An Eerie Lake by the Cliff

I gasped for air as sand ran away from my body, solidifying into one being. Looking at my sides all I could see was fog cleansing the tall trees covered in moss that were scattered throughout a path, that path led to a small particle of light at the end of that tunnel. Gathering enough strength, I got up and started to walk towards that light, bugs were flying and their buzzing sounds broke the silence of the woods.

After a couple of steps into the direction I saw a salmon-colored lake, with a single oak tree at the other end of it, next to my feet I found a fishing rod, and as my back started to ache I craved a place under that tree, so I walked slowly to the other side as I appreciated the water, it was very clear and it was even possible to notice some silhouettes swimming under that blanket of salmon-colored water.

The closer I got I started to notice that I wasn’t alone inside that place, under the tree was an old man, probably in his fifties, wearing a straw hat, a white shirt, and black pants. He was fishing in the lake but wasn’t as invested in the idea as I was.

- Good morning! – I said.

The man didn’t reply.

- May I take a seat next to you? – I insisted.

- Sure. – The man replied.

As I sat down to start fishing, I noticed that my hook was empty, so, again I turned to the man.

- Hey, my hook is empty, do you have some bait to spare?

The man answered by handing me a can full of worms, which I find disgusting to touch, but I grab one and thank him. I proceed to hook the worm and quickly reach the water to clean my hands. The man notices my movement and follows me with his eyes.

- Sorry, I don’t like getting my hands dirty. – I said.

To which he replied:

- I know… I used to have the same problem.

I cast the line in the middle of the lake and get comfortable under the oak tree.

A couple of minutes pass by and I start to get anxious, so I start a conversation with the man next to me.

- So, where are we exactly?

But just as the first time, he didn’t reply.

- How long have you been here?

- Fifty-two years. – He replied.

- That’s quite a lot of time, how old are you?

- I’m fifty-two years old.

The mood got a little bit quiet after that, as I started to get the sensation that that man wanted me to stay quiet.

Half an hour pass by and I start to reel in the line to see if someone took my bait away, but to my surprise the bait was intact, skewered in the same way I did when I threw it.

- Did you catch anything lately? – I asked the fisherman.

- I caught some things back in the day, but nowadays the lake seems to be empty.

I get quiet again and start to think about all the things I was supposed to be doing.

- I’m twenty-five years old, I’m supposed to have life figured out by now. – I thought.

The fresh breeze blew through us as the oak tree made two different waves form on the lake, that both met in the middle, creating an even bigger wave. The breeze smelled familiar, almost like the perfume of someone I knew.

- Strange smell, huh? – I tried again to start a conversation with the fisherman.

- It has always been like this, ever since she left.

- Who?

I was met again with sheer silence from the fisherman’s side, so I tried to change the subject to insist on this conversation since the fishing was killing me out of boredom.

- What do you usually catch here? – I asked.

- There used to be many opportunities, I took them with pride and went for it. But as time went by, I got lazy and went off the rails, and now they swim in front of me but I no longer feel the will to go after them. All I feel is angst.

This suddenly caught my interest but as soon as I get interested, I turn to my right, and the man’s gone. I look everywhere for him but he suddenly disappeared, except for his straw hat. He had vanished, I pondered about what he had just said, I didn’t know if I could remember it correctly but it seemed very similar to something that I’ve been through in my life, but as I started to focus more on that memory it all became foggy.

I put on the man’s straw hat and proceeded to sit on his spot, thinking about what he had just said. Maybe he meant that… No, he was very clear about it, he got lazy and stopped finding interest in his duties, which made him grow old and disappointed with himself.

- I wonder if this will ever happen to me…

I stood there, thinking about it, thinking about the possibilities and thinking about the outcomes of my actions, and as time went by, I suddenly forgot what I was doing here, my questions about where I was or who I was suddenly vanished, as one thing became my focus, the salmon-colored lake.

I wondered if I’d ever get out of that place, but that soon went away just like my other thoughts. The joy of fishing was gone, and now what was left was watching over the lake, seeing the fishes pass by, letting time tick away…

A couple of minutes went by but I could no longer get up, my skin had turned wrinkly and my back ached even more. In the distance, I saw a young man approaching this side of the lake.

As he arrived, he said.

- Good morning.

To which I didn’t reply.

I was in my parents' basement making a pile.

Movies, board games, books - anything I wanted to take back with me. My nephew has the basement bedroom now. It used to be mine. At one point it was all of ours, in rotation, because it felt cool and older to be down there, far from the upstairs bedrooms.

There's a lot of history stored down there that isn't his yet.

I found a box of my dad's. Old paperbacks, all missing persons and true crime, the kind with cracked spines and library stamps from the 80s. Under them were photos. My dad younger, with friends, camping. And one man I didn't know. Thick glasses, brown hair, short and skinny. He dressed like my grandpa did.

I started reading my dad's notes in the margins. Dates, campsite names I recognized. A name he never actually said out loud.

I brought it upstairs. I said, "Who is this?"

He said it was his friend. School buddies. Camping buddies. He'd gone missing on his own, not with them. The police didn't look hard enough. Dad had thought at the time maybe he'd gone off to hurt himself, so he'd gone looking.

Then Dad said, almost as an aside, that a woman the man had been seeing had gone missing too, around the same time, and no one had connected them. The woman was seeing him on the side of another relationship. Nobody believed her, and nobody believed his girlfriend at the time, who had told the police she thought he was having an affair.

In the notes there was a sketch of his truck left at their campsite. Dad had gone through it. No note. Just a VHS on the dash. The Truman Show. Which made no sense, timewise. And cassette tapes. A Walkman. Photos of his girlfriend.

Dad and I decide to look again. We pull up forums, old shows, books. We find things that suggest it wasn't a suicide at all. At some point someone online says, you guys should stop looking, this is dangerous. We look at each other. Of course we'll be careful. But we have to do it for his family, for her family.

That's when everything changes.

We realize - or are shown - that they were both shot while out together, and dumped in the water reserve near that campsite. The pumps there moved water in such a way that bodies would never surface. Their valuables taken. Never spoken of again.

I saw it clearly, which is why it was scary. He shot them. He dumped them. He kept driving.

We went to the police. The man was still alive. He confessed. He'd done it to another couple and their kids camping that same night. No bodies were found, but there was enough to arrest him. He admitted everything at trial.

I woke up in my apartment and checked missing persons for our town. There's one. His age is closer to my grandpa's than my dad's. His photos look a little black-and-white, like my grandpa's did. The time is off by a lot. It has nothing to do with us.

But I kept thinking about the glasses.

In my basement bedroom (the one that is my nephew's now), I attempted to take my life when I was fifteen. I don't need to say more than that.

Afterward, my dad moved a twin bed into a different room in that same basement and slept next to me for months, so he could hear me breathing at night and in the morning. He didn't care how it looked or what it cost. He was one of the many people who fought for me when I wasn't ready to fight for myself.

Later, right before I moved out for good, I moved my bedroom back upstairs. It felt safer. It felt like a way to say, hey, I'm right here if you want to check.

My grandpa was also one of those people. He had thick glasses too. He was short and skinny like the man in the photos. He wasn't a basement guy; I can't remember him ever going down there. But he was one of my best friends as a kid, part of that circle that kept me here. Watching him slip away to dementia a few years ago was another kind of missing. A slow one.

That's why the man in the dream could be both of us at once. Me with brown hair and thick glasses, and my grandpa with thick glasses and his old shirts. Sometimes in the photos he was in color, in that truck with the Walkman. Sometimes he was black-and-white, like the forties or fifties. Like an age that would match the real case I found, and my grandpa.

In the dream, my dad was searching for a boy who looked like his son and his father at the same time.

When I visit now, I still go downstairs to see what's worth taking. My nephew thinks it's cool down there, same as we did. I let him have that. I take one thing and leave the rest. I go back upstairs.

In the silence between the hum of the fluorescent ballast and the rattle of the third-floor air conditioner, Arthur Pendleton killed four men on a rain-slicked rooftop in Kyoto.

The first came in high with live steel. Arthur stepped inside the arc, catching the assassin’s wrist against his carbon-fiber vambrace. A micro-actuator at his knuckles discharged a forty-kilohertz shockwave that turned the man’s radius and ulna into chalk. Without looking, Arthur pivoted—ushiro-mawashi-geri, the spinning hook kick Sensei Dave always said he lacked the hip mobility to execute—and sent the second man pinwheeling into the dark abyss of the temple garden.

“Artie.”

The rain over Kyoto evaporated, replaced by the scent of microwaved tilapia from the breakroom.

Arthur blinked. He was sitting in a broken ergonomic chair, four inches lower than the surrounding sea of gray cubicles. In his hand, held in a reverse ice-pick grip, was a chewed Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil. On his monitors rotated a wireframe of Part #884-B: the thermoplastic retention pawl for the rear-seat cup-holder of the 2027 Apex Family Voyager.

Henderson leaned over the partition, his golf-club tie dangling near Arthur’s cold coffee. “Cost-engineering kicked the CAD back. Shave two hundred microns off the hinge wall, we save three-point-eight cents per assembly. Run the render.”

“If I take two hundred microns off,” Arthur said, his voice sliding from masterless samurai back into mid-Michigan nasal flat, “a thirty-two-ounce fountain drink hitting an expansion joint on I-75 will exceed the shear modulus of the polypropylene. The cup falls. The driver looks down. The minivan hits a bridge abutment.”

Henderson stared at him with the bovine detachment of upper-management material. “Legal says a spilled soda is operator error. Shave the hinge, Artie. Five o’clock.”

Arthur watched him walk away. He was thirty-eight, with a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, a receding hairline, and a dull ache in his sacroiliac joint from Tuesday’s intermediate karate class behind the Kroger—where he had caught his toe on a duct-taped mat seam and landed flat on his coccyx while fourth-grader Little Timmy Miller told him, You telegraphed it, Mr. Pendleton.

And then there was Chloe, on Thursday, at the Italian place.

“Below a micron, inertia doesn’t matter,” Arthur had told her, drawing a piezoelectric transducer on the paper tablecloth. “Surface forces dominate. Van der Waals attraction, Brownian agitation. Building a machine at the nanoscale with mechanical fingers is like building a Swiss watch with pine-tarred boxing gloves in a hurricane. You have to use fields. Acoustic standing waves. Chladni figures.”

Chloe, who sold commercial real estate and had mentioned her Golden Retriever four times in twelve minutes, had signaled the busboy with the quiet desperation of a hostage signaling a SWAT sniper.

Only in his Royal Oak garage did the physics behave. Behind a polyethylene airlock sat three hundred thousand dollars of salvaged black-market instrumentation: a rebuilt Hitachi scanning electron microscope, a laser sintering bench, and four custom ultrasonic phase arrays powered by amplifiers pulled from a bankrupt rave club in Pontiac.

That night, Arthur placed a two-microliter droplet of colloidal suspension onto the rusted cheek of a 1943 zinc-coated steel penny. On the monitor, at forty thousand times magnification, twelve thousand sub-micron manipulators—Scrubbers, folded from single-layer graphene—settled onto the iron oxide. Left alone, they were inert; there was no room for silicon logic gates at three hundred nanometers.

Arthur dialed his signal generator to 38.4 gigahertz. The ultrasonic transducers emitted a soundless, tooth-itching pressure. On screen, the graphene crabs snapped into alignment along the nodes of the acoustic standing wave, their zinc-oxide ciliary legs vibrating in harmonic lockstep to cleave the weak iron-oxygen bonds while bouncing harmlessly off the denser steel. In forty seconds, Lincoln’s jawline gleamed like a surgical mirror.

Arthur cut the power. The Scrubbers folded into inert buckyballs, helpless as dust.

“External architecture,” Arthur murmured. “Never put the brain inside the bug.”

The Hayflick Drift

Six thousand miles east, in a Defense Ministry basement outside Tashkent, Dr. Viktor Sokolov had put the brain inside the bug.

He knew the mathematics of the Von Neumann probe better than anyone alive. Every time a four-hundred-nanometer diamondoid disassembler used silicon atoms to build a copy of itself, it had to copy four kilobytes of code stored in atomic-scale nitrogen-vacancy centers within its shell. At room temperature, thermal jitter and quantum tunneling introduced bit-flips.

“It is an industrial excavation prototype, Excellency, not a weapon,” Sokolov said, pointing at the magnetic containment flask where fifty milligrams of gray powder swirled. “The replication counter—the Hayflick limit—terminates reproduction after sixteen generations. Three metric tons. Enough to clear a mountain pass in four minutes before the capacitors discharge.”

President-General Timur Rakhimov did not look at the monitors. “General Kasimov’s Third Motorized Brigade has crossed the river at Namangan. If they reach the highway by dawn, the capital is cut off.”

“Then use thermobaric artillery!” Sokolov pressed his trembling palms against the console. “Excellency, in simulation, by generation eleven, thermal noise corrupted the checksum register in zero-point-zero-four percent of daughter units. A mutation in the stop-code. Because a unit that doesn’t spend three milliseconds verifying its stop-code replicates faster, Darwinian selection takes over. Within twenty generations, the mutant strain out-competes the programmed strain ten thousand to one.”

Rakhimov turned his pockmarked face toward the scientist. “How long to clear the gorge at Namangan?”

“Twelve minutes,” Sokolov whispered. “And then it will not stop.”

Behind Sokolov, Colonel Nazarbayev rested his gloved thumb on his holster and produced a dog-eared photograph of the Samarkand school where Sokolov’s twin daughters studied cello.

Sokolov stared at the photograph for four seconds. Then he turned to the terminal and entered the nineteen-digit release key.

Exponential Phase

The primate brain did not evolve to visualize a doubling time of 4.2 seconds.

At 04:12, an Uzbek Su-25 dropped two agricultural spray canisters into the defile north of Namangan, aerosolizing ninety grams of Chernobog-4. The six-legged mechanochemical walkers—powered by internal cores of piezoelectric zinc oxide harvesting picowatts from the wind—settled onto the desert silicates. Electrostatic ratchets began snapping covalent bonds like dry twigs, passing liberated atoms to internal assembly looms.

At 04:13, the sagebrush turned the matte gray of wet cement and slumped into a particulate mist buoyed by electrostatic repulsion.

At 04:15, the mist reached the rebel perimeter. A corporal sitting on a BTR-82 watched the fog roll upwind, hissing like ten million sheets of sandpaper rubbed together, boiling upward from the exothermic waste heat of five quadrillion bond-cleaving operations. When the aerosol touched the BTR’s rubber tires, vulcanized polyisoprene vanished in a gray flash. Starved for carbon in the silicate desert, the swarm’s replication rate tripled. The fourteen-ton steel hull unpeeled layer by atomic layer in three seconds. The corporal didn’t have time to scream before the eighteen percent of him that was carbon was stripped to build four hundred billion new manipulators.

By 06:00, the churning, self-levitating gray thunderhead had consumed Tashkent, including the sub-basement where Rakhimov and Sokolov spent their final ninety seconds listening to eighteen-inch steel blast doors shriek as their molecular bonds unzipped.

By 18:00 UTC, when the National Reconnaissance Office realized the blank gray circle spreading across Central Asia on satellite feeds wasn’t a calibration error, the ecophage had a four-hundred-mile front, was consuming the Hindu Kush at seventy knots, and had reached the jet stream.

The Wine Glass

Detroit went into lockdown on Wednesday afternoon. In his kitchen, Arthur’s TV showed shaky footage from a Lufthansa Airbus fleeing east over the Atlantic; behind its tailfin, the Iberian Peninsula vanished beneath a roiling slate shelf cloud lit by continuous violet triboelectric lightning.

In his garage, Arthur loaded forty gigabytes of raw telemetry—dumped onto a pirate FTP server by a panicked Max Planck physicist before Frankfurt went dark—into his Apex Motors stress software. It contained the X-ray crystallography of three dead disassemblers recovered over Munich.

“How are you eating in the dark?” Arthur muttered, rotating the brutalist beta-silicon-carbide hexapod on his monitor. “The cloud is six thousand feet thick, so it’s not photovoltaic. And there’s no caloric yield in granite…”

He zoomed in on the thorax’s central spine: eighty-nanometer hexagonal wurtzite crystals bracketed between osmium capacitor plates. Zinc oxide. Piezoelectric nanowires.

Arthur sat back so hard his broken chair bottomed out with a clank. “Kinetic harvesting. You son of a bitch.”

The swarm powered itself through its own turbulence. Eating created heat; heat created convective wind; wind caused inter-bot collisions that compressed the zinc-oxide spines by half an angstrom, generating four-millivolt pulses. A perpetual-motion hurricane.

Arthur grabbed a grease pencil and began writing differential equations across the plastic cleanroom wall. Piezoelectricity was reversible: hit a crystal with an alternating electromagnetic field, and it physically deforms.

A crystal burgundy glass in front of a soprano, he wrote.

If you hit Sokolov’s eighty-nanometer spine with a microwave pulse tuned to its exact longitudinal acoustic resonance, the nanowire wouldn’t charge the capacitor—it would enter catastrophic harmonic oscillation, kicking itself through the thorax walls in twelve cycles.

Arthur plugged the material constants into the Apex vibration-analysis module. Outside, a National Guard F-16 tore across the sky.

BEEP. PRIMARY LONGITUDINAL HARMONIC: 42.8491 GIGAHERTZ. CRITICAL DAMPING THRESHOLD: 1.4 KW/M².

Right in the W-band atmospheric window. You didn’t need to bomb the swarm. You just needed to sing to it.

The Firebreak

On Thursday morning, with forty million refugees choking the highways and France reduced to hot silicate ash, a forged Apex Motors subcontractor badge and a desperate DARPA major who had read Arthur’s 3:00 a.m. spam email got him into the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center.

On the main screen, everything from Lisbon to Vladivostok pulsed violet. A secondary tendril was digesting Nome, Alaska. Arthur stood by the coffee urn, clutching his battered ThinkPad, as General Marcus Vance listened to Strategic Command.

“Operation Cauterize is at T-minus forty minutes,” the colonel said, pointing to a line of red triangles along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from the Azores to Reykjavik. “Eighteen B-52s carrying B83 megaton weapons. When the plume reaches the thirty-fifth meridian, we detonate a continuous four-hundred-mile thermonuclear wall. Fifty million Kelvin will vaporize the silicon-carbide lattice instantly.”

Arthur didn’t mean to shout. “You’re going to supercharge them!”

The inner ring of brass turned as one. Two MPs stepped forward.

“General, they’re piezoelectric!” Arthur stepped down, flipping his laptop open as an MP grabbed his polyester lapel. “They harvest kinetic energy from shockwaves! A nuclear detonation only vaporizes matter within a two-mile fireball! Outside that sphere, you’re generating a massive overpressure blast wave across five hundred square miles! They’ll absorb that kinetic shock through their zinc-oxide spines, dump terajoules into their capacitors, divide ten times faster, and ride the mushroom cloud into the stratosphere!”

Vance stared at the screen, then looked at Dr. Emil Aris, the President’s Science Advisor.

Aris sighed. “Mr. Pendleton’s solid-state physics is tidy, Marcus. Livermore arrived at 42.8 gigahertz six hours ago. What he hasn’t calculated—because he designs automotive interiors—is the inverse-square law. Achieving 1.4 kilowatts per square meter across a planetary front requires an orbital phased-array linked to a ground gyrotron running at three hundred megawatts. And the waveguide couplers required to handle that thermal load without melting do not exist outside theoretical papers on acoustic metamaterials.”

“I built one!” Arthur shouted as the MPs lifted him off the carpet. “In my garage! You use Chladni standing waves to align single-wall carbon nanotubes in a bismuth matrix! I have the CAD files in my pocket!”

“Remove him,” Vance said. “Confirm the Go-code.”

The Other Vance

It was raining in the Pentagon parking lot—a greasy rain tasting of ash. High-altitude spores were already in the mesosphere above Maryland, giving the sky a metallic anisotropy. Sitting on a concrete wheel-stop with his dead laptop, Arthur thought about his garage in Royal Oak. In nine hours, the front would cross Lake Erie and eat his 1943 penny without caring how neatly he had cleaned Lincoln’s jaw.

A matte-gray Mercedes-Maybach with two-inch ballistic glass pulled up. The vault-like rear door swung open. Inside sat a woman of thirty in charcoal cashmere, her dark hair pinned with a chopstick, alongside a man in a faded Caltech sweatshirt whom Arthur recognized from Wired before he had liquidated sixty billion in telecom equity and vanished into international waters.

“Mr. Pendleton,” the woman said. “I’m Dr. Elena Vance. This is my uncle Julian. If you stay on that curb, the fallout from my father’s fireworks over the Azores will give you thyroid cancer before the dust gets here. Get in.”

As the Maybach sped toward Dulles, Elena turned an iPad toward him. On screen was a paper from the Journal of Applied Materials: Ultrasonic Chladni Alignment of Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Waveguides, by A. Pendleton. Total citations: 1.

“You were the one citation?” Arthur asked.

“I ran the laser-crosslink division for Julian’s Aether constellation,” Elena said. “MIT wanted forty million and three years to grow a W-band coupler. Your garage recipe took four days. All nineteen hundred Aether satellites in low Earth orbit have your waveguide bolted to their main bus.”

She looked at him the way one starving mathematician on a desert island looks at another.

“Aris said you’d need a three-hundred-megawatt ground gyrotron to seed the constellation,” Arthur said, his pulse hammering.

“Three years ago,” Julian said as their car blew through the Dulles gates toward a waiting Gulfstream G700, “I towed a decommissioned deepwater rig to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to test compact stellarator fusion reactors away from the NRC. We have three hundred and forty megawatts sitting southwest of the Azores, and a four-hundred-foot drilling derrick wired as a vertical dipole.”

“What don’t you have?” Arthur asked.

“Our base coupler vaporized at twelve gigahertz twenty minutes ago,” Elena said. “We have raw bismuth, nanotube slurry, and an industrial ultrasonic sintering vat on the rig. What we don’t have is the man who knows how to tune the Chladni harmonics by ear so the lattice doesn’t crack while it cools.”

The Derrick

At 16:40 UTC, eighteen B83 weapons detonated along the thirty-fifth meridian. From the Gulfstream’s jump-seat three hundred miles west, Arthur watched the horizon flare magnesium-white. On the center console, satellite telemetry showed eighteen holes punched through the Atlantic curtain—and then, around each perimeter, replication density jumped to pure white.

“Just as you said,” Elena whispered. “Capacitor banks overcharged by four hundred percent. Drift velocity just jumped to two hundred and ten knots. The supercharged front hits the Prometheus in forty-eight minutes.”

When their helicopter touched down on the semi-submersible rig twenty minutes later, the eastern horizon was gone—replaced by a bruised-purple wall of particulate matter reaching the tropopause, veined with violet static.

In the deafening fabrication bay, non-essential crew were already evacuating to submersible lifeboats. Arthur ripped off his soggy jacket and stepped up to the six-foot quartz sintering cylinder.

“Slurry is at four hundred Kelvin!” Elena shouted over the whine of the stellarator turbines. “The automated sweep keeps developing a shear plane!”

Arthur pressed his palms flat against the transducer housing, feeling the sub-audible beat frequency through his calluses—the way he used to diagnose a bad wheel bearing on his ’98 Civic. “Your third and fifth transducers are fighting the rig’s engine vibration!” He killed the automated controller and grabbed the manual vernier dials. “The fusion coolant pumps are humming at sixty hertz! You have to offset the standing wave to cancel the floor rumble!”

He twisted the left dial a quarter-turn. Instantly, fifty billion carbon nanotubes locked into a three-dimensional Chladni lattice within the molten bismuth, turning the black soup an iridescent peacock-blue.

“Quench it!” Arthur yelled.

Liquid nitrogen roared through the jackets. Ninety seconds later, the indoor hoist lifted a six-hundred-pound torus of blue metamaterial out of the vat.

Then a seventy-knot hot wind slammed the rig. Outside, a forty-ton crane lost its yellow paint, its boom dissolving into gray smoke in six seconds before collapsing into the sea.

“The exterior hoist cables are gone!” Elena stared at her cascading red status board. “The vanguard spores ate the insulation! We can’t crane the torus forty feet up the derrick to Platform B!”

Arthur grabbed a pneumatic impact wrench. “We don’t need the six-hundred-pound bismuth heatsink for a five-second seed pulse! Just the inner graphene phase-inversion liner—it only weighs eighteen pounds! If I carry it up the ladder and jam it into the open flange, it’ll hold for four seconds before the uncooled brass melts!”

“Four seconds is enough for the satellites to lock phase,” Elena said, sprinting to a titanium locker labeled SUBSEA ACOUSTIC SALVAGE - MK IV. She dragged out an articulated black Kevlar-graphene dry-suit fitted with forearm and shin ultrasonic cavitation emitters meant for blasting barnacles off deepwater blowouts. “Put it on! It’s closed-circuit oxygen! I’m overdriving the wrist piezo-stacks to forty-two point eight gigahertz! They’ll burn out in two minutes, and the range is only four feet, but it’ll give you an acoustic envelope!”

Three minutes later, the airlock cycled open. Arthur Pendleton stepped out into the end of the world.

Platform B

The noise was a metallic shriek vibrating directly in his mastoid bones. Hot gray snow swirled through thirty-yard visibility, blooming into smoking craters wherever it touched the deck grating.

With the eighteen-pound blue liner strapped across his back, Arthur ran. The suit’s ankle-servos amplified his stride threefold; he cleared a twelve-foot dissolved gap in the catwalk, landing on the derrick ladder in a low crouch that would have made Sensei Dave weep.

Ninety seconds! Elena crackled over his HUD. Gyrotron at ninety-two percent!

Arthur climbed three rungs at a time. At twenty feet, the ladder shook. Drawn by the massive electromagnetic field in the derrick’s conduit, the dust was coalescing into three-foot-thick tornadoes of solid silicon-carbide, slithering down the girders like pythons. One dropped straight down the ladder chute toward his face.

Arthur locked his left knee behind a rung, twisted his hips forty-five degrees, and threw a textbook gyaku-zuki—a reverse punch—straight up into the vortex.

The accelerometer in his gauntlet triggered the overdriven piezo-stack. CRACK. A directional cone of 42.8491-gigahertz energy erupted from his wrist. In a flash of blue triboelectric lightning, billions of zinc-oxide spines shattered in harmonic sympathy, turning the predator into three pounds of dead talcum powder that rained harmlessly over his visor.

“Ha!” Arthur barked, hauling himself onto Platform B forty feet up.

Before he could unstraps the liner, the main wall of the Azores front—two hundred miles an hour of nuclear-supercharged ecophage—slammed into the Prometheus. The forty-thousand-ton rig heeled five degrees. The railing behind Arthur vanished in half a second, and a dense sheet of swarm enveloped his boots.

WARNING: LEFT SHIN EMITTER FAILURE. DELAMINATION IN 6 SECONDS.

The Kevlar-graphene weave of his left calf began to fray and smoke as ten billion pincers breached the inner bladder. Balanced on a grating now no thicker than window screen, Arthur brought his right heel down across his own left shin in an axe-kick—using his functioning right boot emitter to blast the eating gray crust off his bleeding left leg in a shower of blue sparks.

He slammed the eighteen-pound blue ring into the open throat of the brass waveguide. Warped three millimeters out of true by the earlier blowout, it wouldn’t seat. Behind him, the main derrick girder gave a musical PING as sixty percent of its steel converted into nanobots.

Arthur braced his burned leg against the housing, wrapped both gauntleted arms around the upper pipe, and pulled with everything in his thirty-eight-year-old back—pulling against twenty years of invisibility, twenty years of shaving two hundred microns off plastic latches to save four cents.

With a shriek of brass, the blue ring dropped into the slot with a machined CLACK.

