As a long-time contributor to this sub, I know we love nothing more than discussing our degeneracy. If nothing else, hearing such stories makes you realise there are other people out there who have lived similar experiences to you. Stories of epic failure provide a sense of comfort. Stories of unexpected triumphs provide a feeling of hope.
The following bets - and the circumstances surrounding each - were not necessarily story-worthy. However, there were a number of intricate details which I felt were worth highlighting. Aside from the statistical rollercoaster than one experiences throughout a game (i.e. going from "how can this lose?" to "this bet is over"), there are other factors which can have significant ramifications for one's betting endeavours.
This is where the factor of timing comes into play. How often have you bet on something purely due to the fact that the game was starting shortly? It could either be a straight wager on the game. Or, you might have decided to add the short-priced "lock" to boost your odds. How often has this then come back to bite you? Or conversely, this random event - where your betting urge coincided with the scheduled timing of this event taking place - results in a recuperation of losses from previous games that you "studied" prior to placing your losing wagers?
Without further ado, this is my story. It is but a speck in the ocean that is my entire betting career. But it was a Sunday night full of swings, sweats and... well I won't spoil the ending.
As you read this, I want you to keep the headline in mind. Specifically, the words timing, luck and degeneracy.
It's early on a Sunday evening in Melbourne, Australia. Approximately 6PM to be exact. We are currently under the world's strictest COVID lockdown. We have an 8PM curfew, and I was keen to get in a 1 hour walk before returning home to make dinner. Now typically - as I had already walked my dog several hours earlier - I would not go for another on my own. But for some reason, I just had an urge to get some fresh air. Here is the first element in play: timing. At 6:10PM, an AFL (Australian Football) was scheduled to begin. As I begin my walk, I inevitably flick through my preferred bookmaker's iPhone app and this game catches my eye. Part of me says "don't bet it". The other part of me curb-stomps that voice in my head and says "don't be a pussy". Now on another note, I placed a daily deposit limit of $3000 on my account. To some, that is insanely big. I generally bet $1000 or so, and so this stops me from stupidly chasing the day's losses. Here is where another element peaks it's head: luck. I had deposited $1750 that day. Had I reached my limit, the following events would only have existed in a parallel universe. But as luck would have it, I had $1250 to play with. So I said 'fuck it' and made the deposit. It's about 6:05PM now and I don't have much time. I sift through the markets on offer and decide it's best to play a Same Game Multi (parlaying multiple events from the same game). With not much time left to make a decision, I quickly check the weather forecast in Gold Coast (where this game is taking place) and note that there is meant to be rain in the second half. (Spoiler: there was no rain in the second half). As this sport is played outdoors, this would favour the unders. So I come up with a bet that looks like this:

• First quarter OVER 23.5
• First half OVER 48.5
• Full match UNDER 125.5
• West Coast +34.5 handicap
• Margin: either team by 1-39
• Bontempelli 15+ disposals
• Macrae 20+ disposals

ODDS: 4.10
A bet of $1250 would pay $5125.
​
I was ready to place the bet. The problem? The match was only seconds from beginning.
The time stamp on when the bet was accepted:
18:09:55
I made it by 5 measly seconds.
​
Ok, so game begins rather uneventfully. Now it's worth noting for those who aren't familiar with AFL that you can score by 1's and 6's. It's late in the first quarter and the total is sitting at 22 points. Needing over 23.5, I'm in desperate need of a goal. The whole bet is about to come crashing down without it. With only seconds remaining a player marks the ball from a score-able position. The siren sounds. Now in AFL, if a mark is taken before the siren ("buzzer"), the player may take their kick. As luck would have it, this legend kicks it right through the middle of the goal posts, and the first quarter score ends on 28. We live on!
Second quarter ends, and the combined total is 52 points. Again, we survive the over 48.5 by less than a full goal! (But this one cleared with a handful of minutes left to play, so there was no sweat involved).
I'l wrap up the remainder of the game fairly quickly, as it is rather uneventful. The final score is 47-49, so the total under 125.5 hits easily, the +34.5 and margin 1-39 hit comfortably, and both players rack up well over their required disposals. Fantastic. My account hits $5125.
By this stage, some would be satisfied. I wasn't. I was out for blood.
The smart move would have been to withdraw, say, $4000. Play with the remaining $1125 (house money), and lock in a profit. But what's the fun in that?
I scroll through the upcoming events and see that there is a Chinese Super League (soccer) match starting in a few hours. This isn't the first example of degeneracy in this story, but it's probably the biggest.
So what do I do? Another Same Game Multi of course. And how much do I bet on it? $5125 of course.
The bet:

• Beijing Guoan: win or draw
• Total corners: OVER 7.5
• Total goals: OVER 1.5
• BOTH teams to score in BOTH halves: No

ODDS: 1.95
A bet of $5125 would pay $9993.75
​
Here's where the rollercoaster of events begins.
5 minutes in, we have our first corner.
13 minutes in, we have our second.
Corners are looking good.
Fast forward to half time and Beijing are leading 2-0.

• BOTH teams to score in BOTH halves: No = WINNER
• Total goals: OVER 1.5 = WINNER
• Beijing or draw = TBD, but looking good!
• Corners OVER 7.5 = ONLY 2 FUCKING CORNERS IN THE FIRST HALF!

Remember, they had already accumulated 2 corners 13 minutes into the match. 32 minutes without a single corner!
The live odds for over 7.5 were now over 3.00, and I was losing hope.
The second half begins and approximately 10 minutes passes without a corner. I'm fucked.
The next 15 minutes feels like God (aka Bob from NBA Daily Discussion) had blessed me. A flurry of corners results in an 8th corner before the 70th minute mark!
What looked like a total sweat, turned into the easiest of victories. Or so I thought...
The final leg: Beijing or draw - who by the way, were 1.50 favourites to win the match - were still up 2-0. One book had the opposing team at 81.00 odds to win from here. But you guys can guess what happened next.
Wuhan goal!
I'm still leading 2-1. My brain: "it's all good man, you still have a 1 goal buffer".
Barely a few minutes later...
Wuhan goal!
It's now 2-2. My brain: "it's cool, you just need a draw, you're still likely to win this".
Including the 6 minutes of added time, I have to sit through approximately 20 excruciating minutes of soccer, with just under $10k on the line.
Luckily, Beijing did 75% of the attacking. Wuhan did have a few minor chances, but nothing that made the heart sink.
The referee blew the full-time whistle, and I slowly unclenched my ass cheeks.
I waited to see my account balance, just to make sure all was kosher. (You know, we've all been there, when we thought we bet on a certain team, but because their names are all Chinese, you actually bet on the wrong Beijing or something like that).
My balance appeared at $9,993.75.
It was time to call it a night.
I reflected on the past 6 or so hours that I had just been through, and the 3 things that kept popping up in my mind again were timing, luck and degeneracy.
P.S.
Sorry to all the Djokovic and Heat backers. Brutal. Especially Djokovic. I'd say that's a once-in-a-career circumstance, but I think that would be understating how unlikely it is that the best player in the world get's DQ'd because he inadvertently hit a ball into an official's neck out of frustration.

“You can understand why we weren’t exactly expecting this.”
Dr Greaves had been talking for hours, but I’d barely been listening. I was fixated on the windswept arctic plain beneath me. The turbulence this low down was rough, and the inside of the plane was close to freezing. But the view it offered was astonishing. It was like looking down on an alien world; an infinite white sheet broken by gargantuan clumps of black volcanic rock.
“Most of the team down there are geologists and meteorologists, so for the longest time they never really considered the possibility that we’d need an archaeologist,” he said. “The ice sheet is miles thick and over firm bedrock, and the team’s primary concern… well, up until a week ago, was to investigate the effect of global warming this far in land.” The doctor’s breath turned to mist with each excited word. He was smiling even as his nose turned blue.
“What did you think it was?” I asked.
“Well sonar showed it was hollow, but parts of it were clearly wood and metal. But the size of the thing… I guess the simple answer Dr Rollet is that we didn’t know. We aren’t keen on making guesses, as you know it can lead to bias, but I think if it wasn’t for the fissure we would never have never guessed the full truth. Current samples put the trapped air are over 85,000 years old! A ship like this rewrites everything we know about our history.”
“Quite a bit of luck,” I said.
“Well,” the doctor replied. “If you work here for long you’ll quickly learn that the ice sheet is degrading faster with each year. The warmer it gets the more liquid water there is to weather out old caves and expand them, or even to create new ones. It was exactly that process—and our looking for it—that led us to the discovery.”
“The effect is the same though,” I said. “A new cave system opened up within days of your discovery, and it led you right to it. As if the original find wasn’t bizarre enough.”
“Well… yes,” Dr Hargreave said. “It is a miracle. That’s what I’ve been trying to get at. Chances like this aren’t just once in a lifetime Dr Rosset, they’re once in an epoch. It makes winning the lottery look mundane.”
I couldn’t quite stymie a chuckle, and I had to shake my head apologetically to the doctor when he took offence. “I believe you,” I said. “I do. It’s just that exact same good luck has landed you in a rather… strange position.”
“Everyone thinks it’s a hoax,” Dr Greaves cried, slumping back into his seat like a scolded boy. “They’ve sent three different researchers from my own university and even after they’ve all confirmed the find, I’m still being treated like a fraud.”
“Proof is in the pudding,” I said. “You know the truth.”
“See,” the doctor said, cheered slightly by my words. “If anyone would understand, it’s you.”
I was saved from the need to reply further when a light chimed overhead and the captain’s words rang out over the speaker. The doctor straightened in his chair and Ryan, my assistant PhD student, finally woke up. I returned to the window and watched, breath held, as we finally made our descent, sinking into the fine white mists below.
-
Basecamp was filled with busy students shuffling back and forth. In the distance two young men argued over a half-dissembled ice drill while nearby three people worked to feed a small pack of sled dogs. In the centre of it all was a small table where two men around Hargreave’s age assembled various picks and other tools. I made towards them, dodging half-a-dozen people carrying boxes along the way. Everyone looked exhausted and utterly disinterested in my arrival, and it was only when Dr Greaves caught up with me and called out to the two men in the centre that they looked up and paid attention.
“Ah Dr Rosset,” the oldest called out, fat and plump with red cheeks like Santa. “Good to see you. Bloody tough going, isn’t it? Bet you’ve never flown anywhere like this before.”
“It’s certainly something,” I answered as he took my hand and shook it.
“I am Dr Whittle, this is Professor Shauley,” he pointed to the whip-cord thin man beside him who looked very much like the classic ideal of an aged adventurer. “And obviously you’re acquainted with Dr Greaves.” The moustachioed man beside me smiled and gave a small nod. “Now we’ve had a few of the staff put aside what data we’ve managed to collect so far and put it in your tent, which you’ll find hopefully to your liking just over there.” He pointed to some far corner of the camp and smiled as if that was all the introduction he needed. I ignored him, instead paying close attention to the rope coiled around his shoulder, his spiked ice boots, and the bundle of tools both men carried at their back.
“I’d like to see it,” I said. “I’ll gear up now and join you.”
“Oh well, we sort of hoped you’d…”
“No need to worry about my schedule, gentlemen.” I smiled. “That’s my job. I’ll be with you shortly.”
I picked up my things and marched towards my tent, taking only brief notice of the small cot and heater I’d been provided. I hadn’t arrived unprepared, and despite what Dr Whittle might have thought, I’d spent years working in the arctic circle and was just as well equipped to deal with the climate as the best of them. By the time I was unpacked and ready, barely half-an-hour had passed.
And yet, when I left my tent I saw that the three doctors were nowhere to be found. I pulled aside a young woman making her way past and asked if she’d seen where they went, and she told they’d announced their descent just after I’d entered my tent. I was seething at the news and had her show me the entrance to the fissure. Sure enough, there was fresh rigging buried into the ice, slack rope hanging loose over the edge.
“Thank you,” I muttered and attached my own safety line to the rigging, accepting that I’d be travelling solo. The girl tried to talk me out of it, but I was already a metre down before she could finish her first plea.
I can’t say exactly why I did it, except that I’d been pulled into this venture at the last possible minute and I wasn’t very happy about it. From Dr Hargreave’s behaviour on the plane I thought, perhaps, that the researchers on site would be friendly enough. But it seems they figured out what I’d known right from the beginning; I’d been brought in by the university to harm the project’s credit, not bolster it. I was a black enough sheep that from time to time my name would be stapled on to risky papers—willingly or not—to help ensure they sank in unfavourable journals. I’d learned to accept my fringe status years ago, but to researchers only just learning about the death of their career, I was about as welcome as a leper in a hot tub.
Thankfully the vertical drop wasn’t all that severe and the journey down was short. The fissure penetrated a small cave system below the surface and after a few dozen feet I landed on flat ground. I’d previously worked in ice caves close to the edge of the Canadian coast and most of them have a floor made of bedrock, but in Greenland the ice sheet can reach 3km in thickness and there was nothing but water-worn ice for my feet to find purchase. I felt a kind of vertigo imagining myself hovering two miles over the Earth. It was like another world down there. Fine motes of snow drifted lazily down from the breach above and the gale-force wind—ever present on the surface—had been whittled down to a distant whistle. It was not dark as you might expect because the crystal blue walls turned any torch into a dazzling light display. The effect was one of insulating warmth and uncanny beauty. But it made me feel small, too small to be mucking around in a continent-sized lump of ice where even the minutest shift in material would leave me crushed like a gnat.
I pushed on regardless, and the cave system opened up after a few dozen metres, but the vast empty spaces only doubled that feeling of insignificance. Thank God there were clearly marked guidelines to clip onto. I must have fallen half-a-dozen times and one of them brought me frighteningly close to tumbling into a bottomless chasm. Without those safety lines I would have slid right on over the sloped edge and died. But if those three old dolts could manage it, I knew I could too. It was just a matter of following the trail and staying clipped on.
By the time I arrived I was red-faced and sweaty and had more than a few bruises hidden by my thick clothes. The three men couldn’t see any of those, but they raised an eyebrow at my breathless state and I’m sure I heard Dr Whittle make some shitty comment beneath his breath. I was getting ready to really start tearing into them when finally, I saw it, and I wasn’t in much shape to do anything afterwards except gawk.
It really did look like the photos. And in fact, for a second there, I didn’t believe my own eyes. I just, well… I just couldn’t piece it together as something real. If I had taken a picture, you would have called it fake. If had I sketched it, or painted it, you’d think it a pretty picture of a dream, but nothing more. I have seen photos of glacial ice bisected by sudden geological change, seen the clear blue crystal standing tall like an impossible snapshot of the ocean depths but this was something else. Just a few metres away from where I stood, the wall of ice began, and a few metres further the prow of an enormous ship was clearly seen, frozen perfectly in time. Impossibly large for any wooden vessel I’ve ever seen, it was like a jagged piece of rock or wood that jutted out of the darkness towards us so that only the nose was visible. It looked like some colossal aquatic predator with its face pressed against a sheet of glass and you couldn’t help but feel a little afraid looking at it.
“How big is it?” I said, stammering the words out like a frightened child.
“The air pocket is around 800m.”
I looked towards the three men. I didn’t even remember who’d spoken, but my face must have said what I was thinking because Dr Whittle spoke up quickly enough.
“The nose which is clearly visible is about 100m tall. Whether the ship behind it is 800m long we can’t easily say. But the sonar shows the cavity it’s trapped in is 800m long.”
“It could be half that,” I said. “And still piss all over everything I’ve ever understood about the limits of ship building. The largest ships currently in existence reach around 4 to 500 metres. This… this is a city that floats.”
“It shouldn’t exist,” Professor Shauley snarled and I realised the sour faced adventurer wasn’t making the comment out of awe or even curiosity. It was more of a flat statement, with the emphasis on shouldn’t. Dr Whittle and Greaves both noticed this and something of an argument quickly broke out.
