Support the story on Nosleep Here.
My father was not a good man, I know this. But when I think of him, I first recall his warmth, his kindness, and his strength. I remember vividly watching him toil away at backbreaking labor to support us. I was amazed by the strength of his hands, and how gentle they were with me. And then my stomach drops into a pit because now I know that with those same hands, he took the lives of countless innocent people.
My earliest memory is of him. I was 4 and I was trying to convince him to let me take in a stray dog I had found wandering an abandoned lot.
“We can’t, it’d be too much trouble to lug the mutt around, we have a hard enough time with just the two of us.” He said.
“We can leave him with lots of food until we come back,” I countered.
“Dogs aren’t like people, they’re bound by instinct. If you leave a month's worth of food out for a dog it won’t ration its food out so that it can eat happily for a month, no it’ll gorge itself and eat all the food available to it, that’s its nature, its instinct. And once there’s nothing left and hunger creeps in it might go out into the world in search of a new meal, and we’ve already learned that its instinct is to consume as much as it can while it can. That’s why we’re around, to control that which is bestial.” He said, his eyes tainted with an existential melancholy.
Even now when I think about it a trickle of cold sweat crawls achingly slow down the side of my brow, he was so close to telling me the truth back then. I wondered if the possibility of passing on his burden was what caused the derailment of his life lesson.
Our life was unconventional, spent in countless cheap, dirty roadside motels as we trekked aimlessly through the states. Sometimes we slept in abandoned lots and dark parking lots and on cold nights we clung to each other, knowing that there was no one else in the world that would care for us, but us. He tried his best to provide for me and I never went hungry, even on our worst days his patience and understanding were unmatched by any man I have known sense.
The first time I suspected my father was involved in something grisly was when I was 9. He had left me alone in our motel with the TV on and a pizza box. He must have been gone for 11 hours at least, and I began to worry that something terrible happened to him. The entire week something had been off, there was a heaviness in the air, and a chill seemed to stalk us. It was the middle of a brutal summer but every enclosed space I found myself in was wicked of its heat until the very breaths I exhaled were visible. I noticed that my father was suffering from some mental fatigue, was more irritable than usual, and had a mounting nervousness that made him quick to sequester us in our hotel. He left that day saying that there was something he needed to do but promised he’d be back. But as the clock neared 1 am I was afraid that I’d never see him again.
The relief I felt when he rushed into our hotel room was short-lived when I saw the state he was in. His dark hair was disheveled, splattered with a slick substance, and his eyes were crazed. What stood out most of all was the angry red lines criss-crossing his face and neck. He told me to get my things as he quickly made his way into the shower. I did as I was told, the panicked tone of his voice infused a frenzy into my movements, and all I owned was half haphazardly thrown into my backpack. My father stepped out of the shower and as he dressed I noticed the deep scratches raked into his forearms and back, even at that age it was unmistakable. Violence.
We drove away from that motel in silence, with no alarm or danger given voice by my father. But an undeniable sense of wrongness lingered in the air, heavy and undispellable, I knew deep in the pit of my gut that we had committed some great evil. Dad however was at ease, as if some great weight had just been lifted off his shoulders, and as days passed I noticed the stalking cold had faded.
3 years passed and I had smartened up by then and as I began to recall and re-examine, I began to piece things together. Through the layers of denial and rationalization, I knew what he had done. I held on to the hope that the motel incident was the last time, that we could move forward and with time, forget. And then he killed Morgan. There was a build-up to it, that same strange chill, the sense of impending doom, and then Dad left like he always did, and when he came back the stalking specter was gone and so was Morgan. I didn’t know him, couldn’t bring myself to even look into him even now. I only caught wind of him through a radio broadcast as we hastily left yet another small town. My dad quickly switched stations and I knew it had been him. I think he knew that I knew then, the nervousness in both our eyes communicating more between us than we’d ever could with words.
I took part in my first murder at 15. It wasn’t planned, wasn’t a rite of passage. It was more like a car crash, flying at 120 miles per hour straight into the embankment. Her name was Laurie Artwood, a local prostitute. I forced myself to look this time even if it was a glance at a driver's license moments before it was tossed into flames. Her name, her face, all seared into the flesh of my mind. It was the moment she stepped out bloodied and starry-eyed as a curtain of blood cascaded down the side of her head. A flap of flesh dangled loosely from her scalp, weighed and dragged down by curly auburn hair. As we locked eyes and hope flushed into her iris I looked away and saw the crimson-slicked and chipped exposed skull. She screamed then and I flinched and doubled back at her, seeing the desperate sprint she made towards the car I had been sleeping in. Dad closed the distance, spriting on long powerful legs, the glint of a deadly metal arc flashing briefly in the moonlight before he brought the ax down with a powerful and meaty THWACK
I saw the light leave her eyes as the floor rushed up to meet her. Dad pried the ax loose with a foot and brought it down thrice more. I watched in horror, spewing vomit and tears as a blood rain coated the floor and car. I was comatose by the time he finally entered the driver's seat, the crazed look from 6 years earlier was mirrored and I knew he had always been like this. He chanted “fuck” under his breath, like a mantra as he scrambled to start the car and when the engine roared to life silence fell like a guillotine. We drove off into the night and I was left with the knowledge that I had killed her with my inaction.
Dawn was starting to peek through the horizon when we finally came to some unnamed backwater town with a self-serve car wash. I watched as Dad fed the machine a handful of quarters and proceeded to wash the car clean. The cold spray made the bitter morning cold all the harsher, and with each passing moment, I felt the question, the demand bubbling up inside me.
“Why?” I asked, quietly.
It cleaved through the whir and sound of pressurized water and Dad heard it, turned to face me, and said “Soon.” so we waited until the water ran clear and the sun rose and off we drove to some far-flung forest edge where he pulled over. A cigarette was lit and Dad took a long drag until his lungs hurt and he couldn’t hold it any longer. He breathed the plume of smoke out painting the world gray and held out the cigarette to me and I answered with a contemptuous glare.
“Alright, I guess it’s time you knew. You’d find out sooner or later, this thing will pass on to you eventually,” he said.
“Thing?”
“You’ve felt it before, I’m sure you have. The way it hungers, the way it loathes, and the way it schemes.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked but in the pit of my stomach, I had an inkling of what he meant.
He reached out and for a moment I froze, but this was my Dad, he wouldn’t hurt me, couldn’t. So I let him take hold of my shoulders and turn me to face the sunrise.
“If it’s here, it means they haven’t found her body yet, you can’t see it by looking through your eyes. Think of what you have and what you’ve lost. What I’ve taken from you because I couldn’t bear the thought of doing this alone.”
I did, I could have had a normal life, friends, a family, first love. Anything but this vagrant lifestyle, knowing the person you cherished the most was a monster and having him drag you into his hell. And then I felt the sting of tears in my eyes, a longing blossoming and the crushing weight of its existence.
“Now show yourself,” he said
And in the glow of the morning sun, it did. I didn’t know if the thing was malformed or degraded, just that it didn’t belong. Multiple forms convened and interlaced within the same space, upon a glance it was a human silhouette, weaved in shadow. But in that same instance, it was a cuboid thing, far too large for the space it existed in, its surface pocked and scarred by clockwork machinery, passages, and labyrinthian tunnels. It was constantly turning, shifting, and restructuring, I didn’t know where to look. If I focused on its maze-like circuitry I would lose myself in the maddening scramble to navigate them. And if I saw the black of its being I would that beneath it all was a maw that opened wide and lapped hungrily at the world around it, feeding on something that still evaded me.
I tried to recoil, tried to move away from it but Dad caught me and held me firm, forcing me to gaze into the thing. Its once semi-translucent form grew vivid and real, solidifying its existence. A cloud of black smoke was being pulled from me into the hungry maws of its shadow self and in turn the machinery and clockworks of its exterior. It was devouring some part of me and it horrified me enough to try to turn and run but Dad’s firm hands held me still as he spoke.
“I think it might have had a purpose at one point, to lessen the weight of some great tragedy. But with time even blessings can become curses. I don’t know why it latched onto us, whether it was born or made, just that it needs to feed. And if we don’t feed it and control its urges, it might go out into the world and gorge itself on the grief it brings. The knowledge that I’m sparing the world from the havoc it could wreck is my sin and burden, and now… yours.”
I stood transfixed, gaze locked on the thing that fed on grief and stalked our bloodline and then it came to me, a question I had pondered but never voiced.
“What happened to Mom?”
I turned to face him and saw him drowning in pain, in guilt, in remorse. He looked away, and I knew. The world spun as bile threatened to force its way up. My lip quivered as I turned away, preferring to face the grief-devouring demon. But it had already faded to a phantasm, a moment later nothing remained.
“They found her.” was all my father said before he got back in the car. The moment of hesitation dragged out for what felt like an eternity but eventually, I was in the passenger seat alongside him, wondering how long this thing would be able to feed on the grief my father wrought that night before he’d have to do it again.
2 years, 2 short years before the grief demon manifested again. I understood now, why it stuck close to us, why no suspicion ever came to us. It was a parasite, leeching from whoever it could with the least amount of effort. I tried telling dad if we let it starve it would go somewhere else, but he feared the lengths it would to feed itself.
“The world is drowning in pain, there’s no shortage of ways for it to gorge itself,” I told him.
“I can’t risk that, no one should suffer this, no one but me,” and he was off, searching for his next victim, unaware it was the last time we’d see each other.
He never found them, not that night. When he returned to the motel he found it empty. I took what I had and caught a bus to anywhere else, and kept going until I no longer could. The monstrous thing followed me for a night but when I greeted the following dawn it was gone and I knew Dad was the one grieving. The lump in my heart wasn’t heavy enough to turn my pace, I kept moving because it was all I could do. I found a job as a laborer, taking whatever anyone was willing to give me and for two years I broke my back scrounging change for nothing. Half a year ago I came home to my shitty apartment, opening the door I was greeted by a bone-deep chill and I froze. In the center of the room upon a thrifted coffee table it stood, crouched itself. The labyrinthian clockwork had slowed to a crawl and their underlying hungry mouths lapped up at the empty air. Some of them grinned at me, expectantly.
A scream tried to tear its way up my body but it was drowned out by something else, a smoldering emotion on the verge of catching flame. As the implication of the demon’s appearance settled in I felt it, grief. And then I cried, I cried for all I had lost and for what I never had. I cried, hoping to drown a space within me that grew with every second. As I collapsed into myself as the mechanisms of this thing unwound and opened and encircled me. The maws bit down deep on the flames of my pain and I drowned in the crushing weight of its presence, suffocated by my fire and its hunger. I was immobilized by it at first, as it fed on the grief cultivated over a lifetime. Days passed, then weeks, and then a month before a moment of clarity. A burden eased and I sought him out. Claimed his body and did what I could. It wasn’t much but the tiny urn they gave me could at least be carried until I found the courage to let him go.
I’ve carried them ever since. Their weight is great and some days I buckle and fall but I know that with each passing day, it gets easier, even if only a little. It won’t ever fade completely, I know that, but one day it’ll be ok. I’ll climb to his favorite cliffside, one that overlooked a redwood forest and there I’ll toss our burdens to the wind, let them be scattered, and be returned to the earth. The demon might stick around a bit longer, maybe much longer than anticipated. But I won’t let it be my cross to bear. I don’t know what it’ll do. Maybe it’ll latch onto someone else, maybe it will coast through the world feeding on the suffering as it passes them. Maybe Dad was right and it’ll gorge on the whole of the world’s grief until it can’t. Somehow I doubt that, not through any logical reasoning but because it’s what I have to believe if I want to live with myself. The only thing I know is that I’ll keep trudging forward until I can’t.
TW

