Hi all, F32 here, him M42 Losing my wits. Trying to keep it short to the best of my ability. I’m giving context in the hopes of getting help from you guys, below is how I currently would interpret my experience.
—————————————————— It’s been revelations after revelations, slowly important aspects of my shadow brought to light, this guy is still there and it has been 2-3 years.
Viewed love as manipulative and controlling. As if men wanted to figure me out as to controll me and to strip me from my autonomy. I thought during this experience that my relationship with my father was pretty much healed, we have a wonderful relationship today but clearly at this time there was still work left to do.
I’ve never had problems connecting deeply with my beloved male friends. Objectively good looking fellas. But I’ve been hurt in the past in other friendships with men, where the connections meant a lot to me but they fall in love and thus rejected me and the friendship, leaving me trying to figure out where I did wrong. I became closed off and mindful of my femininity, I wanted to ensure that it wasn’t gonna happen again.
I’ve had infatuations, pure lust, but in retrospect I’ve only truly been in love with this guy. We started out as friends via work. He was in a long-time relationship and I was too. It was turbulent in my relationship during almost all of the 11 years we were together, me projecting sides of my shadow viewing my partner as being emotionally unavailable.
The guy later confessed being in love with me, he was educated in jung, I knew a little but never to the same extent. I was in love too, in a very new way for me. I was surprised he felt the same, and I was trying to repress it, thinking we would snap out of it and get back to a platonic friendship.
I believed both intellectualized the process as being nothing but projections, for some reason I had a better time at accepting the connection in the beginning. I tried to let him battle whatever was going on, I viewed it as him trying to figure out the situation so he could get rid of the illusion. At the start I seemed fine, I valued the friendship and really wanted him to stay in my life.
He was more and more verbal of his romantic feelings but at the same time questioning, almost like I was manipulating him to fall in love with me (that’s how I viewed it). I viewed his feelings as if it was my closest male friends saying it to me. Sometimes I slipped and felt his romantic feelings as being true and thus responding to it.
The more we got to know each other the more the feelings grew and to me it started to feel like a ticking time bomb, something uncontrollably was starting to surface within me and I struggled with not seeing him in a bad light.
Last time we met our connection climaxed, for lack of a better word, we both had never experienced something like it, we could simply just be in the connection without resistance, he texted me that ”he didn’t know then, but that he knew now” along with a song. I was too afraid to think it meant what he felt was true, or that he now could accept it. I tried viewing it as true. But later in a conversation, I heard him questioning again and then it all came as a flood.
My destructive aminus came as a full tornado and I later texted him in a way were I wanted to let him know I was seeing right through him, that I was the victim and if we could cut it out and talk about the anima projection so he could intergrate whatever it was he was projecting. Again, I knew briefly about jung so obviously I didn’t understand fully but I sure as hell felt arrogant enough to ”call” him out. He had a meltdown, work and people could not get a hold of him. We were suppose to go on a job together, but they had to replace him and I talked to him as if trying to get closure, him letting me know he still felt the same and me admitting I was afraid and being happy that someone like him was out in the world. I wanted to end it as I had convinced myself it was my intuiton warning me he was playing around. But I still hoped to talk to him about our experience.
The connection never got physical nor was the conversations sexual, more a longing. I saw his flaws and his beauty but I wasn’t able to see the flaws of my own. He could see them because he had to deal with it, whenever it lashed out like a child. Parts of the beauty he saw in me I already knew and felt was true before I met him due to my own journey. I could never understand why he said I kept myself in control because that’s what I felt he was doing by questioning, but it takes 2 to tango. What I projected as his short-comings were my own.
I healed my relationship with my father a few years ago, before I met this guy. I think I was able to bring parts of my femininity back to my consciousness. But my partner kept being emotionally closed and I could no longer relate to him. During my relationship I’ve had a crush on a guy and looking back I learned my type, if you could put it like that. I didn’t see any flaws but it died away as I figured what I was mirroring.
With the guy I’m referring to in the post I just can’t figure it out. I know what I truly desire is to surrender to him, like giving myself up to him but I can’t do it in the physical world. I tried to reach out after a year, just sending the same song back and nothing else. Part of me wanted to open up a dialogue and talk about what I’ve learned, or maybe he had learned something about the experience that could help. He didn’t answer.
I have to respect him not wanting to talk to me. I feel ashamed and in my search of trying to transcend from all of this I’m constantly swinging between consciousness and unconsciousness (maybe shadow would be correct here) and I can’t get them to merge. The closer I seem to get, the crazier I’m starting to feel.
I feel stuck in a circle and it stops whenever I manage to find a truth, and then it starts again from a new angle, on and on again. I thought of his feminine aspects, thinking it must be the answer and I’ve managed to relate to those aspects from within, thus creating parts of that sensation I felt from being with him. Ultimately, I find myself wanting to share it with him. I can’t seem to shake away relating to him.
I feel ashamed and I want to take responsibilty for my actions but I also want to leave him alone to not cause him any trouble. Instead, I’ve tried implementing these inner lessons into all my relationships and as a result my outside world is so much more balanced, not just black and white, but both. And sometimes this feels like a psycosis.
Why is he still there? I met someone else after him and after separating from my partner, it was pure sexual and he was a lovely man but it was like regressing back to being 16 again.
I would be truly grateful if someone reads this and can bring a perspective to my situation. Any blindspot you as a reader can see? Any litterature that might be useful to me?
If you managed to read all of this, thank you.

eShopperReviews May 2023 Wrap-Up

In the month of May, I reviewed 39 Nintendo Switch games (while buying 27), meaning that I made progress in my goal of reviewing all my games... though mainly because I was too busy playing Zelda to bother buying all that much (for new folks here, 14 games is a pretty small number for me).
All told, my Nintendo Switch titles reviewed to titles owned ratio is now 2239/3131.
Now that I'm making it a point to track the number of subscribers, I'll also point out that this subreddit is at 8878 subscribers. A little bump over the prior month’s numbers, but I’ll take it. For those who are new to this subreddit, hi! Welcome! I hope you enjoy your time here!
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Patreon Updates
On the Patreon side of things, we had 12 patrons kindly donating in the month of May, and their contributions will be recognized in reviews throughout the month of June. If you’re curious to see the names, you can check them out below.
The games Patrons voted on in April for me to review in May were a tie between Lil Gator Game and Melatonin, with Rô winning the budget game vote. I ended up reviewing Lil Gator Game and I’ll talk a bit more about that farther down, but as for Rô, this is a pretty sub-par and mediocre Platformer, but one with a saving grace of only costing $0.50. So, I... guess it’s probably worth that, though definitely don’t expect anything especially great or even all that good.
Okay, so those are the reviews from April’s votes, but what games won the May votes? Well, the normal patron vote resulted in another tie (four ways this time!) between A Space for the Unbound, Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly, Fashion Police Squad, and NeverAwake. As always, I’m the tiebreaker, and you’ll find out which of these games I’m reviewing sometime in the month of June. As for the budget game vote, the clear winner this month was JarataireRPG, which I will also review in the month of June.
Okay, on to new votes up for this month!
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Monthly Patreon Votes - June
For this month's patron vote for those who donate $5 or more on Patreon, I’m focusing on games releasing specifically in the month of June.
The list of games to vote for in the Patron vote are as follows:
Master Detective Archives: Rain Code
Samba De Amigo: Party Central
Dr. Fetus’ Mean Meat Machine
We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie
Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection
Rune Factory 3 Special
Whichever game gets the most votes will receive a review in July.
As for the All-Patron Budget Vote for those who donate $1 or more, I’m looking at yet even more budget games released in early 2023. As per usual, all games in this vote are normally priced in the eShop at $2 or under.
The selections for the second vote are as follows:
Bubble Bird
Cabin Escape: Alice’s Story
Galaxy Revo: Remake
Powers of Hex
Truck Climb Racing
Your Future
As always, whichever game earns the most votes by the end of May will be reviewed in June!
If you want to join in these votes, head over to the eShopperReviews Patreon page and make a donation - again, to be clear, donating any dollar amount allows you to partake in the All-Patron Budget Vote, and donating $5 or more enables you to participate in both votes!
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Podcasts & Game Streams
Once again, Patreon subscribers can hear me discussing the last month’s highlights in a monthly podcast. I should note that these podcasts are made available to patrons first, but if you’re not a patron, you won’t be completely left out - I’ll have the podcast made available to everyone on YouTube a week or so after Patreon patrons get it. However, if you’re curious to hear the podcast right when it releases, please consider heading over to the Patreon page and making a donation! In this month’s podcast, Jenn and I talk about the recent announcements canceling Overwatch II’s PvE campaign content, the recent roadblocks Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard has faced, and we talk at length about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. And as always, we also discuss the last month’s reviews that I deemed to be the best games, worst games, and hidden gems. No streams in May. Is this something people here want to see more of? Please speak up in the comments if so!
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New Monthly... Feature?
Not sure what to call this... Retro Friday? Well, the short version is, the first Friday of each month, I’m going to review a handful of classic games that have been brought to Nintendo Switch. Arcade Archives, ACA NEOGEO, Johnny Turbo, and so on. This way, I can make a regular thing out of reviewing these retro games without them taking over the subreddit. And of course, because tomorrow is a Friday, you’ll be seeing the first group of these tomorrow!
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eShopperReviews Subreddit Updates
On the subreddit side of things, no theme weeks in May (unless you want to count the week I took off to play more Zelda). I did update the Wiki by transferring over the page for Open-World games to the Wiki.
I also added new reviews for May 2023 releases on Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack’s Game Boy Advance App, and in turn I updated the page for the Game Boy Advance App to reflect these.
Once again, no new Bad Behavior Profiles this month. At some point I’ll have to get back to updating these, but... Zelda...
Okay, I think that's it for major events on eShopperReviews in May, now onto some review highlights! Here's my picks for the most noteworthy games I reviewed in May 2023. As always, these are not necessarily games that came out this May, just what I was able to review this last month.
Okay, so on to May’s highlights:
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The Best

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - It cannot possibly be a surprise that this game tops my list of best games I reviewed this month. I took the unusual step of taking a week off from writing reviews for eShopperReviews after publishing my review for this game, just so I would have more time to play this game. And even now, as I write this, I’m feeling myself tempted to procrastinate writing these words just a bit more so I can have more time to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. This is one of the greatest Zelda games ever made. This is one of the greatest Nintendo Switch games ever made. This is one of the greatest Action-RPGs ever made. This is one of the greatest videogames ever made, full-stop. I could gush on and on and on here, but I feel like I already did plenty of that in my review, so if you want to find out more, please go and read that, and if my joy at playing this game isn’t clear by that point, you can feel free to ask me more about my thoughts on the game here. But, barring that, I’ll just go ahead and move on...
Octopath Traveler II - This is an outstanding throwback to the Turn-Based JRPG greats of old much in the same way that its predecessor was, with even more nuanced excellent gameplay, great writing, fantastic characters, and compelling story. My only real complaint here is that once again this game fails to properly incorporate all of the stories of its eight protagonists into one cohesive whole. However, despite this flaw, this is still an excellent game well worth playing, and a must-have for fans of the genre.
Lil Gator Game - Take the core gameplay formula of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, shrink it down to be much smaller in scope, make it more kid- and casual-friendly, and make it one of the most absolutely adorable games you have ever played, and you’ll get something like Lil Gator Game, a joyful romp that had me smiling the entire time i was playing it.
Tactics Ogre: Reborn - This remake of one of the formative games of the Tactics-style branch of the Strategy-RPG genre is still a strong entry in that same genre, with excellent gameplay and a great story. I just wish that this game wasn’t forced into being so restrictive and linear due to its level caps.
Sonic Frontiers - Sonic Frontiers is absolutely riddled with problems. It’s absurdly unpolished and has some major issues. And yet, it still manages to be a joy to play. Sonic’s first steps into an Open-World (or “Open Zone”, if you take Sega’s nomenclature) are messy and broken, yet still extremely enjoyable.
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The Worst

