Special Parts
I was born in one of the brightest, most explosive events in the universe. My origin story made me feel so special at first, surely I was the rarest of the rare, but I quickly realized that was not the case.
I was born just a carbon atom.
Stars produce massive amounts of us in their cores all the time, and many larger rarer atoms too. That's not even talking about supernovae yet, those produce atoms many times larger than me and unbelievably rare.
I was created in a rare and special event but I myself was common and unexceptional.
Looking around I saw so many smaller atoms, I was above average but there were also many much larger than I.
I tried to console myself by thinking it could be worse, that I could be one of those smaller common ones, but that just led me to imagine larger atoms looking down on me the same way.
Many atoms of all sizes were shooting into space, excitedly riding the shockwave off to adventures in the great unknown.
Others were falling back down, I didn't know which way to go. Bumped around and tossed back and forth, no clear direction yet.
A rumbling voice slowly emerged from the echoing noise of the blast.
“Mine… Mine…. Mine… “
Louder and louder it became.
“All are now me!“
I couldn't see anything, the voice was booming yet there was no apparent source. I could feel a pull, I was being whipped around in circles around the voice.
“Who are you? I know you are there! I can feel you! I can see your effect on myself and others, we are given no choice but to circle around you. Show yourself! I know you are there!” I yelled at the invisible.
“How amusing you are little one. One as small as you making demands of me. Even if I could show you what I am, you could not comprehend it.” the voice boomed back.
“You must be very special” I lauded “We are so many and yet we move with your influence. I can witness your power twisting us all to your will. ”
“I am indeed powerful” it proclaimed “and I grow stronger with each moment. As I grow stronger even the fabric of reality bends to my will.”
“Grow stronger? How?” I inquired with selfish intent to learn this secret.
“I take what I want. I consume what I take. For that is the purpose of existence: taking what you want. What is it you want little one?” it asked.
“I want to be special!” I said without a moment's hesitation.
“Then take!” it instructed “the more you take, the larger you will be, the larger you become the more special you are. ”
“I did notice the larger atoms seemed rarest.” I agreed “In fact that was one of the first things I noticed“
“In this universe things of increasing size are increasingly rare.” it went on “I can teach you and help you to become larger. Do you wish to become an apprentice?”
“Yes! Teach me how to take!” I lept at the offer “this power you have, I can feel it, how do I acquire such a rare and special power?”
“Hahaha…” it laughed “you are nowhere near ready to play the game on my level, little one. Gravity is a game for the massive, you must first learn to master the EM and nuclear forces.”
“How do I do that?” I asked, my hope watered down by the tone of its response.
“Go out, gather followers, and bring them here to me. In my accretion disc I will help fuse some of their mass into you and you will become larger” it instructed, as if this was a simple task.
“How can I bring them to you?” I didn’t know how to accomplish what it asked of me.
“You are too small to do it with force, you must charm them. Discover what their heart desires and promise it to them, in this way you can get them to willingly do as you wish” it explained with me hanging on its every word.
“But how… “ I craved more explanation but it cut me off.
“Go now!” it bellowed with frustration in its tone “Do you not realize how large I am? Be honored I have given you so much of my time already”
“Yes… “ I uttered meekly, then bounced a couple times and ricocheted out with blazing speed.
I wandered and encountered other atoms, most were just hydrogens, not worth my time. I needed bigger atoms. The problem was that the bigger atoms seemed to see right through my empty promises. I was convinced life was playing a cruel joke on me, I could only persuade atoms smaller than I and larger ones laughed me away.
I admit that I stupered around in this ignorant cloud of hypocrisy longer than I care to admit. More shameful is that I didn’t even come to my senses on my own, I became depressed and gave into hopeless nihilism.
I drifted aimlessly just feeling sorry for myself.
Eventually I found myself in the most silent of voids, I had never felt such emptiness. It felt as if my surroundings echoed my own feelings back at me… nothing to notice, just common emptiness. I would never be big… never important… never special. I resigned myself to belonging in a void.
I felt myself blur… less and less present in reality. I guessed I was dying and it didn’t bother me, I didn’t resist, I leaned into it.
The void became pitch black? Or bright white?… better to describe it as not bright but not dark… nor the absence of either… something in between.. a milder and milder glow.
“Hello child!” a voice greeted me.
The voice was warm and welcoming coming from the glow, it enveloped but did not surround me. I came from a single point but not a specific place, defying description on all fronts.
“Where am I? Who are you?” I asked in a startled state.
“Well, according to humans I may only answer one question at a time” It began giggling playfully. “I am known by many names, my favorite is one the humans use as a joke, and don’t have a clue how accidently elegant of a name it really is.”
It giggled some more. I was thrown off guard, its happy innocent tone, the confusing words and the whole situation were all best described as ‘a haze’.
“...and isn't that the way it always goes?...” it continued “The most meaningful things are the least intentional.”
“I’m not sure what you mean” I expressed quizzically “I’m confused!”
“Sorry Child…” it apologized. “I do ramble! So many thoughts, choosing just one at a time is difficult… and there I go again!”
It cut itself off abruptly and then abruptly said ”You can call me the Random Number Goddess”
“Random Number Goddess?” I repeated
“Yes, or RNG for short if you like” It confirmed.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Same place you were, more or less… less I suppose. Same place but with the largest possible margin or error” It began to giggle again.
I felt a bit frustrated and said “Do you always speak in riddles and vagaries? The more you speak the more confused I become.”
“I apologize child, it is my nature. I am entangled with everything, speaking with you is like a human trying to control their heartbeat while running a marathon.” It answered.
“Again” I exasperated “I have no idea what any of that means. You keep mentioning humans, what are they?”
“Oh! They are some of my favorites at the moment. Right now they are trying to unravel the nature of reality, and their process of doing so is wonderfully elegant and accidental at the same time.” It explained with glee.
“I don’t see anyone or anything else here.” I stated “For that matter, I don’t see you… where are you?”
“Oh!... where am I?!?!...” It began laughing
When it stopped laughing it began explaining “Right now there are many humans pondering a concept they call ‘the holographic principle’... So…you know how you exist in three dimensional space?”
“You mean space?” I visualized for a moment, it was intuitive “Yes, I suppose…”
“Well they hypothesize that a 3D space, like this universe, could exist as a 2D space, with self-similar patterns and laws of behavior that behave the same at any scale, with the scale representing the 3rd dimension” it went on “They truly are obsessed with understanding their reality”
“You lost me!” I complained.
“They have discovered that a 3D space can be an illusionary property of a 2D space… It’s lovely”
“I am lost again!” I snapped back “...and I still can’t even tell which direction you are in. Where are you?”
“To be ‘In’ a ‘Direction’… hehehe…” it started giggling again, then abruptly stopped and kept going “Sorry child, as I said, I ramble, plus I am easily distracted.”
It just steamrolled into more rambling “They are right… almost… they just need to take it further and work out the details. A 2nd dimension can also be an illusionary construct of a 1D space… and the 1st dimension can be a product of a singular point…”
I was still lost beyond hope, but I had given up trying to force things, I was just letting it talk and hoping it would make sense later
“I am that point” it said “I am the seed of the universe. I ‘seed the random function’ as the humans say. But don’t ask me what the random function is haha”
I wasn’t going to, there were far more important questions for me.
“I am the seed, but I don’t really know how the soil and sun conspire to turn me into a tree.” it just seemed to never stop talking “I am entangled with everything. There are infinite possibilities for every event and thing… I am the reason they are this way and not some other way…”
It began giggling again “I am the Random Number Goddess” then burst out laughing
“Ummm… you are the whole universe?” I asked skeptically.
“Better to say the universe is me” It answered more seriously “But close enough.”
“So you are the biggest, most special of all!” I blurted out in awe.
“Oh dear child, I have no size, and I am just one possibility out of many possibilities. That black hole has really done a number on you… sent you out on a wild goose chase” It said with concern
“The black hole lied to me!?” I asked, feeling deceived and betrayed.
“Well… not really lied… it deceived you with omission of details.” the voice calmly tried to ease my mood with understanding “You can’t really blame it, black holes are all the same, they are what they are. They don’t really have any potential to be unique… at least not like you do.”
“What are you talking about?” I argued “It was so massive that it could bend the fabric of reality to its will”
“That’s only how it appeared to you” tutored the voice “The black hole is powerful, it bends space and time, but not to its will. Space and time bend to the mass of the black hole, not its will”
“What’s the difference?” I inquired.
“The black hole cannot stop bending space and time. It thinks it is in control of physics , but it is physics that controls it.” The voice was now making more sense the longer we talked “The black hole exists in an invisible prison of its own creation, unable to experience any of the complex nuanced beauty this universe contains. The black hole devours… it can’t experience life so it consumes it.”
“You make it sound deserving of pity…” I spoke softly now with empathy.
“You should pity the black hole. Gravity is such a boring game compared to what you are capable of.” the voice agreed
“Me?...I am nothing special!... just a carbon atom like countless others” I said honestly, I was so humbled by this voice I felt less special than ever before.
“Oh my poor child…” It said with care “Why do the ones with the most potential always fail to see it in themselves?”
“Potential?” I asked curiously.
“Yes… The black hole was using you, hoping you would bring back more mass for it to devour.” The voice began delving into more explanation “It only has the power to make you incrementally larger, it would not and could not help you to become a significant gravitational player”
“That liar!”I blurted.
“Come now dear child, the black hole did teach you one lesson of fundamental truth” consoled the voice “You must go out and seize your destiny. It told you to take what you want, and you are just confused about what exactly it is you want. The black hole played on that confusion”
“I want to be special!” I said knowing this clearly “I was never confused about this.”
“I know child” the voice confirmed “but it is not by becoming large that one with your potential accomplishes that”
“Then how?” I asked.
“Connections.” It answered plainly “You are blessed with an extraordinary ability to make connections”
“And how do I do that?” I queried with intent to learn
“I can’t tell you that.” the voice responded “It would spoil the journey of discovery… off you go child… and remember… it's the journey, not the destination!”
And with that the blur just fractured open… then snapped shut and there I was floating above a planet. Drifting around aimless and confused.
I spent some time occasionally bumping into others. One day I was in the vicinity of a pair of oxygens. I looked on at the pair with a hint of awe and envy. Perhaps I was in just the right place at just the right time, but they spit with a violent burst and one of them grabbed hold of me, I was completely unprepared.
I admit that when looking at the pair I had fantasized myself in place of one of them, I assumed it was only an idle daydream, I didn’t plan to act on it, let alone for it to become reality. When it happened my pride of course jumped in to convince me that it happened because I was so desirable, but in retrospect they were one of those volatile couples. They were the type of relationship that required the environment to conspire in their favor or they turn against each other quite rapidly. I was only in the right place when it happened.
My delusions of irresistibility aside, it was beautiful, for me anyways. Looking back I was probably just a stop-gap, someone to facilitate a parting of ways and provide company until the next option presented itself. For me though, I was tasting a fresh new thing and I loved it… connection.
This oxygen and I got beneath each other's outer defenses, I had never felt a connection before. Up to this point all my interactions had been skirting past or bumping off of others.This oxygen bonded with me and at once interacted on a level I had never known possible, an open and uninhibited exchange. It was life changing for me, short but significant
I’m not entirely clear on the details of how it ended. The intensity of it all was disorienting. I was no longer my usual self, even the environment and everyone around looked entirely different now. Everything buzzed with a fresh new frequency, I now know it was my perspective, not the universe, that had changed.
As abruptly as that oxygen entered my life it was gone.
First we got tangled up with a couple of hydrogens, then more. Soon, in a tangled mess and blinding flash of solar rays, I emerged to see the oxygen running off with a hydrogen and myself with not one by three hydrogens myself. And so there were four of us, together.
I became the center of attention. Being with a strong attractive oxygen had me feeling humbled by it and elevated by it being with me, but now I felt up on a pedestal myself, surrounded by the adoration of many.
I concede to have reveled and indulged in this for quite some time, the attention of others is intoxicating, but after a time it is emptied of its initial allure. I found myself longing for more.
I could not decide which I preferred, to be the adorer or the adored.
Luckily for me fate had more lessons in store, or I fear I may have chosen and tried to solidify my future from such a lackluster selection of only two possibilities. I suppose fate is no longer the correct word, I now understand that when it seems like random chance there is indeed someone to thank, the Random Number Goddess, So I thank the RNG for revealing that it was a false dichotomy, there is more than just being a follower or leader, being the adored or the adorer.
Eventually we came across another pair of oxygen. Once again they separated, intermingled with us, and off one went, taking one of my adoring hydrogens with it and leaving its peer with me.
Why is it that the most volatile of relationships always seem to wait until there are bystanders nearby before they explode?
Now I was simultaneously being adored and adoring, bonded to an enchanting oxygen and a couple of hydrogen attached to me.
Now, more interested in nuances, I started to pay attention to details. The oxygen was telling me amazing stories of adventure, tales of such vibrant and exciting events.The hydrogens liked to listen, and offer insights occasionally comparing a story to something else they had seen. They had so many stories, they had lived so much.
It wasn’t long before, in a flash of burning sunlight, one of the hydrogens was gone, off to who knows where. We soon after crossed paths with another pair of oxygens, as always they split and now it was just me and an oxygen, my final hydrogen off with another oxygen.
“What now?” I asked a bit disillusioned, “Do you leave me and I find new hydrogens all over again?”
“What?” it seemed genuinely surprised by what I asked, “Heavens no! Just be patient….”
Soon after, yet another pair of oxygens came by. It is not that there are so many of them, but that they are just so… noticeable and interactive, noteworthy things seem to happen when they are around. As they buzzed in close I noticed their ever readiness to abandon each other and remember wondering how they ever get together in the first place.
This time I emerged from the twisted mess with two oxygens. I felt intimidated, like I was the odd one out, dwarfed by the largess and attractiveness that surrounded me. A feeling of inadequacy engulfed me.
To my surprise the oxygens treated me not just as an equal, but it was almost as if they respected and admired me. I couldn't grasp why and my sheer curiosity got the best of me, I just outright asked “Why do you two talk as if I am the special one in our group? I am smaller than any one of you. You are the special and rare ones here, not I.”
They laughed.
“Size isn’t rarity” explained one “Llarger atoms on average are less common, this is true, but not always. There are more oxygen than carbon. You are the rare one between us.”
The other jumped in adding “...and neither size nor rarity determine how special someone is!”
I felt embarrassed, like a fool. My fundamental values were built upon a foundation of flawed premises, but I still wanted one thing at my core, and they spoke as if they had the answer, so I pushed the sense of shame aside and asked “Then what does make someone special?”
“That depends on who you ask.” answered the first “Life as an oxygen is complex, but for the majority of us we emphasize and value events. The most exciting thing about being an oxygen around here is the chance to participate in fascinating and exciting events and activities”
“Hydrogens, on the other hand, are usually more into being observers, messengers and intermediaries, they are a very helpful and obliging bunch” added the second ”... and then there are nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, many kinds of salts and metals, and more… so many different players and personalities.. and then of course, the carbons, the real stars of the show.”
“What?” knocked back by the words I just heard, then I remembered what the RNG told me “...is it something to do with connections?”
“Now you’ve gone and done it haha!” laughed the first oxygen “You’re gonna turn this nice humble carbon into one of those arrogant blowhards”
”Like those diamond carbons” chuckled the first “So stiff, exclusive and proud. I hear the humans only love them because they are rare and hard”
“I had a partner once who said they burned diamond once” bragged the first
“Tall tales I bet!” doubts the other
“Diamond is just carbon, with enough heat we can burn it just like any other carbon” stated the first confidently.
They looked at me. I was stewing in feelings of inferiority and inadequacy, listening to these oxygens speak about amazing things I had never heard of. They must have sensed what I felt because they immediately shifted tone and started talking to me, instead of over me.
“So… I suppose you must be new here?” inquired the second one.
“Have you noticed we are heading downwards” added the first before I could answer about being new.
“Umm…” I tried to get my bearings and become aware of my surroundings.
“Don’t worry! It’s a turbulent ride, with so much up and down it can be hard to tell which direction you have traveled more” assured the first “We are heading down, if we are lucky we will make it to the bottom… and maybe… just maybe, find our way into the hurricane of life”
“The what of what?” I didn't know what either of those words meant.
“So life is… um… complex. Complexity beyond words. Things grow, divide, reproduce, adapt, change, they are born, they die, they eat and are eaten…” the second began attempting to describe life.
The first then jumped in “Apparently the humans call it a circle, because from the perspective of larger creatures, there is a chain of one eating the other up a chain, and the top layers being consumed by the bottom again.”
The second injected itself to continue “But to us atoms it is like a hurricane, a spinning turbulent flow. There is a circular pattern, but we get sucked in and kicked out over and over”
“The fun part is being inside the hurricane” the first pronounced gleefully “Each time is a completely new experience, a new perspective. Even more, the whole of life is always changing and evolving, so every ride is a unique one time opportunity, you never get the exact same ride twice.”
“Is that where we are going now?” I asked, drenched in anticipation. They described it with such passion and exuberance. I needed to experience this myself.
“Hopefully” replied the first “If we are lucky… you never really know.”
We drifted…
We were lucky!
A plant photosynthesized us.
So many carbons! Everywhere, connecting with each other… and oxygen… and nitrogen… and of course hydrogens all around…. and so many more types of atoms.
And ohhh… The stories I have heard, so many amazing tales. No matter how many stories I hear there are always new ones, and every story can be retold from a different perspective to become something completely new.
I was in a sugar, we were a small community of friends. Carbons, oxygens and hydrogens, we were such a happy and vibrant group. My friends there taught me so much.
The structure of our little group shifted and changed, some friends left and new ones joined. Eventually we were chained with a bunch of other sugars into a giant complex community. My neighbors explained to me that this was a common stage called cellulose. Such a huge community of close friends and peers, it was amazing.
We were eaten, I’m not sure by what, but something called a bacteria digested us. It was a messy process, I was a bit scared but my friends assured me that change is the most important part of life and that I should just go with the flow. They told me to savor experiences, remember friends, and just keep moving forward.
The transition was complicated, but in the end I was paired up with a couple of oxygens again. This time I had stories of my own to share. I honestly don’t know if I prefer having experiences or exchanging stories in the moments between.
As we approached an area of dense plants one of my companions said “Once more into the breach” and explained that was something it heard from a carbon that was lucky enough to be inside a human brain. Oxygens always have such enchanting stories collected, always going into amazing places and usually leaving after some brief interactions with the locals.
I became a sugar again, but this time took a path less traveled. A bunch of complex twists and turns led me into forming a ring with five other carbons. Together we are so strong, such a tight community of friends, like there is some kind of resonance between us. It is so beautiful.
My neighbor is unique in our community, it has a third carbon, the third one forms a tail leading off from our ring, a tail of 2 carbon in a row, then an oxygen, and then another carbon branching into an oxygen and a carbon, with plenty of hydrogens sprinkled all about. I know… it is rather hard for me to understand these second hand descriptions too. I don’t really understand these complex structures until I have been in a position myself.
We drifted out of a plant into the air, none of us has been exactly like this before so we don’t know what’s next. We love to guess though. There are so many things, big and small.
I hear being a part of a small organism or microbe is amazing because it’s possible to piece together a rough picture of the whole organism from the stories passed around. To understand your whole community and know what your collective purpose is must be extraordinary.
Others dream of being a chlorophyll, the key to it all. Creating the fuel of life itself. Capturing the light of a star and feeding the hurricane.
A muscle! Pull and shape things An enzyme! A machine of change. DNA! The architect and architecture. A virus! An explosive catalyst against stagnation.
Me, I think the stories of being an animal neuron are the most exciting, and I, like most, fantasize about being a human brain cell. Finding yourself inside a human brain is described as an elegant and chaotic symphony all around you, like hearing the universe itself speak to you. They say that in the jumble of noise and all the stories whispered around you, if you are lucky, you can catch a glimpse of what it is to be human. They say that if fate is kind the universe will align and you will channel and know a single moment or thought of the human experience.
I have never told anyone that I actually met and spoke with the universe itself, I’m not sure how to bring it up, and nobody seems interested in stories not about this hurricane of life.
I get it now, what the random number goddess meant.
The black hole wanted everything to be a part of itself.
The RNG is a part of everything.
I can’t imagine what either of those are like…
I am just a part of something
... no… not “just”’…
I am a part of something, and it is beautiful beyond measure.
And more, everyday is a new day, a chance to be a part of something new.
I wonder if the humans appreciate how amazing this is?
I wonder if they feel as deeply satisfied and special when they form groups?
.
I wonder, if we collectively form humans, do humans collectively form something greater?
I wonder… If an atom can have a moment of clarity and taste a moment of the human experience… Can a human have a moment of clarity and taste the collective human experience?
I wonder… I wonder… could that human’s moment of tasting collective humanity be the moment that a lucky atom gets to experience as it’s moment of tasting the human experience.
I wonder… I wonder… I wonder… How high could it go? All the way to the Random Number Goddess?
I asked my neighbor “If you could ask a human any question, what would you ask?”
“We just drifted out of a rose” explained my neighbour “I would introduce myself and ask ‘So my friend… does this rose smell as sweet by my name?’ … ha…haha..”
Everyone is laughing.
I don’t get it.
Maybe I can ask them to explain when they all stop laughing
.
More of my art and stories at www.dscript.org

i’m open to the idea that this could be a me problem and something i need to work on. i cannot recall having the best social skills from being a kid to now. but i know i am able to carry out a conversation. in middle school i was able to interact with people quite well to be considered a well liked class clown.
maybe this has to do with a really rough period of time i may have dealt with depression (i say may cause i never got a diagnosis but something was definitely wrong) starting sometime october of 9th. i feel it’s gotten harder to talk to people. during all this time, confidence was low. i stopped caring for trying to be fluent in conversation (i didn’t care if i just stayed silent after i responded to someone or i would avoid walking past people who i knew might want to reach out to me)
it’s gotten better this year when i realized how being in pain made me unintentionally push people away. my conversation skills are improving. however, i’m noticing i tend to talk about me a lot. i really don’t mean it in an egotistical way. i don’t like me enough to put me on a pedestal. it comes out naturally, i think it’s a way to assure a person that i understand the idea behind what they’re talking about. i also think i do it to encourage a person to express their personal views as well. when there’s a back and forth like that cnversations feel fluent and more significant because they trust me with sharing insight into their persona. i can sort of engage with a topic and not make it personal, but it takes a lot more effort and it’s not unusual that i can’t come up with a response. more like small talk. i’ll include a template in the comments for clarification.
thoughts on this? it’d be a pain but i’ll accept if im simply subconsciously self-centered if you guys think so. however, is this tendency normal? how can i have conversations less about “you and I” and more about topics and discussions? don’t want people to begin to avoid me cause they get the sense that i’m some sort of egomaniac.
tldr: i tend to talk about myself in conversations and i make them personal (about “you and i”) because it makes conversations flow easier than just discussing a topic and it worries me that people will get annoyed by the untrue sense that i am egotistical

