• Meet the Kyanah -- the alien civilization I've been working on since 2016
• A Primer on Kyanah Physiology
• Aliens Deserve Alien Brains
• A Primer on Kyanah Pack Dynamics
• Advanced Kyanah Psychology: Inter-Pack Dynamics
• The Motives for Project Hope: Part I
• The Motives for Project Hope: Part II
• The Motives for Project Hope: Part III
• The Motives for Project Hope: Part IV
• The Motives for Project Hope: Part V
• Intro to Kyanah Politics
• An (abridged) Beastiary of the Kyanah Homeworld
• Plantlife of the Kyanah Homeworld
• An Analysis of Kyanah Military Forces: Part I -- Tech
• An Analysis of Kyanah Military Forces: Part II -- Organizational Structure
• An Analysis of Kyanah Military Forces: Part III -- Military Doctrine
• Alien Computers Are Alien
• Alien Computers Are Alien -- Part II: Kyanah-Human Cyberwarfare
• Alien Computers Are Alien -- Part III: A Guide to Kyanah Internets
• A Look Into the Kyanah Education System
• A Rare Look at Kyanah Living Spaces
• A Primer on Kyanah Economics
• Kyanah Food and Drink
• The Kyanah Have A Desert Planet -- Wait No It Has 12 Biomes: Part I
• The Kyanah Have A Desert Planet -- Wait No It Has 12 Biomes: Part II
• Kyanah City-State Dynamics: Part I -- Intercity Relations
• Kyanah City-State Dynamics: Part II -- City-State Demographics
• A Map of the Kyanah Homeworld: Part I
• Some Notes on Kyanah Timekeeping
• Profiles of Kyanah City States: Part I -- the Rktakian Kwardniet

The map again, for reference.
To-on Kan: Location: 57S, 66W (~19500 km from Ikun); Elevation: -1200m; Population: 1.2 million; GDP: $65 billion. Tier: 2. A little bit outside of the main Far South region, but nevertheless culturally and politically aligned. The climate is relatively cool and dry, though winds from the Middle South make it slightly warmer and wetter than it otherwise would be. Much like Ikun, they are located inside an impact crater, though this one is over 200 kilometers across. Almost the entire economy is centered around mining tantalum (despite some attempts to dabble in geoengineering, which were swiftly shut down by sanctions from Ikun), and they have the largest mines on the planet, though they aren't the only supplier. Tantalum is used in the alloys needed for high-performance nanogears for their mechanical computers. For this reason, it's an important strategic city; Ikun had an air base there until they removed it in order to extract political concessions from Koranah in other areas, at which point Koranah promptly invaded and installed a puppet regime as part of a plan to corner the tantalum market and vertically integrate their nanogear production.
Kanenhah: Location: 68S, 55W (~20200 km from Ikun); Elevation: +3200m; Population: 3.5 million; GDP: $500 billion. Tier: 1. Unlike most Far South city-states, Kanenhah is located not just near the Green Impact Range, but inside it, making the climate colder than most in the Far South; temperatures routinely drop as low as 5C in the winter and only rise to about 30-35 in the summer, so basically their summer is like Ikun's winter. Live there long enough and there's a good chance you'll even see snow flurries, a true sign of arctic climates on the Kyanah homeworld. The high elevation, due to its placement on an ejecta pile, makes the air thin and those from lower elevations often need time to acclimate, though on the flip side, this means that they produce a greater proportion of acclaimed athletes than most city-states. Politically, they are Ikun's closest ally in the Far South and one of the closest in the entire world, and thousands of Ikun troops are present in Kanenhah at all times. This has naturally drawn the wrath of Koranah, and relations between the two are extremely hostile. Koranah has thousands of railguns and missiles hidden in the mountains pointed at Kanenhah and accuse them of being an Ikun puppet. As Kanenhah's population is 1/8 that of their #1 enemy, they are one of only a couple hundred Kyanah city-states to have a draft in modern times, with all newly formed packs being required to join the military for 6 years (~2.7 Earth years). Combined with all the high-tech gear sold to them by Ikun at a discount, they are the 10th strongest military in the world, and the 3rd strongest outside the Rktakian Kwardniet. They still have some of their traditional textile and steel mills, but the bulk of their economy has shifted to cars and aircraft, robots, computers, and software. The city-state is also, oddly enough, something of a hub for high fashion and fine dining. Like most Far South city-states, religion is a much bigger part of life than in the Rktakian Kwardniet, and unlike most of the northern hemisphere, collective worship is common. While the government has secularized somewhat in recent decades, under pressure from both the younger generations and Ikun diplomats, and there are no longer any legal penalties for following the "wrong" religious practices, there may be social and professional consequences for packs that are vocal about it, and religious authorities are guaranteed one Lawspeaker seat (reduced from four packs to one a few years ago in Y967). Attending mass-worship is not mandatory, but businesses are required to close during this time, excluding emergency services and some government offices. As Kanenhah lies just inside the southern polar circle, there is a period of about 8 days where the sun does not rise in the winter and even at +4 there is only twilight; hundreds of thousands of locals and tens of thousands of tourists gather at the onset of polar night for the live music, street food, animal sacrifices, and light shows that mark this occasion.
Koranah: Location: 70S, 48W (~20100 km from Ikun); Elevation: +800m; Population: 29.0 million; GDP: $3.5 trillion. Tier: 1. Ikun's main economic and political rival and the largest economy on the planet by raw GDP. One of the few major Far South city-states to actually be located on the south side of the Green Impact Range, it's in a polar barrens biome, locked off from any moderating climatic (and political) influences by the impact range, so despite their lower elevation, the climate is similar to Kanenhah, but with a slightly longer polar night and midnight sun. In Y839, Ikun invaded Koranah, at the time a backwater city-state with an economy based primarily on resource extraction and low-tech manufacturing, and overthrew the non-aligned government, replacing the reigning City Alpha with a pro-Ikun ethnic minority pack who killed thousands of the majority group and ruled with an iron fist until being deposed in Y861 by the current government, which has proven to be even more authoritarian. City Alphas rule for life, passing on power to close ikoin, Lawspeakers may as well just be there for decoration, and packs who are brave (and stupid) enough to file a challenge against the City Alpha have a mysterious tendency to get into fatal car accidents or be arrested on trumped up charges. Surveillance is omnipresent both outside and sometimes inside homes, and leaving requires permission from the government (there's a meme circulating around net zone 1, which includes Ikun, that goes like 'we need a fence to keep everyone out, they need a fence to keep everyone in'). Koranah's populace tend to be deeply religious and have a tendency to participate in mass worship sessions, as with most of the Far South, and regular attendance is mandatory, as the state uses religious leaders to disseminate propaganda, along with having agents in every net zone stirring the pot and spreading anti-Ikun messaging. Despite all of this, Koranah is a very wealthy and prosperous city-state, in the tier 1 category. Ever since the current regime took over, they have been trying to economically and militarily catch up to Ikun by any means necessary, making vast investments in shifting to high-tech manufacturing, knowledge work, and financial services, implementing an egg quota to boost their population and thus economy, building countless new districts at an astonishingly fast rate, razing many slums and historic buildings alike in the process (with a dictatorial government, they can ram through projects that would be bogged down with years of red tape in a city-state like Ikun), and bolstering their military to a point that their conventional weapons have achieved parity with Ikun, although they haven't dared to challenge Ikun's nuclear monopoly.
Modern Koranah has what humans would call a cyberpunk vibe, a vast sea of plain cookie-cutter skyscrapers extending out to the horizon in a grid pattern, with extensive buttresses blocking out large chunks of the sky at street level, and seemingly every surface being a screen of some sort--useful for displaying larger than life propaganda everywhere, while endless flocks of drones soar through the skies. As laws against littering and noise pollution are very strict, Koranah tends to be cleaner and quieter than Ikun--except when the city-wide loudspeaker network is summoning citizens to mass worship or blasting the city anthem as it does every morning. The city has a very sleek and extensive mass transit system and a network of tunnels below street level to allow residents to traverse between buildings without facing the cold outside, so private car ownership is not very common. As Koranah's economy and population have grown, they have participated in the same Globalist tactics used by the Rktakian Kwardniet, siphoning away natural resources from faraway impoverished regions and seeking to grow their influence abroad through military and economic interventionism. They are also the mastermind behind the Climate Control System, a hypothetical network capable of controlling weather and ecosystems on a global scale in much the same way as Ikun controls the Water Distribution System; for this reason Ikun has spent large amounts of political capital getting as many city-states as possible to ban geoengineering technology. Koranah is also the largest manufacturer of high-performance nanogears, important components for the Kyanahs' mechanical computers; if Koranah stopped nanogear exports, computers would likely become several times more expensive overnight, a fact which they use to their advantage politically. Additionally, they have a considerable footprint in space, with many zero-G manufacturing hubs and the current (as of Y976) largest Ryitu base, with a population of 400+.

Continuing the reading, sharing so more impression.
Honestly, I didn't think I'd appreciate the Cultural Festival part that much, I mean, I expected to see more or less the usual thing many anime show, and essentialy it was that, but with more sauce.
Where to start... first of all, I'm glad that Ayanokoji draw some interest in Nagumo, looking forward to a challenge, and that he, despite the depression, accepted. A first chance to settle down this matter came later in volume 9, but I'll talk about it later. That said, I started to like more Nagumo each volume since the 2nd Island exam, he just want someone to play with, as apparently there was no one worthy opponent in his year (if not Kiryuun-senpai, but she had no interest in that).
Regarding the festival itself, I though from the start it was suspicious, the betrayal of Ryuuen towards Horikita, spreading information and then sparking a rivalry on the same theme, and I sensed it right. Business men at work, fomenting competition to increase sales, with low blows to deflect suspicion, great job! That said, Ayanokoji was on another level, a real man of culture!
https://preview.redd.it/hxivg2ny99zc1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dca87d2ebc31a86f12914d88466e88f1f6279fae
"There is nothing in this school you can't buy with points" 💀
Damn, he really used her in the best possible, Chashibara-sensei surpassed all the records, even of Kushida and other maids, well, to be honest, just as expected, I would have given my money for a photo with her too hahaha Poor teacher, traumatized that way, but the GOAT will do anything in order to win, no mercy, miss.
Kushida was another powerfull weapon, especially in the context of the maid café, and to be honest, I'm glad she's still here, her moments are funny to read. On the other, I expected Haruka trying to do something dirty, sure abstention, the threat of expulsion, but I'm glad she was humbled already, as in her personal intoxication she hadn't really understood what type Sakura was.
What I didn't expect was to have both Ichika and Yagami get clowned in this part. Fine for her, she went for Kushida, but then dared to challenge the GOAT in a contest of speed and strenght (bad girl). But the whole love letter part and the trap to Yagami MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA He thought he had set a trap for Horikita, waiting for Ayanokoji, but instead he found himself trapped, with all the unknown people who kept arriving, until he was cornered, freaking out, losing before even getting a chance to fight Ayanokoji. What a clown...
https://preview.redd.it/psg0eb52d9zc1.jpg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7d4751029e3463283d64a4fc7826478f774fd2c
Those damn love letters, huh 💀
I can talk even more about this part, but better move to next one. Hokkaido vacations were another cliché of the school genre, but I enjoyed this part too. Now, imagine if you are the poor guy who end up in the same room with a goblin, a dragon and the GOAT, you will die just from their spiritual pressure, poor Watanabe. Anyway, Kito vs Ryuuen was really fun to see, the level of narration from Kiyotaka was just epic in that battle of pillows... sad that they used his one for that XD
I don't want to seem too superficial, saying the bath scene in the terms was the best part, but over than see two big reasons to go in Ichinose's class, Ibuki was funny as hell. In this part, but even later, in the snowball fight with Horikita. Yeah, she's just a kid who wants to win, but she's funny. Kiyotaka pushing further the massage chairs was also a very iconic passage, while another GOAT mention goes to Koenji, I expected something crazy from him, he never disappoints 🗿 (poor guys in group with him)
Leaving aside the ski lesson and other stuff, fine with the scene of Ichinose at the end, add some salt towards this Ishigami, etc, well... Ryuuen back to Dragon Boy mode, Ayanokoji stepping in was legit, but I didn't expect to see even Kushida falling in the harem...
https://preview.redd.it/vz4h2p60h9zc1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=a6786f35e28a1ea34417accbc5f74f3572db8125
Unmatched absolute first place, Sudo declaring his love to Horikita. Yeah, she refused, not a surprise, but my boy is really growing up, proud of him 🏀
In all of this, still looking forward, Ayanokoji really intend to move to another class? Honestly he has become the new school therapist, everyone talk to him and ask for advices.
I've read also volume 0, not bad to look at the background, Ayanokoji-sensei and the White Room project, but a bit heavy to read, compared to the other, much longer and denser chapters, it took me many days to finish this one.
While volume 9 probably was the most boring one so far... the competition between Nagumo and the GOAT to elect the new student council president could potentially have been interesting, but it quickly faded away, as Ichinose dropped out. That will be for another day. The cooperative exam basically fall in background, following other secondary events, but boring, fill the vacant places in the council, the Kiryuun's case, all the Ichinose's stuff... yeah, so far the most uninteresting read in the 2nd year.
Now I suppose 9,5 are winter holydays, another transition part adding some sauce, more interested in what will come next. I think it's not over yet, but we enter the final part of the 2nd year, right?

If you're reading this I am going to assume one of three things:
A. You're MC-romance-curious and you want some great recommendations to get the juices flowing.
B. You're an MC romance hater and find yourself here to observe what paltry excuses I have for recommending this genre.
You’re about to comment "Good God Ochenkruto stop being so passe. 2011 is long gone, get with the times! We're into Mafia Dudes now, bikers are OUT!"
C. You're a die-hard (I refuse to type ride or die don't even fucking ask me) fan and want to see your faves here.
Before I get to the heart of the matter, a small preface:
I'm not here to debate MC romance as a genre, the depictions of biker culture or the feminist implications of reading these books.
Let's just say that I've run these ideas through my neurotic Judith Butler quoting brain and decided "Whatever, sometimes a romance reader wants to be stepped on by a sweaty guy with a beard."
Let those who have never felt the same way cast the first stone!
As criteria, my taste runs towards the medium-dark, heavy on grit, a 1% club and older characters. This might not be your criteria and I'll note books/authors I enjoyed that may deviate from this standard. I do not enjoy duologies, or trilogies about the same couple.
Lastly, and probably unfairly, but if the first book in a series has a virgin MFC, I will not read the series. It's not a fair rule but it's “me” rule!
Again, this is an opinion-based list, in no way am I casting aspersions on you if I'm critiquing your potential favourites, the reader's taste is not debatable, just the book itself.
Plus, I don't even have good taste, trust me.
Not that anyone needs to justify their tastes or their reading preferences but I enjoy these romances because they often center lower middle-class/working-class characters, frequently giving second chances to older MFCs, single mothers, and women who have blown up their lives and are trying to claw their way back to stability.
Generational poverty, the cracks in unfair systems, the struggle against that system laid bare and open, the hidden darkness of small-town life.
MC Romances give the "romance underclass" heroines their time to shine. Struggling women hanging on by the skin of their teeth, ready to do anything for those they love. Waitresses in trashy roadside bars with big dreams. Hookers without a heart of gold. Mercenary club sluts who want their piece of forever. Strippers who just want to dance. Runaways, former drug users, and women without housing or support. I want them all to find their perfect Epilogue.
The fantasy is that an outlaw, with sexy motor oil stains on his too-worn jeans is going to get you there, but realistically. A new used car, a fixed fridge, a place to live without mold.
Plus his forearms and rough voice and you know, commitment and monogamy.
Cream Of The Crop
{Reapers MC Series by Joanna Wylde}. Undisputed and unchallenged in balancing hot chemistry, dark-ish romance and small-town outlaw grit.
Please see this and this for more information.
Pretty Good
{Chaos Series by Kristen Ashley}
Not at all dark and not at all 1%.
And yet I dare you to read the big reveal scene in that book about the sad woman and the asshole she left twenty years ago and not cry like a loon.
Double dare you.
Warning: KA gets rightfully called out for problematic content, especially her portrayal of WOC side characters and this series has this issue in three of the books.
{Steel Bones MC Series by Cate C Wells}
More age gap than I like and less darkness than I prefer. Yet, her MMCs could easily also be wolf shifters and that's a compliment.
Bijou Hunter has a million small, three to five books, series in an extended small-town universe between West Virginia and Kentucky. Very slice of life, working-class ethos and extremely low angst books that span several generations of different chapters of different MCs.
TW: Some of the books and characters have the darkest and saddest backstories I have ever read.
{Dark and Dirty Sinners MC by Serena Akeroyd} is the OTT zany option. This is my "I didn't say it was good, I said I loved it" series.
Unfortunately, most of her MFCs are particularly unpleasant, she seems to excel at sassy heroines with no friends but makes up for it with very weird sex scenes. Again, I didn't say I had GOOD taste!
The "Plan To Finish in Full Shortly" Category
{Desert Dogs Series by Cara McKenna}.
{Lock & Key Series by Cat Porter} - I got really sad reading the second book in this series and now don't know how to move forward.
{Riot MC Series by Karen Renee}- I'm willing to give the third book in the series a try even though the second one was a frowny face.
{Hell's Handlers MC Series by Lilly Atlas} - I don't have KU so I have to wait until I get a subscription again or some freebies fall on my lap. I medium enjoyed the first book in the series and would read more if I had the chance.
{Brazen Bulls MC by Susan Fanetti} - several interconnected series, but be warned this writer tends to kill off MCs post-HEA in subsequent books. YMMV.
{Torpedo Ink Series by Christine Feehan} is not what I would call very good, in fact, I think it's terrible. The overall plot makes zero sense, and the author tried to shoehorn the Russian mafia with paranormal abilities, kidnapped children turned super assassins into a small-town MC romance. It's the gooniest shit ever BUT WHY I AM STILL WAITING FOR MY LIBBY HOLDS?
Because I told you, I don't have good taste.
Aggressive Nope In Class of Its Own
Tillie Cole's Hades Hangmen MC - I think this might be the most blatant example of an author fetishizing whiteness while also pretending to "address" serious issues like race and class in America, all wrapped up with gratuitous torture porn. I read two books, skimmed a few others and realized that there is no female character that goes unassaulted and undegraded.
Additionally, I found that there is also no book where the author doesn't go overboard glorifying the MFC's "pale, almost translucent skin and sky blue eyes".
And I'm not even touching the redemptions of white supremacist characters matter.
The Rest (aka DNF'd series where I tried one or two books and gave up)
Geri Glen's Kings of Korruption MC Series - Flimsy
Glenna Maynard's Royal Bastards MC Series - Not for me.
Katie Wilde's Hellfire Riders MC Series - Not for me, first three books about the same couple.
Layla Frost's Hyde Series - Not for me.
Jessica Gadziala's Henchmen MC Series - Nope. Too dramatic.
Betty Shreffler's Kings MC Series - Not for me.
Erin Trejo's Soulless Bastards MC Series - Not for me.
Daphne Loveling's Lords Of Carnage MC Series - Not for me. Insta-lust.
Lani Lynn Vale's Hail Raisers MC - Too clean and overly innocent MFC in the first book.
Chelsea Camaron's Regulators MC - - Not for me.
Autumn Lake Jones's Lost Kings MC - First three books about the same couple. I am not three books interested in a biker and a layer. I am only one book interested.
Lena Bourne's Devil's Nightmare MC - Some deeply offensive content about a character.
Megan O'Brian's The Ride Series - Not for me.
River Savage's Knights Rebels MC - Not for me.
Ryan Michele's Ravage MC - Almost turned me off the genre completely.
Lane Hart's Savage Kings MC Series - Not for me.
Marie James's Cerberus MC - Too clean. Not for me.
Jamie Begley's The Last Riders - Holy slut shaming Batman! For a slut shamey genre this one takes the cake.
Anne Malcolm's Sons of Templar MC - I was extremely annoyed at these books and I tried to read three of them. Three!
Jordan Marie's Savage Brothers MC - Nope.
So that's it! Perhaps you'll find something from my list to your taste, or maybe you want to make a fiery defence of a favourite series/book that I unjustly dismissed.
Or maybe you hate all my choices and want to tell it to my beautiful, perpetually youthful, even though I haven't had Botox in four years because of IVF, forty-two-year-old face.
By all means, I welcome your ire.

Hey friends!
Currently sitting in my bungalow at O&O Aesthesis and as promised, hitting you with a live review & AMA. Please feel free to drop any questions. Additional reviews coming from this trip are: Four Seasons Astir Palace, One & Only Kea Island & Porto Zante Villas
Overview 8/10

• One & Only Aesthesis is part of O&Os continuing expansion into Greece (with O&O Kea Island opening June 1). It was officially opened in November '23 so this is it's first summer season
• The vibe is true to O&O standard with an unstuffy approach to ultra luxury. It's a boutique experience, feeling very intimate and accessible. Unlike brand counterparts like OO Mandarina, the grounds while extensive, are very easy to traverse and you can walk everywhere. There are also fun bikes (more below)
• Overall the pricing competes with Four Seasons Astir Palace and while it's not able to compete on the views of AP - the unpretentious approach to luxury, boutique vibes, killer hard product and amazing food make it some much needed competition in the area - it's a great spot if you don't like the "big box" feel of FS and want a super luxe but low key resort just outside of Athens. It's best for couples or older families.