.cat Milk, Axolotl. and Rafa’s World - All three of these games are pretty bad Platformers, but what makes these even worse is that you can get all three together in the Rafa's World + Axolotl + .cat Milk bundle for a mere $0.75, a fraction of even the best sale price that any one of these games sells for individually. Should you buy the bundle? Well, no, I don’t think these games are very good at any price, but you absolutely shouldn’t buy these games individually, unless you like getting ripped off.
Loot Box Simulator - RPG Anime Girls, Loot Box Simulator - Crimson Fire. and Loot Box Simulator - Heroes of the Dark Age - Another trio I’m including together due to how similar these games all are to each other. It’s bad enough that the gameplay in this game seems pointless, random, and nonsensical, not to mention boring. You’re literally just picking one of four options and hoping it’s the best one without any way of knowing until after you select it... then doing that again. But to make things even worse, the point of the game is to earn points to unlock the game’s artwork, which you cannot do anything with, even zoom in. Go to any anime art website and you’ll likely get more value out of your free browsing than you will get out of buying these games.
Prof. Miyamoto's Soroban & Flash Anzan - So this game is just simple math flash cards in digital form. It’s confusingly put-together, simple, and boring, but I suppose some parents might find some use for this. Well, they would, if it didn’t want to charge players admission for each additional time you want to use the game after an initial introduction period. You know, kind of like how dumb parents warned their kids that drug dealers would give them a free hit to get you hooked before cranking up the cost when you go back for more... except no one is ever, ever going to get hooked on this, and if you really want more of this... just get some flash cards and ditch this game.
Airport Flight Administrator Simulator & Air Traffic-Sky Airplane Sim Plane Games - This touchscreen-only minigame collection ties together multiple minigames that are often only extremely loosely-connected to airports. However, the real issue with this game is that the minigames are exceedingly simple and the game gives you no reason to play them more than once. Or, if you’re wise enough to not buy this game, never.
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Hidden Gems

Plague Inc: Evolved - Plague Inc was popularized on mobile devices a decade ago, before we had to contend with an actual worldwide pandemic, with an expanded version of the game hitting consoles one after another. The Nintendo Switch version of the game lacks the multiplayer of other console versions, but otherwise this is the same excellent unique global Simulation game where players must guide their virus to try to kill every last person on Earth. Dark? Sure, but immensely fun too.
Crazy BMX World - When making a Compilation of all the superb Bike Rider DX games from the Nintendo 3DS, I’m frustrated that they named this collection something completely different so it wasn’t clear that’s what this is. However, that irritation aside, this is an excellent trio of Auto-Runner games at a very tempting $3 price.
Galak-Z: The Void: Deluxe Edition - There was a Free-To-Play version of this game on Nintendo Switch at one point, but it is no longer available. That’s okay, because this version of the game is quite good, with a solid presentation, good gameplay, and some compelling Roguelike mechanics.
Some Distant Memory - This game combines Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel elements to tell two stories - one taking place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, and one where these characters are using AI to recreate events that happened in the household they’re digging through amidst the ruins of our Earth. Both stories are surprisingly compelling, with great characters. If a post-apocalyptic story sounds interesting to you, this game is well worth a look.
Jet Set Knights - This is a solid Arcade-style Action-Platformer with some good gameplay that’s slightly marred by poor level design, but it’s still well worth a try for players who enjoy games like Towerfall... though this game is nowhere near as good as Towerfall.
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Anyway, that covers pretty much all of the big stuff for May. I hope you've all enjoyed reading what I have to say!
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Weather permitting, CEMA will be conducting its monthly test of the Emergency Warning Siren System on the first Wednesday of this month ^{(it may even be today, sorry I'm a bot and I post this on the 1st day of month whatever day that happens to be}).
The sirens will sound for one-minute at noon, except for Tybee Island where they will sound for one-minute at 11:30am. The sirens are commonly referred to as Tornado Sirens, but they can be used for a variety of situations.
If weather is inclement, CEMA may delay or cancel the test. Check the CEMA Twitter feed for confirmation. Or sign-up for CEMA Alerts to be sent to your phone.

It had been a long drive, and we still had a long way to go. Momma and I were pushing straight through, taking turns driving while the other slept.
And the weather had turned to shit. We’d hit Tornado Alley. Torrential downpour, and reports of warnings, sightings, and touch-downs coming in over the radio from all over the place.
Late at night, we’d stopped at a gas station to fill up, and had taken a few minutes to quickly wolf down some cold rice and beans.
Then I’d turned over the wheel to her, and settled in for a nap.
I awoke an hour and a half later, glanced at the speedometer, and: “What the hell?!”
“Don’t worry” from Momma, as she stared ahead through the downpour and darkness at the nighttime road ahead of us. “I got this.”
“How long was I out?”
“About an hour and a half.”
“Where are we?”
She told me the name of the last town we’d just recently passed. I picked up the folded-open road atlas. Found the spot. We were getting close to the state border.
Then I traced back to where we’d been when I’d turned over the wheel to the little maniac: No. Not possible. Not in an hour and a half.
“What’ve you been doing?!” I demanded. “90 miles an hour?! Through This?!”
“Most of it. 90, 95.”
“Are you tryin’ to kill us?! What the hell were you thinking?!”
“I was thinking” she said, quietly, but with feeling, “that we needed to get the fuck out of Oklahoma.”

Not a DM, but seeking advice from DMs.
So a friend is starting a DnD Campaign, Dungeon of the Mad Mage. My character is a Drow who's mother failed the curse of the Drider from lloth whilst she was with child, and then subsequently died during child birth.
My character inherrited some minor characteristics as the curse passed to him through blood. Similar to how some vampires curses pass to the unborn when the mother becomes infected whilst pregnant.
The traits that I took were Secondary Arms and Improved physique. Larger and more limbs. Think Four-Arms from Ben 10.
As of the start of the campaign, he is roughly 330 years old (~33 in Elf years) and the curse has not progressed.
Ive been feeling the "curse" has no downside and is just benefits. I spoke to the DM about changing it up and gave him some options. The DM is very much interested in the curse progressing some how:

1. Blood Dependancy: Must drink blood once every 7 days (7 long rests) else take 1 level of exhaustion. This is the easiest to cover as I just need to drain a corpse after battle once every 7 days, and pass a stealth check to not be seen by the rest of the party who are very much on the north side of the morality bar. This is easy as I am a finess martial so Dex and Con saves are my forte.
   
2. Feral: Upon drinking blood, you must pass a CON save or become feral for X turns. Same effect for not drinking. This builds upon the Blood dependancy and adds a risk to drinking. However trying to work out what feral would look like. Do I go into a "rage"? Do I grow long claws and fangs? Do I gain advantage on STR and DEX saves, but disadvantage on INT, WIS, CHA saves? Can I only attack randomly the closest person or creature to me regardless of whether they are friend or foe unless I pass a CON save on each of my turns? Problem is, I am a martial so my CON save is 18+8 proficiency. So how high would the save need to be to add risk? As the curse has been stable thus far, clearly ive passed all my saves for 330 years.
   
3. Curse progression: Drinking blood every 7 days stalls the progression of the curse. Failure to drink the blood causes the curse to progress. Here, id add additional spider like traits but would have a benefit and a detriment. This builds further upon the first two.
   

eg1: The curse may grant the ability to use Web at will, however I must cast a DEX / performance check or I will shibari myself instead of the target. To stop doing this, I need to complete a total of X successful uses, making it look like I am learning to harness the abilities of the curse over time.

Web: You can shoot sticky webs from your body as a ranged weapon attack. This attack has a 30/60ft range. On a hit, the creature is restrained by webbing. As an action, the restrained creature can make a strength check against a DC equal to 8+ your proficiency bonus + your constitution modifier escaping from the webbing on a success.

eg2, Poison Spray: Benefit, ability to cast poison spray at will as a ranged attack, detriment, until I pass X successful uses, I risk poisoning myself.
eg3: Venom Fang: Learn to use fangs as an attack, but until I pass X successful uses, I risk taking half necrotic damage from biting my own lips.
I would also need to work out a reason for the curse to all of a sudden start up again as it has been stable for 300+ years and he lived with a sect of drow that did not follow Lloth, but rather a HB variant upon the cult of Vhaeraun. Think Norcaine from Spellforce if you have ever played it.

Hey, so a friend is starting a DnD Campaign, Dungeon of the Mad Mage. My character is a Drow who's mother failed the curse of the Drider from lloth whilst she was with child, and then subsequently died during child birth.
My character inherrited some minor characteristics as the curse passed to him through blood. Similar to how some vampires curses pass to the unborn when the mother becomes infected whilst pregnant.
The traits that I took were Secondary Arms and Improved physique. Larger and more limbs. Think Four-Arms from Ben 10.
As of the start of the campaign, he is roughly 330 years old (~33 in Elf years) and the curse has not progressed.
Ive been feeling the "curse" has no downside and is just benefits. I spoke to the DM about changing it up and gave him some options. The DM is very much interested in the curse progressing some how:

1. Blood Dependancy: Must drink blood once every 7 days (7 long rests) else take 1 level of exhaustion. This is the easiest to cover as I just need to drain a corpse after battle once every 7 days, and pass a stealth check to not be seen by the rest of the party who are very much on the north side of the morality bar. This is easy as I am a finess martial so Dex and Con saves are my forte.
   
2. Feral: Upon drinking blood, you must pass a CON save or become feral for X turns. Same effect for not drinking. This builds upon the Blood dependancy and adds a risk to drinking. However trying to work out what feral would look like. Do I go into a "rage"? Do I grow long claws and fangs? Do I gain advantage on STR and DEX saves, but disadvantage on INT, WIS, CHA saves? Can I only attack randomly the closest person or creature to me regardless of whether they are friend or foe unless I pass a CON save on each of my turns? Problem is, I am a martial so my CON is 18+8 proficiency. So a how high would the save need to be to add risk? As the curse has been stable thus far, clearly ive passed all my saves for 330 years.
   

