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I was curious about a local legend. Now, what was supposed to be a week-long trip might turn into my eternal nightmare.
2023.06.10 06:34 Critical_Oil_6001 I was curious about a local legend. Now, what was supposed to be a week-long trip might turn into my eternal nightmare.
I just hope that people see this post, that they might start spreading the news before it’s too late. Something big is coming, something ancient, something older than any of us could have ever imagined. It might be too late. I don’t know what will become of me, of the people I love that I might never see again, by the time you are reading this. But I implore you to listen and take this story seriously, because it could save your life. Or not. I don’t know yet how deep this goes. If it’s true, if what I think is true…God help us. Nothing can save us now.
I’ll start at the beginning, because you need to understand how long this has been happening, and the implications of what is possible now that it’s getting worse. Over winter break, I went to visit my friend from high school, Jackson, in Vermont. He goes to Bennington College, studies Social Sciences with a minor in Linguistics. Smart guy. He used to write my papers for me in English class, and I would pay him back in six packs. That’s always how it was: him, studious and put together, and me itching to get outside. I was constantly on the move, biking through the forests behind my house, trail-running, building a treehouse for my little brothers, you name it. I wanted to get my hands dirty, get into nature. I guess that’s why I opted out of college, and went for camp counselor positions and summer gigs until I secured a conservation job with a park near home. Nature is important to me, and I want to do my part as the generation that has a responsibility to heal the world.
The outside was what called me to Bennington, aside from the fact that I missed my best buddy. I don’t remember when it was first brought to my attention, but I became aware of murmurings of Bennington’s rocky past online about a few months before I was set to visit Jackson. Being an experienced outdoorsman, I wasn’t afraid; on the contrary, I was rather excited to get out there and prove my worth to Jackson and his college buddies, who were far less athletic than I am. Looking back, I’m kicking myself for being so cocky. I can’t believe I ever thought of my best friend in that way.
From what I could see on the internet, Bennington College’s history was a long and often sinister one. There were videos about people vanishing into thin air: a girl wearing a red parka went for a hike alone and was never found, an experienced man leading an outdoor expedition disappeared in the woods, a woman fell into a stream, doubled back to the campsite to change her clothes, but never made it to the site, a man on a bus disappeared from the vehicle at a stop but left all of his luggage, a teenage boy was waiting in his mother’s truck and when she came back, he was mysteriously gone…I wish I could say these stories deterred me from poking my head somewhere where it didn’t belong.
Instead, I only grew more curious. What was going on in this so-called “Bennington Triangle?” I was in a unique position to investigate this phenomenon for myself. Many people hear about strange occurrences and the intrigue piques their interest, but they never have the chance to see it for themselves. But I could. I knew I could hold my own out in the wilderness—it was literally my job! Besides, I was a strong, slightly stubborn young man, built steadily, and I could protect myself well. What could possibly happen to me out in those woods, much less to a group of young college-aged men? The people who went missing most likely made one fatal mistake that cost them their lives, or maybe it was all just a big coincidence. Either way, I was about to find out for myself.
It was halfway through December when I left to meet up with Jackson. I got there on the last day of classes, and Jackson told me he would be busy until later in the day. I assumed he was cramming for a final, and I told him it was no big deal, I would meet up with him and maybe meet some of his buddies later. Besides, I had some plans of my own.
The most famous missing persons case in Bennington went cold, and is still unsolved to this day. The case is a tragic one, and I didn’t want to be insensitive by going around asking for information or throwing around names. Everything I needed, I found online. Paula Welden was the name of the girl in the red parka that went missing. Allegedly, she left campus one day to go on a hike by herself. She left the campus around 3pm and hitchhiked to an entrance to the Long Trail, a trail that runs for almost 300 miles from Massachusetts all the way to the Canadian Border. She wasn’t dressed to be outside for long, but as the story goes, she never made it back from the trail.
There was one sighting of her, however, that particularly interested me. A man reported that he had seen her running around, rather erratically, in the bottom of a gravel pit near the entrance to campus, and I wanted to see if there was anything left of the pit. Because I’m experienced with many different kinds of natural phenomena, I initially wondered if there wasn’t a natural explanation for her distressed behavior. I thought maybe there might be an insect nest or an infestation of small animals at the bottom of the pit that she might have disturbed, so I decided to check it out in my free time.
After the RA checked me in and I tossed my luggage into Jackson’s dorm, I packed a small backpack with essentials: water, sunscreen, energy bars, mini first aid kit, some rope, a utility tool, a flashlight, and a lightweight jacket. Then I headed out towards the pit.
The first thing I noticed was how much smaller the pit seemed. According to the eyewitness description of the incident, Paula was running up and down the side of a deep gravel pit, but what lay in front of me now was something much more shallow. I walked down into the center of what was left of the pit, but I could easily see over the edges. The small, dark fragments of rock crunched and ground together under my hiking boots, and the slowly sinking midday sun bounced off of the remnants of white snow around me. It was an unusually sunny day for winter, and the snow was, curiously, letting up for my visit. But the good luck for me ran out here—there seemed to be nothing to investigate at this location. My hopes of finding any evidence of insect or pest infestation that could have disturbed the girl were dashed, maybe buried several feet underground.
I lingered awhile, kicking at the bits of gravel in the small pit. I watched the small rocks scatter over the rest of the gravel, hitting up against the edge of the pit and rolling back down a few inches. I turned to go, but stopped. Maybe it was a trick of my eye, the sun reflecting harshly off of the snow and glinting in my sunglasses, causing me to not see clearly. I walked to the edge of the pit and kicked some more gravel at the side. The small rocks skipped across the uneven surface of the gravel pile, and scattered up the edge of the pit, farther than gravity should allow them to travel. I kicked more, and it happened again. My heart started beating faster.
I crouched down and picked up a small stone. I rolled it gently across the gravel, softly enough that it started to slow when it reached the incline of the side of the pit. I watched, astounded, as the rock slowly rolled uphill about a foot before coming to a stop. I gave a shout of excitement and jumped to my feet.
As I stood up straight I nearly fell back down. In an instant, my hearing seemed to go and I felt an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. I spun around, thinking someone must be behind me, messing with me, but the sensation of closeness stayed pressing at my back. I spun around again, searching for an explanation. My head was fuzzy. I heard my footsteps, overwhelmingly loud, and I couldn’t hear anything else, almost as if my range of hearing was limited to my immediate surroundings. Like I was trapped in the pit. As soon as those words flashed through my head, the claustrophobia overwhelmed me, pushing up against the very air around my body. The silence built up inside my ears until all I could hear was my muffled footsteps, my desperate breathing, and the blood rushing faster and faster through my body.
I lunged for the edge, clambering up the side as fast as I could. Instantly upon passing over the edge the sounds of the late afternoon bore down on my ears. I stumbled and covered my ears, the chirping of the birds and rustling leaves almost too loud for me to bear.
It’s not that I was scared. Obviously, I was a little shaken up. As I hastened back towards Jackson’s dorm, I tried to rationalize what had just happened to me. Maybe I hadn’t drank enough water and I simply became dizzy. Maybe it was altitude sickness. Maybe a strange bug had bitten me and I temporarily lost my bearings. Nothing quite made sense. I tried to push it from my mind and focus on having a good first day, because soon I would be meeting Jackson’s college buddies.
When I got back to the dorm, Jackson was waiting for me. Fresh from the shower, his hair was damp and he was putting on a clean t-shirt. Pulling me into a hug, he expressed his excitement over my visit, asked me about my flight, what I thought about the campus—all the preliminary niceties. Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief. Even if he noticed, he didn’t pry and try to ask me about my slightly shaking hands, my pale face, or the vague disconnectedness with which I answered his questions.
That night eased my worries slightly. I ended up meeting Jackson’s group of friends and, together, we ventured into downtown Bennington. We hit a few bars and chilled at some of the many breweries in town. Live music, good company, and many, many beers did wonders on my nerves. By the end of the night, I had completely forgotten all about my encounter in the gravel pit. Jackson’s friends were nice guys, and I was too busy feeling proud about my best friend coming out of his shell in college. When he left, I had my doubts, but it was crystal clear that Jackson was really coming into himself at this school.
The festivities continued for the next few days: the guys were stoked to be done with their final exams and excited to connect with Jackson’s old friend, so we spent our time drinking and hanging out, bumping music and generally having a blast. It was almost enough for me to forget about one of the very reasons I was excited to be in Bennington in the first place.
It’s been a few days since that incident. I had even almost started to feel better about the whole thing. Maybe it was a mistake to poke around in old history, and maybe I should just focus on living my own life and fulfilling my own passions, working to heal nature as best as I can. But now Jackson and his friends want to go on a hike, and I’m starting to feel that same claustrophobia creeping back in. What the hell is out there, and why do I feel like I shouldn’t be messing with it?
Jackson chose the hike, not me. It was like him; he was the researcher, he was the one who looked at details, so he suggested we hike on the Long Trail. It intersected with the Appalachian Trail, and maybe I wasn’t paying attention when Jackson explained this to me, because it didn’t raise any alarms about the missing persons cases. Paula Welden went missing on the Long Trail, sure—but she wasn’t with a group of capable college guys like I was.
We packed some backpacks, crushed a beer or two for celebratory sakes, and set off on the trail. I let myself feel excited as we stomped through the trees, Jackson and his friends decked out in their matching red Bennington shirts from graduation. The hike was long. It was tedious. I don’t know when I first started noticing the weird aspects around us until about an hour in. The others didn’t pay any mind to these things, but I saw them: leaves drifting in the air with no breeze, snowflakes trapped in patches of sunlight, floating but unmoving, and that tree. It was a towering douglas fir, half-dead and reaching for the afternoon sun with bare branches. Each time I looked over my shoulder to check for hikers behind us or glanced ahead to see what awaited us, it was there. At first I assumed my eyes were playing tricks on me. After all, we had been hiking for a few hours.
Only when we stopped for a breather and Jackson pointed at a nearby stream did the weird things become too much for me. We were hiking on an incline, and we were exhausted, but when Jackson knelt beside this stream, it was flowing uphill. By then I was a little panicked. I freaked out, telling them that we needed to head back. Who cares if we hadn’t reached the halfway point yet? Was there even a halfway point? It felt like we had been walking for miles!
One of Jackson’s buddies opened up a map of the trail on his phone, and it was blank. He had service and bars, but the map was just…gone. Shocked with sudden fear, we immediately turned and headed back down the path. The sky darkened within minutes of us retracing our steps. Somehow, night was falling, despite us beginning the hike only a few hours prior. I tried to point it out, pulling Jackson aside when we slowed our pace to pass around a bottle of water. But Jackson was terrified and unfocused, and when I asked him what was wrong, we realized that one member of our five-person group was missing. How had we not noticed?
So, we made a U-turn and headed back up the mountain. Twenty minutes later, we found his torn university shirt. I turned the red fabric over in my hands, panicked and bewildered. When I looked up to scan our surroundings, I saw that same Douglas fir directly to my left. I was shocked, and the rest of the group must have noticed. We looked at each other and saw the panic rising on our faces. What the hell was happening?
I only had one goal at this point: we had to get down the mountain to call for help.
We decided to do our best to follow the trail on the way we came up, but only once daylight broke; it was difficult to make out the trail in the dark cover of the night, so I insisted it would be too dangerous. Someone could fall and get seriously injured, we could all get separated in the dark, or worse. So we did our best to hunker down and build a makeshift shelter to wait out the night, but it wasn’t easy. I can only describe the sounds we heard as otherworldly. Despite the lack of animals in the woods, nature seemed to be alive around us. The clicking of bugs kept me wide awake, but the noises were louder and deeper than I had ever heard. The baying of giant wolves, so close I imagined them coming up directly behind us. The snuffling of something in the underbrush, but from a cavernous creature larger than any moose could ever be.
Where had these animals been in the daytime? Why did it feel like they were surrounding us now?
I don’t know how I ever fell asleep, but when I awoke in the morning, the sun was beating down on us. From the sheen of sweat on my forehead to the dreadful pit in my stomach, I could tell something was horribly wrong.
When I scrambled to my feet and glanced around the area, I realized that only Jackson and I remained at our site. It was us, the clothes on our backs, and the demure amount of leftover supplies in our pockets: keys, gum wrappers, half-eaten power bars, and anything else that was ultimately unhelpful. We had been stranded on the forest floor, us against nature, as if something had swooped in from above and whisked Jackson’s friends under the pitch-black cover of the night.
I frantically took in our surroundings, peering into the bushes and pushing through thorny shrubbery. There were no tracks, no drag marks. Not even broken branches. I told Jackson we had to get out of there, and fast. I knew we needed to find the closest trailhead and book it down the mountain. Jackson ran so fast he nearly chipped a tooth on a steep hill. He was trying to keep up with me since I was faster by a long shot. All that sports stuff in high school paid off in the moment, so I almost felt bad leaving him in the dust. I called back over my shoulder to him every minute or so, making sure he was there.
He stuck with me for the most part. His t-shirt got torn by overhanging branches at one point, leaving a nasty scrape almost as red as the decimated fabric. I found myself struggling to remember if he was wearing that shirt to begin with, back when we started.
Then I decided I was losing it. It was like a fight against nature, Jackson and me against the blaring sun and sloping trail. Eventually, Jackson starts glaring menacingly at the passing scenery, cursing loudly and deliriously at everything surrounding us.
When we stumbled upon a trail marker, we barely had enough energy to celebrate. While we caught our breath, I tried to calm Jackson down. Something told me that cursing out Mother Nature wasn’t the best idea right now. Whatever was sicking the elements on us wouldn’t appreciate the nasty things he was saying about them. But he was terrified, and nothing I said could slap any reason into him. I had to lead us to safety, get us out of here.
Suddenly, I heard a sound in the distance. But unlike everything else we had heard so far, this one was man made. Jackson heard it too, and started yelling about a helicopter. He made a break off to the left, towards the sound, and I bolted after him. Somehow, he burst out into a tiny clearing.
Ripping off his red Bennington shirt, he started calling out and waving it in the air like a rescue flag. He jumped and shouted, but as the helicopter got closer, the unbelievable happened. The clearing started shrinking, tree branches reaching from either side to close the gap and obscure us from the view of the pilot. Jackson screamed in fury, cursing the forest like never before.
Then the chopper must have been lowering down towards the treelike because the wind picked up, blowing in circles around us like the blades were inches from our heads, faster and faster, more violent by the second.
The brush beneath our feet blew up in the air along with the topsoil and dead leaves, obscuring our vision. We could hear each other gasping for breath, trying to keep the debris out of our eyes and coughing. I flung my arms out into the space around me, calling for my best friend and reaching out for his hands. But then I felt something shift. The decaying leaves around me smelled stronger. The wind became more vicious. The earth trembled beneath my feet, and I thought I felt something looming above me, breathing down my neck but also looking straight into my unseeing eyes.
Then it clicked. Jackson's red shirt, the gravel pit, Paula's erratic behavior, the other missing hikers...something was picking these people off, luring them deeper into the woods where they were sure to never be seen again. Did the color red cause whatever it was to literally see red, like a sick, twisted joke? Like a giant bull in front of a matador? What kind of creature could it be? Such a stealthy hunter, a commanding presence that made man tremble at the sensation of its mere aura...I couldn't even think about it without snapping my mind.
Before the flurry of leaves and moist earth settled back onto the ground, I knew Jackson was gone. I knew the chopper hadn’t seen us and that I was on my own now. I tried not to panic as I felt like every hidden eye in the forest was staring me down, sizing me up. I took off blindly, but where to, I didn’t know. After what seemed like hours of desperately sprinting, I saw a pile of rocks in the distance. Shelter, I thought, and decided to rest there for a minute to get my wits back about me.
Then I had an idea. With what little juice I had in my phone and whatever cell service luck would afford me, I knew I had to send out a warning. For some reason, I didn’t think about myself. I didn’t think about dying, disappearing, or whatever had happened to my friends. If the nature around me would be the thing to end my life, so be it. I had decided to dedicate my life to nature long ago: to save it from my fellow man, to preserve its beauty, and to keep it out of the wrong hands, the people that wanted to use its power for evil and to bring about the harm of those around them. I know it sounds ridiculous to be thinking about when my life was at stake, but I knew it was what I needed to do.
From my makeshift hiding spot in the rocks, I began furiously typing my story with what little battery I had left on my phone. When my hands started cramping, I used the voice option. I didn’t care. I just had to get my story out there.
For an hour , I’d been trying to put it all down in words. I couldn't believe my luck, that my battery hadn’t run out yet.
I had almost gone to the end when I felt the same creeping silence begin to close in on me. It was as if the forest was falling silent around me, and that silence was racing in on all sides, but it was different from when I was in the gravel pit. There was more to the sensation this time, not just the sinking, breathless feeling and the loss of hearing.
Somewhere deep within the forest, but at the same time, only miles away, I heard an awful rumbling sound, something I’ve never heard before. Nothing like the helicopter, not even the giant animals I was convinced I had heard in the night. I can't even think of a word to describe it, but it filled me with a frantic kind of dread that I’ve never felt before. I feel it in the ground. My entire body wants to run as fast as I can, but it’s like I’m glued to the ground. I taste metal in my mouth like maybe I bit my cheek or the dirt from the wind or I bit on a rock, I spit and I can’t get it out. I’m going to open an app and copy and paste it so people can know while I still can type I’m shaking so hard they have to know.
And the smell I’m smelling it’s like fruit that’s gone ripe, but it keeps getting more ripe, a sickly sweetness that keeps building mixed with the smell of the richest earth imaginable.
This is happening now, I’m smelling this now and It’s it’s like I’m trapped under the shadow of some thing bigger something that’s taking the shadow away from the trees and I can’t see the shadow of the trees anymore and the ground around me is trembling. It’s like I can hear the trees calling out to whatever it is, that’s walking towards me or flying I can’t tell, everything is stretching and growing out towards me. No behind me above me something is coming. I’m I feel better right I feel better than I have in days or however long I’ve been out here I’m not thirsty anymore. I’m not hungry anymore. I feel fuller stronger smarter. My mind is overloading. I’m thinking of 1 million things like I don’t know if I can speak anymore it’s like, it’s like I’m fruit like I’m a ripening on the vine and this giant wings beating above me and the smell is too much I
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I’ll start at the beginning, because you need to understand how long this has been happening, and the implications of what is possible now that it’s getting worse. Over winter break, I went to visit my friend from high school, Jackson, in Vermont. He goes to Bennington College, studies Social Sciences with a minor in Linguistics. Smart guy. He used to write my papers for me in English class, and I would pay him back in six packs. That’s always how it was: him, studious and put together, and me itching to get outside. I was constantly on the move, biking through the forests behind my house, trail-running, building a treehouse for my little brothers, you name it. I wanted to get my hands dirty, get into nature. I guess that’s why I opted out of college, and went for camp counselor positions and summer gigs until I secured a conservation job with a park near home. Nature is important to me, and I want to do my part as the generation that has a responsibility to heal the world.
The outside was what called me to Bennington, aside from the fact that I missed my best buddy. I don’t remember when it was first brought to my attention, but I became aware of murmurings of Bennington’s rocky past online about a few months before I was set to visit Jackson. Being an experienced outdoorsman, I wasn’t afraid; on the contrary, I was rather excited to get out there and prove my worth to Jackson and his college buddies, who were far less athletic than I am. Looking back, I’m kicking myself for being so cocky. I can’t believe I ever thought of my best friend in that way.
From what I could see on the internet, Bennington College’s history was a long and often sinister one. There were videos about people vanishing into thin air: a girl wearing a red parka went for a hike alone and was never found, an experienced man leading an outdoor expedition disappeared in the woods, a woman fell into a stream, doubled back to the campsite to change her clothes, but never made it to the site, a man on a bus disappeared from the vehicle at a stop but left all of his luggage, a teenage boy was waiting in his mother’s truck and when she came back, he was mysteriously gone…I wish I could say these stories deterred me from poking my head somewhere where it didn’t belong.
Instead, I only grew more curious. What was going on in this so-called “Bennington Triangle?” I was in a unique position to investigate this phenomenon for myself. Many people hear about strange occurrences and the intrigue piques their interest, but they never have the chance to see it for themselves. But I could. I knew I could hold my own out in the wilderness—it was literally my job! Besides, I was a strong, slightly stubborn young man, built steadily, and I could protect myself well. What could possibly happen to me out in those woods, much less to a group of young college-aged men? The people who went missing most likely made one fatal mistake that cost them their lives, or maybe it was all just a big coincidence. Either way, I was about to find out for myself.
It was halfway through December when I left to meet up with Jackson. I got there on the last day of classes, and Jackson told me he would be busy until later in the day. I assumed he was cramming for a final, and I told him it was no big deal, I would meet up with him and maybe meet some of his buddies later. Besides, I had some plans of my own.
The most famous missing persons case in Bennington went cold, and is still unsolved to this day. The case is a tragic one, and I didn’t want to be insensitive by going around asking for information or throwing around names. Everything I needed, I found online. Paula Welden was the name of the girl in the red parka that went missing. Allegedly, she left campus one day to go on a hike by herself. She left the campus around 3pm and hitchhiked to an entrance to the Long Trail, a trail that runs for almost 300 miles from Massachusetts all the way to the Canadian Border. She wasn’t dressed to be outside for long, but as the story goes, she never made it back from the trail.
There was one sighting of her, however, that particularly interested me. A man reported that he had seen her running around, rather erratically, in the bottom of a gravel pit near the entrance to campus, and I wanted to see if there was anything left of the pit. Because I’m experienced with many different kinds of natural phenomena, I initially wondered if there wasn’t a natural explanation for her distressed behavior. I thought maybe there might be an insect nest or an infestation of small animals at the bottom of the pit that she might have disturbed, so I decided to check it out in my free time.
After the RA checked me in and I tossed my luggage into Jackson’s dorm, I packed a small backpack with essentials: water, sunscreen, energy bars, mini first aid kit, some rope, a utility tool, a flashlight, and a lightweight jacket. Then I headed out towards the pit.
The first thing I noticed was how much smaller the pit seemed. According to the eyewitness description of the incident, Paula was running up and down the side of a deep gravel pit, but what lay in front of me now was something much more shallow. I walked down into the center of what was left of the pit, but I could easily see over the edges. The small, dark fragments of rock crunched and ground together under my hiking boots, and the slowly sinking midday sun bounced off of the remnants of white snow around me. It was an unusually sunny day for winter, and the snow was, curiously, letting up for my visit. But the good luck for me ran out here—there seemed to be nothing to investigate at this location. My hopes of finding any evidence of insect or pest infestation that could have disturbed the girl were dashed, maybe buried several feet underground.
I lingered awhile, kicking at the bits of gravel in the small pit. I watched the small rocks scatter over the rest of the gravel, hitting up against the edge of the pit and rolling back down a few inches. I turned to go, but stopped. Maybe it was a trick of my eye, the sun reflecting harshly off of the snow and glinting in my sunglasses, causing me to not see clearly. I walked to the edge of the pit and kicked some more gravel at the side. The small rocks skipped across the uneven surface of the gravel pile, and scattered up the edge of the pit, farther than gravity should allow them to travel. I kicked more, and it happened again. My heart started beating faster.
I crouched down and picked up a small stone. I rolled it gently across the gravel, softly enough that it started to slow when it reached the incline of the side of the pit. I watched, astounded, as the rock slowly rolled uphill about a foot before coming to a stop. I gave a shout of excitement and jumped to my feet.
As I stood up straight I nearly fell back down. In an instant, my hearing seemed to go and I felt an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. I spun around, thinking someone must be behind me, messing with me, but the sensation of closeness stayed pressing at my back. I spun around again, searching for an explanation. My head was fuzzy. I heard my footsteps, overwhelmingly loud, and I couldn’t hear anything else, almost as if my range of hearing was limited to my immediate surroundings. Like I was trapped in the pit. As soon as those words flashed through my head, the claustrophobia overwhelmed me, pushing up against the very air around my body. The silence built up inside my ears until all I could hear was my muffled footsteps, my desperate breathing, and the blood rushing faster and faster through my body.
I lunged for the edge, clambering up the side as fast as I could. Instantly upon passing over the edge the sounds of the late afternoon bore down on my ears. I stumbled and covered my ears, the chirping of the birds and rustling leaves almost too loud for me to bear.
It’s not that I was scared. Obviously, I was a little shaken up. As I hastened back towards Jackson’s dorm, I tried to rationalize what had just happened to me. Maybe I hadn’t drank enough water and I simply became dizzy. Maybe it was altitude sickness. Maybe a strange bug had bitten me and I temporarily lost my bearings. Nothing quite made sense. I tried to push it from my mind and focus on having a good first day, because soon I would be meeting Jackson’s college buddies.
When I got back to the dorm, Jackson was waiting for me. Fresh from the shower, his hair was damp and he was putting on a clean t-shirt. Pulling me into a hug, he expressed his excitement over my visit, asked me about my flight, what I thought about the campus—all the preliminary niceties. Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief. Even if he noticed, he didn’t pry and try to ask me about my slightly shaking hands, my pale face, or the vague disconnectedness with which I answered his questions.
That night eased my worries slightly. I ended up meeting Jackson’s group of friends and, together, we ventured into downtown Bennington. We hit a few bars and chilled at some of the many breweries in town. Live music, good company, and many, many beers did wonders on my nerves. By the end of the night, I had completely forgotten all about my encounter in the gravel pit. Jackson’s friends were nice guys, and I was too busy feeling proud about my best friend coming out of his shell in college. When he left, I had my doubts, but it was crystal clear that Jackson was really coming into himself at this school.
The festivities continued for the next few days: the guys were stoked to be done with their final exams and excited to connect with Jackson’s old friend, so we spent our time drinking and hanging out, bumping music and generally having a blast. It was almost enough for me to forget about one of the very reasons I was excited to be in Bennington in the first place.
It’s been a few days since that incident. I had even almost started to feel better about the whole thing. Maybe it was a mistake to poke around in old history, and maybe I should just focus on living my own life and fulfilling my own passions, working to heal nature as best as I can. But now Jackson and his friends want to go on a hike, and I’m starting to feel that same claustrophobia creeping back in. What the hell is out there, and why do I feel like I shouldn’t be messing with it?
Jackson chose the hike, not me. It was like him; he was the researcher, he was the one who looked at details, so he suggested we hike on the Long Trail. It intersected with the Appalachian Trail, and maybe I wasn’t paying attention when Jackson explained this to me, because it didn’t raise any alarms about the missing persons cases. Paula Welden went missing on the Long Trail, sure—but she wasn’t with a group of capable college guys like I was.
We packed some backpacks, crushed a beer or two for celebratory sakes, and set off on the trail. I let myself feel excited as we stomped through the trees, Jackson and his friends decked out in their matching red Bennington shirts from graduation. The hike was long. It was tedious. I don’t know when I first started noticing the weird aspects around us until about an hour in. The others didn’t pay any mind to these things, but I saw them: leaves drifting in the air with no breeze, snowflakes trapped in patches of sunlight, floating but unmoving, and that tree. It was a towering douglas fir, half-dead and reaching for the afternoon sun with bare branches. Each time I looked over my shoulder to check for hikers behind us or glanced ahead to see what awaited us, it was there. At first I assumed my eyes were playing tricks on me. After all, we had been hiking for a few hours.
Only when we stopped for a breather and Jackson pointed at a nearby stream did the weird things become too much for me. We were hiking on an incline, and we were exhausted, but when Jackson knelt beside this stream, it was flowing uphill. By then I was a little panicked. I freaked out, telling them that we needed to head back. Who cares if we hadn’t reached the halfway point yet? Was there even a halfway point? It felt like we had been walking for miles!
One of Jackson’s buddies opened up a map of the trail on his phone, and it was blank. He had service and bars, but the map was just…gone. Shocked with sudden fear, we immediately turned and headed back down the path. The sky darkened within minutes of us retracing our steps. Somehow, night was falling, despite us beginning the hike only a few hours prior. I tried to point it out, pulling Jackson aside when we slowed our pace to pass around a bottle of water. But Jackson was terrified and unfocused, and when I asked him what was wrong, we realized that one member of our five-person group was missing. How had we not noticed?
So, we made a U-turn and headed back up the mountain. Twenty minutes later, we found his torn university shirt. I turned the red fabric over in my hands, panicked and bewildered. When I looked up to scan our surroundings, I saw that same Douglas fir directly to my left. I was shocked, and the rest of the group must have noticed. We looked at each other and saw the panic rising on our faces. What the hell was happening?
I only had one goal at this point: we had to get down the mountain to call for help.
We decided to do our best to follow the trail on the way we came up, but only once daylight broke; it was difficult to make out the trail in the dark cover of the night, so I insisted it would be too dangerous. Someone could fall and get seriously injured, we could all get separated in the dark, or worse. So we did our best to hunker down and build a makeshift shelter to wait out the night, but it wasn’t easy. I can only describe the sounds we heard as otherworldly. Despite the lack of animals in the woods, nature seemed to be alive around us. The clicking of bugs kept me wide awake, but the noises were louder and deeper than I had ever heard. The baying of giant wolves, so close I imagined them coming up directly behind us. The snuffling of something in the underbrush, but from a cavernous creature larger than any moose could ever be.
Where had these animals been in the daytime? Why did it feel like they were surrounding us now?
I don’t know how I ever fell asleep, but when I awoke in the morning, the sun was beating down on us. From the sheen of sweat on my forehead to the dreadful pit in my stomach, I could tell something was horribly wrong.
When I scrambled to my feet and glanced around the area, I realized that only Jackson and I remained at our site. It was us, the clothes on our backs, and the demure amount of leftover supplies in our pockets: keys, gum wrappers, half-eaten power bars, and anything else that was ultimately unhelpful. We had been stranded on the forest floor, us against nature, as if something had swooped in from above and whisked Jackson’s friends under the pitch-black cover of the night.
I frantically took in our surroundings, peering into the bushes and pushing through thorny shrubbery. There were no tracks, no drag marks. Not even broken branches. I told Jackson we had to get out of there, and fast. I knew we needed to find the closest trailhead and book it down the mountain. Jackson ran so fast he nearly chipped a tooth on a steep hill. He was trying to keep up with me since I was faster by a long shot. All that sports stuff in high school paid off in the moment, so I almost felt bad leaving him in the dust. I called back over my shoulder to him every minute or so, making sure he was there.
He stuck with me for the most part. His t-shirt got torn by overhanging branches at one point, leaving a nasty scrape almost as red as the decimated fabric. I found myself struggling to remember if he was wearing that shirt to begin with, back when we started.
Then I decided I was losing it. It was like a fight against nature, Jackson and me against the blaring sun and sloping trail. Eventually, Jackson starts glaring menacingly at the passing scenery, cursing loudly and deliriously at everything surrounding us.
When we stumbled upon a trail marker, we barely had enough energy to celebrate. While we caught our breath, I tried to calm Jackson down. Something told me that cursing out Mother Nature wasn’t the best idea right now. Whatever was sicking the elements on us wouldn’t appreciate the nasty things he was saying about them. But he was terrified, and nothing I said could slap any reason into him. I had to lead us to safety, get us out of here.
Suddenly, I heard a sound in the distance. But unlike everything else we had heard so far, this one was man made. Jackson heard it too, and started yelling about a helicopter. He made a break off to the left, towards the sound, and I bolted after him. Somehow, he burst out into a tiny clearing.
Ripping off his red Bennington shirt, he started calling out and waving it in the air like a rescue flag. He jumped and shouted, but as the helicopter got closer, the unbelievable happened. The clearing started shrinking, tree branches reaching from either side to close the gap and obscure us from the view of the pilot. Jackson screamed in fury, cursing the forest like never before.
Then the chopper must have been lowering down towards the treelike because the wind picked up, blowing in circles around us like the blades were inches from our heads, faster and faster, more violent by the second.
The brush beneath our feet blew up in the air along with the topsoil and dead leaves, obscuring our vision. We could hear each other gasping for breath, trying to keep the debris out of our eyes and coughing. I flung my arms out into the space around me, calling for my best friend and reaching out for his hands. But then I felt something shift. The decaying leaves around me smelled stronger. The wind became more vicious. The earth trembled beneath my feet, and I thought I felt something looming above me, breathing down my neck but also looking straight into my unseeing eyes.
Then it clicked. Jackson's red shirt, the gravel pit, Paula's erratic behavior, the other missing hikers...something was picking these people off, luring them deeper into the woods where they were sure to never be seen again. Did the color red cause whatever it was to literally see red, like a sick, twisted joke? Like a giant bull in front of a matador? What kind of creature could it be? Such a stealthy hunter, a commanding presence that made man tremble at the sensation of its mere aura...I couldn't even think about it without snapping my mind.
Before the flurry of leaves and moist earth settled back onto the ground, I knew Jackson was gone. I knew the chopper hadn’t seen us and that I was on my own now. I tried not to panic as I felt like every hidden eye in the forest was staring me down, sizing me up. I took off blindly, but where to, I didn’t know. After what seemed like hours of desperately sprinting, I saw a pile of rocks in the distance. Shelter, I thought, and decided to rest there for a minute to get my wits back about me.
Then I had an idea. With what little juice I had in my phone and whatever cell service luck would afford me, I knew I had to send out a warning. For some reason, I didn’t think about myself. I didn’t think about dying, disappearing, or whatever had happened to my friends. If the nature around me would be the thing to end my life, so be it. I had decided to dedicate my life to nature long ago: to save it from my fellow man, to preserve its beauty, and to keep it out of the wrong hands, the people that wanted to use its power for evil and to bring about the harm of those around them. I know it sounds ridiculous to be thinking about when my life was at stake, but I knew it was what I needed to do.
From my makeshift hiding spot in the rocks, I began furiously typing my story with what little battery I had left on my phone. When my hands started cramping, I used the voice option. I didn’t care. I just had to get my story out there.
For an hour , I’d been trying to put it all down in words. I couldn't believe my luck, that my battery hadn’t run out yet.
I had almost gone to the end when I felt the same creeping silence begin to close in on me. It was as if the forest was falling silent around me, and that silence was racing in on all sides, but it was different from when I was in the gravel pit. There was more to the sensation this time, not just the sinking, breathless feeling and the loss of hearing.
Somewhere deep within the forest, but at the same time, only miles away, I heard an awful rumbling sound, something I’ve never heard before. Nothing like the helicopter, not even the giant animals I was convinced I had heard in the night. I can't even think of a word to describe it, but it filled me with a frantic kind of dread that I’ve never felt before. I feel it in the ground. My entire body wants to run as fast as I can, but it’s like I’m glued to the ground. I taste metal in my mouth like maybe I bit my cheek or the dirt from the wind or I bit on a rock, I spit and I can’t get it out. I’m going to open an app and copy and paste it so people can know while I still can type I’m shaking so hard they have to know.
And the smell I’m smelling it’s like fruit that’s gone ripe, but it keeps getting more ripe, a sickly sweetness that keeps building mixed with the smell of the richest earth imaginable.
This is happening now, I’m smelling this now and It’s it’s like I’m trapped under the shadow of some thing bigger something that’s taking the shadow away from the trees and I can’t see the shadow of the trees anymore and the ground around me is trembling. It’s like I can hear the trees calling out to whatever it is, that’s walking towards me or flying I can’t tell, everything is stretching and growing out towards me. No behind me above me something is coming. I’m I feel better right I feel better than I have in days or however long I’ve been out here I’m not thirsty anymore. I’m not hungry anymore. I feel fuller stronger smarter. My mind is overloading. I’m thinking of 1 million things like I don’t know if I can speak anymore it’s like, it’s like I’m fruit like I’m a ripening on the vine and this giant wings beating above me and the smell is too much I
2023.06.10 06:31 Significant-Sock-450 To Be Loved, To Be Free
(I wrote this poem about my experience with online grooming to help work through the inexplicable pain I felt. I continued on to compete in Speech and Debate with this piece and at this point just want a place to archive it. I hope it reaches someone who needs to hear it.)
[5 min read]
"It started around June 21st, 2021. Which means it's been just over a year, since I was groomed by an adult man. I stand here today to prove to no one but myself, that I can talk about this chapter of my life, and that it is okay to. I am here to be living proof that abuse doesn't mean the end. That you are never too far gone, and you're always worth loving. My abuse story will never look like someone elses, but it stands as an example to prove how some adults are able to manipulate children, even in seemingly passive ways. It took maybe seventeen months to realize the abuse I went through is valid, and worth sharing to help prevent others from making my same mistakes."
I was 16 And a dreamer wanna-be A blue bird in training I live in a beautiful golden cage, With food and water, And a key.
With everything I needed, Discontent reared her ugly head. Shallow hatred of the ways I'd speant my life Begging for something Of substance I didn't want money, or friends, I wanted to send a piece of myself away To trust a man To be grown up For someone To understand
I was 16 And a dreamer turned bird-clipping-its-own-wings Safety meant nothing to me My dreams were jungle palm And my self-hatred a machete
I would have loved to cut through To prove to everyone who knew What was the true center I was nothing, of what I presented- Not the beautiful palm Or crystal waves- I was the hatred The ugly The disinterested way I was Unhappy to be Who sent a piece of unhappy across the sea To a man who knew
I was 16 I still believed in Prince Charming So I gave him the key. I let him inside my cage And smiled and said, "See? We're meant to be! It's the perfect size, You can sleep there, And I'll keep the peace." This arrangement just so happened to be, That I kept things clean, While he turned beautiful words Against me.
I danced in the compliments Reveled in the sweetness of voice Because when given the choice I could not be happy with me
I, a child with tear wrought eyes, Sought sanctuary secretly inside This man's lies. Lies which qualmed the seas of Self hate quieted the jungle cats Who ate my insides Letting the world exacerbate My deteriorating brain
And when caught in that cage, Forced to face The intimacies of men There simply, was no escape.
Health class doesn't teach you How thoes images scar The cage tightened around me Like a dinosaur in tar, Forcing me to confront What my mind couldn't spar-
I told myself "I am 16, This is normal Girls and guys get less formal After less time then this."
So I stayed. I cut my own damn wings Because It seemed Men would only want me For breast For thigh To cast my eye upon him And do as he pleased
I was his, entirely But he was nothing for me. Nothing but vocal chords echoing Through my body Picking out my insecurities With tweezers to keep me tethered. He told me everything I wanted to hear, Sending soft smiles Through my ears While remaining That I was gaining Around the waist
So to compensate I scraped wing and bone Clip off what was me Suck in Pinch sides Cling to his words Listen to lies Roll back your eyes His sweet sighs Comply His noble arrogant pride Comply comply
I was 16 And believed the problem was me If I cried, I was weak If I said no, I was the creep I begged for sleep And got scolded for Trying to leave
I was 16 And learned Prince Charming was a jerk. He didn't care if I said no He only cared that it hurt!
Though feathers regrow And no scars can be seen Inside my golden cage I scream
He never touched me. Still I shrink from any man's company Compliments are manipulation Smiles see right through me Imaginary scenes of the empty threats you sewed to me Haunt my waking hours And devastate any of my dreams This man never picked the lock, I gave him the fucking key
I was only 16 and a year between is nothing to me Now showing my friends My clipped wings Begging for their sympathy That they will let the past be And understand 16 year old me Doesn't want to be seen
I am damaged. A Little girl has seen things she never wanted to see. I spent time after trying to Reclaim the old me. Give me a reason Not to end All my relationships with men Before the age of 10 Because then, there was purity. Sweetness in the eye of she who see Men as a saftey net. And not as an open threat
I'm only sharing, out of necessity Because he shared everything with me A pass time that became blackmail To personal items on the paleness of my body
My brain keeps ping-ponging between He loves me He loves me not How can I stop? Attentions addicting Cocaine to the brain Of the beat up and lonley The 16 year old bird With only one melody, "I mean nothing in the eyes of society Because no one recognizes when there's grooming"
A fact that has been growing ever since My sense of self worth, My passion in life, My body, my secrets, my cries, All of it no longer mine
I sent that piece of myself away All to say, "I loved a man once. See how grown I am? He chose me over all the other little girls. There was passion in all that he touched He touched me- My heart I mean. He treated me like a woman And threatened me just the same."
You know there was pride In the way he cried I was "opening up." Like exposing my body Was something to be copied
And of course... Once was never enough And if I ever said no, God help the soul, He said he'd take it from me anyway Would travel states, Drive night and day, To claim and rape me
I was 16 And it was summer break
Of course when I explained The things he claimed Scared me, Suddenly- It was all a silly little fib.
Now you stare me in the eyes And explain to me How a glorified rape joke- Was funny
The terror it instilled In a still-growing teen And how how I laughed and sighed And agreed- It was funny.
Of course, it never really was
I wish I remember how it ended. I'd like to say I blew up And he surrendered And admitted to his Abuse of power- But.. no. I'm sure I just said, "I have to go" And never looked back At what I used to call home
I still live with the effect, The names he used to say, The way he'd make me behave Especially how he had trained my brain To think that shit Was normal.
But everyday I realize The same stupid thing: Nothing about my past Is ever going to change.
I can cry Scream Rearrange every dream Fix every seam- But even blue birds clip their wings, Occasionally
Though feathers regrow, And no scars can be seen, Now inside my golden cage- I can sing
submitted by Significant-Sock-450 to poetry_critics [link] [comments]
[5 min read]
"It started around June 21st, 2021. Which means it's been just over a year, since I was groomed by an adult man. I stand here today to prove to no one but myself, that I can talk about this chapter of my life, and that it is okay to. I am here to be living proof that abuse doesn't mean the end. That you are never too far gone, and you're always worth loving. My abuse story will never look like someone elses, but it stands as an example to prove how some adults are able to manipulate children, even in seemingly passive ways. It took maybe seventeen months to realize the abuse I went through is valid, and worth sharing to help prevent others from making my same mistakes."
I was 16 And a dreamer wanna-be A blue bird in training I live in a beautiful golden cage, With food and water, And a key.
With everything I needed, Discontent reared her ugly head. Shallow hatred of the ways I'd speant my life Begging for something Of substance I didn't want money, or friends, I wanted to send a piece of myself away To trust a man To be grown up For someone To understand
I was 16 And a dreamer turned bird-clipping-its-own-wings Safety meant nothing to me My dreams were jungle palm And my self-hatred a machete
I would have loved to cut through To prove to everyone who knew What was the true center I was nothing, of what I presented- Not the beautiful palm Or crystal waves- I was the hatred The ugly The disinterested way I was Unhappy to be Who sent a piece of unhappy across the sea To a man who knew
I was 16 I still believed in Prince Charming So I gave him the key. I let him inside my cage And smiled and said, "See? We're meant to be! It's the perfect size, You can sleep there, And I'll keep the peace." This arrangement just so happened to be, That I kept things clean, While he turned beautiful words Against me.
I danced in the compliments Reveled in the sweetness of voice Because when given the choice I could not be happy with me
I, a child with tear wrought eyes, Sought sanctuary secretly inside This man's lies. Lies which qualmed the seas of Self hate quieted the jungle cats Who ate my insides Letting the world exacerbate My deteriorating brain
And when caught in that cage, Forced to face The intimacies of men There simply, was no escape.
Health class doesn't teach you How thoes images scar The cage tightened around me Like a dinosaur in tar, Forcing me to confront What my mind couldn't spar-
I told myself "I am 16, This is normal Girls and guys get less formal After less time then this."
So I stayed. I cut my own damn wings Because It seemed Men would only want me For breast For thigh To cast my eye upon him And do as he pleased
I was his, entirely But he was nothing for me. Nothing but vocal chords echoing Through my body Picking out my insecurities With tweezers to keep me tethered. He told me everything I wanted to hear, Sending soft smiles Through my ears While remaining That I was gaining Around the waist
So to compensate I scraped wing and bone Clip off what was me Suck in Pinch sides Cling to his words Listen to lies Roll back your eyes His sweet sighs Comply His noble arrogant pride Comply comply
I was 16 And believed the problem was me If I cried, I was weak If I said no, I was the creep I begged for sleep And got scolded for Trying to leave
I was 16 And learned Prince Charming was a jerk. He didn't care if I said no He only cared that it hurt!
Though feathers regrow And no scars can be seen Inside my golden cage I scream
He never touched me. Still I shrink from any man's company Compliments are manipulation Smiles see right through me Imaginary scenes of the empty threats you sewed to me Haunt my waking hours And devastate any of my dreams This man never picked the lock, I gave him the fucking key
I was only 16 and a year between is nothing to me Now showing my friends My clipped wings Begging for their sympathy That they will let the past be And understand 16 year old me Doesn't want to be seen
I am damaged. A Little girl has seen things she never wanted to see. I spent time after trying to Reclaim the old me. Give me a reason Not to end All my relationships with men Before the age of 10 Because then, there was purity. Sweetness in the eye of she who see Men as a saftey net. And not as an open threat
I'm only sharing, out of necessity Because he shared everything with me A pass time that became blackmail To personal items on the paleness of my body
My brain keeps ping-ponging between He loves me He loves me not How can I stop? Attentions addicting Cocaine to the brain Of the beat up and lonley The 16 year old bird With only one melody, "I mean nothing in the eyes of society Because no one recognizes when there's grooming"
A fact that has been growing ever since My sense of self worth, My passion in life, My body, my secrets, my cries, All of it no longer mine
I sent that piece of myself away All to say, "I loved a man once. See how grown I am? He chose me over all the other little girls. There was passion in all that he touched He touched me- My heart I mean. He treated me like a woman And threatened me just the same."
You know there was pride In the way he cried I was "opening up." Like exposing my body Was something to be copied
And of course... Once was never enough And if I ever said no, God help the soul, He said he'd take it from me anyway Would travel states, Drive night and day, To claim and rape me
I was 16 And it was summer break
Of course when I explained The things he claimed Scared me, Suddenly- It was all a silly little fib.
Now you stare me in the eyes And explain to me How a glorified rape joke- Was funny
The terror it instilled In a still-growing teen And how how I laughed and sighed And agreed- It was funny.
Of course, it never really was
I wish I remember how it ended. I'd like to say I blew up And he surrendered And admitted to his Abuse of power- But.. no. I'm sure I just said, "I have to go" And never looked back At what I used to call home
I still live with the effect, The names he used to say, The way he'd make me behave Especially how he had trained my brain To think that shit Was normal.
But everyday I realize The same stupid thing: Nothing about my past Is ever going to change.
I can cry Scream Rearrange every dream Fix every seam- But even blue birds clip their wings, Occasionally
Though feathers regrow, And no scars can be seen, Now inside my golden cage- I can sing
2023.06.10 05:14 Jane1813 Four Fragrance review
Hey everyone! I was able to go sample some fragrances today and I thought I'd leave a review of the four I tried (I smelled way more but only tried these four on skin. I'll be revisiting some of the others another time).
NEST WISTERIA BLUE
I was so excited about this one. It smells fresh and aquatic to me. I know some don't like this as a descriptor but there was something about it that reminded me of soap my grandmother used, which is stereotypical grandma soap. I think it's the jasmine. It was just slightly too much for me at the beginning. The dry down was better but there's something about it that I just don't love. I'd wear it if I received it as a gift or something (on a rainy spring day) but I don't think I'll be purchasing this one for myself. I don't love incredibly strong fragrances and in that sense, this one was perfect. I didn't have rub my nose in it to smell it but I don't think anyone would smell it unless they were arms length away or so. I didn't time exactly how long it stayed on but I'd say I probably got at least four hours of decent scent out of it. I can faintly smell it still about 8-9 hours later.
NEST GOLDEN NECTAR
I wasn't sure I'd like this one from other descriptions I'd heard but once I sprayed it on the test strip, I had to try it on me. And if I had been able to smell it on me for longer, I might have bought it. Unfortunately it seemed to just disappear on my skin. It smelled like a wonderfully grown up vanilla like fragrance to me. At one point I was getting a bit of slight spice? It was so nice and warm but not suffocating. And then it was gone. 😭
7 VIRTUES COCONUT SUN
I was most excited about this one. I have been wanting to try this fragrance since it came out. I nearly blind bought a travel size. It starts off very citrusy to me. And the citrus just seems to linger for way too long. It's sharp and just distracting from the rest of the fragrance. It does eventually dissipate and I really do like the dry down. It reminds me of a lighter version of Sunkissed Hibiscus, which I like. I think I prefer the lighter dry down of this one. But because of the citrus opening and the fact that I already have a small SH, I passed on this one too.
Now for the winner of this trip...
KAYALI YUM PISTACHIO GELATO
I have heard/read SO MANY conflicting reviews on this one that I honestly didn't know what to expect. I did get the citrus opening but it was lighter and much shorter than Coconut Sun. And then it just settles into this fresh, gourmand scent. I do get where some people would be disappointed based on the name. I definitely get more marshmallow/whipped cream/cotton candy than anything else. That's not to say I don't get the rest at all because I definitely do and I think that's what gives it the gourmand feeling. But instead of smelling creamy or heavier, I get pistachio/rum/hazelnut flavored cotton candy. All those gourmand scents but whispy and light. And honestly I feel like this is exactly what I like in a fragrance. It's got the sweet and gourmand but I don't feel like I'm drowning in it. I did end up buying this one and I'm so glad because I was sniffing the spot I sprayed ALL DAY.
submitted by Jane1813 to FemFragLab [link] [comments]
NEST WISTERIA BLUE
I was so excited about this one. It smells fresh and aquatic to me. I know some don't like this as a descriptor but there was something about it that reminded me of soap my grandmother used, which is stereotypical grandma soap. I think it's the jasmine. It was just slightly too much for me at the beginning. The dry down was better but there's something about it that I just don't love. I'd wear it if I received it as a gift or something (on a rainy spring day) but I don't think I'll be purchasing this one for myself. I don't love incredibly strong fragrances and in that sense, this one was perfect. I didn't have rub my nose in it to smell it but I don't think anyone would smell it unless they were arms length away or so. I didn't time exactly how long it stayed on but I'd say I probably got at least four hours of decent scent out of it. I can faintly smell it still about 8-9 hours later.
NEST GOLDEN NECTAR
I wasn't sure I'd like this one from other descriptions I'd heard but once I sprayed it on the test strip, I had to try it on me. And if I had been able to smell it on me for longer, I might have bought it. Unfortunately it seemed to just disappear on my skin. It smelled like a wonderfully grown up vanilla like fragrance to me. At one point I was getting a bit of slight spice? It was so nice and warm but not suffocating. And then it was gone. 😭
7 VIRTUES COCONUT SUN
I was most excited about this one. I have been wanting to try this fragrance since it came out. I nearly blind bought a travel size. It starts off very citrusy to me. And the citrus just seems to linger for way too long. It's sharp and just distracting from the rest of the fragrance. It does eventually dissipate and I really do like the dry down. It reminds me of a lighter version of Sunkissed Hibiscus, which I like. I think I prefer the lighter dry down of this one. But because of the citrus opening and the fact that I already have a small SH, I passed on this one too.
Now for the winner of this trip...
KAYALI YUM PISTACHIO GELATO
I have heard/read SO MANY conflicting reviews on this one that I honestly didn't know what to expect. I did get the citrus opening but it was lighter and much shorter than Coconut Sun. And then it just settles into this fresh, gourmand scent. I do get where some people would be disappointed based on the name. I definitely get more marshmallow/whipped cream/cotton candy than anything else. That's not to say I don't get the rest at all because I definitely do and I think that's what gives it the gourmand feeling. But instead of smelling creamy or heavier, I get pistachio/rum/hazelnut flavored cotton candy. All those gourmand scents but whispy and light. And honestly I feel like this is exactly what I like in a fragrance. It's got the sweet and gourmand but I don't feel like I'm drowning in it. I did end up buying this one and I'm so glad because I was sniffing the spot I sprayed ALL DAY.