Location 7/10 (bc of the obstructed views)

• O&O Aesthesis is another ultra luxury hotel popping up in the southern Athenian suburbs, which used to only be home to Four Seasons Astir Palace (another 15 mins further south of O&O)
• Located 30 minutes south of Athens so it's super easy to pop into the city for tours/day trips. It's built on what is being reinvigorated as the the "Athenian Riviera"
• A bit of a history lesson - the Athenian Riviera was an ultra premium, luxury destination for the who's who back in the 60s and 70s and this group of hotels (O&O, FS, more coming) are determined to bring it back to its former glory
• The location gives you easy access to Athens for day trips which is great. However, as it is directly across from the town of Glyfada (kind of feels like a port town) the views from the beach are mid at best. This is a huge disappointment given it's competing with FS Astir Palace which has some of the most killer views of all the FS portfolio. This is the biggest miss in my opinion. The views from the main pool / beach just aren't great because you're looking right across the water at a bunch of halfway built / run down buildings. I hope this will improve over time, but the view will never compete with Astir Palace, I'm afraid.
  • Note that they are building a second beach that is on the other side of the property and will have a killer unobstructed view of the sea. But this is only partway a fix because the main building/pool and beach still face Glyfada

Rooms 9/10 (would be 10/10 were it not for the lack of privacy, which is fixable)

• 128 rooms total - mix of a small number of hotel rooms, 95 bungalows, a number of residences and a handful of villas
• The rooms are stunning, with particular emphasis on the bungalows. They are spacious, with a large sleeping area, separate living area, huge bathroom with one of the best soaking tubs I've ever been in (it's aesthetically beautiful and really deep too), killer rain shower (water pressure is fantastic) & a massive front and back terrace.
• The vibe is very indoooutdoor living and when you open all the sliding doors to connect the front terrace through to the room to the back terrace - the place feels massive
• The front terrace has a couch and several chairs around a fire place and the back terrace has a huge day bed (king size), swinging chair, table with banquette style couch and chairs, 2 chaise lounges and a large plunge pool
  • The pools aren't really heated, they are slightly heated to 23-25 C, but still a bit chilly
• You definitely do not want to stay in the main building (there's only a select number of actual rooms in the main building). The beauty of this place is the privacy so you want a bungalow. And then of the bungalows, you want to be careful which you pick to ensure actual privacy. Some of the vegetation around the garden bungalows is still immature - so the rooms aren't sufficiently shrouded.
• The best bet for your privacy is to book a Sea View or Sea Front Bungalow or work with your TA to make sure that if you book a Garden Bungalow, you get one with appropriate cover

Food 10/10

• It. Is. So. Good.
• The range of options between the two restaurants is impressive. There's the main restaurant Ora which is authentic Greek style, and an unpretentious, family-style approach to dining. And then El Bar which is a pop-up with rotating options - currently it's Spanish cuisine. Also the prices are SO reasonable. Our dinner for 2 last night, each with a specialty cocktail was 85 EUR before tip. That was 2 cocktails, two entrees and two appetizers. An omlette on the breakfast menu is 12 Euro...it's so reasonable.
• It's also extremely vegetarian friendly, which as a vegetarian, I greatly appreciate - especially since Greek custom is heavy on the meat. They have a whole separate vegetarian menu.

Service 7/10 (this is 100% fixable, and they are addressing it)

• The staff is wonderful, kind and upbeat. They are eager to help and are involved without being intrusive. That being said, the service is a bit hit or miss.
• Staffing is a problem everywhere, but is especially felt in this area. About 50% of the staff clearly have experience and are 10/10 (most of them came from FS Astir Palace actually) but the other 50% is green and not yet at the 5* standard.
• Examples of the struggles: staff not clearing tables at the bar when other guests depart, so there's trash/food from previous guests on the table AND it's limited seating so others guests are waiting to take that table as it sits dirty...not cool at all. Asking our room number multiple times during a meal...I think I've been asked my room number a minimum of 12 times since being here - which isn't a huge deal, but it's not a big hotel & occupancy is low, it would be nice if they could remember my room - and they certainly shouldn't ask it multiple times at a single meal. Forgetting a drink order, not checking in on our table for 15 minutes while we wait to order. None of this is earth shattering and all of it will be tightened up as the season goes.
• I will say, they have been smart and strategically placed all their experienced staff in the restaurant so dining is flawless. The newer folks are cutting their teeth at the pool/bars and you can feel the difference. This is totally normal for a new hotel in their first prime season, and will work itself out, I have no doubt

Gym: 10/10

• Large facility with fantastic, brand new equipment
• Personal trainer on staff from 7am - 6pm
• Indoor area with all the normal machines: treadmills, ellipticals, stairmaster, weight machines and free weights and then a separate outdoor area with a massive yoga pavilion
• There's lots of complimentary classes and activities included in your stay

Activities: 9/10

• Love that a bunch of these are included like the fitness classes (depending on time of day) and bikes
• Bikes available to explore the property which includes a bunch of nature trails
• 2 tennis courts
• Paddle court
• Boating
• Stand Up Paddle boards
• Cultural activities like Greek sandle making
• Reasonable prices - but I give a 9/10 vs 10/10 because I think they could offer a bit more variety

Kids Club 9/10

• As is O&O's way, it is SO cute. I don't have kids but I want them just to take them to this charming little area
• I will say, this property isn't really built for kids. Kids are welcome - but if you have kids - go to Astir Palace. The vibe at OO is more sophisticated and couple-focused. There's no adults only pool so loud kids kind of kill the vibe at the main pool, tbh. I was there yesterday and it was all couples and then one family with two really cute girls but the mom felt bad because it was all adults reading and kept sushing the little girls as they played in the pool. It's tough because the girls were being totally appropriate, but at the same time - the vibe was clearly a bunch of adults chilling so the mom felt bad disturbing.

Arrogance of Victory

Ardan Gervasius was a whirlwind of motion, his sword flashing and steel singing as he danced around his fellow Battle Brothers. One Sword Brother versus five Neophytes, already fresh and eager to prove their worth. Templars gathered and cheered as the five tried them damnedest to defeat Ardan. The sound of steel, cheers, and other noises rang out in the Training Cages of the flagship Eternal Crusader.
Soon, the cheers turned to laughter and boos, as Ardan began to fell each of his brothers one by one. As the last Neophyte was brought to his knees, the match was set. Ardan chuckled loudly in triumph, arrogance spewing from his lips, “oh come on now! I hardly broke a sweat!” Grumbling, the neophytes helped each other up to their feet and begin to leave, not wanting to hear Ardan’s boisterous and cocky attitude. Each brother that sparred began to remove the binding chain-links to their armor, then placing the sparring blades back in the hands of menials and servitor servants. Ardan, however, still felt eager as he stretched his body to make himself limber, “I should have Sword Brother Deimos and his squad to try. I need a better challenge.” Ardan’s skill was only surpassed by his pride. Brothers nickname him “Arrogant Ardan.” Whilst they respected his skill with the blade, which some even compared him to First High Marshal Sigismund, Ardan’s attitude was very much less than desired and unwelcomed by his peers. Once such a vocal critic made his presence known.
“For Throne’s sake, quit acting like a damned iterator and shouting your victories. You can at least be humble.” Ardan turned to seek the noise, only to see Castellan Brocas approach the arena. A smile draped across the swordsman’s face, as scathing words shot from his tongue, “you are just mad that I knocked you flat on your ass, Brother Brocas.” Ardan stepped forward equally at Brocas, his arms out in a challenging demeanor, before bumping his chest into each other. The impact of the ceramite clanged loudly as the two stared at each other with threatening intentions. Brocas’s hands curled into fists, and Ardan was ready to provoke his Battle Brother into combat again.
“Brocas is right, you know,” said a gravely cold pang of a vox-caster, as if the sound broke the tension betwixt the two, “even Sigismund himself cared not for boasting and showing off.” Ardan and Brocas turned their heads, greeted by the sight of a skull plated helm, a red tabard draped over the blackest black armor, and across that was two inscribed pieces of parchment of purity. The two warriors stepped back from the other then glancing back to shoot looks of disdain to each other. Ardan then turned to face the man, smiling welcomely “Reclusiarch Grimaldus. It is an honor for you to join us.” Grimaldus said nothing, his helm hiding his face to not show any emotion. Ardan then spoke again, “I was just showing Brocas that his skills need improving in order to defeat me.”
Grimaldus continued his silence, yet Brocas had a feeling that the Reclusiarch’s anger was emanating, as if anger manifested in an aura. That was soon broken by a crackling chuckle over his vox that echoed clearly. “Perhaps I should try my hand at you, Ardan.” It was a surprise indeed. Ardan could not help but find amusement. Grimaldus was indeed legendary amongst the Templars, but he was older. Ardan was even surprised Grimaldus even stood, even after crossing the Rubicon Primaris like High Marshal Helbrecht. This is no contest, he thought, I still have more youthful vigor. “Very well, Reclusiarch, I acc- “
A fist contacted Ardan’s chin, sending him backwards meters away and landing on the ground in a painful thud and clanging of ceramite and steel. Ardan felt pain in his jaw. Looking up, he saw Grimaldus slowly reel his fist back to his side. “Looks like I have won,” said Grimaldus. , Ardan quickly stood up, his pained voice filled with anger like a child throwing a tantrum. “Reclusiarch?! This is not proper combat!”
“Is it not? Yet, I brought you to heel.”
“That’s not the point!” exclaimed Ardan, “we were to have a friendly spar!” Grimaldus then shrugged, “we did, though. And I still won.” Ardan tried to find words, but the pain in his jaw and his pride made his mind clouded. Brocas stood there, eyes widened to what he witnessed. Grimaldus then spoke his turn, “there is no such thing as proper combat. While it is true we hold honor and tradition, War cares not for such a thing.” Ardan growled in retort, “but we are not at war.” Grimaldus then gave Ardan another quick jab, knocking him back down. Ardan could tell that punch was harder than the first. Grimaldus then showed his emotion through his vox, and it was like a parent scolding a spoiled child, “not at war? We are Templars! We are on an eternal crusade! Even as I speak, our rest and relaxation are but a mere illusion to the fact that we are beset on all sides with various foes that seek our death!”
Ardan then went silent. He was too stubborn to admit defeat. “Forgive me, Reclusiarch. You are correct in the notion of our eternal crusade against the Heretic, the Mutant, and the Xeno. But we are Astartes, the same sons of Dorn, and proud devotees to the God-Emperor. Our battles are mere sparrings.” Grimaldus wanted to strike him again. Yet, he did not. Ardan was not worth the effort. He had more important duties. “Maybe some prayer would open whatever clouds your ignorance.”
Earnhart looked upon the visage of Saint Drusus, the death mask of the Living Saint. In life, Drusus fought during the Angevin Crusades, fought alongside mortals, angels, and mechanical Gods of War. He fought off enemies not only on the battlefield but from those he used to call comrades. Now, Earnhart was about to embark from the dusty and salty flats of Maccabeus Quintus, her home and world, to serve as both a pilgrim and a conqueror of the stars. Such an honor indeed, for this may be the last time she would see home again. She looked up to the Statue of Saint Drusus, admiring the heroic figure. She then looked down at the tomb, placing her hand on the Sarcophagus of the Saint. Even in death, Drusus serves the God-Emperor’s will.
"In all things do we take the example of Saint Drusus, who the God-Emperor saw fit to return from death to continue service in His name,” she chanted, kneeling before the sarcophagus, “We endure hardships, as Drusus did. We show no mercy, as Drusus did. We drive back the darkness beyond His realm, as Drusus did." Earnhart then took the silvery death mask of her Saint, forever covering her face, forever to never show a soul her own. “I pledge my service to thee, God Emperor of Mankind. Do with me as You please for my faith is absolute. I will serve thee with all my honor body and soul and prove myself worthy in your name as did Saint Drusus, till the day my reckoning comes.”
She stood at her feet, giving one last look at the tomb. She wanted to engrave every detail of her home, for she may never return. Such is the way of the Janissaries. Such was the will of the Imperium. Though, everything changed when the sirens went off…
Various Templar Astartes and humans knelt at the Shrine in formations, their heads bowed in prayer and ritualistic chanting. A Judicar wearing the ceremonial robes of the chaplaincy and his mouth sealed by cloth, walked along the rows gently swinging lit incense in the censer adorned with Templar iconography on brass and gold. Grimaldus walked alongside the faithful, speaking in reverence, just as any spiritual leader must to his flock. Ardan was deep in prayer, activating his Catalepsean Node to help focus. He was still angered by the Reclusiarch’s dishonor in the training cages. His body soon became lucid, his mind stimulating itself with a hypnotic jerk to try and keep him awake, but to no avail. Soon, Ardan fell into a trance, and then, blackness… Suddenly, a small light was seen in his vision. The light grew. It was embers of fire, and it grew larger and larger, until it became a roaring Inferno. He saw it. It was a battle. On one side, he seen a warrior clad in artificer armor that bore the color of darkened steel. In hand, bound to the figure, was a long, black blade, as if it were made of ebony or even obsidian. Beside the warrior was Astartes and the sight of soldiers clad in masks with a single tear under the right eye, whose faith and fury were equal to that of a Black Templar. On the other side, it was darkness. However, this darkness was unnatural. Evil. And that Darkness smiled and cackled across its scarred face.
Ardan gasped back into focus, his heart beating as if awakening from a nightmare. Was it a dream? No, he thought. It was too real. Grimaldus stopped, noticing Ardan’s heavy breathing. “Something troubles you, brother,” said the Reclusiarch in cold and analytical tones, yet his voice still showing hints of concern through his vox. Ardan took a moment to compose himself, standing upright. “Forgive me, Reclusiarch. But I saw something. A world in flame. A warrior challenging the darkness.” Grimaldus stood silently, thinking this was a ruse, before speaking clearly, “tell me, brother Ardan. What else can you describe in this dream?”
“It was a world in flames. A Shrine World. I saw Astartes and humans clad in masks that bore the same visage. All facing something evil and unnatural, as if it was sadism manifest.” That was all that Ardan saw and remembered. Grimaldus then turned away, thinking to himself within brief moments, until only a mumble escaped his vox, “follow.” Ardan was unsure what this meant, but to find answers, he must follow the Reclusiarch. The two exited the sanctuary, Grimaldus leading Ardan through the narrow halls of the Eternal Crusader, his pace at a speed that even Ardan was trying to match with in urgency, until reaching the Sanctum of the High Marshal. Helbrecht, sitting on his throne whilst the tech priest of the Mechanicus operated on his bionic limb, saw Grimaldus and Ardan approach. “Forgive me,” said the harsh, hoarse vocal cords of Helbrecht, “I was not expecting to have your companies, Reclusiarch and Sword Brother.” Grimaldus then motioned for Ardan to step forward, his silence giving a clear indication for Ardan to speak of what he witnessed in his vision.
Helbrecht’s battle worn face turned to a scowl as Ardan finished speaking of the vision, which prompted the High Marshal to stand from his throne. Shipmaster Heaslet approached the throne from the side of the Sanctum, only to respectfully kneel. “My lord. I come bearing a message for aid from the shrine world of Maccabeus Quintus,” Shipmaster Heaslet said in timidity, fearing his words may offend the Angels of the Emperor, “The Great Enemy has begun an attack on the planet. False Angels in a pastel of colors, bearing our Imperium’s Aquilla in such perverse manners!” Helbrecht looked upon the Shipmaster, his face flushing with building rage and his vein visibly throbbing from his forehead, as if it were to burst. “Emperor’s Children… A vomitous mockery of our brilliant God-Emperor’s divinity.” Helbrecht brought his bionic fist down in anger, shattering the stone carved throne’s arm rest as if it were fragile glass, “And they even dare strike at a Shrine World. Are they trying to goad us?”
Grimaldus could only chuckle at such a thought, “still, High Marshal. You must give commendation to these heretics for their brazen attack. Even if it is foolish and doomed to fail.” He then turned to face Ardan, “it seems that what you saw was true. Then this means the God-Emperor has granted you a vision of the future.” Grimaldus rested his armored hand onto Ardan’s shoulder, his voice surprisingly sincere and not the usual anger that Ardan often would be berated by, “you may be the catalyst for his crusade to drive back the darkness.” Grimaldus then returned to face back at the High Marshal, “I would like a requisition of all nearby Chaplains to convene briefly to determine if Ardan shall become the God-Emperor’s Sword.” Helbrecht nodded to Grimaldus, then motioned the Shipmaster to relay the call to the Astropath.
Ardan stood only in a loincloth, his genetically modified flesh and scars from past battles and triumphs laid bare for the gathered Chaplains to witness. The Chaplaincy deliberated over such a vision, curious if Ardan was even worthy of such a title. One of the Chaplains, with his name Harmon, spoke in favor. “It is clear he saw the future of battle. Every Champion we select in any crusade always has a common vision of battles past and what is to come. It is a vision granted by the God-Emperor!” There were detractors. One of which was by the name of Whisen, whose angered tone was made clear over the vox, “Ardan is a braggard. And to be clear, we have no proof the God-Emperor blessed him. For all we may know, he may have unlocked detestable Psyker abilities!”

“Then how did he know of Maccabeus Quintus being under siege?”
“He never stated so!”
The deafening chorus of voices over the vox echoed through the chamber, until a loud slam of metal rang out. The chaplains turn to see Grimaldus, whose crozius left a dent in the reinforced railing of his position. “Be that as it may, Maccabeus Quintus, an important Shrine World, where they breed the most loyal guardsmen regiments AND is blessed rest of the Imperial Saint Drusus is burning.” Mag-locking his crozius to his hip, Grimaldus then stood up, slowly walking down the steps down to the center, his voice clear for all to hear him, “true, Ardan’s character is unsatisfactory, but he saw battle. He saw himself fighting with brothers and the Guard.” Soon, the Reclusiarch stood beside Ardan, as if his statement were already what others decided, “his destiny awaits him in the battles to come. He has the skill of Sigismund, and more so, the stubborn tenacity of our genefather. He shall adorn the Blackest Armor and wield the Black Blade. He will lead his brothers.” The chaplains in dissent roared out, taking this decision as an insult to the honor of the Black Templars. Still, the decision was Grimaldus’s and his alone.
Janissary Earnhart rushed through the lines with her guard regiment, rushing through the volley of bullets and explosives. Every step, she chanted prayers for the God-Emperor as if they would shield her from the dangers of War. The Planetary Defense Force needed all able-bodied guardsmen to protect key strategically valuable points of interest. “O mighty God-Emperor, whose golden light pierces the darkness of the galaxy, we beseech thee in this hour of need,” she prayed, her breath heavy from running a long distance in gunfire and shrapnel, “As our valiant warrior charges into battle, grant thee your divine protection. May thy blade strike true, and thy armor hold firm against the enemy’s onslaught. Bless thy heart with unwavering courage and may thee be a beacon of hope for all who fight alongside you. In your name, we pray. Ave Imperator!” She then ducked into cover, as traitors opened fire from a nearby makeshift gun nest.
Earnhart and her regiment kept low, the bullets from the heavy stubber machine gun kicking up the dirt and salt of the earth in the trenches. They had to distract the nest somehow, Earnhart thought to herself, seeking any advantage from their disadvantageous position. The rattling belt-fire of the heavy stubber echoed through the ruined monasteries and buildings with the heretical traitors singing praise to the cacophony of destruction. However, whether it was a miracle or luck, the stubber ceased its fire, and the traitors growled in frustration. The weapon was malfunctioning, and Earnhart motioned her Janissaries to advance. Sounding a sonorous war cry for the God-Emperor, the Janissaries began their charge to advance. The traitors had to resort to smaller arms, but it was too late. They were overwhelmed in a matter of seconds, their blood staining the marbled stone. Janissary Earnhart then radioed to the Planetary Defense Force, “we secured the Courtyard. Send additional reinforcements so we can- “
Her message was cut off when a piercing wail unlike anything she ever heard boomed. If not for the padding in her helmet muffling some of the sound, it was likely Earnhart would have gone deaf. She turned to the source of the noise, and it struck her in terror when she saw the sight of Astartes, clad with pink or purple armor plating, with black and golden trim. The Emperor’s Aquilla either perverted or the heretical symbology was marked on their armor, and with a mocking snicker, one of them shouted, “Children of the Emperor! Death to his foes!” The squad presented their unusual weaponry with a malformed screaming face at the end of its barrel, and with a rippling force, shot sonic waves. Janissaries too close were evaporated into red mists, viscera, and other bits of gore and bone, as if they spontaneously exploded. Those farther were either brought to their knees in agony or were forced back. Janissary Earnhart tried to shout for retreat, but the effort was pointless from the booming shockwaves. Soon, the Emperor’s Children squad begin their advance, either slaying any Janissary or Defense Force in their way or releasing sanity shattering noises from their damnable instruments.
But from the sky, burning light crashed onto the stone walkways, shaking the ground as if a meteorite struck. The traitor Astartes and the remaining Janissaries turned to the sight, only to see the black metal of a drop pod, and the iconic white Templar cross. The drop pod doors burst open, and Intercessors and Sword Brethren, led by a warrior in simple yet advanced artificial armor, charged out to meet the traitors head on. Bolter fire, chainblades, sonic booms, and clashing of metal and ceramite sang out as the two rivalling factions fought with ferocity. Then, another drop pod lands, only to open to the sight of a hulking war machine of metal. “No Pity! No Remorse! No Fear!” it roared from its mechanical voxcaster, charging out with gatling fire and promethium flames. The surviving Janissaries cheered, feeling inspired to fight through their pain and joining the fight with lasrifles and explosives. The Noise Marines were no match for the overwhelming force, slain in mere minutes that the Sergeant sounded a retreat.
As the battle died down, and the small fraction of the traitor Astartes in full retreat, Janissary Earnhart slowly approached the leading Astartes of the squad, forming the sign of the Aquilla in her hands. “Bless the God-Emperor, you saved us. We are not worthy to be in the presence of his Angels.” But what escaped from the Astartes’s vox was boastful laughter, “of course you are not. Do you think mere guardsmen could face an Astartes, let alone heretics? I will commend you, though, for trying.” While her face could not be read due to her mask, Earnhart was taken aback by this flamboyant boasting. “m-may I ask your name, Angel?” With pride, the Astartes champion announced, “I am Brother Ardan Gervasius, the Emperor’s Champion. You may address me as Lord Ardan, guardsman.”
“R-right,” stuttered Earnhart, shocked to see such… arrogance? Sure, he slain many of the traitors, she thought, but the least the Astartes could be more… she had no words that would dare match to combat such flamboyant ego. At least, not at this moment. “My Lord, the great enemy blindsided us out of nowhere. The initial strike brought half of the Planetary Defense systems inoperable.” Ardan was unamused, wondering how many of these traitors he could slay on his own. Brocas then stepped forward, as if to meet the surviving Janissaries, “it is good you held out until we arrived. Your actions are deeply commendable.” Earnhart smiled from under her mask. This was how an Angel was personified in her mind. Firm, yet fair. Brocas then broke her admiration and asked, “do we know as to why the heretics dare defile this sacred ground?” This was a question that had no clear answer, but speculation. Earnhart theorized it was to cripple the morale of the Janissaries. Brocas, who had fought the Emperor’s Children before in distant worlds, would believe her theory. This is because those that fall to the chaotic addictions of Slaanesh are trying to seek the stimulations they crave, like addicts to the chemicals they inject into their system for the thrills and pleasures. And what better way to seek the ultimate thrill than the defilement of a Shrine World housing one of the Saints that fought with the Black Templars long before Ardan or Brocas were born.
“Guardsman, is the Shrine of Saint Drusus still guarded?” Brocas inquired. While it was certain that there would be some defense, these mortals were versing the Warp-twisted versions of warriors. Suddenly, one of the battle brothers over the communication two clicks from the squad’s position shouted, “we are being routed! We need reinforcements in Sector Zeta-Two-Six!” Ardan, relishing the opportunity of combat, ordered his squad and surviving Janissaries to move out.
Zeta-Two-Six was a sector close to the Shrine of Drusus, and where the traitors came out in heavy force. Heretic Cultists and traitor guard rolled forward with their heavy armor detachments they looted from the Planetary Defense Force. The roars of Leman Russ pattern tanks and even a Rogal Dorn pattern tank rolled forward, unleashing volley of bullets from its machine guns to the occasional firing of the cannons. The Templar Intercessor Squad and a Squad of Eradicators tried to find a way to flank, but they were pinned down. The traitor Astartes forces reveled with each slain Templar. “Sigismund’s hounds fall rather quickly,” echoed the malformed mouth of one of the leading Champion of the Emperor’s Children, “such sweet cacophony. The smell of gunpowder and blood… my sensory receptors ache for more.”
“It is always a sweet melody to hear the death throes of the weak, Skaalek,” cackled another Child of the Emperor. His armor was unlike the twisted and depraved etchings on the common legionary. As if the armor was alive and pulsed, with faces that scream in agony, this warrior had a slit, morbid smile with scars that practically overtaken his facial features. He smiled, his sharp teeth like polished ivory, and a relic silvery sword of Xeno craft wielded in his dominant hand. Skaalek regarded the Champion, “ahh, Lucius. So grand of you to come to the revelry.” The Champion looked outward to the struggling Black Templars, watching as the foolish worshippers of the Corpse Emperor tried to hold ground against overwhelming odds. But then, out of nowhere, one of the Leman Russ tanks that the traitor guard staffed exploded, releasing a mushroom cloud of fire, smoke, and shrapnel. The surviving traitors that were caught in the blast screamed in agony, or reveled in the pain as either their blood from wounds painted the white marbled stone on the ground or be engulfed in decay. Lucius tilted his head and grinned at the sight.
Ardan and his squad flanked the traitors from behind, with the Janissary kill team led by Earnhart took back or destroyed any heavy armored vehicle. This allowed the Intercessor and Eradicator Squads to push back, unleashing bolter fire and melta charges. Ardan gracefully danced through the traitors like a twister of slashing metal, cutting down any heretic that dared approach or fled. Lucius was intrigued. Aroused even. While he did enjoy the challenge from one of Sigismund’s heirs, this young Champion Astartes reminded Lucius of the time he trained in the ways of the blade. Reminiscing of his days on Chemos to the days of the Great Crusade fighting with or against worthy warriors, Lucius almost shed a tear from his eye. This warrior was like him. And Lucius wanted to revel in this warrior’s lamentations of defeat. “Do not kill that one. I want him,” Lucius growled with a needing hunger for battle, “that Champion of the Corpse Emperor is mine.” Lucius turned, walking away from the battle. Skaalek nodded to the Champion of Slaanesh, giving a silent approval to follow orders. The legionary then ordered, “brothers. Fall back. And let our Lord Commander have his fun.”
The Emperor’s Children fell back as ordered, deciding that their fun had ended. Ardan then ordered Brocas to take the Intercessor Squads and Dreadnought to give chase. It seemed as if these heretics were finally understanding the might of the Imperium, thought Ardan. Taking a cloth from his pouch, he raised the Black Blade and wiped it clean of blood. How such a weapon of exquisite craftsmanship be used to slay those that are truly not worthy disgusted Ardan. Janissary Earnhart tended to her duties with the surviving kill team, executing cultists and traitor guard whilst praying for their souls to redeem themselves in the light of the God-Emperor. One of her teammates questioned this, wondering why she would waste breath and prayer for these damned souls. She replied softly, “because they are just lost. The path for them was dark. All I am doing is giving them the lantern to traverse said darkness.” This brought some weird comfort for her, as if she wanted to give these souls one last chance to return to the God-Emperor.
As she proceeded to execute the last of the heretics, Earnhart received a message from her helmet’s communicator. “All Janissaries! The defenses of our saint have been compromised! Rally there now!” The communicator ended with the scream of the guard and then static. Her heart sunk and her caring prayer stopped. She quickly approached Ardan, her voice cracking in both anger and fear. “My lord. The Shrine of Drusus is being attacked! We must go there now!” Ardan looked at the guardsman briefly, only to give a slight nod. He ordered the remaining squad mates to form up and follow the Janissaries to the Shrine.
By the time the group had made it, the Shrine was littered with the corpses of Janissaries. In the middle of the piled dead stood Lucius, his armor, sword, and whiplike tendrils in his left hand painted with blood and other viscera. Earnhart trembled at the sight. This heretic… no, daemon. Such brazen heresy! Her anger rose, her thoughts clouded as her blood boiled at this macabre display of sadism. Ardan ordered his brothers to engage, charging the Champion. Lucius let out a yawn, before slicing through Ardan’s battle brothers. The gurgling death throes of Ardan’s squad echoed through the Shrine’s basilica. Ardan, however, froze in place. This warrior is unlike anything he had truly faced, he thought to himself. Lucius looked at the Champion, his smile like a mockery to Ardan’s eyes. “Not even worth it, to be honest. These so called ‘Primaris.’ Though, death is such a beautiful song.” Lucius slowly walked to Ardan, to which the Astartes raised the Black Blade in a defensive stance. The sadistic warrior stopped, raising his alien blade in a more offensive posture. “You, Champion of the Corpse God. I want to know. What is your name?” There was a brief silence, but Ardan broke it by granting Lucius the answer, “I am Ardan. Ardan Gervasius. And I will be your death, heretic.”
“Such bravado. I like it,” snickered Lucius, sizing up Ardan’s stance and posture, to discern a needed counter to break it. “We are alike, you and I,” said Lucius, which Ardan took as an insult, “do not compare us, filth! I am nothing like you in the slightest.”
“Oh, but you are wrong,” said Lucius, “we are the same. We are both masters of the blade, dedicating our existence to the dance and grace of such things. Judging from your stance alone, I can tell you are in the stance of an old Terran duelist by the name of Rocco Bonetti.”
Ardan was surprised that this heretic knew of his stance, “so, you, too, know of the greatest duelists. Interesting. With you, I can determine a modified version of Capo Ferro.” With this exchange, Ardan had believed he may have found a worthy and veritable challenge. A true test of his skills. “Although I shouldn’t inquire,” said Ardan, “I would love to know of the enemy I will slay.” Lucius then gave a slight curtsey, “Lucius the Eternal. Champion of the God of Excess. I hope you provide me much more of a challenge than these… well, I want to call them lesser, but that word is giving them too much praise.” Earnhart could not bear to see such respect that these two were showing. Raising her lasrifle, she wanted to open fire. Ardan threatened, “you dare interrupt my battle, I will execute you myself.” Earnhart wanted to risk defying Ardan. To avenge her fallen Janissaries. To cleanse the Shrine of Drusus of this chaotic taint. But her mind fought against her emotions, and she finally lowered her lasrifle. This was a battle between Angels and Daemons. She would only get in the way.

