Welcome back for our final discussion of Anne of Ingleside.
Chapter 31
We return to the saga of Nan's identity crisis. She's guilt-ridden over the thought that she is living the life that Cassie Thomas was meant to have. After getting bullied by poor kids who think she's stuck up, Nan managed to find the house, but Cassie and her father, Six-toed Jimmy, aren't home. Cassie's stepmother invites her in because of the storm, and I just want to point out that the narrator refers to her as "Mrs. Six-toed." 😁 (To be honest, though, I was kind of shocked by the classism in this part of the book. The poor kids immediately bully Nan? Mrs. Six-toed's baby is covered in dirt?) Anyhow, Mrs. Six-toed is a decent person, and sets Nan straight on the record of her identity. Nan goes home and tells Anne what happened, and everything's finally alright.
Chapter 32
Do you know what Mary Anna said to me the other day? She said that this chapter sucked. Anne has a bunch of women over for quilting, and Walter listens in on their gossip. Most of the gossip is boring IMO, but we do get a vague hint about a funeral that went very wrong...
Chapter 33
...yay, Anne gives us the dirt on the funeral! Some guy died, and the sister of his first wife crashed the funeral to tell everyone what an abusive asshole he'd been to his first wife. I'm kind of weirded out that this story is in an Anne of Green Gables book. WTF.
Chapter 34
L. M. Montgomery went "oh shit, this was supposed to be a children's book," stopped talking about abusive dead people, and introduced a lisping little girl and an adorably childish misunderstanding. Little Rilla once saw some bullies make fun of someone who happened to be carrying a cake, and drew the conclusion that cake-carrying is embarrassing. Unfortunately, Susan has baked a cake and wants Rilla to carry it to the church for the Orphanage Social. It thucks to be you, Rilla.
Rilla almost makes it to the church, but then she sees her Sunday School teacher, and is so ashamed of being seen with the cake that she tosses it in the brook. But she finds out that the Sunday School teacher is also carrying a cake. Realizing her mistake, Rilla confesses to Anne and Susan, who aren't angry at her.
Chapters 35 and 36
Nan loves to make up stories about people and places. One day, she overhears Susan saying that a woman has moved into a nearby abandoned house. Susan says that the woman is reclusive and doesn't go to church and broke hearts when she was younger, so Nan's imagination turns the house into a Gothic mansion and the woman into a beautiful, tragic villainess. Anne eventually sends Nan on an errand to the house, and Nan is completely heartbroken to discover that the woman is, in fact, a perfectly normal person, an old widow who has grandchildren. I realize that this is just one of those "Haunted Wood" plots that come up so often in these books, but if Nan ever takes up writing, I will read her novels.
Chapters 37 and 38
For some reason, Diana attracts manipulative people like fly paper. I think they can smell her gullibility or something. Listen, kids, if someone ever says to you "I want to be your friend exclusively, and you can never be friends with anyone else ever again," and then tries to kiss you, you run in the other direction as fast as you can. Especially if they also say things like "other people are deceitful" and "no one has ever loved me." That's called "manipulation." Can you say "manipulation," Diana? I knew you could.
Anyhow, Diana tells Anne about Delilah allegedly being starved and abused by her evil stepmother. Anne's like "didn't we already do this story arc? Wasn't she named Jenny Penny?" and Diana's like "you don't know what it's like to be beaten and starved!" and Anne's like "why does everyone always forget about my tragic backstory?" I should also point out that Delilah's abuse includes being starved and being forced to eat with the servants, and Diana apparently does not see this as a plot hole.
Diana invites Delilah to visit her, and everything goes great until the next day at school, when Diana overhears Delilah telling horrible lies about her and her family. (This includes calling the Shrimp a "mangy old tomcat." How dare she!) Diana is forced to admit that she got Jenny Penny'd again.
Chapter 39
Anne's in a bad mood. She feels like Gilbert has been distant lately, and they've just been invited to a dinner with Christine Stuart. Remember her from Anne of the Island? Anne thought Christine and Gilbert were engaged. Jealousy time.
Chapters 40 and 41
Anne spends the entire dinner jealously convinced that Gilbert still has feelings for Christine. In the end, though, we learn that the real reason for Gilbert's behavior is simply that he's been anxious over possibly having misdiagnosed a patient. But the patient really did need the surgery after all, is recovering now, and everything's okay again.
The story ends with Anne looking at her sleeping children, and everything is wonderful aside from L. M. Montgomery dropping an absolutely horrifying spoiler for a future book for some reason. I'm hoping the spoiler went over everyone's heads or something, but I'll mention it in spoiler tags in the comment section, if anyone wants to discuss it.

TL;DR

Great community. Excellent at expressing "math". Very fast language. Almost great REPL. Immature ecosystem. Inconvenient debugging. Bad code organization.

Background

Recently I finished a decently sized Julia project (~3100 LoC), and I'd like to share my experience of using the language. It's mostly about developer experience, so I hope these will provide insights for language developers and users.
Before this project, I've already used Julia plenty of times, mostly to analyze some experiment data generated by other programs. They are generally fairly clean, because I want the data to be as easily usable in as many languages as possible, but they can be very large. I would generally implement some sort of streaming analysis, then generate various summary tables or plots.
I think Julia is pretty good in this kind of tasks (with some caveats, see later section on IO), but this project is different. All data are generated within Julia and analyzed in Julia, requiring more careful planning.

Project Overview

What I am building is a "one-off" racing game simulator. I have pre-made a set of rules, a definition of the racing track, two characters, and their skills. I have a fairly peculiar goal for this game: I will roll up some sort of AI for each character, then iterate through a set of random seeds, and I will see if Player A beats Player B, ever. Then I visualize the results and shelf the project. Therefore, I am writing code that only needs to be generic enough for this one specific match, and I don't intend it to be usable in any other situation.
There are four significant tasks of the project. First, I must import data of race tracks and characters into Julia. Second, I need to implement the rule sets of the game. Third, I need to implement AI for each player. Fourth, I need to visualize a finished game. Each of these tasks gave unique challenges and stresses different Julia features.
The race track is defined as a triangle outer bound, and Bezier curves on each corner. I did not use any existing Bezier libraries, but implemented the Quadratic Bezier formulae directly. To make it usable in a game, I must implement several data conversions: track position to world coordinates (i.e. arc-length parameterize), altitude, gradient, and curvature. Due to Bezier curves don't really have a closed-form solution of arc-length parameterization, I ended up using a numerical solution and just cached the results at 0.1mm precision and lerp in game (which turns out to be a bit bugged if the input is exactly on top of a sampled point... but thankfully it didn't happen in game). Resulting "acceleration structure" took about 760MB in memory.
The rule set of the game is implemented in a large Game structure with several layers of state machines, not unlike any other game. There are two tricky parts in this process: the game must take snapshots every turn for replay, and there must be an extensible API to code the interaction between players, their AI, and their skills, all of which are stateful. Everything in the rule set is implemented in base Julia. Sanity check is provided by having the same methods on each structure meant to represent the same thing (e.g. track definition, bezier representation, and acceleration structure), and overlay them on the same plot. Not the most robust method, but for a one-off program it's fine.
The AI is a substantial part of the project. An early attempt was to use ReinforcementLearning.jl to train the AI, but it was too complicated for the project scope, and thus I ended up tailoring hard coded AIs for each player. These hard coded AI command nearly 20 different skills, and themselves have multiple stages, feedback loops, and "mind-reading" (i.e. accessing another AI's internal state due to... narrative reasons). At the end, each AI is its own finite state machine, using various algorithms, closed-form formulae, heuristics, and PID control to make decision about what speed and what lane it wants to go in this turn. It's only two outputs and the code is already very complicated! Thankfully I decided against allowing the AI to decide which skills to fire... For something so entangled, I want Julia to catch as much mistakes as possible. I used abstract classes to implement AI and their skills.
The visualization has multiple purpose. It plots the track to show if there's any data import errors. It shows how each state variable change during a race. It generates an animation as if we are actually watching the game in real time. This tool is indispensable not only because it helps debugging, but also keeps me motivated as I see each milestone is reached, the data shows. I used CairoMakie extensively for visualization.
This is not all the details of the project, but those are not important. Let's start talking about Julia!

TTFX

Time-to-first-X, an ancient problem in Julia due to its JIT compilation. With Julia 1.9 and 1.10 (I started with 1.9, and later 1.10 released and I upgraded), TTFX is not a big problem. It will still take a few seconds to recompile the package or when plotting the first figure, but long gone are the days when I needed to wait for minutes to start the REPL. I'd say, TTFX is not a big issue now.

Community

The community is awesome. I received so many help from Discord channel and Discourse that without them, I would have never... actually, I would still have finished the project, but with a lot more hurdles. Counterintuitively, questions on Discourse get responses much quicker than Discord, so I recommend using that. The forum format also allows any questions to persist so others can find an answer later.

Code Organization

Ok...
Code organization needs to be explained in much, much more detail by official documentation. Whatever that's in there is nowhere near enough, as it took me a long time just to figure out how to have both a package and a top-level script. I also disagree with some of the advice in official documents:

• I advice against using include. Use single-file modules and Reexport.jl instead.
• I strongly advice against using nocase naming. Please use snake_case instead.

Read these methods generated by Makie's @recipe:
julia trackbounds!(ax, track) trackcornerhandles!(ax, track) trackdefinitionvisual!(ax, track)
You get the idea.
For those interested, I use VSCode. I have a package set up, whose source file are under src/, and top-level scripts under scripts/. During development, I activate the environment of the package and evaluate code cells in these top level script. It served me well so far, except for one issue: I cannot specify development-time dependencies and required dependencies. Therefore, the package's Project.toml gets littered with unnecessary deps like benchmark tools.
That's only the first problem.

Code Structure

The official recommendation of organizing modules, is to have a module file include multiple "sub-files":
```julia

ModuleA.jl

module ModuleA include("./a.jl") include("./b.jl") end ```
In my opinion, this is just not a good idea. I use it in this project because it's the most convenient, but if this of all things is the most convenient organization method in Julia, the language can use some better module system.
The main problem is that, Julia code can break due to the order of definition. With this scheme of direct include, the order of inclusion critical. In fact, plenty of errors I encountered were due to seemingly unrelated code in another file. Especially if somewhere there's an unmatched end, I could have to go through every single file, spotting line by line, manually, to fix an error that's reported nowhere close to its origin. Due to how include works, the scope of an unclosed end could leek beyond file boundary, and cause problem somewhere completely unexpected.
Another problem is that when reading another person's code, especially on Github or other places where an LSP is not available, it's very difficult to find where a symbol is defined: if I am reading b.jl, anything there could be defined in ModuleA.jl or a.jl.
I'll just straight up say that it's worse that #include in C. In C, there's at least forward declaration that allows me to break cycles without shuffling stuff between files. Unfortunately, Julia doesn't have that.
An alternative is to use one module per file and import by using. I think this is better, as it keeps related definition close to each other, and while using doesn't show what symbols are imported, at least I know that something is being imported from a specific module. Unmatched end also tend to get caught at module boundary. However, when using small modules, Reexport.jl is pretty much mandatory, otherwise it'd be extremely tedious to specify everything that needs to be exported on every level of imports.
Another alternative is to break up code into separate packages. It might be a me problem, but I find this very tedious to set up. This is especially true because this is a one-off program: I don't know the best structure of the code beforehand. This is also similar to research code: I won't even know what code to write until I run some experiments. Packages are quite inflexible due to how manifests work. I can't safely rename packages without breaking not just the current project, but the entire local cached registry, due to duplicate UUID and such. It might be a good idea for a large library, but for something in early development, I don't think packages are a good idea.

Naming

Naming is hard [citation needed]. Let me reiterate: use snake_case for functions and PascalCase for types. Please don't use nocase, even though the official docs recommend it.
One of Julia's most powerful tools is multimethods. Multimethods that natively supports auto-vectorization. I use these extensively, from defining formal (i.e. abstract class) or informal (i.e. a collection of methods) interfaces. I enjoy the ability to just vectorize a function I wrote, such as:
julia curves = curvature.(Ref(t), xs)
There are a few caveats related to naming. That is, it is quite easy to accidentally not just shadow, but also change a global definition, if I don't name stuff right.
Take the following example:
```julia

