Kitchenaid oven door won t close

I feel so far from God even though I want to close. I’m a terrible servant and daughter to Him. I’m scared of hell and I just want to be in Heaven with Him but I’m afraid He won’t allow me. I love Him but I don’t feel like I love Him enough. I try not to sun but I keep falling into the same sin over and over. I’m scared that I might be doing something that is a sin and I don’t know. I wish I was a good Christian like the people I see on Tik Tok and stuff. I don’t have any Christian fellowship in my life because nobody I know is a real Christian. I’m just scared of hell and that’s why my relationship with God is really bad. I wish it could be better.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

This is a continuation of a previous post (look at my other posts for context/background details).
Summary: we are in the US and were working with a broker in the UK. Accidentally bought too many shares ($300k) and they offered us a margin loan ($172k). Since then everything that’s been happening has led us to believe this company is scamming us. They won’t let us sell our active shares until we pay back the loan and are threatening legal action. We never signed any documents, may have just verbally agreed on the phone. We asked for the loan obligations/requirements and they literally sent us a bulleted Microsoft Word document. Again, everything points to this being a scam but that little bit of doubt of them taking legal action is gnawing at us. The original document was written in Russian so I translated it. It reads as such:
“You took the Margin Loan on 05/23/2023, valid until 05/31/2023 Margin Loan is provided not by the company, but by financial institutions such as banks or hedge funds. For the duration of the Margin Loan, the financial institution that provides this amount has the right to restrict any operations on the trading account of the partner, therefore, opening, closing transactions, and withdrawing profits are limited. In case of non-payment of the Margin Loan within the agreed timeframe: - The financial institution that provides the amount gives a month for repayment, but subject to a penalty of 2.5% per week. - If, within these 30 days, you do not pay off the Margin Loan, your account is frozen by HMRC (HM Revenue and Customs) for 180 days until the circumstances are clarified. - After this period, if it is proven that the procedure for obtaining Margin Loan from the company has been followed, HMRC submits a request to the IRS (US Internal Revenue Service) that the US resident owes the financial institutions of the UK. - The IRS, in turn, unilaterally extinguishes the debt to HMRC. - Further, unilaterally or judicially, the IRS hangs this financial obligation on your bank (as a loan) for 2-5 years, at standard bank interest. - The most unfortunate outcome is the prosecution of money laundering and proceeds under the AML policy (https://www.investopedia.com/) Now for the positive: -If during this month you cover 50% of the Margin Loan amount, your analyst will have the authority to resell the losing position that led to the Margin Call. -I will have the opportunity to petition the hedge fund for you not to accrue interest and have the opportunity and delay to pay off the remainder of the Margin Loan. -It is also possible to agree on a partial withdrawal of funds after repayment of more than 50% of the Margin Loan amount.”
How can we find out if any of this is true? Does the IRS even have anything to do with investments dealt with brokers overseas?
We really want to just block them and be done with it (have already lost tens of thousands of dollars) but don’t want this giant loan to be real.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