This trope is awful, and words cannot describe how much I hate it other than it is a literal distraction from what the writer is actually writing, and I would enjoy it a lot if it never got played straight again. Some examples:

RWBY

I apologize for dragging this shows corpse out of its grave one last time to dunk on it one last time so let's just cut to the chase: White Fang written bad, Adam written bad, Blake written bad, Sienna should matter, Illia written bad, everything surrounding Faunus written bad. Is that not a good enough rundown? No, sigh
So, a RWBY is a Texas anime show from 2013(ish). In the world of RWBY, there are humans (regular old humans), creatures of Grimm (generic shadow demon monsters that literally feed off misery), and Faunus. What's a Faunus, well I'm glad you asked! A Faunus is the name for RWBY's take on the Kemomo anime trope (people, usually women, that have animal features like cat ears or tails) but with the not-twist of them being discriminated against by humans. Humans have enslaved the Faunus (off screen), force them to live in Remnant Australia (in the past), refuse to service them at public businesses (background buildings with signs), bully them (onscreen), hurl racial insults at them (onscreen, constantly) and attack them for crossing over the wrong side of town (Adam character short). In response to the insane levels of racial hated thrown their way, a group of Faunus band together to form the White Fang, a civil rights group that become a terrorist organization after Sienna Khan becomes the new leader after Blake's daddy steps down to peacefully live out the rest of his life on Australia as the president that gets the biggest house in a city the characters tell us is overpopulated.
Under Sienna's leadership, the White Fang "sets fire to shops that refuse us service" (volume 1) and robs trains that carry cargo from the Schnee Dust Company (like a cross between Trump industries and Amazon but with a white coat of paint). This brings us to Blake, one of the shows 4 main characters and the star of this shows "Racism subplot" (and the use of the word subplot here is a RedFlag). Blake is the daughter of the former leader of the White Fang, and according to comics that may or may not be canon she grew up in Australian White House with servants waiting at her hands and feet. This information is a plot twist; When Blake first tells the audience her backstory, she says she "grew up with the White Fang" (technically true) and "she's been on the front lines fighting for Faunus freedom ever since" (contradicts that comic that may or may not be canon, contradicts the fact that she is nowhere to be seen in Adam's flashbacks to the Early WF until after her father stepped down and she is a teenager). Another plot twist is that after Blake's father stepped down as leader of the White Fang, she "called him a coward" and ran off with Sienna's White Fang to join the (note: the fact that Blake is the daughter of the founder of the WF is another plot twist). In the Black trailer (Blake's first appearance), Blake is portrayed as reluctantly partaking in a SDC train robberies along with Adam (Blake's mentoboyfriend/abusegroomer if his current age is canon?) and, because Adam doesn't care about human workers on the train that may or may not die in the attack, Blake leaves him, leaves the White Fang, pretends to be Human, and joins a Huntsmen (generic anime fantasy school) academy to "atone for her past actions". Three seasons go by where Blake's main storyline is "stopping the White Fang" (meanwhile she watches a Faunus girl be bullied in front of her and does nothing) and then Adam comes back, stabs her, and cuts off her best friend's arm while promising to "take away everything she loves". Next season, Blake reunites with her parents that have been doing fuck all while their daughter has run off with terrorists and their old organization has committed the Remnant version of 9/11.
The season after that is the conclusion to the "Racism subplot". Sienna gets killed by Adam, the same time she makes her first on screen appearance, because she wasn't racist/radical enough for him. Adam then becomes the new leader of the White Fang. As leader, Adam sends Illia (gay chameleon girl) after Blake to bring her to him. Illia, who has a crush on Blake btw, follows Adam's orders capture her, and then his next orders to kill Blake's parents inside their own home. The reason Illia does any of this is because she is loyal to the WF to a fault and has been ever since her parents died while working inside an SDC mine that had poor working conditions. But at the last second, Blake is able to convince Illia that "White Fang bad, you are not bad, join me who is good" and Illia relents. Blake then looks the Faunus of Australia in the eye and points to her burning house and tells them "Humans didn't do this, we did!" (note: Blake was the one who set her house on fire). Blake & friends then take the mostly civilian population of Australia all the way to the Remnant kingdom of Asia and they fight back against Adam's White Fang, even working with human police forces to do so (note: Remnant Asia is the most racist kingdom, and in one of the RWBY official books a Faunus girl is scared of the idea of having a Japanese partner because she was harassed by Asians before). Next season, Adam kills off the last White Fang members so the story can be about his abuse of Blake now.
What does all of that mean: Every character that is an "extremist" is a villain that is either killed (Sienna, the fox boy, Adam eventually) or redeemed (Illia). All the good characters come to the conclusion that the WF violent ways are wrong, and they should use violence to stop them (Blake, Blake's daddy, Blake's mommy, Illia post redemption arc). Blake eventually goes to Atlas (the second most racist place in Remnant, the same place Illia's parent's died and Adam got branded on the face), and she's "happy and thriving" and going to movies and parties with her best friend-eventual girlfriend, who is a human who never batted an eyelash at Faunus discrimination other than saying "It must be hard to be a Faunus" when watching a Faunus girl be bullied (a guy is pulling on her rabbit ears, technically assault). Said girlfriend has punched people in the face for less!
As you can probably tell, the story went through several rewrites and retcons, and the writers dropped the "racism subplot" the seventh season onward. The final result is a story that feels like it was (ironically) written by anti-BLM people; every person that does anything other than beg for their rights is evil. While Blake is in Atlus, she actually walks past shops that have a "no-Faunus" sigh multiple times, and she doesn't even react to it. She's not allowed to react to it. The "moral" thing to do, as the show teaches us, is to politely tell racist humans to knock it off and anything more is too far... that same season, Blake commits insubordination, and the show portrays it as the right thing to do!!! So, which is it? Always follow the law and stop people from taking violent action, or use violence to stop the government???

X-men 97

That RWBY rant went on for too long so I'm going to keep this part brief: Magneto was right. Magneto still is right. Magneto will forever be right as long as the guy on the other side of the fence is Charles Xavier.
The second mutants had a safe space, it gets blown to smithereens because an organic cyborg thinks it will make humans less sympathetic towards mutants... and he is absolutely right. Humans the world over are more worried over a potential war with mutant kind then, oh I don't know, genocide???
After Genosha, Magneto gets chained up and humiliated by Bastion (the Cyborg), who makes it very clear that he intends to enslave Magneto. And all of Mutant kind. And turns humans into organic sentinels like him the world over in order to do that!!
So, when Magneto is finally free, and EMP waves the Earth just to stop these slave catcher cyborgs, guess who is in the wrong?
Well, I know who it is, and it sure as shit ain't Magneto! Meanwhile Charles Xavier, who was playing the submissive and breed able dog to his bird waifu in space, finally comes back to Earth after realizing "oh yeah, humans still hate mutants!" He finds his house in ruins from the slave catcher cyborgs, and he's mad at Magneto for daring to do something about it. Later on, he's mad at Rouge for daring to not want to walk the path that leads to more mutants being murdered after the love of her life dies. He's mad at Roberto for daring to choose the option where him being killed/enslaved by humans is unlikely.
The show looks me in the eyes and said Magneto is right, and now he's the bad guy because Xavier's back in the city and he's here to say, "Trust Love!"

Conclusion

I am so tired of all these shows that keep saying "the person who hit you is wrong, but if you hit back, you're just as bad!"

I (43f) grew up in my Mom’s house and she’d always been a hoarder, at least as far back as I can remember. I moved out of her house nearly 20 years ago. I moved across the country from my hometown 9 years ago. I never really challenged my Mom’s hoarding. I would say she slowly progressed from a level 1/2 to a 2/3 in the years that she’d been left to her own devices (because my sibling and I had both grown up and moved out) and then after retiring and tending to my aging Grandmother until she passed, Mom’s at a solid level 3, inching toward level 4.
I have been much more emotionally close to my Mom since I moved out of her house, and since I moved to this other state and our relationship is mostly long-distance; phone calls, texting, zoom, email, mailing gifts, etc. We are emotionally closer than ever. We typically meet every morning on zoom and practice yoga together via me screen sharing a yoga video.
But I know that the space where she is doing yoga in her house is in the only bedroom in a 2-family house that can still be used as a bedroom, in a floor space that is exactly the size & shape of her “yoga mat” (it’s a dirty-looking cushion for an outdoor lounge chair that I think she took from a neighbor’s trash). Yoga should be good for her mentally and physically, but it doesn’t seem to help much with the hoarding.
She recently had a heart attack and I flew out to see her and offer my help with getting her settled at home once she was released from the hospital. I haven’t been to her house in a long time because watching it fill-up with junk and crumble around her has always been hard for me. When I went to her house this week to help her, she didn’t want my help with much physically but she did want me to “help her clean” … which amounted to me going through piles of random paper, one-by-one, to try to “organize” her stuff. It was painstaking to do and when I told her she did not need a 10-year-old newspaper clipping of a cookie recipe that she already has in her recipe box, and that we should throw this one out, she started fighting with me, so I left “to see about my sister-in-law” and said I would come back later.
That was partly true - my sister-in-law was dealing with my mother-in-law who was in a nursing home/rehabilitation facility after major self neglect due to depression which lead her to have a debilitating fall which she is now healing from. In the process of trying to figure out my MIL’s financial situation, it was discovered that my MIL’s house deed is actually in her children’s names and not hers.
Then discovered that there’s water & mold in the basement, the yard is overgrown, and there are parts of the house that are coming apart and are probably not up to code. Then discovered that she hadn’t been paying bills, including homeowners insurance and property taxes.
So my MIL can’t go back to her home as a disabled elderly woman, and the house isn’t a safe place for anyone with lungs. I left my own Mom’s house in a rage to help my SIL sort through MIL’s paperwork and personal items for bill payment records, important legal & property documents, and photos that we should salvage, because otherwise we need to hire junk removal and then sell the house as-is, to pay off MIL’s debts, pay for MIL’s nursing home needs (if it’s even enough money for that) and ultimately offload the money-pit of a house that suddenly my spouse owns half of. (I wore a heavy-duty mask in the house)
Spending a few hours sorting through belongings with my SIL was somewhat relieving in the fact that I could discern & decide what was important to keep, and what was garbage (it was mostly garbage) and no one was yelling at me for putting things into trash bags.
When I returned to see my own Mom later in the day, she asked about what I did to help my SIL and I told her the situation and she flipped out on me yelling at me like “You can’t just throw away all her things! You can’t just sell her house!”
I deflected the conversation and I helped her out by doing some laundry and moving some items from one room to another. I left her with a hug and some kind words but I have been stewing over the situation for days.
What does she think is going to happen to her house and her hoard when she has her next heart attack and either ends up in an assisted living facility or she dies?
My MIL was neglecting herself and living in a house she couldn’t afford to maintain, so depressed that she stopped functioning at all. Sorting through my MIL’s stuff to find what was valuable, important, or sentimental wasn’t difficult to do because she was barely a level 1 hoarder, so you could easily tell what was just dust-covered chatchkis and what was a box with important stuff in it.
But I contrast this to my mother, who in her hoarding is burying all of her important paperwork, and anything that’s valuable, while neglecting her home (which probably also has mold that we haven’t found yet) and driving its value down into the red. Which makes me panic over what I will have to do, and what sentimental items will be lost forever when she passes and I can’t sift through all her hoarded junk and just have a service come in to toss everything into dumpsters while I sell my crumbling childhood home as-is.
So now I don’t want to talk to her. I’m steaming mad and I have lost interest in practicing yoga with her. I would rather approach the situation as a discussion but I know that the mention of junk removal or selling houses will throw her into this angry, yelling, unintelligible “Mr. Hyde” version of herself. And junk removal and selling my MIL’s house is all that’s going on for me & my spouse right now.
I feel like a mental dam has burst in my mind and I cannot shake how outraged I am about Mom’s whole situation and the position it puts me in for the future.
AITA for not wanting to stay close with her and not wanting to do yoga with her anymore?

Bearing witness to Ariana's healing process this season as a woman who has been done dirty by a man she loved is POWERFUL.
Ariana is a TEACHER this season - she embodies authentic female empowerment, the power of harnessing our RAGE (another teacher of ours), true boundary setting and standing in your own f'ing power. That's why she has rose in her fame, because she represents what so many of us have felt and experienced. The PEOPLE want to uplift her, and so they did. Power to her and to all of us who need to find our voice and power.
Katie also absolutely deserves her flowers. She showed us how real friends show up, and also has been a teacher of stepping into feminine power and choosing herself.
We all know how reality TV functions and can expect the mess. But the way these two women, especially Ariana given the magnitude of the betrayal she experienced, have held themselves has been excellent representation of women authentically standing in their power and it would have been a real triumph if other women on the cast stood with them rather than against them... namely Lala & Scheana, especially Lala given what she's been through... Scheana - we know what to expect from her after 11 seasons of playing her own tiny violin.
Imagine having to still work with and be FILMED in your utmost vulnerability alongside your ex who betrayed you so deeply, all while people who are supposedly your friends (and your employer?? hello producers are you human??) try to rock you emotionally and psychologically. I would be so proud of myself if I held myself the way Ariana has held herself.
If anyone is healing from being manipulated or wronged, these two are examples of how to choose yourself in the healing process and say F THE REST because it is not as important as your wellbeing.