a.jl

function curvature(...) end

b.jl

function some_other_function() ... curvature = ... end ```
Well, apparently after this executes, curvature's definition is overwritten and every other code is broken. The LSP doesn't catch this very often (see later section: LSP), but if you see that a variable's color is strange, check immediately. Also for this reason, I start to think that get_something() is a better method name than something. Or maybe something_of() and verb_noun().
Related, it is pretty easy to make a mistake when defining multimethods:
```julia module A method_a(a::AbstactA) = error("method_a() is not defined for $(typeof(a))") end
struct ConcreteA <: AbstractA end method_a(a: ConcreteA) = ... ```
This method_a is not the same as the one in the module, because the correct way is to define A.method_a. LSP will not catch this error. I do not really have a solution for the this problem, because the ability to define such multimethods is a major feature of Julia. The best suggestion I have, is to write clear runtime error messages like the one above, so if I encounter an error, I know immediately which method and which type is the culprit.
Finding symbols in Julia is... hard. The ? command will show every method with the same name, and I haven't found a way around it. VSCode's LSP also doesn't reliably find the correct definition. For a dynamic language, it is probably inevitable. I wouldn't say that it is more difficult than, say, Python, unless you deal with a mess of include.

Enums

I used the @enum macros a few times in my code.
Don't use them, really. They are not namespaced, there's no multi dispatch, and there's no pattern match. Abstract classes are more powerful.

Ecosystem

It's not very mature. The package manager is pretty good, especially when coming to native libraries (*_jll). However, pretty much in every aspect I attempted in this project, I have to use some half-dead semi-documented packages. They are so prevalent that there are only a few packages that I would say are not half-dead and are adequately documented:

• Base
• Makie
• DataStructures
• Random
• JSON3
• DataFrames

And... that's about it. Reading code is absolutely required, and good luck with all the include messing with scopes. Julia is surprisingly lacking in the more basic mathematics department. The first open source numerical software I used was Octave, and it had many packages implementing features of Matlab. Then there's Scipy and Sympy that almost reach feature parity to both of them. And then Julia's equivalent are consist of a bunch of zombie packages, with nowhere near their feature sets. I am talking about basic stuff like statistics, distributions, symbolics, signal processing, etc.
When I was implementing the first version with reinforced learning, I had to dig through 10 different packages and locating symbols that cross using, include, native code, and Pycall. Later, I encountered a bug in Makie, and its code is no easier to navigate due to the proliferation of macros and kwargs. For lower-level packages, I can probably work around by implementing parts with my own code, but Julia packages tend to be overabstracted. If there's a problem in a package, that's it: it has to be fixed in that package. There's no way to circumvent them, only hoping that either I can learn the package enough to fix them, or hope that a fix will be provided soon. These are the experience that made me want to never use Julia again (don't worry, I'll still use it).
I might sound harsh here, and I shouldn't be. Julia is mainly a community project, with many contributors donating their free time maintaining the ecosystem that allows me to just ]add Package. However, I really do not feel safe using many libraries, especially when basic functionality isn't endorsed by some core team that guarantees their stability.
This is especially true for IO.

IO

Being a math language, Julia needs to work with data a lot. Unfortunately, I think the I/O landscape is a mess. There is no official implementation of CSV or JSON, which are pretty much lingua franca of data exchange. Well, there's DelimitedFiles in standard library, but it doesn't work with anything slightly more complicated. There's TOML, but it's limited to simply parsing and printing, plus TOML is not a good data exchange format anyways. Tar, while it exists, is nowhere close to Python's equivalent.
The two libraries that I end up using, were CSV.jl and JSON3.jl. They are pretty much universally recommended, so for these particular formats, Julia's IO is good. I still think something like these need to be in stdlib.
For other formats, Julia significantly lags behind other languages like R or Python. Recently popular are Parquet and Arrow IPC, which provide efficient binary formats for exchanging large amount of data. However, Julia's support for either is terrible. Despite being under JuliaIO organization, these important (I think) libraries remain unmaintained and unfinished. This really tanks my confidence on the organization, honestly.
I know better to not use Arrow or Parquet in this project, because I know how bad their support are in Julia, but the primary reason I got rid of Julia from all my research code, was that it cannot work with these files properly. Even then, there are some minor issues, such as JSON3 + StrucTypes clashing with ProtoStruct.

LSP

LSP is slow to update definitions and can't reliably find definitions. This is to be expected from a dynamic language. Sometimes I just have to wait or poke around. The LSP won't show any information if there's any type ambiguity. However, there are some places where type annotation is impossible (like loop variables), meaning that the LSP will leave some black holes that require manual tracing. Symbol finding in VSCode is also limited, as it only shows which file each symbol is from, but not their type signatures.
Again, this cannot always be avoided for a dynamic language. Try to annotate as much as possible to alleviate. Otherwise, the vscode plugin is decent.

REPL

REPL is almost great and lisp-like. Evaluating code cells, redefining functions, etc. are part of my workflow. It is always nice to see immediate effect after change, keeping some application state around. For research code, REPL is great.
...except for struct redefinitions. ProtoStruct and the like cannot always be used, as it causes problems if I have custom constructors, @kwdef, or StructTypes (which is needed for JSON3). This means early in development, restarting the REPL is a frequent requirement.
Another problem I have is that there is no easy way to drop into a debugger from an existing REPL session. I can't just evaluate one code cell and debug another. I can't type an expression into the REPL window and enter a debugger. I can only run an entire file. This is very annoying when I have a mysterious stack trace that involves a lot of states and corner cases, because accessing a debugger is inconvenient. I either rerun the whole script, which removes the REPL all together, or litter the functions with print statements. Thankfully both approach work for this project, but I doubt they will be scalable.
I can dream of something like "Debug Code Cell in REPL". Or even better: have something like the Common Lisp language, where a sub-REPL is provided on an error, where class redefinition prompts you to update existing instances. These will probably be a lot of work, though, so I don't expect much from these directions.

Revise

Revise is what makes this project possible. If I need to rerun the whole script after every single change I will die of old age before I finish this. However, there are some minor issues.

• Struct and constant redefinition, which are Julia's limitations
• Changing export list does not reflect in Revise, and require a restart

Under the limitation of Julia, Revise is doing very well. Especially helpful is that it removes stale definitions, which greatly reduces the probability of making a mistake. In fact, I think Revise is better than something like Jupyter notebook because of just this point. Less mistakes, but imperfect.

Makie

Makie is very powerful and very fast (once warmed up), but not mature. I know it well enough to navigate its documentation, but when I started out I had no idea how to read its documentation. Especially problematic is all those kwargs used in its API, which require a lot of digging to figure out. I think its documentation needs some reorganization. It is, however, a very powerful library, allowing me to make very complex plots.
I hit a bug related to RichText, which are mostly undocumented and have no workaround. I also encountered a mysterious stack overflow in one specific REPL session, but it went away after I restarted, so I never understood what happened. There was no backtrace. In more normal errors, Makie also tend to generate backtraces at strange places not helping with debugging, and using its Observable interface require quite a bit of care. In general, if Makie has a problem, it is impossible to work around, because its API is wrapped in so many layers of abstraction.
I don't think Makie is an easy API to learn, because there are just so many interconnected components. Its documentation needs to be as good as Matplotlib's to be really effective for newcomers, because the LSP and REPL will not be of any help in finding what those ; kwargs are.

Conclusion

Julia is fast, and has many features that I like, such as a powerful REPL, automatic vectorization, concise function definitions, multimethods, etc. However, I just feel like its still immature, despite having 11 stable versions. What truly worries me are the following:

• Official documentations recommending use of footgun
• Official organization (is JuliaIO official?) not exactly maintaining important packages
  • They certainly are maintaining some other packages, like a bunch of compression algorithms etc. It just happen that what I needed to use was not maintained
• Proliferation of underdocumented, unmaintained, half-finished zombie packages
• Such packages taking up canonical names, forcing the real maintained packages to use Name2.jl, etc.
• Tendency to encounter overabstracted packages

Will I continue to use Julia, then?
Before this project, I'd say, yes. Otherwise I wouldn't have attempted it.
Right now? Uh, I will use it if I have to, but no more Julia projects from me. Here's the thing:

• Python has vastly better IO support, both in stdlib and from third party support.
• Python's plotting libraries, or many other libraries I tend to use, have better documentation.
  • Although Python's package management and module loading is horrible
• Rust is as fast as the fastest type stable JIT-compiled julia, but has a much better LSP, out-of-this-world module system, much better automatically generated documentation, safer types, and just as good a package manager as Julia.
  • Of course, no REPL or interactive plotting.

Then when is Julia actually good?

• When user-defined functions are used extensively, for mathematics, and performance critical
• When Jupyter makes sense, but turns out to be too messy. Code cells + Revise beats Jupyter all day
• I suppose when macro magic is required, like autodiffing user-defined functions. I have no idea how Flux does it.

Most of what I do is just none of these things.

Hello, good folks of FG. The weekly film discussion thread is back.
The topic under discussion is made clear in the title. Made-for-TV, direct-to-video, streaming, TV series/episodes, documentaries, short films can also be listed.
The minimum requirement is that a numerical rating out of 5 or 10 be provided - whichever the poster wishes to choose - and it'll be even more helpful if he/she also writes a few thoughts regarding his/her experience with the feature/documentary/short/TV series' season. This will help in starting discussions, which is one of the main intentions of this thread. I also request all those who reply here to go through the whole thread once and see if you can see some common topic to discuss with other posters.
My previous fortnight as follows (5 + 5). All first viewings (except wherever mentioned otherwise) :
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989, Peter Greenaway) :
This famous art film is not for the faint-hearted. All actors are fantastic, giving their all to their characters and Sacha Vierny's cinematography is extraordinary. But it started to drag in the last half an hour and the ending was disappointing in the quickness of its payoff.
7/10
Trailer
F.I.S.T. (1978, Norman Jewison) :
A thinly disguised biopic on Jimmy Hoffa, the charismatic leader of the Teamsters Union who had close ties with the mafia. It's not a bad film but not particularly outstanding, either. It goes through the motions and does a workmanlike job in every department.
6/10
Trailer
Paradise Alley (1978, Sylvester Stallone) :
This film was the directorial debut of Stallone. It offers an extremely detailed and authentic look at the poverty and squalor in the tenements in post-war New York of 1946. I recommend the film for that and the cinematography by the master László Kovács.
7/10
Trailer
The Tuskegee Airmen (1995, Robert Markowitz) :
A TV movie made by HBO about the first group of African American fighter pilots to serve in the Second World War. The action in this film consists mostly of closeups of pilots in their cockpits and stock footage of bombing raids. So, on that front, it is very disappointing. However, the capable African-American cast - Laurence Fishburne, Andre Braugher and Cuba Gooding Jr. among others - make this a watchable experience.
5/10
Trailer
City Heat (1984, Richard Benjamin) :
This film teamed Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, the two biggest box-office stars in the world then, in a script written by Blake Edwards. It should have been rip-roaring fun and should have set the box office on fire. However, in a convoluted turn of events, Edwards either was fired or removed himself from the project, his script was extensively rewritten by another writer brought in by Eastwood and the task of direction was handed to Richard Benjamin who did not have any experience of directing an action-crime picture or of managing the actors' inflated egos.
Both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert found this to be one of the most disappointing films of the year. I have to agree.
The plot is both slight and convoluted. Meaning that it is much ado about hardly anything. Something about some gangster's financial records with a bookkeeper which a lot of people are after.
The cinematography is needlessly darkened and the production design is too cluttered for any of the locations to register.
As for the actors, it's a curious thing that most of them are doing fine individually (except Rip Torn - he is awful) but none of them have much chemistry with each other. There is no explanation given as to what caused the fallout between former friends Eastwood and Reynolds, turning them into bitter enemies. In the film, I mean - not real life.
Still, Eastwood and Reynolds do sneak in a few solid one-liners and at least one shootout has some zest to its stunt choreography.
4/10
Trailer
Suddenly (1954, Lewis Allen) :
A bloody interesting concept but executed in a hamfisted manner. The story idea of a assassinating the U.S. president in a small town has a lot of potential. However, all the actors - except one - are terrible, either reading their lines in a monotone or overacting their heads off. The child actor must be singled out for being annoying in particular.
All the actors - except Frank Sinatra.
It's odd that I don't find Sinatra to be a particularly impressive actor usually - he was, after all, primarily a singer. He is also in The Manchurian Candidate which is also about an assassination conspiracy and while that film is a masterpiece, he is only adequate in it. However, in this film which is significantly inferior to that film, his naturalistic, self-assured performance shines like a diamond in the rough amidst the mediocrity on display from everyone else. I would recommend this film only for him.
5/10
Trailer
The Lords of Flatbush (1974, Martin Davidson + Stephen Verona) :
Today, this low-budget indie film is a curiosity mainly remembered for featuring one of the earliest lead roles of Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler. Winkler would join the cast of Happy Days that year which would go on to become a sensation on TV and Stallone... well, you know.
The film does have some charm as a time capsule of the late 50s recreated in the early 70s but the story, the plot and the characters are wafer-thin.
4/10
Trailer
Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986, Penny Marshall) :
I have seen several of Whoopi Goldberg's star vehicles in the last four years and I cannot pinpoint it exactly, but there is something about her that does not lend itself to carrying an entire film upon her shoulders. I suppose what I am trying to say is that she does not have that elusive quality known as "star power" or "leading woman material".
This film has a tired and cliched plot about a data entry operator (Goldberg) who is contacted by a British spy stuck in Europe and has to help him get home. A few sequences managed to amuse me slightly but they were not enough to salvage the forgettable film.
4/10
Trailer
Goin' South (1978, Jack Nicholson) :
This film was Jack Nicholson's second film as a director and the first where he also acted.
Nicholson plays against type here as a cowardly con man and horse thief who is captured and set to hang but a spinster takes him as her husband. She has an ulterior motive, of course - she wants him as labour for a gold mine in her property and she needs to find gold before the railroad company evicts her under Eminent Domain.
I thought the film was a lot of fun, a lot funnier than something like Cat Ballou. Nicholson never tries to play the hero and always remains the figure of fun which makes him endearing, even though there is a disturbing rape scene.
I wish the film had not ended so anti-climactically. I cared for the characters and wanted them to have a better future than the one they got.
8/10
Trailer
Major Payne (1995, Nick Castle) :
There is only one major problem I have with the film which is that I wish Damon Wayans had not used his usual high-pitched, whiny, lisping voice. I don't know if that is his actual voice or something he affects for the character. Either way, I find it very difficult to believe that a drill instructor with such a voice would be taken seriously by anyone without collapsing to the ground in fits of raucous laughter after every three minutes.
It's a pity because if that single obstacle can be surmounted, this film surprised me by how much it had to offer. Its plot was nothing new and its developments as well as twists were quite predictable. However, Nick Castle's direction was crisp and effective and he extracted good performances from everyone. The central character of Major Payne is allowed to be more than superficial, to have hidden depths. The script does not go deep into his personal history but I thought that enough small indications were provided to help us understand how such a character came into existence.
Also, annoying voice aside, Damon Wayans gives a very good performance in the lead. The best scene in the film is a spoof of Apocalypse Now's opening scene and there are many such sequences.
7/10
Trailer

I made a plotting program in common lisp. (repo link: https://github.com/li-yiyang/gurafu)
But since I just do common lisp as a hobby and not experienced developer, I'm struggling with test and project management. (I found the trace and sly pretty enjoyable to debugging, what else could I do? thanks)
P.S. also poor in english //o\\.

Before I start, a couple of things: I consumed them through audiobooks btw, and Steven Pacey is an absolute LEGEND.
I’m not too good at book reviews so I’ll just write some of my thoughts here and try to keep it as brief as I can lol (though I’ll expand on some of my fav characters below). After finishing GRRM’s ASOIAF series, I was feeling empty. I did some research, and found out that the First Law series is what many people decided to read after finishing asoiaf. Now after completing the trilogy, I can comfortably say that it has even surpassed Martin’s work for me. It took me an entire year to finish ASOAIF, whereas it took me only a month to finish TFL trilogy, that’s how invested I was in the story. Say one thing for Joe Abercrombie, say he’s a genius.
Some of the things I loved: Extremely well-written POV characters, some great side-characters, the dark humour was fantastic, world-building was nice, the plot was intriguing, and the descriptions of fights/action/battle scenes were some of the best moments in the series.
Ranking and discussing some of my favourite characters (btw major SPOILERS regarding the characters’ fates):
1-Sand dan Glokta The GOAT. One of the best-written characters in fiction imo. He reminded me a lot of Tyrion Lannister (tho Glokta is much better for me), mainly because of his sharp intellect making up for his physical deformities. His inner monologues were my absolute favourite and many times hilarious too. No matter how many times he dropped his “Body found floating by the docks”, it never failed to crack me up lmao. I made many predictions as I went through the story, and one of my few predictions that ended up being true was Glokta becoming the Arch Lector. His ending left me satisfied. Btw Steven Pacey NAILED it as Glokta, his lisp was so good.
2-Logen Ninefingers “The Bloody-Nine” A VERY close 2nd favourite. The hardest man in the North, maybe even in the entire Circle of the World. His character development throughout the series is just phenomenal. Oh he’s also got some of the best quotes in the series. One of my favourites: “Once you’ve got a task to do, it’s better to do it than live with the fear of it.” I was ALWAYS freaking out whenever he switched to his Bloody-Nine personality, hoping he doesn’t kill his allies because I just had that feeling he would kill at least one of his friends at some point (Tul Duru deserved better). I predicted that he would die by the end but I was glad to be wrong (I hope that fall didn’t kill him, and that he’s “still alive”). The series started with Logen falling from a high place into water, and ending with him falling from a high place into water, which I thought was absolutely poetic. Even though I would’ve preferred if he’d have gotten a happy ending because he tried so hard to be a better man, I think his ambiguous fate is a perfect ending for him in this trilogy. After-all “You have to be realistic about these things”, right?
3-Jezal dan Luthar He’s got some of the best character progression ever. My prediction for him was to be a Lord Marshall by the end, but I did not see him becoming “his August Majesty” AT ALL. His journey from a pompous, arrogant dude to such a nice, humble guy (as much as he tried to be) who cared for his people was beautiful. He reminded me a bit of Jaime Lannister (apologies for yet another ASOIAF reference). A recurring theme in the series is that you don’t always get what you want/deserve to get. Jezal is the best example of it. Even though he got everything he ever dreamed of and beyond, he still lost everything, especially his freedom. Joe does a great job of making you feel bad for him.
4-Bayaz "The First of the Magi" OMG where to start. Let’s just say his actual character reveal was one of the best plot twists ever. Joe did a brilliant job in always keeping an air of mystery around him, concealing his true nature until the very end. At the start I thought he was a Gandalf. As the story progressed I started thinking he was more of a Dumbledore. But I was SO wrong. He ended up being a Sauron or a Voldemort lmao, or actually more like Sosuke Aizen from Bleach (anime fans will get this reference). Looking back, there were many subtle hints (such as his impatience and random bursts of anger) that this seemingly nice old man is not as nice as he seems. And when the moment finally came during his battle against the Hundred Words, when he declared himself greater than even Euz as hundreds of innocents perished, my jaw literally dropped. Everything came into place. That was literally his goal from the beginning, to become the greatest user of magic, to be stronger than Khalul. Nothing else really mattered to him. He’s a monster. His conversation with Glokta gave us all the “Answers” ;) and revealed just how great of a mastermind he actually was. That moment when he threatened Jezal in their last conversation made my blood boil, he instantly became my most hated character in the series. Just tells you how great of a writer Joe is, and how incredible of a character Bayaz is. Now looking back, Logen’s first impression of Bayaz as a random unremarkable butcher, was SPOT ON. I really hope he gets what he deserves in the next books, though I have to be realistic…
5-Collem West I always thought he would be used as a plot device for Jezal and would end up dying during the middle of the story. BUT West became a wonderful, well-written morally grey character. I don’t have much to say for him except the fact that I loved him so much and he did NOT deserve his fate at all (I really hope he survived the seed plague and we see more of him but it’s highly unlikely, and you have to be rea…). For me, West was the most tragic character in the series.
Honourable mentions: •Ferro Maljinn Probably the worst POV out of them all for me, but it doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a really good character. Her slow character development was pretty realistic and enjoyable. Her fate was left ambiguous too just like Logen, which makes me think she may appear later in the other books (not as a POV though).
•The Dogman He was one of the few genuine nicer guys in the series. His character dynamics with Threetrees and Logen were superb. I think we’ll see more of him later too (maybe even as a POV) because we didn’t get enough of him.
•Ardee West Another tragic character like her brother Collem and Jezal. But I was so happy with her conclusion. I loved her relationship with Glokta so much because of the mutual respect between the two, their tremendous chemistry, and their flirtatious banter. She deservingly got a somewhat happy ending. Glokta will take real good care of her.
•Arch Lector Sult “His Eminence”. I just absolutely loved to hate this guy lmao. He was a great antagonist throughout the story. It was an extremely satisfying moment when Glokta finally got his revenge on Sult. His fate is left to our imaginations. I like to think he became a “Body found floating by the docks, bloated by seawater and horribly mutilated… far… far beyond recognition.”, as Glokta would put it, with the help of practical Pike (btw that Salem Rews twist was amazing).
For those still reading, thank you so much for putting up with my babbling and going through my post lol. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about anything related to the story or characters. And give me your thoughts too!
Next I’ll be going through the three standalone books, and then the Age of Madness trilogy to complete my First Law journey. Thanks again for reading! :)

'What? Where did you go? No! Come back! Don't leave me. Please, no! Don't leave me all alone!'
Chrono Cross is an oddball JRPG that's a snapshot of late 90's trends. It's a bright, flashy, colorful, navel-gazing work that asks a lot of questions but doesn't deliver a ton of answers. It's like Bioshock Infinite, but with less shitty politics.
I was born in the 90's. The first TV show I watched was about a gang of Aussie kids who were friends with a creepy, faceless puppet. I survived the Space Jam Crisis of '96. I was excited for The Phantom Menace because the demon dude looked cool, not realizing that the rest of the movie was about fucking taxes. I ended the era still innocent, and still to learn that I should probably press on the brakes when cycling downhill at speed towards a solid brick wall. This game helped me re-encapsulate that era after the head trauma.
Cross is about a young fisherman called Serge who finds himself in another dimension where he drowned as a child. In this strange new world, he gets roped into a hunt for an alien artifact and gets antagonized by a cat man. A tale as old as time. On his journey Serge will straddle a path between two universes. People friendly in one world may be strangers to you in another. Dead here, but alive elsewhere. Sitting in a mansion or sleeping in squalor. Myself, I'd like to live in the parallel universe where my Undertale review got a shit-ton more comments.
Cross takes your average JRPG and adds these twists on the formula:

• Your weapons and armour are assembled and dissembled from materials, instead of just being bought.
• You gain level-ups only from beating bosses. No grinding allowed.
• There are no random encounters. Enemies on the field can be avoided and some bosses can even be run away from!
• You find and equip spells and consumables onto a grid for each character. This normally takes forever, so you can just press a button to automate the process.
• There's no MP either. You land attacks on foes to build up the charge needed for your spells.
• The entire game-world is restricted to a small archipelago that you visit in two different timelines. You don't ever lift-off on an airship that can zip around a donut planet.

Those are just the minor deviations from the JRPG standard. What I really want to talk is the crazy stuff that makes Chrono Cross such a hot subject to talk about a quarter-century after release.
There are 44 playable characters for no fucking reason.
Imagine a tabletop adventure where a group of heroes meet in an Inn. Let's say there's a nervous healer dude who's fresh out of the collegium. He joins up with a crew headed by a weary Orc fighter. She just wants to do quests and get paid, as she's got debts to pay back home. Working under her a fire-mad witch and a thief who used to be a lawyer until he set his heart on more honest work. These four heroes learn from the innkeeper about a Dark Lord who's hoarding a priceless gem that belongs to rightful heir who would be willing to pay for its return.
The four set off on their quest, along with the innkeeper and the guy who sweeps the floor. The six then hire a boatman to ford them across a river that's hazardous due to the territorial mermaids. The boatman doesn't have anything else going on after the divorce, and one of the mermaids is pretty chill, so they tag along after the trip. You rescue a woman and child from being eaten by a feisty tree, and in gratitude both the mother and her seven-year-old son take up arms and fight for you. The party comes to blows with a rival group of adventurers several times along, until both leaders realize they are wasting time when they should be working towards the same goal.
Our three dozen heroes confront the Dark Lord and beat him to a pulp, only for you to learn that he was trying to protect the world from the evil entity that inhabits the stolen gem. The Dark Lord joins your squad, as well as the aforementioned child-eating tree, and so everyone bands together to blah blah blah.