I am not the Original Poster. That is u/CandyNinja900. She posted in offmychest
Trigger Warning: delusion; threat of kidnapping
Mood Spoiler: disturbing
Original Post: May 31, 2023
Title: My best friend thought that shoving her breast down my daughter's throat to calm her down was completely ok.
Basically what the title says. I have a daughter of 10 months. Me (30f) and my best friend (31f) have always been super close, and she helped a lot during my pregnancy and after childbirth. So it always came naturally to me to ask her for help, till she became some kind of nanny for my daughter when needed. She's always been very eager and happy to help, since she has no children of her own (she had a miscarriage in the past and stopped trying afterwards).
So we were at a mutual friend wedding yesterday, and I was holding my daughter for quite some time, since she hates strollers. My best friend came to me and offered to take her for a while, so that I could take a break and go chat with some friends. I agreed and wholeheartedly thanked her.
After twenty minutes or so, I come back to where we were, and she wasn't there. So I start looking for her in the garden, and she was literally nowhere to be found. Finally after another ten minutes I manage to find her, and I see her talking to some people while holding my baby with her boob shoved down my daughter's throat.
I literally tried my best to keep my composure and not to scream, so I went to her and said that we needed to talk. After reaching a quiet place, I yelled wtf was wrong with her and why was she nursing my daughter. She looked at me in disbelief, and she replied that she understood that it was the best way to calm my daughter, and that there's nothing wrong about it, adding that she could very well be her daughter. Wtf???? I was shocked, but we couldn't keep up the conversation because we needed to get back inside for the wedding cake. I told her that we would have continued the discussion later on.
We never did, but we agreed to meet today in a couple of hours. Honestly, I'm so f--kin mad. Wtf?????? Why did she had to do it?? I don't even f--kin know what to tell her without raging at her. It's been nearly a day and this thought never left my mind not even for a second. How could she say that "there's was nothing wrong with it"??? I feel like she violated my daughter, and she gave literally zero f- about it. I'm trying to arrange my thoughts before talking to her. I hope I don't end up hitting her. I'm nearly bursting out.
Edit: 5 hours later
So we met and we talked. I let her talk first. She explained that my daughter was restless while she was talking to a couple of women, and they said that maybe she was hungry and it was fine for them to keep talking while she was breastfeeding, so she just...did.wtf. I went straight to the point: what she did was completely f--ked up. No excuses. She told me that she didn't agree and that she did nothing wrong. She said that she tried everything in the past and nothing worked except for her breasts, which were the only things that calmed her down, so she just did what she always had done. I literally couldn't believe it. I asked her what was wrong with her for doing such a thing behind my back and why the f-ck among all things she thought that she could dry nurse my daughter. She replied back saying that she was just doing what she thought was best for the baby and doing what my daughter wanted, adding that she didn't think she needed to inform me of such thing, since she's quite a second mother to her. I was losing it, but she continued. She added that she wasn't dry nursing her, since a while ago after using pumps and dry nursing her she started to lactate a little, saying that the supply was still low but that in a while I could leave breastfeeding to her and stop doing it and worrying about it.
I was LIVID, but she didn't even realize, she was completely clueless like absorbed in her own world. Like not even realizing that what she did was wrong. So I stood up from the table, and told her that she was completely insane and that she was creeping me out. I told her that she wasn't allowed near my daughter anymore and to never contact me again, or I would report everything to the police.
She started crying saying that I couldn't cut her off from our daughter's life, so I lost it and shouted at her that it's not her goddamn baby but it was ME who popped her out, it was ME who was pregnant for 9 months and she was MY daughter, and not hers, and left.
I'm just completely shocked. I don't even think shocked can completely describe what I'm feeling now. I received a couple of texts from her begging to reconsider it and asking to see my daughter. I told her to stop contacting me, and blocked her. If I receive another message or call or anything like that I will report everything to the police. I'm just disgusted. She was my best friend. Why did she do something like this? I'm completely speechless.
I'm editing this post again if something happens, but I just hope nothing is going to happen honestly. I just want to puke.
Update Post 1: June 1, 2023 (Next Day)
After trying for most of the last evening to contact me on social medias, this morning she showed up at my front door. I told her that she needed to leave, because I didn't want to call the police on her. She started crying babbling why I was treating her this way and why I was keeping her away from my daughter, since she did nothing wrong. I told her that everything she did was wrong, because she did all of this behind my back. She can't be her mother, and she can't take over as the only one breastfeeding. It was delusional even just thinking something like this.
She responded saying that my daughter needed her breasts and that her milk will be surely by far better than mine for the baby. If this wasn't enough, she said that she was worried because my breasts are too small to feed her properly and to please stop being selfish and start thinking what's really better for my daughter, concluding saying that she was fine with me breastfeeding her until she reached a sufficient supply but then I should leave the responsibility to her if I wanted my daughter to grow healthy. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I wasn't even mad. I couldn't believe it was my best friend the one who was saying such bulls--t.
She was talking really loud and I guess my daughter heard that because she started crying. And she took it as a sign that my daughter was calling for HER. WTF.
She only left when I was dialing the police, saying that I shouldn't treat her like this and that she's only doing what's best for my daughter.
I'm done. I can't take this s--t anymore. I contacted a mutual friend and I told her everything, emphasizing that she needs help. She agreed to talk to her and see what's going on. In the meanwhile, I'll go to the police and try to file for a RO, and I will talk to a pediatrician as soon as possible. I can't live peacefully like this, and I'm starting to get worried for my daughter.
Many, many thanks to each one who showed support/offered advice, and I will update again if something comes up
Relevant Comments:
Can you contact her parents?
"Unfortunately I don't know her parents, and I don't know how to get in touch with her ex husband. I asked the mutual friend if she perhaps knows something more"
Is she even lactating or is that a delusion as well?
"I honestly don't know. Just the thought of her inducing lactation using my daughter makes me shiver. But my daughter gets very frustrated when she gets no milk immediately from sucking, at least with me, so I don't really know what to think. Edit: thinking about it I do think that her breasts have gotten bigger, since I saw her nearly everyday. I don't know if inducing lactation cause breasts to grow just like pregnancy, or if I just made a blunder"
The horrible smaller breasts comment:
"It was so uncalled for and just plain stupid. I couldn't believe she said something like that since she always has been very smart. Yes, she's embarrassingly busty but she never bragged about them not even once, and being busty has nothing to do with breastfeeding. I never had issues feeding my baby. I really have no idea where this thing came from. It doesn't seem like something she would say, like all the rest of it.. And for the record, I don't regard mine as small.. In fact I think they're too big.."
Plans:
"I'm indeed considering staying at a hotel for the time being, I'm trying to organize everything. She has a copy of the house keys and I don't think I can change the locks swiftly"
How much about you and your codes/info/locks does she know?
"She's been my best friend for more than 20 years and she's been with me nearly everyday before and after childbirth. If she doesn't know everything, she knows a good 99% of that everything.."
Why wouldn't you know how to contact her parents/ex-husband after knowing her 20 years?
"I never wrote about not knowing her ex husband. I don't know where you read that. I do know her ex husband but since the divorce I never spoke to him nor I have means to contact him. I asked the mutual friend if she knows something more perhaps his address or telephone number since I can't find him on social medias. Regarding her parents, I don't know them so welll, when we were younger she had a live-in nanny and she's the only person related to her that I knew personally, since she was the one who took her to school or to the playground were we met to play in the past. I only met her parents once, but we never spoke. From what she told me, she always had a strained relationship with her parents because they were always busy working. But it was a delicate topic so we never talked much about it. I could try contacting the nanny but I should try to find her on social medias"
Update Post 2: June 2, 2023 (next day, so two days after OG post)
So, I came back home this morning after spending the night at a nearby hotel. I didn't feel safe staying alone in my house, since she had a copy of the keys. Even if I have a surveillance system I didn't want to take the risk. The first thing I did when I came back was calling an emergency locksmith, explained the situation, and they arrived and did the job swiftly. I felt so much safer knowing that she can't get in anymore. I checked the house but I was exactly as I left it yesterday, and after checking the surveillance tapes I was sure she didn't pay me a visit. I informed my close neighbors about what happened, and they were very understanding and helpful. I then met up with the mutual friend, and she updated me on the talk she had with her.
She told me that she visited her at home this morning, because she wanted to talk to her face to face since she thought I was a little bit overreacting. Well, she went, my best friend greeted her and they started chatting a little before she invited her in. So far so good, until they sat down and my best friend asked her if they could keep talking while she pumped because she needed to get her supply running. Our mutual friend played dumb, saying that it wasn't a problem but she asked why she needed to pump if she doesn't have childrens. She replied back saying that she indeed has a daughter and that she was surprised that I didn't tell the mutual friend about it. She then pointed out that it was my daughter and that even if she didn't gave birth to her she still consider her as her baby too, and that she needed mama's (referring to her) milk to grow healthy. She kept going saying that she had no choice but pumping because I was being sassy and inconsiderate and I wasn't letting her breastfeed our baby, but that she couldn't be inconsiderate like I was and she needed to get her supply to a sufficient level, but that she was sure that I would change my mind in no time since I'm not stupid and I know that her breasts are better for our daughter.
She told me that she couldn't believe what she was hearing, and that she couldn't believe that all of this was true. But what it shocked her the most was the fact that she was indeed lactating, she wasn't producing much but she was indeed pumping breastmilk. She tried to talk to her but it wasn't no use, she just wasn't listening, and after a while trying she just said that there was nothing wrong in what she was doing and that she was just being a good mother, and after that she asked her to leave because she needed to relax while pumping. Unfortunately she forgot about asking for the keys of my house, but fortunately I was able to change the locks this morning.
I honestly wasn't surprised hearing all of that. But still, it was very, very depressing. She was completely shocked and she couldn't understand what happened, since apart from this she seemed completely normal.
I then asked her to accompany me to the police, and unfortunately there aren't no extremes yet to file for a RO, not even a temporary one. According to what they told me where I live solid proofs of harassment, stalking, etc need to be presented, and the surveillance tapes/texts (which are the only things I have) don't show no harassment or clear evidence that she's stalking me. So the only thing I could was file a formal complaint of what happened, and did that. They told me that they will keep an eye on the situation, and they will check my neighborhood more frequently to be sure nothing happens.
And that's it for now. The mutual friend will stay at my house for a couple of days to help me recover from what happened, also to wait for my parents to arrive.
Unfortunately she doesn't know her parents, but she found a way to contact her ex husband, and I will contact him tomorrow to ask for help. It's been a while and I hope he's willing to.
I also booked an appointment with the pediatrician, and I will get my daughter checked next week.
I will stop making updates for a while. I need to get my s--t together, plan what to do next, and take care of my daughter. Fortunately enough my parents are coming to help me, and I'm really really relieved. I don't think I can keep facing this situation alone.
People of reddit, thank you very much, really. You gave me wonderful advices and support, and it really helped. I will update you after the situation settles down a bit, and I really hope it does. Thanks again, and bye for now.

