Despite the player's robust moveset, the paths are too linear, the map has too many dead ends and gaps, and there seems to be only one way to get between the districts. This is why the player gets confused and lost in navigation, so the player has no choice but to rely on the "following the line" HUD guide, which is authentical to the "openworld" navigation.
I pretty much agree with his assessment of the game, and I thought about another openworld game that focuses on navigation, physics-driven movement, and systemic traversal and puts the player in the role of "delivery man"... called Death Stranding.
Obviously, Mirror's Edge and Death Stranding have completely different directions from each other: Mirror's Edge is about keeping constant momentum and Death Stranding is a trekking simulation than a platformer. However, there are commonalities between the two. Both games do a good job of matching the moving character to the environment like a real weighted person in the real world. Both games have a consistently simulated world. Both games have constant jumping and a level design philosophy. Both games involve free open areas where the player has the choice of how to get to the other side of them. Individual platforms may not always be difficult but the skill involved in being efficient and the pathfinding makes them rewarding. The player movements aren't automated but require the player's input and mastery in the traversal. You actually have to pay attention to your actions. They solved the "hold W and spam the Space Bar" problem. The absence of automation would require thoughtful precision and calculation from the player, but be viscerally rewarding once mastered.
While both games excel at the moveset and mechanics, Death Stranding goes beyond it to make a living, breathing openworld--in a sense that its world provides environments to reflect the player agency and choices. The player plans ahead, brings out the different equipment, and changes environments to make their own route, utilizing the interconnected systems that make the traversal possibilities infinite. It revolves around the actions and systems around the traversal that add depth to the environments as well as the basic character actions. The basic actions as well as the relevance of the environment have lasting consequences for the moment-to-moment gameplay and long-term planning. Trying to move up and down a muddy slope requires a different tactic than trying to move up or down a grassy slope, especially if you have a heavy, unbalanced load, as Sam is in constant danger of losing his balance and slipping. Other factors play into the moment-to-moment gameplay, such as wind. If you have a large stack of packages, the wind will make it harder to maintain your balance. Snow and rain will also affect how you play. You can unlock various tools to make your traversal play out differently, such as ladders as makeshift bridges or setting up a network of zip lines. It set out to redefine the openworld genre where the emphasis was put more on slowing down the action and having mechanics related to walking along with the levels/terrain being designed to have weight compared to the mindless and set-dressing that environments become in other games.
Does Mirror's Edge Catalyst allow the player to experiment as much as this...?
...cricket
People make fun of Kojima for saying that a "Strand Type game" is its own genre, but let's be honest, it is. There is no other game on the market, especially in the AAA space, that's anything close to Death Stranding. The "Strand Type" genre means a game where your objectives are achieved through social interaction to connect things. The player's objective is to create "strands"--connections that allow cities to interact with each other. You also “interact” with other players by finding stuff they were trying to deliver but lost or dropped and completing the delivery. You give and receive help and feedback from other players without direct player-to-player in-game visual contact/interaction.
Mirror's Edge is the perfect series to do something like this. It could have borrowed some design tropes from Metroidvania by focusing on exploration and gaining more abilities and ways to move around the map. Now, in the beginning, the city is confusing. The paths are linear and there are dead-ends everywhere. This linear design, initially, accustoms the players to tutorialization without being overt tutorials.
So, on the surface, you just run around the rooftops. However, as Faith completes missions and quests, the player earns money, and you can buy equipment, gears, grappling points, signs, zip lines, jumping platforms, and ladders. The player can place these things all over the map. So you have a strategic goal: get to the point you are supposed to, and you have a less strategic goal: develop the area around your path.
Too confusing to where to go in this part of the district? Place the sign and arrow posts that give the player directions. There is a dead-end in this corner? Place the long ladders and ziplines so that you make your own route. There are cops concentrated in this part of the city? Place grappling points and traps to make your own escape route. This way, these dead-ends become opportunities with the abilities and items that allow the player to make their own courses. It slowly opens up the world as the player progresses and changes how the player traverses by changing the environment.
This means the player can tackle multiple objectives within a world, born from the marriage between a robust moveset and the reactive environments to encourage exploration and freedom in the traversal. You can place the ziplines and grappling points to get to the high places you want, or you can use advanced tricks like chaining various platforming moves according to the player's skill. You then have tactical goals like delivering this or that, here and there. There is also an incentive to create shortcuts and custom routes like this with satisfaction from completing the mission or setting a new score record, which means a high monetary reward.
The development of the area is visual; you can see and use the pathways you just helped to build. The player can buy spray cans and draw graffiti to make the world look different. This way, the player can mold the openworld to their own, both functionally and aesthetically. The player can change the districts with different architectural styles so that the city is more recognizable and easier to explore. The player has something to do all the time on all parts of the map.
The progression is also made by creating new routes after clearing certain objectives, such as getting a keycard that lets the player open a shortcut, or making chaos in one area draws the cops from the other areas, which allows the player to pull out and sneak through the unguarded areas. As the player explores and discovers certain landmarks, they learn certain techniques that help them access new areas or make access to other locations by using faster routes. With landmarks like towers, you know where you're supposed to go, but you can guess where to go while kicking off cops along the way.
Then there are also several mechanics that make traversal different. For example, you move down the roofs when the clouds pour rain. Faith's delivery package becomes degrading quicker and her wall run gets more difficult. This can be solved by buying different types of shoes, but it decreases the normal movement speed. Rain can also be advantageous for the player, which decreases the footstep sounds, which allows Faith to move easier out of the guards' ears. The occasional fog clouds the player and the enemy's visibility. Either the player can face the environmental challenge head-on, or sit in a shelter, waiting out the storm while listening to a relaxing but upbeat song, creating an atmospheric moment.
If you put the game online, the other players might put their own placements and messages like Death Stranding and Souls games. Maybe the player can enter the different player's map, which has different routes and aesthetics. This is how you make a living breathing world. For me, a living breathing world is a reactive world that provides environments to reflect the player's agency and choices.

People say Mirror's Edge Catalyst is bad because it changed its genre to openworld. I disagree. Considering how much the first game was railroaded and linear, Mirror's Edge was the perfect series to move to the openworld since its gameplay is about incentivizing the creative thinking in movement. The problem with Catalyst is that despite moving to the openwrold, the world doesn't feel "open" enough. It still feels restrained and
Game Maker's Toolkit made a great video of Mirror's Edge Catalyst, in which he compared its rigid openworld to Burnout Paradise's openworld. He criticized the game as an openworld being ashamed of being an openworld and making little use of it. The world gives the impression that it is huge and non-linear, but in reality, it is an illusion. Despite the player's robust moveset, the paths are too linear, the map has too many dead ends and gaps, and there seems to be only one way to get between the districts. This is why the player gets confused and lost in navigation, so the player has no choice but to rely on the "following the line" HUD guide, which is authentical to the "openworld" navigation.
I pretty much agree with his assessment of the game, and I thought about another openworld game that focuses on navigation, physics-driven movement, and systemic traversal and puts the player in the role of "delivery man"... called Death Stranding.
Obviously, Mirror's Edge and Death Stranding have completely different directions from each other: Mirror's Edge is about keeping constant momentum and Death Stranding is a trekking simulation than a platformer. However, there are commonalities between the two. Both games do a good job of matching the moving character to the environment like a real weighted person in the real world. Both games have a consistently simulated world. Both games have constant jumping and a level design philosophy. Both games involve free open areas where the player has the choice of how to get to the other side of them. Individual platforms may not always be difficult but the skill involved in being efficient and the pathfinding makes them rewarding. The player movements aren't automated but require the player's input and mastery in the traversal. You actually have to pay attention to your actions. They solved the "hold W and spam the Space Bar" problem. The absence of automation would require thoughtful precision and calculation from the player, but be viscerally rewarding once mastered.
While both games excel at the moveset and mechanics, Death Stranding goes beyond it to make a living, breathing openworld--in a sense that its world provides environments to reflect the player agency and choices. The player plans ahead, brings out the different equipment, and changes environments to make their own route, utilizing the interconnected systems that make the traversal possibilities infinite. It revolves around the actions and systems around the traversal that add depth to the environments as well as the basic character actions. The basic actions as well as the relevance of the environment have lasting consequences for the moment-to-moment gameplay and long-term planning. Trying to move up and down a muddy slope requires a different tactic than trying to move up or down a grassy slope, especially if you have a heavy, unbalanced load, as Sam is in constant danger of losing his balance and slipping. Other factors play into the moment-to-moment gameplay, such as wind. If you have a large stack of packages, the wind will make it harder to maintain your balance. Snow and rain will also affect how you play. You can unlock various tools to make your traversal play out differently, such as ladders as makeshift bridges or setting up a network of zip lines. It set out to redefine the openworld genre where the emphasis was put more on slowing down the action and having mechanics related to walking along with the levels/terrain being designed to have weight compared to the mindless and set-dressing that environments become in other games.
Does Mirror's Edge Catalyst allow the player to experiment as much as this...?
...cricket
People make fun of Kojima for saying that a "Strand Type game" is its own genre, but let's be honest, it is. There is no other game on the market, especially in the AAA space, that's anything close to Death Stranding. The "Strand Type" genre means a game where your objectives are achieved through social interaction to connect things. The player's objective is to create "strands"--connections that allow cities to interact with each other. You also “interact” with other players by finding stuff they were trying to deliver but lost or dropped and completing the delivery. You give and receive help and feedback from other players without direct player-to-player in-game visual contact/interaction.
Mirror's Edge is the perfect series to do something like this. It could have borrowed some design tropes from Metroidvania by focusing on exploration and gaining more abilities and ways to move around the map. Now, in the beginning, the city is confusing. The paths are linear and there are dead-ends everywhere. This linear design, initially, accustoms the players to tutorialization without being overt tutorials.
So, on the surface, you just run around the rooftops. However, as Faith completes missions and quests, the player earns money, and you can buy equipment, gears, grappling points, signs, zip lines, jumping platforms, and ladders. The player can place these things all over the map. So you have a strategic goal: get to the point you are supposed to, and you have a less strategic goal: develop the area around your path.
Too confusing to where to go in this part of the district? Place the sign and arrow posts that give the player directions. There is a dead-end in this corner? Place the long ladders and ziplines so that you make your own route. There are cops concentrated in this part of the city? Place grappling points and traps to make your own escape route. This way, these dead-ends become opportunities with the abilities and items that allow the player to make their own courses. It slowly opens up the world as the player progresses and changes how the player traverses by changing the environment.
This means the player can tackle multiple objectives within a world, born from the marriage between a robust moveset and the reactive environments to encourage exploration and freedom in the traversal. You can place the ziplines and grappling points to get to the high places you want, or you can use advanced tricks like chaining various platforming moves according to the player's skill. You then have tactical goals like delivering this or that, here and there. There is also an incentive to create shortcuts and custom routes like this with satisfaction from completing the mission or setting a new score record, which means a high monetary reward.
The development of the area is visual; you can see and use the pathways you just helped to build. The player can buy spray cans and draw graffiti to make the world look different. This way, the player can mold the openworld to their own, both functionally and aesthetically. The player can change the districts with different architectural styles so that the city is more recognizable and easier to explore. The player has something to do all the time on all parts of the map.
The progression is also made by creating new routes after clearing certain objectives, such as getting a keycard that lets the player open a shortcut, or making chaos in one area draws the cops from the other areas, which allows the player to pull out and sneak through the unguarded areas. As the player explores and discovers certain landmarks, they learn certain techniques that help them access new areas or make access to other locations by using faster routes. With landmarks like towers, you know where you're supposed to go, but you can guess where to go while kicking off cops along the way.
Then there are also several mechanics that make traversal different. For example, you move down the roofs when the clouds pour rain. Faith's delivery package becomes degrading quicker and her wall run gets more difficult. This can be solved by buying different types of shoes, but it decreases the normal movement speed. Rain can also be advantageous for the player, which decreases the footstep sounds, which allows Faith to move easier out of the guards' ears. The occasional fog clouds the player and the enemy's visibility. Either the player can face the environmental challenge head-on, or sit in a shelter, waiting out the storm while listening to a relaxing but upbeat song, creating an atmospheric moment.
If you put the game online, the other players might put their own placements and messages like Death Stranding and Souls games. Maybe the player can enter the different player's map, which has different routes and aesthetics. This is how you make a living breathing world. For me, a living breathing world is a reactive world that provides environments to reflect the player's agency and choices.

Hi
I feel like i need to give a large amount of backstory here. I am not suicidal at this present moment however i have suffered from depression for over twenty years and the last nine years have been particularly hard. During this time though I have discovered multiple ways to pull myself out of this and they are the usual tricks; exercise, keeping brain stimulated good diet etc etc etc but what i am facing and what i believe my depression to be due to is getting horrendous and i am frequently having people making jokes about how i should kill myself and attempting to push me towards it.
Im being harrassed, abused and stalked on a daily basis, seemingly by police, military "intelligence", freemasons and various other branches of government. Not only have I had this confirmed by people in the military, but i've confronted main people involved in this and they've apologised and broken down or have given me what they know.
I've issued 9 complaints, split between my local police, my local council and the home secratary (who apparently would have had to have signed off on the types of harrassment and surveillance that they use) and had zero response. Not only do i get 0 responses, when speaking to three officers face to face (the police were called on me by an unknown person posting a video online about this) they told me there was no record of any of my complaints. I spoke to a organisation in my home town (nottingham) regarding this and they knew all to well of the types of harrassment that i was describing but told me that they are/were unable to assist with complaints regarding law enforcement etc and that i would have to hire a solicitor. i am broke. I am broke because near enough every job i've gone into since leaving the catering industry and a few before are seemingly filled with people who know exactly who i am and make a bee line for me straight off the bat, by manipulating the thoughts and opinions of people around me and doing nothing but try to hold me down and ridicule me.
It is crazy to start stating the amount of abuse and harrassment i face. Not only is the amount of abuse i face the issue, but the reason. It seems to be to do with a fire started in 1976 at st wilfrids church in wilford, nottingham (13 years before i was born) and seems to stretch all the way to the monarchy. If you think this sounds far fetched, the military, police and tax office all come under "his majesties(HM)" etc etc, meaning regardless us stating that we're controlled by government, the monarchy still runs said branches and the church... I was mutilated as a child (i knew this from about 12-14 years old and around three years ago one of the heads of the midwifry department in the hospital i was born in was arrested for having a part in over 1500 deaths and mutiliations) The types of abuse i face are vast; Car registration plates with messages from officers/undercover officers, the false conversations that are had around me constantly, the false people who get involved in my life merely to act as antagonists, i am hacked and surveilled constantly and i am let know that people watch my diary entries that i record onto my pc, at least my last two flats are repeatedly broken into, i am watched everywhere i go and seemingly inside my own flat... It seems as though every name i see on forums or content posts are a thinly veiled allegorical insult towards me...it used to be comments that were thinly veiled insults, however i would reply with some sort of allegorical insult so now it seems to be the names of posters on innocuous posts. This is the same as they used to insult me directly, however i've always been a pretty direct person so now they use allegory and groups of people because they seem to need to tell people i don't stand up for myself which i do the majority of the time, or things such as the reg plates with vehicles usually driven by the elderly or women with kids because if i confront these people it's going to make me look worse...I have actually confronted multiple people, and they give some rushed vague answer as to why they have an obvious insult towards me on their registration plate. I have also been let know twice, by people that work for the government that i have no proof and i'll be able to prove nothing. The last guy was an apparent councilor, who smiling extremely brightly said " it must be really frustrating that you have no proof". speculate all you want on my mental health but that is either a fucking wank councillor or this is another case of them attempting to wind me up. Oh and i was told by a psychiatrist that they were hoping i was going to see this as satirical...I was beaten unconscious while handcuffed one night by three riot vans full of police officers, who in the morning said it was because i matched the description of someone that was trying to break into a vehicle in a hotel car park close to where they arrested me. I don't drive and I was wearing a different coloured hoodie than the color of the hoodie they described in the morning and from what i remember, the police officer was sat on my back screaming "we know you've got something on you"...they mentioned nothing about any vehicle. I was then knocked unconscious and awoke in the morning. This is apparently what i'm supposed to find satirical. Said psychiatrist prescribed me mirtazerpine... split the letters up - mi - (r) tazer - pine...This is more of what they do because to me that equals "military intelligence tazer of the pineal gland" and it for sure made me feel brain dead and devoid of any energy therefore acting as a complete negative, so i stopped taking it after the first round. IT isa similar technique that they use with the naming of alot of drugs - co-caine...All of these organisations are based in religions and in the bible it was caine that killed able...caine killed ability...co...covert operative. weed, which we used to call theshit that grew in our gardens that strangled all the other plants... I believe that i am frequently drugged, set up to appear as shit that i'm not and the last few properties i've lived in have been repeatedly broken into. I actually fully believe that on at least three occasions they have broken into my flat/s to fuck with my cats - the reason being that i was warned that they had done this and over the next couple of days they near enough erupted in fleas and worms. They are house kittens and at the time they were around two months old. When i saw what i perceived to be a warning that they had fucked with my cats, it was another occasion where i thought, "if this comes true then this is another case of indisputable proof in my head".
I am aware, and have told people in the past that alot of this looks ridiculous. I am fully aware that people like this usually like to make their targets seem as untrustworthy/insane as possible, creating a vast amount of smoke and mirrors, such as telling me there doing this "to see how far they can push a decent man before he breaks" or that this is to do with a police officer who arrested me when i was seventeen; They arrested me for taking photos of two guys doing graffiti in an abandoned warehouse...in the interview, i told him he was talking to me like a twat and repeatedly insulted him...due to him being an overly aggressive twat that had arrested someone...for taking pictures....of two people spray painting a wall in a warehouse where we had had a party the week before, hosted by whoever the fuck. He told me they were charging me with burglary, criminal damage and breaking and entering...for taking...photos....in a warehouse that was utterly and completely trashed and had one of its ceilings caved in, was covered in graffiti and had the majority of its windows smashed in...did they think i was going to say "i'm ever so sorry". I'm not and i wont be doing, and he's still a petty piece of shit that should have been charged with wasting police time. They are also trying to make out its to do with this girl i went to school with whose father and mother are both in education and ive seen her dad leaving the freemason building which is about a five minute walk from where i live, covered in shit loads of medals and like, mr t esque chains....i was never into her...i dont think that since we left school, she would say she's been at all into me, but i dont know how it was from her side but ive had nothing but people we went to school with telling me that they think we're going to end up together, over and over and over a fucking gain. I know that she had created a fb page back back in the day, we're talking 2010 (when i discovered it) or possibly prior where she'd invited a bunch of people i know to keep tabs on me and tell her my whereabouts because i used to not respond to her messages. wtf. Oh also one of my mums best friends told me that she was trying to have me sectioned...her ex boyfriend was also sectioned. This would make alot moresense if we'd ever been together...we havent been. we hung out when we were kids and occasionally in our mid twenties. IT would be harsh to say she is nothing to me but like...i really didnt hang out with anyone from school once i left so i dont know how else to put it...There was also another website called "spicy ketchup" that was a tonne of photos of me in compromising positions (drunk etc) that was basically reeling off however much this person hated me and talking about how i couldn't "wax lyrical" and basically a tonne of insults that you could sling at any other human being. This is what i'm talking about when i'm saying that they are trying to make out it's multiple reasons but there are merely multiple reasons because they're trying to mask what it actually is. Oh and i forgot they've been trying to get me to join them for years, telling me on a ridiculous amount of occasions that i'm passing multiple tests oh and they've tried to get me to target my friends child. they told me that they stop killing me when i start killing, (killing not meaning literal murder but killing someones currently personality, which they seem to believe is a mere imprint of modern day society which conflicts with the "free" masons idea of what they think people should be...so essentially they want me to bully an eighteen year old...)i declined this bullshit offer of taking out my own torture and punching down and its obviously caused this to ramp up massively.
I could talk, for days if not weeks about everything that goes on because its about 20 shots each day. To be honest, what pisses them off them most seems to be that i keep doing what im doing and time and time again just ridicule them when they seem to think im done in. It's such a strange situation. On the one hand i faze alot of it out because i have alot of different interests, i keep myself active and i really dont give a shit about some fair weather friends/fed rat kids that wanted to do mummy and daddy proud. On the other hand i'm surrounded. at all times. stalked. harrassed. filmed. set up. physically assaulted. tortured. poisoned/drugged. Oh and more recently, since ive been complaining to the police over and over and over again and began posting youtube videos regarding what was going on, they now seem to be threatening me by telling me that they're going to fuck me if i take this to the media. I imagine that it going to be with false accusations. And why would i give a fuck? ive done nothing...therefore all they'll be able to do is slander me and why would i give a fuck about that.
There's tonnes, upon tonnes of shit ive missed out. Oh yeah this other guy i went to school with once askled me a question that i thought was strange..."would i rather have a hot woman take a dump on my chest but we were in love and together or...i forget the other question because that was the answer i chose. around twelve yearsafter this i came back from doing some travelling in europe and this couple near enoughscreamed at me "yeah well you chose for her to take a shit on your heart"...no somebody asked me a question that i thought was some sort of shit joke...no pun intended.
I am 34 and i can remember thinking something was not right when i was seven. I had a maths teacher when i was fourteen who held me back after class and told me that she had no idea what was going on but that i was intentionally being held back (i was put in the bottom group for nearly everything and my test results were constantly above average and apparently specifically for maths, based on these exams we had to do called CATS). right after this and i mean right after this, she was moved into a different class and was no longer our teacher. within a couple of months she was sacked. I have her name and i also queried all of this with my school, being one of many companies i submitted a sar (subject access request) to. They told me they had no records on me at all, much the same as the two security companies said. In my early teens, there was this guy who used to fuck with me, who i later found out was a cocaine dealer, who was the boyfriend of my mums friend. He's maybe forty-ish years older than me. He has much like the fed, shown up again and again in my life as someone seemingly fucking with me. i found out a few years ago his dad was a priest, which again, was just another "oh yeah well that makes sense" moment.
I am fully aware that i seem insane, but these people seem to be intent on deleting me from history and making it so that it even fucking looks like i dont exist. Again, this seems to be shit to do with some beef over a fucking church gazebo and for them most part, i want to know what the fuck to do. I have been speaking to mental health professionals for sixteen years and they never deem me to have any serious mental health issues, except for the guy that came with the police who wrote down that i had psychosis, which was not mentioned at all in the conversation and i believe along with the piss take medication he prescribed me and letting me know that i was going to find this funny, just thought he'd record that i was insane to further discredit me. I have mentioned this to multiple police officers and i'm on my tenth fucking complaint and i have a feeling theyre going to tell me that they have no information on me other than a couple of drunk and disorderly arrests pre nine years ago and the other two i mentioned and i have a feeling that intelligence will tell me that they can't give me any information.
Like...what do i do..? I'm an average person...i'm bright in some areas and dim in others...i'm happy sometimes i'm miserable others...im hardworking for half the time and im lazy other times...i'm creative-ish but im not a fucking slash...again no pun intended. icant see any reason that im being fucked with other than old men being stick in the mud, rapey pedo twats that are trying to keep some shit you learnatseven years old about code breaking, metaphor and simile "secret squirrel"...its not secret...it never has been, and if im as bang average or thick as you're making out i am then i probably shouldnt be deciphering everything...Again, wtf do i do about this?
p.s. ive rushed this. it doesnt seem like i have due to how long it is but this has been my whole fucking life full of being harrassed and bullied by these people.

