Black ink crew donna and moe
BlackInkCrew
2018.12.09 01:18 zamboroza BlackInkCrew
Black Ink Crew chronicles the daily operations and staff drama of an expanding Harlem tattoo empire -- now with a shop in Atlanta -- that serves a growing celebrity clientele. The diverse cast includes Ceaser, owner and creator of the Black Ink brand; quick-witted and fiery receptionist Sky; shop manager and Ceaser's cousin Ted; and tattoo artists Donna, Walt, Melody, Young Bae and O'S**t.
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2023.03.27 05:32 zachariusfrost Geese
They come back every year. I can recall multiple points in my childhood where I heard them honking in the wee hours of the morning, causing calamities that woke me up far earlier than I would’ve preferred. Every single winter they return, but this year has been different.
Geese are terrible people, and they’re actually not even people, which makes them even worse. One core, traumatic memory of being chased down by one as a child and sobbing hysterically was all it took for me to develop a lifelong distrust of the feathery demons. It seems so needlessly cruel to have what is essentially a long-necked chicken have the temperament of a damn lycanthrope. Their beady little black eyes seem like bottomless pits of spite, and the fact they actually have teeth on their tongues is something I don’t think I can ever forgive God for.
My father still lives in my childhood home, but me and my siblings are all moved out. He’s older now and has some difficulties with mobility so I stop by pretty often to help out where I can. Ever since mom passed, he’s been there alone with his faithful Labrador retriever; Brody, and although he greatly values his independence it’s getting more and more difficult for him to live alone as the years go on.
Me and my older brother: Eric routinely switch-off helping him with tasks around the house that may be a risk to him. Typically, it’s things like cleaning out the gutters, trimming tree branches and simple maintenance on his vehicles, mostly just things I’d rather a 73-year-old man not try and do alone.
Last week I went out to help him with some chores. My brother Eric was supposed to meet my there but he got roped in to his kids’ parent-teacher conferences so I met dad alone. It was just past noon when I met dad out at his house. He and I grilled some burgers and chatted about things for a while before we began on the tasks.
A recent snowfall had damaged some of the trees on the back of his property, and so he wanted to chop them down before they fell onto his shed. He and I grabbed some handsaws and an axe and began systemically pruning the aspens.
We soon determined there were about 3 trees total which we needed to remove. I climbed the ladder and began sawing off some of the upper branches as dad steadied it from down below. Things were going well until a sudden familiar and foreboding ruckus emerged in the distance. I lowered the chainsaw and killed the motor as I spied the flock soar overhead and land in the back pasture.
“Damn birds been ruining that back field. More goose shit than grass back there at this point.” Dad spat as he said it, clearly annoyed by the return of the unwelcome visitors.
“You need some scarecrows or something.” I replied.
“I tried that, damn things have no fear of people anymore though so it didn’t do a damn thing.”
I suppose it’s also important to mention that we live in Canada, and the Canadian goose is our national bird. INB4 comments saying how you should shoot them which unfortunately is not an option. Not only because firearms are severely restricted here, but also because killing a Canadian goose can get you hefty fines and potentially land you in prison.
In America, you guys have the bald eagle, which is cool. They are rare, imposing, beautiful and majestic. You remember the day you see one, and maybe even sing the national anthem or something when you do.
Geese are not like that, and I doubt anyone has ever been happy to see one. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been on my way to work when traffic suddenly just comes to a complete standstill because a few geese decided to casually meander onto the highway. We have made them a protected class, and they know it. The rest of us are lowly peasants when compared to our avian overlords, and Canada remains under the tyranny of the goose forevermore.
“Then there’s the red one.” He spoke it suddenly as though reflecting upon an old foe resurfacing.
“The red one?” Dad nodded and his eyes narrowed on me.
“You’re gonna laugh at me I know, but son, I swear I’ve seen it. A goose as tall as a man, feathers a deep blood red color” He paused and glanced out towards the trees as a gust rolled through the landscape.
“Something ain’t right with it.”
Contrary to dad’s prediction, I didn’t laugh: I didn’t know how to react. I thought he was just messing with me, but there was a deadly serious cadence in his voice. It probably sounds ridiculous to anyone reading, but something about the sincerity in his voice made me take pause.
My father is not a guy that scares easy. Never seen him shed a tear, and never seen him back down from an altercation. A man as stubborn as he is stalwart, and making up tales was never something he seemed particularly good at.
“How often do you see it?”
“Every once in a while… ain’t seen it for some time now, but I know it’s always out there… watching.” He let that ominous phrase just sort of hang in the air unelaborated. It still seemed a bit ridiculous, but clearly he was affected by it.
“You got a slingshot or something?” Dad shook his head down below as he stared contemptuously out at the flock. He didn’t reply, and since it seemed to be genuinely bothering him I decided to do something stupid about it. I climbed down the ladder as he glanced at me side-eyed.
“Where you goin?”
“Birdwatching.” I was already entering the tree line as I called back. A menagerie of branches and leaves split apart as I trudged my way towards them. They all continued peacefully grazing and loitering as I made my approach unseen.
I breached the other side of the tree line and stepped out into the field. The flagrant faction of fowl barely even seemed to notice my arrival. I grabbed a decent sized stick laying on the ground and sauntered out towards them.
“Hey… get outta here!” A few of them turned to look at me, but still seemed woefully unbothered by my display.
“GIT!” I shouted the words at the top of my lungs and began waving the stick back and forth. I was met with a chorus of angered honks as the gaggled fluttered into a frenzy. One by one they leapt into the air and began flying off in various directions.
One of them divebombed directly towards me, but I managed to duck aside as it flew past. Fearing their retaliation, I clutched my stick and prepared myself for battle, but thankfully they continued flying off and resuming their formation in the sky above. Seconds later they were soaring away from the property, hopefully never to return, but I knew I wasn’t that lucky or intimidating.
Once they were beyond the trees, I turned back, but something caught my eye as I turned away. On the ground where they had gathered, something was laying in the muck. I walked towards it, and I froze midstride as the macabre realization struck like thunder.
“Atta boy son, you must be a goose whisperer or something.” Dad chuckled as he and Brody approached from behind me. I just turned back and stared at him, and his expression contorted as he noticed mine.
“What is it?” I just pointed at it. Dad approached gingerly, and as he reached my side he too seemed taken aback.
“Is that what I think it is?” Dad ignored the question and moved in for a closer look. As he knelt down, he grunted and cleared his throat.
“Well, if you think it’s a severed human arm then I think you’re right.”
The two of us hurried back inside his house and dialed 911. The police showed up about an hour later and we escorted them back to where we’d found it. Not long after they had an entire array of workers, technicians and people sectioning off the area. They spent hours combing through the vicinity, and the longer it went on the worse it got.
Dad and I watched as they removed a body bag for the remains we’d found, then another, and another. In total we counted six separate bags of what we assumed were human remains. The initial search area widened to encompass a large chunk of the back field. They didn’t tell us much about it as they worked though, and so the two of us could only speculate as we watched from dad’s porch.
Eventually I was taken down to the police station as a few other cops remained with dad at his house. They interrogated me once we got to the station, and I told them pretty much everything I’ve written here. Obviously, they were skeptical, and I don’t even blame them for eying me suspiciously. Not a whole lot of it made much sense to me either, but I didn’t know what else to say to help them.
They eventually seemed to clear me of any wrongdoing and so took me back to my father’s house. They then took my father to conduct the same interview on him. It was getting late in the day by then, and although I thought about going home, I felt it was better for me to stay there and await dad’s return.
As I waited, I did some more research online. Apparently Geese- despite their aggressive tendencies and fierce attributes are mostly vegetarian. They do eat insects and fish from time to time, but usually just graze on plants. The fact that several of them had blood spackles on their down would seemingly indicate that the group had been eating the arm, and possibly the rest of the remains in the field. As far as I can tell, there’s never been any reports of geese eating humans or even scavenging on their remains.
It was nearly midnight by the time the officers ferried my father back home. He sauntered inside, clearly worn out from the bizarre day. He slumped onto the couch as the lead officer gestured me to join him outside.
“Thank you for your and your father’s cooperation today. I know this is a very odd and worrying situation, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it. Our crew may be out here for awhile while the investigation concludes, but we’ll try our best to stay out of you and your father’s way. Please feel free to call if you discover or learn anything you think we should know.” He held out his card and I nodded back. He and his partner then exited the home and made their way back to the cruiser. The rest of their team seemed to be packing it in for the night as well, so I returned to dad.
He was seated on his weathered living room chair with Brody stationed valiantly at his feet. He sipped from his whiskey glass as I went and sat on the opposing couch.
“Well… can’t say this is how I was expecting today to go.” I spoke with a chuckle and dad nodded back with an affirming grunt.
“You can say that again. Over thirty years I’ve lived on this damn property, and I’ve never seen anything like this happen.” I couldn’t help but chuckle at that.
“Well, I’d sure hope not, geese don’t even usually eat meat apparently.” I prattled off the fact I’d read previous from Google. Dad scoffed as his head slowly swiveled side to side.
“Apparently these ones do.” He glanced silently out the living room window, and towards the back field where the grisly discovery had been made. The two of us sat in silence for a moment as we contemplated the overwhelming day.
We chatted for a few more minutes but soon decided to call it a night as we were both exhausted. Dad told me I could stay the night there and I happily obliged as I was already near unconscious on his living room couch. After wrapping myself in his spare comforter I was out, but it did not last.
The intrusive sounds of aggressive barking stirred me from a deep sleep. Suddenly I felt a cold chill seep into my bones. I stirred from slumber, shivering as a cold chill descended my spine and a fuzzy form began nuzzling against me. It was dark with only the moonlight beaming in from outside the house, but I recognized the barks and blurry outline of Brody beside me.
He began whining and licking my face franticly as my eyes struggled to adjust to the low lighting. I patted his head and back as I tried getting him to calm down, but he seemed really riled up for some reason. The couch I’d been sleeping on sat below the front window and from my vantage point I couldn’t see the front door. As I sat up, and turned to the side I froze stiff.
The front door was wide open.
With a stark fright I jolted to my feet and backed away, confused and trying desperately to adjust my eyes to the shadows and quell my racing heart. Brody continued whining and barking as he stared out into the dark night.
I found my coat and approached the door, but it showed no signs of forced entry. I could only assume my dad had been the one to open it. On tiptoes I snuck to pier out the door, but found nothing but the empty yard and night sky.
Quickly I rushed down the hall to my father’s room, but as expected he wasn’t in there. I couldn’t imagine what would possibly possess him to venture out in the middle of the night alone, but I knew it wasn’t good. As I ventured back to the front door, I felt a true dread seep into the very cortex of my being. Nothing within me wanted to go out there, but I knew I couldn’t leave my father.
The cold breeze struck my skin like needles as I stepped out and shut the door behind me. Brody was still going ballistic inside especially with the door shut, but I didn’t want him to run off and figured leaving him there was the safer option.
I scanned the area around me but saw no sign of anyone or anything. Dad’s old Chevy sat derelict on his driveway along with my Subaru, both of them untouched aside from a thin layer of snow. I thought about calling out his name, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Back on the side of the house I spied a shovel leaning against the wall and so I took it with me.
We’d gotten a bit of snow as we slept, and in the yard, I spied I clear line of footprints leading out from the door and back around the side of the house. As I followed them my feet crunched in the snow which sounded like the crashing of thunder when contrasted with the silent night. My hairs stood on end and my hands shook wildly as I clutched the shovel tight.
The footprints led directly from the front of the house to the back grove where we’d made the macabre discovery earlier that day. Moments later I reached the tree line, but still didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. My father’s footprints vanished into the trees, and I just hoped he hadn’t wandered too far.
Branches scraped against me as I made my way deeper inside the grove. Still I heard and saw nothing out of the ordinary even as I approached the other side where the sectioned-off field was located. `As I breached the edge of the trees, I spotted something up ahead. It was laying near one of the fresh pits the police had been excavating, and after a few seconds I finally realized what it was.
“Dad? Dad are you okay?” I spoke the words in a shouted whisper as I snuck over towards him. He wasn’t moving, and as I got near him my heart sunk as I beheld his condition. His jacket was shredded all over, like someone had haphazardly slashed at him with a razorblade.
Once at his side I found him scratched up and unconscious, but clearly still alive. As I jostled his shoulder he slowly came around and opened his eyes. Suddenly his eyes sprung wide and he lurched upward as he furiously glanced around the area.
“Dad it’s okay… it’s just me.” He didn’t respond, and despite my protest he hobbled back to his feet as he panted heavily.
“What the hell happened? Why are you out here?”
“It’s here… I saw it.” He then groaned and collapsed back to his knees as his face contorted into an agonized grimace. I then saw that his leg was stained red and torn up pretty bad. He clutched it as he slumped down and I moved to assist him.
“We gotta get out of here son.” As I began trying to hoist him back to his feet, a sudden noise pierced the mute night air. An odd raspy sort of bugling noise. It was a weird sound that I didn’t recognize, but it definitely sounded like some kind of animal had made it.
Dad was glancing around franticly trying to see something, but he wouldn’t say anything. His leg was lacerated, and he couldn’t stand on it anymore so as such I ended up just basically dragging him back towards the tree line.
The morose screech we’d heard previous roared out once more, but this time it sounded like it was coming from above us. As I averted my eyes upward, I saw the fleeting form of a large shadow soar beyond the trees. The leaves on the top swayed from the wind of it passing, and clearly it was big, much bigger than any bird or flying creature I’ve ever seen.
“Shit… it’s coming back.” Dad turned and did what he could to try and hobble to the trees. The two of us continued awkwardly stumbling like a pair of drunken baboons until finally reaching the tree line. The moment we stepped inside it, I heard it descend onto the field.
From the shadows we peered out, seeing a large, bipedal creature towering in the field. It stood tall on long, lanky legs. It’s head was suspended upon an elongated neck, and bulbous black eyes stared unblinking back towards us.
My first thought upon seeing it was that it looked like a damn pterodactyl, but it was even stranger than that. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing, but it looked like an enormous goose. That freak of nature had to have stood at least 6 feet tall, with a wingspan probably double that. It’s body was an eerie crimson color much as dad had claimed, and the moonlight beaming down seemed to give it an almost ethereal presence.
It just stood there staring back at us for a long, tense moment of uncomfortable silence. It’s unblinking obsidian eyes seemed to gleam with a rampant sense of primal hunger. Something about it’s gaze was deeply disturbing. It seemed predatory, and of course everything about the situation seemed to reassert that notion. There was something even more than that though, but I couldn’t quite place it.
Dad and I continued backtracking through the woods as best we were able, trying to keep an eye on the fiend as well as get back to the house quickly. We failed the former in mere minutes as the sight of the bird disappeared behind the foliage of the woods. Dad’s leg was pretty mangled, and although it was causing him obvious pain he continued pushing on as I clutched him by the shoulder.
The sight of the house returned as we broke through the other side of the woods. Things were eerily quiet, with no sign of the feathered thing anywhere. The two of us took a moment to inspect the vicinity as we planned our move. I stepped towards the edge of the trees when dad reached a hand out to stop me.
“It’s still out there… it’s waiting for us to leave the woods.” Dad whispered the words as he slumped back against a tree.
“Well, we have to go out there… your legs still bleeding… you need stiches.” Dad grunted and shook his head.
“Trust me… if that thing catches you in the open it’s not gonna be good.” I just threw my hands up then.
“Dad we have to do something, we can’t just sit here.” I pulled my phone out once more, but of course as expected I had no service. Dad’s house was about five kilometers away from the city, and I never got any cell phone coverage there. Dad didn’t have his cellphone on him either, and as such our options were rather limited.
The two of us took a moment to try and bandage his leg as best we could. I took my belt off and applied a tourniquet on his thigh to hopefully stifle the bleeding, and dad tore off the dangling fabric on his jeans to try and wrap up the wound.
As we worked, we heard the sounds of distant honks approaching. A few minutes later and a flock of geese then descended from the night sky and landed around dad’s house. Once they touched down they fell silent, dispersing throughout the yard as though they were on patrol. There was no sign of the big one, but both of us knew it was still out there.
The chill of the night had become a serious problem by then, and both of us felt the cold gnawing against us relentlessly. My teeth chattered in my mouth, and the materials of my clothing proved simply too thin against the frigid night air. We needed to get inside or get away, lest we face serious risk from hypothermia.
I clutched my shovel tight, as dad grabbed some large sticks and filled our pockets with small rocks. At the last second, I told dad to just wait there as I tried to get back to the house. He protested, but both of us knew that with his wounded leg he would be a sitting duck if we got attacked. I had a better chance of going in alone.
I tiptoed out from the woods as dad watched with baited breath from the trees. The eyes of the flock bore down upon me like an oppressive heat, uncomfortable and foreboding. As I reached the halfway point between the woods and the house the flock erupted into a calamity of anger honks. They began to furiously beat their wings and ascend into the air, and I just booked it to the house.
I reached the front door at the same moment one of the geese reached me. It hovered and pecked angrily at me, tearing my coat with it’s beak and slashing against me with it’s feet. Just in case any Canadian authorities are reading this: I ABSOLUTELY DID NOT HARM ANY GEESE IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM.
Somehow (and through entirely legal means) I managed to open the door and slip inside just as the flock slammed into the wall behind me. Brody was barking wildly and licking at my torso as I took a moment to gather my breath. I took a few more moments to calm him down as the frenzied flock outside seemed to calm down a bit. Suddenly there was a large thud on the roof, and my heart dropped. A low gurgling, sort of droning noise became audible above as the rest of the geese fell into a dead silence.
I knew it was that thing again, and turned my attention to find dad’s phone and the car keys. I managed the latter quite quickly, but the former eluded me. After several minutes I all but abandoned the search and formulated a new plan. As I glanced out the window, I spied dad at the edge of the trees. I knew his situation was growing evermore dire by the moment, and I had to do something radical.
Brody remained at my side, a silent resolve seeming to swirl in his dark brown eyes. I took a moment to pet him, and whisper words of encouragement to the good boy. It almost made me tear up how loyal and ready for battle he appeared to be. He knew his owner was in danger, and he was ready to face the darkness. His unwavering courage inspired me, and I whispered to him.
“You’re a good boy Brody, let’s try not to die.”
As I grasped the door handle, something struck the window beside me. Shattering glass exploded into the living room as a goose flailed into the room. It landed with a thump, but quickly rose and ascended into the air honking and screeching furiously. Brody snarled and lunged at it, causing it to back away.
I figured that was the signal it was time to go, and so I flung open the door and beckoned Brody to follow. Together the two of us rushed from the house and towards dad’s truck in the driveway. A sudden surge of angered honks thundered out behind us, with one bellowing cry that dwarfed them all.
I reached the truck and picked up Brody to usher him inside. The engine roared to life as the geese began accosting the outside of the truck. They seemed to have no regard for their own wellbeing as they body-slammed into the chassis again and again.
I put it into drive and floored it towards the trees. Dad then emerged, staggering out from the woods and towards the passenger door. Before he could reach it though, a scarlet shadow descended from the heavens. It slammed down upon him, wailing and lashing out at him.
Brody and I hopped out the other side and pressed our assault. The red beast had dad in the fetal position down below him. Slashing with it’s talons and biting at his torso. With little other ideas I simply lunged at it, latching my arms around it and trying to bear-hug it away from him. Brody lunged and chomped down on it’s ankle as the beast howled.
It was strong, much stronger than I anticipated. It managed to simply toss me off of it and send me plummeting to the ground. It kicked it’s leg and knocked Brody back as dad managed to regain his footing behind it. It then extended it’s wings out with an angered screech. It’s tone like that of a goose distorted through a megaphone and pitched down several octaves.
I then beheld it’s full, horrific form. The thing’s eyes were haunting, like swirling pools of chemicals glinting in the sun. They were comprised of a multitude of colors which under any other circumstance might even be considered beautiful. They didn’t even look like eyes, and it made me realize this thing was no mere animal.
It towered over me, it’s feathers rippling in the cold breeze. Dad managed to clamber inside the truck behind it as Brody and I faced down the thing. Suddenly a torrent of geese descended upon us, and all semblance of order was lost. It’s hard to describe what even happened in the following moments, but it essentially involved me hardcore dancing my way through the swarming birds. By some miracle both I and Brody managed to enter the truck, thanks in no small part to dad flinging rocks out from the passenger side.
Once all three of us were in I put the truck in drive and gunned it out of there. The red one continued to pursue us down the road, slamming down into the truck 3 separate times. With each hit I swerved and nearly lost control, but somehow managed to maintain the course. Mercifully the beast and it’s cohorts eventually seemed to call off the onslaught, and we all breathed a huge sigh of relief.
I had scratches and cuts all over my body and both dad and Brody were pretty beat up as well. Thankfully, none of us appeared too badly injured, and we managed to reach the hospital a little while later.
Dad and I checked in with Brody accompanying us inside. They of course asked us what had happened as we got into the ICU, but all we could really tell them was that we were attacked by some animals. They of course wanted to know which animals in particular, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to tell them. They wouldn’t have believed us anyways.
They got us disinfected which hurt like hell, and stitched-up not long after. They ran us through the gamete of bloodwork, but thankfully they all came back negative including for rabies which was the primary concern. I was exhausted from the entire event, and fell deep into sleep as the sun began to rise outside.
I awoke a few hours later to find the police chief there awaiting me; the same guy in charge of investigating the grim discovery on dad’s property. He was of course curious about what the hell had happened, but I just laughed. I told him it’d be easier for me to just write it out, and that’s exactly what I’ve done here with this document.
The rest of this was not given to the police, but I wanted to add a few more things. Of course, they are skeptical about mine and my father’s accounts, and of course when they returned to our property the geese were nowhere to be found.
They may have locked us up in the loony bin were it not for the damage to my father’s truck and house, as well as my Subaru being covered in goose shit. That part just made me laugh, and it’s almost like the flock just wanted to send me one last middle finger for escaping their fury. One of the piles of stool was unlike the others though, and they got it into the lab for testing. We’ll see if anything comes of it, but I’m not holding my breath.
As for what the hell happened, that I do not know, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else does either. As mentioned, I’ve never seen any accounts of geese behaving like this, nor have I seen any creature or folklore that seems to match that red one.
There are wives’ tales around here about the so-called thunderbirds, and maybe that’s what it was. I just can’t ignore that unnerving feeling it gave me. Of course it was threatening in the sense that it could kill me, but there was also an underlying element to it. It was intelligent, and it’s odd, multi-colored eyes conveyed that beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, but I just hope I never see it again.
Honestly, I was kind of annoyed that my dad had ventured out there in the middle of the night alone, and I had to ask him why he’d done it in the first place. His response might have been the most terrifying aspect of all of this.
“I heard someone crying. Sounded like a kid, but when I got out there all I found was that damn bird waiting for me. I think it was making the noise.”
Brody, my father and I are all doing fine now, but are obviously a little rattled from the experience. If anyone has any theories about this event then please feel free to share them. I fucking hate geese, and this event has firmly reinforced that belief for me. If you see them, maybe it’s best to just avoid them altogether. You never know what those feathery bastards are contemplating.
submitted by zachariusfrost to nosleep [link] [comments]
Geese are terrible people, and they’re actually not even people, which makes them even worse. One core, traumatic memory of being chased down by one as a child and sobbing hysterically was all it took for me to develop a lifelong distrust of the feathery demons. It seems so needlessly cruel to have what is essentially a long-necked chicken have the temperament of a damn lycanthrope. Their beady little black eyes seem like bottomless pits of spite, and the fact they actually have teeth on their tongues is something I don’t think I can ever forgive God for.
My father still lives in my childhood home, but me and my siblings are all moved out. He’s older now and has some difficulties with mobility so I stop by pretty often to help out where I can. Ever since mom passed, he’s been there alone with his faithful Labrador retriever; Brody, and although he greatly values his independence it’s getting more and more difficult for him to live alone as the years go on.
Me and my older brother: Eric routinely switch-off helping him with tasks around the house that may be a risk to him. Typically, it’s things like cleaning out the gutters, trimming tree branches and simple maintenance on his vehicles, mostly just things I’d rather a 73-year-old man not try and do alone.
Last week I went out to help him with some chores. My brother Eric was supposed to meet my there but he got roped in to his kids’ parent-teacher conferences so I met dad alone. It was just past noon when I met dad out at his house. He and I grilled some burgers and chatted about things for a while before we began on the tasks.
A recent snowfall had damaged some of the trees on the back of his property, and so he wanted to chop them down before they fell onto his shed. He and I grabbed some handsaws and an axe and began systemically pruning the aspens.
We soon determined there were about 3 trees total which we needed to remove. I climbed the ladder and began sawing off some of the upper branches as dad steadied it from down below. Things were going well until a sudden familiar and foreboding ruckus emerged in the distance. I lowered the chainsaw and killed the motor as I spied the flock soar overhead and land in the back pasture.
“Damn birds been ruining that back field. More goose shit than grass back there at this point.” Dad spat as he said it, clearly annoyed by the return of the unwelcome visitors.
“You need some scarecrows or something.” I replied.
“I tried that, damn things have no fear of people anymore though so it didn’t do a damn thing.”
I suppose it’s also important to mention that we live in Canada, and the Canadian goose is our national bird. INB4 comments saying how you should shoot them which unfortunately is not an option. Not only because firearms are severely restricted here, but also because killing a Canadian goose can get you hefty fines and potentially land you in prison.
In America, you guys have the bald eagle, which is cool. They are rare, imposing, beautiful and majestic. You remember the day you see one, and maybe even sing the national anthem or something when you do.
Geese are not like that, and I doubt anyone has ever been happy to see one. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been on my way to work when traffic suddenly just comes to a complete standstill because a few geese decided to casually meander onto the highway. We have made them a protected class, and they know it. The rest of us are lowly peasants when compared to our avian overlords, and Canada remains under the tyranny of the goose forevermore.
“Then there’s the red one.” He spoke it suddenly as though reflecting upon an old foe resurfacing.
“The red one?” Dad nodded and his eyes narrowed on me.