Drinking blood every 7 days stalls the progression of the curse. Failure to drink the blood causes the curse to progress. Here, id add additional spider like traits but would have a benefit and a detriment. This builds further upon the first two.
eg1: The curse may grant the ability to use Web at will, however I must cast a DEX / performance check or I will shibari myself instead of the target. To stop doing this, I need to complete a total of X successful uses, making it look like I am learning to harness the abilities of the curse over time.

Web: You can shoot sticky webs from your body as a ranged weapon attack. This attack has a 30/60ft range. On a hit, the creature is restrained by webbing. As an action, the restrained creature can make a strength check against a DC equal to 8+ your proficiency bonus + your constitution modifier escaping from the webbing on a success.

eg2, Poison Spray: Benefit, ability to cast poison spray at will as a ranged attack, detriment, until I pass X successful uses, I risk poisoning myself.
eg3: Venom Fang: Learn to use fangs as an attack, but until I pass X successful uses, I risk taking half necrotic damage from biting my own lips.
I would also need to work out a reason for the curse to all of a sudden start up again as it has been stable for 300+ years and he lived with a sect of drow that did not follow Lloth, but rather Nor, a HB variant upon the cult of Vhaeraun. Think Norcaine from Spellforce if you have ever played it.

Draven sliced through the neck of a feral mutant, his sword cleanly splitting throw its thick bone exoskeleton. The creature was a Marrow, a humanoid mutant creature that looked like a cross between a human and a gorilla. Thick white bone exoskeleton covered the Marrow as protective armor. Like all other mutants created through magic, Marrows were Hollows. Human beings that had their humanity hollowed by magic, transforming them into abominations.
The sense of impending death bombarded Draven’s mind, warning him of danger. He leaned to the side, dodging a bone spike launched. His hand shot out, plucking the bone spike from the air.
“Ari, turn the suit up to 100%,” Draven said as he locked on to the mutant who launched the bone spike at him. The creature was a Hollow Spike, longed limbed and thin like a rail. Sharp bone spikes protruded from its skin.
“Will do,” Ari, the AI part of his exosuit, voiced back. Steam drifted out of the air vents of the suit as the power core kicked into overdrive.
Draven launched himself at the Hollow Spike. Dirt exploded with every step he took as he blurred toward his opponent.
He focused his mind and dove into the Weave. Thousands of Sympathetic Threads become visible to his eyes, interconnecting every object around him. Draven focused on the Thread connecting the bone spike in his hand and the mutant Hollow in front of him. Mana essence flowed from his core and solidified the sympathetic connection.
Draven pulled the bone spike towards him, the spike taking on the weight of the Hollow as well now that they were bound together. The Hollow Spike came hurtling towards Draven’s charging form. Draven swung his blade, and flames manifested around it as it sliced through the mutant's midsection. Killing the creature in an instant.
Draven looked around, searching for more Hollow. But the only other person standing nearby was Master Sygvar. The rest of the Hollow had run away, seeking to live another day.
“Ari, disable combat mode.” Draven sheathed his blade as he approached Master Sygvar, “Do we give chase?”
Sygvar turned towards his disciple, “Yes, they might lead us to whoever is behind the attacks on the government.”
Sygvar looked towards the sky and whistled.
A mighty roar answered back, and the clouds parted as a massive object descended toward their position. Draven was in awe as the Fire Dragon Tywen plummeted towards the earth. The land quaked as the massive beast landed on the ground.
“You called,” the voice of Tywen was deep and gravelly. The dragon was massive, at least five to six war horses long. And easily taller than a two-story house. And Tywen was still growing. Black and red scales covered the dragon.
“Yes, we need you to follow the fleeing Hollow,” Sygvar said as he jumped onto Tywen’s back. He used a telekinetic push to give him a boost.
Draven followed after his master, using the same trick with telekineses to enhance his jump. He landed just behind Sygvar on Tywen’s back.
Welcome to the System!
Name: Draven Althorne
Age: 18
Ancestory: Fire Dragon Born (Tier 1 - Level 0)
Class: None
Sub Class 1: None
Sub Class 2: None
Sub Class 3: None
Feats: None
Attributes:
Mind:
INT (Intelligence): 17 / 17
FIN (Finese): 14 / 14
WIS (Wisdom): 11 / 11
Body:
STR (Strength): 19 / 19
DEX (Dexterity): 17 / 17
CON (Constitution): 16 / 16
Soul:
SPR (Spirit): 12 / 12
AFF (Affinity): 14 / 14
FOR (Fortitude): 19 / 19
/Attribute Points: 0
Essence:
Stamina: 129 / 129
Vitality: 150 / 150
Mana: 135 / 135
Talents: 0 / 9
Path Points: 0
Paths: 8
Draven smiled, “Master, my system awakened.” Draven’s eyes roamed across his status sheet. All his attributes were at least two points higher than the standard starting nine points everyone gets on their 18 birthday. His Strength and Fortitude were his highest stats, each ten points higher than average.
Sygvar tapped Tywen on the neck, and the dragon took to the sky, soaring throw the clouds. Down below, Draven could see the Hollow feeling through the fields.
“That’s good. We’ll have a celebration later today. Now tell me the paths you have available,” Sygvar said.
Draven opened his status and selected the Paths tab.
Paths:
The Way of the Al’Manti
Dragonborn of Fire
Mind Supremacy
Body Supremacy
Arcane Weaver
Exosuit Pilot
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata
Draven read each off to his master.
“Pick the Way of the Al’Manti. That one will give you the Al’Manti Disciple class when you complete it. Now tell me the Talents you have selected.”
Draven selected the Way of the Al’Manti, and the other paths disappeared.
You have selected the Way of the Al’Manti.
The Al’Manti are an Order of Dragon Knights. Sworn to protect the Imperium and its five kingdoms. By selecting this path, you will embark on a long journey that will grant you great power and burden you with great responsibility.
Path Selected: The Way of the Al’Manti 0 / 9
Draven exited the Paths tab and opened the Talents tab.
Talents:
Draconic Pyromancy
Sympathy
Entropy
Apathy
Mind Supremacy
Body Supremacy
Soul Supremacy
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata
Exosuit Pilot
Arcane Weaving
Telekinesis
Telepathy
Empathy
Healing
Precognition
Postcognition
Spatial Domain
Enhanced Senses
Synesthesia
“Take Draconic Pyromancy, Mind Supremacy, Body Supremacy, Soul Supremacy, and Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata. You can fill the other four remaining slots with whatever you want.” Sygvar said.
Draven click the five Talents his master suggested.
You select the Draconic Pyromancy Talent!
You are a Dragonborn, born with the power of fire. Creating and controlling fire is as easy as breathing for you. Your draconic flames burn hotter than normal fire. Easily able to melt throw the toughest of metals. Go forth and set the world ablaze young Dragon. - Grants the ability to create and manipulate draconic fire - Grants the ability to create and manipulate fire
Techniques: None
You select the Mind Supremacy Talent!
You have mastered your mind, and it bends to your will. - Grants the ability to shape your mind
Techniques: None
You select the Body Supremacy Talent!
You have mastered your body, and it bends to your will. - Grants the ability to shape your body
Techniques: None
You select the Soul Supremacy Talent!
You have mastered your body, and it bends to your will. - Grants the ability to shape your soul
Techniques: None
You select the Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata Talent!
The 5th Blade Kata of the Al’Manti focuses on the offensive. Dominate your opponent with an unrelenting assault. End them with swift attacks. You are one with the blade. The blade is one with you.
Techniques: None
“Why those?” Draven asked.
“Because you have been training those five skills since you join the Al’Manti. Your skill level is higher than the common level 0 those Talents will start at. This means you will level extremely fast, and you will get Path Points faster for a short time.”
“Do you have any other suggestions?” Draven asked.
“If you want more Path Points, pick Exosuit Pilot, Sympathy, Apathy, and Entropy. If you want a more well-rounded build, go for Arcane Weaver, Synesthesia, Precognition, and Postcognition. Those will enhance your senses, especially when connected to the Weave.”
Draven nodded and closed his status. He was not in a rush to select his Talents. He had all day to think about it.
Tywen banked downwards, the wind blasting against Draven’s exosuit almost making him fall off. Draven leaned down, making his body more aerodynamic. Tywen landed with a thump, shaking the ground as he landed.
“The Hollowed went into that cave,” the Tywen said.
Draven jumped down from Tywen’s back, followed by Master Sygvar. They approached the cave on foot, Draven eager to try out his new Talents and progress his new path.
Draven followed after Sygvar as they entered the cave the Hollows fled into. He conjured a flame above his hand, providing light so that they could see. The cave was cold, and the air was stale from being underground. The floor was smooth, a sign that some type of machinery was used to smooth over the surface.
Then after a few paces, the cave opened up, and the walls transformed from their rocky texture to a smooth metallic surface of interlaying metal sheets.
“What is this place,” Draven asked as he took in the full view of the room they found themselves in. The room was three stories tall, with walkways leading into various rooms along the walls. Lights fixtures provided light, painting the room in a yellowish tint. Draven put out the flame above his palm, wanting to conserve energy.
“I hope it’s not what I think it is,” Sygvar said as he continued towards a computer console sitting in the middle of the room.
Suddenly, Draven heard roars, screams, and feet hitting the metal flooring. Sygvar drew his blade, and instantly a layer of flames began to coat the sword. Draven followed Sygvar’s example and returned his suit to combat mode.
Marrow and Spike Hollows flooded the room, screaming and pounding against the metal floor.
Draven threw himself forward, propelling himself with jets of fire from his feet. He flew towards a Marrow. Draven twirled, his blade leaving behind a fire trail as he cut through the Marrow like a tornado.
New Draconic Pyromancy Technique! Jet Step
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata Level 1!
Draconic Pyromancy Level 1!
Body Supremacy Level 1!
Path Points: 3***
A bone spike sailed toward Draven’s head. He deflected it with the armor on his arm. Conjuring a fire blast, he sent it towards the Spike that attacked him.
New Draconic Pyromancy Technique! Fireball
The Spike fled as soon as the fireball came close to it. Draven used Sympathy and [Draconic Pyromancy] to steer the fireball toward the Spike. Upon contact with the Spike, Draven detonated the fireball, blowing the Spike to bits.
Draconic Pryomacy Level 2!
Soul Supremacy Level 1!
Mind Supremacy Level 1!
Path Points: 6
Draven took a punch to the gut, the armor around his exosuit taking the brunt of the damage. A Marrow had snuck up on him, roaring as it aimed to slam him into the ground with its fist.
Draven rolled out of the way, sending a fire current into the Marrow's face.
New Draconic Pyromancy Technique! Fire stream
The creature screamed as it pulled away. Hands covering its flaming face.
Draven sent out a telekinetic blast, knocking the Marrow off its feet onto the ground. Then he charged, denting the ground under him as he sliced through the Marrow's neck.
Two more Marrows came charging out of a tunnel, and a Spike followed behind them.
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata Level 2!
Draconic Pryomacy Level 3!
Soul Supremacy Level 2!
Mind Supremacy Level 2!
Body Supremacy Level 2!
Path Points: 11
Draven connected his senses to the Weave. He dodged the bone projectiles the Spike sent flying toward him. He conjured flames around his blade and slashed toward the charging Marrows. An arc of superheated fire cut straight throw the charging Marrows, cauterizing the wounds made by the attack. The two Marrows fell into pieces before Draven.
New Draconic Pyromancy Technique! Flaming Slash
Centering his mind, Draven telekinetically pulled the Spike hollowed towards him. The creature sailed throw the air, impaling itself onto his blade.
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata Level 3!
Draconic Pryomacy Level 4!
Soul Supremacy Level 3!
Mind Supremacy Level 3!
Body Supremacy Level 3!
Path Points: 16
Ancestory: Fire Dragon Born Level 1!
+1 STR
+1 INT
+1 SPR
+3 Attribute Points
Clapping echoed off the walls of the base. Draven turned his head searching for the source of the noise. Spotting an El’Dresi male in an exosuit guarded by two Bone Devils standing three stories up on a walkway.
“What do we have here?” The El’Dresi said as he jumped down and landed on a cushion of air. The air manipulation was a sign of an Air Dragonborn. The two Bone Devils followed him, thudding against the ground as they landed.
“An Al’Manti and his little disciple? This should be fun.” A smile bled through the man’s voice as he drew a blade from his waist. He whistled, and the Bone Devils screamed, charging Draven and Sygvar.
---
Thanks for reading.
Any editing suggestions or critics are welcomed. Keep in mind that this is a rough second draft.