Given Reddit’s recent shenanigans I don’t expect I’ll be sticking around much longer.
Unless some major backtracking happens between now and June 30th, I’ll be leaving Reddit for good.
I leave this comment on here for the few folks in here that I’ve gotten to know and form friendships with. I won’t name y’all here but if you’re reading this and weren’t just curious about a random commenter, then you’re probably one of them. Thanks for the memories and good times, I appreciated our interactions.
Cheers, and thanks for all the fish.

I (now 18f) got pregnant when I was 16, with my then boyfriend at the time, he was 19. We were together for 2 years and had a very toxic relationship.
He lived with me in the basement of my parents house and about 5-6 months into the relationship started isolating me from friends. As our relationship kept going he became obsessive and controlling, one time calling me 147 times in 30 minutes because I didn’t call him while I ate lunch at school. We would fight all day over stupid things like me being at school/work and not being able to be on my phone (I worked 6-12 month room in a daycare) and then come home to a room we shared, and fight about our day and me not wanting to constantly be pestered while I’m trying to get things done. Once we would lay down to go to bed he would guilt trip me into having sex with him, saying things like, “we never do it anymore,” “you don’t love me anymore,” “come on babe, please.” After multiple times of telling him no, I would finally give in, and lay there while he did his thing, trying to get it done and over with so I wouldn’t have to hear him complain anymore.
One day I was getting out of work, and while I was getting into the passenger seat of his car while we were fighting I accidentally dropped my phone on the pavement, bent down to grab it, and he started backing up the car, eventually hitting me in the face with the door. I had a black eye for 4 days and had to go to school and work with it. He told me to “put some ice on it, so your mom doesn’t think I hit you.”
After 2 years of stress, fighting, and being coerced into having sex with him when I didn’t want to, I eventually broke up with him and got a new job.
3 weeks after, I found out I was pregnant (most likely from me not wanting to have sex). After the first trimester was over and I was less likely to lose the baby, I told him and stated very clearly, I would like to be left alone and I don’t want him involved due to how his and my relationship was. About 2-3 months later he told me that the kid wasn’t his and I was lying because I was embarrassed about getting pregnant from a one night stand (I never cheated, and didn’t sleep with anyone til 3 days before I found out I was pregnant)
I cut contact with him after we broke up and the only communication we’ve had is through him contacting my family. I had a beautiful healthy baby boy and have tried to keep his life as stress free as possible. Bd is not on the birth certificate and has no legal rights to my son, nor has he ever met/asked any questions about him.
He started harassing me and threatening to take me to court, using the excuse “he needs a testosterone masculine man in his life to show him how to fix things.” After talking to a lawyer, she advised me to leave the state and become a resident (after 6 months living here) to make it harder for bd to threaten, or take me to court.
I left my state, telling no one but my mom and dad, and went to stay with distant family in another state. Me and my son are thriving here and I’m getting to watch him grow up and be an active part of his life (something I felt I couldn’t do before I moved due to working so much)
I still stay up every night contemplating what the right thing to do is, but I know for a fact that keeping any and all negativity or manipulative behavior away from him is what he needs. If I let bd into his life, he won’t actually care for him and only use him as a pawn to get to me, get his way, and always be right. I know my son needs positive role models in his life and I have an amazing support system that can and will be that for him. It’s very confusing feelings I have about all of this. AITA for leaving and telling no one?

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

Standing and moving still brought the Arbiter a lot of pain. But the Law’s grim enforcer couldn’t let anyone see that weakness. Especially not with the pirate before them and the very same assassin who had nearly killed them weeks before beneath that pirate’s foot.
The Arbiter had only just been cleared for light duty and decided to spend that time with the Officers in charge of watching the pirates Demon ship. They weren’t ADCU since those officers couldn’t be wasted on a simple stakeout. The Arbiter however had been assured the Officers in charge there were the best they had. But not two minutes within the stakeout tent the Arbiter had learned that the pirate Captain had slipped past the officers assigned to tail her. And more disturbingly that every pirate who left the Astaroth had slipped their tails with disdainful ease.

The utter lack of concern had further stoked their fury. According to the officer on duty every pirate that left eventually made a mess of something and stirred up a minor disturbance. And that only a few that left were unaccounted for. 

