• SAVING … DON'T TURN OFF THE POWER
  
• trying to convert my friends to Buddhism so they'll give me all their stuff
  
• polar bears in the zoo sometimes grow algae on their fur, turning them green; they say it's because they're stuck in the wrong place.
  
• the best feature of the Nintendo Switch is one that's rarely talked about: it's basically immune to power outages.
  
• there's no such thing as a normal person, only people who try really hard to appear that way; everyone's a fucking freak underneath the facade.
  
• trying to remove the word “just” from my vocabulary, outside of very specific instances. stuff i’m trying to avoid is, “I'm just saying …” or “I was just …” because these come off as very defensive and unconfident, in a way.
• every passing car, a breeze.
  
• ‘If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the “Fuck you” signs in the world. It's impossible.’ —Holden Caulfield
  
• police are in the business of crime; their quotas necessitate the existence of crime.
  
• so far, I'm not a huge fan of the first LotR novel, especially when compared to The Hobbit, the latter being a fun, action-packed adventure that quickly gets to the point, whereas LotR is much slower to start and overwrought with descriptive text, very “telling” over “showing.” like I don't need to know what every single hill in The Shire looks like. let's just get on with it, thanks. I usually appreciate descriptive writing that gets a description of a place across in one paragraph, more than descriptive writing that needs like three pages to describe a field of poppies. although, Fellowship does get a lot better In the second half, after Strider is introduced; but you have to slog through almost 200 pages to get there.
  
• infection maybe the highest form of intimacy
  
• I can't stand it when people fit stereotypes so perfectly. it's like they're doing it on purpose. like, every guy with a trump sign in his yard around here also has a motorcycle, a huge potbelly, and some sort of mustache. it's ridiculous. it's as if some sort of evil God pushed them all out of a demonic cookie cutter or something. I don't understand it
  
• every star a pentagram
  
• dozing off while reading a book in a nice comfy bed: one of the best feelings in the world
  
• we all feel like imposters because we are.
  
• Trump admin be like “there was one immgitent dude who raped a girl therefoee they all gotta go” every press conference is like this. just grasping at anything to justify their latent fear of people who look different from them, it’s basic baby stuff, actually.
  
• my entire life can be traced down i-95
  
• rechargeable bolted-in batteries in controllers are inherently anti-consumer compared to replaceable batteries, because batteries are the main breakpoint for controllers, And if a rechargeable bolted-in battery breaks or whatever, It's hell replacing it (at least for the average consumer); so, the normal person just buys a brand new controller, whereas in the past we could have just swapped out the double A's; in this way, rechargeable batteries are the ultimate convenience but they also pull the wool over our eyes and trick us into spending more money
  
• smartphones are humanity’s One Ring, and we are all being summoned to Mordor. this analogy basically writes itself; it's so obvious that it's not even worth writing more about it, because you already know. i mean, when Frodo wears the ring, an evil overlord is able to track everything he does, for God's sake, lol; the PHONES parrellel is too obvious. One Ring = Your Smartphone; Evil Overlord = Google, Apple, Zuck, &c. &c.
  
• I love these YouTube shorts that arelike two videos spliced together, vertically; like, the video on the right is some comedian telling a really bad joke that isn’t fuinny no matter how you listen to it, and the left is muted Rocket League footage or something. isn't this just like a tacit admittance that both things being shown are too boring to exist on their own? like they need to support each other to be interesting?? or maybe we have finally dropped the act, surrendered to the fact that we have collectively killed our ow attention spans and cannot even watch one video at a time anymore???
  
• i know it's a construct, but there's still something emasculating about sitting in the backseat of a four-door, like i feel like a child when i have to sit in the back, this is certainly a mental hangup of some sort lol
  
• It's good to take a break from a game every now and then, especially a game you really love—otherwise you might just wear it out.
  
• leave it to the Nintendo fan base to go wild over an announcement that 20+-year-old games are being rereleased on the switch 2—totally unchanged, without even so much as upscaled resolution. Nintendo literally puts no effort into it, just ports ROMS over to their new hardware, pretty much, and still the diehard Nintendies go crazy: “finally I can play Wind Waker again, at 640x480, on my 4k television!!! my nostalgia!!!!” man I can’t stand quote-unquote “gamers,” we are the worst kind of consumer ever. i’m embarrased to be a part of it, really. unfortunatley, games are in my blood, been playing them since like 2-years-old. but seriously only the Nintendo fan base would be happy with very old rereleases for near-full price on their brand-new state-of-the-art console. ROMS lol.
  
• how to raise a kid in 2020s: just don't give them a phone. that's it. if you can do that, your kid is already way better-off than most. the bar has literally never been lower.
  
• some people may consider themselves “lucky,” but no amount of “luck” is going to save them from long-term asbestos exposure. what I'm trying to say is, there is obviously a hard biological limit to “luck.”
  
• delivering mail is one of the best jobs ever, and one of the most meaningful, in my opinion, in terms of raw “goodness” and true fulfilment—because mail-people are literally bringers of joy, deliverers of happiness. one of the few jobs w/ significant existential meaning. like, some random guy just handed you the book that you have been wanting to read for 10 years (cuz you ordered it), or they hand you a sweet letter from mom, or whatever. delivering joy is literally the job of the mail person, what could be better? yes, i guess they sometimes deliver bad news, too, but whatever; yinyang wabi-sabi &c. &c.
  
• Suikoden HD, a remaster of a single player jrpg from the 90s, just released, and they're releasing a patch for it to fix a number of bugs; this got me thinking that, back before online was such a prominent thing, games were just released as is and that was it, no more changes; it’s not like a guy could come to every house and reprogram the game if there was a bug just discovered after release. but also, I feel like there weren't as many game-breaking bugs back then compared to now when nearly every game needs a bunch of post-release patches—why is that? Could it be that the prominence of online has made developers less thorough in the development process because they know that they can just fix their mistakes with an online patch post-release? i guess this method leads to faster game development, thus more games, but the trade off is more bugs because developers can be less diligent in the development process. idk.
  
• The Trump tariffs are impacting the price of video game consoles and PC parts and, at this point, the tariffs have even delayed the Switch 2 pre-order. which means, FINALLY, it is happening: the beast, once asleep, now awake: GAMERS ARE RISING UP TO SAVE AMERICA, NAY, THE WORLD.
  
• How can I sometimes think myself so smart yet so dumb simultaneously; this is my essence, my burden, my cross to bear, as they say, or something, whatever.
  
• “this machine kills fascists,” written on Woody Guthrie’s guitar.
  
• make everything slightly inconvenient and the stuff you find yourself still doing frequently will be the stuff you truly love; for example, instead of using Spotify, switch to a Cassette player, then you'll find yourself taking the time to seek out and listen to the music you’re actually interested in, instead of mindlessly going from one song or album to the next, going in one ear, out the other, due to the sheer convenience of Spotify. access to everything all at once is NOT a good thing. convenience turns everything mundane, in a way, you start to take things for granted when you have access to everything at your fingertips.
  
• i have fond childhood memories of reading manga in the nail salon after school, my mom getting her nails extravagantly done, it taking fucking forever.
  
• THERE'S JUST SOMETHING ABOUT THAT BRICK WENDY’S AESTHETIC
  
• ChatGPT just released a new image generator that people are using to create Studio Ghibli-like images; I was reading an article about this which included a picture of Miyazaki, and the caption underneath read: “The animator and director Hayao Miyazaki, whose work can be EASILY RECREATED using ChatGPT, has been critical of artificial intelligence in the past.” And I thought this caption was incredibly disrespectful because of the verbiage “can be easily recreated using ChatGPT,” which is a very bizarre, almost naive (or willfully dishonest) way to spin this, because ChatGPT cannot and will never be able to “easily recreate” Miyazaki’s work. ChatGPT could never create something like Kiki's Delivery Service or My Neighbor Totoro, because these works are more than just an art style, they are the creation of human imagination—which is my way of saying that ChatGPT (and other AI tools) will never be able to come up with something as original as a Studio Ghibli movie, even if it can create artwork that somewhat looks like it, because AI tools don't have the level of ingenuity and/or creativity to come up with their own unique ideas, they feed off the ideas of humans, so of course it could never create an original Ghibli film, because anything it could create would be derivative of already existing Ghibli films—what i’m trying to say is, anything ChatGPT could create would be a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy &c. &c.
  
• the thing about Stewart Copeland’s drumming is that he's wild as fuck even on slow tempo tracks, take “Murder By Numbers” for example. you’d figure, with how many different things he's banging on in the timeframe of literal milliseconds on that song, that the song would have to be up tempo, but somehow it's not, somehow he just fits a whole bunch of crazy shit into small periods of time, all while keeping a slow time. he’s one of the most impressive drummers I've heard, and he’s def the most talented guy in The Police, and that’s saying something because i normally don't care about drums too much. same guy did the soundtracks for the Spyro games, i think.
  
• “So I don't know about bores. Maybe you shouldn't feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don't hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• PlayStation 3 logo font is the same font used in the titles of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films. this makes sense when you think about how both were owned by Sony, but it just makes the Ps3 stuff look really tacky in hindsight, like the console of choice for edgy 13 year olds (which i was one, don’t get me wrong lol).
  
• SaGa Frontier 2 (one of my favorite rpgs) has been remastered. If you haven't played it give it a try, the music alone is worth it—best soundtrack on the PlayStation, even better (imo ofc) than Chrono Cross and FF8. But DON'T play the remaster; play the original. SF2 has gorgeous hand-painted watercolor backgrounds, but the remaster team has “upscaled” the background in a way that stretches and lowers the quality—it's likely that they used some cheap AI tool to do it, too, which, frankly, is disrespectful to the game’s legacy—and pisses me off, somewhat. Unfortunately, this is a common trend with these old PS1 “remasters,” especially the SquareEnix ones, upscaling the backgrounds poorly or whatever. I'm sure the game itself is still fine, it's just not the original experience, and some of the beauty is gone. (I'm noticing that these “fragment” documents are progressively featuring more and more complaints about AI—a portent of things to come??)
  
• the pursuit of intellectual enlightenment or whatever is always selfish, which is why most intellectuals stay unhappy and depressed, because it's a solipsistic pursuit, obsessed w/ the self; true happiness comes from family and companionship, which both require a level of selflessness that the average hardcore intellectual does not really have, because they're more focused on expanding their own brain or whatever.
  
• “The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” —G-Man, Half-Life 2
  
• the right fart at the wrong time can make all the laughs in the world
  
• “Super Anti-Kaiju War Machine Mecha-Thunder-King” real Yu-Gi-Oh! card
  
• the official white house twitter posted an AI-generated Ghibli-style image of a woman being arrested by ICE. let it sink in.
  
• Ruka Buraito
  
• “Nostalgia” by The Chameleons. great pop song. considered putting a quote from it in Mysterium Nostalgia, but wouldn't have fit, thematically.
  
• Zelda BOTW note: I don't think weapon breaking is a bad thing, but I do think having to navigate a menu to equip a new weapon every time a weapon breaks is a bad thing; for a game like BOTW—which no doubt aims to be immersive—any time the player is forced to navigate a menu, immersion is broken, which is objectively bad within the framework of maximizing immersion, which, again, seems to be the game’s goal.
  
• “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.” —Gandalf
  
• The problem with this “everything is subjective, nothing matters” philosophy is that it's self-defeating in that, if nothing matters, the philosophy itself doesn’t matter, thus it’s not worth discussing; it trivializes literally everything to the point where why are we even having discussion at all. It's some of the most brainrot philosophically paralyzing garbage ever. And, to me, it's just clearly not true; if you say nothing matters yet are depressed or sad or enjoy certain things, then obviously stuff matters to you, like the fact that you care undermines the whole premise.
  
• we're all putting on airs, perhaps airs is all we are.
  
• can bugs read malicious intent? why they bite me???
  
• do you know what pisses me off in video games? The whole “here’s an enemy standing on a wooden tower with a bunch of explosive barrels near the bottom of it” thing, like why would the enemy put a bunch of explosive barrels right at the bottom of their wooden tower so that someone could easily just trigger the barrels to explode??? it's just so dumb. it totally takes me out of it. I know it's just video games, but this type of stuff is too video-gamey, if you know what i mean, it breaks immersion.
  
• “this game needs a remake.” no, it doesn't. great games never need a remake. stop encouraging companies to milk you for money with copies of copies of copies and ouroborus tail-biting behavior.
  
• dig a little deeper into Steve Albini and—I assure you—you'll hate the guy. idk why no one talks about this. don’t say i didn’t warn you though. it’s gross.
  
• I hate being lectured at; I immediately tune out, regardless of content of the lecture. this is probably one of the factors that contributed to my poor performance in school.
  
• i’m entranced by Breath of the Wild. i haven’t felt this sense of wonder for a video game in a LONG time. i play it at night, after my son goes to bed, and I am actually excited to play it throughout the day; a game hasn’t made me feel like that in a long long time.
  
• I got Suikoden Remastered for Switch, it came with a code for day-one exclusive content. like what? “gotta get my day-one content for this single player role-playing game from the '90s.” ?? devs & publishers: stop doing this.
  
• use ChatGPT to write an essay about how much AI sucks
  
• now that I've played played breath of the wild, I can now see just how much it influenced elden ring, but elden ring is almost like the Hyrule map without any of the exploration tools like climbing or gliding or whatever, and now elden ring just seems very blah; Like I was never fully sold on the fact that elden ring needed an open world to begin with, and now I'm even more convinced that it never needed one. open world is cancer 90% of the time.
  
• “I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• “free speech absolutist” or: i should be allowed to say the n-word while you should NOT be allowed to say anything negative about me saying the n-word or the country or the president
  
• what if dreams are actually windows into events happening simultaneously to other versions of yourself in a parallel universe? welcome to “high thoughts,” high school edition
  
• which means that some version of myself just got his head sawed off by a maniac near a dark pool at night. fucking hate dreams sometimes. actually, hate them all the time, because i only remember the bad ones.
  
• I love how “transmog”—a word from “transmogrify” that was made popular by the World of Warcraft player base, pretty much—has been adopted by all other game devs across the planet to mean any in-game mechanic that changes the look of something. this is a perfect example of how language is like a virus (negative connotation, but no negativity intended, just an observation).
  
• “people never think anything is anything really.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• I wanna know what you're like, alone, driving in a car, at night, when no one watching. do you pick your noses? scream lyrics at the top of your lungs? say weird stuff to yourself? i really wanna know.
  
• i know this is capital-letter MEAN, but i can't take Brandon Sanderson seriously because I keep picturing him without his shirt on. i can’t imagine that guy has much self-control or discipline in his life, and I shudder to think what his ofice looks like, probbably nasty with fast-food wrappers all over the plac. and—THIS ISN’T JUST ME BEING JEALOUS—but, after reading some of his prose and considering his extremely fast novel output, i think a lot of his work is actually AI-generated.
  
• There are quests in breath of the wild that are collaborations with other games, for example, there's a quest called literally “Xenoblade Chronicles 2.” it makes me want to throw up. I can't think of a better way to break immersion than by reminding the player that the game they’re playing is not only a game but also an advertisement for some other game. uhhhhggggg
  
• my default state is “fuck you”
  
• 4/1 WHITE HOUSE PRESS SEC. ANNOUNCEMENT (not april fools): “An illegal alien released by the Biden administration into our country was just arrested in Georgia and charged with the horrific killing of Camellia Williams, a mother of five and grandmother. The suspect has now been indicted on charges of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, rape, aggravated sexual battery, and necrophilia—which, for those who don’t know, necrophilia is an sexual obsession with a horse, ahem, corpse.”
  
• ‘”Lawyers are all right, I guess-but it doesn't appeal to me,” I said. “I mean they're all right if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn't”’ —Holden, The Catcher in the Rye, pg. 190.
  
• pressure washing an old stone wall is like wiping the wrinkles off an old man’s face or something
  
• young children tend to sleep more than older people and this seems tragic, like biology insists that youth be wasted.
  
• Nintendo’s RIDICULOUS Switch2 pre-order process: ‘As of right now, the reservation process is limited to Nintendo account holders in the US and Canada who are at least 18 years old. Invitations will be valid for 72 hours and will be “prioritized on a first-come, first-served basis,” according to Nintendo; you’ll also need to have purchased a Nintendo Switch Online membership for a minimum of 12 months and have logged 50 hours of gameplay on the original Switch as of April 2nd, 2025, to be eligible. What’s more, you must have opted in to share gameplay data with Nintendo (you can see if you’ve done so in the privacy section when logged into your account). Once invitations have been sent to account holders who have met these criteria, Nintendo says it will send invitations to “remaining eligible registrants” on a first-come, first-served basis. Unsurprisingly, the invitations will be nontransferable and sent to the email address you used while registering your interest with Nintendo. Console and accessory purchases will be limited to one per eligible account, at least during the initial invitation period, with the first batch of invitations going out on May 8th.’ YOU MUST ALSO BE WHITE OR JAPANESE, NO CHINESE OR BLACKS. ALSO, YOU MUST COMPLETE A CREDIT CHECK, AND SUBMIT YOUR LAST THREE PAYSLIPS. YOU MUST ALSO OWN A HOME, NO RENTERS. AND YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST 3 YEARS OF TENURE AT YOUR CURRENT PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT—IF YOU OWN YOUR OWN BUSINESS, YOU MUST SUBMIT NET PROFITS FOR THE LAST THREE YEARS. thank you.
  
• “Former Persona and Shin Megami Tensei Creator returns with Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter — A Roguelite Deckbuilder powered by AI trained on his own art.” retch. hope it bombs. we shouldn't normalize any game made with AI, even if it's only made partly to w/ AI. should've known it would be Atlus.
  
• there's a “Villains wiki” that labels Mr. Antolini as the “main antagonist” of the Catcher in the Rye, which i find just absolutely knock-out funny—like, that's certainly one perspective
  
• Imagine, like, a club of pee drinkers. Like a Pee Drinking Club, and all the members are like, “We love drinking pee; and the only ones who get harmed by drinking pee are ourselves, so who cares if we like to drink pee? Ain't hurting anyone else.’ Then someone comes around and is like, “Yo, maybe you shouldn't drink pee?” But they're all like, “Um, please let us live our lives; we aren't hurting anyone else, and if drinking pee was so bad, why do other people do it, like the people in this club? Please stay out of our Pee Drinking Club, we don't want any Anti-Pee Drinkers in our Pee Drinking Club.”
  
• when you get so hungry that you don't know what to eat anymore because everything seems gross.
  
• “'A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings. Yes, sooner or later—later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last-sooner or later the dark power will devour him.’” —Gandalf, LotR 51
  
• is Hamilton supposed to be uncomfortable to watch? the actors are impressive, and I respect anyone who can recite all those lines so perfectly in one go like that. but the music is definitionally cringe, like a middle school diss track, lPG Eminem on sedatives, and the history is storybook, and the whole thing reeks of hardcore bourgeois virtue signalling for the terminally well-off. people who obsess over Hamilton are the same type of people who spend $400 on useless shit at Target every week and drink white wine every night.
  
• for a super rich guy about to fall off a mountain, you sure are desperate to pitch your chocolate to me, sir
  
• something you may not know about me: I don't use big words, because I can't remember them, because I'm fucking stupid. and no, this is not some self-deprecating joke.
  
• one time, when I was 10 or something
  
• sometimes i seriously wonder, considering all these stylistic genre labels, if they're all just made up after the fact, to pigeon hole an author, when the author was just writing what came from their soul. like, imagine you're an author and you just released your breakthrough novel or whatever, and then imagine some critic is interviewing you, asking you stuff like, “so what gave you the idea to write a novel w/ such baroque prose in the philosophical didactic style with hints of metafictional irony?” idk about you but I would be like: “excuse me, what?” i doubt any novel written with the intent of trying to check specific genre/style boxes is even worth reading to begin with because it would be tainted from the get-go with this pretentious conformity to some high-minded genre labels instead of being original and honest to the writer's true self. it follows that, if you willfully try to fit a mold—“I'm going to write a Neo-Victorian Pastiche!”—then you are sacrificing a little bit of your originality.
  
• Brian Eno's Windows Chime is a lesson in minimalism: you can cause great joy with just a few seconds.
  
• ‘That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tomb-stone and all, it'll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say “Fuck you.” I'm positive, in fact.’ —Holden Caulfield
  
• YouTube has created a culture of creation that is dependent on other creators to exist, for example: “Skyward Sword Retrospective.” 2 hrs of some dude talking about some other creation. so there's creators then there's creators that rely on other creators to create then there's consumers, and the last two there are very close to being exactly the same, except the Creator who relies on other creators to create is making money from their consumption of other creator’s creations, so they're almost like exploiting other creators creations, in a way. it's really telling about the nature of YouTube that nearly all the “content” on there would not exist without the existence of some other content that precludes it. YouTube is like a leech, in a way, attaching itself to someone else’s baby, sucking the life blood to sustain itself. this is also why watching YouTube videos always leaves you with this unfulfilled feeling like you just wasted an hour of ur life, and you immediately forgot what you just watched; whereas watching a movie, reading a book, or playing a game barely ever leaves you feeling this way.
  
• AI has made it so corporate content masquerading as “artwork” is easier than ever to spot and avoid; all u gotta do is look for that glossy sheen.
  
• I actually really like Shinichirō Watanabe’ new anime Lazarus. obviously trying to capture the magic of Cowboy Bebop a second time, and it's very obviously style over substance so far, but the electro-jazz soundtrack is excellent AND THE EVEN USED “LAZARUS” BY THE BOO RADLEY’S AS THE ENDING THEME; man, I got goosebumps when that started playing the first time, bravo.
  
• when you're feeling stuck, artistically, rearrange the furniture in your workspace.
  
• I've been playing Zelda BotW recently, and it's got one huge problem: it's too fucking big. in game dev, at what point does the size of the game world become a psychological burden upon the player? well, the answer appears to be BotW.
  
• I think as an adult with big-boy job and kids and a writing hobby, 100-200 hours to complete a game is way too fucking long
  
• another flaw with Zelda BotW is that there's nothing to unlock; like, in previous Zelda games, you progressively unlock new, cool items, and those items allow you to access new, cool things, and this ushers you on, encourages the player to keep going, to unlock the new stuff; but in BotW, you get all the tools at the beginning of the game, and those tools become stale after a couple hours of play. compared to another type of game, like a JRPG, as you progress in the game, you unlock more characters, more spells/abilities at higher levels, etc. but BotW has none of this, there is no true feeling of progression outside of hearts, stamina wheel, and clothes, which is all too basic or superficial to feel profound from a gameplay sense.
  
• BotW is a game moreso about vibes than gameplay: moreso about wandering the perfect cell-shaded Ghiblian countryside of Hyrule than swinging a sword back and forth. So the true question is: How long can vibes alone sustain interest in a video game? of course the answer will be different for everyone, but for me, it's about 20 hours.
  
• generative AI is very unregulated right now, but just wait until some billionaire loses a bunch of money because of some AI-generated hoax; once that happens, AI will be locked down hardcore. maybe we should encourage that to happen????
  
• body dysmorphia is when your face feels blob-like and you have constant intrusive thoughts telling you to take a knife and carve up your jawline so that it looks immaculate; or the urge to slice off the small curves of fat on your stomach and sides, regardless of the numbers on the scale (it’s malfunctioning and/or inaccurate) or the positive feedback of others (they're lying). sometimes I wonder if it's biological or if it's cultural, like if i had grown up in a body-positive culture, would I still feel this way? would I still feel like a nasty bulbous monster when walking down the street? does culture dictate my reality so plainly? it's sad that that might just be the case, implies my will is not my own, or I am incredibly weak and susceptible to manipulation.
  
• pickleball is so lame; it's like tennis with its balls chopped off.
  
• DBZ is probably the hardest anime to adapt to live action because the character aesthetics are so pivotal to the popularity of the series. like Goku has to look like Goku or the fans will flip.
  
• contrary like the sun to the moon
  
• we all want acceptance from others, but we rarely say it outright. the whole reason anyone tells someone else about their own interests is to gain acceptance and companionship. this is the only reason people talk about themselves, even for narcissists.
  
• on 4/16, after a 3 day weed break, i smoked some resin and had something like an existential crisis, one of those recursive psychological weed-loops in which you just keep circling back to something, overanalyzing it to death, seeing all the ways it has possibly fucked you over going forward in the future. this feeling, which i’m still having while typing this, has shown me, once again, that i should never smoke weed. weed is so weird and contrary that it tells you not to smoke it. seriously, i am not smoking weed after today. DONE. i quit alcohol, i can quit weed.
  
• sent this to some dude in an email and liked it: “I'm in that sort of so-high-you-hate-yourself-for-being-high high state.”
  
• “It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.”
  
• one of the things i hate about the Nintendo Switch is that, once I play a game docked on the TV, I feel like I can’t play that game on handheld anymore; as if the handheld experience is now lesser in some way, when i know that that is totally stupid, yet i still psychologically loop this way for some reason.
  
• “Wallace said the plotting and notes had a fractal structure modeled after the Sierpiński gasket.” note that a ‘sierpinski gasket’ is basically a TRIFORCE, literally a triforce shape. Infinite Jest is modeled after a triforce.
  
• I've been listening to albums on cassette tapes w/ my walkman for the past month or so, and the whole process has brought me closer to the music, like I've formed a special relationship with the albums themselves, because tapes kinda facilitate a full listening experience because they force you to put in real effort to listen to them, as opposed to something like Spotify where listening to music turns into a throwaway, “swipe right”-like experience. seems to me like over-accessibility leads to taking things for granted.
  
• all philosophy is cope for the horrors of biology; in this way, religion and philosophy are not so different.
  
• funny how these mega corps manipulate people every day into saying their ridiculous product names out loud, like “hey pass the NERD CLUSTERS™”
  
• Tom Bombadil is annoying as hell. Jackson was right to cut him from the movies. although I like this quote, “Take off your golden ring! Your hand’s more fair without it.”
  
• there's a scene in Suikoden I In which the main character is given the choice to drink some poison tea, and if you select the no option, the dialogue simply loops around back to the choice again until you select the yes option; and this is like the epitome of JRPGs, their essence. the illusion of choice. which, from a certain perspective, is fine, because jrpgs are more about telling a linear story rather than letting you make up your own (story), but it's always jarring running into one of these fake choices in jrpgs
  
• when i was 15, my dad sent me to the South Carolina Citadel military camp for a month. during my start, i sent a note home that was full of expletives. my grandma kept the note. years later, the citadel camp program was shut down due to allegations of widespread sexual abuse; i didn't see any of that during my time there, but it didn't surprise me, considering hardcore conservative Christian military dudes seem like the perfect chemical petri dish for suppressed sexual urges. anyway. I'm thinking about writing an essay or short story about this whole thing, although, for some reason, I don't remember much of my time at the camp, but—interesting fact—there is a Columbo episode set in the exact same barracks I stayed in.
  
• country music like weird al without the jokes
  
• all these modern remasters of old JRPGs (like Suikoden 1+2 & SaGa Frontier II) fuck up in the same way: they make the UI modern-looking in this minimal, black way, and they smooth out the font, which the makes the whole UI look and feel soulless. the original Suikoden 2, especially, got a lot of character from its antique, earthy UI, which is just lost completely in the remaster. i am not shaking my fist at clouds here, it's objectively stupid and ugly and pointless; the only reason remasters should exist is to make the same old games playable for a new audience, nothing else; the games themselves don't actually need to be changed in any way, they just need to be ported to modern hardware so they're not lost to time. stop putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
  
• our childhood wants and need never change—just the older we get, the more we’re pushed into phonyism to continue to fulfil those wants and needs; what I'm trying to say is: everybody would rather be playing games, hanging out with friends, or doing whatever, than working, but they still do the phony work. ask anyone, the goal is always to retire comfortably, everything up to that point (outside of leisure and passion) is phony.
• this will likely be my last fragments post, because i’m trying to transition to taking notes in little notebooks, because writing by hand feels better—more deliberate, thoughtful—and also so the notes will be accessible to my kids when i die or something, idk, and also because i’m starting to care less and less about advertising my thoughts to people, like they’re even worth advertising here, and how egotistical it all feels, expecting you to read this stuff and think it smart or whatever.

#fragments #notes

Content Warning: NSFW – Sex, violence, and nudity. All at the same time.

(It’s wet MMA in Beat, Prey Love. Come on now. Be fr.)

“Aight, so... I'll go easy on you. We'll keep it light, have some fun, shoot some saucy content and-”

“Wait, what the fuck? Why would you go easy on me?” The feisty blonde interrupted. “You got fucking destroyed by that short nerdy Black girl and then Vivian kicked your ass the next time. Neither of them are even that scary. You lose to losers: I should be the one offering to take it easy on you, red.”

Kathy Liu had to stop herself from gawking. “You know, Flor says I might be on the spectrum, but even I'm not that bad at reading people...” She wasn't sure if McKenzie had heard her or not; the freckled blonde wasn't a great listener at the best of times. But McKenzie Booth or “Combat Keigh” as the Beat, Prey Love audience knew her, had other skills. Blessed with soft, extremely bountiful curves and a round, cute face, the 5'5” Tennessee native was a reliable draw for a few reasons.

Kathy and the BPL audience recognized two big, heavy reasons in particular.

“That's perfect then. Just come at me 100%: I want you to kick my ass and humiliate me; really put it on me, OK?” The invitation was utterly facetious; Kathy could not include “accomplished martial artist” alongside any honest description of McKenzie. But the stubborn, buxom blonde blamed each loss on her unimpressive record on factors beyond her control. Tonight Kathy intended on being one of those factors.

The pair climbed into the boxing ring in the middle of the gym and stood in opposing corners, waiting for the fight to begin in earnest. The crowd was large enough to pack the gym's bleachers, she observed. Good. These fights were fun, to be sure, but what use was making content if it didn't draw fans?

When both fighters agreed that they were ready, the referee called them to the center of the ring. “Kelsey Drama,” black roots visible in her dyed orange hair, was at once a fiction and a very real part of Kathy. Her raunchy streaming persona had transitioned seamlessly to a world of raunchy, wet fights where sex and violence commingled. Her black, pleated athletic skirt only partially covered her curvy ass. The green bandeau top stretched against her chest was printed with “BPL,” the initials of her promotion, on the front.

Kathy Liu was a college student. Kelsey Drama was a poster child for controversy, sensuality, and violence.

Combat Keigh sized her up, vicious grin lighting up her peach colored face. The 5'10 Kelsey Drama smiled down at her.

“Alright! Kelsey Drama! Combat Keigh! If y'all are ready, let's get it on!”

The bell rang, the crowd cheered and the two pressed chest to chest. Kathy reached behind her opponent and cupped Keigh's ass in the palms of her fingerless MMA gloves. She could feel the shorter woman standing on her tiptoes to kiss her. The audience wooped their approval as the two women met in a kiss, hands gliding across each other other's curves. Keigh felt as thick as she looked, with real heft to her hips and torso. Keigh's massive bust squished against the streamer's toned abs as they kissed. Keigh's kisses were as aggressive as the rest of her, with an overeager tongue that pushed into Kelsey's mouth too early and too often. Kelsey moved her hand up behind the blonde's head and tilted it until she could more easily suck on Keigh's lip. She let her tongue dance, teasing and taunting the younger woman. Kissing was a skill, and her smoldering relationship with a woman on her dorm floor had only made her more eager to practice.

The two combatants stood there, locked in the sultry embrace that began wet MMA matches at Beat, Prey, Love. Kelsey felt the growing warmth in her chest, the tingle between her thighs, the familiar pleasure of sharing heat and contact and affection. It was intoxicating.

But Combat Keigh was drunk on it.

The kittenish streamer felt the shorter woman swoon, felt her knees buckle for an instant before the blonde college student regained her composure. Combat Keigh tried to break their kiss and pull back for air but found no reprieve. Kelsey pushed their lips together again until the shorter woman flailed. When Kelsey finally relented, Keigh pulled back too hard and fell onto her ass. The pratfall drew cheers and laughter from the audience, and Beat, Prey, Love's proprietor and most committed showman prepared to put on a performance.

“C'mon loser. I love rolling around with cute girls, but they usually at least try to punch me first.” Kelsey said with a devilish grin. She patted the blonde on her head, rustling Combat Keigh's messy bangs and pigtails before Kelsey lightly ground her hips against the curvy southerner's head.

“I'm gonna do more than just try!” Combat Keigh said, pushing Kelsey away and rising to her feet.

Kelsey Drama waved her in, slowly circling the shorter woman in the center of the ring. Long and limber, the edgy streamer intended to keep this Southern nuisance at bay until Combat Keigh decided she was a lover, not a fighter. When her opponent charged, Kelsey played matador, catching Combat Keigh with a jab before slipping to the side. She pawed at the shorter, younger fighter, casual punches and kicks intended to test reflexes and responses. Data collection. The first punch caught Combat Keigh flush and briefly froze her. The second landed on her arms as she covered up.

Kelsey Drama lacked the force or volume to cower Keigh into timid compliance, instead the peach toned Tennessee native pushed into range and threw a flurry of punches. Kelsey bobbed and weaved through them, absorbing a few light impacts on her arms and abs as she slid to the left and away from the corner.

“Maybe try... hitting me?” She teased.

An insulted Keigh charged again, hands lower this time as if to grapple her. Kelsey stepped up and used every inch of her 5'10 frame to throw a long, straight kick that cruised over Keigh's lowered gloves. The ball of her foot slammed into Combat Keigh's chest and stopped her in her tracks. The blonde winced and gasped Kelsey Drama followed up with a long, hard kick that slammed into the blonde's calf.

“Let's go shortstack. I thought you were gonna make this look easy?” She teased.

“Shut up! I'm gonna make you look easy,”

The two women iterated on this initial encounter: Combat Keigh's height disadvantage and limited footspeed made approaching the nimble streamer difficult, and Kelsey relished each opportunity to demonstrate the difference in their accuracy, speed, and footwork. Keigh surged forward in bursts of action, but their fight took place at the range where Kelsey wanted it and she repeatedly tagged the overconfident blonde with punches and kicks thrown from farther than Keigh could retaliate. And when Kelsey wasn't hitting her in the ribs, she was ribbing her with jokes, teasing and encouraging the younger woman to make good on her pre fight boasts. Keigh finally scored on a very nice punch combo, but Kelsey pulled her to the mat in their next exchange and gave the wilting blonde some unwelcome affection before pulling away, dramatically savoring the taste of her opponent's mouth, lips and neck. Kelsey Drama refused to finish a fight so quickly but she couldn't resist demonstrating her superiority to audience and opponent alike.

Combat Keigh chased a takedown of her own but a stiff kick collided with her cheek and wobbled her. The streamer wrapped up her struggling quarry, nuzzling her in a clinch that wasn't strictly violent.

“You're my favorite fucking loser, you know that?” Kelsey said, just loud enough for the front row of fans to hear. She snuggled the blonde, pulling Keigh's face against her hefty pair. “Get your rest, Keigh; you're about to need it.”

She repeatedly drove her fist into Keigh's unprotected side, cradling her blonde head with the other arm. From this distance she couldn't generate the torque necessary to knock anyone out, but the punches hurt all the same, and they elicited the desired response: The sorority member moaned and flailed but didn't collapse. Their bodies pressed together in sweaty embrace, the sorority member struggled, until she broke free. Kelsey grabbed her again, greeting her with a sloppy kiss. When Keigh finally escaped that indignity, the rangy streamer looped her leg behind her victim and tripped her to the mat. The younger woman reached for anything to keep her standing and tugged on Kelsey's skimpy tube top. The black and green bandeau didn't rip but it did slide down her torso, baring Kelsey's bouncing breasts to the audience and the camera.

Kelsey covered her chest with her arm, feigning scandal for a moment before shrugging and pulling the top up and over her head completely. What was the point of advertising a wet fight if no one got naked or wet? The crowd cheered as Kelsey Drama smacked her ass and wiggled her hips for their amusement.

“Let's go blondie. I'm not done wringing you dry.”

On her ass for the second time in the match, the freckled braggart lacked some of the boisterous confidence she'd started with. What remained was indignant insecurity: a woman embarrassed but not yet beaten. Kelsey Drama looked down at her and thought she saw Keigh recognizing that victory was slipping from her grasp.

“No, now it's my turn!” The blonde snapped, rising onto shaky legs.

Kelsey hesitated for a moment too long and couldn't react in time to prevent Keigh's burst of action turning into a takedown, her first successful one of the night. Combat Keigh lay across her torso, vengeance in her blue eyes. Kathy winced as the scrappy blonde scrambled to hit her and climb on top of her at the same time, and she grabbed the waistband of Keigh's already unbuttoned skimpy denim short shorts. Keigh managed half of a submission attempt and a few solid knees and elbows before settling on an sensual approach that Kelsey Drama found much more agreeable. The sensation of steamy wet mouth on nipples stiffened by the chilly gym air sent an immodest shiver through Kelsey as she lay pinned on her back.

Combat Keigh had finally done something besides flail and absorb punishment. Kelsey was almost impressed. The blonde pushed her advantage, tongue trailing a wet trail from the streamer's chest towards the beltline of her skirt. Kelsey leaned into the sudden reversal, content to let the little loser lead their dance: this didn't need to be any more of a one-sided dismantling than it already had been, and she longed to see if what the southern belle had learned during her current losing streak against anyone in Beat Prey Love's gold or diamond divisions. Combat Keigh shifted now, crawling on top of her foe and pressing her hand between Kelsey's thighs. The streamer eschewed underwear during her matches; Keigh's aggression was about to lead her towards a soft, steamy prize.

“Y'all ready for me to fuck her? I'm not stopping till she screams louder than y'all do!” Keigh yelled before pressing her face against the streamer's hot sex.

Kelsey smiled at the boast and bided her time, listening as the crowd's loyalties turned and they cheered Combat Keigh's success. The streamer moaned, slightly exaggerating the sensation of Keigh's tongue against her lips. It was nice not to have to do all the work sometimes. When she lifted her legs straight up, the blonde didn't move. Kelsey sighed, half from the pleasure and half from the unfortunate realization that her favorite grappling dummy still hadn't learned to recognize danger.

Their reversal was sudden and severe: Kelsey's legs tightening like a snare trap around Combat Keigh's neck and arm, those same legs rolling both women over, and then finally turning Keigh's prize into a prison as the experienced grappler sat up and sat on her opponent's face. Kelsey trapped the blonde between her thighs and the canvas, grinding slowly to emphasis the position.

“Auughhh fuck. Get off me!”

Keigh raged and flailed until her fury turned to whimpers. Her legs slapped harmlessly against the ring's canvas as the Asian American streamer luxuriated in her torment. One hand traced sensual curves up and down her own curves, kittenish expression promising more eroticism to come. Kelsey's other hand wandered along her opponent's soft torso, pulling her heaving breasts free of her loosened top before pulling at the knot itself. She tugged at Keigh's already unbuttoned shorts, tugging the denim down one hip. The task was made easier by her opponent's relative lack of hips.

Kelsey felt arousal rising inside her: a tightness in her body, a warmth spreading through her, and a yearning for physical touch and lewd sensations. She'd intended to prolong this beating, but riding a girl's face to orgasm was about as demonstrative a victory as you could manage in a wet fight.

Only the bell to end the first round saved Combat Keigh from the indignity of being Kelsey Drama's latest sexual conquest. The streamer reluctantly rose off of her opponent, tension and frustration clear on her flushed face.

“I was soooo close. Like... I was right there....” She moaned, thighs clenched together. “Damn. I guess I'll just have to fuck you next round.”

Her opponent yelled something at Kelsey, but the San Francisco native was more entertained by Combat Keigh yelling at the referee who'd reminded the blonde that any partially removed clothing had to be fully removed. The 30 seconds she'd spent tugging at the sorority member's top and shorts had ensured Keigh would start their second round devoid of either. Unfortunately for her, she was facing an opponent eager to put on a show at her expense.

The 10 minute first round hadn't been kind to Keigh's stamina, looks, or attitude. Kelsey watched the flushed blonde take long, slow breaths that only emphasized her massive bust. Her face and body both bore enough bruises and swelling that she'd have to make “you should see the other girl” jokes in class on Monday. Unfortunately for her, people could see the other girl. This match was being recorded after all.

Kelsey Drama came out of her corner grinning and bouncing. Her missing top necessitated a little less jumping around, but neither her opponent nor the fans would mind. The red-faced blonde met her near her own corner, clearly wishing that the one minute break had been longer. Kelsey took her time exhausting her outmatched opponent. Keigh's increasingly desperate lunges only gave Kelsey more opportunities to delight the crowd with creative applications of blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. She dragged her prey to the mats and had her way with her, wrapping his long, strong legs around Keigh's neck or aching ribs. Each surge, shove, and scramble was another chance to bend and stretch Keigh, another chance to drag practiced fingers across her sweat slicked skin or apply his eager mouth and tongue to the exciting work of drawing immodest moans from her opponent.

“This is where it gets fun, Keigh! You're so good at losing I'd swear you're starting to like it” She giggled, taking a moment to smile and preen for the camera ringside while her victim squirmed, immobilized and helpless.

The next three minutes of their second round were a gauntlet of near submissions and near orgasms. The shorter woman spent each torturous second held, squeezed, bent, folded, moaning, or dripping until she finally ran out of pride or composure.

“Fuck... just... fuck me already alright?” She conceded. She'd spent all but a few seconds of the round on the canvas courtesy of a streamer eager to show off her grappling prowess. Kelsey looked down and saw a woman exhausted and subdued.

“You win. Just... give them what they want or whatever...” Keigh gasped, hips still bucking from Kelsey's most recent exploration of her steamy, exhausted body. Sweat and saliva ran down her curves, puddling beneath her as she struggled and finally gave up trying to sit up.

“Hmmm.... since you asked so nicely. OK!” Kelsey Drama laughed. “You all heard her right? Anyone got any ideas? I'm taking requests.”

Kelsey stood up and left her victim on the canvas behind her. She listened for a few seconds, eyes darting between the crowd and the soggy puddle of woman she'd just dismantled and humbled. One idea caught her fancy, and she turned around to greet her victim. “It's your lucky day, Keigh: we're both about to go viral.”

Folded into a position Kelsey could perform better than she could describe, Keigh was a passenger to her own demise. The scandalous streamer sucked and slurped greedily on the younger woman's skin, sating her own lewd longing by grinding on her victim's thigh before letting her fingers wander down Keigh's reddened stomach. The end of the match came when Combat Keigh did, moaning and shaking and utterly spent. Too lost in the euphoria to retain any of her early petulance, the conquering martial artist distinctly heard her blonde victim mutter a meek “thank you” between heaving breaths.

“Awww, you're welcome. And thank you for being such a good little loser. That video's gonna do fucking numbers.” The Asian American woman whispered, caressing the downed woman with genuine affection. “Might compile all your losses into one video. We can call it the 'Keigh-O highlight reel.'”

Kelsey Drama stood up and found the nearest camera. Her wink for the viewers came accompanied by double peace signs and a naughty grin at the cameras before she sucked the glistening arousal off her fingers. The sex and violence were real, but Kelsey Drama was a performance that clarified everyone's expectations of her. Her image of a too-online, raunchy 'e-girl' entailed clear tasks, expressions, poses, and phrases.

The cameras caught every angle of Keigh laying on the canvas before she stood, supported by Kelsey's warm hug. The announcer read off the details of her victory as the referee raised her arm, but Kelsey's thoughts had already left her exploits in the past: there were more fights on tonight's Beat, Prey, Love card, and with them, more money to make. Kelsey Drama was a business, but Kathy Liu was an entrepreneur.

#Writing #FirstDraft #NSFW #Series #BeatPreyLove #BPL #Fiction #Action #Sex #Fight #MartialArts #MMA

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Book 1: The Mythic Dawn

“Greetings, novitiate, and know first a reassurance: I was once like you, asleep, unwise, protonymic.”

On December 31st, 2024, I spent exactly $236.74 all to play literally one game; I spent $161.02 on the Xbox 360 Slim in glossy black, and I spent $39.81 on an authentic Microsoft 360 controller, and I spent $35.91 on the actual game itself, and I even considered buying a mint-condition copy of the game’s official strategy guide, but this would have cost me an additional $41.36, and—considering that was more expensive than the game itself—it was all starting to feel a little excessive at that point, so I had to draw the line somewhere.