They didn’t tell us the name of the next kid that disappeared. They didn’t tell us another kid had disappeared at all. We could all tell by the silence what had happened. It spoke volumes. I’m sure they talked about it in great detail amongst themselves. In PTA meetings and City Councils. My parents made sure to turn off the TV at 5 o’clock before the news came on, at least in my home. They’d turn it back on for the 11 o’clock news, when were were in bed and couldn’t hear the details.
The strange thing is, they never told us to just stop going outside. They told us to go in groups, sure, but they never decided, or as far as I could tell even though, to keep us all indoors. I guess that sort of freedom wasn’t something they were willing to give up. Instead, they did the neighborhood watch thing. For those few months, I remember my folks meeting more of our neighbors than in all the time previously, or since. Retirees would spend their days out in their front lawns, watching kids and everybody else coming and going. They’d even set up lawn furniture, with umbrellas, even all through the rains of spring. Cops stopped sitting in ambushes on the highways waiting for speeders and instead started patrolling the streets, chatting with us as we’d pass by. Weekends would see all the adults out in their yards, working on cars in the driveways, fixing the gutters, and so on. They had this weird way of looking at you as you’d ride by. Not hostile stares, but it was like they were cataloging your presence. Boy, eight years old, red raincoat silver bike, about 11:30 in the morning, heading south on Sorensen. Seemed fine.
The next time we saw it, it wasn’t in our neighborhood, and I was the one who saw it first. We were visiting Russ, a sort of 5th semi-friend from school. We rarely hung out, mostly owing to geography. His house wasn’t far as the crow flies, but it was up a steep hill. We spent a Saturday afternoon returning a cache of comic books we’d borrowed. The distance we covered was substantial, as we had decided to take lots of extra streets as switchbacks, rather than slowly push our bikes up the too-steep hills.
The descent was going to be the highlight of the trip, up until I saw the Hidebehind. We were on a curving road, a steep forested bluff on one side. The uphill slope was mostly ivy-covered raised foundations for the neighborhood’s houses. That side of the road was lined with parked cars, and the residents of the homes had to ascend steep staircases to get to their front doors.
I was ayt the back of the pack when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Movement, something brown squatting between two closely parked cars. My head snapped as I zoomed past, and despite not getting a good look, I knew it was that terrible thing. “It’s behind us!” I shouted and started pedaling hard. The others looked for themselves as I quickly rushed past them, but they soon joined my pace.
Ralph’s earlier idea of directly confronting the thing was set aside. We were moving too fast, and down too narrow a street to turn around. Then we saw it again it was to our left, off-road, between the trees. Suddenly it leaped from behind one tree trunk to the next and disappeared again. That hardly made sense, the base of the trees must have been thirty feet below the deck of the street we rode down. One of us, I think it was India, let out one of those strangled screams.
There it was again, back on the right, disappearing behind a mailbox as we approached. That couldn’t have been, it must have outpaced us and crossed in front of us. Logic would suggest there was more than one, but somehow the four of us knew it was the same thing. More impossible still, the pole holding up the mailbox was too thin, maybe two inches in diameter, yet that thing had disappeared behind it, like a Warner Bros. cartoon character. It was just enough to catch a better glimpse of it though. All brown. A head seemingly too bulbous and large for its body. Its limbs were thin but far longer, like a gibbon’s. Only a gibbon had normal elbows and knees. This thing bent its joints all wrong like it wasn’t part of the natural order. We were all terrified to wit’s end.
“The trail!” Ralph shouted, and the other three of us knew exactly what he meant. The top of it was only just around the curve. It was a dirt footpath for pedestrians ascending and descending South Hill, cutting through the woods on our left. It was too steep for cars, and to be honest, too steep for bikes. We’d played on it before, challenging each other to see how high up they could go, then descend back down without using our brakes. A short paved cul-de-sac at the bottom was enough space to stop before running into a cross street.
Ralph had held the previous group record, having climbed three-quarters of the way before starting his mad drop. India’s best was just short of that, I had only dared about halfway up, Ben only a third. This time, with certain death on our heels, the trail seemed the only way out. Nothing could have outrun a kid on a bike flying down that hill.
We followed Ralph’s lead, swinging to the right gutter of the street, then hanging a fast wide left up onto the curb, over a patch of gravel, between two boulders set up as bollards, lest a car driver mistake the entrance for a driveway, and then, like a roller coaster cresting the first hill, the bottom fell out.
It was the most overwhelming sensation of motion I’ve ever had, before or since. I suppose the danger behind us was the big reason, and being absolutely certain that only our speed was keeping us alive. I remember thinking it was like the speeder bike scene from Return of the Jedi, also a recent movie from the time. Only this was real. I didn’t just see the trees flashing past it, I could hear the motion as well. Cold air attacked my eyes and long streamers of tears rushed over my cheeks and the drops flew past my ears, I didn’t dare blink. Each little stone my tires struck threatened to up-end me and end it all. Yet, and perhaps worse, half the time it felt like I wasn’t in contact with the ground at all. I was going so fast that those same small stones were sending me an inch or two into the air, and the arc of the flights so closely matched the slope that by the time I contacted the trail again, I was significantly further down the hill.
At the same time, I had never felt more relief, as the thing behind us had no way of catching us now. Somehow, maybe the seriousness of the escape gave us both the motive and the seriousness to keep ourselves under control. Looking back, I marvel that at least one of us didn’t lose control and end up splitting our skulls open.
We hit the pavement of the cul-de-sac below, and didn’t bother to slow down. We raced through the cross-street, one angry driver screeching to a halt and laying on his horn. This brought out the neighborhood watch. Just a few of them at first. Still, we didn’t slow down, our momentum carried us back up the much shallower slope of our neighborhood. Witnesses saw us depart at high speed, and this only brought out more of the watch. We heard whistles behind us, just like our P.E. teacher’s whistle. We figured that was the watch’s alarm siren. Regardless of what happened to that thing, it was behind us. We returned to our homes, shaken, but safe and sound, our inertia taking us almost all of the way there.
Another kid disappeared that Sunday, up on South Hill. We’d suspected it because we could see the lights of the police cars on a high road, surrounding the spot where it would turn out later, one of the kid’s shoes had been found. Russ confirmed it at school on Monday. It was a kid he’d known, lived down the road from his place, went to private school which is why we didn’t recognize his name.
I remember seeing Ralph’s face the next day when he arrived at school. He looked angry. Strong. Like he’d been crying really hard, and now it was over and he was resolved. He said he’d felt guilty because the thing we’d escaped from had gotten the other kid instead. He tried to tell his old man about it, then his mom, then any adult he could. He’d tell them about the monster who hides behind things. They needed to focus on finding and stopping that instead of looking for some sort of creeper or serial killer. Of course, nobody had listened to him. They hadn’t listened to the rest of us either when we’d tried to tell.
So he’d devised a plan. He was calling it the “Fight Patrol,” which we didn’t argue with. If the adults wouldn’t do something, we would. We’d patrol our neighborhood on our bikes, the four of us, maybe a couple more if we could talk others into it. We’d chase it off like that first time, maybe for good, or maybe corner it. Clearly, it could not handle being caught.
Naturally, we brought up the scare on South Hill. He argued that was a bad place. Too isolated, couldn’t turn around easily. We needed to stay on our home turf, lots of visibility, and plenty of the Neighborhood Watch within earshot. Maybe we and the adults working together was the key, even if the adults didn’t understand the problem.
Well, that convinced us. Our first patrol was that afternoon, after school. We watched everybody’s back like hawks. Nothing had a chance to sneak up on us. Nothing could step out from behind a bush without getting spotted. By Friday afternoon there were eight of us. The next week we split up to extend our territory to the next neighborhoods over.
Nothing happened. We never saw anything. Ben thought it was because we were scaring it away. Ralph just thought we were failing, and took it personally. I myself thought the thing had just moved to different parts of town, where the new disappearances were taking place. I told him we should keep it up until the thing was caught.
It was all for naught.
One day, India didn’t show up for school. I asked everybody, the teachers, the office staff, the custodian, my parents. All of them said they didn’t know, and it was so easy to tell that they were lying. That would mark the end of the Fight Patrol.
Ben didn’t show up a couple of days after that. When I got home and collapsed into bed, my mother came in to tell me that Ben’s mother had called. She’d taken him out of school and they were moving elsewhere. I called up Ralph to let him know the news, and he was relieved too.
My last day was Friday, and then I was taken out. Again, I called Ralph so he wouldn’t worry. I guess when there were only two weeks left of school, and it was just grade school, a couple missed weeks don’t amount to much. So I ended up spending the bulk of the summer out in the country, with my grandparents, which was why I brought up my grandpa in the first place.
I suppose I did fine out on their farmhouse. I was safe. There was certainly no shortage of things for a kid to do. I think my mom felt a strong sense of relief too. Things slipped through the cracks.
My grandparents didn’t have cable, too far out of town. They just had an old-school antenna and got a couple of TV stations transmitting out of Canada, Vancouver specifically. I remember one July day, sitting in their living room. My grandmother had just fixed lunch for me and my grandfather and had gone out to do some gardening as we watched the news at noon.
My grandfather was already being ravaged by his illnesses. He was able to get around, but couldn’t do any real labor anymore. He’d lounge in front of the TV in a special lounge chair. He hardly talked, and when he did he’d just mumble some discomfort or complaint to my grandma.
The lead story on the news was the current situation in Farmingham, despite being in the neighboring country, it was still big news in Vancouver, and the whole rest of the region. It seemed the disappearances were declining, but the police were still frantically searching for a supposed serial killer. I didn’t pick up much about what they were talking about, I was a kid after all, but my grandfather was watching intently, despite his infirmity.
He mumbled something, I didn’t catch. I asked him was he said, and as I approached I heard him say “fearsome critters.”
He turned his eyes to me and said again, distinct and in a normal tone of voice, “fearsome critters,” then returned his attention to the screen. “I don’t know why they call them that. Fearsome, sure. But ‘critters?” Makes it sound silly. Like it's some sort of fairy tale that it ain’t. Guess it’s like whistling past the graveyard. Well, they don’t have to worry about them no more, guess they can call them what they like.”
Then he turned to me. “Do you know what it is?” he asked. “Squonk? Hodag? Gouger? Hidebehind?”
“Hidebehind,” I whispered, and he turned back to the TV with a sneer. I had no idea what on earth he was talking about. Remember, this would be years before I learned he spent his youth as a lumberjack. And yet, somehow, I knew exactly what we were talking about.
“Hidebehind,” he repeated. “That will do it. They give them such stupid names. The folk back East, that is. Wisconsin. Minnesota. Ohio. Way back in the old days, before my grandfather would have been your age. Back when those places were covered by forests. They didn’t give them silly names back then, no. Back then they were something to worry about. Then they moved on, though. They all went out West, to here, followed the loggers. So as once they didn’t have to worry about them anymore, they started making up silly stories, silly names. “Fearsome critters,” they’d call them. Just tall tales to tell the greenhorns and scare them out of their britches. Then they’d make them even sillier, and tell the stories to little kids to spook them.”
