#like dad just make the font size bigger
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i haven't seen anyone talking about his dad squint yet
have you seen him
sir, that's peak dad behavior
#*leans in despite having glasses*#like dad just make the font size bigger#here gimme your phone i will show you#ok so you open settings and go down to-#honkai star rail#welt yang#i am v fond of him#love this idle so much#it caught me so off guard lmao
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City life au facts
I am announcing that from four all the way up to six years old that Antonio is a professional vet. Bruno noticed that Antonio liked animals so he bought him all the vet and animal books he could find.
Antonio usually reads the books with one of his siblings or dad so he can learn how to pronounce some words but he's learning how to pronounce some things on his own.
2. The kids have a mixture of each other's gifts because they help with missions and life-or-death situations. And who doesn't want to talk to animals, grow exotic flowers, be able to lift a house, or hear when an enemy is approaching miles away? The hearing gift isn't annoying it can only turn on when someone really needs it
3. The shape-shifting, super strength, and superhearing only activate for emergencies. The flower and Zoolinguism gifts are constant because they live in a house full of animals and therefore need to communicate with them. Isabela is mostly the only one to use her plant gift but the others will use it if they want a certain flower or need to reach something.
4. Mirabel spends her days building very colorful steampunk machines and since she was given the gift of superspeed instead of taking months to build a machine it only takes her about 3 weeks. The size of it doesn't matter. When it comes to regular days she can't use superspeed at all. The only time she can use it is when she's building something or when it's an emergency. Mirabel has made a ship, and a train(along with Luisa), a submarine, guns, and much more.
5. The other family members fancy building things as well. Antonio built mechanic mice so the big cats have something to follow when it's time to go to the barn. Dolores built her own car and Expresso machines, Isabela built many explosive devices, Luisa built and designed a literal train and Camilo made a typewriter that can produce any font and any color ink you want. He made one for himself and
(Luisa also makes toys for kids)
6. I'm gonna change the ages a little bit. Bruno left a little before Mirabel was born and the girls walked into his home a little after she and Camilo were born(they were both 6 months old). I'm changing it because these kids need a lot more time to build half of the things I've mentioned.
7. Whenever they come across a kid without parents or a kid with terrible parents the family scoop them right up and claim them as their own or take them to the orphanage where Luisa volunteers. But it's safe to say the Aventura's are a way bigger family than they were.
8. Bruno and the others teach the kids at the orphanage about everything their is to know about plants, animals, Self defense, math, writing, acting, art, science, and Robotic/mechanical engineering. They try to make it a fun learning experience for them and they always succeed. They also teach abroad.
9. When Luisa was 12 she volunteered to work at the orphanage and never left sense. When she gets older she plans on adopting.
10. I switched it to Mirabel making the doll when she was 11 so Casita could grow up and learn with Antonio and the rest of them. He looked 1 year old but he could move like a 5-year-old. It baffled everybody that still doesn't/don't know Casita was a sentient house. Casita didn't care how they looked they were just happy that they can move around on their own.
11. Doll/toddler casita stayed with Bruno a lot. Casita didn't realize that they weren't being the responsive house they were so whenever Alma or the other adults asked for something they wouldn't get a response. And once they did realize it they didn't care, what's Alma or the adults going to do about it? nothing. they responded when they wanted to or when their siblings were in the house.
12. If Antonio can't help an animal the others will step in.
13. The older kids are amazing cooks but will sometimes fool around in the kitchen just for laughs.
Isabela's bombs
Antonio's mice
Mirabel's ship, train, and submarine
Luisa's train, I can't decide between this one or that one
Dolores's espresso machine and car
Camilo's typewriter and Bruno's typewriter
I didn't mention this but Casita made a TV with their older siblings' help of course. I love steampunk anything so I had to make them steampunk too.
If you have any questions, ideas, headcanons, or drabble ideas my asks are open
#city life au#encanto au#au#bruno madrigal#mirabel madrigal#luisa magridal#isabela madrigal#antonio madrigal#casita#camilo madrigal#dolores madrigal#my asks are open
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Some of the things I have been through...
Back in my hellementary school days, there were a few teachers “2 in particular (A couple, there last name being Cole, which was very fitting for their hearts) and as for the other, even though he wasn’t nearly as bad, he was still able to make my list” (And 2 IAs, one in particular who was rarely around but was a much bigger bully) that were bullies along with 4 students in particular who were notably worse then the other bullies. I went through a lot, believe me. To top it all off there was this one time when I went to the principal's office to talk to the vice principal about the bullying from the teachers and other students and I was angry, sobbing and the works and I did not hold back on how I felt or on what I was saying, but little did I know that the system for the entire schools speakers was on, so everyone in the entire school heard everything...
Now, some of the things that was done to a good friend of mine (Who has Cerebral Palsy), well, she had an instructional assistant (Same one I had) who at times put the lock of her locker on backwards as she was being timed, sometimes also having her wear an intentionally heavy nap sack when she was walking with her crutches when she already had a hard enough time with nothing extra weighing her down, on the odd occasion had her crutches put towards the classroom door so she had to use the desks to balance herself to get to them, one day she slipped and fell in the mud on her way to one of the portables and she was forced to enter the classroom… (As for me, I have roughly 30 regular sized pages with regular sized font single spaced “I think it was around 50 or so before it was edited for me” of a bunch of the BS that happened to me).
Anyways, after the schools PA system incident, the bullying got even worse. It did not matter that mom and dad called and tried to help. No one was able to do anything at all for me, nothing (I was a caged animal with no escape/no way to get any kind of help. Even now, emotional abuse is not something that the cops will typically intervene in)... Then one day towards the end of the 7th grade I just snapped completely on one of the bullies, ripped his shirt, tackled him to the ground and would not stop going completely ballistic on him/just absolutely out of control... The lunchroom/recess supervisor who basically did pretty much nothing against emotional bullying ended up pulling us apart and if she hadn't have stepped in then I would not have stopped...
The thing about these days is with the internet, social media/etc it just seems like there is a lot more evil stuff going on because it is a lot easier to uncover it, and kids/teens (As well as adults/seniors/etc) need to be encouraged to stand up to bullies (If they can), and to stand up against bullying when they see it happen and to secretly record if things get bad enough (Recording live stream if possible just incase they get caught.having those recording being recorded to some secret place on the web that the victim can have access to those files when and if they ever need them. Recordings that will never be seen/known by the bullies if they do happen to snatch the recorder, if this advanced type of option is even possible).
As for the job end of things, with my second last boss he was a real master at manipulation (Could be one of the most vicious to one of the most loving people you have even met on the drop of a dime/flip of a switch) and knew how to pull peoples mental/emotional strings, and believe me when I say that I make a really good target especially during some days when I was the first/only one there where at times there were alcohol and beer bottles over the floor and during those time especially he had the kind of rage that literally shook my body and went right through to my very soul.
I was mentally/emotionally trapped there for like 8 years and as such I have lots of stuff that I typed about that job/torments as well as a couple videos I made of shots that I took in secret), there was one time in particular where the boss (A strong guy) took a large post and just chucked it at me in a way so it barely missed me…
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This just happened to me a few seconds ago but I wanted to project it onto jason just bc I can BUT anyways jason todd wears glasses and he knows that he needs them when he’s not wearing contacts. He just doesn’t really like wearing them bc they’re a hassle but also he just gets annoyed whenever roy or dick poke fun at them.
Often times he’ll wear them when he’s reading and note him and bruce have a similar pair ( like the ones dad’s wears the rectangle ones with that are silver but they have them in black). Roy likes poking fun at them calling them old man binoculars which earns him a swift knock in the head.
ALSO jason always brings them along when he goes to the library to read for the kids especially when hes not reading them books with a bigger font/size.
Additional things about jason and his glasses is the fact that before bruce figured he needed glasses but he obviously preferred wearing contacts he used to type his papers or make out text messages with his eyes completely unfocused and managed to type it out perfectly and hit send.
#dc comics#batfamily#jason todd#dcfandom#dc batfam#roy harper#bruce wayne#red hood#batfamily headcanons#jason todd headcanon
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To carry on the MCU Peter anon: would you ever write a multiverse / blend where your Peter meets a more MCU Peter (actual MCU Peter not the fanon created one)? And/or initimable Peter meeting another version you’ve created?
Also, would you ever write a MJ (my beloved) POV fic?
Hey boo
So Question 1: I did a little piece with a MCU/Inimitable crossover here
It’s not quite the same, since it’s from the pov of MCU Peter.
The idea of young Inimitable Peter meeting someone who he could have so easily been if he’d not gotten involved with Team Red and had instead stuck closer to Stark would be an interesting thought, I must say. Not so interesting that I’d write it, but I’d def have half a drink and then a muse on the idea and how it would unfold.
For MJ, I have written some stuff from her POV! ( See just roll with it from the Dumpster Fires Verse)
I also wrote a terrifying piece a long ass time about about some non-NYC vigilantes trying to step in and overthrow the vigilante/Superpeople order of things by trying to goad Peter, Matt, Wade, etc into a fight. MJ narrates it and it’s sort of dark so I’m putting it under the cut here.
trigger warnings for violence (like Netflix DD and Punisher levels), violence against minors at school, and some pretty heavy injuries.
-------
“Michelle?” a voice she’d never heard in her life rasped into the classroom door. The smell of iron and smoke and god, blood—that was blood she was smelling—it was all suffocating.
“Michelle, honey, c’mon, sweetheart. We ain’t got time for being scared right now,” the voice said.
She’d never thought that she’d have to consider the fact that those were boots coming towards her, not sneakers, not shoes.
The butt of a rifle swung down into her view. Joined the boots right in front of her. Bones popped as the Punisher knelt down.
She knew him by the skull on his vest.
She knew him as a monster. Not a hero.
He held out a hand to her.
“I got you, baby girl,” he promised, “Ain’t no one gonna touch you.”
His hands were smeared in some kind of grease. Gun oil? Soot? It didn’t matter. He stayed crouching low. He didn’t wear a mask.
His nose was kind of crooked. And his eyes were deep set.
They were brown.
He said nothing, just held out his big, greasy hand.
She took it.
--
The Punisher’s grip was calloused and firm and he kept her behind him at all times. He was even bigger than she’d ever imagined; bigger than Mr. Murdock. Bigger than her dad. Maybe the around the same size and build as Wade.
He didn’t explain things; he used his hands to talk.
Stay behind me, said the press of his rough palm. Don’t let go, stay behind me.
Out front, the fingers said later, now curled over the tops of her own. Walk, walk fast. Out front.
Stay behind.
Out font.
Down.
He made her kneel with him and peeled off his vest. He didn’t give her a choice.
It was heavy. So heavy. He strapped it onto her as tight as it would go.
“Home stretch, darlin’,” he finally said with words, the noise of bullets and panic around them seemed quieter with him talking. She found that she didn’t want to leave him. “You go when I say, alright? You go when I say and you don’t look back, alright?”
No.
No, he would die if she left. He needed to wear the vest.
“Look at me, Michelle.” She did, through the tears. “You don’t look back.”
She nodded.
--
He said go.
She didn’t look back.
Not until Mr. Murdock was pulling her away, shouting at the top of his voice for an ambulance. She’d never heard that gravel in his tone before.
“Michelle, look at me,” Mr. Murdock told her, grabbing her cheeks and pulling her gaze away from the classroom where the Punisher was dying.
“Look at me, honey, look.”
There wasn’t much to look at, she couldn’t see his eyes through his mask.
“Are you hurt? Where are you hurt? Show me where you’re hurt.”
It didn’t matter, she couldn’t feel it anymore. The Punisher was dying in there, he needed his vest.
“Frank’s fine,” Mr. Murdock told her. He pulled her head back to face him, but he wasn’t looking at her at all. It was like he was looking down at the space between them. One of her hands felt warm on top, cold at the fingers. It didn’t want to cooperate as she pulled at the vest. “He’s fine, he’s gonna be fine. Fuck. Fuck. Put your arms around my neck, honey, c’mon. There you go, good girl. Alright, up you go. No, one more time. There you go, I got you. It’s okay, I got you.”
Mr. Murdock was stronger than he looked and he didn’t seem to mind that the vest was digging into his chest. His voice didn’t seem as loud, even though her head was right next to his throat.
She couldn’t tell if he was talking to her anymore.
--
She woke up.
There was white and blue and gray everywhere.
Her mom was burgundy. Her sweater was. Then she was tears, tears pouring out of her eyes, down over her lips. Her eyes weren’t burgundy, they were neon. Neon pink.
--
Her mom held her hand while the doctors explained to her that she’d have a lot of scarring, but she would be okay. She’d need some physical therapy to make the wrist do what it was supposed to again, but the bullet hadn’t caused irreparable damage.
The same for the wound in her ankle.
She’d be okay.
So why did she want to cry so bad?
--
She remembered why.
--
Peter was okay. He was in the room one over, attached to a lot of machines, but he was okay. His face wasn’t as clean as hers, the doctors and nurses hadn’t had the same kind of time to wash him down, they’d been busy trying to save his life.
His aunt had stepped out to go get things to wash his face for him. She was still wearing her scrubs. She worked in the ICU upstairs.
--
Ned was okay, he had a row of stitches from the bump in his wrist to his elbow. He told her tiredly that once he turned eighteen, he’d get a tattoo to cover the mark. Maybe laces, like sneaker, he told her.
Maybe stitches again, to remind himself what he’d almost lost.
--
Flash was okay. Abe was okay. Melanie and Gabriella were okay.
They were all okay.
Including the Punisher.
--
He came to see her in the hospital, he’d swiped a staff ID to do it. She thought that that was maybe overkill, but this was the man who’d offered his life for hers.
He was startled and went wide-eyed and stiff when she threw her arms around his broad chest and started crying. But he loosened up and told her that she shouldn’t be putting weight on her ankle. He let her hug him sitting on the bed instead.
He didn’t say things were okay like the others did. He grabbed her chin and shook it a little and said, “You’re fucking brave, girl. You’re so fucking brave.”
She didn’t believe him.
She’d just gone and hadn’t looked back.
“Sweetheart, there are times when you think, and times when you move. And both of them are different kinds of bravery,” he told her.
Different kinds of bravery.
“Do you mean courage?” she asked him.
He cocked his head. He had stitches of his own at the top of his cheekbone. Bruises from his temple to his chin.
“No, courage, that’s something else,” he said, “I’m talking about bravery.”
She didn’t understand. He said that he didn’t have a better way of explaining it. He smoothed her hair back and said that he was glad that she was alive and that she was going to get better.
He’d been the one who’d carried Peter out. He’d had to send her out first because he couldn’t carry both of them.
Mr. Murdock’s voice was raw and hoarse because he’d come running from the fire in the classroom next door and he’d been trying to find Peter. He was the only one who could hear Frank Castle through the fire and the bullets and the creak of the burning building. And Mr. Castle had told him that he couldn’t take both Peter and Michelle.
She remembered now.
Mr. Castle had been talking to himself the whole time they’d been running and hiding through that building. He’d been talking to himself, but he’d really been talking to Mr. Murdock who was trying to find a way in and a way out that wouldn’t get him killed.
There hadn’t been one, there were too many guns. The second she’d started running, Frank Castle had whistled, hard and loud and piercing and all the guns had turned on him.
She didn’t look back.
She thought that he hadn’t either.
“Thank you for saving us,” she told him.
He shook his head.
“Red’s your man, he called me screaming. Man never calls nobody in that tone of voice. You’d have thought y’all were his babies dying in there.”
Okay.
Okay, so was Mr. Murdock okay?
“Nah, girl. I don’t think he is. But I think he’ll get there.”
--
Mr. Murdock pretended like he was okay, but the way he wrapped his arms around both Michelle and Peter when they came to his office said that he was very much not. It wasn’t an awkward hug, even though there were two of them.
It was firm.
It was tight.
And Peter started crying and it was hard, really really hard not to join him.
Mr. Murdock let them go and pressed his forehead to Peter’s and said nothing. He just held Peter’s shoulder with one hand and smoothed a hand through his hair with the other. Peter wasn’t making words so much as he was making distressed sounds, but Matt understood him.
“He’s alright, Pete,” he said. “He’s alright.”
Who?
--
Wade was fine, somehow. There wasn’t a bullet hole in him. There wasn’t a scratch on him, he claimed, trying to smile and make Peter stop sobbing his heart out.
Matt told him that he wasn’t fucking helping and to just be fucking honest for once in his goddamn life.
Matt’s hands shook a little at his sides. His cuticles were still stained gray from the soot.
Wade looked from him to Peter a little helplessly and then at Michelle and he sobered. He held out an arm for her to come closer.
He was big, too. His ribs felt different from Mr. Castle’s.
“Where’s Ned?” he asked, pressing a hand on the back of Peter’s head to encourage him to direct his upset into his chest.
Ned was at home. Ned’s mom and dad were too upset to let him out of their sight for now.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Wade said. He didn’t hug her as tight as Matt had, he more laid a heavy arm across her shoulders and pulled a bit.
--
They weren’t allowed to go back to school. The whole campus was closed, there’d been significant damage to the south side and there were too many photos and crime scenes that needed to be documented.
Peter’s wounds were already mostly healed, while hers ached and burned with every movement.
He apologized for not getting to the room she’d been in faster.
That was some dumbass shit, that was.
“Who did it?” she asked him.
Peter set his jaw.
“We don’t know. Wade and Mr. Castle said they’re finding out. They aren’t letting me or Matt in on it.”
What did that mean?
“I think it means that it’s something bigger than us.”
And what did that mean?
“Uh, maybe bigger isn’t the right word. Lower.”
Lower. Like?
“Someone underground. Deeper in than me and Double D. We’re—we’re mostly surface level. Wade and Mr. Castle, they’re deep under there.”
“Were they trying to kill you, Peter?” she asked him.
He took a long shaky breath.
“I really hope not.”
---
They weren’t trying to kill Peter, Mr. Murdock eventually told them, having had them come to his home for this news. He had them sit on his faux leather couch as he said this.
He was trying to say something without words, Michelle thought.
She thought she was reading it right.
It was personal. This was personal.
“Were they trying to kill you, Matt?” she asked. He shook his head.
No.
They weren’t trying to kill anyone, they’d been trying to draw them out. As many of them as possible.
“They’re taking stock of us,” Matt said to his fists. His knuckles never seemed to heal. “Making lists. They knew a school would bring everyone out and we fell for it like fucking chumps.”
What did that mean?
“Means there’s something big brewing, and I want nothing to do with it.”
That’s not what his knuckles said.
“Peter,” Matt said, “Whoever they are, they’re going to target you. You’re young, that makes you an easy mark. Do not engage, do you understand?”
Peter understood.
---
Peter was hurt. He was hurt every day over the next few weeks. He had bullet wounds and knife wounds and it got to the point where, even after school reopened, he didn’t come back. It wasn’t suspicious, a lot of kids didn’t. Their parents were still terrified, maybe looking into other academies.
Peter was just sleeping. He had to sleep to heal and he had to heal because the second he set foot out the door there was someone there waiting for him and he couldn’t engage. He just had to take it. Suit or no suit.
MJ would have hit back by now, she was amazed that he hadn’t.
“The second I hit back, they’ll take that as permission,” Peter told her quietly at his desk in his room. May had bandaged his arm for him. She wasn’t concerned about school, she didn’t want Peter to even leave the house.
“Permission to do what?” she asked.
“To engage,” Peter said.
What did that mean, though?
“They’ll kill me.”
He couldn’t know that. He couldn’t—
“They don’t care who I am. It’ll be a message. As soon as I hit back, that makes whatever happens next fair game, so I can’t do anything.”
“Can’t Stark help you?” she asked. He sighed and looked at his bandaged wrist.
“If it gets any worse, he and May said I’ll stay with him for a while. But they’ll just move onto the next guy, and then the next guy, until someone engages. We can’t avoid them forever.”
‘We,’ Peter said. That meant that this was beyond him. This was everyone on that list those guys had shot her, stabbed Ned, scared everyone to make. The list that had set their school on fire.
---
It got worse.
Peter didn’t come to school.
He couldn’t breathe very well. He slept even more, but not at home. He slept at Stark Tower, where Tony Stark could guard him, because no one else could at the minute.
---
It got worse because they started picking on Matt.
Matt as Mr. Murdock most certainly would not have engaged, but Matt as Matt was struggling. He was very obviously struggling.
Just sit back and take it, was what he had to do. Unlike Peter, who slept and had somewhere to go when things got too bad, Matt didn’t heal and Matt didn’t have anyone to lean on.
He stopped showing up to work.
Neither Foggy or Karen said anything about it. They carried on with the cases and the work and the filing as if nothing was wrong, as if nothing happened. As if they weren’t both suffocating, trying to carry their friend’s pain with their own.
Michelle went to see him and Foggy told her to be as quiet as she could be.
He slept with a broken arm laid up on his chest. He shivered in his sleep. His knuckles weren’t bruised, but his neck was and he didn’t acknowledge anyone who spoke to him.
There was a woman there with him, she was his sister, MJ remembered her. Elektra was watching him with silent, stoic fury in her eyes. It showed nowhere else on her.
“She’s protecting him,” Foggy explained as he made them all tea. “Well, maybe not protecting, but guarding him so he feels like he can sleep.”
There wasn’t anything to say to that, not when Spiderman and Daredevil could only rest in unconsciousness.
“Why are they doing this?” she asked him. Foggy sighed and set the kettle down.
“Because they’re cruel and they’re jealous and they think that this will get them respect,” he said.
Respect.
Psh.
All it did was make her mad.
“If you show them that you’re angry, Michelle, that’s as good as engaging. We can’t let them know that they’re getting to any of us.”
This was bullshit.
---
Bullshit because Matt went to get groceries and didn’t come home and Wade had to go find him. They wouldn’t let Michelle see him, but she heard his sister screaming. She screamed at anyone who touched him, swore that she’d put the lights out of the next person who tried.
Foggy didn’t stop her.
Matt didn’t say anything.
He didn’t come to work and Foggy kept his office door closed.
Karen told Michelle that Elektra had taken Matt somewhere with her, where he would be safe. He wasn’t in Hell’s Kitchen. Elektra wouldn’t say where they’d gone, but she’d sent Foggy pictures so that he knew Matt was safe.
---
It was bullshit because they were too scared to fuck with Wade or Castle, so instead they attacked Hawkeye the younger and Michelle heard through Wade that Hawkguy had nearly exploded in his anger. He couldn’t do anything, of course he couldn’t, that was how this game worked.
But he’d swapped his easy-going persona for the one he used when he worked with the Black Widow.
Wade said it was eerie to see him so quiet and focused. Locked onto his target.
The people trying to pick a fight, well, they were scared of Hawkeye.
---
Not for long. They went in on both of Hawkeyes at the same time and soon Hawkeye the elder reached breaking point and called in the Widow so that he and his partner could get two minutes of peace. Just two.
---
It was interesting how the second the Widow got involved, everything went topsy turvy.
Michelle had passed by the place where Wade had told her the Widow was standing guard and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Then she realized that whoever these guys were, they were really, really scared of the Widow.
Not so high and mighty now, huh, boys?
They abandoned the Hawkeyes and went after Jessica Jones.
---
It went on and on like this for two, three, maybe even four weeks. People took as much as they could. They picked themselves up. Some limped into the offices of Nelson, Murdock and Page. Some limped, watched carefully by people, in the street.
They were stopped at all hours by guys in plain clothes who struck out without warning. Threw fists. Feet. Spat on people. And instead of fighting back, local bodies threw them off and ran away. Avoided confrontation. Put walls and doors and fences between themselves and the others as much as they could.
It was, in a way, amazing.
The level of restraint was super human.
---
Then the new kids got cocky and shoved the Winter Soldier.
They were in for a lesson.
Michelle saw the conflict on the news. Five guys throwing themselves at Bucky Barnes, who was trying to buy a bottle of whiskey in peace.
He ignored them, counted out exact change.
He walked right through their group on the way out the door and they parted around him, then followed him out of the convenience store.
Camera phone footage showed him walking home, being heckled by these creeps. A few blocks, presumably, from his home he stopped walking and the gang of people drew in close around him.
And then they all leapt back.
The Winter Soldier wasn’t taking their shit, he’d apparently decided. Loud enough to be heard from the cameraman’s place across the street, he shouted, “Y’all have one more chance to get the fuck out of my way.”
Let no one say he didn’t warn them.
They went down hard and they went down fast and they all went down within a minute of each other.
Bucky Barnes held a guy by his throat and told them to call their motherfucking leader, he wanted to have a chat.
It was the beginning of the end.
---
Do not engage went right out the window and MJ woke up to her phone sending her six thousand alerts not to take such-and-such road or to approach such-and-such area.
The news showed her Peter slamming his fist into a man’s face like he was born to do it.
The Man in the Mask was out in broad daylight, stalking towards those people who were suddenly trying to escape him. He picked them up and dropped them without so much as breaking the rhythm of his pace.