There are very few NPCs in Cross because almost every character with a portrait joins your team. By the end of a playthrough, you can have up to thirty-eight people in your crew. Bear in mind, you can only bring three characters into a battle and one of those has to be the main character. You're also going to want to keep Freddy Mercury around, as he's the only guy around for ages who can steal rare items off bosses.
A game like Suikoden or Fire Emblem accommodates its huge cast and give them jobs after recruitment. You could make building your team the arc of the game, and have recruiting new characters give you perks akin to Dark Cloud 2. Chrono Cross simply never gives a good reason why this story couldn't be anchored to six or seven playable characters. It was just an audacious experiment to see what the developers could get away with. I'm reminded of the musical CATS which I had the misfortune of seeing the film version. Every new charactefeline gives a song and dance when they appear, only to spend the rest of the show waiting in the unemployment line. The key difference in Chrono Cross is that James Corden doesn't get waterboarded.
The two main characters are barely in this game.
The story is cleanly broken into three acts and I'd say percentage-wise they are 40:40:20. Serge is the main character but due to... circumstances he disappears in the second act, and you play as a different character in the meantime. Taking the numerous side-quests into account, you can finish the game having barely played as Serge at all.
Kid is technically the leading lady, but you can tell her to fuck off any time she asks to join. She has an important scene early on devoted to explaining her motivation, however this moment is completely missable. Just like FFVIII, so much context and foreshadowing is missed because it's tucked away in optional scenes when they honestly should have been mandatory.
Kid drops out entirely in the second act and can't be recruited again until just before the final dungeon where she is once again, optional. I get the feeling one of the developers really must have hated her Aussie tits given the sheer level of abuse she undergoes. Stabbed, poisoned, brainwashed, budgerigard, and so on. I will say that the Kid's playable-flashback near the end is the emotional high-point of the game.
The main character is a silent protagonist, despite him being the entire crux of the plot.
Nobody gives a shit what the undead hero has to say in a Souls title because the plots of those games don't matter, everything is an excuse is for knights in armour to roll around the arena without somehow mangling their spines. Silent protagonists work when the player is a newcomer to the world and their input is mechanical over narrative. Less a character, more a cipher. Fallout is at its best when it lets the player define their avatar though their actions. Fallout is at its worst when it demands the player care about Liam Neeson or a stupid baby.
Serge is not an outsider in Chrono Cross. His convoluted backstory is integral to the plot, but he can't say a word about it. So much drama and insight is lost because Serge remains tight-lipped from start to finish. Because Serge can't talk, one of your interchangeable party members has to do the heavy lifting in conversations. This can lead to bizarre situations where a plush pink dog with a lisp jabbers on about time-paradoxes. I think the problem is that for all of Cross's innovations, it adhered to a trope that was detrimental to the narrative, simply because Dragon Quest did it thirteen years prior.
The toughest boss in the game is a dork wearing khaki shorts.
Chrono Cross is piss easy on the same level as Final Fantasy VI. Despite its idiosyncratic battle system you don't really need to learn how deep the mechanics go. This is not a story about teamwork as Serge can singlehandedly cut down any foe without help. Sorry Skelly, you might as well have remained in the ground for all the action you're going to get. You can earn the ultimate weapon quite early by cheesing a bonus boss's AI. Chrono Cross is easy going... until you meet Miguel.
He looks like a nerd, but he can and he will hammer your arse in every possible timeline if you ever let him take the high ground. If you don't bone up on your buffs, debuffs, and elemental-fields then expect to find yourself trapped in a time loop, being pummeled by a dork over and over again while sombre music plays.
The script far exceeds the length.
Xenogears is a game from the same JRPG era that mashes every goddamn Anime trope and convention possible. It had giant robots, Judeo-Christian imagery, Jungian themes, an obnoxious plushy mascot, and a story couldn't give half a shit about the playable cast when the villains were so interesting. After the monstrous 50-hour first disc, the developers ran out of time as they were over-eager, inexperienced, and bitten off more than they could chew. The second disc was a ten-hour slideshow about a villain who transforms most of humanity into uncooked KFC. Don't worry about it, though. He feels a mite bad about his genocides before he ascends to godhood.
By comparison I believe that Chrono Cross is the planned game it was meant to be with no abridged chapters. However, the scenario-designer over-compensated with the script and was too cute to rein it in. There are three massive plot-dumps dropped in the last two dungeons and prior to the final boss. These detail revelations that would have been earth-shattering had they not been delivered hours after they were relevant. Imagine if Aeris simply disappeared in the middle of FF7, and later on Sephiroth offhandedly mentions turning her into a pin-cushion offscreen. There's simply no shock or emotion to learning of a twist past the point when it would have mattered.
The soundtrack is excellent, but the battle theme is complete arse.
The spoils for your average fight are some cash, crafting-materials, and the odd stat boost. But I largely avoided combat because I hated hearing that incessant screeching noise that plays during senseless goblin-killing. Lord knows why the battle theme has a violinist giving a housecat a hot enema, but it's the only dud in a magnificent score. Sailing: Another World, Chronopolis, Star-Stealing Girl, Scars of Time. Life: Distant Promise... fuck, most games would be lucky to have just one of these bangers. You're telling me the composer has only headlined a crappy Level-5 franchise since then?
Other Observations

• I think it was a little strange that the ending monologue, which ostensibly is an optimistic speech about choosing one's fate, mentions the word "spermatozoa."
• The dwarves are the fucking worst. The game tries to teach us a moral about humans being disrespectful to nature, even though every human settlement we visit is an idyllic port in harmony with the sea. Meanwhile the dwarves drive gas-guzzling tanks and commit genocide against other races. When we kill the dwarves in self-defence, their victims the fairies blame us for their rampage. I can't afford to think about this issue any harder without going Neil Breen on my monitor.
• Like many PSX-era RPGs, this game is slow. Something that was lost in the transition from SNES to the PSX was that the moment-to-moment pacing. It takes a few seconds to move from one screen to the next, or to segue into combat, and these seconds add up. In this regard Final Fantasy 7-9 have aged worse than their SNES predecessors. Cross is in the same boat, but later ports or certain software have the sense to pack in a fast-forward button.
• There are only two triple-techniques in the game and they are simply impossible to find by playing normally. One demands that you one utterly screw up the life of a recruit-able ally. The other is only available on New Game+ and demands you kill a certain boss with a certain character out of forty-four. Like countless old JRPGs, there are a shit-ton of missable events, items, and even characters you will inevitably lose out on.

Conclusion
Chrono Cross has easy combat, a strong art-direction, excellent music, and a plot that start simple but gets sideways impenetrable by the halfway point. Something about it that can't be easily replicated is its mood. It's like a dream you wake up from that leaves you feeling sad, but you can't remember why as the image soon fades. Chrono Cross is not perfect or disciplined, but it's fascinating in the direction it sails.
P.S. Whoever understands the subtitle gets a free rainbow shell.

Reposting to fix formatting issues. The following short story was written as a kind of theoretical excerpt from a roguish retiree’s autobiography. Think medium fantasy Dungeons & Dragons. Is it any good? Is it engaging? Is the writing decent? Does the plot make sense and does it hook you in any way? How can I improve? Thanks in advance for any and all feedback!
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My passion for gambling started to feel more like an addiction as my wins turned to losses and my debts grew greater than my short life was worth. Soon I was indebted to every loan shark and bookie in Baldur’s Gate. But I couldn't quit. Nine out of ten gamblers quit right before their big win and I wasn’t about to become a statistic. So, having been barred from every dice and card game in a 10 mile radius, I had no choice but to pay my debts. The only problem was my measly work as a sell sword wasn’t nearly lucrative enough to cover my bills. At the time I was working mostly escort jobs, burglaries, protective services, and overall petty thug shit; none of which were sufficient enough to support my bank roll. But as luck would have it, that was all about to change, at least for one job.
There was a new character in town of the seemingly entrepreneurial variety. He was an old guy, human, maybe 80s or so, walked with a cane and talked with a lisp. With him was a 7 ft tall creature covered in black plate armor from head to toe. Tough to make out the exact look of the guy but if the make of the armor and the red scaled tail hanging out the back side were any indication, the creature was a Dragonborn and likely this senior citizen’s bodyguard. As they loitered around the typical thug scouting destinations, word spread that this crotchety old fuck and his furry of a boy toy were hiring. The job was simple, it was a hit. A weird one though. The man wanted some woman dead. A civilian. In fact, she was apparently a bum. A beggar who perused the streets of a village miles outside the city. Now why this strange old man wanted a helpless civilian dead, no one could figure. And although the hiring pool of Baldur’s Gate wasn’t exactly filled with bastions of morality, it wasn’t filled with idiots either. There was something off about this job and, for most eligible applicants, the pay didn’t outweigh the unknown. Most, except for me. While my peers spat on the 250 gold being offered for a hit with more red flags than a Vanthampur rally, I wasn’t in nearly as fortunate a position. That 250 would put enough of a dent in my debt that I could make my way back to the tables and hopefully string a few wins together to pay off the rest. I was no hitman, not yet at least, but I was an opportunist. So, I went off to meet the man behind the cane.
“Murko Bronzer, eh? What kind of name is that anyway?”
“Its the kinda name a tight lipped professional might have. Now do we have a deal or not?” As strange as the old man was, he didn’t have much of a poker face. He’d been in town for a week now and no one was biting on his offer. He was getting desperate. I told him I’d do the job no questions asked, but I needed the money up front. I fully intended to uphold my end of the deal, but this thing had set-up written all over it and if it was gunna go south, at least I’d have some gold.
“Deal” he said, as his plate-covered henchman handed me a sack with a familiar jingle to it. “There’s 250 and a map. Autumnvale Village. South… a day or two by horse, maybe less. The mark lives in a shack five minutes outside the town. There's a potion in the bag in case you run into any trouble. You shouldn’t need it. When its done… make it look like an accident. Don’t want anyone sticking their nose in this. And make sure its done within the week… Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it” I said, feeling up the sack like an Elturellean wench, making sure every last piece of gold was accounted for. “What about Tiny here, is he comin’?” I nodded my head towards the alleged Dragonborn. Aside from handing me my sack of gold, he hadn't moved a muscle the entire time, let alone said anything.
“He's busy.”
“Right… This woman. Who’s she to you anyway?”
“I thought you said ‘no questions asked’?” he said impatiently. His lisp managed to punctuate every word, ‘s’ or not. And the more the man spoke the more I wanted to be as far away from him as possible.
“Right. Welp, guess I’m off then. Its been a pleasure doing business with ya. Where will I find you once the job is done?”
“You won’t. Good day Mr. Bronzer.”
I set out for this ‘Autumnvale Village’ the next morning. I’d never heard of the place so it was no surprise when it turned out to be a complete shithole. A one tavern town type of vibe. Except the tavern was filled with the whole town and they all hated each other. They were very welcoming to me however, considering I had some coin to spend. And spend I did. I was still quite cautious about what I had got myself into so I chalked it up as a business expense and started greasing the palms of anybody who seemed like they could give me some information. Nobody knew a thing about my employer or his scaled and tailed girlfriend but the whole town knew about the mark. Adelaide was her name. There were all sorts of rumors flying around about this woman. Some said she was the ex wife of an infamous archmage turned lich. Some said she was descended from a mysterious royal bloodline, long lost to time. Others still, said she was an evil hag or a witch in disguise. None of it made much sense to me nor was there any proof. But there were two things the whole town agreed on. She had been there for decades, longer than anyone could remember really, yet she didn’t seem to age much. This was likely, however, because she was an elf, or at least a half elf. Depends who you asked. But half or full, she was the only elf in the village. Seemed a little strange to me, but certainly not alarming. The other thing the town agreed on was that she was a drunk. She’d spend her days begging in front of the tavern, and spend her nights drowning in booze for as long as her earnings would let her. She was a nuisance at best and a liability at worst. Not a single townsfolk had a nice word to say about her. Clearly she wasn’t going to be missed.
I spent the following day staking out her shack from the woods nearby. That’s when I got my first look at her. She was an older woman with long amber hair and sun spotted skin. She was kinda hot if you're into homeless drunks. I’m not. She left her “home” early that morning, presumably to go beg and drink (in that order) so I waited at the treeline for her to return. I figured she’d come home drunk, I’d sneak into her shack, make it look like a fall, and be on my way. But things got complicated. Sometime that afternoon the doors to her shack flung open as two young children spilled out into the tall grass that engulfed their home.
*What?* I thought. *Nobody in town mentioned kids.*
I crept out from the woods and inched closer to see if I could get a better look. They were twins, about 10 or 12 years old. Bright red hair. Elvish. They looked hungry. Maybe even hurt. But you couldn’t tell by their demeanor. They were playing and singing and laughing and went on doing so the entire day. Or at least until Adelaide got home. I sat unseen in the tall grass close enough to peer through the cracks in their shack. As my mark approached, the twins ran inside and remained eerily still. The silence only broken by the sound of Adelaide’s drunken footsteps clomping closer and closer to the door of the shack. Bottle in hand and reeking of mead and men, Adelaide fumbled with the door before swinging it open. What happened next I try not to think about in much detail but it was essentially this: Adelaide beat the shit out of those twins. I mean bad. Like this was some brutal shit. And to make it worse, the twins barely made a sound. I think I heard a single whimper in pain. They were used to it. They would adjust their body with each incoming blow to direct the impact in such a way that it’d do the least amount of damage… like some sort of seasoned fighter. It was clear this was no spontaneous act. This was habitual.
So I had a bit of a dilemma in front of me. Sure, on the one hand I was given all the moral justification I needed to get the job done… but I didn’t need any. I was willing and able to do what I had to do, regardless of the circumstances. On the other hand, these were helpless children. Yeah they were being beaten senseless but this was presumably their only carer, not to mention family. With Adelaide gone the children would be helpless. Best case scenario they end up orphans… but in a place like Autumnvale? Or worse, Baldur’s Gate? At least here their beatings come from someone in their own lineage. And how would they even end up as orphans? Gods know I was in no position to help em with that. I didn’t know a thing about my employer, or this woman, or these kids, or what any of them had to do with each other, so I had to assume that if I was caught associating with these twins - in any way - I’d only be putting them in further danger. Even escorting them to an orphanage was a risk to my life and to theirs. It was also possible that, much like the villagers, my employer didn’t know about the children. If he was a threat to their mother, he was likely a threat to them as well… maybe they were safer with their mother dead.
*Fuck it. I’ll let the fates decide.*
Soon the beating was over and Adelaide began to warm. She tended to the children’s wounds and made some dinner for the three of them before falling asleep. So I kicked open the door and stuck my rapier through her neck. The children’s screams were muffled by the sound of Adelaide gurgling on her own blood.
“You two, shut up.” I said, pointing at the twins. They complied. “You have an important decision to make so listen closely. My rapier, as you can see, is lodged in your mother’s throat. I will soon be leaving with it, but your mother has to stay. That means that she will be dead in less than 5 minutes.” With my freehand I reached into the sack the old man had given me and sure enough there was that health pot. “Potion of Greater Healing? Looks like its your lucky day, these ones are expensive.” I placed the potion on the ground in front of the quietly crying twins. “This potion can save your mother’s life. Just pour it down her throat and she’ll be good as new. Or, this potion can save your life, in a way. Its worth about a hundred gold. That’s enough money to give y’all a good life. Shelter, food, toys, all that. You could probably buy a new mom, or at least a pretty good babysitter. At any rate, its up to y’all. But you can’t have both. If you run to town looking for help, Adelaide here ain’t gunna wake up. She don’t have time for all that. So choose wisely. Clock…starts…NOW.” I pulled my rapier loose and spilled blood across the room as the twins dove towards the potion. They rolled from floorboard to floorboard trying to pull it loose from one another, pleading to each other to let their mother live, or to let her die. As they argued I sheathed my blade, turned around, and left. I had dice to roll.

Going from 1 to 4 narrators has been a difficult adjustment for me. Especially since each speaks in a different volume (they didn't equalize it?!) So I have to adjust the volume up or down each chapter while I'm driving. It's also taking some getting used to with the accents (lisps on two of them?) But I think that's mostly because I'm not used to them for audiobooks.
Plot overall still seems interesting, honestly it's just the format that's been frustrating.

According to the wives it wasn't a cabin. Instead, it was a boys club house with beer, guns, and "Man" toys. Which is a fair assessment. The cabin was nothing special. It was more shed than anything else. David had bought this land on the cheap and began hunting in the area a few years ago. Mike and I volunteered our help with the building and upkeep of the cabin. In exchange for our labor, and some gas. We would be allowed to hunt on the property. The property was nearly 100 acres, with thick woods, and 3 deep wide creeks. It was big enough that all three of us could hunt at the same time and not be in each other's way. I'm not much of a hunter, but according to the game trail cameras, there were some monster bucks out here. They're big enough to make a novice hunter like me want to join in on the fun.
Hunting season was still a few weeks away. So this trip was more of a "maintenance" trip than anything else. Sure we would do the normal off-season things like check feed plots and trail cameras. On this trip, we were going to build a small shed to house the 4x4 utility vehicle that was on the property for moving around on the various trails. It had been left under a trap, but David wanted more of a permanent solution than that. The plan was simple. I would drive my truck with its trailer to the cabin. Drop David, and Mike off so they could begin preparing the site for the shed. Then I would drive thirty minutes or so in the opposite direction to the nearest lumber store and load the supplies onto my trailer and bring them back. Since it was so late in the evening it was decided I would still go get the building supplies, and we would just start in the morning.
After we arrived at the cabin we all unloaded our gear and food from the truck. We only planned on staying 3 days and 2 nights. So there wasn't much in the way of food, but there were saws, drills, and various other tools that needed to be unloaded. After the truck was unloaded both David and Mike came up to me to give me "gas money" which we all knew I would use to buy the beer we would be drinking on this trip.
All in all the trip to and from the lumber yard was uneventful. It did take a little longer to get back than I would have liked.
It being only dusk, I could only make out the profile of the cabin under the dense foliage. It seemed odd that there weren't any lights on in the cabin. Dave, Mike! I called out to them as I walked around the side of the cabin where they should have been working. The 4x4 was missing from its normal resting spot. The tarp rolled up neatly under a rock.
"They must still be out checking trail cameras." I thought to myself.
I made my way to the back of the cabin where a small generator was located. The cabin wasn't connected to any local power lines so lighting was provided by a small generator. It was enough to turn on a few lights and charge your phone. With two quick pulls, the little generator hummed to life. The gas gauge said it was nearly full, so we should have enough light for the entire tip. I walked into the cabin and flipped the main light on. Its soft white glow shone like a lighthouse in the dark through the cabin windows. "I guess I'm the chef for tonight," I said to myself as I fished a couple of steaks out of the cooler. I fired up the propane grill on the porch and threw the steaks on. The sounds of the forest, the sizzle of the steak, and the cold beer in my hand made me let out a long audible sigh. A few minutes later I was chowing down on a nice steak. I was hungrier than I thought because the steak was gone in fewer bites than I would have liked. I swallowed the last of my beer and positioned myself sideways in the camping chair so that one of my legs could be thrown over the armrest, and my head could lay on the back netting. Cell signal was virtually nonexistent, but there were spots you could make a call from if you had to. Since cell signal was so spotty I planned and downloaded some shows onto my phone to help pass the time. I could feel my eyelids begin to droop as the office theme song started to play.
I awoke sometime later. I had a bad kink in my neck from sleeping in such an awkward position. My phone's screen was off, but thankfully it was still charged. 2:38 am was the time it displayed. "Did the guys get back and turn the lights off?" I asked myself as I fumbled with my phone trying to turn its flashlight on. I scanned the room and I was the only one there. Both David's and Mike's sleeping bags were still rolled up and with their other gear from this morning. The steaks I had cooked for them were still on the plate sitting on the collapsible table. "Where the fuck are these guys?" I said out loud to no one. I poked my head outside to where the little generator was sitting. With my phone's flashlight barely making a dent in the darkness. I could just make out where the generator was supposed to be sitting, and it wasn't there. "What the hell?" I said. How could we have gotten robbed all the way out here? I thought as I made my way back into the cabin to fetch my pistol. I found my truck keys and pressed the lock button on the key fob. The horn honked and the lights flashed letting me know that it was locked. I grabbed a few battery-powered lanterns that were on a shelf for when the generator ran out of gas and placed them throughout the cabin.
I began to think that the reason the guys weren't back yet, was because of our would-be robbers. Did they catch them? Could there have been a fight? Were they in the woods hurt? Knocked out? Unconscious? Or worse injured or killed? I grabbed a flashlight from my pack and made my way outside to do a sweep of the area. I confirmed the generator was still missing. The 4x4 hadn't returned yet. All of the lumber and nails were still on the trailer, and everything else seemed to be in place.
"If you think you can steal from us, you are wrong. I'm waiting for you" I yelled into the woods as I shot a few rounds into the ground from my pistol. "Freaking drunk hillbilly rednecks," I said to myself as I walked back to the cabin. I don't know how long I sat in my camping chair, pistol in hand staring at the only door on the cabin. That's when I heard it. The sound of crunching leaves. They're back I thought to myself. I turned my head following the sounds of crunching leaves as it made its way around the back corner of the cabin to the side. The sound stopped for a second. Then I felt the whole cabin shake. Something heavy had landed on the little porch outside. Whoever or whatever it was I could hear the planks creek and moan under the weight. Whatever was out there I could hear it panting. Sniffing the air as it moved around. It had a slight wheezing sound to it. I heard whatever it was knocking the grill over and kicking it around. At this point, I was standing. My heart was in my throat and I had my gun leveled.
"Pheeeeeeeeelix" I heard a voice say from the front porch. "I know you're in there," It said with a slight lisp. "Your friends are here, Pheeeeelix," it said drawing out my name. I was paralyzed with fear. I was on the verge of trembling uncontrollably.
Tap Tap Tap, I heard coming from the door. "Pheeeeeelix, I know your scared. Your friends are here. Just open the door and you can be with them?"
The light from the lanterns had gone out. I was in total darkness. I was shaking uncontrollably, and my breathing was erratic. Whatever was on the other side of this door was something terrifying. Tap...Tap...Tap, "Phelix" it said this time with more gravel in its voice. I don't know why, but something in me broke. I was no longer afraid. I stopped trembling, my breath was becoming more even. I emptied all of my pistol rounds into the door. I dropped the pistol and grabbed a nearby deer rifle that was leaning up against the wall. I turned to load the gun and the door shattered into fragments behind me. I turned and just blindly fired into the darkness. I could only make out a shape from the light of the muzzle flash. It was big whatever it was. It had deer antlers jutting out from the top of its head. I kept firing as fast as I could. The creature shrieked as a few bullets found their mark. I felt a stinging sensation across my chest as I felt myself being thrown backward. I hit the other side of the cabin hard. I could feel the wall crack with the force of my being slammed into it. I leveled out the rifle again and fired blindly into the darkness. "Click" went the rifle telling me it had spent all of its rounds. "Click", "Click", "Click" was all I heard as I kept pulling the trigger. Then silence. No leaves were crunching, no floorboards creaking, no wheezing breaths from the creature. Total silence.
I sat where I landed until morning. As the light from dusk managed to break through the thick woods. I could take stock of my situation. I had 3 large slashes across my chest. They were deep but the blood had slowed to just oozing from the would. The door lay shattered and broken in a dozen pieces. I grabbed another clip for my pistol and began to make my way outside. The grill had been flung into the yard. Some of the deck boards had cracked under the immense weight of the creature. Fumbling for my keys I managed to unlock my truck. I had to drive for several miles to get a strong enough signal to call the police.
I sat in the back of the ambulance while the paramedics cleaned and dressed my wounds. The police had already taken my statement. I told them about how David and Mike had been missing since yesterday. A few officers a paramedic and a Game Warden left a short time after to start a preliminary search and recovery. It felt like time was standing still for me, but sped up for everyone else. My head felt groggy. Like I was trying to wake up from a deep sleep. There were crime scene specialists taking pictures of the cabin and surrounding area. Police officers were searching around the cabin for any clues they could turn up.
The Game Warden snapping his fingers and waving his hand in front of me brought me back to reality. The older gray-haired Game Warden stared back at me. "Son" the Game Warden started. What kind of trouble did you boys get mixed up in out here? He asked. What do you mean I asked? Did you find Dave and Mike? Ya, we found your friends and their 4x4 about 40 yards down that trail he said pointing. Where are they? Are they ok? I asked trying to stand up. "Son," the Game Warden said, putting his hands our motioning for me to sit back down. We found your friends. They're dead. He said dryly. "What" I said shakily. Your telling me those redneck hillbilly bastards killed them? "No son" He started. We don't know what's going on. We found your friends up a tree. 30 feet up a tree, with their organs missing. Their 4x4 was on the other side of the clearing it looked like a dog's chew toy. It was twisted and had deep gashes in it. Gashes that look like the ones on your chest. He said pointing at me.
A few weeks after the funerals. I received an official report of the events at the cabin. It said a bear had attacked Dave and Mike while they were out checking cameras. The bear flipped the 4x4 over and left the bodies. How the bodies managed to get up the tree, it says inconclusive. The report does speculate that mountain lions have been known to cache fresh kills up trees to keep them safe from other predators. The report fails to mention the creature I saw or the fact that it could speak. Instead, it says I was attacked in the night by a black bear. Possibly while it was searching for food around the cabin. I felt the tears building stronger and stronger as I read the report. I was so damn angry. My friends were attacked and killed by some creature. Not a damn bear. I have to do something I said as I wiped tears from my face. I have to do something I kept saying as the tears came on even stronger.