Hi
I feel like i need to give a large amount of backstory here. I am not suicidal at this present moment however i have suffered from depression for over twenty years and the last nine years have been particularly hard. During this time though I have discovered multiple ways to pull myself out of this and they are the usual tricks; exercise, keeping brain stimulated good diet etc etc etc but what i am facing and what i believe my depression to be due to is getting horrendous and i am frequently having people making jokes about how i should kill myself and attempting to push me towards it.
Im being harrassed, abused and stalked on a daily basis, seemingly by police, military "intelligence", freemasons and various other branches of government. Not only have I had this confirmed by people in the military, but i've confronted main people involved in this and they've apologised and broken down or have given me what they know.
I've issued 9 complaints, split between my local police, my local council and the home secratary (who apparently would have had to have signed off on the types of harrassment and surveillance that they use) and had zero response. Not only do i get 0 responses, when speaking to three officers face to face (the police were called on me by an unknown person posting a video online about this) they told me there was no record of any of my complaints. I spoke to a organisation in my home town (nottingham) regarding this and they knew all to well of the types of harrassment that i was describing but told me that they are/were unable to assist with complaints regarding law enforcement etc and that i would have to hire a solicitor. i am broke. I am broke because near enough every job i've gone into since leaving the catering industry and a few before are seemingly filled with people who know exactly who i am and make a bee line for me straight off the bat, by manipulating the thoughts and opinions of people around me and doing nothing but try to hold me down and ridicule me.
It is crazy to start stating the amount of abuse and harrassment i face. Not only is the amount of abuse i face the issue, but the reason. It seems to be to do with a fire started in 1976 at st wilfrids church in wilford, nottingham (13 years before i was born) and seems to stretch all the way to the monarchy. If you think this sounds far fetched, the military, police and tax office all come under "his majesties(HM)" etc etc, meaning regardless us stating that we're controlled by government, the monarchy still runs said branches and the church... I was mutilated as a child (i knew this from about 12-14 years old and around three years ago one of the heads of the midwifry department in the hospital i was born in was arrested for having a part in over 1500 deaths and mutiliations) The types of abuse i face are vast; Car registration plates with messages from officers/undercover officers, the false conversations that are had around me constantly, the false people who get involved in my life merely to act as antagonists, i am hacked and surveilled constantly and i am let know that people watch my diary entries that i record onto my pc, at least my last two flats are repeatedly broken into, i am watched everywhere i go and seemingly inside my own flat... It seems as though every name i see on forums or content posts are a thinly veiled allegorical insult towards me...it used to be comments that were thinly veiled insults, however i would reply with some sort of allegorical insult so now it seems to be the names of posters on innocuous posts. This is the same as they used to insult me directly, however i've always been a pretty direct person so now they use allegory and groups of people because they seem to need to tell people i don't stand up for myself which i do the majority of the time, or things such as the reg plates with vehicles usually driven by the elderly or women with kids because if i confront these people it's going to make me look worse...I have actually confronted multiple people, and they give some rushed vague answer as to why they have an obvious insult towards me on their registration plate. I have also been let know twice, by people that work for the government that i have no proof and i'll be able to prove nothing. The last guy was an apparent councilor, who smiling extremely brightly said " it must be really frustrating that you have no proof". speculate all you want on my mental health but that is either a fucking wank councillor or this is another case of them attempting to wind me up. Oh and i was told by a psychiatrist that they were hoping i was going to see this as satirical...I was beaten unconscious while handcuffed one night by three riot vans full of police officers, who in the morning said it was because i matched the description of someone that was trying to break into a vehicle in a hotel car park close to where they arrested me. I don't drive and I was wearing a different coloured hoodie than the color of the hoodie they described in the morning and from what i remember, the police officer was sat on my back screaming "we know you've got something on you"...they mentioned nothing about any vehicle. I was then knocked unconscious and awoke in the morning. This is apparently what i'm supposed to find satirical. Said psychiatrist prescribed me mirtazerpine... split the letters up - mi - (r) tazer - pine...This is more of what they do because to me that equals "military intelligence tazer of the pineal gland" and it for sure made me feel brain dead and devoid of any energy therefore acting as a complete negative, so i stopped taking it after the first round. IT isa similar technique that they use with the naming of alot of drugs - co-caine...All of these organisations are based in religions and in the bible it was caine that killed able...caine killed ability...co...covert operative. weed, which we used to call theshit that grew in our gardens that strangled all the other plants... I believe that i am frequently drugged, set up to appear as shit that i'm not and the last few properties i've lived in have been repeatedly broken into. I actually fully believe that on at least three occasions they have broken into my flat/s to fuck with my cats - the reason being that i was warned that they had done this and over the next couple of days they near enough erupted in fleas and worms. They are house kittens and at the time they were around two months old. When i saw what i perceived to be a warning that they had fucked with my cats, it was another occasion where i thought, "if this comes true then this is another case of indisputable proof in my head".
I am aware, and have told people in the past that alot of this looks ridiculous. I am fully aware that people like this usually like to make their targets seem as untrustworthy/insane as possible, creating a vast amount of smoke and mirrors, such as telling me there doing this "to see how far they can push a decent man before he breaks" or that this is to do with a police officer who arrested me when i was seventeen; They arrested me for taking photos of two guys doing graffiti in an abandoned warehouse...in the interview, i told him he was talking to me like a twat and repeatedly insulted him...due to him being an overly aggressive twat that had arrested someone...for taking pictures....of two people spray painting a wall in a warehouse where we had had a party the week before, hosted by whoever the fuck. He told me they were charging me with burglary, criminal damage and breaking and entering...for taking...photos....in a warehouse that was utterly and completely trashed and had one of its ceilings caved in, was covered in graffiti and had the majority of its windows smashed in...did they think i was going to say "i'm ever so sorry". I'm not and i wont be doing, and he's still a petty piece of shit that should have been charged with wasting police time. They are also trying to make out its to do with this girl i went to school with whose father and mother are both in education and ive seen her dad leaving the freemason building which is about a five minute walk from where i live, covered in shit loads of medals and like, mr t esque chains....i was never into her...i dont think that since we left school, she would say she's been at all into me, but i dont know how it was from her side but ive had nothing but people we went to school with telling me that they think we're going to end up together, over and over and over a fucking gain. I know that she had created a fb page back back in the day, we're talking 2010 (when i discovered it) or possibly prior where she'd invited a bunch of people i know to keep tabs on me and tell her my whereabouts because i used to not respond to her messages. wtf. Oh also one of my mums best friends told me that she was trying to have me sectioned...her ex boyfriend was also sectioned. This would make alot moresense if we'd ever been together...we havent been. we hung out when we were kids and occasionally in our mid twenties. IT would be harsh to say she is nothing to me but like...i really didnt hang out with anyone from school once i left so i dont know how else to put it...There was also another website called "spicy ketchup" that was a tonne of photos of me in compromising positions (drunk etc) that was basically reeling off however much this person hated me and talking about how i couldn't "wax lyrical" and basically a tonne of insults that you could sling at any other human being. This is what i'm talking about when i'm saying that they are trying to make out it's multiple reasons but there are merely multiple reasons because they're trying to mask what it actually is. Oh and i forgot they've been trying to get me to join them for years, telling me on a ridiculous amount of occasions that i'm passing multiple tests oh and they've tried to get me to target my friends child. they told me that they stop killing me when i start killing, (killing not meaning literal murder but killing someones currently personality, which they seem to believe is a mere imprint of modern day society which conflicts with the "free" masons idea of what they think people should be...so essentially they want me to bully an eighteen year old...)i declined this bullshit offer of taking out my own torture and punching down and its obviously caused this to ramp up massively.
I could talk, for days if not weeks about everything that goes on because its about 20 shots each day. To be honest, what pisses them off them most seems to be that i keep doing what im doing and time and time again just ridicule them when they seem to think im done in. It's such a strange situation. On the one hand i faze alot of it out because i have alot of different interests, i keep myself active and i really dont give a shit about some fair weather friends/fed rat kids that wanted to do mummy and daddy proud. On the other hand i'm surrounded. at all times. stalked. harrassed. filmed. set up. physically assaulted. tortured. poisoned/drugged. Oh and more recently, since ive been complaining to the police over and over and over again and began posting youtube videos regarding what was going on, they now seem to be threatening me by telling me that they're going to fuck me if i take this to the media. I imagine that it going to be with false accusations. And why would i give a fuck? ive done nothing...therefore all they'll be able to do is slander me and why would i give a fuck about that.
There's tonnes, upon tonnes of shit ive missed out. Oh yeah this other guy i went to school with once askled me a question that i thought was strange..."would i rather have a hot woman take a dump on my chest but we were in love and together or...i forget the other question because that was the answer i chose. around twelve yearsafter this i came back from doing some travelling in europe and this couple near enoughscreamed at me "yeah well you chose for her to take a shit on your heart"...no somebody asked me a question that i thought was some sort of shit joke...no pun intended.
I am 34 and i can remember thinking something was not right when i was seven. I had a maths teacher when i was fourteen who held me back after class and told me that she had no idea what was going on but that i was intentionally being held back (i was put in the bottom group for nearly everything and my test results were constantly above average and apparently specifically for maths, based on these exams we had to do called CATS). right after this and i mean right after this, she was moved into a different class and was no longer our teacher. within a couple of months she was sacked. I have her name and i also queried all of this with my school, being one of many companies i submitted a sar (subject access request) to. They told me they had no records on me at all, much the same as the two security companies said. In my early teens, there was this guy who used to fuck with me, who i later found out was a cocaine dealer, who was the boyfriend of my mums friend. He's maybe forty-ish years older than me. He has much like the fed, shown up again and again in my life as someone seemingly fucking with me. i found out a few years ago his dad was a priest, which again, was just another "oh yeah well that makes sense" moment.
I am fully aware that i seem insane, but these people seem to be intent on deleting me from history and making it so that it even fucking looks like i dont exist. Again, this seems to be shit to do with some beef over a fucking church gazebo and for them most part, i want to know what the fuck to do. I have been speaking to mental health professionals for sixteen years and they never deem me to have any serious mental health issues, except for the guy that came with the police who wrote down that i had psychosis, which was not mentioned at all in the conversation and i believe along with the piss take medication he prescribed me and letting me know that i was going to find this funny, just thought he'd record that i was insane to further discredit me. I have mentioned this to multiple police officers and i'm on my tenth fucking complaint and i have a feeling theyre going to tell me that they have no information on me other than a couple of drunk and disorderly arrests pre nine years ago and the other two i mentioned and i have a feeling that intelligence will tell me that they can't give me any information.
Like...what do i do..? I'm an average person...i'm bright in some areas and dim in others...i'm happy sometimes i'm miserable others...im hardworking for half the time and im lazy other times...i'm creative-ish but im not a fucking slash...again no pun intended. icant see any reason that im being fucked with other than old men being stick in the mud, rapey pedo twats that are trying to keep some shit you learnatseven years old about code breaking, metaphor and simile "secret squirrel"...its not secret...it never has been, and if im as bang average or thick as you're making out i am then i probably shouldnt be deciphering everything...Again, wtf do i do about this?
p.s. ive rushed this. it doesnt seem like i have due to how long it is but this has been my whole fucking life full of being harrassed and bullied by these people.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror, by Mizuki Tsujimura
"Lonely Castle in the Mirror" is a genre-savvy portal fantasy about junior high students who get drawn into a mysterious castle when they're supposed to be in school. Kokoro had a terrible experience early in the school year that's made her terrified of facing her classmates, and develops some kind of (psychosomatic?) illness that prevents her from attending either the normal school or a special alternative school for students who need more support. Shortly after this, her bedroom mirror turns into a portal to the castle with six other students who are also not in school during the normal hours. The "Wolf Queen" in charge--an elementary school girl who enjoys allusions to "Little Red Riding Hood"--tells them all that there's a secret key in the castle that can grant one wish, and they have a year to find it and, potentially, use it. Also, if anyone is caught in the castle outside of the 9-5 school day timeframe, they'll all be eaten by a wolf.
So, these painfully shy students have the opportunity to make friends and have a non-terrifying experience with kids their own age, and they all enjoy bonding and playing video games and drinking tea together, and for the most part nobody cares about finding the key, because that would make the castle close and prematurely end their new friendship. For most of the book, the contrived quest stuff doesn't play into it. And then when it does, it kind of lampshades "oh yeah I have to do this on speedrun mode."
There are a lot of takes pointing out that books where "the magic goes away"/"everyone loses their memories"/"we just have to move on with our lives and pretend like the portal fantasy never happened" can be pretty messed up. In this book, however, I couldn't find myself relating to the characters because it felt like a perverse incentives situation. Yes, middle school is an emotionally volatile, turbulent, unpleasant environment full of many immature people. This is a pretty common experience, actually. Kokoro just can't handle it, and as a response, the infinitely patient teacher at the alternative school reassures her mother that she's battling really hard and it's not her fault, she just can't go to school, and then she gets to go through a portal into fantasy world with people who play video games and eat snacks all day...? I understand there's more to it than that, but something has to change about this situation because otherwise this really isn't the message you want to send. (Once we learn about the backgrounds and life situations of some of the other students, I can imagine how it was easier for people like Subaru and Aki to fall through the cracks, but it feels like, eg, Masamune and Ureshino's junior high situation should have had some kind of guidance counselor or adult in the room. The readers' guide in the back of the book describes Kokoro as a "futoko," and I understand this is more pervasive in Japan than elsewhere, but I have a hard time accepting that seventh graders staying home for months on end with no apparent homeschooling or tutoring gets such a shrug.)
The prose didn't really grab me, sometimes it felt awkward ("That day, Fuka apparently enjoyed the chocolates back home, for she faithfully reported to Kokoro that 'they were delicious.'") and there were a several parts with very. short. one. line. paragraphs.

Kokoro tried to convince herself that she hadn't been at home that day. Miori and the others had simply pounded on the door of an empty house, trampled over the patio, gone round and round over outside of the house. But nothing actually happened. Nothing at all. She never was about to be killed. And yet the next day, she said, "I have a stomachache." And she really did. It was no lie. And her mother chimed in: "You do look pale. Are you OK?" And that's when Kokoro stopped going to school.

A few paragraphs later:

Would she be able to protect herself?
The only place she could now go to freely from her bedroom was the castle.
If I'm in the castle, she started to think, then I'll be safe.
Only the castle beyond the mirror could offer her complete protection.