Ironman beat the shit out of twelve people in the company courtyard.
Hawkeye had switched his bow for a rifle.
The general advice from all city personnel was to stay the fuck inside.
This was war.
---
And then it was over.
And everything was cleaned up and bodies were carted off if they were found.
Peter arrived to school.
Matt reappeared in his office.
They carried on like nothing had happened. But there was something about the aftermath of silence that made the day of brutality so much more violent.
Neither of them were smiling. They were cold, thawing slowly.
Michelle thought of all the things they weren’t saying.
She thought she heard their combined bodies whisper, this is my city. This is our city. Get with it or go the fuck home.
She didn’t know if it made her feel better, but it certainly made her feel safe.
--------
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52 Project #27: The Pale Bro
Five friends drove up the mountain into the forest, where the vacation cabin waited for them. It was their senior year of college, so it wouldn’t be long before they’d be graduating and going their separate ways, and who knew when they’d all be able to hang out together again? So they’d decided that this year, instead of going on spring break someplace where there were a ton of other people, they’d spend break together in a cabin in the woods, because there was no possible way that that could go wrong.
They were just five totally ordinary college guys. Steve, a white dude with brown hair who loved video games and playing guitar; Trevor, a black dude with short hair who was on track to graduate magna cum laude and had already been accepted at a top medical school; Harrison, an outgoing, short, red-haired white dude who played soccer, but not, like, at career athlete level or anything; Evan, an Asian dude who kept his hair in a long ponytail, and whose family owned the cabin, who was planning on taking a year off after graduation to backpack around Asia and had sold it to his parents as an exploration of his heritage; and the Pale Bro, a twelve-foot tall dude with paper-white skin whose fingernails were like long razor blades and who was completely covered with eyes and mouths, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cut-off shorts that would have been nearly pants on any other guy, and a pair of Vans on his feet. Just five ordinary young fellows, like anyone you might know.
Steve was driving the minivan, kinda wishing it was his dad’s SUV because of the effort of getting a minivan up the slope, but his dad’s SUV was in a different state and besides, it wouldn’t have had room for the Pale Bro. The minivan was the kind where you could put down the back row of seats to expand the cargo capacity, and the Pale Bro had laid out a thick sleeping-bag style blanket on top of their suitcases and was laying on them now, curled sideways because there was no dimension where he could stretch out in the van. Must be rough for him, Steve imagined, always having to bend down or curl up to fit into buildings and vehicles with his bros. He never complained about it, though. He was a great friend.
“How much farther is this place?” Harrison asked. “I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’ve been unfortunately next to you at the urinals,” Trevor said. “I’d believe it.”
Steve checked the GPS. “Shit. The GPS has just decided to get the vapors because it’s up too high. It’s telling me I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, look at this.” He showed the screen to Evan. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even drawing the road.”
“Don’t worry about it, I can guide you in from here,” Evan said. “Just stay on the road another 20 minutes or so.”
With a voice that rumbled like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together and the hiss of static from the birth of the universe behind it, the Pale Bro conveyed that there had better be some fucking food at the cabin, because he was starving.
“You and me both, buddy,” Trevor said.
“We all just got Burger King like, two hours ago,” Steve complained.
“Yeah, well, me and Pale are tall dudes. We need more food than you.” Trevor smirked.
“There should be food, I had a grocery delivery scheduled for earlier today and one of my parents’ employees was supposed to swing by the place, pick it up and put it in the fridge.”
“There’s a fridge at this cabin?” Harrison asked.
Evan looked at him. “Yeah, dumbass, you think I’d have suggested coming here if there was no fridge? There’s running water, too. It even gets hot if you run it long enough.”
“Well, excuse me for not being so rich I can afford to go to a cabin in the woods, ever, before now.”
“What else has it got?” Trevor asked.
“Well, there’s three bedrooms, one of which has a king-sized bed and the other two have bunk beds. I figure, Pale Bro gets the big bed and we break up into two’s and do the roommate thing. There’s a sofa bed too, in case someone really can’t stand having a roommate. We don’t have a washer or dryer, but if you only brought one pair of underpants and it’s getting really rank, we’ve got detergent and a clothesline so you can wash them in the sink. There’s a dishwasher.”
“I would have put in a washer and dryer before I put in a dishwasher, personally,” Steve said.
“Yeah, well, my mom had a different opinion. Anyway, it’s camping in the woods. It’s not supposed to be just like if we were at home.”
“I call top bunk!” Harrison said.
“There’s two top bunks. Both rooms have bunk beds.”
The Pale Bro expressed in a voice like a Gregorian chant of nightmares that he wanted to know if there was a bathroom in the master bedroom, because that shit would be sweet.
“Naah, man, sorry,” Evan said. “But there is one of those really deep claw-foot bathtubs that you like.”
Like the rumbling of an oncoming avalanche, the Pale Bro opined that that was excellent.
***
“I don’t believe this shit.”
They had just disembarked, the Pale Bro in the rear bringing his own suitcase and the beer cooler, which was the size of a mini-fridge, and everyone else dragging their suitcases in… except for Evan, who had gone directly to the kitchen without bringing in his own stuff yet. He came stomping out. “Joe never showed up, the bastard! I’m totally having my dad fire his ass.”
“What do you mean?” Steve asked.
“I mean that food order never showed up. So we have canned food, and boxed food, but we don’t have anything perishable. No bread, no lunchmeat, no eggs, no bacon, no orange juice, none of that shit.” He sighed. “I’m gonna have to drive down into town myself to get food, and we just got here.”
“Hey, man, I can still drive the car,” Steve said. “You just need to tell me where to go.”
“Steve, you’ve been driving for 6 hours, you’re probably wiped. I can drive,” Trevor said. “It’s the least I could do with Evan buying our food.”
“Yeah, but you bought the beer, man,” Evan said. “So maybe Harrison needs to drive.”
“Uh, hey, before anyone drives anywhere, maybe you should call and find out if your parents even know where that Joe guy who never showed up is, and if he’s all right?” Harrison called from outside.
“Why?”
“Just… everyone come take a look at this!”
Everyone went outside and congregated around Harrison’s find, which was a roughly humanoid, but clawed, tread that was at least three times the size of a normal footprint. Experimentally the Pale Bro put his own massive foot into the tread. Harrison whistled. The footprint was about 25% bigger than the Pale Bro’s.
“Dude. What is that? Is that a bear?” Harrison asked.
Trevor shook his head. “Those are sneaker treads, Har. Bears don’t wear sneakers.”
In a voice that was the perfect auditory personification of the Zalgo font, the Pale Bro suggested that it looked like one of his cousins was back on its bullshit again.
“Goddamn,” Evan said. “That’s a big fellow.”
“I think maybe if we go into town we should all go,” Steve said.
“We’ve just been driving all this time, though,” Evan said. “I wanted to relax, crack a cold one, put on some MP3s. We don’t get Internet worth shit out here but I’ve got a huge music library on the stereo’s hard drive.”
The Pale Bro opined that before anyone drove anywhere, maybe he had better find his cousin and make it clear that if his cousin touched any of his friends he would shove its head so far up its ass it would be blinking shit out of its 27 eyes for a month.
“That… sounds reasonable,” Trevor said. “Since we don’t know what happened to Joe. We can hunker down here and wait for you to get back.”
“I’m pretty sure I got instant just add water pancake mix,” Evan said. “And my mom stocked this place with crappy dehydrated chicken pieces like the kind doomsday preppers buy. I could make a shitty chicken soup, we’ve got bouillon and noodles. Oh, and there’s a few cans of chili. Canned stuff is shit but I could maybe perk it up with some spices, some extra beans… put some rice in the cooker, I bet my mom left rice here, she buys like 100 pound bags of rice.”
Like the sound of Jupiter hovering in orbit above, rotating ponderously, the Pale Bro agreed that some canned chili with extra spices sounded pretty good considering how fucking hungry he was, and as soon as he found his asshole cousin he’d be back to eat with the rest of his bros. He also reminded them to save him some beer.
“Dude!” Steve laughed. “We’ve got three keggers’ worth in that cooler! There will be plenty of beer for you.”
Evan called his parents as the Pale Bro left the house, and reported back, somewhat gray-faced. “They said Joe never called in to say he got to the house. He reported picking up the groceries, he was headed up here, and then nada.”
“Oh, well, then, you work on the chili,” Trevor said, “and me and the rest of the guys are gonna lock up all the windows and doors and put someone on watch for when the Pale Bro gets back. You don’t have any guns up here, by any chance, do you?”
“Nope, my parents aren’t really hunters,” Evan said.
“Well, I’ve seen your kitchen at home, I know what kind of equipment your mom likes to stock. We’ll have plenty of sharp knives, I’m betting.”
“Yeah.”
And so as Evan attempted to turn six cans of canned chili into something his bros would find edible, and the Pale Bro stalked through the forest on the mountaintop looking for his asshole cousin, the other three made sure everything was locked up, that the car keys were secure, and that there were wicked cooking knives within easy reach, but not line of sight from the outside, of every door. Just like ordinary bros do, every day.
***
The Pale Bro stalked through the woods. Now, you’d think that being twelve feet tall and having a foot easily the size of a car tire’s diameter would make it hard to walk through a thickly wooded forest with plenty of underbrush, but the Bro’s long, skinny arms and legs could easily step over bushes and shrubs, and could pivot in directions that didn’t seem to quite exist within three-dimensional space. So he had very little difficulty making his way through the dense forest.
In the beginning, he was tracking the large treads that may or may not have been left by his asshole cousin, but the trail disappeared as it crossed a small creek. In a tone that sounded like the anthropomorphic personification of the trumpets of Jericho, the Pale Bro groaned, recognizing that he’d lost the trail and would have to search for it.
And so he went up the creek, and down the creek, and out from the creek, and up the trees around the creek, looking for any sign of his cousin… until he heard, in the distance, human voices.
Human female voices.
He stumbled through the woods, suddenly much clumsier than he’d been, following the sound of girls, until he half-fell out of the treeline and ended up in a clearing around another cabin, like Evan’s but bigger. The sounds were coming from around the corner of the cabin. The Pale Bro slid forward, long long legs making long long strides through the yard around the cabin, until a hot tub with a wooden deck came into view. The hot tub was on, and populated by five smokin’ hot girls.
There was a fair-skinned blonde girl, in a skimpy blue bikini that showed off all her curves, whose wavy hair floated angel-like around her head, improbably given that she was in a hot tub. There was a short, delicate black girl with hair in very wet braids and a soft, beautiful face, wearing a candy pink bikini. There was an Indian girl with long hair and an athletic build, with a red bindi mark on her forehead and a pale turquoise one-piece bathing suit with a little skirt, sitting on the deck and kicking her feet slowly in the water. A red-haired white girl with tan Mediterranean skin, tight curls, and a bright white bikini that stood out against her tan, had turned away from the tub and was looking directly at the Pale Bro, a slight smile on her face. The fifth girl was green and scaly, with webbed hands and golden eyes with nictating membranes; she didn’t have hair, but she had betta-like, beautifully colored fins on her head that looked hair-like.
All of them were absolutely gorgeous.
The blonde girl shrieked and ducked into the tub; the black girl bounced and climbed out of the tub, a big grin on her face. “Hi there, stranger!” she yelled from the rail around the deck. “Why don’t you come over and have a beer with us?”
The Pale Bro admitted in a tone like the creaking of an ancient rusted machine at the base of an abandoned windmill that that sounded awesome.
The green girl rolled her eyes. The Indian girl gave the black girl a questioning look. “Are you sure, Kayla?”
“Come on, Nandi,” the red-haired girl said. “I think he’s cute.”
The blonde girl came back up. “Are you inviting him over?” she asked, sounding horrified. “What if he’s a psycho killer?”
“Oh, right,” the green girl said. “He’s pale and tall and has eyes all over his body so he must be a psycho killer. Racist much?”
“No! He’s just a strange dude, that’s all! You have to watch out for strange dudes!”
The Pale Bro explained in the voice of a broken subwoofer booming at outdoor concert sound levels underwater that he didn’t really want to scare any of the girls and he’d go if they didn’t want him here.
The green girl leaned her elbows on the edge of the hot tub. “Forget Ashlee, she’s just paranoid.”
“You didn’t want him coming over either, Y’lehna,” Nandi said quietly.
“I just knew that if Kayla invited him over, we’re gonna lose Rhiannon for the rest of the night,” Y’lehna muttered.
The red-haired girl, presumably Rhiannon, was smiling broadly at the Pale Bro now. “Hey there,” she said. “We’ve got hard cider and hard lemonade, Bud, Corona and a couple of local microbrews. What’s your pleasure?”
In a voice that was actually surprisingly normal-sounding for once, the Pale Bro said he’d have whatever Rhiannon was having, which turned out to be hard cider.
He clambered up onto the hot tub deck, pulled off his sneakers, and soaked his feet in the hot tub, which barely came up to his knees.
“So what are you doing around here? You don’t live near here, do you?” Kayla asked.
And so the Pale Bro explained that he and his bros had decided to spend their last spring break of college together, in a cabin in the woods, because once graduation came they might never see each other again, and certainly even if they made excuses to get together on occasion, they’d see each other a lot less.
“That’s so sweet!” Kayla said.
“We’re juniors,” Rhiannon said. “Except Ashlee, she’s a sophomore, and Y’lehna’s technically a senior but she’s planning on doing a fifth year. But we decided to hang out here because Ashlee’s parents just put in a hot tub.”
“Hot tub!” Kayla sang out, and slid back into the tub. She was maybe just a little bit drunk.
As it turned out, they all went to the same university, and Y’lehna and the Pale Bro chatted for a bit about sports. “I tried out for the swim team,” Y’lehna said, “but when they found out I had gills, they disqualified me because apparently part of the point of the sport is that you are only allowed to breathe gaseous oxygen?”
The Pale Bro commiserated, as he hadn’t even tried trying out for the basketball team like he had once dreamed of, realizing that they would never allow someone who was taller than the hoop to play.
***
“I don’t know, though,” Ashlee, who had warmed up to the Pale Bro once another hard lemonade was in her hand, said. She was lying in a deck chair rather than in the tub. “Normally I love this place, and the tub’s great, but something just feels really creepy today.”
“You’ve been on edge since we got here,” Nandi – whose full name turned out to be Nandini, but she insisted that the Pale Bro should use her nickname – agreed.
The Pale Bro was thus reminded that his bros were expecting him to track down what might be a killer who may or may not have murdered Joe, the guy who was supposed to bring in the groceries, and also that he was very hungry and the hard cider wasn’t doing him any favors on an empty stomach. He pulled his feet out of the tub and confessed, in a voice like the grinding of the gears of the machinery that runs the universe, that his bros had sent him out to find a monster – he didn’t mention that the monster was probably his cousin – who might have killed someone, and also that dinner was waiting for him back at the cabin.
“Oh, you should bring them over!” Kayla said cheerfully.
“Are they all like you?” Rhiannon asked in a tone that might be considered “sultry” by anyone not as oblivious as the Pale Bro.
The Pale Bro shook his head and admitted that his bros were all much shorter than he was.
Rhiannon put a hand on his arm. “Well, that’s too bad, but I guess one handsome, tall fellow in a group is all I can expect, right?”
The Pale Bro looked at Rhiannon’s hand like it was an inexplicable glob that might be ice cream and possibly should be washed off, but equally possibly should be licked up.
Y’lehna said, “Why don’t you bring them over? They might be cute.”
“Yeah,” Nandi said, “we can’t all fit in the hot tub at once, but didn’t you say you had four friends back at your cabin?”
“That makes five,” Ashlee said, “and there’s five of us!”
“Also,” Nandi said, “we’ve still got, like, five pizzas in the house.”
This made the decision for the Pale Bro. He took the girls up on their offer of a couple of slices of pizza – they were cold, but he didn’t mind – and then headed back to the cabin to let his bros know about the girls’ offer.
***
The Pale Bro knocked on the window of the cabin, which apparently gave everyone inside heart attacks, even though he’d just meant to warn them to open the door for him. “Jesus, Pale,” Evan complained. “There’s a door.”
Within a few minutes – and after dropping his hard cider bottle in the recycling bin, because Evan’s family were big on recycling and the Pale Bro wanted to be polite – he had explained the situation to his bros.
“Let me get this straight,” Evan said. “You didn’t find any sign of Joe, you didn’t find your cousin or any other kind of monster or killer, and you want us to leave and go hiking through the woods to go hang out at a cabin full of strangers?”
When Evan phrased it that way, the Pale Bro admitted that it didn’t sound like a great idea, but on the other hand, there were five incredibly hot girls, plus a hot tub, plus pizza.
“Now let’s talk about this,” Trevor said. “Has anyone considered that if there’s really a psycho killer or a monster loose in the woods, those five girls might be in a lot more danger than we are? Maybe we should go over there to help protect them.”
“Yeah! And we could bring some of our beers, and Evan’s chili and rice—” Harrison suggested.
“Fuck no, I’m not making anybody else have to eat this chili,” Evan said. “It’s shit. It’s just the best I could do with the supplies I’ve got.” He sighed. “Too bad I can’t bring my tunes.”
“We need to be careful about locking everything up,” Steve said. “We really don’t want to come home tomorrow morning and find the psycho killer waiting for us here.”
“Or a gaggle of rabid raccoons,” Evan said. “That’s a thing around here.”
“Did any of you guys bring condoms?” Harrison asked. “Because I didn’t think we’d be seeing any action this weekend, so I didn’t bring any…”
Trevor chuckled. “We haven’t even met these girls, Har. Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?”
“Hey, I like to be prepared.”
“I’ve got a handful in my wallet, but I don’t think I’ve got five of them,” Steve said.
The Pale Bro pointed out with laughter like the rolling of thunder in a distant cavern that probably none of Steve’s condoms would fit him anyhow, so it would be fine.
“You don’t have to eat that chili, man,” Evan said, observing that the Pale Bro had dumped half a rice cooker’s worth of rice onto a plate and then all the rest of the chili that the other bros hadn’t eaten on top of that, and was currently chowing down. “It’s shit. I admit it. And you said you had some pizza.”
The Pale Bro declared that he was too hungry to care what it tasted like, that two slices of pizza weren’t nearly enough, and besides, it tasted fine to him.
So the five bros armed themselves with the sharp knives from Evan’s mom’s kitchen just in case they ran into a psycho killer along the way, locked all the doors and windows to the cabin and the doors to the car, and the Pale Bro carried the beer cooler as he led the way back to the house with the five hot girls.
***
It wasn’t particularly easy for the Pale Bro to retrace his steps through the woods; it’d been just short of sunset when he’d found the girls, and now it was full dark. His myriad eyes could see well in the dark, of course, but his bros couldn’t, so he had to watch out for them, and they were also a lot less flexible, and tall, than he was. Also, he hadn’t been toting a beer cooler the last time he came through here.
It didn’t help that his bros were very jumpy, freaking every time a night bird called or a twig broke loudly. The Pale Bro got it, he did – there might be a psycho killer in the woods, or a monster, or his cousin who was also a monster, and they couldn’t see as well as he could, or defend themselves. But this was just ridiculous. In a voice that was an auditory personification of the concept of dread, he suggested that they stop being such big pussies and concentrate on not tripping before they accidentally stabbed each other trying to brandish knives at random bushes.
“Yo, man, we can’t all be twelve feet tall,” Harrison said, sounding pissed but also still really anxious.
In a voice that was best described by some kind of metaphor implying a deep and scary sound that hopefully hasn’t been used already in this story, the Pale Bro offered to give Harrison a piggyback ride.
Trevor said, “Not in the middle of trees, man, you’d brain him. Walk right into a tree branch and knock him off.”
“Yeah, I gotta turn that down,” Harrison said.
“You smell that?” Steve said. “Smells like someone’s firing up a grill somewhere. I can smell the charcoal.”
“Did the girls have a grill?” Trevor asked.
The Pale Bro admitted that to the best of his knowledge, they did not, but on the other hand they had Hawaiian pizza. This, of course, triggered the old argument, where Steve and Harrison insisted that pineapple did not belong on pizza, and Evan and the Pale Bro insisted that pineapple on pizza was quite valid. The argument continued, with Trevor’s exhortations to show some common sense and save the argument until they were not walking through a dark forest that might contain a psycho killer going unheeded, until Steve accidentally fell in the creek because he couldn’t see it, and in the process lost one of Evan’s mom’s good cooking knives.
However, the Pale Bro mused, this was a potentially good sign because he’d found the girls while walking alongside the creek. So the bros walked alongside the creek, Steve muttering that these girls had better be hot after all this, until they heard the sound of female human voices, exactly like the Pale Bro had had before.
They entered the clearing, observed the very large cabin, Evan making comments like “I bet it’s a bitch to keep clean, ten to one that thing’s not sanitary” because he was jealous that the cabin was bigger than his family’s, and then around the corner to observe the very hot girls, who were all still very hot even though some of them had pizza sauce smeared around their lips.
“Well, hell-o, ladies!” Harrison said, trying to be suave and cool, and failing miserably.
The Pale Bro wondered, in the voice like the echoes of a rockslide in a canyon, if there was any of the pineapple pizza left, because unfortunately he was still hungry. He gestured at his very large body somewhat self-deprecatingly.
“Hi, guys!” Kayla, who was obviously the group’s ambassador to guests, said, with possibly more bubbliness in her voice than was currently in the hot tub. “I’m Kayla, and this is Nandini, and over there in the blue bikini is Ashlee, whose cabin this is – I mean, really it’s her family’s cabin—”
“I get it,” Evan said. “My family’s got a cabin too, that’s where we’ve been hanging. We just got in today. My name’s Evan.”
“Cool!” Kayla said. “That’s Y’lehna in the lawn chair with the wine cooler, and Rhiannon went to the bathroom but I’m sure—”
“I’m back!” Rhiannon announced. Trevor’s eyes widened and then turned heart-shaped. Metaphorically.
“And I’m Trevor. Hello, ladies,” he said, sounding much cooler when he said it than Harrison had.
“I’m Harrison, and this is Steve, and he’s kinda shy!” Harrison punctuated this by shoving his kinda shy friend forward.
“Uh, hi,” Steve said. “I kind of fell in the creek on my way here?”
Kayla’s eyes went wide. “Oh, wow! Hey, Ashlee, do you mind if I bring him inside and show him the shower?”
“Long as he takes his shoes off,” Ashlee said, coming to the deck railing. Steve saw her angelic hair, beautiful skin, and ample charms shown off by the rather small bikini, and fell in love.
“Oh, definitely. I’ll definitely do that. I – yeah. Thanks a lot for letting me use the shower, I’m all covered in mud. Which you can see. Because you’re standing there, looking at me covered in mud.”
Kayla laughed. “Oh, yeah, let’s get you cleaned up!” She took Steve’s hand with surprising alacrity and lack of reluctance, given that he was covered in mud.
Evan said, “The guy who was supposed to bring over the groceries never showed, and I made some chili and rice out of canned stuff for my friends, but it was kinda shitty. Pale asked if there was any more of the pineapple pizza? I could definitely go for a slice if you’re offering.”
Ashlee lit up. “Oh! Sure! I can take you in to get some pizza!”
Rhiannon had by then walked over to the Pale Bro, and put her hand on his arm again. “You know, I could definitely go for some more pizza myself,” she purred.
Meanwhile, Harrison was trying to chat up Y’lehna, and also strip to his boxers so he could get in the hot tub, without looking like he was doing it in a creepy way. “So, where’re you from?”
“Massachusetts,” Y’lehna said, lying back in the lawn chair and wistfully gazing at Trevor, who had followed Rhiannon, the Pale Bro, and Ashlee in for pizza. “A little town called Innsmouth, on the coast. Little more than half an hour north of Boston.” Y’lehna had legs, but they were covered with scales and her feet were large and webbed.
“Cool. I’m from New Jersey, but, you know, like the south end. Not the part that’s all gritty like Newark and Jersey City.” Harrison slid into the hot tub. “Oh, man, this is nice. You wanna get back in?”
“After I finish my wine cooler, maybe. Ashlee doesn’t like it when we eat or drink in the tub.”
Evan was the first to come back from the pizza hunt, carrying a beer and two slices and had actually had swimming trunks at the cabin – they hadn’t planned on going swimming on this trip, but Evan kept some clothes here all the time, and he’d already changed into them and then put his clothes on over. He stripped to his bathing suit and then went and got into the hot tub near Nandini. “Hey.”
Nandini barely noticed; she was too busy looking at Harrison. Evan had to say it again to get her attention. She turned and looked at him. “Oh, you can’t eat those in the tub. Or drink the beer.”
“What if I sit back from the tub and just soak my feet, until I’m done with the food?”
Nandini shrugged. “I guess that’d be okay, but you’d have to ask Ashlee. Can I ask you something?”
Evan beamed. “Sure! Whatever you want!”
She nodded her head toward Harrison. “Does your friend have a girlfriend?”