“Well it does exist Garett!” Dr Whittle cried. “That issue has long been settled!”
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Dr Greaves said. “Please gentlemen, this is truly something special.”
But Professor Shauley was obstinate and difficult, and he never fully stated his case while I was present. Instead he skirted around the idea that they should have never reported it, that they had somehow breached their scientific responsibility by not ignoring the evidence of their own eyes. In the meantime I returned to the ship, absolutely breath-taken by its imposing size and jagged outline. It looked unlike any ship I’d ever seen, pitch-black and full of blunt hard angles, like an oil-tanker made out of burnt match sticks.
“This won’t reach the outside world,” I said, my loud voice cutting cleanly through their bickering so that they all looked towards me. “I’m sorry to say this Dr Greaves but you won’t be recognised for this kind of discovery, or in all likelihood any others. Some truths are a little too big and this is one of them.”
“You can’t say that!” Dr Greaves cried. “We’ve had visitors from at least a dozen universities and they’ve all seen this very thing right in front of you.”
“And they won’t be recognised either.” I smiled. “Some things break the scientific method and this is… hoo boy this is a big one.”
“But we have to try!” he cried. “You said it yourself: the proof is in the pudding.”
“I’m not surprised you’re trying to pull us into your silly conspiracy peddling,” Dr Whittle snorted.
“None of you will see this work published,” I told them, ignoring Dr Whittle’s remark. “Not even in the small journals. To be honest, I thought it was all a hoax, despite the things I’ve seen, and so does everyone else and they don’t have the benefit of my experience. The fact you so readily called in help will only make this worse for you because the sooner it becomes clear you really do have something, well, that’s when they show up.”
“They are welcome to it,” Professor Shauley said, a glint of defeat in his eye. “I never wanted to be Galileo.”
“I don’t blame you,” I replied. “But there are worse hills to die on. As it stands, I’d say you have a week or two before some very stern looking people turn up and start taking everything you have. At least, that’s my experience.”
“Of course!” cried Dr Whittle. “Here we go again. The strange men in suits, the inexplicable stalling of a bright young career, threats and even direct coercion. The difference here Dr Rollett is that we have proof of our claims instead of parading some nonsense theory about prehistoric civilisations.”
I left that last part unanswered and instead cut to the chase.
“You have 7 to 14 days,” I said. “Your careers are dead. There is no acclaim to be had, no place in the history books. I am truly sorry, but sooner or later you must mourn the death of your life’s work because it’s happening one way or another. Why else would I be sent here to taint you all by association? Any of your colleagues who openly support you will quickly find themselves out of pocket for all sorts of reasons. Dismiss it as conspiracy all you want. I’m long past arguing it. But all you have going for you is that the people who matter still think you’re lying and that buys you time.”
“Time to do what?” asked Dr Greaves.
I pointed to the ship.
“To go take a closer look. There will be no credit, no claims, no glory, no acclaim. Just the truth, for you and you alone. Scream this news from a mountain top and all you’ll get is struck by lightning. But for those of us who value knowledge for its own sake, there will always be the truth of what lies in that ship. So,” I rubbed my hands together with barely contained glee, “who wants to crack this thing open?”
-
Ryan was fiddling with the lighting on his camera, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him none of it would leave the camp intact. Still, his expertise on remote camera rigs was very helpful and there was something strangely funny about watching him explain the concept of a GoPro to Professor Shauley. As it was, we’d managed to jury rig a pretty half-decent solution to just about every problem that had popped up in the last four days and with the recording equipment all set up we were good to go.
Now the cave was almost always occupied as various engineers and mechanics had worked tirelessly to first drill into the ice and then establish a safe corridor to the ship’s hull, all under sealed airtight conditions. Tents were set up and quarantine procedures established, and standard hazmat deep-pressure suits were hanging by the improvised bulkhead. Turns out that my connections weren’t so unwanted after all, and by the time I’d had a drill flown in that was worth over £250,000, Dr Whittle finally started warming up to me. Professor Shauley remained distant, but he broke one quiet evening while I sat outside my tent and smoked, coming over to ask how I’d possibly known the head of the company well enough to work that kind of favour.
“Proof is in the pudding,” I said with a smile. “My theories went down in flames but the truth is still worth something in the right places. How do you think I fund my research? Some people will give anything to know what no one else does, and they’ll pay even more to tag along or play some vital role in digging it all up. But then, you’ll find out soon enough.” He said nothing in return and simply stomped off in silence, his footfalls crunching in the snow.
But whether he liked it or not I’d played a vital role in making this all happen, and I watched Dr Whittle and Professor Shauley suit up with a kind of glint in my eye. The professor caught it at one point and turned visibly red and I had to look away to stop myself from laughing. This couldn’t have happened without me, and I stopped just short of openly revelling in it.
Once Ryan had the remote camera feed all set up, they pulled on their unwieldly helmets and started the long waddle to the bulkhead. I had felt a powerful sense of accomplishment all throughout this day, and yet the sight of the two men approaching the door with the ship looming overhead left me frightened for them. The ship was a pitch-black splinter in the abyssal depths and nothing about it looked welcoming – a floating city of tar too large to imagine moving around the open ocean. My own experiences taught me that there were old things buried deep in the Earth that do not like being woken up, and the question of who had built this ship and how remained hanging over all our heads. When I took the time to consult a few marine architects, they all practically laughed me off the phone at the suggestion of an 800m long wooden ship. Even with all the luxuries of modern technology, they said, such a thing simply isn’t feasible. One, only one, had floated the novel idea that it might somehow be workable if the wood scaled in size as well.
“But of course,” he’d laughed. “That’d require a tree over 800m tall to create a really solid structure with any hope of surviving the stress. And gravity puts a hard limit on how tall trees grow.”
I hadn’t liked to think too much on that. I wasn’t sure how to file it away in my brain, so I left it floating around until it came back to me in that moment as I watched the doctors enter the bulkhead and disappear from view. It was a question that should have inspired awe and fascination, but that ship looked all too hungry and I turned to the remote feed with a feeling of intense anxiety. It took hours for the two men to finally cut an entrance into the hull, and the whole time a small army of students waited on hand to take away the steady stream of samples and begin testing.
By the time they cut the final section away Dr Greaves had joined me and we waited with bated breath.
“Here we go,” Dr Whittle muttered to himself and I watched as he plunged ahead.
The entrance was about two foot off the ground, and one of the men leaned forward into the darkness. His light was pale and chalky in the gloom, showing a floor coated in thick layers of dust that flared bright white in the camera. Debris littered the floor, buried under the blanket of dust like cabins in the snow. When one of the men started to climb upwards, his movement disturbed a flurry of ashy flakes that swept across the screen like a blizzard. They flashed brightly in the camera’s glare and visibility was poor. We could see no walls yet, just an empty space.
Hesitantly, Shauley took his first steps and swept his head around to gauge the size of the room. It was enormous, though the ceiling was low and the shadows felt claustrophobic. We hadn’t had time to arrange for proper medical monitoring, but I could well imagine both men’s hearts were racing. Their breathing filled their helmets and more than once they swallowed too loudly for our comfort. They walked onwards until, after a few metres, something came into view. It swept past the camera at first, and before any of us could tell him to swing back he had already done a double take and brought the object into full view.
It was a cage filled with little more than a pile of white dust and beside it was an identical one with similar contents. A few feet behind it a wall came into sight, and the men’s torches caught sight of other crates all lined up in a row. Their exact number was lost to darkness but even with our limited sight we saw that they were arranged in a repeating pattern of pairs.
“Two by two,” I muttered.
Dr Greaves was pink, his face a puzzle I couldn’t crack. Ryan’s expression at least was familiar.
“What the fuuuck…” he groaned.
I turned back to the feeds and watched the two men follow the wall. The going was slow, and both scientists stopped often to collect a few lone items resting on top of some of the crates; they were knives mostly, but one looked oddly like something the Egyptians used to remove the brain prior to mummification. One by one they were bagged and put away into various pouches along the men’s suits. They were meticulous in detailing what little they found so the going was slow, but eventually a break in the wall appeared. It was a rounded doorway and looking through it we all saw a set of wooden steps rising into the darkness. They were wooden planks fixed to the wall with no sign of rails, and the thought of ascending them turned my stomach.
“Did you see that?” Dr Whittle cried and everyone in the small crowd that had gathered around us jumped all at once. From the back, laughter could be heard but my eyes were wide and fixed on the screen. He was staring straight up at the stairs, desperately trying to see past the gloom.
“Did you see that!?” Dr Whittle cried again, his voice suddenly frail.
“I did,” replied. “I saw it.”
“Something moved!”
“That’s not possible Doctor,” Dr Greaves said, grabbing the speaker.
“Check the audio readings,” Professor Shauley said, his voice grave. “I didn’t see anything but I’m sure I heard it.”
Ryan was already on it. While we had access to two standard radios the suits included extremely sensitive recorders designed to pick out the faintest noise. I didn’t tell anyone on site, but they were actually specialist items used by ghost hunters to detect EVP. At the time I’d found the irony delicious. Sitting there as Ryan skipped through the first twenty minutes of recording, it wasn’t irony I could taste but instead the acid wash of terror that stung the back of my throat.
We saw it before we heard it, a rising peak in the waveform that stood out from the other noise. When it reached playback it began as some ill-defined shuffling, briefly pierced by a loud and clearly defined thump, followed by fading drumming sound akin to footfalls retreating into the distance.
For the last few minutes Whittle had refused to take his eyes from the stair way, but Shauley’s feed was roaming from side to side. He had focused on a doorway that appeared in the corridor a few metres down. I imagine he was terrified just like the rest of us, but it was clear he couldn’t stop curiosity getting the better of him. He peered through the doorway and found an identical room to the last, filled with rows and rows of endless pale cages.
“What’s that?” he said and approached one a few metres away. Whatever he saw, our cameras couldn’t make it out until he was right by it.
This pile of white dust had a face. It emerged out of the mound like a primitive face carved into a volcano. Attached to two bars on either side of the cage were hands, frail and thin like a shrivelled monkey’s paw. Of the arms there was no sign.
“Looks almost human, doesn’t it?” the professor said.
“It does,” I replied, my voice like paper. “Is there anything under it? Or is it just a pattern left by the dust?”
“Why don’t we find out,” Shauley replied and I watched as he knelt down and pushed his arm between the bars. He gently poked the surface and it yielded to his fingers, but he must have felt something nonetheless because he spoke. “It’s not all dust,” he mumbled, before pulling out a small section of skull that included some brow, eye-socket, and cheekbone. He sifted through a bit more and found a few teeth that were too sharp and long to belong to a primate, and he deposited them safely to the excitement of us all.
“Wait,” he added, “what’s this? That wasn’t in the last room?”
He went further into the darkness until a small flat surface unveiled itself on the far wall. It was looked like a kind of workspace, little more than a stone slab with a few large jars huddled around the floor beside it. One of the jars, about two feet tall, had been hauled onto the top and was open.
“Be careful,” I said as he approached it, suddenly aware of how far into the darkness he’d gone.
“Dr Whittle,” I added, turning to the second screen. “Are you okay?”
His eyes were still fixated on the stairs above him. His breaths were quivering, desperate, and no matter how hard I tried, he refused to reply. “Professor,” I said, returning to his feed. “I think you need to return to Dr Whittle.”
He was standing over the pot staring down into a featureless pile of white clay-like material. It was soft, yielding like soil to the small scraper he used to collect a sample. “Professor,” I repeated myself. “You need to check on—”
The speaker beside me exploded into a cacophony of screams. The professor’s own feed cried out as well so that the whole workspace was filled with duelling copies of the same shrieking horror. I snapped my head to the side and tried to see what was happening but the doctor’s screen showed only darkness while the professor shuffled quickly to the spot where his colleague had once stood. He found only a lone strip of the doctor’s suit but no sign of the man himself. I was already shouting at Ryan to playback the recording of the doctor’s feed while Dr Greaves grabbed another screen and stared at the audio recording. He was pressing one side of a pair of headphones to his ear and his face had gone white with sheer terror.
“What is it?” I asked, but he didn’t reply. He looked at me and I saw he was close to passing out. “Professor,” I yelled, grabbing the radio. “You need to leave!”
Shauley’s speaker burst into protest but I ignored them and turned back to Dr Greaves. “What is it?” I cried. “What can you hear!?” Ryan, hovering just behind me who could no longer bear the tension leaned forward and tore the headphone jack out of the computer. Both the doctor and I cried out at once:
“No, don’t!”
But it was already too late. The camp was filled with the sounds of wet and painful splutters. Someone was hyperventilating close by, short sharp desperate breaths, and occasionally those deathly shudders turned into small gentle moans of dying protest.
“No,” the Dr Whittle whispered. His voice was distant, but he repeated the word a few more times. “No…
“Please…
“No.”
There was a terrible crack and some of us winced. The hyperventilating stopped but the frantic gurgles and wet animal panting continued. I turned the sound off with shaking hands. I could see that Professor Shauley was close to the stairs, one foot raised to go looking for his friend, and I cried out.
“Professor Shauley!” I said. “You need to leave.”
“I have to find him!” he roared. “You can’t be serious! We can’t abandon him!”
His voice was so loud it hurt the speakers. It was a sobering outburst. As his words died the whole cave become silent until only the sound of dripping water and radio static could be heard. Suddenly we were all aware of how alone the Professor was, and so was he. I could see him looking around, surrounded on almost all sides by aching shadow. This was an impossible nightmare carved out of tar, disorientating and distressing in ways that reeked of the uncanny.
“Leave,” I whispered and this time he didn’t argue. He nodded, probably more to himself than to me. And at last he turned back the way he came. It was awkward to walk in the suit but I willed him on to go as quickly as possible. I don’t know if it was our imagination, but during such tense silence the white hiss of the radio seemed full of spectral bumps and shuffles. And I could see the paranoia and fear affect Shauley; his feed was constantly moving from side to side and occasionally he jumped at something none of us could hear or see.
“I’m close to the entrance,” he said at last.
“Come on, come on, come on!” I whispered.
Shauley was no more than ten or fifteen metres from the exit when something shifted in the pixelated shadows on either side of the blinding white portal. The professor stopped dead in his tracks and froze like a deer in headlights. In defiance of everything I knew possible, something stepped out into the light and barred the professor’s way. It was tall, stooped against the ceiling in a blurry humanoid silhouette. The professor cried out and so did we all. The shape of this thing, the way it moved, sent shivers down my back. I felt like I was watching film from another world, but a part of my mind reminded myself the events occurred no more than a hundred metres from where I stood.
The professor was trying to back up when this thing reached out towards him. Its giant misshapen hand filled the screen and the professor’s cries rose to a crescendo. There was a sound like a tree falling and the screen went black and the professor’s screams stopped. For a moment I thought he was truly dead until Ryan looked up from the workstation. His eyes were red and I could see he was crying, but it took me a moment to realise what had caught his attention.
The professor’s screams hadn’t stopped. The microphone had been disabled, but we could still hear him. His voice was now tinny, faintly audible through distance, ice, and thick airlock doors. But we could still hear him, and he was squealing like a pig. I was barely able to stand but I managed to approach the door. I was close enough to touch it when the screaming finally stopped for real this time. In those final few seconds I was just about able to make out what it was he was saying.
He was pleading for it to stop.
Part 2
Part 3

Monday 8/10/2020 to Thursday 8/13/2020
I won't do the play by play. It's more fun to just amalgamate the highlight reel of the week.
I get call after call from people looking for 380 and 9mm ammo. One notable dialogue at 8PM
1: You have any 380 ammo?
Me: Yes, I have 7 boxes yet
1: How much?
Me: 20 to a box, 50 each
1: Great we can come pick it up now!
Me: It's 8PM and I've already left for the day. Come in tomorrow
1: But we need it now.