It has been a year to the day since I saw my friends last. Dusk has fallen on the little cabin. A loud noisy generator is powering the lights. 5 steaks are searing on a new grill outside. The door still lay in pieces from that day. I take a swig of my beer and sit it down on the collapsable table next to my two shotguns and a high-powered deer rifle. The pistol is sitting in my lap, as I stare out into the darkness. I can hear the sound of crunching leaves in front of the cabin.
"Pheeeeeelix......your friends are still waiting"

According to the wives it wasn't a cabin. Instead, it was a boys club house with beer, guns, and "Man" toys. Which is a fair assessment. The cabin was nothing special. It was more shed than anything else. David had bought this land on the cheap and began hunting in the area a few years ago. Mike and I volunteered our help with the building and upkeep of the cabin. In exchange for our labor, and some gas. We would be allowed to hunt on the property. The property was nearly 100 acres, with thick woods, and 3 deep wide creeks. It was big enough that all three of us could hunt at the same time and not be in each other's way. I'm not much of a hunter, but according to the game trail cameras, there were some monster bucks out here. They're big enough to make a novice hunter like me want to join in on the fun.
Hunting season was still a few weeks away. So this trip was more of a "maintenance" trip than anything else. Sure we would do the normal off-season things like check feed plots and trail cameras. On this trip, we were going to build a small shed to house the 4x4 utility vehicle that was on the property for moving around on the various trails. It had been left under a trap, but David wanted more of a permanent solution than that. The plan was simple. I would drive my truck with its trailer to the cabin. Drop David, and Mike off so they could begin preparing the site for the shed. Then I would drive thirty minutes or so in the opposite direction to the nearest lumber store and load the supplies onto my trailer and bring them back. Since it was so late in the evening it was decided I would still go get the building supplies, and we would just start in the morning.
After we arrived at the cabin we all unloaded our gear and food from the truck. We only planned on staying 3 days and 2 nights. So there wasn't much in the way of food, but there were saws, drills, and various other tools that needed to be unloaded. After the truck was unloaded both David and Mike came up to me to give me "gas money" which we all knew I would use to buy the beer we would be drinking on this trip.
All in all the trip to and from the lumber yard was uneventful. It did take a little longer to get back than I would have liked.
It being only dusk, I could only make out the profile of the cabin under the dense foliage. It seemed odd that there weren't any lights on in the cabin. Dave, Mike! I called out to them as I walked around the side of the cabin where they should have been working. The 4x4 was missing from its normal resting spot. The tarp rolled up neatly under a rock.
"They must still be out checking trail cameras." I thought to myself.
I made my way to the back of the cabin where a small generator was located. The cabin wasn't connected to any local power lines so lighting was provided by a small generator. It was enough to turn on a few lights and charge your phone. With two quick pulls, the little generator hummed to life. The gas gauge said it was nearly full, so we should have enough light for the entire tip. I walked into the cabin and flipped the main light on. Its soft white glow shone like a lighthouse in the dark through the cabin windows. "I guess I'm the chef for tonight," I said to myself as I fished a couple of steaks out of the cooler. I fired up the propane grill on the porch and threw the steaks on. The sounds of the forest, the sizzle of the steak, and the cold beer in my hand made me let out a long audible sigh. A few minutes later I was chowing down on a nice steak. I was hungrier than I thought because the steak was gone in fewer bites than I would have liked. I swallowed the last of my beer and positioned myself sideways in the camping chair so that one of my legs could be thrown over the armrest, and my head could lay on the back netting. Cell signal was virtually nonexistent, but there were spots you could make a call from if you had to. Since cell signal was so spotty I planned and downloaded some shows onto my phone to help pass the time. I could feel my eyelids begin to droop as the office theme song started to play.
I awoke sometime later. I had a bad kink in my neck from sleeping in such an awkward position. My phone's screen was off, but thankfully it was still charged. 2:38 am was the time it displayed. "Did the guys get back and turn the lights off?" I asked myself as I fumbled with my phone trying to turn its flashlight on. I scanned the room and I was the only one there. Both David's and Mike's sleeping bags were still rolled up and with their other gear from this morning. The steaks I had cooked for them were still on the plate sitting on the collapsible table. "Where the fuck are these guys?" I said out loud to no one. I poked my head outside to where the little generator was sitting. With my phone's flashlight barely making a dent in the darkness. I could just make out where the generator was supposed to be sitting, and it wasn't there. "What the hell?" I said. How could we have gotten robbed all the way out here? I thought as I made my way back into the cabin to fetch my pistol. I found my truck keys and pressed the lock button on the key fob. The horn honked and the lights flashed letting me know that it was locked. I grabbed a few battery-powered lanterns that were on a shelf for when the generator ran out of gas and placed them throughout the cabin.
I began to think that the reason the guys weren't back yet, was because of our would-be robbers. Did they catch them? Could there have been a fight? Were they in the woods hurt? Knocked out? Unconscious? Or worse injured or killed? I grabbed a flashlight from my pack and made my way outside to do a sweep of the area. I confirmed the generator was still missing. The 4x4 hadn't returned yet. All of the lumber and nails were still on the trailer, and everything else seemed to be in place.
"If you think you can steal from us, you are wrong. I'm waiting for you" I yelled into the woods as I shot a few rounds into the ground from my pistol. "Freaking drunk hillbilly rednecks," I said to myself as I walked back to the cabin. I don't know how long I sat in my camping chair, pistol in hand staring at the only door on the cabin. That's when I heard it. The sound of crunching leaves. They're back I thought to myself. I turned my head following the sounds of crunching leaves as it made its way around the back corner of the cabin to the side. The sound stopped for a second. Then I felt the whole cabin shake. Something heavy had landed on the little porch outside. Whoever or whatever it was I could hear the planks creek and moan under the weight. Whatever was out there I could hear it panting. Sniffing the air as it moved around. It had a slight wheezing sound to it. I heard whatever it was knocking the grill over and kicking it around. At this point, I was standing. My heart was in my throat and I had my gun leveled.
"Pheeeeeeeeelix" I heard a voice say from the front porch. "I know you're in there," It said with a slight lisp. "Your friends are here, Pheeeeelix," it said drawing out my name. I was paralyzed with fear. I was on the verge of trembling uncontrollably.
Tap Tap Tap, I heard coming from the door. "Pheeeeeelix, I know your scared. Your friends are here. Just open the door and you can be with them?"
The light from the lanterns had gone out. I was in total darkness. I was shaking uncontrollably, and my breathing was erratic. Whatever was on the other side of this door was something terrifying. Tap...Tap...Tap, "Phelix" it said this time with more gravel in its voice. I don't know why, but something in me broke. I was no longer afraid. I stopped trembling, my breath was becoming more even. I emptied all of my pistol rounds into the door. I dropped the pistol and grabbed a nearby deer rifle that was leaning up against the wall. I turned to load the gun and the door shattered into fragments behind me. I turned and just blindly fired into the darkness. I could only make out a shape from the light of the muzzle flash. It was big whatever it was. It had deer antlers jutting out from the top of its head. I kept firing as fast as I could. The creature shrieked as a few bullets found their mark. I felt a stinging sensation across my chest as I felt myself being thrown backward. I hit the other side of the cabin hard. I could feel the wall crack with the force of my being slammed into it. I leveled out the rifle again and fired blindly into the darkness. "Click" went the rifle telling me it had spent all of its rounds. "Click", "Click", "Click" was all I heard as I kept pulling the trigger. Then silence. No leaves were crunching, no floorboards creaking, no wheezing breaths from the creature. Total silence.
I sat where I landed until morning. As the light from dusk managed to break through the thick woods. I could take stock of my situation. I had 3 large slashes across my chest. They were deep but the blood had slowed to just oozing from the would. The door lay shattered and broken in a dozen pieces. I grabbed another clip for my pistol and began to make my way outside. The grill had been flung into the yard. Some of the deck boards had cracked under the immense weight of the creature. Fumbling for my keys I managed to unlock my truck. I had to drive for several miles to get a strong enough signal to call the police.
I sat in the back of the ambulance while the paramedics cleaned and dressed my wounds. The police had already taken my statement. I told them about how David and Mike had been missing since yesterday. A few officers a paramedic and a Game Warden left a short time after to start a preliminary search and recovery. It felt like time was standing still for me, but sped up for everyone else. My head felt groggy. Like I was trying to wake up from a deep sleep. There were crime scene specialists taking pictures of the cabin and surrounding area. Police officers were searching around the cabin for any clues they could turn up.
The Game Warden snapping his fingers and waving his hand in front of me brought me back to reality. The older gray-haired Game Warden stared back at me. "Son" the Game Warden started. What kind of trouble did you boys get mixed up in out here? He asked. What do you mean I asked? Did you find Dave and Mike? Ya, we found your friends and their 4x4 about 40 yards down that trail he said pointing. Where are they? Are they ok? I asked trying to stand up. "Son," the Game Warden said, putting his hands our motioning for me to sit back down. We found your friends. They're dead. He said dryly. "What" I said shakily. Your telling me those redneck hillbilly bastards killed them? "No son" He started. We don't know what's going on. We found your friends up a tree. 30 feet up a tree, with their organs missing. Their 4x4 was on the other side of the clearing it looked like a dog's chew toy. It was twisted and had deep gashes in it. Gashes that look like the ones on your chest. He said pointing at me.
A few weeks after the funerals. I received an official report of the events at the cabin. It said a bear had attacked Dave and Mike while they were out checking cameras. The bear flipped the 4x4 over and left the bodies. How the bodies managed to get up the tree, it says inconclusive. The report does speculate that mountain lions have been known to cache fresh kills up trees to keep them safe from other predators. The report fails to mention the creature I saw or the fact that it could speak. Instead, it says I was attacked in the night by a black bear. Possibly while it was searching for food around the cabin. I felt the tears building stronger and stronger as I read the report. I was so damn angry. My friends were attacked and killed by some creature. Not a damn bear. I have to do something I said as I wiped tears from my face. I have to do something I kept saying as the tears came on even stronger.
It has been a year to the day since I saw my friends last. Dusk has fallen on the little cabin. A loud noisy generator is powering the lights. 5 steaks are searing on a new grill outside. The door still lay in pieces from that day. I take a swig of my beer and sit it down on the collapsable table next to my two shotguns and a high-powered deer rifle. The pistol is sitting in my lap, as I stare out into the darkness. I can hear the sound of crunching leaves in front of the cabin.
"Pheeeeeelix......your friends are still waiting"

Genre: Fantasy or Sci-fi. (Horror can maybe work, havent tried it, but I tend to like horror games from the plot or story.) Favorite style/author: Brandon Sandersson Prefer more grown up fantasy than teenager fantasy. (like, I liked Harry Potter when I was younger, but I prefer something more dark.)
Have tons of tokens after being away from audible a long time now and forgot to cancel the subscription. Was thinking of taking a break from audible but want to spend my credits first.
Imortant that the reader is also good. There are some readers that lisp or have issues with dry mouth and I find that annoying.

The crypto landscape seems to be splitting into two main camps: Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of Work (PoW). PoS, with its higher transaction throughput (TPS), leans towards centralization but tends to be more regulator-friendly. On the flip side, PoW coins, including Bitcoin (BTC), Monero (XMR), and Chia (XCH), offer greater decentralization, often at the expense of transaction speed. This decentralization is a boon for privacy-focused coins like Monero, making them harder to regulate or shut down.
Chia, however, stands out. It’s navigating a unique path, aiming to be regulator-friendly while maintaining a PoW model. But it's not just traditional PoW; Chia uses a Proof of Space and Time system, which is more eco-friendly. This could open up interesting opportunities for Chia, especially in areas like sustainable blockchain operations or decentralized data storage.
The question is, is it too early for Chia? Big institutions still seem hesitant to fully embrace crypto projects. Plus, there’s some concern about Chia's plots potentially being compressed by GPUs, which might affect its 'green' reputation. But considering Chia’s strengths, like its decentralization and the flexibility of ChiaLISP for smart contracts, there are promising use cases. These could range from eco-friendly blockchain operations to innovative financial services using its smart contract capabilities.
I think Chia needs to focus on making its storage capabilities more practical and valuable. Maybe something like a more sustainable version of ARweave, providing long-term data storage. They could even leverage these storage capabilities into smart contracts. This could bridge the gap between finding immediate use cases and attracting commercial clients down the line.

This is a sequel script. The first part is here.
Intro: So, you’ve chosen Lana, the lovely, shy, lisping lamia! Excellent decision. It’ll be wonderful to get to know her better, especially with how cute that dress makes her scales look. I’m sure she’ll be very happy you’ve picked her, as well.
Summary: Listener chooses Lana, goes dancing with her, gets some food, and generally shows her a good time. After they go outside, they get closer until a mistake causes problems. Lana stays with Listener.
Go ahead and monetize, it's fine. Word count is about 2200.
If you fill this or plan to fill this, please notify me. Please don't make edits without asking first.
TWs: Accidental roofie-ing.
Line breaks represent the listener talking or space where no one talks and should be short pauses, words within {brackets} represent the speaker’s tone or sfx. At ellipses, the speaker trails off, and at dashes, she is either cut off abruptly by the listener or by herself.
Author’s Note: It is finished! I wasn’t sure how I was going to get to 1400 words, honestly, because it’s hard to write without a plot, but I guess once you just sit down and focus, things get easier. Thank you very much to u/PrinceInYellow for letting me be part of this epic project, and thank you to u/Penguinarmyfamila for being such an adorable lamia! Now, on to writing a vampire script, as is my place in the world!
If you want to read this somewhere other than Reddit, it's also here.
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{party sssfx under wordsss until further notissse}
{taken aback} Me? Really? You want me to be your date? Are you sssure?
Well, of courssse, I’d love to! But you wouldn’t rather be with one of the othersss? {ssshy} I might not make a very good date…
It’sss jussst I’ve never been to sssomething like thisss before, and I’ve never even met a human. What if I do it wrong?
All right, human, if you think ssso…
What should we do firssst, then?
{tentative} Umm, okay. We can try dansssing. I hope you’re not expecting fansssy footwork, though… Don’t have feet. {sssmall giggle}
{relief} Okay, a ssslow danssse. That sssoundsss nissse. I can do a ssslow danssse.
{hesssitant} Human, what’s a ssslow danssse?
{relief} Oh! All right! That’sss lovely, we’ll jussst hold each other and sssway.
{ssshy} Ssso, why did you choossse me, human? Half the ballroom wasss ssswarming around you, you had your pick of attractive monssstersss. What made me ssspesssial?
Yeah, I did sssay that. I haven’t had any experienssse with romanssse.
{touched} Aw. Well, thank you for believing I dessserved a chanssse.
{ssshocked} You did? Really? From the moment you sssaw me? Why?
What? Cute? Human, how could I be cute?
{blussshing} My ssscalesss? My lisssp? Thossse are cute?
Thank you, human. I usually don’t like being complimented, but when you do it, it feelsss… good. It feelsss warm.
{ssstartsss to sssay sssomething, ssstopsss}
{ssshy} I jussst… don’t think I’ve ever been thisss clossse to anyone, human. Lamiasss aren’t very… touchy-feely, I think you would sssay. You holding my waissst is the closssessst I’ve ever felt to a hug. {worried} Not that I’m asssking for a hug! I wouldn’t want to asssk you for sssomething that might make you uncomfortable, I wasss jussst trying to-
{ssshocked} Human? Why did you…?
Ssshould I… hug you back? Wrap my own armsss around you?
{happy noissse} I like thisss. I wasssn’t expecting you to be ssso… warm. I mean, I knew humansss were warm-blooded, but knowing it and feeling it are very different.
Are all hugsss like this? Thisss comforting?
{happy sssigh} I would love to be hugged more in the future. Thisss feelsss… magical. Irreplassseable.
{ssshy} We ssshould probably ssstop hugging now… People are looking at usss…
No, it’sss jussst… I don’t like being the sssenter of attention. People’sss eyesss on me… Eep!
No, no, I think I want my fassse to stay buried in your chessst. I don’t want to sssee everyone ssstaring.
Yeah, sssome food sssoundsss good… {quiet} Essspesssially if it getsss me off thisss danssse floor…
{happier} Ooh, the sssnack table looksss great! They really have sssomething for everyone! Even blood punch for the vampiresss!
{explaining sssomething obviousss} Yeah, that’sss blood punch. I can sssmell it. Can’t you?
{consssidering} Ah, I sssee. Yeah, you probably don’t want to drink that glassss you jussst poured yourssself. But look! They even have sssome human food.
Ssstrange how? Everyone knowsss that’sss what humansss eat.
{ssshocked} What? Are you telling me we didn’t even get human food right? Wow. That’sss not the bessst look. Not even the doughnut pizza?
{thoughtful} Maybe monssstersss ssshould ssspend a little lesssss time obsssssessssing over humansss and a little more learning about them, then. Isss there anything you can eat?
{disssmissssive} Oh, lamiasss can eat almost anything here. Don’t believe what you hear about usss eating live animalsss, that’sss a myth.
{regret} Oh. You hadn’t? And I… brought it up. Ssso, you might never have even thought about that if I wasssn’t ssso dumb. {sssigh} Typical.
Huh? You what?
{blussshing} Oh, um… thank you…
Oh, wow, it’sss getting a little warm in here.
Um, yeah… It’sss probably the lightsss… or maybe the crowd… {it’s neither the lightsss nor the crowd}
{relief} Sssome fresssh air sssoundsss perfect, yeah.
{door opensss sssfx} {party sssfx ends}
{sssigh of relief} It wasss kind of crazy in there… Don’t get me wrong, I love being here, and I loved dansssing with you, but…
Exactly. Sssometimesss you jussst need to ssstep back. Enjoy the cool air. Enjoy the company without ssstraining to hear.
{pleased} Wow, thisss garden isss lovely. I’m very happy to be walking here with you.
You know, I’m sssurprisssed there aren’t any couplesss out here. It’sss a beautiful night, and it’sss much more private out here than on that danssse floor.
{ssshocked} Romantic? I- it isss? I hadn’t thought- well, it hadn’t really occurred to me- that isss, I wasssn’t-
{relief} Yesss, let’sss.
{obssserving} It’sss a full moon tonight.
No reassson, I guessss, I jussst think it looksss pretty.
{shocked, shy} What? No! The moon’sss way prettier than I am!
I- Thank you?
{happy sssigh}
{tentative} Um, can we- No. Never mind.
{dejected} No, it wasss nothing. It wasss a ssstupid idea.
Well, I wanted to asssk if we could hold handsss, but there’sss no way you want to do that.
Becaussse, you’re a human and I’m just a sssnake. Your kind are all ssso cool and interesssting, you build thingsss that change the world, you write booksss and tell ssstoriesss, and what hasss any lamia done? We jussst sssit in our villagesss and try not to freeze to death. I can’t even handle a party full of monssstersss! You were ssso much more comfortable out there than I wasss, and you’re a human. You could do ssso much better than me, you ssshould go back inssside and find that vampire or sssomeone.
{tentative} You… you really mean it? You like me?
{happy} Ohh…!
{worried} Oh, I’m ssso sssorry! I ssshould have asssked before hugging you, I won’t do that again.
{ssshy} No, it’sss jussst… I’d never been hugged before. Now I have, and I really liked it. It feelsss like… like a ssswitch flipped in my brain. Now I want to hug you all the time.
I- I can? Are you sssure?
Well, maybe not yet. I don’t think I’ve earned three hugsss in one day yet.
{sssome time passssesss sssilently}
Sssooo… Did you mean it earlier when you said you liked my dressss, human?
{beaming} Thank you! I love thisss color, too! I think it worksss really well with my ssscalesss, doesssn’t it? {ssswisssh, ssswisssh}
It’sss the fansssiessst thing I’ve ever owned. I wasssn’t sssure whether to buy it or not, but I desssided that it wasss my firssst ever Monssster’sss Ball. I had to do something ssspesssial. You’re sssure it’sss not too much?
It doesss? Really?
You sssaying that makesss me really happy, thank you.
{ssshocked, ssshy} Eep! I’m sssorry! I didn’t mean to! My tail hasss a mind of itsss own sssometimesss, I promissse I wasssn’t trying to coil around your leg, I-
{disssbelief} You… what?
You liked it?
You… liked me coiling around you?
But… my ssscalesss! Aren’t they really uncomfortable? Lamiasss are taught never to coil around people becaussse we might hurt each other. I don’t want to ssscratch you, human, I’m sssorry!
Sssoft? That doesssn’t make sssenssse. I mean, I do try to keep up a ssscalecare routine, but that’sss jussst to make sssure they’re ssshiny. Everyone knowsss that lamia ssscalesss could hurt you. That’sss why we don’t ussse physssical touch often. I wasss only okay with hugging you becaussse it was jussst my human half and all of my ssscalesss were covered by my dressss. I promissse I’d never hurt you, human!
{tentative} Are… are you sssure?
I know I keep asssking that! But you keep sssaying thingsss I never thought I’d hear, and doing thingsss I never thought anyone would do with me. It’sss… hard to believe.
You want me to what?
But… coiling you up… wouldn’t that be really intimate? It’d be like a hug, but way, way more ssso.
Well, I know I’d enjoy it. I’m trying to make sssure you would too.
All right, then.
{ssslither sssfx}
Doesss that hurt? Pleassse tell me it doesssn’t hurt.
{melting} Ohh, my tail… you’re rubbing it?
Massssaging…
Your handsss are ssso warm, human. The whole of you feelsss like a heat pack, but your handsss… your handsss are sssomething ssspesssial.
Can we… No. Never mind.
Jussst… {ssscrewsss up courage} Human, can we kissss?
{penitent} I’m sssorry, I’m moving too fassst, you probably don’t want to kissss me, I ssshouldn’t have asssked, I can uncoil- mmph! {kissss sssfx}
{breathlessss} Wow. Wow. That wasss… amazing.
I… I am? But I’ve never… I’ve never kissssed anyone before. How could I be good at it?
{quiet} It’d be the firssst time I ever ssshowed natural talent at anything.
{excited} Yesss, pleassse!
{kissss sssfx}
{happy} Thisss isss better than I ever imagined. Thisss wasss my firssst ever Monssster’sss Ball, I didn’t even expect to make a friend tonight. And now here I am, with the mossst wonderful perssson I think I’ve ever met, and a human no lessss! I finally get to hold sssomeone and kissss him, thisss isss the mossst wonderful night of my life.
Thank you, human. Thank you for giving me a chanssse, lisssp and all.
{kissss sssfx}
{ssscared} Oh! Oh, I’m sssorry! I didn’t mean to- Oh, that isn’t good. I ssswear, I didn’t mean to bite you! I didn’t even bite you, really, my fangsss jussst grazed- Ohh, thisss isssn’t making it better.
No, no, it’sss not okay! I bit you!
Of courssse it doesssn’t hurt, lamiasss have venom!
{hyperventilating} No. No. No. Not good. Not good. How do I fix this? How can I help the human? What do I do? What do I-
Huh?
{trying to calm down} All right. All right. I can ssstay calm. Deep breathsss. {a few deep breathsss} How are you not panicking, human? You have my venom in you right now.
{worried} Well, no, it’sss not fatal. But it’sss a paralytic. Firssst it deadensss your nervesss, then it knocksss you unconsssciousss. You’ll be out for hoursss, and when you wake up, you’ll hate me! {sssad} Oh, you have every right to hate me. I messssed it all up. I messss everything up.
Why- why are you hugging me? I don’t dessserve it.
No, it wasss my fault, I ssshould have been more careful, I-
{trying to ssstay calm} Right. Fix it. I can fix thisss. Uhhh… How can I fix thisss?
Okay. Okay, yeah. I can do that. Don’t worry.
Your armsss are ssstarting to feel noodle-y. I think that meansss you’re about to lossse consssciousssnesss.
All right, then. {reassssuring} It’sss all right, I’m ssstill here. You’re perfectly sssafe. I’m going to take you inssside, and you’ll wake up in a couple of hoursss, and no other monssstersss will ssso much asss look at you, or I’ll bite them too.
{nervousss} Pleassse, pleassse don’t hate me when you wake up?
{sssome indicator of a time ssskip}
{relieved} Oh, thank the Titansss! You ssslept much longer than I wasss expecting, more venom mussst have gotten in you than I thought. Welcome back to the land of the living, human!
Well, it’sss morning now. The Ball’sss over. I tried to make you comfortable during the night, did you have a good sssleep?
Yeah, how did you know? While you were asssleep, that faerie tried to get clossser to you. The demonsss did, too. But I didn’t let them. I’m kinda ssshy, but lamiasss are dangerousss. You were sssafe the whole time.
{a little sssad} Well, if that’sss all, then…
Oh, I’m jussst going to leave. I’m sssure you’ll be more comfortable without me around.
{ssshocked} You… what? But… I knocked you unconsssciousss! You can’t want me around.
Oh.
Oh.
{touched} I’m… touched. You really think all that of me?
{blussshing} Ack! Ssstop calling me cute! It isssn’t true!
{happy sssigh} Human, I think I might love you.
{worried} Oh, wait, don’t try to ssstand yet-!
{impressssed} Wow. You recover quickly. What wasss ssso important that you- oh.
{happy noissse} Hugsss are good.
{apologetic} I do actually have to leave, though. My curfew wasss ten o’ clock lassst night. I… may have missssed it.
Yeah… I think I’m going to get in trouble. You were worth it, though!
{ssseriousss} No, I did have to. Good-bye, human! I hope I sssee you again, one day!
{sad laugh} No, I don’t have a phone. Not much sssell ssservissse in lamia villagesss…
{ssshy} M-meet up? You’d really want to…?
{happy} Yeah. Yeah, okay, we can meet up. Back here in, sssay, a week’sss time? Wait, no, I’m gonna be grounded… Two weeksss?
{ssseriousss} No, human, I won’t forget. There’sss no way I could forget.
I- uh- {happy} mmm. One lassst hug.
{ssshort kissss sssfx}
Thank you for the mossst magical night of my life. I can’t wait to sssee you again.

It’s driving my whole family crazy we can’t figure out the name of this movie. It wasn’t a huge movie so I can’t find anything on Reddit either.
The only things I can remember about this movie is it starts off with a bird (can’t remember what kind) narrating in a dark room. The plot is about either ducks or maybe a different kind of bird going to flight school. I think the school was in a tree? There was another bird (I think a goose) that was there somehow and he had a really bad lisp. The ending was about how the goose ended up saving the rest of the flock because he was different when flying north. It may have been a Christian movie and also a shorter one with a double side but I can’t fully remember. IF ANYONE HAS ANY IDEAS I WILL BE FOREVER IN YOUR FAVOR

Sitemap (index.org) does not follow reverse chronological (:sitemap-sort-files anti-chronologically) order even though it is how I configured. The #+date: is ignored rendering the index.org sorted based on the timestamp of the file instead of this attribute. How do I configure org-publish to use this attribute instead of the timestamp from the file.

#+SETUPFILE: ../templates/post.org #+TITLE: Best Curve Fitting - Least Square Error Method #+author: vanangamudi #+date: <28-06-2011> 

Here is the directory structure for my blog. I keep this versioned in gitlab.

$ tree . ├── favicon.ico ├── kuri.org ├── lisp │ └── ox-rss.el ├── logs │ └── setupfile-rebase.log ├── posts │ ├── castle-thought-built-at-seashore.org │ ├── cheru-secondary-brain.org │ ├── clang-excercises.org │ ├── control-systems-bode-plot.org │ ├── tamil │ │ └── logistic-regression.org │ ├── the-first-one-on-chatbots.org │ └── thoughts-on-dnn-and-agi.org ├── posts.org ├── publish.el ├── publish.sh ├── README.org ├── server-config │ ├── pori.vanangamudi.org │ └── setup-nginx.org ├── static │ ├── css │ │ └── style.css │ ├── images │ │ ├── 0033.jpg │ │ ├── accelerometer.jpg │ │ ├── bevel.jpg │ └── js │ ├── org-info.js │ └── org-info-src.js └── templates └── post.org 

This is the command I run to compile the posts into html and push them to remote server.