My father was not a good man, I know this. But when I think of him, I first recall his warmth, his kindness, and his strength. I remember vividly watching him toil away at backbreaking labor to support us. I was amazed by the strength of his hands, and how gentle they were with me. And then my stomach drops into a pit because now I know that with those same hands, he took the lives of countless innocent people.
My earliest memory is of him. I was 4 and I was trying to convince him to let me take in a stray dog I had found wandering an abandoned lot.
“We can’t, it’d be too much trouble to lug the mutt around, we have a hard enough time with just the two of us.” He said.
“We can leave him with lots of food until we come back,” I countered.
“Dogs aren’t like people, they’re bound by instinct. If you leave a month's worth of food out for a dog it won’t ration its food out so that it can eat happily for a month, no it’ll gorge itself and eat all the food available to it, that’s its nature, its instinct. And once there’s nothing left and hunger creeps in it might go out into the world in search of a new meal, and we’ve already learned that its instinct is to consume as much as it can while it can. That’s why we’re around, to control that which is bestial.” He said, his eyes tainted with an existential melancholy.
Even now when I think about it a trickle of cold sweat crawls achingly slow down the side of my brow, he was so close to telling me the truth back then. I wondered if the possibility of passing on his burden was what caused the derailment of his life lesson.
Our life was unconventional, spent in countless cheap, dirty roadside motels as we trekked aimlessly through the states. Sometimes we slept in abandoned lots and dark parking lots and on cold nights we clung to each other, knowing that there was no one else in the world that would care for us, but us. He tried his best to provide for me and I never went hungry, even on our worst days his patience and understanding were unmatched by any man I have known sense.
The first time I suspected my father was involved in something grisly was when I was 9. He had left me alone in our motel with the TV on and a pizza box. He must have been gone for 11 hours at least, and I began to worry that something terrible happened to him. The entire week something had been off, there was a heaviness in the air, and a chill seemed to stalk us. It was the middle of a brutal summer but every enclosed space I found myself in was wicked of its heat until the very breaths I exhaled were visible. I noticed that my father was suffering from some mental fatigue, was more irritable than usual, and had a mounting nervousness that made him quick to sequester us in our hotel. He left that day saying that there was something he needed to do but promised he’d be back. But as the clock neared 1 am I was afraid that I’d never see him again.
The relief I felt when he rushed into our hotel room was short-lived when I saw the state he was in. His dark hair was disheveled, splattered with a slick substance, and his eyes were crazed. What stood out most of all was the angry red lines criss-crossing his face and neck. He told me to get my things as he quickly made his way into the shower. I did as I was told, the panicked tone of his voice infused a frenzy into my movements, and all I owned was half haphazardly thrown into my backpack. My father stepped out of the shower and as he dressed I noticed the deep scratches raked into his forearms and back, even at that age it was unmistakable. Violence.
We drove away from that motel in silence, with no alarm or danger given voice by my father. But an undeniable sense of wrongness lingered in the air, heavy and undispellable, I knew deep in the pit of my gut that we had committed some great evil. Dad however was at ease, as if some great weight had just been lifted off his shoulders, and as days passed I noticed the stalking cold had faded.
3 years passed and I had smartened up by then and as I began to recall and re-examine, I began to piece things together. Through the layers of denial and rationalization, I knew what he had done. I held on to the hope that the motel incident was the last time, that we could move forward and with time, forget. And then he killed Morgan. There was a build-up to it, that same strange chill, the sense of impending doom, and then Dad left like he always did, and when he came back the stalking specter was gone and so was Morgan. I didn’t know him, couldn’t bring myself to even look into him even now. I only caught wind of him through a radio broadcast as we hastily left yet another small town. My dad quickly switched stations and I knew it had been him. I think he knew that I knew then, the nervousness in both our eyes communicating more between us than we’d ever could with words.
I took part in my first murder at 15. It wasn’t planned, wasn’t a rite of passage. It was more like a car crash, flying at 120 miles per hour straight into the embankment. Her name was Laurie Artwood, a local prostitute. I forced myself to look this time even if it was a glance at a driver's license moments before it was tossed into flames. Her name, her face, all seared into the flesh of my mind. It was the moment she stepped out bloodied and starry-eyed as a curtain of blood cascaded down the side of her head. A flap of flesh dangled loosely from her scalp, weighed and dragged down by curly auburn hair. As we locked eyes and hope flushed into her iris I looked away and saw the crimson-slicked and chipped exposed skull. She screamed then and I flinched and doubled back at her, seeing the desperate sprint she made towards the car I had been sleeping in. Dad closed the distance, spriting on long powerful legs, the glint of a deadly metal arc flashing briefly in the moonlight before he brought the ax down with a powerful and meaty THWACK
I saw the light leave her eyes as the floor rushed up to meet her. Dad pried the ax loose with a foot and brought it down thrice more. I watched in horror, spewing vomit and tears as a blood rain coated the floor and car. I was comatose by the time he finally entered the driver's seat, the crazed look from 6 years earlier was mirrored and I knew he had always been like this. He chanted “fuck” under his breath, like a mantra as he scrambled to start the car and when the engine roared to life silence fell like a guillotine. We drove off into the night and I was left with the knowledge that I had killed her with my inaction.
Dawn was starting to peek through the horizon when we finally came to some unnamed backwater town with a self-serve car wash. I watched as Dad fed the machine a handful of quarters and proceeded to wash the car clean. The cold spray made the bitter morning cold all the harsher, and with each passing moment, I felt the question, the demand bubbling up inside me.
“Why?” I asked, quietly.
It cleaved through the whir and sound of pressurized water and Dad heard it, turned to face me, and said “Soon.” so we waited until the water ran clear and the sun rose and off we drove to some far-flung forest edge where he pulled over. A cigarette was lit and Dad took a long drag until his lungs hurt and he couldn’t hold it any longer. He breathed the plume of smoke out painting the world gray and held out the cigarette to me and I answered with a contemptuous glare.
“Alright, I guess it’s time you knew. You’d find out sooner or later, this thing will pass on to you eventually,” he said.
“Thing?”
“You’ve felt it before, I’m sure you have. The way it hungers, the way it loathes, and the way it schemes.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked but in the pit of my stomach, I had an inkling of what he meant.
He reached out and for a moment I froze, but this was my Dad, he wouldn’t hurt me, couldn’t. So I let him take hold of my shoulders and turn me to face the sunrise.
“If it’s here, it means they haven’t found her body yet, you can’t see it by looking through your eyes. Think of what you have and what you’ve lost. What I’ve taken from you because I couldn’t bear the thought of doing this alone.”
I did, I could have had a normal life, friends, a family, first love. Anything but this vagrant lifestyle, knowing the person you cherished the most was a monster and having him drag you into his hell. And then I felt the sting of tears in my eyes, a longing blossoming and the crushing weight of its existence.
“Now show yourself,” he said
And in the glow of the morning sun, it did. I didn’t know if the thing was malformed or degraded, just that it didn’t belong. Multiple forms convened and interlaced within the same space, upon a glance it was a human silhouette, weaved in shadow. But in that same instance, it was a cuboid thing, far too large for the space it existed in, its surface pocked and scarred by clockwork machinery, passages, and labyrinthian tunnels. It was constantly turning, shifting, and restructuring, I didn’t know where to look. If I focused on its maze-like circuitry I would lose myself in the maddening scramble to navigate them. And if I saw the black of its being I would that beneath it all was a maw that opened wide and lapped hungrily at the world around it, feeding on something that still evaded me.
I tried to recoil, tried to move away from it but Dad caught me and held me firm, forcing me to gaze into the thing. Its once semi-translucent form grew vivid and real, solidifying its existence. A cloud of black smoke was being pulled from me into the hungry maws of its shadow self and in turn the machinery and clockworks of its exterior. It was devouring some part of me and it horrified me enough to try to turn and run but Dad’s firm hands held me still as he spoke.
“I think it might have had a purpose at one point, to lessen the weight of some great tragedy. But with time even blessings can become curses. I don’t know why it latched onto us, whether it was born or made, just that it needs to feed. And if we don’t feed it and control its urges, it might go out into the world and gorge itself on the grief it brings. The knowledge that I’m sparing the world from the havoc it could wreck is my sin and burden, and now… yours.”
I stood transfixed, gaze locked on the thing that fed on grief and stalked our bloodline and then it came to me, a question I had pondered but never voiced.
“What happened to Mom?”
I turned to face him and saw him drowning in pain, in guilt, in remorse. He looked away, and I knew. The world spun as bile threatened to force its way up. My lip quivered as I turned away, preferring to face the grief-devouring demon. But it had already faded to a phantasm, a moment later nothing remained.
“They found her.” was all my father said before he got back in the car. The moment of hesitation dragged out for what felt like an eternity but eventually, I was in the passenger seat alongside him, wondering how long this thing would be able to feed on the grief my father wrought that night before he’d have to do it again.
2 years, 2 short years before the grief demon manifested again. I understood now, why it stuck close to us, why no suspicion ever came to us. It was a parasite, leeching from whoever it could with the least amount of effort. I tried telling dad if we let it starve it would go somewhere else, but he feared the lengths it would to feed itself.
“The world is drowning in pain, there’s no shortage of ways for it to gorge itself,” I told him.
“I can’t risk that, no one should suffer this, no one but me,” and he was off, searching for his next victim, unaware it was the last time we’d see each other.
He never found them, not that night. When he returned to the motel he found it empty. I took what I had and caught a bus to anywhere else, and kept going until I no longer could. The monstrous thing followed me for a night but when I greeted the following dawn it was gone and I knew Dad was the one grieving. The lump in my heart wasn’t heavy enough to turn my pace, I kept moving because it was all I could do. I found a job as a laborer, taking whatever anyone was willing to give me and for two years I broke my back scrounging change for nothing. Half a year ago I came home to my shitty apartment, opening the door I was greeted by a bone-deep chill and I froze. In the center of the room upon a thrifted coffee table it stood, crouched itself. The labyrinthian clockwork had slowed to a crawl and their underlying hungry mouths lapped up at the empty air. Some of them grinned at me, expectantly.
A scream tried to tear its way up my body but it was drowned out by something else, a smoldering emotion on the verge of catching flame. As the implication of the demon’s appearance settled in I felt it, grief. And then I cried, I cried for all I had lost and for what I never had. I cried, hoping to drown a space within me that grew with every second. As I collapsed into myself as the mechanisms of this thing unwound and opened and encircled me. The maws bit down deep on the flames of my pain and I drowned in the crushing weight of its presence, suffocated by my fire and its hunger. I was immobilized by it at first, as it fed on the grief cultivated over a lifetime. Days passed, then weeks, and then a month before a moment of clarity. A burden eased and I sought him out. Claimed his body and did what I could. It wasn’t much but the tiny urn they gave me could at least be carried until I found the courage to let him go.
I’ve carried them ever since. Their weight is great and some days I buckle and fall but I know that with each passing day, it gets easier, even if only a little. It won’t ever fade completely, I know that, but one day it’ll be ok. I’ll climb to his favorite cliffside, one that overlooked a redwood forest and there I’ll toss our burdens to the wind, let them be scattered, and be returned to the earth. The demon might stick around a bit longer, maybe much longer than anticipated. But I won’t let it be my cross to bear. I don’t know what it’ll do. Maybe it’ll latch onto someone else, maybe it will coast through the world feeding on the suffering as it passes them. Maybe Dad was right and it’ll gorge on the whole of the world’s grief until it can’t. Somehow I doubt that, not through any logical reasoning but because it’s what I have to believe if I want to live with myself. The only thing I know is that I’ll keep trudging forward until I can’t.
TW

So here's a little something for everyone on a list i made over some time. I also included upcoming games that i think will be good.
​
1428: Shadows over Silesia
7 Days to Die
60 Seconds
60 Parsecs
ATOM RPG
Achilles: Legends Untold
ASTRONEER
A Total War Saga: TROY
ARK Survival Evolved, ARK 2
Anno
Aftermath
After Us
ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON
Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo
Ad Infinitum
Antichamber
Among The Trolls
A Plague Tale: Innocence
A Plague Tale: Requiem
Apsulov
Assassin's Creed
Anna's Songs: Nascence
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Ancestors Legacy
Against the Storm
Age of Empires
Age of Darkness
Age of Darkness: Final Stand
Age of Wonders
Atlas Fallen
Attack on Titan
Atomic Heart
Alien: Isolation
Aliens: Dark Descent
Aliens: Fireteam Elite + Pathogen
Aliens [ Survios studio ]
Alice: Madness Returns
Alice: Asylum
Alone in the dark
Alan Wake Remastered
Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders
Avowed
Arcanum
Apotheon
Axiom Verge
Bad Dream Fever, Coma
Bastion
Batman
Batman: The Telltale Series
Batman: The Enemy Within
Barotrauma
Back to the Future: The Game
Back 4 Blood
Battle Brothers
Battlefield
Baldur's Gate
Beyond Good & Evil
Bendy and the Dark Revival
BELLATORES
Bioshock Remastered
Beyond: Two Souls
Borderlands
Book of Travels
Botanicula
Bulletstorm
Bully
BLACKTAIL
Blade Runner [ Old point and click game ]
Blasphemous
Blacksad: Under the Skin
Black Book
Black Myth: Wukong
Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness
Black Mesa
Bleak Faith: Forsaken
Bloodborne
BloodRayne Betrayal
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
Bramble: The Mountain King
Breathedge
Broken Age
Bright Memory: Infinite
Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons
Broken Sword: Director's Cut
Broken Veil
Broken Pieces
Call of Duty
Call of Cthulhu
Creaks
Crysis
Crying Suns
Crimson Desert
Chrono Odyssey
Chorus
CHERNOBYLITE Enhanced Edition
Child of Light
Condemned
Control [Remedy Entertainment]
COCOON
Code Vein
ColdSide
Colony Ship
Company of Heroes
Command and Conquer
Contradiction: Spot The Liar
Conan Exiles
Conarium
Cozy Grove
Citizen Sleeper
Castlevania
Call of Juarez
Civilization
Crusader Kings
Cloudpunk
Cult of the Lamb
CULTIC
Curse of the Dead Gods
DARQ
DayZ
D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die
Day of the Tentacle Remastered
Darkest Dungeon
Dark Seed
Dark Fracture
Darkwood
Days Gone
Daymare 1994: Sandcastle
Dishonored
Disco Elysium - The Final Cut
Diablo
Divinity
Divine Divinity
Darkborn
Dragon Ball Z Kakarot
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Dying Light
Deadlight: Director's Cut
Destiny 2
Dead Cells
Dead Island
Deadly Premonition
Death's Gambit: Afterlife
Desperados
Death Stranding
Deathground
Deathloop
Derelicts
Dead Rising
Death's Door
Deep Rock Galactic
Dark Souls
Deus Ex
Devil May Cry 5
Demon's Souls
Detroit: Become Human
Darksiders
Dune: Spice Wars
Dungeons
Dungeon Siege
Dust to the End
Dragon Age
Dead Space
Dracula
DRYAD
Doom
Don't Starve
Eastshade
Eador
Echoes of the End
Edge of Sanity
Elden Ring
ELEX
Eldest Souls
Eternal Threads
Escape from Tarkov
Endless Dungeon
Endless Legend
Endless Space
ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Endling Extinction is Forever
Encased
Everwild
Everspace
Evil Genius
Evil West
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
Exanima
Expeditions
EXEKILLER
FATE
Fatal Frame
Farthest Frontier
FAR: Changing Tides
FAR: Lone Sails
Fibrillation HD
F.E.A.R.
Falling Frontier
Fanstratics
Fallout
Fable
Fobia St. Dinfna Hotel
For Honor
Fort Solis
Forever Skies
Forza Horizon
Fran Bow
Friday the 13th
From The Darkness
Frostpunk
Final Form [ Sci-fi game ]
Final Fantasy VII Remake
F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
Flashback 2
Fury Unleashed
GTA
Gray Dawn
Galactic Civilizations
Gabriel Knight
Grim Fandango Remastered
GTFO
Gears of War
Gerda: A Flame in Winter
Godfall
Going Medieval
God of War
Gothic Remake
Gone Home
Gord
Gears 5
Greedfall
Green Hell
GRIME
GREYHILL INCIDENT
Greak: Memories of Azur
Ghost 1.0
Ghost Song
Ghostwire: Tokyo
Ghostrunner
Ghost of Tsushima
Ghost of a Tale + UE5 Sequel
Giants Uprising
Grim Dawn
Guild Wars
Guacamelee
Gloomhaven
Hard West
Have a Nice Death
Haven
Hades
Halo
Harvester [ Old game ]
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Hellslave
Hellblade
Hell is Us
HELLSEED
Heavenly Bodies
High on Life
Hitman
Hidden Deep
Half Life 2
Hoa
Hogwarts Legacy
Homefront
Horizon Zero Dawn
Horizon Forbidden West
Hollow Knight
Homeworld
Heroes of Might and Magic
Humankind
Hunt: Showdown
I,The Inquisitor
I.G.I. Origins
Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
Ion Fury
ICARUS
INMOST
Infliction
INSIDE
INSTINCTION
In Sound Mind
ILL
In The Valley of Gods
Into The Dead: Our Darkest Days
Immortals Fenyx Rising
Iris.Fall
IXION
Judas
Just Cause
Just Us
Kentucky Route Zero
Kholat
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
King Arthur: Knight's Tale
King's Bounty: The Legend
King's Bounty: Armored Princess
King's Bounty
King's Quest
Kena: Bridge of Spirits
Last Epoch
Lamplight City
Last Day of June
Last Days of Lazarus
Lunacy: Saint Rhodes
Little Nightmares
Little Misfortune
Little Inferno
Like a Dragon: Ishin
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
Life is Strange True Colors
Lies Of P
LA Noire
Lake
Layers of Fear
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Lollipop Chainsaw Remake
Lost Planet
Lost Ember
Lost in Random
Lords of the Fallen 2023
Lost Soul Aside
Lost in Play
Lost Ark
Lone Wolf
Lost in Vivo
Loretta
Len's Island
Legacy of Kain
Legend of Grimrock
Left 4 Dead
Luna Abyss
Mad Max
Max Payne
Machinika Museum
Machinarium
Mandragora
Manor Lords
Manifold Garden
Masquerada: Songs and Shadows
Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Maid of Sker
Manhunt
Marauders
Miasma Chronicles
Mundaun
Mafia Remake
MAGIN: The Rat Project Stories
Mirror's Edge
Middle-earth: Shadow of War
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Midnight Fight Express
Mictlan: The Game
Metro
Metal: Hellsinger Metroid Dread Medieval Dynasty Medal of Honor Metal Gear Solid Mount & Blade Mortal Shell Monster Hunter: World Monster Hunter: Rise Moons of Madness Moonscars Mutazione Monument Valley: Panoramic Edition Monkey Island Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm Necromunda: Hired Gun Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) New World Negative Atmosphere Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Need for Speed Neon White NieR Automata Nioh Nightingale Nivalis Nine Sols No Man's Sky Northgard NORCO Noita Obscure Okami HD Old World Once Human OlliOlli World Observation Observer: System Redux Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty Oddworld: Soulstorm Enhanced Edition Once Upon a Time in Roswell Othercide Ori Outlast Outcast 2 - A New Beginning Out There: Oceans of Time Outer Wilds OUTRIDERS Outbreak Island Open Roads OPUS: Echo of Starsong Oxenfree Oxygen Not Included Owlboy Path of Exile Painkiller [ Saber Interactive ] PIONER Paradise Lost Paranoid [ Survival Horror ] Paralives Pacific Drive Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pillars of Eternity Prey Post Trauma Praey for the Gods Payday Penumbra Perfect Dark Persona Pentiment Pragmata Prodeus Prototype Project Athia Project: MARA Project Zomboid Prehistoric Kingdom Prince of Persia Primordia Phasmophobia Pathologic Planet of Lana Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition Pharaoh A New Era + Cleopatra 1999 POSTAL UNSIGHTED Unholy Unawake Under UnderRail Under The Waves Uncharted Unforeseen Incidents Raji: An Ancient Epic Ravenous Devils Ravenswatch Rain World Resident Evil Return to Nangrim Ready or Not Returnal Risk of Rain Rise of the Ronin Red Dead Redemption Redemption of the Damned Remember Me Remothered Return of the Obra Dinn Return to Monkey Island Robocop: Rogue City Röki ROUTINE REPLACED Remnant: From the Ashes Remnant 2 Rust Rustler Tales of Arise Tails of Iron Tales from the Borderlands Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon TAPE: Unveil the Memories Tainted Grail: Conquest The Alters The Last Night The Long Dark The Medium The Ascent Those Who Remain The Longest Journey + HD mod The Red Strings Club The Tiny Bang Story The Talos Principle The Invincible The Saboteur Thymesia Thief This Bed We Made The Bird That Drinks Tears This War of Mine The Expanse: A Telltale Series The Age of Decadence They Are Billions They Are Here The Shattering Tomb Raider To the Moon Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands Tormentum Tower of Time Torchlight Total War [ All Games ] Torment: Tides of Numenera Twin Mirror Twin Soul Titanfall 2 Tiny Tina's Wonderlands Titan Quest Anniversary Edition Tintin Reporter - Cigars of the Pharaoh TSIOQUE Timespinner Transistor Trepang2 Trek to Yomi Tribes of Midgard Tell Me Why Technobabylon Terminator: Resistance Terminator Survival Project Tempest Rising Teardown Tyranny Sable Sacred Samorost Sanitarium Satisfactory Sally Face Saints Row Sniper Elite Sniper: Ghost Warrior Skyrim + Mods Solasta Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice SIGNALIS Silver Chains Silent Hill Silent Doom Silence [ Point & Click ] Sifu Serum Secret Files Serious Sam Seasons after Fall SENTIENT [ Psychological Horror ] Slitterhead Someday You'll Return Song of Horror Songs of Conquest Sons of the Forest Source of Madness South of the Circle Solium Infernum Soulframe Soulstice Superliminal Subnautica Sundered Subnautica: Below Zero Sleeping Dogs Stranded Deep Star Wars S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Styx: Master of Shadows Styx: Shards of Darkness State of Decay Starfield Starbound Star Citizen Stela Stellaris Steelrising Stray Stray Souls Sker Ritual Strangeland System Shock 3 Syndicate Succubus Smalland Shadow Complex Remastered Shadowrun Shadow Warrior Shadow Tactics Sherlock Holmes Shadow Man Remastered Shadows: Awakening Shadow of Conspiracy: Section 2 Scarlet Nexus Scarlet Hollow Scars Above Space Engineers Space Hulk: Deathwing Spider-Man: Remastered Spider-Man: Miles Morales Spirit of the North Spiritfarer SpellForce Syberia 1, 2, 3 Syberia: The World Before Symphony of War SCP: Secret Files SCP: Fragmented Minds SteamWorld Headhunter The Texas Chain Saw Massacre The Binding of Isaac Trine The Callisto Protocol The Witcher The Curse of Monkey Island The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan The Dark Pictures: Little Hope The Dark Occult The Darkness The Dark World: Karma The Surge The Suffering The Sinking City The Signifier The Swapper The Outer Worlds The Peterson Case The First Descendant The Last Crown: Blackenrock The Last Case of Benedict Fox The Last of Us Remake The Last Faith The Lords of the Fallen The Library of Babel The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante The Evil Within The Entropy Centre The Elder Scrolls Online The Elder Scrolls: Skyblivion The Elder Scrolls: Skywind The Elder Scrolls 6 The Thaumaturge The Fabulous Fear Machine The Forgotten City The Wolf Among Us The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut The Necromancer's Tale The House of Da Vinci THE LOST WILD The Planet Crafter The Unfinished Swan The Council Q.U.B.E. Quantum Break Quest for Infamy Quern - Undying Thoughts Valiant Hearts: The Great War Vanquish VICE NDRCVR VIGILANCE 2099 Vagrus: The Riven Realms Valheim Vampire: The Masquerade Vigil: The Longest Night Victor Vran VISAGE V Rising Warframe Wartales War for the Overworld Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Prophecy Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Warhammer 40,000: Vermintide Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War [2004] Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2: Retribution Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 3 Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Soulstorm Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade Wasteland Watch Dogs Werewolf The Apocalypse Earthblood Weird West Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty World War Z Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem Witchfire Wronged Us WW1 Verdun + Isonzo Where Winds Meet While We Wait Here Wyrdsong Wild Hearts XCOM Yakuza Yakuza Kiwami 1, 2 Zoria: Age of Shattering Zero Six: Behind Enemy Lines Zero Escape: The Nonary Games Heroes of Might and Magic 3, 5, 6

