44 Betting jobs in Dublin, Ireland (1 new)

I've seen some people looking for fantasy on here recently. I thought I'd try my hand at it.
I watched as the little girl ran excitedly over to me, her golden pigtails flying. The girl’s pink dress and white shoes shone in the halogen lights of the parking lot.
“It’s my birthday today.” Said the girl in a breathless rush, her cherubic smile making the corners of my mouth rise in sympathy.
“Happy Birthday.” I said and put a .45 caliber hollow-point between the girl’s baby-blue eyes.
The girl opened her mouth in shock and started to fall, what hit the ground was green, scaly, and had eyes like windshields.
“I hate Changelings.” I remarked to the chill, night air.
{They’re pathetic things really, Changelings that is, even for Wild-Fae. The damned things barely have enough juice to work a Mask, that’s why they go after children. People used to think that Changelings were left behind when the Gentry snatched a kid, like the Changeling was supposed to cover the bastard’s tracks. Dumb. Not that the Gentry would grab humans, I can personally attest that they do, but why would the Lords and Ladies take a kid? Adults make better slaves, we’re more durable, and there’s more meat on our bones if the Gentry are feeling hungry. Besides, the Gentry don’t care about hiding their crimes from humans. Truth be told, they wouldn’t even understand the concept. No, Changelings are not left behind while the child gets to frolic about in Faerieland, the truth is that children are just weak enough for magical vermin to prey on. Besides, living in a human household masks the Changeling’s scent, gives it a good place to hide from anything higher up the Wild-Fae food chain.}
Luckily, the parking lot was empty. The stupid creature must have panicked. I’d been on its trail for a few days now, and it must have thought it could ambush me.
{A six-year-old girl in an abandoned lot at 2 am? Yeah, that’s not suspicious. You don’t need the Second Sight to read the warning signs here, but it sure helps.}
I doused the body in kerosene and set a match to it. The things usually rotted pretty quick, but it never pays to be careless. I watched the flames for a moment, flickering the eerie green and violet of magical fire, and thought of the girl, the real one who had been killed and eaten by the now-burning thing. I hoped she was happy wherever she was, and I prayed to whatever might listen or care that her parents wouldn’t suffer too much. As the last embers cooled on the tar I walked back to my car, angrier than I had been all night.
{I should probably introduce myself. I’m Jim, I kill Faeries. My partner and I both do (you’ll meet up with her in a bit), what you need to know is that the Fae are nasty, less Tinkerbell or Ferngully, and a little more Pennywise the clown mixed with some probe-happy Roswell Aliens. There are roughly two types; the Wild-Fae, like the impromptu barbecue you just saw, who live in our world, and the High-Fae, the Gentry, who live in Faerie, an alternate dimension and/or planet which can only be accessed via the magic/technology of the Lords and Ladies themselves. My partner and I were nabbed by the High-Fae a while back. We spent some time as slaves in the Unseelie Court, those guys are the real bad-asses, and believe-you-me they make Wild-Fae look sane and harmless by comparison. Lucky us, someone left the cage door open one day, and we stumbled out of Faerie and back to reality. With no idea who, where, or when we were, or even the slightest clue what to do next.}
I had just taken my first sip of coffee when Maggie walked into the diner. Turning every head in the place as she did so. I have trouble gauging human attractiveness, we both do to be honest,
{When the Gentry nabbed us they changed our looks, they consider humans “uncouth”, so our faces and bodies were changed to look more pleasing to the Lords and Ladies. Thing is, compared to the Gentry themselves that still only gets us to about a 2 on their 10-point scale. It screwed our frame of reference all to hell, though. Most humans look the same to us now.} but even I could tell that Maggie was gorgeous. She had green eyes, an hourglass figure, and a mane of fiery, crimson curls. Maggie looked like she should be pulling pints and breaking hearts in an Irish pub, either in the South end of Boston, or downtown Dublin. Maggie slid into the booth opposite me, her tight jeans ensuring that she had the undivided attention of the diner’s entire male clientele. I could practically feel the hormones surging through the room and had to dig my fingers into the table to avoid throwing myself at the closest warm body. Which happened to be Maggie herself. She’d understand, but honestly too many scenes like that get embarrassing. {What can I say? The Faerie version of LSD is a hell of a drug. Side effects may include, but are not limited to; moderate to severe PERMANENT nymphomania, and complete memory loss.}
“You look awful Jim.” Said Maggie, with her usual tact. “You should get some more sleep.”
“That’s what coffee’s for.” I said taking a sip. It was just the way I liked it; black, bitter, and about two days old.
{When you get grabbed by the Gentry they feed you on Faerie food. This stuff screws you up. Faerie food is delicious, beyond belief, beyond words, beyond comprehension, so much so that it messes with your brain chemistry. We can’t taste human food anymore. Only the most extreme tastes come close, that’s why I like my coffee so bitter, it’s better than sipping on a steaming cup of nothing.} “Where’ve you been?”
“Corn Country,” Maggie replied. “I tracked a string of sexual assaults across southern Nebraska, caught up to a couple of Fauns the day before last.”
{Fauns, or Satyrs, are another type of Wild-Fae, one that lays a glamour on its victims before “breeding” with them. A Faun’s glamour works like a magical roofie, it keeps the victim conscious but paralyzed throughout the whole ordeal. Unlike Rohypnol, however, Satyr glamour doesn’t wipe your memories.}
“Did you get the names?” I asked.
“Way ahead of you.” Maggie said, sliding a folded piece of paper across the table towards me.
Maggie stared at the list, like she had a grudge against it. I waited, sipping my coffee, knowing that whatever the problem was I would hear about it soon enough.
“Jim,” Maggie said, right on schedule. “It’s going to be 20 or 30 years before we know one way or another what happened to those kids.”
{Most human-Fae couplings end in miscarriages, the ones that survive, approximately 1 in 10, are human enough, but they tend to come out … strange. Occasionally, one of the survivors gets the urge to follow in dear old Dad’s hoof prints, so we like to keep track of them if possible.}
“It’s not like we won’t be around Mags.” I said stonily.
Maggie’s hand went to her chest and rubbed the spot above her heart where I knew the brand still burned, as cold as ice. I had the same brand on my chest.
{The Gentry do a couple of things to all their slaves. Among the more dick-ish is the brand, it identifies us as the property of a particular noble of the Unseelie Court, it’s what gives us the Second Sight, and makes us obedient to any order given directly from our master, one of the many, many reasons we never want to see him again. The brand also slows our aging. We’ll be around for those kids’ retirement parties.}
“Don’t think about it Mags.” I said tossing a couple of bills onto the table to pay for the coffee. “Let’s go kill something.”
It was with great relief that I returned my rental car and slipped back into my familiar place as Maggie’s copilot. I’m not a bad driver, but the truth is, her reflexes are faster than mine, and she actively enjoys driving, whereas it will never be more than an unfortunate necessity for me.
“Where to next, boss?” Maggie asked as she navigated our way back to the highway.
“How do you feel about Duck Boats?” I asked. “There was a story on the news about a couple of accidents in Boston, they got my spidey senses tingling.”
“Fine by me.” Maggie said. “Do we know what’s doing it?”
“Not yet.” I replied.
Maggie drove fast, the jaunt from Illinois and up to Massachusetts, took about a day. We both caught up on our sleep during that time. Maggie grumbled about me driving like an old lady once she woke up from her nap and saw how much time we hadn’t made. Otherwise we made small talk. Both Maggie and I are phenomenally bad at small talk, so that quickly gave way to shop talk.
“I cornered them in a bar in Lincoln.” Maggie said, her hands tight on the wheel. “They made the approach together, twins probably.”
I nodded in agreement.
{Faeries don’t have children very often, their fertility cycles are few and far between, and the gestation period is long. Twins are regarded as special, a good omen of sorts, so they tend to stick together, for luck. Which runs out pretty damn quick if they bump into us down a dark alley.}
“Anyway” Maggie continued. “I saw them across the bar looking for a target, so I made sure to catch their eyes.”
“How did you do that?” I asked, bemusedly.
“Karaoke.” Maggie replied, matter-of-factly. “Now can I get back to my story?”
I waved a hand in a gesture of apology.
“Once I knew they had chosen me, I walked out to my car, like I was leaving. They followed and invited me back to their place. You should’ve seen them Jim, the way they were acting, all smooth and slimy. I had to pretend I couldn’t see past their Masks.” Maggie shuddered, and continued. “All that hair, and the smell…” She made a retching noise in the back of her throat. “I’m still not sure how I kept it up until we got back to their motel. I almost ganked them in the parking lot, just to shut them up.”
“How did you do it?” I asked, professional curiosity piqued.
“Once they hit me with the Glamour, I played possum until they were close enough and then ventilated their necks with a Bowie knife for them.” Maggie said it nonchalantly, feigning professional detachment, but I could hear the rough edge in her voice as she struggled to choke down the vestigial rage.
{Glamour is a funny thing, it’s the catch-all term for the mind-fuckery that the Fae can pull off. All the Fae have it to one degree or another, but the Wild-Fae tend to be one-trick ponies. Whereas the Gentry, can just about rewrite reality if they want, especially in Faerie where the laws of physics aren’t nailed down quite so well as they are on Earth, they aren’t omnipotent, but they come damn close. Once you’ve gotten used to High-Fae Glamour, you can usually shrug off anything a Wild-Fae can throw at you, most of the time.}
I shuddered. Knowing Maggie, the place had probably looked like a Jackson Pollack painting done in red by the time she was finished.
{Maggie had been a gladiator, back in the bad old days. That’s an example of High-Fae humor, take the 98-pound girl and put her in a fistfight with a pissed-off ogre. Get the joke? Me neither. Upside: she got really, really good at stabbing Wild-Fae. Downside: the High-Fae steroids she was on the whole time make her prone to hulking out and trying to stab EVERYONE.}
“I could have used you Jim.” Maggie said quietly.
My jaw set, hard, as I stared mutely at the road ahead.
“I’m no good at talking Jim, this job should have been yours.” Maggie said, her voice uncharacteristically quiet.