The willful orc beat his chest with axe in hand, “Shield! Axe! Spear! All shall strike the thoughts of fear! Shield! Axe! Spear! All shall strike the thoughts of fear!”, he barked out to his remaining warriors.
The band under him filed out of the hill fort and started beating their own chests and roaring the words of power once spoken by the mighty Ozen centuries ago. Words of wisdom spoken in the darkest hour of their people when legions of humans poured into their lands to raid, pillage, and destroy. Kacek called upon that same strength that Ozen called upon to lift hearts and blades for one last time.
“Shield! Axe! Spear! All shall strike the thoughts of fear!”, chanted the orcs. The sons of Ozen who would make their Founding Father watch as they fought to the last orc.
Kacek waited until all eighty orcs gathered behind him. Teeth bared in challenge as if saying, “You want us? Then come and get us”. In unison, the orcs formed into two ranks of forty orcs. They slowly marched towards the many hundreds of skeletons before them.
Lord Alachos could be seen pushing away skeleton after skeleton to join the frontline of his army. His victories had made him cocky and self-assured. With a staff in one hand and claws in the other, he directed his skeletons to create a loose formation. Clearly he planned a mass charge to break the formation of orcs who dared defy him. A doglike growl from Kacek’s throat all that showed of his anger and newfound strength from the chant. ‘This will be the first and last day of the last true sons of Ozen’, thought Kacek as he swung his axe at the undead army before him. He only wished that Snaril was there beside him to fight side by side one last time.
“Shield! Axe! Spear! All shall strike the thoughts of fear!”, the orcs chanted one last time before stilling their tongues.
A screeching noise erupted from the Death Lord’s throat, signaling the charge. The skeletons darted towards the pitifully small band, more skeletons emerged from the forest showing that not even they were the full might of Alachos’ host.
The sons of Ozen stood their ground and the Death Lord’s forces took up the challenge. The tall square shields of the skeletons met the round iron rimmed ones of the orcs. Wood splintered and spears broke upon the wood and flesh and bone as both sides struggled against each other. Alachos took two swings of his staff against one orc. Kacek could hear the bone crunching slam of the staff against his companion’s head despite the noise of the battle. The orc lay dead on the floor and Alachos moved on to the next orc.
“Radek! To me!”, said Kacek.
The younger orc smashed his hammer against two skeletons and let another take his place to meet with his leader, “Yes lord?”.
“Spare the niceties. I’m no lord. Lend me your arms and help me over the field. I mean to face Alachos”, he said before cutting down another skeleton.
The young warrior grunted in affirmation and dropped his hammer then cupped his hands below his waist. Kacek put one foot down there and with a roar and straining muscles, Radek threw him up in the air. Kacek, without hesitation, raised his axe hoping to strike down at Alachos’ head. The necromancer saw him and rapidly pulled a skeleton away from the back and withdrew from Kacek’s intended landing spot. The orc yelled in frustration, pulverizing the skeleton’s skull and shoving it away to get at the Death Lord.
Rolanus, a former scout of Drumur’s host, blocked a javelin throw at his leader with his shield. Since the spear couldn’t come off and there was no time to think of a solution, he dropped the shield and began swinging wildly with his axe at the skeletons overrunning his brethren. Talkag and his brother both fell together, so many spears running through them they looked like pincushions. Kacek and Rolanus immediately made an unspoken agreement to guard each other’s flanks. Skeletons replaced other skeletons and when they went through the bone grinder that was the orcs then they too were replaced.
Alachos hissed at the sons of Ozen and whispered incantations into his staff, bones appeared up in the sky crashing down at the few who would dare continue to resist him. But these were no ordinary bones belonging to living beings. They were summoned from a realm of death, of blood and sinew and cartilage and skin and bone. These bones passed through the orcs like ghosts and sickened and weakened them, draining them of vitality and tethering them to the Death Lord himself so that their deaths would add to the ranks of his already mighty host.
Kacek and Rolanus were a force to reckon with, hacking apart skeletons even as their own warriors lost ground to the vastly larger host of the undead. Within seconds, the two orcs became surrounded by the milk-white living dead. Alachos saw this and ceased his incantations, pushing away his lackeys to face the orcs though not before calling his strongest warriors. Soon, the duo found themselves facing the Death Lord and two very large and big boned skeletons.
While Rolanus faced one of the giants, Kacek was attacked by Alachos. The necromancer’s strength was such that he broke the shield apart piece by piece with every blow. Kacek had to find some way of evading his attacks but knew that there was only one way left: kill him before he gets killed.
He kicked at the mage’s knee and slashed at his face, leaving a permanent scar across from brow to chin. The Death Lord howled with pain and began swinging more erratically. With his opponent’s attacks unfocused and more akin to flailing, Kacek could more easily evade them and balance the fight. He chopped the head of the staff and embedded his axe into the Death Lord’s chest, breaking through his sternum.
Blood gushed out, Alachos looked down, more surprised than in pain. All of his victories, his countless massacres, his sacrifices all led to this. He screamed like the monsters of ancient myths and punched him in the stomach, driving all the wind out of him. Kacek crumbled to the floor in all fours as he struggled to find his breath. The necromancer cursed him in an ancient tongue but his heart stopped when he saw Rolanus on his knees, crimson fluid snaking down his arms. Rolanus’ head looked at him while upside down like a lid tethered to the flask. While Kacek was busy with the Death Lord, the bone giant had popped out Rolanus’ head leaving it dangling by his spine.
Kacek’s anger found untouched reserves of strength within him. He grappled the mage, causing the both of them to tumble down in the mud. Both fighters were weakened by their wounds, the necromancer’s staff broken and chest bleeding, the orc breathless and ribs giving him a scrapping feeling within, certain to cause internal bleeding. Kacek didn’t plan on surviving just killing the bastard before his own death.
Eventually, muscles imbued with magical strength won out and Alachos brought both fists down on Kacek’s back. Breathless and exhausted, the orc let him go and decided to bring up his axe which was immediately taken, along with his hand, by a nearby skeleton’s sword. Kacek screamed in agony. He looked with horror at his severed hand and didn’t hear any of the necromancer’s words as he spoke. His vision blurred, he felt blood draining away and pooling in the ground.
He steeled his mind and made himself look at the Death Lord. Despite the deep gash in his chest, the man looked triumphant even as he winced when keeping his feet steady. He looked behind him and saw his force had dwindled down to a group of five orcs, all of them were slow in their strikes, each one bleeding from one place or another and one was barely even able to lift his shield once more.
When Alachos took a skeleton’s sword away from it he impaled Kacek’s shoulder. Kacek grabbed the Death Lord’s hand tore through his skin, leaving another gash in the man. The necromancer roared inhumanly and seized the orc’s throat, squeezing the life out of him. That was when the warrior decided to bring up his axe and cleave through the man’s temple. Despite his triumph he could not retrieve the axe, the Death Lord dropped him but he couldn’t get back up. His strength dissipated, his organs shut down, his breathing became shallow, and he began to worry. What would the afterlife be like? Would Ozen see me as a worthy warrior to sit and drink with him until the End of All? Would his family welcome him after all he has done? He didn’t know. Then he could feel no more.

https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/halo-the-third-life
Header Image ^[Imgur]
"October 2558. After being taken prisoner by the Banished as chaos erupts across the galaxy, Ilsa Zane’s hunt for the truth leads her to a new stage of life she never expected..."
Halo: The Third Life is available here on Halo Waypoint, as a free PDF, and in audiobook format on YouTube.
HISTORIAN’S NOTE
Halo: The Third Life begins on October 28, 2558—immediately following the awakening of the Guardian on Laika III at the end of Hunt the Truth —and continues through the subsequent year as Cortana’s uprising begins to alter the axis of power in the galaxy.
Well, hello there. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Long enough for you to have thought that I was dead. Did you search for me? Did you even try to find me? Doesn’t matter now, of course, since I’m the one with the gun to your head.
I know this must be as much of a surprise to you as it is to me. Once, I gave everything I had to your cause. I believed in everything you stood for, everything you promised… but things have changed, and I can see you now for who you really are.
Before you die—and you are going to die—I want to tell you a bit about who I am, and how we ended up here.
My name is Ilsa Zane.
The traitor. The rebel. The “mad Spartan.”
The tip of the spear of the New Colonial Alliance.
And my hunt for the truth… has led me back to you.
OCTOBER 28, 2558 LAIKA III
Nobody kills Ilsa Zane.
Those were the four words she had lived by her entire life. From the fall of Kholo, where everyone and everything she had ever known was lost to the Covenant, to her selection for the first phase of the SPARTAN-IV program where she had been used and discarded... to now, to this day.
The time of the New Colonial Alliance had come, heralding the culmination of all they had worked for to secure total colonial independence. Rebel groups across human space had rallied, alliances had been forged with a myriad of mercenary factions, and fleets were ready to launch to finally bring war to the United Nations Space Command.
But it had all been put in jeopardy by a single undercover agent of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
FERO.
Over a week ago, Conrad’s Point had suddenly been hit by a seismic event of unprecedented scale. A massive alien construct had risen out of the ground, leaving a colossal crater behind before jumping into slipspace. The cataclysmic event matched other scattered reports of similar activity occurring across several different colonies.
The NCA had managed to get to Conrad’s Point first to study the crater, and it was there that Ilsa Zane had forged a still-undisciplined group of rebels into fighting shape. While they had been ascertaining data that might point to the next site to suffer an event like this, FERO had slipped into their ranks, bringing a devastating UNSC air strike with her in a futile attempt to assassinate Zane.
Enraged and undeterred, Zane had gathered what remained of the NCA survivors and tracked FERO to Laika III, where the next awakening event was set to occur. The objective had been twofold: eliminate FERO, and obtain whatever new, anomalous power had begun to emerge.
Neither goal had panned out.
FERO had taken shelter with a cult known as Triad, whose leader—a slippery conman named Dasc Gevadim—had proclaimed that these events heralded divine transcendence. And then, to add to the growing list of complications, ONI had arrived with enough troops to turn Laika III into an unmarked grave, just in time for the new awakening event to wipe the board clean.
Zane witnessed Triad followers suspended in the air by gravitational anomalies as the ground beneath them collapsed into a gaping maw, but despite the otherworldly phenomena that surrounded her, she used this moment for what it was: a distraction.
The UNSC thugs had been rendered dumbstruck by the chaos, and she had taken the opportunity to tear through as many of them as she could. She had lost her weapon at some point and could not recall dropping it, but she knew she didn’t need one. Ilsa Zane was already a weapon. A wellspring of bloodlust rose within her as she tore through the enemy with her bare hands—a pale wall of dust and rock and death drawing ever closer.
Within a few moments, a great sonorous roar tore through the air. A series of debilitating concussive waves dispersed the dust cloud, and Zane was either tackled by or collided with a body she couldn’t distinguish, hitting her head hard on the upturned ground.
The last thing she saw as darkness crept at the edges of her vision was the winged shadow that rose into the air and disappeared into slipspace. She tried to grit her teeth, clench her fist, but consciousness faded with what she feared might be her final thought.
Nobody kills Ilsa Zane.
Ilsa Zane jolted awake as a creature roared in her face—the combined intensity of the rotten breath and fresh saliva that covered her cheek caused her to convulse and gag as an array of reactionary senses all caught up to her at once. She held her stomach with one hand and used the other to lean on a cold rock wall, but the defiant stance she tried to take against her own biological responses quickly vanished as she vomited on the ground, casting an acrid spatter on her combat boots.
It was not until she looked up to see what had caused her rude awakening that she froze. For the first time in years, the ice-cold rush of fear ran through her entire body. She had almost believed herself to be beyond such feelings, but the dire situation that presented itself was one she had hoped never to experience first-hand.
The creature that had now turned its back to her stood over eight-and-a-half feet tall with light gray skin and patches of dark fur over rippling fat and muscle. It picked at its fanged, bloodstained teeth with sharpened claws, and it bore crimson-colored armor plates over a dark undersuit—a Jiralhanae warrior.
“Whatever you do,” a low voice whispered to her, "do not look it in the eyes.”
Zane’s senses gradually managed to stabilize, and she followed the quivering, pointed finger of the man who had spoken. Her eyes settled on a dark smear on the wall that left a three-meter-long trail along the ground.
The area around her was essentially a makeshift prison, or rather a cattle pen made of improvised wooden barriers and mounds of concrete from buildings that had no doubt been laid low by the winged construct’s destructive awakening. Within the pen, she counted seventeen other humans. Some were still clad in scraps of UNSC uniform, while others had been among her own rebel forces—but the man who placed a heavily calloused hand on her shoulder was neither.
He was bald with a long silvery beard and dressed in a gray hooded robe that was tattered and torn, but the marking on his chest was unmistakable. A white ring cut into three sections by a red ‘T’ to symbolize the three internal lives that "must be linked as the key to our transcendence"—the insane story that had gathered a cult following as it spread across Waypoint.
“Well I’ll be damned...” Zane found herself saying aloud, her jaw dropping slightly.
“Yes, child,” he gave a kindly smile, bearing perfectly white teeth, sensing her recognition. “You indeed see clearly.”
She had survived, only to have been plucked and deposited into this foul mire, where she found herself looking into the eyes of Dasc Gevadim himself.
“Let yourself settle first,” he said, surveying their fellow captives who all kept their heads firmly locked to the bile-strewn ground. “They’ll be back soon.”
“What for?”
Dasc grimaced. “Dinner.”
He explained to Zane in hushed whispers that the construct—what he called a Guardian—had been claimed by an artificial intelligence who then broadcast a message across the galaxy, declaring that a new order of peace would be imposed to bring an end to hunger, pain, and conflict. Frankly, it sounded every bit as absurd and unbelievable as the false religion Dasc himself peddled, but Zane chose to entertain his words for as long as he was providing her with information.
The others, it seemed, would say nothing. They simply stood, shaking on the spot, muttering to themselves, teeth chattering in the cold and retching in the foul stench of death and soiled clothing. The barriers of their cattle pen could easily be slipped through or climbed over, but none dared try their luck.
Dasc detailed how all the survivors of the Guardian’s awakening had been rounded up when a new force arrived in a siege ship to lay claim to the crater.
The Banished.
Zane had only some familiarity with the mercenary faction. She had assumed them to be scavengers picking the bones of the dead, plundering old Covenant War-era battlefields and factories for whatever supplies they could get. All she knew was that Admiral Mattius Drake—leader of the New Colonial Alliance—had not sought to parley with them in the NCA’s pursuit of independence.
“So,” Dasc concluded. “The only remaining matter is how we get out of this.”
“You seem pretty familiar with these Brutes,” Zane replied. Although Dasc was clearly shaken, he spoke with a peculiar confidence, where hardened rebel fighters and ONI troops had been utterly broken.
“I once found myself in a similar situation some years back. We managed to stage an escape by turning the pack against each other, but it can be tough to play the same card twice.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’ve got an ace,” Zane said, prompting Dasc’s brow to raise. “I have a tracker implant that directly pings NCA command every twelve hours. By now, they’ll no doubt know I’m on Laika III, and if I don’t report in within three days, then Admiral Drake will send a rescue team.”
“So, it’s a waiting game,” Dasc stroked his chin with a muddy hand. “Which means we’ll have to outlast this lot for another day or two.”
Zane regarded the remaining survivors, figuring that wouldn’t be too difficult.
“I propose a deal,” Dasc said, a twinkle in his eye. “I can teach you how to survive the whims of these Brutes until your rescuers arrive. In exchange, I come with you and get dropped off at a location of my choosing.”
Everybody always had an angle, and it was difficult to tell whether Dasc’s confidence was simply motivation to survive or something else. He was, after all, a conman and a “spiritual guru” who wanted people to believe that he had transcended to some other level of reality with the Guardians’ rising. How could she possibly trust a man like that?
The thudding of footsteps and subsequent whimpering among the other humans interrupted Zane’s deliberation and announced the return of the Jiralhanae.
The armored warrior moved slowly, reveling in the atmosphere of terror its mere presence created as it opened the wooden gate and stepped inside. Two UNSC Marines standing closest to the gate stepped back to create space for the Jiralhanae like honor guards, their heads still dipped to the ground, tears welling in the eyes of the others as their breathing grew ragged.
Whether they would live or die today was entirely in the hands of this Jiralhanae, and it was not clear which fate was worse—to continue to fester in the muck and gore of this abattoir for another day, or to be devoured by this beast and its packmates.
These were the rules of the game, and none of this sorry lot had the power, capacity, or will to do anything about it. They would simply let themselves be snuffed out like a candle flame, and for that Ilsa Zane held no pity in her heart for them. It made them small, weak. Inferior.
Maybe thinking like that made her a monster, but whatever else she had become over the years, Ilsa Zane was a Spartan.
And if there was one thing a Spartan could do, it was change the rules of the game. So she did what no one else dared do.
She looked up.
The action immediately caught the lumbering Jiralhanae’s attention, gnashing its tusks at the human’s audacity, shoving aside the Marine it had been eyeing to answer the challenge to its authority. Dasc’s eyes went wide as he saw what Zane was doing, believing in that moment that she was madder than anybody had ever thought him to be.
"Hey, ugly,” Zane stepped forward, fists clenched, and looked directly into the Brute’s eyes.
What happened next was a blurred rush of violent ecstasy. The Jiralhanae threw its head back to let out a blood-curdling roar, and that was when Zane launched herself forwards, punching it in the throat as hard as she could, crushing its windpipe.
The augmentations that Spartan Zane had received all those years ago were unique to what would become standard for the SPARTAN-IV program. She had been told that ONI was looking to make the costly Mjolnir armor effectively obsolete by instead making her bones practically indestructible, grafting reinforcement plating under her skin and inducing muscle growth that would put her on as close to an equal physical footing with the likes of a Sangheili or Jiralhanae as possible.
That was only half true, of course—a convenient story that seemed just as contrived as Dasc’s religious con. In reality, she had been a lab rat for untested augmentation cocktails and procedures that had wreaked havoc on her brain as well as her body.
But she didn’t mind what she had become. Ilsa Zane liked being a living weapon, it was just a matter of having the choice of who she was aimed at.
The beast continued to claw at its throat, desperately gasping for air. In response, she pulled off one of its armored shoulder pieces, turned it to its jagged edges, and brought the alloyed plating down onto its face. Again and again, as the creature fell to its back on the ground, writhing in pain. Dark blood began pouring from its eyes, nose, and mouth, and still Zane kept slamming her improvised cudgel down as hard as she could until she could no longer feel her arms.
She felt the bloodlust rising in her again, singing in her veins like the sweetest sort of song.
She followed the feeling until it spilled from her mouth in a war cry.
Until it morphed into dark, unencumbered, laughter.
She was only dimly aware of the other humans in her periphery watching in horror, flinching with each dull thud that sounded from her relentless assault.
It might have been seconds, minutes, or even hours before she finally stood up, content that her jailer was now little more than a dark smudge on the ground. Slipping her hands into the Brute’s exposed harness straps, she dragged the body over to the wooden gate to display her handiwork.
There, she found a gathering of six Jiralhanae who had watched the grisly scene play out. One of them stepped forward—clearly the leader from its heavy gray-red armor and ornate helmet, a gravity hammer the length of a human being in its hand. The chieftain appraised Ilsa Zane with bared teeth.
“The human has murdered one of our brothers,” one of the chieftain’s packmates shouted. “Slay her now!”
Its fellows roared and began to chant a rising chorus of “Slay her now, slay her now,” but they were quickly silenced as the chieftain thudded the pummel of its hammer on the ground three times.
“The human has killed Amatus,” it said plainly, pausing as it felt the pack’s collective attention hang on whatever would be said next. “I did not like Amatus.”
Roars from the pack were howled into the sky, and Ilsa Zane dropped the armored shoulder piece that had been her weapon. She hadn’t liked Amatus either.
“You have done well, human,” the chieftain’s face settled into a dark grin. “I offer you a boon for your show of strength and spirit. You shall dine with us tonight, and you may choose which of your fellows shall take your place and be fed to the pack.”
A thousand thoughts thundered through Ilsa Zane’s mind at once. She had earned the respect of the Banished chieftain, she was not going to die today, she would be fed and watered, and...
And I have a loose end.
She had told Dasc that the New Colonial Alliance would soon be on their way. If he were to attempt to curry favor with the chieftain, all he needed to do was reveal this information and the tracker would be pulled from her body by force. She was strong, but there was no way that she would survive the whole pack descending on her.
Perhaps Dasc was counting on her choosing somebody else until the rescue team arrived, honoring her word... but she hadn’t actually agreed to the terms of his deal before Amatus showed up.
In the end, Dasc Gevadim was simply... in her way.
“Him,” Ilsa Zane pointed to the old man in his tattered gray robe, and part of her delighted at the shocked expression on his face, at an outcome he had never conceived.
He may well have shouted Ilsa’s secret at that very moment, but he had been rendered as stunned as the other humans had been in their silent stupor.
Two Jiralhanae warriors entered the pen and grabbed the cult leader from under his arms, dragging him through the mire. His legs struggled to find purchase as he numbly attempted to dig his heels into the ground, as if it might slow the march to his final, deserved, delicious end.
And as he was carried over a hill and out of sight, the screams of Dasc Gevadim eventually faded with the coming of night.
And that was it. I waited, day after day, week after week, and no NCA ship ever showed up. So I made the most of my situation, did whatever it took to survive.
Every day, they let me pick the next one to die. They all just stood there, as if something in them had collectively… broken. The complete absence of hope had brought about some kind of dissociation between mind and body—perhaps that was the only way they could filter out the horror of the situation they were in.
Every day, Admiral , I imagined them with your face.
In time, I became part of the pack. We hunted, we killed, we ate, and we waited…
One day, after I had lost count of how long I had been there, a ship arrived. It seemed like this was what the others had been waiting for, keeping the site secure so that their scientists could study the ancient structure that the Guardian had risen from.
Don’t know what they were looking for, but it was something big enough for the war chief of the Banished himself to be present.
He wasn’t pleased to find that I was alive at first, but let’s just say that I made him an offer he couldn’t turn down…
[SLIPSPACE RUPTURE DETECTED]
And would you look at that.
He’s here right on time.
MAY 8, 2559 EDOLAS SYSTEM ABOARD NCA D’ARTAGNAN
Ilsa Zane turned the command chair of Admiral Mattius Drake to face the bridge’s viewscreen so he could bear witness to the arrival of the intrusion corvette that had just slipped in.
The vessel bore extensive modifications from its Covenant origins, from additional sensor arrays and jagged ramming spikes to an underbelly containing several boarding craft for rapid breaching operations. And painted on its front was a blood-red stripe emblazoned with the mark of the Banished.
A single Phantom emerged from the intrusion corvette and approached the hangar of the NCA D’artagnan.
There was a perceptible shift in the air as Admiral Drake’s blood ran cold, his brow lined with sweat and his face pale. In that moment, he reminded her of Dasc. All he could manage was little more than a strangled whisper.
“Ilsa, please…”
But she had already turned her back on him to examine the holotable on the bridge which was displaying the New Colonial Alliance ships located in the system. A little over two-dozen NCA spacecraft were currently stationed here—a mixture of light frigates, corvettes, and converted merchant trawlers docked at a former-Covenant space station. They were joined by a handful of alien warships, and the inherited remains of Vata ‘Gajat’s mercenary band, now led by the far more pliable T’vaoan known as Tek.
“Attention, all NCA vessels,” Zane began to transmit on an open frequency. “This is Ilsa Zane here to inform you of a… change in management.”
Admiral Drake struggled against his restraints, but his chair held firm.
“For years, Admiral Drake has promised to claim independence, vowing to strike at the UNSC and secure our freedom. We built a machine of conquest, but here we are hiding in some distant system, preying on scraps, and waiting like spineless cowards.”
She could hear his approach now, the great thudding footfalls of the Banished war chief. He had come alone, leaving his guards in the hangar bay.
“This was to be our time,” Zane continued. “A bunch of misfits and rebels given purpose—as every little piece of a larger machine needs. But there’s a very specific piece that just doesn’t fit any more; it’s holding us all back, and I refuse to let it break what we’ve built together.”
The shadow that was cast over the broad, hulking form of War Chief Escharum receded as he entered the bridge, revealing a Jiralhanae with a gray beard on his chin, a milky, clouded eye, and a heavily scarred face. He appraised the situation: a handful of ensigns dead in their seats, Admiral Drake bound to his own command chair, and the one he had encountered on Oth Voran—the rogue Spartan—broadcasting her message from the holotable.
“And so, I am relieving Admiral Drake of command,” she unholstered her pistol. “Permanently.”
Ilsa Zane barely registered the sound of her pistol firing as she pulled the trigger without a moment of hesitation and saw the light instantly disappear from Drake’s eyes. A sad, pathetic end to a man who had proclaimed to be laying the groundwork for greatness, reduced now to little more than a footnote in the New Colonial Alliance’s history.
“Our fleet spread across countless colonies, our agents entrenched on a thousand frontlines, and the fire in our hearts for independence—all that we have mustered,” Ilsa Zane concluded. “All that makes us the New Colonial Alliance is hereby pledged to serve as both sword and shield to the Banished.”
Escharum snarled in approval. Though the war chief lacked the same admiration that Atriox held for humanity, he was no fool. The current state of the galaxy demanded greater unity with willing allies to face the challenges ahead, and there was great potential for the resources and influence of this new alliance to be put to use.
He would not deny those who pledged their loyalty and service to Atriox. And so, it was time to welcome a new brotherhood into the widening reach of the Banished.
“Atriox sees you for what you are and for what you could be,” Escharum boomed, stepping beside Zane at the holotable. “For the fury that fuels your desire for freedom is his fury too. We shall do great things together—hunt powerful prey and plunder ancient treasures. You shall be paid in blood and sport and spoils. And you shall never bow again.”
It was done.
Halo: The Third Life image depicting Ilsa Zane surrounded by fire and Banished banners ^[Imgur]
That was the day that changed everything for the New Colonial Alliance.
Do I regret killing Drake? No more than I regret any of my actions that have brought me to this point—which is to say, hell no, not one bit.
Once, I owed my life to that man, but the NCA is bigger than any one person or leader, and at such a critical point there was no room for weakness. Drake would have seen us wallow in obscurity until the forces we’d gathered lost their edge, rebelled, or simply fled. It all would've fallen apart.
Not while I’m still here.
I can’t help but think about Dasc. He was the leader of a fake religion, one that believed in linking the three internal lives we all supposedly have, and in a weird way I recognize how that applies to me more than I might have originally thought.
There was the orphan, who I used to be during the Covenant War, a life that seems a thousand light years away from me now.
Then, after the war, I became a tool to be used and discarded for a new generation of insipid UNSC propaganda.
And now they call me the Banished Spartan. I like that. It feels... right, and I’m eager to discover what this third life has in store for me.
Escharum was keen to put us to use almost immediately. A mission to test us, get us bloody—that’s a story for another time. But if you’re wondering how I got this armor, well... let’s just say it wasn’t the first Spartan I’ve killed.
I’ve got a list of names to work through as we go—old scores to settle. FERO. Musa. Palmer. Kree’yat. Dinh...
It's a big galaxy out there, and I’m ready for a new hunt.
This post was made by a script written and maintained by the Halo mod team to automatically post blogs from Halo Waypoint. If you notice any issues with the text output or think this was posted by mistake, please message the mods.