“You’re gonna laugh at me I know, but son, I swear I’ve seen it. A goose as tall as a man, feathers a deep blood red color” He paused and glanced out towards the trees as a gust rolled through the landscape.
“Something ain’t right with it.”
Contrary to dad’s prediction, I didn’t laugh: I didn’t know how to react. I thought he was just messing with me, but there was a deadly serious cadence in his voice. It probably sounds ridiculous to anyone reading, but something about the sincerity in his voice made me take pause.
My father is not a guy that scares easy. Never seen him shed a tear, and never seen him back down from an altercation. A man as stubborn as he is stalwart, and making up tales was never something he seemed particularly good at.
“How often do you see it?”
“Every once in a while… ain’t seen it for some time now, but I know it’s always out there… watching.” He let that ominous phrase just sort of hang in the air unelaborated. It still seemed a bit ridiculous, but clearly he was affected by it.
“You got a slingshot or something?” Dad shook his head down below as he stared contemptuously out at the flock. He didn’t reply, and since it seemed to be genuinely bothering him I decided to do something stupid about it. I climbed down the ladder as he glanced at me side-eyed.
“Where you goin?”
“Birdwatching.” I was already entering the tree line as I called back. A menagerie of branches and leaves split apart as I trudged my way towards them. They all continued peacefully grazing and loitering as I made my approach unseen.
I breached the other side of the tree line and stepped out into the field. The flagrant faction of fowl barely even seemed to notice my arrival. I grabbed a decent sized stick laying on the ground and sauntered out towards them.
“Hey… get outta here!” A few of them turned to look at me, but still seemed woefully unbothered by my display.
“GIT!” I shouted the words at the top of my lungs and began waving the stick back and forth. I was met with a chorus of angered honks as the gaggled fluttered into a frenzy. One by one they leapt into the air and began flying off in various directions.
One of them divebombed directly towards me, but I managed to duck aside as it flew past. Fearing their retaliation, I clutched my stick and prepared myself for battle, but thankfully they continued flying off and resuming their formation in the sky above. Seconds later they were soaring away from the property, hopefully never to return, but I knew I wasn’t that lucky or intimidating.
Once they were beyond the trees, I turned back, but something caught my eye as I turned away. On the ground where they had gathered, something was laying in the muck. I walked towards it, and I froze midstride as the macabre realization struck like thunder.
“Atta boy son, you must be a goose whisperer or something.” Dad chuckled as he and Brody approached from behind me. I just turned back and stared at him, and his expression contorted as he noticed mine.
“What is it?” I just pointed at it. Dad approached gingerly, and as he reached my side he too seemed taken aback.
“Is that what I think it is?” Dad ignored the question and moved in for a closer look. As he knelt down, he grunted and cleared his throat.
“Well, if you think it’s a severed human arm then I think you’re right.”
The two of us hurried back inside his house and dialed 911. The police showed up about an hour later and we escorted them back to where we’d found it. Not long after they had an entire array of workers, technicians and people sectioning off the area. They spent hours combing through the vicinity, and the longer it went on the worse it got.
Dad and I watched as they removed a body bag for the remains we’d found, then another, and another. In total we counted six separate bags of what we assumed were human remains. The initial search area widened to encompass a large chunk of the back field. They didn’t tell us much about it as they worked though, and so the two of us could only speculate as we watched from dad’s porch.
Eventually I was taken down to the police station as a few other cops remained with dad at his house. They interrogated me once we got to the station, and I told them pretty much everything I’ve written here. Obviously, they were skeptical, and I don’t even blame them for eying me suspiciously. Not a whole lot of it made much sense to me either, but I didn’t know what else to say to help them.
They eventually seemed to clear me of any wrongdoing and so took me back to my father’s house. They then took my father to conduct the same interview on him. It was getting late in the day by then, and although I thought about going home, I felt it was better for me to stay there and await dad’s return.
As I waited, I did some more research online. Apparently Geese- despite their aggressive tendencies and fierce attributes are mostly vegetarian. They do eat insects and fish from time to time, but usually just graze on plants. The fact that several of them had blood spackles on their down would seemingly indicate that the group had been eating the arm, and possibly the rest of the remains in the field. As far as I can tell, there’s never been any reports of geese eating humans or even scavenging on their remains.
It was nearly midnight by the time the officers ferried my father back home. He sauntered inside, clearly worn out from the bizarre day. He slumped onto the couch as the lead officer gestured me to join him outside.
“Thank you for your and your father’s cooperation today. I know this is a very odd and worrying situation, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it. Our crew may be out here for awhile while the investigation concludes, but we’ll try our best to stay out of you and your father’s way. Please feel free to call if you discover or learn anything you think we should know.” He held out his card and I nodded back. He and his partner then exited the home and made their way back to the cruiser. The rest of their team seemed to be packing it in for the night as well, so I returned to dad.
He was seated on his weathered living room chair with Brody stationed valiantly at his feet. He sipped from his whiskey glass as I went and sat on the opposing couch.
“Well… can’t say this is how I was expecting today to go.” I spoke with a chuckle and dad nodded back with an affirming grunt.
“You can say that again. Over thirty years I’ve lived on this damn property, and I’ve never seen anything like this happen.” I couldn’t help but chuckle at that.
“Well, I’d sure hope not, geese don’t even usually eat meat apparently.” I prattled off the fact I’d read previous from Google. Dad scoffed as his head slowly swiveled side to side.
“Apparently these ones do.” He glanced silently out the living room window, and towards the back field where the grisly discovery had been made. The two of us sat in silence for a moment as we contemplated the overwhelming day.
We chatted for a few more minutes but soon decided to call it a night as we were both exhausted. Dad told me I could stay the night there and I happily obliged as I was already near unconscious on his living room couch. After wrapping myself in his spare comforter I was out, but it did not last.
The intrusive sounds of aggressive barking stirred me from a deep sleep. Suddenly I felt a cold chill seep into my bones. I stirred from slumber, shivering as a cold chill descended my spine and a fuzzy form began nuzzling against me. It was dark with only the moonlight beaming in from outside the house, but I recognized the barks and blurry outline of Brody beside me.
He began whining and licking my face franticly as my eyes struggled to adjust to the low lighting. I patted his head and back as I tried getting him to calm down, but he seemed really riled up for some reason. The couch I’d been sleeping on sat below the front window and from my vantage point I couldn’t see the front door. As I sat up, and turned to the side I froze stiff.
The front door was wide open.
With a stark fright I jolted to my feet and backed away, confused and trying desperately to adjust my eyes to the shadows and quell my racing heart. Brody continued whining and barking as he stared out into the dark night.
I found my coat and approached the door, but it showed no signs of forced entry. I could only assume my dad had been the one to open it. On tiptoes I snuck to pier out the door, but found nothing but the empty yard and night sky.
Quickly I rushed down the hall to my father’s room, but as expected he wasn’t in there. I couldn’t imagine what would possibly possess him to venture out in the middle of the night alone, but I knew it wasn’t good. As I ventured back to the front door, I felt a true dread seep into the very cortex of my being. Nothing within me wanted to go out there, but I knew I couldn’t leave my father.
The cold breeze struck my skin like needles as I stepped out and shut the door behind me. Brody was still going ballistic inside especially with the door shut, but I didn’t want him to run off and figured leaving him there was the safer option.
I scanned the area around me but saw no sign of anyone or anything. Dad’s old Chevy sat derelict on his driveway along with my Subaru, both of them untouched aside from a thin layer of snow. I thought about calling out his name, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Back on the side of the house I spied a shovel leaning against the wall and so I took it with me.
We’d gotten a bit of snow as we slept, and in the yard, I spied I clear line of footprints leading out from the door and back around the side of the house. As I followed them my feet crunched in the snow which sounded like the crashing of thunder when contrasted with the silent night. My hairs stood on end and my hands shook wildly as I clutched the shovel tight.
The footprints led directly from the front of the house to the back grove where we’d made the macabre discovery earlier that day. Moments later I reached the tree line, but still didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. My father’s footprints vanished into the trees, and I just hoped he hadn’t wandered too far.
Branches scraped against me as I made my way deeper inside the grove. Still I heard and saw nothing out of the ordinary even as I approached the other side where the sectioned-off field was located. `As I breached the edge of the trees, I spotted something up ahead. It was laying near one of the fresh pits the police had been excavating, and after a few seconds I finally realized what it was.
“Dad? Dad are you okay?” I spoke the words in a shouted whisper as I snuck over towards him. He wasn’t moving, and as I got near him my heart sunk as I beheld his condition. His jacket was shredded all over, like someone had haphazardly slashed at him with a razorblade.
Once at his side I found him scratched up and unconscious, but clearly still alive. As I jostled his shoulder he slowly came around and opened his eyes. Suddenly his eyes sprung wide and he lurched upward as he furiously glanced around the area.
“Dad it’s okay… it’s just me.” He didn’t respond, and despite my protest he hobbled back to his feet as he panted heavily.
“What the hell happened? Why are you out here?”
“It’s here… I saw it.” He then groaned and collapsed back to his knees as his face contorted into an agonized grimace. I then saw that his leg was stained red and torn up pretty bad. He clutched it as he slumped down and I moved to assist him.
“We gotta get out of here son.” As I began trying to hoist him back to his feet, a sudden noise pierced the mute night air. An odd raspy sort of bugling noise. It was a weird sound that I didn’t recognize, but it definitely sounded like some kind of animal had made it.
Dad was glancing around franticly trying to see something, but he wouldn’t say anything. His leg was lacerated, and he couldn’t stand on it anymore so as such I ended up just basically dragging him back towards the tree line.
The morose screech we’d heard previous roared out once more, but this time it sounded like it was coming from above us. As I averted my eyes upward, I saw the fleeting form of a large shadow soar beyond the trees. The leaves on the top swayed from the wind of it passing, and clearly it was big, much bigger than any bird or flying creature I’ve ever seen.
“Shit… it’s coming back.” Dad turned and did what he could to try and hobble to the trees. The two of us continued awkwardly stumbling like a pair of drunken baboons until finally reaching the tree line. The moment we stepped inside it, I heard it descend onto the field.
From the shadows we peered out, seeing a large, bipedal creature towering in the field. It stood tall on long, lanky legs. It’s head was suspended upon an elongated neck, and bulbous black eyes stared unblinking back towards us.
My first thought upon seeing it was that it looked like a damn pterodactyl, but it was even stranger than that. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing, but it looked like an enormous goose. That freak of nature had to have stood at least 6 feet tall, with a wingspan probably double that. It’s body was an eerie crimson color much as dad had claimed, and the moonlight beaming down seemed to give it an almost ethereal presence.
It just stood there staring back at us for a long, tense moment of uncomfortable silence. It’s unblinking obsidian eyes seemed to gleam with a rampant sense of primal hunger. Something about it’s gaze was deeply disturbing. It seemed predatory, and of course everything about the situation seemed to reassert that notion. There was something even more than that though, but I couldn’t quite place it.
Dad and I continued backtracking through the woods as best we were able, trying to keep an eye on the fiend as well as get back to the house quickly. We failed the former in mere minutes as the sight of the bird disappeared behind the foliage of the woods. Dad’s leg was pretty mangled, and although it was causing him obvious pain he continued pushing on as I clutched him by the shoulder.
The sight of the house returned as we broke through the other side of the woods. Things were eerily quiet, with no sign of the feathered thing anywhere. The two of us took a moment to inspect the vicinity as we planned our move. I stepped towards the edge of the trees when dad reached a hand out to stop me.
“It’s still out there… it’s waiting for us to leave the woods.” Dad whispered the words as he slumped back against a tree.
“Well, we have to go out there… your legs still bleeding… you need stiches.” Dad grunted and shook his head.
“Trust me… if that thing catches you in the open it’s not gonna be good.” I just threw my hands up then.
“Dad we have to do something, we can’t just sit here.” I pulled my phone out once more, but of course as expected I had no service. Dad’s house was about five kilometers away from the city, and I never got any cell phone coverage there. Dad didn’t have his cellphone on him either, and as such our options were rather limited.
The two of us took a moment to try and bandage his leg as best we could. I took my belt off and applied a tourniquet on his thigh to hopefully stifle the bleeding, and dad tore off the dangling fabric on his jeans to try and wrap up the wound.
As we worked, we heard the sounds of distant honks approaching. A few minutes later and a flock of geese then descended from the night sky and landed around dad’s house. Once they touched down they fell silent, dispersing throughout the yard as though they were on patrol. There was no sign of the big one, but both of us knew it was still out there.
The chill of the night had become a serious problem by then, and both of us felt the cold gnawing against us relentlessly. My teeth chattered in my mouth, and the materials of my clothing proved simply too thin against the frigid night air. We needed to get inside or get away, lest we face serious risk from hypothermia.
I clutched my shovel tight, as dad grabbed some large sticks and filled our pockets with small rocks. At the last second, I told dad to just wait there as I tried to get back to the house. He protested, but both of us knew that with his wounded leg he would be a sitting duck if we got attacked. I had a better chance of going in alone.
I tiptoed out from the woods as dad watched with baited breath from the trees. The eyes of the flock bore down upon me like an oppressive heat, uncomfortable and foreboding. As I reached the halfway point between the woods and the house the flock erupted into a calamity of anger honks. They began to furiously beat their wings and ascend into the air, and I just booked it to the house.
I reached the front door at the same moment one of the geese reached me. It hovered and pecked angrily at me, tearing my coat with it’s beak and slashing against me with it’s feet. Just in case any Canadian authorities are reading this: I ABSOLUTELY DID NOT HARM ANY GEESE IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM.
Somehow (and through entirely legal means) I managed to open the door and slip inside just as the flock slammed into the wall behind me. Brody was barking wildly and licking at my torso as I took a moment to gather my breath. I took a few more moments to calm him down as the frenzied flock outside seemed to calm down a bit. Suddenly there was a large thud on the roof, and my heart dropped. A low gurgling, sort of droning noise became audible above as the rest of the geese fell into a dead silence.
I knew it was that thing again, and turned my attention to find dad’s phone and the car keys. I managed the latter quite quickly, but the former eluded me. After several minutes I all but abandoned the search and formulated a new plan. As I glanced out the window, I spied dad at the edge of the trees. I knew his situation was growing evermore dire by the moment, and I had to do something radical.
Brody remained at my side, a silent resolve seeming to swirl in his dark brown eyes. I took a moment to pet him, and whisper words of encouragement to the good boy. It almost made me tear up how loyal and ready for battle he appeared to be. He knew his owner was in danger, and he was ready to face the darkness. His unwavering courage inspired me, and I whispered to him.
“You’re a good boy Brody, let’s try not to die.”
As I grasped the door handle, something struck the window beside me. Shattering glass exploded into the living room as a goose flailed into the room. It landed with a thump, but quickly rose and ascended into the air honking and screeching furiously. Brody snarled and lunged at it, causing it to back away.
I figured that was the signal it was time to go, and so I flung open the door and beckoned Brody to follow. Together the two of us rushed from the house and towards dad’s truck in the driveway. A sudden surge of angered honks thundered out behind us, with one bellowing cry that dwarfed them all.
I reached the truck and picked up Brody to usher him inside. The engine roared to life as the geese began accosting the outside of the truck. They seemed to have no regard for their own wellbeing as they body-slammed into the chassis again and again.
I put it into drive and floored it towards the trees. Dad then emerged, staggering out from the woods and towards the passenger door. Before he could reach it though, a scarlet shadow descended from the heavens. It slammed down upon him, wailing and lashing out at him.
Brody and I hopped out the other side and pressed our assault. The red beast had dad in the fetal position down below him. Slashing with it’s talons and biting at his torso. With little other ideas I simply lunged at it, latching my arms around it and trying to bear-hug it away from him. Brody lunged and chomped down on it’s ankle as the beast howled.
It was strong, much stronger than I anticipated. It managed to simply toss me off of it and send me plummeting to the ground. It kicked it’s leg and knocked Brody back as dad managed to regain his footing behind it. It then extended it’s wings out with an angered screech. It’s tone like that of a goose distorted through a megaphone and pitched down several octaves.
I then beheld it’s full, horrific form. The thing’s eyes were haunting, like swirling pools of chemicals glinting in the sun. They were comprised of a multitude of colors which under any other circumstance might even be considered beautiful. They didn’t even look like eyes, and it made me realize this thing was no mere animal.
It towered over me, it’s feathers rippling in the cold breeze. Dad managed to clamber inside the truck behind it as Brody and I faced down the thing. Suddenly a torrent of geese descended upon us, and all semblance of order was lost. It’s hard to describe what even happened in the following moments, but it essentially involved me hardcore dancing my way through the swarming birds. By some miracle both I and Brody managed to enter the truck, thanks in no small part to dad flinging rocks out from the passenger side.
Once all three of us were in I put the truck in drive and gunned it out of there. The red one continued to pursue us down the road, slamming down into the truck 3 separate times. With each hit I swerved and nearly lost control, but somehow managed to maintain the course. Mercifully the beast and it’s cohorts eventually seemed to call off the onslaught, and we all breathed a huge sigh of relief.
I had scratches and cuts all over my body and both dad and Brody were pretty beat up as well. Thankfully, none of us appeared too badly injured, and we managed to reach the hospital a little while later.
Dad and I checked in with Brody accompanying us inside. They of course asked us what had happened as we got into the ICU, but all we could really tell them was that we were attacked by some animals. They of course wanted to know which animals in particular, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to tell them. They wouldn’t have believed us anyways.
They got us disinfected which hurt like hell, and stitched-up not long after. They ran us through the gamete of bloodwork, but thankfully they all came back negative including for rabies which was the primary concern. I was exhausted from the entire event, and fell deep into sleep as the sun began to rise outside.
I awoke a few hours later to find the police chief there awaiting me; the same guy in charge of investigating the grim discovery on dad’s property. He was of course curious about what the hell had happened, but I just laughed. I told him it’d be easier for me to just write it out, and that’s exactly what I’ve done here with this document.
The rest of this was not given to the police, but I wanted to add a few more things. Of course, they are skeptical about mine and my father’s accounts, and of course when they returned to our property the geese were nowhere to be found.
They may have locked us up in the loony bin were it not for the damage to my father’s truck and house, as well as my Subaru being covered in goose shit. That part just made me laugh, and it’s almost like the flock just wanted to send me one last middle finger for escaping their fury. One of the piles of stool was unlike the others though, and they got it into the lab for testing. We’ll see if anything comes of it, but I’m not holding my breath.
As for what the hell happened, that I do not know, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else does either. As mentioned, I’ve never seen any accounts of geese behaving like this, nor have I seen any creature or folklore that seems to match that red one.
There are wives’ tales around here about the so-called thunderbirds, and maybe that’s what it was. I just can’t ignore that unnerving feeling it gave me. Of course it was threatening in the sense that it could kill me, but there was also an underlying element to it. It was intelligent, and it’s odd, multi-colored eyes conveyed that beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, but I just hope I never see it again.
Honestly, I was kind of annoyed that my dad had ventured out there in the middle of the night alone, and I had to ask him why he’d done it in the first place. His response might have been the most terrifying aspect of all of this.
“I heard someone crying. Sounded like a kid, but when I got out there all I found was that damn bird waiting for me. I think it was making the noise.”
Brody, my father and I are all doing fine now, but are obviously a little rattled from the experience. If anyone has any theories about this event then please feel free to share them. I fucking hate geese, and this event has firmly reinforced that belief for me. If you see them, maybe it’s best to just avoid them altogether. You never know what those feathery bastards are contemplating.
2023.03.27 05:01 Kamen-Ramen [H] Doom Eternal, TÜRKIYE-SYRIA, STAND WITH UKRAINE, Black Desert, Blasphemous, Bloodstained, and more! [W] Steam Games or PayPal
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2023.03.27 05:01 Kamen-Ramen [H] Doom Eternal, TÜRKIYE-SYRIA, STAND WITH UKRAINE, Black Desert, Blasphemous, Bloodstained, and more! [W] Steam Games or PayPal
I am in the USA. :)
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GAMES I KNOW YOU WANT:
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GAMES I KNOW YOU WANT:
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- Doom 64
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2023.03.27 05:00 greeneyes0332 [WTS] NAGASAWA ORIGINAL PRO GEAR SLIM ONOMATOPE - PUKAPUKA, plus some inks!
Hi! I’d like to sell my NAGASAWA ORIGINAL PRO GEAR SLIM ONOMATOPE - PUKAPUKA medium nib - A2 condition. I’ve only had it for a week and only inked it once. It’s a beautiful bright blue with subtle sparkle and I love how sailors Medium nibs write! I just went on a pen/ink splurge so I’m trying to reel it back lol I have the original box it came in plus the 2 black ink carts. Paid $280, asking $215 shipped. If requested I’ll include a sample of the matching Kobe ink. I have flushed and throughly cleaned the pen and it’s ready to be shipped! I’d be happy to answer any questions you may have or provide more pictures 🙂 verification
These are just some inks I’ve purchased over the last few weeks that I’d like to sell. All have only been swatched, no box with them. - Sailor manyo Sakura 50 ml $20 shipped OBO - Diamine dragon blood 50 ml $6 OBO - Robert Oster 30 ml rose gold antiqua $20 shipped OBO
ink verification
I also have two Robert Oster samples - Rose gilt tynte and Sydney Lavender. Idk how much to price them so if you purchase something let me know if you want a sample.
I have a small lot of random ink cartridges- 10 pack of platinum blue black, 1 green and 1 violet, 2 black (single platinum carts) and 5 royal blue Kaweco carts. Best offer on these. Forgot to add the random J herbjn converter- I don’t know how I ended up with this but I have no pen to use it with so if your interested it’s yours!
submitted by greeneyes0332 to Pen_Swap [link] [comments]
These are just some inks I’ve purchased over the last few weeks that I’d like to sell. All have only been swatched, no box with them. - Sailor manyo Sakura 50 ml $20 shipped OBO - Diamine dragon blood 50 ml $6 OBO - Robert Oster 30 ml rose gold antiqua $20 shipped OBO
ink verification
I also have two Robert Oster samples - Rose gilt tynte and Sydney Lavender. Idk how much to price them so if you purchase something let me know if you want a sample.
I have a small lot of random ink cartridges- 10 pack of platinum blue black, 1 green and 1 violet, 2 black (single platinum carts) and 5 royal blue Kaweco carts. Best offer on these. Forgot to add the random J herbjn converter- I don’t know how I ended up with this but I have no pen to use it with so if your interested it’s yours!
2023.03.27 04:47 663flip Waterproof inks are psychologically tormenting me
I've never lost a page of writing to water damage in my life. I don't even take my main notebook out of the house. Yet now that I have a good waterproof ink (TWSBI Blue Black) I keep thinking how it's superior to every other ink I own in this regard, I should use it exclusively for my journal, I should really try some more document and pigment inks... This is ridiculous! I'm never giving up my Diamines!
Anyone else have this problem?...
submitted by 663flip to fountainpens [link] [comments]
Anyone else have this problem?...
2023.03.27 04:42 JaymesGrl So this is why they're called blue nonces. WTF 8yr old's?
 | Explain to me like I'm stupid. Why are they traumatising eight year olds with a strip search? Is an eight year old going to have drugs up their insides or something? Just, why? submitted by JaymesGrl to GreenAndPleasant [link] [comments] |
2023.03.27 04:38 NekrounRose The Human Support and Guidance Forum Part 8
Part 1 l Part 7 l Part 9
This Chat Room is specifically for those seeking help or offering advice in dealing with the Humans around them. Any unrelated posts will be removed.
\*- This symbol indicates that this User is considered to be a Human Expert. A human expert has at least one of the following qualifications;*
At least 7 standard years of experience dealing with and managing humans
Extensive knowledge of Human cultures and habits
Flown on at least 1 Human crewed vessel for a period greater than 3 standard years
Or
Spent at least 3 standard years living in a primarily Human settlement.
Please be advised that many Users that meet the requirements to be a Human Expert also begin to display Human-like behaviors. They do not often seem aware of these tendencies so please take care in how you address any “humanisms.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STORY (W.A.N.A.H.)
Chevarnaltakii** (Shipboard Security Officer):
We were halfway between the Deltarii Star Cluster and Vashinuwv when our ship was attacked by pirates. The battle was brief and we successfully fended them off, but not without sustaining damages. Our primary FTL drives were down and the backups were bleeding power. Our engineer, a Zeburu by the name of Grsh’kik, was at a loss. We weren’t going to make it to Vashinuwv and we didn’t dare send out a distress signal so close to where we had been attacked.
Then, our human pilot, Hannah, admitted that she had some mechanical experience from working on old ships with her Father. “Nothing professional,” she warned, “But I’ll take a look at it. I might be able to jury rig something.”
I had no idea what “jury rig” meant, but it was something to try. Even if it blew up the ship, that was a better fate than slowly wasting away as the ship drifted through the Darkening Black and into the Unyielding Void.
She disappeared into the engine bay for three hours as the crew waited in uneasy silence. Would the human do something that would end in our fiery deaths? Would we just explode without warning? The waiting felt as endless as the Void itself. I felt as though I should count the beats of my heart so as to cherish each one.
Finally, the human emerged. Grease was smeared across one cheek and she had bound her hair up into a lopsided knot on the back of her head.
“I need two more holophones and some parts from the coffee maker, but I think I can make it work,” She informed us. A cheer broke out the crew as we reclaimed some fragment of hope. Perhaps this was not the day Darkness claimed us. I surrendered my holophone without hesitation and the Captain surrendered his. This left only the coffee maker and the captain gave permission, despite some minor grumbling from the other human on the crew.
Two more hours slunk past with all the speed of a Kil’maroo hunting. Hannah emerged again and now she looked as though she had attempted to paint herself with grease. I had not known that our engines even contained that much grease.
“We should be good to go, now!” She cheered and plopped herself back into the pilot’s seat. “On your mark, Captain!”
“Mark?” I believe that Captain Shralt was trying to get an explanation of the term, but Hannah took it as permission. She pressed a series of buttons and a strange whirring sound filled the ship.
“What is that sound?” I asked. Crew safety IS my responsibility, after all.