2023.06.10 05:04 ThisFeeling4118 Gratis haul
 | From left to right: full size living proof full dry volume&texture spray, mini dry bar final call, full size ouai dandruff shampoo, full size Paul Mitchell tea tree special detox, travel acqua di gio men, travel acqua do gioia women, travel billie eillish, travel Paco rabone invictus victory intense elixir, rem plumping gloss away message, mini Clinique take the day off, urban decay liquid liner binge, sample of nyx face freezie, nye reusable eye patches, nars afterglow sensual shine lipstick dolce vita 888, rem beauty pallete principesca, mini f.a.b ultra repair moisturizer, mini hydrating la roche posay cleansers, sample eczema honey body lotion, sample philosophy dose of wisdom serum, mini f.a.b facial radiance pads, mini kopari lychee foaming cleanser and vitamin c face mask, bobbi brown long-wear cream shadow stick Smokey topaz, mini Clinique 100 hr moisture surge moisturizer and full size quick liner ebony, lastly travel Givenchy irresistible rose velvet women. submitted by ThisFeeling4118 to Ulta [link] [comments] |
2023.06.10 05:01 The_Alloquist [A Lord of Death] - Chapter 64 (Sorore)
[←Chapter 63] [Cover Art] [My Links] [Index] [Discord] [Subreddit] [Chapter 65→]
In a rare moment, Sorore was actually having a nice dream, a normal one, one could even say. She was back home, in that moderately seized house in Erratz, laying on her mother’s lap. She could even hear the gentle sound that the needle made as it went in and out of the cloth. It was peaceful, pleasant, surrounded by familiar sound and smells, though her sight was blurry and confused.
It was not to last, as the sound of rushing water overtook all else, until she was forced awake by its unrelenting pace. When she sat up, rubbing her eyes in the broad bed, she released that it wasn’t the sound of water, nor was it relegated to her dreams. There was a commotion outside people talking in hushed but harsh tones.
Neither Lillian, nor Aya were within the room, and she wondered if they were having an argument. That wouldn’t be good - she’d watched them have the spat earlier, and that dispute didn’t need much worsening. Sorore crept to the door to the outer hallway - she loved how they slid to create whole new rooms. It was something she’d have to think about more she decided as she pulled it open and realised several things at once.
One, there were a whole lot of armoured figures in the hallway, at least four, maybe half a dozen. Two, the balcony door was open, and Lillian was currently arguing with one of them, Aya standing by looking like a mining explosive had gone off right next to her. Three, her brother and Niche had just emerged out of the room beside, and Niche was about to draw his sword at the sudden intrusion.
For a moment, she panicked, her mind going completely blank. Her mind raced with visions of bloody aftermath, and a chase through the city, back to the dinner she’d had with all those nice people.
“Oh, hello!” she blurted, drawing the surprised stares of several of the men, “who might you be?”
There was an instant of shocked silence between all parties.
“Nobody do anything!” called the man who was out on the porch, “We are representatives of the sand-shell legion, on behalf of the matriarch of the Eisen. We have come to retrieve her granddaughter.”
Niche lowered his hand from his sword belt, but Sorore could tell that he was ready to fight on a moment’s provocation. She also noticed that Kieren, in the same gown she’d worn to the square was standing in the stairwell. The woman looked so nervous Sorore thought she might fall over and down the stairs.
“Let’s move to a less cramped area,” said the captain, in a tone that brook no argument.
Eventually, it was sussed out, though not without considerable resistance on part of the paladins, that they were to meet in the great hall. As they sat, they were brought simple drinks of milk and honey, flavoured with something else that Sorore could not quite place. The two paladins looked like pacing cats, constrained on their chairs, arms crossed and eyes hard.
“Under no circumstances can we give one of ours into you custody,” said Lillian, locked in a match with the captain.
“Within the city, you are under the authority of the guard, no matter who you are. If the matriach has sent for this girl, then we have our orders.”
“As do we, captain,” said Niche, “to protect and guide each of these young women and… man, unto the holy lands of Angorrah.”
One of the guards flanking the captain whispered something in his ear.
“She’s not going to like it,” the captain said, then heard something else.
“Very well. Bloodshed before the Festival would be unwise. We have enough of that already. Right then, one of you paladins, assuming you are who you say you are, shall come with us and the lady to be received by the Eisen. I cannot say it’s likely you will have a happy reception. They will expect you to come unarmed.”
The paladins were bristling at the implied threat, and several hands were already dangerously close to their sword belts. Sorore gripped the mug that she was being offered, before Aya sat up and proclaimed to the group.
“Leave two of your men with us, then,” she said.
The captain’s eyes furrowed.
“I don’t wish to second guess you, my lady,” he said, “but why would I do that?”
“Trust,” Aya said, with a side long look at Lillian, “simple. If you leave your men with us, you can’t simply waltz off with me and my friend. Plus, it gives us men who know, and can quickly get around the city, so they can find you whenever they need to.”
The captain considered, and nodded.
“Very well my lady. Two men will be left for the disposal of your party members. But you shall have to come with us, immediately.”
“Me as well,” said Lillian.
“As you wish,” he said, “but you must disarm yourself. That is non-negotiable.”
Lillian was fuming, but unbuckled her belt and handed her armaments to Niche. The legionaries surrounded them, and departed with them out the front of the pyramid. They were left in front of the roaring fire, Kieren sitting beside them holding a considerably more full glass of the amber coloured alcohol.
“You said that this-” Niche began, his face reddened, “you sold us out!”
“Sold you out?” said Kieren incuriously as she swirled the glass around, “sold you out?”
The woman slammed down the glass on one of the nearby table, somehow not breaking it in the process.
“Maybe, you should of told us that you had the granddaughter of Aystara godsdamned Eisen in your retinue? No, forgot that little detail?”
“Okay, can we get this over with?” said Frare, picking at his nails.
“What?” said both the paladin and the trader, staring at the temerity of the youth.
“Blah, blah, we’ve all kept things from eachother,” he said, “so let’s all move on. Who is this ‘Aystara’? Why is she important?”
While Niche gaped at the casual ease from which Frare dismissed the turbulence, the trader seemed to settle.
“Only one of the two most powerful people in the city, young man,” she said, downing a shot from the glass, “between her and Edmund Poutash, it’d be easier to list what they don’t own. The docks, the schools, the farms… if you want an import or export licence? You go through her. You want to own a ship bigger than a rinky-dink fishing boat? You go through her or Potash.”
She finished the glass, and reached for the decanter, and stopped herself.
“And you waltz into the city, and conveniently forget to mention that you have her granddaughter, who hasn’t been in the city ever, if I remember correctly. To say she’d be furious that you didn’t bring the young lady before her immediately would be an understatement. And worse, you dragged us into it.”
“She must be awfully mean - you had nothing to do with us. You just hosted it.”
The woman blinked at the boldfaced remark, and Sorore delivered a good kick to his shins to drive the point home.
“No, no,” she ultimately said, “no I don’t think she’ll do anything to our family, if she believes us. She’s not unreasonable. At least, so I’ve heard. I’ve only met her once, and that was for a brief time. As for what she’ll do to you...”
She gave a pointed look at Niche.
“You tried to hid her granddaughter from her, maybe unintentionally, maybe not. If I were a betting woman, which I’m not, I would say that means trouble. If you want my advice-”
“I don’t,” said Niche, crinkling his noise.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Frare, before he howled at another kick.
Sorore’s face was burning with indignation and embarrassment. This was all too much.
“If you want my advice,” Kieren pressed on, “you’d go find and talk to your commander immediately. I could fetch for him if you wish - I know where Amicio’s home is.”
Niche, through narrowed eyes and clenched teeth, acquiesced.
“Good, now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some letters to send,” she said, “of course, though this has earned you no small amount of displeasure from certain peoples, we’ve been instructed to provide you with house and board for as long as it takes to sort this out. You are still welcome guests and you will be treated as such.”
The tepid truce struck, the children were sent back up to their rooms. Sorore tried to sleep, and managed no more than half an hour before she was woken by her brother.
“The commander’s here,” he said, “he wants to talk to us.”
The commander, looking very tired, but light of step than Sorore had ever seen him, waited by the fire. He was talking with Kieren and the two remaining legionarries in the fast-paced trading tongue of the city, but stopped when he saw the girl come downstairs.
“My lady,” he said, “it seems there’s been a huge misunderstanding.”
She realized that it was his manner of dress which was throwing her off. Instead of his usual worn and thoroughly practical travelling clothes, he wore the long flowing silks of orange and cream. It suited him, matching his calm personality.
“What misunderstanding?” she said.
“Well, we had no idea that our own Aya was the granddaughter of Aystara Eisen herself. I was surprised as anyone. Of course, I knew she was an Eisen, from her mother.”
He looked at Kieren, who looked like she was about to fall asleep.
“But I never imagined that she was a direct descendent of the main house. I thought she was part of the branch, not necessary to cause any fuss, especially during the preparation of the festival. Ah!”
He slapped his head to indicate his shock at the realisation.
“What a terrible mistake I’ve made,” he said, patting the woman’s arm, “this is all on my horrendous lack of judgement. Here’s what’s going to happen, one of these gentlemen and trader Amicio will be vouching for me at the gate. I’m going to the Eisen estate and having a friendly chat with the matriarch, to clear up this misunderstanding.”
Sorore felt at last some suggestion that someone around the city knew what was happening and what they were going to do.
“Here’s what I need you and your brother to do,” Naia said, “I want you to wait and enjoy the hospitality of the madame of the house.”
The term seemed to flatter Kieren, who flushed at the complement. Or that might’ve been the drink, Sorore wasn’t entirely sure.
“Niche, you take care of them. I expect that I might be at the estate for the rest of the night, and possibly onto next afternoon. Things are always so chaotic around the Festival. There’s no reason for you not to attend the festival opening tomorrow, if you can.”
“You want us to attend a festival?” said Niche in disbelief, “right now?”
“Well, not right now, it hasn’t started yet,” said the commander, “but, if Kieren would graciouslly agree to take you as guest of honour, you’d have excellent seats. If that’s not too much to ask, especially after our little debacle.”
Kieren nodded, and affirmed that she wouldn’t mind at all, if the matter was going to be soon cleared up. Sorore was now certain that it wasn’t just alcohol.
“Great. You’re all taken care of, now I’d better explain myself. If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, pointing to the quarter full glass, which Kieren handed to him. The commander downed it all in one, rolled his shoulders, and smiled.
“Don’t worry. It’ll all work out in the end,” he said, “in fact, I would say to enjoy yourselves, as much as you can. And best go back to bed, unless you want to be sleeping during the festival, which, I assure you from experience, you do not.”
Before they could say anything, the commander had swept by them, vanishing out of the front of the pyramid.
“You should heed him,” said Kieren, picking up the decanter and the glass and moving towards the kitchens, “if you’re stuck here for the time being, you might as well enjoy it And that starts with getting good sleep.”
“Last time you said that, we woke up to armed guards,” Niche said flatly.
“Well, I assure you, I’m not boring enough to do that a second time. It would be assassin’s from across the streets, who approach over the rooftops.”
“Do they actually exist?” asked Frare, suddenly excited.
“Oh, I’m sure,” said Kieren as she stowed away her drinking equipment, “but not tonight. Go get some sleep sir paladin, and you two young ones as well. You’ll need it.”
Sorore was cajoled up the steps, Frare coming up after her. Niche seemed placated enough for the time being, though he was clearly unhappy with the outcome. The pleasant dreams neglected to revisit for a second time, but at least the sleep was uninterrupted. When Soroe next awoke, it was a young handmadein, pulling open the screen doors.
“Good morning, my lady,” she said, “how did you sleep?”
“I- well enough, I suppose,” she said, stretching and yawning, before quickly covering her mouth.
The maid had the presence of mind not to notice as she revealed the bright sunlight streaming through the open balcony.
“It must almost be midday!” Sorore exclaimed, leaping out of the bed as she tried to straighten herself.
The maid chuckled as she finished opening up the room.
“Not to fear, my lady,” she said, “it’s customary to sleep into the early afternoon. The Festival does not start until just before sunset, afterall. In fact, you might be earlier than many of the household.”
“Oh,” Soroe said, feeling rather foolish, “Um. Well, I guess I’ll get dressed.”
“Of course. I’ve left out some clothes for you. Madame Kieren suggested that you try clothes from our city. I hope you’ll love them. Do you bathe?”
Sorore wrinkled her nose at the prospect. What kind of question was that?
“Of course I do,” she said.
“Well, there’s a place to bath at the bottom of the pyramid. If you wish to bath alone, you should go now - I’ll bring you clothes for you to change at the waterfront.”
“You bathe together here?” Sorore said
“In the mornings and evenings,” she said, “we do not bring water up into the house if we cannot avoid it. To the stone goes the sea, and to the home goes the sky.”
She looked around, then leaned in with a smile.
“Also, water is very troublesome to carry up all those flights.”
“So just come down to the waterfront?” she said, gathering up what spare things she needed.
“Just follow me, my lady,” said the handmaiden, picking up a pile of clothes and leading her down the stairs.
They emerged onto an inset pool carved into the pyramid interior. A smooth stone deck, with benches and chairs and stacks of towels, as well as several large paper screens, presumably for changing. Sorore was glad to see they were alone, at least for the time being.
At the handmaid, Kiroe’s, direction, she stripped down naked and plunged into the pool. The water was a perfect temperature - cold enough to dispel the last of the grogginess, warm enough to be pleasant to float in. She swam around for a bit, constrained by the relatively small volume, while Kiroe prepared her outfit on the deck.
“Do you mind if I join you?” came a voice from the other end.
Kieren slipped out of a thin morning dress and stepped into the water. Sorore swam over and came to stand beside her.
“Is there any news? About Aya and the commander?” she said, a little too quickly.
Kieren, who’d been sinking into the water with a sigh of contentment, opened one eye.
“Straight to business? Perhaps you are better suited to the city than I thought.”
Sorore tried to smile, but her concern was betrayed, judging by the woman’s softening of expression.
“My knowledge is limited. My uncle is serving as our representative for now. Sounds like your commander was at least allowed to make his case to the Eisen. He made note of one other companion of yours.”
“Oh? Who?” she said, pushing out into the pool, feeling the water surge over her shoulders.
“A man in black clothes,” she said, “who hides his face behind a mask. He was there for the meeting.”
“The mage?” said Sorore, before considering that she maybe shouldn’t have mentioned it.
“A mage?” said Kieren, before submerging herself in the water.
She tossed her hair back as she came back up, spraying water in a neat arc.
“Well, that explains his odd demeanour,” she said, “now, regrettably, that’s all the time I have today for bathing. I will see you at the festival.”
“Hello cousin! May I join- oh,” came a voice from the steps leading out.
It was Ivers, dressed in nothing but a loose robe, which was already half-way off his body, sculpted with muscle from hauling rope and tackle. Sorore stifled a gasp and turned away, trying not to redden.
“I can come back later,” he offered.
“Do you mind?” Kieren said to Sorore, “if you do, it’d be best to finish soon and let others bathe.”
“No, no,” she said, waving her host away.
Kiero had warned her, after all. It would be best to become accustomed to the strange ways of this beautiful city. Besides, it’s not like she hadn’t bathed before in the company of men her age back home. She cursed herself for being so self-conscious, and forced herself to turn around.
“Are you sure? I can leave if you want, it’s not-” Ivers began.
“No, it’s fine. It’s fine,” Sorore said, smiling at him, “it’d be good to have companionship.”
“Well, then, Ivers, I trust you’ll behave yourself,” said Kieren rising from the water.
“Of course, cousin,” Ivers said, casting his eyes to the floor.
Sorore tried not to take a wicked pleasure at the blush that crept across his dark complexion.
“Oh, one more thing,” whispered her host, bending over to the girl, “it’s considered polite to not look when they’re outside the water.”
Kieren laughed at Sorore’s own furious blush as she made for one of the poolside changing screens.
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In a rare moment, Sorore was actually having a nice dream, a normal one, one could even say. She was back home, in that moderately seized house in Erratz, laying on her mother’s lap. She could even hear the gentle sound that the needle made as it went in and out of the cloth. It was peaceful, pleasant, surrounded by familiar sound and smells, though her sight was blurry and confused.
It was not to last, as the sound of rushing water overtook all else, until she was forced awake by its unrelenting pace. When she sat up, rubbing her eyes in the broad bed, she released that it wasn’t the sound of water, nor was it relegated to her dreams. There was a commotion outside people talking in hushed but harsh tones.
Neither Lillian, nor Aya were within the room, and she wondered if they were having an argument. That wouldn’t be good - she’d watched them have the spat earlier, and that dispute didn’t need much worsening. Sorore crept to the door to the outer hallway - she loved how they slid to create whole new rooms. It was something she’d have to think about more she decided as she pulled it open and realised several things at once.
One, there were a whole lot of armoured figures in the hallway, at least four, maybe half a dozen. Two, the balcony door was open, and Lillian was currently arguing with one of them, Aya standing by looking like a mining explosive had gone off right next to her. Three, her brother and Niche had just emerged out of the room beside, and Niche was about to draw his sword at the sudden intrusion.
For a moment, she panicked, her mind going completely blank. Her mind raced with visions of bloody aftermath, and a chase through the city, back to the dinner she’d had with all those nice people.
“Oh, hello!” she blurted, drawing the surprised stares of several of the men, “who might you be?”
There was an instant of shocked silence between all parties.
“Nobody do anything!” called the man who was out on the porch, “We are representatives of the sand-shell legion, on behalf of the matriarch of the Eisen. We have come to retrieve her granddaughter.”
Niche lowered his hand from his sword belt, but Sorore could tell that he was ready to fight on a moment’s provocation. She also noticed that Kieren, in the same gown she’d worn to the square was standing in the stairwell. The woman looked so nervous Sorore thought she might fall over and down the stairs.
“Let’s move to a less cramped area,” said the captain, in a tone that brook no argument.
Eventually, it was sussed out, though not without considerable resistance on part of the paladins, that they were to meet in the great hall. As they sat, they were brought simple drinks of milk and honey, flavoured with something else that Sorore could not quite place. The two paladins looked like pacing cats, constrained on their chairs, arms crossed and eyes hard.
“Under no circumstances can we give one of ours into you custody,” said Lillian, locked in a match with the captain.
“Within the city, you are under the authority of the guard, no matter who you are. If the matriach has sent for this girl, then we have our orders.”
“As do we, captain,” said Niche, “to protect and guide each of these young women and… man, unto the holy lands of Angorrah.”
One of the guards flanking the captain whispered something in his ear.
“She’s not going to like it,” the captain said, then heard something else.
“Very well. Bloodshed before the Festival would be unwise. We have enough of that already. Right then, one of you paladins, assuming you are who you say you are, shall come with us and the lady to be received by the Eisen. I cannot say it’s likely you will have a happy reception. They will expect you to come unarmed.”
The paladins were bristling at the implied threat, and several hands were already dangerously close to their sword belts. Sorore gripped the mug that she was being offered, before Aya sat up and proclaimed to the group.
“Leave two of your men with us, then,” she said.
The captain’s eyes furrowed.
“I don’t wish to second guess you, my lady,” he said, “but why would I do that?”
“Trust,” Aya said, with a side long look at Lillian, “simple. If you leave your men with us, you can’t simply waltz off with me and my friend. Plus, it gives us men who know, and can quickly get around the city, so they can find you whenever they need to.”
The captain considered, and nodded.
“Very well my lady. Two men will be left for the disposal of your party members. But you shall have to come with us, immediately.”
“Me as well,” said Lillian.
“As you wish,” he said, “but you must disarm yourself. That is non-negotiable.”
Lillian was fuming, but unbuckled her belt and handed her armaments to Niche. The legionaries surrounded them, and departed with them out the front of the pyramid. They were left in front of the roaring fire, Kieren sitting beside them holding a considerably more full glass of the amber coloured alcohol.
“You said that this-” Niche began, his face reddened, “you sold us out!”
“Sold you out?” said Kieren incuriously as she swirled the glass around, “sold you out?”
The woman slammed down the glass on one of the nearby table, somehow not breaking it in the process.
“Maybe, you should of told us that you had the granddaughter of Aystara godsdamned Eisen in your retinue? No, forgot that little detail?”
“Okay, can we get this over with?” said Frare, picking at his nails.
“What?” said both the paladin and the trader, staring at the temerity of the youth.
“Blah, blah, we’ve all kept things from eachother,” he said, “so let’s all move on. Who is this ‘Aystara’? Why is she important?”
While Niche gaped at the casual ease from which Frare dismissed the turbulence, the trader seemed to settle.
“Only one of the two most powerful people in the city, young man,” she said, downing a shot from the glass, “between her and Edmund Poutash, it’d be easier to list what they don’t own. The docks, the schools, the farms… if you want an import or export licence? You go through her. You want to own a ship bigger than a rinky-dink fishing boat? You go through her or Potash.”
She finished the glass, and reached for the decanter, and stopped herself.
“And you waltz into the city, and conveniently forget to mention that you have her granddaughter, who hasn’t been in the city ever, if I remember correctly. To say she’d be furious that you didn’t bring the young lady before her immediately would be an understatement. And worse, you dragged us into it.”
“She must be awfully mean - you had nothing to do with us. You just hosted it.”
The woman blinked at the boldfaced remark, and Sorore delivered a good kick to his shins to drive the point home.
“No, no,” she ultimately said, “no I don’t think she’ll do anything to our family, if she believes us. She’s not unreasonable. At least, so I’ve heard. I’ve only met her once, and that was for a brief time. As for what she’ll do to you...”
She gave a pointed look at Niche.
“You tried to hid her granddaughter from her, maybe unintentionally, maybe not. If I were a betting woman, which I’m not, I would say that means trouble. If you want my advice-”
“I don’t,” said Niche, crinkling his noise.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Frare, before he howled at another kick.
Sorore’s face was burning with indignation and embarrassment. This was all too much.
“If you want my advice,” Kieren pressed on, “you’d go find and talk to your commander immediately. I could fetch for him if you wish - I know where Amicio’s home is.”
Niche, through narrowed eyes and clenched teeth, acquiesced.
“Good, now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some letters to send,” she said, “of course, though this has earned you no small amount of displeasure from certain peoples, we’ve been instructed to provide you with house and board for as long as it takes to sort this out. You are still welcome guests and you will be treated as such.”
The tepid truce struck, the children were sent back up to their rooms. Sorore tried to sleep, and managed no more than half an hour before she was woken by her brother.
“The commander’s here,” he said, “he wants to talk to us.”
The commander, looking very tired, but light of step than Sorore had ever seen him, waited by the fire. He was talking with Kieren and the two remaining legionarries in the fast-paced trading tongue of the city, but stopped when he saw the girl come downstairs.
“My lady,” he said, “it seems there’s been a huge misunderstanding.”
She realized that it was his manner of dress which was throwing her off. Instead of his usual worn and thoroughly practical travelling clothes, he wore the long flowing silks of orange and cream. It suited him, matching his calm personality.
“What misunderstanding?” she said.
“Well, we had no idea that our own Aya was the granddaughter of Aystara Eisen herself. I was surprised as anyone. Of course, I knew she was an Eisen, from her mother.”
He looked at Kieren, who looked like she was about to fall asleep.
“But I never imagined that she was a direct descendent of the main house. I thought she was part of the branch, not necessary to cause any fuss, especially during the preparation of the festival. Ah!”
He slapped his head to indicate his shock at the realisation.
“What a terrible mistake I’ve made,” he said, patting the woman’s arm, “this is all on my horrendous lack of judgement. Here’s what’s going to happen, one of these gentlemen and trader Amicio will be vouching for me at the gate. I’m going to the Eisen estate and having a friendly chat with the matriarch, to clear up this misunderstanding.”
Sorore felt at last some suggestion that someone around the city knew what was happening and what they were going to do.
“Here’s what I need you and your brother to do,” Naia said, “I want you to wait and enjoy the hospitality of the madame of the house.”
The term seemed to flatter Kieren, who flushed at the complement. Or that might’ve been the drink, Sorore wasn’t entirely sure.
“Niche, you take care of them. I expect that I might be at the estate for the rest of the night, and possibly onto next afternoon. Things are always so chaotic around the Festival. There’s no reason for you not to attend the festival opening tomorrow, if you can.”
“You want us to attend a festival?” said Niche in disbelief, “right now?”
“Well, not right now, it hasn’t started yet,” said the commander, “but, if Kieren would graciouslly agree to take you as guest of honour, you’d have excellent seats. If that’s not too much to ask, especially after our little debacle.”
Kieren nodded, and affirmed that she wouldn’t mind at all, if the matter was going to be soon cleared up. Sorore was now certain that it wasn’t just alcohol.
“Great. You’re all taken care of, now I’d better explain myself. If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, pointing to the quarter full glass, which Kieren handed to him. The commander downed it all in one, rolled his shoulders, and smiled.
“Don’t worry. It’ll all work out in the end,” he said, “in fact, I would say to enjoy yourselves, as much as you can. And best go back to bed, unless you want to be sleeping during the festival, which, I assure you from experience, you do not.”
Before they could say anything, the commander had swept by them, vanishing out of the front of the pyramid.
“You should heed him,” said Kieren, picking up the decanter and the glass and moving towards the kitchens, “if you’re stuck here for the time being, you might as well enjoy it And that starts with getting good sleep.”
“Last time you said that, we woke up to armed guards,” Niche said flatly.
“Well, I assure you, I’m not boring enough to do that a second time. It would be assassin’s from across the streets, who approach over the rooftops.”
“Do they actually exist?” asked Frare, suddenly excited.
“Oh, I’m sure,” said Kieren as she stowed away her drinking equipment, “but not tonight. Go get some sleep sir paladin, and you two young ones as well. You’ll need it.”
Sorore was cajoled up the steps, Frare coming up after her. Niche seemed placated enough for the time being, though he was clearly unhappy with the outcome. The pleasant dreams neglected to revisit for a second time, but at least the sleep was uninterrupted. When Soroe next awoke, it was a young handmadein, pulling open the screen doors.
“Good morning, my lady,” she said, “how did you sleep?”
“I- well enough, I suppose,” she said, stretching and yawning, before quickly covering her mouth.
The maid had the presence of mind not to notice as she revealed the bright sunlight streaming through the open balcony.
“It must almost be midday!” Sorore exclaimed, leaping out of the bed as she tried to straighten herself.
The maid chuckled as she finished opening up the room.
“Not to fear, my lady,” she said, “it’s customary to sleep into the early afternoon. The Festival does not start until just before sunset, afterall. In fact, you might be earlier than many of the household.”
“Oh,” Soroe said, feeling rather foolish, “Um. Well, I guess I’ll get dressed.”
“Of course. I’ve left out some clothes for you. Madame Kieren suggested that you try clothes from our city. I hope you’ll love them. Do you bathe?”
Sorore wrinkled her nose at the prospect. What kind of question was that?
“Of course I do,” she said.
“Well, there’s a place to bath at the bottom of the pyramid. If you wish to bath alone, you should go now - I’ll bring you clothes for you to change at the waterfront.”
“You bathe together here?” Sorore said
“In the mornings and evenings,” she said, “we do not bring water up into the house if we cannot avoid it. To the stone goes the sea, and to the home goes the sky.”
She looked around, then leaned in with a smile.
“Also, water is very troublesome to carry up all those flights.”
“So just come down to the waterfront?” she said, gathering up what spare things she needed.
“Just follow me, my lady,” said the handmaiden, picking up a pile of clothes and leading her down the stairs.
They emerged onto an inset pool carved into the pyramid interior. A smooth stone deck, with benches and chairs and stacks of towels, as well as several large paper screens, presumably for changing. Sorore was glad to see they were alone, at least for the time being.
At the handmaid, Kiroe’s, direction, she stripped down naked and plunged into the pool. The water was a perfect temperature - cold enough to dispel the last of the grogginess, warm enough to be pleasant to float in. She swam around for a bit, constrained by the relatively small volume, while Kiroe prepared her outfit on the deck.
“Do you mind if I join you?” came a voice from the other end.
Kieren slipped out of a thin morning dress and stepped into the water. Sorore swam over and came to stand beside her.
“Is there any news? About Aya and the commander?” she said, a little too quickly.
Kieren, who’d been sinking into the water with a sigh of contentment, opened one eye.
“Straight to business? Perhaps you are better suited to the city than I thought.”
Sorore tried to smile, but her concern was betrayed, judging by the woman’s softening of expression.
“My knowledge is limited. My uncle is serving as our representative for now. Sounds like your commander was at least allowed to make his case to the Eisen. He made note of one other companion of yours.”
“Oh? Who?” she said, pushing out into the pool, feeling the water surge over her shoulders.
“A man in black clothes,” she said, “who hides his face behind a mask. He was there for the meeting.”
“The mage?” said Sorore, before considering that she maybe shouldn’t have mentioned it.
“A mage?” said Kieren, before submerging herself in the water.
She tossed her hair back as she came back up, spraying water in a neat arc.
“Well, that explains his odd demeanour,” she said, “now, regrettably, that’s all the time I have today for bathing. I will see you at the festival.”
“Hello cousin! May I join- oh,” came a voice from the steps leading out.
It was Ivers, dressed in nothing but a loose robe, which was already half-way off his body, sculpted with muscle from hauling rope and tackle. Sorore stifled a gasp and turned away, trying not to redden.
“I can come back later,” he offered.
“Do you mind?” Kieren said to Sorore, “if you do, it’d be best to finish soon and let others bathe.”
“No, no,” she said, waving her host away.
Kiero had warned her, after all. It would be best to become accustomed to the strange ways of this beautiful city. Besides, it’s not like she hadn’t bathed before in the company of men her age back home. She cursed herself for being so self-conscious, and forced herself to turn around.
“Are you sure? I can leave if you want, it’s not-” Ivers began.
“No, it’s fine. It’s fine,” Sorore said, smiling at him, “it’d be good to have companionship.”
“Well, then, Ivers, I trust you’ll behave yourself,” said Kieren rising from the water.
“Of course, cousin,” Ivers said, casting his eyes to the floor.
Sorore tried not to take a wicked pleasure at the blush that crept across his dark complexion.
“Oh, one more thing,” whispered her host, bending over to the girl, “it’s considered polite to not look when they’re outside the water.”
Kieren laughed at Sorore’s own furious blush as she made for one of the poolside changing screens.
[←Chapter 63] [Cover Art] [My Links] [Index] [Discord] [Subreddit] [Chapter 65→]
2023.06.10 04:54 Suspicious_Safety691 25 [f4m] southern California/America/ looking for romance and serious e-dating
There are line breaks in here to make this easier to read! That's why I put them there.
Ldr okay and local both okay but we need to meet up eventually. —
About me; latina, plus size, weeb and autistic. I listen to jpop all day and I like weeb music, and video games. Video games I like are slime rancher, cattails, and traveler's rest. —
I enjoy my JPN visual novels too. I love genshin impact when I can actually play it because it's so big on storage.
I have traits that are considered unattractive so I prefer if you like personality more than appearance. I like personality more than appearance so don't send me selfies right away until I ask.
About the partner I would potentially like; I really like men who are gamers and weebs.
—- I have multiplayer games on steam. We can play together if you have them too! I have bloons td 6, tower unite, Starbound, Minecraft (non steam) Starbound, Terraria and one hundred percent oj.
I have two dogs and one cat with a very flat face (Persian)
Please tell me about yourself and what you're into or I may ignore your message!
submitted by Suspicious_Safety691 to ForeverAloneDating [link] [comments]
Ldr okay and local both okay but we need to meet up eventually. —
About me; latina, plus size, weeb and autistic. I listen to jpop all day and I like weeb music, and video games. Video games I like are slime rancher, cattails, and traveler's rest. —
I enjoy my JPN visual novels too. I love genshin impact when I can actually play it because it's so big on storage.
I have traits that are considered unattractive so I prefer if you like personality more than appearance. I like personality more than appearance so don't send me selfies right away until I ask.
About the partner I would potentially like; I really like men who are gamers and weebs.
—- I have multiplayer games on steam. We can play together if you have them too! I have bloons td 6, tower unite, Starbound, Minecraft (non steam) Starbound, Terraria and one hundred percent oj.
I have two dogs and one cat with a very flat face (Persian)
Please tell me about yourself and what you're into or I may ignore your message!
2023.06.10 04:51 docXfamas [H] June Choice and other bundled games [W] Paypal, TF2 keys
Note:
MY REP Wishlist
Gems
TF2 keys/ Csgo Cases
submitted by docXfamas to SteamGameSwap [link] [comments]
- All keys are primarily from US/NA region
- My list maybe slightly outdated so I apologize in advance if some of the games mentioned are already traded/Sold.
- I accept XBOX keys as well.
- I accept PayPal only via goods and services so all transactions will include fees.
- My Wishlist, I am mostly uninterested in other games.
HAVE
JUNE 2023 games- Curse of the Dead Gods
- Ghostwire: Tokyo
- Remnant: From the Ashes - Complete Edition
- Eternal Threads
- GRIME
- Honey, I Joined a Cult
- Meeple Station
- Turbo Golf Racing
- Generation Zero® x 2
- Midnight Ghost Hunt x 2
- Northgard x 2
- Borderlands 3: Super Deluxe Edition x 2
- Destiny 2: Beyond Light
- Gloria Victis x 2
- PULSAR: Lost Colony x 2
- Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery x 2
- Bendy and the Dark Revival x 3
- Builder Simulator x 2
- Operation Tango x 2
- Spiritfarer®: Farewell Edition x 2
- The Invisible Hand x 2
- Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters x 4
- Windjammers 2 x 3
- Aliens: Fireteam Elite x 5
- DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR'S CUT x 4
- Founders' Fortune x 1
- Life is Strange 2 Complete Season (incl. Mascot Bundle DLC) x 5
- Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp x 2
- Revita x 2
- Rollerdrome NA region x 4
- The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante x 2
- BIOMUTANT x 2
- Demon Turf x 2
- Edge Of Eternity x 3
- Golden Light x 3
- Hero's Hour (NA Region) x 4
- Jurassic World Evolution 2 x 2
- Monster Crown x 3
- Rogue Lords x 3
- A Little Golf Journey x 2
- Arcade Paradise - Arcade Paradise EP x 2
- Chivalry: Medieval Warfare x 2
- Eternal Threads x 2
- Field of Glory II x 2
- Hue x 2
- Ice Age: Scrat's Nutty Adventure
- Indivisible x 2
- Murder by Numbers
- Perfect x 2
- PlateUp!
- Rescue Party: Live! x 2
- Rise of the Slime x 2
- Songbringer
- Soul Axiom Rebooted x 2
- Spiritfarer®: Farewell Edition x 2
- Steel Rats x 2
- STONE x 2
- Strange Brigade x 2
- Teacup
- The Last Campfire x 2
- Turbo Golf Racing x 2
- Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War x 2
- White Day: A Labyrinth Named School x 2
- Sifu Deluxe Edition Upgrade Bundle x 2
- Fallout + Fallout 76
- Five Dates x 2
- Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel x 3
- Othercide
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition x 2
- ScourgeBringer x 2
- Shady Part of Me x 2
- SCUM x 2
- Starsand x 2
- State of Decay 2 x 2
- SurrounDead x 2
- The Long Dark: Survival Edition x 2
- Volcanoids
- DOOM Eternal
- Hokko Life
- Greedfall
- Wasteland 3
- Blade Assault
- Super Magbot
- TOEM
- Where the Water Tastes Like Wine
- A Fisherman's Tale
- Car Mechanic Simulator VR
- Cook-Out
- I Expect You To Die
- Sairento VR
- Shooty Fruity
- SUPERHOT VR
- The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets
- The Wizards - Dark Times
- Until You Fall
- Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases
- The Smurfs - Mission Vileaf
- Anna's Quest
- AtmaSphere
- BATTLETECH
- Cardaclysm
- Dead Age 2: The Zombie Survival RPG
- Derange
- DISTRAINT 2 x 2
- Driftland: The Magic Revival
- Enclave (Gold)
- Everreach: Project Eden
- Fantasy Blacksmith
- Golf Club Wasteland
- Heal
- INDUSTRIA
- Interplanetary: Enhanced Edition
- Jack Orlando: Director's Cut
- Journey of a Roach
- Last Inua
- LEAVES - The Journey
- LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham
- LEGO Marvel Super Heroes
- LEGO® MARVEL's Avengers
- LEGO® The Hobbit™
- Main Assembly
- Majesty 2 Collection
- My Big Sister
- Noosphere
- OUTBUDDIES DX
- Paw Paw Paw
- Pesterquest
- Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville (ORIGIN KEY)
- PUBG: Battlegrounds – Golden G-Coin Box
- Red Wings: Aces of the Sky
- Seed Hunter x 2
- Ship Simulator Extremes
- Shooting Stars!
- Smart Factory Tycoon
- Space Cows
- Stars End
- Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse
- The Deed II
- The LEGO Movie - Videogame
- The LEGO NINJAGO Movie Video Game
- The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia
- The Town of Light
- Truck Racer
- Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus
- Wildfire
- Worms Clan Wars
- Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal
- The House of Da Vinci (ROW)
- Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning FATE Edition
- Raji: An Ancient Epic
- Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun - Aiko's Choice
- UnMetal
- Roboquest x 2
- Morbid: The Seven Acolytes
- Eldest Souls
- Hidden & Dangerous 2: Courage Under Fire x 3
- Hidden & Dangerous: Action Pack x 3
- X-COM: Complete Pack x 3
- CivCity: Rome x 3
- Duke Nukem Forever collection x 4
- Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum x 3
- Railroad Tycoon 3 x 3
- Sid Meier's Railroads! x 3
- The Golf Club 2019 Featuring PGA TOUR x 3
- WWE 2K BATTLEGROUNDS + Ultimate Brawlers Pass x 4
- BioShock: The Collection (EU region) x 2
- BioShock: The Collection (NA region) x 2
- Borderlands 3: Super Deluxe Edition
- PGA Tour 2K21 x 3
- Sid Meier's Civilization VI x 2
- XCOM: ULTIMATE COLLECTION x 4
- 11-11 Memories Retold x 2
- 112 operator
- 198x
- 8 doors
- 911 Operator x 2
- A Case Of Distrust
- A plague tale: innocence x 2
- Aegis Defenders x 3
- Ageless x 3
- Agents Of Mayhem
- Alien Spidy
- American Fugitive x 2
- Amnesia: rebirth x 3
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent + Amnesia: A Machine for pigs
- Anna's Quest
- As Far As The Eye
- Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 7
- Automachef x 3
- Bartlow's Dread Machine
- Beholder 2
- Between the stars x 4
- Beyond the wire x 2
- Bionic Commando x 2
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
- Book of Demons x 3
- Boomerang Fu
- Boreal Blade x 3
- Boundless
- Broken Age x 2
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
- Butcher
- Capitalism 2
- Car Mechanic Simulator 2018
- Carnival Games VR
- Civilization III x 2
- Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3
- Crazy Machines 3
- CROSSBOW: Bloodnight x 2
- Crown Trick
- Cursed Castilla (Maldita Castilla Ex)
- Cyber Hook x 2
- Dagon: by H. P. Lovecraft - The Eldritch Box DLC x 2
- Dangerous Worlds x 2
- Dark Future: Blood Red States
- Darksburg x 2
- Dead In Vinland x 2
- Dear Esther: Landmark Edition
- Deathloop x 3
- Deleveled x 2
- Desert Child
- Desolate x 2
- Desperado 3
- DiRT Rally 2.0 - H2 RWD Double Pack
- DiRT Rally 2.0 - Opel Manta 400
- Dirt Rally 2.0 - Porsche 911 RGT Rally Spec
- Disjunction - gog
- Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen x 3
- Drake Hollow x 2
- Draw Slasher x 2
- Drawful 2
- Drawful 2
- Driftland: The Magic Revival x 3
- Ducati - 90th Anniversary
- Due Process x 3
- EarthX
- Ember
- Encodya - GOG x 2
- Endless Space 2 x 2
- Endzone - A World apart
- Enslaved™: Odyssey To The West™ Premium Edition
- Evergarden x 2
- Evoland Legendary Edition x 2
- Expeditions: Viking
- Fable Anniversary
- Family Man x 3
- Farmer's dynasty x 2
- Fear Effect Sedna
- Field of Glory: Empires
- Fling to the Finish
- Forager
- Frog Detective 2: The Case Of The Invisible Wizard x 3
- Fun With Ragdolls: The Game x 2
- Fury Unleashed x 5
- GameGuru x 2
- GameMaker Studio 2 Creator 12 Months x 2
- Garage: bad trip
- Gas Station Simulator x 2
- Gauntlet
- Genesis Alpha One Deluxe Edition x 3
- Ghost Of A Tale
- Gnog
- Go Home Dinosaurs x 2
- Graveyard Keeper
- Greak: Memories Of Azur
- GRIP: Combat Racing Artifex DLC x 3
- Guts and glory
- Hellpoint x 2
- Hexologic
- Hiveswap friendsim x 2
- Hiveswap: Act 1
- Hot Wheels Unleashed x 2
- Hotshot Racing x 3
- Ikenfell x 2
- Immortal Planet
- Imperator: Rome Deluxe Edition x 2
- In sound mind x 2
- Indivisible x 3
- Inmost
- Iris And The Giant
- Iron Danger
- Jurassic World Evolution x 2
- Katana zero
- Kerbal Space Program
- Kingdom Two Crowns
- Kingdom: New Lands x 2
- Kyle is Famous: Complete Edition
- Lacuna - A Sci-fi Noir Adventure
- Lawn mowing simulator
- Levelhead x 2
- Liberated GOG x 2
- Lostwinds
- Lovecraft's Untold Stories x 3
- Lust for Darkness x 2
- Lust from Beyond: M Edition x 2
- Maneater
- Memoria + Soundtrack
- Metro Exodus
- Midnight protocol x 2
- Milky Way Prince - The Vampire Star x 2
- Mo:astray
- Monaco
- Monster Hunter: World
- Moon Hunters
- Mordhau
- Morkredd x 3
- Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator 2021
- Moving Out
- Music Maker EDM Edition x 2
- Nebuchadnezzar
- Necromunda: Hired Gun
- NecroWorm x 2
- Neoverse x 3
- Neverout x 2
- Nex Machina
- Nickelodeon all-star brawl
- Nickelodeon Brawl
- Niffelheim x 2
- Nowhere Prophet x 3
- Orbital Racer x 2
- Out of Reach: Treasure Royale x 2
- Out Of Space
- Outward + The Soroboreans And Outward Soundtrack x 3
- Partisans 1941 x 2
- Path Of Giants
- Pathfinder Second Edition Core Rulebook and Starfinder Core Rulebook x 2
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker Enhanced Plus Edition
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Royal Ascension
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Wild Cards
- Pathway
- Paw paw paw x 3
- PC Building Simulator x 2
- Peaky Blinders: Mastermind x 2
- Pesterquest x 3
- Phantom Doctrine x 2
- Pikuniku
- Pine
- Pixplode x 2
- Police stories
- Popup Dungeon
- Post Void
- Prison Architect + Aficionado (Dlc)
- Pumpkin Jack x 2
- Purrfect Date
- Quantum Break x 2
- RAD x 4
- Railway Empire
- Red solstice 2: survivors
- Relicta x 3
- Remnants of Naezith
- Remothered: Broken Porcelain x 2
- Resident Evil 4 (2005)
- Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition
- Resident Evil HD REMASTER x 3
- Resident Evil Revelations x 4
- Resident Evil Revelations 2 - Episode 1: Penal Colony x 3
- Retimed x 3
- Ring of pain x 4
- Rise Of Industry x 3
- Roarr! Jurassic Edition x 2
- Rover Mechanic Simulator x 3
- RPG Maker VX
- Rustler x 4
- Saturday Morning RPG
- Say No! More
- Shing! x 2
- Shining Resonance Refrain x 2
- Shoppe Keep 2
- Simple Rockets 2
- Simplerockets 2 x 2
- Simulacra + Simulacra 2
- Size Matters x 3
- Skullgirls 2nd Encore
- Slinger VR x 2
- Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts x 2
- Soulblight x 2
- Spec Ops: The Line
- Speed Brawl x 2
- Splasher
- Starbound
- Stealth 2: A Game Of Clones
- Still There x 3
- Stories Untold
- Street Fighter V x 2
- Strider x 2
- Struggling x 2
- Stubbs The Zombie In Rebel Without A Pulse
- Super Meat Boy x 2
- Supraland x 2
- SYSTEM SHOCK: ENHANCED EDITION x 2
- Tabletop Playground x 3
- Telefrag VR x 2
- The Amazing American Circus x 2
- The Ambassador: Fractured Timelines
- The Ascent x 2
- The Bard's Tale IV: Director's Cut x 3
- The Beast Inside x 3
- The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters x 2
- The Darkness II x 2
- The Haunted Island, A Frog Detective Game x 3
- The Henry Stickmin Collection x 2
- The Shapeshifting Detective
- The Survivalists
- The Swords Of Ditto: Mormo's Curse x 2
- The Textorcist: The story of Ray Bibbia x 2
- The USB Stick Found in the Grass x 2
- The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners x 2
- The Wild Eight
- Them's Fightin' Herds
- Throne Of Lies® The Online Game Of Deceit
- Through The Darkest Of Times x 3
- Tilt Brush x 2
- Timelie
- Toejam & Earl: Back in the Groove x 2
- Tohu x 3
- Tools up x 2
- Tooth and Tail
- Total Tank Simulator x 2
- Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt x 2
- Toybox Turbos
- Train Station Renovation x 2
- Treasure Hunter Simulator x 2
- Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince x 2
- Tropico 4
- Truberbrook / Trüberbrook
- Tumblestone
- Tyranny: Deluxe Edition x 2
- Undungeon
- Vagante
- VALKYRIA CHRONICLES 4 COMPLETE EDITION
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows Of New York x 3
- Vane x 3
- Vikings - Wolves of Midgard
- Voidigo
- Wanderlust: Travel Stories x 2
- Wandersong x 2
- Wargroove x 2
- Warhammer: Chaosbane x 2
- WARSAW x 5
- We Are Alright x 2
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse Heart Of The Forest x 3
- Wildfire
- Worms rumble + legends pack dlc x 3
- Wrath: Aeon Of Ruin
- WWE 2k Battlegrounds
- X-morph Defense x 3
- X-Morph: Defense + European Assault, Survival of the Fittest, and Last Bastion DLC x 2
- Xcom® 2: Resistance Warrior Pack
- Yoku's Island Express
- Zombotron
- Leisure Suit Larry - Wet Dreams Don't Dry
- Leisure Suit Larry - Wet Dreams Dry Twice
- Aragami
- Unto The End
- Anuchard
- Call of Juarez Gunslinger
- Darkwood
- Interstellar Space: Genesis
- Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer's Legacy
- 198X
- A.I.M. Clan Wars
- Alekhine's Gun
- Alwa's Awakening
- American Fugitive
- Ballpoint Universe - Infinite
- Battlestar Galactica Deadlock
- Blasphemous
- Bunker Punks
- Clustertruck
- Clutch
- Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues
- Convoy
- Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!
- Cosmic Star Heroine
- Crash Drive 3
- Danger Scavenger
- Degrees of Separation
- Demon Pit
- Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders
- DiRT Rally
- Do Not Feed the Monkeys
- Dracula: Love Kills
- Driftland: The Magic Revival
- Eador. Imperium
- El Matador
- Eternity: The Last Unicorn
- Fantasy Versus
- FAR: Lone Sails x 2
- Fictorum
- Four Sided Fantasy
- Fun with Ragdolls: The Game
- Garfield Kart - Furious Racing
- GemCraft - Chasing Shadows
- Gift of Parthax
- Grand Mountain Adventure
- GRID Autosport - Premium Garage Pack DLC
- GRID Autosport - Road & Track Car Pack DLC
- Guts and Glory
- Heavy Burger
- Horizon Chase Turbo x 2
- Hyperdrive Massacre
- Iratus: Lord of the Dead
- JumpJet Rex
- King's Bounty: Warriors of the North
- Kings of Kung Fu
- Liberated
- Lichdom: Battlemage
- Magrunner: Dark Pulse
- Making History: The Calm and the Storm Gold Edition
- Mech Mechanic Simulator
- Men of War
- Monster Slayers
- Monster Slayers - Advanced Classes Unlocker
- Monster Slayers - Fire & Steel Expansion
- Morbid: The Seven Acolytes
- My Time At Portia
- Mytheon
- NecroVisioN: Lost Company
- Neversong
- Nongunz: Doppelganger Edition
- Overlord: Ultimate Evil Collection
- Planet Alcatraz
- PlataGO!
- Rage in Peace
- Re-Legion
- Rebel Galaxy Outlaw
- Redeemer: Enhanced Edition x 2
- Reventure
- RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic
- Save Room - Organization Puzzle
- Shadowhand: RPG Card Game
- Shark Attack Deathmatch 2
- Silver Chains
- Sin Slayers
- Slain: Back from Hell
- Songbird Symphony
- Space Hulk Ascension
- SPACECOM
- Sparklite
- Star Wolves
- Star Wolves 3: Civil War
- Sunblaze
- Super Panda Adventures
- Super Trench Attack!
- Supreme Ruler 1936
- Supreme Ruler: Cold War
- Tacoma
- Tannenberg
- Tesla vs Lovecraft
- The Long Reach
- The Surge
- The Uncertain - The Last Quiet Day
- The Vagrant
- This Strange Realm Of Mine
- This War of Mine: Stories - Season Pass DLC
- Torchlight
- Toybox Turbos
- Unexplored
- UNLOVED
- V-Rally 4
- Verdun
- Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach
- Wayward Souls
- Wick
- Wick
- World's Dawn x 2
- Yet Another Zombie Defense HD x 2
- Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair
- 10 Second Ninja X
- A story about my uncle
- AGELESS
- Automobilista
- Before We leave
- Caveman World: Mountains of Unga Boonga
- Charlie's Adventure
- Cultures - 8th Wonder of the world
- Dead Age
- DUCATI - 90th Anniversary
- Dust to the End
- Earth 2140
- Fated Souls 3
- Figement
- HELLDIVERS™ Dive Harder Edition
- HELLDIVERS™ Dive Harder Edition
- Ikenfell
- Iron Sky Invasion
- Jorney of a roach
- Lawn Mowing Simulator
- Munin
- My Big Sister
- Narita Boy
- Nigate Tale
- Nigate Tale
- Nordlicht
- Nuclear DAWN
- Of Orcs and Men
- Oh My Gore
- Oh My Gore!
- Pitiri 1977
- Remnants of Naezith
- Scheming Through The Zombie Apocalypse: The Beginning
- Scheming Through The Zombie Apocalypse: The Beginning
- Ship simulator extreme
- Snake Pass
- Sorry, James
- The Deed Dynasty
- Tohu
- Tools Up!
- Toy tinker Simulator
- Treasure Hunter Simulator
- Vagrant Hearts 2
- Whispering Willows
- Windscape
- A Sceptic's Guide to Magic
- Age of Wonders III
- Amnesia Collection x 2
- Assassin's Creed® Chronicles China UPLAY key
- Canyon Capers
- CAPITALISM 2
- CHESS ULTRA
- Chicken Assassin Reloaded
- Deponia: The Complete Journey x 2
- Dirt Rally x 2
- ELIZA
- Enclave (Gold)
- ETHERBORN
- F1 2017 1988 McLAREN MP4/4 Classic Car DLC
- Garfield Kart
- Gold Rush! Classic
- Gothic 3
- Headsnatchers x 2
- Heli Heroes
- Homefront
- Introvert Quest
- Kingdom: Classic
- Knights and Merchants
- Layers of Fear + Soundtrack
- LEGO® The Hobbit™
- Majesty 2 Collection
- Manual Samuel
- Medieval Kingdom Wars
- Mystery Castle: The Mirror's Secret
- Oh My Gore!
- PAC-MAN 256
- Pixel Puzzles: UndeadZ
- Port Royale 3
- Rig n Roll
- RIOT - Civil Unrest
- Satellite Reign
- Shooting Stars
- THE HEX
- The Red Solstice x 2
- THEM'S FIGHTIN' HERDS
WANT
PayPalMY REP Wishlist
Gems
TF2 keys/ Csgo Cases
2023.06.10 04:46 Current-Photo2857 Bathroom baskets
Our venue suggests we place baskets for our guests in the restrooms during the reception, but what should be in them? For the women’s room I was thinking a sewing kit and a spray deodorant, but what else? And what do you put in a men’s room basket?
submitted by Current-Photo2857 to weddingplanning [link] [comments]
2023.06.10 04:09 UncleCeiling Writing on the Wall, Chapter 16
First Chapter Here
Previous Chapter Here
My other story, Going Native Here
Hey look, a chapter released in a somewhat reasonable timeframe! As always, thank you for reading and let me know what you think!