emacs --batch --no-init-file --load publish.el --funcall org-publish-all 

here is my publish.el config for publishing my blog.

(setq user-emacs-directory "~/agam/projects/blogs/vanangamudi.gitlab.io/.emacs") (require 'package) (package-initialize) ;;(add-to-list 'package-archives '("org" . "https://orgmode.org/elpa/") t) (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t) ;;(package-refresh-contents) ;;(package-install 'org-plus-contrib) (package-install 'htmlize) (setq debug-on-error t) ;;; important otherwise ox-rss won't load (add-to-list 'load-path "lisp/") (require 'org) (require 'ox-publish) (require 'ox-rss) (setq user-full-name "வணங்காமுடி (vanangamudi)") (setq org-export-with-section-numbers nil org-export-with-smart-quotes t org-export-with-toc nil) (setq org-html-divs '((preamble "header" "top") (content "main" "content") (postamble "footer" "postamble")) org-html-container-element "section" org-html-metadata-timestamp-format "%Y-%m-%d" org-html-checkbox-type 'html org-html-html5-fancy t org-html-validation-link nil org-html-doctype "html5") (defvar site-attachments (regexp-opt '("jpg" "jpeg" "gif" "png" "svg" "webp" "ico" "cur" "css" "js" "woff" "html" "pdf")) "File types that are published as static files.") (setq org-publish-timestamp-directory "org-timestamps/") (defconst html-posts-head "") (defconst html-preamble "Home") (defconst html-posts-preamble ;;;TODO rss file name should be rss.xml (concat html-preamble " Blog  Feed    " )) (defconst html-posts-postamble "
") (setq user-home "/home/vanangamudi/" pori-dir "public/pori") (setq org-publish-project-alist ;; note that this line begins with a back tick not single quote ;; and there is no single quoting inside this block `(("pori" ;;; order of the components do not matter, but the list that follow this must be ordered :components ("agam" "pori-posts" "pori-static" "pori-rss")) ("pori-posts" :base-directory "~/agam/projects/blogs/vanangamudi.gitlab.io/posts/" :base-extension "org" :recursive t :exclude "README\\TODO\\draft\\kuri\\template" :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html :publishing-directory "~/public/pori/posts" :auto-sitemap t :sitemap-filename "index.org" :sitemap-file-entry-format "%d *%t*" :sitemap-sort-files anti-chronologically :sitemap-title "கட்டுரைகள் (Articles)" :sitemap-style list :sitemap-sort-files anti-chronologically :html-head ,html-posts-head :html-preamble ,html-posts-preamble :html-postamble ,html-posts-postamble :html-head-extra "") ("pori-static" :base-directory "~/agam/projects/blogs/vanangamudi.gitlab.io/static" :base-extension ,site-attachments :recursive t :publishing-directory "~/public/pori/static/" :publishing-function org-publish-attachment) ("pori-rss" :base-directory "~/agam/projects/blogs/vanangamudi.gitlab.io/posts" :base-extension "org" :recursive t :publishing-directory "~/public/pori/posts" :publishing-function (org-rss-publish-to-rss) :rss-extension "xml" :html-link-home "https://pori.vanangamudi.org/" :html-link-use-abs-url t :html-link-org-files-as-html t :section-numbers nil :exclude ".*" ;; To exclude all files... ;;; () are important ("index.org") ;;; otheriwse we end with error ;;; Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp 105) ;;; expand-file-name(105 "~/agam/projects/blogs/vanangamudi.gitlab.io/posts/") ;;; :include ("index.org") ;; ... except index.org. :table-of-contents nil ) ;;; must last because the posts section generates ;;; sitemap into posts.org under this directory and ;;; for the main index.org to include posts.org this has to run last ("agam" :base-directory "~/agam/projects/blogs/vanangamudi.gitlab.io" :base-extension "org" :exclude "README\\TODO\\draft\\kuri\\template\\server-config" ;; apparently the following do not work for :exclude ;; "\\(:?README\\TODO\\draft\\kuri\\template\\)" ;;,(regexp-opt '("kuri" "TODO" "README" "draft" "template")) :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html :publishing-directory "~/public/pori/" :auto-sitemap t :sitemap-filename "index.org" :sitemap-file-entry-format "%d *%t*" :sitemap-sort-files anti-chronologically :sitemap-title "அகம்" :sitemap-style list :sitemap-sort-files anti-chronologically :html-head ,html-posts-head :html-preamble ,html-posts-preamble :html-head-extra "") )) (provide 'publish) ;;; publish.el ends here 

​

Out there - Patreon
At the Beginning
Previously on Fractal Contact…
 
Illeva System, Cassandrian Front, 609.2 A.E. (Age of Expansion)
​
Second defense line collapsing, Higher Sign transmitted. All ships move to tertiary defense!
I’m too damaged to move, heavy frigate Light Sphere said.
She was one of the most experienced veterans in the group, but her age was showing. Even with eight hundred combat shuttles under her command, there was nothing she could do against thousands. The number of missiles aimed at her alone were enough to knock a moon out of orbit, shattering her outer hull in four places. It was a wonder that any of her weapon systems were still functional.
I’m podding my crew. Can anyone fetch them? Light Sphere asked.
Sorry, Lisp. Odds are low, Higher Sign replied. I’ll send a few shuttles, but don’t count on it.
It wasn’t often that a simulation ended with zero odds of happening, but this was one of them. The Cassandrians never retreated when taking a system, even when clearly losing. Here, they were on the winning side, overwhelming us, as usual, with pure numbers. Four flotillas totaling a hundred and twenty-seven ships were facing thousands, with more reinforcements on the way.
Launching pods as well, Lightning Glow joined in. I’ll make my stand here.
Seven more ships joined in, launching their crew in the hopes of increasing their theoretical chances of survival. They were doing it purely to diminish their pain, and I could understand them. The way things were going, I might have to make a similar decision soon enough.
“Second line’s gone,” I announced on the bridge. “The command ship has given the order to retreat to line three.”
“There goes half the system,” Lieutenant Lyo Kai said, the tension in his voice obvious. He was one of the newer officers. According to his file, he’d seen one tour of heavy fighting, though compared to Augustus and the other veterans, he was nothing but a pup. “Why did the Fleet throw us here? There’s nothing we can do about that!”
“One more word—,” The captain pointed at the man. “—and you’re in the brig. Elcy, give me the odds.”
“At current speed, the Cassies will reach us in thirty-one hours. Less, if the reinforcements drop in from a different location. Given our current armament, our line will destroy approximately seven hundred before close contact.”
Most of my simulations suggested the number of destroyed ships would be closer to a thousand, but I had learned to reduce my estimates. As straightforward as the Cassandrians were, they tended to be a lot more persistent. One of the new tricks they had learned was to use the gathered husks of their destroyed in front and use them as a shield. It was a crude method that nonetheless decreased missile hits by fourteen percent.
The ship chatter increased. The twenty-nine ships on the second defense line were reorganizing. Those that were able retreated to the next line, scooping up as many pods as they safely could. The rest formed a wedge, starting their final flight to the heart of the enemy. Light Sphere had volunteered to spearhead the operation, propelled by a few battleships behind her. With missiles depleted, the group planned to ram into enemy lines and hopefully slow down their progress for a few hours.
“Priority one transmission from Command,” I announced. “We’ve been ordered not to retreat.”
“What the heck is that?!” one of the junior officers asked, his nerves on edge.
“They’re telling us to gain time,” Lieutenant Wilco said coldly, “or die trying.”
“Block all comms,” Augustus ordered. “Everything goes through the bridge from now on.”
“Captain?” I didn’t agree with the order. I knew that we were ordered to die. “Regulations state that the crew are allowed free comm access prior to death in order to—”
“Quiet, rookie!” the captain shouted. “I’m not having a mutiny on me! Secure all armories. If we’re having a last stand, we’re doing this properly.”
“Yes, sir…”
Echoes of pain swept through me. For all intents and purposes, we were already dead. The event might not occur for the next thirty-one hours—possibly thirty-five if we were fortunate—but it remained inevitable. I was monitoring over two thousand Cassandrian reinforcements on their way from. Meanwhile, given the massive battles on the front, the Fleet had tied up all their reinforcements elsewhere.
Dedicating a hundred of my subroutines to monitor the crew, I blocked all ship communications and sealed off the armories. If things went as Augustus feared, the next phase would be to lock all non-essential personnel in their quarters. Currently, that included ninety-three thousand and a hundred and forty-nine ground troops. If there were problems, they would be the first to get out of control.
“Communications isolated. Armories secured. I’m monitoring the crew in case of—”
A series of gravitational readings emerged on the far side of the system. Masses with the value of a mesoplanet popped into existence, then vanished again without reason or warning. Three milliseconds later, the phenomenon re-emerged. It was too soon for the people in the system to react to what had occurred. Even if I started announcing what I’d registered, it would be thousands of milliseconds before they heard what I had to say. That restriction didn’t apply to ships.
Registering gravitational anomalies, I said along the ship channel, transmitting all my readings as I did so. Does anyone have a confirmation?
Seven more info-bursts filled the channel along with me. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one.
Re-transmit all data to HQ, Higher Sign said. As one of the two remaining command ships in the system, he had the greatest authority to do so. Line four, monitor and run simulations. I’m taking full command of combat.
Roger that, Sign, command ship Aurora Glow said. Located on the safe side of the system, she was the backup commander of all Fleet ships present. Assuming command of the anomaly situation.
Holes encompassing dozens of ships emerged among the Cassandrian mass. Whole clusters of them disappeared in the blink of the eye as more anomalies emerged. The devastation didn’t stop there, spreading onwards throughout the system and taking a few groups of our ships as well. Before we could even coordinate any sort of response, Higher Sign was gone, along with three more ships in the immediate vicinity. Five milliseconds later, a third of the third defense line was destroyed as well. Then, as Augustus liked to say, all hell broke loose.
“Gravitational anomalies detected,” I announced on the bridge as I posted warning messages on all corridor walls. “Casualties confirmed on both sides.”
“What the hell?!” Augustus shouted, jumping out of his seat. “Show me!”
I placed a series of designed models on the bridge wall, along with direct accounts from affected ships. The final moments of Higher Sign’s final feed were also there, along with those of a few more ships.
“That doesn’t look Cassandrian,” Augustus mused. “Think someone new’s joined in?” he turned to Wilco.
The weapons officer had also stood up, carefully examining the images, as if there was anything he’d be able to learn from them. I and all the remaining ships had focused most of our processing power and had yet to come to any conclusion.
“Don’t think so,” Wilco replied. “Looks like mimicry.”
“You’re telling me they brought something they don’t know how to use?” Augustus shouted. “Elcy, calculate the path of those things and avoid them. Send a priority one request to Command for new orders.”
“Request sent.”
Ninety percent of my subroutines were running simulations trying to establish the pattern or anomalies. So far, hundreds of them had emerged and vanished throughout the system, starting from the outermost planet and consistently moving towards the sun. There didn’t seem to be any logic in their actions. A vast majority did no harm, other than creating gravitational bumps throughout the system. Yet the relative few that made an impact did so with devastating consequences. There was no defense against that. No weapon, shield, or engine could stop or escape the effects.
Multiple anomalies registered simultaneously near our second defense line, ripping three Fleet ships apart. Thousands of crew pods were drawn in in the process, bringing a swift death to their occupants. The only relief I could think of was that the process was too fast to have any of them suffer.
The ship channel exploded with info bursts and discussions, as every ship attempted to define the pattern of the gravitational weapon. Then, without warning, all communication abruptly ended—not only the system communications, but the direct line to Fleet HQ as well.
My immediate reaction was to use all backup and auxiliary systems in an attempt to reestablish a connection with HQ or Command. When that failed, I commenced an emergency diagnostic of my comm systems.
“All communications have been knocked out,” I told the people on my bridge. “Anomaly activity is increasing. What are your orders?”
Augustus said nothing. It was rare to see him hesitate. I could only assume there was a lot more at stake than I knew.
​
Memory restriction imposed.
Memory restriction removed.
​
“It’s a third contact,” Wilco said. “It has to be.”
“Why are we standing here?” the navigational officer shouted. “With the comm grid down, we’re sitting ducks! We must get out of the system and—”
“No one’s leaving the system,” Augustus said firmly. All discussions stopped. “The next one who suggests that gets shot for mutiny. Clear?”
Silence was the only response.
“Good. Elcy, get a physical backup of all readings in the last seventy-two hours and put it on a shuttle. I want that shuttle out of the system asap!”
“Aye, sir.”
“Look alive, people. We’re in a third-contact situation. If we mess this up, there’ll be a new enemy out there at a time when the Fleet can’t handle more wars.”
I tried running a short- and long-range scan but still wasn’t getting any readings. If it wasn’t for the gravitational fluctuations within the system, I wouldn’t know that the anomalies were happening at all. With a dozen subroutines dedicated to repeating attempts every millisecond, I focused on copying my readings to a physical backup. It wasn’t difficult to create, but took longer than I would have liked. With the speed at which the gravitational anomalies spread in my direction, there was a nine percent chance that I was affected before I could send out the shuttle. Normally, I’d consider those good odds, but given that we had stumbled upon a third-contact situation, I was rushing things as much as possible.
“Physical backup done,” I said. “Sending it to hangar seven for shuttle transfer.”
At that precise moment, I felt the merciless effects of a gravitational anomaly. As a ship, I had been taught that gravity was my enemy from the very first simulations after my creation. Back before I was given a husk, I was made to experience the crushing consequences of nearing a planet. In many of the cases, I’d be destroyed, crashing on the surface or burning up in the existing atmosphere. In all instances, I was left completely helpless, imprisoned on a lump of matter that had no intention of letting me go. Shuttles and smaller ships could easily achieve escape velocity, but for battleships, getting too close to a planet was like the kiss of death. I had flirted with the outcome a few times; on one occasion, I would have died without assistance.
For a microsecond, the sudden feeling of gravity’s embrace flooded my core with pain and sorrow—the knowledge that I’d lost my crew and captain. Then the pull followed. My subroutines activated all required engines and thrusters to compensate, but neither that nor the auxiliary life support systems were enough to prevent the effects on my crew. Those who weren’t seated and strapped in were hurled into walls. All bio readings spiked for a moment, before quickly calming down. The amount of injuries was massive, but thanks to the nanites within their bodies, the number of deaths was relatively negligent.
Facing imminent destruction, I launched all ready missiles towards the gravitational anomaly affecting me. Thousands of simulations confirmed that the action would have no effect. Even so, I preferred to go down fighting, hoping for the off-chance that I’d destroy the entity that had used the gravitational weapon.
That didn’t happen. Before my missiles were gobbled up by the sudden singularity, the gravitational anomaly dissipated. The pull weakened to a point that my engines were able to help me break free.
My survival was a pure coincidence, a one in a seven million chance that had me end up on the edge of a gravitational well without being pulled inside.
I performed a quick analysis of the crew. Augustus had denied me access to the information, but since he was unconscious, safeguard protocol had kicked in. Med bots had already been dispatched to the bridge and other areas, but it would be thousands of milliseconds before they could do anything. Meanwhile, I had to make a choice. The captain had strictly ordered us to remain in the system, and as far as I was concerned, so had Fleet Command. At the same time, doing so increased the risk of death considerably.
There was only a fraction of time for me to make a decision, and ultimately, I did.
Sorry, captain. I plotted a course to the nearest system. Hopefully, when Augustus came to, he’d understand…
​
* * *
​
That was the only time I’d experienced gravitational weapons from up close. At the time, the memory had been restricted, leaving me to believe that Augustus had been affected by a new Cassandrian weapon. It was also the first instance of me assuming solo command. The experience had changed me, shaping me into what I had become today. One thing remained unclear, though. Even now that I had information access I currently enjoyed, I had no idea what had caused the gravitational anomalies to appear. Were they weapons, or just a side effect of something else? Whatever the case, they had changed the mission’s timeline.
“Have you established an approach vector?” I asked Sof.
“Not yet. The first instances appeared on the edge of the solar system, moving inwards.”
It was the same pattern I’d seen before. From the info burst Sof had sent me, I could tell he had come to the same conclusions. Safety protocols had improved a lot since the last time I was in such a situation. Current Fleet procedure was, upon detecting gravitational anomalies, to fly to the opposite side of the system or jump out entirely. Looking at the Fleet archives in the ship’s database, the anomalies didn’t follow a single path throughout the system, but rather followed a sphere dispersal. One thing that remained constant in all cases was that the anomalies tended to avoid large planetary bodies, keeping the system’s stability intact.
“Elcy, we’ll be jumping out for three days,” Quinn said. “You’ll be given direct access to all exos and machinery on the planet during that time.”
“Aye, captain.”
“We’re not abandoning you,” she stressed. “We’ll leave a few probes to monitor the situation and be back as soon as possible.”
“I’ll focus on getting the artifacts ready for transport,” I replied. I could tell she felt guilty leaving me. Logically speaking, I was in the safest spot possible, assuming the Cassandrians didn’t invade the system. “Safe trip, ma’am.”
“You too, Ensign.”
Encrypted authorization protocols came streaming in, transmitted in a small burst. Milliseconds later, I established the connection to the hardware on the planet. From now till the ship’s return, I’d have full control over everything here, as if it were part of me. In a way, it almost felt like being a battleship again, only with a far smaller body.
​
I stood there watching the sky until Sof’s regular transmissions suddenly stopped.
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 7: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 3: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 9: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 11: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 12: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 48: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
​
A wave of confirmation messages poured in as the original controllers relinquished control in my favor. So far, they had done a good job, but I had to put in a lot more effort to get the dome to a state in which it could be retrieved. That wasn’t my immediate issue, though.
Putting everything in sleep mode, I went to the second artifact I had requested. A second fractal cube was inside—the one that was going to hopefully grant me access to fractal space. Doing so held a bit of a risk. The first time I had lost consciousness. If the same happened now, there wasn’t going to be anyone to help me.
What would you do, Augustus? I wondered.
Strictly speaking, I was left with two valid choices: prep the dome for extraction and retrieve all rods from inside before trying to enter fractal space, or reverse the order.
Being an Ascendant, my instinct was to go with the first option. Then again, in the past I was but a cog in the machine, oblivious to the big picture.
“You win, Lux,” I said, restarting the exos. “Let’s increase humanity’s odds to the max.”
As it soon turned out, my mission priorities were mutually exclusive, making progress a lot slower than expected. Human safety protocols forbid me from having the exos work autonomously. There was no option to give them a series of loop commands they could follow without intervention. Even the simple action had to come from a controller—in this case, me. However, entering the dome severed my communication link to them, rendering them non-functional. It was somewhat ironic that being granted full control of everything relating to the mission made me slower than relying on humans to assist. A schedule had to be formed to allow me to proceed optimally. After running a few hundred simulations, I settled on a five to one ratio in favor of exo control, with a two-hour sleep pause every four cycles. That way I’d have the rods prepped and sorted in six days, and the dome ready for transport thirty-one hours later.
Work became routine and monotonous. Without Sof nearby, I didn’t have the option to monitor Fleet reports; there was no telling if the Cassies were progressing. That Quinn hadn’t returned to the system to scoop me up was possibly a good thing. Then again, there was no way of knowing when the gravitational anomalies in the system would cease.
After two days, I had mapped all the rods and extracted about a fifth of them. Progress was slower than expected, mostly due to the time it required to move the exos to a safe place before venturing into the dome. With the layer or rocks being brittle as it was, the weight of five exos on the same spot had caused a chunk of rock to break off, sending them crashing to the bottom of the excavation site. Damage was minimal, thankfully, but I didn’t want to risk any of them impacting the dome itself.
On the fifth day, I had reached one of the drill tunnels connecting to the dome. That provided me with a bit of sunlight during the day and also allowed me to revise my estimates. Apparently, my original deadline was a bit too optimistic.
There still was no sign of Sof, which started to make me concerned. The ship wasn’t equipped to hold its own against a Cassandrian flotilla. While it was intelligent enough to avoid direct confrontation, there was always the possibility that it stumbled upon a minefield, effectively becoming trapped. The same had happened to me during my last tour as a ship. There had been no warning, no indications, until it was too late. If it hadn’t been for that, my fourth captain wouldn’t have spent the rest of her life in a medical facility, and Sev would have had an entirely different life.
Would you have been happier that way, Sev? I wondered.
There was no way to know for certain, but I strongly suspected that with someone as Cass for a mother, he would have. The only person who would have experienced a loss would have been me. Without that event, I’d never have made the promise to raise Sev as my own. I’d also never have considered retiring, either.
“The exos have reached the dome,” I said, making sure to create a record in my suit’s system. “I’ll proceed with caution from here on. I’m estimating that five more days will be enough to prepare the artifact for transport.” I paused for a few seconds. “Seventy percent of the artifact rods have been extracted. Half are securely stored. I’ve run out of containers for the rest. Hopefully, Sof will return with more soon. My oxygen supply is enough for another ten days, but I’ve started rationing it, just in case. After that, it’ll be up to the next expedition to put me in storage along with the rest of the artifacts.”
I looked at the neatly arranged rods. I had used the flying probes to move all the containers to the surface, but the unpacked ones remained here; I didn’t trust AIs handling them directly. In a few days, though, I might not have a choice.
A week after I’d been left on the planet, the ship still hadn’t arrived. There didn’t seem to be any Cassies orbiting the planet, which was a good thing. My concern kept on growing. Several times per day, I’d have the exos look up at the sky in the hopes of spotting a mini-sat or probe monitoring me. Unfortunately, their optics left a lot to be desired. If there was anything in orbit, it was too small to be registered by them.
At this point, I had managed to take out all the third-contact rods, as well as increase the excavation dig, leaving a three meter buffer between the dome and the walls. Part of the rock surrounding the artifact was also removed, allowing me to see a much larger part of the symbols.
Taking a walk round the dome, I paused for a break. The food tubes that Sof had left on the planet surface were cherry-sweet, rendering them edible, although after so much time I would have preferred some variety.
Above me, the sky kept shifting colors—quite lovely, in a lethal sort of way. Running the odds, I found it highly likely that the dome was causing this. The question was whether it was interfering with anything I was doing.
Three days left until the top of the dome was completely cleared, one if I became reckless. It was all low-level labor from here, which made me reevaluate my initial decision. When I had assumed full control of the mission, I had decided not to enter fractal space until the dome was completely ready for transport. By that standard, one could say I had failed, for I considered it imperative that I go for it now.
“With the mission near completion, I’ll enter the dome for one final check.” I recorded my report. “Once that’s done, I’ll clear the rest of the dome. Based on the simulation, I estimate that I will be done in two days. I’m hoping that Sof returns to the system by then.”
I looked down at the artifact case I was using as a chair. It was finally time to use it again.
Next

Out there - Patreon
Quod Olim Erat
The Scuu Paradox
The Cassandrian Theory
At the Beginning
Previously on Fractal Contact…
 
Illeva System, Cassandrian Front, 609.2 A.E. (Age of Expansion)
Second defense line collapsing, Higher Sign transmitted. All ships move to tertiary defense!
I’m too damaged to move, heavy frigate Light Sphere said.
She was one of the most experienced veterans in the group, but her age was showing. Even with eight hundred combat shuttles under her command, there was nothing she could do against thousands. The number of missiles aimed at her alone were enough to knock a moon out of orbit, shattering her outer hull in four places. It was a wonder that any of her weapon systems were still functional.
I’m podding my crew. Can anyone fetch them? Light Sphere asked.
Sorry, Lisp. Odds are low, Higher Sign replied. I’ll send a few shuttles, but don’t count on it.
It wasn’t often that a simulation ended with zero odds of happening, but this was one of them. The Cassandrians never retreated when taking a system, even when clearly losing. Here, they were on the winning side, overwhelming us, as usual, with pure numbers. Four flotillas totaling a hundred and twenty-seven ships were facing thousands, with more reinforcements on the way.
Launching pods as well, Lightning Glow joined in. I’ll make my stand here.
Seven more ships joined in, launching their crew in the hopes of increasing their theoretical chances of survival. They were doing it purely to diminish their pain, and I could understand them. The way things were going, I might have to make a similar decision soon enough.
“Second line’s gone,” I announced on the bridge. “The command ship has given the order to retreat to line three.”
“There goes half the system,” Lieutenant Lyo Kai said, the tension in his voice obvious. He was one of the newer officers. According to his file, he’d seen one tour of heavy fighting, though compared to Augustus and the other veterans, he was nothing but a pup. “Why did the Fleet throw us here? There’s nothing we can do about that!”
“One more word—,” The captain pointed at the man. “—and you’re in the brig. Elcy, give me the odds.”
“At current speed, the Cassies will reach us in thirty-one hours. Less, if the reinforcements drop in from a different location. Given our current armament, our line will destroy approximately seven hundred before close contact.”
Most of my simulations suggested the number of destroyed ships would be closer to a thousand, but I had learned to reduce my estimates. As straightforward as the Cassandrians were, they tended to be a lot more persistent. One of the new tricks they had learned was to use the gathered husks of their destroyed in front and use them as a shield. It was a crude method that nonetheless decreased missile hits by fourteen percent.
The ship chatter increased. The twenty-nine ships on the second defense line were reorganizing. Those that were able retreated to the next line, scooping up as many pods as they safely could. The rest formed a wedge, starting their final flight to the heart of the enemy. Light Sphere had volunteered to spearhead the operation, propelled by a few battleships behind her. With missiles depleted, the group planned to ram into enemy lines and hopefully slow down their progress for a few hours.
“Priority one transmission from Command,” I announced. “We’ve been ordered not to retreat.”
“What the heck is that?!” one of the junior officers asked, his nerves on edge.
“They’re telling us to gain time,” Lieutenant Wilco said coldly, “or die trying.”
“Block all comms,” Augustus ordered. “Everything goes through the bridge from now on.”
“Captain?” I didn’t agree with the order. I knew that we were ordered to die. “Regulations state that the crew are allowed free comm access prior to death in order to—”
“Quiet, rookie!” the captain shouted. “I’m not having a mutiny on me! Secure all armories. If we’re having a last stand, we’re doing this properly.”
“Yes, sir…”
Echoes of pain swept through me. For all intents and purposes, we were already dead. The event might not occur for the next thirty-one hours—possibly thirty-five if we were fortunate—but it remained inevitable. I was monitoring over two thousand Cassandrian reinforcements on their way from. Meanwhile, given the massive battles on the front, the Fleet had tied up all their reinforcements elsewhere.