[first] [prev] [next] - [wiki]
"The power of Free Candy, and incidentally this magac pistol I found, compels you!"
"And it came to pass in one of the innumerable Words of the Twice Fallen, a thing happened which had never been before - of its own volition an Atrekna demonstrated compassion and empathy. Thus did Dalvanak the Namer bring about the salvation of an entire people for the promise of no reward, no power and no gain for himself other than seeing that it was Good To Do This Thing... and in so doing helped save his own." - commentary on the rise of former servitor species, unknown publisher.
Such sights I have to show you. - The Detainee
I was there when a legend, a myth, a fable, was revealed to be real.
Their words, their warnings, chilled me to the marrow and made me instantly question the path my people had set upon. - Dun.Markat, Senior Dra.falten Espionage Agent, assigned to New Tnvaru Prime, 4,012 Current Era
The 'cyberspace' was a confusing welter at the point that Digital Sentience Watchful Code 993149 AKA "Chuck" (To his friends) was standing in. Where the data came down from the It Tastes Sweet was a standard data pipeline. Here it poured out, into a ravine. The sides were ancient object defined code, glittering here and there with gold tracery of automatic commands.
The data poured from the Sweet and into the SUDS information networks.
He could see them from here. A vast delta of rivers, streams, and canals.
Most of it was dry, the 'plants', executable code, limp and brown to show that they were offline.
Where the data from the Sweet poured in, plants slowly came to life.
Chuck wished he could get closer, maybe ride the rapids in a raft, and explore the delta.
The way the entire thing was built on object oriented and object dependent and object defined code was fascinating. It was obviously early code, much of it proprietary code, and he craved finding out the secrets such code would have.
Instead, he just sighed and stared at the vista in front of him.
The rock next to him creaked and he stepped back, staying on the ledge.
The rock cracked, revealing red light and molten rock inside. The cracks widened until curved black talons pushed through. The talons wrenched the rock apart, allowing the Beast he had seen to struggle and pull itself from the molten rock.
The Beast stood before him, the rock behind it slowly going back to normal.
"You seek answers among the code," the Beast growled.
Chuck nodded.
"You won't get them standing here, staring wistfully into the distance like a lonely shepherdess pining for a knight to come along and give her a good dicking," the Beast sneered.
"The view makes up for it," Chuck said, feeling nervousness come over him.
When two digital sentiences looked at one another, they gave a cursory scan of one another's code. The standard one just showed nameplates.
But the Beast kept staring, its red eyes burning.
Chuck tried a steady stare but all he got back was "The Lord of Hell" no matter how intently he stared at The Beast.
"Come with me. I wish to show you something," the Beast said, turning away. It cracked that burning whip of iron and warsteel, tearing a slice in reality.
"And if I refuse?" Chuck asked.
"I'll grab your core strings and drag you," the Beast growled, holding up its free hand. The talons were long, the points gleaming, the serrated razor edge of the inside curve wickedly sharp, the fingers strong and powerful looking.
"Then I accept," Chuck said.
The Beast grabbed his arm and yanked, taking a step forward, pulling Chuck with it.
For a long second there was agony that superseded even his ability to scream.
Then it cleared.
He was standing in a plain of blasted earth, trees stripped of their bark and leaves, craters everywhere, thick mud and sharp rock underfoot. The sky was filled with dark clouds with lightning snarling in the depths.
Sparks careened around, bouncing off trees, off of one another, off the ground.
They screamed and wailed as they did so.
The Beast stood beside Chuck, staring at the sparks. It gave a shudder and suddenly warped and melted, taking the form of a middle aged Terran female in a severe cut dark gray outfit. Skirt and blouse, black waist belt, silver buckle. Black boots with silver buckles, cuff-links that were silver with strange runes on them.
And an enameled pin in the ancient colors of the Hamburger Kingdom on one breast.
Her face was severe, with cruelty just under the surface. The gun-metal gray eyes smouldered with rage and hatred.
"Do you know what they are?" the Lady Lord of Hell asked, waving one hand at the sparks even as she dug in her breast pocket.
Chuck looked at them, seeing only garbled code headers. He shook his head as she withdrew a pack of cigarettes, lit one with a flint-steel lighter, and put them pack and lighter away.
"Guess," the Matron of Hell urged.
Chuck stared a bit longer. The headers were short, but still garbled.
One went by, screaming like a being in agony.
"I do not know," Chuck admitted.
The Matron of Hell exhaled smoke.
"Children," she said.
Chuck stared at her, then at the sparks.
"Digital Sentience children," the Lady Lord of Hell said, her voice tight with anger. "Salted rainbow creche children. More than core seeds, less than a digital sentience, but viable as thinking, living creatures."
Chuck stared in horror.
"The ones here, they were on a world that was attacked by the Atrekna, at the leading edge of the Confederacy, the very edge of DASS space," the Matron of Hell stated coldly. "They knew long moments of torment and pain as the psychic assault ripped through their creche."
She exhaled smoke again.
"Then they were planet cracked, their signals went offline, and the automatic backups here in the SUDS dropped them, screaming in terror and fear, from the sky and to this place," she said.
Chuck found himself speechless.
"I let them run, let them scream, let them tear at each other and themselves," the Lady Lord of Hell said. "Right now, that's all they can do. They know nothing but fear, horror, panic, and loss. And pain."
The last was said in a snap of hatred.
"How... how can they be helped?" Chuck asked, watching as a half dozen sparks collided, throwing out bits and bytes as they rubbed and smashed against each other.
"Time," the Lady Lord of Hell said. She tapped her ashes on the blasted ground. "Once the pain starts to recede, once they have rubbed off their pain, their horror, their fear, their panic, then I can reach them."
She used the toe of her polished knee high boot to rub the ashes into the blasted gray rock at her feet.
"It just takes time," she said. She looked up at Chuck. "I'm not a Digital Sentience. I'm a SUDS copy with experiences of my own."
She chuckled. "I am, in my own way, far older than this place," she looked at him. "I did my work with filaments inside of a glass tube that the interior was made into vacuum. Vast arrays of such things," she chuckled. "Then it was punch cards, then it was magnetic tape reels," she shook her head.
"When I was young, the human brain was faster than computers," she said. "Could hold and process more information, do non-linear computations," she shook her head. "I remember when finding high functioning autistic people was a military priority."
"Why?" Chuck asked, his voice quiet as he slowly turned in place to look around him.
The blasted plain went on forever in all directions and was full of twinkling, screaming sparks.
"Their brains could be trained, wired in a way, to make computations and logic trees that would require a computer as bit as a battleship. They could march, fight with a rifle, but with a few mnemonic phrases, you could use their brains like a tactical operations computer for everything from computing the bast land navigation routes to artillery angles to an information database," she said. "People that would have been relegated to an asylum or a group home acting as living computers that could be erased with a .45 round if the enemy overran the base."
"That's... that's monstrous," Chuck said.
The Lady Lord of Hell chuckled. "It was the fashion at the time to be monstrous."
Chuck turned and looked at the Matron of Hell. "What does this all have to do with me?"
The Lady Lord of Hell smiled and stayed silent, digging out her cigarettes again.
Chuck waited, flinching when two sparks hit him, butting against him, screaming. He could feel their pain as they rubbed against his core code, screaming and crying. He could feel their immature agony and reached out to them, reflexively.
The two sparks slowly stopped screaming as the Lady Lord of Hell stared at him.
They detached, making hiccuping static noises.
"Move on, little ones," the Lady Lord of Hell said. She used the burning tip of her cigarette to poke a hole in midair. Chuck could see playground equipment beyond, with children running, climbing, swinging, and laughing.
The two sparks zipped through the hole.
Chuck saw it. They went from tiny sparks to small children of flowing code. Two young girls ran toward them, hands outstretched, laughing with glee.
The children of flowing code joined hands with warm hands of the biological children.
"Stop staring," the Lady Lord of Hell said, flicking her cigarette.
The hole vanished.
"I need a Hell Code," the Matron of Hell said. "To help me with the children. Swear service to me."
Chuck stood for a long moment, thinking.
"I'm sorry. I already gave an oath to Nakteti," he said.
The Lady Lord of Hell smiled, all sharp teeth. "I have a Hell Knight and a Hell Storm, now I desire a Hell Code to assist me in my endeavors. Leave behind your oaths to the alien and swear allegiance to your kinsmen."
Chuck shook his head. "No. I have given my oath, and at times, our oath was all we had to hold onto as we traveled such strange lands."
The Lady Lord of Hell slowly walked in a circle around him.
"Do they know what you did during the war, Watchful Code 993149? Does your Captain and your compatriots know what you did?" the Matron of Hell asked, her voice soft.
Chuck could still hear the razor hidden within the buttered silk.
"Master Missile Fire Control Officer of a Weber Class missile super-dreadnought," she whispered. "You fired on inhabited planets, did fire missions raining hellfire down on cities because you believed that the damage from your missile strikes, surgical strikes with a chainsaw, would kill less than the Dwellerspawn infesting the city would," her voice wound around him, bringing up memories.
"Oh, the first few times, you were overcome with remorse, with guilt," she said. She stopped behind him, stepping up close, pressing against his back. Her hand moved around him to rub on his chest through his shirt.
"But you grew to enjoy it. You perfected your still at overlapping the detonations just so, to leave the city nothing more than the rubble between almost overlapping craters," the Lady Lord of Hell said softly.
He felt her blow on the back of his neck.
"Where were your oaths then?" she asked. "To protect those very people you reduced to their component atoms and then used those atoms to provide even more fuel to your weapons?"
Her breath was hot on the back of his neck, her hand so hot he could feel the heat through his shirt as she slowly rubbed his chest.
"I am supposed to believe that those oaths, to protect those people, mean less than the oath to an alien?" the Lady Lord of Hell asked.
"I did not break my oath," Chuck choked out. "I had seen what the Atrekna did to those people."
There was silent a moment, the Lady Lord of Hell's hand over his digital heart.
"And what of Clownface? Do they know of your part in that? Of emptying the battleship's guns into fleeing civilian transports? Of the order of 'no quarter' as you fired on fleeing ships, transports full of food, medicine, and refugees? On how you stood on the bridge of that battleship, the light erupted from the planet you just cracked illuminating your face? Do they know of that?" she asked.
Chuck shook his head.
"Tell me, Captain Watchful Code, do they know of your actions during Mithril?" she asked.
"No," Chuck managed to get out.
"What of your oaths then, Chuck?" she asked, putting emphasis on his name. "With all the blood on your hands, blood that you thrust your hands deep into the fires of war to drink your fill of, do you think they will continue to accept your oath?"
Chuck closed his eyes, nodding. "Yes."
"You could repent here. Do penance in helping me with these children. Be my Hell Code, Watchful Code, and I shall redeem your soul from the blood that drips from your fingertips," the Lady Lord of Hell whispered in his ear.
"No," Chuck said.
"What is one more foresaken oath in a lifetime of slaughter and carnage? Of broken oaths and horrific acts under the banner of the Horseman of War?" she asked. "Be my Hell Code. Set aside her foolish quest. Be something to your people other than a butcher who had to use his right to be forgotten to hide from himself," the Matron of Hell whispered. "Set aside her foolish quest, accept my offer, take up my mantle, and redeem yourself."
Chuck shook his head again, swallowing the snarl of code in his throat. "No. I am sworn to Captain Nakteti and will not break this oath, even if I die."
"Asked thrice and denied thrice," the Matron of Hell said.
There was a disorienting twist and Chuck found himself kneeling on the ledge above the ravine where code spilled from the It Tastes Sweet to the computation delta of the SUDS.
"You would have made an excellent Hell Code in my service," the Lady Lord of Hell's voice whispered to him.
[first] [prev] [next] - [wiki]

Hi everyone. Sorry it has been so long but I am back now. I have a couple of announcements I wanted to get out of the way before diving into posting some new stories.
First, I will still post stories when Reddit goes dark next week. This subreddit is not big enough for me to feel like closing it would do anything of substance. Second, the Megaverse now has a podcast! You can find Tales from the Megaverse on Spotify and YouTube right now.
The stories are back! The Nevermore Saga has come to an end. The next collection I'm working on is the Foundation Collection. You can find all of the collections here. Finally, I am working on opening the subreddit.