*****
Faye hadn’t noticed right away that Meechie missed her regular stop. The pair had been standing in relative silence, Faye’s thoughts drifting off to debate whether or not she would go to the next movie night at the Library, and it was several stops before she realized that she hadn’t said goodbye to the Rakiri. It was in a bit of a brain fog that Faye half-turned, figuring she should hurry and say it now before Meechie got too far away, but instead she jerked her head to find the brown-furred woman staring directly at her.
“I am still here,” Meechie said quietly, a small smile causing the fur on her cheeks to bristle.
“You are,” Faye agreed. “I thought I missed seeing you off.”
“I am accompanying you to the library,” the young woman declared. Faye tried not to read too much into vocal cues, especially when she had little-to-no experience with the species in question, but there still seemed to be something nervous in Meechie’s voice. Nervous and pleading.
“I don’t need a bodyguard,” Faye said cautiously. “And I definitely don’t need someone making a decision like that for me.”
That seemed to strike a nerve. Meechie slunk back as if hit, causing some grumbles from the other passengers. The Rakiri took a moment to smooth out the fur on her face with one hand before replying.
“I did not express myself well. I wished to visit a library after work, and as you work at one I thought it would be nice to travel alongside you.” Meechie’s eyes lowered. “I should not have presumed.”
As if on cue, the bus slowed to its next stop and Meechie moved to leave. It would put the furry young woman at a corporate business park near absolutely nothing of interest. Faye shot out a hand and grabbed Meechie by the shoulder. The Rakiri froze mid-step as if turned to stone.
“Don’t!” She tugged gently and Meechie shifted back to Faye’s side. “No need to run off. Sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”
“I…” Meechie seemed to be glancing everywhere except at Faye. “It’s alright?”
God damn was this poor girl shy. “Yes, you can ride to the library with me. I just wish you had mentioned it earlier; we don’t have a lot of time to talk shop now.” Faye considered Meechie again, clothes that looked brand new and not a speck of grease to be seen. “Is that why you got all dressed up?”
Meechie nodded, still keeping her eyes somewhere to the left of Faye’s face. “I normally go straight home, but it wouldn’t do to soil any of the books.”
“The books and I both appreciate it.” That earned Faye a smile, at least. “What are you looking for? I didn’t take you for much of a reader.”
“I like adventure stories,” Meechie replied.
“Hmm…” Faye tapped a fingertip to her lips as she thought. “Historical? Big battles?”
“The fighting isn’t what’s important.” Meechie stopped, eyes drawn to the motion of Faye’s finger, and she self-consciously brought her hands back down to her sides. “It is more about the people the hero meets on his travels.”
His travels?
The pronoun threw Faye for a bit of a loop; she was so used to hearing the feminine form used as the general that it stood out. It only took a moment for her to understand. Faye grinned.
“Romantic stories?” She asked the question in a faux whisper, slightly teasing, and Meechie immediately went wide-eyed. Her freshly-cleaned fur puffed up in what could only be panic. Faye reached over and gave Meechie a couple quick pats on the shoulder before leaning in.
“Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”
—
“...should have what you’re looking for. I’m going to be upstairs at Archives, but the help desk can find what you’re looking for if you get lost. And remember, no judgment.”
Mahnti glanced across the lobby more out of instinct than anything else. Hearing Faye’s voice simply drew his attention, especially considering he didn’t think her shift had started yet. His eyes quickly picked her out as Faye turned away from the entrance and towards the hall that led towards the employee lounge. He also took note of who she had been talking to.
Rakiri weren’t uncommon in University City, but the way this one stood in place, staring at Faye’s back with an unnerving intensity, was setting off alarms all down Mahnti’s rather sizeable spine. He began to make his way on an intercept course towards Faye, trying to imprint the furry girl’s look into his memory just in case. Brand new clothing, still showing the creases of packaging. Not quite the right fit for the woman’s frame, and she moved like she was profoundly uncomfortable in them. Dark brown fur that seemed to puff up as she stared at Faye, then flattened as she noticed Mahnti watching her.
The Senthe flared his hood slightly, emphasizing his size instinctively as he narrowed his eyes. The Rakiri stared at him unblinking for a moment, then turned and wandered off towards the main stacks. It only took another moment for him to catch up to Faye.
“Who was that?”
Faye jerked slightly, then stopped and turned with a small smile decorating her lips. “Good morning to you too.”
“Yeah, yeah, good morning and all that. Was that your bus Rakiri?”
Faye nodded, the smile fading as she picked up on Mahnti’s unease. “Yeah. Why, do you know her?”
“No, nothing like that.” Mahnti sighed. He didn’t want to cause problems, but he also had some serious bad vibes going. “She was just standing there staring at you. It was pretty creepy.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed her doing that a lot. I think it might be a Rakiri thing? Meechie seems to have latched on for whatever reason.” Faye shrugged. “I don’t think she has any friends.”
“I’m not surprised if that’s her way of making them. She seriously looked like she was about to attack you or something.”
“Doesn’t know anybody, trying to figure out how to socialize with people…” Faye shrugged again, adding a lopsided smile. “I can relate. She seems harmless enough, even helped protect me the other day.”
Mahnti slumped a little. “I suppose. I just… be careful, okay? I don’t want to have to frame another dent in a wall.”
He also didn’t want to have to worry about Faye bleeding out in some dark corner somewhere. She could outrun a Shil, but a Rakiri with ill intentions would be a far more dangerous proposition.
“After what happened before, I’m not taking chances.” Faye patted the side of her purse conspiratorially and Mahnti could see the outline of a cylinder. It seemed to be a fair bit larger than the grinshaw spray he carried in a vest pocket, but that could have just been a trick of the bag it was in. Regardless, he felt a little better knowing she had something. It wasn’t until he saw the fear she was tucking down behind her smile that he suddenly realized just how vulnerable Faye must feel.
She was smaller and weaker than a Shil’vati, easy to pick out of a crowd and easier to pick on, and with the way she dressed and styled herself Faye really was priming the pump for trouble. A random attack at her place of work had nearly killed her and, less than a week later, here she was trying to take it in stride. All while knowing that the chance of it happening again was approaching certainty.
“Come on,” Mahnti said quietly. He took one of Faye’s hands and pulled her deeper into the hallway, away from prying eyes and towards the break room. He almost told her that she was safe here, but that was a lie. Nowhere was safe if you stood out, and he knew that better than anyone.
–
Ib’aest Jamia, chronic layabout and day manager at the Jamia Library, hoped he didn’t look too guilty when Faye’s face poked through his office doorway and interrupted the scandal rag he was reading on his pad. He slipped his pad face-down into his desk drawer in a single smooth motion and slapped on his second-best friendly but not flirtatious smile.
“Hey Ibby.” Faye seemed suddenly nervous herself, glancing around the room as if to ensure that it was just him in his office. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Is it work related?” Faye shook her head in the negative. “Then of course! Come on in and shut the door.”
Faye followed his lead, latching the door and stepping gracefully to the chair he indicated on the other side of his desk. It was odd, watching the way she moved. Too graceful for most women he knew, but still nervous. Faye sometimes seemed to approach the world as if everything was made of glass. Or perhaps that she was.
Ibby looked the girl up and down, trying for a “kind older friend” vibe. The Human was dressed simply in one of the outfits she seemed to have a knack for throwing together. He knew he had seen at least some of it before, the tights and the skirt at least, but the overall effect was new to him. She struck such an odd balance, clearly a woman but throwing off such a distractingly masculine vibe. In this one person Ibby had a real empirical example of the strange dichotomy that made Humanity so interesting. That said, there was really only one reason for a young woman to ask to speak to an older man in private. At least, only one he figured Faye would be up for.
“Boy troubles?”
Faye blinked at Ibby, confused for a moment. “Kind of, yeah. I guess you could call it that.”
Ibby ran through the list in his head. Mahnti was the obvious first choice, but the way that pair seemed to be getting along he didn’t think there would be any trouble he’d have to intervene with. Besides, the Senthe had said they weren’t doing the perpendicular poke. At least not yet. Faye also knew Tevor, but Ibby had yet to see anyone aside from Sade who could pull that poor kid out of his shell. Maybe Iora over in Digital Media. Did Faye even know Iora?
“Have you ever been to any fancy dress parties?”
Ibby’s racing mind slammed into a drift, changed gears, and nearly ran headlong into the answer. “You’re going on a date with that reporter!”
“It’s NOT a date. I have gone to great lengths to make that clear to both of us.” Faye’s voice was firm. The girl was apparently a better liar than Ibby thought. “He invited me out to go see a play being performed in English at a fancy theater.” Faye pulled out her pad and showed Ibby a copy of the playbill.
“Ooh, the Icosahedral Garden. That’s a great venue.” Ibby considered. “I assume he’s dragging you out to dinner first?”
“I guess? I didn’t really think that far ahead. I just realized that I have no idea what’s culturally acceptable to wear to an event like this.” Faye blushed prettily. “I don’t want to show up in a ball gown and have it turn out to be more of a spikes and corpse paint thing.”
“I… what?”
“Nevermind. Just making a joke.” Faye shrugged, eyes drooping as her expression soured. “It seems like I make a scene no matter where I go. It would be nice to blend in for a change.”
Fat chance of that, Ibby thought. Still, he could be of some help. “What would you say to another shopping excursion? I wouldn’t mind helping you out.”
Faye nodded, relief washing over her. “I would appreciate that. I have an errand to run tonight and plans for tomorrow, but how about the day after? I’m free all day and that will still give me plenty of time before the show.”
“It’s a…” Don’t say date, you idiot. Poor girl is nervous enough as it is. “..plan. Truth be told, it’ll be nice to show you the sights properly. Most of your new friends seem to be more of the indoor sort.”
Faye snorted back a laugh. “Ain’t that the truth.”
–
…Really?
Faye tilted her head to one side just to give her eyeroll a running start. The sign hanging above the shop door was written in a rounded style made to emulate the shape of English letters despite being Shil’vati script. Through the window she could see an assortment of Human snacks, assorted tchotchkes that somehow made her feel victimized on behalf of every race and culture involved, and an embarrassingly large amount of soft-core pornography.
"Chad Nova’s Human Emporium" was probably the single cringiest store that Faye had ever seen, and she distinctly remembered hanging out at the mall back when you could get jeans with pockets big enough to hold a CD player. It didn’t help that, while Faye was standing in the mall concourse staring at the store, the clerk inside was staring right back. That girl seemed to consider blinking an afterthought.
After a moment to square her shoulders and pat the side pocket on her purse reassuringly, Faye entered the store. It was a riot of mismatched goods, poorly made display swords and replica firearms tucked alongside “authentic” Polynesian nose flutes and decks of playing cards. After accidentally locking eyes with what she was fairly certain was an Abraham Lincoln body pillow, she decided to simply accept that this was what her species boiled down to.
“Can I help you, miss?” The voice was high and cracked around the edges. Faye turned to look at the clerk, a Shil’vati girl barely out of school with a face still lightly dusted with acne. The girl seemed to be about ten seconds from exploding in excitement.
“Actually, yeah. I was wondering if you do special orders.” Faye pulled out her pad and started tapping at the screen. “I brought some sundries when I moved out here and I don't know what I’m going to do when I run out.”
“Moved, like from Earth?” Make it five seconds.
“Yes, and to answer your next question, yes, I’m a Human. Nobody decided to bleach a Helkam or anything like that.”
Four… three… two…
The Shil girl turned away and ran to the back of the store, sliding to a stop in front of a rather tacky looking beaded curtain hanging next to an “Employees Only” sign. She shoved her head through the beads.
“MOOOOOOOOOOM!!! HUMAN!!”
Faye took a moment to collect herself. She glanced around, cataloging the strange array of goods. There were some things that clearly fell into similar themes, like the large snack section or the graphic novels (emphasis on graphic), but much of the place was simply a cacophony of crap. She noticed a stuffed doll of the Statue of Liberty fallen over into a container of brightly colored, thumb-sized plastic crucifixes. All the little Jesuses seemed to be staring in mute, cross-eyed horror at the plushie green giant.
“Oh! It’s you!”
Faye turned away from the plastic Jesusai and saw that the young Shil’vati clerk was now accompanied by another woman. Definitely not old enough to be the clerk’s biological mom, but with how things tended to go with Shil families and how long lifespans could get it wasn’t the most surprising. If the clerk was a Human seventeen, she’d put this new one at twenty three or twenty four.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Faye replied to the stranger with a shrug.
“We saw you on the news, but…” the young woman trailed off, her black and gold eyes focused on the still-fading bruises on Faye’s face.
“Lost a fight,” she said curtly. Anything to move this along. “Some friends of mine recommended this place to get Human snacks, and I figured if you’re getting regular imports you might be able to get me some other stuff.”
“..Ah. Oh! Yes!” The woman blinked, then looked at her daughter. “Can you go grab my order book?” Turning back to Faye, she continued, “What sort of things did you need? We have quite a collection here.”
“You certainly do.” Faye tried to focus on the woman, but her eyes kept getting drawn off to the side. An anime-style wall scroll of a mostly-naked, hugely muscled brown-skinned man was staring at her, and she couldn’t place who it was supposed to be. Bob Sapp maybe?
“Mostly I was thinking about makeup, maybe some comfort food. Stuff you probably don’t stock but I can’t afford to import on my own.”
The young woman nodded, her dark hair bouncing. “I’m sure we can work something out. You’re lucky; most Human stores are part of a chain, but we’re independent. We’re not confined to ordering from just one catalog.”
As if she was just waiting for her cue, the Shil kid arrived and plopped an oversized binder into her mom’s open arms. She placed it on a table and flipped it open with a thump.
It was like someone tried to print the Internet. The woman quickly fingered her way through hard-copy recreations of digital storefronts while Faye groaned inwardly. She liked paper more than most but this just seemed so awkward. An alien luddite.
“My brother-in-law’s cousin-in-law works on Earth at one of those new superconductor factories. They ship a lot of materials here, so I was able to negotiate a good deal to take up their extra mass allotment for cheap.” The woman stopped on a page, then pointed. “Something like this?”
Faye leaned over the book and looked. It was the digital storefront of one of those corner store and pharmacy chains that sells makeup on top of everything else. Not exactly top of the line, but better than the dollar store.
“Perfect.” Faye started noting individual things she’d like and the woman dutifully started marking things down on a scrap of paper. The big items on Faye’s shopping list were more foundation and concealer, but she picked out some blush, lipstick, and eyeliner pencils too; she was leery about trusting Shil makeup in general. It was hard enough to find brands that didn’t make her skin break out into an oily mess without getting alien biochemistry involved.
“We can order whatever you like, but the fewer stores you have to pick from the better. I would hate for our buyer to get pissy because she has to run too many errands on the hot guy planet.” The clerk paused for an eye roll. “Also, keep in mind that these prices aren’t what you’ll pay; there will be an additional convenience fee.”
Faye nodded. “Of course. What are you thinking?”
“Hmm…” The woman looked Faye up and down in a way that suddenly made her feel a lot smaller and more vulnerable. While this stranger wasn’t particularly tall for a Shil, that still made for a five or six inch height difference. “You are pretty cute…”
“Dad said no more cute discounts!” Faye’s attention was drawn to the younger girl, who had been watching the whole exchange from a few steps back. The darkening purple blush on her face matched Faye’s own red one.
“You’re no fun!” The Shil mock glared at her (step?)daughter, then turned back to Faye. “Seriously, though, as long as the mass and volume are small the cost to get this sort of thing here isn’t too bad. Say twenty percent. It'll be more if you want anything big or our buyer has to go to a specialty store, but we can do that too. It will still be a lot cheaper than trying to import anything yourself.”
“Twenty percent isn’t bad.” It was a great deal, honestly. Faye doubted they’d be doing much more than breaking even on her little orders. She closed her eyes for a second, clearing her mind. She could feel the spray canister in her bag, pressing against the inside of her arm. Its presence was reassuring. “Can I add an absolutely no flirting policy to our agreement?”
The woman nodded, suddenly looking abashed. “Sorry, I forgot Human women aren’t normally into other girls. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Whether or not Faye was into girls was irrelevant, but she wasn’t about to get into an argument about it. Instead, she turned a few pages back and forth, adding a few more odds and ends to the list that she hadn’t been able to find in University City. Much of the list consisted of condiments and seasonings that might help make the Shil instant meals Faye had been purchasing a little more palatable.
By the time they were done, Faye had an order totaling a couple hundred credits and a promise that she would have her goods in three to four weeks. Before she left she made a point of stocking up on junk food and picked up a few English-language graphic novels that looked interesting. She rounded out the visit with a couple decks of playing cards. Tomorrow was game night, after all. She should be at least somewhat prepared.
****
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This is a fanfic that takes place in the “Between Worlds” universe (aka Sexy Space Babes), created and owned by u/BlueFishcake. No ownership of the settings or core concepts is expressed or implied by myself.
This is for fun. Can’t you just have fun?
submitted by UncleCeiling to Sexyspacebabes [link] [comments]
Previous Chapter Here
My other story, Going Native Here
Hey look, a chapter released in a somewhat reasonable timeframe! As always, thank you for reading and let me know what you think!
*****
Faye hadn’t noticed right away that Meechie missed her regular stop. The pair had been standing in relative silence, Faye’s thoughts drifting off to debate whether or not she would go to the next movie night at the Library, and it was several stops before she realized that she hadn’t said goodbye to the Rakiri. It was in a bit of a brain fog that Faye half-turned, figuring she should hurry and say it now before Meechie got too far away, but instead she jerked her head to find the brown-furred woman staring directly at her.
“I am still here,” Meechie said quietly, a small smile causing the fur on her cheeks to bristle.
“You are,” Faye agreed. “I thought I missed seeing you off.”
“I am accompanying you to the library,” the young woman declared. Faye tried not to read too much into vocal cues, especially when she had little-to-no experience with the species in question, but there still seemed to be something nervous in Meechie’s voice. Nervous and pleading.
“I don’t need a bodyguard,” Faye said cautiously. “And I definitely don’t need someone making a decision like that for me.”
That seemed to strike a nerve. Meechie slunk back as if hit, causing some grumbles from the other passengers. The Rakiri took a moment to smooth out the fur on her face with one hand before replying.
“I did not express myself well. I wished to visit a library after work, and as you work at one I thought it would be nice to travel alongside you.” Meechie’s eyes lowered. “I should not have presumed.”
As if on cue, the bus slowed to its next stop and Meechie moved to leave. It would put the furry young woman at a corporate business park near absolutely nothing of interest. Faye shot out a hand and grabbed Meechie by the shoulder. The Rakiri froze mid-step as if turned to stone.
“Don’t!” She tugged gently and Meechie shifted back to Faye’s side. “No need to run off. Sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”
“I…” Meechie seemed to be glancing everywhere except at Faye. “It’s alright?”
God damn was this poor girl shy. “Yes, you can ride to the library with me. I just wish you had mentioned it earlier; we don’t have a lot of time to talk shop now.” Faye considered Meechie again, clothes that looked brand new and not a speck of grease to be seen. “Is that why you got all dressed up?”
Meechie nodded, still keeping her eyes somewhere to the left of Faye’s face. “I normally go straight home, but it wouldn’t do to soil any of the books.”
“The books and I both appreciate it.” That earned Faye a smile, at least. “What are you looking for? I didn’t take you for much of a reader.”
“I like adventure stories,” Meechie replied.
“Hmm…” Faye tapped a fingertip to her lips as she thought. “Historical? Big battles?”
“The fighting isn’t what’s important.” Meechie stopped, eyes drawn to the motion of Faye’s finger, and she self-consciously brought her hands back down to her sides. “It is more about the people the hero meets on his travels.”
His travels?
The pronoun threw Faye for a bit of a loop; she was so used to hearing the feminine form used as the general that it stood out. It only took a moment for her to understand. Faye grinned.
“Romantic stories?” She asked the question in a faux whisper, slightly teasing, and Meechie immediately went wide-eyed. Her freshly-cleaned fur puffed up in what could only be panic. Faye reached over and gave Meechie a couple quick pats on the shoulder before leaning in.
“Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”
—
“...should have what you’re looking for. I’m going to be upstairs at Archives, but the help desk can find what you’re looking for if you get lost. And remember, no judgment.”
Mahnti glanced across the lobby more out of instinct than anything else. Hearing Faye’s voice simply drew his attention, especially considering he didn’t think her shift had started yet. His eyes quickly picked her out as Faye turned away from the entrance and towards the hall that led towards the employee lounge. He also took note of who she had been talking to.
Rakiri weren’t uncommon in University City, but the way this one stood in place, staring at Faye’s back with an unnerving intensity, was setting off alarms all down Mahnti’s rather sizeable spine. He began to make his way on an intercept course towards Faye, trying to imprint the furry girl’s look into his memory just in case. Brand new clothing, still showing the creases of packaging. Not quite the right fit for the woman’s frame, and she moved like she was profoundly uncomfortable in them. Dark brown fur that seemed to puff up as she stared at Faye, then flattened as she noticed Mahnti watching her.
The Senthe flared his hood slightly, emphasizing his size instinctively as he narrowed his eyes. The Rakiri stared at him unblinking for a moment, then turned and wandered off towards the main stacks. It only took another moment for him to catch up to Faye.
“Who was that?”
Faye jerked slightly, then stopped and turned with a small smile decorating her lips. “Good morning to you too.”
“Yeah, yeah, good morning and all that. Was that your bus Rakiri?”
Faye nodded, the smile fading as she picked up on Mahnti’s unease. “Yeah. Why, do you know her?”
“No, nothing like that.” Mahnti sighed. He didn’t want to cause problems, but he also had some serious bad vibes going. “She was just standing there staring at you. It was pretty creepy.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed her doing that a lot. I think it might be a Rakiri thing? Meechie seems to have latched on for whatever reason.” Faye shrugged. “I don’t think she has any friends.”
“I’m not surprised if that’s her way of making them. She seriously looked like she was about to attack you or something.”
“Doesn’t know anybody, trying to figure out how to socialize with people…” Faye shrugged again, adding a lopsided smile. “I can relate. She seems harmless enough, even helped protect me the other day.”
Mahnti slumped a little. “I suppose. I just… be careful, okay? I don’t want to have to frame another dent in a wall.”
He also didn’t want to have to worry about Faye bleeding out in some dark corner somewhere. She could outrun a Shil, but a Rakiri with ill intentions would be a far more dangerous proposition.
“After what happened before, I’m not taking chances.” Faye patted the side of her purse conspiratorially and Mahnti could see the outline of a cylinder. It seemed to be a fair bit larger than the grinshaw spray he carried in a vest pocket, but that could have just been a trick of the bag it was in. Regardless, he felt a little better knowing she had something. It wasn’t until he saw the fear she was tucking down behind her smile that he suddenly realized just how vulnerable Faye must feel.
She was smaller and weaker than a Shil’vati, easy to pick out of a crowd and easier to pick on, and with the way she dressed and styled herself Faye really was priming the pump for trouble. A random attack at her place of work had nearly killed her and, less than a week later, here she was trying to take it in stride. All while knowing that the chance of it happening again was approaching certainty.
“Come on,” Mahnti said quietly. He took one of Faye’s hands and pulled her deeper into the hallway, away from prying eyes and towards the break room. He almost told her that she was safe here, but that was a lie. Nowhere was safe if you stood out, and he knew that better than anyone.
–
Ib’aest Jamia, chronic layabout and day manager at the Jamia Library, hoped he didn’t look too guilty when Faye’s face poked through his office doorway and interrupted the scandal rag he was reading on his pad. He slipped his pad face-down into his desk drawer in a single smooth motion and slapped on his second-best friendly but not flirtatious smile.
“Hey Ibby.” Faye seemed suddenly nervous herself, glancing around the room as if to ensure that it was just him in his office. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Is it work related?” Faye shook her head in the negative. “Then of course! Come on in and shut the door.”
Faye followed his lead, latching the door and stepping gracefully to the chair he indicated on the other side of his desk. It was odd, watching the way she moved. Too graceful for most women he knew, but still nervous. Faye sometimes seemed to approach the world as if everything was made of glass. Or perhaps that she was.
Ibby looked the girl up and down, trying for a “kind older friend” vibe. The Human was dressed simply in one of the outfits she seemed to have a knack for throwing together. He knew he had seen at least some of it before, the tights and the skirt at least, but the overall effect was new to him. She struck such an odd balance, clearly a woman but throwing off such a distractingly masculine vibe. In this one person Ibby had a real empirical example of the strange dichotomy that made Humanity so interesting. That said, there was really only one reason for a young woman to ask to speak to an older man in private. At least, only one he figured Faye would be up for.
“Boy troubles?”
Faye blinked at Ibby, confused for a moment. “Kind of, yeah. I guess you could call it that.”
Ibby ran through the list in his head. Mahnti was the obvious first choice, but the way that pair seemed to be getting along he didn’t think there would be any trouble he’d have to intervene with. Besides, the Senthe had said they weren’t doing the perpendicular poke. At least not yet. Faye also knew Tevor, but Ibby had yet to see anyone aside from Sade who could pull that poor kid out of his shell. Maybe Iora over in Digital Media. Did Faye even know Iora?
“Have you ever been to any fancy dress parties?”
Ibby’s racing mind slammed into a drift, changed gears, and nearly ran headlong into the answer. “You’re going on a date with that reporter!”
“It’s NOT a date. I have gone to great lengths to make that clear to both of us.” Faye’s voice was firm. The girl was apparently a better liar than Ibby thought. “He invited me out to go see a play being performed in English at a fancy theater.” Faye pulled out her pad and showed Ibby a copy of the playbill.
“Ooh, the Icosahedral Garden. That’s a great venue.” Ibby considered. “I assume he’s dragging you out to dinner first?”
“I guess? I didn’t really think that far ahead. I just realized that I have no idea what’s culturally acceptable to wear to an event like this.” Faye blushed prettily. “I don’t want to show up in a ball gown and have it turn out to be more of a spikes and corpse paint thing.”
“I… what?”
“Nevermind. Just making a joke.” Faye shrugged, eyes drooping as her expression soured. “It seems like I make a scene no matter where I go. It would be nice to blend in for a change.”
Fat chance of that, Ibby thought. Still, he could be of some help. “What would you say to another shopping excursion? I wouldn’t mind helping you out.”
Faye nodded, relief washing over her. “I would appreciate that. I have an errand to run tonight and plans for tomorrow, but how about the day after? I’m free all day and that will still give me plenty of time before the show.”
“It’s a…” Don’t say date, you idiot. Poor girl is nervous enough as it is. “..plan. Truth be told, it’ll be nice to show you the sights properly. Most of your new friends seem to be more of the indoor sort.”
Faye snorted back a laugh. “Ain’t that the truth.”
–
…Really?
Faye tilted her head to one side just to give her eyeroll a running start. The sign hanging above the shop door was written in a rounded style made to emulate the shape of English letters despite being Shil’vati script. Through the window she could see an assortment of Human snacks, assorted tchotchkes that somehow made her feel victimized on behalf of every race and culture involved, and an embarrassingly large amount of soft-core pornography.
"Chad Nova’s Human Emporium" was probably the single cringiest store that Faye had ever seen, and she distinctly remembered hanging out at the mall back when you could get jeans with pockets big enough to hold a CD player. It didn’t help that, while Faye was standing in the mall concourse staring at the store, the clerk inside was staring right back. That girl seemed to consider blinking an afterthought.
After a moment to square her shoulders and pat the side pocket on her purse reassuringly, Faye entered the store. It was a riot of mismatched goods, poorly made display swords and replica firearms tucked alongside “authentic” Polynesian nose flutes and decks of playing cards. After accidentally locking eyes with what she was fairly certain was an Abraham Lincoln body pillow, she decided to simply accept that this was what her species boiled down to.
“Can I help you, miss?” The voice was high and cracked around the edges. Faye turned to look at the clerk, a Shil’vati girl barely out of school with a face still lightly dusted with acne. The girl seemed to be about ten seconds from exploding in excitement.
“Actually, yeah. I was wondering if you do special orders.” Faye pulled out her pad and started tapping at the screen. “I brought some sundries when I moved out here and I don't know what I’m going to do when I run out.”
“Moved, like from Earth?” Make it five seconds.
“Yes, and to answer your next question, yes, I’m a Human. Nobody decided to bleach a Helkam or anything like that.”
Four… three… two…
The Shil girl turned away and ran to the back of the store, sliding to a stop in front of a rather tacky looking beaded curtain hanging next to an “Employees Only” sign. She shoved her head through the beads.
“MOOOOOOOOOOM!!! HUMAN!!”
Faye took a moment to collect herself. She glanced around, cataloging the strange array of goods. There were some things that clearly fell into similar themes, like the large snack section or the graphic novels (emphasis on graphic), but much of the place was simply a cacophony of crap. She noticed a stuffed doll of the Statue of Liberty fallen over into a container of brightly colored, thumb-sized plastic crucifixes. All the little Jesuses seemed to be staring in mute, cross-eyed horror at the plushie green giant.
“Oh! It’s you!”
Faye turned away from the plastic Jesusai and saw that the young Shil’vati clerk was now accompanied by another woman. Definitely not old enough to be the clerk’s biological mom, but with how things tended to go with Shil families and how long lifespans could get it wasn’t the most surprising. If the clerk was a Human seventeen, she’d put this new one at twenty three or twenty four.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Faye replied to the stranger with a shrug.
“We saw you on the news, but…” the young woman trailed off, her black and gold eyes focused on the still-fading bruises on Faye’s face.
“Lost a fight,” she said curtly. Anything to move this along. “Some friends of mine recommended this place to get Human snacks, and I figured if you’re getting regular imports you might be able to get me some other stuff.”
“..Ah. Oh! Yes!” The woman blinked, then looked at her daughter. “Can you go grab my order book?” Turning back to Faye, she continued, “What sort of things did you need? We have quite a collection here.”
“You certainly do.” Faye tried to focus on the woman, but her eyes kept getting drawn off to the side. An anime-style wall scroll of a mostly-naked, hugely muscled brown-skinned man was staring at her, and she couldn’t place who it was supposed to be. Bob Sapp maybe?
“Mostly I was thinking about makeup, maybe some comfort food. Stuff you probably don’t stock but I can’t afford to import on my own.”
The young woman nodded, her dark hair bouncing. “I’m sure we can work something out. You’re lucky; most Human stores are part of a chain, but we’re independent. We’re not confined to ordering from just one catalog.”
As if she was just waiting for her cue, the Shil kid arrived and plopped an oversized binder into her mom’s open arms. She placed it on a table and flipped it open with a thump.
It was like someone tried to print the Internet. The woman quickly fingered her way through hard-copy recreations of digital storefronts while Faye groaned inwardly. She liked paper more than most but this just seemed so awkward. An alien luddite.
“My brother-in-law’s cousin-in-law works on Earth at one of those new superconductor factories. They ship a lot of materials here, so I was able to negotiate a good deal to take up their extra mass allotment for cheap.” The woman stopped on a page, then pointed. “Something like this?”
Faye leaned over the book and looked. It was the digital storefront of one of those corner store and pharmacy chains that sells makeup on top of everything else. Not exactly top of the line, but better than the dollar store.
“Perfect.” Faye started noting individual things she’d like and the woman dutifully started marking things down on a scrap of paper. The big items on Faye’s shopping list were more foundation and concealer, but she picked out some blush, lipstick, and eyeliner pencils too; she was leery about trusting Shil makeup in general. It was hard enough to find brands that didn’t make her skin break out into an oily mess without getting alien biochemistry involved.
“We can order whatever you like, but the fewer stores you have to pick from the better. I would hate for our buyer to get pissy because she has to run too many errands on the hot guy planet.” The clerk paused for an eye roll. “Also, keep in mind that these prices aren’t what you’ll pay; there will be an additional convenience fee.”
Faye nodded. “Of course. What are you thinking?”
“Hmm…” The woman looked Faye up and down in a way that suddenly made her feel a lot smaller and more vulnerable. While this stranger wasn’t particularly tall for a Shil, that still made for a five or six inch height difference. “You are pretty cute…”
“Dad said no more cute discounts!” Faye’s attention was drawn to the younger girl, who had been watching the whole exchange from a few steps back. The darkening purple blush on her face matched Faye’s own red one.
“You’re no fun!” The Shil mock glared at her (step?)daughter, then turned back to Faye. “Seriously, though, as long as the mass and volume are small the cost to get this sort of thing here isn’t too bad. Say twenty percent. It'll be more if you want anything big or our buyer has to go to a specialty store, but we can do that too. It will still be a lot cheaper than trying to import anything yourself.”
“Twenty percent isn’t bad.” It was a great deal, honestly. Faye doubted they’d be doing much more than breaking even on her little orders. She closed her eyes for a second, clearing her mind. She could feel the spray canister in her bag, pressing against the inside of her arm. Its presence was reassuring. “Can I add an absolutely no flirting policy to our agreement?”
The woman nodded, suddenly looking abashed. “Sorry, I forgot Human women aren’t normally into other girls. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Whether or not Faye was into girls was irrelevant, but she wasn’t about to get into an argument about it. Instead, she turned a few pages back and forth, adding a few more odds and ends to the list that she hadn’t been able to find in University City. Much of the list consisted of condiments and seasonings that might help make the Shil instant meals Faye had been purchasing a little more palatable.
By the time they were done, Faye had an order totaling a couple hundred credits and a promise that she would have her goods in three to four weeks. Before she left she made a point of stocking up on junk food and picked up a few English-language graphic novels that looked interesting. She rounded out the visit with a couple decks of playing cards. Tomorrow was game night, after all. She should be at least somewhat prepared.
****
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This is a fanfic that takes place in the “Between Worlds” universe (aka Sexy Space Babes), created and owned by u/BlueFishcake. No ownership of the settings or core concepts is expressed or implied by myself.
This is for fun. Can’t you just have fun?
2023.06.10 04:08 richi-carmen Aspects influencing the outcome of timber pellet mill
 | Wood pellet mill is an important tools in manufacturing, so in the manufacturing process, what variables can influence the result of wood pellet mill devices? submitted by richi-carmen to pelletmachinery [link] [comments] 1. Several elements influencing the result of timber pellet device In the adhering to, Richi Device will present to you several major elements that affect the result of sawdust wood pellet mill: ( 1) Grease. Add 0.5% to 1% of oil, which is beneficial to reduce the wear of timber pellet device parts, as well as make the pellets conveniently travel through the die holes and boost the outcome. Keep in mind, however, that when the boost in oil goes beyond 2%, it will make the pellets challenging to form. As a result, when including grease, 30% of the overall quantity should be added at the mixer, and also 70% of the complete quantity should be sprayed at the wood pellet mill. https://preview.redd.it/c6jwq9snm35b1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3e99946906844e201189cd7497c55e04c216bdb9 ( 2) Starch. Grains have a high starch web content as well as are very easy to granulate at heat and high dampness. Consequently, the appeased and solidified dampness is in between 16% and 18%, the temperature level is above 80 ℃, and the outcome of the pellet maker is likewise high. If the grain is currently grown before conditioning (eg drying corn), the output of the wood pellet mill will certainly be lowered. ( 3) Thermal sensitivity. The thickness of lactose as well as whey powder in the material boosts after home heating, which helps to boost the output. However, if the temperature level exceeds 60 ℃, it is easy to appear coking, which will block the die hole and affect the outcome. ( 4) Crude fiber. Ideal unrefined fiber ( web content 3% ~ 5%) contributes to the bonding of pellets and enhances the granulation output, but when the content of unrefined fiber goes beyond 10%, the cohesiveness of the product will certainly become worse, impacting the hardness of the pellets and creating price, while boosting mechanical wear and decreasing wood pellet mill output. ( 5) Product moisture. When the humidity of the product is too high, it is hard to solidify the material and also it is simple to create the product to slip between the internal wall of the ring die and the pressing roller, leading to the clog of the ring die hole. Usually speaking, the moisture material of the product should be listed below 13% before conditioning. ( 6) Minerals. Not natural products have almost no communication and poor granulation efficiency. For that reason, when the inorganic web content in the material is too high, a percentage of binder is usually contributed to the product to improve the granulation feature as well as boost the outcome of the wood pellet mill. Related post: wood pellet machine usa The above are the significant factors that affect the result of timber pellet mill, I hope it can be useful to everybody! Richi Equipment is a biomass straw rice husk timber pellet plant tools maker concentrating on the wood pellet mills offer for sale, if you want our biomass and also wood pellet mill jobs and options, please leave your needs and e-mail, WhatsApp and various other call details, our sales personnel will give expert solutions and equivalent product pictures, video clips and quotations. 2. The process of biomass gas: Biomass fuel is based on farming and forestry residues as the major basic material. After assembly line equipment such as slicers, pulverizers, clothes dryers, timber pellet mill, coolers, balers, etc, it is finally made into shaped eco-friendly fuels with high calorific worth and also adequate burning. It is a clean and also low-carbon renewable energy. https://preview.redd.it/k60eiqfom35b1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c9df50437c1ffe62afe5657a316868043d2984c As a fuel for biomass burning equipment such as biomass heaters as well as biomass boilers, it has a lengthy burning time, improved burning, high heating system temperature, and is economical as well as environmentally friendly. It is a top quality environmentally friendly fuel to change standard fossil power. 3. The growth of wood pellet machine constantly adheres to the plan Biomass pellet fuel, a new item developed by wood pellet mill maker manufacturers, is a renewable new power source with absolutely no carbon emissions, so my nation strongly sustains the promo of biomass fuel pellets. Managers who can see through the marketplace have actually switched over to the biomass pellet machine industry. The advancement of timber pellet mill has actually constantly adhered to the plan. Just recently, the biomass wood pellet mill device market has actually continued to be popular. It is estimated that the size of the biomass fuel pellet market will remain to boost in the future. The continual boost in the biomass fuel pellet market is primarily based upon the following factors ：. ( 1) As a result of the liberalization of energy-saving as well as environmental protection policies, the number of users who switched to the wood pellet mill sector has actually enhanced, causing the expansion of the market scale. ( 2) Because of the substantial use of biomass timber pellet mill, it is in line with my country's brand-new environmental protection and also power saving plan, and has no demands for the choice of resources. It is beneficial to plants such as corn straw, wheat straw, rice husk straw, bean husk straw as well as various other waste. As a resources, the cost of resources is reasonably low. What brings in new individuals is that biomass fuel pellets can change some non-renewable energy sources. With an increasing number of customers, the market size of biomass timber pellet mill will certainly continue to increase. Related post: wood pelletizer machine 4. The market prospect of biomass wood pellet mill machine. Recently, the state has actually strongly advocated and also supported the growth and also usage of bioenergy. With the worldwide power scarcity and also the environmental protection needs of power preservation as well as emission reduction, the marketplace need and revenue margins of biomass renewable energy will certainly be immeasurable. ( 1) What is biofuel? Biomass gas is a kind of strong waste utilizing plant straw and other products, such as corn straw, wheat straw, cotton stalk, straw, peanut covering, corn cobs, branches, bark, sawdust as well as furfural deposit, edible fungi residue, typical Chinese medicine deposit, etc, a new sort of renewable resource made after crushing, pressurizing and also densifying. ( 2) Attributes. Biomass gas is little in size, large in specific gravity, resistant to burning, as well as has a calorific value of 3500-5500 kcal, which is convenient for storage and also transportation, and also is a very convenient strong fuel. ( 3) Scope of application. Biomass gas can totally change firewood, raw coal, dissolved gas, and so on, as well as is widely made use of in living cooktops, home heating furnaces, warm water central heating boilers, industrial boilers, biomass power plants, and so on( 4) Market need. Biomass gas is clean as well as environmentally friendly, fairly reduced in price, and has a wide variety of applications. It can be made use of in urban home heating, home heating, resorts, bathing and also various other industries. It is anticipated that the reserves of underground oil, natural gas and coal are just sufficient for around 60 years according to the present exploitation as well as use price. Consequently, biomass power is an important development direction of renewable energy in the future. Richi Machinery specializes in the design, advancement and also sales of biomass pellet mill devices, timber pellet mill, straw pellet mill devices, and so on. It is among the fastest growing suppliers in China's biomass pellet machine market, with strong production experience and technical stamina. 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2023.06.10 03:59 Calypthea Accidentally a Dungeon Chp. 26
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Without that horrendous bat flapping around and causing a mess for me, I'm now able to focus all of my efforts on bringing down the blinded bear colossus. It is unfortunate that I lost too many owls in the aerial battle, and that Alexa is too exhausted to help out herself, as that means I won't have any reinforcements available from them coming to Jackie’s aid any time soon. That being said, I know just the fish who might be able to make an early return in their stead.
Since they’ve been resting since the start of the battle, Selene and Hecate have been able to recuperate a bit of their mana pools already. Considering that I’m near 100% confident that it doesn’t matter how much the big bear regenerates if it can’t breathe, plus the fact that it doesn’t take too much mana just to hold some water in place, there’s not much reason to keep them benched much longer. Somehow though, I doubt it’s going to be quite that easy to take the bear colossus down. So why don’t we improve the chances of success a bit with all of this free manna I find myself currently swimming in?
Thanks to the sheer quantity of invaders Deepholm is swarming me in, I’ve got more mana to make use of than ever before, and I’d be a fool not to put it to good use. The steep requirement of having to pay 4 times the mana as any of my other scions to upgrade them is hardly an issue at this moment, so I begin the process of pouring my power into my fish. All the while, I keep an eye trained on the battle at hand, waiting for whatever it is the bear will try next. Deepholm scions don’t just meekly turn over and accept their defeat after all.
While I’m only halfway through providing upgrades to my fish scions, my caution is proven entirely warranted as the bear scion bellows its frustration and rage at the top of its lungs. Unable to proceed along a straight path due to Jackie’s constant interference, the colossus hunkers down for a moment in my lake and covers its head with its paws. Then, as soon as its eyes have had a chance to regenerate once more, it peeks out and gets a lock on my location before Jackie inevitably puts more arrows through the freshly grown eyes. This time it hardly pays the attack any mind, reaching down to its flank with those huge claws and ripping free a sizable chunk of its own flesh. With a great heave, the bear scion sent the chunk sailing through the air where it crashed with a meaty splat against the trunk of my tree.
First of all, …gross. Secondly, that bear has surprisingly good aim to be able to nail the part of my tree trunk that is perfectly in line with where my core is. Lastly, heh-heh, I’m in danger. Unable to use its sight, and no longer able to rely on the bat scion for its sonic guidance, the bear has resorted to using smell to guide its way. And what better trail to follow with one’s strong sense of smell than the stench of one’s own blood and viscera? Without a moment of hesitation, the bear scion is back on its feet, and charging forward once more.
This time, there’s truly nothing we can do to stop its advance, the bear’s nose is too big to fully destroy the bear’s sense of smell, even with Jackie’s arrows desperately blasting pieces off of it. With a tremor that I can feel throughout the entire island, the bear scion slams headfirst into the high cliffs, which only serves to daze the beast for but a moment before it starts awkwardly clambering upwards. I curse vehemently, at this rate the colossus will reach my tree before I’m done with upgrading the twins. I can cut it short and make the current upgrade the last one, but it will still take a minute or so for the twins to become accustomed to their strengthened bodies.
It doesn’t take long for the bear’s claws to scramble against the top of the cliffs, digging in for extra purchase, shortly followed thereafter by the beast’s snarling and arrow-riddled cranium. The twins have only just finished absorbing the mana from the latest upgrade, they’re not going to make it in time. It is at that moment that my saviors made their gallant entry into the fray. Cutting a swathe through the remaining army of normal invaders charged not any of my scions, but the brave surviving members of my defensive forces. Having abandoned their defensive chokepoint in the entrance cave, a combined throng of brawler bunnies and leopards led the way as my froglings and flechette-pines provided cover fire. Beside me, I can feel the consternation roll off of Giorno as he tries to keep some semblance of organization in place amidst an attack that he had most certainly not ordered.
Though our tactics have done a great deal in leveling the playing field in the battle between denizens, there are still a lot of enemies left to deal with, and this attack will only open us up to many more unnecessary casualties. Underneath his annoyed countenance however, I do detect a hint of pride in their reckless attempts to buy me more time. An attempt that certainly pays its dividends.
With a series of tremendous leaps, the brawler bunnies and leopard forces bound up to the limbs of the bear scion and begin hacking away at it with sharp claws and stone swords. They scale up the beast, slashing at every joint and every digit along the way. The colossus roars in pain and slips from the cliffside as the tendons in each limb are systematically severed time and time again. But this moment of victory comes at far too steep a cost.
When the bear scion crashes back into the lake, its sheer mass flattens dozens of my brave denizens at a time. From there it thrashes about, crushing some more of my stalwart defenders and sending others flying through the air. Not wasting the opportunity, my denizens lead the enemy scion over to the remnants of the invader army, where both sides become equally devastated by the beast’s angry flailing. I try to call my denizens back, telling them to retreat, that they’d done enough already. When that failed, I resorted to using some of my mana to make it a direct order. Retreat already! The twins are on the way, swimming around the south side of the island as we speak. There’s no need for any more of you to die!
I can feel the mana drain away as the orders take hold, but then I got a unanimous response back through Alexa’s network. Every single one of them started the retreat and then volunteered themselves to be a rearguard to help cover the escape. Even though technically they were following through with my order, not a single denizen so much as turned around or took a single step backward. They were loopholing me! Those damnable, brave, fools were refusing to leave until my scions could arrive. Who the heck taught you bastards to test the limits of the rules and look for ways to bend them in your favor anyhow!?
It took less than a minute for my twins to arrive. But it took even less time for the bear colossus to finish with its rampage. Now the only living combatants faced each other over a lake stained to the same red as the bear scion’s eyes. As a healer, Selene has seen more than her fair share of nasty injuries, as well as plenty of corpses from my previous encounters with Deepholm’s invaders. But even still, all that experience could not have prepared her for the sight of the slaughter before her. All the violent thrashing had thoroughly frothed the water of the lake, but rather than help hide the bodies below with the white foam it only served to accentuate them by clinging to whatever pieces remained above water.
It left my poor fish heartbroken. Disgust and despair raged inside her alongside a powerful wave of guilt at not recovering fast enough to be able to come to their aid in time. I know, sweetie, I know. But those denizens out there? They bought us enough time to stop any more atrocities from happening. They bet everything on you two and Jackie, and now it’s time to make sure we don’t waste a single death. All that anguish and sorrow you’re feeling? I need you to use it. Use it to hone a blade in your heart to turn against those who spread such senseless violence. It’s time to take up the second half of the saint’s job and smite down that walking calamity of a bear. And you’re not alone, Hecate is right beside you along with Jackie, and together, I know you all can do this.
Pep talk done, Hecate gives her sister a loving nuzzle under her chin before turning her hate-filled eyes to the bear scion as well. She isn’t taking kindly to all the desolation wrought by the colossus either, and is especially pissed by how upset it is making her kind-hearted twin. The white crescent moon mark on her forehead glows faintly in response to her roiling emotions, while after a few deep breaths, Selene’s black crescent moon mark does the same, her eyes now steeled in vindictive determination.
As one, they lifted a massive ball of water into the air and slammed it into the bear scion’s face, completely covering it in a matter of seconds. Meanwhile, I begin the process of funneling mana into Jackie for her own upgrades. The beast hasn’t shown any magical capacity besides its regeneration, but who knows? Maybe it has something up its sleeve that would save it from the same fate as its companion. Better safe than sorry in this case, no?
Evidently, I was correct to prepare for the backup plan, because rather than struggle against the water bubble encasing its face, the bear colossus calmly slurped the water down. The vast amounts of suction overwhelmed the amount of mana the twins could use to keep the water in place, and so it simply disappeared down the beast’s gullet with a taunting smile that seemed to say, “Thanks for the refreshing drink, I was feeling rather parched”. Not a smidge of magic was used, or needed, to easily trounce my hopes of drowning our problems away. What stood before us surely could not be described as anything but the epitome of relentless brute force, a fact which has now been hammered home rather insultingly by the defeat of my plans through lung power of all things.
With a challenging roar, the bear plowed forward while ignoring the twin’s follow up attacks. Right, plan B it is then. If we can’t suffocate him, then we’ll just have to overwhelm his regeneration with more damage than it can keep up with! In but a moment the bear scion has slammed into my cliffside and begins scaling it once more. This time, Selene and Hecate are there to stop it from making any meaningful progress, their watery slashes biting deep into flesh and disabling limbs long enough for the next attack to land. Where Hecate’s attacks strike necrosis quickly follows, seeping into the flesh until the entire mass falls off to be replaced by newly regenerated meat. Meanwhile, Selen’s strikes shine with the radiant power of her light mana, her slices digging deep through muscles, tendons, and all the way to the bones beneath.
Together they manage to keep the colossus pinned in place to the craggy wall of my island, allowing Jackie all the time she needs to hop around and unleash a torrent of her aether arrows. Rather than strike into the beast herself however, I have her shoot the cliffs themselves where she then sprouts much more massive vines than usual to grasp at the enemy scion and bind it in place. I know that the twins will run out of mana long before I can bleed this invader dry in a battle of attrition, so instead my goal here is to line Jackie up for one big shot to put an end to this colossus once and for all.
Bounding up to the top of the cliff, right over the massive head of the bear, Jackie grows the limbs of her bow out further than even its longbow form, one side planting itself firmly into the stone. With a mighty heave, she stands upon the bow’s limbs and pushes down with all the strength in her legs while hoisting up on the drawstring with her arms. A ballista-sized arrow grows into place, aimed straight down to the skull of the beast below. Through this, Jackie channels the full force of her wind aether. With my hand on her back, I speak softly to into her mind through the bond we share.
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Let’s do this Jackie, together!”
Through my hand I channel even more mana into Jackie than before, really packing it into her as fast as the upgrades can handle. 2 more, then 5, then 10. The power swirls around her like a maelstrom that would have left anybody else gritting their teeth to ride out the storm. But not my Jackie. As much as I pushed the mana into her, she matched me by pulling it into her control right away, weaving it into her aether flawlessly. Around the arrow tip the air began to swirl, faster and faster, like a drill turned up to turbo speeds.
This obviously did not go unnoticed by the bear scion, but it was too late for the behemoth to avoid its fate. Bound up tightly in Jackie’s vines while Selen and Hecate kept its prodigious strength locked away through their continuous onslaught. Their mana has already depleted dangerously low once again, but their combined efforts have bought us all the opportunity we need. All the enemy can do is flounder uselessly in its restraints, glaring balefully at Jackie and its impending doom.
With a boom the arrow disappears from Jackie’s bow, boring a path straight through the entire length of the bear scion and continuing deep into the ground beneath it. Jackei’s wind arrow had accelerated freely without any resistance, twisting the air in front of it out of the way and turning the space in front into a devastating drill. Meanwhile, just behind the shaft, the collapse of the resulting vacuum pushed the arrow along even faster than any projectile has ever flown before in this world.
The twisting motion of the air and the shockwaves from the collapsing vacuum bubble didn’t just serve to speed up the arrow however. Like a delayed reaction after the arrow had already sped through, I watched as a spray of blood exploded from the bear’s body, accompanied by the splash of water beneath its feet. I watched as the beast’s jaw was ripped away to hang loosely by a strip of flesh on the right side of its head. From there the arrow had traveled down into the beast’s shoulder and blazed a path all the way through its chest cavity, the aftershocks ripping the bear’s body apart and leaving its left side barely attached anymore. It looked as if some giant had cleaved its axe down the bear’s side, all the way from the shoulders to the hips.
The scion had managed to avoid an instantly fatal blow by twisting its head as far to the side as possible, but that proved to only postpone the inevitable at this point. With that much damage to the internal organs, it couldn’t hope to recover in time. We’d done it, we’d won!