Evan’s first reaction was dismay – Nandini seemed to not even notice him as a man, and was just making eyes at Harrison, who was obviously captivated by Y’lehna. Then he narrowed his eyes and decided to make problems on purpose. “Oh, sorry, Harrison is gay.” Actually, Steve was bi and the rest of them were straight – Evan thought, anyway, unsure about the Pale Bro and if he even had a sexuality, but he did seem to like to look at girls.
Nandini sighed. “Aren’t they always.”
Ashlee was the next to come back. She sat next to Evan. “You know, if you want to get into the hot tub and still eat your food, I normally have a rule about that but I could let it go this time. Just as long as you keep the actual food and drink out of the hot tub so it doesn’t make everything gross.” She smiled at Evan.
Evan smiled at her, because it was always good to smile at your host, and it was also always good to smile at a pretty girl, and Ashlee was both. “Thanks,” he said, not planning to take her up on it because what if he dropped the pizza?, and then turned back to Nandini. “What’re you majoring in?”
“Ugh, I hate having to explain it to people,” Nandini said. “It’s… complicated. It’s a discipline that’s part economic theory, part psychology, part sociology and part anthropology. Basically, I’m majoring in the question of why do people do dumb things when they’d be better off doing smart ones, and how that impacts our understanding of economics.”
“That sounds really interesting,” said Evan, who had quit his business major because he was bored out of his mind by economics. “I’m doing Asia studies. Yeah, it’s a cliché.” He’d gone into Asia studies after he quit his business major because it was the only thing he thought his parents would let him get by with if he refused to study business. Some kind of “Mom, Dad, I really want to get in touch with our heritage and understand the culture of my grandparents” bullshit. Also, statistically you were more likely to find a girl who considers Asian guys hot in Asia studies than any other major, he suspected.
“That’s pretty cool!” Ashlee said. “Which part of Asia is your family from? China, Korea…?”
“China, originally,” Evan, whose real name was Haoran, but who’d been going by Evan since second grade, said. His pizza finished, he slid down into the tub and turned back to Nandini. “So, we came over here to warn you – and maybe help you fight if it comes to it – but we’re worried there might be a killer or something in the woods?”
“Omigod, really?” Ashlee asked, eyes wide with terror.
“Why do you think that?” Nandini asked, seeming completely calm.
“Well, my parents had an employee, Joe, buy food for my cabin. He was supposed to drop it off… but he never showed up, and he never called my parents, and he’s not answering his cell. Meanwhile, we saw this absolutely huge tread in the dirt, and the Pale Bro thinks it might be his cousin.”
“Yeah, he told us all that,” Nandini said. “Except for the part about it maybe being his cousin.”
“So, a monster?” Y’lehna asks. “Because there’s a difference between a psycho killer, who’s human, and a monster, who isn’t. You don’t know what the monster’s capable of, but when you see them, you know they’re a monster.”
“Yeah, but just because they look like a monster doesn’t mean anything about what they’re like!” Harrison said. “The Pale Bro looks like a monster, but he’s a really great guy!”
“I’m guessing his cousin sucks, though,” Y’lehna said.
“Well, we don’t know his cousin,” Harrison said, somewhat diplomatically.
“Do you really think there’s a killer?” Ashlee asked, getting into the hot tub right next to Evan – and inconveniently, between him and Nandini. “But you’ll protect us, right?”
“Uh, some of us can protect ourselves…” Nandini said.
Evan got back out of the tub so he could see Nandini more clearly without Ashlee in the way. “Absolutely. I’m not trying to say that we’re offering our protection because, you know, we’re guys and you’re girls and we think we’re tougher than you. That’s not it at all; I bet most of you could kick my ass.” He did not actually think this; Evan was in pretty good shape, since he was preparing to backpack all over Asia next year if he got the chance, and also, he bicycled a lot. It was pretty clear to him, though, that Nandini was invested in thinking of herself as someone who could protect herself, and who knew? Maybe she was a martial arts master or a crack shot. “But we figure, there’s safety in numbers. Plus, if it is the Pale Bro’s cousin, he can get it to back the hell off.”
“Good point,” Nandini said.
At this point there was a glass-shattering, horrible screech, and then something, some unknown creature moving so fast it was a blur, leapt out of the hot tub and charged directly at Evan, Nandini and Ashlee. All three of them screamed, as it slashed bright pain across Evan’s legs, right above his knees.
And then Ashlee started cracking up, as the horrible assailant stopped at the edge of the deck and began washing itself vigorously. “Phenyl, you dumbass. I know you like to sleep on the tub when we have it covered, but couldn’t you see we have it open and it’s full of water?”
Evan’s heart was still pounding, but now that he could see the creature that had slashed gashes into his thighs, he took deep breaths to calm himself down. “That’s your cat?”
“Yeah, her name is Phenylephrine and she’s a dumbass. She catches rats, though. One time she chased off a raccoon who’d gotten into the trash.” Ashlee attempted to pick her cat up, but the almost-entirely-black-except-for-white-bib cat jumped down off the deck, apparently not sufficiently recovered from her ordeal to tolerate interacting with humans. Evan decided not to ask why the cat was named after a decongestant.
“So what are you majoring in?” Harrison asked Y’lehna, trying to come across as casual. “I’m doing liberal arts, you know? Just a little of everything.”
“Shakespearean literature,” Y’lehna said.
“Oh, wow! You know about the theory that he didn’t write his own plays, right?”
Y’lehna rolled her eyes. “Of course I do. It’s bullshit.”
And as she explained all the reasons why she thought the theory was bullshit, Harrison listened to her raptly with imaginary hearts in his eyes.
***
Steve was deeply grateful to Kayla for taking him in to find Ashlee’s shower. The cabin had wooden floors, thankfully, so the gunk still dripping off his body could be easily cleaned. It made sense – it was a cabin in the woods, after all – but Steve had some vague idea of what rich people houses were like from visiting Evan, and carpet played a big role in his mental image of a rich person abode.
He was less impressed with the towel Kayla found him, after he came out of the shower. It was very… brief. Bigger than a hand towel, but not by much, it covered the territory it was required to cover and not very much else.
“I hate to ask, but does Ashlee have any brothers or other family members who might be around my size? This towel is kinda…”
Kayla laughed. “I think you look cute in it, but yeah, I can see why you’d want something bigger!” She stuck her head in the kitchen, where Ashlee was serving pizza to Evan, Rhiannon, Trevor, and the Pale Bro. “Hey, Ashlee! Does Hunter have any swimming trunks or t-shirts here?”
“You can check. He usually uses the middle bedroom.”
Steve called out, “I can have them cleaned and returned tomorrow, I just… my clothes are all muddy… I don’t want to impose, but this towel’s kind of tiny…”
“No problem, I don’t even care if you keep Hunter’s stuff. It would serve him right for being a douche,” Ashlee said.
Kayla checked, and came back with a NASCAR t-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks with grotesquely grinning emojis all over it. “Sorry, I hope it fits! It’s all he had!”
“No problem, NASCAR’s cool,” Steve said. The sum total of his knowledge about NASCAR was that it had something to do with cars, probably, and that guys who drank warm crappy beer and drove pickup trucks liked it, and that was all. But if Ashlee’s family was into it, maybe it was worth checking out.
He and Kayla walked into the kitchen, now that he was vaguely decent. “OMG I am so sorry,” Ashlee said. “That shirt is awful. Is that really the only one Hunter had?”
Steve shrugged, understanding more about Ashlee’s relationship to her brother’s interests. “It’s not like I’m into NASCAR or anything, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?”
The Pale Bro chose this moment to inform everyone in a voice that echoed like a portent of doom that there was no more beer in Ashlee’s fridge, and this was a problem, because he and his bros had brought beer for 5 people for three days, but now they had ten people, so what if they ran out?
Steve privately thought it was good that the Pale Bro wasn’t majoring in anything that needed math. Ten people would burn through the beer for five people at twice the rate, but twice the rate of three days would be a day and a half, more than enough time to go get more beer, unless the psycho killer or monster slashed their tires or something.
Kayla spoke up. “I’ve got more in the trunk of my car, but I parked kind of crappy.”
“Well, no matter how crappy the parking job was, more beer’s always a good thing,” Trevor said.
The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was like the crackling of atoms fusing together in the unfathomable heat of the sun that he’d be happy to go get them out of Kayla’s car.
“Uh… no, I think Steve should do it,” Kayla said. “Because he’s shorter, and it’s a really crappy parking job. Trust me, you will bonk your head on trees about six times just trying to reach my car.”
“Did you park it in the woods?” Trevor asked.
“Um, sorta… I was kinda excited about getting here and waving to my friends and I accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and I ended up in the woods… yeah.” She looked up at Steve forlornly. “I’m such an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Steve said, because it was always a good idea to tell a pretty girl who said she was an idiot that in fact she was not.
In a voice like the echoes of a NASCAR race going on over one’s head because one was in a sewer system under the track, the Pale Bro offered to help Kayla get her car out of the woods, if it was stuck there.
“That’s really sweet of you,” Rhiannon purred. “Probably better to do it in daylight, though. There’s a cliff drop near there, and you don’t want to accidentally slip over the edge.”
“Or worse, drop the car,” Steve said, and laughed. Kayla laughed with him.
The Pale Bro expressed to Kayla that if there was a cliff face near there, then he was very glad that she hadn’t accidentally driven off the edge, because that would have been bad.
“Yeah,” Kayla said, “but it all worked out so no harm done, right? Unless, like, I punctured the gas tank with a tree branch or something. That would definitely be bad.”
Steve, Trevor, Rhiannon and the Pale Bro all agreed that that would definitely be the case.
***
After Steve and Kayla had left to go to Kayla’s car to get more beer, Rhiannon asked the Pale Bro what his major was.
“I’m pre-med,” Trevor inserted, not actually having been asked.
“Mm, nice. I’m trying to become a physicist, myself. What about you?” She repeated the question in the Pale Bro’s direction.
In a voice that was muffled and full of pizza, the Pale Bro conveyed that he hadn’t heard the question, sorry.
“I just wanted to know what your major was,” she said.
The Pale Bro confessed that he was majoring in gender studies, having decided that hotel management was not really a good career path for him.
“Oh, really!” Rhiannon brightened. “You don’t see a lot of guys majoring in gender studies! You must be very secure in your masculinity.” She said this as someone who seemed very secure in the Pale Bro’s masculinity, herself, as she pressed against him.
The Pale Bro mumbled in a voice that really didn’t sound all that different from anyone else’s mumbling that he just didn’t like how society treated women, and added that his mother raised him to respect and look up to women. He confided that she had torn apart giant megafauna with her bare claws and fed them to her brood of spawn while insisting on table manners, and that he couldn’t imagine any job more difficult than being the primary caretaker of children. Children, he admitted, scared him.
“Oh, yes, the little rugrats can totally bring the chaos,” Rhiannon laughed.
The Pale Bro clarified that actually chaos was perfectly fine by him and the natural state of all things that the universe must someday return to; it was their high-pitched screechy voices that really bothered him.
“I never knew that,” Trevor said. “Weird, what you learn about people. Rhiannon,which kind of physics are you concentrating on? Like, space, or quantum, or what?”
“Haven’t really narrowed it down like that, it’s going to depend on what grad school accepts me and which programs I can get into,” Rhiannon said. To the Pale Bro she said, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk? It’s really nice out.”
“It is, but there might be some kind of killer or monster in the woods,” Trevor reminded her. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to go wandering off by yourself?”
She rolled her eyes and gestured at the Pale Bro. “I’m pretty sure that Pale here would be able to protect me if anything came up,” she said.
The Pale Bro confessed in a voice that echoed like the infrasound rumble of the collapse of a concrete building, but an embarrassed and regretful tone, that actually he wanted to wait right here, because he wanted more beer and also his feet hurt.
“Well, why don’t we go back to the hot tub and let you soak your feet for a bit?” Rhiannon asked.
“That sounds like a great idea,” Trevor said. “We’ve got our own beer cooler out there, remember? You brought it over.”
This was true, the Pale Bro admitted, but he couldn’t eat or drink in the hot tub, and he wanted another slice of Hawaiian pizza if there was any.
“Oh, but you’re a big fellow,” Rhiannon said. “You could totally sit back from the hot tub and dangle your feet in it while you’re eating, and you wouldn’t be close enough to the tub to bother Ashlee.”
In that case, the Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like the rumbling of a train full of dead bodies, he was all for the hot tub, because that shit sounded great.
***
The group joined back up around the hot tub, all except for Kayla and Steve, who were still in the woods, ostensibly getting beer out of Kayla’s car. Ashlee had brought out chips and pretzels, which, she said, were not to be eaten within five feet of the hot tub. This meant that the Pale Bro could soak his feet while he snacked, as promised, but no one else could actually eat near the tub.
“Come on, that’s not fair,” Y’lehna, who was considerably more drunk than she had been earlier in the evening and probably really needed to fill her stomach with chips and pretzels, complained. “I’ve been good all night but now I’m starving, and you know my skin needs to be moisturized.”
“I keep offering to let you try some of my Oil of Olay,” Ashlee mumbled.
“If I wanted to cover myself in something oily, I’d use fish oil, it’s traditional around my hometown,” Y’lehna said sharply. “I wanna be in water. Like, H20.” She looked up at Trevor, pleadingly. “Do you think I’m asking too much? I don’t think I’m asking too much.”
“I think you should definitely eat something,” Trevor said.
“I don’t think it’s too much to ask,” offered Harrison eagerly.
“But I don’t want to get any food in the hot tub,” Ashlee whined. “It’d be gross, and we’d have to drain it and clean it…”
“Well, I want to be in the water and I want goddamn pretzels, is that too much? Is that really too much?” Y’lehna yelled, making Ashlee quail.
At that point they all heard the sound of clanging and shattering, and Kayla and Steve screaming like they were being murdered.
Ashlee shrieked in terrified response. The Pale Bro, Trevor and Nandini were all off the deck and running toward the sound in a second, followed by Rhiannon, Evan and Harrison. Y’lehna took the opportunity to grab an entire dish of pretzels, drop herself into the tub, and stand at the edge of the tub, facing the concrete around the tub and stuffing her face. “I can be responsible,” she muttered. “I can not get pretzels in the tub. I don’t have to eat underwater. I don’t even want to. Pretzels aren’t like fish. They get soggy.”
No one was there to hear her, though, because they had all gone into the woods.
The Pale Bro had only gotten in a few feet when Steve yelled, “Don’t come any closer, guys!”
“Are you being murdered?” Trevor asked, loudly.
“We will totally fuck them up if someone is trying to kill you!” Harrison said, clenching his fists.
“No, guys, it’s good… it’s all good.”
“It’s not good at all!” Kayla wailed. “I spent so much money on that beer!”
The Pale Bro heard the word ‘beer’ and conveyed that if something was going on with the beer he absolutely needed to know, right now.
“We dropped it!”
“We dropped it off a goddamn cliff,” Steve moaned. “Kayla had this whole big cooler—”
“It was so expensive! So much beer!”
“And we were carrying it together, and then I tripped on a tree root, and slipped, and Kayla tried to grab me… and we dropped the beer.”
“Off the cliff!” Kayla couldn’t have sounded more heartbroken if she were a young lady during the Vietnam War being told that her betrothed, who had been her childhood sweetheart since she was three years old, had had a completely sober four-way with two Vietnamese twins and their pet goat, and then had been killed by the Viet Cong while he was still cavorting with the goat.
In a voice that sounded like the auditory representation of hair raising combined with the scream of nails on a chalkboard, the Pale Bro expressed that he couldn’t believe this and Steve had been such a fuckup.
Steve, actually kind of intimidated, raised his hands. “I know, man, I’m sorry! We didn’t mean to!”
The Pale Bro then lectured the two of them about how if he’d been allowed to help in the first place, he wouldn’t have accidentally dropped the beer off the cliff and right now they would all be knocking back some sweet brews, but instead they insisted they could handle it and now all that beer had been tragically lost, cut down in the prime of its life, its yeasty lifeblood spilling out across the rocks and stones below where none could drink it except maybe some squirrels who would get themselves totally fucked up.
“Come on, man, it’s just beer,” Evan said. “We can get more.”
“Not if there’s a killer out there!” Kayla wailed. “We won’t be able to leave to go get beer until morning! What if the killer slashes our tires?”
The Pale Bro conveyed that if that happened, it was fucking on because no psycho killer, monster, or cousin was going to get between him and more beer.
Trevor, trying to be the voice of reason, said, “Folks, we’ve got a lot of beer in our cooler and we’ve barely touched it. There’s no use crying over spilled… beer.”
“Yes, there is! It’s very cryable!” Kayla declared, starting to cry.
“God, you’re drunk,” Nandini muttered. “Maybe you shouldn’t be hitting any more of the beer anyway.”
“Come on,” Steve said, putting his arm around Kayla. “It’s gonna be all right. Don’t cry. Trevor’s right, we’ve got a lot in our cooler.”
Kayla turned toward him and cried against his chest, as he hugged her with one arm and awkwardly patted her head with the other.
“Wow,” Nandini said. “You’re really into this guy, aren’t you?”
Steve turned red, which they could all see by now because they’d made their way out of the woods and back into the outside lights of the cabin. “Uh, I don’t think so, I’m just trying to comfort her…”
“You’re a white guy touching her hair and she’s putting up with it,” Nandini said. “Kayla’s been known to punch white people who touch her hair.”
“That was that bitch Madison and it was one time!” Kayla cried.
Steve removed his hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I just…”
“No! I like it when you touch my hair! I don’t like it when bitches like Madison touch my hair after they’ve just said some racist bullshit, but you’re being so sweet! You can officially touch my hair,” Kayla said, and then started sobbing again, hugging Steve tightly.
The Pale Bro audibly sighed, in a voice like a dude who’s just seen one of his best friends score a date with a chick he was really into and he can’t even be mad because it wasn’t like he got anywhere with her himself or even admitted to anyone how cute he thought she was.
***
The group returned to find that Harrison had wandered back to the hot tub as soon as it was clear that no one was being killed except maybe a large number of innocent bottles of beer, and was sitting outside the hot tub but right by Y’lehna, who was in the hot tub eating chips.
Nandini said, severely, “Y’lehna! Ashlee told you not to do that!”
“Ashlee can tell me herself,” Y’lehna said with chips in her mouth.
“I’ve been watching,” Harrison said brightly. “None of the crumbs have fallen in the water! It’s all good!”
Trevor snorted. “Well, of course you think so, Har,” he said. “You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”
Nandini frowned, and then scowled, and glared at Evan. “Wait, you told me he was gay!”
“You said what?” Harrison was shocked.
Evan held up his hands. “Sorry, Har. But…” He looked over at Nandini. “I thought that if I told you that he only likes really unusual girls, you’d feel hurt because it would sound like I was telling you you were basic or something, and that’s totally wrong. You’re gorgeous and you could probably get any guy you wanted, except Harrison, because you don’t have scales or feathers or six eyes or something.”
“Well, you could have said that,” Nandini said.
Kayla said, “I get it. Rhiannon’s like that, too.”
“To be fair,” Harrison said, “I am bi.” This was information Evan had not known. “I just haven’t yet met any weird dudes who aren’t related to Pale here, and it’s just way too weird to date one of your bro’s actual brothers or something.”
“Does anyone know where Ashlee went?” Steve asked.
Everyone looked around. There was no Ashlee.
“Could she be in the bathroom, maybe?” Nandini asked.
“Don’t think so,” Y’lehna said. “She ran off while you guys were running to the woods. I wasn’t gonna get in the hot tub and eat pretzels if she was still here!”
“Uh, yeah,” Rhiannon said. “That’s a little long to be in the bathroom.”
The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was exhaustedly done with this bullshit that he could look for her.
“Nah, man, I’ll do it,” Trevor said. “I know your feet are hurting, and I’m the next biggest guy after you.”
“I could go with you,” Steve said.
Trevor shook his head. “Steve… that is a cute girl who is very, very drunk,” he said, pointing at Kayla. “I don’t know her tolerance, but I’m pretty sure that if she isn’t at puke bucket level now, she will be soon. You need to stay with her and make sure she’s okay.”
“Yeah, good point,” Steve said.
Nandini turned back to Evan as Trevor walked away. “I can’t believe you lied to me, though. I mean, I know Rhiannon. I could have accepted ‘he’s only into weird-looking chicks’—”
“Thanks, Nandi, that’s sweet,” Y’lehna said.
“You know what I mean,” Nandini said, waving her hand dismissively.
“Look, I’m gonna come clean with you,” Evan said. “I really thought you were great. You’re hot, you’re smart – I’m not dumb, but when you talked about your major, I realized you could run rings around me – and you stay calm in a crisis, and I really respect that. But you asked me if Har had a girlfriend, and I just – I’m sorry. It was like you didn’t even notice I’m a dude, and that made me feel bad. So I did something shitty, and I gotta apologize to both you and Harrison.”
“I mean, no problem on my end,” Harrison said. “It’s all good, bro.”
“Damn,” Nandini said, running her hand through her hair. “I didn’t even think about what that sounded like when I asked you. I’m sorry, Evan, what I said to you was a shitty thing too. I mean, I still think what you did was worse because you were lying, but I understand why you did it.”
“Hey, I know you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.”
“Evan’s right, though,” Harrison said. “I mean, not about me being gay, I like girls just fine, but…” He shrugged. “Girls that look like normal human beings, even beautiful human beings, it just doesn’t click. Y’lehna here’s really different-looking, and that is so hot.” He turned to Y’lehna. “You know you’re super-hot, right?”
“Yes,” Y’lehna said, “but boys like you don’t usually agree. So that’s nice.”
“I guess I can forgive you,” Nandi said to Evan. “But you’d better not lie to me again.”
“I am pretty sure you could kick my ass if I did, so I won’t. I like my ass un-kicked.”
“Your ass is okay,” Nandini said. “I’ve seen better asses, but yours is all right.”
Rhiannon had offered to give the Pale Bro a foot rub, since his feet hurt. A guy as big as he was suffered from foot pain frequently, so he’d agreed, while apologizing in a voice like a church organ in a cave for his toenails. Some might say his toenails were worth apologizing for, as they were about four inches long and razor sharp.
But Rhiannon disagreed. “Your toenails are great. Look how white they are! I never see guys without all kinds of grody fungus turning their toenails yellow. And I bet you’re amazing at climbing trees with them.”
The Pale Bro allowed that this was true, and that climbing in general was one of his talents.
Steve, meanwhile, wasn’t exactly sure what he ought to be doing with Kayla, who was now lying on her back, her head in his lap, rambling about stars and how far away they were. When she’d asked for another beer, he’d gotten her cold water instead and reminded her that water was important to avoid hangovers. She’d finished most of the water – the rest had spilled – and now she seemed to be close to falling asleep in his lap.
“You’re really into stars, huh?” he asked. “You an astronomy major?”
“Oh no!” Kayla laughed. “Math! I’d tell you all about it but I’m waaaaaay too drunk. I just reeeeally like stars!”
“That’s cool,” Steve said. “I’m a comp sci major myself.”
“Are you gonna build an AI that wants to take over the world and enslave humanity?” Kayla asked.
“Hey, I’d be happy if I could build an AI that can identify rocks as not sheep,” Steve laughed.
***
Trevor had very quickly guessed where Ashlee might be.
Ashlee was nervous and reacted badly to things that startled or scared her. Ashlee was also at her own house – well, cabin. So odds were, Ashlee had gone into the cabin to calm down.
The cabin wasn’t very big, and Ashlee wasn’t in any of the rooms in an obvious place. So Trevor started checking the not-obvious places, like a closet in a room that looked girly enough that it might be her room. He knocked on the door.
She shrieked, inside the closet, but he said, “Ashlee, calm down! It’s me, Trevor. Can I check on you to make sure you’re okay?”
“Uh… okay,” she said, and Trevor opened the door. Ashlee was sitting in a lighted closet, on the floor, completely covered to her shoulders with stuffed animals.
“Wow. Are you okay?” He squatted down. Being a big black man, Trevor had learned many strategies for making himself look less threatening. Not towering over somebody was one of them.
“Not… really?” Ashlee said.
“I know you were scared with all that noise. Hell, I was too. But it turned out to be nothing. Steve and Kayla accidentally dropped some beer over the cliff.”
“It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s just… it’s too much. Too many people.”
“Yeah?” He sat on the floor crisscross applesauce, making himself even lower and more relaxed-looking. “You want us to go?”
“No! I mean, this was supposed to be a weekend with just my friends, and then you guys show up, but you’re nice guys! I like you guys! But it’s just so many people, I started to wig out.” She lifts an arm out of the sea of stuffed animals. “So I do this thing when there’s too many people and I start to freak… I find a tiny place and I fill it with soft things and I lay in them until my tachycardia goes away.”
“Tachycardia?”
“Oh, um, that means fast heart beat. Sorry. I just always call it that because it sounds scarier than fast heartbeat and it really is scarier so I want people to know it’s a problem.”