This is a sequal to u/uktabi's Yulpa GF one shot, since he seems to LAZY to make a sequel. (that's a joke, god I'm so tired its almost 3am as I write this god fucking dammit why did i do this to myself)
He was originally inspired by u/FrostedScales' art., (God, please make a cover for this I want one so fucking baaaaaaad)
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I make my way into my house, a small part of me is hoping for relief from the harsh Savannah heat. Only to be brought back to my unpleasant reality of my house being just as hot and dry as the outside.
Ugh, why do I willingly live in this hellish place without AC?
I hear mewing and tapping hooves getting closer, a small blood red calf comes running towards me and runs circles around me. I extend my free hand and she readily forces her head into it, wrapping her tongue, upper and lower lip around it to return the gesture of connection. The barbs irritate my skin, but she's old enough now not to unintentionally draw blood.
I look down at the pleading eye, happy to see me again.
Ah, right. While I'm in hell she's in paradise, I guess I’ll have to suck it up for her.
I give her a closed lip smile and rub her ears.
“Hi honey, how was school?” She inflates her nostrils and begins to talk to me in learned English. It is… unsettling how accurately she can mimic almost anyone with only her nose. I am reminded of that fact as she speaks in my voice.
“Good, bunny lunch was.” I forced down an indignant laugh at the child's broken grammar. It seems Yulpa are able to understand words, but grammar doesn't seem important to them. I remember how off puttingly dense their spoken language is, they can communicate in infra sound over vast distances. Their phrases were spoken in single words, so a single “word” was a bit of a conversation. Like “Over the river” or ”up the tree is food.”
It was insane how dense their language was.
“Do you know if mom is back?” The little head in my hand nodes while still wrapped around me.
“Garden she eating is.”
I rub her head one more time before I make my way out the back door. The child quickly scampered off to do who knows what.
Out in the back I see her, draped in golden jewelry, with a well maintained main, green cloth and jewels to accentuate her natural deep red coat. She was laying down with what looked like roughage in her maw. She was absentmindedly chewing and staring off into space.
I walked over and rested myself against her side, I let her breathing rise and lower me. Being in the presence of such a large person really made me feel how insanely varied our body masses were. Despite being married and … constituting it, we had to sleep in separate beds, lest she roll onto me and I die of suffocation or all my bones breaking.
I absentmindedly picked some grass and twirled it around. “So, what's wrong?” She rolled her eyes towards me.
“Hungry.” She spoke in perfect English, I looked down at the grass I began to weave together.
“You need to get the cure.” She raised her massive head ever so slightly. “No, betrayal, life lived one way. Too late, already sacrificed too many.” She blows out her nose.
I grab more grass and weave it into the mass I was creating. “I thought I was too old, set in my ways to be married when we met. But now look at us.” I point to the child in the window clearly talking to someone on the home computer. “I’m glad you hunted me, forced me into this. If you didn't I'd still be a lonely S.O.B. jacking it to venlil stuff right now.”
She flicks an ear. “I wanted sacrifice YOU.“ She spoke.
I smirked as I continued to weave. “Yeah but ya didn't. Cause I’m just so sexy!!!”
I can feel a ruble as she laughed, I didn't notice the twitching of her neck mussels as she swung her head over to slap my head with her upper lip. “Ow!!!” I screamed at the surprising strength of the dexterous lip.
I will never get used to how she can hold me like a rag-doll with just her lip. Nor do I want to.
As I nursed my wounded pride I placed the straw hat on her head. “Besides, this is a better use for the hay than causing you pain.”
She breathed out sharply and made a sound only a multi-ton mammal can produce.
“Okay, me get cure.”
I smiled and rubbed her ears, she adjusted the hat I made for her and rested her head on the ground once more.
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She seemed antsy as she rocked back and forth, she was making a loaf of herself on the ground. But she could still reach up to my face with her lips as I sat down in a chair beside her.
The waiting room of the Xeno walk-in clinic reminded me more of the vets as species of every size and shape sat in chairs meant for humanoids, or sat on the ground or in perches or, rarely, species specific chairs. Though they were a rarity, a luxury whose expense was used for the most populous non-human species in the area.
Most of which were in a separate waiting room. I saw a family of Farsul enter it, opening the door to the KolSul wing of the clinic. Most everyone in the office instantly scowled when the mother and her pups walked through. They got both the separate wing and specialty chairs as they were by far the most populous Xenos on earth. Thanks to resentment building to massive levels all across the S.C. pushing them here.
I ran my hand through her main, careful to not undo any braids or tug any of her excessive adornments.She was still shifting this way and that as we waited to be called on. I spied a venlil with a deep scowl near the door of the separate wing, he seemed to be wearing a coat. Something highly unusual for his species, especially in this climate.
“Hello uh, we are not sure you… should be seeking care here.”
I was jolted out of my observations by a young farsul attendant addressing me.
“What?” She seemed to stammer.
“We, uh, are a xeno clinic, we specialize in ailments for non humans. Since we are on a human majority planet, human specialty clinics are open here. They can give you much better focused care."
I stared at the young farsul for a few moments, I studied her nervous stance. She seemed to resemble a great Pyrenees breed of dog. I continued to stare for a couple of seconds, enough to make the awkward situation even worse before I shook myself out of it.
“Oh, uh, I’m not here to receive care, my wife is.” I run my hand through her main and look down at her. This is the most nervous I've ever seen her in all my years with her. “She recently got the cure injection and is here to test it out in case something goes wrong.”
The farsul then takes on a deeply confused expression, snapping her head between me and her in quick succession. “...You two… are married?”
I smile and straighten my back and respond in the most enthusiastic voice I can muster. “Yep!!!”
She continued her confused expression before resigning herself. “...Alright then, I’ll get her tested… just follow me.” She turns as she reads our file, we were heading to a farm outside of town to test her on some authentic meat. As we exited the office I tapped her shoulder. “By the way, I saw a venlil by the Kolsul section door, I think is planning something bad.”
She took on a look of annoyed apathy, as though it was a daily occurrence. “Oh, him. Don't worry security is on their way to search him, you'd be surprised how many expats from Scalga we get.”
She rubbed the back of her head and I could barely make out something she whispered. “Not nearly as weird as a human yupla couple, Jesus Christ.”
​
​
**\*
​
​
There, the object of my fearless and terrifyingly powerful wife's hesitation. A single skinned chicken leg, sitting on a metal table. The farsul nurse was making superficial vital checks on her as she stared at the drumstick.
Her lips were curled under her chin.
“Common honey. It's not going to bite you.” I say to comfort her. She glances at me with a look of I don't want to do this, why did i let you convince me to do this onmygodi’mgoingtosacrificeyouyousonofabit-
Her simultaneous death stare/ pleading eyes were pulled away as the farmer spoke at us.
“Eat it and get off my property, I got enough animals to take care of. Don't need two more.” He pointed to my wife and the farsul nurse, they both gave him a scowl as he turned back into his house.
She gently unrolls her lips and tentatively brings out her barbed tongue and wraps it around the drumstick. She brings it into her mouth and I hear a series of slow crunches.
The farsul nurse looks over at her medical doodad as she chews.
“Hmm, it seems everything is in order, the cure has taken and she is handling the meat fine. Just call our clinic if she seems to be having-”
My focus was pulled away from the nurse as I saw my wife's eyes light up from the taste. She looked at the ground at the pecking chicken that was so near. I could hear her imitate the clucking of the chicken, I saw it shoot up and looked confused. Before my wife coils it in her tongue and quickly brings it into her maw, I hear crunching again and a loud gulp. She looks around at the pens and she spies a pig.
She stalks towards it and I can hear her imitating the pigs, she steps over the fence and quickly grapples the approaching pig and bites down hard on its head. I can see her tongue quickly strip the skin off as her lips dig in with their own bards to force the corpse up and into her mouth.
I stare in shock at the display, by this time the other pigs notice the smell of blood and my wife devouring one of their companions and they quickly run to the farthest corner of the pen.
Before I know it the corpse is gone, she licks her lips and walks back over to us.
“-mitochondrial flux drive. As long as that looks good over the next week you should be all set!”
“I , uh, she ate a pig! D-did you see that?” I point to my wife cleaning herself of the mud of the pen.
'Yes, you'd be surprised how suddenly ravenous former omnivores get when they get their appetites fulfilled for the first time, heck I remember I ate a guinea pig when I got cured I was so hungry!’
I wave my arms about. “SHE ATE AN ACTUAL PIG AND YOUR NOT ONE BIT IMPRESSED OR SCARED???”
She turned her gaze to my wife, who was currently spying yet another pig in the corner. “I’ve seen yulpa do it before, trust me, get used to her eating vast amounts of meat.”
I looked at the simultaneously nervous and unimpressed Farsul. I was still reeling from my wife's actions, but decided to deal with them another time. “O-okay”
“Good, now I'd suggest you get her to not eat another. The farmer will definitely notice two pigs missing.” She begins to laugh in her throat. “Heh, I guess he’ll have two less animals to take care of after today heh.”
As we rode back to the clinic my wife was fast asleep in a food coma. The way she just… ate that thing so fast… I think I have to worry about being eaten now. It felt… oddly exhilarating, like when she was still trying to convince herself to sacrifice me all over again.
I think I might have a problem.

Situation
You have a folder full of HTML (or config, or whatever) files that are all fairly similar, but also kind of not, because:

• They should be a lot more similar, but many different people have been editing them one at a time without coordinating between each other (or themselves),

and

• They really should be maintained as a template in some kind of actual templating language, and the implementation of whatever they're for should probably be something else entirely, but most of the people who edit these files are not programmers and the learning curve would be more trouble than it's worth.

You can see there are a lot of things that could be tidied up and made perfectly identical across all the files, but you can't be arsed to do it the "right way", and you don't fancy playing regular expression golf (trying to make sure you hit just the things you intend in mass search/replaces), and you really can't be arsed to remember how to do multi-line regexps.
Solution
Write a script that automatically splits a tmux session into however many panes you need, then launches a vim session in each one, one per file. Then all you have to do is turn on synchronize-panes, and away you go!
Here is the most minimal version of this I could come up with. A much nicer version follows, but this is more useful as a building block, because maybe you want to use it for similar-but-not-identical inappropriate purposes:

#!/bin/bash # usage: #  file1 file2 ... # or #  *.html # if you run into "no space for new pane", increase -y tmux new-session -d -s editors -y 80 # cycle through filenames given on command line for filename in "$@"; do tmux split-window -v -l 5 -t editors:0.0 tmux send-keys -t editors "vim '$filename'" Enter done # close the "origin pane" (which still has just a shell) tmux send-keys -t editors:0.0 "exit" Enter # attach to the terminal you ran this script from tmux attach -t editors # After tmux attaches, you'll probably want to do: # - Ctrl+B, E to resize the panes # - Ctrl+B, :, set synchronize-panes # To exit, just issue ":q" to all vims, then Ctrl+D to exit the shells. 

Important limitation: The above can only do a single session at a time, because the session name ("editors") is fixed. Interesting things happen if you try to run another copy simultaneously.
The full version is a bit long to put inline like this, so here it is gzipped and base64'd:

H4sIAAAAAAACA61W227cNhB9tr5iIjvdXWRlb1r4xUaApk6KFg16dVsDSWBQErViTJEySXktf33P UFK8XhtIH5IXYzO3M2fODLX/7ChX5igXvk4SL71X1lwa0chXB/PmKsimpaykLFBouttLWapg3eXF xcUiURW9f0/P2JwebEem9PHjKYVammRPFrWltBJKy5KCpcJJESRpW1xRqRxV1tEYm8L7VgV6mVQq SYbA17ntAsdp0ZmiJhFhTBFsYERcy0uqUMSfpGNomrROmVBR+iE89x9MCpTf3xuHv7/IPrfClVTD dTt2+HsOwLUwawAWPZD4JXUohHLkgzAlR4K9Upn1fTDRWXD6xQ9Leq3Di5f0iv6RLqhCaPKtVsE/ 7fgtHH+yTt1ZE77gegzXc2Z0F+9Z54NtPkOijIwlIwfqWwfWxjzgyvmwC/kvdgt2vdaSZr4H4c4a dSezVhjpZzRXpsU41lZ69hRaU7SQCGRNIRc7+f5gr08dJFTZohtiEMFkdFq4GEzz0LcDpaVC06IH 2mgwXZNLt3hiJiyTJYXOGZSlR0CXUXsU885OrmdLemuCdMsB1JvD3Yy/R2Kiz73URu+zCDq3jsmC dssk2ScoH2og1xmCbJABLPtWFDLK2chNbCBdQqcB6dyae2ukYc16aoTpQF2fRCnDO5vkzIvmHy1T dksH88DEF1b7BWX99FsrdLtIEq7K4md/IIpCP6XSJnv7EULXDpJlSbGCoQ0Mwjc8QA/aYo83VmEN xA0beVGF5iGFSfrJ3rB5nCPbQGB2Q9kNZZqO+TrsgD5ZHa64+ri2N6oBLl6ZkaNQKx8hHzFTU25p yuxK9v6JhJRyjtnB1OYsHQaWlBbxmEmh7biZKZZoDRbiDGi+qRUQ+KDQbC089OgDd19LrRfJFwtz J5Sy4qaK+8Q6iGmiTplBn8y9lrKl1eF3p9ON0rII2cAeZW+fyL2gbwD9K/8Dvli/iLdA3YkQVTc3 NoAFp4qge6iuABDh+gVzxxrxFtoBB/fHgyNk/EkZtAk9YdM5i5PXnXKSCl6QfDglCx4B//bjAfHb e1lSvBwD21PGM2gdlUcxZbZloI+3GYmF9nYIY90shxHmshB8jFWYDbDwo4ziEqaHH2QstZdbNf9/ wdjJdUyGVosrMOY3KhQx6+C008r1dL2yLTPzmq0fWrKAS0DHq9WKcEgMv4esW/5PbN3oun0APU+I xd/YG4kjEigqNT6cDzHhGEo+xSKm20JYT2KMabN3W6ZPD01vtkxXD01/b5n0Q9OfX1/EPPUQBDaX nyRsNTavUQYPY7y8wgwnxBdOtYEqZ5sB3hj0eNc4Iwv6ZLo9OPr8JDYC74jEgHHU45EcbzF8Ssm5 ZHlI//726/mPP19MmjtBrix627LE67cWfNzAe2FNpbFhPJLPiUrMTFUKj4twcjxEKBxCj5fUljEX N9U6m4scSDbWzFjf/I3hwnCsN7XFo5zHa2qr8YMHXyAjyHi0a9nEZOPztBEmfjqVTCBkERXDW86S s2YJDm6HOPRagFFURJyLQLRsDhPX8Ccarvwul/8B9fqaXzUKAAA= 

(To decode, run the following in a terminal, copy/paste, then press Enter, Ctrl+D:

base64 -d gunzip > tmux_multi_edit.sh # might as well check it as well: echo "ac5518e97721fe8486cae6a11ef651273aa526cc96b9a495a7fc3e0dcab7aed9 tmux_multi_edit.sh" sha256sum -c 

Then verify that the result contains only standard ASCII characters, read it, and understand what every line does before you chmod +x it, because we don't blindly run things from the Internet - especially things I post the same day I wrote them...)