The game in question here is one that I’ve owned in one form or another since its release back on March 20th, 2006. Originally, I had it on the 360, back when I was fifteen years old, at which time I put in about 100 hours and earned all the achievements—according to my old Xbox Live account that I no longer have access to (“Wonderless,” look it up)—and about two years later, after I had sold the 360 for a vinyl record player, my mom bought me a nice gaming rig—a Dell XPS 700, to be exact—so I got the game again, at which point I started modding, making the game look and play like something it wasn’t, and—with a little help from Adderall XR—this led to many replays with different characters and different builds and all sorts of role-playing restrictions. The whole nine nerdy yards. I’m talking literal weeks’ worth of playtime here, which pretty much branded the game’s iconic symbol onto the gray matter of my underdeveloped teenage brain, and now it’s as if the game is part of my identity, my essence, my very soul—and it certainly felt that way back then, back when I was still a kid, in the Mythic Dawn.

Since that golden age, I’ve replayed the game every few years, putting in another hundred hours or so each time. In fact, I’ve played the game so many times that I can recite dialogue from it on demand—like the funny way Weebam-Na says “Rat Ragu with Powdered Deer Penis” or the very creepy but kinda cute way Falanu says “Do you happen to know what the fine is here in Cyrodiil for necrophilia?”—and I can even point to the location of the Ayleid ruin Vindasel on a map faster than I could my own home, and I can tell you exactly where and when to find Quill-Weave on the Gold Road on the 7th of each Tamrielic month, and I know how to duplicate any item using two copies of the same scroll, and I know how to get infinite gold by looting Dorian’s corpse over and over again, and I can even tell you exactly how long it takes to walk from Leyawiin to Anvil on foot with the default speed stat—which, in case you were wondering, is about 48 minutes, give or take, which is around one full game day, considering that one minute of real-time is 30 minutes of in-game time, which is yet another useless fact branded upon my brain, all of which just goes to show how much I really fucking love this game.

Of course, the game I’m talking about here is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The very same game that won five awards at the 2006 Spike Video Game Awards: Game of the Year, Best Original Score, Most Addictive Game, Best RPG, and the oddly titled Best Performance by a Human Male, which was, of course, presented to Sir Patrick Stewart—of Star Trek and Gnomeo & Juliet fame—for his portrayal of Emperor Uriel Septim VII, whose voice is the first thing you hear when starting up a new game, but not the last, because he accompanies you for only about twenty minutes before giving you his amulet and telling you to “close shut the jaws of Oblivion” before being murdered by a member of a fanatic cult while you’re just kinda standing there, powerless, in one of the few scenes where the game takes control away from the player, which kicks off the whole epic adventure.

And Oblivion’s not just any old epic adventure—it’s a beautiful epic adventure, even by today’s standards, but not only that, it’s also a twisted fucking nightmare. The province of Cyrodiil is a bright, colorful, Tolkienesque fantasy world, a work of art really, wherein both deer and demon frolic freely, a land where minotaurs are just as likely to bash your brains out as a wandering cat person is to tell you a funny riddle and wish you well on your way. It’s a huge, heinous, beautiful world out there, spanning 16 real square miles, dotted with sprawling cities, comfy settlements, dozens of camps, hundreds of forts and caves to ransack, and of course portals to some of the most deranged hell worlds you’ve ever seen. And I’m not just talking about portals to hell itself—because there are plenty of those, complete with fire, brimstone, and massive corpse-mashing machines—but also all the little pockets of hell found in the homes of seemingly well-adjusted citizens; I’m talking basements full of corpses and zombies and bodies hanging from ropes and severed heads on plates and blood all over the walls and limbs just scattered all over the floor. And this contradictory beautiful-twisted-nightmare aesthetic is made even more potent by the fact that the character models themselves are incredibly lifelike yet there’s just something totally off about them—maybe it’s their potato-like faces, or the weird way their eyes shift when you talk to them, or the fact that their dialogue is often batshit insane or just flat-out incomprehensible—all of which serves to give the inhabitants of Cyrodiil this uncanny feeling, like you’re standing right there in the valley itself, which adds an unsettling dreamlike quality to the whole thing.

And, by virtue of the open-world design, all of Oblivion’s twisted dreamlike beauty is accessible from the very moment the tutorial ends, right when you step out of the Imperial City sewer, where the majesty of Cyrodiil is on full display, right there, in glorious first-person: The glowing white marble ruins of Vilverin right across the shimmering waters of Lake Rumare, upon which a lone wooden boat bumps against a time-worn dock, on which sits a single lamp perpetually lit by the magic of video games; and behind all that, out there in the foggy distance, the rolling hills of the Heartlands, where the meadows stretch like endless oil paintings and the sky is smeared with bubblegum clouds and the trees sway gently in time with “Wings of Kynareth,” as if the music itself were a light breeze upon which all possibilities drift. And, if you’re lucky, you may exit those sewers when the timing is just right: at night, when the weather’s clear and the two moons of Mundus—Masser and Secunda—hang low in the starry sky, pale moonslight the only thing between you and infinity. And in these moments, you will fall in love with a video game.

The sheer majesty of Oblivion will make you want to cry—or, at least, it will make you put the controller down and stare at the screen, slack-jawed and speechless; that’s certainly what it did for me back then, in the Mythic Dawn, when I was fifteen, back when I was playing the game for the first time.

Oh, how I long to go back there, to the first time, to the Mythic Dawn. Back before cigarettes and alcohol, cars and girls, work and bills, marriage and mortgages. Back when televisions weren’t “smart,” in the primordial era, when I would come home from school, eat some Easy Mac, lie to Mom about homework, take a dozen Diet Cherry Cokes up to my room, draw every curtain, make sure the lighting was just right, pop some Adderall, boot up the 360, scroll through my friend list, send off a few mildly insensitive voice messages with the official 360-branded headset, gulp some Diet Cherry, start up Oblivion then just get absolutely lost in another world. Back when phones still flipped, in the dragon break, when I was never worried about losing my job or becoming homeless, when politics were inconsequential and the price of eggs was never even a thought that crossed my mind, back when the most stressful thing in life was coming up with some sort of excuse as to why I didn’t do my homework because I had stayed up all night slaying goblins. Back when MySpace was still a thing, in the chaos years, when I was beautiful and could never die, when the things I loved were always interesting and my attention never waned, when the top priority in life was looting enough gold to enchant the sickest blade in all of Cyrodiil. Back when Mom still bought me CDs from FYE, when home was suffused with the scent of lavender candles, back when I was naive but believed myself not to be, when I felt totally safe as if there were a forcefield around me at all times, back when I was still basically in the womb pretty much, when I really believed that time could be stopped and that things would never change, when I was unwaveringly in my zone, slow-walking through the streets of Skingrad pretending like it was actually me in there, in the television, walking by all the Imperials and the Nords and that one crazy Wood Elf who wanted me to kill all his neighbors because he believed they were spying on him or something. Back when I was fifteen, when I was still willing to try new things, back when first times felt like forever and nostalgia was just some word in the dictionary that I had never even thought about. Oh, how I long to go back there, to the first time, to the Mythic Dawn.

It should be noted that I’ve owned Oblivion on Steam since at least 2012, and I have a perfectly good PC capable of playing it. So, considering that information, you may be wondering something like, “Well—if you already have the game, why did you spend $236.74 to play it again?” And that’s a valid question, especially considering the PC version is arguably the superior version because it runs without stuttering every few seconds, has considerably better visuals in all respects, supports mods for both enhancing the game and fixing the many game-breaking bugs—of which there are many—has load times that are pretty much instant as opposed to forever, and offers a number of other benefits far too long to list here. So then, why did I do it? Why did I spend all this money on one game? Well, I have multiple answers to that question, such as the fact that the PC version doesn’t have native controller support, or the fact that I’m running Linux so the three hours of system tweaking I’d have to do to get the game in a playable state is time I’d rather spend doing something else, or the fact that there’s no achievement support on PC, and I’m sure there are other answers I could come up with given enough time. But, of course, all these answers are just excuses, because I think you already know the real reason I spent $236.74 to play some video game that I still own and have played dozens of times before, and it has less to do with actually playing the game and more to do with the fact that I am a nostalgic idiot.

So, in short, I spent $236.74 to go back to 2006, to my old room, with the Easy Mac and the Diet Cherry Coke and the perfect lighting. I wanted to boot up the old 360 again, feel the smoothness of that perfectly curved controller in my hands while I navigated that glorious Blades user interface. I wanted to feel that little hit of dopamine whenever that green-and-gray badge popped up for unlocking an achievement or whenever a friend logged in or whatever. I wanted to watch my friends logging in and out in real time; I wanted to check which games they were playing, which achievements they had unlocked, like I was part of some sort of real living breathing gamer community again, like it wasn’t just me sitting there, alone, in front of my TV, in my office, thirty-something years old, pretending I was fifteen years old. No. I wanted to actually be fifteen years old. I wanted to fold spacetime, actually go back there, to 2006, to the Mythic Dawn. That’s why I spent $236.74.

And it worked—but not for long. Because after a few days, something felt off. Something was different. Oblivion just didn’t feel the same. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. So I approached it as if it were a book of riddles, some sort of Mysterium Nostalgia. I figured what I’d do was, I’d just keep adding new nostalgic things into the mix, I thought that if I just added the right nostalgia variables, I could solve the riddle, unlock the secret, reach a point where I felt like I was truly back in the Mythic Dawn: maybe the lighting in the room wasn’t right, so I experimented with different lighting; maybe I wasn’t drinking enough Diet Cherry Coke, so I drank more; maybe it was because I wasn’t listening to the right music, so I started listening to The Strokes and Radiohead again, to cultivate that 2006 atmosphere; maybe it was because my 360 friend list was empty and depressing, so I scoured online forums and found about thirty people to add to recreate that old online-community feeling; maybe it was because the smells were all wrong, so I bought some lavender incense and lit them while playing; and I even exclusively ate Easy Mac for about three weeks straight.

But even then, after adding all those extra nostalgia variables, Oblivion still just didn’t feel the same. Something was off.

But why? What was I doing wrong?

Well, I have some good news.

After playing Oblivion for the six hundred twenty-third time, I’m writing these commentaries to tell you that I have indeed solved the riddle of the Mysterium Nostalgia, and the answer was right under my nose the whole time, practically staring me in the face with sunken eyes.

In fact, the answer was right there in the game’s narrative—in Gaiar Alata.

Book 2: Gaiar Alata

“Deny not that these days shall come again, my novitiates!”

To understand the Mysterium Nostalgia, first we must understand the mind and motives of Mankar Camoran, the main antagonist of Oblivion. Camoran, like myself, was addicted to nostalgia, to an idea of a better time, to the way-back-when: the Mythic Dawn. He led a cult, the creatively named Mythic Dawn, which aimed to return the world back to the era of the Mythic Dawn, and he planned to do this through a plot involving the worship of a Daedra Lord named Mehrunes Dagon—the self-proclaimed “Daedric Prince of Darkness and Destruction,” who also sometimes went by “The Flame Father” or “The Master of Razors” or “The Father of Cataclysm” or “The Exalted and Most Puissant Lord”—all of which really should have tipped Camoran off that maybe this Dagon character isn’t really all that interested in returning mortals to a golden age and instead may just want to cause destruction or something, but alas, nostalgia blinds us to even the most obvious of truths, as will be revealed in these commentaries.

The Daedra themselves are god-like beings that reside in the planes of Oblivion—hence the game’s name—and they follow their own social hierarchies and rules, all of which are mostly incomprehensible to mortals. These Daedric princes constantly meddle in mortal affairs, and some occasionally try to take over Nirn itself—the planet on which Cyrodiil is located—but they struggle to do this because of an ancient pact which erected a barrier between the planes of Oblivion and Nirn, meaning they (the Daedra) cannot simply cross into Nirn whenever they please. But for the barrier to remain intact, a living emperor with dragon blood, wearing the Amulet of Kings, must light the Dragon Fires at the Temple of the One. And if the emperor dies, the Dragon Fires are extinguished, requiring the ritual to be completed once more by the emperor’s heir.

As you might have guessed, Mankar Camoran wants to destroy the barrier, as he claims to have deciphered an ancient text—the Mysterium Xarxes—written by Mehrunes Dagon himself, which, with the help of four esoteric keys, supposedly possesses the power to bring back the Mythic Dawn, which was basically a paradise era wherein everyone was immortal, according to Dagon, the self-proclaimed “Daedric Prince of Darkness and Destruction.” But for the Mythic Dawn to return, Dagon must be allowed to cross the barrier so that he can merge his fiery hell realm with Nirn; hence his need to manipulate nostalgia-obsessed mortals into assassinating the emperor, which will extinguish the Dragon Fires, which will destroy the barrier, which will allow him (the self-proclaimed “Father of Cataclysm”) to cross into Nirn and turn the world into a fun-loving paradise of immortality—or so the clearly evil demon lord claims.

How Mankar Camoran doesn’t realize that he’s obviously being played by an evil demon is beyond my mortal comprehension. Perhaps Camoran’s nostalgia blinded him to the obvious signs, or perhaps he truly wanted to believe in something more, something beyond the mortal plane—a place beyond suffering, where everyone was beautiful and could never die. Maybe he really did long for the old days, the Mythic Dawn, a time before moon sugar and skooma, maidens and magic, marriage and mortgages, and all that mortal coil stuff. Perhaps he dreamed of the womb, a temporal bubble wherein he could remain unwaveringly in his zone forever. Or maybe he just wanted power, maybe he was just pure evil or something, who knows, his in-game characterization is, admittedly, pretty shallow.

Of course, by the end of Oblivion, the Hero of Cyrodiil thwarts Mankar Camoran’s plans and saves Nirn. But before all that, the hero journeys through Gaiar Alata—Camoran’s first attempt at utopia, a sort of beta-test paradise—located in Mehrunes Dagon’s realm. And upon entering this paradise, it appears stunningly beautiful at first glance, but closer inspection reveals a heinous nightmare world wherein people are forced to work and fight endlessly; a place of immortality, but also a place where suffering is forever, because anyone who dies is reincarnated only to suffer and die once more, at which point they’re resurrected only to suffer and die again, and so on and so forth. And to illustrate the levels of depravity here, there’s an underground lair where a Daedra has locked people in cages, and the cages are slowly lowered into lava—screaming, gurgling, and sizzling of flesh all quite audible—before the cages are lifted to reveal nothing but ash, at which point the Daedra laughs maniacally, resurrects the victims, and starts the whole process over again. What the point of all this suffering actually is, I don’t know—the in-game details are hazy at best—but one can assume, since Gaiar Alata is located within Mehrunes Dagon’s plane of Oblivion—which is literally called “Deadlands,” go figure—that it’s all to power some sort of demonic hell gate or maybe even the Deadlands itself, who knows.

The point is, basically, to no one’s surprise, Mankar Camoran’s paradise turned out to be a hell world wherein people were doomed to repeat their terrible lives—and gruesome deaths—over and over again in the most heinous ways possible. So, of course, cult members who entered Gaiar Alata enthusiastically, expecting an immortal paradise, were begging to leave pretty much as soon as they got there, only to find themselves trapped, endlessly repeating themselves, dying over and over and over again.

So, at this point, you may be wondering something like, “What does any of this have to do with nostalgia?” And, well, the answer is simple: Gaiar Alata and nostalgia are one and the same. This is the first truth required to even begin to understand the Mysterium Nostalgia.

Let me explain.

Book 3: Nostalgia

“Know this, novitiate. Enraptured, he who finally goes unrecorded. Recorded, the slaves that without knowing turn the Wheel. Enslaved, all the children of the Aurbis As It Is.”

What is nostalgia, really?

One might liken nostalgia to magic, but everything is magic before explanation. So here, to the best of my ability, I will provide an explanation of what “nostalgia” actually is, although the explanation of nostalgia is less important than nostalgia’s effects on us as real fleshy human people.

If I had to describe nostalgia in a non-video game context, I would liken it to a sense that can draw upon the other five basic senses but is its own sense entirely. The sixth sense. And I know this because I’ve felt it—you have too, we all have.

With a single thought, nostalgia can twitch our noses, make us smell aromas that aren’t even there, like the scent of an old lover’s perfume; and it can perk our ears, make us hear notes that we haven’t heard in ages, like a familiar melody that we can’t quite place; and it can trigger our taste buds, make us savor foods that aren’t even in our mouths, like the taste of grandma’s chocolate-chip cookies; and it can even give us goosebumps, tingle our jaws, simply by looking at an old familiar thing, like the glow of a CRT showing some old game that, by today’s standards, looks like total shit but, through the veil of nostalgia, looks like the most whimsical thing we’ve ever seen; and, in this way, nostalgia can pull the wool over our eyes, make us see things that aren’t actually there. And nostalgia can work in reverse, too; we can smell a certain aroma, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, we’re in an old girlfriend’s house or something.

Not only is nostalgia a psychic sense but also a spacetime sense—a psychic-spacetime sixth sense that deals in the temporal, the folding of space, by transporting us, sensorily and psychically, back to a specific moment in our lives, forever tethering us to our pasts, almost as if nostalgia itself is core to who we are as individuals, as if nostalgia is part of our very identities—because who would we be without the things that came before? But nostalgia doesn’t just fold spacetime; it also makes that specific time and place seem perfect in our mind’s eye—like a paradise, a Mythic Dawn—as if, back then, everything was awesome and there were no problems whatsoever.

Nostalgia is incredible and can make us feel really good. But while incredible, nostalgia is also addictive, blinds us to the present, and has diminishing returns when excessively indulged—and, for the purposes of these commentaries, that last bit about the diminishing returns is most important; because the more we repeat a thing, the less special that thing becomes, until, eventually, we wear the thing out, at which point we tarnish the very thing we loved—like listening to a song over and over again in a short period of time: the melody dulls, and we become sick of it—until, eventually, there’s nothing left but a faint memory of the thing’s prior glory. And sometimes, upon repeating a thing, we may even start to notice the thing’s flaws more than we normally would; we may even start to nitpick the thing to death, which only serves to diminish the thing even further.

What I’m trying to say is, nostalgia draws us in, makes us play Oblivion, again, for the 17th time; because, in our mind’s eye, Oblivion is not only the greatest game ever created, but it’s also a fixture of a time and place in our lives, all associated with its own smells and sights and sounds and feelings; and maybe, just maybe, by playing Oblivion again, we can actually go back to that place. And it may work for the first few times, but nostalgia, like any drug, is a false promise of paradise—a Gaiar Alata—because after we’ve been there for a while, playing Oblivion for the 36th time, waxing nostalgic, repeating the same thing over and over, we start to wonder why everything feels different, why the experience seems so dull, why everything feels so decayed; but we persist anyway, we keep playing Oblivion, as if chasing some perfect high, some Mythic Dawn feeling, at which point it’s too late—the nostalgic thing has already been used up, changed for the worse.

And before we know it, Oblivion is ruined.

At least, that’s what happened to me, this last time I played Oblivion, for the hundredth time.

Book 4: Oblivion, My Oblivion

“Novitiate, you will sense a shadow-choir soon. The room you are in right now will grow eyes and voices. The candle or spell-light you read this by will become gateways for the traitors I have mentioned.”

Nearly every video game I’ve played, movie I’ve watched, album I’ve listened to, television show I’ve binged, or book I’ve read has been replayed, rewatched, relistened to, rebinged, or reread countless times. And I do this because I hate how everything decays, how nothing can last, how innocence is lost, how children grow up, and how adults forget. I don’t want to forget. I long for permanence. I need it. And the inanimate things from my youth are permanent, in a way. So, by playing the old games, I can feel both young and permanent, because the games themselves are unchanging, they’re the same old games they were back then, during the Mythic Dawn—or at least, that’s what I thought, until just recently.

The truth is, games change all the time—but not necessarily in the way you might expect. And I know this to be true because, upon playing Oblivion for the thousandth time, I realized the game had actually changed quite a lot.

At some point, while wandering through the beautiful meadows of the Heartlands, playing Oblivion for the millionth time, I started to think that the Heartlands themselves looked kinda samey, like everywhere else in the game, and then I started to think that Oblivion’s landscapes weren’t actually all that varied—almost generic, in a way—and at that point, something changed; the game felt a little less special, as if I were looking at a copy of the game instead of the original, like the game had been xeroxed and the ink had faded. And from that point onward, each time I booted up the game, it felt as if I were making a copy of it. The first copy was fine because the faded ink—the nostalgic decay—was more or less unnoticeable, but eventually, as days passed, it felt as if I were playing a copy of a copy, then a copy of a copy of a copy, then a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, and so on and so forth, until eventually, the nostalgic decay was so prominent that I had to make a conscious effort to block it out, which meant I could never truly immerse myself in the game because I was too preoccupied with blocking out all the aforementioned decay; and, as a side effect, this caused my ever-sought-after sense of permanence to decay as well. That special feeling I had once associated with after-school sessions of cutting down zombies in old Ayleid Ruins while chugging Diet Cherry Coke and bare-fisting pretzels had melted away, leaving nothing but the acute awareness of myself being an almost-middle-aged man who had spent $236.74 to play a single game he already owned—all to pretend that he was fifteen years old again.

And then I started to notice a number of little annoying things about Oblivion. I began to nitpick the game to death. Like how, for a game that prides itself on its open world, player customization, freeformity, and role-playing options, the game itself is actually very linear, because while quests themselves are well-written and often surprising, there’s very little the player can do to actually influence the outcome of the stories, to the point that, at worst, it feels like you’re just a floating camera that sometimes kills people to push along a story that was very obviously written without you in mind; an NPC may thank you for “getting rid of those evil cultists” then proclaim you a hero or whatever, but that’s the extent of your involvement—you are the muscle to push along a pre-written story with very rigid outcomes that you have no control over. So, you end up feeling as if the only role you can play in this quote-unquote “role-playing game” is the one the developers want you to play. There’s very little real choice, outside of refusing to play outright, and when there is choice, it’s shallow stuff like, “Should I kill this thief and take the stuff back or should I report the thief to the authorities?” Whereas, maybe, if I want to play the role of an evil villain, I might want to partner with the thief, get a cut of the profits, then kill the thief and reanimate his corpse, for funsies, only to kill him again—Gaiar Alata-style—or perhaps I’m playing a selfish anti-hero who would demand a better upfront reward from the quest giver, or maybe I want to convince the quest giver to let it go and move on because I’m playing a monk-type character that believes in total non-violence or something. Don’t get me wrong, certain quests do have multiple choices, and some even have multiple outcomes, but these choices and outcomes feel so predefined that you might as well have no choice at all—there’s no true freeformity here, which is the game’s surface-level promise as an open-world role-playing game, so after awhile it all starts to feel like a trick almost, and this is especially prominent after replaying the game a few times, when everything starts to feel like some sort of weird deja vu in which you can predict literally every little thing that happens; which means that, on the second or third playthrough, there's no surprise left, which would be fine if this were a novel or something, but this is a “truly immersive” game wherein “the NPCs are not scripted” (according to the game’s director, Todd Howard), so at some point you have to wonder if you've been bamboozled here. But, of course, back then, when I was a kid, in the Mythic Dawn, it all felt magical, like I was truly in another world, so none of this mattered.

Then I realized how broken the game’s progression system is; since the game uses a scaling level system—the monsters level up as the player does—if you don’t build your character in a very specific way early on (max Endurance and Strength as soon as possible), you’ll get absolutely wrecked by even the wimpiest of mudcrabs because the monsters’ stats have advanced far beyond your own, meaning to succeed on the normal difficulty you must actively plan each level-up so that you can increase your stats in such a way that you don’t accidentally under-power your character, which is very easy to do, especially since the game gives very little guidance on how to avoid this; and leveling up the proper stats is often a tedious task, like mindlessly summoning zombies and hitting them over and over again for an hour so that your Blade skill increases at least 10 times, so that, upon level-up, you can raise your Strength attribute by the maximum of 5, and you have to do this for three different attributes per level—otherwise, you won’t be able to kill monsters who have leveled up more efficiently than you have—which creates a gameplay loop of literally making little check marks on a notepad each time you gain a skill-up, carefully watching every little thing your character does to make sure you don’t accidentally increase the wrong skills, which means you never feel immersed in the game because you’re always number-crunching and worrying about fucking up your build. And even the developers knew they had created an awful progression system, because they added a difficulty slider that can be adjusted at any time, almost as if they realized late in the game’s development that the progression system they had created ironically punishes the player for progressing, so they said, “fuck it, we’re not going to fix it, we’re just going to add this difficulty slider here, and besides, this is a game about pretty landscapes and vibes, so who cares.” And, of course, back then, when I was a kid, in the Mythic Dawn, none of this mattered. But as an adult replaying the game for the billionth time, it matters a hell of a lot for some reason: I want some real delicate craftsmanship in the games I’m playing; I want to feel like the developers really put love and care into it; I want to feel like the game is cohesive, not held together with cheap glue and string; I want to be able to freely build a cool character without having to keep a notebook full of level-up graphs so that rats don’t one-shot me, because that just feels dumb as hell. Of course, to get around this stupid rats-one-shot-you dynamic, I could set the game to the lowest difficulty—where everything dies in one or two hits regardless—but this kinda defeats the whole purpose of a progression system to begin with. But, again, as a kid playing the game for the first time, in the Mythic Dawn, I didn’t care about any of this, because it was all so new, and I was so fully immersed.

Then I noticed that the game’s melee combat is brain-dead stupid, basically just hitting the enemy with the same basic attack over and over, with very little deviation—sure, there are sideways power attacks, backward power attacks, and neutral power attacks, but these are just fancier swings that, in most cases, are worse to use because they take longer to wind up. And Oblivion gives you a lot of time to notice its brain-dead combat, because the enemies themselves always have way too many health points—due to the dumbass progression system—so every encounter devolves into just smacking your enemy with what feels like a wet noodle for twelve hours, hearing their little pained ooo’s and aaa’s as you watch their health bar slowly diminish, you yourself half asleep, nearly zonked out. And the damn zombies are the worst because they take even longer to kill due to their innate health regeneration, I mean they’re so bad that it’s hard to believe they even made it out of playtesting, or that there was any playtesting done on the game at all. Again, the difficulty slider solves many of these issues, but the issues themselves shouldn’t exist to begin with. And yes, there are magic spells that make things a bit easier, but outside of blasting things with fireballs or electricity—which gets monotonous—enemies under the effect of debilitating spells like paralysis still need to be smacked with the wet noodle a billion times to properly die; you could instead cast an “enrage” spell, which will cause enemies to attack other nearby enemies, but it might also cause them to attack friendly NPCs, which might trigger those NPCs to accidentally hit other NPCs, which might just trigger an all-out NPC war, and then, before you know it, you have a whole town full of dead NPCs, and sometimes this just happens randomly because the NPCs have some randomness built into their programming, which is all to say that cities accidentally turning into graveyards is a far too common occurrence; so common, in fact, that “What’s up with all the dead bodies in the Imperial City?” is usually the first or second post on any given online Oblivion discussion board; and the developers also knew this would happen, evidenced by the fact that they made quest-essential NPCs effectively immortal as a workaround for their buggy programming, which is just another tacit admittance of the game’s jank. Truly, the creators of Oblivion are some of the most impressive Jank Wizards of our time for how much jank they were able to jank the masses into spending money on. And furthermore, some spells, like invisibility, trivialize every encounter to the point where using them feels like cheating, and then there’s the fact that there are only like three or four voice actors, so every other NPC sounds exactly the same, and then there’s the fact that every cave looks and feels identical—same goes for every Ayleid ruin and Oblivion gate—and also you have to scroll through hundreds of items in your inventory to get to whatever you need due to a lack of granular item groupings combined with a janky interface, and also accidentally hitting your horse kicks you out of the Mages Guild for some reason, and the game doesn’t encourage exploration at all because all you have to do is just follow the fucking quest markers which consequently means that NPCs never give directions beyond stuff like “I put a marker on your map” as if the whole population of Cyrodiil is plugged into one big Google Maps database, and also the writing for the Shivering Isles expansion basically amounts to Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m so every line of dialogue triggers an involuntary cringe response, and also becoming a vampire overrides your character’s facial customization for some reason replacing it with a gaunt version of the default face which makes every character look like the damn Count of Skingrad.

OK, I realize that I might have gone off the deep end there, but the whole point is that during my most recent playthrough of Oblivion, I wasn’t actually playing Oblivion—not as I knew it—I was playing some different game altogether. The game may have been technically the same, but my perception of it had changed entirely, and this depressed me very much so indeed.

So, in an effort to restore my childhood Mythic Dawn vision of Oblivion, I figured what I could was, I could smoke some weed, get into an immersive headspace, just zone out playing the game. So I bought myself a nice blue bowl shaped like a Sherlock Holmes-style pipe—which I took to calling “Sherlock Bowlmes”—and also bought some of that legal Delta-8 flower, and then one night I packed up Mr. Bowlmes and took some micro-hits, just enough to feel a little something, and then I sat down in front of the TV and booted up Oblivion; and, for a few nights there, it worked, I was immersed once more, back in the Mythic Dawn, walking through the dilapidated streets of Bravil, savoring that perfect Diet Cherry Cola, conversing with beggars and mages alike, eating the best damn Easy Mac I had ever tasted, thwarting evil plots left and right, happily summoning zombies and striking them with swords and lightning bolts for hours to skill up, making my little check marks, head full of lore justifying all the game’s jank, fully immersed in just becoming the best damn Nova Knight Battlemage named “Forestralonarth” that Cyrodiil had ever seen. And this worked for about a week until my weed tolerance built up, and I had to smoke even more to get into the same hyper-immersed superstate. Of course, my tolerance built up even further, so I had to smoke even more, and then even more than that, and so on, until eventually, I was puffing on Mr. Bowlmes all the time, just totally zonked out every night, real high on dope, all in an effort to revive some long-dead feeling from my youth.

Then, one night, I guess I smoked a little too much weed, and I got so introspective and paranoid that I hyperfocused on the fact that I was, indeed, getting high every night all in an effort to revive some long-dead feeling from my youth—which was, of course, something I never had to do back in my youth, ironically, which my high brain also fixated on—and this made me feel pathetic, like I was a drug addict trying to get his fix not only on nostalgia but also on literal drugs; at which point, I became acutely aware that a part of my childhood had died, and I was trying desperately, in vain, to bring it back. And then, super high on dope, candles suffusing lavender smoke throughout the room, Oblivion still running in the background, NPCs talking nonsense in my periphery, I started looking at all the stuff in my office, and I noticed that almost all the games and DVDs and books and comics and records that I owned were from my childhood, at which point I realized that my entire office was pretty much just a shrine to myself, my own youth, which felt incredibly egotistical, in a way, but also depressing, because it meant that my entire office was full of stuff that was once very special to me but was now diminished, tarnished by the false promise of Gaiar Alata, faded by the xerox copy machine of nostalgia, and at that point, I became so flustered that I had to leave the room.

So I stepped outside, sat lotus on the dirt, and put my head in my hands for a whole hour, as if I were in some sort of dark meditative state, feeling like I was going to cry; and during this dark meditative state, in which I felt like I was going to cry, I realized that I hadn’t tried anything new—games, books, whatever—in a long long time; in fact, the last five games I had played were all old games that I had played dozens of times before. I could even name like twenty interesting newer games that I had recently dismissed offhand with some sort of, “they just don’t make ‘em like they used to, everything’s garbage now” reasoning—in fact, I remember specifically calling The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a pale imitation of Assassin’s Creed fused with Skyrim, without ever having actually played the game myself—which all served only to keep me tethered to the past, repeating myself, xeroxing the things I loved, instead of living in the moment, in the present, creating new experiences, ones untouched by the hands of the way-back-when.

And that’s when I realized:

I didn’t spend $236.74 on an Xbox 360 and a video game—I spent $236.74 on an existential crisis and a newfound addiction to marijuana.

Oblivion, as it turns out, was my oblivion.

Book 5: Return to the Mythic Dawn

“Greetings, novitiate, I was once you, asleep, unwise, protonymic, but Am No More.”

Yet, despite all that, I just kept packing more and more weed into Mr. Bowlmes, getting totally zonked out every night, until eventually I finished my trillionth playthrough of Oblivion, and I even unlocked all the achievements, again, for the quadrillionth time, just to prove that I had been there and done that, again.

But upon unlocking that final achievement, while standing in the courtyard of the New Sheoth Palace, Amber Mace in hand, Jyggalag dead before me, both Golden Saints and Dark Seducers now addressing me as the new God of the Shivering Isles, the real me—sitting there in my office chair, high as fuck, 360 controller in hand, watching that virtual representation of me in the New Sheoth Palace courtyard—felt neither pride nor joy nor satisfaction nor any sense of achievement whatsoever.

I just felt empty, and a little sad.

So, I bent over, sank the power button on the $236.74 existential-crisis machine, then sat there, looking at the reflection of myself in the blackness of the flatscreen, myself both real high and a little dead inside. There, in the black, I saw a thirty-something-year-old man—shaved head, pale face, baggy shirt, big sweatpants, kinda sunken eyes, real high and a little dead inside—staring right back at me, and that’s when I realized I had wasted 78 hours, 51 minutes, and 34 seconds of my life (according to the 360 save file metadata), not because I was playing a video game or whatever, but because I was looping, and I wasn't even having fun doing it. I was living in the past in the present, repeating myself, experiencing a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. But not only that, I also realized that instead of reliving the Mythic Dawn, I had tarnished it somehow, made it worse in my mind, as if I had personally strangled a little child version of me to death. And I also realized a few things about myself, such as: I’m the perfect petri dish for the cultivation of nostalgic decay. Because I just love how nostalgia makes me feel and am also psychologically compelled to finish anything I start, which often results in exactly what happened with my quintillionth playthrough of Oblivion—that being, enjoying only the first few hours of it, then becoming bored or disenchanted or whatever, but still forcing myself to complete it because I would feel like some sort of failure otherwise; like, if I stopped playing Oblivion after I had already told myself I was going to beat it, I would somehow be betraying myself, breaking my own oath; I would be failing to live up to my own expectations, like it’s a matter of personal responsibility or something. It’s hard to explain. I just know that, at some point, I was very passionate about playing Oblivion, but while actually playing it, something happened, and I was no longer passionate at all—but I still wanted to be—so I pretended, and ended up feeling like a fraud because of it; and, at that point, every time I sat in front of that TV with that 360 controller in hand, I was living in my own little personal Gaiar Alata, like: “If I love Oblivion so damn much, why am I not having any fun? And if I’m not having any fun, why can’t I stop playing? What the hell’s wrong with me? Am I going insane?”

Again, this is all very hard to explain. One thing I can explain, however, is that the passion I originally felt before starting my sextillionth playthrough of Oblivion was the product of nostalgia: a longing to return to the Mythic Dawn. Nostalgia had passionately compelled me to pursue Oblivion—to chase the Mythic Dawn—but when that nostalgia wasn’t powerful enough to maintain the passion, I crashed, hard, at which point I ended up noticing all the little flaws of the game, diminishing the very idea of the game in my mind’s eye, basically ruining Oblivion for myself, thus snuffing out a little piece of my childhood, at which point I was left wondering: What good is nostalgia if it causes so much ruin?

This is the riddle of the Mysterium Nostalgia distilled.

But the good news is, my time playing Oblivion wasn’t all wasted because, by staring into that black screen, I unlocked the secret of the Mysterium Nostalgia. And it’s actually really simple, and it only requires four keys.

The first key is the most saddening of them all—it is the realization that no matter how much money we spend, or how many drugs we take, or how much we trick ourselves, we will never experience something for the first time a second time. First times are not forever. Time marches on. Any time we try to recreate a first-time feeling, we are really just experiencing the first-time thing a second time, thus creating a slightly faded copy of the first-time thing, and with each subsequent attempt, we are creating a copy of a slightly faded copy, so each copy will have less fidelity than the one before it, until eventually the first-time thing we were copying becomes so unrecognizable that we may even grow to dislike it, as I did with Oblivion.

The second key is the realization that nostalgia and obsession are one and the same. The endless pursuit of that special first-time feeling is not driven by real passion; it is driven by obsession—a selfish desire to feel a certain way, a gratification of self. And while neither nostalgia nor obsession is inherently wrong—as both can lead to feelings of immense happiness, accomplishment, or both—they can easily become twisted when indulged without moderation and introspection, as evidenced by my nonillionth time playing Oblivion.

The third key follows from the second, and it is moderation. It is the realization that if we love something then we must set it free, leave it alone, otherwise it will not stay golden in our minds. Overindulgence of the things we love turns them stale and mundane. Perhaps one day the things we love will return to us, but we must never force them to return; otherwise, we are harming the things we love, and we would not harm the things we truly love. Remember this: the idea of a thing already experienced is often better than the thing itself, especially if we have done it many times before, and this compounds.

The fourth and final key is the hardest to grasp, but also the most eye-opening—and thus the most important to unlocking the secret of the Mysterium Nostalgia—and it is the realization that:

Every Moment Is a Nostalgic Moment.

Yes, we are living in a nostalgic moment right now, reading this—we just don’t know it yet.

The fourth key is the realization that we are always creating nostalgia, and therefore there’s no need to chase nostalgia at all, because we’re experiencing nostalgia literally right now. We’re actually creating and experiencing nostalgia all the time, with everything we do.

This is what I realized, back then, after I had beaten Oblivion for the decillionth time, as I was staring at myself in the reflection of that black flatscreen, real high and a little dead inside, sunken eyes staring right back. In that moment, I started thinking back, to even just a few months ago, and I realized that there was some nostalgia there—nostalgia for a time, a few months ago, when I was reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney and taking my son out to the playground near the soccer fields every afternoon and listening to The Verve all the time. There was some sort of fuzzy nostalgia there, a special feeling. And then I started thinking back to a few months before that, when I was playing Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color for the first time, listening to The Fall and Guided by Voices a lot, when my son was still young enough for the playpen, and after work I’d get in the playpen with him, where we’d roll around, have tickle fights, and watch Blue’s Clues together, singing “Mail Time.” There was a special feeling there too, a nostalgic feeling. And then I started thinking back to the hard times, like back during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was living in a small trailer in which raccoons fell through the roof due to mold and water damage, when I was always worried about making enough money to pay rent, when my daughter and I would stay up late playing Fortnite and Minecraft together, when I was going through a phase wherein I listened only to Depeche Mode for some reason and was maybe drinking a little too much. There was nostalgia there, too. And I just kept thinking about all these golden moments, some near, some far, all nostalgic, every second of them.

Staring at that black flatscreen, sunken eyes staring back, I realized that each moment in my life is like a little epoch, and each little epoch has its own color, its own nostalgic flavor. And these little epochs didn’t just happen in my childhood—some happened just months ago, some even a few weeks ago, a few days ago, a few hours ago, some even just a few minutes ago, and some even a few seconds ago—like just now, when I was typing up that last sentence. All of it, nostalgic.

Every Moment Is a Nostalgic Moment—this is the final key, and with this final key, we unlock the secret of the Mysterium Nostalgia. And that secret is:

The Mythic Dawn Is Now.

Consider for a moment, realize that when we're 20, we look back to when we were 10; when we're 30, we look back to when we were 20; when we're 40, we look back to when we were 30; and so on. Then realize that everyone has their own “good old days,” that every generation says their generation was the best, and that the grass is always greener somewhere else. Then realize that if these statements are true, then it must be the case that nostalgia is all around us, happening all the time; therefore, everything is nostalgic, therefore we are living in the Mythic Dawn literally right now. Then realize that every moment spent longing for the past is a moment spent missing the present, a moment spent missing the Mythic Dawn, a moment we could have spent creating a new first time—because first times can be forever, as long as we keep doing new things.

This is the secret: The Mythic Dawn is something we create ourselves, all the time, just by living in the moment.

So it’s time to abandon our pretensions—our back-in-my-day’s and they-don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to’s—and create some new first times.

Only then can we begin truly living in the Mythic Dawn.

---

If this essay made you feel something, please let me know via email at f0rrest@pm.me.

---

#Oblivion #Essay #Autobiographical #ComputerGames

Dr. Fawltea had been looking forward to this day. After many many years of begging his wife, it was his day out—finally, some much-needed time to himself. An escape from the constant whining at home and from the Tekken Tag Tournament-obsessed, pop culture-addicted, wannabe Western “burgers” who discussed more philosophy than medicine, infesting the medical ward where he worked. Oh, would that he were like that man who was half jaguar, half human (or perhaps he was just wearing a mask?) and able to capture them in a throw and never let go, until their very life force was extinguished. Fawltea made a mental note of making sure to take one of these annoying idiots home one day, the one who knew how to do those never-ending grabs, so that his son could be taught a lesson, humbled into giving up video games and focusing on his education.

And speaking of education, he was responsible for their training, wasn't he? But they didn't seem to give a shit. Even when they talked ethics, it was more in relation to Ariana Grande, or Lana Del Rey who, in Fawltea's opinion, sounded more like car models.

He wondered why all of these popstars had such car-sounding names:

Ariana Grande – Corolla Grande

Lana Del Rey – Ford Del Rey

Taylor Swift – Suzuki Swift

Whatever happened to the good old days of names like Beyoncé and Lady Gaga? Nowadays you have people calling themselves Sabrina Carpenter, which in Pakistan would be considered a local carpentry business. Or Charli XCX, which just reminded him of the Punnett Square for color blindness and how XcX women were carriers. Is this why she calls herself that? She's colorblind? Brave, I suppose.

Fawltea made his way out of that godforsaken “It's a medicine ward where we do everything but practice medicine” that would've humbled even the harshest of administrators, wondering where his chums Frank and Joe Hardy (he had nicknamed them such because they reminded him of his favorite duo of adventurers) were; probably off on a grand adventure in the Margalla Hills, befriending a Snow Leopard and what not. Or possibly even gone to FATA and Balochistan, masquerading as locals to capture terrorists. In Fawltea's view, there was no timeline where these tigers among men would not have been recruited by the army in secret, maybe that's why they worked at the government hospital where no one knew who was where, as a deep cover.

As a matter of fact, they had both gone to the police hospital, just a few miles away from where Fawltea was currently, because funds were in short supply and the local blood bank proved a most amiable treasure chest if one only knew where to sell the stolen packs. Far from being secret agents, they would be more likely to sell the nation for some change.

He had only gotten as far as the emergency block, when once again, that annoying pest Gul Abad was waiting at the special entrance meant for ambulances, defibrillator in hand. He was a technician who pretended to be a cardiologist, and if recent rumors were to be believed, he claimed to have specialized in electrophysiology.

Of course, he was more like a lizard whose skin changed its color depending on where he was, in the ICU he was known as Gul Abad the intensivist, and he must've had many more roles besides that.

“For God's sake, Gul Abad, not every emergency case needs to be shocked.”

Gul Abad merely rolled his eyes. “You should be glad someone wants to learn, unlike all your other trainees. Anyways, what's the harm, all it does is analyze the rhythm and tell me if its shockable or not.”

Fawltea was in no mood to argue, and that last riposte was quite nasty, he was done for the day. He didn't care to tell Gul Abad that he was wasting precious seconds, especially when a patient arrived with bullet holes in his body, and Gul Abad would stop them at the entrance for “mandatory rhythm analysis.” Someday, he'll get his, thought Fawltea.

As Fawltea walked, he was ambushed by that which he feared the most, an army brat. For those not in the know, an army brat is the spawn of usually not one but two army officers, and crossing one in Pakistan can have disastrous consequences. This one, like all others, was beyond entitled.

“Dr. Fawltea, I was wondering, can I do open heart surgeries?”

You're a medicine trainee, you're not even allowed in one of the damn ORs – is what he wanted to say – but he also didn't want to end up in a black Vigo, vanished without a trace, lost to time, knowing full well his damn son would be playing video games without even batting an eye, not giving a toss. Possibly, he would even order a cake.