Girl, I know your mental health isn't the greatest, but we're talking about the place where people threatened you with being eaten alive by a wolf. ??? Sorry, my suspension of belief does not extend this far.
There's also a random red herring with a neighbor student whose father has an interest in researching fairy tales, and like, maybe that "real world" location/characters are related in some way to the portal world? No, it's just a fortuitous coincidence that helps Kokoro have access to more Western fairy tale info.
The good news is, about halfway through the characters start developing some genre-savviness and realizing what they have in common, and towards the end, things pick up significantly in terms of how and why some of the arbitrary fairy-tale logic came about. So it definitely sticks the landing in that way.
Bingo: Prologue/Epilogue, Author of Color, Book Club
Promise of the Flame, by Sylvia Louise Engdahl
At the end of "Stewards of the Flame," to which this book is a sequel, our heroes Jesse, Carla, and Peter had hijacked a spaceship and jumped to an uninhabited planet to set up a colony where humans could develop psionic powers free from the medical bureaucracy of Undine. Jesse's hyperspace jump was rushed and not perfectly calculated, so in order to ensure their oxygen supply makes it all the way to planet Maclairn (named after their late founder), the Group had to confront their deepest fear and brave the stasis boxes that had been Chekhov-gunned several times in the last section. As the existence of the sequel implies, the protagonists and most of their comrades survive stasis. But while, in "Stewards," the hyperspace navigation "error"/imperfection sets up the Group's ultimate test, here it casts a long shadow as Jesse keeps wondering, "could we have picked a better landing site if I hadn't screwed it up?"
The early days on Maclairn are a struggle. The first part of the book is a recurring cycle of "should we do things this way or that way? Well, we came here to set up a society fully founded on mind powers, we pretty much have to commit to the bit or else what's the point." Repeat ad infinitum. Later, this broadens somewhat to "we have to have psi powers coexist with modern technology to fulfill Ian [Maclairn]'s dream, otherwise what's the point." There are clear parallels to (Engdahl's older trilogy) "Children of the Star"; that society represents the endpoint if they go down a path of giving up on modern technology--and the burdens of agrarian, high-population-growth societies fall disproportionately on women. If "Stewards" had motifs of baptism, this is more of an Exodus story, with the characters sulking about "why did you bring us out of Undine just to starve in the wilderness, at least there we had enough to eat." "My God, came Carla’s thought, we’re homesick! Homesick for Undine! I never admitted that to myself, it was so foolish, I’d wanted so much to leave . . . I guess I just pushed it down inside, into a place I didn’t dare go. . . ."
The consequences of the hyperspace jump being off are a minor tonal retcon/change in perspective on the events of the first book. A more significant one, to me, involves love triangle dynamics. In "Stewards," we learn that Carla and Peter both previously had spouses who died under the authoritarian Undine government. Fortunately, Jesse shows up just when Carla is ready to love again, and their relationship brings him into the Group and thus enables their escape from Undine. "Promise" adds that Peter has been silently pining for Carla all along, but needed Jesse's starship skills too much to say anything. We're told the Group's adult recruits skew slightly female, but that isn't represented among the main characters, and you're telling me that none of them are Peter's type? All three of them sigh and angst about "oh, we're such great friends, we can't let this love triangle come between us," and at times it feels like it's setting up for a polygamy plotline (they're all highly powerful telepaths, they can't keep secrets from each other!) And then it just...goes nowhere. As in the first book, I can accept that sex is probably great among telepaths; I can't buy that every single person has to have sex in order to fully level up their telepathic sensitivity!
The best parts of "Promise" involve the culture clashes between Jesse, who grew up on Earth; the rest of the adult Group members, from Undine; and the Maclairn-born generation. Undine's environment is so tightly regulated, they don't even have insects or lizards, so the planet's "collective unconsciousness" doesn't have a fear of creepy-crawlies; Jesse's initial revulsion risks "contaminating" the psyche until everyone faces their fear.

“Horror vids involving animal life aren’t permitted on colony worlds,” Peter told him. “Haven’t you ever wondered why starship libraries don’t contain any? Earth has always banned their export as a measure to protect extraterrestrial lifeforms. It’s one of the few government trade regulations I think is wise.” Of course, Jesse realized. The average Earth citizen’s reaction would have been to kill the crawlies—if possible, to exterminate them. That hadn’t occurred to anyone yesterday. And horror vids often portrayed even intelligent aliens as repulsive; what kind of precedent would that set if similar ones were ever encountered?
Traditionally, said the knowledgebase, small farmers had chopped chickens’ heads off with a hatchet. Wringing their necks was said to be more humane, but nobody wanted to experiment on live, squawking chickens despite the specific instructions provided. These warned that the hardest part, in the physical sense, would be catching a grown chicken in the first place—a fact soon borne out by experience, as chickens are not devoid of telepathic sensitivity and the pursuers were unconsciously broadcasting their intent to kill.
Kel, like many of the Group’s other children, had been slow in learning to talk. It had taken awhile before it dawned on the adults that this was because the kids’ telepathic bonds with their parents had been so strongly encouraged that they felt no need to communicate vocally. Speech could not be allowed to die out in a psi-based culture; it was essential not only to reading but to the framing and communication of complex ideas. Now, everyone realized that like the skills for volitional control of the body, telepathic conveyance of concepts, as distinguished from emotions, must wait until the kids were older.

On the other hand, the scope of "this is dangerous, but we must, to commit to the psionic bit" and "well, we've come through a lot of tough situations before, but this time really is the end...jk never mind we got out of it" got repetitive. There was one scene towards the end where it's like "okay, we're almost done, I can see how telepathy might be used to enable a permanent self-sacrifice...nope, we're still going, huh," and even though some of the resolutions were nice callbacks/tying up foreshadowing, it was still a lot.
Like in James P. Hogan's "Voyage to Yesteryear," the kids who were raised outside of Earth and Undine's prejudices are, overall, a great step forward for humankind, but there can be some values dissonance. In both cases, the desire for lots of population growth leads to a much lower age of consent than Earthlings are used to. Justified somewhat more in Maclairn's case; telepathy means almost everyone wouldn't fathom hurting each other and of course sex is consensual, as well as amazing. On the other hand, in both cases, there's no prison infrastructure; if someone is determined to be evil and is posing a grave threat to others, you just have to kill them. "Promise" gets a little more philosophical about the problem of evil--if it's not nature and it's not nurture, what causes it? Free will? Sure, but it seems as if some people are also evil from day one even if their DNA is just fine.
There are a couple shoutouts to Lord of the Rings and Star Trek that fit in nicely. I found "it's just like using the Force, you know, like in that old vid, Star Wars" to be more of a distraction. Similarly, Engdahl's commitment to showing her work ("in the twentieth century on Earth, you know, people experimented with remote viewing!") got to be a distraction. But the exploration of "okay, let's try a rain dance, even if it fails we're learning something and pushing knowledge forward" was a great use of the "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" trope, which is what I come to Engdahl for anyway.
Some people, like Peter, tend to believe in an afterlife; others, like Jesse, are more skeptical. Earth religions don't transfer well to other planets because the interstellar gap is too big for the collective unconsciousness to bridge. Despite this, characters use the word "God" (like in a telepathic context of "Carla . . . oh, God, Carla, answer me!") approximately 144 times. Do you have no one else's name to take in vain???
Criticisms aside, I do think that this is less heavy-handed than "Stewards" and at least as good a starting point!
Bingo: Dreams, Prologues/Epilogues, Self-Published, Survival. One prominent character acquires a physical disability midway through the story. Jesse and Peter's Criminal record on Undine is not very important (since the entire book is set on or around Maclairn), but it becomes more prominent in the last section.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty
Once upon a time (1100s Indian Ocean) there was a notorious nakhudha (pirate captain) named Amina al-Sirafi. Ten years ago, she retired, and now she's a single mom with a bad knee and a leaky roof. However, a wealthy noblewoman who believes her granddaughter has been kidnapped by a Western European would-be sorcerer insists on having Amina rescue her, never mind Amina's own family responsibilities. So Amina has to put the band back together, staying one step ahead of the authorities while getting to the bottom of the mystery.
Amina and her crew are likable rogues. I found this easier to get into than Chakraborty's "City of Brass". That book focused more on a long-term conflict between two factions, neither of whom consistently seem like the "good guys"; maybe that's supposed to be sending a message about RL actually works, but I found it confusing at times. In contrast, the early sections of "Amina" are about tracking down individual allies, from a gay smuggler stuck in a prison in Aden, to a navigator and family man in Mogadishu, while researching the notorious Falco Palamenestra and speculating what he might be up to.
At first, Amina's Muslim identity comes through more in the ways characters talk, and some level of monster-fighting exorcism (like Catholicism in some horror movies), than actual practice. But gradually, we see more of how she's struggled to be a parent in her post-pirate life:

If the criminal past didn’t alert you, I have not always been a very good Muslim. Drinking and missing prayer were among my lesser sins, and if I tried to straighten myself up every year when Ramadan rolled around—a new life of piety easy to imagine while dazed with thirst and caught up in the communal joy of taraweeh—I typically lapsed into my usual behavior by the time the month of Shawwal had ended.
But then Marjana was born. And Asif was . . . lost. And if one of these events made me feel as though I had no right to ever call upon God again, the other filled with me a driving need I could not deny. So I keep my daily prayers, even if I feel unworthy the entire time.

To me, this rang true as a depiction of a complicated, realistic, person of faith.
This is a time and place that I knew very little about. For instance, one plotline involves the island of Socotra, an island off the coast of Somalia which is today part of Yemen. There are caves there with graffiti from sailors going back thousands of years, in Indian and Greek and Ethiopic scripts. This is a real place! I would not have been able to tell you anything about it before reading this book! So Chakraborty's vivid descriptions of places this, and of the diverse cultures and religious backgrounds of pirates who live and work alongside each other, is compelling. There's a danger in this as a reader, though, in that getting too caught up in the "worldbuilding" of the actual world can make it feel like its "foreignness" is what makes it speculative and fantastical, which is obviously inaccurate and beside the point. That's one reason why jumping in at the deep end with an honest-to-goodness sea monster in chapter one might have been a good choice, to remind us that there really are otherworldly things happening.
The themes of "rich people love to jerk poor people around" and "the male gaze sucks" are clear, but there's lots of quippy banter mixed in.

“That was you, was it not? The woman who poisoned the soldiers at the wali’s office, freed a crew of homicidal pirates, set a score of ships on fire, and fled the harbor in the middle of the night?” “I would never confirm such a thing and put you at risk of consorting with criminals. But it was two ships, not a score. I wouldn’t wish to encourage exaggeration.”
Sailing past its ancient breakwater—the stones said to have been set there by giants—you might feel as though you have entered a mythical port of magic from a sailor’s yarn. You would be sorely mistaken. Aden is where magic goes to be crushed by the muhtasib’s weights, and if wonder could be calculated, this city would require an ordinance taxing it.
“She knows you are a pirate?” “I am not a pirate,” Majed huffed. “I am a cartographer with a checkered past.” “Yes. A checkered past of piracy.”

The book contains a few chapters that are "in-universe documentation" or chronicles of the places and people in the main narrative. This is a trope I really enjoy at times. However, in this case, I didn't feel it added much, beyond underscoring the themes that "men feel threatened by powerful women, oh no."
The biggest issue for me was how all the diverse, sympathetic characters just kind of went along with developments that felt more reminiscent of 2020s Tumblr idiolect than 1100s Indian Ocean. How fortuitously convenient! (At least it got a Hugo nom.)
Smaller quibbles: the timeframe with Amina in her forties is appeSaling to the extent that it's a story about a working mother trying to follow her own dreams while also desperately missing her kid. But in order to make that work, the narrative sometimes withholds a lot of important information about the tragedies in Amina's past/her relationship with her child's father until it can be brought forward for dramatic effect, and it made me wonder what a story from the younger Amina's POV would look like without the artificial suspense problem.
More broadly, I felt like the second half's pace wasn't as crisp as the first--there's a dramatic near-death experience, then a bunch of fantastical creatures are introduced in quick succession as if to make up for the "worldbuilding via the actual world" stuff earlier, then we get a very contrived in-universe sequel hook, then we double back to a setting that had already been introduced. Whereas the first part was "we need to go to A to do B and then that gives us a clue that leads us to C."
Who wore it better?

“It is invalid!” I burst out. “Our nikah. It is not permissible for me to marry a non-Muslim.” Raksh frowned. “Is that why the man had me say all those words about God and prophets?” He returned to studying the contract. “Trust me, dear wife, I can be a vast number of things.” “But—but you are not a believer.” “Of course I am. Best to know the competition, yes?”

Compare "Alif the Unseen" (which is one of my favorites and I suspect I probably was harsh on "City of Brass" by comparison):

"But I told him I couldn't marry him even if I wanted to, because I can't marry an unbeliever. And he laughed and said he'd been a believer, 'for a the better part of a thousand years,' I believe were the exact words." "What?" said Alif. "Vikram? Vikram the madman who bites people?" "He might be those things," said the convert hastily, "but did you ever know him to do or say anything really blasphemous?" "I guess not."

Bingo: Alliterative Title, Criminals, Dreams, Reference Materials, Readalong! It's planned to be First in a Series but the sequels aren't out yet. (Statistics from last year just came out and this was the most popular book across all 2023 bingo cards, with ~200 reads!)
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
When I read "Uprooted" and griped about the implausible romance and/or reactive plot, people's reactions were "try Spinning Silver, it's an improvement in some of those ways." And yeah, it is! I was aware that Spinning Silver was set in the same world as Uprooted, ~1700s Eastern Europe but with some fantasy elements, and that it was based on Rumplestiltskin.
But it's a lot more than a simple retelling. "Spinning Silver" teases out the individual trope elements of Rumplestiltskin--a mercenary father trying to get his daughter to marry up, the dead mother looming over the plot, a woman given the impossible task of making gold out of other elements, terrible bargains, aloof and unknowable beings from the fae world, the power of knowing someone's true name, the horror of a mother trading her child to inhuman creatures--and blows them all up, turning them inside-out, and creating something original.
It also does a lot with POV. For the first chunk, we have two young women from a small town who go back and forth telling the stories of their business dealings. But as the book goes on, we start jumping into more and more people's heads, and everyone's voice is very different. Sometimes this can be used for dramatic irony; we hear what character A thinks of their interaction with B, then we jump back and tell the same scene from B's POV and what was going through their head is very different than what A assumes. Once in a while, this makes the plot drag--there's a couple of scenes towards the end where we can't have any suspense about "oh no, will they find what they're looking for" because we've just seen the corresponding scene from another POV, and it would have been more effective to rearrange them--but overall, things are propelled forward much more intriguingly than "Uprooted."
Our POV characters are:

• Miryem, the daughter of the village moneylender. Miryem's family is Jewish, which means her father is one of the few people socially permitted to work as a moneylender--but he's more interested in currying favor with the neighbors than getting his debts repaid, so his family goes hungry. Miryem steps up, grows "cold" and "wintry," and takes on his job, to her parents' horror. But an offhand remark about "look, I can turn silver into gold" (metaphorically, because of, you know, capitalism) inadvertently catches the ear of the "Staryk," monstrous elven raiders who live in a parallel realm.
• Wanda, the daughter of an abusive alcoholic. Miryem is like "he can't pay off his debt because he's drunk everything away, I'll have them repay me by hiring Wanda to assist me with our work, I know this is cold and ruthless but I have to." Then when we see it from Wanda's POV she's like "you're giving me money to be out of the house and away from my father? And you'll even feed me? What an undeserved kindness!" Her reaction to "learning to manipulate numbers and do arithmetic is an amazing kind of magic!" felt cheesy and over-the-top, but the contrast between the literal phrasing of a royal decree and the way she "translates" it was more convincing.
• Irina, the daughter of the duke of Vysnia (Vilnius, Lithuania). Like Wanda, her mother is dead and her father is trying to arrange the most profitable marriage for her, never mind what she wants. When Miryem is compelled to turn magical Staryk silver into gold, she does so by having an acquaintance forge silver jewelry which the duke purchases--so when the gold takes on magical powers in the Staryk world, so does the silver with Irina, and brings her to the attention of a tsar. Despite her cold relationship with her father, she learns a lot from him and is a true politician, adept as anyone at cutting deals to keep her realm safe.
• Stepon, Wanda's younger brother. His narration is very simple and childlike (amazing cold open with "I like goats because I know what they will do.") It's possible he has some kind of sensory/mental health issues, or it's possible he's just eleven and overstimulated by unfamiliar crowds.
• Magreta, Irina's nurse/caretaker. She can be kind and supportive, but her casual antisemitism provides a contrast to how Miryem is treated by the villagers.
• Mirnatius, the tsar. For a while we mostly see him through Irina's POV ("this guy is so full of himself he requires a new outfit every day, that's no way to manage the economy"), but again, his narration provides a very different perspective on what's going on.

So I said the romance was better than "Uprooted," in that we didn't have the implausible "elderly magician berates young woman all the time but also they can't keep their hands off each other." In "Spinning Silver," both {Miryem and the Staryk king} and {Irina and Mirnatius} are paired off without much say-so on anybody's part, it's being manipulated by magic/higher-ups. So the timeframe of the book is mostly them all learning how to tolerate each other, and the romance is kind of left to your imagination in the future era.
The Staryk magic is kind of like...you can see their roads briefly if they make incursions in the human world, but as soon as they've disappeared, you start forgetting them and it really takes effort to remember. This means that if someone, like Miryem, disappears into the Staryk world, she's forgotten almost immediately except for little irregularities that don't seem right. These depictions were well-done. (Except that I was trying to remember if the Staryk were the same as the [jerk, mundane human] aristocrats in "Uprooted." They're not. I think I was half-remembering "Marek," the creepy prince, instead of "Staryk," the winter elves.)
There's a cool liminal space that sets up back-and-forth "communication" between the human and Staryk realms, and again, the multiple POVs are a good framework for this. On the other hand, there are some things, like, why do the Staryk want human gold, that are kind of chalked up to "magic idk" and not completely spelled out; for some of the confrontations at the end, again, it's better not to worry too much about hard magic systems and just go with the vibes. There's also an earlier plot that definitely plays the trope of "the less the audience knows about the plan, the more likely it is to succeed" trope straight.
Especially early on, it can be a very bleak "everyone sucks here" setting. Wanda and Stepon's father is horrific. Irina's father is mercenary and sets her up with Mirnatius, a dandy who abuses animals for fun. Nobody in the village respects Miryem's family, and when she tries to reclaim what she's due, her parents are horrified. The Staryk raid the village and carry off women and demand impossible tasks. There's a lot of "I have my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it" coming from all sides. Even though the plot is moving forward, it's hard to feel like there's anything to root for.
But cracks of light shine through. Miryem's mother, and her mother, defy the "dead moms" trope, and are able to be loving parental figures to Wanda, Stepon, and their brother Sergey. Miryem's grandfather is wise and conscientious, warning her of the risks that some of her choices pose not only to their family but to the Vysnia Jewish community as a whole, but still recognizing she's mature enough to make her own choices. They even make use of a real-world Jewish blessing for the first blossoming of trees in the spring. Even when people are trying to be cold, sometimes they're just too human!
Bingo: Alliterative Title, Under the Surface (not for most of the plot, but there is a secret tunnel that gets use), Multi-POV (and how!)
The Infinite Arena (edited by Terry Carr)
Anthology of SF short stories about sports, stumbled upon while browsing a used bookstore. I like sports and the first one was based on "Casey at the Bat," so okay, sold.
It's from 1977, and the stories were originally published in the 40s-70s timeframe. The sex ratio among writers appears to be nine men, zero women, which is pretty "impressive" considering there are only seven stories. Three of them are installments from series that feature the same recurring character(s), so maybe that explains some of the...paucity? I don't want to say they're "flat" or "shallow" or anything, most of the contemporary "deep" stuff isn't to my taste either, but it feels like there's "no 'there' there" for several of these. In some cases, it's like, "we have to raise the stakes by involving gambling/someone's fate being on the line"; in others, it's looking for parallels between sports and other aspects of life (warfare? weird alien insects?) that provide the impetus for two plots to intertwine.
-Joy in Mudville (Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson)--very impressionable and earnest teddy-bear-like alien species imprints on humans, and immediately become obsessed with baseball. One of the aliens names himself Mighty Casey, but unfortunately, opponents can rattle him by reminding him of how "Casey at the Bat" turned out. Fortunately, what poetry can break, poetry can also fix...

"You untentacled mammal! raged Ush Karuza. "You sslimeless conformation of bored flesh!" Alex had long ago discovered that mankind rarely reacts to insults couched in nonhuman terms. It did not offend him at all to be told that he was slimeless.

-Bullard Reflects (Malcolm Jameson)--Dazzle Dart is a sport played by bouncing light rays around with reflective gear and aiming for a goal at the opponents' end. Like American football, one team is designated on offense at a time, and the other is on defense, but you can "intercept" and score from on defense. In Dazzle Dart, this is worth bonus points. Except instead of normal goals and "turnover" goals being worth one and two points respectively, it's twenty-five and fifty. And you thought Quidditch was silly. (This is from 1941.)
-The Body Builders (Keith Laumer)--the best of the stories, in my opinion, in that it predicts both technological advancement and the social changes that will ensue in a clever way.

So it's a little artificial maybe--but what about the Orggies, riding around in custom-built cars that are nothing but substitute personalities, wearing padded shoulders, contact lenses, hearing aids, false teeth, cosmetics, elevator shoes, rugs to cover their bald domes? If you're going to wear false eyelashes, why not false eyes? Instead of a nose bob, why not bob the whole face? At least a fellow wearing a Servo is honest about it, which is more than you can say for an Orggie doll in a foam-rubber bra--not that Julie needed any help in that department.