“I know what it means, I’m a pre-med. I just wondered—”
“Oh wow! I’m in pre-med, too!” Ashlee sat up , some of the stuffed animals falling off her. “I guess we’re not in any classes together because you’re a senior and I’m a sophomore, but did you have Lessing for Organic Chemistry?”
“You’re doing orgo in sophomore year?” Trevor whistled. “That’s fast.”
“Yeah, I, um, my high school had like this program where good students could do science classes at a nearby college, for college credit, in senior year, so I took chemistry then, and bio last year and also the math I needed, so I get to do orgo this year.”
“I hated orgo. It’s just memorize a bunch of prefixes and suffixes and string them together. Couldn’t we find a better way to describe methylethylpropylene than that?”
She laughed. “Is that even a real thing?”
“I don’t know, but it’s pretty ridiculous that I can put together a string of prefixes and make something that sounds like a chemical even if it doesn’t exist.” He shook his head sadly. “And yeah, I had Lessing. She’s tough. She giving your brain a real workout?”
“Yeah. It’s a challenge. Everyone always told me, ‘Ashlee, you can’t just coast along getting straight As without ever studying. Ashlee, when you go to college it’ll be a lot harder. Ashlee, you need to learn how to study or you’ll fail in college.’ Well… I haven’t failed yet, but… it might be close.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I must sound so stuck up with my humblebrag. ‘Oh, it’s so hard to be a gifted student who gets straight As!’ But it really is hard. Because if it was too easy for you in school you don’t learn how to handle it when it gets too hard, and I’m just, like, totally stressed.”
“I feel you. My mom made me study, and I was like, ‘momma, I do not need to read the book and highlight all the important parts and then write them in an outline and then read over the outline! I got it the first time I read the book!’ And that was what she said. ‘You take shortcuts now because everything’s easy, you’ll be in a world of hurt when things get hard.’ And hell, I ended up in a world of hurt in orgo anyway.” They both laughed.
“Anyway, your friends are worried about you and I don’t want people to think we both got bumped off by a psycho killer, so I figure, there’s three options here. I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and I leave you the hell alone; I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and then I come back and we keep talking; or you and I both leave together and we both tell everyone you’re okay, and then we get to eat some chips, if Y’lehna and Harrison didn’t get them all already.”
“She’s in the hot tub eating chips, isn’t she.” It was not a question.
“Yeah, sad but true. At least she’s leaning over the side so the crumbs get on the concrete and they don’t fall in the tub.”
Ashlee sighed. “I guess I better get back out there. But I do still want to talk and stuff. And I wanna check up on Phenylephrine so maybe you can help me find her.”
“Phenylephrine?”
“My cat. The cat before her was Sudafed so when she died and I got a new kitten I named her Phenylephrine.”
“I get the joke there, but why was the first cat named Sudafed?”
“My mom was allergic to cats and she said if we get a cat we might as well name it Sudafed because she’d be taking so much of it, and then we did get a cat, so she did name her Sudafed.”
“Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten a cat if she was that allergic?”
“Oh, no, my mom loves cats. She just says wiseass things sometimes. Anyway, Phenyl lives here at the cabin and the cleaning service makes sure she gets fed. They call her the head of Mousekeeping Services.”
Trevor laughed.
***
Outside, it turned out there was no need to turn out a search party for Phenylephrine, as for some entirely inexplicable reason it turned out she liked chips, and also Harrison’s lap, where he was feeding her chips. She didn’t actually eat the chips, she just licked them.
The party was starting to flag just a bit; Evan suggested putting on some music, but the internet wasn’t good enough here for Ashlee’s Spotify playlist and she didn’t have MP3s on a hard drive like Evan did. Evan was regretting not putting a bunch of MP3s on a flash drive and bringing them with him. Nandini had a CD in her car – the girls had all come up here in their own cars, except for Y’lehna who couldn’t drive – but it was hit songs from Bollywood musicals and no one here knew any of them, and she was self-conscious about whether anyone would even like them.
And then, as they discussed what to do about tunes, a shadow fell across them, blocking the moon for a moment.
They all looked up, even the Pale Bro. A shambling monstrosity, 20 feet tall and brick red, with sprouting tentacles where its face should be and eyes on the tentacles, and Edward-Scissorhands-length blades for fingernails, loomed over them.
Several of the group screamed. The Pale Bro got to his feet.
“D̶̫̊̚Ũ̸̟̝͍̘̮͒Ḍ̸͋̽̀E̷̛̝̹̗͈̊͌̍,̷̨̖̲̺̤̝͂̈́̎͘ ̴̛̱͚͗Y̶̧͔͉̙͋͊̊͋͘Ô̸̢̥̙͙U̴͖͍̳̭͗̊̌͘͘͜R̷̫̜̘̀ ̶̼̘̠̾̐̈́̒̚Ṃ̴̡̡̦̮̖̿͗̊͋͝Ȯ̴͛ͅM̴̺̱͕̳̀ ̷̱͔̄̃̎́I̸̙͐̍͑͐S̶͉͉̲͋̊͒̽̄͜ ̵̤̙̬̫̒͋́͛P̷̧̧̧̰͔̦͠Î̴̢̜͒̅͘S̷̛̝̤͂́̍̐S̴̭͉͆̋̿É̴̢̺̲̫̝͋́̋̚̚D̴̥͈̠̋̅̅̀͝͝ ̴̡̡̖̬̓A̵͈͚̣͂̆̔̍̂̕T̷̡͙̠̙̫̎̈̄͝ͅ ̴͔͗̀̋͗̏Y̴̤͇̪͕͇͎͆̌̀̊̈́Ơ̸̡̢̙̭͇͕̒̐̕̕U̸̡̩̠̚.̸̣̖̼̫́͛̄,” the entity boomed.
In a sound like the rushing of lava through underground caverns just before a volcano was about to blow, the Pale Bro demanded to know if the entity had eaten any people lately.
“S̴̙̱͕̀H̴̭͐̈́͠I̷̘̟͉̝͊͐̄̋̀̑Ṱ̷̢̫̮͓̲̐̑͗̈́̀,̵͓̥͖͈̾́̏̇͘ ̵̣̳͍̿Ń̵̟̦̰͖̺͜O̸͉̓̈̊͛̔̕.̷̣̜̗̩̈́ ̸͖̋̓̀̀͝͝Í̶̘̗͓̱̗̬̀̈́'̴̗̯͈͈̥͎̎̇M̷̹̻͉̼͑̎̓̐̏̀ ̴͚̻͚̱̇̿͛̏͒͠O̴̩̪̣̯̤͙̐̐̚̚Ņ̶͇̘̤̗͗͗̑͛̏̇͜ ̸̡͎̔̽͛A̷̢̘̪͎̗͊͐̌͝͠ ̸̤̺͉̫̖̫̀̓̑̕̕D̴̡̜̤̻̉Ĩ̸̡̯͉͔́̓̂͘͝Ę̶̨̫͇̬̳̉̽͑̈̊͐T̸̥̝̹̑̾.̷̢̟̻̭̲̿ ̴̧̣͌̆̃̕ͅÏ̷̟̰̫̰̹̽̐̐F̶͖̂̉̌ ̵͔͚̊̐Y̸͔̆Ö̴̞̦͕̘̀̒̀͘Ṳ̶̪̝͙̎̿͘ ̵̥̀̏͗E̵̦̣̲͍͉̥̊V̶̑͒̏ͅȨ̷͚̪̲̎͜ͅR̵͎͖̀̓̈́͑͠ ̷̣̀̀̓͋C̸̲̗͎̞͔̭͌̈́̕͘Ã̶̝͉̮͉͉̓̄͒̈́͜͝M̵̙̮͎̹̌E̷̥̪̎̓͗́͝ ̷͎͓̙̺͔̗͂̑̕H̶̢̍͗́͋͊O̴̗̎̽̆M̴̮̭̮͐̑́̚Ë̶̩̦̹̞́͂̈́̆ ̴̩̻̈́͘Y̴̨͍̣̩͈̎̅͘͘O̵̠͉͒̐̈̕͝U̶̪̝̳̺͑͆̇'̸̖̋D̶̗̉̓̿͐̓ ̸͉̍̀͠K̷̥̞̼̍͛́̇͗͝N̵̡̹̠͚̥̰̋̈́̌̈́͘O̸̻̠͍̲͋̉Ẁ̸̞͎̺̀͆̌̀ ̴̛͔̙͗͗̉͠T̸̨̓̀̎H̶̡̱̘͈̹͐̔͗͂͘A̷̠̠͉͎̫̰̿̄T̴̡̰͍̦͕̉̌,” it said, rolling tentacles clockwise around its face in an approximation of an eye roll.
If that was the case, the Pale Bro shot back, explain why this entity’s footprint was found right outside his bro’s cabin, and a man was missing.
“Į̴̙͈̻̓͗͜ͅ ̷̙̑̔͛͝W̷̺̯̲͗͝Ã̸̹͕̊S̷̹̲͆̏ͅ ̵̝̈́̒͗̓̍L̸͖̺̊͛Ǫ̶̗̥̼͍̥̒̒̌̊O̸͙̊̎̋̏̕Ķ̴͚̫̤̈̔́̅͑͝Į̵͑̍Ṉ̸̨͌͂́Ǵ̵̭̥̹̮̞̏͂ͅ ̷͚͙̹̋F̸̧͕͉͓̊̾͊O̵̲̙͓͛̌̄̏̕̚R̴̬͚̠͉̬̘̽̀̌́͊ ̴͎̀̏̐͋Y̴͈̘̮͌͋̍̃̍̈́Ơ̷̞͉̝͙̻̒U̵̦̭͈̻̪̽͂͗̚,̴̳̐ ̸̢̠̙͕̰̐̅D̸̟̫̋͑̅̈́̄͜͝ͅŰ̵̡̜̤̺̿̍̃̈́M̵̼̜̳̊͊̋̈ͅB̷̧͖̲̮̤̜͋̐͑̔Ȁ̶̼̪̟̼̱̐̔̋̀͘S̷̨̳͂S̶̨̡͈̈́̐͂̿͜͠,” the entity said. “A̷͕̎͆Ṷ̴̢̣͙͐Ņ̷͓͔͕̙̟͛̿́̐͝T̶̠̹̜͇͐̾̊̂̚ ̸͔̐͋̓̓͐͝€̶͉̦̍̊̅₯̷̟̙̗̱̤̈́̋̌͂͌̚ῥ̷̠̩̇ῗ̶̦͎͚̃͊̾ᾗ̴̤̞̰͕͓̈́͜Ỷ̸͔̫͙̦͐ẞ̶̦͕̱́͂͑́͊̈́ ̵͉͍͉̼̐͑̈́͋͝S̷̢͇̽͗͛͊̏E̸͉̲̓̉̎̈N̸̤̾Ț̷̻̍́̍ ̴͓̱͉͍̝̄̐̀͜ M̷̹͖͝E̸̘̖͓̍͋͜ ̶̢̲̘͋ T̴̠̘̲̼̍̈́̄̏̃͝ͅǪ̷̨̡̤͕͎͠ ̴̬͑͊ T̵͚̫̆̏͘E̴͚̗̯̠̊͗͌̕̚ͅL̴̫̺̫̀̄̽̃̕L̶̡͚̫̬̈́͑̇ ̴̲͙̼̖̘̺̈͊̓̂͠ Y̸̰̳̰̑Ơ̵̢̼̯͕̌Ų̶̜̜͚͇̕ͅ ̶̟͎̫͌ Y̴͔̱̼̅̋̄̀͜O̴͕̰̰̎̄U̶͓̜̼̝͑̃͂͘͝ ̸̨͎̀͊Ṅ̵̢͙̙̹̀Ë̸̖E̵̢̪̪͛̒̈D̷͍͖̀̈̏͊͋̚ ̶̦̙̫̺͓̉͂͠T̸̙̮̬͚̚Ó̷̖̘̩̘̝̌̄ ̸͇͍͋͒̃̑Ṽ̸͉̞͔̘̱̃͑̌I̷͙͛͑͝S̸̢̗̬̞͂̽I̵̺̿̾͗̀̓̅T̷̢͈̺̹̀̇͊͐̊̍ͅ,̵̭̔ ̷̹̥̺̟̣͋̄͜Ş̵̺̱̃Ḩ̴̙͙̼͙͉̔̎̍̐́̃I̷͔͚͂̇̑͂͜T̷̲̱͔̬̓͠H̶̝̝͌̏͐Ę̴̨̰̙̤͖̎A̸͔͠ͅḐ̴̻͚͔̯̏́͐͘.̵͚͎̪͖̼̻̇̉.”
The Pale Bro replied, in a voice like the whining of an engine underneath the whapping sound of helicopter rotors, that he was on vacation with his bros and he was not here to visit his mom and she could just deal.
“A̶̱̘̬̪̝̓͌͊͐̚R̸͙͌̉̆̆̇̔ͅE̵̡̱̙̯̮̅͗ ̴͈͒̐Y̶̮̤̽̄O̴̢͓̙̝̮͉̾̆̈́̔̚͝Ų̸͚̗͓̞͎̀͝ ̶̡̬͚̄̆͌͋̉̆F̷̙͊͋U̷̿͊̊̽͌̚ͅC̴͙̦̼͕̈́̊̒K̴̬̘͆̀̑͒̐I̸̅́̈͒̅͠ͅŅ̴̪͍̭͂̈G̴̗̥͎͌̔̽̑̈́ ̸̻̰͆̈̕Ȟ̶̱̜̎̕Ī̴͎̝̖̼̤̱̏̐G̵͚͙̊͆̃̍̅ͅͅḦ̸̡̾̄̕?̵͉̫̠̉̈́̓ ̸̡͕̔͐Y̵̨͒͊̈̕O̴̮͓̼̽̓͝Ú̶̝̺͜ ̴̛̪̚ͅͅC̸̣̆͛̿̓̂Á̸͇͈̦͐͗̇͝N̸̞̭̲̻͖̦̽̈́̈'̶̪̪̐͐̈́T̸͔̘͌̄ ̴̨̪͙̫̩̐́S̶̩̋̃A̷̡̨͙͉͕͑́̔̓̌͜͠Y̸̯̝͕̋͗̄̾ ̵̲̜̥̥͆͊̾̑̊͜͝ͅT̴̟̭̼̲̐̄H̶͚̦̯̱̐̔͝Ą̴̥̤̅̃̄̂̾T̵̞̜̱̍̈́̔̕͜ͅ ̶̤͇͐Ṱ̷̃̾̚Ȏ̷͇͈͓̰͇͓ ̶͓̘̟̉̄̀͌̽ͅẎ̸̢̠̿Ỏ̸̧̢̹̹̀̓U̶̢̬͚̞̘͂́̃̆̽̔Ṛ̵̬̱̯̟̀͐̓̎̃͠ ̵̨̮̏̑̐̐M̷̽͜͝O̴̪̙͙͕̥̕͘M̵̨͉̫̭̩̔͑̈́̈̈͝!” the entity exclaimed.
“This is your cousin, bro?” Evan asked diplomatically.
In a voice like the moaning of the wind through a forest of dead things and disappointments, the Pale Bro admitted that this asshole was indeed his cousin, and was carrying a message from the Bro’s mom that he needed to come visit her, because somehow she’d found out that he was vacationing in the area.
“Well, why don’t you just tell him that you will go to visit your mom, in a few days, right before we head out? It is rude to be right near her house and not go visit her, but on the other hand you’re on vacation to spend time with us, so just do it at the end,” Evan suggested.
The Pale Bro expressed that if he absolutely had to visit his mom, that was probably the best way to handle it, and could his cousin kindly fuck off now.
“Ö̵̡̩͙̠̮͌̓̍K̶͈̬̳̰̺͂̋̂́̕Ạ̸̢̬̪̠̠̽͝Ÿ̴͓̰̰̻͔́̏͒̌͆,̶̮̉͒͒̿̏ ̵̦̺̠͓̩̲̍͆̉B̸͕̽͆Ư̵̟̔̈́̌̏͒Ţ̵̳̞̙̣̪̏̂ ̶͈̲̃͐̈́͋͛Y̴̝͍͌̈̍Ơ̶̙̝̱̘̈́̉́̊͒Ū̷͎̦ ̸͚̓B̷͕̥͊͗̿̒͝Ë̴͕͖̪͇̃́T̶͉̓̾̌̃̀͘T̵̨̟̠̩͚̜͂̎̚̕͝Ḙ̴͈̳̮͗̆͋̐́̈́R̶̡̛̪̮͖͓͙̍̈́͌́ ̸̧̘̻̞̣̈́͆͑̄͜N̷͎̦̬͊͌̆̌̕O̵̧̫̾́̾͜T̵͔̉́ ̸͔̒̀̐͆̌F̵̣͉̖̺̱̚ͅÒ̸̯̜̼̖̋̑͘͜R̶̲̦̱̭̱̙̆̈G̵͓̘̞͎̑̅E̴̲̓̿T̴̝̝̑͌̏̊̄̕ ̴̧̡̮̮͓͓̐͒T̸̡̛̖͈͒̕Ḥ̸̬̭͙̪̲̈́͌̈́̚͠͝Ì̸̡͎̝̎̈́̾͂̕S̷̠̻̣̈́̓͘̚ ̶̧̤̀̈́Ţ̴̧̛̫̫̑͗̓͌̉ͅÏ̵̧̘̰̆ͅM̶̮̤̎̉͜E̶̘̬̟͓̜͔̓̕̕̕,̶̗̈ ̶̖͇̞̀̾͑̓͜͠D̷̡̢̧̹̖͙͛̂̒̏̏I̵̛͍̘̜̲̥̓̏̅͐͂̋͝P̴̧̢̡̱͖̣͔̰̦̊̀Ṡ̸̳̺̓̓̕H̷̰̭̣͂͗Ị̶̢̧̜͇̅̎̓̈̉̂̃̐̕͜͜ͅT̶̰̰̋͐.̵͍̜̠̰͊͝ ̷̝͔̼̞͘ͅI̶̩͍̘͎̺̓'̷͕̟̗̣̳̻̀͂͠L̵̹̣̃͗̇͆L̴̢̛̩̤͖̬̆̚ ̸̲̬̲̈́͛͑̌B̴̘̹́́̈͝E̵͓͐̋͒͐̏̎ ̵͇̹̂͒Ẇ̵̨͎̣̝͔͘ͅA̷̻̗̫̍͑̈́̇̐T̸̥̱̘̲̳̋C̶̪̀H̵̢̏͜Ì̸̡̨͙̜̠̲͘N̸͖̹̦̿͊́͛̈́͝G̵̡̨̘̼̀̑̅̎.̷̍̑̆.” The giant creature lumbered off, back into the woods.
“Your family sounds like mine,” Evan said, commiserating.
“Mine, too,” Nandini said. “If I was within 50 miles of my mom while I was on vacation and I didn’t stop by to see her, I’d never hear the end of it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met your mom,” Steve said.
The Pale Bro suggested that that was just as well.
***
Kayla was napping on Steve, whose legs were starting to go numb but he didn’t want to risk waking her up. Trevor and Ashlee were talking animatedly about terrible professors and classes that were absolute bullshit but required for the pre-med track. Nandini, having forgiven Evan for lying to her about Harrison, had agreed to go on a date or two with him once they all got back to school, and see where things went. Also, she’d helped him recover his mom’s good knives, which they’d all dropped in the dirt when they got here so the girls wouldn’t be scared of them. Rhiannon continued to hit on the Pale Bro, who either didn’t notice, or was so flustered by a girl paying attention to him that he pretended not to notice. Y’lehna, somewhat overheated by spending too long in the tub and not drinking enough water, had a headache, and Harrison was tending her by getting her glasses of water with ice from Ashlee’s freezer.
Everything was going pretty well, and a lot of fun, except for Steve and his numb legs, when a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a bloody knife came out of the woods.
Everyone except Trevor and the Pale Bro screamed. The Pale Bro growled, less like a dog and more like the sound of the devil’s car engine, down in Hell, when the devil is revving it because he’s just challenged the Archangel Michael to a race in a demonic replica of NASCAR. Trevor took note of where Evan and Nandini had put all of Evan’s mom’s kitchen knives, and yelled, “Can we help you?”, preparing to grab a knife from the pile and go knife-fight the dude, just in case the Pale Bro was too drunk to simply lift the fellow up and toss him off the cliff that had already claimed Kayla’s case of beer.
“I hope so!” the man yelled back. “I’m in the middle of cutting up steaks for the grill, and I realize, I don’t have any potatoes! I was gonna do the potatoes on low and slow so they’d be nice and soft inside, but turns out, all my potatoes rotted and I haven’t got any, and it’d take like forty-five minutes to drive into town. And now it’s too late for baked potatoes, but I haven’t got any kind of starch, so I was wondering if you guys have any French fries?”
Trevor blinked.
“Uh, why are you wearing a ski mask?” Nandini asked.
“Oh, this!” The man pulled off the mask. “Haha, almost forgot I had this on! I’m anemic, so my face gets cold. I wear ski masks around to keep warm, but I forgot how that would look to somebody else. Wow, that was dumb of me.”
The man was a good bit older than any of them, maybe late 20’s or early 30’s. He was a white dude with a tan complexion, like Rhiannon’s, but it was a little grayish and unhealthy looking in the bright lights around the hot tub, which could be due to the anemia. His black hair was wavy and longish, parted on the side and going down to his shoulders, framing his face, and he had a mustache and beard. “My name’s Jason,” he said. “My girlfriend and I just moved back in to the cabin – we live here in the spring and summer months because my girl can’t handle the summer sun, she needs some shade – and I brought the steaks with me to celebrate, but I thought I had potatoes. I forgot, potatoes don’t survive being stored for four months.”
“Whew.” Evan shook his head. “That’s nasty, man. I hope you were able to get the smell out of wherever you were storing them.”
“It might take a few more good scrubs,” Jason acknowledged, grinning. “Hey, do you guys mind if I put the ski mask back on? I know what it looks like, but my face is really cold.”
“Go ahead,” Trevor said.
“Yeah, we don’t mind,” Nandini said. “If you turn out to be a serial killer, it’s not like you’re not a serial killer when the mask is off.”
Jason laughed again. “Well, I can eat a whole box of cereal in one sitting, so I guess you could call me a cereal killer.” Many of the college students groaned at the pun.
“You and your girlfriend, do you have kids?” Harrison asked. “Because that was dad-joke worthy.”
“Haha! Nah, no kids yet, dunno if that’s in the cards ever to be frank. Angella’s not much of a kid person.” He pronounced the name On-zhellah rather than An-jellah, like it was French or something.
“I don’t think I have any fries,” Ashlee said. “Or anything, really. When I’m here at the cabin I mostly drive down into town and get takeout. I mean, I’ve got bacon and eggs and bread for toast, and I could make you a PB&J or a lunch meat sandwich, but no real food.”
“That’s better than what I’ve got,” Evan muttered, and then, more loudly, “You got any tomatoes or peppers? I could chop them up and fry you some Spanish rice; I’d just have to go back to my cabin to get rice and spices.”
“Hey, man, that’d be awesome,” Jason said. “Yeah, I’ve got tomatoes and peppers. We’ve got a lot of steak and I don’t think even Angella’s appetite for bloody meat will put a dent in it, so if you guys wanted to come over and get some steak…”
The Pale Bro said in a voice like the moon had crashed but was still orbiting, scraping itself along the Earth’s crust as it went, that steak sounded sweet and he wouldn’t mind having some steak.
“Bro, you are just, like, an eating machine,” Harrison said. “But yeah, wouldn’t mind a steak.”
“I prefer seafood,” Y’lehna said, “but I don’t dislike steak.”
“Guys, Kayla’s asleep and I can’t leave her alone here,” Steve pointed out.
“I’ll stay here with Kayla,” Ashlee suggested. “You can go get steak.”
“I don’t feel great leaving you guys by yourselves, though, you sure you don’t want me to stay?”
At this point, Kayla lifted her head and asked blearily, “What’s happening?”, which solved the issue of who would stay with her; when steak was explained to her she cheerfully agreed that steak would be nice, and everyone else agreed that Kayla had had enough to drink that, assuming she didn’t puke it up, putting more food in her stomach might be a good idea.
Trevor and a couple of knives went with Evan back to Evan’s cabin to get the rice; the Pale Bro went with the rest of them to Jason’s cabin, both to make sure nothing happened to any of his friends, and because steak sounded awesome. Since Evan’s family had been coming here for vacations since he was a kid, he knew the area well enough to know how to get to Jason’s house once Jason gave him the address.
***
Jason’s cabin was about the same size as Evan’s, and it did not have a hot tub, but it did have a barbeque grill. Not one of those tiny little portable things that run on charcoal, either. This was a large fancy propane-powered grill of the kind that could practically be used in an industrial kitchen.
“Honey! I brought guests! And they brought beer! And their friend is gonna make us some Spanish rice!” he called.