“I'll uh….I'll talk to the departmental chair, see if we can't arrange something, you are, after all, so damn talented. How about we start you off on something small, hmm, an appendectomy?”

She preened at the praise but there was also a smidgen of annoyance he could pick up on. “Appendectomies? Even Gul Abad does those, give me something serious to do, na.”

Somehow, the fact that Gul Abad had started doing surgeries did not surprise Fawltea one bit. No wonder post op infection rates were peaking. To make matters worse, that na was not a friendly na, it was the passive aggressive na, lord help him.

“How about some cardiac catheterization to start off with? We can even mark it down as part of your future cardiology rotation, change a few dates around, the usual.”

She glared at him as if he owed her a few thousand dollars, or even a kidney, before flashing a smile.

“Oh look, the Vigo's here to pick me up. I do hope I'll get to do that open heart surgery, Dr. Fawltea, I simply won't settle for anything less. D'you know, I never noticed just how fast these things are, until today. Why, you could be off in a flash.”

She didn't even bother to look back at Fawltea as she made her way to the Vigo, knowing full well he was probably drenched in sweat and his heart was off its rocker due to anxiety.

In a world where Gul Abad did appendectomies, Fawltea reasoned, surely a qualified medical trainee doing an open heart surgery wouldn't be so bad...That is what government hospitals were for, after all, training dens that churned out butchers at the expense of the poor, uneducated masses.

As Fawltea got to his car, the exit was blocked by a BMW. How typical. And he knew well who that BMW belonged to, like all his demons, this car too had ties to the halls of power. It belonged to some new fangled spoiled navy brat (because army and air force brats weren't enough demons to face, apparently) who had only just started her training at the ripe old age of 33, that too due to nepotism and without passing the first part of the fellowship exam. After acquiring her degree, she'd gone on a world tour for the better part of 7 years, as only the elite could afford to, and was now finally ready to start her life, without even going through any of the hurdles one usually does. And the fact that her training was stipendless bothered her not a bit, for her pocket money was more than what Fawltea made in 3 months.

In fact, now that Fawltea thought about it, this very BMW was something he'd never be able to afford, even if he saved up his whole life. Suddenly he realized why that forlorn, vampire-esque trainee whined about poverty so much. He was the only serious trainee and regular fixture here, though he was not smarter than the doctor that reminded him of Veronica Mars, who while being a genius with insane medical knowledge, cared not an iota to lift a finger because of her “It's better to ease a poor person's suffering by letting them die, they have no future here, this country has no future” world view, Fawltea wondered if Dr. Veronica Mars would also let the emo trainee die, were he to end up admitted here with a serious illness. Then again, she had told Fawltea to drive his car off the hospital terrace when she'd asked him how much he'd saved up for the upcoming rupee crash, so the answer was probably in the affirmative.

For once, Fawltea felt the pain of being poor. He too wanted the very best in life, but could not afford it, it had been his dream to drive a Ferrari, and it would remain so until the day he died. Unless, of course, one of these rich brats invited him to drive theirs some day. He could only hope. He had once dreamt of owning a Bugatti, or a Lamborghini, or even one of the more higher end Ferraris but that was 1998, before the country's first default. Then, he had lowered his gaze to just owning any Ferrari, no matter how cheap, that was the second default. Now that Pakistan had defaulted thrice, he was merely hoping he'd get to drive one someday. O Hope, he told himself, no wonder you were part of Pandora's Box.

Snapping out of his thoughts, he called the naval brat, but of course she was not picking up. Then, because it'd be too pathetic if he went looking himself, he called Gul Abad, who answered almost immediately. “Gul Abad, I need you to find that BMW brat, the one who brags about her damn world tour, no doubt paid for by our damn dime.”

Gul Abad spoke as if he were this serious, intense professor: “Oh, sorry I can't help you, I'm teaching the medical students how to do pericardiocentesis. And it's not going very well. And stop being petty, this is why I keep telling you to stop paying those taxes like me, gullible man.”

Fawltea could hear worried whispers, a cry or two, but before he could say anything, Gul Abad had terminated the call.

Oh well, I have other cards to play, thought Fawlty, and called his only serious trainee, the depressed fellow who looked like he hung out at graveyards. Legend has it that the reaper saw his face and spiraled into depression himself, and for just one day, no one died.

“Yes, I need you to find that BMW brat like yesterday, I'm losing precious time here.” The fellow simply said “Yes, sir” and terminated the call, this is what Fawltea liked about him, he knew his place, and he obeyed without question. Oh, to have a few more like him.

Fawltea stood there, waiting. 5 minutes passed, 10 minutes passed, he sat down on a bench and started looking at his phone. He had left the ward at 1 PM, it was somehow 2:50 already, oh well, he had 5 more hours to himself, and 10 minutes too if it came to that.

At 3:30 he could wait no longer, and called the grave-dweller.

“You seriously can't find one damn doctor? Where can she even be?”

His voice, as beaten as ever, came out softly. “I've searched our ward, no one has seen her sir. Then, I searched the 2nd floor, and even the 3rd. Just 9 more to go...”

“You buffoon, just go to the security room and ask to have a look at the cameras, God, you people are so inefficient.”

20 more minutes passed, and no update, Fawltea sent him an angry voice message, telling him to start by reviewing footage from the car parking.

3 minutes later, he got a call.

“Sir she seems to have left the premises with a guy, it looks like, she's not here in the hospital.”

“Ugh, sod this, I'll just get a damn cab. And tell Gul Abad to cut the brakes on this damn BMW, sod her.”

“Not a good idea sir, he'll just go to her and tell her you said this, sell you out.” he replied.

“Sod you all.” Fawltea said angrily, and started to walk towards the exit gate. He had only just passed the CCU, when he saw Gul Abad teaching 2 medical students the art of reading an ECG. There was no one else in the damn ward, not a single doctor.

“They left you in charge, Gul Abad?”

“Of course sir, they said you can read ECGs, know how to load MI patients, and do pericardiocentesis if need be, and are able to use the defib, they said I'm a cardiologist already. It's Eid, all the trainees went to their villages. They said I can practice central lines while I'm here, and if need be, use the cath lab. Doctor Zain said it's as simple as driving through a tunnel, I just have to push the catheter through.”

“Doctor Zain is a damn pathologist, he's never even seen the damn inside of a cath lab, let alone a procedure. Do you even know what a bloody guide wire is?” Fawltea asked, knowing fully well he was only gonna be more annoyed. At this point, Fawltea's mustache seemed like it was going to grow a pair of beefy arms, and punch Gul Abad's lights out.

“No, but there's nothing like doing, to learn. Experience is the best teacher. And you are just jealous of him because he is a total rockstar and fast bowler, and the nurses don't even look at you while they go all the way to the lab to flirt with him. No one buys your lopsided combover, Dr. Fawltea.”

The mustache deflated faster than the tires of a Suzuki Mehran drifting through glass on one of those roads near Karkhano Market, where all the glass factories had decided to form a giant glass factory behemoth, King of Glass GaoGaiGar as the locals called it in fact, they did not call it such a thing, yours truly is embellishing here

“Goddamit. Goddamn you all. Sod you lot. Sod this CCU, I'll have every damn trainee terminated.” Fawltea's patience for these hooligans, the so called “doctors” of today had run dry.

“Not a good idea, sir, three of them are related to the Corps Commander...” Gul Abad said in a smug tone, and suddenly Fawltea found his patience again. For to Fawltea, that word might as well have been Corpse Commander, bringing forth vivid hallucinations of a rogue lich general with an army of corpses all storming him.

Fawltea hated the milk of human kindness, the very little that remained in him, because it compelled him to stay. He called his graveyard shift crypt dwelling trainee again, and decided to do a proper round. There was also a new fellow, a house officer who didn't know how to tell a patient's pulse, let alone what a beta blocker was, the chief minister's nephew, because of course he was. Gul Abad had also called his friend the janitor Fazal Amin, who was apparently an “expert at calculating doses” because he was just really good at Math, beyond that he had no use. He was also really good with his hands, apparently.

He explained, to these three stooges and that one vampire wannabe – a total emo if he ever saw one – each case, its management protocols, possible complications, and what to keep an eye out for, as best he could. There were 12 beds, and it took Fawltea 15 odd minutes to cover each. Fawltea had lost 3 more precious hours of his time. It was now 7 PM, and he only had one hour left.

It's Eid, dammit, I can't waste this day, I simply must do something. Fawltea ran, ran outside to get a cab, he had but crossed the building when he saw the BMW leaving, finally, oh thank God. He ran back to his car, and turned the keys. Ignition.

Only there wasn't any.

No, he had to make this day count, he would fight his compulsion to troubleshoot, test and diagnose, to repair, he would not waste his only day off, he would take a cab and go for a stroll and dinner at the nearby golf club, at the very least, and possibly even play a round or two, if they let you at night, for once he would spend his money and treat himself, his wife never agreed to give him any time off, he had to make this count dammit, he had to...……

“Say Gul Abad, you wouldn't happen to know how to fix cars, would you?”

“As it happens, sir, Fazal Amin here moonlights as a mechanic....”

And so they made their way to the car, Fawltea, Fazal Amin, Gul Abad, and even the emo trainee.

“Hachi Go...” said the trainee, and popped the hood, getting to work before Fazal could even understand what he had said.

Well, at least I found my new mechanic, thought Fawltea, taking the cigarette Gul Abad had offered. He had never smoked in his life, but he wanted to get something out of this day, at the very least. The damn thing tasted like melted tires, but he continued to blow smoke, between coughs. He wondered if maybe this is what he needed to be cool, damn Zain and his damn rockstar looks. No one should have a full head of hair and look 30 at 50, Fawltea felt. Damn you, Telomeres, and damn you Free Radicals, and damn you especially, Apoptosis. Damn you, Anne Hathaway, for being a vampire and hiding the secrets of immortality from the rest of us.

He couldn't believe he was driving home half an hour later, his car felt better than ever. Fazal Amin was magic, the garage he worked at was a mere 5 minutes away, and that coupled with emo mister's knowledge had led to his car getting a shot of adrenaline. The two crazy geniuses were talking about how they'd managed to squeeze in an automatic transmission with close gear ratios for a more sporty feel, whatever that meant; Fawltea wasn't really paying attention to his emo trainee's infodump, all he heard was 8-6 or something.

Fawltea was cruising, it was as if he was young again. Zain was right there, right next to his car in his stupid 2007 Civic, Fawltea hit the accelerator hard, showing him the true power of his unreasonably maligned car, for that moment he was not Dr. Fawltea, Internal Medicine Specialist who fancied himself a better Cardiologist than anyone else in Peshawar, he was Michael Schumacher, making lesser drivers taste his tire's dust. All he needed was some rain, and for Zain to slip, crash and burn, but alas.

As he continued to blitz through Mall Road pretending it was Need for Speed 1 – for Fawltea never did like 2 – the traffic light turned red, Fawltea hit the brakes repeatedly but the car just kept going.

“Oh well, if Gul Abad can do appendectomies, maybe I can drive home without brakes,” he reasoned. He knew the coin of fate had fallen on tails far too many times for one day, and now it was time for heads.

Just then, a BMW suddenly veered onto the road.

“Well, shit.”

*presented as is, yeah

• i have a real nice water tumbler, it’s black, stainless steel or something, my wife got it for me. water tastes good in that tumbler, and the same water tastes different in a different tumbler, so my tumbler has this special quality, in my mind. i’ve notcied that some people aren’t happy with their tumblers; they want all sorts of stuff, like the next best tumbler, or the next best car, or a bigger house, and a pool in the backyard. why does it seem like some people can only enjoy stuff they haven’t got? why can’t people just enjoy the tumblers they have now?
  
• my favorite pokemon is Togepi on account of all the potential—and the nice triangles
  
• It’s almost like, if you love something, you should leave it alone, set it free.
  
• some bloggers literally be like: “computer, write me the most overwrought fucking bullshit you can think of about my dead grandma. thanks.”
  
• “all morons hate it when you call them a moron.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• when I was young, i felt like everyone was looking at me. now, I feel like no one looks at me ever. I don't know which is worse.
  
• every medical drama when something uplifting happens: analytic piano melody
  
• lost phone like a phantom limb
• “Greetings, novitiate, and know first a reassurance: Mankar Camoran was once like you, asleep, unwise, protonymic.” —Mythic Dawn Commentaries
  
• democracy is doomed because anyone who seeks office, even through an electoral process, is predisposed to the pursuit of power, and the pursuit of power is inherently corrupting, and the desire for power is a huge red flag, as you know in your deep down places
  
• she felt far away like a person who is far away.
  
• “doordash partners with klarna to provide ‘eat now, pay later’ service.” ya, now I can take out a loan for my taco bell?
  
• pretend pretund
  
• page 193, Holden talks about wanting to become a catcher in the Rye, catching children before they accidentally fall off a cliff—which is metaphorically kind of what Holden is doing in this novel, being a stupid kid and maybe falling off an existential cliff; also, in the tarot, the fool card, the fool is about to walk off a cliff, and there's a dog barking/nipping at his ankles, trying to stop/warn him from falling off the cliff, so the dog In the fool tarot could be considered a Catcher in the Rye, of sorts, for Holden.
  
• you know that tense feeling you get in your mid-to-upper back when you're in a dark area? it's like this physical sensation of fear. sometimes it's predictable, like in a dark area you've never been in before, but other times it can randomly happen, like when you're outside your own home, taking the garbage cans to the road at midnight or whatever—this sudden sensation of fear in your back that seems to come out of nowhere, as if your body somehow knows that someone (or something) is watching you from a nearby bush or something. idk. just a weird thing. maybe some sort of survival instinct, but sometimes it seems to kick in when there's no actual threat around, as if the survival instinct is defective in some way—maybe because it hasn't been truly needed for several ancestral generations due to the relative peace of first-world life? the instinct is out of practice, dull? it's all out of whack or something? or maybe, when it does happen, seemingly at random, when you're taking out the trash at night or whatever, maybe someone actually is watching you. maybe our bodies do actually know when someone is watching us with malevolent intent, even from long distances? but that seems a little supernatural. and that also means that, just now, just before i got the inspiration to write this note, someone was watching me in my backyard… or perhaps the sensation just exists to keep us in a heightened state of awareness in the dark, in general—that seems more likely.
  
• anti-war is anti-orgasm
  
• when i was like 14 I had the coolest The Cure t-shirt, it was white with purple and blue watercolor paint splashes on it, and it had that silhouette-like pic of Robert Smith with his back turned with guitar hanging with the big shoes and crazy hair (same pic as the one on Join the Dots); I got it from Junkman’s Daughter in Little Five Points, downtown Atlanta. no idea what happened to it.
  
• America is Mordor. Americans are orcs.
  
• one of the core American values is hypocrisy. I don't need to explain this; you always know
  
• Kirsten Dunst singing Turning Japanese; “I want a doctor to take your picture, so i can look at you from inside as well.”
  
• Bill Clinton playing sax on The Arsenio Hall Show is one of the coolest things a president has ever done (note that Clinton played the same Sax lick during every recorded instance of him playing sax, so by no means was he some expert sax dude). the whole Lincoln emancipation proclamation comes in at a close second, of course.
  
• in a world where everyone has magical powers, those born without magic powers are the most magical of all, or something—although it would probably suck.
  
• Red Hot Chili Peppers fills the room with a certain vibe that i cannot abide
  
• “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” —The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
  
• the inside of Barnes & Nobles makes me want to kill myself. support your local book stores, kids.
  
• I have to catch a glimpse of myself in every reflective surface I pass, why is that?
  
• when trump says “you don't have the cards,” what he means is: you don't have the guns. because everything is about violence to these people.
  
• cyber attacks against oligarchical structures might be one of the only ways that the average citizen can fight back nowadays—DDOS attack Tesla, Amazon, etc? i think this might be totally justified, as long as you're not harming innocent people by hacking/leaking customer info.
  
• Brand loyalty is corporate mind control
  
• idk if it’s just the fact that i’m entrenched in writing and stuff, but sometimes i read these
  
• when the night sky clouds are like chiffon, the moonlight diffuses mellow gold.
  
• sad truth of the whole Lord of the Rings cinematic universe is that Tolkien would have hated all of them—each and every film—because they stray too far from the themes of the books, are too violent, and are too Americanized. America being something Tolkien disliked immensely, what with all the industrialization, greed, and endless drive for expansion, destroying nature, the list goes on forever. so when you watch the LOTR movies, you have to kinda treat it as it’s own thing entirely, almost not related to Tolkien’s work at all.
  
• sleeping in a non-ground level room just feels different, you know? elevated.
  
• conduct yourself in a way that wouldn't be embarrassing if written about in a memoir.
  
• had a dream where I bought a “Nintendo Genesis” and, before checking out, I turned to the cashier and said “it’s not going to work is it?” then the cashier just laughed at me. what does it mean??????
  
• one of my co-workers demands people address her with the “miss” honorific which is a little fucking weird.
  
• “I thought I could organize freedom; how Scandinavian of me.” —Bjork
  
• ReviewBrah (TheReportOfTheWeek) is the millennial-era Christopher Walken of YouTube
  
• she's the type of person who would get mad at you for something you did in a dream
  
• thinking back to a good day, you might remember the songs you were listening to or way the flowers smelled or her smile against the ocean backdrop, but you never remember how your hair looked—that's why I shaved my head.
  
• you ever heard a good song titled “Untitled?” i haven't
  
• you have contracted droops
  
• cell phone manufacturers should go all in and start making dumb phones with the slogan “are the smartphones that WE MAKE consuming your life and making you feel stupid? get one of our new dumb phones instead!” capitalize on both markets, a market they made themselves lol insidious rly. see, i don’t even need a degree in marketting to come up with evil shit, it’s that easy
  
• I think about myself in the past tense often, as if I'm someone else talking about another person (me), like “oh, he was shot at the pier and he was listening to Sonic Youth when it happened.” I don't know why I do this. it feels very egotistical, though. I've done it my whole life, as far back as I can remember.
  
• “ I watched this thing on the news and now I'm really upset” maybe stop watching the news?? The greatest existential myth of our time is that the average person needs to be aware of literally everything all the time even though we have basically no say over any of it, like the media/politicians just want us all to feel really fucking bad all the time, so we don’t better ourselves
  
• “when you're young, you're a loaded gun.”
  
• i often mistype “YouTube” as “YouRube”
  
• a co-worker sent me an email with the abbreviation “tldr,” but “tldr” was hyperlinked to the Wikipedia article detailing what “tldr” actual meant, which I thought was a little fucking weird—considerate, but a waste of time, and a little presumptuous—as if people don't know what “tldr” means. i guess some don't. but who are you, the arbiter of colloquial early-2000s verbiage? fuck off
  
• “In summary, while “may” and “might” are often used interchangeably, they do have subtle differences in meaning and usage. “May” is generally used to express permission, possibility, or a high degree of certainty, while “might” is used to indicate a lower degree of possibility, hypothetical situations, or past events.”
  
• if you cross your eyes while looking at yourself in a mirror then slowly get closer to the mirror, you look like a cyclops you.
  
• msm talking heads refer to “the market” as if it's a living organism; “the messaging from the White House certainly doesn't put The Market at ease! The Market is scared! We should be nice to The Market! The Market is sensitive!” like The Market is down sort of metaphysical borg cube, a postmodern collective of all of humanity’s wishes and desires. when we're having a bad week, feeling depressed, The Market goes downnnnnn. etc.
  
• “I like to remember things my own way; how I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” —Lost Highway
  
• chewing gum brands ranked by bubblability:
  
• “good people have to fight to exist.” —Alex G, Gretel
  
• life insurance incentivizes murder???
  
• i cannot stand the saccharine “notes”-culture bullshit on Substack; “having readers doesn’t matter if you love to write; true writers don't care about likes and subscribes; the number of subscribers you have is not an indication of the quality of your writing! don't feel bad if no one reads your stuff, because you're a genius either way! …. but also, if you restack this note, I'll restack and promote your blog! but again, none of this matters, but please post a comment below with a link to your blog, and please restack this! but again, true writers shouldn't need or want to market themselves!!!” I think you kinda get the point; it's also easy to sit there and be like “look guys, likes and subs don't matter” when your account has 10k subs and hundreds of likes on every post, lol. the hypocrisy is palpable, but not only that, the unawareness—that's what really gets me; either the poster is totally unaware of their contradictions, OR they are actually grifting for subs by playing on the emotions of writers who feel like their stuff is shit because no one reads it. it’s kinda gross. similar energy to ambulance chasers or something, charlatans, idk
  
• “They serve Quarter-Pounders, they will put pounds on you.” —Wesley Willis, Rock N Roll McDonald’s
  
• I love these YouTubers that put the copyright law text/verbiage at the start of their video; is this not the most guilty-minded behavior ever? under title 17 of U.S.C. section 107 I AM NOT BREAKING ANY LAWS, I SWEAR. like they're citing the shadow proclamation or something.
  
• TIME IS A CIRCLE; what once was is again; the first and last thing you remember is womb egress, or something.
  
• The most offensive thing about the smartphone market—apart from the fact that the industry tries to get you to buy a new phone every year and they rot your brain—is the fact that every new smartphone looks exactly the fucking same. it’s the most boring-looking tech imaginable, just a fucking rectangle, with absolutely no ingenuity or creativity behind it whatsoever; that's the most offensive part about this whole thing. (maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, maybe it's not the most offensive thing, the most offensive thing would be the fact that smartphones are rotting all of our brains, but in terms of like aesthetics, this is really really bad, like imagine if every new game looked like Gears of War or something)
  
• 2/23: just sat in my office for three hours writing, only managed to get 222 words out. they are OK words, but god damn this writing thing can be fucking ridiculous sometimes.
  
• social media is an extension of capitalism. the product being sold is the self. money is replaced by social clout represented by a number. higher number is good; expansion never-ending. and social media follows the same tit-for-tat principles as any old corrupt backroom dealing. I think animal life kinda defaults to this tit-for-tat behavior, but we as humans with higher intelligence should fight against it, because it makes us feel like shit, as evidenced just by looking around and talking to people. nature is no justification for suffering. “that's just how it is” well it doesn't have to be.
  
• they're selling Nirvana shirts at Target; I'm sure Kurt would have loved that.
  
• “you have the invitation, you have not the address.” —Mythic Dawn Commentaries
  
• everything feels mundane in the moment, magical in memory.
  
• from a lore / writing perspective, Michael Kirkbride is the Elder Scrolls’ special sauce, and without him I have a hard time believing anything interesting will happen with the Elder Scrolls series going forward, in terms of stor, lore, and all that stupid crap.
  
• there's an entire industry of CBR-like “Dragon Ball DAIMA Confirms Super Saiyan 3 Vegeta is Stronger Than Super Saiyan 4 Mini Goku” articles out there which, to me, is like the lowest-of-the-low most bottom-of-the-barrel media-based online content out there; like being 8 years old and insisting Superman is stronger than The Flash or that Spider-Man can beat Captain America in a fight, as if the whole thing isn't fictional bullshit that the authors make up as they go along—its worse than, like, Kardashian content, I think. at least Kardashian stuff is rooted in real life, although highly dramatized and often made up, but at least it’s real people. DBZ power-levels are totally ephemeral postmodern non-things, totally brainless, they offer no deeper meaning to anything, no insight on the human condition, actually a real waste of time and brain space, deep sorrow for those adults out there that read these types of articles. but also WhATeVeRrRrRrrr xD So RaNdOM
  
• if I were a betting person, I would bet money that the majority of media/art critics out there are literally just fucking jealous.
  
• in a post-facts society, rhetoric is all powerful.
  
• “Aurora Phelps allegedly used online dating apps to lure at least four older men to meet her in person, then drugged them with sedatives and stole their money in a ‘sinister’ romance scheme, the FBI says.” this is one of my kinks.
  
• “Errol (Elon Musk’s father) once commented, ‘The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce.’” RUNS IN THE FAMILY
  
• the ghost of a ghost
  
• Robert Smith has been married to the same woman since high school—so my question is, who the fuck are all his songs about? some are quite clearly about other women, lyrically, like “How Beautiful You Are,” in which he talks about hating some woman they he was once intimate with. maybe they have a polyamorous relationship? or maybe he's just singing hypothetically about stuff? storytelling??
  
• self-promotion makes me feel so sick. this whole please-read-my-work dynamic, like whoring myself for attention—attention that I want but shouldn’t want because I should be self-sufficient, able to cultivate my own happiness without people telling me that I am smart or a good writer or whatever. there is something gross about marketing yourself. i need to dig deeper into why it feels so gross, maybe an essay, one day. the money one is easy, because money taints artistic endeavors, however slightly, by making part of the artistic pursuit about making money, which means the art is subject to corruption or disingenuousness as to manipulate a market as to make more money; but the “attention seeking” self-promotion is harder to attack, because obviously humans like attention and need it, being social animals, but it still feels gross on some level, maybe for the same reasons as the money-making self-promotion, i.e. to maximize self-promotion you need to pander to a certain audience, and this inclination to pander may dilute the work, make it disingenuous in relation to the true intent of the artist, who is now subtly altering their work to pander to a certain audience.. hmmm. i think there may be a seedling here, or a sprout, but not a full tree, not yet. maybe it's the ME ME ME-ness of the whole thing, so focused on the self, self-promotion as a willful admittance of narcissism, like you're so special that you deserve more attention than the normal everyday person, perhaps this is what makes me uncomfortable: the ease at which people can self-promote but not admit that they're self-absorbed egotists that really only care about ME ME ME?
  
• it's nearly impossible to make friends as an adult. while playing with my son, I met a husband/wife at the playground, they also had a kid my son’s age, so we exchanged numbers, and I sent a text like “hey let me know if you want to do a playdate or just want to hang, I don't have many friends in the state” and ever since then, when I see them at the playground (small town), THEY AVOID ME—yes, AVOID ME; and it's not just in my mind, or paranoia; last two times they saw me, they left around the back area, without saying a word, despite having seen me, to avoid me. ONE TIME I EVEN WAVED. it's actually really strange, like maybe me “I have no friends here” text made them think I was a weirdo or something? I came on too strong? like, what is this world we're living in where people being honest and vulnerable are seen as fucking creepers? Jesus.
  
• every minute, a butterfly drowning
  
• cut from THE GHOSTS OF 27TH STREET: Sometimes, things just happen, and sometimes those things are good things, but other times those things are really bad things—and yes, I know, that sounds really dumb, a big duh moment; of course things happen. And of course we can, and should, take precautions to prevent certain things from happening, and certainly the wisdom gained from being an idiot is not without it’s perks, but, still, sometimes, things just happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and, in all fairness, there’s nothing you should have to do about it, in an ideal world, bad things shouldn’t happen at all.
  
• The Space X TESLA Zaibatsu (We’re close to this future, maybe already there)
  
• “this whole album slaps” like WTF does that mean. what is it hitting. the listener?
  
• Bilbo is like god mode in The Hobbit, the ring breaks the game—just like invisibility breaks Oblivion.
  
• had a bizarre dream in which I swam in the decorative pool of some mansion. nothing further.
  
• I visited the USAID.ORG site on 2/27, and it's been turned into a big wall of text, a notice with the headline “Obtaining Personal Belongings from the Ronald Reagan Building,” and at the bottom: “As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAID direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally.” something scary about this; how quickly someone's livelihood can be changed by a notice on a website. what is really happening to our country, really.
  
• one of the things about Trump is that he’s proved that, if the president wants something done, it can and will be done, and this means that, in the past, when liberal presidents were sitting there like, “i want to legalize weed (or abortion, or student loan forgiveness, or whatever), but it’s a big bureaucratic thing and it needs to go through all these approvals, which is why i can’t just snap my fingers and do it” that these were all just bullshit excuses, they never really wanted to do any of that shit, it was all to manipulate voters, to get more votes. this is the only good thing Trump has done: lifted the wool over our eyes, revealed that changing shit in government is actually pretty easy for the president, if they want to do it.
  
• Trailer-home backdoors without steps so you just fall right through; Wonder if anybody has died accidentally doing that, like, maybe, they were visiting the trailer home for the first time, and they just opened the backdoor and walked through without thinking and just fell. broke their legs or something
  
• my day-to-day is like small existential crisis over whether or not I should download the reddit Mobile app and what kind of attention-deficit darkness that will lead to, and what sort of productivity issues that will lead to, and how that will impact my writing, and my free time—just to illustrate the magnitude of probably unnecessary worry that goes into every little decision.
  
• the fact that newer games often have some sort of TWITCH DROPS menu programmed into them is fucking sicken to me; like, 20 years from now, when Twitch is fucking dead or sold off, name change, whatever, these games will continue to have this fucking nonsense menu that does nothing (i guess devs could patch them out at that point but why would they bother?)
  
• only in America can you be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt but still buy a brand new 100inch TV
  
• Brave New World’s success at the box office makes me figuratively weep for modern cinema.
  
• carwash or car wash or car-wash
  
• there is a difference between cleanliness and order.
  
• Oblivion’s Shivering Islands expansion has the same energy as Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m!!1!!1!
  
• I feel kinship with Andy Rooney
  
• watching dragon Ball daima to see the cool super Saiyan 4 shit but as I was watching it I just felt embarrassed, just pure embarrassment watching these cartoon people scream and punch and shoot balls out of their hands/head and shit; it's just so mindless, no substance, stupid, just pure cringe; when they say “anime is for children,” this is what they're talking about, maybe I'm getting old, fuck. some entertainment is better than others, from a standard of “meaning,” like, the anime “MONSTER” has a lot more “meaning” than “DRAGON BALL.” this applies to all stuff, for exmaple, if you’re a writer, and you only write sex/action stuff, your writting has very little meaning outside of BASE URGE SATISFACTION (i like fuck, i like violence), like, there’s an audience for that, sure, but that’s not me. I need my VIOLENCE/FUCKING to be accompanied by some introspection and higher thought, not just the base urges on paper. SORRY.
  
• David Bowie plays a very important character in Twin Peaks
  
• imagine how sad your life would have to be to say something like, “I've been a life-long Wendy’s fan…” like, the corporate hands here have dug deep into the gray matter of this hypothetical person. idk. being a FAN of [CORPORATE THING] seems sick to me, in a i’m-being-manipulated kind of way.
  
• the simple reason why Zelensky doesn't want to sign a deal giving up land/resources to the Russia/US (respectively) in exchange for “protection” is actually really simple, for 2 reasons; 1) it’s exortotion (like the mob coming to a local store and offering “protection from theft” for a price lol) and 2) Ukraine is a sovereign fucking nation, and Russian invaded them, so regardless of how much blood has been spilled on either side so far, Russia doesn’t get to time out the clock as if they never tried to conquer a sovereign nation to begin with. basically Russia is the aggressor here, and any concession made to Russia is more akin to Ukraine just rolling over, which sets a very bad precedent, reinforcing the idea that MIGHT MAKES RIGHT, which, when taken to its logical conclusion, results in dictatorships and widespread death all over the planet.
  
• I hate everything I've ever written. if I like something I've written. just give it a month or so and I'll hate it. this seems to be the curse of writing.
  
• “Dragons may not have much real use for all their wealth, but they know it to an ounce as a rule.” —Tolkien, The Hobbit
  
• there's like six novels worth of interesting material to be gleaned from any given Waffle House’s workforce.
  
• Robyn Hitchcock has a substack, most posts are hidden behind a pricey paywall, this disappoints me, big time. makes me sad.
  
• i loathe the adjective “INTERESTING,” it's vacuous, a platitude, and redundant, because everything is interesting—if you find just specific things interesting, then you're just boring.
  
• “Lord of the Never-There.”
  
• spend 2 years making a record only for it to appear on some tiktokers’s “best rock album head tilt” video—something about dimwitted critics turning very hard work into a casual score or “yeah this is a good album” or “yeah this is a bad album” for clicks (and cash) is gross, very American, consumerist, i think i am starting to develop strong anti-America sentiment, and i think that, if you read this whole thing, you’ll agreee that i am indeed starting to develop those things, like i don’t even know if i like democracy anymore.
  
• “I will wear costume after this war will finish,” Zelensky replied. (in reference to why he doesn't wear a suit to Oval Office meetings. I quite like the use of the word “costume” for suit, lol. although i don’t tihnk he used the word “costume” to offend, he’ just bad at American English, but this only makes it better, i think. [fuck america])
  
• stop being pretentious, just use Ubuntu bro, who cares, not every choice in life has to be some profound ethical statement, abstaining from certain operating systems or browsers or whatever is not going to save the world, so annoying, CHILL OUT, or at least stop shaming people, chrissakes
  
• “Blessed are the Obsessed, for their courses are clear.” —The Blessings of Sheogorath
  
• anti-trump posting on x??? apparently there are real people who do this and don’t think twice about it, and many of these people are American, which makes sense because hypocrisy is a core American value.
  
• my dad has always been somewhat of an anti-intellectual—”philosophy is pointless, money is more important than you think, art is a waste of time, &c. &c.”—and I think I have inherited this trait a little bit, as I have a default disdain for pretentious intellectual types (like, the disdain just automatically turns on for me the moment someone starts talking about literature [in person], unprompted; like, if we’re friend or whatever, and we’re talking about books or whatever, that’s fine, but just randomly talking about intellectual stuff, or trying to fit it into vaguely related conversation [even friends who do that annoy me]), and I do see the logic behind my father’s anti-intellectual sentiment—mostly because it's easy to think yourself into a coma, into inaction, like someone who pledges total non-violence might then let themselves killed, for no good reason, other than the fact that they had pledged total non-violence (this is not a great example, but i’m typing on a roll right now and am not proof-correcting). And I do focus on “real, tangible” stuff over intellectual stuff sometimes, usually. And I get very annoyed when I'm talking to someone online/irl and that person is all like “the proto-wittgensteinian blah blah” or they’re typing to me in like perfect english with high-brow punctuate, as if talking to me on Discord or whatever is akin to writing a novel, like they’re obviously trying real hard to appear smart and/or impressive, while being unable to realize that they're embarrassing themselves, which kills me; but at the same time, I am intellectual myself—as evidenced by my entire writing portfolio— and I do some of this stuff myself, hypocritically, so, in some ways, I guess I'm an anti-intellectual intellectual, which is why people like Mark E. Smith and Lou Reed appeal to me, i think, because they too claim to hate intellectualism while simultaneously having vast bodies of intellectual work credited to their name (be it music, books, lyricism, etc); so it’s almost as if they hate themselves in some way—as if us anti-intellectual intellectuals hate ourselves in some way, like we’re so contrary that we’re even contrary of our own very nature. idk.
  
• keep on pushing me baby don't you know you drive me crazy
  
• aliens come down, find the ruins of human civilization, find a keyboard, see 1! and 2@ and 3# (etc.), and believe those to be single symbols; so our human legacy is misinterpreted, you know, like a big galactic phone game, of sorts. the aliens would be all like, “the civilization on this planet used did 1! plus 1! and the like” etc.
  
• “Have you caught my act yet? I'm Thaedil, the juggler. I'm sure you've heard of me. Oh, who am I kidding? More likely you came to scoff at the worst juggler in the world.” —NPC from Oblivion, who reminded me of me, just replace the word “juggler” (in the quote) with “writer.”
  
• Short story about a guy who role plays in World of Warcraft (or a -like) all day, and the story starts out as if it's in a real fantasy realm, like a fantasy novel, using fantasy language without telling the reader that this is a digital fantasy world; but towards the end of the short story, the guy has to log out and like brush his teeth and go to bed or something; the big twist being that the whole story took place in a digital world instead of a real fantasy world (kinda like The Egg chapter 1 I guess, but more SAD, like implying this digital fantasy world was the guy’s whole life).
  
• the best, most well-maintained, nicest-looking, fan wiki is,UESP, by leaps and bounds; the staff’s dedication to quality (and Elder Scrolls), is incredible. and the no-ads, tan-parchment aesthetic is top notch, always pleasant to look at.
  
• never met an honest Air Conditioner guy, or competent.
  
• “DUNE 2 wins best self-serious, humorless film award” everyone cheers
  
• Gen x online usernames often be like “dipshit” and “2DFraud” and other self-deprecating things, obviously to give a first impression of “hey look i know I suck and I don't care” when they actually care a lot, otherwise they wouldn't care to preemptively deflect accusations of being a dipshit/fraud (I'm generalizing here).
  
• finish a video game: feel changed for thirty minutes, then feel empty inside. finish a book: feel changed forever.
  
• substack culture is more celebratory of the idea of being a writer than of the act of writing itself.
  
• if you think my depiction of people in the deep South ghetto is offensive or generalizing, then you have never been in a deep South ghetto; keep your sheltered performativity to your cringe Tumblr blog, thx.
  
• Trump has imposed high tariffs on Canada and Mexico, citing their unwillingness to combat the “fentanyl trade” as the reason—this claim is both untrue (Canada, at least, has done a lot to curb the drug trade at their border) and, frankly, a very niche justification for a trade tax that harms citizens of all affected countries, especially Americans, since the U.S. imports more than it exports, meaning that if Canada and Mexico reduce exports to America (in response to these tariffs), prices for Americans will rise due to basic supply and demand. Trump is even on record saying Americans “may be harmed in the short term,” so what he is banking on is that we will recover by pivoting to making more goods in America instead of relying on other countries. This is a deliberate way to ensure that America is not reliant on other countries to prosper (whether or not this will be successful is a whole other thing). My theory is that Trump is not imposing these tariffs because of fentanyl but rather because, in the long term, he wants to distance America from other countries, as he wants to prime America for expansion. Trump is a pro-isolation nationalist who believes that America is the best country in the world, that America should be the only country in the world, and that America can support itself without relying on imports from Canada, Mexico, China, or anywhere else. Trump is trying to make America a self-sufficient superpower that doesn’t need support from any other country, and his way of achieving this is to impose tariffs that deter building allies (among other things—see: withdrawing from WHO, Greenland, talks about exiting the UN, halting funding to literally everywhere, the Ukraine situation, etc.). Now, if you’re not convinced, consider that Trump has “jokingly” threatened to take over Canada—a sovereign nation (meaning such an act basically necessitates a war)—and that he is renaming all sorts of shit to “America X” (or whatever), and suddenly his true motive starts to reveal itself: He wants America to take over the world and, as such, he does not want America to rely on other countries—which he views as TARGETS FOR EXPANSION—as dependence on these other countries would make American conquest/expansion more difficult in the long run. From Trump, going forward, expect to see more policy that, on the surface, doesn’t make sense; stuff that may seem to hurt America more than it helps (in the short term [Trump logic]); stuff that makes countries we were once friendly with pissed at us—and each time Trump does something like this, expect him to blame it on the targeted country/organization, like he did with Canada (“didn’t do anything to stop fentanyl!!!”) and WHO (“mishandled the Covid 19 pandemic!!!!”), so that 1) his base doesn’t realize he’s a warmongering monster and 2) he can feel justified in his expansionist bullshit. So, basically, what I’m trying to say is, RIP.
  
• “Topping the list: Dark Side of the Moon. Dark Side of the Moon is considered Pink Floyd's best album for a reason. I will not explain the reason.”
  
• another classic from the band fantasy of a broken heart: “We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways.”
  
• stuff like this for single-player games is a huge turn off: “Preorder Day One Edition and get: Prosperity Orb, Fortune Orb, and 57,300 Potch!” like, it manages to make this single-player-offline game seem mobile, gatcha-esque somehow?? why do they do this.
  
• consider plucking an eyebrow, and then looking at the part of the hair that was inside of your head, the little film around it, the DNA or whatever that is; and then consider that there has to be a section just beyond the first layer of skin that is just these inside-the-skin hair film parts, the hair epidermis, like eeew. human body bestows us with a brain that finds it's own body vessel disgusting, isn't that weird
  
• look what your love has done to me cmon baby set me free
  
• i don’t think modern AI (which is not “AI,” but I’m going to keep using the term AI because it’s the most well-understood, colloquially) could ever write/record a Sonic Youth-like song. i don’t think AI would ever think to drag a screwdriver against guitar strings, not in a vacuum at least. any ingenuity like this would have to be inserted by humans. and this interests me because, like, “Avant Garde” probably couldn’t happen with AI, at least not true “Avant Garde” that’s entirely unique; NEW stuff. humans have to think of something NEW, then do it, then AI copies it, so AI can’t come up with new shit, it’s just copies at scale.
  
• the elder scrolls online artwork aesthetic is too glossy and sexy; es should not be sexy, it should be a cross between tolkien-esque and pulpy.
  
• we're a Roku-TV-only family
  
• the concept of “canon” in fiction is cancer
  
• paid “writing workshops” are a scam, the only way to become a “better writer” is by reading and writing all the time. some workshop isn't going to make your writing interesting, or give it character; it might make your writing proficient in some arbitrary standard, but not interesting or worth spending the time to read—if anything, a workshop will make your shit more sterile, homogenized, “workshoped.” if you want feedback on your writing, give it to a friend or someone you respect as a writer. random people online or an instructor at a workshop, both are not going to provide valuable feedback, just standardized, boring stuff. not all feedback is valuable, in fact some of its detrimental.
  
• waiting on the Jon Favreau allegations
  
• artists/bands that pretend to be hard, edgy, rebellious, beyond the status quo—but are really just a bunch of white larpers that do Starbucks promos with expensive high-rise condos in the most pretentious artsy part of downtown, aka The Flaming Lips, Spoon, late Sonic Youth, Beck. note I listen to all these bands lol
  
• collectors are gollums
  
• “you can soul trap creatures you summon yourself.”
  
• wife's been listening to rain sounds on the speaker at night; and the other night, it was actually raining, but she still put on rain sounds—yes, despite real rain sounds. “Spotify version sounds better,” she said.I just about puked.
  
• Spoon’s album Girls Can Tell is like Squeeze’s Eastside Story, in fact Spoon is kinda like the 90s-era Squeeze; quirky, soft, melodic, obviously influenced by The Beatles but also the back-then indie grunge zeitgeist, but different from the rest, in some special way.
  
• today, on 3/11, I watched a car hit a goose. dead. the car just drove off. didn't stop or nothing. the goose's mate was standing nearby and, upon realizing that their mate was dead, they started honking, standing in the same spot, near their dead mate, and they honked for at least an hour. I could hear it in my office, the honking. so i got my shovel and a trash bag, went out there, in the middle of the road, and shoveled that dead goose into the trash bag, and then I put that trash bag into another trash bag, tied it up, and then put that trash bag in the outdoor trash bin. and now, when you're reading this, I imagine that trash bag in it is in a landfill somewhere. And I imagine that dead goose’s mate will never truly understand what happened, maybe they've already forgotten, found another mate, I hope so. anyway, the whole thing was a bit foreboding and depressing. when you're born, you never expect to end up in a trash bag in a trash bag in a landfill.
  
• imagine being a “gamer”
  
• hayao miyazaki’s anti-west, anti-war movie (The Boy and the Heron) won an Oscar, an award provided by the very same war-loving West that Miyazaki so often subtlety criticizes with his work; I wonder if anyone in the audience that night got the irony. and that irony is literally all over the place in the west, btw, we celebrate all sorts of anti-west stuff while at the same time partaking in the same western behavior that that anti-west stuff lambastes (see South Park’s anti-corporate sentiment now streaming on MAX!)
  
• I don't really get Bjork, but I don't think anyone can really get Bjork—that's why she's a treasure of our time. She's a foreign soul. Totally unique.
  
• as a developer, by making the MMO more solo-accessible, you run the risk of essentially forcing a community-focused game (w/ dull single-player aspects) into a dull single player game, because it was never really meant to be single player to begin with; for example, one of the appeals of Final Fantasy 11—while being very time-consuming to play—was that it was extremely community focused in that it forced you to play with others and thus build relationships with other people; this was one of the shining strengths of the game outside of its general aesthetic and world. now, with all the recent updates, Final Fantasy 11 is very solo-focused but in a way it feels like a ghost world because you don't need to actually play with anybody to to do anything anymore, they've solofied the experience. you see other players running around but you never interact with them so they're just kind of like phantoms, in a way, might as well be NPCS. it's lonely and depressing. and I understand the need to make an MMO more solo friendly, especially if you intend to keep the game alive forever, because you can't have it online forever due to cos, so turning it into a single-player game essentially keeps it alive forever because you can then, as as developer, remove the online component and just leave it as a dull single player game, a ghost of its former self. what I believe is happening with Final Fantasy 11 is that essentially they're going to make it a single player game so that it's not dead one day, but the problem with this is that it won't be the same game—it'll have the same world and armor and NPCs and weapons and jobs and all that, but it will be missing its most important element: the element of community, which is the most important element of every MMO ever, so in a way all MMOs are destined to die eventually due to cost and the passage of time, even if they’re turned into an offline solo-game, they’ll be a different game at that point.
  