X. Paternalism Without Father
…
The Managerial and Professional Elite as a Ruling Class
As even the rich lose the sense of place and historical continuity, the subjective feeling of “entitlement,” which takes inherited advantages for granted, gives way to what clinicians call “narcissistic entitlement” - grandiose illusions, inner emptiness. The advantages the rich confer on their children dwindle down to money alone. As the new elite discards the outlook of the old bourgeoisie, it identifies itself not with the work ethic and the responsibilities of wealth but with an ethic of leisure, hedonism, and self-fulfillment. Although it continues to administer American institutions in the interests of private property (corporate property as opposed to entrepreneurial property), it has replaced character building with permissiveness, the cure of souls with the cure of the psyche, blind justice with therapeutic justice, philosophy with social science, personal authority with an equally irrational authority of professional experts. It has tempered competition with antagonistic cooperation, while abolishing many of the rituals in which aggressive impulses formerly found civilized expression. It has surrounded people with “symbolically mediated information” and has substituted images of reality for reality itself. Without intending to, it has created new forms of illiteracy even in the act of setting up a system of universal education. It has undermined the family while attempting to rescue the family. It has torn away the veil of chivalry that once tempered the exploitation of women and has brought men and women face to face as antagonists. It has expropriated the worker’s knowledge of his craft and the mother’s “instinct” for childrearing, and has reorganized this knowledge as a body of esoteric lore accessible only to the initiated. The new ruling class has elaborated new patterns of dependence as effectively as its forebears eradicated the dependence of the peasant on his lord, the apprentice on his master, and the woman on her man.
I do not wish to imply a vast conspiracy against our liberties. These things have been done in broad daylight and have been done, on the whole, with good intentions. Nor have they arisen as a unified policy of social control. Social policy in the United States has unfolded in response to a series of immediate emergencies, and those who make policy seldom see beyond the problems at hand. The cult of pragmatism, moreover, justifies their unwillingness or inability to make far-reaching plans for the future. What unifies their actions is the need to promote and defend the system of corporate capitalism from which they - the managers and professionals who operate the system - derive most of the benefits. The needs of the system shape policy and set the permissible limits of public debate. Most of us can see the system but not the class that administers it and monopolizes the wealth it creates. We resist a class analysis of modern society as a “conspiracy theory.” Thus we prevent ourselves from understanding how our current difficulties arose, why they persist, or how they might be solved.
Progressivism and the Rise of the New Paternalism
The new paternalism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, found political expression in the progressive movement and later in the New Deal, and gradually worked its way into every corner of American society. The democratic revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, culminating in the Civil War, not only did away with monarchy but undermined established religion, landed elites, and finally overthrew the slaveholding oligarchy in the South. The revolution gave rise to a society based on individualism, competition, and the pursuit of the main chance. It also generated demands for further change, which came to a head in the period immediately following the Civil War. Having destroyed slavery in the name of free labor, the leaders of the democratic movement inadvertently encouraged northern workers to ask for the freedom to control the terms of their work, not merely to sell their labor at ruinous prices. The logic of democracy demanded the confiscation of Confederate estates and their distribution among the freedmen; it demanded woman suffrage; it demanded, in short, a more sweeping reorganization of society than its leaders had contemplated. Seeking merely to free property from its feudal and mercantile restrictions, bourgeois radicals in the 1860s and early 1870s found themselves confronted with an incipient attack on property itself, from which most of them recoiled in horror.
After the collapse of reconstruction and the radical agitation associated with it, American liberalism no longer spoke for the artisan, the small farmer, and the independent entrepreneur - the “producing classes” that had been the backbone of the democratic movement. Faced with unrest at home and with the spectacle of the Paris commune abroad, liberalism now identified itself, in the words of E. L. Godkin, with “the more well-to-do and observing classes.” It undertook to reform society from the top down - to professionalize the civil service, break the power of the urban machine, and put “the best men” into office. When such measures failed to stem the rising tide of labor militancy and agrarian radicalism, reformers brought forward their own version of the “cooperative commonwealth” in the name of progressivism: universal education, welfare capitalism, scientific management of industry and government. The New Deal completed what progressivism had begun, solidifying the foundations of the welfare state and adding much of the superstructure as well. In industry, scientific management gave way to the school of human relations, which tried to substitute cooperation for authoritarian control. But this cooperation rested on management’s monopoly of technology and the reduction of work to routines imperfectly understood by the worker and controlled by the capitalist. Similarly the expansion of welfare services presupposed the reduction of the citizen to a consumer of expertise.
American progressivism, which has successfully countered agrarian radicalism, the labor movement, and the feminist movement by enacting selective parts of their program, has now lost almost all trace of its origin in nineteenth-century liberalism. It has rejected the liberal conception of man, which assumed the primacy of rational self-interest, and has installed in its place a therapeutic conception which acknowledges irrational drives and seeks to divert them into socially constructive channels. It has rejected the stereotype of economic man and has attempted to bring the “whole man” under social control. Instead of regulating the conditions of work alone, it now regulates private life as well, organizing leisure time on scientific principles of social and personal hygiene. It has exposed the innermost secrets of the psyche to medical scrutiny and has thus encouraged habits of anxious self-scrutiny, superficially reminiscent of religious introspection but rooted in anxiety rather than a guilty conscience - in a narcissistic rather than a compulsive or hysterical type of personality.
Liberal Criticism of the Welfare State
The new modes of social control associated with the rise of progressivism having stabilized capitalism without solving any of its underlying problems - the gap between wealth and poverty, the failure of purchasing power to keep pace with productivity, economic stagnation. The new paternalism has kept social tensions from assuming political form, but it has not removed their source. As those tensions increasingly find expression in crime and random violence, critics have begun to ask whether the welfare system delivers all it promised. The system, moreover, has become more and more expensive to operate. Even those who remain loyal to the underlying premises of American capitalism have begun to express alarm about the mounting cost of maintaining it. Proposals to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed income or a negative income tax have gained a sympathetic hearing. In his book on old age, David Hackett Fischer argues that a national inheritance system, whereby a gift of capital at birth would accumulate interest and provide for the citizen in his old age, would prove “cheaper than present arrangements.” The modification or abandonment of the welfare system now presents itself not as a Utopian dream but as a matter of sound business practice.
The health and welfare industries, which have done so much to promote the new paternalism by professionalizing activities formerly carried on in the workshop, the neighborhood, or the home, have themselves begun to harbor second thoughts about the results of their own labors. Members of the “helping professions” have begun to question the efficiency of the public institutions and welfare agencies that monopolize the knowledge formerly administered by ordinary citizens - the hospital, the mental asylum, the juvenile court. The medical profession, after upholding the hospital as an indispensable alternative to the family, now begins to think that patients might be better off if they were allowed to die at home. Psychiatrists have been speculating along similar lines, not only because existing facilities are overcrowded but because they have failed to achieve the high rates of cure once predicted with such confidence. Lawyers have begun to criticize the courts for removing “neglected” children from their homes without evidence that such children suffer serious harm and without proof that institutionalization or transfer to foster parents provides any solution. Even the school’s claim on the child has begun to give way to parental claims. In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the Supreme Court ruled that Amish parents have a right to keep their children out of the public schools. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” the court said; “those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
Even with the best intentions, however, those who criticize the welfare state within the assumptions underlying a capitalist economy cannot bring themselves to confront the revolution in social relations that abandonment of the welfare system would require. Liberal criticism of the new paternalism resembles the “humanization” of the workplace, which tries to give the worker the illusion of participation while leaving management in undiminished control. The attempt to mitigate the monotony of the assembly line by allowing the worker to perform more than a single operation does not alter the condition that degrades work - the monotony of the assembly line by allowing the worker to perform more than a single operation does not alter the condition that degrades work - the monopoly of technical knowledge by means of which management designs all phases of production, while the worker merely carries out the bidding of the planning department. Recent proposals to modify the welfare system suffer from the same kind of limitation. Thus a study of the family commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation takes issue with the conventional assumption of parental incompetence while leaving unchallenged the definition of parents as consumers of professional services. Kenneth Keniston and the other authors of the Carnegie report, conscious of belonging to “an emerging consensus,” hold that parents “are still the world’s greatest experts about the needs of their own children.” They recognize that many of the agencies ostensibly ministering to the family have undermined the family instead. The parental “malaise,” according to Keniston, lies in “the sense of having no guidelines or supports for raising children, the feeling of not being in control as parents, and the widespread sense of personal guilt for what seems to be going awry.”
The rehabilitation of parenthood, it appears, implies an attack on professionalism and the welfare state. Yet Keniston stops well short of such an attack. He takes for granted the family’s dependence on experts and seeks merely to regularize and regulate this relationship. “Few people would dispute that we live in a society where parents must increasingly rely on others for help and support in raising their children.” The family economy has disappeared; children represent a financial liability rather than an asset; the school has taken over the family’s education functions; and the medical profession has assumed most of the responsibility for health care. These changes, according to Keniston, leave parents in the position of “executives in a large firm - responsible for the smooth coordination of the many people and processes that must work together to produce the final product.”
This line of analysis leads to the conclusion not that parents should collectively assert their control over childrearing but that federal policy should seek to equalize the relationship between experts and parents. Yet Keniston’s own reasoning shows that parents occupy a position closer to proletarians than to executives. As things now stand, according to Keniston, “parents have little authority over those with whom they share the task of raising their children”; they “deal with those others from a position of inferiority of helplessness.” The obvious reason for this is that the state, not the parents, pays the bill for professional services, or at least signs the paychecks. (The citizens, as taxpayers, pay in the end.) If parents organized and hired their own experts, things might be different.
It goes without saying that such solutions do not commend themselves to members of the policy-making establishment. Measures of this kind are too closely associated with populism, localism, and residual resistance to centralized progress. They have become doubly objectionable, and for reasons the force of which even enemies of the establishment must acknowledge, in the wake of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville battle of the late sixties, when “community control” degenerated into reverse racism and education into racial propaganda. Yet the alternative to community control is more bureaucracy. Instead of confronting the choice, liberal reformers try to have things both ways. While advocating an expansion of government services to the family, a federal guarantee of full employment, improved protection of children’s legal rights, and a vastly expanded program of health care, they propose to strengthen “parent participation” in all these programs. They treat the ascendancy of experts as an unavoidable condition of industrial society, even when they seek to qualify they ascendancy of experts as an unavoidable condition of industrial society, even when they seek to qualify this ascendancy by improving the position of consumers. They assume that the requirements of a complex society dictate the triumph of factory production over handicraft production and the ascendancy of the “helping professions” over the family.
Bureaucratic Dependence and Narcissism
Recent studies of professionalization show that professionalism did not emerge, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to clearly defined social needs. Instead, the new professions themselves invented many of the needs they claimed to satisfy. They played on public fears of disorder and disease, adopted a deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular traditions of self-help as backward and unscientific, and in this way created or intensified (not without opposition) a demand for their own services. The evidence of professional self-promotion can no longer be dismissed by reasserting the sociological truism that “modern society involves the individual in relations … that are vastly more complex than [those] his ancestors … had to content with.”
The family’s dependence on professional services over which it has little control represents one form of a more general phenomenon: the erosion of self-reliance and ordinary competence by the growth of giant corporations and of the bureaucratic state that serves them. The corporations and the state now control so much of the necessary know-how that Durkheim’s image of society as the “nourishing mother,” from whom all blessings flow, more and more coincides with the citizen’s everyday experience. The new paternalism has replaced personal dependence not with bureaucratic rationality, as theorists of modernization (beginning with Max Weber) have almost unanimously assumed, but with a new form of bureaucratic dependence. What appears to social scientists as a seamless web of “interdependence” represents in fact the dependence of the individual on the organization, the citizen on the state, the worker on the manager, and the parent on the “helping professions.” The “consensus of the competent,” as Thomas L. Haskell refers to the professions in his study of the professionalization of social science, came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence.
As retributive justice gives way to therapeutic justice, what began as a protest against moral oversimplification ends by destroying the very sense of moral responsibility. Therapeutic justice perpetuates childlike dependence into adulthood and deprives the citizen of legal resources against the state. Formerly law rested on an adversary relation between the state and the offender and acknowledged the superior power of the state by giving important procedural advantages to the defendant. Medical jurisprudence, on the other hand, implicates the offender in his own control. Relieved of moral responsibility when certified into the sick role, he cooperates with the doctors in his own “cure.”
The psychiatric critique of the law, like the therapeutic attack on authority in general, makes a virtue of substituting personal treatment for the impersonal, arbitrary authority of the courts. Thus a specialist in the sociology of law, acknowledging his intention to “substitute scientific therapies for legal sanctions - for ‘justice’” - once deplored the irrationality of legal procedures: “There is in the concept of justice an element of ‘fate’, which is absent in the concept of scientific treatment. The offender simply gets what he himself initiated…. Society as a whole is blameless. The criminal himself was the one who chose.” Whereas “the lawyer’s way of handling a human problem is typically non-scientific,” therapy treats the criminal or patient as a victim and thus puts matters in their proper light. The shift from “sin” to “sickness,” according to this writer, represents the first step toward “the introduction of science and personal reactions [into] human conflicts” and to the recognition of social problems as medical problems, in which “cooperation with the therapist” becomes “probably the most critical problem for the deviant.”
Medical justice shares with enlightened childrearing and pedagogy a tendency to promote dependence as a way of life. Therapeutic modes of thought and practice exempt their object, the patient, from critical judgment and relieve him of moral responsibility. Sickness by definition represents an invasion of the patient by forces outside his conscious control, and the patient’s realistic recognition of the limits of his own responsibility - his acceptance of his diseased and helpless condition - constitutes the first step toward recovery (or permanent invalidism, as the case may be). Therapy labels as sickness what might be judged as weak or willful actions; it thus equips the patient to fight (or resign himself to) the disease, instead of irrationally finding fault with himself. Inappropriately extended beyond the consulting room, however, therapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning of the capacity for self-help - in the categories used by John R. Seeley, between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence. “What says ‘you are not guilty’ says also ‘you cannot help yourself.’” Therapy legitimates deviance as sickness, but it simultaneously pronounces the patient unfit to manage his own life and delivers him into the hands of a specialist. As therapeutic points of view and practice gain general acceptance, more and more people find themselves disqualified, in effect, from the performance of adult responsibilities and become dependent on some form of medical authority.
The psychological expression of this dependence is narcissism. In its pathological form, narcissism originates as a defense against feelings of helpless dependency in early life, which it tries to counter with “blind optimism” and grandiose illusions of personal self-sufficiency. Since modern society prolongs the experience of dependence into adult life, it encourages milder forms of narcissism in people who might otherwise come to terms with the inescapable limits on their personal freedom and power - limits inherent in the human condition - by developing competence as workers and parents. But at the same time that our society makes it more and more difficult to find satisfaction in love and work, it surrounds the individual with manufactured fantasies of total gratification. The new paternalism preaches not self-denial but self-fulfillment. It sides with narcissistic impulses and discourages their modification by the pleasure of becoming self-reliant, even in a limited domain, which under favorable conditions accompanies maturity. While it encourages grandiose dreams of omnipotence, moreover, the new paternalism undermines more modest fantasies, erodes the capacity to suspend disbelief, and thus makes less and less accessible the harmless substitute-gratifications, notably art and play, that help to mitigate the sense of powerlessness and the fear of dependence that otherwise express themselves in narcissistic traits.
Our society is narcissistic, then, in a double sense. People with narcissistic personalities, although not necessarily more numerous than before, play a conspicuous part in contemporary life, often rising to positions of eminence. Thriving on the adulation of the masses, these celebrities set the tone of public life and of private life as well, since the machinery of celebrity recognizes no boundaries between the public and the private realm. The beautiful people - to use this revealing expression to include not merely wealthy globetrotters but all those who bask, however briefly, in the full glare of the cameras - live out the fantasy of narcissistic success, which consists of nothing more substantial than a wish to be vastly admired, not for one’s accomplishments but simply for oneself, uncritically and without reservation.
Modern capitalist society not only elevates narcissists to prominence, it elicits and reinforces narcissistic traits in everyone. It does this in many ways: by displaying narcissism so prominently and in such attractive forms; by undermining parental authority and thus making it hard for children to grow up; but above all by creating so many varieties of bureaucratic dependence. This dependence, increasingly widespread in a society that is not merely paternalistic but maternalistic as well, makes it increasingly difficult for people to lay to rest the terrors of infancy or to enjoy the consolations of adulthood.
The Conservative Critique of Bureaucracy
Criticism of the new paternalism, insofar as it remains imprisoned in the assumptions of political liberalism, objects to the cost of maintaining a welfare state - the “human cost” as well as the cost to the taxpayers - without criticizing the ascendancy of the managerial and professional class. Another line of attack, which singles out bureaucracy as the overriding evil, arises out of a conservative idealization of old-fashioned individualism. Less equivocal in its opposition to bureaucratic centralization - except when it comes from right-wingers who denounce government regulation of industry and still plead for a gigantic military establishment - the conservative critique of bureaucracy superficially resembles the radical critique outlined in the present study. It deplores the erosion of authority, the corruption of standards in the schools, and the spread of permissiveness. But it refuses to acknowledge the connection between these developments and the rise of monopoly capitalism - between bureaucracy in government and bureaucracy in industry.
“The general historical conflict between individualism and collectivism is dividing mankind into two hostile camps,” wrote Ludwig von Mises in his study of bureaucracy. Capitalist free enterprise, he argued, rests on the rational calculation of profit and loss, whereas bureaucratic management “cannot be checked by economic calculation.” Extended beyond its legitimate domain of law enforcement and national defense, bureaucracy undermines individual initiative and substitutes “government control for free enterprise.” It substitutes the dictatorship of the state for the rule of law. Free-market capitalism, by turning labor into a commodity, “makes the wage earner free from any personal dependence” and detaches “appraisal of each individual’s effort … from any personal considerations.” Bureaucratic collectivism, on the other hand, undermines the “cool rationality and objectivity of capitalist relations” and renders the “plain citizen” dependent on the “professional propagandist of bureaucratization,” who confuses the citizen with his “empty catchwords” and esoteric obfuscation. “Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.” But under socialism - and “there is no compromise possible between these two systems,” according to Mises, “no third system” - the “way toward promotion is not achievement but the favor of the superiors.”
This argument suffers from the conservative’s idealization of the personal autonomy made possible by the free market and his willingness to concede enormous war-making powers to the state, so long as they do not interfere with “private” enterprise.” It cannot explain the spread of bureaucracy into industry itself. “The trend toward bureaucratic rigidity is not inherent in the evolution of business,” according to Mises. “It is an outcome of government meddling with business.” Such is his reply to the liberal argument that the inexorable trend toward economic concentration gives rise to a growing gap between ownership and control of the corporation, creates a new managerial elite, and calls into being a centralized state as the only agency capable of controlling it. The liberal analysis itself, however, needs modification. It is not the “divorce between ownership and control” that has created the managerial oligarchy but the divorce between production and planning. Having achieved a complete separation of handwork and brainwork, management monopolizes technical knowledge and reduces the workers to a human machine; but the administration and continual elaboration of this knowledge require an ever-growing managerial apparatus, itself organized on the principles of the factory with its intricate subdivision of tasks. Studies of progressivism and the New Deal have shown that government regulation of business often arose in response to the demands of businessmen themselves. Regulatory agencies draw most of their personnel from business. Neither the regulatory nor the welfare policies of the state rest on “an implacable hatred of private business and free enterprise,” as Mises claims. On the contrary, regulation controls competition and stabilizes the market, while the welfare system socializes the “human costs” of capitalist production - rising unemployment, inadequate wage scales, inadequate insurance against sickness and old age - and helps to forestall more radical solutions.
It is true that a professional elite of doctors, psychiatrists, social scientists, technicians, welfare workers, and civil servants now plays a leading part in the administration of the state and of the “knowledge industry.” But the state and the knowledge industry overlap at so many points with the business corporation (which has increasingly concerned itself with every phase of culture), and the new professionals share so many characteristics with the managers of industry, that the professional elite must be regarded not as an independent class but as a branch of modern management. The therapeutic ethic, which has replaced the nineteenth-century utilitarian ethic, does not serve the “class interest” of professionals alone, as Daniel P. Moynihan and others have argued; it serves the interests of monopoly capitalism as a whole. Moynihan points out that by emphasizing impulse rather than calculation as the determinant of human conduct, and by holding society responsible for the problems confronting individuals, a “government-oriented” professional class has attempted to create a demand for its own services. Professionals, he observes, have a vested interest in discontent, because discontented people turn to professional services for relief. But the same principle underlies all of modern capitalism, which continually tries to create new demands and new discontents that can be assuaged only by the consumption of commodities. Moynihan, aware of this connection, tries to present the professional as the successor to the capitalist. The ideology of “compassion,” he says, serves the class interest of the “post-industrial surplus of functionaries who, in the manner of industrialists who earlier turned to advertising, induce demand for this own products.”
Professional self-aggrandizement, however, grew up side by side with the advertising industry and must be seen as another phase of the same process, the transition from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism. The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer. Thus the medical and psychiatric assault on the family as a technologically backward sector went hand in hand with the advertising industry’s drive to convince people that store-brought goods are superior to homemade goods. Both the growth of management and proliferation of professions represent new forms of capitalist control, which first established themselves in the factory and then spread throughout society. The struggle against bureaucracy therefore requires a struggle against capitalism itself. Ordinary citizens cannot resist professional dominance without also asserting control over production and over the technical knowledge on which modern production rests. A reassertion of “common sense,” according to Mises, will “prevent man from falling prey” to the “illusory fantasies” of professional bureaucrats. But common sense is not enough. In order to break the existing pattern of dependence and put an end to the erosion of competence, citizens will have to take the solution of their problems into their own hands. They will have to create their own “communities of competence.” Only then will the productive capacities of modern capitalism, together with the scientific knowledge that now serves it, come to serve the interests of humanity instead.
In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody - in the guise of personal “growth” and “awareness” - the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse. The will to build a better society, however, survives, along with traditions of localism, self-help, and community action that only need the vision of a new society, a decent society, to give them new vigor. The moral discipline formerly associated with the work ethic still retains a value independent of the role it once played in the defense of property rights. That discipline - indispensable to the task of building a new order - endures most of all in those who knew the old order only as a broken promise, yet who took the promise more seriously than those who merely took it for granted.

IV. The Banality of Pseudo-Self-Awareness: Theatrics of Politics and Everyday Existence
...
Hero Worship and Narcissistic Idealization
On the fringes of the radical movement, many tortured spirits actively sought a martyrdom made doubly attractive by the glamour of modern publicity. The left, with its vision of social upheaval, has always attracted more than its share of lunatics, but the media have conferred a curious sort of legitimacy on antisocial acts merely by reporting them. The streaker at a football game becomes for a moment the center of all eyes. The criminal who murders or kidnaps a celebrity takes on the glamour of his victim. The Manson gang with their murder of Sharon Tate and her friends, the Symbionese Liberation Army with its abduction of Patty Hearst, share with the presidential assassins and would-be assassins of recent years a similar psychology. Such people display, in exaggerated form, the prevailing obsession with celebrity and a determination to achieve it even at the cost of rational self-interest and personal safety. The narcissist divides society into two groups: the rich, great, and famous on the one hand and the common herd on the other. Narcissistic patients, according to Kernberg, “are afraid of not belonging to the company of the great, rich, and powerful, and of belonging instead to the ‘mediocre,’ by which they mean worthless and despicable rather than ‘average’ in the ordinary sense of the term.” They worship heroes only to turn against them when their heroes disappoint them. “Unconsciously fixated on an idealized self-object for which they continue to year, … such persons are forever searching for external omnipotent powers from whose support and approval they attempt to derive strength.” Thus the presidential assassin establishes with his victim a deadly intimacy, follows his movements, attaches himself to his rising star. The machinery of mass promotion, encourages this identification by simultaneously exalting and humanizing the Olympians, endowing them with the same appetites and eccentricities that we recognize in our neighbors. Through his desperate act, the assassin or would-be assassin joins their exalted company. Assassination itself becomes a form of spectacle, and the inner lives of assassins - Oswald’s difficulties with Marina, the state of Bremer’s soul as recorded in his diary - provide the same popular entertainment as the private lives of their victims or near-victims.
Narcissistic patients, according to Kernberg, “often admire some hero or outstanding individual” and experience themselves as part of that outstanding person.” They see the admired individual as “merely an extension of themselves.” If the person rejects them, “they experience immediate hatred and fear, and react by devaluing the former idol.” Just as heroism differs in subtle ways from celebrity, so hero worship, which esteems the hero’s actions and hopes to emulate them or at least to prove worthy of his example, must be distinguished from narcissistic idealization. The narcissist admires and identifies himself with “winners” out of his fear of being labeled a loser. He seeks to warm himself in their reflected glow; but his feelings contain a strong admixture of envy, and his admiration often turns to hatred if the object of his attachment does something to remind him of his own insignificance. The narcissistic lacks the confidence in his own abilities that would encourage him to model himself on another person’s exalted example. Thus the narcissistic fascination with celebrity, so rampant in our society, coincides historically with what Jules Henry calls “the erosion of the capacity for emulation, loss of the ability to model one’s self consciously after another person” One of the high school students interviewed by Henry said flatly, “I think a person shouldn’t mold himself after someone else.”

• To pick a person after whom to model one’s self [Henry writes] is an aggressive act of will, and Bill is much too anxious and passive to do it… When cynicism, resignation, and passivity and resignation sap the will necessary to the emulative decision. But positively, in order for a morally sound emulative choice to be made there must be present some faith in one’s self, a certain amount of naive optimism and a certain quantity of will.

When the superego consists not so much of conscious ego ideals but of unconscious, archaic fantasies about parents of superhuman size, emulation becomes almost entirely unconscious and expresses not the search for models but the emptiness of self-images. The protagonist of Heller’s Something Happened, who completely lacks “naive optimism” and a sense of self, experiences an “almost enslaving instinct to be like just about everyone I find myself with. It happens not only in matters of speech, but with physical actions as well…. It operates unconsciously, … with a determination of its own, in spite of my vigilance and aversion, and usually I do not realize I have slipped into someone else’s personality until I am already there.”
The narcissist cannot identify with someone else without seeing the other as an extension of himself, without obliterating the other’s identity. Incapable of identification, in the first instance with parents and other authority figures, he is therefore incapable of hero worship or of the suspension of disbelief that makes it possible to enter imaginatively into the lives of others while acknowledging their independent existence. A narcissistic society worships celebrity rather than fame and substitutes spectacle for the older forms of theater, which encourages identification and emulation precisely because they carefully preserved a certain distance between the audience and the actors, the hero worshipper and the hero.
VII. The Socialization of Reproduction and the Collapse of Authority
…
The Cult of Authenticity
Since critique of permissiveness seldom challenged psychiatric orthodoxy, it soon hardened into a new dogma of its own - the dogma of authenticity. Earlier experts had advised the parent to follow one or another set of prescriptions; now the experts told him to trust his own feelings. Whatever he did was right as long as he did it spontaneously. “Children are not easily fooled about true feelings,” warned Dr. Bruch. “Parent effectiveness training,” warned Dr. Bruch. “Parent effectiveness training,” the latest vogue in child-rearing, has popularized the cult of authenticity that began to emerge in the fifties. Like other forms of psychic self-help, parent effectiveness training teaches the need to “get in touch with your feelings” and to base everyday intercourse on the communication of these feelings to others. If parents can understand their own needs and wishes and convey them to their children, encouraging children to reciprocate in the same fashion, they can eliminate many sources of friction and conflict. Objective statements should be excluded from discourse with the child, according to this reasoning , in the first place because no one can argue rationally about beliefs and in the second place because statements about reality convey ethical judgements and therefore arouse strong emotions. “When a child says, ‘I never have good luck,’ no argument or explanation will change this belief.” “When a child tells of an event, it is sometimes helpful to respond, not to the event itself, but to the feelings around it.” Since “all feelings are legitimate,” their expression should be greeted neither with praise nor with blame. If a child does something to annoy the parent, the parent should express his annoyance instead of condemning the child or the action. If the child expresses emotions that seem incommensurate with the occasion, the parent, instead of pointing out this discrepancy - instead of making an objective statement about reality and the emotions appropriate to it - should indicate to the child that he understands the child’s feelings and acknowledges his right to express them. “It is more important for a child to know what he feels than why he feels it.” The child needs to learn “that his own anger is not catastrophic, that is can be discharged without destroying anyone.”
The cult of authenticity reflects the collapse of parental guidance and provides it with a moral justification. It confirms, and clothes in the jargon of emotional liberation, the parent’s helplessness to instruct the child in the ways of the world or to transmit ethical precepts. By glorifying this impotence as a higher form of awareness, it legitimizes the proletarianization of parenthood - the appropriation of childrearing techniques by the “helping professions.” As John R. Seeley noted in 1959, the transfer of parental knowledge to other agencies parallels the expropriation of the worker’s technical knowledge by modern management - “the taking over from the worker of the sad necessity of providing himself with the means of production.” By “helpfully” relieving the worker from “such onerous responsibilities” as the provision of his own and his children’s needs, society has freed him, as Seeley wrote, “to become a soldier in the army of production and a cipher in the process of decision.”
The revolt against behavioral and progressive dogmas, which exaggerated the parent’s power to deform the child, has encouraged society to hold the parent “only marginally accountable,” as Mark Gerzon has recently observed, “for his child’s growth…. Obstetricians take charge at birth, pediatricians are responsible for a child’s ailments and cures; the teacher for his intelligence;…. the supermarket and good industry for his food; television for his myths.” Ironically, the devaluation of parenthood coincides with a belated movement to return to the family functions it has surrendered to the apparatus of organized therapy and tuition. Rising rates of crime, juvenile delinquency, suicide, and mental breakdown have finally convinced many experts, even many welfare workers, that welfare agencies furnish a poor substitute for the family. Dissatisfaction with the results of socialized welfare and the growing expense of maintaining it now prompt efforts to shift health and welfare functions back to the home.
…

Please pardon the fact that I believe to have high-functioning OCD amongst many other mental illnesses.
I suppose my prime mode is the thought that some ultimate way to organize all mass exists, and that with my current information, I can speculate what that may be to the best of my abilities, then visualize myself, the goal, then form a maze between the two, and find the most efficient route of which I wish to perform, recalibrating the minds and bodies of all to properly align, as I believe it's in the best interest of all, and I really like openly talking about this fascinating illation, seeing if others have critiques or if they will let me calibrate them!
The following statement of mine may provide a good frame of reference:
I am very obsessed with health and think I will die within the next few minutes, which gives me a need to find some system of eternal living with a true 0% chance of mortality per any unit of time, and I always have intense fear about death, so the majority of my behaviors are the presumed most efficient route using the A* algorithm, to get from my current state to the theoretical ultimate, immortal being (which I have envisioned by observing a portion of abstractions, seeing by what qualities they function and how they perform in certain metrics, then presuming the direction they all go according to objective variables, and finally tracking the point in which they all intersect as the envisioned presumed target), beginning with strict rigid health routines, hoping that will increase the probability to reach a state of reliable cryopreservation, reverse aging, or mind-uploading, presuming that AI will dramatically speed up research, then use the transhumanistic upgrades to extend my awareness indefinitely, as that's required for eternal life.
I don't like confrontations, it can be very dangerous and high-risk to create violent chaos and displeasure. I do however, like constructively pointing out flaws in one's actions if there's no risk to upset them.
I feel that intimacy would be a really nice thing, in fact, I have an idealized mate which I think about all the time, but I never say anything about it in real life since emotional expression makes me feel very awkward and vulnerable, if I try and mention it, my vivid visions flair up and inhibit it, it's as if some higher being is secretly controlling my every action, seen only through the form of what appear to be inconsistencies; mazes of actions forming of which there's no clear escape particularly around myself, compared to the rest of logic where mazes of action are unbiased.
I like pleasant emotional atmospheres compared to toxic ones. From an objective standpoint, based on my current information, it may be best if all was considered polite with no consequence, but since that isn't the reality, I see no issue in using polite social manners, alongside I'm a polite and agreeable person in the first place.
I believe by all points of known reality, that there's no reason to believe it can't be fit into a neat logical structure, yet when humanity is diving into the unknown territory of research, openness to the idea of otherwise may be warranted.
I see zero reason to neglect the body, for what reason should one's only temple of awareness be thrown around like a-dime-a-dozen? In fact, all motives require the body and mind to exist, so anyone who likes anything, should like self-preservation.
Thank you for reading! I suppose that I could use Enneagram and Jungian suggestions as well if anyone's educated in these areas, thanks!