Me: I'm not heading back to work to sell a box of ammo.
1: Oh come on! I called you! You should be able to help me!
Me: I am, during normal business hours. But if you really want 2 boxes - $100 bill and I'll head back in.
1: ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS? YOU JUST TOLD ME IT WAS TWENTY!
Me: Twenty to a box, 50 bucks each box times two boxes
1: That's highway robbery! That's price gouging!
Me: Go look online. Nobody has any 380 ammo. And if they do it is $1 or $2 per round.
1: That's ridiculous! You're not the only guy in town that has 380 ammo!
(Editors note: She calls back the next day asking for 380 ammo. Apparently I am the only guy in town that has 380 ammo. I tell her there's a new policy. No ammo sales to people who have not bought firearms.)
One of my surgeon customers calls me telling me his lead nurse who hates guns wants to buy a gun. I tell them to come on down. Her whole family and the doc come in and I have this dialogue.
1: Can you suggest a gun for someone who hates guns?
Me: That's like a vegan walking into a steakhouse and saying "whats a good steak for a vegan?" - there's no real good way to do it and everything I can suggest you is sold out and then some.
1: Well what do you have here?
Me: That's a Glock 17, here take a look.
(Unload and show clear, hand her a Glock 17)
1: OH MY GOD THIS IS SO HEAVY!
Me: That's one of the lightest full size firearms ever made.
1: Do you have something with a safety? I love safeties. The more the better. If you have a gun with 150 safetys, that's something I would be interested in.
(I glare at the doc)
Me: I've only got three or four different model pistols left in stock. Here try out this springfield XD-S.....
1: I don't like this thing in the grip here the bump....
Me: You mean the grip safety?
1: yes
1: What happened to "I love safties the more the better"
(Doc nearly inhales his surgical mask from laughing)
She hates guns and wants to go rent a bunch of guns before buying any guns but I explain the problem is you can go rent something, fall in love with it and the dealer can't get one for a year. Case in point: Glock 19's, Sig 365's and Springfield Hellcats. She believes she is not ready to buy a gun until she rents one. I tell her go to a range and go rent one and find out what she likes.
She has just taken a "safety course" offered by the local girl and a gun chapter. The local girl and a gun chapter is run by a middle aged woman who has NRA instructor creds that is the WORST FIREARM INSTRUCTOR I HAVE EVER MET IN MY LIFE with the possible exception of James Yaeger. The last time I was at one of her events she was using the "mugger in a hoodie" paper targets and she instructed all the women to shoot him in the balls during one course of fire.
Now, I wasn't wearing my Caltech shirt that day but the fast math and trig is as follows.
Person shooting at a target 10 feet from the bench at a downward angle with a backstop of dirt 50 feet behind the bench...
I was trying to fix someone's gun before I could do anything. I am concentrated on fixing this pistol and the first volley of gunfire breaks my concentration. I then hear the sound of dozens of 9mm projectiles hitting the concrete and skipping off the property. I drop the pistol and shout at the top of my lungs a cease fire and evetyone looks at me funny
Me: KAREN! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?
1: Oh they're just girls, let them have their fun!
Me: ALL THE BULLETS ARE LEAVING THE PROPERTY!
1: What? No! How?
(I point at all the ricochet gouges on the concrete of the gun club)
1: Ohhhhhh
This woman is barely qualified to run a dairy queen much less instruct neophyte gun owners. Holy fucking shit. Why are people going to her? She's open, and she's a woman that has credentials that "can teach".
Yeah.
One day I head to lunch at the local pizza joint for lunch with Megan. Eddie makes a nice pizza and I sit down and have a pie. We rap about business as I eat my antipasato and wait for my freshly prepared clam pie to cool down a bit. It's not on the menu but he makes it special for us.
Me: hey eddie how's business?
ed: It's steady, lots of takeout.
Me: Its a tough economy I'd take it!
ed: Hey now!
Me: You doing okay?
ed: yeah I found that derringer I wanted at the last gun show!
Me: Oh really?
ed: Yeah! Someone ceracoted it tiffany blue and magenta
Me: Whoa whoa whoa! Please! I'm trying to eat here! Disgusting!
(Megan is drinking water and nearly does a spit take)
This is the world we're living in now.
Speaking of the new world... I wind up working a deal with a friend and we split 100k pcs of once fired lake city 5.56 brass. A local military contractor was doing some testing and they had a fucking ton of it and this is what was left. We got it for the cost of manpower to scrape it up and load it, clean it, tumble it and sort it and deprime and resize it.
My friend has two kids that are doing online learning with school, so he made them a deal. He cut the kiddos a deal to help him clean and resize and deprime the brass as labor.
We're into this stuff CHEAP. So we can sell it cheap or whatever the fuck we want in this market. I tell Ray I've got the perfect ad. We get some projectiles, some powder and primers and we run an ad. "5.56 ammo! $275/thousand! Some assembly required!" and Ray laughs his ass off.
The we got it was it was loaded into some wooden ammo crates that were left over at the contractors facility. They're heavy, not cost effective to ship and came with 5000 pcs of brass each. Ray gets an idea. He has discovered that if we portion it out and throw out or sell the wooden crates, we save a ton of money on shipping.
I wonder where he got this idea from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nozIkRy0v-M
The kiddos load all the brass into USPS flat rate boxes in no time flat and we've got ourselves loaded ready to roll product that can ship immediately. His kids did the legwork in the loading on account of my bad back and I'm tasked with lining up buyers. No problem. I start working the local gun boards, my customers, myspace, etc. You know the usual spots.
This is where the wheels come off the wagon. I get a guy who comes right out the gate asking for 9k and then he blurts out "How much do you have, I'm interested in all of it"
Little hint for the readers. Anyone that says they're interested in everything you have are interested in nothing you have. They're blowing smoke 99% of the time and the 1% of the time that someone does buy everything you have, you're making a killing off them or they're making a killing off you. You know the old saying in poker - if you sit down at the table and you can't find the sucker in 5 minutes, you're the sucker? It's like that.
Anyhow, my ad reads as follows: $125/thousand 5.56 Brass Lake City cleaned, sorted, resized, trimmed and polished - DILLON 1050 READY!
The guy calling me wanting 9k then asked how much I had left - he lines up 9 of his friends and they want to take ALL of it and divvy it up. Pick up today or when the guys can get off of work and come get it, they're working back asswards logistics as to who's truck is going to haul all of it, who's loading it and unloading and they plan to show up at 630 tonight after work to come get it.
At 445 I get a message - hey can you send me a picture again one of my friends wants to check something and I send it over.
And that's when the entire deal falls apart because this butthead read 5.56 brass lake city NATO headstamp $125/thousand and thought he was getting loaded 5.56 NATO spec ammo for 12.5 cents a round in 2020, told all his friends about it and shot his mouth off like a damn fool. Now he has to explain to every single one of his friends that no you're not getting 10,000 rds of 5.56 NATO ammo for $1250. Wasting my fucking time. That was my Thursday. All these people begging for ammo are driving me nuts. Yes, I have 250,000 rds of ammo. No I am not going to bend over backwards and sell it to you cheap just to be a nice person/earn your business/because your sister gave me a handjob in high school. God damn.
Lady calls me looking for 380 ammo. She needs some for her CCW class that Karen is teaching and I tell her I have some left. She comes in and I tell her it's $50 a box. She leaves without buying anything.
There's other miscellany but you get the gist of it.
NOW here's the meat and potatoes you've wanted! The tale of the gun show!
Friday 8/14/2020
I take inventory. I'm down to about 500 guns in stock and I pack as much as I can and get it ready for the show. I've got some Sigs left, a handful of Glock and a mishmash of everything else. I head to bed early knowing full well the next show will be a total shitshow. I have not done a show in a big city for nearly six months. This will be epic or epic fail.
Saturday 8/15/2020
I pull chocks at 430AM, hit the flying J for diesel and pull into the local grocery store for a sandwich at 7AM right around the corner from the gun show. They fuck up my sandwich. Serves me right for buying morning of. Fuck me to tears. I start loading into the show and the entire front of the building is set up with crowd control barriers and it takes me an extra 40 minutes to thread the needle of my hand truck and loadout. I get the table setup as fast as I can and by 9AM the doors are open and we are off to the races. I will do hour blocks instead of my previous play by play for simplicity.
9AM: Right out the gate I have people asking me for Sig 365's. I have a used one with three mags and a holster I have tagged at $650. The guy asks me if I can do any better. I ask him if he's feeling lucky. I run the 4473 bet with him.
He fills out the form straight on the first shot, no corrections - and he gives me $650, he gets $50 back with his ID.
If there's a correction to be made, I keep half a yard. He says its a bet. He loses.
As I write that up at $650, I have another guy snag a regular 365 for $700. Both their background checks clear quickly.
The morning is not off to a bad start, I think to myself. I'm about to be proven wrong massively.
One of my old friends from high school asked me to liquidate some of his collection and I told him that I would selectively cherry pick some stuff and haul it to the show since I didn't want to commit large amounts of table space for other people's guns. He's got a super clean Century M70 underfolder. It's clean even by century standards but I don't want to buy that gun.
I have it out on the table and an old romanian guy starts checking it out.
1: What country is this from?
FC: I'm not a big AK guy, it's a century so I'm guessing maybe yugoslavia or maybe romania - I don't think that its a bulgarian one, but you're welcome to take a look
1: Does it say cugir?
FC: It does not
1: How do you know it does not say cugir?
FC: I can see the side of it it does not say that
1: Where does it not say?
FC: If you look at the side of the receiver, Century has shitty electropencil that is parkerized over that you can barely read
1: Do you have some oil I can put on there to rub on it so I can read it?
FC: Look, I'll read it. What do you want to know?
1: Does it say cugir?
FC: it does not.
1: What does it say?
FC: Century M70 AB2 7.62 x 39 Georgia Vermont
1: it does not say cugir? I am romanian if it says cugir is romanian
FC: It does not say that
1: Come on then make me a deal!
(1 taps the price tag marked at $850)
FC: It's the first 20 minutes of the show, I'm not making anything on the deal it's a favor for a friend of mine. I think that gun sells down here for top dollar.
1: I give you 600 cash
FC: Come see me at the end of the show maybe I'll be amenable to discounting but not this early
1: You know problem with topcover right?
(FC looks at topcover, it's slightly off from the hole and detent. Why? IT'S A CENTURY! WHAT DID YOU FUCKING EXPECT?!?! The care and attention to detail that only Jim Fuller from Rifle Dynamics or maybe a Bulgarian Arsenal offers? Fuck you.)
FC: This gun is gonna sell this weekend as is where is, even if you think it's not right.
1: Come on make me deal!
FC: I don't negotiate with terrorists or people spending under $10k. This ain't over $10k.
1: I have cash!
FC: Got $850? We'll write it up right now.
(1 walks away and comes back 3 minutes later)
1, while holding a wad of cash: Come on make me a deal!
FC: What's your offer?
1: I will go $700
FC: Come see me at the end of the show on Sunday and I'll see what I can do.
(1 gets yelled at by the county exhibition authority for not wearing a face mask correctly and he adamantly refuses to adjust his mask and starts a full blown screaming match with the poor county employee who VERY politely asked him to wear his face mask properly. As he is engaged in this animated debate, two individuals who I will call 2 and 3 show up. 2 and 3 want the underfolder AK. 2 and 3 are what we would call hip hop/droopy jean enthusiasts, their dialogue is presented word for word without adjustment. They were dropping the hard r, not me so please don't call me names for reporting the truth.)
2: ohhhhh snapppp this is what I came here lookin for!
3: damn nigga thats a straight up choppa right there you should buy that
1: HEY I WAS HERE FIRST I AM MAKING DEAL! BACK OFF!
FC: No, you walked away - these two gentlemen are here and now they're interested in that gun and I'm giving them my time.
1: BUT I WAS HERE FIRST HOLDING CASH!
2: back off nigga I'm here to check out stuff motherfucker i'm gonna mess you up
3: yeah man back the fuck off before my nigga messes you up god damn shieeeeeeit
1: I AM HERE! HOLDING CASH! YOU GOING TO DO BUSINESS WITH ME?
FC: You walked away. This is what happens when you walk away. It's their turn......
1: BUT I AM HERE WE ARE MAKING DEAL
(FC does an ACTUAL facepalm and presses his forehead and feels a headache beginning. A deep sigh)
FC: You two.....you're killing me here.
1: I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF MAKING DEAL AND YOU DON'T WANT TO DEAL!
FC: You want to see deal? I'll show you deal!
(FC grabs AK from the hip hop enthusiasts and looks right at them while holding an order pad in right hand and rifle in other)
FC: You got $750 cash?
2: nigga I got $750 cash right here (pulls out wad of 100's)
3: oh shit that guy gonna get fuckin SWOOPED
FC: You want me to write this up right now? $750 cash. And I'll throw in 4 mags (I pull out 4 mags loaded with x39 brown bear)
2: I GET THE MAGS AND THE AMMO FOR THAT PRICE? FUCK NIGGA YOU GOT A DEAL! (he counts out $800 in c-notes and drops his ID on the table)
FC: You got yourself a rifle.
(I look back at angry romanian)
FC: That's a deal. You passed. Move faster next time.
1: I AM STANDING HERE! HOLDING CASH!
(1 throws down a stack of cash on the table, some falls behind on my table. I pick it back up and place it on his stack)
FC: You dropped some back here, don't want you thinking I shorted you or stole your money. I've got to write up these gentlemen, we're here until 5 today if you need anything else
1: (shouts at me in angry romanian while gesticulating like George Costanza complaining to Elaine about taking credit for the big salad)
FC: I'm sorry about that guy, he's got some issues. That man needs therapy not another gun
2: all good nigga all good that mofo gonna get his ass beat someday
FC: Today I didn't even have to use my AK, I got to say it was a good day
3: sheeeeeit he knows ice cube! this nigga og!
FC: Catholic school for the win!
(we fist bump)
I piss off at least one person every show. Sometimes it's good to get it out of the way in the first hour, lets you concentrate on the bigger picture things.
Three down.
10AM: Guy points at a green Glock 43 and Glock 19 Gen 4 that I have. They're each tagged at $725. Cash comes out and I write up the sale. Three women in a row snag black Glock 43's from me at $700 each. We are cranking now!
Eight down before lunch. This is getting wild.
11AM: Colt Lightweight Commander - tagged at $1050. Sells for cash. Colt Combat Unit - tagged at $1450 Sells for cash. Glock 19 MOS Gen 4 - tagged at $825. Sells for cash. Two of them back to back. Gen 4 straight 19 tagged at 775 sells on Amex. Background checks begin to start bogging down.
Thirteen down before I can even touch my sammich.
12PM: I write up three ruger LCP's in a row at $300 each. I eat half my sandwich as I sell a Kel Tec Sub 2000 at $825. Springfield Hellcat tagged at $735 goes out on a mastercharge.
Eighteen before I'm done with lunch. Sheeeeit.
1PM: My old buddy Rusty Shackleford sends me some of his collection he does not want the hassle with selling. Three ugly as sin Glock 21's, three semi clean Glock 17's and two super like new 17's. 1PM is profitable as I manage to sell everything except for a 21 and 17. People are paying $650 for PD trade 21's and $700+ on trade in Glock 17's. Why? They're the only ones in the show. Not glocks in general, I mean 21's and 17's.
Twenty four down and I have yet to finish my sandwich.
2PM: I have an immigrant from another country come over and try to buy a gun. He's super patient waiting for me to finish with customers that DO NOT STOP. Springfield XD goes out at $600. That's 25. He hands me the clipboard and I immediately stop everything I'm doing and I look down at the form.
Not only has he forgotten 10A and 12.d.2 but he's put the city in the county box and answered the firearm is not for him and he's been convicted of misdemeanor DV. I sigh and hand the form back to him for corrections.