The complete lack of awareness for how shady and suspicious all that should have sounded baffled the Arbiter’s mind. They knew crime and violence didn’t come so naturally to other species as it did for the Arbiter’s human mind. But the failure to make such a basic connection that the pirates were creating distractions so that other pirates could do their work covertly, screamed at incompetence.
That led to the Arbiter learning that all the officers in charge of the overwatch operation were actually low level beat cops and file clerks. Looking into the system used to select these officers the Arbiter learned that they weren’t just incompetent, but so incompetent that the staggering number of negative reports had confused the filing system and had placed them into the highest bracket of trusted officers. The system was made to calculate negative values but couldn’t properly place such incompetent people into their proper bracket because there wasn’t a bracket appropriately low enough to place them into. So instead it simply went past the lowest level and placed them into the highest level.
And of course such poor officers couldn’t simply be fired because the officers workers union would make a fuss. Which meant the SS couldn’t replace these idiots with any slightly more intelligent sapients.
The bureaucratic idiocy was so infuriating that the Arbiter had lashed out at a nearby pole before they could think better of it. The pole snapped at the impact, fell over, and collapsed half the tent with it.
After that little outburst the Arbiter decided to take a walk and calm down. Only to stumble upon the missing pirate captain locked in a life-or-death battle with the very same assassin who had ambushed them just weeks before.
The Arbiter hadn’t been there for the start of the fight, but simple deduction was enough to reason that the assassin had likely initiated the conflict. They had mentioned Astarte’s name on the night of the attack. And the Pirate had no reason to seek out and attack the assassin.
During that fight The Arbiter had barely survived their encounter with the assassin. The assassin’s prosthetic modifications presented a gap in power that the Arbiter just couldn’t bridge. But despite fighting what should have been a one sided battle, the pirate was doing surprisingly well. In fact if the Arbiter was any judge, Astarte seemed to have a slight advantage.
Not in speed, power, or endurance. The assassin’s mechanical body was simply too powerful for a human to matchup. But in skill Astarte out matched the mechanical assassin.
Astarte dodged and weaved without effortless ease, getting past the assassin’s guard to strike at their, or her, mechanical body. If the assassin hadn’t been a machine then Astarte would have won by now, even with the gap in power.
Rachel felt slightly ashamed at her own poor showing against the assassin when compared to Astarte’s fight. The shame then quickly burned into anger as the Arbiter gripped the rifle at their side and pulled it out to try and shoot the assassin. Unlike the Arbiter had been that night, Astarte was wearing that ridiculous dark red armor and had a sword like she was some sort of space samurai. The Arbiter had done well that night, and their lack of superior weaponry had been their only flaw. One that had been amended with the addition of a more powerful pulse rifle.
They tried to line up a shot on the assassin that wouldn’t hit Astarte, when Astarte began to speak. “You wanna know the funny part. Greyson didn’t even care that you were gone.”
Wait, did these two share a past. The Arbiter guessed that old saying about birds of a feather was true. Who was Greyson? Some sort of man they had both known?
“Didn’t even question me about. Just said ‘Zera’s gone, now you will guard my back’” the pirate continued. “Then not even a week later I was second in command and got to sleep in his comfy bed.” The pirate gave her attacker a sloppy lascivious grin.
“And then you killed him like the deceptive whore you are!” the assassin spat, her attacks becoming sloppier with more openings.
Where these two quarreling over a man? The Arbiter felt bile rise into their throat. Two of the deadliest human women they had ever seen fighting over some man they had known. Pathetic. No man was worth that. Especially not whoever this Greyson bastard was given how quickly he had let the pirate into his bed after his first girlfriend disappeared.
Wait, Greyson, pirate, dead. Were they talking about the infamous human pirate, Byron Greyson? The one who had been a menace to the Femeri system, who was responsible for the disappearance of over thirty thousand humans and the deaths of many more? The one whose headless body had turned up one day aboard the drifting remains of the Black Saint? It couldn’t be, right?
But the rise of the Astaroth and Astarte had happened shortly before Greyson’s mysterious death. It seemed too coincidental.
“Of course I did, I refused to be the latest women he ruined and dumped into the gutter. Face it, your days were numbered. If it wasn’t me it would have been him.” The pirate said with a derisive sneer.
A bit callous and mercenary, but if they were discussing Greyson then likely not inaccurate.
The assassin however didn’t see that logic. “LIAR!” she screamed as she flew into a rage.
Then the Arbiter saw the reasoning behind Astarte’s taunts. This assassin was dangerously unhinged, and Astarte was using that to bait her into a trap.
The next sequence of attacks was too fast for the Arbiter to follow. A sword hilt to the face, followed by something launching out of the assassin’s arm. Then somehow Astarte had her other arm in her grip and flipped the assassin over a shoulder. With the assassin on the ground, Astarte quickly pressed one leg to their back, and with the arm in hand began to pull. The assassins sudden ultrasonic scream made the Arbiter vison darken at the edges, and maybe caused their ears to bleed a little.
Then the arm came out with a pop and the screaming stopped.
The pirate looked at the arm for a second, before lifting it above her head and swinging it down into the assassin’s head. The loud conk of metal on metal was enough to startle the Arbiter out of her awe and terror.
The barrel of their pulse cannon lifted up with Astarte centered in its sight “FREEZE!” the Arbiter roared with all their might.
Astarte paused mid swing, looked towards the Arbiter, and then raised both of her hands above her head. As well as the assassins severed arm. “It was self defense.” The pirate said quickly.
The Arbiter could have sworn they saw a flash of red. But it happened so fast that they weren’t sure if it was really there. And if it was then why would the pirates eye flash red?
The eye crossed by a gruesome scar. Did the pirate have a glass color changing eye?
No, her eyes were both clearly moving around and focusing on things like they should. Could it be cybernetic? Those were supposed to be impossible, too complicated to properly miniaturize with current technology.
It was something to investigate.
The Arbiter had been so focused on Astarte that they hadn’t been watching the assassin close enough. In a movement the Arbiter hadn’t seen the assassin threw Astarte off her back before popping up to her feet. Astarte went down onto the ground and the assassin lurched forward to attack her downed foe. But before she could reach the pirate three quick blasts from the Arbiters rifle stopped her in her tracks.
One had winged her side, another went wide. But the third had caught her right where a liver should have been. The assassin stuttered, but wasn’t dead. They dodged the next shot by ducking and then the second by somehow leaping ten meters into the air and onto a window seal. The assassin looked down on the two women and was clearly judging their chances at victory. But with an, admittable impressive, one-handed springlike flip Astarte was back on her feet, sword ready for another round.
The assassin’s strange mechanical face scowled before another impossible jump sent her over a nearby building and out of sight.
The Arbiter relaxed once the assassin was gone, but Astarte didn’t. The pirate turned, grabbed the Arbiters gloved hand, and pulled her into a jog down the open alleyway. “Come on, there’s an open lot nearby. Can’t jump us from there.” She said without looking back as she dragged the Arbiter along.
For a stunned few seconds Rachel stared at the strong hand grasping her own smaller one. But then the Arbiter saw the logic in Astarte’s worry and forced their hand to release the pirate and ran alongside her.
A few times the Arbiter had noticed a thin humanoid shadow leap between the buildings above them, but a quick turn down an alley from Astarte had them moving away from the incoming ambush from the assassin chasing them via roof tops. In no time at all they made it to an open loading dock for a nearby warehouse. Astarte ran into its center and scanned the roof tops, the Arbiter followed suit.
The Arbiter and the Pirate stood back to back, each searching for any signs of the mutual foe.
“There!” Astarte shouted while pointing her finger at a roof top.