• “Magic: The Gathering fans are not happy about the SpongeBob cards.”
  
• cut from “Something Tookish”: And while I did eventually get a better job, it was only because a coworker got a new job at a different company and then urged me to apply to that company with her referral, which gave me the same nepotistic advantage that I once used as an excuse for not trying to get a better job to begin with, so of course I had to make up another excuse as to why I wasn’t a massive hypocrite, and then another excuse excusing that excuse, and so on, repeating the whole endless cycle of excuses. All this is to say that I have been pretty much just lucking out my whole life, putting in the minimum amount of effort required to get by, and I have a whole bunch of excuses as to why that’s perfectly OK.
  
• On 3/14, while driving past a strip mall, I saw a large Black woman get out of her car with her young child in the parking lot behind the strip mall. She pulled down her pants—exposing her huge Black ass—pissed on the pavement, pulled her white panties up, then got back in the car. Idk wtf that was about. Fucking bizarre. was one of those third-world moments.
  
• short story about someone dating a stage magician who pulls out doves and shit while they're having intercourse, and other weird behaviors, like the magician can't turn it off or something.
  
• ive been thinking about playing Pokemon Gold recently, like on my Miyoo, but then I realized that it's literally just left-right-up-down and A button, sometimes B for backing out of menus; like, like, I realize all games are buttons, but this was like, when the game is so simple—mechanically—that you literally can't not think about the buttons, like the buttons are all you think about, I am going right, pressing right on the pad, now I am talking to this NPC with A, now I'm cycling through the dialogue with A, and so on
  
• isn't funny how sometimes you think you'll never find another great melody to hum, but there you are a week later humming a totally different tune, as if there's just an infinite amount of music to fall in love with? I love music.
  
• I like how my phone keyboard sometimes suggests frowny face emoji as a response to other people's messages, sometimes inappropriately. I always send the frowny face when suggested, w/ no further explanation.
  
• “run for your life, it's Civil Protection!”
  
• “Pokémon Go Players Were Duped Into Training a Powerful AI Map of the Real World: While you thought you were training your Pikachu, you were actually training AI to see the world. This AI doesn’t just create a 3D model—it understands space. It can recognize the layout of a city street, differentiate between buildings and trees, and even anticipate what’s around the corner based on millions of other locations it has seen. Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS), trained on over 50 million neural networks and 150 trillion parameters, is already operational in over a million locations. So here’s the kicker: Pokémon Go players weren’t just collecting Pokémon. They were, in essence, unpaid cartographers for one of the most sophisticated AI mapping projects ever attempted.”
  
• Facebook/Meta is such a failed company that the only reason they're still in business is for a reason totally sidebar to what their actual goals as a company—which is to buildAI/tech garbage—instead, people now just use Facebook to sell cabinets and sofas to locals. it's like a Craig's List 2.0. and Meta execs are seriously trying to make “Meta glasses” the next big thing, lol; they either have no idea how people use their shitty product or they are in denial about it. how embarrassing.
  
• “In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength” -Avatar: The Last Airbender. Iroh, Book 2. Episode 5.
  
• a core American value is hypocrisy, and then we go to church and pray for hypocrisy forgiveness.
  
• fattest woman i had ever seen was working at waffle house, her name was literally America. it was poetic, almost.
  
• Tim Walz says Democrats “aren't doing enough,” but what's he actually doing, really? he's just talking about it, in interviews, then going home to his high-class fancy white suburban gated community. “if i say democrats aren't doing enough, maybe people will think i'm actually doing something, and then they'll vote for me in 4 years!!” one of the core American values is performativity, along with hypocrisy, and inaction. the whole system's a joke. democracy was flawed from the get-go, anyone who runs for political office willingly is already predisposed to the pursuit of power, which is inherently corrupting. walz will continue to do interviews in which he lambasts other Democrats for not doing anything while he himself does nothing at all. as a politician, simply talking about things is not enough—the everyday person can talk about stuff—he has to do something, help force bills through, help organize real political opposition. etc
  
• the grass smelled like grass.
  
• “I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• vespertine is my favorite bjork album; favorite track: frosti. the whole album has this hazy “what if the early 2000s were captured in a music box” kind of feel.
  
• in American video games, nine times out of ten, you can shoot through padlocks, as if every problem can be solved with a gun.
  
• I want to write an essay about Half-Life 2 but it's going to be very very very difficult not to go very very very political with it—what with all the human enslavement, misinformation campaigns, oppressive government, etc.—and I don't like going too political in my work. maybe i could do something like, “when is politician violence OK?” but I've already done that, although the one I already did is kinda weak, and I could probably do it better now, but it would still get too political I think.
  
• “‘I don't want to scare you,’ he said, ‘but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause.’” —Mr. Antolini, Catcher in the Rye
  
• pretty sure my sock account on reddit is shadow banned, and for good reason, because i’m just vitriolic as hell over there, about everything. i feel like i’m channeling some sort of profound darkness when i’m over there. like the dark battery is fully charged, overflowing with negative energy.
  
• I like Moby, IDC what u think. listen to “Shot in the Back of the Head.” how can you not like that?
  
• hello i am the blog police, i am emailing u to let u know that ur site has bad blogs on it, these are blogs that do not adhere to my exact political/social leanings, all takes that are not my own are bad, reporting this to u make me feel very accomplished, like i am making a big difference in the world, getting this one blog taken down, becasue i don’t like the takes, because i have nothing going on in my offline life, and i am actually just a very sad person in general, will u be my friend, please be my friend please please please please.
  
• some of my friends like to pretend that I didn't exist before I met them: “how do you know about X band? never heard you listening to them before.”
  
• there's shit going on at the church tonight. lots of cars in the parking lot, a line of them going far out the lot. their God ain't real but their love & community spirit sure as hell is. that's something I'm missing in my life.
  
• why is it that everyone who claims to read “the classics” has to tell you they read the classics at every opportunity? I read Kiki’s Delivery Service last year—take ur head out of ur ass.
  
• I feel genuine sympathy for older people on social Security who voted for Trump that are now about to have their fucking social security just totally wiped out—and I'm not being sarcastic here. I think anyone who celebrates the fact that “these MAGA boomers will reap what they sow hahaha” are just as psychopathic as the worst of them, because these older people who depend on social Security, misled by propaganda, are really going to suffer when Trump cuts their only means of “income.” suffering is not suddenly okay just because it's happening to people you don't agree with politically. the goal should be to reduce suffering, not celebrate it. there are grown adults out there that literally don't understand the basic lessons of kids shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender. how can we ever expect to improve as a species when “people with red hat should die.” maybe all of us should die.
  
• character that releases any caged animal they see. humorous zoo and pet store situations
  
• the only logical conclusion to America’s materliasm and expansion-obssesssed culture is suicide because, if you follow the doctrine, whatever you achieve will NEVER be enough.
  
• Michael Walz added you to the group.
  
• “In Mark 5:5, the Bible describes a man possessed by demons, often referred to as a “lunatic,” who is described as “crying out and cutting himself with stones” both day and night, living among tombs and in the hills.”
  
• the miserable neighbor who looks for things to report to the HOA just because. people with no real problems make their own, and they make sure everyone around them feels it too.
  
• In avatar The Last Airbender there's an episode where the Avatar has to unlock his chakras, and the final step to doing this is to let go of all attachments— This mirrors some Buddhist teachings— but the Avatar refuses to let go of his love for his girlfriend or whatever, and this Is played as a good thing in the show; I took this as a pretty scathing critique of Buddhism that mirrors my own thoughts on Buddhism, particularly the LIE of enlightenment, or the idea that you (and people in general) should let go of ALL ATTACHMENTS, when I think this would have some pretty negative consequences on human well-being on a massive scale. Note that I think people should let go of some attachments (like many material attachments), but I don't think that people should let go of attachments to other people. Buddhism is something I'm critical of in general (Buddhism is too theoretical, imo, i.e. In theory, if you let go of literally all attachments, you will have nothing to feel suffering over, So therefore you have a eliminated personal suffering in some way, but 1) I think people need some suffering and 2) I just don't think it's realistic to get rid of all attachments—it's like saying “oh if you just drink the happy juice, you'll be happy,” like okay, but like what the fuck is the happy juice? is it even real? [this is a really bad analogy, I blame my fast note-taking brain, no prep, and no editing]) and this is something that I've wanted to write about, and I probably will one day but not anytime soon, cuz got other things i’m writing right now. but this is on the back burner, too bad my burner is way too hot and burns ideas to a crisp quite often.
  
• I don't need copyright protection for my writing because my writing is so cringe that no one would want to take credit for it.
  
• “my teacher is a child with a big smile, no bitterness.” —Alex G

---

#fragments

So much for an easy first job.

Demise had run this playbook before: A quiet heist conducted while the city's heroes were busy elsewhere. Pacify the local civilians, collect whatever item had attracted her attention, and leave quickly and quietly. A clean first job. She'd learned from her previous mistake. Experience had sanded down the rough edges of her procedure until even a heroic response didn't phase her. She'd dismissed Thundriana in less than 3 minutes when she attempted to stop her in Eagleton. She'd put the Pale Strider in the hospital for trying to keep her from snatching the Rabanastre Diamond. Heroes were goofy, sanctimonious, predictable. Barely even worth her time.

She'd assumed the same of the fierce looking Black man in the red and white armor who'd accosted her in the R&D facility of the Meritron Building. He was tall, muscular, and as cocky as the rest. Demise remembered yawning before dropping the stellar engine she'd stolen into the starry abyss of her coat. She'd barely felt anything at all when she'd cast her favorite spell and hurled toward him. Malus Meteora sent her flying through the air and to take her target down with meteoric force. Despite her knees on his shoulders and the solar powered superhero's warm face between her thick thighs, Demise had barely felt anything at all. Heatstroke, as he'd introduced himself, was uncommonly attractive, but she remained unconvinced that he was uncommonly smart or strong. Defeating him, embarrassing him, would be like going through the motions, and she wouldn't feel anything at all doing so. It was all so mundane.

Then he'd proved her wrong. Repeatedly. The Black women with mystical powers hated this man in a way she struggled to fully articulate. It was something in the way he called her a “witch” and said it like a pejorative. The way he kept staring at her chest, or her thighs, or her eyes like some horny, disgusting voyeur. The cocky way he joked as they traded blows. Heatstroke was so goddamn sure of himself. All of it lit something in her, excited her. She'd already hit him with much of her repertoire, including using her summoned shadow servants to bolster her own techniques. She'd put him through the ringer from the very first. And he'd kept getting up, as obnoxious as ever.

He took her best shots and hit her with the kind of power that defied easy hyperbole. He didn't “hit like a truck,” and he didn't have “monstrous strength.” This Heatstroke had already proven he was better, stronger than any of that; he was a real fighter in the superpowered sense. It was the way he moved in his stance, steady and balanced. The way he threw feints and paced his stamina and whatever powers he possessed. He was game for a fucking fight, and the sensation was intoxicating. No distractions, no objectives, no mercy. Demise loved the heat in her blood, the warmth spreading throughout her curvy frame, the glee that came from hurting someone who dared to stand up to her. The 33 year-old witch savored this chance to get to fight without worrying about the rest of the coven getting in the way of her fun, or getting themselves hurt. She wanted to make her name off of his and establish a new threat here on the sunny Southern California Coast. She didn't know much about Heatstroke but she knew she wanted to beat him senseless. She didn't need her thick glasses to see that this man was a challenge and a threat.

And WitchWay's field leader and resident Combat Witch fucking loved every moment of this. It reminded her of why she'd picked this line of work, why she'd been comfortable operating on the wrong side of the law. She was bad. Demise wanted to take all of his strength and pride and joy and crush it. She wanted to hear Heatstroke whimper and watch him cower and see the look in his eyes that said he regretted crossing her. She wanted to have her way with him. She wanted to break Heatstroke and let his humiliation serve as her fearsome introduction to this city. And if he were lucky, maybe she'd have some fun with him before someone came to cart him off. She certainly had enjoyed the feeling of his warm face between her thighs. If his dick was as hard and hot as the rest of him she might just leave him alive after she'd emptied him out.

But as she wrapped her legs around him in midair and spun him to the ground hard enough to crack the tile and leave a crater, the short, curvaceous combat caster had to face a dispiriting truth: Heatstroke didn't stay down. Not when she bounced him off the wall of the laboratory, not when three summoned shadows hit him with consecutive diving elbows, not even when she taunted him about the ass kicking she was delivering. No, instead the musclebound hero stood up, nearly blinded her with a flash of light, and then hit her hard enough that Demise worried he might have knocked a spell out of her memory.

She heard him standing over her, certain he'd won, never noticing the spell she was weaving. Commanding her shadows was second nature and she could do it with her eyes closed. The taunting? The taunting came naturally. With talent and strength and desires like hers, she had the liberty to say whatever she wanted, take whatever she wanted. But he lit something inside her, something bloodthirsty and insatiable. Something she had to fight to keep control of her own desires. Each time she adjusted her wide brimmed hat or glasses or braids was an attempt to keep her burgeoning desires in check. But she didn't want to fuck him.

Demise wanted to annihilate him.

She felt it in her veins, flowing as surely as her magic. She wanted to consume him. He looked worse for wear, his brightly colors clothes and glowing body each bearing the marks of her punishment. But the harder she fought, the harder this cocky superhero hit her in return. The brawny, athletic Black man wasn't ceding any ground while the short, stocky Black witch steadily burned through her mana and her ideas to demolish or demoralize him. And so when they tumbled on the ground for the umpteenth time, she swerved. When she couldn't fully pin him beneath her, she kissed him. The feeling of her lips on his, her chest against hers was almost as gratifying as feeling him go limp. The taste of his mouth was as delicious as his surprise. She adjusted her broad brimmed witch hat and grinned down at him, black and yellow braids falling down around her chubby face, black sclera eyes staring imperiously at him.

It wasn't fair. She'd changed the rules of their conflict on a whim with no warning, adding eroticism to what'd been a simple fight, simply because she'd wanted to. But that was her ethos: doing whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and destroying anyone who dared challenge her. It was why she'd never seriously considered working as a hero. Goody two shoes like Heatstroke didn't get to do things like this. They had rules and procedures and limitations. She had whatever her mind could conceive. Demise seized her moment, pitching forward and trying to choke him with one of her favorite techniques. When Heatstroke fought her complicated maneuver, the frustrated witch wrapped her arms behind his head and pulled him deep into her massive cleavage.

There was more than one way to choke a hero, after all.

But the heat from his face sent an immodest shiver through her chest and between her legs. Fully seated on his waist, Demise felt the rippling muscles of his hips and thighs strained her hips. Just straddling him was a stretch. But Heatstroke's warmth didn't stop at his face. Demise stifled a gasp of her own and kissed him harder, grinding her lips against his abs just to see the shocked look on his stupid face. She especially savored the delicious moment he lost sight of their fight. She knew what enchantment she'd placed on her lipstick, and his subtle, unseemly moan made no secret of what he wanted to do with her, to her.

Fucking loser.

“Ohhh? I wasn't sure that spell would work, but that's not a torch in your pants is it, Heatstroke? Be a good boy and I might reward you.” She teased him, gesturing at her massive chest to further emphasize her body even as she denied him. An obnoxious man like Heatstroke deserved to writhe with unmet need forever, begging for mercy that she'd never give him.

But even that abuse didn't put him down and out. Instead he, woozy and distant, muttered some unintelligible bullshit and pushed him off of her with a strength that was frankly insulting. How was he this strong, even after the beating he'd endured, and the effects of her enchanted lips?

The 33 year-old villainess knew her strengths: she'd overpowered heroes three times her size, and just last month her kisses had turned the pair of thieves who'd tried to double-cross her into needy, drooling sluts crawling over each other for the chance to worship her.

So what made Heatstroke so agonizingly different? She wanted to know, if only before she ruined it, before she despised him. But Demise recognized the grim reality of the situation. Her mana reserves were rapidly depleting and she was no closer to escaping or destroying the sole hero she'd encountered. The realization was sobering, and whatever fire she'd harbored while fighting him had died, smothered by the uncomfortable realization that anyone who arrived on the scene with powers wouldn't be there to help her. At best they'd be greedy villains who'd demand a cut of her take in exchange for help. At worst they'd be whatever this hotheaded asshole counted as friends. Meanwhile, she'd come here for some lawless fun and to start the first of what would surely be many lucrative high profile thefts in this sprawling metropolis. The deceptively strong witch needed to escape now, while she still had her wits, mana and the prototype stellar engine she'd stolen moments before he arrived.

And so the sinister Black woman considered what spellstrikes she hadn't tried yet. The Umbra Driver, a fearsome combination of magical and wrestling acumen, wasn't the kind of move you merely walked away from. She relished the thought of leaving this bright eyed nuisance half buried in the floor as she offered the last words and thoughts he'd ever elicit. But the spell was complicated to weave and harder still to perform. Its substantial costs also meant she'd only get one attempt at it. The risk of burning out her reserves and collapsing somewhere in the city before even securing her ill gotten gains was too great.

No, the thirty-three year old Black witch needed something a little more... measured. And so she began considering alternatives. And when Heatstroke struggled to his feat, she envisioned his defeat. It took the form of a tightly coiled ball of dark magic, churning and vibrating with frenetic energy. Cupped in her palm, the purple-black mass buzzed angrily like TV static. She stared at her work and smiled. Then she leapt at him, enjoying the fear in his glowing eyes as she plunged it into his chest.

---

The curvy, sneering haughty witch didn't remember leaving her feet or hitting the floor. But there she was, pushing up to her hands and knees, coughing and sputtering and swearing and bleeding. Her eye had swollen enough to obstruct her vision, and her cheek and ribs ached. Her head rang like a telephone and her veins throbbed. It was absolutely infuriating. How the hell had the first hero she'd met in this godforsaken city pushed her to her absolute limit? Inconceivable.

Worse yet, this asshole couldn't even die right. Instead he'd deflected the spellstrike at the last possible moment, turning a lethal strike into a devastating one. For both of them. Whatever solar power enveloped him tightened at the last moment and reacted violently to the concentrated mass of dark magic she'd summoned.

Now she heard him murmuring, beginning to wake. Demise decided then and there that fighting Heatstroke was no longer fun, satisfying or lucrative. He stood, armor cracked, hero swaying, and Demise felt an unwelcome pang of arousal shoot through her. The blood and bruises marring his frame did nothing to obscure his good looks. If anything, seeing him battered and ailing only made her want him more. The broad bands on his skin had dulled to pale yellow, and he swayed on unsteady feet. She'd done that to him. She wanted to finish things between them.

Demise waved him in, losing herself in the heat of the moment. In him. She swung at him, annoyed by her own lethargy, only for him to grapple willingly with her. She'd never be too tired to drop a loser on his head.

And then he kissed her, and her plans changed again. He tasted nice, the sweat on her lips and the warmth of his tongue. She wanted him, the strength of his hands on her bountiful hips, the way he squeezed her like she was his already. It was presumptive and bold and she didn't hate it. He'd stood up to her and meant it, lasted in a way few others could, or had. This could be a consolation prize before she conquered him. Heatstroke, this brawny hero, grabbed her bare ass, slipping his hand underneath her torn dress. She gasped, stifled a moan, and fought to maintain her composure, and to think about anything but her burgeoning lust. They kissed, once, and then again: slow, wet, sloppy kisses exchanged by opponents who'd each expected a quick, decisive victory.

She hated how much she wanted this, liked this sensation. Her hands explored him, touching him in ways she hadn't been able to while trying to physically overpower him, doing things she simply couldn't while summoning servants to help her slam, stomp, twist, and choke him. She wanted him, she decided. But she needed to leave. Now.

He'd asked her if she was ready to give up. He must have known how she would answer.

“So what comes next?” He'd asked her. And the Field leader for WitchWay drew on every ounce of her training as a combat witch.

“Your demise.”

She'd left her familiar as a lookout, tasking the enchanted creature with watching for anyone with enough power to interfere with her ongoing robbery. At least, anyone else. Now she spoke to it without words with a bond only the two of them understood. The creature was a fount of mana and Demise needed every drop of it.

The haughty spellstriker summoned her last few shadows, pitiful, threadbare things barely held together like poorly sewn dolls. While they engaged the weary hero, Demise ran, touched her black cat familiar and weaved, a familiar, desperate spell.

Magic wrapped around the beast, turned her familiar into a facsimile of her current appearance. She placed her hand on the black cat's head and suddenly beheld herself instead of the creature. Her familiar still couldn't talk; it was only a cat, albeit a magical one, but the important thing was that her beloved pet looked exactly like she did right now. On one hand this made it a convincing decoy. On the other hand, the sight was frankly disconcerting

Her black and purple braids were frayed, singed, torn. Her cheek was swollen. Her dress had ripped in several places and afforded her precious little modesty. Her heaving breasts strained the now ripped fabric, and her hat and cape both had rips and tears in the night sky fabric. Bruises marred her beautiful dark brown skin and one eye looked swollen. This was not a haughty, conquering witch. No, the Demise she beheld in front of her had been in a fucking fight with a truly fearsome.

And survived. Maybe even won.

She nodded at the familiar-turned-facsimile and fled. Behind her, the hero tore through the last of her summoned shadows. The short, stocky witch felt Heatstroke pull on her threadbare cape. “Get your fucking hands off me!” She yelled, pulling away from him. The fabric gave way and she heard it rip before she broke into a full sprint. “Bitchass!” She offered one last insult and dove through the illusory plate of jet black shadow at the end of the room.

When the black abyss finally parted, she emerged onto a busy street. The witch ducked into an alley, out of sight, and paused to catch her breath. What a fucking ordeal. When her pulse finally slowed, Demise gathered herself, pulling the hat off her head and reaching into the night sky of its underside. The fabric was deeply enchanted, less a fashion accessory than a portal, and her hand vanished into it as she scrounged around the void of starry space stitched into the underside of her hat.

She finally found what she was looking for, not a moment too soon. Someone had come around the corner into the alley, and she was unwilling to engage anyone while she was so utterly depleted. She might have her pride, but more than anything she still had some sense. Heatstroke hadn't knocked all of that loose at least. The witch pulled out an inky, eerie black circle, and shoved it against the wall. A transportation spell. All she had to do was think of her destination and walk.

She heard yelling behind her but it was too late. They'd never catch her. Instead she thought of the loft her and her coven had leased, spun around to face her mysterious pursuers, and flipped off what ended up being a bunch of young, poorly dressed adults. Heroes perhaps? Mere goofballs? None of it mattered as she fell back into the void and away from the world.

---

“Tea and an ice pack?” The pale woman cackled. “Looks like someone had a rough-”

“Shut up, Mathilda.” Breanna Thompson wasn't in the mood for her teammate's acerbic sense of humor. “It's too early for that shit.”

Mathilda Lundstrom shrugged, and walked past the short Black woman to begin digging into the nearby fridge. “So, two questions, Demise.” Mathilda ran a slender hand through her messy blonde tresses. Her stocky friend eyed her warily, and the two women exchanged glances in their airy loft.

“You get one, Maddie.”

“Did you get the number of the truck that hit you?” Breanna watched her teammate dissolve into ugly cackles.

“That's your question? Not 'did you get the Star Engine?' Not 'did you find out more about the heroes in this city?' Not, 'how are you feeling?” She'd been willing to humor the older woman, but the combination of the oppressive morning light and Mathilda's wisecracks was too much for the cranky witch.

“Honestly? I figured we'd get to the important shit later. You're good for that. That's why we made you coven leader, remember? That way I get to be your wise cracking deputy who handles morale and discipline. And fundraising.”

Breanna didn't know when the lithe Swedish woman had found, or began eating, an apple, but that was the least of her questions right now. Mathilda Lundstrom, known professionally as Overhaul, specialized in transmogrification magic. While Demise had shaped her magic into control of shadows and close range combat, Overhaul focused on turning things into other things. A backpack into a jetpack. A metal box into a car. A pebble into an an apple.

“And also,” Mathilda continued. “I know you, Bre. If you hadn't brough the engine back, we would have known about it. You're a lot of things, but 'a good loser' ain't one of them. Seriously though. The fuck happened to you?” She pulled up a chair, spreading her legs to sit backwards in it. The two woman sat there in the broad, vacant studio. Witch Way's two oldest members, and its longest tenured. Breanna didn't want to be dressed this early, let alone at the studio and conducting buisiness. That annoyed her, but the fact that the other members besides Maddie hadn't shown up yet frustrated her more. She stared across the table at her friend. Maddie had a quirky charm to her, especially when she wasn't covered in her characteristic sheen of motor oil. The woman sat with her arms crossed, open flannel shirt partially covering her soiled tanktop, messy hair spilling out from her backwards cap.

“Less about me.” Breanna's head still ached but the pain was already beginning to dull. She wore a sweater baggy enough to mostly hide her curvaceous physique, paired with short shorts that always seemed too eager to ride up her thighs. The result was something nondescript without being uncomfortable or looking unsightly, helped by a series of charms on her necklace, a nose stud, and a pair of fashionable earrings. She looked like the kind of woman who might live at, or perhaps also run, an artist commune. “So Wwere are the cadets?”

“Abbi Kadabra and Hextasy went out on the town last night. Said something about painting the new town red.” Mathilda laughed. She was now drinking from a porcelain cup. It smelled like good coffee.

“It's not our town, yet.” Breanna's hand tightened around the handle of her own tea cup. The flavor helped ease the tension curling her fingers. Loose leaf, of course. Cherry, and lemon and vanilla. The store she'd bought it from had called it 'Cherry Swirl.' That wasn't too far off.

“Alright. Sounds like we need to talk.

Breanna took a deep breath and pushed her glasses up her nose. Those frames were the only part of her 'Demise' wardrobe that perssisted into her civilian life. Her wide-brimmed, connical hat, sultry dress, and wrestling boots were more 'work outfit' than 'everday gear.' She looked up from her still steaming cup of tea, and then started explaining exactly what had happened the night before. At least, most of it. Breanna had to catch herself a few times, stopping mid-sentence to pointedly elide the most intense of her emotions, as well as the two kisses she'd shared with the hero. She'd expected to literally walk all over him, to embarass him and leave him for the medics to find. Instead he'd matched her,m step for step, and forced her to nearly empty her mana and her bag of tricks to escape.

But even her escape hadn't been absolute. Left entirely unspoken was the fact that she'd seen Heatstroke again that night, if only in her head: the brawny, tenacious hero had crossed her mind more than once while she masturbated in bed, trying to relieve that day's tension. Something about his bright eyes and broad shoulders and the warmth of his face made her tingle even now. In her lewd fantasies he'd been bound by thick tendrils of shadows, powerless to do anything but squirm before she rode his warm, satisfying face to a messy conclusion. It was lewd, and lurid, but that was one fantasy she'd have to keep secret from the rest of her coven.

“I can' t remember the last time you didn't absolutely maul somebody on your first night in a new town. Are you slowing down, Bri?” Mathilda flashed her crooked smile. The two small horns protruding from her forehead didn't ruin the effect. Each member of their coven bore a brand, some physical indication of the pact they'd forged with whatever entity had given them their powers. Breanna didn't regret the pact that gave her her sinister colored eyes. Black sclera and yellow irises were a small price to pay for the kind of power that could disrupt a city. Mathilda's knobby horns were similarly a small cost for powers that let her turn a plastic fork into a plastic explosive, or a sheet of cardboard into a functional parachute. Breanna shook her head, sending her black and purple braids shaking like a curtain of beads. “Same. But it doesn't change anything. We're running the same playbook as always. Art gallery by day, crime ring by night.”

“Technically those both happen at night.” Mathilda said, unable or unwilling to hide her cheeky grin.

“Shut it, Maddie. Anyways, that hero from last night said he was from the “Kinetic Solutions” like that was supposed to mean something. Tell Abbi and Hextasy that if they wanna hit the streets so damn badly, they can go round up some intel on what we're dealing with. I like wins, not surprises.”

“Point taken. I'll make sure Dylan and Stef get the message. So do you have something planned for tonight?”

“Sleep.” Breanna said, once again sounding like the confident leader of a coven of superpowered witches “Tomorrow I want a coven meeting at sunset. We came here because I have a few leads I wanna follow. Also, Maddie, go wherever you go to find all that scrap metal. If we're gonna pull off this 'artist commune' thing, we need to actually make some art. I'm planning an exhibition in a week and a half. Gives us enough time to build a little buzz without making it feel like a spur of the moment thing.”

“Aye aye, captain. Your wish is my command.” Her deputy grinned, and the two women switched to other topics.

“So how are we on cash?”

#Writing #FirstDraft #Series #SFW #HotDarkLoveStory #HDLS #Fiction #Romance #Action #Fight #Magic #Superheroes #MartialArts

I was staying up too late one night, going down a youtube rabbit hole when a thought occurred to me. What was behind that one sunken ship door in that game I never finished a few years ago? I could never quite make out the solution. So I dug into videos on how to complete it, what the solution was, what the breakdown of the puzzles were and so on for the absolute masterpiece of a game that is The Witness.

The Witness came out in 2016, the follow up to Jonathan Blow's famous indie game hit Braid. The game took over seven years to complete, going over its initial release date substantially. In interviews and on the development blog, the game's architects reveal that the initial gameplay prototype was completed relatively early and the final few years were spent mostly on polish. In the game, you can see and feel that time spent in every corner of every environment of the world.

The Witness is a puzzle game, in which the central mechanic is drawing a line between a circular origin point and a destination. This is primarily presented through the use of panels in the game world which usually unlock a door or the next panel in a sequence. The twist comes when variations in the puzzle panels are presented. There are dots along the path that you have to cross over, shapes you have to outline, colored squares you have to separate, etc.

The real ingenuity and beauty of the game becomes apparent in some of the more advanced puzzles, in which there are no obvious clues on the panel toward its solution and too many possibilities to try each one individually. A player (you) has to use clues from the surrounding environment to find the correct path to trace.

A beautiful example comes in the orchard section of the game, where the panels are not their usual grid shape but instead laid out in the shape of exponentially branching trees. There are hundreds of possible solutions, which would take quite a while to trace individually. The beauty comes when you notice, just behind and off to the left of the panel, a tree in a somewhat similar shape to the puzzle. The tree has only one apple hanging from its branches, and when you trace the path of the branches that ends in the apple, the pleasant sound of a panel successfully completed greets you and a lighted wire leads you to the next location.

This helps to teach you some of the lessons that the game will expand upon in wonderful and unexpected ways. Heavy spoilers lie ahead. I honestly recommend you play this game so much that if you might have any interest or desire to play this game, playing it unspoiled is the only real way to understand what the game is trying to communicate. So read no further, ye who wish to have one of the most absolutely unique experiences in the field of gaming unspoiled.

The years of polish they spent on this game come through most clearly in the environmental design. Puzzles completely aside, every different location on the island is located relatively closely to one another, has its own distinct aesthetic, color pallette, and soundscape. There is no background music in the game, aside from where it factors into a puzzle or two. Instead, there are the ambient sounds of the wind, the beach and your footsteps as you walk to different locations on the island. But the best part of the soundscape is that the sound of your footsteps change depending upon the environment, the crunch of sand in the desert is a far cry from the metallic clank of walking on platforms in the swamp. The sharp taps of the quarry contrast with the muffled thumps in the forest. All these areas sit close enough to one another to be able to walk back and forth in a minute or two, but the from within each area very rarely distracts from your objectives there. As a player, I could almost see the immense amount of tweaking and moving things around slightly to create each area's own sense of space and location. Not to mention how each area's theme plays into its puzzles.

The quarry's concept deals with subtracting areas from puzzle grids that you were already familiar with. The desert deals with the reflections of the sun and other objects to clue you in to the solution. The treetops deal with connecting isolated areas, both in form and puzzle function. The town in the middle of the island displays a mixture of the puzzle types of all the surrounding areas.

But the in-game metaphor goes further than that. If you're still reading and feeling intrigued about this game, stop and go play it instead of reading on. I assure you, the actual gameplay is better than reading about it here! Also, because I am going to talk about one of the absolutely sublime things the game does with its themes and I would rather you experience it firsthand from a game that took years to make rather than my writing which took significantly less. I'm going to talk about THE MOMENT.

THE MOMENT

So eventually the time comes where you have been conditioned to look in more detail at the environment around you. There are many puzzles that use the environment, one in particular that I banged my head against for quite a while featured a transparent panel. No other panel in the game up to that point is transparent so it initially sticks out. I went round and round until I realized that it must have been transparent for a reason so I started looking around to see what might give me clues to the solution. This panel is located near the shore of the island, with a beautiful coastline in the distance spotted with several bright green palm trees. The trees contrast against the rocky brown surface of the island outcropping and they are just the right distance away to all be seen through the panel I was wrestling with. If you treat them like some of the surrounding puzzle elements, they point the way to solve the puzzle. It takes a few leaps of logic to solve this one, and for an optional puzzle no less!

But that’s just one trick the game has for you, in a quiver that seems bottomless. As you’re wandering about the island, you will have seen places, perhaps on walls, perhaps outlined in the trees, that remind you of the shape of the puzzles you’ve been seeing on the panels this whole time.

Wouldn’t it be funny, you smirkingly think to yourself, if…

And then you click and see that it works! You can trace these patterns in the environment! Your mind is blown, you had no idea this was even possible. Your expectations have been shattered and a sense of wonder fills you as you try to discern exactly what is happening. The limit of what is possible in a game seems much bigger than you initially thought.

Meanwhile, the game is giving you audio and visual feedback as you move your cursor through the line you’ve spotted in a garden or walkway. Completing the line, the game gives you a thunderous, resounding echo and a trail of sparkles that point you to the previously inscrutable obelisks you may have already run across. These obelisks now show the pattern you just outlined brightly on one of its sides, while the rest of the sides show darkened patterns that await you to find them.

You were never explicitly told to find these patterns or to try and click on them. But the game has been conditioning you to see both the elements of the puzzle and to pay attention to your environment to be able to progress. To get that little hit of dopamine when you solve a puzzle. While it may only be tracing a line, it feels like enlightenment the first time you do it.

And then you start noticing these patterns everywhere. They were there from the beginning, hiding in plain sight. The game was pushing you towards this epiphany. It wanted you to see it, it gave you a starting point and clues from your environment to help you find the intended destination.

But that’s not the end of the game. To finish the game, you have to complete enough puzzles in enough areas to alight the lasers at the end of each sequence. Once finished, a laser will emerge that points towards the mountain that has been looming over you while you have been exploring the island. Making your way up there, you find the summit locked by another beautifully unique puzzle involving perspective. Solving it, the peak of the mountain opens. Within is a labyrinth you descend which functions as a kind of final thesis of the ideas and themes of the game.

Now, an admission. In my gameplay, I had descended deep within the mountain, finding both the intended route and the alternate deeper path which lead further into the caverns. However, I was distracted by outside life events and ended up never completing the game from that point forward. Oddly like many other games I had gotten 95% of the way through and abandoned (Warcraft II, various Final Fantasies, etc.) I never returned to it. Until late one night where my curiosity got the better of me.

I resigned my gameplay fully believing that, spatially and thematically, you would finish the game by rising up through the same tunnel you started the game in. Watching through a handful of YouTube videos that night proved my inclination right. You see, aside from just puzzles the game also contains audio recordings of voice actors reciting quotes from various sources including philosophical texts, famous scientists and the Diamond Sutra.

As I’m sure you all know, the Diamond Sutra is a foundational work in the practice of Zen Buddhism. I certainly didn’t have to look that up. Anyway, another practice of Zen you might be familiar with is that of a koan. In short, a koan is a saying or piece of text that tries to induce a sense of uncertainty or contradiction in order to break through false understanding to try and bring a greater or more intuitive understanding.

In this sense, the game functions as a zen koan. It gives you patterns, lets you solve them and then deliberately changes the rules to give you a greater understanding of the world the puzzles inhabit. The environmental puzzles, too serve this purpose as both an extension and breaking of the rules of the world.

I have come to similar understandings through various methods in my own life. Perhaps the easiest for me to explain is through, surprisingly, statistics. If you’re trying to build a statistical model of a system, let’s say a six-sided dice roll, you can easily tell a computer to randomly choose a number between one and six. But there are always problems with any simulation. If you’re a student of computer science, you know that computers are not really all that great at choosing truly random numbers. It might not matter for a single 1/6 chance, but run the simulation thousands or millions of times and biases reveal themselves. Conversely, your simulation might not account for a tiny chip in your die that leads to one number being favored over another if rolled a certain way. In either case, the computer model of the d6 might work for just about any purpose you might want, but it’s not a perfect model.

In statistics, this was made clear to me in the phrase, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” This phrase is attributed to George Box in the 1970s. But as the wikipedia page I just pulled that from notes, the sentiment has been expressed many times throughout history with one of my favorites being, “The map is not the terrain.” by Korzybski, 1933. This jives with the many references towards scientific understanding in the game as well.

But I think the game posits that this metaphor extends to enlightenment as well, with the Buddha himself saying in the Diamond Sutra that, “All that has a form is illusive and unreal. When you see that all forms are illusive and unreal, then you will begin to perceive your true Buddha nature.” While I don’t call myself a Buddhist, I take this to mean the same thing, that capital-t Truth is unknowable. But our senses can give us useful impressions and ideas of the universe that can increase our understanding of it. In this way, I think that enlightenment is an ongoing process, not a linear path to an end.

Which brings us back to the game. Solving line puzzles over and over eventually brings you to the game’s main ending, which as I later found out takes you on a tour of the island, resetting all the puzzles you’ve completed and returning you to the tunnel you began in. Is the game saying that our time doing all of that was wasted? No, I think it’s trying to say something a bit deeper. It’s not the act of tracing lines that’s important, it’s the journey you took, the things you learned along the way. To be blunt, the things you witnessed or that inspired you or surprised you or frustrated you or blew your mind were what really mattered.

But all these themes and gameplay mechanics coming together with the story and textual references to such a point to prime you to that feeling of epiphany, it’s an incredible achievement. And not just to experience it, but to interrogate it, to feel it over and over again and try to get you to ask the question why? An incredible achievement. Where some games can’t even keep their mechanics and story coherent between one cutscene and the next, Jonathan Blow has created gameplay so enmeshed within its themes that it’s breathtaking. For all these reasons I recommend playing it. Spoiling yourself is denying you the experience of climbing to these heights and is, I propose, another false enlightenment. Sure, why not save time and look up the puzzle solutions? Why think hard about things when I can just get the answer whenever? Why climb a mountain when I can just look at a picture of it? Why try to change myself when I can just cruise through life from one experience to the next. This game is not for those type of people.

Endings and pretentiousness

Which brings me to the topic of the second ending. If you manage to light all the lasers from every area, find all the environmental puzzles and thoroughly explore the underground area you will find a new set of caves with more audio recordings. These, though, are not of famous scientists or religious experts but conversations between people that detail their experience with the island. Some have been profoundly changed by it, some don’t remember their time there. It’s remarked on that the island is a simulation and that each individual has to choose when they want to exit.

Here’s where the ‘story’ of the game might be said to be hidden, in that the island was apparently constructed to be a tool to induce and examine these feelings of enlightenment and self-awareness. There is one last hidden puzzle here, which gives you an alternate solution for the gate of the first area of the game. Instead of opening that gate and allowing you into the remainder of the island, it opens a gateway to what might be termed a developer room. This takes the form of a luxury resort, showing photos and other items from the process of creating the game. Following this newly opened path to it’s end, you are treated to a video in first person of someone emerging from what looks like a dream.

The person interacts with their environment as though still in the simulation, aka the game, touching circles and tracing lines along furniture in their surroundings. But here in the ‘real’ world, there’s no feedback or reward to continuing these activities. This downer ending is where a lot of the negative feedback and accusations of pretentiousness have come up after the game’s release.

First, a few disclaimers. I never personally achieved this ending, or any ending within the game. As I said earlier, I quit probably minutes before I reached the end. And as previously mentioned I’m not an expert on Buddhism or statistics or anything like that. But I do think this ending is open to interpretation (and there has been a lot of it out there, to be sure).

I think this video was included for the extraordinarily devout that went and solved every last damn puzzle the game offered. The character in the movie seems unable to move past their time in the simulation, almost broken or crippled by their compulsion to see everything as a puzzle to be solved. I feel this was intended as a warning by the developers for those chasing nirvana or easy answers within the game. If life, understanding, and enlightenment are processes, then getting stuck in our understanding of one portion of any of them is a false enlightenment. Like a doctor who insists on treating patients the way they always have despite new and better medicines being available. Or a person who has overcome trauma in their life only to look down upon others who have not had to struggle.

I think this game tries to help us to progress towards understanding, but obsessing over it, taking it for more than was intended only leaves us more poorly equipped to understand the world around us and ourselves. We have to choose to exit the island to get back to reality. If we don’t we’re stuck, literally and metaphorically.

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Recommended readings:

The Unbearable Now: An Interpretation of The Witness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOJC62t4JfA

The Diamond Sutra: https://diamond-sutra.com/read-the-diamond-sutra-here/

Literary Analysis of the Witness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0HbiCLiWu8

The Witness Dev Blog: http://the-witness.net/news/

Also, since I thought I understood what the game was trying to say and didn’t feel the need to finish every last puzzle or even complete the game means that I ‘won’ the game in the truest sense and am better than anyone else at everything.

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I, The Bottomless Bag

“Sorry! I don’t want any adventures, thank you. Not today.”
—Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien, 1937

I didn't sign up for this. It’s too hard. I’m a hands-on learner. I don't have any experience. I’m too young. College is too expensive. I don’t want to go into debt. Degrees are useless anyway. There’s too many options. I'm dyslexic. I’m not ready. I’ll never get a good job. It’s all nepotism, cronyism, soulless networking. I won’t play the corporate game. I’m better than that. The world isn’t made for people like me. I will not change. I have too many things going on. I’m scared. People are going to laugh at me. There’s not enough time. I’ve got deep childhood trauma. I’m antisocial. I cannot change. I can’t. I just can’t. I was never trained for this. It’s not in my wheelhouse. I’d rather stay home. I’m comfortable here. The outside world is cruel. The system is working against me. I’m too stressed out. I’m being discriminated against. I’m depressed. I don't like going out. I didn't choose to be born. It’s not fair. Everything is a scam. It’s all luck. Only psychopaths are successful in this capitalist netherworld. I’m better than that. I won’t compromise my values. I don’t want to be a slave to the wage. My morals are superior. I’m doing better than most people my age anyway. Adulting is too confusing. I’ve tried it. It didn’t work out. It never works out. Everything should be free anyway. It’s not fair. It’s all stupid. I’m too old. I can't focus. I have ADHD. There are plenty of people just like me; they’re doing fine. Learning an instrument is too complicated. It takes too much time. I lack the hand-eye coordination. I’m clumsy. Some people are born gifted; I’m not one of those people. I’m dumb. I can’t write. I have writer’s block. No one is going to read my stuff anyway. Just thinking about it makes me anxious. Talking to people makes me nervous. It’s not my fault. It’s my parent’s fault. They didn’t prepare me for this. It’s not my responsibility. Someone else should handle it. I’d probably fail anyway. I’m not that smart. What's the point, anyway. Everyone dies. The universe will end. Everything is meaningless. Success can't be measured. It's all subjective. Nothing matters. I’d rather stay home, smoke weed, play games, and read. I just want to be left alone. I’m not hurting anyone. Who cares.

And those are only some of the excuses in my bottomless bag of excuses.