FC: Okay, what county are we in?
1: (names city)
FC: What COUNTY are we in?
1: oh! USA!
FC: What COUNTY is this city in?
1: (names city)
FC: We're in (names county)
1: Ohhhhh thats right
FC: Who's this gun for? You or someone else?
1: Me
FC: Is there any reason you've indicated you are NOT the actual purchaser?
1: Not good at reading the form I guess
FC: Strike out intiial and date the change
1: Okay
FC: Have you been convicted of a misdemanor crime of domestic violence?
1: No it was just a misdemeanor
FC: Is there a reason why you said "yes I have been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence?"
1: oh man I screwed that up
FC: Initial and date the change
(He fixes the front of the form and signs on 14 and dates on 15. I turn the page. He's written his passport number expiration date in the ID field and indicated that NICS has denied him)
FC: Is there any reason you wrote your passport expiration date and number here?
1: Well I'm supposed to do that, right?
(FC points to line that says SECTION B MUST BE COMPLETED BY SELLER)
1: Oh man
FC: Is there any reason you checked DENIED on the NICS result box?
1: did I do that?
(FC points to the box where he's put a big bold X under DENIED)
1: Was I not supposed to do that?
(FC hands him another form to complete)
3PM: It is now over an hour to get this 4473 done. His wife and child have to help him with the form. I finish my sammich as I look at the front of his form and it is still marked "firearm is being purchased for someone not me" and he has to correct it. I turn the page. The date is marked 9/8/2020.
FC: What day is today?
1: Saturday
FC: No I mean what day is today, what calendar day?
(1 pulls out his phone)
1: Oh. You want me to do another form?
FC: No, strike out using a single line. And using WORDS - write the date.
1: gotcha
(FC looks down at the form. the date is struck out using a single line. It now reads in words SATURDAY 9/8/2020)
FC: What day is it?
1: It's saturday.
FC: Saturday the.........
1: Fifteeenth?
FC: Then explain why this says 9/8/2020?
1: Oh man you want me to do another form?
FC: Just fill it out using WORDS AS THE DATE - MONTH/DAY/YEAR
1: okay I got you
(FC hands the form back for correction)
1: I got it now! Man was that hard!
(FC looks down at the form. SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 8 2020)
FC: Take out your phone
(1 takes out his phone and presses the home button)
FC: Look at the date. What does it say and look at what you wrote.
1: Oh man
FC: Is it possible for us to get the correct date?
1: Yeah man I'm so sorry....
FC: Take out your phone and write out the date in letters and words EXACTLY AS YOUR PHONE DISPLAYS IT
1: Okay I can do that
(FC looks down at the form. 3:23 SATURDAY AUGUST 15. Fuck it, this is as good as it gets.)
FC: Close enough. Give me your ID.
(I write up my last Glock 19. It's tagged at $825. He pays cash without blinking.)
I mean, I've seen some shit but WOWWWW.
That's 26.
4PM: The rest of my glocks fly off the table. NIB Glock 36 - tagged at $725, gone. NIB Glock 30SF, tagged at $700, gone. NIB Glock 30, tagged at $700, gone. The only thing left on the table are 17 Gen 5 MOS's at $875 and 43X's at $775 and 44's at $400. That's 29 by 4PM. One guy does not have current ID so I have him go on the fish and game website on his phone and get a fishing license that gets me his up to date address. After 20 minutes he emails me a screencap and he's on his way home with his Glock 30.
5PM: Time to go home! I drop a stack of guns off at the local dealer for transfer on my way out the door and I make it home just before 7PM after stopping at the grocery to pick up dinner. I have a platter of fried chicken and mac and cheese. It is delicious. I get to bed early, tomorrow is going to be a long fucking day.
Sunday August 16th
737AM. I wake up and get my ass to my desk. I need to replenish some of the table. I grab stacks of more guns and get them loaded up and I swing by the grocery store deli on the way to the show. It's 8AM and they are out of bread. As in the bakery has not baked them any bread for sandwiches. For fucks sake. They make me a wrap instead. And they make it WRONG. I am not happy.
10AM: Get to the show and uncover my tables and get cranking. A millennial wants a Ruger LC380 and her fucking debit card does not work. This is why you bring cash to gun shows. It's fucking useless when technology fails AND YOU HAVE NO BACKUP. She transfers money from wells fargo to her boyfriends account at chase and he tries to use the ATM to get her cash. No dice. I swear to jebus, if you take debit cards away from this generation all of them will starve to death and die alone. Gun number 30 for the weekend is hard fought but it's done.
11AM: Crank off a Sig 1911 for a guy. He sends a stand in to pick it up for him since his son is exempt from waiting period but he isn't. It goes like this.
1: I'm gonna buy this gun instead
FC: why?
1: that's none of your business
FC: Yes it is. Purchase of firearm with intent to resell is unlawful
1: What I do with the gun after I get it, if I want to sell it to my dad is my business not yours
FC: No dice. Take a hike
Dad: Lets just do it his way, he wants to give it to the other dealer that's what we'll do. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I write up 31 for the weekend. My jack sack is full of cash.
12PM: I got a guy come over, former law enforcement wanting to buy his kid a gun. He wants to do the paperwork and pay me and the gun is for his kid. I say if the gun is for the kid, he needs to do it. I shake off the forms and get the kid on the clipboard and everything goes smooth and I rack up a sale for a trade in FN FNS. That's 32.
1PM: Old school NYPD beat cop comes over wanting a deal on a springfield 1911 Long Beach Operator
1: They're 1911's! They're not popular anymore! Make me a deal!
FC: ANYTHING with a barrel and a trigger is popular right now. Best deal you're getting is on the tag, which is 1250 plus tax and call in that puts you right near 1350.
1: Come on, hook a brother up!
FC: That's the rate on everything, we're selling it out as fast as we can get it! Excuse me as I help these other people......
2PM: Lady comes by and says she wants a shield EZ. I ask her why. She says her man and her firearm instructor says she cant rack the slide. I pick up a Sig 220 off the table and tell her to show me. She racks the slide. I ask her how does it feel to rack a slide properly? She spends the rest of the day wondering why they lied to her. Another lady asks me for suggestions for a first gun. I ask her what she's shot before. Answer: Nothing. She cannot rent guns and try them out because every range is booked for firearm rentals for the next 2 months out. Yeah.........
Brooklyn 99 comes back over and taps on the LB operator
1: Come on man, hook a brother up!
FC: That's the price, the LB operators are a sexy gun and they're not coming out of the warehouse very often
1: Come on brother! I'm just looking for a deal! How about 1200 all in?
FC: Cash or card?
1: Card
FC: No dice.
1: Come on brother! (more pleading for a discount)
At this point the crowd at the table has heard this guy trying to get a discount for a few minutes and I've had enough.
FC: Let me ask you a question
1: Sure thing
FC: Do you have pictures of my nephews on your phone?
1: No
FC: Did you spend thanksgiving dinner at my house?
1: No
FC: Are you a named beneficiary on my will?
1: No
FC: Then guess what? You're not my brother. Hell, without your money you're not even my customer.
You could hear the snickers from the peanut gallery as I gave the guy a dressing down. I wasn't about to let him off the hook. I still had an out in the deck to play and I was going to use it.
FC: Now, if you want this gun - you want it at a discount, I respect that. Here's what I"ll do. You feeling lucky?
1: Always!
FC: Here's the clipboard. Give me a straight form, no strike outs, no errors, no mistakes, NOTHING that needs correction - I'll give it to you for 1200 on a card flat. I hand the pen back to you to fix something, I write it at 1400 all in. $200's the action, you in or you out?
1: getoutttahere
FC: I'm serious. You want the discount, get the form right and you got what you want. If there's even one error, I keep the two bills.
1: It's a bet! Lets go! I've done this hundreds of times without a problem!
I hand him the clipboard and he starts filling out the form. The peanut gallery is now fervently watching for the results as if it were not already a foregone conclusion. The fans had no idea but they were watching a fixed horse race. My dealer neighbor at the next table over chimes in.
Neighbor: hey, are you seriously taking action?
FC: ALWAYS!
Neighbor: What's the money?
FC: two bucks
Neighbor: High stakes!
FC: You haven't seen high stakes yet.
Neighbor: You're a character. I'm glad that romanian guy didn't get that rifle yesterday, he was such a pain in the ass. Like even I was annoyed by it and it wasn't even my stuff.
FC: I know, right? You snooze, you lose.
Neighbor: But really, can I get in on the 4473 bet?
FC: You can take the bookmaker out of the catholic school but.....
NYPD: I'm all done! Lets see my new $1200 gun!
(I pick up the forms and his ID and credit card and look at the forms. 12.d.2. is blank. I hand pen back to him and point at 12.d.2.)
FC: Forgot 12.d.2. That's $1400 on your Amex, sign here.
NYPD: MOTHERFUCKER THAT WASN'T ON THERE LAST TIME!
FC: When was the last time you filled out that form?
NYPD: 2012
FC: That's why. Here's your new gun, thank you for your action.
Neighbor: How often does that bet win?
FC: My house edge on that bet is 100%.
Neighbor: Shit. That's fucking hilarious. Now I know how you got that watch. I just picked up a 50th anniversary sub myself (he shows me his sub and we rap about horology for a bit.)
33 down.
3PM: ONE HOUR TO GO! I write up a shield 2.0 9mm for a lady and her hubs for $650. One lady gets unhinged when I tell her she's not going to get her gun today on account of background check volume. She starts terrorizing me with WHY CANT I GET MY GUN TODAY?!?!?!??!?! This isn't dealing with Al-Quaeda, this is Al-Karen. Last minute sale 10 minutes before the show closes cleans me out of Ruger LC9's tagged at $450. 35 down. One guy snags a Glock 43X from me for $775.
36 for the weekend makes me a happy boy. I look at all the sales in cash and credit cards and I've booked quite the fat stack of cash. I've done a month's worth of business in TWO DAYS.
4PM: Show is closed. I start packing up. The dealer across from me has Gen 5 Glock 34's tagged at $1000, 9mm at $575/thousand and 380 at $750/thousand. We rap about the state of the industry. It's just gonna get worse closer to the election. I pack up and get all my stuff loaded up.
530PM: Homeward bound........I wish I was........HOMEWARD BOUND..............
730PM: I get back to my desk and dump off a fucking STACK of 4473's. I make a bank drop for the cash and I unload and head back home. I'm starving, so I decide to have the deli re-make their culinary abortion of a wrap.
8PM: The deli is out of bread AGAIN. Are you fucking kidding me? The deli is out of bread at 8AM and 8PM? What is this bullshit..... the deli clerk takes an entire loaf of italian sandwich bread and uses it to make me a single sandwich. My colon is about to hate me. I'm waiting in line to have the cashier comp me as I see a big tall gun guy from the gun club walk in. I yell and wave since I'm wearing a mask and he comes over.
815PM: Tim O'Toole is a big giant irish gun nut criminal defense attorney that I know from the gun club. He is an aggressive and in your face about how wrong you are if you are wrong and at 6'6" he cuts an imposing presence on any courtroom he walks into. He's just bought a house in my neighborhood and we start chatting guns. He asks me if I have a Glock 17 Gen 3 9mm barrel for his latest build and I tell him that I've probably got 3 sitting on my desk. I jump on my phone and check pricing. Wholesale + $5 for him since he helps out a lot out at the gun club and he says it's a deal. He goes and gets groceries and I eat my meat tornado of a sandwich at home.
Monday August 17th
10AM: Tim comes by right on time for his barrel and asks what else I have. I have a Glock 43 come off layaway and go back into rotation and he snaps up that and a 43X and a whole litany of extra parts, glock 17 gen 3 firing pin, channel liner, trigger bars, extra mags, etc. My 1 item sale I set up in line at the grocery store is now a 15 item $2500 sale. And he wants even more stuff that I can't get! We rap about the best legal film ever made, My Cousin Vinny. He gets every judge to approve his demand to videotape depositions and witness statements. Why? "I shot the clerk" - you have to watch the movie to understand this reference. Every time a judge asks him why he wants it on tape he simply says "I shot the clerk" and since we are in the deep south and every judge that's been stuck in the Louisiana mud knows the film My Cousin Vinny, his motion is approved. I laughed my ass off. I told him I was very much looking forward to regaling the federal judge with some witty banter that went along the lines of "the two utes" and he laughed his ass off. I really wanted to pull that stunt.
11AM: Lady comes in to pick up a layway and she can't fill out the 4473 and wear a mask at the same time. She also cannot stop talking. She drives me nuts but I hold it together long enough to get her stuff worked up. She also asks me to get her a Glock 23 Gen 4. I tell her it won't be cheap and it's probably going to set her back $850 by the time I beat the bushes and line one up. She says no problem, Visa okay? Done. I get a Glock 23 Gen 4 off one of my dealer buddies in NC and get it squared away.
12PM: Lunctime. It's Salmon Hollandaise special at this new market just down the road from me and I stop in and say hi. It's like a small version of Eataly. I went to high school with the owners daughters and he's got 5 million bucks into this concept. Wine bar, cafe, grocery, NY bagels delivered daily, ramen bar, raw bar, restaurant, the whole 9 yards. Amazing. The fish is delish and on the way out I run into a guy I went to ELEMENTARY school with that's now the general manager. He offers me a job managing the seafood department and I am seriously considering it given how screwed up the gun market is.
1PM: Back at my desk, have eaten the salmon and the hollandaise has found a home in my thighs. I am fat and sassy. I sell the remaning 380 I have to a customer picking up a Sig P238 and she's super stoked to get a gun.
2PM: Random walk in. Local restaurant owner that I sold a Sig 227 to a few months ago wants me to put in an SRT kit. He's disassembled the entire frame and wants me to put it togther. I explain that an SRT install is normally 5 minutes. This is easily a 45 minute job to reassemble and that's IF he has all the parts. He says he has all the parts. I begin putting the gun back together. He does not have all the parts. He goes home and says he will look harder for the missing part.
3PM: I look online for the missing part. It's $5 and 4 weeks to ship and in stock at most vendors. This sucks. I call some favors and I know of one in the mid atlantic area I can get here in a week in case he can't find it. As I get off the phone he walks in with the missing part.
Just an FYI for the readers. In ten years, I have had "bag o gun" come through the door on three previous occasions.
First: Sig 229 from local PD. Chief took it apart, couldn't put it back together. Had no backup gun and had to go on duty in a few hours, I was asked to put it together.
Second: My buddy Bruce in PA. He detail stripped his 220 and got it wrong. I put it back together and sent it back to PA.
Third: Rusty and his 226. See above. He missed some parts. I put it back together and sent it back to Texas.
If anyone thinks they see a pattern here it's because there IS a pattern here.
I start work on the 227 and this thing is a bitch and a half. The ejector, which is a 25 cent stamped metal part is not to spec. Sig's QC sucks. Their 3mm hole PRECISELY stamped in one place isn't 3mm and isn't precise. The sear pin that has to go through the left side of the frame, through the ejector, through the left side of the sear, through the sear reset spring, through the other side of the sear, through the safety lever and through the right side of the frame is NOT COOOPERATING because the ejector is too tight. I have to beat on this thing with a drilling hammer to get it to go. 45 minutes of anger and frustration later, 227 is back in action with the garbage one piece E2 grips.
For this pain, I bill $100. He tells me he should have had me do it in the first place. I say he's right but it's a tough job doing Sig classic pistols right. They're a very challenging platform.
4PM: I ship off some more 5.56 brass and pay my buddy Ray. I head home.
5PM: Beef jerky time.
I hope you all enjoyed these stories. They have not been embellished because they need no embellishment. Stay tuned for my next story where I post about the state of the firearm industry!
God bless and have a wonderful Saturday.