A woman came out of the cabin, looking so goth she might as well have invented it. She had incredibly pale white skin, without even the undertone of red most healthy human beings have; she wasn’t quite as pale as the Pale Bro, but it was close. Long black hair slunk down her back like she was cosplaying Morticia Adams. She was wearing hip-hugging black jeans and a long-sleeved black blouse, and a chain around her neck with an Egyptian ankh on it, and her lips were blood-red.
Then she opened her mouth, and it became immediately apparent that she had fangs.
“How do you do,” she said in a vaguely quasi-European accent. “I’m called Angella Darque, with a q. And you are?”
The college students introduced themselves, Nandini wearing a very skeptical pair of eyebrows the entire time. After introductions were done, she asked, “Is your last name really Darque?”
Angella looked taken aback. Jason said, “It’s really Duncan, actually, but she’s getting together the legal paperwork to get it changed because she hates her dad. Deadbeat, never paid child support, you know the type.”
“Oh, Jason, I had no idea today was ‘let’s tell total strangers all about my girlfriend’s private history’ day. Is that what we’re celebrating?”
“Sorry.”
“His lips are so loose,” she confessed to the students. “Sometimes I just want to… sew them shut.”
“Isn’t she hilarious?” Jason laughed. “We met at a support group for people with anemia, five years ago, and we’ve been together since.”
“Um,” Ashlee, obviously very nervous, said. “Uh, we brought some beer if you want. And also wine coolers. Would you like a wine cooler?”
“No, I never drink… wine,” Angella said. And then, “Do you have anything like a Jaeger?”
“Evan’s got vodka back at the cabin,” Steve volunteered.
“Does your cell phone work up here? Maybe you could call him,” Jason said. “Or I could, if he’s got a landline.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to put anyone out,” Angella said. “I have 151 here, and that’s quite fine. Would any of you like some?”
“Yeah, slip it on me!” Kayla cheered, somewhat mangling her idiom.
Nandini and Y’lehna said at the same time, “No.” And then Y’lehna clarified. “I’m a little drunk, but she’s, like, totally plastered. We can’t even let her have a beer at this point. Soda’s cool, though.”
The Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like a million marbles suddenly gaining sentience and stampeding for a cliff to fling themselves over like lemmings, except that lemmings don’t really do that, that he would appreciate a rum and Coke.
Angella went back in the house to make the Pale Bro a rum and Coke with dangerously-high-proof rum. Harrison, Steve, and the girls looked at each other. Finally Rhiannon said, “I thought maybe I saw… your girlfriend has fangs? What’s up with that?”
“Pretty cool, huh?” Jason said cheerfully. “Now you guys need to let me know, should I use the rosemary garlic marinade, the pineapple ginger, or the Brazilian steakhouse?”
“Why not mix it up?” Harrison asked. “You got a lot of steak there, you could do ‘em all!”
“I don’t think pineapple ginger would go well with steak,” Ashlee said uncertainly. “Doesn’t that sound like more of a pork thing?”
“Or fish,” Y’lehna said. “Oh, but wait! Nandini, can you even eat pork?”
“I can eat anything,” Nandini said irritably, “but my family’s Hindi, not Muslim. I’m supposed to stay away from beef, not pork. But some traditions I don’t even believe in is not going to stop me from eating a nice steak.”
“I could add pork medallions, if you thought it was a good idea,” Jason said.
“Nah, man, you’ve got a lot of meat here,” Harrison said. “It looks great! Maybe if you had like a swordfish or tuna steak for Y’lehna, but if you don’t, no worries.”
“I got a salmon.”
“Pineapple ginger might go really well with salmon,” Y’lehna suggested.
Meanwhile Angella had brought the Pale Bro his rum and Coke, and they were currently discussing literary trends in fiction aimed at college-educated women.
***
Evan and Trevor returned with rice, spices, dried vegetables, and coincidentally, a can of pineapple chunks. Jason ended up preparing the salmon with the pineapple chunks after defrosting it in his microwave, and Evan made the Spanish rice he’d promised, and no one actually questioned why someone had started grilling steaks at midnight.
The salmon was done first, and Y’lehna and Nandini, who was feeling just a little bit guilty over her earlier decision to eat beef, got most of it. Angella got the first steak that came up, when it was barely warmed, still dripping blood. Then the rest of them, as the rest of the steaks were all done around the same time, along with the rice.
At some point, Evan suggested that everyone return to his cabin, because he had video games and music and nice speakers; Jason and Angella turned the offer down, Angella saying, “The night is young, and has yet to yield all its delights”, which was really corny and pretentious, but given the look she gave Jason when she said it, none of the guys questioned why he was staying at his own cabin tonight instead of going with them. Ashlee also insisted on staying at her own cabin; after a whole night of having ten people at her house, she was kind of burned out on people, and needed to get some sleep. And everyone agreed that Kayla should stay at Ashlee’s cabin; she was still cheerful and fun, but she was still pretty plastered. Because of the potential threat of a killer, Steve volunteered to stay with the girls; he knew Evan’s landline number, so he could call in reinforcements if necessary. Everyone else trooped back along the road, many carrying tinfoil-covered plates of steak and spicy rice, back to Evan’s cabin.
There was blood dripped onto the driveway.
The Pale Bro noticed it before anyone else, with his multiple sensitive eyes. His arm went out to block Evan from going any further, and in a voice like the rumble of an entire river’s worth of water pouring from a broken dam, he warned everyone of the blood and suggested he should go first.
Evan put up his hands. “No problem, man,” he said. “You take point.”
“I’m right behind you,” Trevor, holding one of the knives in front of him, said.
“Okay, I’ll bring up the rear,” Nandini said. “Harrison, Y’Lehna, Rhiannon, Evan, you go between us.”
Harrison looked at Nandini, who was taller than him, and then at the others. Evan was maybe the same height as Nandini, maybe very slightly taller… or very slightly shorter. It was too dark for Harrison to accurately judge.
He, too, put up his hands. “Works for me,” he said.
Evan looked back at Nandini. “I feel like I should be back with you,” he said. “If Pale’s got Trevor as backup…”
The Pale Bro pointed out, in a tone that conveyed deep irritation, that he didn’t need backup because if it was a human killer he’d make short work of them and if it was a monster, only he had a chance, and anyway it was probably not a monster because his cousin had claimed to be on a diet and the only reason they’d thought it was a monster in the first place was his cousin’s footprint. He then walked forward resolutely.
The door to the cabin was hanging open. The Pale Bro ducked his head way down, which he was pretty much used to doing any time he was going through a door, and pushed through, followed by Trevor. They’d left all the lights on, with the shutters closed, so that the light leaking around the edges of the shutters would make someone think they were home, and also because the lights were LED bulbs so seriously, that was probably like only thirty cents worth of electricity wasted. In that light, they saw blood all over the floor.
All of the group looked at each other uneasily. Ever since the Pale Bro had found the girls and the hot tub, no one had really been acting as if there genuinely was a potential killer out there; they’d given lip service to the idea, they’d certainly gotten scared enough every time something bizarre happened – and a lot of bizarre things had happened – but they hadn’t really treated it as a serious risk. Now it seemed possible that someone had been murdered in Evan’s cabin, or had been stabbed somewhere else and staggered into Evan’s cabin, despite the fact that all the locks had been locked.
The Pale Bro went forward into the kitchen, following the blood trail – and stopped in confusion. This caused everyone else to stop short, without being able to see into the kitchen because the Bro was blocking the doorway.
“Come on, bro, what’s going on?” Evan asked.
The Pale Bro slid sideways out of the way in a fashion that didn’t quite look like a real way anything could possibly move, and Evan pushed forward to be right behind Trevor, both of them crammed into the doorway.
A middle-aged white dude wearing a baseball cap advertising Evan’s parents’ company was at the sink, his front covered in blood. He had turned to face all of them, his hands clean but his sleeves completely saturated with something’s death juices.
“Joe?” Evan said disbelievingly.
“Evan!” Joe said. “I’m so sorry about the mess, man, and the hour, I know you’re pissed and I don’t blame you, I’d be pissed too, I know I’m really late—”
“Joe. Why are you covered in blood? What happened?”
“The meat defrosted,” Joe said. “I was driving around this mountain trying to find the cabin for so long, the meat defrosted, and when I pulled it out of my trunk, the bag caught on something and ripped and all the blood from the meat defrosting was all over me. I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you—” Evan glanced at a fancy cuckoo clock on the wall that actually ran on batteries, not solely on clockwork. “—getting in at two fucking am when you were supposed to be here before six?”
“I have been driving around this mountain since four in the afternoon,” Joe said. “My GPS stopped working halfway up the mountain, and I swear I tried to follow your mom’s directions, I swear, but I couldn’t find Long Leaf Lane no matter how hard I looked, and I went back down and asked at the gas station but none of them lived on the mountain, so I bought a paper map but it didn’t help at all because Long Leaf Lane wasn’t even on it—”
“It’s a private drive, I don’t even know if they put those on maps,” Evan said.
“Evan, if this is your guy with the food and he’s not dying of stab wounds, I’m going to use your bathroom,” Nandini said. “Where is it?”
“There’s two, one upstairs with a claw-foot tub and one down on this floor, go back out of the kitchen and it’s the door on the east side of the living room,” Evan said.
“Great, using the downstairs one,” Nandini said, and ducked back out of the doorway.
“Are you okay?” Rhiannon asked Joe.
“I’ve been driving for ten hours. Last six of which I couldn’t find my way back down the mountain either, and I didn’t have any food and the only water was the ice that used to be in my Sprite that melted—”
“Come on, man,” Evan said, sighing. “Yeah, the GPS situation really sucks around here. I wouldn’t wanna try to find Long Leaf Lane if I hadn’t been coming here every summer for, like, ten years. Let’s get you upstairs and get you cleaned up.” He looked over at Harrison and the Pale Bro. “Guys, you know more or less where the stuff in the kitchen goes, right? Can you put the food away?”
“The ice cream melted,” Joe moaned. “I’m so sorry…”
“No, come on. Let’s get you a shower and a change of clothes. I’ll borrow something of Steve’s while you’re in the shower, he’s about your size.”
“I think I know,” Harrison said. “We put the meat in the freezer?”
Rhiannon and Evan said, “No!” at the same time, and Rhiannon added, “You’ve got to put it in the fridge. You can’t freeze most things twice, they get freezer burned.”
“Huh,” Harrison said, looking over the sheer quantity of meat that Joe had been trying to carry in a paper shopping bag with handles. “I guess we’re gonna go back to Jason and Angella’s at least one night this week, ‘cause this is way more meat than we can eat before it goes bad.”
The Pale Bro, who had just picked up the bag of melted ice cream and slurped the whole thing down like it was a milkshake, said, in the voice of a creature whose mouth was entirely full of melted ice cream, something very much like “Watch me.”
“Lemme go throw this shit out,” Harrison said of the paper shopping bag, whose bottom had almost disintegrated from holding way too much au jus for even a strong, well-made paper shopping bag to handle, and which smelled like a murder had been done, or at least that someone had lost an arm and was bleeding out.
Evan took Joe upstairs to the bathroom to wash himself, broke into Steve’s suitcase and took a random t-shirt and pair of shorts, and advised him that he could stay overnight, sleep on the couch, and have some eggs and bacon in the morning, now that he had brought the eggs and bacon.
And then they all heard Harrison screaming.
Evan got down the stairs approximately as fast as Nandini came racing from the bathroom, but Rhiannon, Y’lehna and the Pale Bro were out the door faster, having been closer.
Harrison was on the ground. The trash can had been dumped over. It was mostly cleaning products used by the team that cleaned the cabin between uses, but there were some banana peels and candy wrappers – and now, a bloody shopping bag – in the pile of trash.
Standing over the pile of trash, looking kind of pissed, was a black bear.
In the voice of a guy who has finally, finally gotten the chance to use his strength and size to protect his friends after like what seemed like twenty-seven false scares tonight, the Pale Bro said something that could possibly be understood to be “Fucking finally,” and charged at the bear.
The bear had a lot of mass, even more than the Pale Bro, who was a very, very skinny dude, but the Pale Bro was around twice as tall as the bear, had much longer claws, and was doing something weird to the space around the bear, making lensing effects that distorted all the angles of the trees and branches behind the trash can. The bear flailed a bit, and then the Pale Bro lifted it and held it straight out from his body, where its much smaller paws couldn’t hope to reach. It snarled and kicked and scratched, but the Pale Bro relentlessly carried it into the woods, where they both disappeared.
“Well.” Evan said. “Who wants to help me clean up this trash?”
“’Want’ is a strong word,” Harrison said, but he helped, and Nandini and Rhiannon pitched in. Y’lehna would have helped, but she had to run back into the cabin to run cold water over her arms and legs.
The Pale Bro returned minutes later, without a scratch on him. “Where’d you put the bear, dude?” Harrison asked.
The Bro conveyed that he could possibly have gone out to the cliff that ran alongside the road – the same cliff that, in a different location, had claimed the life of an entire case of beer – and by the way, did any of them know that bears bounce? Because he hadn’t.
“Dude, you didn’t have to kill it,” Evan complained.
“Yes, he did! It was gonna kill me! I don’t want it coming back for revenge!” Harrison gabbled out.
The Pale Bro declared that he hadn’t killed it. Before anyone could feel either relief or fear over that, he added that his mom lived down that way someplace and she would probably kill it, because eldritch spawn eat a lot and he had a lot of brothers and sisters.
***
And so the first night of their vacation ended, with the Pale Bro staying up all night playing video games with Trevor, who’d returned to the cabin with Steve once they’d both been informed that there was no psycho killer and Joe was actually fine, he’d just gotten really lost. Evan, Harrison and Steve went to bed like normal people, or rather, like normal people who are young men in college, around four am, after walking Rhiannon, Nandini and Y’lehna back to their cabin like gentlemen, because psycho killer or no, the woods were dark and any number of things could happen. In other words, it was a perfectly normal night on vacation, just like any group of friends in college might have.
As for anything that might have happened the next day, or any of the other days of their vacation… that’s a story for another time.
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‘AFTER THE FALL’ - LIVEREAD
I say ‘liveread’ but there’s a pretty decent chance this’ll turn into a RWDEread.
So, After The Fall is finally out in the UK and my copy has landed arse-first on my desk, so I’m gonna read it and post my observations here so that you can experience it with me! And also experience whichever stages of grief I go through as we go!
I will preface this with a warning: as much as I love the characters of RWBY, canon is currently the target of all of my spite, so I’m approaching this novel with HANDFULS of wariness and also salt! Most people who follow me already know I don’t pay attention to canon, nor care for it, nor listen to it, and most of you also know I headcanon Velvet as a 6ft+ trans and queer beefcake who can bend your spine into a pretzel, so I’m already at odds here. As such, if it seems like I’m not approaching this liveblog with the benefit of the doubt: that’s because I’m not!!! Yay!!!
So with that said, let’s enjoy Murphy Wishing Velvet Were Big, But Isn’t, And So Suffering Never Ends:
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Firstly, this book is thicker than I expected, whilst the font is bigger than I’d have thought. I know it’s for teens so it’s not as if this was gonna be, like, 1000 pages in a size 10 font, but this probably won’t take me long to read (although it’ll take longer by virtue of me adding to this as we go). There doesn’t seem to be a chapter list, though, so I have no clue how long each chapter is. Guess we’ll find that out when we get there.
Secondly, the cover of this book sure is, uh, a Thing. What’s going on with Velvet’s face?
Thirdly, the cover is Not Nice to Touch. This is a weird observation, but trust me, I’m tempted to laminate the cover just so it doesn’t feel so... dusty.
PROLOGUE
Velvet’s the narrator, and Murphy isn’t surprised! Velvet’s such a fan favourite that having her not be the narrator (at least for some of this book) would have been an absolute crime.
Okay, halfway through the first page and I did laugh at ‘a terrible place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there’. I may pass that line along to my dad, because it’s a, how you say, big mood.
Fox’s Semblance is Telepathy, which is... a thing, I guess? I’ve seen some pretty creative thoughts on what Fox might have, and this seems kinda lackluster, but the phrase ‘special teamspeak’ IS funny and I love the concept of them acting like it’s a voice channel on Discord. That’s good, and for that I accept this.
(I will note I trust the author of this novel. He seems neat and I already like the humour. I don’t trust M+K but we already knew that.)
‘As [Yatsu] stepped onto [Velvet’s] linked hands, she heaved upwards and stood, boosting his jump as he catapulted high over her head.’
Velvet, bridal-carrying Yatsu: idk he weighs the same as a couple of grapes
I will say, it’s nice having CFVY content at all. They might be Fools but I do love them,
‘[Velvet] pressed the stitched heart emblem to open it and then removed Anesidora, her high-tech camera that used special Dust--’
Anesidora???? That’s the name of her camera??? Of all the things I expected, that was probably the LAST thing I expected. What??? Wikipedia says it’s Greek for sender of gifts, but why that’s the name I am, Not Sure,
‘Combined with her Semblance--photographic memory--Velvet could wield these 3-D replicas with skills and moves that otherwise would have taken years of training to master.’
That’s no surprise, really (and I did already write a short about Exactly That) but I probably wouldn’t have called it photographic memory. Muscle memory, more like? But yeah, that’s pretty expected.
REESE GOT MENTIONED ILU REESE,,,, when will my gay child return from the WAR. LITERALLY. WHERE IS SHE.
Velvet’s thinking abt Weiss dustbun confirmed!!!!!!!!!!! But seriously when will Velvet kiss a small gay Schnee??? What must I do. Whomst must I kill.
OUGH VELVET LOSING THE PHOTOS OF FRIENDS SHE ISN’T SURE HAVE SURVIVED,,,, OWIE. THAT HURT MY FEELIES MR MYERS,,,, but I AM enjoying this angst and that I shall not lie about.
Ruby and Coco, leaders in arms... I will say that the moment of them kinda regarding each other as equals would have landed considerably better had they ever really, uh, interacted in the show. I tend to write Ruby being Coco’s little protege, but we don’t actually have a ton of canon evidence of that really being a thing? So even though I’m enjoying this li’l tidbit, it’s really lacking some foundation, alas.
Fox’s tonfas (is it tonfa time? I think it’s tonfa time) are called Sharp Retribution. Which MMORPG did he get that from?
“We’re Shade Academy’s newest star pupils.”
The sheer cockiness of it all. Ilu Coco.
Okay so, y’all know that Murphy’s about to say: I HATE that Velvet gets treated like a goddamn marshmallow. I’m trying my BEST, I SWEAR, not to complain abt canon Velvet because everyone knows this is my biggest sticking point, but god I hate that she’s written to have such a specific semblance and be so squishy. Aaaaaaaaaaaaa--
Also: we’re having a case of a jumpy POV, particularly with the conversation with Glynda. I know this tends to be something that happens with writing for younger audience, but woof am I noticing it.
I’m liking Yatsu!!!! He had like, no lines (at all) in the show, but he’s actually more of a smartass than I had dared hope for, so that Something.
Oh yeah, Fox is a Vacuan boye! I do like that he’s very chill with everything whilst Velvet is begging for seven different types of death (but could I make a comment abt my Velvet here? Yes. Am I going to? I’m trying not to).
CHAPTER ONE
Owie wowie this is already gettin’ kinda long. If chapter one causes a lot of commentary, I may have to add on in a reblog so the people don’t have to suffer.
Coco is our narrator now! Let’s see how many times the word ‘sunglasses’ comes up (hint: probably enough times that if I took a shot for every one I’d be very dead).
/sees the name Alabaster
YOU aren’t a big chunky polar bear Faunus! Leave!
“Who’s your tribe?”
“I’m from Kenyte,” Fox said. “But it’s been a long time.”
Vacuan tribes, baby! I’m tempted to see how I could work this into anything, but my lore is pretty stick-stuck so I’m probably just gonna jot this down as a ‘cool thing’. Oh, wait, they’re tribal nomads, which means it DOES fit the lore!!! Nice!!! Murphy guessed it!!! Cool!!
‘A perky Faunus waitress with a pig snout came over.’
With a what. Canon, where are we with traits? Also, like, I feel there are multiple childhood movies that scared the crap out of me with people getting pig snouts so I’m making the executive decision to ignore this line. Never happened.
Racism incoming, so I’m getting a cup of tea.
And we’re back! This guy also has a mace and a mohawk and is he just the combination of team CRDL or what?
‘Coco couldn’t take her eyes off the fit, dark-skinned woman.’
I presume they mean fit as in physically fit but my BritBrain is like ‘hell yeah shes fit’ and now I’m envisioning Coco as, like, maybe a scouser. Can you imagine her with a beehive? Anyway, moving SWIFTLY on.
‘--chain mail crop top--’
I’ve never seen a worse combination of words, which is impressive when I wrote Velvet as wearing bright yellow boardshorts with a neon-blue tank top that one time. And by one time, I mean, every time,
I’ve seen this outfit in pictures ‘cause of Amity Arena but god it sounds even worse in words like. Nobody is hot enough to pull off this absolute jumble of clothes. Nobody is.
I do enjoy big lesbian Coco though, so there’s that.
People have already mentioned the ‘could you picture me in a uniform’ line w/ Thirsty Coco so I won’t give it more screentime but it is a mood, and now we know coco has a uniform kink,
“We’re doing this for school credit,”
fox: i do not want money i want an a+
Velvet POPPIN OFF for Mysterious Reasons... is this gonna be like Qrow’s bad luck Semblance only someone has the Semblance of ‘Will Piss Everyone Off In Vicnity’? I think we call those anons,
CHAPTER TWO
I think I’ll stop after this chapter since this chapter’s a little bigger, and this liveblog is already too dang long. It’s a flashback!
‘Vale has been [Coco’s] home all her life.’
I’m quietly ignoring this line in favour of Atlesian Coco. You cannot stop me. But Coco does have a younger brother, so that’s neat! Kinda! IDK what to do with this information but it sure is there existing!
‘And to top it off, [Glynda] was also hot--’
This is the only bit of canon I will accept, because it’s true and Coco should say it.
‘[Velvet and Coco had] both come from Pharos Combat School--’
Another tidbit ignored because I favour Menagerie-born-and-bred Velvet, but I do like hearing the names of other combat schools outside of Signal. Looooooore.
OH there’s a GOOD PARAGRAPH HERE that I don’t really wanna type out, but Velvet is mentioning how she doesn’t like bunny jokes or puns (’hop to it’, she classifies as ‘harmless-but-hurtful’) and THANK YOU, oh my GOD. I’ve written about this before but if I see one more person have Coco make a bunny joke in a fic I will fight Them Myself,
Oh, Fox’s Scroll has an ‘Accessibility Dialogue Assistant’ (ADA)! That’s quite cool, actually. I’ve been wondering how tech might have functioned for Fox, so we have some confirmation about a Scroll’s use for accessibility stuff! That’s neat! I like that! Also, his telepathy also lets him sense people -- pinpointing them exactly the better he knows them -- so that’s a cool little side-effect, too. Although, I swear these Semblances are getting more poorly named by the minute.
Coco’s weapon is called Gianduja, which is... a type of chocolate! Unsurprisingly.
‘Besides, Coco wasn’t looking for a girlfriend--’
yet.
Coco and Fox have a fun dynamic, and I enjoy it immensely. They’re bros...
Also, how does Velvet procure this very expensive Dust for her weapon, anyway? I wonder if we’ll find out later.
“You’re from Mistral,” she said.
Yatsuhashi blinked. “So?”
“Your people don’t tend to like my people.”
That’s an interesting tidbit that Mistral as a whole has a reputation. I suppose they mean the Kingdom and not the continent (of Anima), but still.
“Don’t worry,” Velvet smirked. “I’ll protect you.”
ah, that is, how the kids say, hott,
“So it’s a Death Stalker den. Only an idiot would go in there.”
Jaune found dead from a sneezing fit.
Awh, I like Coco describing the temple bit. Already she’s looking out for her Best Boye. Also, playing cards are a cool thing, and they’re the King of Hearts! That’s ‘cause they’re gonna win a lot, too,
Okay, I now understand Coco’s Hype Semblance. It’s interesting! I’m curious how else it can be used, aka how versatile it is, but it’s a neat concept.
Velvet dabbled in fortune-telling when she was younger and I am enamoured with this idea. Also, picking the Queen of Hearts ‘cause it’s the only one w/ good vibes? Love it.
Okay, end of chapter! RIP Velvet who constantly looks like a squishy baby, and even though that still Irks Me As a Person And A Gay, at least it’s. Maybe gonna be a plot point or smthng idk. Anyway, I’m stopping here for now because this is slow going when I’m adding commentary, so I’ll probably reblog this and add onto it later. Less RWDE than expected, but it’s still early chapters yet.
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Twice Haunted House AU
Prompt:Haunted House AU.
Requested: Omg that’s a really good list of au may I request twice haunted house au? Ty!!