Whenever I’m presented with a new thing—a challenge, something I’m uncomfortable with—I start pulling excuses out of the bag, almost instinctually, as a way to deflect, avoid responsibility, stay in my zone, and remain comfortable. Because, really, when we get down to it, I just want to chill out and coast through life, doing as little as possible while remaining relatively happy while doing so. That’s all I want, to relax into infinity—unwaveringly in my zone, forever. I would love to just put myself in a bubble, freeze time so that I don’t have to deal with the responsibilities of life, so I don’t have to watch as time ravages the things I love. I hate how everything decays, how nothing can last, how innocence is lost, how children grow up and adults forget. It depresses me. Time is my mortal enemy. It’s better to just pretend that it doesn’t exist, in my temporal bubble.

But most of that is lie because, in short, I’m just risk-averse, lazy, and I hate change. And I’m scared. I’m scared of failure, of ridicule—but if I don’t try, then I don’t have to deal with those things to begin with. This is where the excuses come in handy. I can just coast through life, telling myself that I don’t want or need anything more than what I have at this very moment, right here, right now—and when that cognitive dissonance kicks in, I can just reach into the bottomless bag.

But these, too, are just more of my excuses: sophisticated self-aware excuses, but excuses nonetheless. Because time marches on regardless, and no matter how many excuses I make, it doesn’t change the fact that I want more—I want to learn how to play an instrument, I want to become a better writer, I want to feel more fulfilled and happier, all the standard self-help stuff—but the prospect of achieving these goals is frightening and uncomfortable, because to achieve these things, there is often a trial, a long scary trial, and at the end of this trial is often a big scary dragon. And dragons scare the hell out of me. So I reach into the bottomless bag, and I cope. I cope hard.

But one day, I know something will happen—something blatant, something that forces me to face the trial, something that forces me to make a decision. Perhaps one day, when I’m sitting alone in my home, not doing much at all, just blowing smoke rings, someone—a wizard, let’s say—will show up at my door, asking me for help. Perhaps the wizard might say something like, “I have no time to blow smoke rings this morning. I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.” And at that point, I will have to make a choice:

Do I close the door on the wizard, stay unwaveringly in my zone, my faux temporal bubble? Or do I take a walk on the wild side, let the wizard in, and do Something Tookish?

This was the choice Bilbo Baggins faced in The Hobbit, and this is also the choice I want to examine with this essay, because it’s actually a choice I’m faced with every day, all the time, even though sometimes I don’t like to admit it.

But first, I want to talk a little bit about Bilbo.

II, A Baggins & a Took

“We are plain quietfolk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them.” —Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit

Bilbo Baggins was both a Baggins and a Took. His father was the wealthy Bungo Baggins, and his mother was the famous Belladonna Took, of the three daughters of Old Took, who had lived across The Water somewhere near Tuckburrow, in the Greenhill country, close to Waymeet, in Tookland, The Shire, or something like that. It was often said that the Took line had some fairy blood mixed in because there was something “not entirely hobbit-like” about the Tooks; members of this line supposedly had a strong desire for adventure, often disappearing for months at a time—which was something that hobbits just didn’t normally do.

And that’s because hobbits don’t like adventure. They like staying home, in their hobbit-holes, which are mounds of earth all tunneled through, with paneled walls and many hooks for hats—because they do enjoy visitors—and small round doors that most people have to duck through, because hobbits are small, real small, a little smaller than a dwarf, in fact, who are about half the size of an average human, who are just a little shorter than elves, who are about half the size trolls, themselves about half the size of a full-grown dragon standing on its hind legs, which means that hobbits are about the size of a dragon’s paw—that is to say, hobbits are very small indeed, little people who like to dress in bright colors, and they’re typically on the portly side, and they don’t usually wear shoes—because their feet get so hairy that they don’t need them—and they like to laugh “deep fruity laughs,” and they have big pointed ears, and they enjoy smoking long pipes and blowing fat smoke rings, and they eat six meals a day, and they enjoy sitting around, telling stories, relaxing, reading, painting, and tending to their gardens, all from the safety of their own little hobbit-holes, which is a compound noun synonymous with the word “comfort,” according to Tolkien. All this is to say that, while hobbits may enjoy telling heroic tales around a fireplace, they do not like being the subject of those heroic tales themselves, because they do not like adventure, they do not like it one bit. In fact, hobbits are just like me: they’re risk-averse, they hate change, they’re unwaveringly in their zone, and some might even say they’re lazy—although hobbits would just say that they’re comfortable with the way things are.

That’s why, when Gandalf arrived at Bilbo’s hobbit-hole—Bag-End—that fateful Middle-Earth morning, Bilbo at first might have offered the wizard some tea and pipe tobacco, and he might have even said something like, “Sit down, we have all day!” But the moment the word “adventure” was uttered by the old wizard, Bilbo was having none of it—in fact, Bilbo was done, instantly, quickly hurrying Gandalf out of his home: “Why not tomorrow? Come tomorrow! Goodbye!” Closing the door behind him as politely as possible, excising any notion of adventure from his humble little hobbit-hole.

But that didn’t stop Gandalf, who proceeded to trick thirteen dwarves into believing that Bilbo was some sort of master burglar, perfect for the heist of the century—stealing back the Lonely Mountain from the great dragon Smaug—so these dwarves barged into Bilbo’s hobbit-hole and made themselves at home: feasting, drinking, and singing heroic songs all throughout the night. And one might think that this would have upset Bilbo—and maybe it did, a little, at first—but instead of flying into a fit of rage, something else happened, something sparked inside him, something like courage, spunk, something a little reckless, a little radical, something not entirely hobbit-like.

Something Tookish.

So Bilbo, who had no expertise in thievery, didn’t know the first thing about adventuring, had never held a sword in his life, and had never once stepped outside of The Shire, still full of self-doubt and excuses, but feeling a little Tookish, decided to take a chance. He reluctantly agreed to accompany the dwarves on their adventure—and the next morning, they set off to the Lonely Mountain to face the mighty dragon Smaug, among other nasty things.

This ended up being a year-long adventure through desolate wastes, misty mountains, spooky spider forests, troll lands, caverns full of goblins, and all sorts of other dangerous, not-hobbit-like places, all of which put Bilbo’s resolve to the test. And each time—despite having no experience in adventuring, no expertise in thievery, never having held a sword in his life, and all that other stuff—he passed the test, sometimes just barely, like when he got the group captured by trolls and needed to be saved by Gandalf. But it didn’t take long for him to rise to the occasion, becoming more confident with every step and misstep, eventually becoming the most overpowered member of the party—partially thanks to the Ring, which had the power to render him invisible, but mostly because of his free will, perseverance, and Tookishness. He even saved the group multiple times, all while internally doubting his own abilities and wanting to return home: He saved the party from giant spiders in Mirkwood, and helped the dwarves escape imprisonment at the hands of the Elvenking, and when the time came to face Smaug, he did it—alone—despite his fear, even taunting the great worm while doing so, showing just how much the adventure had changed him for the better.

But “change” isn’t really the right word here, because Bilbo didn’t really change at all; he was always a clever, sneaky, Tookish, wise hobbit—he just never had a reason to be when he was sitting around, smoking, reading, telling stories, tending to his garden, and eating six meals a day in his hobbit-hole. His fear of change—of risk, of adventure—stagnated him, kept him unwaveringly in his zone, frozen in time, a faux temporal bubble, never fully realizing his full potential. And for most hobbits, this type of stagnation is fine—after all, what’s the use in all that adventure stuff when they could just live comfortably in hobbit-holes their whole lives—but the difference with Bilbo was that he wanted more. All those dwarven songs about treasure and dragons sparked something in him, and suddenly he wanted to see the world, prove himself, achieve something, and in that moment, back in his hobbit-hole, with Gandalf and the dwarves, moved by the magic of adventure, he had a Tookish thought: What if? What if I went on this adventure, with the dwarves, with Gandalf? What if I faced the dragon? And despite all his doubt, and his fear, and his excuses, which were all there in spades, Bilbo gave in and did Something Tookish.

This is all to say that, while I myself may be a little hobbit-like, I am certainly no Bilbo Baggins—and I'll prove it to you.

III, School, Dragon, Proof

“There was a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug. One day he flew up into the air and came south. The first we heard of it was a noise like a hurricane coming from the North, and the pine-trees on the Mountain creaking and cracking in the wind.”
—Thorin, The Hobbit

I never was a good student.

I remember, back in middle school, when I myself was quite hobbit-like, they put me in special education classes, because I refused to do the work or anything school-related at all. The special ed classroom, itself very inviting and animated and colorful, was off the main hall, through the big lobby near the entrance, down the slope to the basement floor where no kid dared tread because there was nothing else down there apart from janitor closets, so if you were going down that slope—which everyone could see you doing, on account of it being off the main hall—everyone knew you were going to special ed. And being in special ed classes, in grade school, was akin to being a leper, pretty much social suicide. American kids are not very nice, in general, especially those who fit in with the pack, because they’re primed for conformity from a young age, and conformity begets a certain level of cruelty, because it carries with it a certain set of standards that, if you don’t meet—on account of being deformed, slow, weird, ugly, or whatever—you are ridiculed and more or less ostracized from the greater social groups; and this is especially pronounced in grade school where labels are assigned quickly and taken very seriously, with all the jocks, punks, nerds, preps, drama-class kids, and what not. So, in a way, grade school is the perfect microcosm of human socialization; which is my long-winded way of saying that I went to great lengths to hide the fact that I was in special ed classes, mostly because I was embarrassed about it, but also because I could fit in with normal middle school social groups provided the kids in those groups didn't know I was in special ed; a detail that, if ever discovered, would immediately be used against me as persistent ridicule, which would eventually lead to me being pushed out of any social group I might have been part of, which means that I would sneak out of the basement-floor backdoor and walk up a hill, around the school, and back through the front door, or vice versa, so no one would see me going in or out of the special ed class. But this whole avoidance routine didn’t matter in the long run, because I wasn’t very social to begin with, so I never made much of an attempt to insert myself into the popular social groups in the first place, which meant that, for about a year there, the only social group I was really a part of was the special ed social group, which wasn’t actually a bad social group to be a part of, because the kids in that group were very nice when they weren’t throwing tantrums or refusing to talk or eating crayons or hyperfocusing on Egypt or shoving three Twinkies in their mouths at once or drawing nonstop or banging their heads against their desks or talking to themselves or just otherwise screaming and acting crazy. (I was the one who wouldn’t stop drawing. The Egypt one was Haley; she had sandy-blonde hair in a bowl cut and wore square glasses, but aside from that, she looked like any normal girl—except when she was wearing pharaoh headdresses or pretending to be Cleopatra—and she was also really nice to me.) The point being, the special ed kids were much nicer than your average Algebra 1 kid, which is my way of saying that special ed wasn’t all that bad. In fact, the only bad thing about special ed was the fact that non-special ed kids made fun of you for being in special ed, which forced the special ed kids to a special table in the cafeteria, not because of any school policy, but because the other kids would make fun of us so badly that we had to band together—and when I say “us” and “we” there, I really meant “they,” because I was quite ashamed of being in special ed back then, to the point where I wouldn’t eat in the cafeteria; instead, I would go into an empty classroom so I wouldn’t be seen because, even though the special ed kids were nice and all, I really didn’t feel like I belonged in their social group to begin with.

(By now, you’re probably wondering how the hell any of this relates to The Hobbit, to which my response would be: I’m getting there, please be patient.)

But, of course, back then, I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I didn’t care for anything, really, other than myself—and being able to play my video games and watch my TV shows. I especially didn’t care for school, so I refused to do the work, and of course, this meant that I was failing most classes, which meant that obviously something had to be wrong with me—according to the teachers—and so I was put in special ed, which, at the time, I was embarrassed about, but now, in my thirties, I realize that the only reason I had been embarrassed at all was because of the whole stigma around it, and the constant bullying; but that’s a lie because, like I said, I wasn’t bullied much—because I went to great lengths to hide my special ed-ness—so I was mostly just embarrassed because I was lying to myself, because even as a young kid I had a little bit of introspectiveness, so lying to myself made me feel like a capital-P, capital-C Phony Cringelord, acutely so.

And the lie was simple: I wasn’t actually refusing to do schoolwork because I didn’t care for school; I was refusing to do it because I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of being seen as stupid, less gifted than the other kids. I was afraid that, if I applied myself and failed, then I would truly feel like a legit failure, and I didn’t like the idea of feeling like or being seen as a legit failure, so I simply refused to do the work, which meant that, when I did fail, I could say, “Well, I wasn’t even trying,” which meant that no one could prove that I was a legit failure because I had never tried to begin with, because, in my mind, there was nothing really to fail at, which meant that I got to live in my faux temporal bubble, unwaveringly in my zone, for a long long time, never having to face my fear of true failure; as if failure itself were some sort of dragon, and by avoiding the trial, I never had to confront the dragon at all. But, as a side effect of this dragon-avoidance, I never had the opportunity to slay the dragon, so the dragon just continued to live in my mind, rent-free, like Smaug in the Lonely Mountain, hoarding all that treasure, spooking all the dwarves away. Because dragons are scary as hell, and if you fail to defeat a dragon, well, you die, which is kinda how I felt back then, as if school were a dragon that I had no hope of defeating, so why even try? And, of course, I didn’t want to die.

But I wasn’t that introspective back then because, in an ironic roundabout way, by trying to avoid failure (by doing nothing at all), I was put in special ed—basically scarlet-lettered—and considered a failure by my peers, so I might as well have been a legit failure anyway. This, of course, was a paradox my younger self had not considered.

(And in that last paragraph, when I used the term “failure,” I meant it in the sense of what my adolescent brain considered a “failure” back then: someone who, upon trying, failed and was relegated to special classes because of it, reflecting the common belief about failures among quote-unquote “normal” kids at the time, which is why I was embarrassed about being in special ed. But at the time, I would tell myself that I was not a legit failure because I didn’t even try to begin with, which was actually just my way of coping with the whole thing. Of course, now I recognize that this failure-slash-not-a-failure way of looking at things was entirely misguided and immature because kids in special ed are not failures at all—they are simply kids with different needs. In fact, I now believe that no child can be a failure by any definition, only the adults and systems around them can be [which is a topic for another essay]. And now, thinking back, I recognize that I was actually right where I needed to be because I was one of those very kids with special needs, considering my inability to apply myself, antisocial proclivities, and inclination to get all mixed up in the head with weird conflicting thoughts—and while I can recognize all this now, at the time, it was terrible.)

My outlook back then hurt me in the long run because I maintained this contrarianism fueled by a fear of failure well into my college years, back when Mom paid tuition, and I would tell her I was getting good grades when, in reality, I was skipping class and flunking out because I was scared as hell of the dragon. I thought, if no one knew I was failing, then I wasn’t failing. I was stuck in my faux temporal bubble, pretending all was good. And it hurt me because even now I’m stuck in this faux temporal bubble, in a soulless corporate job, sitting behind a computer all day, pretending that sending emails and creating slide decks is deeply meaningful when, in actuality, the whole thing is just pointless busy work in the grand scheme of things, and really I’m just a big phony because I never wanted to be in corporate America to begin with. In fact, corporate America was kinda the antithesis of everything I stood for when I was younger—I wanted to be an artist, a musician, someone who followed their dreams no matter the cost. But back in school, where the foundation of one’s dreams is laid, I squandered the opportunity because I perceived attaining my dreams as a trial with a scary dragon at the end, and I couldn’t face the dragon—no way, no how.

So when I was scheduled to attend Fine Arts at 11 a.m. every Tuesday at the local community college but instead stayed home and played Final Fantasy XI, there was always this dissonance lingering in the back of my mind, something like: “I know I should be going to class right now, getting a degree in something I actually care about, but that’s too hard, so instead I’m living in a faux temporal bubble, pretending that nothing will ever change, that I will be able to sit in my hobbit-hole forever, playing games, pretending that ignoring the trial somehow slays the dragon—or at least makes him leave me alone—even though I know that’s stupid as hell, because eventually all this is going to catch up with me, because the dragon’s still there, curled up on my treasure, softly snorting sparks in his sleep, because I’m too scared to sneak into the Lonely Mountain and slay him, so instead I stay unwaveringly in my zone, pretending that everything is fine, still knowing that the dragon is there, yet still being too afraid to confront him, so, once again, I’m back to pretending that everything is fine,” and so on and so forth.

And I’m still doing this, to this day, with all sorts of stuff. I want to learn how to play guitar, make pop music, record an album, but it’s “too hard,” so I say stuff like, “It’s too hard. It takes too much time. I lack the hand-eye coordination. I’m clumsy. Some people are born gifted; I’m not one of those people.” When, in the back of my mind, I know that anyone can do whatever they set their mind to provided they just start doing the thing, keep at it, and never give up, because I’ve seen it done before by the most unlikely of hobbits—yet, for some reason, I tell myself that I’m exempt from this, that I’m stupid, untalented, clumsy, and all the rest of those adjectival excuses that we’ve been over before.

In fact, I use a ridiculous amount of brainpower coming up with excuses for why I don’t follow my dreams, and then I use even more brainpower coming up with excuses for those excuses—to trick myself into believing that I am not, in fact, making excuses—and then, of course, I have to come up with even more excuses for those excuses, and so on, until I am just brain-dead stupid, unable to actually do anything, which is, of course, just another excuse, so you can see how this becomes very problematic indeed.

Good thing that I have a bottomless bag.

The truth is, I’ve just been coasting my entire life, from one soulless job to another, sticking around way too long, riding one sick lazy wave, just lucking out, really. I worked the same call center job for twelve years, doing the bare minimum, with barely any promotions, all while living in a rundown trailer where, one time, some raccoons fell through the ceiling because of mold and water damage. And this was fine because the lifestyle was relatively easy and comfortable—as long as, after work, I could smoke my weed and play my games and watch television—or at least, that’s what I told myself, when really I was just headfirst in the bottomless bag. Because I didn’t really want to work in a call center my whole life—who would?—I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to follow my dreams. But following my dreams required me to leave my faux temporal bubble, which was my comfort zone, so instead of taking a chance, applying for a new job that actually paid a living wage, I would say something like, “I’ll never get a good job. It’s all nepotism, cronyism, soulless networking. I won’t play the corporate game. I’m better than that.” Which all goes to show that I have been pretty much coasting my whole life, lucking out, putting in the minimum amount of effort required to get by—and I have a whole bunch of excuses as to why that’s perfectly OK.

But how long will my luck last? Can I really expect to coast from one soulless job to another, hardly caring about anything, while remaining unwaveringly in my zone, relatively happy and comfortable, forever? Would my apathy not catch up with me eventually? Would I not need to take some risk or do something a little Tookish every now and then to maintain my comfortable homeostasis? Is the dragon not still there, in the Lonely Mountain, sleeping on my treasure? I can ignore him, but for how long? How long until the dragon wakes and razes my hobbit-hole to a smoky cinder? Not to mention, how long can I pretend that my dreams are not there, swirling around in my head, constantly wishing to be fulfilled, without falling into a deep depression?

I can ask all these introspective, thoughtful questions—but really, what’s the point? Everyone dies, the universe will end, everything is meaningless, success can’t be measured, it’s all subjective, nothing matters. I’d rather stay home, smoke weed, play games, and read. I just want to be left alone, and I’m not hurting anyone, so who cares?

So, there’s your proof—I’m no Bilbo Baggins.

IV, Bilbo and I

“Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.”
—The Hobbit

What I’m realizing, after reading The Hobbit, is that Bilbo and I are similar in many ways—we both like to stay home, read, tell stories, play games, make excuses, and blow smoke rings—but we’re different in one crucial aspect, the most important aspect, the thing that makes Bilbo, well, Bilbo:

Bilbo took a chance, despite his fear—and while Gandalf may have prodded him a little, it was still Bilbo’s choice in the end to go on the expedition to the Lonely Mountain. And he took that chance because Bilbo, like me, really wanted to do Something Tookish—go on an adventure—but he was afraid, afraid of the trial, afraid of the dragon, afraid of failure, so he made excuse after excuse, fighting the urge for adventure until something woke inside him, and he could not deny it any longer. The dissonance created by his desire for adventure and his fear of the trial was so great, and so diametrically opposed, that his excuses could no longer hold back his Tookishness. He reached a breaking point. Suddenly, sitting in his hobbit-hole, fantasizing about adventure, was no longer enough; he had to experience it for himself: see the great mountains, hear the pine trees and the waterfalls, explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking stick.

So he made a choice: he chose to do Something Tookish.

And Bilbo, upon returning from his year-long journey, did not regret it. His need for adventure was fulfilled, and he became good friends with dwarves and elves and even men, and he was a happier hobbit for it, even if the other hobbits ended up thinking he was a little weird upon his return—which just goes to show that you shouldn’t care about what other hobbits think of you; as long as you yourself are fulfilled. And Bilbo was very fulfilled, but he wouldn’t have been if he had dived headfirst into the bottomless bag that day Gandalf showed up at his round hobbit-hole door.

And there was a secondary benefit of going on the adventure too, one that Bilbo didn’t even realize at the time: By helping the dwarf party reclaim the Lonely Mountain, they neutralized Smaug, who may have razed The Shire and the lands around it later on. So, in a roundabout way, Bilbo saved The Shire—and also all of Middle Earth, if we’re counting the The Lord of the Rings—which meant that he essentially preserved his ability to stay home, read, play games, tell stories, and blow smoke rings for a long long time. Because sometimes a hobbit needs to leave their faux temporal bubble and do Something Tookish if they wish their hobbit-holes to last forever.

So, what I’m really trying to say is, Bilbo Baggins is a hero—and not one of those phony comic book heroes, either, but a mundane, everyday kind of hero. He’s just a regular hobbit, like you and I, who trembles with fear, makes excuses, and doesn’t think he can face the dragon—but he tries anyway; that’s what makes Bilbo such an inspirational character.

And thanks to Bilbo, twenty years after middle school, I’m now realizing that I’m no hero and that I myself am full of excuses. I have a whole bottomless bag full of them. And I use them with great precision, all the time, for almost anything that’s not just sitting around playing video games or watching television or doomscrolling on my phone—all things that would be fine if they were actually things I wanted to be doing—but most of the time, I’m doing those things in spite of other things that I’d rather be doing, Tookish things, because I have a desire for more than just doomscrolling and consuming media. I want to learn how to play an instrument, I want to be a better father, I want to write more often, and so on. But all this stuff is hard, scary, dragon-esque, so I retreat into my hobbit-hole, my faux temporal bubble, and I never do anything Tookish.

So, yeah, I’m no Bilbo Baggins—but I’m realizing now, as I’m typing this out, that maybe I don’t need to be. Besides, I can’t be Bilbo anyway, because I’m 6’2”, have rounded ears and mostly hairless feet, and I definitely cannot eat six meals a day—not without getting very sick, at least—so maybe becoming Bilbo is a bit unrealistic, maybe, instead, I just need to adopt some of his Tookish qualities.

The question is—how?

V, Disclaimer

“Many character names, places, events and other elements from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, including the titles of those works, are trademarked by Middle-earth Enterprises, LLC.”
—The Tolkien Estate

Before we go any further, I want to clarify something important: From that last chapter, you may have picked up some notion that I look down on hobbies like playing video games or watching television or whatever—but that would be an incorrect assumption. I see all that stuff as akin to reading a book. They’re all hobbies that people find comfort in, and that’s all that matters for the purposes of this essay: These things provide comfort. They are hobbit-holes. And who am I, really, to say that someone should leave their hobbit-hole? I am not trying to cast judgment on anyone who enjoys partaking in these hobbit-hole hobbies; in fact, I partake in these hobbit-hole hobbies myself, quite liberally, all the time, so I’m really in no position to judge.

But (yes, there’s a but) these hobbit-hole hobbies, which provide so much comfort, are often partaken in despite other things that the partaker might want (or need) to be doing instead. I know, personally, I’m constantly fighting this inner battle of, “I’m playing video games right now, but I really need to be writing, but I feel like I have writer’s block, so I’m just going to keep playing video games instead.” And the dissonance this causes feels unpleasant, so I often just double-down on video games to distract myself further from the unpleasant dissonance, which is a loop that only ends up causing more dissonance, relieved only once I start doing the thing I felt like I needed to be doing in the first place.

But the real point I’m trying to make here is that “video games” as the distraction could be replaced with anything else in my previous example, as the distraction doesn’t matter—the distraction isn’t the thing making the excuses; the thing making the excuses is actually me, myself, and I. Furthermore, it’s important to note that this “thing I need to be doing” (in my case, “writing”) is totally subjective and that any cultural standard that tries to assign greater worth to one activity over another (such as writing being of greater worth than playing video games, for example) is just that: a cultural standard, which is subjective, meaning you should analyze it and decide for yourself if that’s what you need (or want) to be doing. Of course, arguments could be put forth that one hobby is indeed greater than the other, but that’s not the purpose of this essay. I am not trying to open that can of worms here.

What I’m ultimately trying to get at with this prolix parenthetical is that your personal “thing I need to be doing” is going to be unique to you—it’s totally your own thing, something only you know. It could be writing, it could be painting, it could be spending time with your family, it could be applying for a new job, and it could even be playing video games. It could be anything. I don’t know the thing that you actually need to be doing, and I don’t pretend to know, but I do know that there is something that you need to be doing, and I know that you’re deeply passionate about that thing, and I know that you know what that thing is, and I also know that perhaps sometimes you make excuses for not doing that thing—or maybe you don’t (only you would know)—but I do know that I certainly do, make excuses, that is.

So let’s move on.

VI, The Four-Step Path

“Be good, take care of yourselves—and DON’T LEAVE THE PATH!”
—Gandalf, The Hobbit

So, back to the question: How do I become more Tookish?

Well, Bilbo Baggins had the advantage of being born a Took, which, unfortunately, is an advantage that we, as humans, do not have. But actually, I don’t believe that Bilbo’s Took bloodline had anything to do with him going on his adventure—I think that’s just an excuse that other hobbits use, a way to otherize hobbits who don’t conform to the play-it-safe, stay-at-home hobbit standard—“He’s not like us hobbits, he’s a Took!”—when all hobbits, deep down, want to go on adventures but are scared, just like Bilbo was, yet don’t know how to deal with it other than by blaming the urge for adventure on some evil foreign gene.

And besides, attributing someone’s character and choices to some sort of ancient bloodline is a little too deterministic for my tastes, and it promotes the idea that certain bloodlines excel at certain things, which leads to some pretty nasty ethical conclusions—the entire concept of race itself being rather problematic already. So, we’ll keep the “Tookish” adjective because it sounds great, but we’ll throw out the bloodline part, because we don’t need it.

Bilbo’s choice to leave The Shire had nothing to do with his Took bloodline, but instead, his own ability to recognize when he’s making excuses and his ability to exercise good old-fashioned free will to overcome those excuses; and Tolkien made this clear in the text, because throughout The Hobbit, Bilbo constantly wishes to go home, often saying things like, “Why, O why did I ever leave my hobbit-hole!” and “I wish I was back in my hobbit-hole by my own warm fireside with the lamp shining!” and so on. Yet, despite all this, he pushes on, to the Lonely Mountain.

So, with that in mind, maybe the first step to becoming more Tookish is looking for excuses or recognizing when I’m making excuses, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds because making excuses feels really good at the time—which is why I make them—but they never feel good later, upon analysis, if I choose to analyze them, which I often don’t, because that requires me to confront my own darkness, and that’s uncomfortable. But usually, if I’m having trouble figuring out how to recognize if excuses are preventing me from doing something I truly want to be doing, I’ve found that it’s actually a lot easier than it seems: I simply close my eyes and think about the thing I want to be doing—but not the thing specifically, more so how that thing makes me feel. I think stuff like, “Does it make me feel nervous?” or “Does it fill me with dread?” or “In my mind’s eye, does it look like a big dragon?” or “Is there dissonance there?” And if there is dissonance there, then excuses are bound to be nearby; and by that point on the path, I have usually pinpointed about ten excuses already. In fact, I’ve found that the more cognitive dissonance associated with a thing, the more important that thing usually is to me; almost as if cognitive dissonance is like a psychic smoke detector of sorts.

Once that’s done, the second step is to take note of all the excuses. As an example, the next time I’m playing video games or whatever, and I feel the urge to do that special thing I need to be doing—like learning how to play guitar, which is one of the things I’ve always fantasized about—I’m going to take note of what I tell myself. It may be something simple like, “I’m too tired to do that right now,” or it may be something more complicated, like, “It’s too hard. The world isn’t made for people like me. I will not change. I have too many things going on. I’m scared. People are going to laugh at me. There’s not enough time. I’ve got deep childhood trauma. I’m antisocial. I cannot change. I can’t. I just can’t.”

Regardless of how simple or complicated the excuses may be, the third step is always to turn each excuse into a question, essentially putting the excuse on trial, forcing it to prove itself. For example: Is learning guitar really too hard? If so, how are so many other people doing it? Am I truly less talented than all these people who can play guitar, some of whom seem pretty dimwitted? Does that mean that I myself am incredibly dimwitted? And so on.

The fourth step is to start answering these questions rationally. For example: Maybe learning how to play an instrument is hard for everyone at first, and those who are good at it just stuck with it and practiced consistently. Maybe this is why even someone as stupid as Kid Rock can play guitar. Following this logic, it makes sense that those who have practiced something I haven’t are better at it than me, so maybe I’m not so dimwitted after all. Perhaps I’m just full of excuses, headfirst in the bottomless bag? And now I’m a little bit closer to becoming motivated to learn how to play guitar.

But even at this point, I’m still full of doubt. I might tell myself something like, “Well, I’ve tried guitar before and failed,” but this too is just another excuse that has to be dealt with in the same way as all the other excuses, by following the same process of breaking down the excuse’s logic or lack thereof. For example: There’s this idea that some people are just amazing at whatever they try from the start, as if they were born to be musicians, writers, painters, philosophers, or whatever. But I don’t believe any of this is true. It’s far more likely that a celebrated author, musician, or whoever only got there because they started, stuck with it, and improved over time. In fact, I’m confident most celebrated artists weren’t very good (using “good” loosely here) early on and probably had many of the same doubts I have. I doubt anyone—even a savant—is good at something the first time they try it; these are Hollywood myths, historical legends built around cults of personality that only formed after the subject of the cult had practiced enough to get good at the thing they’re known for. It follows that failing at something once doesn’t mean I’ll never be good at it—though, if I keep telling myself otherwise, I might never be good at it because doubt is a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if I give in to it.

So, to recap, the four-step path to becoming more Tookish is the following: 1) recognize when you’re making excuses, 2) note each excuse, 3) turn each excuse into a question, and 4) answer those questions rationally.

However, this is still not enough to do Something Tookish. All I’ve done, by utilizing this four-step path, is increase my cognitive dissonance, because even though I just broke down several of my excuses for not learning how to play guitar, I’m still not learning how to play guitar; I’m just extra aware of the fact that I’m headfirst in the bottomless bag, hence the increased cognitive dissonance. But this is intentional, because increased cognitive dissonance is a good thing, as cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, and the more uncomfortable I become, the more willing I am to do Something Tookish to get rid of that cognitive dissonance.

But it turns out that simply recognizing the irrationality of my excuses is one thing, while actually doing the thing that those excuses are preventing me from doing is a whole other thing entirely.

VII, The Fifth & Final Step

“So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!”
—Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit

Now that I’ve flipped my excuses into questions, answered those questions, and revealed my excuses to be more or less irrational, the fifth step is turning each of those excuses into Tookish Affirmations, or little mantras that promote Tookish behavior. And it just so happens that I have a whole list of excuses right there at the top of this essay, in one long run-on paragraph, that are perfect fodder for Tookish Affirmations. So that’s what I’ll do—turn each of those excuses into Tookish Affirmations.

“I didn't sign up for this.” Neither did Bilbo nor anyone else, but lesser hobbits have risen to the occasion, so I can too. “It’s too hard.” Everything is hard starting out; rendering something easy is just a matter of practice, time, and patience. “I’m a hands-on learner.” Last time I checked, I have hands, so I don’t see the problem. “I don’t have any experience.” And I never will until I try. “I’m too young.” Which means the joys of many first-times are still ahead of me. “College is too expensive.” Loans and grants exist; money is a construct. “I don’t want to go into debt.” Money is a cultural meme, a construct; debt is invisible numbers that can’t hurt me. Defaulting and bankruptcy exist—intangible numbers will not keep me from my dreams. “Degrees are useless anyway.” Achievements should not be measured by their tangible usefulness but in the fulfillment derived from the achievement itself and the ability to say: I did it, here’s the proof. “There are too many options.” And therefore so many opportunities. “I’m dyslexic.” Challenge accepted. “I’m not ready.” Nobody is. “I’ll never get a good job.” Jobs are just a means to an end, and my end is achieving my dreams, most of which exist outside of my profession—so who cares? “It’s all nepotism, cronyism, soulless networking.” If I’m trying to get a job somewhere where this is the case, then I’m at the wrong job, and it’s time to expand my horizons. “I won’t play the corporate game.” But I will play my own game. “The world isn’t made for people like me.” The world isn’t made for anyone, and this isn’t a bad thing—it just means that I can mold my reality, make it work for me. “I will not change.” I don’t need to change; everything I need is already inside me, waiting to be released. I am full of potential, and realizing my potential doesn’t suddenly erase my unique character; if anything, it adds to it. “I have too many things going on.” Which just means I need to get better at prioritization. “I’m scared.” But I’m not alone—Bilbo and many others were afraid too; but if they can do it, so can I. “People are going to laugh at me.” Let them. Who cares? I never liked most people to begin with. “There’s not enough time.” Time is an illusion; the only time now is party time. “I’ve got deep childhood trauma.” Don’t we all? “I’m antisocial.” I can adapt. “I was never trained for this.” Doesn’t matter, training starts now. “It’s not my wheelhouse.” Wheelhouse is a cringe corporate buzzword (reminder: stop using cringe corporate buzzwords). “I’d rather stay home.” But to keep my house, I have to leave it once in a while, doing something I might not want to do, so that when I’m done, I can return home to my cozy hobbit-hole and relax without fear or stress. “I’m comfortable here.” Anyone can get comfortable anywhere via hobbit homeostasis. “The outside world is cruel.” Maybe so, but I try not to be, and what goes around comes around. “The system is working against me.” I am working against the system. “I’m too stressed out.” My mind can be tamed; things never turn out as badly as they seem in my head. “I’m being discriminated against.” Obstacles only make me stronger. “I’m depressed.” Then I need to get out of the house, experience something new, stop being idle, give my mind something else to think about. “But I don’t like going out.” Yet staying inside too long makes me depressed, so circle back to the previous excuse. “I didn’t choose to be born.” No one does; that’s just the way it goes. “It’s not fair.” I hate to sound like my father, but life isn’t fair, kid. And I can adapt. “Everything is a scam.” And I’m smart enough to see through the scam and work around it. “It’s all luck.” I make my own luck. “Only psychopaths are successful in this capitalist netherworld.” I’m not part of the capitalist netherworld; I’m part of my own world, which I mold to my liking, using my own free will. “I won’t compromise my values.” If I feel as if I have to compromise my values to achieve my goals, then my goals need to be reevaluated. “I don’t want to be a slave to the wage.” My mind cannot be shackled. “My morals are superior.” If I’m making this excuse, then I need to check myself, because any moral system that proclaims one person to be superior to another is a dubious one. “I’m doing better than most people my age anyway.” But that’s no reason to stop now. “Adulting is too confusing.” Yet there are many adults, many of whom are doing just fine, so I can too; in fact, I can do even better. “I’ve tried it. It didn’t work out. It never works out.” No one is good at something the first time they try it. “Everything should be free anyway.” True, but these are the cards I have been dealt, so I will adapt. “It’s not fair.” We’ve been over this. “It’s all stupid.” If everything is stupid, then nothing is stupid. “I’m too old.” Which only makes me wiser. “I can’t focus. I have ADHD.” My hyperactivity and ever-shifting focus allow me to stay energized and catch things others do not, which is more akin to a superpower than a neurodevelopmental disorder. “There are plenty of people just like me; they’re doing fine.” And there are plenty of people just like me doing much better, too, so why stop now? “Learning an instrument is too complicated.” Writing ten-thousand-word essays about The Hobbit is pretty complicated too, but I’m doing that, so there. “It takes too much time.” Yet I spend at least three hours a day looking at my phone, so it seems like there’s a lot of time waiting to be reclaimed for better things. “I lack the hand-eye coordination. I’m clumsy.” Maybe so, but with practice and dedication, I won’t be as much. “Some people are born gifted; I’m not one of those people.” Genetics do not define my character or motivations. I have free will. I can do whatever I want. “I’m dumb.” I’ve met dumber. “I can’t write.” Yet I’m writing right now. “I have writer’s block.” So I’m just going to throw stuff at the figurative wall and see what sticks. “No one is going to read my stuff anyway.” That’s not the point, that was never the point. “Just thinking about it makes me anxious.” My anxiety is unpleasant, but it forces me into a state of heightened awareness, allowing me to think more critically, anticipate challenges, pinpoint flaws, and correct them efficiently. “Talking to people makes me nervous.” But I am an interesting person with interesting things to share, and I’m sure the people I’m talking to are a little nervous as well, so it all evens out. “It’s not my fault.” It might not be my fault, but I can still do something about it. “It’s my parents’ fault. They didn’t prepare me for this.” My parents are regular people who make mistakes, like all parents, and I love them, and I know they want to see me happy, and following my dreams makes me happy, so I’m going to follow my dreams. “It’s not my responsibility.” If everyone thought this way, the world would fall to ruin in seconds. “Someone else should handle it.” See previous Tookish Affirmation. “I’d probably fail anyway.” Failing is a powerful teacher, and I’ve yet to fail the same way twice. “I’m not that smart.” Intelligence is an arbitrary metric, defined differently by different people and cultures, which means, ultimately, intelligence is subjective, and therefore pretty much everyone is a genius, including me.

And last but certainly not least: “What's the point, anyway? Everyone dies. The universe will end. Everything is meaningless. Success can't be measured. It's all subjective. Nothing matters. I’d rather stay home, smoke weed, play games, and read. I just want to be left alone. I’m not hurting anyone. Who cares?” And this one seems like the smoking gun, the perfect excuse to just zone out completely, ignore everything, including my own aspirations and dreams, because, hey, I’m just going to die anyway, so what worth are achievements or talents or anything, really? But the thing about this excuse is that it actually works both ways: If everything is meaningless, and everyone dies, and everything is subjective, this actually means that everything is in a state of flux, meaning everything is both meaningful and meaningless at the same time, which means this is all word games, which means that meaning is actually a matter of one’s perspective or attitude. And if I consider which attitude actually makes me feel better in the long term (and often in the short term, too), it’s the attitude that everything is meaningful, because this is all there is, I’ll never get another life like this ever again—and I do have hopes and dreams and aspirations that I want to fulfill; and I know that in the past, when I’ve achieved some of those dreams—like publishing a long essay I spent a lot of time on—I’ve felt much better than when I simply thought about writing the essay but held myself back by telling myself “everything is meaningless, so what does it matter?”

And besides, if everything is meaningless, then what am I making excuses for? Why am I doing anything? Clearly, I believe deep down that there is meaning in the things I’m doing; otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing anything at all. I would just wither away and die, because who cares. But here I am, doing things. In fact, the assertion that “everything is meaningless” is actually a meaningless assertion, undermined by its own premise—that everything is meaningless—therefore, the assertion itself is meaningless and thus can be safely ignored, by its own admission. This is the paradox of meaninglessness.

And as far as “I’m not hurting anyone,” well, I know that’s not true, because every time I make an excuse, I’m depriving myself of the feeling of fulfillment that I know for a fact—from experience—brings me joy. And, ultimately, every time I make an excuse for not facing the trial, I am letting the dragon linger in this world a little while longer, which just puts me at risk of being burned alive by the great worm’s fiery breath later on, and that would definitely hurt me, so I’m not not hurting anyone, because I’m hurting myself, in a deeply profound way, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time, because of the short-term soothing effect of excuse-making.

I realize some of these Tookish Affirmations may sound like big-time cope, like I’m just saying empty platitudes or something to make myself feel better, but they’re only as empty as I believe them to be. These Tookish Affirmations exist to bolster both my self-esteem and motivation, to help me achieve my goals and follow my dreams. And while some of these Tookish Affirmations may not work, and some may seem hokey or self-helpy, if they get me closer to achieving my true goals, then they’re serving their purpose, regardless of their hokeyness or even their veracity—because if I can trick myself into believing that I can do something, then I might as well be able to do that thing. Believing in myself is just as good, as it will force me to start doing the things I really want to do, which brings me closer to achieving my goals and living my dreams. And if I fail at first, I will just get up and try again.

I will fake it until I make it.

That’s what Bilbo Baggins did. He was just an ordinary hobbit, like you and I, who loved his hobbit-hole, but he dreamed of something more, he dreamed of adventure. And when it came knocking on his door in the form of one wizard and thirteen dwarves, he took a chance; he was neither an adventurer nor a burglar, but he faked it, and by the end, he was stealing treasure right from under the great dragon’s nose—and if a hobbit can do something like that, then so can I.

So I think I’m ready for the final step now, but first I need to buy an acoustic guitar.

It’s time for me to do Something Tookish.

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If this essay made you feel something, please let me know via email at f0rrest@pm.me.

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#TheHobbit #Essay #Autobiographical #Books

It is Ramazan, and a pleasant one at that with good weather so one doesn't really get too exhausted while fasting.

I am not really in the mood to write something proper so this is just me babbling about matchmaking culture.

When growing up in Pakistan, you're told life starts when you finish your degree and get your first job.

As a doctor with over 3 years experience, I am now being told life starts when you finish your training and get a big post, then you're able to buy a car, a house, etcetera and are considered eligible.

By the time that happens for me most of my peers will have children aged 9 and what not, they will probably have enough savings to get a 2nd house or probably just be out of this hellhole. It feels a bit like trying to race a bicycle or perhaps even a donkey cart versus some cars.

In Pakistan, those who don't get married past a certain age are generally viewed as leftovers – yes, it is that toxic.

For women that age is lower, and thus life even harsher. Past 25, people start wondering if there are serious issues with the girl, after all if she's unmarried at 25, something must be seriously wrong with her. And 30? Well that's the red line. After all, there can only ever be one reason a girl is unmarried, it means nobody wanted her.

Mhm, people here are that stupid and toxic.

For men you used to get a bit more leeway, as it's a patriarchal society and men were expected to take time to settle, but that has also faded away as of late. With so many rishta bureaus, Facebook groups dedicated to matchmaking and apps for the same, there's no shortage of men and thus, it is no longer a case of “oh men need time to settle.” because so many men have houses from their parents, familial wealth, automobiles etc. I am already mocked for it at 26 by people I work with, friends etc. and there is another senior we have, aged 31 or perhaps 32, who I have heard being referred to as patay maal by the nurses, other doctors etc.

Patay maal means leftovers, maal being thing/item/asset and patay meaning ignored/left behind.

Now the fellow says it started at 30. For me who is getting it at 26, I wonder how bad it'll be. I mean, I already have some idea, I am the kind of person who if he visits his relatives won't get offered a glass of water, whereas others might get forced to stay for dinner, but I'd rather not have fake niceties in my life.

For all my poor, not so well off friends, the matchmaking system is brutally transactional in nature, and will make you feel utterly worthless unless you have some decent assets. People would rather have an uneducated landlord with a good passive income than a struggling banker, doctor, engineer, lawyer etc. I do understand, to a certain extent – you would, at the very least, want to make sure your daughter was financially secure if you lived in the capitalistic hellscape of Pakistan; a dystopia so hellish for the common man that it would make Orwell throw away his finished manuscript and begin to write it all over again.

A lot of my aunts tell me I brought this on myself, and should have become a freelancer or something of the sort and studied something that paid better instead. There is no sympathy no matter where you go. And if you complain about the saturation and lack of pay, “Doctor so and so” aged 50 with a decades old private practice is mentioned. Reason, as they say, goes out the window, for a swim with some starving sharks, while wearing a blood soaked shirt.