PS - and this is how you do a "week in the life" thread, you fucking imposter. https://www.reddit.com/guns/comments/i759qj/a_week_in_the_life_of_your_favorite_firearm/

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https://preview.redd.it/03avn81ybwp51.jpg?width=851&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=072c6e9af01020538afbea1c0dc6ffa6490f972d

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As this is a language of tastes and strands of DNA analog names cannot be written phonetically and are instead replaced with a human name or Earth analog in [brackets].
Span: The diameter of an average [Gaian] = 0.94mm, Kilospan = 0.94m.
Beat: The amount of time it takes an average [Gaian] to move their cilia = 0.064s, kilobeat = 1min 4s.
Work Cycle: 10 kilobeats. Equivalent to around 15 hours on their time scale
Day: Day length on [Gaia] = 28h 16min. Equivalent to around 3 months on their time scale.
Year: Year length on [Gaia] = 224.4 days = 264.3 Earth days.
[First] [Previous] [Next]
——————————————————————
Director Townsend combed through the pile of reports in his inbox carefully, most of them were on the drone project. It was a massive stroke of luck that his facility was the one that was closest to where the drones had been captured, some components were going to be shipped to other labs soon, but at the moment his lab had a head start on any research coming out of these things. While his name won’t be on any of the papers, having them come from his lab was still something. Though there was also the risk of the unknown and active cyborg technology getting loose or self-destructing. The higher ups would not be pleased if his lab ruined their only samples.
So far, the physicists were having little luck disassembling the device the drones had been found with. The drone dissection team was having a little more progress, though so far they were mostly just confirming data that had already been gathered from the first crushed drone. The ineffectualness of the comm jammers when the agents were capturing these things was still a worryingly open question.
Oh well, its a bit optimistic to hope we would make much progress on the first day. He thought ruefully. He made his way down to the latest report from the dissection team, noting that there was a considerable pause between it and their last report. He clicked it open and as he read his bushy grey eyebrows rose steadily higher up his forehead. When he finished he sat back and stared at the far wall blankly for a few moments.
…shit it really is aliens. Or at least the things are claiming to be from aliens. Jesus, if they are telling the truth this is an even bigger issue than we thought.
He read the report again and started making calls.
——————————————————————
Alison was in the middle of explaining that the phase “we can fix that” can apply to metaphorical concepts like widespread fear when a knock on the lab’s outer door interrupted them. Carl went through the signal blocking pair of doors and had a brief conversation with the person outside. He walked back in looking thoughtful.
“The director just read our report and is sending in some language experts, they should be here in a few hours. He called NASA too and they are wanting more data about the spaceship they’re looking for. I just gave the messenger our updated report about tiny things inside the wasps beingthe aliens, so that might cause some ruckus as well.”
Alison glanced over at the cage. “Did you understand that?” She asked, testing their vocabulary.
“Affirmative. Minor. Highly.” The wasp at the front of the cage replied.
“What did you understand?”
“Read. Arriving. Language. Desire. Information. Vessel. Message. Small. Inside.”
“Yeah that’s pretty scattered. I’ll explain, it was multiple messages. The first was saying other people who have knowledge about languages are coming to help you communicate with us soon. The second was saying people are desiring more information about your vacuum ship, and the third message was that we told our decision maker that you are naturally evolved not made.”
The bug stopped looking around at the ceiling and turned to face her again briefly.
“Understood. Request. Vessel. Information.”
Alison smiled. They are so ADHD. Or maybe they are trying to find escape routes. I’m glad they followed that explanation though regardless.
“How large is your vacuum ship.” She asked, figuring that was a good place to start off.
The bugs paused for a moment before the one up front held out two front legs around a millimeter apart.
“Single. Length. Unit.” It said, gesturing at the two legs with a third limb.
Alison nodded. “Understood. How many standard length units long is your ship?” She asked, as David zoomed in a camera to get a close up shot of the bug’s gesture. They hissed at each other for a moment before the bug replied “Lack. Knowledge. Numbers.”
Alison sighed and began explaining base ten counting systems and the words involved. At this point most of her coworkers had returned to their various jobs examining the dead wasps and let Alison take the lead on the communication attempts, as her original job of studying the “drones’” computers was kind of out the window.
I guess I’m not the worst of us have this job. Given all the behavior and computing capacity tests I was planning I’m probably the closest thing we have to an interrogator at the moment She thought wryly as she finished her short lecture.
“Did you understand that?” She asked.
——————————————————————
“Eve! Wake up. It stopped talking.” Frank sent.
Eve jerked out of the light doze she had fallen into. “Huh, what? Oh, yeah falling asleep in front of it during a lecture probably isn’t good.” She said, remembering the long kilobeats she had just spent trying to look like she was paying attention, it had been talking for ages.
“Did anyone follow what it was saying?” She sent sleepily, the last she remembered it was drawing dots and symbols on one of its big glowing screens and saying something about places.
“Yeah, we think those squiggles it was drawing under the clumps of dots are symbols for different numbers. They kind of match some of the symbols we have seen on the phone too, so that’s interesting. Anyway, it seems that it uses a system of displaying number in multiples of ten by grouping symbols next to each other. It’s pretty straight forward, though annoyingly it’s sound language messes things up. As best I can tell, they having different words for each grouping, so you need to learn a new word to say a larger type of number. Why not just say the names of each symbol making up the number?” [Frank] trailed off grumbling.
[Walter] [sighed] and sent over [Frank] “Regardless, we think we know enough to use the symbol numbers at least. I still think we should have just sent them 330 [beeps]. That would have taken way less time.”
“This will be faster in the long run.” [Eve] replied. “…I hope. How complex are the symbol numbers?”
“I think we can show the length in just three symbols, so it’s not that bad.” [Frank] sent. “The vison-based version is actually logical…”
“Alright, we get it, you don’t like the sound version. Let’s just answer the question already.” [Erin] snapped. Nerves were beginning to wear thin after nearly a tenth day stuck in this bare glass room.
“Alright, alright, help me grab the interface tool.”
——————————————————————
Alison watched excitedly as the aliens began moving their little stylus on their phone again. They drew a crude 3 and then the radio let out three short tones.
Ah good, checking their work I guess.
“Three, yes.” She replied.
They then drew another 3 next to the first and the radio let out a rapid squeal of beeps.
“Err, I can’t count that fast.” Alison muttered as she played back the signal a few times slower. There were 33 beeps. She grinned.
“Thirty-three, yes.”
The drones then added a zero at the end and Alison rushed to count the slightly slower stream of beeps that the radio spat out.
330, they seem to have gotten it She thought with some relief after she finally finished counting. The bug up front was looking bored again. I really should try and tell them apart better; I might need to add some colored dots on them or something. Oh shit, they might have names, we never introduced ourselves. I’ll have to do that after this.
“Three hundred and thirty, yes.” She replied, putting those thoughts out of her mind for the moment. The bugs carried the stylus away from the screen, thankfully not adding another digit. One of the ones standing near the phone flew onto the screen and pointed at the number.
“Vessel. Unit. Lengths. Numbers.” The radio said, Alison wasn’t sure if it was the alien on the phone or the one up front speaking, they all used the same voice.
“That’s the length of your vacuum ship in the units you showed us?” Alison checked.
“Yes.”
“Huh, so about this big?” She said, spreading her hands a third of a meter apart. “That’s pretty small.”
“You. Large.”
“…fair enough.” Alison said, noting the dimension down.
“Is that the ship you used to travel between stars?”
“Yes.”
How the hell did they go interstellar in something the size of a football? She thought, shaking her head. Something for the actual interrogators to ask.
“You drew the ship as an oval, is that roughly its shape?” She said, looking back up at the wasp in the front of the cage.
“Word. Oval.”
She drew a quick oval on her tablet. “That’s an oval.”
“Vessel.”
“No, I mean the shape, not what its representing.”
“Symbol. Named. Query.”
“Yes, we have names for different symbols.”
“What. Symbol. Mean.”
“It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a type of shape.”
“Understood. Type. Form. Not. Symbol.”
“Err, yes. Anyway, your ship is oval shaped?”
“Not. Flat.”
She sighed and tried gesturing with her hands to outline a 3d ovoid “Like this? A not flat oval?”
The wasps paused and watched her hand motions for a bit before replying. “Yes.”
Alison dropped the charades and grabbed her sketch again, drawing length and width lines around the craft. “Ok, so its three hundred and 30 units long, how wide is it?” She said, waving her stylus from one side of the drawing to the other.
The creatures wrote 104 on their phone. “Unit. Lengths.” The radio finished.
“Ok, what is the ship made of?”
The wasps seemed to struggle for words for a bit before one of the drones grabbed one of the chips of plastic scattered around where they had been sawing on the phone. It gestured towards the fleck. “Minor. Link.”
“Slightly similar? Comparable?”
“Yes.”
Alison wrote down ‘Some sort of polymer.’ She then quickly sketched the scene of the ship between Earth and the Moon. “Anything more you can tell us about the ship’s location?” She asked, pointing to the rather vague drawing.
“No. Ship. Move.”
“But it moves around in this area?”
“Many. Do. Yes.”
“Oh! So there are several here? How many?”
The wasps froze and hissed at each other again briefly. They then wrote 38.
That’s not suspicious at all. Alison thought, noting the pause.
“Are you lying?” She asked, squinting at them.
They flinched. “No. Considered. Found. Negative.”
“Say again?”
The little bug up front twitched with annoyance.
“Considered. Lying. Decided. Not.”
Hmm, I’m not sure if them admitting that makes me trust them more or less Alison thought, making a note of the incident.
“Is there anything else about one of your ships that would help us locate them?”
“No.”
“Ok. I’ll send this to my decision makers now.” She said, stepping out of the lab briefly to feed a paper copy of her report to a scanner outside. This seems kind of over kill given they don’t seem to be classic computers at all, but they could still have some computers on board their little wasp vehicles, or they could just be good hackers. Cyberweapons could still be an issue. Alison mused as she walked back in.
She stood looking at the cage awkwardly for a moment, wondering what to ask next. They look pretty pathetic in there; we need to get an actual habitat or something set up for them if we plan on questioning them for long. Oh right, I still haven’t done introductions. She cleared her throat.
“I am sorry, I haven’t told you my name, I am Alison. Do you have names?”
“Yes. Not. Sound.”
“Your name is Not Sound?”
“No.
Name. Not. Word. Scent. Memory.”
“Oh. So not speakable then?”
“Yes.”
“That is a shame. I would have liked to know them. You are multiple individuals, right?”
The wasp up front tilted its head slightly.
“Query.”
“Different minds.”
“Yes. You. Query.”
“Yes, I am an individual too.”
“You. Many.”
“What do you mean?”
“Many. Small. Life.”
“Oh, cells. Yeah, I have lots of cells. I still only have one mind though.”
“Confirmed. Idea.”
“You were wondering about that? I guess we are pretty alien to you. Are you not made of multiple cells?”
“One. Creature. Yes.”
A biologist would have a million questions right now. Alison bet. “Hey Carl!, I think you’ll like this.” She yelled to her coworker on the other side of the lab room. He glanced up from a scan of one of the wasp’s legs and hurried over.
“What is it?”
“I figured you’d like to know our guests here are unicellular.”
He blinked. “That’s…interesting. It fits what we saw when that one was crawling around. How the heck to they think though?”
“Memory. Chain. Folding.” The radio hissed.
“That isn’t very helpful.” Carl muttered.
Two wasps grabbed their stylus again and drew a triple helix shape. “Memory.” The radio said.
Carl peered closer. “…that looks like the triple stranded DNA analog we found in the wasps’ nerve cells. Interesting, they encode memories into their genome?”
“Word. Genome.”
“Err, data storage for replication.”
“Similar. Type.”
“Fascinating. I really wish I could get a good scan of one of them but that might hurt them. How tolerant of ionizing radiation are you?” Carl asked.
“Word. Ionizing.”
“Rips electrons, small charged matter pieces, from atoms, um, small matter building blocks.”
“Large. Bad.”
The wasp up front opened up its head, and a tiny shimmering ball oozed out. Alison zoomed in with one of the cameras and watched as it formed several limbs and began flicking them around just above itself. Alison frowned with confusion until she noticed the faint shimmering on its body was actually not on its surface at all, it was coming from a faint translucent sphere englobing the creature. The alien was gesturing at it.
“Need. Shield. On. Surface.” The radio hissed. “Star. Power. Hurt. Forget. Insane. Die.”
The creature slid back into its case again and the wasp shuddered back to life.
“…ok, important note, X-rays are off the table.” Carl said worriedly as he jotted down a report on his tablet. “You said you need those shields on the surface, do you normally live under ground?”
“Under. Water.”
“Ah. Do you need those shields when in your flying bodies?” He asked.
“No.”
“How long can you stay in those things?”
“Many. Day.”
“How many?”
——————————————————————
“Err, I don’t know? It should be largely indefinite right?” Asked [Frank].
“The life support systems are only rated for around 4 days of total use. Indefinite for most practical purposes, though it wasn’t expected for us to be using them nonstop like this.” [Walter] sent softly.
“At the rate this questioning is going they might actually keep us for that long. Heck, that would only feel like half a tenth day to them. And that’s assuming they are planning on letting us go at all.” [Erin] replied grimly.
“Maybe that would be a good bargaining chip into letting us go? There is no point in keeping us longer if we will just starve.” [Eve] wondered.
“I mean, they could just be planning on killing us when they are done. They might not want us reporting back to the fleet.” [Walter] pointed out.
“Important questions.” [Eve] sent. “Lets ask them quickly.”
——————————————————————
The wasps drew a 4 on the tablet, Carl and Alison shared worried looks. “That won’t give us much time at all.” He said.
The radio hissed “Time. Limited. Vessel. Return. Query.”
Alison grimaced. “That depends a lot on how communications with your ships go. If they run away or attack then we won’t be able to send you back. How do you think your people will respond to us contacting them? Or will they contact us soon? They must know you are missing.”
“Decision. Makers. Know. Self. Gone. Long. Time. Think. Dead. Highly.”
“Hmm, will they be willing to talk if we contact them and show them that you are still alive?”
“Possible.”
“What would their reaction likely be?”
“Fear. Curiosity.”
“We can work with the latter. Is their understanding of this language similar to yours?”
“Yes. Same.”
“OK, we might want to improve yours more first so you can act as translators. We wouldn’t want a misunderstanding with them.”
“How. Long.”
“Depends on how fast your translator improves, I’ve already noticed some improvement.”
“Interaction. You. Confirmation. Assists.”
“That’s good, some language teachers should be arriving in a few hours and they should be even better at that.”
“Word. Hours.”
“One 24th of a day.” Alison said, writing the numbers out on her tablet.
“Long. Time.”
“Yeah, your craft running out in a few days is a worrying time constraint. We might have to work out a way of synthesizing the stuff you need. What is it that will run out in 4 days?”
“Food. Machine. Fail.”
“Could you give us a sample of your food?”
——————————————————————
“Do we really want to give them the ability to keep us here forever?” [Walter] asked.
“Beats starving to death if the deeper downs do something stupid.” [Erin] replied.
“Maybe we should wait until we know that has happened first. Getting rid of that leverage should be our last resort.”
“Come on [Walter], they are slow, it might take them days to get a synthesizer running. Besides, we could still threaten to kill ourselves if they refuse to let us go.” [Erin] pointed out, gesturing at him with an antenna.
“That’s a bit bright, but fine I get your point.” [Walter] [sighed].
“I guess I’ll give them the sample then.” Said [Frank] “You already have way too much exposure time [Eve].”
“Fine by me.” She replied. “I feel no great need to make myself feel even more exposed again.”
——————————————————————
“Yes. Give. Where.”