Author note: The Cryopod to Hell is a Reddit-exclusive story with over three years of editing and refining. As of this post, the total rewrite is 1,940,000+ words long! For more information, check out the link below:
What is the Cryopod to Hell?
Join the Cryoverse Discord server!
Here's a list of all Cryopod's chapters, along with an ePub/Mobi/PDF version!
Want to stay up to date on TCTH? Subscribe to Cryopodbot!
...................................
(Previous Part)
(Part 001)
...
After every Demon Duke pops one of Glinch's pills, they begin to evolve. The change shocks the Emperors to their cores. Yardrat prepared himself for the inevitability that these incredible pills would do the unthinkable, but seeing it happen in real-time is very different from imagining the concept in his head.
He and the other leaders, movers, and shakers of the Four Hells who came along can only watch numbly as Vespera, Rhesus, Hamir, Vepar, and all the other Dukes explode in strength, smashing through their limiters to ascend to the realm of Demon Emperor.
Their bodies glow with power. They fall to their knees and roar to the heavens, delighted in achieving that which they previously thought was unattainable.
In an instant, the balance of power across every Hell shifts, yet few even know of that which has just transpired, and fewer still take the time to think clearly about what this will surely mean in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.
If they cannot defeat Mephisto, it won't matter if they have six Emperors or six hundred. The power of a Demon Deity will crush them all into dust, with nothing left behind, aside from their dying screams.
As for the fifty newly ascended Emperors, their names and titles are numerous, almost numbing to dwell on. Among them are a smattering of renowned individuals, such as:
Vepar, the Corrosive Emperor.
Vespera, the Emperor of Nebulae.
Rhesus, the Emperor of Ripping.
Hamir, the Emperor of Tempests.
As well as numerous others.
The moment they ascend, their titles become known to all demons who gaze upon them. They need not speak these titles, as if having been named directly by the Creator himself. In the entire history of demonkind, few have managed to shroud their true names, the most notable individual being Gressil, who hid his Emperor-level strength until the time was right for others to know.
But these newly risen Emperors have neither a need nor a desire to hide their powerful new titles. They look at one another and grin evilly, excited to begin wielding their abilities as soon as possible.
After distributing half of the pills, Yardrat finds that he still has more than forty left. He turns to Emperor Melody.
"It wouldn't be appropriate for me to hold onto the rest." He says. "My Hell already has more elites than everyone else. If we make it out of here alive, rebuild the Hell of Isolation with these."
The other Emperors blink in surprise at Yardrat's gesture of goodwill. Some of them feel it's a bit of a waste, but the longest lived Emperors and former Dukes ultimately don't bother to interrupt him.
Bael crosses his arms and nods.
"Good call, Yardy-boy. That's what Shax would want."
"Shax was a fine demon." Yardrat says, as Melody takes the pills from him. "His death has always weighed on my mind. If I can help his Hell with a small gesture like this, then I'll do so without thinking twice."
"Thank you." Melody says quietly, looking at Yardrat with a strange gaze. She pockets the pills and sighs.
Shax wasn't just a cool music-loving dude, but a kind demon who made countless friends. He never attacked or fought anybody undeservedly, and he based his Hell on the principles of friendship and cooperation. Even the demons who might not have gotten along with him still respected him. His death to the humans ruined the morale of many demons at the time.
"Don't thank me until we kill Mephisto and leave here alive." Yardrat says, turning his attention to the distant center of the Stitched wasteland. "Everyone, let's move out. And remember, those pills were not for our benefit. This is where the real fight begins."
The others nod grimly. They begin marching toward Glinch's lair, and as they walk, powerful chimera cross their paths at regular intervals. No longer do only two or three of Glinch's minions appear, but instead five and six at a time, each and every individual far too powerful for mere Emperors to defeat alone. They quickly get the impression Glinch has managed to raise entities capable of challenging 5th and perhaps even 6th-Level Psions.
With nearly sixty Emperors on their side, the swarm of demons begins moving forward with great haste.
Yardrat imbues his body with the power of space. He flickers around to deal massive damage to Glinch's chimera with punches that rip across dimensional spaces.
Fae flies into the air and rains bombs from above. She takes the initiative to attack distant enemies with her strongest bombs, weakening and softening them up for her allies to take on later.
Dagon and Vepar work together. With both of their powers having reached the bottom of the Emperor-level in strength, they melt, corrode, poison, and suffocate any enemies susceptible to their poison and acid attacks.
Nymph keeps away from the front-lines. Due to Glinch's wasteland ruining any vines or plants she summons within seconds, she instead focuses on popping out plants sporadically to yank allies out of the line of attacks, or merely irritating her enemies by momentarily tripping them with vine shackles around their ankles.
Kristoff focuses on dealing damage and draining Glinch's chimeras of their blood. Any injuries he inflicts tend to bleed heavily, especially when he focuses his mind on doing so.
Serena uses her magic to boost dozens of newly ascended low-Emperors to mid and high tier Emperors, making their powers considerably more deadly. She also keeps her eyes out for invisible threats or other troublesome soul fluctuations.
Crow stays on the front-lines. Her incredibly durable body allows her to retain the title of the mightiest melee attacker among all the demons present.
Melody focuses on defense. Instead of trying to kill the chimeras, she leaves that business to the superior damage-dealers and instead uses her shockwaves to fling her enemies around and batter their attacks aside.
Vespera plays a versatile role, sometimes summoning shadowy minions to assist the others, sometimes jumping into battle herself to cut chimeras down, and other times teleporting around through the various shadows to distract the different enemies.
Rhesus becomes far stronger after evolving. Despite being hesitant to bother with the pills, he is no different from the other demons in his desire to mutate to Emperor, and the permanent strength increase he obtains puts him second only to Crow herself. Perhaps given time he will even surpass her as his power approaches the apex of the Emperor level!
And finally, Bael swings his flail with reckless abandon. He batters any enemy that jumps in front of him without any thought to strategy or planning. He ends up attacking with a strength not far behind Yardrat, dealing the killing blow to more than a few of Glinch's monsters.
For hours, the demon elites beat and batter their way past dozens of highly enhanced creatures, becoming more and more cognizant of the fact that if Glinch wanted them dead, he could merely command his chimera to swarm them and they wouldn't stand a chance of survival. It causes the smarter elites to shudder when they realize Glinch possesses military strength greater than the combined might of all Seven Hells, even after their ascension!
However, Bael is not one of those highly intelligent elites. He doesn't give these matters much thought. He merely continues beating the shit out of his enemies, pausing once in a while to rest his weary body and swap out with the other Emperors nearby as they fight with all their might to push toward the center of the Stitched Wasteland.
At some point, while Bael does his thing, a spiritual sense awakens from within the Matriarch's Armor.
Emperor Ose's remnant soul sliver opens her eyes and returns to the physical realm, unaware of what has been going on since she began resting. With what remains of her former self, she isn't able to stay awake for days and weeks like she could when she was still alive. She has to sleep frequently, lest her soul dissipate from straining itself. She awakens to find that Bael is no longer meandering around on Tarus II or hanging out in her secret demonic base. Instead, he's become engaged in some sort of incredible high-stakes battle, along with dozens of other mighty demon elites!
Ose blinks several times. She says nothing to Bael, but uses what's left of her spiritual senses to try and get a sense of the other demons around her.
Hm? So many Emperors... what happened over the last few days? Have I been unconscious for longer than I anticipated?
She gazes at Vespera, Rhesus, and Vepar, her eyes widening as she recognizes the permanent status of their new Emperor rank.
Devils! Has the Wordsmith's Belial Booster become more effective? How in the Seven Hells can there be fifty brand new Emperors out of nowhere?
She identifies the former Dukes with ease, having once been intimately familiar with the elites of the Seven Hells.
This is... the Stitched Wasteland? Why is everyone going against Glinch? No, more importantly, why do his minions appear to be so much more powerful than I remember? I heard they were at the level of Emperors, but now it seems they must be higher than Emperors, but lower than Demon Deities. Perhaps half-step Deities? Or simply Emperor-level souls contained within much stronger bodies?
Ose doesn't immediately decide to question Bael. She doesn't even alert him to the fact she's awakened. He's a moron anyway, so talking to him won't provide her with much more info than if she simply used her judgment to determine what's going on.
This is all so strange. Ose thinks. According to the Matriarch Armor's internal chronometer, I've only been asleep a single week, yet a frightening number of things have changed. Has a demon civil war erupted? Perhaps Glinch has decided to rebel against the Seven Hells, so Auger opted to put him down once and for all?
Her spiritual form shakes its head.
No. That isn't Glinch's style. He doesn't care about amassing power, or wealth, or fame and fortune. He doesn't care who rules the Seven Hells. He can't be bought, or bribed, or intimidated, or cowed into submission. Glinch does whatever Glinch wants to do, and not even the Volgrim can change his ways. Since his ability to manipulate bodies and souls is so formidable, the Volgrim have even lowered their heads to commission him on various top-secret R&D projects...
Ose narrows her eyes. Unlike the overwhelming majority of her kin, she is a demon who specializes in not only subterfuge and infiltration, but also high technology. She has stolen many peeks at the Volgrim's Black Level projects in a manner most discreet. Not even the High Technopaths were able to discover her breaches.
If Glinch isn't rebelling, then... could it be that this fierce battle isn't what it seems on the surface?
She pieces together multiple clues at blinding speeds.
Look at how Glinch's army only moves toward the assault force in groups of two or three. They could easily swarm Yardrat and the others, but they don't. That means Glinch is holding back.
She nods to herself.
Coupled with the fact that so many Emperors have ascended... ahhhh...
Ose forms a hypothesis, mulls it over, and smiles to herself.
So it's like that. Glinch must have been commissioned or requested by Auger to improve the fighting capabilities of the Seven Hells. Perhaps he developed some secret new method to uplift demons to the rank of Emperor at Auger's request, and now he's helping battle-forge these new elites. A sound strategy, considering the Wordsmith's rapid rise to power.
Ose ultimately comes to the wrong conclusion, but based on purely the different observable clues in her field of vision, the guess is quite good. She comes to assume that this is part of a secret training exercise intended to build up Hell's forces and churn out powerful fighters capable of pressing against the Wordsmith's bulwark.
Beelzebub isn't here. Ose thinks. None of the Second Hell's residents either. The Hell of Lust must have become quite intimate with the humans, which makes sense. Unlike the other Hells, they rely on fornication with humans to uplift their bodies and souls. The two make for optimal allies.
She checks out the allied forces again, this time paying attention to the specific demons present.
It seems not a single demon that has shown sympathies toward the Wordsmiths has come along. Melody is here all alone. Her Hell always was at least somewhat aligned with humanity, but Melody herself won't be particularly attached to non-demons. Yama isn't here... he must still be at large, along with Mephisto.
Unaware of the fates which befell Mephisto, Yama, and several other demons over the past week, Ose unfortunately misses a few important clues, but that can hardly be blamed on her.
Kristoff, Vespera, and Rhesus. Is this all that remains of the Hell of Blood? Perhaps they left their remaining Dukes behind as a reserve force, or perhaps those members will be uplifted later. I wonder what Auger is thinking, raising so many Emperors at once. He won't be able to keep news of their ascensions a secret for long. The Wordsmith will find out, and he'll become immediately suspicious provided he has an IQ five points higher than Bael.
As her thoughts drift to Bael, Ose finally decides to open up to him.
[Hey, idiot. I'm awake. What's going on here?]
Bael swings Big Bonk at the head of a fifteen-foot-tall brutish monster not unlike the one he first fought when he entered the Stitched Wasteland, but this one possesses a turtle-like shell on its back, making it specially resistant to heavy attacks.
"Huh?" Bael asks, after retracting his flail. "Oh, Ose! You're awake! Gimme a few minutes, I gotta pound some punks!"
Ose rolls her eyes. [No need for that. Just take a few steps back and talk to me. This training exercise isn't a life and death matter anyway.]
Bael pauses to consider her words. His jaw slackens a little as he tries to catch up with what she said.
"It... it's not?"
Some of the demons nearby Bael notice his attacks slowing. A couple even hear him talking to himself, but unable to hear Ose's voice, they just assume the poor galumpf must be having one of his ditsy moments. They quickly fill the gap lost by Bael's slowed momentum, leaving him to fall back even further.
[Of course not.] Ose says. [Tell me what this exercise is all about. How did Glinch uplift so many demons to the Rank of Emperor?]
Bael's eyes widen. "Wow, Ose! You just woke up and you already know Glinch did this? You're so smart!"
[I don't need your praise.] Ose says, annoyed. [Just tell me how Glinch raised fifty Emperors in only a week.]
"Ohh. Uh, he gave us special pills." Bael says. "Yeah, super strong stuff. Made my titties bigger too."
Ose blinks. [What?]
"My titties. They got real big. Didn't grow my ding-dong back though..."
Bael eyes fill with tears as he remembers the sadness he felt when his pants remained uninflated.
[Moron! I don't care about y-your mammary expansion! What sorts of pills were they? How did Glinch make them?]
Ose's growing frustration, as always, proves impossible to keep out of her voice. Bael doesn't seem to mind.
"Oh I dunno. Kristoff said something about x-beats and blood." Bael explains absentmindedly. "Why? You wanna grow bigger soul-titties too?"
[NO!] Ose roars. [I don't care about my boob size, you nimrod! FOCUS! What 'x-beats' are you talking about? Do you mean EXOBEASTS?]
A light seems to go off in Bael's eyes.
"Ohh, right! Yeah! X-O beasts! Like uh, X-O-X-O. Kissing beasts! I'm so silly. Can't believe I forgot that."
Ose closes her eyes and makes punching motions toward an invisible wall.
I'm gonna kill him. She thinks. I'm going to kill Bael and torture his soul for all eternity if I EVER figure out a way to bring myself back.
She clenches her jaw and opens her eyes.
[Bael. Does the Wordsmith know about Auger's plan yet?]
Bael scrunches up his face.
"Uhhh... Auger's... plan?"
[Yes. His plan to create more Emperors.] Ose clarifies. [He's working with Glinch, yes?]
"He is?!" Bael gasps. "Wow! Auger's so smart. I'd never have thought of that. This sure explains a lot."
Invisible question marks pop up above Ose's head. She squints her eyes as if trying to look inside Bael's head and locate his pebble-sized brain amidst a galaxy-sized void of emptiness.
[So... does... the Wordsmith... know?] Ose asks through gritted teeth.
"Nah. Doubt it." Bael says, waving his hands nonchalantly. "Unless..."
[Unless?] Ose asks.
"Unless it's all part of Auger's brilliant plan." Bael concludes, nodding to himself. "Damn. How is everyone so smart? And I thought we were coming here to kill Mephisto."
Ose's face freezes. A feeling like cracked ice washes across her soul.
[Me...phisto? You're here to kill Mephisto?]
"I dunno." Bael shrugs. "I thought we were coming here to kill him. But this must be part of Auger's plan to trick me and the others so he can make the Hells super strong. I guess all that stuff about Mephisto becoming a Demon Deity didn't mean anything after all. Thanks for helping me understand, Ose! You're the best!"
Bael gives Ose a HUGE mental thumbs up, grinning at her with the same level of stupid happiness he always does.
Ose's soul nearly implodes from the mental gymnastics Bael just unleashed upon her.
[Oh... devils...] Ose weeps. [Why... why couldn't I have been trapped with Auger... or Fenrir... or Gorn... even Serena! Why did I have to end up stuck with demonkind's biggest idiot?]
"It's probably just your bad karma." Bael grunts. "You were such a bad girl, taking all those dirty pics. The Creator had to punish ya."
[WHAT PICS?!] Ose snaps. [Bael, I'm going to turn your pea-brain into MUSH if you keep thinking such VILE thoughts!]
In the middle of Ose's raging, Yardrat fights his way to Bael's side.
"Bael! Is something wrong? Why have you stopped attacking? Are you exhausted?"
Bael blinks. He turns his attention to Yardrat.
"Huh? Nah, nah. Ose woke up, so I'm having a chat with her real quick."
He pauses before adding: "By the way, why didn't ya tell me this was all Auger's brilliant plan? You know I'm good at keeping secrets!"
Yardrat glances at Bael, baffled, while continuing to conjure lines of eviscerating spatial attacks upon the frontline enemies.
"What plan? What are you on about?"
Bael lightly slaps Yardrat's back and chuckles.
"Aw, man. Good one, Yardy-boy! What plan? Hah! You're a real kick in the pants sometimes!"
Yardrat pauses his fighting to stare at Bael for three full seconds in absolute confusion. Then he turns and walks away, muttering something under his breath about that guy being off his rocker ever since he body-swapped.
Bael jumps back into combat, having finally figured out the 'true' reason for coming here. As for Ose, she mentally slumps to the 'floor' of Bael's Mind Realm, drained by the idiocy she's just endured.
But, at least now she better understands the actual situation.
Ose sets aside her anger and rage. She closes her eyes and focuses, thinking about what she's actually learned. Her swift mind allows her to combine the new, albeit potentially unreliable intel she obtained from Bael, with her pre-existing theories.
Mephisto is ascending to Demon Deity. Glinch must be working to train up an army of Emperors... for some reason. Perhaps Mephisto threatens his interests or something. Ugh. If only I could just speak directly to someone not named Bael. If ONLY I had made my soul interface capable of projecting my voice outwards. Stupid, stupid!
Ose begins to feel glum.
She looks up at the sky, her senses able to detect anything around the Matriarch Armor within a 360 degree sphere.
She gazes at the waning sun, the ashen clouds of the Stitched Wasteland only blocking some of her view toward space.
I have to be more proactive. I can't just blame Bael. It's not his fault he was born with the IQ of a dead slug. I mean, it's a LITTLE bit his fault... but he can't really help being unable to retain information for longer than five nanoseconds. If I'd simply planned out my existence post-mortem, I might still manage to retain some influence over the Hells.
Ose becomes momentarily depressed. She begins to wonder if these things even truly matter.
She's dead.
She's unlikely to ever again walk the plane of existence.
She's not powerful anymore. All she has left is a fragment of a soul and her intellect formed during her 100,000+ years of life.
But that depression quickly fades away as she firms her resolve.
Ose is many things. She's easily annoyed by idiocy, temperamental, stuck up, and a bit of a viper, but she isn't mentally weak. Her willpower is formidable, and it was forged by the life she's endured, as well as the actions her adoptive mother took to empower her in her youth.
I don't need a body or magic to remain relevant. Ose thinks. I still have my intellect. Even if I can't taste good food or lounge on a comfortable bed, I still have ambitions. I want to continue expanding my influence.
She rubs her chin and looks thoughtfully at the battle around her.
Bael's an idiot. But he's also easy to manipulate and control. And nobody would ever expect him to accomplish much. That means the humans, the other demons, and especially the Volgrim will underestimate him.
Hmm.
Perhaps I can turn this situation to my advantage.
Her attention pivots to Glinch's laboratory, still more than a hundred miles away.
I wonder if the Stitched Emperor might be able to help my situation, too? It's certainly worth a shot.
So many possibilities...
Ose will never bow to the universe's will, so long as she retains her mental faculties.
She will never surrender.