“Some of the coffee grinder bits couldn’t be separated from the rest of the machine and they don’t have the sound dampeners encasing them anymore,” Hannah explained, “Sounds like it’s working good elseways. Commencing FTL, Captain.”
“Please do.”
What followed was the strangest FTL flight I have ever experiences but it got us to Vashinuwv intact. I cannot recommend Coffee Maker Engines, but it is STARS better than drifting through the Void until the End of All Things.
I will forever more agree that We All Need A Human.
COMMENTS:
VirNova (Sensor Technician):
You flew with an UNDER CAFFEINATED human pilot? You are brave indeed.
Chevarnaltakii** (Shipboard Security Officer):
The humans were not COMPLETELY without caffeine. They were able to make coffee the "old fashioned" way by heating water on the cooking unit. There was some grumbling about it "not being the same" and Captain Shralt did have to stop Hannah from attempting to use the remains of the coffee maker where it is, partially inside the engines.
Sarran** (Traffic Controller):
I think I heard about this. Was your ship, by chance, the one that almost crashed into Vashinuwv Station?
Chevarnaltakii** (Shipboard Security Officer):
Yes. That docking was far from smooth. Human Hannah did a remarkable job to get us there intact at all and that near crash was not even close to the most terrifying part of that journey. I would much rather have fought off more pirates.
VirNova (Sensor Technician):
This is why we need to start keeping redundancies on the coffee makers and their parts. Humans NEED their anti-murder juice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STORY:
Xiavaknan (Marketing Director):
Human warning and safety lights are highly confusing. I was riding in a human-flown taxi this daycycle, and an odd light was on. I asked the human why there was suddenly a glowing volcano on his dash console as I found this particular symbol alarming. He then informed me that this simply meant that he was low on a particular cleaning fluid.
WHY DOES A CLEANING FLUID LIGHT RESEMBLE A VOLCANO?
I believe that we need a reference guide for all of these symbols. It will save us all a large quantity of panic.
COMMENTS:
Jor MalKin (Technical Support):
It turns out that there is a reference guide for these symbols; it is called an “Owner’s Manual” and the humans include one with each machine that they create. The problem is that these symbols are not standardized across all human created equipment so while your taxi showed a tiny volcano (It is supposed to represent the way the cleaning fluid is applied) another could show it as “Washer Fluid Low.” There are exceptions to this on some of those deemed as the most relevant. “Check Engine” seems to be one such exception.
VirNova (Sensor Technician):
Really? Because the only time I’ve seen a light that was trying to get us to check the engines it said “Eruption Imminent.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STORY (W.H.AT.):
Jiordn (Cargo Management and Security):
Update: A while back I posted that human Steve, the engineer on my ship, had stopped eating properly and started “Tinkering.” I want to thank @ MkDusklind for the excellent advice he gave. This incident has now finished resolving and I thought I would share with you how this advice may have saved our lives.
Human Steve continued the tinkering behavior until three hours past his normal end of day. At this point, Ship Captain Nevraliint determined that we should intervene and so Cargo Hauler Vert’Nick was sent and I followed to prevent any possible incidents. Vert’Nick interrupted him and recommended that he needed to begin his sleep cycle.
Steve stared at the cargo hauler. “It’s not that late,” I recall him saying, “It’s only-” And then he checked the time. “Oh. Well, let me just finish this and-”
“No,” our brave cargo hauler interrupted again, “The captain has determined that we have allowed your abnormal behaviors to continue long enough. You are being commanded to proceed to your scheduled sleep cycle.”
“Abnormal behaviors?” Human Steve questioned, “What are you talking about?”
“You have not consumed any of your supplied sustenance this day cycle. You have worked well past the end of your work and day cycles.”
“What but I had- I ate-” Fortunately, this was enough to convince Steve that he should stop what he was doing as he had clearly not realized his lack of proper sustenance. He proceeded to his sleep cycle and did not return until his normal FirstCycle. The tinkering resumed just before the start of his midcycle break. He did not take his break or eat the meal that was brought.
We had maintained our surveillance on him so it was immediately apparent when he lost awareness of everything beyond his workbench. We observed carefully as he made… something. None of us were trained in engineering so we had no way of knowing what the device could possibly be.
Halfway through his SecondCycle, he finished the device. I was on surveillance duty when he sat back in his chair and grinned at the device.
“Alright,” he said, “That should do it,” and he reached for what was unmistakably a power switch.
“Wait!” I admit that I may have panicked a little bit at that. However, my voice most certainly did NOT squeak, no matter what anyone else may tell you.
Steve jerked in his chair, seeming to rise into the air for a brief moment. I have no idea how he managed this.
“Jeeze, man. Give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”
“Do you require medical attention?” I feared I had broken him somehow. Heart attacks are said to be a very serious illness.
“Just a figure of speech,” Human Steve waved it off, “What’s up?” I began to look towards the ceiling but human Steve noticed and corrected himself, “I mean, ‘what is going on?’ Why did you stop me?”
“What is this device that you are making?”
“Oh! I had this really awesome idea, check it out!” He turned back to the device, “You know how the flux transmitters for the FTL drive can only handle like a tenth of the potential output for the reactor cores?” I had no idea what he was talking about but he did not give me the chance to say this. “This should let me create a secondary bypass system that will increase the volume of vrashe that that system can handle!”
“I do not understand.”
“So, right now, our reactors are putting out approximately 530 vrashe every minute but the flux transmitters can only handle 50 vrashe. This means that the FTL drive is only getting 100 vrashe, 50 per transmitter. This thing,” He patted the device, “will let me bypass the transmitters without letting any of the Latent Chaos through. It will still do the transmitters job, just without the power loss!”
“Can the drive handle the higher power level?”
“Should be able to.”
“I would rather not risk the safety of the ship and crew on “SHOULD.”
“There is no reason why not, the drive was built to last through any potential power surge. The most it would do is fry a few wires, blow some fuses, or-”
“Do you really want to risk fried drive components when that is the only thing keeping the ship moving towards our destination?”
“We’ll reach our destination faster this way!”
“Or not at all. How about this; you do not activate that device until we reach port and I will get the captain to consider approving modifications to HIS ship.”
“Oh… um, okay. I’ll- I’ll do that.”
When we reached the station, Human Steve activated his device and it did, in fact, “fry some wires, blow some fuses,” AND corrupt the control unit. It took FIVE daycycles to complete the repairs and get the new “Bypass System'' running properly. The replacement control unit had to be purchased on station as we did not already have one. Captain Nevraliint even authorized the purchase of a spare “just in case.”
Our ship is running much faster now, but I am immensely grateful that we did not become another tale of a ship lost to human tinkering.
COMMENTS:
MkDusklind** (Electrical Engineer):
Oh, wow. I am very glad that you were able to stop Human Steve in time. That was far too close.
Rawn Velmer (Engineer):
Is Human Steve planning to sell this design?
Jiordn (Cargo Management and Security):
Yes. The captain is working on that with him though I hope that we can do more thorough testing first.
Part 1 l Part 7 l Part 9
submitted by NekrounRose to HFY [link] [comments]
This Chat Room is specifically for those seeking help or offering advice in dealing with the Humans around them. Any unrelated posts will be removed.
\*- This symbol indicates that this User is considered to be a Human Expert. A human expert has at least one of the following qualifications;*
At least 7 standard years of experience dealing with and managing humans
Extensive knowledge of Human cultures and habits
Flown on at least 1 Human crewed vessel for a period greater than 3 standard years
Or
Spent at least 3 standard years living in a primarily Human settlement.
Please be advised that many Users that meet the requirements to be a Human Expert also begin to display Human-like behaviors. They do not often seem aware of these tendencies so please take care in how you address any “humanisms.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STORY (W.A.N.A.H.)
Chevarnaltakii** (Shipboard Security Officer):
We were halfway between the Deltarii Star Cluster and Vashinuwv when our ship was attacked by pirates. The battle was brief and we successfully fended them off, but not without sustaining damages. Our primary FTL drives were down and the backups were bleeding power. Our engineer, a Zeburu by the name of Grsh’kik, was at a loss. We weren’t going to make it to Vashinuwv and we didn’t dare send out a distress signal so close to where we had been attacked.
Then, our human pilot, Hannah, admitted that she had some mechanical experience from working on old ships with her Father. “Nothing professional,” she warned, “But I’ll take a look at it. I might be able to jury rig something.”
I had no idea what “jury rig” meant, but it was something to try. Even if it blew up the ship, that was a better fate than slowly wasting away as the ship drifted through the Darkening Black and into the Unyielding Void.
She disappeared into the engine bay for three hours as the crew waited in uneasy silence. Would the human do something that would end in our fiery deaths? Would we just explode without warning? The waiting felt as endless as the Void itself. I felt as though I should count the beats of my heart so as to cherish each one.
Finally, the human emerged. Grease was smeared across one cheek and she had bound her hair up into a lopsided knot on the back of her head.
“I need two more holophones and some parts from the coffee maker, but I think I can make it work,” She informed us. A cheer broke out the crew as we reclaimed some fragment of hope. Perhaps this was not the day Darkness claimed us. I surrendered my holophone without hesitation and the Captain surrendered his. This left only the coffee maker and the captain gave permission, despite some minor grumbling from the other human on the crew.
Two more hours slunk past with all the speed of a Kil’maroo hunting. Hannah emerged again and now she looked as though she had attempted to paint herself with grease. I had not known that our engines even contained that much grease.
“We should be good to go, now!” She cheered and plopped herself back into the pilot’s seat. “On your mark, Captain!”
“Mark?” I believe that Captain Shralt was trying to get an explanation of the term, but Hannah took it as permission. She pressed a series of buttons and a strange whirring sound filled the ship.
“What is that sound?” I asked. Crew safety IS my responsibility, after all.
“Some of the coffee grinder bits couldn’t be separated from the rest of the machine and they don’t have the sound dampeners encasing them anymore,” Hannah explained, “Sounds like it’s working good elseways. Commencing FTL, Captain.”
“Please do.”
What followed was the strangest FTL flight I have ever experiences but it got us to Vashinuwv intact. I cannot recommend Coffee Maker Engines, but it is STARS better than drifting through the Void until the End of All Things.
I will forever more agree that We All Need A Human.
COMMENTS:
VirNova (Sensor Technician):
You flew with an UNDER CAFFEINATED human pilot? You are brave indeed.
Chevarnaltakii** (Shipboard Security Officer):
The humans were not COMPLETELY without caffeine. They were able to make coffee the "old fashioned" way by heating water on the cooking unit. There was some grumbling about it "not being the same" and Captain Shralt did have to stop Hannah from attempting to use the remains of the coffee maker where it is, partially inside the engines.
Sarran** (Traffic Controller):
I think I heard about this. Was your ship, by chance, the one that almost crashed into Vashinuwv Station?
Chevarnaltakii** (Shipboard Security Officer):
Yes. That docking was far from smooth. Human Hannah did a remarkable job to get us there intact at all and that near crash was not even close to the most terrifying part of that journey. I would much rather have fought off more pirates.
VirNova (Sensor Technician):
This is why we need to start keeping redundancies on the coffee makers and their parts. Humans NEED their anti-murder juice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STORY:
Xiavaknan (Marketing Director):
Human warning and safety lights are highly confusing. I was riding in a human-flown taxi this daycycle, and an odd light was on. I asked the human why there was suddenly a glowing volcano on his dash console as I found this particular symbol alarming. He then informed me that this simply meant that he was low on a particular cleaning fluid.
WHY DOES A CLEANING FLUID LIGHT RESEMBLE A VOLCANO?
I believe that we need a reference guide for all of these symbols. It will save us all a large quantity of panic.
COMMENTS:
Jor MalKin (Technical Support):
It turns out that there is a reference guide for these symbols; it is called an “Owner’s Manual” and the humans include one with each machine that they create. The problem is that these symbols are not standardized across all human created equipment so while your taxi showed a tiny volcano (It is supposed to represent the way the cleaning fluid is applied) another could show it as “Washer Fluid Low.” There are exceptions to this on some of those deemed as the most relevant. “Check Engine” seems to be one such exception.
VirNova (Sensor Technician):
Really? Because the only time I’ve seen a light that was trying to get us to check the engines it said “Eruption Imminent.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STORY (W.H.AT.):
Jiordn (Cargo Management and Security):
Update: A while back I posted that human Steve, the engineer on my ship, had stopped eating properly and started “Tinkering.” I want to thank @ MkDusklind for the excellent advice he gave. This incident has now finished resolving and I thought I would share with you how this advice may have saved our lives.
Human Steve continued the tinkering behavior until three hours past his normal end of day. At this point, Ship Captain Nevraliint determined that we should intervene and so Cargo Hauler Vert’Nick was sent and I followed to prevent any possible incidents. Vert’Nick interrupted him and recommended that he needed to begin his sleep cycle.
Steve stared at the cargo hauler. “It’s not that late,” I recall him saying, “It’s only-” And then he checked the time. “Oh. Well, let me just finish this and-”
“No,” our brave cargo hauler interrupted again, “The captain has determined that we have allowed your abnormal behaviors to continue long enough. You are being commanded to proceed to your scheduled sleep cycle.”
“Abnormal behaviors?” Human Steve questioned, “What are you talking about?”
“You have not consumed any of your supplied sustenance this day cycle. You have worked well past the end of your work and day cycles.”
“What but I had- I ate-” Fortunately, this was enough to convince Steve that he should stop what he was doing as he had clearly not realized his lack of proper sustenance. He proceeded to his sleep cycle and did not return until his normal FirstCycle. The tinkering resumed just before the start of his midcycle break. He did not take his break or eat the meal that was brought.
We had maintained our surveillance on him so it was immediately apparent when he lost awareness of everything beyond his workbench. We observed carefully as he made… something. None of us were trained in engineering so we had no way of knowing what the device could possibly be.
Halfway through his SecondCycle, he finished the device. I was on surveillance duty when he sat back in his chair and grinned at the device.
“Alright,” he said, “That should do it,” and he reached for what was unmistakably a power switch.
“Wait!” I admit that I may have panicked a little bit at that. However, my voice most certainly did NOT squeak, no matter what anyone else may tell you.
Steve jerked in his chair, seeming to rise into the air for a brief moment. I have no idea how he managed this.
“Jeeze, man. Give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”
“Do you require medical attention?” I feared I had broken him somehow. Heart attacks are said to be a very serious illness.
“Just a figure of speech,” Human Steve waved it off, “What’s up?” I began to look towards the ceiling but human Steve noticed and corrected himself, “I mean, ‘what is going on?’ Why did you stop me?”
“What is this device that you are making?”
“Oh! I had this really awesome idea, check it out!” He turned back to the device, “You know how the flux transmitters for the FTL drive can only handle like a tenth of the potential output for the reactor cores?” I had no idea what he was talking about but he did not give me the chance to say this. “This should let me create a secondary bypass system that will increase the volume of vrashe that that system can handle!”
“I do not understand.”
“So, right now, our reactors are putting out approximately 530 vrashe every minute but the flux transmitters can only handle 50 vrashe. This means that the FTL drive is only getting 100 vrashe, 50 per transmitter. This thing,” He patted the device, “will let me bypass the transmitters without letting any of the Latent Chaos through. It will still do the transmitters job, just without the power loss!”
“Can the drive handle the higher power level?”
“Should be able to.”
“I would rather not risk the safety of the ship and crew on “SHOULD.”
“There is no reason why not, the drive was built to last through any potential power surge. The most it would do is fry a few wires, blow some fuses, or-”
“Do you really want to risk fried drive components when that is the only thing keeping the ship moving towards our destination?”
“We’ll reach our destination faster this way!”
“Or not at all. How about this; you do not activate that device until we reach port and I will get the captain to consider approving modifications to HIS ship.”
“Oh… um, okay. I’ll- I’ll do that.”
When we reached the station, Human Steve activated his device and it did, in fact, “fry some wires, blow some fuses,” AND corrupt the control unit. It took FIVE daycycles to complete the repairs and get the new “Bypass System'' running properly. The replacement control unit had to be purchased on station as we did not already have one. Captain Nevraliint even authorized the purchase of a spare “just in case.”
Our ship is running much faster now, but I am immensely grateful that we did not become another tale of a ship lost to human tinkering.
COMMENTS:
MkDusklind** (Electrical Engineer):
Oh, wow. I am very glad that you were able to stop Human Steve in time. That was far too close.
Rawn Velmer (Engineer):
Is Human Steve planning to sell this design?
Jiordn (Cargo Management and Security):
Yes. The captain is working on that with him though I hope that we can do more thorough testing first.
Part 1 l Part 7 l Part 9
2023.03.27 04:34 Acceptable_Ocelot [US-OH] [H] Phoneix45, Mochi Edition TKC Candybar, Dimple+, Boardsource Macropad, JTK Black on White with Red Accents, Infinikey Pastel Mint, GMK Bleached Numpad/ISO, IFK True Olivetti Keycaps, Pudding Keycaps, Tai-Hao Keycaps, Artisans [W] PayPal
Timestamp
Been away from the market for a bit but have still been buying keyboard stuff and need more room to buy more :)
submitted by Acceptable_Ocelot to mechmarket [link] [comments]
Been away from the market for a bit but have still been buying keyboard stuff and need more room to buy more :)
- Shipping not included
- Comment before PM, NO CHAT
- PMing postal code and PayPal address in first message is a great way to get an invoice if item is available!
- Prices are flexible and lowered from previous posts - always willing to discuss!
Keyboards and Macropads
- Phoenix45 with translucent purple p3d keyboard case $120 - Lubed and Filmed Zealios v1 in Everglide v2 housings. Lubed linear Tealios in the spacebar. Encoder knobs in the Winkey blocker position are functional as a key press as well! Purchased from another Mech Market user. Used infrequently since purchasing, just have way too many boards!
- Mochi Edition TKC Candybar $240 - Purchased from another MM user. Built with included switches and used for a few days. Limited edition pink color way case with additional badge that was included - righty hotswap PCB with the included c3 stabs, lubed and tuned. I will also include the extra parts that were not used in the current build - included white alu plate, and white pom plate from green door geeks. - case and plate smart foam from green door geeks - Otemu silent switches offered with bundle - Candybar IFK Islander kit offered with bundle - extra rubber feet - extra hardware included in the kit - included USB cable. No switch or keycap puller.
- LazyDesigners Aluminum Dimple Plus $310 - Pink aluminum top, black aluminum bottom, black aluminum place, purple Dimple+ PCB. Soldered with L&F Strawberry Milk tactiles from DangKeebs.
- Boardsource.xyz Macropad with SMKeyboards Case $70 - Built Boardsource.xyz purple macropad with custom SMKeyboards case. PCB built with hotswap sockets. Keycaps/switches not included.
Keycaps
- JTK Black on White with Red Accents $80 - Mounted for one day on a 65% board then removed and stored, ships in original trays. These are in stock on zFrontier but if you are in the US these have a shipping discount :)
- Infinikey Pastel Mint Base $80 - Mounted enough for a 40% board and used intermittently. Both sets ship in base kit box.
- GMK Bleached Numpad/ISO $45 - Numpad/ISO has never been mounted.
- Infinikey ePBT True Olivetti $60 - Purchased from another mm user but ended up not using. Ships in original box/trays, fair warning, they are NOT great. Will take $5 off if shipped in bags.
- Hyper-X Black Pudding Keycaps $10 - Purchased as part of a bundle from another mm user but don't really need. Ships in bags. Photo in timestamp.
- Hyper-X White Pudding Keycaps $10 - Purchased and mounted on my original Ducky One SF before getting into more custom builds. Ships in bags. Photo in timestamp.
- Tai-Hao Backlit Purple Rubber Gaming Keycaps - $10 ships in original packaging. Photo in timestamp.
Artisans
| Maker | Sculpt | Colorway | Box | Slot | Price | Available? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jelly Key | Puptopia | Valentines Adorabox 1 | Purple Ceph | A1 | 40 | Yes |
| Jelly Key | Puptopia | Year of the Dog | Purple Ceph | A2 | 40 | Yes |
| The Box Key Cap | Tanuki | OG | Purple Ceph | A3 | 50 | Yes |
| Matae Keycaps | Goerita | Red Apple | Purple Ceph | A4 | 30 | Yes |
| Blank SA | Red Glitter | Purple Ceph | A5 | 5 | Yes | |
| Coz Caps | Volkeyno | Red | Purple Ceph | A6 | 5 | Yes |
| Purple Ceph | A7 | No | ||||
| JAK | Peek | ROYGBIV Red | Purple Ceph | B1 | 60 | Yes |
| rtg Caps | Walter | Fresh Flowers | Purple Ceph | B2 | 40 | Yes |
| Systematik Kaps | Key Fu | Valentines Day | Purple Ceph | B3 | 30 | Yes |
| Bhomass Caps | Tantrum | Pulmonary | Purple Ceph | B4 | 30 | Yes |
| Blank SA | Sprinkles | Purple Ceph | B5 | 5 | Yes | |
| TaraByte Caps | Mona | Purple Ceph | B6 | 30 | Yes | |
| Purple Ceph | B7 | No | ||||
| Navacaps | .0.0 | BubbaPuke | Purple Ceph | C1 | 45 | Yes |
| Navacaps | Taka G2 | BubbaPuke | Purple Ceph | C2 | 45 | Yes |
| Navacaps | Drooga G2 | BubbaPuke | Purple Ceph | C3 | 45 | Yes |
| Navacaps | Death Mask G2 | BubbaPuke | Purple Ceph | C4 | 45 | Yes |
| Sublyme Keys | Cupcake Kitters | Graham Cracker | Purple Ceph | C5 | 45 | Yes |
| Lo Ki | Purr | Full Heats | Purple Ceph | C6 | 40 | Yes |
| Purple Ceph | C7 | No | ||||
| Unbranded | Sleepy | Rose Agate | Purple Ceph | D1 | 65 | Yes |
| Miroti Caps | Miro | Stilleto | Purple Ceph | D2 | 55 | Yes |
| Yeeunee's Keycaps | Mung Cap R3 | Pink with Purple Accent | Purple Ceph | D3 | 40 | Yes |
| Arcana Keys | Blank | Purple Ethereal Plane | Purple Ceph | D4 | 40 | Yes |
| Enso | Bonsai | Purple DSA | Purple Ceph | D5 | 30 | Yes |
| Arcana Keys | Blank | Geywild | Purple Ceph | D6 | 40 | Yes |
| Winkeys | Goober v1 | Krash | Purple Ceph | E1 | 45 | Yes |
| KapCave | Blank'topus | Matsumoto | Purple Ceph | E2 | 40 | Yes |
| KapCave | Blank'topus | Actinic Pretender | Purple Ceph | E3 | 40 | Yes |
| Binirias | Phyloxy | Spyro | Purple Ceph | E4 | 30 | Yes |
| Winkeys | Goober v1 | Nanner Split | Purple Ceph | F1 | 45 | Yes |
| Lootcaps | Blank | Green with Glitter | Purple Ceph | F4 | 5 | Yes |
| tinymakesthings | Snoot | Golden | Purple Ceph | F5 | 70 | Yes |
| Cece Studios | Devi | Lemon | Purple Ceph | F6 | 40 | Yes |
| Lividity | Puppeteer | Eddy | Purple Ceph | F7 | 50 | Yes |
| Krap Shop | Copy Cat | Zombie | Purple Ceph | G1 | 65 | Yes |
| Purple Ceph | G1 | Yes | ||||
| TaraByte Caps | Penny | St. Patty's Day | Purple Ceph | G2 | 40 | Yes |
| Coz Caps | Volkeyno | Green | Purple Ceph | G3 | 5 | Yes |
| Amidst the Clouds | Octoboi | Radioactive Wastelander Xenobiotic | Purple Ceph | G4 | 50 | Yes |
| Cece Studios | Devi | Lime | Purple Ceph | G5 | 40 | Yes |
| Krap Shop | Bento Box | Minty Ashen | Purple Ceph | G6 | 40 | Yes |
| Krap Shop | Copy Cat | Musubi | Purple Ceph | G7 | 65 | Yes |
| rtg Caps | Walter | Ice Blue | Purple Ceph | H1 | 40 | Yes |
| Lividity | Puppeteer | Dexter | Purple Ceph | H2 | 50 | Yes |
| Coz Caps | Volkeyno | Blue | Purple Ceph | H3 | 5 | Yes |
| Gothcaps | Brimcap v1 | Starry Night Mare | Purple Ceph | H4 | 25 | Yes |
| Gothcaps | Brimcap v1 | Hyper Wrath | Purple Ceph | H5 | 25 | Yes |
| Destroyer Caps | Fisherman's Friend | Necro | Purple Ceph | H6 | 25 | Yes |
| Destroyer Caps | Puddy | Necro | Purple Ceph | H7 | 25 | Yes |
| Unbranded | Sleepy | Ice Agate | Purple Ceph | I1 | 65 | Yes |
| Miroti Caps | Miro | Mirosakura | Purple Ceph | I2 | 55 | Yes |
| Miroti Caps | Miro | Prestige | Purple Ceph | I3 | 55 | Yes |
| Rath Caps | Leaf Blank | Alpha (White) | Purple Ceph | I4 | 30 | Yes |
| Yeeunee's Keycaps | Mung Cap R3 | White with Brown Accents | Purple Ceph | I5 | 40 | Yes |
| Bad Habit | The Graduate | Polar Shake | Purple Ceph | J3 | 50 | Yes |
| Bad Habit | The Graduate | Redactish | Purple Ceph | J4 | 50 | Yes |
| Amidst the Clouds | Octoboi | Boundles Spook Tangible | Purple Ceph | J5 | 50 | Yes |
| Amidst the Clouds | Cloud | Boundles Spook Tangible | Purple Ceph | J6 | 50 | Yes |
| KapCave | NerdChick | Love is Grey | Purple Ceph | J7 | 30 | Yes |
| JAK | Cuddles | Ink Stain | Purple Ceph | K1 | 60 | Yes |
| Amidst the Clouds | Cloud | Pop Art - Untitled | Purple Ceph | K2 | 50 | Yes |
| Mihi Mini Studio | Tranquility Moon | Starry Night | Purple Ceph | K3 | 5 | Yes |
| JAK | Sprout | Black on Black | Purple Ceph | K4 | 30 | Yes |
| Amidst the Clouds | Octoboi | Purplightening | Purple Ceph | K5 | 50 | Yes |
| Amidst the Clouds | Cloud | Purplightening | Purple Ceph | K6 | 50 | Yes |
| TaraByte Caps | Penny | Encore | Purple Ceph | K7 | 30 | Yes |
| Lo Ki | Purr | Raymond | Purple Ceph | L1 | 40 | Yes |
| Bad Habit | The Nar | Dark Dolch | Purple Ceph | L2 | 50 | Yes |
| Lootcaps | Blank | Satin | Purple Ceph | L3 | 5 | Yes |
| Lootcaps | Blank | Satin | Purple Ceph | L4 | 5 | Yes |
| L5 | No | |||||
| L6 | No | |||||
| L7 | No | |||||
| Krap Shop | Bento Box | White with Brown Accents | Purple Ceph | M1 | 50 | Yes |
| Krap Shop | Bento Box | Brown | Purple Ceph | M2 | 50 | Yes |
| Krap Shop | Bento Box | White | Purple Ceph | M3 | 50 | Yes |
| Gothcaps | Brimcap v1 | Slothboi Clique | Purple Ceph | M4 | 25 | Yes |
| M5 | No | |||||
| M6 | No | |||||
| M7 | No |
2023.03.27 04:24 SZeenGames123 [S] Cookie Survivor: Duskgloom Sea (Season 35)
Hello! Welcome to Cookie Survivor! after a 2 week hiatus the series. is back after Croissant Cookie having the won for last time. but now, 6 hosts sent 18 other cookies visited in Duskgloom Sea the sea where Black Pearl Cookie lives. and split into 2 tribes of 9 cookies each. and who would be next winner on cookie survivor?