They said I should just shut up and marry someone over 40, just because of her wealth. Maybe in a different world, I would have done, but I have spent so long swimming in the waters of poverty that I no longer care about much, if anything. Give me a good book or a film and I am set, I have even lost interest in two of the things I loved the most, anime and games, no longer do I care for either, perhaps I am too depressed, who knows.....

I do, in fact, and it is depression after all, wearing an orange hoodie with the words eat, pray and love written in bold while he mixes ice cream with coca cola and makes a float.

Just as men suffer rejection based on physical traits – for instance, age, baldness, height, wrong skin color are the main dealbreakers for many – so too do women, and of a far worse degree. In addition to height, color (girls with wheatish and dark skin are often told to get certain dodgy injections for whitening, fairness creams are the norm – think of the famous Fair and Lovely), their face gets scrutinized – someone I know got plastic surgery because her big nose was a deal-breaker for her cousin, so do their manners, their “keeping in line with tradition”, dressing, how they talk, obedience and what not. There are also those weird types obsessed with finding a doctor daughter in law, only to turn her into a homemaker, it is considered a societal flex. Yes, things are that bad.

To be honest, I am just a bitter man paying for having grown up a little too sheltered, I had no idea medicine was so saturated or that my life after becoming a doctor would be no different than the struggles of a common clerk, but that is the state of Pakistan, turn over a rock and you find 100s of us, or even 1000s, there are more medical colleges than ever, and the rate at which new hospitals emerge with new posts isn't even 1:10 for the amount of new doctors that graduate every year. The teaching side isn't much better either.

Women have it far worse, being treated like cattle or livestock at a market, imagine just resting at home, reading a book when you are told to come down to the lounge and meet this family who wants to look at you. It is all so Orwellian, and the normalization/embedding level of this culture is too horrid. And for those over 30, it is a particularly horrendous nightmare, as then you're shown men of 40, 50 and even 60 or often widowers and divorcees. Lucky are they who come from more liberal families and don't have to go through this system – though even there some families often force their daughters to end things and marry that one boy they picked out, instead. What follows will be a cleansing (or in more extreme cases, deletion) of all her online accounts, perhaps with Ariana Grande's Thank U, Next playing in her room as she does – my shout outs to that one colleague who has imparted more pop culture knowledge to me during our breaks than an entire college level course would in years, sometimes I feel like we are hanging out in America when she's talking.

I've always wanted siblings but I'm glad I don't have a sister, I would not be able to stand her going through this system.

My own fate, you can say I kind of foresaw this, even as a kid, was always clear. When you swim in the waters of poverty too long you start to accept that maybe this is all you'll get, but there is also a sense of gratefulness, having a roof over your head and edible food, and the respect I get from some patients and all our custodial staff.

And so, my once great expectations have turned into grape ones. Life goes on, it throws a newspaper at someone's window, drives over a ditch, slips on a banana peel, nearly gets eaten by a tiger, and smokes a cigarette with death, who is waiting for his friends at the bus stop. Turtles move a lot faster than we realize, and often life drives over them too.

My Interests (Part 1)

For my first blog post on this site, I wanted to introduce myself by sharing some things I have an interest in. While I have already met some of the people here on Mastodon, it’s been a while since I actually interacted with them and discussion of my favorite media was kept to a moderate level. The people were so kind, to a point that I felt like I was able to express myself in a way I never thought I could ever do. So now, it’s time for me to gush about some of my favorite pieces of media.

Sonic the Hedgehog: Despite the inconsistent quality of the franchise’s games and the series as a whole being easy to make fun of, there’s no doubt that Sonic the Hedgehog had a massive impact on the gaming industry and those who played it, me included. One of my earliest gaming memories was playing Sonic Advance on a hand-me-down Game Boy Advance which was also my introduction to Sonic. While I absolutely sucked balls at it because I was only 3 when I first played the game, there were so many things about it that caught my attention. The expressive characters, the vibrant graphics, the catchy music, it was unlike anything I ever experienced.

Since then, I have become a massive fan of the franchise and not only played the games, but also read the IDW comics, collected the merch and watched the TV shows and movies. I know that to this day, some people still make fun of the franchise and its fans, but that doesn’t stop me from loving it to death. Whenever I have a crummy day or start feeling anxious, Sonic and pals are there to help me get through it.

And like I said, the actual games themselves are not exactly golden when it comes to quality, but I enjoy a majority of them because of how unique they are. The series’ various gameplay formulas are styles that haven’t been replicated by other games outside of indie titles. Even though I am usually averted to change, Sonic still manages to capture my attention and even in its dark phases, I will always support this amazing franchise.

Super Mario: Another platformer icon I take great interest in is the beloved Super Mario franchise and its countless sub-series. Even though I’m a bigger fan of Sonic than I am of Mario, I definitely agree with many on the later having a greater quantity and quality of games. Even if you aren’t into gaming, there’s a good chance you’ve played at least one of the red plumber’s outings. Take one look into a video game store and you’ll see this man’s face everywhere, and I’m okay with that.

I know that some people in recent years have criticized the Mario series for being oversaturated and formulaic and while I agree to a certain extent, there’s something so damn charming about it. There’s a reason Mario has stuck around for so many years, that being the franchise is universal. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what your age is or even if you take an interest in gaming because Mario can appeal to almost every demographic under the sun. Even though I personally tend to stay far away from games in the mainstream, there’s something different about Mario.

Just like with Sonic, my first experience with the series was at an early age and my appreciation for it has grown since then. Each game contains something that makes it stand out from other titles, in other words, every game is distinct. I also love the characters; in an era where every game tries to have some gloomy edgelord as a protagonist, it’s great to see characters that are just there to join the ride and have fun. I have many issues with Nintendo, but I’ll always love Mario.

Five Nights at Freddy’s: Whether or not you like Five Nights at Freddy’s, you can’t deny its impact on horror gaming. Ever since the first game released back in 2014, it provided an experience unlike any other at the time. Its gameplay was relatively simple but contained a genuinely tense and unsettling atmosphere. That first game was my introduction to horror, and I would continue to follow the franchise for years to come. Interestingly enough, the gameplay was a very small part of why I enjoyed the series. I loved the games for their atmosphere, complex lore and characters that truly straddle the line between creepy and cute.

Speaking of which, the characters were probably my favorite part of Five Nights at Freddy’s. It might seem crazy to say that considering how their personalities, especially in the first few games, are almost non-existent. Though, I think it has to do with how said characters are designed. They strike a balance between appearing eerily uncanny and being lovable goofballs. The animatronics in Security Breach are probably my favorite, especially Roxanne Wolf.

While I never directly participated with other FNAF fans, it was still awesome to experience the evolution of the series as more and more games were released. I know that FNAF isn’t as popular as it once was a decade ago, but I still love it. Even those who are still in the fandom have created a real sense of community with several fan-created works being prominent in certain online spaces. FNAF isn’t for everyone, but it certainly was and still is an amazing series for me.

South Park: If you follow me on Mastodon, you probably know that South Park is my favorite show, and I don’t just mean in the realm of animation. The writing, characters, and humor are among the best in any piece of media I’ve ever experienced. In addition, South Park has crossed every possible line multiple time to the point it’s a wonder the show hasn’t gone off the air. Though, one of the reasons for that is because it’s a masterpiece.

Despite my parents having differing political views from one another, they were both pretty cool with allowing me to watch stuff that I probably shouldn’t have. At the age of 13, I watched my first episode of South Park called ‘Medicinal Fried Chicken’ where Randy intentionally got testicular cancer to smoke marijuana while Cartman got involved in a KFC crime gang (no, I’m not kidding). It was absolutely hysterical which further caused me to watch more episodes and eventually the entire show.

Even though South Park has a reputation for being arguably the most offensive TV show of all time, it’s oddly endearing compared to other adult animations. A lot of animated shows geared towards mature audiences seem to rely on swearing and political incorrectness as a crutch while lacking subtlety and cleverness. South Park is different because it offers commentary and dark humor that’s surprisingly nuanced.

South Park was also something of a comfort show when I was stuck in my home during the COVID Pandemic. Throughout that time, I became depressed and even now, I still feel like crap on most days. However, it was refreshing to discover South Park, a show that made me laugh like a hyena. I was never really emotive and barely let my feelings show, but South Park somehow never fails to make me feel happy, especially when it feels like the world is fucking burning.

DOOM: Just like South Park, I got into DOOM during the pandemic and similarly allowed me to ease my anxiety. It sounds strange considering how the game is basically about slaughtering demons to utter abandon. However, it was cool to unleash my anger without harming any real people. This anger eventually turned into me genuinely enjoying one of the greatest gaming franchises of all time. Before then, I already had an interest in retro games, though DOOM skyrocketed that obsession.

At its core, DOOM is simple; you take a gun, see a demon, shoot a demon, rinse and repeat, right? Well, that’s not entirely the case because DOOM is very intricately designed, even compared to modern shooters. Everything just works, from the level design to the weapon variety to the absolute god-tier soundtrack. It’s impressive how DOOM, despite being one of the first games of its kind, manages to be even more expertly crafted than almost every FPS game that came after.

There are also the sequels which are just as fun as the original, DOOM Eternal being an obvious example. Let’s not forget about the infinite number of unofficial WADs which makes an already re-playable series into something that could last for several lifetimes. While I think other video games are better, well, games, if I was forced to play only one game for the rest of my life, it would be DOOM. Despite what the name might imply, there is a lot of hope to be found in DOOM.

Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss: Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss are among the more recent pieces of online animation and have gained quite a fandom, as well as a hatedom for some reason. Despite the divisive nature of both shows, I think they’re breaths of fresh air in this era of adult animation and kind of changed how web series were viewed. Needless to say, these flawed masterpieces showed how internet-created animation could be just as amazing, maybe even surpass what’s seen on television.

Like I mentioned before, both Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss are polarizing, but I personally love them to death. The art style is very unique, the soundtracks are awesome, and the characters are probably some of the most empathetic and down-to-earth in animation, which is ironic considering the shows literally take place in hell. They can also be quite emotional and even gave me an entirely new perspective on media.

The characters in particular are very well-written, which is a rarity in the realm of adult animation. My favorite characters are Husk from Hazbin Hotel and Loona from Helluva Boss (I swear I’m not a furry). The two have a deadpan snarky attitude, an archetype I will never not love. The story is additionally very engaging and ambitious, one could argue that it’s too ambitious. I know these shows aren't for everyone and totally get the criticism for it, but I adore it, and I’ll always remember the moments that made me laugh, feel happy, or shed tears.

Resident Evil: Now that we got slaughtering, rehabilitating and empathizing with demons out of the way, it’s time to do that first one with zombies. As of now, Resident Evil is my latest hyper-fixation, and I don’t think it’ll be going away any time soon. Back in December, I played Resident Evil 4 and quickly considered it one of my all-time favorite games. Afterwards, I went straight to the PS1 trilogy and enjoyed those as well, with Resident Evil 2 being the best in my opinion.

I know I’ve stated this plenty of times, but I love retro games, and Resident Evil is no different. The gameplay, the visuals, the story, the characters, the soundtrack, they’re all incredible. I also like how narmy the games can get, especially with the voice acting (Jill Sandwich, anyone?). It adds a ton of charm and honestly feels like something right out of a low-budget B-grade horror flick. There’s also a massive amount of lore, even in the classic games which was pretty rare for gaming in the 90s.

They’re also addicting as hell and have a crap ton of replay value which I really appreciate. Though, even with the often-subpar voice acting and clunky tank controls, RE can be pretty frightening. Something about the dated aspects of PS1 horror games has always unnerved me, speaking of which, I will elaborate on that in a future post.

-Purple

“Listen up,” She said as she called the room to order. She stood at the head of the table, graphs and pictures displayed on the large screen behind her. “We're real and we proved it. We're not some one-off rebellion. We're the Renegades, and the Maji will have to deal with us globally now. That means clashes with the Astral League, the Starseekers, and whoever else they find.” Nedra explained, sitting backwards in her chair at the head of the table. She ran a hand through her dense braids and smiled at the group of agents and majes assembled in the room. Her dark red leather jacket commanded almost as much attention as her confidence did.

“It also means running PR missions for non-Maji aligned countries.” Max said, British accent on full display. “You can run an operation, but civilians need to see us run a campaign.” With his dirty blonde curly undercut and trimmed goatee, Max Winters looked ready for a photoshoot or a battlefield. Like Nedra, he'd also shown up in his typical outfit. Unlike her leather jacket, holsters, and gear just casual enough to blend into a crowd, Max's purple and black bodysuit was designed for absorbing impacts and minimal wind resistance while flying through the air.

“What they need is stability.” Across the table from him, Donojan Oerbas scowled. His wavy silver tresses hung down his brown face in an asymmetric cut designed to obscure his eye patch. “Wars aren't won on the battlefield. They're won in the hearts and minds of the populaces and soldiers involved. Ask me how I know.”

The question was facetious; everyone in the room knew the well publicized story of the crown prince of the nation of Oerbas ascending to the throne 12 months prior amidst rumors of scandal and betrayal only to be ousted after a long bloody civil war led by his wife. Less public was his recent association with a group reviled as terrorists or hailed as liberators, depending on who was talking.

Nedra Adebayo intentionally kept a low profile, but “Spectre” had gained notoriety among the intelligence community as an opponent of the Maji ever since her departure from the CIA. Though he might report to her, Major Max Shields, better known as “Max Impact” served as the Renegade’s public face and ostensible leader. Donojan had been assumed dead after being deposed by a successful civil uprising, but “Dusk,” had slowly come around to the idea of operating on a team. Together, the trio were the burgeoning movement’s most powerful battlemajes.

“So 'the Renegades' are international, thanks to that little dust up in Fortazela.” Donojan said, “the real test will be what comes next.”

“We know what comes next.” Max laughed. “The Maji aren't just gonna sit there and take it. They're gonna come out swinging.”

“They're going to try and delegitimize us.” Nedra corrected him. “It's what I would do.” The Nigerian woman scanned the room: nearly two dozen faces stared back at her, some standing against the walls of the makeshift conference room. “When that fails, they're going to hunt us. They'll try and get us off the chessboard however they can. The one thing they can't tolerate is a viable alternative to their plan for the world. It’s why they hated Set. And feared him. But with him gone, we have the funding. We have the support. We have the resources. But most importantly? We have the opportunity. Take a look around: we can either do this now or die wishing we had.”

Her audience responded with nods and growing confidence written on their faces. This was working. It reminded her of being an intelligence field agent, running ops and sowing the seeds of an insurgency. It felt good to make a difference the way she knew how.

“If we want to fight them on anything like equal footing though, we'll need more majes. battlemajes.” A woman at the table opined, green eyes locked with Nedras as her straight black hair ran down one side of her face. “I'm tired of getting my ass kicked and having to take cover everytime Rumble or Andromeda or fucking Verdict shows up, yeah?”

“That's a good point, Lin. Ain't too many heavies walking around now what can hang with those two. Even fewer I can think of I'd want to recruit.” His British accent was clear. “But I might just know one.” He grinned and pulled a phone from his pocket.

“Wait, what? You know someone who could even kinda stand up to Rumble and just... didn't call them?”

“Hey, listen. She's... fucking unpredictable, aight? We’ve only talked once since the Aegis days. But if she's still alive, I know she's still down to scrap.” Max put his hand up to silence the groans his answer produced.

Nedra knew who he had in mind. She'd read Max’s file months before she'd ever recruited him. Before he'd been the face of the Renegades, even before his second stint as a battlemaje for the British Air Force, Major Impact had been part of Aegis, the now defunct strike force made up of battlemajes from a dozen different countries.

With his versatile telekinesis majick, self propelled flight came as easy to Max as gathering a cloud of debris and hurling tree branches and rebar from 200 feet in the air. The man was his own artillery, his own air support, his own “no fly zone.” But majes like Martin “Rumble” Washington or Verdict shrugged off those kinds of impacts. They called them “heavies” for a reason.

No, if the Renegades wanted someone who could stand toe to toe with those juggernauts, there was only one person she knew that he knew. Their eyes met, and Nedra considered spoiling his secret. But Max's talents were only matched by his ego; if she wanted him around she needed to move out of the way and let him shine.

“I'll leave it up to you. Don't disappoint me.” She warned.

“I never do.” He grinned.

———————————

She was too big for the helicopter, and Max Impact wondered if she'd grown since they'd last seen each other. He hadn't expected they'd see each other again at all. Her agreeing to work with them came as a genuine shock to a man difficult to shock anymore. The intense wind whipped her blonde high ponytail and messy bangs back and forth. She crouched in front of him, peering out of the side of the chopper and down at the scene beneath.

The wind made it difficult, but he could just make out the words she muttered.

“God I missed this.”

Below them a battle raged. Smoke wafted from plasma scorched craters and people fled east along streets choked by abandoned cars and bikes.

“Right then, what fresh hell am I dropping into?” She asked as she shut the door and turned back to him. He’d almost forgotten her New Zealand accent.

“It’s a protest gone wrong.” He paused to consider how much more to tell her, or how much more she’d want to know. “It’s political. There’s a new candidate with some divisive ideas. We didn’t start today’s fight, though.”

“No? Pussies. Whatever. Don’t care who started. I’m gonna finish it, Max.” The towering woman punched her palm. Her blue eyes gleamed at the prospect of violence.

“Alright. We’ll bring the chopper lower and you can hit the ground running. Play it just like we planned...” He gestured towards the ground.

“Since when do you play things according to plan? Don't tell me you turned into Beacon when I wasn't looking.” She teased.

During the Aegis days he’d been the one bristling loudly at overbearing commanders. Max wondered when he’d become a boring authority figure to her; another voice telling her ‘no.’

“Fuck you and fuck him. I know you can regenerate, but I didn't bring you all the way out here to watch you go splat on the bloody asphalt.” Max took umbrage at being compared to their former squad deputy commander. “Beacon wouldn't know a joke unless he was planning to avoid it during a mission.” They were nothing alike.

“No, you brought me out here to beat up the big mean man who's been bullying you and your friends.” The tall, tanned woman laughed at her own joke. She looked for someone to high five, and finding no one, high fived herself. Max noticed that the extraordinarily tall woman had changed her outfit and her attitude. Gone were the preppy red and white jersey and shorts designed like a volleyball outfit.

Now Hellbent wore a cropped black jacket partially zipped up over a red halterneck top. Her new jacket was no better at hiding her massive bust than her old outfit had been, but her change to pants fitted with armor plates was a welcome one. The new gear made her look older, more serious.

And in their years apart she'd found new confidence and a new attitude to boot.

“I changed my mind. Go fucking splat right there on the asphalt, Leslie.” Their banter felt familiar like an old jacket pulled out of a closet.

“THAT's the Max I remember. Welcome back, asshole. And tell your boys not to forget my luggage. I'm high maintenance.” She fell backwards out of the helicopter, two middle fingers extended, tongue out.

Just like old times.

Max gave a command to the agent behind him, motioned to the black case along the wall of the helicopter, and then followed her out of the helicopter and into the open air above the city.

Hellbent might enjoy a freefall all the way to the ground, but Max Impact was telekinetic. His purple aura wrapped tightly around him long before he hit the ground and he turned a tight arc until he was parallel with the ground, racing above a city street. Leslie Slayter had her mission. His was search and rescue.

Her legs tensed like springs and she felt the ground shake beneath her as she landed. She felt the impact plates in the soles of her heavy boots snap and shatter, and felt that entropy warm her in turn. Breaking things was a fact of life for a woman more than 2 meters tall. But Hellbent's majick turned broken things into power. Each shard of glass that broke beneath her feet was a drop in the bucket of her mana. She found the first soldier and threw him. She didn't much care whose side he was on. He was an appetizer. His scream, the sound he made when he hit the wall behind him, the parts of his she'd dislodged or damaged, all of it was fuel.

Hellbent was hungry.

She ran into the fray, towards the next group of soldiers, plasma rifles heated and blaring. She recognized then that she'd gotten it right. Her first victim had been one of these. This trio went down shooting and screaming, victims to a battlemaje who thrived on conflict like some statuesque blonde war goddess. It was almost boring. Almost.

Hellbent turned to study the situation, looking for whatever direction the civilians and allied agents alike were running from. She could count on the most fun and the best fuel there at the source of the chaos. She popped the collar to her jacket, checked the straps on her heavy boots and gloves, and began running.

He wasn't hard to find. She'd seen him on TV before. He looked taller there. In front of her he was half a foot shorter than her and nearly as wide as he was tall. But the man in front of her was definitely, obviously Martin 'Rumble' Washington. There weren't too many metas with glowing blue veins and sweat and a shape that would make a bodybuilder envious.

She found a hunk of concrete and split it into chunks with a downward elbow. More broken bonds.More drops of mana absorbed. She hefted one melon sized piece of concrete and hurled it straight at Rumble, trying to catch him unaware. But if the videos oversold his stature, they undersold his composure. The brawny Black American lifted an arm to guard himself but never turned towards her, even as the stone turned to dust as it collided with his beefy forearm.

“Wicked...” Hellbent said. This was going to be fun after all.

Rumble barked an order to his soldiers nearby and then took a step that Leslie barely saw. She fixed her eyes on him as he came to a stop in front of her. He wore an orange and black rash guard, lightly padded along the ribs and back and marked with the Cosmic League's starred logo. His shorts were short and broad, designed to never impede his movement.

“What name should I give them when the paramedics come get you?” He asked, staring through her as he assumed a mixed martial artist's stance, loose and ready for anything

“Well how's that for a hello? I figured we'd banter back and forth a bit. Get to know each other a bit. You know girls like a little foreplay before you try and sweep them off their feet.”

If he cracked a smile, it was a small one, black goatee and moustache framing his mouth. “Everyone knows who I am. If you're here, you're here to fight. So let's rumble.”

Hellbent was halfway through her high roundhouse kick by the time he finished his sentence. The 6'6” New Zealander felt her shin against her boot against his arm and pivoted into a hook, and then a knee, a flurry of strikes meant to test his defense. Rumble blocked, then parried, but she caught him by surprise when she caught his brown arm in hers and flung him into the air.

The stocky battlemaje turned midair, trying to regain his balance. Hellbent met him in the air, legs tensed to send her soaring before she curved her body backwards and spiked him back into the ground like a giant volleyball.

“The name’s Hellbent, asshole.” She smiled, brushing off her pants.

It felt nice to put skills from her pre-majick life into practice here in her new career. Back when her greatest ambition was pro volleyball. She landed with a much softer thud than Rumble had, but he leapt back to his feet before she could follow up.

This time there was no denying he'd cracked a smile. The Starfinder’s premier brawler, their immovable titan, was impressed. Hellbent twirled, picking up a downed street sign with ease and swinging it at Rumble. She didn't even see him duck beneath it. Instead, her eyes locked on him again right before his fist landed flush on her cheek and sent her tumbling.

“Hellbent? Sure. Let me know when you start regretting coming here.”

“Hey Leslie, you still alive down there?” Impact's voice was clear in her ear. The fact that he thought to check on her was sweet. The fact that he thought he needed to after a punch like that was insulting.

“Fuck off, flyboy. Me and Rumble are about to get much better acquainted.” She rolled away from Rumble's diving knee, realizing then that a piece of rebar had slashed her side. She felt her mana seeping out of her, mending the torn skin. She watched Rumble observe the reaction as well, studying her.

“Oh, you like that? Come closer and I'll give you a closer look.” Hellbent wiped a layer of dirt off her shirt and made certain to touch her chest more suggestively than necessary. Her curves were no secret. Why not make them a weapon.

“I'll see you close enough when you're in a cell.” Rumble said.

And then they lunged at each other.

Rumble was faster than she’d expected, especially from a man that large. But that was the power of majick: nothing needed to be as it seemed. He fought with the confidence of a career fighter; no surprise coming from a man who’d been a champion fighter before ever becoming a maje. But Leslie leaned on her advantages too; a body that healed itself, and a significant reach advantage. Most important of all, she’d never learned to fight by any rules. She was free to use anything and everything at her disposal.

And that included her luggage.

He’d gotten the better of their last few exchanges, striking with near instant and thunderous force. He was learning her style, her habits, and beating her to the punch. Worse yet he was mocking her for it. The smiling Black man was enjoying himself more with each passing moment.

But Hellbent was not a woman without her secrets.

“Drop my luggage.” She said, finger to her earpiece.

“Leaving already?” Rumble taunted, circling her. He dashed toward her, but Leslie saw an opening in his approach this time, hoisting him up off his feet and then jumping into the air before dropping him on his head. She didn’t press her advantage this time, instead leaping away from him. The black obelisk was already plummeting towards them.

“Bingo.”

The man sized box landed with a thud and a cloud of smoke. Rumble stared at her, uncomprehending as she stood next to it. She slapped the top of the box and then grinned as it split open, revealing a minigun.

She pulled the weapon from its container and hefted it in two hands. Its immense weight didn’t surprise her; the weapon had originally been designed for mounting on vehicles. Only the superhuman strength offered by her majick made the immense gatling laser a feasible weapon for the athletic brawler.

“I didn't expect to need this, but since you got me all riled up... let's go another round!” The blonde woman grinned, weapon trained on him, her hand wrapped around its massive trigger.

#Battlemaje #Action #Magic #Fight #Fantasy #FirstDraft #SFW #Fiction

Part 1 | Part 2

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I, Pale Spectre

There I was, a pale spectre, on a bench, on a walkway, on the Atlantic, on a private island, in a gated community to which I belonged but did not belong, waves going up and down like the addys and grass I was coming down on, cool morning breeze blowing right through me, mossy oaks getting sensual, no sleep, teenage brain basically fried, one hand dangling a lit cigarette between two fingers, the other a copy of Breath of Fire III, missing the front-cover insert so the orange disc shone right through, and I could see my reflection there, off the jewel case, through a cloud of smoke: hair wild as the wind, eyes sunken all Night of the Living Dead, expression expressionless.

There I was, a pale spectre, bearing to look at myself no longer, so I flipped the jewel case, scanned the words: SUGGESTIVE THEMES … a rebellious youth … YOU POSSESS THE POWER … ponders his purpose … MILD ANIMATED VIOLENCE … the lone survivor … DRAGON GENE SPLICING … a great journey … LEGENDARY ROLEPLAYING … shrouded in mystery … TEEN (13+)

I had heard good things about Breath of Fire III: they say it has a timeless art style, a complex ability system, a jazzy soundtrack; they say the story’s not bad either: the main character grows up, changes, gets older; they say it’s a bildungsroman—whatever the fuck that means—but there I was, a pale spectre, about to throw the game right into the Atlantic Ocean…

So I guess I’ll never know.

II, The Headmaster Ritual

Flashback 24 hours.

It’s Friday morning. Barack Obama had won the election just three days prior, so it was a week of celebration, or a week mourning, depending on who you asked. I didn’t care about politics, of course, as my dark hair was like that of an overgrown fern and my blue eyes were dark with eyeliner and my canvas messenger bag was full of Nietzsche books I had never read in my life and my arms were wrapped in all sorts of colorful bracelets and my girl jeans were ripped at the knees and I had spent the night before wired on Adderall playing Starcraft while listening to The Sundays and my left ear was hooped and my dark collared shirt was two sizes too big because I thought it looked cool in a gloomy post-punk kind of way and my cigarettes were right there in the glove box and I thought the whole world was kind of a joke, so obviously I didn’t care about much at all, other than myself, thinking everything was pretty much meaningless because we all die so we might as well just do whatever we want, within reason; and on this specific day, I extolled these anti-values from the cramped backseat of what was basically a real-life Hot Wheels car: a white 1991 Pontiac Firebird with the fluttering eyes and curved profile of a femme fatale, two doors, parked on a side road just outside the school zone; it wasn’t my car; it was my friend Robert’s, because I couldn’t drive, even being of age—because I claimed to have nowhere to go , but in truth I was just too lazy to take the tests—so my mom would drop me off in the morning, and when she was out of sight, I would creep off campus, get in the Firebird—which Robert always left unlocked for me—and snuggle up the best I could in that cramped backseat with a thin pillow and one of those old 5th Generation iPods—the kind that plays videos—which was originally Robert’s, but he had given it to me for keepsies, for no reason other than I had asked him for it, eager to please, so he was just that kind of friend: a good one, a good friend, my best friend.

On this day, I happened to be watching Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and after watching, for the umpteenth time, the fight scene with Tifa and Loz in the church—which always gave me goosebumps with its piano rendition of the original game’s battle theme—I contorted myself like a broken plastic straw into the passenger seat, popped open the glove box, grabbed my soft pack of Marlboro Lights, and then kicked open the door and bent myself out of the car, stretching my 6’2 self out right there on the cement sidewalk, looking all around, absorbing the atmosphere: dark, broken, homicidal decay that oozed from every surrounding building, as if the buildings themselves had been addicted to meth for over three hundred years, which was roughly the age of this town, which was a nationally recognized historic port town known for its booming illegal narcotics trade—due to the ease of trafficking because of all the ports—and the school itself was only minutes away from the druggy ports and the real bad part of town we called Wolf Street—because of its name, but also because of the literal wolves—and the pulp mill, with its smokestacks that billowed rancid clouds of gas, which made the whole town smell of rotten eggs every afternoon around 1:30 PM sharp, and all this was only one bridge and two causeways away from the private island community to which I belonged but did not belong, where I lived with my mother and wealthy stepdad; it was as if there were a literal line dividing the haves and have-nots of the county, and I was skirting that line, pretending to be a have-not, both to be cool and because, well, it just wasn’t wise to be wealthy on Wolf Street.

So I leaned back on the Firebird, slid a cigarette between my lips, sparked it, took a nice long drag, exhaled, sighed pleasurably, popped in my earbuds, slid my thumb across the iPod click wheel, navigated to The Smiths, Self-Titled, and clicked play: It's time the tale were told, of how you took a child, and you made him old. But this was too downtempo for the moment, so I thumbed the old click wheel back to The Smiths, Meat Is Murder, and clicked play once more: Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools; spineless swines, cemented minds. And this fit the moment, so I took it all in, leaning on that Hot Wheels car, tapping fingers to Marr’s aural attack, absorbing Morrissey’s doomed literacy, cool breeze swaying both sweetgum and water oak as if in time with the music, while I puffed clouds of poisonous gas and tried real hard to look like a post-punk James Dean, looking down on all the belligerent ghouls, believing myself to be quite literally too cool for school; all while Mom was back home, none the wiser, keeping her second husband’s business books in order while watching her soaps and her No Spin Zones and her SlapChop infomercials, believing her only son was not a total fuck-up, that he just pretended to hate everything for funsies and suffered for fashion. It’s just a phase, she would say, and she had been saying this for nearly two decades, probably even in my utero.
But I must have lost track of time, because the bell rang out and just like that a wave of teens—many in Obama ‘08 t-shirts, with slogans YES WE CAN and CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN—flooded the sidewalk. Then a pick-up truck with quite a few McCain bumper stickers and at least two confederate flags somehow attached to the hood slowly rolled down the street, in its bed a few teens, all with trucker hats and mullets; they spit out thick wads of snuff in unison at a tall black kid wearing a YES WE CAN, and then they screamed something like GO BACK TO AFRICA WITH YOUR MONKEY PRESIDENT, and that black kid took off after the truck on foot, as if intent on stopping it with his bare hands, at which point the good-ol’ boys in the back yelled GOTDAMN HE FAST then started with the hootin’ and hollerin’, and the driver stomped the gas, blasting off down the one-way, nearly hitting a garbage can before skidding off into a side road, tailpipe backfiring, distinct smell of diesel left behind, at which point the black kid threw up his hands and gave up, which I watched with some morbid curiosity, myself basically immune to race-based discrimination due to my ghostly complexion, a prilevege I never really thought about back then, but one I certainly reaped the benefits of.

And it was around this time I pulled out my Motorola, checked the time, and realized it was 15 minutes into lunch, a time when juniors and seniors were allowed to leave campus, as long as they were back in time for next period; but I, a seventeen-year-old sophomore held back a grade or two for basically never showing up to class, was not allowed to be off campus to begin with, and many of the faculty knew it and could spot me from a mile away—due to my peculiar dress and ridiculous hair—particularly the principal, Mr. Saunds, who kind of had it out for me ever since the year prior when he caught me skipping class but was unable to get ahold of my mother due to her phone number being incorrect in the school database (in a stroke of administrative genius, the parent paperwork could be turned in by the students themselves), so he had no quick way of reporting my truancy in both school and life itself.

Mr. Saunds himself had a bit of a reputation, he would drive the school-issued golf cart around all day, trying to catch class cutters, such was his headmaster ritual, and students would often recount urban legends about him, say he would sometimes climb off-campus trees, just perch up there like a shrike scanning for prey, his little head just barely poking out of the foliage, waiting to get the drop on some unsuspecting kid trying to ditch school; they also said Mr. Saunds would hide in bathroom stalls, perch up on the toilet seat with his feet up on the rim and his knees held high—so kids couldn’t see him if they happened to peek under the stalls—just waiting for some kid to light one up, at which time he would pop out, confiscate the cigarettes or the reefer or whatever non-school-appropriate stuff the kid happened to have; Mr. Saunds himself reeking of piss and shit like some sort of poop bandit—because of all the bathroom perching—which is supposedly how he got his nickname: Shitty Saunds. They even said he had a whole desk full of confiscated flip phones, iPods, weed-nug baggies, lighters, Nintendo DS consoles, cigarettes both loose and packaged, PlayStation Portables, Magic: The Gathering cards, Tamagotchis, pocket knives, and whatever else he happened to get his very hairy hands on, all labeled with the appropriate student’s name, so that he could pull them out during parent-teacher conferences and say stuff like: Look familiar, kid? Complete with Shitty Saunds’ Signature Shit-Eating Smirk. It was as if he hated the very thing that made his work possible to begin with: kids, particularly teenaged kids. And he always wore these thick square glasses over his little beady eyes, patchy rough beard always trimmed real close to his always-sweaty face, itself tanned and pock-marked, and he wore the same brown vest and slacks every day, and he was balding with a wicked hairline and little waves of brown above his ears, his reddish dome wider than the rest of his thin body, which itself was kind of phallic, so overall he looked pretty much like a penis—and that was the common reaction from kids unlucky enough to come face-to-face with him: shock and disgust, as if some dude had just pulled out their member in public; meaning that Mr. Saunds was not only a complete dick, but he looked like one too.

I scanned the area, looking for Robert, who usually met up with me at lunch but, for whatever reason, was nowhere to be seen. A few minutes passed, and my cigarette was down to the filter, so I took one final drag, bent down, crushed out the cherry, one earbud falling out, and that’s when I heard it: the electric hum of the golf cart, and that’s when I saw it: the actual golf cart, quite a ways away but slowly making its way down the road, Shitty Saunds behind the wheel, his head leaning out, no doubt looking for freshmen and sophomores to torment. I pushed the fallen earbud back into my ear: He does the military two-step down the nape of my neck. And that’s when I realized that Saunds hadn’t seen me yet, so I quickly turned to the Firebird—figuring I could just hide in the car for a bit—gripped the passenger-side handle, gave it a tug, and then a few more, and that’s when I realized that I had accidentally locked myself out, so I panicked and rushed to the driver-side door, gave the handle a few tugs, only to find that it too was locked; and that’s when my eyes went wide, shifting back and forth from the approaching golf cart to the Firebird and then to the shady parking lot just across the street, which was supposed to be for a bank but was now dotted with several unhoused individuals—many holding signs, most with tents, some with dogs, and some with many dogs—and then I glanced back at the golf cart, which was much closer now, and that’s when I heard: I SEE YOU, BOY. And now Shitty Saunds was closing in on me, hairy fist raised high out the side of the vehicle, golf cart reaching speeds of 10 mph. YOU’RE NOT GETTING AWAY THIS TIME. So with no option but to flee, I did a quick pocket-check for phone, iPod, cigarettes, lighter, and then, and after a car zoomed by while Morrissey sang bruises bigger than dinner plates, I bolted across the road, right into the neo-Hooverville that was the scary parking lot just a block away from the school.

All the running caused my earbuds to fall out, so I pushed them deep into my pockets and just kept running like my life depended on it. Never looking back. Voices of the dispossessed trailing behind me: Where you going, kid? Got a cigarette? Spare a few? Dogs barking, snarling. Hey, honey, how about you come over here? Green, I got green. Whatcha so in a hurry for? You want some? And at some point, a pitbull, poorly tied to a tent stake, snapped at my legs, then a dark hand reached out from that same tent, so I took a giant leap, clearing both the dog and the hand, landing hard on my feet, then continuing my heinous sprint like there was no tomorrow, right out of that ruinous hell zone and right into a thin alley between the old Fox’s Pizza and the Antique Shop run by the old lady that was just a little too friendly; then I exited the alley into downtown proper, suddenly surrounded by old brick and worn awnings and palm trees and the old city hall, complete with out-of-place Romanesque columns, the port nearby giving off that classic undead fish smell, soot and algae rubbing off as I used one hand to lean myself up against Fox’s tan brick to catch a breather, the city library just a block away.

After catching my breath, I flipped open the Motorola and dialed Robert. His Verizon ringback tone started going off: Well, sad, small, sweet, so delicate. It used to be this dying breed. Well, I've got a bad feeling about this. Taking Back Sunday. And I cringed a little bit, like I did every time, waiting for him to pick up the phone, which he did, but only after the end of the chorus, at which point Robert whispered: What’s up?

And I said: Where were you at lunch? I was all alone out there. Shitty Saunds, like, practically chased me across town. And why are you whispering?
There was a brief silence before another whisper: Had to stay over in AP Lit, finish some stuff, teacher doesn't like phones, says there’s going to kill us all or something, should be out in a few. Where are you?

I looked over my shoulder, nervous, glared down the alley, saw a dirty man in a funny shirt, wasn’t Saunds, sighed relief, then looked across the street, car passing, nothing to worry about, then I looked everywhere else, satisfied, I answered: I’m going to the library. Your mom cool with you coming over tonight?

Yeah, she doesn’t care, as long as I bring Hannibal. Oh, and I told Oscar I’d hang out with him tonight, mind if he comes along?

I paused because Oscar was new to me, a senior that I had only met a few weeks ago, at a party or something, but he seemed cool when I met him, from what I could remember, and he was old enough to buy cigarettes; so I answered optimistically, with a shrug: Yeah, I guess. Bring your PS3.

Yeah. Cool. Of course. See you soon.

III, Strange Apparition

I dug up my earbuds, removed my iPod, flicked the click wheel to random, and clicked. Lord, please don't forsake me, in my Mercedes-Benz. Dropped the iPod back into my pocket, removed the pack of Marlboro Lights, now only one cig left. All the riches and the ruins, now we all know how that story ends. Balanced the cig on my lower lip, sparked it with my blue Bic. Woody ammonia, earthy toxin, groovy decay. Music still going. I dragged, billowed, started to feel like mellow gold as that honky-tonk Stones-esque piano melody rolled its way through my brain. I tousled my already wild hair, posed against the wall, tried to blow a smoke ring, imagined myself some sort of rock & roll wyvern.

Then, over the music, I heard someone shout, HAIL. Startled, thinking it might be Saunds, I turned and saw the same dirty man from earlier: tan, disheveled, baggy stained jeans, open flannel revealing a t-shirt upon which the words HERE’S A LIST OF WHO ASKED FOR YOUR OPINION, stylized in all caps, alongside a picture of an anthropomorphic Saint Bernard holding a blank sheet of paper while looking very aggressive and malevolent. The man’s dark hair was spiked into little horns with what looked like actual mud in lieu of hair gel, and he had these hypnotic feline eyes, but they were glazed over like little donuts, and his jawline and cheekbones were gaunt but immaculate—like a cokehead, or a pillhead, or a methhead, or one of those other heads, certainly a human head, on drugs. But all in all, he would have been quite handsome if not for the patchy shave job, dirt face, obvious drug addiction, and yellow-green stains all around his crotch area.

The dirty man made twirling hand gestures as he walked up to me, stopping about four feet away, at which point he stared at me for some time, handsome smile on his face, and I stared right back, awkward but unafraid, because we were both out in the open, pedestrians all around us, there was even a cop accosting some woman across the street, although there was this feeling that time had stopped, that I was peering out from some sort of temporal bubble, but I was not afraid, as I had dealt with the homeless before—during my school-skipping escapades—finding most to be harmless, plus I had a morbid curiosity about their lives—a writer’s fascination, almost—as if they were walking stories rather than walking people. So, I took out my earbuds, draped them over my shoulders, and gave this dirty man my full attention.

The dirty man had a radio voice and spoke weird English: May I beseech thee for a smoke, good lad? And this prompted a moment of silence, with me just standing there, kinda slack-jawed, processing the anachronism, then I wrist-flicked my pack of Marlboro Lights open to reveal the nothingness inside: All out, I said. And this caused the man’s handsome face to warp into wrinkles, frowning, which made him look much older than I initially assumed, and then he said: This is a most woeful turn of hap; I am sorely famished for a smoke, dear boy, yet have not a single coin wherewith to barter. And then there was yet another weird silence wherein my lips were quivering, about to burst with laughter, smoke escaping from the sides of my mouth as I lifted my palm to both hide my amusement and remove the cigarette from between my lips; the cigarette which, after swallowing laughter, I held out to the man and said: You can have the rest, I guess. And then the dirty man’s wrinkles vanished, and his eyes lit up as he daintily plucked the cigarette from between my fingers—there was a star tattooed there, on his wrist—and then he started huffing it down with animal-like fervor, gumming the filter, at which time I noticed he had only a few teeth, all of which looked like little corn kernels. I wanted to gag but kept myself together.

The dirty man looked quite pleased and, between long drags, he spoke, all while gesturing poetic: Ah, the aroma, the taste, the vapors coursing down mine throat, mine lungs swelling and falling, the smoke becoming as mine very flesh, the buzz, THE BUZZ, most wondrous and sweet; I thank thee, good lad.

And as I watched this dispossessed Shakespeare, I felt a shiver run down my spine, like I saw something of myself in him, as if he were me from the future—a homeless bum out of time, stuck in the past, trying to relive his youth, begging his younger self for sticks of corporate death, as if his very life depended on shortening that same life through arsenic and formaldehyde—but then I shook my head, snapped out of it, remembered that I was seventeen and invincible, the only kid on the planet, that I was lucky and always had been lucky and will continue to be lucky, and that I will never end up like this dirty man, and then, wanting to remove myself from the situation, to stop the weird dissonance, I said: OK then, I’ll see you around. And then tried to get the hell out of there.

But the dirty man just watched me intently, smoking, as if trying to work some sort of hypnotic gaze on me. So I blinked real hard, and then I fidgeted, and then I said, well uh bye then, and started my way down the sidewalk toward the library, about to put my earbuds back in, and that’s when I heard the dirty man shout, HARK, which startled me, so I turned back to him and saw him rummaging through his pockets as if looking for something very important, which piqued my interest, and then the man removed a crumpled piece of printer paper from his pocket, held it out to me, and spoke: O kind lad, for thy goodness, I bestow upon thee a vellum most precious.

My eyes shifted from the paper to the man’s dirty face to the mean-looking Saint Bernard on his shirt then back to the paper, a weird dread overcoming me, so I stepped back and said: Uh, no, no thanks. I’m good. I have to, I have to get—

But the dirty man only stepped closer, ball of paper aggressively outstretched like the dog on his shirt: You must take it, boy; this artifact hath brought great comfort in the lonely alleyway nights, ‘neath moon and star, surrounded yet so alone, huddled ‘neath tattered sack, garbage my closet friend and only cloak, drinking from puddles the wealthy stomp and splash upon me, living on naught but apple cores and melted cheese scraped from the wrappings of yon McDonald’s; this parchment is most dear to me, boy, and I would have thee take it, behold it, and keep it, to use in those long cold nights when thou art far from the touch of another soul—be it man, woman, or otherwise.