“They were looking for a woman,” I said stonily. “It wouldn’t have worked.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.” Maggie snapped back, her nerves frayed by the unusual tension between us. “The hormones those guys were pumping out? I could practically taste them. It would’ve taken you 5 seconds to have them ripping each other’s throats out. It wouldn’t be the first time. Remember that troll in Yellowstone?”
{You know how Maggie spent her time in Faerie becoming Xena: Warrior Princess? Yeah, I was a gigolo. No, that’s not a joke, I was a member of a High-Fae noble’s harem. I got really good at persuading horny people to do what I wanted. As for the troll? Let’s just say it was in a vulnerable position when I cut off its head. This is not an experience I want to repeat, particularly not with a pair of bipedal goats.}
I said nothing for a while, just sat in my seat seething with anger, mostly because I knew she was right. I could have made the approach in the daytime, and not risked the Satyrs picking another target. I had potentially put another girl at risk because of my squeamishness. Eventually, I couldn’t stand it anymore, “Look, it’s done. You killed the perverts and got out clean. No harm, no foul.” I said angrily.
Maggie just drove on in silence.
I stretched in the warm June sun, it felt good to be out of the car at last. Maggie tossed me a wallet from over the car’s roof.
“Grab me something to eat would you? Our friends from Nebraska are treating.” Maggie said, turning to the gas pump to fill up the car.
I continued to stretch as I walked into the convenience store, opening the wallet as I did so. No driver’s license, not that that was unusual.
{Cameras don’t have brains, so Glamour doesn’t work on them. You get a Fae in a picture you see its true form. Luckily, people have been faking pictures of Fae since the invention of the camera, so they’re always dismissed as hoaxes.}
The credit cards were too risky, the Nebraska police had probably already found the two that Maggie had left behind, and were no doubt interested in whoever had pureed them. There was cash in the wallet, a couple hundred bucks, so we were good there. {What? So, we steal from bad guys, we have to eat. Besides, it not like Magical Vigilante pays a whole lot.} I ditched the wallet while I was in the store, with any luck it would be on its way to a New England landfill, and no one the wiser. Maggie was just finishing up, as I walked over to the car, her head was turned away from me returning the nozzle to it’s hook. I winged a protein bar at the back of her head as hard as I could. Faster than I could follow her hand flashed up and caught the bar, without turning her head. I chuckled.
“Jim, give it up would you?” Maggie said, sighing.
“Not until you show me how to do that.” I replied.
“Patience, grasshopper.” Maggie replied around a mouthful of protein bar.
Eventually we made it to Boston, winding our way to the scene of the suspected killings.
“I did some more digging. There have been three deaths in the last week, all at an abandoned warehouse.” I said, as we sat in Boston’s notorious traffic.
“Why now?” Asked Maggie, “Fae don’t usually restrain themselves, why did it go psycho just this past week?”
“The building has been empty since the 70’s, completely abandoned.” I said, I’d had the same question too. “The place was bought recently by a developer, who’s going to demolish it. The men that were killed, were an engineer and a couple of surveyors preparing to blow the place.”
“So we could be looking at something territorial.” Maggie remarked. “How did they die?”
“The engineer fell off a catwalk.” I replied. “When the surveyors ran over to help him the whole thing fell down on top of them. From what I’ve read, I guess it was pretty messy.”
“I’ll bet.” Was Maggie’s only comment.
The warehouse was nothing special, an abandoned pile of rust and tetanus, squatting in a ghost-town of similar buildings. Maggie and I surveyed the building warily.
“So, what could set up shop here?” I asked. “And more importantly, how do we find it and turn it inside out?”
“Something territorial, with the juice to pull down an iron girder?” Maggie mused.
{A quick note about iron, there’s this idea that iron and sometimes silver is somehow toxic to the Fae, or that it repels Glamour in some way. Not true. Now it’s correct that the Fae don’t really use metal tools. Why would they when magic exists? It is true that you can kill the Fae by stabbing them through the heart with an iron or silver knife. I can’t really think of any creature that is going to be especially chipper after something like that. But I’ve found bullets to be a lot cheaper personally.}
“Something big could do it.” Maggie said skeptically, “A troll or an ogre for instance.”
I shuddered at the thought.
“But I doubt it, both of those tend to stick out, and the body count would be a hell of a lot higher if a troll or ogre was squatting here.”
“Which leaves what?” I asked.
“Something reclusive, that likes out of the way places with easy access to people but will kill if its territory is threatened.” Maggie said, a wicked little smile quirking one side of her mouth. “Something that kills by making it look like the victims had a run of very bad luck.”
I could feel myself getting excited now, I rubbed my hands together in anticipation. “You think so?” I asked. “They’re pretty rare on this side of the pond.”
“It fits.” Said Maggie, racking the action of her shotgun. “Let’s go bag ourselves a Leprechaun.”
I covered Maggie with my handgun, as we entered the building.
{A Colt m1911, for those of you interested. Maggie likes 12 gauge slugs, but for my money .45 caliber hollow-point bullets make a lovely soup out of Fae grey matter.}
The interior of the building was cool and dark, the light glancing in from broken cracks in the roof casting eerie shadows on the floor. The place had been a factory once, piles of broken, rusted machinery lay scattered across the space, making a maze out of the cavernous building.
“Where are we looking?” I asked Maggie in a whisper.
“You said the Engineer was killed up on the catwalk?” Maggie asked in reply.
I nodded in ascent.
“Then I’m thinking up there.” Maggie motioned towards the foreman’s office set up against the ceiling, its panoramic window giving it a view of the entire factory floor. The right-hand catwalk was collapsed, no doubt where the engineer had met his grisly end, but the left-hand catwalk still looked in good repair.
Maggie went first up the steps, her sawed-off shotgun held in front of her, ready to make mincemeat of anything that startled her. I was about to follow up after her when a voice with a thick Boston accent called out from behind me.
“Hey! What are you doin’ heah.”
I spun around, my gun still lowered, to see a paunchy, balding, middle aged man wearing some sort of uniform. A security guard of some kind.
“You're trespassin’, get outta heah, before I call the cops.” The man yelled, his face reddening.
Truthfully, I almost fell for it, I was about to apologize, or make up an excuse, before I noticed the telltale flicker around the edges of the man’s figure. Once I saw that, the Mask unraveled. I could still see the security guard, but he was ghostly, like a halo projected out from a much smaller, much uglier figure that was really in front of me. I raised my gun and fired at the new figure’s head, about the level of the security guard’s groin. I was too slow. The Leprechaun ducked out of the way a fraction of a second before I fired, vanishing into the maze of rusted, neglected machinery around me.
“Maggie, he’s down here!” I yelled. Flicking my bowie knife out of its sheath with my left hand, I chased after the escaping Leprechaun. Behind me I heard Maggie clattering back down the stairs.
“No, stay there.” I shouted back to Maggie. “Don’t let him get up top.” I yelled back.
I was well into the maze now, my vision obscured by hulks of machinery and refuse that had been carefully piled to make this labyrinth. A sound from behind made me whirl, just in time to see the Leprechaun wink into view and try to swing a piece of rebar at my knees. I leapt back, the rebar whistling past my legs by mere inches. The Leprechaun jabbed the long piece of rebar at me like a spear, and I parried with my knife, silently promising that I would never complain that Maggie’s fencing lessons were pointless ever again. I brought my gun up and fired again, but the Leprechaun vanished with a snap of his fingers.
{Leprechauns can’t actually evaporate into thin air, but they’re naturally quite small, and agile. They’re damn hard to hit even when the buggers aren’t invisible.}
“Come out you little weasel” I screamed into the gloom. A clattering from above me, gave me just enough time to move as a large piece of cast iron rained down smashing into the ground right where I had been standing. “Missed me, midget.” I taunted. There was a swoosh in the air, and I turned just in time to avoid the baseball bat that had been swung at my head.
{Well it would have been swung at my head if my attacker had been more than 2 ½ feet tall, as it was, it was swung at my clavicle.}
I lunged with my knife and felt it sink into muscle tissue. I twisted, and the Leprechaun flickered into sight.
“Tremble, foolish mortal,” The Leprechaun snarled. “and I will make your dying swift.”
{All Leprechauns have a major case of short man’s syndrome, which is why taunting them works so well. They’re easily the most powerful of the Wild-Fae, which is how he was able to Glamour me, even temporarily. Leprechauns like to play at being High-Fae but the sad truth is, they can’t hold a candle to any of the Gentry, and they know it, so they totally blow their tops if they’re insulted in any way. Hence, the cliched movie villain soliloquy.}
I put a bullet through the bastard’s head and spared myself more melodramatics.
“Got him.” I called to Maggie, who let out a whoop of triumph. About 20 minutes later Maggie and I were up on the catwalk breaking down the door of the old Foreman’s Office, while the Leprechaun’s corpse blazed merrily away down on the factory floor. The door was old and busted and pulled off its hinges fairly easily. I was about to walk inside when Maggie stopped me. Reaching forward with her shotgun she tripped the wire that was stretched across the base of the door frame, at ankle height, jerking back her hand to save her gun from being crushed by the mass of falling metal that smashed into the floor a moment later.
“What is it with this guy and dropping things on people?” I asked, rhetorically.
Maggie and I moved in closer, checking for any more booby traps that the Leprechaun might have laid. Eventually, once the room had been cleared, we stood in front of the large glittering pile in the center of the floor.
“Jackpot.” Maggie breathed.
{Most of it was worthless of course. For all their pretensions Leprechauns are really just magical magpies. They love anything shiny, and will guard their hoards to the death, regardless of the actual value of the items. So much for the crock o’ gold at the end of the rainbow. Still, the little kleptomaniacs tended to accumulate a couple things of value, and Maggie and I salvaged enough out of the pile of tinfoil and aluminum to keep us going for a little while longer. I love a happy ending.}
Previous: Jim and Maggie: Origins
Next: Hunter's Moon ~ Part 1