Cookie Survivor: Duskgloom Sea
Meet the Cookies:
Caviar Tribe
Blueberry Pie Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S19, S26, S29, S32 (Winner of Season 32)
Captain Caviar Cookie: (u/JackTaker23)
Ice Candy Cookie: (u/LateCash7496) S17
Lime Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S1, S2, S28
Mango Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S25
Orange Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S1, S3, S4, S5, S25, S28
Pure Vanilla Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S1, S3, S8, S10, S13, S15, S18, S19, S22, S25, S26, S31 (Winner of Season 18)
Sorbet Shark Cookie: (u/LateCash7496) S4, S5, S7, S8, S10, S12, S13, S15, S17, S23, S25, S26, S31 (Winner of Season 4)
Squid Ink Cookie: (u/Late_Jak_2791) S17
Black Pearl Tribe
Black Pearl Cookie: (Already by the host) S23
Candy Diver Cookie: (u/JackTaker23)
Captain Ice Cookie: (u/Late_Jak_2791) S2, S17
Caramel Arrow Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S12, S19, S28
Licorice Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S3, S9, S24, S26, S32 (Winner of Season 26)
Lollipop Cookie: (u/Late_Jak_2791)
Peppermint Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S2, S17
Pink Choco Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S13
Pirate Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123)
Winner: Mango Cookie
Runner-up: Licorice Cookie and Black Pearl Cookie
Fan Favorite: Mango Cookie
All-Stars: Final 7
Second Chances: Orange, Peppermint, Lollipop
My Thoughts: YES Mango Cookie won for season also the fan favorite one. the u/LateCash gets 3 spots for 5th place. He beats Licorice and Black Pearl. stay tuned we're arrived in Dragonhead Coast with 20 cookies.
Season 1: https://brantsteele.com/survivo19/r.php?c=dQQ3cupK
Season 2: https://brantsteele.com/survivo21/r.php?c=U9Spf7gJ
Season 3: https://brantsteele.com/survivo24/r.php?c=HDtc2a8a
Season 4: https://brantsteele.com/survivo26/r.php?c=sfMfcLc9
Season 5: https://brantsteele.com/survivo32/r.php?c=Q7YB7d4b
Season 6: https://brantsteele.com/survivo25/r.php?c=AzaL9eyu
Season 7: https://brantsteele.com/survivo26/r.php?c=rAHAknFZ
Season 8: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2017/r.php?c=oZUAHu4F
Season 9: https://brantsteele.com/survivo39/r.php?c=a5a3cqO7
Season 10: https://brantsteele.com/survivo34/r.php?c=HBXTj9jc
Season 11: https://brantsteele.com/survivo37/r.php?c=OJ563MA7
Season 12: https://brantsteele.com/survivo36/r.php?c=Zn86m6jD
Season 13: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2016/r.php?c=r2hXYMOe
Season 14: https://brantsteele.com/survivo30/r.php?c=WFNtItMA
Season 15: https://brantsteele.com/survivo20/r.php?c=KSJ3Ufu2
Season 16: https://brantsteele.com/survivo29/r.php?c=LRrxepfZ
Season 17: https://brantsteele.com/survivo17/r.php?c=ciuPZKwO
Season 18: https://brantsteele.com/totaldrama/01/r.php?c=UazaXFcF
Season 19: https://brantsteele.com/survivo22/r.php?c=nATu7Qcz
Season 20: https://brantsteele.com/survivo31/r.php?c=Usza7zNh
Season 21: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2018/r.php?c=QtrMlQpb
Season 22: Christmas Special https://brantsteele.com/survivo21/r.php?c=pT3Gd10S
Season 23: https://brantsteele.com/survivo35/r.php?c=91B8Hl4Y
Season 24: https://brantsteele.com/survivo21/r.php?c=38Qt20bb
Season 25: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2016/r.php?c=fE5SmJU1
Season 26: https://brantsteele.com/survivo34/r.php?c=0e4soQw3
Season 27: https://brantsteele.com/survivo27/r.php?c=pMEEl6Y7
Season 28: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2019/r.php?c=b3QC8p20
Season 29: https://brantsteele.com/survivo30/r.php?c=3XUhg0Lq
Season 30: https://brantsteele.com/survivo20/r.php?c=Y32tIYB8
Season 31: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2017/r.php?c=yNJBeh9j
Season 32: https://brantsteele.com/survivo32/r.php?c=JxK78PbM
Season 33: https://brantsteele.com/survivo26/r.php?c=3rNImtaJ
Season 34: https://brantsteele.com/survivo34/r.php?c=7dJa46TS
submitted by SZeenGames123 to BrantSteele [link] [comments]
Cookie Survivor: Duskgloom Sea
Meet the Cookies:
Caviar Tribe
Blueberry Pie Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S19, S26, S29, S32 (Winner of Season 32)
Captain Caviar Cookie: (u/JackTaker23)
Ice Candy Cookie: (u/LateCash7496) S17
Lime Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S1, S2, S28
Mango Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S25
Orange Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S1, S3, S4, S5, S25, S28
Pure Vanilla Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S1, S3, S8, S10, S13, S15, S18, S19, S22, S25, S26, S31 (Winner of Season 18)
Sorbet Shark Cookie: (u/LateCash7496) S4, S5, S7, S8, S10, S12, S13, S15, S17, S23, S25, S26, S31 (Winner of Season 4)
Squid Ink Cookie: (u/Late_Jak_2791) S17
Black Pearl Tribe
Black Pearl Cookie: (Already by the host) S23
Candy Diver Cookie: (u/JackTaker23)
Captain Ice Cookie: (u/Late_Jak_2791) S2, S17
Caramel Arrow Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S12, S19, S28
Licorice Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S3, S9, S24, S26, S32 (Winner of Season 26)
Lollipop Cookie: (u/Late_Jak_2791)
Peppermint Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S2, S17
Pink Choco Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123) S13
Pirate Cookie: (u/SZeenGames123)
Winner: Mango Cookie
Runner-up: Licorice Cookie and Black Pearl Cookie
Fan Favorite: Mango Cookie
All-Stars: Final 7
Second Chances: Orange, Peppermint, Lollipop
My Thoughts: YES Mango Cookie won for season also the fan favorite one. the u/LateCash gets 3 spots for 5th place. He beats Licorice and Black Pearl. stay tuned we're arrived in Dragonhead Coast with 20 cookies.
Season 1: https://brantsteele.com/survivo19/r.php?c=dQQ3cupK
Season 2: https://brantsteele.com/survivo21/r.php?c=U9Spf7gJ
Season 3: https://brantsteele.com/survivo24/r.php?c=HDtc2a8a
Season 4: https://brantsteele.com/survivo26/r.php?c=sfMfcLc9
Season 5: https://brantsteele.com/survivo32/r.php?c=Q7YB7d4b
Season 6: https://brantsteele.com/survivo25/r.php?c=AzaL9eyu
Season 7: https://brantsteele.com/survivo26/r.php?c=rAHAknFZ
Season 8: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2017/r.php?c=oZUAHu4F
Season 9: https://brantsteele.com/survivo39/r.php?c=a5a3cqO7
Season 10: https://brantsteele.com/survivo34/r.php?c=HBXTj9jc
Season 11: https://brantsteele.com/survivo37/r.php?c=OJ563MA7
Season 12: https://brantsteele.com/survivo36/r.php?c=Zn86m6jD
Season 13: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2016/r.php?c=r2hXYMOe
Season 14: https://brantsteele.com/survivo30/r.php?c=WFNtItMA
Season 15: https://brantsteele.com/survivo20/r.php?c=KSJ3Ufu2
Season 16: https://brantsteele.com/survivo29/r.php?c=LRrxepfZ
Season 17: https://brantsteele.com/survivo17/r.php?c=ciuPZKwO
Season 18: https://brantsteele.com/totaldrama/01/r.php?c=UazaXFcF
Season 19: https://brantsteele.com/survivo22/r.php?c=nATu7Qcz
Season 20: https://brantsteele.com/survivo31/r.php?c=Usza7zNh
Season 21: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2018/r.php?c=QtrMlQpb
Season 22: Christmas Special https://brantsteele.com/survivo21/r.php?c=pT3Gd10S
Season 23: https://brantsteele.com/survivo35/r.php?c=91B8Hl4Y
Season 24: https://brantsteele.com/survivo21/r.php?c=38Qt20bb
Season 25: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2016/r.php?c=fE5SmJU1
Season 26: https://brantsteele.com/survivo34/r.php?c=0e4soQw3
Season 27: https://brantsteele.com/survivo27/r.php?c=pMEEl6Y7
Season 28: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2019/r.php?c=b3QC8p20
Season 29: https://brantsteele.com/survivo30/r.php?c=3XUhg0Lq
Season 30: https://brantsteele.com/survivo20/r.php?c=Y32tIYB8
Season 31: https://brantsteele.com/survivoau2017/r.php?c=yNJBeh9j
Season 32: https://brantsteele.com/survivo32/r.php?c=JxK78PbM
Season 33: https://brantsteele.com/survivo26/r.php?c=3rNImtaJ
Season 34: https://brantsteele.com/survivo34/r.php?c=7dJa46TS
2023.03.27 04:23 Loubakerart Svengoolie Black Light Original Art 22 by 30"
 | Done with a mix of fluorescent inks and acrylic, along with black india ink. Now what do i do with it? submitted by Loubakerart to BlacklightArt [link] [comments] |
2023.03.27 04:13 ohimjustakid AI and Comicbooks
You know what'd be cool? If like we actually used AI and machine learning to bolster art rather than just plagiarize. At the moment I hate how AI art just copies and adapts current artwork done by actual humans in the guise of 'democratizing' art. But with how important the tech is to practically every industry I think people should really consider how we can use it too improve on what we already have.
For example with "AI Voice Cloning", where given enough voice input data you can 'clone' any voice to create a synthetic imitation tied in with 'optical character recognition' would allow comic publishers to create module voice narration.
Again just a suggestion as to how to cope with the inevitable, AI is already changing our perceptions of 'art' and we can either find ways to hopefully push it the right direction or let it get to a point where we have no say whatsoever.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
submitted by ohimjustakid to comicbooks [link] [comments]
For example with "AI Voice Cloning", where given enough voice input data you can 'clone' any voice to create a synthetic imitation tied in with 'optical character recognition' would allow comic publishers to create module voice narration.
Imagine the Uncanny X-Men series completely narrated with matching and adaptable voices, accents and sound effects *BAMF*Or how about a way to recolor or thematically color old comics? The CMYK limited color schemes and inking may be nostalgic for some, but wouldn't it be cool to use AI to recolor or slightly shift their schemes to whatever the user wants. An example being from the computer roleplaying game 'World of Horror' where they allow you to change the plain black and white color scheme to whatever you see fit. Imagine that idea applied to older comics and manga.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
2023.03.27 03:57 Cashling The sloop Peggy: A case of 18th century cannibalism that may have some parallels to the 1996 storyline.
While I was watching the second season premiere, I remembered something I saw on a documentary about cannibalism. I did some searching and found this true story.
In 1766, the sloop "The Peggy" got stuck on some rocks and was unseaworthy or something. At any rate they were stranded and had no food source other than what was on the ship. The ship had wine and rum in the cargo hold so, after they ran out of rations, they had a source of calories.
Another ship spotted them but wouldn't give them food or let them on their boat. They promised to send help for the crew of the Peggy.
Since alcohol is mostly or all empty calories, they were still starving. They decided to "draw lots" to "decide" who to eat. Then they decided to eat the only black man on the ship. The captain refused to eat the man but everyone else on board did.
One sailor was so hungry he ate the man's liver raw. He got sick and went "mad" and died three days later. They decided to not eat the sick man and buried him at sea.
They preserved the human meat but eventually they ran out of it. They decided to eat someone else, but to draw lots fairly this time. The man who lost was the most well-liked and respected member of the crew. Out of respect they decided not to kill him immediately and let him have the night to pray. He went "deaf and insensate" at midnight that night.
Two hours before they were set to kill the man they were rescued. There were seven survivors.
I put spoilers in the title in case anyone wants to speculate on how there could be parallels.
Seven survivors, Lottie's catatonia, the girl foaming at the mouth etc.
submitted by Cashling to Yellowjackets [link] [comments]
In 1766, the sloop "The Peggy" got stuck on some rocks and was unseaworthy or something. At any rate they were stranded and had no food source other than what was on the ship. The ship had wine and rum in the cargo hold so, after they ran out of rations, they had a source of calories.
Another ship spotted them but wouldn't give them food or let them on their boat. They promised to send help for the crew of the Peggy.
Since alcohol is mostly or all empty calories, they were still starving. They decided to "draw lots" to "decide" who to eat. Then they decided to eat the only black man on the ship. The captain refused to eat the man but everyone else on board did.
One sailor was so hungry he ate the man's liver raw. He got sick and went "mad" and died three days later. They decided to not eat the sick man and buried him at sea.
They preserved the human meat but eventually they ran out of it. They decided to eat someone else, but to draw lots fairly this time. The man who lost was the most well-liked and respected member of the crew. Out of respect they decided not to kill him immediately and let him have the night to pray. He went "deaf and insensate" at midnight that night.
Two hours before they were set to kill the man they were rescued. There were seven survivors.
I put spoilers in the title in case anyone wants to speculate on how there could be parallels.
Seven survivors, Lottie's catatonia, the girl foaming at the mouth etc.
2023.03.27 03:19 ZJ_10 So I came up with an origin story for Pink that connects Black and Grey's...
Among Us: Personas Have Lives
Black is the smartest impostor in Among Us. He (the incarnation in question) was made known to the public in Vs. Impostor V4 as the main antagonist. But the comic depicting his origins didn't quite get everything...
The parasite that would end up infesting Black first took an interest in a certain crew (that consisted of bots) on the Skeld. I won't list all of the crew members here, but a few highlights were Pink Shifter (then known simply as Pink), Sheriff (who you probably know from the mod Sheriff Showdown), Coral's mom (Coral from Friday Night Parasite), White (from Vs. EVIL Impostor), and Black. Yellow and Pink were mini-crewmates on this Skeld. The parasite infested one of them, attempted to kill the others, and after either a success or failure, rewound and repeated the process, each time with a new host. Strangely, Yellow and Pink (then going by Mini-Pink) remembered each round. Now, I should probably mention that Sheriff was mute, so Yellow had to do most of the talking for him. He tried to tell Black after the first rewind, but Black dismissed the idea, calling Yellow "cuckoo". But after several months of rewind, something unexpected happened: Someone joined the crew. His name was Noob49, his color was grey, and he had an antenna on his head (and his own mini-crewmate). The parasite then started the match. This round, the parasite infested Pink Shifter, infesting Pink as well. During the previous round, Yellow had told Pink that they had to do the right thing to stop the parasite (i.e. USE EVIDENCE TO BACK UP ACCUSATIONS, PEOPLE!). Pink took Yellow's advice to heart, and when she found out she and her parent (idk Pink Shifter's gender lmao) could shapeshift, she shapeshifted into Mini-Grey (Grey's name at the time) when the parasite turned into Sheriff - and ditched the disguise when the real one and Yellow walked in on a kill. This would get Pink Shifter ejected - but the parasite wanted to see if Noob49 was worthy of being a host, as at this point, it only infested those it found to be a good crewmate. So it announced that it had infested two other crewmates before Pink Shifter was taken to the "ejection area". At that point, Sheriff suddenly became extremely talkative, and Pink decided to stick with him, if only to help Yellow figure out why. Sheriff eventually killed Coral's mom (and infested Coral, but that's irrelevant to this story), and Yellow and Pink ran to the cafeteria, where Sheriff was waiting for them. (Note: If this were a mod, Dead and Buried would start playing here.) While Pink kept Sheriff busy, Yellow snuck around him and called an emergency meeting. When he accused Sheriff, Noob49 questioned why they should trust him, but as Yellow pointed out, "You believed me last time, right?" (Sheriff had called the meeting that got Pink Shifter ejected.) Sheriff got ejected, but there was still the other infested. This turned out to be Black, who had spent all of the excitement resisting the parasite's influence. Eventually, the parasite called a meeting for no reason and accused Noob49 of being the other infested. But there was a slight problem: Roles were revealed after ejections, and Mini-Grey was pretty smart as well. He called a meeting and said, "Isn't it strange that my father was accused of being the other infested, but turned out to not be?" Black got voted out because of this, but before the actual ejection, Black warned them, "You're going to regret this when you see the monster it created." The parasite decided to stay in Black's body after this. As for Mini-Grey, he suddenly lashed out at who was left, saying they killed Noob49 by believing Black. Thus began Grey's fall to insanity...
(ftr Noob49 is actually the name of Grey's dad)
submitted by ZJ_10 to FridayNightFunkin [link] [comments]
Black is the smartest impostor in Among Us. He (the incarnation in question) was made known to the public in Vs. Impostor V4 as the main antagonist. But the comic depicting his origins didn't quite get everything...
The parasite that would end up infesting Black first took an interest in a certain crew (that consisted of bots) on the Skeld. I won't list all of the crew members here, but a few highlights were Pink Shifter (then known simply as Pink), Sheriff (who you probably know from the mod Sheriff Showdown), Coral's mom (Coral from Friday Night Parasite), White (from Vs. EVIL Impostor), and Black. Yellow and Pink were mini-crewmates on this Skeld. The parasite infested one of them, attempted to kill the others, and after either a success or failure, rewound and repeated the process, each time with a new host. Strangely, Yellow and Pink (then going by Mini-Pink) remembered each round. Now, I should probably mention that Sheriff was mute, so Yellow had to do most of the talking for him. He tried to tell Black after the first rewind, but Black dismissed the idea, calling Yellow "cuckoo". But after several months of rewind, something unexpected happened: Someone joined the crew. His name was Noob49, his color was grey, and he had an antenna on his head (and his own mini-crewmate). The parasite then started the match. This round, the parasite infested Pink Shifter, infesting Pink as well. During the previous round, Yellow had told Pink that they had to do the right thing to stop the parasite (i.e. USE EVIDENCE TO BACK UP ACCUSATIONS, PEOPLE!). Pink took Yellow's advice to heart, and when she found out she and her parent (idk Pink Shifter's gender lmao) could shapeshift, she shapeshifted into Mini-Grey (Grey's name at the time) when the parasite turned into Sheriff - and ditched the disguise when the real one and Yellow walked in on a kill. This would get Pink Shifter ejected - but the parasite wanted to see if Noob49 was worthy of being a host, as at this point, it only infested those it found to be a good crewmate. So it announced that it had infested two other crewmates before Pink Shifter was taken to the "ejection area". At that point, Sheriff suddenly became extremely talkative, and Pink decided to stick with him, if only to help Yellow figure out why. Sheriff eventually killed Coral's mom (and infested Coral, but that's irrelevant to this story), and Yellow and Pink ran to the cafeteria, where Sheriff was waiting for them. (Note: If this were a mod, Dead and Buried would start playing here.) While Pink kept Sheriff busy, Yellow snuck around him and called an emergency meeting. When he accused Sheriff, Noob49 questioned why they should trust him, but as Yellow pointed out, "You believed me last time, right?" (Sheriff had called the meeting that got Pink Shifter ejected.) Sheriff got ejected, but there was still the other infested. This turned out to be Black, who had spent all of the excitement resisting the parasite's influence. Eventually, the parasite called a meeting for no reason and accused Noob49 of being the other infested. But there was a slight problem: Roles were revealed after ejections, and Mini-Grey was pretty smart as well. He called a meeting and said, "Isn't it strange that my father was accused of being the other infested, but turned out to not be?" Black got voted out because of this, but before the actual ejection, Black warned them, "You're going to regret this when you see the monster it created." The parasite decided to stay in Black's body after this. As for Mini-Grey, he suddenly lashed out at who was left, saying they killed Noob49 by believing Black. Thus began Grey's fall to insanity...
(ftr Noob49 is actually the name of Grey's dad)
2023.03.27 03:09 bloopdoopdeedoo Any experience with purple ink healing?
I’m planning to get a black and grey tattoo with some purple accents, but even after looking online, I haven’t seen much information on how purple ink heals. Does anyone have any experience with purple ink tattoos? Does the color fade quickly or turn into other colors?
submitted by bloopdoopdeedoo to tattooadvice [link] [comments]
2023.03.27 03:08 msftxpev Is this normal ?
I have brother MFC-J995DW, few months ago the black ink ran out, so I replaced it with a new cartridge from Amazon. It worked fine after the replacement of the cartridge, today I tried to print a document and everything was except for the black ink, it was missing
When I try the maintenance steps, the test page after the cleansing process has all dots except the black ones, but what's strange is that the text at the bottom is very clear
What's wrong ? Appreciate your help please if you are familiar with this issue
submitted by msftxpev to printers [link] [comments]
When I try the maintenance steps, the test page after the cleansing process has all dots except the black ones, but what's strange is that the text at the bottom is very clear
What's wrong ? Appreciate your help please if you are familiar with this issue
2023.03.27 02:57 GucciShrek [H] Cyber Hook, Aggelos, Pathologic 2, Hokko Life, and more [W] Steam Gifts or Offers
IGS Rep
Looking for any offer, but I'm mainly interested in SCP: 5K and S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl
• Grow: Song of The Evertree
• Cyber Hook
• Crashlands
• OUT OF THE BOX
• Wounded: The Beginning
• Supraland
• Pathologic 2
• Demon Turf
• Alchemist's Castle
• Ittle Dew 2+
• Calico
• Frick Inc.
• The Inner World
• Anomaly Korea
• Space Crew: Legendary Edition
• SPACECOM (x2)
• Iron Danger
• Amerzone The Explorers Legacy
• Leisure Suit Larry 7 - Love for Sail
• Black Moon Chronicles
• Monument Builders: Alcatraz
• GOAT OF DUTY
• Desolate
• The Wild Eight
• Monument Builders: Alcatraz
submitted by GucciShrek to indiegameswap [link] [comments]
Looking for any offer, but I'm mainly interested in SCP: 5K and S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl
Newly added games
• Hokko Life• Grow: Song of The Evertree
• Cyber Hook
• Crashlands
Game List
• Aggelos• OUT OF THE BOX
• Wounded: The Beginning
• Supraland
• Pathologic 2
• Demon Turf
• Alchemist's Castle
• Ittle Dew 2+
• Calico
• Frick Inc.
• The Inner World
• Anomaly Korea
• Space Crew: Legendary Edition
• SPACECOM (x2)
• Iron Danger
• Amerzone The Explorers Legacy
• Leisure Suit Larry 7 - Love for Sail
• Black Moon Chronicles
• Monument Builders: Alcatraz
• GOAT OF DUTY
• Desolate
• The Wild Eight
• Monument Builders: Alcatraz
2023.03.27 02:40 Rapn3rd [HM] Mrs. Liederkenstenflam's Lidl Doggie
It was morning, and Jean, the receptionist for the law firm of O’Ryan and Greenblatt, unlocked the office door and then went to her computer.
An hour or so later, a five-foot-tall woman about 70, who was carrying a shopping bag, entered the office. She spoke with a Yiddish accent.”
“Hello. May I help you?”
“Yes, dear, I’m Mrs. Liederkenstenflam.”
“My name is Jean,” she said, went to Mrs. Liederkenstenflam, and led her to chairs. “Let’s sit down, Mrs. Liederkenstenflam.”
“Thank you, dahling, I was tired. You’re such a nice girl. Here. She took a container, spoon, and napkin out of her shopping bag, opened it, and gave it to Jean. “Have some nice chign soup. It’s Jewish penicillin. It will fix all your problems,” she said and tried to feed her.
Jean gently held her hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Liederkenstenflam, but I’m not hungry.”
“Okay, dahling,” she said and put everything back in her bag.
“Now, how can we help you?”
“I need a lawyer, a good lawyer.”
“You’ve come to the right place. The firm of O’Ryan and Greenblatt is one of the best law firms in the city.”
“Okay. I’ll take Mr. Greenblatt.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Greenblatt isn’t taking any cases, but his daughter, Karen, is taking cases.”
“Okay, I’ll take Karen, but before you call her, tell me how much I have to pay.”
An office door opened, and a man came out. He went to the coffee pot and held it up. “It’s empty. Again, it’s empty,” he said, put his hand on his hip and stamped his foot. Jean and Mrs. Liederkenstenflam watched him. “Gosh darn. Darn. How is a great lawyer supposed to be great if there’s no coffee?”