Joyfully, I turned to Giorno, ready to send some mana down to Kelvin next, but what I saw froze me in my tracks. This whole battle, Giorno had been his usual calm and composed self, issuing orders and cooly commanding our forces. But now, he was trembling with a visual amount of fear, his skin blanched of all color. Thoroughly spooked, I racked my brain for anything I might have missed, but I got my answer sooner than expected.
“Kill it, kill it now! We don’t have any time, finish it before it's too late! It’s going to do something to the bear!”
Dutifully, Jackie and the twins ready their next attacks to hasten the bear scion’s demise, but something Giorno said stuck out to me. Wait, the bear is the subject of his sentence, not the object for some reason. But…, that would have to mean…
With wide eyes, I come to a dreadful realization, I never got a mana notification for the bat scion. No, no! No WAY that bastard survived, right? Feeling the sneaking march of dread closing in on my throat, I check the spot where the bat scion had crashed into my island. There it lay, wings in tatters and its chest caved in from impacting the ground, lying in a pool of its own blood. By all accounts, it appears to be dead. But that’s when I notice something off. The pool of blood is moving.
Right before my eyes, I watch as little bubbles capture air inside, and then get mixed in the blood as it slowly circulates out of the lethal wounds and then back into the bat’s body. It must have kept conscious through the crash and is now using its blood magic to just barely keep itself alive. Would that be all the bat was up to, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. But no, all around the crash were scattered splotches of fresh blood, drawn out into a foreboding set of interlocking symbols when viewed from above. The bat was casting something, using its own life as fuel. With a weak wheeze in place of a laugh, the bat scion spoke for one final time.
“Glory be to the Mountainlord. Blood Arts: Sacrifice.”
Accompanied by the ding of a new notification, I watched in horror as all the blood was forcibly wrested from the bat scion’s fresh corpse, instantly mummifying it into a dried-out husk. Then that mass of brackish liquid moved faster than it had any right to, thin tendrils shooting out from the main body quickly dragging the blob to the edge of the island. Before any of my scions could react, it had already latched onto the dying bear’s head and begun pouring itself forcibly through every orifice it could reach.
Writhing in agony at the black-red liquid shoving itself down its throat, nostrils, and eye sockets, my scions lashed into the bear’s body with as much strength as they could, but to no avail. The wounds would begin closing before their attacks could even finish, and from the bear’s torso sprouted several bloody tentacles which wrapped themselves around the dangling left side, pulling it back into place with a wet squelch. The newfound regeneration didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, stop there however. All over the colossus’s body something churned beneath its hide.
Every single muscle in the behemoth’s body squirmed as it doubled, then tripled in size, in some places rupturing the skin as it struggles to contain the roiling mass of flesh. Muscle fibers sprung from the fur like weeds sprouting out of fertile ground, twitching and flailing about looking for something to connect to, until the beast’s entire form was nothing but a bulging mass of undulating flesh vaguely shaped like a bear. From the monstrosities head, the repaired jaw split open far wider than anything still attached to the skull to allow, revealing row after row of sharp fangs growing into place all the way down its throat.
With an unearthly screech, the monstrosity easily tore itself free of the vines and took a swipe at Jackie with its misshapen foreleg. Nobody must have told Deepholm that inflating your musculature so much is a direct reduction in flexibility however, because the blow was slow and cumbersome, allowing Jackie to easily vault backwards out of reach. But Deepholm didn’t need to care about such silly things like flexibility, or the limits of a physical body, as halfway through the swing a series of cracks could be heard as the bear monstrosity’s muscles broke every single bone in its arm, causing it to suddenly stretch out on just the muscles and ligaments, increasing in speed as the limb turned into an impromptu flesh whip tipped with giant claws.
Caught completely by surprise, Jackie could only try to form a hasty shield of roots with her life aether, but the abomination’s claws sundered it with ease, cleaving through her bow, then her arm, and finally raking across her torso. My girl hit the ground, hard, and didn’t get back up. Meanwhile, the twins were still desperately flinging any kind of attack they could think at the bear horror, all to no avail. This affront to nature had such strong regeneration now that nothing in their repertoire could hope to leave any lasting damage.
With thundering steps, the abomination practically oozed up onto my island, all four legs standing firmly upon my territory for the first time. A few steps brought it close enough to brush up against my trunk, and then it sunk its claws deep into the bark and tore a ginormous chunk of wood free. As easily as tearing apart cardboard, Deepholm’s monstrosity began to dig its way deeper and deeper towards my sanctum, and inevitable destruction. From beside my core, a loud snap rang out as the inspector’s white-knuckle grip finally crushed the handle of her kanabo.
“Damn it all, I can’t just sit here at let this happen! I have to–”
Whatever she was about to say was cut off as she took her first step forward, weapon raised with the intent to join the fray. Instantly she was beset by floating swords made of light on all sides, not even given enough time to swear before they all plunged into her body. With a gasp Lydia fell to the floor, covered in wounds. She’d managed to use her ki to shift the trajectory of enough blades away from her vital organs, but she was still grievously wounded and wouldn’t be doing any fighting any time soon.
In what felt like no time at all, the fleshy abomination had reached the final bit of wood separating me from the outside world. With a psychic scream of determination, Leonardo charged forth, combining his life and kinetic affinities to try and brace that final barrier, but his efforts were carelessly brushed aside as the bear’s claws crashed through anyways, collapsing a pile of splinted timber down upon my peaceful crafter. From above and behind, Alexa had joined the twins in trying to drag the enemy scion back, but with barely a sliver of mana left between the three of them, they were little more than flies buzzing uselessly through the air to it.
Fully exposed to the outside world for the first time since my birth into this world, I was now face to face with the monstrosity as it raised its claws for one final strike. But oddly, all the fear and terror that had frozen me still before was utterly absent. I couldn’t even focus on the looming mountain of death in front of me, nor on the panicked shrieks of my scions as they struggled to the last. Rather, my gaze fell upon the prone form of the very first scion I had designated. My strongest defender, and the most earnest girl you would ever meet. With my focus beside her, I could tell that my brave girl was just barely hanging onto life, but she wouldn’t last long at this rate. Every shaky breath was accompanied by a wave of anguish washing over the bond.
Even without a proper physical form, I knelt beside her and gathered her up into one final embrace. I’m so sorry Jackie. The UI might call you guys scions, but truthfully you have all been a family to me, right from the start. I never had one, back in my previous life, so I know I must have messed up so many times, in so many ways. But even still, I had a blast getting to know each and every one of you, wishing for each day to stretch into infinity so I could enjoy our time together forevermore. But I’ve failed you, I’ve failed you all. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a life full of happier days, and I hope whatever comes in the next life, you can forgive me.
“You’ve been the best daughter I could have ever asked for. I love you.”
Jackie PoV
Everything hurts. My ears won’t stop ringing, and everything around me is moving in super slow motion. Through blurry eyes, I can see my arm lying just out of reach, still clutching my bow tightly, well, half of it anyways. Further away, I can see the blurry shape of the gross thing from Deepholm tearing its way through Mama’s tree. The twins and Alexa were swooping around behind it, but there was no stopping the beast anymore. Pain throbbed through my chest, my heart heavy as it slowly pumped my blood out onto the ground.
I’d failed, again. Right when it mattered most. Some huntress I’d turned out to be. Sure I was able to handle the regular invaders, but against every enemy that ever posed a serious threat, I’d been beaten every time. When I first lost to Miss Lydia, it hadn’t been so bad. Mama told me to learn from it and grow stronger for next time. I’d been useless too against those water birds on the first day. So I trained, and then I trained and I trained and I trained some more. Till the calluses on my paws were bleeding, I practiced every day.
For some reason Mama didn’t like that though, so she forced me to take breaks pretty regularly after that. At first, it felt like she didn’t have faith that my efforts would help with anything, but that feeling faded pretty quickly. She’d always have a bowl of those red fruits she calls strawberries ready for me by her core. Then when I would get settled in beside her and begin munching on the sweet fruit, she would tell me unbelievable stories about the world she remembers from her past life.
Apparently, her old world had jackalopes too, or at least stories of them. Mama says they supposedly had lightning in their veins they could move so fast. Lightning! The big flashes in the sky that make the air go boom. That stuff! The jackalopes from Mama’s world must be really amazing if they could do that. Nervously, I asked her a bit more about it, feeling rather inadequate by comparison, but she ended up talking too much about how technically lightning is in every living creature, but just really really small amounts of it? And something even more confusing about something called eel-ektons that makes it charge based on if they’re in a good mood or not?
Mama does that a lot, going off on tangents about difficult subjects for a long period of time, but even though I couldn’t understand most of it, it is nice just to sit back and listen to her speak. Eventually, she would always notice her rambling, and swap to asking me questions instead. I felt really proud when she asked me so much about my experience training with ki, and later on aether as well. She’d always thank me for my hard work, and for helping her figure out how things work in this world. It made me happy to think that Mama needed me, and that all my efforts were slowly paying off.
And it really felt like I had been improving too! I’d wrangled all the rowdy brawlers into line, and chased off that group of novices. But then that big flying scion came and knocked me out of the fight before I could even tell it was coming. Kelvin was barely a few days old and he had to handle that nasty bat all on his own! And despite all the work I put into developing my aether, I then lost to Miss Lydia again right after that. It felt like I was stuck in place, running as hard as I could but never getting anywhere with it. I did my best to hide it from Mama since she’s so perceptive, but it really hurt.
And now, even after all the faith and strength Mama poured into me, I’d still managed to let her and everybody else down. They’re all going to die, because of me. I’m not sure which is worse at this point, the pain from my injuries or the pain from my failures washing over me. I watched through bleary eyes as the gross bear tore open the deepest part of the tree, and revealed Mama’s core for all the world to see. It’d been a few weeks since our last break together, so when I saw the soft green glow of Mama’s core, it stirred up a weird mix of relief and regret in my heart. I’d missed that comforting glow, but also the only reason I could see it now is because I’d doomed it to oblivion.
Grief filled me up to the brim, and all I could do is wordlessly apologize over and over again.
To my surprise, however, I could feel her presence nearby, and that comforting warmth brushed aside my apologies to fill our bond with light instead. I don’t get it, why is she here? Why is she focusing on me, when the enemy is literally right in front of her core, staring her down? Why is she wasting her time on me when I can barely even move anymore?! And even if I could, we both know I would just let her down some more. So why, why does it feel like I’m back by her side, listening to her tell stories at length, feeling so comfy and secure?
“I……ry….J..ki”
Go on, go! Leave already and focus on someone else, maybe they have a chance to save you, to fix things. Haven’t I failed you enough? I, I can’t do anything but disappoint you. I…I can’t be like the jackalopes from your stories Mama. I’m not good enough for that. I’m sorry.
“..b..en….f…….to me……..t…….ro……sta…”
Despite shoving my weakness, my numerous defeats and doubts to the front and finally showing Mama everything I’d tried to keep hidden from her through the bond, absolutely nothing changed. If anything, the feeling of closeness only increased and that warm feeling wrapped me up even tighter, never wavering for a moment. For a moment, the ringing in my head subsided, but my eyes must still be playing tricks because I thought I could see a bunch of golden sparkles floating in the air around me, forming the vague outline of a person with her arms wrapped around me. The next words came through confidently and clearly, and finally put a name to the feeling I always felt when Mama’s attention was on me.
“I love you.”
…Why? When I’ve already let you down so many times, when you’re about to die because of me…why spend your last moments on this worthless rabbit who couldn’t save anything? The bond held no answers for me, only that same persistent warmth, refusing to relent for so much as a moment. Over in the tree, the bear monster had raised its claw into the air, readying the final strike that would take Mama away for good. A few tears slipped free from my eyes and dropped down to join the blood at my feet. Belatedly, I realized that at some point I must have stood up, but that doesn’t really matter right now.
In fact, standing there, basking in the feeling of being wrapped up in Mama’s love, it felt like a lot of things didn’t matter. My doubts, my fear of not being good enough, and the pain of being proven right. It all felt like wisps of smoke being carried away on the wind. They scattered against the constant reinforcement pouring out from the bond, powerless before it. She’d seen all of my shortcomings, witnessed every downfall, and yet this was always her response. Yellow sparks crackled through my fur, and larger arcs of energy began to flicker back and forth between the branches of the antlers on my head.
Slowly, all the world began to fall away. The ground beneath my feet, the stench of death hanging upon the wind, even the tree itself, along with the slow-motion bear scion bringing its claws down for the kill. There was just me, and there in the distance, the light of Mama’s core, calling me home like a beacon. Under her light, I remembered the simple truth that Mama has always seen and understood so much more than me, guiding me as best she could and celebrating both my success and failures alongside me. For this moment in time, all those complicated and difficult subjects stopped being important. All those times spent hoping I could measure up to the lofty heights she spoke about seemed a silly waste of time. All I had to do was stop trying to become something else. Maybe, just maybe, I was already everything that Mama could see in me, and I just hadn’t realized it yet.
I crouch down low to the ground, those strange sparks increasing in intensity, coiling inside of me like a power I never knew I had. My ears and paws were starting to char black from all the energy flowing through me, but I didn’t feel a thing. After all, none of that mattered. With a mighty leap, I left the feeling of solid earth behind. Wait for me just a little longer, ok Mama? I’m coming to your side.
Blood flash-boiled.
Flesh charred into shattered lumps of charcoal.
Bones fragmented and caved under the tremendous forces at play.
Jackie never got to experience the joy where in this, her latest challenge to a race between herself and the sound carried along through the air, the wind finally lost.
Neither did she get to see how, for the first time in its life, the bear scion’s body was lifted fully up off of the ground and flung to the side like gravity had suddenly reversed its direction.
But perhaps..., someday, there would come a time when she’s relaxing with a bowl of those delectable strawberries once more, and she’ll get to listen to Mama’s voice as she regales her with another one of her wild stories. A story where one little rabbit made all the difference in the world, and through her actions did save the day. Now wouldn’t that be nice?
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Author Notes://
Here it is, the big one! I've had this chapter in mind since before I even started writing this story. In fact, it's what made me say fuck it, I'm gonna try writing it out and see what happens. Sorry again for the long delay on this chapter, I didn't want to split it into anything smaller, so it ended up pretty long. Also, yay! First scion PoV, just like you guys wanted right? xD
I hope you enjoyed reading this part, and I'll see you all again next time for the final conclusion to the Deepholm Arc.
submitted by Calypthea to HFY [link] [comments]
Without that horrendous bat flapping around and causing a mess for me, I'm now able to focus all of my efforts on bringing down the blinded bear colossus. It is unfortunate that I lost too many owls in the aerial battle, and that Alexa is too exhausted to help out herself, as that means I won't have any reinforcements available from them coming to Jackie’s aid any time soon. That being said, I know just the fish who might be able to make an early return in their stead.
Since they’ve been resting since the start of the battle, Selene and Hecate have been able to recuperate a bit of their mana pools already. Considering that I’m near 100% confident that it doesn’t matter how much the big bear regenerates if it can’t breathe, plus the fact that it doesn’t take too much mana just to hold some water in place, there’s not much reason to keep them benched much longer. Somehow though, I doubt it’s going to be quite that easy to take the bear colossus down. So why don’t we improve the chances of success a bit with all of this free manna I find myself currently swimming in?
Thanks to the sheer quantity of invaders Deepholm is swarming me in, I’ve got more mana to make use of than ever before, and I’d be a fool not to put it to good use. The steep requirement of having to pay 4 times the mana as any of my other scions to upgrade them is hardly an issue at this moment, so I begin the process of pouring my power into my fish. All the while, I keep an eye trained on the battle at hand, waiting for whatever it is the bear will try next. Deepholm scions don’t just meekly turn over and accept their defeat after all.
While I’m only halfway through providing upgrades to my fish scions, my caution is proven entirely warranted as the bear scion bellows its frustration and rage at the top of its lungs. Unable to proceed along a straight path due to Jackie’s constant interference, the colossus hunkers down for a moment in my lake and covers its head with its paws. Then, as soon as its eyes have had a chance to regenerate once more, it peeks out and gets a lock on my location before Jackie inevitably puts more arrows through the freshly grown eyes. This time it hardly pays the attack any mind, reaching down to its flank with those huge claws and ripping free a sizable chunk of its own flesh. With a great heave, the bear scion sent the chunk sailing through the air where it crashed with a meaty splat against the trunk of my tree.
First of all, …gross. Secondly, that bear has surprisingly good aim to be able to nail the part of my tree trunk that is perfectly in line with where my core is. Lastly, heh-heh, I’m in danger. Unable to use its sight, and no longer able to rely on the bat scion for its sonic guidance, the bear has resorted to using smell to guide its way. And what better trail to follow with one’s strong sense of smell than the stench of one’s own blood and viscera? Without a moment of hesitation, the bear scion is back on its feet, and charging forward once more.
This time, there’s truly nothing we can do to stop its advance, the bear’s nose is too big to fully destroy the bear’s sense of smell, even with Jackie’s arrows desperately blasting pieces off of it. With a tremor that I can feel throughout the entire island, the bear scion slams headfirst into the high cliffs, which only serves to daze the beast for but a moment before it starts awkwardly clambering upwards. I curse vehemently, at this rate the colossus will reach my tree before I’m done with upgrading the twins. I can cut it short and make the current upgrade the last one, but it will still take a minute or so for the twins to become accustomed to their strengthened bodies.
It doesn’t take long for the bear’s claws to scramble against the top of the cliffs, digging in for extra purchase, shortly followed thereafter by the beast’s snarling and arrow-riddled cranium. The twins have only just finished absorbing the mana from the latest upgrade, they’re not going to make it in time. It is at that moment that my saviors made their gallant entry into the fray. Cutting a swathe through the remaining army of normal invaders charged not any of my scions, but the brave surviving members of my defensive forces. Having abandoned their defensive chokepoint in the entrance cave, a combined throng of brawler bunnies and leopards led the way as my froglings and flechette-pines provided cover fire. Beside me, I can feel the consternation roll off of Giorno as he tries to keep some semblance of organization in place amidst an attack that he had most certainly not ordered.
Though our tactics have done a great deal in leveling the playing field in the battle between denizens, there are still a lot of enemies left to deal with, and this attack will only open us up to many more unnecessary casualties. Underneath his annoyed countenance however, I do detect a hint of pride in their reckless attempts to buy me more time. An attempt that certainly pays its dividends.
With a series of tremendous leaps, the brawler bunnies and leopard forces bound up to the limbs of the bear scion and begin hacking away at it with sharp claws and stone swords. They scale up the beast, slashing at every joint and every digit along the way. The colossus roars in pain and slips from the cliffside as the tendons in each limb are systematically severed time and time again. But this moment of victory comes at far too steep a cost.
When the bear scion crashes back into the lake, its sheer mass flattens dozens of my brave denizens at a time. From there it thrashes about, crushing some more of my stalwart defenders and sending others flying through the air. Not wasting the opportunity, my denizens lead the enemy scion over to the remnants of the invader army, where both sides become equally devastated by the beast’s angry flailing. I try to call my denizens back, telling them to retreat, that they’d done enough already. When that failed, I resorted to using some of my mana to make it a direct order. Retreat already! The twins are on the way, swimming around the south side of the island as we speak. There’s no need for any more of you to die!
I can feel the mana drain away as the orders take hold, but then I got a unanimous response back through Alexa’s network. Every single one of them started the retreat and then volunteered themselves to be a rearguard to help cover the escape. Even though technically they were following through with my order, not a single denizen so much as turned around or took a single step backward. They were loopholing me! Those damnable, brave, fools were refusing to leave until my scions could arrive. Who the heck taught you bastards to test the limits of the rules and look for ways to bend them in your favor anyhow!?
It took less than a minute for my twins to arrive. But it took even less time for the bear colossus to finish with its rampage. Now the only living combatants faced each other over a lake stained to the same red as the bear scion’s eyes. As a healer, Selene has seen more than her fair share of nasty injuries, as well as plenty of corpses from my previous encounters with Deepholm’s invaders. But even still, all that experience could not have prepared her for the sight of the slaughter before her. All the violent thrashing had thoroughly frothed the water of the lake, but rather than help hide the bodies below with the white foam it only served to accentuate them by clinging to whatever pieces remained above water.
It left my poor fish heartbroken. Disgust and despair raged inside her alongside a powerful wave of guilt at not recovering fast enough to be able to come to their aid in time. I know, sweetie, I know. But those denizens out there? They bought us enough time to stop any more atrocities from happening. They bet everything on you two and Jackie, and now it’s time to make sure we don’t waste a single death. All that anguish and sorrow you’re feeling? I need you to use it. Use it to hone a blade in your heart to turn against those who spread such senseless violence. It’s time to take up the second half of the saint’s job and smite down that walking calamity of a bear. And you’re not alone, Hecate is right beside you along with Jackie, and together, I know you all can do this.
Pep talk done, Hecate gives her sister a loving nuzzle under her chin before turning her hate-filled eyes to the bear scion as well. She isn’t taking kindly to all the desolation wrought by the colossus either, and is especially pissed by how upset it is making her kind-hearted twin. The white crescent moon mark on her forehead glows faintly in response to her roiling emotions, while after a few deep breaths, Selene’s black crescent moon mark does the same, her eyes now steeled in vindictive determination.
As one, they lifted a massive ball of water into the air and slammed it into the bear scion’s face, completely covering it in a matter of seconds. Meanwhile, I begin the process of funneling mana into Jackie for her own upgrades. The beast hasn’t shown any magical capacity besides its regeneration, but who knows? Maybe it has something up its sleeve that would save it from the same fate as its companion. Better safe than sorry in this case, no?
Evidently, I was correct to prepare for the backup plan, because rather than struggle against the water bubble encasing its face, the bear colossus calmly slurped the water down. The vast amounts of suction overwhelmed the amount of mana the twins could use to keep the water in place, and so it simply disappeared down the beast’s gullet with a taunting smile that seemed to say, “Thanks for the refreshing drink, I was feeling rather parched”. Not a smidge of magic was used, or needed, to easily trounce my hopes of drowning our problems away. What stood before us surely could not be described as anything but the epitome of relentless brute force, a fact which has now been hammered home rather insultingly by the defeat of my plans through lung power of all things.
With a challenging roar, the bear plowed forward while ignoring the twin’s follow up attacks. Right, plan B it is then. If we can’t suffocate him, then we’ll just have to overwhelm his regeneration with more damage than it can keep up with! In but a moment the bear scion has slammed into my cliffside and begins scaling it once more. This time, Selene and Hecate are there to stop it from making any meaningful progress, their watery slashes biting deep into flesh and disabling limbs long enough for the next attack to land. Where Hecate’s attacks strike necrosis quickly follows, seeping into the flesh until the entire mass falls off to be replaced by newly regenerated meat. Meanwhile, Selen’s strikes shine with the radiant power of her light mana, her slices digging deep through muscles, tendons, and all the way to the bones beneath.
Together they manage to keep the colossus pinned in place to the craggy wall of my island, allowing Jackie all the time she needs to hop around and unleash a torrent of her aether arrows. Rather than strike into the beast herself however, I have her shoot the cliffs themselves where she then sprouts much more massive vines than usual to grasp at the enemy scion and bind it in place. I know that the twins will run out of mana long before I can bleed this invader dry in a battle of attrition, so instead my goal here is to line Jackie up for one big shot to put an end to this colossus once and for all.
Bounding up to the top of the cliff, right over the massive head of the bear, Jackie grows the limbs of her bow out further than even its longbow form, one side planting itself firmly into the stone. With a mighty heave, she stands upon the bow’s limbs and pushes down with all the strength in her legs while hoisting up on the drawstring with her arms. A ballista-sized arrow grows into place, aimed straight down to the skull of the beast below. Through this, Jackie channels the full force of her wind aether. With my hand on her back, I speak softly to into her mind through the bond we share.
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Let’s do this Jackie, together!”
Through my hand I channel even more mana into Jackie than before, really packing it into her as fast as the upgrades can handle. 2 more, then 5, then 10. The power swirls around her like a maelstrom that would have left anybody else gritting their teeth to ride out the storm. But not my Jackie. As much as I pushed the mana into her, she matched me by pulling it into her control right away, weaving it into her aether flawlessly. Around the arrow tip the air began to swirl, faster and faster, like a drill turned up to turbo speeds.
This obviously did not go unnoticed by the bear scion, but it was too late for the behemoth to avoid its fate. Bound up tightly in Jackie’s vines while Selen and Hecate kept its prodigious strength locked away through their continuous onslaught. Their mana has already depleted dangerously low once again, but their combined efforts have bought us all the opportunity we need. All the enemy can do is flounder uselessly in its restraints, glaring balefully at Jackie and its impending doom.
With a boom the arrow disappears from Jackie’s bow, boring a path straight through the entire length of the bear scion and continuing deep into the ground beneath it. Jackei’s wind arrow had accelerated freely without any resistance, twisting the air in front of it out of the way and turning the space in front into a devastating drill. Meanwhile, just behind the shaft, the collapse of the resulting vacuum pushed the arrow along even faster than any projectile has ever flown before in this world.
The twisting motion of the air and the shockwaves from the collapsing vacuum bubble didn’t just serve to speed up the arrow however. Like a delayed reaction after the arrow had already sped through, I watched as a spray of blood exploded from the bear’s body, accompanied by the splash of water beneath its feet. I watched as the beast’s jaw was ripped away to hang loosely by a strip of flesh on the right side of its head. From there the arrow had traveled down into the beast’s shoulder and blazed a path all the way through its chest cavity, the aftershocks ripping the bear’s body apart and leaving its left side barely attached anymore. It looked as if some giant had cleaved its axe down the bear’s side, all the way from the shoulders to the hips.
The scion had managed to avoid an instantly fatal blow by twisting its head as far to the side as possible, but that proved to only postpone the inevitable at this point. With that much damage to the internal organs, it couldn’t hope to recover in time. We’d done it, we’d won!
Joyfully, I turned to Giorno, ready to send some mana down to Kelvin next, but what I saw froze me in my tracks. This whole battle, Giorno had been his usual calm and composed self, issuing orders and cooly commanding our forces. But now, he was trembling with a visual amount of fear, his skin blanched of all color. Thoroughly spooked, I racked my brain for anything I might have missed, but I got my answer sooner than expected.
“Kill it, kill it now! We don’t have any time, finish it before it's too late! It’s going to do something to the bear!”
Dutifully, Jackie and the twins ready their next attacks to hasten the bear scion’s demise, but something Giorno said stuck out to me. Wait, the bear is the subject of his sentence, not the object for some reason. But…, that would have to mean…
With wide eyes, I come to a dreadful realization, I never got a mana notification for the bat scion. No, no! No WAY that bastard survived, right? Feeling the sneaking march of dread closing in on my throat, I check the spot where the bat scion had crashed into my island. There it lay, wings in tatters and its chest caved in from impacting the ground, lying in a pool of its own blood. By all accounts, it appears to be dead. But that’s when I notice something off. The pool of blood is moving.
Right before my eyes, I watch as little bubbles capture air inside, and then get mixed in the blood as it slowly circulates out of the lethal wounds and then back into the bat’s body. It must have kept conscious through the crash and is now using its blood magic to just barely keep itself alive. Would that be all the bat was up to, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. But no, all around the crash were scattered splotches of fresh blood, drawn out into a foreboding set of interlocking symbols when viewed from above. The bat was casting something, using its own life as fuel. With a weak wheeze in place of a laugh, the bat scion spoke for one final time.
“Glory be to the Mountainlord. Blood Arts: Sacrifice.”
Accompanied by the ding of a new notification, I watched in horror as all the blood was forcibly wrested from the bat scion’s fresh corpse, instantly mummifying it into a dried-out husk. Then that mass of brackish liquid moved faster than it had any right to, thin tendrils shooting out from the main body quickly dragging the blob to the edge of the island. Before any of my scions could react, it had already latched onto the dying bear’s head and begun pouring itself forcibly through every orifice it could reach.
Writhing in agony at the black-red liquid shoving itself down its throat, nostrils, and eye sockets, my scions lashed into the bear’s body with as much strength as they could, but to no avail. The wounds would begin closing before their attacks could even finish, and from the bear’s torso sprouted several bloody tentacles which wrapped themselves around the dangling left side, pulling it back into place with a wet squelch. The newfound regeneration didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, stop there however. All over the colossus’s body something churned beneath its hide.
Every single muscle in the behemoth’s body squirmed as it doubled, then tripled in size, in some places rupturing the skin as it struggles to contain the roiling mass of flesh. Muscle fibers sprung from the fur like weeds sprouting out of fertile ground, twitching and flailing about looking for something to connect to, until the beast’s entire form was nothing but a bulging mass of undulating flesh vaguely shaped like a bear. From the monstrosities head, the repaired jaw split open far wider than anything still attached to the skull to allow, revealing row after row of sharp fangs growing into place all the way down its throat.
With an unearthly screech, the monstrosity easily tore itself free of the vines and took a swipe at Jackie with its misshapen foreleg. Nobody must have told Deepholm that inflating your musculature so much is a direct reduction in flexibility however, because the blow was slow and cumbersome, allowing Jackie to easily vault backwards out of reach. But Deepholm didn’t need to care about such silly things like flexibility, or the limits of a physical body, as halfway through the swing a series of cracks could be heard as the bear monstrosity’s muscles broke every single bone in its arm, causing it to suddenly stretch out on just the muscles and ligaments, increasing in speed as the limb turned into an impromptu flesh whip tipped with giant claws.
Caught completely by surprise, Jackie could only try to form a hasty shield of roots with her life aether, but the abomination’s claws sundered it with ease, cleaving through her bow, then her arm, and finally raking across her torso. My girl hit the ground, hard, and didn’t get back up. Meanwhile, the twins were still desperately flinging any kind of attack they could think at the bear horror, all to no avail. This affront to nature had such strong regeneration now that nothing in their repertoire could hope to leave any lasting damage.
With thundering steps, the abomination practically oozed up onto my island, all four legs standing firmly upon my territory for the first time. A few steps brought it close enough to brush up against my trunk, and then it sunk its claws deep into the bark and tore a ginormous chunk of wood free. As easily as tearing apart cardboard, Deepholm’s monstrosity began to dig its way deeper and deeper towards my sanctum, and inevitable destruction. From beside my core, a loud snap rang out as the inspector’s white-knuckle grip finally crushed the handle of her kanabo.
“Damn it all, I can’t just sit here at let this happen! I have to–”
Whatever she was about to say was cut off as she took her first step forward, weapon raised with the intent to join the fray. Instantly she was beset by floating swords made of light on all sides, not even given enough time to swear before they all plunged into her body. With a gasp Lydia fell to the floor, covered in wounds. She’d managed to use her ki to shift the trajectory of enough blades away from her vital organs, but she was still grievously wounded and wouldn’t be doing any fighting any time soon.
In what felt like no time at all, the fleshy abomination had reached the final bit of wood separating me from the outside world. With a psychic scream of determination, Leonardo charged forth, combining his life and kinetic affinities to try and brace that final barrier, but his efforts were carelessly brushed aside as the bear’s claws crashed through anyways, collapsing a pile of splinted timber down upon my peaceful crafter. From above and behind, Alexa had joined the twins in trying to drag the enemy scion back, but with barely a sliver of mana left between the three of them, they were little more than flies buzzing uselessly through the air to it.
Fully exposed to the outside world for the first time since my birth into this world, I was now face to face with the monstrosity as it raised its claws for one final strike. But oddly, all the fear and terror that had frozen me still before was utterly absent. I couldn’t even focus on the looming mountain of death in front of me, nor on the panicked shrieks of my scions as they struggled to the last. Rather, my gaze fell upon the prone form of the very first scion I had designated. My strongest defender, and the most earnest girl you would ever meet. With my focus beside her, I could tell that my brave girl was just barely hanging onto life, but she wouldn’t last long at this rate. Every shaky breath was accompanied by a wave of anguish washing over the bond.
Even without a proper physical form, I knelt beside her and gathered her up into one final embrace. I’m so sorry Jackie. The UI might call you guys scions, but truthfully you have all been a family to me, right from the start. I never had one, back in my previous life, so I know I must have messed up so many times, in so many ways. But even still, I had a blast getting to know each and every one of you, wishing for each day to stretch into infinity so I could enjoy our time together forevermore. But I’ve failed you, I’ve failed you all. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a life full of happier days, and I hope whatever comes in the next life, you can forgive me.
“You’ve been the best daughter I could have ever asked for. I love you.”
Jackie PoV
Everything hurts. My ears won’t stop ringing, and everything around me is moving in super slow motion. Through blurry eyes, I can see my arm lying just out of reach, still clutching my bow tightly, well, half of it anyways. Further away, I can see the blurry shape of the gross thing from Deepholm tearing its way through Mama’s tree. The twins and Alexa were swooping around behind it, but there was no stopping the beast anymore. Pain throbbed through my chest, my heart heavy as it slowly pumped my blood out onto the ground.
I’d failed, again. Right when it mattered most. Some huntress I’d turned out to be. Sure I was able to handle the regular invaders, but against every enemy that ever posed a serious threat, I’d been beaten every time. When I first lost to Miss Lydia, it hadn’t been so bad. Mama told me to learn from it and grow stronger for next time. I’d been useless too against those water birds on the first day. So I trained, and then I trained and I trained and I trained some more. Till the calluses on my paws were bleeding, I practiced every day.
For some reason Mama didn’t like that though, so she forced me to take breaks pretty regularly after that. At first, it felt like she didn’t have faith that my efforts would help with anything, but that feeling faded pretty quickly. She’d always have a bowl of those red fruits she calls strawberries ready for me by her core. Then when I would get settled in beside her and begin munching on the sweet fruit, she would tell me unbelievable stories about the world she remembers from her past life.
Apparently, her old world had jackalopes too, or at least stories of them. Mama says they supposedly had lightning in their veins they could move so fast. Lightning! The big flashes in the sky that make the air go boom. That stuff! The jackalopes from Mama’s world must be really amazing if they could do that. Nervously, I asked her a bit more about it, feeling rather inadequate by comparison, but she ended up talking too much about how technically lightning is in every living creature, but just really really small amounts of it? And something even more confusing about something called eel-ektons that makes it charge based on if they’re in a good mood or not?
Mama does that a lot, going off on tangents about difficult subjects for a long period of time, but even though I couldn’t understand most of it, it is nice just to sit back and listen to her speak. Eventually, she would always notice her rambling, and swap to asking me questions instead. I felt really proud when she asked me so much about my experience training with ki, and later on aether as well. She’d always thank me for my hard work, and for helping her figure out how things work in this world. It made me happy to think that Mama needed me, and that all my efforts were slowly paying off.
And it really felt like I had been improving too! I’d wrangled all the rowdy brawlers into line, and chased off that group of novices. But then that big flying scion came and knocked me out of the fight before I could even tell it was coming. Kelvin was barely a few days old and he had to handle that nasty bat all on his own! And despite all the work I put into developing my aether, I then lost to Miss Lydia again right after that. It felt like I was stuck in place, running as hard as I could but never getting anywhere with it. I did my best to hide it from Mama since she’s so perceptive, but it really hurt.
And now, even after all the faith and strength Mama poured into me, I’d still managed to let her and everybody else down. They’re all going to die, because of me. I’m not sure which is worse at this point, the pain from my injuries or the pain from my failures washing over me. I watched through bleary eyes as the gross bear tore open the deepest part of the tree, and revealed Mama’s core for all the world to see. It’d been a few weeks since our last break together, so when I saw the soft green glow of Mama’s core, it stirred up a weird mix of relief and regret in my heart. I’d missed that comforting glow, but also the only reason I could see it now is because I’d doomed it to oblivion.
Grief filled me up to the brim, and all I could do is wordlessly apologize over and over again.
To my surprise, however, I could feel her presence nearby, and that comforting warmth brushed aside my apologies to fill our bond with light instead. I don’t get it, why is she here? Why is she focusing on me, when the enemy is literally right in front of her core, staring her down? Why is she wasting her time on me when I can barely even move anymore?! And even if I could, we both know I would just let her down some more. So why, why does it feel like I’m back by her side, listening to her tell stories at length, feeling so comfy and secure?
“I……ry….J..ki”
Go on, go! Leave already and focus on someone else, maybe they have a chance to save you, to fix things. Haven’t I failed you enough? I, I can’t do anything but disappoint you. I…I can’t be like the jackalopes from your stories Mama. I’m not good enough for that. I’m sorry.
“..b..en….f…….to me……..t…….ro……sta…”
Despite shoving my weakness, my numerous defeats and doubts to the front and finally showing Mama everything I’d tried to keep hidden from her through the bond, absolutely nothing changed. If anything, the feeling of closeness only increased and that warm feeling wrapped me up even tighter, never wavering for a moment. For a moment, the ringing in my head subsided, but my eyes must still be playing tricks because I thought I could see a bunch of golden sparkles floating in the air around me, forming the vague outline of a person with her arms wrapped around me. The next words came through confidently and clearly, and finally put a name to the feeling I always felt when Mama’s attention was on me.
“I love you.”
…Why? When I’ve already let you down so many times, when you’re about to die because of me…why spend your last moments on this worthless rabbit who couldn’t save anything? The bond held no answers for me, only that same persistent warmth, refusing to relent for so much as a moment. Over in the tree, the bear monster had raised its claw into the air, readying the final strike that would take Mama away for good. A few tears slipped free from my eyes and dropped down to join the blood at my feet. Belatedly, I realized that at some point I must have stood up, but that doesn’t really matter right now.
In fact, standing there, basking in the feeling of being wrapped up in Mama’s love, it felt like a lot of things didn’t matter. My doubts, my fear of not being good enough, and the pain of being proven right. It all felt like wisps of smoke being carried away on the wind. They scattered against the constant reinforcement pouring out from the bond, powerless before it. She’d seen all of my shortcomings, witnessed every downfall, and yet this was always her response. Yellow sparks crackled through my fur, and larger arcs of energy began to flicker back and forth between the branches of the antlers on my head.
Slowly, all the world began to fall away. The ground beneath my feet, the stench of death hanging upon the wind, even the tree itself, along with the slow-motion bear scion bringing its claws down for the kill. There was just me, and there in the distance, the light of Mama’s core, calling me home like a beacon. Under her light, I remembered the simple truth that Mama has always seen and understood so much more than me, guiding me as best she could and celebrating both my success and failures alongside me. For this moment in time, all those complicated and difficult subjects stopped being important. All those times spent hoping I could measure up to the lofty heights she spoke about seemed a silly waste of time. All I had to do was stop trying to become something else. Maybe, just maybe, I was already everything that Mama could see in me, and I just hadn’t realized it yet.
I crouch down low to the ground, those strange sparks increasing in intensity, coiling inside of me like a power I never knew I had. My ears and paws were starting to char black from all the energy flowing through me, but I didn’t feel a thing. After all, none of that mattered. With a mighty leap, I left the feeling of solid earth behind. Wait for me just a little longer, ok Mama? I’m coming to your side.
Blood flash-boiled.
Flesh charred into shattered lumps of charcoal.
Bones fragmented and caved under the tremendous forces at play.
Jackie never got to experience the joy where in this, her latest challenge to a race between herself and the sound carried along through the air, the wind finally lost.
Neither did she get to see how, for the first time in its life, the bear scion’s body was lifted fully up off of the ground and flung to the side like gravity had suddenly reversed its direction.
But perhaps..., someday, there would come a time when she’s relaxing with a bowl of those delectable strawberries once more, and she’ll get to listen to Mama’s voice as she regales her with another one of her wild stories. A story where one little rabbit made all the difference in the world, and through her actions did save the day. Now wouldn’t that be nice?
Author Notes://
Here it is, the big one! I've had this chapter in mind since before I even started writing this story. In fact, it's what made me say fuck it, I'm gonna try writing it out and see what happens. Sorry again for the long delay on this chapter, I didn't want to split it into anything smaller, so it ended up pretty long. Also, yay! First scion PoV, just like you guys wanted right? xD
I hope you enjoyed reading this part, and I'll see you all again next time for the final conclusion to the Deepholm Arc.
2023.06.10 02:06 poetryflex 53 [M4F] relatively innocent coffee or wine dates in Berkeley or Oakland and maybe San Francisco
Looking for a woman who can stimulate the muscles both between my ears and my legs for a time.
Hobbies include travel, reading lots to be a smarter man, photography, hiking. Not that we’ll do much of that while on opposite sides of a table or sitting on a park bench.
You are attractive to people other than those who just have to say so. Try as I may I am not attracted to size large anything or extremes of identitarian customization and styling. Any age and race but I know white and Northeast Asian best if that matters to you. Any status. Count to ten and guess why.
I look presentable, younger than I am so don’t be disappointed, and mostly unremarkable in a good way. I’m told I look like an artist and talk like a professor. Very well-educated. White. 5’11”. I don’t smoke anything ever.
I don’t want sex. Not this way anyway. Just want to meet someone and exchange thoughts and glances.
On the off chance you respond please respect my spam guard and bullshit detector by opening with no less than three complete sentences. Please also know ahead of time that if we’ve been talking then you’re suddenly unresponsive to chat for more than 24 hours without telling me that’ll happen when you come back I’ll have blocked you. I’m here to chat only about chatting in person and will be focused on that goal of meeting someone in person. I know there are plenty of men on here who are just desperate to just talk with anyone pretending to be a woman. I’m not one of them. Thank you for your understanding.
submitted by poetryflex to SFr4r [link] [comments]
Hobbies include travel, reading lots to be a smarter man, photography, hiking. Not that we’ll do much of that while on opposite sides of a table or sitting on a park bench.
You are attractive to people other than those who just have to say so. Try as I may I am not attracted to size large anything or extremes of identitarian customization and styling. Any age and race but I know white and Northeast Asian best if that matters to you. Any status. Count to ten and guess why.
I look presentable, younger than I am so don’t be disappointed, and mostly unremarkable in a good way. I’m told I look like an artist and talk like a professor. Very well-educated. White. 5’11”. I don’t smoke anything ever.
I don’t want sex. Not this way anyway. Just want to meet someone and exchange thoughts and glances.
On the off chance you respond please respect my spam guard and bullshit detector by opening with no less than three complete sentences. Please also know ahead of time that if we’ve been talking then you’re suddenly unresponsive to chat for more than 24 hours without telling me that’ll happen when you come back I’ll have blocked you. I’m here to chat only about chatting in person and will be focused on that goal of meeting someone in person. I know there are plenty of men on here who are just desperate to just talk with anyone pretending to be a woman. I’m not one of them. Thank you for your understanding.
2023.06.10 00:44 ArcAngel98 The Way of the Dragon Monk- Part 1
Dracula: World of War --- The Violet Reaper ---- Humans Don’t Make Good Familiars Book 1 ---- The Lonely World --- Discord ---- YouTube --- My Patreon --- My Author's Page --- ArcAngel98 Wiki ---- The Next Best Hero ---- HDMGF Book 2 ---- Jess and Blinx: The Wizard ---- The Questing Parties ---- The Immortal Legends: The Van Helsing
Endless nothingness. A blank void that stretches into infinity, and stops only at the border between here and there. That is this place, called Ofo. But that is just the name I happen to use. Some call it the ‘Null’, others refer to it as ‘The Timeless Realm’. All of them are fine, I suppose, but I prefer Ofo. I’ve been here for longer than I ever cared to keep track of, and longer than I could likely count in millennia. Long enough to forget my name anyway. The wizards who accidentally trap themselves here, and the criminals who were exiled here all call me Agba, and that works fine for me.
As I sit in a rock out cropping of my den, a small moss-covered rock brought here by accident eons ago, I gaze out into the nothingness and think. Well, it isn’t quite nothing anymore. Ever since a wizard called Helmgarthin created a spell to bring people here on purpose, there has been a lot more things floating around. Once, it was just me, and the dying wizards, and they certainly weren’t good company. Occasionally, I’d see a void worm roaming around, but they never got close. But now, many things exist. Loose dirt drifts around, and the corpses of dumb adventurers who didn’t realize that a void means there’s no air. There’s even a city nearby now. It’s filled with air, magic, and living people. One day, I might visit there; it does get lonely in Ofo occasionally.
As I watched the dirt drift around, and the city float aimlessly in the distance, I felt a presence come from behind me. It was small, and weak, so I did not mind it. Using my magic, I turned my den towards the direction of the creature, and saw it was a humanoid wearing a fine suit of armor, and standing upon a ship propelled by magic. It connected our minds, and introduced itself.
“Great Dragon Agba, I am Mel Thoron, Crown Prince of Thoronia.” The humanoid said.
“What do you seek?” I asked, skipping past this part. Over the years, many have come to me wanting something, or asking something, and I have grown bored of their silver tongues.
“I seek to invite you to my coronation.” He said, catching me off guard for a moment. Surprised, I uncoiled my long body, shook lose my limbs, stretched out my wings, and stood to my full height. I felt his fear through our link, but paid it no mind.
“For what purpose?” I asked, finishing my stretch.
“You… you have been our neighbor for centuries, we wish to welcome you to see our city.” He lied. He was clearly unaccustomed to using a mental link, and left his true undefended. He held malice, greed, fear, and betrayal in his mind.
“You seek to slay me. To bring me to your city, and fight me in your den, where you have the advantage.” I said plainly, but amused.
“No Agba, you misunderstand!” He stuttered over his words. Peering further into his mind, I saw his desire for glory.
“I do not, but I will play along.” I chuckled. “Let us go to your so called coronation.”
“Oh… um, yes.” Mel said, confused. The ship turned, and sailed through the void to the city. Small rocks would bounce off the wooden hull with hollow sounds as it glided swiftly on the waves of magic that filled its sails. We arrived at the city, surrounded by a large magical dome, and a field of dirt; some of which floated gently in its wake.
Crossing through the dome, a wave of magic passed through me, attempting to stop me, but failing. As the ship and prince landed in an open field of grass and stone pathways, I set myself down beside them. The grass tickled my scales, and the dirt settled nicely under me, cradling my body from my tail to my back legs quite pleasantly.
“Ah, this alone was worth the trip. Your kingdom has fine soil, Crown Prince Mel.”
“Um… thank you.” He said, using his mouth and sounds this time. I noticed it when I arrived, but paid no attention to it, but this dome was filled with cold, crips air. For the first time in eons, I filled my lungs, and even got a bit chilly. As I breathed out, flames poured from my mouth, frightening the prince.
“Ah, I had forgotten about that.” I apologized, and expelled the last of the air from my lungs. “I will use my thoughts, from now on, Prince Mel, so that I do not ruin your air.”
“Yes, quite.” He said, hiding his emotions from his face. “Please, follow me. The coronation is this way.”
“You continue with this charade? Well, if it means so much to you…”
“Truly great Agba, I do not…” he sighed, “if you know why I invited you, why did you come?” He asked. His voice was even, and calm, but anger and pride swelled in his mind.
“Why not?”
“You believe you can defeat us?” He asked, as he stopped walking, and placed a hand on the sword on his hip.
“I do not know, but perhaps we can learn something from this.” I mused. While he stopped, I continued to walk forwards, in the direction we had both been going. By the time I had answered his question, the last of my body was just passing his.
“We shall see,” he muttered, the followed. After a little more walking, we stood before a great set of doors, by human standards. Behind the door, were dozens of small weak presences, each with pitiful magic weapons and armor.
A fine trap for a fool. I thought to myself. I had to kneel down and slither my body to reach the inside. Once my head was through, a large metal object fall down atop me, and I heard shouting from all sides. The metal object fell onto the base of my neck, but broke straight away against my scales. Looking around, I saw several men in armor cheering. Carefully, I slithered the rest of my body through, which silenced the cheers completely. “I apologize again, Prince Mel. It seems I broke this.” Picking up the remains of the metal object, which seemed to be some form of large blade, I placed it gently against the wall that housed the rest of its parts. Prince Mel however, had no response, but simply glanced back and forth between the blade and my neck.
“No, it seems I must apologize. I greatly underestimated your strength, Agba.” Prince Mel finally said.
“Have you learned anything yet?” I asked.
“That it will take more that a blade to slice your scales.” He shook his head.
“Indeed, but I was hoping for a more profound revelation. Perhaps on your next attempt?”
At that, he seemed shocked. “You… what?”
“Is this the only attempt you had planned?” I wondered.
“Well… if you would give me a moment.” He said, and called over several of the men in armor. After a short while, they left, but returned quickly with potion vials, rope, and crossbows. “This will do you in, certainly!” Mel boasted.
“A hasty plan can be worse than none at all, you know.” I teased him, and watched him dip the crossbow-bolts into the potions. “Shall I lay down so you can use your rope?” I asked. Mel grumbled something, then politely refused. His mind was growing ever more frustrated and embarrassed. I on the other hand was rather enjoying myself. This was the most fun I’d had since his father’s coronation, and his father’s before that. At least this one had the courtesy to invite me to his coronation.
After several hours, and well over a dozen different failed attempts, the prince’s coronation continued, and he was officially named king. I clapped as he solemnly took his crown, and gave my congratulations for his ascension. Then I gave my condolences for his failure to kill me. After that, I welcomed him to try his hand at killing me whenever he wanted, and flew back home. My den had floated away while I was gone, so I swiftly corrected it, and retook my position watching the void.
Time passed, and through it, the new king Mel stopped by with a group of warriors to take me up on my offer. More than once, actually. Hundreds of tries, hundreds of plans, and hundreds of failures. But each time I’d ask him what he learned, occasionally he would even answer before storming off. He would say things like, “level two enchantments weren’t enough,” or “if poison doesn’t work, I’ll try acid!” It wasn’t much, but it was progress, and it was amusing.
One day, while lounging around my den, thinking about what I wanted to eat that year, I spotted something moving in the void. At first, I assumed it was King Mel coming to try to kill me again, but as it grew closer, I realized it was much too large to be a ship. In fact, it was almost as large as I was.
Looking closer, I saw that it was another dragon like myself. Ah, perhaps this is the day I die after all? King Mel will not be happy about this. I thought, and laid my head down in waiting for my visitor.
“Hail, father! Agba of Ofo!” A familiar voice called out. Opening one of my eyes, I saw the face of my youngest son. Now his face looked very different from mine. He looked old, his frills went all the way down to his neck, and his skin grew wrinkled and grey.
“Hail, son. Throm of… where did you end up?” I asked, closing my eye again.
“With mother in the realm of falling leaves.” Throm answered.
“You’ve sure gotten old.” I said.
“Not all of us cower from death in realm between realms. I faced my mortality with grace.” Throm said. I did not need a psionic connection to tell he was upset.
“As one should.” I agreed, and scratched an itch behind my frills.
“Mother is dying, father. She wishes to see you.”
“She is welcome, anytime.” I said.
“She is too sick for interplanar traveling spells.”
“How long has it been?” I asked.
“She has been growing frail for the last four thousand years. I fear she has less than one hundred years left.”
“I see, then I will visit. One last time.”
“How long will you be able to say, father?”
“An hour, at most.”
“Then I will inform mother. When will you come?” Throm asked. I stood up, to my full height, and began casting a planar traveling spell. While I did that, I cast another spell on my den. One that would serve as a final farewell to King Mel, and as an apology for him not being the one who kills me.
“We will go now.” I said, and finished the spell. With a bright flash of light, we burst through the walls of the realm of falling leaves, and appeared beside my love.
As soon as we arrived, I felt the years begin, but my heart was lightened when I saw my love, Ti. She was laying on a small nest made of cloth and leather. Her small body rested cozily, but stirred when we appeared. She raised her head, now no larger than that of a human’s chest, and smiled upon seeing me. “Oba!” She called out, reminding me of a name long forgotten. “My love!” I laid down beside her next, and she moved from it, to my snout. “You came.”
“Yes, my love. To spend my final moments with you.”
“Father has but an hour, Mother.” Throm said.
“An hour is an eternity for an immortal, and not nearly long enough.” I said. Ti removed herself from my snout. Not by choice, but because it was no longer large enough for her to rest on. The years were catching up with me, quickly. I looked down at my claws, and saw that they had lost their golden shine, and were now wrinkled and yellow.