I watched as the little girl ran excitedly over to me, her golden pigtails flying. The girl’s pink dress and white shoes glowed in the halogen lights of the parking lot.
“It’s my birthday today.” Said the girl in a breathless rush, her cherubic smile making the corners of my mouth rise in sympathy.
“Happy Birthday.” I said and put a .45 caliber hollow-point between the girl’s baby-blue eyes.
The girl opened her mouth in shock and started to fall, what hit the ground was green, scaly, and had eyes like windshields.
“I hate Changelings.” I remarked to the chill, night air.
{They’re pathetic things really, Changelings that is, even for Wild-Fae. The damned things barely have enough juice to work a Mask, that’s why they go after children. People used to think that Changelings were left behind when the Gentry snatched a kid, like the Changeling was supposed to cover the bastard’s tracks. Dumb. Not that the Gentry would grab humans, I can personally attest that they do, but why would the Lords and Ladies take a kid? Adults make better slaves, we’re more durable, and there’s more meat on our bones if the Gentry are feeling hungry. Besides, the Gentry don’t care about hiding their crimes from humans. Truth be told, they wouldn’t even understand the concept. No, Changelings are not left behind while the child gets to frolic about in Faerieland, the truth is that children are just weak enough for magical vermin to prey on. Besides, living in a human household masks the Changeling’s scent, gives it a good place to hide from anything higher up the Wild-Fae food chain.}
Luckily, the parking lot was empty. The stupid creature must have panicked. I’d been on its trail for a few days now, and it must have thought it could ambush me.
{A six-year-old girl in an abandoned lot at 2 am? Yeah, that’s not suspicious. You don’t need the Second Sight to read the warning signs here, but it sure helps.}
I doused the body in kerosene and set a match to it. The things usually rotted pretty quick, but it never pays to be careless. I watched the flames for a moment, flickering the eerie green and violet of magical fire, and thought of the girl, the real one who had been killed and eaten by the now-burning thing. I hoped she was happy wherever she was, and I prayed to whatever might listen or care that her parents wouldn’t suffer too much. As the last embers cooled on the tar I walked back to my car, angrier than I had been all night.
{I should probably introduce myself. I’m Jim, I kill Faeries. My partner and I both do (you’ll meet up with her in a bit), what you need to know is that the Fae are nasty, less Tinkerbell or Ferngully, and a little more Pennywise the clown mixed with some probe-happy Roswell Aliens. There are roughly two types; the Wild-Fae, like the impromptu barbecue you just saw, who live in our world, and the High-Fae, the Gentry, who live in Faerie, an alternate dimension and/or planet which can only be accessed via the magic/technology of the Lords and Ladies themselves. My partner and I were nabbed by the High-Fae a while back. We spent some time as slaves in the Unseelie Court, those guys are the real bad-asses, and believe-you-me they make Wild-Fae look sane and harmless by comparison. Lucky us, someone left the cage door open one day, and we stumbled out of Faerie and back to reality. With no idea who, where, or when we were, or even the slightest clue what to do next.}
I had just taken my first sip of coffee when Maggie walked into the diner. Turning every head in the place as she did so. I have trouble gauging human attractiveness, we both do to be honest,
{When the Gentry nabbed us they changed our looks, they consider humans “uncouth”, so our faces and bodies were changed to look more pleasing to the Lords and Ladies. Thing is, compared to the Gentry themselves that still only gets us to about a 2 on their 10-point scale. It screwed our frame of reference all to hell, though. Most humans look the same to us now.}
but even I could tell that Maggie was gorgeous. She had green eyes, an hourglass figure, and a mane of fiery, crimson curls. Maggie looked like she should be pulling pints and breaking hearts in an Irish pub, either in the South end of Boston, or downtown Dublin. Maggie slid into the booth opposite me, her tight jeans ensuring that she had the undivided attention of the diner’s entire male clientele. I could practically feel the hormones surging through the room and had to dig my fingers into the table to avoid throwing myself at the closest warm body. Which happened to be Maggie herself. She’d understand, but honestly too many scenes like that get embarrassing.
{What can I say? The Faerie version of LSD is a hell of a drug. Side effects may include, but are not limited to; moderate to severe PERMANENT nymphomania, and complete memory loss.}
“You look awful Jim.” Said Maggie, with her usual tact. “You should get some more sleep.”
“That’s what coffee’s for.” I said taking a sip. It was just the way I liked it; black, bitter, and about two days old.
{When you get grabbed by the Gentry they feed you on Faerie food. This stuff screws you up. Faerie food is delicious, beyond belief, beyond words, beyond comprehension, so much so that it messes with your brain chemistry. We can’t taste human food anymore. Only the most extreme tastes come close, that’s why I like my coffee so bitter, it’s better than sipping on a steaming cup of nothing.}
“Where’ve you been?”
“Corn Country,” Maggie replied. “I tracked a string of sexual assaults across southern Nebraska, caught up to a couple of Fauns the day before last.”
{Fauns, or Satyrs, are another type of Wild-Fae, one that lays a glamour on its victims before “breeding” with them. A Faun’s glamour works like a magical roofie, it keeps the victim conscious but paralyzed throughout the whole ordeal. Unlike Rohypnol, however, Satyr glamour doesn’t wipe your memories.}
“Did you get the names?” I asked.
“Way ahead of you.” Maggie said, sliding a folded piece of paper across the table towards me.
Maggie stared at the list, like she had a grudge against it. I waited, sipping my coffee, knowing that whatever the problem was I would hear about it soon enough.
“Jim,” Maggie said, right on schedule. “It’s going to be 20 or 30 years before we know one way or another what happened to those kids.”
{Most human-Fae couplings end in miscarriages, the ones that survive, approximately 1 in 10, are human enough, but they tend to come out … strange. Occasionally, one of the survivors gets the urge to follow in dear old Dad’s hoof prints, so we like to keep track of them if possible.}
“It’s not like we won’t be around Mags.” I said stonily.
Maggie’s hand went to her chest and rubbed the spot above her heart where I knew the brand still burned, as cold as ice. I had the same brand on my chest.
{The Gentry do a couple of things to all their slaves. Among the more dick-ish is the brand, it identifies us as the property of a particular noble of the Unseelie Court, it’s what gives us the Second Sight, and makes us obedient to any order given directly from our master, one of the many, many reasons we never want to see him again. The brand also slows our aging. We’ll be around for those kids’ retirement parties.}
“Don’t think about it Mags.” I said tossing a couple of bills onto the table to pay for the coffee. “Let’s go kill something.”
It was with great relief that I returned my rental car and slipped back into my familiar place as Maggie’s copilot. I’m not a bad driver, but the truth is, her reflexes are faster than mine, and she actively enjoys driving, whereas it will never be more than an unfortunate necessity for me.
“Where to next, boss?” Maggie asked as she navigated our way back to the highway.
“How do you feel about Duck Boats?” I asked. “There was a story on the news about a couple of accidents in Boston, they got my spidey senses tingling.”
“Fine by me.” Maggie said. “Do we know what’s doing it?”
“Not yet.” I replied.
Maggie drove fast, the jaunt from Illinois and up to Massachusetts, took about a day. We both caught up on our sleep during that time. Maggie grumbled about me driving like an old lady once she woke up from her nap and saw how much time we hadn’t made. Otherwise we made small talk. Both Maggie and I are phenomenally bad at small talk, so that quickly gave way to shop talk.
“I cornered them in a bar in Lincoln.” Maggie said, her hands tight on the wheel. “They made the approach together, twins probably.”
I nodded in agreement.
{Faeries don’t have children very often, their fertility cycles are few and far between, and the gestation period is long. Twins are regarded as special, a good omen of sorts, so they tend to stick together, for luck. Which runs out pretty damn quick if they bump into us down a dark alley.}
“Anyway” Maggie continued. “I saw them across the bar looking for a target, so I made sure to catch their eyes.”
“How did you do that?” I asked, bemusedly.
“Karaoke.” Maggie replied, matter-of-factly. “Now can I get back to my story?”
I waved a hand in a gesture of apology.
“Once I knew they had chosen me, I walked out to my car, like I was leaving. They followed and invited me back to their place. You should’ve seen them Jim, the way they were acting, all smooth and slimy. I had to pretend I couldn’t see past their Masks.” Maggie shuddered, and continued. “All that hair, and the smell…” She made a retching noise in the back of her throat. “I’m still not sure how I kept it up until we got back to their motel. I almost ganked them in the parking lot just to shut them up.”
“How did you do it?” I asked, professional curiosity piqued.
“Once they hit me with the Glamour, I played possum until they were close enough and then ventilated their necks with a Bowie knife for them.” Maggie said it nonchalantly, feigning professional detachment, but I could hear the rough edge in her voice as she struggled to choke down the vestigial rage.
{Glamour is a funny thing, it’s the catch-all term for the mind-fuckery that the Fae can pull off. All the Fae have it to one degree or another, but the Wild-Fae tend to be one-trick ponies. Whereas the Gentry, can just about rewrite reality if they want, especially in Faerie where the laws of physics aren’t nailed down quite so well as they are on Earth, they aren’t omnipotent, but they come damn close. Once you’ve gotten used to High-Fae Glamour, you can usually shrug off anything a Wild-Fae can throw at you, most of the time.}
I shuddered. Knowing Maggie, the place had probably looked like a Jackson Pollack painting done in red by the time she was finished.
{Maggie had been a gladiator, back in the bad old days. That’s an example of High-Fae humor, take the 98-pound girl and put her in a fistfight with a pissed-off ogre. Get the joke? Me neither. Upside: she got really, really good at stabbing Wild-Fae. Downside: the High-Fae steroids she was on the whole time make her prone to hulking out and trying to stab EVERYONE, me included.}
“I could have used you Jim.” Maggie said quietly.
My jaw set, hard, as I stared mutely at the road ahead.
“I’m no good at talking Jim, this job should have been yours.” Maggie said, her voice uncharacteristically quiet.
“They were looking for a woman,” I said stonily. “It wouldn’t have worked.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.” Maggie snapped back, her nerves frayed by the unusual tension between us. “The hormones those guys were pumping out? I could practically taste them. It would’ve taken you 5 seconds to have them ripping each other’s throats out. It wouldn’t be the first time. Remember that troll in Yellowstone?”
{You know how Maggie spent her time in Faerie becoming Xena: Warrior Princess? Yeah, I was a gigolo. No, that’s not a joke, I was a member of a High-Fae noble’s harem. I got really good at persuading horny people to do what I wanted. As for the troll? Let’s just say it was in a vulnerable position when I cut off its head. This is not an experience I want to repeat, particularly not with a pair of bipedal goats.}
I said nothing for a while, just sat in my seat seething with anger, mostly because I knew she was right. I could have made the approach in the daytime, and not risked the Satyrs picking another target. I had potentially put another girl at risk because of my squeamishness. Eventually, I couldn’t stand it anymore, “Look, it’s done. You killed the perverts and got out clean. No harm, no foul.” I said angrily.
Maggie just drove on in silence.
I stretched in the warm June sun, it felt good to be out of the car at last. Maggie tossed me a wallet from over the car’s roof.
“Grab me something to eat would you? Our friends from Nebraska are treating.” Maggie said, turning to the gas pump to fill up the car.
I continued to stretch as I walked into the convenience store, opening the wallet as I did so. No driver’s license, not that that was unusual.
{Cameras don’t have brains, so Glamour doesn’t work on them. You get a Fae in a picture you see its true form.}
The credit cards were too risky, the Nebraska police had probably already found the two that Maggie had left behind, and were no doubt interested in whoever had pureed them. There was cash in the wallet, a couple hundred bucks, so we were good there. {What? So, we steal from bad guys, we have to eat. Besides, it not like Magical Vigilante pays a whole lot.} I ditched the wallet while I was in the store, with any luck it would be on its way to a New England landfill, and no one the wiser. Maggie was just finishing up, as I walked over to the car, her head was turned away from me returning the nozzle to its hook. I winged a protein bar at the back of her head as hard as I could. Faster than I could follow her hand flashed up and caught the bar, without turning her head. I chuckled.
“Jim, give it up would you?” Maggie said, sighing.
“Not until you show me how to do that.” I replied.
“Patience, grasshopper.” Maggie replied around a mouthful of protein bar.
Eventually we made it to Boston, winding our way to the scene of the suspected killings.
“I did some more digging. There have been three deaths in the last week, all at an abandoned warehouse.” I said, as we sat in Boston’s notorious traffic.
“Why now?” Asked Maggie, “Fae don’t usually restrain themselves, why did it go psycho just this past week?”
“The building has been empty since the 70’s, completely abandoned.” I said, I’d had the same question too. “The place was bought recently by a developer, who’s going to demolish it. The men that were killed, were an engineer and a couple of surveyors preparing to blow the place.”
“So we could be looking at something territorial.” Maggie remarked. “How did they die?”
“The engineer fell off a catwalk.” I replied. “When the surveyors ran over to help him the whole thing fell down on top of them. From what I’ve read, I guess it was pretty messy.”
“I’ll bet.” Was Maggie’s only comment.
The warehouse was nothing special, an abandoned pile of rust and tetanus, squatting in a ghost-town of similar buildings. Maggie and I surveyed the building warily.
“So, what could set up shop here?” I asked. “And more importantly, how do we find it and turn it inside out?”
“Something territorial, with the juice to pull down an iron girder?” Maggie mused.
{A quick note about iron, there’s this idea that iron and sometimes silver is somehow toxic to the Fae, or that it repels Glamour in some way. Not true. Now it’s correct that the Fae don’t really use metal tools. Why would they when magic exists? It is true that you can kill the Fae by stabbing them through the heart with an iron or silver knife. I can’t really think of any creature that is going to be especially chipper after something like that. But I’ve found bullets to be a lot cheaper personally.}
“Something big could do it.” Maggie said skeptically, “A troll or an ogre for instance.”
I shuddered at the thought.
“But I doubt it, both of those tend to stick out, and the body count would be a hell of a lot higher if a troll or ogre was squatting here.”
“Which leaves what?” I asked.
“Something reclusive, that likes out of the way places with easy access to people but will kill if its territory is threatened.” Maggie said, a wicked little smile quirking one side of her mouth. “Something that kills by making it look like the victims had a run of very bad luck.”
I could feel myself getting excited now, I rubbed my hands together in anticipation. “You think so?” I asked. “They’re pretty rare on this side of the pond.”
“It fits.” Said Maggie, racking the action of her shotgun. “Let’s go bag ourselves a Leprechaun.”
I covered Maggie with my handgun, as we entered the building.
{A Colt m1911, for those of you interested. Maggie likes 12 gauge slugs, but for my money .45 caliber hollow-point bullets make a lovely soup out of Fae grey matter.}
The interior of the building was cool and dark, the light glancing in from broken cracks in the roof casting eerie shadows on the floor. The place had been a factory once, piles of broken, rusted machinery lay scattered across the space, making a maze out of the cavernous building.
“Where are we looking?” I asked Maggie in a whisper.
“You said the Engineer was killed up on the catwalk?” Maggie asked in reply.
I nodded in ascent.
“Then I’m thinking up there.” Maggie motioned towards the foreman’s office set up against the ceiling, its panoramic window giving it a view of the entire factory floor. The right-hand catwalk was collapsed, no doubt where the engineer had met his grisly end, but the left-hand catwalk still looked in good repair.
Maggie went first up the steps, her sawed-off shotgun held in front of her, ready to make mincemeat of anything that startled her. I was about to follow up after her when a voice with a thick Boston accent called out from behind me.
“Hey! What are you doin’ heah.”
I spun around, my gun still lowered, to see a paunchy, balding, middle-aged man wearing some sort of uniform. A security guard of some sort.
“You’re trespassin’, get outta heah, before I call the cops.” The man yelled, his face reddening.
Truthfully, I almost fell for it, I was about to apologize, or make up an excuse, before I noticed the telltale flicker around the edges of the man’s figure. Once I saw that, the Mask unraveled. I could still see the security guard, but he was ghostly, like a halo projected out from a much smaller, much uglier figure that was really in front of me. I raised my gun and fired at the new figure’s head, about the level of the security guard’s groin. I was too slow. The Leprechaun ducked out of the way a fraction of a second before I fired, vanishing into the maze of rusted, neglected machinery around me.
“Maggie, he’s down here!” I yelled. Flicking my bowie knife out of its sheath with my left hand, I chased after the escaping Leprechaun. Behind me I heard Maggie clattering back down the stairs.
“No, stay there.” I shouted back to Maggie. “Don’t let him get up top.” I yelled back.
I was well into the maze now, my vision obscured by hulks of machinery and refuse that had been carefully piled to make this labyrinth. A sound from behind made me whirl, just in time to see the Leprechaun wink into view and swing a piece of rebar at my knees. I leapt back, the rebar whistling past my legs by mere inches. The Leprechaun jabbed the long piece of rebar at me like a spear, and I parried with my knife, silently promising that I would never complain that Maggie’s fencing lessons were pointless ever again. I brought my gun up and fired again, but the Leprechaun vanished with a snap of his fingers.
{Leprechauns can’t actually evaporate into thin air, but they’re naturally quite small, and agile. They’re damn hard to hit even when the buggers aren’t invisible.}
“Come out you little weasel” I screamed into the gloom. A clattering from above me, gave me just enough time to move as a large piece of cast iron rained down smashing into the ground right where I had been standing. “Missed me, midget.” I taunted. There was a swoosh in the air, and I turned just in time to avoid the baseball bat that had been swung at my head. {Well it would have been swung at my head if my attacker had been more than 2 ½ feet tall, as it was, it was swung at my clavicle.} I lunged with my knife and felt it sink into muscle tissue. I twisted, and the Leprechaun flickered into sight.
“Tremble, foolish mortal,” The Leprechaun snarled. “and I will make your dying swift.”
{All Leprechauns have a major case of short man’s syndrome, which is why taunting them works so well. They’re easily the most powerful of the Wild-Fae, which is how he was able to Glamour me, even temporarily. Leprechauns like to play at being High-Fae but the sad truth is, they can’t hold a candle to any of the Gentry, and they know it, so they totally blow their tops if they’re insulted in any way. Hence, the cliched movie villain soliloquy.}
I put a bullet through the bastard’s head and spared myself more melodramatics.
“Got him.” I called to Maggie, who let out a whoop of triumph. About 20 minutes later Maggie and I were up on the catwalk breaking down the door of the old Foreman’s Office, while the Leprechaun’s corpse blazed merrily away down on the factory floor. The door was old and busted and pulled off its hinges fairly easily. I was about to walk inside when Maggie stopped me. Reaching forward with her shotgun she tripped the wire that was stretched across the base of the door frame, at ankle height, jerking back her hand to save her gun from being crushed by the mass of falling metal that smashed into the floor a moment later.
“What is it with this guy and dropping things on people?” I asked, rhetorically.
Maggie and I moved in closer, checking for any more booby traps that the Leprechaun might have laid. Eventually, once the room had been cleared, we stood in front of the large glittering pile in the center of the floor.
“Jackpot.” Maggie breathed.
{Most of it was worthless of course. For all their pretensions Leprechauns are really just magical magpies. They love anything shiny, and will guard their hoards to the death, regardless of the actual value of the items. So much for the crock o’ gold at the end of the rainbow. Still, the little kleptomaniacs tend to accumulate a couple things of value, and Maggie and I salvaged enough out of the pile of tinfoil and aluminum to keep us going for a little while longer. I love a happy ending.}