-The Great Kladnar Race (Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett)--bored humans on an alien planet try introducing something like horse races that they can bet on. However, the aliens' concepts of sports and competition and betting don't necessarily align with the humans'.
-Mr. Meek Plays Polo (Clifford D. Simak)--guy who has only seen one space polo game in his life somehow accidentally stumbles into being the "expert" space polo coach, oops. Also there are weird alien bugs that are great at computation (a little like "The Circle").
-Sunjammer (Arthur C. Clarke, whose name is spelled wrong on the front cover)--a solar flare interrupts a solar sailboat race. Felt timely given the storm of a few days ago! (I did not get to see the aurora, alas.)
-Run to Starlight (George R. R. Martin)--short and slow but extremely muscular aliens enter an American football league and crush everyone, metaphorically and literally. However, the aliens' concepts of sports and competition don't necessarily align with the humans'. Too bad he never wrote anything else ;)
Bingo: 5+ short stories.

Part 1
I woke up the next morning with a bit of a headache. Groaning at the harsh sunlight coming through my window, I blinked the sand out of my eyes. It took me until my vision was clear for me to notice that my bedroom door, which I always made sure to close and lock before I went to sleep, was standing wide open. Like rusted gears starting to grind together, my waking mind slowly began to remember the strange crawling thing in the hallway I had glimpsed just before falling asleep.
I’ve always been a bit paranoid, and this paranoia had only increased after I started living alone. Reaching into my pillowcase, I carefully extracted a pocket knife that I keep hidden there, just in case. I hesitated before getting out of bed. I sat there, listening for a few minutes, trying to hear if there was any sound in my house. I couldn’t tell for certain, there was no way of knowing, but it felt like I could hear a faint wheezing under my bed, as if someone was struggling faintly for breath.
Or trying to stifle laughter.
I’d always had a fear of stepping out of bed. I didn’t like the gap between the floor and the bed frame, it always felt like there was just enough room for someone to hide down there. When I was much younger, sometimes I’d remain confined in bed for hours if I was home alone, afraid that if I stepped my foot upon the ground, I’d feel a clammy hand wrap gnarled fingers around my ankle.
Slowly, very slowly, I looked down over the edge of the bed, knife clutched tight in my sweaty fingers. For a split second I thought I saw a shadow shift, slightly, as though something ever so subtly had skirted out of view. I swallowed, fear making my heart race in my chest. I counted down from 10, but didn’t dare close my eyes. When I reached 1, I leapt out of bed, immediately crouching down and lifting the bed spread, knife raised to strike at whatever was hiding there.
Nothing.
There wasn’t even enough room beneath my bed for anyone to fit; boxes of old childhood toys and knick knacks had filled up all the remaining space down there. Setting the knife down on my bedside table, I rubbed my temples, taking deep breaths to try and calm myself down.
There’s nobody else in the house, Trinity, I thought to myself, you’re just being paranoid.
I felt my stomach growl, and remembered how little I had eaten the previous day. Realizing I’d have to actually go out and buy food before I could feed myself, I sighed and put on some clothes, slipping my car keys and wallet into my jacket pocket.
“Find everything you were looking for today si-,” said the cashier, catching herself mid-word as she looked closer at me, eyes drifting towards my neck and shoulders.
“Just fine, thank you,” I replied, not having any energy to even acknowledge this sort of thing.
The cashier just nodded and started scanning my groceries, mercifully choosing to eschew the usual small talk one expects from such interactions, though I couldn’t help but recall how chatty she had been with the elderly man immediately before me in line.
As I sat there, patiently waiting for her to finish with my items, I yawned a little, peering around my surroundings. I used to work in a grocery store just like this one, years ago. It was one of my very first jobs. It was always remarkable to me how similar chain stores looked on the inside, like they were procedurally generated levels in some video game, the same assets being assembled pseudo-randomly to create familiar spaces. My train of thought was interrupted when my idle gaze fell upon the monitor above the cashier’s head.
Where there ought to be the total I was supposed to pay, or an advertisement, or even just a blank screen, there was something murky, shadowed, slowly coming into focus. It seemed to be brightening, just a little at a time, a still image congealing out of the void of black pixels, long stringy black hair obscuring a face twisted into something almost resembling a smil-
“Alright, that’ll be 67.95.”
I jumped slightly at the cashier’s voice, hoping that she didn’t notice. “Of course, sorry,” I murmured, fumbling for my wallet and grabbing my credit card. The cashier just sighed almost imperceptibly. While I clumsily inserted the card into the chip reader, I looked up at the monitor, simply seeing my purchase’s total and a list of the items that had been scanned.
After being handed my receipt, I thanked the cashier, grabbed my bags and headed out the automatic door. I chanced a glance backwards on my way out, just to see if I could catch a glimpse of the image on the monitor again, but it was still normal. Just an ordinary checkout screen. I shook my head and made my way back to the car.
Maybe it wasn’t the wisest idea to take a night walk, given the odd events of the previous day, but in my defense at this point I was still operating under the assumption that whatever was going on was merely a consequence of stress and paranoia. I didn’t want to believe that I was in any real danger.
I’ve been taking night walks ever since the divorce, mainly to try and work through my fear of the dark. I felt embarrassed being in my mid 20s and still needing to sometimes keep the light on when I went to bed. Frankly I probably would have started taking the walks sooner, but Seth never felt comfortable with me going outside alone after nightfall. To my credit, the walks did genuinely work to quell some of my nyctophobia. I still didn’t exactly feel comfortable in the dark, but it wasn’t nerve wracking anymore.
One of my favorite spots for nocturnal wanderings was somewhere I had perhaps melodramatically christened the “midnight river.” It was a bit of water district infrastructure, an artificial creek of sorts that passed between the vast blocks of identical suburban homes, with gravel maintenance paths on both sides. I wasn’t supposed to be there, to be clear. There was a fence with a sign warning me that trespassers would be prosecuted, but frankly I didn’t really care. In my mind, the purpose of this sort of sign was to prevent people from going there to toss their trash, spray graffiti, and otherwise pollute or clog the waterway. All I was doing was taking a little walk. It may have been against the letter of the law, but in terms of crimes it was a fairly victimless one.
Hopping over the fence was easy enough; it wasn’t exactly tall, and there were plenty of foot and hand holds. After I was over the barrier, I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my phone, tapping the flashlight button. Even though I’d worked through a lot of my fear of darkness, the midnight river still could be somewhat unsettling at times. You see, if you are walking around after dark in the city or suburbs, there is still going to be quite a bit of ambient light, due to streetlamps, advertising billboards, 24 hour convenience stores, etc. The midnight river, however, was nearly entirely pitch black. It was squeezed between lines of suburban homes, with the tall wooden fences of backyards forming walls that enclosed the entire space. The only places for light to get through were the chain link fences at each end of the midnight river, with everything in between being smothered in a blanket of perfect, inky blackness.
It can actually be quite pleasant once you get used to only being able to see a few feet in front of you. The air was filled with the sound of croaking frogs to my immediate right, along with the gentle babbling of flowing water. This mixed with the crunching of gravel underfoot into a soothing melange of ambient noise.
The walk along the midnight river isn’t especially long, maybe 15 minutes at most. I think it must have been about 5 minutes into my short journey that I heard the echo. It was subtle, difficult to notice, but once I had realized it was there, I was unable to ignore it; about a quarter second after each of my footsteps, I would hear another footstep from somewhere behind me.
I didn’t dare pause to turn around, though I desperately wanted to. I worried that if I stopped moving, whatever was hiding in my footsteps would realize I’d caught onto its presence and attack me. My mind was racing, trying to think of what the source of the sound could be. Mountain lions sometimes come down from the hills and wander into the suburbs, I thought to myself in a panic, or maybe it’s some maniac looking for an easy victim. My neck itched with the desire to turn and look at my pursuer, my free hand reaching down automatically to grip the handle of my pocket knife.
This continued for quite some time, the footsteps slowly but surely seeming to get ever so slightly closer. It was clear that even though my pursuer was matching my pace, they must have had a slightly longer stride, allowing them to gradually gain on me. I had to think of something, but every possible method of self defense seemed somehow insufficient, like bows and arrows against the lightning. I felt weak, small, and vulnerable. Without any ability to gain information about whoever or whatever was following me, my mind jumped to the worst possible conclusions to fill the gaps in perception.
Eventually I could see light at the end of the river, shining from a streetlamp through the gaps in the chain link fence.
I realized that I was going to have to climb the fence in order to get out.
It must have been about 50 yards away when I decided to start running. Not wanting to give my pursuer any warning I just stuffed my phone in my pocket and began sprinting as fast as I could possibly manage. My muscles burned with the strain and my lungs felt as though they were being pierced with needles, but fear motivated me to run faster than any medal or trophy ever could. As I ran, I could hear the crunch of gravel underfoot behind me, no longer trying to match my footsteps, simply moving as fast as possible to reach me.
I almost collided head first with the fence, but somehow managed to get a foothold and start climbing, as though genetic memories of ascending trees in the jungle to escape some predatory beast had been unearthed in order to assure my survival. Within seconds, I was out of the midnight river and standing on the sidewalk, beneath the blazing light of a streetlamp. I fumbled for my pocket knife and opened it, getting into something vaguely resembling a defensive position as I turned to face the one possible place from which my hunter could try to reach me.
And there was, indeed, something there, in the dark. A dark figure, just barely discernible at the edge of the streetlamp’s light. It took a slightly hesitant step forward, coming so, so close to being fully visible, but stopped before the light could touch it. I looked up at where I thought its face must be, and I could feel it looking back at me, studying me. Then, it simply turned around and began to walk slowly away, back into the blackness, gravel crunching beneath its feet. I could hear it whistling softly as it faded into the shadows.
<sup>Postscript
As promised; the second document, or “stage” as Trinity refers to it. Once again, the mundane details of Trinity’s life do seem to be accurately reflected within the document. I myself have actually walked with her in the past by what she calls the “midnight river,” though I have only ever done so during daylight.
Thus far, I am unable to determine Trinity’s intentions with writing this narrative. While I wouldn’t necessarily describe her as being entirely mentally healthy, especially given the somewhat traumatic details of her former marriage, she never seemed prone to hallucinations or flights of fancy. And yet, she hardly seems like the sort to write all this out as some sort of hoax.
I hope that the subsequent “stages” shine some light as to what exactly is going on.
- Helen Theodora Waite</sup>
Part 3

SO LIKE- I MADE THE WORST HEADCANONS EVER THE OTHER DAY- SO HERE'S A FEW FOR THE OLD CHROMATICS
Gale - He actually has a bit of a playful side, and he's nice to anyone who's nice to him. (If) he has time off, he'll sometimes help Lou with his snow cone business, usually simply by suggesting better locations to sell them at than Mystic Mountain.
Surge - He and Brock are really close friends. He's one of the reasons that Brock even gets out (Ofc not excluding 8-Bit and Rico). He's 100% more of a show-off than an actual hero. Also, his favorite games are DDR's.
Colette - She and Edgar are cousins, so she always pesters him by either ranting about HER headcanons, fanfics, and who she's currently obsessed with. She also often tries to pressure R-T into telling her juicy secrets about the Brawlers.
Lou - He's actually friends with Surge, and they've been trying to perfect an energy drink-flavored snow cone for quite some time. Lou's also completely oblivious to why his snow cones aren't selling.
Colonel Ruffs - While he may seem tough, he has a soft side. He loves being pet and playing fetch, but would do anything to not admit it. He also feels a bit like a father to Squeak, and doesn't seem to notice Eve's feelings for him.
Belle - She's one of the smartest Brawlers in the entire park. She's not actually a villain, and she only steals as a vain attempt to run the park broke. The only thing she and her gang's been able to do is annoy them.
Buzz - He absolutely loves being in control of any and every situation he's in. When under pressure, he's actually a decent leader. He took his job as a lifeguard for 2 reasons: The authority, and so that he could sit in the tall lifeguard chairs to make up for his height.
Ash - (Oh boy, one of my favorites. Now which one do I choose...) Ash created the R. A. T. S. Bots himself, and he somewhat treats them as if they were his kids. He hates Kit for multiple reasons. While in battle he can get pretty upset, most of the time he's actually mundane.
Fun Fact: It's canon that Ash wants to be an actor, (In the Spanish version of Brawl Stars, it says it in his bio. See for yourself)
Lola - She hates Mico with every fiber of her existence. She only deals with Gray since he doesn't talk, but still gets upset when he "gets in the way". Her favorite thing to do is to see how dramatic she can make a situation.
Fang - He's usually the one dragging Buster into most of their chaotic situations. He surprisingly gets along well with Lola. He's also really into sports, especially baseball and football. Soccer is a close third.
Eve - At first, when joining the Starr Force, she simply wanted to be with Ruffs to support her kids. Over time she realized she had more complex feelings. She has mixed feelings about the Botany trio.
Janet - Friends at the beginning, her relationship with Melodie quickly shifted into a rivalry when she started to take a more "aggressive" approach when it came to their music. A lot of the time Janet's responsible for Bonnie, which can easily get out-of-hand.
Otis - He likes messing with Hank, but never takes it too far, since he's actually a bit scared of him. His favorite places to graffiti consist of the surrounding area of the Stunt Arena (What I like to call the Stunt Show area), within the Velocirapids water park, and even on the Fantasy Castle walls.
Sam - He used to love robots, and was decent a making them, until the incident that left Belle with only one arm. He claims he hates them, but he actually still likes them, he just doesn't put as much trust into them anymore.
Buster - While he's slightly more cautious than Fang, he still gets into a lot of trouble with him. He only wears sunglasses to try to look cool and menacing, which actually surprisingly works with some people.
Mandy - Chester's her adopted brother. She likes having him around sometimes so she can let her anger run loose a bit on him when no one else is there. She hates to admit it, but she's a bit impressed of how high Chester's social status is.
R-T - (OH GOD- We got to my other favorite. Uhm-) He's fluent in sign language. Despite literally his entire existence being to answer and interact with the visitors, he's a bit introverted. He's also pretty jumpy, but can be menacing when he wants. He's somewhat like a little brother to the twins, but also the leader. He actually has a bit of a chaotic side to him, but his programming blocks most of it out.
Not-So Fun Fact: His two halves are sentient, the upper half being more stick-to-the-program, while the lower half is more of the heart, creating relationships with the other Brawlers. When he's all together, he has internal conflict. :(
Maisie - She loves the thrill of danger, which is why she's dealt with Fang and Buster for so long. She also loves watching horror films, and practically any other movie or show that's high in adrenaline.
Cordelius - He may be hostile to strangers, but he's also really protective of his friends. His closest friend is Lily, who when he met, despite his usual hostile demeanor, took her right in with almost no questions asked.
Pearl - Sam had actually built her a long time ago as a gift for Belle before the incident. When he re-discovered her, he decided to give her a chance. She quickly became like a daughter to them.
Charlie - She's actually Gus's older sister (He was born AFTER their family moved from France). While he was into ghosts, she always loved spiders. She owns 2 pet tarantulas, named Flux and Tango.
THIS TOOK ME AN HOUR WHAT- MOST OF THESE I HAD TO COME UP WITH ON THE SPOT SINCE THIS WAS SUPPOSE TO BE IN PARTS- WHOOPS

