Defy trampoline park
Park Beyond
2021.08.25 21:14 NaijeruR Park Beyond
Dare to dream the impossible! Defy every limit and impossify your world in Park Beyond, coming 2023.
2009.12.22 16:45 samblam Augusta, Georgia
Welcome to /Augusta! We're a community for Augusta, Georgia’s second largest city and its surrounding area. Whether you’re new to the area, just passing through, or a long-time resident, we’re glad you’re here. Got a question? Looking for things to do? Or just want to keep up with local news, events, politics, and more? That’s what we’re here for.
2016.05.29 08:50 onedeeone Paizo's Starfinder RPG
The Unofficial Starfinder Subreddit
2023.03.24 01:57 bey0nd_repair Is there a type of therapy that helps you as a parent?
I went to therapy for 5 years for C-PTSD, the goal was to help me be a better parent as I started to have flashbacks just as I became a Dad.
My daughter is now 5 and has ASD level1. She was always sensitive from birth, she is a mirror of me with that HSP profile. She has a couple of very obvious pre-verbal/sensory PTSDs to me and a separation incident when she was 2. It presents as a fear of my voice if it isn't a happy/bright playful voice. I cant be sad, frustrated or directive with her without triggering her into a melt down/flight/fight response. The other presentation is really bad separation anxiety.
Therapy went wrong for me and I left abruptly which broke me.
I came up with an approach to help me get out of the nonstop flashbacks I was left stuck in. I was also extremely frustration at talking about all these challenges as it played out yet, nothing changed or helped and here I am, a kid broken by me being her Dad. All therapists I try to engage since just say reframe, you only need to get 33%, there is no such thing as disorganised in children, its never the parents, you're the most self critical person Ive met be kind to yourself etc...
Well what if it is the parent? When the unconscious has become conscious you either accept or change, I need to change not re-frame or accept as that further harms my daughter.
I ended up building my own modality and becoming my own psych, learning all the concepts and bastardizing them. I figured we have a disorganised attachment, heal that and most her challenges will pass but first I have to get her out of the trauma brain stem and that is why nothing has worked so far. We can't do it together as I'm a source of her fears, the family all on eggshells trying not to trigger each other from the stress of the environment.
Wim Hoff/Cold therapy and Stephen Porges/Safe and Sound protocol worked for that. She stopped grinding her teeth in her sleep, stopped ruminating and asking the same question 50 times when she was anxious. Clothes have stopped itching, her body sensation awareness improved, her attachment system opened up and made a few friends, held space and didnt freeze in the playground around other kids.
We did Aletha Solters attachment play concepts and I made a child version of Dan Browns 3 pillar approach, an explore plan of more group activities, OT and activities to improve her meta-congative awareness, and me using attachment concepts and play to be the perfect parent, mixing in concepts like love languages and other psych's work like Bruce Perry. What was amazing was my Daughter started to ask to play the exact games in Aletha's books for each challenge she faced and started mashing them together building more and more complex themes. Her separation anxiety is 90% gone, she walks into a new school without a care in the world on the 2nd day. She is just left with this fear of my voice and us rupturing. Her new teacher doesn't believe us when we told them she was ASD, there are only very subtle signs where she now needs to develop areas that she didn't get to and a higher than normal anxiety/inner critic.
For her fear of my voice Im using a concept from how to talk to kids books and DBT. We sat together and drawed out her morning routine then timed her on a good day and drew a clock next to each task with the number of minutes shaded e.g. 7-7:15 food, 7:15-7:20 clean teeth get dressed. I just silently point at the picture instead of instructing her to hurry up, avoiding me triggering a meltdown making her late for school. Agreed that if I have to tell her not to do something, I will pick her up and hold her as I do it so she knows I am not triggered.
She would hide pain if she suddenly hurt herself, I used introspective awareness concepts and DBT describe concept via drawing what happened when she hurt herself. She now cries but has to blame me first to feel safe. I'll take it, she is hurting inside because of me, I need to hold that anger from her, not reject it to protect myself make her feel safe letting it out again and again until she trusts me. I have to suck it up and deal with how that makes me feel and what ever trauma onion layer it triggers within me.
I sit on an exercise ball and bounce when watching over her play, if I zone out I almost fall off, I'm teaching her to swim so I have to watch over her non stop. She gets to look up and see me watching over and delighting instead of in my head, zoning out around her. We go to a trampoline park and jump and regulate together that way, just like a kid does.
For food sensitivities, I noticed she was in fight/flight, picking at it but looking at me in the corner of her eye. So I asked if she was scared I would be upset if she didn't eat it or was there something she was worried about. She said yes so I told her I will leave the room to make her feel safe. Mum then attuned to her fear made her feel safe, set the boundaries around cooking different food and the reasons then offered to either eat it herself or they could play like a baby and Mum will be a robot spoon feeding her (regression play) It worked, the next new meal my daughter paused started to look uncomfortable, turned to me and asked me if I would spoon feed her it, we laughed through the meal and she told me to pretend to throw it in her face if she is too slow. (I must of rushed her in the past! she is so empathic and sensitive she didnt want to upset me) now she just asked to be spoon fed by me if she is unsure and sometimes she might just leave it after a few tries but other times she enjoys it then will eat it alone the next time. Taking on all her own healing!
Thing is, its hard and exhausting coming up with this. I was a homeless teen... I'm not better of alone... I need someone to guide me through the chaos like I didnt get as a kid...
I've tried talking to a number of psycholgoists and they just seem terrified, "I cant comprehend how you even thought to do any of this and mash it together", "I feel very intimidated sitting opposite you and the amount you have read on these topics", "Its very pretty and professionally put together" (I made a presentation will all the concepts, the results and how each ASD behavior matched to a mistake I had made and the matching psych concept as I got sick of being told to reframe and that it is never the parents)
I get Therapist don't give advice, yet they have all the knowledge on the concepts at play. I wasted 5 years in therapy, in 4 months Ive achieved so much more with this type of approach (I use a similar 'practical' therapy on myself and no longer dissociated, using reflexes to bring me back out of the brain stem when I need to, attaching to myself and giving myself the attachment needs, delighting in myself that I am able to come up with this nonsense etc. and help my daughter how I have) If I had done this 2+ years ago after her separation trauma, her development would be a lot less impacted, there would be less to catch up. Hell there were signs from birth that she was probably in fight/flight. Her neruo pathways were still growing then and would have been less impacted.
Is there any kind of therapy where someone would work through these type of parental challenges and help me come up with actual practical solutions to try out like Ive been coming up with? This will be a long challenge healing us with new things that will come up.
If not are there any good books/material that I should read? These are some I have found great
submitted by bey0nd_repair to askatherapist [link] [comments]
My daughter is now 5 and has ASD level1. She was always sensitive from birth, she is a mirror of me with that HSP profile. She has a couple of very obvious pre-verbal/sensory PTSDs to me and a separation incident when she was 2. It presents as a fear of my voice if it isn't a happy/bright playful voice. I cant be sad, frustrated or directive with her without triggering her into a melt down/flight/fight response. The other presentation is really bad separation anxiety.
Therapy went wrong for me and I left abruptly which broke me.
I came up with an approach to help me get out of the nonstop flashbacks I was left stuck in. I was also extremely frustration at talking about all these challenges as it played out yet, nothing changed or helped and here I am, a kid broken by me being her Dad. All therapists I try to engage since just say reframe, you only need to get 33%, there is no such thing as disorganised in children, its never the parents, you're the most self critical person Ive met be kind to yourself etc...
Well what if it is the parent? When the unconscious has become conscious you either accept or change, I need to change not re-frame or accept as that further harms my daughter.
I ended up building my own modality and becoming my own psych, learning all the concepts and bastardizing them. I figured we have a disorganised attachment, heal that and most her challenges will pass but first I have to get her out of the trauma brain stem and that is why nothing has worked so far. We can't do it together as I'm a source of her fears, the family all on eggshells trying not to trigger each other from the stress of the environment.
Wim Hoff/Cold therapy and Stephen Porges/Safe and Sound protocol worked for that. She stopped grinding her teeth in her sleep, stopped ruminating and asking the same question 50 times when she was anxious. Clothes have stopped itching, her body sensation awareness improved, her attachment system opened up and made a few friends, held space and didnt freeze in the playground around other kids.
We did Aletha Solters attachment play concepts and I made a child version of Dan Browns 3 pillar approach, an explore plan of more group activities, OT and activities to improve her meta-congative awareness, and me using attachment concepts and play to be the perfect parent, mixing in concepts like love languages and other psych's work like Bruce Perry. What was amazing was my Daughter started to ask to play the exact games in Aletha's books for each challenge she faced and started mashing them together building more and more complex themes. Her separation anxiety is 90% gone, she walks into a new school without a care in the world on the 2nd day. She is just left with this fear of my voice and us rupturing. Her new teacher doesn't believe us when we told them she was ASD, there are only very subtle signs where she now needs to develop areas that she didn't get to and a higher than normal anxiety/inner critic.
For her fear of my voice Im using a concept from how to talk to kids books and DBT. We sat together and drawed out her morning routine then timed her on a good day and drew a clock next to each task with the number of minutes shaded e.g. 7-7:15 food, 7:15-7:20 clean teeth get dressed. I just silently point at the picture instead of instructing her to hurry up, avoiding me triggering a meltdown making her late for school. Agreed that if I have to tell her not to do something, I will pick her up and hold her as I do it so she knows I am not triggered.
She would hide pain if she suddenly hurt herself, I used introspective awareness concepts and DBT describe concept via drawing what happened when she hurt herself. She now cries but has to blame me first to feel safe. I'll take it, she is hurting inside because of me, I need to hold that anger from her, not reject it to protect myself make her feel safe letting it out again and again until she trusts me. I have to suck it up and deal with how that makes me feel and what ever trauma onion layer it triggers within me.
I sit on an exercise ball and bounce when watching over her play, if I zone out I almost fall off, I'm teaching her to swim so I have to watch over her non stop. She gets to look up and see me watching over and delighting instead of in my head, zoning out around her. We go to a trampoline park and jump and regulate together that way, just like a kid does.
For food sensitivities, I noticed she was in fight/flight, picking at it but looking at me in the corner of her eye. So I asked if she was scared I would be upset if she didn't eat it or was there something she was worried about. She said yes so I told her I will leave the room to make her feel safe. Mum then attuned to her fear made her feel safe, set the boundaries around cooking different food and the reasons then offered to either eat it herself or they could play like a baby and Mum will be a robot spoon feeding her (regression play) It worked, the next new meal my daughter paused started to look uncomfortable, turned to me and asked me if I would spoon feed her it, we laughed through the meal and she told me to pretend to throw it in her face if she is too slow. (I must of rushed her in the past! she is so empathic and sensitive she didnt want to upset me) now she just asked to be spoon fed by me if she is unsure and sometimes she might just leave it after a few tries but other times she enjoys it then will eat it alone the next time. Taking on all her own healing!
Thing is, its hard and exhausting coming up with this. I was a homeless teen... I'm not better of alone... I need someone to guide me through the chaos like I didnt get as a kid...
I've tried talking to a number of psycholgoists and they just seem terrified, "I cant comprehend how you even thought to do any of this and mash it together", "I feel very intimidated sitting opposite you and the amount you have read on these topics", "Its very pretty and professionally put together" (I made a presentation will all the concepts, the results and how each ASD behavior matched to a mistake I had made and the matching psych concept as I got sick of being told to reframe and that it is never the parents)
I get Therapist don't give advice, yet they have all the knowledge on the concepts at play. I wasted 5 years in therapy, in 4 months Ive achieved so much more with this type of approach (I use a similar 'practical' therapy on myself and no longer dissociated, using reflexes to bring me back out of the brain stem when I need to, attaching to myself and giving myself the attachment needs, delighting in myself that I am able to come up with this nonsense etc. and help my daughter how I have) If I had done this 2+ years ago after her separation trauma, her development would be a lot less impacted, there would be less to catch up. Hell there were signs from birth that she was probably in fight/flight. Her neruo pathways were still growing then and would have been less impacted.
Is there any kind of therapy where someone would work through these type of parental challenges and help me come up with actual practical solutions to try out like Ive been coming up with? This will be a long challenge healing us with new things that will come up.
If not are there any good books/material that I should read? These are some I have found great
- Dan Brown – Attachment Disturbances in Adults; Treatment for Comprehensive Repair
- Aletha Solter – Attachment play, Tear and Tantrums, How to Heal Your Traumatized Child
- Bruce Perry – Boy Raised as a Dog
- Gabor Mate - All of his books/movies
- Wim Hof
- Stephen Porges - Polyvagal Theory
- Elaine Aron – Highly Sensitive Child/Person
- MD Thomas Boyce Orchid and Dandelion theory
- Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish - How to talk to kids so they listen and listen so kids will talk
- Steve Biddulph - Raising Girls
- Gary Chapman Love Languages
- Justin L. Barrett - Born Believers: The Science of Children's Religious Belief
- Richard C. Schwartz’s Inner Family Systems and Jay Early’s Self therapy book.
- Mona Delahooke Brain-body Parenting
2023.03.23 21:02 whitejaguar [H] Steam gifts, collectors games and removed games [W] TF2 keys, Tether, Bulk offers
Have - Steam gifts (ROW, unrestricted, if you can't see the game in my inventory, it is still available, so add me for the trade)
Want:
Trade offer link: https://steamcommunity.com/tradeoffenew/?partner=99041861&token=oT95zjCo
Steam inventory: https://steamcommunity.com/id/routemasteinventory#753_1
Inventory listing by TradeStarter
submitted by whitejaguar to SteamGameSwap [link] [comments]
| Game name | Price | Notes | Stock | Game Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures | offers | Gift | ||
| A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Aerena - Clash of Champions | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Age of Empires Legacy Bundle | 25 keys | Gift | ||
| Agricultural Simulator 2011: Extended Edition | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| AirMech 2 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Amnesia Memories | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Arena Wars 2 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Awesomenauts Power Pack | 1 TOD Ticket | subID 36025 | Gift | |
| Back to the Future The Game | 25 keys | removed game | subID 6970 | Gift |
| Barbie Dreamhouse Party | 400 keys | removed game | Gift | |
| Battle Los Angeles | offers | removed game | subID 11488 | Gift |
| Borderless Gaming | 5 keys | Gift | ||
| Broken Age | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Call of Duty World at War | 25 keys | Gift | ||
| Castle of Illusion | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Circuits | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Cities XL 2012 | 15 keys | removed game | Gift | |
| Clive Barker's Jericho | 40 keys | removed game | subID 531 | Gift |
| Commandos Pack | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Crusader Kings II Collection | 5 keys | subID 26483 | Gift | |
| Deadpool + Merc with a Map Pack DLC | 500 keys | removed game | 28777 + 29453 | Gift |
| Deathgarden BLOODHARVEST | 4 keys | Gift | ||
| Defy Gravity Extended | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Demigod | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Deus Ex Game of the Year Edition | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| DiRT 2 | 50 keys | removed game | subID 14293 | Gift |
| Dirt 2 | 50 keys | removed game | subID 2493 | Gift |
| Don't Starve Soundtrack | 5 keys | Gift | ||
| Droplitz (Holiday Sale 2011 Gift) | offers | removed game | subID 12638 | Gift |
| Ducati World Championship | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Dungeon Defenders | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Euro Truck Simulator 2 | 4 keys | Gift | ||
| F1 2011 | offers | removed game | subID 11620 | Gift |
| F1 2011 | offers | removed game | subID 12677 | Gift |
| F1 2012 | offers | removed game | Gift | |
| Faerie Solitaire | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Farming Simulator 2013 Titanium Edition | 9 keys | Gift | ||
| Fast and Furious Showdown | 30 keys | removed game | subID 27803 | Gift |
| Football Manager 2014 | 20 keys | removed game | subID 30274 | Giftable copy/add me |
| Fortified | 1 TOD Ticket | Steam key/add me | ||
| FUEL | offers | removed game | subID 1878 | Gift |
| Ghostbusters The Videogame | offers | removed game | subID 1693 | Gift |
| Grid | offers | removed game | Gift | |
| Grim Fandango Remastered | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Hero Academy - Tribe Pack - Hatless Gift | 4 keys | Gift | ||
| Hitman Collection (ROW) | 23 keys | subID 49903 | Gift | |
| Hospital Tycoon | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Ice Age 4 | 30 keys | removed game | subID 19227 | Gift |
| Infestation Survivor Stories Classic | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Insecticide Part 1 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Iron Storm | 6 keys | Gift | ||
| Iron Warriors T - 72 Tank Command | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Jurassic Park The Game | offers | removed game | subID 7705 | Gift |
| Kane & Lynch 2 DLC Alliance Weapon Pack | offers | Gift | ||
| Kane & Lynch 2 DLC Multiplayer Masks Pack | offers | Gift | ||
| Kane & Lynch 2 DLC The Doggie Bag | offers | Gift | ||
| Kerbal Space Program | 10 keys | Gift | ||
| Kingdoms Rise | offers | removed game | Gift | |
| Left 4 Dead | 4 keys | Gift | ||
| Legendary | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Lord of the Rings War in the North | 50 keys | removed game | subID 12158 | Gift |
| Lucius | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Lunar Flight | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Maelstrom The Battle for Earth Begins | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Max Payne 2 The Fall of Max Payne | 12 keys | Gift | ||
| Medieval Engineers | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Metro Last Light Complete | offers | removed game | subID 39286 | Gift |
| Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor Season Pass | 4 keys | removed game | subID 51210 | Gift |
| Mount & Blade Complete | 6 keys | subID 38003 | Gift | |
| Move or Die | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| NASCAR The Game 2013 | 45 keys | removed game | subID 28448 | Gift |
| Natural Selection 2 | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| NBA 2K16 Michael Jordan Edition | offers | removed game | subID 73028 | Gift |
| Nexuiz | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Painkiller Hell & Damnation | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Paradox Grand Strategy Collection | 6 keys | Gift | ||
| PAYDAY 2 Gage Weapon Pack 02 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| PAYDAY 2 The Goat Simulator Heist | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Pinball FX3 - Star Wars Pinball | 5 keys | Gift | ||
| PlayWay's Sim Bundle | 5 keys | subID 51669 | Gift | |
| Please Hold | 50 keys | subID 92974 | Gift | |
| Post Apocalyptic Mayhem | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Pro Cycling Manager 2012 | offers | removed game | subID 15175 | Gift |
| Pro Cycling Manager 2013 | offers | removed game | subID 28407 | Gift |
| Pro Cycling Manager 2014 | 6 keys | Gift | ||
| Punch Club | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Puzzle Dimension | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Ratz Instagib | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Razor2 Hidden Skies | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Resilience Wave Survival | 4 keys | Gift | ||
| Retro City Rampage DX | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| RIFT | offers | Gift | ||
| Roogoo | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Rush Bros | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bundle | 10 keys | Gift | ||
| Saints Row IV - Child's Play Pack | 1 TOD Ticket | removed game | subID 35488 | Gift |
| Section 8 Prejudice | offers | removed game | subID 11106 | Gift |
| Shannon Tweed's Attack Of The Groupies | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai Collection | 10 keys | subID 17095 | Gift | |
| Sins of a Dark Age Early Access Gift | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| STAR WARS Empire at War Gold Pack | 7 keys | Gift | ||
| SteamWorld Dig | 1 TOD Ticket | Steam key/add me | ||
| Sugar Cube Bittersweet Factory | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Super Meat Boy | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Super Meat Boy Soundtrack | offers | removed game | subID 12323 | Gift |
| Super Monday Night Combat | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Team Fortress 2 | 15 keys | Gift | ||
| Test Drive Unlimited 2 | offers | removed game | subID 12636 | Gift |
| The Amazing Spider-Man + DLC Bundle | 400 keys | removed game | Gift | |
| The Amazing Spider-Man - All DLC Bundle | 40 keys | removed game | Gift | |
| The Bureau XCOM Declassified | 5 keys | Gift | ||
| The Desolate Hope | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| The Holiday Express | 4 keys | subID 35154 | Gift | |
| Incredible Adventures Van Helsing | 4 keys | Gift | ||
| Incredible Adventures Van Helsing Arcane | 1 key | Gift | ||
| Incredible Adventures Van Helsing Blue Blood | 1 key | Gift | ||
| Incredible Adventures Van Helsing Thaumaturge | 1 key | Gift | ||
| The Bureau: XCOM Declassified | 6 keys | Gift | ||
| The Lord of the Rings Online Helm’s Deep Base | offers | removed game | subID 32781 | Gift |
| The Lord of the Rings Online Quad Pack | offers | removed game | subID 32775 | Gift |
| The Lord of the Rings Online Steely Dawn Pack | offers | removed game | subID 18483 | Gift |
| The Political Machine (2012) | offers | removed game | Gift | |
| The Ship | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| The Sims 3 Diesel Stuff | 10 keys | Gift | ||
| The Sims 3 Generations | 10 keys | Gift | ||
| The Sims 3 Pets | 10 keys | Gift | ||
| The Sims 3 Seasons | 10 keys | Gift | ||
| The Walking Dead Survival Instinct + Herd DLC | 40 keys | removed game | 26399 + 27013 | Gift |
| The Wolf Among Us | 7 keys | Gift | ||
| theHunter Primal | offers | removed game | Gift | |
| Total War Master Collection Sept 2014 | 15 keys | subID 51362 | Gift | |
| Train Simulator 2013 - Trains vs Zombies 2 | 10 keys | Gift | ||
| Trine Collection | 4 keys | subID 28358 | Gift | |
| Tropico 4 Collector's Bundle | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Uncrowded | offers | removed game | subID 67613 | Gift |
| Unreal Tournament 2004 Editor's Choice Edition | offers | removed game | Gift | |
| Velvet Assassin | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Watch_Dogs Complete | 20 keys | Gift | ||
| What's under your blanket !? | offers | removed game | subID 89803 | Gift |
| Who Wants to be a Junior Millionaire | offers | removed game | subID 26732 | Gift |
| Who Wants to Be a Millionaire | offers | removed game | Gift | |
| Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Football | offers | removed game | subID 14925 | Gift |
| Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Movies | offers | removed game | subID 14928 | Gift |
| Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Music | offers | removed game | subID 14923 | Gift |
| Who Wants to be a Millionaire SciFi Pack | offers | removed game | subID 17122 | Gift |
| Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Sports | offers | removed game | subID 14926 | Gift |
| Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Star Trek | offers | removed game | subID 14927 | Gift |
| Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Trivia Booster | offers | removed game | subID 14924 | Gift |
| Who Wants to be a Millionaire Video Games | offers | removed game | subID 15611 | Gift |
| Winter Voices Episode 1 Those who have no name | 2 keys | subID 6648 | Gift | |
| World Basketball Manager 2010 | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Xcinerator | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Your Doodles Are Bugged! | offers | removed game | subID 8256 | Gift |
| Z1 Battle Royale | 3 keys | subID 90424 | Gift | |
| Zombie Driver HD | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Zombie Driver HD Apocalypse Pack | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Zombie Driver HD Brutal Car Skins | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Zombie Driver HD Burning Garden of Slaughter | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Zombie Driver HD Tropical Race Rage | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift |
- Offers with TF2 keys are preferred
- CSGO skins
- Regarding Tether offers, buyer goes first and covers the transaction fees
- Please DO NOT offer game codes, Humble links, Origin, Uplay codes and 3rd party accounts.