I guess I also have backstories for all of them, if you want them. Just ask.
Stats and attachment guide can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZtnEOGXEroEDhhZC2hxm4xbzbptCoebSEc-AHteT7h0/edit?usp=sharing

Operation: Scorched Earth—Israeli Shin Bet Yamas

Yamas (Hebrew: יחידת המסתערבים‎‎, Yehidat HaMista'arvim) is a special operations unit attached to the Israeli Border Police, but directly subordinate to Shin Bet. A secret unit, its personnel do not wear uniforms and are not allowed to disclose their membership of the organization. (Wikipedia)
Secret service taken to the extreme, next to nothing is publicly known about these elite operators. Numbers? Classified. Operational readiness? Classified. Deployment history? Classified. Even their level of funding cannot be accurately estimated. So when Rainbow went to Israel to recruit the best of the best, the choice was pretty obvious. Now attached to Rainbow, the operators Selah "Wildfire" David and Ishmael "Razor" Kaplowitz stand ready to destroy all who may oppose the sovereign security of Israel, and will not accept defeat as an option.

Attacker: Selah "Wildfire" David

1 Armor, 3 speed
Primary weapon: IMI Galatz DMR or IMI Negev LMG
Secondary weapon: G22 .40cal or G18 9mm
Gadget: Breach charges or Smoke grenades
Special ability: Wildfire carries a specialized incendiary charge that, when attached to a flammable material such as wood, plaster, or drywall, starts a medium speed burn that will eventually, if not cut off, consume the entire floor or wall it is placed on. The charge cannot burn through metal supports or ceramic tile, and can be "cut off" if its path is manually destroyed (leaving it with nothing to burn) or if the point it began its burn at is destroyed before it spreads. If a floor or wall has two layers, it will burn through both. She carries one of these charges with her kit.

Defender: Ishmael "Razor" Kaplowitz

2 armor, 2 speed
Primary weapon: IWI X95 MTAR or Armsel DAO12 Stryker
Secondary weapon: G22 .40cal or G18 9mm
Gadget: Deployable shield or barbed wire
Special ability: wrapped around his left arm, Razor wears a rolled up, partitioned, magnetically reactive riot shield. Made of bullet resistant glass and containing deployable magnetic fibers, the shield can be extended with the push of a button. Like any ballistic shield, he can ADS with his sidearm, but is forced into a severely inaccurate hipfire with his primary weapon equipped (though he can use his shield and primary together, it's just not very effective). The shield is not large enough to cover his entire body, forcing him to choose between exposing his head (more accurate fire) or legs (less chance of getting domed) the same way Capitão chooses his bolts. Movement speed is reduced to 1 while the shield is deployed, and it has 300 health.

Map: Safehouse, Tel Aviv

A smallish, House style map consisting of two floors, a sub level op center, and a heavily destructible interior environment, this map favors chaotic, close quarters combat and rewards players with good map knowledge and fast reflexes. The trick here is to not blink: between the collapsing floors, burning walls, scorching hot earth and baking Israeli sun, you might miss something.

Operation: Broken Diamond—Mexican CdFE

The Mexican Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales (Special Forces Corps) is a special forces unit of the Mexican Army. Formerly the GAFE (Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales | Special Forces Airmobile Group), the SF Corps has six battalions; one is the Fuerza especial de reaccion, a quick response unit, and one is assigned to the Paratroopers Rifle Brigade; the motto of the SF Corps is Todo por México (Everything for Mexico). Within the SF Corps, there are regular, intermediate, and veteran service troops. The soldiers usually operate as light infantry. The intermediate service soldiers (lieutenants and captains) usually are instructors. The veteran service soldiers of the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales del Alto Mando (GAFE High Command) handle Black Ops missions. Also known as the COIFE, the Special Forces Corps of the Mexican Army is equivalent to the U.S. Army Special Forces. Wikipedia
The White Masks have recently began looking for funding outside of their normal operating procedures—drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Without access to that money, the White Masks are almost nothing more than a blog. Rainbow, I'm sending you to cut off the head of this snake in Mexico. Joining your for the op are two of the country's finest, hailing from the Special Forces Corps. They've been fighting these drug lords for a while, and have taken the fight to the terrorists since day one. You'll find few more loyal allies. Meet Marco "Acero" Ramirez and Alicia "Reina" Flores. Gear up, Operators. We've got work to do.

Attacker: Marco "Acero" Ramirez

1 Armor 3 speed
Primary weapon: H&K PSG1
Secondary weapon: P7M13 9mm
Gadgets​: Claymore or flashbang
Special ability: Acero loads a special explosive round into his rifle, one at a time. When fired, the round will travel through two pieces of destroyable cover or until it impacts a body, indestructible surface, or reinforced wall. When it hits a reinforced wall as intended, the round will prime for 1 second and then detonate, leaving a single hole roughly the size of 1 X-KAIROS pellet. Acero carries 5 such rounds in his kit, ensuring that he cannot breach a reinforced wall by himself—he can only open it.

Defender: Alicia "Reina" Flores

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: FAMAE SAF 9mm SMG or AA-12 shotgun
Secondary weapon: P7M13 9mm
Gadget: Barbed wire or Nitro Cell
Special ability: Reina can place down up to 4 high powered electromagnets on floors and walls in the same way Jäger can place down his ADS. Instead of destroying the grenade, the device pulls the grenade towards itself. A lethal (frag or cluster charge) will destroy the magnet, but non-lethals will not. The grenade will still go off, but simply while being pulled in or attached to the magnet.

Map: Cartel, outside Ciudad Juarez

Taking place inside of a drug kingpin's hacienda, Cartel offers medium range sight lines in the foyer, CQC in the drug tunnels, and plenty of exterior shacks and huts for Glaz and Acero to have plenty of fun.

Operation: Fallen Tide—Australian SOCOMD

The Special Operations Command (SOCOMD) is a command within the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Special Operations Command was established on 5 May 2003 to unite all of the Australian Army Special forces units and by 2008 was fully operational.[2][3][4] Australia's Special Operations Command is of equivalent status to Australia's Maritime, Land and Air Commands.[2] It is modelled on the equivalent commands in the United States and British militaries. Led by a Major General (Special Operations Commander Australia, SOCAUST). Wikipedia
Rainbow, you're going down under. We've received actionable intelligence that the White Masks are attempting to secure several points of coastline along Australian territory. That much sea access, if left unchecked, could be disastrous for global counterterrorism operations around the globe. Help secure their country, and the Australian SOCOMD has promised to of their best to our mission. Meet up with Jamison “Dragon” Rutledge and Chloe “Angel” Williams and make sure it gets done.

Attacker: Jamison “Dragon” Rutledge

2 armor 2 speed
Primary weapon: FN Herstal F2000, H&K G36SV-SL8 DMR, or KelTec KSG12
Secondary weapon: SL9mk3 sidearm
Gadget: Frag Grenade or Breach Charge
Ability: Dragon replaces his standard drones with hover capable airborne variants, capable of reaching places other drones cannot. In addition, each drone is loaded with 2 tracking darts. When a dart is placed on an enemy, they transmit real time position data, Caveira Style, to the attacking team for 5 seconds. After the 5 seconds, that target is immune to the effects for an additional 30 seconds. If the drone is destroyed, the tracking signal is lost.

Defender: Chloe “Angel” Williams

2 armor 2 speed
Primary weapon: Steyr AUGA3 XS-Para or KelTec KSG12
Secondary weapon: SL9mk3 sidearm
2 armor 2 speed
Gadget: Barbed wire or nitro cell
Ability: Angel is equipped with a grenade launcher loaded with 2 cluster flashbang grenades. After being fired, these grenades are armed by hitting a surface or person, then detonate 1.5 seconds later. The charge then spits out 9 flashbangs in various directions which are all less intense than their attacking counterpart, but with a shorter fuse.

Map: Carrier, off the Western coast of Australia

A boarded US aircraft carrier which was hosting Rainbow's negotiations with the Australians. Some metallic hulls are less destructible (but still destructible) than wood and drywall, and the floor to floor bulkheads won't be quite as clean as regular trapdoors. If you listen closely, you can hear fighting in other areas of the ship (at least for prep phase).

Operation: White Storm—Ukrainian Alpha Group

Like all post Soviet states, Ukraine inherited its special forces (Spetsnaz) units from the remnants of the Soviet armed forces, GRU and KGB units. Ukraine now maintains its own Spetsnaz structure under the control of the Ministry of Interior, and under the Ministry of Defense, while the Security Service of Ukraine maintains its own Spetsnaz force, the Alpha group. The term "Alpha" is also used by many other post Soviet states such as Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan as these units are based on the Soviet Union's Alpha Group. Ukraine's Berkut special police force gained mainstream attention during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution as it was one of the main forces used by the government to quell the uprising. Ukraine relies on Spetsnaz forces for various activities from intelligence gathering, fighting fraud and organized crime, responding to terrorism, electronic warfare, as well as responding to mass protests. Wikipedia
Rainbow, I wish I had good news. Kiev has been attacked by the White Masks. Casualties are still counting, but estimates already place it at several hundred dead after a radiological weapon detonated at a Victory Day parade that who even knows how many people watched. Luckily, Ukrainian Intelligence has tracked the materials back to a source. Not so luckily, the materials came from Chernobyl. Yeah, that Chernobyl. Alpha Group has already prepped a team to hit the main operating base of the White Mask cell responsible, and they're requesting backup. This is the first time we've had to respond to a homeland attack on allied soil since Bartlett. Wipe them out. Natalia “Obrazet” Vann and Alexi “Havok” Yevtukh will brief you en route. Godspeed, Rainbow.

Attacker: Natalia “Obraza” Vann

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: CZ805 BREN A2, SKS DMR, or FORT 500T shotgun
Secondary weapon: FORT17 or Serbu Super Shorty 12g
Gadget: Breach Charge or Smoke grenade
Ability: Obraza can fire a single shot from a unique, custom grenade launcher loaded with a soft-penetration thermal imaging camera. When fired onto a soft wall or floor, the camera will pierce through one layer and then imbed itself in between the two layers of the structure, then activate. While active, the camera is accessible to all teammates and can see through the wall or floor it’s placed in, as well as one additional soft surface beyond it using full spectrum (black-blue-green-red-white) thermal imaging.

Defender: Alexi “Havok” Yevtukh

1 Armor 3 speed
Primary weapon: FORT-224 9mm, AKS-74U, or FORT500T
Secondary weapon: FORT17 or Serbu Super Shorty 12g
Gadget: impact grenades or deployable shield
Ability: Havok can place up to 4 RFID traps on the sides of doors or windows. If an attacker passes through a trap, a tag (a la Jackal) will be placed on their position every 5 seconds for 20 seconds. The trap Israel is simply an RFID sprayer mounted to the side of the entrance, and makes a very distinct sound when discharged. Each trap can only yeah one enemy and cannot ID. The trap can be destroyed with an EMP, bullets, or frags, but not by breach charges or Ash grenades. A tag can be removed via EMP or death.

Map: Warehouse, location unspecified

Taking place in an emptied out, half underground, Soviet Era nuclear storage facility the Ukrainians would rather forget about. A complex tunnel system is great to evade and flank your enemies, but take care not to get lost.

Operation: Frozen Sun—South African Recces

The South African Special Forces Brigade, colloquially known as the Recces, is South Africa's principal special operations unit and counterinsurgency elite, specialising in combat reconnaissance as well as unconventional parachute techniques. Only about 8% of recruits who undergo South African special forces training pass the course. Wikipedia
Rainbow, I think we got them. Yesterday, South African police intercepted a phone call from a known White Mask agent which suggested that they may be planning a strike soon on a government run diamond mine. By all accounts, no such thing has happened yet, so this may be our opportunity. I want you to travel to South Africa, rendezvous with the Recces operators, and lick that place down. If possible, secure the Commander and​ see what​he knows. I want them running scared.

Attacker: Amose “Nakala” Louw

2 armor 2 speed
Primary weapon: Barrett REC7 Commando or SRM 1216 shotgun
Secondary weapon: .410 Judge or Mateba revolver
Gadget: claymore or smoke grenade
Ability: after working undercover for several years, Nakala feels uncomfortable using only one kit. Instead, he prefers to be whatever is needed to best get the job done. Once per round, Nakala can retrieve the gadget off of a dead ally or injured enemy—for instance, he may pick up Hibana’s launcher or the controller to Echo’s YOKAI. He can only switch once, and for a teammate, they must be dead—for an enemy, downed, but not out. Nakala cannot retrieve gadgets from attackers who have been teamkilled, they must have died to enemy fire.

Defender: Imanathi “Phantom” Ebrahim

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: Beretta MX4 or SRM 1216
Secondary weapon: .410 Judge or Mateba revolver
Gadget: Impact grenade or deployable shield
Ability: Phantom is able to is special EMR goggles to see electronic devices at close range, similar to in SC:DA. While viewing through her goggles, Phantom is also able to hack Attackers drones, revealing the positions of all remaining drones and allowing Defenders to view the drone on their camera feed as well as taking control of the drone itself. These goggles can see through walls out to 5 meters, and have a maximum range of 10 meters.

Map: Mine, just off the Nambian border

Takes place inside the aboveground ore processing facility attached to the diamond mine proper. High destructibility combined with minimal natural sight lines make for high octane, frantically paced combat.

Operation: Rising King—Egyptian TF777

Unit 777 (Arabic: الوحدة 777 قتال‎‎), also known as Task Force 777, is an Egyptian military counterterrorism and special operations unit. It was created in 1978 by the government of Anwar Sadat in response to concerns of increased terrorist activity following the expulsion of Soviet military advisors from the country by Sadat and his efforts to achieve peace with Israel. Wikipedia
I don't know how to say it, Rainbow, so I'll just say it. The White Masks took the Suez Canal. No one knows how, it's like they just walked in like they owned the place. The point is, we can't let them keep it. You know more about this enemy than anyone, so the Egyptian government is happy to lend any support they can, including two 777 operators. Best of the Egyptian best, Anum “Pharaoh” Zaid and Zahra “Ruin” Anat. And Rainbow? Give those sick bastards a bullet from me, would you?

Attacker: Anum “Pharaoh” Zaid

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: Colt M16A4, Izhmash AK104, or H&K Fabarm FP6 shotgun
Secondary weapon: Helwan 920
Gadget: Breach Charge or Claymore
Ability: in addition to his standard drones, Pharaoh uses a custom built drone (cannot be used in prep phase) with a very special effect: at any time before it is destroyed, it can be self destructed to release a powerful concussive blast, similar to Echo, over a significant radius. However, once detonated, the drone cannot be used again, and if destroyed, it cannot detonate. It does require a 2.5 second charge before detonation.