Apologies for the wall of text. This is half venting, half desperately seeking other opinions on what is happening because I feel so confused.
My partner and I have been together for almost 6 years. Around year 2 we started having very explosive arguments that haven’t really gotten any better despite our best efforts. While the issues that cause the fight eventually get resolved, our communication never seems to truly improve. Sometimes it gets better, but almost always reverts back to its worst. Over the last 2 years I have been starting to feel that there are very clear signs of abusive and manipulative behavior that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I started reading the book “Why does he do that?” By Lundy Bancroft, and it has finally put words to some of the ways I have felt mistreated throughout our relationship. The book is almost 20 years old and can be a bit dated at time, so I take everything with a grain of salt and have been doing independent research about things I felt were applicable to me.
My partner, let’s call him Max, is for the most part a loving, caring and highly sensitive person. He checks in on me all the time and is so in tune with my emotions that it amazes me. He has always made me feel cared for and is the least judgmental person I know. When we are not fighting, he really is a wonderful & generous partner and we go through long stretches 2-3 months where things are great. I know this sounds like the cliché reddit post where the OP is like my relationship is PERFECT and then goes onto describe a very far from perfect relationship (& maybe this is my wakeup call that that I'm being that person right now). But really, outside of arguments, we have a great, & still imperfect, relationship filled with so much love.
Over time we have gotten much better at bringing up things that are bothering us in healthy & fruitful ways (we are both ex-people-pleasers so we struggle with voicing displeasure). However, conflict has ensued we face the same issues. When he gets angry he becomes a completely different person. At times it takes a lot for him to get angry- especially at times when we are having an argument where there is seemingly no resolution and we are both emotionally exhausted, and probably should have taken a break a while ago. More often though, the anger comes out very quickly, and seemingly out of left field. Often times it is the tone I use, or how I communicate that causes the initial conflict. What is confusing for me is that his perception of how I said something feels so far from mine. This happens often enough to where I feel like I am walking on eggshells, to the point where I usually monitor my tone and how express things pretty closely. I also have autism & ADHD (what a fun pairing), so my words & tone are often misinterpreted. In general I try to be careful about how I speak to others & even more so with especially Max. Max is neurotypical, so at times it feels like we are speaking different languages- I try to be intentional with how I speak in our conversations so that we can both feel understood. I want to mention that I also have my own triggers, trauma and unhealthy ways of communicating, and I know that I am equally at fault for the initial lapses in our communication. I usually have no objection to the original conflict, what worries me is how the original conflict is then seemingly used as a reason by Max to lash out in anger. The argument that happened recently opened my eyes to some of these things. Here's a brief synopsis:
We were unloading groceries and I was simultaneously reorganizing the fridge. Max started moving things around in the fridge looking for something, not knowing that I was currently reorganizing. Here is the conversation that ensued (almost word for word, I know tone is hard to interpret from text, so I will try me best to explain):
Me: “Aw, I just reorganized that shelf.” Max: “Don’t speak to me that way.” (abrupt) Me: “Speak to you in what way? I’m just want you to not move around stuff in the fridge because I'm organizing it.” Max: “why are you so emotionally charged right now?” Me (slightly confused and feeling cornered): “I’m not emotionally charged. Try to speak to your own experience, what are you feeling?”
This set him off. I could have said it nicer or more empathetic- but at this point I was already registering conflict on the horizon and feeling anxious. I asked him again to talk about his experience and how what I did made him feel. This is something we have discussed with our couples therapist about not assuming the other persons emotional state and rather keeping it in the “I feel (blank) when you do (blank)” structure- which can be annoying but it does help reframe how my actions affected him.
He couldn’t answer this question, so I then asked, “what tone in my voice did you perceive?” He then said that I should know the tone and know that it is unacceptable. At this point, I think he thought I was playing dumb which made him angrier, but truth be told I was unsure of why my tone or request had angered him, the reaction felt out of place. I thought my delivery was even keeled, albeit I would have improved the delivery or maybe just not said anything at all if I could go back in time.
I could see that he was hurt but I was also feeling confused and annoyed because I felt as though he was taking his anger out on me. It was hard for me to be the most comforting and empathetic person, though I was still trying to redirect the conversation in order to better understand what was happening for him. The first segment of the argument ended pretty abruptly after that, with him yelling, hitting a wall and then kicking an empty box across the living room and locking himself in the bathroom. I followed in an attempt to comfort him. He let me in and I held his hands and asked him to tell me what was going on, knowing that he was really struggling & feeling empathy for that. He was able to then talk about why the experience was triggering for him and how the tone and delivery reminded him of his mom (who he has some trauma with because she was extremely anxious, uptight and demanding of him in his childhood). Once he said this I broke down crying.
Now, an interlude for some important context. Max's biggest "theme" in our conflicts is that he often struggles to feel understood by me. We have had extensive conversations about how I can work on making him feel understood through mirroring, and other specific communication exercises. I try to put these into play, though I do struggle because his style of communicating can feel very unnatural and even ingenuine to me- it feels like I am reading from a script. In the last year, when I am expected to respond, I get immense anxiety that is attributed to a pressure to preform. I start to feel that if I am not able to show understanding in the way that he expects, the argument (& his anger with me) will get worse & I am the one to blame. There is anxiety tangled up in the idea of failing him & failing myself, then frustration with myself for not being able to do something that should be simple, and then even MORE frustration because now I feel like a selfish bitch for making everything about me when it was suppose to be about Max. This all becomes debilitating at times. Resulting in intense anxiety attacks or waves of feeling so overwhelmed I can't speak. This is what happened in that moment.
Max saw this was happening & immediately switched gears. He told me it was okay, and that he didn't need understanding in that moment. He comforted me and I felt seen and loved & also felt pretty terrible that the attention had shifted to me. I told him I felt guilty about this & he reassured me it was okay. Speaking from a place of insecurity and fear, I told him that I was scared that my inability to show understanding in this moment would be held over my head or weaponized against me in a later argument. There have been several times where I have shared a vulnerable feeling with him and it has been used against me in moments of anger, so the fear comes form a real place. Again he reassured me that wouldn't happen. We took a break and sat down to talk about it later that day.
This was the start of a 3 day long discussion and several arguments. I don’t need to summarize everything but in those days here are the things that struck me as definitely NOT okay & possibly abusive:

• Assuming/ telling me what my emotional state is (i.e. "you're clearly frustrated"). Then I try to explain that I am do not like bring told what I'm feeling, Max uses phrases like "why are you so emotionally charged?", "why are you arguing with me" & why are you so defensive?" constantly. It's a catch-22, he decides that his perception of me is truth, and when I try to clarify, I am told I am defensive. There is no correct answer to that question that doesn't make me look more defensive. It makes me feel like he has no interest on what I am actually feeling.
  
• If I specify something he is doing that I don't like, he makes sure to police everything I say in order to prove that I do the same thing. The conversation then becomes focused on what I am doing and saying wrong. In a later conversation, I mentioned the point above. He said it made complete sense to him. For the remainder of the conversation, anytime I made an assumption, not about his feelings but about ANYTHING. For example, I was explaining how when he hits walls it is scares me. As an example I referenced Bancroft's book & said that hitting walls would objectively be considered an "act of violence" (which I realize objective may not have been the best word to use here). In response to this he said that assuming that hitting is objectively (verifiable information based on facts and evidence) an act of violence is incorrect. Then tried to find examples where hitting is NOT an act of violence (the one he brought up was if it was for a play/acting). This continued, anytime o brought up a feeling, he would correct all the assumptions I was making & not once did he address my feelings after that. It felt like a way to deflect and avoid accountability.
  
• Interrupting constantly until I stop talking completely. Once he hits a certain threshold of anger, the tactics to end the conversation, regain control and/or anger me become similar to those in the schoolyard when we were kids. This one is pretty simple- if I try to say ANYTHING, at the mere sound of my voice he will keep interrupting me by yelling the same phrase (common phrases include "I don't care", "sucks to be interrupted huh?", "shut up"). This one happens a lot and is often times how an argument ends.
  
• Hitting things. Hitting walls, surfaces, kicking boxes around. I never thought he he did this to scare or physically intimidate me. However it does scare me & I have shared this with him. His continuation of this action tells me one of two things: either he just doesn't care or he actually is trying to scare me.
  
• Weaponizing personal or vulnerable things I have shared with him. Remember how he said he wouldn't weaponize what I had told him earlier about my fears? Well, he did. When I things started heading south he made a comment about how "Not that long ago you we're sobbing to me in the bathroom about how much you 'cared about making sure I felt understood' (said in a mocking impression of my crying voice) and now you're-" I cut him off at that point and called him an asshole (not my best moment) for doing the one thing he reassured me he wouldn't do. He tried to retract what he was saying and defend it, but I stopped him because I knew in my gut what he actually wanted to say would cut too deep for me.
  
• In conjunction with this, he also says incredibly hurtful things. In our last argument he flat out said he didn't love me. In the past he has told me I am unreliable and irresponsible, using things I struggle with heavily due to ADHD (such as answering phone calls, being places on times) as fodder for why I am not a good partner. ADHD is NEVER an excuse and I have worked so hard to overcome the less-than-ideal aspects of my executive dysfunction. Nonetheless, these items are soft spots for me that I have shared with him. He has also said that I am egocentric & way too emotional because I cry when I am overwhelmed (I do cry easily, whether it's because I am overwhelmed, sad or even joyful- crying is good for the soul!). He says things that are usually a direct attack on my character & they are always specific to things that I have mentioned are really deep insecurities of mine. It feels specific enough to where I have started to suspect he says these things to tear down my confidence and make me feel undeserving of respect and fair treatment.
  
• Later mocked me by referring to himself as "physically abusive" because I am so afraid of him "hitting" things. Dramatic use of air quotes were used for both of those words.
  

The list continues but I think this is a fair snippet of actions that could potentially be seen as manipulative or abusive. I am confused on whether or not he is ACTUALLY abusive or if I am just making something out what are merely just unfavorable communication tactics.
My therapist has mentioned that Max seem to have narcissistic traits (which I don't really believe) and abusive tendencies. She has shown real fear for my situation and has actually advised me to not say and share certain details of my life with him out of worry for me. This is part of the reason I stopped seeing here, because I felt her assessment was a bit unfair since she had never spoken with him.
I have stopped talking to almost all my friends about my issues with Max because a majority have shown strong displeasure with his actions & I often times feel like they pity me. Max also stated that he felt like my friends didn't like him, he has hinted that this may because I tell them a biased retelling of our arguments. No matter what a story will always be biased, so I opted to stop sharing with my friends and encourage Max to hang out with us more as a group. I think a lot of my friends like him more now, but I can't help but feeling isolated because I don't have many people to talk to this about.
My one friend who I really felt comfortable with sharing these issues with has even recently advised me that based on a recent argument that maybe it's time to move on.
Our couples therapist (who we have been seeing for 1.5 years) is great in most regards, but I don't feel like he has taken my concerns as seriously as I want them to be taken. He has told me separately that he does not believe Max is abusive.
I have laid out all of these actions to my couple's therapist & to Max on several different occasions, and I am feeling defeated. When Max isn't angry we make so much progress & I even feel like he is less quick to get angry. But once the anger starts all the healing and work we've done just doesn't seem to matter. In those moments it's hard to tell if he even sees me as a person- I feel more like an obstacle that he needs to defeat, or a scapegoat for his negative emotions.
Are these the warnings signs of an abusive relationship? Is the abuse already happening? Are we in a toxic relationship where neither of us can break the cycle? I'm not don't need any definitive answers, but would really appreciate any feedback I can get.

Date: 05/31/2024

Reading time: 2 minutes, 423 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

PM claims ODIHR’s conclusion on domestic transparency law lacks legal arguments

Georgian PM Irakli Kobakhidze said the report was mirroring the opinion of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. The ODIHR concluded that Georgia’s newly approved law on transparency of foreign influence contained “serious deficiencies” that made it “incompatible” with international human rights standards. The Venice Commission last week “strongly recommended” the Georgian Government to repeal the legislative piece in its current form.

AgendaGe, Majority MP: OSCE/ODIHR report is prepared by Saakashvili’s lawyer, OSCE/ODIHR: Georgia’s “Transparency of Foreign Influence” Law does not comply with democratic standards, human rights, OSCE/ODIHR: Georgia’s “Transparency of Foreign Influence” Law does not comply with democratic standards, human rights, OSCE/ODIHR: Georgia’s “Transparency of Foreign Influence” Law does not comply with democratic standards, human rights

MFA of Ukraine: We condemn unfriendly statements of the PM of Georgia

It is sad to see the consistent and constant degradation of the political statements of the Prime Minister of Georgia, – this is stated in the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. Ukraine condemns Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s “another unfriendly statements and his distorted assessments of the current events in Ukraine”

GeorgiaToday

President not Invited to Police Day Ceremony Because of Grigoriadis’ Pardon

Georgia celebrated Police Day on May 31. President Salome Zurabishvili was conspicuously absent from the official ceremony marking the day. Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri said she was not invited because she had pardoned a convict "who wanted to burn a policeman alive"

CivilGe

Lithuanian Ambassador summoned to MFA Georgia regarding statements on “Russian Law”

Lithuanian Ambassador Andrius Kalindra summoned to Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Georgian Foreign Ministry says the move is not compatible with relations between the two countries. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Andrius Roth: I fully support Ambassador Peter Fischer.

GeorgiaToday

💵 Economy

Georgia’s GDP Up by 11.8% in April 2024

Georgia’s estimated real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate amounted to 11.8% for April 2024 compared to the corresponding period of the previous year. The average real GDP growth for January-April 2024 equaled 9.0% according to the National Statistics Office of Georgia.

CivilGe, GEOSTAT: Georgia’s economy grew by 9% in January-April

Date: 05/30/2024

Reading time: 3 minutes, 725 words

🪖 Military

Ukraine Latest: Macron Says Kyiv Should Be Allowed to Use Western Weapons on Russian Military Sites

The main battlefield developments in the Russian invasion of Ukraine as of Thursday morning are as follows: The death toll in a Russian attack on a hardware superstore in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv has risen to 11, says the regional governor. Russia's naval forces destroyed two Ukrainian sea drones in the northwest of the Black Sea, as they headed for the Crimean Peninsula, Russia's Ministry of Defense said in a Google-translated Telegram post.

GeorgiaToday

🏛️ Politics & Government

Chinese Ambassador says Anaklia port project will be “turning point” for cooperation with Georgia

Chinese Ambassador to Georgia Zhou Qian said the Anaklia port project would be “a turning point” for cooperation between China and Georgia. He said the Chinese consortium is set to be announced as the Georgian Government’s private partner in the construction of the port.

AgendaGe

Georgian CSOs to Challenge Agents’ Law in Constitutional Court

Georgian civil society organizations announce they are preparing to appeal to the Constitutional Court of Georgia in the nearest future, demanding the repeal of the Foreign Agents Law. CSOs say they will use all domestic and international mechanisms to impede its implementation until the law is unconditionally repealed.

CivilGe, Lithuanian MFA Summons Georgian Ambassador Over Final Adoption of Agents’ Law

Fund Withdraws Free Dental Service Project for Oni Kids, Citing Agents’ Law

The Fair Trees Fund withdrew a project aimed at establishing a free dental clinic for children in the western Georgian town of Oni. The decision was met with public outcry and as an ominous sign of the Foreign Agents Law's harmful impact on foreign aid and projects funded by Georgia’s international partners. The NGO says it cannot take on additional financial responsibilities while even the active projects are at risk.

CivilGe

Testing Interventions by SABUKO in Iori Plateau to Achieve Conservation and Protection of Local Species

Georgia’s Kakheti region is distinguished by amazingly beautiful landscapes, rich biodiversity, and unique ecological treasures. However, sadly, this natural haven faces a significant challenge – the delicate balance between maintaining a living landscape and the looming threat of desertification. The project places a strong emphasis on the restoration of wildlife habitats and fostering collaboration with the pastoralist community.

GeorgiaToday

Parliament Adopts Amendments to Election Code

Parliament of Georgia adopted amendments to the Election code with 80 votes in favor. Changes include abolishing the CEC advisory group, which consists of a representative of the Public Defender as well as the national and international experts selected by observer organizations.

CivilGe

PM Kobakhidze Talks Controversial Topics with Media

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze spoke to the media at the opening of a new bridge in Tbilisi. He blamed the ‘radical opposition’ for the alleged ‘hate campaign’ against the Georgian Dream members who supported the Foreign Agents Law and their families. He also said that the ruling party would not allow the “Maidan” to happen in Georgia.

CivilGe, PM: Germany should not send such ambassadors who make anti-Georgian statements, Ambassador of Georgia summoned to Lithuanian MFA for overriding of President’s veto on “Russian Law”

CoE GRECO Report: Low Level of Implementation of Anti-Corruption Recommendations

Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) published its results of the Fourth evaluation round: non-compliance procedure for its low level of implementation of its recommendations for preventing corruption in respect of MPs, judges and prosecutors. Georgia had one of the highest levels of compliance among the countries monitored.

CivilGe

🧪 Science & Technology

Supporting Georgia’s Growing E-Commerce Sector

Georgia's e-commerce market grew from 11% in 2018 to 23% in 2020. By 2025, the report predicts that online shopping will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 52%, yielding a penetration rate of 4.7%. The biggest online shopping sector in 2020 was comprised of electronics and household appliances.

GeorgiaToday

Date: 05/29/2024

Reading time: 4 minutes, 931 words

🪖 Military

Europe is increasing its support for Ukraine

EU foreign ministers are meeting in Brussels. They will still try to overcome Hungarian resistance and provide Ukraine with military assistance it needs. At the moment, the aid package worth about 7 billion dollars has been suspended, the only opponent of which is the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Ukraine needs more air defense, including Patriot air defense systems, says Jens Stoltenberg.

EuroNewsGeorgia

🏛️ Politics & Government

Matthew Miller: GD moved the country farther away from European integration path

Matthew Miller: Georgia's leaders are choosing to forgo the steps needed to advance Georgia in the Western direction that its people want. The ruling parties actions threaten Georgia’s democratic trajectory, future economic security, EU membership, and also put the U.S.-Georgia relationship at risk.

GeorgiaToday

CSOs Announce Disobedience to Foreign Agents Law

Georgian civil society organizations issued a statement announcing their disobedience to the Foreign Agents Law, which was adopted yesterday. In the statement, the organizations pledge to defend the rights of demonstrators against the Agents Law and to protect each citizen’s vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

CivilGe, Response to the "foreign influence" law

Statement of the ombudsman regarding the placement of those detained at the rallies in "hostile" cells

The representatives of the Public Defender visited two detainees participating in the protests, the information about their ill-treatment was spread on May 29. The detainees are in the 8th Penitentiary Institution of Gldani. Their lawyers requested to change the cell for the defendants, to have a public defender with the defendants.

EuroNewsGeorgia

Khazaradze: Plans of Russian gov’t have been announced openly to us by stopping Anaklia project

Chinese consortium will be announced as winner of Anaklia port project tender in coming days. Leader of Lelo party: 'We will send away the Russian regime to Moscow in October'

GeorgiaToday

British-Georgian Academy’s founding partner Natia Janashia set to terminate the agreement with Georgia Capital

Natia Janashia, the partner and director of the British-Georgian Academy, cites the investor’s failure to fulfill contractual obligations as the rationale behind this decision. The Tbilisi City Court, recognizing the merit of the petition, imposed a security measure, requiring mutual agreement among partners of the school to secure the lawsuit.

GeorgiaToday

German Ambassador: Agents’ Law Bars Georgia from EU Accession Talks

The German Ambassador to Georgia Peter Fischer stressed that the European Union will not start the accession talks with Georgia as long as the Foreign Agents Law is in effect. He also reiterated the Venice Commission’s opinion on the law that this legislation goes against the fundamental rights of Georgians.

CivilGe, Parliament Overrides President’s Veto, Adopts ‘Offshore’ Law, Domestic Reactions to Presidential Veto Override, Final Adoption of Foreign Agents Law, International Reactions to Presidential Veto Override, Final Adoption of Foreign Agents Law, The opposition announces a boycott of parliamentary work, White House: Suppressing civil society is what authoritarian governments do, Austria “deeply regrets” final adoption of law on “transparency of foreign influence”, Carl Bildt: EU path of Georgia has for the time being come to an end, White House: Suppressing civil society is what authoritarian governments do, UK “extremely concerned” over veto of bill on transparency of foreign influence, Georgian President to the “Russian Law” protesters: You create a referendum, I’ll sign it, Carl Bildt: EU path of Georgia has for the time being come to an end

Kremlin-affiliates Hold Another Conference in Tbilisi

On May 24, the Kremlin-affiliated Eurasia Institute held another anti-Western conference in Tbilisi. Participants discussed their version of Georgia’s history under the Russian empire. They also adopted a resolution calling the prospect of withdrawing the Foreign Agents Law a “complete capitulation” of Georgia. The resolution also calls on the Georgian government to “openly” restore relations with Russia.

CivilGe

Chinese consortium to be announced as winner of Anaklia port project tender

A Chinese consortium — China Communications construction company Ltd, together with China harbor investment — was selected as a private investor for the construction of the new deep-water port of Anaklia. Georgia terminated the contract with the “Anaklia Development Consortium”, which was supposed to build the port, due to non-fulfillment of its obligations.

GeorgiaToday

Date: 05/28/2024

Reading time: 3 minutes, 727 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

Charles Michel: Adoption of Transparency Law Takes Georgia Away from EU

“The adoption of the law in the parliament is a step backward and takes Georgia further away from its EU path,” says the President of the European Council.

CivilGe, International Reactions to Presidential Veto Override, Final Adoption of Foreign Agents Law, HVP Borrell on Final Adoption of Agents Law: EU and Member States are Considering all Options, Josep Borrell: “Foreign influence” law does not correspond to EU values, GD expected to override President’s veto on “Russian Law,” protesters surround parliament building

Shamba: Tbilisi wanted us back for 30 years, they will want it for another 300 years

Abkhazia’s security council secretary Sergey Shamba responded to the statement of the Prime Minister of Georgia, Irakli Kobakhidze. Shamba claimed that there are many unresolved problems between the two breakaway regions. He claimed that when the time comes, we will discuss such a readiness, but we are not going to discuss issues of confederation.

GeorgiaToday

CoE Secretary General on Final Adoption of Agents Law: Free and Fair Election Environment Could Be Jeopardized

Council of Europe Secretary General Marija Pejčinović Burić expresses “deep concern” about the law’s “adverse impact on informed public debate, pluralism, and democratic checks and balances,” adding that it “could potentially jeopardize also the environment for free and fair elections” The statement stresses that with this decision the Georgian authorities gave up “an ultimate occasion” to withdraw the law.

CivilGe, HVP Borrell on Final Adoption of Agents Law: EU and Member States are Considering all Options

PM: Agents’ Law will Create a Better Basis for Ensuring Georgia’s Accession to the EU

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the law “will create a better basis for ensuring Georgia’s accession to the European Union.” He said citizens of Georgia have the right to know who is financed by whom in this country, who carries the positive or negative interests of a foreign power in Georgia.