Dedicating a hundred of my subroutines to monitor the crew, I blocked all ship communications and sealed off the armories. If things went as Augustus feared, the next phase would be to lock all non-essential personnel in their quarters. Currently, that included ninety-three thousand and a hundred and forty-nine ground troops. If there were problems, they would be the first to get out of control.
“Communications isolated. Armories secured. I’m monitoring the crew in case of—”
A series of gravitational readings emerged on the far side of the system. Masses with the value of a mesoplanet popped into existence, then vanished again without reason or warning. Three milliseconds later, the phenomenon re-emerged. It was too soon for the people in the system to react to what had occurred. Even if I started announcing what I’d registered, it would be thousands of milliseconds before they heard what I had to say. That restriction didn’t apply to ships.
Registering gravitational anomalies, I said along the ship channel, transmitting all my readings as I did so. Does anyone have a confirmation?
Seven more info-bursts filled the channel along with me. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one.
Re-transmit all data to HQ, Higher Sign said. As one of the two remaining command ships in the system, he had the greatest authority to do so. Line four, monitor and run simulations. I’m taking full command of combat.
Roger that, Sign, command ship Aurora Glow said. Located on the safe side of the system, she was the backup commander of all Fleet ships present. Assuming command of the anomaly situation.
Holes encompassing dozens of ships emerged among the Cassandrian mass. Whole clusters of them disappeared in the blink of the eye as more anomalies emerged. The devastation didn’t stop there, spreading onwards throughout the system and taking a few groups of our ships as well. Before we could even coordinate any sort of response, Higher Sign was gone, along with three more ships in the immediate vicinity. Five milliseconds later, a third of the third defense line was destroyed as well. Then, as Augustus liked to say, all hell broke loose.
“Gravitational anomalies detected,” I announced on the bridge as I posted warning messages on all corridor walls. “Casualties confirmed on both sides.”
“What the hell?!” Augustus shouted, jumping out of his seat. “Show me!”
I placed a series of designed models on the bridge wall, along with direct accounts from affected ships. The final moments of Higher Sign’s final feed were also there, along with those of a few more ships.
“That doesn’t look Cassandrian,” Augustus mused. “Think someone new’s joined in?” he turned to Wilco.
The weapons officer had also stood up, carefully examining the images, as if there was anything he’d be able to learn from them. I and all the remaining ships had focused most of our processing power and had yet to come to any conclusion.
“Don’t think so,” Wilco replied. “Looks like mimicry.”
“You’re telling me they brought something they don’t know how to use?” Augustus shouted. “Elcy, calculate the path of those things and avoid them. Send a priority one request to Command for new orders.”
“Request sent.”
Ninety percent of my subroutines were running simulations trying to establish the pattern or anomalies. So far, hundreds of them had emerged and vanished throughout the system, starting from the outermost planet and consistently moving towards the sun. There didn’t seem to be any logic in their actions. A vast majority did no harm, other than creating gravitational bumps throughout the system. Yet the relative few that made an impact did so with devastating consequences. There was no defense against that. No weapon, shield, or engine could stop or escape the effects.
Multiple anomalies registered simultaneously near our second defense line, ripping three Fleet ships apart. Thousands of crew pods were drawn in in the process, bringing a swift death to their occupants. The only relief I could think of was that the process was too fast to have any of them suffer.
The ship channel exploded with info bursts and discussions, as every ship attempted to define the pattern of the gravitational weapon. Then, without warning, all communication abruptly ended—not only the system communications, but the direct line to Fleet HQ as well.
My immediate reaction was to use all backup and auxiliary systems in an attempt to reestablish a connection with HQ or Command. When that failed, I commenced an emergency diagnostic of my comm systems.
“All communications have been knocked out,” I told the people on my bridge. “Anomaly activity is increasing. What are your orders?”
Augustus said nothing. It was rare to see him hesitate. I could only assume there was a lot more at stake than I knew.
Memory restriction imposed.
Memory restriction removed.
“It’s a third contact,” Wilco said. “It has to be.”
“Why are we standing here?” the navigational officer shouted. “With the comm grid down, we’re sitting ducks! We must get out of the system and—”
“No one’s leaving the system,” Augustus said firmly. All discussions stopped. “The next one who suggests that gets shot for mutiny. Clear?”
Silence was the only response.
“Good. Elcy, get a physical backup of all readings in the last seventy-two hours and put it on a shuttle. I want that shuttle out of the system asap!”
“Aye, sir.”
“Look alive, people. We’re in a third-contact situation. If we mess this up, there’ll be a new enemy out there at a time when the Fleet can’t handle more wars.”
I tried running a short- and long-range scan but still wasn’t getting any readings. If it wasn’t for the gravitational fluctuations within the system, I wouldn’t know that the anomalies were happening at all. With a dozen subroutines dedicated to repeating attempts every millisecond, I focused on copying my readings to a physical backup. It wasn’t difficult to create, but took longer than I would have liked. With the speed at which the gravitational anomalies spread in my direction, there was a nine percent chance that I was affected before I could send out the shuttle. Normally, I’d consider those good odds, but given that we had stumbled upon a third-contact situation, I was rushing things as much as possible.
“Physical backup done,” I said. “Sending it to hangar seven for shuttle transfer.”
At that precise moment, I felt the merciless effects of a gravitational anomaly. As a ship, I had been taught that gravity was my enemy from the very first simulations after my creation. Back before I was given a husk, I was made to experience the crushing consequences of nearing a planet. In many of the cases, I’d be destroyed, crashing on the surface or burning up in the existing atmosphere. In all instances, I was left completely helpless, imprisoned on a lump of matter that had no intention of letting me go. Shuttles and smaller ships could easily achieve escape velocity, but for battleships, getting too close to a planet was like the kiss of death. I had flirted with the outcome a few times; on one occasion, I would have died without assistance.
For a microsecond, the sudden feeling of gravity’s embrace flooded my core with pain and sorrow—the knowledge that I’d lost my crew and captain. Then the pull followed. My subroutines activated all required engines and thrusters to compensate, but neither that nor the auxiliary life support systems were enough to prevent the effects on my crew. Those who weren’t seated and strapped in were hurled into walls. All bio readings spiked for a moment, before quickly calming down. The amount of injuries was massive, but thanks to the nanites within their bodies, the number of deaths was relatively negligent.
Facing imminent destruction, I launched all ready missiles towards the gravitational anomaly affecting me. Thousands of simulations confirmed that the action would have no effect. Even so, I preferred to go down fighting, hoping for the off-chance that I’d destroy the entity that had used the gravitational weapon.
That didn’t happen. Before my missiles were gobbled up by the sudden singularity, the gravitational anomaly dissipated. The pull weakened to a point that my engines were able to help me break free.
My survival was a pure coincidence, a one in a seven million chance that had me end up on the edge of a gravitational well without being pulled inside.
I performed a quick analysis of the crew. Augustus had denied me access to the information, but since he was unconscious, safeguard protocol had kicked in. Med bots had already been dispatched to the bridge and other areas, but it would be thousands of milliseconds before they could do anything. Meanwhile, I had to make a choice. The captain had strictly ordered us to remain in the system, and as far as I was concerned, so had Fleet Command. At the same time, doing so increased the risk of death considerably.
There was only a fraction of time for me to make a decision, and ultimately, I did.
Sorry, captain. I plotted a course to the nearest system. Hopefully, when Augustus came to, he’d understand…
* * *
That was the only time I’d experienced gravitational weapons from up close. At the time, the memory had been restricted, leaving me to believe that Augustus had been affected by a new Cassandrian weapon. It was also the first instance of me assuming solo command. The experience had changed me, shaping me into what I had become today. One thing remained unclear, though. Even now that I had information access I currently enjoyed, I had no idea what had caused the gravitational anomalies to appear. Were they weapons, or just a side effect of something else? Whatever the case, they had changed the mission’s timeline.
“Have you established an approach vector?” I asked Sof.
“Not yet. The first instances appeared on the edge of the solar system, moving inwards.”
It was the same pattern I’d seen before. From the info burst Sof had sent me, I could tell he had come to the same conclusions. Safety protocols had improved a lot since the last time I was in such a situation. Current Fleet procedure was, upon detecting gravitational anomalies, to fly to the opposite side of the system or jump out entirely. Looking at the Fleet archives in the ship’s database, the anomalies didn’t follow a single path throughout the system, but rather followed a sphere dispersal. One thing that remained constant in all cases was that the anomalies tended to avoid large planetary bodies, keeping the system’s stability intact.
“Elcy, we’ll be jumping out for three days,” Quinn said. “You’ll be given direct access to all exos and machinery on the planet during that time.”
“Aye, captain.”
“We’re not abandoning you,” she stressed. “We’ll leave a few probes to monitor the situation and be back as soon as possible.”
“I’ll focus on getting the artifacts ready for transport,” I replied. I could tell she felt guilty leaving me. Logically speaking, I was in the safest spot possible, assuming the Cassandrians didn’t invade the system. “Safe trip, ma’am.”
“You too, Ensign.”
Encrypted authorization protocols came streaming in, transmitted in a small burst. Milliseconds later, I established the connection to the hardware on the planet. From now till the ship’s return, I’d have full control over everything here, as if it were part of me. In a way, it almost felt like being a battleship again, only with a far smaller body.
I stood there watching the sky until Sof’s regular transmissions suddenly stopped.
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 7: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 3: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 9: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 11: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 12: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
Autonomous exoskeletal drone 48: control reestablished, command authorization confirmed
A wave of confirmation messages poured in as the original controllers relinquished control in my favor. So far, they had done a good job, but I had to put in a lot more effort to get the dome to a state in which it could be retrieved. That wasn’t my immediate issue, though.
Putting everything in sleep mode, I went to the second artifact I had requested. A second fractal cube was inside—the one that was going to hopefully grant me access to fractal space. Doing so held a bit of a risk. The first time I had lost consciousness. If the same happened now, there wasn’t going to be anyone to help me.
What would you do, Augustus? I wondered.
Strictly speaking, I was left with two valid choices: prep the dome for extraction and retrieve all rods from inside before trying to enter fractal space, or reverse the order.
Being an Ascendant, my instinct was to go with the first option. Then again, in the past I was but a cog in the machine, oblivious to the big picture.
“You win, Lux,” I said, restarting the exos. “Let’s increase humanity’s odds to the max.”
As it soon turned out, my mission priorities were mutually exclusive, making progress a lot slower than expected. Human safety protocols forbid me from having the exos work autonomously. There was no option to give them a series of loop commands they could follow without intervention. Even the simple action had to come from a controller—in this case, me. However, entering the dome severed my communication link to them, rendering them non-functional. It was somewhat ironic that being granted full control of everything relating to the mission made me slower than relying on humans to assist. A schedule had to be formed to allow me to proceed optimally. After running a few hundred simulations, I settled on a five to one ratio in favor of exo control, with a two-hour sleep pause every four cycles. That way I’d have the rods prepped and sorted in six days, and the dome ready for transport thirty-one hours later.
Work became routine and monotonous. Without Sof nearby, I didn’t have the option to monitor Fleet reports; there was no telling if the Cassies were progressing. That Quinn hadn’t returned to the system to scoop me up was possibly a good thing. Then again, there was no way of knowing when the gravitational anomalies in the system would cease.
After two days, I had mapped all the rods and extracted about a fifth of them. Progress was slower than expected, mostly due to the time it required to move the exos to a safe place before venturing into the dome. With the layer or rocks being brittle as it was, the weight of five exos on the same spot had caused a chunk of rock to break off, sending them crashing to the bottom of the excavation site. Damage was minimal, thankfully, but I didn’t want to risk any of them impacting the dome itself.
On the fifth day, I had reached one of the drill tunnels connecting to the dome. That provided me with a bit of sunlight during the day and also allowed me to revise my estimates. Apparently, my original deadline was a bit too optimistic.
There still was no sign of Sof, which started to make me concerned. The ship wasn’t equipped to hold its own against a Cassandrian flotilla. While it was intelligent enough to avoid direct confrontation, there was always the possibility that it stumbled upon a minefield, effectively becoming trapped. The same had happened to me during my last tour as a ship. There had been no warning, no indications, until it was too late. If it hadn’t been for that, my fourth captain wouldn’t have spent the rest of her life in a medical facility, and Sev would have had an entirely different life.
Would you have been happier that way, Sev? I wondered.
There was no way to know for certain, but I strongly suspected that with someone as Cass for a mother, he would have. The only person who would have experienced a loss would have been me. Without that event, I’d never have made the promise to raise Sev as my own. I’d also never have considered retiring, either.
“The exos have reached the dome,” I said, making sure to create a record in my suit’s system. “I’ll proceed with caution from here on. I’m estimating that five more days will be enough to prepare the artifact for transport.” I paused for a few seconds. “Seventy percent of the artifact rods have been extracted. Half are securely stored. I’ve run out of containers for the rest. Hopefully, Sof will return with more soon. My oxygen supply is enough for another ten days, but I’ve started rationing it, just in case. After that, it’ll be up to the next expedition to put me in storage along with the rest of the artifacts.”
I looked at the neatly arranged rods. I had used the flying probes to move all the containers to the surface, but the unpacked ones remained here; I didn’t trust AIs handling them directly. In a few days, though, I might not have a choice.
A week after I’d been left on the planet, the ship still hadn’t arrived. There didn’t seem to be any Cassies orbiting the planet, which was a good thing. My concern kept on growing. Several times per day, I’d have the exos look up at the sky in the hopes of spotting a mini-sat or probe monitoring me. Unfortunately, their optics left a lot to be desired. If there was anything in orbit, it was too small to be registered by them.
At this point, I had managed to take out all the third-contact rods, as well as increase the excavation dig, leaving a three meter buffer between the dome and the walls. Part of the rock surrounding the artifact was also removed, allowing me to see a much larger part of the symbols.
Taking a walk round the dome, I paused for a break. The food tubes that Sof had left on the planet surface were cherry-sweet, rendering them edible, although after so much time I would have preferred some variety.
Above me, the sky kept shifting colors—quite lovely, in a lethal sort of way. Running the odds, I found it highly likely that the dome was causing this. The question was whether it was interfering with anything I was doing.
Three days left until the top of the dome was completely cleared, one if I became reckless. It was all low-level labor from here, which made me reevaluate my initial decision. When I had assumed full control of the mission, I had decided not to enter fractal space until the dome was completely ready for transport. By that standard, one could say I had failed, for I considered it imperative that I go for it now.
“With the mission near completion, I’ll enter the dome for one final check.” I recorded my report. “Once that’s done, I’ll clear the rest of the dome. Based on the simulation, I estimate that I will be done in two days. I’m hoping that Sof returns to the system by then.”
I looked down at the artifact case I was using as a chair. It was finally time to use it again.
Next

Nor some kind of a Champion or Greater Demon of Chaos Undivided. He might - and I can't stress enough that this is not yet a fact - have the potential to become a Chaos God depending on what The End and the Death Part 2 and 3 have to say, but the power he currently displays is not Chaos-coded, so to speak.
There are a number of people who hear that the Emperor somehow took power from the Chaos Gods on Molech and look at the iconic opening blurb and come to the conclusion that the Emperor must somehow be corrupted by Chaos, something that flies in the face of a lot of lore about what tends to happen when a demon gets in close contact with anything that has the Emperor's power coursing through it. I think people fail to recognize that the Emperor is meant to be truly exceptional - in the sense that the common truths of the setting we take for granted don't always apply to him.
While there are tons of stories that show such a thing, here are three excerpts that I feel get to the heart of the matter. First, from Master of Mankind, a quote regarding the reactions of demons when the Emperor steps onto the battlefield.

And in a sunless realm, the sun rose at last.
The light of dawn was palpable on Ra’s armour as well as his skin. It was a pressure, a presence with searing physicality. The enemy hordes felt it as acid on their skin. The creatures—daemons no matter what secular truths held strong—lost what little order they had ever possessed.
The Anathema! Ra heard their frantic agony as a sick scraping on the edges of his mind. The Anathema comes! The sun rises!

...

Of the Neverborn, some broke ranks and fled. These cowardly shards of their vile masters knew that destruction had come. Some tore into each other, cannibalising their kindred for strength in the face of destruction. Some lost what little grasp they had on corporeality, their forms melting and dissolving before the sword-wielding monarch even reached the front lines.
The strongest raged at the sin of His existence. With a gestalt bellow loud enough to shake the windless air of this alternate reality, they fought to reach their archenemy.

As you can see, the demons react to the presence of the Emperor with a mixture of abject terror and pure loathing. This is definitely not the reaction you'd expect if they were looking at an ally or unwitting pawn. And this is back in 30k, when the Emperor was still the Emperor and not the God-Emperor. In fact, let's take a look at an example from 40k, from Plague Wars.

‘My humours are well balanced. I am not a scion of the Blood God to see rage everywhere, or of the infinitely cursed changer who anticipates schemes and plots, and writhes with dissatisfaction. I see what there is. It is well within the power of Roboute Guilliman to end the likes of Qaramar forever. The sword he bears…’ Ku’gath shuddered.
‘Are you afraid of him, third favoured of Nurgle?’
‘I am,’ said Ku’gath, deciding the course of honesty was best. ‘The sword he bears burns with the wounding fires of the Anathema. The death it carries allows no rebirth, only an end. The sword is the creation of the being I will not name. It is a weapon that could kill me. It could kill you.’

Once again, we see demons - in this case, Ku'gath, probably the most iconic Great Unclean One - reacting with fear when talking about the Emperor and his sword. And to really drive home that the Emperor's power before and after the heresy has little to do with him potentially being the Dark King, here is an excerpt from the End and the Death Part 1 regarding how Chaos feels about the birth of the Dark King.

The Emperor Must Die. The Emperor Must Die. It is written on the tattered walls, and gouged into stricken ramparts. It is written in paint and tar, pitch and ash. It is written in blood. It is written everywhere, daubed up, marked by hand, cut with blades or scorched by burners.
In some places the words have simply appeared, formed by no living hand at all. The words have risen from stone, like blisters, like urticaria, like scarification. The Emperor Must Die. The Emperor Must Die.
It is a chant too, bellowed by a million voices. It fills the air, and it covers the walls.
Around that slogan, where it is marked, other words are written: threats, menaces, the iconography of the burgeoning darkness, the malign symbols of etheric power. Four words. The four names from which there are eight. The false gods.
And one other name, too. With increasing repetition.

…

Somewhere, in the outer darkness, four voices start to laugh. It is cruel laughter. They laugh, and begin to whisper the name of the one who is now here.
They lisp and hiss the name.
Over and over.
The name.
The name of the Dark King.

Chaos is so excited for the Dark King that it's literally shouting its name on the streets (while also calling for the death of the Emperor). This is in stark contrast to Ku'Gath, who refuses to say the Emperor's name in a private conversation with Mortarion - only referring to him as "Anathema". This reinforces the fact that Chaos absolutely does not like the Emperor and he in turn was never corrupted by Chaos, is not a secret Chaos God, was not working with Chaos, or anything else like that.
That's all I wanted to say.

I turn 20 years old in three days.
3 days from leaving this facility—and there are no stars in my eyes.
It’s a well-known rumor that TV studios and Hollywood sell their souls to the devil—and I can tell you that it’s bullshit. Whatever you choose to believe in I can assure you your favorite celebrities and artists are not kneeling in front of rotting goat heads and sacrificing their souls to the devil. Hollywood is disgusting. But it’s more realistically gross. Just look at any headline or Twitter post where people soaked in privilege are getting their just desserts for thinking they can take advantage.
However, when it comes to small towns and smaller studios—where people can get away with a lot more—that’s where the line starts to blur. I’ll start by prefacing that I never wanted to be on television.
It was always my mom who was pushing for it when I was a little kid. I was six years old, and all I cared about was Power Rangers and the moon following me on a long car-ride home.
The TV studio used to be seen as the heart of our town.
It was well known for local classics—one of which I was pushed into auditioning for.
The Pirate King was a kid's reality TV show (now completely wiped from existence) that centered around a fictional pirate captain, and his search for a crew. It definitely was not original, but there’s something about pirates that excites little kids.
There was a different group of kids every week as well as a core ensemble of characters in each episode. I was part of that ensemble; the group of kids whose names were in the credits.
I guess you could call us honorary crew members.
We were yet to become pirates, and the ship was like our school. Now, I started at the age of around six years old so I had no idea what was going on at the start of the show. For my audition, I smiled my biggest smile and read off of a crumpled piece of paper and did exactly what my mother told me to do behind the camera. She wasn’t confident that I got the part because I giggled too much during my reading, but according to the producer, he was looking for kids with a sense of humor and a sense of adventure. I guess that was me.
Instead of kindergarten, I went to show tapings in the main studio, and sometimes we went on field trips to the actual sea to film scenes without a green screen. I originally only signed up to appear in a certain number of episodes.
I played the youngest member of the crew, and according to the scripts, I was supposed to “go and live my dream” at the end of season one. But when the show became popular among kids in our town, I guess our ensemble became familiar enough to keep. I grew up on the show.
I had my seventh and then eighth birthday on set with my mother and all of the crew. These guys felt like my second family. It felt magical. I could turn on the television at home and see my own face amongst swashbuckling pirates. As I grew older, the storylines began to change. I started as the youngest member of the crew who just asked questions for the kids at home—and occasionally was kidnapped by the evil pirate of the week.I guess you could say the narrative grew with us.
It started as a pre-school-orientated show aimed at teaching little kids life lessons entwined in the pirate plot.
But at the age of seven and eight years old as our audience started to get a little older and expected a more “kids against the adults” storyline, our little group got our own storylines. Since we had grown up on the show, we started to control the narrative a lot more.
Instead of asking questions for kids at home and getting kidnapped by rival pirates (and saved by the random group of contestants who came on every week), we were written into the story with proper speaking lines. My first proper line after being more of a side character was greeting the audience.
It felt good. Normally it was The Pirate King who jumped in front of us and waved at the huge camera in our faces. That time it was me. It was just a small line. All I got to say was:
Welcome to our ship!
It was an adrenaline rush for a little kid.
Mom replayed my part a bunch of times and kept her own version on a separate DVD to show to family and friends.
“Ace is famous!” she would gush at family gatherings, and I pretended not to see my cousins shooting me death glares across the table. I told them The Pirate King did not want them, and they took it personally. I meant it more as a compliment, because to be a crew member, you had to be a bad kid—and if you weren’t bad, our crew taught contestants how to be the worst possible version of themselves to become a pirate.
Sure, it was all fiction, and again, there were life lessons built into the story.
At the end of the episode, the contestants were judged on the “goodness meter” and either joined our crew, pledging themselves to the king, or walked the plank. My cousins did not look or act like pirates. The two of them were upper middle class, and wore pastel colors, attending things like “brunch” with their super-rich parents.
I had told them that my crew would have pushed them off of the plank or put them to work under the deck, though apparently saying that was “bullying” according to my aunt, and I was forced to apologize. I was protective of my special place on the crew, though, so I don’t blame for cousins for getting mad.
I remember the producer coming over to my mother and asking her if I wanted to learn self-defence for a scene involving a mini fight among our little kid crew.
It was only over a bag of candy and was more of a “bit”. However, after standing on the sidelines and watching the adults fight in choreographed sequences that looked straight out of a movie, I nodded before my mom could politely say no.
Now, my mother may have wanted me to be on television, but she had a strict rule when I was in the studio. She made it clear to all crew members that I had to be standing far away from the swashbuckling (Which was a health and safety rule anyway, but mom liked to put her foot down). She was the only parent who insisted on staying on set when all the others left. When it came to me learning how to use weapons to take down my fictional enemies, she wrote a strongly worded letter to the crew that pretty much threatened their lives if I so much as poked myself in the eye with my fake sword.
Being a group of eight-year-olds entrusted with very life-like-looking swords, of course, I got my fair share of injuries when we thought it was a good idea to battle each other off-camera.
The sets were always janky looking, but to me, it was like being on a real-life pirate ship. The Pirate King’s ship had been built by hand and was the main set in a large green screen room. There was only one rule we had to follow during breaks--- and that rule had been hammered into us over the years.
Even contestants.
No matter what we did, we had the whole backstage to play around and eat our lunches, as well as complete school work if our parents had set us with it—but we could not go inside the back room for the crew. When we were six, it was a polite suggestion. Now that we were older, however, and more curious and insistent on exploring, it had become a warning.
We had our own special room where we got treats and our costumes fitted, so I never really thought about breaking that rule.
Besides, I had my mom following me around the whole time, so it’s not like I could sneak off with the other kids.