Defender: Zahra “Ruin” Anat

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: PT Pindad PM2 or H&K Fabarm FP6.
Secondary weapon: Helwan 920
Gadget: nitro cell or barbed wire
Ability: Ruin can secure up to 2 trapdoors with a device that will, once placed, destroy the trapdoor underneath. After doing this, the trap will automatically open when a defender is standing over it, or if they die on top of it, dropping them safely into the room below. After dropping the defender, the hatch will remain open for 1 second before reclosing itself. These trapdoors are considered reinforced and require an incendiary explosive to breach.

Map: Lock, the Suez Canal

Takes place inside of 2 administration buildings on either side of the canal, as well as on top of and inside the lock, this Plane style map will test everything you've learned in Siege thus far.. Long, linear sight lines and minimal flanking routes make Suez a fight to be feared.

Operation: Dark Forest—Indian NSG

The National Security Guards (NSG) is a commando unit originally created for counterterrorism and hostage rescue missions. Raised in 1986, it is popularly known as the "Black Cats" for the uniform worn by its operators. Like most military and elite security units in India, it is media shy and the general Indian public is largely unaware of its capabilities and operational details. Wikipedia
Well, Rainbow, this is it. Everything we've trained for, everything we've done, it all leads up to this. At approximately 0300 this morning, the White Masks made a desperate play—they've taken an Indian nuclear launch facility near the Pakistani border. We don't know how they got in, or how many they have, but our best intel suggests they hit it with everything they have, and they're currently preparing for an allout war. I won't​ lie to you, this will be the hardest mission of your careers. But we cannot let them use that facility, it's just not an option. Rainbow, millions of lives are depending on our success today. Gear up, meet with the two NSG operatives they sent us, and bring this home. And I'll happily accept your retirement after this.

Attacker: Shiva "Siren" Bassi

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: INSASAR, INSAS-LMG, or USAS12 shotgun
Secondary weapon: GCIM No. 1 .50GI
Gadget: Smoke grenade or flashbang
Ability: Siren carries two dual use antipersonnel mines. When placed onto the ground, the Siren mine will fire it's payload 15 feet (1.5 standard building stories) into the air. If the charge does not impact anything, it will detonate in midair, sending tungsten shrapnel flying outwards from the device like a supercharged frag grenade. This mode of detonation is best used when placed under trapdoors or when fired through steel support beams. If the payload does impact a surface, it will stick there, and after 1.5 seconds, arm itself to be remote detonated. When detonated in this position, the shrapnel fires in a cone shape downwards, guarding doors and other breach points.

Defender: Imran "Hornet" Atwal

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: MSMC 5.56x30 or USAS12 shotgun
Secondary weapon: GCIM No. 1 .50GI
Gadget: Impact grenade or barbed wire
Ability: when the prep phase is over, Hornet can move to any open exterior window and deploy a large-ish drone, called WASP, out into the approach. Once deployed, WASP will wait 10 seconds​ before cloaking (similar to YOKAI), flying out to a fair distance, and it will start orbiting the building at a medium speed (1 orbit/~45 seconds). WASP can then be viewed as a camera by any Defender. While viewing through WASP's camera, Hornet himself is able to adjust the minimum elevation and maximum orbit distance, though it cannot go lower than 15 feet and no closer than 20 feet. Although cloaked, WASP still makes a fair bit of noise as Attackers get closer to it. Lastly, WASP has 250 health, and the cloak is temporarily ​deactivated for one second if it is struck.

Map: Launch Site, outside of Kolkata

Takes place between a topside observation post and an underground command center with potential entrances through roof, doors, or rappelling into several open silos. Dimly lit with little sense of direction, Launch site is a test of courage just as much as skill.

Operation: Hard Gravity—Chinese PLASOF

The People's Liberation Army Special Operations Forces (simplified Chinese: 中国特种部队; traditional Chinese: 中國特種部隊; pinyin: Zhōngguó tèzhǒng bùduì) is the special forces branch of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Ground Force. It specialises in rapid reaction combat in a limited regional war under high tech conditions, commando operations, counterterrorism, and intelligence gathering. Although the size of the Special Operations Forces is classified, it is estimated to number 7,000 ~ 14,000 troops. Wikipedia
You ever find a weapon that you really know the world would be a better place without? Yeah, me too. White Masks are trying to make a play in China. Intel says they're using an abandoned PLA camp to make homemade Sarin— they have the materials and knowhow, so I'm calling this actionable. Word is, they want to release it into the Beijing water supply, try to kill off government as much as they can. Obviously, not happening. I won't lie, I had to call in a few favors to approve the op, and PLA is giving two of their own, but I know you'll get it done.

Attacker: Tao “Yîncáng” Zhang

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: QBZ95B or HAWK12G Secondary weapon: QSZ97
Secondary gadget: Breach Charge or claymore
Special ability: Yîncáng can equip a QLZ87 automatic grenade launcher loaded with 3 special “homebrew” tear gas grenades. When fired, the grenades occupy slightly less area than Smoke, and do not deal damage. Instead, the longer a target is in the gas, the more distorted their vision becomes, and the greater effect it has on their accuracy (heavier and heavier recoil). When stepping out of the gas, recovery time is based on how much time was spent in the cloud, and the cloud self disperses after 20 seconds.

Defender: Xia “Pàotǎ” Dan

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: Type 79 or HAWK12G
Secondary weapon: QSZ97
Secondary gadget: Deployable shield or impact grenades
Special ability: Pàotǎ can place down a specialized remote turret, holding 50 rounds with a base damage of 25 per shot firing at 450 RPM. After the 50 rounds has been fired, the turret will need to be reloaded and can do so 2 times. The turret have 600 health and are made to deter more than kill. If an Attacker gets behind the turret, they can remotely deactivate it, and Pàotǎ would have to reactivate. It is disabled, but not destroyed, by EMPs and accessible only to Pàotǎ via camera feed. It uses a headshot multiplier of 1.5x damage (with range and armor factored in) and has a large amount of spread, similar to hipfiring with a riot shield.

Map: Containment, abandoned PLA camp outside of Tianjin

An old PLA camp that the White Masks have converted into a functional biodome. Main fighting takes place in the lab, where lots of interior cover combined with many internal windows make for interesting, unique, and memorable firefights.

Operation: Noble Scars, Swiss TIGRIS

The exact budget allocated to the unit has been made classified by the Federal Office of Police, only being known as part of its allocated budget. Due to their covert origin, Swiss media has called them Supercops. As of 2009, TIGRIS operators have been deployed for 130 operations in Switzerland.No shots have been fired by TIGRIS during these operations. Wikipedia
You know all those old stories about Germans and Allies ending up becoming friends in Swiss hospitals during World War II? Which I could say that was the case, but something tells me these White Masks don't want to be friends. You know how I know that, Rainbow? Because this morning they car bombed a goddamned hospital. Suddenly, our Swiss friends don't seem so keen on neutrality. Link up with TIGRIS forces sent to secure that hospital. They'll want help with those Masks, and we need them on our side. Dismissed.

Attacker: Birgit "Hydra" Sankt

2 armor 2 speed
Primary weapon: H&K HK416A511DS, KelTec RFB DMR, or Mehrzweckgewehr 91 shotgun
Secondary weapon: SP2022 .40SW
Secondary gadget: Smoke grenade or claymore
Ability: Hydra can place down up to 10 linear meters of water dampened high penetration DetCord onto breakable walls and floors. Being water dampened, it detonates much quieter than traditional explosives (more Mira than Kapkan, if that makes sense), and the high pressure jet can cut through steel wall supports (like in House's laundry room).

Defender: Markus "Gryphon" Faust

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: AR57 or Mehrzweckgewehr 91
Secondary weapon: SP2022 .40SW
Secondary gadget: Barbed wire or impact grenade
Ability: Gryphon can place down a special deployable pillbox, standing only a few feet tall and measuring 2.5 meters across, this semicircular structure is made of a high density tungsten alloy and is completely bulletproof with an explosive resistance of 200 (2 frags, 2 Ash rounds, etc.) on the outside. There are three slits for the occupant to fire out of, and the pillbox can be crouched in to avoid fire. It cannot be paced directly against the wall, so there must be room to climb in (climbing in is its own action, like getting on a turret), and if a grenade finds its way inside, the pillbox will be destroyed.

Map: Intensive Care, Bellinzona, Switzerland

The remains of a 4 story hospital after a car bomb. Some rooms have fully exposed views of the street below. Fighting ranges from an ER and ICU to a Medlab and an inpatient commons area.

Operation: Crashing Dagger—Dutch KMar

The Koninklijke Marechaussee (KMar) (Royal Gendarmerie) is one of the four services of the Armed forces of the Netherlands. It is a gendarmerie — that is, a military organisation which conducts the duties of a normal police force as well as being the police force to the armed forces. The Marechaussee is a fully military force under the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence. However it does not answer to the Chief of the Defence Staff, but directly to the minister of defence (to secure independence and impartiality when enforcing military law). Wikipedia
I'll keep it brief, I need all of you on the tarmac as soon as possible. 18 hours ago, I got a message from a man calling himself "The Advocate", complete with both pictures and coordinates of a facility being used by the White Masks as a storage depot for those damn gas bombs they use. It's on an island just off the coast of the Netherlands. Given your expertise, the Dutch have agreed to allow you to run the op on their soil. Go there, dig up anything you can on where the weapons are being made, and secure the site for recovery​. Keep it clean, quiet, and make sure everyone comes home. If everything goes according to plan, we've new allies in our pocket and taken out a massive White Masks asset. Now, go!

Attacker: Daan "Shockwave" van Dekken

2 armor 2 speed
Primary weapon: SIG SG510 or FN TPS shotgun
Secondary weapon: Glock 41 .45ACP Competition
Secondary gadget: Breach Charge or Smoke grenade
Special ability: Shockwave can place 2 Electronic Distortion Devices onto walls and floor. When triggered, the device will will flood enemy radios within 20 feet with an impenetrable white noise, completely deafening them and causing mild vision distortion for 5 seconds. If there is a signal jammer between the device and its target, it will be ineffective. After the 5 seconds is up, Shockwave must wait another 45 seconds until the device recalibrates to the Defenders' new radio frequency. Full recovery time is 6.5 seconds.

Defender: Piet "Nomad" Jongerius

1 Armor 3 speed
Primary weapon: AAS Honey Badger PDW or FN TPS shotgun
Secondary weapon: Glock 41.45ACP Competition
Secondary gadget: Impact grenade or barbed wire
Ability: Legion can place up to three prototype sonar spikes into any breakable floor or wall. After being placed and triggered, the device will give off 6 sonar pings at 5 second intervals that will place a mark of the her operator icon on enemy positions within 30 feet similar to Jackal. While the Attackers are not notified with a prompt, the sonar ping is both very loud and very distinctive, letting everyone know that the ping is currently in progress. In addition, if the device is found before the 30 seconds is up, it can be destroyed by any Attacker.

Map: Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands

A cultural center in downtown Utrecht, Museum is filled with various educational​ tools and exhibits, priceless historical artifacts, and plenty of natural cover combined with a mostly wooden floor structure to have fun out. The important thing to remember is that even if you can't see or hear your enemy... Nowhere is truly safe.

Operation: Thunder's Wake—Argentine 602 Commandos

The modern Argentine Military Forces are fully committed to international peacekeeping under United Nations mandates, humanitarian aid on emergencies relief and support the country's continuous presence at Antarctica. Democratic governments since 1983 straightened the military budget and did not approve any large scale equipment purchases. Argentina military spending is one of the lowest of South America and as of 2010, its 0.9% of GDP only exceeds Suriname. Since the 2000s, the Argentine defense industry was relaunched after the politics of privatization carried out during the 1990s by Carlos Menem administration virtually eliminated all. While Mercosur is only an economic entity so far, the strengthening of confidence among the member countries has been beneficial to the peace in the region, exercising a useful role in supporting democracy. The Mercosur served, for example, to discourage the Paraguayan military from an attempted coup in early 2000. In 2003, for the first time, the Argentine Navy (classified as major non NATO ally) interoperated with a United States Navy battlegroup when destroyer ARA Sarandí (D13) joined the USS Enterprise Carrier Strike Group and Destroyer Squadron 18 as a part of Exercise Solid Step during their tour in the Mediterranean Sea. Wikipedia
Alright, Rainbow. Good news, bad news. The bad news is that the Argentine Ministry of Security has officially confirmed White Masks presence on their sovereign soil. Good news is, they don't seem to be doing much. In fact, all they really seem to be doing is scouting out some old weather monitoring stations up in the mountains. Yeah, that's it. Nothing has happened yet, and I really, really don't like that. Go down there and put a stop to it. I'm sure I don't need to remind you all of the incredible efforts of the Argentinians during world peacekeeping operations recently, so you know they'll be tremendous allies. I'm counting on you. Get it done.