Alison pointed to the back wall of the cage where the hatches were set and then went into the back room where they were operated. The room was an organized mess of various boxes full of testing materials that had been hastily cobbled together when they had heard about the wasps being caught and sent here this morning. On the near wall was an array of small hatches and the mechanical levers that opened them. She pulled a lever that operated the inner door for the smallest of the four hatches, and waited a few moments until Carl told her a wasp had gone in and out. She then closed the inner door and opened the outer one on the little airlock like chamber. Looking inside she didn’t see anything at first, until she spotted a dark mote of dust sitting in the center of the cubby.
Being careful not to blow it away she scooped it up with the tip of a scalpel and deposited it into a sample vial. She walked back to Carl and passed it to him, he squinted at it confused for a moment.
“I’m pretty sure the little speck in there is the sample they gave us.” Alison said “Or it might be a mote of dust, I can’t really tell.”
“I’ll go check with the microscope.” Carl muttered as he headed back over to his work station. A couple of moments later he yelled over his shoulder “Yeah this was it. It’s actually a tiny plastic bottle, looks like it was made with a bit of the plastic from the phone case. I’m going to need some really good tweezers to get this open.”
Alison left him to his work and turned back to the cage. “After food is there anything else you will need?”
“More. Cage. Swim.”
“Yeah, that box was meant just for a few tests, not long-term habitation. What kind of habitat do you need?”
——————————————————————
“An apartment would be nice but somehow I’m guessing they don’t have a standard sized building laying around.” [Frank] muttered.
“A water tank and a plastic block with some holes punched in it shouldn’t be too hard for them to make, and would give us at least some crude “rooms” to relax in out of sight.” [Eve] sent, along with a mental image.
“Hmm, yeah. And if we specified a soft material it wouldn’t be too hard for us to just carve out rooms ourselves. There wouldn’t be any appliances in them or anything, but it beats swimming around an empty tank or just sitting in our craft for tenth days on end.” Another engineer agreed.
“OK, let’s draw this out on the device.”
——————————————————————
Alison spent a few minutes copying several sketches for what amounted to tiny fish tank decorations, mostly some minuscule blocks of plastic and wood with various nooks carved into them. Security will probably want to go over all of this to make sure that they couldn’t make anything dangerous out of it but so far it seems pretty innocuous.
“Alright, what water conditions do you need? Do you need salt water?”
“Word. Salt.”
“It’s a mineral made of…ok let me get a periodic table. I figure you guys know about atoms and stuff, right?”
“Matter. Building. Blocks. Yes. Very.”
“Good, let me just give you our words for them then.”
——————————————————————
[Walter] and [Erin] watched the giant’s slow lecture with bemusement.
“I’m no chemist but they seem to have a decent grasp of the basics.” [Walter] remarked as the creature above them slowly blinked and one of its fingers continued its gradual progression towards the next label on the chart it was holding.
“It didn’t mention quarks at all so they don’t seem to have gotten that far.” One of the fabricators replied.
“True, though it seems to be trying to keep things short, thank the depths. Its only describing how they categorize different elements and isotopes, that just requires mentioning protons and neutrons.” [Walter] replied. “Also, look at how many elements they have on that chart, they must have some transuranic elements on there. I wonder how they got samples of those; you need to be pretty close to a super nova to get those.”
“They use radioactive materials for power, they can briefly make supernova like conditions.” [Erin] pointed out.
“Lovely thought.” [Walter] sent. That would be an interesting question to talk to the creature (err… Alison) about, but it taking a kilobeat to answer puts a damper on things.
The creature eventually finished explaining the labeling system for the chart it was holding up, and pointed to elements 11 and 17 which it then called “Sodium” and “Chlorine”. It then drew a pair of circles next to each other with a dashed line in between. It labeled one circle 11 and the other 17. It tapped the drawing and said an unknown word, [Walter] figured it probably meant “ionic bond”.
The creature did some more scribbling and then showed two smaller circles with 1’s in them linked to a bigger circle labeled 8. The smaller circles were linked to the bigger one with solid lines. It then drew a copy of that molecule next to the first and showed them being linked together with a dotted line. It then pointed to each type of line and named them.
“Hmm, that’s clearly a pair of water molecule given the elements in them, I think it’s showing us how to draw different bonding types.” [Frank] sent.
The thing began opening its mouth and the team waited a few hundred beats for it to speak. “Provide” “Many-atom” “Types” “In” “Water”
“I think it wants us to list the minerals the tank water will need.” [Eve] sent.
“That makes sense. Ugg, that’s going to take awhile to draw. Let’s get started on it then.” [Erin] grumbled as she flew over to the stylus again. The team spent a few kilobeats listing the components and concentrations of standard hab water.
——————————————————————
Alison finished noting down the materials list, it was pretty short, just water with a few trace minerals to keep osmosis in check. She didn’t know enough about fish tanks to know if the oxygen concentration listed was normal or not though.
“OK, this all looks like stuff we can get. I’ll submit a request for this stuff to the director.” She said, walking out of the lab again. While she was waiting for the scanner in the hall to finish, she turned to the bored looking intern sitting nearby.
“Any word about how the director is handling this?” She asked the messenger.
“Nothing worth interrupting you guys.” He said, flicking through the messages on his computer. “Some notices to other departments about requesting equipment to studying that lifting machine, not much progress on that still. Some proposals to try getting your aliens to turn it on for us, though security is vetoing that idea at the moment. The director is in talks with the FBI about moving those things to a different facility, it’s kind of a clusterfuck at the moment. The government doesn’t really know what they want to do with the things.”
Alison let out a breath “Yeah no kidding, I don’t think anyone has a plan for dealing with captive sentient amoebas. I think we might have to return them to their ship soon, their life support will supposedly run out in a few days. Any word on finding their ships?”
“NASA is working on it right now.”
——————————————————————
Henry glared at the radar data again for the millionth time before starting slightly as his phone rang with his boss’s number. He worriedly grabbed it.
“Hel-“
“DC called a few minutes ago. They are asking about any signs of small ovoid spacecraft in between the Earth and the Moon. The anomalies you are checking might not be an instrument error after all.” His boss said breathlessly.
Henry blinked. “Umm, how big of a spacecraft are we talking here? The data is showing a football sized body zipping around. Are these some microsats they are trying to locate? There is no way they could have the fuel for the maneuvers this thing would supposedly be pulling.”
“That matches what they described. They asked for 32 cm by 10 cm sized ovoids. The radar signatures you sent me last night are consistent with a rotating ovoid, and accelerating like that definitely rules out a natural body.”
“It also rules out an unnatural body. The blip changed trajectories like crazy, the g’s those maneuvers would produce is absurd. It’s clearly an instrument glitch.”
“On both the radar system and the thermal telescope?” His boss asked pointedly.
Henry sighed. “Fine, if they want to double check it themselves they can be my guest. I’ll send the files over now.”
——————————————————————
Director Townsend had been juggling phone calls all afternoon thanks to this alien issue. The linguists and questioners the NSA was sending over were going to arrive any minute now, and there was talk of them leaving with the creatures.
“Yes sir, I realize this is a matter of national security, in fact I would go so far as to say it’s a matter of international security. But we are currently one of the more secure locations to house these creatures, and we need to keep studying them. This is an alien species for crying out loud, the place we need them is in a lab. We don’t even know what they eat yet, we need to do more research on them before we can send them off to some military base.” Townsend said with restrained frustration, this was the third time the NSA director had brought this up.
The man on the other end of the line sighed. “Fine, if there really is that much left to do you can keep them for now, but I will be sending additional security. Finish your work quickly.”
Townsend glared at the phone briefly after the general abruptly hung up. Ugh, at least he was somewhat willing to compromise. He grumbled to himself as his phone immediately began ringing again, it was NASA.
“Director Townsend speaking.” He said urgently.
“Director, this is Bernstein again. We have found several matches for the objects you described. There were several unexplained small objects caught on radar over the last few weeks, and even some thermal images as well. We began a search for more of them an hour ago and we think we found another one. Its in a low elliptical orbit that misses most of our radar stations, though we managed to get a good read on it a few minutes ago. Its albedo is crazy low, its messing with the radar a bit too, but we spotted it with an infrared satellite as well. Its quite a bit warmer than a normal rock should be.”
“Sounds promising. Keep a close eye on it, we might be giving them a call soon.”
He hung up and checked his messages again and saw the interrogators had arrived. Let’s hope they don’t make a mess of things.
(Continues in comments)
[Next]

Hi! I am a Milspouse. My husband and I have a unique story, and the struggle is so real trying to settle on a song for our first dance song. We chose "You Are The Reason" by Callum Scott for my to walk to and "I Wouldn't Have Nothing" from Monster's Inc. for the processional. We cannot find just the right song for the first dance. I was hoping by telling our story that someone out there would hear it and would have the perfect answer. We are not entirely opposed to Christian music.
(PLEASE FEEL FREE TO SKIM TO GET THE IDEA OF OUR STORY)
I talk too much, so I know this a lot.
I was engaged to my high school sweetheart. I spent six years with him. I was diagnosed at 19 with Endometriosis, a disease that wreaks havoc on a woman's body. The most common problems are painful periods, painful intercourse, depression, and cramping, but the list goes on. I had hundreds of appointments, multiple surgeries, and appointments, all of which he never attended. I experienced much manipulation with this man. I always got a "you never feel good, the least you can do is let me take care of myself," if you get where I am going with that. I paid for every bill, every meal, every grocery, and this man never took me on a date on this own dollar. I have had to file for bankruptcy due to the amount a credit card debt and loans I was left with. All because I felt no one would love me because of the endometriosis. Due to a tragedy in his family, I was able to find my chance of "If I do not cut it now, I never will." I began collecting my thoughts, crying over my chicken fajitas, a Chili's with my parents. I called him and told him he needed to stay out of state with his family because they needed him, and I did not want him to come back. I packed his stuff and told him to get it. I experienced guilt because of the family tragedy, but I cried for one hour, and that was it. Obviously, dating was the furthest thing from my mind because of my illness. I also just wanted to focus on school and actually having a social life. In December 2018, at 23, I had a partial hysterectomy with no children leaving one ovary (which I will likely be having removed soon). By the end of January 2019, I was like a whole new person socially. I was able to enjoy life and had confidence in myself. I started online dating. I told myself I never would, but I am a bit of a goofy person, and the places I went to did not make it easy for me to meet someone, especially that would not be a conflict of interest. I actually received the first message from anyone on a dating app I still have to this day, and it was the most baffling and hilarious thing I ever read. I saw a lot of adult babies, couples seeking a third, and just downright jokes. I set up a couple of dates and would get ghosted; I was stood up and left at the restaurant (that was depressing). I eventually just stopped trying. I started swiping only on Sundays and then would talk to the matches through the week to see who lasted. One of my best guy friends bet me on messaging every single match first, and it'll work eventually, which I was not opposed to, but normally I only sent an emoji as a first message; he wanted words, haha. He also told me to swipe on all and delete the uglies, which I hated that, but I would delete the rude people or did not communicate (looks aren't all that mattered to me.)
On Sunday, April 7th, I was drunk swiping while catching up on This Is Us. I get a match. The match breaks a lot of the rules I set for myself. No one under the age of 22. No one in the military (I am a Navy brat, was not trying to sign up for that life again, especially Marines, because the Marine Navy giving each other beef). No one out of state (long distance is fun for no one). No one with memes on their profile. His picture was him in uniform in front of the helicopters he works on, 21, a meme of Dr. Phil (which was actually pretty funny), and he was 109 miles from where I was; there was no doubt that was out of state. Part of his bio said he was a really nice guy. Therefore my noble award-winning first message to him was, "so are you actually a nice guy" with a tongue-out emoji. We chatted non-stop from that moment on. On Wednesday night, we decided to video chat, and he noticed a photo from the day of my hysterectomy on Instagram; he asked why I had surgery. Unfortunately., most guys I explained it to were like, "Oh cool, so you can get pregnant if I raw dog you," but this was the first time I got the response he gave me. It looked as if he was going to cry, and he was telling me how he knew how much it hurt a woman not to be able to have children but provided so much reassurance like "I am sure there's a reason" and "It will all work out for you to be a mom." I kid you not; this is the moment I knew he was the one. Two days later, that Friday, as I was house sitting, he tells me he was being made to get out of his barracks room (which I figured was bs, but I went with it). I texted the person I was house-sitting for, and she told me just no parties, haha. I swear my heart sank to my butt. He asked for coordinates, so since he works on helicopters, I decided to be a smartypants and send him the actual ones, haha. Once, he was on his way for his 3-hour drive (crazy, right!?) We spent the whole weekend together, and it was like I knew him my whole life from the moment he walked in the door. He met my parents that Saturday (HE MET MY PARENTS THE SECOND DAY). They presented him with his own crayons (which if you know anything about Marine jokes, you will get it). I was terrified because of my ex; I never thought my parents would be happy with anyone ever. Now he is the son my dad never had, and sometimes I think my mom loves him more than she loves me. After meeting my parents, we went to my apartment, which was just a detachment from my parents' house. (TMI, but relevant) We ended up doing what adults do (wink wink, nudge nudge). He was the third person I had ever been with and the first since my ex-fiance. I had no idea what I was going to experience because of the hysterectomy. It was embarrassing on so many levels, but I do not think he could have approached it any more perfectly. I basically experienced a flashback, panic attack, and almost had like PTSD induced pain. I had sooooo much pressure on my stomach. I got up, walked to the toilet, and just sat there and cried. Instead of him being like wtf, he brought me a bottle of water, warm washcloth, and sat on the edge of the tub, comforting me until I was calm enough to ask where to find everything else. He left on Monday morning at 4 to drive three hours and then have a 24-hour duty! That's insane, right!? When I tell you I blubbered when I was telling him bye, I am not joking. I had a million feelings, but the biggest fear of him ghosting me once he got home. The day he did formally ask me to be his girlfriend. From that point on, he came to see me every weekend. The next weekend, he spent Friday night with me, but when with his family Saturday night for Easter, he kept messaging me about how much he wanted to be with me. You could tell how relieved he was the second he got back to my apartment to spend the rest of his long weekend with me (It's relevant, don't worry).
Every single weekend, he was there. My parents told me over and over how much our relationship resembled theirs. My friends were quick to open arms to him (which again was not expected). My co-workers quickly began taking bets on marriage. We took our first vacation for July 4th. He took leave, so with the long weekend, he spent a total of two weeks with me. The separation anxiety we both experienced after this was crazy. By the end of July, I had decided to start looking for a job near him. We would rent an apartment (which didn't force me to stay if it did not work out). My family has always been firm on learning to live together before you get married, which is so true! I was able to get a job very quickly, paying exactly what I needed. We found the most amazing apartment, and when I explained my bankruptcy, the company waived the security deposit. Everything was falling into place. I had family close by, which allowed me to start work a bit earlier to build up some savings, or so I thought. I arrived to work on Wednesday of my second week, and I am approached by a gentleman telling me I need to go to the conference room. I find out that the entire department is dissolved! A choice by corporate, or I would have never been hired. I can not describe the panic. With my severance paperwork, I was given an Indeed posting for a job that was the dream entry-level position for me. I had not had a chance to put my bachelor's degree to work. I got the job! On my third day, I had to decide to evacuate due to the incoming hurricane. We decided to go to my parent's house three hours away. The day after the storms passed where my parents live (when it was hitting where we evacuated from), he decided to ride his motorcycle to where his family lives, which he did almost every weekend anyway, so this was not a rare thing. He drove to a gym nearby but had to leave because it was closed. On his way back, a young girl in her car pulled out in front of him while driving 60 miles per hour. She explained that she was trying to get out quickly, so she did not have to ride behind him. You ever get a phone call, and you have a gut feeling before you answer it that it is going to be bad? That is what I experienced when his mom called and said he was in an accident. My mom rushed me to the hospital with my dad following behind; we made a 45-minute drive in times that we should get a trophy for. Once we parked, I called his mom, and I could hear him screaming in the background (I can still hear it to this day). I told her I was there, and she told me where they were, and once I started asking questions, she said I need to be with my son and hung up on me. So obviously, I ran as anyone would. I had no clue what injuries he had; I did not know what happened; I was absolutely clueless. I did not know if that was going to be the end; I had no idea. However, he went into the OR before I could see him. There was a lot of tension because it is a divorced family coming together because of a tragedy. The biggest damage was a compound fracture in his femur, broken wrist, a hairline fracture in his neck, debris that completely shredded the front of his neck, TBI, and depleted his blood volume 1 1/2 times in the first 24 hours. I was by his side from day one. The only time I left the hospital was to shower until he had a room with a shower or to run to the store. He only asked for his dad, which in my brain makes complete sense for a 21-year-old man and me. Unfortunately, this is where things get interesting. This was not acceptable to his mother or her mother.