Trade offer link: https://steamcommunity.com/tradeoffenew/?partner=99041861&token=oT95zjCo
Steam inventory: https://steamcommunity.com/id/routemasteinventory#753_1
Inventory listing by TradeStarter
2023.03.23 20:20 Addydaddyz Dying light 2 is a trampoline park
submitted by Addydaddyz to dyinglight2 [link] [comments]
2023.03.23 18:03 meeplewirp I’m sorry but there are some areas in which riding a bicycle is just idiotic and I don’t know why they’re allowed on the road or on the sidewalk
If you don’t like it then campaign for bike lanes. I can understand sharing the road in parts of NYC and Chicago but not a place that is very car centric where left turns mean crossing 4 lanes of oncoming traffic like Los Angeles. I’m sorry but without bike lanes it’s just setting yourself up. To be clear people who hit people with their car are still at fault. But from the perspective of someone who cares about the cyclist I’m sorry you don’t live in the right spot and it’s just dumb. Go to the park. Unless part of what you like about riding a bicycle is it being a death defying experience?
submitted by meeplewirp to unpopularopinion [link] [comments]
2023.03.23 16:35 moutain_squirrel_68 Anyone else have issues with the stability control on the camera?
Took the kids to the trampoline park and had them hold the selfie stick and jump around hoping to get cool shots. Got home to check the footage only to be disappointed! Every time the kids landed the camera would vibrate and distort everything the video was horrible. Is this normal?
submitted by moutain_squirrel_68 to Insta360 [link] [comments]
2023.03.23 14:50 Western_perception1 Visiting for spring break March 30-April 2
My 10 year old son and I are planning a trip down to Sac for his spring break. Is everything okay down there weather wise and any events going on? We were thinking of at least doing the trampoline parks and arcades. Any other ideas? Thank you!
submitted by Western_perception1 to Sacramento [link] [comments]
2023.03.22 21:02 whitejaguar [H] Steam gifts, collectors games and removed games [W] TF2 keys, Tether, Bulk offers
Have - Steam gifts (ROW, unrestricted, if you can't see the game in my inventory, it is still available, so add me for the trade)
Want:
Trade offer link: https://steamcommunity.com/tradeoffenew/?partner=99041861&token=oT95zjCo
Steam inventory: https://steamcommunity.com/id/routemasteinventory#753_1
Inventory listing by TradeStarter
submitted by whitejaguar to SteamGameSwap [link] [comments]
| Game name | Price | Notes | Stock | Game Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures | offers | Gift | ||
| A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Aerena - Clash of Champions | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Age of Empires Legacy Bundle | 25 keys | Gift | ||
| Agricultural Simulator 2011: Extended Edition | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| AirMech 2 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Amnesia Memories | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Arena Wars 2 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Awesomenauts Power Pack | 1 TOD Ticket | subID 36025 | Gift | |
| Back to the Future The Game | 25 keys | removed game | subID 6970 | Gift |
| Barbie Dreamhouse Party | 400 keys | removed game | Gift | |
| Battle Los Angeles | offers | removed game | subID 11488 | Gift |
| Borderless Gaming | 5 keys | Gift | ||
| Broken Age | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Call of Duty World at War | 25 keys | Gift | ||
| Castle of Illusion | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Circuits | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Cities XL 2012 | 15 keys | removed game | Gift | |
| Clive Barker's Jericho | 40 keys | removed game | subID 531 | Gift |
| Commandos Pack | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Crusader Kings II Collection | 5 keys | subID 26483 | Gift | |
| Deadpool + Merc with a Map Pack DLC | 500 keys | removed game | 28777 + 29453 | Gift |
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| E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy | 2 keys | Gift | ||
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| FUEL | offers | removed game | subID 1878 | Gift |
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| Hero Academy - Tribe Pack - Hatless Gift | 4 keys | Gift | ||
| Hitman Collection (ROW) | 23 keys | subID 49903 | Gift | |
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| Insecticide Part 1 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Iron Storm | 6 keys | Gift | ||
| Iron Warriors T - 72 Tank Command | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Jurassic Park The Game | offers | removed game | subID 7705 | Gift |
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| Kerbal Space Program | 10 keys | Gift | ||
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| Max Payne 2 The Fall of Max Payne | 12 keys | Gift | ||
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| Metro Last Light Complete | offers | removed game | subID 39286 | Gift |
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| Move or Die | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| NASCAR The Game 2013 | 45 keys | removed game | subID 28448 | Gift |
| Natural Selection 2 | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| NBA 2K16 Michael Jordan Edition | offers | removed game | subID 73028 | Gift |
| Nexuiz | 2 keys | Gift | ||
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| Paradox Grand Strategy Collection | 6 keys | Gift | ||
| PAYDAY 2 Gage Weapon Pack 02 | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
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| Please Hold | 50 keys | subID 92974 | Gift | |
| Post Apocalyptic Mayhem | 1 TOD Ticket | Gift | ||
| Pro Cycling Manager 2012 | offers | removed game | subID 15175 | Gift |
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| Pro Cycling Manager 2014 | 6 keys | Gift | ||
| Punch Club | 3 keys | Gift | ||
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| RIFT | offers | Gift | ||
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| S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bundle | 10 keys | Gift | ||
| Saints Row IV - Child's Play Pack | 1 TOD Ticket | removed game | subID 35488 | Gift |
| Section 8 Prejudice | offers | removed game | subID 11106 | Gift |
| Shannon Tweed's Attack Of The Groupies | 2 keys | Gift | ||
| Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai Collection | 10 keys | subID 17095 | Gift | |
| Sins of a Dark Age Early Access Gift | 2 keys | Gift | ||
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| SteamWorld Dig | 1 TOD Ticket | Steam key/add me | ||
| Sugar Cube Bittersweet Factory | 3 keys | Gift | ||
| Super Meat Boy | 3 keys | Gift | ||
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| Team Fortress 2 | 15 keys | Gift | ||
| Test Drive Unlimited 2 | offers | removed game | subID 12636 | Gift |
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- Offers with TF2 keys are preferred
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Trade offer link: https://steamcommunity.com/tradeoffenew/?partner=99041861&token=oT95zjCo
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Inventory listing by TradeStarter
2023.03.22 07:14 glossyplane245 I told one of my friends about something that’s been happening recently and he told me I was being crazy and I need someone else to confirm if it’s real or not
So I started suffering from hallucinations recently. I can’t always tell what’s a hallucination and what’s not but I’ve been able to tell enough times that I can piece together something isn’t right, hence why I’m asking this here. I feel like I have nowhere else to turn to and the only person I’ve told anything to doesn’t believe me. I need confirmation of some kind from anyone.
a few weeks after that a red jeep started following me everywhere. I see it multiple times a day, every time j leave the house I see it at least once. I don’t trust it, I’ve started leaving the house less and less because I don’t want to run into it. The only reason I leave at all is because it hasn’t tried anything yet. I feel like it parks nearby my house to watch it during the night. Id confirm but I don’t want to leave during the dark and actually find them and never be found again.
I keep having visions of a key. I don’t know why. I feel like if I find that key I’ll find a way to make the jeep stop. And that they don’t want that, that’s why they’re around me. I’ve started checking spots in the woods, old ruins and the like, hoping to find it. I don’t know what It goes to but I don’t know what else to do.
I vented to one of my friends the other day about all of that and he told me “sorry but that sounds crazy, pls go get therapy or something that’s not normal thinking.”
The thing is I don’t know if I can trust him fully. I only know him online. I also don’t trust therapists at all. They’re fucking dirty snakes preying on the mentally ill for money, drugging them up with god knows what to keep them coming back for more, telling them that it’ll help them and it’s for their own good, they disgust me. I don’t like the fact he recommended me to them.
Hence why I’m posting here. I haven’t been able to sleep almost at all for god knows how long and I feel like if anywhere can help me it’s here, I’ve known about this sub for a while so I trust it to a degree. I don’t know if I can fully trust it but it might help soothe my head a bit.
I feel stupid posting this but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t want to tell any of my in person friends or family members and im too afraid of law enforcement to call them. They could be with the jeep, I have no reason to believe they’re not. I’m doubting myself and my own thoughts. I already have to doubt my eyes and ears. I keep responding to things that aren’t there. The only way I can tell anything is fake is because it usually defies reality that’s already been established. Like I know my dog can’t go through walls, so if I see her in a room and then she’s not there anymore I know that’s fake. I try to keep a journal of the ones I know are fake but I can’t remember to write it in most of the time.
Im just desperate for anything. Any info that will at least point me in the right direction of what’s happening. I haven’t found a key of any kind any where I’ve checked. I feel like I’m running out of time. It’s been weeks, surely something has to happen soon, even if I have no proof it will its just sense.
I hope this made sense. I feel like when I say anything it goes through a scramble machine first. Proofreading only helps so much.
submitted by glossyplane245 to schizophrenia [link] [comments]
a few weeks after that a red jeep started following me everywhere. I see it multiple times a day, every time j leave the house I see it at least once. I don’t trust it, I’ve started leaving the house less and less because I don’t want to run into it. The only reason I leave at all is because it hasn’t tried anything yet. I feel like it parks nearby my house to watch it during the night. Id confirm but I don’t want to leave during the dark and actually find them and never be found again.
I keep having visions of a key. I don’t know why. I feel like if I find that key I’ll find a way to make the jeep stop. And that they don’t want that, that’s why they’re around me. I’ve started checking spots in the woods, old ruins and the like, hoping to find it. I don’t know what It goes to but I don’t know what else to do.
I vented to one of my friends the other day about all of that and he told me “sorry but that sounds crazy, pls go get therapy or something that’s not normal thinking.”
The thing is I don’t know if I can trust him fully. I only know him online. I also don’t trust therapists at all. They’re fucking dirty snakes preying on the mentally ill for money, drugging them up with god knows what to keep them coming back for more, telling them that it’ll help them and it’s for their own good, they disgust me. I don’t like the fact he recommended me to them.
Hence why I’m posting here. I haven’t been able to sleep almost at all for god knows how long and I feel like if anywhere can help me it’s here, I’ve known about this sub for a while so I trust it to a degree. I don’t know if I can fully trust it but it might help soothe my head a bit.
I feel stupid posting this but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t want to tell any of my in person friends or family members and im too afraid of law enforcement to call them. They could be with the jeep, I have no reason to believe they’re not. I’m doubting myself and my own thoughts. I already have to doubt my eyes and ears. I keep responding to things that aren’t there. The only way I can tell anything is fake is because it usually defies reality that’s already been established. Like I know my dog can’t go through walls, so if I see her in a room and then she’s not there anymore I know that’s fake. I try to keep a journal of the ones I know are fake but I can’t remember to write it in most of the time.
Im just desperate for anything. Any info that will at least point me in the right direction of what’s happening. I haven’t found a key of any kind any where I’ve checked. I feel like I’m running out of time. It’s been weeks, surely something has to happen soon, even if I have no proof it will its just sense.
I hope this made sense. I feel like when I say anything it goes through a scramble machine first. Proofreading only helps so much.
2023.03.22 04:28 UltramicroscopicSaw Police Blotter Reports on Altitude Trampoline Park
I was there about a year ago with my 3 year old and see a fight break out right next to us on the trampolines. I was concerned but assumed it was a very rare occurrence. Has anyone else seen fights break out in or outside Altitude?
From police blotter
A teenage girl’s mom reported Monday that some kids assaulted her daughter, causing a concussion, and stole her jewelry while she was at a trampoline park, according to a police report.
At about 7:54 p.m., a woman entered the Police Department lobby to speak with an officer. She said her daughter was jumped in the 2400 block of South Interstate 35E on Saturday.
The woman told police that her 15-year-old daughter was at a trampoline park when she texted that there was a fight. She picked her daughter up and learned she had been jumped, and the girl had injuries like bruises and scrapes. She drove her daughter to the hospital, where she learned her daughter had a concussion.
A woman reported Monday that her son was jumped by a group of boys outside a trampoline park over the weekend, according to a police report.
Other report
At about 2:04 p.m., police took a report over the phone from a woman who said her son was assaulted near the same trampoline park on Saturday.
The mother said her two sons were being verbally harassed by a group of boys. They allegedly waited for her sons to exit a business and then jumped one of them. She showed police a video of a large group of boys in a fight.
During the fight, she alleged, one of her sons was pushed to the ground and sustained bruises and abrasions.
Police are still investigating the incident. They are still working to confirm the identities of everyone involved in both this assault and the aforementioned robbery.
submitted by UltramicroscopicSaw to Denton [link] [comments]
From police blotter
A teenage girl’s mom reported Monday that some kids assaulted her daughter, causing a concussion, and stole her jewelry while she was at a trampoline park, according to a police report.
At about 7:54 p.m., a woman entered the Police Department lobby to speak with an officer. She said her daughter was jumped in the 2400 block of South Interstate 35E on Saturday.
The woman told police that her 15-year-old daughter was at a trampoline park when she texted that there was a fight. She picked her daughter up and learned she had been jumped, and the girl had injuries like bruises and scrapes. She drove her daughter to the hospital, where she learned her daughter had a concussion.