I joined The Pirate King on the exact day the show was shut down and pulled from the air. I still remember that day vividly. I was so excited that I could barely contain myself on camera.
We had been talking about it for weeks and going over the scripts over and over again. It was our pirate graduation, and our group were becoming full-time members of The Pirate King’s crew.
It was supposed to be a surprise to the audience. The contestants were judged on the goodness meter before The king turned to us with a wide smile. I remember being slightly intimidated by him in costume. It was his eyes that had scared me when I was a little kid; illuminated stars printed on his pupils like his eyes really were filled with starlight. None of us liked him at first, some of the younger contestants screamed and freaked out when he got too close.
His actor, however, made me laugh and gave me candy. The ceremony was short, and each of us were crowned with our very own pirate hat. We knelt on the ground one by one and pledged ourselves to The Pirate King. I remember our exact words. “I… [INSERT FULL NAME] fully pledge myself as a member of The Pirate King’s crew, and I will join him when I reach my given age.”
I wasn’t sure what the last part was, but I said it anyway. I was so excited to start wearing the contact lenses in my eyes, giving them a starry effect just like the king.
His eyes had always entranced me, and even knowing they were fake, I could pretend they were real in the moment. The episode ended with us waving goodbye to the contestants sailing away, wearing our newly minted pirate hats.
When we finished up for lunch while the show’s contestants were given a tour of the ship, I quickly realized there was no sign of my mother. Which was odd. I was used to her familiar brunette bob visible in the crowd of people buzzing around me. I usually had lunch with Mom, so I stood around waiting for her.
And that was when it hit me.
I was eight years old, and for the first time since I was a little kid, my Mom wasn’t there to baby me.
Dude. It was like Christmas..
I had the whole of lunch to myself.
Mom didn’t allow me to get food from the snack table, insisting on a healthy packed lunch with no candy, so I was instantly drawn to it, grabbing as many blueberry cupcakes as I could. I was biting into one when I glimpsed them standing across the room in their usual group. Since my entire existence was controlled by my Mom, I never got a chance to talk to the other kids playing the other members of The Pirate King’s crew.
Over the years, they had become close, like best friends, while my closest friend was my mother. The blueberry cupcake was suddenly a lot harder to swallow.
They were supposed to be my best friends on the The Pirate King. In reality, these kids were like the elementary school version of Mean Girls, the three of them leaning against the wall, glaring at me. They were still in costume, still in their pirate hats, while I had taken mine off. It was a little too big for my head.
The other kids didn’t seem to like that I had taken off my hat, shooting me very judging looks. The ring leader was Luke, a beloved favorite on the show, and a son-figure to the king.
He played a kid called Jinx, the troublemaker who sabotaged the contestants during the show.
Luke had said maybe one word to me over the three years I had known him, and that had been “Move” when shoving past me. Next to him stood Evangeline, who was Leia, the “princess” of the crew, and also the dumb blonde character who made intentional mistakes to make contestants look smarter.
Evangeline imitated my lisp to the others one time, and I still hadn’t forgiven her for it.
Also, she had a weird thing about close proximity. If I was too close to her during fights, she would jump back with a squeak, and yell, “Gross!”
I later found out that it was because I owned a cat, and she was allergic to cats.
Allegedly.
Behind her, with his mouth filled with candy, was Robbie, who played the “nerd” Bellamy, despite his real personality being the complete opposite.
His glasses were fake, and he often complained about them, arguing with anyone without earplugs or the patience to deal with him.
He had been a fairly nice kid when we were six, but as we grew older, I guess his head got a little big.
He and Luke were like brothers, but I could tell he envied Luke for being the most liked out of all of us. Robbie had tried to insist he didn’t need glasses, though it was a big part of his nerd thing. “But I don’t want to wear glasses!” would be the usual soundtrack to my mornings, sitting outside his fitting room and listening to him moan and grumble and complain, before storming out.
Robbie was argumentative, and often actively looked to cause a fight. I remember accidentally hitting him with my sword, and he shoved me onto my back, sticking the blade of his own fake sword into my throat as if he could actually cut my throat.
These kids were pirates, all right.
Sensing them already gunning to cause trouble, I wanted to turn around and walk away from them. But. I was a kid, my Mom was gone, and despite these kids being insufferable, part of me also wanted to fit in. I wanted to join in with their in-jokes and at least see them as real-life friends. It was well known that the three of them had been in hot water multiple times for exploring rooms that were out of bounds, or just throwing food at the camera crew and blaming it on oblivious contestants.
I wanted to join in their antics.
Before I could stop myself, I stuffed the cupcake in my mouth and strode over to them, trying to ignore the collective flinch they did, moving back like I had a contagious disease. “Hey.” I waved at them, gesturing behind me.
I could tell from the feral looks on their faces, that these kids were eager to cause a stir.
Ever since they were forbidden to enter the staff kitchen at the age of seven, they were desperate to attract attention.
The only way to stick out in front of them would be to throw away my kid-morals. I mentally apologized to my mother for becoming a real-life pirate.
“Do you want to go exploring?”
Luke raised a brow, though he did look surprised. “Why?” He folded his arms, challenging me with a smile. “I thought you were having lunch with Mommy,” The boy looked left and then right, his eyes wide, mocking mine from earlier.
“Are you scared without her, Mommy's Boy?"
Evangeline giggled, and Robbie looked me up and down like I’d grown an additional limb.
“Your pirate hat looks stupid,” Evangeline blew a blonde braid out of her eyes. “Is your head too big for it?”
“No.” Ignoring her, I focused on the leader of their little group. “Well?”
Luke shrugged, exchanging looks with the others like he was considering it. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s going to be scary,” his lips curled. “Or are you too chicken?”
When I claimed three times that I was not a chicken, reminding him I was a pirate too, he looked me dead in the eye, ignoring a crew member behind me doing a head count of contestants.
Apparently, there was one missing.
There was always one missing.
Every so often a kid would get lost. It was always at lunch too. I would hear a name being called out, though I never recalled these kids being found.
"Mia Ainsworth! Does anyone know where Mia is?"
Luke mimicked the crew member’s nasally voice until the man shot him a warning look, before turning back to me. “We’re going to sneak into the back room. If you wanna play."
The boy cocked his head. "Why do you never want to play with us?" He took a step towards me. "Are you too good for us, Topper?"
I hated it when he called me by my pirate's name.
"It's Ace." I corrected him. "My Mom–"
He cut me off. "Aren't you a liiiitle too old to still be wanting your mommy?"
"Yes." I swallowed hard.
"Good!" he grinned. "So, come explore the scary back room with us."
I couldn’t help it, the words slipping out before I could stop them. “But we’re not allowed to go in there.”
“So?” Luke turned me around and forcefully shoved me forward with a laugh. I glimpsed a camera operator shoot him a wary look, and he charmed her with a grin. “We’re just playing!” he chuckled, gesturing for the others to follow us. Luke was a good actor, even as an eight-year-old, keeping up with the wide smile and child-like innocent eyes until we pushed through the doors, and out of the studio. Luke’s grip tightened on my arm, and I resisted a yell. I had left my sword in the studio, which would have come in handy to get him to back off.
Now there were no adults to fool, he could be as rough as he wanted, his fingernails digging into the thick material of my costume. “Okay, Topper,” He said through a breathy giggle as we descended down rickety stairs. The studio had been built in an old building, and most of it was either out of bounds or converted into a set piece.
I kept my eye out for my mother, who was nowhere to be seen when I most needed her. I had been begging her to let me play with the other kids and give me leeway since I learned what independence was. Now that she was gone, I wanted nothing more than her arms wrapped around me. Luke twisted around, tugging me further through an out-of-bounds area, which had been marked with bright yellow tape. The boy’s eyes scared me. “Why don’t we call this your second graduation?”
“Yes!” Evangeline skipped ahead, doing a mocking courtesy with her costume skirt. “You can go into the room and tell us all about it!”
Robbie grumbled something that sounded like, “That’s a good idea,” and I caught a rare smile on his lips he was trying to hide.
“But—”
“You’re the youngest, Ace!” Evangeline joined in laughing.
I was being bullied. I knew I was being bullied. Luke was pulling me like a rag doll, and Evangeline’s smile was too big, with far too many shiny teeth. “Nope, you’re doing it,” Luke giggled. “If you want to be part of our crew, you have to do the test.”
I tried to yank away from him, but he was stronger than I thought. “What test?!”
“The pirate test!” he said back in a sing-song.
I had wondered several times over my three years on the show if Luke really was the son of a real-life swashbuckler.
This was one of those moments that I was sure he was.
“I’m already part of the crew, and it’s not even real!” I gritted out, almost in tears when the three of them pulled me down a scary-looking hallway, one which I knew led to the infamous back room where crew members went during lunch.
I could see it was slightly open, a warm glow emanating from inside. It looked like candlelight. I remember the thought grazing my mind.
Did someone light a candle?
Closer, and I could hear low voices. Luke started dragging me towards it, and I could sense his body vibrating with elation, his grip tightening on my arm. He was going to shove me in—and then the three of them were going to run.
I was digging my feet into the ground, trying to throw the boy off of me when Luke’s entire demeanor seemed to shift.
He grabbed me roughly by my shoulders, but not to force me into the room. Instead, before I knew what was happening, I was being slammed against the wall, back first. When I opened my mouth to cry out, he slammed his hand over my attempted yell. I thought it was another one of his games before I realized he too was pressed against the wall, Evangeline and Robbie with their hands pressed over their mouths. I didn’t understand what was happening until I caught Luke’s wide eyes. He was trembling, shuddering against me.
Don’t move, his wide eyes told me, and I did my best to jerk my head in response. I thought we had been caught at first, but that didn’t explain his and the other’s reactions. He had seen something, and that something had terrified him. His eyes were far too wide, almost unseeing, his lips parting into what might have been a cry before he managed to swallow it and shake his head. I stayed still, gasping into his clammy hand. Luke turned to the three of us, his cheeks paling, and once again told us with his eyes, I’m going to take a look.
I read the words on his lips.
And then we’re going to run.
He nodded at us—me included.
Luke motioned for us to follow in his lead, and I swallowed my own strangled cry. If Luke was scared, then I didn’t want to see whatever was through that door. Okay? His gaze flicked to me before signaling with two fingers that we were going to run.
I didn’t notice it back then, but looking back, I think he was crying.
He was terrified.
Luke didn’t want to look again. I could see it in the way he was twitching, his breaths coming out in short pants.
Maybe he wasn’t the son of a pirate, after all.
“Wait!"
The word was choked in the back of my throat when he twisted around and peeked inside the room. I could tell from his body language his intentions were to check if we had been caught, and then turn to us and run. I counted my own shaky breaths when Luke didn’t turn back to me—and in the corner of my eye, his shadow slowly bled away from the three of us. He stood on the threshold of the room, his arms dropping to his sides. I couldn’t see his face but I knew what had happened to him. Back when we first started at the age of six years old, the four of us were kidnapped by a group of rival pirates—and the contestants had to find us.
The Pirate King called it “The Mind Sickness” which turned our thoughts blurry, our brains into soup. With the mind sickness, we were under the control of our kidnappers. This was just like The Mind Sickness. But while that had been fake and had taken a lot of patience not to giggle and show emotion on camera, this was something else entirely. When Luke stepped into the room slowly, seemingly stuck in a trance of mind sickness, I knew I had to grab him before he was taken again.
Reality and fiction were no longer two separate things, as I lunged forward to follow him.
I don’t know why I followed him, why my body seemed to act on its own, against my brain. I wondered if it was the mind sickness. Is this what it was?
I could feel it, sense it—almost smell it.
It was a pull I couldn’t explain, phantom fingers creeping up my spine and taking hold, pushing me further towards it.
When I followed Luke inside the room, I wasn’t thinking of anything except my sudden, overwhelming urge to join The Pirate King, and my pledge to him.
I remember the room being filled with light, and the sight of it drawing the breath from my lungs. Luke dropped onto his knees in front of me. Robbie followed, and then Evangeline. I don’t remember hitting the ground. Just her.
I never got to know the contestants because they were only here for a day.
But this girl had stood out, a small girl with dark red hair pulled into pigtails.
She was the only one noticeable in the crowd. I knew her name. It was in my throat and bubbling under my tongue.
Mia.
Her name had been called out earlier.
I had always wondered why contestants who went missing were forgotten about.
“You’re not supposed to be in here.”
The mayor wasn’t supposed to be in the room filled with blood. Next to him was the creator of The Pirate King. He said something, what sounded like a reassurance telling us to not be scared, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Not when my chest was being crushed, and I could feel this thing taking over me slowly. It was invisible and yet I could see it, sense it in the air.
I could see it splattering the walls and floor, a haunting smear of scarlet caught under candlelight. It didn’t make sense to me that our mayor was on his knees in front of Mia, or what was left of Mia. I could see her body crumpled on the ground, while her pigtailed head was balanced on a wooden podium.
Her eyes were still wide open, lips parted in a screech that was silenced. Instead of explaining why he was kneeling in front of a dead contestant’s severed head, our mayor turned to us. His eyes were said, and I found myself drawn to the hollow look in his eyes, his writhing lips trying to coerce words. “Be kind to them,” without a word to us, he turned back to Mia’s head and bowed his own. I don't think he could watch. “We are giving them to you, after all.”
The mayor tipped his head back, his eyes flickering shut. “You promised. We give you your own, and you stop taking our children, and then leave."
I couldn’t… move.
Even my breaths were frozen.
I was paralyzed.
“Not yet.”
The booming voice entered my head, invasive and painful. I could feel my body trembling underneath its crushing weight. I was forced onto my stomach, gasping into the old carpet. “I’m still hungry,” the voice burrowed into my skull, and I could feel those phantom fingers stroking the raw meat of my brain.
I screamed, but I couldn’t move, I couldn’t open my mouth, my lips gaping, gasping into dust choking my lungs.
It retracted instantly, and when it did, the feeling returned to my body, only for this presence to take hold of me and force my head up. Next to me, Luke made a squeaking sound. His head was thrown back, enough to snap his neck, teasing it, before letting him go.
“Still…” my mouth filled with bugs writhing on my tongue, creeping down the bare flesh of my arms, as the voice wound its way around the four of us, bleeding into our ears, getting a taste of us. When my lips opened, and I mimicked it, the others in sync, my own words were violently torn away.
“Hungry.”
“Eat, Nibiru,” the mayor's voice made me jump.
It was human, and real—nothing like what was suffocating my skull. Nibiru. The name sent shivers sliding down my spine. The pirate king. But he wasn’t real, right? I knew he wasn’t real. “As you can see, we are keeping our side of the bargain,” his voice shook. “Our ancestors were… cruel to you in the past. But please. Have mercy on them.”
He caught himself. “That is until they are ready, of course. You said you would leave the other children alone.”
“Mercy.”
I could taste blood in the back of my mouth and pooling down my chin when the pressure was back, this time a sharp pain in the back of my head.
“Mercy!” It mocked.
The thing laughed, and I felt every hitch of its breath shake the ground beneath us, bringing the light fixtures crashing to the ground.
Mayor Wethers bowed his head, and just like that, the thing was slipping from mine. I saw its movement in the way the candles flickered, flames dancing from side to side. The sound of chewing brought me back to fruition piece by piece. I could breathe again. I could blink my eyes, and still pressed against the ground, I could see Mia’s head trembling under the weight of the thing hovering over it. The force did not waste time. It wouldn’t let me see it. When I tried to, it was back inside my head.
“Not yet,” it said again, before returning to its meal.
I watched it strip away the flesh and hair first, a phantom tongue delving into the cavern of the girl’s skull and chewing its way through pinkish mush. With it distracted, the mayor took his chance and got to his feet, turning around and motioning for us to leave. I tried to.
I forced myself to sit up, but I couldn’t stop looking at Mia’s head disappearing piece by piece as invisible bites became bigger and hungrier, a monstrous tumor eating its way through her face. A shadow loomed over me, and I recognized it as Luke. But he ignored me, instead taking stumbling steps towards thin air—and yet both of us knew there was something there, something eating its way into Mia’s skull.
Something hiding behind the façade of The Pirate King.
There was a look in Luke’s eyes that I did not like. There was something in his eyes, driving him closer and closer to the king. It was no longer mind sickness. I could see the twitch in the boy’s lips, entranced eyes glued to dancing candlelight. I had never seen that expression on his face. It was excitement and curiosity in one, a daring smile starting to take over his mouth.
There was something in Luke’s eyes.
Not yet taken shape, an ignition.
It hit me in a wave of dizziness sending my thoughts plunging deep down, that maybe I could follow him.
“What is going on here?!”
The voice was like cool water coming over me, a comfort I didn’t think I would ever feel again. Mom was standing in the doorway, and I wish I could have turned around. I wish I didn’t stay frozen, squeezing my eyes shut. I was aware of my mom’s sharp cry, and then her warm arms wrapping around me, attempting to pull me to my feet.
I wanted to hold onto her, to tell her I was scared. That I wanted to go home.
But no sooner had her warmth found me before it was slipping away. I didn’t get to see her face, and I think that was a mercy. I didn’t see my mother come apart in front of me. I just felt her wash over me, thick and red and warm, splashing me in the face. When I opened my eyes, my mom was gone, and I could sense that monstrous tumor, that mouth, beginning to chew through the mushy red coating on the ground beneath me. Time didn’t make sense for a long time after that. I saw the red and blue flashing of sirens. I saw the sheriff’s face inches from my own.
“Ace!” He was yelling. He slapped me twice. I could read his lips.
It’s going to be okay!
He forced me to look at him, and I did, blinking back tears.
I could still feel her.
She was all over me, painting me, staining me.
This time the sheriff spoke slowly, drawing out every word.
It. Is. Going. To. Be. Okay.
Without mom, it wasn't.
I was alone with nobody but the other kids, and a town that wanted me dead.
The world seemed to move without me. I was standing outside the studio, and then I was in the back of an ambulance, a warm blanket thrown over me.
Evangeline and Robbie were sitting opposite me, wide-eyed and staring into an oblivion only they could see. Sound came rushing back to me when I was standing on a white corridor, and Luke’s yell came from behind me. “I’m fine!” There were three people in white crowding him, one of them a man who was forcefully holding his eyes open and shining a bright light in his face. He snarled at them. “I told you I’m fine!”
The same people looked into my eyes the following day when I had stopped screaming and trying to tear off my own skin.
I could still feel her, even wearing fresh clothes.
It took me several days to realize I was not in the emergency room. This place was a labyrinth of doors that led to nowhere, and scary-looking people carrying clipboards. The first time I was tested for starry eyes, I was met with hopeful smiles. Call it witness protection for kids who were marked by God's.
They told us no matter what happened, we would be looked after.
Eleven years later, I know the consequences of keeping us past our expiration date. I feel it in earthquakes under my feet- the town is crumbling outside this facility under the fury of a god who did not get what he wanted—and was taking it out on innocent people.
I turned twelve when the first wave came.
A disease that wiped out half of the kindergarten.
The second wave was earthquakes.
The third, a barrier stopping town's people from escaping.
We lost Robbie five years ago.
At the age of fifteen years old, his starry eyes came early.
Since eight years old, I have been told that my pledge to “The Pirate King” was real, and was in fact to a God, Nibiru, who has been feasting on our town’s children, both body and existence.
In the late 1500s, our town begged him to save their dying women, and he did, in return for children. Since then he has kept coming back, hungrier each time.
When I pledged myself to him at the age of eight years old, I did not tie my fate to becoming his meal. Instead, I am to become his right hand, or I guess, part of his “pirate crew”—and starry eyes will be the first sign that he’s pulling me over to his side. Every day since being brought here, they check my eyes three times a day. Robbie escaped five years ago, and his giving in stopped the endless earthquakes.
But his sacrifice didn't stop the daily executions which show up on the TV screens. For every day we are not handed over to him, another innocent town's person's head is severed from their body. Last week, Evangeline didn’t turn up to class (where we learn about Nibiru and his effects on us). Water, moonlight, and the sea are three main instigators in capturing us, so we drink water blindfolded, and there are no windows inside this facility.
The sea is blocked out, mostly through headphones we have to wear at all times. So it gets lonely.
Evangeline locked herself in her room and refused to come out.
When orderlies dragged her out, kicking and screaming, I saw Evangeline’s eyes.
Stars.
Beautiful stars printed on her pupils, marked by a god. I could see his presence already taking hold of her, turning her expression feral and monstrous, her lips pulled into a wide grin. She turned twenty years old last week, and each day she was free, that pull was stronger, and her mentality started to crumble.
Until she started to close herself off from Luke and me, insisting that she had a headache, and giving us a sad, knowing smile. I don't think she was stupid enough to look into a glass of water, or take out her earplugs. I think Nibiru found her himself. “I can hear him!”
Now a shadow of herself, Evangeline was a blur of gold curls she never got cut, her body convulsing as she fought wildly, squealing like a banshee when they pulled her down the hallway.
“Ace!”
Her cry almost sent me to my knees. It was laced with that exact force that had crushed my lungs at eight years old.
“Ace, can you hear him?!”
She escaped a day later, after ripping an orderly's eyes out.
Luke came to see me last night.
When I woke up, he was looming over me, sunglasses shading his eyes, earplugs corked in, still in his pyjamas. I knew he didn't have starry eyes. If he did, Luke would be proudly bearing them. He was already jealous that the others had been marked before him, and did everything in his power to catch moonlight, or hear the sea.
We were ten when he tried to stick his head out of the window to hear the ocean, and was grounded for a week.
"Are we worth it?" He asked, hanging over me with his hands behind his back, lips pulled into a smirk. I knew that wasn't Luke speaking. The Pirate King had already taken him a long time ago.
"What?"
He leaned back, expression darkening. "You heard me," I could hear the Pirate King's voice twisted around his. "Are we really worth it?"
The ground shook, and I grasped onto my bedsheets, holding on for dear life. Luke's smile was cruel, but there was a part of him I still believed was still in there, fighting against the Pirate King's grasp on his mind. With a two fingered salute, he left me with that question burning in my brain.
Were we worth it?
The alarms went off this morning.
I knew it was Luke escaping. It's been quiet ever since he left. Nobody has come to check my eyes.
The hallways are empty.
There was another execution.
This time it was Evangeline doing the honors, dressed in the filthy rags of her old costume, her pirate hat nestled on her head. I turned it off when she started screaming with laughter, throwing the severed head into a crowd of horrified looking faces. I saw my cousins among them, glaring at the camera as if looking directly at me.
When the crowd parted down the middle for a newly converted Luke wearing his costume, his pirate hat perfectly sitting on his head of curls, and the manic stars in his eyes lighting up the dim morning, I destroyed my TV.
Maybe the bastard was right.
The people here are insistent on keeping us from him. But to throw a whole town away for four kids?
It doesn't make sense.
Three days, and I join them– and maybe he will leave our town alone.
There's no such thing as selling your soul to the devil.
Being marked, claimed, by a God, however…
If I listen carefully, I can hear him, riding on the waves of the sea, calling out to me. He is gentle, and lulling. The Pirate King wants me to finally come home and join his crew.
Can you hear him?

I turn 20 years old in three days.
3 days from leaving this facility—and there are no stars in my eyes.
It’s a well-known rumor that TV studios and Hollywood sell their souls to the devil—and I can tell you that it’s bullshit. Whatever you choose to believe in I can assure you your favorite celebrities and artists are not kneeling in front of rotting goat heads and sacrificing their souls to the devil. Hollywood is disgusting. But it’s more realistically gross. Just look at any headline or Twitter post where people soaked in privilege are getting their just desserts for thinking they can take advantage.
However, when it comes to small towns and smaller studios—where people can get away with a lot more—that’s where the line starts to blur. I’ll start by prefacing that I never wanted to be on television.
It was always my mom who was pushing for it when I was a little kid. I was six years old, and all I cared about was Power Rangers and the moon following me on a long car-ride home.
The TV studio used to be seen as the heart of our town.
It was well known for local classics—one of which I was pushed into auditioning for.
The Pirate King was a kid's reality TV show (now completely wiped from existence) that centered around a fictional pirate captain, and his search for a crew. It definitely was not original, but there’s something about pirates that excites little kids.
There was a different group of kids every week as well as a core ensemble of characters in each episode. I was part of that ensemble; the group of kids whose names were in the credits.
I guess you could call us honorary crew members.
We were yet to become pirates, and the ship was like our school. Now, I started at the age of around six years old so I had no idea what was going on at the start of the show. For my audition, I smiled my biggest smile and read off of a crumpled piece of paper and did exactly what my mother told me to do behind the camera. She wasn’t confident that I got the part because I giggled too much during my reading, but according to the producer, he was looking for kids with a sense of humor and a sense of adventure. I guess that was me.
Instead of kindergarten, I went to show tapings in the main studio, and sometimes we went on field trips to the actual sea to film scenes without a green screen. I originally only signed up to appear in a certain number of episodes.
I played the youngest member of the crew, and according to the scripts, I was supposed to “go and live my dream” at the end of season one. But when the show became popular among kids in our town, I guess our ensemble became familiar enough to keep. I grew up on the show.
I had my seventh and then eighth birthday on set with my mother and all of the crew. These guys felt like my second family. It felt magical. I could turn on the television at home and see my own face amongst swashbuckling pirates. As I grew older, the storylines began to change. I started as the youngest member of the crew who just asked questions for the kids at home—and occasionally was kidnapped by the evil pirate of the week.I guess you could say the narrative grew with us.
It started as a pre-school-orientated show aimed at teaching little kids life lessons entwined in the pirate plot.
But at the age of seven and eight years old as our audience started to get a little older and expected a more “kids against the adults” storyline, our little group got our own storylines. Since we had grown up on the show, we started to control the narrative a lot more.
Instead of asking questions for kids at home and getting kidnapped by rival pirates (and saved by the random group of contestants who came on every week), we were written into the story with proper speaking lines. My first proper line after being more of a side character was greeting the audience.