The Arbiter stared up, but couldn’t see anything. But following the pirate’s direction they raised their rifle and shot at the edge of the building Astarte had pointed at. The blasts landed and then the crouched figure of the assassin rose up and backed away.
How had the pirate seen her? The Arbiter spared her a glance and saw a second flash of red before the pirate shifted her head.
“You should call for backup.” The pirate stated while still scanning the roof tops.
“To arrest the assassin?” the Arbiter asked before they could think better of it.
Astarte snorted. “Wouldn’t trust any SS to arrest a dead log, let alone Zera. But more witnesses might scare her off.”
Two things stood out in that statement, the assassin’s apparent name, and “SS, is that supposed to be short for station security?”
“Schutzstaffel actually, its just a strange coincidence they line up” the Pirate joked wryly.
The Arbiter scowled “You think the Station security are like the Nazi’s?” The Arbiter’s lessons about the various evil factions during Earths history had left her with nightmares for years. Crucifixion, death by a thousand cuts, blood eagles, and the like had disturbed their six-year-old mind. Their lessons had spent weeks on all the evils humanity inflicted upon each other, all the way until First contact.
“If the kinky boot fits.” Astarte said while examining the Arbiter’s own black boots.
The Arbiter swished their cloak to hide their boots, and the pirates gaze snapped back up to the rooftops. The Arbiter made the call, and the idiots in charge of the tent said they would need a few minutes to ‘locate’ their rifles and arm shields. Why they had to be located in the first place confused the Arbiter? They couldn’t be so incompetent as to not know where their weapons were, right?”
Tense minutes past before Astarte let out a sigh of relief. “I think she gave up.” she then shot the Arbiter an accusing glare “I almost had the bitch. If you hadn’t interfered we wouldn’t have to worry about her coming back.”
"You expect me to stand by while you committed murder?” The Arbiter growled, now stepping back from the pirate and reaching for a set of cuffs.
The pirate frowned, then glanced up as if recalling a distant memory. “I… ugh felt my life was in imminent danger, and feared for my life while facing down a clearly aggressive and violent deathworlder with a weapon. I used whatever objects I could find at the time…I carry no weapons and was forced to use ceremonial objects in crude, and ugh…unusual ways for self defense. I did not think retreat was possible so I acted to end the threat” she said in a bland staccato rhythm of everyone reciting words from memory. Her words obviously citing several different laws pertaining to self-defense.
The Arbiter felt an eye twitch. “The law pertaining to Deathworlder assailants was not intended to include Deathworlder victims.” The Arbiter said slowly.
Astarte shrugged “Union vs. Trevor Philips established that the enforcement of the law was done by the letter of the law, not the spirit. By that ruling and precedent I acted reasonably and was within my rights for self-defense. Any attempt to detain me would result in punitive measures from my legal representation.”
In all their time on the ADCU the Arbiter had never encountered a criminal so well versed in the intricacies of Union law. Some loop holes were well known, and easy for Officers to circumvent in order to attain an arrest. But the Arbiter hadn’t encountered something like this before.
The Arbiter looked down and noticed the sword she still held, red blood from the pirate running down its blade. “So that sword isn’t a weapon?” The Arbiter asked pointedly.
The feline smile that covered Astarte’s face sent shivers up their spine. “My dear officer, as you can notice I am of half Japanese heritage, a hafu if you will. I am dressing in the traditional fashions of my people. The armor, the katana, and the wakizashi are all hallmarks of the samurai I am descended from. None of these are worn for anything beyond cultural heritage. And for that matter, my crew wear the same to honor my ancestry.”
The Arbiter sighed. Astarte’s defense, though blatantly false, was airtight. Arresting her now would only give her ammunition to legally strike back. And with the recent backlash of the Deathworlder crack down the Arbiter could doom Judge’s career. It had been a celebrated move of the last chief, but the knock-on effects of it had resulted in several months of rioting, looting, and political discourse in the heart of the Union. The last chief was forced to step down and Judge took his place and was still trying to reverse the damages. Which was hard with all the precincts fighting him on it. Those officers had too many friends torn apart by Terran criminals to ever let that grudge go.
“Then you may leave the arm behind and be one your way.” The Arbiter ordered.
Astarte blinked, “the arm?”
The Arbiter pointed to the severed arm still within the pirate’s grasp “That is evidence in an on going investigation. LEAVE. IT. BEHIND” The Arbiter explained, growling out the last words slowly. Just because Astarte had likely saved the Arbiter’s life with some quick thinking didn’t erase the fact that she was a person of interest/suspect in the same case.
Astarte glanced down at the severed arm and blinked as if surprised she was still holding it. Then tossed it carelessly onto the ground. “All yours, make sure to check for bugs before plugging it in.”
“Bugs?”
“Computer viruses hidden in its OS. Thing could have all sorts of things hidden within.”
“And how do you know?”
“I don’t. It’s just the sort of thing I would do myself. Try loading it onto a separate server. Oh, and check for small explosives.”
“Danm Deathworlders” the Arbiter growled as they now considered the severed arm on the ground next to a small splatter of Astarte’s blood. She was right, Deathworlders were known for their tricks and traps. Humans especially. During one investigation a load of seized morphine from an illegal clinic had been stored next to an unstable chemical that reacted poorly to the jostling of the transport and destroyed the evidence in a fiery explosion.
Astarte chuckled “Glass stones Arbiter.”
“What?”
“Glass stones, it’s a human malaphor of sorts. I’ll leave the details for you to figure out. Good luck with tracking down Zera, I’d recommend starting with the prison records on Union Station Parox.” She said as she turned aways and strode off. Walking in the opposite direction of the arriving officers, half of which were missing their weapons or shields.
The Arbiter let out a sigh as she observed the most incompetent idoits she had ever seen strut onto the lot without a care in the universe.
“You called us Sir.” The lead Voral said.
The Arbiter took in a deep breath “Yes I did. Ten minutes ago.”
“It was a long walk.” The officer said defensively, no care for the Arbiters growing anger.
“Its only a few hundred standard meters. But that doesn’t matter I encountered an assassin in the midst of their crime. That’s their arm.”
The Voral looked panicked and began to look from side to side.
The Arbiter felt an involuntary eye twitch and clenched her fist. “The assassin is gone.”
The Voral relaxed “So you want us to secure the evidence?” he asked.
That had been the Arbiters plan, but now seeing them mill about aimlessly they changed their mind. “No, secure the area and stay out of CSI’s way. Understood?”
The officer looked offended. “Sir, its just an arm. We don’t need to wait around for CSI, one of my men can bag it right now.”
Patience wearing thin the Arbiter marched right into the Voral’s face. The fact the Officer loomed over her by two meters did little to diminish the Arbiter’s menacing aura. “AM. I. UNDERSTOOD?”
“Yes Sir.” The cowed Voral officer answered with a nervous buzz of his wings.
“Then go.”
Ten minutes later six medium shuttles from the CSI unit, and two small shuttles from the ADCU were on the scene of the lot and in the alley where the Arbiter had stumbled upon Astarte. Edict and Prosecutor began to jump along the rooftops, recreating the assassin’s movements and collecting more evidence.
The assassin’s arm, and the dried sample of Astarte’s blood was collected. As well as fragments of what looked to be a broken glass eye with a micro camera.
They lost the assassin’s trail after they ducked into the inner hull of the station and escaped across the pipes, wires, and support structure of Unity.
Thirty minutes after that they departed for the central precinct. The Arbiter within the darkened confines of the ADCU shuttle felt safe enough to take off the hood. Caleb and Bartolv did the same. They noticed her pensive mood and didn’t disturb her.
It wasn’t lost on her that Astarte knew exactly who this assassin was. And if she hadn’t left those pretty blatant clues about how to identify her then then Rachel would be trying to acquire a warrant to bring her in for questioning. But that still left her with a lot of questions.
And despite the answers she might get, she had the sinking feeling it wouldn’t be enough to see the whole picture. How big was this whole thing?
Previous/Patreon/Next