“Ah, a much more manageable size.” Ti laughed. “Throm, you will need to cast the spell when it is time.”
“Yes, Mother. I am aware.”
The next hour went wonderfully slowly as my love and I laid side by side with one another quietly, enjoying each other’s presences and linking our minds one last time. Once I reach the same size as her, we knew it was time to part for the last time. Throm cast the spell, as I was no longer capable of doing so, and we move into the far reaches of the realm of falling leaves.
“Thank you, my son.” I said, feeling my last moment come upon me.
“Father, before I go… you’ve lived so long. What did you learn?”
“I learned the final lesson all immortals learn; waste not a moment.” I told him, as my heart tore itself in two.
“Goodbye, Father.” With that, Throm vanished, and returned to his mother’s side. Five…. I gaze out into this new void, and thought how clustered it was. Four… it was filled with so many things. Three… Stars, planets, people, and who knows what else. Two… I used the last of my strength, and cast one final spell. One… I want to see it all again, through new eyes.
Screaming filled my ears, a woman’s I believe. I tried to open my eyes, but they were too weak, so instead I trained my ears. People were talking. New people. I touched their minds with my own, and saw through their eyes. A humanoid woman had just given birth. To a small baby boy… a dragon-kin boy… to me, I think.
submitted by ArcAngel98 to SyFyandFantasy [link] [comments]
Endless nothingness. A blank void that stretches into infinity, and stops only at the border between here and there. That is this place, called Ofo. But that is just the name I happen to use. Some call it the ‘Null’, others refer to it as ‘The Timeless Realm’. All of them are fine, I suppose, but I prefer Ofo. I’ve been here for longer than I ever cared to keep track of, and longer than I could likely count in millennia. Long enough to forget my name anyway. The wizards who accidentally trap themselves here, and the criminals who were exiled here all call me Agba, and that works fine for me.
As I sit in a rock out cropping of my den, a small moss-covered rock brought here by accident eons ago, I gaze out into the nothingness and think. Well, it isn’t quite nothing anymore. Ever since a wizard called Helmgarthin created a spell to bring people here on purpose, there has been a lot more things floating around. Once, it was just me, and the dying wizards, and they certainly weren’t good company. Occasionally, I’d see a void worm roaming around, but they never got close. But now, many things exist. Loose dirt drifts around, and the corpses of dumb adventurers who didn’t realize that a void means there’s no air. There’s even a city nearby now. It’s filled with air, magic, and living people. One day, I might visit there; it does get lonely in Ofo occasionally.
As I watched the dirt drift around, and the city float aimlessly in the distance, I felt a presence come from behind me. It was small, and weak, so I did not mind it. Using my magic, I turned my den towards the direction of the creature, and saw it was a humanoid wearing a fine suit of armor, and standing upon a ship propelled by magic. It connected our minds, and introduced itself.
“Great Dragon Agba, I am Mel Thoron, Crown Prince of Thoronia.” The humanoid said.
“What do you seek?” I asked, skipping past this part. Over the years, many have come to me wanting something, or asking something, and I have grown bored of their silver tongues.
“I seek to invite you to my coronation.” He said, catching me off guard for a moment. Surprised, I uncoiled my long body, shook lose my limbs, stretched out my wings, and stood to my full height. I felt his fear through our link, but paid it no mind.
“For what purpose?” I asked, finishing my stretch.
“You… you have been our neighbor for centuries, we wish to welcome you to see our city.” He lied. He was clearly unaccustomed to using a mental link, and left his true undefended. He held malice, greed, fear, and betrayal in his mind.
“You seek to slay me. To bring me to your city, and fight me in your den, where you have the advantage.” I said plainly, but amused.
“No Agba, you misunderstand!” He stuttered over his words. Peering further into his mind, I saw his desire for glory.
“I do not, but I will play along.” I chuckled. “Let us go to your so called coronation.”
“Oh… um, yes.” Mel said, confused. The ship turned, and sailed through the void to the city. Small rocks would bounce off the wooden hull with hollow sounds as it glided swiftly on the waves of magic that filled its sails. We arrived at the city, surrounded by a large magical dome, and a field of dirt; some of which floated gently in its wake.
Crossing through the dome, a wave of magic passed through me, attempting to stop me, but failing. As the ship and prince landed in an open field of grass and stone pathways, I set myself down beside them. The grass tickled my scales, and the dirt settled nicely under me, cradling my body from my tail to my back legs quite pleasantly.
“Ah, this alone was worth the trip. Your kingdom has fine soil, Crown Prince Mel.”
“Um… thank you.” He said, using his mouth and sounds this time. I noticed it when I arrived, but paid no attention to it, but this dome was filled with cold, crips air. For the first time in eons, I filled my lungs, and even got a bit chilly. As I breathed out, flames poured from my mouth, frightening the prince.
“Ah, I had forgotten about that.” I apologized, and expelled the last of the air from my lungs. “I will use my thoughts, from now on, Prince Mel, so that I do not ruin your air.”
“Yes, quite.” He said, hiding his emotions from his face. “Please, follow me. The coronation is this way.”
“You continue with this charade? Well, if it means so much to you…”
“Truly great Agba, I do not…” he sighed, “if you know why I invited you, why did you come?” He asked. His voice was even, and calm, but anger and pride swelled in his mind.
“Why not?”
“You believe you can defeat us?” He asked, as he stopped walking, and placed a hand on the sword on his hip.
“I do not know, but perhaps we can learn something from this.” I mused. While he stopped, I continued to walk forwards, in the direction we had both been going. By the time I had answered his question, the last of my body was just passing his.
“We shall see,” he muttered, the followed. After a little more walking, we stood before a great set of doors, by human standards. Behind the door, were dozens of small weak presences, each with pitiful magic weapons and armor.
A fine trap for a fool. I thought to myself. I had to kneel down and slither my body to reach the inside. Once my head was through, a large metal object fall down atop me, and I heard shouting from all sides. The metal object fell onto the base of my neck, but broke straight away against my scales. Looking around, I saw several men in armor cheering. Carefully, I slithered the rest of my body through, which silenced the cheers completely. “I apologize again, Prince Mel. It seems I broke this.” Picking up the remains of the metal object, which seemed to be some form of large blade, I placed it gently against the wall that housed the rest of its parts. Prince Mel however, had no response, but simply glanced back and forth between the blade and my neck.
“No, it seems I must apologize. I greatly underestimated your strength, Agba.” Prince Mel finally said.
“Have you learned anything yet?” I asked.
“That it will take more that a blade to slice your scales.” He shook his head.
“Indeed, but I was hoping for a more profound revelation. Perhaps on your next attempt?”
At that, he seemed shocked. “You… what?”
“Is this the only attempt you had planned?” I wondered.
“Well… if you would give me a moment.” He said, and called over several of the men in armor. After a short while, they left, but returned quickly with potion vials, rope, and crossbows. “This will do you in, certainly!” Mel boasted.
“A hasty plan can be worse than none at all, you know.” I teased him, and watched him dip the crossbow-bolts into the potions. “Shall I lay down so you can use your rope?” I asked. Mel grumbled something, then politely refused. His mind was growing ever more frustrated and embarrassed. I on the other hand was rather enjoying myself. This was the most fun I’d had since his father’s coronation, and his father’s before that. At least this one had the courtesy to invite me to his coronation.
After several hours, and well over a dozen different failed attempts, the prince’s coronation continued, and he was officially named king. I clapped as he solemnly took his crown, and gave my congratulations for his ascension. Then I gave my condolences for his failure to kill me. After that, I welcomed him to try his hand at killing me whenever he wanted, and flew back home. My den had floated away while I was gone, so I swiftly corrected it, and retook my position watching the void.
Time passed, and through it, the new king Mel stopped by with a group of warriors to take me up on my offer. More than once, actually. Hundreds of tries, hundreds of plans, and hundreds of failures. But each time I’d ask him what he learned, occasionally he would even answer before storming off. He would say things like, “level two enchantments weren’t enough,” or “if poison doesn’t work, I’ll try acid!” It wasn’t much, but it was progress, and it was amusing.
One day, while lounging around my den, thinking about what I wanted to eat that year, I spotted something moving in the void. At first, I assumed it was King Mel coming to try to kill me again, but as it grew closer, I realized it was much too large to be a ship. In fact, it was almost as large as I was.
Looking closer, I saw that it was another dragon like myself. Ah, perhaps this is the day I die after all? King Mel will not be happy about this. I thought, and laid my head down in waiting for my visitor.
“Hail, father! Agba of Ofo!” A familiar voice called out. Opening one of my eyes, I saw the face of my youngest son. Now his face looked very different from mine. He looked old, his frills went all the way down to his neck, and his skin grew wrinkled and grey.
“Hail, son. Throm of… where did you end up?” I asked, closing my eye again.
“With mother in the realm of falling leaves.” Throm answered.
“You’ve sure gotten old.” I said.
“Not all of us cower from death in realm between realms. I faced my mortality with grace.” Throm said. I did not need a psionic connection to tell he was upset.
“As one should.” I agreed, and scratched an itch behind my frills.
“Mother is dying, father. She wishes to see you.”
“She is welcome, anytime.” I said.
“She is too sick for interplanar traveling spells.”
“How long has it been?” I asked.
“She has been growing frail for the last four thousand years. I fear she has less than one hundred years left.”
“I see, then I will visit. One last time.”
“How long will you be able to say, father?”
“An hour, at most.”
“Then I will inform mother. When will you come?” Throm asked. I stood up, to my full height, and began casting a planar traveling spell. While I did that, I cast another spell on my den. One that would serve as a final farewell to King Mel, and as an apology for him not being the one who kills me.
“We will go now.” I said, and finished the spell. With a bright flash of light, we burst through the walls of the realm of falling leaves, and appeared beside my love.
As soon as we arrived, I felt the years begin, but my heart was lightened when I saw my love, Ti. She was laying on a small nest made of cloth and leather. Her small body rested cozily, but stirred when we appeared. She raised her head, now no larger than that of a human’s chest, and smiled upon seeing me. “Oba!” She called out, reminding me of a name long forgotten. “My love!” I laid down beside her next, and she moved from it, to my snout. “You came.”
“Yes, my love. To spend my final moments with you.”
“Father has but an hour, Mother.” Throm said.
“An hour is an eternity for an immortal, and not nearly long enough.” I said. Ti removed herself from my snout. Not by choice, but because it was no longer large enough for her to rest on. The years were catching up with me, quickly. I looked down at my claws, and saw that they had lost their golden shine, and were now wrinkled and yellow.
“Ah, a much more manageable size.” Ti laughed. “Throm, you will need to cast the spell when it is time.”
“Yes, Mother. I am aware.”
The next hour went wonderfully slowly as my love and I laid side by side with one another quietly, enjoying each other’s presences and linking our minds one last time. Once I reach the same size as her, we knew it was time to part for the last time. Throm cast the spell, as I was no longer capable of doing so, and we move into the far reaches of the realm of falling leaves.
“Thank you, my son.” I said, feeling my last moment come upon me.
“Father, before I go… you’ve lived so long. What did you learn?”
“I learned the final lesson all immortals learn; waste not a moment.” I told him, as my heart tore itself in two.
“Goodbye, Father.” With that, Throm vanished, and returned to his mother’s side. Five…. I gaze out into this new void, and thought how clustered it was. Four… it was filled with so many things. Three… Stars, planets, people, and who knows what else. Two… I used the last of my strength, and cast one final spell. One… I want to see it all again, through new eyes.
Screaming filled my ears, a woman’s I believe. I tried to open my eyes, but they were too weak, so instead I trained my ears. People were talking. New people. I touched their minds with my own, and saw through their eyes. A humanoid woman had just given birth. To a small baby boy… a dragon-kin boy… to me, I think.
2023.06.10 00:43 ArcAngel98 The Way of the Dragon Monk
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Endless nothingness. A blank void that stretches into infinity, and stops only at the border between here and there. That is this place, called Ofo. But that is just the name I happen to use. Some call it the ‘Null’, others refer to it as ‘The Timeless Realm’. All of them are fine, I suppose, but I prefer Ofo. I’ve been here for longer than I ever cared to keep track of, and longer than I could likely count in millennia. Long enough to forget my name anyway. The wizards who accidentally trap themselves here, and the criminals who were exiled here all call me Agba, and that works fine for me.
As I sit in a rock out cropping of my den, a small moss-covered rock brought here by accident eons ago, I gaze out into the nothingness and think. Well, it isn’t quite nothing anymore. Ever since a wizard called Helmgarthin created a spell to bring people here on purpose, there has been a lot more things floating around. Once, it was just me, and the dying wizards, and they certainly weren’t good company. Occasionally, I’d see a void worm roaming around, but they never got close. But now, many things exist. Loose dirt drifts around, and the corpses of dumb adventurers who didn’t realize that a void means there’s no air. There’s even a city nearby now. It’s filled with air, magic, and living people. One day, I might visit there; it does get lonely in Ofo occasionally.
As I watched the dirt drift around, and the city float aimlessly in the distance, I felt a presence come from behind me. It was small, and weak, so I did not mind it. Using my magic, I turned my den towards the direction of the creature, and saw it was a humanoid wearing a fine suit of armor, and standing upon a ship propelled by magic. It connected our minds, and introduced itself.
“Great Dragon Agba, I am Mel Thoron, Crown Prince of Thoronia.” The humanoid said.
“What do you seek?” I asked, skipping past this part. Over the years, many have come to me wanting something, or asking something, and I have grown bored of their silver tongues.
“I seek to invite you to my coronation.” He said, catching me off guard for a moment. Surprised, I uncoiled my long body, shook lose my limbs, stretched out my wings, and stood to my full height. I felt his fear through our link, but paid it no mind.
“For what purpose?” I asked, finishing my stretch.
“You… you have been our neighbor for centuries, we wish to welcome you to see our city.” He lied. He was clearly unaccustomed to using a mental link, and left his true undefended. He held malice, greed, fear, and betrayal in his mind.
“You seek to slay me. To bring me to your city, and fight me in your den, where you have the advantage.” I said plainly, but amused.
“No Agba, you misunderstand!” He stuttered over his words. Peering further into his mind, I saw his desire for glory.
“I do not, but I will play along.” I chuckled. “Let us go to your so called coronation.”
“Oh… um, yes.” Mel said, confused. The ship turned, and sailed through the void to the city. Small rocks would bounce off the wooden hull with hollow sounds as it glided swiftly on the waves of magic that filled its sails. We arrived at the city, surrounded by a large magical dome, and a field of dirt; some of which floated gently in its wake.
Crossing through the dome, a wave of magic passed through me, attempting to stop me, but failing. As the ship and prince landed in an open field of grass and stone pathways, I set myself down beside them. The grass tickled my scales, and the dirt settled nicely under me, cradling my body from my tail to my back legs quite pleasantly.
“Ah, this alone was worth the trip. Your kingdom has fine soil, Crown Prince Mel.”
“Um… thank you.” He said, using his mouth and sounds this time. I noticed it when I arrived, but paid no attention to it, but this dome was filled with cold, crips air. For the first time in eons, I filled my lungs, and even got a bit chilly. As I breathed out, flames poured from my mouth, frightening the prince.
“Ah, I had forgotten about that.” I apologized, and expelled the last of the air from my lungs. “I will use my thoughts, from now on, Prince Mel, so that I do not ruin your air.”
“Yes, quite.” He said, hiding his emotions from his face. “Please, follow me. The coronation is this way.”
“You continue with this charade? Well, if it means so much to you…”
“Truly great Agba, I do not…” he sighed, “if you know why I invited you, why did you come?” He asked. His voice was even, and calm, but anger and pride swelled in his mind.
“Why not?”
“You believe you can defeat us?” He asked, as he stopped walking, and placed a hand on the sword on his hip.
“I do not know, but perhaps we can learn something from this.” I mused. While he stopped, I continued to walk forwards, in the direction we had both been going. By the time I had answered his question, the last of my body was just passing his.
“We shall see,” he muttered, the followed. After a little more walking, we stood before a great set of doors, by human standards. Behind the door, were dozens of small weak presences, each with pitiful magic weapons and armor.
A fine trap for a fool. I thought to myself. I had to kneel down and slither my body to reach the inside. Once my head was through, a large metal object fall down atop me, and I heard shouting from all sides. The metal object fell onto the base of my neck, but broke straight away against my scales. Looking around, I saw several men in armor cheering. Carefully, I slithered the rest of my body through, which silenced the cheers completely. “I apologize again, Prince Mel. It seems I broke this.” Picking up the remains of the metal object, which seemed to be some form of large blade, I placed it gently against the wall that housed the rest of its parts. Prince Mel however, had no response, but simply glanced back and forth between the blade and my neck.
“No, it seems I must apologize. I greatly underestimated your strength, Agba.” Prince Mel finally said.
“Have you learned anything yet?” I asked.
“That it will take more that a blade to slice your scales.” He shook his head.
“Indeed, but I was hoping for a more profound revelation. Perhaps on your next attempt?”
At that, he seemed shocked. “You… what?”
“Is this the only attempt you had planned?” I wondered.
“Well… if you would give me a moment.” He said, and called over several of the men in armor. After a short while, they left, but returned quickly with potion vials, rope, and crossbows. “This will do you in, certainly!” Mel boasted.
“A hasty plan can be worse than none at all, you know.” I teased him, and watched him dip the crossbow-bolts into the potions. “Shall I lay down so you can use your rope?” I asked. Mel grumbled something, then politely refused. His mind was growing ever more frustrated and embarrassed. I on the other hand was rather enjoying myself. This was the most fun I’d had since his father’s coronation, and his father’s before that. At least this one had the courtesy to invite me to his coronation.
After several hours, and well over a dozen different failed attempts, the prince’s coronation continued, and he was officially named king. I clapped as he solemnly took his crown, and gave my congratulations for his ascension. Then I gave my condolences for his failure to kill me. After that, I welcomed him to try his hand at killing me whenever he wanted, and flew back home. My den had floated away while I was gone, so I swiftly corrected it, and retook my position watching the void.
Time passed, and through it, the new king Mel stopped by with a group of warriors to take me up on my offer. More than once, actually. Hundreds of tries, hundreds of plans, and hundreds of failures. But each time I’d ask him what he learned, occasionally he would even answer before storming off. He would say things like, “level two enchantments weren’t enough,” or “if poison doesn’t work, I’ll try acid!” It wasn’t much, but it was progress, and it was amusing.
One day, while lounging around my den, thinking about what I wanted to eat that year, I spotted something moving in the void. At first, I assumed it was King Mel coming to try to kill me again, but as it grew closer, I realized it was much too large to be a ship. In fact, it was almost as large as I was.
Looking closer, I saw that it was another dragon like myself. Ah, perhaps this is the day I die after all? King Mel will not be happy about this. I thought, and laid my head down in waiting for my visitor.
“Hail, father! Agba of Ofo!” A familiar voice called out. Opening one of my eyes, I saw the face of my youngest son. Now his face looked very different from mine. He looked old, his frills went all the way down to his neck, and his skin grew wrinkled and grey.
“Hail, son. Throm of… where did you end up?” I asked, closing my eye again.
“With mother in the realm of falling leaves.” Throm answered.
“You’ve sure gotten old.” I said.
“Not all of us cower from death in realm between realms. I faced my mortality with grace.” Throm said. I did not need a psionic connection to tell he was upset.
“As one should.” I agreed, and scratched an itch behind my frills.
“Mother is dying, father. She wishes to see you.”
“She is welcome, anytime.” I said.
“She is too sick for interplanar traveling spells.”
“How long has it been?” I asked.
“She has been growing frail for the last four thousand years. I fear she has less than one hundred years left.”
“I see, then I will visit. One last time.”
“How long will you be able to say, father?”
“An hour, at most.”
“Then I will inform mother. When will you come?” Throm asked. I stood up, to my full height, and began casting a planar traveling spell. While I did that, I cast another spell on my den. One that would serve as a final farewell to King Mel, and as an apology for him not being the one who kills me.
“We will go now.” I said, and finished the spell. With a bright flash of light, we burst through the walls of the realm of falling leaves, and appeared beside my love.
As soon as we arrived, I felt the years begin, but my heart was lightened when I saw my love, Ti. She was laying on a small nest made of cloth and leather. Her small body rested cozily, but stirred when we appeared. She raised her head, now no larger than that of a human’s chest, and smiled upon seeing me. “Oba!” She called out, reminding me of a name long forgotten. “My love!” I laid down beside her next, and she moved from it, to my snout. “You came.”
“Yes, my love. To spend my final moments with you.”
“Father has but an hour, Mother.” Throm said.
“An hour is an eternity for an immortal, and not nearly long enough.” I said. Ti removed herself from my snout. Not by choice, but because it was no longer large enough for her to rest on. The years were catching up with me, quickly. I looked down at my claws, and saw that they had lost their golden shine, and were now wrinkled and yellow.
“Ah, a much more manageable size.” Ti laughed. “Throm, you will need to cast the spell when it is time.”
“Yes, Mother. I am aware.”
The next hour went wonderfully slowly as my love and I laid side by side with one another quietly, enjoying each other’s presences and linking our minds one last time. Once I reach the same size as her, we knew it was time to part for the last time. Throm cast the spell, as I was no longer capable of doing so, and we move into the far reaches of the realm of falling leaves.
“Thank you, my son.” I said, feeling my last moment come upon me.
“Father, before I go… you’ve lived so long. What did you learn?”
“I learned the final lesson all immortals learn; waste not a moment.” I told him, as my heart tore itself in two.
“Goodbye, Father.” With that, Throm vanished, and returned to his mother’s side. Five…. I gaze out into this new void, and thought how clustered it was. Four… it was filled with so many things. Three… Stars, planets, people, and who knows what else. Two… I used the last of my strength, and cast one final spell. One… I want to see it all again, through new eyes.
Screaming filled my ears, a woman’s I believe. I tried to open my eyes, but they were too weak, so instead I trained my ears. People were talking. New people. I touched their minds with my own, and saw through their eyes. A humanoid woman had just given birth. To a small baby boy… a dragon-kin boy… to me, I think.
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Endless nothingness. A blank void that stretches into infinity, and stops only at the border between here and there. That is this place, called Ofo. But that is just the name I happen to use. Some call it the ‘Null’, others refer to it as ‘The Timeless Realm’. All of them are fine, I suppose, but I prefer Ofo. I’ve been here for longer than I ever cared to keep track of, and longer than I could likely count in millennia. Long enough to forget my name anyway. The wizards who accidentally trap themselves here, and the criminals who were exiled here all call me Agba, and that works fine for me.
As I sit in a rock out cropping of my den, a small moss-covered rock brought here by accident eons ago, I gaze out into the nothingness and think. Well, it isn’t quite nothing anymore. Ever since a wizard called Helmgarthin created a spell to bring people here on purpose, there has been a lot more things floating around. Once, it was just me, and the dying wizards, and they certainly weren’t good company. Occasionally, I’d see a void worm roaming around, but they never got close. But now, many things exist. Loose dirt drifts around, and the corpses of dumb adventurers who didn’t realize that a void means there’s no air. There’s even a city nearby now. It’s filled with air, magic, and living people. One day, I might visit there; it does get lonely in Ofo occasionally.
As I watched the dirt drift around, and the city float aimlessly in the distance, I felt a presence come from behind me. It was small, and weak, so I did not mind it. Using my magic, I turned my den towards the direction of the creature, and saw it was a humanoid wearing a fine suit of armor, and standing upon a ship propelled by magic. It connected our minds, and introduced itself.
“Great Dragon Agba, I am Mel Thoron, Crown Prince of Thoronia.” The humanoid said.
“What do you seek?” I asked, skipping past this part. Over the years, many have come to me wanting something, or asking something, and I have grown bored of their silver tongues.
“I seek to invite you to my coronation.” He said, catching me off guard for a moment. Surprised, I uncoiled my long body, shook lose my limbs, stretched out my wings, and stood to my full height. I felt his fear through our link, but paid it no mind.
“For what purpose?” I asked, finishing my stretch.
“You… you have been our neighbor for centuries, we wish to welcome you to see our city.” He lied. He was clearly unaccustomed to using a mental link, and left his true undefended. He held malice, greed, fear, and betrayal in his mind.
“You seek to slay me. To bring me to your city, and fight me in your den, where you have the advantage.” I said plainly, but amused.
“No Agba, you misunderstand!” He stuttered over his words. Peering further into his mind, I saw his desire for glory.
“I do not, but I will play along.” I chuckled. “Let us go to your so called coronation.”
“Oh… um, yes.” Mel said, confused. The ship turned, and sailed through the void to the city. Small rocks would bounce off the wooden hull with hollow sounds as it glided swiftly on the waves of magic that filled its sails. We arrived at the city, surrounded by a large magical dome, and a field of dirt; some of which floated gently in its wake.
Crossing through the dome, a wave of magic passed through me, attempting to stop me, but failing. As the ship and prince landed in an open field of grass and stone pathways, I set myself down beside them. The grass tickled my scales, and the dirt settled nicely under me, cradling my body from my tail to my back legs quite pleasantly.
“Ah, this alone was worth the trip. Your kingdom has fine soil, Crown Prince Mel.”
“Um… thank you.” He said, using his mouth and sounds this time. I noticed it when I arrived, but paid no attention to it, but this dome was filled with cold, crips air. For the first time in eons, I filled my lungs, and even got a bit chilly. As I breathed out, flames poured from my mouth, frightening the prince.
“Ah, I had forgotten about that.” I apologized, and expelled the last of the air from my lungs. “I will use my thoughts, from now on, Prince Mel, so that I do not ruin your air.”
“Yes, quite.” He said, hiding his emotions from his face. “Please, follow me. The coronation is this way.”
“You continue with this charade? Well, if it means so much to you…”
“Truly great Agba, I do not…” he sighed, “if you know why I invited you, why did you come?” He asked. His voice was even, and calm, but anger and pride swelled in his mind.
“Why not?”
“You believe you can defeat us?” He asked, as he stopped walking, and placed a hand on the sword on his hip.
“I do not know, but perhaps we can learn something from this.” I mused. While he stopped, I continued to walk forwards, in the direction we had both been going. By the time I had answered his question, the last of my body was just passing his.
“We shall see,” he muttered, the followed. After a little more walking, we stood before a great set of doors, by human standards. Behind the door, were dozens of small weak presences, each with pitiful magic weapons and armor.
A fine trap for a fool. I thought to myself. I had to kneel down and slither my body to reach the inside. Once my head was through, a large metal object fall down atop me, and I heard shouting from all sides. The metal object fell onto the base of my neck, but broke straight away against my scales. Looking around, I saw several men in armor cheering. Carefully, I slithered the rest of my body through, which silenced the cheers completely. “I apologize again, Prince Mel. It seems I broke this.” Picking up the remains of the metal object, which seemed to be some form of large blade, I placed it gently against the wall that housed the rest of its parts. Prince Mel however, had no response, but simply glanced back and forth between the blade and my neck.
“No, it seems I must apologize. I greatly underestimated your strength, Agba.” Prince Mel finally said.
“Have you learned anything yet?” I asked.
“That it will take more that a blade to slice your scales.” He shook his head.
“Indeed, but I was hoping for a more profound revelation. Perhaps on your next attempt?”
At that, he seemed shocked. “You… what?”
“Is this the only attempt you had planned?” I wondered.
“Well… if you would give me a moment.” He said, and called over several of the men in armor. After a short while, they left, but returned quickly with potion vials, rope, and crossbows. “This will do you in, certainly!” Mel boasted.
“A hasty plan can be worse than none at all, you know.” I teased him, and watched him dip the crossbow-bolts into the potions. “Shall I lay down so you can use your rope?” I asked. Mel grumbled something, then politely refused. His mind was growing ever more frustrated and embarrassed. I on the other hand was rather enjoying myself. This was the most fun I’d had since his father’s coronation, and his father’s before that. At least this one had the courtesy to invite me to his coronation.
After several hours, and well over a dozen different failed attempts, the prince’s coronation continued, and he was officially named king. I clapped as he solemnly took his crown, and gave my congratulations for his ascension. Then I gave my condolences for his failure to kill me. After that, I welcomed him to try his hand at killing me whenever he wanted, and flew back home. My den had floated away while I was gone, so I swiftly corrected it, and retook my position watching the void.
Time passed, and through it, the new king Mel stopped by with a group of warriors to take me up on my offer. More than once, actually. Hundreds of tries, hundreds of plans, and hundreds of failures. But each time I’d ask him what he learned, occasionally he would even answer before storming off. He would say things like, “level two enchantments weren’t enough,” or “if poison doesn’t work, I’ll try acid!” It wasn’t much, but it was progress, and it was amusing.
One day, while lounging around my den, thinking about what I wanted to eat that year, I spotted something moving in the void. At first, I assumed it was King Mel coming to try to kill me again, but as it grew closer, I realized it was much too large to be a ship. In fact, it was almost as large as I was.
Looking closer, I saw that it was another dragon like myself. Ah, perhaps this is the day I die after all? King Mel will not be happy about this. I thought, and laid my head down in waiting for my visitor.
“Hail, father! Agba of Ofo!” A familiar voice called out. Opening one of my eyes, I saw the face of my youngest son. Now his face looked very different from mine. He looked old, his frills went all the way down to his neck, and his skin grew wrinkled and grey.
“Hail, son. Throm of… where did you end up?” I asked, closing my eye again.
“With mother in the realm of falling leaves.” Throm answered.
“You’ve sure gotten old.” I said.
“Not all of us cower from death in realm between realms. I faced my mortality with grace.” Throm said. I did not need a psionic connection to tell he was upset.
“As one should.” I agreed, and scratched an itch behind my frills.
“Mother is dying, father. She wishes to see you.”
“She is welcome, anytime.” I said.
“She is too sick for interplanar traveling spells.”
“How long has it been?” I asked.
“She has been growing frail for the last four thousand years. I fear she has less than one hundred years left.”
“I see, then I will visit. One last time.”
“How long will you be able to say, father?”
“An hour, at most.”
“Then I will inform mother. When will you come?” Throm asked. I stood up, to my full height, and began casting a planar traveling spell. While I did that, I cast another spell on my den. One that would serve as a final farewell to King Mel, and as an apology for him not being the one who kills me.
“We will go now.” I said, and finished the spell. With a bright flash of light, we burst through the walls of the realm of falling leaves, and appeared beside my love.
As soon as we arrived, I felt the years begin, but my heart was lightened when I saw my love, Ti. She was laying on a small nest made of cloth and leather. Her small body rested cozily, but stirred when we appeared. She raised her head, now no larger than that of a human’s chest, and smiled upon seeing me. “Oba!” She called out, reminding me of a name long forgotten. “My love!” I laid down beside her next, and she moved from it, to my snout. “You came.”
“Yes, my love. To spend my final moments with you.”
“Father has but an hour, Mother.” Throm said.
“An hour is an eternity for an immortal, and not nearly long enough.” I said. Ti removed herself from my snout. Not by choice, but because it was no longer large enough for her to rest on. The years were catching up with me, quickly. I looked down at my claws, and saw that they had lost their golden shine, and were now wrinkled and yellow.
“Ah, a much more manageable size.” Ti laughed. “Throm, you will need to cast the spell when it is time.”
“Yes, Mother. I am aware.”
The next hour went wonderfully slowly as my love and I laid side by side with one another quietly, enjoying each other’s presences and linking our minds one last time. Once I reach the same size as her, we knew it was time to part for the last time. Throm cast the spell, as I was no longer capable of doing so, and we move into the far reaches of the realm of falling leaves.
“Thank you, my son.” I said, feeling my last moment come upon me.
“Father, before I go… you’ve lived so long. What did you learn?”
“I learned the final lesson all immortals learn; waste not a moment.” I told him, as my heart tore itself in two.
“Goodbye, Father.” With that, Throm vanished, and returned to his mother’s side. Five…. I gaze out into this new void, and thought how clustered it was. Four… it was filled with so many things. Three… Stars, planets, people, and who knows what else. Two… I used the last of my strength, and cast one final spell. One… I want to see it all again, through new eyes.
Screaming filled my ears, a woman’s I believe. I tried to open my eyes, but they were too weak, so instead I trained my ears. People were talking. New people. I touched their minds with my own, and saw through their eyes. A humanoid woman had just given birth. To a small baby boy… a dragon-kin boy… to me, I think.
2023.06.10 00:19 finnishyoursoup 10 Days in London & Amsterdam (Trip report)
 | submitted by finnishyoursoup to HerOneBag [link] [comments] https://preview.redd.it/9ju0zw4rh25b1.jpg?width=1182&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=88f5a6af625afb698ef66a8ac4af3c1a84a33f0b https://preview.redd.it/9fhb335rh25b1.jpg?width=1224&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f41ad543a1e9c5e0e2213d7f6c1ca4634982e3f1 I recently returned from a 10-ish day trip to London and then Amsterdam, 5 days each. Time spent there consisted of tons of walking through the city and general sight-seeing. In London, we stayed at a hotel for a day, then in an airbnb for the remainder, while in Amsterdam we stayed in a hotel near the city center. The airbnb had a washedryer, so we had a wash day near the midpoint. In Amsterdam, I had to hand wash a couple things in the sink. This was my husband and I’s first international one-bagging stint, and the both of us definitely learned a lot to say the least! My packing list Clothes Worn
The MVPs Birkenstocks. First time buyer of the brand, and just a month ago, I’ve been liking them so far. But this trip made me a believer! I thought I’d be okay with the Docs + blister kit for good measure, but nope… so. much. pain. I switched to these (rocked the socks+sandals combo) and the pain was greatly reduced. This invalidated the need for the blister kit and cork ball, too. I only went back to the boots when we were traveling. My mark against the Birks is that they are pretty unwieldy to pack, but I stuffed some clothes in them on the return trip to fill that weird space. Minaal bag. Still very happy with this bag. It’s comfortable on my back and I appreciate how adjustable it is to still work on my 5’4” frame. It fit under the seat on the flight to London (United), but not on the way back from Amsterdam (Icelandair). Still, I felt pretty slick compared to my husband’s Cotopaxi Allpa, which didn’t fit under the seat either time :p I also used the empty laptop compartment to hold the two scarves I brought back. The not-so-good/shouldn’t have brought: Clothes. I managed to make a versatile capsule wardrobe, but totally underestimated the weather. It got real windy, so I hardly wore the shorts and didn’t even attempt the dress. I wish I had nixed one of the tanks and t-shirts and brought another long-sleeve. The button up also didn’t pack well and got very wrinkly, so I didn’t wear it until Amsterdam (the London airbnb water temp suuuucked and couldn’t get the bathroom steamy). Toiletries. I overdid it here. I just started a new hair routine, was worried about not following that to a T. I did not need the leave-in conditioner, could have left the claw clip and probably the wide-tooth comb, could have used the body wash from the hotels instead of my own. Misc. I could have left the random little stuff, such as the notebook. I always bring it but never use it. The pen I brought to fill out the custom form on the plane actually leaked/exploded whilst in the air, so that sucked (made the tissues worth it though!). Didn’t need the headphones cord either. The souvenirs we bought got relegated to my husband’s Cotopaxi day bag which became my personal item for the flight. I could have probably stuffed them into the Minaal or his travel bag if needed, but decided not to. Overall comments Phew! This got long. Thanks for reading this far. I can already see places for improvement, namely in the clothes department. If I had brought a slimmer dress + tights and lost a t-shirt or two, that would have freed up a good chunk of space. Otherwise, I’m also floating the idea of buying a packable day bag so my husband can be free from the non-packable Cotopaxi one. Happy to answer any questions or clarify! I got a little rambly. |
2023.06.09 22:06 Odd-Breath2166 Same script different day
“Get my ass in the shower” “Reveal my beautiful tan” “Gotta get my morning monster” “First sip is always the best” “Rally the troops” “No peein on the porch, ya hear me Winston?” “Kane, boop boop boop boop” “It’s really _______ out today talks about weather” “I’m gonna wear some shorts and then pair it with this little top” “I went in with my dove deodorant and the scent of the day is ______. 1000 sprays of perfume mmm smells so good” “Have an amazing day and have a good one”
Like seriously I can mouth the words she’s going to say as she says them 😭 miss girl never goes off script lmfao. Did I miss any?
submitted by Odd-Breath2166 to exposemakeupqueenn30 [link] [comments]
Like seriously I can mouth the words she’s going to say as she says them 😭 miss girl never goes off script lmfao. Did I miss any?
2023.06.09 22:04 Profecionallystupid Respect Jason Grace Thread [All] (Long)
Some time ago, I made two posts with some of Percy's best feats. The first one can viewed here. And the second: here.
Now I know that Jason isn't the most liked character in the fandom, but I like him. So I wanted to scale him.
Contents: Strength, speed, reaction speed, skill, durability, actual powers, Tl;dscaling, closing segment.
He was able to throw a club hard enough to knock down a Venti. Even causing it to curve so that it would hit Dylan when he tried to doge:
Speed:
He was able to stab a giant:
He was able to keep up with Lit. The same guy who was so good, he earned the name Reaper of Men:
He can react to lightning:
Too much for you to follow, here:
He reacts to arrows:
Also keep in mind that he is nearsighted. Giving him even less time to react than normal:
Next up, skill.
He can keep up with Lit, a man so deadly, he was named the Reaper of Men:
Durability:
He is immune to, or at least, resistant to electricity:
He can correct aim of things he throws:
Closing segment: Honestly I think he could have been more powerful if we'd seen him in more books. Also I didn't use a Trials of Apollo feats as there I didn't find any. If you see any feats I missed let me know so I can scale them. So what did you think? Did this make you see Jason as more or less powerful than you originally thought? Who else would you like me to scale?
Respect Jason Grace, son of the sky god, Zeus!
submitted by Profecionallystupid to camphalfblood [link] [comments]
Now I know that Jason isn't the most liked character in the fandom, but I like him. So I wanted to scale him.
Contents: Strength, speed, reaction speed, skill, durability, actual powers, Tl;dscaling, closing segment.
He was able to throw a club hard enough to knock down a Venti. Even causing it to curve so that it would hit Dylan when he tried to doge:
Jason threw the club. It seemed useless with the winds so strong, but the club flew right at Dylan, even curving when he tried to dodge, and smacked in the head so hard he fell to his kneesHe was able to deflect a spear hit from a giant:
The Lost Hero
Jason raised his javelin to block the giant's next strike-a big mistake. Don't fight force with force, a voice chided him-the wolf Lupa, who told him that long ago. He managed to deflect the spear, but it grazed his shoulder, and his arm went numb.The same giant was able to cause the entire mountain to shake just by slamming the butt of said spear into the ground:
The Lost Hero
Before they could get very far, Enceladus slammed his spear against the ground. The entire mountain shook.Moving onto House of Hades, we see him casually shatter a metal with a kick, firmly putting him into the superhuman category of strength. Not only that, but he managed to stagger and knocked a giant to his knees:
The Lost Hero
One last time Jason flew at [Clytius], kicking him in the chest, and the giant's breastplate shattered. Clytius staggered backward..He fell to his knees, and the demigods encircled himHe was able to cut through a statue made of metal with help from Piper:
House of Hades
Piper and Jason went to work on Hygeia. They slashed through the statue's kneesWe are now done with Jason it the strength department. Obviously, he lacks many feats in this department, especially compared to Percy, but he is definitely stronger than an average human.
Blood of Olympus
Speed:
He was able to stab a giant:
[Jason] rolled away from the giant's first spear thrust and jabbed Enceladus in the ankle. Jason's javelin managed to pierce the thick dragon hide, and golden ichor-the blood of immortals-trickled down the giant's clawed foot.This might not seem that impressive, but Jason was being slowed down by Gaea. The Giant was being helped by Gaea. Finally, the giant was predicting Jason's attacks:
The Lost Hero
Enceladus' spear missed him by a millimeter. Jason kept dodging, but the ground stuck to his feet. Gaea was getting stronger, and the giant was getting faster. Enceladus might be slow, but he was not dumb. He began anticipating Jason's moves, and Jason's attacks were only annoying himWe see this here again:
The Lost Hero
Enceladus let him approach, grinning with anticipation. At the last second, Jason faked a strike and rolled between the giant's legs. He came up quickly, thrusting with all his might, ready to stab the giant in the small of his back, but Enceladus anticipated the trick. He stepped aside with too much speed and agility for a giant, as if the earth were helping him move.Reaction/ combat speed. This is where Jason really shines. As he has several impressive feats:
The Lost Hero
He was able to keep up with Lit. The same guy who was so good, he earned the name Reaper of Men:
Lit charged.He can react to giants:
The guy was fast. He slashed and sliced, and Jason could barely dodge the strikes, but his mind went into a different mode-analyzing patterns, learning Lit's style, which was all offense, no defense.
The Lost Hero
Jason raised his javelin to block the giant's next strike-a big mistake. Don't fight force with force, a voice chided him-the wolf Lupa, who told him that long ago. He managed to deflect the spear, but it grazed his shoulder, and his arm went numb.He scales to Percy in reaction speed and was able to amaze Piper:
The Lost Hero
[Piper] rolled to the edge of the road and looked back, dazed and horrified, as [Percy and Jason] crossed swords, gold against bronze. Sparks flew. Their blades blurred-strike and parry-and the pavement trembled. The first exchange only took a second, but Piper couldn't believe the speed of their sword fighting.The same guy who I scaled to have reaction speed as fast as 10 milliseconds. And the average human reacts at 250 milliseconds.
Mark of Athena
He can react to lightning:
Jason called down another lightning strike, but Ephialtes caught it on his spear and deflected the blast, melting a life-size plastic cow. He slammed a stone column out of his way like a stack of building blocks. Percy tried to keep the lake churning. He didn’t want Otis rising to join this fight, but as Ephialtes closed the last few feet, Percy had to switch focus. Jason and he met the giant’s charge. They lunged around Ephialtes, stabbing and slashing in a blur of gold and bronze, but the giant parried every strike. “I will not yield!” Ephialtes roared. “You may have ruined my spectacle, but Gaea will still destroy your world!” Percy lashed out, slicing the giant’s spear in half. Ephialtes wasn’t even fazed. The giant swept low with the blunt end and knocked Percy off his feet. Percy landed hard on his sword arm, and Riptide clattered out of his grip. Mark of AthenaWhile technically not reacting to lighting, Percy fought a giant who could, so Ephialtes' reaction speed=Percy's. What I'm getting at here is Ephialtes can react to lightning. Percy can keep up with Ephialtes. So Percy=Ephialtes' reaction speed. Jason=Percy reaction speed. Therefore, Jason=Ephialtes' reaction speed.
Too much for you to follow, here:
Jason swung at the first spirit. His blade passed through it and the creature's smoky form disintegrated. The second spirit let loose a bolt of lightning, but Jason's blade absorbed the charge. Jason stepped in-one quick thrust, and the second storm spirit dissolved into gold powderThere you go.
The Lost Hero
He reacts to arrows:
This time Jason's senses were on high alert. He felt the air ripple as an arrow materialized, racing towards Nico's chest.Now, Romans use a type of composite bow called a Sagittarii. Composite bows can shoot arrows as a speed of 250 to 370 feet per second (76 to 113 m/s).
Jason intercepted it with his sword and deflected it sideways.
House of Hades
Also keep in mind that he is nearsighted. Giving him even less time to react than normal:
"Oh, of course!" Asclepius said. "You're a bit nearsighted! Simple fix."So all in all, he has some fast reaction speed. Well above human.
He opened the drawer, whipped out a prescription pad and an eyeglasses case. He scribbled something on the pad, then handed the glasses and the scrip to Jason.
Blood of Olympus
Next up, skill.
He can keep up with Lit, a man so deadly, he was named the Reaper of Men:
Lit charged.He did all of this:
The guy was fast. He slashed and sliced, and Jason could barely dodge the strikes, but his mind went into a different mode-analyzing patterns, learning Lit's style, which was all offense, no defense.
The Lost Hero
"I slew the Trojan sea monster," Jason continued. "I toppled the black throne of Kronos, and destroyed the Titan Krios with my own hands. And now I'm going to destroy you, Porphyrion, and feed you to your own wolves."He killed the Trojan sea monster and killed a Titan without a weapon.
The Lost Hero
Durability:
He is immune to, or at least, resistant to electricity:
Dylan's form flickered. "That was enough lightning to kill twenty men!"He survived this:
The Lost Hero
Enceladus let him approach, grinning with anticipation. At the last second, Jason faked a strike and rolled between the giant's legs. He came up quickly, thrusting with all his might, ready to stab the giant in the small of his back, but Enceladus anticipated the trick. He stepped aside with too much speed and agility for a giant, as if the earth were helping him move. He swept his spear sideways and met Jason's javelin-and with a snap like a shotgun blast, the golden weapon shattered.While this is an already impressive feat, we have this to make this even more impressive:
The explosion was hotter than the giant's breath, blinding Jason with golden light. The force knocked him off his feet and squeezed the breath out of him.
The Lost Hero
The javlin's destruction had released so much energy, it had blasted a perfect cone-shaped pit thirty feet deep, fusing the dirt and rock into a slick, glassy substance.He was uncut by plastic shrapnel:
The lost Hero
Together, the giants picked up a fake mountain as big as Percy's New York apartment and hurled it at the demigods. Percy and Jason bolted. They dove into the nearest trench and the mountain shattered above them, spraying them with plastic shrapnel.He can tank a hit from a giant trident, although he was in a lot of pain:
Mark of Athena
Jason managed to avoid the prongs of the trident again, but the giant swung the other end around and smacked him in the chest.Powers. This is another place he is impressive in. He has several abilities he can call on in a clutch:
Jason reeled back, stunned and in pain. Polybotes came in for the kill. Just before the trident would have perforated him, Jason's ventus acted on its own. It spiraled sideways, whisking Jason thirty feet across the courtyard.
He can correct aim of things he throws:
Jason threw the club. It seemed useless with the winds so strong, but the club flew right at Dylan, even curving when he tried to dodge, and smacked in the head so hard he fell to his kneesHe can control air pressure:
The Lost Hero
[Jason] felt a tugging sensation in his gut, and the air pressure dropped so rapidly his ears popped.He can summon Tempest, a horse made of wind and electricity:
The Lost Hero
Suddenly the air turned cold. Piper's ears popped. About fifty yards away, a miniature cyclone three stories tall tore across the tops of the sunflowers like a scene from The Wizard of Oz. It touched down on the road next to Jason and took the form of a horse-a misty steed with lightning flickering through its bodyJason and Percy working together can create a massive storm:
Mark of Athena
On the deck of the Argo II, Percy and Jason stood together, their swords crossed. Annabeth got a tingle down her spine as she realized the boys were working together as one, summoning the sky and the sea to do their bidding. Water and wind churned together. Waves heaved against the ramparts and lightning flashed. Giant eagles were knocked out of the sky. Wreckage of the flying chariot burned in the water, and Coach Hedge swung a mounted crossbow, taking potshots at the Roman birds as the flew overhead.Jason can fly and carry people with him:
The Mark of Athena
Jason summoned the wind to carry him and Piper to shoreHe can cause water to boil and temporarily blind Piper:
Mark of Athena
BOOM! Lightning stirred the water into a boiling cauldron, steaming and hissing with electricity. Piper blinked the yellow spots out her eyes as the god Achelous wailed and dissolved under beneath the surfaceHe can use wind offensively:
Mark of Athena
The demigods rolled to either side, and Jason summoned the wind, using the giant's own momentum to shove him into the waterHe can get angry enough to generate electricity:
Mark of Athena
the air turned electric-literally, as Jason started throwing off sparks.He can melt iron and cause gold to steam:
Mark of Athena
Just then, thunder boomed overhead. Lightning flashed, and the bars on the nearest window burst into sizzling, melted stubs of iron.Jason has the ability to track people who use winds as a method of transport so things like air spirits can't run from him:
Jason flew in like Peter Pan, electricity sparking around him and his gold sword steaming.
House of Hades
Jason couldn't exactly see him, but he'd had enough experience controlling the wind that he could track the angel's path-a warm wisp of red and gold zipping across the street..He can control the four winds and even construct this out of wind:
House of Hades
[Jason] thrust out his hand. A swirl of dust shot toward the nearest horse. A lasso-a rope of wind, more tightly wound than any tornado-wrapped around the horse's neck. ..In less than a minute he had tethered all four venti. He reined them in, still whining and bucking, but they couldn't break Jason's rope. It felt like flying four kites in a strong wind-hard, yes, but not impossible.He uses wind defensively:
House of Hades
Jason summoned gusts of wind to last aside javelins and arrows. He deflected a vial of Greek fire right up the throat of a gryphon, which burst into flames and spiraled into the pit.He can carry others without having to fly himself:
House of Hades
Three dead Romans rose into the air and flew across the chasm. Then three more joined them. Finally Jason flew himself across and his squad began cutting through some very surprised-looking telkhinesHe can use a sword or a javelin:
House of Hades
Jason slashed his gladius in a wide arc, vaporizing the nearest suitors; then he vaulted onto the table and jumped over Antinous' head. In midair he willed his bade to extend into a javelin-a trick he'd never tried with this sword-but somehow he knew it would work.He once more demonstrates his ability to create objects from air and now he can encase himself in air armor:
Blood of Olympus
[Jason] raised his arm and summoned a lasso of wind... He lashed out with his wind rope, searching for strongest, most ornery *ventus in the storm.Jason is capable of summoning weird lightning stuff at the bottom of the ocean. Also worth noting it is still as deadly and didn't shock Percy who was also in the water next to him. On top of that, he can now separate the volts to attack multiple targets instead of just one:
He lassoed a nasty patch of storm cloud and pulled it in. "You're serving me today."
Howling in protest, the ventus encircled him. The storm above the ship seemed to lessen just a bit, as if the other venti were thinking Oh, crud. That guy means business.
Jason levitated off the deck, encased in his own miniature tornado. Spinning like a corkscrew, he plunged into the water.
But [Jason] couldn't think of a better option. He thrust up his sword. Immediately the blade glowed red-hot.He can carry a current throughout his body, holding it for latter:
A diffuse cloud of yellow light billowed through the depths, like someone had poured liquid neon into the water. The light hit Jason's sword and splayed outward in ten separate tendrils, zapping the basiliks.
Blood of Olympus
With a deafening blast, a white-hot bolt arced from the sky, straight through Jason's body as he leaped, wreathed in lightning, at the giant king.He can blast a 30 foot giant off a clif:
Jason fell on King Porphyrion with such force that the giant crumpled to his knees-blasted with lightning and stabbed in the neck with a golden gladius.
Porphyrion lashed out wildly with his spear, but Jason cut it in half with his gladius. He charged in, jabbing his sword through the giant's breastplate, then summoned the winds and blasted Porphyrion off the edge of the cliff.Tl;dr and scaling: So Jason is powerful. He is definitely superhuman in al physical states. I am going to say, city level durability. His power level is at mountain level.
Blood of Olympus
Closing segment: Honestly I think he could have been more powerful if we'd seen him in more books. Also I didn't use a Trials of Apollo feats as there I didn't find any. If you see any feats I missed let me know so I can scale them. So what did you think? Did this make you see Jason as more or less powerful than you originally thought? Who else would you like me to scale?
Respect Jason Grace, son of the sky god, Zeus!
2023.06.09 21:06 Elote1869 64% of DFW men says they've experienced domestic violence.
Hey guys,
Ever since I lost my job, I dove full-time into my organization and after interviewing 100 men, I wrote this article.
What I find really interesting is that I keep running into women and older men who continue to say that men can't experience domestic violence. I wanted to share my initial findings with you guys, and I want to keep you all updated the more we talk to and interview men and women. (I also wouldn't mind if you guys shared what I find 😅)
Ultimately, my goal is to interview men and women (with appropriate sample sizes) around the US to continue giving you guys accurate data!
submitted by Elote1869 to MensRights [link] [comments]
Ever since I lost my job, I dove full-time into my organization and after interviewing 100 men, I wrote this article.
What I find really interesting is that I keep running into women and older men who continue to say that men can't experience domestic violence. I wanted to share my initial findings with you guys, and I want to keep you all updated the more we talk to and interview men and women. (I also wouldn't mind if you guys shared what I find 😅)
Ultimately, my goal is to interview men and women (with appropriate sample sizes) around the US to continue giving you guys accurate data!