“So, make some coffee,” Jean said.
“But that’s your job,” he whined. “I do lawyer things and you make coffee. That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he complained, stamped his foot and wiggled to his office.
'`D' boichick, I think he needs some chign soup. Yeah?”
“He needs something.”
“Now, I was asking how much I have to pay.”
“You don’t have to pay anything up front if the attorney decides to take your case. If the attorney loses, you don’t pay anything. If the attorney wins, you pay just one third.”
“Oy, how terrible. How can you do such a thing? I think I need a doctor.”
“What’s wrong, Mrs. Liederkenstenflam?” Jean asked anxiously.
“Well, you see, my great aunt died, may her soul rest in peace, and she left me her little doggie in her will, but my sister took d’ little doggie, and I want Karen should make my sister give back d’ liddle doggie, but how could I give you one third of a little doggie? What would you do with just a part of a liddle doggie? How could d’ liddle doggie get along widout d’ part you took? D’ poor liddle doggie needs all his parts. After all,” she said sounding very anxious.
“You don’t understand, Mrs. Liederkenstenflam. The cases we take involve financial settlement. Our fee would be in dollars. You need to take your case to a small claims court.”
“In a small claims court, they won’t take a part of my liddle doggie?”
“No, they won’t. The judge will listen to both sides and then decide who should get the dog, the whole dog.”
“I’ll go to that court. What a relief. I wouldn’t want Pedro Garcia Juan Padilla De Santa Maria cut up into liddle pieces. Thank you, dahling. Say hello to Karen for me,” she said and left.
Karen came out of her office as Mrs. Liederkenstenflam left.
“Jean, did I hear that woman mention my name?”
“Yes.”
“Do I know her?”
“No.”
“Does she know me?”
“No.”
“Then how did my name get into the conversation?”
Don Flynn came out of his office, went to Jean’s desk and listened.
“She wanted a lawyer to get her doggie from her sister, and she thought you were going to cut a third of her doggie off and keep it for payment.”
“Karen, how could you threaten a client?” Don said angrily. Why would you take a third of a dog? What a thought. That’s a leg and a…yuck. That’s disgusting.”
Vera came out of her office, went to the group, and listened. “Karen, were you going to cut off a dog’s leg? How could you do that?”
“I wasn’t going to cut off a dog’s leg. Jean, would you please explain.”
“Okay,” she said, and told the story. “So she thought Karen was going to take a third of the dog for payment.”
Frank came to the desk and listened to the story. “Karen, that’s despicable. Besides, what would the firm do with part of a dog? Yuck.”
“Karen, you know there are laws protecting animals from abuse, don’t you?” Don said. “You could cut off a person’s leg and get away with it, but not a dog. A jury would hang you in a minute.”
Harry came out of his office and listened.
“My God, I never said I would cut off a dog’s leg. This is crazy,” she growled.
“What’s crazy?” Harry asked.
“Karen threatened to kill an old lady if she didn’t pay her bill,” Don said.
“I didn’t threaten to kill anybody or anything. This conversation is crazy,” Karen yelled. “You’re all crazy,” she growled and hurried to her office.
“Karen, don’t forget the staff meeting this afternoon with your father,” Jean called to Karen.
“So, what’s this meeting about?” Don asked.
“Money,” Vera said. We're sliding perilously close to red ink. Mr. Greenblatt has a plan to get us back to the black. I hope it's a good plan. Eating and paying rent have become a habit.”
At the staff meeting, Mr. Greenblatt addressed his staff. “Folks, unfortunately, the firm is operating in the red. In order to get back on our feet, I’ve decided to use a talent agency. They will hire Rock Lockwood, the soap opera actor, to be our spokesperson. Irene Young from the agency and Lockwood will be here around 2:00. Karen, I’d like you to be my eyes and ears. Let’s hope this works. I’ll keep you all informed,” he said and all returned to their offices. On the way to her office, Karen stopped at Jean’s desk.
“Jean, please call me when Lockwood arrives,” she said and left.
An hour later, the office door opened and two people entered. One was Irene Young and the other was Rock Lockwood, a handsome soap opera actor about 30 years old. He wore his overcoat over his shoulders and a wide-brimmed hat tilted to one side, and a white scarf around his neck. They went to Jean’s desk. “May I help you?”
“Yes. I'm Irene Young and this is Rock Lockwood. I'm from the King, Clayton, Bernstein, Baton, Mervin, Morgan, Fillmore, Furry talent agency. I have an appointment with Mr. Greenblatt.”
“Would you repeat those names? King, Benson, Bitten, and something furry.”
“Yes,” Irene said, speaking slowly, and Jean wrote. “I'm Irene Young from the King, Clayton, Bernstein, Baton, Mervin, Morgan, Fillmore, Furry talent agency. I have an appointment with Mr. Greenblatt.”
“Fine. Just one moment. I’ll call him,” Jean said, picked up the phone, and pressed a button. “Mr. Greenblatt, Irene Young from the King, Clayton, Bernstein, Baton, Mervin, Morgan, Fillmore, Furry talent agency is here to see you. Okay, sir, I’ll tell her,” and hung up the phone. Ms. Young, he'll be right with you. Please sit down and make yourselves comfortable.” She returned to her computer.
“Bobby came out of his office, went to the coffee pot, and held it up. Jean, the coffee pot is...” he said, saw Rock and walked like a zombie to him, pointing the coffee pot at Rock. “You’re Lock Rockwood, I mean Rock Lockwood. It’s really you. Oh, be still my heart. I’m your biggest fan,” he swooned and inched closer to Rock, who looked terrified. “I know everything about you. I know why you left Eloise at the altar. She was a tramp. And Shawna doesn’t deserve you, the tramp.” Rock hurried behind Irene as Bobby tried to get to him.
Jean picked up the phone. “Mr. Greenblatt, come quick. Bobby is loose.”
Mr. Greenblatt rushed out of his office and stepped between Bobby and Rock. “Bobby, go back to your office,” he ordered, and Bobby sulked away. “I’m terribly sorry, Ms. Young. I meant to give Bobby the day off, but I forgot.”
“Bobby, bring the coffee pot back,” Jean yelled and, looking at Rock, he brought it back and went to his office.
Rock looked stunned. “Who was that? I’ve never been married. And who are Eloise and Shawna?”
“Rock. Think. You’re married on your soap opera, and the others are characters on your soap opera,” Irene said.
“Oh, yeah,” Rock said, seeming confused.
“Let’s go into the conference room. You’ll have plenty of room to work there. My daughter, Karen, will be right in. She’ll help you anyway she can. Make yourselves comfortable,” he said, left, and told Jean to tell Karen that Lockwood was in the conference room.”
Jean phoned Karen, who hurried out of her office to the conference room. Lockwood stood. “Well, hello, there. I’m Rock Lockwood, the famous actor who is adored by millions. Would you like my autograph?”
“Uh, yes, of course, I’d love to have your autograph, Mr. Rockwood.”
“That’s Lockwood.”
“Yes, of course.”
Rock took out a gold-trimmed, leather-bound notebook from his pocket. “To?”
“I think one will be enough.”
“I mean to whom should I write my autograph?”
“Uh, how about to me?”
“I’ll need a name.”
“You have a name already.”
“I need your name if I’m going to write an autograph to you.”
“Of course. My name is Karen.”
He wrote and gave her the paper. She folded it and put it in her skirt pocket. “I’ll cherish this forever. Believe me. I’ll put it in a place in my office that’s made just for things like your autograph,” she said and went to Irene. “Ms. Young, I’m Karen Greenblatt. I’m happy to meet you,” she said and they shook hands. “My father told me to help you anyway I can.”
“Okay. Suppose we run through each commercial and you tell me if it’s what you want. Rock, read the first commercial.”
Rock held the script, slowly leaned forward and yelled. “If you have a legal…”
Karen jumped back.
“Rock, what are you doing? We want to bring people in, not scare them away,” Jean said admonishingly.
“I was just projecting.”
“Rock. You’re not doing Hamlet in front of a live audience. You’re doing a TV commercial. Now, try it again.”
Rock slowly leaned forward so that he was a few inches from Karen, and growled. “Are you a victim? Are you letting the world step all over you? Are you…”
Karen grimaced. Irene appeared to be in pain.
“Rock. This is not revenge of the werewolf. You have to sound sympathetic, like you’re talking to an old friend.”
“I see. Sympathetic. An old friend. I think I have it.” Rock leaned back in his chair, looked at Karen, smiled broadly, and grinned as he read. “Hi, there, this is your old, sympathetic friend…”
“Cut, cut, cut. Rock. Why are you grinning? This is serious and when you are discussing a serious matter you don’t have a stupid grin on your face.”
“Uh, if you’ll excuse me, there’s something I have to take care of,” Karen said, left and hurried to Mr. Greenblatt’s office. She stopped at Jean’s desk on the way.
“How’s it going, Karen?”
“This Rock Wormwood is an idiot. If he has a brain, then it’s as flat as a pancake because he’s sitting on it. If my father let’s this agency use this hack, then we’re doomed. I have to warn my father,” she said and hurried into his office. After a few minutes, he and Karen hurried to the conference room.
“Karen, why don’t you show Mr. Lockwood around while I speak with Irene.”
Karen’s first stop was Jean’s desk. “Mr. Lockwood, this is Jean, our gal Friday.”
“You look familiar, Jean. Have we met before?”
“Uh, no, we haven’t.”
“Well, then, would you like my autograph?”
“As a matter of fact, it is in my nature to avoid cluttering my life with unimportant, trivial affectations that do not serve to better the lot of mankind as a whole.”
He stared blankly at Jean for a few moments. “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. A person should be able to practice his or her religion as she or he wishes. Absolutely. So, would you like my autograph?”
“No.”
“Mr. Lockwood, if you come with me I’ll show you around the office.”
“As you can see, each attorney has his or her own office.”
“I see. So, what kind of business do you run here?”
“What kind of business do we run here?” she said smiling.
“Yeah. Just curious.”
“Rock. This is a law firm. We practice law. That’s why we have lawyers working here.”
“Uh, huh. Lawyers work here.”
“That’s right. I would say much of our business involves suits of one kind or another.”
“Suits? I just bought two new suits. One is double-breasted. It makes me look muscular. Boy, if I had known you sell suits, well, next time.”
“Mr. Lockwood, are you planning to come here to buy your suits?” Jean asked chuckling.
“Yes.”
“What size suit do you wear?”
“I wear a 42 long. Do you carry that size?”
“A 42 long law suit? That’s a popular size law suit size. I think we can work something out,” Karen said with a serious expression on her face.
“That’d be great,” he said smiling.
“Shall we continue?”
“Sure.”
“We also specialize in tax law.”
“Oh, yeah, taxes. I don’t bother with taxes. I tell my friends that by not paying taxes you get to keep all your money, but they keep paying taxes. Do you pay taxes?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I have a feeling that taxes go to poor people. Personally, I don’t believe in being poor.”
Mr. Greenblatt and Irene come out of the conference room. “Come on, Rock, “it’s time to go. Wait in the car,” she ordered and he left. Well, Mr. Greenblatt, I’m sorry we couldn’t help you,” she said, they shook hands, and she left.
“Maybe a talent agency wasn’t such a good idea after all,” he said, and he and Karen went to their offices.
submitted by Rapn3rd to shortstories [link] [comments]
An hour or so later, a five-foot-tall woman about 70, who was carrying a shopping bag, entered the office. She spoke with a Yiddish accent.”
“Hello. May I help you?”
“Yes, dear, I’m Mrs. Liederkenstenflam.”
“My name is Jean,” she said, went to Mrs. Liederkenstenflam, and led her to chairs. “Let’s sit down, Mrs. Liederkenstenflam.”
“Thank you, dahling, I was tired. You’re such a nice girl. Here. She took a container, spoon, and napkin out of her shopping bag, opened it, and gave it to Jean. “Have some nice chign soup. It’s Jewish penicillin. It will fix all your problems,” she said and tried to feed her.
Jean gently held her hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Liederkenstenflam, but I’m not hungry.”
“Okay, dahling,” she said and put everything back in her bag.
“Now, how can we help you?”
“I need a lawyer, a good lawyer.”
“You’ve come to the right place. The firm of O’Ryan and Greenblatt is one of the best law firms in the city.”
“Okay. I’ll take Mr. Greenblatt.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Greenblatt isn’t taking any cases, but his daughter, Karen, is taking cases.”
“Okay, I’ll take Karen, but before you call her, tell me how much I have to pay.”
An office door opened, and a man came out. He went to the coffee pot and held it up. “It’s empty. Again, it’s empty,” he said, put his hand on his hip and stamped his foot. Jean and Mrs. Liederkenstenflam watched him. “Gosh darn. Darn. How is a great lawyer supposed to be great if there’s no coffee?”
“So, make some coffee,” Jean said.
“But that’s your job,” he whined. “I do lawyer things and you make coffee. That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he complained, stamped his foot and wiggled to his office.
'`D' boichick, I think he needs some chign soup. Yeah?”
“He needs something.”
“Now, I was asking how much I have to pay.”
“You don’t have to pay anything up front if the attorney decides to take your case. If the attorney loses, you don’t pay anything. If the attorney wins, you pay just one third.”
“Oy, how terrible. How can you do such a thing? I think I need a doctor.”
“What’s wrong, Mrs. Liederkenstenflam?” Jean asked anxiously.
“Well, you see, my great aunt died, may her soul rest in peace, and she left me her little doggie in her will, but my sister took d’ little doggie, and I want Karen should make my sister give back d’ liddle doggie, but how could I give you one third of a little doggie? What would you do with just a part of a liddle doggie? How could d’ liddle doggie get along widout d’ part you took? D’ poor liddle doggie needs all his parts. After all,” she said sounding very anxious.
“You don’t understand, Mrs. Liederkenstenflam. The cases we take involve financial settlement. Our fee would be in dollars. You need to take your case to a small claims court.”
“In a small claims court, they won’t take a part of my liddle doggie?”
“No, they won’t. The judge will listen to both sides and then decide who should get the dog, the whole dog.”
“I’ll go to that court. What a relief. I wouldn’t want Pedro Garcia Juan Padilla De Santa Maria cut up into liddle pieces. Thank you, dahling. Say hello to Karen for me,” she said and left.
Karen came out of her office as Mrs. Liederkenstenflam left.
“Jean, did I hear that woman mention my name?”
“Yes.”
“Do I know her?”
“No.”
“Does she know me?”
“No.”
“Then how did my name get into the conversation?”
Don Flynn came out of his office, went to Jean’s desk and listened.
“She wanted a lawyer to get her doggie from her sister, and she thought you were going to cut a third of her doggie off and keep it for payment.”
“Karen, how could you threaten a client?” Don said angrily. Why would you take a third of a dog? What a thought. That’s a leg and a…yuck. That’s disgusting.”
Vera came out of her office, went to the group, and listened. “Karen, were you going to cut off a dog’s leg? How could you do that?”
“I wasn’t going to cut off a dog’s leg. Jean, would you please explain.”
“Okay,” she said, and told the story. “So she thought Karen was going to take a third of the dog for payment.”
Frank came to the desk and listened to the story. “Karen, that’s despicable. Besides, what would the firm do with part of a dog? Yuck.”
“Karen, you know there are laws protecting animals from abuse, don’t you?” Don said. “You could cut off a person’s leg and get away with it, but not a dog. A jury would hang you in a minute.”
Harry came out of his office and listened.
“My God, I never said I would cut off a dog’s leg. This is crazy,” she growled.
“What’s crazy?” Harry asked.
“Karen threatened to kill an old lady if she didn’t pay her bill,” Don said.
“I didn’t threaten to kill anybody or anything. This conversation is crazy,” Karen yelled. “You’re all crazy,” she growled and hurried to her office.
“Karen, don’t forget the staff meeting this afternoon with your father,” Jean called to Karen.
“So, what’s this meeting about?” Don asked.
“Money,” Vera said. We're sliding perilously close to red ink. Mr. Greenblatt has a plan to get us back to the black. I hope it's a good plan. Eating and paying rent have become a habit.”
At the staff meeting, Mr. Greenblatt addressed his staff. “Folks, unfortunately, the firm is operating in the red. In order to get back on our feet, I’ve decided to use a talent agency. They will hire Rock Lockwood, the soap opera actor, to be our spokesperson. Irene Young from the agency and Lockwood will be here around 2:00. Karen, I’d like you to be my eyes and ears. Let’s hope this works. I’ll keep you all informed,” he said and all returned to their offices. On the way to her office, Karen stopped at Jean’s desk.
“Jean, please call me when Lockwood arrives,” she said and left.
An hour later, the office door opened and two people entered. One was Irene Young and the other was Rock Lockwood, a handsome soap opera actor about 30 years old. He wore his overcoat over his shoulders and a wide-brimmed hat tilted to one side, and a white scarf around his neck. They went to Jean’s desk. “May I help you?”
“Yes. I'm Irene Young and this is Rock Lockwood. I'm from the King, Clayton, Bernstein, Baton, Mervin, Morgan, Fillmore, Furry talent agency. I have an appointment with Mr. Greenblatt.”
“Would you repeat those names? King, Benson, Bitten, and something furry.”
“Yes,” Irene said, speaking slowly, and Jean wrote. “I'm Irene Young from the King, Clayton, Bernstein, Baton, Mervin, Morgan, Fillmore, Furry talent agency. I have an appointment with Mr. Greenblatt.”
“Fine. Just one moment. I’ll call him,” Jean said, picked up the phone, and pressed a button. “Mr. Greenblatt, Irene Young from the King, Clayton, Bernstein, Baton, Mervin, Morgan, Fillmore, Furry talent agency is here to see you. Okay, sir, I’ll tell her,” and hung up the phone. Ms. Young, he'll be right with you. Please sit down and make yourselves comfortable.” She returned to her computer.
“Bobby came out of his office, went to the coffee pot, and held it up. Jean, the coffee pot is...” he said, saw Rock and walked like a zombie to him, pointing the coffee pot at Rock. “You’re Lock Rockwood, I mean Rock Lockwood. It’s really you. Oh, be still my heart. I’m your biggest fan,” he swooned and inched closer to Rock, who looked terrified. “I know everything about you. I know why you left Eloise at the altar. She was a tramp. And Shawna doesn’t deserve you, the tramp.” Rock hurried behind Irene as Bobby tried to get to him.
Jean picked up the phone. “Mr. Greenblatt, come quick. Bobby is loose.”
Mr. Greenblatt rushed out of his office and stepped between Bobby and Rock. “Bobby, go back to your office,” he ordered, and Bobby sulked away. “I’m terribly sorry, Ms. Young. I meant to give Bobby the day off, but I forgot.”
“Bobby, bring the coffee pot back,” Jean yelled and, looking at Rock, he brought it back and went to his office.
Rock looked stunned. “Who was that? I’ve never been married. And who are Eloise and Shawna?”
“Rock. Think. You’re married on your soap opera, and the others are characters on your soap opera,” Irene said.
“Oh, yeah,” Rock said, seeming confused.
“Let’s go into the conference room. You’ll have plenty of room to work there. My daughter, Karen, will be right in. She’ll help you anyway she can. Make yourselves comfortable,” he said, left, and told Jean to tell Karen that Lockwood was in the conference room.”
Jean phoned Karen, who hurried out of her office to the conference room. Lockwood stood. “Well, hello, there. I’m Rock Lockwood, the famous actor who is adored by millions. Would you like my autograph?”
“Uh, yes, of course, I’d love to have your autograph, Mr. Rockwood.”
“That’s Lockwood.”
“Yes, of course.”
Rock took out a gold-trimmed, leather-bound notebook from his pocket. “To?”
“I think one will be enough.”
“I mean to whom should I write my autograph?”
“Uh, how about to me?”
“I’ll need a name.”
“You have a name already.”
“I need your name if I’m going to write an autograph to you.”
“Of course. My name is Karen.”
He wrote and gave her the paper. She folded it and put it in her skirt pocket. “I’ll cherish this forever. Believe me. I’ll put it in a place in my office that’s made just for things like your autograph,” she said and went to Irene. “Ms. Young, I’m Karen Greenblatt. I’m happy to meet you,” she said and they shook hands. “My father told me to help you anyway I can.”
“Okay. Suppose we run through each commercial and you tell me if it’s what you want. Rock, read the first commercial.”
Rock held the script, slowly leaned forward and yelled. “If you have a legal…”
Karen jumped back.
“Rock, what are you doing? We want to bring people in, not scare them away,” Jean said admonishingly.
“I was just projecting.”
“Rock. You’re not doing Hamlet in front of a live audience. You’re doing a TV commercial. Now, try it again.”
Rock slowly leaned forward so that he was a few inches from Karen, and growled. “Are you a victim? Are you letting the world step all over you? Are you…”
Karen grimaced. Irene appeared to be in pain.
“Rock. This is not revenge of the werewolf. You have to sound sympathetic, like you’re talking to an old friend.”
“I see. Sympathetic. An old friend. I think I have it.” Rock leaned back in his chair, looked at Karen, smiled broadly, and grinned as he read. “Hi, there, this is your old, sympathetic friend…”
“Cut, cut, cut. Rock. Why are you grinning? This is serious and when you are discussing a serious matter you don’t have a stupid grin on your face.”
“Uh, if you’ll excuse me, there’s something I have to take care of,” Karen said, left and hurried to Mr. Greenblatt’s office. She stopped at Jean’s desk on the way.
“How’s it going, Karen?”
“This Rock Wormwood is an idiot. If he has a brain, then it’s as flat as a pancake because he’s sitting on it. If my father let’s this agency use this hack, then we’re doomed. I have to warn my father,” she said and hurried into his office. After a few minutes, he and Karen hurried to the conference room.
“Karen, why don’t you show Mr. Lockwood around while I speak with Irene.”
Karen’s first stop was Jean’s desk. “Mr. Lockwood, this is Jean, our gal Friday.”
“You look familiar, Jean. Have we met before?”
“Uh, no, we haven’t.”
“Well, then, would you like my autograph?”
“As a matter of fact, it is in my nature to avoid cluttering my life with unimportant, trivial affectations that do not serve to better the lot of mankind as a whole.”
He stared blankly at Jean for a few moments. “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. A person should be able to practice his or her religion as she or he wishes. Absolutely. So, would you like my autograph?”
“No.”
“Mr. Lockwood, if you come with me I’ll show you around the office.”
“As you can see, each attorney has his or her own office.”
“I see. So, what kind of business do you run here?”
“What kind of business do we run here?” she said smiling.
“Yeah. Just curious.”
“Rock. This is a law firm. We practice law. That’s why we have lawyers working here.”
“Uh, huh. Lawyers work here.”
“That’s right. I would say much of our business involves suits of one kind or another.”
“Suits? I just bought two new suits. One is double-breasted. It makes me look muscular. Boy, if I had known you sell suits, well, next time.”
“Mr. Lockwood, are you planning to come here to buy your suits?” Jean asked chuckling.
“Yes.”
“What size suit do you wear?”
“I wear a 42 long. Do you carry that size?”
“A 42 long law suit? That’s a popular size law suit size. I think we can work something out,” Karen said with a serious expression on her face.
“That’d be great,” he said smiling.
“Shall we continue?”
“Sure.”
“We also specialize in tax law.”
“Oh, yeah, taxes. I don’t bother with taxes. I tell my friends that by not paying taxes you get to keep all your money, but they keep paying taxes. Do you pay taxes?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I have a feeling that taxes go to poor people. Personally, I don’t believe in being poor.”
Mr. Greenblatt and Irene come out of the conference room. “Come on, Rock, “it’s time to go. Wait in the car,” she ordered and he left. Well, Mr. Greenblatt, I’m sorry we couldn’t help you,” she said, they shook hands, and she left.
“Maybe a talent agency wasn’t such a good idea after all,” he said, and he and Karen went to their offices.
2023.03.27 02:11 memesareg4y [WTS][USA] Used shoes size 8, aj1 mocha, dunk low panda, cdg converse
tagged photos and timestamp
https://imgur.com/a/7A11aJf
all shoes size 8 and dont have og boxes. Mochas do have extra black laces.
$70shipped mochas from pk
$60shipped dunks from muks
$30shipped cdg converse low size 8 has ink mark on sole
paypal invoice only comment before pm
submitted by memesareg4y to REPSNEAKERBST [link] [comments]
https://imgur.com/a/7A11aJf
all shoes size 8 and dont have og boxes. Mochas do have extra black laces.
$70shipped mochas from pk
$60shipped dunks from muks
$30shipped cdg converse low size 8 has ink mark on sole
paypal invoice only comment before pm
2023.03.27 02:07 Trash_Tia I've been talking to the boy next door through my bedroom window for a while. His latest messages are freaking me out.
I want to talk to you about the boy next door.
I first noticed him when we arrived here. Mom was moving in all of our boxes and furniture, and I was sitting on one of mom’s boxes labelled “fragile” downing ice-cold lemonade.
It wasn’t exactly the weather for cold drinks, but I was pooped after spending my morning and half of my afternoon going back and forth with all of our stuff. It was just a glimpse.
One of the movers asked me to help him with a box of kitchen equipment. I was struggling to get a proper grip of it, twisting around to shout that I needed help—when I saw him.
Not much of a person, more of a shadow poking from behind the fence. What I could make out was a tallish figure and mousey hair.
I lifted my hand in a greeting, but the guy walked away. I didn’t think much of it.
Maybe he was shy.
Though I was curious about my neighbors. I was expecting them to join the parade of families on our doorstep harbouring every food you can imagine, but they stayed away. I did know a family existed next door, however. There was a large wooden fence separating us. So, if I really wanted to talk to them I’d either have to grow several feet taller or invest in stilts. I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with meeting them.
I knew they had kids my age. I could hear them.
Whether they were arguing over video games, or laughing at something trivial, I could always hear them when I was sitting on our wooden porch or helping mom clean our yard.
According to mom, who heard it from the nice lady across the street, our neighbors were called the Wilders.
There was a single mom, and her four teenage kids.
Huh, I thought. So the mystery shadow guy must have been a Wilder kid.