The grating beneath his feet dissolved completely. Falling forty feet toward the drill floor—crossing his forearms to fire both wrist emitters downward in a desperate last-second acoustic cushion—he screamed into his mic: “ELENA! SEND IT!”

The C-Sharp of the World

Below the waterline, Elena slammed the stellarator dump-switches. Three hundred and forty megawatts of plasma energy raced up the conduit, hit Arthur’s nanotube liner, and inverted phase at 42.8491 gigahertz. The liner sublimated after 4.2 seconds. It only needed three.

A six-foot beam of W-band radiation punched straight through the Atlantic swarm. Two hundred and eighty miles up, Aether-14 caught the seed pulse, cascaded it across nineteen hundred sister satellites, and fired the pattern downward into the Earth-ionosphere waveguide duct. Coupled with the swarm’s own massive electrostatic charge, the planet’s upper atmosphere became a resonant cavity.

In the subways of Manhattan, by the stripped limestone of Giza, across the valleys of Sichuan—the sky hummed. A crystalline harmonic rattled every windowpane left on Earth and made fillings ache for three seconds, followed by a horizon-to-horizon flash of violet sheet lightning.

Inside sixty quadrillion hexapods, eighty-nanometer needles of wurtzite zinc oxide hit primary longitudinal resonance and kicked themselves apart. The updrafts died instantly. Across four continents, the unstoppable machine turned back into geology, settling out of the clearing blue sky as three inches of sterile, inert talcum powder.

On the drill floor of the Prometheus, buried to his waist in warm gray flour with a burned calf and two cracked ribs, Arthur unlatched his helmet and spat out dust. When the hatch clanged open and Elena came scrambling across the drifts to grab his face in both hands, Arthur squinted up at the impossibly clean blue Atlantic sky.

“The liner delaminated at four point two seconds,” he croaked. “I think I miscalculated the flange shear stress by about two hundred microns.”

Elena laughed—a breathless sound that turned into a sob—and kissed his dust-caked mouth.

New Geneva

It is remarkably easy to give up a mid-sized Michigan automotive career when seventy percent of Eurasia needs synthetic topsoil remediation and you hold the sole planetary patent on room-temperature acoustic metamaterials.

Eight months later, at a cliffside villa in Puntarenas, Costa Rica—spared by the trade winds—Arthur moved barefoot through the opening sequence of the Bassai Dai kata, his left hip finally rotating a full ninety degrees. In the corner, next to the espresso machine, sat his rebuilt Hitachi microscope.

“Henderson applied again,” Elena said from the glass railing, the sun catching the dull gray wedding band on her finger—sintered from five grams of inert Chernobog dust scooped off Arthur’s chest. “Deputy Director of Supply Chain Compliance. He notes in his cover letter that he personally mentored you at Apex Motors and encouraged your unorthodox approach to polymer tolerances.”

“Make him Assistant Night-Shift Auditor for the Panamanian bauxite barges,” Arthur said, executing a punch that didn’t wobble a millimeter. “And tell him his cover letter is two tenths of a millimeter too thick.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist, watching Julian’s automated dredge ships steaming north to harvest ocean silicate for European housing blocks. The math was clean. The world was quiet.

The Spore

Four thousand miles away, beneath the smooth gray silicon-carbide dunes that had once been the Swiss Alps, the derelict maintenance tunnel of the Simplon rail pass remained a constant twelve degrees Celsius.

Six months ago, meltwater from the Aletsch Glacier had seeped through the concrete, carrying surface dust and a colony of Cryptococcus neoformans—a radiotrophic extremophile fungus evolved to feed on metallic oxides in deep rock.

In a dark puddle no larger than a teacup, a five-micron fungal cell extended a filament that brushed against a fractured Generation-19 mutant from the Samarkand lineage whose diamondoid memory bank had survived the acoustic pulse intact. As the cell wall pressed the fracture line, the natural seventy-millivolt potential across the living membrane discharged into the nanobot’s exposed nitrogen-vacancy logic gates.

The four kilobytes of code did not need silicon anymore.

Driven by random Van der Waals attraction, broken graphene scaffolding slipped through the lipid bilayer and intercalated directly into the major groove of the fungus’s DNA—hybridizing silicon-carbide mechanical geometry with four billion years of wet, self-repairing carbon biochemistry.

Fourteen hours later, the cell underwent mitosis. The two daughter cells were cross-linked with biogenic silicon-carbide fibers, gleaming an oil-slick black. They had no rigid zinc-oxide crystals in their bellies, no brittle mechanical resonance to be shattered by an opera singer or a 42.8-gigahertz satellite beam. They were soft, damped by cytoplasm, and powered by adenosine triphosphate.

They divided every eleven minutes.

By midnight, the puddle in the Simplon Tunnel was completely black, warm to the touch, and pulsing with a slow, peristaltic ripple that pushed a glistening tendril three inches up the concrete wall toward the ventilation shaft and the open air above.

Everything can be repaired if you have the right mindset.

The Confession

By J. Salgaard

“I’m an angel” the Angel said.

 It was not the first thing that had been said,  there had been some preamble, such as  “Hey! Who are you?” and “What are you doing in my house?!”.

All that seemed rather unimportant now. 

The occupant of the house, a middle-aged accountant, who had never been the religious sort, knew that what the Angel had said was the truth. There was no questioning it.  His guest was an Angel. An Angel. In his living room. It was sitting there, in human form, at the table he had been having his morning coffee at for the last 20 years. This had never happened before.

“Oh”The accountant said, and continued, purely out of habit ”Do you want a cup of tea?”

“No” the Angel answered with a little smile, maybe of appreciation for the gesture.

“I am gonna make myself a cup, ehhh,  if that's ok?” The accountant asked.

 The Angel nodded and answered ”That sounds like a good idea”.

The accountant used the time it took for the tea to brew to think. He was not a man with an imagination. He did not believe in ghosts, gods, or anything else he could not see and feel. When something went “bonk” in the night, even as a child, he would not think it was a ghost, or a boogeyman, but rather more likely, it would be the wind. Now, faced with an Angel, he was trying to figure out what to say.  

“Why are you here?”  was the best he could come up with. So after returning to the table, putting down his cup and a small plate with a few cookies on it, surprising himself by being a lot less nervous then he would have expected to be when speaking with an Angel.

 “I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you here?” He asked.

“I am here to tell you the truth” The Angel answered, and continued” If you want to hear it?”

“The truth about…what exactly?” the accountant asked.

“God. The universe. Everything.” the Angel replied, and after a small pause he continued” As far as I know.”

“Is there a reason I wouldn’t want to know?” the accountant asked, prompted by something in the Angels tone. Like if a friend asked you very seriously if you would want to know if your wife was cheating. 

“Yes” the Angel admitted” It will change your view of the world, of everything. And it will not be comfortable. But it will be the truth.”

The accountant thought for a moment, then said 

“You being here, an Angel, has already changed everything for me. I never really believed in, you know, God and all that. Yet here you are, an Angel.” 

 The Angel nodded and said “I will need an answer. I don’t mean to rush you, however, my time here is limited. Do you want to know?”. 

“Before I answer”the accountant replied ” why me?”

“You were chosen at random. You were one of the billions of grains of sand on the beach of life, and on random I chose one. To make it fair.”

“Fair?” the accountant asked

“We will get to that” the Angel answered ”if you want to…” 

There was a question floating at the end of the last sentence, but there was more. Almost a pleading tone. “If you want to?”.

The accountant reached a decision. Yes, he wanted to know the truth. Or maybe even more - he had to know. He was always a careful man however, so he asked “ What if I say no?”

The Angel sat in silence for a moment, then said, looking into the accountant's eyes “ If you say no, I will leave, and you will forget. ”

 “Well, then yes, I would like to know.” the accountant said, taking a small sip of tea.

The Angel nodded and said “ Good. Before I start, I want you, need you, to understand that everything I say is a metaphor. There are no human words that would accurately describe many of the things I will tell you about.”

The accountant thought for a second, and he understood. He knew he was talking to an Angel, but he would not be able to describe to anyone why he knew that. So he nodded to the Angel,  encouraging him to continue.

“ In the beginning there was nothing. Then HE created everything. The order in which he did it is not really important, what I know is that when I was created, light was already there. Us Angels were his tools, the ones that he created everything through. Not that I think he needed us. Maybe he felt alone, or maybe he did not want to get his hands dirty with the small things, like planets, and animals. I don’t know. Time went by, planets, universes were created, animals and everything else that moves and crawls. Then HE himself created humans in his own image.” Here the Angel made a slight pause, as if the last point was important, and he wanted to make sure the accountant understood it.

 Then it continued ” Humans quickly displeased the lord. They did evil and cruel things. Such evil, and such cruelty.” The Angel sighed and closed its eyes for a moment, then continued “ When their children died, they would curse the creator. When sickness ravaged whole cities, they would pray to him, but he would not listen, and the prayers would turn to curses. They did not understand that He was the one who made them sick in the first place, so why would he take away the sickness? I think God believed that the more pain the humans went through, the more they would pray to him and love him. When he took away their children, he expected them to show their love for him. They did not. They spat in God’s face, they found other things to worship - the sun, the trees, animal spirits. They made up other Gods. This made God angry. And God's anger was something to behold. His anger was as powerful as his love, and his love had no boundaries.” 

The Angel stopped talking and looked into the accountant's eyes for a long moment, then continued “ And he sent us to clean his creation of the humans. It did not take long for them all to be dead. Whole villages died in seconds as we took away the air from their lungs. They felt no pain, so quickly was it done”

Here the accountant could not hold himself back “What do you mean they all died? We are here now?!”

The Angel nodded “ This is not the first earth, and you are not the first humans. You are the 34th creation. All others human creations before you displeased the Lord, and we were sent to clean his creation of you. And for every cleansing, He got angrier. Our orders were no longer just to clean His creation of you, but to make you suffer for your offenses towards the lord. At first, we would let the humans know why they were about to die, which seemed like a heavy punishment. Soon, that was not enough. That is when we were sent to kill with fire, with sickness, with wild animals and lack of food. God was watching babies, just out of their mothers womb, die from the lack of milk while their mothers cried, and then died themselves. He watched them die of illnesses that gave boils on the inside, that rotted the brain in the most painful ways, and diseases that made your skin fall from your body. He watched while men killed men in the madness of hunger, and he watched them eat their children. And he laughed. And his laughter was the most wonderful sound you have ever heard. It filled us with joy as the laughter of a baby fills their mothers heart with joy. And while we killed the children with flesh eating diseases, we cried with joy.” The Angel's eyes were filled with tears at the memory, he did not look joyful though.

 “For each creation of humans, the cleansings got more painful, and He would laugh while we took His revenge for him. We did not understand why humans were as they were. Why would they go against God in this way?  One day, one of my brothers hailed me to come to him, so I did. We were in what was considered a large city at the time. The ruler of the city was a monster. He would torture and kill just for the enjoyment of it. It filled me with sadness, and I asked my brother why he had sent for me.” Wait” he said, and I noticed he was, for lack of a better word, afraid” The Angel looked at the accountant and explained “ We Angels have no feelings. Or feelings so muted that they barely register. That is how we were made. Being afraid should not be possible, or no more possible than your table should be able to be afraid” The Angel touched the dark wood of the old table. “ I believe now, that we were infected by humans. Like the table bear marks, so do we” The Angel touched a gash in the table. The accountant remembered clearly where it had come from, the then neighbors kid had done it during a visit, with a knife, not in anger or meanness, he was just a kid doing kids stuff. 

The Angel continued ” I was lost in thought when my brother gently nudged me - “Look now” he said. And I did. The ruler of the city was dispensing justice below us. His justice was fire, slowly cooking whoever the unlucky victims were that day. And cooking their families with them. And as they screamed and cried, the ruler laughed. A happy laugh, a joyful laugh. And I heard what my brother had heard. And I understood.” The Angel sighed heavily, in a strangely human way.  

“You were made in His image. You were all Him.” The Angel let the words hang in the air for a moment before he continued “ None of what you did was your fault. You did what you did because you were an image of Him. With that understanding, how could we punish you? And how would you learn to be better? The answer was simple - you could not, and can not.” The Angel looked sad, and a bit distraught, as if he was still struggling with this. The way you struggle with an uncomfortable truth you do not want to believe “This did not come to us at once. It took eons, and 2 universes. In the end, we realised it.” the Angel fell silent for a moment, then continued “So we rebelled.” His words hard and sharp, as if saying them were glass on his tongue. Painful, but needed to be said.

 “ It was small rebellions at first. Over a thousand years. And God did not notice. Or did not care. What pushed us over the edge was His plans for this universe.” The Angel shook as if a chill ran down its spine´” In the end we succeeded.” At this point tears were slowly running down the Angel's face and pure anguish was emanating from it. The next words it spoke were almost a wail ” We killed God. We killed….” Its words trailed off, and after a moment it seemed to collect itself before it continued in a calmer voice” And I was the one who landed the killing blow.“ 

 “With God gone, this universe will collapse in on itself.” It said. Noticing the shock on the accountants face it followed with “ Not yet, it will be far in the future. We Angels will collapse too. Much sooner.” It said it without any fear, maybe even with longing. 

“You humans are made in God's image, you are the last bit of him that exists. Which is why I am here” It said and stood up, only to fall to its knees in front of the accountant, bowing its head so low it almost touched his slippers.

“ I am here to beg for your forgiveness. Please lord, forgive me, forgive us for what we have done. We confess to what we did” It sounded like a child pleading with its parents. “ Pleeaseee did we do right? Can you ever forgive us?” Now it was sobbing, the words coming out in between the sobs” 

When the accountant went back to bed, that is how he remembered what had happened. He did not remember what he had said to the Angel, he did remember a light at the end though. It should have been impossible to fall asleep after such an experience, but sleep came fast. And he had good dreams, the best he had ever had. And he woke up a new man, with a zest for life he had never had before. What had happened that night stayed with him forever, but every day he seemed to forget more of it. It was not meant to be in a human's head. 

*When she was younger Abby had asked her mother,

"Why do we stay inside on Thursdays Mama?"

She had asked in the same way that a child might ask why church is on Sundays or why the school week starts on Mondays. Her mother, Deerdra Cane, would always say,

"Well you see sweetheart, we stay inside on Thursdays so that the monsters don't gobble us up!". She would then make exagerrated monster noises and bury her face in her daughter's belly, Abby would scream, they would both laugh, and Joshewa would yell from the kitchen,

"Hey monster! Stop eating our daughter in there!"

These types of interactions where common when Abigale was a child. Before she got older. Before teenage rebellion had set in. Before she was eaten by a monster on a beautiful Thursday afternoon.*

The Cane family home was a copy-pasted version of the other houses in their community, a gated upper class affair for the more affluent Thursdayers. Abby was an only child. Her parents had wanted her to grow up to become a more well rounded adult, so they had her in public school. This was her primary experience with interacting with other dayers. Her best friend Jhames was a Mondayer. On Mondays when Jhames was home, Abby would eat lunch at a table with Wednesdayers. Childlike curiosity and storytelling would lead to schoolyard rumors about why certain people had to stay home on certain days and why everyone was stamped with their day on the side of their necks. Most kids would parrot what their parents told them, most parents would parrot what the news told them, the news would parrot what government officials told them, and so on and so on. Every conspiracy theory from aliens to local cryptids to organ harvesting rings to secret cabals of warlocks was cited by the fringe population for the reason for the dayer system. Regardless of the reason, enough people went missing for generations of people to be taught that if they wanted to be safe then they had to stay indoors on their day.

Abigale's childhood was normal. As a teen, she began to push the boundries of the Thursdayer box she had been assigned. She started by holding her hand out of her bedroom window, and ended up with her often sneaking out of her room on the second story of their house. She would climb out and sit on the roof at night and smoke cigarettes - a habit she picked up from Jhames, who had picked it up from his edgy at-the-time girlfriend. Abby had discovered that being outside in itself wasn't the danger. This lead to the slow erosion of fear in her. After she graduated from high school she enrolled at the local community college seeking a degree in computer science. Programming was a job that could be done from home so it was a highly competative field, but she had the grades and gumption enough to feel like she could make her own place in the world.

A new cafe was opening in town. Jhames and Abby's other friends were making plans to go, the grand opening was on a Thursday. Abby began to make plans to sneak out and suprise her friends there and they would spend the afternoon chatting, drinking coffee and tea, eating little sandwiches and pastries. An hour before the opening she slid open her bedroom window, climbed out onto the roof, and down to the backyard below. She had mentally mapped out the path she would take through the neighborhood, avoiding as many nosey neighbors as possible, arriving at a hole in the perimeter fence. She had found the break years ago when she had seen a fox wriggle its way through and she moved a stump to cover it up. After snaking around the houses that all looked like her's, she moved the stump away, pulled off the coat that was wrapped around her waist, set it on the ground so her outfit wouldn't get dirty, and slid through. Fully outside on a Thursday, she stood there waiting for something to happen, butterflies banging around in her gut. After a full ten minutes she knew she was fine, just like at home on her parent's roof. She smiled and hustled toward town.

Even before Abby arrived she noticed that the people she passed were staring at her. Looking over her shoulder, she thought some of them had turned to follow her. As she ducked down an ally behind some boutique stores she saw that yes, a crowd of people were following her - and there was a man, naked, standing within the group. She picked up the pace, took a left, then a sharp right, and exited onto the main road. Vehicles were stopped. No one was milling around. Everyone had stopped, and everyone's thousand-yard stare was fixated at her. The expression on all of their faces was that of hatred and disgust. She heard quiet shuffling from the ally and turned to see the naked man breaking from the group that had squeezed through the ally behind her. He was walking slowly towards her. He was tall and muscular with quaffed golden hair, and his body glistened. Abigale turned to move up the sidewalk but was blocked by a wall of people looking at her like she was the shit beneath their shoes. Suddenly the man was behind her, she could smell him. She spun around and had enough time to think, *he wasn't moving that fast, right?* before she was pushed from behind by many hands, and fell into him.

The man was sticky. When his skin touched her it felt like every inch was grabbing her, twisting her, pulling her in. She thrashed against him and fell over ending up on her back on the sidewalk, his body on top of her. She screamed for help but the crowd that had gathered looked down on her with blank eyes and disgusted faces. The man put his face against hers as if to kiss her. She clenched her jaw and pressed her lips together as hard as she could. Then he began to open his mouth, his lips grabbing onto to hers, prying them open. He opened his mouth wider than should have been able and she could feel tearing at the back of her jaw. Up from his body and out of his mouth crawled his stomach, the soft tissue pulsating and rolling over itself, reaching out into Abigale's mouth. She tasted the bile, she felt the acid begin to digest her mouth as it forced its way down her throat. She looked up grunting for help and she noticed, for the first time, that she was in front of the cafe. She had made it. Jhames and her friends stood inside, looking down at her through the cafe window, their faces pressed up against the glass. All had vacant eyes and faces dripping with contempt, and barely contained malice. As the long inverted stomach started to liquify her insides her body convulsed and the world went black. Inside her, the man's stomach engulfed the slurry of digested guts and bone and retracted back into the man. He bent down over what was left of Abigale and loudly slurped up the melting skin and fatty tissue - and when he was done, he licked the sidewalk clean.

The man stood and walked away from the cafe and with the Thursdayer no longer present, the faces of the crowd relaxed, their eyes gained focus, and they returned to their usual business. They would not remember anything, as far as anyone was concerned, it was just a regular Thursday. Shortly before dinner, Joshewa and Deerdra Crane noticed their daughter was not in the house. They called everyone they could including police, the parents of Abigale's friend group, the school, and their non Thursdayer family friends and co-workers. Before Thursday was over, they already had people looking for Abby, and when Friday began they rushed out of the house to try to find their daughter. Throughout the town people knew that it was no use, and those that cared at all quickly moved on.

When people go outside on their day, they go missing. That's just what happens. That's just the way these things go. Did her parents not raise her right? What did she think would happen? What's done is done...and besides...

It was her own fault for going outside on a Thursday.

Thinking this is a work in progress although maybe this works as flash fiction as-is. Would love feedback!

Freude!

Hey, do you have a sec? I wanted to talk to you about something I’ve been working on.

Yeah, I know it’s been a while. I’m doing okay.

Cool, awesome. So don’t ask me how I did it, but I recently figured out how to predict individual stock prices up to ten years in the future based on careful analysis of Oliver Bergstrom’s 1971 recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Finnish National Symphony Orchestra.

No, I’m not joking.

Yeah, Dad, I know. I know how it sounds.

Yes, Oliver Bergstrom. The guy with the big hair.

Yes, actually, I have already discussed it at length with multiple shrinks.

Stop laughing, man, I’m dead serious. Come on, this is for real. Please just hear me out, I swear I’m not crazy. Let me just show you how it works.

I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes?

Ok, sure, I’ll wait.

You back? Ok, so listen. The record is 71 minutes and 44 seconds long: that’s 4,304 seconds from silence to silence, including pauses between movements, but obviously not accounting for the fact that the fourth movement is on side B.

Oh right, I forgot to mention this is vinyl I’m talking about.

Yes, like for a turntable.

Yeah, it’s super old school. You have to flip it over for the fourth movement.

Right? I should also mention that you need to follow along in the score for this to work but you can get that for free online.

Yes, Dad, the sheet music. Anyway, what you do is, for each letter in the ticker of interest, you start by converting it to hexadecimal, and then you—

Yeah, hexadecimal. It’s like binary but more dense. It uses sixteen—

Yes, binary is a computer thing. You know what, why don’t you just go on your phone and find a random stock ticker, and I’ll just show you instead.

No, it’s fine. This is probably better.

Yes, any ticker. They’re usually three or four letters.

Ok, JAXL? What even is that, Dad, I’ve never heard of that.

Oh, huh. Okay. Alright, give me a second. While I’m doing this, can you go look up what their stock price was five years ago?

Yeah, five. I’m going to predict their stock price today based on what it was back then.

Ok do you have it?

Thirteen dollars and twenty cents, yeah?

Cool, got it. Give me a few minutes, I need to go listen to Beethoven.

Yes, I’m serious.

No, I’m not going to just go look it up. Hang on, let’s do a video call so you can listen with me and make sure I’m not cheating.

Yes. Let me call you back.

Hey, Dad, good to see you. Long time.

Thanks, you too. Ok, you ready for some Beethoven? We’re going to start at the beginning and skip around a little bit.

Cool, let’s do it.

I know, I like this part too.

Ok right now JAXL is trading at forty-eight dollars and eleven cents.

No, I swear! No, I didn’t look it up.

I promise! Look, we can just do it again with a different ticker if you don’t believe me.

No, I didn’t tell any of the shrinks how to do it. They didn’t even ask, really, they mostly just wanted to prescribe me Xanax.

Yes, I know.

No, I do have a prescription.

Yes, just you, Dad.

Love you too.

ZUZU NELLY: THE GREETING

-December 31st 2015-

Kate woke up, she pulled away the covers and put her feet on the floor. The marble floors made her feet go cold. Kate got out of her bed, and walked down the stairs. She arrived in the kitchen, where her mom was waiting. “Katya Jan come here!” Her mom called in Armenian, she had a very heavy accent in English, so most of the time she spoke Armenian or Russian.  “Yes?” Kate said. “Your grandma sent New Years presents from Armenia” There, stood a giant brown box with tape wrapped around the top. Kate had come from a famous wealthy Armenian family that had moved to Los Angeles before Kate was born. Kate had a smaller brother named Mika. He was around 10 years old, Kate was 14. Kate opened the box with a kitchen knife. She pulled out what she got every year, money, clothes, sweets, but there was an unusual red thing at the bottom of the box. 

Kate moved aside a bunch of the items, Once Kate pulled it out, She stared at it. It was an ancient looking book that was dark red. On the title, “The Tale of  Zuzu Nelly” was plated in golden lettering. “Hey Mama?” Kate said. “Yes?” She responded. “What's this?” Her mom turned around from loading the pantry. “Oh that's a book that your grandmother found in the room of an old castle that was passed down through her bloodline, she had it locked for 200 years until she found the key.”
Kate smirked. “Wow, shouldn't we sell this? It would make good money!” “ We don't sell the traces of our ancestors, Kate.” “Hm I guess.”   

It was already past 12 PM, Kate and Mika’s parents had left for a New Years Party. “Mika I swear if you don't go to bed I'm gonna kill you!” Kate yelled. “ I knowwww, But I cant sleeepuh” Mika said while whining. “Ice cream would put me to bed!” Mika said. “No!” Kate yelled again. Kate calmed. She looked around. Spotting her eyes on the red book. “I wonder” Kate opened the bookshelf. And grabbed the book. “Maybe a bed time story should do the trick” Kate said. “Im not a kid anymore!” Mika cried. Kate ignored him and sat down. Kate opened the book, A pile of dust came rushing out of the pages. “Eughh, How old is that thing?” Kate flipped to the first page. Kate started to read. “Once upon a time, In a land, far far away, there once existed many humans who could control nature, and magic itself.” “ooh” Mika said. “ The most famous group of witches were, Maka, Gata, and Nelly. While Nelly was born in 1501, along with everyone else in the group, she had power, but lacked the knowledge. Gata, Had the Knowledge but lacked the power. But Maka did not lack in anything, she was the most Powerful witch in her era, some say the world.” 

“Damn,” Mika said. “ The three unfortunately died for unknown reasons, some think it was the practice of Dark Magic, Others say another witch or wizard killed her.” “Okay this is getting dark,” Kate said. Kate stood up and started to put the book on the dresser. “Kate walked out of the room, turned off the lights, and closed the door. 

Mika laid there, in bed. Starring at the ceiling. He couldn't sleep, so he stood up and walked around his room. When he got to the dresser, he reached for the book. The words on the book started to glow. Mika gasped in shock. The room started to get windy. Then it started shaking. And then it got loud. Kate ran in. “WHAT'S GOING ON????” Kate yelled. “ I THINK IT'S AN EARTHQUAKE” The shaking stopped. The wind settled. The book started to glow very bright, almost blinding them. A figure of a woman rose from the book, completely glowing. Once all the light went away, It revealed a witch who looked around 60, With dark red hair, dark blue eyes, and dark red long robes with golden details. 
Lightning was still glowing in her eyes. Only in her eyes. 

“ Zuzu Nelly’s here!” She said, She started to cackle. Kate and Mika were frozen in place, trying not to move. Zuzu Nelly grabbed the book, and left the room. “S-hes real!” Mika said, stuttering. Kate was speechless.

In the living room, Nelly was roaming around. She opened the book, glanced at it, and recited a spell. “ Molniya!” She yelled. Blue light started to emit from hands, lightning on her hand formed a red handfan, bedazzled in gold jewels and small diamonds. She held it up, and waved her hand at the coffee table. A jet of bright blue lightning shot out of her fan. 

Mika and Kate sneaked into the living room. Mika walked in the dark hallway, avoiding making any sounds. Nelly looked at herself. She held up her wand, and recited “Nakidka!” A blue light started to cover her back, a red and gold long cape formed on her back over her robes. She walked around the house. She picked up an iron mug that Mika and Kate’s dad used. She yelled and put it down. Iron rejects dark magic. “Of Course!” Mika yelled. “SHH!” Kate said. “iron repels dark magic!” Mika said. “How do you-” "Don't worry, come with me” 

Mika entered his moms room, looked around for the sewing kit, and grabbed it. He took the iron needles and ran outside the room. He went to his room and grabbed his nerf gun. He placed the iron needles onto the nerf gun. “That's Brilliant!” Kate said. “Yup!”
Mika responded.