A couple of examples: A couple of days after his accident, he kept asking for my dad (no one knows why), but my dad made the drive to be there as soon as he could to be there. My dad and I were on either side of the bed, and his mom was in the back of the room. He kept pointing at her and doing the "shew" hand like one would a fly. I asked if he wanted us to leave, and he shook his head no and pointed at her again and shewed again. I asked, do you want her to leave, and he shook yes, then I said do you want dad to leave? He shook no, and then I asked do you want me to leave, and he shook no. This was followed by a statement from her of "Could you not say that I am his mother, and I have a right to be here if I want to be here." She goes out of the room to talk to her friends sitting on a bench right outside the door and says, "She best stop mothering my child." Little did she know my mom was a few seats down.
He was throwing up, I had to hold the vomit bag for him, and I just rubbed his head to comfort him. She and one of her nurse friends begin to tell me that I need to make him hold the bag himself, or he will rely on me to do everything for him forever, and they have seen people way worse off hold the bag themselves. He had a plastic neck brace tight against his chin but was open at the throat area for all the exposed torn up skin to breath. The initial injury caused blurred vision (obviously, he hit a car at 60 miles per hour). He could not get the bag wedged between his chin and brace fast enough; therefore, it all went into those open scars... So you're telling me just let him get an infection? Absolutely not.
At one point, his grandmother showed up to see him and asked me to leave the room; I said, absolutely no problem; that is your right. A nurse goes in and has her step out. I ask if she would like my seat because it was the only one and this woman verbally attacks me in ways I have never experienced. She accuses me of isolating him from his family (even though he has expressed to everyone his wishes), tells me I should be holding his phone and wallet (even though he gave them to me because he said he did not trust anyone else with it). Then when the nurse comes back out, she rushes in and closes and blocks me out. All of my stuff was in that room; I was in my PJ's and Socks. The only thing I had on me was my phone in a city I was unfamiliar with.
We decided to get legally married last December because he wanted to wait until he fully relearned to walk to have a ceremony. His grandmother texted him, stating he might as well have shot his mother. (We did not have anyone with us, no one knew, not my parents, not his dad, and stepmom, so this was crazy to us)
I'll spare you the other cringy stories, but clearly, his mother's side completely flipped on me. Until the hospital, they treated me as if I was already their daughter in law. It was like a flip of a switch. Honestly, you could make a movie just about that. When it came time for him to leave the rehabilitation facility, he decided he was more comfortable being at my apartment because it was much larger for his wheelchair. He had more privacy by going to my apartment versus his mother's home. He had a chance to be independent. His mother tried to make the caseworker at the facility force him to go to her home. THAT IS NUTS, RIGHT?!?
The first time he decided to make a long drive, we went to get all of his stuff from his barracks room. On our way home, we passed a woman running over a gentleman on his motorcycle. He saw every second of it and slammed on his brakes, and I ran to help, although there was not much I could do. I remember him explaining how things happened at his accident, so I went over those steps out loud, and everyone worked together with that. I started collecting his wallet contents and lost it once I picked up something that indicated he had kids/grandkids. I just kept giving positive words out loud because I could only imagine the last thing you hear is people being frantic, so I just kept saying it is okay everyone is taking care of you. I kept seeing flashes of my husband lying in front of me. I refused to walk away until I knew what hospital he was going to. Then, the moment when everyone dropped their heads. I felt so attached to this man I had never met. I knew I had to find a way to give his family answers I knew they were not going to get from law enforcement. I found his daughter on Facebook; we are still friends on there to this day.
In February 2020, we were able to move back to base finally. Then COVID, but we have made the best of it. In June, we booked our wedding with Carnival Cruise Lines out of Charleston, SC. Early two weeks ago, we were told the president gave the cruise industry the thumbs up to reopen. It was a sigh of relief... The next morning we wake up to find that the Carnival CEO elected to cancel through 2021. In two weeks, we went from a ceremony of 25 people and a dinner in place of reception in Charleston with a honeymoon cruise following to a whole new city, a ceremony, and reception with 75+ people, a well known FoodNetwork restaurant for catering, a photographer who used to shoot for Disney, Open bar, Limo, Penthouse, and we are visiting family in Orlando for Christmas for a few days, and this will be a "make up" honeymoon at Disney until we can have our big honeymoon.
We are an incredibly goofy couple, but we are also the perfect example of having your spouse as your best friend. We always say that we were put into each other's lives because we needed each other.
I am so sorry this is so long-winded, but you deserve an award or something if you made it this far. I hope you can help!!

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Mark stepped out from below X'rtani House. He never realized just how much he had missed regular exercise of the caliber he was used to. Every part of him was sore in the warm, fulfilling way the gym usually left him in. One part he still missed was the communal aspect; feeling that sense of pride in another when a New Year's newbie kept up their training, spotting for friends both below and above your weight bracket, seeing the dedication on the face of someone determined to reach their ideal physique. That sense of belonging to a community that he connected with, he missed it dearly. While it was easy for him to get back in the habit of regular exercise, it was far more daunting for him to return to a proper diet. Although the all meat menu he was relegated to provided him with more protein than he knew what to do with, T'aro's message to him earlier that day shone a light on the nutritional deficiencies he was bound to run into should he stick to the average X'erren diet. Although an air of distrust hung between the two, the points T'aro raised were too valid to rightly ignore. It took a bit of Flow browsing to find an operator's manual for the omni-cooker in the kitchen, but once he knew exactly what features the appliance had and how to use them, it was fairly simple to whip up a surprisingly filling meal out of three different varieties of meat and a nutritional supplement sauce that was to be portioned with meals; it tasted bitter in a way he hadn't encountered before, but it wasn't entirely unpleasant.
Passing the cafeteria, he waved to Arnd, who was in the middle of her morning breakfast and browse routine. The person to receive the greeting, however, was not the distracted Arnd, but a Rilk'r who had just deposited his used tray. <"Hey, Mark! How's it going? You got that bank card yet?">
"Not yet, but I reckon I'll have it soon. I just need to find a break in my schedule long enough to get out to the bank and get it done; that shouldn't be too hard." That express permission to walk the city streets he received from T'aro went a long way to improving Mark's overall mood. Yet in knowing the very real threat posed by less open minded figures in the political sphere, Mark's eagerness to utilize his newfound freedom was tempered, at least for the moment.
<"Shame. But still, you got a moment? It's about your ship.">
"... Alright." Mark replied, taking a seat at a nearby table.
Rilk'r joined him. <"So, it took some serious trial and error, what with alien circuits and language and all, but we managed to get your cockpit up and running. Given how compact the whole thing really is, I imagine your ship's main computer would've been kept somewhere else on the ship?">
"Yeah, just below the main deck." Insofar as it could have been called a main deck: a cramped space accessed from a short corridor leading from the cockpit's main hatch with a single swiveling chair, the main store of rations, and a computer terminal.
<"I thought as much, we couldn't access anything but a few basic flight aides and diagnostics. It's a wonder you managed to get that thing off the ground, let alone out here with backup programs that bare.">
"It wasn't my job to program the interface, I just worked with it."
<"First thing, the first thing you make sure of is that there are sufficient redundancies!"> he preached, slapping the table. <"A proper craft wouldn't make it through its first iteration without them these days. How long were they developing that thing for?">
"It was in the pipeline for a while, but proper development went on for about twelve years. Apparently we went over budget by quite a ways before I stepped into the pilot's seat."
<"Well that explains a lot. It took us a few decades to nail our first Slipspace capable craft. Over two hundred unsuccessful tests if I remember right."> It had been a few years since he last read up on the history of Slipspace travel.
"Well, looking at it all objectively, I think we did pretty good for our first field test."
Rilk'r paused. <"Come again?">
"... Looking at it all objectively, I think we did pretty good for our first field test."
Rilk'r's eyes narrowed. <"... This was your first test?">
"Field test." Mark assured him. "We ran... I think it was close to a million simulations? This was just the first practical test flight. The suits wanted to prove to the public that it was safe for actual people to pilot it and, given the fact that I'm here at all, I think they're on to something." Whether Mark wanted them to be on to something or not, he was still deciding.
Arnd walked past, her breakfast having been just as unsubstantial as usual. She tried to pay no attention to the conversation or the pair engaged in it.
Rilk'r 's face lit up in disbelief. <"Are they mad on top of having no damn clue what they're doing?! You were drifting in the void! If we weren't on our way to Men-te, you'd be dead!">
Mark sombered a little. "Yeah... probably."
Arnd paused, grit her teeth and chastised herself for not realizing it sooner. <"You owe me."> she grumbled over her shoulder, and walked off into the bar.
Rilk'r blinked. <"Are you two okay?">
Mark blinked. "I... don't know. Which is kind of a bummer because she's teaching the lesson on the spirits of the land and their history I have in... right now." He jumped out of the seat and made after Arnd. "Nice chatting with you, Rilk'r!"
Rilk'r stared stupidly at the door for a long moment. He still had a million questions on his mind: What was the rest of Mark's ship like? What could it do? How did they go about achieving Slipspace tech? He resigned himself to waiting yet again for answers, and strode off toward the elevators.
Uns'la, waiting while leant on the banister, linked up with her friend as he passed. <"So, what'd you find out from Tiny?">
<"That humans are insane.">
​
<"... From there, the wobunil is yanked from the mountainside, where it falls to its death. While scientists have since confirmed that the animal's death was usually instant upon impact, committees expressed concern that this method was unduly cruel to the animals, sparking innovations in lasso design and technique that ensured the initial tightening of the rope around the wobunil's neck instantly snaps the spinal cord, leading to an instant and painless death without upsetting the animal."> read Arnd deadpan, verbatim from the article on her device. She and Mark hadn't uttered a single non-lesson related word to each other since Mark arrived, which was fine by her.
Mark, however, grew increasingly concerned at his teacher's disposition. Bound as he was to his word in regards to Arnd dealing with herself, he couldn't help but feel that if nothing was done, their dynamic would soon become openly hostile. This concern wasn't aided by the fact that Arnd neglected to wait for him to board the shuttle before leaving. "Uh-"
<"Yes?"> she snapped. Any motherly hint her voice usually carried during lessons had vanished entirely, with apathy taking it's place.
"I... was just wondering... why am I being taught this? I don't picture myself scaling mountainsides hunting these lumpy things any time soon." Mark knew his improvisation was going to fail him one day.
Today was not that day. <"The cultural significance of wobunil hunting has persisted until today. Many architects hide small wobunil statues and carvings in the high places of their works to both honor where we came from as a nation and to bestow upon their works the watchful protection of the wobunil's spirit."> She stared at him as though her eyes could carve her words into his brain. <"Now keep pace with those notes of yours, I won't be repeating myself.">
"Yes, sir."
The lesson stretched on. From the wobunil delicately climbing steep mountainsides to the kaoul stalking their way along tide-filtered beaches and all the myriad creatures in between, Mark came to learn of their behaviour, natural and adapted habitats, the sweeping variety of hunting methods each beast required, and the spiritual significance they carried.
"... and sprinkling powdered palute carapace into the mortar as it's laid is said to bestow the brickwork with unnatural strength as befitting of the beast from which the material came." recited Mark after three long hours of notation and recital.
Arnd looked on him a moment. <"Good. We're done here."> She changed the channel to a paused film she was watching before breakfast and took a seat on her sofa. The movie continued, with Arnd saying nothing and throwing not so much as a brief glance in Mark's direction. The human took the hint, and made for the door.
He paused as he reached for the button. "Arnd."
Nothing.
"Arnd." he repeated.
<"Yes?">
"I owe a debt to you. I have a good idea of what it is, but it doesn't matter. What can I do to repay it?"
Arnd paused the film and breathed. <"Just leave me alone."> She wanted to say: 'Just leave me alone and stop making it so damn complicated.'
Mark understood. "See you tomorrow." he said weakly before leaving.
A silent minute after the door closed behind the human, Arnd scrunched her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. <"Four days, Arnd. Just four more days. You can do this."> she muttered to herself reassuringly. She wasn't entirely convinced. She continued the film, trying to return to the captivation she felt before Mark arrived as she watched a pair of lovers, battered and bruised, crawl agonizingly toward each other.
...
Arnd groaned aloud and shut the film off. Soon, she had quickly hashed out her daily report, but by that time, any desire she had to continue the film had drained from her. Frustrated, she randomly flipped through channels until something caught her eye. When she realized what she was looking at, she felt the overpowering urge to scream in blinding rage.
~~~
The prison yard was abuzz with activity. Beyond the typical swathes of women exercising, engaging in a number of sports, and the occasional fight between more disruptive prisoners, chat abounded of the new developments happening below on Kerc-en. A new tabloid segment comprised of clips submitted by the general public paired with sensationalist commentary. Everyone watching knew that it was little more than a trashy cash grab capitalizing on current events, but the content presented struck just the right nerve to keep their attention: MarkWatch.
Everything from Mark's poorly-hidden curiosity, to the lavish suits he and Arnd wore, to even the route they took, nothing showcased in the programme was left unmentioned in the yard. Behn paid it no mind, and focused on making laps of the yard. Of course she'd seen the programme, it aired during lunchtime, and the guards seemed bent on keeping everyone up to speed. Of course she'd watched as her mother guided Mark through the city. Of course she saw her wearing something classier than anything she ever wore on special occasions, like graduations, or birthdays, if she even attended in the first place. Behn slowed after realizing that her stable jog had turned into a rage-fueled sprint that drew unwanted attention from across both yards, and decided then and there that she had run enough. She slathered her neck and back as she made for the benches outside the joffur court, eager to get all of this out of her mind.
<"So,"> spoke Wora curiously, sidling up beside Behn after spectating a scuffle happening across the yard that necessitated the intervention of several guards to break up. <"did you see your mum on TV earlier?">
<"Yes."> Her glare had knives in it.
<"Okay..."> Wora sat down next to Behn. <"Do you wanna talk about it?">
The pair sat in silence a long while, staring out at the twinkling stars beyond everything she had ever known and plundered. <"She..."> Behn began, her tone somber. <"She's a hard worker. Too hard a worker. I don't remember my first few years, I was too young. But I remember, when I was... I want to say six, when a sitter came over. Mum ruffled the fur on my cheeks, said goodbye, and was gone for three weeks. I cried when she returned, I'd missed her.">
There was a pause, and Wora took in the words. She didn't expect this, and wasn't used to it either.
<"Then things were fine for a month or so. She helped with homework when I got home from school; she couldn't cook to save her life, but she always got good food on the table; she'd take me out to the fair or to the markets up in the Wings. It was fun. Then she left again, and I was being taken care of by the sitter again. She- Gon'on was her name, Gon'on wasn't nasty at all, she was actually really nice. She could cook, for one, and damn well, too. She'd do everything that Mum did, Mum didn't want her to feel like a stranger. And after a while, she didn't. It was like she was always there, like she was family. And for a few years, that's how it went: Mum would be my parent for about a month, then she'd leave for work, and Gon'on would take her place for a few weeks. It was unorthodox, but it worked. Then Mum left for five weeks, then six, then a month, with shorter home visits in between.">
<"I take it your dad wasn't in the picture?"> Wora slammed her mouth shut too late to stop herself from blurting out her words.