I was told to not get too excited, though. Apparently, Mrs Wilder was very protective over her children and home-schooled them.
So, there was no chance of me making friends or even getting to know them. On our second day in our new home, mom told me over breakfast that Mrs Wilder had sent out a polite notice to the neighbourhood that her children were not to be disturbed or talked to. Which was crazy. I thought that was weird. But mom understood it—and to my annoyance, accepted the woman’s notice. I was warned not to talk to the Wilder children.
And if I did, that was an automatic week grounding. Which meant no diner, no seeing friends after school, and my phone privileges taken away. According to her, she figured they were just a private family and wanted to accept that. She theorised the kids had been bullied at public school and had to be home-schooled. But I was sceptical. “All of them?” I’d asked her through a mouthful of cereal.
“Phoebe.” Mom sent me a warning look, sipping her coffee. “What we’re going to do is respect Mrs Wilder’s wishes.”
“It’s child abuse.” I muttered into my frosted flakes. Only for mom to reach across the table and poke me with the prongs of her fork.
“Ow!”
“Don’t play with your food.”
“I’m not playing with my food.” I held up a spoonful of soggy cereal. “You just never get the chocolate brand. These taste like sandpaper.”
“We are going to be respectable neighbors,” mom said, ignoring me. “So, you are not going to speak to those kids. Do you understand?”
I knew mom only wanted to abide by the weird rules because she was obsessed with joining the mom’s club, or whatever they were called, but it didn’t make sense to me that his woman wasn’t letting her own kids have a social life.
At a younger age, maybe eleven or twelve, I could understand. But seventeen? That was almost college age. What, was she expecting to coddle them forever?
Did she really think these kids were going to stay with her? Seventeen was the age of finding first loves and making mistakes. Not staying at home with mommy dearest. “Okay, but would you do this to me?” I asked her. “Would you really lock me up and stop me from going outside and living my life?”
Mom had been spreading butter on bread. I didn’t realise her mood had drastically changed until she was almost slicing her finger with the knife. “You don’t know this yet because you are far too young,” she lifted her head, her lips curving into a smile. “But there is something called a mother’s instinct. When our children are born, we are overcome with an almost… feral need to protect them from danger. If you look it up, it is present is every creature. Every mother. Our children are worth more than ourselves. We give our own lives to keep them alive. You can roll your eyes and say it’s stupid, but I’m sure as soon as you have your own child, you will feel the exact same with them.”
She nodded at me. “I had that with you. I… I still have it with you, Phoebe. No matter how old you are. When you were a baby, I wanted to hold you in my arms every second of every day. I hated it when people wanted to hold you, and you were such a clingy baby. Always cradled to my chest. As you grew up, I started to understand that you were seeing the world for the first time and you needed your own time and space. I let you take your first steps on your own. I cried when you said your first word—and when I grabbed your hand and raced down the kindergarten steps for the first time. Letting you go was painful. And if I had a choice in the matter? Yes, I would keep you in here. I would stop you from going outside and seeing this world.” She dropped the knife with a startling, metallic clang, before picking it back up.
“Because this planet is a scary place, Phoebe. And as mother’s, it is our job to keep our kids safe. Even if that means going to the slightest of extremes.”
“Slightest of extremes?” I scoffed, despite knowing I was being pedantic. “They have to fly the nest! That’s called growing up!”
Ignoring her glare, I continued.
“Yes, I believe in mother’s instinct. But at what point do you have to look at yourself and realise you’re being ridiculous? Seventeen year olds aren’t infants. They won’t just blindly walk into traffic. They have self-awareness of what is wrong and right.”
I pointed at myself. “You let me drive, right? I got my license. Where was your ‘mother instinct’ when I got myself a big-girl vehicle I could easily have an accident in?”
Mom curled her lip. “Don’t push it.”
Leaning across the table, I fixed her with a smile. “See? You trust me, mom. You let me grow up. That’s the difference between you and Mrs Wilder. Kids have to grow up. No matter what the circumstances are. It’s just part of being human. We all grow up and leave our parents.”
I sent her a look, stirring the soggy soup of my cereal. “Well. Unless you’re Mrs Wilder.”
Mom finished her coffee and stood up. “You don’t even know these children. They could be in any stage of development which makes them very different to you. All kids mentally age at different points.”
She took her plate to the faucet and dumped it in the bowl. Mom washed the dishes when she was angry or stressed, and she was really going to town on our brand new pattern plates. I saw that as a mark of finality. “I’m done talking about this, okay? You’re not eighteen yet which means you abide by my rules, and really, Phoebe, I’m not exactly holding you prisoner. I’m just asking you to be polite and follow a simple rule which is not hard. We are a new family, and we need to make a good impression. Which means no talking to Mrs Wilder’s children.” She cleared her throat.
“Respect our neighbour’s wishes or lose your phone.”
Ducking my head, I continued to stir my cereal into a mushy soup which had quickly become unappetising. It looked like barf. I pushed it away. “You only want me to follow the rules so you can get into Mrs Becker’s book club and go on Pilate dates with middle aged Karen’s.”
Mom dropped a plate in the sink, and the sound of the splash made me flinch slightly.
“Is that understood?”
“Yes.” I said, rolling my eyes. “Obviously, I will abide by this street’s draconian rules so I can continue scrolling through Tik-Tok.”
It was sarcasm, but I wasn’t sure my mother could detect it. She was so blinded by becoming one with our neighbors.
Why was she so obsessed with meeting all the other mom’s anyway?
Was she planning on setting me up on a playdate with 3 year old Evie? I wouldn’t put it past her doing that for the brownie points.
“Good. End of conversation.” Mom said, hurrying to get her jacket and bag. “I’m late for work, and you have an induction to get to.”
I wanted to argue further because this sounded unfair. The kids were teenagers, right? How were they not arguing against this? It seemed insane that they were going along with what their mother said. But I was aware of significant punishment if I broke this rule. So, I begrudgingly agreed. After my induction, I asked around new friends and classmates if anybody knew of the Wilder kids, and they did.
But they didn’t want to elaborate on what they knew. I heard a lot of rumours with dead ends. Most of them involved a father who had walked out on them, and their mother going into ultra-protective mode in response. It sounded like these kids were bearing the brunt of a messy divorce. They were complete enigma’s.
I didn’t know anything about them except from their insanely overprotective mother’s wicked grip on them. I gave up being curious. Mom was serious about me not speaking not them. She gave me a lecture on respecting the woman’s privacy, and blah, blah, blah. I tuned out after five minutes, my attention flicking to an episode of Breaking Bad playing on the lounge TV.
The next few weeks were boring. Mom was invited to join Mrs Beck’s book club, so on Monday’s at 5PM, I made myself scarce. I did exactly what mom said. I ignored the kids next door. My bedroom happened to be facing the room of one of the kids, but their dark blue curtains were always shut. Sometimes it was hard. When I was sitting in the yard, reading a book, I could hear them on the other side of the fence.
The boys were the most vocal, laughing and teasing each other. There was a point when I risked it. I jumped to my feet and got halfway across the expanse of grass, standing on the tips of my toes and trying to catch a peek. But mom was calling me inside. I swore she had eyes in the back of my head. Mom always knew when I was outside. When I was near the fence.
It wasn’t until a month had gone by when I finally got a glimpse of a Wilder kid. I had just gotten back from school. I’d dumped my backpack on my bed and grabbed my phone, slumping onto my bed to text my friends and mindlessly scroll through social media. I noticed movement at the corner of my eye, and when I’d lifted my head, blinking rapidly—those same blue curtains which had shut me out for what felt so long—they were open. Not just that.
I could see a bedroom smothered in personality. I glimpsed a hardwood desk strewn with paper and an expensive laptop, a blue bedspread, a beaten up guitar leaning against light green walls covered in old-school movie posters.
There were screwed up pieces of paper everywhere. I had to guess he was some kind of artist. The room was illuminated in the evening dim, a soft warm light bringing the room to life. A knock startled me, and my gaze flicked to the window.
There he was. The Wilder boy next door.
He was my age, maybe even older. This guy looked almost college aged. Which made it increasingly weirder that his mother would insist on babying him at the age of seventeen.
He was cute. The dorky kind of cute. He wore bulky glasses but was the type to instantly suit pretty much anything. If I could compare him to anyone, it would be the mental image in my head that my younger self had imagined Percy Jackson when I reads the books.
The guy looked comfortable in a sweater and jeans, mousey brown hair hanging in warm eyes. There was an inquisitive smile on his lips. I jumped up to open my window to speak to him, but he shook his head—and I quickly remembered his mother’s stupid rule which forbid us from talking. So, I got creative.
Give me a moment! I mouthed.
I expected him to ignore me and go back to what he was doing, but the guy straightened up and nodded, arching a brow.
He was intrigued.
I grabbed an old notebook and a pen and sat on my bed, scribbling a message. I wrote: “Hello! So, you’re the kid under house arrest lmao.”
When I held it up, his smile pricked. He laughed. But I couldn’t hear it. I could tell he had a dorky kind of laugh, a nasally one. The guy held up a hand for me to wait and rummaged on his desk. He quickly wrote out a message and held it up with a grin. He looked almost proud of his own message, and I couldn’t resist my own smile. I expected him to curse his mother, maybe apologise for the lack of communication.
But instead, he simply wrote: “Hello! What’s your name?” Followed by a slightly smudged smiley.
After a moment of consideration, mom’s words echoing in my mind, I thought fuck it. “Phoebe.” I said. “Yours?”
“It’s nice to meet you, Phoebe.” He responded. Which spanned multiple conversations which took up several of my notepads.
We talked about everything from school to his life at home. He had three siblings. Matilda, Freddie, and Issac. He liked to play the guitar and draw, but also apparently sucked at both. When I asked what his favourite TV show was, he looked confused for a moment before answering “All of them”. Following that odd answer, I asked if he liked Marvel, and again, he had that look again. A look of confusion.
But I knew he was trying to make a good impression. “What is Marvel?” He wrote back, this time his handwriting in a bubbly font. I could almost call his writing calligraphy. It practically danced off of the page. The Wilder boy’s strange answers made wonder if this kid had been home-schooled his whole life. He seemed way too polite. Kids were polite, sure.
There was a certain amount of respect you had to pay to your elders and parents.
But looking at this kid, I wasn’t even sure he knew what a meme was—or even the concept of a joke. He had no idea about one of the biggest movie franchise in the world, and his favourite celebrity was apparently “All of them”. In fact, he had answered “All of them” to several of my questions. His messages reminded me of my grandma’s. Still though, he was good company. Though I made it my mission to convert him into a normal teenager.
I had to guess due to constantly being home and around the same people, this kid had zero social skills. I asked him what his favourite movie was, out of the posters on the wall. He had Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, and Fight Club.
Again, he looked confused. His head cocked to the side, and I had to physically point to them behind him.
“All of them.” He wrote back with a smiley face.
Damn, this kid needed to see a movie which wasn’t some educational shit. I bet his mother had turned him into perfect member of society.
“What have you seen?” I couldn’t help asking him. “Like, movies, TV shows. Do you play video games?”
He shook his head before scribbling back. “What is that?”
Holy shit, this kid was completely cut off from the outside world.
I was already mentally thinking up plans to get him out of the house and to a party, or something like that. From the look of this kids face—a slightly blank if not completely innocent smile—he needed time away from home. Away from his overprotective mother’s wicked grasp.
After a while, I realised he never told me his name. I didn’t notice time go by. Almost three hours, and I’d spent most of it lecturing him on movies and TV shows he really should have known. I guessed Mrs Wilder didn’t let him watch the TV. My gaze flicked to his laptop. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had blocked out all social media. My notepad was full of scribbles and doodles, an attempt at copying his handwriting style. The sky was blooming into twilight outside, thick orange and cotton candy pink streaking the horizon. I have always loved a pre-twilight sky.
“What’s your name?” I wrote in marker pen, before holding up my notepad. I was running out of paper. I could hear mom downstairs preparing dinner, and I could tell from his diminishing smile Mrs Wilder was probably shouting for him to go downstairs.
He didn’t reply for a while. I watched him put the pad down, before heading over to his desk and cleaning up the paper—every trace we had been talking and dumping each response he’d given in the trash. Before he slumped onto his bed, wrote something down in several strokes, before holding it up for me to see. “Casper.” He’d written. “My name is Casper Wilder.”
For a moment, his expression changed completely. He glanced at the door, before frowning at the pad of paper in his lap.
It looked like he wanted to write more, before twisting around, his eyes widening. Someone was coming. I could tell by the look on his face.
The knot between his brows.
Casper gathered everything he’d been using to write to me, pens and pencils, scraps of paper and the backs of movie posters, and shoving them under his bed. Then he grabbed the curtains and pulled them closed, blocking me out once again. I thought he’d come back, but after standing like an idiot with an odd feeling in my gut, frowning at his curtains, I realised he was finished talking to me for the night. What I expected was that to be it. I didn’t think he’d come back. The next morning, however, he was back at his window, smiling at me through a mouthful of toothpaste. He was still in his pyjamas, unbrushed curls falling in sleepy eyes.
He looked strange without his glasses. Like his face was too bare. The more I took him in, though. Something was… different. Though I couldn’t make it out. It hit me then.
Casper wasn’t moving, staying in the same position. The night before, he had gone to and from his bed, hurrying around to grab equipment to write with. But now he was stood, looking more shadow than human. I was quick to dive for my notepad, but Casper was already holding up his own greeting with a grin. “Good morning, Phoebe! How are you feeling today?”
“Tired.” I wrote back, my writing barely comprehensible. “Do you have school?”
“YES.” He responded with an excited smile. “I’m so excited to learn! Do you have a favourite class?”
I laughed at that. And after looking confused, he copied my laugh. Which made me laugh harder.
“None of them!” I scribbled back. “School is boring!”
Casper shrugged. “I like it. I have a great tutor.”
“Really?” This time, I drew an attempt at the rolling eyes emoji. “You shouldn’t be excited for school. Weirdo.”
He curled his lip. “You’re the weirdo.” He wrote back. Casper paused, chewing on the lid of the pen, before writing, “What’s a weirdo?”
“You’re kidding!” This time, with too much vigour, I pointed to him with a laugh. “You! You’re the weirdo!”
We talked as I got ready for school, gathering all my books and homework. I was stuffing my gym clothes in my bag, when I noticed something was on the ground behind Casper. Looking closer, it looked like a chord. Like a long cable sort of thing. I thought it was for a games console, but then I remembered he had no idea what a video game was. I didn’t question what it was for a while. We talked every night, about everything and nothing.
I told Casper about school and friends, filling up every piece of paper we had in the house, and he told me about his siblings. They were all the same age, and all enjoyed school. His brother was a piano prodigy, while his sister’s strongest subjects were math. Casper told me he felt like the odd one out being the artist of the family, and I quickly told him that creativity was the best part of a person.
He showed me his drawings. And to my confusion, and slight disgust, they were all of his mother. They were good—sure. His skills were Ivy League worthy. Perfect shading. Everything about the drawings were perfect.
But the fact that his muse was his mother—it put a weird taste in my mouth. He showed me each drawing, his smile widening with excitement. While I nodded and pretended to be impressed. Well, I was.
Though it became startlingly obvious that Casper didn’t have a choice who he drew. He didn’t draw fruit or landscapes, or even the sky. We live in a picturesque town, the perfect canvas for an artist. However, Mrs Wilder was at the centre of every single fucking drawing and painting, ink blot. Even with different styles and angles, she was always there. And Casper Wilder saw no wrong in it. He saw absolutely no fucking wrong in this woman taking control of every aspect of his life. His social life, his friends, education and hobbies.
I half expected him to grab his guitar and start singing about her through the glass. I couldn’t take it anymore. It was driving me crazy. We continued to talk through writing to each other, but soon enough the only subject was his mother. Casper asked me if I could rate a drawing he was working on. It was her. Of course it was. I ignored him, getting to my feet and holding up the sign I had written weeks before. But I was too scared to show him.
I didn’t want to ruin our friendship, but I had to know. I had to know several things which had been keeping me up all night
“Why are you okay with your mother controlling your life?” I asked in bold letters.
And below that: “Also… I’ve been wondering this for a while. But what is that thing behind you?”
The thing behind him was at the centre of my thoughts. I’d worked out it wasn’t a chord for a TV or a games console. Not even a laptop, or for his guitar. Not to mention it was always there. Morning and evening, even at night when I spied him getting ready for bed. This thing was always on the floor, snaked across his bed. Sometimes it was even wrapped up on his desk. I couldn’t understand the length of it. I asked friends at school, and even the internet. But my descriptions didn’t do it justice. A long, silver chord like thing which didn’t have an end.
Casper blinked at my message. Before he ducked his head and started writing before holding up his response.
“I love my mom.” He said, doodling a little heart. “She doesn’t control my life. I like that she’s in it.”
Below that, a follow up message which twisted my gut. “What do you mean? I don’t see anything, Phoebe.”
Tapping my pad with my pen, I struggled to think of a response. There was no way he couldn’t see this thing. It was pretty hard to miss. Instead of writing, I pointed behind him.
“That!” I mouthed, using my lips for the first time. It felt good to actually talk to him. Even if a window of glass separated us.
“What?” His handwriting was slipping slightly. And I noticed his hands were visibly shaking. “What can you see, Phoebe?”
This time, he stood up. I noticed something change in him, the notepad slipping off his knee. Casper turned around, scanning the room.
Before his eyes finally found the cord-thing. His smile seemed to dampen, eyes going wide, fists clenching.
“Casper?” I hurriedly wrote when he didn’t move for a while. His gaze was glued to the chord. I watched his eye follow it around the room, before his hand slowly raised, trembling fingers moving to his neck, and then the back of his head. Was there an insect? That’s what I thought. It must have been a spider, or some kind of bug which had startled him. I could only describe his expression as close to catatonic. He stood up, but then quickly slumped back down. But not like it was his choice. As if he was being dragged back down by an unseen force. Like one minute I was looking at Casper Wilder, and then I was seeing a stranger. A completely different person take over a rapidly paling face. Something snapped inside my gut when he moved forwards suddenly, his arms lunging out to close the curtains.
But that wasn’t the end of what I saw. The boy had unknowingly left a splinter, a tiny gap allowing me to glimpse. I expected him to react to whatever had freaked him out. But instead, he simply flopped back onto his bed. This time, I noticed the silver chord jolt with his movement. He was already asleep, his eyes closed. I watched him, my heart diving into my throat. There was no way he just fell asleep like that. It was too fast.
Mrs Wilder came into his room soon after. But I only got a glimpse of her because she was already striding over to the window. I ducked behind my bed, panic creeping up my spine. I expected the woman to start yelling at me through the window, but instead she simply pulled the curtains properly shut. Mrs Wilder definitely saw me. And even if she didn’t, Casper’s messages to me were still piled on his bedsheets. I was left completely in the dark, then. I stood and pressed my face against the window, fully aware that I was addicted to the mystery surrounding my neighbour.
My mind began to wonder to uncertain and scary places.
What exactly was Casper’s mother doing to him behind the curtain? I wanted to believe she was simply tucking him in and saying goodnight, but the strange chord-like thing on the ground, and how he’d reacted to noticing it—for what seemed like the first time. His change in expression, like a different person had taken over him, and that person was… scared.
Catatonic. I refused to believe Mrs Wilder was innocent. I waited for him to draw his curtains again—but he didn’t. Casper’s window stayed completely blocked for days. I stopped hearing his siblings in the yard, and after days of nothing, mom reiterated her warning to me over dinner. “No communication with the Wilder children,” she told me. “Which includes notes and letters.”
Busted.
So, Mrs Wilder knew we were talking.
I wondered if she was punishing her son for breaking the rules—and that was why he had been MIA for the last few days.
“There’s something wrong with Casper.” I worked up the courage to tell mom “The boy next door. I think Mrs Wilder is hurting him.”
“Hurting him?”
“Yeah, like…” I frowned. “I think she can make him go to sleep when she wants.” I pulled a face. “Like, hypnotism—or maybe even drugs.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Drugs, mom.” I said. “Mrs Wilder is drugging her seventeen year old son!”
“That’s nice, honey.”
“Are you even listening to me?” I leaned across the table, stabbing the page of her book. “Mom! Casper Wilder is a total blank slate!”
“I’ve told you a thousand times. She’s protecting them,” she hummed. “You have just seen far too many crime dramas—and your generation have been poisoned by the likes of crime entrainment. Finding what you think is your own mystery must be fun, but you are reaching, baby.”
“Reaching?” I prodded my own temple. “I’m sorry, were you not listening when I told you he doesn’t even know what video games are?”
Mom was acting weird. Usually, she talked about school with me, and at least tried to engage in conversation, but she was too busy reading the book Mrs Becker has recommended her. It was like talking to a brick.
“You’re being ridiculous, Phoebe,” she turned over a page with a sigh. “I’ve spoken to his mother. She’s a lovely woman. We’re having lunch next week. I met her in the grocery store."
“What a coincidence,” I shot her a look over my phone. I was looking up child abuse helplines. “You’re suddenly best friends with the neighborhood witch when I’m caught talking to her son.” Dropping my phone for emphasis, I stood up. “If you would just listen to me—"
“That’s enough.” Mom cut me off. She finished her coffee, grabbing her jacket from where it was slung over a chair. “Stay out of trouble, okay? I’m heading back to work. I’ve left cash if you want to order pizza. You have other interests, alright? Please. Leave Mrs Wilder alone. This obsession you have with her kids is unhealthy. Why don't you stick to fiction, hm?"
Yeah, no.
As soon as she was gone, I sprinted to my room to see if Casper’s curtains were open. To my dismay, though. They weren’t.
Frustrated, I yanked mine shut too.
Slumping onto my bed, I continued looking up helplines. I got bored soon after and started googling chords and wires which fit the description of what I’d seen.
There was a match, though it was on a weird medical website which looked like it had been made in 2005. The interface was outdated, and according to the description, it was some kind of clamping device. There were a lot of words I didn’t know, and after further googling, I was getting increasingly more confused. Until my gaze flicked to a section at the bottom of the page. According to whoever wrote it, the chord in question was experimental. There weren’t many in circulation, but it was mainly used in medical centres such as specialist surgeries and hospitals. When I scrolled down, there was a diagram which showed a long chord-like thing labelled as “The body” and a sharp looking needle. Something warm crept up my throat and I sat up, frowning at the screen. Was that it? Was that thing the end?
And what did this thing even connect to?
A sudden THUD made me almost jump out of my skin. I slid off my bed.
THUD.
It was coming from my window. My curtains were still shut, blowing in the slight breeze. Slowly, I made my way over, my spine tingling.
THUD.
THUD.
THUD.
The first thing I saw was red. Bright, intense scarlet spattering the Wilder boy's window. Then I glimpsed Casper. He was slamming his face into the glass, over and over again, his already bleeding nose exploding with more red. But it wasn't the boy I knew. The kid I had gotten to know over the last few months. No. This kid was a mess of torn up clothes, bruises yellowing his eyes and scratches sliced into his flesh. My first thought was his mom. She must have done this to him. But then my gaze was finding his bloodied nails, and claw marks on his arms and cheeks. There was something white wrapped around his head, a bandage.
I could glimpse red leaking through, smudging clinical white and pooling down his temples in sharp rivulets. Casper's eyes were an enigma in themselves, a mixture of fear and confusion, and almost feral look of anger and frustration. But the twitch in his lip and between his brow, was evident that something was fighting that.
Emotions and feelings he wasn't feeling himself.
It was like looking at two different guys. One was Casper, the artist who lived next door, who ended every message with a smiley. While this twisted other self, a self which was broken out and was feral in his expression, was a whole other person. I started to realise the more I looked at him, at the mess of flesh and blood caught between his nails, and his trembling hands every so often creeping to the back of his skull before jolting and coming back to curl into fists, battering the window--- he had clawed into his own head.
Immediately, I reached for my phone. But he already knew what I was going to do.
“No!” He mouthed, shaking his head—so I grabbed my notepad. I could barely write.
“What’s going on?” I held up my pad. “Are you okay? You’re fucking bleeding!”
Instead of using a pen and paper, Casper squinted, blinking rapidly. His handwriting was different, a manic scrawl, as he wrote in the explosion of blood on the window.
When he twisted around, his gaze going to the door, the breath caught in my throat. Someone was yelling his name. I could tell by his reaction. His bloodied fingers clawed at his face and hair, at bald patches and rugged stitches lining his scalp and the back of his skull. They kept going, a narrow line of stitches all the way down his neck, and presumably his spine.
My thoughts flashed back to the equipment I’d been looking up. This kind of thing was designed to bury into the brain and spinal cord. I looked for it, but the thing was nowhere to be seen on him. It was no longer on the floor. Casper struggled to write coherently. I notice he kept swearing, his finger smudging the words he was trying to write. This was more like it, I thought. This was the kind of boy I had expected to be the kid next door. “Fuck.” He shook his head, his movements erratic as one hand went to the back of his head and came back slick with glistening red.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck!
He slammed his fists into the window in frustration, but I was already seeing his message start to blossom and make sense.
“WHO.”
Casper was crying. I could see that he could barely breathe, struggling to inhale, swiping at his eyes with smudged fists.
“AM.”
“I?”
I started to back away, but he continued. When he’d finished, he wrote it again and again, growing more and more fraught.
I jumped when he slammed his head into the glass of the window again. At first a part of me thought he was using his blood for paint.
So he was intentionally hurting himself to draw more.
But his words spelled it out for me in black and white.
Who am I? He wrote. WHO AM I? WHO AM I WHO AM I? WHO AM I?
This time I could barely even read my own handwriting. I held up a scrap of paper.
“DID YOUR MOM HURT YOU?”
I gestured to the bandage on his head, and he stumbled back, wild eyes searching for something to write with.
“THAT WOMAN.” He scribbled in block capitals.
“THAT WOMAN IS NOT MY FUCKING MOM.” He wrote, before he dropped to his knees. He was still writing but failing to show me.
I don’t know who I am.
He wrote the same thing 12 times, before tearing up the paper and burying his head in his lap.
I gave up writing messages.