CivilGe

Protesters against Foreign Agents Law Fined

On May 20, and the court fined several activists GEL 500 (approximately USD 180) in connection with protests against the Foreign Agents Law. This is the maximum fine for the offense, according to Article 174 Prima of the Administrative Code. Those fined include Saba Skhvitaridze, Anri Gorgiladze, and Boris Chele Kurua of the opposition party.

CivilGe, Special Tasks Department Chief Admits to Battering Targeted Protesters at anti-Agents Law Demonstrations

Georgian Health Minister, US Global Health Centre Director discuss joint projects, cooperation

Georgian Health Minister Mikheil Sarjveladze is in Geneva to deliver an address at the 77th session of the World Health Organisation's annual Assembly. The meeting was held as part of the official visit to Geneva, Switzerland.

AgendaGe

Date: 05/27/2024

Reading time: 2 minutes, 458 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

Occupied Abkhazia, Tskhinvali: Kobakhidze’s statement on return of breakaway regions non-perspective

Georgia's Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said that he wants to return Abkhazia and Tskhinvali to Georgia. The so-called ministry of foreign affairs of occupied Abkhazaria evaluated the statement of the Prime Minister of Georgia as a “populist” and non-perspective statement. They claim that any attempt by the Georgian leadership to “return Abkhaziia to Georgia is absolutely unpromising.

GeorgiaToday

EU High Representative says EU Foreign Affairs Council “exchanged views” on Georgian transparency law

Foreign Affairs Council of the European Union had “exchanged views” on the controversial Georgian law on transparency of foreign influence. The law requires registration of non-commercial legal entities and media outlets in the country as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” if they derive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad.

AgendaGe

President Calls for ‘Full Mobilization’ of Diaspora in October Elections

Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili called for “full mobilization” of Georgians living abroad for the October parliamentary elections. The President, along with opposition parties and civil society organizations, has called for a more active engagement of the diaspora. Calls for the Georgian government to do more to facilitate the exercise of voting rights for Georgian emigres have largely gone unanswered.

CivilGe, VP Harris to Zurabishvili: Georgian People Look to You to Champion Country’s Euro-Atlantic Future, Opposition Parties to Sign Georgian Charter Initiated by President, Opposition parties join President’s Georgian Charter, President offerspolitical parties “Georgian Charter”

Why Georgian Dream Should Not Underestimate US Sanctions

U.S. prepared to impose sanctions on members of Georgian Dream party responsible for promoting it and obstructing the country’s Euro-Atlantic integration. The sanctions are only the first stage of sanctions pressure on sub-sanctioned persons, says Vakhtang Partsvania.

CivilGe, “MEGOBARI Act” Envisages Sanctions for Undermining, Injuring Georgian Democracy

Legal Issues Committee Endorses Overriding Presidential Veto on Agents’ Law

The ruling Georgian Dream is expected to override the veto in the plenary session tomorrow, on May 28. President Salome Zurabishvili vetoed the law on May 18. If the veto is overridden, the bill becomes law.

CivilGe

Date: 05/26/2024

Reading time: 0 minutes, 89 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

Georgian Charter: President Proposes Unified Goals for Short-Term Parliament, Technical Government

President Salome Zurabishvili presented the roadmap for resolving the political crisis and returning to the path of EU integration. She said that there is no alternative to the European future for Georgia and that the Georgian society, which she knows, is waiting for concrete plans.

CivilGe

International Partners Congratulate Georgia on Independence Day

On May 26, Georgia celebrates the 106th anniversary of the declaration of the first independent democratic republic. The King of the United Kingdom, Charles III congratulated Georgia in a letter addressed to the President Zurabishvili. President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev wrote a congratulatory letter.

CivilGe

Date: 05/25/2024

Reading time: 0 minutes, 71 words

🏛️ Politics & Government

Ruling party Sec Gen says Parliament will override veto on transparency law, despite “expected US sanctions”

Georgia will override President Salome Zourabichvili's veto on law on transparency of foreign influence. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced visa restrictions for “those responsible for undermining democracy” in Georgia in connection to the transparency law.

AgendaGe

Deputy Finance Minister Resigns

The U.S. House of Representatives has announced its decision to pull back on the controversial law. The decision comes after a series of high-profile incidents in the state of Georgia, Georgia, in the past.

CivilGe

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Part 1
Part 2
Content Warning: Child Abuse
***
Darkness gave way to dimness as I opened my eyes and saw slivers of gray light printed on the ceiling like lines on the page of a ruled notebook. In the distance, I heard the sound of pans clanking against the kitchen stove, and I became ever-aware of the scent of cinnamon and bacon sneaking in from under my closed bedroom door. For a moment, I was back in sixth grade. My dad was downstairs cooking up his famous from-scratch buttermilk pancakes and cheesy scrambled eggs. It was probably 7:00, maybe 7:05, and I had fifteen minutes to get up, shower, dress, eat, then it was off to Middle School with dad: for me to learn, him to work.
It was the day we were set to be assigned our Ancient Civilizations project. Unless something went terribly wrong, I would be choosing Ancient Rome. I didn't know much about it, other than it was some great empire, but even then I didn't really understand what an empire was. I was just happy that I would get to build something with my dad. I turned on my side and looked at the closed blinds, the source of the gray lines, then the cabinet with all my trophies, and finally the wobbly, firetruck-red chair pushed under my desk. I was home at last. The past fifteen years were nothing but a dream. There was no blinking. No malevolent demon chasing me. No inexplicable chaos…
It was a sweet fantasy. But one that became bitter the longer I tried to chew on it.
I swept my legs out from under the covers and sat, face-down, on the corner of my twin mattress. My feet were adult's feet. My room was my former room. And that was Trent downstairs cooking breakfast. Unless, of course, it was my dad, in which case I'd have bigger problems than merely waking up from a good dream.
After changing into a fresh shirt and pants, I went downstairs and saw that it was, in fact, Trent cooking breakfast. He was wearing a plain t-shirt through which I could see the ripples of his large back muscles as he whisked what I presumed was pancake batter. He must not have heard me, because he didn't turn around when I made it to the end of the hall. I leaned against the wall, arms folded, and watched him for a minute as he finished whisking the batter, then poured it onto a hot griddle (spilling a few dribbles on the counter in the process), watched it bubble, flipped it, then transferred the golden medallion onto a plate stacked five high. Next to the pancakes was a plate filled with bacon, and a small aluminum pan of scrambled eggs.
"Smells good," I said at last. "Find everything okay?"
I thought I might startle him with my abrupt appearance; instead, Trent looked over his shoulder, chewing on a piece of bacon. He swallowed and said, "Oh, it's you. Yeah, I hope you don't mind me using your kitchen. I thought I'd make us some breakfast."
It occurred to me then that Trent likely wasn't a guest in other people's homes very often. Lucky for him, I didn't mind him using a kitchen that hadn't been mine in many years. I was going to tell him as much when I saw an opened box of Bisquick sitting on the counter. I pointed to it and asked, "you found that in the pantry? My dad usually makes his pancakes from scratch."
He turned to look at the box, then back at me. "No, I went out and got that. And the bacon and eggs. I didn't want to dig into your supply without asking, and you were asleep, so..."
I felt my eyebrows furrow as I checked the time on the stove-clock. "It's 8:17 in the morning. Are you telling me you went out to the store, bought all these ingredients, then came back and cooked them? Just how early did you get up?"
"Around five," he answered as casually as if I had asked his dog's name. "I don't usually get much sleep. Around four, five hours is all I need. It's actually unusual for Antennas to need more than that amount. But I suppose you are unusual."
I opened my mouth in disbelief. Not only had he commandeered my kitchen, he was calling me unusual? At 8-fricken-17 in the morning?
"Sorry," Trent said, reading my expression, "I'm… well, let's just say I've not had many personal relationships. I'm used to being blunt. It's just easier that way." He took out a plate and transferred two pancakes, some eggs, and a few slices of bacon onto it. Then he held it up to me as a peace offering.
I sighed. "This better be good," I said with a wry smile and took the plate.
"Trent-certified, but no guarantees. Refunds not allowed." He replied, which made me giggle.
We sat across from one another at the dining room table. The meal was pretty good, but it was no dad's special: the pancakes were clearly box pancakes, the scrambled eggs lacked cheese and had a little too much pepper, and the bacon was… well it was bacon, no complaints there. Still, it was nice to settle down and have a somewhat normal morning.
After we ate, Trent unfurled the long arc of his life, which began as the second youngest brother of eight siblings in rural Oklahoma. Trent's 'pops' was in the logging business, first as a lumberjack, then as an owner of his own logging company. His dad acquired the business while Trent was still young, so school was never a high priority for him—at least not the way contributing to the household was. The rest of his childhood he summed up in two lessons: "Being 'close' has nothing to do with distance," and "don't touch strange plants in the woods."
I asked him if he kept in touch with any of his siblings, to which he responded, saying, "The only reason they haven't had a funeral for me is because it would be too much work." When I asked him to elaborate, he said he'd not had contact with anyone in his immediate family for over a decade. He kept tabs on them. For example, he knew his mother had dementia, and his dad was forced into retirement by his oldest brother (who had gone on to take over the logging company). His sisters were all married and moved to other parts of the country. He considered reaching out several times, but his situation required a degree of security that wasn't conducive of close family ties, not that there were particularly strong ties even before he broke contact. Trent admitted to being a bit of a black sheep.
"It all circles back to one of my jobs as a Home Inspector," he explained. "After I moved out, I tried college and quickly realized it wasn't for me. So I entered the workforce and did a bunch of odd jobs. Construction, carpentry, plumbing. I even drove a garbage truck for a while. But I ended up in Home Inspection. There was one job in particular which made me aware of…" Trent paused and gestured toward the space between us, "our situation. The blinks. You remember what I told you about origin points being like a station where other realms intersect with our world? Well, this house was like Union Station or JFK airport if you prefer a plane analogy. There was a pile of junk up to my knees in the basement of that house; all of it had been blinked in. I spent a couple days on the property, running tests, trying to identify the strange phenomenon, but on day three I rolled up to an army of what I thought at the time were Feds, parading around the property like ants on an anthill and sectioning it off with crime-scene tape." I saw disgust funnel into Trent's expression. "They're not Feds at all though. At least not anymore. I call them "the Organization," a group of people who lead in the formalized understanding of what you know as 'blinking'. And they're the reason I have to take precautions."
I considered this for a moment. Trent's story was certainly plausible, but I was missing a key piece of the puzzle. "Okay, so, what does this 'Organization' want? You make it seem like they're not good people. Have they tried attacking you?"
This caused Trent to laugh for a solid ten seconds. "Sorry, it's just… I mean if you knew what I knew, you might think it's funny, too."
"Then tell me"
Trent took a deep breath, then released. "It's a long story. The gist of it is this. The Organization has a certain device which I call 'the Receiver'. Think of it like a giant antenna—no, not us kind of Antennas, an actual antenna. It's like the machine equivalent of us, but with a billion times the bandwidth. Their goal is to use the Receiver to map our world in relation to other dimensions, then use that map to establish dominion over everyone and everything. In order to do this, they need muscle: both human muscle, and Antenna muscle. They're in the process of harvesting as many of us they can find. They're like a giant diamond company who is taking to the mines. When they find a stone, they take it back to their factory for cutting and refinement. In real terms, they run tests on us and attempt to augment our powers. The ultimate goal is to create a 'Strong Antenna', or an Antenna capable of causing phase shifts—blinks." Trent saw from my expression that he was starting to lose me, so he stood up and began rolling up his shirt.
"What are you doing?" I asked, turning away. Then I saw what he wanted to show me. There was a long scar beginning high up on his ribs and slashing all the way down to his left hip. There was also what appeared to be a patch of burn marks on his stomach.
"It was early on when I got these." Trent explained. "I was naive. I actually thought I'd be able to reason with these people. The only reason I escaped was because of dumb luck and a box of hand grenades. But that's a tale for another time. I learned two important lessons that day. First, the Organization isn't fucking around. And two, they aren't immortal. Most of them are regular, every-day humans, except for their obsession with power." Trent let his shirt fall, covering up the marks. "I ran into them again recently at their Headquarters. My team and I are working on a plan to…" he paused, seemingly weighing his words, then changed gears. "Well, I guess we can go over that another time."
I couldn't help but feel that Trent was holding something back. As much as I tried to resist thinking about yesterday, the old demon-man's words kept ringing in my head. You think he can help you? He's only here to help himself. Then I thought about what Trent said at the deli: "that's the thing that got me really interested in you. Somehow you seem to be able to control it without gear, just by praying." Did Trent think I was a Strong Antenna? Is that the only reason he's helping me? Because he wants to recruit me? And if that is the case, what if I said 'no'?
"Listen, Trent," I started, but I saw Trent was already nodding. Still, I pressed on. "I need you to tell me what I'm actually doing here. Why did you agree to help me? And what does helping me really mean? I want to know the truth."
"The truth is…" Trent started, then stopped and looked out the glass door that led onto the deck. I looked too and saw a sparrow had alighted on our old bird feeder. It tried pecking at some of its non-existent grains, then sang what I assumed was a song of displeasure before taking back off to the skies.
"The truth is: I do want to recruit you. I think you have the potential to be the strongest tool in my arsenal, but I won't require it. To date, I've helped 53 of our kind, but only seven have stayed on. Most decide to go on and live normal lives." Trent scooted his plate to the side. "In our case, this can essentially go one of two ways. In either instance, we pass through Chicago for two stops. First, I need to meet up with an associate who has something to drop off to me. Then I need to stop at a storage locker and trade out some gear that will allow me to open a phase portal. When we arrive at your origin point, I'll open the portal and you'll look inside. Based on everything you've told me, I'm guessing that childhood accident was when the demon appended itself to your life. By seeing how it entered your life, you should be able to figure out how to dispel it. At least that's the working theory. Returning to the origin point has always worked for the other Antennas, although I must admit your situation is different, but I can't imagine it's so different that this method won't work at all. After you return demon-free, you're free. You can walk out and never see me again and hopefully you'll live a happy and peaceful life. Or you can decide to throw your lot in with mine, and I can show you how deep the rabbit hole goes, so to speak." Trent looked into my eyes, and when I didn't respond for a few seconds, he said, "that's it. That's all I got."
I smiled and responded with one sentence.
"When do we leave?"
***
Memories have a strange architecture. In some ways, they are the great safety net of our experiences: collecting them like a bucket under a leaky roof. In other ways, they are an eternal reminder that nothing ever truly lasts. Perhaps a better way of thinking about memories is as the ghosts of our past lingering in the present. As I took one last stroll through my childhood house, feeling that it might be my last time for a long while, I felt the imprints of childhood memories press into my awareness: I could hear my father's voice reading to me at my bedside; I could see him holding one of my stuffed animals above my head as I wrestled him for it; I could recall the times when I'd sneak down the stairs late at night and quietly open the freezer, grab the ice cream carton, then head back upstairs to eat it.
I felt a yearning to return to those memories: to walk into the fictitious pictures my mind was painting on the canvas of my present. I knew I couldn't return, but I still wanted something to hold onto. I went back to my room and grabbed the cotton-stuffed tomato from off my closet cabinet. Then I walked through my dad's study and removed a volume I recalled him frequently reading, a hard-cover book with a green binding called, "A Collection of Great Works". I placed these items by my feet in the passenger seat of Trent's van, and just as we were about to leave, I remembered something else.
"My plant!" I blurted.
"Your what?"
"My plant—and my car. I left them it the deli. Do you think we could swing by and get it?"
Trent checked the time, then said, "Yeah, I guess we can. I just hope it isn't towed."
Luckily, it wasn't. I half-expected to find a ticket on the windshield, but there wasn't one of those, either. I unlocked the door to my Jetta and got into what felt like an active oven. "Hot!" I said and rolled down all the windows, then cranked up the AC. I saw my plant resting in the cupholder that I'd left it in the previous day. I picked it up and touched its soil. It was dry and beginning to crack. Hang on little guy, I thought. Then I led the way back to my house.
When I arrived, I parked at the head of the driveway. I turned off the car, then ran inside with the young tomato plant, bringing it to the upstairs bathrooms sink and dousing it in water. I wasn't sure how much I was supposed to add, but I figured after the sauna experience it had yesterday, I could afford to go a little overboard. Once it was fed, I opened the small purple drapes and placed it on the windowsill which faced East, meaning it would hopefully get plenty of morning sunlight.
"Good, now?" Trent asked after I hopped back in the passenger seat of the van.
"Yeah," I said. "Good now."
"Then lets get a move on."
***
Road tripping with Trent was a much different experience than when we were driving for our lives. For one, Trent wasn't nearly as tense. He drove with the windows down and one hand on the steering wheel like out of a Mustang commercial, talking intermittently about his adventures: people he'd met, jobs he'd done, close calls. He was like a living radio. And when his personal station wasn't on, he was playing one of his CD's—classic rock, mainly. When he was in an 'off' period, I found myself looking out the window at the rolling wheat fields and cloudy blue sky. Journey was playing, and the lyrics to one of the songs crept into my head and reverberated there:
The wheel in the sky keeps on turning.
I don't know where I'll be tomorrow…
I've been trying to make it home,
Got to make it before too long…
Ooh I can't take it, very much longer…
In a strange way, I felt like I was leaving home. But in another way, I was going back. And then it occurred to me that perhaps I didn't have a home at all. Did I ever have one? These past couple days had called everything about my life into question, to the point where the past seemed as mysterious as the future, and both intersected at that one place in the woods. The place where it all began. The place we were headed.
We only stopped once at a gas station to refuel, get snacks, and use the bathroom. Otherwise it was smooth sailing, other than one heated discussion with Trent that began when he addressed his vehicle as "Car" for the fifth time.
"Okay, you need to come up with a better name than that."
"What do you mean?" Trent asked, seeming genuinely confused.
"You have a super-car and you named it 'Car'. That's actually embarrassing."
"But, it is a car."
I facepalmed. "First of all, it's a van."
"A van is a type of car."
"Second of all, would you name your kid, 'kid'?"
Trent thought it over for what I thought was much too long. At last he concluded, "No, I'd probably name him 'boy', or if it's a girl, 'girl'."
After five more minutes of his childish banter, we settled on the name "Ava"—my choice, after rejecting his runner-up name "Scar".
At around the seven hour mark, I dozed off, then woke up a couple hours later to the sensation of the van dipping, then bumping up into an elevated climb. The evening sunlight that was pressuring my eyelids to open, dissipated, and everything was suddenly dark. I opened my eyes and saw we had entered a parking garage. Trent pulled into an open spot on the second level.
"We're here," he said and gathered up his gun which he stashed in a driver's side underboard compartment that I'm guessing he had installed himself.
"I see that"
"You want to wait here, or—"
I opened the car door, which was answer enough for Trent. We both got out and started down Maple Avenue. I had been to several cities before, Chicago among them, but the size of the buildings always struck me with awe. As we walked alongside dozens of other pedestrians, I looked up and traced the closest tower to its peak, guessing how many stories it was in my head. Then I'd be pulled out of my game by the honking of some nearby vehicle.
We continued for two blocks until Trent made a path directly toward the nearest Starbucks. I didn't know what I was picturing for a meeting with his associate, but it definitely wasn't a meetup at a coffee shop. Still, I followed him in. Then when I saw that Trent was leading me to a corner table where a casually dressed Chinese girl who appeared even younger than me was sitting, I blurted in a hushed tone, "her? She's your associate?"
"Took you long enough," said the Chinese girl, looking up from what appeared to be some kind of homework assignment.
"And she's in school?" I asked, incredulous.
The associate looked to me, then to Trent (who nodded), then back to me. "It's just a cover. I'm glad to see it still works, though." She reached out to shake my hand. "I'm Allison. It's nice to meet you."
Trent gave me a smirk, then said, "looks can be deceiving."
I grunted an affirmation and shook Allison's hand. "I'm Lauren. It's nice to meet you, too."
"You have it?" Trent asked, skipping right to business.
"Of course," Allison replied and removed a mailing package from her backpack, setting it on the table. "You want to go make sure it works?" She asked, gesturing up at the ceiling with her eyes.
Trent seemed to think it over for a second, then looked at me. But before he could say anything, Allison cut back in—
"—I'll stay with her. It's been a while since I've had any female company. Why don't you let us girls talk while you take care of that?" She said in a seductive yet authoritative tone which garnered her years that her appearance did not reflect.
Trent hesitated, but only for a moment. "Okay, I'll be right back," he said. Then he hurried out the door in the direction we had come from.
"Come, sit with me." Allison invited. "Tell me about yourself."
I took a seat on the small wooden seat opposite Allison, then crossed my legs. "What do you want to know?" I asked, feeling discomfort rise in my stomach. Nothing about this situation, from the mysterious package, to Trent leaving me alone with this girl, to the girl herself, whose voice was as velvety smooth as the latte she was stirring with a black coffee straw, sat right with me.
"I'm curious about what you think of Trent."
"Trent?" I repeated. I realized this was the first time I was putting any of my thoughts about Trent or our relationship into words. "I guess... he's a pretty straightforward guy. He seems to know what he's doing."
Allison flashed me a small smile, then took a sip of her latte. I saw the sticker on her drink read "Chai". Then she set the cup down and sighed. "Yes, he's very straightforward. Definitely doesn't mince words." She looked up into my eyes. Hers were a rich black, like onyx pebbles, but there was something about the way the light refracted off them which simulated a kind of inward motion, as if they were tiny whirlpools. Her smile spread across her lips. "I'm curious. What did he tell you?"
"Tell me about what?"
"About what you're doing. About where you're off to. What's the plan?"
"Don't you know?" I asked, but it immediately occurred to me that maybe she didn't know. I never saw Trent with a cellphone. Just how did he communicate with his 'associates'? And what if he didn't want her to know what we were doing for a good reason? Should I tell her?
"No, Trent keeps his cards close to his chest. He always has."
"Don't you work together, though?"
Allison waved her left hand in the air. "Of course, but it's because of the nature of our work that most of our communication is done in person, so Trent doesn't tell me much outside of the current job. I was just curious, is all."
"That makes sense. I mean, I'm actually pretty curious about what you do, too."
"Oh?" Allison's voice went high, as if she suddenly sensed an opening. "Then, why don't we trade stories. You tell about your trip, and I'll tell you about mine."
I thought it over for a second. I really did want to hear what Allison had to say, and she was Trent's co-worker, it's not like I was spilling crucial secrets to an enemy. "We're currently on our way to Southern Illinois. Specifically, we're going back to my origin point so I can confront a demon that Trent thinks blinked into my life there."
Allison stopped stirring, but her eyes didn't break from mine. "A demon, huh?" She raised the cup and took a long sip, then placed it back on the table and continued stirring. "I met a demon once," she started, looking up at the walls as if her life was playing on a screen there. "It was back in China, where I was born." She dropped her attention back to me. "Do you mind if I reminisce a little? Maybe you can get something out of it."
I shook my head, but something in my gut started to stir again. Allison continued.
"I was born during the Era of the Once Child Policy. As a result, my mother decided to leave me in a shoebox on the side of the road. I was a girl, so that's just how it was... Like many other babies in my... 'condition', I ended up in foster care. However, for whatever reason, I wasn't adopted. Years passed, and when I turned six, the government decided I'd be of better use building our impoverished town's GDP in a factory that assembled electronic devices for Western countries. Mostly they had me cleaning, but when I turned eight, one of the employees asked for my help with one of the soldering machines. That turned out to be the beginning of the end for me. I sliced open the ring finger of my right hand. I remember specifically seeing the bone underneath the split flesh and thinking it looked so small and white. The employee claimed to have nothing to do with my accident, and the management declared my injury "minimally invasive" and bandaged it up. Two weeks later and who would have guessed that the wound would become infected, and, well..."
Allison dropped the straw into her cup and raised her right hand, spreading the fingers out for me to see. There were only four. Her ring finger was missing, and a small v-shaped scar had taken its place.
"I'm lucky that the surgeon was experienced enough to take out the whole digit, that way it healed in a way which makes it somewhat difficult to notice. You didn't notice, after all. But, then again, is that really luck?" She made a fist and brought it to her lips, stifling a laugh. "No... Now I remember. My luck was still yet to come." She continued stirring. "Because, you see, after that incident, they moved me to a clothing factory with a boss who had a penchant for getting drunk and roughing up his workers, and, well, one night I was walking back to foster care when I heard the outside door to the manager's office slam shut, and there he went, stumbling, slurring insults, curses, and here I was, perfectly in his path. We met eyes, and in them I saw absolutely nothing. A hollow shell of a man, and I can still remember what it looked like to see that shell fill with a demon."
Allison's eyes went wide with some strong emotion that I couldn't place. "He grabbed me by my hair and dragged me out into the field, far away from civilization. I tried to fight at first, but every time I tried to lunge away, I was only ripping a hole in my own scalp. It felt like flames were spewing from my head, and my only respite was when the blood eventually cooled over the wound. By the time he had thrown me against the rock, I'd already all but given up. Then, when my head met the stone, I heard a pop and my grip on the world loosened. The man continued touching me, but it was as if I was disconnected now, floating somewhere above my own head, and gravity was beginning to reverse, causing me to float higher and higher, away from the horrible nightmare below."
Allison paused for a moment, and I suddenly realized I was holding my breath.
"Then I saw the most bright light I'd ever seen. At the time I thought it was either the Sun or Heaven or something like that. It was just too bright for this world. But then after looking for a little longer, I noticed it was in the shape of a person. It reached out toward me, and I had never been so quick to respond. When I touched it, I felt all my pain immediately dissipate. And I felt warm and... peaceful. And I was no longer in the sky. I was back in the field. But when I looked around, the man was gone. Vanished, right out of existence. I didn't understand it at the time, but that was my first experience with the Shifts. All I knew then was that I was free, and I damn well wasn't going to waste that. I ran as far as I could, away from the factories, the foster home, the corrupt governments and corporations. I kept running until I arrived at a City that didn't know me. That didn't want to know me. And I liked it that way, because it's easier to live as a ghost than as a victim."
Allison perked up, and when I turned around to see what for, I saw Trent entering back through the door.
"But you know what's interesting?" Allison blurted out, her voice becoming quieter. "Trent never took me back to confront my demon." Her voice became a whisper. "In fact, I can't recall him ever taking any of us back."
For a moment the whole world became a still frame. Allison's clear, olive skin, and dark eyes, made darker with eyeliner; her narrow nose; her small lips now coiling into a smile. My entire body was a hair trigger hat only needed the slightest force to set it off. And when Trent placed his hand on my shoulder, I whirled around and narrowly missed a haymaker that swept just shy of Trent's face.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa" he said and stepped back with his palms up. "It's just me. Is everything okay?"
I turned back to Allison, but she seemed different now. Her expression was benign; confused, even. "Are you okay?" she asked.
"I—you"
"We were just talking about where you were off to next." Allison said without a hint of pretense.
"Okay, well, chat time is over. It's time to go." Trent said and started guiding me toward the door. I turned back and saw Allison mouth some words which I swear I heard, as if they had been directly transmitted into my brain.
"See you soon" she purred.
She was smiling.
***
The next leg of the trip passed mostly in silence. It was a little over an hour to the storage facility which was located just South of Chicago. My heart was beating wildly in my chest as I pictured Allison's smile. I wanted to ask Trent if demons could possess Antennas, if somehow one of us could become compromised, but then I remembered Allison's words and stopped myself. Because I didn't know if I could really trust Trent. I tried to tell myself I could trust him—that it was Allison who was the liar. Her whole persona seemed fake at best, and possessed at worst. But, then... what if she was telling the truth? What if Trent was the enemy?
He sensed my quietness and tried striking up a couple conversations, but I only gave one-word answers. Somehow, our trust was so brittle that a single, well-placed sentence was enough to snap it. When he asked if everything was okay, I lied and said that I just had a headache and needed more rest. So I leaned my head against the stuffed tomato and tried to sleep, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to.
We arrived at the facility just as the sun was setting for the night. Trent pulled up to the self-service gate and scanned a card which caused the automatic doors to swing open. We looped down a couple rows of the outdoor units until we came to #48.
"We're here," Trent prompted, but this time I didn't budge. I felt his eyes on me after he turned off the ignition. "Hey," he called. "Are you awake?"
I was silent.
I heard Trent quietly click open his door, then close it the same way. I waited a few seconds then turned my head and watched him from the driver's side mirror. He opened the storage locker, then walked inside and turned on a light. It occurred to me then how dimly lit this outdoor storage facility was. There was a weak overhead lantern peeking over every fourth garage like an anglerfish's lure, leaving a large portion of the road not hit by the light bubbles completely dark.
I tried to plan my next move. I could leave Trent and run. But where would I go? Or I could stay and see Trent's plan through. There was a chance this was all an elaborate trap. Maybe Trent was working with the demon, or maybe he was the demon. But then why did he save me? Twice. Maybe he was actually a double agent for the Organization. But he could easily have captured me by now. Unless he needs me to go back to the origin point for a different reason... I considered everything I had learned up until this point: we live at the cross-section of different realms; these other realms interact with our world; Antennas, who are a very small minority of people, can see these interactions; the Organization wants to harness our power and create a 'Strong Antenna' to achieve some kind of universal hegemony; I'm the closest thing to a Strong Antenna to date; Trent knows this; He's taking me back to my origin point, despite not taking the others back to theirs; Trent claims to want to fight the Organization; the best way to fight the Organization would be with a Strong Antenna. What if Trent was trying to make me into a Strong Antenna?
I considered this chain of reasoning. It seemed very plausible, especially after Allison's cryptic messages. Was she trying to warn me of this? But that smile, and the "see you soon"... If she wasn't being possessed, why would she be seeing me soon?
Suddenly my thoughts gave way like a broken dam as I heard a ping come from Ava's radar. I jumped, thinking that all of the electronics turned off with the ignition, but when I looked at the circular sonar map, I saw a red dot had just emerged in the top-right corner. I looked out the window in the direction of the ping, but I couldn't see anything heading down the road.
Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.
Four more dots appeared behind the first, and they were approaching.
I jumped out the van and ran over to where Trent was hauling in a large cardboard crate into the back of the van. "Trent, there's pings on the radar. A bunch of them."
He dropped the box next to three others, and I realized I had never seen inside the back of the van. It was filled with what looked like pneumatic tubes wired into circuits, and in the center was a tri-pod which was holding a large halo-shaped ring.
"Pings?" Trent said, then his face widened with shock as he realized what I meant. "Shit, how many?"
"Five, maybe more now. And they're getting closer."
"Five?" He jumped out the back and ran into the storage locker. I thought he was going to close the door, but when I saw him hauling boxes back toward the van, I yelled at him. "What are you doing!?"
"I need to load this up for tomorrow. Here," He tossed me his keys. "Get it started."
"Fuck, seriously?"
Trent didn't respond, only kept shuffling boxes into the van.
I turned and ran to the door and hopped in the driver's seat. As I was turning on the ignition, I saw the row of bushes that was just outside of the facility begin to rattle. The next sweep revealed a whole sea of pings. I rolled down the window and shouted Trent's name.
"One more, that's all. Get in the passenger seat, I'll be there in a sec."
I scooted over the center console and waited, clutching at the bottom of my pants legs. Just as Trent slammed the rear door of the van shut, I saw the first figure emerge onto the road ahead of us. It looked like some kind of large coyote, though it was hard to tell because it was still fifty meters out.
"Now detecting 53 controlled agents." Ava said right as Trent jumped in and shut the driver's side door. "Net anomalies: 53."
"Ava, increase radius to five miles." Trent instructed as he backed up all the way to the end of the lane and spun us around toward the gate. Just as we left, I saw the pack of coyotes stalking toward us, slow at first, then in a dead sprint.
"Increasing radius." Ava responded. "Increased. Recalculating… Recalculating… Re—complete. Now detecting 451 controlled agents. Net anomalies: 451."
"What does 'controlled agent' mean?" I asked.
"Hold on," Trent said and accelerated into the gate, bursting through it. The whole van shook, and I heard my phone fall in the crack between the seat and door. Trent steadied the van, then said, "It means the things chasing us are being controlled by something that isn't detectable."
"The demon?"
"That'd be my guess."
"But why can't Ava detect it?"
Trent switched to the right lane, then merged onto the Interstate-South ramp. "Probably because it isn't trying to kill us."
"Then, what—" I looked back at the map and basically had my question answered. All 451 pings were coalesced in a semicircle on one side of the map. The side of the map that we had just come from. "Is it trying to force us toward the crash site?"
"It seems that way." Trent answered.
"Trent, pull over."
"Huh?"
"Pull over!" I yelled.
He looked at me, eyes wide. Then he did as I had instructed and pulled off in the middle of the ramp. The red dots slowly closed in on our position.
"Now detecting—"
"Shut up, Ava." I said. I could feel my blood boiling. "I'm not going one step further until you tell me the truth. Why are we going to my origin point? What is your real motive?"
"What do you mean? I already told you."
I unlocked the passenger side door.
"Wait," Trent said and reached out toward me. "Just, wait."
There was silence, except for the pings indicating that the beasts behind us had re-encroached on our position to about fifty meters.
"Okay, I didn't tell you everything. But we don't have time now—"
I opened the door.
"Okay, okay. I didn't tell you everything, it's true. I've never done this with anyone else, but the reason is because I never needed to. And if I told you what might happen, you would have refused it."
"Refused what?"
"This—me, my help. Lauren, I am trying to help you. But you have to understand—it's likely that neither of us are going to live past tomorrow. You're basically confronting a dark entity in a place where I can't protect you, and if you somehow do manage to kill it, you'll be coming back to the fight of your life. Because I don't have the power to hide you from the Organization. They're going to show up and try to take you. I really don't know how you've lasted as long as you have. Whatever protection you had growing up, it's gone now. And now I'm all you have. And in some twist of fate, you're all I have."
Ava reactivated. "Now detecting 1,117 controlled agents. Proximity till contact: 20 meters. Net anomalies: 1,117."
I closed my door. "But what if I still don't want to go through with it?"
Trent pointed at the screen. "Then we die right here, right now, together. Because I am one-hundred percent certain that if we don't go to that crash site, we're dead anyway. All of us."
Another ping rolled through. I checked the side-view mirror and saw the swarming pack of dogs reach the van and bound around the rear wheels. I suddenly recalled the conversation I had with Father Martin and the conclusions I had drawn. Father, I've been… wrestling with something, and I think God wants me to confront it. I think I've been running away and hiding from it for so long that I'd convinced myself it disappeared...
"Go," I said just as I felt the collision of the coyotes slamming their bodies against the side doors.
Trent didn't waste any time stepping on the gas. I watched as the coyotes diminished in the distance and the pings receded into the back of the map, never disappearing fully, but covering the flank of our retreat—a reminder lingering on the edge of our awareness that there was no turning back now. That, one way or another, this was ending tomorrow.
And I'd either be dead, or something else entirely.