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What is IPF Classic Worlds?
The International Powerlifting Federation (IPF) is the largest international drug tested fed. “Classic” means the lifters can wear a belt and knee sleeves, but not knee wraps (or bench shirts, deadlift suits, etc). As with all standard powerlifting meets, the lifter with the best total (their best squat + best bench + best deadlift for the day) within each weight class wins.
When is it?
June 11-18
How do I watch? The IPF live stream page.
Find the full schedule here (times listed in Central European Summer Time), and the full roster and nominating totals here (men/women). Note that all the lifters discussed below will be in the “A” group for their weight class.
​
Story lines to watch
Is Karlina Tongotea the new queen of the -76s?
Karlina Tongotea (New Zealand) came roaring into the international spotlight last fall when she totaled 600 kilos at the Commonwealth Games, and won the hyped “battle of the 76s” at Sheffield 2023, despite missing several lifts. Here she faces off again against reigning World Champ Jessica Buettner (Canada) and Equipped Champ (and the brief holder of the -76 total world record, until Karlina broke it) Agata Sitko (Poland). Karlina comes into this as the favorite; winning cements her as the premier -76 kilo raw lifter.
Check out the epic showdown between Agata and Jess at last year’s IFP Worlds here.
​
The -63s, and the return of Carola Garra
Lya Bavoil (France) was the undisputed -63, but failed to make weight for the 2022 IFP Worlds. This opened the door for a fierce competition that ended in a three-way tie for best total, with Meghan Scanlon (USA) winning on bodyweight. With Bavoil moving up to the -69s, the favorite to win is Carola Garra (Italy), with Chiara Bernardi (Italy) and Scanlon likely fighting for silver. Garra last competed in Classic Worlds in 2019, where she won gold. Since then she's mostly competed in equipped, where she has been equally successful.
Bonus: Check out this podcast interview with Scanlon, where she talks about coming back to elite level powerlifting after giving birth to twins.
​
Does Bonica Brown have a real challenger?
Bonica Brown (USA) has been the strongest 84+ for years. At Sheffield in March she broke the squat world record and total world record, and all of her lifts looked easy. However, Belgian lifter Sonita Mulah has been putting up monster gym numbers. She’s also got a big deadlift, so if things are close she has the advantage in that she’ll likely deadlift last. Brittany Schlater (Canada) is also worth keeping an eye on.
​
Evie vs Noemie: The Rematch
Evie Corrigan (New Zealand) shocked everyone by cutting down a weight class to the -52s for Sheffield, where she shocked (almost) everyone and won the whole competition as a wildcard nomination. However, Noemie Allabert (France) was just a few kilos behind her. The battle is going to be intense and could easily come down to the last deadlift.
​
The -93s
The men’s -93 class is absolutely stacked, and paired with the women’s -76s last year was one of the most fun sessions to watch. Even though last year’s champ Chance Mitchell (USA) won’t be competing, Jonathan Cayco (USA), Gustav Hedlund (Sweden), Emil Krastev (Bulgaria) and Gavin Adin (USA) are all legitimate contenders for gold (and would be even if Chance was there). Cayco put on a masterclass at Sheffield, coming in second, while Adin had a monster world record squat attempt that the jury ultimately declared a bad lift on depth (he placed third overall). Expect Adin to nail the squat record this time.
Highlights from last year's showdown here.
​
This event is huge, so there are a ton of great lifters and awesome match ups I didn't have space to talk about. Use this thread to talk about what you're hyped for, discuss the competition, and ask questions.