“Not out here they didn’t tell no stories nor make up any names. It was bad enough they followed us out. I had no clue they even existed until I saw one for myself. Bout your age, I suppose. Maybe a little older. Nobody ever talks about them. Not even when they take apart a work crew, one by one. They just pull the crews back. Wait till mid-summer when the land is dry but not too dry. Then they move the crews in, a lot of them. Do some burning, make a lot of smoke. Drives them deeper into the woods, you know. Then you can cut the whole damn place down. But nobody asks why, nobody tells why. The people who know just take care of it.”
“I guess that’s why they’re coming to us now. All the old woods are almost gone. So they’ve got to. Like mountain lions. I supposed it’s going to happen sooner or later.”
We heard my grandma come into the back door to the utility room, and stomp the dirt off her boots. My grandfather turned to me one last time and said, “Whichever way you look at it, somebody’s just got to take care of it.” Then my grandmother came in from the utility room and asked us how our lunch had been.
Now that I look back at it, that might have been the last time my grandfather and I really had a meaningful talk.
We moved back home in late August. I had been having a fantastic summer. Though looking back, I suppose it could be rough for a still-young woman to be living in her aging parents' house when she’s got a perfectly good husband and house of her own in town.
First thing I did was visit Ralph. He’d been busy. He’d fortified his treehouse into a proper, well, tree fort. He’d nailed a lot of reinforcing plywood over everything. He hadn’t gone out on patrols by himself, of course, but the height of the tree fort afforded him a view of the nearest streets. He’d also made some makeshift weapons out of old baseball bats, a hockey stick, and a garden rake. The sharp rocks he’d attached to them with masking tape didn’t look very secure, but it’d only take one or two good blows with that kind of firepower. He also explained he’d been teaching himself kung fu, by copying all the movies he saw on kung fu movies late at night on the unpopular cable channels. That was classic Ralph.
As for the monster, it seemed to be going away. Its last victim had disappeared weeks previously, part of the reason my mom felt it was time to go back. This had been at night too. What’s more, the victim had been a college student, a very petite lady, barely five feet tall, under a hundred pounds. The news had speculated that their presumptive serial killer had assumed she was a child. I remember thinking the Hidebehind didn’t care. Maybe it just thought she couldn’t run fast enough to get away or put up a fight when he caught her. Like a predator.
At any rate, the college students were incensed. Of course, they’d been hyper-alert and concerned when it was just local kids going missing. Now that it was one of their own the camel’s back had broken. They really went hard on the protests, blaming the local police for not doing enough.
They started setting up their own patrols, and at night too. Marches with sometimes dozens of students at a time. They called it “Take Back the Night.” They’d walk the streets, making sure they’d be heard. Some cared drums or tambourines. They’d help escort people home, and sometimes they’d unintentionally stop random crimes they’d happen across. I felt like this was what the Fight Patrol could have been, if we’d just been old enough, or had been listened to. This would be the endgame for the Hidebehind, one way or another.
I stayed indoors the rest of the summer, and really there wasn’t much left. It doesn’t get too hot in the Pacific Northwest, nobody has air conditioners, or at least we didn’t back then. It will get stuffy though, in August, and I liked to sleep with my window open. I could hear the chants and challenges from the student patrols on their various routes. Sometimes I could hear them coming from far away, and every now and then they’d pass down my street. It felt like a wonderful security blanket.
I also liked the honeysuckle my mother had planted around the perimeter of the house. Late at night, if I was struggling to fall asleep, the air in my bedroom would start to circulate. Cold air would start pouring in over my windowsill, bringing the sweet scent of that creepervine with it, and I’d the sensation before finally passing out.
This one night, and I have no knowledge if I was awake, asleep, or drifting off, but the air in the room changed, and cooler air poured over the windowsill and swept over my bed, but it didn’t carry the sweet smell of honeysuckle. Regardless of my initial state, I was alert pretty quickly. It was a singularly unpleasant smell. A bit like death, which at that age I was mostly unfamiliar with, except a time some animal had died underneath the crawlspace of our house. There was more to it, though. The forest, the deep forest. I don’t know and still don’t know, what that meant. Most smells I associate with the forest are pleasant. Cedar, pine needles, thick loam of the forest floor, campfires, even the creosote and turpentine of those old timey-logging camps. This was none of those smells. Maybe… rotting granite, and the spores of slime molds. Mummified hemlocks and beds of needles compressed into something different than soil. It disturbed me.
So I sat up in bed. I hadn’t noticed before, but I’d been sweating, just lightly in the stuffy summer night heat. Now it was turning cold. Before me was my bedroom window. A lit rectangle in a pitch-dark room. To either side were my white, opened curtains, the one on the right, by the open half of the window, stirred just slightly in the barely perceptible breeze.
Most of the rectangle was the black form of the protective cypress tree. Only the slight conical nature of the tree distinguished it from a perfectly vertical column. To either side was a dim soft orange glow coming from the sodium lamps of the street passing by our house. It was perhaps a bit diffuse from the screen set in my window to keep out mosquitos. In the distance was the sound of an approaching troupe of the Take Back the Night patrol. They were neither drumming nor chanting, but still making plenty of noise. They were, perhaps, three or four blocks away, and heading my way.
For some reason that I didn’t understand, I got up, off of the foot of the bed. The window, being closer, appeared bigger. I took a silent step further. The patrol approached closer. Another step. I leaned to my right, just a bit, getting a slightly wider view to the left of the cypress tree. That was the direction the patrol was coming from.
That was when it resolved. The deeper black silhouette within the black silhouette of the cypress tree. A small lithe frame with a too-bulbous head. It too leaned, in its case, to the left, to see around the cypress tree as the patrol approached. They reached our block,on the other side of the street. A dozen rowdy college students, not trying to be quiet. None of them fearing the night. Each feeling safe and determined, and absorbed in their own night out rather than being overtly sensitive to their surroundings. They were distracted, unfocused If they had been peering into the shadows, if just one of them had looked towards my house, behind the cypress tree, they might have seen the Hidebehind, poking its face out and watching them transit past. But they didn’t notice.
It hid behind the cypress tree, and I hid behind it, hoping that the blackness of my bedroom would protect me. I stood absolutely still, as I had done once when a hornet had once landed on the back of my neck. Totally assure that if I made the slightest movement or made the slightest sound that I’d be stung. I hardly even breathed.
The patrol passed, from my perspective, behind the cypress tree and temporarily out of view. The Hidebehind straightened, ready to lean to the right and watch the patrol pass, only it didn’t lean. Even as I watched the patrol pass on to the right, it stood there, stock still, just as I was doing.
It was then I became aware that my room had become stuffy again. The scent was gone. The air had shifted and was now flowing out through the screen again, carrying my own scent with it. I knew what this meant, and yet I was too paralyzed to react. The thing started to turn, very slowly. It was a predator understanding that it might have become victim to its own game. It turned as if it was thinking the same thing I had been thinking, that the slightest movement might give it away.
It turned, and I saw its face. Like some kind of rotting desiccated, shriveling fruit, it was covered in wrinkles. Circles within concentric circles surrounded its two great eyes, eyes which took up so much of its face. I couldn’t, and still struggle, to think of words to describe it. Instead, I still think in terms of analogies. At the time I thought of the creature from the film E.T., only twisted and distorted into a thing of nightmares. Almost all eyelids, and a little drooping sucker mouth. Now that I’m more worldly, it reminds of creatures of ancient artworks. The key defining feature were the long horizontal slits it had for eyes. You see that in old masks carved in West Africa, or by the Inuit long ago. You see it in what’s called the “slit-eyed dogu” of ancient Japan.
As I watched the wrinkles on the face seemed to multiply. Then I realized this was the result of its eyes slowly widening. It’s mouth, too, slowly dilated, revealing innumerable small razor-sharp teeth. A person, standing in its location, shouldn’t have been able to see in. Light from the sodium streetlamps lit the window’s screen, obscuring the interior. It was no person. It could see me, and it was reacting to my presence. Its eyes grew huge, black.
My own eyes would have been just as wide if not for my own anatomical limitations. I was still watching when it disappeared. It didn’t see it move to the right. I didn’t see it move to the left, nor did I see it drop down out of view. It simply disappeared. One fraction of a second it was there, and then it decided to leave, and so it did. It was not a thing of this world.
There were no more disappearances after that poor woman from the university. I don’t think it had anything to do with me. The media and police all speculated their “serial killer” had gone into a “dormant phase”. There was no shortage of people who tried to take credit. Maybe they deserve it. The thing’s hunting had been on the decline. All the neighborhood watches and student patrols, I think that maybe all that commotion was making it too hard for the Hidebehind to go about its business. Maybe it had gone back to the woods.
Then again, maybe Ralph had been right the whole time. Maybe it really, really, really didn’t like to be seen.
So.
Now I’ve got some decisions to make. I think the first thing I should do is look at social media and dig up Ralph. It’s been a good thirty years since I last talked to him. He ought to know the Hidebehind is back. He’s probably made plans.
Then, there’s the issue of my son. He’s up in his bedroom now, probably still mad at me. Probably confused about why I’d be so strict. Maybe he’s inventing explanations as to why.
I’m not sure, but I’m leaning toward telling him everything. He deserves to know. It’d probably be safer if he knows. I think people have this instinct where, when they see or know something that they’re not supposed to know, they just bottle it up. I think that was the problem with grown-ups when I was a kid. It was the issue with my grandfather, telling me so little when it was almost too late. I think people do it because we’re social animals, and we’re afraid of being ostracized. Go along to get along.
Hell, my son is probably going to think I’m crazy. It might even make him more mad at me. And even more confused. He knows about the disappearances. “The Farmingham Fiend” the media would end up dubbing the serial killer that didn’t really exist. It’s become local “true crime” history. Kids tell rumors about it. It was almost forty years ago, so it probably feels safe to wonder about.
So yeah, I suppose when I say I know who the real killer was, a magical monster from the woods that stalks its prey by hiding behind objects, then impossibly disappears- that I’m going to look like a total nut. I’d think that if I were in his shoes.
Except… people are going to start disappearing again, it’s only a matter of time. The media will say that the Farmingham Fiend is back in the game. Will my son buy that? He’ll start thinking about what I told him, and how I predicted it. Then he’ll remember that he saw the thing himself, he and his friends, even if it was just out of the corner of his eye.
I hope, sooner or later, he’ll believe me. I could use his help. Maybe Ralph is way ahead of me, but I’m thinking we should get the Fight Patrol back together. Father and son, this time. Multigenerational, get the retirees involved too.
Old farts of my generation, for reasons I don’t understand, like to wax nostalgic over their own false sense of superiority. We rode our bikes without helmets and had distant if not irresponsible parents. Yeah, yeah, what a load. I think every new generation is better than the last, because every generation is a progression from the last, Kids these days? They’ve got cell phones, with cameras. And helmet cams. GoPros you can attach to bikes. Doorbell cameras.
It seems the Hidebehind loathes being seen. This time around, with my grandfather’s spirit, my own memories, and my boy’s energy? I think this time we’re finally going to beat it.