A woman reported Monday that her son was jumped by a group of boys outside a trampoline park over the weekend, according to a police report.
Other report
At about 2:04 p.m., police took a report over the phone from a woman who said her son was assaulted near the same trampoline park on Saturday.
The mother said her two sons were being verbally harassed by a group of boys. They allegedly waited for her sons to exit a business and then jumped one of them. She showed police a video of a large group of boys in a fight.
During the fight, she alleged, one of her sons was pushed to the ground and sustained bruises and abrasions.
Police are still investigating the incident. They are still working to confirm the identities of everyone involved in both this assault and the aforementioned robbery.
2023.03.22 01:55 Kyraryc RT Tests
Doctor Fate
The Babylonians had believed Nabu to be a god of wisdom. He was already, in his own way, a champion of Order, willing to defy his father Marduk, Chaos' immortal mortal ally upon the Earth. What better candidate for Order's purpose? So the Lords of Order recruited Nabu's soul, now free of the limitations of his fragile, mortal form. Elevating it to a higher calling, they gave purpose to his once pointless death and revealed the dangers resulting from the chaos of the Klarion-Marduk alliance. Gaining an oath of Nabu's fealty to Order, the Lords forged something new: not simply an agent of Order on Earth, but a Lord of Order.Long ago, Nabu was a prince of Babylon and the son of the demigod Marduk, also known as Vandal Savage. One day, Klarion arrived without warning and offered Marduk a way to deal with his general's independence. Over Nabu's objections, Marduk took Klarion up on his offer and summoned a mind-controlling alien starfish named Starro. Instead of helping Marduk, Starro launched an invasion. Nabu fought valiantly with his father but was slain.
Intrigued by Nabu's death under these circumstances, the Lords of Order raised Nabu's soul and transformed him into a Lord of Order. They are powerful magical beings responsible for restoring balance and order to the universe. It is difficult for them to maintain a presence in the physical world, so Nabu bound his presence into his helmet.
Nabu eventually found a host with Kent Nelson, even joining the Justice Society of America. Kent later hung up the helmet, and Nabu went without a host for 65 years.
The helmet fell into the hands of the Team, and was used to help with their most dire battles. Nabu released the hosts until Zatanna donned it. He initially refused to release her but yielded when Zatara traded himself for her.
After ten years, Zatanna convinced Nabu to alternate hosts between Zatara, Zatanna, Traci Thurston, and Khalid Nassour.
Whoever dons it is turned into Dr. Fate. Nabu takes control of their body and transports their soul into the helmet. The host feels any damage that happens to their body, but is unable to remove the helmet unless Nabu wills it. It takes a toll on the wearer, after only 8 years of wearing the helmet, Zatara, a 47-year-old man, has had his hair go completely white and is full of wrinkles.
He is currently a member of the Justice League.
- Some of the sources are from the S8 Gargoyles Ask Greg page. The creator Greg Weisman answers fan questions on this page, though by his own word, the responses should be considered "canon-in-training." These sources will be marked with an AG.
- Fate's strength varies based on who is wearing the helmet. A host with low stamina or with no affinity for magic severely limits Doctor Fate's abilitiesAG. Currently, Fate alternates hosts weekly between Zatara, Zatanna, Thirteen, and Khalid Nassour. The host for each feat will be marked.
- The first time Zatanna wore it, the world (including the Helmet) was split in half. Those feats will be marked with a Zatanna/2.
Energy Projection
- Knocks Teekl awayKid Flash.
- Blasts KlarionKid Flash.
- Matches KlarionZatanna/2.
- Blasts apart a couple rock pillarsKid Flash.
- With Miss Martian and Aqualad, brings down Klarion's shieldZatanna/2.
- Temporarily restrains KlarionZatanna/2.
- Breaks out of a giant ice fistZatara.
- With Klarion, blocks a fireball from ChildZatara.
- Fires blasts at ChildZatara.
- Blasts Child's barrierZatara.
- While empowered by the Sentinals, hits Child with an energy blast that causes an enormous explosionZatara.
- Battles a tentacle monsterThirteen.
Shield Magic
- Blocks Wotan redirecting his own chainsAqualad.
- Blocks a bunch of rapid fire shots from KlarionKid Flash.
- Blocks a bunch of fireballs from KlarionKid Flash.
- Blocks a large fire dragon from KlarionKid Flash.
- Blocks lightning from KlarionKid Flash.
- Protects against a tentacle monsterThirteen.
- Protects the Earth from the WarworldZatara. The Warworld's missiles are powerful enough to blow up large chunks of alien warships and blow up Reach warships, which are tough enough to no sell US Airforce missiles.
- With a couple other Leaguers, neutralizes 64% of the Warworld's saturation attack. 23% was sufficient to decimate a hemisphere.Zatara.
- Reflects a massive laserZatara that Mongul said "would have ended the world in a matter of minutes. The same laser also blew up every alien warship in its path.
- His shield was broken by ChildZatara.
Teleportation Magic
- Strips everything off of Abra KadabraKid Flash.
- Sucks away a ton of Joker Venom gasAqualad.
- Teleports himself to a parkZatara
- Teleports Nightwing from the Watchtower to the WarworldZatara.
- Teleports Green Beetle and Blue Beetle from the Warworld to El Paso, TexasZatara.
- Teleports himself and 4 other wizardsZatara.
- Tracks Child's rampage across the EarthZatara.
- To Sydney, where she created an active volcanoZatara.
- To Manhattan, where her pillar reversed gravityZatara.
- To Poseidonis, where her pillar created waters that killed anything it touchedZatara.
- To Taipei, where demons were crawling out of her pillarZatara.
- To Agra, where her fire pillar created a blizzard that froze everyone nearbyZatara.
- To the Fortress of Solitude, where she was planning on melting the polar ice capZatara.
- Creates a magic circle that Klarion and Teekl use to summon ChildZatara.
- Teleports to Vandal Savage aboard the Warworld to gloatThirteen.
- Returns the magic school bus back to its proper time and place, ten years agoKhalid.
Transformation Magic
- Blasts through Wotan's attack and binds him in chainsAqualad.
- Undoes the spell that split the world in halfZatanna/2.
- Cleans himself upZatara.
- Absorbs residual fireZatara.
Miscellaneous Magic
- Prevents Zatanna's spell from removing the helmetZatara.
- Creates mystic trials for Khalid, Mary, and ThirteenZatara. The trials were a manifestation of their minds, but in the Tower of Fate, those manifestations were real - and really dangerousAG.
- Khalid's trial focused on the contradictions between his faith, heritage, and profession. He overcame it by embracing magic as a gift from God and vowing to keep the balance within himself.
- Mary's trial focused on her taking half-measures by refusing to become Sergeant Shazam again. She overcame it by remembering why she had to give it up and vowing not herself become consumed again.
- Thirteen's trial focused on her doubts and insecurities. She overcame it by accepting them without letting them control her.
- Creates a security camera by his doorZatara.
- Attends Wally West's funeral as an astral projectionZatara.
- Created a spacetime GPS to guide Klarion, who previously spent hours bouncing around time and space trying to find his wayZatara.
- Yam eht owt emoceb eno ecno erom! (May the two become one once more!)Zatanna/2 - With Zatara in the adult dimension, breaks Klarion's spell that split the world into two dimensions.
Durability
- Shocked when Wotan broke through his shieldAqualad.
- Hit by Wotan redirecting his own attackAqualad.
- Hit by a fireball from KlarionKid Flash.
- Hit by a column of fire from KlarionKid Flash.
- Shocked by KlarionKid Flash.
- No sells a stream of fire from Klarion while transformingKid Flash.
- Unharmed from being slammed between a couple rock pillarsKid Flash.
- With the help of a spell from Zatanna rendering him intangible, he withstands Child destroying the Tower of Fate and immediately recoversZatara.
- Punched through a wall by FlawZatara. He recovered shortly afterZatara, though his Helmet was permanently crackedZatara.
- Frozen in a giant ice hand by ChildZatara. He breaks out shortly afterwardsZatara.
- Unharmed in a rain of fireZatara.
- Fights through Child's Salem pillar which was disrupting his connection to the mortal planeZatara.
- A Lord of Order is a being of pure magic. Nabu anchors himself to the mortal plane with his helmet. If it is destroyed, he would return to his true form and be banishedZatara.
Speed
- Dodges attacks from WotanAqualad.
- Dodges explosive balls from KlarionZatanna/2
- Dodges fireballs from KlarionKid Flash.
- Dodges a fire dragon from KlarionKid Flash.
- Dodges firebreath and fire columns from KlarionKid Flash.
- Throws up a shield before lightning cast by Klarion can strike himKid Flash.
- Dodges a log thrown by ChildZatara
- Dodges and blocks shots from ChildZatara.
- Puts up a shield in time to block Child's attackZatara.
Miscellaneous
- Defeated KlarionKid Flash.
- Battles and defeats Child withZatara the help of Klarion, ZatannaZatara, Thirteen, Khalid Nassour, and Mary BromfieldZatara.
- Translated an ancient spellZatara that allowed Zatanna to cleanse Blue Beetle's Scarab.
- Senses the Motherbox soul in HaloZatara.
- Senses Child's descent upon the EarthZatara.
- Immediately senses Zatanna's intrusion into his TowerZatara.
- Should the Helmet be destroyed, he'd return to his true form as a Lord of Order and be unable to maintain it on the Earthly planeZatara.
- He can sense magic and mystic forces nearbyAG.
- Nabu could possess someone without their consent, but would choose not toAG.
- He has any powers and abilities that the host body possessesAG.
- He has some magical resources for dealing with what he would perceive as the unpleasantness of the human conditionAG.
- Doctor Fate could probably accomplish by his own means most everything Zatanna could do, but he would go about it differentlyAG.
Scaling Threads
2023.03.21 21:22 Adomanzius We encountered something in the ocean that defies explanation.
We had been checking weather reports tirelessly for two weeks, until we finally found our spot. The following week should be nothing but sun and smooth winds, so we tentatively decided that to be our slot. Our small crew consisted of me and my friends Josie and Frank. Josie’s dad owned the boat (and he still needed to sign off on our plan), so we had to reserve it ahead of time, and make sure that we got it back in pristine condition, on the dot, and preferably with a nice coating of wax or whatever they use to make boats shine like candied apples.
Monday arrived and the weather was still solid, and Josie’s dad had reluctantly signed off on our plan, so we decided not to wait any longer and take it out the next day. The idea was to have a two day mini-cruise; just us hanging out on the boat and maybe docking it for the night at a nearby town. Although Josie’s dad was a hardass, he had taught her how to drive and maintain the boat since she was a kid, so really, the worst thing that could happen is that we wouldn’t have enough snacks.
Me and Frank met at the parking lot, and saw Josie standing on the boat at the end of the dock. Her dad was with her, lecturing her about some winch or other, Josie rolling her eyes next to him, barely maintaining her attention.
“He really can’t leave her alone even for a couple days, can he?” Frank asked, keeping his voice low as we stepped on the long dock.
“Josie or the boat?”
Frank chuckled, then quickly returned his resting poker face as we reached the boat, Josie’s dad turning around as he heard the planks creaking under our feet.
Before he could say anything, Josie ran up from behind him and said “Hi boys! You brought the food and snacks and the five gallons of vodka, I assume?”
“Aye aye, Captain!” we replied in unison. It was Josie’s dad’s turn to roll his eyes.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” he said to Josie, starting to walk down the small ramp down to the dock. “And remember, two days, no more. I expect you to bring her back in one piece.”
“Sure thing, dad!” That was Josie’s way of saying yes, yes, yes, I get it already.
Josie’s dad gave us a stern look followed by a slight nod as he walked past us. He never really liked me or Franki, a bunch of hooligans, as he’d once called us when we were kids. For the record, me and Franki didn’t like the guy either, so at least the feeling was mutual.
After her dad was out of earshot, Josie yelled “Are you ready kids?!” putting on her damndest pirate voice.
“Aye Aye Cap-TAIN!” we screamed and sprinted up the ramp and into the boat.
After an exchange of hugs we unloaded our groceries into the mini-fridge below deck, then met up with Josie, who was already sitting inside the helm. “Ready to leave, crew?” she asked. “Let’s rock this boat,” Frank replied. The amount of bad jokes this early in the morning was surely a great indication for what the rest of the day held.
It wasn’t long until the shore behind us was gone, the tranquil open sea spreading out in all directions. Josie seemed to know where we were going, but at that point I could no longer discern what direction we had even come from.
Me and Frank sunbathed and joked around on the deck until Josie emerged from her cocoon-like cockpit. “Sorry to interrupt your hi-LARIOUS hijinks, but I’d propose we have some lunch soon.”
Like destiny, the word lunch produced a unified grumble from both me and Frank’s stomachs - the universal horn of yes please, food please, now please.
“We can stay here for a while, then we could start heading towards the town,” Josie said.
Feeling bad that she was doing all the heavy lifting, I asked her “You need any help? It’s your boat, and us your honored guests, so don’t be afraid to command us, cap’n!”
“Please,” Josie replied, “when I get a chance to drive this boat, I take it. Dad’s been hogging it like crazy all summer. Besides, it’s not like you guys even know what half of the things on this boat are called, let alone what they’re used for.”
“Well, that’s the driver’s seat,” Frank said, pointing at the helm.
“That’s called a helm, my dear. Frank - you just earned yourself the honorary job of heating up our lunch.”
“This ain’t no Ford Prius, I see,” he replied as he got up and started to take lazy strides towards below deck.
“Toyota,” I said.
“What?”
“Prius is Toyota. Not Ford. Come one, let’s go make lunch for the captain.” I got up to follow Frank, nodding approvingly to Josie.
We had cheap microwave meals for lunch, seeing as the boat didn’t have a stovetop or an oven. For some reason - maybe it was the soothing sounds of the ocean lazily slapping the boat, or the warm afternoon sun - the food defied its low expectations and tasted great.
Afterwards we had a little siesta where I almost fell asleep until Josie said “Shall I take course towards the town, then?”
Through a straw hat laid across his face, Frank mumbled “Aye aye.”
“You sure you don’t need any help?” I asked Josie once again, but she was already jumping into the helm, excited to get back at it. “You guys just take a chill, I’ll get us where we need to.”
As the motor’s soothing hum returned, I got myself a bag of chips and sat on the deck, watching the horizon. Frank still had the hat on his face, which either meant that he didn’t want to be bothered, or that he’d fallen asleep. Either way, I was happy to just sit under the sun as the boat slowly rolled towards our destination, cutting a line into the flaccid water behind us.
“Shit, Shit SHIT!” Josie screamed. I must’ve fallen asleep, and as I got up the half eaten bag of chips crushed under my foot.
“What, Josie? What’s wrong?”
“What’s going on?” Frank parroted as he stood up, the hat falling beside him.
“There’s a fucking storm coming,” Josie said as she frantically pressed buttons, her eyes darting across the dashboard of the helm.
I turned around and looked at the horizon. Dread filled me as I saw an infinitely wide wall of dark clouds spread across the sky, making contact with the water in a misty gray curtain. I noticed that the ocean was no longer level, for it was rippled with small waves that thumped the sides of the boat in eager anticipation.
“I thought it was supposed to be nothing but clear skies,” Frank said. He’d walked beside me, taking in the horror beyond the horizon.
“Ex-fucking-actly, Sherlock. It came out of fucking nowhere,” Josie snapped, holding the wheel tightly in her right hand as she fiddled something with her left.
“Okay, Josie, I know this might sound stupid, but bear with. Why are we going towards the storm?” I asked, trying to not seem disingenuous as I turned around to face her.
She gave a sigh, stopping what she was doing and looked me in the eyes. “That’s where the town is. It’s the closest place to dock right now, and the storm’s moving faster than any I’ve ever seen. If we go back it’ll catch up to us and we’re fucked. If we go through it, we’ll spend the least amount of time inside it, giving us at least a chance.”
“A chance at what?” Frankie asked.
“A chance at getting out of here.”
“Any port in a storm, I guess,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, to which Frank gave me a concerned look.
The air had turned cool, so I went and changed to warmer clothing, Frank doing the same. Coming back up to the deck, I saw that the storm had moved closer. A lot closer. Josie instructed us to put on life jackets and to stay below deck, not to come out unless she asked us to. We put on the puffy orange jackets and promptly hunkered down below deck. The increasing waves were already rocking the boat uneasily.
“Are we gonna die?” Frank asked, his voice whimpering as he looked up at me from the opposite bench.
Although the question had already burrowed itself into my mind as well, I replied “No, NO, man, we’re not gonna die. Like Josie said, it’s just a quick ride through and then we’re back on dry land,” hoping that my words held even a sliver of truth.
In a matter of minutes, the sky turned dark and the boat started jumping on waves, like a rollercoaster rapidly going up and down and up and down. The rain tore into the boat like a machine gun as thunder sounded from across the way, lightning flashing the sky white erratically. Frank’s lunch quickly escaped his stomach, coming out in an arc of brownish green vomit that splattered across my legs and the floor. I was too scared to care, and he was too frightened to apologize.
The storm kept getting worse, the waves becoming larger as evidenced by the deeper dives and longer ascensions. Water was constantly slamming the deck, some of it trickling down to our feet. Through the two small windows the cabin had, it was near impossible to know whether we were on top of the water or under it, or which way was up or down. Although the storm was loud, I could still hear Josie cursing and screaming as she battled the waves and tried to keep us afloat, which was the only indication that she hadn’t been swallowed into the depths below. Frank was sweating bullets, his face a pale white. I wasn’t doing much better either, the words it’s gonna be ok it’s gonna be ok repeating in my mind.
Slowly the storm started to ease up, the waves thinning out and the rain becoming only a slight patter. Neither Frank or me said anything, though, not wanting to jinx it before we were safely back on land. Soon, the boat’s rocking lessened severely, and I could see sunshine coming through the windows.
“Hey guys, you okay? You can come up now,” Josie yelled, her inflection hesitant but calm.
Frankie apologized for the vomit as we got up and made our way up the steps. Josie was standing at the front of the deck, tumbling through her soaking wet hair with her fingers.
“Ho-lee shit, did we just survive the fucking apocalypse?” Frank asked rhetorically, his eyes darting between me and Josie.
“Josie! You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah… I’m fine,” she replied, waving her hand like nothing abnormal had happened at all.