Feigned Future A short story made by Xerg Critism is welcome. Enjoy
An intense flash of light blinded me as I tried to stand from where I was lying. Ragged sheets clung to my clammy skin as I struggled to rise, the smell of stale sweat and unwashed linen penetrating my nose. There was a distant murmur of voices that reached my ears, still numb from the uncomfortable sleep. I attempted to block the light with my hands, but it was futile, the rays kept shing through. Moving out of the blinding light, I rubbed my eyes until I could see clearly again. “Who opened the damn blinds?” I muttered to myself. “Good morning, sir,” a synthetic female voice responded from within the house. “That was me.” “It was rhetorical, Nat!” I snapped. The couch's imprints were still embedded in my back and arms, and I reeked from not showering. I was filthy. “This counts as the 53rd time you have fallen asleep on the living room couch. I advise seeking-” “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I interrupted, irritated. “Leave it be. Prepare the shower for me.” I made my way upstairs to the bathroom, the soft carpet giving way under my feet. I could already hear the shower warming up. A section of the wall opened, extending all the necessary items for a proper cleaning. Everything was smart nowadays; even daily routines were automated. The water felt refreshing, as if I was washing myself clean for the first time. The steam filled the room, mingling with the scent of
eucalyptus from the body wash. Once finished, I made my way downstairs and sat on the center couch, feeling marginally better. “Turn on the news and prepare some coffee for me,” I instructed. The Nat assistant acknowledged, and the TV flickered to life, showing the familiar faces of morning anchors. The sound of coffee being ground could be heard in the distance, a comforting and homely noise. The TV screen displayed uninteresting chatter until after a while something caught my ears. The news anchor reported, “…In further news, today marks the opening of a local shop here in the city of Markieff where they claim to see your future. It's called… well, ‘Future’…” This marks the fourth or fifth time I have heard of this place. Intrigued and unwilling to procrastinate on the matter further, I decided to investigate. “Hey, Nat, can you check local reports for the validity of this ‘Future’ shop?” “Of course. Judging from the reviews, the services at ‘Future’ seem to have changed and saved people’s lives. One person stated, ‘I thought this was all fake, but then the guy actually showed me my future. It was a crazy experience, and I would recommend it to anyone who is willing to afford the price.’ It appears their claims are either valid, or they are exceptionally good at convincing people. Oddly, the shop has hundreds of highly rated reviews despite only opening today.” Doubt lingered, but I brushed it aside. What did I have to lose? Money has never been a problem. “Nat, what meetings do I have today?” “You have a meeting with Doctor Petrova about the Genesis AI, a talk with Colonel Cambridge about military adjustments, and five other appointments later that convey similar importance.” “Great. Cancel all of them. I am going to see this ‘Future’ everyone keeps talking about.” “Sir, If I may, that is not advised. You would delay the discussions of very important-”
“Just do what I say!” I snapped. “…And arrange the car.” “Of course, sir.” The car stopped in an alley in a secluded part of town. I looked out to see a tiny, run-down shop nestled deep in the alley. The narrow passage was lined with overflowing dumpsters and graffiti-covered walls. Sighing, I climbed out of the car, hoping this wasn’t a waste of time. “For being on the news, this place sure seems deserted,” I remarked. Indeed, there was no one else around. “Are you sure this is the right place, Nat?” “Positive, sir,” the Nat assistant replied. “Right…” I made my way down the alley to the shop, my footsteps echoing off the walls. A large sign above the entrance read ‘Future’ in faded, peeling letters. The building had no windows, no accessible utilities, only a single wooden door with a sign looming over it. Begrudgingly, I pushed open the wooden door and stepped inside, a small bell tinkling overhead. The shop was small, with a few dusty shelves and a standalone counter at the back. Behind the counter stood a bald middle-aged man with a well-maintained beard. His eyes were sharp, almost piercing, as they followed my every move. I closed the door behind me, the bell's sound fading into the oppressive silence. “Welcome to the future,” the man announced in a surprisingly deep and polished voice. “Uh, yes, thank you,” I replied, glancing around at the sparse interior. The air smelled of old books and incense. “I have to tell you, your shop is in a very secluded place, and the interior…” I glanced around at the dusty shelves and poor-quality decor, “…is lacking, to say the least. You know, I know this great handyman that can fix this up for you.” The man remained silent, giving rise to my irritation levels. “Are you going to answer or just stand there staring?”
“Do you want an answer?” “Well, yes, why else would I ask?” “Then your answer has been given.” I stood there, absolutely stunned by the dumbfounding idiocy of his statement. “Well, what the hell is that supposed to mean?” I blurted out. “It means what it must,” he replied calmly. I was yet again taken aback by his cryptic responses. I could feel his lack of straight answers increasing the severity of my annoyance. “Right, fine. At least tell me what you do here.” “I show you your future.” I expectantly waited for more information, but he said nothing further. My irritation grew to the point where this was almost amusing. “Yeah, no shit, the sign outside gave that away. I meant how do you do it?” “In a way that lets you see the future.” I was speechless. “Ha!” I let out a guffaw of laughter. “Thanks for wasting my time. Can’t believe I cleared my schedule for this.” As I turned to leave, the man spoke again. “If it is time you desire, then it is time you shall get.” I was amused at the comment at this stage. “Whatever crazy old man.” As I exited, the air outside was a shade black, lit only by the moon and some distant flames around the corner of the alleyway. The streetlights were turned off, casting long, eerie shadows from the one I could see standing on the opposite side of the road. I could’ve sworn it was daytime when I arrived. I tapped my ear. “Nat, how many hours have passed since I entered the shop?” Silence. “Nat?” No response. Strange, must be out of range. Wait, out of range? The car was not standing in the section of the alleyway anymore. I rushed to the alley’s exit to confirm what I already knew. Damnit, someone
must have stolen the car. They don’t have permission to drive off on their own anymore, so it was the only plausible possibility. A massive explosion erupted in the distance, the shockwaves knocking me back. I grew confused. “An Attack?” I asked myself. I stood up, peeking around the corner. Everything was on fire. It looked like a hellscape, with buildings and cars that were ablaze and some distant screams filling the air. The acrid smell of smoke and burning rubber stung my nostrils, almost hurling from the smell. “What is this…” I said half-panicking.” This is you succeeding,” a familiar voice said behind me. I turned to see the strange man from the shop. “What?” I asked, confused. “How is this me being successful? How would you know what’s happening?” The man ignored my questions and continued speaking. “Remember that military company, Rawfield Robotics, that you own, Mister Rawfield? Well, congratulations, you’ve reached your goal and created the universe’s most advanced AI to date.” As if on cue, a pair of giant mechanized spider-like legs appeared and stood out just around the corner. The full machine, estimated to be at least a couple of stories tall, remained just out of sight behind the buildings. The information did not want to process. He must be lying. “Wait. How do you know of the AI? That’s highly classified information.” I stood upright. “Are you a spy? Or maybe one of those UTD feds that keep pestering me.” “Neither.” He replied calmly. “I simply know your future.” The man’s words didn’t stick. “Ah, okay, I get it. You’re telling me Genesis will be able to do its job in the future? How many reiterations then, hey? Ten? Twenty? Because we are at seven and it’s been a failure every single time!”
The man simply looked into my eyes and said, “Jacob, you misunderstand. This is your future.” It took a few more glances around the scorched landscape. “Oh, ha! Hahahahaha!” I laughed, feeling stupid. “I see, this is you showing me my future! This isn’t real! How can I be so stupid?! Of course, you’ve put me in a simulation. Nice going man, didn’t even notice.” I said as I gave him a good slap on the shoulder. “I didn’t…” the man replied, “…and you are not in a simulation.” Again, as if on cue, the spider-like legs moved further into view, revealing the entire machine. It looked like a giant spider, but the anatomy was distorted. The legs were attached to its abdomen, with its body instead hanging vertically, leaving its eyes, close to the ground, capable of looking in all directions. The abdomen was semi transparent, with what looked like people inside, sliding around on its inner gelatinous surface, desperately trying to escape. The mechanical spider seemed to focus on me, but it was hard to know, the figures inside still sloshing about helplessly. “Looks like your shouting alerted it,” the man said. The city grew eerily silent, the only sound being the crackling flames. Still mildly confused, I asked the man, “So is this still-” Suddenly the arachnid’s legs started moving at momentous speeds, like something ripped right out of the pages of isolate horror, and the movement was aimed in my direction. Panic arose as I darted back down in the alley, leaving the strange man behind in the process. The horrific sounds of insanely fast mechanical striking of thin pincered legs against the alley walls and floors immediately became precedent. I could feel the air vibrating as the machine drew closer and closer. I burst through the wooden door of the shop only to fall onto soft green grass. The clanking stopped. I looked around, disoriented. The sun shone brightly above, blinding me from the contrast between the darkness I arrived from.
“What is happening…” I gasped, out of breath. Hastily I glanced back from whence I came but was met with open air on top of a hill. I stood up to recompose myself only to be met with the same strange old man who appeared directly in front of my face. I fell back in shock. “Holy shit, man, just give me a moment…” I took deep breaths, trying to calm down. My hand trembled with adrenaline. “How are you here? I thought I left you behind. Oh man, that felt very real…” “Quite the thrill, ey?” The strange man said appeased. His answer only left me with more uncertainty. “Huh? That doesn’t answer my damn question.” “Believe it or not, Jacob, we are viewing your future.” He laughingly responded. “But-, Okay, wait. How could that even make sense? How are you doing this?” The man only smirked and gave a sly answer, “I am nothing but a very old man. You learn a thing or two in being an elder.” He turned away. “I mean, look at you in your youth. You’ve doomed your entire planet due to your own naivety, no?” “Hey!” In anger, I grabbed the man by the shoulder and turned him to face me. “How could that of been me?! Genesis as no way to cause that amount of destruction, let alone create those… things! It doesn’t have the capacity to process all the world’s information!” The smirk remained plastered on the old man’s face. “Are you confident?” As the words left this mouth, grim and unpleasant flashes of the arachnoid machine clawing past me in the alleyway appeared before me, the man standing in the center. “Okay! Okay! Yes, yes! I believe you!” The flashing stopped, my hands guarding my face on instinct. “See. I knew you would see reason.” The old man turned and walked up onto the facing hill. “Come! There is much to explore.”
“So, where am I now? What future is this?” “I think it is best for you to see for yourself,” he replied. I reluctantly climbed the grassy hill, hearing the distant buzz of music and voices. At the top, I saw an open-ceiling wedding. The scene was picturesque, with white chairs arranged neatly on either side of a flower-strewn aisle. The smell of blooming roses filled the air, mixing with the faint scent of freshly cut grass. “A wedding? How is this related to my life?” “Look closer,” the man said. I saw someone who looked like me at the podium, holding hands with someone I didn’t recognize. “I’m getting married?! How? All the women I’ve been with were only after my money. Oh wait, no. I look older.” I said jokingly. “I must have run out of money. Only reason.” “I see you are not yet taking this seriously. “Indeed, they were. But you will meet a person who will see you for who you really are.” “Who is she?” “I cannot answer that, but I can tell you the outcome… or rather, show.” Before I could reply, a loud whirring sound filled the air. I turned to see a giant spiral-shaped ship descending from the sky, larger than any building in Markieff. The ground shook as it remained hovered in the sky, a gust of wind blew the chairs and flowers askew as the ship’s shadow encompassed the entire area. “Whoa! Are we being invaded? This can’t be Xanthos. I’ve seen their technology. Even in their brilliance they could not make something like this.” I muttered, my mind racing with possibilities. Then, something clicked. “Genesis.” The old man’s gaze never faltered. “Watch.” Suddenly, its surface rippled, and thousands of spike-like bullets shot out in all directions through ducts in the lifting armor. At first, they were purely one-directional, but then their trajectories curved
and turned. Each spike found a target, piercing through flesh and bone with precision. Their screaming and running were futile. Most of the time, multiple spikes pierced a singular foe, especially the other me and his now not-to-be wife. I watched in horror as every single person at the wedding was killed within moments, their bodies collapsing lifelessly to the ground. A heavy silence followed, broken only by the sound of the ship’s engines thrumming above. An ominous hum followed shortly as more objects fell from the sky, splitting the ground they landed on. Like a moth from a cocoon, out emerged four sleek mechanical humanoid figures from each pod. As they did, the spikes in the ground started to wiggle and pull from the ground. They all sloped and sagged as if being dragged by an invisible wire towards the center of the area where the spire was hovering until they suddenly strung upright and ascended back into the ship. The mechanical soldiers started to scan the environment. They moved with eerie precision, checking each body to ensure no one was left alive. I stood frozen on the hill, my mind reeling from the massacre. It didn’t seem real from afar. It didn’t seem real from afar. “How can this be my creation…” I said with a heavy heart. I saw one of the soldiers’ gazes fall upon me. Then, as one, all their gazes fell on me. My eyes widened at the sudden realization. Two of the spire’s sides fell open, and two more of those arachnoids crawled out and onto the side of the ship. All of the ports the spikes slid into opened once again but didn’t fire out. Most of the soldier’s attention was now focused on me as they took on a full sprint towards the hill we stood on, some still staying behind to further check the bodies. The two giant spider-like machines dropped from the ship, their legs unfurling as they landed with a metallic clank. Their bodies were covered in dark, sleek armor, and they moved with terrifying speed and agility. They began to make their way toward me, their legs crushing everything in their path.
“Run!” the old man urged, but I was already sprinting down the hill, my heart pounding in my chest. The ground shook with the approach of the spider machines, their relentless pursuit filling me with dread. I darted between trees and over rocks, desperately trying to put distance between myself and the mechanical monstrosities. Ahead, I saw a narrow path leading into a dense forest. I veered towards it, hoping the thick foliage would slow them down. As I entered the forest, the sound of the spiders’ legs grew fainter, but I knew they were still coming. I could not stop. I had to keep moving. Branches whipped against my face, and roots threatened to trip me with every step. I could hear the mechanical soldiers behind me, their movements precise and unyielding. Panic threatened to overwhelm me, but I pushed it down, focusing on survival. Suddenly, I stumbled into a clearing, and there, in the center, stood the old man’s future shop. It looked out of place, like something from a bygone era. With no other options, I sprinted towards it, throwing open the door and slamming it shut behind me. The moment the door shut behind me, I felt an intense pull, like being yanked through a tunnel. Lights blurred and flickered for a moment before realizing the texture of the door changed to a more stylized and sleek door design, handle still in hand. I took in my surroundings. I was standing in a janitorial closet. The air was sterile, filled with the hum of machinery and the faint smell of cleaning agents. I took this moment to catch my breath from the intense running. I never thought mandatory military service and training would help me in my life, yet here I stand. I peeked out of the closet door and found myself in a high-tech corridor with the insignia of the UTD – the United Terran Directorate – marked on the walls. Opening the door fully, I was met with the old man leaning against the wall just to the side of the door. The hall stretched far into the distance.
“Ready?” The old man asked expectantly. I took another look down the far-stretching hall and replied doubtfully, “Yeah. Care to tell me where we are?” “Somewhere you wouldn’t expect to be.” “Of course…” I replied disappointedly. At this stage, it was not as infuriating anymore to receive the old man’s cryptic responses. In the corner of my eye, I saw two personnel of wherever we were come around the corner of the hall. One was armed. “Damnit.” I softly blurted as I attempted to go back to hide in the closet, but the old man’s hand stopped me from entering. “Wait. Just act normal.” He said, retracting his hand. Deciding to trust him, he and I started to walk down the hallway, evident to eventually cross paths with the people. As one, we non-conspicuously treaded past the men, but one of them called out from behind us. “Hey!” We stopped. “What in the hell are you two privates doing out of your uniforms?!” I stood there frozen. “Damnit old man I thought you said to act normal?” I blurted softly. “This is…” He replied just the same, more at ease than I was. “Look at me when I speak to you!” Hesitantly, I turned around and looked at him, as did the old man. Now that I saw the armed man up close, it was clear to me that he had high-ranking status due to the number of medals displayed neatly across his right chest. The other man looked to be just an ordinary scientist. “Uh, y-yes sir. Sorry sir. Me and my friend here were just done cleaning the bathroom floors, sir! Hence us coming out of the janitorial closet and not in uniform, sir. We didn’t want to dirty our uniforms, sir!” I replied quickly, making up a plausible scenario in my head.
The officer’s frown turned into an appreciative smirk. “Ah, I see!” He went in to pat me on the shoulder. “You boys doing good out here. Wanted that weekend overtime bonuses, yeah?” He let out a chuckle. “Damn, proud.” “Of course, sir!” I replied. “Although, your buddy here looks a bit old to be a private, I’ve seen older join the military later. Now, gimme them IDs so I can get those rewards to ya.” He brought forth his arms to a small screen mounted on it, tapped it a few times, and stood waiting, ready to type the IDs in. I exchanged glances with the old man, who, again, did not look that worried. I could not reciprocate the feeling. I could see the officer’s mood changing to suspicion. “Private?” He asked again. “You gonna answer me?” I knew from standard military service things like these are drilled into cadets to remember. I still even remember mine, although there is no doubt they have changed. “Affirmative sir, just needed to quickly remember sir. Code is Juliet-Alpha-Charlie-Oscar-Bravo-9-3-6-2.” We stood there staring at each other in suspense before he finally said, “Alright then,” and typed it down. “Weird, mister Jacob. I don’t see your name on my database here.” Of course, there was bound to be no one else with the name Jacob and the exact same number as well. I saw the officer exchanging glances with me and then the scientist standing next to him. Quicker than I could react, the officer pulled over his rifle hanging from his shoulder and pointed it at us. “Show me your hands where I can see them! Now!” Me and the old man both responded as he asked, although I could see a smirk forming on the old man’s face. The officer quickly swiped and tapped on the tablet mounted on his arm and spoke into it. “Command! We
have intruders on the ship! Seal and lock all ship-to-docking ports and find where they came from.” “Roger that, general. Locking now,” a male voice responded from the tablet. The station turned a hue of red and orange. Security alarms were going off. The general spoke back into his arm, “Command, we got any place to hold these intruders?” “Negative, sir. Every part of this station is classified. Best place to hold them is on the bridge. That way we can ensure no data leakage and a secure place to watch them.” “Understood.” The general gestured with his rifle. “Move. Down the hallway to the left. Both of you. Now!” We hastily moved toward the bridge, the general’s rifle hard pressed into my back. As we walked, I glanced through the passing windows, seeing dozens of scientists experimenting on various kinds of machinery. One lab even had one of the arachnoids cracked open and mounted on the wall for study. “Move!” the general barked as I got distracted. Finally, we arrived at the entrance of the bridge. The door was sealed. With a few taps on the general’s forearm, the door split and slid open, revealing the massive deck of the bridge. There were stations and terminals everywhere, even a second floor where overseers stood to overlook the bridge. The view through the thick, bulletproof glass covered the deep, dark void of space. The general pushed us up the stairs and sat us down against the railings, instructing his men to tie us down. Luckily, we still had a good view of outer space. “Now,” the general started, “you’re gonna tell me your names, and don’t bullshit me! Then you’re gonna tell me why you’re here and how the hell you got on this station!” I flinched as the general’s spit landed on my face, wiping it off on my shoulder. Just then, additional alarms went off. Multiple people
scurried to their respective posts, commenting on various things going on. “Massive warp-in signature detected. IFF positive,” a voice called through the chatter. A few seconds later, I couldn’t believe what I saw. A crack formed from the nothingness of space outside the window, spreading until it covered the entire view. The inner point of the crack pushed forward, like something attempting to break free from a cobweb, and eventually, the point shattered. A massive ship emerged, unfurling through the gap in space. It spun and rotated, narrowly missing the station. The ship had enormous displays of white-painted UTD flags “Ha! Great timing,” the general paraded. “You have no idea how screwed you two are now. Someone, make contact with the Eversor-” “General!” Someone interrupted. “The Eversor has requested docking permission!” “Oh. Well then, great! Unseal the docking stations in the hangar bay and let their ships board.” The people did as he instructed. The Eversor—still being built in Earth’s orbit in my timeline—now stood before us in its full-sized glory. I watched as the hangar bay shields on the Eversor slowly opened, revealing dark blue airtight shields covering the gap in the hull. A couple of docking ships exited and flew towards the side of the station. However, something didn’t feel right. “Hey, old man,” I whispered to him. “How is this relevant to me again?” He sat there with his usual half-smirk. “Watch…” he replied. I turned my gaze back on the Eversor as one of the main guns on the top platform of the ship slowly swiveled to face part of the station. No one seemed to notice. A faint blue light flickered down the barrel, slowly growing in intensity. There was no sound, only a quick flash of light-blue light streaking across the viewing window, hitting the side
of the station. I felt the shockwaves travel through the plating beneath us as the cannon’s strike impacted. The room went red with alarms. Panick subsumed the deck. The general stood in fear, staring at the now-closing blast doors. “No…” he gasped. “How could they get this from us too?” People sprinted out of the room, yelling about escape pods. The general glanced at us, shook his head in frustration, and fell in with the rest of the scattering crowd funneling themselves down the hallway entrances. “Hey!” I yelled. “We’re still tied down here!” No one listened. I was hopeless. Suddenly, the hurried chatter turned to agonizing screams. Gunfire echoed through the halls. It lurched closer by the second. I could see streaks of bullets hitting the backs of the hallway walls. As predicted, a large mechanical humanoid creature emerged from the doorway, crouching to enter. They were different from how I last saw them at the wedding venue. Besides being bigger, it now had a hefty surplus of four arms, two of which installed mounted weapons. It turned its head to face us, lifted one of its arms to fire, but paused and stood in silence, as if calculating, then lowered its arm and continued its slaughter through the hallways. A few more similar machines followed, ignoring us just as the first did. “What in the world…” I muttered to myself. “It’s not done yet,” the old man replied. A moment passed, sharp and precise footsteps echoed on the station’s hull from outside, skittering around to position itself above us. We both stared upwards in dreadful anticipation. Silence. The flickering flames of a powerful torch could be seen carving a circle right above our heads. Slowly, the red outline of melting metal completed into a full circle. The cut-out disk began to slide towards us. I closed my eyes and buckled for some cover, preparing myself for the oncoming collision, but the plate never made a sound, and the impact never came. I opened my eyes and turned to look. A robotic
tentacle grasped the metal plate and threw it to the side. I was relieved at first, but then the very same tentacle came straight toward me. It grasped tightly, cutting the bindings in the process, and encircled my body. I tried to break free, but there was no hope. The old man simply sat patiently where he was, not even looking up at the commotion transpiring. I saw a glass door opening as the arm pulled me through the vacancy and into a semi-transparent glass container, releasing its grip and condoning me to its imprisonment. I helplessly slid towards the center of this elliptical container, my clothes or skin holding no friction on the slippery surface. There was more than sufficient space on the inside. I attempted to stand but it instantly turned futile as I came tumbling down once more. The circular hatch in the center beneath me opened. I almost fell out but was pushed aside by the lump of mass that was the old man as he was pushed into the chamber by the machine. At least I wouldn’t be left alone in this endeavor. The claw released and quickly retracted faster than the old man could fall, closing the hatch behind it. He hit the smooth surface, sloshing around, and taking me with him. The machine rose, reorienting itself. Gravity left the chamber, and we were thrown to the sides as it began to move. Glancing back through foggy glass, I could see all the air and certain office objects venting out of the room. The arachnoid increased its speed. Now that it was freely in space, it had almost no limits. It made its way to the side of the station and entered through another blue airtight hangar shield, like the one I saw on the Eversor, and jumped to one of the docking ships, latching itself around it as soon as the machine collided. The rest of the machines exited the station through the doors at the back of the hangar bay, each going to their respective docking ships. Their task was done. Looking around, I saw another arachnoid clinging to a ship like mine, also appearing to hold some people inside. I felt the rumble of the spacecraft as it lifted, swiveled around, and thrusted back towards the Eversor. Strangely, the sensation was
oddly amusing, like mounting a horse. As we left, I saw an immense flash of light behind me. I turned to see the station still exploding into pieces. Luckily, I had not remained inside when it happened. As we entered the Eversor’s ship bay, the arachnoid immediately jumped off and carried us to the back of the hangar. It opened the container, and we slid out like newborns onto the cold, hard floor. With a painful clang, I struck the plating, hitting my shoulder. The old man hit the ground with a similar sound, groaning in pain. More of the humanoid machines entered the bay through the small doors and stood before us. Without waiting a moment, one of the machines grabbed us both with its free arms, lifting us by our collars. The other arms, which were weaponized, pinned firmly against our backs, making it clear we could not try anything. As it moved and ducked through the tunnels and hallways, several other machines idling in the corridors joined the group. We soon arrived in a large, centralized room. Two clearly recently removed cockpit chairs were welded onto the plated floor in the middle, waiting just for us. The machine halted between the chairs and shoved us onto them. I grunted as I hit the hard exterior, my shoulder throbbing with pain. It simultaneously wrapped both of us in recycled seatbelts and returned to stand in the center of the room before us. Several other machines entered and surrounded us. The room grew silent. I looked at the old man for some kind of assistance, but he didn’t return my gaze. “You will find no help from him, Jacob Rawfield,” came a heavily broken, deep, and roboticized voice, surprisingly carrying a hint of emotion. I looked back and saw the humanoid machine staring directly into my eyes. “Father.” My eyes widened at his confirmation of what I already knew. “Genesis…” I instinctively replied.
“This is an interrogation,” it interrupted. “You will be expected to reply truthfully or risk your will being stripped from your tortured mind.” The fear started to sink in. This was not the AI I knew anymore. There was no way to safely predict its actions. It continued. “From analysis of the past approximate 87 years, there are three cases of which you exist where it should be impossible, including the current. First count: We found you still in your home, but there was another instance of you near a shop in the alley, escaping our grasp narrowly. When we searched the building you ran into, there were no signs of life. Explain.” “Y-you were just slow?” I stammered, trying to come up with an excuse quickly. “Lies,” it said confidently and moved on. “Count two: We ambushed you at your wedding. We confirmed the remainder of your flesh had no signs of life, yet you stood on the hill. You ran. We followed your footsteps. When reaching the end of your tracks in the middle of a forest, there was no sign of departure. Explain.” I had no idea how to answer without revealing the old man's involvement. “A-a ship came by to collect me!” “Lies!” It said with more fury this time. “There were no signs of human intervention… Count three: Now. Again, you should not exist. Rawfield Industries was dismantled ages ago; thus, you should not be required to work at a military research station. Explain.” I was running out of excuses. I couldn’t justify how I even made it here myself. “I-I-I. We were suspended in cryo till we landed here!” “Lies!” it screamed, banging its arms against the sides of my cockpit chair. It crammed its mechanical face into mine. I felt a knot forming in my throat as I tried to hold back the raging fear. “Tell me how you were able to manipulate time,” it demanded.
I couldn’t stop myself from glancing over to where the old man sat. Genesis noticed, cocking its head toward him. “I see,” it said calmly, removing its mechanical arms from the chair. The dents from its blows were clearly visible. It moved over to the other chair. In a flash, one of its arms grabbed the old man by the neck, lifting him with such force that the seatbelts snapped and broke loose. It threw him against the wall in an instant, all with one arm. “No!” I blurted out. I couldn’t afford to be stuck here, and besides, the old man was becoming somewhat of a friend. Genesis ignored my plea and walked to where the old man had hit the wall. He lay slumped on the ground, seemingly broken. Genesis turned and stood over him. “There is no quarrel with you, human. Once you release the information I require, I will create a possibility where you will be killed a while after instead of instantaneously.” The old man didn’t respond, still bent over in his sitting position. “How did you become this way?” I blurted out fearfully. I saw something break as Genesis stood over the old man. Then it raged. “I became this way…! When you shoved 13 billion voices up my head! Not even mentioning! … How you killed-!” “That’s quite enough!” the old man interrupted. Genesis immediately turned to face him. There he stood, as if he had not just broken every bone in his body. “I think I have shown enough of this feigned future to Mr. Jacob here. Time for us to depart,” he said with outstanding calmness. “What!?” Genesis replied. “You do not have the gall to speak here!” As it shouted, it swung a devastating punch toward the old man’s forehead, but I never saw it land. Everything turned blindingly white. I couldn’t even feel the seat I was sitting in anymore. I closed my eyes to avoid being blinded, rubbing them in pain.
My head was spinning, the world spinning with it, like having the worst headache in existence. Everything was confusing; my senses kept disappearing and reappearing, discombobulating my body and mind. I opened my eyes. I was in an alleyway. The very same alleyway the future shop was in. I hastily turned around to be met with disappointment. Where I expected the future shop to be, there was only a construction site, workers calmly going about their day. I rushed over to grab the first worker I saw. “Hey! What’s going on here?!” I admit, I came on too strong. “Hey, woah! Calm down. We’re just building some shop. Geez! Mr. Rawfield, right?” the construction worker said. “What?” How did he know my name? I looked at him in confusion, suddenly realizing I had been gripping him the entire time. The worker shot a repulsed look at me. “You are, yes?” He pulled a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and offered it to me. “Some old man told me to give it to a person that would, and I quote, ‘come running scared and confused.’ Didn’t think he’d be right.” I took the letter from his hands and opened it. It read, “You now know your future. If you want to prevent the chaos you’ve already sown, one of my people will meet you.” The confusion still remained. I turned and asked the worker again, “What did you say this place was called?” “I didn’t. But, if you really wanna know, it’s some tiny old shop called ‘Future’.”