Preface: "Don't you ever dare to think you can escape me, Dalia. You're mine to love, mine to hate, mine to protect, and mine to destroy. You belong to me, you've always been." His words were nothing but a mere whisper as the man who clutched onto me once again savored my lips as if he'd been famished his whole life for this very moment. His tongue danced with mine in a game neither of us understood. Were they fighting for love or fueled by hate?
One of his hands secured me in my position, as if he was scared I'd escape. And his other hand took its sweet time caressing and teasing my skin as it traveled to its destination. His lips never left mine, even as my lungs burned for air and I wriggled my body to make him stop. But he didn't. It was as if he was intent on making it my last kiss, and is determined to make it worth it. The moment he found my burning core, he cupped it, squeezing it until I withered in pain.
I bit onto my bottom lip, sinking my teeth so deep that drops of blood dripped from it as I tried to hold in the loud, throaty moan daring to escape. There was just a thin wall keeping us apart from the horde of media who were standing outside eagerly waiting to get their hands on something that would tear us to shreds. If there's something better than a scandal, it's a celebrity scandal. And an affair of a newbie actress with Hollywood's heartthrob is definitely news worth telling. It could ruin his career and my life, yet it didn't matter to him. All he wanted in this moment was to claim the woman he's loved all his life and who destroyed his love within a minute.
"Do you know, Dalia, what you mean to me? I love you so damn much that I could write your name all over my life. Yet I hate you just as much that I'd burn down everything I am to wipe you from existence," he breathed against my lips, finally allowing me to breathe. I took a lungful of air, only to have my breath catch in my throat as his fingers ruthlessly slid into my folds.
"Altair, stop! It... it hurts," I barely managed to speak the words when another of his fingers slid into my burning core, stretching me to a point I'd never experienced before.
But my pleas had no effect on him; his three fingers continued to torture me, sliding to the depths of my womanhood and then pulling back, only to fill me to the brim once again. The sensation of his fingers sliding against the sensitive walls of my core set my skin ablaze, yet I couldn't get enough. I've always hated when a man touched me, but why does my body betray me when it comes to him?
What makes him so special? Is it the love he once had for me? Or is it the fact that he's become my only salvation in this godforsaken world? But does it even matter? It's a tale of love, hate, and revenge. Whether love wins or hate does, it doesn't matter, because all I want is my revenge.
Episode 1: If I were to tell the joke that's stood the test of centuries, it'd be the one and only...
Love!!!
Yeah, I'm talking about those jittery butterflies in your belly doing the cha-cha like it's spring break in there, eyes locked on their face like they're the last chocolate chip cookie in the jar, heart pounding like it's trying to escape your chest, and you doing all sorts of wacky things – like ditching that sweet gig in Paris and hauling ass through the airport like your butt's on fire just to win them back. Let me tell you, all these feelings are nothing but a big ol' scam, like pyramid scheme-level scam.
Now, before you happily-ever-after believers start throwing fairy dust at me, hear me out. I might sound like the president of the anti-love club right now, but sweetie, I've been dealing with cheaters practically every damn day for the past 90 days.
When my friend Maeve and I, both broke as jokes, launched 'Siren's Call,' our very own loyalty-testing agency a year ago, we never imagined we'd be drowning in cases. And, now it's my bread and butter, catching those sneaky snakes red-handed, gathering evidence so their poor suspecting partners cash in on a jackpot of karma during divorce settlement.
And, at the moment, I find myself in the company of my client number 47, Julia's husband David, who seems to have mistaken my waist for a decorative armrest. Ah, the joys of being treated like furniture. This man didn't bother to ask for my consent. Ughh, I hate it... I absolutely loathe it when they touch me. And my body isn't holding back from showing him just how much it detests his touch.
Sweat drips down my forehead, my hands tremble with nerves, my knees feel like jelly and I fear I might collapse any second, and my stupid heart twists painfully in my chest. 1... 2... 3... I silently count, reminding myself of the hundred damn reasons why I have to put up with this. But it's not doing much to help. I feel bile rise in my throat, and I have this overwhelming urge to hurl all over this guy. Gross, I know, but so are his words.
"I figured a classy dame like you would have good taste," he slurred, leaning in closer like he thought he was being suave. But all I wanted to do was smack him upside the head.
"Well, my taste buds are alright, but when it comes to men, they've got a history of bad choices" I gritted my teeth, struggling to keep my cool.
"Let me guess, your heart's been shattered, huh? Man, who in their right mind would break the heart of someone as stunning as you? I swear on my mom's lasagna, if you were into me, I'd get my eyes laminated. So that, I wouldn't even think about checking out anyone else but you," He licked his lips, his gaze descending to my breasts, as if he's suddenly forgotten the art of subtlety.
"Aww, you're so loyal, just like my neighbor's dog, Jimmy," I cooed, feeling sick as his hands started wandering. 'It's all for Maeve's sake.' I chanted in my head again and again, praying, hoping my fear just doesn't win.
"Bet Jimmy's a real cutie, just like me," he tilted his head, poking his fingers in his chubby cheeks, trying to look adorable. "Kill him, his wife will thank you later," And now my inner voice was beyond over this guy.
"Mhmm, you two could practically pass for twins. He barks too much, just like you" I quipped, unable to hold back any longer as my patience wore thin.
Alright, maybe that's not the textbook way to flirt, and more likely make any boy run away. But, I'm telling you, I'm a freaking expert at flirting game. Check out my track record – I've charmed 46 men out there. But for some reason, this dude's really getting under my skin.
"Hahaha, a babe with a sense of humor, deadly combo, I swear." And ladies and gentlemen, we have a contender here who clearly left his self-respect at home, all in the hopes of scoring tonight – either that or it never made it into his wardrobe to begin with!
"You know, I've got some tricks up my sleeve too. How about we bounce to my place, and I'll show you what I've got? I bet you'll be impressed..." His spiel got cut off by his wife's ear-splitting voice, which unfortunately blasts painfully loud through my cheap Bluetooth earpiece lodged in my other ear.
"Ha, is this guy seriously trying to flex his skills? What skills does he even have, airing out the same dirty skivvies for a month? This freeloader's been mooching off me for a decade, and now he's out there two-timing me. You know what, Dalia? Just break it..."
"Break what? His eggs?" My bestie Maeve chimed in. This girl just loves violence I swear.
"Eggs... his noggin, break whatever needs breaking. Personally, I vote we send him packing. We'll stash this motherfucker in the backyard cemetery; nobody will bat an eye if one more schmuck vanishes." Mrs. 47's fury practically singed my ears.
"Yeah, but if the cops catch wind, we're toast, right, girl? We're only on the hunt for proof of your heartbreak, not to bust your hubby's skull." Maeve and Mrs. 47 are both lurking outside, tasked with keeping an eye on us, but it seems they missed the memo on stealth.
"Excuse me? What did you think? My place..."The man raised his voice, clearly annoyed by the fact that I've just ignored his proposal. And at this point, to be honest, I just want to get it over with.
"Sure, let's roll." I could still hear Maeve and Mrs. 47 squabbling, but I'm too wiped to care. So I tagged along quietly, praying I get the dirt I need ASAP, so I could crawl back into bed with a wad of cash and maybe hopefully with the last remaining threads of sanity
*****************************
The car ride with this idiot has been nothing but pure torture. He's been trying to grope my legs, hands, waist, hairs – heck, he even made a play for my toes – don't ask me how, trust me, you don't want the gory details.
I swear, I was so close to jumping out of the window – not because of his pervy touching habits, but because of his awful flirting skills. Someone needs to sit this guy down and give him the lowdown: to pull off a "baby girl," you've gotta be either Massimo-level hot daddy or Christian Grey-grade charmer, and sadly, he's rocking neither the Italian stallion vibe nor the billionaire allure. He's more like the guy who brings store-bought cookies to a bake-off – well-meaning, but totally missing the mark. But the good thing is, we've finally made it to his lavish two-story house.
And when I say lavish I so damn mean it, this blue white building is a perfect blend of modern chic and classic. The front yard is so vast, you might need a GPS just to navigate your way to the front door. The façade screams "I've made it" with its grandiose columns and a front porch spacious enough to host a block party. And this... meticulously manicured lawn – damn it's so green! is this even possible? I'm sure as hell it's Photoshopped.
But all those good vibes flew out of my brain the moment we neared the front door and it freaking swung open in our faces... by itself, and there was pitch darkness in the house.
Mrs. 47, aka Julia, made sure that none of the staff was at home when we came here. She's with Maeve a few blocks away, waiting for us to go inside, so how the heck did the door just magically open? Mr. Clueless over here must be as lost as me, by the way he's standing there staring into the abyss.
I had a bad feeling about this dude, an even worse feeling about this house, and the absolute worst feeling about this whole damn night.
"No one... should be home at this hour. So why the heck is this door...?" He gulped nervously. So, now he's sweating bullets about getting busted?
"You sure this place isn't haunted?" My serious tone freaked even myself out.
"N-No... I mean, the only ghost I've seen in this house is my wif... wi... widow sister." His words came out slower than a whisper, as he took a few steps back.
"Why don't we go inside and check? I'm sure your widowed sister won't mind me crashing your crib." With a flick of my finger, I motioned for him to follow as I strutted confidently inside. I've seen this kinda stuff go down in horror flicks a million times. It's very first warning from the demons hiding out in the house. And even though I'm pretty sure I'm way smarter than those clueless teens who bite the dust first in horror movies, because they gotta know what the ghost looks like, when it comes to curiosity, I'm just as dumb as 'em.
☠️⚠️Warning: First things first, do not, I repeat, do not enter a strange house with an unknown strange man, kiddo. He could turn you into tomorrow's newspaper headline. Secondly, when you see a door open by itself, pray to God, Buddha, almighty, and burn that darn house down before the ghost catches up to you.☠️⚠️
Back to the story... the house was painfully silent; the only sounds were the 'tick-tock' of some ancient million-dollar antique grandpa clock and the 'clip-clop' of my borrowed, worn-out dollar store heels. Not a soul, ghost, or even a hint of a breeze in sight... until the silence was shattered by a loud, over-the-top laugh. Whoever's trying to be a monster needs acting lessons ASAP.
"Who- Who are you?" Mr. 47, shaking like a leaf beside me, yelled out with whatever ounce of bravery he had left.
"Me? You're asking who I am? I'm your sweet-sweet death, loser. Hahahaha!" That darn fake laugh again. Whoever they are, they really need to stop now.
"I'm your sweet-sweet death, loser! Hahahaha!" The mystery voice cackled again. I swear, they either forgot their lines or missed the memo about subtlet. Their silhouette is now slightly visible in the darkness; they're standing on the head stairs, descending one step with each passing minute. And guess what they did next? Yep, you guessed it right: that man screamed 'I'm your sweet-sweet death' one freaking time again.
"Alright, Mister Mystery, zip it. If you belt out those cringe-worthy lines one more time, I'm gonna hit you where it hurts – real bad." I shot him a warning glance, trying to keep my cool. And surprisingly, he actually listened.
He didn't repeat those god-awful words, but this time, he screamed at the top of his lungs "You worthless, good-for-nothing Jojo! I trusted you with one simple task and you botched it up royally. Congratulations, asshole, you've single-handedly sabotaged my grand entrance. Didn't I specifically instructed you to flick the switch the moment I dropped my killer line, didn't I?"
And just like that, the lights flooded the house. For a second, I was blinded; it was so darn bright. But once my eyes adjusted, I wish I hadn't seen what was in front of me. In all my 27 years, I've never been scared, but in that moment, I screamed like a banshee.
"Holy shit! whoever's on the clock right now – God, Buddha, or even the intern – I'm officially calling in that favor. Save me!"

In year x he told me he liked me however I rejected him because I wasn’t into him at the time. After 7-8 months we liked each other again and started talking again then became serious just this year. However, yesterday he said he had something serious to tell me and I was scared. I was contemplating what I had done, thinking he was going to break-up with me. But during class, (after he told me he had something to say) he started saying how much he loved me and how he was sorry out of nowhere. So I was thinking it didn’t seem like he was breaking up with me but what could he have done…After class he looked really troubled so I asked repeatedly to tell me what was wrong and he looked so scared and vulnerable, I wanted to know…
So he told me.
I was in such shock I ran to my friend (didn’t tell her anything) but gave her a hug. Then I started reminiscing and realised I had questions I needed answers too. So I went back to him and discussed what I needed too. Initially, he thought I was gonna say we should have a break or break up but I didn’t want too.
I’ve become too attached and love him way too much. Aside from this happening his been a pillar in my life, helpful, gifting, supportive (a tiny bit sassy) but he’s become someone important in my life and I don’t want to let go of all the memories we’ve had because of the past.
I asked for opinions (not baiting out his business but being as subtle and discrete as possible) and my friends were saying I was too forgiving or stupid for going back quickly but I feel as though there’s nothing I can do, there’s no way to change his past.
I don’t want to feel as though I’m over reacting but I’m a 15 F in the same year as him, having done nothing with a male before. He’s my first boyfriend, first kiss, first male I let close to me romantically and he’s lied to me…
I had also given him multiple opportunities to tell me the truth but he told me he must of jokingly told me he had lost his virginity however I called him “dirty” and “disgusting” for it and blocked him but he texted me asking to be u blocked saying he was joking…Maybe that was why he didn’t tell me the truth?
He’s expressed how sorry he is, how much he loves me, how much he regrets it and how he wishes it weren’t true.
However today, I became too overwhelmed with the fact I wouldn’t be his first anything as I was an innocent female in a generation of whores. I had 2 mental/emotional breakdowns and I’ve finally gotten it off my chest by coming to Reddit.
Am I [15F] an idiot for still staying with him?

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.

Who do you have to be to do yoga? Is yoga only intended for the people of far east, Buddhists, Hindus, yogis, and so forth? Is yoga established in a way to glorify some deity? Are there any negative energies surrounding yoga? It is up to you to decide. But, why not treat yoga as one of many other exercise, used solely to promote fitness levels and increase muscular strength. Actually, it is certainly the case that thousands and thousands of individuals performing contemporary yoga, have no association to the ritualistic elements of this so-called sport. They do it just for the sake of excreting, and not being aware and not having interest of its historical origin, when it was used to glorify some deities like Shiva or Buddha.
But, could a Muslim practice yoga? Should a Christian practice yoga? Must anyone who is spiritual, religious, should they practice this sport? I think yes, if it is done primarily to stretch and strengthen the bodily elements which would benefit from such yoga exercise. But, if you are a Christian and doing yoga, please do not dare chant any mantra in glorifying a foreign deity! Instead, while performing some excursive, you could keep on repeating over and over the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy own me a sinner”. This prayer could be said not because you would feel any sin or guilt in performing this sport, which was first given to us from the far-east. But, it is to give all glory to the true God in whatever you do. And, for the more exciting and thrilling experience, while doing yoga, you could even say this holy, mystical, grace-giving prayer in any other language of your liking. In doing yoga, some languages that could have an event more extensive energy-producing element could be Hebrew, as it is a holy tongue of the God-chosen people of Israel. For the love and respect to the countries of far-east, you could also chant the “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner” prayer in Hindi, Chinese, r even Japanese! For an even greater cleansing, purification, and healing of body and soul, you could go some steps ahead and try to learn this prayer in Aramaic. Yes, Aramaic is tough to learn these days in entirely, but there could be some tools and resources available which could provide an accurate translation from English to Aramaic. Oh, how mysterious it is that this holy language spoken by Our Savior two thousand years ago, is not understood nowadays by the general public at all. That would be glorious if this language is saved for the Kingdom of Heaven, when we could be able to speak it when we enter this eternal Kingdom. That would truly be fantastic if we won’t even have to learn our eternal language, and it would be given to us in full comprehension the moment we enter heaven. If Aramaic was to be understood and spoken by the masses today, what a miracle that would be! Actually, MIRACLES! Then, positive supernatural healing, blessing, and joyful energies would have been poured out throughout all the lands that Aramaic was to be spoken. But, on the other hand, we could assume that it is not the vocabulary that produces this force, but the way the Lord blesses those who speak this language. The Saints of the past have done so many miracles not because they spoke Aramaic, but there were indeed variety of other reasons. So, find a way how you could energize and discipline your spiritual state, to perform wonders for yourselves and others surrounding you.
What is needed for a Christian to do yoga? A yoga mat is not even a requirement for that. People doing yoga on yoga mats because of either tradition, either comfort, or as a general norm. But, you are free to do yoga anywhere and anyhow, if not on a yoga mat. Are you reading this for the first time and have never done any yoga before, and now you are ready to start doing yoga for the purpose to glorifying Christ? Then, you could just lay on your back, stomach, or go into any position you are in a mood for. If you want to do it outside, then make yourself comfortable on the grass, and go for it. if you are in your room and are about to start your very first personal yoga session, then you could start from the comfort of your bed. You could always add a yoga mat under you, to make it seem more traditional. When you are ready to begin, you are free to make up any exercise you want, and call it yoga. There is no need to even spend hours watching other self-help yoga exercise videos to learn this sport. But, studying from others could help as well. When I first became interested in Christian yoga some years back, I had troubles finding such deviation-inspired yoga videos. Mostly there was just plenty of standard how-to videos showing basic, intermediate, and more advanced exercise examples. This shows that Christian yoga is a fractionated minority compared to what mainstream yoga has developed into. But there is still hope and chance that those doing yoga now or in the future who are not spiritually inclined, would miraculously be converted into faith of Christianity, and would place their Lord before anyone or anything else while doing yoga., and would tend to find ways in glorifying Christ throughout their yoga sessions. Hence, when doing yoga, it is essential to surrender selves entirely to Christ, and have faith that He is ultimately the one who cleanses and purifies the body and soul, and that doing yoga is just a secondary instrument in fulfilling and increasing such cleansing and purification. The thing is that we should 100% believe that the power and presence of God is everywhere and every time. This means there are no boundaries where we could hide or escape from the Creator’s presence. We might not see Him visibly in a physical body at this time for some reason, but He is there. So, when a Christian is doing yoga and in the same time prays or meditated on the gospel, the Lord could be even more happy with that person and could invisibly manifest His even closer presence with that individual. So, be sure to take this into consideration if you would consider practicing spirituality and in the same time exercising in yoga!
God is great. He is entirely worthy to be prayed and worshipped. His love for us is so great that we cannot even grasp it completely. We can’t even imagine how much He loves us unconditionally. That is why He deserves our worship in magnifying and glorifying His Holy Name. As the Lord can watch and see our every move and action, what could we do today to make Him happy while viewing us? One thing that comes to mind is for a believer to do some yoga movement, and either say it, whisper, or think inside these words “Lord, in these movements of mine, I glorify You now, as You gave me this body and soul. Holy are You now and forever. Amen”. Truly, it is suggested to think about the Lord and communicate with Him as much as possible, so doing yoga should be no exception. Don’t do it for the purpose of getting any reward from doing this first of all. But, try to do it sincerely just to prove your love and loyalty to Him. And, off course you would eventually start feeling a greater extent of blessings, joy, and well-being from your acts of worship. They come in their due time. It doesn’t happen instantly, and that is what makes so many people discouraged to pray and sometimes even to believe. They think that because they don’t get results right away, all of their faith and praise is for nothing. But, patiently endure and you will eventually get your requests and desires fulfilled in one way or another. Patience and faith is the key here. The presence of the Spirit is omnipresent, it is just essential to discipline self in requesting for the right things, at the right time, and in a correct manner.
No need to get discouraged. for some reason, prayers here on Earth don’t get answered right away i the way we think about time. So, there might be an obligation to look at time differently. A thing that came into my thinking some time back: what exactly is this time which is measured by human measure of time? Were there even things such as watch and clocks thousands of years ago? some hundred of years ago? How were people being aware about what time is it way back then? This contemporary invention of watch and time clocks has its own advantages and disadvantages. If you had all the time in the world in infinite measures, what would you do with it? You could consider spending a good portion of it doing yoga and in the same time performing Christian prayers, reading the Scriptures, listening the gospel music, and repeating over and over again miraculous prayer “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner”. Glorify Your Creator. Strive to get familiar with godly ways and teachings. Educate yourself with the Scriptures and devotional holy writing of the Saints. listen to more gospel music. If you are up for it, BE CALM AND DO CHRISTIAN YOGA.

Previous post

The upstart

Arch rival to Calap Roud was the illimitable, ambitious, inexcusably young Brash Phluster. That he delighted in the old bastard’s presence on this journey could hardly be refuted, for Brash so wanted Calap to witness youth’s triumph in Farrog. With luck, it would kill him.

Next on the chopping block is Brash Phluster, and what a masterpiece that name is. Brash means many things, including overly confident and lacking respect. Clearly that's how Calap views him at least. And Phluster just looks so much funnier than "fluster". It's as subtle as a brick to the face, but we really get everything we need to know about Brash from just the name.
Note that like with Purse we begin Brash's introduction by pointing out his relationship with Calap Roud. But whereas Purse was Calap's object of lust, Brash is his nemesis. We get a list of Brash's characteristics. He is illimitable, ambitious, and inexcusably young. This is definitely describing Brash as Calap sees him. The tell is the "inexcusably young" bit, but we also see a subtle jab with the way Flicker uses both illimitable and ambitious, words that have very similar meanings. He's definitely imitating Calap here, so it's like he's so incensed at Brash that he's stumbling for whatever word he can find. And accidentally goes for two words that mean basically the same thing.
Then we get Brash being happy at Calap's presence, which makes us think that perhaps the rivalry is one sided. But then we see that it's just because Brash wants to rub it in Calap's face, so the rivalry is definitely a thing. And finally there's the hope that Calap's defeat would kill him. So there's clearly an underlying hatred that runs deeper than a normal rivalry. The rivalry also seems to be generational. Brash represents the younger generation of artists, and he sees this as a conflict between young and old.