Admin:Mirae
Day 1
It wasn’t your idea
You didn’t want to move out of your old house but your parents insisted
They said it would be a better experience for your family
Of course, you thought that it was a complete lie
The bough an old house out towards the country
You didn’t know much about the place except that it was incredibly huge and nice
It needed some work done on it but nothing major
You overheard your parents talk about why it had such a low price
Apparently, it was incredibly cheap for house its size, even if it did need work done
You hadn’t cared much
As long as it had running water and heat
You could live
You let out a sigh as you opened the car door
Your parents were right when they said it was a nice house
But they were also right again when they said it needed some work
The entire paint job was coming off
Part of the front deck was missing
You looked over at you mom and rolled your eyes
“I promise we will get you a dog,”
She said knowing what you were going to say
“Uh, at this rate I better get 4 dogs,’
You replied looking back at the house
“Why do we even need all this space?”
You suddenly asked
It was a huge place for only your mom and dad plus you
Your mom gave a knowing look to your dad before looking back at you
“We are turning it into a daycare,”
She said with an enthusiastic smile
Your head tilted to the side as you thought for a moment
“Daycare? Mom this place is in the middle of nowhere what kind of parents will want to drive all the way out here just to drop their kid off”
You pointed out sighing at your mother’s stupidity
She rolled her eyes with a sigh
“Y/N you think I didn’t plan ahead? This is the house is right in the middle of a whole bunch of towns. Most people have to leave their town to get to work. This house happens to be right on there way. don’t judge me,”
She said doing jazz hands at the end to add to the effect
You sighed and grabbed your bag from the car
“Can I at least choose my room before you give it up to a bunch of 5 yr olds?”
You asked exhausted and tired from the long drive
She nodded her head
“Let’s let you father get all the heavy boxes. We can go look around,”
She said with a cheerful voice, waving goodbye at your dad
You laughed to yourself before looking up at the house
You tilted your head in confusion when you saw a girl standing in the window
“Mo-”
Your voice trailed off when you realized she was no longer there
“What? What is it, sweetie?”
She asked confused
“Oh nothing, I thought I saw something but I was wrong,”
You said with a laugh
Your mom nodded before grabbing your hand and pulling you into the house
She opened the door with the biggest smile she could muster
Pushing to door open your mouth fell agape
It was huge
The room you were in must have been your living room
Some of your furniture was already moved her thanks to the moves
You walked inside and looked around
“Mom…wow,”
You simply said
“We might need more furniture,”
You then added soon after
“Well, we will be doing a lot of renovations. We already have 3 clients anxious to drop their kids off her. We need to childproof this place and do the rooms. Plus redo the paint job and replace some of the things,”
Your mom rambled
You nodded your head before something shiny caught your eye
“Mom, what’s that?”
You asked walking towards it
She didn’t say anything or follow
Your hand reached out for the object
Pulling you had managed to get it out
It was a small silver necklace
Some kind of design was on it
J.Y.P was written in a fancy font
You turned to look at your mom who only shrugged
“It might have been the movers. I’ll have to call and see if anyone of them had lost a necklace,”
She said easing your stomach
You looked at the necklace in your hand
Something about it scared you
Something in your gut was telling you to run
Put it away and get out of here
However, you simply put it in your back pocket and followed your mom up the stairs
“I’ll show you the kitchen later but first let’s pick your room,”
She said leading you to a hallway of doors
“You have 4 options. Option 1 has a balcony,”
She said opening the first door
You looked at it, it didn’t seem so bad
You just didn’t like how small the closet was
“Option 2, has a walk-in closet,”
She said reading your mind
You laughed as she opened the door
It was nice, but you wanted a room that just pulled you in
“Okay Option 3, It’s bigger than the others,”
She said opening the third and final door
You smiled this one was really nice
It had a balcony and walk-in closet
Why did your mom even think that you would want a different room
“I like-”
You mom cut you off before you could even finish
“Option 4, is the entire attic,”
She said gesturing for you to follow
An even bigger smile stretched onto your face
“Why did you even consider those other options when I could have had the entire attic?”
You asked
She rolled her eyes and pushed you
“I want to build suspense for the attic,”
Your laugh got cut off when you shivered
“It’s kinda cold? Please tell me we have working heat,”
You said almost desperate
“Yes, but it’s chilly. Maybe we should turn it up when we get back down,”
She replied shivering a little
Her hand reached out as she opened a door. Inside was a staircase leading to the attic
She turned and made a face at you before waking up them
You laughed and squealed with excitement
“This is so nice!”
You said walking around the place
It was huge
It had a cushion right by the window so you could look out
You smiled and moved to the window
Looking at you waved at your dad
He looked up at you and waved by with a cheerful grin
A thought came to you
This was where you thought you saw the girl
You turned around only to see your mom sitting on a crate
“Y/N before we get fully settled in there was something I wanted to tell you,”
She said looking somber
You could feel your heat drop at her face
“What is it?”
You asked sitting down also, afraid that whatever she had to say would scare you
“I know this has been hard for you but I want you to know that your father and I are here for me. Just promise me one thing, don’t lock yourself up and away because of you’re upset..please?”
She asked giving you the mom talk
You nodded your head feeling some relief
“Mom of course. I thought you were going to tell me someone died here,”
You joked with a laugh
Your mom’s eyes widen before she laughed also
“Yeah..someone…die…here”
She joked out
You nodded your head
“Let’s go help dad, I can’t wait to move in,”
You said standing up
Your mom followed close behind you as you left the house
Day 2
Your eyes flit heavy as you peeled them open
You had woken up with a pounding headache
The sun shined into your room rather brightly
“I need a curtain,”
You mumbled to yourself in a scratchy voice
“Y/N are you awake?”
Your mom called from downstairs
“Yes, mama,”
You hollered back
You heard a few thumps before you mom had opened your door
She looked at you before shutting the door and sitting on your bed
“I called the movers,”
She said looking at you
“Oh, was it there?”
You asked curiously
“No, but Y/N why are you wearing the necklace?”
She asked confused
You made a face at her before touching your neck
You gasped when you realized it was around your neck
You knew for a fact that you didn’t put it on
But your mom wouldn’t believe you so you lied
“I’m so stupid! This necklace is mine, I guess I forgot to tell you last night,”
You said with an awkward laugh
You mom rolled her eyes
“Where did you get it?
She asked reaching out to hold it
“I got it from my teacher,”
You lied
“What does it stand for?”
She had asked once more
“Joyful, Young, Persevering. JYP,”
You replied making it sound like it was the most obvious thing ever
She nodded her head before standing up with a crack of her back
“Well come on downstairs I made breakfast”
She said
You yawned and move the blankets off of you
“Alright,”
You simply said following her out of the door
Once you got down the stairs
You and your mom jumped when your bedroom door slammed shut
You jumped at the sound before looking at your mom
“Wow its really drafty up there,”
She said shrugging her shoulders
Yous stood frozen in place
Maybe that girl you saw yesterday was hiding somewhere here
Maybe she was the one that placed the necklace around our neck
You sighed and followed your mom into the kitchen
“Some nice guys are stopping by later to repaint the house,”
She said placing an apple in her mouth
You did say anything instead nodded
“Mom do they have a library near here?”
You asked staring out the window
She nodded her head
“Yeah, it’s not that far from here why? Do you want your father to give you a ride?”
She had answered
“Yes, please. Can you ask him for me? I need to go get ready,”
Your mom nodded
“Yeah, I’ll give you 30 mins,”
She said
You smiled and grabbed an apple before heading back up the stairs
Time Skip~ I have never seen a time skip in a kpop fanfic but oh lordy have I seen them in anime fics.
You hurried down the stairs and waved goodbye to your mom
Your dad was waiting in the car
You opened the door and joined him
“Ready kiddo?”
He asked
“Yeah, lets go,”
You replied hurriedly. You just needed to get some info on this house
maybe you did put the necklace on but I couldn’t remember anything regarding that night
SOmeone had to put it on you
You stared out the window as the boring car ride almost came out and end
Your dad pulled inform of the library
He glanced over at you before speaking
“I’ll be back in 1 hour to pick you up. You better be outside and ready,”
His voice was stern so you knew he would be mad if you were any later
“Yesiry,”
You replied with a laugh
He chuckled at your actions
You opened the car door and hurriedly entered the library
Since you had never been here before you had no clue where to start
Hesitantly you approached a worker
“Ma’am, I just moved into a house out in the country and I would like to do some more research on it. Where do I look?”
You asked in your most professional voice
The lady breathed heavy as she looked you up and down
“From here go straight until you reach the Teen Romance section then take a right and go until you see a blue ball hanging from the ceiling above you. If you take another right there you will find the section you’re looking for,”
Her voice was dry and scratchy sounding, almost painful for you to listen to.
“Thank you,”
You said with a bow
The lady nodded and went back to what she was doing in the first place, nothing
You followed her directions like your life depended on it
Even though you didn’t like her, you would have to thank her later because her directions were spot on
The small sign hung above, it was a section about the history of the town
You bit your lip, finding it now would still be hard but at least you knew where to look
Something would have to explain the girl the cold and the necklace
You almost choked when a book fell off the shelf and nearly hit you
Holding your hand over your heart you picked up the mouth and nearly dead
It was a book all about an old music academy
On the cover was your house
Your house was known as the JYP music academy
With a sigh, you opened the book
“JYP, the pristine all girls music academy that only the best musicians can get into and after years of hard work, is finally ready to show the public his best students. Of course, if you see a young girl wearing JYP you better ask for her autograph, it could be worth thousands in the future,”
So it housed students?
THat would explain the necklace but not how it got on your neck
You randomly flipped through a few pages trying to find something interesting
“You have an interesting taste in books,”
A deep voice said behind you
You turned around only to make eye contact with a guy that looked your age
“WHy? You have a problem that I want to read about JYP?”
You asked trying to sound rude
“No, its just. I feel bad for those girls, you know?”
He said trying to stand his case
You rolled your eyes before turning away
Your heart stopped when you replayed what he said in your head
“What happened to these girls?”
Your voice was wavering
“Ah, haven’t you heard? The school housed 9 girls, they were the best students. One night as the girls practiced their song some strange person broke into the house. All 9 of the girl were killed. They haven’t found the killer yet though, it’s a tragedy,”
He said watching your face to see how you would react
“He killed them? In the house?”
That couldn’t have been true!
Your mom would have boughten it if some girls were murdered in it
“Yeah, I heard they sold the house recently. Those folks will move out in no time. Rumor has it that the girls haunt the house seeking revenge for their untimely death,”
He made a weird gesture with his hands
You would have replied if you didn’t notice a girl staring at you from behind a shelf
Hestitnly you raised a hand and waved
She bit her lip and waved back, only to hid behind her long hair soon after
Holding the book to your chest you thought about your newly found information
Stopping you looked up at the guy before looking back at the girl
She was still staring at you, but you noticed something wrong
Her shirt was covered in blood, you looked at her face
She looked familiar but you don’t know why
With a gulp, you looked back at the guy
“How were they killed?”
Honestly, you probably sounded like a freak by now but you didn’t care
“Well with a knife, they were all killed in different ways but one thing was consistent a knife,”
This guy was just sitting out all the information that you needed
“Did the cops ever figure out why?”
You asked biting your lip
“Yeah, there had been a rumor going around that there was a safe in the house. Supposedly it held so much money, that not even a poor man would know what to do,”
Your eyes wandered to the girl before you pushed past the guy
“I’ve got to go,”
You said walking towards her
She started to back up, causing you to shake your hands no
You had remembered reading and seeing in movies that ghosts could have a spiritual attachment to an object
You were guessing that the necklace you were wearing was hers and that was how she was able to travel here
She more and likely had an attachment to it
“What’s your name?
You asked getting closer to her
Now that you got a better look you could see what she looked like
Her hair was long and she it was dark brown
She was certainly beautiful
You watched as she pointed at the letter T
“T? T and what else,?”
You asked before your eyes happened to land on a clock
Your heart sank when you realized your dad would be here soon
“T, follow me,”
You said walking back to the front of the building
You needed to check out this book
Once at the check out the same breathing problem lady looked at you
“You can’t check out that book. Town history books cannot be checked out,”
She said
“Yeah well, and you can’t breath now let me ask this book home,”
You snapped
She reached over and grabbed a walkie-talkie
“Secretary we got a code 3,6,1 here I’m going to need back up,”
Her eyes never left you’re as she spoke
You looked at T before bottling it out the door
T eyes widened at your actions
Luckily your ad was here
You ran to his car and shut the door, buckling
“No questions just drive,”
You yelled looking at him
He looked at the book in your hand before sighing and looking at the library
“You little-”
He said before noticing the guards coming out of the building
“It’s literally just a book that I will return why are they acting like this,”
You said tapping your foot
He rolled his eyes and backed out
Your dad drove out of there as fast as he could
No word was exchanged on the car ride home
Once he pulled into the house’s driveway you thanked him and ran inside
Running past your mom you entered your bedroom
Your heart sped up when you noticed a brown box sitting on your bed
Looking around you wondered where T was
Almost like she could read your mind T appeared on your bed
She looked at you anxiously before gesturing to the box
“Your throat didn’t slit, I think you can talk,”
She rolled her eyes
“I’m Tzuyu,”
She said in a soft voice
You smiled brightly
“hi Tzuyu in Y/N,”
You said waving
She giggles slightly before pointing at the box
You reached out and opened it
Inside was a photo of 9 girls
You were guessing they were the girls that lived here
You recognized Tzuyu
Looking at there faces you pointed at a girl who was sitting on a bench with 5 other girls
“WHo is the girl, 2nd to the right?”
You asked curiously
“That’s Jihyo,”
She said
“Why don’t the other girls appear?”
Tzuyu looked at you before looking away
“They were too scared. The only reason appeared is because I’m the youngest. They placed my necklace on your neck while you spelled, it was also the one you found,”
Tzuyu smiled at you
“How can I help you, girls?”
Nayeon
Nayeon was the first in the house to die
She was in the living room preparing snacks
Someone came up behind her and slit her throat
Nayeon died form blood loss
Whenever people moved into the house she was violent
She was angry that her and her best friends were killed
She would leave scratches on people
Sometimes she would pull their hair
Nayeon didn’t like people living in the house either
She was always the first to find out if people moved in
Jeongyeon
Jeongyeon was with Nayeon at the time
She hit the perpetrator with a chair
However she failed to defend herself
She got stabbed straight in the heart
Jeongyeon was a friendly ghost
She didn’t hurt people like Nayeon
She just always watched and observed people
Jeongyeon often just stayed in one of the rooms not leaving
Momo
Momo was one of the last to die
She was with Mina and Sana practicing Korean when the killer came
He killed Momo first, hitting her over the head with the butt of the knife
She died from blunt force trauma
Momo haunted the house and the people
She played tricks on everyone
Moving things was a frequent pleasure
She would misplace things in order to scare others
Momo didn’t want to hurt people
Jihyo
Jihyo felt guilty
She saw the guy kill Nayeon and Jeongyeon but she didn’t do anything
She simply hid
Jihyo ws the leader
She should have come out and prtect them
But she didnt
Jihyo died when the killer turned around and stabbed her in the heart
She made apperacnes to people
Jihyo would appear and scare the guests living in the house
That was why you saw her on the day you moved in
She wanted you too se her
She wanted you to know that the house was haunted
She craved for your fear
Sana
Sana died with Momo and MIna
She was kileld after Momo
Slit throat
Sana couldn’t talk as a result
She could say anthing in the afetr life
Sana had to write things
Which would be why people in the house found notes
On the notes would be things wirrten like
“They don’t know we are here yet,” “Nayeon should just kill them,”
This would terrify the people living there
Mina
Mina died after she watched Momo and Sana die
She got pushed off the balcony
Mina fell to her death
In the afterlife Mina was nice to the guests
She knew Nayeon hurt them so she did her best to leave medicine around
Mina would put blankets on them if they fell asleep
Mina would sometimes leave food around for them
Dahyun
Dahyun was held hostage
She was told to lead them killer to the safe
Dahyun didnt know what he meant
She nevr heard of s safe
She wanted to live so she lead the person to the basement
When the killer realized that she was lying
He pushed her down the stairs
Her back was bent and broken
Dahyun would appear to people if they came to the basement
She would follow them
You know when you feel like you are being watched?
Thats Dahyun
Chaeyoung
Chaeyoung was the last to die
After the J Line
She had been outside the enitre time
When she came in she screamed from the horros she saw
Chaeyoung got stabbed right in the back
Chaeyoung was the one who put the necklace around you
She was violent like Nayeon
Chaeyoung would push people
She would hit them and pull their hair
Tzuyu
Tzuyu had her stomach slit
It was because she had lied with Dahyun
Tzuyu was the one who appeared to you
She didn’t like how her and the other girls died
When she appeared to you she didn’t know what to do
This wasn’t her kind of thing
Tzuyu was afraid
She wanted someone to free the girls spirts
She wanted to move on
Find peace
#kpop#kpop imagines#kpopau#kpop scenarios#kpop angst#kpop fluff#kpop twice#twice imagines#twice scenarios#twice fluff#twice ua#twice angst#nayeon imaginies#jeongyeon imagines#momo imagines#jihyo imagines#sana imagines#mina imagines#dahyun imagines#chaeyoung imagines#tzuyu imagines#kpopwritingnet#kpop writing net
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[PDF EBOOK EPUB KINDLE] The Simple Path to Wealth Your road map to financial independence and a rich free life Download and Read online
[PDF] Download Ebook | READ ONLINE The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free lifebody {font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;}#example1 {border: 2px solid black;padding: 25px;background: lightblue;background-repeat: no-repeat;background-size: 100% 100%;}nav {margin:auto;text-align: left;width: 80%;font-family: roboto;}nav ul {list-style: none;position: relative;display: inline-table;width: 80%;}nav ul li{float:left;}nav ul li:hover{background:#FFFF00;}nav ul li:hover a{color:#000;}nav ul li a{display: block;padding: 25px;color: black;text-decoration: none;}p{position:absolute;top: 20px;z-index: 2;color: black;background-color:yellow;}[PDF EBOOK EPUB KINDLE] The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life Download and Read online
The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life
[PDF] Download The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life Ebook | READ ONLINE
Author : J.L. Collins
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN : 1533667926
Publication Date : 2016-6-18
Language : eng
Pages : 265
To Download or Read this book, click link below:
http://read.ebookcollection.space/?book=1533667926
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Synopsis : [PDF EBOOK EPUB KINDLE] The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life Download and Read online
'In the dark, bewildering, trap-infested jungle of misinformation and opaque riddles that is the world of investment, JL Collins is the fatherly wizard on the side of the path, offering a simple map, warm words of encouragement and the tools to forge your way through with confidence. You'll never find a wiser advisor with a bigger heart.' -- Malachi Rempen: Filmmaker, cartoonist, author and self-described ruffian This book grew out of a series of letters to my daughter concerning various things-mostly about money and investing-she was not yet quite ready to hear. Since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we've created, understanding it is critical. 'But Dad,' she once said, 'I know money is important. I just don't want to spend my life thinking about it.' This was eye-opening. I love this stuff. But most people have better things to do with their precious time. Bridges to build, diseases to cure, treaties to negotiate, mountains to climb, technologies to create, children to teach, businesses to run. Unfortunately, benign neglect of things financial leaves you open to the charlatans of the financial world. The people who make investing endlessly complex, because if it can be made complex it becomes more profitable for them, more expensive for us, and we are forced into their waiting arms. Here's an important truth: Complex investments exist only to profit those who create and sell them. Not only are they more costly to the investor, they are less effective. The simple approach I created for her and present now to you, is not only easy to understand and implement, it is more powerful than any other. Together we'll explore: Debt: Why you must avoid it and what to do if you have it. The importance of having F-you Money. How to think about money, and the unique way understanding this is key to building your wealth. Where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works. What the stock market really is and how it really works. Why the stock market always goes up and why most people still lose money investing in it. How to invest in a raging bull, or bear, market. Specific investments to implement these strategies. The Wealth Building and Wealth Preservation phases of your investing life and why they are not always tied to your age. How your asset allocation is tied to those phases and how to choose it. How to simplify the sometimes confusing world of 401(k), 403(b), TSP, IRA and Roth accounts. TRFs (Target Retirement Funds), HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and RMDs (Required Minimum Distributions). What investment firm to use and why the one I recommend is so far superior to the competition. Why you should be very cautious when engaging an investment advisor and whether you need to at all. Why and how you can be conned, and how to avoid becoming prey. Why I don't recommend dollar cost averaging. What financial independence looks like and how to have your money support you. What the 4% rule is and how to use it to safely spend your wealth. The truth behind Social Security. A Case Study on how this all can be implemented in real life. Don't let any of this intimidate you. Those that have gone before you say: ..'..in his patented no-frills and often humorous style, JL makes it both approachable and simple. And powerful.'..'.effective message told in a visual, funny style.'..'.a refreshingly unique and approachable take on investing.''JL Collins has the gift of making boring financial concepts funny and interesting.''Instead of esoteric equations about measuring a stock's alpha and comparing it to its beta, he lights up the campfire and starts telling stories.' Enjoy the read, and the j
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I hate this
I hate this : Memes
your passport photo and copy of passport
At my school, the homework was to color the picture.
So very true...
In my school it’s so bad, the teacher projects it on the whiteboard
ah, nightmares
Soo true XD
They say that because you cropped it out.
And that is a fact
They use plotters
I get it!
Lol that’s good shit
Im sory Toad
The homework that steals your time and your lunch money
99% of sane teachers shows u the color image on smart board
No teachers want to show u crappy print
Just understand it.
Color printer is expensive.
You’re telling me that teachers give out free black children? Bet, already got three in the basement
itsa me, Noir-io
Facts tho
It'sa me, a-Copyo!
We all make mistakes in the heat of passion, Jimbo. Come back in ten years
And they pop in a “do you see the ... in the picture” question
Why mario on the right looks like he's about to wake me up at 3 am saying with deep demonic voice It's time for me to turn you into my spaghetti
Is this the new "We have ____ at home" ?
Since im in school this is to relatable
The math graphs were the worst though
30 years of saving princesses, 30 years of smashing brown mushrooms. And for what? Cake?
Mario!?
Why does this remind me of the fearsome Llapp Goch Master.
There's a good chance this is unique! I checked 103,921,185 image posts and didn't find a close match
Whenever I got bad copies I'd always split the best copies around the room so every student was at least near a good copy and keep a bad one for myself...
Remember when you were the chosen one to go out of class and get em papers wonderful
If Mario was in Papers, Please
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
printer companies: see you little shits? this is why your printer needs colored cartridges!
My name is paublo
Yes
Is that pablo
It's supposed to be not centered
Based on a true story
Itsa me, Marijuanio!
he looks so sad:( NVM took a secound look he looks like he bout to ask me if i wanna buy WEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDD
Kinda looks like Hitler though
Noah get the Death Star.
My kindergarten teacher wife has to print shit at home for this reason. Effectively costs $300/year in paper/ink and another $100 to replace whatever broken down color ink printer we have in a given year. I want her to transition to laser, but haven't been able to convince her.
More like the board of Education, principal and superintendents wanting another raise so the kids get B&W copies.
At our large school we have 1 color copier, the rest are black and white. More often than not, kids are not getting color copies. Budget.
Why is this too true
Don't you be knocking LaserJet. Those things were a tank whose toner lasted a long time. DeskJet is what you are looking for.
Made with HP LaserJet 100 color MFP
Same
Mario on the right side looks like sleep paralysis demon, ngl.
Mario and Noireio.
Top 10 hollywood stars ruined by drug addiction.
It looks like if he ran into me he'd try to stuff me into an animatronic suit where I belong
Mario looks like he's going to go on a mugging spree
Too true
Me looking at my paper: HERE WE GOOOO
One more gram common u can do it
is fentanyl the new drug to go? i only appy the fentanyl patches on them cancer patients at work, so they don't suffer 24/7. a couple of months ago there was a problem at our elderly home, bc some crazies tried to dig them used patches out of our trash..have fun with patches which are covered in shit and piss
You should have done 64 or 69
Bro youd die before you even got through half a gram of fentanyl wtf do you even know what fentanyl is lmao
A true epic gamer moment
God I wish I had some pure fent
Issa me, Black tar heroin Mario! Come with me and meet my gang of druga dealers!
I really Was expecting a rickroll lmao
And this is probably what he's listening to on his alone time https://youtu.be/ijBrulQXE2U
It me mrio I jst snrted one mre grm and I jst deid
DO IT FOR THE GRAM
Go ahead and do another gram
just one more gram
Legendary
The homework that steals your time and your lunch money...............
Luigi says: do the coke to get the smoke
Betta tell your moms your dads your ministers...
WOOOMP WOOOMP WOOOMP!!!!
Justa what me the Doctor Mario prescribed
Mama mia I a need a more of that a shit
YAHOOOOOO!!!!
And remember kids - when you do drugs, you go to hell before you die!
It’s a me druggooo Mario! I have snorted 68 grams of pure fentanyl and I am going to die. Itsame itsame
I’m literally studying for an exam right now and my professor put that on his own notes... like bro nobody gives a shit about your stats notes
I had a professor just say “don’t waste your money on the book. Just google book name pdf and it should be the first link.” Then he did in in class go show us
And then you have the ones that sell their own 40 page notes in 2 sections for €20 each at the college book store.