I walked up next to her and said “We got through it, didn’t we? Now just let’s get ourselves back on land, eh?”
“Yeah, well, that’s the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look,” she said, holding her hand out at the pale horizon, like she was presenting it on an invisible platter. “Where’s the town?”
“What do you mean where’s the town? We got through the storm, so shouldn’t we be able to get through to it now?”
“That’s the thing. It should be right in front of us.”
“Where’s the storm?” Frankie yelled from the back of the boat.
“What do you mean ‘where’s the storm?’ We just went through it” Josie yelled in annoyance, still peering at the horizon.
“For fuck’s sake, come here,” Frank replied.
Josie looked at me and rolled her eyes, then started walking towards Frank as she gave a long sigh. I followed tepidly behind her.
As we reached the back of the boat, I realized what Frank had meant. There was no storm, nor clouds, or even residual waves. “What the fuck,” I exclaimed under my breath, right as Josie started sprinting around the boat, looking in all directions, her head swiveling in frantic motions, her hair throwing beads of water around like a dog drying up after a swim. A minute later she joined us, panting, and said “It’s all just water. There’s nothing on any side. We’re in the middle of the fucking ocean, the storm’s gone, there’s nothing.”
“Shit, shit, shit…” Frank muttered as he started to tap his foot on the deck, holding himself in a tight hug as he shivered in his wet clothes.
I turned to Josie. “Well we shouldn’t be far off from something, right? It’s still day, and even with the storm we couldn’t have gone too far.”
I could see that Josie was tired. She looked like she had aged about ten years in the last twenty minutes. “Okay, okay, you’re right. Let me just check some things and figure out where to go.”
Josie left for the helm, leaving me and Frank to stare in silent horror at the lazy, blue ocean that seemed to stretch infinitely in all directions.
After a long minute Josie called to us “Guys… you better come check this out.”
She was staring intensely at the dashboard of the helm as we arrived.
“Okay, so good and bad news. Which first?”
“Good, please.” Frank replied, recovered from the worst of the shivers.
“Okay, so the good news is, uhh,” she began, still fiddling with controls as if to double check her suspicions “the boat seems to be in running condition. There’s no damage to anything that would prevent us from going forward.”
“So what’s the problem then?” I asked.
“Check your phones.”
“What?” me and Frank said in unison.
“Check if you have a signal, internet, anything.”
“Shit,” Frank said. “Yeah, mine too,” I replied as I looked at my phone and saw that there was absolutely no signal or internet.
“Yeah, I don’t have a signal either - just had to check. And it doesn’t stop there,” Josie said, “compasses, readings, all of that - it’s shot. I can’t navigate us anywhere, and I have no idea where we are.”
Frank started to freak out and walked towards the front of the boat, his wet shoes squishing as he stomped angrily. “Fuck, fuck, FUCK. What the fuck do we do?”
“Well, as I said, we can still move. The only question is where. I have a faint idea of where the sun was when we first headed out, and I suggest we try to mimic its movement back to the dock,” Josie said to me while keeping her eye on Frank.
Frank was now squatting on the deck, his hands gripping his neck as he stared down at his feet.
“That sounds smart. Then if we see the storm again, we can recalibrate. We should probably be hitting land at some point, right?” I said to Josie.
“That’s my logic, at least.”
“You with us Frank?” I asked, turning to him.
“Yeah, yeah. I guess that sounds smart,” he replied in a solemn voice under his breath.
“Need any help?” I asked Josie.
“Take care of Frank,” she said quietly. “The best thing we can do is stay calm.”
Josie revved up the engine and turned the boat around carefully as she mapped out our approximate direction, and then we left towards a horizon that was no different from the others, guided only by the sun’s approximate movements.
As Josie manned the wheel, me and Frank cleaned up below deck and dried our clothes. As we were finishing up, he said he’d stay below deck, as he needed some time to think.
Looking at the sun, the day was slowly turning to evening. It was summer, so we still had daylight for a few more hours. I went up to Josie to see how she was doing.
“Frank’s below. Said he needed some time to think. I don’t blame him - this is indeed a bit fucked up, isn’t it?”
“Logically, we should hit land at some point,” she replied, her eyes fixed on the horizon, her presence distant.
“How are you doing, Josie? You just pulled us through hell. I know you don’t need help with the boat, but I’m just saying -- I’m here if you wanna talk.”
Josie sighed and turned to me. “Thanks. I think right now what I need is to get us safely back home. Once we’re back you can buy me a beer and then we can talk.”
I nodded, and then turned my head to look at the horizon. Noticing something in the distance, I said “Josie, uhh, what’s that?”
She turned her head back to survey the ocean.
In the distance there were small, dark peaks rising from the ocean, like the tips of underwater mountains rising above the water. They’d appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
“I -- I don’t know. But I think we’re gonna see soon enough.”
I stayed with Josie as we approached the peaks. As we got closer, it was obvious that there was no land between them. Instead, they shot up from the water in thick spirals that tapered off the higher they reached. As we got closer we could finally realize their true size. Although some were smaller than others, most were the equivalent of tall office buildings, some reaching even higher. They spiraled and twisted in the air, arcing like blades of grass in the wind, and it seemed like they could fall down at any moment, but they did not move or shake in the slightest. There must have been twenty or so, and they all looked similar despite their differences in size; dark, mostly smooth yet also scratched, like charred meat on a grill.
“You have any idea what these are? They look like… trees or something, except they don’t have leaves or branches,” I said to Josie.
“Never seen anything like it. Must be some rock formations or something. Maybe there’s an underwater volcano that bursted lava out and it solidified -- I really don’t know. But those should only happen deeper in the ocean, far away from land.”
I heard Frank coming up the stairs. He looked better than he had before, his step lighter. Although I’d been afraid he’d been brooding, I guess having some time to think really did help.
As he saw the spiraling towers, his face turned into a twisted and confused half-frown as he said “What the fuck are those?”
“We don’t know,” I replied, “but it’s the only thing we’ve seen so far.”
Soon the closest spiral towered just a mere two hundred yards away, its wide shade casting upon the boat. From a distance it had been hard to decipher the dark structures, but upon closer inspection, it was clear that their anatomy was… abnormal. Stretches of surface material were mostly smooth, but all of the spirals seemed to have slight craters that were formed above the rest of the exterior. It looked like they had been bombarded by meteors of differing sizes, although even if this had been the case, how had they not been immediately broken, I do not know. They were beyond any logic I could muster.
“So, anyone know what we’re looking at?” Josie askied, surprising both me and Frank - she was usually the one to know things, us just tagging along for the ride.
“No clue, captain,” replied Frank as he stared upwards in dismay at the towering spiral.
“Still no,” I said.
Suddenly the boat’s end shot up, followed by the front, ascending us a good ten yards in mere seconds. Frank and I were knocked down on the deck, but Josie managed to hold onto the walls surrounding the helm. The boat kept rocking as waves hit us from behind. I slowly stood up with my knees bent for support, and went to help out Frank who was still laying on the deck, his eyes wide in panic.
Once I’d gotten Frank up, Josie had already managed to make her way to the back of the boat. We held onto the railings along the boat’s edge and walked as fast as we could through the oceanic turbulence to catch up with her. Once I saw what had produced those waves, I wanted to get back to land more than I ever had before.
In the distance tens more of the spirals had emerged from the ocean, some even larger than the ones we’d seen. They dripped with water, and some were covered in green algae. Somehow they’d been quiet, merely disturbing the water as they’d shot up.
“We need to move! One of those things could shoot up under the boat and sink the whole fucking thing!” Josie screamed, running back inside the helm as the waves slowly calmed down and became smaller. I leaned on the railing to see if there was something underneath us - not that there was much I could do, even if I saw a gigantic spiral shooting up from the depths.
The water beneath the surface was unmoving, holding an abyssal darkness. It seemed as if the light penetrated less than it had before, and what was deep below was nothing but pitch black shadowlands.
Just as I was about to disembark and head towards Josie, something moved in the water. I craned my neck farther over the railing to get a better look. It looked like two large masses were separating from each other, unearthing a ravine.
Josie had gotten the boat moving, and we were starting to turn towards an opening between two of the spirals. As the boat circled, I got a better view of what lay below. The ravine widened, and inside it I could see a dark, whitish yellow mass peeking through. As Josie cranked us up to speed the yellow mass had opened up into a large, oval shape that seemed to span across the ocean floor. Its center held a deep, dark circle that sucked in light as if it were a black hole, twisting all things inside of it.
Then it closed up. I sighed in relief, hoping that no more spirals would emerge.
Suddenly it opened up again in a furious motion, wider than before, into a perfect circle. Then it hit me - it was an eye, larger than anything I could think of. Although we were moving at full speed, it was so gargantuan that we weren’t making any headway.
It had blinked.
“Josie? Frank?” I screamed as I turned around and saw Frank on the opposite railing looking down at the water, witnessing the same thing I was seeing.
Frank turned to me, his face a washed white, and his mouth slightly agape. “They’re tentacles. They’re fucking tentacles, look!” he pointed at one of the bigger spirals. “They have fucking suction cups and all! Shit, SHIT!”
As if on cue, the tentacles started to return to the water, splashing as they did so, producing strong currents in the water. The boat was immediately caught up in the chaos, going up and around huge waves and being dragged by the water’s shifting volume. Frank sprang below deck, and I followed him. From the small round windows I could see one of the gargantuan tentacles dropping back into the water, the boat just barely missing its tip and almost sunk by the shifting ocean.
Josie ran inside with us and exclaimed “The storm is back! It’s fucking back! I can’t maneuver the boat worth shit!”
As she closed the door behind her, we were flung to the side, my ribs hitting one of the cabinets, producing a painful crack. I could hear the rain start to scratch at the boat, and soon we were engulfed in darkness, the rain gunning down on us through the waves. The boat rocked and swayed worse than it had before, and at some points I was sure we’d gone under, buried into the deep sea, never to see the sun again. We held on to whatever we could as water trickled through the sealed door and started pooling up on the floor.
Slowly, but steadily, the storm started to pass, the boat regaining its level status along the water. The darkness outside faded into a dark red. Once it was possible to stand with relative ease, we emerged from the cabin and walked up to the deck.
“Everyone okay?” Josie asked.
“I think I’m gonna --,” Frank replied, and promptly ran to grab the edge of the railing and vomited yellow bile into the water, his stomach empty of food from before.
“My ribs got a beating, but I don’t think anything’s broken, “ I said. “What about you?”
“I’m fine. Just some bruises. Look,” Josie said, walking to the other side of the boat.
On the horizon, we saw the evening sun illuminating a crimson glow behind a small town some 500 yards away.
“Frank?” Josie called out.
“Yeah?” he replied through thick phlegm that sounded like it was stuck to his throat and running down his nostrils.
“We made it.”
We docked at the unfamiliar town and found a small hotel - probably the only one there - just a quick walking distance away. Once we got our phones dried off, Josie’s seemed to be the only one that still worked. As she looked up our location she nearly dropped the phone on the ground.
“I -- I don’t know how, but we’re quite far from home,” she said, her voice produced in quick breaths.
“How far?” Frank asked.
“Some 480 miles away.”
We checked and double checked her phone, but she was right: somehow we’d ended up nearly 500 miles down the coast into a small fishing town.
We were so tired that we decided to get some sleep before giving the bad news to Josie’s dad. The next morning Josie called him up and explained the situation, giving him the simple version: a storm had hit us, and after we got out we’d arrived here. I could hear the screams he gave her through the phone - apparently he was sure we’d driven the boat all the way to this ghost town in the middle of nowhere and docked it here, just to spite him. Josie didn’t respond to him much, only apologizing and telling him to come pick us up.
A day later he arrived, furious with us - and especially Josie. Once we showed him the boat I thought he was going to burst into a thousand tiny pieces, for I’d never seen a man so angry before. Although I think he overreacted, it was true that the boat was in shambles. There was water damage throughout the interiors, most of the equipment was shot, and large scratches were present along the exterior’s white paint.
Josie begged him not to drive the boat back home, but he insisted, not hearing a word her daughter was saying. We drove his car and arrived home that night.
As promised, me and Josie went out for a beer a few weeks later after her dad had settled down enough to let her out of the house. We went through the events of the trip in great detail, confirming to each other that it really did happen - although we disagreed on one thing.
Josie still thought that the spirals were just magma turned rock, and the whole thing was just extremely bad luck. According to her, we got held up by a superstorm or hurricane that moved our boat on top of an active underwater volcano, and then got hit by that same storm later as it moved across the ocean at miraculous speeds. Her theory was that the storm moved us along with it, making it possible to traverse such tremendous lengths with ease.
But Josie didn’t see what had been underneath us. Her theory was that the ‘eye’ I saw was simply lava cooling down as it emerged from the ocean bed. But she hadn’t seen it blink.
Frank of course seen it as well, but I haven’t heard from him much after the incident. According to his mom, he’s been cooped up in his room, drawing yellow circles on black pages. He’d told her that he needed some time to think.
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Monday arrived and the weather was still solid, and Josie’s dad had reluctantly signed off on our plan, so we decided not to wait any longer and take it out the next day. The idea was to have a two day mini-cruise; just us hanging out on the boat and maybe docking it for the night at a nearby town. Although Josie’s dad was a hardass, he had taught her how to drive and maintain the boat since she was a kid, so really, the worst thing that could happen is that we wouldn’t have enough snacks.
Me and Frank met at the parking lot, and saw Josie standing on the boat at the end of the dock. Her dad was with her, lecturing her about some winch or other, Josie rolling her eyes next to him, barely maintaining her attention.
“He really can’t leave her alone even for a couple days, can he?” Frank asked, keeping his voice low as we stepped on the long dock.
“Josie or the boat?”
Frank chuckled, then quickly returned his resting poker face as we reached the boat, Josie’s dad turning around as he heard the planks creaking under our feet.
Before he could say anything, Josie ran up from behind him and said “Hi boys! You brought the food and snacks and the five gallons of vodka, I assume?”
“Aye aye, Captain!” we replied in unison. It was Josie’s dad’s turn to roll his eyes.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” he said to Josie, starting to walk down the small ramp down to the dock. “And remember, two days, no more. I expect you to bring her back in one piece.”
“Sure thing, dad!” That was Josie’s way of saying yes, yes, yes, I get it already.
Josie’s dad gave us a stern look followed by a slight nod as he walked past us. He never really liked me or Franki, a bunch of hooligans, as he’d once called us when we were kids. For the record, me and Franki didn’t like the guy either, so at least the feeling was mutual.
After her dad was out of earshot, Josie yelled “Are you ready kids?!” putting on her damndest pirate voice.
“Aye Aye Cap-TAIN!” we screamed and sprinted up the ramp and into the boat.
After an exchange of hugs we unloaded our groceries into the mini-fridge below deck, then met up with Josie, who was already sitting inside the helm. “Ready to leave, crew?” she asked. “Let’s rock this boat,” Frank replied. The amount of bad jokes this early in the morning was surely a great indication for what the rest of the day held.
It wasn’t long until the shore behind us was gone, the tranquil open sea spreading out in all directions. Josie seemed to know where we were going, but at that point I could no longer discern what direction we had even come from.
Me and Frank sunbathed and joked around on the deck until Josie emerged from her cocoon-like cockpit. “Sorry to interrupt your hi-LARIOUS hijinks, but I’d propose we have some lunch soon.”
Like destiny, the word lunch produced a unified grumble from both me and Frank’s stomachs - the universal horn of yes please, food please, now please.
“We can stay here for a while, then we could start heading towards the town,” Josie said.
Feeling bad that she was doing all the heavy lifting, I asked her “You need any help? It’s your boat, and us your honored guests, so don’t be afraid to command us, cap’n!”
“Please,” Josie replied, “when I get a chance to drive this boat, I take it. Dad’s been hogging it like crazy all summer. Besides, it’s not like you guys even know what half of the things on this boat are called, let alone what they’re used for.”
“Well, that’s the driver’s seat,” Frank said, pointing at the helm.
“That’s called a helm, my dear. Frank - you just earned yourself the honorary job of heating up our lunch.”
“This ain’t no Ford Prius, I see,” he replied as he got up and started to take lazy strides towards below deck.
“Toyota,” I said.
“What?”
“Prius is Toyota. Not Ford. Come one, let’s go make lunch for the captain.” I got up to follow Frank, nodding approvingly to Josie.
We had cheap microwave meals for lunch, seeing as the boat didn’t have a stovetop or an oven. For some reason - maybe it was the soothing sounds of the ocean lazily slapping the boat, or the warm afternoon sun - the food defied its low expectations and tasted great.
Afterwards we had a little siesta where I almost fell asleep until Josie said “Shall I take course towards the town, then?”
Through a straw hat laid across his face, Frank mumbled “Aye aye.”
“You sure you don’t need any help?” I asked Josie once again, but she was already jumping into the helm, excited to get back at it. “You guys just take a chill, I’ll get us where we need to.”
As the motor’s soothing hum returned, I got myself a bag of chips and sat on the deck, watching the horizon. Frank still had the hat on his face, which either meant that he didn’t want to be bothered, or that he’d fallen asleep. Either way, I was happy to just sit under the sun as the boat slowly rolled towards our destination, cutting a line into the flaccid water behind us.
“Shit, Shit SHIT!” Josie screamed. I must’ve fallen asleep, and as I got up the half eaten bag of chips crushed under my foot.
“What, Josie? What’s wrong?”
“What’s going on?” Frank parroted as he stood up, the hat falling beside him.
“There’s a fucking storm coming,” Josie said as she frantically pressed buttons, her eyes darting across the dashboard of the helm.
I turned around and looked at the horizon. Dread filled me as I saw an infinitely wide wall of dark clouds spread across the sky, making contact with the water in a misty gray curtain. I noticed that the ocean was no longer level, for it was rippled with small waves that thumped the sides of the boat in eager anticipation.
“I thought it was supposed to be nothing but clear skies,” Frank said. He’d walked beside me, taking in the horror beyond the horizon.
“Ex-fucking-actly, Sherlock. It came out of fucking nowhere,” Josie snapped, holding the wheel tightly in her right hand as she fiddled something with her left.
“Okay, Josie, I know this might sound stupid, but bear with. Why are we going towards the storm?” I asked, trying to not seem disingenuous as I turned around to face her.