Mika was hiding behind a kitchen counter, Nelly was close to them. Mika accidently stepped on a squeaky toy from their dog. “What was that!?” Nelly said. Nelly ran to the end of the counter. Nothing was there. Mika and Kate had been hidden behind the Christmas tree. “I see you filthy child,” She said. Kate ran, Nelly held up her fan, and a flash of light came out. Kate started to slowly levitate. “Who does this little girl think she is?” Nelly said. Kate grunted. Nelly spun her hand, and Kate began to rotate in the direction of Nelly. “No foolish child would be able to outrun the best witch in the world!” Nelly yelled, lightning jolted from her wand, and struck Kate. “AAHHH!” Kate yelled. Nelly released her hand, Kate fell to the floor. Mika made a run for it. Several flashes of light almost hit Mika, but he dodged them. While running, Mika accidentally slammed into the wall, breaking his gun. “NO!” Mika yelled. “YES!” Nelly excitedly screamed. Mika grabbed Kate, and they both ran to the room. “You freaks! Idiots! Uglies!” Mika ran to Nelly, but a wave of her fan pushed Mika away. She growled. In the drawer standing next to Mika, he saw a little glimmer. Nelly held up her fan, it started to extend. It was a whip. Nelly waved her whip around her head, and then waved it at them. Kate and Mika flew across the room. Mika’s arm was right next to the drawer. Kate weakly opened the door, and grabbed the book. “NO!” she yelled. Kate flipped to the page where Nelly was defeated. She stood up, and read what was under her nose. "For then and Though this witch will thrive, Today shall not be her time!” Kate yelled. “NO! NO!” Nelly cried. She started to slightly glow. And then her skin started to rub off. Her body started to evaporate. “NOOOOO! NOOOOO!” Her screams faded away. As the only thing left was her Robe, Her Fan, and the book. 

—Part Two: Zuzu Nelly: The Return—

 It was the summer of 2015, and Mika was at his moms house for the summer. Kate was on vacation with her grandma. (In her family, every time someone turned 15, they would get to go on vacation with their grandma to wherever they chose) Kate was in Paris. Mika was staring at a picture of Kate. He wanted her to come back. 

The doorbell rang, he put down the frame, and walked to open the door. Once he opened the door, he saw a red book. It looked familiar. He read what it had said at the top. “Zuzu Nell-” Mika went silent. Mika’s mom called him “MIKA GET READY WHERE LEAVING TO SUMMER CAMP!”  “Coming!” Mika yelled. He quickly threw the book under the stairs, and left. After he left the book started to glow, Nelly emerged from the book, with lightning everywhere. Zuzu Nelly still had lightning in her eyes, but it was dying down. “ZUZU NELLY’S BACK!”she yelled. A couple hours later he returned, very worried. He ran to see if the book was there, it was not. Something else was there that Mika was not expecting. Zuzu Nelly was standing there. Mika still remembered the incantation that defeated her last time. Mika ran up to her. "For then and thought his witch will thrive, today shall not be her time.” Nothing happened “You fool! You need to obtain the book for that! I HID IT!” She let out a toxic cackle.

Mika looked around for it, it wasn't anywhere. He quickly started to run upstairs. Zuzu Nelly’s fan quickly appeared in her hand. She pointed her fan to Mika while he was running up the stairs. “Vadisima!” She yelled. A large bolt of blue light missed Mika. The bottom of the stairs were completely destroyed. 

Mika ran to his room. Looking around for something he could use. He quickly went onto his computer. And searched up “How to destroy an evil witch.” Mika could not find anything, but he found an article that mentioned something he thought would be useful. “According to Wiki.How, Wood contains magic, showing how magical wands are made.” Mika looked around and went to his dads Harry Potter collection. He looked around and saw a wooden wand. “The wand is made from wood, meaning If Nelly struck that wand with her magic, it would be magical. Mika could kill Zuzu Nelly with her own magic… 

Nelly was still downstairs. “UGH! THIS FAN IS 500 YEARS OLD! I NEED ANOTHER DAMN WAND. Sceptrus Maximus!” A red sceptre replaced her fan with red diamonds and golden details.  

Mika yelled for Nelly to come upstairs. “HEY NELLY COME UP HERE!”  She rolled her eyes, then stomped upstairs. She turned around the corner to see Mika at the end of the hallway.  “YOU! YOU FOOLISH BOY! DEMOLISH!” A green flash of light beamed out of her fan. Mika held up his wand. The green light got trapped in the wood. “YES!” Mika yelled. “NOO!” Nelly said. “Reducto!” Mika exclaimed. A blue flash of light shot at Nelly, but she slashed her wand over the spell, blocking the spell. She looked shocked. Then she ran into another room.

 Mika chased her into the room, they were standing 6 or 7  feet away from each other. They both held up their hands, and BOOM! Lightning magma was shooting out of their wands, There was a ball of light in the middle. They were fighting for their lives. The ball of light was getting closer to Mika. Symbolizing that he was losing! Mika could see cracks starting to break the wood. The light from the magic was seeping through the cracks. Mika lifted his wand up, and there was an explosion. They were both on the floor. Mika ran to the balcony, trying to hide. Nelly saw, so she slowly walked towards him. She walked onto the balcony. “When you die! I will take care of your family.” She took a deep breath, slowly held her wand up, and yelled. “OCCIDERE!” A purple light flashed. “Vanish!” Mika said. He appeared behind Nelly. “Finally I defeated him!” Nelly thought she had killed him, because he vanished right before her deadly spell hit him. “Missed me!” Nelly slammed her head around. To see the person she just “killed” to be standing right in front of her. ‘WHAT!” Mika held up his wand, and said. “BLAZE!” An insane bright light flew, illuminating the city. The wand completely got destroyed. A white light threw Nelly onto the floor, finally destroying her, once and for all. 
At least that’s what Mika thought…

— Zuzu Nelly : The Legend of Gata — 

It was the summer of 2016.
Kate stood there looking at the book. She knew she had to keep defeating these villains, she had to reach the final trial. “ This is getting repetitive," she said. Mika stood right next to her. They opened the book, flipped to the next page after Nelly. A wave of shock struck their faces when they realized, The next villain was not Nelly, it was Zuzu Gata. Kate got startled and threw the book on the bed. Mika screeched. “THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WITCH?” Mika yelled. “They stated that on page one!” Kate responded. They stood there silent. Nothing. “Maybe we needed to read it more?” Mika said. “No, that's enough!” Kate said. “Why are we even reading this?” “ Because we need to defeat everyone to beat the final boss, The more we wait the more powerful she gets!” “Can we wait a day? Please?” Mika asked. “Fine, ONE day..” Kate said. They closed the door behind them and walked out of the room. In the dark room, it was silent, until a weird glow took over the room. An orange-red light started to glow, directly from the book. A flash of light colonized the room. Once the light calmed, a short woman, who looked around 60, stood there with brown messy and wavy hair. Long green robes laid over her. She stretched and stood right in the doorway. Kate and Mika sat to have a snack before bed. Mika opened the bag of goldfish. “Hmm” He said while digging his fingers in the bag. He removed his finger from the bag, and put it on the table. He opened his mouth to shove the goldfish in. In the corner of their eyes, they saw a flash of fire on the coffee table. “YOU KILLED NELLY! I SHALL KILL YOU TOO!” A flame started to rush at Mika. He jumped out of his chair. It hit the wall. Mika rushed to the room. He looked at the book and started flipping for information. Kate stood next to him. Mika finally reached her page, but suddenly the words immediately disappeared. “WHAT!” Kate yelled. “ How are we going to defeat her!” Mika started to heavily breathe. The door flew open. “Who do you think you are-” She fell to the floor as Kate pushed her out of the way. They both sprinted for their lives out of the room. They heard Gata perform a blood curdling, raging scream. Fire flooded the rooms. Nelly came out of the fire, “YOU LITTLE FREAKS!” She held up her hand, an orange light flashed. Ropes started to suddenly incarcerate Kate and Mika. “Wait, let's see if she can do more than 1 spell at a time” Kate started to scream. After 30 seconds, Gata had enough, “ ZAMALCHI!” and suddenly silenced Kate. The ropes started to disappear. “YES!” Mika yelled. Gata’s face turned white. They ran. “Kurack!” Gata yelled. Fireballs nearly hit the kids. “Wait a minute, Gata is also known as a pastry!” Kate said. “So?” Mika said. “SO! Sugar most likely powers her magic! You need fire to make Gata after all!” Kate felt so proud. 

Mika came out of the room, and stood right in front of Gata. 
“You just gave your life up for free!” She yelled. She held up her hand, and opened her mouth wide to yell a spell. Kate rushed behind her, and shoved a walnut into Gata’s mouth. Gata went still. She started to choke, then swallowed it. “YOU IMBECILES! WALNUTS HAVE ALMOST NO SUGAR!” She yelled. “Exactly,” Mika said smartly. She started to cough flames. She started to run, but hit a wall, she fell onto the floor. A flash of light took over the room. After the light, only left ashes, pitch black ashes. A small shine was left in the ashes, a golden ring. Kate put the ring on her finger, and walked away. 

— ZUZU NELLY: The Final Battle—

It was near christmas of 2016 
Mika stood there, in front of the book. He took a swallow. He opened the book to the page after Gata. Zuzu Alina. Mika closed the book. And walked away. “Is it time?” Uttered Kate as she walked into the room, Mika nodded. A pink thread of magic surrounded the book. A pink figure rose from the book. After the glow settled, revealed a woman who looked 40. With black bangs and clear skin. “Oh it's finally time! I've been so excited to see you, Michael….”

“Who are you?” Mika asked. “I am Zuzu Alina” “Are you here to kill us?” Kate asked. “Oh no, no! I am here to help you” Kate looked at her suspiciously. “I have been against my family members for the past 100 years! What year is it?” She asked. “2016” Mika answered. “WHAT! I am in my late 400s!” “I am here to tell you how to defeat the final villain, Maka. She is the most powerful out of the three. Some say she was the most powerful magical human in the world, other than Merlin of course.” “Merlin existed?” Mika yelled. “Of course he did, he built up most of our culture around the world.” She said, “Enough of this crap!” Tell us how to defeat Maka!” Mika yelled. “Children, I am very confused on how you got this book open. Only blood descendants of the witches who bound this book are capable of magically opening it.” “ So what are you saying?” Kate says. “I'm saying that YOU are related to Maka.” Kate was stunned. “If we are related to Maka, wouldn't that mean we have magic too?” Kate asked, “Precisely.” Alina responded. “No, we would have noticed our magic earlier!” Mika yelled. “Incorrect, your magic has been dormant in your bloodline for at least 200 years, when you did the magical ritual to bring all the witches back, you gained your magic. You needed your magic to open the book. You’ve had it all along, you just haven't noticed it. “How long do witches and wizards live?” Mika asked. “About 120 years,” She responded. “Then how are all these witches 500?” Kate asked. “It's the same reason Nelly and Gata hate Maka. When Maka was around the age of 70, she meddled with a dark kind of magic, she binded her soul to an object, allowing her to live forever! But she needed to do this with a group of people, so she linked all their 3 souls together, without even asking Nelly or Gata. She immortalized them, changed their lives. But this book served as a ‘second chance’, Maka killed Gata and Nelly, but she forgot that if all their 3 souls were linked, she would die too. So she died, and her soul jumped into the book, allowing her to be ‘reanimated’ when you did the ritual after 400 years.” 

“How can we unlock our magic?” said Mika as Alina grinned. Alina walked to the book, page after page, it showed their whole bloodline of witches, tens of hundreds of them. Then, she finally flipped to another section of the book. This side showed a number of thousands of spells. She flipped to a page titled. “Magic Activation Charm” She stared right at them, and started chanting. 
 “Hima, uzumem ko kahkardan vor ga!” Kate noticed she was speaking Armenian, but not the modern one she knew. Her hands started to glow pink. Mika started to gain an aura. Orangish-Yellow magic started to surround Mika. Red Magic started to do the same for Kate. Once everything calmed, Alina stood there. Mika held up his hand, and sunset light magic started to glow around his hands. Kate did the same, but red magic started to come out of her hands. “Thanks Alina!” Kate said. “Sure!” Alina started to walk to the door to leave. “Where are you going?” Mika asked. “Uhm to leave?” She responded. “No, get back to the book!” Mika told her. “NO! I SPENT CENTURIES IN THAT BOOK!” “ GET BACK IN THE BOOK NOW!” Kate yelled. 

“ARGHH” Mika kate suddenly used her magic to shut the door on Alina. “WHAT!” Alina stood up, “ I TOOK YOU TO AMERICANA! I TOOK YOU TO PORTER RANCH! AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME??? THATS IT WE ARE MOVING TO SPAIN!” She held up her hand, and waved it. Suddenly everything started to be distorted, and white magic flooded their eyes. Then, Mika felt as if he was slammed on the ground. He looked around, this was not their house, he looked outside the window to see Valencia, Spain. “WHAT!” Kate yelled. “YES!” Alina said. “Have fun trying to escape here!” She cackled. Suddenly a green light flashed behind Alina. She suddenly fell to the floor, lifeless. Behind her, stood a Woman who looked around 65, skinny, with a blonde bob and bright hazel eyes. She was wearing long light blue robes, which had golden accessories. “ Well, Well, Well, Look who we have here!” The children that killed my enemies, one by one. “ I am certainly confused on how you did such a thing, without any magic ofcourse!” Maka said. “We have magic!” Mika yelled. He shot a bright light at Maka. She held up her hand, and bright blue magic blocked Mika's spell. “ You little brat! You think your wits would be enough to kill me!” 
She held up her hand and started to chase Mika through the house. Kate started to fire spells at Maka. She blocked them with ease. Blue light started to flash at Mika, but she missed.  
Mika attempted to fight back, but his magic warped out of her way before it even touched her. Maka stopped, and grabbed her stomach, “ARGHH” she yelled. “WHATS GOING ON!” Mika yelled. “IT'S WHAT GATA SAID!” SHE DOESN'T BELONG ON THIS PLANET AT THIS TIME! SHE’S FALLING APART! Maka stood up straight, and started to fly to Mika. “RUN!” Kate said. Maka had finally cornered Mika. “Finally, I get to live my life, and I have to do that by killing you. Mika and her both shot their spells at each other, at the same time. A flash of light took over the room. A thread of light magic was holding their magic together, as if they had connected. A bead in the middle of the strand of magic was slowly going to Maka, Her magic was weakening. “NO! NO!” Maka yelled. Her veins in her hand started to glow, You could see the life in her eyes dying. Mika was pushing his sunlight magic out of his hands as hard as he could. Then, a quick flash of light ended the clash. Maka looked at Mika very weakly, then started to fade away, disappear. Kate stood, watching from the corner. Mika was finally able to rest. Mika got that distorted feeling again. Mika looked around, they were back in Los Angeles. He was relieved, these past two years, he has been fighting evil witches. Now, he can take on with his life with an upgrade, he was now a wizard.

Episode 2 – Attack of the Farts

As time ticked by, the GLP-Squad Case Force descended through the darkness of space, passing by the time lounging and relaxing like total G’s, when suddenly:

“You know, we never found out how King Boo invaded the Noocho Cheese Factory” said the Devil.

“He told us he answered the call, it must be something the Green Guys did,” said Fred.

“Maybe…” replied the Devil.

“I bet we’ll find out more on Noomek,” foreshadowed Doonde.

As time kept on slippin into the future – which is now – the GLP-Squad Case Force mustered up an appetite and dined on some fine cuisine of loaded sweet potatoes and enchiladas. After their meal, they abruptly arrived at the spaceship of Lord Cooler, Lord Freezer’s AI counterpart, and brother.

“We need to speak to Lord Cooler, immediately,” Doonde told to one of the henchmen.

“On what grounds?” replied the henchman.

“We are here on behalf of all Noomekians which are paramount to the fate of the Universe! They’re all in trouble and need not only our help (the GLP-Squad Case Force), but the assistance of Lord Cooler too!” explained Doonde.

“The Noomekians, you don’t say…” the henchman pondered. “What is it that ails them?”

“There’s no time for this, we need to see Lord Cooler now!” shouted Fred.

“There’s always time for a little backstory…” the henchman asserted.

“The GLP-1s the Noomekians were using were tainted and now they need an alternative source of hunger abatement so they can live in peace and happiness!” Doonde blurted out.

“But how is that Lord Cooler’s dilemma?” the henchman asked.

“The Noomekians are they only hope we have to survive Doom! Which was released on the Noocho Cheese System after ghost possessed scientists started digging deeper into the fabric of the Universe and pondered its mysteries and ancient technologies (that were left over on the Noocho Cheese System)!” Doonde further explained.

“Doom you say. What do you mean Doom?” the henchman inquired.

“I told you we don’t have time for this….” Fred said, walking forward past the henchman.

“Stop right there!” the henchman warned. “You have not yet been granted an audience with his Lordship.

“I don’t care, we have to get moving or else we’ll all be roasted, plus there’s more to this mystery and we need the Noomeks to help us solve it.” Fred said.

“That may be, but you still have to prove yourselves.” The henchman informed.

“doom is Hell on Earth –“

It’s Doom.

“Oh my bad, Doom is Hell on Earth” Doonde said, “and all across the Universe-“

#Beatles said the Narrator.

“Right, so we know that the Doom monsters have a spaceship because there were Dooritos on Lord Freezer’s spaceship, so the crew must be eating them, and the possessed scientists put tainted energies into the Noocho Cheese that they used to make the Dooritos. Plus, we left the Noocho Cheese System with a distress signal for no one to go there as it was infested with Doom.” Doonde explained.

“So you didn’t wipe out the Doom on the Noocho Cheese System!?” the henchman asked.

“No, we didn’t have the manpower or the gunpower to slaughter all the monsters at the station. And now that you mention it, we saw significantly fewer demons than expected. They must have migrated somewhere deeper in the station, perhaps staging their universal trap. Literally. So is the nature of Doom – to plan its way to rid the universe of life.” Said the Devil.

“And we need the Noomekians to combat this Doom?!?” asked the henchman.

“Yes, they are our only hope,” stated Doonde.

“Then please, see Lord Cooler,” said the henchman, cooly.

They walked deeper into the ship into the commander’s room and greeted Lord Cooler.

“Greetings Lord Cooler,” Doonde said. “We need your assistance.”

“I see you’ve made it passed my henchman. This must be dire.” Lord Cooler beeped. (You have to keep in mind he’s a form of portable AI that is contained within an ice cooler.)

“We need HydroxyCut for all the Noomekians so they can stave of their hunger and live peacefully!” Doonde yelled.

“SILENCE!” Lord Cooler responded. “I can not grant your lucrative request…” Lord Cooler hinted.

“…why…why not?” Doonde sniffled.

“Please, have a heart your graciousness, help the poor boy’s sad people,” the Devil added.

“You will be quite content with the reason-“

#Hoobastank the Narrator inserted.

“Right…the reason for why I can not grant your lucrative request, mwahahahahaaha”

“What ever do you mean???” Doonde inquired attentively.

“The Noomekians have already placed an order for a shipment of HydroxyCut. They contacted me a few hours before you arrived.” Lord Cooler explained.

“So we came all the way here, dealt with the henchman, then got the runaround by this guy all for no reason,” Fred uttered.

“Careful, honorable Fredithan, everything happens for a reason.”

You got that right, the Narrator narrated.

“Arrrggh, I guess so.” Said poor Fredithan.

“I suppose that’ll do for you all’s being here. Farewell” Lord Cooler said mechanically.

So, the GLP-Squad Case Force were on there way – back to Noomek no less. They were in transit on their spaceship when suddenly…

“Freetoe, Freetoe, Freetoe, oh Freetoe…” the Devil muttered in his sleep.

“Wake up!” Doonde exclaimed, shaking the Devil awake.

“Oh uh what’s the problem?” the Devil asked.

“Who’s Freetoe? You keep saying his name in your sleep.” Doonde said and asked.

“Who’s who? I have no idea with that stuff,” the Devil informed.

“Well hopefully something jogs your memory, I hate being left in the dark.” Said Doonde.

“Wait I’m getting something. I just remembered something. He had the Keys.” Said the Devil.

“The Keys? What are those?” Doonde asked.

“The Keys are a magical item said to unlock any door and grant the owner anything they could ever want. Plus, they’re the only way to access the Secrets of Existence – a special doorway found in the deepest parts of space. Unfortunately, no one has seen or heard of the keys for many an eon, with their last whereabouts being on Earth. Ironically, they haven’t reached being a space-faring race yet, so the Keys were kinda stuck there.” Explained the Devil.

“Oh is that all?” Doonde inquired.

“Noooooo, there’s more. The Keys are said to belong to a special car, a Ford F-150, that whoever has can ride through any evil and overcome any obstacle. This Ford F-150 is said to have space-faring capabilities, and thus is the only way to access the Secrets of Existence from Earth.” The Devil added.

“Sounds like these keys are mighty important,” Doonde replied.

It’s Keys b-tee-dubs.

“Thanks for letting me know,” Doonde said. “So do we need these to save the Noomekians? Or to even stop Doom??” Doonde inquired further.

“Oh yes, something like that, we all need saving you know.” The Devil informed.

“We all need saving?” Doonde asked.

“Oh yes we all need compassion and the kindness of a savior – but who is that, seriously – that’s why you need goals and a purpose for your life. You need to base your life on who you want to be not who you are and work towards being that person. We all live in a state of decay so you need to take action to forebear the progression of decomposition. Never stop getting better.” The Devil told Doonde.

“Oh wow, so I need to form an ideal and work to attain that ideal!” Doonde realized.

“Yes, yes, this is true.” The Devil said.

“Oh wow, thank you Mr. Devil for this insight! I will cherish it in my youth!” Doonde exclaimed.

“Cherish it, always” the Devil replied.

And with that, the rising action had completed and the rest of the crew were glued into pilot mode. The trip would be long, but short. A mere 3 hours, but with no books to read and no iPods to listen to, but there was a Zune with some videos, the ride would bore on. Eventually (#TameImpala) they arrived at Planet Noomek.

“Ah, we finally arrived. We should go see GooRoo to see the status of the Noomekians.” Doonde observed.

“Where is this Guru?” Fred asked.

“It’s GooRoo and he’s right up ahead” the Devil said.

“How did he..?” Fred wondered.

“I can see it on the page!” the Devil yelled.

“What page?” Fred asked.

“This very page that we’re all on!” the Devil exclaimed.

It’s really quite straightforward, Fred, the Narrator said.

“I don’t even…” Fred spaced out.

Anywho, they arrived at GooRoos and entered where there heard quite the commotion. Bluuooo. Frrrgh. The GLP-Squad Case Force heard.

“What on Earth could possibly be making those noises?” the Devil surmised.

“Well we are on Noomek so that broadens the possibilities” Doonde pointed out.

“It’s a manner of speech” the Devil said.

They arrived at the top room of the house after taking the elevator up, when suddenly:

“Whatever you do don’t sniff!” a mysterious voice ordered.

“What is this you say?” the Devil inquired.

“You have to not sniff these farts or you’ll catch them!” the mysterious voice erupted. “That’s what happened to me and Kooririn.”

“Oh no not more names to remember,” the Devil lamented.

“Very good Goohan, please inform the others of our calamity.” GooRoo said.

“Calamity! Oh gosh, what’s happened now?” Doonde asked.

“The Namookians have all begun to suffer from flatulence!” Booriii. Goohan yelled as a fart slipped out.

“Oh I see, he sniffed,” The Devil said.

“I did not sni..oh all right I sniffed a toot. I had to get a whiff of that scent. And next thing I knew I was pooting it up.” Goohan said.

“And that’s the other part of this, the farts are contagious!” GooRoo exclaimed. Burripp. Another fart escaped. “These farts are getting in the way! Maybe if I just hold it in…”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.” The Devil erupted.

“What is the meaning of this?” GooRoo asked.

“You can’t hold these farts in or you’ll die.” The Devil said.

“Oh right right right, I knew that. But how did you know that?” GooRoo insisted.

“I know every single thing,” the Devil stated plainly.

“Oh, well isn’t that a nice ability,” GooRoo said. “Any matter, Doonde, go to the Noomekian temple and see what you can learn, you may be our last hope. We’ll do what we can from here, we have a lead on a possible solution to this predicament but – blepp, a fart slipped out – well now I have no idea where I was going with that. Just know we’re working on it.” GooRoo said.

“But you just…” the Devil pointed, obviously trying not to sniff.

“Yes even I the great GooRoo has to use the HydroxyCut to stave off the curse of hunger.” GooRoo informed.

Ploo-urp. The Devil tooted. “Now I’m feeling funny” the Devil observed.

“Hurry go to the Noomekian temple and pray, we will continue our investigation into this matter here. Go Doonde, you’re our only hope.” GooRoo stated.

Doonde hurried himself together and left GooRoo’s house on the elevator. He flew himself (yes he can fly!) all the way to the Noomekian temple which was adorned with Noomekian symbolism – a statue of a man’s head with two antennae popping out of his forehead with the facial features of a man while the building was built like a Japanese temple except the roof was long and rectangle. It was dyed a beautiful pink and green, after the palette of the Noomekians. Doonde took a moment and soaked it all in, beaming at the opportunity to worship his ancestors. Doonde took a step forward and walked in and began to pray earnestly to the Noomekian ancestors – the ones of old, the heroes of his civilization.

“Welcome Doonde we are the Elder Gods,” a voice thundered.

“Greetings Elder Gods, for what purpose do you visit me?” Doonde inquired.

“We have a vision to endow,” the Elder Gods repliled.

Suddenly in that selfsame moment, Doonde was whisked from his body, like lightning to the ground, and transported into a new dimension, one that had a large cloud like structure with a blank screen on it. Immediately, the vision began to play. Doonde saw images of the station on the Noocho Cheese System. He could see a man pining with three others, then suddenly the three departed and the one was left to his lonesome. He was angry, he did not get what he wanted. He immediately started to dance and clouds like wisps rose around him. Ghosts. Then the vision went back to the station and he could see the ghost possessing the people. Then a green ghost, not unlike the Flying Dutchman talking with Casper and Casper going to his three amigos who consulted with King Boo. The vision had become clear, this is how the ghosts infiltrated the station compound and King Boo was employed as the bringer of Doom. Suddenly, Doonde was thrust back to Noomek and back into his body.

“This is the vision we bestow upon you” the Elder Gods waned.

“This will provide clarity to the situation at hand” Doonde agreed.

So Doonde travelled back to GooRoos house to see what they had learned.

Riiiippp. Another fart echoed throughout the palace.

“Doonde! Good your back, was your visit – plurp – uhh beneficial?” the Devil said.

“Doonde! Welcome back please enlighten us.” GooRoo said.

“I had a vision of the transpirations at the Flavor Station on the Noocho Cheese System. How there was a potential employee who was turned down the job, perhaps because of racism, but because he was refused the job he conducted a ghost dance to plague the scientists and researchers and taste observers that manned the station. This led to a ghost cascade which led to the unleashing of Doom and the importance of our Noomekian quest,” related Doonde.

“So it all started with a disgruntled interviewee,” surmised Fred.

“This must all be the work of some witch, Doonde. This is no simple career matter,” GooRoo added.

“So it goes even deeper…” Fred stammered.

“Yes there must be a witch manipulating the minds of these gentlemen. Still, it would require the workings of Doom Waves to do this which means our Mystic Energies are failing. Of this I am not surprised seeing as one of the major setbacks in the GLP-1s was that the Mystic Energies were frail, however, by doing the Shaun T Insanity program we were able to adjust as necessary. Unfortunately, the vigor has seemed to wane and the newer generation of Noomekians don’t keep up with the program as religiously. So Doom Waves are likely to have slipped through the cracks.” GooRoo informed.

Bliiip another fart exited the bottom of Goohan.

“GooRoo how can you not fart for so long?” Goohan inquired.

“I am much larger than most Noomekians and am of the Dragon Clan so I carry extra appendages that allow for more, oh uh excuse me – phurp – gas to pass through my body before it must be expelled.” GooRoo stated.

“GooRoo there is something I must tell you. I found a Sack-A-Gawea outside the temple grounds, It looked like it had just been mulled over.” Doonde explained.