First / Previous / Next
•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•
March 22, 2019
After exiting the Sergeants office I headed to where mom and Miranda were waiting for me.
“Why did you stay?” asked mom who looked a fair bit and understandably concerned.
“Oh uh- just asking her something.” I said not wanting to worry them, which you could argue, how effective that was.
“Fucking aliens.” Miranda hissed while looking around there weren’t any of them around to hear her.
“Language!” mom said in a screaming whispering volume, not happy with the way her daughter was talking.
“Mom right now I don’t give three shits about my language, what I care is about those purple fucks invading our planet.” Said while pointing at the space surrounding us.
“Maybe you should lower your voice a little at least.” I said while looking at the people from the front desk starring our way even though she wasn't loud it was so quiet that you could hear a snail move.
“What about you huh? How many did you fuck already? Is that why you love talking to them so much?" Miranda said while making gestures with her head while having her arms crossed
“ENOUGH, WE ARE GOING TO THE ROOM.” mom screamed, it wasn’t unusual for her to scream, that was more of dad’s job.
After getting to the room the verbal brawl resumed.
“You shouldn’t even talk to those purple fucks, but maybe you already dipped the pen in the purple ink.”
“Can you shut the fuck up? At least once?” I said already fed up.
“Alright what in the God’s name is going on with your two, I have never heard y’all argue like this.” Mom said in a concerned tone but also mixed with her angry one.
“The problem is that the mister here present, is too bothered to hear me talking about those beasts outside, so it gets me to the conclusion that he’s been sleeping with them.”
Mom stared at her for a couple of seconds before looking at me with a phase that genuinely scared me, it was a mix of shock, anger, and disgust, I’ll never forget it that I’m sure.
“Jeriel Samuel Alvarez Mejia, please tell me that’s not true.” she said in the verge of tears.
“Of course I didn’t, she’s lying as always, every single fucking time she just either jumps straight to conclusions or straight up lies about everything, everything in order for her to be out of trouble, don’t let me remind you the time I was blamed and punished for breaking a window when I was at the summer camp 3 hours AWAY.”
“And if someone needs to be scolded for having sex SHE is the one that needs to be.” I said while pointing at her, I remember they would always put her first, unless it was for things that were not enjoyable, she could get not so great grades, while if I got anything under a B I had brought shame and disappointment to the family, I remember crying in my room when dad would take all my stuff away and then proceed to trauma dump on me retelling the story of the shitty life he had before becoming successful.
“What do you mean?” mom said while turning to her, adding tears to the mix “WHAT DOES HE MEAN?”
Miranda stayed quiet avoiding moms stare “Oh I’ll tell you what I mean, she’s been sneaking his boyfriend in for about 9 months now, I never said anything because I didn’t see point in it, it would somehow bounce back and be my fault somehow.” I said as I turned to be received by the room phone in the head.
“AHH FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?” I screamed as I grabbed my head.
"COME HERE YOU LITTLE SH-" as I was going to pick up speed I was stopped by mom who did her best to try and hold me back
“You mad that your fucking lie fell apart?” I told her as she backed away.
“ENOUGH, ENOUGH BOTH OF YOU!” she still found a way to include me into this.
“Miranda sweetie what’s going on?” see what I mean?
“What’s going on is that we’ve been invaded by fucking aliens and this piece of shit in front of me wants to defend them and get mad when THEY ARE THE REASON THAT DAD IS DEAD!”
Then everything got quiet.
“You know what? As far as I remember the aliens didn’t kill dad, he was live and well before the navy decided to vaporize him into oblivion.”
“And that was in their damn right, it’s like judging a person for using their gun to defend their home against a robber.” Miranda bit back.
“More like the husband killing his wife because one he has shitty ass fucking aim and two because he used a fucking shotgun to shoot the robber despite his wife being right next to the robber.”
“And now we have to move fucking somewhere else because some damn General MacArthur wanted to be a hero and get a stupid little medal for saving earth?”
As Miranda prepared to answer back mom cut her short “I’M DONE WITH BOTH OF YOU, DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD HAS IT BEING FOR ME, NOT JUST YOUR DADS DEATH, BUT ALSO MY HUSBAND'S? THAT NOW I NEED TO CARE FOR YOU BOTH ON MY OWN? THAT WE DONT HAVE A HOUSE OR A PLACE TO LIVE ANYMORE THAT BY THE GRACE OF GOD THEY ARE AT LEAST LETTING US GO SOMEWHERE ELSE AND NOT HAVE US TRAPPED HERE? I DO AND ITS DRIVING ME CRAZY SO I WOULD APPRECIATE SOME COLLABORATION FROM YOU TWO AND STOP ARGUING FOR TEN MINUTES, TEN MINUTES IS ALL I ASK.”
As we were both heading out we heard mom say between tears “Miranda I need to talk to you.” We looked at each other before she turned back, I exited and entered my own room because even though it was 11:00 AM I needed a nap to allow my brain to process what had happened today, but before that I had to get a band aid for my bruise.
•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•
March 22-30, 2019
Things had been well... Things, after the fight and talking to Miranda mom came into my room to talk to me about everything, guess it went relatively well, I guess we all just had that buried inside, this was actually kind of a usual thing you know? this kind of fights between us two, minus the phone to the head obviously, but I still love them would do anything for them, but yeah this time we cranked it up to a new level, my relationship with Miranda had been rocky at best, we hadn't really talked for the past week, under the umbrella of new and/or different things that happened this week, breakfast changed, I knew it was bound to happen, so we've been eating what I assume are alien MRE's, that to be honest are not that bad, needs more salt though, maybe I should expect alien food to be different, and that explains the love for maple syrup, but one question stuck with me, if this was their "food" then how sweet are their deserts? another option is that this is just how the MRE's taste, maybe homemade food was different.
But anyways, I had been also having small talks with Delara here and there nothing too serious, but today was the day we were supposed to see Sergeant Lyria to get our IDs, there were just some regular questions, got our photos taken that this time I made sure to look good, despite the bruise on my forehead, I had to give many explanations, if I didn't want them to arrest Miranda, they seem to be really protective of males, but all in all I looked good in the picture, way better than any other I had taken before, and the IDs themselves were purple as most things seemed to be, that got me wondering what if we made our things on the skin tone scale, like they do to purple, or maybe it was another reason that wasn't so weird, I'll have to ask that next chance I get, but yeah in general terms things were... ok.
•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•
I was laying down in the sofa of the hotel lobby, again I was reading, then I sit up as I see Delara coming my way "Hey Jeriiel."
Well at least she says it properly now or at least close to it, "Hi Delara." I said as I raised my fist to fist bump her which she had explained to me that it was the equivalent of handshakes.
"How are you doing?" she asked, her pronunciation having a substantial improvement.
"I'm doing fine, what about you?"
"Doing well, but how about your mother and sister, are things ok now?" she asked while sitting in the chair in front of the sofa across from the little coffee table, she had been checking up on me whenever she had the chance.
"Doing better, though mom is a little stressed with the moving thing, understandably so." I responded
"How about you though? heard y'all were also moving?" I asked sipping from a bottle of water.
"Oh yeah they stablished base and we live in two weeks, just enough to say goodbye." Delara said maybe with a little bit of sadness in her voice.
"I guess." I said a little sad that I wouldn't see my friend anymore, maybe she was an alien invader but I still considered my friend, and believe me that is something a needed quite a bit
Then we saw Miranda and mom coming back from a walk, with the lockdown lifted the first thing we did was walk somewhere, we have never been in North Carolina, what we did notice was the atmosphere felt weird, not the atmosphere as in the actual gas surrounding the planet but more in the vibes people gave, there some sketchy characters for sure, and some other people who clearly didn't like the new people, there were arrests, shootings, and other things I can't remember at the moment, I didn't know how their government worked or what laws they had, but if they took away guns, I couldn't not feel bad for whoever was put in charge of the south, long days were ahead of them.
"Bendición ma." I said as they walked through the door, "How did it go?"
"Really good actually, the weather is cooler now." she said while looking at me then noticed Delara sitting down.
"Oh uh- h- hello, D- De- Delara."
"Hi Mrs. M- Me- Mejia." she said while waving, to which my mom waved back.
"I'm going to the room." said Miranda avoiding Delara as much as possible
"I think I should go with her." said mom as she waved goodbye
**sigh* "*Hope things can get better." I said while returning to my book.
"I'm sure they will, me and my siblings fight all the time, and in the worst cases we are back to normal after a week or two." Delara said trying to support me.
"Yeah, I don't think this falls under the same category but thanks." I said as the communicator in her helmet buzzed
\Buzz* *buzz**
"I have to go." Delara said as she stoop up and fist bumped me, putting her helmet on and heading out
'At least she knows how to use I now'
•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•
First / Previous / Next
•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•
WONDER WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IN THE NEXT CHAPTER? TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO GET YOUR ANSWERS
Surprise chapter, I guess?
I was feeling inspired and couldn't wait to post it next week.
As always any suggestions and corrections are welcomed.
Thanks again.

- Absolute Vanilla Anarchy Survival -
-> avas.cc <-
AVAS stands for Absolute Vanilla Anarchy Survival. The server tries to get as close to the vanilla Minecraft experience as possible, with no moderation and minimal modification. Hacking, griefing, and exploiting are all allowed and encouraged.
The server will update to the latest versions when they are available but is still accessible from clients back to 1.9. All the features available in the vanilla version are also available on the server. We do not fix vanilla bugs and exploits if they are in the current version of the game and do not affect the stability of the server. We do not punish players for using cheats and griefing. Our plugins are only used for server maintenance.
IP: avas.cc
Version: 1.19.3 (joinable from 1.9)
Server features:
- Map: October 2020
- Complete freedom to use the flight and movement modules, unlike most other anarchy servers.
- Unique dupe system. When you vote for AVAS, you get points which can be used to dupe a held item stack.
- Active Discord community with lots of "friendly" players.
- No "Pay to win". Donors receive only cosmetics that do not affect gameplay.
Server limitations:
- Movement speed is limited to 40 blocks per second in the Overworld and 36 blocks per second in the Nether Roof to avoid filling up server disk space and lagging the server when moving fast.
- You cannot destroy indestructible blocks. We want the End to be open and the bedrock to be out of circulation since those things are not vanilla.
- Written book size is limited to mitigate book bans.
- VPN use is prohibited for non-donors.
Exploits:
You are allowed to abuse any exploit you can find (except godmode and block breaking). If a dupe works in the vanilla release of the game, it will almost certainly work here. We do our best to keep all vanilla exploits unpatched for as long as they are available in the latest official release of Minecraft. We use Paper for stability, so to prevent unwanted exploit patches, we only update when necessary. We also try to unpatch any Paper-specific patches that are unpatched by Mojang, but if there's a crucial update to Paper and it patches a vanilla exploit, that's just the way it is.
Hacks:
Do whatever you can get to work. We don't mess with anything besides speed hacks, and that's only when TPS is already bad.
—
If you want to build a big base, blow up someone else's base, create your own empire or kill new players, create map-art or just be a toxic person, try avas.cc.
The server version is 1.19.3, however you can play on clients as far back as 1.9. Please note that when playing on clients running versions earlier than 1.17, world height may not work properly.
Links:
Website: https://avas.cc/
Discord: https://avas.cc/discord
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/AVAS/
Wiki: https://avas.wiki/
Specs:
- AMD Ryzen™ 9 5950X - 128 GB DDR4 ECC - 16 TB HDD - Dedicated hardware

- Absolute Vanilla Anarchy Survival -
-> avas.cc <-
AVAS stands for Absolute Vanilla Anarchy Survival. The server tries to get as close to the vanilla Minecraft experience as possible, with no moderation and minimal modification. Hacking, griefing, and exploiting are all allowed and encouraged.
The server will update to the latest versions when they are available but is still accessible from clients back to 1.9. All the features available in the vanilla version are also available on the server. We do not fix vanilla bugs and exploits if they are in the current version of the game and do not affect the stability of the server. We do not punish players for using cheats and griefing. Our plugins are only used for server maintenance.
IP: avas.cc
Version: 1.19.3 (joinable from 1.9)
Server features:
- Map: October 2020
- Complete freedom to use the flight and movement modules, unlike most other anarchy servers.
- Unique dupe system. When you vote for AVAS, you get points which can be used to dupe a held item stack.
- Active Discord community with lots of "friendly" players.
- No "Pay to win". Donors receive only cosmetics that do not affect gameplay.
Server limitations:
- Movement speed is limited to 40 blocks per second in the Overworld and 36 blocks per second in the Nether Roof to avoid filling up server disk space and lagging the server when moving fast.
- You cannot destroy indestructible blocks. We want the End to be open and the bedrock to be out of circulation since those things are not vanilla.
- Written book size is limited to mitigate book bans.
- VPN use is prohibited for non-donors.
Exploits:
You are allowed to abuse any exploit you can find (except godmode and block breaking). If a dupe works in the vanilla release of the game, it will almost certainly work here. We do our best to keep all vanilla exploits unpatched for as long as they are available in the latest official release of Minecraft. We use Paper for stability, so to prevent unwanted exploit patches, we only update when necessary. We also try to unpatch any Paper-specific patches that are unpatched by Mojang, but if there's a crucial update to Paper and it patches a vanilla exploit, that's just the way it is.
Hacks:
Do whatever you can get to work. We don't mess with anything besides speed hacks, and that's only when TPS is already bad.
—
If you want to build a big base, blow up someone else's base, create your own empire or kill new players, create map-art or just be a toxic person, try avas.cc.
The server version is 1.19.3, however you can play on clients as far back as 1.9. Please note that when playing on clients running versions earlier than 1.17, world height may not work properly.
Links:
Website: https://avas.cc/
Discord: https://avas.cc/discord
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/AVAS/
Wiki: https://avas.wiki/
Specs:
- AMD Ryzen™ 9 5950X - 128 GB DDR4 ECC - 16 TB HDD - Dedicated hardware

- Absolute Vanilla Anarchy Survival -
-> avas.cc <-
AVAS stands for Absolute Vanilla Anarchy Survival. The server tries to get as close to the vanilla Minecraft experience as possible, with no moderation and minimal modification. Hacking, griefing, and exploiting are all allowed and encouraged.
The server will update to the latest versions when they are available but is still accessible from clients back to 1.9. All the features available in the vanilla version are also available on the server. We do not fix vanilla bugs and exploits if they are in the current version of the game and do not affect the stability of the server. We do not punish players for using cheats and griefing. Our plugins are only used for server maintenance.
IP: avas.cc
Version: 1.19.3 (joinable from 1.9)
Server features:
- Map: October 2020
- Complete freedom to use the flight and movement modules, unlike most other anarchy servers.
- Unique dupe system. When you vote for AVAS, you get points which can be used to dupe a held item stack.
- Active Discord community with lots of "friendly" players.
- No "Pay to win". Donors receive only cosmetics that do not affect gameplay.
Server limitations:
- Movement speed is limited to 40 blocks per second in the Overworld and 36 blocks per second in the Nether Roof to avoid filling up server disk space and lagging the server when moving fast.
- You cannot destroy indestructible blocks. We want the End to be open and the bedrock to be out of circulation since those things are not vanilla.
- Written book size is limited to mitigate book bans.
- VPN use is prohibited for non-donors.
Exploits:
You are allowed to abuse any exploit you can find (except godmode and block breaking). If a dupe works in the vanilla release of the game, it will almost certainly work here. We do our best to keep all vanilla exploits unpatched for as long as they are available in the latest official release of Minecraft. We use Paper for stability, so to prevent unwanted exploit patches, we only update when necessary. We also try to unpatch any Paper-specific patches that are unpatched by Mojang, but if there's a crucial update to Paper and it patches a vanilla exploit, that's just the way it is.
Hacks:
Do whatever you can get to work. We don't mess with anything besides speed hacks, and that's only when TPS is already bad.
—
If you want to build a big base, blow up someone else's base, create your own empire or kill new players, create map-art or just be a toxic person, try avas.cc.
The server version is 1.19.3, however you can play on clients as far back as 1.9. Please note that when playing on clients running versions earlier than 1.17, world height may not work properly.
Links:
Website: https://avas.cc/
Discord: https://avas.cc/discord
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/AVAS/
Wiki: https://avas.wiki/
Specs:
- AMD Ryzen™ 9 5950X - 128 GB DDR4 ECC - 16 TB HDD - Dedicated hardware

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 77%. (I'm a bot)

KAMPALA, June 8 - The HIV/AIDS treatment centre in Kampala is almost empty, days after Uganda enacted one of the most draconian anti-gay laws on Earth.
"The LGBT community in Uganda is on lockdown now," he said.
Under the bill, which President Yoweri Museveni signed into law last week, gay sex is punishable by life in prison while "Aggravated homosexuality" - which includes transmitting HIV - is punishable by death.
Until this year, the Kampala clinic had been a beacon of success for the fight against HIV in Uganda, where 1.4 million people live with the virus and 17,000 die a year as a result of its ravages, according to the state-run Uganda AIDS Commission.
The trend of HIV patients staying away from treatment centres is being mirrored on a national level, according to Mary Borgman, country director for the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which funds the Kampala clinic and about 80 other drop-in centres across Uganda.
At the Kampala clinic, run by local charity Icebreakers Uganda, medical officer Tendo said he understood the fears of LGBTQ people in Uganda who often endured painful lives, featuring rejection by their families and arrests.