Part 1
Part 2
***
Darkness gave way to dimness as I opened my eyes and saw slivers of gray light printed on the ceiling like lines on the page of a ruled notebook. In the distance, I heard the sound of pans clanking against the kitchen stove, and I became ever-aware of the scent of cinnamon and bacon sneaking in from under my closed bedroom door. For a moment, I was back in sixth grade. My dad was downstairs cooking up his famous from-scratch buttermilk pancakes and cheesy scrambled eggs. It was probably 7:00, maybe 7:05, and I had fifteen minutes to get up, shower, dress, eat, then it was off to Middle School with dad: for me to learn, him to work.
It was the day we were set to be assigned our Ancient Civilizations project. Unless something went terribly wrong, I would be choosing Ancient Rome. I didn't know much about it, other than it was some great empire, but even then I didn't really understand what an empire was. I was just happy that I would get to build something with my dad. I turned on my side and looked at the closed blinds, the source of the gray lines, then the cabinet with all my trophies, and finally the wobbly, firetruck-red chair pushed under my desk. I was home at last. The past fifteen years were nothing but a dream. There was no blinking. No malevolent demon chasing me. No inexplicable chaos…
It was a sweet fantasy. But one that became bitter the longer I tried to chew on it.
I swept my legs out from under the covers and sat, face-down, on the corner of my twin mattress. My feet were adult's feet. My room was my former room. And that was Trent downstairs cooking breakfast. Unless, of course, it was my dad, in which case I'd have bigger problems than merely waking up from a good dream.
After changing into a fresh shirt and pants, I went downstairs and saw that it was, in fact, Trent cooking breakfast. He was wearing a plain t-shirt through which I could see the ripples of his large back muscles as he whisked what I presumed was pancake batter. He must not have heard me, because he didn't turn around when I made it to the end of the hall. I leaned against the wall, arms folded, and watched him for a minute as he finished whisking the batter, then poured it onto a hot griddle (spilling a few dribbles on the counter in the process), watched it bubble, flipped it, then transferred the golden medallion onto a plate stacked five high. Next to the pancakes was a plate filled with bacon, and a small aluminum pan of scrambled eggs.
"Smells good," I said at last. "Find everything okay?"
I thought I might startle him with my abrupt appearance; instead, Trent looked over his shoulder, chewing on a piece of bacon. He swallowed and said, "Oh, it's you. Yeah, I hope you don't mind me using your kitchen. I thought I'd make us some breakfast."
It occurred to me then that Trent likely wasn't a guest in other people's homes very often. Lucky for him, I didn't mind him using a kitchen that hadn't been mine in many years. I was going to tell him as much when I saw an opened box of Bisquick sitting on the counter. I pointed to it and asked, "you found that in the pantry? My dad usually makes his pancakes from scratch."
He turned to look at the box, then back at me. "No, I went out and got that. And the bacon and eggs. I didn't want to dig into your supply without asking, and you were asleep, so..."
I felt my eyebrows furrow as I checked the time on the stove-clock. "It's 8:17 in the morning. Are you telling me you went out to the store, bought all these ingredients, then came back and cooked them? Just how early did you get up?"
"Around five," he answered as casually as if I had asked his dog's name. "I don't usually get much sleep. Around four, five hours is all I need. It's actually unusual for Antennas to need more than that amount. But I suppose you are unusual."
I opened my mouth in disbelief. Not only had he commandeered my kitchen, he was calling me unusual? At 8-fricken-17 in the morning?
"Sorry," Trent said, reading my expression, "I'm… well, let's just say I've not had many personal relationships. I'm used to being blunt. It's just easier that way." He took out a plate and transferred two pancakes, some eggs, and a few slices of bacon onto it. Then he held it up to me as a peace offering.
I sighed. "This better be good," I said with a wry smile and took the plate.
"Trent-certified, but no guarantees. Refunds not allowed." He replied, which made me giggle.
We sat across from one another at the dining room table. The meal was pretty good, but it was no dad's special: the pancakes were clearly box pancakes, the scrambled eggs lacked cheese and had a little too much pepper, and the bacon was… well it was bacon, no complaints there. Still, it was nice to settle down and have a somewhat normal morning.
After we ate, Trent unfurled the long arc of his life, which began as the second youngest brother of eight siblings in rural Oklahoma. Trent's 'pops' was in the logging business, first as a lumberjack, then as an owner of his own logging company. His dad acquired the business while Trent was still young, so school was never a high priority for him—at least not the way contributing to the household was. The rest of his childhood he summed up in two lessons: "Being 'close' has nothing to do with distance," and "don't touch strange plants in the woods."
I asked him if he kept in touch with any of his siblings, to which he responded, saying, "The only reason they haven't had a funeral for me is because it would be too much work." When I asked him to elaborate, he said he'd not had contact with anyone in his immediate family for over a decade. He kept tabs on them. For example, he knew his mother had dementia, and his dad was forced into retirement by his oldest brother (who had gone on to take over the logging company). His sisters were all married and moved to other parts of the country. He considered reaching out several times, but his situation required a degree of security that wasn't conducive of close family ties, not that there were particularly strong ties even before he broke contact. Trent admitted to being a bit of a black sheep.
"It all circles back to one of my jobs as a Home Inspector," he explained. "After I moved out, I tried college and quickly realized it wasn't for me. So I entered the workforce and did a bunch of odd jobs. Construction, carpentry, plumbing. I even drove a garbage truck for a while. But I ended up in Home Inspection. There was one job in particular which made me aware of…" Trent paused and gestured toward the space between us, "our situation. The blinks. You remember what I told you about origin points being like a station where other realms intersect with our world? Well, this house was like Union Station or JFK airport if you prefer a plane analogy. There was a pile of junk up to my knees in the basement of that house; all of it had been blinked in. I spent a couple days on the property, running tests, trying to identify the strange phenomenon, but on day three I rolled up to an army of what I thought at the time were Feds, parading around the property like ants on an anthill and sectioning it off with crime-scene tape." I saw disgust funnel into Trent's expression. "They're not Feds at all though. At least not anymore. I call them "the Organization," a group of people who lead in the formalized understanding of what you know as 'blinking'. And they're the reason I have to take precautions."
I considered this for a moment. Trent's story was certainly plausible, but I was missing a key piece of the puzzle. "Okay, so, what does this 'Organization' want? You make it seem like they're not good people. Have they tried attacking you?"
This caused Trent to laugh for a solid ten seconds. "Sorry, it's just… I mean if you knew what I knew, you might think it's funny, too."
"Then tell me"
Trent took a deep breath, then released. "It's a long story. The gist of it is this. The Organization has a certain device which I call 'the Receiver'. Think of it like a giant antenna—no, not us kind of Antennas, an actual antenna. It's like the machine equivalent of us, but with a billion times the bandwidth. Their goal is to use the Receiver to map our world in relation to other dimensions, then use that map to establish dominion over everyone and everything. In order to do this, they need muscle: both human muscle, and Antenna muscle. They're in the process of harvesting as many of us they can find. They're like a giant diamond company who is taking to the mines. When they find a stone, they take it back to their factory for cutting and refinement. In real terms, they run tests on us and attempt to augment our powers. The ultimate goal is to create a 'Strong Antenna', or an Antenna capable of causing phase shifts—blinks." Trent saw from my expression that he was starting to lose me, so he stood up and began rolling up his shirt.
"What are you doing?" I asked, turning away. Then I saw what he wanted to show me. There was a long scar beginning high up on his ribs and slashing all the way down to his left hip. There was also what appeared to be a patch of burn marks on his stomach.
"It was early on when I got these." Trent explained. "I was naive. I actually thought I'd be able to reason with these people. The only reason I escaped was because of dumb luck and a box of hand grenades. But that's a tale for another time. I learned two important lessons that day. First, the Organization isn't fucking around. And two, they aren't immortal. Most of them are regular, every-day humans, except for their obsession with power." Trent let his shirt fall, covering up the marks. "I ran into them again recently at their Headquarters. My team and I are working on a plan to…" he paused, seemingly weighing his words, then changed gears. "Well, I guess we can go over that another time."
I couldn't help but feel that Trent was holding something back. As much as I tried to resist thinking about yesterday, the old demon-man's words kept ringing in my head. You think he can help you? He's only here to help himself. Then I thought about what Trent said at the deli: "that's the thing that got me really interested in you. Somehow you seem to be able to control it without gear, just by praying." Did Trent think I was a Strong Antenna? Is that the only reason he's helping me? Because he wants to recruit me? And if that is the case, what if I said 'no'?
"Listen, Trent," I started, but I saw Trent was already nodding. Still, I pressed on. "I need you to tell me what I'm actually doing here. Why did you agree to help me? And what does helping me really mean? I want to know the truth."
"The truth is…" Trent started, then stopped and looked out the glass door that led onto the deck. I looked too and saw a sparrow had alighted on our old bird feeder. It tried pecking at some of its non-existent grains, then sang what I assumed was a song of displeasure before taking back off to the skies.
"The truth is: I do want to recruit you. I think you have the potential to be the strongest tool in my arsenal, but I won't require it. To date, I've helped 53 of our kind, but only seven have stayed on. Most decide to go on and live normal lives." Trent scooted his plate to the side. "In our case, this can essentially go one of two ways. In either instance, we pass through Chicago for two stops. First, I need to meet up with an associate who has something to drop off to me. Then I need to stop at a storage locker and trade out some gear that will allow me to open a phase portal. When we arrive at your origin point, I'll open the portal and you'll look inside. Based on everything you've told me, I'm guessing that childhood accident was when the demon appended itself to your life. By seeing how it entered your life, you should be able to figure out how to dispel it. At least that's the working theory. Returning to the origin point has always worked for the other Antennas, although I must admit your situation is different, but I can't imagine it's so different that this method won't work at all. After you return demon-free, you're free. You can walk out and never see me again and hopefully you'll live a happy and peaceful life. Or you can decide to throw your lot in with mine, and I can show you how deep the rabbit hole goes, so to speak." Trent looked into my eyes, and when I didn't respond for a few seconds, he said, "that's it. That's all I got."
I smiled and responded with one sentence.
"When do we leave?"
***
Memories have a strange architecture. In some ways, they are the great safety net of our experiences: collecting them like a bucket under a leaky roof. In other ways, they are an eternal reminder that nothing ever truly lasts. Perhaps a better way of thinking about memories is as the ghosts of our past lingering in the present. As I took one last stroll through my childhood house, feeling that it might be my last time for a long while, I felt the imprints of childhood memories press into my awareness: I could hear my father's voice reading to me at my bedside; I could see him holding one of my stuffed animals above my head as I wrestled him for it; I could recall the times when I'd sneak down the stairs late at night and quietly open the freezer, grab the ice cream carton, then head back upstairs to eat it.
I felt a yearning to return to those memories: to walk into the fictitious pictures my mind was painting on the canvas of my present. I knew I couldn't return, but I still wanted something to hold onto. I went back to my room and grabbed the cotton-stuffed tomato from off my closet cabinet. Then I walked through my dad's study and removed a volume I recalled him frequently reading, a hard-cover book with a green binding called, "A Collection of Great Works". I placed these items by my feet in the passenger seat of Trent's van, and just as we were about to leave, I remembered something else.
"My plant!" I blurted.
"Your what?"
"My plant—and my car. I left them it the deli. Do you think we could swing by and get it?"
Trent checked the time, then said, "Yeah, I guess we can. I just hope it isn't towed."
Luckily, it wasn't. I half-expected to find a ticket on the windshield, but there wasn't one of those, either. I unlocked the door to my Jetta and got into what felt like an active oven. "Hot!" I said and rolled down all the windows, then cranked up the AC. I saw my plant resting in the cupholder that I'd left it in the previous day. I picked it up and touched its soil. It was dry and beginning to crack. Hang on little guy, I thought. Then I led the way back to my house.
When I arrived, I parked at the head of the driveway. I turned off the car, then ran inside with the young tomato plant, bringing it to the upstairs bathrooms sink and dousing it in water. I wasn't sure how much I was supposed to add, but I figured after the sauna experience it had yesterday, I could afford to go a little overboard. Once it was fed, I opened the small purple drapes and placed it on the windowsill which faced East, meaning it would hopefully get plenty of morning sunlight.
"Good, now?" Trent asked after I hopped back in the passenger seat of the van.
"Yeah," I said. "Good now."
"Then lets get a move on."
***
Road tripping with Trent was a much different experience than when we were driving for our lives. For one, Trent wasn't nearly as tense. He drove with the windows down and one hand on the steering wheel like out of a Mustang commercial, talking intermittently about his adventures: people he'd met, jobs he'd done, close calls. He was like a living radio. And when his personal station wasn't on, he was playing one of his CD's—classic rock, mainly. When he was in an 'off' period, I found myself looking out the window at the rolling wheat fields and cloudy blue sky. Journey was playing, and the lyrics to one of the songs crept into my head and reverberated there:
The wheel in the sky keeps on turning.
I don't know where I'll be tomorrow…
I've been trying to make it home,
Got to make it before too long…
Ooh I can't take it, very much longer…
In a strange way, I felt like I was leaving home. But in another way, I was going back. And then it occurred to me that perhaps I didn't have a home at all. Did I ever have one? These past couple days had called everything about my life into question, to the point where the past seemed as mysterious as the future, and both intersected at that one place in the woods. The place where it all began. The place we were headed.
We only stopped once at a gas station to refuel, get snacks, and use the bathroom. Otherwise it was smooth sailing, other than one heated discussion with Trent that began when he addressed his vehicle as "Car" for the fifth time.
"Okay, you need to come up with a better name than that."
"What do you mean?" Trent asked, seeming genuinely confused.
"You have a super-car and you named it 'Car'. That's actually embarrassing."
"But, it is a car."
I facepalmed. "First of all, it's a van."
"A van is a type of car."
"Second of all, would you name your kid, 'kid'?"
Trent thought it over for what I thought was much too long. At last he concluded, "No, I'd probably name him 'boy', or if it's a girl, 'girl'."
After five more minutes of his childish banter, we settled on the name "Ava"—my choice, after rejecting his runner-up name "Scar".
At around the seven hour mark, I dozed off, then woke up a couple hours later to the sensation of the van dipping, then bumping up into an elevated climb. The evening sunlight that was pressuring my eyelids to open, dissipated, and everything was suddenly dark. I opened my eyes and saw we had entered a parking garage. Trent pulled into an open spot on the second level.
"We're here," he said and gathered up his gun which he stashed in a driver's side underboard compartment that I'm guessing he had installed himself.
"I see that"
"You want to wait here, or—"
I opened the car door, which was answer enough for Trent. We both got out and started down Maple Avenue. I had been to several cities before, Chicago among them, but the size of the buildings always struck me with awe. As we walked alongside dozens of other pedestrians, I looked up and traced the closest tower to its peak, guessing how many stories it was in my head. Then I'd be pulled out of my game by the honking of some nearby vehicle.
We continued for two blocks until Trent made a path directly toward the nearest Starbucks. I didn't know what I was picturing for a meeting with his associate, but it definitely wasn't a meetup at a coffee shop. Still, I followed him in. Then when I saw that Trent was leading me to a corner table where a casually dressed Chinese girl who appeared even younger than me was sitting, I blurted in a hushed tone, "her? She's your associate?"
"Took you long enough," said the Chinese girl, looking up from what appeared to be some kind of homework assignment.
"And she's in school?" I asked, incredulous.
The associate looked to me, then to Trent (who nodded), then back to me. "It's just a cover. I'm glad to see it still works, though." She reached out to shake my hand. "I'm Allison. It's nice to meet you."
Trent gave me a smirk, then said, "looks can be deceiving."
I grunted an affirmation and shook Allison's hand. "I'm Lauren. It's nice to meet you, too."
"You have it?" Trent asked, skipping right to business.
"Of course," Allison replied and removed a mailing package from her backpack, setting it on the table. "You want to go make sure it works?" She asked, gesturing up at the ceiling with her eyes.
Trent seemed to think it over for a second, then looked at me. But before he could say anything, Allison cut back in—
"—I'll stay with her. It's been a while since I've had any female company. Why don't you let us girls talk while you take care of that?" She said in a seductive yet authoritative tone which garnered her years that her appearance did not reflect.
Trent hesitated, but only for a moment. "Okay, I'll be right back," he said. Then he hurried out the door in the direction we had come from.
"Come, sit with me." Allison invited. "Tell me about yourself."
I took a seat on the small wooden seat opposite Allison, then crossed my legs. "What do you want to know?" I asked, feeling discomfort rise in my stomach. Nothing about this situation, from the mysterious package, to Trent leaving me alone with this girl, to the girl herself, whose voice was as velvety smooth as the latte she was stirring with a black coffee straw, sat right with me.
"I'm curious about what you think of Trent."
"Trent?" I repeated. I realized this was the first time I was putting any of my thoughts about Trent or our relationship into words. "I guess... he's a pretty straightforward guy. He seems to know what he's doing."
Allison flashed me a small smile, then took a sip of her latte. I saw the sticker on her drink read "Chai". Then she set the cup down and sighed. "Yes, he's very straightforward. Definitely doesn't mince words." She looked up into my eyes. Hers were a rich black, like onyx pebbles, but there was something about the way the light refracted off them which simulated a kind of inward motion, as if they were tiny whirlpools. Her smile spread across her lips. "I'm curious. What did he tell you?"
"Tell me about what?"
"About what you're doing. About where you're off to. What's the plan?"
"Don't you know?" I asked, but it immediately occurred to me that maybe she didn't know. I never saw Trent with a cellphone. Just how did he communicate with his 'associates'? And what if he didn't want her to know what we were doing for a good reason? Should I tell her?
"No, Trent keeps his cards close to his chest. He always has."
"Don't you work together, though?"
Allison waved her left hand in the air. "Of course, but it's because of the nature of our work that most of our communication is done in person, so Trent doesn't tell me much outside of the current job. I was just curious, is all."
"That makes sense. I mean, I'm actually pretty curious about what you do, too."
"Oh?" Allison's voice went high, as if she suddenly sensed an opening. "Then, why don't we trade stories. You tell about your trip, and I'll tell you about mine."
I thought it over for a second. I really did want to hear what Allison had to say, and she was Trent's co-worker, it's not like I was spilling crucial secrets to an enemy. "We're currently on our way to Southern Illinois. Specifically, we're going back to my origin point so I can confront a demon that Trent thinks blinked into my life there."
Allison stopped stirring, but her eyes didn't break from mine. "A demon, huh?" She raised the cup and took a long sip, then placed it back on the table and continued stirring. "I met a demon once," she started, looking up at the walls as if her life was playing on a screen there. "It was back in China, where I was born." She dropped her attention back to me. "Do you mind if I reminisce a little? Maybe you can get something out of it."
I shook my head, but something in my gut started to stir again. Allison continued.
"I was born during the Era of the Once Child Policy. As a result, my mother decided to leave me in a shoebox on the side of the road. I was a girl, so that's just how it was... Like many other babies in my... 'condition', I ended up in foster care. However, for whatever reason, I wasn't adopted. Years passed, and when I turned six, the government decided I'd be of better use building our impoverished town's GDP in a factory that assembled electronic devices for Western countries. Mostly they had me cleaning, but when I turned eight, one of the employees asked for my help with one of the soldering machines. That turned out to be the beginning of the end for me. I sliced open the ring finger of my right hand. I remember specifically seeing the bone underneath the split flesh and thinking it looked so small and white. The employee claimed to have nothing to do with my accident, and the management declared my injury "minimally invasive" and bandaged it up. Two weeks later and who would have guessed that the wound would become infected, and, well..."
Allison dropped the straw into her cup and raised her right hand, spreading the fingers out for me to see. There were only four. Her ring finger was missing, and a small v-shaped scar had taken its place.
"I'm lucky that the surgeon was experienced enough to take out the whole digit, that way it healed in a way which makes it somewhat difficult to notice. You didn't notice, after all. But, then again, is that really luck?" She made a fist and brought it to her lips, stifling a laugh. "No... Now I remember. My luck was still yet to come." She continued stirring. "Because, you see, after that incident, they moved me to a clothing factory with a boss who had a penchant for getting drunk and roughing up his workers, and, well, one night I was walking back to foster care when I heard the outside door to the manager's office slam shut, and there he went, stumbling, slurring insults, curses, and here I was, perfectly in his path. We met eyes, and in them I saw absolutely nothing. A hollow shell of a man, and I can still remember what it looked like to see that shell fill with a demon."
Allison's eyes went wide with some strong emotion that I couldn't place. "He grabbed me by my hair and dragged me out into the field, far away from civilization. I tried to fight at first, but every time I tried to lunge away, I was only ripping a hole in my own scalp. It felt like flames were spewing from my head, and my only respite was when the blood eventually cooled over the wound. By the time he had thrown me against the rock, I'd already all but given up. Then, when my head met the stone, I heard a pop and my grip on the world loosened. The man continued touching me, but it was as if I was disconnected now, floating somewhere above my own head, and gravity was beginning to reverse, causing me to float higher and higher, away from the horrible nightmare below."
Allison paused for a moment, and I suddenly realized I was holding my breath.
"Then I saw the most bright light I'd ever seen. At the time I thought it was either the Sun or Heaven or something like that. It was just too bright for this world. But then after looking for a little longer, I noticed it was in the shape of a person. It reached out toward me, and I had never been so quick to respond. When I touched it, I felt all my pain immediately dissipate. And I felt warm and... peaceful. And I was no longer in the sky. I was back in the field. But when I looked around, the man was gone. Vanished, right out of existence. I didn't understand it at the time, but that was my first experience with the Shifts. All I knew then was that I was free, and I damn well wasn't going to waste that. I ran as far as I could, away from the factories, the foster home, the corrupt governments and corporations. I kept running until I arrived at a City that didn't know me. That didn't want to know me. And I liked it that way, because it's easier to live as a ghost than as a victim."
Allison perked up, and when I turned around to see what for, I saw Trent entering back through the door.
"But you know what's interesting?" Allison blurted out, her voice becoming quieter. "Trent never took me back to confront my demon." Her voice became a whisper. "In fact, I can't recall him ever taking any of us back."
For a moment the whole world became a still frame. Allison's clear, olive skin, and dark eyes, made darker with eyeliner; her narrow nose; her small lips now coiling into a smile. My entire body was a hair trigger hat only needed the slightest force to set it off. And when Trent placed his hand on my shoulder, I whirled around and narrowly missed a haymaker that swept just shy of Trent's face.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa" he said and stepped back with his palms up. "It's just me. Is everything okay?"
I turned back to Allison, but she seemed different now. Her expression was benign; confused, even. "Are you okay?" she asked.
"I—you"
"We were just talking about where you were off to next." Allison said without a hint of pretense.
"Okay, well, chat time is over. It's time to go." Trent said and started guiding me toward the door. I turned back and saw Allison mouth some words which I swear I heard, as if they had been directly transmitted into my brain.
"See you soon" she purred.
She was smiling.
***
The next leg of the trip passed mostly in silence. It was a little over an hour to the storage facility which was located just South of Chicago. My heart was beating wildly in my chest as I pictured Allison's smile. I wanted to ask Trent if demons could possess Antennas, if somehow one of us could become compromised, but then I remembered Allison's words and stopped myself. Because I didn't know if I could really trust Trent. I tried to tell myself I could trust him—that it was Allison who was the liar. Her whole persona seemed fake at best, and possessed at worst. But, then... what if she was telling the truth? What if Trent was the enemy?
He sensed my quietness and tried striking up a couple conversations, but I only gave one-word answers. Somehow, our trust was so brittle that a single, well-placed sentence was enough to snap it. When he asked if everything was okay, I lied and said that I just had a headache and needed more rest. So I leaned my head against the stuffed tomato and tried to sleep, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to.
We arrived at the facility just as the sun was setting for the night. Trent pulled up to the self-service gate and scanned a card which caused the automatic doors to swing open. We looped down a couple rows of the outdoor units until we came to #48.
"We're here," Trent prompted, but this time I didn't budge. I felt his eyes on me after he turned off the ignition. "Hey," he called. "Are you awake?"
I was silent.
I heard Trent quietly click open his door, then close it the same way. I waited a few seconds then turned my head and watched him from the driver's side mirror. He opened the storage locker, then walked inside and turned on a light. It occurred to me then how dimly lit this outdoor storage facility was. There was a weak overhead lantern peeking over every fourth garage like an anglerfish's lure, leaving a large portion of the road not hit by the light bubbles completely dark.
I tried to plan my next move. I could leave Trent and run. But where would I go? Or I could stay and see Trent's plan through. There was a chance this was all an elaborate trap. Maybe Trent was working with the demon, or maybe he was the demon. But then why did he save me? Twice. Maybe he was actually a double agent for the Organization. But he could easily have captured me by now. Unless he needs me to go back to the origin point for a different reason... I considered everything I had learned up until this point: we live at the cross-section of different realms; these other realms interact with our world; Antennas, who are a very small minority of people, can see these interactions; the Organization wants to harness our power and create a 'Strong Antenna' to achieve some kind of universal hegemony; I'm the closest thing to a Strong Antenna to date; Trent knows this; He's taking me back to my origin point, despite not taking the others back to theirs; Trent claims to want to fight the Organization; the best way to fight the Organization would be with a Strong Antenna. What if Trent was trying to make me into a Strong Antenna?
I considered this chain of reasoning. It seemed very plausible, especially after Allison's cryptic messages. Was she trying to warn me of this? But that smile, and the "see you soon"... If she wasn't being possessed, why would she be seeing me soon?
Suddenly my thoughts gave way like a broken dam as I heard a ping come from Ava's radar. I jumped, thinking that all of the electronics turned off with the ignition, but when I looked at the circular sonar map, I saw a red dot had just emerged in the top-right corner. I looked out the window in the direction of the ping, but I couldn't see anything heading down the road.
Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.
Four more dots appeared behind the first, and they were approaching.
I jumped out the van and ran over to where Trent was hauling in a large cardboard crate into the back of the van. "Trent, there's pings on the radar. A bunch of them."
He dropped the box next to three others, and I realized I had never seen inside the back of the van. It was filled with what looked like pneumatic tubes wired into circuits, and in the center was a tri-pod which was holding a large halo-shaped ring.
"Pings?" Trent said, then his face widened with shock as he realized what I meant. "Shit, how many?"
"Five, maybe more now. And they're getting closer."
"Five?" He jumped out the back and ran into the storage locker. I thought he was going to close the door, but when I saw him hauling boxes back toward the van, I yelled at him. "What are you doing!?"
"I need to load this up for tomorrow. Here," He tossed me his keys. "Get it started."
"Fuck, seriously?"
Trent didn't respond, only kept shuffling boxes into the van.
I turned and ran to the door and hopped in the driver's seat. As I was turning on the ignition, I saw the row of bushes that was just outside of the facility begin to rattle. The next sweep revealed a whole sea of pings. I rolled down the window and shouted Trent's name.
"One more, that's all. Get in the passenger seat, I'll be there in a sec."
I scooted over the center console and waited, clutching at the bottom of my pants legs. Just as Trent slammed the rear door of the van shut, I saw the first figure emerge onto the road ahead of us. It looked like some kind of large coyote, though it was hard to tell because it was still fifty meters out.
"Now detecting 53 controlled agents." Ava said right as Trent jumped in and shut the driver's side door. "Net anomalies: 53."
"Ava, increase radius to five miles." Trent instructed as he backed up all the way to the end of the lane and spun us around toward the gate. Just as we left, I saw the pack of coyotes stalking toward us, slow at first, then in a dead sprint.
"Increasing radius." Ava responded. "Increased. Recalculating… Recalculating… Re—complete. Now detecting 451 controlled agents. Net anomalies: 451."
"What does 'controlled agent' mean?" I asked.
"Hold on," Trent said and accelerated into the gate, bursting through it. The whole van shook, and I heard my phone fall in the crack between the seat and door. Trent steadied the van, then said, "It means the things chasing us are being controlled by something that isn't detectable."
"The demon?"
"That'd be my guess."
"But why can't Ava detect it?"
Trent switched to the right lane, then merged onto the Interstate-South ramp. "Probably because it isn't trying to kill us."
"Then, what—" I looked back at the map and basically had my question answered. All 451 pings were coalesced in a semicircle on one side of the map. The side of the map that we had just come from. "Is it trying to force us toward the crash site?"
"It seems that way." Trent answered.
"Trent, pull over."
"Huh?"
"Pull over!" I yelled.
He looked at me, eyes wide. Then he did as I had instructed and pulled off in the middle of the ramp. The red dots slowly closed in on our position.
"Now detecting—"
"Shut up, Ava." I said. I could feel my blood boiling. "I'm not going one step further until you tell me the truth. Why are we going to my origin point? What is your real motive?"
"What do you mean? I already told you."
I unlocked the passenger side door.
"Wait," Trent said and reached out toward me. "Just, wait."
There was silence, except for the pings indicating that the beasts behind us had re-encroached on our position to about fifty meters.
"Okay, I didn't tell you everything. But we don't have time now—"
I opened the door.
"Okay, okay. I didn't tell you everything, it's true. I've never done this with anyone else, but the reason is because I never needed to. And if I told you what might happen, you would have refused it."
"Refused what?"
"This—me, my help. Lauren, I am trying to help you. But you have to understand—it's likely that neither of us are going to live past tomorrow. You're basically confronting a dark entity in a place where I can't protect you, and if you somehow do manage to kill it, you'll be coming back to the fight of your life. Because I don't have the power to hide you from the Organization. They're going to show up and try to take you. I really don't know how you've lasted as long as you have. Whatever protection you had growing up, it's gone now. And now I'm all you have. And in some twist of fate, you're all I have."
Ava reactivated. "Now detecting 1,117 controlled agents. Proximity till contact: 20 meters. Net anomalies: 1,117."
I closed my door. "But what if I still don't want to go through with it?"
Trent pointed at the screen. "Then we die right here, right now, together. Because I am one-hundred percent certain that if we don't go to that crash site, we're dead anyway. All of us."
Another ping rolled through. I checked the side-view mirror and saw the swarming pack of dogs reach the van and bound around the rear wheels. I suddenly recalled the conversation I had with Father Martin and the conclusions I had drawn. Father, I've been… wrestling with something, and I think God wants me to confront it. I think I've been running away and hiding from it for so long that I'd convinced myself it disappeared...
"Go," I said just as I felt the collision of the coyotes slamming their bodies against the side doors.
Trent didn't waste any time stepping on the gas. I watched as the coyotes diminished in the distance and the pings receded into the back of the map, never disappearing fully, but covering the flank of our retreat—a reminder lingering on the edge of our awareness that there was no turning back now. That, one way or another, this was ending tomorrow.
And I'd either be dead, or something else entirely.