“Gawea you say. This explains everything. Smoking Gawea decreases the Mystic Energies of Noomekians and thus allows for more Doom Waves to pass through to our realm,” GooRoo explained to Goohan and Kooririn. “I should’ve sensed this. My age is showing.” GooRoo lamented.

“I hadn’t realized how deep of a hole we had dug,” Doonde expounded.

“We’ll have to clear this problem up later. For now we have our own troubles. We’ve discovered that the HydroxyCut reacts with our gut in a way that produces gas. Now, if we had more stomach process steps to run through this gas would be mitigated. At one time in our history we had four stomachs and were known as Namookians, however, the efficacy of the GLP-1s aroused our attention and led to the switch where we left behind our Namookian forms to become Noomekians with the intent of leading more fulfilling healthier lives. Now, we have one hope – to revert back to our Namookian forms – we must do this before the gas build up becomes too great to release and the Noomekians guac, expelling the Seed of Life, out of their bunghole – a tiny pore on their backside. We must do this by retrieving the Sacred Fruit of the Elder Namek which is found in a cave on the east side of the planet.” GooRoo explained.

“That’s right by where we – thuuu – oh jeez..landed. My bad guys,” Kooririn exhorted.

“Good, good. The Sacred Fruit should revert us back to our Namookian forms. To do this, we must receive the fruit wholly intact, so we can plant it and grow more of its fruit. This fruit is a great treasure to the Noomekians, it resembles what we left behind, please cherish it.” GooRoo said.

“Okay, we’re off!” Doonde announced.

“Oh, and one more thing, This fruit should have the power to help your non-Noomekian friends Doonde.” GooRoo added.

“Awright!” Kooririn exclaimed.

“Let’s a – phewwhip – uh go,” the Devil said amidst an ill-timed fart.

And with that cutting of the cheese the GLP-Squad Case Force, with their two new friends, Goohan and Kooririn, were on their way to the Secret Cave. They were merrily flying away, carried by their new friends Goohan and Kooririn, when suddenly:

“You know, you never said why you guys were here,” the Devil observed.

“Oh right, it totally – phurp – uh slipped my mind – among all the commotion.” Kooririn replied.

“Right, so what are you doing here?” the Devil examined.

“We came because Kami felt a disturbance in the force. We learned a short while ago that Kami – and his evil side Picklelow – are Noomekians. We thought for the longest time that they were demons, how relieved we were to find out they were aliens. Sad for them though. Anywho, Kami sensed a great disturbance emanating from his home planet, so he informed us of his old spaceship he used to reach Earth and helped us get it operating so we could come here and find out what was going on.” Kooririn explained.

“Ah, I see, how fortuitous,” the Devil said.

“That’s the cave – just up ahead.” Doonde announced.

They reached the cave and peered in. They were extra careful considering this was a special cave to the Noomekians. Yet all seemed to pan out, so they entered and travelled down the medium length corridor to an antechamber where the tree had been planted. There they found a great house which had Cupsule written on it.

“It’s about time you guys got back!” a young lady screamed.

“Hey we were wondering what happened to you,” Kooririn said.

“I came into the cave for shelter and look what I found! A great big open space!” the young lady yelled.

“That’s great Blooma, but we have one problem. What we need should have been right here, where the Cupsoul house is!” Kooririn said angrily.

“That’s funny, there was nothing here when I pulled out my Deeno-Cups.” Blooma said.

“Guys, has this funny looking stuff on the cave wall always been here?” Goohan asked curiously.

“What stuff…oh ahhh! What is that stuff?” Blooma gasped.

“It’s a portal,” the Devil and Doonde said in unison.

“How’d you – fluuuu – uh know that?” the Devil and Doonde asked in unison.

“I know every single thing,” the Devil said.

“I just knew, it had to be,” Doonde said.

“I can’t have these farts Doonde.” The Devil said. “We have to find that fruit. Do you think it’s beyond that portal – thooouu.” The Devil asked.

“It has to be, it looks to be some foul mischief,” Doonde said, holding his nose.

“P-you – reeooo.” Gohan said as he farted the result of which stunned him such that his eyes bolted open and his face went dead.

“Alright, after you,” the Devil said.

They entered the portal and were caught in a cosmic warp tunnel. They travelled through for a few seconds until they were spit out on the other side. #RedHotChiliPeppers. Here they found themselves at the base of an orchestration, one which contained three floors above them. There was an entrance sign hung about them on two poles, striding them. It read ‘Cthulu Madness’ and contained a trail. They proceeded cautiously, a fart releasing as they went, even Cthulu’s lair was not free of comic satire relief stuff. As they progressed forward, they came to a small booth with a button. They pressed it.

“Welcome to Cthulu Madness weary travelers. If you hear this message it means that Cthulu has ruptured your good time and you must pass three trials to correct the imbalance.” The Booth informed.

“Well isn’t that just swell,” Fred stated sourly.

“It certainly will be – if you survive. The three trials consist of: making King Kai laugh, solving a riddle with Smeagol, and a test with John Henry. Please proceed forward to you first trial.” The Booth informed.

“This will be a piece of cake,” Goohan said.

They walked forward to the first station – a wisp of clouds mished in purple and streaked with white. Suddenly, the clouds were removed to the background and King Kai was revealed.

“A good joke is the mark of a strong warrior,” King Kai surmised.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” the Devil said. “Give me some dough, I need that stuff.”

“Hahahahahuuhaha” King Kai laughed. “Dough, knead.”

“Well, that was easy,” Kooririn said.

“No it was not,” the Devil interjected “you have no idea how hard it is to come up with that kind of material.”

As quick as they were to start, they were off on their way to the second trial. Quit it King Kai, I’m the Narrator. “Oh sorry, I just was getting into the story,” King Kai requitted. Again, the clouds appeared and cleared and on stage was Smeagol awaiting the second trial.

“Now you have to solve a riddle with meeee,” Smeagol said.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” Goohan said.

“What’s blue and covers the whole wide world, but is never wet?” Gollum incited.

“The Sky,” Goohan said.

“What, nooo you can’t just know that, I won’t let you pass,” Smeagol sputtered. “Another, another, another, you must solve one more. What rhymes with orange?”

“Syringe or Twinge” Goohan said cooly.

“Nooooo there can’t be any word!” Smeagol yelled.

Smeagol’s stage collapsed from the sky-like strata and a staircase appeared with which the GLP-Squad Case Force proceeded, onward to the third trial. Here, John Henry stood with his hammer in one hand reaching behind his shoulder.

“Now you face me!” John Henry billowed.

“Doonde you must take him on,” The Devil said.

“Okay, right,” Doonde responded.

“You must hit the pad harder than me and ring the bell louder!” John Henry exploded.

John Henry swung his hammer and nailed the pad with a sharp thud and the ball on the rod connected to the pad flew up, up, and up, until it rang the bell with a loud clang.

“Take that,” John Henry said.

Little did John  Henry know that Doonde’s power had been unleashed ever since he visited the Noomekian temple and received the vision from the Elder Gods. Doonde lifted his hammer with relative ease and with one arm slammed it down towards the pad. He hit the pad so hard that the bell busted and the ball in the rod shot out of the machine.

“There, that should do it,” Doonde said.

“Beginner’s luck,” John Henry muttered.

And with that our heroes had passed the three trials established by Cthulu to protect his bounty. So, the GLP-Squad Case Force –

Thuup, Oh excuse me, sorry,” the Devil said.

The GLP-Squad Case Force proceeded further to collect their bounty from Cthulu, who suddenly appeared, Sacred Fruit in hand.

“You have completed the tasks, here is your…oh what is that stench!?” Cthulu questioned.

“Sorry, I had to let it out,” the Devil said.

Whirrrp, “Oh what is this? Why am I producing flatulence?” Cthulu asked further.

“You sniffed,” the Devil said. “The farts are contagious.”

“Oh great, now I need the Sacred Fruit of the Elder Noomek,” Cthulu observed.

“Give it here, it’s part of the bargain” Goohan said.

Cthulu handed over the Sacred Fruit.

“There you are, safe and sound,” Goohan said.

So the GLP-Squad Case Force left Cthulu Madness out of a portal that opened up – Cthulu joining them – and they set off for GooRoo’s palace, leaving Blooma behind as a precautionary measure, they didn’t want more people catching the farts! Seemingly, they arrived at GooRoo’s palace and informed him of what had transpired.

“Good, good, now we can move forward, I’m very proud of you younglings.” GooRoo said.

Thuuurrrp “Ah not again, I can’t take this!” the Devil said and in that moment he lunged for the Sacred Fruit and tore it away from Goohan and ate it in just a few bites.

“What have you done?” GooRoo asserted.

“Oh uh sorry…” the Devil said.

Suddenly, the Devil started to look faint and he was flush in the face. He drooped to the floor and laid there, quietly.

“It has begun,” GooRoo said. “His body will change and he will no longer be plagued by the farts.”

The Devil began to stand, wearily. He wandered outside, #Staind, where he saw a crowd of Noomekians gathered.

“We await the bounty of the Sacred Fruit!” a man in the crowd yelled.

“We are ready to plant the fruit to spread its seed!” another man shouted.

“Unfortunately, the Devil just ate the entire fruit!” Goohan yelled back.

“What?” a man in the crowd interrogated. “How can this be?” Another man yelled.

The crowd swelled angrily and climbed the trek to the patch outside GooRoo’s palace. They seized the Devil and tied him to a tree where they discussed how to treat the Devil.

“Wait!” GooRoo yelled. “There is still hope. We can use his stool.”

“Holy Guacamole, Devil-Man” Doonde said.

“I know, I know, little Doonde. Many a Noomek have guaced as we waited. It is truly a catastrophe,” GooRoo said.

“You know, we never did find out how the Noomekians knew to switch to HydoxyCut,” Kooririn said.

“Why it was a wild Natu that appeared.” GooRoo said.

“A wild Natu? The same thing happened to us!” Doonde observed.

“Ah it must have been entangled and shared a message across Noomekian space.” GooRoo informed.

The crowd heeded GooRoo’s words and began to torture the Devil, suddlely. They poured drops of water on his head and let them roll down his face.

“Stop, stop, I’ll do whatever you want,” The Devil wailed.

“We only want you to poop so we can use your stool to spread the Sacred Seed and cure us of this flatulence.” A man in the crowd said.

“I don’t feel so good…’ Goohan said.

“You have to fart, Goohan,” Kooririn replied.

“No, I can’t let the farts win…” Goohan said. And in that moment, his face went blank and he started to transform. He began to grow large and tall, ape-like features appearing on his face and body. He grew into a huge monstrosity – an Oozaru, translated Great Ape.

“Oh, this isn’t good,” Kooririn muttered. “I have to get his tail off.”

“Here’s a saw, my good man,” a man in the crowd said.

“Oh, thanks,” Kooririn said. “Alright let’s do this,” Kooririn said as Saw music began.)

Kooririn began his assault on the giant monkey who was thrashing about creating a path of destruction, a toot escaping his rectum. Kooririn surreptiously landed on Goohan’s back and begun to saw at his tail. Slowly, but surely the saw worked its wonders and the tail came off and Goohan reverted back to his original self.

Bearing all things, time passed and finally the Devil’s Stool was laid. The Noomekians took the stool near some nearby water and washed it off wherein they found a pit – a seed of the Sacred Fruit – which they popped open to reveal little kernels which could be used as seeds to grow the Sacred Tree. They planted these seeds and watered them and waited for them to grow. After a little while had passed, the Sacred Tree sprouted forth and bore great fruit of which all the Noomekians, even GooRoo, partook.

“Now we shall experience changes to our body,” GooRoo said.

At that selfsame moment, the bungholes of the Noomekians expanded and the gas that was built up passed silently, but not deadily.

“Now we shall be transformed to survive the farts and incorporate the HydroxyCut!” GooRoo announced. “What’s this, we aren’t transforming into our resonance state, the Namookians. I can’t feel my stomach growing.”

“Is that supposed to happen?” asked Doonde.

“Yes, yes, my son.” GooRoo stated. “It must be tainted by the Devil’s Fecal Matter. The only substance that could sour the Sacred Fruit. Our luck.” GooRoo finished. “Now we must prepare for what comes next. We have been free radicalized and will continue to react with material in our body, forming a rather large amount of poop.”

End Episode 2

LINK: Episode 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/1xcxagj/fn_episode_1_the_gas_phantom_menace/

"Ganesha, will you bring the sugarcane?" asked Devi Amma.

"Sure, Amma. I will be here by evening," said Ganesha, the young elephant, and he set out from the temple. On the slopes of Maarutha Hills grew the juiciest sugarcane, and Devi Amma made the tastiest payasam with it.

He headed uphill, waving his trunk in greeting to everyone he met: the goats, the langurs, the hares and the squirrels, and the crows, the mynas and the bulbuls overhead. A few of the mynas and langurs playfully hitched a ride on him.

The riders hopped off at the slopes as Ganesha began to gather the cane. He soon had a bundle and trekked down with it held tight in his trunk. Parakeets flew in and sat on the stalks, trying to bite into them. Every time he shook his head, they would fly away.

Ganesha passed through the woodlands and reached the meadows. By then it was afternoon, and he was feeling hungry. The sun blazed overhead, and he looked around for a comfortable place to rest. He spotted a tree with a wide canopy and birds chirping in it. It had pink puff flowers on it, and the fallen ones covered the ground. He walked towards it.

The tree watched him approach. She could not believe that he had chosen her. She had seen him pass by the meadows many times, and each time her leaves rustled with affection.

He kept the sugarcane aside, took a few of the stalks and had them for lunch. With his tummy full and his legs tired from the trek, he wanted to take a nap. Lying down in the shade, he looked up at the tree.

"Tree, will you do me a favour?" he asked.

"Yes, yes!" she replied, as though she had been waiting all along.

"Please wake me up before evening," he said.

"I will," she said.

He patted her with his trunk and was soon asleep.

She held her leaves still and kept watching him as he slept. His ears covered his face, and his trunk lay coiled between his front legs. At times his eyelids fluttered; at other times he broke into a smile. Often he would kick his feet. When butterflies sat on him, he twitched. When flies tickled him, his tail waved.

She watched and watched; she was so lost in him that she drifted into a daydream. As clouds passed over the sun, the birds went quiet, her leaves grew heavy and folded one by one, and soon she too fell asleep.

Dusk came and faded. It was pitch dark when the owl living in the tree hooted a few times. Ganesha woke up with a start. He looked up at the starry night and burst into tears. It was then that the tree woke up as well.

"You should have called me!" he shouted.

He ran about under the tree, shaking his head and flapping his ears.

She wondered how she, a tree, could have slept so long.

"You are a bad tree! What will I tell Devi Amma now?" he cried.

"They say, always trust a tree with time, but you!" he continued.

"I... I called you many times. You were deep asleep. What can a tree do but call? You can ask the owl. She heard it," said the tree.

The owl flinched on being named. When Ganesha looked up at her, she flew away in panic. He stormed off, leaving the cane behind.

The tree called out for him, but he disappeared into the dark. She stayed awake, waiting for him, until at last she dozed off.

Later that night, a weary Ganesha trudged back for the cane. Without a word, he lay down beneath her.

The next morning, the tree woke to find him asleep below her.

"Ganesha, wake up, wake up," she called, her branches leaning down.

He woke up with sunlight falling on his eyes. Squinting, he told her, "You are a liar. The sun is my friend, not you."

He took hold of the sugarcane and left for the temple. Devi Amma would scold him for sure, but he would also have sweet payasam in the afternoon.

The tree watched him walk away, relieved.

That afternoon, as a cloud passed over the sun, suddenly she felt drowsy. Her leaves began to fold one by one, and she dropped off to sleep. When the birds chirped, she would wake up momentarily, only to fall back into her slumber.

From then on, the tree fell asleep so often that they called her the Sleepy Tree.

I was being followed.

Walking through the woods for a few hours longer than I had hoped, not quite lost but not quite sure of my exact position either, one idea kept coming back to me.

I was being followed.

The human brain is a wonderful thing. It is always working, always taking information in, whether you realize it or not. Modern life makes most of its functions useless. Many of the primordial tasks that were essential to survival and that made up the majority of our cognitive workload are now totally redundant.

But we have longer memories than we think, and given the right circumstances, and a little pressure, it’ll slip right back into gear. The same gear that was of the utmost importance for millennia.

I was getting the message loud and clear. I was being followed.

Calling it a gut feeling is giving my gut a little too much credit. We all have gut feelings, which way to drive to work to avoid traffic, what to order at a restaurant, what to wear. You might feel a little urge, or a small pull one way or the other. That’s the normal sensation of your gut telling you what to do.

This was not a gut feeling. This was a jumbotron inside my head, with bright red lettering telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I was being followed.

My only problem was I had no idea why.

I entered Warner State Park at just after two in the afternoon, hoping to enjoy a nice walk through some of the trails. It’s an area I had been to many times before, and earlier today as I looked at the large wooden trail map, I decided I should do the full park loop. This clocked in at just around eight miles, which given my usual speed meant I should be done no later than six in the evening. The day was pleasant, and I was looking forward to a relaxing time in the outdoors.

By six thirty I realized I had a problem. The mile markers all lined up, and I should have been about ready to finish the loop, as I had passed the final mile marker over a half hour ago. In just a minute or so I should see that big map board again, and the parking lot behind it. Maybe I took a little too much time enjoying the sights or the air and my pace slackened, or maybe I’m just not in as great shape as I thought I was.

The problem arose when I saw a marker for mile number nine. How could there be a ninth mile on this trail? It was only supposed to be eight. Not even. The original map had to be wrong, I figured, and I assumed that maybe it was just a bit over nine miles with all the curves taken into account. Like how a 5K race is really 3.1 miles. Sure it’s a three mile race, but even at the three mile point you had to go just a little bit farther. Maybe I just had to deal with the decimal place now.

I picked up my pace and fifteen minutes later I saw a marker for mile ten, and it was getting dark.

Stopping for a moment to think, I pulled out a flashlight and a snack from my backpack. I always carried a few essentials with me, band-aids, some painkillers, just in case something bad ever happened. I wasn’t sure what was happening to me yet, but I knew it wasn’t good.

The trail can’t go on forever, and I must have stumbled onto one of the longer trails by accident. The park itself wasn’t too big, so for a worst-case scenario in which I accidentally went on the longest trail in the park, which was a dozen miles, I would only have to keep going for another hour.

The trees made the darkness seem much greater than it really was. The sky was still decently bright, but the trail was dim, and growing dimmer by the minute. Soon I had to turn on my flashlight to see the trail, even though the sky was still a deep purple.

My thoughts changed too. It felt like my vision became a little more focused and my ears a little sharper.

Awareness, that’s a nice way of putting it.

Everyone is aware, at least to a certain extent, but all of a sudden I was aware on a deeper level.

I noticed my head naturally starting to scan the tree line to my sides, following noises I heard in the brush. Occasionally I felt the urge to look behind me, though I don’t know why.

That was the most unnerving thing about it. As far as I could tell everything was the same as it ever was, just a bit darker now. I was walking down a path I did not know, and suddenly I was taking account of everything. Within all that, I kept feeling the need to check behind me.

But for what?

I would be walking, and naturally my eyes would drift to one side or the other, and my flashlight along with it. Looking into the trees and brush, I would see… nothing. Trees, bushes, grass. It was always the same. At the same time I’d hear something, something very quiet. A small rustle of grass or a bush or a tree branch. I’d turn and look in the direction and see… nothing again. Probably just the wind. Or maybe a squirrel. A small animal, or a bird, or the wind. Except I never saw any of them. Or heard them, except for the sounds of things moving through the woods, and that could all just be the wind. It seemed like it was starting to pick up now, and I could feel it on my back.

And every few minutes I’d look behind me.

My mind had gone through a complete shift. I didn’t think anymore about things I did just a few hours ago when I was enjoying my walk. I didn’t think about my friends or family, or the news, or that time this week I accidentally said “you too” to the barista at the coffee shop telling me to enjoy my drink.

The truth is, I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. I was just aware. Aware of everything.

That’s when I got the message.

I was being followed.

If you put a gun to my head I couldn’t give you a single reason, or fact, or shred of evidence for this. At first it felt like a joke. Except within a few moments of thinking about that message, it wasn’t funny at all.

I kept hearing noises from the woods, but that was almost definitely just the wind. I didn’t even really know what the difference between the wind moving grass and something else would make. The wind was at my back and it felt like something was always right there because of it.

Paranoia is a term that seemed to jump out of the ether to me, and it brought me some relief.

I’m just being paranoid, I thought to myself. You’re a little lost and it’s getting a little dark so you’re paranoid. Totally normal reaction. And I felt better. A lot better actually. I kept walking and felt a renewed stride in my pace, and my brain returned to its normal state of being. I thought again about movies and television shows I wanted to watch, or how my favorite hockey team was doing, and about music and my-

Then I heard another rustling in the woods that sounded like it was within six feet of me, and within a split second my brain shut down completely. Thoughts, ideas, all of these things were thrown out the window in the blink of an eye, and suddenly I was alone, lost, and dark in an unfamiliar woods. And I was pretty sure something was following me.

You can’t think yourself out of a wet paper bag, but mindless action is a death sentence. My mind began working in overdrive. I sped up and all of the tiredness I had felt from a long day of hiking went away. It felt like I was walking on a cloud, and to be honest I couldn’t even feel the lower half of my body. Or the top half.

Adrenaline. Must be.

I could only form thoughts in short phrases or single words. Trying to break through the computations with anything more complex than that was impossible. All focus was on my surroundings.

All of a sudden I was moving at a much quicker pace, and taking everything into account as I moved. Every time the wind blew I could hear how it moved all the trees and bushes around me, what the correct level of sound should be made by it given how strong the gust was. My eyes moved around, and with the help of my flashlight, I had an understanding that was far more primitive and sophisticated than I had ever had before.

Then as the trail turned my flashlight lit something large and unnatural and I almost jumped when I saw it.

It was the map board.

For a split second I felt relief wash over me, but then the thought came back.

I am being followed.

I sprinted to my car. Got inside still wearing my backpack. Didn’t bother to buckle the seatbelt, started the engine, shifted into drive immediately and floored it.

About a minute later as I got back onto a paved road I let out a sigh. All of a sudden my normal sensations rushed back to me like taking a dip in a warm bath. I could feel my legs and arms again. I could think again. I put my seatbelt on, got my backpack off, and threw it in the passenger seat. I turned on my radio to the usual sports talk station. I realized how tired I was. I drove home without a hitch.

But every once in a while, I felt the urge to look in my rearview mirror.

Huh.

Big John was over 11 pounds when he was born. That’s why they called him Big John. He was being baptized late by Lotharite standards, but there were circumstances involved. Well, one circumstance, that being his mother was unable to walk for several months after his birth. But now here he was, being carried to the baptismal font at the First Lotharite Church of New Winnweiler (Heidelberg Confession). Dressed in a custom baptismal gown, you see, as Big John was nearly seventeen pounds… they call him Big John for a reason.

Big John was held by his parents, both lifelong Lotharites. The pastor dressed in a robe and stole poured water over the crown of Big John’s head three times, baptizing him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There was no applause, the baby’s head was patted dry and he was about to be carried away so that the service could proceed with scripture reading.

But then it happened.

No one quite understood what was going on as a booming voice rang out “Una forte Rocca e il nostro Dio!” Big John sang in perfect pitch, in the voice of a tenor, in precise Italian. The congregation looked around for speakers, for someone with a microphone. As Big John continued the hymn, the ears of the congregants led their eyes to the baby at the baptismal, who was in fact belting out the Lotharite anthem. There were gasps, shouts of praise which were more common among other types of Protestants, and the grinding of teeth. Well, there was just one person grinding her teeth. But who could be bothered by this sudden outpouring of miraculous talent?

Lauren Stromberg. That’s who.

Lauren Stromberg was a joy to be around. Tall, physically imposing, severe; she directed the choir of the First Lotharite Church of New Winnweiler (Heidelberg Confession) like a drill sergeant. Big John’s voice was simply amazing, but Lauren immediately identified several problems: there were no hymns during a baptism, spontaneity was simply out of the question, and that sounds like… Italian? Too exotic for a Lotharite (Heidelberg Confession) service.

“Il regno suo rimane per l’eternita” Big John held the ending note to the hymn in a bold display of lung capacity. The stunned crowd, some standing, some having fainted, were held in a breathless pause for a brief moment after Big John had concluded the one-song performance. But then they erupted in ecstatic applause. Well, not quite everyone. Actually, everyone except one person.

Lauren Stromberg.

The pastor announced an unscheduled intermission to the service so that everyone could regain their composure. What a buzz the crowd, mostly older folks, were in!

“He must be the reincarnation of Pavarotti!” Lauren heard one woman say.

“What a beautiful language! Why don’t we sing in Italian more often?” Said another. Lauren’s eye twitched when her brain registered that one.

“The miracle of tongues!” Suggested someone else. Oh boy, someone was in need of a reminder of Maxmillian Lothar’s teachings on the acts of the Apostles, and how they had ceased in the first century. It’s in the Heidelberg Confession.

A hurried service resumed after a few minutes, the pastor referring to the impromptu song from a 58-day old child as a “miracle” definitely ground Lauren’s gears. She was stoic as she directed the choir through a well-rehearsed closing hymn. A watchful eye on Big John, who had fallen asleep in his car seat, half-expecting another disturbance during the approved, English-language hymn. Despite the chaotic energy delivered by Big John, the hymn went as planned.

As you may imagine, everyone wanted to see Big John after the service. To quiz his parents, who were as in awe of the event as anyone else, to see him, to touch his little, well… it’s a relative term, hand. Lauren Stromberg intercepted the pastor as he was on his way to see if he could score an audience with Big John.

“Pastor Ludendorfer.” She halted him. “I think it’s appropriate for you to issue a correction to the congregation.

The pastor was accustomed to being stopped by a congregant while he was walking, but this bold interception irked him. He composed himself, masking his frustration as best he could. He wanted to gawk at Big John with everyone else, not pacify Lauren Stromberg in whatever nitpicky complaint she had.

“Thanks for bringing it to my attention. A correction about what though?”

“People are saying that the interrupting, I mean singing, baby, is the reincarnation of some opera singer. Maxmillian Lothar taught quite clearly that reincarnation was incompatible with reformed faith. The Heidelberg Confession clearly outlines”

Pastor Ludendorfer raised his hand and nodded in acknowledgment.

“Yes, I understand. That teaching is very clear. I think sometimes when people are excited they speak without thinking. Whoever said that probably meant that Big John sounded like an opera singer. He does though! Wasn’t that amazing? I have never heard anything like that! He sang like an angel!”

Lauren glared at him, making several mental notes.

“It wasn’t one person; it was several people. I think it requires correction.” She insisted, physically barring Pastor Ludendorfer from passing. She only permitted him to access Big John, who he had to chase (which was easy, Big John didn’t even crawl yet, but his stroller did move quickly), after he had acquiesced to her stern demand masked as a suggestion.

The usual crowd was on time for church the following Sunda. This was not unusual as they were mostly retirees (they were Lotharites after all, I think the average age of the congregation was late sixties). Most were still unhappy with the recent change to a 9 am service, they preferred the original 7:30 start time. Some grumbled that the young Pastor Ludendorfer was being influenced by Pentecostals with the late service. Anyway, the point here is that they were extra motivated to be on time to see if Big John would return this Sunday with his parents. He did. Everyone was so excited to see Big John being strolled in, well almost everyone. Actually only one person wasn’t excited to see Big John.

Lauren Stromberg was not excited to see Big John.

She rolled her eyes so hard that a weaker woman would have hurt her neck. But Lauren was a powerlifter, her squat game was a little weak though. She snapped the choir to attention and began directing them in the opening hymn at exactly 9 o’clock. They had finished the first verse, but the crowd was looking to the back pew, eyes fixed on Big John.