Or the ones that make class notes and give them out in the first class.
Even better are the ones that accidentally send a pdf of their own book that they make no money on due to a shitty publisher to one or two people in the class.
my favorite kinds of professors
A full commitment is what I'm thinking of
A lot of emulators come with a warning like "Use a bios file from your own console. Do not download one for free from the Internet!"
I saw something on TIL a while back, during the prohibition era of the United States, some companies sold grape concentrate. They had a warning on them that said something to the effect of "after adding the concentrate to water, do not let it sit for two weeks as it will ferment into wine."
As if...they wanted you to do it!
That's a pretty calculated statement for them to make.
*mobile errors
I had calculus profs who would tell us 'I legally cannot advise you to steal copywrited material so under no circumstances should you go to this website and torrent the textbook for free instead of buying it from the overpriced book store and wasting your money'
I always love those blank pages that just have in like size i font "Do not write here" for no fucking reason.
Then the teacher tells you that they didn't see it
I like when it’s in huge, WHITE print in the middle of the fucking page so half the assignment is cut off
I like when it says on the side of the paper COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL DO NOT PHOTOCOPY OR DISTRIBUTE BY ANY MEANS
Or the "here's a form that was made in Excel, if you could fill it out so that we can input the information back in Excel that would be great."
"yeah..."
"But the image gets worse!"
Work in Japan. Teachers give me a copied paper. "just copy it. They have the file on their damn computer. Which is where we are sitting.
-20 points.
I can’t even read the damn question
At my school, we get lectured for printing a class set rather than just a master. They say it’s about toner being cheaper and the copier cartridges are much much bigger.
There are also a lot of places where teachers don't have access to a shared laser printer like that and don't have any option but to make photocopies, so stuff like the OP can be unavoidable sometimes.
Genuinely not a problem in my school - we have a fleet of MFDs for bulk printing. We have an admin assistant in charge of the reprographics room who can interrupt jobs if needed as well. It's just an old mindset that they can't get out of.
Yeah but then you have to be the asshole that released a print job with 200+ pages while others are waiting to use the copier since this is the only one you can print to.
What is full sending?
huzzah, a man of quality
Have you tried full sending it?
From an IT perspective, usually it's not that they want you to know what triggered the problem, they want you to provide concise information on what exactly you were doing up until the issue occurred. Though I do understand that IT technicians are notoriously unsociable lol
I'm sure thats a great suggestion but that's the thing is that IT acts like its up to the enduser to already know whats causing the issues and what needs to be done to fix it. Also this doesn't solve his/her issue of getting staples on the copies.
Have your IT reinstall your driver and you can select the options that your printer has. likely you are on a global driver, or it wasn't installed correctly!
Or if I want staples. We can only select staples on our copier itself.
It would be easier if the print queue thing was reliable. But I can't keep running back to my room if it didn't send it, so I make extra copies from my first one. Or if I need front/back from different originals
I work in IT support for a school - teachers, for some fucking reason beyond my understanding, seem to print one copy of something, then photocopy it for their classes. Telling them that just printing it for everyone keeps the quality better doesn't sink in. It costs the same, comes out of the same device, and it's less work, but I'm the insane one.
Th s rin er se ms o æ run ing lo n ink
To the knee
And my axe!
And my sword!
Take mine too!
Fuck off take a useless arrow
Actually it seems this printer is low on incas.
Damn u incas
"I'm so sorry kids, our ancient printer is not working properly again"
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Top 5 Melissa quotes?
The universe works in beautiful, wonderful ways. Terrible things happen to make us realize more about ourselves. I always talk about the gift. There’s a gift in every adversity, there’s something to learn.
It’s the same as facing the day itself; I wake up every morning thinking this might be the day that I’m hit by falling space debris, I still go out, get jacked up on coffee, and have the best day I can!
The ability to fight isn’t a one-size fits all; everybody is different.
I relate to her in a way a lot of women relate to her. Of course, I think we are both extremely sensitive to other people. It took years for me to find my own personal courage, to learn to speak up for myself for instance. I think I’m a fighter. I think when I have something to do I really try to do my best, especially when, you know, it’s for someone else…..yeah, there’s quite a bit actually.
Once [fans] start getting nasty to each other, it’s heartbreaking to me and so unnecessary. I have to walk away and try to avoid things where I might see something like that. There’s just enough nastiness in the world, big, serious nastiness that I don’t understand why people [do it.] To what end, I don’t get it. It hurts people
I love photography. I love painting. I love making hats. I love thinking. I just like kind of sitting, just roaming around in my brain. I also like observing people. That’s something I’ve always loved to do, although it’s a little harder to find places to go to just kind of watch people. Yeah, psychology is something I’m very interested in. I love watching documentaries.
My parents were so relieved. My dad was like, ‘I was just about to go buy one of those 200,000-inch TVs just so I could see your name at the end if they hadn’t put it up front in bigger font type.’ It’s all very fancy to us.
put “top 5” anything in my ask
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/journal 3/
chapters 9-10 / the bridge to the 20th century (part 1)
9 / graphic design and the industrial revolution
I must say, chapter 9 was very difficult for me to get through. Although it was interesting, I felt that there were a lot of run on sentences that including too many unknown big words. I think it was a lot for one chapter personally. (Chapter 10 as well, but not as hard)
I have never heard a bolder font be called a fat face, not even in my typography class. That's pretty hysterical.
The images in this chapter really saved it for me. It's fascinating to look at the different styles of posters as well as all the different typefaces that people were creating so early on in graphic design. It did make logical sense that they would use a variety of fonts to save money rather than thinking about what they would look like all cramped on one piece of paper. It's true that you have to try everything before you can know what you're doing and what you want!
I didn't choose to talk about photography because although I do enjoy taking pictures, the history of taking pictures never interested me all too much. Don't get me wrong, when I took Photography and I got to work in the dark room, I found the process to be more of an effort in the sense that I felt I earned owning the picture I developed. I respected older photographers way more as there are so many chances to easily mess up. I've also always thought negatives were a fun thing to have. I'm not sure why the different terms never got me intrigued, photography is just not my passion to learn hardcore about.
It was a bit funny to read about how each printer after the other was talking about how much better it is than its predecessor in terms of how many more pages it can print in one hour. I feel that similar facts of current technology does that as well: "this new phone is a little bit bigger, a little bit thinner, a bit more battery life, etc." While I obviously see the value in the printer being able to print more, it was just funny to read that about the Linotype machine, the Monotype machine, etc.
The toy books part was interesting, I never thought that they would be considered as toys just because they are books for children. Also, the part about how "Western countries had a tendency to treat children as little adults" (Meggs. pg. 179): I could compare that to how my dad frequently will talk about how when he was a kid, the adults just let him be and wouldn't necessarily helicopter parent compared to kids these days that are overly concerned about their children's safety that they won't let them actually live. Time has acknowledged that society needs to care passed the surface level but it has developed some negative traits as well, obviously.
10 / the arts and crafts movement and its heritage
I noticed that as this chapter progressed, the images showed less and less stylized drop caps. They went from being arrogantly bold and detailed to more so just barely outshining the regular body text. It may have been for multiple reasons: to save ink, realizing it was more of a waste of space and materials and that it was more important to be able to fit text, or it could have been neither and daintier thinner strokes looked more visually appealing. The Arts and Crafts movement seems to have also started the scrapbook type of vibe as the texts are sometimes written in various sizes of boxes.
Rudolf Kuch's calligraphy in red looks beautiful, I absolutely love how the stroke in the middle exaggerates downward into an empty space. When reading that he spoke of the alphabet as being "a supreme spiritual achievement of humanity", I thought that that was a unique way to phrase it, but I don't entirely agree with the spiritual part (Meggs. pg. 202). Obviously, it is more understandable that Kuch would be a religious person, the alphabet to me does not hold any sort of greater wisdom. I'm probably reading too much into this quote, but I just found it odd.
It is not surprise that more readable fonts like Garamound would stick around while more stylistic typefaces would leave their trended era. I feel this was a crucial point in time when the mass amount of people were still trying to master understanding the alphabet, how to read and possibly how to write, that more structured fonts could make it easier to comprehend.
Source: Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 6th Edition, Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. PurvisJohn Wiley & Sons publishers.
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Buckle up cause this is a long one. A lot of the stuff might sound a bit unbelievable, but it's all true. The original story has a tonne of pictures and videos, which might help explain. So perhaps, read over at https://thekanyestory.com and come back here for the discussion. Anyways Enjoy, I'll be around in the comments.IntroIt’s Friday night, 1 am. I’m lying in bed scrolling twitter. Reading the usual shit. Getting my dopamine fix. “The Backstreet boys are back with a brand new sound”. Yeah, whatever. I read another headline. Then another. “There’s a dating site for straight Trump supporters”. The mob’s getting angry. As you’d imagine the media are loving it. It’s the perfect fodder to pump to the masses.But forget Donald Trump. There something here. Free audience. Free attention. Embrace the controversy. Elon Musk sold flamethrowers and made a million. Supreme sold bricks and made a million. You’ve got to think like the little kid who hasn’t had his imagination beaten out of him. Companies splash thousands on “growth hacking” goon squads but having one mind like Bart Simpson on your team is more valuable.I jump out of bed and start writing down ideas. Dating is a good starting spot. It’s funny and simple. Now I just need something controversial. Brexit Dating, Harry Potter Dating, Kanye West Dating. Yes Kanye West, I’m a fan. I know the audience. How about — KanyeWestDating.com. Doesn't pop. Maybe Yeezy.Dating. Bingo! Add to Basket.ViralI wake up late the next morning and cook some eggs. I want to start building the dating site, but let’s be realistic. The chances are no-one will use it and I’ll end up spending 3 months locked in my bedroom, deprived of sunlight, going insane.So, instead, I open up Instagram, change my username from @harrydry to @yeezydating, delete my old posts and upload a picture with the caption “Yeezy.Dating — Coming this March”. Bamn. We’re cooking.Time to build my blogger hit list. I don’t really know what I’m doing so I start googling. 10 minutes later I come across this website called Buzzstream Discovery.Turns out I’ve hit the jackpot. Buzzstream is amazing. You enter a search term and it spits back the names of all the bloggers who have written stories about that search term. So I enter “Kanye West”, filter “within the last 30 days” and Buzzstream gives me a list of all 440 bloggers who have written stories about Kanye West over the last month. These bloggers are my perfect audience. It’s their job to pump out, simple, funny, digestible stories about Kanye West and I’m about to spoon feed them a classic.Getting the names is only half the battle though. I’ve also got to get email addresses. I find this website called Hunter.io where you type the name of any company and it tells you the correct email format which that company uses. Four hours later 220 emails are locked away in an excel doc.I type up the following message:Hey, I just made a dating site for Kanye fans called Yeezy.Dating. Going crazy on Reddit atm. Any questions please let me know :)wack on my headphones, and play through Kanye’s whole discography, whilst I send email after email after email after email after email. Go to sleep, wake up, and then I'm back commuting into London for a day's work.My phone rings during a meeting. I turn it to silent. It rings again. I turn it off. As soon as I get out of the meeting I check the database. 9,100 email address’. Surely this can't be real. I click refresh. Now 9,109. My mind freezes. I type Kanye's name into google and Yeezy Dating is everywhere. I check analytics. 250 people online. 65 unread emails. Then lunch break is over and I’m being called back in for another meeting.It’s 10pm when I arrive back from work. The press momentum is still rolling on. It feels good to know that my big plan worked. 25 news anchors coast to coast are discussing my imaginery dating site and I’m just in my bedroom, in my pyjamas with an old Macbook pro making the whole thing up as I go along. I start a big Yeezy Dating group chat, and invite everyone from my email list.7:40 am the next day and I get a text from my pal saying, “Tune into BBC Radio 1. They’re talking about Yeezy Dating right now and they want to speak to you”. Guess where I am? On a two hour train from Portsmouth to London for another day of meetings. I try and dial into Radio 1 but there’s no signal. I’m cooped up on this train carriage and I’m stressing out. The database has over 13,000 emails now. I’ve told the media the dating site is “Coming This March”, its now 17th March and I haven’t written a line of code. And to top it all off, I’ve got no idea how to make a dating site.I get back that evening, call my boss and tell him that I’m going to be out of action for a few months. He asks why. So I tell him I'll be making a dating site for Kanye West fans. He bursts out laughing, wishes me luck and that’s that. I'm a free man.ViralIt’s time to build a dating site. First things first I scout other dating sites looking for something I can copy. The whole Tinder / Bumble swiping thing is too complex. I find a Jewish Dating site called J Date which looks promising. All user profiles are displaying on one long infinite scroll page. A few months earlier I did Wes Bos’ “Learn Node” course where he does a similar thing with restaurants. I start merging J Date with some lessons from Wes’ course and I'm up and running.At this point, there isn’t much to tell you. There’s no secret ingredient. Just long days laying bricks. 10 months ago I hadn’t written a line of code before and it was too hard. One week into Yeezy Dating it’s still too hard. Webpack is a mess and I don’t know how to save geoJSON data. Boo-hoo. Nobody cares. I don't care. Figure it out. Everyone else figured it out.I write I AM HARRY DRY on a sheet of paper, buy some Blu Tack and pin it to my wall. Every time I get stuck I look up at the words and snarl. It’s Street Fighter II. I’m coding like Diego Costa plays football. No technique. No Barcelona academy. Rampaging from obstacle to obstacle.Problem after Problem. Forum after forum. I'm becoming the most hated man on Stack Overflow. And I'm loving every second of it.LaunchI wake up one fine spring morning and it’s all done. I’m a couple of weeks late, but that’s ok. I fix the final bug from the lab at 3 pm and post on Instagram to build some hype.Then I cycle to town and walk into Vodafone. I tell the store manager I’m “just browsing” whilst I test the site on all their different devices. iPhone’s are zooming in on my input fields and it’s looking wierd. Damn. I pitch up in Starbucks next door, grab a croissant, and start googling. Turns out my font size needs to be 16px on iOS to the stop auto zoom. I head back into Vodafone, “more browsing” I tell the store manager, and the problems solved. Happy Days.The Yeezy Dating group chat still has a buzz about it. Several hundred messages a day. They’re like my army of ultra fans. My plan is to launch with them first to test the site works. I’m back at home, dotting i's crossing t’s. Suddenly I have 10 mentions in Telegram. The ultras have found the site and have started making profiles.10 profiles are up. Now 20. Now 30. Shit. It’s happening. Beautiful profile photos appearing up on my screen. Real people are on the site. Real people are matching each other. Real people are messaging. It’s working. And I made all of this! Hahaha. Look at me go. I post on Instagram saying that Yeezy.Dating is open for business. Suddenly 200 people flood to the site.Now, legend says that the fisherman on shore only sees a tsunami a couple of seconds before it hits.Capow! Left, right, center, profile images start disappearing. 5 pictures vanishing every second. I refresh the page, images disappearing everywhere. Time slows down. I can’t think straight. 3 minutes later the site is stripped bare. 350 profiles. No images. I load up Heroku. 6,700 critical errors. Dad potters in from the kitchen to see how the big launch is going. Not great I tell him.I woke up Steve Jobs. I'm ending the day Steve Harvey. The site's properly crashed now. I’m trying to put out fires everywhere but nothing’s working. I can’t do this anymore. I apologise to my followers on Instagram, I apologise to the ultras on Telegram, and I fall into bed.RebornNext day I wake up and do nothing. Eat some cereal. Watch some Peep Show. I’m still at a low ebb. I manage to write a post on the Indie Hackers forum explaining the site crashing and what went wrong with the images.Quite remarkably developers start giving me their email address, offering me help. I’m blown away by their generosity. Within 24 hours there are five pro developers digging through my code. Several changes later they give it the all clear. “Good luck”, one texts me from Singapore.A few days later Yeezy.Dating launches again. The feeling is different this time. The first time it felt like the biggest thing in my universe. This time around I’ve got perspective. There a bigger things in life. If it crashes, it crashes.Testing with the ultras goes well so I start emailing my big list. 1,500 users join within 10 hours. 2,500 within 24 hours. Then 4,200. But growth is slowing. My intuition is telling me that the parties going to end soon. Where’s the next 4,000 coming from?There’s no marketing budget, no development team, it’s just me. Replying to all the emails, fixing all the bugs, trying to keep the momentum up and I’m tired. We need an app. I’m not an app developer. We need ten thousand users for dating to work. I don't know how to get ten thousand more users. The novelty is starting to wear off. I’m thinking 5 moves ahead and I can see cheque mate on the horizon.There’s only one way out the water tank. I've got to get Kanye West involved.BillboardsSo I’m back in the lab. Emailing away. Managers, ex-managers, stylists, PR relations, anyone who has ever worked for YEEZY on Linkedin. But nothing. No replies. I can’t get through.I ask my Dad for advice. “You’ve got to think on a bigger scale son”, he tells me. So now I’m thinking what if I make a video, or a mixtape, or a magazine or a painting, or I rent a plane and fly a banner. Then it hits me. I’m going to rent Billboards. YEEZY is opening offices in Calabasas, New York, London, Wyoming. Four locations. Four billboards.Ten minutes later I’m on the phone with Billboard companies. Quizzing them. What’s your pricing like? What type of Billboard would you recommend? How quickly can we do this? What’s the shortest time each Billboard can stay up for? And in my head, the billboards are already in the sky.But, the next day, I wake up with cold feet. Two halves of my mind in deep discussion:"Two months wages. On three billboards. You’re crazy." “Don’t use money as an excuse. You know that’s not the reason.” “Why don’t I want to do it then?” “Cause you’re scared. Your afraid of what people might think.” “But …” “No, don't give me no buts. Relax your mind. You're not going to let the mob control you. Let's do it.”So I draft my Dad onto the campaign team and it starts to come together. He’s in his element. We take over my brother's bedroom and set up basecamp. Dad buys three alarm clocks, sets one to New York time, one to LA time and one to Wyoming time. “You’ve got to know your timezone, son,” he tells me.The sun goes down once more and now it's the day of the Billboards. I'm working like an Octopus, organising photographers, drafting emails, teeing up interviews and everything starts coming together. London. New York. Wyoming. All confirmed. There’s less than an hour to go, and suddenly WACK. 8:11 pm an email drops into my inbox from Lamar, the Billboard provider, and my head spins like I’ve walked onto Tyson Fury's right hand. (The email essentially says, "we can't run the ads because of legal reasons of you using Kanye West's name") See the actual site for an actual photo)Lamar's supposed to be covering both New York and Wyoming. Without them, I’m left with just one Billboard in London and that’s not enough. I’m calling this whole thing off. The game’s up. It’s over. I’m safe again. Life’s comfortable. No billboards. No problems.I walk downstairs to show Dad the email. He looks up at me, smiles like it’s nothing, and says “Don’t worry. We’ll find a way”. And maybe that’s why you need a team because in that moment I wanted an excuse to give up but the old man wasn’t blinking so we fought on.Phone calls start flying everywhere. On one phone I’m hammering the account manager. On the other Dad’s posing as a BBC journalist, throwing jab after jab at their legal department, “The kid spent two days clearing this with intellectual property lawyers”, “We’ve got a camera crew waiting outside Times Square as we speak”.It’s 9 pm now. A wonderful soul called Candice is waiting in the New York rain eyes glued to the Billboard ready to take the photo, but she isn’t going to wait all day.Suddenly Dad’s beckoning me over. If we change, “Kanye West” for “Mr. West” the legal department will approve it. My gut tells me it’s good enough. I export the new text and send to the account manager in Times Square. 5 minutes later the Billboards are live. Candice takes the photo. It appears in my inbox. And I take a deep breath. [See https://thekanyestory.com for the photos and interviews]Soon after, the Wyoming and London Billboard’s go up. I start attaching the photos to the drafts we prepped, sending out our emails, hoping to get lucky again.A couple of stories start breaking, journalists start requesting interviews and back down into the depths of the Maelström we descend. The phone rings and rings and it could be anyone on the line. I’m wished luck, sold insurance, thrown onto live radio, taunted by youths, offered jobs, reunited with old school friends.I check twitter. Kanye's name is trending. My heart jumps. Surely not. Have I made it? I click. My heart sinks. “Kanye West has just said 400 years of slavery sounds like a choice”. And from there on in I’m dead in the water. A tadpole in a shark tank. The media is at Kanye saturation. Journalists have bigger fish to fry and my little story is left on the shelf.Ok, one last try. I track down Yeezy Headquarters on Google Maps, find the phone number of some offices nearby and start dialing. I start telling this receptionist about the dating site, about the Billboards, and I can’t believe it but she’s actually listening to me.“Funnily enough my best friend A***** works at Yeezy” “If I send you an email could you forward it on?” “Sure” And that's that. Now I can go to bed, wake up the next day and get on with my life.A few weeks pass and, lo and behold, an email from A****** drops into my inbox. [See "The Kanye Story" website for the actual email from Kanye's team. It basically says they love the idea and the CFO of YEEZY wants to talk with me] And a few hours I get sent a screenshot from Kanye's office chat.[Again, see website. This is basically Kanye's office people talking about site and saying, "direct email Kendall, bcc Chris Jenner. Tell Kanye."]I can't help but smile. After all my efforts emailing journalists, practicing for radio interviews, writing press releases, retouching images, all it took was a simple phone call to the company whose office was next door.YEEZYAnd that’s how we got to now. It’s 9:52 pm, Thursday 24th May. In ten minutes time, I’ll be on the phone with the CFO of Kanye West’s Billion Dollar company.I remember sitting round with my uni housemates last year talking about what the future would hold for all of us. They were all saying, “I’m applying for a finance job” or “I’ll do a masters ”, stuff like that. And it came to me and I said, “I’m going travel to Nazareth, learn to code, come back to England, finish my book, learn about business and start my own stuff.”They were used to my spiel now and started groaning, “None of this shit's going to happen Dry. The real world’s going to chop you up and spit you out. You're going to be stuck in the rat race, clocking in, clocking off, packed onto the tube, just like all of us.”I smiled. “Tell me that again”. So they did. “Reality is going to grind you down. You’re going to be clock watching, Monday to Friday. There’s nothing you can do about it. And you know it.”“Tell me that that one more time”, I said. So they did. And I smiled even more.I’m not saying I’ve done anything yet cause I haven’t. But at least I've stuck to my word. I've tried and given it a go.So there we go. Thanks for reading and making it all the way to the bottom. I'm @harrydry on Twitter. I also write an email newsletter about startups, marketing and breaking free which you can find over on the main website. Thanks again and peace out!
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Alloy Motors Builds a Back-to-Basics 1968 Dodge Dart
Since it’s 1960 inception, the Dodge Dart gradually shrank over its generations, and by 1968 it had settled in its spot as Dodge’s inexpensive compact, replacing the Lancer in 1963. Small, lightweight, cheap, and with room for a V8, it was and still is the perfect candidate for hot rodding. So why mess with a good thing? Alloy Motors of Oakland, California, prefers to build just that kind of plain-spoken muscle machinery that hearkens to a simpler time, so the team there created a no-thrills, stroker-powered Mopar—a traditional build with modern parts.
After the Dart left Car Craft’s El Segundo, California, studio, Geoff trailered to the Roadkill Zip-Tie Drags in Tucson, Arizona. It was the car’s first shakedown, and despite having the owner’s permission, Geoff lifted early, resulting in a 13-second pass. “I let out in Third and said, ‘Yep, it’s fast, and that’s all I need to know,” Geoff said with a laugh.
The traditional muscle car has become lost in today’s sea of Pro Touring builds and LS swaps. Building a body-swap or all-modern drivetrain can rob the muscle car of its essence. An authentic muscle car evokes feelings of freedom, with a ball shifter in one hand and steering wheel in the other with your elbow hanging out of the window. The 245 air conditioning (two windows down, 45 mph) forces you to listen to the sweet rumble of eight cylinders. Alloy Motors built just that, a true Mopar-powered Dodge that screams freedom.
The BluePrint Engines 408 stroker was dressed up with Mopar Performance valve covers and accessory drive pulleys. A Spectre hat and K&N air cleaner grab air from the front of the engine compartment.
A few years ago, Geoff Gates, owner of Alloy Motors, picked a 1967 Dart to build to highlight his shop’s talent. “I wanted to take a risk on an underutilized platform and do it spectacularly to see if it got noticed, and it did,” Geoff said. “It’s smaller, lighter, more like a modern-car size, and I thought we can have a lot of fun with this and make it sexy.” Geoff’s Dart features a show-stopping paint job. “I wanted it black because I wanted to show off what I can do. It has a lot of straight lines, and you can’t hide a thing.”