2023.06.09 20:55 jravitz [WTS] 265+ Bottles - Niche, Designer, Hard to Find, Discontinued and Vintage - Hermessence, Le Labo, Guerlain, MFK, Creed, YSL, Chanel, Dior, Byredo, Kilian, Amouage, Memo Paris, More! (Bottle)
| HOUSE | FRAGRANCE | SIZE | REMAINING | Notes/Condition | Price | Type | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amouage | Incense Rori Attar | 12mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $439 | Niche |
| 2 | Amouage | Material (Woman) | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; Tester Cap | $145 | Niche |
| 3 | Amouage | Orris Wakan Attar | 12mL | 99% Full | Full Presentation | $419 | Niche |
| 4 | Amouage | Rose Aqor Attar | 12mL | 99% Full | Full Presentation | $419 | Niche |
| 5 | Amouage | Vanilla Barka Attar | 12mL | 99% Full | Full Presentation | $419 | Niche |
| 6 | Andy Tauer | Cologne du Maghreb | 50mL | 99% Full | First Release, Rectangular Clear Bottle; With box | $95 | Niche |
| 7 | Bond No. 9 | Hamptons | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $125 | Niche |
| 8 | Bond No. 9 | Madison Square Park | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box, No Cap | $135 | Niche |
| 9 | By Kilian | Apple Brandy on the Rocks | 50mL | 99% Full | Full Presentation, Box has some wear. | $160 | Niche |
| 10 | By Kilian | Bamboo Harmony | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester Refill (No Spray) | $209 | Niche |
| 11 | By Kilian | Black Phantom | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester Refill (No Spray) | $215 | Niche |
| 12 | By Kilian | Gold Knight | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester Refill (No Spray) | $209 | Niche |
| 13 | By Kilian | Good Girl Gone Bad | 250mL | 99% Full | Decanter; No Box | $800 | Niche |
| 14 | By Kilian | Intoxicated | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester Refill (No Spray) | $209 | Niche |
| 15 | By Kilian | Love Don't Be Shy | 50mL | 99% Full | Full Presentation, Box has some wear. | $160 | Niche |
| 16 | By Kilian | Love Don't Be Shy Extreme | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $195 | Niche |
| 17 | Byredo | Infloresence | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $135 | Niche |
| 18 | Byredo | Lil Fleur | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $135 | Niche |
| 19 | Byredo | Mixed Emotions | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $135 | Niche |
| 20 | Byredo | Mumbai Noise | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $135 | Niche |
| 21 | Byredo | Sunday Cologne | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $135 | Niche |
| 22 | Chanel Exclusif | Misia EdT | 200mL | 95% Full | Vintage Discontinued Formula; No Box | $350 | Niche |
| 23 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Bois D'Argent | 7.5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini | $30 | Niche |
| 24 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Bois D'Argent | 5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini - Batch Code 0V01 (2010 Production Date) - Price includes shipping | $35 | Niche |
| 25 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Cologne Royale | 5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini - Batch Code 1X01 (2011 Production Date) - Price includes shipping | $30 | Niche |
| 26 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Diorissima | 7.5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini; No Cannister - Price includes shipping | $30 | Niche |
| 27 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Eau Noire | 5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini - Batch Code 1R01 (2011 Production Date) - Price includes shipping | $35 | Niche |
| 28 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Eden Roc | 7.5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini - Price includes shipping | $30 | Niche |
| 29 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Granville | 5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini - Batch Code 0V01 (2010 Production Date) - Price includes shipping | $35 | Niche |
| 30 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Milly-La-Foret | 5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini - Batch Code 0W01 (2010 Production Date) - Price includes shipping | $30 | Niche |
| 31 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | Mitzah | 5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini - Batch Code 1W01 (2011 Production Date) - Price includes shipping | $35 | Niche |
| 32 | Christian Dior / Dior Privee | New Look 1947 | 5mL | 100% Full | Official Mini - Batch Code 1R01 (2011 Production Date) - Price includes shipping | $30 | Niche |
| 33 | Clive Christian | I Pour Femme (Woody Floral with Vintage Rose) | 50mL | 99% Full | No Box | $180 | Niche |
| 34 | Clive Christian | Rock Rose | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $289 | Niche |
| 35 | Creed | Acqua Florentina - F Batch | 75mL | 95% Full | Box, Can add a Creed Cap as well | $175 | Niche |
| 36 | Creed | Aventus - 22A11A | 100mL | 100% Full | Full Presentation | $250 | Niche |
| 37 | Creed | Aventus Cologne - 2022 Batch | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $229 | Niche |
| 38 | Creed | Aventus Cologne - F Batch (Plastic Cap) | 100mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed in Box | $239 | Niche |
| 39 | Creed | Aventus for Her - F567 | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $185 | Niche |
| 40 | Creed | Erolfa - 15X01 | 120mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $349 | Niche |
| 41 | Creed | Erolfa - F Batch | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box, No Cap | $160 | Niche |
| 42 | Creed | Green Irish Tweed - 19U11 | 50mL | 99% Full | No Cap | $139 | Niche |
| 43 | Creed | Green Irish Tweed - 2022 Batch | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $195 | Niche |
| 44 | Creed | Himalaya - 22B01A | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Square Style Cap | $175 | Niche |
| 45 | Creed | Millesime Imperial - F Batch | 100mL | 100% Full | Comes with Box and SQUARE Older Style Cap. | $180 | Niche |
| 46 | Creed | Neroli Sauvage - F241 | 100mL | 100% Full | Comes with Box and SQUARE Older Style Cap. | $180 | Niche |
| 47 | Creed | Original Santal - F511 | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $160 | Niche |
| 48 | Creed | Royal Mayfair - 15R01 | 120mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $229 | Niche |
| 49 | Creed | Royal Oud - F BATCH | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $250 | Niche |
| 50 | Creed | Royal Water - 20C01N | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Square Style Cap | $175 | Niche |
| 51 | Creed | Silver Mountain Water - 21V01A | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Square Style Cap | $180 | Niche |
| 52 | Creed | Spring Flowers 2023 | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $209 | Niche |
| 53 | Creed | Tabarome - 21Y01A | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $160 | Niche |
| 54 | Creed | Viking - F512 | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $205 | Niche |
| 55 | Creed | Virgin Island Water - F473 | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $195 | Niche |
| 56 | Creed | White Amber - 17W01 | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $149 | Niche |
| 57 | Creed | White Flowers | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $200 | Niche |
| 58 | Creed | Wind Flowers - 22C01B | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap | $199 | Niche |
| 59 | DS & DURGA | Amber Kiso | 100mL | 100% Full | New, No Box | $125 | Niche |
| 60 | Frederic Malle | Eau de Magnolia | 10mL | 100% Full | Official Travel Spray | $55 | Niche |
| 61 | Gallagher | Bergamot Silk | 100mL | 99% Full | $84 | Niche | |
| 62 | Giorgio Armani / Armani Prive | Gardenia Antigua | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $155 | Niche |
| 63 | Giorgio Armani / Armani Prive | Pierre de Lune | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $155 | Niche |
| 64 | Giorgio Armani / Armani Prive | Rose Alexandrie | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $155 | Niche |
| 65 | Guerlain | Angelique Noire | 30mL | 100% Full | Mini Bee Bottle Decant | $215 | Niche |
| 66 | Guerlain | Angelique Noire | 10mL | 100% Full | Tall Glass Decant | $55 | Niche |
| 67 | Guerlain | Bois D'Armenie | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $379 | Niche |
| 68 | Guerlain | Cherry Oud | 100mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $279 | Niche |
| 69 | Guerlain | Cruel Gardenia | 200mL | 95% Full | Tester; No Box | $319 | Niche |
| 70 | Guerlain | Embruns D'Ylang | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $339 | Niche |
| 71 | Guerlain | Epices Volee | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $339 | Niche |
| 72 | Guerlain | Gourmand Coquin | 10mL | 100% Full | Tall Glass Decant | $60 | Niche |
| 73 | Guerlain | Herbes Troublantes | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $339 | Niche |
| 74 | Guerlain | Joyeuse Tuberuese | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $349 | Niche |
| 75 | Guerlain | Musc Outreblanc | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $349 | Niche |
| 76 | Guerlain | Oeillet Pourpre | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $339 | Niche |
| 77 | Guerlain | Oud Nude | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $349 | Niche |
| 78 | Guerlain | Rose Barbare | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $339 | Niche |
| 79 | Guerlain | Rose Barbare | 200mL | 90% Full | DECANTED - NO ORIGINAL BOTTLE | $250 | Niche |
| 80 | Guerlain | Santal Pao Rosa | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $349 | Niche |
| 81 | Guerlain | Tonka Imperiale | 30mL | 100% Full | Mini Bee Bottle Decant | $199 | Niche |
| 82 | Guerlain | Tonka Imperiale | 10mL | 100% Full | Tall Glass Decant | $55 | Niche |
| 83 | Hermes / Hermessence | Agar Ebene | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box, No Cap | $150 | Niche |
| 84 | Hermes / Hermessence | Brin de Reglisse | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 85 | Hermes / Hermessence | Cedre Sambac | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 86 | Hermes / Hermessence | Epice Marine | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $170 | Niche |
| 87 | Hermes / Hermessence | Iris Ukiyoe | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box, No Cap | $150 | Niche |
| 88 | Hermes / Hermessence | Muguet Porcelaine | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 89 | Hermes / Hermessence | Myrrhe Eglantine | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $185 | Niche |
| 90 | Hermes / Hermessence | Osmanthe Yunnan | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box, No Cap | $150 | Niche |
| 91 | Hermes / Hermessence | Paprika Brasil | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $170 | Niche |
| 92 | Hermes / Hermessence | Santal Massoia | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $170 | Niche |
| 93 | Hermes / Hermessence | Vanille Galante | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box, No Cap | $150 | Niche |
| 94 | Hermes / Hermessence | Vetiver Tonka | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box, No Cap | $150 | Niche |
| 95 | Hermes / Hermessence | Vetiver Tonka | 200mL | 100% Full | Full Presentation, Brand New. | $399 | Niche |
| 96 | Hermes / Hermessence | Violette Volynka | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $185 | Niche |
| 97 | Hiram Green | Vetiver | 50mL | 95% Full | Full Presentation | $130 | Niche |
| 98 | House of Sillage | Hufflepuff | 75mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $325 | Niche |
| 99 | House of Sillage | Nouez Moi | 75mL | 99% Full | Tester | $120 | Niche |
| 100 | I Profumi di Firenze | Caterina De Medici | 50mL | 99% Full | No Box | $35 | Niche |
| 101 | Initio | Side Effect | 10mL | 100% Full | Official Travel Atomizer | $75 | Niche |
| 102 | Knize | Knize Ten | 125mL | 99% Full | No Box | $110 | Niche |
| 103 | Le Labo | Another 13 | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $189 | Niche |
| 104 | Le Labo | Baie 19 | 100mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $225 | Niche |
| 105 | Le Labo | Cedrat 37 – Berlin City Exclusive | 100mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $275 | Niche |
| 106 | Le Labo | Cedrat 37 – Berlin City Exclusive | 50mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $225 | Niche |
| 107 | Le Labo | Gaiac 10 – Tokyo City Exclusive | 100mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $400 | Niche |
| 108 | Le Labo | Mousse de Chene 30 - Amsterdam City Exclusive | 50mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $300 | Niche |
| 109 | Le Labo | Musc 25 – Los Angeles City Exclusive | 50mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $250 | Niche |
| 110 | Le Labo | Rose 31 | 50mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $175 | Niche |
| 111 | Le Labo | Tabac 28 – Miami City Exclusive | 50mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $250 | Niche |
| 112 | Le Labo | The Noir 29 | 50mL | 99% Full | Sprayed Once to Test / Brand New; No Box | $175 | Niche |
| 113 | Maison Crivelli | Bois Datchai | 100mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $169 | Niche |
| 114 | Maison Crivelli | Rose Saltifolia | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $159 | Niche |
| 115 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | 724 | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $365 | Niche |
| 116 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | 724 | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 117 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Amyris Femme Extrait Special Edition Bottle | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $245 | Niche |
| 118 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Celestia | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $115 | Niche |
| 119 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Celestia Cologne Forte | 200mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $279 | Niche |
| 120 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Celestia Cologne Forte | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $149 | Niche |
| 121 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Celestia Forte | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $159 | Niche |
| 122 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Media Cologne Forte | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Cap | $175 | Niche |
| 123 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Universalis Cologne Forte | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $119 | Niche |
| 124 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Universalis EdT | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $219 | Niche |
| 125 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Vitae | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $219 | Niche |
| 126 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Vitae Cologne Forte | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $119 | Niche |
| 127 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Aqua Vitae Forte EdP | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $159 | Niche |
| 128 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Baccarat Rouge 540 EdP | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $205 | Niche |
| 129 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Baccarat Rouge 540 EdP | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $409 | Niche |
| 130 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Gentle Fluidity Gold | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 131 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Grand Soir | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $170 | Niche |
| 132 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | L'eau a La Rose | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $129 | Niche |
| 133 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | L'eau a la Rose | 35mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $90 | Niche |
| 134 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | L'homme A la Rose | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $159 | Niche |
| 135 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Oud EdP | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $170 | Niche |
| 136 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Oud Extrait | 10mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $35 | Niche |
| 137 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Oud Satin Mood EdP | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $190 | Niche |
| 138 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Oud Silk Mood EdP | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Cap | $170 | Niche |
| 139 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Oud Silk Mood Extrait | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Cap | $190 | Niche |
| 140 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Petit Matin | 70mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $145 | Niche |
| 141 | Maison Francis Kurkdjian | Petit Matin | 200mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $350 | Niche |
| 142 | Maison Lancome | Orange Bigarades | 100mL | 100% Full | Full presentation with Box | $229 | Niche |
| 143 | Mark Birley | Charles Street | 75mL | 97% Full | Travel Version | $90 | Niche |
| 144 | Masque Milano | Tango | 35mL | 99% Full | $90 | Niche | |
| 145 | Memo Paris | French Leather | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Cap | $135 | Niche |
| 146 | Memo Paris | Inle | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Cap | $135 | Niche |
| 147 | Memo Paris | Italian Leather | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box or Cap | $135 | Niche |
| 148 | Memo Paris | Lailabella | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $135 | Niche |
| 149 | Memo Paris | Marfa | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $135 | Niche |
| 150 | Memo Paris | Moon Fever | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $135 | Niche |
| 151 | Memo Paris | Oriental Leather | 75mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box; No Cap | $135 | Niche |
| 152 | Mind Games | Caissa | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $250 | Niche |
| 153 | Mind Games | Gardez (Black Queen) | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $225 | Niche |
| 154 | Mind Games | Scholar's Mate | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $225 | Niche |
| 155 | Mizensir | Cologne de Figuer | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $175 | Niche |
| 156 | Mizensir | Cologne de Matte | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $175 | Niche |
| 157 | Mizensir | Ideal Oud | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 158 | Mizensir | Luxury | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Cap | $165 | Niche |
| 159 | Mizensir | Mythique Vetiver | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $175 | Niche |
| 160 | Mizensir | Sweet Prailine | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 161 | Mizensir | Bois de Mysore | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 162 | Mona di Orio | Cuir | 75mL | 99% Full | No Box | $120 | Niche |
| 163 | Oliver and Co. | M.O.U.S.S.E. | 50mL | 99% Full | Limited Edition 87/133 | $110 | Niche |
| 164 | Parfums de Nicolai | Patchouli Intense | 100mL | 98% Full | Full Presentation | $119 | Niche |
| 165 | Perris Monte Carlo | Tuberuese Absolue | 100mL | 99% Full | No Box | $99 | Niche |
| 166 | Pomare's Stolen Perfume | Angel's Share | 9mL | 70% Full | No Box | $40 | Niche |
| 167 | Roja Dove | Apex Discovery Atomizer | 7.5mL | 99% Full | $50 | Niche | |
| 168 | Roja Dove | Creation-E Essence de Parfum | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 169 | Roja Dove | Scandal Essence de Parfum | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $165 | Niche |
| 170 | Roman Monegal | L'eau de Rose | 50mL | 97% Full | $70 | Niche | |
| 171 | Santa Maria Novella | Sandalo | 100mL | 95% Full | No Box | $80 | Niche |
| 172 | The Harmonist | Desired Earth Eau de Parfum | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand new, Sealed | $219 | Niche |
| 173 | The Harmonist | Magnetic Wood Parfum | 50mL | 100% Full | BNIB Sealed | $229 | Niche |
| 174 | Tom Ford | Beau de Jour | 1000mL | 100% Full | Sealed Dramming Bottle | $1,000 | Niche |
| 175 | Tom Ford | Ebene Fume | 250mL | 99% Full | Decanter; No Box | $750 | Niche |
| 176 | Tom Ford | Ebene Fume | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $170 | Niche |
| 177 | Tom Ford | Fougere Platine | 250mL | 90% Full | Decanter; No Box | $625 | Niche |
| 178 | Tom Ford | Fougere Platine | 1000mL | 100% Full | Sealed Dramming Bottle | $1,000 | Niche |
| 179 | Tom Ford | Fucking Fabulous | 250mL | 99% Full | Decanter; No Box | $750 | Niche |
| 180 | Tom Ford | Fucking Fabulous | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $180 | Niche |
| 181 | Tom Ford | Grey Vetiver Parfum | 100mL | 100% Full | Sealed, New in Box | $170 | Niche |
| 182 | Tom Ford | Oud Fleur | 1000mL | 100% Full | Sealed Dramming Bottle | $1,000 | Niche |
| 183 | Tom Ford | Oud Wood | 250mL | 99% Full | Decanter; No Box | $750 | Niche |
| 184 | Tom Ford | Rose de Chine | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $175 | Niche |
| 185 | Tom Ford | Rose Prick | 100mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $269 | Niche |
| 186 | Tom Ford | Soleil Blanc EdP | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $140 | Niche |
| 187 | Tom Ford | Soleil Brulant | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $145 | Niche |
| 188 | Tom Ford | Soleil Neige | 1000mL | 100% Full | Sealed Dramming Bottle | $850 | Niche |
| 189 | Tom Ford | Tobacco Oud | 50mL | 95% Full | No Box | $180 | Niche |
| 190 | Tom Ford | Tobacco Vanille | 50mL | 90% Full | Full Presentation with Box | $155 | Niche |
| 191 | Tom Ford | Tuscan Leather | 50mL | 100% Full | Magnetic Cap Decant | $119 | Niche |
| 192 | Tom Ford | Vert des Bois | 1000mL | 100% Full | Sealed Dramming Bottle | $900 | Niche |
| 193 | Tom Ford | White Suede | 1000mL | 100% Full | Sealed Dramming Bottle | $850 | Niche |
| 194 | TVGA | Milestones Extrait | 9mL | 90% Full | No Box | $40 | Niche |
| 195 | Washington Tremlett | Black Tie | 100mL | 95% Full | $125 | Niche | |
| 196 | Yves Saint Laurent | Tuxedo | 250mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $375 | Niche |
| 197 | Acqua di Parma | Arancia Di Capri | 150mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $65 | Designer |
| 198 | Acqua di Parma | Colonia EdC | 100mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $75 | Designer |
| 199 | Acqua di Parma | Colonia Intensa | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $65 | Designer |
| 200 | Aqua di Parma | Magnolia Nobile | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $115 | Designer |
| 201 | Caron | Pour un Homme de Caron Le Matin | 125mL | 100% Full | Opened to test, sprayed once | $69 | Designer |
| 202 | Caron | Pour un Homme de Caron Le Soir | 125mL | 100% Full | Opened to test, sprayed once | $69 | Designer |
| 203 | Caron | Pour Un Homme Impact Parfum | 75mL | 97% Full | No Box | $175 | Designer |
| 204 | Chanel | Allure Homme Sport - Aftershave Balm | 100mL | 99% Full | No Box | $65 | Designer |
| 205 | Chanel | Allure Pour Femme EdT | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $65 | Designer |
| 206 | Chanel | Antaeus | 100mL | 85% Full | Silver Sprayer | $125 | Designer |
| 207 | Chanel | Bleu de Chanel - Aftershave Balm | 100mL | 99% Full | No Box, Minor Cosmetic Damage | $55 | Designer |
| 208 | Chanel | Bleu de Chanel - Aftershave Lotion | 100mL | 99% Full | No Box, Minor Cosmetic Damage | $55 | Designer |
| 209 | Chanel | Bleu de Chanel Parfum | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $130 | Designer |
| 210 | Chanel | Chance Eau Tendre EdP | 50mL | 90% Full | Tester; No Box | $90 | Designer |
| 211 | Chanel | Chance Eau Tendre EdT | 150mL | 99% Full | Tester; No Box | $120 | Designer |
| 212 | Chanel | Coco EdP | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $85 | Designer |
| 213 | Chanel | Coco Mademoiselle - Moisturizing Body Lotion | 200mL | 99% Full | No Box | $55 | Designer |
| 214 | Chanel | Coco Mademoiselle EdP | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $90 | Designer |
| 215 | Chanel | Coco Mademoiselle EdT | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $65 | Designer |
| 216 | Chanel | Coco Mademoiselle L'eau Privee | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $90 | Designer |
| 217 | Chanel | Cristalle Eau Vert EdT Concentree | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $135 | Designer |
| 218 | Chanel | Cristalle EdP | 50mL | 95% Full | Tester; No Box | $135 | Designer |
| 219 | Chanel | No. 19 | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $115 | Designer |
| 220 | Chanel | No. 5 Eau Premiere | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $85 | Designer |
| 221 | Chanel | No. 5 EdP | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $85 | Designer |
| 222 | Chanel | Platinum Egoiste | 75mL | 99% Full | SPLASH, NOT SPRAY Older Formulation | $125 | Designer |
| 223 | Christian Dior | Dior Homme Sport - 2017 Version | 125mL | 99% Full | Tester; No Box Batch Code is 6Y02 | $89 | Designer |
| 224 | Christian Dior | J'adore in Joy EdT | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap, No Box | $60 | Designer |
| 225 | Floris | 007 | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap, No Box | $100 | Designer |
| 226 | Floris | A Rose For... | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $65 | Designer |
| 227 | Floris | Cefiro | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester with Cap, No Box | $59 | Designer |
| 228 | Floris | Lily of the Valley | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box. | $65 | Designer |
| 229 | Gucci | Gucci Guilty Absolute | 90mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $70 | Designer |
| 230 | Guerlain | Habit Rouge L'instinct | 100mL | 99% Full | Sprayed once | $84 | Designer |
| 231 | Guerlain | L'instant de Guerlain Pour Homme EXTREME | 10mL | 100% Full | VINTAGE BLACK RIM - DECANT | $50 | Designer |
| 232 | Hermes | Twilly | 80mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Box | $65 | Designer |
| 233 | Jo Malone | Amber & Lavender | 30mL | 90% Full | No Box | $52 | Designer |
| 234 | Jo Malone | English Oak & Redcurrant | 30mL | 80% Full | No Box | $49 | Designer |
| 235 | Jo Malone | English Pear & Freesia | 100mL | 100% Full | Brand New with Gift Box and Gift Set (Body Wash, Body Lotion) | $180 | Designer |
| 236 | Jo Malone | Rose & White Musk Absolu | 100mL | 100% Full | No Box | $180 | Designer |
| 237 | Jo Malone | Velvet Rose and Oud Cologne Intense | 50mL | 99% Full | Tester; No Box | $90 | Designer |
| 238 | Thierry Mugler | A*MEN | 100mL | 99% Full | Rubber Flask; No Box | $75 | Designer |
| 239 | Thierry Mugler | A*MEN Ultra Zest | 100mL | 85-90% Full | Rubber Flask; No Box | $250 | Designer |
| 240 | Tom Ford | Costa Azzura Parfum | 50mL | 100% Full | Brand New, Sealed | $130 | Designer |
| 241 | Amouage | Cristal and Gold Ladies | 50mL | 95% Full | Vintage, Incredibly hard to find. Full presentation in nice condition | $399 | Vintage |
| 242 | Cartier | Santos EdT | 100mL | 100% Full | Spray; Refill. | $299 | Vintage |
| 243 | Chanel | Egoiste Cologne Concentree | 100mL | 97% Full | Bottle Only | $399 | Vintage |
| 244 | Chanel | Gardenia EdT | 100mL | 100% Full | Vintage; Sealed | $390 | Vintage |
| 245 | Crabtree & Evelyn | Crabtree & Evelyn Extract of West Indian and Sicilian Limes | 125mL | 100% Full | Full presentation with Box | $209 | Vintage |
| 246 | Dunhill | Cologne | 125mL | 99% Full | Vintage; Splash | $100 | Vintage |
| 247 | Escada | Pour Homme Aftershave | 75mL | 100% Full | BNIB Sealed | $165 | Vintage |
| 248 | Escada | Pour Homme Aftershave | 125mL | 100% Full | BNIB Sealed | $240 | Vintage |
| 249 | Floris | Bay Rum | 3.5 Oz | 97% Full | Vintage; Splash. "Use as a cologne, after shave lotion, or hair lotion." | $84 | Vintage |
| 250 | Floris | Special 127 | 100mL | 98% Full | Vintage; Dark Blue Box., 2 Royal Warrants, Vintage Version | $70 | Vintage |
| 251 | Fragonard | Zizanie | 240mL | 80% Full | Shaker bottle (Splash, not spray) no box. At least 80% Full. | $240 | Vintage |
| 252 | Geo F Trumper | Ajaccio Violets | 100mL | 99% Full | $40 | Vintage | |
| 253 | Gucci | Envy Aftershave | 50mL | 100% Full | BNIB Sealed | $140 | Vintage |
| 254 | Gucci | Envy Aftershave | 100mL | 100% Full | BNIB Sealed | $215 | Vintage |
| 255 | Gucci | Rush for Men | 50mL | 100% Full | Full Presentation; These do not come fully filled | $190 | Vintage |
| 256 | Gucci | Rush for Men Aftershave | 100mL | 100% Full | BNIB Sealed | $140 | Vintage |
| 257 | Guerlain | Heritage EdT | 200mL | 100% Full | New; Vintage; Splash. 1991 Bottle. | $225 | Vintage |
| 258 | Guerlain | Samrasa EdP | 50mL | 100% Full | No Box | $109 | Vintage |
| 259 | Guerlain | Samsara EdT 1992-1993 Formulation | 100mL | 100% Full | Tester; No Cap; No Box | $109 | Vintage |
| 260 | Jean Desprez | Bal a Versailles | 9 Oz | 70% Full | Vintage; Splash; No Box Open to offers on this enormous bottle. | $135 | Vintage |
| 261 | Lacoste | Eau de Sport Vivifiante | 100mL | 99% Full | No Box | $110 | Vintage |
| 262 | Lacoste | Land | 100mL | 99% Full | $130 | Vintage | |
| 263 | Nino Cerruti | Fair Play Pour Homme | 100mL | 99% Full | Full presentation with Box | $275 | Vintage |
| 264 | Paco Rabanne | Eau de Metal | 20mL | 100% Full | Vintage; Mini | $15 | Vintage |
| 265 | Ralph Lauren | Silver Romance for Men | 100mL | 80% Full | No Box, No Cap | $145 | Vintage |
| 266 | Revillon | Pour Homme Eau de Toilette Super Concentrate | 60mL | 99% Full | Atomizer | $190 | Vintage |
| 267 | Revillon | Pour Homme Eau de Toilette Super Concentrate | 90mL | 99% Full | Atomizer | $290 | Vintage |
2023.06.09 20:24 Mean-Classic-7739 Something in the blizzard pt.2
Part 2
Day 11
The pain was excruciating and all over my body. A thousand knives seemed to dig into me. I lay there for a minute with the dead creature still on top of me. I was trying to muster enough strength to get up and move this horrible thing off me, but I couldn’t. Finally, after what seemed like lying there for an hour Chloe came over and helped me move its dead body off me.
She froze when she saw me. I must’ve looked horrible so much had happened to me in the last 10 minutes. I saw her eyes move to my left hand. I found my tired eyes looking over, and what I saw was horrifying. My left hand was a bloody broken mess, fingers were missing, bones were sticking out in odd places, and a huge chunk of my palm was completely gone. I puked all over myself. Chloe looked like she was trying so hard to keep herself together.
The next few minutes were tense. Chloe tied one of her layers to my arm as a makeshift tourniquet. Then we slowly made our way home with Chloe practically dragging me.
They had to stitch my wounds while I was still conscious due to us not having anesthetics, and those were the most painful moments of my life. I felt the needle go in and out of my skin, I felt the small string pull my muscle and skin back together, and I felt when they had to cut one of my fingers off. It was absolutely excruciating and after it was done I passed out.
Chloe sat on the couch feeling awful and tired. She’d just spent an hour trying to get the food that had been in the fridge into coolers, but her mind was so busy she hardly cared. She felt awful about everything. There was so much she could’ve done, so many ways she could’ve helped me. So many ways that led to me still having a hand. If only I hadn’t been a coward, she thought, if I just hadn’t stood there maybe he would still have his hand. If only she’d just shot it again. She wiped her face trying not to cry. She had to be the strong one now, she had to be brave.
She was very curious, she wanted to know what exactly had happened to Carl. Joey hadn’t had the time to tell her whether or not the man was dead. She assumed he was due to the blood and the creature, but there was a small chance. She told Gretchen and Ronda (my mom) what her plan was. They agreed and she went to get ready.
She brought two guns, the sniper and the semi-automatic. She also found an old motorcycle helmet and decided to use that as a makeshift helmet. She knew if I had been awake I wouldn’t have not in a million years let her go, so she made her process quick just in case I did wake up.
Crunch! The snow had melted slightly the night before so now it felt more like walking across huge ice sheets. As she walked she realized she didn’t even have to use the GPS because of the blood trail. She followed it for a while, the snow constantly attacking her. After a couple of minutes, she found it. Lying in the middle of the street now with a fresh layer of snow on it was the creature, the hound as she’d begun to refer to it in her head. She hadn’t gotten a good look at it like I had so her eyes went wide when she saw the body. She was struck by how much its exoskeleton looked like big chunks of rocks. She also noticed the now frozen yellow-greenish blood around the body. Chloe leaned down to examine what was left of the head. What was left was a hollow shell of the exoskeleton; the gunshot in the mouth had practically liquefied everything in its head. She remembered how everything had exploded from the mouth and eye holes. The image of the eyes getting blown out from behind disgusted her.
She found herself examining the rest of the body and she couldn’t help but keep looking at the four legs. They looked so out of place on the body. They looked so mammalian for such an insect-like creature. They literally looked like stretched-out bald dog legs. She had a feeling of deja vu as she looked at the legs, she couldn’t help but think of the black dog they’d seen the other day. She made a note in her head that she wanted to take the body with her on the way back.
Finally, she stood up and started making her way towards the store. Like before she just followed the blood. She remembered when Joey ran into her he was covered in blood, like he’d slipped into the trail. She dreaded to think what he’d found in the showers. Her trek was slow and eerie. Then as she got closer the dead silence was cut by a ticking sound. She vaguely recognized it as something those spiders had made. Specifically the stinger ones. She kept the semi-automatic raised and got ready for a fight, but the ticking sounds slowly faded and she kept moving.
The store was just as she had left it early that morning. It was still a complete wreck. She hurried past the shattered glass and toppled shelves, through the small break room, and into the bunk room. It looked even worse than before. It looked like the creature had destroyed a few more things after it caught the headlamp. She specifically noticed a new deep gash in the bunk they’d hid behind.
As she walked into the shower room she heard a faint dripping sound. She started going one stall at a time to find it. First empty, second empty, but the third she wanted to throw up. Carl lay in the back of the stall, his body a bloody mess. His torso was almost gone. Everything inside of it had been ripped out along with most of his flesh. His ribs were shattered and lying on the floor. His spine was cracked and twisted. It looked like it had been broken. She threw up and stepped away from the sight, making her start to sob. Pull yourself together, she thought to herself, now isn’t the time. She wiped the tears off her face and continued. He had a daughter and a wife. She had to know what happened to them. So with much hesitance, she continued.
Fourth room empty, fifth empty, sixth empty, seventh empty, she stood next to the eighth stall dreading what she’d find inside. She didn’t want to see what was in there, but she would never forgive herself for not looking.
Two cocoon-looking things lay in the stall. They were white and pulsating slightly. They looked like the web cocoon the stingers had wrapped around the dog, but these were too big to be dogs. Instantly she knew what had happened to his wife and daughter. Chloe stepped away so she didn’t have to see it anymore, and then she had a thought. They wouldn’t leave them unattended, would they? She became much more nervous and started cautiously making her way from the room. She started to hear the ticking noises outside again and her hands started to shake. She took a deep breath and kept walking.
She walked into the main part of the store and saw a dozen or so stingers crawling in through one of the broken windows. She gasped, then in a hurry ducked back into the breakroom. Her whole body was shaking as she stood there listening to them scurrying around the store. Then after a minute one walked into the breakroom didn’t see her and disappeared into the bunk room. Then another went through, then another, then another, then another, and soon all but one had passed through. Her whole body was trembling when finally it walked through. This one was walking more slowly and looking around much more than the others, and suddenly its small beady eyes met hers. Scre… Rat-a-tatata! Four quick bullets cut through the stinger. All four hit it right in the head. She had a small feeling of triumph then Screech! The other stingers started running into the room. She hurried out in such a rush she didn’t watch where she was stepping and slipped on a piece of glass.
Smack! Her helmet slammed into the ground and then the rest of her. She watched them hurriedly crawl towards her. She tried to get a shot but they were just too fast. Then she felt a sharp pain in her leg. One of the stingers had sunk their stinger into her calf. Another was about to sting before she made her move. She grabbed a large piece of glass and stabbed it into the one on her leg, and then quickly stuck the shard into the other one that was about to sting her. Then she quickly stood up. Her body was starting to feel heavy and she was getting a little loopy. The other stingers were screeching and running toward her. Rat-a-tatatatata! She shot 10 rounds into the remaining nine stingers. Seven exploded when the bullet made contact, another got three legs blown off, the last wasn’t hit, and before she could shoot again it had lodged its stinger in her boot. She stopped for a second realizing that the stinger hadn’t actually pierced her foot then Rat-a-tat! She shot two bullets into the thing and then pulled it off her foot.
Her adrenaline was wearing off and the venom was doing its work fast. Her eyes were starting to close and she had to concentrate just to keep them open. I need to get somewhere safe, she thought looking around, and then her eyes fell on an intact door.
She locked the door to the women's restroom and then slumped against it as she felt her consciousness begin to slip. All she could think of was me hoping that I was okay, and hoping that she’d be able to see me again. Then finally she blacked out.
Her eyes fluttered open to see she was in the same place she’d passed out. There was a small puddle of blood around her calf. She weakly reached over and touched the wound. It wasn’t bleeding any more. I must’ve been out for a while. She thought, gingerly beginning to put weight on her leg. It hurt but she could walk. Click, she unlocked the bathroom door, raised the gun, and opened the door. She was nervous, worried that maybe more of them had come while she was out. It didn’t look like too much time had passed, and even more importantly there were no stingers. She looked over and saw her footprints were still visible through the heavily falling snow. Good not much time must have passed, she thought. Then she pulled out the phone and called Gretchen.
Bzzz…
“Gretchen, I got stung and passed out. What time is it?” She asked.
Gretchen’s relieved voice cut through the phone: “Oh Chloe thank goodness, it’s 2:42. You left around 12.”
Day 13
I woke up to giggling and laughter. I sat up and looked at the doorway and on the other side I could hear the boys quietly playing together. I moved the covers and tried to move my legs, but instantly daggers of pain went up my right leg. I wanted to do it more slowly but nothing seemed to help.
“Chloe!” I called and immediately heard something clatter upstairs followed by fast footsteps into the basement.
In a second Chloe had sprinted into the room and was on top of me giving me a huge hug. She pulled away and gave me one of her pretty little smiles.
“How are you feeling?” She asked.
My stomach growled and that answered her question.
“You’ve been asleep for almost two days, no wonder you’re hungry.” She said, I froze and looked over at the clock, but nothing showed on it. It was just a blank black screen.
“When did the power go out?” I asked, turning back toward her.
“Not long after you fell asleep.” She said, “We put as much food as we could into coolers, but most of what was in the fridge and freezer has gone bad.”
Her face was sad and grim. I reached for her hand with my good hand and squeezed it.
“We’ll get through this just like everything else. We’ll make it through if we stick together.” I told her starting to realize how hoarse I sounded.
She smiled then looked up at me again: “I’ll go get you some food… and a water bottle.” She said walking back out of the room.
I lay there in deep thought when Alan poked his head in.
“Uncle, are you okay?” He asked, sitting down on the foot of the bed.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, smiling at him.
He smiled back, “Uncle you’ve got a Lego hand now.” He yelled pointing to my left hand.
I looked at my hand and saw the way they wrapped it did look like a Lego hand.
“Ha… yeah I suppose so.” I chuckled, Alan nodded and disappeared into the hallway.
A few minutes later Chloe appeared in the doorway with a plate and Mom and Gretchen tailed her.
“Sweety, are you ok?” My mom asked, walking over to the bedside and putting her hand on my forehead.
“Yes Mom I’m ok, I’m as ok as I can be right now,” I told her.
“Well I’m glad you’re ok,” She said, hugging me.
“Me too,” Gretchen added, hugging me.
After a minute they broke away and Chloe gave me my plate. It was some dry cereal and a piece of toast.
“Sorry… that’s all I could scrape together.” She said her expression was sad.
“How much is left?” I asked her.
“A few days maybe, the water situation is even worse though,” She said grimly.
I felt a crushing sense of defeat at that.
“We’re going to need to do something now,” Gretchen said, “Before we can’t do anything.”
“Agreed, but what? There is no chance of leaving without a snow plow.” I grumbled, becoming more disheartened.
“What if we had a snow plow?” Chloe asked.
“What?” Me and Gretchen asked.
“I mean, they keep it at the tractor place just a mile away. We could get the snow plow.” She suggested a hint of hope in her eyes.
“I don’t think we’ll all fit. Let alone supplies.” I told her.
“So then we bring two vehicles,” She said, “One or two of us go to the place, get the snow plow, and come back to the others in the other vehicle and follow behind.”
It was actually a pretty good plan, but it was still wishful thinking. They had a lot of variables on that.
“That might work, but it will take time and we don’t exactly have time,” I said.
“Well then let's get some more time. We might be able to find more food in other homes,” My mom said.
“Yes, in theory, that would work, but we don’t have two people to go,” I said.
“I’m out of commission, Gretchen isn’t leaving her boys, and not in a million years am I letting you go, Mom,” I argued.
“She can handle herself, she did the other day,” Mom argued back.
“What?... no I was with her…” I turned toward Chloe in confusion.
I saw a guilty look on her face and she told me that she’d gone to the store on the 11th day after they were done treating me.
I pulled her into a tight hug and whispered in her ear: “If you do that again I will use whatever force necessary to make your stay here.”
She looked at me, her eyes darkening: “Joey if I don’t go, we will starve. I’m terrified too but if that is what needs to be done I’ll do it.”
“I… I… I don’t want to lose you.” I sputtered out.
Her face turned red before she said: “I don’t want to lose you either, or any of you guys and that's why I need to go.”
I finally relented, Gretchen and my mom left the room, and Chloe sat and chatted with me while I ate my mediocre breakfast.
She perked up and said, “Joey I need to show you something.”
She got up and helped me get out of bed. Getting out wasn’t that hard unless I had to move my left leg or arm. Once I was standing she helped me over to the restroom and then helped me sit down.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked, looking around the bathroom.
“This,” She said, pulling the shower curtain open and revealing what was inside.
Lying inside the tub was the body of the dog bug creature.
“Why the heck did you bring that in?” I asked.
“Aren’t you curious what it is?” She asked, an almost crazed look in her eyes.
“Fair, I am curious,” I said. “Found anything out so far?” I then asked.
“Well a no, not yet,” She said looking disappointed now, “I just know it isn’t anything science knows of.”
“Nothing, nothing interesting?” I inquired.
“Well yes there are interesting things,” She said, “Like look at this.”
She grabbed a knife covered in yellowish-green blood and used it to open a previously cut incision into the body. I looked inside and saw something quite strange. This thing still had an endoskeleton.
“Nothing that we know of on earth has an endo and exoskeleton, and I honestly don’t know why an animal would have both.” She said looking up at me.
“Hmm… mind if I take a look?” I asked.
She nodded and I moved over and took the knife with my right hand. I used the knife to hold open the incision and I looked at the bone. It looked normal but I was suspicious so I set the knife down, reached in, and yanked the femur I’d been looking at out. The femur was the size it should’ve been for a normal dog, but for this creature, it was extremely undersized.
“Just as I thought,” I said, looking over at her.
“Can you explain to me what it is that you just figured out?” She asked, very confused.
“Look how small this femur is, it should be double the size for this creature, but it is the adequate size for a normal dog. The way I figure this is that during the metamorphosis that changed the dog into this thing the bones were not destroyed or changed. That’s why they are still there but not the right size.” I explained holding the bone up to her.
“I suppose that your theory makes sense,” She said after a short pause.
Day 14
Chloe sat on the bed strapping on the extra gear I was making her take. I knew I couldn’t stop her from going so I decided I would make her as safe as possible. I dug through old boxes and found my dad's old Kevlar vests. There were two so I cut one up to make guards for her arms and legs. Then I made her put on an extra coat to add one more layer of protection, as for other parts I agreed that the motorcycle helmet was the best helmet we had so she put that on.
Now she was sitting on the bed with the helmet sitting next to her while she was loading her weapons. She was bringing the semi-automatic and the sniper rifle with extra ammo for each. She also had a hunting knife strapped to her belt saying it would’ve come in handy last time. I looked at her and gave her a tight hug.
“If you don’t come back I’ll find you and teach you a lesson.” I jokingly threatened her.
She let out a giggle, “I’ll try my best.”
Again she made her outside into the blizzard. It raged on around her as it had been for days. She had to climb the almost four-foot-tall pile of snow before she could really start exploring. They’d assumed that the people who had left town wouldn’t have much food in their homes, so she planned to hit Carl’s house and the Garrison’s house today. Then check out a few other houses the next day, but right now she had to focus on simply taking the next step because anytime she stepped wrong she’d sink further into the snow. Slowly through the whipping wind and freezing snow, she walked. It was exhausting especially with her still being sore from a couple of days ago, but she continued despite the pain and weather. Despite it all she kept taking step after step after step, and the whole time the blizzard's icy claws were digging into her.
Eventually, she saw the destroyed store and walked past it, her eyes eyeing the shattered windows for any movement but nothing happened. She continued onward knowing that Carl’s house was now only a block away. She walked carefully and precisely trying not to step in the wrong place. Then she saw it. Carl’s house was a small colonial-style two-story home with a big wrap-around porch, but now it looked horrible. The door was ripped out of its hinges and two or three windows were shattered. She slid down a short snowy slope and onto the porch. Crack! One of the wooden planks that made the porch broke from under her foot and her foot slipped down. She pulled it out of the hole and slowly walked into his house.
There was a trail of snow leading in from the fallen door almost like a carpet leading her into this place. It was horrible on the inside. It reminded her of the store. Furniture was thrown every which way, some bearing deep gashes. The closest door to her had a hole going straight through it. She walked over a vast sea of shattered glass and turned into the kitchen. The granite countertops had been ripped from their places and shattered on the tiled floor. A large gash was in the door of the now fallen fridge. She walked over and kneeled down near the fridge, ripping open one of the doors. As she suspected, everything in there was frozen solid. Sitting in there was cheese, deli meat, assorted fruits and vegetables, shattered glasses of condiments, and two steaks. She grabbed everything and stuffed it all into one of the duffel bags she’d brought. Then she saw a loaf of bread lying on the ground near her and grabbed that too. She stood up and looked around the kitchen. She noticed a box of pasta sitting next to a pot on the stove. The box was full, so she grabbed it. The pot was partly melted onto the stove and frozen tomato sauce sat inside.
The picture of what had happened began to emerge in her head. Carl had likely been walking home from the store when it attacked. It chased him inside, breaking down the door and destroying everything in its path. His wife, Greta, had been making spaghetti for dinner when it happened. He ran into the kitchen and grabbed his wife with the beast following him. It destroyed the kitchen as it chased them.
Chloe pushed those thoughts from her head and opened their pantry to see if there was more food. There were lots of boxes but her eyes fell on the cans that lined the bottom of the pantry. There were dozens of them, probably a hundred or two cans. She kneeled and started eagerly grabbing the cans and putting them in the duffel bag. She even took out the cheese and pasta to make for more room.
She stopped her eager collecting when she heard a slight ticking noise. Stingers she thought and then pulled her knife from her belt in preparation. The ticking was slight and distant. It probably just walked in, she thought. With the ticking, she heard the slight creaking of the wood floor in the hall as it approached the kitchen. Then a scraping tapping sound as it began walking on the tiles. She gripped the knife tightly and got ready to stab the thing. Scr…! The stinger managed to give off a faint screech before the sharp hunting knife pierced its windpipe. She yanked the knife out of its neck severing the head from the body. Then she resheathed the knife and quietly got back to what she’d been doing. She didn’t stop until the bag was bulging then she zipped it closed and heaved it under her arm. It was heavy but she wasn’t weak.
She walked over to the front door and set the duffel bag next to it. She wanted to check out the rest of the house before she left.
She crept down the hall and into the master bedroom. It was intact, everything looked right and nothing was broken. She walked over to the dresser and started going through the drawers. Darn, just clothes. She thought as she dug her hands in shuffling the clothes around. She opened the drawer and start thrashing around the clothes when she felt something hard. She pulled a box of ammo out of the drawer. It was for the revolver she looked to see how much but it was empty.
Almost every stair on the way upstairs bore scratches and one or two were cracked. They creaked so loud she began to worry that the noise would get the stinger’s attention but nothing came. Then finally she arrived upstairs. The second floor of their house was composed of two rooms, a restroom, and his daughter Lacy’s bedroom. The bedroom door and a dresser lay on the room floor scratched and broken. The rest of the room was torn apart. The bed was shredded and a mirror lay shattered on the ground. Her eyes fell to the window which was propped open.
The rest of their story seemed to fall into place. Carl and Greta ran upstairs chased by the hound, and into Lacy’s room. They barricaded the door as the creature tried to get it, and then they all quickly slipped out of the window onto the porch roof and then to the ground. They ran to the store and bunkered there. The creature searched the whole shop but couldn’t find them. Then later the hound came back and Carl went to fight it. He told Greta and Lacy to hide in a stall and made his way to the main part of the shop. There he was killed and then dragged into the shower stall to be eaten, and at some point during that time the stingers and slugs got to Lacy and Greta.
She shivered, they’d tried so hard but it still got to them. Maybe if he’d had more bullets he could’ve survived. Thinking of the empty box and the two shots that had woken them that night.
She walked out of the bedroom and back downstairs. She found her eyes wandering around the destroyed first floor again, and it struck her that something bigger had to have done this. There was no way the deer-sized hound would have destroyed this much. She hurried over into the kitchen again and looked at the gash in the fridge. That’s too big. Way too big! She thought looking at the huge gash. She started to think about the store and the same inconsistencies began to appear in the memories. All the damage, the claw marks, the strength, it was all too much, too big, there was no way the hound had done this.
As she was thinking she noticed a doorway she hadn’t been through. Next to her was the doorway to the basement stairs with the door wide open. She peaked down and saw light down there, not much probably from a window, but it was something.
Creak! Her first step of descent was loud and made her worry again that something would hear her. She stopped and listened, but nothing. So as carefully as she could she continued. Every step was as loud as the first and every step made her jump in her skin and wait for something to happen. But after what seemed like ages she arrived at the bottom.
The basement was large with two spare bedrooms and a large storage room. She slowly walked down the hall looking into the bedrooms on both sides of her. They were bare with nothing much more than beds, so she walked forward and into the main storage room.
The storage room had large shelving units across the whole room. The shelves were partially filled with labeled boxes. She walked over to one shelf and started reading the labels. Christmas, no, I don't need that. Halloween, not that. Games, nope. Sports could be useful. She thought as she grabbed the heavy crate and set it out in front of her. She grabbed the latches on either side, undoing them and popping the lid off.
Suddenly a ripping sound erupted from another part of the basement. The ripping had a sort of wet sound to it. Chloe started to walk over to the sound far too curious not to. Screech! It came from the same direction as the ripping sound. She got the gun ready and then jumped from around a shelf not facing what was making the sound. She watched one of those hound things fully emerge from a cocoon and look over at her. A chill ran down her spine as its four eyes met hers; the two to the left were icy blue and the two to the right were dark brown. This one was also slightly smaller but much stockier than the other. Rat-a-tatatata! She released a quick barrage of bullets hoping to stop the disgusting thing, but it just started charging for her. Quickly she moved to the other side of the shelving and pushed it down. Her whole body was shaking, but she had to keep calm and keep fighting. The hound howled in pain and started cracking through the wooden shelf to get to her. She took this time to aim a good shot at its face. Rat-a-tat! She shot two quick bullets into its face. One sunk into its exoskeleton the other buried itself into one of its eyes. SCREECH!!!!! It broke through the shelf and made a quick dive toward her. It pinned her to the ground, knocking her gun away in the process. It sunk its jaws into the helmet and it started to break and crack. She started to cry. This thing was going to eat through her helmet then her face, but during this moment of panic she remembered something. She pulled the knife from her belt and stabbed it into the hound's semi-exposed underbelly. It screeched again in pain so she stabbed again. She then shoved the hurt thing off of her and dove for the gun. She felt one of its praying mantis talons slash her vest and then her upper leg, so she turned around and fired. Rat-a-tatata! She shot it four more times, one hitting its forehead, the second hitting its mouth, the third mouth as well, and the fourth badly damaged its lower jaw. Its face was covered in yellow-greenish blood and it was throwing up blood onto the floor. Just as she thought it might be dying it made a quick sprint toward her. It bit her right knee, its teeth sinking in and actually managing to make her bleed. But then crash! It shoved forward and caused her to fall on top of it. Not having a good shot she grabbed the knife and started stabbing anywhere she could until it finally stopped fighting.
She lay there catching her breath until finally she stood up. Her vision was disrupted by the cracks in the helmet’s visor. She tore the helmet off and threw it down onto the dying hound. Even as it lay there it still tried to get toward her and attack her. She thought about executing it but decided that would just be a waste of a bullet and in a weird way she found its attempts to attack entertaining.
The sports crate she’d opened earlier didn’t have much use. It contained a few balls and two or three different types of rackets. She continued looking through the shelves until she found a box labeled camping. She slid it off the shelf and onto the floor, undid the latches, and popped the lid off. Inside the box were all sorts of goodies. At the top of the box were two big mummy sleeping bags. She pulled those out to see fire starters, water purifiers, bug spray, sunscreen, a small tent, utensils, pots and pans, and a large hatchet. Excitedly she grabbed her other duffel bag and moved everything from the crate into it.
She heaved the duffel bag under her arm and carried it back upstairs. She set it next to the other and turned around. She wanted to check one more place before she left the house. She walked across the house and to the backdoor pushing it open and looking outside. In their backyard half buried in snow was a shed. She hurried over to the shed through the deep snow. The doors were almost completely covered in snow and she knew she wouldn't be spending the whole day shoveling. Luckily there was a small window near the top of the shed. She gave it one good kick and the window popped open. She slid through the hole and dropped down into the shed.
The shed was small with very little inside. There was a lawn mower and a few tools but that was it. The one thing that did catch her eye was a small wooden sled with a rope tied to the front. She picked it up thinking how much easier it would make carrying the bags.
Chloe carefully shoved the sled through the window frame and then squeezed through herself. She carried the sled into the house, used tape to keep the bags secure on it, and then started pulling the sled back towards home. Carl’s house was near the top of a small hill, so for a short couple of seconds, she rode the sled as it slid down the icy slope. It made her feel like a little kid and she wished it would have lasted longer.