Attacker: Sofiá "Lanza" Ruiz

2 armor 2 speed
Primary weapon: Full clear polymer police issue riot shield
Secondary weapon: Colt Python .44 revolver or Bersa Thunder .380ACP
Secondary gadget: Smoke grenade or Claymore
Special ability: Lanza wears a pneumatic grappling hook on her right wrist. When activated, this hook can do one of three things. 1.) When fired at wooden barricades or destructible walls, the grapple will tear down the barricade or open the wall with a hole similar in size to Ash. When used in this way, the hook has a limited range of 20 feet. 2.) When fired at enemy operators, the hook will begin pulling them into Lanza, ending once in melee range. A Defender can break free of the grapple by knifing the rope or if Lanza dies. Alternatively, going prone will stop the movement of the hook, but not free you from it. When used in this way, the hook has a limited range of 20 feet. 3.) When standing next to a wall that can be rappelled up, the hook will fire straight up and transport Lanza to the top of the wall she is rappelling at the same speed of a "quick descent" while rappelling down. Because of the force needed to use the hook in these ways, it can be used a maximum of 10 times. In addition to the grappling hook, Lanza's shield also provides her with an ability. While facing a wooden barricaded window that is placed on the same level she is standing, she can take one action to both break the barricade and vault through the window. If she is rappelling on the window, she will swing in shield first to break it.

Defender: Mateo "Cazador" Acevedo

2 armor 2 speed
Primary weapon: Colt RO635 9mm or M870MAG14"
Secondary weapon: Colt Python .44 revolver or Bersa Thunder .380ACP
Secondary Gadget: Impact grenade or barbed wire x3
Special ability: Cazador can use three specially modified throwing knives to slay his enemies. One the knife is thrown, if it hits a target, it will always down them, regardless of where it hits. The knife can then be retrieved, and if it still resides in an injured enemy, removing it will kill them. Targets downed by the knife will bleed out faster than other enemies. However, after the knife is thrown, it could also be detonated, exploding in the radius of an impact grenade with the force of a nitro cell. As soon as the knife is in the field, it must be either retrieved or detonated in order to use the next one, so no throwing it twice in a row. The knife, although nonlethal, does count as a melee attack and will stager shield users, though detonating the knife will still be absorbed by the shield, not the operator.

Map: Stormfront, outside of Mendoza

Abandoned, dark, and cramped, this abandoned weather monitoring station has seen better days. The Doppler's burnt out, the power comes and goes, oh, and there's a bunch of terrorists setting up shop in it. Featuring numerous winding pathways and balconies, a large Doppler Radar facility, and several underground entrances, your options on Stormfront are always numerous... Just like your possible outcomes.

Operation: Blood Sky—Irish Army Rangers

The Army Ranger Wing (ARW) (Irish: Sciathán Fiannóglaigh an Airm, "SFA") is the special operations force of the Irish Defense Forces, the military of Ireland. A branch of the Irish Army, it also recruits personnel from the Naval Service and Air Corps. It serves at the behest of the Defense Forces and Government of Ireland, operating internally and overseas, and reports directly to the Chief of Staff. The ARW was established in 1980 with the primary role of counter terrorism and evolved to both special operations and counterterrorism roles from 2000 after the end of conflict in Northern Ireland. The unit is based in the Curragh Camp, County Kildare. The 2015 White Paper on Defense announced that the strength of the Wing would be considerably increased. Rangers have served abroad in a number of international peacekeeping missions, including in Somalia, East Timor, Liberia, and Chad. The ARW trains with special forces units around the world, particularly in Europe. The ARW in its domestic counterterrorism role trains with the Garda Síochána (national police) specialist armed intervention unit, the Emergency Response Unit (ERU). Wikipedia
We've got them backed into a corner now, Rainbow! A man claiming to be leading the White Masks, calling himself "The Engineer", and a force of terrorists have taken over a convention center in Dublin, with almost a dozen hostages. Thing is, our old friend "The Advocate" got us access to the guys cell records, and he's the real deal. The actual bastard in charge. The man responsible for a chemical attack at Bartlett, for attacking an American carrier, for bombing a Victory Day parade in Kiev, for capturing the Suez canal and for threatening the world with Indian nukes, Rainbow, we got him! I fully expect this to be a trap, and that's why I'm sending all my best. All my operators. Rainbow, get to Dublin and take this bastard out once and for all. Godspe... Someone's here. Someone's in the command bunker? Shit, somebody get me the [CONNECTION LOST]

Attacker: Emily "Blackout" McGowan

2 armor 2 speed
Primary weapon: IA-2 DMR or AWS sniper rifle
Secondary weapon: Beretta Px4 Storm 9mm
Secondary gadget: Smoke Grenades or Breach charges
Special ability: Blackout opens the chamber of her rifle and inserts one of her five EMP rounds to fire from the weapon. After striking a surface, the round goes off, resulting in all electronics within its radius and in line of site of the impact to be temporarily disabled. Though the effect cannot travel through walls or hard cover and does not permanently destroy the gadgets it affects, it has a significantly longer deployment and effect range compared to EMP grenades. What it lacks in power, it makes up for utility.

Defender: Michael "Tone" Graves

3 armor 1 speed
Primary weapon: Magpul PDR, Agram 2000, or Benelli M4-MAG
Secondary weapon: Beretta Px4 Storm 9mm
Secondary gadget: Deployable shield or Nitro Cell
Special ability: Tone places down 2 "Boomerang" Sniper Detection Systems, each with 100 "charges". When a round enters the setup's 2.5 meter range, it will transmit one "tone", or spotting mark, on the shooter's position 5 seconds later for every shot that was fired within that five seconds. After the five seconds, additional rounds with 1 second of each other cost no charges. LMGs, DMRs, Shotguns, and Sniper Rifles use 1 charge per round, or 2 if suppressed. Assault Rifles, SMGs and handguns use 2 charges, or 4 if suppressed. Handguns use 10 charges, or 15 if suppressed. If a device does not have sufficient charges to place all tags accumulated during the 5 second period, no tags will be placed. One time per setup, the device can be recharged from a charge of 15 or below by Tone, up to 75 charges.

Map: Convention Center, downtown Dublin

Filled with backstage rooms, open auditoriums, setups from ongoing press conferences, and halls filled to the brim with natural cover, Convention Center's loose design and open setups favor medium to long range combat, though you'll always have to keep an eye out. With so many rooms and hallways, you never know who's just behind you.

Just want to start of with saying the main purpose of this story is to show that you, me and all other gamblers are just a like and nobody is an exception in terms of being a degenerate gambler,
I am 23 years old I’m a kid from Dublin Ireland, I grew up in a home with just me and my mother and I am an only child, my father has never been around as he’s spent the majority of his adult life in prison. My mother done an amazing job doing both jobs, she worked hard for a living and I wanted for nothing, I was spoiled rotten and had everything. As I grew up and started secondary school I was a handful to say the least, always fighting always in trouble of some sort, never attending school I would constantly bounce classes, I was very crafty as a teenager. As I came to the age of 15 by then all of my friends would be drinking and I was never a drinker, I would smoke the occasional joint and that would mostly be it but that escalated and I started supplying blow around the area to pay for my own smoke and some food and entertainment on the weekends as things were tight at home financially with just my mother paying the bills.
It all started with friends talking about how people would click football accumulator bets with very little stake for very large returns. I would ask exactly how it works as the thought of clicking a nice bet at 15 was a nice thought indeed. It’s simple the lads would say just tick each box for each team, we would wait outside the local bookies ask people to go in and grab us a couple of accumulator sheets and we would tick away and same again ask somebody going in to place are bets. It didn’t take long at all for it to escalate for me as the money I was making from the blow the weekends would be gambled and keep in mind it was only small money 100-200euro but at the age of 15 in secondary school that was a lot of money. I soon found myself standing outside the bookies asking people to put 10s 20s and 30s on horses for me and the occasional 50 bet and keep in mind only 2,3months previous I was placing 1,2euro accumulators. I was like a fucking gobshite outside the bookies with the lads, having bets placed and watching them through gaps between the advertisement boards in the front window and egging the horses on you’d think I was riding them for fuck sake haha, it wasn’t long before it started to get nasty and while this was developing I had been expelled from school and had to attend a school just outside Dublin city, I would keep doing my dealing during the week and weekends to pay for my smoke and gambling until it got really nasty, I would gamble the money I had collected to pay of the drugs I had received on slate and then ask for more and before I knew it I found myself getting lends of Peter to pay Paul and it was all a mess, there was money owed everywhere all because of the gambling, the gambling came first and then when I’d won or lost the weed smoking would come after, at this stage I was smashed and in debt up to my eyeballs I would have to get a bus every morning to a school basically in Dublin city center which would be a good 45-70 minute bus journey depending on traffic and each morning I would get this bus into school and then back out of school, everyday my mother would leave me 7euro that would pay for my 1euro 50cents bus fare in and out from school and leave me with me exactly enough to purchase a chicken roll and drink deal in the local shop, I was only settling into the new school and was only attending a couple of days and I had a pain in my hole with it all I wanted to do was gamble and get money up to gamble, every morning I would board the bus and pay my bus fare and make way for Dublin city center but it wasn’t my school stop I was getting off at, I would continue on and get of at the last stop which would leave me at a street called O’Connnell street in Dublin city and on O’Connell street there was a casino that would open at 10am, I would be in there for 9am and hang around outside waiting with my 5er to enter and play the roulette table, A measly 5er to my name in the middle of Dublin city a 3hour walk from home and a cunt of a walk that was, a walk I would get all to familiar with, the casino doors would open and like bats out of hell me and the rest of the degenerate gamblers would scurry in to find our seats, there was about 8 tables with about 6seats a table and we all had all sorts of theory’s on which number would come out at which table at certain times of day and lucky seats that would pay out at certain times, 90% of the time I would loose my money and find myself walking 3hours home or praying there would be a different bus driver on as all the previous had heard my sob story’s once to many on how I’d lost my money or been robbed in return for symphony and a free bus fare, this went on for 6months and it was nasty, the horror story’s iv seen and heard in that place would give you the creeps, I would see full grown men crying at the tables on how they will have to go back to there wife’s again after loosing the weeks wage again with more unpaid bills and no food in the house. As much as it was a sight for sore eyes there is something about a bunch of people sharing the same addiction and how they have the ability the communicate so well with each other and don’t get me wrong I did have a laugh sometimes with the people you would meet which would be from all walks of life and mostly men, workers, and there I was amongst them day in day out because the thing was when you’d a 3hour walk ahead of you and your sitting on a comfy leather chair with no money for food and free water to keep you going you’d end up just spending 3,4,5 hours there watching the spins to see patterns and trying to get a good suss for the following day, take in mind I was going in with a lowsey 5er and it would be gone in seconds but whatever it is about gambling your lead to believe you can turn a 5er into 5grand if you were lucky and which you could but very unlikely.
I would be about late 16 at this stage and I’d gotten sick of gambling with 5ers and owing out money so I started to branch out to different contacts in different areas for more drugs on thick and also more weight which meant a bigger payment needed to be made for the drugs and more chance of a big fuck up. I would find myself collecting anywhere from 800euro to 1500euro each Friday and was gambling about 300 roughly a week at minimum and I was managing to keep my head above water in regards to paying of my man each Friday for the drugs but that was until it started to really spiral out of control. I found myself on a certain Friday waiting around to meet my man which he was held up and to be another 2hours before he could meet me to collect the money, so I had 2grand in my pocket for 2hours and I’m standing at my local shop outside my local bookies and then I somehow convince myself I will just go in for a 5euro bet, before I knew it I had waxed the whole 2grand in about 30minutes and couldn’t believe it. My mother ended up having to pay for my drug debt and then I continued on not to get more drugs to gamble but to rip of every customer I had for drugs by robbing them for there money for drugs and that would probably be in the range of 15grand, I continued on and I won’t go into it as I could be here all day but from 15-16 and just over a year of gambling if I’d done that much damage you could only imagine the damage I’d go on to do for another 5years ha.
My mother never gave up and I ow her a lot as I would probably not be here today if I’d continued on gambling I don’t know how many times the thought of me leaving everything behind gave me relief that I would be free from gambling, how many times I’d been down the park sobbing my eyes out on the verge of bungee jumping of a tree except with the rope around my neck, the thing about gambling when your in the depths of it, it’s the most loneliest place I believe a man can ever be, because it’s just you and the addiction staring into the eyes of each other, the way it detaches you from everything in life, the way you can be with your friends and family physically but not mentally, constantly thinking of a bet or to get money up for a bet just so far apart from the person siting next to you. My mother tried a lot for me and she had came across a book and before I get into it about this book, I was the gambler who believed I genetically inherited this burden and had accepted the fact I was a gambler till the day I die, and that’s what the gambling trap is designed to do, my mother would constantly say it’s not the case and I’d tell her she didn’t understand what I did about it and i wasn’t to blame cause that’s all the trap will let you understand is that your a gambler and that’s it, it’s designed to make you believe there’s no hope and that this is it for the rest of your days and it’s sad because as a gambler you accept it as much as you want to walk away from it.
ALLEN CARR THE EASY WAY TO STOP GAMBLING is the name of this book and when I picked it up to read it I had no intention of stopping gambling but one thing the book asks for you to do is to have an open mind and to believe just for a second that everything it says is possible and by god is it, this book instantly gave me such a lift I couldn’t believe it I was only 20 pages in and i knew what Allen Carr was saying was logic as the books states, instead of using the willpower method this book breaks down the condition logically and shows it for what it is and the tricks and illusions that keeps us stuck in the trap basically think of it like this if you were a mouse and let’s just say a really smart mouse and you get giving the mechanics of how the trap works, you would want to be stupid to get caught out by it again and this is what the book does it shows us exactly how it all works and once you know how it works you’ll never get caught out by it again the logic in this book is mind blowing, I would be 50 odd pages in and hugging my ma with tears saying this is it, the will power method is the wrong method people, it’s like having an itch on your leg and trying not to scratch it through will power it’s only a matter of time before you give in to scratch it, how many times in life have we tried to stick something Out through will power and failed? I myself could say probably 80% of the time. I’m a person that’s all about logic, I’m a realist and if you are to this book will blow your mind it’s crazy the knowledge it provides not only for gambling but for many other things it will give you another look on life, I’m coming up on nearly 2years of the gambling and can hand on heart say there is no urge, I’m not like someone going to GA meetings through will power fighting an urge each day, I have removed the urge through logic, the quality of life I have is amazing but don’t get me wrong life is still hard and that’s when I say fuck me life’s so hard without gambling how the fuck did I do it for 6years, cause I’m strong and believe it or not someone with an addiction isn’t the sign of weak will power it’s the sign of strong will power the same way when u try a cigarette for the first time and you say I’m not getting anything out of this why is everyone doing it and then the next day you try again and you say I’m still not enjoying this I don’t know why people like this until you keep trying and trying until your addicted and that is the work of a strong willed person, to keep trying something they didn’t like to see if there would be something to like, I just beg anybody who’s suffering with gambling addiction to please read the book with an open mind and I won’t even say you need to be ready to stop cause I can’t honestly say I was but what I’ll say is I’m a reasonably intelligent person and for me to read the logic on the mechanics of the gambling trap and for me to get trapped again, it’s simply not possible for me to ever get caught again. All I’m saying is read the book with an open mind I gave an insight into the misery I brought of My family and friends through gambling and it was an experience and made me the person I am today.
the thought of giving gambling up leaves us with the idea we’re missing out on something as if it’s a genuine pleasure when simply all we are doing is removing something that has caused nothing but misery to are lives since day 1 and the day you realize you aren’t sacrificing anything that your just removing gambling and resuming your life to the same way before you ever gambled the same way you didn’t need it then and the same way you won’t need it now.