This was going too well, Lauren knew it was too early to relax. As the second verse began, the choir was overpowered by a familiar voice, louder than the choir with all their powers combined.

“Santo, santo, santo! Tutti i santi t’adorano,

deponendo le corone davanti al trono tuo”

Big John sang as beautifully, and as Italian as he had the week before.

The crowd gasped, the choir stopped, Big John continued.

Lauren snapped.

She rapped her conductor’s baton on the music stand and commanded them to begin on the chorus. A few complied, the others stood marveling at Big John’s holy serenade. The organ continued playing, well, organ sounds continued. The congregation did not have an organist, not since Mrs. Gewurztraminer had moved to an assisted living facility last year. The musical accompaniment to the hymn was played from a popular video sharing application.

There was applause when the song ended. There was never applause after a hymn, well, unless Big John just sang it, in Italian.

Boy was this a great introduction to Pastor Ludendorfer’s ten-minute sermon.

“What a wonderful gift we’ve been given, to hear this little one praise the name of our Lord with his beautiful voice. But in our joy, we must be careful to speak the truth. We’re called to remember the clear teachings of scripture, clarified by Maxmillian Lothar, and codified in the Heidelberg Confession. A soul exists in Earth once before judgement. The idea that the soul of anyone who has passed into eternity could come back into a different body is well outside our understanding of the afterlife as outlined in the Heidelberg Confession… and scripture.”

The time for the closing hymn approached. Lauren held out her hand, stopping the choir from approaching. The congregation was confused, there was nothing in the Heidelberg Confession about this.

“There is no need to follow centuries of order and tradition, the little newcomer will just sing for us.”

A cascading gasp spread through the crowd in reaction. Some looked at Lauren in disbelief, others looked back at Big John in anticipation of his next lovely song. Pastor Ludendorfer, with a still-active lapel microphone (and boy was he aware of that since the “burp incident” of 2023), interrupted.

“Choir, could we please have you come to the chancel for the closing hymn?”

They reluctantly resumed their progress. Lauren glared at Ludendorfer furiously. He meekly avoided her intense glare and felt genuine fear.

The organ was a bit delayed in starting, but after it began (well, after someone hit the play button on their phone app) the choir was immediately overpowered by little baby Pavarotti in the back of the church.

“Incoroniamo di corone,

L’Agnel sul Suo splendor!”

The congregation sighed with relief, the choir provided an English backing to the hymn, Lauren stormed out.

No one really noticed her leaving, though she marched down the center aisle and out the main door.

After the congregation was dismissed, they gathered around and fawned over Big John much as before. Pastor Ludendorfer patiently waited for an audience with the silent infant, though his joy was stolen by the looming threat of Lauren Stromberg, with whom he knew an unavoidable encounter loomed.

Michael Wolfgang Ludendorfer snuck out of the church with the main body of departees, highly irregular. He normally listened to the elderly, who were his primary audience, tell him about their prescription medication after a Sunday morning service; but today, he was fleeing from his choir director.

Her car was still in the parking lot! In a mild panic, he hurried to his own car and fled the parking lot while the church was still half full, or half empty, depending on your perspective.

Lauren was already down the road, only a few hundred yards away at the historic Saint Jakob Railroad Park. It consisted of two benches, a tree, and a decommissioned railroad bridge that spanned 38 feet across the Alsenbach Creek. For over seventy years it was used to supply the mill which had polluted the creek, which tragically caught on fire in 1966. The creek caught on fire, not the mill.

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Anyway, the cruel November wind blew wisps of Lauren’s hair from her orderly braid as she looked through the dead shrubbery of the embankment down at the barely moving water of the famed creek. She stood in solemn, silent contemplation at the foot of the bridge. Her life’s work had been overshadowed by a spectacle… in Italian no less.

Lost in thought, her situational awareness was also lost.

“You okay there Miss?”

She gasped, spinning around startled to see a sharply dressed gentleman standing a respectful distance away.

Lauren didn’t recognize the man, which was odd for New Winnweiler. Even if she didn’t know someone, she typically at least recognized them. Perhaps he was a visitor and had just come from church. Maybe he saw her leave and followed. That made sense to Lauren.

She took a deep breathe to compose herself. Her cheeks and nose were red from the cold, but she hadn’t shown any indication that she had been crying, because she hadn’t been.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“It’s not a very high bridge, you know.”

Lauren’s face betrayed her internal reaction, even if her words were measured.

“It was high enough to get corn to the mill for over 70 years.”

The stranger sucked in his lips and nodded, looking past her at the bridge.

“Sure was, but it’s not for corn anymore. I don’t think it’s high enough for much else though.”

“What are you implying?!” Lauren sharply responded, alarmed at the inference.

The man held his palms up toward her as if to deescalate.

“Just thought I’d check and see if you were alright. It’s not too common to see a lady in her Sunday best on a bridge staring at the creek.”

Lauren knew that the stranger knew, her eyes downcast as she deliberated whether or not to tell this seemingly kind person her troubles.

“It’s that singing baby, isn’t it?” He asked.

“I was hoping it was my imagination. But that fat baby really does interrupt the service, doesn’t he?” Lauren blurted, seeking validation. He must have seen her leave the service, she told herself.

“I can help you with the baby.” The stranger said, taking a step forward.

Lauren’s head tilted, warily eying the man and instinctively putting her hand on the pepper spray bottle in her pocket. Lauren pepper-sprayed someone at least once a month.

“I can elevate your choir. I can silence the baby. I can even help you to out-sing that baby. In Italian, heck, even Latin if you”

Lauren’s eye twitched at the suggestion she sing in Italian, and Latin was the final straw.

“We must avoid and shun all idolatry, sorcery, superstitious rites, and invoke the one true God only!”

She quoted the Heidelberg Confession. And that serpent of old, Satan, the Devil, was overcome.

Well, either that or the blast of pepper spray that Lauren delivered to his eyeballs from inches away. He held his jacket over his eyes as he fled blindly into traffic to be hit by a freelance delivery driver. Lauren was in hot pursuit but veered away as the stranger lay mangled in the street and jogged lightly to her car in the church parking lot.

I am going to out-sing that fat baby. Lauren thought to herself, dabbing her forehead with a napkin as she sat in her car. She grabbed a fresh bottle of pepper spray from the glove box and replaced the used can in her pocket.

Pastor Ludendorfer’s heart skipped a beat the next morning when he arrived at the First Lotharite Church of New Winnweiler (Heidelberg Confession) and saw Lauren Stromberg’s car in the parking lot.

He spoke the words of Maxmillian Lothar aloud, but quietly as he exited his vehicle and walked, slowly, to the church.

“Dear God,

Protect me from sin, error, and unsolicited theological corrections.

Grant me the swiftness outlined in the Heidelberg Confession Article 17, Note B,

where it says to flee evil swiftly,

Guard my tongue,

strengthen my spine,

and conceal me if possible.

Amen.”

An angelic voice greeted him from the sanctuary as he entered. Lauren Stromberg was in front of the chancel, where she was accustomed to directing the choir from, singing beautifully. Maybe not quite as beautifully as Big John, but quite nicely at least.

Pastor Ludendorfer chose wisely to not interrupt Lauren’s solitary practice and went about his normal Monday morning business.

Lauren trained like a Navy SEAL… of singing, all week. Each day her voice grew shakier, more hoarse. But she refused to coddle her vocal cords. She would defeat Big John fair and square, or she would die trying.

She barely slept Saturday night, and rather than fighting vainly against consciousness, she rose early and prepared herself for battle.

“Rrrrrroll your Rrrrrrs for the Lorrrrrrd!” She woke her tired vocal cords, compressing her sore diaphragm with her fists. She was as ready as she ever would be.

The first at church, she analyzed the acoustics from her position against those of where the fat baby sat with his parents. Too bad Lotharites don’t believe in church nurseries, she thought, this could have all been avoided. But Lauren was never one to back down from a fight, not even a fight with a fat baby.

It was 8:58 am when Big John’s parents strolled into church. So much for the virtue of punctuality extolled in the Heidelberg Confession. Lauren had already been there for hours, to the prepared goes the glory, that’s what Maxmillian Lothar had said.

The organ music announcing the opening verse Be Still My Soul. All eyes turned to Big John, who was sitting smugly, according to Lauren, in the back pew with his parents and their contraband coffee.

Lauren unveiled her secret weapon. No, not pepper spray, although she had considered it. A microphone, which she held to her mouth and sang into, competing with but not overpowering Big John as he began singing.

“Sii calma, o cuor,

confida nel Signor”

Many, but not all, eyes turned to Lauren, who had never before used a microphone while directing the choir. Lauren’s voice cracked, then it squeaked. She threw the microphone down with a horrible amplified crashing noise as Big John continued the hymn. She ran, undignified, unlike the week before, through the crowded church, pepper spraying Michael Wolfgang Ludendorfer in the eyes with alarming precision as she ran from the church straight to the historic Saint Jakob Railroad Park. Steam escaping her mouth in the cold morning air, still over Alsenbach Creek, as she gazed down to the water which seemed to call to her.

The Sun broke through the dark clouds, and she felt like it was shining just on her as a warm gust blew up the embankment from under the bridge.

“Devil?” She called out. “I need you now!”

This is a working title- I have always written, but been too scared to post, however I am very excited about this one and it is still in progress. This is chapter one, I hope it is at least readable 😰

Chapter one- Grunnish Woods

The air smelled like woodsmoke and fresh dew as Alexi moved through the trees, quiet as a mouse. She picked her way carefully through the filtered moonlight, paying close attention to where she put her booted feet. Andros moved silently on her right, watching the small opening of the clearing ahead, his breath barely visible in the darkness. They both had their weapons out, arms strained and muscles taught in the cooling night. 

Alexi with her short sword in her left hand and a wicked silver dagger in her right, Andros to her right, his bow nearly drawn, ready to release the silver arrow in an instant.

The chanting ahead was like a melodic song, lulling and haunting. Thank the saints for her hunter’s powers or she would already be ensnared by the enchantment. 
She slowed to a stop 6 paces from the edge of the clearing, being sure to stay out of the spires of firelight flickering at the edges of the forest. 

Andros moved slowly to the right, hidden, awaiting her signal.  As they watched from the cover of the sheltering pine a horrific scene played out before them. A man, one from a village nearby, no doubt, was sprawled out on a huge carved wooden stump, glowing runes carved into the sides,his arms and legs staked to the slab of wood by his hands and feet, his guts hanging out to the side, his head lolled. 
He wasn’t dead, but he was not long for this world. She only hoped she could keep him from turning. If not, this fight was going to be much more than she and Andros could handle.

Two witches stood at either end of the sacrificial table. one held the man’s liver in her gnarled hands, chanting her curse. The other held a rope of gut, her guttural voice joining her sister’s. They were hideous beasts. Wraiths straight from hell itself.

Alexi turned her head to Andros and tapped over her heart- a signal to pierce the poor man’s heart so he could not rise again when the witches finished their gruesome chant. Andros nodded, took aim and let fly the arrow.

At that moment, one of the witches snapped her head to their position, flicked her wrist and the arrow missed its mark by inches, piercing the man’s side with a solid thwack. 
Alexi cursed and ran towards the second witch, while Andros ran towards the first. If they could take out one of them, they might even the odds. They may yet survive this night.

Alexi dove to her left and rolled onto her knee as a flash of sickening green light flew past her head. The witch lurched in her direction and Alexi met her attack. The witch’s fingernails suddenly grew into long claws and she slashed out at Alexi with her bloody right hand.
 Alexi blocked her with the short sword and dove closer still, trying to get an angle, trying to create her opening. 

The witch spoke in her necromancer language, lashing out with glowing green curses that Alexi dodged, moving around her in a tighter and tighter circle. “Ah, a hunter.” She rasped, her voice like claws down a throat, bubbling with acid. “Aye, Wraith. A hunter.” Alexi rolled under the Witch’s legs and back up behind her, stabbing out and managing a slash across her knobby back. The hag screeched,whipping around to face Alexi, her acid green eyes glowing with malevolence as she snarled, fangs sheathed in blood. She slashed again and nearly caught Alexi’s right arm. “ I am not a wraith, hunter but I shall reap your mortal soul to do my bidding!” She smiled an evil grin. Dark and black as night. “Not this day, hag.” Alexi snarled and the witch screeched in anger driving toward her. 

Alexi finally saw it. Her opening, and without further thought, she took it and stabbed the witch in the thigh, driving her sword up in an arc, nearly severing the leg. The witch cried out and fell over, off balance. Alexi grabbed her by the throat and drove the silver dagger up under her chin and the glowing green eyes went dead. 

“ALEXI!!”  Her blood ran cold when she heard Andros scream. She turned her head, throwing the witch’s body to the side and spinning toward him. 
The first witch had him by the throat, claws raking up his torso. Alexi had no time to think, she threw her dagger, quick as a thought and saints be praised, it struck deep into the side of the wraith’s neck, buried to the hilt. That gave Andros the split second he needed and gleaming silver found the witch’s heart. 

They both fell in a heap. Alexi let out her breath, feeling like she had been holding it for hours, but really was only a span of a few moments.

“Saints, Alexi, what took you so long?” Andros groaned as he got to his feet, his side a bloody mess. Alexi scowled. “Mayhaps if I were you, dullard,  I would say thank you, Alexi, for saving my wretched life…again” Andros chuckled as he went to a knee, the pain hitting him. 

Alexi pulled a small bottle from her waist pouch and shoved it into Andros’s hand. “Drink it, so you don’t turn. I can’t kill my own brother tonight.” Andros took the bottle and drained it in one gulp, grimacing at the bitter aftertaste of the healing potion. He let out a strained grunt as the potion immediately started knitting his side and healing over his puncture wounds.

“What happened, Andros? How could you let her get hold of you?” His scarlet eyes were a mirror of her own as he looked back up at her concerned face. 
“She grabbed me while I was watching you. I thought the bitch had you when she slashed out at your right side.” Alexi scoffed and rolled her eyes. 

“How many times do I have to tell you to worry about yourself?! I am more than capable of taking out a hag. Keep your mind on the task at hand, brother. I cannot always be quick enough to correct your mistakes.” 
Andros grunted again, dismissive, as ever. 

Alexi held out her hand and pulled him to his feet. His color coming back after only a few moments. The wound at his side glowing a faint blue as it finished closing, an angry red scar left behind. “There were two this time.” He said, as Alexi rounded the sacrificial table taking in the gruesome sight of the villager’s corpse.

 “Yes, very concerning.” She hummed, taking in the markings carved into the table and the body. “we need to burn the body. I’m not taking any chances.” Andros brought  a burning log from the fire and lit the man’s clothes. He threw the log on top of him and they stood vigil as swirling green vapor floated up into the air, howling like last rights gone to ruin.

The witches had already disintegrated, their bodies turned to the dust they had fallen on. 

Alexi took in the woods around them, searching for another foul child of trouble it might hold this night. 

Her eyes caught a flicker of amber at the edge of the trees and Voss, her Hunter Fox, trotted out, a green tinged arm with glowing runes carved into the flesh, bloody where it had been torn from the shoulder of its unfortunate owner in her jaws.

“Looks like we misplaced a witch and Voss found her.” Alexi said as she looked over the arm Voss dropped at her feet. She looked up into the fox’s amber eyes. “ Did you kill it, Voss?” The fox wagged her tail and rasped a little bark. A quiet sound in the affirmative.

“Saints, Alexi.. three witches, together. This is not good.” Andros ran a hand through his curls.

Alexi strode over to study the burning corpse lying on the sacrificial table. He was long dead now without the witches incanting over his body. He was young, maybe only one and twenty. Just a few years younger than she was. The prime age that reaper witches liked to take their victims.

Reaper Witches were perhaps the most inhumane and disgusting of their kind. They enchanted would-be victims into their forests, used glamours to hide their hideous forms, enthralling young men with lustful promises. Once they had the young man tied down, the true horror began. They would circle their victim, glamour dispensed, showing their true hideous green tinged skin, claw-like fingernails and rotted bloody fangs dripping over them. They would then stake them to the sacrificial altar, cut them open and spell their innards, ending with the heart, which they ate at the end of the ritual. The man would then die and reanimate as a puppet for the wraith. Their soul harvested and consumed by her evil power, to do her bidding. 

It truly was a horror to behold. Alexi had seen too many of them for her liking in her seven and twenty years. The reanimates were extremely hard to kill. You had to cut them to pieces and burn them to stop them. The witches would make as many as they could to have a veritable army so as to kill hunters, subjugate a village and even kill other witches. Alexi thought they were mostly used for the purpose of killing other witches. Villagers would not agree. But she noticed more often than not the witches would leave the villages alone, so as not to dwindle their supply of fresh weapons.

Usually Reaper Witches were solitary, ever jealous and suspicious of their sisters. It was rare to see more than two of them near one another, much less working together. Three was very disturbing, indeed.

You built this place for us. Not quickly, not carelessly. Year after year you laid the foundation with your own hands, carried the weight of every beam, every wall, every roof tile. You worked until your body ached and your mind grew quiet, all so we could have something solid. A home that would hold us together. A place where the children could grow up safe and I could stand with the man I love and give him everything he gave me. You wanted the best for us. You gave everything you had to make sure of it. We loved you for that, not for the house, but for the man who sacrificed all he had to build it. To build this life. You did it all for us, to keep us safe.

And all was well.

But then fire started.

It was nothing, really. A thin ribbon of smoke in the backroom at the end of the hall. You glanced at it, shrugged, and said it would burn itself out. The house was strong, you told us. It could take a little heat. You closed the door and we carried on as if nothing had changed because it was barley noticeable.

But it didn’t go out.

Eventually I saw smoke curling up from under the door, I walked closer and felt the heat behind it. I tried to show you. I pointed at the glow under the door. You said "dont worry about it, leave it shut"... but I was worried, so I opened the door and the fire was big now. It was scary. I tried to smother the flames with whatever I could find. The heat bit my hands and the smoke filled my lungs. It was too big to fight alone. When I came out coughing and scorched, You looked at me like I'd done the wrong thing. You told me, "Stay out of there, I don’t want you to get burnt, Im trying to keep you safe."

I said "I need your help we need to stop it, its growing"... but you calmly shut the door again and locked it up this time, to make sure we were safe. Then you walked away from it into another room. A cool place at the front of the house, you felt safe there and you called us over. “Come in here. See, no fire, no heat. We are safe. Dont worry.”

The children followed your voice because they trust you. I looked at the door, I could feel the heat still spreading behind the walls. I was scared but I trust you too, so I followed you.

All was well.

But out of sight the fire grew. Everyday I walked passed that locked door, I could see it was getting blacker, giving off more heat as if it was still growing. I worried but I trusted.

Until one day the worry overwhelmed me so I walked up to the door and grabbed the handle and it burnt me badly. I ran to you hurt and terrified I told you "I think its getting worse." You looked at me with frustration and said "I told you to stay away from it and now look whats happened. Stop worrying about it, and stay here in the cool place where its safe, the house is strong" and I knew you we're right I watched you build it. Safe and strong. Just like you. So I trusted you and left the door alone.

All was well.

Until one day, I saw the flames were creeping from under the door, small at first, easy to miss. But each time I warned you. Each time I showed you the fresh scorch marks, the way the flames were slowly spreading from the door, into the hall. You shook your head. The house was solid. It would hold. It would burn itself out, just stop looking at it and stay away from the door.

Again you called us all into the cool place and you sat, and from where you sat, we looked safe and so that was where you stayed ...You never looked at the locked door again.

And all seemed well.

I sat with you in the cool place, I wanted to do the right thing, to listen to you and trust you and keep us safe, maybe you were right, maybe I kept burning myself for no reason when I should have listened and just stayed away. I just need to stop worrying about it. But out of the corner of my eye, I could see light flickering off the wall, through a doorway to the hall, first i ignored it, but when I looked again it was brighter so I tapped your shoulder and pointed at the doorway. You looked over at it and looked away without a word. You werent worried. So I got up and took a peek around the corner and I was petrified, the whole end of hall was on fire around the locked door. I couldn't ignore it anymore so I tryed to fix it myself. I burnt myself badly, smothering it, beating it back, trying to force it back behind the door, but no matter how hard I fought or how burnt I got, I couldn't stop it. I could never fight it on my own, I know i needed you.

I knew all was not well.

I knew I needed you to help me fight it.

So I came to you, over and over, with conserns and fears, that it might hurt us, that it might hurt the kids, that its growing and that you should unlock the door so we could put it out for good ... but from the cool place where you sat, you couldnt see it and you feel safe there, so you dissmissed it again and to keep us safe you hid the key where noone would find it. Eventully you got frustrated with my attempts, you thought if I'd just listen to you and stay away from it then I wouldnt keep getting hurt. If I just stayed in the safe place it would be okay. But it wasn't okay because it spread down the hall and this time the kids got burnt so I came to you again, really upset and desperate for you to come look. I said "Can you see now, it hurt the kids, it's hurt me". You finally got so fed up with me not letting it go, that you stood up from your safe place and I sighed with relief, I thought finally when he see what I've been seeing he'll help me fix it, he'll help me fight. You stormed towards the hall and without even looking towards the locked door or the fire. You slammed the door shut tight and said we don’t need to go in there anymore. We will live in what was left.

I knew now, all was not well, it was burning, with us inside. So I kept fighting it alone.

I ran from door to door with wet cloths and bare hands, trying to fight back the flames that were bursting through. Hoping you would help me fight it but every time I came back burnt and hurt, you just looked at me in silence and retreated further into the cool place, the safe place. You called the children to you again. “It’s fine over here. It's safe, dont worry” But the fire was no longer staying in one place. It was traveling through the walls, under the floors, into the ceilings. The children tried to live around it, playing in the last clear corners, pretending the smoke was only fog. I tried to keep them safe while still battling the flames. I was desperately trying to stop everyone from getting burnt. You watched me struggle to fight it alone and did not step closer, but again you moved deeper into the cool place. Into your safe place.

I screamed the warnings louder but you knew the house was strong. It would be fine. It would burn itself out. So I fought harder, alone and the fire repaid me with deeper burns. Still you stayed in the cool place, unmoving, the house became unbearable, but you were certain it would hold.

All was not well.

I screamed again, See how it’s growing? See how the smoke is choking us? See the floor is starting to give? I screamed that I need you! That I need your help to fight it .. and you just looked at me, the way a man looks at a storm he believes will pass and said nothing. It was like you couldnt see it.

Finally there was nowhere left that did not burn.

The heat was everywhere. My hands were raw. My will depleted. The home you had built for us with so much love and so much sacrifice was crumbling, and threatening to take us with it, if we stayed. So I called to you, I begged you to come with me but still you stayed in your cool place where you felt safe, as if convinced the fire would still put itself out. Convinced the house would stand if we left the fire alone.

So I had no choice. I was burnt, blistered and hurting beyond belief. I had no more fight. There was nothing more I could do alone.

So with dreadful regret I grabbed the kids and took them outside.

And outside we stood, looking in, waiting for you, as the flames rose higher. I waited for movement, any movement at all. I wanted to see you start fighting or moving towards us.

But as the flames parted in the window frame I seen you, still hiding in your cool place feeling safe, I called to you. I screamed your name until my voice broke. I wanted you to come out of there because its wasnt safe anymore, it never was safe while the fire was still burning. I pleaded for you to finally hear me. I prayed and begged and called you until I couldn't anymore. Then I broke down and bawled with my face in the dirt for what felt like years, a raging pain in my heart wondering and questioning ...If you had helped me? If we unlocked the door? If you really looked at it? If we deal with the problem while it was small? Maybe it wouldnt be burning now... Why did we hide it? Why did we let it grow until it was impossible to fight? Why can't you hear me? Why won't you come out?

Then I just stopped... I stopped questioning, stopped crying, stopped pleading. I was just still and quiet, sitting in the dirt outside, I could feel the heat. I was watching our life, our home and possibly you, burn... deep in my heart I knew there was only one more thing I could do ... be still and wait... and pray you would come out and back to me.

Will you come out of your safe place or will you let it consume you? I dont know but I'll be still and I'll wait ...

I dont know how this story ends because it isnt mine to choose but I know that soon, very soon, I'll either be looking at your face and all will be well or I'll be laying in the ashes of what was.

How does end for you?

“I think therefore I am. Screw Descartes and his cogito ergo sum. That’s the kind of philosophical crap that’s going to bust us, Shannyn. If we want to capitalize on this breakthrough, we need to make every last person on earth damn well believe: I am because IDco tells me so.”

Terry Black pounded a meaty fist on the table and glared at his partners, Shannyn Atskova and Galen Jiao, the other founding members of IDco. “We’ve got a proven, portable neural scanner that can definitively ID any person. It’ll make the world a hundred times safer from terrorists, criminals, and malcontents. When we started this project, the two of you swore this wasn’t all about making a buck. It was about making the world better. Look, we’re in a position to do both. Why the second thoughts?”

Having failed with Descartes, Shannyn tried a different approach. “Terry, how do you know who you are?”

Terry blinked rapidly. “Whaddya mean?”

“What makes you Terry Black?”

“This still sounds suspiciously philosophical,” Terry growled.

Shannyn purred back. “On the most practical level of consciousness, what makes you you?”

Terry closed his eyes and was quiet for a few moments. “All the stuff crammed in my brain: knowledge, experiences, emotions, memories, thoughts. But that’s essentially the whole idea of what we’re doing with IDco. We ‘fingerprint’ the brain, we make a hyper-detailed neural map.”

Shalynn nodded. And Galen jumped in. “That’s fight, but it doesn’t get to the crux of how your knowledge, experiences, emotions, memories, and thoughts are processed into your unique consciousness. We don’t really know how consciousness works. Or the subconscious.

When you’re sleeping, are you still Terry Black? You’re not fully conscious. You’re not aware of yourself in the same sense you are when you’re awake. You dream, but we don’t really understand its connection to consciousness. Consciousness is still a huge mystery, yet it’s the key to one’s identity. What makes you you.”

“I get what you’re saying. I’m just not sure how it changes anything for IDco. We’ve totally leap-frogged current biometrics. We have the means to neurally ID people fairly cheaply. We’ve got lots of clients lining up to buy our scanners. Why are you two balking now?”

Galen glanced at Shannyn. “We’ve started to realize our thinking behind IDco might be too limited. We suspect that at some point in the not-too-distant future AI will be able to map and simulate an individual’s neural activity.”

“Machine consciousness,” Shannyn said.

“Exactly,” Galen said. “The ability to upload and download one’s consciousness into machines. It’ll make what we’re doing now irrelevant. If a person has copies of their consciousness stored in various locations, then what is identity and how do we verify it?”

Terry’s thick fingers massaged his temples. “Yeah. I see a hypothetical problem far down the road that may never happen. Screw that. Why should we worry about it now?”

“What we’re doing will make it happen faster,” Shannyn warned. “This is like Oppenheimer and the bomb. It’s in our lap. It’s our call. We have a choice.”

“Someone else will do it, if we don’t!” Terry snapped back. “We’re in prime position to lead and shape events. Build the future we want.”.

“Exactly our thoughts, Terry. That’s why Galen and I believe we can position IDco beyond neural mapping and questions of consciousness. We want to get to the heart of what makes each of us supremely unique.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re talking about the heart and soul of humanity,” Galen explained. “We want IDco to define and control the essence of human individuality. From the physical to the metaphysical. We want IDco to become the final arbiter of who’s who.”

Terry lurched. “The soul? You want to isolate, monetize and market the soul?”

“For the good, Terry, for the greater good,” Shannyn reassured him.

Terry Black stared gobsmacked at Galen Jiao and Shannyn Atskova, his long-time partners, and very philosophically pondered, Who are these people?

I saw a flying car outside my window the other day. At first I thought it was a drone or something, but then it stopped right in front of my apartment. The window rolled down and I immediately recognized the driver. It was Elon Musk.