Fake it 'til you make it

Seven years Calap had been defecating on Brash, trying to keep him down on the crusty floor, but Brash was not one to let a rain of guano discourage his destiny. He knew he was brilliant in most things, and where he lacked brilliance he could fill those spaces with bold bluster and entirely unfounded arrogance. A sneer was as good as an answer. A writhe of the lip could slice throats across the room. He eyed Calap as would a wolf eye a dog, appalled at a shared pedigree and determined to tear the sad thing to pieces at the first opportunity.

We continue with the Calap/Brash beef, bringing back the metaphor from Calap's introduction with the gilded cage. There we got a brief mention of the "white-headed fools" that Calap shat on, and now we learn that Brash was indeed one of those fools. The imagery here is absolutely foul, with the floor crusted with bird shit and the rain of guano. There's a really nice alliteration here too. We get "defecating" and "down", and then a bit later "discourage" and "destiny". I love how it's all these really negative and nasty words, before flipping it with "destiny".
Flicker is definitely putting himself in Brash's head as he's done many times before, as we get this view of his inflated self image. We get a lot of Bs and Ls here with two instances of "brilliant" before we get "bold bluster". I love how he seems to be just blatantly in fake-it-until-you-make-it mode. And then Flicker dips out of Brash's head to provide his own commentary with "entirely unfounded arrogance".
And then we continue with Flicker giving his not-quite-charitable reading of Brash's character with this quick flurry of sentences. When confronted, Brash doesn't really respond, but just pretends like answering is beneath him. Like Calap he's willing to play the social game in order to get ahead. And that is made clear with the comparison. They're different, but also in some fundamental way they "share the same pedigree", which I think is their mutual willingness to pull all sorts of dirty tricks to get rid of rivals. And Brash is ready to do just that to Calap.

Master of disguises

True talent was found in the successful disguise of genius, and Brash accounted himself a master of disguises. His future was glory, but he would reveal not a single hint, not one that some cragged critic¹ or presumptuous rival might close in on, stoat fangs bared. No, they could dismiss him each and every day for the time being. He would unveil himself in Farrog, and then they would all see. Calap Roud, that stunning watery-eyed dancer, Purse Snippet, and the Entourage too—

Right off the bat I want to say that I love this first sentence. Flicker mentioned Brash's fake-it-until-you-make-it attitude in the previous paragraph, but here we get a hint that perhaps Brash is faking more than he'd care to admit. But he doesn't care, because he's so confident in his disguises.
Erikson has on many occasions remarked upon (and lamented) that many authors are incredibly secretive about their craft. He's mentioned authors on panels whose answers amount to basically just an advertisement for their book rather than an examination of their process. I think here he is poking fun at that attitude. Brash is established as being extremely tight lipped, because he doesn't want the critics or his competitors to find out his secret sauce. Admittedly, since he's traveling with Calap Roud that attitude may not be simple paranoia.
I also love that he calls his rivals stoats, calling back to the weasel analogy from a few weeks ago. Stoats are of course² a kind of weasel (or at least a weasel-like mammal). So we're still not letting go of these metaphors.
We also get a glance at the way Brash is seen by others. He's dismissed by them. Clearly, Brash thinks they're underestimating him, but are they? We'll find out in time when we get some of Brash's poetry. The alliteration here is also nice, with each and every framed by dismiss and day.
He ends with a declaration that he's not even begun to peak. That he's saving the best for last, and he's savoring that. He mentions Calap Roud, who he wants to destroy, and Purse Snippet who he likely wants to impress. Here we also see the difference between Flicker and Brash in action. Flicker saw through to the core of Purse's being. Brash, on the other hand, just sees a pretty dancer. He even notes that her eyes are always watery, but he doesn't even seem to consider that they might be like that for a reason.
And finally, the Entourage...
But we'll get to them next time. That's it for Brash's introduction. See you next week!
¹ There's some nice alliteration here. The word "cragged", itself onomatopoeic, adds that onomatopoeia to the word "critic".
² I say as if I didn't have to look that up myself

This might be long so thank you for taking the time to read. I am looking for advice, feedback or just a new perspective.
I (M39) have been with my wife (F37) for 18 years (married for 8). We met back in July 2006 when she visited my country and stayed in the resort I was working in as a summer job.
I approached her the first day she arrived. I'll admit that I took things slow and thought I had time. But not long after, I heard her saying she's with another guy "for the duration of her vacation". I remember feeling a little disappointed because I found her attractive and from the few conversation I had with her she seemed nice and fun, and the guy was a real jerk. The evening after while going to my hotel room I saw her leaving the guy's room. I didn't know at the time that the image will remain in my head for years.
The rest of the week she kept talking to me when we met, she would tell me that they went out and saw this or that, and I was thinking "yeah you just paid for his meal and drinks" but of course didn't say anything. Fast forward a few weeks, the guy got fired. He got drunk and lured a girl who had a mental illness to his room and locked her inside until she started screaming (that's how big of an asshole he was).
Then out of the blue the girl (now wife) called me to ask me if she should send him money because he needed help. I told her that he was trying to scam her. The irony is that some other colleagues blamed ME for revealing the truth and stopping HIM from getting the money!
I kept in touch and she told me that she was coming back in September to the same resort, and I told her that I would like to meet her even though I won't be working there as my contract ends in August. She replied "we'll see how it goes".
I went to meet her and saw my ex colleagues and they were grinning at me strangely, then one guy said "I know why you came here, but unfortunately you're too late" then pointing at another "this guy is taking care of her for you" then they started laughing and the guy in question said "best part of it is that she came to me, I did not put any effort into it"
At first I didn't want to believe it. I knew they were capable of lying just to dissuade me from asking her out.
I met with her and we spent the afternoon together and I had a feeling that something was off. I ended up asking her and she confirmed it. This time it did sting more. Then while saying goodbye she kissed me on the lips "so your day won't be ruined" she said.
Fast forward a few weeks, she called me again out of the blue. The second guy asked her for money using some bullshit story. And she wanted to ask me as I'm the only guy she can trust, WOW.
I saved her a few hundred bucks, again. She ended the conversation saying that she will come back in October and this time she really wanted to meet me.
I was single and as I said I found her attractive so I thought why not.
We dated and slept together (a lot) during that week, it went great. And before leaving she told me that she fell in love with me.
To be honest I didn't take it really seriously at first (can you blame me?). I kept living my life and partied and fooled around with other girls (no sex though). But we kept talking and the relationship grew stronger as we were really compatible and had much in common.
She kept coming back to visit me, first she stayed at the same resort and we would meet outside but later we started renting appartements and spending time 100% together.
That's when I started having hard time dealing with what happened with the two guys. She would talk about it casually from time to time, like describing what a pigsty the guy's room was... I ended up telling her that it bothered me and she apologized and promised to stop.
Had to deal with this for a while on my own and it was really hell. Ended up managing not to think about it and focused on other things like studying and fitness etc..
We ended up having long distance relationship for 10 years, during which she dropped out of two different universities, developed a severe case of psoriasis on 50% of her body and gained weight due to treatment, and I was nothing but supportive until she ended up getting a degree and was healed.
I moved to her country, we got married, I landed a good job, we bought a house, cars, traveled a lot, had a baby girl and everything was going great.
I still had some triggers but I kept it under control like a fading memory most of the time.
The other day she asked me to look for a picture taken at our wedding, I couldn't find it so I searched for all pictures on the hard drive. Yeah I shouldn't have done that. I found old pictures of her with different guys from the resort, some were after we started dating. One with a guy she told me asked her to sleep with him when I didn't come see her for a few days when my grandma died (this dude was my roommate), but she turned him down.
So yeah, it hit me even harder than before and all the bad memories became so real suddenly when I saw the faces and the location. It's consuming me every waking hour and I don't sleep much. When I talked to her about it she told me she didn't know the pictures still existed and that they were pictures her mother took and she never took the time to sort them. She started crying and I couldn't talk to her that day.
After we had a long conversation and she said that she's aware she hurt me again with her naivety. She just took pictures with the staff like all the people leaving that day. Then we talked about what happened with the two guys and how come she friendzoned me and made me wait. She couldn't explain it, she said she just ended a bad relationship before that and didn't believe in love anymore, she didn't care and just wanted to go wild, but she regrets it all together.
This didn't help me understand why not do that with me as I was there and showed interest, instead she slept with clowns who barely spoke her language.
She said that I was the first guy to start flirting with her, she usually initiated contact with guys first. She meant it as a compliment cause it shows that I'm a real man who knows what he wants, but it did the exact opposite effect: I am the loser who she made wait while fooling with guys she was really attracted to, and when she gave up on them I was still waiting like a good boy.
She said that she wouldn't dare compare me to them, that I am better in every way possible, that she won't be able to live without me, but that doesn't change the fact that they got to bang what I consider the woman of my life so easily while I was helplessly watching it take place.
She talked about how she willingly did things with me in bed that she never did before because she was disgusted, that she experienced the best sex with me and that before it was bland and felt like a chore most of the time. That after 18 years she still looks forward to it and initiates it often (which is true). I can't deny the fact that it felt good and made me feel somewhat special when she said it but the effect didn't last long unfortunately.
When I think about it, it hurts my ego so much, I worked on myself so hard as a teen, I worked out and read a lot, worked on social skills, dressed up and took care of my appearance. But that wasn't enough. The irony is that I had other girls choose me over the other guys during that summer, but unfortunately not the one who matters the most.
I am at my lowest, I have a hard time getting all this out of my head. I feel that just accepting it will change who I am and how I view and treat my wife and our relationship (love her less) which is very hard for me to even consider. At the same time I can't imagine throwing what we have away because everything else is just perfect.
I just feel trapped.
PS: she had other boyfriends before that, but it doesn't bother me even if I wish she dated better people cause they were horrible to her.
TLDR:
Wife of 8 years and 18 years together friendzoned me when we first met and fooled around with two guys I knew (real scumbags). Tried my best to move past it when we became serious and partly managed to keep it under control. But lately saw pictures of her with different guys from that time on old computer and RJ hit harder that ever.