Hey guys, I thought I would post here to see if any of you could help me out!
I am an architecture student from Dublin and in January I am moving over to Gent for 7-9 months. I don't really have much set plans for when I am there except to work a bit, experience Belgium etc.
Currently I have a great group of friends from Belgium who have been helping me out in relation to accommodation websites, some advice and so on, but theres some things I am still trying to find out such as,

• In relation to an architecture internship, would anyone know the average monthly wage I could expect? (I have completed three years , a bachelor equivalent, and I already have 6 months work experience in an arch office if that helps)
  
• In relation to a part time job (bar,shop etc) What is the chances of finding a job which revolves mainly around english? (especially at the beginning of my stay) I have presumed a few bars or hostels might be my best bet.
  

I definitely have a few more queries but hopefully you guys can help me out on those first! Cheers!

Verified? (This bot cannot verify AMAs just yet)
Date: 2013-12-10
Link to submission (Has self-text)

Questions	Answers
How did your relationship with the other members of your crew change throughout the trip?	At first there was great respect and interest between us all. When you think of the kind of people a trip like this may attract, they are bound to be quirky individuals.
	The trip was mentally challenging due to fatigue, temperature lack of contact with the outside world etc, and each person had their own way of dealing with it. There were times when we wanted to just kill each other. But at that time, it is more important to get the sail in, or replace a fuse for the engine or cook a meal and you just have to do it. Groups of men naturally find pecking orders according to rank, common interests, age, self interest etc.
	We also shared moments of joy, for instance seeing a polar bear come right up to our boat to check us out. I can say that at the end of the trip I have a great respect for all the members of the crew, however that respect is very different from that which I started with.
	All things considered I would crew for and with any of them again in a heart beat.
	It's an excellent question and I'll think about it more.
They are always extremely headstrong, type A individuals who have been doing things their own way all their lives.	Definitely four headstrong dudes. Definitely used to their own way. But even with all that clash and tempers, look what we managed to do. Worth every minute, I'm sure everyone would say the same. And As I've said, I'd join that crew again in a minute.
Was there any cost or payment to go on this trip?	We split the costs of the trip, that is food, fuel, iridium phone credit, engine parts etc.
What kind of preparation did you have to undertake?	As for preparation, I joined the crew with no previous sailing experience. I have a background in Caving, Diving and Climbing so that helped me show them I had transferable skills and would not just be a deadweight on board I think.
How difficult was the process of learning how to maintain and run the ship?	Some things were easier to learn than others. A lot of the rope work was familiar, but I learned my favourite rope trick called a hay makers hitch, which allows a 2:1 purchase on hauling without actually knotting the rope (check it out its an awesomely useful bit of ropework)
The knot in question "hay makers hitch".	Mine looks slightly different, but I don't have a rope handy to check. in any case, an awesome piece of work. So many times since I've got back I've had to tie something down and it's so nice knowing the perfect knots.
Also called the Trucker's Hitch or the Harvester's Hitch among others.	You get that warm smug feeling.
Hey! I met you guys at Fljotavik in Iceland. We were the 3 guys on that small zodiac. Really admire your trip. What was your favorite place you visited in Iceland?	You guys were so kind to share your fishcakes with us, we tried to recreate the recipe with some cod and char we caught but they were nowhere near as good. My favourite place was around Myvatn. I camped in a hot spring, any time I got cold during the night, I just hopped into 40 degree water and swam around. How did your trip go after? We lost our VHF at Flotavik, so if you need a new one you know where to find it. So cool to catch up with you here!!!
40 degree water is warm to you?	I should have said this is in celsius, just above body temperature, the perfect bath temperature.
What was the most dangerous thing that happened to you during the trip ?	Hypothermia.
	I was waiting for James (First Mate) to collect me in the dinghy after a 16 hour hike. All of my gear had already been taken to the boat. Almost as soon as he reached the shore, a fast wind hit. The wind is known as a katabatic and arises as spill off from the glacier. Thus it is fast moving, ice cold air.
	I got soaked head to toe in the attempt to row against the wind, but we couldn't do it. James decided to try alone and he made it back to Dolphin. The combination of wind and wetness was so relentless I could feel myself slowing down mentally.
	I've been in many dangerous situations where you would get an adrenaline rush, but this was just fearful.
So what happened to you once James got back to Dolphin? You sat tight on shore?	I walked inshore and found a depression where there was some heather and snuggled into the undergrowth. I took off my trousers, ripping them over my boots as I knew my fingers would not be able to tie my boot laces back on. I ever so slowly started to realise I had to find better shelter. I spotted something orange in the distance and after some press ups t get blood going started out for it. As it was the other side of the fjord, I had to cross the river to get over. The river was of course Ice melt from the glacier that caused the katabatic wind and so I got cold all over again.
	My orange blur turned out to be a tent inhabited by an american girl called Mindy. She was awesome. As soon as I was out of the wind I could finally generate heat without it being stripped away instantly. I waited out the wind with Mindy eventually getting my fingers back and attempting to mend her stove but I didn't have the toold.
	Finally the wind died down and Capps rowed out for me. I learned a lot that day. ALWAYS HAVE YOUR GEAR. Always!
	Since then I brought a full change of dry wool clothes with me, food and a bivvy bag for one nights sleep on shore.
	Hardest lesson I ever learned. I made the tiniest slip up and was severely punished.
You get her number?!	I have her email address and she wrote a blog piece with us in it!
What's your next planned "fuck it" moment that you mentioned in the askreddit thread?	I got invited to go to Oman to put cameras up in the mountains to study goats. I didn't take it. What an idiot I am sometimes!
	Next fuck it moment will probably be asking a girl out that I know.
I'm right with you there.	What do you mean? Asking a girl out?
	If that's it I wish you the best of luck!
Mindy??	Melinda. She's an awesome girl.
Nah he didn't take up an offered Arabic goat adventure.	Hahaha.
Was there ever a specific time where you really just wanted to call it quits and go home?	Many times. The day we left Greenland I volunteered to haul anchor which is an awful job particularly at 5 am. The Captain chewed me out of it for stowing the anchor incorrectly and he went way way way too far.
	At that point in time I wanted to throw him overboard. Or jump overboard. I actually remember planning to just leave the guys at Iceland and hitchhike to Reykjavic and fly home.
	And it turned out the anchor was stowed correctly.
Would you say the Captain went overboard?	There you go, captain went overboard, lucky to be alive.
As a former sailor in the US Navy, I'm curious about the details of how the captain disciplined you. I've been reprimanded for cleaning a coffee pot with soap, I can't imagine the hell I'd get for stowing an anchor improperly.	How can I say this, a verbal assault? A serious dressing down?
	Please note, I did not stow the anchor improperly. It was perfect.
	In my opinion it was a tactical release of tension from several other problems. I'm sure you are familiar with these scenarios being a former US Navy sailor. Mind games.
Were you ever in danger of pirates... or were there ever pirate tales being told? Sorry I just really like pirates :)	We got surrounded by hunters in Mikisfjordur.
	A small motor boat pulled alongside and asked us to turn off our depth sounder. They were hunting seals and didn't want them scared away. We turned it off.
	Another boat pulled alongside, and told us the same. While we were distracted, another two boats came out of nowhere (fjord is choked with icebergs so they can sneak up on you) and next thing there are 20 angry inuit hunters standing over us one foot each on our deck.
	It was a tense few minutes while we got a translator on the satelite phone. In their mind, we were greenpeace, and one thing you need to know if you go to greenland is that if you are in greenpeace you are liable to be killed and probably will be.
	We couldn't convince them we were not eco activists, and we had to just leave. thankfully no one got hurt.
What is/was your occupation, and how did you find the time and courage to just pick up and leave everything for 4 months? Was it hard to return to "the real world?"	I was a tour guide for a coach tour company and worked my ass off for a year. I was going out with a girl in England and took all of my time off to visit her as much as I could.
	She cheated on me and I just decided to do something incredibly selfish that wouldn't harm anyone else. Just totally invest in myself. I turned down an expedition to the deepest cave in Mexico in February so I could bring her to Norway. I said I'd never give up such an opportunity again.
	It was incredibly easy for me to get up and leave because I'd reached that point of 'fuck everything I'm outta here'.
	It's been hard to return to the real world! I'm stuck between getting a career job and never doing this again or taking minimum wage and heading off again in March. I still have savings and think I will just go with the expedition route. I need to find a way to make it pay itself by selling photos or writing on it.
Hey, I'm in my final year of high school and I would like to adventure for a living. which fields of study would you recommend to enable me to purse my dream ?	I'm not so sure. I studied but not in any field of exploration. What was more important for me was joining the climbing club, caving club, diving club etc as I got exposed to sports and techniques that I would otherwise have had no access to.
	I would also like to figure out how to adventure for a living and I'm working on it at the moment. The classic way is as an author. I love the works of Tilman, Andy Kirkpatrick, Eric Newby etc. Perhaps you could consider writing or photography as the profession to fund your passion.
Did you guys play Folk and Black Metal non-stop on the voyage like I'm picturing in my mind?	We didn't have any music at all! I sang a lot, and I'm in a thrash metal band if that helps!
Which of your crewmates was your favorite and why? Any wacky stories you and said crewmate experienced together?	I was closest to Rob, the deckhand who joined us in Isafjordur. He is the same age, studied a similar field in university, had a great attitude. On the return trip we spent a lot of time hitch hiking in Iceland while we waited for the right weather window to leave. We had a crazy time then.
	Most beautiful and wacky moment was smoking a joint with an icelandic motorsport champion in a cave at Dimmuborgir. We met at a hot dog stand after asking directions to a natural hot spring where we planned to sleep. They ended up showing us to a much more secluded 'locals only' hot spring where we went skinny dipping. Then we went to the aforementioned cave, and saw the end of the day with the most beatiful sunset you could ever imagine . I don't usually smoke, but it really was the perfect thing.
	The first mate turned out to be a very talented cook also, that was a nice surprise.
I don't usually smoke pot; but when I do, it'll be sometime during an intense month-long boating/hiking/traveling adventure with people I only recently met, inside a cave in Iceland with that country's motosport champ whom I ALSO just met, while a gorgeous sun shows her stuff as she sets.	That's the way to do it. It was perfect. I was just sitting back that day watching the best day of my life unfold before me. Oh, and a joint while the sun skips off the horizon? Of course. Of course there was going to be a joint.
	That close to the arctic circle, you don't get full sunset really, the sun just bounces below the horizon. It's very impressive
Why?	To sea what I could see sea see.
This is what I want to know. Is the trip for something? Is the captain rich and just really wants to go, but needs a crew? Do you set out some expedition money to finance the boat and supplies?	Hi Aratar. Fair question, yes the Capatin is quite well off, and does annual trips. The boat is worth around £90,000 uk sterling so you would need to be fairly right with money to own that! His name is Roger Capps and he's quite an extremist, hitchhiking to Afghanistan when he was 17 for example. I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by your last question, can you explain it?
Thanks for explaining! My last question I just meant, did you also have to set out some initial money for the trip or did the captain cover everything?	When we had to buy things like fuel, shopping, charts one of us would just get it with whatever cash or card they had on them. Great for me because I always ended up getting free things or huge discounts... Guess that's just the gabby.
	We kept a score of who bought what at what price, so when the total cost of the trip was calculate, we just subtracted what we'd already spent.
What was the deal with the danish navy?	As a pleasure yacht, we had to report to Greenland Command/Danish Navy every day with an update of position, conditions and expected route for the day. They had a ship heading north and decided to check up on us and see if we were where we said we were.
	They couldn't believe we navigated through the ice with a wooden boat and congratulated us on being the furthest north on east Greenland coast for that year. As the ice was not open further south, it was safe to assume no one got further than us, and as it turns out no one did.
When you went to Iceland, did you sample the best hotdog in the world?	Many times over. When I got back from Greeland I turned into a fat bitch eating anything greasy I could get my hands on.
	What a beautiful country!
Sex, motherfucker. Did you have it?	No man :(
I guess it was hard to break the ice between you two?	I sang her an enrique iglaciers song and everything!
Cost of adventure?	€1100 in shared costs (food, fuel etc.) also spent arounf €1600 on gear (crapons, rope, ice climbing boots, sailing gear)
How did the ship fair with the weight of the crew and your massive balls? This is pretty amazing, if given the chance would you do it again?	Hahaha! I would do it again in a heartbeat. Honestly I am dying for the chance to do it again. I mentioned further down about turning down an opportunity to work on an expedition in Oman, and that was a mistake.
	I am on the look out for a new challenge. If you hear of anyhting let me know!