She gave a sigh, stopping what she was doing and looked me in the eyes. “That’s where the town is. It’s the closest place to dock right now, and the storm’s moving faster than any I’ve ever seen. If we go back it’ll catch up to us and we’re fucked. If we go through it, we’ll spend the least amount of time inside it, giving us at least a chance.”
“A chance at what?” Frankie asked.
“A chance at getting out of here.”
“Any port in a storm, I guess,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, to which Frank gave me a concerned look.
The air had turned cool, so I went and changed to warmer clothing, Frank doing the same. Coming back up to the deck, I saw that the storm had moved closer. A lot closer. Josie instructed us to put on life jackets and to stay below deck, not to come out unless she asked us to. We put on the puffy orange jackets and promptly hunkered down below deck. The increasing waves were already rocking the boat uneasily.
“Are we gonna die?” Frank asked, his voice whimpering as he looked up at me from the opposite bench.
Although the question had already burrowed itself into my mind as well, I replied “No, NO, man, we’re not gonna die. Like Josie said, it’s just a quick ride through and then we’re back on dry land,” hoping that my words held even a sliver of truth.
In a matter of minutes, the sky turned dark and the boat started jumping on waves, like a rollercoaster rapidly going up and down and up and down. The rain tore into the boat like a machine gun as thunder sounded from across the way, lightning flashing the sky white erratically. Frank’s lunch quickly escaped his stomach, coming out in an arc of brownish green vomit that splattered across my legs and the floor. I was too scared to care, and he was too frightened to apologize.
The storm kept getting worse, the waves becoming larger as evidenced by the deeper dives and longer ascensions. Water was constantly slamming the deck, some of it trickling down to our feet. Through the two small windows the cabin had, it was near impossible to know whether we were on top of the water or under it, or which way was up or down. Although the storm was loud, I could still hear Josie cursing and screaming as she battled the waves and tried to keep us afloat, which was the only indication that she hadn’t been swallowed into the depths below. Frank was sweating bullets, his face a pale white. I wasn’t doing much better either, the words it’s gonna be ok it’s gonna be ok repeating in my mind.
Slowly the storm started to ease up, the waves thinning out and the rain becoming only a slight patter. Neither Frank or me said anything, though, not wanting to jinx it before we were safely back on land. Soon, the boat’s rocking lessened severely, and I could see sunshine coming through the windows.
“Hey guys, you okay? You can come up now,” Josie yelled, her inflection hesitant but calm.
Frankie apologized for the vomit as we got up and made our way up the steps. Josie was standing at the front of the deck, tumbling through her soaking wet hair with her fingers.
“Ho-lee shit, did we just survive the fucking apocalypse?” Frank asked rhetorically, his eyes darting between me and Josie.
“Josie! You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah… I’m fine,” she replied, waving her hand like nothing abnormal had happened at all.
I walked up next to her and said “We got through it, didn’t we? Now just let’s get ourselves back on land, eh?”
“Yeah, well, that’s the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look,” she said, holding her hand out at the pale horizon, like she was presenting it on an invisible platter. “Where’s the town?”
“What do you mean where’s the town? We got through the storm, so shouldn’t we be able to get through to it now?”
“That’s the thing. It should be right in front of us.”
“Where’s the storm?” Frankie yelled from the back of the boat.
“What do you mean ‘where’s the storm?’ We just went through it” Josie yelled in annoyance, still peering at the horizon.
“For fuck’s sake, come here,” Frank replied.
Josie looked at me and rolled her eyes, then started walking towards Frank as she gave a long sigh. I followed tepidly behind her.
As we reached the back of the boat, I realized what Frank had meant. There was no storm, nor clouds, or even residual waves. “What the fuck,” I exclaimed under my breath, right as Josie started sprinting around the boat, looking in all directions, her head swiveling in frantic motions, her hair throwing beads of water around like a dog drying up after a swim. A minute later she joined us, panting, and said “It’s all just water. There’s nothing on any side. We’re in the middle of the fucking ocean, the storm’s gone, there’s nothing.”
“Shit, shit, shit…” Frank muttered as he started to tap his foot on the deck, holding himself in a tight hug as he shivered in his wet clothes.
I turned to Josie. “Well we shouldn’t be far off from something, right? It’s still day, and even with the storm we couldn’t have gone too far.”
I could see that Josie was tired. She looked like she had aged about ten years in the last twenty minutes. “Okay, okay, you’re right. Let me just check some things and figure out where to go.”
Josie left for the helm, leaving me and Frank to stare in silent horror at the lazy, blue ocean that seemed to stretch infinitely in all directions.
After a long minute Josie called to us “Guys… you better come check this out.”
She was staring intensely at the dashboard of the helm as we arrived.
“Okay, so good and bad news. Which first?”
“Good, please.” Frank replied, recovered from the worst of the shivers.
“Okay, so the good news is, uhh,” she began, still fiddling with controls as if to double check her suspicions “the boat seems to be in running condition. There’s no damage to anything that would prevent us from going forward.”
“So what’s the problem then?” I asked.
“Check your phones.”
“What?” me and Frank said in unison.
“Check if you have a signal, internet, anything.”
“Shit,” Frank said. “Yeah, mine too,” I replied as I looked at my phone and saw that there was absolutely no signal or internet.
“Yeah, I don’t have a signal either - just had to check. And it doesn’t stop there,” Josie said, “compasses, readings, all of that - it’s shot. I can’t navigate us anywhere, and I have no idea where we are.”
Frank started to freak out and walked towards the front of the boat, his wet shoes squishing as he stomped angrily. “Fuck, fuck, FUCK. What the fuck do we do?”
“Well, as I said, we can still move. The only question is where. I have a faint idea of where the sun was when we first headed out, and I suggest we try to mimic its movement back to the dock,” Josie said to me while keeping her eye on Frank.
Frank was now squatting on the deck, his hands gripping his neck as he stared down at his feet.
“That sounds smart. Then if we see the storm again, we can recalibrate. We should probably be hitting land at some point, right?” I said to Josie.
“That’s my logic, at least.”
“You with us Frank?” I asked, turning to him.
“Yeah, yeah. I guess that sounds smart,” he replied in a solemn voice under his breath.
“Need any help?” I asked Josie.
“Take care of Frank,” she said quietly. “The best thing we can do is stay calm.”
Josie revved up the engine and turned the boat around carefully as she mapped out our approximate direction, and then we left towards a horizon that was no different from the others, guided only by the sun’s approximate movements.
As Josie manned the wheel, me and Frank cleaned up below deck and dried our clothes. As we were finishing up, he said he’d stay below deck, as he needed some time to think.
Looking at the sun, the day was slowly turning to evening. It was summer, so we still had daylight for a few more hours. I went up to Josie to see how she was doing.
“Frank’s below. Said he needed some time to think. I don’t blame him - this is indeed a bit fucked up, isn’t it?”
“Logically, we should hit land at some point,” she replied, her eyes fixed on the horizon, her presence distant.
“How are you doing, Josie? You just pulled us through hell. I know you don’t need help with the boat, but I’m just saying -- I’m here if you wanna talk.”
Josie sighed and turned to me. “Thanks. I think right now what I need is to get us safely back home. Once we’re back you can buy me a beer and then we can talk.”
I nodded, and then turned my head to look at the horizon. Noticing something in the distance, I said “Josie, uhh, what’s that?”
She turned her head back to survey the ocean.
In the distance there were small, dark peaks rising from the ocean, like the tips of underwater mountains rising above the water. They’d appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
“I -- I don’t know. But I think we’re gonna see soon enough.”
I stayed with Josie as we approached the peaks. As we got closer, it was obvious that there was no land between them. Instead, they shot up from the water in thick spirals that tapered off the higher they reached. As we got closer we could finally realize their true size. Although some were smaller than others, most were the equivalent of tall office buildings, some reaching even higher. They spiraled and twisted in the air, arcing like blades of grass in the wind, and it seemed like they could fall down at any moment, but they did not move or shake in the slightest. There must have been twenty or so, and they all looked similar despite their differences in size; dark, mostly smooth yet also scratched, like charred meat on a grill.
“You have any idea what these are? They look like… trees or something, except they don’t have leaves or branches,” I said to Josie.
“Never seen anything like it. Must be some rock formations or something. Maybe there’s an underwater volcano that bursted lava out and it solidified -- I really don’t know. But those should only happen deeper in the ocean, far away from land.”
I heard Frank coming up the stairs. He looked better than he had before, his step lighter. Although I’d been afraid he’d been brooding, I guess having some time to think really did help.
As he saw the spiraling towers, his face turned into a twisted and confused half-frown as he said “What the fuck are those?”
“We don’t know,” I replied, “but it’s the only thing we’ve seen so far.”
Soon the closest spiral towered just a mere two hundred yards away, its wide shade casting upon the boat. From a distance it had been hard to decipher the dark structures, but upon closer inspection, it was clear that their anatomy was… abnormal. Stretches of surface material were mostly smooth, but all of the spirals seemed to have slight craters that were formed above the rest of the exterior. It looked like they had been bombarded by meteors of differing sizes, although even if this had been the case, how had they not been immediately broken, I do not know. They were beyond any logic I could muster.
“So, anyone know what we’re looking at?” Josie askied, surprising both me and Frank - she was usually the one to know things, us just tagging along for the ride.
“No clue, captain,” replied Frank as he stared upwards in dismay at the towering spiral.
“Still no,” I said.
Suddenly the boat’s end shot up, followed by the front, ascending us a good ten yards in mere seconds. Frank and I were knocked down on the deck, but Josie managed to hold onto the walls surrounding the helm. The boat kept rocking as waves hit us from behind. I slowly stood up with my knees bent for support, and went to help out Frank who was still laying on the deck, his eyes wide in panic.
Once I’d gotten Frank up, Josie had already managed to make her way to the back of the boat. We held onto the railings along the boat’s edge and walked as fast as we could through the oceanic turbulence to catch up with her. Once I saw what had produced those waves, I wanted to get back to land more than I ever had before.
In the distance tens more of the spirals had emerged from the ocean, some even larger than the ones we’d seen. They dripped with water, and some were covered in green algae. Somehow they’d been quiet, merely disturbing the water as they’d shot up.
“We need to move! One of those things could shoot up under the boat and sink the whole fucking thing!” Josie screamed, running back inside the helm as the waves slowly calmed down and became smaller. I leaned on the railing to see if there was something underneath us - not that there was much I could do, even if I saw a gigantic spiral shooting up from the depths.
The water beneath the surface was unmoving, holding an abyssal darkness. It seemed as if the light penetrated less than it had before, and what was deep below was nothing but pitch black shadowlands.
Just as I was about to disembark and head towards Josie, something moved in the water. I craned my neck farther over the railing to get a better look. It looked like two large masses were separating from each other, unearthing a ravine.
Josie had gotten the boat moving, and we were starting to turn towards an opening between two of the spirals. As the boat circled, I got a better view of what lay below. The ravine widened, and inside it I could see a dark, whitish yellow mass peeking through. As Josie cranked us up to speed the yellow mass had opened up into a large, oval shape that seemed to span across the ocean floor. Its center held a deep, dark circle that sucked in light as if it were a black hole, twisting all things inside of it.
Then it closed up. I sighed in relief, hoping that no more spirals would emerge.
Suddenly it opened up again in a furious motion, wider than before, into a perfect circle. Then it hit me - it was an eye, larger than anything I could think of. Although we were moving at full speed, it was so gargantuan that we weren’t making any headway.
It had blinked.
“Josie? Frank?” I screamed as I turned around and saw Frank on the opposite railing looking down at the water, witnessing the same thing I was seeing.
Frank turned to me, his face a washed white, and his mouth slightly agape. “They’re tentacles. They’re fucking tentacles, look!” he pointed at one of the bigger spirals. “They have fucking suction cups and all! Shit, SHIT!”
As if on cue, the tentacles started to return to the water, splashing as they did so, producing strong currents in the water. The boat was immediately caught up in the chaos, going up and around huge waves and being dragged by the water’s shifting volume. Frank sprang below deck, and I followed him. From the small round windows I could see one of the gargantuan tentacles dropping back into the water, the boat just barely missing its tip and almost sunk by the shifting ocean.
Josie ran inside with us and exclaimed “The storm is back! It’s fucking back! I can’t maneuver the boat worth shit!”
As she closed the door behind her, we were flung to the side, my ribs hitting one of the cabinets, producing a painful crack. I could hear the rain start to scratch at the boat, and soon we were engulfed in darkness, the rain gunning down on us through the waves. The boat rocked and swayed worse than it had before, and at some points I was sure we’d gone under, buried into the deep sea, never to see the sun again. We held on to whatever we could as water trickled through the sealed door and started pooling up on the floor.
Slowly, but steadily, the storm started to pass, the boat regaining its level status along the water. The darkness outside faded into a dark red. Once it was possible to stand with relative ease, we emerged from the cabin and walked up to the deck.
“Everyone okay?” Josie asked.
“I think I’m gonna --,” Frank replied, and promptly ran to grab the edge of the railing and vomited yellow bile into the water, his stomach empty of food from before.
“My ribs got a beating, but I don’t think anything’s broken, “ I said. “What about you?”
“I’m fine. Just some bruises. Look,” Josie said, walking to the other side of the boat.
On the horizon, we saw the evening sun illuminating a crimson glow behind a small town some 500 yards away.
“Frank?” Josie called out.
“Yeah?” he replied through thick phlegm that sounded like it was stuck to his throat and running down his nostrils.
“We made it.”
We docked at the unfamiliar town and found a small hotel - probably the only one there - just a quick walking distance away. Once we got our phones dried off, Josie’s seemed to be the only one that still worked. As she looked up our location she nearly dropped the phone on the ground.
“I -- I don’t know how, but we’re quite far from home,” she said, her voice produced in quick breaths.
“How far?” Frank asked.
“Some 480 miles away.”
We checked and double checked her phone, but she was right: somehow we’d ended up nearly 500 miles down the coast into a small fishing town.
We were so tired that we decided to get some sleep before giving the bad news to Josie’s dad. The next morning Josie called him up and explained the situation, giving him the simple version: a storm had hit us, and after we got out we’d arrived here. I could hear the screams he gave her through the phone - apparently he was sure we’d driven the boat all the way to this ghost town in the middle of nowhere and docked it here, just to spite him. Josie didn’t respond to him much, only apologizing and telling him to come pick us up.
A day later he arrived, furious with us - and especially Josie. Once we showed him the boat I thought he was going to burst into a thousand tiny pieces, for I’d never seen a man so angry before. Although I think he overreacted, it was true that the boat was in shambles. There was water damage throughout the interiors, most of the equipment was shot, and large scratches were present along the exterior’s white paint.
Josie begged him not to drive the boat back home, but he insisted, not hearing a word her daughter was saying. We drove his car and arrived home that night.
As promised, me and Josie went out for a beer a few weeks later after her dad had settled down enough to let her out of the house. We went through the events of the trip in great detail, confirming to each other that it really did happen - although we disagreed on one thing.
Josie still thought that the spirals were just magma turned rock, and the whole thing was just extremely bad luck. According to her, we got held up by a superstorm or hurricane that moved our boat on top of an active underwater volcano, and then got hit by that same storm later as it moved across the ocean at miraculous speeds. Her theory was that the storm moved us along with it, making it possible to traverse such tremendous lengths with ease.
But Josie didn’t see what had been underneath us. Her theory was that the ‘eye’ I saw was simply lava cooling down as it emerged from the ocean bed. But she hadn’t seen it blink.
Frank of course seen it as well, but I haven’t heard from him much after the incident. According to his mom, he’s been cooped up in his room, drawing yellow circles on black pages. He’d told her that he needed some time to think.
2023.03.21 18:54 slide_penguin Torn ACL questions
Last year, I (40f) hurt my knee at a trampoline park. I went to an orthopedic walk-in clinic in my area and after an MRI was told that I completed ruptured my ACL and had what looked like a previous tear in my MCL. My doctor recommended we try PT before looking into surgery and the last visit told me that because of my progress with PT, I shouldn't need surgery (October of 2022, the tear happened June of 2022). I still had some swelling on certain parts of my knee and he told me to take two Aleve in the morning and 2 at night to help. This past week I went to PCP and found this report on my visit summary: 6/29/22: MRI showing torn ACL, horizontal tear of the posterior horn of the medial meniscus, macerated tear of posterior horma of lateral meniscus, large hemarthrosis, small nondisplaced fracture in posterior rim of the medial tibial plateau.
I still have swelling that comes and goes on my knee and haven't been to PT since late October. Stairs are still rough at times but overall it's about 80% better. Is there anything that should have been done differently? I did not know about the fracture at all until reading it on my report from my PCP.
submitted by slide_penguin to AskDocs [link] [comments]
I still have swelling that comes and goes on my knee and haven't been to PT since late October. Stairs are still rough at times but overall it's about 80% better. Is there anything that should have been done differently? I did not know about the fracture at all until reading it on my report from my PCP.
2023.03.21 13:42 K9XD 16M, i do NOT smoke, or drink
I need help
Ok so on the 15th of march I went to a trampoline park with my friends, and while jumping i got a sprain in my back, i thought putting pressure on that area might loosen it up, so I told one of my friends to stand on my back, Its been 6 days and I still have the sprain, it pains when i'm walking. My mom tells me i need to do some stretches but i cant cuz it hurts when i try to excercise. My health has not been very good btw, I did not do any excercise, and my diet was not too great either
submitted by K9XD to AskDocs [link] [comments]
Ok so on the 15th of march I went to a trampoline park with my friends, and while jumping i got a sprain in my back, i thought putting pressure on that area might loosen it up, so I told one of my friends to stand on my back, Its been 6 days and I still have the sprain, it pains when i'm walking. My mom tells me i need to do some stretches but i cant cuz it hurts when i try to excercise. My health has not been very good btw, I did not do any excercise, and my diet was not too great either
2023.03.21 12:54 Errfbond This sign for a trampoline park
 | submitted by Errfbond to funnysigns [link] [comments] |
2023.03.21 07:37 Jrubas The Wolf and the Warrior: Pt 1
Griger Kel-Am watched from his cell in the old town jailhouse as workers busily erected a scaffolding in the courtyard below. It was shaping up nicely, he thought with an appreciative nod; the skeletal beams reminded him of the bones of dead animals in the Karel Desert and that comparison almost disturbed him.