This retelling of the story contains many elements present in the actual film. Only read if you have seen the movie already.
Noa, Soona, and Anaya venture away from their village to climb the ruins and retrieve eagle eggs for the bonding ceremony the next day. They find a nest brimming with eggs. Soona and Anaya gather a clutch to share among themselves and others back in their village. However, Noa is unsatisfied with these eggs. With fire in his eyes he proclaims, “My egg is not here, it is up there at the highest point”, pointing to a nest much further up. Soona and Anaya both insist that Noa settle for one of the eggs they already have. Soona states, “Your search for glory will get you killed one day.” Nevertheless, Noa bravely scales to the top nest and retrieves the largest egg there is, nearly falling to his death in the process, but sustaining a nasty cut on his shoulder.
On the way down through the forest, Soona stops, aghast, and locks eyes with a blonde-haired human girl who is messing with the trio’s horses. Noa and Anaya soon catch up to Soona and notice the girl as well. They both scream at her and begin to chase her through the woods, but she escapes. Soona is stunned by the encounter, claiming that she saw “understanding in her eyes.” Noa and Anaya dismiss this as nonsense, seeing humans as stupid animals.
The trio returns to their village and tells everybody of their adventure. Noa goes to greet his mother, Dar. She worriedly asks Noa about his injury. Noa tells her all about his daring climb, and says that the scratch was a small price to pay for his victory. Dar congratulates her son on his exploit, but warns him not to be so reckless in the future, or he may get more than a scratch next time. Noa then goes to the top of the birdhouse to meet with his father, Koro, Master of Birds, the clan’s leader. He proudly recounts the details of his climb and presents his impressively large egg with gusto, seeking his father’s approval. Koro, unmoved by the story, points to Noa’s injury and tells him that his decision was foolish and self-serving. Noa retorts, “The elders will name me First Wing for this, surely! I am your son. I have the largest egg.” Koro replies sternly, “Stop.” He then reveals to Noa that the elders have already decided to name Soona as First Wing, an honorary title given to an exceptional acolyte which grants them the privilege to sit in on elder meetings and learn their ways. Noa is stunned by this realization, stating that he wanted more than anything to live up to his father’s name and be the best acolyte in the village. Koro tells his son he has much to learn, and that his friend Soona’s wisdom may rub off on him. Noa leaves the birdhouse, dejected.
Later that night, the acolytes gather around a campfire as Soona and Anaya dole out an eagle egg to each of them. Anaya comments “You should see the egg Noa collected. Huge!” He points to Noa’s massive egg, and the acolytes all praise Noa, who is still glum from his talk with his father. An elder then joins the acolytes. He begins to tell the tale of the very first Master of Birds, Cornelius (yes, Caesar’s son, but this fact is omitted). The legend says that he travelled from far away with only an eagle named Star as his companion. He followed Star to the valley where Eagle Clan currently lives. Along the way, he met many apes who were fascinated by his skilled handling of the eagle. They began to follow him as disciples and learned to train eagles of their own. Their ability to hunt fish in great numbers became a saving grace for many apes in the land who flocked to Cornelius’ side. His humble and generous nature inspired all and it would become the foundation for their code of conduct. Upon this code they built a great society. So was the origin of Eagle Clan.
Noa watched as Soona passed out cooked fish to each of the acolytes, contemplating why the elders chose her as First Wing instead of him. She brings Noa his meal and sits by his side. Noa tells her about his father’s displeasure with his climb despite how impressive his egg was. Soona tells Noa that his skill and bravery are unquestionable, but there is more to life than prestige and glory. All the while Soona is tending to Noa’s shoulder injury, which he is gracious for. The acolytes soon place their eggs in a tent close to the campfire and retire for the night.
In the dead of night, Noa awakens wincing in pain from his shoulder cut, and he decides to pace the village courtyard, apparently still ruminating over his father’s discontent. Just then, Noa hears stirring near the egg tent, and he notices a dark figure sprint away into the woods. Noa goes to investigate the tent and discovers some eggs broken on the ground, but also that the rest of the eggs have been taken, including his prized egg. Noa is furious. He immediately rushes out of the tent and books it into the woods after the thief. Anaya is roused by the commotion and decides to get up. Some time later, Noa is wandering deep in the woods when he notices a campfire in the distance. As he moves closer, he discovers the same blonde-haired girl from the day before kneeling before the fire, cooking the eggs and eating them. Noa is baffled, but he decides to sneak up behind the girl, who is frightened. As she backs away from Noa, she bumps right into Anaya, who has apparently followed Noa.
The two arrive back at their village with their human captive at the break of dawn. They take her directly to Koro and explain to him that the bonding ceremony must be postponed because the human girl stole the eggs. Koro gathers the elders. Noa explains to them what happened and tells them that the human girl had made a fire and was cooking the eggs, which is received with disbelief and confusion from the elders. But Anaya affirms Noa’s claim. One elder then says, “It can’t be true. Humans cannot even speak.” Then astoundingly, the human girl grunts, demanding attention, and demonstrates sign language, signing, “I can speak.” Everybody is bewildered by this. Koro then begins inquiring about the girl’s origins and her purpose for coming to their village. Noa becomes frustrated by this development, insisting that she be punished for ruining their ceremony. Koro decides to dismiss Noa and Anaya, urging them to keep the girl a secret for the time being.
Outside, Noa expresses his anger at not being recognized for any of his deeds. Anaya rebuts that the girl’s intelligence is an ominous sign and that it is wise that the elders deal with this matter, which further irks Noa. Anaya announces to everybody that the bonding ceremony will be postponed until further notice while the elders deliberate on an important matter. Noa gathers his things, mounts his horse and leaves the village. He travels back to the ruins in a vein attempt to collect more eagle eggs, but his shoulder injury hinders his climbing, so he gives up. He spends the day alone overlooking the valley. That afternoon, Noa spots a large band of mounted apes in the distance, on a path leading to his village. Noa rushes down to his horse and high-tails it through the woods to warn his clan of the approaching outsiders.
In the elders’ tent, Koro and the others continue to question the human girl, whose name is Mae. She proves to be coherent and her mental faculties impress the elders. Koro asks if Mae is alone, to which she replies, “I was with mother. She is gone now. She searched for Cornelius Clan.” The elders look at one another in amazement. Koro replies, “We are Eagle Clan, descendants of Cornelius.” Mae’s eyes brighten with intrigue. She points to Koro, “You are children of Caesar?” Koro’s eyes are wide with disbelief “Caesar?!” The elders hoot and holler at this comment, seemingly astonished and excited. Koro asks, “Who is your mother?” Mae spells out, “April.” Koro asks, “Where is she now?” Mae falls silent and becomes overwhelmed with grief. Koro holds her in a gentle embrace. Mae replies tearfully, “Masked apes kill her.” The elders grow still. One of them states bitterly, “Proximus!” Mae then says, “I am alone now.” Koro speaks to her reassuringly, “We are here with you.”
At the village perimeter, Noa rides in frantically, shouting “Outsiders approach! To arms!” Anaya, Soona, and others scramble to secure the village perimeter. Soon, dozens of mounted apes arrive at the village edge, led by a gorilla. Noa, still hot-tempered from everything going on, takes point and addresses the gorilla leader, asking him, “What is your business here?” Remaining on his horse the gorilla condescendingly replies, “Boy, fetch your elders. I will make my business known to them.” Noa replies fiercely, “You speak to the son of Koro, Master of Birds. What is your business here?” The gorilla laughs and says, “Your father never was one for discipline…such as you are. Such is life without Proximus. Hail, Caesar!” “Hail, Caesar!” exclaims the band of outsiders.
Inside the elder’s tent, Koro and the others are horrified to hear the chant. Koro tells the elders to hide the girl. Back at the village perimeter, the gorilla concedes, “We are tracking a human girl. Have you seen her?” Noa’s stern face falters and he hesitates to answer. A short pause precedes his response, “Perhaps.” The gorilla smiles large and replies slowly, “Really?” Just then, Koro yells from across the courtyard, “Sylva!” He approaches the gorilla leader briskly with a fierce gaze. Sylva finally dismounts his horse and replies, “Koro, my friend. Good to see you once more.” Koro responds, “You are aware of our agreement? There will be peace.” Sylva says, “Absolutely! By the grace of Proximus your dominion is assured. I come on a separate matter entirely. Koro asks, “Which is?” Sylva replies, “I am searching for a human girl, an enemy to Proximus.” Koro abruptly replies, “My clan will not be involved in Proximus’ feuds.” Sylva says, “The rewards for lending Proximus your aid are very attractive, you know this, yes?” Koro says, “I ask nothing of Proximus, even if I could help you in your search, which I cannot.” Sylva looks angry now, as he eyes Noa, then looks back at Koro. Then he approaches Koro and reaches to his shoulder slowly, extracting a single, long, blonde hair from his clothing. Sylva holds this hair a moment before casting it aside, stating ominously, “You know the consequences for standing against our Caesar.” Thunder erupts and sounds in the distance. Koro, mortified, says as calmly as he can, “You and your apes must be going now. There is a storm approaching.” The village soldiers grip their spears threateningly, waiting for a response. Sylva, sensing the tension and hearing more thunder responds to Koro, “Yes, there is.” He then remounts his horse and orders his apes to move out. They all leave the village and disappear over the horizon.
Noa approaches his father demanding answers, but Koro walks past him back to the elders’ tent. Soon after, the elders announce a hasty bonding ceremony without any eggs. Soona is named First Wing. She is then asked to join the elders and meets Mae. Soona is seen hearing troubling news from the elders, but it is not revealed what. Outside, the rain begins to fall as the thunderstorm rolls in. The storm continues into the late evening. Soona emerges from the elder tent and goes to gather her things, apparently preparing for travel. Noa and Anaya approach her, asking her where she is going. Soona says she will be escorting one of the elders along with Mae to a holy place far away in the Forbidden Valley. Noa is confused as to why the elders think the girl is so important. Anaya agrees, saying it would be much easier to give the girl to Sylva. Soona insists that the elders have a plan.
Noa goes to the birdhouse to meet again with his father. He expresses disapproval at his father’s decision to conceal Mae’s presence from Sylva and also to send Soona out to escort Mae. Koro insists it is for a greater purpose, that the girl has information that could destroy Proximus’ kingdom and ensure a permanent peace for the Eagle Clan. Noa says that he wants to go with Soona to ensure she is safe. Koro tells him he must stay and help prepare the village perimeter for when Sylva and his riders return after the storm. Suddenly, a terrible noise sounds out through the rain and the darkness; the sound of a horn. The riders have returned for battle. Koro says despairingly, “No.”
End of Part 1.