There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.

Draven sliced through the neck of a feral mutant, his sword cleanly splitting throw its thick bone exoskeleton. The creature was a Marrow, a humanoid mutant creature that looked like a cross between a human and a gorilla. Thick white bone exoskeleton covered the Marrow as protective armor. Like all other mutants created through magic, Marrows were Hollows. Human beings that had their humanity hollowed by magic, transforming them into abominations.
The sense of impending death bombarded Draven’s mind, warning him of danger. He leaned to the side, dodging a bone spike launched. His hand shot out, plucking the bone spike from the air.
“Ari, turn the suit up to 100%,” Draven said as he locked on to the mutant who launched the bone spike at him. The creature was a Hollow Spike, longed limbed and thin like a rail. Sharp bone spikes protruded from its skin.
“Will do,” Ari, the AI part of his exosuit, voiced back. Steam drifted out of the air vents of the suit as the power core kicked into overdrive.
Draven launched himself at the Hollow Spike. Dirt exploded with every step he took as he blurred toward his opponent.
He focused his mind and dove into the Weave. Thousands of Sympathetic Threads become visible to his eyes, interconnecting every object around him. Draven focused on the Thread connecting the bone spike in his hand and the mutant Hollow in front of him. Mana essence flowed from his core and solidified the sympathetic connection.
Draven pulled the bone spike towards him, the spike taking on the weight of the Hollow as well now that they were bound together. The Hollow Spike came hurtling towards Draven’s charging form. Draven swung his blade, and flames manifested around it as it sliced through the mutant's midsection. Killing the creature in an instant.
Draven looked around, searching for more Hollow. But the only other person standing nearby was Master Sygvar. The rest of the Hollow had run away, seeking to live another day.
“Ari, disable combat mode.” Draven sheathed his blade as he approached Master Sygvar, “Do we give chase?”
Sygvar turned towards his disciple, “Yes, they might lead us to whoever is behind the attacks on the government.”
Sygvar looked towards the sky and whistled.
A mighty roar answered back, and the clouds parted as a massive object descended toward their position. Draven was in awe as the Fire Dragon Tywen plummeted towards the earth. The land quaked as the massive beast landed on the ground.
“You called,” the voice of Tywen was deep and gravelly. The dragon was massive, at least five to six war horses long. And easily taller than a two-story house. And Tywen was still growing. Black and red scales covered the dragon.
“Yes, we need you to follow the fleeing Hollow,” Sygvar said as he jumped onto Tywen’s back. He used a telekinetic push to give him a boost.
Draven followed after his master, using the same trick with telekineses to enhance his jump. He landed just behind Sygvar on Tywen’s back.
Welcome to the System!
Name: Draven Althorne
Age: 18
Ancestory: Fire Dragon Born (Tier 1 - Level 0)
Class: None
Sub Class 1: None
Sub Class 2: None
Sub Class 3: None
Feats: None
Attributes:
Mind:
INT (Intelligence): 17 / 17
FIN (Finese): 14 / 14
WIS (Wisdom): 11 / 11
Body:
STR (Strength): 19 / 19
DEX (Dexterity): 17 / 17
CON (Constitution): 16 / 16
Soul:
SPR (Spirit): 12 / 12
AFF (Affinity): 14 / 14
FOR (Fortitude): 19 / 19
/Attribute Points: 0
Essence:
Stamina: 129 / 129
Vitality: 150 / 150
Mana: 135 / 135
Talents: 0 / 9
Path Points: 0
Paths: 8
Draven smiled, “Master, my system awakened.” Draven’s eyes roamed across his status sheet. All his attributes were at least two points higher than the standard starting nine points everyone gets on their 18 birthday. His Strength and Fortitude were his highest stats, each ten points higher than average.
Sygvar tapped Tywen on the neck, and the dragon took to the sky, soaring throw the clouds. Down below, Draven could see the Hollow feeling through the fields.
“That’s good. We’ll have a celebration later today. Now tell me the paths you have available,” Sygvar said.
Draven opened his status and selected the Paths tab.
Paths:
The Way of the Al’Manti
Dragonborn of Fire
Mind Supremacy
Body Supremacy
Arcane Weaver
Exosuit Pilot
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata
Draven read each off to his master.
“Pick the Way of the Al’Manti. That one will give you the Al’Manti Disciple class when you complete it. Now tell me the Talents you have selected.”
Draven selected the Way of the Al’Manti, and the other paths disappeared.
You have selected the Way of the Al’Manti.
The Al’Manti are an Order of Dragon Knights. Sworn to protect the Imperium and its five kingdoms. By selecting this path, you will embark on a long journey that will grant you great power and burden you with great responsibility.
Path Selected: The Way of the Al’Manti 0 / 9
Draven exited the Paths tab and opened the Talents tab.
Talents:
Draconic Pyromancy
Sympathy
Entropy
Apathy
Mind Supremacy
Body Supremacy
Soul Supremacy
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata
Exosuit Pilot
Arcane Weaving
Telekinesis
Telepathy
Empathy
Healing
Precognition
Postcognition
Spatial Domain
Enhanced Senses
Synesthesia
“Take Draconic Pyromancy, Mind Supremacy, Body Supremacy, Soul Supremacy, and Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata. You can fill the other four remaining slots with whatever you want.” Sygvar said.
Draven click the five Talents his master suggested.
You select the Draconic Pyromancy Talent!
You are a Dragonborn, born with the power of fire. Creating and controlling fire is as easy as breathing for you. Your draconic flames burn hotter than normal fire. Easily able to melt throw the toughest of metals. Go forth and set the world ablaze young Dragon. - Grants the ability to create and manipulate draconic fire - Grants the ability to create and manipulate fire
Techniques: None
You select the Mind Supremacy Talent!
You have mastered your mind, and it bends to your will. - Grants the ability to shape your mind
Techniques: None
You select the Body Supremacy Talent!
You have mastered your body, and it bends to your will. - Grants the ability to shape your body
Techniques: None
You select the Soul Supremacy Talent!
You have mastered your body, and it bends to your will. - Grants the ability to shape your soul
Techniques: None
You select the Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata Talent!
The 5th Blade Kata of the Al’Manti focuses on the offensive. Dominate your opponent with an unrelenting assault. End them with swift attacks. You are one with the blade. The blade is one with you.
Techniques: None
“Why those?” Draven asked.
“Because you have been training those five skills since you join the Al’Manti. Your skill level is higher than the common level 0 those Talents will start at. This means you will level extremely fast, and you will get Path Points faster for a short time.”
“Do you have any other suggestions?” Draven asked.
“If you want more Path Points, pick Exosuit Pilot, Sympathy, Apathy, and Entropy. If you want a more well-rounded build, go for Arcane Weaver, Synesthesia, Precognition, and Postcognition. Those will enhance your senses, especially when connected to the Weave.”
Draven nodded and closed his status. He was not in a rush to select his Talents. He had all day to think about it.
Tywen banked downwards, the wind blasting against Draven’s exosuit almost making him fall off. Draven leaned down, making his body more aerodynamic. Tywen landed with a thump, shaking the ground as he landed.
“The Hollowed went into that cave,” the Tywen said.
Draven jumped down from Tywen’s back, followed by Master Sygvar. They approached the cave on foot, Draven eager to try out his new Talents and progress his new path.
Draven followed after Sygvar as they entered the cave the Hollows fled into. He conjured a flame above his hand, providing light so that they could see. The cave was cold, and the air was stale from being underground. The floor was smooth, a sign that some type of machinery was used to smooth over the surface.
Then after a few paces, the cave opened up, and the walls transformed from their rocky texture to a smooth metallic surface of interlaying metal sheets.
“What is this place,” Draven asked as he took in the full view of the room they found themselves in. The room was three stories tall, with walkways leading into various rooms along the walls. Lights fixtures provided light, painting the room in a yellowish tint. Draven put out the flame above his palm, wanting to conserve energy.
“I hope it’s not what I think it is,” Sygvar said as he continued towards a computer console sitting in the middle of the room.
Suddenly, Draven heard roars, screams, and feet hitting the metal flooring. Sygvar drew his blade, and instantly a layer of flames began to coat the sword. Draven followed Sygvar’s example and returned his suit to combat mode.
Marrow and Spike Hollows flooded the room, screaming and pounding against the metal floor.
Draven threw himself forward, propelling himself with jets of fire from his feet. He flew towards a Marrow. Draven twirled, his blade leaving behind a fire trail as he cut through the Marrow like a tornado.
New Draconic Pyromancy Technique! Jet Step
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata Level 1!
Draconic Pyromancy Level 1!
Body Supremacy Level 1!
Path Points: 3***
A bone spike sailed toward Draven’s head. He deflected it with the armor on his arm. Conjuring a fire blast, he sent it towards the Spike that attacked him.
New Draconic Pyromancy Technique! Fireball
The Spike fled as soon as the fireball came close to it. Draven used Sympathy and [Draconic Pyromancy] to steer the fireball toward the Spike. Upon contact with the Spike, Draven detonated the fireball, blowing the Spike to bits.
Draconic Pryomacy Level 2!
Soul Supremacy Level 1!
Mind Supremacy Level 1!
Path Points: 6
Draven took a punch to the gut, the armor around his exosuit taking the brunt of the damage. A Marrow had snuck up on him, roaring as it aimed to slam him into the ground with its fist.
Draven rolled out of the way, sending a fire current into the Marrow's face.
New Draconic Pyromancy Technique! Fire stream
The creature screamed as it pulled away. Hands covering its flaming face.
Draven sent out a telekinetic blast, knocking the Marrow off its feet onto the ground. Then he charged, denting the ground under him as he sliced through the Marrow's neck.
Two more Marrows came charging out of a tunnel, and a Spike followed behind them.
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata Level 2!
Draconic Pryomacy Level 3!
Soul Supremacy Level 2!
Mind Supremacy Level 2!
Body Supremacy Level 2!
Path Points: 11
Draven connected his senses to the Weave. He dodged the bone projectiles the Spike sent flying toward him. He conjured flames around his blade and slashed toward the charging Marrows. An arc of superheated fire cut straight throw the charging Marrows, cauterizing the wounds made by the attack. The two Marrows fell into pieces before Draven.
New Draconic Pyromancy Technique! Flaming Slash
Centering his mind, Draven telekinetically pulled the Spike hollowed towards him. The creature sailed throw the air, impaling itself onto his blade.
Al’Manti 5th Blade Kata Level 3!
Draconic Pryomacy Level 4!
Soul Supremacy Level 3!
Mind Supremacy Level 3!
Body Supremacy Level 3!
Path Points: 16
Ancestory: Fire Dragon Born Level 1!
+1 STR
+1 INT
+1 SPR
+3 Attribute Points
Clapping echoed off the walls of the base. Draven turned his head searching for the source of the noise. Spotting an El’Dresi male in an exosuit guarded by two Bone Devils standing three stories up on a walkway.
“What do we have here?” The El’Dresi said as he jumped down and landed on a cushion of air. The air manipulation was a sign of an Air Dragonborn. The two Bone Devils followed him, thudding against the ground as they landed.
“An Al’Manti and his little disciple? This should be fun.” A smile bled through the man’s voice as he drew a blade from his waist. He whistled, and the Bone Devils screamed, charging Draven and Sygvar.
---
Thanks for reading.
Any editing suggestions or critics are welcomed. Keep in mind that this is a rough second draft.