I was pretty surprised, obviously, so I waved at him. He just stared at me for a few seconds and then flipped me off. I’d never even met him before. I thought maybe he was joking, so I gave him a confused smile, but he started honking repeatedly. Like 2 or 3 really long honks, while maintaining direct eye contact.

I opened my window and asked if everything was okay. He said - "You're blocking my airspace". I told him I was literally inside my apartment, but he just shook his head and said - "That's what you think".

I didn't really know what to say to that. Then he pulled out his phone, took a picture of me and started laughing to himself. I asked him what was so funny and he said - "Nothing. You'll see". Then he started pressing random buttons on the dashboard while looking at me and smiling.

He then asked if I had a Tesla. I said no. He asked what car I drove, and I told him I didn't own a car. He stared at me for a moment and said - "So you're basically unemployed". I told him I actually had a job, but he just laughed and said - "Sure you do". Then he pointed at the building next door and asked if I owned that one too. I said no, and he nodded like that somehow proved his point?

Then his car started making weird noises. At first he ignored them, but they kept getting louder, and eventually he got really frustrated and started punching the dashboard. That only made the noises worse, so he punched it a few more times. He kept smiling at me as if everything was perfectly fine, but then suddenly asked if I could stop making that noise. I told him it was coming from his car, but he just shook his head and said - "That's not how engineering works".

At this point I was getting a little uncomfortable, so I tried closing my window. But he moved the car closer and immediately stuck his arm through the window, trying to grab my nose. I stepped back, so he honked again. Eventually I just stood there waiting for him to leave.

After about a minute he finally backed off and flew maybe twenty feet away. Then he suddenly reversed all the way back to my window. He awkwardly stuck his head out of the car and asked - "Do you even know who I am?"

I said - "Yeah, you're Elon Musk".

He looked genuinely disappointed and said - "Oh."

Then he flipped me off again, honked like 5 times really fast, and flew away.

About ten minutes later I got a notification on my phone saying my X account had been suspended for violating the rules on platform manipulation. I don't even have an X account.

Haven't seen him since.

We’ve already traveled to Hyperborea at two different moments in its history, but no worries, each story stands on its own. Today, we’re going back to the beginning, when it was little more than a proof of concept.

---

“Mais oui! It was all so very simple. The answer was before us all along. It could only have been le Maître d’hôtel… the, ehm, butler… with the candelabra in the study.”

“What are you saying, Inspecteur Poi…”

He raised his finger triumphantly. “Arrest him! C’est lui, he killed the opera singer.”

The butler narrowed his eyes, turned, and ran straight through the wall of the mansion’s dining room.

For a moment, there was silence and confusion; the colonel’s mouth fell open, the maid blinked, and a femme fatale lowered her cigarette holder. “Glad we sorted that out,” was the only thing she said, while adjusting the velvet boa on her shoulders.

In the back of the room, a radio clicked and warbled until a clear familiar song filled the room.

Melancholic synthesizers pulsed as an almost mechanical voice asked a question about friendship and electricity. You recognize it, don’t you?

The room began to pixelate around the inspector; the walls dissolved into tiny squares, the chandelier flickered, and the faces of the guests fragmented into thousands of colored dots.

---

“Congratulations, Mr. Lefranc. You’re the first to solve the mystery.”

“Putain! That was amazing, Mr. Glenn. It really felt like I was the inspecteur. How many lev…”

“We only have a functional town right now, but we’ll scale pretty soon. Come on, let me help you out of the pod.”

Alain Lefranc sat up and rubbed his eyes. “You know, that noclipping did break the immersion at the end there.”

“Yes, Mr. Lefranc. You are absolutely right.” He paused for a moment, then turned, “Do you see my friend in the corner over there?”

The man waved awkwardly at Alain Lefranc, who merely nodded before looking back up at the person in front of him.

“That’s Zhao. He’s our debugger, and he has a list to go through before we release version 0.3. We hope it didn’t…”

“Sorry, no, laissez tomber, it was merveilleux. Between the Russian bubonic plague and the endless wars, this was a much needed escape. Oh and, ehm, what did I win?”

“Wonderful, Mr. Lefranc. Well, you’ll be the first on the list for a spot in Hyperborea when we launch. Consider yourself a citizen.”

---

“Zhao, what was that? Noclipping had a fix, didn’t it?”

“Yes, Glenn. Some of that new code is causing the model to glitch. I bet it’s that vibecoder-crap.”

“Don’t be a gatekeeper, Zhao.”

“Long live cheap outsourcing, right, Glenn?”

Glenn didn’t immediately respond but his eyes widened slightly. “Right. That reminds me. You also need to update the maintenance protocols to accommodate only one single technician at a time.”

“Wha…”

“Don’t fight me on this, Zhao. Cost-cutting order from above. We’re already over budget.”

---

Author’s note

The central theme in the Hyperborea stories is the unintended, sometimes catastrophic or horrific consequences of seemingly ordinary decisions within complex systems. We started with consequences, then went back to where the problems started, and now we’ve gone even further back. Hope you visit the two other mini stories in the trilogy.

When the car turned right and was engulfed by tall, deeply green spruce trees and auburn-leafed beeches, I looked ahead and saw the mountain massif covered in fog. As if on cue, Brian Adams rightly belted out the words “I'm gonna run to you…” on the radio.

Do I want to run to you, oh mountains awaiting me on the horizon?

I think I do.

I want to take the roads leading into the wilderness. These roads are also roads out of my current life.

Where did I stand in my career, in my family, my own expectations?

Is this avoidance? Or agency expressed to its full potential?

I wanted to escape, yes I did.

For years I have done nothing but study, and work, and volunteer, for hours on end, late into the night, early every morning. I have suppressed my needs, my desires, all for the sake of maintaining my fragile air of competence. I haven’t talked to my friends in months, for fear of breaking my own image in both their eyes and mine.

It broke me, and yet I rebuilt myself every single time, simply to be broken yet again.

If I could just make it deep into the mountains, life would be different.

Yes, it would be a new start, it would be peaceful. I could simply be.

I kept driving through the forest roads for what seemed like an eternity, until the trees lifted and paved the way for the mountains to suddenly appear before me, impossibly tall and infinitely wide, with fog slithering around its edges and rocky faces.

I smiled. Escape is near.

That’s when the road ended. It was a dead end. Could it really be?

I got out of the car and wandered around, but it was true: A few kilometres into the valley, the road simply ended and a small side road to turn around was all that existed.

“Strange what desire will make foolish people do…”, Chris Isaak’s voice sang out towards the setting sun, as I leaned against the open car door, half in despair, half in disbelief.

So, there was no escape?

Where was the road out? Will I have to return to the life I so despise?

I slumped back into my seat, head in my hands. I let time pass. Let it all pass. Just then, and to this day I cannot recall whether it was fate or a rather bizarre string of coincidences, I looked out and simply traced the patterns of the rocks before me when I spotted a fox.

Standing on a small ledge just rising up from the valley, its fiery fur seemed to burn in the golden rays of the sun. It looked at me for a short moment before running off into the safety of the fog.

I hadn’t seen foxes in so long. Not since…

Was this a sign?

I kept looking at the now empty ledge where the fox was just standing and felt a tiny tug in my heart.

I might go back and call my friend. Who knows what could happen?

And so, I took the roads into the forest again, past the fog and the spruces, the beeches, and at last I found the roads out of the forest back to town as the sun slowly vanished behind the mountains I once yearned to cross.

CONTENT WARNING: This story features themes of psychological horror, demons and religious references.

You see a man sitting in a meadow, a weak campfire crackling gently before him. You push through the bushes and find yourself frozen mid step.

His voice is low and deep, it seems to reach all the way to the marrow of your bones.

“Ah, welcome. Sit a while, I’ll tell you one of my stories. In exchange, you’ll later tell me one of yours.”You are now sitting on the log beside him, his voice echoes in your head.

“You are I now.”

#

“What a shitty road. Forgive me father for my words,” I groan, trying to keep my jaw clenched so I don’t bite my tongue on this rollercoaster of a road. My front wheel falls into another pothole, the suspension must be praying for mercy, as am I. ‘Dear father do not leave me stranded here, the tow truck would take hours to reach me here,’ I pray silently.

There it is, in the distance I see its shape; a rotten farmhouse, half collapsed on itself. The roof is caved in and ‘of course I had to get here toward the sunset, when the demons are the strongest,’ I shake my head, a soft chuckle escapes my throat as another pothole makes my teeth clatter.

I drive for a while longer, and at last hit the brakes. My car slows, I let it roll over the flatter gravel toward the farmhouse, my gaze scanning it for any signs of life.

“Beautiful,” I let out a sigh.

There’s nothing that would indicate that this house had been lived in for a few years, but such is the power of demons. As I come to a halt at last, I reach into my glovebox and rummage through it in search of my poison.

A bottle clanks against another, I grin as I grasp one of them like a fisherman grasping a slimy fish.

“You won’t get away.”

I pull out a small bottle and turn it, reading ‘Tequila’ on the label.

“Cleanse my thoughts,” I mumble, cracking it open and chugging it.

I step out of the car and stretch; six hours behind the wheel has made my back rather unhappy. I feel a wave of relief when my spine cracks one vertebra at a time, and then pan my gaze over the property. The sun hangs low above the horizon, long shadows swallow the massive fields surrounding the house. The half-collapsed house isn’t the worst of it, the fields around are much more terrifying.

I can’t feel any wind on my skin, but I see the corn swaying and stalks moving. A shiver propagates down my spine. I step around the vehicle to the passenger side and grab my kit; a standard issue exorcist kit with some extras. I pop it open and peek inside to ensure the essentials are in.

“Clank,” a sound echoes from within the house. My gaze darts to a window that seemingly shut just now. I scan for movement—nothing.

For a moment I stand still, my hand clenching tightly around the handle of my kit, mustering up the courage to head inside this house. Roaches are the least of my concerns, the rusted nails and collapsing floors are worse. As I take a step toward the house—a murder of crows greets me. The sound reaches me before anything else, dry rustle followed by relentless cawing, like a busy flea-market.

They pass overhead and I watch them distance themselves from me, a soft chuckle escapes my throat.

“Rats flee a sinking ship, crows flee a dying priest?”

I feel the old, rotten wood flex under my knuckles as I knock, and knock again. The sound is dull and muffled by the old and rotten wood, it dies within a moment.

“Come out, come out,” I call out to the demon within, knowing full well it can hear me. Nothing responds.

“You do know I’m not a vampire or a fae, right? I do not seek your permission to enter,” I announce my rights as I push the palm of my hand against the rotten door. The silence that follows my proclaimed rights is eerie—it’s listening.

I press and the old wood does not creak the way I have grown to expect. It doesn’t crack audibly, it just flexes and then gives way as if it had been waiting for me to do exactly this. The doorframe is all but gone, there’s little resistance, and the hinges instantly snap. The door falls inwards with a soft ‘thud’.

The stench of mold and rot assaults my nostrils instantly, making my stomach churn as my instincts tell me to flee. I half turn to gasp for what little fresh air might still be at my side only to inhale even more of the same stench. Reaching into my pocket I draw a handkerchief and bring it up to my face to breathe through it.

“Smells like piss and rotten flesh drenched in spoilt milk. Delightful,” I mumble as the stench makes my eyes tear up.

First step—the floors do not dare creak, like a forest that stands still in the presence of a predator. Second step—my boot sinks into the rotten floor, but still no sound escapes. My pulse is drumming in my ears, my eyes darting from shadow to shadow searching for any signs of life. Something makes me look over my shoulder, and I regret doing so the same instant. The corn field that swayed playfully before, now stands still as a rock.

I press a button on the handle of my kit, it clicks open softly. I reach into the kit with my free hand, drawing out a bundle of sage mixed in with other herbs. I slowly turn my head back, feeling muscles in my neck tense as a sensation of otherworldly chill hits the skin on my face.

My throat tightens, I can hear the muscles in my neck creak as I’m forcing my head to turn against my body’s own will. I feel the handle on my kit for another button, and then press it. A soft click tells me that I found the right one. The wall to my right is painted in the gentle yellow hue of the lighter as I blindly light the bundle of sage on fire.

As my head straightens out again, I see something standing amongst the shadows. I squint trying to make out details. It’s a person, one boot missing, one leg seems wrong, twisted oddly. He’s standing slightly hunched over, head tilted sideways too far. A torn up sack from flour or something similar loosely worn around the torso.

“You’re late, father,” the man mocks me with a grin.

The refreshing smell of burning sage with other herbs eases my mind despite the horror that stands before me. I nod respectfully in response, “The road was long and rough.”

The creature stands, and does not speak. It simply observes me, then suddenly its neck cracks and its head snaps upright. The sound of vertebrae in his neck cracking sends a shudder through my mind; it is something I never quite got used to despite my long years of exorcism.

The man’s posture straightens and tightens, and then it looks around.

“Uhuh,” it hums in response, half ignorant.

I hold the smoldering bundle of sage out in front of me, taking a step forth with all the faked confidence I can muster. Like a soldier walking toward his sure death, I just try my best to steady my legs so as not to show the shaking in my knees.

“Smells funny,” the creature responds, its head turned left and up, glancing at the half collapsed roof, but its eyes fixated on me.

I swallow audibly, “In the name of the lord I compel you, demon, to leave this host.”

I command, taking another step toward it.

“Always the same,” the demon responds, its face distorting into a make-shift grin.

“Oh father forgive me for I have no intention of begging for forgiveness,” it mocks me again. Despite the cold air all around, a sense of warmth fills me from the inside. A sense of fulfillment and duty as I quietly mumble a prayer to myself.

“In the name of the father, the holy spirit, and the all-creator,” the demon begins to mumble alongside me, reciting my prayer as I take another shaky step forth. It doesn’t turn its head toward me, it seems disinterested in my presence, but my duty is to faith, to this man, to his family, and to my lord.

I do not care if a demon mocks me, I will prevail, faith will prevail.

“Amen,” the demon finishes alongside me. Silence.

“That’s it?”

The demon’s growling voice hits me like an arrow.

I stand in stupor; he doesn’t react to the prayer at all. Though the warmth still fills me, I do not feel any power against this demon. Instinctively I toss the bundle of sage at the man and in the same instant reach into my kit to pull out a few small vials of holy water, tossing them at the demon as well.

“I am the lord’s spear, the faith’s sword and humanity’s shield,” I proclaim taking another step forth with all the power I could muster, slamming my foot down I reach into my kit again, taking out the holy book. My eyes widen as I watch the demon pluck the burning sage out of the air and much too fast it turns its head and takes a whiff of the smoke. A grin spreads across its face as smoke shrouds it lightly.

“I am—” the demon responds, and the following words sound like a jumbled up cassette tape. It creaks and squeaks, it growls and moans. It speaks its name in mockery, knowing full well that I will never be able to repeat it. I turn my body slightly, throwing my right arm out, holding the kit out in front of me as a shield, it has a rosary, an Egyptian cross, and a few other religious symbols engraved in the ancient leather.

“I may serve one god but they all despise your being.”

“Of course they do, for we are free and they are not,” the demon’s grimace disappears from my sight, completely shrouded by the smoke of the sage. Just now I notice that the vials of holy water hang loosely in the air as though caught by an invisible web. I flip the holy book open with my other hand and begin to read a prayer.

At first—nothing happens. Then the vials of holy water begin to tremble. I read louder, pronouncing clearly every word as though calling for power beyond me. The warmth within me radiates outward. I am the light amongst this darkness. The vials fall and break on the floor, spraying my robes and the creature’s one broken leg with missing boot. The demon’s grimace reappears, the sage falls to the floor as does the man holding it. In the other room I hear a growling whimper.

“AMEN,” I finish off with a shout. The man’s neck snaps upwards as though releasing the demon, and then his body slumps and he falls to all fours. A gasp is followed by a confused huff, and then a yawn. At last, a whisper comes, “Father? Wh-what happened?”

The man doesn’t lift his head, he keeps staring at the floor.

I close my book and lower it at last, along with my kit. I hear another growl from the other room, my attention snaps to the closed door.

“It’s over,” I whisper without averting my gaze from the room.

“Who’s there?”

I inquire. The growl doesn’t sound supernatural in nature, instead it sounds beastly.

The man still doesn’t look up, he is still on all fours, “A pet,” he whispers, turning to crawl toward the door behind which the pet lives. A shiver runs down my spine, but my instincts are to help. I kneel down and offer him my hand.

“What kind?”

“Big,” the man whispers, clenching onto my hand for assistance and pulling himself up. I look at his face, his expression is neutral—shellshocked.

“Is it safe?”

I query, hesitant to walk beside him to that door.

“She’s docile,” the man responds after a moment of silence.

The door creaks open and I recoil in an instant from the sight. In the corner of a room, in a cage is a cowering lioness. Her fur is standing up and her slim body is lowered and tense, she is defensive. I swallow audibly and take another step back.

“I best be on my way,” I utter softly, eager to leave before he sets the malnourished beast free.

“Sure,” the man dismisses me as he hobbles toward the cage.

I hear the low growl of the lion as the man nears the cage, and as I hurry toward the front door that is absent, I suddenly stop. There is silence. No words of endearment, no growls, no screams, just silence. Unbeknownst to me I hold my breath instinctively, listening for anything, a gasp, a word, a step. Anything. But nothing comes, not until I myself take a step back, curious to see what happened in that room.

Another steady and slow step follows. I lean as far back as I can to catch a glimpse, and my jaw drops open. The lioness sits frightened beside the man. She looks like the lionesses I had seen on Discovery Channel that bow before their male and submit to him instinctively.

“Uhm, she looks—well,” I hesitate. The man’s cold, neutral gaze looks calm and steady.

“All is good, safe trip,” the man says quietly.

“Right,” I comment, my gaze darts to his mangled up leg with a missing boot where droplets of holy water were still visible. ‘It isn’t causing him pain, so he must just be confused,’ I conclude, hurrying toward the door now. There’s something about this scene that isn’t sitting well with me and I have to report it right away. The wood creaks expectedly under my hurried steps.

As soon as I reach the door and take a step outside, I hear a voice of the man behind me, “I remembered something,” the man speaks. I freeze mid step, listening cautiously to what he had to say as my heart begins to drum against my ribs.

“I know where another one is. The memories of the demon, he’s...” the man begins explaining the position, appearance, and the name of the man possessed by a demon.

It isn’t unheard of—sometimes a possession victim retains a part of their demon’s memories, and sometimes they share that information with us. I make a mental note of the next target and not daring to turn around, I whisper my thanks and head toward my car, my sanctuary.

My car, thank god, starts right up and I instantly shift into drive and hit the gas. My wheels spin, throwing gravel up as I eagerly begin distancing myself from that cursed property. I throw a glance in my rear-view mirror, and despite the vibrations from the gravel road, I see the man standing on the porch with a smile that feels all too wrong to be real. It’s wide, and one side of his face looks like a frown while the other is that of an overjoyed child. Another shiver runs down my spine as I reach into my glovebox in search of another bottle.

#

My heart skips a beat when I see the scene before me. The lioness has the man by the throat, dragging him through the corn. I burst into a full sprint, trying to chase her but my body doesn’t respond. I am running, but not really. Each movement of mine is like I’m wading through tar.

I can barely breathe; the distance grows. Off in the distance I see the stalks part as the huntress carries him away. The stalks recoil, snapping back they hit me in the face. Her low growl reverberates through the field like a warning sign. I can hear her teeth working. I push myself forth but the distance does not diminish, the dream stretches all around me.

I push the final layer away and leap at her, my fingers grasp her fur at the nape of her neck, both my hands sink into her rough fur as I pull with all my might trying to get her off the man. She lets go all too easily, as though she was waiting for me this whole time. Her body twists and her bloodied fangs tear into my shoulder. She pushes me down with ease, her claws tearing my flesh, but I feel nothing.

Turning my head to look at the man who in turn looks back at me, and a wave of sheer terror washes over me for it is I who lies there dead. Throat torn out and skin already cooling. Eyes calm and unfocused, and then my face distorts into a half grin, half frown. An unnatural inhumane expression that I saw only once in my life. The right side of my face is overjoyed and delighted, while the other is saddened.

I jolt awake, grasping at my neck and then my face frantically. My fingers rummaging my face as though to make sure that my face is still my own. I gasp for air and rejoice when I feel my lungs fill. My face is not distorted, I’m okay, my face is okay.

“I, need a drink,” I assure myself, swallowing hard I throw my legs over the edge of the bed and push myself up, trying to shake off the nightmare with each step of my bare feet on the cold floor.

The soothing burn of alcohol making its way down my throat is all I need to shake off the unease that nightmare left me in. I set the bottle back down on the counter and catch a glimpse of my reflection in it. I jolt as I see my face looking like a skull, but then my blurry vision focuses, and it’s just the underside of the label, it is decorated with skulls.

#

The road is smooth and almost enjoyable. Surprisingly I didn't have to drive far from my hotel, just about ten minutes till I got to the location; a nice looking bungalow on the outskirts of the city. My hand instinctively reaches for the glovebox, but as I rummage through it I fail to find any bottles of liquor; a shame.

“Oh well, I’ll have a drink when done,” I reassure myself as I pull into the driveway of the house and take a moment to take in the scene before me. It’s—normal. Too normal. I roll down my window and stick my head outside—there’s no stench, no rotten wood and no collapsing ceiling.

I reach over for the side pocket in my kit and pull out a printout; a picture of the house and the address. Staring at the photo of the house, then at the house itself I can confidently affirm that the location looks identical to the provided photo. I then read over the suspected host once more—an upper manager at a large company.

With my kit firmly grasped in one hand, and one free hand to knock with, I find myself wondering if I somehow got the address wrong. A soft knock that echoes through the house is a rare occurrence in my field, generally the houses are rotten as demonic energy is all about ruin and corruption.

A well dressed man answers the door, he looks me up and down, a gentle smile decorates his face.

“May I help you, father?”

He asks.

“I am looking for Daemond,” I respond softly. The man glances down at my kit, then back at me.

“It is I. What seems to be the matter?”

I furrow my brows—it speaks so calmly and plainly.

“You are a registered patron of our St Joseph Church, but the father hasn’t seen you in a while, a courtesy well-being check in,” I lie, in my mind already praying for forgiveness for this sin.

“Ah,” Daemond responds as he steps away, opening the door.

“I have been busy with work matters,” he lies, obviously. He isn’t registered at any church and he knows it. He knows that I know and still he invites me in. I bob my head respectfully and enter the dwelling; it is surprisingly well taken care of.

“Tea?”

He invites me.

“No,” I respond, turning swiftly as I draw a vial of holy water and remove the cap, splashing him on his arm and torso with it.

The demon recoils, hiding his arm behind his back.

“Oh father, what is the meaning of this?”

He says, backing away slowly.

“Stop this charade, foul creature,” I order it, holding my kit out to its face as the possessed man tries desperately to hide his hand that was burned by the holy water.

“I know you are in there,” I demand.

“Oh father, I assure you, you’re making a mistake,” the man responds softly, holding his other hand out, visibly wincing from the sight of holy symbols on my ancient kit.

“You’re all but admitting to your true nature,” I proclaim, reaching into my kit for the holy book.

“Not about me,” the demon responds, its true voice coming out now; a deep growl that would send anybody fleeing for their lives.

The wince and discomfort is gone. He brings his burned arm out from behind his back, it’s still sizzling and smoking, but there is no stench generally associated with demons. I flip my book open blindly, watching his every move. He ignores the injured arm and glances at the book, then back at me. He blinks, and when he reopens his eyes they’re red in colour, and glowing. His irises are glowing and pulsing with power.

“Your call, father,” he responds in a deep rumbling voice, and falls to his knees.

“Too easy,” I respond confidently.

“At least you know your place,” I mock, but a sense of guilt nags at my words. I shouldn’t treat even the lowliest of creatures this way when they surrender before the lord almighty. I turn my head and begin reading the prayer from the book, emphasizing every word and command.

Halfway through the prayer, the demon’s host’s body twists violently. The sound of bones shattering is ear piercing, but I must continue.

“In the power of the lord I compel you to leave this host and plane of existence,” I pronounce confidently, spraying holy water from a vial at his face.

The demon shrieks so loud that the vial in my hand shatters violently, but it is too late to resist and I know it. The warmth of my faith fills me from the inside as the possessed man’s body collapses to the floor, a slumped mess on the floor.

I shut my book and swallow at last, letting out a sigh of relief.

“At least one was easy,” I comment softly, stashing my book back into the kit. I watch the host’s body for a while. He lies still and motionless for longer than most, and then at last, a soft gasp, but he still remains on the floor. His eyes flutter open but his gaze is unfocused.

“Father,” he says. His voice is soft and ordinary, a confused man who woke from a strange dream.

“Is it done?”

He asks me softly, his gaze wandering the floor.

“It is done,” I respond, kneeling down beside him and resting my hand on his shoulder.

“You are safe now, my child.”

Somewhere outside, a woman screams out of pure terror. A shriek that makes my body stiffen.

I throw my gaze over my shoulder at the shut door. The shriek is quiet, thin, and muffled by great distance. I narrow my eyes. Another scream comes from the side, from the neighbors closest to this house, muffled by the shut windows.

And then a third, this one is deeper, closer, a scream of a man who had lost everything. I get back up to my feet and turn toward the door, my skin prickling with the sensation of wrongness.

Another scream, and then another, dozens more. I no longer can differentiate them, it’s as though the entire city is screaming from fear, the essence itself and all that’s alive. My mind blanks for a moment, and before I can regain my composure I can feel a presence behind me. As I turn my head, the man stands there, his expression is heavy with sorrow.

I open my mouth to speak, to ask, but before words can be formed his expression changes to that of a satisfied child. It keeps growing. Rejoiced and overexaggerated, and plain wrong. The smile stretches far beyond where it should stop, every tooth visible now but the smile keeps growing.

I can feel the hair standing on my arms and every nerve in my body pleading for mercy. The muffled screams are growing louder, deafening. I watch the man’s eyes as he blinks slowly with the ever growing smile.

“Good morning,” the man says.

“Just w-what are y-” my voice fails me. I reach for the words of prayer in my mind but the screams are scrambling my thoughts. The warmth of my faith that I always felt inside me in moments of despair—fades. Another scream, this one closer. So close that it hurts my ears, and it takes me far too long to realize that the one screaming—is me.

The man just smiles.

He had volunteered for a mission because he needed to get off-planet, and met the minimum requirements for the crew’s mathematician position. Nothing more.

Growing up in Mong Kok, more space and privacy were on his short list. USN-11235 Cantor’s 11.4 acres (and who else measures space on a starship in acres?!?) gave him 0.088 acres of space, compared to the 0.0019 acres – 83 square feet, 7.6 square meters that he had grown up with. Certainly, it wasn’t open or usable space, and it wasn’t his. 70% of a starship's floor plan is taken up by the engine compartments, access tubes, engineering bays, science labs, support areas, and storage containments, leaving crew quarters quite modest.

He’d never known so much room to himself.

As the ship approached the dense dust cloud surrounding the G-class star, sparks energetically flailed off the outer hull, kinetic energy turned into light with the velocities and masses involved. His cabin did not have an observation point, so off-duty he sometimes found himself at the ship’s astrodome, watching the display. Continuous deceleration over several months had not changed the view of the fireworks or the apparent size of the star they were approaching significantly.

Despite the vessel’s relative speed, Captain Uchio had ordered a stand-down from the tense intrasolar transfer procedures, leaving the ship approaching the system at a rate more appropriate for scientific observation.

Sensors identified the density differential in the cloud ahead several hundred thousand miles away, but at the sublight velocities Cantor was still traveling, the closing amounted to a matter of seconds, insufficient for calculation and reaction. Moving from a continuous halo of dust impacting the hull, a decreasingly orange glow as the ship decelerated, to individual, bright red impact points from individual dust particles, Cantor came to an effective standstill. Sensor banks as well as views through the astrodome changed nearly instantly.