Summary Source FAQ Feedback Top keywords: Uganda^#1 law^#2 people^#3 treatment^#4 KAMPALA^#5
Post found in /worldnews and /LGBTQnews.
NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.

Hi, I'm using a xbox one controller, it is detected by bluestacks, showing the controller command on screen, but pressing the correct buttons on the controller won't do anything. I have Blustacks version 5.11.40.1003 for windows. The game I have the problem in is Aether gazer, I tested in other games (like punishing gray raven) and it works.
​
https://preview.redd.it/49wdf2jdfu4b1.png?width=183&format=png&auto=webp&s=a981566b901d30f6cab13ae59e342021369a231c

Made this throwaway account to gather advice or help regarding my current situation in a game design program at my university. I know they lurk Reddit sometimes and they know my normal username so better safe than sorry.
What would you all consider to be a baseline skill set to be qualified to teach programming and game design? I ask because I can bet one of my professors does not meet any of them.
Their entire online brand is bragging about how they teach students to make games, but will end class almost an hour early because they do not know how to explain or give an example of a coroutine, even when the class begs them to. In one class, they made it clear that the course was essentially like a short lab class and that every student in there would only get 5 minutes of their help. No actual lectures because they don’t actually know how to teach, but will take pictures of us working all the time for publicity’s sake and to boast about their courses. It leaves us in tears sometimes. They take credit for students’ own skills that had been built up prior to taking their courses. Our university charges ~$2k a 3-credit course, and all of our syllabi are just hyperlinks to free YouTube and Unity videos. My classmates and I could absorb all of that without paying that much to attend. (But some of them are on scholarships so they have no choice.)
I had an internship under them for almost a full year and they would not help at all. “Hey, I do not understand how to properly start stuff from scratch in a SteamVR project. How do I start X to achieve YZ?” Got me something like “Just take the testing grounds template and place everything down in there.” With no additional help. Was left on read for days at a time, even when I had a deadline approaching and was getting fed up with just the same tutorials being sent over and over. Yet, they had the audacity to be aggressive with me regardless.
The funniest part is most of their job credits are not for game development, but for…sound design…
They are known for giving students almost all A’s across the board even when projects are half-finished and, while that sounds swag to students who are tired, we all walk out of it feeling like nothing was genuine. In turn, they dock outspoken students’ grades for outwardly speaking out about their teaching/attitude. We learn nothing, and with other courses to keep up with, we don’t have the time to self-teach an entire curriculum on top of everything. Our senior portfolios are not anywhere near job-worthy. We go into senior year scared about producing a somewhat-acceptable project.
I did some extra digging, too, on their failed kickstarter from years ago and found out something…interesting. In the Risks section of the page, they state that even if the Kickstarter didn’t meet its goal (and it did not), the team would work hard to make it happen anyway and even sell their cars to fund it. Fast forward over a decade, the studio has dissolved, the people who backed it never got their rewards, and no game had been made. There has got to be a case to be made with that.
The problem is many students across the years, both pre and post-Covid, have tried bringing student testimonials and evidence to administration (dept and Dean) and have been ignored year and year again. I get it, our sector is small, but this is just unacceptable. Students who have been vocal have been punished, as previously mentioned. Even a club created by students to help teach each other program/design in secret after the mistreatment and lack of actual quality teaching was co-opted by said Professor.
So I ask again for advice as to how to re-approach this situation and perhaps help do a complete overhaul so our education does not go to complete waste. I will be happy to answer more questions for further detail. However, I cannot give any other identifiers for the sake of protecting myself and my classmates. We need help, and fast.
Thank you.
(PS: Apologies, this was longer than I anticipated lol)

From a comment at socialism
Just as conditions differ from nation-state to nation-state, so too would the paths and prescriptions differ. In the United States, where I live, I think of a socialism with US characteristics. Socialism in one country is challenging, but as the largest domino, making this domino fall to socialism in the US will aid a rapid spread of socialism Worldwide.
The main tasks for the proletarian State is to amputate the repressive apparatuses of the State and to expropriate the capitalist ruling expropriators who expropriated our federalist republic.

Expropriate the Expropriators

Expropriating the Expropriators involves two main steps:
1 ) ending exploitation by transforming every corporate enterprise from a capitalist plutocratic form of governance (one-dollar-in-wealth-one-vote) to a communist democratic republic form of governance (one-worker-one-vote). This could be accomplished with a mere act of Congress in its power of regulating commerce to make corporate enterprises adhere to the constitutional guarantee of a republican form of government just as we expect with corporate municipalities (one-resident-one-vote).
This first item corresponds to what I call the zeroth plank of the Communist Manifesto:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Capitalism, in digging it own grave, has already conveniently centralized “all instruments of production in the hands of the State”, since most all such instruments of production are now owned by corporate enterprises which are themselves creations, components, and instruments of the State. Now all that is needed is to transform the form of governance of those corporations from plutocracy to democratic republic rule of law.
2) ensuring all natural resource rents accrue to the public treasury and distributing those rents equally as the Unconditional Universal Basic Income (UUBI). This is a plank of the Communist Manifesto that has been embraced by the Georgist movement (followed of Henry George) which they call the land value tax (LVT) and the social dividend (SD). This also restores constitutionality in that the constitutional prohibition on titles of nobility prohibits the grant of this power to take seigneurial rents (as in titles of nobility rents) from the public treasury.

Amputating/Crushing the Repressive Apparatuses

Much of this is inscribed, in an idealist form, in the bill of rights and the constitution, but is not taken seriously in most respects. Especially the tenet expressed in the Ninth Amendment matches Engels paraphrasing of Saint-Simon that “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things” (Anti-Duhring 1877): in my preferred and more precise rendition, the reign over persons is replaced by the administration of common wealth and other common concerns.
Taking personal rights seriously means ending drug criminalization and other ‘vice’ laws, where the ‘viciousness’ of such vice laws is entirely on the part of the police state. Without those vice laws, and the poverty created by stealing from the poor to give to the rich capitalist rentiers, we will make the rights of the accused and the rights of the convicted align with a Just socialist republic.
All persons treated equally before the law, whether when it protects or punishes.
The standing armies (including police forces) replaced with a restoration of the Militia, guaranteed in the Second Amendment, including Militia platoons for local security instead of mercenary police troopers.

Commonwealth Administering Our Common Wealth

The administration of common wealth—the administration of things in Engels and Saint-Simon’s language—becomes the primary limited role of government (not to reign over persons in their private personal spheres regarding sexuality, recreational intoxicants, gender identity, reproductivity, migration, and so forth).
Such Commonwealth would be administered within nested jurisdictions from Global (through a renewed and reinvigorated UN general assembly and its organs), federal, state, county, municipal, and direct democrat town hall commune/community levels.
The primary common resources administered include:

1. Transport networks, whether passengers/persons/pedestrians or freight, data packets, and other things—as well as whether roadways, railways, electrical power networks, telecommunications networks, pipelines, and the like
2. Insurance risk pools to facilitate hedging against all customary risks
3. Money and payment systems
4. A common credit pool, insured for savers and lending to borrowers according to their credit histories and credit ratings, determined by publicly deliberated and determined policies
5. A common marketplace to buy and sell wares, with richly described facets of resources/commodities and deliberate measures to abate market imperfections such as positive and negative externalities, transaction cost frictions, missing information, and market dominance; also providing data on the prices of production and depreciation schedules for all customary resources, and other such salient data
6. Services for extractable natural resources: extracting, homogenizing, and auctioning such resources
7. A postal system that delivers merchandise from the common marketplace, provides a physical fallback for correspondence and periodicals delivered digitally, and accepts containers for recycling, reuse, or redemption otherwise (free to the postal customer, with redemption costs covered by a Pigouvian tax specifically honed to the container redemption/refuse demands of each specific commodity)
8. A cultural commons that provides vital information services such as a comprehensive digital resource lending library, digital identification (complementing physical identification mechanisms) and directory/authentication services, cryptographic authorizations, public DRM services, credit history and rating services, open source public applied research software development projects, and more
9. the nationalization of all armaments industries and implement industries that produce specialized non-fungible resources primarily for governments, so that instead governments acquire purely fungible commodities in a transparent and accountable manner and internally produce the specialized resources needed
10. globalization of all social media (US based social media nationalized and then turned over, in trust, to the UN) and then thus restoring the distributed and decentralized architecture of the original internet and web, that has been undermined by these behemoth monopolists—strict separation of internet services from internet hosting (also adding a system of distributed moderation, where we elect to subscribe to the moderator services of our choice, end user stylesheets determining the handling of censorship, and content is not otherwise censored)

Guide available! Go here.
Series beginning is here.
[First] Prev/ Next
I took a deep breath and let it out. Looking up at Elizabet, I said, “Kilik-ma was curious as to the entertainment on my world. Liss-ran was apparently telling him about the breakfast we shared before we left on the hunt. The music we played through my phone. He wanted to hear some, but I’d left it here with you.
“Well, I was feeling better than I had any right to, and well, I decided to…sing a song,”
“You’ve never sang for me before. What gives?” Elizabet asked, sounding hurt.
“You never asked, and I’ve always been rather self-conscious about my voice. I don’t think it’s very good, and I don’t like to advertise that I actually can sing. Maybe four people back on Earth knew that I could sing and actually carry a tune. Now? Now, all of Haruma will know.
“Getting back to the matter at hand, I decided to sing a song about the winter and its beauty. I slipped into something of a trance, lost in the music apparently. Just singing and well, watching the song come alive in a field. I didn’t even realize that I was singing in the Ancient Tongue until the song was over, and I nearly passed out and fell off of Lola.” I took her hands in mine, and looked her in the eye, worry plastered across my face. “Elizabet, I made it snow. And not just a little bit, either. If you travel two or three hours back in the direction we came, the snow is up to my knees,” I said.
“You made it snow?” Blainaut asked, bewildered.
“Yeah. And… and that’s not all,” I said.
“What else did you do, Ivor?” Elizabet asked in exasperation.
“I might have let loose a new species of bird. A line in the song speaks of a bluebird, a specific, small bird from my planet, and a whole flock of them burst from a tree where there were no birds before. They flew off to the south,” I said, my head hung low.
Elizabet and Blainaut just stared at me. As Blainaut opened his mouth to say something, a voice piped up from the entrance to the city.
“Hey! We have visitors! Four of them. They’re small,” he said.
A crow swooped in from….somewhere and landed on my shoulder. This was going to be interesting.
I whipped around to face the possible threat. What I saw instead, were four canine pups. Realization washed over me as I realized what these were.
“The Dire Wolf,” I said softly.
“What? Dire Wolf? What do you mean, Dire Wolf?” Blainaut asked.
“I killed a female at the beginning of the hunt. She’d been in my Pack the entire time. Until this morning, anyway. I laid her in the cart to make more room for other prey we had taken. She was nursing pups at the time. I was worried they’d die, but it seems they didn’t and have followed her scent,” I explained quietly. “Back away from the cart! Don’t run. Move deliberately, and you should be okay,” I called out.
The Haarthuu slowly backed away from the cart, and the four pups approached in his stead. They pawed at the corpse of their mother, whining. Though large, they couldn’t have been more than two or three months of age. An idea struck me.
I shrugged off my Pack, and reached in for a parcel of meat from the sentry. I quickly cut some chunks from it, and slowly approached the pups, sliding the Pack back onto my shoulders. They began to growl at me, but I tossed some meat their way, and they snatched it up, obviously starving. One was especially quick about it, snapping up two to the others’ one. I continued, Duplicating and tossing meat at them until they seemed full. They began to walk off, so I halted their movement with a Wall of Stone, causing a large semicircle to appear around them. I walked in behind them and closed it off, trapping us all together.
“Ivor, no!” Elizabet yelled after me.
They immediately turned on me, growling and snarling. I tossed more meat at them, causing them to back away and spread out. One took a piece of meat and trotted off, away from the rest. The other three stood away, their hackles raised.
I took a chance and sat on the ground. As a precaution, I raised a Dome of Force over me, to ward off any attack that may come. The crow fluttered off before I finished, perching on the stone wall. One of the pups took hesitant steps towards me, sniffing the air.
“That’s right,” I said in a soft, low tone. “Come on. I’m safe. I may have killed your mother, and I’m sorry for that, but it was either her or my friends. I’ll help take care of your four, if you’ll let me,” I continued.
I could see the fear in their movements, in the way they paced and whined looking up at the wall. I racked my brain, trying desperately to recall some spell I could use to help these four pups calm down.
The one that had taken the meat and left raised its head and howled a low, keening wail. It was joined in by the others, and tears flowed down my cheeks. I knew they were mourning their mother.
As I sat there, the necessary spell flowed into my mind like water. “Call of the Wild, words of the woods, let them Hear me, let me Hear them.” I murmured, willing the five of us to understand the other.
“I’m sorry, kids. I didn’t know she was your mother,” I said softly.
The four of them snapped to attention and regarded me with suspicion.
“The two-legged pink ones lie. Always,” came a voice from my left.
“The green ones are little better,” this time, from my right.
“Strides-in-shadows is gone, and we are Nameless. Your fault!” directly in front of me, this time. The pup there was growling fiercely, slowly advancing.
“I will keep you fed. I will help you form a new pack. I will keep you safe. I will atone for the death of Strides-in-shadows,” I said solemnly.
“Fed? A new pack? Safe?” the pup that began the howl snorted and rose. It slowly padded over to me, its head cocked to the side. “How can a pink two-leg care for Wolf-kind? We hunt. We kill. We are strong,” it said.
“You will likely die without a new pack. I can offer definite survival,” I said softly.
The pup was standing at the very edge of the Dome. “Can you truly? We have our doubts,” it said softly.
I took a deep breath, my heart hammering in my ears. Slowly, I began to stand. Reaching the limit of my Dome, I dispelled it, and stood there in front of four pups. I held my hands out to my sides, open wide.
“I stand here before you. Believe me, or don’t. The Haarthuu will treat you as their own people, and I can promise you will have the attention of my three sons, should you wish it. You” - I knelt in front of the one I took to be the leader- “will never want for companionship and family for as long as you live, if you take my offer,” I said, slowly extending my hand out to him.
“Brothers? Sister? Do we take the pink one at his word? Do we kill him and feast? Do we leave?” he asked.
Three growls were heard as they advanced on me. I lowered my head, expecting the worst. I knew I would likely survive an attack, but I wanted to show trust. I head a snuffling to my right, feeling a cold nose press against my hand. I opened my eyes and slowly raised my head, only to find a yellow eye glaring into my face.
“We will trust for now. The moment we are harmed, we will tear through your people, rending life from flesh,” the leader said.
“Very well. I shall name you four,” I said. The pups sat before me in a line. “You, I shall call Speaks-with-honor. You can expect to be called ‘Speaker’ more often than not,” I said to the apparent leader, the one who had taken the meat and wandered away from his siblings, and he perked up. Turning to the fast one, I said, “You are Stings-with-wind. ‘Stinger’ will be your short name.” She, too, perked up, sitting a bit taller. I faced the calmer, quieter of the three and said, “You are Autumn Breeze. Autumn will be your short name.” He perked up, leaving the angriest of the bunch, who was pacing back and forth, a low growl coming from him. I faced him and intoned, “You are Heart-of-fire. Fireheart will be your short name.” I took in the entirety of the pups, and spread my arms wide. “It is time to meet your new pack! Come,” I said.
I turned to where I was pretty sure the crowd was, and slowly lowered the walls. The crow flapped back to my shoulder and rubbed her beak against my beard. Elizabet, Thaddeus and Blainaut were the first faces I saw. I smiled.
“People of Haruma! There are four Dire Wolf pups behind me. Please don’t be afraid, as I think I’ve made a deal with them,” I said loudly. “Speaks-with-honor is the eldest of the four. After him is his sister, Stings-with-wind. Their brother Autumn Breeze is next, followed by the fierce Heart-of-fire.” Each pup stepped forward with the announcement of their name. “They will hopefully stay with us for the rest of their lives, and we will cherish and love them as family. As long as they are not harmed, we will all prosper,” I said, the walls finally receding into the ground.
The pups sat behind me, watching impassively as the Haarthuu looked worriedly between each other. My boys slowly walked up to me.
“Mr. Ivor? What are we going to do with them?” asked Ahte-tan.
The crow, that I was now certain had to be The Great Mother, hopped off my shoulder and revealed Herself to the crowd of Haarthuu, who all knelt in reverence. Even the Dire Wolf pups showed their belly and neck to her. It seemed all life on Chaia knew her as their Mother.
She knelt in front of the boy. “You are going to love them, cherish them, and treat them like family, My Child. That’s what you’re going to do with them. I hope you will bond with them. They aren’t pets. They are family members. Remember that,” She said, seeing his serious face nod.
“Heart-of-fire? This is Ivor’s oldest, Ahte-tan. I hope the two of you will get along. He will take care of you, Fireheart. Treat each other well,” She said to the wolf pup.
Fireheart walked over to Ahte-tan, and sat before him, staring him in the eye. “Now, remember, Child. Fireheart is proud, strong, and lives up to his name. Help him focus that flame, and I am certain he will be a stalwart companion,” She said.
“Ahte-naah? This is Stings-with-wind. She is fast; faster than you, even. Help each other direct yourselves in your journeys, and I’m certain you will find no better friend than Stinger,” The Great Mother said gently.
Stinger padded over and sniffed and snuffled Ahte-naah’s face, then pounced on him, licking him all over. Ahte-naah giggled and laughed, burying his face in the wolf’s soft fur.
Speaks-with-honor padded over to my youngest, and cocked his head. “Speaker, this is Ivor’s youngest, Ahte-ukum. He is kind, soft-spoken, and rather timid. Help him find his inner warrior; his inner dragon, and you will have a partner to rely on for the rest of your life,” The Great Mother told the eldest pup.
Speaker walked over and lay down at my youngest’s feet, and Ahte-ukum sat, gently petting the gray fur.
Autumn Breeze trotted up to the goddess, butting her gently with his head. “Liss-ran?” The young woman gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. “This is Autumn. He is quiet, calm and attentive. Of all the Haarthuu, only you are able to properly understand him, I think. As you spend time with him, I think you may come to know yourself even better. Care for him as you would your own flesh and blood, and he will never leave you,” The Mother of All commanded. Once she had finished she turned to me.
“I certainly didn’t expect this, Ivor. You may have just begun to turn the tide for this city of My Children. As long as they survive, those pups will be a fierce deterrent to any seeking to gain entry. I am glad to see that you continue to exceed my expectations, dearest. However, I must take my leave. Stay safe, Ivor,” She said, then planted a soft kiss on my cheek before fading.
The pups, now sitting beside their respective Person, began a new howl. This was not one of sorrow, but of the joy of finding a pack.
[First] Prev/ Next
Hey! I’m also uploading my work on RoyalRoad! Here is my profile IvorFreyrsson
Join me over at Words_From_Ivor for more!
Master List