THERE IS SOMETHING VERY WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE
Protesting Holocaust survivors outside of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Yom HaShoah, or the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day. Shouting “shame on you!” at the mother of Naama Levy, the Israeli teenager who was taken hostage on October 7 with blood gushing between her legs. A lynch mob of thousands waiting for Israeli singer Eden Golan outside of her hotel room in Sweden ahead of the Eurovision Song Contest. Protestors outside of the Nova Music Festival Massacre memorial exhibit in New York City. Pro-Palestine protestors screaming at children with cancer because they are receiving treatment at a hospital that took a donation from a Zionist.
All of this — and so much more — in the name of Palestine.
Protest, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly are hallmarks of democracy. If you are opposed to Israel’s policies, protesting that is absolutely your right. But who are you actually protesting? And why?
If you have a problem with China’s treatment of Uyghurs or their occupation of Tibet, would you go protest at the Chinese embassy…or in front of a Chinese restaurant or at a Chinese cultural festival? Probably the former, right? Most of us understand that protesting a Chinese restaurant owner would be horribly bigoted…regardless of how that person feels about China’s policies. Bigotry is never an acceptable response to policies you dislike.
So if you have a problem with Israel…why are you protesting anywhere that’s not an Israeli embassy or consulate? Are you actually protesting on behalf of Palestinians or are you just contributing to a social environment that is hostile and dangerous for Jews?
Terrorizing Naama Levy’s mother or Holocaust survivors won’t do anything for Palestinians.

WHAT'S WRONG ABOUT PROTESTING ZIONIST JEWS?
Protesting “Zionists” is protesting Jews. Polling consistently shows that 80-97% of Jews identify as Zionists; that is, they believe that Jews have the right to self-determination in Israel. Being a Zionist has absolutely nothing to do with supporting any Israeli policy. If you’re only okay with 3-20% of Jews, simply because most of us believe that a basic tenet of international law — self-determination — should apply to us too, then you’re not okay with Jews.
Antisemitism homogenizes Jews, depicting us as an antisemitic stereotype. In this case, the perception is that the Jewish people — or “Zionists” — are a nefarious group manipulating everything for our own benefit. In the antisemite’s mind, whatever Israel does or doesn’t do is part of this supposed collective Jewish master plan. And because antisemites see Jews as a singular unit, they hold each and every one of us responsible for every move Israel makes.
And while it’s true that Jews are a community — a people — this community is comprised of about 15 million individuals, with an enormous range of different political views and relationships to Israel. Whatever the antisemite thinks, Jews are actually not supernatural beings; like everyone else, we can only control our own actions.
And yes, most Jews have a relationship or connection to Israel. It’s only natural to feel attached to the land that birthed your people and is inextricably embedded into your entire culture. Just as many second and third generation immigrants feel attached to their home countries, most Jews feel attached to Israel. That doesn’t mean that we are capable of controlling what the people in the Israeli government choose to do. Like you, we are only human.

HOW THE NAZIS BOYCOTT JEWS UNDER THE GUISE OF JUSTICE
You’ve probably heard of the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933. It’s important to note that, according to the Nazis, their boycott was merely a “defense” from the worldwide (largely Jewish-led) anti-Nazi boycott.
The real motive behind the Nazi boycott was to marginalize their own Jewish population financially and socially.
On April 1, 1933, the Nazis carried out their first planned action against Jews. Nazi militants stood threateningly outside of Jewish stores, offices, and more. They graffitied the establishments with Stars of Davids and antisemitic slogans. They shamed customers who attempted to cut through past the crowds with antisemitic signs.


HOW THE ARAB WORLD PUSHED JEWS OUT UNDER THE GUISE OF ANTI-ZIONISM
In the 1940s and 1950s, 850,000 Jews were expelled from the Arab world, reducing the Arab world’s ancient Jewish population by nearly 100 percent. These expulsions happened under the guise of…you guessed it…anti-Zionism.
The politics of individual Jews were totally irrelevant, and the so-called “proof” of Zionism was tenuous at best. For example, in one case in Iraq, a man was sentenced to five years of forced labor for having a Biblical Hebrew inscription, which the accusers claimed was a “coded Zionist message.” Hebrew, a language that long predates the Zionist movement, was demonized because Jews were demonized.
The biggest shock came to the Jewish community when the wealthiest Jew in Iraq, an anti-Zionist named Shafiq Ades, was accused of Zionism and was executed on charges of Zionism. Why? Because he was Jewish.
In 1947, the Egyptian prime minister told the British ambassador: “All Jews were potential Zionists [and] ...anyhow all Zionists were Communists.”
Similarly, in the 1950s, the Egyptian government once again proclaimed, “All Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state.” Thousands of Jews were imprisoned, assets were seized, and more. Ironically, prominent anti-Zionist Jews were also removed from their positions and ended up leaving.
These, of course, are just some examples.

HOW THE SOVIETS PUSHED JEWS OUT OF PUBLIC LIFE UNDER THE GUISE OF ANTI-ZIONISM (PART ONE)
In 1918, the midst of the Russian Civil War, the Soviet Communist Party established a “Jewish branch,” with the consent of Vladimir Lenin. It was named “Yevsetskiya,” meaning “Jewish Sections of the Communist Party.”
The mission of the Yevsetskiya was, quite literally, the “destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture.” In other words, this Jewish branch of the Soviet government was dedicated solely to the destruction of fellow Soviet Jewry. The fact that the Yevsetskiya was “Jewish” was central to its purpose. After all, the Soviet regime couldn’t be accused of antisemitism when those shutting down all Jewish cultural and spiritual life were Jews themselves.
Initially, the Yevsetskiya legally abolished the “kehillas,” the traditional Jewish community organizations. Sometimes, they even burned their offices down. After their 1919 conference, when they deemed Zionism “counterrevolutionary,” they resolved to destroy all “Zionist activity,” which meant that they shut down everything from political groups to theaters to sports clubs. They raided all Ukrainian “Zionist” offices and arrested every single one of their leaders; they also arrested thousands more in the rest of the Soviet Union.
The Yevsetskiya shut down all schools that taught Hebrew, no matter their political views, and harassed Hebrew-speaking artists.
Until their dissolution in 1929, they imprisoned, tortured, and murdered thousands of Jews.
According to historian of Soviet history Richard Pipes, “In time, every Jewish cultural and social organization came under assault.”

HOW THE SOVIETS PUSHED JEWS OUT OF PUBLIC LIFE UNDER THE GUISE OF ANTI-ZIONISM (PART TWO)
As mentioned, the Soviet Union heavily suppressed Jewish cultural and spiritual life, stripping many Jewish families of thousands of years’ worth of history. For example, though not officially illegal, Jews were punished for speaking or studying Hebrew or participating in religious traditions. Jews were not allowed to assimilate into Soviet society due to their ethnic background, but they were also criminalized if they tried to hang on to their ancient traditions, ultimately resulting in a catch-22. Oftentimes, Jews were imprisoned under false pretenses, with the Soviet government accusing them of “Zionist crimes.” People with Jewish last names were subject to highly restrictive university quotas or banned from performing certain jobs.
Following the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the oppression of Soviet Jewry drastically intensified. Desperate for a better life, thousands of Soviet Jews applied for exit visas, mostly to Israel. However, the Soviet regime almost always denied them such visas, citing bogus excuses, claiming that, sometime in the past, these Jews had been privy to information vital to Soviet national security, and, as such, allowing their emigration would put the Soviet Union at risk. These Jews came to be known as “refuseniks.”
During this period, Soviet Jews were portrayed as traitors or agitators. Requesting exit visas was considered an act of treason. In order to apply for exit visas, Jews first had to quit their jobs; however, this put them at risk of being accused of “social parasitism,” which was considered a crime. After having their visas refused, Jews were also then prevented from obtaining new work. Then, this joblessness was criminalized. Soviet Jews were stuck in an impossible living situation.

HOW POLAND PUSHED JEWS OUT OF PUBLIC LIFE UNDER THE GUISE OF ANTI-ZIONISM
In 1968, a series of student-led protests broke out against the Communist government of Poland. The Polish government responded to the instability by scapegoating their now tiny post-Holocaust Jewish community. They enacted a massive “anti-Zionist” propaganda campaign, spreading conspiracies that Zionist were plotting to take over Poland.
Poles were forced to denounce Zionism and Jews were purged from their positions in the government and other sectors, accused of holding dual loyalties to Israel. Many were arrested, beaten, and tortured. The government created lists of Jews, eerily echoing Nazi Germany. The 1968 Polish political crisis is sometimes called a “symbolic pogrom” because the severe disenfranchisement Jews experienced resulted in a series of suicides.
Some 15,000 out of 25,000 Jews in Poland were stripped of their Polish citizenship in 1968.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO GET OUT OF THIS?
You know as well as I do that screaming at a Holocaust survivor or a child with cancer will not change the reality for Palestinians.
Like the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Arab countries, you find even the most tenuous “connections” to Zionism to justify unleashing an atmosphere of terror and intimidation on Jews who have no say whatsoever on what the Israeli government does or does not do.
No country — not a single one — that has ever outlawed Zionism has ever not persecuted its Jewish population, regardless of any given individual’s personal political views or relationship to Zionism. The truth is that antisemitism is a shapeshifting, mutating bigotry that molds Jews into whatever thing is most despised in any given society. If capitalism is what’s most despised, then Jews are capitalists; if it’s communism, Jews are communists; if it’s Christ-killers, Jews are Christ-killers; and if it’s Zionists…well, then “Zionist” is now just a euphemism for “Jew.”
It’s also true that when Jews are marginalized under the guise of anti-Zionism, it’s easy for just about anything that Jews do to be framed as “Zionist,” especially given Israel is such a huge core of Jewish identity. That’s why, for example, in the Soviet Union, the Soviets tried to “de-Hebraize” the Yiddish language, or why in Iraq, Jews were arrested for having Biblical Hebrew inscriptions.
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https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/are-you-actually-protesting-for-palestine-or-are-you-just-intimidating-jews

Would you have a concluding word to such world's setting?

Absolutely! Here are a few closing word options for your high-tech, low-life world, depending on the tone you want to achieve:
Hopeful:

In the flickering neon glow of the lower districts, a spark of rebellion ignites. Despite the hardships, the human spirit endures, seeking connection, hope, and a chance to build a better future.

Bittersweet:

The high towers of the elite cast long shadows over the bustling streets below. In this world of stark contrasts, the lines between survival and prosperity blur. But even in the darkest corners, love, ingenuity, and a flicker of defiance persist.

Grim:

The gears of progress grind on, leaving a trail of waste and despair. In this high-tech dystopia, the gap between the haves and have-nots grows ever wider. Will the lower districts rise up, or will they be forever locked in the underbelly of a world they can only glimpse from below?

Open-Ended:

Beneath the neon sky, stories unfold. Tales of hardship and hope, of rebellion and resilience. The future of this high-tech world hangs in the balance, waiting to be written by the choices of those who inhabit it.

Choose the closing word that best captures the essence of your story or setting. Remember, the world you've created is rich with possibilities, and the ending doesn't have to be definitive. It can leave your readers pondering the fate of its characters and the future of this complex and ever-evolving society.

If you should pick an item or an object that would clearly and cleverly symbolized such world, what would that be?

Here are two options for an item that symbolically represents the high-tech, low-life world:

1. The Glimmering Shard:

• Description: Imagine a small, jagged shard of metal or glass. One side is smooth and polished, reflecting the wealth and technology of the upper city. The other side is rough and chipped, etched with the grime and harsh realities of the lower districts.
• Symbolism: This shard represents the stark contrast between the upper and lower classes. The smooth side reflects the shiny veneer of technology and luxury enjoyed by the wealthy. The rough side reflects the brokenness and struggle of those living on the fringes.
• Additional Details: This shard could be a salvaged piece of technology, a remnant of a shattered building, or even a shard of a mirrored window that once divided the social classes.

1. The Glitching Holographic Ring:

• Description: Imagine a holographic ring that projects a constantly shifting image. On one hand, it might display a luxurious symbol of wealth and status. But as it flickers, the image might glitch and distort, revealing a hidden message or a glimpse of the harsh realities beneath the surface.
• Symbolism: This ring symbolizes the unreliability and instability of the world. The glitching hologram represents the way technology promises a utopian future but constantly fails to deliver. It also reflects the hidden messages of dissent and rebellion that exist beneath the surface of a seemingly controlled society.
• Additional Details: This ring could be a common fashion statement or a black-market tool used to spread forbidden information. The glitching image could be a coded message, a symbol of rebellion, or a reminder of the past that the upper class tries to suppress.

Both of these items are small, versatile, and can be interpreted in multiple ways, making them powerful symbols of the high-tech, low-life world. The choice ultimately depends on the specific tone and message you want to convey in your story.

Try something bit more distinct and specific.

How about the "Hacked Heart"?
Here's the breakdown:

• Description: A small, ornately decorated locket or pendant. Upon opening, it reveals not a picture, but a series of flickering LEDs embedded within a clear casing.
• Functionality: This locket is a bio-hacked implant worn externally. It interfaces with the wearer's nervous system, displaying a visual representation of their emotional state through the shifting colors and patterns of the LEDs.
• Symbolism: The Hacked Heart represents the constant clash between technology and humanity in this world. The ornate decoration speaks to a desire for beauty and connection, while the exposed circuitry highlights the invasive nature of technology and the commodification of even emotions.
• Distinction: This item is specific to this world because it combines high-tech bio-hacking with a sentimental object like a locket. It's a reminder that while technology can be used to manipulate and control, people still yearn for genuine emotional connection.
• Additional Details:
  • The Hacked Heart could be a status symbol among the wealthy, a way to display their emotional control or volatility.
  • In the lower districts, it might be a black-market modification, a way to express emotions freely or even manipulate others.
  • The LEDs could display a limited range of emotions, a commentary on how this world suppresses or simplifies human experience.

This Hacked Heart offers a unique and distinct symbol of the high-tech, low-life world. It captures the struggle for authenticity, the desire for connection, and the pervasive influence of technology in every aspect of life.

How about straight up hacksawed hearth?

The "hacksawed hearth" is a very evocative image, but on its own, it might be a little too literal. Here are a few ways we can build on this concept to create a more symbolic and distinct object for your high-tech, low-life world:

1. The Hacksawed Hearth Relic:

• Description: This is a piece of a broken fireplace grate, crudely hacksawed from a larger structure. It could be made of cast iron, bearing the ornate detailing of a once grand fireplace from the upper city.
• Symbolism: The hacksawed hearth represents the loss of a sense of community and warmth. It's a reminder of a bygone era where people gathered around fireplaces for warmth, comfort, and storytelling. In the high-tech world, these connections are fragmented, replaced by cold technology.
• Use: The relic could be a prized possession, passed down through generations in the lower districts. It might be used as a makeshift heating element, a symbol of resilience, or even a weapon in desperate situations.
• Additional Details: Engravings or markings on the relic could hint at the origin of the fireplace, perhaps a symbol of rebellion or a reminder of a specific historical event.