Did anyone else get that alert on their phone? There's nothing on the government website and there were no details about location.

Prima di prendermi i cazzi di tutto Reddit sono doverose alcune precisazioni:

1. Nella mia famiglia abbiamo sempre parlato, parliamo e parleremo ancora ai nostri figli dell’esistenza dei maschi, delle femmine e di tutte le possibili declinazioni, sfumature e implicazioni che questi termini indicano o suggeriscono;
   
2. Nella mia famiglia siamo tutti ben consapevoli che l’orientamento sessuale di una persona è privato, che chiunque può amare chiunque e che di questo aspetto della vita, appunto privata, degli altri deve interessarci il giusto e non è mai motivo di scandalo;
   
3. Ad oggi i nostri figli (M12, F8 e M5) non hanno manifestato alcun tipo di interesse spontaneo relativamente a identità di genere e orientamento sessuale (né nei confronti di loro stessi né in termini più astratti o di società) e non sono da noi indirizzati o obbligati a comportarsi o esprimersi in questo o in quest’altro modo.
   

Detto questo oggi, un po’ per provocarla un po’ per conoscere il suo pensiero sull‘argomento, ho detto a mia figlia che doveva diventare un maschio, perché solo i maschi sono forti e ho bisogno di qualcuno di forte per aiutarmi nel bosco a tagliare la legna per l’inverno.
Lei, senza battere ciglio, mi ha risposto che se proprio voglio un maschio forte devo chiedere ai suoi fratelli e che comunque anche lei è forte e in grado di aiutarmi e che le piace venire nel bosco con me e che comunque e in ogni caso a lei piace essere femmina e non si vuole trasformare in un maschio e anche se è femmina può fare quello che vuole.
Ora io dico che una società in cui a ogni cittadino fosse permesso di esprimersi e vivere così liberamente è una società per la quale vale la pena lottare e scendere in piazza.
Io, invece, penso che ci stiamo incartando sul rispetto dei pronomi senza far nulla di serio per migliorare i luoghi in cui viviamo e lavoriamo.

Estou em um novo ciclo da minha vida, e eu queria que ele fosse eterno, me sinto mais feliz do que nunca. Cada dia que passa, estou me tornando uma mulher forte e independente, eu tenho orgulho de mim.
Agora, enquanto escrevo esse desabafo, meus olhos encheram de água. Não, não é "drama" ou qualquer outra coisa.
No ano passado (acredito que nessa mesma época q estamos) eu simplesmente desanimei de viver, não conseguia me imaginar passando daquele ano. Não tinha ânimo para sair de casa, e quando saia, eu me sentia sendo excluída por todos.
Gente, eu passei por tanta coisa, nunca imaginei que iria superar. Foram tantos traumas de infância, tanta rejeição da família, tanta culpa, tanta dor, tanto sofrimento. Eu queria me sentir aliviada daqui, queria parar de sentir tanta dor.
Eu me olhava no espelho, meus olhos estavam fundos, eu tinha me tornado a dor em pessoa. Ficava me questionando o porquê daquilo estar acontecendo comigo, porquê eu não poderia ter uma vida normal, família normal.
Carrego cicatrizes dessa fase da minha vida até hoje. Eu estava a um ponto de desistir de mim mesma, e ninguém (além do meu namorado) estava lá para estender a mão pra mim. Foi a dor mais dolorosa que eu senti até hoje.
Tenho muito orgulho da mulher que estou me tornando, pq eu consegui sozinha! me reergui sozinha! E eu fico muito feliz de me ver assim, forte, corajosa, determinada.
Aprendi que nessa vida a gente é sozinho, que se não for você por você mesma, você cai. Eu não desejo oq eu passei à ninguém.
Hoje, eu digo com o coração quentinho que eu amo viver, acordar todos os dias e agradecer por estar vivendo, é gratificante. E pensa que eu estava pronta e preparada para acabar com tudo...
Eu não sei qual é o meu propósito aqui, mas eu sei que é algo lindo, e que naquele momento ainda não era a minha hora de ir. E foi esse "propósito" que me fez ficar.
Eu sou grata por estar vivendo essa minha "nova vida" com pessoas que me fazem bem por perto, e a cada dia tentando superaperdoar os traumas e pessoas envolvidas que fizeram da minha "antiga vida" um inferno.
Então se você leu até aqui, eu quero que você saiba que você é mais forte do que você imagina, e que se você for determinado(a) nada e nem ninguém pode derrubar você, e se ninguém disse isso pra você VOCÊ É IMPORTANTE, VOCÊ É ESPECIAL, EU AMO VOCÊ!❤️

OK folks, we're looking to add a couple more moderators. Ideally, we'd like at least one gay guy to patrol all the M4M ads, which we barely touch today. We'd also LOVE A WOMAN if any of you are willing. Best way to get noticed? Report stuff to us via Chat or DM or modmail, offer helpful suggestions, etc. Show us expertise in automoderator. Do some research for the FAQ.
We're cracking down on F4M ads that don't use an actual neighborhood or suburb name and just say generic stuff like Dallas or Fort Worth or "Downtown" since most of that activity is spam. It doesn't have to be your actual suburb for your privacy, it can be nearby. Live in Plano? Say Carrolton or Allen. We're going to nuke first, then ask you to appeal. Sorry for that, I know it's a pain, but we've gotten maybe one appeal in the last six months, which says to me that everything we nuked was probably spam unless we discouraged actual real posters so much they didn't even bother to appeal which seems crazy.
We have a LOT of folks sending modmail about the automoderator post format. Please get it right. And low effort means you need at least like 140 characters- if you're posting less than that go get on Twitter or a dating app or something lol.
Previous post, all still valid:
Sending dick pics in Texas without a request is a CRIME. That's right, it's a class C misdemeanor which might show up on a background check. Don't do it. If someone reports it, you will be permabanned. Someone has to explicitly say "Send me a dick pic" either in their post or in a chat / DM to you. Nothing else counts, not "Send me a pic" not anything. Explicitly say "I wanna see your cock", understand? https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/86billtext/html/HB02789I.htm
Don't send and then delete cock pics, we will STILL ban you. Don't send homemade porn either unless she asks or approves when you ask.
RULES ADDITION: If you say "Check out my profile, there's pics you might like" and you have for instance, pinned or recently posted a bunch of dick pics, you better include a warning "There's dick pics or nudes" or we will ban you for two weeks or a month if reported. Don't try to trick girls into seeing your dick in a link on Reddit, your Reddit profile, or offsite to a photo album or other site by telling them to click on or open something that immediately has dicks without warning them. We will ban for this if it looks sketchy like you were trying to trick her or deliberately didn't warn. Note: If someone has to go scroll multiple pages back to find a dick pic, that's not what we're worried about. We're worried about guys trying to get girls to click on their profiles and stuffing it full of dicks immediately on open or the next page. You can post in here even if you've got dick pics in your recent history or even pinned as long as you don't try to get girls to open your profile. You can tell a girl you have a Fetlife or offsite notoriously NSFW site profile, it's probably expected there's nudes there, but please be courteous and warn them.
Always post your general area in your ad title or the post itself. Scammers don't know our area and thus the automatically posted spam stuff won't have geographic details and lots of scammers will pick an implausible area. Posting just Dallas or Fort Worth isn't specific enough, pick a neighborhood, and some scammers just say "downtown" without saying which downtown. If you're concerned about anonymity, an easy fix is to pick a place near yours. You're in Lower Greenville IRL? On here, you're posting from Lakewood or Deep Ellum, problem solved.
Other items:

1. We're continuing to ban dick pic senders, spammers, etc. Please continue to report stuff to us via the report button or with screenshots via DM / Chat or . I'm pretty sure reporting bad DMs will get people banned from Reddit as well. Click the flag icon and you can report chat messages to Reddit- I've gotten guys banned from Reddit who have dick pic'd me or sent me pictures of their open mouth. https://www.reddit.com/r4rDFW/comments/xsivlt/a_reminder_unsolicited_dick_pics_to_anyone_are_a/
2. The admins have been nuking posts in here more than usual. Please obey the global Reddit rules. https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043513471 Specifically: "Paid services involving physical sexual contact;" Don't post sex work ads in here, which includes trying to find people to make content for your OnlyFans, or post F4M ads that are basically designed to get guys to click on your profile and join your OnlyFans, etc. I'm sorry, it isn't my rule. I am sure you can find ways to get clients here or offsite without posting explicit ads. We have plenty of thirsty M4F posters you can DM and offer. We don't want our subreddit banned.
3. Reminder to think with your head, not your dick. There's constant spam and scams and other stuff going on, we moderators can't sit in front of our PCs 24x7 and nuke posts. Learn how to spot bad shit and don't do anything stupid. A good tip is to take any messaging username given to you and search Reddit or Google for it to look for other accounts or scammy behavior. The majority of F4M posts that don't obey our rules and format are scams. And NEVER give a girl money in any format whether gift card, CashApp, Venmo, whatever before a meetup. For some reason, the majority of scammer posts are like 22 or 24 or 27 Fs. If a younger girl is asking for some crazy shit, take a breath and ask why? Learn how to reverse search images to look for stolen pics. Common spam signatures include "#Dallas" or "#FortWorth" in the title, a single paragraph demanding a bunch of edgy sex acts, posting in FreeKarma4U or other a few random subs to get upvotes. Always search Kik names and other social media usernames on Google and Reddit- it's amazing how many are reused for scams.
4. Remember, one post per user per day. And you cannot post the same ad more than once in a week- this means you can post totally different things but don't just change the title or post slightly. Don't repeat your posts. It looks spammy and we will give you a one week ban.
5. We've had a couple folks show up begging for gift cards or other help. This really creeps me out and probably violates the Reddit rules. I think Dallas has a list of resources that can help, please go there instead of asking in here. We suspect many of these are scams too.
6. Reddit chat was bugged for a while. If you've got unread chats that won't go away, check https://old.reddit.com/chat/ to see the message requests you aren't getting.