And as he spoke these insane words, he gazed down on me, covered me in shadow, which is when I realized he had to be about seven feet tall, and then the thought crossed my mind that this man could most definitely kill me if he wanted, and just like that my writer’s curiosity shattered, the dread was no longer weird but profound, almost prescient, like this was my impending doom; I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t say no, so I apprehensively took the paper from the dirty man’s hand, stepped back a good distance, and said, I’ll uh check it out later thanks, which is when I tried to turn, get the hell out of there, but the man’s face twisted into some horrible thing and he shouted in his golden radio voice, LOOK UPON IT NOW, which caused my legs to tense up, and my eyes were wide and trembly, my strength sapped, as if some terrible hex had been cast upon me; so I looked down at the crumpled paper, the hobo vellum, and started unfurling it; an image revealing itself as if in slow motion: first the tip of a bed, faded red sheets; then a pair of legs, bare, hairy; then the stomach, then the pelvis, nude, then the manhood, then the other man, then the third man, then my stomach twisted into a knot, the sodomy, the fellatio, I wanted to barf; and it was all somewhat faded as if the printer had been low on ink, and the ink itself was smeared in places as if by some milky liquid, which I could also assume was exactly what I thought it was.

Speechless and shuddering, I dropped the paper, voice in my head repeating why why why, and then I looked up, slowly, expecting to see the dirty man looking right back at me, maybe even closing in on me, but he wasn't there. He was gone. So, I frantically scanned all around me, but he was nowhere to be seen. He was gone.

That’s when some random people walked by, as if the bubble burst, and this made me feel safer somehow, but my mind was swirling with questions: who was that, where did he go, why did he give me that paper, why did he talk like that, what the actual fuck?

As to drown out my noisy thoughts, calm myself, I pushed my earbuds in, and that’s when I realized this whole thing had happened within the span of four minutes, because the same song was playing—Beck was singing the second chorus: Strange apparition, haunting my brain; piss on the ashes, of a dream that got cremated. Or maybe it was on repeat—I didn’t actually check—I just stood there, listening to the outro, and watched as a cool breeze blew the vile vellum through the air and right into a sewer grate—where it belonged, I thought.

And then a car horn went off, and I jumped; it sounded close, so I turned and saw the Firebird pulled up to the sidewalk, Robert in the driver's seat, his thin arm hanging out the open window, his long brown hair waving gently in the breeze, his beard totally wild and not-age-appropriate at all. He shouted, HEY MAN, and this cleared my mind, dispelled the hex, so I ran up to the driver’s side, put my hands on the hood and, wanting to check my sanity, said: Did you see a guy just now, jeans, had one of those Big Dog shirts on?

And Robert said, No.

IV, Falling & Laughing

The display showed 1:40 PM, or around there, volume knob twisted full left, AC knob about middle, slider in the off position, no air coming out; we were parked in the McDonald’s parking lot, windows down, Firebird running. I could see the smokestack skyline, those great pillows of smog. I was taking big gulps of Sprite, talking with my mouth full of fries:

You know, he said something about eating cheese off McDonald’s wrappers, out of the trash, or something, I couldn’t really understand him, he talked in this, like, weird, like, Shakespeare english, or something.

That’s fucking crazy, Robert said, taking his time eating McNuggets, which were in a brown paper bag between the driver and passenger seat, right near the shifter.

I reached into the bag for more fries, still chewing my previous handful: Yeah, whole thing was really sketch, should have kept the paper, I was just, like, freaked out, you know?

Are you sure this really happened? You exaggerate sometimes.

I fucking swear, I said, glaring.

And he was wearing a Big Dog shirt?

Yeah.

And he showed you pornography?

Yeah.

And it had … stains … on the paper?

Yeah.

Jesus, Robert said, shaking his head.

Do you think he could get in trouble for, like, showing porno to someone who is, like, technically a minor? Isn’t that like a federal crime, or something, distributing porn to kids?

Robert sipped his sweet tea: Yeah, maybe. I mean, like, prison would probably be better for him anyway, like, compared to where he’s at now, in an alley, drinking puddle water. Fuck. Prison would be like an all-inclusive resort for this guy. In fact, more hobos should go to prison, better quality of life.

Laughing real hard, I covered my mouth to prevent fry chunks from flying out, and after nearly choking, I said: Are you going back to class?

I don’t need to. Passing either way.

Cool, then let’s, like, go your place, get the PS3, pick up Hannibal—get Oscar later, I guess. Oh yeah, we need cigs, too, unless you have some? And weed, we’re out of weed, I think.

We’ll figure it out, Robert said, then he nodded, pushed the brown bag into my lap, twisted the volume knob full right—appreciate your concern, you're gonna stink and burn, Kurt sang out—shifted gears, pulled out of the parking lot, into the main road proper, near the marshside causeway, on the Atlantic, seaside, sun’s rays piercing through the smog and reflecting iridescent off the water as we cruised on by.

Robert drove a few blocks only to find that the road back home was blocked by a bad wreck, so he shouted over the heavy grunge, LOOKS LIKE WE’RE TAKING WOLF STREET, and then he got in the left lane at the next light and prepared to make a U-turn.

I was head down, flipping through a CD case, eager to find something else to listen to—not being a big fan of Nirvana—and it only took me a moment to produce a burned Memorex with the words ORANGE JUICE–GLASGOW SCHOOL written upon it in poor handwriting with thick black pen, so I pressed the eject button on the stereo console, removed In Utero, and inserted the burned disc, and that’s when the jangly guitar and bouncy bassline kicked in, then Edwyn Collins’ goofy dandy-like baritone: You must think me very naive, taken as true, I only see what I want to see. And I was singing along the whole way as we turned onto Wolf Street, where we narrowly avoided a stray dog and waited for a group of baggy-pants kids to cross very slowly while they gave us these maniacal looks—at which point I double-checked that my door was locked—and that’s when Robert stepped on the gas, speeding down the road, obviously trying to get out of there as fast as possible, passing homes of burned wood and shattered windows, some riddled with bullet holes, missing doors, overgrown yards full of forgotten toys, roaming packs of dogs, maybe wolves, broken people walking around all bent up, some just holding up spoons at the stop signs, and others splayed out on the cement, not a cop in sight. And that’s when we hit a red light at the four-way, which was located right next to a derelict parking lot that, on this day, had been turned into a makeshift car wash with tents by a crew of individuals that could only be described as thugs with very baggy clothing and weird under-shirt lumps near their belts and Black-&-Milds-that-were-not-Black-&-Milds permanently hanging from their lips like some sort of growth. So, of course, Robert rolled the windows up and stared at the stop light ahead, very obviously trying not to make eye contact with anyone over there at the car wash, but I watched with that writer’s curiosity of mine, Edwyn Collins’ offbeat croon rounding out the end of the song: falling again, cause I want to take the pleasure with the pain, fall falling, falling and laughing, falling and laughing. And that’s when a duragged individual walked up to my side and knocked on the glass; he was a huge man, thick, no hair anywhere on his head, his face a dark blob that was both childlike and scary as hell, yellow eyes, huge diamonds in his ears, all black hoodie, hood down, baggie dark jeans, boxers showing, thick globs of smoke ballooning off the fat blunt hanging from his puffy lower lip. Y'ALL LOOKIN’ TO BUY? And I just kinda stared at him from behind the looking glass, blinking, barely understanding him on account of the loud Orange Juice, signature dumbfounded look on my face. So, after a few seconds of staring, I turned the volume down, then the big man shouted once more WELL Y'ALL LOOKIN’ OR WHAT? And that’s when I turned to Robert, who was looking back at me, his eyes like supermoons thrown out of orbit, and I said to Robert, Uh well we are out of weed, to which Robert made no movement whatsoever and said nothing—for he was the type to just go along with every stupid thing I did—so I turned back to the window, rolled it down just so, and, voice cracking a bit, said to the big man, meekly: Yes, please. And that’s when the big man smiled wide, revealing a row of gold teeth, and then he said: WELL THEN PULL UP IN THAT LOT OVER THERE—he pointed over there—AN’ I GETCHU, at which point we pulled into that lot over there and waited for that big man to getchu—whatever that meant—my desire to obtain even a small amount of weed compromising my judgement, which was already compromised by the intoxicating folly of youth.

As we idled there, waiting, there were only the sounds of hip-hop and hollering, and the engine purr. I watched as Robert sank into his seat, melting, only the tip of his head visible from the outside looking in, and I couldn't help but follow suit, sinking myself. And then, trying to convince myself more so than anyone else, I said: Look, we’ll be fine, we’ve done stuff like this before, we’re lucky, we always come out good, right?

But Robert said nothing.

Then there was a pop pop off in the distance, and we both jumped in our seats.

Was that gunfire? Robert said, anxiously looking at me with those trembly moon eyes.

I, I don’t know, probably just, like, fireworks or something; I said after taking a big gulp of nothing. Then I slowly brought myself up, peeking out the window, seeing nothing but the back of the ruined gas station, windows and doors all boarded up, and the parking lot, cement cracked up, pot holes, faded white lines for parking but no cars in sight apart from our own, for who in their right mind would ever park here.

Robert talked real low and fast: We should leave, right? I mean, this is stupid, right? We can get weed on the Island, let’s just—

But he was interrupted by a loud knock on my window, which caused us both to yelp for our lives. And when we looked up, we saw the big man, standing there, very big, very scary, a bemused expression on his blob-like face, as if he were powering himself with the nervous-white-boy energy we were very obviously generating.

My hand trembled as I reached for the window switch, turning to Robert before pushing it, this dire look on my face—his too—tears almost. Then I turned back to the window, rolled it down just so, and said: S, sir?

WHAT Y'ALL BUYIN'? The car shook.

I looked at Robert for input, but he had lowered his head into the steering wheel, closed his eyes, maybe he was pretending this whole thing would just go away if he willed it hard enough. So, with Robert out of commission, I turned back to the man and said: W, weed, please.

FORTY? TWENTY? WHAT Y'ALL THINKIN'? The big man was digging through his pockets now. AN EIGHTH?

Shaking, I said: Uh, just, uh, t, twenty.

But the big man was quiet for a moment. I noticed he was desperately patting down his pants. Then he said: SHIT, I’M OUT.

W, what? I said

LOTS AT THE CRIB THO. The big man looked at me with those yellow orbs, as if asking me something with his eyes, then said: Y'ALL GOOD?

I paused, confused, then said: Are, are we good? For, for what?

And that’s when the big man placed his huge hand on the hood of the car, which made a loud thud, which must have caused Robert’s foot to spasm, out of fear, into the gas pedal, producing a loud rev, which startled the big man, who, in one fast motion, pushed off the car, placed a hand inside his open hoodie, and, frantically started screaming, SHIT SHIT SHIT. WE GOOD? WE GOOD?

Fumbling and freaking out a little bit, I got closer to the window and said: Sorry, my friend, he, uh, he hit the gas by accident, I think, our bad.

WELL SHIT, THANK JESUS. WE GOOD. LET ME IN. DRIVE TO PICK UP MY GAS. GIVE Y'ALL A SPECIAL. SINCE Y’ALL DOIN’ ME A SOLID.

I was just blinking up at the man, hands trembling, thinking to myself: Is this how I die?

Then Robert’s head snapped up. He was looking directly at me—eyes somehow even bigger than before—and whispered: Wait, what, what is he saying?

And I whispered back: I think he’s, like, asking us to take him to his house to, uh, pick up some weed, or something, I don’t know.

He doesn’t have weed? Robert whispered, incredulously, exasperated, a little too loud; so the big man raised a browless brow, still looking down into the car window.

I guess not, I mumbled.

That’s when Robert stared off, pale, as if looking at some oncoming hell parade, an impending storm, some sort of calamity, saying nothing but transmitting this psychic aura of pure no no no no no no—and so was I, suddenly realizing we were way out of our depth. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps we were at a crossroads between survival and: TWO TEENS FOUND DEAD OFF WOLF STREET, CAR STOLEN, REWARD FOR ANY INFORMATION. I wanted more than anything to leave, for Robert to stomp the gas and get the fuck out of there, but then there was that feeling, that same paralytic feeling from before—with the dirty man—as if I couldn’t control myself, as if a hex had been placed upon me, as if I was trapped in the circumstances of my own making and now had to see it through, as if I were too weak-willed to say no or even stand up for myself, like this was some sort of temporal thread that needed to be looped and tied off; I thought that, if I left now there would forever be this loose end, haunting me, looking for me—some big black guy, slighted by me, made a fool of, now forever out to kill me, I would have to watch my back in the city, forever.

So I looked directly up at the big man and said: How, how far, you know, to, to your place?

The big man paused for a moment, blinking as if looking at an alien, then, not even answering the question, said: YOU WEARIN’ EYELINER, BOY? SHEEEIIT. THAT GAY AS HELL. Dragging out the syllables just like that.

I felt an embarrassment so strong that I wanted to both cry and die, but before I could do anything, the big man let out a booming laugh then said, JUST DOWN OVER THERE, and then he pointed over there, and then, like an afterthought, he said: FUCKIN’ WHITEBOYS BE CRAZY.

Seconds later, just like that, the big man was crammed into the backseat of the little Firebird, and we were driving down the road. I could see him through the rearview, his yellow eyes darting back and forth, scanning cars as he took small puffs from his blunt. The inside of the Firebird was pretty much a smoke cloud at this point—a smoke cloud that stank of some mixture of strong weed and body odor and musky aftershave and citrusy cologne. I was snapping one of my bracelets on my wrist, a nervous habit, then the big man shouted, JUST TURN RIGHT DOWN THERE—he pointed right down there—and Robert followed the directions in this perfectly still, robotically silent way, like learned helplessness, his eyes one-hundred-and-one percent on the road. TURN THE MUSIC UP, the big man boomed and the car shook; so with a trembly hand, I pressed the FM button—knowing that Orange Juice would probably be met with this man’s ridicule—and then attempted to turn the volume knob slightly but, due to the trembliness, I inadvertently turned it way too far right, blasting STEAL THE RHYTHM WHILE YOU CAN, SPOONMAN then THAT WAS SOUNDGARDEN WITH SPOONMAN AND YOU’RE LISTENING TO ROCK ONE OH SIX POINT ONE WHERE THE RIFFS ROCK AND THE MUSIC NEVER STOPS, and Robert covered his ears, as if by reflex, causing the car to swerve, at which point I scrambled to turn off the radio, and the big man, unfazed, said: SHIT, Y'ALL WHITEBOYS GOT ANY GUCCI MANE IN THIS WHIP? Then he took a big puff of his blunt before saying: TURN RIGHT HERE, and he pointed, and then Robert turned the wheel a little too hard, jerking everyone to the right, and then we were driving through a nasty side road, massive project off in the distance, Section 8, smokestacks behind it, and I was just sitting there, in the passenger’s seat, lanky arms wrapped around myself, trying to keep my skeleton from jumping out of my skin. I kept asking myself why why why, why can’t I just say no to people, what the fuck is wrong with me, why can’t I stand up for myself? And then I thought that perhaps we were driving to our own funerals.

We parked in front of a two-story box next to another box next to another box; smooth red brick, ropes of ivy and streaks of black mold all over the walls; rectangular windows, some with units, others wide open, glass broken, cheap drapes flapping out, flower pots dangling, flowers dead, others barred; cage-like metal staircase with broken railing, a man in a sleeping bag in the shade below; brown metal doors, some all dented up, some with children’s drawings of little families and dragons and basketballs and DESHAWN’S HOUSE and frowns; clothesline out front, an older woman, apron, hair up in a grocery bag, doing something with the clothes; basketball hoop growing out of broken cement, kids dribbling, hollering, cursing; a slide and jungle gym in the overgrown grass, an older man—shopping cart filled with blankets and cans—mumbling and flailing his hands, no children there; paper bags, blunt wrappers, discarded toys, beer cans, plastics everywhere; there was an orange couch on the sidewalk, missing cushions, three guys—bald, dreads, beanie—sitting upon it, talking to each other, gesturing at our car, laughing as they did so. It was uncanny, as if we had just parked in an episode of The Wire. I was freaking out, silently, in my head.

WELL? YOU GON LET ME OUT?

Shaking, I pushed the door open and got out as quick as I could, ducking my head, covering my face with one hand—trying to hide from the whole project that I was wearing eyeliner—then pulled the seat up and let the big man out the back, at which time he patted me on the shoulder and said, JUST A FEW, and this collapsed me back into the front seat, where I closed the door as fast as possible, locked it, then leaned back and closed my eyes, breathing heavily, at which time I heard the big man say, LEFT MY STUFF SO YOU KNOW I’M GOOD. And that’s when Robert and I both looked at each other, mutual terror, then slowly turned our heads to the backseat, where we saw what must have been ten large baggies all filled with pills, which looked maliciously like children’s candy; and upon seeing this, we snapped our heads back to the front, as if in sync, double-checked that the doors were locked, and then looked at each other and mouthed, silently, at the same time: what. the. fuck.

And then I watched as the big man gestured to the men on the couch and then to the Firebird and then walked off into an alley between two boxes. The men on the orange couch were looking at our car, nodding. Robert and I both slid down, melted into our seats, trying hard not to be seen.

He’s going to kill us, Robert whispered. We are going to die.

Stop, I mumbled.

Why do I just, like, go along with everything you say?

I sat there, silent, some guilt bubbling up as Robert continued:

I could have just, like, driven off; we could get weed on the island, from Rob, much safer.

Rob’s a flake, and his parents are always home, I mumbled.

Better than being dead.

He’s not going to kill us, I said, raising my voice a tad, trying to sound confident, not confident at all.

Maybe he’s setting us up—why else leave, like, hundreds of dollars worth of pills in the back seat? Maybe the cops are on their way right now, as we speak.

And, as if on cue, a siren went off in the distance, and Robert’s expression changed to a told-you-so kind of thing, to which I rolled my eyes because, in the projects, sirens were always going off, but cops were never to be seen—the sirens were just part of the atmosphere.

Rationalizing, I said: Look, he’s obviously a real dealer, this is probably his, like, career or something, he’s not going to just set up two kids for no reason, ruin his livelihood, that’s stupid.

Robert, looking very serious now, retorted: He could be working undercover, for the cops, as a plea deal or something, I’ve seen that on Law and Order, it happens all the time.

And what, the cops want to pinch two white kids? Don’t they usually go for, like, the big fish? Suppliers and stuff. I snorted.

Robert was silent for a moment, as if thinking real hard, then followed up with: We could just drive off right now, with his stuff, he’d never know.

I was looking at him like he was crazy.

Then he continued: Give me, like, one reason why we shouldn’t just dip right now.

So I said: Uh, well, because he would, like, want to kill us—and he knows what your car looks like.

At this, Robert sighed and sunk even lower into the car seat, then he said: OK, we’ll give him, like, 5 more minutes and if—

But suddenly there knock on the glass. ROLL YO SHIT DOWN.

I peeked up at my window. It was the big man, yellow eyes seeming to glow horror. I rolled down the window just so, then, voice cracking, said: Y, yes? And that’s when the big man’s hand reached through the crack in the window, opened, and dropped a huge baggie of weed on my lap, to which I did a double-take, and then said: This, this is twenty?

The big man’s expression changed from blank to all smiles, gold teeth glittering brilliant in the sun. His booming voice rang out: THAT’S FOUR. GOT YOU SOME SPECIAL, SINCE Y’ALL DROVE. ‘PRECIATE IT. Then the big man looked over his shoulder, then back: HAND ME THEM PILLS. So I handed him the pills, still a little shaky, unsure of what was going to happen here. The big man looked over his shoulder once again before pocketing the pills, and then he stuck his hand into the window and said: WELL?

I blinked, said: W, well what?

The big man’s face twisted ever so slightly, and that’s when I realized he was waiting for money, so I dug through my pocket, pulled out a twenty that mom had given me for lunch, and placed it in the big man’s big hand. Y’ALL NOT SO BAD, COME BY SEE ME ANY TIME. And then the big man turned, started to walk off, but before he could get far, I said: Hey, what’s your name? And that’s when he looked back over his shoulder and said only two words: MOON DOG; then he walked away for good this time, vanished into the projects, as if he had become one with the ghetto; the men on the orange couch were gone too; the only sounds were those of children shouting, balls dribbling, sirens going off in the distance, and the purring Firebird. I was looking all dumbfounded, hardly able to believe that my stupid antics had paid off, shocked that the guy’s name was actually Moon Dog.

Robert, hollowed out from the ordeal, scratched his beard as if in disbelief, then looked down at the huge bag of weed nugs and said: That much—for twenty?

With Moon Dog’s disappearance, it was as if a ghost had left the car, taking the tension, anxiety, and dread along with it. I exhaled loudly, sat up straight, shoved the weed into the glove box, and said: Told you, nothing to worry about—now, let’s get the fuck out of here.

So Robert put the Firebird in reverse and pulled out of there faster than I had ever seen him pull out of anywhere, ever. And just after the turn, a little ways down the street, I looked in the rearview and noticed two cruisers pull into the project, then park, then make the whorp noise, then turn their lights on, and then the kids around the hoop fled in all directions, to which I whispered, holy shit, and Robert, too, said, holy shit, a little louder. Then I wondered if the whole thing was actually a setup, and then Robert asked me if the whole thing was actually a setup, and then he made a quick turn at the next light and was driving all slow so as not to break any laws—as if we didn’t have a huge-ass bag of weed in the glove box—and the rest of the drive was very anxious indeed, dreadful almost, but we never saw those cruisers again, so I guess we were in the clear, literally, figuratively, and existentially.

And then, after a few stoplights and turns, we pulled into Robert’s neighborhood, which was packed with low-cost, cookie-cutter homes on a straight-shot road into something like a trailer-park-neighborhood combo, complete with Stars and Bars, kids playing kickball, and big trucks parked on every side of the road, beaten up cars in every driveway, those cheap Walmart playsets. Robert turned into his own driveway and put the Firebird in park. Then we both sat there, quiet, in the Firebird, engine purring. It was a weird silence, like we could hear each other’s thoughts or something, both of us thinking the same thing—that we had come this close to dying or ruining our lives in some irreversible way, Robert probably questioning why the hell he even hangs out with me at all. And then, when the silence became too weird, I pushed the CD button and then PLAY and then turned the knob: You must think me very naive, taken as true, I only see what I want to see. And we listened for a while, saying nothing, before Robert turned the car off. Then we got out, walked to his front door, unlocked the door, opened it, and out burst a dark blur, which pounced me, sending me right into the dirt below.

It was Hannibal. He licked my face as I struggled to get up, slobber everywhere. I kept saying, good boy good boy down down, as I tossed and turned in the dirt, Robert just standing there, looking down at me, not doing a thing about it—and that’s when he said, FUCKING MOON DOG.

And I couldn’t help but laugh, then Robert started laughing, and I like to think that Hannibal was laughing too—so there we were, in that front yard, me falling, everyone laughing.

V, Creep

I WISH I WAS SPECIAL YOU’RE SO FUCKIN’ SPECIAL BUT I’M A CREEP I’M A WEIRDOOO WHAT THE HELLLL AM I DOING HEREEE I DON’T BELONG HEREEEEEEE

I was hollering, radio full blast, speakers rattling, not a care in the world; Robert had both hands on the wheel, windows down, scenester hair blowing all crazy; cruising five under because we were riding dirty; oaks a blur, houses too, stop signs three; tide was high, marsh was overflowing, something fishy in the air, and the smell of rain, too; the wind was nice and crisp; the clock read 2:15 PM, or something like that; Hannibal’s big head was sticking out between the seats, swinging to and fro as he watched stuff zoom by, long tongue flopping, armrests moist with slobber, the most excited animal in the car, by far.

We pulled into the driveway of a home with a perfect lawn, its backyard opening onto a wild marsh, the sky was pink in places but mostly gray. Robert put the Hot Wheels in park, right next to a Honda, which I observed and said: Is that his parents’ car?

No, that’s his car, I think, Robert said, twisting the key out of the ignition before exiting and doing a quick stretch, me following along, and then Hannibal managed to fit his head through the thin opening between the door frame and the window, at which point Robert rubbed the dino-bone-like bump on the top of Hannibal’s head and said: We’ll be right back, boy. And that boy whimpered.

The house was smooth white stucco, wide, two stories—a main floor and a basement area with a garage, some wooden criss-cross stuff going on. It had those glued-on shutters that were more for looks than function. You had to walk a whole flight of white stairs, pass a big American flag and two clay flower pots, and step on a brown-fiber doormat with no text on it whatsoever to get to the front door, which we did, at which point Robert rang the doorbell, and I stood there, unamused, with this pouty, standoffish look on my face, as I was eager to go home, take some Adderall, smoke some sick Moon Dog weed, listen to some vinyl, and play some video games. But then I remembered that Oscar, being eighteen, was old enough to buy cigarettes, and this smoothed over my angst just a little bit.

Robert rang the bell one last time, waited a moment, and that’s when the door swung open to reveal Oscar standing there, dark hair in wavy curls, wearing a pink polo and short khakis in this fifty-degree weather. I scanned him up and down, and he me, and then our eyes met, and he smiled handsomely, and I, well, I didn’t. I just stood there, looking like a goth girl at a pep rally. But he didn’t seem to mind. He spoke in this deep voice that was both somehow geeky and dangerous, as if he was too smart for his own good but trying to hide it and hiding it well; he said: Robert, come on in, and you too, uh—what was your name again? I think we’ve only met once or twice—at a party, was it?

So I told him my name, and he scanned me once more, a long scan, and then smiled, handsomely; for he was quite handsome, built like a runner, thin, big shoulders, feline, his face curved, chiseled almost, immaculate jawline, Adonis-esque, Persian in beauty, dark skin, he was foreign in some way but in which way I did not care; and as I was doing this mental measure of the young adult male Oscar standing before me, I happened to catch eyes with him again, and he smiled again, and this time I sort of smiled back, and then he directed both Robert and me to his room, which was through a hallway that was littered with photos of his family, each photo must have been taken during a different year because Oscar was growing older in each one—which kind of weirded me out, so I turned to Robert and said, Creepy, and Robert whispered, Shut up, but I kept looking at the photos as we passed; Oscar’s dad looked just like Oscar, only with a mustache, and his mother was radiant beyond words. But the interior of the home was dark, authoritarian, scary clean, strong parents-are-low-key-abusive sort of vibes, no pets, no personality, no soul, sleepovers-ain’t-happening-here-no-way-no-how energy; I caught a glimpse of the fridge and it was blank: no drawings or magnets upon it, probably not one soda in that fridge, probably full of no-sugar-added coconut water and almond milk and protein shakes; there was no humor in this house, no funny business, no comedy whatsoever, not even one of those annoying feel-good BLESS THIS MESS wall things; the place was so drab it was dreary, domineering; it was oppressive, I felt oppressed walking through that house; and soon we made it to Oscar’s room, which was less oppressive but just as dull as the rest of the home, with its light-colored walls, perfectly made bed, dressers upon which trophies both atheltic and academic sat abundant alongside pictures of Oscar himself, all through the years, which I also thought was creepy—having pictures of yourself in your room, especially baby pictures—so I turned to Robert and whispered, That’s a little creepy, which was when I noticed a small CRT television, snug in a little alcove on a desk, upon which The Complete Works of Shakespeare sat, but also the solitary controller for the PlayStation 2 Slim; the console was beneath the desk, sunken a little bit into the plush carpet; so I took it upon myself to open the lid of the console—as I was very interested in video games and anyone who played them (video games being a sort of great equalizer for teenagers during this era)—and that’s when I saw the disc for Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, which was a game I had beaten years before but remembered enjoying quite a bit, so I said: Hey, you playing this? Which was a stupid question, but I said it regardless, and then Oscar walked up to me and placed a firm hand on my shoulder and said: Yes. But I thought he was lying for some reason, I thought this eighteen-year-old high school senior with trophies and baby pictures of himself surely would not be playing such niche Japanese role-playing games, so I said: Prove it.

So Oscar proved it: he turned on the CRT, booted up the game, and showed me his save file: max level, sixty-plus gameplay hours. And then he loaded up that file and initiated a battle and subsequently completed that battle like a pro, as both Robert and I watched, transfixed by those dancing CRT lights as we so often were, so I nodded to Oscar and said: Cool. And then Oscar and I met eyes again, and he did that smile again, that handsome smile, and I smiled back, a little nicer this time, and then I said: Good game. And he said: Yeah. And our eyes lingered a little too long, which was awkward but nice, because I liked the attention, and then, after another awkward moment, I said: Motoi Sakuraba does the music for that game, he also did the music for Valkyrie Profile, which is, like, one of my favorite games of all time. And then Oscar said: Oh, wow, I didn’t know that. And then, feeling a little more welcome and loose, I said: So, what’s up with the baby pictures? And it seemed like I dropped a bomb almost, as Oscar blushed, looked away, and then Robert said something like: Sometimes he can be a dick, ignore him (meaning me). So I glared at Robert, but Oscar only chuckled softly and said: No no, that’s alright, my mom put those pictures there, she won’t let me take them down. And I laughed, and Robert laughed, and Oscar laughed too. Then I noticed a dresser near the PS2, which for some reason I was compelled to open, and, upon opening the top drawer, I caught a glimpse of a funny shirt and some paper stuffed in the back, then Oscar quickly rushed to close it and said coolly: No, no, that’s just clothes. So I stepped back, somewhat taken aback, before Oscar took my hand gently in his own—which was odd but also somewhat soothing and almost paralytic in a way—and then he moved my hand to the dresser’s second drawer handle, and then he said: This one.

So, I opened the second drawer, and that’s when I saw Oscar’s collection of old PlayStation games, and my face lit up like I had just stumbled upon some sort of treasure room. Robert, too, was enthralled by this treasure, as it was vast, containing all the PlayStation Final Fantasy games—including Origins, Chronicles, Anthology, Tactics, even Chocobo Racing and Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring—so we were both a bit slack-jawed at that point. Then Robert said, without thinking, something like: See, told you he was cool. And I just nodded, scanning those games, and that’s when I noticed he even had Valkyrie Profile, which I slid out of its spot in the collection and scanned front to back, nodding and hmm’ing as if I were some sort of expert appraiser, and then I turned to Oscar and said: Good game. And he smiled at me. And I smiled right back at him. And then I delicately put Valkyrie Profile back in its spot, running my finger across the rest of his collection, at which point I stopped at Breath of Fire III, slid it out of its spot, and, scanning it back to front, noticed it was missing the front-cover insert, so the orange disc just shone right through, and I could see my reflection there, off the jewel case: hair wild as the wind, eyes penciled but bright as could be, expression full of wonder. And I could see Oscar there, too, in the reflection, behind me, looking at my neck, smiling, clever glint in his dark eyes. And then I turned to him, held up the game, and said:

I’ve read good things about Breath of Fire III: they say it has, like, a timeless art style, and a complex ability system, and a jazzy soundtrack; they say the story’s not bad either: the main character grows up, changes, gets older, or something, they say it’s, like, a bildungsroman—whatever the fuck that means.

Oscar laughed at that last part, nodded, and said: Yeah. It’s a gem, one of my favorites, you can have it.

So I blinked at him, then blinked down at the game, then back at Oscar, then back at the game, then at Oscar, and finally said: You sure? And he said: Yes, I’m sure. And I felt like I could give him a big kiss while holding that copy of Breath of Fire III, which was missing the front-cover insert, so the orange disc shone right through; and I could see my reflection there, off the jewel case, manic expression of pure hype, imagining myself already high on Adderall playing the game, and just how much fun that would be.

Oscar then turned to Robert, placed a hand on his shoulder, and said: You can have one too, anything you want, I’ve beaten them all. So Robert picked The Legend of Dragoon, and that was that. We had our games, and then we were ready to go. So I turned to Oscar and said: What are we doing here, anyway? And Oscar said: I just need to get my stuff. And I said: Right. And then he said: I was wanting to stay out with you guys tonight, if that’s OK. And by this point, anything was OK with me—considering Breath of Fire III and all—so I just smiled and said: Sure. And this pleased Oscar, who gathered his one bag and nodded, ready to go, and then, just like that, we were leaving, almost as quickly as we came.

The whole scene had to have taken just about twenty minutes, which must have felt like forever to Hannibal, because when that black dog saw us exit the home, he started barking up a storm. But as we stepped down the porch staircase, I noticed that he was not barking impatiently, but viciously, at Oscar, which was not like him—such a sweet dog—so I turned to Oscar and said, He doesn't seem to like you, to which Oscar said nothing in response. And then Robert rushed to the Firebird, got inside, and started play-wrestling with Hannibal, knocking around that sweet dog’s sweet face, which seemed to cheer him right up.

Before we left for real, Oscar turned to me and said: I have to get up early in the morning, so I think I’ll take my car.

And I replied sardonically, with a smile: So, what you’re saying is, this whole trip here was pointless.

Oscar laughed and said: You got Breath of Fire out of it, at least.

So I held up the game, orange disc shining right through, and I saw my reflection say: Thanks, by the way.

And that was when Oscar said: No problem. I have a hard time keeping friends, so I don’t want to mess this up.

But I was too engrossed in the game to fully register what he had said, and when it did register, it seemed innocuous enough, so I just nodded, didn’t give it two thoughts, smiled at him; and he smiled back, charmingly, and then he said: I’ll follow you guys.

So I said: Oh, right—do you think you could buy us some cigs?

Yeah, sure, just don’t tell anyone.

Who me?

Another laugh, and then Oscar said: Hey, do you have my phone number? In case I get lost following you.

And I did not, so I took out my phone, and he gave me his number, and I sent that number a text, and he got that text, and then he looked at me with that handsome smile of his before getting into his Honda, which roared to life then sputtered idly as he waited for us to leave.

But after pocketing my phone, I just stood there, thinking, distracted, reading the back of the jewel case: SUGGESTIVE THEMES … a rebellious youth … YOU POSSESS THE POWER … ponders his purpose … MILD ANIMATED VIOLENCE … the lone survivor … DRAGON GENE SPLICING … a great journey … LEGENDARY ROLEPLAYING … shrouded in mystery … TEEN (13+); and I must have been doing that for longer than I thought, because Robert shouted, WE LEAVING OR WHAT? which got my attention, so I hustled to the Firebird, nudged Hannibal to the back, and slid into the passenger seat.

Then we pulled out of the driveway, Oscar coming up from behind, Hannibal watching from the back window, growling.

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Part 2

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#ShortStory

Wolf 3D (PC DOS) In middle school, I had a fantastic teacher named Mr. Ziegler. He taught our little class a ton of interesting and fun things, but he also trusted us and sometimes left us to work unsupervised. Abusing this trust, I was messing around one day with the singular classroom computer. This was in the days before broadband internet, before thumb drives, before CD drives. It was a DOS computer, with some frontend tacked on that showed a list of programs. The top entry, which at the time I had no conception of what it might be, was titled WOLF 3D. Hitting enter on that opened my mind to a whole new world. Videogames were not exactly new, but then were somewhat primitive and rare, so seeing a texture-mapped 3D space filled with machine gun toting nazis shouting at the player was wholly new and unexpected.

Classroom work came to a halt as everyone gradually noticed the game I was playing and Mr. Ziegler eventually had to intervene. To his credit, he harnessed our curiosity about the game into a reward for work well done later, but that first taste of FPS goodness stuck in my brain permanently.

Doom ][ (PC, DOS/WIN95) This was the big one, the grand duke of FPS games. The introduction of the super shotgun to the universe.

I somehow missed the original Doom, but made up for it in the fervor that I pursued the sequel. I played the first few levels so much that I could probably draw them from memory. This is where I got into mods and my first attempts at level building.

It’s also where I found out about the huge online community of people making stuff for Doom. I eventually downloaded some total conversions, Ultimate Doom 2X, Doom 2X Gold, and Doom 2 X-Treme. They were part of a trilogy, with custom enemies and levels, modified weapon characteristics, and graphics taken from other Doom mods. The maker, Chuck Lai, even changed the cheat codes, which forced me play through them honestly and made the experience one of the most fun of those early years in the modding scene.

Half-life 2 (Xbox) Despite being mainly a PC gamer throughout my life, I first played this on the Orange Box collection for the Xbox 360. I sat my chair squarely in front of the good old tube TV, probably too close, as I prepared to immerse myself in the sequel to one of the best games ever made.

The game did not disappoint! It pioneered so many things that modern games accept as standard, which is one of the reasons that it holds up so well today. I’ve heard it likened to Citizen Kane, in that watching it or playing it today it just feels like a good game, but at the time so many of its techniques were revolutionary and copied endlessly by media afterwards.

I have a hard time imagining a better value than getting all three games of the Orange Box together at one price. Portal itself was an instant classic and hilarious. TF2 is still going today, and playing HL2 on the Xbox 360 still seems somewhat miraculous. A true cornerstone in gaming history.

Pong (?) While my parents had good intentions buying me presents for birthdays and holidays, their budget and lack of knowledge on the topic led to some interesting times. One of the most interesting was a hand-me-down relic of at least ten years prior. It was a single game console that plugged into your TV and came with two ‘controllers.’ That one game was a generic knockoff variation on Pong.

Now this was in the early 90s, we had a NES and knew of the new SNES and Genesis systems available out there. This Pong console was probably from the 70s, one step removed from electromechanical devices like pinball tables.

It came with physical switches on the controllers that allowed you to adjust the difficulty, the size of the paddle, the speed of the ball and other parameters. I couldn’t get my sister interested in competitive Pong, so the unit got handed down to kids even less fortunate than us. I have a hard time imagining they had much fun with it.

Planescape: Torment (PC) This was second on my PC RPG playlist, right after Baldur’s Gate 2. While BG2 got me used to D&D 3.5-era rules, Planescape turned all that on its head. Here you could improve base stats through dialogue and leveling up, you could change class whenever you wanted, there were barely any swords in the game and combat took a back seat to dialogue and character interactions.

I got lucky in playing through this before the era of rampant spoilers. My first playthrough used no guides or walkthroughs; I went in blind and excited. Since I want to preserve the plot for any people potentially reading this, I won’t go into details, but this game featured the synergy of gameplay and plot in a way that few others have done before or since.

And it’s all incredibly written! So many wild concepts come part and parcel with the Planescape setting and the writers made full use. Wrapping the plot around a character that’s immortal and still retaining a sense of stakes and progression is no small feat.

Ninja Gaiden (Xbox) Another indelible memory is that of sitting on the communal couch in the house I shared with way too many friends from college, playing my original Xbox. I was wowed by the return of the NES-era Ninja Gaiden into a fantastic 3D brawler / action game. Being a central congregation area, the basement couch also frequently provided an audience for my ninja escapades.

While others quickly bounced off the title due to its rather severe difficulty, I persevered. I got way into the game and my compatriots enjoyed watching me taking down the game’s array of giant skeletal dragons, demon lords and other assorted mutants. As with any group activity, it quickly turned to trash talking the enemies as I beat them down. This morphed into a stupid little song I would end up singing as I played. I’ll preserve the lyrics for posterity here:

You're fucking shit up and you don't even know what shit you broke, bitch. Bitch.

Halo 2 (Xbox) This is another game linked with a specific point in my life. I was in school and had made some fantastic new friends, all of whom were also into nerdy pastimes like myself. Comics, cartoons, and videogames were regular topics of conversation. As we all enjoyed relatively similar games, we all got heavily into Halo 2 upon its release.

We regularly played splitscreen together. I was never a big console FPS player, but I got good in a relatively small timeframe and was able to dominate just about every style of gameplay offered by the title. So we had to up our game. We took our Xbox on the road, attending console LAN parties, hooking up multiple controllers and TVs together to battle against other teams of players. We even ventured into that most forbidden of areas, online play.

Halo 2 offered a ton of options for playing online, including a Forge mode that allowed changes to the basic systems of the game. I fondly remember playing infected maps, where one player would start being able to run at ridiculous speeds but having no shields and only an energy sword for a weapon. Every player they killed would join the infected team until everyone was converted. The other team had the regular array of weapons and a fortress to hide out in and defend. Between that and racing four wheelers with rocket launchers, we had a blast. So many fond memories of that time and place in my life.

Carmageddon 2 (PC Win95) I was a PC gamer for a long time, but that doesn’t mean I always had the peripherals to go with it. I played through many PC racing games without the benefit of analogue steering or analogue braking, using only a keyboard. Carmageddon 2 was one of those games.

Carmageddon 2 was the full-3D sequel to the hilarious and bloody original. It stands out even today with its over-the-top ability to run over pedestrians for bonuses. I loved it then for its surprisingly detailed car deformation models and twisted sense of humor.

You could smash off the bumper, destroy the quarter panels and see them go flying off, and break parts off of opponents cars as well. You could even split your car evenly down the middle, which would only occasionally not kill you and end your run.

The wacky powerups contributed to this game’s sensibilities, giving you among other things a giant cartoon spring to push pedestrians or other drivers away from you. It also played with the gravity, giving both moon and Venus powerups which made you undriveably floaty or unbelievably heavy respectively.

I had a million fun times with this game, smashing other cars, pedestrians and the occasional cow or reindeer through the varied and expansive levels. The ski resort, amusement park, mine and nuclear power plant all still live fondly in my memories. I’m still waiting for a proper sequel to this one, but I don’t expect to be satisfied any time soon.

Diablo 2 (PC) This game. Oh, this game. I played Diablo 2 far, far too much in college. I was hooked more than any other game I have played before or since. Endless Pindle runs, Mephisto runs, trying to get my Necromancer up to level 99. So many good memories.

But I also played so much that I ended up late for class on several occasions. I rejected far too many social interactions in favor of that last bit of exp. I bought items off of eBay, for Christ’s sake! Mistakes were made. Time was not merely wasted, but executed with prejudice.

But for all the good and the bad, this game sticks with me. It pioneered the modern skinner-box-style of gameplay that so many others have since incorporated. It’s addictive qualities started many conversations about predatory mechanics in games. It spawned so many other ARPGs, like Path of Exile and further Diablo sequels. For better and worse, this was a turning point for gaming at large.

Super Mario Bros 3 (NES) I had a big, old tube TV in my basement growing up where I played NES games. The TV was so old, it didn’t have RCA jacks for video in, only two wires to hook an antenna up to. But we got the NES running nonetheless, so me and my sister played on it all the time.

Mario 3, the best of the NES Mario games, was either a Christmas or birthday addition to our game library, I don’t remember which. I do remember my sister and I taking turns playing the 2-player version for hours in the basement. Since it was brand new, we had gotten to the boss of the first world and were taking turns getting killed by him over and over. The frustration grew as did the volume of our disappointed outbursts. Eventually our parents came downstairs and grounded us both for cursing at the TV, although to this day I maintain my innocence.

Final Fantasy (NES) You always remember your first. Final Fantasy was the first RPG I ever played.

I had the Nintendo Power special issue solely devoted to Final Fantasy. I had read it cover to cover countless times, imagining the adventures I could have. It took years and buying a used copy, but eventually I did get to dive into its world.

I remember endless grinding for gold, constant referrals to the strategy guide to pick only the best spells for my party, checking where to find items in dungeons, and the peninsula northeast of Provoka; the best grinding spot in the game.

I still play different versions of this classic game to see what twists and improvements they’ve added. But I’m always surprised how well the core of the game holds up, how well the curve of enjoyment bends with the curve of the gameplay and story complexity. Hats off to you, NES Final Fantasy.

Seaman (DC) This game came along for me in the aftermath of the death of the Dreamcast. Games were cheap as the hardware stopped production, ceding this round of the console wars to the Playstation 2. I picked this one up after hearing how weird it was from various gaming websites and magazines.

They weren’t kidding. After an intro by Leonard Nimoy, you’re put in charge of a few eggs bobbing in a virtual aquarium. Gradually the eggs hatch into fish with human faces and eventually learn to talk. This is where the microphone peripheral comes in, as you can answer the questions they pose and they will remember your responses.

I played this in my dorm room at college, baffling both myself and any passers-by. This kind of wild interactivity and odd real-time gameplay has to my mind never even been attempted to be replicated. This was the strength of the Dreamcast, it was a place to take these kind of wild swings. In return it offered gameplay experiences never to be forgotten, if only for their peek into the future.

Duke Nukem 3D (PC) My memories of this game are inextricably mixed with my high school experience.

My grade year in school was one of the first in my district to offer programming classes. Being a nerdy sort, I relished the opportunity to play on computers more than I already did, and on school time to boot. C++ was somewhat fun to learn, but the real fun came after all of the people in class had finished their assignments for the day. Our teacher, who was probably only a lesson or two ahead of us in programming in general, let us play Duke Nukem 3D once our work was complete.