Which was no easy feat. Griger had seen the worst the world had to offer. He fought beasts in the Staygin Mountains, fended off feral bandits in the Jarel Plains, and weathered more attacks, fights, battles, and death than most people even knew existed. Nothing on earth could rattle him. He couldn’t afford to let himself be shaken. Life, he had learned, was like a surging storm tide. You either stand strong against it, or you get knocked down and swept away. Griger refused to be swept away. He refused to wind up like the old bones he stumbled across on the North Road and in the snowy stepps at the top of the world. A man must be hard and stoic to survive, and he must be harder and colder to thrive.
Despite his grizzled face, many scars, dead eyes, and unseemly facial hair, Griger, a sword for hire since before the Great Plague, had always thrived.
Sighing, Griger left the window and walked over to the door; three brisk paces. He threaded his arms through the bars and tried his best to look up the corridor. In the cells across from him, other men, their faces dirty and white, cowered, waiting for their judgement.
Their open fear disgusted Griger.
Cowards.
Griger wasn’t afraid to die. Dying was easy; you closed your eyes and went to sleep. Living...living was hard, every day a knock down, drag out fight for dominance against something. Outlaws, nature, your own inner darkness. He did not seek death, but he welcomed it. The prospect of a noose tightening around his neck, of his body jerking and dancing before many jeering eyes and spitting mouths, however, almost bothered him.
But as a wise old man he once knew had said, This too shall pass.
A sardonic smile touched Griger’s chapped lips and he shook his head like a man who couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Of all the things he’d done in his life to deserve a hanging, self-defense is what did him in. Ha.
Two weeks ago, he was following the river from the North, on foot and alone save for his sword and his rucksack. He stopped at a tide pool to drink, and was beset by a man with a knife. In his frock coat and rubberized boots, he was too well dressed to be a highwayman; he never spoke a word until he lay in the grass, his throat laid open and gushing rich red blood. “Scoundrel,” he gurgled.
Griger relieved him of his boots and pocketbook and carried on. Before dusk, he came across the village and rented a room at the inn. Women in cheap, homespun dresses haunted the halls, knocking at doors to sell their company, and Griger, lying in bed by the flickering light of a lamp, was considering spending the rest of the money on one when three constables broke down the door.
The man he killed, they told him later, was the son of the mayor. At that moment, Griger knew he was in trouble.
They refused to believe that the son attacked first and pointed to the things Griger had taken from his as proof of overland piracy, theft, and murder. He was tried in a packed courtroom and found guilty, standing tall and proud but alone as no lawyer in the land would take his case.
Out in the courtyard, someone shouted, and a team of horses neighed, Griger, sitting on the edge of his cot, looked up at the window. The light was getting weaker as night approached. Shadows, long and black, fell through the slats and made unwholesome shapes across the earthen floor. Down the hall, a man cried out for water, and elsewhere, someone raked a metal cup back and forth across the bars. Would they hang him tonight, Griger wondered, or would they wait for dawn?
“You,” someone spat.
Griger looked up to find the mayor standing at the bars, his bloated face filled with hatred. Another man was with him, this one taller and thinner. They were both clad in the finest garments, but the stranger was undoubtedly better suited. Griger took him for a government official.
“What do you want?” Griger asked, an edge in his voice.
The mayor opened his mouth to speak, but the stranger silenced him. “My name is Urick Farbin. I’m the governor of Ezk Province and I have a proposition for you.”
“What’s that?”
Farbin flashed a tight smile.
It looked to Griger like he wouldn’t be hanged at all.
And that made him smile.
***
Griger watched the countryside pass slowly by, all green hills, trickling brooks, and dense thickets. The occasional straw hut loomed out of the wilderness like an antsy thief, and six miles out of the village, they passed a stately manor house that could only have belonged to the mayor.
It was mid-afternoon and the overcast day wrapped itself around Griger like a wet blanket. The previous night, Governor Farbin sprang Griger from his cell and brought him to the inn, where he was kept under armed guard. Griger spent most of the evening in a straight back chair and whittling. You don’t have to worry, he said to the sentry standing at the door, I’m not going anywhere.
And he wasn’t. He was not an honor bound man by any stretch, but Farbin saved his life, and Griger reckoned that earned him a little loyalty.
The guards didn’t stand down, but Griger didn’t blame them. He wouldn’t have either.
In the morning, they set off in a horse drawn carriage, heading northwest along the Western Road. Now, hours later, Griger sat next to the Governor, who wore a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat befitting his office. Beside him, the driver held the reins and stared ahead with the practiced indifference of a man used to tuning out things he wasn’t supposed to hear.
“Will you explain to me what I’m doing?” Griger asked.
Farbin was quiet for a moment, then he looked up at the sky, the muted light bathing his craggy features. “Your file says that you’ve done work for the Government.”
“Some,” Griger replied.
“You’ve handled things of a singular nature,” the old man continued. “Things that most other men have never dreamed possible.”
Gringer nodded. He had. His only oath was to himself, and he worked for whoever paid him the highest sum. Men like him were called mercenaries but he preferred to think of himself as a businessman.
“There’s a matter in a nearby village that has been ongoing for quite some time,” Farbin said, picking his words carefully. “I have sent my best agents and they’ve done nothing for it. When the paperwork on you came to my office, I checked your name, as I do all condemned men, and knew at once that you were the man for this job.”
Griger was almost touched. “What’s the job?”
The Governor turned to face Griger, his expression bloodless and sober, as though he had something great yet terrible to impart upon him. “Do you believe in werewolves?”
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
“Have you ever killed one?”
Griger hesitated. “No,” he said, “not personally, but I was with a party that did.”
Five years before, Griger wintered in a village among the steep foothills guarding the forbidding expanse of Mount Grez. In the deepest, darkest days of the freeze, local livestock began to die, ripped asunder and strewn across snowy fields like trash. Wolf tracks larger than any Griger had ever seen led to and from each scene, and at night, high, ghostly howls rose above the shrieking wind, curdling the blood of even the most sturdy men.
After a watchman on patrol was attacked and gutted in the main square, the men of the village banded together and tracked the beast, eventually cornering it in a cave near a frozen river. Even if he lived to be a thousand, Griger would never forget the monster they encountered. Seven feet tall, coated in matted gray fur, its face canine yet human, its eyes blazed with the fires of hell, and as the men approached, it snapped and snarled, the sounds it made so close to words that even now, Griger wondered if it were trying to speak. They beset it with swords and torches, and when the dust settled, five men were dead and three were wounded. The wolf lay crumpled on the ground, decapitated and aflame. Even with no head, even with its heart divorced from its body, it screeched as the fire consumed it, a high, hitching wail that haunted Griger’s dreams for many moons after.
Farbin nodded. “I figured as much. A man as well-travelled as you has to have seen such things.”
He went on to explain that a suspected werewolf was loose in the countryside around the village of Koreth, a tiny fishing port on the sloped and muddy banks of the Rey River. Three weeks before, sheep and horses began to turn up dead, their bodies laid open and their intestines pulled from their stomachs. Before long, travellers along the Western Road started to die in a similar manner. Every time a new victim appeared, officials found large wolf tracks and strands of fur nearby.
Several nights ago, it broke into the home of a land baron and killed him, his wife, and his daughter. His young son survived, but was blinded in one eye.
‘It was a massive beast,’ the boy told the Governor, a personal friend of the baron. ‘It stood seven feet tall, was as wide as it was long, and had the snarling face of a man mixed with a dog.’
“You want me to kill it,” Griger said. It was not a question.
“Yes.”
The carriage jostled as its big wheels splashed through ruts and puddles. “And in return…?”
“You’ll get a full and unconditional pardon.”
Hmm. Griger considered the offer carefully, even though he was in no position to bargain. “Alright,” he said at last, “I’ll do it.”
They arrived at the village three hours later. Perched on the banks of the lazy river, it seemed a single estate rather than a town. A stone wall, roughly a dozen feet high, enclosed it, pitched roofs visible beyond. Two guards in helmets and chainmail, swords on their hips and crossbows in their hands, stood at the gate, their expressions stony and as hardscrabble as the fields sloping away from the walls.
Inside, tiny buildings lined narrow dirt streets and people in plain, homespun clothes went about their business, pushing carts, hawking vegetables, and playing dice. Old men sat in canned chairs before the town pub and a group of boys chased each other back and forth through shadowed warrens, their faces smudged and weatherbeaten beyond their years. Chickens and pigs, both plump and hale, ran free, the former flapping their impotent wings and the latter snorting happily as they wallowed and shat. Griger spotted a blacksmith in his quarters, striking an anvil with a hammer, and wondered idly if he had any interesting items for sale.
“The people here are stubborn and refuse to flee,” Farbin said.
Griger faced forward. “These types usually are.”
“You are not to worry about their safety,” Farbin warned. “They can see to themselves. Your only concern is to be the wolf.”
“Understood.”
The driver parked near the town inn and tied the horse to a hitching post while Griger and Farbin got out. Griger rolled his neck and flexed his shoulders. After so many years of walking wherever he went, he was unaccustomed to sitting for long periods and inevitably ended any long, stationary trek sore.
Past the batwing doors, a shadowy lobby lit by candlelight greeted them. Farbin led Griger directly up the stairs and to a tidy room with a single, neatly made bed and a desk beneath the window. “These are your quarters,” Farbin said.
“Spacious,” Griger said unsarcastically. He sat on the edge of the bed. “What leads do you have on this wolf?”
“None beyond what I’ve told you,” Farbn said. “My men have scoured the countryside but they haven’t found a thing.”
Griger hummed. “No tracks? Droppings? Nothing at all?”
“Not beyond what I’ve told you.”
That was odd. Werewolves rarely strayed far from their den. Unless they were of the rare half-breed that turned upon the cycle of the moon, man at day and beast by night. But those were as common as an honest man in the High Council - not very damned common at all.
“What are you thinking?” Farbin asked.
Griger said what was on his mind.
“But those aren’t real,” the Governor said, a hint of confusion in his voice.
“I tell you they are.”
Farbin’s brow furrowed with incredulity. “A man cannot simply change his form, nor can a wolf, for that matter. It goes against all logic.”
All Griger could do was spread his hands. That a man - even a large one - could transform into a werewolf (and that a werewolf could shrink back to the size of a mere man) did defy logic. Griger could not account for it, but he knew it to be so, and he said as much. Farbin, shaken by the confidence in Griger’s tone, nervously scratched the back of his neck and looked constipated. “Put aside what you think you know and ask yourself. What if it is a wolf-man?”
“But what if it isn’t?” Farbin countered.
Griger ticked his head to the side in acquiescence. “Maybe it’s not. Maybe your men have failed to uncover a den large enough to house a seven foot tall monster. Maybe they’ve been looking up each other’s backsides instead of where they should be.”
A dark shadow flickered across Farbin’s face. “My men are highly trained and highly skilled.”
“That’s why you came to me.”
Farbin fumed. “I came to you because you have experience in such things.”
“Right,” Griger said. “I do. And I’m telling you - in my expert opinion - that if there is no den, the wolf is a changeling. I cannot explain the science behind how and why it is a changeling. I don’t know how it can happen...but it does. You have to consider the possibility that you are looking for a phantom, that your wolf may be out there right this second ploughing a field or herding sheep and not asleep in a cave waiting to be found and made.”
Farbin turned away and put his hands on his hips. No shoulder had ever been colder, and for a second, Griger thought the old man was going to send him back to the gallows. “Alright,” Farbin finally said, “suppose it is a half-breed. What then?”
“I want to see where the latest attack happened.”
A half an hour later, Griger and Farbin stood before a large stone house with a slate roof and wide windows. A dirt drive looped around an ornate fountain and tall trees rustled in the new breeze. Several Provincial Guardsmen accompanied them, all with swords and crossbows and one, the commander, with a rare flintlock on his hip. Farbin led Gringer to the west side of the structure. “The wolf came in through the servants’ entrance,” he explained. A set of paw prints led to the door and Gringer knelt to study them. Roughly half a foot apart, they were slightly larger than any other he had seen.
Inside, the house was dark and cold, shadows clustered in corners like demons waiting for the fall of night to advance their ghoulish aims. Dried blood stained the wooden floors and spackled the bare walls. “Has anyone seen this creature and lived but the boy?”
Farbin shook his head. “No.” His face was white and strained, the somber, funeral atmosphere affecting him.
“You’ve told me everything?”
“Yes.”
Griger nodded to himself. If the wolf were a changeling, someone, somewhere likely would have seen it coming or going. That was a strike against his theory. On the other hand, there were likely dozens of isolated farms and homesteads scattered through the surrounding countryside. The wolf could be anyone from anywhere.
“I want to talk to the locals,” Griger said as he and Farbin walked back to the carriage.
“Right.”
“I’ll also need a team of men at my disposal,” Griger said. “And a sword.”
They were sitting across from each other in the carriage’s enclosed cab. Without, the sky was beginning to cool to purple and evening gloom stealthy crept from the forest. “We’ll get you one.”
“It must be made with silver,” Griger said.
Farbin frowned. “Silver is a poor alloy for sword-making.”
“But it’s the only alloy for werewolf killing,” Griger said. “It shouldn’t be made entirely of silver, but there must be some in it, the more, the better.
Farbin nodded that he understood.
By the time they made it back to the village, full dark had fallen. The streets stood deserted, the animals locked up for the night and most of the people hunkered in their homes. A few guards walked the lanes and dooyards, bows and swords at the ready, and a stray cat with no tail slunk furtively between piles of refuse, its ears laid flat against its skull and its fur matted and crisscrossed with scars from battles past.
The only activity was at the pub attached to the inn, where lights burned in the segmented windows and the chatter of many voices drifted into the street, occasionally flaring in laughter or song. Apparently, those hearty souls refused to let a wolf stand between them and their end-of-day festivities.
Griger’s respect for them increased.
Before entering, Farbin and Griger called on the blacksmith, a burly man with a bald head and a mustache that reminded Griger of walruses he had killed and eaten at the top of the world. Griger explained his need and impressed upon the man a sense of urgency. “I need it as soon as you can possibly have it ready.”
The blacksmith nodded gamely. “I’ll have it by dawn.”
Farbin took out his purse and paid, then they made their way to the inn.
Inside, a roaring fire crackled in the stone hearth and lamps on the walls sent shadows flickering across the floor. A dozen men sat at the bar with stines of beer and a half dozen more occupied the many tables in the middle of the room. A barkeep kept the drinks flowing while a pretty waitress with her blonde hair done up in an elaborate braid like a golden tiara brought trays of beer and pretzels to the tables.
Griger and Farbin sat at an empty table near the fireplace and Farbin removed his gloves. “Men will make merry even while the world burns around them,” he mused.
“Why not,” Griger said, “they can’t do it in the grave.”
The women came over and they ordered a pitcher of beer and a sandwich each. While they waited, Griger went to every man one-by-one and asked them about the wolf. They responded, to a man, with an eye roll or a dismissive laugh. None were worried in the slightest. One man lifted his brow in a pitying sort of way and looked Griger up and down as though he were mad. “Werewolves? Why, those were banished from the Realm centuries ago, it’s all much ado about nothing.”
“It’s a big wolf,” the barkeep said, “and dangerous too, that much is fact. But it’s a lot of hysteria. People today are too goddamn soft. In my time, we had wolves and bears too. If they acted out of line, we hunted them down and cut their heads off.”
The last man Griger came to was a wispy, white-haired oldster with rheumy eyes and three days’ worth of stubble covering his angular chin. Baggy brown clothes, old and wrinkled and caked in the dirt of the field, hung slack from his scrawny frame, and his long, spindly fingers threaded through the handle of his mug like fleshless bone. If Griger had ever seen a man who bore the official title “Town Drunk” he wouldn’t look the part any more than the old man.
Before Griger could ask him a single question, he spoke in a rusty voice that conjured images of graveyard gates in the dark Province of Helem. “I seen it,” he said, “and it weren’t no regular wolf neither.”
The barkeep sniffed. “You see lots of things, Sel. Like them little pink elephants.”
A wave of mean-spirited laughter ran through the bar, and Sel’s jaw clenched. Griger sensed that Sel was often made sport of at the bar.
Ignoring the other, Griger asked, “You’ve seen it?”
Sel nodded and held up three fingers. “Thrice, in fact,” he said with a belch.
“Tell me.”
The old timer looked up at him with a twist of suspicion. “Down by the road leadin’ up,” he said.
“All three times?”
“All three times,” Sel confirmed.
Once a mason, Sel had moved to the village ten years before to try his hand at farming, he explained. His homestead, comprising five acres, a tumbledown barn, and a decomposing shack masquerading as a house, sat below the walls, in a hollow between the hill and the river. Many nights, he sat on the front porch and “communed with the King” (King Rum, Griger assumed). From that perch, he witnessed “The damned beast” loping toward town. “The first time, I seen’t it over in the road,” he said, pronouncing road as rud. “I have good eyesight and I knew right off it weren’t normal, so I jumped outta my chair and ducked down real low so ways he couldn’t see me.”
Sel couldn’t provide a description of the wolf beyond “near eight damn feet tall and built like a mountain” but Griger didn’t need one. The old man’s story supported his supposition that the wolf was coming from somewhere else and not a den in the hills. Why would it come down the middle of the road each time? The only thing to the south was the river and open fields dotted by stands of forest, all of which Farbin’s men had already searched.
Werewolves are nocturnal creatures who sequester themselves somewhere dark and dry during the day. Farbin’s men should have found it by now. That they hadn’t suggested that it was a changeling.
Thanking Sel for his help, Griger went back to the table and sat across from Farbin. “The baron’s house lies in the direction of the river,” he said, more to himself than to the Governor. “What of the other attacks?”
“Mainly in that area,” Farbin said, “why?”
“The changeling - and that’s what it is - comes from across the river. How many homesteads are there beyond the banks?”
“At least two dozen,” Farbin said.
Griger crossed his arms and thought for a moment. “I want your men, tomorrow, out there going door to door with garlic. Make everyone they come across smell it and anyone who sneezes is put under watch.”
The Governor looked stricken. “But...why?”
“Changelings are allergic to garlic,” Griger said.