SummerSlam 2024:
Bo Dallas vs Finn Bálor
Five years ago, at this very same event, Bray Wyatt debuted a brand new version of himself. A version known as The Fiend. A monstrous being that featured very little man in its existence, it was a demonic creature, feeding on the fear of those it crossed and becoming seemingly impervious due to it.
Five years later, the brother of the man who brought that thing into the wrestling world, faces the same man who fell victim at the feet of The Fiend. And just as Bray Wyatt did, Bo Dallas has some tricks in his sleeve, or...some rabbits in his hat.
[Finn Bálor enters first, the confident Irishman with a historic career who has made his mark as a legend in the business. From Bullet Club to training Becky Lynch & JD McDonagh to arguably the greatest NXT Champion of all time to the first ever Universal Champion to The Judgement Day. Tonight, he looks to build upon that illustrious status with a victory over the unpredictable Bo Dallas.
Bálor stands, ready to fight, when the lights dim out. Bálor is slightly puzzled, this isn't part of Bo's recent entrances.
At the top of the entrance way sits a door, an eerie glow doubled with an eerie vibration emanating from it. Suddenly, the door busts open.
White Rabbit Remix - Jefferson Airplane
Bálor watches as from the door emerges a figure. A figure seemingly humanoid in nature, but something slightly off, the fog filling the area makes it hard to discern what that is.
The fog clears and it becomes increasingly clear what's gone wrong here. The crowd gasps and then quiets.
Bo Dallas White Rabbit inspiration
Bo Dallas White Rabbit inspiration
A figure, very similar to the images above, exits the door and infringes on the sanctity of the ring as he approaches. Fur is matted along the arms, abdomen, legs. Splatters of a once viscous red liquid that has dried a crimson brown are visible all over the once pristine, white pelt.
And the face...a disgusting hybrid between a human and an inhumanely large rabbit. The ears jutting out of the face made out of that same...material. That unnatural fur. The left side of the face revealing what used to be a man. He looks...like Bo Dallas. The skin portion of the face is smothered in red, further stretching the meaning of recognizable. An almost leathery appearance coats the angry, red skin. A texture much too old for Taylor Rotunda's age of thirty three.
The teeth lay as jagged pieces of metal, unable to be contained by the maw of the creature.
The lights come up as the unholy monster enters the once sacred ring. A ring that has made this sport possible and a ring where the best matches in professional wrestling have occured, a ring that held the matches and moments that made you fall in love with wrestling in the first place.
And it's tainted, rendered unclean, by this animal. A chill runs down Finn Bálor's spine. He stands his ground, eyeing his bizarre opponent warily, unsure of what to expect from this unholy creation. Memories of a scene he's starred in before, not unlike this, flooding him.
The White Rabbit's grotesque visage contorts into a twisted semblance of a grin as he advances towards Bálor, his movements jerky and unnatural. Bálor braces himself for the impending confrontation, his senses on high alert as he prepares to defend himself against this monstrous aberration.
The bell rings, signaling the start of the match, and Bálor wastes no time in launching a flurry of strikes at The White Rabbit, hoping to catch him off guard and gain the early advantage. But The White Rabbit proves to be more agile than he appears, dodging Bálor's attacks with ease and countering with a brutal barrage of his own.
The White Rabbit toys with Bálor, taunting him with mocking gestures and sadistic laughter as he systematically dismantles his opponent with a series of harsh maneuvers. Bálor fights back with all his might, refusing to let fear or uncertainty cloud his judgment as he battles against the odds.
As the match progresses, The White Rabbit's dominance becomes increasingly evident, his unnerving presence casting a pall over the arena as he unleashes his full arsenal of twisted and unpredictable offense. Bálor struggles to keep pace, his every move countered with ruthless efficiency by his monstrous adversary.
But just when it seems that all hope is lost, Bálor summons the strength of his fighting spirit, rallying back with a defiant burst of energy that catches The White Rabbit off guard. With The White Rabbit still standing, Bálor delivers a thunderous Coup de Grâce, driving his feet into The White Rabbit's chest with bone-shattering force.
The impact ripples through the ring as The White Rabbit crumples to the canvas, his grotesque form writhing in agony. Bálor seizes the opportunity, pinning his monstrous opponent for...for a one count.
Bálor quickly climbs and attempts a second Coup De Grâce, this time to a downed opponent. The White Rabbit moves out of the way and quickly snaps the neck of Finn Bálor. The Rabbit pulls up the paralyzed form of Bálor, and sinches in Hell's Gates.
The referee calls for the bell as the lifeless form of Bálor begins to bleed from his nose and ears, the extraneous pressure from the submission evident.
The White Rabbit stares out at the audience, stares down at Bálor and exits the ring, he walks towards the door, goes through the portal and closes it behind him.
The lights come up and all that's left is the ravaged body of Finn Bálor.]
RAW, 8/12/24:
(Writers Note: Damian Priest is going to be uninvolved in this feud due to focusing on his main event aspirations and his growing distance from The Judgement Day.)
Two weeks after the emergence of one of the most disturbing figures we've ever seen grace the squared circle, Bo Dallas returns to RAW to address the events of SummerSlam.
He says that when he returned to WWE four months ago, he was a very nervous man. He was wracked with feelings of uncertainty and fear, he remembers going into a match with a specific man, Joe Gacy. He remembers being the most scared he's ever been, you have to understand, Bo wasn't like his brother. Bo didn't get 'extreme', he didn't get the opportunity to have matches like that and here he was.
Faced with a madman, challenged to a Love and War match. Joe, he taught Bo something that night, he told him "Fulfill Your Destiny." And it was at that moment, that Bo realized something. He realized what Bray had been doing all those years.
If you can take your fear, and manifest it into something physical, something truly special can be born, and better yet, it leaves you, the man behind the magic, completely fearless.
Before Dallas can continue, The Judgement Day appears, Dominik Mysterio, Finn Bálor & JD McDonagh surround the ring. Bálor says that Bo caught him off guard at SummerSlam, and he wants a rematch, especially seeing as how without his smoke and mirrors, Bo sure does seem fragile.
"It's true. I wouldn't be able to fight all three of you by myself, which is why I'm so glad I don't have to."
BRAUN!
The Monster Among Men makes his first appearance in almost a year, marching out on stage. The Judgement Day is already sufficiently rattled before the titantron goes a mossy green and Erick Rowan appears besides Strowman, standing with his former Wyatt Family brother.
Strowman & Rowan storm the ring causing JD & Dominik to flee and escape, but Bálor turns around into Grim Affection. Dallas stands tall, inheriting the family Bray built. What's that saying? The brother of my brother is my brother? Something like that.
Bash In Berlin 2024:
Bo Dallas, Braun Strowman & Erick Rowan vs The Judgement Day (Dominik Mysterio, Finn Bálor & JD McDonagh)
[Following a confident, braggadocios entrance by The Judgement Day, Dallas, Strowman and Rowan mark their arrival with a Code Orange performed remix of Feared. The music, calling back to the numerous other songs Code Orange has provided for the Rotunda family.
Dallas, flanked by the hulking figures of Strowman and Rowan makes for an intimidating visual. The Judgement Day have an experience edge though, especially with Bálor having personally trained and scouted McDonagh several years ago.
Dallas and Mysterio start the match and Bo quickly gets flustered by the speed and lucha experience of Dominik. Though Dominik has control early, Dallas gets fed up, and following a lucky strike, tags out to Braun Strowman.
Strowman dismantles Dominik, tossing him around the ring with ease. He connects with a heart-throb to the chest before hoisting Mysterio into a move we have not seen from Strowman...since he was a follower.
The hanging triangle lock is applied, Strowman squeezing around the neck of Dominik as Mysterio hangs limply. Dominik kicks out, inciting Braun to return another maneuver. The reverse chokeslam connects and Strowman places a boot on Dominik's chest, but Mysterio still manages to fight out.
Strowman brings Rowan in, who locks a bear hug forcing Dominik to scramble for escape. Despite Dominik's surviving the bear hug, his relief is short lived as Rowan cinches a vice grip around the skull. Dominik creates separation, and Rowan tries to flatten him with a spin kick, but Mysterio ducks. A dropkick to the knee and a 619 follows, giving Dominik an opportunity to tag out.
Finn Bálor is brought in and begins striking away on Rowan, littering the bigger man with bruises. A well placed pele kick wobbles Rowan and leaves him victim to a shotgun dropkick into the turnbuckles. Bálor attempts a Coup De Grâce, but Rowan avoids shoving Finn into the corner. Rowan charges in, but Bálor hops over him and Erick crashes into the steel post.
JD is tagged in and immediately hits a pump helluva kick on the cornered Rowan. Rowan is down to a knee and McDonagh comes from behind with a leap over Rowan culminating in a stunner. A kick out by Rowan inspires McDonagh to connect with a swanton bomb for a near-fall.
JD attempts for Devlinside, yet discovers Rowan is too big of a man to be trying that on. Rowan gets grip on the neck and goes for a chokeslam, McDonagh does a backflip out of it landing on his feet. JD connects with a superkick, followed by a springboard moonsault DDT.
Dallas breaks up the pin, Dominik rushes in to even the odds, Strowman neutralizes Dominik, Bálor brawling with Braun. Chaos unfolds, and eventually Dallas and co. clear the ring. Braun runs the Strowman Express on Judgement Day plowing through each member at ringside, except for JD who catches him with a penalty kick after hopping onto the apron.
JD and Rowan begin to battle again as the legal men, McDonagh knees Rowan in the face and dives with a crossbody for a two count. JD tags out to Bálor, who allows Rowan to bring in Bo Dallas.
Dallas and Bálor, now both as their mortal selves, begin to brawl. Bálor connects with a slingblade, and a shotgun dropkick driving Bo nearly through the turnbuckles. Bàlor attempts a Coup De Grâce, but Dallas avoids and attempts Grim Affection. Bálor slips out and locks the head up under the arm, connecting with a snap elbow drop across the heart.
Bálor climbs now once more, and Dallas hangs him up before sending Finn to the canvas below with a superplex. A near-fall follows, and Dallas clings to the leg of Bálor, trying to prevent a tag. Finn kicks him away and reintroduces McDonagh to the fray.
JD flusters Dallas with strikes and speed, but as he locks onto the wrist and attempts his springboard moonsault DDT, Dallas catches him in position and connects with Grim Affection. Strowman and Rowan plow through Dominik and Bálor preventing a save.
Dallas gets the victory for his team, and alongside his disciples of destruction, stands tall. The entire locker room put on notice.]
Over the next several weeks, The Judgement Day keeps their distance from Dallas's clan. Dallas fastly finds a new target, challenging The Final Testament. Dallas continuously tells Karrion Kross that he was destined for this, dating back almost a decade (in reference to Kross's stint as The White Rabbit in Lucha Underground.)
We get a very fun Authors Of Pain/Strowman & Rowan match out of it, and by the end of September, Bo has successfully convinced Karrion Kross to abandon AOP, Paul Ellering and even Scarlett, adding yet another massive man to his growing group.
October arrives and with his group nearing completion, Dallas targets a man his brother knew very well. That man being Seth Rollins. Dating back to The Shield & The Wyatt Family's iconic feud to The Fiend chasing Rollins' Universal Championship, Rollins was always one of Bray's best rivals. Not to mention, Dallas and Rollins have history from their days in FCW together, only Rollins has so significantly eclipsed Dallas in success and he's sure to rub that in Bo's face now.
You may think the numbers game is so insurmountable and overwhelming, but one puzzle piece that makes this that much more interesting is who Seth has been teaming with as of late. His protege and trainee, Nathan Frazer.
There's a segment featuring Dallas, flanked by his followers and Rollins with Frazer, but the tension is so heavy between Bo and Nathan, you would think they were the only two people in the ring. Frazer addresses his fear of Dallas, and that fear was proven valid considering the damage Dallas has done to the foes he's encountered since.
Dallas cost Nathan his best friend, he cost him his tag team titles, he cost him his brother! But Nathan has news for Bo, he is not running anymore.
Dallas steps forward, looking to acknowledge the impact he's had on Frazer.
"Nate, is it? I don't know how to tell you this, but...I don't even know who you are."
Bo is calloused and cold, and simply decides to feed Frazer and Rollins to the wolves. We get a tag match between Rollins and Frazer vs Strowman and Rowan, with commentary making note of Rollins and Braun being former tag team champions together, ending in victory for Rollins and Frazer.
Armageddon 2024:
Bo Dallas vs Seth Rollins
[The anticipation is high as Bo Dallas and Seth Rollins step into the ring, flanked by their respective allies. Rollins, accompanied by Nathan Frazer, exudes the confidence of a former champion as he eyes Dallas, who seems to stand that much taller alongside the imposing trio of Braun Strowman, Erick Rowan, and Karrion Kross.
The match begins with Dallas and Rollins locking up in the center of the ring, each vying for control. Rollins gains the early advantage with his technical prowess, countering Dallas's power-based offense with precision strikes and fast maneuvers. But Dallas refuses to back down, using his size and strength to overpower Rollins and gain the upper hand.
As the match progresses, both competitors unleash a barrage of moves, each refusing to give an inch in their quest for victory. Rollins employs his signature high-flying arsenal, soaring through the air with breathtaking dives and aerial assaults that keep Dallas on the defensive. But Dallas proves to be a resilient opponent, weathering Rollins's onslaught and mounting several counterattacks of his own.
In the final moments of the match, Rollins, alongside Frazer battle off Dallas's trio of monsters. Rollins looks for a Curb Stomp, that Dallas avoids. Dallas hooks on for Grim Affection, but Rollins latches onto the arm, trapping Bo before spinning him into a RainTrigger knee strike. A definitive Curb Stomp follows and Rollins is able to secure the victory giving Bo his first clean singles loss since returning.]
With Survivor Series fast approaching, the men Dallas has targeted come back to haunt him, as Rollins and Frazer form something of a truce with The Judgement Day, seeking to take down the common enemy in Bo Dallas.
We get some interesting interactions such as Kross trying to convince JD that he can see the darkness in him, harkening back to JD's NXT character of old, only for JD to tell Kross that he doesn't know anything about him before shattering his nose with a wicked headbutt.
With Dominik Mysterio, Finn Bálor, JD McDonagh, Nathan Frazer & Seth Rollins banding together Bo seems to be just one man short. It's the RAW prior to Survivor Series when Dallas, Strowman, Rowan and Kross stand on stage staring down the babyface quintet. The crowd waits with baited breath before Love Is Blind hits and Joe Gacy strolls on stage, making his main roster debut to side with his NXT foe.
They charge the ring and a brawl breaks out, and as security tries to keep the ten men apart, we here a distinguished William Regal shout
"WarGames!"
Survivor Series 2024:
Team Dallas (Bo Dallas, Braun Strowman, Erick Rowan, Joe Gacy & Karrion Kross) vs Team Rollins (Dominik Mysterio, Finn Bálor, JD McDonagh, Nathan Frazer & Seth Rollins) - WarGames
[It is decided that Joe Gacy and Seth Rollins will be opening this match. Both men selected by their teams for their stamina in matches like these, Gacy from his CZW days, Rollins having been WWE's premier workhorse for years.
The bell rings and they make their way on to the steel connector between the two rings. They begin wallaying on each other with forearms before Joe sneaks in a boot to the midsection, Gacy attempts a powerbomb on the steel, but Rollins reverses with a back body drop.
Seth looks for a superkick, but Gacy catches the foot and sends Rollins into the left ring. Rollins looks for a spinning forearm, but Gacy ducks and gores Rollins with a shoulder thrust. Joe sails over Rollins into the ring, and using his deceptive athleticism, looks for his handspring lariat.
Rollins catches him with a superkick and tries for a Pedigree. Gacy is able to muscle up Rollins into an Alabama Slam, he then throws Rollins into the turnbuckles forcing Seth to take a seat. A big crossbody to the seated, cornered Rollins follows and Gacy begins to reign.
Joe starts targeting the bad back sending Rollins writhing with forearms and knees to the lumbar. He eventually gets a knee on the spine with a tight grip around the mouth, controlling Seth's breathing. Rollins begins to fire up and fight out with elbows to the midsection. Rollins hits a leaping knee strike to Gacy and takes him down a peg.
Rollins attempts a Curb Stomp, but Gacy moves landing Winds Of Change as Rollins turns around. Gacy tries for a running senton, but Rollins moves this time. Curb Stomp attempt, Gacy moves, handspring lariat, Rollins ducks, superkick, Curb Stomp connects.
Rollins knows he can't make the cover so he climbs to the top to inflict more damage. Frogsplash, but Gacy gets the knees up. Joe shoves Rollins into the ropes hoping to connect with an elbow to the back, but Rollins rebounds with a spinning forearm. Gacy ducks locking on for a German Suplex, Rollins lands on his feet and closes in with a V-Trigger, Gacy rebounds off the ropes into a Falcon Arrow and the countdown begins.
Erick Rowan is the next entry, joining Joe Gacy as a focused duo. Rowan pounces on Rollins, but Seth fights back, attempting a RainTrigger but Rowan catches him by the face, in an Iron Claw like grip. Rowan looks for a slam using the claw grip, but Rollins hooks onto the head and reverses into a DDT.
Rollins begins to litter both Joe and Rowan with corner forearms, Rowan eventually catches Rollins and attempts a two handed chokeslam. Rollins dropkicks the body of Rowan mid-slam, and recuperates. He attempts a Pedigree, but Rowan reverses with a back body drop, Rollins lands on his feet and nails an enziguri to stumble the big man.
He mounts Rowan in the corner and begins landing repeated right hands, Rowan shoves him off the middle turnbuckle and closes the distance with a big boot. He positions Seth in the corner before slapping Gacy and hyping him up, ala The Bludgeon Brothers.
Gacy charges for a crossbody to the downed Rollins, but Seth springs up, sails over the running Gacy and lands a dropkick to Rowan. A leaping knee to the mouth follows and Rollins gets Rowan back in Pedigree position.
Gacy comes over with a clothesline that Rollins ducks before hitting a superkick to Gacy, Rowan tries to whip Rollins into the corner but Seth reverses and Erick smashes into Gacy. Rollins jumps to the middle turnbuckle raining down with a barrage of right hands to Rowan then Gacy.
Rowan and Gacy try to catch their bearings before turning around into a Phoenix Splash Crossbody from Rollins and the countdown begins.
Finn Bálor is the next entry, entering a couple of chairs into the field for him and Rollins. They stare each other down, remembering all the wars they've been through and begin to beat down on Rowan and Gacy. It's going well at first, with Gacy especially being incapacitated, before Rowan stops Bálor mid chair swing.
He mule kicks Rollins and rips the chair out of Finn's hands before tossing Finn into the corner. Rollins shortly after joins him. Rowan proceeds to biel toss Rollins who tucks and rolls to come out unscathed. Bálor is then biel tossed on top of Rollins before Rowan throws the aforementioned chair into the face of Bálor.
Rowan attempts to chokeslam Seth on top of the other chair, Rollins scrambles and kicks the chair over so it's legs up. Rowan proceeds with the chokeslam anyway, delivering Rollins onto the bottom of the chair. He then sets up another chair in the corner, wedging it between turnbuckles. He vaults Bálor in that direction, but Finn slides low to avoid connection, only for Gacy to bull pounce him into the chair anyway.
Rowan and Gacy survey the carnage they've caused, as Bálor tries to crawl into the other ring. Rowan joins him on the steel connector and despite Finn's valiant efforts, is able to claw slam him onto the steel beam as the countdown begins.
Bo Dallas is the next entry, and he doesn't waste time getting his hands dirty. He simply passes his objects of destruction their tools. A table, a length of chain and a toolbox. He then observes as his monsters begin to wreak havoc.
Gacy whips at Rollins with the chain, before wrapping it around his face and neck. Rowan squeezes between Bálor's fingers with pliers, applying pressure as he kneels on his back.
Gacy throws the toolbox into the face of an unsuspecting Rollins. Gacy sets up the table against the turnbuckles. He tries to whip Rollins into it, but Seth catches himself, he fights back against Rowan and Gacy but Joe gets a knee to the face before lifting Rollins on his shoulder and charging him through the table.
Rowan yanks Bálor up and delivers him with biel tosses onto the chain and toolbox as the countdown begins.
Dominik Mysterio is the next entry, and he quickly realizes the challenge he's up against. He ducks under Rowan and Gacy, tackling Bo and unloading with right hands. Rowan and Gacy drag him off and begin mercilessly beating on him.
Dallas calls them off, dragging Dominik into the right ring, telling Rowan and Gacy that he'll handle Mysterio. He looks for Grim Affection, but Dominik escapes and rolls backwards with Dallas before hitting a dropkick to the back. Bo is in position, but as Dallas runs the ropes, Rowan catches him by the throat.
Rowan chokeslams Dominik into the arms of Gacy who connects with a German Suplex. The ominous duo gaze down at the broken body of Mysterio, before feeding him to Dallas, who connects with Grim Affection as the countdown begins.
Karrion Kross is the next entry, and introduces a very special weapon. A barbed wire wrapped 2x4 as well as a suspicious grey baggie.
He begins brandishing Bálor and Rollins with the wood and wire. He rips at the flesh and rakes it across the face of Rollins. He begins toying with Bálor, and releases the 2x4 asking Finn to stand up and show him what he's got. Bálor fires up, and sweeps the legs sending Kross back first onto the barbed wire. He then stomps on the chest caving Kross further in.
He beckons Rowan and Gacy to try their best, and as they begin to swarm, the numbers game becomes too much. Rowan with a spinning heel kick, Gacy with a crossbody against the ropes. They continue to dismantle their foes as the countdown begins.
JD McDonagh is the next entry, and introduces several chairs. He cracks Gacy, Rowan and Dallas repeatedly, bruising them with the stiff chair strikes.
He gets Bo in the corner and hits a running dropkick with the chair under his feet, ala Rob Van Dam. McDonagh is rolling, but here comes Kross. Karrion and McDonagh have had something of a personal sub rivalry, and Karrion relishes punishing McDonagh. A fallaway suplex downs McDonagh and leads to Kross wielding a chair.
Swing and a miss, swing a miss, swing and connects with the foot of JD who was going for a roundhouse, swing and the chair lodges itself around the head of McDonagh, headbutt by McDonagh with the chair around the head, both men down and the countdown begins.
Braun Strowman is the next entry, the final for Team Dallas. He introduces multiple tables and sets them up in a row of three. Dominik chooses this time to reappear and swiftly gets chokeslammed through one of the tables.
Braun is able to get JD up in a hanging triangle lock with the chain wrapped around his neck, but Bálor and Rollins come to the save. Finn, Seth and JD work to take down Gacy, Rowan, Strowman and Kross.
McDonagh scaling the cage, Rowan, Dallas and Strowman starting to recover, Gacy on one table, Kross on one table, Rollins and Bálor climb, frogsplash through the table from Rollins, Coup De Grâce through the table from Bálor, moonsault from the top of the cage by McDonagh!
Everyone is down as the countdown begins.
Nathan Frazer is the next and final entry, Frazer is a one man wrecking crew as he enters, showing off his agility using both rings to his advantage. Frazer clears Kross, Gacy, Strowman, Rowan but faulters as he encounters Dallas.
Bo taunts Frazer from his knees, and as Frazer hesitates to take the kill shot, Rowan takes advantage with a claw slam to Nathan. Rollins capitalizes with a superkick to Dallas and a chair shot to the head of Rowan, once Erick's head is sufficiently trapped inside the chair, Rollins hops onto the back and hits a modified Pedigree, jamming the chair into the throat and jaw.
Gacy is seen stalking Rollins, having wrapped the barbed wire from the 2x4 around his arm, he charges in with a handspring barbed wire wrapped lariat to Rollins. Bálor closes in with a shotgun dropkick into the corner before fetching the grey baggie. He opens it, emptying out thumbtacks onto the canvas.
Bo comes over, striking with Bálor. Finn gets the upper hand and climbs for a standing Coup De Grâce, similar to how he tried to put The White Rabbit away at SummerSlam. He misses, going feet first into the tacks, Dallas grabs hold of the head and connects with Grim Affection on the tacks.
Three seconds later, and Team Dallas has survived WarGames. Bo collects up his soldiers, standing above the battered bodies of his opposition. One question remains clear, who can stop Bo Dallas?]
With Team Dallas pulling out a massive victory inside arguably the most grueling match type in WWE history, they look forward to moving on from the men they dismantled at Survivor Series.
One man, though, refuses to let them. That man is Nathan Frazer. Still haunted by the price he paid, the friend he lost, the halt in momentum, due to Bo's arrival in NXT.
A couple of weeks following WarGames, Frazer comes out to call out Bo Dallas, Seth Rollins tries to talk Frazer down and calm him, but Nathan is insistent. He failed to take Bo down, he failed to make things right, he needs to beat Bo Dallas.
Strowman, Rowan, Kross and Gacy emerge. Gacy states that Bo isn't here tonight, but they would be more than happy to show Frazer exactly what he's in for if he wants to keep...chasing rabbits.
The monsters storm the ring and surround Rollins and Frazer in a very hound like way. Just before they pounce, a theme song hits, the lights go up and wouldn't you know it, motherfucking Axiom arrives.
Frazer & Rollins take advantage of the distraction and Axiom lends his hand, leading to the monsters retreating. Rollins guards the ring as Axiom and Nathan Frazer stare each other down.
'Hug It Out' chants run through the arena, and Axiom & Frazer embrace, putting the past behind them.
Over the next two weeks, we get two very interesting matches. The first, a street fight between Bo Dallas and Nathan Frazer, in which Frazer finally gets an opportunity at singles revenge on Bo in a brutal, chaotic brawl. Dallas wins this match with help from his possee.
The second, Karrion Kross vs Seth Rollins, a good showcase for Kross as he steps up against a main eventer and one of the best in the world. Rollins wins in a good match, but it's what happens after that draws attention.
Rollins is seated in the corner when the lights go out, section by section, plunging Rollins into darkness and for the first time, Seth Rollins meets The White Rabbit.
The Rabbit crawls towards Rollins who closes his eyes in fear, creating parallels to a similar scene five years ago. Rollins, though, this time, stands up and stares down The Rabbit.
Seth grabs a microphone and stares down this fiendish entity. "Crown Jewel, me and my boys vs you and yours."
The Rabbit cocks his head to the side and the lights go out once more, when they come up, a hat remains in the ring. A hat very similar to Uncle Howdys', Rollins lifts it and a rabbit jumps out. At the bottom of the hat is a note, written on light blue, Firefly Funhouse themed paper.
"WE ACCEPT."
Crown Jewel 2024:
Axiom, Nathan Frazer & Seth Rollins vs Bo Dallas, Braun Strowman & Erick Rowan
[Five years after Bray Wyatt defeated Seth Rollins at this same event to become Universal Champion, Rollins faces off against his spiritual successor and younger brother, Bo Dallas. Frazer and Axiom share a quick nod of understanding, their strategy clear: use their speed and agility to outmaneuver their larger opponents. On the other side of the ring, Dallas, Strowman, and Rowan stand tall, their imposing presence a stark contrast to the quickness of their adversaries.
The match begins with Axiom and Dallas squaring off for the first time since NXT when Dallas took Axiom's title. The two competitors circle each other cautiously before locking up in a test of strength. Axiom utilizes his lightning-fast strikes and acrobatic prowess to keep Dallas off balance, darting in and out of range with precision. Shortly after, Nathan and Rowan engage in a battle of power versus speed, with Frazer using his agility to evade Rowan's powerful strikes while delivering rapid-fire kicks and strikes of his own.
As the match progresses, Rollins enters the fray, unleashing a flurry of high-flying maneuvers on his ex-partner, Strowman. Braun struggles to keep pace with his nimble opponent as Rollins utilizes his speed to his advantage, ducking and weaving around Strowman's attempts at offense before delivering an enzuigiri that sends the big man staggering backwards.
Rollins lands a knee to the nose and a step-stool Curb Stomp off the back of Frazer shortly after, but Rowan saves the match. Axiom and Nathan join forces, working in tandem to take Rowan out and wear him down with a series of double-team maneuvers. Rollins exits the ring and, acting in the role of Reigns, assists in hitting a Shield Bomb through the announce table on Rowan.
Despite the valiant efforts of Dallas, Strowman, and Rowan, the tide of the match begins to turn in favor of Rollins and his team. Axiom unleashes a devastating flurry of strikes on Dallas once Strowman and Seth tag out, culminating in a rattling roundhouse kick that leaves the former champion reeling. Meanwhile, Nathan Frazer climbs to the top turnbuckle and launches himself into the air, executing a picture-perfect shooting star press that connects squarely with Bo Dallas, leaving him sprawled out on the canvas.
With Dallas incapacitated, Nathan seizes the opportunity to go for the pin, hooking the leg as the referee counts the three. The crowd erupts into cheers as Rollins, Axiom, and Nathan Frazer celebrate their hard-fought victory, Frazer finally getting his revenge on the man who permanently altered his career.]
January arrives and the Dallas clan set their sights on the Royal Rumble, more specifically, helping Bo to win the Royal Rumble. To fulfill his destiny at WrestleMania.
When the Rumble arrives, they're doing a great job of tearing through everyone in the match. Rowan and Gacy aren't even entries, but continuously skirt around the rules, helping Bo, Kross and Strowman rack up eliminations.
They eliminate the likes of Finn Bálor, Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn before they encounter the one man wrecking crew that is Randy Orton. Orton swiftly eliminates Kross and Strowman before turning his attention to Dallas. Bo is able to force him into position for Grim Affection, but Orton escapes landing an RKO and eliminating Bo Dallas.
When the Rumble has concluded, Bo has a hard time accepting this loss, and sics his men on Orton. Orton gets a victory over a game Karrion Kross leading to the onslaught by Strowman, Rowan and Gacy. However, this draws the call of the disgruntled men Bo's crew eliminated at the Rumble.
Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn.
Kevin and Randy already have a friendly history, and Zayn, coming off an Intercontinental Title loss to Ilja Dragunov in August, partners up with his long time tag partner to fight the cause.
Bo acknowledges the history his brother had with Randy Orton, including Orton burning down his childhood home, The Wyatt Compound.
Finally, at Elimination Chamber, much like The Shield and The Wyatt Family over a decade prior, we get a six man tag.
Elimination Chamber 2025:
Bo Dallas, Braun Strowman & Erick Rowan vs Kevin Owens, Randy Orton & Sami Zayn
[It's very poetic, Bo has been very much hitting all of Bray's best moments in modern day versions. The demonic alter-ego debuting at SummerSlam against Finn Bálor, facing off with Seth Rollins at Crown Jewel and now a six man tag at Elimination Chamber.
Dallas lets his opponents know ahead of this match that he has some tricks up his sleeves, but that a truly good magician never reveals his secrets.
There's plenty of fun interactions, Strowman & Zayn having been Braun's first feud away from The Wyatt Family, Strowman & Owens and the terrorizing Kevin went through in 2018, Rowan & Orton facing off for the first time since Orton went after The Wyatt Family in 2017, Bo & Sami reigniting their NXT feud from 2014.
The match ends when Braun sets Owens, Zayn and Orton up in separate corners. He biel tosses Orton, biel tosses Sami and goes for Owens, but Kevin fights back hitting a Stunner on the big man. Bo comes in and eats a Pop-Up Powerbomb for a near-fall.
Kevin gets Dallas in the corner for a Kevin Cannonball and connects, once, twice, Kevin looking for a third cannonball from the corner. Zayn stops Owens and tells Kevin to let Sami end this. Bo staggers up and Sami looks for a Helluva Kick from the corner to the right of the one Owens is stood in.
HELLUVA KICK! TO OWENS!
Kevin falls into Zayn's arms and Sami pushes him to the ground before walking off, leaving Owens defenseless.
Bo crawls over looking for Grim Affection, Kevin escapes, superkick connects. Both men fall and Owens makes the hot tag to Orton. Orton clears out Rowan, Gacy, Kross and Strowman with RKOs before setting up Dallas for the punt. No one to help the wounded rabbit, The Viper closes in.
Orton's momentum is halted though by a hand grabbing his foot at ringside, the person is in a hood and just as Orton shakes free of his grip, he turns around into Grim Affection for the win.
Bo Dallas has pinned Randy Orton. His family in ruins all around the ring, Bo celebrates his victory, and is proven to be a very truthful man. He really did have quite a few tricks up his sleeve tonight.]
It is advertised that on RAW the following night, we will find out the man who cost Randy Orton at Elimination Chamber.
When the time comes, Bo, flanked by his men, states that long ago his brother put into motion a plan. A plan that would unite six people together, the six most optimal people to incite change into this company. They were handpicked by Bray since the beginning.
Braun Strowman, Bray's black sheep, the man he personally discovered and brought into the WWE to be part of his family.
Erick Rowan, Bray's left hand and the man who carried out Bray's commands for years, one of his most loyal soldiers.
Joe Gacy, a man who felt an indescribable spiritual connection to Bray Wyatt, Bray told Bo that he didn't know who the final member was, but that the man meant to fill the role would, that they would feel an intrinsic, undeniable pull.
Karrion Kross, a man with goals very similar to Bray, and a man who was being mentored by Bray backstage prior to his passing, his golden child.
And now that just leaves one person. Someone who knew Bray very well, someone Bray found much success with in this very ring. So without further ado, the final member of The Wyatt Si-
Randy Orton enters, he denounces this ceremony and is out for blood tonight. Bo states that it's actually perfectly convenient that Orton be here for this, seeing as Randy also knows this person very well.
"In fact, Randy, you're the reason this person wasn't here for five years. The past is a funny thing Randy, the axe forgets, the tree...oh, the tree always remembers."
Realization sets in on the face of Orton before the hooded figure blasts Randy as he turns around. The hood comes off, and there stands, the final member of The Wyatt Six.
Matt Hardy.
Randy Orton is able to get his revenge on Matt Hardy in Matt's last WWE match ever, a street fight on an episode of RAW. It's a grueling, physical battle, but Orton knows the numbers game is too large for him to seek revenge on Bo Dallas.
Besides, Dallas has his hands full.
Just as quickly as The Wyatt 6 began, some subtraction begins to occur. One week, Rowan will be with them backstage only to not come to the ring and go missing, Kross and Strowman face similar fates, leaving only Dallas, Gacy and Hardy.
Dallas begins to question where his family members have gone, and Gacy vows to protect him. That is moments before Dallas and Gacy head to the ring, and Matt Hardy is no longer with them.
Backstage footage airs of something destroying Matt Hardy, beating him violently, and as the being turns its head, it is made clear.
The Demon is here.
Heartbeats fill the arena and Gacy exits the ring to guard the perimeter. Red lights dawn on the squared circle, before The Demon attacks Gacy at ringside making quick work of him.
The Demon crawls into the ring before Dallas grabs a mic, kneeling down to The Demon's level.
"I know what you want, there's only one place for souls like ours to do this. Hell In A Cell."
On the go home show for WrestleMania, Finn Bálor and Bo Dallas have a face to face, Finn says that The Demon never got to meet The Fiend but it will get to meet The Rabbit.
"In layman's terms, Bo. You bring your demons, I'll bring mine."