Those frantic deathmatches in the last few minutes of class were incredible. Other than a LAN party, which I had scant access to, I would never have been able to get that many people playing one of my favorite games at the same time.

I even ended up making my own deathmatch levels with the included level editor. My favorite was a facing worlds-esque level with one entire huge wall of the arena being a giant mirror. The whole idea revolved around a rarely-used quirk of the game mechanics where if you got hit by the shrinker, using steroids would return you to normal size. Also, shrinker shots bounced off mirrors, so I tried to make fun use of that in my level.

I also recruited friends with computers to try using their dial-up modems to play a game of deathmatch. This was complicated by the fact that one friend didn’t quite grasp the concept of how the whole thing worked and kept answering the phone when the modem would dial his number, instead of letting the computer connect. This lead to us cackling in laughter and frustration every time we would hear our computer speakers outputting the confused “Hello? Hello” of our friend, who we eventually did get to fight in deathmatch one he figured out what was going on.

Ikaruga (DC) This game landed at the exact right time for me as a gamer. I was getting into shmups on the Dreamcast and there were so many great titles to choose from. Giga Wing, Mars Matrix, Under Defeat, I loved all of them. I heard about a Japanese game that people considered head and shoulders above the rest: Ikaruga.

Game magazines lauded its deceptively simple black and white bullet mechanics as well as its artistry and feel. I knew I had to have it, but it came at the exact wrong time for me financially as I was a broke college kid with barely enough money to scrape together for pizza. But I bought an import copy on eBay anyway for a then princely sum of $60.

I have never regretted it. This game is the zenith of shmups, both in style and substance. This is the high water mark and for me no shooting game has matched it since.

ToME 2.3.4 (PC) I’ve blathered on about roguelikes for quite a while, so I’ll be brief here. ToME was my first roguelike and the first one I ever won. I had tried Nethack before, but bounced off due to the huge amount of info you needed to know to be able to successfully play the game. ToME has quite a bit of info you need to know too, but it was several degrees more approachable than any others I had tried.

The power curve of your characters’ growth was fantastic. In the beginning by gaining levels, in the middle by acquiring items, in the late game by completing quests. The variety of enemies, stages, items and character options never got wholly boring for me. There was always the hope that that next quest would give you access to a skill far outside your normal playstyle and let you crack the game wide open. Or that you’d get some amazing new ring which would make the next 20 levels a walk in the park. So many good times.

Final Fight 3 (ZSNES) When I got big into emulation for the first time, it ended up biting me in the ass.

I had an NES growing up, but I missed out on the SNES era. So when emulators became widely available I went in heavy, rummaging through the library of games I had missed out on, but this time with savestates and fast-forwarding.

There had also been a wave of technology grants for schools at the time that allowed my high school and many others to have computers to help expose kids to technology. But the software and expertise to lock down those computers had yet to catch up, so I often ended up playing emulated SNES games in the computer lab during my study hour.

I played through all the big JRPGs, all the platform games, everything I was vaguely curious about I smuggled onto the network. But there was one series I kept coming back to: Final Fight. The first game was only a port of the arcade game but with fewer characters, the second was a SNES only sequel with barely any tweaks to the gameplay formula. But the third introduced sprinting, complex combo options, more weapons, hidden items and routes, new characters and Street Fighter-style special moves. There were enough fun additions to keep me playing and trying to master its many systems.

In my exuberance, I got carried away with my keyboard punching and was noticed by the vice principal while she passed by. A detention for me and new rules for the computer lab later, I had learned to keep my obsession with emulated SNES games better hidden. But regardless of all that, Final Fight 3 still holds up as probably the best beat ‘em up on the system.

Kirby's Dreamland (GB) I have a strange relationship with music in games. While so many other people make much of the quality or incongruity of the music accompanying the action in a game, I generally find music forgettable in most games I play. There are a few exceptions to this rule, like when music is a cornerstone of the game design as in Hotline Miami. The only other one I can think of is Kirby’s Dreamland for the Gameboy.

I played this game so much, the sheer repetition has ingrained the soundtrack into my mind. The crisp tones of the Gameboy were bent to a number of musical styles and the gameplay was cute and just difficult enough to be consistently fun. Some part of my brain is eternally in the back seat of a station wagon, letting the music and the comfy fun wash over me while I play.

Kingdom of Loathing (Internet) I don’t know where I stumbled upon it, maybe one of those early internet magazines or some odd gaming website I used to go to, but when I started playing Kingdom of Loathing (KoL) I fell in love right away.

KoL is nominally an online browser RPG where you have a certain number of turns each day to adventure, fight monsters, level up, etc. But every enemy, place and item you encounter is stuffed with jokes. Really dumb jokes, bad puns, esoteric references, song lyrics, all that jazz is packed into a surprisingly fun gameplay loop. Oh, and all the graphics are stick figures and the currency is meat.

I chose a Pastamancer as my first class and joined a clan called Pastamancers Unite! In clans you can share consumables, get tools to make more advanced items and go on special raids. Over the course of a year or so I donated a bunch of items, helped fellow clan members through the chat and ended up as the clan leader after the previous one left. I ran the clan for a while, but real life has a way of sweeping you along with it and I had to retire.

The clan is still going strong. My account is still there after all these years. The same group has released two rather hilarious RPGs on Steam, West of Loathing and Shadows Over Loathing, that are well regarded, also filled with tons of jokes and also feature stick figure graphics. I recommend you check all of them out, you have nothing to lose but free time.

Metal Storm (NES) When I was a kid, I was a ravenous reader of Nintendo Power. This was in the full glory of the NES era, where the magazine was one of the only sources besides store shelves to see and learn about new games coming out.

My parents, concerned about my grades no doubt, made a deal with me one year. If I made straight A’s, they would buy me one NES game of my choice. Now this was around 1990, games’ $50 asking price then is akin to more than $120 today. For our family, this was no small purchase. But at the time, I saw only an opportunity. I put in the extra effort, pulled off the ace and proudly presented my report card at the end of the year.

Nintendo Power had recently run a cover feature on Metal Storm, featuring its gravity-changing gameplay. I was going for this one from the start. I knew this was what I wanted. It was and remains a fantastic game with unique mechanics, great NES spritework and fun gameplay.

Daggerfall (PC DOS, Unity engine) For the time, this game was insane. It had miles and miles and miles of world to explore, which was mirrored by the grotesquely labyrinthine dungeons that also populated the wilderness. All in early 3D with creepy pixel monsters on top.

This started my love affair with the Elder Scrolls series because I spent hours upon hours making the most powerful warriors and mages imaginable with the flexible character creator. But the quests were hazy and occasionally impossibly difficult, even with cheats enabled. Even with the mark and recall spells, you might never find your way out of a dungeon if you went far enough in.

Most of the original game’s problems have been remedied by the remake of Daggerfall in the Unity engine, which has options to limit the size of the dungeons and fix the numerous bugs it originally shipped with. Also with mod support! Now you can see the countryside fly by as you fast travel, with vastly extended view distance. And since it’s been forever, the game is free on Bethesda’s website. Go check it out if you’re interested in where the series came from. DFUnity makes it a much better and more modern experience.

#20games

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Heatstroke checked the information on his phone one more time before he landed on the ground: a lone metahuman, hostile, no known accomplices, involved in a robbery. Several reports of injuries and property damage, but no fatalities. By all accounts it was the exact kind of situation he excelled at solving quickly and simply. He'd run in there, let his or his squad's reputation precede him, and then, if he was lucky, get to fight a little besides. The thought spread a smile across his brown face as he leapt through the air. The superhero gripped the high collar of his chestpiece with both gloved hands as the ground raced up towards him. Heatstroke grunted with the impact of his boots along the concrete, taking a few running steps to gather himself like a plane landing on the tarmac. He'd gotten more accurate with his massive leaps across town, but timing his solar powers to soften the landing was often more trouble than it solved. Instead he skidded across the asphalt, trying not to warm it beneath him with each step.

It wasn't hard to distinguish which building had been hit: the block had only one building whose facade looked like some giant beast had taken a bite out of its second floor. Debris littered the floor outside the building, and he considered whether to use the front door or enter via the hole that someone else had already made. The latter made more sense, and glass crunched beneath his laced boots as he looked around.

“Oh thank God!” Someone yelled as he stood there in the hole in the wall, illuminated by the midday Sun behind him. He loved the feeling of sunshine on his back and the promise of his energy stores refilling as he fought. Thank God for daytime missions. Heatstroke presented the picture of aggressive confidence as he scanned the room.

“Oh shit... is that Heatstroke?” another asked.

“Like... from Kinetic Solutions?”

“Ahhh shit...”

“You're safe. I'm here.” He quieted the crowd's chatter, his hands already glowing with his signature solar might. The facility's employees sat in small clusters, each guarded by a strange shadowy creature. From this distance, each bipedal guard looked like an undifferentiated mass of dark grey, like an opaque shadow. The creatures turned to face him the moment the civilians began yelling, and Heatstroke prepared for the fight he'd been waiting for.

The monsters—bipedal and clawed with strange, misshapen heads—leapt at him en masse. They made low, guttural noises, more beastly than human, and Heatstroke met their aggression in kind. He bobbed and swayed, moving his thickly muscled frame with agility and efficiency of a trained boxer. The first creature raked the air in front of him and then disappeared into a puff of smoke when he punched through what would have been its chest. The next leapt at him, and Heatstroke discovered they had tails when a third wrapped its appendage around his exposed knee. It pulled him off balance and the one sailing through the air sliced his cheek with a sharpened foot. Both puffed into smoke a moment later when he punched down into the one wrapped around his leg and caught the other in his white hot palm. He hurled the mysterious beast into another of its kind and then scanned the room for threats, calling out the hostages ringing the room.

“Everyone still alive? Did you see who did this or where they went?”

The clump of hostages nearest him waved him over, its members still looking around as if the monsters might emerge from the shadows again at any moment. A woman with bright brown eyes held half of a ripped shirt against a nasty looking cut, and a younger man explained that the woman responsible had burst through the wide building unannounced and unprovoked. She'd summoned a dozen of the monsters he'd fought before subduing the building's meager security and leaving most of the monsters to guard the hostages. Another employee interrupted to describe the woman, and the one who'd spoken before nodded along.

“Big purple hat, purple clothes, and glowing eyes.” They all agreed about her eyes. They bickered loudly about her stature and complexion and exactly what she'd told them. Heatstroke let them talk, already signaling for a paramedic.

“Ok, great. Aside from shadow monsters, what did she do?” He asked. The sunlight bounced off his gear: boots reminiscent of hard armor plates affixed to boxing boots, a thick belt around his flared shorts that left room for his thick calves to see the sun, an armored breastplate that stopped just below his ribs and just before his shoulders but featured a high collar that nearly covered his chin, and armored gloves that stopped at his knuckles as to not hamper the sunlight that gathered in his fingertips. He'd consulted with a few designers and manufacturers on how to maximize protection without impeding his brawling, kickboxing fighting style or covering too much of the bare brown skin that turned sunlight into superhuman abilities.

He'd picked the colors—a deep red and pure white with vivid yellow details—to further emphasize his solar powers and draw attention. And also because he thought the entire thing looked badass when put together.

The initial report, the one he'd responded to when he accepted this job, didn't identify her as any known meta, hero, villain, or otherwise. That was rare but not unheard of, but he wanted some foresight about who he was about to apprehend and if or how they might resist. Even boxers studied tape of their opponents to prepare for a match.

The chatter grew louder as the worried victims each tried to speak over each other. The brawny hero heard no fewer than a dozen terrified and conflicting accounts of what this woman had done or said and what she was capable of. the only thing that they agreed about was that she'd headed upstairs, into the R&D department. A vicious rumbling interrupted his investigation and sent the room into violent cacophany as people huddled on the ground. Screaming and wailing, the tall, atheltic hero quickly decided that he had no better option than to investigate on his own. It was no secret that the Kinetic Solutions—the superhero team he led— were recommended for the jobs likely too violent for other teams. Nails in need of a team of hammers. He checked his armor—red and white with yellow accents in a clear artistic interpretation of the Sun that powered him— and jogged toward the stairs.

What's her hazard rating right now? He wondered, checking his phone. The Hazard system, long used as a rough guide, informed what level of response he could reasonably justify. A villain who hadn't murdered anyone shouldn't expect lethal force, and neither hero nor villain could claim they “feared for their lives” without serious extenuating circumstances. This woman's No one needed to die today

Shattered glass and twisted metal decorated the stairs. Heatstroke wondered if the damp, unpleasant smell of the stairwell predated this attack or not. He leapt up the center of the stairs, zooming out of his stories high arc and over the railing when he heard the familiar buzz of damaged electronics.

The door presented only token resistance when he pulled it off its hinges and stepped onto the R&D floor of the Meritron Inc building. Smoke poured from ruined devices lining the walls, engineering and science equipment he'd only seen in machine shops and labs. Whoever had been working here had been busy with something. The far side of the room was too obscured by smoke to see clearly, but the high ceilings, thick concrete walls, and sturdy floors of this level made clear that Meritron intended on keeping whatever work was done here close at hand. Heatstroke's brown eyes glowed with the same yellow white light that wound around his dark brown skin in ever changing patterns.

The blue-grey haze 20 feet in front of him was smoke. Natural. Carbon based. The product of burning plastic and silicon. But the smoke pooling behind it?

Magic.

Blocking his vision, denying the illumination pouring off of him. His hands glowed and Heatstroke braced himself, bobbing and shifting in his stance to present a moving target. He threw a single bolt of solar energy into the smoke, angling it towards the floor to hopefully avoid any further damage. It burst against the tile and spread a harsh glow that illuminated her silhouette in the smoke

“If you're in there, this is your chance to come out, hands up, and keep this simple.” He said.

A door opened in the deep grey smoke, like curtains parting. And then she appeared. He saw her eyes first: her irises were yellow discs sent against the deep black abyss of her pupils and sclera. The effect was chilling, inhuman. She stared at him behind thick, golden framed glasses, and a curious smile spread across her dark brown face. Her cheeks were soft and round, as was the rest of her. Her visage clarified as he approached her. She was small, with a deep purple dress inlaid with gold glyphs that stretched over her generous curves. He looked over her quickly, noting the purple fog blanketing the floor around her. The purple hat and cape gave her the distinct image of a sorcerer or a witch, but her heavy gloves and boots suggested someone much more accustomed to hand to hand combat.

She stared at him, hard, for a long while before saying anything. He figured she was sizing him up the same as he was her. “You first responder heroes are never any fun.” she said, resting her chin in her palm and folding that arm over the other. “Go call for backup and tell them to bring me a challenge.” She dropped something from her hand and it disappeared into the split cloak waving behind and below her without a sound. Then she dismissed him with a wave and turned around, returning to whatever she'd been doing when he'd arrived.

Heatstroke gritted his teeth but kept his emotions in check. He'd done this for too many years for such a simple barb to get under his skin.

“Joke's on you, witch; when I'm the first responder, I'm the only response they need.” He knew exactly how 'witch' sounded and relished the wide eyed rage that flashed across her admittedly pretty brown face. Even with her long purple and black braids partially blocking her face, there was beauty there. Only those inhuman eyes ruined the effect. A reminder that she wasn’t just a pretty thicc woman in a revealing dress.

“Oh?” The tendrils of smoke beneath the woman tightened and coalesced as she turned to face him again, and he noticed now that she was floating. Likely mere centimeters above the ground, but the visual of her bobbing up and down made it clear that she wasn't standing on solid ground. She unfolded and crossed her arms and regarded him with what looked like intrigue. “Tell me more, hero.” He noticed her fingers waggling but ignored it.

Now it was Heatstroke's turn to regard someone with intrigue and interest. “You're new in town, huh? Pretty sure they have wifi in the jails now. When you get there, look up “Kinetic Solutions. Last I heard I was the man in this city. Ask about me. As a matter of fact...”

He lost himself in his own introduction. Who wouldn't? He'd led the city's— no, the state's— most dangerous superhero team for almost 3 years. He was tall, dark, handsome, and as skilled at tactics as he was as scrapping. He was squad leader for a reason. His solar powers made him sturdy, dangerous, mobile, and let him be as aggressive as he wanted. He didn't even have them on yet. His bands weren't even glowing right now. And-

And then she was flying toward him, knees first, yelling what sounded distinctly like “Malus Meteora.”

He felt her shins on his shoulders, and braced, and then felt something around his ankle. Hands. Cold shadowy hands. And then he toppled over onto his back and got a much clearer view of the witch rampaging through Meritron's R&D facility. She sat on his hard chestplate, her full body weight on top of him. She was heavier than she looked. Solid. And surprisingly muscular beneath the soft squish of her thighs. Her dark brown skin contrasted with the rich purple and gold of her skimpy robes. The slit on each side put her wide, curvy hips on full display. From this angle, trapped beneath her, he couldn't see her face, not with her massive chest obscuring her view. Each breast looked like it might be just a little larger than her head. But when she leaned forward. It was her eyes that caught him and held his attention. Her irises glowed, golden halos set against the night sky of her jet black sclera. A demon's gaze, nearly hidden by her curtain of black and purple twists spilling out of her witch hat.

This was dangerous. She'd pinned him immediately, gotten the drop on him while he'd gotten lost bragging about himself. She was almost certainly going to try and incapacitate him here. The thought of a genuine brawl excited him like little else could, and Heatstroke watched her expression curdle as she looked down on him.

“Glad to know heroes here love the sound of their own voices as much as they do everywhere else. Sorry to cut this short, hero, but I'm in a time crunch. Any last words before I turn you into an unpleasant memory?” She stretched out her arm above him, fingers curling to contain a rapidly growing black hole that churned and seethed in her palm, a miasma of energy from an unknown source. He didn't have to understand its origin or mechanism to know that he wouldn't enjoy her shoving it into his face. She caressed his jaw with her other hand. “It is a pity though. You're cute, in a 'big dumb idiot' kind of way. I would have had a lot of fun playing with you until you broke like a cheap toy.”

“Just one.” He said. Her eyes narrowed at him. “Mind if I turn my powers on?”

Heatstroke didn't give her a chance to respond. Instead, the burst of light and heat flung her away from him, directly up into the air. The two shadow servants disappeared in the flash while he rolled away and onto his feet, body now coursing with his sunlit powers. The white gold bands of light pulsed and shifted across his skin in changing patterns, a human light show.

“Sorry.” He said, cracking his knuckles. “That was rude as fuck, but goddam is that shit funny. “'Some hero you are.' 'Man you're weak.' Yada yada.” he laughed in a mocking tone. “Then I turn the lights on and they start running like roaches.”

In front of him, the curvy, dark skinned witch had righted herself, smoothing out her dress and already mumbling a spell. She didn't have any words for him this time, and Heatstroke fell into his familiar stance, looking to close the distance and bring his sunlight charged fists to bear. Or a knee, maybe a spinning elbow. He wasn't especially picky about how he hit her, or even if he made direct contact. Light and heat poured off his limbs in sufficient amount to turn near misses into painful reminders for opponents to keep their distance from the Sun. To his surprise though, she didn't flee. Most spellcasters preferred to keep their distance to give them more time to react with the proper incantation. This one bent forward in a half-crouch, hands spread out wide like a...

Like a wrestler?

There was a first time for everything. They met in the center of the room when she ducked his wide, arcing punch to launch herself at his waist. He felt her arms wrap around him, soft and smooth until the muscles beneath tensed as the diminutive witch hauled him off his feet and onto her shoulders. She capsized, falling to her side to drive him headfirst into the cold tile of the research lab. They fell much further than he expected, than they should have, until Heatstroke saw the now disintegrating puff of obsidian colored magic that must have catapulted them both into the air. The impact sent an ugly thud resounding through the drafty room and rattled him. Then two shadow beasts he hadn't seen darkened his vision and stomped him like they were trying to squash a roach. He drew his arms up to cover his face but otherwise ignored them. The witch kneeling near him was the bigger issue. The eerie purple glow emanating from her body and especially her hands hurt just from touching him, and he recognized the danger immediately. Whatever spell pulsed around her seemed concentrated around her body. No wonder she wanted to wrestle. It ate at him, sapped him, even as her massive chest squished against his bare abs.

“What's wrong, hero? You don't look so hot.” She said, already trying to roll him over onto his stomach. Heatstroke braced himself and fought free, she lunged at him again, and this time he caught her with a sharp punch that stunned her long enough for him to back away and shake off the lingering traces of her spell.

They both caught their breath, and he strafed and circled as she walked straight towards him, brimming with menace and confidence. She could summon seemingly endless amounts of those shadow beasts on a whim, and the purple smoke that trailed her and her ominous purple energy crackling around her both seemed to eat at his vitality. It looked bad, no matter how he considered it?

Did he need to call for backup? At least one of the other five members of Kinetic Solutions was likely available if he needed it.

But pride might be harder to defeat than this woman was. He didn't need anyone. Not for a one-on-one against a spellcaster who didn't even know his powers. Instead he considered tactics and possibilities. What hadn't he tried yet? Ideas raced through his head as he parried her advances, throwing small bursts of sunlight at the horde of shadows that stepped forward from the edge of the room. She taunted him but that could wait. A vaguely hand-shaped spark of energy raced out toward him and Heatstroke made up his mind. The latest spell raced past him as he ducked beneath it, surging toward the caster as he delivered his first solid punches of their fight. The third blow erupted in a pulse of sunlight that sent the woman skidding along the cold floor of the R&D lab until one of the shadow creatures caught her and turned her upright. She might be as sturdy as she was haughty, but he bet that this small, voluptuous woman couldn't absorb many of the strikes that had sent larger villains flying and stopped armored vehicles in their tracks.

“You have a name?” He asked. “Or a callsign at least?”

“You can call me... Demise.” She said after taking a moment to wipe her face and adjust her glasses.

“Of course I can.” He shook his head. “Edgiest shit ever.”

“Heatstroke doesn't sound very heroic.” She said, circling him again.

“Anything's heroic if you're putting villains away and saving the day.” He swore that disdain flashed across her face as he finished the rhyme.

They circled like two predators fighting for territory, feinting and lunging, firing off bolts and rays of energy in an attempt to force one reaction or another. He caught her as she overextended, tagging her with a jab and a glowing kick before looping his hand behind her head and pulling her close to him. Her short stature and compromised posture pressed her chest against him, her massive chest squishing against his chiseled abs. He caught the shock in her cold black and yellow eyes as he drove his knee into her soft middle and tried to rearrange her face with a blistering right hook that sent a crescent of yellow white light through her and briefly dissipated her smoke cloud..

“You're almost too pretty to hit, nahmean? If you weren't robbing the place I'd be asking for your number.” He admitted, preparing to hit her again.

“If I fuck you, will you let me get off with a warning?” She asked, with a vulnerability he'd never heard from her. It gave him pause. Rumors, some confirmed, of heroes and villains working out extralegal agreements to conclude their hostile engagements persisted, but Heatstroke had never offered. He'd been solicited once, by a villain who'd clearly heard of the practice and thought it might work for them. Heatstroke had impolitely declined before putting them down for the count.

“I-I'm not like that. I didn't show up to fuck you.” He stammered, giving her the moment she needed to turn the tables on him.

“Pity.” She cackled, sliding out of his grip and behind him. “You're pretty hot, and you're good with your hands. I wouldn't mind seeing how good exactly.” Her warm breath tickled his ear and sent a twitch of distraction through him. Magic? He couldn't tell. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her body into his back, smashing her hips into his, her generous chest into his. “If you change your mind, I might just see if you can let me off easy. Or get me off easy.” The implications were as explicit on her long, wet tongue dragging across his hot back. The sensation didn't last long though, not when he felt her pillowy legs wrapped around his neck.She nearly sat on his shoulders, legs tangled around his neck. She fell backwards, trying to use the momentum to drag him backwards off his feet and onto the ground, headfirst, but a mighty effort from his glowing frame kept him upright. The shadow slammed into his calf and sent him toppling. Heatstroke saw the wan fluorescent lights of the laboratory come into view and then disappear as Demise slammed the top of his head into the floor.

The tile cracked with the impact, and Demise maintained her grip. The soft squish of her legs gave way to taught cords of muscle threatening to cut off his blood circulation. She sat on his back and reclined, straining with the effort of grapevining her legs around his thickly muscled neck. Her thighs rubbed against his goatee, and he fought desperately to unwind her limbs. When he made a little progress, she swore aloud and then changed tack. He felt Demise pitch forward, her chest pressed against him. She looped a leg under either of his and slipped her arms under his chin. He didn't recognize the hold until she pulled back, straining his bare abs. Heat fought this hold like the other, and they grunted into strained silence. He looked back at the too-handsy witch and plotted his escape. She cracked an unwelcome smile.

When he looked ahead again there was a shadow beat running at him. He didn't recognize the summoned shadow's intent until it reared back and kicked him square in the face like a soccer player taking a penalty kick. The creatures might not pose a threat to him when he could strike back, but undefended, their blows hurt like any other. Thankfully, the impact was sufficient for the brawny hero to rock backwards and then forward out of Demise's grasp. She didn't pursue him, instead she rested her head in her palm and watched him scramble up onto shaky legs.

“I'm gonna devour you. You realize that yet? You're doomed. Fucked. I'm gonna be your, and this city's-”

“Don't you fucking dare.” He roared, too late to stop her.

”-Demise.” She finished, laughter creasing her dark brown face. “I'm glad you're a sun hero. You're cooked. Well done, in fact. But if you get on your knees and put your face between my thighs, I might let you live. You'll make a delicious pet.”

Something about her taunts was strangely reassuring. A villain who deigned to banter was a villain engaged with the task at hand. She was focused on him. This wasn't easy for her. Now he had to unravel her strategy and put her on the defensive. Ideas already ran through his head as he assessed their fight so far.

“I thought I told you that when I'm the first responder, the city doesn't need a second. I'm having fun with you. This is a great workout. But I'm a big guy: if you want me on my knees, do it yourself, witch.”

The same insult, the same twitch of rage. He'd struck a nerve with that one. He'd have to remember to use that again later. She'd hurt him each time she'd caught him off guard, and he'd need to be more diligent about staying focused on her. Her style was similar to Gamma Crush, his radiation powered teammate, though Gamma's grappling was less technical, less precise. And he dealt with magic on a regular basis courtesy of training with the Emissary, the mage whose pact with an incubus had turned him into a very petite, very unassuming magical hazard. His teammates had prepared him for this. Heatstroke could do this, no matter how heavy his legs felt or how much his head throbbed.

He took the advantage this time, leaping into the cavernous room and then using a burst of solar power to change his direction in midair. He shot downwards like a missile and caught her dead in the face, then knocked the reeling woman off her feet with a charged sun ray.

“I'm Heatstroke, and I don't lose fights.” he promised her, pounded his gloved fist on his cracked armor.

Their battle soon settled into a clear dynamic: they both wanted physical contact on their own terms. She wanted to lift him, slam him, strangle him with those big soft legs of hers. He wanted to turn her into a very pretty punching bag, or target practice for rays of solar energy projected from his fists. His brawn made him difficult to keep down, and his control of his powers gave him the kind of mobility most opponents didn't expect from a man of his size and strength. On the other hand, he couldn't tell exactly what spell or wrestling hold she'd attempt next, and the element of surprise made her dangerous. Her shadows threatened to tip the balance on more than one occasion, and he grew accustomed to evaporating them via bolts of sunlight hurled in their direction each time he had a second to spare. He'd guessed that they were more expensive for Demise to create and maintain than they were for him to destroy, and doing so had the added effect of hampering some of her most vicious spells and techniques. He'd also guessed that direct sunlight would be particularly effective at dissipating summoned shadows.

He still had questions about this mysterious woman, (none the least of which was how her glasses hadn't broken after being punched in the face repeatedly) but all those could be settled after she'd been apprehended.

“You know,” she asked as Heat absorbed a glancing blow from a jumping spinning kick he'd only seen on wrestling shows, “you might think about offering that whole 'sex for freedom' option. You're hot, and I get the feeling you're more of a lover, not a fighter.”

The brawny hero responded with a kick of his own. The blow missed but the arc of light it produced knocked her off balance enough to launch her into the air with a solar uppercut and guarantee her a hard landing with another strike as she fell back towards the floor. Each titanic blow sent waves of blinding light and blistering heat through the distressed building. So much for the typical financial incentive for reducing collateral damage. Demise hit the ground hard enough to bounce against the tile, finally landing face up and eyes closed. She didn't move further, splayed out on the cracked tiles and visible concrete. Heatstroke allowed himself a deep breath as he stood over her. Her sumptuous curves were distracting to say the least. Her soft, chubby waist terminated in hips and thighs each thicker than his impressive biceps. They jiggled softly as her chest rose and fell, but not as visibly as her massive chest. Each labored breath lifted breasts each larger than her head, and she murmured softly, apparently unconscious. With her demonic eyes closed it was easy to admire her face. Rich dark brown skin, large lips that demanded he investigate if they were as soft as they looked, and round cheeks that made her look younger, cuter, than anything else about her did. He guessed she was in her thirties, but considering her magical talents, she might be a hundred years old, concealed by a glamor spell.

“You're cute when you're asleep.” He admitted, but 'cute' was an understatement. She was as gorgeous as she was hazardous, as alluring as she was lethal. He wanted her. Not enough to take her while she was unconscious, but he knew they hadn't seen the last of each other. The surge of desire passed, and he pulled restraints from the pouches on his waist. He knelt by the vicious witch and paused. There was movement on the edge of his vision.

He noticed her fingers wiggling a new spell and mouth murmuring a new incantation a moment before three summoned shadows barrelled into him, knocking him headlong onto the floor. He shook off dust and sat up just in time for the decidedly not-unconscious to collide with him knees first: her shins caught his broad shoulders before her crotch collided flush with his face. They rolled in a heap before she sat on his waist, and Heatstroke cursed his complacency. He should have pummeled her till he was certain she wouldn't be an issue any time soon. The swelling on her eye didn't conceal those unsettling jet black eyes, their yellow irises only serving to make her more scary, not less. He prepared to rely on his grappling training to escape, before she ran her fingers along his chest.

“Awwwww, did the big, scary, hero fall down? That's twice I've hit you with 'Malus Meteora,' Heatstroke; maybe we're both getting used to me pressing my kitty against your face. If you wanted to taste real villainy, you should have asked earlier, champ.”

“God, you talk too much.” Heatstroke said, squirming under her. She was heavier than her short stature suggested, and he wondered if this was also a spell. From her he could just make out the brim of her hat past her prominent bust. The bottom, the inside of the hat's brim swirled with stars and galaxies set against a black sky. It took him a moment to realize that the sky wasn't merely a pattern sewn onto the hat; the sky and stars were moving in her hat, like a window of a night sky. He caught a single shooting star before it disappeared past her breasts and out of view. “Normally that's my job.”

They fought for position, rolling over once and then again, before she eked out a short advantage and pressed her body flat against his. Her chest squished against his cracked chest armor as she fought to pin his broad hands above his head. When she couldn't capture his hands or wrists for more than a moment he watched her lower her head until...

Until their lips met. He didn't expect the kiss, though he immediately discovered that her dark, plump lips were exactly as soft as they looked. Her tongue wiggled past his lips and delivered a taste of villainy he hadn't expected. It was faintly sweet like her breath, with a taste he struggled to place. He wanted her. Needed her. He wanted to taste her, he wanted to touch her, he wanted to fill her. Her grinding on his waist made him uncomfortably aroused and he had grief visions of fucking her in various positions and locales. From behind, the witch bent over a desk. On a bed, the witch on her back, single thigh lifted up to rest on his chest while she made soft, vulnerable moans.

“Ohhh?” Her taunt roused him from his lewd dream. “I wasn't sure that spell would work, but that's not a torch in your pants is it, Heatstroke? Feels like you're more than a little curious about what's under my dress. Be a good boy and I might reward you.”

Heatstroke realized that this was bad. Critically so. Here he was thinking about her mouth while she was trying to put him in the hospital or the morgue en route to making a clean getaway with unknown technology. She might be fine as [i]fuck[i/] but Heatstroke had a [i]fucking[/i] job to do and [i]fucking[/i] wasn't part of it.

He made one last effort and dislodged her with considerable effort.

“An infatuation spell? That hardly seems fair.” He groaned, pushing up to his hands and knees.

“I'm a villain, asshole. Did you expect me to play fair? If you wanna play pattycake, go find some dopey hero. I'm Demise, and Witch Way runs your city now, loser. Tell your little loser ass friends too.”

“Witch way?” He coughed, quickly connecting that Witch Way was likely the name of her group. Her coven? “Run the city? Y'all not even jogging. I've never heard of you.” He stood again, ailing and aching. “But come down to the station with me and I'll make sure we get your squad registered before you do some time in jail, nahmean?”

She rushed at him now, and Heatstroke expected more wrestling from the grappler witch until he noticed the black orb in her open palm, churning and swirling like liquid night.

“Here's your answer!” Demise screamed, and Heatstroke swore as he considered his options. She was too close, moving too fast. He couldn't dodge in time. He was too weak, still recovering from whatever her kiss had done to him. He didn't want to match power against power, especially with only a split second to charge. Instead a surge of churning light swaddled on muscled arm and he deflected her hand as best he could away from his head and heart. He'd live with the consequences.

Probably.

Demise's latest spell hurled them across the room in different directions and Heatstroke lost his bearings before he finally tumbled to a stop. He felt nothing and considered for a moment that he might in fact be dead. Maybe he hadn't survived whatever dark orb she thrust into his chest after all. He felt briefly furious at the idea of dying here, to her, on a job like this. It was insulting.

Then the pain found him and he briefly wished he had died. His body felt like a punctured water bottle, leaking fluid from a new and unwelcome orifice. Whatever she'd done to him was trying to sap him or his solar energy. It was draining him. He wanted to vomit. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to cough. But more than anything, he wanted to win. The pain finally subsided enough for him to stop writhing and stand, stance and armor both severely compromised. He touched his armor, chest and legs both, and found numerous holes in each. His ablative armor had done its job. He bled, but between him and his chestpiece, only the armor had been pierced. The cracked and fraying edges of it threatened to cut the fingers he ran along it, and when he instinctively grabbed his high front collar, the entire thing gave way. The red and white sleeveless crop top armor crumbled in his hands and fell onto the cement floor, looking very much like a shattered porcelain urn.

He swore as he felt the cold air on his bare, brown skin. He flexed, wincing each time his body alerted him to a new tweak, bruise, or strain. At least nothing felt broken. Across the room, Demise didn't look much better than he felt. Her already revealing robe had further tattered and threatened to reveal her deep cleavage and whether she had a thigh gap or not. She wobbled slightly, punchdrunk and winded, while Heatstroke checked his arms. His sun bands had cooled to dull yellow and pulsed in sluggish, lazy waves across his brown muscle. He needed to finish this now. The audience of shadow servants that had originally ringed their fight was now much thinner, and the ones that remained fuzzed and blurred like TV static. She was running on fumes like he was.

She waved him in, steadying herself as he approached. His fists felt heavy and he felt slow, but he had one attack he hadn't tried yet. Heatstroke ducked low and surged forward, coming out of his crouch to wrap his arm around her again. He could feel her tense up, which made it all the more satisfying when he kissed her instead.His hands slid down the curve of her voluptuous frame and he allowed himself a little indulgence as he tasted her, nibbling on her lip, feeling the odd coolness of her soft, doughy waist and the sheer size and impressive shape of her hips. Her tattered dress offered no resistance as his fingers found a purchase on her hip, his broad hand grabbing the sensual crease where the curve of her ass met the curve of her thigh. He felt her gasp, felt the heat in his hands warming her. She resisted, but only at first. The next sound she made was a swooning, purring, moan. As satisfied as a cat napping, basking in the sunlight warming the window sill.

“Ready to give up yet?” He asked between slow kisses.

Her heavy bust pressed into his and he felt just how far her massive breasts could squish, freeing on hand to roam upwards along her dark brown frame. The rest of her was human. So delightfully human. He caressed her neck as they embraced, fighting to keep his own composure as her hands explored his muscles. From his broad shoulders to his chest, chiseled and bare, to the muscular ridges of his waist. She wanted all of him.

Her answer came slowly. An unintelligible but distinctly negative response. He'd expected that after all. Heatstroke nibbled on her neck again and whispered into her ear. “Then you know what comes next.”

“Your demise.” She muttered, eyes glowing once again.

They broke their kiss with a frenzy of action. She deflected his first blow but he caught her cleanly with two lighter punches that knocked her head backwards. She grabbed him, first his torso, then his thigh, and almost tripped him to the ground before disengaging. She turned to leave, but not before he caught hold of her short, high split cape. The same one she'd dropped a peculiar looking device into. It held the same night sky pattern as the underside of her hat, he noticed.

“Ughhhhh you're being unpleasant, Heatstroke! We had our fun, now it's time to go our separate ways.” She said with apparent exhaustion.

“We're not done quite yet, Demise.” He reminded her, still tugging on her cape. The fabric stretched then tore with a loud noise and a puff of magic. Demise kept her footing and spun away from him towards the darkened back wall. Heatstroke took a deep breath and leapt over her, landing within arm's reach. He needed to finish this soon or not at all. He was spent and he knew it.

The supervillain turned and ran in the other direction, towards the set of stairs he'd used. He dashed, sunlight in his steps as he curved around her and ended up back in her way. But the hero realized too late that this latest movement had been a feint, meant to distract him from her preferred path. She was running back towards the back wall after all. The one cloaked in shadow that she'd been standing near when he'd arrived. Now a throng of fading, buzzy shadows leapt into his path now, obstructing his vision. He vaporized them all with a glowing left hook that sent a sputtering wave of light into the air and sought out their creator.

And there she stood. Hands on her knees, panting, gasping. Her curves were more noticeable than usual. She held up a finger in a plea for time to catch her breath. Heatstroke couldn't, wouldn't oblige. They weren't having [i]that[i/] much fun, no matter how attractive she was. He expected a quip from her. He did not expect her to look into his glowing eyes and meow. Not the mimicked sound a human might make, but a full throated, authentic cat noise. He stared at her, and then Demise wasn't Demise anymore.

He was holding a large black cat. Other than the feline he was now alone in a room bereft of shadows or villains. He stood there, holding a cat in one hand and a length of tattered purple fabric in the other, and scanned the room.

He caught only a glimpse of her, but that was enough to see Demise—the real, human one—take a final step and leap through the wall in front of her, which rippled and shimmered like the surface of an ebon pool as she phased through it. He dropped the cat and chased after her, arriving at the same wall she'd used and quickly recognizing that the intense darkness on this side of the room had been the result of a witch’s spell rather than mundane darkness. She’d worked magecraft to black, shadowy plate to cover the gaping hole in the building wall she’d made sometime previously. He punched through it with his light, but staring down into the busy street below he could find no trace of the woman.

Demise had escaped.

He spun around and her cat too, was gone. He yelled with frustration and pounded the wall with his fist before deactivating his powers and slumping to the ground. All he had of her was her taste and the cape in his hands, tattered and torn. He looked at it and sighed. It would have to do.

“So Demise, huh? This city just got a lot more interesting...” “So what happened at Meritron?” 10-Count asked over breakfast the next morning. The Kinetic Solutions headquarters was modest, but well equipped to house its team of 6 superheroes and a small contingent of staff dedicated to the team’s success.

This morning the two superheroes sat in the chow hall in relative silence, save a TV playing the latest news. Jessica Nguyen, known to the world as '10-Count,' was an aggressive, determined superhero, enough so to stand out on a team full of them. She wasn’t the oldest or most experienced or the most socially adept, but the woman recognized a weakness when she saw one and knew how to exploit it.

Heatstroke looked up from his hot cereal. “C'mon Jess. Not now.”

Jessica looked away, and then the solar powered brawler returned to his meal.

“So Cal, what happened at Meritron yesterday?” Heatstroke heard her clearer this time for everything she said nonverbally: the way she used his government name, the curt tone in her voice, and the way she now specified the location and date. He might be the group's field leader, but 10-Count was the enforcer on a team full of superpowered enforcers. Heatstroke outranked her, and could make her drop it, but pulling rank over a debrief would be more trouble than it was worth. Instead, the bruised and weary solar powered hero acquiesced. He could give a little now and get a little more back from her later.

The dull ache in his skull and back had ruined enough of his sleep that he didn't feel like fighting her over this. Come to think of it, the dull aches plaguing him were likely what she wanted to talk about. The shredded cape he'd pulled off of Demise sat in a tattered heap next to him on the cafeteria table. He doubted 10-Count recognized it as such.

“Sure,” he said, reaching past the strap of his white tank top undershirt to rub his traps and shoulder. “She was there when I got on the scene. Took care of her magical... shadows or whatever and called in a medevac for the civilians. She didn't care, didn't try to use the employees as hostages. You'd think she tied 'em up and forgot about 'em.”

Calvin saw curiosity bloom in her brown eyes, partially hidden as they were by her short, wavy hair.

“So what was she there for?”

“Fuck if I know. You know Meritron ain't saying shit either. But I caught her pulling some shit out of a container in their third floor lab.”

Jessica motioned for him to keep talking.

“She dropped it into her cape.”

“Like, her pocket? Gamma Crush said you brought her cape back with you.”

“Nah. Not quite.” Calvin gestured at the witch's cape. “You see any pockets on that thing?” He failed to conceal his frustration or fatigue. “When she was wearing it the inside looked different. It glowed. Had stars on it like a night sky.”

The short, athletic woman stared at him, uncomprehending. “So what. Magic?”

“I mean, she had no shortage of spells for me. But once I ripped it off of her-”

“The spell dissipated?”

They shrugged at each other. That was as far as deduction could take them.

“Yeah, basically. I wanna ask Em about it. Where is he?”

Jessica's scrunched up face and exaggerated shrug was all the answer Calvin needed.

Emile Collet, better known as the Emissary, served as the Kinetic Solution's only current magical expert. The man was an antisocial jackass even by their loosened standards, but Calvin couldn't deny that the caustic little jackass was their best bet at determining what the hell had happened to the cape.

“So the job went sideways and lil' miss witchy-poo gave you the business.” Jessica was teasing him now and he knew it. “Bet you wish you called for backup now, huh Cal?”

Hand-to-hand combat excellence was a prerequisite for Kinetic Solution membership, but 10-Count surpassed even that. She might not have the other skills necessary to be team leader yet, but being the best fighter on the team was a constant debate and a point of pride for all six of their team's current members.

Calvin swore at her first. Then he explained what Demise had done, or tried to. She and her ‘Witch Way’ coven represented new forces acting on the already delicate balance of superhumans in the city and beyond. A new team capable of going toe to toe with the Kinetic Solutions threatened everything they'd built, including their reputation as the city's foremost fighters. He omitted, however, any mention of Demise's physique or the way she'd groped, kissed, taunted him. He wanted her he realized, or at least he had during their brief encounter. He'd more than wanted her. He'd needed her. Their last kiss had been one he'd initiated, and he couldn't lie to even himself that he'd done so solely to recover what she'd stolen. He'd kissed her to keep her from leaving.

But 10-Count didn't think that way about anyone, and mentioning his brief infatuation with the voluptuous witch would only make her doubt his judgement. As far as Jessica needed to know, Demise was just a wrestler with magical powers who’d squabbled with him before escaping. He snapped at her, fully aware of his exhaustion now.

“But anyways... a wrestler witch, huh?” The lithe Vietnamese woman took a moment to consider the possibility. “So like, a battle mage, combat witch kind of vibe. Like a magus or a warlock I guess. But I've never heard of one fighting barehanded.”

“First time for everything.” He said.

10-Count nodded. “Gotta love it. That's the superhuman world for you. If she's as sturdy as you say she is, I can't wait to get my hands on her.”

“Be careful. I hit her with the same punch that put Mac Mortar down. But she got up. I don't know if it's a dark magic vs Sun power thing or what, but you can bet I'm gonna find the fuck out.”

“Someone's touchy. You want your lick back, don't you?” Jessica shot him a devious smile.

Calvin nodded. “Damn right. I owe that witch some bruises.”

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