Farbin pursed his lips in contemplation. “Alright,” he said, “I’ll have them start at first light.”
After dining, they adjourned to their rooms, Farbin on one side of the hall and Griger on the other. A team of six Guardsmen took up position in the empty saloon and kept watch, ready to roll out at a moment’s notice. Griger threw the window open and perched on the ledge, the night breeze washing over him and rustling his graying hair. He rolled a cigarette, lit it with the bedside candle, and looked up at the glowing face of the waxing moon. Tomorrow night it would be full and the changeling would be compelled to turn and hunt as the tide was compelled to crest. It could come tonight still, but unless it was killed, it would return tomorrow for certain, mad with bloodlust.
Well past midnight, Griger blew out the candle and retired. The mattress was far too soft and it took him nearly a half hour of tossing, turning, and muttering curses to himself to find a position he liked. Once he did, he fell into a light sleep from which he was aroused near dawn by a knock at the door. One of the guards informed him that the blacksmith was finished with his sword, and after dressing, he and Farbin went to collect it. Comprising a simple blade with a guard and a grip, it was far from the most opulent weapon Griger had ever wielded, but it was well-suited to his needs and fit comfortably in his hand.
Back at the inn, Farbin gathered every available man under his command, including the constable and his three deputies, and ordered them to sweep the countryside as Griger had suggested the night before. They showed no reaction despite their lord’s strange request, and departed in a single file line.
The saloon opened for breakfast at six and Griger and Farbin each had a plate of eggs, bacon, and beans. People began to drift in as they ate, Sel the Drunkard at the head of the pack. The maiden, who quartered somewhere upstairs, came down in a simple white dress beneath a waist apron, and Griger’s eyes tracked her as she carried out her functions. The dress - loose and high cut - revealed nothing of her bosom, but pulled tight across her bottom when she leaned over to set food and coffee in front of her guests. Their gazes met, and her eyes flicked quickly away like two timid minnows in a fish bowl.
She was beautiful.
She reminded him of someone.
His mind went back to the jagged mountains atop the world, to a little cabin where weary travellers waited out the snowstorms that raged sometimes for weeks in the winter. There, in one of the most isolated outposts of the Realm, lived a woman Griger had known. She was tall and gaunt whereas the barmaid was average and healthy, her hair was black to the maiden’s blonde, but their eyes were the same breathtaking hazel. Now, staring at his plate, his chest stirred in a way that it hadn’t in years.
He didn’t like it.
“...else,” Farbin was saying.
“Yeah,” Griger said, as though he knew what Farbin had said. Now, the woman he loved one winter was on his mind and his mood was verging on foul. He recalled the way her hair brushed the creamy slope of her throat when she turned her head, the sound of her laughter, how her heels dug into his behind, urging him deeper unto her.
He was young, then, and a fool. People, he learned later, come and people go. Loving someone...indeed even hating them...was pointless, for in a breath of summer wind, they’re gone.
After finishing with breakfast, Farbin requested a metal tub be filled with water so that he could bathe. While he did that, Griger threaded his sword through his belt and walked down to the river, keeping his eyes open for wolf tracks. He spotted a few in the dirt edging the road, all pointing in the direction from which he had just come, and squatted down to examine one more closely.
Just before reaching the water, Sel’s farm appeared on the right, the main house seeming to sag in the middle as though under the burden of years and the field out back overgrown and gone to seed. The place looked as though it had died, come back to life, then died again. The screen door, which naturally hung askew, banged open, and Sel himself backed out butt first, a ceramic pot in his hands. He turned, saw Griger, and hesitated, then ducked his head and scurried down the stairs, disappearing around the side of the house Griger lingered a moment, then followed, tangles of grass pulling at his boots. In the back, a clear patch boasted several pots like the one Sel had come out with, each blossoming with an assortment of multicolored flowers. Sel knelt before one and heaped rich soil in with his hands. A gust of wind flipped his lank, white hair back and forth, and a satisfied smile played at the corners of his thin mouth.
“You garden?” Griger asked.
Sel shot him a dirty look. “I do,” he said, a defensive edge in his voice. He stopped, favored the flowers with a sober look, and added, “These plants are the only friends I’ve got.” He chuckled self-consciously.
“Plants seem like they’d make poor friends,” Griger said. “When the first frost comes, they leave you.”
Sel ticked his head to one side in acquiescence. “Tis better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.”
An image of the girl at the top of the world flashed across Griger’s mind, and for a moment he could feel, feel, her presence. “I don’t believe that,” Griger said. “Loss is hard for a man who’s known love.”
“Still better than never knowing it at all,” Sel said and got stiffly to his feet. He dusted his hands on his pants.
“You’ve never lost someone,” Griger said.
“You’ve never loved someone,” Sel countered.
Griger stiffened. Mouthy old bastard, yes I have.
“What do you want?” Sel asked.
“I wanted to ask you about the werewolf.”
Sel’s face crinkled. “I told you everything I know.” He started walking back to the front of the house, and Griger fell in beside him.
“Is there anywhere around here you think a werewolf might live?” Griger asked. “Caves? Dens? Anything.”
“There’s some caves about,” Sel said, “other than that, I can’t say.”
They were on the porch now, Sel holding the door open.
“Can you tell me your story one more time?” Griger asked. “Maybe it might jog something you forgot.”
Sel sighed. “I don’t have nothin’, okay?”
He started to go inside, but Griger stopped him. “Please?”
The old man looked at him, then sighed. “Fine. Come in.”
They sat in Sel’s tiny and cluttered parlor. The furniture was as old and threadbare as the man who owned it, and the simple walls were crowded with old photos, many of them featuring a smiling woman with dark hair. She looked nothing like the girl at the top of the world, but Griger was reminded of her anyway. “Your wife?” he asked.
Sel, seated in an armchair across from him, busied himself pouring Griger a cup of tea. “Yes,” he said shortly.
From his tone - and the woman’s absence - Griger inferred that she was dead. “I’m sorry.”
Sel’s hand shook as he pushed the cup across the table. “So am I,” he said.
“Children?” Griger asked.
“Three,” Sel said. “Two boys and a girl.” Tears crept into the old man’s faded eyes and he fixed his gaze on a point over Griger’s shoulder. Open displays of emotion made Griger uncomfortable, and he shifted in his seat, sorry that he had brought the topic up. “We were married thirty years,” Sel said. His lips trembled and Griger thought he was going to break down crying. Instead, he smiled. “Those were good years.”
Griger nodded to himself. “I bet.”
He must not have sounded convincing, because Sel creased his brow. “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Ever loved someone?”
“No.”
Sel looked at him with a frank directness that bordered on mind-reading, and though it wasn’t possible, Griger could almost imagine the old man was seeing into his mind...and his heart. “You’re a liar.”
Griger considered his reply for a long time. “When I was a boy,” he said. “I thought I was in love.”
“What happened?”
Perhaps the old man had cast some kind of pall over him...or maybe he was in a rare mood...but Griger heard himself answer honestly. “I left her.”
A heavy silence lay between them.
“You left her?”
Griger nodded. “I moved on. She had her ways and I had mine. I didn’t see us working.”
“You regret it.”
“Yes,” Griger responded instantly. “I wish I tried.”
Sel nodded understandingly. “All boys make mistakes. Some are just luckier than others, I reckon.” He laughed, his posture relaxing, and Griger realized he was starting to like the old bastard.
“True,” he said. “Now your story…”
Sighing, Sel lifted a hand. “I don’t have much ways else to say.” He ran through his story just as he had before, with no additions or subtractions.
Griger nodded that he was satisfied, and got to his feet. “That’ll be all.”
Sel walked him to the door and stuck out his hand. “That damned thing’s a monster,” he said as they shook, “you watch yourself.”
“I can handle a werewolf,” Griger assured him.
Later on, after returning to the inn, Griger and Farbin rode out to meet the men on the other side of the river, catching up to them at a fork in the road. “No one’s sneezed or broken out, sire,” Farbin’s second-in-command, a tall, rodent-faced man, reported.
“Expand the dragnet,” Griger said.
Rat-face looked at Farbin for confirmation, and the Governor nodded.
They would find the wolf...or the wolf would find them.
Griger wanted the former, but would settle for the latter.
If he had to.
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Griger Kel-Am watched from his cell in the old town jailhouse as workers busily erected a scaffolding in the courtyard below. It was shaping up nicely, he thought with an appreciative nod; the skeletal beams reminded him of the bones of dead animals in the Karel Desert and that comparison almost disturbed him.
Which was no easy feat. Griger had seen the worst the world had to offer. He fought beasts in the Staygin Mountains, fended off feral bandits in the Jarel Plains, and weathered more attacks, fights, battles, and death than most people even knew existed. Nothing on earth could rattle him. He couldn’t afford to let himself be shaken. Life, he had learned, was like a surging storm tide. You either stand strong against it, or you get knocked down and swept away. Griger refused to be swept away. He refused to wind up like the old bones he stumbled across on the North Road and in the snowy stepps at the top of the world. A man must be hard and stoic to survive, and he must be harder and colder to thrive.
Despite his grizzled face, many scars, dead eyes, and unseemly facial hair, Griger, a sword for hire since before the Great Plague, had always thrived.
Sighing, Griger left the window and walked over to the door; three brisk paces. He threaded his arms through the bars and tried his best to look up the corridor. In the cells across from him, other men, their faces dirty and white, cowered, waiting for their judgement.
Their open fear disgusted Griger.
Cowards.
Griger wasn’t afraid to die. Dying was easy; you closed your eyes and went to sleep. Living...living was hard, every day a knock down, drag out fight for dominance against something. Outlaws, nature, your own inner darkness. He did not seek death, but he welcomed it. The prospect of a noose tightening around his neck, of his body jerking and dancing before many jeering eyes and spitting mouths, however, almost bothered him.
But as a wise old man he once knew had said, This too shall pass.
A sardonic smile touched Griger’s chapped lips and he shook his head like a man who couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Of all the things he’d done in his life to deserve a hanging, self-defense is what did him in. Ha.
Two weeks ago, he was following the river from the North, on foot and alone save for his sword and his rucksack. He stopped at a tide pool to drink, and was beset by a man with a knife. In his frock coat and rubberized boots, he was too well dressed to be a highwayman; he never spoke a word until he lay in the grass, his throat laid open and gushing rich red blood. “Scoundrel,” he gurgled.
Griger relieved him of his boots and pocketbook and carried on. Before dusk, he came across the village and rented a room at the inn. Women in cheap, homespun dresses haunted the halls, knocking at doors to sell their company, and Griger, lying in bed by the flickering light of a lamp, was considering spending the rest of the money on one when three constables broke down the door.
The man he killed, they told him later, was the son of the mayor. At that moment, Griger knew he was in trouble.
They refused to believe that the son attacked first and pointed to the things Griger had taken from his as proof of overland piracy, theft, and murder. He was tried in a packed courtroom and found guilty, standing tall and proud but alone as no lawyer in the land would take his case.
Out in the courtyard, someone shouted, and a team of horses neighed, Griger, sitting on the edge of his cot, looked up at the window. The light was getting weaker as night approached. Shadows, long and black, fell through the slats and made unwholesome shapes across the earthen floor. Down the hall, a man cried out for water, and elsewhere, someone raked a metal cup back and forth across the bars. Would they hang him tonight, Griger wondered, or would they wait for dawn?
“You,” someone spat.
Griger looked up to find the mayor standing at the bars, his bloated face filled with hatred. Another man was with him, this one taller and thinner. They were both clad in the finest garments, but the stranger was undoubtedly better suited. Griger took him for a government official.
“What do you want?” Griger asked, an edge in his voice.
The mayor opened his mouth to speak, but the stranger silenced him. “My name is Urick Farbin. I’m the governor of Ezk Province and I have a proposition for you.”
“What’s that?”
Farbin flashed a tight smile.
It looked to Griger like he wouldn’t be hanged at all.
And that made him smile.
***
Griger watched the countryside pass slowly by, all green hills, trickling brooks, and dense thickets. The occasional straw hut loomed out of the wilderness like an antsy thief, and six miles out of the village, they passed a stately manor house that could only have belonged to the mayor.
It was mid-afternoon and the overcast day wrapped itself around Griger like a wet blanket. The previous night, Governor Farbin sprang Griger from his cell and brought him to the inn, where he was kept under armed guard. Griger spent most of the evening in a straight back chair and whittling. You don’t have to worry, he said to the sentry standing at the door, I’m not going anywhere.
And he wasn’t. He was not an honor bound man by any stretch, but Farbin saved his life, and Griger reckoned that earned him a little loyalty.
The guards didn’t stand down, but Griger didn’t blame them. He wouldn’t have either.
In the morning, they set off in a horse drawn carriage, heading northwest along the Western Road. Now, hours later, Griger sat next to the Governor, who wore a dark cloak and wide-brimmed hat befitting his office. Beside him, the driver held the reins and stared ahead with the practiced indifference of a man used to tuning out things he wasn’t supposed to hear.
“Will you explain to me what I’m doing?” Griger asked.
Farbin was quiet for a moment, then he looked up at the sky, the muted light bathing his craggy features. “Your file says that you’ve done work for the Government.”
“Some,” Griger replied.
“You’ve handled things of a singular nature,” the old man continued. “Things that most other men have never dreamed possible.”
Gringer nodded. He had. His only oath was to himself, and he worked for whoever paid him the highest sum. Men like him were called mercenaries but he preferred to think of himself as a businessman.
“There’s a matter in a nearby village that has been ongoing for quite some time,” Farbin said, picking his words carefully. “I have sent my best agents and they’ve done nothing for it. When the paperwork on you came to my office, I checked your name, as I do all condemned men, and knew at once that you were the man for this job.”
Griger was almost touched. “What’s the job?”
The Governor turned to face Griger, his expression bloodless and sober, as though he had something great yet terrible to impart upon him. “Do you believe in werewolves?”
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
“Have you ever killed one?”
Griger hesitated. “No,” he said, “not personally, but I was with a party that did.”
Five years before, Griger wintered in a village among the steep foothills guarding the forbidding expanse of Mount Grez. In the deepest, darkest days of the freeze, local livestock began to die, ripped asunder and strewn across snowy fields like trash. Wolf tracks larger than any Griger had ever seen led to and from each scene, and at night, high, ghostly howls rose above the shrieking wind, curdling the blood of even the most sturdy men.
After a watchman on patrol was attacked and gutted in the main square, the men of the village banded together and tracked the beast, eventually cornering it in a cave near a frozen river. Even if he lived to be a thousand, Griger would never forget the monster they encountered. Seven feet tall, coated in matted gray fur, its face canine yet human, its eyes blazed with the fires of hell, and as the men approached, it snapped and snarled, the sounds it made so close to words that even now, Griger wondered if it were trying to speak. They beset it with swords and torches, and when the dust settled, five men were dead and three were wounded. The wolf lay crumpled on the ground, decapitated and aflame. Even with no head, even with its heart divorced from its body, it screeched as the fire consumed it, a high, hitching wail that haunted Griger’s dreams for many moons after.
Farbin nodded. “I figured as much. A man as well-travelled as you has to have seen such things.”
He went on to explain that a suspected werewolf was loose in the countryside around the village of Koreth, a tiny fishing port on the sloped and muddy banks of the Rey River. Three weeks before, sheep and horses began to turn up dead, their bodies laid open and their intestines pulled from their stomachs. Before long, travellers along the Western Road started to die in a similar manner. Every time a new victim appeared, officials found large wolf tracks and strands of fur nearby.
Several nights ago, it broke into the home of a land baron and killed him, his wife, and his daughter. His young son survived, but was blinded in one eye.
‘It was a massive beast,’ the boy told the Governor, a personal friend of the baron. ‘It stood seven feet tall, was as wide as it was long, and had the snarling face of a man mixed with a dog.’
“You want me to kill it,” Griger said. It was not a question.
“Yes.”
The carriage jostled as its big wheels splashed through ruts and puddles. “And in return…?”
“You’ll get a full and unconditional pardon.”
Hmm. Griger considered the offer carefully, even though he was in no position to bargain. “Alright,” he said at last, “I’ll do it.”
They arrived at the village three hours later. Perched on the banks of the lazy river, it seemed a single estate rather than a town. A stone wall, roughly a dozen feet high, enclosed it, pitched roofs visible beyond. Two guards in helmets and chainmail, swords on their hips and crossbows in their hands, stood at the gate, their expressions stony and as hardscrabble as the fields sloping away from the walls.
Inside, tiny buildings lined narrow dirt streets and people in plain, homespun clothes went about their business, pushing carts, hawking vegetables, and playing dice. Old men sat in canned chairs before the town pub and a group of boys chased each other back and forth through shadowed warrens, their faces smudged and weatherbeaten beyond their years. Chickens and pigs, both plump and hale, ran free, the former flapping their impotent wings and the latter snorting happily as they wallowed and shat. Griger spotted a blacksmith in his quarters, striking an anvil with a hammer, and wondered idly if he had any interesting items for sale.
“The people here are stubborn and refuse to flee,” Farbin said.
Griger faced forward. “These types usually are.”
“You are not to worry about their safety,” Farbin warned. “They can see to themselves. Your only concern is to be the wolf.”
“Understood.”
The driver parked near the town inn and tied the horse to a hitching post while Griger and Farbin got out. Griger rolled his neck and flexed his shoulders. After so many years of walking wherever he went, he was unaccustomed to sitting for long periods and inevitably ended any long, stationary trek sore.
Past the batwing doors, a shadowy lobby lit by candlelight greeted them. Farbin led Griger directly up the stairs and to a tidy room with a single, neatly made bed and a desk beneath the window. “These are your quarters,” Farbin said.
“Spacious,” Griger said unsarcastically. He sat on the edge of the bed. “What leads do you have on this wolf?”
“None beyond what I’ve told you,” Farbn said. “My men have scoured the countryside but they haven’t found a thing.”
Griger hummed. “No tracks? Droppings? Nothing at all?”
“Not beyond what I’ve told you.”
That was odd. Werewolves rarely strayed far from their den. Unless they were of the rare half-breed that turned upon the cycle of the moon, man at day and beast by night. But those were as common as an honest man in the High Council - not very damned common at all.
“What are you thinking?” Farbin asked.
Griger said what was on his mind.