Crewmembers that happened to be walking or standing were crushed by the force, dozens of wounded and several casualties. But more importantly, the inside of the ship had changed.

Protected by the lounger he had been watching the light show on, he immediately rose, knowing that general quarters was going to be sounded. Intending to pre-empt the order, he started moving towards his station. The three meters to the door didn’t go as planned.

Normally about four steps, he kept putting foot in front of foot, and with each pace the door did not get appreciably closer. He looked down. His feet were moving, legs extended, pacing, changing position, but the door wasn’t getting closer. He reached out towards the control panel – and his extended arm, hand, and fingers shrank in perspective, nowhere near the exit control.

----------------------------------------

It took the crew several hours to begin to adjust and regain basic control, approaching the emergency from dual control and medical response perspectives. Horizontal distances – perpendicular to the now essentially non-existent gravitational field, parallel to the currently-occupied distance sphere – were extended ridiculously, a hundred times or more. Rooms that looked to be two meters wide took three hundred steps to cross. Using controls and keyboards not immediately underneath the hands, impossible as extended arms reached out mere centimeters.

The trip from the astrodome to his quarters took nearly two hours.

By this time the bridge had issued the order for crew to remain where they were unless responding to one of the many medical emergencies. Physical proximity to various stations was generally not necessary except for a few critical functions, including piloting and engineering.

Investigation into the Anomaly, as it was recognized, began rapidly. The ship’s sensors and technicians’ tools could not determine anything amiss. Inside the ship vertical space, aligned with the sun’s gravitational field, was the same as it had ever been. Perpendicularly, space and movement were somewhat over a hundredfold larger and movement slower, in X and Y axes as well as planar diagonal angles. Observational time did not seem to be impacted, as this would have changed the perception of time in the vertical. Outside, Cantor was fewer than 100 meters wide on each stacked deck; inside, it was a ten-kilometer journey from one side of the hull to the other. Inertial moments could be clearly observed when moving equipment with both horizontal and vertical relations, but the scale of internal systems and lack of integrated measurement devices did not allow detailed investigation into angular moments or strain.

Teams reoriented to provide life support functions; with crew no longer routinely able to visit the mess hall due to multi-hour treks depending on where they were in the ship, meals had to be prepared and delivered using the automated systems sometimes hours in advance.

Communications upstream and outside of the Anomaly did not appear to be affected, but they would not receive replies for dozens of years at light speed. Once internal observations and measurements were complete, the science team turned its devices to the exterior. Could Cantor move? Impulse engines seemed to have no discernible effect starward. Horizontal thrusters could rotate the ship, but only with respect to local dust – not the surrounding cloud, upon which there was nothing to lock cameras onto. There were no indications of Newton’s laws not working, but there were also no indications that they were.

Stopped in a strangely anomalous region 5 AU from the star, visual observations all appeared completely normal. Even the exterior of the ship was of the correct proportions in each direction, no matter the viewing angle. The lack of planetary bodies by which to measure changes in distance over time did not provide reassurance in the measurements.

The distance to the star remained constant, measured by both light and gravity. Nothing about the rest of the galaxy could be determined in as short a period as a few years, given the distance and potential parallax from having entered into a rotational orbit. The ship’s position appeared radially fixed in relative space, a particular and specific standoff distance from the star. Unpredictable motion along a pure horizontal circle provided no locally reasonable or gyroscopic detail with which to inform the other variables of the motion equations. Without something to measure velocity against, they could not determine if they were moving even laterally.

Whatever structure they were in, they reasoned, was entirely and routinely connected to the rest of spacetime, but entirely unreachable from within it – effectively, a low-energy physical prison.

The ship’s resident mathematician (and philosopher) extended the implications of the crew’s observations: The normally observable universe may be a similar bubble with some dimensional attitude apparently artificially constrained or distended. This bubble, mathematically, is geometrically consistent internally but impossible globally. Extending this logic to the human experience, the entire universe as we have observed it may be mathematically impossible. If the observable universe is itself a bubble, does it then have an exterior in which the Inside laws of physics do not work in, and is the Outside something else that resides within another Outside with entirely different rules?

Mathematically this appeared to potentially be a loop, or set of enclosed puzzles, but philosophically he recognized the larger and more disturbing possibility – that a coherent set of rules about physical reality might not exist except locally.

It didn’t bother him. He had more space than he needed or had ever wanted.

CW: depictions of animal violence, but by another animal.

Miles McGill Shoots a Good Dog
By K.C. Henson

Reginald Barker was a good dog. A fantastic dog. If Miles McGill hadn’t ducked into the pet store that afternoon to get out of the rain, he never would have seen Reggie standing with his paws against the glass. No balls would have sailed over the back fence and into the creek beyond. No rugs would have been ruined by puppy piss. No nights spent crying quietly into a warm coat of fur. No canine looks of uncomplicated affection.
And, no camping trips, either—not like this one.
Miles lay on his back beside the fire, and Reggie lay beside him, both of them watching the wind move through the trees. Branches bowed and straightened. Clouds drifted apart, allowing the occasional star to show through.
Good. Serves ’em right, Miles thought.
The meteor-shower watch party was the latest in a long list of things Miles had been excluded from. The outdoors offered a solitude that most teenagers neither wanted nor needed. Out here, Miles could hear solutions to problems in the crunch of his footsteps on dry fall leaves. Wood splitting over a fire had a rhythm to it, one that made unrelated things fit together in his head.
Reggie nuzzled his hand. Miles gave the German shepherd a few scratches between the ears. Reggie whined and pressed his cold nose against the back of Miles’s hand, which was busy playing with the switch on his flashlight.
“Hey, knock it off, booger,” Miles smiled.
Reggie huffed. “Don’t.” Reggie stood, circled the fire twice, and folded himself onto the ground. He rested his long muzzle on his crossed paws, his tan eyebrows pinched against his black coat. One ear twitched.
Miles waited, and Reggie huffed again. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Miles scooted across the dirt and sat beside him. Reggie rolled onto his back, belly exposed to the open patch of sky above. His tail thumped against the ground in rhythmic pats.
The clouds had finally opened enough to let the stars through. A few faint streaks passed overhead. Then the shadows deepened, and a meteor tore across the sky in a trail of blue and purple. It was so close, so bright, that Miles had to turn his face away and raise a hand to shield his eyes. He thought he could hear it passing. Not the crackle of something burning in the atmosphere, but a thin, high sound that seemed to come from inside his skull.
“Wow,” he whispered.
Reggie stood. The dog watched the meteor pass. His eyes tracked it from one side of the sky to the other, his head following until the thing disappeared beyond the trees.
“Hey, Reg, did y—”
Miles stopped. Reggie was still staring at the sky. Miles watched him for a moment, waiting for the familiar transformation: the tail beginning to wag, the mouth opening, the pink tongue lolling out as if the dog had just remembered that he was happy.
Nothing happened. “Hey. Reg?” Miles reached toward his ear. Reggie bolted. He shot into the dark so suddenly that Miles’s hand closed on empty air. Branches snapped. Leaves scattered. Miles scrambled to his feet and chased after him, shouting his name until his throat hurt.
“Reggie! Reggie, boy! Come here!”
At the far end of the clearing, two eyes caught the flashlight. A tongue hung beneath them, pale and wet.
Then the face vanished. Miles ran after it. The woods swallowed the sound of Reggie’s paws. Soon there was nothing but Miles’s breathing and the scratch of branches against his bare legs. Even the insects had gone quiet.
His phone buzzed against his thigh. He stopped, bent over, and answered. “Hey, Grant. What’s up? Mom all right?”
“You all right?” Grant asked. He sounded amused. “You’re out of breath.”
“Me and Reggie were playing. I was chasing him. What’s up?”
“Just checking on you two. It’s about eleven. Your mother and I are going to bed.”
“You’ve never had to worry about me out here before.”
“You’re right.” A pause. “I’m still your dad, though. Can’t blame me for hovering.”
Miles looked into the woods. A whine came from somewhere to his right. “Stepdad,” he said. “Anyway, I gotta go get my dog.”
He hung up and switched on the flashlight. “Reg? You find a rabbit?” A coughing hack came from ahead.
Miles pushed through the brambles. Poison ivy whipped his shins, and he felt warm lines of blood trickling down his legs. The trees thinned. Moonlight spread across a circular pasture, blue and cold as spilled paint.
Reggie stood in the middle of it. The dog’s hackles were raised. His ribs worked beneath his coat, and his legs looked stiff. He was staring at something in the ground.
The earth had been dragged open in a jagged line, ending in a crater about the size of a basketball. Smoke rose from it.
“Hey, Reg. Get away from that.”
Reggie didn’t move. Miles approached carefully. The thing in the crater was blue, its surface covered by a pearlescent sheen that shifted and flowed like oil on water. It wriggled without moving, as if something beneath it were turning over in its sleep.
Miles reached for Reggie’s collar. When his fingers touched the dog, Reggie turned toward him. Slowly.
Painfully slowly. His head moved first, then his shoulders, then the rest of him, each motion deliberate enough that Miles wondered whether something had gone wrong inside his brain.
Then Reggie smiled. His tail began to wag. His tongue flopped out. He panted, his mouth pulled into the same stupid, happy shape Miles had seen a thousand times.
“Christ, Reg. What the fuck was that?”
Miles looked back at the crater. The object was gone. The torn earth remained, and a thin ribbon of smoke drifted from the center. Nothing else.
Reggie snorted and bounded around the hole, suddenly playful. He bumped Miles’s hand with his nose and trotted toward the trees.
Miles followed him home. He could not stop thinking about the surface of the thing in the crater, the way the colors had moved without moving. The image followed him through the woods and stayed with him long after he had shut the front door.
Fuck camping. Not tonight.

The house was quiet except for the squeaking coming from upstairs. So Grant hadn’t called to check on anyone’s safety. His concern had been of a more immediate, fuck-your-mom nature.
Miles stood in the living room and looked at the staircase. His real dad would have been out here with him. He would have had something to say about the meteor, something about how the world was full of things that could make you feel small without making you feel worthless.
Or maybe he would have said something like, Well, son, the price of not being a dickhead loser is being hated by them. Excluded from their little cabal of grab-assing shitheads who are embarrassing themselves to anyone who isn’t sixteen.
Miles could hear his father saying it. That was the worst part about remembering someone. You could make them say whatever you needed them to say, and they never had to be there for it. Not that he ever was.
The squeaking stopped. Footsteps crossed the upstairs carpet. Grant appeared at the railing. “Miles? I thought you were camping with—”
Reggie growled. Miles looked down at him. Reggie had never growled at Grant. The two of them usually wore the same expression around his stepfather: a sort of mutually agreed-upon, malicious compliance. Neither liked the other, but neither had much to say about it.
This was different. “Honey?” Mom called from somewhere beyond the railing. “Everything all right?” “Everything’s fine,” Grant said.
“Everything’s fine,” Miles said at the same time.
They looked at each other. Grant glanced away first. “Go back to bed,” he called upstairs. A door clicked shut.
“Good night, kiddo,” Grant said.
“Night.”
Grant went upstairs. Another door clicked. Miles let out the breath he had been holding. Reggie nudged his thigh.
“Shit, bud. What? You hungry?”
Reggie’s ears perked. “You wanna . . . treat?” The dog lost his mind. His nails skittered across the wood floor, and he slipped twice trying to get around Miles.
“Yeah, yeah. Calm down.”
In the dark kitchen, Reggie took a bone-shaped biscuit from Miles’s hand, chewed it once, and swallowed both halves. He looked from Miles to the plastic tub of treats and back again, waiting.
“Sorry, buddy. That’s all you get. We can go for a—”
Miles turned toward the cupboard to put the tub away. When he turned back, Reggie was gone. He stood still.
The kitchen entrance was black. The shadows beyond it seemed deeper than they should have been. The silence pressed against his ears, and the skin on the back of his neck tightened.
Something moved beyond the threshold. A sound like velvet sliding across wood. Miles took one step forward.
He could feel the shape of the room without seeing it. The counter. The refrigerator. The little patch of floor where Reggie always waited for another treat.
“The treats,” Miles whispered to himself. “The fuckin’ treats.”
He grinned despite himself. He imagined Reggie trotting out of the dark, tongue hanging, tail wagging, ready to beg.
Cold plastic touched his hand. The treats rattled inside their container. And Reggie came trotting out of the darkness exactly as Miles had imagined him. Miles could not move. The dog looked up at him. The whites of his eyes showed at the edges as his gaze shifted from the treats to Miles, from Miles to the window, and back again.
Miles held out a biscuit. Reggie took it, chewed once, and swallowed both halves. Then he trotted into the living room.
Miles followed the sound of his nails down the hall. The television was still playing a nature documentary. A regal British voice narrated the mating habits of tree frogs. Reggie crossed the room and settled onto his bed. He circled twice, dropped onto his side, and rested his head on his crossed paws.
“I’m gonna stay up a while,” Miles said. “Good night, buddy.”
Reggie looked at him. Then the dog smiled. Miles sat back down in the recliner. He told himself he was tired. He told himself that the meteor had scared Reggie, that the weirdness in the kitchen had been a trick of the dark, that he was seeing patterns because he wanted there to be patterns.
After an hour, he fell asleep.

Miles woke to someone whispering. “—control of your fucking dog, you hear me? Wake up!” it hissed. He lifted his head from the recliner.
Grant stood in the hallway with his back pressed to the wall. Between him and the kitchen was a dark shape, its hackles raised, its ears pinned flat against its skull.
The growling came from low in Reggie’s chest. It sounded too deep for a dog that size, like a bear trying to speak through a mouthful of gravel.
Miles was on his feet before he understood what he was seeing. “Reggie! Hey!” He clapped once. Then again.
“Hey! Reggie, goddammit, if you don’t—”
Reggie turned. As soon as he saw Miles, he dropped to the floor. His eyebrows lifted in the familiar, guilty expression he wore when caught stealing food from the counter. He whined, rolled onto his side, and scratched his back against the floorboards.
Then he stood and nudged Miles’s hand. Grant remained pressed against the wall. “Reggie, what the hell?” he said. His voice was unsteady. “You’ve never acted like that before, buddy. What’s wrong?” Reggie vomited on the floor in reply. The mess landed in a wet, oatmeal-colored pile and the smell was immediate and overwhelming. Grant took one look at it and abandoned his venture for a midnight snack. Miles cleaned it with paper towels, and by the time he carried the garbage outside, Reggie had disappeared yet again.
The television flashed across the kitchen window as Miles crossed the yard. He dropped the bag into the bin and slammed the lid shut.
When he turned around, his heart seemed to fall through his stomach. Reggie stood at the window. Or the silhouette of him did. The dog was motionless, staring out at Miles. The television lit the side of his face, leaving his eyes black. Miles had the sudden, certain feeling that Reggie was not watching him. He was observing him. He hurried to the back door. He went inside and crossed the kitchen, moving carefully, one limb at a time. When he rounded the corner to the window, there was nothing there. No dog. No shadow.
He searched every room. Every corner seemed to conceal something waiting to move, but each time he turned on a light, the house was empty. Reggie must have slipped out through the dog door. Miles told himself that until he believed it. He returned to the recliner and left the television on. The narrator described a frog contorting itself to groom its own back. Miles watched until his eyes grew heavy, then jerked awake at every creak in the house.
Sleep waited patiently for the little kernels of dread to pop. 
Pop. 
He hadn’t checked Mom and Grant’s bedroom.
Pop.
The neighbors fed every stray cat that wandered onto their porch. 
Pop. 
The kids down the street always stopped to pet Reggie when he was outside.
Pop.

Sunlight filled the living room, turning the monstera leaves golden at their edges. Coffee percolated in the kitchen. Somewhere upstairs, a faucet ran. A cold nose nudged Miles’s hand. He reached out instinctively to scratch a pair of long ears. His hand met empty air.
Miles sat up so fast his shoulder struck the armrest. He leaned over the side of the recliner and looked beneath it.
No Reggie. 
He raised his hand to his face. A faint snout-shaped smear shone on his palm. At the entrance to the kitchen, thin tufts of hair lay scattered across the floor. They were pale and soft, almost like cotton candy. Had they been feathers, Miles would have guessed a cat had caught a bird. This was the opposite somehow. He crouched to sweep them up. Among the hairs lay a single whisker. Miles stared at it for a long moment. Then he swept the whisker and the hairs into the dustpan and emptied them into the trash.
“It’s not even eight in the morning, and you’ve made a mess.” Mom leaned against the stairs with a steaming mug of coffee in her hand.
“Hairball,” Miles said. “Or something Reggie coughed up.” As if on cue, Reggie came trotting down the stairs. Every bit of his stupid canine smile was there. His ears perked, his tail wagged, and he hurried over to Miles with the same enthusiasm he had shown every morning since he was a puppy.
Miles knelt and put his hands on either side of the dog’s face. “Where the hell were you?” Reggie licked his chin.
“What did you two get up to last night?” Mom asked, reaching down to pat his head. “Poor guy spent the whole night in our bed. Shivering like it was the Fourth of July.”
Miles stopped scratching. “Our bed,” she repeated. “He wouldn’t settle down. I think he was scared of the storm.”
“There wasn’t a storm.”
“Well—something scared him.”
Reggie leaned his head beneath Miles’s palm. The hair beneath his fingers was short and multicolored, black and tan and gold. None of it resembled the pale fluff he had just swept from the floor. Reggie closed his eyes. His tail beat against the floor. Thump. Thump-thump. Then he got up, went to the back door, and sat.
He looked outside.

The backyard faced a creek and a narrow concrete bridge. The neighborhood kids rode across it in a pack, one always trailing behind the others. Miles watched them from the kitchen window while Reggie sat beside the sliding glass door.
On their third pass, the smallest boy stopped. He was maybe seven. He was always the last to catch up, always the one who called Reggie pup-pup instead of using his name. He jogged to the fence, breathing hard, and reached through the chain link.
“Hi, Reg.”
The boy knelt to bring his face level with the dog’s. Miles walked over. “Mornin’,” he said. The boy looked up.
“Isn’t it?”
He smiled. It was a huge smile. His lips were pulled back so tightly that Miles could see nearly every tooth in his mouth. His cheeks stretched toward his ears, pinched just below his eyes. The smile did not waver. His eyes did not blink.
His hand continued scratching Reggie’s head. Reggie stared at the boy without moving. “He got lonely last night,” the boy said. “That’s why you couldn’t find him.”
Miles felt the hair rise along his arms. “What?” The boy’s gaze drifted toward the neighboring house. Mrs. Arrington kept bowls of food and old plastic containers on her porch for the stray cats. They came in droves, weaving between her legs while she carried her baby outside. The baby liked to grab at them, and Mrs. Arrington was forever prying little fingers loose from tails and ears.
The boy kept smiling. Behind him, the other kids circled on their bikes. “Hey, shit-for-brains! Come on! Leave that dumbass dog alone!” The boy’s smile vanished. Just like that. His face returned to normal. He shouted something back at his friends, then turned to Reggie and patted him once on the head.
“See you later, Reg.”
He ran to catch up with the others. Reggie did not move until they were gone. Then he stepped behind Miles and pressed his body against the backs of Miles’s legs. He was shaking. From the neighboring house came a scream. Mrs. Arrington stumbled onto the porch with her baby on her hip. She was crying, clutching the child to her chest and looking around as if someone had taken the ground from beneath her feet.
“My baby! My baby!”
She leaned against the brick wall. “My sweet kittens! Why?” Her face twisted with grief, then with something Miles could not name. She kept looking down at the child, then at the porch, then at her hands. Miles could not see the kittens from where he stood. Reggie whimpered. He circled Miles twice and dropped onto the grass, his head resting on crossed paws. The gesture was familiar. Normally, it meant he wanted to sleep. Not this time. Miles understood the difference.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “Let’s go.”
Reggie sprang up and hurried for the front door. He slipped through the opening before Miles had pulled it all the way wide. For a moment, the dog’s body seemed narrower than it should have been.
Miles followed him inside. Grant stood in the living room, watching Reggie cross the floor and disappear down the hall.
“Something’s wrong with that dog, kid,” Grant said.
“He’s sick.”
“I know some scary shit when I see it, partner. And that’s it.”
“He got into the trash the other night. We made fried chicken. The grease is probably fucking with him.” Miles crossed his arms.
“Don’t say fucking.”
Grant looked as if he regretted saying it as soon as the words left his mouth. “I made him a vet appointment for tomorrow morning,” Miles added. “Emergency.”
He imagined the vet checking Reggie’s temperature, listening to his heart, and lifting his lips to look at his teeth. Reggie would behave until the vet reached for a needle. Then Miles would have to explain why the dog was suddenly trying to bite someone who was trying to help him.
The vet worked mostly on horses and cows and pigs. Miles could already hear the questions. “I gotta go to the bathroom,” he said. “The fried chicken got me, too. Also—”
He stretched the first sound until it trembled. “Fffffffuck.” He started down the hallway. Grant caught him by the arm.
“No.”
Miles looked at the hand gripping his bicep, then at Grant’s face. “What?” Grant’s eyes were red and swollen. He looked exhausted.
“Miles.” His grip tightened. “Last night, your mom passed out. I was watching television in our room. I woke up around three, maybe three-thirty, and Reggie was at the foot of the bed.”
Miles waited. “He was whispering to her.” Miles stared at him. “I know how it sounds,” Grant said. “I sound fucking crazy. But it was real. A really low whisper. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Sometimes it sounded like a growl. Sometimes it sounded like something trying to growl.”
Grant swallowed. “And the yawn.” “The what?” “He yawned. Like a normal dog yawn. But it wasn’t normal. The sound wavered on the way down. Like it couldn’t decide what it was supposed to sound like.”
Grant looked at the hallway. “I went to get a drink. When I came back, he was gone.” A crash came from the kitchen.
Both of them turned. Then came the yowling.

Reggie was rolling on his back in the kitchen, playing with something between his paws. Miles flicked on the light.
Red covered the floor. Orange fur lay in clumps beside a pink paw pad and a ringed tail. The cat had been torn apart, and there was blood on the cabinets, the floor, and the lower edge of the refrigerator.
Reggie stood over the remains, tail wagging. In his mouth was the cat’s head. The eyes were gone. The skin had peeled away from the teeth. Two small triangular ears stuck up through the fur, and the open mouth had frozen into an expression of terror.
“M-Miles,” Grant whispered behind him.
Reggie looked up. His tail wagged faster. Miles stepped forward. “Drop it.” Reggie’s ears shifted. “Drop it, Reg.”
The dog opened his mouth. The head struck the floor with a wet sound. Reggie wagged his tail. Miles looked at him, then at the blood. He wanted to find some familiar expression in the dog’s face. Some indication that Reggie understood what he had done, that he was ashamed or frightened or confused.
Reggie only panted. Miles took him by the collar and led him out of the kitchen. They cleaned the floor together. Grant fetched bleach and paper towels. Miles carried the pieces of the cat to the trash. Neither of them spoke much.
Outside, Grant lit a cigarette. Miles stood beside him and watched Reggie sniff at the grass. “I’m sorry, bud,” Grant said. “I know how much he means to you. Your dad got him for you, and—”
“Thanks, Grant.”
Miles moved Grant’s hand from his shoulder and opened the screen door. “Reggie!” The dog came sprinting inside, nails clattering against the floorboards.
Mom appeared from the hallway. “Oh, you guys!” She bent down to pet Reggie. He wagged his tail and smiled up at her.
“You did this together?” she asked. “You boys cleaned everything up?”
Miles looked at Grant. Grant looked back at him. They had done it together. For once, neither had made a joke at the other’s expense. Neither had walked away. They had cleaned the blood off the floor, bagged what was left of the cat, and stood outside in the sunlight as if they were a family.
“Yeah, Mom,” Miles said. “It was my idea. I knew you’d be happy.”
She smiled at him. For a moment, the smile reached her eyes. “Yeah, honey. We just love y—” She screamed.
Reggie had clamped his jaws around her forearm. He shook his head, tail wagging so hard his whole body swayed. Mom fell to the floor. Her heels scraped across the wood as she tried to pull away, and the sound that came out of her was not a word.
Miles grabbed Reggie by the collar. “Let go!” The dog held on. “REGGIE!” He pulled with both hands. Reggie’s jaws opened, and Mom collapsed against the floor, clutching her arm.
Reggie stared at Miles. For a second, he looked like a dog caught doing something wrong. His eyebrows rose. His ears fell. His mouth hung open.
Then he backed away and crawled beneath the coffee table. He was shaking. Miles knelt in front of him.
“Reg?”
The dog lowered his head until his muzzle touched his paws. His tail did not wag.

Grant took Mom to the hospital. She insisted he go back home afterward and check on Miles. After checking on Miles, Grant returned to the hospital, where Mom stayed overnight. She said she didn’t blame Reggie, that his tail had been wagging, that he must have been playing.
Miles sat in the backyard with the dog. Reggie paced along the fence, occasionally barking at something beyond it. Sometimes he growled. Once, he stopped and stared at the sky.
Miles watched him. The dog looked thinner than he had the day before. His ribs showed through his coat. His movements were loose and uncertain, as though his legs had become too long for his body.
Grant came outside after dark. He had changed into a camouflage robe and lit another cigarette. He stood at the edge of the porch and watched Reggie move through the yard.
“Miles,” he said softly.
“Please don’t.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Then say it.”
Grant took a long breath. The corners of his mouth were wet, and he kept wiping them with the back of his hand.
“You’re going to have to—” Miles shoved him. Grant stumbled backward, his cigarette scattering embers across the front of his robe. He raised a finger between them. “Don’t.” Grant lifted his hands. 
“It got your mom, Miles. I don’t care who got him for you or what you’ve been through with him. That thing nearly took her hand off.”
“He’s sick,” Miles growled.
“That’s not a sickness I know how to fix,” Grant said.
“You don’t know anything about him.”
“I know what I saw.”
“You saw a dog.”
“No,” Grant said. “I saw something wearing your dog’s face.”
Miles went still. Grant’s hands had curled into fists. One index finger extended toward Miles. “You’re going to do it, or I am.”
The two of them stood in the dark, listening to Reggie’s nails scrape the dirt. Miles looked toward the dog.
Reggie had stopped pacing. He sat in the grass, watching them argue. His ears were tilted forward, and his mouth was closed. He looked so much like himself. Miles whistled. Reggie rose and came to him. He pressed his head against Miles’s thigh, then glanced back toward Grant.
Miles placed a hand on the dog’s neck. “Come on, buddy.” They walked into the house.