Enjoy your weekend Houston!
If you find value in these posts please sign up for my email list. I send the list out on Thursday by email and every new signup is appreciated.

THURSDAY- JUNE 8th 🌦

boygenius @ White Oak Music Hall @ 6PM
MYOA @ Warehouse Live @ 8PM
Junior Brown @ The Heights Theater @ 8PM
​

FRIDAY- JUNE 9th 🌦

SaberCats vs Old Glory DC @ SaberCats Stadium @ 8PM
Max Roach Documentary Screening @ MFAH @ 7PM This new documentary is a profound and expansive portrait of legendary jazz drummer, composer, bandleader, and activist Max Roach.
Mixers & Elixirs @ HMNS @ 7PM Make friends with like-minded brainiacs on this special event where science meets dancing, music, food, and drinks!
Contemporary Dance Performance @ Miller Outdoor Theatre @ 8:30PM ‘Restore’ dance performance features new signature works by the nationally acclaimed Houston Contemporary Dance Company.
Duran Duran @ Woodlands Pavilion @ 7PM *With Nile Rodgers & Chic + Bastille
Inlovingmemory @ Bayou Music Center @ 8PM *With Bones, Xavier Wulf, Eddy Baker
Muscadine Bloodline @ House of Blues @ 7PM
Gimme Gimme Disco @ White Oak Music Hall @ 9PM
Luci @ Stereo Live @ 10PM
Otep @ Warehouse Live @ 8PM
​

SATURDAY- JUNE 10th 🌦

Dynamo vs LAFC @ Shell Energy Stadium @ 7:30PM
Art Beyond Sight @ MFAH @ 11AM Trained educators use verbal description and hands-on materials to engage bling or partially sighted visitors with museum art.
‘The Cool World’ Screening @ MFAH @ 7PM This landmark film directed by Shirley Clarke reflects the harsh realities of Harlem street life through the story of 15-year-old Duke and his gang.
Dance & Movement Workshop @ DeLUXE Theater @ 10AM Join artist Donna Crump for a community dance and movement workshop at the historic DeLUXE Theater.
Ongoing - Saturday Stargazing @ George Observatory in Needville
Ongoing - Arte en el Parque / Art in the Park @ Discovery Green @ 12PM Students, ages 3 to 12 will create a unique art piece while improving their speaking and listening skills en español!
Summer Neighborhood Concert @ Austin High School @ 7:30PM Join your friends, family, and community members for a FREE evening of family fun and music performed by the Houston Symphony.
DJ Sun & Aperio @ Miller Outdoor Theatre @ 8:30PM Enjoy a warm summer evening of Lo-Fi jams by Aperio and live orchestral performance of DJ Sun’s soulful ‘Loveletter.’
Mika Singh - Bollywood @ NRG Arena @ 8PM
Koe Wetzel @ Woodlands Pavilion @ 7PM *With Huser Brothers
Mariachi Vargas De Tecalitlán @ Bayou Music Center @ 8PM
The Tontons @ The Heights Theater @ 8PM
An Orchestra Rendition of Dr. Dre 2001 @ House of Blues @ 8PM *Presented by Alternative Symphony
Modestep @ Stereo Live @ 10PM
​

SUNDAY - JUNE 11th 🌞

Dash vs NJ/NY Gotham FC @ Shell Energy Stadium @ 6PM
Bilingual Zumba @ MFAH @ 11AM FiTMiX instructors get you up and moving with a free zumba class.
'Dancing the Twist in Bamako' Screening @ MFAH @ 5PM This is a romantic story set against the backdrop of post-colonial Mali in 1960s on the cusp of dramatic political change.
Becky Robinson Comedy Show @ House of Blues @ 8PM
Weston Estate @ Warehouse Live @ 8PM
DJ Pauly D @ Clé Pool @ 2PM
​

All weekend

SATURDAY & SUNDAY - The Texas Tenors @ The Grand Opera House @ 8PM / 3PM The Texas Tenors are the most successful music group and third highest selling artist in the history of America’s Got Talent!
All weekend - Arnez J Stand Up @ Houston Improv
All weekend - ‘Servan of Two Masters’ Play @ Hubbard Theatre Presented by Alley Theatre, this new adaptation of the classic Carlo Goldoni comedic masterpiece will have you laughing like nothing else!
All weekend - ‘Swan Lake’ Ballet @ Brown Theater Houston Ballet’s season comes to an end with one of ballet world’s greatest love stories, ‘Swan Lake.’
All weekend - 'Wicked' Musical @ The Hobby Center A Broadway sensation, this musical looks at what happened in the Land of Oz…but from a different angle.

Ongoing

Ongoing - Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces Exhibition @ MFAH NEW - See outstanding works by art stars including Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Manet, and Modigliani presented within the context of their experiences.
Ongoing - 'Where Do We Go From here' Exhibition @ CAMH Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s (CAMH) Teen Council presents their 13th biennial exhibition featuring work from Houston-area teen artists.
Ongoing - 'Ming Smith: Feeling the Future' Exhibition @ CAMH NEW - the exhibition explores artist Ming Smith’s unique, multi-layered work in various formats.
Ongoing - Si Lewen ‘The Parade’ Exhibition @ Menil Menil’s latest exhibition features 63 drawings by Polish-American artist Si Lewen, which compromise a graphic novel depicting WWII and the liberation of Poland.
Ongoing - ‘Hyperreal: Gray Foy’ Exhibition @ Menil The exhibition features American artists Gray Foy’s most important and celebrated works.
Ongoing - ‘The Curatorial Imagination of Walter Hopps’ Exhibition @ Menil The exhibition explores the influential vision of one of the most distinguished curators - Walter Hopps, and features artwork by Warhol, Kienholz, Gilliam, and many others.
Ongoing - 'Art of the Cameroon Grassfields' Exhibition @ Menil This exhibition celebrates the enduring artistic traditions from Cameroon and its global diaspora.
Ongoing - Wall Drawing Series: Mel Bochner @ Menil Drawing Institute The Menil Drawing Institute is proud to work with artist Mel Bochner on the fourth installment of the museum’s ephemeral wall drawing series.

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 73%. (I'm a bot)

Night hadn't fallen; rather, particles from the fires in the Amazon rainforest had travelled to the heavily-populated city, turning everything gray.
Since she had already been looking at the fires in the Amazon, she also wanted to understand how this phenomenon was affecting the health of the local Indigenous people.
Through a model that examines how air travels through the atmosphere - when there are and when there aren't fires - combined with demographic information from the Amazon basin and a formula about the impact of PM2.5 particles on premature deaths, Bonilla and her team concluded that those most at-risk populations are the Indigenous communities of the Amazon.
The figure just for those who are living in Indigenous territory was around 230 premature deaths.
To give another example, the data suggests that, between 2014 and 2019, exposure to smoke from forest fires represented almost 39,000 deaths throughout Brazil.
The study also says that, since 2002, the annual number of fires in the Amazon has twice exceeded the figure of 600,000, both in 2004 and 2007.

Summary Source FAQ Feedback Top keywords: fire^#1 deaths^#2 premature^#3 Indigenous^#4 particles^#5
Post found in /worldnews and /EverythingScience.
NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.

Main hub thread with the full 131 rankings
Anchors aweigh, my boys, anchors aweigh
Farewell to foreign shores, we sail at break of day, of day
Through our last night ashore, drink to the foam
Until we meet once more, here's wishing you a happy voyage home
Navy is one of the oldest football programs in the country, having fielded their first team in 1879. With that comes a history of excellence, as it should with the Navy, who as a program is top 25 in all-time wins for FBS schools, has 2 Heisman winners, and a national title in 1926. Quarterback Roger Staubach, known as “Captain America”, was the winner of the 1963 Heisman and is an NFL Hall of Famer, the only QB in history to achieve both feats.

Best Seasons and Highlights

1. 2015: 19. Navy: 11-2 (25.276) 2. 2019: 19. Navy: 11-2 (24.894) 3. 2009: 28. Navy: 10-4 (13.712) 4. 1996: 28. Navy: 9-3 (8.642) 5. 2013: 42. Navy: 9-4 (7.584) 6. 2004: 31. Navy: 10-2 (6.282) 7. 2010: 41. Navy: 9-4 (4.625) 8. 2016: 47. Navy: 9-5 (3.576) 9. 2008: 44. Navy: 8-5 (3.107) 10. 2006: 42. Navy: 9-4 (2.051) 11. 2014: 53. Navy: 8-5 (-0.393) 12. 2005: 45. Navy: 8-4 (-2.572) 13. 1997: 51. Navy: 7-4 (-3.492) 14. 2007: 57. Navy: 8-5 (-4.937) 15. 2012: 61. Navy: 8-5 (-5.454) 16. 2003: 62. Navy: 8-5 (-7.845) 17. 2017: 64. Navy: 7-7 (-9.488) 18. 1984: 62. Navy: 4-6-1 (-12.294) 19. 1985: 59. Navy: 4-7 (-16.923) 20. 2011: 78. Navy: 5-7 (-18.345) 21. 1995: 67. Navy: 5-6 (-20.772) 22. 1999: 77. Navy: 5-7 (-22.534) 23. 2021: 93. Navy: 4-8 (-24.879) 24. 1990: 83. Navy: 5-6 (-25.375) 25. 2022: 101. Navy: 4-8 (-25.436) 26. 1993: 90. Navy: 4-7 (-34.187) 27. 2020: 111. Navy: 3-7 (-34.632) 28. 1998: 92. Navy: 3-8 (-36.294) 29. 1989: 85. Navy: 3-8 (-36.349) 30. 1983: 92. Navy: 3-8 (-38.305) 31. 1988: 90. Navy: 3-8 (-38.616) 32. 2018: 110. Navy: 3-10 (-42.027) 33. 1994: 93. Navy: 3-8 (-43.185) 34. 1986: 97. Navy: 3-8 (-46.615) 35. 2002: 109. Navy: 2-10 (-51.419) 36. 1987: 99. Navy: 2-9 (-52.186) 37. 1992: 100. Navy: 1-10 (-54.324) 38. 2000: 108. Navy: 1-10 (-56.258) 39. 1991: 105. Navy: 1-10 (-56.694) 40. 2001: 114. Navy: 0-10 (-60.702) Overall Score: 11207 (78th) 

• 220-256-1 record
• 0 conference titles
• 9-7 bowl record
• 2 consensus All-Americans
• 8 NFL players drafted

No conference titles? Navy’s bad! Kidding of course, they didn’t have a chance to win any as an independent until 2015 when they joined the AAC. As you can see on the list above, Navy’s clearly had some bad years, with a whopping 14 seasons of 3 or less wins. To make up for it, they’ve achieved some remarkable highs for a service academy, with 11 finishes inside my top 50. A 10-2 season in 2004 narrowly misses out on Navy’s top 5 seasons because of their 107th ranked strength of schedule that year. Despite some remarkable QB play in recent years from Keenan Reynolds and Malcolm Perry, the 2 consensus All-Americans are both from RB Napoleon McCallum in 1983 and 1985, who finished 6th and 7th in Heisman voting in those years, respectively. Speaking of Keenan Reynolds, he set the NCAA career record for rushing TDs in 2015, accumulating 88 in his 4 year career.