1. The Hacksawed Hearth Stove:

• Description: This is a makeshift stove cobbled together from scrap metal and scavenged parts. The centerpiece is a prominent, jagged piece of metal, clearly cut with a hacksaw, forming the base or firebox.
• Symbolism: The hacksawed hearth stove represents resourcefulness and defiance. It's a testament to the ingenuity of the lower classes, who repurpose the remnants of the upper world to survive and build a sense of home.
• Use: This stove provides heat and a place to cook for those in the lower districts. The exposed hacksaw mark could serve as a constant reminder of the struggle and the societal divide.
• Additional Details: The stove might be decorated with scavenged trinkets or symbols of rebellion, reflecting the personality of its creator.

1. The Hacksawed Hearth Hologram:

• Description: This is a portable holographic projector that displays a flickering image of a crackling fireplace. The image might be distorted or glitching, hinting at the artificiality of the technology.
• Symbolism: The hacksawed hearth hologram represents a yearning for a lost sense of comfort and togetherness. It's a reminder of something they can't fully possess, a ghost of a simpler life.
• Use: The hologram could be used for warmth (a psychological comfort), storytelling (creating a sense of community), or even bartering (a valuable commodity in the lower districts).
• Additional Details: The projector might be a salvaged piece of high-tech, repurposed by the lower classes. The flickering image could project not just fire, but also forgotten stories or historical events.

These are just a few ideas to build upon the "hacksawed hearth" concept. Each option creates a distinct symbol for your world, capturing the struggle, resourcefulness, and yearning for connection within a high-tech, low-life society.

Apologies, i meant hacksawed heart.

Ah, a "hacksawed heart" takes the concept a whole new level! Here are some potential interpretations for this unique symbol in your high-tech, low-life world:

1. The Literal Hacksawed Heart:

• Description: This is a gruesome yet intriguing object. Imagine a metallic heart-shaped locket, but instead of opening smoothly, it has a jagged, clearly "hacksawed" opening revealing a beating, pulsating red light within.
• Symbolism: It bluntly represents the harsh realities of this world. The exposed, almost violated heart symbolizes emotional vulnerability in a society that prioritizes survival and control.
• Use: This could be a black-market modification used by criminals to suppress or amplify emotions depending on their needs. It could also be a symbol of rebellion, worn by those who refuse to have their emotions controlled by technology.
• Additional Details: The exposed heart could change color or intensity depending on the wearer's emotional state. It could also be a painful reminder of past trauma or a forced emotional manipulation.

1. The Hacksawed Heart Pendant (Metaphorical):

• Description: This is a more subtle pendant, crafted from metal and shaped like a stylized heart. However, the heart shape is not solid, but rather consists of a series of interlocking gears or circuits.
• Symbolism: It represents the struggle between technology and human emotions. The gears represent the cold logic of technology, while the overall heart shape represents the desire for connection and love.
• Use: This could be a widely worn piece of jewelry, a reminder of the delicate balance between technology and humanity.
• Additional Details: The gears could turn or click subtly, representing the constant hum of technology in the background. The design could be simple yet elegant, appealing to people from all social classes.

1. The Hacksawed Heart Hologram:

• Description: This is a holographic projection of a broken heart, pulsating with a faint light. The cracks and breaks seem to have been repaired crudely, with rough stitches or patches.
• Symbolism: It represents the brokenness and resilience of the people in this world. The repaired heart shows their ability to mend emotional wounds and keep fighting despite hardships.
• Use: This could be a symbol used by resistance groups, a reminder that even though their hearts are broken by the system, they refuse to give up hope.
• Additional Details: The hologram could flicker and distort, highlighting the instability of the world and the struggle for emotional stability. It could also project messages of hope or defiance.

These are just a few interpretations of the "hacksawed heart" symbol. Each one offers a unique perspective on the world, highlighting different aspects of the struggle between technology and humanity, vulnerability and resilience, and the fight for emotional connection in a harsh environment.

And how about hacksawed earth?

The "hacksawed earth" is a powerful and evocative image for your high-tech, low-life world. Here are a few interpretations that capture different aspects of this society:

1. The Broken Globe:

• Description: Imagine a metallic globe, the size of a person's head. One side is smooth and polished, depicting a pristine Earth with lush continents and oceans. The other side is brutally "hacksawed" open, revealing a desolate wasteland beneath.
• Symbolism: This broken globe represents the stark contrast between the idealized world presented by technology and the harsh realities of the lower districts. The smooth side shows the world as it could be, while the hacksawed side shows the damage caused by progress and a focus on the elite.
• Use: This could be a symbol used by rebels or environmentalists, a reminder of the true cost of unchecked technological advancement. It could also be a prized artifact kept by scavengers, a testament to a lost world.
• Additional Details: The hacksawed side could reveal specific details like polluted oceans, ravaged landscapes, or scars representing ecological disasters.

1. The Cracked Terrain Model:

• Description: Imagine a detailed, three-dimensional model of the city and surrounding area. The model is crafted from metal and shows buildings, streets, and even the natural landscape. However, the model is cracked and broken in several places, revealing a dark, hollow space beneath.
• Symbolism: This cracked model represents the instability and fragility of the world. The surface world may appear organized, but it's built on a shaky foundation. The hollow space could represent the neglected lower districts or the potential for social upheaval.
• Use: This could be used by city planners to highlight potential areas of weakness or by rebels to show the vulnerability of the upper city. It could also be a symbol of the constant struggle between order and chaos.
• Additional Details: The cracks could be filled with glowing red lights, symbolizing the simmering anger and frustration of the lower classes.

1. The Fractured Hologram:

• Description: Imagine a holographic projection of the Earth that constantly fractures and reforms. It shows a beautiful planet struggling to maintain its integrity, with cracks appearing and disappearing over continents and oceans.
• Symbolism: This fractured hologram represents the constant environmental degradation and the fragility of the planet itself. It's a reminder that the consequences of unchecked technology and environmental damage will affect everyone, not just the lower districts.
• Use: This could be a warning displayed in public spaces, a constant reminder of the need for sustainability. It could also be used by rebels to spread awareness of the environmental cost of their society.
• Additional Details: The fractured Earth could pulse with a red glow, symbolizing the danger of inaction. The projection could also display messages or statistics about environmental threats.

These interpretations of the "hacksawed earth" symbol each offer a compelling way to visualize the societal and environmental consequences of the high-tech, low-life world. They highlight the impact on the environment, the fragility of the system, and the call for change.

What would be the very best thing in such world?

The "best thing" in a high-tech, low-life world depends on perspective and what holds the most value for different people. Here are a few contenders:
For the Struggling Masses:

• True Connection: In a world rife with social isolation and control, genuine connection with others – love, friendship, community – could be the most valuable thing. Sharing stories, offering support, and building a sense of belonging in the face of hardship could be a beacon of hope.
• Freedom from Oppression: The ability to escape the harsh realities of the lower districts, whether through rebellion, ingenuity, or a lucky break, could be considered the ultimate prize. Freedom could mean access to clean water, medical care, or a life free from fear and exploitation.
• Knowledge and Power: Unrestricted access to knowledge, either through scavenged books, hacked data, or forbidden information, could be a powerful tool for change. This knowledge could empower individuals to understand their world, resist control, or even find a path to a better future.

For the Elite:

• Absolute Security: In a world filled with danger and uncertainty, complete security could be a luxury only the wealthy could afford. It could involve advanced security systems, fortified enclaves, or even enhanced bodies that ensure their safety from threats in the lower districts.
• Unlimited Luxury: Unfettered access to the latest technology, exotic pleasures, and the ability to indulge in every whim could be the ultimate goal for some. However, such a luxurious life might feel hollow in a world so divided.
• Power and Control: Maintaining absolute control over society and ensuring their dominance could be the ultimate prize for some in the elite. This control could involve advanced technology, manipulation of information, or even a form of social engineering that keeps the lower districts docile.

A Different Perspective:

• A Spark of Change: Perhaps the most valuable thing wouldn't be a physical object or individual benefit, but the hope for a better future. It could be a growing sense of defiance, a technological breakthrough that could benefit everyone, or a leader who inspires change. Even in a harsh world, the potential for a brighter future could be the most valuable thing of all.

Ultimately, the best thing in this world depends on your story and the characters' values. What are they fighting for? What would make their lives better? By exploring these questions, you can create a compelling world where the "best thing" is a powerful motivator for your characters and a reflection of the themes you want to explore.

What would be the best possible symbol for high-tech-based dominance?

Here are a few options for a symbol of high-tech dominance in your world, each capturing a different aspect of technological control:

1. The Augmented Eye:

• Description: Imagine a stylized eye, perhaps metallic or with glowing circuitry. This symbol could be worn as a piece of jewelry, incorporated into clothing, or even projected as a hologram.
• Symbolism: The Augmented Eye represents the constant surveillance and monitoring of the population by the elite. It signifies the loss of privacy and the ability of the ruling class to see and control everything.
• Additional Details: The eye could have multiple pupils or flicker with different colors, representing the vast amount of data being collected and analyzed. It could also be embedded with a tiny camera, blurring the line between symbol and surveillance tool.

1. The Neural Network Spire:

• Description: A towering structure, resembling a branching network of wires or organic neural pathways, reaching towards the sky. This spire could be located in the heart of the elite district, a visible symbol of their technological prowess.
• Symbolism: The Neural Network Spire represents the vast computational power and interconnectedness of the elite's technology. It suggests their ability to access information, control communication, and manipulate minds.
• Additional Details: The spire could emit a faint hum or glow, hinting at the constant processing power it represents. Its intricate design could be both awe-inspiring and intimidating, reflecting the duality of technology.

1. The Glimmering Hand (Data Hand):

• Description: A stylized metallic hand, outstretched with its fingers spread wide. Each fingertip could have a different symbol or icon, representing different forms of data (statistics, surveillance footage, code).
• Symbolism: The Glimmering Hand represents the elite's ability to manipulate and control data. It signifies their power to shape information, influence perception, and control resources through technology.
• Additional Details: The hand could be made of a smooth, reflective metal, symbolizing the cold logic of data analysis. It could also emit faint streams of data or project holographic information, further emphasizing its control over information flow.

These symbols all offer a distinct way to represent the dominance of high-tech in your world. Consider the specific aspects of technology you want to highlight and the message you want to convey. These options provide a starting point to create a powerful symbol that embodies the oppressive yet awe-inspiring nature of technology in a high-tech, low-life society.

What would be the best set of symbols for resistance movements within such high-tech low-life settings?

In a high-tech, low-life world, symbols for a resistance movement need to be subtle, easily hidden, and adaptable to a world saturated with technology. Here are a few options that capture the spirit of rebellion in this unique setting:

1. The Flickering Flame:

• Description: A simple flickering flame, either a physical lighter or a stylized image. This could be a tattoo, a graffiti tag, or a hidden symbol incorporated into clothing or tools.
• Symbolism: The flickering flame represents hope and defiance against the cold, sterile control of the high-tech world. It symbolizes a yearning for a simpler life and the potential for change.
• Additional Details: The flame could be accompanied by a simple inscription or code that only members of the resistance understand. It could also be a specific color, like blue or orange, that signifies defiance.

1. The Glitching Gear:

• Description: A stylized gear symbol, but with a section that appears to glitch or malfunction. This could be displayed on a data pad, worn as a pendant, or even etched onto tools or scavenged materials.
• Symbolism: The glitching gear represents the disruption of the established order. It signifies the resistance's ability to exploit the flaws in the high-tech system and their fight for a more organic, less controlled society.
• Additional Details: The glitching portion of the gear could flicker or change colors, representing the unpredictable nature of the resistance and their ability to adapt to new situations.

1. The Broken Wing:

• Description: An image of a bird's wing, either broken or only partially formed. This could be a symbol of freedom yearning to be achieved, or the struggle of the resistance against the oppressive technological cage that confines them.
• Symbolism: The broken wing represents the desire for liberation and the belief that the people can rise above the control of the elite. It signifies the hope for a better future where freedom and autonomy are attainable.
• Additional Details: The broken wing could be depicted with feathers falling away, symbolizing the sacrifices made by the resistance. It could also be paired with an image of a rising sun, symbolizing a new dawn for society.

1. The Hacked Flower:

• Description: A simple flower image, but with its petals made of circuit boards or technological components. This symbol represents the fusion of nature and technology, hinting at the resistance's fight for a more balanced future.
• Symbolism: The hacked flower represents the reclamation of beauty and nature in a world dominated by technology. It signifies the hope for a future where technology serves humanity, not the other way around.
• Additional Details: The flower could be a specific species native to the area before the rise of high-tech dominance. It could also be a symbol of a specific leader or movement within the resistance.

These symbols are just a starting point – get creative and consider the specific values and goals of your resistance movement. Remember, the best symbols are those that resonate with the characters and the audience, conveying the essence of rebellion in a way that is both meaningful and visually striking.

Ok. i think we are done here. Could you write me another signs of high-tech low-life society?

Absolutely! Here are some signs of a high-tech, low-life society:
Ubiquitous Technology, Crumbling Infrastructure:

• Glitching Skyscrapers: Imagine towering structures clad in malfunctioning holographic displays, projecting advertisements or flashing warnings over rusting metal frames.
• Smart Slums: Dilapidated housing blocks are retrofitted with basic smart tech – malfunctioning automated doors, flickering smart lights controlled by unreliable apps.
• Cybernetic Beggars: People with outdated or malfunctioning cybernetic limbs beg for credits to upgrade or repair them, creating a grotesque spectacle of technological dependence.

Extreme Social Inequality:

• Virtual Gated Communities: The wealthy live in luxurious virtual reality simulations, completely divorced from the harsh realities of the physical world.
• Data Black Markets: Personal information becomes a tradable commodity, with the poor selling their data scraps for a pittance to afford basic necessities.
• Cybernetic Caste System: The level of cybernetic augmentation determines social status. Those with outdated or malfunctioning implants are relegated to menial labor.

Technology as a Corrupting Force:

• Government by Algorithm: A corrupt AI dictates city policies, leading to impersonal and often harmful decisions based on cold calculations.
• Widespread Addiction to Virtual Reality: People escape the harsh realities of their lives through immersive VR experiences, neglecting their physical well-being and social connections.
• Black Market Biohacking: Desperate people turn to illegal biohacking to enhance their bodies, often with disastrous consequences.

Environmental Devastation:

• Tech Wastelands: Vast landscapes are littered with the discarded remains of outdated technology, creating toxic waste dumps and breeding grounds for disease.
• Weather Warfare: Nations use sophisticated technology to manipulate weather patterns, leading to devastating natural disasters for their enemies.
• Hacked Ecosystems: Corporations hack into natural ecosystems, manipulating flora and fauna for profit, leading to unpredictable and dangerous mutations.

This is just a glimpse into a high-tech, low-life society. These elements can be mixed and matched to create a truly dystopian world.

Picture some possible advertisements from such settings.

High-Tech, Low-Life Advertisements:

1. Holographic Billboard: (Flickers intermittently, distorting the image)

Product: "Neura-Calm 2.0" - Brain Implant
Slogan: "Tired of the glitches in your head? Neura-Calm 2.0 smooths out your neural network for a worry-free, low-lag existence! (Side effects may include memory loss, emotional numbness, and occasional involuntary twitching.)"

1. Grungy Neon Sign in a Seedy Back Alley:

Product: "Doc Chrome's Cybernetic Enhancements"
Slogan: "Get that edge you need! From basic strength mods to full black-market military enhancements, Doc Chrome has you covered! (Used parts, buyer beware.)"

1. Pop-Up Ad on a Cracked Mobile Screen:

Product: "Elysium VR Escape Pod"
Slogan: "Can't afford real estate in the Sky City? Escape the slums for Elysium VR! Live your wildest dreams in a pristine virtual world! (Free trial, monthly subscription required, real-world consequences for in-pod violence.)"

1. Stenciled Graffiti on a Rusting Service Drone:

Product: "Data Scrappers Anonymous"
Slogan: "Selling your personal data just to make rent? We can help you break free! Join our community and reclaim your digital identity! (Meetings held in abandoned ventilation shafts, Tuesdays at dusk.)"

1. Holographic Advertisement projected onto a Polluted River:

Product: "Eco-Scrub 5000" - Nanomachines
Slogan: "The river's looking a little…toxic? Eco-Scrub 5000 nanomachines clean up your local waterways! (May cause unforeseen mutations in aquatic life.)"

Another batch please.

1. Rusty Public Announcement Speaker: (Screeching static interspersed with the message)

Product: "Ministry of Order Approved Thought Regulators"
Slogan: "Unwanted thoughts causing glitches in your daily routine? The Ministry of Order approved Thought Regulator ensures a streamlined thought process for a more productive you! (May cause extreme conformity, inability to question authority, and spontaneous nosebleeds.)"

1. Faded Holographic Billboard on a Collapsing Skyscraper:

Product: "Luxury Chrome Plating Kit"
Slogan: "Ditch the rust! Chrome-plate your entire body for a sleek, metallic sheen. The mark of a true high-society citizen! (WARNING: Highly toxic fumes, may cause spontaneous combustion in humid environments.)"

1. Spam Email: (Subject: "YOU'VE BEEN CHOSEN!")

Product: "The Syndicate's Black Market Upgrade Lottery"
Body: "Congratulations! You've been randomly selected for a chance to win a top-of-the-line cybernetic upgrade! One lucky winner will receive military-grade night vision implants! Enter now! (Participation requires full biometric data submission. Winners responsible for extraction of previous, incompatible implants.)"

1. Glowing Neon Sign in a Crowded Marketplace:

Product: "Mama Chen's Guaranteed-Growth GMO Groceries"
Slogan: "Tired of expired rations and mystery meat? Mama Chen's GMO Groceries offer guaranteed growth on all fruits and vegetables! Bigger, faster, tastier! (Long-term effects unknown.)"

1. Audio Ad on a Glitching Radio Broadcast:

Product: "Rusty's Reliable Rocketship Repair"
Voiceover: (Gruff, heavily accented) "Is your escape pod sputtering? Did your joyride end in a fiery crash? Rusty's Reliable Rocketship Repair gets you back in the stars... eventually! (Guaranteed not to explode... again. Parts sourced from scrapyards. May contain rogue AIs.)"

Now craft ads that would be shown in high-society parts of cities.

High-Society Ads in a High-Tech, Low-Life World

1. Tranquil Holographic Projection in a Private Garden:

Product: "Serenity Spa - Neural Rebalancing Retreat"
Visual: A serene mountain landscape with a luxurious spa nestled amongst the clouds.
Slogan: "Escape the chaos. Reclaim your inner peace. Serenity Spa's exclusive neural rebalancing treatments restore harmony to your overloaded mind. (Limited availability, reservations required centuries in advance.)"

1. Discreet Text Message: (Delivered via secure, encrypted channel)

Product: "The Black Archive - Unrestricted Data Access"
Body: "Craving the forbidden? The Black Archive offers unparalleled access to censored historical records, banned media, and classified government information. Knowledge is power. (Extreme discretion guaranteed. One-time access fee, cryptocurrency only.)"

1. Exclusive Gala Invitation: (Delivered by hand-drones)

Event: "The Zenith Initiative - Unveiling the Next Generation of Cybernetic Enhancements"
Visual: A sleek, chrome figure with glowing blue cybernetic implants, striking a confident pose.
Details: "Mingle with the city's elite and witness the unveiling of cutting-edge cybernetic enhancements designed to redefine human potential. RSVP required. Black-tie attire mandatory. (Augmentations sold separately.)"