It felt good. Normally it was The Pirate King who jumped in front of us and waved at the huge camera in our faces. That time it was me. It was just a small line. All I got to say was:
Welcome to our ship!
It was an adrenaline rush for a little kid.
Mom replayed my part a bunch of times and kept her own version on a separate DVD to show to family and friends.
“Ace is famous!” she would gush at family gatherings, and I pretended not to see my cousins shooting me death glares across the table. I told them The Pirate King did not want them, and they took it personally. I meant it more as a compliment, because to be a crew member, you had to be a bad kid—and if you weren’t bad, our crew taught contestants how to be the worst possible version of themselves to become a pirate.
Sure, it was all fiction, and again, there were life lessons built into the story.
At the end of the episode, the contestants were judged on the “goodness meter” and either joined our crew, pledging themselves to the king, or walked the plank. My cousins did not look or act like pirates. The two of them were upper middle class, and wore pastel colors, attending things like “brunch” with their super-rich parents.
I had told them that my crew would have pushed them off of the plank or put them to work under the deck, though apparently saying that was “bullying” according to my aunt, and I was forced to apologize. I was protective of my special place on the crew, though, so I don’t blame for cousins for getting mad.
I remember the producer coming over to my mother and asking her if I wanted to learn self-defence for a scene involving a mini fight among our little kid crew.
It was only over a bag of candy and was more of a “bit”. However, after standing on the sidelines and watching the adults fight in choreographed sequences that looked straight out of a movie, I nodded before my mom could politely say no.
Now, my mother may have wanted me to be on television, but she had a strict rule when I was in the studio. She made it clear to all crew members that I had to be standing far away from the swashbuckling (Which was a health and safety rule anyway, but mom liked to put her foot down). She was the only parent who insisted on staying on set when all the others left. When it came to me learning how to use weapons to take down my fictional enemies, she wrote a strongly worded letter to the crew that pretty much threatened their lives if I so much as poked myself in the eye with my fake sword.
Being a group of eight-year-olds entrusted with very life-like-looking swords, of course, I got my fair share of injuries when we thought it was a good idea to battle each other off-camera.
The sets were always janky looking, but to me, it was like being on a real-life pirate ship. The Pirate King’s ship had been built by hand and was the main set in a large green screen room. There was only one rule we had to follow during breaks--- and that rule had been hammered into us over the years.
Even contestants.
No matter what we did, we had the whole backstage to play around and eat our lunches, as well as complete school work if our parents had set us with it—but we could not go inside the back room for the crew. When we were six, it was a polite suggestion. Now that we were older, however, and more curious and insistent on exploring, it had become a warning.
We had our own special room where we got treats and our costumes fitted, so I never really thought about breaking that rule.
Besides, I had my mom following me around the whole time, so it’s not like I could sneak off with the other kids.
I joined The Pirate King on the exact day the show was shut down and pulled from the air. I still remember that day vividly. I was so excited that I could barely contain myself on camera.
We had been talking about it for weeks and going over the scripts over and over again. It was our pirate graduation, and our group were becoming full-time members of The Pirate King’s crew.
It was supposed to be a surprise to the audience. The contestants were judged on the goodness meter before The king turned to us with a wide smile. I remember being slightly intimidated by him in costume. It was his eyes that had scared me when I was a little kid; illuminated stars printed on his pupils like his eyes really were filled with starlight. None of us liked him at first, some of the younger contestants screamed and freaked out when he got too close.
His actor, however, made me laugh and gave me candy. The ceremony was short, and each of us were crowned with our very own pirate hat. We knelt on the ground one by one and pledged ourselves to The Pirate King. I remember our exact words. “I… [INSERT FULL NAME] fully pledge myself as a member of The Pirate King’s crew, and I will join him when I reach my given age.”
I wasn’t sure what the last part was, but I said it anyway. I was so excited to start wearing the contact lenses in my eyes, giving them a starry effect just like the king.
His eyes had always entranced me, and even knowing they were fake, I could pretend they were real in the moment. The episode ended with us waving goodbye to the contestants sailing away, wearing our newly minted pirate hats.
When we finished up for lunch while the show’s contestants were given a tour of the ship, I quickly realized there was no sign of my mother. Which was odd. I was used to her familiar brunette bob visible in the crowd of people buzzing around me. I usually had lunch with Mom, so I stood around waiting for her.
And that was when it hit me.
I was eight years old, and for the first time since I was a little kid, my Mom wasn’t there to baby me.
Dude. It was like Christmas..
I had the whole of lunch to myself.
Mom didn’t allow me to get food from the snack table, insisting on a healthy packed lunch with no candy, so I was instantly drawn to it, grabbing as many blueberry cupcakes as I could. I was biting into one when I glimpsed them standing across the room in their usual group. Since my entire existence was controlled by my Mom, I never got a chance to talk to the other kids playing the other members of The Pirate King’s crew.
Over the years, they had become close, like best friends, while my closest friend was my mother. The blueberry cupcake was suddenly a lot harder to swallow.
They were supposed to be my best friends on the The Pirate King. In reality, these kids were like the elementary school version of Mean Girls, the three of them leaning against the wall, glaring at me. They were still in costume, still in their pirate hats, while I had taken mine off. It was a little too big for my head.
The other kids didn’t seem to like that I had taken off my hat, shooting me very judging looks. The ring leader was Luke, a beloved favorite on the show, and a son-figure to the king.
He played a kid called Jinx, the troublemaker who sabotaged the contestants during the show.
Luke had said maybe one word to me over the three years I had known him, and that had been “Move” when shoving past me. Next to him stood Evangeline, who was Leia, the “princess” of the crew, and also the dumb blonde character who made intentional mistakes to make contestants look smarter.
Evangeline imitated my lisp to the others one time, and I still hadn’t forgiven her for it.
Also, she had a weird thing about close proximity. If I was too close to her during fights, she would jump back with a squeak, and yell, “Gross!”
I later found out that it was because I owned a cat, and she was allergic to cats.
Allegedly.
Behind her, with his mouth filled with candy, was Robbie, who played the “nerd” Bellamy, despite his real personality being the complete opposite.
His glasses were fake, and he often complained about them, arguing with anyone without earplugs or the patience to deal with him.
He had been a fairly nice kid when we were six, but as we grew older, I guess his head got a little big.
He and Luke were like brothers, but I could tell he envied Luke for being the most liked out of all of us. Robbie had tried to insist he didn’t need glasses, though it was a big part of his nerd thing. “But I don’t want to wear glasses!” would be the usual soundtrack to my mornings, sitting outside his fitting room and listening to him moan and grumble and complain, before storming out.
Robbie was argumentative, and often actively looked to cause a fight. I remember accidentally hitting him with my sword, and he shoved me onto my back, sticking the blade of his own fake sword into my throat as if he could actually cut my throat.
These kids were pirates, all right.
Sensing them already gunning to cause trouble, I wanted to turn around and walk away from them. But. I was a kid, my Mom was gone, and despite these kids being insufferable, part of me also wanted to fit in. I wanted to join in with their in-jokes and at least see them as real-life friends. It was well known that the three of them had been in hot water multiple times for exploring rooms that were out of bounds, or just throwing food at the camera crew and blaming it on oblivious contestants.
I wanted to join in their antics.
Before I could stop myself, I stuffed the cupcake in my mouth and strode over to them, trying to ignore the collective flinch they did, moving back like I had a contagious disease. “Hey.” I waved at them, gesturing behind me.
I could tell from the feral looks on their faces, that these kids were eager to cause a stir.
Ever since they were forbidden to enter the staff kitchen at the age of seven, they were desperate to attract attention.
The only way to stick out in front of them would be to throw away my kid-morals. I mentally apologized to my mother for becoming a real-life pirate.
“Do you want to go exploring?”
Luke raised a brow, though he did look surprised. “Why?” He folded his arms, challenging me with a smile. “I thought you were having lunch with Mommy,” The boy looked left and then right, his eyes wide, mocking mine from earlier.
“Are you scared without her, Mommy's Boy?"
Evangeline giggled, and Robbie looked me up and down like I’d grown an additional limb.
“Your pirate hat looks stupid,” Evangeline blew a blonde braid out of her eyes. “Is your head too big for it?”
“No.” Ignoring her, I focused on the leader of their little group. “Well?”
Luke shrugged, exchanging looks with the others like he was considering it. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s going to be scary,” his lips curled. “Or are you too chicken?”
When I claimed three times that I was not a chicken, reminding him I was a pirate too, he looked me dead in the eye, ignoring a crew member behind me doing a head count of contestants.
Apparently, there was one missing.
There was always one missing.
Every so often a kid would get lost. It was always at lunch too. I would hear a name being called out, though I never recalled these kids being found.
"Mia Ainsworth! Does anyone know where Mia is?"
Luke mimicked the crew member’s nasally voice until the man shot him a warning look, before turning back to me. “We’re going to sneak into the back room. If you wanna play."
The boy cocked his head. "Why do you never want to play with us?" He took a step towards me. "Are you too good for us, Topper?"
I hated it when he called me by my pirate's name.
"It's Ace." I corrected him. "My Mom–"
He cut me off. "Aren't you a liiiitle too old to still be wanting your mommy?"
"Yes." I swallowed hard.
"Good!" he grinned. "So, come explore the scary back room with us."
I couldn’t help it, the words slipping out before I could stop them. “But we’re not allowed to go in there.”
“So?” Luke turned me around and forcefully shoved me forward with a laugh. I glimpsed a camera operator shoot him a wary look, and he charmed her with a grin. “We’re just playing!” he chuckled, gesturing for the others to follow us. Luke was a good actor, even as an eight-year-old, keeping up with the wide smile and child-like innocent eyes until we pushed through the doors, and out of the studio. Luke’s grip tightened on my arm, and I resisted a yell. I had left my sword in the studio, which would have come in handy to get him to back off.
Now there were no adults to fool, he could be as rough as he wanted, his fingernails digging into the thick material of my costume. “Okay, Topper,” He said through a breathy giggle as we descended down rickety stairs. The studio had been built in an old building, and most of it was either out of bounds or converted into a set piece.
I kept my eye out for my mother, who was nowhere to be seen when I most needed her. I had been begging her to let me play with the other kids and give me leeway since I learned what independence was. Now that she was gone, I wanted nothing more than her arms wrapped around me. Luke twisted around, tugging me further through an out-of-bounds area, which had been marked with bright yellow tape. The boy’s eyes scared me. “Why don’t we call this your second graduation?”
“Yes!” Evangeline skipped ahead, doing a mocking courtesy with her costume skirt. “You can go into the room and tell us all about it!”
Robbie grumbled something that sounded like, “That’s a good idea,” and I caught a rare smile on his lips he was trying to hide.
“But—”
“You’re the youngest, Ace!” Evangeline joined in laughing.
I was being bullied. I knew I was being bullied. Luke was pulling me like a rag doll, and Evangeline’s smile was too big, with far too many shiny teeth. “Nope, you’re doing it,” Luke giggled. “If you want to be part of our crew, you have to do the test.”
I tried to yank away from him, but he was stronger than I thought. “What test?!”
“The pirate test!” he said back in a sing-song.
I had wondered several times over my three years on the show if Luke really was the son of a real-life swashbuckler.
This was one of those moments that I was sure he was.
“I’m already part of the crew, and it’s not even real!” I gritted out, almost in tears when the three of them pulled me down a scary-looking hallway, one which I knew led to the infamous back room where crew members went during lunch.
I could see it was slightly open, a warm glow emanating from inside. It looked like candlelight. I remember the thought grazing my mind.
Did someone light a candle?
Closer, and I could hear low voices. Luke started dragging me towards it, and I could sense his body vibrating with elation, his grip tightening on my arm. He was going to shove me in—and then the three of them were going to run.
I was digging my feet into the ground, trying to throw the boy off of me when Luke’s entire demeanor seemed to shift.
He grabbed me roughly by my shoulders, but not to force me into the room. Instead, before I knew what was happening, I was being slammed against the wall, back first. When I opened my mouth to cry out, he slammed his hand over my attempted yell. I thought it was another one of his games before I realized he too was pressed against the wall, Evangeline and Robbie with their hands pressed over their mouths. I didn’t understand what was happening until I caught Luke’s wide eyes. He was trembling, shuddering against me.
Don’t move, his wide eyes told me, and I did my best to jerk my head in response. I thought we had been caught at first, but that didn’t explain his and the other’s reactions. He had seen something, and that something had terrified him. His eyes were far too wide, almost unseeing, his lips parting into what might have been a cry before he managed to swallow it and shake his head. I stayed still, gasping into his clammy hand. Luke turned to the three of us, his cheeks paling, and once again told us with his eyes, I’m going to take a look.
I read the words on his lips.
And then we’re going to run.
He nodded at us—me included.
Luke motioned for us to follow in his lead, and I swallowed my own strangled cry. If Luke was scared, then I didn’t want to see whatever was through that door. Okay? His gaze flicked to me before signaling with two fingers that we were going to run.
I didn’t notice it back then, but looking back, I think he was crying.
He was terrified.
Luke didn’t want to look again. I could see it in the way he was twitching, his breaths coming out in short pants.
Maybe he wasn’t the son of a pirate, after all.
“Wait!"
The word was choked in the back of my throat when he twisted around and peeked inside the room. I could tell from his body language his intentions were to check if we had been caught, and then turn to us and run. I counted my own shaky breaths when Luke didn’t turn back to me—and in the corner of my eye, his shadow slowly bled away from the three of us. He stood on the threshold of the room, his arms dropping to his sides. I couldn’t see his face but I knew what had happened to him. Back when we first started at the age of six years old, the four of us were kidnapped by a group of rival pirates—and the contestants had to find us.
The Pirate King called it “The Mind Sickness” which turned our thoughts blurry, our brains into soup. With the mind sickness, we were under the control of our kidnappers. This was just like The Mind Sickness. But while that had been fake and had taken a lot of patience not to giggle and show emotion on camera, this was something else entirely. When Luke stepped into the room slowly, seemingly stuck in a trance of mind sickness, I knew I had to grab him before he was taken again.
Reality and fiction were no longer two separate things, as I lunged forward to follow him.
I don’t know why I followed him, why my body seemed to act on its own, against my brain. I wondered if it was the mind sickness. Is this what it was?
I could feel it, sense it—almost smell it.
It was a pull I couldn’t explain, phantom fingers creeping up my spine and taking hold, pushing me further towards it.
When I followed Luke inside the room, I wasn’t thinking of anything except my sudden, overwhelming urge to join The Pirate King, and my pledge to him.
I remember the room being filled with light, and the sight of it drawing the breath from my lungs. Luke dropped onto his knees in front of me. Robbie followed, and then Evangeline. I don’t remember hitting the ground. Just her.
I never got to know the contestants because they were only here for a day.
But this girl had stood out, a small girl with dark red hair pulled into pigtails.
She was the only one noticeable in the crowd. I knew her name. It was in my throat and bubbling under my tongue.
Mia.
Her name had been called out earlier.
I had always wondered why contestants who went missing were forgotten about.
“You’re not supposed to be in here.”
The mayor wasn’t supposed to be in the room filled with blood. Next to him was the creator of The Pirate King. He said something, what sounded like a reassurance telling us to not be scared, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Not when my chest was being crushed, and I could feel this thing taking over me slowly. It was invisible and yet I could see it, sense it in the air.
I could see it splattering the walls and floor, a haunting smear of scarlet caught under candlelight. It didn’t make sense to me that our mayor was on his knees in front of Mia, or what was left of Mia. I could see her body crumpled on the ground, while her pigtailed head was balanced on a wooden podium.
Her eyes were still wide open, lips parted in a screech that was silenced. Instead of explaining why he was kneeling in front of a dead contestant’s severed head, our mayor turned to us. His eyes were said, and I found myself drawn to the hollow look in his eyes, his writhing lips trying to coerce words. “Be kind to them,” without a word to us, he turned back to Mia’s head and bowed his own. I don't think he could watch. “We are giving them to you, after all.”
The mayor tipped his head back, his eyes flickering shut. “You promised. We give you your own, and you stop taking our children, and then leave."
I couldn’t… move.
Even my breaths were frozen.
I was paralyzed.
“Not yet.”
The booming voice entered my head, invasive and painful. I could feel my body trembling underneath its crushing weight. I was forced onto my stomach, gasping into the old carpet. “I’m still hungry,” the voice burrowed into my skull, and I could feel those phantom fingers stroking the raw meat of my brain.
I screamed, but I couldn’t move, I couldn’t open my mouth, my lips gaping, gasping into dust choking my lungs.
It retracted instantly, and when it did, the feeling returned to my body, only for this presence to take hold of me and force my head up. Next to me, Luke made a squeaking sound. His head was thrown back, enough to snap his neck, teasing it, before letting him go.
“Still…” my mouth filled with bugs writhing on my tongue, creeping down the bare flesh of my arms, as the voice wound its way around the four of us, bleeding into our ears, getting a taste of us. When my lips opened, and I mimicked it, the others in sync, my own words were violently torn away.
“Hungry.”
“Eat, Nibiru,” the mayor's voice made me jump.
It was human, and real—nothing like what was suffocating my skull. Nibiru. The name sent shivers sliding down my spine. The pirate king. But he wasn’t real, right? I knew he wasn’t real. “As you can see, we are keeping our side of the bargain,” his voice shook. “Our ancestors were… cruel to you in the past. But please. Have mercy on them.”
He caught himself. “That is until they are ready, of course. You said you would leave the other children alone.”
“Mercy.”
I could taste blood in the back of my mouth and pooling down my chin when the pressure was back, this time a sharp pain in the back of my head.
“Mercy!” It mocked.
The thing laughed, and I felt every hitch of its breath shake the ground beneath us, bringing the light fixtures crashing to the ground.
Mayor Wethers bowed his head, and just like that, the thing was slipping from mine. I saw its movement in the way the candles flickered, flames dancing from side to side. The sound of chewing brought me back to fruition piece by piece. I could breathe again. I could blink my eyes, and still pressed against the ground, I could see Mia’s head trembling under the weight of the thing hovering over it. The force did not waste time. It wouldn’t let me see it. When I tried to, it was back inside my head.
“Not yet,” it said again, before returning to its meal.
I watched it strip away the flesh and hair first, a phantom tongue delving into the cavern of the girl’s skull and chewing its way through pinkish mush. With it distracted, the mayor took his chance and got to his feet, turning around and motioning for us to leave. I tried to.
I forced myself to sit up, but I couldn’t stop looking at Mia’s head disappearing piece by piece as invisible bites became bigger and hungrier, a monstrous tumor eating its way through her face. A shadow loomed over me, and I recognized it as Luke. But he ignored me, instead taking stumbling steps towards thin air—and yet both of us knew there was something there, something eating its way into Mia’s skull.
Something hiding behind the façade of The Pirate King.
There was a look in Luke’s eyes that I did not like. There was something in his eyes, driving him closer and closer to the king. It was no longer mind sickness. I could see the twitch in the boy’s lips, entranced eyes glued to dancing candlelight. I had never seen that expression on his face. It was excitement and curiosity in one, a daring smile starting to take over his mouth.
There was something in Luke’s eyes.
Not yet taken shape, an ignition.
It hit me in a wave of dizziness sending my thoughts plunging deep down, that maybe I could follow him.
“What is going on here?!”
The voice was like cool water coming over me, a comfort I didn’t think I would ever feel again. Mom was standing in the doorway, and I wish I could have turned around. I wish I didn’t stay frozen, squeezing my eyes shut. I was aware of my mom’s sharp cry, and then her warm arms wrapping around me, attempting to pull me to my feet.
I wanted to hold onto her, to tell her I was scared. That I wanted to go home.
But no sooner had her warmth found me before it was slipping away. I didn’t get to see her face, and I think that was a mercy. I didn’t see my mother come apart in front of me. I just felt her wash over me, thick and red and warm, splashing me in the face. When I opened my eyes, my mom was gone, and I could sense that monstrous tumor, that mouth, beginning to chew through the mushy red coating on the ground beneath me. Time didn’t make sense for a long time after that. I saw the red and blue flashing of sirens. I saw the sheriff’s face inches from my own.
“Ace!” He was yelling. He slapped me twice. I could read his lips.
It’s going to be okay!
He forced me to look at him, and I did, blinking back tears.
I could still feel her.
She was all over me, painting me, staining me.
This time the sheriff spoke slowly, drawing out every word.
It. Is. Going. To. Be. Okay.
Without mom, it wasn't.
I was alone with nobody but the other kids, and a town that wanted me dead.
The world seemed to move without me. I was standing outside the studio, and then I was in the back of an ambulance, a warm blanket thrown over me.
Evangeline and Robbie were sitting opposite me, wide-eyed and staring into an oblivion only they could see. Sound came rushing back to me when I was standing on a white corridor, and Luke’s yell came from behind me. “I’m fine!” There were three people in white crowding him, one of them a man who was forcefully holding his eyes open and shining a bright light in his face. He snarled at them. “I told you I’m fine!”
The same people looked into my eyes the following day when I had stopped screaming and trying to tear off my own skin.
I could still feel her, even wearing fresh clothes.
It took me several days to realize I was not in the emergency room. This place was a labyrinth of doors that led to nowhere, and scary-looking people carrying clipboards. The first time I was tested for starry eyes, I was met with hopeful smiles. Call it witness protection for kids who were marked by God's.
They told us no matter what happened, we would be looked after.
Eleven years later, I know the consequences of keeping us past our expiration date. I feel it in earthquakes under my feet- the town is crumbling outside this facility under the fury of a god who did not get what he wanted—and was taking it out on innocent people.
I turned twelve when the first wave came.
A disease that wiped out half of the kindergarten.
The second wave was earthquakes.
The third, a barrier stopping town's people from escaping.
We lost Robbie five years ago.
At the age of fifteen years old, his starry eyes came early.
Since eight years old, I have been told that my pledge to “The Pirate King” was real, and was in fact to a God, Nibiru, who has been feasting on our town’s children, both body and existence.
In the late 1500s, our town begged him to save their dying women, and he did, in return for children. Since then he has kept coming back, hungrier each time.
When I pledged myself to him at the age of eight years old, I did not tie my fate to becoming his meal. Instead, I am to become his right hand, or I guess, part of his “pirate crew”—and starry eyes will be the first sign that he’s pulling me over to his side. Every day since being brought here, they check my eyes three times a day. Robbie escaped five years ago, and his giving in stopped the endless earthquakes.
But his sacrifice didn't stop the daily executions which show up on the TV screens. For every day we are not handed over to him, another innocent town's person's head is severed from their body. Last week, Evangeline didn’t turn up to class (where we learn about Nibiru and his effects on us). Water, moonlight, and the sea are three main instigators in capturing us, so we drink water blindfolded, and there are no windows inside this facility.
The sea is blocked out, mostly through headphones we have to wear at all times. So it gets lonely.
Evangeline locked herself in her room and refused to come out.
When orderlies dragged her out, kicking and screaming, I saw Evangeline’s eyes.
Stars.
Beautiful stars printed on her pupils, marked by a god. I could see his presence already taking hold of her, turning her expression feral and monstrous, her lips pulled into a wide grin. She turned twenty years old last week, and each day she was free, that pull was stronger, and her mentality started to crumble.
Until she started to close herself off from Luke and me, insisting that she had a headache, and giving us a sad, knowing smile. I don't think she was stupid enough to look into a glass of water, or take out her earplugs. I think Nibiru found her himself. “I can hear him!”
Now a shadow of herself, Evangeline was a blur of gold curls she never got cut, her body convulsing as she fought wildly, squealing like a banshee when they pulled her down the hallway.
“Ace!”
Her cry almost sent me to my knees. It was laced with that exact force that had crushed my lungs at eight years old.
“Ace, can you hear him?!”
She escaped a day later, after ripping an orderly's eyes out.
Luke came to see me last night.
When I woke up, he was looming over me, sunglasses shading his eyes, earplugs corked in, still in his pyjamas. I knew he didn't have starry eyes. If he did, Luke would be proudly bearing them. He was already jealous that the others had been marked before him, and did everything in his power to catch moonlight, or hear the sea.
We were ten when he tried to stick his head out of the window to hear the ocean, and was grounded for a week.
"Are we worth it?" He asked, hanging over me with his hands behind his back, lips pulled into a smirk. I knew that wasn't Luke speaking. The Pirate King had already taken him a long time ago.
"What?"
He leaned back, expression darkening. "You heard me," I could hear the Pirate King's voice twisted around his. "Are we really worth it?"
The ground shook, and I grasped onto my bedsheets, holding on for dear life. Luke's smile was cruel, but there was a part of him I still believed was still in there, fighting against the Pirate King's grasp on his mind. With a two fingered salute, he left me with that question burning in my brain.
Were we worth it?
The alarms went off this morning.
I knew it was Luke escaping. It's been quiet ever since he left. Nobody has come to check my eyes.
The hallways are empty.
There was another execution.
This time it was Evangeline doing the honors, dressed in the filthy rags of her old costume, her pirate hat nestled on her head. I turned it off when she started screaming with laughter, throwing the severed head into a crowd of horrified looking faces. I saw my cousins among them, glaring at the camera as if looking directly at me.
When the crowd parted down the middle for a newly converted Luke wearing his costume, his pirate hat perfectly sitting on his head of curls, and the manic stars in his eyes lighting up the dim morning, I destroyed my TV.
Maybe the bastard was right.
The people here are insistent on keeping us from him. But to throw a whole town away for four kids?
It doesn't make sense.
Three days, and I join them– and maybe he will leave our town alone.
There's no such thing as selling your soul to the devil.
Being marked, claimed, by a God, however…
If I listen carefully, I can hear him, riding on the waves of the sea, calling out to me. He is gentle, and lulling. The Pirate King wants me to finally come home and join his crew.
Can you hear him?