<"No, he wasn't."> Wora breathed a sigh of relief. <"He and Mum broke up before I was born, Mum found out he was cheating and kicked him out. After some pestering, I managed to get in contact with him and, while he's absolutely a shitheel, he wasn't quite as bad as Mum made him out to be. Turned out he was the grandson of some CEO, so I can see where he got his assholery from. I'm getting off track.
<"So, Mum'd be gone longer and longer, and Gon'on was always there in her place. Eventually, I got too old to have a sitter over, and I'd be left alone to wait for her to get back. I invited Gon'on over anyway. She taught me how to cook, how to take care of the house, everything. After a while, she became more of a mother to me than Mum was. Then she died. Turns out she was using her paychecks to pay off a gang debt, and when the money stopped coming in, the gang did."> Wora kept her mouth shut, that sounded vaguely like something she heard her boyfriend say to his gang buddies in another room. <"I resented Mum for that for a while, but I eventually got over it all, she didn't know about any of that gang stuff. Didn't stop her from leaving for a month and a half at a time; that, I continued to resent her for. But I always thought that one day, things might change. Until one day, after two months on the job, she walked in, threw off her uniform, and went to bed. No 'Hi Behn' or 'Sorry I was gone so long', nothing, like I wasn't even there. She left for work the next day and didn't come back for a month, didn't notice me as she left, either. It got to the point that I had to see her at the hangar if I was gonna see her at all, and sometimes I didn't even get that.">
Wora sat, stunned at what she was hearing. <"I... wow. What the fuck is wrong with her?">
Behn opened her mouth to speak, her fangs subtly bared, but slowly shut it. <"The- the thing is that, I know she genuinely loves me. She made sure I never ran out of funds to take care of myself, and every time she was there for me, she'd make it count. She told me that everything she did, she did for me, and I believe it. Wasn't enough, though. I appreciate what she did for me, I don't doubt that it was tough, but it doesn't make up for what amounts to willingly removing herself from my life, nothing she can do is going to make up for it."> She stared at the ground, an anguished grimace on her face.
Wora hesitated a moment before laying a hand on Behn's shoulder. An alarm sounded, signaling the prisoners to return to the building. No more words were said between the women, and they walked back to the complex together.
​

Wrath: Chapter 8. Verse 10.
Wey'sai spoke unto the chiefs' armies: <"Know that I am returned. Lay your weapons down and know the peace I offer.">
The chiefs replied: <"I would sooner welcome death than permit the heathens to live!"> and drew their blades.
Armies clashed and blood was spilt. Naught a man unbroken existed upon the field ere day's end.
Wey'sai looked upon the ruins, and wept.

Ledrn collected his meal and began making his way to his seat when a man slid into his periphery.
Ledrn remained silent, staring ahead. He had finally grown confident enough in his ability to use his non-dominant hand to begin exercising again, not that there was much to do besides during yard times. The extra physical activity didn't stop him from thinking, however, as he had thoroughly planned out his ongoing narrative for the psychiatrist, his righteous outburst two days ago be damned. All he had left to do on that front is execute. Yet the issue of the administration not taking the demon's growing favour remained as yet unsolved, and it was proving difficult to formulate a solution.
He reached a lonely table and sat. The man sat down opposite him, remaining silent. He didn't touch his food, or appear to have food. Ledrn looked up from his tray and saw a face he last remembered seeing behind a humming laser grid.
<"Hello."> said Ser'ke.
<"Pirate."> replied Ledrn with disdain. An ember floated in his mind, dim and unnoticed.
<"Former, I want to atone.">
Ledrn raised an eyebrow, it had been quite some time since he was looked up to as an authority in any capacity that wasn't related to security. <"Then you will stay out of trouble and remain true to the Holy Wisdom.">
<"Y-yes."> Ser'ke stammered. He began to eat, a look of subdued regret on his face. <"I should have listened to you back on that ship. I should have believed you when you told me it was a demon.">
Ledrn fought to keep his eyes from widening. Part of him wanted to ask the man to confirm his statement, but he thought better. <"Indeed. Pale as in death and with might unnatural, a twisted and vicious mockery of the souls we lost. It should be obvious to anyone.">
<"Of course."> He paused, considering his words. <"Should- should I inform the others?">
Ledrn laid his utensils down, his meal finished. <"Do what you believe to be just. I'm glad we were able to reconcile, no matter how little. Good day."> The pair nodded to each other, and Ledrn took his tray to the disposal chute. His thoughts turned again to the future of the cause; the ember had struck home, and a fire alighted.
~~~
Being locked out of X'rtan Freight's database hadn't stopped Du'fra from spending every spare moment he had in combing public records, searching for any sign of money that shouldn't be there. That, however, didn't stop Du'fra's search from being ultimately fruitless. High-ranking figures in the company spent frivolously, but that was already in line with their previous purchasing habits, and with no significant change in expense. He could glean little else, as the details of his opposition's bank accounts were private, and their net worth, so far as the public was permitted to know, was fairly standard in terms of growth for people in their wealth bracket. This didn't deter Du'fra, who turned to every remaining company contact he had, the list of which, as he soon found out, was far slimmer than he either wanted or expected. These too proved of little use, with each either deflecting, speaking around the question, or openly calling him out on what could debatably be called ill-advised managerial decisions. None of them, it was clear, cared as much about the company as he. Regardless of these numerous setbacks, Du'fra's determination to see the company he loved survive remained, and he sped off in the cold night to save it. Lu'su had to believe him.
He arrived at Lu'su's abode, dressed and groomed more immaculately than he ever had before. He strode determinedly past the doorman and into the building, where already the company's elite feigned raucous laughter at Lu'su's increasingly stale jokes and stories. Du'fra rounded the corner into the open lounge and found, to his shock, that Lu'su was not present. Rather, a large hologram projected in the center of the room depicted the man laid in a bed. Lu'su rotated, looking down at the men assembled in a circle around the image, once again relaying his tale of wartime bravado, when he locked eyes on Du'fra. Immediately, his look of nostalgic joy turned to an upset scowl. <"What are you doing here, son?"> he said, his voice raspier than usual.
Du'fra shook off his initial shock. <"Chief, I've come to tell you that the men assembled here have been embezzling company funds and have been doing so for years now! Careful inspection of the company's financial records show a slow decline in profits that's in stark contrast to the growing rate of incoming contracts! Maintenance, refurbishing, and the costs of new hires and equipment don't make up so much as a tenth of the money that's being lost here! And it all travels through the hands of these men before anything else! Chief, you have to believe me!">
<"On what proof, Neem? I've recently performed an inspection of the financial records and have found nothing of what you claim."> The elder snapped back, coughing as he did. At these words, Du'fra's heart sank. <"And besides, how am I to trust the word of a clear bigot? Mister Vuk'li here shared with me a quite telling snippet of security footage corroborated by numerous people both working under him and not. Far more substantial than your claims.">
Du'fra didn't hear the man's words past the first sentence, his mind was reeling. <'It was in the heat of the moment, I didn't mean it! I couldn't let them ruin this company! It- it's X'rtan Freight, not X'oland Freight!'> The little hope he had left after it was dashed by the CEO's words was burned away, leaving nothing in it's place.
Lu'su's scowl deepened. <"I do not permit bigots to work in my company, especially bigots who make mistakes as disastrous as letting go of what could very well be the single most important woman of our age!"> The coughing returned, escalating into violent hacking.
<"Get some rest, Chief, I'll make sure the guards escort him out."> spoke Vuk'li, standing from his seat
Lu'su composed himself. <"See that you do. Goodbye, Mister Neem."> The hologram vanished.
<"What. Is. Going. On?"> growled Du'fra, hate dripping from every syllable.
<"The Chief caught a minor illness some days ago. If it were any of us, I wouldn't doubt that we'd shake it off no problem, but at his age, well, he's not doing so well. He can't effectively run a company from his bed while coughing his guts up, so somebody had to take up the responsibility, and he was all too happy to hand it to me."> His smugness was echoed by his cohorts, chuckling among themselves.
Du'fra's fangs were on full display, and his eyes were wild with fury, bathing everything he saw in a blood-yellow hue. <"How fucking dare you?! You're bleeding the company dry, the same company that probably helped pay for the houses your employees grew up in, the same company that has sent aid to countless worlds in crisis! How dare you pervert it, you parasitic monster?!">
<"I'm a businessman, Neem, I do business, and I do it well."> He raised his hands and clapped loud enough to send the sound echoing off the walls. <"Guards! We have an unwanted guest causing trouble for us and Mister Lu'su, please remove him from the premises!">
And once again, before he knew it, his wrists were clapped in restraints behind his back and he was being dragged off, with no amount of writing and struggling slowing the sentry any.
<"Expect a defamation suit in the mail, Neem. See you in court."> sneered Vuk'li as he watched Du'fra being lugged away, flashing the tips of his fangs in a thin and cruel smile.
<'You want to make it legal, Vuk'li? Fine.'> though Du'fra, recognizing his lone remaining chance at staying in this ruthless game. He found his feet, and slowly righted himself as much as he could in the guard's unshakable grip. <"I declare Kre'gadol!"> he bellowed. A moment of shocked silence followed, then a chorus of laughter the likes of which Lu'su never genuinely received rang out in the hall, all the crueler for its authenticity. Drink was spilled and glasses were carelessly dropped to the floor as the elite fell into the throes of laughter, with some threatening even to fall out of their chairs. Demoralization of that caliber was not something Du'fra had ever encountered, but it hit all the same, and he shut his eyes, doing all he could to keep from weeping.
Then a voice rose over the top of the mad cackling that threw a silence over all in earshot. <"I accept!"> Vuk'li stepped forward, a look of fiendish curiosity on his face. <"You're that desperate to cling to this company? Alright, I'll bite. I'm more than confident that my lawyers can shoot down a premeditated attack charge and if they can't, it's not like I'm hurting for bail money."> he chuckled. Du'fra found a new hope to cling on to, and he stood up straight, staring his opponent down.
Vuk'li's expression hardened. <"But if we're going to do this, we're doing it legit: No interference">—Vuk'li shot a glance to his co-conspirators, his gaze genuine—<"no lethal strikes, with proper mediation and documentation. I'm giving you one chance to reconsider. Is this the path you want to take?">
<"Yes it is!"> Du'fra snapped, puffing out his chest. The shackles binding him were released at a nod by Vuk'li. The pair stared each other down, and knew that there was no going back from this.
​
The room was made suitable, every obstacle being removed from the center of the room, leaving a circular ring with only a short hologram projector in the center remaining, a feature accepted by both combatants. The guard was tasked with being the impartial judge, and the abode's security system was tuned to document the match. Vuk'li's coworkers sat on the sidelines, quietly making bets among themselves, as was their opportunistic nature.
In the center of the room, to one side of the projector, Du'fra and Vuk'li stared each other down. They had each removed each other's shirts and jackets, laying them over their opponent's shoulders as representative of the final, thin thread keeping them tied to the peace that came with civilization. The pair each gripped one end of their tops, eager and twitching to throw them off at any moment.
Du'fra eyed up his opponent. <'There's no getting around it, he's in far better shape than myself. That, and his ethnically consistent height brings with it a big range advantage. Thing is, I'm not only much, much heavier than he is, I have far more to lose. I'm not giving up until this company is safe, or I'm dead.'> He tensed in anticipation.
The guard stomped, demanding attention. <"The fighters will step forward!">
Du'fra and Vuk'li complied, neither daring to break the stare.
<"The fighters will now vow to honor the sanctity of this duel!">
Du'fra and Vuk'li each extended their right hands, and touched each other's chests with tightly balled fists. <"This duel is sacred, and it shall be respected as such. I vow to fight with honor and purpose."> spoke both fighters in unison.
<"Return to the starting distance!"> bellowed the guard.
The two combatants obeyed, and a long, slow silence followed. Each fighter stood still as a statue, not risking even the slightest show of weakness. Their eyes remained locked as though in a duel of their own: Vuk'li's calm superiority versus Du'fra's impassioned vigor. The quiet dragged on.
<"Begin!">
<"Kre'gadol!"> The two combatants threw their garments away, and the duel began.
Du'fra charged, keeping his arms high to guard his head as he quickly closed the distance. Vuk'li anticipated this, sidestepping and kicking upward into Du'fra's exposed belly; the blow knocking the wind out of him made Du'fra realize that his opponent's arrogance was somewhat justified. Du'fra capitalized, however, by catching Vuk'li's leg in an arm lock and pulling him in closer; he threw a haymaker that connected with Vuk'li's jaw, much to his satisfaction.
With his advantageous position inside his opponent's range, Du'fra kept the pressure on, lashing out with blow after blow, repeatedly hammering and slashing Vuk'li with his fists and talons wherever he could find an opening. This streak was ended with a single well placed knee to the chin by Vuk'li, followed up with a swift, toe-led kick to the stomach, driving his talons into Du'fra's blubbery abdomen. Du'fra cried in pain, and once again grabbed Vuk'li's leg. This time, he forcibly wrenched backward, forcing Vuk'li to topple to the floor, whereupon Du'fra dived upon him.
And the two wrestled on the floor, with Du'fra holding much of an advantage thanks to his considerable bulk, but said bulk and related health issues were starting to catch up with him, and his momentum waned. Before long, Du'fra found himself powerless to resist Vuk'li's legs mightily kicking him off the businessman, sending him sprawling backward onto the projector. Winded and with stamina rapidly draining, Du'fra laid on the projector a moment to catch his breath.
A moment was all Vuk'li needed. Quickly righting himself, Vuk'li bolted around the projector and with one quick, violent, viscerally satisfying stamp downward, broke Du'fra's left arm over the projector's edge with a sickening snap. The audience and guard winced while Du'fra wailed in excruciating agony.
The guard stepped forward to end the duel, but Du'fra forced his body up and into a standing position opposite the projector to Vuk'li, and shot a death glare and the man. The guard backed off just in time for Vuk'li to once again speed around the center obstacle and land a vicious strike on an off-guard Du'fra; a claw swipe across his right cheek.
Du'fra, fresh adrenaline surging through his body, reacted before Vuk'li could step outside his range, and pinned Vuk'li's foot to the floor with his own. Vuk'li lashed out with a left straight, leaving his side wide open to a heavy kick from Du'fra, driving his talons into Vuk'li's exposed obliques. But, in the moment following, where his face was on the receiving end of Vuk'li raining blows down upon it, Du'fra realized that his spike of adrenaline had just expired. The sound in his ears grew muffled as one last punch hit home, the face of its furious deliverer remained etched into his sight for a moment before all he could see was black.
​
Du'fra's eyelids fluttered. He was wrapped in a cocoon of throbbing pain, but felt that he was cushioned by soft bedding. His eyes shot open to a stark white light. He looked down and saw a hospital bed. He took a moment to recall what had just happened. He began to sob, curling into a ball beneath the sheets. Everything he had done, he had done for the company, the company that rescued him and his family from poverty, the company that was now in the hands of the men who would see it burn if the ashes helped to line their pockets. His sorrow turned slowly into hot, simmering rage, his conviction to fight and die for the company was all too real. But he knew that his anger would have nowhere to go; as of now, and with the defamation suit that would inevitably tarnish his reputation, Vuk'li was untouchable. Du'fra's eyes narrowed, his pupils constricting as his anger boiled over into a focused and dangerous mania. <'If I can't yet punch upward,'> he thought in his manic rage. <'I'll just have to begin by punching downward.'>
At this thought, his injuries flared again, shocking him into unconsciousness. As his consciousness faded, a name came to his mind, a name that by now every x'erren alive knew. It was all too perfect, the woman that was the crux of Vuk'li's masterstroke had to be working with him. The salvation of X'rtan Freight would begin with her.
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