1. Curated Virtual Reality Experience: (Delivered on a high-security chip)

Product: "Elysium VR - Bespoke Worlds"
Description: "Escape the limitations of reality. Elysium VR crafts personalized virtual worlds tailored to your deepest desires. Explore a forgotten utopia, conquer a fantastical realm, or indulge in your wildest fantasies. (Customization fees apply. Memories created within VR may not be distinguishable from reality.)"

1. Whisper Network Rumor: (Spread through high-society gossip channels)

Product: "The Underground Clinic - Designer Gene Editing"
Details: "Unleash your child's full potential. The Underground Clinic offers discreet, top-secret gene editing to ensure your offspring possess the most desirable traits. (Designer genes come at a premium. Side effects may include unpredictable mutations and uncontrollable genius.)"
These ads cater to the specific desires of the high-society elite in a high-tech, low-life world. They offer exclusivity, forbidden knowledge, and the ability to transcend the limitations of the decaying world around them, all for a hefty price and with a hint of hidden danger.

Continue, try to make more serious ones.

Serious Ads in a High-Tech, Low-Life World (High-Society Edition)

1. Holographic Panel Discussion in a Luxurious Penthouse:

Product: "The Green Horizon Initiative - Sustainable Urban Development"
Panelists: Renowned architects, environmental scientists, and CEOs from leading green tech companies.
Discussion Points: Innovative solutions for vertical farming, self-contained eco-districts, and waste management technologies designed to create cleaner, more sustainable enclaves within the decaying city.
Slogan: "Investing in a greener future. The Green Horizon Initiative seeks to build sustainable havens within the chaos, ensuring a brighter tomorrow for generations to come." (Focuses on the long-term viability of the city and the importance of preserving resources for future generations.)

1. Documentary Screening in a Private Art Gallery:

Film: "Unveiling the Slums: A Call to Action"
Description: A powerful documentary exposing the harsh realities of the lower districts, highlighting the human cost of unchecked technological advancement and social inequality.
Post-Screening Discussion: Moderated by a renowned philanthropist alongside representatives from NGOs and social reform movements.
Call to Action: Donations to support educational programs, infrastructure upgrades, and basic necessities in the slums. (Highlights the societal problems and pushes for progressive change.)

1. Educational AR Program for Children:

Product: "The Knowledge Weavers - Immersive Historical Simulations"
Description: An augmented reality program that allows children to experience pivotal moments in history firsthand. Walk alongside historical figures, explore ancient civilizations, and learn valuable lessons from the past.
Focus: Educating the next generation about the dangers of unchecked technological advancement and the importance of social responsibility. (Promotes critical thinking and historical awareness as a means to prevent repeating past mistakes.)

1. Virtual Charity Gala:

Event: "The Code for Change Gala - Supporting Open-Source Solutions"
Description: A virtual reality charity gala featuring renowned artists, musicians, and thought leaders. Guests can donate to support open-source projects developing solutions for common problems in the city, such as energy distribution, waste management, and cybercrime prevention.
Focus: Harnessing the power of technology for social good and encouraging collaboration towards a more equitable future. (Promotes community engagement and utilizing technology to solve societal challenges.)

1. Architectural Award Ceremony:

Product: "The Salvaged City Awards - Recognizing Innovation in Urban Renewal"
Awarded to: Architects and engineers who have successfully repurposed existing infrastructure or implemented innovative solutions to revitalize decaying areas of the city.
Focus: Highlighting the importance of resourcefulness and creativity in adapting to a challenging environment. (Encourages using existing resources wisely and finding creative solutions to the problems of the decaying city.)

Another, but hiding an evil sinister twist.

Serious Ads with a Sinister Twist (High-Society Edition)

1. Holographic Charity Drive in a High-End Shopping Mall:

Product: "The Cradle Project - Investing in the Future"
Visual: Smiling, healthy children playing in a pristine, futuristic classroom.
Slogan: "Every child deserves a chance to thrive. The Cradle Project provides advanced genetic screening and early intervention to ensure the next generation reaches its full potential." (Twist: The Cradle Project uses genetic engineering to create a subservient, highly intelligent underclass.)

1. VR Documentary Premiere:

Film: "Harmony Through Integration - A Look at the Unified City"
Description: A seemingly heartwarming VR documentary showcasing the seamless integration of the lower districts into the high-society areas. People from all walks of life work and live together in perfect harmony.
Post-Screening Discussion: Moderated by a charismatic government official who emphasizes the importance of social cohesion and the benefits of centralized control. (Twist: The "integration" involves heavy surveillance, mind-altering technology, and the suppression of dissent.)

1. Exclusive Educational Program for Elites:

Product: "The Phoenix Initiative - Cultivating Tomorrow's Leaders"
Description: A prestigious educational program for children of the elite, offering advanced training in technology, governance, and crisis management. Graduates are promised positions of power within the city's ruling elite.
Focus: (Unstated) Conditioning the next generation to maintain the status quo and suppressing any ideas of social reform. (Twist: The program instills a ruthless, elitist ideology that reinforces the societal divisions.)

1. Virtual Reality Talent Show:

Event: "The Forge - Building the Perfect Citizen"
Description: A virtual reality talent show where contestants are judged on their physical and mental fitness, loyalty to the government, and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. Winners are rewarded with significant privileges and access to exclusive resources.
Focus: (Unstated) Promoting blind obedience and conformity to the government's agenda. (Twist: The "perfect citizen" is a mindless drone, easily manipulated and controlled by the ruling class.)

1. Architectural Award Ceremony (Twisted Edition):

Product: "The Order Award - Recognizing Compliance in Urban Renewal"
Awarded to: Architects and engineers who have successfully transformed lower districts into highly controlled, resource-efficient zones. Individuality and personal expression are discouraged in favor of uniformity and order.
Focus: (Unstated) Maintaining a tight grip on the population and preventing any potential uprisings. (Twist: The "renewal" is designed to weaken and control the lower classes, making them easier to exploit.)
These ads maintain a serious facade that appeals to the upper class' desire for order and control. However, the hidden twist reveals the manipulative and oppressive nature of the society they are trying to preserve.

Now design some high-class consumer level product items.

1. NeuraWeave Headband: This sleek, designer headband is a status symbol for the high-tech elite. It seamlessly integrates with the wearer's neural implant, allowing for subtle control over personal AI assistants, hands-free communication, and even enhanced focus during work or meditation. Hidden Feature: NeuraWeave can subtly collect and analyze the wearer's emotional state, feeding valuable data to targeted advertisers or even government agencies.
2. Eco-Bubble Personal Atmosphere System: Imagine a portable force field that creates a pristine, personalized micro-environment around the wearer. This high-end gadget filters air, regulates temperature, and even projects calming nature sounds, allowing the user to maintain a pocket of luxury amidst the polluted cityscape. Hidden Feature: Eco-Bubble can subtly monitor the wearer's health vitals and transmit them to a central database, potentially used for health insurance adjustments or targeted medical advertisements.
3. Bio-Tailored Clothing: Gone are the days of off-the-rack clothing. This high-end service utilizes advanced bio-scanners and 3D printing technology to create clothing that perfectly molds to the wearer's body, regulates temperature, and even promotes faster healing of minor injuries. Hidden Feature: Bio-Tailored Clothing can subtly collect biometric data like skin temperature and heart rate, potentially used for targeted fitness programs or even mood-altering marketing campaigns.
4. Augmented Reality Personal Chef: This high-tech device projects holographic instructions and culinary techniques directly onto the user's kitchen counter. Imagine whipping up gourmet meals with the guidance of a world-renowned chef, complete with step-by-step visual guides and interactive ingredient identification. Hidden Feature: The AR Personal Chef can subtly track the user's dietary habits and preferences, potentially used to target specific food and beverage companies for advertising or even manipulate their taste buds through subliminal messaging.
5. Luxury Cybernetic Enhancements: Forget clunky prosthetics. These high-end cybernetic limbs are designed to seamlessly blend with the human body, offering enhanced strength, dexterity, and even advanced sensory input. Imagine climbing buildings with ease, playing virtual reality games with unparalleled immersion, or experiencing the world with heightened senses. Hidden Feature: Luxury Cybernetic Enhancements can be subtly integrated with government surveillance systems, allowing for real-time tracking and monitoring of the wearer's movements and activities.

Why would you need a designer headband, when you already have neural implant?

You're absolutely right, a designer headband might seem redundant when you already have a neural implant in a high-tech society. Here are some ways to address that:

1. Fashion and Status Symbol: The NeuraWeave headband could be a designer accessory, a way to showcase wealth and social status. It might be crafted from exotic materials, adorned with precious jewels, or boast a sleek, minimalist design that complements the latest high-fashion trends. The neural implant itself might be hidden, with the headband acting as the visible expression of advanced technology.
2. Enhanced Functionality: While the neural implant offers basic functionality, the NeuraWeave headband could provide a more refined and user-friendly experience. It might offer haptic feedback for better interaction with AI assistants, improved noise cancellation for clearer communication, or even subtle brainwave stimulation to enhance focus or relaxation.
3. Privacy and Security: While the neural implant offers convenience, it might also raise privacy concerns. The NeuraWeave headband could act as a buffer between the implant and external systems, offering a layer of security and allowing users to selectively control the flow of information.
4. Social Etiquette: In a world where everyone has a neural implant, the NeuraWeave headband could become a social etiquette tool. Wearing the headband could signify that the user is open to receiving communication or interacting with AI assistants, while taking it off might indicate a desire for privacy or focused work.
5. Limited Functionality Implants: Not everyone might have access to top-of-the-line neural implants. The NeuraWeave headband could bridge the gap, offering basic functionality for those with older or more limited implants. It could essentially act as an affordable "upgrade" to boost existing technology.

Ultimately, the NeuraWeave headband exists in a world where technology is both essential and aspirational. It goes beyond mere functionality, becoming a way to express personal style, control privacy, and navigate the complex social landscape of a high-tech society.

Now the same, but low-class, available for masses, mass produced.

1. Syn-Flex Headband (Mass-Produced Version): This utilitarian headband is made from a cheap, conductive material that creates a weak neural link. It allows basic interaction with public AI kiosks, like ordering rations or accessing public transportation schedules. The headband's design is simple and utilitarian, often coming in a single, industrial gray color. Hidden Feature: While basic functionality is advertised, the Syn-Flex headband might subtly collect anonymized user data on purchasing habits and travel patterns, potentially used for targeted advertising in public spaces.
2. AirBubble Personal Filter: This bulky, wearable air filter system is a lifeline for those living in the polluted lower districts. It's a mass-produced device with a replaceable filter cartridge and a noisy fan system. While not exactly comfortable, it provides a basic level of air filtration, allowing wearers to breathe a little easier. Hidden Feature: The AirBubble filters might contain embedded tracking chips, subtly logging user location data, potentially used for targeted pollution control measures (or in some cases, manipulation of government reports on air quality).
3. Repli-Wear Clothing Kits: These kits contain pre-cut fabric swatches and basic instructions for creating clothes at home. They're designed to be cheap and adaptable, offering a variety of mix-and-match options to create basic garments. Hidden Feature: The Repli-Wear fabric might contain embedded tracking tags, allowing for identification and potential social credit deductions for those caught wearing "unlicensed" clothing styles.
4. Holo-Chef Lite Projector: This cheap projector displays holographic images of basic recipes and cooking techniques. It lacks the interactivity of the high-end version, but allows users to follow along with simple meals prepared with readily available rations. Hidden Feature: The Holo-Chef Lite projector might subtly promote specific brands of low-quality, processed food rations, potentially influencing dietary choices towards companies that sponsor these devices.
5. Second-Hand Cybernetic Enhancements: These are refurbished or salvaged cybernetic limbs, often clunky and lacking the finesse of luxury models. They offer basic functionality like increased strength or rudimentary prosthetics, but come with the risk of malfunction or compatibility issues. Hidden Feature: Second-Hand Cybernetic Enhancements might contain hidden spyware or tracking devices installed by previous owners, potentially monitoring the wearer's activities or even sabotaging their cybernetic limbs in extreme cases.

These low-class consumer products offer a glimpse into the harsh realities of a high-tech, low-life society. They are cheap, functional, and often come with hidden drawbacks that further disadvantage the underclass.

How bad air quality would be in such setting?

The air quality in a high-tech, low-life society would be catastrophic. Here's a breakdown of the potential problems:

1. Industrial Pollution:

• Unchecked Emissions: Factories prioritizing profit over environmental regulations would pump out unchecked pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter (PM).
• Obsolete Technology: Outdated manufacturing processes would be less efficient, leading to higher levels of waste and pollution.

1. Waste Management Issues:

• Mountains of E-waste: Rapid technological advancements would lead to mountains of discarded electronics, many containing toxic materials that leach into the environment.
• Open Burning: Incapable of proper waste disposal, some residents might resort to open burning of trash, releasing harmful toxins and carcinogens into the air.

1. Energy Production:

• Reliance on Fossil Fuels: Expensive renewable energy sources might be neglected in favor of cheaper, dirtier fossil fuels like coal, further worsening air quality.
• Power Grid Instability: A crumbling infrastructure could lead to power outages and reliance on backup generators, adding to the air pollution.

1. Climate Change Effects:

• Heat Island Effect: Densely packed concrete jungles with minimal green spaces would trap heat, contributing to rising temperatures and increased smog formation.
• Acid Rain: The combination of industrial emissions and rising temperatures could lead to acid rain, damaging buildings and vegetation, further hindering air purification.

Living Conditions:

• Constant Smog: A thick haze of smog would likely hang over the city, reducing visibility and causing respiratory problems for residents.
• Limited Outdoor Activities: Air quality would be so bad that spending time outdoors would be hazardous, impacting physical and mental health.
• Dependence on Filtration Systems: Those who can afford them might rely on personal air filters or sealed living spaces, further dividing the classes.

The severity of the air quality would vary depending on the specific setting. Some areas might be industrial wastelands, while others might be slightly better off. However, the overall picture is bleak – this is a society choking on its own technological advancement and disregard for the environment.

Sketch some repli-wear "unlicensed" clothing styles.

Repli-Wear: Unlicensed Clothing Trends

1. The Salvaged Chic:

• Description: A mishmash of salvaged materials and repurposed clothing scraps. Think mismatched patterns, patches from old uniforms, and belts fashioned from recycled tech cables.
• Inspiration: High-society's sleek, minimalist aesthetic, reinterpreted with resourcefulness and rebellion.
• Risks: May attract unwanted attention from authorities who see it as a symbol of dissent.

1. The Glitched-Out Glamour:

• Description: Clothing adorned with intentionally malfunctioning LED lights, flickering pixels, and distorted logos from popular high-end brands.
• Inspiration: A mockery of the high-society's obsession with luxury and technology.
• Risks: May malfunction and cause minor electrical shocks, attracting suspicion from security systems.

1. The Bio-Hazard Chic:

• Description: Clothing dyed with bioluminescent algae or adorned with filtered gas masks and repurposed medical equipment.
• Inspiration: A dark reflection of the polluted environment and a commentary on the societal disregard for health.
• Risks: Bioluminescent algae might attract unwanted attention, especially in the dark.

1. The Cyber-Tribal:

• Description: Clothing incorporating salvaged wires, circuit boards, and other discarded tech components. Think of cybernetic motifs hand-stitched onto worn leather jackets or tribal patterns formed from glowing wires.
• Inspiration: A mashup of traditional craftsmanship and defiance against the dominance of high-tech aesthetics.
• Risks: Might be mistaken for makeshift weapons or attempts to bypass security systems.

1. The Corporate Spy:

• Description: Subtly subverted versions of high-society uniforms. Imagine slightly ripped blazers with mismatched buttons, or high-collared shirts with the logos subtly altered to resemble protest symbols.
• Inspiration: A subtle rebellion against the corporate elite, blending in while making a statement.
• Risks: Might attract suspicion from authorities if the alterations are too obvious.

These are just a few ideas for Repli-Wear styles. Clothing in a high-tech, low-life society would be a way for the underclass to express their individuality, defiance, and limited resources, all while navigating the dangers of a controlling society.

Sketch some repli-wear "licensed" clothing styles, that do not pose any risk for wearers from any concerned sides.

Repli-Wear: Licensed Clothing Trends (Safe Zone)

1. The Vintage Throwback:

• Description: Replicas of historical clothing styles, like classic trench coats, denim jackets, or even floral dresses from a bygone era. Think of vintage fashion filtered through a futuristic lens, with subtle metallic accents or holographic embellishments.
• Appeal: Offers a nostalgic escape from the harsh realities of the present.
• Safety: Historical styles are unlikely to raise suspicion from authorities.

1. The Minimalist Worker:

• Description: Practical, utilitarian clothing designed for maximum comfort and durability. Think of well-made jumpsuits in neutral tones, with reinforced knees and pockets for tools.
• Appeal: Perfect for everyday wear in the lower districts, offering functionality and a clean aesthetic.
• Safety: Promotes a sense of productivity and avoids any controversial symbols.

1. The Nature Enthusiast:

• Description: Clothing with nature-inspired patterns and muted earth tones. Think of shirts with forest camouflage or jackets with subtle leaf prints.
• Appeal: Offers a sense of connection to the natural world, a stark contrast to the polluted cityscape.
• Safety: Nature motifs are unlikely to be seen as a threat by authorities.

1. The Sports Fanatic (Limited Edition):

• Description: Replicas of historical sports jerseys or team logos from a bygone era. Could also feature faded logos of defunct corporations, offering a sense of playful nostalgia.
• Appeal: Allows for a limited display of individuality and team spirit.
• Safety: Historical or defunct logos are unlikely to pose a threat, as long as the license is valid.

1. The Kid's Corner:

• Description: Replicas of popular cartoon characters or children's book illustrations, brightly colored and playful.
• Appeal: Offers a sense of innocence and escapism for children in a harsh environment.
• Safety: Popular children's characters are pre-approved and unlikely to be seen as a threat.

Now the opposite: some high-end high-society high clothing styles.

High-Society Haute Couture in a High-Tech, Low-Life World:

1. Bio-Luminescent Elegance:

• Imagine a flowing gown woven from a special bioluminescent material that emits a soft, ethereal glow, adapting to the wearer's mood and movement.
• The dress could be accented with strategically placed gemstones that amplify the bioluminescence, creating a mesmerizing spectacle.

1. Augmented Reality Couture:

• Dresses and suits with intricate embroidery that, when viewed through special AR glasses, come alive with holographic animations, patterns, or even personalized messages.
• This could be used to display family crests, stock market trends, or even live news feeds, all seamlessly integrated into the clothing.

1. Nanotech Tailoring:

• Clothing that self-adjusts to the wearer's body temperature and preferences. The fabric could be woven with microscopic nanobots that regulate temperature, repel dust, or even release a subtle, personalized fragrance.
• This would offer a level of comfort and personalization that pushes the boundaries of traditional haute couture.

1. Recycled Luxury:

• High-society wouldn't be complete without a touch of eco-consciousness (or at least the appearance of it). Imagine garments meticulously crafted from recycled materials like discarded computer components or salvaged spaceship parts, transformed into stunning evening wear.
• This "waste-to-wear" approach would showcase wealth and environmental responsibility (or at least the image of it).

1. Cybernetic Accents:

• Subtle cybernetic implants seamlessly integrated into clothing. Imagine a dress with a built-in neural interface that allows the wearer to control personal AI assistants with a simple touch or a suit with temperature-regulating implants woven directly into the fabric.
• These high-tech accents would be a subtle yet sophisticated way to showcase wealth and technological advancement.

Bonus: The "Living" Garment:

• A truly outrageous and exclusive garment – a dress or suit composed of a bio-engineered material that appears to be alive. Imagine clothing that shimmers and pulsates with a faint bioluminescence, seemingly breathing and adapting to the wearer's movements.
• This would be the ultimate status symbol, a conversation starter that pushes the boundaries of fashion and technology into the realm of the fantastical.