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Memory Transcription Subject: Tassi, Bissem Alien Liaison
Date [standardized human time]: June 29, 2160
Ambassador Loxsel had mentioned that the Sivkits wished to see humanity’s progress, as he phrased it, staking their claim to further-off thrones. With a fleet beelining its way from Paltan space toward the site of the incident, the theatrical Sivkit had graced us with his virtual presence. The entire Sapient Coalition was watching, uncertain how our ships would stack up against theirs. The humans would attempt to hail the unknown hostiles through their drones, from the border base, but I somehow doubted our new enemies would pick up. The research vessels had long since ducked away from the front lines, replaced by top-notch attack drones rushing toward an open class.
Gunning down civilian ships was easy, as Naltor put it to me. The weaponry did take them out with startling efficacy, but they hadn’t picked a target that could fight back. Onso had facilitated another meeting with Kaisal, and Zalk’s secure tech lines proved invaluable to setting up a back channel, cutting out the Yotul middleman. I found myself on edge, worried that our schemes would be discovered. Kaisal promised the Arxur were heading into the fray, as soon as news of the dead carnivores was leaked to him. It might’ve gotten Bissems a gift-wrapped fleet, but I was worried about complicating a situation that was already perilous.
“Now that they’re rushing off to war, and trying to save the Osirs, there’ll be no time to save Ivrana or look for the ghost exterminators,” Zalk complained. “We have to do this ourselves.”
The Osirs were the human’s chosen name for the extinct quadrupeds, crafted after a myth that had appalled several SC representatives. It was named after a god who’d been chopped into pieces by his brother, and brought back to life when the bits of his body were sewn together. Even I wasn’t sure I liked that analogy, but the Terrans found it fitting. They were trying to stitch the carnivores back together with pieces of genetic data; it was easier to obtain viable samples with the Osirs than other extinct races. They could be the race that led the way for others—researchers were hopeful to create a synthetic embryo for them within a few weeks, and start its development in an artificial womb.
I heaved a sigh. “The humans haven’t paused their work on our ecosystem, or the outreach with our diplomats to start peace talks. Between a global war at home and whoever killed the Osirs and the Sivkit expedition, are ghost exterminators really the biggest threat?”
“Of course they are,” the Tseia hissed. “They’re the ones who attacked us. We have no answers, but they’ll go to the ends of the galaxy for these Sivkits and Osirs!”
General Naltor narrowed his eyes. “Settle down, Zalk. Both tasks deserve attention, and with the magnitude of power needed to wipe out a spacefaring species…this is extremely worrying. We can’t expect them to care about us, if we don’t address their concerns. The Paltans are in immediate danger.”
“Which is why we need to keep them on the defensive, so they don’t wind up in our territory. You think they’ll spare Ivrana if they get that far? They already wiped out one carnivore race,” I spat.
“It doesn’t change that we’re on our own, Tassi!” The Tseia tugged at his headfeathers. “We have to figure out ways to be useful, to get anything from anyone.”
“That doesn’t have to be solely military. Be team players; offer aid and a safe haven to any who need it. That’d buy goodwill, so maybe one day, more than people-eating carnivores will back us.”
“What are you all whispering about?” Dustin’s voice made me jump, and the xenobiologist seemed to notice that his presence startled us all. I wondered what he would think if he knew we’d been skulking around to meet Kaisal, and drag the Collective into this to gain a fleet; somehow, I doubted he’d approve. “I haven’t said anything, but you lot have been acting strange ever since your visit to Leirn. What did the Yotul drag you into? It was strange how soon they flipped their tune on your SC bid.”
Naltor scowled. “You’re the one who tried to get us in touch with them to change our minds. We can do some things on our own.”
“Of course you can. I just…thought we were in this together, and would be more open with each other.”
“Dustin, you get regular memory scans. We can’t tell you anything we don’t want leaking to the galaxy, even if we do trust you to keep it in confidence aside from that,” I said, thinking quickly.
I never confronted him, but I don’t understand why he withheld so much about the Arxur. Dustin could say that it’s publicly available info…still, his version of events was much less flattering.
The human scientist frowned, but seemed to give in. “You have a point. I just wish I could help more. It’s hard to give advice when you’re being iced out.”
“You’re not being iced out, so much as the Yotul don’t want the Terran government involved,” Naltor offered a half-truth. “We can’t afford to have them turn on us. It doesn’t have to affect our friendship. We’ve been through some real shit together, nerd.”
“Yeah. We have, haven’t we? Now, we’re witnessing a new interstellar war. I know I’m supposed to provide reassurance, but that scares me a little. All hell’s broken loose since we met Bissems.”
“We feel the same about everything we learned about you; everything’s gone to shit. If you don’t beat these cloacabeaks today, then we’re doubly fucked.”
“Cloacabeak. You adopted my word?” Zalk gasped.
“Shut up, wanderbird. It’s time to see what the white and fluffy ball of drama has to say…and how the battle goes.”
Loxsel had finally moved close to the screen, after making a show of checking that his viewport was completely shuttered and his door was locked. Secretary-General Kuemper looked like she’d swallowed sawdust, as the Sivkit finally unmuted; she was worried what the character of an ambassador would have to say. On an adjacent screen, an alternating feed from the drone formation showed that they’d been booted from subspace. If the aggressors were still in the area, that would prove this system was of enough importance to defend. We’d find out whether they’d confront our inbound fleet soon; should they choose not to meet us, we’d get a read on the planet the Grand Herd had been bound for.
“Hello from c-captivity—for I am a free man in name only! The fateful day of your r-rampage has arrived. Prowl the fields where millions died!” Loxsel screeched. Wasn't it hundreds of thousands? “Salivate at what might have been. May your s-savage hunger carry you to victory!”
Kuemper managed to keep a straight face. “I hope we’ll get a proper assessment of the enemy capabilities, or better yet, contact them to understand why they attacked you. I also hope that the UN has been treating you well.”
“I am well-fed. Fattened for the s-slaughter! You should not talk to them, predator…yet you admire their b-butchery. You seek their massacre techniques for yourself. Generations of scrumptious bites gone, p-puffed out of existence. Don’t you savor to play with your food—the taste, excoriating their flesh?”
“Loxsel, we don’t consider Sivkits to be food. We’re here to lend a hand, like you asked us to. We’d like to have diplomatic relations with the Grand Herd, but we can’t manage that without a shred of…normalcy in what you say to us.”
“Then just kill them all. Whatever r-ruse you project toward these servile prey, your instincts howl for blood. Brethren of mine, slain by their craven debauchery, entrails scattered. We want these abominations off this world, and your almighty claws can deliver it!”
The Secretary-General’s pupils snapped toward him. “Why are you so set on this world in particular? Wouldn’t it be wiser for the Grand Herd to avoid this…craven debauchery by choosing another planet? It’s not like this one is brimming with vegetation; our long-range scans suggest it’s mostly desert.”
“You wouldn’t understand. All that matters to hunters is w-what lines your voracious stomach, and ruling over as much terrain as possible. We have purpose. We want what’s ours, yet is now blighted by vermin. It could not be b-bloodless, no! Despair at the infestation. I lament…what was snatched, wrenched from our pastures! It is an insult to have to turn to foul, rancorous b-beasts like you.”
“You came to us. You didn’t have to,” Kuemper hissed. “You insult us—”
“I am showering you with praises, odes to your c-cruelty! I apologize if I insulted you; I’ll step it up!”
“What does stepping it up look like?” Onso snickered from the crowd. “Go on, show us!”
“Rapacious m-menaces of Sol, ingesting war and death with insatiable appetite. Flayers of children, crushers of hope, terrors that flattened the cradle!”
“That wasn’t them. The humans fought to save us, and then rebuilt our home from scratch,” the Gojid Prime Minister interjected.
“The cradle was flattened, and that’s the part that matters! Where was I? Ahem. Unhallowed ones who stole the Arxur’s cattle for yourselves, who had Duerten minions perform the shadow caste’s execution…who broke our spines!”
Kuemper smacked her forehead. “We definitely didn’t do that. We could fix them even, if you stopped shunning us.”
“By fix, do you mean removing the bone altogether? Paralyzing us so it’s not a problem? I’m not so ‘Sivkit-brained’ to not see through your word lures!”
“If that’s what you truly think of us, then never mind. Humanity doesn’t want to be seen as monsters, and you hold us in such low regard. Why don’t we observe the battle in silence?”
“Yes, predator master! I won’t dare to raise my voice or interrupt your war cries again.”
Loxsel placed a paw on the top and bottom of his muzzle, as if manually holding it shut. The human leader’s exasperation was on full display, adding color to an otherwise tense and sober moment. Having been booted from FTL transit on the system’s fringes, the drones dispensed ammo on the disruptors to ensure they wouldn’t impede backup; that allowed them to tunnel slightly closer, before planet-based gravity distortions interrupted their progress again. Ship signatures appeared, warping in behind the UN armada from the direction they came. More automated foes crawled out of the woodwork throughout the system, thousands upon thousands of them waiting. There were also a colossal amount of hostiles marching out from the desert world.
Attempts to hail the foreign faction went unanswered; the Terrans even flashed blinking lights from the hull, in case traditional communications weren’t working for some reason. Our enemies zipped toward the SC fleet, this time not hiding that their guns were primed for the kill. While prepping for combat, our force spared a few resources toward scouring the system for signals, and trying to crack their encryption. Running their language through a translator matrix could help us gather intel—perhaps learning more about the attacks on the Sivkits and the Osirs. However, there was nothing of use we could pick up, besides the standard background radiation and our internal signals.
Why are these people so hostile to us, so adamant about driving anyone out of this system without any communication attempts?
It was evident that these murderous aliens had been expecting our return, judging by the uptick in ships stationed here. They started off by slinging particle beams, but the Terran spacecraft on the frontlines were generating strong magnetic fields—which could separate the charged rays. General Naltor was taking notes about the SC’s capabilities, just as he had during the general strategy briefing. It was a test of hurling offensive weapons at one another, and seeing if they could be parried or deflected. The enemy had numbers, having anchored themselves deeply to this system. Ambassador Loxsel should lose whatever attachment he had to this world in a hurry.
Our own particle beams weren’t countered by plasma or magnetic shielding, rather being absorbed by what appeared to be a layer of liquid armor; our weapons’ power fizzled within the water, as the simple medium scattered their heat. The battle of engineering appeared to be a stalemate so far, with each party finding a unique counter.
“Only predators could c-create such dastardly weapons!” Loxsel brayed, paws flying away from his snout. “They dreamed up the same base horrors as you. This is hunter against hunter, a contest of t-trickery. How primal…this can’t be my life! I want out!”
Kuemper raised a hand. “These aliens are clever, Loxsel. They figured out their own way to oppose our particle beams, but we have other weapons. The question is really who has the best weapon.”
“Bring out the antimatter! Launch them at the planet and hope it falls from the heavens like rain!”
“That is not how we operate, even if they did with the Osirs. If they somehow aren’t behind the Osirs’ deaths, then that’s not the signal we want to send about our terms of engagement.”
“Do you kill your prey by being boring? Because I’m about to…drop DEAD! Dead, I say!”
“You do that,” Onso heckled from the audience. “In silence.”
Kuemper’s comment about whoever would deliver the weapon that turned the tide rang true; someone needed to score major blows. These enemies must have the force to at least whittle us down with their superior numbers. In any other system, throwing twenty thousand SC drones would be enough to overrun the place, but this region of space was fortified to the teeth. As we crested to closer distances, each side tested the other’s ionic shields and armor with plasma, and point-defenses against mini-missiles. The deciding factor was indeed that home advantage, the terrain being familiar to our foes. The asteroid belt—and I mean all of it—came to life, with tens of thousands of giant rocks chucked at us with slingshots.
“Hey! That’s our move,” Dustin protested, as the SC drones reacted to the barrage of space rocks flying in all directions. “Maybe humans aren’t the craziest ones out there.”
Zalk gave him a perplexed glance. “The hostiles threw a plurality of their asteroid belt at you, and that’s your reaction?”
“What do you want me to say? That we probably don’t have enough explosive firepower, or time, to break them all up?”
“I see your drones desperately firing away from the ships, and weaving all about to avoid space rocks. How am I supposed to believe you can protect the Tseia when you are getting rolled?”
The human’s lips curved down. “There’s always a bigger fish, Zalk. They’re formidable…but we’ve ended bigger fish before, with a lot less at our disposal.”
“While I appreciate an attempt at a relatable metaphor, I wouldn’t go comparing yourself to fish. On Ivrana, all fish get eaten by us,” Naltor quipped.
“Fine. There’s always a bigger Bissem—and I’m looking right at him.”
“Half-feathered nerd.”
I looked toward the screen with worried eyes. “Is now the time for jokes and banter?”
“Gallows humor, Tassi,” Dustin sighed. “Beats doomspiraling, doesn’t it?”
I couldn’t help but to “doomspiral,” as the enemy seized our automatons’ moment of weakness. Our formation was scattered across all three axes, but each feed showed them under a similar asteroid siege. Recognizing that the Terran-led craft were on the back foot, the hostiles made use of their greater numbers at last; they hurled themselves at our front lines—ramming tactics that piled onto the existing debris barreling down on us. Our drones were being beaten into submission, flinging antimatter missiles at asteroid and foe alike.
The SC dispatched their nanodrones to attack by a thousand cuts, but dust guns smited these with equally small particles. Larger ships’ shielding could burn them in a heartbeat, yet the tiniest vessels struggled to reckon with them. Clearly, our enemies had a rotating arsenal for every situation. Asteroids crashed over the paltry physical shields, rendering them ineffective in blocking incoming fire. The humans looked a bit disheartened, seeing that the hostiles had an answer for every punch they threw.
Not hesitating to bring all of their friends to the party, space stations nestled within the asteroid belt revved to life. The enemy dumped warheads in our faces as well, just as our casualties were teetering on the edge of a catastrophic count. The Sapient Coalition was getting hit with everything under the ice shelf, all at once. I wasn’t even sure our nemeses had shown their entire hand, but they didn’t need to. Feeds across the drone fleet were going dead, limiting the rapidly alternating angles. Lights blinked out on the space map’s display feed.
The humans aren’t going to be able to avenge the Sivkits or the Osirs today. This is a swift, devastating loss. We can’t take them on their own turf…and I’m not sure we could, even outside of their territory!
Kinetics, lasers, particle beams, missiles, and asteroids vanquished SC vessels one by one, despite their last gasp of resistance. For all of Dustin’s gallows humor, I could see the human was internally doomspiraling—fearing a war on the scale of the one they put to bed twenty-three years ago. Ambassador Loxsel flopped to the floor as the last feed went dead, amid a sea of debris that marked all that was left of our fleet. The Sapient Coalition had some hard questions to ask themselves, about how they could stand up to an enemy on this level…and to consider whether it was worth it to engage at all.
---
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Edit: DO NOT message me a simple hi or hello, with no information about you, Put some effort in to your message like i have, come on. Day+Attempt#183
Hello everyone, Thank you for taking the time to read, I know its long, I know - I know. But its worth the read, Trust me. I appreciate you immensely.
Here's a bit about me,
My name is Jay, I live on the East coast of the US. I'm looking for love - like everyone else on here.., but you may not believe or even be doubtful that I've never had a GF before with me being 26, but its true. I'm simply just not willing to "be with" just anyone and I'm very picky. I want us to be a match, more than just have similar things in common.
One thing I have always been told is that I'm a "Real Catch, I'd be extremely lucky to have someone like you" - WELL THEN TAKE ME. I'M FREE. LOL.
About me:
Physically -
~I'm a semi-tall guy, around 5'10.
~I'm thin but muscular.
~I have dirty blonde/ brown hair.
~Changing colored eyes.
~A voice nice enough to melt all your safeguards and get right into your heart and weak spots.
~I do not have any tattoos or piercings. Though I would like to get some eventually.
If you'd like to see a picture of me just ask and I'll show you - IF I may see you as well, I simply just don't want a picture of me out there for anyone to see.
-If there's anything else you'd like to know just ask.
Otherwise -
~I do have 3 pet bunnies I would be more than happy to show you, they are extremely cute.
~I'm a very honest and down to earth guy.
~I'm very patient and easy going.
~I'm very curious and inquisitive. I will try to ask everything I can to learn all about you haha.
~I'm Very VERY Kind & Caring, I will probably ask how you are feeling a bajillion times a day, simply out of care for you.
~I can get pretty clingy, and will always want your attention and to be talking with you. If i have someone im interested in i wont want to talk to anyone else🤷‍♂️
~I'm very trustworthy - you can confide in me, and entrust your deepest secrets and I wont tell a soul.
~I'm a HUGE hopeless romantic, im old fashioned and will always try to impress you.
- I'm, a BIG softie even though I may look a smol bit intimidating, but I'd do just about anything to see you smile or laugh. And yes.., I do mean anything.
~I'm a big goof - I will get up to some silly shenanigans ALL the time, I will crack dumb jokes and send you memes and tik toks just to make you happy, even if its from across the room I'd wait to see your reaction lol.
~I'm extremely loyal, and would never even think of cheating.
~I will cook for you, and clean up too, even around the house, I'm very self productive and don't ask for much. Just don't forget to kiss the cook.
~I'd also love to just cuddle up and watch a movie or read a book together, anything to get us closer. Id try to take you out on dates whenever possible haha. I have a million SUPER romantic date ideas I have but have never had anyone interested enough in me to take out. Here's your chance ;)
~I will always want to share stuff I find interesting with you, and try to share every moment of every day with you. I'm not looking for someone who can only talk for a small amount of time, I want someone who's willing to put in all the effort I put into them back into me, it goes both ways. If I'm "with" someone you are my TOP priority nobody and nothing else would be. You would be the only person I'd truly want to talk to, so rest assured I would NEVER cheat, even more so because no one is interested in me - Hence why I'm here hahaha.
I'm sure there is more to me than this snippet but I cant think of more at the moment haha, so get to know me and find out more about me.
Some of my interests are: Engineering- I'm a nerd. I admit it. I love being technical and hands on, I love building things. All kinds of things, from furniture, machinery, and reverse engineering anything I find. I love learning how things work and trying to improve things.
Music - I prefer music with a very fast pace, or with some very meaningful lyrics I can relate to. I love to sing along to music and songs that have a deep meaning behind it I can sympathize with makes it all the better. Some bands I like are: Bad Omens, Beartooth, Demon Hunter, MIW, I9K - The list goes on. I'm a bit of a metalhead unfortunately.
TV Shows & Movies - I love watching shows, and I'd love to stream some shows and have some E-dates with you, to get to know you, or if you are close to me, maybe we could do it in person. Some shows I like or more of the Fantasy/Sci-Fi, Comedy, Action, stuff like: National Treasure, Halo, BattleBots, Rick and Morty, AHS, Anything Marvel or DC, The Witcher, Wednesday, The Sandman, The Magicians, The Umbrella Academy, ETC.
Gaming - Yes yes I know, Basic guy likes basic stuff. But gaming has been a thing for me since forever. I know most of you wont care or want to hear that, but I'll leave out the specifics on this part unless you are interested in that, MEGA Bonus points if you are.
Here's a lists of Cons to dating me-
~I'm not Ryan Reynolds. Disappointing, I know.
~I will fight you on what goes on pizza lol.
~I'm not rich.., Yet.
~I can't pronounce Worcestershire.
~I'm slightly forgetful, but with good reasoning.
~(Not really a con but- some might disagree) I still have ALL of my firsts, Do with that what you will c:
~I've got an endless pile of love and affection and no one to give it to! What a dilemma! Help me fix it?
Other than that I'll save the rest for a bit more of getting to know each other.
Here's a bit of what I'm looking in you:
~Preferably someone with lots of free time, and loves to chit chat. I'm seriously not interested in getting 1 message a day. Though I understand people get busy, I personally am not willing to try to learn about you and form something with 7 responses a week. Effort gets reciprocated and I appreciate the time you put in me.
~Physically: -I’m not personally attracted to anyone who’s “curvy/ chubby”, I apologize. Not a shallow thing, I just dont have the attraction chemical in my brain for that, I’m sorry. -If you’re shorter than me, thats a plus to me. -I love dimples, if you have those when you smile, bonus points 😊 - I’m not sure what else to put.., but as for nsfw wise find out😂
~I'm a sucker for a different accent other than American, and if you have an Posh English accent you have already won my heart.
~I'm also only really looking for someone within the ages of 18-35. I don't want anyone old enough to be my mom lol.
~I'd prefer (But not a must) people NOT on the other side of the world, as other time zones SUCK. I don't expect to find anyone who also has never had a boyfriend either, but that would be a real plus. I also don't mind a LDR, but I don't want that forever. But it gives us time to get to know each other.
But as for attributes I'm looking for in you:
~Someone who is above all else very very Loyal and would never cheat.
~Someone who is Honest, and will tell me the truth over a little white lie.
~Someone who is Kind & Caring, who'd constantly check on me, and accept me for who I am & help me improve day to day.
~Someone who is trustworthy, and I can count on to keep my secrets safe, or even just help me remember things.., I do tend to be somewhat forgetful.
~Someone who is very Patient and wants to see me succeed and will help me do so, just like I would help you. Even if its small day to day things, I would appreciate your company ANY time.
~I want a partner who is Affectionate, can reciprocate, and loves to snuggle and talk about their day, and what their interests are, and what makes them happy.
~Someone who can admit they get clingy or overprotective is a bonus.
~A partner with good communication is key, if something wrong we have to be able to talk about it.
~A partner who likes to game with me or at least watch me play would be a plus but not a requirement.
~Someone with a good sense of humor and like to joke around, I am a big goof after all and I love to joke around. Sending memes is always appreciated and good to cheer people up too!
~I'd prefer someone with the same music taste, but not a requirement, Plus if you wouldn't mind if I send you love songs occasionally that's a bonus, or sending me some back haha.
~Being willing to voice call is a must, Texting forever is not the way to go. I have to know what your voice is like haha, later on we can video call if you are comfortable with that. I prefer chatting on Discord because Reddit messages of any kind I'm sure you know are unreliable and sucky in general. So please send me your discord if you have one :)
~I would LOVE to see picture of your pets if you have any. Bonus points if it includes your beautiful self haha.
I'm sure there is more I'm looking for but I cant think of it right now haha, I will have to edit this when I think of it.
Please tell me about you as an opener! I told you a good bit about me, now its your turn haha.
Tell me some things like -
~What's your name?
~Where are you from?
~How old are you?
~What are your hobbies / interests?
~What about my post interested you?
~Where is my TV Remote?!
~Selfie? Pet pics?
~Hit me with your best joke or meme :)
~What's your favorite candy?
I'd LOVE to get to know you, and see where things go.
But yeah, I know it was long I'm sorry haha. Send me a message and lets get to know each other! :)