After a long walk through the blizzard she arrived home tired and her face feeling like it was freezing off. Gretchen hugged her the moment she walked in.
“Are you ok? We thought we heard gunshots.” She said a little worried.
“You did… I had to kill another hound thing. Just like the one in the tub. The armor worked like a charm though, I hardly felt its bite.” Chloe said motioning to the rip in her pants around the knee.
“Oh shoot you bleeding,” Gretchen said looking at her leg.
Chloe looked down to see a cut on her thigh and a few small nicks on her knee.
I sat in bed. I'd just heard Chloe come in and I waited patiently for her to come down. After a couple of minutes, I heard footsteps come downstairs and start creeping down the hall. Then I saw her face poke in from around the door. She smiled and walked in when she saw I was awake.
“Hi babe, how are you feeling?” She asked, taking a seat next to me.
“I mean my hand still hurts like heck, but yeah I’m fine.” I joked.
She smiled, “Seriously though, are you feeling alright?” She asked.
“I’m feeling fine,” I lied trying to get her to stop worrying.
“I want to hear about everything that happened,” I said sitting up.
So she told me everything that happened, even her theory on what exactly happened to Carl and his family.
“Did they have a dog?” She asked me after finishing her story.
“Yeah… a pitbull I think,” I replied, trying my best to remember the odd times when Carl talked about his dog.
“That explains it, that hound was a lot stockier than the one you shot.” She said, “Also it destroyed the helmet so I need a new one before I go to the Garrison’s house.”
I gave her a worried look, “Do you need to go?” I asked.
“YES!” She insisted, “We don’t know what happened to them, and I’d like to find a little more food.”
“But do we need more food?” I asked, “You got a lot of cans.”
“Joey, this has already been going on for two weeks. Who knows how long it will last? More preparation never hurts.” She argued, sounding a little angry now.
“Ok… Ok… Just be safe,” I told her and gave her a big hug.
Gretchen found an arguably better helmet in the garage, a big metal welding helmet. It fit Chloe almost perfectly, and as a backup, she wore two thick hoods to protect the back of her head. She had a very bad feeling this time, as she stood there by the door she couldn’t help but shake. She wanted someone to come with her, and as big Herman came over to say his goodbyes she had an idea.
She marched through the deep snow with Herman atop the sled she pulled. She’d try to have him follow on foot, but the snow was just too high and he kept getting stuck. But she didn’t care that he was just extra weight because she was just happy that she wasn’t facing this alone. She slowly made her way down the street, the blizzard more relentless than ever. It seemed to her the longer the blizzard continued the stronger it was becoming. The snow continued to pound down on top of her slowly wearing down her will to continue, but it didn’t stop her. She took one step after another after another. She was starting to tire and the pain of the injuries was beginning to wear on her. But every time she seemed to slow Herman would give a little woof, and she would keep on going.
The snow had become so hard to see through that more than an outstretched hand was invisible to her. Her vision was so bad she didn’t know the group of crawlers and slugs were there until she was practically right on top of them
Meanwhile…
“Hey, we should probably start clearing the driveway now,” Gretchen said suddenly to her mom while they both sat at the kitchen table.
“That’s probably a wise idea,” Our mother said with a smile.
Gretchen and Mom began their efforts with large snow shovels. Gretchen did most of the work as Mom had to take frequent breaks. They shoveled and shoveled as the day wore on going over their work with salt so as to not let more snow accumulate. Gretchen was exhausted from the work, but she continued nonetheless. She kept digging ad digging until she heard the shovel scrape concrete then she moved to the next section. Despite the cold, they were both dripping with sweat.
I sat by the window watching them work while the boys played. I so wanted to go help but knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but sit and watch them work. I felt horrible as I watched, and then my mind started thinking of Chloe. I pulled out the walkie and pressed the button to talk.
The first thing Chloe heard was Screech! The stinger was right in front of her clearly just as surprised by her as she was of it. But it wasn’t alone from her restricted view; it looked like there were about 10 stingers and 3 or so slugs.
She tried to raise her gun but they were scattering around far too quickly. Then she heard a ripping noise as one of them drove a stinger into her boot. She pulled out the hunting knife and made quick work of the stinger. Two more stingers were charging straight for her and one was coming from her left. Before she could do anything the snow under the two erupted and they were dragged down into it. She wasn’t able to see what it was and she began to shake as it did the same thing to the one coming from her left. In a sudden panic, she turned around to see the sled empty with a hole in the snow right next to it. She let out a small cry whatever was under the snow had gotten Herman and the stingers, but there was no time for mourning as more of the stingers began coming for her. Again the snow erupted under them but this time she got a better look. Whatever was under the snow was big and white. She got the gun as the thing took out the rest of the slugs and stingers. She assumed it was coming for her next. She hurried and jumped atop the sled so it couldn’t take her down easily. She stood there ready to fight whatever monster thing had gotten everything. Horrible images of twisted spider mole creatures flew through her head. Suddenly the snow next to the sled exploded open and she saw the large white beast jump out of the snow and on top of her. She closed her eyes expecting to feel teeth begin to sink down, but after a second she heard a lapping sound. She opened her eyes to see Herman on top of her licking her helmet. She smiled and let out a laugh.
“Good boy!” She said encouragingly.
Herman was completely covered in snow; he looked more like a polar bear than a dog. She brushed some of it off but didn’t bother to do much. She helped the big dog back onto the sled and continued forward. She walked another block before she finally saw her destination to her right was the Garrison’s large house broken and beaten from obvious attacks. It stood there somehow feeling more eerie than the surrounding houses. She stepped onto the wooden porch and there was a loud creak. Ever so more carefully she and Herman crept across the porch and into the house. If only they’d known what they were about to walk into.
submitted by Mean-Classic-7739 to LighthouseHorror [link] [comments]
Day 11
The pain was excruciating and all over my body. A thousand knives seemed to dig into me. I lay there for a minute with the dead creature still on top of me. I was trying to muster enough strength to get up and move this horrible thing off me, but I couldn’t. Finally, after what seemed like lying there for an hour Chloe came over and helped me move its dead body off me.
She froze when she saw me. I must’ve looked horrible so much had happened to me in the last 10 minutes. I saw her eyes move to my left hand. I found my tired eyes looking over, and what I saw was horrifying. My left hand was a bloody broken mess, fingers were missing, bones were sticking out in odd places, and a huge chunk of my palm was completely gone. I puked all over myself. Chloe looked like she was trying so hard to keep herself together.
The next few minutes were tense. Chloe tied one of her layers to my arm as a makeshift tourniquet. Then we slowly made our way home with Chloe practically dragging me.
They had to stitch my wounds while I was still conscious due to us not having anesthetics, and those were the most painful moments of my life. I felt the needle go in and out of my skin, I felt the small string pull my muscle and skin back together, and I felt when they had to cut one of my fingers off. It was absolutely excruciating and after it was done I passed out.
Chloe sat on the couch feeling awful and tired. She’d just spent an hour trying to get the food that had been in the fridge into coolers, but her mind was so busy she hardly cared. She felt awful about everything. There was so much she could’ve done, so many ways she could’ve helped me. So many ways that led to me still having a hand. If only I hadn’t been a coward, she thought, if I just hadn’t stood there maybe he would still have his hand. If only she’d just shot it again. She wiped her face trying not to cry. She had to be the strong one now, she had to be brave.
She was very curious, she wanted to know what exactly had happened to Carl. Joey hadn’t had the time to tell her whether or not the man was dead. She assumed he was due to the blood and the creature, but there was a small chance. She told Gretchen and Ronda (my mom) what her plan was. They agreed and she went to get ready.
She brought two guns, the sniper and the semi-automatic. She also found an old motorcycle helmet and decided to use that as a makeshift helmet. She knew if I had been awake I wouldn’t have not in a million years let her go, so she made her process quick just in case I did wake up.
Crunch! The snow had melted slightly the night before so now it felt more like walking across huge ice sheets. As she walked she realized she didn’t even have to use the GPS because of the blood trail. She followed it for a while, the snow constantly attacking her. After a couple of minutes, she found it. Lying in the middle of the street now with a fresh layer of snow on it was the creature, the hound as she’d begun to refer to it in her head. She hadn’t gotten a good look at it like I had so her eyes went wide when she saw the body. She was struck by how much its exoskeleton looked like big chunks of rocks. She also noticed the now frozen yellow-greenish blood around the body. Chloe leaned down to examine what was left of the head. What was left was a hollow shell of the exoskeleton; the gunshot in the mouth had practically liquefied everything in its head. She remembered how everything had exploded from the mouth and eye holes. The image of the eyes getting blown out from behind disgusted her.
She found herself examining the rest of the body and she couldn’t help but keep looking at the four legs. They looked so out of place on the body. They looked so mammalian for such an insect-like creature. They literally looked like stretched-out bald dog legs. She had a feeling of deja vu as she looked at the legs, she couldn’t help but think of the black dog they’d seen the other day. She made a note in her head that she wanted to take the body with her on the way back.
Finally, she stood up and started making her way towards the store. Like before she just followed the blood. She remembered when Joey ran into her he was covered in blood, like he’d slipped into the trail. She dreaded to think what he’d found in the showers. Her trek was slow and eerie. Then as she got closer the dead silence was cut by a ticking sound. She vaguely recognized it as something those spiders had made. Specifically the stinger ones. She kept the semi-automatic raised and got ready for a fight, but the ticking sounds slowly faded and she kept moving.
The store was just as she had left it early that morning. It was still a complete wreck. She hurried past the shattered glass and toppled shelves, through the small break room, and into the bunk room. It looked even worse than before. It looked like the creature had destroyed a few more things after it caught the headlamp. She specifically noticed a new deep gash in the bunk they’d hid behind.
As she walked into the shower room she heard a faint dripping sound. She started going one stall at a time to find it. First empty, second empty, but the third she wanted to throw up. Carl lay in the back of the stall, his body a bloody mess. His torso was almost gone. Everything inside of it had been ripped out along with most of his flesh. His ribs were shattered and lying on the floor. His spine was cracked and twisted. It looked like it had been broken. She threw up and stepped away from the sight, making her start to sob. Pull yourself together, she thought to herself, now isn’t the time. She wiped the tears off her face and continued. He had a daughter and a wife. She had to know what happened to them. So with much hesitance, she continued.
Fourth room empty, fifth empty, sixth empty, seventh empty, she stood next to the eighth stall dreading what she’d find inside. She didn’t want to see what was in there, but she would never forgive herself for not looking.
Two cocoon-looking things lay in the stall. They were white and pulsating slightly. They looked like the web cocoon the stingers had wrapped around the dog, but these were too big to be dogs. Instantly she knew what had happened to his wife and daughter. Chloe stepped away so she didn’t have to see it anymore, and then she had a thought. They wouldn’t leave them unattended, would they? She became much more nervous and started cautiously making her way from the room. She started to hear the ticking noises outside again and her hands started to shake. She took a deep breath and kept walking.
She walked into the main part of the store and saw a dozen or so stingers crawling in through one of the broken windows. She gasped, then in a hurry ducked back into the breakroom. Her whole body was shaking as she stood there listening to them scurrying around the store. Then after a minute one walked into the breakroom didn’t see her and disappeared into the bunk room. Then another went through, then another, then another, then another, and soon all but one had passed through. Her whole body was trembling when finally it walked through. This one was walking more slowly and looking around much more than the others, and suddenly its small beady eyes met hers. Scre… Rat-a-tatata! Four quick bullets cut through the stinger. All four hit it right in the head. She had a small feeling of triumph then Screech! The other stingers started running into the room. She hurried out in such a rush she didn’t watch where she was stepping and slipped on a piece of glass.
Smack! Her helmet slammed into the ground and then the rest of her. She watched them hurriedly crawl towards her. She tried to get a shot but they were just too fast. Then she felt a sharp pain in her leg. One of the stingers had sunk their stinger into her calf. Another was about to sting before she made her move. She grabbed a large piece of glass and stabbed it into the one on her leg, and then quickly stuck the shard into the other one that was about to sting her. Then she quickly stood up. Her body was starting to feel heavy and she was getting a little loopy. The other stingers were screeching and running toward her. Rat-a-tatatatata! She shot 10 rounds into the remaining nine stingers. Seven exploded when the bullet made contact, another got three legs blown off, the last wasn’t hit, and before she could shoot again it had lodged its stinger in her boot. She stopped for a second realizing that the stinger hadn’t actually pierced her foot then Rat-a-tat! She shot two bullets into the thing and then pulled it off her foot.
Her adrenaline was wearing off and the venom was doing its work fast. Her eyes were starting to close and she had to concentrate just to keep them open. I need to get somewhere safe, she thought looking around, and then her eyes fell on an intact door.
She locked the door to the women's restroom and then slumped against it as she felt her consciousness begin to slip. All she could think of was me hoping that I was okay, and hoping that she’d be able to see me again. Then finally she blacked out.
Her eyes fluttered open to see she was in the same place she’d passed out. There was a small puddle of blood around her calf. She weakly reached over and touched the wound. It wasn’t bleeding any more. I must’ve been out for a while. She thought, gingerly beginning to put weight on her leg. It hurt but she could walk. Click, she unlocked the bathroom door, raised the gun, and opened the door. She was nervous, worried that maybe more of them had come while she was out. It didn’t look like too much time had passed, and even more importantly there were no stingers. She looked over and saw her footprints were still visible through the heavily falling snow. Good not much time must have passed, she thought. Then she pulled out the phone and called Gretchen.
Bzzz…
“Gretchen, I got stung and passed out. What time is it?” She asked.
Gretchen’s relieved voice cut through the phone: “Oh Chloe thank goodness, it’s 2:42. You left around 12.”
Day 13
I woke up to giggling and laughter. I sat up and looked at the doorway and on the other side I could hear the boys quietly playing together. I moved the covers and tried to move my legs, but instantly daggers of pain went up my right leg. I wanted to do it more slowly but nothing seemed to help.
“Chloe!” I called and immediately heard something clatter upstairs followed by fast footsteps into the basement.
In a second Chloe had sprinted into the room and was on top of me giving me a huge hug. She pulled away and gave me one of her pretty little smiles.
“How are you feeling?” She asked.
My stomach growled and that answered her question.
“You’ve been asleep for almost two days, no wonder you’re hungry.” She said, I froze and looked over at the clock, but nothing showed on it. It was just a blank black screen.
“When did the power go out?” I asked, turning back toward her.
“Not long after you fell asleep.” She said, “We put as much food as we could into coolers, but most of what was in the fridge and freezer has gone bad.”
Her face was sad and grim. I reached for her hand with my good hand and squeezed it.
“We’ll get through this just like everything else. We’ll make it through if we stick together.” I told her starting to realize how hoarse I sounded.
She smiled then looked up at me again: “I’ll go get you some food… and a water bottle.” She said walking back out of the room.
I lay there in deep thought when Alan poked his head in.
“Uncle, are you okay?” He asked, sitting down on the foot of the bed.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, smiling at him.
He smiled back, “Uncle you’ve got a Lego hand now.” He yelled pointing to my left hand.
I looked at my hand and saw the way they wrapped it did look like a Lego hand.
“Ha… yeah I suppose so.” I chuckled, Alan nodded and disappeared into the hallway.
A few minutes later Chloe appeared in the doorway with a plate and Mom and Gretchen tailed her.
“Sweety, are you ok?” My mom asked, walking over to the bedside and putting her hand on my forehead.
“Yes Mom I’m ok, I’m as ok as I can be right now,” I told her.
“Well I’m glad you’re ok,” She said, hugging me.
“Me too,” Gretchen added, hugging me.
After a minute they broke away and Chloe gave me my plate. It was some dry cereal and a piece of toast.
“Sorry… that’s all I could scrape together.” She said her expression was sad.
“How much is left?” I asked her.
“A few days maybe, the water situation is even worse though,” She said grimly.
I felt a crushing sense of defeat at that.
“We’re going to need to do something now,” Gretchen said, “Before we can’t do anything.”
“Agreed, but what? There is no chance of leaving without a snow plow.” I grumbled, becoming more disheartened.
“What if we had a snow plow?” Chloe asked.
“What?” Me and Gretchen asked.
“I mean, they keep it at the tractor place just a mile away. We could get the snow plow.” She suggested a hint of hope in her eyes.
“I don’t think we’ll all fit. Let alone supplies.” I told her.
“So then we bring two vehicles,” She said, “One or two of us go to the place, get the snow plow, and come back to the others in the other vehicle and follow behind.”
It was actually a pretty good plan, but it was still wishful thinking. They had a lot of variables on that.
“That might work, but it will take time and we don’t exactly have time,” I said.
“Well then let's get some more time. We might be able to find more food in other homes,” My mom said.
“Yes, in theory, that would work, but we don’t have two people to go,” I said.
“I’m out of commission, Gretchen isn’t leaving her boys, and not in a million years am I letting you go, Mom,” I argued.
“She can handle herself, she did the other day,” Mom argued back.
“What?... no I was with her…” I turned toward Chloe in confusion.
I saw a guilty look on her face and she told me that she’d gone to the store on the 11th day after they were done treating me.
I pulled her into a tight hug and whispered in her ear: “If you do that again I will use whatever force necessary to make your stay here.”
She looked at me, her eyes darkening: “Joey if I don’t go, we will starve. I’m terrified too but if that is what needs to be done I’ll do it.”
“I… I… I don’t want to lose you.” I sputtered out.
Her face turned red before she said: “I don’t want to lose you either, or any of you guys and that's why I need to go.”
I finally relented, Gretchen and my mom left the room, and Chloe sat and chatted with me while I ate my mediocre breakfast.
She perked up and said, “Joey I need to show you something.”
She got up and helped me get out of bed. Getting out wasn’t that hard unless I had to move my left leg or arm. Once I was standing she helped me over to the restroom and then helped me sit down.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked, looking around the bathroom.
“This,” She said, pulling the shower curtain open and revealing what was inside.
Lying inside the tub was the body of the dog bug creature.
“Why the heck did you bring that in?” I asked.
“Aren’t you curious what it is?” She asked, an almost crazed look in her eyes.
“Fair, I am curious,” I said. “Found anything out so far?” I then asked.
“Well a no, not yet,” She said looking disappointed now, “I just know it isn’t anything science knows of.”
“Nothing, nothing interesting?” I inquired.
“Well yes there are interesting things,” She said, “Like look at this.”
She grabbed a knife covered in yellowish-green blood and used it to open a previously cut incision into the body. I looked inside and saw something quite strange. This thing still had an endoskeleton.
“Nothing that we know of on earth has an endo and exoskeleton, and I honestly don’t know why an animal would have both.” She said looking up at me.
“Hmm… mind if I take a look?” I asked.
She nodded and I moved over and took the knife with my right hand. I used the knife to hold open the incision and I looked at the bone. It looked normal but I was suspicious so I set the knife down, reached in, and yanked the femur I’d been looking at out. The femur was the size it should’ve been for a normal dog, but for this creature, it was extremely undersized.
“Just as I thought,” I said, looking over at her.
“Can you explain to me what it is that you just figured out?” She asked, very confused.
“Look how small this femur is, it should be double the size for this creature, but it is the adequate size for a normal dog. The way I figure this is that during the metamorphosis that changed the dog into this thing the bones were not destroyed or changed. That’s why they are still there but not the right size.” I explained holding the bone up to her.
“I suppose that your theory makes sense,” She said after a short pause.
Day 14
Chloe sat on the bed strapping on the extra gear I was making her take. I knew I couldn’t stop her from going so I decided I would make her as safe as possible. I dug through old boxes and found my dad's old Kevlar vests. There were two so I cut one up to make guards for her arms and legs. Then I made her put on an extra coat to add one more layer of protection, as for other parts I agreed that the motorcycle helmet was the best helmet we had so she put that on.
Now she was sitting on the bed with the helmet sitting next to her while she was loading her weapons. She was bringing the semi-automatic and the sniper rifle with extra ammo for each. She also had a hunting knife strapped to her belt saying it would’ve come in handy last time. I looked at her and gave her a tight hug.
“If you don’t come back I’ll find you and teach you a lesson.” I jokingly threatened her.
She let out a giggle, “I’ll try my best.”
Again she made her outside into the blizzard. It raged on around her as it had been for days. She had to climb the almost four-foot-tall pile of snow before she could really start exploring. They’d assumed that the people who had left town wouldn’t have much food in their homes, so she planned to hit Carl’s house and the Garrison’s house today. Then check out a few other houses the next day, but right now she had to focus on simply taking the next step because anytime she stepped wrong she’d sink further into the snow. Slowly through the whipping wind and freezing snow, she walked. It was exhausting especially with her still being sore from a couple of days ago, but she continued despite the pain and weather. Despite it all she kept taking step after step after step, and the whole time the blizzard's icy claws were digging into her.
Eventually, she saw the destroyed store and walked past it, her eyes eyeing the shattered windows for any movement but nothing happened. She continued onward knowing that Carl’s house was now only a block away. She walked carefully and precisely trying not to step in the wrong place. Then she saw it. Carl’s house was a small colonial-style two-story home with a big wrap-around porch, but now it looked horrible. The door was ripped out of its hinges and two or three windows were shattered. She slid down a short snowy slope and onto the porch. Crack! One of the wooden planks that made the porch broke from under her foot and her foot slipped down. She pulled it out of the hole and slowly walked into his house.
There was a trail of snow leading in from the fallen door almost like a carpet leading her into this place. It was horrible on the inside. It reminded her of the store. Furniture was thrown every which way, some bearing deep gashes. The closest door to her had a hole going straight through it. She walked over a vast sea of shattered glass and turned into the kitchen. The granite countertops had been ripped from their places and shattered on the tiled floor. A large gash was in the door of the now fallen fridge. She walked over and kneeled down near the fridge, ripping open one of the doors. As she suspected, everything in there was frozen solid. Sitting in there was cheese, deli meat, assorted fruits and vegetables, shattered glasses of condiments, and two steaks. She grabbed everything and stuffed it all into one of the duffel bags she’d brought. Then she saw a loaf of bread lying on the ground near her and grabbed that too. She stood up and looked around the kitchen. She noticed a box of pasta sitting next to a pot on the stove. The box was full, so she grabbed it. The pot was partly melted onto the stove and frozen tomato sauce sat inside.
The picture of what had happened began to emerge in her head. Carl had likely been walking home from the store when it attacked. It chased him inside, breaking down the door and destroying everything in its path. His wife, Greta, had been making spaghetti for dinner when it happened. He ran into the kitchen and grabbed his wife with the beast following him. It destroyed the kitchen as it chased them.
Chloe pushed those thoughts from her head and opened their pantry to see if there was more food. There were lots of boxes but her eyes fell on the cans that lined the bottom of the pantry. There were dozens of them, probably a hundred or two cans. She kneeled and started eagerly grabbing the cans and putting them in the duffel bag. She even took out the cheese and pasta to make for more room.
She stopped her eager collecting when she heard a slight ticking noise. Stingers she thought and then pulled her knife from her belt in preparation. The ticking was slight and distant. It probably just walked in, she thought. With the ticking, she heard the slight creaking of the wood floor in the hall as it approached the kitchen. Then a scraping tapping sound as it began walking on the tiles. She gripped the knife tightly and got ready to stab the thing. Scr…! The stinger managed to give off a faint screech before the sharp hunting knife pierced its windpipe. She yanked the knife out of its neck severing the head from the body. Then she resheathed the knife and quietly got back to what she’d been doing. She didn’t stop until the bag was bulging then she zipped it closed and heaved it under her arm. It was heavy but she wasn’t weak.
She walked over to the front door and set the duffel bag next to it. She wanted to check out the rest of the house before she left.
She crept down the hall and into the master bedroom. It was intact, everything looked right and nothing was broken. She walked over to the dresser and started going through the drawers. Darn, just clothes. She thought as she dug her hands in shuffling the clothes around. She opened the drawer and start thrashing around the clothes when she felt something hard. She pulled a box of ammo out of the drawer. It was for the revolver she looked to see how much but it was empty.
Almost every stair on the way upstairs bore scratches and one or two were cracked. They creaked so loud she began to worry that the noise would get the stinger’s attention but nothing came. Then finally she arrived upstairs. The second floor of their house was composed of two rooms, a restroom, and his daughter Lacy’s bedroom. The bedroom door and a dresser lay on the room floor scratched and broken. The rest of the room was torn apart. The bed was shredded and a mirror lay shattered on the ground. Her eyes fell to the window which was propped open.
The rest of their story seemed to fall into place. Carl and Greta ran upstairs chased by the hound, and into Lacy’s room. They barricaded the door as the creature tried to get it, and then they all quickly slipped out of the window onto the porch roof and then to the ground. They ran to the store and bunkered there. The creature searched the whole shop but couldn’t find them. Then later the hound came back and Carl went to fight it. He told Greta and Lacy to hide in a stall and made his way to the main part of the shop. There he was killed and then dragged into the shower stall to be eaten, and at some point during that time the stingers and slugs got to Lacy and Greta.
She shivered, they’d tried so hard but it still got to them. Maybe if he’d had more bullets he could’ve survived. Thinking of the empty box and the two shots that had woken them that night.
She walked out of the bedroom and back downstairs. She found her eyes wandering around the destroyed first floor again, and it struck her that something bigger had to have done this. There was no way the deer-sized hound would have destroyed this much. She hurried over into the kitchen again and looked at the gash in the fridge. That’s too big. Way too big! She thought looking at the huge gash. She started to think about the store and the same inconsistencies began to appear in the memories. All the damage, the claw marks, the strength, it was all too much, too big, there was no way the hound had done this.
As she was thinking she noticed a doorway she hadn’t been through. Next to her was the doorway to the basement stairs with the door wide open. She peaked down and saw light down there, not much probably from a window, but it was something.
Creak! Her first step of descent was loud and made her worry again that something would hear her. She stopped and listened, but nothing. So as carefully as she could she continued. Every step was as loud as the first and every step made her jump in her skin and wait for something to happen. But after what seemed like ages she arrived at the bottom.
The basement was large with two spare bedrooms and a large storage room. She slowly walked down the hall looking into the bedrooms on both sides of her. They were bare with nothing much more than beds, so she walked forward and into the main storage room.
The storage room had large shelving units across the whole room. The shelves were partially filled with labeled boxes. She walked over to one shelf and started reading the labels. Christmas, no, I don't need that. Halloween, not that. Games, nope. Sports could be useful. She thought as she grabbed the heavy crate and set it out in front of her. She grabbed the latches on either side, undoing them and popping the lid off.
Suddenly a ripping sound erupted from another part of the basement. The ripping had a sort of wet sound to it. Chloe started to walk over to the sound far too curious not to. Screech! It came from the same direction as the ripping sound. She got the gun ready and then jumped from around a shelf not facing what was making the sound. She watched one of those hound things fully emerge from a cocoon and look over at her. A chill ran down her spine as its four eyes met hers; the two to the left were icy blue and the two to the right were dark brown. This one was also slightly smaller but much stockier than the other. Rat-a-tatatata! She released a quick barrage of bullets hoping to stop the disgusting thing, but it just started charging for her. Quickly she moved to the other side of the shelving and pushed it down. Her whole body was shaking, but she had to keep calm and keep fighting. The hound howled in pain and started cracking through the wooden shelf to get to her. She took this time to aim a good shot at its face. Rat-a-tat! She shot two quick bullets into its face. One sunk into its exoskeleton the other buried itself into one of its eyes. SCREECH!!!!! It broke through the shelf and made a quick dive toward her. It pinned her to the ground, knocking her gun away in the process. It sunk its jaws into the helmet and it started to break and crack. She started to cry. This thing was going to eat through her helmet then her face, but during this moment of panic she remembered something. She pulled the knife from her belt and stabbed it into the hound's semi-exposed underbelly. It screeched again in pain so she stabbed again. She then shoved the hurt thing off of her and dove for the gun. She felt one of its praying mantis talons slash her vest and then her upper leg, so she turned around and fired. Rat-a-tatata! She shot it four more times, one hitting its forehead, the second hitting its mouth, the third mouth as well, and the fourth badly damaged its lower jaw. Its face was covered in yellow-greenish blood and it was throwing up blood onto the floor. Just as she thought it might be dying it made a quick sprint toward her. It bit her right knee, its teeth sinking in and actually managing to make her bleed. But then crash! It shoved forward and caused her to fall on top of it. Not having a good shot she grabbed the knife and started stabbing anywhere she could until it finally stopped fighting.
She lay there catching her breath until finally she stood up. Her vision was disrupted by the cracks in the helmet’s visor. She tore the helmet off and threw it down onto the dying hound. Even as it lay there it still tried to get toward her and attack her. She thought about executing it but decided that would just be a waste of a bullet and in a weird way she found its attempts to attack entertaining.
The sports crate she’d opened earlier didn’t have much use. It contained a few balls and two or three different types of rackets. She continued looking through the shelves until she found a box labeled camping. She slid it off the shelf and onto the floor, undid the latches, and popped the lid off. Inside the box were all sorts of goodies. At the top of the box were two big mummy sleeping bags. She pulled those out to see fire starters, water purifiers, bug spray, sunscreen, a small tent, utensils, pots and pans, and a large hatchet. Excitedly she grabbed her other duffel bag and moved everything from the crate into it.
She heaved the duffel bag under her arm and carried it back upstairs. She set it next to the other and turned around. She wanted to check one more place before she left the house. She walked across the house and to the backdoor pushing it open and looking outside. In their backyard half buried in snow was a shed. She hurried over to the shed through the deep snow. The doors were almost completely covered in snow and she knew she wouldn't be spending the whole day shoveling. Luckily there was a small window near the top of the shed. She gave it one good kick and the window popped open. She slid through the hole and dropped down into the shed.
The shed was small with very little inside. There was a lawn mower and a few tools but that was it. The one thing that did catch her eye was a small wooden sled with a rope tied to the front. She picked it up thinking how much easier it would make carrying the bags.
Chloe carefully shoved the sled through the window frame and then squeezed through herself. She carried the sled into the house, used tape to keep the bags secure on it, and then started pulling the sled back towards home. Carl’s house was near the top of a small hill, so for a short couple of seconds, she rode the sled as it slid down the icy slope. It made her feel like a little kid and she wished it would have lasted longer.
After a long walk through the blizzard she arrived home tired and her face feeling like it was freezing off. Gretchen hugged her the moment she walked in.
“Are you ok? We thought we heard gunshots.” She said a little worried.
“You did… I had to kill another hound thing. Just like the one in the tub. The armor worked like a charm though, I hardly felt its bite.” Chloe said motioning to the rip in her pants around the knee.
“Oh shoot you bleeding,” Gretchen said looking at her leg.
Chloe looked down to see a cut on her thigh and a few small nicks on her knee.
I sat in bed. I'd just heard Chloe come in and I waited patiently for her to come down. After a couple of minutes, I heard footsteps come downstairs and start creeping down the hall. Then I saw her face poke in from around the door. She smiled and walked in when she saw I was awake.
“Hi babe, how are you feeling?” She asked, taking a seat next to me.
“I mean my hand still hurts like heck, but yeah I’m fine.” I joked.
She smiled, “Seriously though, are you feeling alright?” She asked.
“I’m feeling fine,” I lied trying to get her to stop worrying.
“I want to hear about everything that happened,” I said sitting up.
So she told me everything that happened, even her theory on what exactly happened to Carl and his family.
“Did they have a dog?” She asked me after finishing her story.
“Yeah… a pitbull I think,” I replied, trying my best to remember the odd times when Carl talked about his dog.
“That explains it, that hound was a lot stockier than the one you shot.” She said, “Also it destroyed the helmet so I need a new one before I go to the Garrison’s house.”
I gave her a worried look, “Do you need to go?” I asked.
“YES!” She insisted, “We don’t know what happened to them, and I’d like to find a little more food.”
“But do we need more food?” I asked, “You got a lot of cans.”
“Joey, this has already been going on for two weeks. Who knows how long it will last? More preparation never hurts.” She argued, sounding a little angry now.
“Ok… Ok… Just be safe,” I told her and gave her a big hug.
Gretchen found an arguably better helmet in the garage, a big metal welding helmet. It fit Chloe almost perfectly, and as a backup, she wore two thick hoods to protect the back of her head. She had a very bad feeling this time, as she stood there by the door she couldn’t help but shake. She wanted someone to come with her, and as big Herman came over to say his goodbyes she had an idea.
She marched through the deep snow with Herman atop the sled she pulled. She’d try to have him follow on foot, but the snow was just too high and he kept getting stuck. But she didn’t care that he was just extra weight because she was just happy that she wasn’t facing this alone. She slowly made her way down the street, the blizzard more relentless than ever. It seemed to her the longer the blizzard continued the stronger it was becoming. The snow continued to pound down on top of her slowly wearing down her will to continue, but it didn’t stop her. She took one step after another after another. She was starting to tire and the pain of the injuries was beginning to wear on her. But every time she seemed to slow Herman would give a little woof, and she would keep on going.
The snow had become so hard to see through that more than an outstretched hand was invisible to her. Her vision was so bad she didn’t know the group of crawlers and slugs were there until she was practically right on top of them
Meanwhile…
“Hey, we should probably start clearing the driveway now,” Gretchen said suddenly to her mom while they both sat at the kitchen table.
“That’s probably a wise idea,” Our mother said with a smile.
Gretchen and Mom began their efforts with large snow shovels. Gretchen did most of the work as Mom had to take frequent breaks. They shoveled and shoveled as the day wore on going over their work with salt so as to not let more snow accumulate. Gretchen was exhausted from the work, but she continued nonetheless. She kept digging ad digging until she heard the shovel scrape concrete then she moved to the next section. Despite the cold, they were both dripping with sweat.
I sat by the window watching them work while the boys played. I so wanted to go help but knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but sit and watch them work. I felt horrible as I watched, and then my mind started thinking of Chloe. I pulled out the walkie and pressed the button to talk.
The first thing Chloe heard was Screech! The stinger was right in front of her clearly just as surprised by her as she was of it. But it wasn’t alone from her restricted view; it looked like there were about 10 stingers and 3 or so slugs.
She tried to raise her gun but they were scattering around far too quickly. Then she heard a ripping noise as one of them drove a stinger into her boot. She pulled out the hunting knife and made quick work of the stinger. Two more stingers were charging straight for her and one was coming from her left. Before she could do anything the snow under the two erupted and they were dragged down into it. She wasn’t able to see what it was and she began to shake as it did the same thing to the one coming from her left. In a sudden panic, she turned around to see the sled empty with a hole in the snow right next to it. She let out a small cry whatever was under the snow had gotten Herman and the stingers, but there was no time for mourning as more of the stingers began coming for her. Again the snow erupted under them but this time she got a better look. Whatever was under the snow was big and white. She got the gun as the thing took out the rest of the slugs and stingers. She assumed it was coming for her next. She hurried and jumped atop the sled so it couldn’t take her down easily. She stood there ready to fight whatever monster thing had gotten everything. Horrible images of twisted spider mole creatures flew through her head. Suddenly the snow next to the sled exploded open and she saw the large white beast jump out of the snow and on top of her. She closed her eyes expecting to feel teeth begin to sink down, but after a second she heard a lapping sound. She opened her eyes to see Herman on top of her licking her helmet. She smiled and let out a laugh.
“Good boy!” She said encouragingly.
Herman was completely covered in snow; he looked more like a polar bear than a dog. She brushed some of it off but didn’t bother to do much. She helped the big dog back onto the sled and continued forward. She walked another block before she finally saw her destination to her right was the Garrison’s large house broken and beaten from obvious attacks. It stood there somehow feeling more eerie than the surrounding houses. She stepped onto the wooden porch and there was a loud creak. Ever so more carefully she and Herman crept across the porch and into the house. If only they’d known what they were about to walk into.
2023.06.09 20:23 TripleNerdScore1 Trip Report: Tokyo Kyoto Osaka Hakone (30s couple, traveling while visibly trans)
Hi everyone! This sub was so incredibly helpful to me in the planning process - I was deeply grateful for everything I learned, so I thought I'd post a trip report now that we're back!
About us: We're a 30s couple from the Midwest US. We're pretty experienced travelers (South America, UK/Ireland, Europe, lots of places in the US), but this was our first visit to Asia and first visit to Japan. As travelers, we love getting out on foot, local food/drink (especially street food), live music, nerd shit, weird art/vending machines. Also, my partner is a cis guy, but I am a trans masc person who is visibly trans (post-op in a few ways, but not passing/not stealth).
Dates: May 13 - May 29
What we did: Tokyo Kyoto Osaka Hakone Back to Tokyo
Tips and tricks:
DAY 1 ARRIVAL 📍 Flew into Haneda; made it to our hotel (lovely experience at Hotel Plaza Sunroute); had our first world-famous konbini 7/11 experience; walked around Shinjuku; went out for dinner at Ryu no Miyako Inshokugai - talk about jumping in the deep end 🍣 Onigiri and vending machine green tea; little whipped cream treats; Nagahama ramen and sesame mackerel donburi 👣 10,400 steps 🏁 4.8 miles
DAY 2 SHIBUYA 📍 Meiji Shrine and Gardens - got goshuin and omamori; Harajuku, went to 7/11; back to the hotel for a nap; Shibuya, including Don Quijote, Center Gai and Dogenzaka Street; Nonbei Yokocho for late night 🍣 7/11 (plum onigiri and corn/mayo sandwich, some kind of spam musubi situation, matcha roll); Ichiran coin-op ramen with extra chashu and a matcha tofu custard thing; banana shock smoothie at Shibuya109 in Center Gai; chicken and pork belly yakitori with beers at Morimoto; brown sugar shoju and shoju-infused Oolong tea cocktails at Tight Bar (strong recommend for this joint!); grilled squid, octopus, and okonomiyaki for afters at Tsukishima Monja Kuuya Shibuya 👣 32,000 steps 🏁 14.5 miles 😮💨
DAY 3 SHINJUKU 📍 Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden; Shinjuku area (including Disk Union, Disney, Onitsuka); Kabukicho and Kabukicho Tower; GODZ metal bar; Golden Gai; Omoide Yokocho 🍣 7/11 (onigiri, matcha filled roll thing, royal milk tea, tomago sushi, strawberry donut, cafe latte); many types of dango (sesame oil, soy sauce, and apricot mochi were our favs); McDonald's (weirdly good chicken sandwich with yuzu radish topping, vanilla custard chocolate pie, white grape soda); yummy little warm imagawayaki filled with adzuki bean paste + royal milk from depachika); a couple of Asahis at GODZ; simple yakitori snacks at Golden Gai (including some… mystery offal items); back to 7/11 for drunk matcha ice cream and waffle snacks 👣 28,800 steps 🏁 13.0 miles
DAY 4 ASAKUSA 📍 Went out for coffee; walked around Kinarimon Gate and Nakamise; toured Asakusa Shrine, Senso-ji Temple, surrounding Shinto and Buddhist shrines; stopped for sushi and mochi; went for a walk up Sumida River; dipped into Shoden and Imado shrines; crossed Kototoi Bridge to Tokyo Skytree; went up Tokyo Skytree; back to Senso-ji for night photos; capped off evening with gyoza 🍣 Lattes at cute puppet theater coffeeshop (espresso, dandelion tea); 7/11 for breakfast-y fuel; strawberries from a street stall at Nakamise; sushi lunch; beautiful mochi + tea dessert; grilled gyoza, soup dumpling gyoza, shoujo Oolong tea cocktail for afters 👣 25,500 steps 🏁 11.66 miles
DAY 5 JIMBŌCHŌ, AKIHABARA 📍 Train to Ichigaya - notable French-inspired neighborhood; breakfast at local French café; Yasakuni Shrine; Kanda River walk by Hosei University; Tokyo Daijingu Shrine; Jimbōchō Old Book Town; walked from there to Akihibara; hit up noodles, arcade, nerd shops (comics, TCGs/CCGs, retro video games systems, TTRPGS, etc); gachapons; hit up the bizarre rare vending machines 🍣 Vending machine coffee and milk tea; yummy French pastries (bacon and sour cream roll, quiche, sour cream raisin custard thing); had to try some avocado and cheese Doritos; cold udon with duck broth soup, curry rice for Chris; fish-shaped taiyaki with custard cream dessert treat; dope gyoza place ("weekday" version with pork and cabbage, shrimp and chili mayo, yakitori with tare, and shogayaki with onions) 👣 Forgot watch at hotel - we’ll say 10,000 steps 🏁 Guessing about 5 or 6?
DAY 6 TEAMLAB PLANETS, TRAVEL TO KYOTO 📍 Hit up teamLabs, had an amazing time exploring the exhibits - the infinite light crystal room was our fav; train to Tokyo Station; lunch at underground Ramen Street restaurants under the station - went with Soranoiro, one of the few veg/vegan ramen shops in Japan - delicious; shinkansen to Kyoto; out for nightlife in Kiyamachi-Dori and Pontocho 🍣 Quick 7/11 snacks; train snacks (pocky, coffee, little teriyaki cutlet sandwich); Soranoiro ramen bowls; killer yakitori we fried right at our table in izakaya in Pontocho (honestly probably a meal highlight of the whole trip); brown sugar shoujo; 7/11 for ice cream on the way back 👣 18,900 steps 🏁 8.63 miles
DAY 7 KINKAKUJI, NISHIKI, GION 📍 Kinkakuji Temple; bus back to Kiyamachi-dori; spent whole afternoon walking and eating street food at Nishiki Market; back to hotel for rest, laundry, rooftop drink; out for nightlife in Gion 🍣 Family Mart for coffee and doughnuts; Nishiki Market Street street food delights - seared yakitori style crab stick, little octopus chuka idako on skewers, kara-age on skewers, sea squid croquettes and beer, strawberry and adzuki bean mochi balls; mimosas and red wine; Kyoto Gion Okaru - geisha-decorated izakaya with insane curry udon bowls and beers; picked up box of mochi dango for dessert 👣 20,200 steps 🏁 9.07 miles
DAY 8 SHRINE DAY 📍 OK, this is a lot:
DAY 9 FUSHIMI-INARI 📍 Fushimi Inari, the famous shrine of over 1,000 torii gates - super amazing (and intense!) summit of Mt Inari! Back to Nishiki Market for reward street food and drinks; back to hotel for a rooftop drink and soak; finally out for soba at Kawamichiya Ginka in Pontocho. 🍣 Snack pack on our hike (sausages, cheese, some kind of fish meat/cheese stick, and surume - sweet chewy dried squid stuff); orange smoothie; conveyor belt sushi; strawberry mochi roll; whisky highball and red wine; massive soba spreads (chicken seared with wasabi/yuzu/horseradish dipped in ponzu sauce, fried soba noodles in a rich soup, cold soba noodles dipped tsukemen-style in a really amazing umami soy sauce soup, tempura shrimp and veggies, a hot soba noodles in a clear broth soup) 👣 27,600 steps 🏁 Supposedly 12.3 miles, but that hike to summit Mt Inari was something else 😤
DAY 10 TRAVEL TO OSAKA, SHINSABASHISUJI, AMEMURA, DOTONBURI 📍 Beautiful brunch on the bank of the canal in Kyoto; local train to Osaka-Umeda; checked into Osaka hotel; walked around Shinsaibashisuji and Dotonburi a little bit; scoped out Amemura ("Ameri-mura") for dope American-inspired Japanese streetwear; wandered up and down street food stalls in Dotonbori; swung by Namba Hips (mostly pachinko); found a couple of fun little hole-in-the-wall places (little Japanese craft beer brewery, retro video games bar) 🍣 Brunch at Kawa Cafe (croque monsieur, ramen, tea and delicious apple tart); takoyaki, cheesy waffle shaped like a massive 10yen coin, sweet chili hotdogs from stands in Dotonbori; dashi gose craft beer (by Derailleur Brew Works) from Umineko, shots at Space Station bar 👣 19,500 steps 🏁 9.01 miles
DAY 11 NAMBAYASAKIJINA, DOTONBURI 📍 Morning Japanese breakfast at a wonderful little 24-hour diner; Hozen-ji (moss shrine); Kamigata Ukiyo-e Museum across the street (focusing on Osaka woodcuts celebrating Dotonburi's kabuki and entertainment history); Nambayasaka-jinja (lion head shrine); Den Den Town (Osaka's Akihabara); ended up at a cozy little kushikatsu bar which actually was playing the Tigers game (away game vs the Swallows at Tokyo); street food waffles for dessert; hit up a late-night batting cage - ended up at Round1 (a big multi-floor arcade complex) and did the rooftop batting cage! My partner won a giant plushie for me from a claw machine! 🍣 Dope traditional japanese omelette and fish breakfast; cute macarons from market stand; Family Mart for snacks before nightlife; skewers, beer, and highballs from Dotonbori kushikatsu place; ridiculous nutella, whip, and strawberry stuffed waffle from Waffle Khan 👣 29,100 steps 🏁 13.31 miles
DAY 12 KUROMON ICHIBA, OSAKA CASTLE, DOTONBURI 📍 Kuromon Ichiba Market for street food; Osaka Castle Park and Nishinomaru Gardens; toured Osaka Castle and museum all the way up to the top; subway to Tanimachi-9-chome subway station for amazing live jazz at Sub Jazz Cafe. (This was amazing! Akira "Ro" Hasegawa (sax) and Yukie Fujikawa (keys) - Ro is also the owner and was bartending on this particular night too.) Out to Don Don for killer yakiniku and beer; found our way to Oboradaren, an Tokunoshima-themed island vibes bar and music spot where there was a great live band playing fun island vibes beach rock - big crowd of 40s+ Japanese women who knew all the songs, wound up drinking passionfruit chuhai and joining them in the conga line around the bar 🍣 Oden hot pot, wagyu skewer, otoro sashimi, crab gratin in the half-shell, bracken green tea soy cakes at Kuromon Market; ice cream sandwiches at Osaka Castle; milk tea, little roast beef sandwich, and cheesecake at Sub Jazz Cafe; yakiniku-style wagyu, ribs, ox tongue, assorted mushrooms; passionfruit chuhai and red wine at the island vibes spot; taro and brown sugar boba teas 👣 23,000 steps 🏁 10.42 miles
DAY 13 KAIYUKAN, SHINSEKAI, DOTONBURI 📍 Fun trip to Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan; quick pass through Shinsekai; lunch at spot where you can fish your own catch from an indoor fishing boat pool; out for one last Dotonburi night - wound up getting konbini snacks and sitting on the waterfront talking and people-watching for hours 🍣 Not a banger food-wise, but interesting little spread at the fish-your-own place - huge prawn for grilling, kara-age, and fatty tuna nigiri for Max, tempura veggies and whitefish with doteyaki for Chris; from Family Mart, fruit smoothie, ice cup, and KitKat for Max, onigiri and lemonade for Chris 👣 19,100 steps 🏁 8.64 miles
DAY 14 TRAVEL TO HAKONE, HAKONE SHRINE 📍 Bombed to Shin-Osaka for an early shinkansen to Odawara; trained to Odawara to Hakone; dropped luggage off at ryokan, then bus to Motohakone; saw Hakone Shrine and Onshi-Hakone Park (as well as a segment of the actual Old Tokaido!); returned to ryokan for the night, where we were treated to a gorgeous 1:1 kaiseki from a Michelin-star chef, private hot spring onsen, and private in-room hot spring bath 🍣 Konbini snacks before shinkansen; snacks and coffee on train; late lunch in Motohakone (curry and soba, pork cutlet); incredible, massive multi-course kaiseki and sake for dinner, plus strawberry cake, champagne, and more sake for dessert 👣 13,900 steps 🏁 6.26 miles
DAY 15 HAKONE OPEN AIR MUSEUM, TRAVEL TO TOKYO, LAST NIGHT IN SHINJUKU 📍 Woke up in gorgeous ryokan; leisurely kaiseki breakfast with leftover cake; final soak in the private onsen; Hakone Open Air Museum - very cool; had kind of a challenging trip back but finally made it from Museum back to ryokan to bus stop to Hakone-Yumoto to Odawara to Shinjuku to the hotel 😮💨 Considering the last night as our real "last night" of the trip, our final night out in Tokyo was all just extra icing on the cake - went out for yakitori skewers and Asahi Superdrys in cozy alley in Omoide Yokocho, found really wonderful cake and tea dessert open late also in Omoide, hit up 🎵 Donki! 🎵 for a final round of bulk snacks and souvenirs, ended up on a late-night excursion to find Park Hyatt Hotel (featured in Lost in Translation); finished night at hotel watching the city go to sleep from our balcony 👣 22,700 steps 🏁 10.3 miles
FINAL SCORE 📸 Pics: 1,929 👣 Steps: 337,700 🏁 Miles: 153.78 (we averaged 9.6 miles per day, every day, for 16 days) 🇯🇵 “Nihongo jōzu!”: 4 (I know more proficient Japanese speakers are insulted, but it's honestly a pretty nice comment when you're at my level) 👶 Comments on how young we look/how we can’t possibly be celebrating our 10-year wedding anniversary: 3 ✨ Gratitude: Infinite.
submitted by TripleNerdScore1 to JapanTravel [link] [comments]
About us: We're a 30s couple from the Midwest US. We're pretty experienced travelers (South America, UK/Ireland, Europe, lots of places in the US), but this was our first visit to Asia and first visit to Japan. As travelers, we love getting out on foot, local food/drink (especially street food), live music, nerd shit, weird art/vending machines. Also, my partner is a cis guy, but I am a trans masc person who is visibly trans (post-op in a few ways, but not passing/not stealth).
Dates: May 13 - May 29
What we did: Tokyo Kyoto Osaka Hakone Back to Tokyo
Tips and tricks:
- Definitely get your walking training in ahead of time! We walked 10 miles a day on the trip. We're pretty avid backcountry camping/hiking fans who regularly put in 8 - 10 miles on the trail (not to mention taking our dog for multiple walks a day in the neighborhood), so I figured we'd be good - but it was A LOT, especially since you're also trying to translate and navigate at the same time. Japan is not generally a super accessible place from a disability perspective; benches and public seating areas are not common. I found myself wishing I'd packed a collapsible seat of some kind, tbh!
- Good shoes a must! Merrell Moabs are my go-to for hiking, but for this trip I went with Nike Dunk 6 high-tops, which rocked. My partner went with Onitsukas and didn't do as well - he wound up buying inserts partway through the trip, which helped.
- Work on a little Japanese ahead of time! We came in with about a dozen words/phrases, which was honestly truly helpful. So many people are so kind and thoughtful anyway, but it was an appreciated gesture that we had planned ahead and were trying our best. Google Translate's camera feature (Google Lens) was a life-saver for translating written words on signs!
- We had a great experience with Ubigi for an eSIM. The days of purchasing an actual SIM card or even a burner device (like we used to do when backpacking in Europe) are long past. We hooked up our Ubigi eSIMs beforehand, flipped the switch when we got there, and we were golden. Just in case, we'd set up our Verizon coverage to include a Pay-As-You-Go international plan, but we didn't end up using it. We also didn't use half as much data as we thought we would - we both came home with extra GB on our Ubigi plan still. We didn't do a PocketWifi and I don't think we needed it - Ubigi did most of the heavy lifting, and free WiFi at various places did the rest.
- Fly into Haneda, not Narita - way closer to Tokyo city center.
- Get your Suica right away at the airport - our beloved Suica got us through so many things! We also withdrew some cash and split it up between us - we withdrew a few more times on the trip and it worked like a charm. (Just make sure it's an international ATM that includes your card type - not all of them do. Also, notify your bank you'll be traveling, so your card doesn't throw a flag!) We used our credit card as well - the Chase card was accepted pretty much all places CCs are, but many places remain cash-only, especially bars and restaurants.
- Had a great experience using the Friendly Limousine Airport Bus service straight from Haneda to our hotel area.
- I booked shinkansen tix ahead of time, so I got nice discounts on weekday Green Car tix for two - but I really needn't have worried, there were plenty of seats available day-of.
- Don't bother with shinkansen for Kyoto to Osaka - we wound up just hopping on a local with our Suicas and it was fine.