I’m in an engineering class with a lot of shy guys, and I don’t know if they’re even single so I know for sure they won’t make the first move.
I want to kind of open the door for them to talk to me without approaching them first. How would you do this in a class setting?
My friend told me to make eye contact and smile and I’m working on that because I’m kind of shy. But yeah, I’m open to any more tips! Thanks!

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

Hey guys! So first off, if you don’t want to read any analysis, just go to this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gnzoCZOyb6ymoyJLTaC5lu-9yFqfTkdTuyB6m_-2vD0/edit?usp=sharing
That sheet has the data from six seasons, split between two franchises that analyze loyalty. As a brief explanation, I took one team, set all player attributes to be 60, then simmed each franchise through three seasons and collected data. I’ll reference each season using hyphenated numbers. So, the first franchise, season three will be written as 1-3, the second franchise, season two, will be written as 2-2, etc.
(I wrote a much longer post before, but then my browser crashed and I lost it all, so this is my second attempt and it’ll be shorter because I’m sad).
First, a mechanics issue I found:
Player loyalty doesn’t reset when you re-sign a player at their new asking salary. I don’t know if this is a bug or not. But there is a bug when it comes to re-signing: If you agree to their new asking salary, it won’t be reflected in the next season. Your payroll won’t change. This will likely be fixed in a future patch, but for now, re-sign away!
Now, before I do my deep dive, you need to know my very strong opinion:. The only thing that matters as far as this whole “Loyalty” system goes is RSI (Re-Sign Interest). It’s like that scene in Moneyball, where Jonah Hill goes “You’re not trying to buy players, you’re trying to buy wins.”
Think of it this way: who cares if every player has a loyalty above 80 if your average RSI is 0%, right? But wait! Could that even happen? Unfortunately, my answer is… kinda? Yeah?
Generally speaking, loyalty drops every year. There is an average of 13.8 negative manager moments, and only 8.4 positive, with 2.4 “swap” moments (what I called the moments where one player increases loyalty, and the other decreases).
In 1-1 I missed the playoffs, but in 2-1 I made the playoffs. Both years my RSI average was 95%. 1-2 and 2-2, I missed the playoffs. My average RSIs were 79% and 74% respectively. In 1-3 I missed the playoffs yet again, but I made the playoffs in 2-3. My RSI in 1-3? 74%, close to 1-2. My RSI in 2-3 though was only 52%! Clearly making the playoffs didn’t matter to the players. My records each year also didn’t really look like they mattered.
The loyalty obviously decreased each year, but not enough to explain the drop from 2-2 to 2-3, and the difference between 1-3 and 2-3.
So next you might be thinking that individual player stats affect RSI. Good guess, but wrong. There was really no difference. Players had performances between seasons fluctuate while maintaining the exact same RSI. Look at the stats for Charleigh Correa from 2-1 all the way to 2-3. Her loyalty was basically the same every year, and her RSI stayed the same.
So what is it that affects RSI?
There’s really only two things: Loyalty and Player Rating increases. If you look at the spreadsheets, several players did not have manager moments during the season, but their RSI drastically reduced. Why? The previous season, their player rating had increased. That’s it. Those are the only two things. Sure, you could increase their loyalty, but sometimes that doesn’t even matter. They’ll still leave.
So what should you do about your players RSI? If you’re on your second season, and they’re rated at a B+ or below, the answer is simple: Nothing. Let them walk. Most times a player leaves and they’re rated at a B+ or below, you can still likely sign them in the off-season for less than their asking salary.
If they’re at an A- or above and you want them for one more season, then it’s probably worth it to sign them, even if they don’t have the best loyalty. But because loyalty doesn’t reset, I don’t know if it would be smart to give in to their new asking salary for a second season if their RSI is low.
Anyways, hope you guys enjoyed this, and I’ll try and answer any other questions you guys have if you ask. This is only the first analysis, and I’ll probably go into more depth after the game has received multiple patches/fixes.

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

i was practicing picking the deadbolt in my parents house while home from college, and it was going smoothly until i opened it again, turned it 180° to pull the bolt back in but then i couldn’t turn it back to the standard 0° position. the pins are completely bound, i can’t move them, and my house key won’t even go in.
is there a way i can fix this quickly? i’d rather not tell my parents because they actively discourage this particular hobby of mine and wouldn’t be happy to know i’ve been practicing on their door.

My baby is a little over three months old and my maternity leave is coming to an end. He sleeps in his bassinet at night but will only contact nap during the day. I actually love the contact naps. It’s nice to soak up the cuddles while I still can. But I’m worried that he won’t be able to nap once I go back to work. I work from home and we’re going to have a combination of sitters and grandparents watching him during the week. I know I am very privileged in that regard — I’ll be close by at all times. But I’ll need to focus on work and I won’t be able to let him sleep on me. How do I help him transition to napping in his bassinet? Right now, if I put him down after he falls asleep, he just wakes up a few minutes later and cries until I hold him. Will he just grow out of contact naps? Have I done something wrong by reinforcing this pattern of behavior? I love him so much. I’m a FTM and I’m so sad that I have to go back to work and can’t continue bonding with him this way.