“Casper!” I shouted.
Then I threw a rock at his window, and he lifted his head, blinking rapidly.
Gesturing for him to open up his window, he struggled with the latch for a moment before pulling it open.
I stuck my head out of my own window, cold air hitting me in the face. “I’m going to help you.” I managed to choke out. “Hold on, okay?”
Casper clawed at his face. "Help me." His voice was a sharp hiss. "Please help me. I don't know who I..." His fingernails ripped into the flesh of his cheeks, but he barely seemed to feel it, to be fazed. They kept going, digging into layer after layer. "I don't know who I am." He jumped up suddenly trashing his desk and throwing his laptop against the wall. He reminded me of a child having a tantrum. In this case though, it was more than acting out. I was sure that Casper Wilder didn’t exist. "I don't know who I am. I don't know... fuck... I don't know who I am!”
His eyes found mine, and I could have sworn I saw something there, buried deep, deep inside his pupil.
He blinked, and it was gone.
“You need to tell me what she’s done to you.” I said stiffly. “Tell me what she’s done to your head.”
Casper was only growing progressively more frenzied. Animalistic. He came back to the window, slamming his fists into it. Then his head. Again and again. Like he was trying to knock himself out. "Help me. I can't remember... I can't remember who I am. I just know.. I know her.”
His lips suddenly twisted into a startling grin.
“Mom.” He whispered, his expression softening. “My mom.” His gaze flicked to the desk. “She won’t like that I’ve… I’ve made a mess.”
“Your mom did this.” I gritted out. “I’m calling the cops.”
His expression was scaring me. Whatever was in his eye was scaring me. But this boy needed help. He needed to be taken out of that house.
"No." Casper sobered up. "No, my mom... my mommy said... she said no police." His eyes widened suddenly, seemingly noticing the mess of the window for the first time. “Oh, no.” Casper stumbled back. “I should… I should clean this. Before my mom sees what a mess I made.”
His door opened, and another head poked through.
Another guy. I figured it was one of his brothers. Freddie, or Issac. He too had a bandage wrapped around his head.
His brother’s eyes found the blood spatters, and then me. Like his mother, he strode over to the window, shutting the curtains.
But I could still hear it.
A mechanical whirring noise, followed by Casper’s sharp breath and the sickly crunch of metal protruding through blood and bone.
That was it.
“Mom!” I yelled. I’d heard her come back earlier. She must have finished work early.
I stumbled downstairs to tell her to call the cops, but a shadow was already looming behind the corner. Before I knew what was happening, a wet rag stinking of pool cleaner was being pressed over my mouth and nose.
I don’t remember passing out. When I woke up, I was lying on my mom’s couch. It was dark outside, but the curtains were open. My foggy thoughts drunk in slithers of moon poking from between the clouds before registering I wasn’t alone. Sitting up, my stomach galloped. There was no sign of mom. But I recognised each of the faces surrounding me. Mrs Becker was sitting with her legs crossed, delicately sipping from a cup. And next to her, wearing a smug smile, was Mrs Wilder. She wasn’t looking at me. Instead, her eyes were lovingly glued to something which had been built over mom’s coffee table. It was made completely out of paper. The scraps of paper I had been using to talk to her son. Though there weren’t just my messages. I glimpsed Casper’s writing too. It was a house. I was staring at a perfect paper rendition of the Wilder house. And next to it stood four little paper dolls.
There were no faces. No expressions. Just four dolls. Two boys, and two girls.
Though in her lap were more. Mrs Wilder’s nimble fingers were working to make more of them. They filled her lap differing in sizes.
“Phoebe, is it?”
Her voice was smooth like chocolate. I could almost mistake it for kindness.
I nodded, my heart in my throat. I was watching her create another doll. She folded a piece of paper in half, cut it in two, and started to fold sections, bringing the doll-form to life. This one, unlike the other, did have attention put into it. She had even added the birth mark on my right temple, following that, colouring in my dark blonde hair, and finishing with my jean jacket. Mrs Wilder didn’t have to spell it out for me. When she got to the doll’s head, she shocked me, by tearing it off. Then she ripped off its arms and legs and tearing its torso in half.
Mrs Wilder straightened up. “Phoebe, are you aware of a mother’s instinct?”
I couldn’t reply. Instead, I was staring at the paper-doll she had set alight. I watched smouldering orange rip into it, before she put the fire out, dropping the blackened paper doll on the carpet. For just a brief second, I could have sworn the hem of my jacket had also caught alight. Just a single flash of orange. But maybe I was seeing things. “I was pregnant with four beautiful children,” she said softly. “As soon as I found out, I had already named them.” Her smile was dreamy. Melancholic. “Freddie. My little Freddie. He kicked quite a lot. Oh, and Matilda. She and her twin were quite the pair, I must say. Swiftly draining me of my energy so I had to take medication.” Mrs Wilder chuckled.
“And finally, Casper. Named after my favourite movie. I loved him with all of my heart. He was my little fighter.” She quickly lost her smile, her gaze flicking to me. “I hope you understand that if you talk to, or even the breathe the same air as my children again, I will rip you apart too.”
Mrs Wilder never raised her voice. She didn’t need to. I was terrified of her.
She held up my doll for emphasis, before throwing it in the paper dollhouse. “Or… perhaps you could become another daughter of mine, hmm?” I couldn’t move, my body paralysed when she leaned over me, cruel eyes drinking me in. “Maybe not.” She hummed. “I only take the dead or dying.” Straightening up, she sighed. “It’s not a hard task, Phoebe. Keep away from my children and I will keep away from you.”
The two of them left after that, leaving me unable to move. To breathe. They took the dollhouse. All of the paper. Even my own doll.
Casper has been unreachable since. Mom has hardly been at home—and I’m starting to lose my mind.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who or what Mrs Wilder is, but I’m afraid she’s going to keep adding to her collection.
Whoever those kids are, they’re not hers. I think she’s taken them. She’s using them as canvases. Dolls. For what she’s lost.
Am I next?
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I first noticed him when we arrived here. Mom was moving in all of our boxes and furniture, and I was sitting on one of mom’s boxes labelled “fragile” downing ice-cold lemonade.
It wasn’t exactly the weather for cold drinks, but I was pooped after spending my morning and half of my afternoon going back and forth with all of our stuff. It was just a glimpse.
One of the movers asked me to help him with a box of kitchen equipment. I was struggling to get a proper grip of it, twisting around to shout that I needed help—when I saw him.
Not much of a person, more of a shadow poking from behind the fence. What I could make out was a tallish figure and mousey hair.
I lifted my hand in a greeting, but the guy walked away. I didn’t think much of it.
Maybe he was shy.
Though I was curious about my neighbors. I was expecting them to join the parade of families on our doorstep harbouring every food you can imagine, but they stayed away. I did know a family existed next door, however. There was a large wooden fence separating us. So, if I really wanted to talk to them I’d either have to grow several feet taller or invest in stilts. I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with meeting them.
I knew they had kids my age. I could hear them.
Whether they were arguing over video games, or laughing at something trivial, I could always hear them when I was sitting on our wooden porch or helping mom clean our yard.
According to mom, who heard it from the nice lady across the street, our neighbors were called the Wilders.
There was a single mom, and her four teenage kids.
Huh, I thought. So the mystery shadow guy must have been a Wilder kid.
I was told to not get too excited, though. Apparently, Mrs Wilder was very protective over her children and home-schooled them.
So, there was no chance of me making friends or even getting to know them. On our second day in our new home, mom told me over breakfast that Mrs Wilder had sent out a polite notice to the neighbourhood that her children were not to be disturbed or talked to. Which was crazy. I thought that was weird. But mom understood it—and to my annoyance, accepted the woman’s notice. I was warned not to talk to the Wilder children.
And if I did, that was an automatic week grounding. Which meant no diner, no seeing friends after school, and my phone privileges taken away. According to her, she figured they were just a private family and wanted to accept that. She theorised the kids had been bullied at public school and had to be home-schooled. But I was sceptical. “All of them?” I’d asked her through a mouthful of cereal.
“Phoebe.” Mom sent me a warning look, sipping her coffee. “What we’re going to do is respect Mrs Wilder’s wishes.”
“It’s child abuse.” I muttered into my frosted flakes. Only for mom to reach across the table and poke me with the prongs of her fork.
“Ow!”
“Don’t play with your food.”
“I’m not playing with my food.” I held up a spoonful of soggy cereal. “You just never get the chocolate brand. These taste like sandpaper.”
“We are going to be respectable neighbors,” mom said, ignoring me. “So, you are not going to speak to those kids. Do you understand?”
I knew mom only wanted to abide by the weird rules because she was obsessed with joining the mom’s club, or whatever they were called, but it didn’t make sense to me that his woman wasn’t letting her own kids have a social life.
At a younger age, maybe eleven or twelve, I could understand. But seventeen? That was almost college age. What, was she expecting to coddle them forever?
Did she really think these kids were going to stay with her? Seventeen was the age of finding first loves and making mistakes. Not staying at home with mommy dearest. “Okay, but would you do this to me?” I asked her. “Would you really lock me up and stop me from going outside and living my life?”
Mom had been spreading butter on bread. I didn’t realise her mood had drastically changed until she was almost slicing her finger with the knife. “You don’t know this yet because you are far too young,” she lifted her head, her lips curving into a smile. “But there is something called a mother’s instinct. When our children are born, we are overcome with an almost… feral need to protect them from danger. If you look it up, it is present is every creature. Every mother. Our children are worth more than ourselves. We give our own lives to keep them alive. You can roll your eyes and say it’s stupid, but I’m sure as soon as you have your own child, you will feel the exact same with them.”
She nodded at me. “I had that with you. I… I still have it with you, Phoebe. No matter how old you are. When you were a baby, I wanted to hold you in my arms every second of every day. I hated it when people wanted to hold you, and you were such a clingy baby. Always cradled to my chest. As you grew up, I started to understand that you were seeing the world for the first time and you needed your own time and space. I let you take your first steps on your own. I cried when you said your first word—and when I grabbed your hand and raced down the kindergarten steps for the first time. Letting you go was painful. And if I had a choice in the matter? Yes, I would keep you in here. I would stop you from going outside and seeing this world.” She dropped the knife with a startling, metallic clang, before picking it back up.
“Because this planet is a scary place, Phoebe. And as mother’s, it is our job to keep our kids safe. Even if that means going to the slightest of extremes.”
“Slightest of extremes?” I scoffed, despite knowing I was being pedantic. “They have to fly the nest! That’s called growing up!”
Ignoring her glare, I continued.
“Yes, I believe in mother’s instinct. But at what point do you have to look at yourself and realise you’re being ridiculous? Seventeen year olds aren’t infants. They won’t just blindly walk into traffic. They have self-awareness of what is wrong and right.”
I pointed at myself. “You let me drive, right? I got my license. Where was your ‘mother instinct’ when I got myself a big-girl vehicle I could easily have an accident in?”
Mom curled her lip. “Don’t push it.”
Leaning across the table, I fixed her with a smile. “See? You trust me, mom. You let me grow up. That’s the difference between you and Mrs Wilder. Kids have to grow up. No matter what the circumstances are. It’s just part of being human. We all grow up and leave our parents.”
I sent her a look, stirring the soggy soup of my cereal. “Well. Unless you’re Mrs Wilder.”
Mom finished her coffee and stood up. “You don’t even know these children. They could be in any stage of development which makes them very different to you. All kids mentally age at different points.”
She took her plate to the faucet and dumped it in the bowl. Mom washed the dishes when she was angry or stressed, and she was really going to town on our brand new pattern plates. I saw that as a mark of finality. “I’m done talking about this, okay? You’re not eighteen yet which means you abide by my rules, and really, Phoebe, I’m not exactly holding you prisoner. I’m just asking you to be polite and follow a simple rule which is not hard. We are a new family, and we need to make a good impression. Which means no talking to Mrs Wilder’s children.” She cleared her throat.
“Respect our neighbour’s wishes or lose your phone.”
Ducking my head, I continued to stir my cereal into a mushy soup which had quickly become unappetising. It looked like barf. I pushed it away. “You only want me to follow the rules so you can get into Mrs Becker’s book club and go on Pilate dates with middle aged Karen’s.”
Mom dropped a plate in the sink, and the sound of the splash made me flinch slightly.
“Is that understood?”
“Yes.” I said, rolling my eyes. “Obviously, I will abide by this street’s draconian rules so I can continue scrolling through Tik-Tok.”
It was sarcasm, but I wasn’t sure my mother could detect it. She was so blinded by becoming one with our neighbors.
Why was she so obsessed with meeting all the other mom’s anyway?
Was she planning on setting me up on a playdate with 3 year old Evie? I wouldn’t put it past her doing that for the brownie points.
“Good. End of conversation.” Mom said, hurrying to get her jacket and bag. “I’m late for work, and you have an induction to get to.”
I wanted to argue further because this sounded unfair. The kids were teenagers, right? How were they not arguing against this? It seemed insane that they were going along with what their mother said. But I was aware of significant punishment if I broke this rule. So, I begrudgingly agreed. After my induction, I asked around new friends and classmates if anybody knew of the Wilder kids, and they did.
But they didn’t want to elaborate on what they knew. I heard a lot of rumours with dead ends. Most of them involved a father who had walked out on them, and their mother going into ultra-protective mode in response. It sounded like these kids were bearing the brunt of a messy divorce. They were complete enigma’s.
I didn’t know anything about them except from their insanely overprotective mother’s wicked grip on them. I gave up being curious. Mom was serious about me not speaking not them. She gave me a lecture on respecting the woman’s privacy, and blah, blah, blah. I tuned out after five minutes, my attention flicking to an episode of Breaking Bad playing on the lounge TV.
The next few weeks were boring. Mom was invited to join Mrs Beck’s book club, so on Monday’s at 5PM, I made myself scarce. I did exactly what mom said. I ignored the kids next door. My bedroom happened to be facing the room of one of the kids, but their dark blue curtains were always shut. Sometimes it was hard. When I was sitting in the yard, reading a book, I could hear them on the other side of the fence.
The boys were the most vocal, laughing and teasing each other. There was a point when I risked it. I jumped to my feet and got halfway across the expanse of grass, standing on the tips of my toes and trying to catch a peek. But mom was calling me inside. I swore she had eyes in the back of my head. Mom always knew when I was outside. When I was near the fence.
It wasn’t until a month had gone by when I finally got a glimpse of a Wilder kid. I had just gotten back from school. I’d dumped my backpack on my bed and grabbed my phone, slumping onto my bed to text my friends and mindlessly scroll through social media. I noticed movement at the corner of my eye, and when I’d lifted my head, blinking rapidly—those same blue curtains which had shut me out for what felt so long—they were open. Not just that.
I could see a bedroom smothered in personality. I glimpsed a hardwood desk strewn with paper and an expensive laptop, a blue bedspread, a beaten up guitar leaning against light green walls covered in old-school movie posters.
There were screwed up pieces of paper everywhere. I had to guess he was some kind of artist. The room was illuminated in the evening dim, a soft warm light bringing the room to life. A knock startled me, and my gaze flicked to the window.
There he was. The Wilder boy next door.
He was my age, maybe even older. This guy looked almost college aged. Which made it increasingly weirder that his mother would insist on babying him at the age of seventeen.
He was cute. The dorky kind of cute. He wore bulky glasses but was the type to instantly suit pretty much anything. If I could compare him to anyone, it would be the mental image in my head that my younger self had imagined Percy Jackson when I reads the books.
The guy looked comfortable in a sweater and jeans, mousey brown hair hanging in warm eyes. There was an inquisitive smile on his lips. I jumped up to open my window to speak to him, but he shook his head—and I quickly remembered his mother’s stupid rule which forbid us from talking. So, I got creative.
Give me a moment! I mouthed.
I expected him to ignore me and go back to what he was doing, but the guy straightened up and nodded, arching a brow.
He was intrigued.
I grabbed an old notebook and a pen and sat on my bed, scribbling a message. I wrote: “Hello! So, you’re the kid under house arrest lmao.”
When I held it up, his smile pricked. He laughed. But I couldn’t hear it. I could tell he had a dorky kind of laugh, a nasally one. The guy held up a hand for me to wait and rummaged on his desk. He quickly wrote out a message and held it up with a grin. He looked almost proud of his own message, and I couldn’t resist my own smile. I expected him to curse his mother, maybe apologise for the lack of communication.
But instead, he simply wrote: “Hello! What’s your name?” Followed by a slightly smudged smiley.
After a moment of consideration, mom’s words echoing in my mind, I thought fuck it. “Phoebe.” I said. “Yours?”
“It’s nice to meet you, Phoebe.” He responded. Which spanned multiple conversations which took up several of my notepads.
We talked about everything from school to his life at home. He had three siblings. Matilda, Freddie, and Issac. He liked to play the guitar and draw, but also apparently sucked at both. When I asked what his favourite TV show was, he looked confused for a moment before answering “All of them”. Following that odd answer, I asked if he liked Marvel, and again, he had that look again. A look of confusion.
But I knew he was trying to make a good impression. “What is Marvel?” He wrote back, this time his handwriting in a bubbly font. I could almost call his writing calligraphy. It practically danced off of the page. The Wilder boy’s strange answers made wonder if this kid had been home-schooled his whole life. He seemed way too polite. Kids were polite, sure.
There was a certain amount of respect you had to pay to your elders and parents.
But looking at this kid, I wasn’t even sure he knew what a meme was—or even the concept of a joke. He had no idea about one of the biggest movie franchise in the world, and his favourite celebrity was apparently “All of them”. In fact, he had answered “All of them” to several of my questions. His messages reminded me of my grandma’s. Still though, he was good company. Though I made it my mission to convert him into a normal teenager.
I had to guess due to constantly being home and around the same people, this kid had zero social skills. I asked him what his favourite movie was, out of the posters on the wall. He had Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, and Fight Club.
Again, he looked confused. His head cocked to the side, and I had to physically point to them behind him.
“All of them.” He wrote back with a smiley face.
Damn, this kid needed to see a movie which wasn’t some educational shit. I bet his mother had turned him into perfect member of society.
“What have you seen?” I couldn’t help asking him. “Like, movies, TV shows. Do you play video games?”
He shook his head before scribbling back. “What is that?”
Holy shit, this kid was completely cut off from the outside world.
I was already mentally thinking up plans to get him out of the house and to a party, or something like that. From the look of this kids face—a slightly blank if not completely innocent smile—he needed time away from home. Away from his overprotective mother’s wicked grasp.
After a while, I realised he never told me his name. I didn’t notice time go by. Almost three hours, and I’d spent most of it lecturing him on movies and TV shows he really should have known. I guessed Mrs Wilder didn’t let him watch the TV. My gaze flicked to his laptop. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had blocked out all social media. My notepad was full of scribbles and doodles, an attempt at copying his handwriting style. The sky was blooming into twilight outside, thick orange and cotton candy pink streaking the horizon. I have always loved a pre-twilight sky.
“What’s your name?” I wrote in marker pen, before holding up my notepad. I was running out of paper. I could hear mom downstairs preparing dinner, and I could tell from his diminishing smile Mrs Wilder was probably shouting for him to go downstairs.
He didn’t reply for a while. I watched him put the pad down, before heading over to his desk and cleaning up the paper—every trace we had been talking and dumping each response he’d given in the trash. Before he slumped onto his bed, wrote something down in several strokes, before holding it up for me to see. “Casper.” He’d written. “My name is Casper Wilder.”
For a moment, his expression changed completely. He glanced at the door, before frowning at the pad of paper in his lap.
It looked like he wanted to write more, before twisting around, his eyes widening. Someone was coming. I could tell by the look on his face.
The knot between his brows.
Casper gathered everything he’d been using to write to me, pens and pencils, scraps of paper and the backs of movie posters, and shoving them under his bed. Then he grabbed the curtains and pulled them closed, blocking me out once again. I thought he’d come back, but after standing like an idiot with an odd feeling in my gut, frowning at his curtains, I realised he was finished talking to me for the night. What I expected was that to be it. I didn’t think he’d come back. The next morning, however, he was back at his window, smiling at me through a mouthful of toothpaste. He was still in his pyjamas, unbrushed curls falling in sleepy eyes.
He looked strange without his glasses. Like his face was too bare. The more I took him in, though. Something was… different. Though I couldn’t make it out. It hit me then.
Casper wasn’t moving, staying in the same position. The night before, he had gone to and from his bed, hurrying around to grab equipment to write with. But now he was stood, looking more shadow than human. I was quick to dive for my notepad, but Casper was already holding up his own greeting with a grin. “Good morning, Phoebe! How are you feeling today?”
“Tired.” I wrote back, my writing barely comprehensible. “Do you have school?”
“YES.” He responded with an excited smile. “I’m so excited to learn! Do you have a favourite class?”
I laughed at that. And after looking confused, he copied my laugh. Which made me laugh harder.
“None of them!” I scribbled back. “School is boring!”
Casper shrugged. “I like it. I have a great tutor.”
“Really?” This time, I drew an attempt at the rolling eyes emoji. “You shouldn’t be excited for school. Weirdo.”
He curled his lip. “You’re the weirdo.” He wrote back. Casper paused, chewing on the lid of the pen, before writing, “What’s a weirdo?”
“You’re kidding!” This time, with too much vigour, I pointed to him with a laugh. “You! You’re the weirdo!”
We talked as I got ready for school, gathering all my books and homework. I was stuffing my gym clothes in my bag, when I noticed something was on the ground behind Casper. Looking closer, it looked like a chord. Like a long cable sort of thing. I thought it was for a games console, but then I remembered he had no idea what a video game was. I didn’t question what it was for a while. We talked every night, about everything and nothing.
I told Casper about school and friends, filling up every piece of paper we had in the house, and he told me about his siblings. They were all the same age, and all enjoyed school. His brother was a piano prodigy, while his sister’s strongest subjects were math. Casper told me he felt like the odd one out being the artist of the family, and I quickly told him that creativity was the best part of a person.
He showed me his drawings. And to my confusion, and slight disgust, they were all of his mother. They were good—sure. His skills were Ivy League worthy. Perfect shading. Everything about the drawings were perfect.
But the fact that his muse was his mother—it put a weird taste in my mouth. He showed me each drawing, his smile widening with excitement. While I nodded and pretended to be impressed. Well, I was.
Though it became startlingly obvious that Casper didn’t have a choice who he drew. He didn’t draw fruit or landscapes, or even the sky. We live in a picturesque town, the perfect canvas for an artist. However, Mrs Wilder was at the centre of every single fucking drawing and painting, ink blot. Even with different styles and angles, she was always there. And Casper Wilder saw no wrong in it. He saw absolutely no fucking wrong in this woman taking control of every aspect of his life. His social life, his friends, education and hobbies.
I half expected him to grab his guitar and start singing about her through the glass. I couldn’t take it anymore. It was driving me crazy. We continued to talk through writing to each other, but soon enough the only subject was his mother. Casper asked me if I could rate a drawing he was working on. It was her. Of course it was. I ignored him, getting to my feet and holding up the sign I had written weeks before. But I was too scared to show him.
I didn’t want to ruin our friendship, but I had to know. I had to know several things which had been keeping me up all night
“Why are you okay with your mother controlling your life?” I asked in bold letters.
And below that: “Also… I’ve been wondering this for a while. But what is that thing behind you?”
The thing behind him was at the centre of my thoughts. I’d worked out it wasn’t a chord for a TV or a games console. Not even a laptop, or for his guitar. Not to mention it was always there. Morning and evening, even at night when I spied him getting ready for bed. This thing was always on the floor, snaked across his bed. Sometimes it was even wrapped up on his desk. I couldn’t understand the length of it. I asked friends at school, and even the internet. But my descriptions didn’t do it justice. A long, silver chord like thing which didn’t have an end.
Casper blinked at my message. Before he ducked his head and started writing before holding up his response.
“I love my mom.” He said, doodling a little heart. “She doesn’t control my life. I like that she’s in it.”
Below that, a follow up message which twisted my gut. “What do you mean? I don’t see anything, Phoebe.”
Tapping my pad with my pen, I struggled to think of a response. There was no way he couldn’t see this thing. It was pretty hard to miss. Instead of writing, I pointed behind him.
“That!” I mouthed, using my lips for the first time. It felt good to actually talk to him. Even if a window of glass separated us.
“What?” His handwriting was slipping slightly. And I noticed his hands were visibly shaking. “What can you see, Phoebe?”
This time, he stood up. I noticed something change in him, the notepad slipping off his knee. Casper turned around, scanning the room.
Before his eyes finally found the cord-thing. His smile seemed to dampen, eyes going wide, fists clenching.
“Casper?” I hurriedly wrote when he didn’t move for a while. His gaze was glued to the chord. I watched his eye follow it around the room, before his hand slowly raised, trembling fingers moving to his neck, and then the back of his head. Was there an insect? That’s what I thought. It must have been a spider, or some kind of bug which had startled him. I could only describe his expression as close to catatonic. He stood up, but then quickly slumped back down. But not like it was his choice. As if he was being dragged back down by an unseen force. Like one minute I was looking at Casper Wilder, and then I was seeing a stranger. A completely different person take over a rapidly paling face. Something snapped inside my gut when he moved forwards suddenly, his arms lunging out to close the curtains.
But that wasn’t the end of what I saw. The boy had unknowingly left a splinter, a tiny gap allowing me to glimpse. I expected him to react to whatever had freaked him out. But instead, he simply flopped back onto his bed. This time, I noticed the silver chord jolt with his movement. He was already asleep, his eyes closed. I watched him, my heart diving into my throat. There was no way he just fell asleep like that. It was too fast.
Mrs Wilder came into his room soon after. But I only got a glimpse of her because she was already striding over to the window. I ducked behind my bed, panic creeping up my spine. I expected the woman to start yelling at me through the window, but instead she simply pulled the curtains properly shut. Mrs Wilder definitely saw me. And even if she didn’t, Casper’s messages to me were still piled on his bedsheets. I was left completely in the dark, then. I stood and pressed my face against the window, fully aware that I was addicted to the mystery surrounding my neighbour.
My mind began to wonder to uncertain and scary places.