We are in Part 3 of the Oregon Trail saga. (Here are links for Parts 1 and 2.) To know what to do, read the entire section below.
Having left Devil's Gate, you and your family are headed to South Pass, where you'll enter Oregon Territory. At "nooning" (your midday rest), Caleb, the captain sends you and his children, Joseph and Eliza, to find a resting spot. As you rest by the Pacific Springs, Caleb announces that you'll be reaching the Parting of the Ways. He explains that your options will be to continue your trail to Fort Bridger or take the Greenwood Cutoff. You should continue your trail to Fort Bridger.
While your family sets up camp, you and Joseph go to collect sagebrush. In this area, known as Little Sandy Crossing, grass and fuel are scarce. As you return to the train, you notice a Native American settlement, where the Shoshone live. You eat baked beans (seasoned with bacon) and pan bread. You fall asleep reading a (worn) copy of Gulliver's Travels, but in the early morning, you awake to the sound of a guard's alarm, yelling that you have been robbed of a cow and two horses! Joseph tells you that one of the groups you saw last night must be responsible and he's going to spy on them. He tells you to cover for him if anyone asks. You get the choice of telling Pa where Joseph is going or going after Joseph. Pick the former.
Upon hearing of Joseph's plan to spy on the other camp, Pa tells Caleb. They go with two other men to track Joseph down. Joseph doesn't even look at you when you return, but Pa says that the other wagon train was in really bad shape itself and didn't take your animals. Ma asks about the missing animals, but Pa says to just forget about them. For the next couple of days, Joseph refuses to even look at you, but after a while, he admits that going off like that was a bad idea and that you were only looking out for him. You become friends again. The next day, you arrive at the infamous Green River Crossing, which, especially in the spring (when the snow melts and raises the water level), is known to be difficult to cross. The water is a little lower in July, but you still have to walk across the river on narrow gravel bars. Some mountain men have created a ferry, but they charge a fee. The area around the crossing is now a camping site. Caleb goes to ask how much the ferry will cost, but learns that it's being repaired, which will take at least four days. You're asked if you want to wait for the ferry or cross the river. The option to pick is to wait for the ferry.
Having heard many stories of pioneers falling into the Green River, almost everyone agrees with your suggestion to wait for the ferry. The banks make for a nice camping place, and Pa and Caleb help repair the ferry, helping it get finished a day sooner. When it's time to ride across, you sit in the wagon, holding the hands of your little brother and sister, Samuel and Hannah. While waiting for the train to get across, you, Joseph, and Eliza play a game of hide-and-seek. Samuel declares you to be it and runs. After counting to fifty, you see your dog, Archie, bark and run to a bunch of bushes. You follow him and see a baby antelope. Guessing it's been orphaned or abandoned, you ask Ma for milk to give it. Upon seeing the animal, Ma softens and gives you milk. The antelope becomes your new pet. You name her Gertrude and tie a ribbon around her neck. She travels with you when the wagon train moves. One afternoon, however, tragedy strikes: during your midday break, some dogs appear out of nowhere and chase after Gertrude. Two Lakota men on horses race after them. You run after them, yelling that she's yours, but they do not hear you. The dogs kill Gertrude and the men bring her back on a horse. After a talk with Pa, the men apologize for what happened and offer you deerskins in return. Do not accept them.
You tell Pa that you don't want the deerskins. Because the dogs didn't know that Gertrude was your antelope, you would feel bad taking anything from the Lakota. Pa tells that to the Lakota, and they ride away. Just after you start to hike again, however, they return, stating that they will travel as far as the next village. The men, whose names are Roaring Cloud and Bright Sky (father and son, respectively) point out various plants, telling you what's edible and what's used for making medicine (with Ma making notes in her journal). The Lakota disappear when you make camp, but return with a jackrabbit, which Ma prepares in a stew. After the meal, Roaring Cloud tells you Lakota legends, which you, Hannah, and Samuel enjoy. The next day, you make camp at the Lakota settlement and are invited to supper. You, Hannah, and Samuel get wildflowers, and Pa brings some fuel for the fire. During the feast, you see a loaf of bear root bread, wild onion stew, and a cake-like thing (which Pa has eaten and says tastes like a sweet potato) made of another root. Roaring Cloud is looking at you, and although you don't want to offend him, you're not used to this kind of food. The options you get are to force yourself to eat this food or to just wait for leftovers. Force yourself to eat the food.
You eat some of the root cake and realize that Pa wasn't kidding when he said that it tastes like a sweet potato! You ask Joseph about the stew, and he says that it's really good. After the meal, you have nuts, berries, and fragrant hot tea for dessert. Afterward, some performers perform some stories for entertainment. The night continues until Samuel nods off and Ma motions that it's time to head back to camp. The next day, you bid farewell to the Lakota and head to Fort Bridger, but when you get there, it's not what you expect! It's a collection of rickety wooden buildings belonging to fur traders. Fortunately, there's a blacksmith shop where Pa buys shoes for the oxen and replaces the cow you lost. That night, you're sleeping in a hut when Archie growls. You start to shush him, but then, you see what made him growl: a big rattlesnake! You are asked whether you want to run away or lie still. Pick the latter option.
You and Archie stay still. Eventually, the rattlesnake slithers into a small hole on the other side of the hut. Archie's barking wakes everyone up, but when they hear of your encounter, they congratulate you for not trying to strike the snake or run. However, no one, least of all you, gets much more sleep, and (even though you aren't sorry to leave Fort Bridger) you're exhausted when the morning bugle sounds. At Bear Lake Vally, you find plenty of firewood and water, but Caleb warns of another obstacle: Big Hill, one of the steepest climbs on the Trail. When you get there, everyone starts wondering how they will get up. Joseph suggests a windlass, and when you ask what that is, he explains the process: you anchor one wagon at the top of the hill, attach ropes to its wheels, attach the other end of the ropes to the rest of the wagons at the bottom of the hill, and then turn the wheel on the windlass like a crank, pulling the wagons up the hill. Some people agree with Joseph's suggestion, but others (nervous about using something with which they're unfamiliar) suggest the slow and steady route. You should go with Joseph's suggestion.
The windlass works (although it takes several hours to get all the wagons up). As everyone has leftover breakfast as a midday snack, you start wondering how you will make it down the hill. You remember that in Alcove Spring (during the second week of your journey), you used ropes to tie your wheels and make breaks, and it took the strength of all the men to slowly bring the wagons down the hill. Here, you take the same precautions, and the men take the wagons down the hill in a zigzag pattern rather than straight down (but not without some items falling out). For the next few days, it's smooth sailing. Then one afternoon, Samuel says that you're approaching Soda Springs! You marvel at the bizarre landscapes and drink some of the water. After you drink your fill, Ma and Pa let you explore the area with Joseph and Eliza. You hear a high-pitched whistle that Joseph says comes from Steamboat Spring, but Eliza would rather go to the hot springs to soak her feet. Go to Steamboat Spring.
Whereas other springs hiss, Steamboat Spring shoots out a stream of water every fifteen seconds. After camping, you trek four days to Fort Hall, where a fur trader named Henry invites the group to supper. During supper, he says that the most difficult part of the Trail is ahead: the mountains and the Columbia Valley! He suggests going southwest alongside the California Trail. Some people are tempted by Henry's suggestion and want to go to California, but others want to continue the journey to Oregon. The options that you're given are to go to the California Trail or continue on the Oregon Trail. You should continue on the Oregon Trail although one might instinctively pick that option anyway, given the title of this series.
In the end, only three wagons (luckily for you, Caleb's isn't one of them) split off. You hike for three days to the Raft River, a deep and rapid stream leading to the Snake River (and where the families leaving for California turn southwest). On the second day, it starts to rain and doesn't stop until the third. While you search for a spot for camping, you notice that because of all the rain that's fallen over the past two days, the water levels are higher than usual. The scouts pick out a spot, but the ground is muddy and wet. Some people complain, but others want to camp anyway. Ma asks you if you want to camp or look elsewhere. Pick the latter.
You find another spot to camp, but after you eat, your throat begins to feel sore, and so does Samuel's. Ma makes you some hot tea and sends you to bed early. The next morning, your throat is less sore, but you now have a cough, which isn't helped by Samuel (who is doing much better) running around and kicking up dirt. You try to rectify this with a swig from the water-skin, but at night, you start to cough a lot, much to the chagrin of Hannah. You then remember that Caleb has some tonics, but you don't want to wake him up. Your options are to take some of the tonic or just try to sleep without it. Try to sleep without the tonic.
Ma comes to check on you and, upon seeing your situation, wraps you in a blanket and gives you some of the tonic. The next day, you've recovered from your cough, and the train makes its way to the Shoshone Falls. It's a beautiful sight. A couple of days later, you see Shoshone people spearing fish. Pa barters for several large fish and grills them over a campfire that night. The evening gives everyone a nice break, which is important because you're about to approach the hardest part of Snake River: Three Island Crossing! Caleb explains that you have to ford one section of the river (which is about one hundred yards wide) to an island. Then you cross a swift and dangerous branch to another island, and then there's one more part to get across. One man suggests tying the wagons together, stating that the extra weight will make the wagons less likely to tip over or drift downstream. Another man suggests taking the wagons apart and floating them across the river so the animals only have to manage themselves. You now have the option of attaching the wagons together or floating them across. You should attach the wagons together. (This is only your second-to-last set of choices; floating the wagons across leads to two more choices, but they both lead to bad endings.)
You tie two wagons together and travel in pairs. After two pairs go, your wagon follows. As you go in, things go smoothly until the wagon jerks violently! Ma (who isn't a very good swimmer) falls in, hits her head on a rock, and is knocked unconscious (but thankfully not killed)! Pa manages to fish her out and revive her, and she seems okay. You quickly keep moving and reach the island safely. As you reminisce over your journey, you think of what comes next, but you're now a tried-and-true pioneer. You win (for now)!
Here are two more good endings:

• Pa finds a freshwater spring with clear water. Your family sets up camp and eventually decides that this is a better life than the one on the Trail.
• Pa opens a business with the Shoshone people to help those who have missing animals, want guides, or need food and water.