I’m a 29 year old man. Have been pretty socially isolated for the last 5 years since I moved to the Bay Area. I suffer from PTSD and moderate-severe depression/anxiety.
Was touched inappropriately by a babysitter (dry-humped) when I was 8 and then that same sitter molested my younger brother while I wasn’t there, putting his penis in my brother’s mouth.
I got sold the Catholic mortal sin bullshit when I experimented with a boy at age 9. I’ve dealt with a lot of confusion and shame over experimenting with my sexual orientation ever since.
Was to some degree sexually assaulted when I lost my virginity at 16 to a manic, meth-addicted 20 year old woman. I told her I was a virgin and wasn’t ready for sex, so she offered me a “just a blowjob” after we got drunk, and then pulled me into a closet rather forcefully, and then pulled the condom off and pulled me back into her even though I said no.
Even though I felt really insecure about the whole situation I just went with it. Didn’t get to cum even after kind of angry fucking her for another 30 minutes. Probably because I was so uncomfortable and drunk and in shock.
It definitely felt like an assault anyway.
From 16-17 I was in a 2 year relationship with a 21 year old woman who lived with me in my mother’s home. I was informed later by a close friend of said girlfriend that she was cheating on me the whole time.
At 19 years old I got outed by 2 of my best friends at the time, for having sex with one of their gay cousins. It was really painful and embarrassing and we pretty much weren’t friends anymore after that. The irony of that betrayal was that I’d had my first threesome with both of them (mmf).
From 19 years old to now 10 years later, I’ve mostly been alone. I had a couple different girlfriends at 24-25 years old, back when I was still addicted to heroin, as were they.
The 1st one cheated on me and got pregnant while I was away visiting family for a month. The latter of the 2 set a fire underneath my mother’s bedroom window and probably burnt my mother’s garage down as well, where I had been sleeping.
It was too cold that night, so I went inside the main house and woke up to a cop banging on the back door at 5am, and the garage in blazes.
Since then I’ve hooked up online with strangers from Craigslist and then Grindr probably twice a year or so… mostly men and trans women even though I’m pretty sure I’ve experimented enough by now to know I’m pretty straight… at this point I feel incapable of having real friendships, let alone real intimate relationships and just utter shame and brokenness.
I don’t like the way I’ve put myself at risk, and have resolved to stop fucking strangers over the last year, but it’s hard to feel the loneliness sometimes.
All I feel is loneliness, shame and an impenetrable distance between everyone else now… I have very little hope left of having relationship of any meaning anymore.
Rant complete I guess.
Have gained some headway with the PTSD/ depression, believe it or not.
Hope to get back to work soon so I can at least be out in the world more again, and try to find at least some joy in my existence even if I spend it alone.
Take care, everybody. ✌️
All trolls, please hold your breath and save humanity some oxygen. 🖕

My cousin is graduating high school and going to her dream university, and while I am very happy for her and I feel bad for not wanting to go, esp b/c she looked up to me growing up, i legit feel so bored and annoyed every single time I go to her parents house. No fault of her own, or her parents, but i dont mesh well with majority of the people that normally go to their house parties, which are her dads side of the family(hes not my uncle, her mom is my aunt) which is also my ex boyfriends family, not the end of the world, but it is a bit awkward. (No we are not related.)
If it was something intimate like close family only, then I would go. I WANT to celebrate her success and am immensely proud of her, i got her gifts and everything, that i could technically give to my parents to give to her.. I just feel like I won’t be very good company if I just sit there wishing I could leave, bored and annoyed as a result of having nothing in common with her family.
i also have work that day, and i get off 30 minutes before the time that the host wants everyone to be there, her mom keeps stressing to everyone how important it is to be there early. normally after work I like to re-charge or go do something lowkey and relaxing..
My parents keep telling me i should go, and that its about her and celebrating her, and that none of us wanna go but that we’re “faking it” for the sake of doing the right thing. And they’re right, part of me thinks sucking it up may be the right thing to do, at least for a few hours, and maybe I could leave early and make an excuse. Buuuut…Is it so terrible if i dont go and maybe just text her congrats instead? …ok that sounds messed up 🤦🏻‍♀️ what would you guys do?

With how much the new Across the Spider-Verse movie resonated with ny situation I feel the need to vent about it but better word it.
The whole thing about being limited to one or two ways to communicate or spend time together and missing said people you cared about.
Wishing they checked up on you at least once or twice like you do them. Wondering “I mean yeah everyone has thier own Lives/Things to do but am I seriously THAT INVISIBLE OR FORGETTABLE when things aren’t busy??”
Through it’s painful I’m wary about the true friends I do have that I can honestly count on 2 Hands but at least I can feel safe sometimes that they won’t throw me off to the side…
Though I know who my real friends are it just hurt that none of the ones I wished check up and I thought was close to did. I’ve gotten to a “I hate everyone except my Wife” Phase which is good for us cause we’ve had our fair share of problems so me being this wary of people makes me just prefer her company 90% of the time.
But I basically muted and want all these people I used to call Friend to block me since it’d save me the trouble. I’m holding grudges. Most of the time when I see a post of them talking about their struggles I hope for the worst, I hate the nickname they keep calling me when I hop in on streams or sometimes not even a hello my way. I hope to GOD they don’t hop in on mine when I eventually start and I DREAD going back But to discord cause if I see a DM from them it’d be a sick joke cause if I got even a fraction of that attention on the platforms I could actually get messages from maybe I wouldn’t have turned out like this and I’m also happy for the day I can lash out at these people.
I’m done being nice and just explaining my feelings or taking their struggles into account . I’m allowed to be Angry or hold a Grudge and I’d be valid to punch them in the face if they were all physically near me cause oh boy they deserve worse.

Hey everyone, so as a birthday gift for me, my fiancé decided to let me take my pick for seats at for upcoming Joji tour. After waiting in the presale queue I quickly snagged up GA Floor seats, however I feel like now I’ve made a mistake and feel absolutely gutted about it..
I keep seeing people talking about how VIP takes the first several rows of the concert venue so you won’t even get near the front as GA, and I keep seeing how people need to be getting to the concert venue almost 6-7 hours before the doors open just to have a chance of being anywhere near the front..
My fiancé is 5’0 and I’m only 5’8 so I feel like this was a terrible choice as now I’ll be limited to basically hearing a Joji album instead of actually watching the concert as the rows and rows and rows of people in front of us will limit what we’ll be able to see..
Do I really have to be there 6-7 hours before to even have a chance to be able to actually see Joji perform..? Is there any way I could somehow refund these tickets and get seated seats so I can Atleast be able to see the concert..? Is there any way for me to actually be able to see what’s in front of me at the show without literally sleeping there overnight..?
I’d love to hear what you guys think