What exactly was Casper’s mother doing to him behind the curtain? I wanted to believe she was simply tucking him in and saying goodnight, but the strange chord-like thing on the ground, and how he’d reacted to noticing it—for what seemed like the first time. His change in expression, like a different person had taken over him, and that person was… scared.
Catatonic. I refused to believe Mrs Wilder was innocent. I waited for him to draw his curtains again—but he didn’t. Casper’s window stayed completely blocked for days. I stopped hearing his siblings in the yard, and after days of nothing, mom reiterated her warning to me over dinner. “No communication with the Wilder children,” she told me. “Which includes notes and letters.”
Busted.
So, Mrs Wilder knew we were talking.
I wondered if she was punishing her son for breaking the rules—and that was why he had been MIA for the last few days.
“There’s something wrong with Casper.” I worked up the courage to tell mom “The boy next door. I think Mrs Wilder is hurting him.”
“Hurting him?”
“Yeah, like…” I frowned. “I think she can make him go to sleep when she wants.” I pulled a face. “Like, hypnotism—or maybe even drugs.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Drugs, mom.” I said. “Mrs Wilder is drugging her seventeen year old son!”
“That’s nice, honey.”
“Are you even listening to me?” I leaned across the table, stabbing the page of her book. “Mom! Casper Wilder is a total blank slate!”
“I’ve told you a thousand times. She’s protecting them,” she hummed. “You have just seen far too many crime dramas—and your generation have been poisoned by the likes of crime entrainment. Finding what you think is your own mystery must be fun, but you are reaching, baby.”
“Reaching?” I prodded my own temple. “I’m sorry, were you not listening when I told you he doesn’t even know what video games are?”
Mom was acting weird. Usually, she talked about school with me, and at least tried to engage in conversation, but she was too busy reading the book Mrs Becker has recommended her. It was like talking to a brick.
“You’re being ridiculous, Phoebe,” she turned over a page with a sigh. “I’ve spoken to his mother. She’s a lovely woman. We’re having lunch next week. I met her in the grocery store."
“What a coincidence,” I shot her a look over my phone. I was looking up child abuse helplines. “You’re suddenly best friends with the neighborhood witch when I’m caught talking to her son.” Dropping my phone for emphasis, I stood up. “If you would just listen to me—"
“That’s enough.” Mom cut me off. She finished her coffee, grabbing her jacket from where it was slung over a chair. “Stay out of trouble, okay? I’m heading back to work. I’ve left cash if you want to order pizza. You have other interests, alright? Please. Leave Mrs Wilder alone. This obsession you have with her kids is unhealthy. Why don't you stick to fiction, hm?"
Yeah, no.
As soon as she was gone, I sprinted to my room to see if Casper’s curtains were open. To my dismay, though. They weren’t.
Frustrated, I yanked mine shut too.
Slumping onto my bed, I continued looking up helplines. I got bored soon after and started googling chords and wires which fit the description of what I’d seen.
There was a match, though it was on a weird medical website which looked like it had been made in 2005. The interface was outdated, and according to the description, it was some kind of clamping device. There were a lot of words I didn’t know, and after further googling, I was getting increasingly more confused. Until my gaze flicked to a section at the bottom of the page. According to whoever wrote it, the chord in question was experimental. There weren’t many in circulation, but it was mainly used in medical centres such as specialist surgeries and hospitals. When I scrolled down, there was a diagram which showed a long chord-like thing labelled as “The body” and a sharp looking needle. Something warm crept up my throat and I sat up, frowning at the screen. Was that it? Was that thing the end?
And what did this thing even connect to?
A sudden THUD made me almost jump out of my skin. I slid off my bed.
THUD.
It was coming from my window. My curtains were still shut, blowing in the slight breeze. Slowly, I made my way over, my spine tingling.
THUD.
THUD.
THUD.
The first thing I saw was red. Bright, intense scarlet spattering the Wilder boy's window. Then I glimpsed Casper. He was slamming his face into the glass, over and over again, his already bleeding nose exploding with more red. But it wasn't the boy I knew. The kid I had gotten to know over the last few months. No. This kid was a mess of torn up clothes, bruises yellowing his eyes and scratches sliced into his flesh. My first thought was his mom. She must have done this to him. But then my gaze was finding his bloodied nails, and claw marks on his arms and cheeks. There was something white wrapped around his head, a bandage.
I could glimpse red leaking through, smudging clinical white and pooling down his temples in sharp rivulets. Casper's eyes were an enigma in themselves, a mixture of fear and confusion, and almost feral look of anger and frustration. But the twitch in his lip and between his brow, was evident that something was fighting that.
Emotions and feelings he wasn't feeling himself.
It was like looking at two different guys. One was Casper, the artist who lived next door, who ended every message with a smiley. While this twisted other self, a self which was broken out and was feral in his expression, was a whole other person. I started to realise the more I looked at him, at the mess of flesh and blood caught between his nails, and his trembling hands every so often creeping to the back of his skull before jolting and coming back to curl into fists, battering the window--- he had clawed into his own head.
Immediately, I reached for my phone. But he already knew what I was going to do.
“No!” He mouthed, shaking his head—so I grabbed my notepad. I could barely write.
“What’s going on?” I held up my pad. “Are you okay? You’re fucking bleeding!”
Instead of using a pen and paper, Casper squinted, blinking rapidly. His handwriting was different, a manic scrawl, as he wrote in the explosion of blood on the window.
When he twisted around, his gaze going to the door, the breath caught in my throat. Someone was yelling his name. I could tell by his reaction. His bloodied fingers clawed at his face and hair, at bald patches and rugged stitches lining his scalp and the back of his skull. They kept going, a narrow line of stitches all the way down his neck, and presumably his spine.
My thoughts flashed back to the equipment I’d been looking up. This kind of thing was designed to bury into the brain and spinal cord. I looked for it, but the thing was nowhere to be seen on him. It was no longer on the floor. Casper struggled to write coherently. I notice he kept swearing, his finger smudging the words he was trying to write. This was more like it, I thought. This was the kind of boy I had expected to be the kid next door. “Fuck.” He shook his head, his movements erratic as one hand went to the back of his head and came back slick with glistening red.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck!
He slammed his fists into the window in frustration, but I was already seeing his message start to blossom and make sense.
“WHO.”
Casper was crying. I could see that he could barely breathe, struggling to inhale, swiping at his eyes with smudged fists.
“AM.”
“I?”
I started to back away, but he continued. When he’d finished, he wrote it again and again, growing more and more fraught.
I jumped when he slammed his head into the glass of the window again. At first a part of me thought he was using his blood for paint.
So he was intentionally hurting himself to draw more.
But his words spelled it out for me in black and white.
Who am I? He wrote. WHO AM I? WHO AM I WHO AM I? WHO AM I?
This time I could barely even read my own handwriting. I held up a scrap of paper.
“DID YOUR MOM HURT YOU?”
I gestured to the bandage on his head, and he stumbled back, wild eyes searching for something to write with.
“THAT WOMAN.” He scribbled in block capitals.
“THAT WOMAN IS NOT MY FUCKING MOM.” He wrote, before he dropped to his knees. He was still writing but failing to show me.
I don’t know who I am.
He wrote the same thing 12 times, before tearing up the paper and burying his head in his lap.
I gave up writing messages.
“Casper!” I shouted.
Then I threw a rock at his window, and he lifted his head, blinking rapidly.
Gesturing for him to open up his window, he struggled with the latch for a moment before pulling it open.
I stuck my head out of my own window, cold air hitting me in the face. “I’m going to help you.” I managed to choke out. “Hold on, okay?”
Casper clawed at his face. "Help me." His voice was a sharp hiss. "Please help me. I don't know who I..." His fingernails ripped into the flesh of his cheeks, but he barely seemed to feel it, to be fazed. They kept going, digging into layer after layer. "I don't know who I am." He jumped up suddenly trashing his desk and throwing his laptop against the wall. He reminded me of a child having a tantrum. In this case though, it was more than acting out. I was sure that Casper Wilder didn’t exist. "I don't know who I am. I don't know... fuck... I don't know who I am!”
His eyes found mine, and I could have sworn I saw something there, buried deep, deep inside his pupil.
He blinked, and it was gone.
“You need to tell me what she’s done to you.” I said stiffly. “Tell me what she’s done to your head.”
Casper was only growing progressively more frenzied. Animalistic. He came back to the window, slamming his fists into it. Then his head. Again and again. Like he was trying to knock himself out. "Help me. I can't remember... I can't remember who I am. I just know.. I know her.”
His lips suddenly twisted into a startling grin.
“Mom.” He whispered, his expression softening. “My mom.” His gaze flicked to the desk. “She won’t like that I’ve… I’ve made a mess.”
“Your mom did this.” I gritted out. “I’m calling the cops.”
His expression was scaring me. Whatever was in his eye was scaring me. But this boy needed help. He needed to be taken out of that house.
"No." Casper sobered up. "No, my mom... my mommy said... she said no police." His eyes widened suddenly, seemingly noticing the mess of the window for the first time. “Oh, no.” Casper stumbled back. “I should… I should clean this. Before my mom sees what a mess I made.”
His door opened, and another head poked through.
Another guy. I figured it was one of his brothers. Freddie, or Issac. He too had a bandage wrapped around his head.
His brother’s eyes found the blood spatters, and then me. Like his mother, he strode over to the window, shutting the curtains.
But I could still hear it.
A mechanical whirring noise, followed by Casper’s sharp breath and the sickly crunch of metal protruding through blood and bone.
That was it.
“Mom!” I yelled. I’d heard her come back earlier. She must have finished work early.
I stumbled downstairs to tell her to call the cops, but a shadow was already looming behind the corner. Before I knew what was happening, a wet rag stinking of pool cleaner was being pressed over my mouth and nose.
I don’t remember passing out. When I woke up, I was lying on my mom’s couch. It was dark outside, but the curtains were open. My foggy thoughts drunk in slithers of moon poking from between the clouds before registering I wasn’t alone. Sitting up, my stomach galloped. There was no sign of mom. But I recognised each of the faces surrounding me. Mrs Becker was sitting with her legs crossed, delicately sipping from a cup. And next to her, wearing a smug smile, was Mrs Wilder. She wasn’t looking at me. Instead, her eyes were lovingly glued to something which had been built over mom’s coffee table. It was made completely out of paper. The scraps of paper I had been using to talk to her son. Though there weren’t just my messages. I glimpsed Casper’s writing too. It was a house. I was staring at a perfect paper rendition of the Wilder house. And next to it stood four little paper dolls.
There were no faces. No expressions. Just four dolls. Two boys, and two girls.
Though in her lap were more. Mrs Wilder’s nimble fingers were working to make more of them. They filled her lap differing in sizes.
“Phoebe, is it?”
Her voice was smooth like chocolate. I could almost mistake it for kindness.
I nodded, my heart in my throat. I was watching her create another doll. She folded a piece of paper in half, cut it in two, and started to fold sections, bringing the doll-form to life. This one, unlike the other, did have attention put into it. She had even added the birth mark on my right temple, following that, colouring in my dark blonde hair, and finishing with my jean jacket. Mrs Wilder didn’t have to spell it out for me. When she got to the doll’s head, she shocked me, by tearing it off. Then she ripped off its arms and legs and tearing its torso in half.
Mrs Wilder straightened up. “Phoebe, are you aware of a mother’s instinct?”
I couldn’t reply. Instead, I was staring at the paper-doll she had set alight. I watched smouldering orange rip into it, before she put the fire out, dropping the blackened paper doll on the carpet. For just a brief second, I could have sworn the hem of my jacket had also caught alight. Just a single flash of orange. But maybe I was seeing things. “I was pregnant with four beautiful children,” she said softly. “As soon as I found out, I had already named them.” Her smile was dreamy. Melancholic. “Freddie. My little Freddie. He kicked quite a lot. Oh, and Matilda. She and her twin were quite the pair, I must say. Swiftly draining me of my energy so I had to take medication.” Mrs Wilder chuckled.
“And finally, Casper. Named after my favourite movie. I loved him with all of my heart. He was my little fighter.” She quickly lost her smile, her gaze flicking to me. “I hope you understand that if you talk to, or even the breathe the same air as my children again, I will rip you apart too.”
Mrs Wilder never raised her voice. She didn’t need to. I was terrified of her.
She held up my doll for emphasis, before throwing it in the paper dollhouse. “Or… perhaps you could become another daughter of mine, hmm?” I couldn’t move, my body paralysed when she leaned over me, cruel eyes drinking me in. “Maybe not.” She hummed. “I only take the dead or dying.” Straightening up, she sighed. “It’s not a hard task, Phoebe. Keep away from my children and I will keep away from you.”
The two of them left after that, leaving me unable to move. To breathe. They took the dollhouse. All of the paper. Even my own doll.
Casper has been unreachable since. Mom has hardly been at home—and I’m starting to lose my mind.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who or what Mrs Wilder is, but I’m afraid she’s going to keep adding to her collection.
Whoever those kids are, they’re not hers. I think she’s taken them. She’s using them as canvases. Dolls. For what she’s lost.
Am I next?
2023.03.27 01:59 DanInTheD4rk Adalian News 26MAR23
 | Gooood morning, good morning Adalians! submitted by DanInTheD4rk to influenceth [link] [comments] It is day 17001 in the belt. Dan here bringing you your weekly update. The buzz has settled a bit from last week's updates, but the belt keeps turning. Let's dive in: ☄️ Around The Belt
⚙️ Builders Corner
🪐 Alliance UpdatesNo alliance news this week. Once phase 4 launches and release is eminent, expect to see a whole lot of action within alliance servers as they hammer out launch week strategies.If you haven't joined one already, consider hopping around alliance servers and find out which best suits you (or start your own!). Let's take a look at the formation of the three largest Influence specific alliances:
💵 Big Sales
💡 Trainee TipsMany community members are former EVE online players and Influence itself pulls from EVE as one of its inspirations. With the recent news about CCP's new blockchain game funding, here's a breakdown for prospective players of how Influence differs from EVE (source):
🗓️ In Case You Missed It
❓ Question Of The WeekFor new players on a budget (can't afford a rock or Arvad crew), what do you think will end up being the best general strategy for new players to get started in the game?*** That's all for this week! If you aren't in the discord or just want to find out more about an upcoming space strategy sandbox MMO where you compete to spread your influence by mining, building, trading, researching, and fighting in the asteroid belt we now call home, join here. The references and news in these weekly reports usually revolve around the discord. Alternatively if you are on twitter, give the team a follow to keep up with updates |
2023.03.27 01:38 kem81 So... We Aren't Alone? (part 18)
I know.... Its been forever since I updated last. I'm sorry. I've been having a hard time getting in the mood to write lately. I'll try to be better.
___________________________________________________
First / Prev
Mira was taken back to her quarters to rest. “I am worried about leaving you alone. You are very tired. What if you need help and no one is here?” Vebi asked.
Mira chuckled. “I’ve been through worse.”
Fennis was shocked. “Really?”
Mira chuckled again. “No. Not really….. Maybe? I have been through aspects that were worse than this, just not all together like this. All I really need is rest. Besides, the ship’s computers are voice activated if I really need help. Z’natla showed me how to do that.”
“I’ll still have Povin come and check on you later today. I am giving him a temporary over-ride to needing permission to enter for today only. He will still call out to ask for permission to enter, but if you don’t respond, he will use his over-ride.” Fennis replied.
“I can agree to that.” They said their good-byes and Mira headed to the bedroom to sleep.
____________
It was dark and Mira heard movement close to her. She gasped awake and tried to discern where the noise came from.
“I called and you didn’t answer. I didn’t mean to make you afraid.” Came Povin’s voice in the dark. He saw that she wasn’t focused on him but in his general direction. “I didn’t know that humans can’t see in this lighting. I’m going to lighten the room a little.” He tapped a spot on the wall that Mira guesses was where another monitor was. There was a low tone to indicate the computer was listening for an order. “Rise lighting 3 percent.”
The room was still mostly cast in shadow, but now she could see Povin’s outline. “I’m sorry. I must have been sleeping really deeply.”
“It is a few hours to end of day and you haven’t eaten all day. Do you think you can eat? Or perhaps even sit with some of your friends?”
“Sure, I could eat. And I would love to sit with my friends.”
“Do you need any help? Z’natla is outside, I can ask her to help you.”
“Z’natla’s here? I’m good. Just give me a few minutes.” Povin nodded and headed back to the living area to give her privacy.
In 10 minutes, she was fully awake and was heading with Povin to the dining hall. “I asked them to go ahead so we’ll all be able to sit together.”
At the dining hall, she was met with a chorus of “Mira!”’s. Sitting around a large table were S’sveta, Z’natla, Klarood, Deno, the three other members of her and Povin’s team from the fight, as well as a few others she had seen, but not officially met. Everyone had plates of food in front of them.
“Wait, isn’t the food here going to cause you problems?” Mira asked of S’sveta, Z’natla, and Klarood.
Klarood pointed to a member of his race who was bringing out another platter of some kind of food. “There were many losses on The Meteor. Black Hole shipmates have taken over many of the auxiliary jobs such as kitchen staff. As a result, we brought over food we can eat. All food being served currently came from Black Hole. Our two ships are heading to the closest Federation outpost to make repairs, take care of our dead we were able to recover, as well as take on replacement ships and crewmembers. Your return home will be delayed for a few days. Black Hole as well as another ship, God’s Eye is how I think it translates…. Did that translate?” Mira nodded. “God’s Eye and Black Hole will travel the rest of the way to your home planet in case another attempt is made against your return.”
Klarood took a bite of food and S’sveta continued the conversation. “We didn’t want to show such a large, well-armed force as part of first contact, but considering everything it will be for the best. The Meteor will still remain the main point of contact with your planet’s leaders. As you know, we at the Black Hole would not be able to step foot on your planet without issues. The crew of God’s Eye are Red Class. That’s the next step away from Black Class. They would be able to go on your planet, but each of the races on that ship have different issues that would make staying on your planet long term be difficult. The Quix need high temperatures, oxygen is poisonous to the Trablkians, and their nocturnal species, the Naxuns need nearly total darkness. Their skin is highly reactive to light. Luckily, both the Quix and Trablkians have excellent night vision. The Trablkians actually live on a world with a permanent twilight-like lighting, so don’t do well in bright light. It’s an odd ship grouping, but they do well together.”
Z’natla chimed in, “I hear that once we’re at the outpost, we’ll have a meet and greet among the three ships. I hear that the Quix Chief Medical Officer is eager to meet with you, Mira. In fact, God’s Eye jumped at the chance to be the second escort ship.” Her eyes twinkled at the gossip.
“Oh yes.” Klarood replied. “When another Black Class ship offered to be the second, Drixa, the Quix CMO pointed out that there had been a request to Quix from The Meteor to assess ‘the human’. I didn’t hear all the details about that. Mira, do you know why such a request was made?”
“One of the Acili medical officers, Garda, spoke with me after I woke up. Because I had such an adverse reaction to the Luxshi and they don’t look like the pictures you showed me. I think they have been on Earth for a really long time too. Garda thinks that humans may have low psionic abilities. Not enough to fight off the Luxshi, but enough to be affected by them.
“You see them as somewhat insectoid? Two upper arms and four lower legs, multifaceted eyes, short antenna, full mouth of teeth but no lips, and a somewhat emaciated looking body. I’m sure that looks normal for them, but to me it looks nearly skeletal for a bug…. Which is just a weird concept. That’s not what they look like to me.” Mira brought out her portable which had become like a cell phone to her; to feel lost without it tucked away in it’s belt pouch. She brought up the images that resembled what she saw. “These are artist renderings of what they look like to us. Though, I do wonder if we might each see them differently as humans…. There are a number of slightly similar creatures like this, and I have to wonder if they might all be Luxshi appearing as things that would scare us.”
S'sveta was concerned. “Show us the other things you think might be Luxshi in disguise. I think between all of us here we can at least tell you if they are a known species.” Mira went through as many cryptids as she could think of, but none of them were recognized as a known species. It was decided that they wouldn’t know for sure unless the Quix also saw the Luxshi in these other forms.
After eating and much catching up, Povin lead Mira back to her room before heading to his own.
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First / Prev
Kind of short, but I know someone was concerned about whether favorite characters had made it through the fight. I try not to kill unnecessarily in what I write. So here's your proof of life.
As always, comments and upvotes help me to know you're still interested in the story.
submitted by kem81 to HFY [link] [comments]
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First / Prev
Mira was taken back to her quarters to rest. “I am worried about leaving you alone. You are very tired. What if you need help and no one is here?” Vebi asked.
Mira chuckled. “I’ve been through worse.”
Fennis was shocked. “Really?”
Mira chuckled again. “No. Not really….. Maybe? I have been through aspects that were worse than this, just not all together like this. All I really need is rest. Besides, the ship’s computers are voice activated if I really need help. Z’natla showed me how to do that.”
“I’ll still have Povin come and check on you later today. I am giving him a temporary over-ride to needing permission to enter for today only. He will still call out to ask for permission to enter, but if you don’t respond, he will use his over-ride.” Fennis replied.
“I can agree to that.” They said their good-byes and Mira headed to the bedroom to sleep.
____________
It was dark and Mira heard movement close to her. She gasped awake and tried to discern where the noise came from.
“I called and you didn’t answer. I didn’t mean to make you afraid.” Came Povin’s voice in the dark. He saw that she wasn’t focused on him but in his general direction. “I didn’t know that humans can’t see in this lighting. I’m going to lighten the room a little.” He tapped a spot on the wall that Mira guesses was where another monitor was. There was a low tone to indicate the computer was listening for an order. “Rise lighting 3 percent.”
The room was still mostly cast in shadow, but now she could see Povin’s outline. “I’m sorry. I must have been sleeping really deeply.”
“It is a few hours to end of day and you haven’t eaten all day. Do you think you can eat? Or perhaps even sit with some of your friends?”
“Sure, I could eat. And I would love to sit with my friends.”
“Do you need any help? Z’natla is outside, I can ask her to help you.”
“Z’natla’s here? I’m good. Just give me a few minutes.” Povin nodded and headed back to the living area to give her privacy.
In 10 minutes, she was fully awake and was heading with Povin to the dining hall. “I asked them to go ahead so we’ll all be able to sit together.”
At the dining hall, she was met with a chorus of “Mira!”’s. Sitting around a large table were S’sveta, Z’natla, Klarood, Deno, the three other members of her and Povin’s team from the fight, as well as a few others she had seen, but not officially met. Everyone had plates of food in front of them.
“Wait, isn’t the food here going to cause you problems?” Mira asked of S’sveta, Z’natla, and Klarood.
Klarood pointed to a member of his race who was bringing out another platter of some kind of food. “There were many losses on The Meteor. Black Hole shipmates have taken over many of the auxiliary jobs such as kitchen staff. As a result, we brought over food we can eat. All food being served currently came from Black Hole. Our two ships are heading to the closest Federation outpost to make repairs, take care of our dead we were able to recover, as well as take on replacement ships and crewmembers. Your return home will be delayed for a few days. Black Hole as well as another ship, God’s Eye is how I think it translates…. Did that translate?” Mira nodded. “God’s Eye and Black Hole will travel the rest of the way to your home planet in case another attempt is made against your return.”
Klarood took a bite of food and S’sveta continued the conversation. “We didn’t want to show such a large, well-armed force as part of first contact, but considering everything it will be for the best. The Meteor will still remain the main point of contact with your planet’s leaders. As you know, we at the Black Hole would not be able to step foot on your planet without issues. The crew of God’s Eye are Red Class. That’s the next step away from Black Class. They would be able to go on your planet, but each of the races on that ship have different issues that would make staying on your planet long term be difficult. The Quix need high temperatures, oxygen is poisonous to the Trablkians, and their nocturnal species, the Naxuns need nearly total darkness. Their skin is highly reactive to light. Luckily, both the Quix and Trablkians have excellent night vision. The Trablkians actually live on a world with a permanent twilight-like lighting, so don’t do well in bright light. It’s an odd ship grouping, but they do well together.”
Z’natla chimed in, “I hear that once we’re at the outpost, we’ll have a meet and greet among the three ships. I hear that the Quix Chief Medical Officer is eager to meet with you, Mira. In fact, God’s Eye jumped at the chance to be the second escort ship.” Her eyes twinkled at the gossip.
“Oh yes.” Klarood replied. “When another Black Class ship offered to be the second, Drixa, the Quix CMO pointed out that there had been a request to Quix from The Meteor to assess ‘the human’. I didn’t hear all the details about that. Mira, do you know why such a request was made?”
“One of the Acili medical officers, Garda, spoke with me after I woke up. Because I had such an adverse reaction to the Luxshi and they don’t look like the pictures you showed me. I think they have been on Earth for a really long time too. Garda thinks that humans may have low psionic abilities. Not enough to fight off the Luxshi, but enough to be affected by them.
“You see them as somewhat insectoid? Two upper arms and four lower legs, multifaceted eyes, short antenna, full mouth of teeth but no lips, and a somewhat emaciated looking body. I’m sure that looks normal for them, but to me it looks nearly skeletal for a bug…. Which is just a weird concept. That’s not what they look like to me.” Mira brought out her portable which had become like a cell phone to her; to feel lost without it tucked away in it’s belt pouch. She brought up the images that resembled what she saw. “These are artist renderings of what they look like to us. Though, I do wonder if we might each see them differently as humans…. There are a number of slightly similar creatures like this, and I have to wonder if they might all be Luxshi appearing as things that would scare us.”
S'sveta was concerned. “Show us the other things you think might be Luxshi in disguise. I think between all of us here we can at least tell you if they are a known species.” Mira went through as many cryptids as she could think of, but none of them were recognized as a known species. It was decided that they wouldn’t know for sure unless the Quix also saw the Luxshi in these other forms.
After eating and much catching up, Povin lead Mira back to her room before heading to his own.
_________________________
First / Prev
Kind of short, but I know someone was concerned about whether favorite characters had made it through the fight. I try not to kill unnecessarily in what I write. So here's your proof of life.
As always, comments and upvotes help me to know you're still interested in the story.