Did you sing any shanties?	The Irish Rover of course, and my favourite song to row to is The Mero.
To expand on this, how much of an effect did singing have, if at all, when doing your duties. This is of course dependent on the fact that you did actually sing.	Whistling at sea is banned. I love to whistle while I work, but I'd get shouted at for it because it's supposed to be bad luck. I sang away though. It's nice having a rhythm to work to. Sweating the main sail to the beat of Sad But True. Makes you work harder I think.
	And also this, Link to www.youtube.com
	It's a song about Dublin which I missed while I was gone. I sang that at a lock in in scotland after the trip. Good times.
Bad luck because back in the day the mate would use a whistle to whistle out a specific tune to the crew up the mast (on old square rigs) to tell them how to set the sails. Someone whistling randomly would upset the system. At least I think that's the reason.	Ah thanks! Great to hear these things. One of the guys who commented above was in a pub in Scotland when I was coming home and we got chatting. He told me the chant of Two, Six, Heave was after the cannons which were fired by a team of six. Numbers 2 and 6 were free during the haul and so the chant is an order.
How did you come about signing up for this?	I recieved an email from the Royal Geographical Society advertising the vacancy. I contacted the Captains girlfriend by email and then called him up.
	As for RGS itself, you can sign up and fill out an expedition CV. So for example you can include diving qualifications or a driving licence for a truck, whatever... If I am organising an expedition and need a truck driving diver I can search it and find you and call you up!
Was there any point, either before or during the trip, when you regretted your decision, even for a moment?	Osrry for not replying yet, I want to do this question justice, fantastic question by the way.
	When tempers fly, whether you are right or wrong, you can't get away. You can't go to your room. You can't close a door. Little things build up over time and come out all at once.
	During times like these I regretted ever joining the trip. I felt powerless as there is nothing you can do. You might want to leave the trip, but you'd be leaving a crew understaffed and that is dangerous. You would be playing with fate. And in that moment what can you do anyway? You can't just step of at sea. You can't escape.
	Honestly at times I regretted my decision for days on end. Looking at my diary 2 days in particular. During that time I performed my duties with a will, and refused to let it affect my role on board but it was tough for a while.
Who would you recommend this adventure to?	So long as you understand the risk of joining the trip with no experience and are prepared to work hard, listen to every criticism and constantly jump through every hoop, go ahead. Sailing in the arctic in a wooden boat has it's dangers - any iceberg over 2 metres cubed will sink you. You cannot afford to be complacent. You cannot afford to be a novice (by the time you get there). You must use every available moment to better your understanding of the operation of the boat.
	Taht's what I was told, and that's what I did.
How big was the boat really? How much room did you guys have to work in? (I'm kind of crazy jealous of you, by the way! I wish I had the guts to do something like that!)	The deck length is just shy of 12 metres. Then the bow sprit (the wooden think that sticks out the front to carry our jib sail) is another 3 metres.
	In this photo, I think you will get a good idea of my working space: Link to i.imgur.com you can see the shrouds either side of the mast. They are the black ladders. When the boat is keeled over in high wind, you can snuggle in for a safe working environment, but the deck may be at 40 degrees or so so it can be hard to get around. It is vital to keep the working area clean and I took great pride in coiling my ropes!
	To get up there, I have to climb over the buckets and dinghy.
	As for the living quarters,, there is a cupboard sized kitchen with a gas cooker, a soloon with a table and two beds then length of a man, then a forepeak with another two beds and a tiny toilet at the the fore end.
	If you want to do it, do it!
What is your survival plan if the boat sinks in the bitter cold ocean?	Honestly there is no survival in that case. No help will arrive quick enough. Unless you get the dinghy untied in less than a minute, or the life raft. But realistically, forget about it.
What was the hardest part of the whole trip and what was the funnest part?	Hardest part is getting up during your rest period to change a sail. This is inevitably during a weather chage so you are most likely going to get soaked and you are supposed to be sleeping.
	Imagine when you go to sleep for an hour I tell you to get up, put on some soaking freezing clothes and haul a massive weight with bare hands. Imagine I tell you that 3 or 4 times per night. With such little sleep, you never enter a deep sleep phase. Just REM sleep, so you are dreaming all the time. Delirium is constant and you have to be so vigilant not to let fatigue make you forget to tie a rope off or duck if the main sail moves sdo you dont get your head knocked off!
	The funnest part for me was the moments when I realised how much I'd learned. I just get up and tweak a sail, check the computer and see I'd added half a knot of speed through intuition. Seeing results like that would bring a massive smile to my face. I'll have a think about it more, I think that is an excellent question.
Great AMA! Are you originally from Ireland? If so what County? Also what did you do to pass the time when you were not working?	I am originally from the Isle of Man, but have lived all over Ireland. Are you Irish?
	While not working I would work! Funny as it sounds it's true. There is always something you can be doing, for instance I made seals for the forehatch from a tractor inner tube, and a tensioner for our bilge pump. There was always a need for more bread, so I would bake it. I would study maps of our destination to find routes I could climb or walk. I oiled the deck, and made a new bunk because our first mate was getting soaked beside the engine compartment. I would fish off the side, or take an alcohol wipe shower. I wrote a journal during the trip also. As soon as we got anchored, I would go for a hike or run or swim. On days at anchor where we had to do anchor watch i.e one stays to mind the boat I'd rig up a hammock and get a proper deep sleep.
How do someone prepare for a trip like that? What basic tools do you need? What did you brought and thought "Well I will definitely need that!" then you discovered it was totally worthless? How did you keep contact with the world?	I keep fit, but honestly I think the preparation is mental. You have a whole trade to learn and fast. You need to be ready to learn.
	A good knife. Always. A good knife. A heavy duty PVC jacket and dungarees. Forget any other sailing gear. Forget gortex. Wool wool and more wool.
	I brought about 30 pairs of socks. They took up as much room as my sleeping bag. They were a wool/acrylic blend and utterly useless.
	I had one pair of 100% wool socks lined with merino outer was old wool. I bought a pair of 100% old wool socks. I used these two pairs of socks exclusively for the remainder of the trip except on or two times after river crossings.
	Wool is the most awesome material. It doesn't stink up. It's kind to your skin.
	We had an iridium phone which is a satelite phone with coverage all over the world. But it costs a fortune to use. I emailed when I could and sent postcards!
How was obtaining food handled? did you just buy it, catch it, forage for it, what?	One of my jobs on the boat was baking bread. Obviously fresh bread will not last so we stocked up on flour, yeast etc.
	I would make a mix with raisins and oats for something to chew on and mix in the yeast. We had a heat exchager on the exhaust of the boat which was placed in a cupboard under one of the bunks. At one end a 12v computer cooling fan was attached which blew the hot air into a cupboard with racks. I used this to rise the bread and we could also dry some clothes in there, a wonderful bit of rigging I have to say.
	I baked the best bread I've ever tasted on that boat.
	We also had stocks of eggs, some canned fish... But most of the meats were caught on the way. This is an example of what 5 minutes fishing can get you in Icelandic waters: Link to i.imgur.com
	They were caught by jigging with a builders string, some hooks and a bit of red rubber. Gutted and fried within 5 minutes of being caught. We used squeeze lemon juice on them and eat them straight away. I cannot describe how delicious it was. I've never eaten so well.
	Also a lot of people just donated food to us. For example a racing student in Reykjavic called Orri came over for a chat and then came back to the boat with a thigh of foal and a bag full of ground beef. The foal made the tastiest stew! I never would have eaten foal only for him. In Isafjordur a whaling boat donated minke whale meat. We cooked it like steak and when you did it too much, it just tasted like beef steak with fish sauce. But rare, it took a whole new flavour full of oily fish. I went rarer and rarer till I ate it raw and that was amazing.
	I have to stress, we weren't begging for food or anything, people were just delighted to see a beautiful ship and wanted to play a part in our adventure. I can't thank them enough.
How old were you at the start of your journey?	I had just turned 24 years old and left 2 weeks after
I sailed on the HMB Endeavour replica (for those who dont know The boat Captain Cook sailed to Australia in). Did a trip down in the southern ocean and copped a force 10. By far the best thing I have ever done in my life. If you are ever up for a trip like this again, get in contact with me. EDIT. Was offering myself up for a trip! If there is enough of us, perhaps we can convince the folks of the HMB Endeavour to do another extended voyage?	That sounds amazing, and I would love to sail or go adventuring with you! I'm up for a trip!
My bf dumped me about a month ago and I've just signed up to sail from Singapore to South Africa for 90 days in the fall as my own "fuck it" moment. Do you have any advice for a 21 year old girl who is doing this sort of trip? It's with SeaMester and I have been sailing since I was 6 years old, so it's different from what you did. Did you have any trouble adjusting to life when you got back? What was the one item you couldn't do without on the trip?	Sorry to hear that, but you will have an amazing time on the sea, and will pick up so many stories and get to practice your sailing which it sounds like you're pretty good.
	Advice, enjoy the hell out of it. Talk to people and tell them a funny story. If you can get someone to laugh you're usually in for a great chat. I bet you will find 10 guys more interesting than him.
	It is hard to adjust getting back, but I just kept myself busy playing guitar and training for a marathon. I think the one thing now that I am so glad for bringing is a journal. Write write wrote you'll always thank yourself for it!
Thanks! I plan on bringing tons of notebooks :)	Sorry it took so long to reply I noticed your comment slipped through the cracks. Nice one, remember to let us know how you get on!
How common is what you did? Do people do expeditions like that frequently?	We met a few other crews sailing to Greenland, one of which made it to Scoresbysund or Ittoqoortoormitt. From there, we were the only boat who continued North. I think Scoresbysund as a destination is a lot of yacht owners dreams but they never find the crew of that perfect break in the ice to get in.
Are you a fan of this shanty? Link to www.youtube.com	GOD DAMN THEM ALL!!!
Did you have any prior experience being a deckhand?	No prior experience of sailing at all. When I called the Captain first, I was so nervous but so determined to join I couldn't believe it when he said I could. I kept reminding him I had no experience haha.
This kind of thing sounds absolutely awesome, but I have never operated a boat.	It was certainly a trial by fire. But totally worth it for me!
Are you that guy from the askreddit?	Only you can answer that question... but if you mean the one about fuck it... then yes I am.
Plom, could you share some photos from your trip? Would love to see some scenery photos from Iceland!	How can I best do this? Upload to Imgur or how would you like it?
Sure! Imgur works!	Just trying to find a shortcut to get them from facebook to imgur :)
	Ok I'm uploading them here; Link to plom.imgur.com
Did you guys wear cool viking hats like they did in the old days? Or at least pillage one of those towns you referenced? Btw what do you do in "real life"	No but I have long hair and a beard and I'm from an Island renouned for it's Viking history. I can't remember pilaging anything or stealing.. I got mentally drunk in Iceland and Scotland. How aare my viking credentials looking??
Do you feel you have to live to a silly standard that ALL the Irish can drink like mad? I mean surely there must be some Irishmen who don't care about drinking too much. What are some of the most beautiful or historical spots in Ireland? I'd like to go one day.	No I don't have to live up to it, but you know I like drinking like mad. I love going into a pub just for one pint and ending up hammered with a new best friend. It's actually fun, especially when the sea stories get going :)
I've been reading all of your replies in a heavy Irish accent even before I found out that you're Irish. Strange (I'm American so I don't know why)	Haha great! All the other lads were english and it was funny to see their faces when I got into Irish accent mode. I met a few Irish people along the way and the lads couldn't understand a thing. Beautiful.
What advice do you have for prospective adventurers who have no idea how to get involved?	Find out what you want to do.
	Find out people who do it.
	Or another approach is to just see what's on offer.
	I can't pretend it was my dream to sail to Greenland. I was in a rut, saw the opportunity and took it. I suppose my advice would be to surround yourself with people who can give you that opportunity.
	You know some of my favourite storied from this trip are from when I went hitchhiking in Iceland, nothing to do with sailing. Just the art of getting by with no money and only good stories to get you by. Now that's travelling. That's when you meet people you will never forget. An adventure without effort or money.
Fantastic AMA. Amazing journey.	Not really dry as a rule, but we just ended up not drinking much. A few whiskeys in a celebration, the odd beer shared over dinner. Iceland has a ridiculously low limit for spirits and we had a few bottles stowed away.
Was it a dry boat? Or did it just become dry as your journey went on? Friends have done lots of boat deliveries and mostly they run dry while at sea as a rule. I guess at 5hrs on then off you don't get much chance for ruming it up..?	Watches were constant so you couldn't afford to drink any way into drunkeness.
Are you the guy who commented somewhere that his gf dumped him and he was depressed and found things online to forget about his pain. then he sailed for four months?	Close enough, yes it's me.

Last updated: 2013-12-14 06:50 UTC
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