“But those aren’t real,” the Governor said, a hint of confusion in his voice.
“I tell you they are.”
Farbin’s brow furrowed with incredulity. “A man cannot simply change his form, nor can a wolf, for that matter. It goes against all logic.”
All Griger could do was spread his hands. That a man - even a large one - could transform into a werewolf (and that a werewolf could shrink back to the size of a mere man) did defy logic. Griger could not account for it, but he knew it to be so, and he said as much. Farbin, shaken by the confidence in Griger’s tone, nervously scratched the back of his neck and looked constipated. “Put aside what you think you know and ask yourself. What if it is a wolf-man?”
“But what if it isn’t?” Farbin countered.
Griger ticked his head to the side in acquiescence. “Maybe it’s not. Maybe your men have failed to uncover a den large enough to house a seven foot tall monster. Maybe they’ve been looking up each other’s backsides instead of where they should be.”
A dark shadow flickered across Farbin’s face. “My men are highly trained and highly skilled.”
“That’s why you came to me.”
Farbin fumed. “I came to you because you have experience in such things.”
“Right,” Griger said. “I do. And I’m telling you - in my expert opinion - that if there is no den, the wolf is a changeling. I cannot explain the science behind how and why it is a changeling. I don’t know how it can happen...but it does. You have to consider the possibility that you are looking for a phantom, that your wolf may be out there right this second ploughing a field or herding sheep and not asleep in a cave waiting to be found and made.”
Farbin turned away and put his hands on his hips. No shoulder had ever been colder, and for a second, Griger thought the old man was going to send him back to the gallows. “Alright,” Farbin finally said, “suppose it is a half-breed. What then?”
“I want to see where the latest attack happened.”
A half an hour later, Griger and Farbin stood before a large stone house with a slate roof and wide windows. A dirt drive looped around an ornate fountain and tall trees rustled in the new breeze. Several Provincial Guardsmen accompanied them, all with swords and crossbows and one, the commander, with a rare flintlock on his hip. Farbin led Gringer to the west side of the structure. “The wolf came in through the servants’ entrance,” he explained. A set of paw prints led to the door and Gringer knelt to study them. Roughly half a foot apart, they were slightly larger than any other he had seen.
Inside, the house was dark and cold, shadows clustered in corners like demons waiting for the fall of night to advance their ghoulish aims. Dried blood stained the wooden floors and spackled the bare walls. “Has anyone seen this creature and lived but the boy?”
Farbin shook his head. “No.” His face was white and strained, the somber, funeral atmosphere affecting him.
“You’ve told me everything?”
“Yes.”
Griger nodded to himself. If the wolf were a changeling, someone, somewhere likely would have seen it coming or going. That was a strike against his theory. On the other hand, there were likely dozens of isolated farms and homesteads scattered through the surrounding countryside. The wolf could be anyone from anywhere.
“I want to talk to the locals,” Griger said as he and Farbin walked back to the carriage.
“Right.”
“I’ll also need a team of men at my disposal,” Griger said. “And a sword.”
They were sitting across from each other in the carriage’s enclosed cab. Without, the sky was beginning to cool to purple and evening gloom stealthy crept from the forest. “We’ll get you one.”
“It must be made with silver,” Griger said.
Farbin frowned. “Silver is a poor alloy for sword-making.”
“But it’s the only alloy for werewolf killing,” Griger said. “It shouldn’t be made entirely of silver, but there must be some in it, the more, the better.
Farbin nodded that he understood.
By the time they made it back to the village, full dark had fallen. The streets stood deserted, the animals locked up for the night and most of the people hunkered in their homes. A few guards walked the lanes and dooyards, bows and swords at the ready, and a stray cat with no tail slunk furtively between piles of refuse, its ears laid flat against its skull and its fur matted and crisscrossed with scars from battles past.
The only activity was at the pub attached to the inn, where lights burned in the segmented windows and the chatter of many voices drifted into the street, occasionally flaring in laughter or song. Apparently, those hearty souls refused to let a wolf stand between them and their end-of-day festivities.
Griger’s respect for them increased.
Before entering, Farbin and Griger called on the blacksmith, a burly man with a bald head and a mustache that reminded Griger of walruses he had killed and eaten at the top of the world. Griger explained his need and impressed upon the man a sense of urgency. “I need it as soon as you can possibly have it ready.”
The blacksmith nodded gamely. “I’ll have it by dawn.”
Farbin took out his purse and paid, then they made their way to the inn.
Inside, a roaring fire crackled in the stone hearth and lamps on the walls sent shadows flickering across the floor. A dozen men sat at the bar with stines of beer and a half dozen more occupied the many tables in the middle of the room. A barkeep kept the drinks flowing while a pretty waitress with her blonde hair done up in an elaborate braid like a golden tiara brought trays of beer and pretzels to the tables.
Griger and Farbin sat at an empty table near the fireplace and Farbin removed his gloves. “Men will make merry even while the world burns around them,” he mused.
“Why not,” Griger said, “they can’t do it in the grave.”
The women came over and they ordered a pitcher of beer and a sandwich each. While they waited, Griger went to every man one-by-one and asked them about the wolf. They responded, to a man, with an eye roll or a dismissive laugh. None were worried in the slightest. One man lifted his brow in a pitying sort of way and looked Griger up and down as though he were mad. “Werewolves? Why, those were banished from the Realm centuries ago, it’s all much ado about nothing.”
“It’s a big wolf,” the barkeep said, “and dangerous too, that much is fact. But it’s a lot of hysteria. People today are too goddamn soft. In my time, we had wolves and bears too. If they acted out of line, we hunted them down and cut their heads off.”
The last man Griger came to was a wispy, white-haired oldster with rheumy eyes and three days’ worth of stubble covering his angular chin. Baggy brown clothes, old and wrinkled and caked in the dirt of the field, hung slack from his scrawny frame, and his long, spindly fingers threaded through the handle of his mug like fleshless bone. If Griger had ever seen a man who bore the official title “Town Drunk” he wouldn’t look the part any more than the old man.
Before Griger could ask him a single question, he spoke in a rusty voice that conjured images of graveyard gates in the dark Province of Helem. “I seen it,” he said, “and it weren’t no regular wolf neither.”
The barkeep sniffed. “You see lots of things, Sel. Like them little pink elephants.”
A wave of mean-spirited laughter ran through the bar, and Sel’s jaw clenched. Griger sensed that Sel was often made sport of at the bar.
Ignoring the other, Griger asked, “You’ve seen it?”
Sel nodded and held up three fingers. “Thrice, in fact,” he said with a belch.
“Tell me.”
The old timer looked up at him with a twist of suspicion. “Down by the road leadin’ up,” he said.
“All three times?”
“All three times,” Sel confirmed.
Once a mason, Sel had moved to the village ten years before to try his hand at farming, he explained. His homestead, comprising five acres, a tumbledown barn, and a decomposing shack masquerading as a house, sat below the walls, in a hollow between the hill and the river. Many nights, he sat on the front porch and “communed with the King” (King Rum, Griger assumed). From that perch, he witnessed “The damned beast” loping toward town. “The first time, I seen’t it over in the road,” he said, pronouncing road as rud. “I have good eyesight and I knew right off it weren’t normal, so I jumped outta my chair and ducked down real low so ways he couldn’t see me.”
Sel couldn’t provide a description of the wolf beyond “near eight damn feet tall and built like a mountain” but Griger didn’t need one. The old man’s story supported his supposition that the wolf was coming from somewhere else and not a den in the hills. Why would it come down the middle of the road each time? The only thing to the south was the river and open fields dotted by stands of forest, all of which Farbin’s men had already searched.
Werewolves are nocturnal creatures who sequester themselves somewhere dark and dry during the day. Farbin’s men should have found it by now. That they hadn’t suggested that it was a changeling.
Thanking Sel for his help, Griger went back to the table and sat across from Farbin. “The baron’s house lies in the direction of the river,” he said, more to himself than to the Governor. “What of the other attacks?”
“Mainly in that area,” Farbin said, “why?”
“The changeling - and that’s what it is - comes from across the river. How many homesteads are there beyond the banks?”
“At least two dozen,” Farbin said.
Griger crossed his arms and thought for a moment. “I want your men, tomorrow, out there going door to door with garlic. Make everyone they come across smell it and anyone who sneezes is put under watch.”
The Governor looked stricken. “But...why?”
“Changelings are allergic to garlic,” Griger said.
Farbin pursed his lips in contemplation. “Alright,” he said, “I’ll have them start at first light.”
After dining, they adjourned to their rooms, Farbin on one side of the hall and Griger on the other. A team of six Guardsmen took up position in the empty saloon and kept watch, ready to roll out at a moment’s notice. Griger threw the window open and perched on the ledge, the night breeze washing over him and rustling his graying hair. He rolled a cigarette, lit it with the bedside candle, and looked up at the glowing face of the waxing moon. Tomorrow night it would be full and the changeling would be compelled to turn and hunt as the tide was compelled to crest. It could come tonight still, but unless it was killed, it would return tomorrow for certain, mad with bloodlust.
Well past midnight, Griger blew out the candle and retired. The mattress was far too soft and it took him nearly a half hour of tossing, turning, and muttering curses to himself to find a position he liked. Once he did, he fell into a light sleep from which he was aroused near dawn by a knock at the door. One of the guards informed him that the blacksmith was finished with his sword, and after dressing, he and Farbin went to collect it. Comprising a simple blade with a guard and a grip, it was far from the most opulent weapon Griger had ever wielded, but it was well-suited to his needs and fit comfortably in his hand.
Back at the inn, Farbin gathered every available man under his command, including the constable and his three deputies, and ordered them to sweep the countryside as Griger had suggested the night before. They showed no reaction despite their lord’s strange request, and departed in a single file line.
The saloon opened for breakfast at six and Griger and Farbin each had a plate of eggs, bacon, and beans. People began to drift in as they ate, Sel the Drunkard at the head of the pack. The maiden, who quartered somewhere upstairs, came down in a simple white dress beneath a waist apron, and Griger’s eyes tracked her as she carried out her functions. The dress - loose and high cut - revealed nothing of her bosom, but pulled tight across her bottom when she leaned over to set food and coffee in front of her guests. Their gazes met, and her eyes flicked quickly away like two timid minnows in a fish bowl.
She was beautiful.
She reminded him of someone.
His mind went back to the jagged mountains atop the world, to a little cabin where weary travellers waited out the snowstorms that raged sometimes for weeks in the winter. There, in one of the most isolated outposts of the Realm, lived a woman Griger had known. She was tall and gaunt whereas the barmaid was average and healthy, her hair was black to the maiden’s blonde, but their eyes were the same breathtaking hazel. Now, staring at his plate, his chest stirred in a way that it hadn’t in years.
He didn’t like it.
“...else,” Farbin was saying.
“Yeah,” Griger said, as though he knew what Farbin had said. Now, the woman he loved one winter was on his mind and his mood was verging on foul. He recalled the way her hair brushed the creamy slope of her throat when she turned her head, the sound of her laughter, how her heels dug into his behind, urging him deeper unto her.
He was young, then, and a fool. People, he learned later, come and people go. Loving someone...indeed even hating them...was pointless, for in a breath of summer wind, they’re gone.
After finishing with breakfast, Farbin requested a metal tub be filled with water so that he could bathe. While he did that, Griger threaded his sword through his belt and walked down to the river, keeping his eyes open for wolf tracks. He spotted a few in the dirt edging the road, all pointing in the direction from which he had just come, and squatted down to examine one more closely.
Just before reaching the water, Sel’s farm appeared on the right, the main house seeming to sag in the middle as though under the burden of years and the field out back overgrown and gone to seed. The place looked as though it had died, come back to life, then died again. The screen door, which naturally hung askew, banged open, and Sel himself backed out butt first, a ceramic pot in his hands. He turned, saw Griger, and hesitated, then ducked his head and scurried down the stairs, disappearing around the side of the house Griger lingered a moment, then followed, tangles of grass pulling at his boots. In the back, a clear patch boasted several pots like the one Sel had come out with, each blossoming with an assortment of multicolored flowers. Sel knelt before one and heaped rich soil in with his hands. A gust of wind flipped his lank, white hair back and forth, and a satisfied smile played at the corners of his thin mouth.
“You garden?” Griger asked.
Sel shot him a dirty look. “I do,” he said, a defensive edge in his voice. He stopped, favored the flowers with a sober look, and added, “These plants are the only friends I’ve got.” He chuckled self-consciously.
“Plants seem like they’d make poor friends,” Griger said. “When the first frost comes, they leave you.”
Sel ticked his head to one side in acquiescence. “Tis better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.”
An image of the girl at the top of the world flashed across Griger’s mind, and for a moment he could feel, feel, her presence. “I don’t believe that,” Griger said. “Loss is hard for a man who’s known love.”
“Still better than never knowing it at all,” Sel said and got stiffly to his feet. He dusted his hands on his pants.
“You’ve never lost someone,” Griger said.
“You’ve never loved someone,” Sel countered.
Griger stiffened. Mouthy old bastard, yes I have.
“What do you want?” Sel asked.
“I wanted to ask you about the werewolf.”
Sel’s face crinkled. “I told you everything I know.” He started walking back to the front of the house, and Griger fell in beside him.
“Is there anywhere around here you think a werewolf might live?” Griger asked. “Caves? Dens? Anything.”
“There’s some caves about,” Sel said, “other than that, I can’t say.”
They were on the porch now, Sel holding the door open.
“Can you tell me your story one more time?” Griger asked. “Maybe it might jog something you forgot.”
Sel sighed. “I don’t have nothin’, okay?”
He started to go inside, but Griger stopped him. “Please?”
The old man looked at him, then sighed. “Fine. Come in.”
They sat in Sel’s tiny and cluttered parlor. The furniture was as old and threadbare as the man who owned it, and the simple walls were crowded with old photos, many of them featuring a smiling woman with dark hair. She looked nothing like the girl at the top of the world, but Griger was reminded of her anyway. “Your wife?” he asked.
Sel, seated in an armchair across from him, busied himself pouring Griger a cup of tea. “Yes,” he said shortly.
From his tone - and the woman’s absence - Griger inferred that she was dead. “I’m sorry.”
Sel’s hand shook as he pushed the cup across the table. “So am I,” he said.
“Children?” Griger asked.
“Three,” Sel said. “Two boys and a girl.” Tears crept into the old man’s faded eyes and he fixed his gaze on a point over Griger’s shoulder. Open displays of emotion made Griger uncomfortable, and he shifted in his seat, sorry that he had brought the topic up. “We were married thirty years,” Sel said. His lips trembled and Griger thought he was going to break down crying. Instead, he smiled. “Those were good years.”
Griger nodded to himself. “I bet.”
He must not have sounded convincing, because Sel creased his brow. “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Ever loved someone?”
“No.”
Sel looked at him with a frank directness that bordered on mind-reading, and though it wasn’t possible, Griger could almost imagine the old man was seeing into his mind...and his heart. “You’re a liar.”
Griger considered his reply for a long time. “When I was a boy,” he said. “I thought I was in love.”
“What happened?”
Perhaps the old man had cast some kind of pall over him...or maybe he was in a rare mood...but Griger heard himself answer honestly. “I left her.”
A heavy silence lay between them.
“You left her?”
Griger nodded. “I moved on. She had her ways and I had mine. I didn’t see us working.”
“You regret it.”
“Yes,” Griger responded instantly. “I wish I tried.”
Sel nodded understandingly. “All boys make mistakes. Some are just luckier than others, I reckon.” He laughed, his posture relaxing, and Griger realized he was starting to like the old bastard.
“True,” he said. “Now your story…”
Sighing, Sel lifted a hand. “I don’t have much ways else to say.” He ran through his story just as he had before, with no additions or subtractions.
Griger nodded that he was satisfied, and got to his feet. “That’ll be all.”
Sel walked him to the door and stuck out his hand. “That damned thing’s a monster,” he said as they shook, “you watch yourself.”
“I can handle a werewolf,” Griger assured him.
Later on, after returning to the inn, Griger and Farbin rode out to meet the men on the other side of the river, catching up to them at a fork in the road. “No one’s sneezed or broken out, sire,” Farbin’s second-in-command, a tall, rodent-faced man, reported.
“Expand the dragnet,” Griger said.
Rat-face looked at Farbin for confirmation, and the Governor nodded.
They would find the wolf...or the wolf would find them.
Griger wanted the former, but would settle for the latter.
If he had to.
2023.03.21 00:53 specialist299 Buying a franchise or small business
I’m hoping to have a more nuanced conversation and learn from people with experience instead of a “Buying a franchise is like buying a job” canned response from folks who’ve never done this.
A close friend shared that he bought into a Trampoline Park/Arcade franchise 4 years ago. After 2-3 years of working on the business (through Covid!) while keeping his full time job, it’s now on auto-pilot with a Director who makes $70k base and 10% of profits. It’s not completely passive, but also not a hassle either. Initial investment of $1M, SBA loan of $4M and net income of $400k. He’s looking to start one more and FatFire when it gets to $200k. He will also own the underlying real estate once SBA loan is paid off in some 20 years.
That’s $600k on $2M invested, plus principal pay-down.
Such a business sounds appealing to me for diversification, as an additional income stream during retirement, and also as something to keep one engaged post retirement, but not so much as to tie you down.
Have any of you done something similar close to retirement, as a way to FatFire, or to keep busy? The numbers sound too good so what am I missing? Did he just get lucky with location etc?
submitted by specialist299 to fatFIRE [link] [comments]
A close friend shared that he bought into a Trampoline Park/Arcade franchise 4 years ago. After 2-3 years of working on the business (through Covid!) while keeping his full time job, it’s now on auto-pilot with a Director who makes $70k base and 10% of profits. It’s not completely passive, but also not a hassle either. Initial investment of $1M, SBA loan of $4M and net income of $400k. He’s looking to start one more and FatFire when it gets to $200k. He will also own the underlying real estate once SBA loan is paid off in some 20 years.
That’s $600k on $2M invested, plus principal pay-down.
Such a business sounds appealing to me for diversification, as an additional income stream during retirement, and also as something to keep one engaged post retirement, but not so much as to tie you down.
Have any of you done something similar close to retirement, as a way to FatFire, or to keep busy? The numbers sound too good so what am I missing? Did he just get lucky with location etc?