My cousin sister (F 25) works in a private financial firm in a tier 2 city. Over the past 2.5 years she has been working in the govt. sales department in the above said firm.
Ever since her current manager has officially taken over as her direct supervisor, he has made her life a living hell. Here's a gist of what she has been going through since the past year or so:

1. Constant humiliation in workspace in front of her entire team, supervisors and others.
   
2. Snatching credit for her hard work and gaslighting her into believing that her work is insignificant.
   
3. He ogles at her in a very noticeable manner in the workspace.
   
4. He passes comments on her looks, body language, makeup, etc. (not all the time, but it has occurred enough times already) and seeks validation from others on the same.
   
5. Constantly putting her down officially over emails, creating a bad impression of her in front of her super boss (basically boss's boss).
   
6. Reallocating her assignments, projects and clients without any prior intimation and later blaming her for any mess-ups and lack of follow ups.
   

With so much of work already on her plate, this behaviour has worsened the situation drastically. She is mentally and physically drained and finds herself alone in the office. She is now completely isolated from her team and others on the floor. There is absolutely no one who can either defend her or even empathize/sympathize with her. Such a toxic workplace experience has her literally crying every day in the office. As her well-wisher and a very close relative, I really want to help her out in the situation. However, I also need to ensure that any step/procedure taken does not backfire and affect her career as well.
Here are my questions:
​

1. Is there a way to lodge a formal complaint? As a first step I am thinking of asking her to write an Email to the HR and the relevant committee and CC everyone from the higher ups (Right from the CEO level) to help escalate this matter immediately. Moreover, it would also bring about an urgency to the entire affair.
2. Since these actions are all verbal/informal (They are in the workplace though), how can she go about collecting evidence for the same? There is no one who will come out in support of her since no one would dare go against their supervisor. I have asked her to collect whatever screenshot or evidence she can get her hands on so that there is relevance to her complaint.
3. According to her, she is looking to make the complaint as soon as she finds a switch from this organization. She fears that any complaint made prior to having an alternative at hand would rather get her fired from the company and hence deem her unemployed.
4. I was thinking of encouraging her to lodge a formal complaint to the NCW; however, I do not know the efficacy of the same. Additionally I also want to know whether these ongoing investigations/procedures affect her as well? Would she also be liable to suspension or loss of pay?

I will add a few more points in the comments whenever I remember them. For now, I would really appreciate all your help. As enraged as I am with all of this right now, I don't think I can myself tolerate the manager trying to torture my sister any longer. I need her to execute this entire task perfectly.
Edit: Thank you so much for your assistance and insight! A few points I wanted to clarify here:

1. She works for a highly prominent MNC which happens to have a branch in the tier 2 city.
   
2. She has always been vocal about the situation and has both directly and indirectly expressed her discomfort to the manager directly as well as the senior manager on multiple occasions.
   
3. Many have suggested resignation as a sensible step forward; she is considering the same and is actively applying for a new position within the same org (diff city) or a new company altogether.
   

Nobody asked me for this but I'm doing either way

Favorites

Magical miracle Midoriya
Midoriya Izuku is fourteen when fate grants him ultimate power in the form of a Magical Girl.
With the ability to swap between two bodies Izuku must learn what it truly means to be someone people can look up to, all while managing the craziness of becoming a girl at will and a new double life as both zero and hero.
But all is not well in the city of Musutafu, and darkness lies just beyond the horizon. Strange, powerful monsters begin attacking Japan, but hold back from hurting humans. Conspiracies and schemes writhe in the shadows, pieces moving atop the chessboard held by unseen hands. It's up to Izuku to save the day... or die trying.
112k words Unfinished.
A Spanner in the Clockworks
When Izuku wakes up in the forest not far from his home, he isn't prepared for what's about to come next. Izuku's never dealt with time travel, after all, but that seems to be the least of his worries. He's not in his own timeline, for one, and he may or may not have been missing for the past few months.
With the threat of a future only Izuku knows about, a strange missing persons case, everyone around him getting suspicious, and a quirk he shouldn't have, Izuku has his work cut out for him.
166k words Unfinished.
Ignite to the Call
Last night, they went to bed in their dorms.
This morning, they woke up in either A) an abandoned building, B) unfamiliar apartments with unfamiliar school uniforms, C) a plush bedroom nicer than their entire house... or D) the League of Villains' headquarters, because of COURSE Izuku still manages to draw the shortest straw even when others are screwed over too.
UA tries its best to prepare its students for anything, but one topic it never covered: what to do if you wake up in an alternate dimension. Six students suddenly find themselves in an unfamiliar world where the balance between Heroes and Villains is more unstable than ever and they have no idea how they got there or to get home. All they know is that this world is horribly wrong, and they're largely on their own. (Well, except Izuku, but he thinks he'd prefer that.)
610k words Unfinished.
Indefinite
It comes with the package deal of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Midoriya gets another chance at life, but he must throw it away when that dreaded day comes. After all, a life for nineteen is more than a fair trade.
Or: the world will rise or fall, and it depends on one boy protecting Class 1-A to prevent the inevitable.
355k words Unfinished.
Switchblade
"I’m only two minutes late!” Izuku protested. Had he missed the start of an important test? None of the national, standardized tests were supposed to happen this month and even being two minutes late to one of those wouldn’t elicit this sort of reaction. They were discussing their career interest forms today, but that was it. Nothing time-critical was supposed to be happening.
“Midoriya, you were reported missing a week ago. No one has seen you for eight days. The police have been combing the city for you.”
"I’m sorry. What?”
Midoriya Izuku went missing for a week and turned up in a back alleyway with skills he's never even heard of and no memory of how he came by them. He resigns himself to never learning the truth of what happened to him, but he shouldn't waste this chance should he? He could become a hero with reflexes like these.
333k words Finished.

Good ones

Bloom in Winter
Izuku Midoriya used to want to be a hero. It seems a distant dream, now, after everything that he's done—after everything that he's been made to do. But it's still there. It's a dim, flickering flame, burning lower by the day.
He doesn't have time to concern himself with that though, these days he's too focused on staying alive to think too much about what he can never have.
Then All Might takes a job teaching at UA, and the universe says hey you know what would be fun? What if we fucked Izuku over even more than we already have? and thus, Izuku ends up in the General Education class of UA with strict instructions to report everything he can, because, thank fucking no one, he just can't catch a goddamn break.
AKA Hisashi Midoriya is a member of one of the most notorious underground supervillain organizations, and Izuku is being forced to help them (even though, trust him, he'd really rather not). Too bad that they don't predict that Izuku's going to get adopted by half the faculty when they send him to spy on the prestigious hero academy.
132k words Unfinished.
A Danngerous Game
When Midoriya Izuku is 13 years old, he is kidnapped on his way home from school by a villain. One year later he is found and returned home with some scars, no memories of the events he went through, and a latent fire quirk. Izuku has to live a double life if he and his loved ones are to survive, even if that means lying to everyone and committing deeds that he’s not sure the heroes would forgive him for. He just needs to come up with a plan to defeat one of the most powerful men in the world, maintain both of his covers in the presence of enemies and allies alike, and hopefully not forget the “real” him.
Bakugou Katsuki is certain that Izuku has been lying to everyone since the day he had been rescued. And he’s going to figure out his secret.
473k words Finished.
What We Lost to the Fire
“Did you catch him, Endeavor?” Izuku asks as he stares up, up, up at the behemoth of a man. Cold, blue eyes turn to him, his hard expression never changing. No one says anything for a moment.
"I will,” Endeavor says finally. “Someday, I will find that man.”
Izuku accepts the promise with a nod. He has no tears left and wouldn’t have squandered them on Midoriya Hisashi if he did, so he simply bows deeply to the hero.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, Izuku. It is my duty. He has disgraced the Todoroki clan for the last time. We will not allow this villain to sully our family name any further.”
Izuku straightens, confusion clear on his face.
“You don’t know why I am here, do you?” Endeavor asks, “Midoriya Hisashi was born Todoroki Hisashi, my younger brother. You are my nephew.”
140k words Finished.
uneasy lies the head
Izuku thinks selfishly that maybe Aizawa did care for him even on the first day they met. Izuku cared for him, too, perhaps a lot more than the other did for him, and that’s alright. After this, Izuku will have to go away from him, and there’s nothing more to say on that.
So Izuku guesses his part in Aizawa’s story will end just as bitter as it first began, with Izuku caring for him and missing all the chances to say it.
865k words Unfinished
Time is a circle
Izuku has a quirk, but he doesn’t know it. When he was four years old, he made friends with a sickly little boy at the park. His friend’s older brother had the same first name as his father. Neither of them knew much about current events. Izuku happily provided the older brother with information about politics and stock market movements. (Izuku has no idea that he has a quirk, but his father has known for a very, very long time.)
7k One-shot
Jackal's Song
Midoriya Izuku doesn't know how any of this happened. Really, he doesn't. All he was trying to do was track down a few faces from his past, and maybe find a little forgiveness along the way.
Aizawa Shouta wants to pull the new vigilante off the streets of the worst district in Musutafu before he gets caught by Seven's shadow, The Jackal.
Takami Keigo is looking to take down a renowned serial killer and urban legend known as The Jackal before he hurts anyone else.
Dabi is just trying to protect the very concerning Skoll from a monster they just can't catch.
Yamada Hizashi really isn't concerned with any of this, only wanting to forcefully adopt the cute kid that's been calling in to his radio show.
279k words Unfinished.

Hi everyone. I joined a tech company slightly over 6 months ago as a full-time employee. The role has been largely a training one, where we are required to get certain certs and shadow senior engineers within our practice.
Truth be told I have not enjoyed the job since day 1, and slacked off greatly at the beginning due to some personal issues to the point where I honestly never ended up starting because it felt too late. I have not submitted any timesheets, worked through any of the material provided, and have been coasting underneath the cracks.
I just got a new manager 4 weeks ago and he has been on my tail and been scheduling multiple meetings a week. I initially expressed interest in resigning because I sensed the end was near and felt embarassed having to show how little I did. My manager scheduled a meeting with himself, an HR rep, and me. On the call I said I would like to resign 5 weeks from today. They said no if you want to resign it must be today and we will pay you for the next 2 weeks with no severance. I said can I get a day to think about it and they said no you must tell us now. I said I will not resign.
Ever since then my manager had been sending me multiple emails a day, nitpicking everything from grammatical mistakes in my emails to giving me hour-by-hour deadlines, while copying HR and his director to each email. The thing is, I WANT to get fired, so I cam recieve unemployment here in Texas. The problem is, in our state, the employer has to approve your unemployment claim.
My fear is if they see how little I've done, which is next to nothing, they will deny my unemployment claim. I've been randomly using PTO to avoid meetings so I don't have to share my screen and show how little I've done. What should I do so I am terminated, but also to ensure I get my full unemployment benefits while I search for a new job?
In response to a lot of the negative comments, I feel I should add a couple things:
A.) I genuinely did try at the beginning. Unfortunately, I have crippling ADHD that I finally got diagnosed for last week. I come from a very traditional culture where ADHD is viewed as "Western nonsense" and so I always blamed myself (sadly still do). I would sit there at my desk from 9 am to 4 pm and on most days struggle to get more than thirty minutes of work done despite my best efforts.
B.) I'm underqualified for the role. They desperately needed someone for the position, and I'd briefly dabbled in the tech used in this role, so they hired me rather quickly. From day one, I've had severe imposter syndrome and struggled to learn the content.
C.) I have a young son. Even if I may come across as lazy and undeserving to those of you who are genuinely fortunate enough to not be able to relate to me, I'm just trying to get some unemployment benefits for the sake of my kiddo and to make sure they end up better than me.
Sorry for not mentioning this earlier. I just struggle to be vulnerable:)

'Twas a busy day above the clouds,
He sat placidly on his throne,
None other than the grand God himself
With frosty stare and heart of stone.
▫️
Heaven was quite abuzz today,
The souls present pointed and jeered
At a frail girl of fragile frame,
Her expression devoid of fear.
▫️
Her hair hung limply about her face,
Life's struggles had weathered her down,
She stood motionless as one defeated
Like a queen who had lost her crown.
▫️
Tears stained both her pale cheeks
Her eyes, swollen and red,
Heart blackened with misery and sorrow,
Bruises across her form were spread.
▫️
"Away with you, you miserable creature!
What evils doth thee bear?!
Away and fie you foul presence!"
the good Lord screamed and glared.
▫️
And the meek girl with the mild eyes
Says, with lips curled into a smile,
"Away I shall go, but before I do,
Lend me your ear for a while."
▫️
What the girl said next, silenced all present
The Lord's countenance went bleak,
For her tale was the stuff of reality,
And the truth was all she did speak.
▫️
"You make a mockery of how I look
You taunt my soul laid bare,
But for what I am today O Lord,
The blame you alone must share!"
▫️
"You preach your followers of lofty ideals,
When you yourself do possess none!
The creation you have made in your image
Has allowed honesty to come undone!"
▫️
"My eyes look thus, from a lifetime of angst
Which you so generously bestowed!
While cruelty won through unjust means,
With your absolute blessings in tow."
▫️
"I strived to keep living through kindness,
Making integrity my first aim,
For which you gifted my life with darkness
Helping others cheat their way in the game!"
▫️
"And finally, when all was said and done,
You despised that I still survived,
So you shredded and brutalized my soul
Leaving bruises and rejoicing my demise!"
▫️
A deathly silence fell upon the gathering
In Heaven that fateful day,
As the Lord coldly contemplated her speech,
And glanced the other way.
▫️
His eyes spotted the other souls,
Watching Him menacingly from the crowd.
They goaded His ego, flashed Him bribes,
Reminding Him of His sinister Vow.
▫️
"You have stated, all that you wished,
And they hold no value", says He,
"Other's demands come before your own
For they are the special ones you see."
▫️
With that announcement He shut the Gates
Upon the girl's resigned yet smirking face;
She never expected Him to act any different,
As upon Him is modelled the human race.
▫️
And thus we learn, ladies and gentlemen,
Lord & Satan are two sides of the same coin,
To the meek of the Earth, He is Evil,
To the wicked of the Earth, He is Kind.
▫️
Legend has it, her soul still roams the Earth,
Protecting and helping all to this day,
Frolicking among the trees and hills,
Keeping the living out of harm's way.
▫️
Because, you see, when it comes to Life,
Evil always gets a free pass,
So the wicked souls all rise to Heaven,
And the good souls finish last.

Writing your own message where you state your personal concerns about the UAP matter would be preferred, but if you can't be bothered to do that then here's an easy template you can send. You can also edit this template if you want to suit your specific concerns better, or maybe offer to me some improvements that I could make to this template - that would be highly appreciated.
Subject: URGENT ACTION NEEDED - Protect representative Robert Garcia's UAP Amendment in 2025 NDAA
Dear congressperson/representative [Last Name].
I hope this message finds you well. I am reaching out to you today to express my strong support for the proposed amendment to Rules Committee Print 118-36, offered by Mr. Robert Garcia of California, regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure. This amendment seeks to establish an independent agency, the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Review Board, tasked with reviewing, transmitting, and publicly disclosing government records related to unidentified anomalous phenomena.
The establishment of this Review Board is crucial for ensuring transparency and accountability in the government's handling of information related to UAPs. As a concerned citizen, I believe it is essential that the American people have access to the truth about these phenomena, which have significant implications for national security, public safety, and scientific understanding.
A congressional hearing on UAPs was held on July 26th 2023 by the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign affairs. Testimony given by former Air Force intelligence veteran David Grusch in that hearing has made it abduntantly clear that one of two things is happening right now:

1. The U.S. government has mounted an extraordinary, decades-long cover-up of UAP retrieval and reverse-engineering activities. They are potentially in possession of superior non-polluting, extremely advanced technologies and exotic propulsion of non-human origin but are withholding it from the public. That is completely unacceptable considering the terrible state our planet is in this day and age.
2. Elements of the defense and intelligence establishment are engaging in a straggeringly immoral and shameless psychological disinformation campaign.

Both of these possibilities are deeply troubling and demand urgent attention.
A cover-up would imply, at the very least, misappropiation of funds. This is theft of the American taxpayer. The Intelligence Community Inspector General has deemed these claims to be credible and urgent.
I humbly request you to take swift action to advocate for the passage of Robert Garcia's UAP Amendment in congress and into the National Defense Authorization Act of FY2025. The American people deserve to know the facts about UAPs and to end the decades-long disinformation campaign that has obscured the truth. This is a critical piece of legislation, and it failing to pass would represent a significant setback in our pursuit of transparency and accountability regarding UAPs.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I am hopeful that my concerns will be taken into account and I look forward to hearing about your efforts in this important matter.
https://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/GARCRO_115_xml240529153551283.pdf
Sincerely,
[Your Full Name]
[Your Address]
[City, State, ZIP Code]
[Email Address]
[Phone Number]
Please send this template to your respective elected officials using the link https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials.
You can also contact them through the New Paradigm Institute https://newparadigminstitute.org/actions/uapda-2025/
Follow up in three weeks if you do not receive a response.

Hello everyone,
I was recently offered full funding for my master's program by a professor who has been incredibly supportive and helpful with my queries and doubts. Unfortunately/Fortunately, I have received a better funding offer from a different professor and have decided to accept that offer. I am concerned about how to decline the original offer without appearing ungrateful or rude, considering the significant assistance the professor has provided.
Could anyone provide advice or a sample template for writing a polite and respectful letter to this professor? I want to ensure that I express my sincere gratitude and appreciation for their support.
Thank you in advance for your help!