- Don't bother with the Romancecar from Hakone back to Tokyo - it's fastemaybe a nicer seating experience, but just hopping on a local with your Suica is an order of magnitude cheaper.
- Look things up in Japanese if using Google Translate; use Tabelog for restaurants if possible. Google Maps in English is more touristy reviews/reactions.
- Tokyo Skytree was hit-or-miss - only real letdown of the trip.
- Tokyo teamLab PLANETS was completely worth it - absolutely worth the hype in my opinion.
- Queer and trans travelers - I felt completely safe, but as a plus-size trans masc nonbinary queerdo, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn't feel in danger, but I was absolutely aware that I did not fit in. Stares were common, especially from older men and young kids. (Weirdly, local women seemed more friendly and curious about me!) Just be prepared for it and remember you're not in any danger physically - it's all just curiosity.
- I have to thank this subreddit for recommending Hakone, especially for the tip to book a ryokan with private onsen access. We had an absolutely beautiful experience at Yamanochaya in Hakone, which included both a private "onsen" soaking tub in our room and private 1:1 access to a larger, actual hot spring onsen on the property. I otherwise would not have been able to experience a real hot spring onsen at all, as they are gender-segregated. Thank you, /JapanTravel!
DAY 1 ARRIVAL 📍 Flew into Haneda; made it to our hotel (lovely experience at Hotel Plaza Sunroute); had our first world-famous konbini 7/11 experience; walked around Shinjuku; went out for dinner at Ryu no Miyako Inshokugai - talk about jumping in the deep end 🍣 Onigiri and vending machine green tea; little whipped cream treats; Nagahama ramen and sesame mackerel donburi 👣 10,400 steps 🏁 4.8 miles
DAY 2 SHIBUYA 📍 Meiji Shrine and Gardens - got goshuin and omamori; Harajuku, went to 7/11; back to the hotel for a nap; Shibuya, including Don Quijote, Center Gai and Dogenzaka Street; Nonbei Yokocho for late night 🍣 7/11 (plum onigiri and corn/mayo sandwich, some kind of spam musubi situation, matcha roll); Ichiran coin-op ramen with extra chashu and a matcha tofu custard thing; banana shock smoothie at Shibuya109 in Center Gai; chicken and pork belly yakitori with beers at Morimoto; brown sugar shoju and shoju-infused Oolong tea cocktails at Tight Bar (strong recommend for this joint!); grilled squid, octopus, and okonomiyaki for afters at Tsukishima Monja Kuuya Shibuya 👣 32,000 steps 🏁 14.5 miles 😮💨
DAY 3 SHINJUKU 📍 Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden; Shinjuku area (including Disk Union, Disney, Onitsuka); Kabukicho and Kabukicho Tower; GODZ metal bar; Golden Gai; Omoide Yokocho 🍣 7/11 (onigiri, matcha filled roll thing, royal milk tea, tomago sushi, strawberry donut, cafe latte); many types of dango (sesame oil, soy sauce, and apricot mochi were our favs); McDonald's (weirdly good chicken sandwich with yuzu radish topping, vanilla custard chocolate pie, white grape soda); yummy little warm imagawayaki filled with adzuki bean paste + royal milk from depachika); a couple of Asahis at GODZ; simple yakitori snacks at Golden Gai (including some… mystery offal items); back to 7/11 for drunk matcha ice cream and waffle snacks 👣 28,800 steps 🏁 13.0 miles
DAY 4 ASAKUSA 📍 Went out for coffee; walked around Kinarimon Gate and Nakamise; toured Asakusa Shrine, Senso-ji Temple, surrounding Shinto and Buddhist shrines; stopped for sushi and mochi; went for a walk up Sumida River; dipped into Shoden and Imado shrines; crossed Kototoi Bridge to Tokyo Skytree; went up Tokyo Skytree; back to Senso-ji for night photos; capped off evening with gyoza 🍣 Lattes at cute puppet theater coffeeshop (espresso, dandelion tea); 7/11 for breakfast-y fuel; strawberries from a street stall at Nakamise; sushi lunch; beautiful mochi + tea dessert; grilled gyoza, soup dumpling gyoza, shoujo Oolong tea cocktail for afters 👣 25,500 steps 🏁 11.66 miles
DAY 5 JIMBŌCHŌ, AKIHABARA 📍 Train to Ichigaya - notable French-inspired neighborhood; breakfast at local French café; Yasakuni Shrine; Kanda River walk by Hosei University; Tokyo Daijingu Shrine; Jimbōchō Old Book Town; walked from there to Akihibara; hit up noodles, arcade, nerd shops (comics, TCGs/CCGs, retro video games systems, TTRPGS, etc); gachapons; hit up the bizarre rare vending machines 🍣 Vending machine coffee and milk tea; yummy French pastries (bacon and sour cream roll, quiche, sour cream raisin custard thing); had to try some avocado and cheese Doritos; cold udon with duck broth soup, curry rice for Chris; fish-shaped taiyaki with custard cream dessert treat; dope gyoza place ("weekday" version with pork and cabbage, shrimp and chili mayo, yakitori with tare, and shogayaki with onions) 👣 Forgot watch at hotel - we’ll say 10,000 steps 🏁 Guessing about 5 or 6?
DAY 6 TEAMLAB PLANETS, TRAVEL TO KYOTO 📍 Hit up teamLabs, had an amazing time exploring the exhibits - the infinite light crystal room was our fav; train to Tokyo Station; lunch at underground Ramen Street restaurants under the station - went with Soranoiro, one of the few veg/vegan ramen shops in Japan - delicious; shinkansen to Kyoto; out for nightlife in Kiyamachi-Dori and Pontocho 🍣 Quick 7/11 snacks; train snacks (pocky, coffee, little teriyaki cutlet sandwich); Soranoiro ramen bowls; killer yakitori we fried right at our table in izakaya in Pontocho (honestly probably a meal highlight of the whole trip); brown sugar shoujo; 7/11 for ice cream on the way back 👣 18,900 steps 🏁 8.63 miles
DAY 7 KINKAKUJI, NISHIKI, GION 📍 Kinkakuji Temple; bus back to Kiyamachi-dori; spent whole afternoon walking and eating street food at Nishiki Market; back to hotel for rest, laundry, rooftop drink; out for nightlife in Gion 🍣 Family Mart for coffee and doughnuts; Nishiki Market Street street food delights - seared yakitori style crab stick, little octopus chuka idako on skewers, kara-age on skewers, sea squid croquettes and beer, strawberry and adzuki bean mochi balls; mimosas and red wine; Kyoto Gion Okaru - geisha-decorated izakaya with insane curry udon bowls and beers; picked up box of mochi dango for dessert 👣 20,200 steps 🏁 9.07 miles
DAY 8 SHRINE DAY 📍 OK, this is a lot:
- Yasakajinja (we happened to be here while a young couple was having a Shinto wedding ceremony!)
- Yasui Kompira-gū (built 1170, shrine for ending bad relationships and starting new ones, has special stone that you pin your wishes to - many young girls will crawl through the stone to mark a breakup or wish for love)
- Kennin-ji (built 1202, large grounds - among the oldest in Kyoto);
- Reigen-in (part of Kennin-ji grounds, a Zen teahouse with a tea garden where they served adzuki bean buns with tea made from the actual hydrangeas of the tea garden outside!)
- Zenkyoan (boar shrine which we initially thought were cute hedgehogs)
- Kyoto Ebisu Shrine (dedicated to fishermen - we happened to be here during the shrine's annual mikoshi festival - a battalion of locals in traditional clothes, hoisting and dancing with the mikoshi around the neighborhood)
- Kodai-ji (built 1606, gorgeous grounds - we skipped the tour)
- Hōkan-ji/Yasaka Pagoda (dating back to 589 and rebuilt in 1400s, huge black 5-story pagoda featuring massive shakyamuni pole inside and reliquary of a bone of the Buddha in the foundations)
- Ryōzen Kannon (built 1955 after WW2, massive Buddha statue and active Buddhist temple)
- Of course the world-famous Kiyomizudera (built 778, enormous Kyoto-red temple with beautiful buildings spiraling up into the forest)
DAY 9 FUSHIMI-INARI 📍 Fushimi Inari, the famous shrine of over 1,000 torii gates - super amazing (and intense!) summit of Mt Inari! Back to Nishiki Market for reward street food and drinks; back to hotel for a rooftop drink and soak; finally out for soba at Kawamichiya Ginka in Pontocho. 🍣 Snack pack on our hike (sausages, cheese, some kind of fish meat/cheese stick, and surume - sweet chewy dried squid stuff); orange smoothie; conveyor belt sushi; strawberry mochi roll; whisky highball and red wine; massive soba spreads (chicken seared with wasabi/yuzu/horseradish dipped in ponzu sauce, fried soba noodles in a rich soup, cold soba noodles dipped tsukemen-style in a really amazing umami soy sauce soup, tempura shrimp and veggies, a hot soba noodles in a clear broth soup) 👣 27,600 steps 🏁 Supposedly 12.3 miles, but that hike to summit Mt Inari was something else 😤
DAY 10 TRAVEL TO OSAKA, SHINSABASHISUJI, AMEMURA, DOTONBURI 📍 Beautiful brunch on the bank of the canal in Kyoto; local train to Osaka-Umeda; checked into Osaka hotel; walked around Shinsaibashisuji and Dotonburi a little bit; scoped out Amemura ("Ameri-mura") for dope American-inspired Japanese streetwear; wandered up and down street food stalls in Dotonbori; swung by Namba Hips (mostly pachinko); found a couple of fun little hole-in-the-wall places (little Japanese craft beer brewery, retro video games bar) 🍣 Brunch at Kawa Cafe (croque monsieur, ramen, tea and delicious apple tart); takoyaki, cheesy waffle shaped like a massive 10yen coin, sweet chili hotdogs from stands in Dotonbori; dashi gose craft beer (by Derailleur Brew Works) from Umineko, shots at Space Station bar 👣 19,500 steps 🏁 9.01 miles
DAY 11 NAMBAYASAKIJINA, DOTONBURI 📍 Morning Japanese breakfast at a wonderful little 24-hour diner; Hozen-ji (moss shrine); Kamigata Ukiyo-e Museum across the street (focusing on Osaka woodcuts celebrating Dotonburi's kabuki and entertainment history); Nambayasaka-jinja (lion head shrine); Den Den Town (Osaka's Akihabara); ended up at a cozy little kushikatsu bar which actually was playing the Tigers game (away game vs the Swallows at Tokyo); street food waffles for dessert; hit up a late-night batting cage - ended up at Round1 (a big multi-floor arcade complex) and did the rooftop batting cage! My partner won a giant plushie for me from a claw machine! 🍣 Dope traditional japanese omelette and fish breakfast; cute macarons from market stand; Family Mart for snacks before nightlife; skewers, beer, and highballs from Dotonbori kushikatsu place; ridiculous nutella, whip, and strawberry stuffed waffle from Waffle Khan 👣 29,100 steps 🏁 13.31 miles
DAY 12 KUROMON ICHIBA, OSAKA CASTLE, DOTONBURI 📍 Kuromon Ichiba Market for street food; Osaka Castle Park and Nishinomaru Gardens; toured Osaka Castle and museum all the way up to the top; subway to Tanimachi-9-chome subway station for amazing live jazz at Sub Jazz Cafe. (This was amazing! Akira "Ro" Hasegawa (sax) and Yukie Fujikawa (keys) - Ro is also the owner and was bartending on this particular night too.) Out to Don Don for killer yakiniku and beer; found our way to Oboradaren, an Tokunoshima-themed island vibes bar and music spot where there was a great live band playing fun island vibes beach rock - big crowd of 40s+ Japanese women who knew all the songs, wound up drinking passionfruit chuhai and joining them in the conga line around the bar 🍣 Oden hot pot, wagyu skewer, otoro sashimi, crab gratin in the half-shell, bracken green tea soy cakes at Kuromon Market; ice cream sandwiches at Osaka Castle; milk tea, little roast beef sandwich, and cheesecake at Sub Jazz Cafe; yakiniku-style wagyu, ribs, ox tongue, assorted mushrooms; passionfruit chuhai and red wine at the island vibes spot; taro and brown sugar boba teas 👣 23,000 steps 🏁 10.42 miles
DAY 13 KAIYUKAN, SHINSEKAI, DOTONBURI 📍 Fun trip to Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan; quick pass through Shinsekai; lunch at spot where you can fish your own catch from an indoor fishing boat pool; out for one last Dotonburi night - wound up getting konbini snacks and sitting on the waterfront talking and people-watching for hours 🍣 Not a banger food-wise, but interesting little spread at the fish-your-own place - huge prawn for grilling, kara-age, and fatty tuna nigiri for Max, tempura veggies and whitefish with doteyaki for Chris; from Family Mart, fruit smoothie, ice cup, and KitKat for Max, onigiri and lemonade for Chris 👣 19,100 steps 🏁 8.64 miles
DAY 14 TRAVEL TO HAKONE, HAKONE SHRINE 📍 Bombed to Shin-Osaka for an early shinkansen to Odawara; trained to Odawara to Hakone; dropped luggage off at ryokan, then bus to Motohakone; saw Hakone Shrine and Onshi-Hakone Park (as well as a segment of the actual Old Tokaido!); returned to ryokan for the night, where we were treated to a gorgeous 1:1 kaiseki from a Michelin-star chef, private hot spring onsen, and private in-room hot spring bath 🍣 Konbini snacks before shinkansen; snacks and coffee on train; late lunch in Motohakone (curry and soba, pork cutlet); incredible, massive multi-course kaiseki and sake for dinner, plus strawberry cake, champagne, and more sake for dessert 👣 13,900 steps 🏁 6.26 miles
DAY 15 HAKONE OPEN AIR MUSEUM, TRAVEL TO TOKYO, LAST NIGHT IN SHINJUKU 📍 Woke up in gorgeous ryokan; leisurely kaiseki breakfast with leftover cake; final soak in the private onsen; Hakone Open Air Museum - very cool; had kind of a challenging trip back but finally made it from Museum back to ryokan to bus stop to Hakone-Yumoto to Odawara to Shinjuku to the hotel 😮💨 Considering the last night as our real "last night" of the trip, our final night out in Tokyo was all just extra icing on the cake - went out for yakitori skewers and Asahi Superdrys in cozy alley in Omoide Yokocho, found really wonderful cake and tea dessert open late also in Omoide, hit up 🎵 Donki! 🎵 for a final round of bulk snacks and souvenirs, ended up on a late-night excursion to find Park Hyatt Hotel (featured in Lost in Translation); finished night at hotel watching the city go to sleep from our balcony 👣 22,700 steps 🏁 10.3 miles
FINAL SCORE 📸 Pics: 1,929 👣 Steps: 337,700 🏁 Miles: 153.78 (we averaged 9.6 miles per day, every day, for 16 days) 🇯🇵 “Nihongo jōzu!”: 4 (I know more proficient Japanese speakers are insulted, but it's honestly a pretty nice comment when you're at my level) 👶 Comments on how young we look/how we can’t possibly be celebrating our 10-year wedding anniversary: 3 ✨ Gratitude: Infinite.
2023.06.09 10:31 RavniTrappedInANovel Alchimia Rex [031] [The Big](Bonus)
Rick had expected that taking an entire tribe to Sinco would be slow. Who wouldn’t? It was a whole tiny village after all, one nearing a handful hundred.
But the Orcs, and by extension all the other maidens, had more than one surprise in store.
When the tribe had set off, they’d done so with a grand demolition. The moment everything of value had been picked up and packaged, the village was then torn to shreds by anyone willing to take part in the little destruction-derby.
Following this, the tribe would split up into hut-family units.
Every “family” would be made of one human and multiple maidens. The maiden with the highest standing within the family unit (almost always an Orc) would be in charge of carrying and protecting the human on their back. And the rest would handle the luggage and supplies that “family” unit would take with them.
And from there, they would break into a jogging pace that, to a human, would have been a dead sprint.
Rick had the distinct “honor” of being carried by Urtha since Monica’s job as the chief meant it was her job to be at the tip of the metaphorical spear. Meanwhile, Rick was left seated on a sort-of-backpack the tall Orc carried.
Kiara flew overhead with the handful of other flying maidens that’d been woken up from the boxes. Leaving Eva and Dia to carry their belongings. It left an unpleasant aftertaste in Rick’s gut.
The smirk Dia kept shooting his way as he petulantly crossed his arms and resigned himself to being glorified luggage. “I could at least be playing the drums to mark the pace or something. It’s not like we’re being subtle or quiet.”
“Humans have no place drawing attention where danger lurks,” Urtha said, the only one present that wasn’t even winded. “Less so the Father.”
“Some feral might think you are a cheesy snack.” Dia, huffing as she pushed herself, still giggled.
“The tribe is tense enough already.” The Orc shook her head. “We rarely bring this many weaklings with us.”
“One of many changes to come.” Rick held the sigh, mostly because he was holding on to the chair to keep from falling over. He didn’t want to think about it, but once they reached Sinco, things would get complicated.
They were effectively marching out, seeking to conquer a city. Whether it be through actual warfare or maneuvering, they weren’t sure just yet. They just knew that they were prepared for the former if the latter didn’t work out. The reports had come in: Sinco was not in a good place. The constant presence of highly aggressive ferals had been chipping away at their defenses.
The only hope the city held was that they would receive reinforcements from Aubria.
Rick would get there faster.
It was in these thoughts that he pondered throughout the day. The tribe traveled and rested too often to the Orc’s liking. There was much friction to be had, and the humans were guarded like the treasures the tribe considered them to be.
When night came, a singular large hut was made for the humans, and the maidens would sleep in rotations. There would be small songs and minor stories that were shared, small moments of comfort. But they were all held under the looming watchfulness of the tribe.
Because they were at their most vulnerable. One missed feral deciding to make a stand could mean a human getting hurt. Rick had to begrudgingly respect them for that. As much as he loathed being treated like some kind of porcelain doll, there was no room to question that the maidens were going the extra mile for everyone’s safety and survival.
Though they would sometimes go a bit overboard against the maidens that “slowed down the tribe”. His role mediating such disputes had become his main role throughout the following days.
One morning, as they were preparing to set out, he heard it.
It started with a scream, then a yelp, and then a rush.
By the time Rick realized what was going on, Monica was upon him. Drenched from head to toe and stinking of salt and seaweed. The massive maiden was looking at him with a smile that threatened to split her head in two.
“Rick!” She hovered over him, dripping water all over. “Come! Come!”
“Is everything alright?” He asked from the discomfort of the portable chair he was currently occupying.
“COME!” she insisted, hopping on her feet and skittishly looking back, aiming her ear in the direction she’d come from. “Quick!”
“The tribe is not heading that way.” Urtha pointed out.
Rick considered it for a second. “Are there any problems shifting course to travel nearer to the sea?”
“It is a bad idea. For many reasons.”
Her words brought nods from Eva and Dia, to which Rick could only respond with a shrug. “Ok, then we could call for a break for the day, give everyone a chance to properly unwind, and I’ll go with Monica.” He pointed over at the feline that was bouncing on her heels, just barely holding back from reaching out and yanking him into her wet embrace. “Seems like the chief is very excited about something.”
“I bet its food,” Eva said.
“Urtha?” Rick waited.
The Orc glanced over at the crowd. “We will set camp for the day. We cannot afford to lose any of the weaklings.”
That was as good as he could’ve hoped. Rick nodded and was immediately snatched by Monica’s fuzzy paw. The maiden picked him up, putting him over her shoulder and trotting through the shrubbery and trees with little regard for who might be following.
Rick got himself a face full of leaves, flinching and batting them away. “Hey, wait, the branches-”
The Sabretooth yanked him into her arms and broke into a full sprint. Dirt and rocks burst forth from where she stood as air whipped about them. Her fang-filled smile only grew. Monica’s eyes were only focused forward. Rick, meanwhile, was trying to avoid swallowing bugs. The insects that kept flying about appeared to prefer smacking against his face.
There was a moment of clarity, light, and blue.
And with a splash, he was underwater.
Rick made the mistake of gasping, swallowing sea-water, wildly flinging his arms to get himself to the surface. Monica yanked him out of the water, leaving him feeling like a half-drowned cat as he coughed and spat.
“LOOK!” she proclaimed, dropping him on the sandy beach as she hurried towards the crashing waves, kicking at them and sending sprays of foam high into the air. “Rick! BIG!” She waved wildly, rushing her way into the water, then back out.
“That’s the sea.”
“Monica see!” With wide arms, she tried to point at all of it at once.
“No, it’s a new word. Sounds similar.” He combed his hair out of his face with his hands, removing his shirt. “Sea. S-E-A. Big, wet, and salty.”
“BIG WET!” Monica was cheering and splashing, kicking her way up and down the shore, jumping into the waves and coming out a dozen meters away and then making her way back to the shore.
“It’s the sea.” He couldn’t help but smile, watching as she slapped the water with her huge paws, creating a billowing tower of water and foam to rise at least a dozen meters into the air.
He put the low-end terrifying notion of how much force was packed into that strike and kept an easy-going smile.
“It’s the ocean.” The voice called from above, Kiara leisurely drifting down and sitting next to him. “Too far away from anything or anyone. Few ships go through here.”
“So chock-full of dangerous ferals?”
“Just like everywhere else.” Her eyes weren’t on Monica. The Succubus’ gaze appeared more focused on trailing the waves as they crashed into the shore. “Likely they’ve been scared off, though. The rush must have eaten everything available near the shore.”
Rick looked at the waves, then at her. “How can you tell?”
“There’s nothing in the waves.” She pointed. “Usually there’s at least the odd Sprite.”
“Maybe Monica scared them off.”
“Doubtful.” Kiara shook her head, turning to eye him with a slight smirk. “You’re drenched. Maybe you’d want to take your clothes off?” Her gaze trailed over him in a distinctly predatory way.
“You’re hungry, huh?”
She leaned closer, hand reaching over to caress his shoulder. “Maybe a little more than that…” Gold eyes locked to his, her hand gently pushing his back into the sand, the Succubus moving in closer so that she could pin him down.
Rick grinned. “Careful with the splash.”
The momentary confusion turned to shock and horror as she was yanked away and flung into the sea. Monica stared with ample amount of self-satisfaction as the Succubus swore and sank into the waves. “No horny time.” The feline declared, looking at Rick with a dangerous glint in her eyes.
“I understand.” He raised his hands, playing the role of innocent bystander.
“Play time.”
His eyes widened with concern. Uh oh.
She reached down, pulling him up by the shirt. “Rick train swim.”
“I know how to swim.” He quickly proclaimed, grabbing hold of her claws as her arm tensed. “BUT!”
Monica hesitated, looking at the water, then at him with narrowed eyes. “But?”
“Don’t throw me like you did Kiara or I will break,” he said, quickly relaxing a little as he pointed up into the air. “Throw me a little up. Gently, into the water.”
She eyed him for a moment, and with a flick of her tail, caught a stone. “Like this?” She grasped the rock and gently tossed it into a high arch that fell into the sea with a little plop.
“Yeah, just like-AAAAAHHHH!!!”
He was flying, body spinning in the air as gravity quickly lay claim. Rick did the only thing he could think of, curling into a ball, drawing breath, and plunge. He was underwater in the next instant, bubbles and light, with the sandy bottom still within sight.
It was down there that he spotted Kiara looking up at him with a smirk, a bubble wrapping her head. The conspicuously naked Succubus used her wings to swim up at him, catching him in her grasp and pulling him down.
Rick clutched his mouth, trying to keep his breath.
Kiara’s amusement was apparent as she held him by the shirt, looking at him with a mischievous twinkle. The iron grip remained, and he could see what her plan was, so he leaned into her, breaking the surface of the bubble with his face.
The breath was cut short with the kiss.
Then she shoved him away, waving off and winking as she swam further away from the shore. The speed she was moving with clearly was one not meant for him to follow, so Rick didn’t, going up to the surface.
Monica was waiting for him, excitedly grinning from ear to ear.
“Again!” he declared the moment he stepped on the sand. “But this time not from the shirt or it might rip.”
By the time others were reaching the beach, the duo had figured out a way to make the launch procedure safer… ish. Mostly in that the victim of choice would stand on Monica’s palm and curl into a cannonball, so that she could then throw.
And the maiden had quite the throwing arm.
The couple of Goblins that showed up excitedly joined in. Then came the Orcs, Mousegirls, and Doggirls, and by the time Urtha had shown her face, the various tribe members had a line of eager volunteers to be thrown into the sea. While the Orcs were competing with one another to see who could get their cargo the furthest from the shore.
Dia caught sight of the glare before Rick could even speak up. “I’ve set up a rotation of guards with the ones keeping watch over the tribe,” the healer proclaimed. “And the water maidens are working as lookouts.”
“Do you think that would placate me?”
“Do you want to play in the launch games?” Rick asked, giving Dia a warning look. “I bet you’d give Monica a run for her money.”
“She is stronger.” Urtha spoke after just a moment of observation, shaking her head. “I would need to wait for her to tire.”
He looked at the Orc as she remained near them, but didn’t sit. He could almost taste the tension within her, that knot of uncertainty. “Would you like to build a sand castle, then?”
“A castle of sand?”
“Exactly that.” Rick sat up. “Just wet sand and more sand, and make a castle with it.”
Urtha’s thick brows furrowed. “That… sounds childish.”
He shrugged. “Sand is fragile and crumbles easily if mishandled. Consider it a test of skill.” A sly smile followed. “Or are you scared a little human will be better at it than you?”
With a scoff, she stomped her foot once. “Show me.”
“I’ll join in!” Dia said. “It’s been a while since I’ve played mud-walls.”
“The what now?”
“It’s a game we healers played when little helped give us finer control over our power.” She crouched down, grabbing a handful of wet sand and proceeding to carefully lay it down in the shape of a very thin tube. A tube no thicker than a straw, and tall enough to reach her knee. “The trick is in pushing the water away at the right time.”
Rick and Urtha shared a worried glance.
Two hours later, things had escalated… a little.
It turned out that the Orc’s ability to make wood nearly as tough as steel could be applied to sand to just enough of a degree that Urtha had made a box tower about two meters on the side and five tall. Rick, working with a knife, carved out details on the tower.
Mostly windows and bricks.
Dia, on the other hand, had built a miniature replica of the fortified city of Balet. Devoid of any details, the city was a configuration of boxes roughly knee height.
It was when some maidens that had tired of the Monica-Launcher™ had gathered to watch that things escalated. With Mousegirls quickly getting recruited by Dia so that they could turn the sand boxes into detailed houses, and Urtha recruiting other Orcs so that they could put together a second tower.
Somewhere along the way, Sheel had shown up to set up an impromptu grill service.
Rick got his fill as he watched the competition unfold, recovering his energy and feeling exhausted in a good way. He caught sight of Kiara emerging from the sea, sans clothes. The Succubus took one look at the gathering, and eventually locked on to him.
The alluring blue-haired Succubus shifted her walk, tucking away tiredness and presenting only assuredness and grace. Her ample hips swayed with a mesmerizing rhythm, tail punctuating every step with a flick. The maiden made a show of pushing her sky-blue hair over her shoulder, presenting her bare chest for him to drink in.
There was a twinkle of enjoyment in her golden eyes when his gaze locked on to her body. A sly smile played on her lips, seductive and coy.
As she reached him, the succubus knelt down and whispered in his ear, her voice soft and alluring. “Is this spot taken?”
Rick felt his throat dry, and he coughed a little. “Sure.”
Kiara grinned wider, taking his lap, tail reaching under his shirt to caress his chest. “It is very comfortable.” She punctuated her words by grinding against herself against his crotch a little. “You seem thrilled to see me.”
He wrapped his hands around her midriff, pulling her against his chest, ignoring the slight discomfort of her wings. “Be warned that Monica is looking our way,” he whispered. “Engage and you will get launched. She’s gotten great at it.”
The tail twitched. “Noted.” Her tone was begrudging. “I meant to ask, are you familiar with… this? The sea? The ocean? The depths?”
“I’ve been on my fair share of boats, and went diving in a reef once.” He admitted freely. “And I’ve flown over the clouds in one of the most boring technological marvel my world built.” A little chuckle followed. “But I think you were meaning to lead this somewhere else?”
Kiara shifted, staring over her shoulder for a moment. “I’d like to hear more about your world sometime.” Her voice held an edge of hesitation to it, and Rick had the distinct impression she was trying to hold something back. “But yes, I was meaning to lead the conversation to this.”
The tone was gone; the look was gone, replaced by smug satisfaction as she held up a blue gemstone. The object was the size of a pearl and a deep, glimmering blue.
“An impure elemental stone.” The Succubus declared. “Take it.”
Rick obliged, lifting it to get a better look. Light wavered and refracted within the sphere, adding a shimmer that made it look as if there was a tiny sea contained within. Twisting and shifting the stone did not make the illusion of change, making the little sphere appear like a looking-glass of some sort.
The refracted light swayed and shifted against his palm like an aurora.
“It’s… this is really impressive.” He declared after a moment, glancing back at her.
“I stumbled onto this while looking for something else. It has some minor value, but is mostly useless since it has a very low purity.” She shrugged her lithe shoulders, trailing his jaw with her sharp nail. “Consider it compensation.”
He frowned a little. “Compensation for what?”
She shrugged, beating her wings once and hopping on to her feet. “I will go get myself a change of clothes and a snack.” She turned to leave. “You’re more than welcome to join.”
Rick could only chuckle. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m exhausted right now.”
“Have it your way.” The maiden vanished into the thicket, sauntering off to the tribe. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, pay some attention to the little leech. Wouldn’t want her to feel neglected, now would we?”
Where had that come from? Rick watched her go, taking a moment to stand up and check that the little get-together was going nowhere. From there, he turned his focus inwards and sought the bond to Eva. It was tougher than he’d expected, especially with the noise from all the other bonds trying to drown out everything.
He found her sitting on a rock, at the very edge of the sandy shore, staring off at the setting sun. The maiden had her knees tucked against her chest, body covered under her black cape, only her red eyes and pale face exposed to the sunlight.
She noticed his approach, but didn’t react.
Rick took a spot next to her, not quite within arm’s reach. “You’ve avoided talking with me. Anything I should worry about?” His question caused the intended result. Eva looked at him with wide eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you don’t like small-talk, and this is just about the most important subject I could think of.”
The Fledgling turned away. “True.” She acknowledged. “I cannot answer your question, sir.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t.” She hugged her knees, turning away and towards the horizon.
Was she hesitating to take a stance, or was she unsure of what stance to take to begin with? Rick nodded a little. “If it’s any consolation, it’s weird for me, too.” He lay back on the stone, looking at the orange clouds above. “Especially with how stiff you’re acting.”
“The Wildling-King calls me his property, and then complains he is treated with the due formalities?” Eva glared.
“Point taken.” Rick sighed. “I just expected that you’d learn from the others.”
“I cannot compare myself to the monster that is Monica or Kiara, nor consider myself to hold a fraction of the trust you give Dia,” she summarized. “I am a Fledgling. Anywhere within the kingdom, a slip of the tongue, a mistake, or a perceived fault would earn me severe punishment.” The maiden glowered, then sighed. “I myself have given such for less.”
“So you don’t know what to expect from me, but will avoid talking with me about those expectations.”
The glare intensified. “I would trust you of all would understand the matter is not that simple.”
“You’re not calling me sir.” He replied with an arched brow, watching her flinch. “I don’t want to insult your intelligence, but it seems like you’re intentionally running on a groundless hypothesis. So my question would be, why have you kept at it?”
She deflated with a sigh. “I don’t know.”
Rick reached out, ruffling her hair. “Well, while you think about it, how about spending some actual time together with the others? Brooding didn’t get you the answer you were looking for, so how about trying to change the pace a little?”
The glare intensified. “I was not brooding. What do you take me for? I am older than you! I was the head of a noble house of great prestige!” She shot to her feet, glaring, lips curling into a snarl.
Rick stepped closer, directly into her personal space. “Evangeline.” He declared, his tone holding only the barest edge to it.
The Fledgling flinched, looking away, hands hiding under her cape. “You are right.” She spoke, deflating. “I… am Evangeline now.”
She moved to kneel, to lower herself, but his hand on her chin held her in place. He raised her gaze so that they would meet eyes. “The only line you stepped over was baring your fangs at me. Nothing else.”
He wanted to step away, to turn around and go to the beach with the others. But something else held him in place as he looked down to those ruby red eyes, the way she trembled against his palm, how she inhaled deeply and her eyelids fluttered. The maiden leaned into his touch, taking a hesitant step closer.
“Th-this…” Eva stammered, swallowing.
Rick leaned closer. “This is your chance to step away.”
She didn’t.
The Fledgling followed the gentle tug of his palm, raising herself to her tiptoes, leaning into the kiss. She froze, opening her mouth a little and scratching his lips with her fangs in hunger. They pierced, only enough to draw a drop of blood, only enough to make him flinch.
Eva recoiled, eyes wild, face beet read. “I, no, I-… This isn’t…”
The maiden vanished into the shadows before he could say anything. He could sense her quickly making an escape through the darkness. The human was left mostly amused at the reaction, chuckling as he took the long way back to the others.
He could understand why Kiara found entertainment out of teasing the Fledgling. Idly, he wondered if they could exchange some notes.
----
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But the Orcs, and by extension all the other maidens, had more than one surprise in store.
When the tribe had set off, they’d done so with a grand demolition. The moment everything of value had been picked up and packaged, the village was then torn to shreds by anyone willing to take part in the little destruction-derby.
Following this, the tribe would split up into hut-family units.
Every “family” would be made of one human and multiple maidens. The maiden with the highest standing within the family unit (almost always an Orc) would be in charge of carrying and protecting the human on their back. And the rest would handle the luggage and supplies that “family” unit would take with them.
And from there, they would break into a jogging pace that, to a human, would have been a dead sprint.
Rick had the distinct “honor” of being carried by Urtha since Monica’s job as the chief meant it was her job to be at the tip of the metaphorical spear. Meanwhile, Rick was left seated on a sort-of-backpack the tall Orc carried.
Kiara flew overhead with the handful of other flying maidens that’d been woken up from the boxes. Leaving Eva and Dia to carry their belongings. It left an unpleasant aftertaste in Rick’s gut.
The smirk Dia kept shooting his way as he petulantly crossed his arms and resigned himself to being glorified luggage. “I could at least be playing the drums to mark the pace or something. It’s not like we’re being subtle or quiet.”
“Humans have no place drawing attention where danger lurks,” Urtha said, the only one present that wasn’t even winded. “Less so the Father.”
“Some feral might think you are a cheesy snack.” Dia, huffing as she pushed herself, still giggled.
“The tribe is tense enough already.” The Orc shook her head. “We rarely bring this many weaklings with us.”
“One of many changes to come.” Rick held the sigh, mostly because he was holding on to the chair to keep from falling over. He didn’t want to think about it, but once they reached Sinco, things would get complicated.
They were effectively marching out, seeking to conquer a city. Whether it be through actual warfare or maneuvering, they weren’t sure just yet. They just knew that they were prepared for the former if the latter didn’t work out. The reports had come in: Sinco was not in a good place. The constant presence of highly aggressive ferals had been chipping away at their defenses.
The only hope the city held was that they would receive reinforcements from Aubria.
Rick would get there faster.
It was in these thoughts that he pondered throughout the day. The tribe traveled and rested too often to the Orc’s liking. There was much friction to be had, and the humans were guarded like the treasures the tribe considered them to be.
When night came, a singular large hut was made for the humans, and the maidens would sleep in rotations. There would be small songs and minor stories that were shared, small moments of comfort. But they were all held under the looming watchfulness of the tribe.
Because they were at their most vulnerable. One missed feral deciding to make a stand could mean a human getting hurt. Rick had to begrudgingly respect them for that. As much as he loathed being treated like some kind of porcelain doll, there was no room to question that the maidens were going the extra mile for everyone’s safety and survival.
Though they would sometimes go a bit overboard against the maidens that “slowed down the tribe”. His role mediating such disputes had become his main role throughout the following days.
One morning, as they were preparing to set out, he heard it.
It started with a scream, then a yelp, and then a rush.
By the time Rick realized what was going on, Monica was upon him. Drenched from head to toe and stinking of salt and seaweed. The massive maiden was looking at him with a smile that threatened to split her head in two.
“Rick!” She hovered over him, dripping water all over. “Come! Come!”
“Is everything alright?” He asked from the discomfort of the portable chair he was currently occupying.
“COME!” she insisted, hopping on her feet and skittishly looking back, aiming her ear in the direction she’d come from. “Quick!”
“The tribe is not heading that way.” Urtha pointed out.
Rick considered it for a second. “Are there any problems shifting course to travel nearer to the sea?”
“It is a bad idea. For many reasons.”
Her words brought nods from Eva and Dia, to which Rick could only respond with a shrug. “Ok, then we could call for a break for the day, give everyone a chance to properly unwind, and I’ll go with Monica.” He pointed over at the feline that was bouncing on her heels, just barely holding back from reaching out and yanking him into her wet embrace. “Seems like the chief is very excited about something.”
“I bet its food,” Eva said.
“Urtha?” Rick waited.
The Orc glanced over at the crowd. “We will set camp for the day. We cannot afford to lose any of the weaklings.”
That was as good as he could’ve hoped. Rick nodded and was immediately snatched by Monica’s fuzzy paw. The maiden picked him up, putting him over her shoulder and trotting through the shrubbery and trees with little regard for who might be following.
Rick got himself a face full of leaves, flinching and batting them away. “Hey, wait, the branches-”
The Sabretooth yanked him into her arms and broke into a full sprint. Dirt and rocks burst forth from where she stood as air whipped about them. Her fang-filled smile only grew. Monica’s eyes were only focused forward. Rick, meanwhile, was trying to avoid swallowing bugs. The insects that kept flying about appeared to prefer smacking against his face.
There was a moment of clarity, light, and blue.
And with a splash, he was underwater.
Rick made the mistake of gasping, swallowing sea-water, wildly flinging his arms to get himself to the surface. Monica yanked him out of the water, leaving him feeling like a half-drowned cat as he coughed and spat.
“LOOK!” she proclaimed, dropping him on the sandy beach as she hurried towards the crashing waves, kicking at them and sending sprays of foam high into the air. “Rick! BIG!” She waved wildly, rushing her way into the water, then back out.
“That’s the sea.”
“Monica see!” With wide arms, she tried to point at all of it at once.
“No, it’s a new word. Sounds similar.” He combed his hair out of his face with his hands, removing his shirt. “Sea. S-E-A. Big, wet, and salty.”
“BIG WET!” Monica was cheering and splashing, kicking her way up and down the shore, jumping into the waves and coming out a dozen meters away and then making her way back to the shore.
“It’s the sea.” He couldn’t help but smile, watching as she slapped the water with her huge paws, creating a billowing tower of water and foam to rise at least a dozen meters into the air.
He put the low-end terrifying notion of how much force was packed into that strike and kept an easy-going smile.
“It’s the ocean.” The voice called from above, Kiara leisurely drifting down and sitting next to him. “Too far away from anything or anyone. Few ships go through here.”
“So chock-full of dangerous ferals?”
“Just like everywhere else.” Her eyes weren’t on Monica. The Succubus’ gaze appeared more focused on trailing the waves as they crashed into the shore. “Likely they’ve been scared off, though. The rush must have eaten everything available near the shore.”
Rick looked at the waves, then at her. “How can you tell?”
“There’s nothing in the waves.” She pointed. “Usually there’s at least the odd Sprite.”
“Maybe Monica scared them off.”
“Doubtful.” Kiara shook her head, turning to eye him with a slight smirk. “You’re drenched. Maybe you’d want to take your clothes off?” Her gaze trailed over him in a distinctly predatory way.
“You’re hungry, huh?”
She leaned closer, hand reaching over to caress his shoulder. “Maybe a little more than that…” Gold eyes locked to his, her hand gently pushing his back into the sand, the Succubus moving in closer so that she could pin him down.
Rick grinned. “Careful with the splash.”
The momentary confusion turned to shock and horror as she was yanked away and flung into the sea. Monica stared with ample amount of self-satisfaction as the Succubus swore and sank into the waves. “No horny time.” The feline declared, looking at Rick with a dangerous glint in her eyes.
“I understand.” He raised his hands, playing the role of innocent bystander.
“Play time.”
His eyes widened with concern. Uh oh.
She reached down, pulling him up by the shirt. “Rick train swim.”
“I know how to swim.” He quickly proclaimed, grabbing hold of her claws as her arm tensed. “BUT!”
Monica hesitated, looking at the water, then at him with narrowed eyes. “But?”
“Don’t throw me like you did Kiara or I will break,” he said, quickly relaxing a little as he pointed up into the air. “Throw me a little up. Gently, into the water.”
She eyed him for a moment, and with a flick of her tail, caught a stone. “Like this?” She grasped the rock and gently tossed it into a high arch that fell into the sea with a little plop.
“Yeah, just like-AAAAAHHHH!!!”
He was flying, body spinning in the air as gravity quickly lay claim. Rick did the only thing he could think of, curling into a ball, drawing breath, and plunge. He was underwater in the next instant, bubbles and light, with the sandy bottom still within sight.
It was down there that he spotted Kiara looking up at him with a smirk, a bubble wrapping her head. The conspicuously naked Succubus used her wings to swim up at him, catching him in her grasp and pulling him down.
Rick clutched his mouth, trying to keep his breath.
Kiara’s amusement was apparent as she held him by the shirt, looking at him with a mischievous twinkle. The iron grip remained, and he could see what her plan was, so he leaned into her, breaking the surface of the bubble with his face.
The breath was cut short with the kiss.
Then she shoved him away, waving off and winking as she swam further away from the shore. The speed she was moving with clearly was one not meant for him to follow, so Rick didn’t, going up to the surface.
Monica was waiting for him, excitedly grinning from ear to ear.
“Again!” he declared the moment he stepped on the sand. “But this time not from the shirt or it might rip.”
By the time others were reaching the beach, the duo had figured out a way to make the launch procedure safer… ish. Mostly in that the victim of choice would stand on Monica’s palm and curl into a cannonball, so that she could then throw.
And the maiden had quite the throwing arm.
The couple of Goblins that showed up excitedly joined in. Then came the Orcs, Mousegirls, and Doggirls, and by the time Urtha had shown her face, the various tribe members had a line of eager volunteers to be thrown into the sea. While the Orcs were competing with one another to see who could get their cargo the furthest from the shore.
Dia caught sight of the glare before Rick could even speak up. “I’ve set up a rotation of guards with the ones keeping watch over the tribe,” the healer proclaimed. “And the water maidens are working as lookouts.”
“Do you think that would placate me?”
“Do you want to play in the launch games?” Rick asked, giving Dia a warning look. “I bet you’d give Monica a run for her money.”
“She is stronger.” Urtha spoke after just a moment of observation, shaking her head. “I would need to wait for her to tire.”
He looked at the Orc as she remained near them, but didn’t sit. He could almost taste the tension within her, that knot of uncertainty. “Would you like to build a sand castle, then?”
“A castle of sand?”
“Exactly that.” Rick sat up. “Just wet sand and more sand, and make a castle with it.”
Urtha’s thick brows furrowed. “That… sounds childish.”
He shrugged. “Sand is fragile and crumbles easily if mishandled. Consider it a test of skill.” A sly smile followed. “Or are you scared a little human will be better at it than you?”
With a scoff, she stomped her foot once. “Show me.”
“I’ll join in!” Dia said. “It’s been a while since I’ve played mud-walls.”
“The what now?”
“It’s a game we healers played when little helped give us finer control over our power.” She crouched down, grabbing a handful of wet sand and proceeding to carefully lay it down in the shape of a very thin tube. A tube no thicker than a straw, and tall enough to reach her knee. “The trick is in pushing the water away at the right time.”
Rick and Urtha shared a worried glance.
Two hours later, things had escalated… a little.
It turned out that the Orc’s ability to make wood nearly as tough as steel could be applied to sand to just enough of a degree that Urtha had made a box tower about two meters on the side and five tall. Rick, working with a knife, carved out details on the tower.
Mostly windows and bricks.
Dia, on the other hand, had built a miniature replica of the fortified city of Balet. Devoid of any details, the city was a configuration of boxes roughly knee height.
It was when some maidens that had tired of the Monica-Launcher™ had gathered to watch that things escalated. With Mousegirls quickly getting recruited by Dia so that they could turn the sand boxes into detailed houses, and Urtha recruiting other Orcs so that they could put together a second tower.
Somewhere along the way, Sheel had shown up to set up an impromptu grill service.
Rick got his fill as he watched the competition unfold, recovering his energy and feeling exhausted in a good way. He caught sight of Kiara emerging from the sea, sans clothes. The Succubus took one look at the gathering, and eventually locked on to him.
The alluring blue-haired Succubus shifted her walk, tucking away tiredness and presenting only assuredness and grace. Her ample hips swayed with a mesmerizing rhythm, tail punctuating every step with a flick. The maiden made a show of pushing her sky-blue hair over her shoulder, presenting her bare chest for him to drink in.
There was a twinkle of enjoyment in her golden eyes when his gaze locked on to her body. A sly smile played on her lips, seductive and coy.
As she reached him, the succubus knelt down and whispered in his ear, her voice soft and alluring. “Is this spot taken?”
Rick felt his throat dry, and he coughed a little. “Sure.”
Kiara grinned wider, taking his lap, tail reaching under his shirt to caress his chest. “It is very comfortable.” She punctuated her words by grinding against herself against his crotch a little. “You seem thrilled to see me.”
He wrapped his hands around her midriff, pulling her against his chest, ignoring the slight discomfort of her wings. “Be warned that Monica is looking our way,” he whispered. “Engage and you will get launched. She’s gotten great at it.”
The tail twitched. “Noted.” Her tone was begrudging. “I meant to ask, are you familiar with… this? The sea? The ocean? The depths?”
“I’ve been on my fair share of boats, and went diving in a reef once.” He admitted freely. “And I’ve flown over the clouds in one of the most boring technological marvel my world built.” A little chuckle followed. “But I think you were meaning to lead this somewhere else?”
Kiara shifted, staring over her shoulder for a moment. “I’d like to hear more about your world sometime.” Her voice held an edge of hesitation to it, and Rick had the distinct impression she was trying to hold something back. “But yes, I was meaning to lead the conversation to this.”
The tone was gone; the look was gone, replaced by smug satisfaction as she held up a blue gemstone. The object was the size of a pearl and a deep, glimmering blue.
“An impure elemental stone.” The Succubus declared. “Take it.”
Rick obliged, lifting it to get a better look. Light wavered and refracted within the sphere, adding a shimmer that made it look as if there was a tiny sea contained within. Twisting and shifting the stone did not make the illusion of change, making the little sphere appear like a looking-glass of some sort.
The refracted light swayed and shifted against his palm like an aurora.
“It’s… this is really impressive.” He declared after a moment, glancing back at her.
“I stumbled onto this while looking for something else. It has some minor value, but is mostly useless since it has a very low purity.” She shrugged her lithe shoulders, trailing his jaw with her sharp nail. “Consider it compensation.”
He frowned a little. “Compensation for what?”
She shrugged, beating her wings once and hopping on to her feet. “I will go get myself a change of clothes and a snack.” She turned to leave. “You’re more than welcome to join.”
Rick could only chuckle. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m exhausted right now.”
“Have it your way.” The maiden vanished into the thicket, sauntering off to the tribe. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, pay some attention to the little leech. Wouldn’t want her to feel neglected, now would we?”
Where had that come from? Rick watched her go, taking a moment to stand up and check that the little get-together was going nowhere. From there, he turned his focus inwards and sought the bond to Eva. It was tougher than he’d expected, especially with the noise from all the other bonds trying to drown out everything.
He found her sitting on a rock, at the very edge of the sandy shore, staring off at the setting sun. The maiden had her knees tucked against her chest, body covered under her black cape, only her red eyes and pale face exposed to the sunlight.
She noticed his approach, but didn’t react.
Rick took a spot next to her, not quite within arm’s reach. “You’ve avoided talking with me. Anything I should worry about?” His question caused the intended result. Eva looked at him with wide eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you don’t like small-talk, and this is just about the most important subject I could think of.”
The Fledgling turned away. “True.” She acknowledged. “I cannot answer your question, sir.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t.” She hugged her knees, turning away and towards the horizon.
Was she hesitating to take a stance, or was she unsure of what stance to take to begin with? Rick nodded a little. “If it’s any consolation, it’s weird for me, too.” He lay back on the stone, looking at the orange clouds above. “Especially with how stiff you’re acting.”
“The Wildling-King calls me his property, and then complains he is treated with the due formalities?” Eva glared.
“Point taken.” Rick sighed. “I just expected that you’d learn from the others.”
“I cannot compare myself to the monster that is Monica or Kiara, nor consider myself to hold a fraction of the trust you give Dia,” she summarized. “I am a Fledgling. Anywhere within the kingdom, a slip of the tongue, a mistake, or a perceived fault would earn me severe punishment.” The maiden glowered, then sighed. “I myself have given such for less.”
“So you don’t know what to expect from me, but will avoid talking with me about those expectations.”
The glare intensified. “I would trust you of all would understand the matter is not that simple.”
“You’re not calling me sir.” He replied with an arched brow, watching her flinch. “I don’t want to insult your intelligence, but it seems like you’re intentionally running on a groundless hypothesis. So my question would be, why have you kept at it?”
She deflated with a sigh. “I don’t know.”
Rick reached out, ruffling her hair. “Well, while you think about it, how about spending some actual time together with the others? Brooding didn’t get you the answer you were looking for, so how about trying to change the pace a little?”
The glare intensified. “I was not brooding. What do you take me for? I am older than you! I was the head of a noble house of great prestige!” She shot to her feet, glaring, lips curling into a snarl.
Rick stepped closer, directly into her personal space. “Evangeline.” He declared, his tone holding only the barest edge to it.
The Fledgling flinched, looking away, hands hiding under her cape. “You are right.” She spoke, deflating. “I… am Evangeline now.”
She moved to kneel, to lower herself, but his hand on her chin held her in place. He raised her gaze so that they would meet eyes. “The only line you stepped over was baring your fangs at me. Nothing else.”
He wanted to step away, to turn around and go to the beach with the others. But something else held him in place as he looked down to those ruby red eyes, the way she trembled against his palm, how she inhaled deeply and her eyelids fluttered. The maiden leaned into his touch, taking a hesitant step closer.
“Th-this…” Eva stammered, swallowing.
Rick leaned closer. “This is your chance to step away.”
She didn’t.
The Fledgling followed the gentle tug of his palm, raising herself to her tiptoes, leaning into the kiss. She froze, opening her mouth a little and scratching his lips with her fangs in hunger. They pierced, only enough to draw a drop of blood, only enough to make him flinch.
Eva recoiled, eyes wild, face beet read. “I, no, I-… This isn’t…”
The maiden vanished into the shadows before he could say anything. He could sense her quickly making an escape through the darkness. The human was left mostly amused at the reaction, chuckling as he took the long way back to the others.
He could understand why Kiara found entertainment out of teasing the Fledgling. Idly, he wondered if they could exchange some notes.
----
Hello, I'm back, kinda.[First]
Things have been a monumental mess over on my end. Lots of things happened over the past couple months.
I'll be clear: Reddit isn't a convenient place to post stories. Yes, there's a community, but the website is very clearly designed for other kinds of content creators. Story writing is more of a "Despite" thing. Combined with the upcoming policy changes (what with the site being sold off and wanting to coerce users into their App, at the cost of all else), I don't think I'll be sticking around.
The story will continue being regularly posted over at Royalroad and Scribblehub.
There's practically a full volume already posted over there. Seriously, as a writer I can't stress enough just how monumentally important the post-scheduler is for me. My life is far too chaotic and sometimes I spend weeks without time or energy to prepare the posts, and then just dump 15 of them into the auto-loader.
I will try to get the next full volume (up to chapter... 62?) posted here throughout the next couple weeks, and unless something changes, I'll mostly stick to those other sites from there onward.
See you guys around, and thanks for sticking this long with the story.
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