Three years ago, Dean Wallace fell in love with that Dart, nicknamed “Dart Vader.” He wanted his own but without the shiny paint. “Basically, the same car but with more power and three pedals,” Geoff said. “More go, less show.” Dean and Geoff created a rendering and a plan, starting with a straight donor car Geoff found off the Reno, Nevada, Craigslist. It was a $3,500 clean roller with no engine or transmission, but boxes of parts. “It still had the factory insulation under the carpet,” Geoff said. It was essential to find a suitable car with little rust and a straight body; this cut down on expensive bodywork and extended downtime. “It saves a lot when you don’t have to install quarter-panels and floorboards.”
Alloy jumped in with minor bodywork and prepped the car for paint. “It was a quickie,” Geoff said. The team fixed a few dents and hit it with 120-grit sandpaper. It was primed, blocked, and shot. “To my standards, it’s a cheap paint job, but many people like it. We were able to do a lot with a little because it started as a such a straight car.” Alloy Motors developed a color using single-stage Vintage Flatz Hot Rod paint. It included a gallon of black, a little white, and a little blue.
The satin-blue paint is a custom mix of single-stage Vintage Flatz Hot Rod paint.
The paint was a flip on the standard gloss/satin combination with a satin body and the bumpers, trim, and wheels various shades of gloss black. The most significant difference between the two Darts is the quality of paint. “Dean wants to beat on the thing,” Geoff said. “Not sit and stare at it, waxing it every Sunday.”
The satin-black vinyl graphics on Dean’s Dart were custom designs inspired by other Mopars of the era. “I looked at others, and just thought I’d do my own thing,” said Geoff, who cut all the vinyl by hand. The “Dart” font is that of a 2013 Dodge Dart.
“Looking at other Mopars of a similar era, we thought we’d do our own thing,” said Alloy Motors’ Geoff Gates, who designed the custom graphics. The “Dart” font is that of a 2013 Dodge Dart.
Geoff grew up in his dad’s body shop in Detroit, where he painted his first car at age 12. He attended art school, worked as an art director at an ad agency, and opened his own agency. He moved to the Bay Area 19 years ago and quickly grew tired of the corporate life.
For Geoff, cars began as a hobby, “But it became more and more satisfying. My friends noticed it was always making me happy, and I was good at it,” said Geoff, who opened Alloy Motors six years ago. “I enjoyed the immediate gratification. The accomplishments are on an hourly and daily basis, unlike advertising, where your payoffs were only quarterly.”
It also evokes pride. “I could say, ‘I made that with my hands,’ or ‘I messed it up, and I’m going to redo it and make it great,’” he said. “This is more about passion than money.”
Initially, the Dart was a moderately priced version of the dressier fullsized Dodges. It was quickly downsized two years later and wedged into the entry-level car market, but it was still too elaborate and awkward to classify as a muscle machine. That changed with the fourth-generation 1967 Dart, which featured a more appealing boxy design. In 1968, Dodge introduced the Hemi Dart, slamming a 426 Hemi under the hood. The hot-rodding public took notice—kind of.
Today, true Mopar enthusiasts have mixed feelings about the Dart’s place. “I think they’re underappreciated,” Geoff said. The A-Body platform is nimble, inexpensive, and simple, and Geoff kept it that way. “It was an economy car, built almost like modern cars today. However, if you look at it, it’s a smaller and lighter B-Body. You put a lot of horsepower into it, and you have the same damn thing. Why should the winged cars and Superbees get all the love?”
Alloy Motors built Dean’s Dart in a traditional mindset, but with a few modern conveniences. The 360ci V8 was an option in the 1970s, but this one is stroked to 408 ci. The 1968 model year ushered in Chrysler’s Clean Air Package emission-control system, the company’s answer to new federal mandates. While this stroker isn’t a Hemi, it did replace the sluggish single-barrel carb and emissions controls with a tunable FAST EFI system. It bolts on like a carburetor, keeping the EFI electronics, sensors, and wiring minimal.
The result was a muscle car to pair with Geoff’s previous build. “I don’t think I’m a traditional builder; both of those cars are built with constraint,” he said. “There are not a lot of expensive parts on either car.” Initially, it was to be one of Dean’s first Mopars, but while waiting, he picked up a 1966 Dart drag car that he’s sending to Alloy Motors for a freshening up.
Following our photo shoot, the Dart was christened at the Roadkill Zip-Tie Drags in Tucson, Arizona. Geoff said the Dart hooks up exceptionally well and, with some fine-tuning, believes tire-lifting launches are in its future. Back in Oakland, he performed more shakedown miles. “You can roll at 10 mph, stab the gas pedal, and it rips the tires off. It’s a beast. To me, cars are supposed to be cars, not trailered to shows and shown. Regardless of how much money you spend, you should enjoy them. That’s why I restrain a bit. I’d rather see a customer take it out and flog it; that’s what it’s for.”
Tech Notes
Who: Dean Wallace
What: 1968 Dodge Dart
Where: Oakland, CA
Engine
The drivetrain was a bigger priority than paint. Dean wanted to retain the muscle-car feel with a true Mopar powerplant—no LS swap here. Alloy Motors kept it simple and called upon BluePrint Engines for a 408ci stroker small-block Chrysler. Dean’s Dart is the yin to Geoff’s yang, trading glossy paint for more power.
The 408ci stroker was dyno-tested before arrival; it made 445 hp and 500 lb-ft of torque at the flywheel on pump gas. The 360 LA features a 4-inch bore and a 4-inch stroke, with a steel crank, forged pistons, 10:1 compression, and 63cc aluminum heads. The flat-tappet cam specs are 0.545 intake and 0.545 exhaust, 241 intake and 247 exhaust duration, and 110 degrees of lobe separation. “With that cam and stainless-steel exhaust, it sounds menacing,” Geoff said.
The FAST controller is mounted on the A-pillar and displays engine speed and other vital information. BluePrint Engines dyno-tuned the FAST system before delivery, making for a simple install. The throttle-body sits atop an Edelbrock Performer aluminum intake. The only issue was the HEI distributor rubbing the firewall. An MSD 6AL box mounts on the inner fender.
Alloy Motors rewired the Dart using a Ron Francis wiring kit, keeping it as clean as possible under the hood. An Optima Redtop battery keeps the Dart starting every time. Alloy Motors built the fan shroud for the custom Griffith two-row aluminum radiator.
Earl’s Pro-lite 350 -6AN fittings and lines handle the fuel with an Aeromotive Phantom 340 fuel pump inside a stock replacement tank.
The stroker is dressed up with Mopar Performance valve covers and accessory drive system. The K&N air cleaner was built to grab air from the front of the engine compartment. The intake uses a Spectre hat with a polished tube and custom-built support.
The Moser 8.75-inch Chrysler rear axle with Sure Grip limited-slip keep both wheels spinning for quick burnouts. Hotchkis leaf springs, 1-inch rear sway bar, and Fox shocks round out the rear suspension package.
Drivetrain
The Dart had to have a manual transmission, so Alloy called upon American Powertrain for its Chrysler A-Body Pro-Fit 5-Speed kit. The kit includes crossmember, cables, driveshaft, single-disc clutch, and sheetmetal for raising the transmission tunnel. Dean opted for the Tremec TKO 500, which handles 600 lb-ft of torque, leaving plenty of room for more power. The transmission only weighs 99 pounds. Out back, a Moser-equipped Chrysler 8.75 rear axle features an Auburn Sure Grip limited-slip and 3:73:1 gears, making for fun burnouts.
Wheels & Tires
The blacked-out wheels may cause bad flashbacks for some readers; they’re Chrysler Cop Car wheels built by Wheel Vintiques. They measure 15 inches all around with 225/50R15 Goodyear tires up front and 255/70R15 Mickey Thompson Street E/T Streets in the rear.
Suspension
The Dart’s sharp handling and stance come from the Hotchkis Total Vehicle Suspension System, which features tubular control arms with polyurethane bushings, Fox adjustable struts, and a 1.5-inch sway bar. Hotchkis leaf springs in the rear have improved geometry over the factory. A 1-inch Hotchkis rear sway bar and Fox shocks round out the rear suspension. The front spindles have been swapped out for factory E-Body units as a part of the kit. The system retains the OEM-style torsion-bar suspension, which makes it easy to adjust the height without changing many components. “Just turn some screws and change the whole attitude of the car,” Geoff said. The car is lowered 2 inches in the back and roughly 1.5 inches in the front. “We simply raised it enough to keep the tires from rubbing.”
Brakes
Wilwood forged Superlite brakes with billet hubs, 13-inch rotors, and forged four-piston calipers take care of stopping power all around. The Dart has an SSBC 1-inch-diameter master cylinder and a Wilwood proportioning valve.
A bonus to the clean donor car was a good interior. Alloy Motors only replaced the carpet, headliner, and recovered the rear seat.
Interior
The car started life as a Dart GTS, meaning it had an upgraded interior with nicer seats and door panels. Most of the inside remains as the factory intended, but with a new rear bench cover, carpet, and headliner. The steering wheel is a Flaming River Tuff Wheel. The car originally featured a center console, but that was removed when Alloy rebuilt the transmission tunnel for the new Tremec five-speed.
Exhaust
TTi ceramic-coated shorty headers dump into 2.5-inch collectors. The true dual stainless-steel exhaust features Gibson MWA mufflers and a Magnaflow X-pipe with Gibson tips.
Alloy custom-built the fan shroud for the large Griffin radiator. Other than a stuck thermostat, the car has had zero overheating issues.
The post Alloy Motors Builds a Back-to-Basics 1968 Dodge Dart appeared first on Hot Rod Network.
from Hot Rod Network https://www.hotrod.com/articles/alloy-motors-builds-back-basics-1968-dodge-dart/
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Inktober #20: Tread
Two people have done fan art for this character; I will reblog them after posting this, with a tag to make them findable, since Tumblr hides posts with links from search.
Five friends drove up the mountain into the forest, where the vacation cabin waited for them. It was their senior year of college, so it wouldn’t be long before they’d be graduating and going their separate ways, and who knew when they’d all be able to hang out together again? So they’d decided that this year, instead of going on spring break someplace where there were a ton of other people, they’d spend break together in a cabin in the woods, because there was no possible way that that could go wrong.
They were just five totally ordinary college guys. Steve, a white dude with brown hair who loved video games and playing guitar; Trevor, a black dude with short hair who was on track to graduate magna cum laude and had already been accepted at a top medical school; Harrison, an outgoing, short, red-haired white dude who played soccer, but not, like, at career athlete level or anything; Evan, an Asian dude who kept his hair in a long ponytail, and whose family owned the cabin, who was planning on taking a year off after graduation to backpack around Asia and had sold it to his parents as an exploration of his heritage; and the Pale Bro, a twelve-foot tall dude with paper-white skin whose fingernails were like long razor blades and who was completely covered with eyes and mouths, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cut-off shorts that would have been nearly pants on any other guy, and a pair of Vans on his feet. Just five ordinary young fellows, like anyone you might know.
Steve was driving the minivan, kinda wishing it was his dad’s SUV because of the effort of getting a minivan up the slope, but his dad’s SUV was in a different state and besides, it wouldn’t have had room for the Pale Bro. The minivan was the kind where you could put down the back row of seats to expand the cargo capacity, and the Pale Bro had laid out a thick sleeping-bag style blanket on top of their suitcases and was laying on them now, curled sideways because there was no dimension where he could stretch out in the van. Must be rough for him, Steve imagined, always having to bend down or curl up to fit into buildings and vehicles with his bros. He never complained about it, though. He was a great friend.
“How much farther is this place?” Harrison asked. “I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’ve been unfortunately next to you at the urinals,” Trevor said. “I’d believe it.”
Steve checked the GPS. “Shit. The GPS has just decided to get the vapors because it’s up too high. It’s telling me I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, look at this.” He showed the screen to Evan. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even drawing the road.”
“Don’t worry about it, I can guide you in from here,” Evan said. “Just stay on the road another 20 minutes or so.”
With a voice that rumbled like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together and the hiss of static from the birth of the universe behind it, the Pale Bro conveyed that there had better be some fucking food at the cabin, because he was starving.
“You and me both, buddy,” Trevor said.
“We all just got Burger King like, two hours ago,” Steve complained.
“Yeah, well, me and Pale are tall dudes. We need more food than you.” The smirk on Trevor’s face indicated that he didn’t really believe that.
“There should be food, I had a grocery delivery scheduled for yesterday and one of my parents’ employees was supposed to swing by the place, pick it up and put it in the fridge.”
“There’s a fridge at this cabin?” Harrison asked.
Evan looked at him. “Yeah, dumbass, you think I’d have suggested coming here if there was no fridge? There’s running water, too. It even gets hot if you run it long enough.”
“Well, excuse me for not being so rich I can afford to go to a cabin in the woods, ever, before now.”
“What else has it got?” Trevor asked.
“Well, there’s three bedrooms, one of which has a king-sized bed and the other two have bunk beds. I figure, Pale Bro gets the big bed and we break up into two’s and do the roommate thing. We don’t have a washer or dryer, but if you only brought one pair of underpants and it’s getting really rank, we’ve got detergent and a clothesline so you can wash them in the sink. There’s a dishwasher.”
“I would have put in a washer and dryer before I put in a dishwasher, personally,” Steve said.
“Yeah, well, my mom had a different opinion. Anyway, it’s camping in the woods. It’s not supposed to be just like if we were at home.”
“I call top bunk!” Harrison said.
“There’s two top bunks. Both rooms have bunk beds.”
The Pale Bro expressed in a voice like a Gregorian chant of nightmares that he wanted to know if there was a bathroom in the master bedroom, because that shit would be sweet.
“Naah, man, sorry,” Evan said. “But there is one of those really deep claw-foot bathtubs that you like.”
Like the rumbling of an oncoming avalanche, the Pale Bro opined that that was excellent.
***
“I don’t believe this shit.”
They had just disembarked, the Pale Bro in the rear bringing his own suitcase and the beer cooler, which was the size of a mini-fridge, and everyone else dragging their suitcases in… except for Evan, who had gone directly to the kitchen without bringing in his own stuff yet. He came stomping out. “Joe never showed up, the bastard! I’m totally having my dad fire his ass.”
“What do you mean?” Steve asked.
“I mean that food order never showed up. So we have canned food, and boxed food, but we don’t have anything perishable. No bread, no lunchmeat, no eggs, no bacon, no orange juice, none of that shit.” He sighed. “I’m gonna have to drive down into town myself to get food, and we just got here.”
“Hey, man, I can still drive the car,” Steve said. “You just need to tell me where to go.”
“Steve, you’ve been driving for 6 hours, you’re probably wiped. I can drive,” Trevor said. “It’s the least I could do with Evan buying our food.”
“Yeah, but you bought the beer, man,” Evan said. “So maybe Harrison needs to drive.”
“Uh, hey, before anyone drives anywhere, maybe you should call and find out if your parents even know where that Joe guy who never showed up is, and if he’s all right?” Harrison called from outside.
“Why?”
“Just… everyone come take a look at this!”
Everyone went outside and congregated around Harrison’s find, which was a roughly humanoid, but clawed, tread that was at least three times the size of a normal footprint. Experimentally the Pale Bro put his own massive foot into the tread. Harrison whistled. The footprint was about 25% bigger than the Pale Bro’s.
“Dude. What is that? Is that a bear?” Harrison asked.
Trevor shook his head. “Those are sneaker treads, Har. Bears don’t wear sneakers.”
In a voice that was the perfect auditory personification of the Zalgo font, the Pale Bro suggested that it looked like one of his cousins was back on its bullshit again.
“Goddamn,” Evan said. “That’s a big fellow.”
“I think maybe if we go into town we should all go,” Steve said.
“We’ve just been driving all this time, though,” Evan said. “I wanted to relax, crack a cold one, put on some MP3s. We don’t get Internet worth shit out here but I’ve got a huge music library on the stereo’s hard drive.”
The Pale Bro opined that before anyone drove anywhere, maybe he had better find his cousin and make it clear that if his cousin touched any of his friends he would shove its head so far up its ass it would be blinking shit out of its 27 eyes for a month.
“That… sounds reasonable,” Trevor said. “Since we don’t know what happened to Joe. We can hunker down here and wait for you to get back.”
“I’m pretty sure I got instant just add water pancake mix,” Evan said. “And my mom stocked this place with crappy dehydrated chicken pieces like the kind doomsday preppers buy. I could make a shitty chicken soup, we’ve got bouillon and noodles. Oh, and there’s a few cans of chili. Canned stuff is shit but I could maybe perk it up with some spices, some extra beans… put some rice in the cooker, I bet my mom left rice here, she buys like 100 pound bags of rice.”
Like the sound of Jupiter hovering in orbit above, rotating ponderously, the Pale Bro agreed that some canned chili with extra spices sounded pretty good considering how fucking hungry he was, and as soon as he found his asshole cousin he’d be back to eat with the rest of his bros. He also reminded them to save him some beer.
“Dude!” Steve laughed. “We’ve got three keggers’ worth in that cooler! There will be plenty of beer for you.”
Evan called his parents as the Pale Bro left the house, and reported back, somewhat gray-faced. “They said Joe never called in to say he got to the house. He reported picking up the groceries, he was headed up here, and then nada.”
“Oh, well, then, you work on the chili,” Trevor said, “and me and the rest of the guys are gonna lock up all the windows and doors and put someone on watch for when the Pale Bro gets back. You don’t have any guns up here, by any chance, do you?”
“Nope, my parents aren’t really hunters,” Evan said.
“Well, I’ve seen your kitchen at home, I know what kind of equipment your mom likes to stock. We’ll have plenty of sharp knives, I’m betting.”
“Yeah.”
And so as Evan attempted to turn six cans of canned chili into something his bros would find edible, and the Pale Bro stalked through the forest on the mountaintop looking for his asshole cousin, the other three made sure everything was locked up, that the car keys were secure, and that there were wicked cooking knives within easy reach, but not line of sight from the outside, of every door. Just like ordinary bros do, every day.
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Voices in AI – Episode 81: A Conversation with Siraj Raval
Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese
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About this Episode
Episode 81 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and Siraj Raval discussing how teaching AI to the world can help improve the quality of life for everyone, and what the footfalls along the way are.
Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com
Transcript Excerpt
Byron Reese: This is voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Siraj Raval. He is the director of the School of AI. He holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University. Welcome to the show, Siraj.
Siraj Raval: Thank you so much for having me, Byron.
I always like to start off with just definitions. What is artificial intelligence and specifically what’s artificial about it?
That’s a great question. So, AI, Artificial Intelligence is actually… I like to think of it as a giant circle. I’m a very visual person so just imagine a giant circle and we’ll label that circle AI, okay? Inside of the circle, there is a smaller circle, and this would be the subfield of the eye. One of them would be heuristics. These are statistical techniques to try to play games a little better.
When Garry Kasparov was defeated by big blue — that was using heuristics. There’s another bubble inside of this bigger AI bubble called machine learning and that’s really the hottest area of AI right now and that’s all about learning from data. So there’s heuristics, there’s learning from data — which is machine learning — and there is deep learning as well, which is a smaller bubble inside of machine learning. So AI is a very broad term. And people in computer science are always arguing about what is AI, what isn’t AI? But for me, I like to keep it simple. I think of AI as any kind of machine that mimics human intelligence in some way.
Well hold on a minute though, you can’t say artificial intelligence is a machine that mimics human intelligence because you’re just defining the word with what we’re trying to get at. So what’s intelligence?
That’s a great question. Intelligence is the ability to learn and apply knowledge. And we have a lot of it. Well, some of us anyway (just kidding)
That’s interesting because of AlphaGo — the emphasis on it being able to learn is a pretty high bar. Something like my cat food dish that refills itself when the cat eats all the food, that isn’t intelligent in your book, right? It’s not learning anything new. Is that true?
Yeah. So it’s not learning. So there has to be some kind of feedback, some kind of response to stimulus, so whether that’s from data or whether that’s a statistical technique based on the number of wins versus losses, did this work, did this not work? It’s got to have this feedback loop of something outside of it being external to it is affecting it. In the way that we perceive the world, something external to our heads and that affects how we act in the world.
So [take] the smartest program in the world. Once it’s instantiated as a single program, is no longer intelligent. Is that true? Because it stopped learning at that point. It can be as sophisticated as can be, but in your mind, if it’s not learning something new it’s not intelligent.
That’s a good question. Well, I mean, the point at which it would not need to learn or there would be nothing for it to learn would be the point in which, to get ‘out there,’ it saturates the entire universe.
Well, no. I mean like, let’s take AlphaGo. Let’s say they decide, let’s put out an iPhone version of Go and let’s just take the latest and greatest version of this. Let’s make a great program that plays Go. At that point it is no longer AI, if we rigidly follow your definition because it stopped learning, it’s now frozen in capability. Yeah, I can play it a thousand times in a game 1001 it’s not doing any better.
Sure. Okay, but to stick to my rigid definition, I’ve said that intelligence is the ability to learn and apply knowledge.
Right.
That we will be doing in the latter part.
Do you think that it’s artificial in that it isn’t really intelligence, it just looks like it? Is what a computer does actually intelligent or is it mimicking intelligence? Or is there a difference between those two things?
There are different kinds of intelligences in the world. I mean, think of it like a symphony of intelligences like, our intelligence is really good at doing a huge range of tasks, but a dog has a certain type of intelligence that keeps it more aware of things than we would be, right? Dogs have superhuman hearing capability. So in that way a dog is more intelligent than us for that specific task. So when we say ‘artificial intelligence,’ you know, talking about the AlphaGo example, that algorithm is better than any human on the planet for that specific task. It’s a different kind of intelligence. ‘Foreign,’ ‘alien,’ ‘artificial’ — you know, all of those words would kind of describe its capability.
You’re the Director of School of AI. What is that? Tell me the mission and what you’re doing.
Sure. So I’ve been making educational videos about AI on YouTube for the past couple of years and I had the idea about nine months ago, to have this call to action for people who watch my videos. And I had this idea of saying, ‘Let’s start an initiative where I’m not the only one teaching but there are other people, and we’ll call ourselves The School of AI and we have one mission which is to teach people how to use AI technology for the betterment of humanity for free.’
And so we’re a non-profit initiative. And since then, we have, what are called ‘deans.’ It’s 800 of them spread out across the world, across 400 cities globally. And they’re teaching people in their local communities from Harare, Zimbabwe to Zurich to parts of South America. It’s a global community. They’re building their local schools, Schools of AI, you know, School of AI Barcelona, what have you, and it’s been an amazing, amazing couple of months. It feels like every day I wake up, I look in our side channel, I see a picture of a bunch of students in, say, Mexico City and our school there, our logo there and it’s like, “Is this real?” But it is real. Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun so far.
Put some flesh on those bones. What does it mean to learn… what are people learning to do?
Right. So the guideline that we’re following — we’re talking about the betterment of humanity — are the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) outlined by the United Nations. One of them would be no poverty, no extreme poverty, sustainable action on the climate, things like that. Basically trying to fulfill the basic needs for humans both in developed and developing countries so that eventually we can all reach that stage of self-actualization and be able to contribute and create and discover, which is what I think we humans are best at. Not doing trivial laborious repetitive tasks. That’s what machines are good for. So if we can teach our students, we call them ‘wizards,’ if we can teach our wizards how to use a technology to automate all of that away, then we can get to a world where all of us are contributing to the betterment and the progress of our species whether it’s in science or art, etcetera.
But specifically, what are people learning to do like on a day to day basis?
One example would be classifying images, and that’s a very generic example, but we can use that example to say, help farmers in parts of South Africa to detect plants that are diseased, or that are not diseased. Another example would be anomaly detection. So kind of finding the needle in the haystack. What here doesn’t fit in with the rest? And that can be applied to fraud detection, right? If you’ve got thousands and thousands of transactions, and one of them is a fraud, and AI can learn ‘what fraud is’ better than any human could because it’s just so much data. That’s just two, I can get some more. There’s quite a lot but I think that…
No, but I mean, what’s the clue… so it’s the idea that there just aren’t enough people that have the basic skills to “do AI” and you’re trying to fill that gap?
That is what it is. And yeah, in that the concepts behind this technology, the mathematical concepts I don’t believe are accessible yet to a wide enough audience. So we at School of AI are trying to broaden that audience and trying to make it accessible not just to developers but eventually to everybody. You know, moms, dads, grandmas, grandpas, people who — just they’re not like the most technical people — we’re trying to reach them and make this something that everybody does, because we sincerely believe that this is going to be a part of our lives and eventually everybody is going to be implementing AI in some way or another.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be code. It can be through some application or some kind of ‘drag and drop’ interface, but it’s definitely in the future of work. So yes, that’s what it is. And also it’s the fact that we are facing so many huge problems, daunting problems as a species — existential threats. And we think we might not be good enough alone to solve these problems. Climate change, for example: a lot of people think that it’s too late to solve climate change, but we think that we have a huge amount of data available and we think that the answers to some of the hardest problems related to CO2 emission and how we can allocate resources for that goal lie hidden in that data, and using AI we can find them.
Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com
Voices in AI
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Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.
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