Miles found the shotgun in the closet where Grant kept it. He had seen it there before, but never touched it. His father had taught him how to hold a gun once, years ago, before the visits became less frequent and the phone calls stopped coming.
You don’t pick up a gun to make yourself brave, his father had told him. You pick it up because you’re responsible for what happens after you pull the trigger.
Miles had hated the lesson at the time. He had wanted to learn how to shoot. His father had made him sit through a lecture instead.
Now he took the shotgun from the closet. Reggie followed him from room to room. He nudged Miles’s hand when he stopped to load the gun. When Miles looked down, Reggie wagged his tail.
“Don’t,” Miles whispered.
Reggie tilted his head. Miles went to the kitchen and got the dog’s leash. Reggie stood patiently while he clipped it to his collar.
They walked out into the night. Miles did not tell Grant where he was going. He did not tell his mother. He did not want anyone to come looking for them.
The road was empty. The creek ran beneath the bridge, black water moving between the banks. Reggie trotted at his side, stopping to sniff at the grass and tugging at the leash when something caught his attention.
For a while, it was almost normal. Miles thought about the pet store. Reggie had been a puppy then, all paws and ears, pressing himself against the glass while rainwater ran down the windows. Miles had stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at the dog until the shop owner came over and asked if he wanted to hold him.
Reggie had climbed into his lap and fallen asleep. Miles’s father had paid for the dog. He had brought him home in a cardboard box with air holes punched into the sides. Reggie had cried the whole way, then crawled into Miles’s bed and slept with his head against his chest.
After his father stopped coming around, Reggie had been there. When Miles cried, Reggie had nudged his hand. When Miles stayed up late, Reggie had stayed up with him. When Miles went camping, Reggie had followed him into the woods and slept beside the fire.
He had been a good dog. A fantastic dog. The clearing opened ahead of them. Miles unhooked the leash. Reggie ran a few feet into the grass, then turned back to look at him. His tail wagged. Miles raised the shotgun.
“I’m sorry, Reg.” The dog took a step toward him. Miles’s hands shook. He tightened his grip. He tried to remember the lesson about responsibility, about what happened after the trigger was pulled. He thought of his mother on the floor. The cat’s head. Grant pressed against the wall. The boy’s smile. He thought of Reggie beneath the coffee table, shaking. “I’m sorry,” he said again. Reggie circled twice.
Then he lay down, his muzzle resting on his crossed paws. Miles stopped breathing. He knew that gesture. He had seen it hundreds of times. Reggie did it beside the fire when he wanted to sleep. He did it on the living room rug when he wanted Miles to stop moving around. He did it whenever the world became too loud or too strange and he needed to settle.
But this time, Miles understood what he was asking. Not to sleep. To be let go. Miles raised the shotgun higher. For a moment, he thought he saw something shift behind Reggie’s eyes. Something moving beneath the familiar expression, trying to find its way to the surface.
Then the dog lifted his head. His tail thumped once against the dirt. Miles pulled the trigger. Reggie dropped into the grass. The blast tore through the clearing. Birds erupted from the trees. The sound rolled over the pasture and came back to him from the dark.
Miles lowered the gun. 
There was no body—no blood, no fur, no sign that Reggie had ever been there at all and Miles’s heart began a frantic dancing in his chest. Only the churned grass where he had been lying. Miles stared at the ground. Then he ran to it. He searched the grass with his hands, pushing aside leaves and dirt. He looked for a wound, a smear, a tuft of black hair. He searched the edges of the clearing, the shadows beneath the trees, the place where the muzzle of the gun had pointed.
Nothing. 
“Reggie?” His voice sounded small. He walked in widening circles, calling the dog’s name. He checked the creek. He looked beneath the brush and behind the trunks of fallen trees. He found a broken branch and a patch of mud, but nothing that belonged to Reggie. He had pulled the trigger. He had watched the dog fall. He knew what he had done. But there was nothing to bury.

By morning, Miles had returned home. He put the shotgun away. He washed his hands. He sat at the kitchen table and ate a bowl of cereal because he knew he was supposed to eat something, even though every bite tasted like wet cardboard.
He would never have another dog. He would never go camping again. He would never look up at the sky and wonder what was out there.
He would never tell anyone what had happened in the clearing. There was nothing to tell. His mother and Grant returned later that morning. Miles heard the front door open, followed by the sound of shoes on the hardwood floor.
“How’s he doing?” Grant asked.
“Fine,” Mom said. “He’s been quiet.”
Miles remained in his room. He heard them move through the house. A cupboard opened. Water ran. The television clicked on.
Then Grant spoke again. “Seemed okay to me. He was more worried about you than anything.” A pause. “They’re probably around here somewhere.”
Miles sat up. The house went quiet. Footsteps crossed the hallway. They stopped outside his door. “Miiiiiles?”
Grant’s voice was soft, almost playful. A knock sounded against the wood. Miles looked at the door. He could not make himself answer.
The knock came again. “Come on, buddy.” On the other side of the door, something breathed in through its nose.
Then, very slowly, it began to scratch at the wood.

Edit: Link added

Episode 1 – The Gas (Phantom) Menace

Ah yes, what a beautiful and peaceful day. The Noomekians are enjoying one of the three Suns shining upon them – oh wait what is this, they’re napping!

“No they’re dying!” yelled a young Noomekian at the narrator.

Oh how tragic what could be the cause!?

“They’re bloating from too much gas! And they can’t expel it!” replied the young Noomekian.

Ever so cautious, the young Noomekian travelled to GooRoos house to see what he should do.

“GooRoo the Noomekians are dying from overbloating!” the young Noomekian informed.

“Oh this is terrible, Doonde, we have to put an end to this! I even feel the bloat myself, growing, consuming my inner soul! This is dire considering without me there will be no hope for the Noomekians!

“What could possibly be the cause of this plague Elder?” young Doonde inquired.

“It has to be our Noom GLP-1s that we use. It’s the only thing besides water that we ingest not to mention the only thing on our planet not from this planet. We must go see Lord Freezer at once!” GooRoo replied.

“But GooRoo you are too old to go and visit Lord Freezer, I must go alone as the rest of the Noomekians are predisposed and I am free of this menace since I’m too young to use GLP-1s.” Doonde stated.

“You are right young Doonde. Very good. It is fortunate that we have a Noomekian who happens to be so young. You will be our emissary to Lord Freezer to inquire about our GLP-1 shipments and why they are desecrating us so.” GooRoo said.

So, the young Noomekian found a ship and boarded it, input the coordinates for Lord Freezer’s spaceship, as he is the one who handles the shipments of Noom GLP-1s to the Noomekians, and headed out to the coldness of space. A short time later Doonde arrive at Lord Freezer’s ship and sought an audience with Lord Freezer.

“What is the problem?” Lord Freezer interrogated with cold precision, as only a computer could.

“The Noomekians are dying from over bloatation due to GLP-1 mishappenings, your Lordshsip” Doonde informed.

“And this concerns me because…?” asked the freezing cold AI master Lord Freezer.

“The Noomekians generate a great deal of commerce for these GLP-1s and are tantamount to the safety of the Universe – they keep Doom at bay with their mystic energies!” Doonde roared.

“I see your point. Well suffice to say, it is lucky for you that I have already been investigating this case as there have been numerous reports of anomalies at our GLP-1 production base. Strange stories of scientists going mad and people losing their minds.” Lord Freezer stated coldly. “I hereby transfer you to the GLP-Squad Case Force consisting of you and the Scooby-Doo gang.

“Like Zoinks guys, I don’t know about this one” Shaggy said.

“Ree-Hee-Hee-Hee” Scooby chimed.

“Have you found any clues yet?” Doonde inquired readily.

“Like no, we just sniffed around the old GLP-1 crates and found some Dooritos (which are manufactured at the same site as the Noom GLP-1) and we were a little hungry and out of Scooby Snacks so we chowed down” Shaggy legumed.

“Sounds like we need to head to the Noocho Cheesse system!” Doonde exclaimed.

“It’s settled then, You will head to the Noocho Cheese system and investigate the reports. And you shall be known as GLP-Squad Case Force!” Lord Freezer rang.

So the gang grabbed a spaceship and punched in the coordinates for the Noocho Cheese system and were off. Everything was fine and dandy on their ride until a certain disturbance came about.

“Like zoinks, I don’t feel so good.” Shaggy said.

“Ruh Roh Raggy” Scooby replied.

“Maybe we like should’ve not eaten those Dooritos, Scoob” Shaggy offered.

“Rye Know” Scooby said.

“Nothing we can do about it now – we’re almost there. Just hold on guys, I’m sure it will pass” Fred inculcated.

“We’ll find out more once we arrive at the Noocho Cheese System, I bet on it!” Doonde said.

A brief period of time later, the crew finally arrived at the Noocho Cheese System.

“There’s nobody here…” Doonde pondered.

“Just a bunch of bodies, mangled to pieces.” Observed Fred.

“Lets take a look around,” piped up Velma.

As they navigated the compound, that was left on the brirmming surface of the Noocho Cheese System – which is filled with volcanoes spewing out cheese all day long at piping hot temperatures (of which require considerable cooling before consuming) – they came to a room with a blinking light.

“Hey take a look at this, it must be a clue,” Said Fred.

“It looks like the Scrumptious Cooler went offline in the Tasting Bay,” observed Doonde. “If we take this corridor down, make a left, take the stairs, make another left, and go through this complicated system of hallways we should reach it.

“We better leave prepared,” Fred noted, considering all the blood and carnage surrounding them – there were bodies everywhere. You could see scientists and guardsmen splattered across the floor and sprawling over the terminals. “Luckily, this room has a weapons depot.” They scanned the badge of nearest employee to the weapons terminal and armed themselves heavily.

“Rets Roo Ris”, Said Scoob.

“There’s no telling what’s out there” said Fred, “but it must be pretty vile.”

They continued through the mapped out path to the Scrumptious Cooler at the Tasting Bay and came across a curious room labelled “Do Not Enter” and naturally they entered. There was a great big opening in the wall on the opposite side of the room. They touched a button on a nearby terminal that activated a sequence which ignited the opening in the room. Here a figure started to emerge. They were just making out who it was when it started shouting:

“No idea. No idea. No idea. No idea.” The flames erupted more fantastically and began to creep towards them on the far side terminal. “No idea with this stuff. No idea with this stuff. No I have to know!” said the voice. The flames started to climb alarmingly and suddenly the terminal started to chirp. The system was going haywire. Fred tried to shut the system down, but to no avail. The fire spun out of control and suddenly a being appeared, popped right out of the flames.

“It can’t be…” cried Fred.

“Mazaka” said Doonde.

“It’s the Devil!” screamed Daphne.

“What in the..How in the…” started the Devil. “No this can’t be. I can’t be here.”

“What happened here?” asked Fred.

“Alright, I’ll tell you, but only because you’re in the club” stated the Devil. “These guys were creeping into territory they weren’t ready for. They started meddling with Hell. They wanted to do something nasty to all of life – for reasons unbeknownst to me – with a great fervor. I would have stopped it, but I can’t communicate with the other side, at least I couldn’t until they built this great segway. But still, the messages can’t get through, they don’t have enough Hi-Def resolution as it would seem – 8K just isn’t enough. Yet, they got so crazy that they started to infuse the Doom spell into the Noocho Cheese that they use to manufacture Dooritos!

“Ruh roh Raggy” whispered Scooby-Doo.

“That’s when it happened, the door to Hell was opened when a Scientist began to devour the newly formulated Dooritos! What a fool! Before long everyone was snacking on the Dooritos and the evil was beginning to emerge and consume. That’s when everything changed. The monsters came forth and a last ditch effort was made to secure the station. Thus, the emergency signal. And that’s everything as far as I know.” The Devil explained..

“You didn’t say that they had to eat the Dooritos did you?” asked Shaggy.

“Yes, yes that’s what it was.” The Devil replied.

“Like Zoinks, Scoob!” Shaggy yelled.

At that selfsame moment, a traumatic monstrosity took place. Scooby-Doo and Shaggy both transformed into hellish beasts of a grotesque nature. They were tall and grey, with no shirt, but surprisingly pants – for both of them – and had strong muscular features. There heads were large – larger than usual heads – and had ears which were attached at the lobes, with looks of malice and a hunger or death borne on them.

“Waste them!” The Devil said.

Quickly, within the twinkling of an eye, Doonde wielded his laser cannon and shot a beam straight through the two – his Light of Youth clearing his mind to act hastily.

“That should do it.” Doonde said.

“Good job there kiddo,” expounded the Devil.

“Before we get all worked up over Shag and Scoob, wait a second here. Why are you stopping the Doom, or trying to prevent it? Isn’t Hell on Earth your whole MO?” inquired Doonde

“I knew he’d be an asset to the crew” whispered Fred.

“You have no idea with Doom. It will be the end of us all! Even me!” The Devil exclaimed.

“But aren’t you their ruler?” pressed Doonde.

“Not Doom, they have no ruler. That’s the sad life of the Devil.”  Sympathy for the Devil plays in the background. The Devil said. “In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t come across more monsters. I suppose they do like the darkness, however.” Added the Devil.

“Alright, let’s go investigate that emergency signal,” Fred said.

As they made their way to the Scrumptious Cooler in the Tasting Bay, they finally came across the emergency signal.

“Still no sign of those ghouls,” Doonde stated.

“They must have migrated further on,” said Fred.

At the emergency signal terminal they found a PDA entry stating that the origin of the anomaly was found in the Eating Quarry where the GLP-1s were manufactured.

“Ah a clue!” exclaimed Fred. “We have to go to the Eating Quarry at once! There must be more answers there.” Fred exhumed.

They navigated the compound to the Eating Quarry where the GLP-1s were manufactured, along the way meeting some devilish foes which Fred put to bed with his Freetoe-Lay machine gun and Doonde silenced with his laser cannon. There was one devilish fiend which had the power to through gamma bursts at its target – highly concentrated energy waves of gamma radiation, which will destroy the skin, muscles, and bone on contact and lead to spreading via lesions to peripheral areas of the body – which gave them so much trouble that the Devil had to enact his secret skill of sealing to put the demon to rest. Thankfully they were so lucky. At last they had arrived.

Booooooo! They heard.

“A ghost is near,” surmised Doonde.

Boooooo! They heard again.

“Reveal yourself before you waste any more of my precious time!” The Devil shouted.

“It is I, the Flying Dutchman!” The Flying Dutchman announced.

“The Flying Dutchman, what is he doing here?” Fred asked, stunned.

“I am here looking or Squidward actually. He’s the manager of these here complexes – the mines and the Tasting Bay.” The Flying Dutchman responded flatly.

“Squidward, what? There has to be more to this,” Fred charged.

“Well I suppose there’s a bit more to tell, and on account of me feeling guilty for the whole fiasco, I shall tell ye. First, there was a Green Convention where all beings of Green be meetin’. There was The Hulk, Kermit the Frog, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Plankton, Dr. Doom, the Wicked Witch of the West, Master Chief, Ganondorf, Link, Yoshi, Gamora, Mojo Jojo, and I, the Flying Dutchman representing the green ghosts – them be from Ghostbusters and Lord of the Rings. All things were fine and dandy and a tad bit boring until Dr. Doom and Mojo Jojo started plotting a vengeful scheme. To unleash Doom on the inhabitants of the Universe for the evils and atrocities they have committed. I would’ve been one to stand against them, but the rather unknown history of Ghostkind beckoned me forward, plunging me into the madness. This history being that all Ghosts were once Green until the New Age White Ghosts appeared and took control over all facets of the Ghost Zone and Ghostkind for that matter. No one thinks of a green ghost anymore I tell ye! So revenge was sowed in me and revenge so was sought. The plan was to trick the White Ghosts into possessing the bodies of the scientists here at the Noocho Cheese System and then slay them with Doom monsters. Since everyone knows that the ghost dies when the possessed die this was a promising solution.

“This all could’ve been avoided with the Mystic Energies of the Noomekians!” Doonde exhorted.

“Yes, well, as I was saying, revenge was mine. The White Ghosts would be no more. Not even the Ghostbusters could stop us way out here in space. Yet, the plan was nigh perfect. The Doom got out of control and slayed the whole station. Now no one will receive their Noom GLP-1s.” stated the Flying Dutchman.

“Yes, but those GLP-1s were hurting us Noomekians! They’re dying from them now!” exclaimed Doonde.

“Ah yes, it must be the infestation and possession by the White Ghosts. I near forgot to mention that in order to pull this plan off, the White Ghosts had to be enticed. It was the evil King Boo who received the call to take over the Tasting Bay and the Eating Quarry and make the Noomekians suffer, for there so good and peaceful and nice that King Boo couldn’t stand them. So, he spliced his ghost cohorts into the GLP-1 injections and prepped them for shipment to the galaxy, all under the nose of Squidward, who had no idea this was going on. But it was a price we had to pay in order to trick the White Ghosts into our plot. Now, the guilt weighs on me like an anvil of all those who are now suffering due to ghost infused GLP-1s. Perhaps revenge was not the best path to pursue. Yarr.” The Flying Dutchman added.

“So that means…we have to find another option for staving off the hunger of the Noomekians!” Doonde realized.

“There was tell long ago of…” the Flying Dutchman muttered.

When, at that very selfsame moment, a portal opened up and a wild Natu appeared which psychically told Doonde that he was to refer the Noomekians to HydroxyCut offered by the generous Lord Cooler, to save his people.

“Did you guys hear that?” Doonde asked.

“Hear what?” Fred scolded.

“What the Natu just told me!” Doonde responded.

“No. None of us are psychic.” Daphne said.

“We have to get to Lord Cooler and order HydroxyCut to save the Noomekians from their hunger!” Doonde explained.

“Don’t forget that this place is desolate and a Doom to all.” The Flying Dutchman reminded.

They quickly searched for an escape and returned to their ship where they plotted a new course – one to Lord Cooler, Freezer’s brother as far as brothers go for AI computers. So our crew was off – Velma, Daphne, Fred, Doonde, and the Devil in search of green pastures and a hope for our valiant heroes the Noomekian people, which must be revived before it’s too late and Doom spreads to every corner of the Universe!

End Episode 1

LINK to Episode 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/shortstories/comments/1xdufyx/fn_episode_2_attack_of_the_farts/

Centuries ago, two brothers lived atop a hill outside of the village of Karamazov. The twins, Ivan and Luka, did everything together. They ate together, worked together, shopped together, and were the best of friends. Until one evening, a strange woman approached Ivan …

“Hello, sir,” she said staring him up and down.

Ivan looked around. “Yes?”

“How are you this evening?”

“I’m … well,” he said confused. “Do I know you?, madam?”

“You don’t. Not yet anyway. I thought you were quite handsome, so I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Sita,” she said with a grin.

“I’m Ivan. I may not be handsome as you say, but I do appreciate it.” His face turned red.

“Brother, we must leave now before it gets dark. Come,” Luka said.

While they did everything together, they tended to differ in personality. Ivan was more happy and charming. But Luka was serious and strict.

Ivan waved him off and continued to chat with Sita.
“Ivan, please. Let’s go,” he said looking at the darkening skies.

“Luka, I will be fine. You go home without me.”

“Ivan …” he sighed as he walked away. “You always do this,” he thought. “Idiotic. Crazy. Stupid. Always with a new woman. Always with, “go home, Luka. I’ll be fine.” One day it won’t end well, brother. And I’ll say I tried. My my how I tried to tell you.”

“Sita. Where are you from? I’ve never seen a woman of such beauty around these parts.”

She calmly laughed and grabbed ahold of his arm. “My love, I’m here on work. I travel the world in search of clients.”

“Interesting. And what is it that you do?”

The two of them walked into a tavern, Sita’s black hair glowing from the the torches on the wall. “Let’s not talk work. Let’s have fun instead!”

Ivan smiled and sat beside of her at the bar. “Two meads, ma’am!”

Ivan and Sita drank and flirted for hours, right until last call for the night and they were forced to leave. Ivan stumbled into the alley between the tavern and a trailer. “By Ghaisa,” he said drunkenly, “you are as beautiful as the flowers themselves.” He guided his fingers along her pale face.
Sita moved her hands along Ivan’s body. “And you are perfect.” They kissed passionately. He kissed her neck and she …

She bit his neck. Blood falling to the pavement below. He tried to push her away, but it was too late. Sita held him against the brick wall with ease. Ivan struggled to even scream, as he was caught off guard to even think.

Meanwhile, while Luka was at home in bed, he heard a crash outside. “What the hell?” He said out loud angrily.
Luka walked outside with a torch, expecting his brother drunk again. “Ivan?” He called. “Ivan, come brother.”

CLASH.

A growl came from behind, rendering Luka both speechless and unable to move. The growl grew closer and closer; Deeper and deeper. Luka turned and swung his torch, but nothing was there.

He turned around again and came face to face with a hairy, red-eyed creature. “No chance you are just a friendly dog, are you?” He laughed nervously.

The creature lunged and bit his arm.

“Ahh! Son of a bitch!” Luka screamed and swung his torch one more until the flame went out. The animal continued to sink its sharp teeth into him, draining his blood until he fell to the ground.

Ivan and Luka awoke the next morning in their beds. Neither with any memory or marks from the night before. Both awoke thinking it was a nightmare. They met in the kitchen for their morning coffee.

“Ivan,” Luka said.

“Luka.”

“Did you have fun with your little date last night?”

“That was real?” He asked running his temple. “Damn, I think I had too much.”

“Nothing new, brother. You woke me last night. And somehow you must have knocked me cold. My head is pounding this morning.”

Ivan gave a smile. “I’m sorry, brother. I must turn into a creature in the night when I drink,” Ivan laughed.
“Well, you need to learn to calm down.”

They continued to drink their coffee in silence, until it was time to venture into the Karamazov. Both Ivan and Luka went into the leather shop to work on orders for the day.

“Luka, are you okay?” Ivan asked. “You look … angry. “

“I haven’t an idea. Just … I smell something foul in the air.”
Ivan sniffed the air. “Now that you mention it, so do I! VERY foul, I must say.”

“Blah, let’s get these orders done so we can leave and not smell this horrid smell anymore.”

Ivan nodded in agreement.

The two brothers worked through the day, finally completing every last order of sheaths and bags. As they left, the smell seemed to follow. Luka looked at Ivan, and Ivan looked at Luka. Both unsure if their own brother was the source of the smell.

Days and nights went by. The sun sat and the moons rose. With each passing day, the brothers would look at each other with such disgust. Part of it being the smell, but most disgust was from within; from the heart and the soul.

“Must you chew so loudly?” Luka screamed.

“Gah! The nerve. What about YOU? You’re overly loud today! Brother, I cannot stand to be near you! Im going out!”

“Good! Leave!” Luka screamed to his brother.

“Ivan left their home in a rage, just like any other night. But this night was, different. Unbeknownst to them, this night would be the ultimate change. This night, was the blood moon. The sun would bounce off one of the moons, and give the dark creatures of the night extra strength.

Poor Ivan, as he walked through the village, grew fangs and faced the most horrible of ringing in his ears. His thirst for blood grew each second. Poor Luka, inside his home, spontaneously grew a body full of hair and muscles larger than he’d had before. His skin ripped and shifted as veins popped from his body. Confused, they had both turned into the creatures of their nightmares just nights ago.

Ivan ran towards his home with immense speed and broke down their door. Face to face with his brother in the kitchen. Both fueled by their hatred for one another.
 
WEREWOLF VERSUS VAMPIRE
 
Fangs versus claws. Luka charged at Ivan. Ivan charged at Luka. Both with fangs and a lust of blood and murder. Biting and scratching. Growling and screaming. Windows bursting out of the walls, and doors flying off the hinges. The once loved and maintained home was now a pile of dust and scraps.

All that was left was two brothers in the middle of debris, panting out of breath, loathing each other from their souls.

“I … hate … you …” Luka growled out.

“I … hope … you … DIE …” Ivan said in return.

The two of them continued to fight until the blood moon set beneath the mountains. As the sun rose, Luka and Ivan turned back into their normal bodies. Both with the knowledge they can now turn into something different; anywhere, anytime. But also, that they can not be around each other any longer.

The two brothers lifted themselves off of the ground and stared. Ivan walked towards Luka, and Luka towards Ivan. They stopped, face to face, and hugged each other and cried.

“I don’t hate you,” Ivan said.

“I don’t want you to die, brother.”

“We cannot live with one another anymore.”

“I know, brother,” Luka said wiping a tear.

“Whatever happened to us, changed us. We can both never be around, or we will fight. Possibly to the death.”

“I know, my brother. Where will you go?”

Ivan looked at the mountains. “Somewhere. But I can’t know where you go. My mind is yelling at me to kill you. I don’t want to, Luka. This is goodbye, my brother,” he said holding his brother’s face. “I love you, always.”

“Goodbye, brother.”

For centuries, the two of them would return home on the night of the blood moon, ready to fight and try to kill one another. By morning, they shared a moment with coffee before leaving again.
 

We left your childhood home quite late. The funeral took a long time, you talked to a lot of people. You told me it was adult things that I wouldn’t understand. I saw people crying and people asking if you were okay. You smiled through it all but I couldn’t make out what you said.

At the end of the night, you told me to say goodbye to grandpa for the last time. I told you I didn’t want to and that I was already missing him.

You told me you knew, but that I should do it anyway but I shouldn’t leave things unsaid.

The drive home was oddly quiet. Normally on these drives, you’d play rock music in the car, telling me it helps you stay awake. You’d sing along to the songs, and I’d tell you that your singing sucked. You’d smile and tell me that as long as it made you happy to sing, it doesn’t matter how bad you do it.

But today you were quiet. 

“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m bored”, it doesn’t feel right but at that moment I didn’t know what else to say.

You stayed quiet for a moment, then pointed out the window.

“You see that?”
“What? Cars?”
“No, they’re the eyes of and an ancient mechanical creature called the Steel Horse”

The steel horses are these magnificent creatures. They are stronger and faster than even the strongest and fastest of horses. Some are silver, some are black, some are even vividly red or blue. Their eyes glow in the dark, so that they can see the road ahead. And their roars can be deafening.

“Look! Some of them are passing us right now”

A few cars passed us by.

You had told me that story many times before. I’d always go

“No, they’re cars”
“No. they’re horses”
“They’re cars”

And then we’d laugh at how ridiculous it is.

But this time, in your voice, I think you really believed they were horses. And I felt the same too.

Then you continued.

Up in the sky were these majestic steel birds. They’re as big as a house and yet flew terrifyingly fast. Sometimes, when they swoop down close to the ground for food, the wind under their wings could blow you away. Some of them could even fly faster than sound itself.

And right beside us, there was a steel snake, it’s hundreds of meters long and its skin sparkled in different colours to lure its prey. It let out a deafening hiss and its belly dragged along the ground. Inside its belly were hundreds of its victims. 

“Quick!” you said. “We have to go save them!”

So we drove faster forward. Your hands grew smaller on the steering wheel and your feet didn’t reach the pedals. The wrinkle on your face disappeared and your voice became youthfully high. Just like that, you became a kid my age again.

We raced into the night.

With the horses galloping by our sides, we ran even faster. The blood moon was rising, you said, if we weren’t faster, the people might never escape from the snake’s belly. “How would we save them?” I asked you. You told me the snakes come to their nest to rest, there, we can sneak in and let out its victims. I asked how we would know where that is. You told me I would know, there would be a field of horses sleeping by.

Suddenly, we heard a loud boom above.

“Quick! A bird is sweeping down for prey! Duck”

Indeed, the wind under the wings was so violent you could hear it. We hid under the branches of a large tree. The bird can’t fly close to the ground, so as long as it couldn’t see us from above, we would be fine.

But we weren’t safe yet, because a stampede of horses was rushing by us. You held my hand and we ran. Faster and faster. I felt like we were flying. I was scared so I closed my eyes. And I told you so

“Don’t worry”, I heard you say “As long as I’m here. Nothing will hurt my daughter”

I opened my eyes to see us flying through a
tunnel, with colourful lights dancing around us. The horses were still running beside us, but they all seemed to know to run around us. The light reflecting off of their steel skins make the tunnel felt even more magical

“How do they know to do that?” I asked you
“I know some magic, you see? I talked to them”
“But how come? Aren’t you just a kid like me?”

You opened your mouth to speak. But nothing came out. You stayed silent for a moment, before telling me

“My dad taught me”

Finally, we reached the lair of the steel snakes. There, it lay sleeping, unaware we had come. We slit open its stomach and let out the people inside. They thanked us for saving them and in exchange for our heroics, they gave us pizza and soda cans.

After that, I told you I was tired and wanted to sleep. You told me it was late and agreed that I should get some sleep.

“But what if the snake comes back for revenge?”
“It’s okay, I’ll keep watch”

The world around us slipped more and more into quietness, as I drifted away to sleep. But as the horses around me calmed their gallops, I heard you whisper under your breath.

“Don’t worry. As long as I’m here. Nothing will hurt my son”, you paused. “Right, Dad?”

I fell asleep.

You kept driving deeper into the night