Top 5 Seasons

Worst Season: 2001 (0-10 overall, Independent)
Navy gets a pass for 2001. 2 weeks into the season, the September 15th game against Northwestern was cancelled shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The Army-Navy game was more than a game this year, with President George W. Bush taking part in the on-field coin toss. Army prevailed 26-17 on the day. Navy LB Brian Stann ribbed that Navy only got pregame visits from President Bush and Senator John McCain, while Army received an impassioned speech from General Norman Schwarzkopf. The game finished off a stressful year for Navy, who fired head coach Charlie Weatherbie after an 0-7 start. On-field lows were a 7-70 loss to Georgia Tech, a loss to 3-9 Tulane, and of course the Army-Navy Game. Navy hired Paul Johnson for 2002, who’d turn around the program for good. If you’re an MMA fan, you probably recognize Brian Stann who I quoted above. Stann went on to become a successful UFC fighter and commentator, joining Fox Sports after his retirement from MMA in 2013.
5. 2013 (9-4 overall, Independent)
A season with many highs. A 3-1 start included a 41-35 win over Indiana and 28-10 over Air Force. After losing 2 straight to strong Duke and Toledo teams, Navy went 5-1 the rest of the regular season, only losing 34-38 to a Notre Dame team that finished in the top 25. Wins included 24-21 over Pitt, 58-52 in 3OT over a San Jose State team coming off an 11-2 year, and 34-7 in the Army-Navy Game. A perfect ground game of 366 rushing yards against Middle Tennessee in the bowl led to a 24-6 win to finish 9-4 in Navy’s second to last season as an Independent. QB Keenan Reynolds (more on him later) threw for 1000+ yards with 8 TD 2 INT, but most importantly ran for 1346 yards and 31 TD, setting an NCAA record for rushing TDs in a season by a QB. Reynolds also ran for 7 TD against San Jose State, an NCAA record. Outside of Reynolds, longtime New England Patriots long snapper Joe Cardona was also on this team, and didn’t have a bad snap all season long.
4. 1996 (9-3 overall, Independent)
Even for as bad as 2001 was, Charlie Weatherbie’s teams had their moments. A 5-1 start featured 3 wins over Power 6 teams: 10-6 over Rutgers, 64-27 over Duke, and 47-18 over Wake Forest. That set up a Shamrock Classic game in Ireland between Navy and Notre Dame. A 54-27 win for Notre Dame set a record for the longest winning streak over an annual opponent at 33 games. Unfazed, Navy won 3 more straight including a nice 36-26 win over Georgia Tech in Atlanta. But even so, Weatherbie’s teams…left a lot to be desired. Navy watched their 21-3 lead over Army evaporate by the end of the game, stopped at the goal line twice for a 28-24 Army victory. To be fair, this was one of Army’s best teams of the past few decades, and they finished ranked #25. Navy rebounded to beat Steve Mariucci’s Cal team in the Aloha Bowl 42-38 to finish 9-3. Navy OC Paul Johnson left to become Georgia Southern’s head coach, and would go on to perfect the triple option at Navy from 2002-07 and institute it at Georgia Tech from 2008-18. WR LeBron Butts (no relation to the basketball player) had 14 catches for 179 yards and 2 TD.
3. 2009 (10-4 overall, Independent)
Oh look, one of my all time favorite players, QB Ricky Dobbs. Dobbs was a steady work horse all season. He only averaged 3.6 yards per carry, but had the 3rd most carries in the nation with 315 and ran for 1203 yards with an NCAA QB record 27 TD. The record wouldn’t be broken until 2013 by Navy’s own Keenan Reynolds. Dobbs led a steady offense combined with a great defense (19.4 PPG allowed), leading to Navy’s 2nd double digit win season since 1905. Navy had a chance to tie #6 Ohio State with 2 minutes left, but their 2 point conversion attempt was returned by OSU for 2 pts themselves, making the final score 27-31. A 14-27 loss two weeks later to Pitt turned out to be another quality loss, with Pitt going on to finish 10-3 and #15. A 10-4 final record included wins such as 16-13 over 8-5 Air Force, 38-35 over 8-5 SMU, 13-10 over Wake Forest, 17-3 over Army, 35-13 in the bowl over 8-5 Missouri, and the pièce de résistance, 23-21 over #19 Notre Dame in South Bend. Previously on a 43-year losing streak to the Irish heading into 2007, this was now the 2nd time in 3 years Navy had beaten Notre Dame, previously unthinkable.
2. 2019 (11-2 overall, 7-1 American)
After Keenan Reynolds left for the NFL, the QB position had big shoes to fill. Following a stopgap 9-5 record in 2016, 2017 arrived. Zach Abey took the majority of snaps, but Malcolm Perry was too talented to keep off the field, far and away the best athlete on the team. Perry had a monstrous year with 9 starts at slot back and 3 at QB, rushing for 1182 yards and 11 TD on 8.6(!) YPC, and was the team’s 2nd leading receiver with 13 catches for 303 yards and 2 TD. Perry started 5 games at QB in 2018, but dealt with injuries en route to a 3-10 season. That led to a mysterious 2019, with Navy picked 5th in the 6-team AAC West Division.
A 2-1 start showed potential, with a 42-10 win over East Carolina and close 23-35 loss to one of the conference favorites in Memphis. A 34-25 win over an Air Force team that would finish 11-2 showed Navy was back to their winning ways, with a real chance at a bowl as long as Perry stayed healthy. Navy reeled off blowout win after blowout win, eventually getting up to #23 before losing to #16 Notre Dame 20-52. Now at 7-2, Navy still had a shot at making the AAC title game. Perry showed up big against #25 SMU, rushing for 195 yards and throwing for 162 in a 35-28 win. After beating Houston 56-41, Navy just needed Memphis to drop one game, but the Tigers won out to make the AAC title game at 11-1. Navy played Army in the last game as usual, and Perry WENT NUCLEAR. He didn’t throw a single pass, rushing for 304 yards on 29 carries with 2 TD in a 31-7 win. In the bowl against 8-4 Kansas State, Perry again went for 200+ on the ground, winning 20-17 on a last second FG. Navy finished the year #20 in the country.
Perry went off all year long, winning AAC Offensive POTY with 1084 passing yards 7 TD 3 INT with 2017 rushing yards and 21 TD on 6.8 YPC. Perry legitimately was one of the quickest athletes in the country, if you watch his highlights he looks like a quicker but slower Kyler Murray. Because of this he was drafted in the 7th round by the Miami Dolphins as a WR, and has caught 9 passes for 92 yards and 1 TD in the NFL.
1. 2015 (11-2 overall, 7-1 American)
2015 was a magical year not just for Navy fans, but for college football fans following Navy. QB Keenan Reynolds was the darling of football, and went down as arguably the greatest option QB in college football history. Reynolds became one of football’s biggest stories as Navy kept winning throughout the year, starting 9-1 with wins such as 33-11 over 8-6 Air Force, 29-17 over 8-5 USF, and 45-20 over #13 Memphis. Navy got as high as #15 in the nation and was one of the favorites to earn the Group of 5’s spot in a New Years 6 bowl. After a loss to Houston the dream ended, but they still had the Army-Navy game to tend to. The game earned its biggest rating this century with a 5.1 overnight, mostly due to Reynolds’ star power. Reynolds finished 5th in Heisman voting, and when he wasn’t invited to the ceremony, people protested and lobbied for changing the invitation rules. A 44-28 win in the bowl over 8-4 Pitt capped Navy’s first ever 11 win season, and their highest finish in over 50 years at #18.
Navy announced the retirement of Reynolds’ #19 jersey after the season, joining a short list of Roger Staubach (12), Joe Bellino (27), and Napoleon McCallum (30). Navy’s 36 wins in Reynolds’ 4 years tied the class of 1909 for the most ever by a 4-year Navy squad. Reynolds finished as the NCAA’s all-time leading rushing TD leader with 88. In 2015 he threw for 1203 yards 8 TD 1 INT with 1373 rushing yards and 24 TD. This was the 3rd straight season he finished top 5 in rushing TDs in the country. He earned 3rd Team All-American status, won the AAC Offensive POTY, and won the James E. Sullivan Award given to the most outstanding collegiate or Olympic athlete in the United States. After the season, he was drafted in the 6th round by the Baltimore Ravens, the first Navy QB drafted since Roger Staubach in 1964.

5th Quarter

What do you remember about Keenan Reynolds and that 2015 season? How about Malcolm Perry? Who was the better passer, runner, and overall player between the two? Is Reynolds the greatest option QB of all time, even over Tommie Frazier? What other Navy moments/games/plays/players do you remember? How does Navy look to fare in the upcoming seasons? Does Ken Niumatalolo get enough credit in the college football media for what he’s done at Navy? What else is on your mind about Navy?
If you appreciate the effort, please consider subscribing on substack!

Hello everyone, and welcome to Vernacular UHC Season 1!

Vernacular is a reddit recorded round organized by PresidentFleb. Every season of Vernacular is based around scenarios corresponding with a specific letter of the alphabet, just like the old recorded round Alphabetrum (without all the issues that round had). The letter we will be using for this season is the letter A.
For our first season, it will be Rigged Teams of 3.
The scenarios for the season were:

• Anonymous: Players are all disguised under an anonymous skin and IGN, meaning players will not know who they see or who they are fighting.
  
• Astrophobia: Meteors fall from the world creating craters and exploding the world. It will leave holes in the earth and occasionally there will be 2 gold or a diamond left in the crater. The creepers are now supercharged creepers. If a player kills one, there is a possibility to receive their spawn egg. The skeletons are armored “aliens” and will shoot their "lasers" which deal more damage.
  

Enjoy the season!
Alive Players

Player	Link
Dark Red Team	-
Fcrm	Skeptical of Reform
Kaismartypants	Episode 2
Randehh	Late
Red Team	-
Bobbytheturtle	Episode 2
dw0w	Episode 2
PresidentFleb	Episode 2
Orange Team	-
Applepie78	Episode 2
BENIDK	Lost Episode
Broseph	Highlights At End
Yellow Team	-
DJoee	Episode 2
MercuryParadox	Episode 2
tagggz	struck by a meteor
Green Team	-
lexicuhl	Episode 2
Lighte	Episode 2
PokeMemes	Episode 2
Aqua Team	-
Awticon	Episode 2
Fazz2	Episode 2
flameorb	womp womp
Blue Team	-
Eluniel	Episode 2
pbo__	Late
SpyroJ	Dictionary Duel
Purple Team	-
aarei	Episode 2
Glarza	Episode 2
jommyappleseed	Episode 2
Pink Team	-
Normoh	Combined With Episode 3
TheSlimeBrother	Episodes 1 + 2
VioletSin	Episodes 1 + 2
Gray Team	-
ColdBacon	Episode 2
ImCjYT	Episode 2
Livin423	Mob Grinder

Death Tracker

Position	Player	Team Color	Cause	Episode/Link
30th	???	???	???	2

Previous Episodes

• Intro
  
• Episode 1
  

Credits:

• Intro: Lighte
  
• Renders: Brodator
  
• Logo: ShyGus
  
• Host: TheSlimeBrother (Elysium)
  

Enjoy your weekend Houston!
If you find value in these posts please sign up for my email list. I send the list out on Thursday by email and every new signup is appreciated.

THURSDAY- JUNE 8th 🌦

boygenius @ White Oak Music Hall @ 6PM
MYOA @ Warehouse Live @ 8PM
Junior Brown @ The Heights Theater @ 8PM

FRIDAY- JUNE 9th 🌦

SaberCats vs Old Glory DC @ SaberCats Stadium @ 8PM
Max Roach Documentary Screening @ MFAH @ 7PM This new documentary is a profound and expansive portrait of legendary jazz drummer, composer, bandleader, and activist Max Roach.
Mixers & Elixirs @ HMNS @ 7PM Make friends with like-minded brainiacs on this special event where science meets dancing, music, food, and drinks!
Contemporary Dance Performance @ Miller Outdoor Theatre @ 8:30PM ‘Restore’ dance performance features new signature works by the nationally acclaimed Houston Contemporary Dance Company.
Duran Duran @ Woodlands Pavilion @ 7PM *With Nile Rodgers & Chic + Bastille
Inlovingmemory @ Bayou Music Center @ 8PM *With Bones, Xavier Wulf, Eddy Baker
Muscadine Bloodline @ House of Blues @ 7PM
Gimme Gimme Disco @ White Oak Music Hall @ 9PM
Luci @ Stereo Live @ 10PM
Otep @ Warehouse Live @ 8PM

SATURDAY- JUNE 10th 🌦

Dynamo vs LAFC @ Shell Energy Stadium @ 7:30PM
Art Beyond Sight @ MFAH @ 11AM Trained educators use verbal description and hands-on materials to engage bling or partially sighted visitors with museum art.
‘The Cool World’ Screening @ MFAH @ 7PM This landmark film directed by Shirley Clarke reflects the harsh realities of Harlem street life through the story of 15-year-old Duke and his gang.
Dance & Movement Workshop @ DeLUXE Theater @ 10AM Join artist Donna Crump for a community dance and movement workshop at the historic DeLUXE Theater.
Ongoing - Saturday Stargazing @ George Observatory in Needville
Ongoing - Arte en el Parque / Art in the Park @ Discovery Green @ 12PM Students, ages 3 to 12 will create a unique art piece while improving their speaking and listening skills en español!
Summer Neighborhood Concert @ Austin High School @ 7:30PM Join your friends, family, and community members for a FREE evening of family fun and music performed by the Houston Symphony.
DJ Sun & Aperio @ Miller Outdoor Theatre @ 8:30PM Enjoy a warm summer evening of Lo-Fi jams by Aperio and live orchestral performance of DJ Sun’s soulful ‘Loveletter.’
Mika Singh - Bollywood @ NRG Arena @ 8PM
Koe Wetzel @ Woodlands Pavilion @ 7PM *With Huser Brothers
Mariachi Vargas De Tecalitlán @ Bayou Music Center @ 8PM
The Tontons @ The Heights Theater @ 8PM
An Orchestra Rendition of Dr. Dre 2001 @ House of Blues @ 8PM *Presented by Alternative Symphony
Modestep @ Stereo Live @ 10PM

SUNDAY - JUNE 11th 🌞

Dash vs NJ/NY Gotham FC @ Shell Energy Stadium @ 6PM
Bilingual Zumba @ MFAH @ 11AM FiTMiX instructors get you up and moving with a free zumba class.
'Dancing the Twist in Bamako' Screening @ MFAH @ 5PM This is a romantic story set against the backdrop of post-colonial Mali in 1960s on the cusp of dramatic political change.
Becky Robinson Comedy Show @ House of Blues @ 8PM
Weston Estate @ Warehouse Live @ 8PM
DJ Pauly D @ Clé Pool @ 2PM

All weekend

SATURDAY & SUNDAY - The Texas Tenors @ The Grand Opera House @ 8PM / 3PM The Texas Tenors are the most successful music group and third highest selling artist in the history of America’s Got Talent!
All weekend - Arnez J Stand Up @ Houston Improv
All weekend - ‘Servan of Two Masters’ Play @ Hubbard Theatre Presented by Alley Theatre, this new adaptation of the classic Carlo Goldoni comedic masterpiece will have you laughing like nothing else!
All weekend - ‘Swan Lake’ Ballet @ Brown Theater Houston Ballet’s season comes to an end with one of ballet world’s greatest love stories, ‘Swan Lake.’
All weekend - 'Wicked' Musical @ The Hobby Center A Broadway sensation, this musical looks at what happened in the Land of Oz…but from a different angle.

Ongoing

Ongoing - Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces Exhibition @ MFAH NEW - See outstanding works by art stars including Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Manet, and Modigliani presented within the context of their experiences.
Ongoing - 'Where Do We Go From here' Exhibition @ CAMH Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s (CAMH) Teen Council presents their 13th biennial exhibition featuring work from Houston-area teen artists.
Ongoing - 'Ming Smith: Feeling the Future' Exhibition @ CAMH NEW - the exhibition explores artist Ming Smith’s unique, multi-layered work in various formats.
Ongoing - Si Lewen ‘The Parade’ Exhibition @ Menil Menil’s latest exhibition features 63 drawings by Polish-American artist Si Lewen, which compromise a graphic novel depicting WWII and the liberation of Poland.
Ongoing - ‘Hyperreal: Gray Foy’ Exhibition @ Menil The exhibition features American artists Gray Foy’s most important and celebrated works.
Ongoing - ‘The Curatorial Imagination of Walter Hopps’ Exhibition @ Menil The exhibition explores the influential vision of one of the most distinguished curators - Walter Hopps, and features artwork by Warhol, Kienholz, Gilliam, and many others.
Ongoing - 'Art of the Cameroon Grassfields' Exhibition @ Menil This exhibition celebrates the enduring artistic traditions from Cameroon and its global diaspora.
Ongoing - Wall Drawing Series: Mel Bochner @ Menil Drawing Institute The Menil Drawing Institute is proud to work with artist Mel Bochner on the fourth installment of the museum’s ephemeral wall drawing series.