dexhopper

[dexhopper]

1 week of progress writing a novel. 2.5 chapters done, 28 pages, almost 10k words. I'm getting a big boost in energy from finally committing to this!

[dexhopper]

Progress on my novel, day one! One chapter down, 25 more to go!

[dexhopper]

God damn, me and fucking who?

so what if I sucked his dick. his knuckles were split and bloody from defending my safety and my honour what else was I supposed to do

[dexhopper]

takes my boyfriend with a humiliation kink out for dinner for his bday & tells the staff it’s his bday & when they come out singing happy bday he gets so hard that he passes out

[dexhopper]

*tears streaming down my face as i desperately grab at the fabric of your shirt* am i at least cringe and annoying in a fuckable way

[dexhopper]

The Thrill of the Fight

If you love superheroes, but prefer a more grounded, personal narrative that focuses on characters and their development more than action and spectacle, then The Thrill of the Fight is for you.

My debut novel is the story of Evan, a 17 year old kid who feels as though his life is painfully boring and uneventful. This is changed when he's put in danger, and something within him is sparked, like the fuse of a bomb, and he discovers a craving for adrenaline that he'd not known he needed. Due to these cravings, and a strange power that manifests to save him when he feels threatened, Evan puts himself on the path of vigilantism, and maybe a legitimate superhero one day! Along the way, Evan is introduced to new friends, enemies, challenges and obstacles that he must overcome if he truly wishes to be like the heroes he sees in the movies, and these events test both his powers and his character as Evan matures into who he wants to be, whether that's a good idea or not.

The Thrill of the Fight is available on Amazon right now for $3 USD, and you can check it out following this link.

[dexhopper]

How I came to realise that Fantasy is an inherent leap in logic.

Recently, I’ve published a novel. To those that care, this post will contain some spoilers, but they aren’t too heavy. It’s an urban superhero fantasy story, and I wanted to do it right while sticking to the core concept of ‘superheroes in a more personal, street-level context’, and I’ve done just that, but I ran into a problem early on with character motivations and realistic decision-making by the main character, Evan.

See, my main character immediately makes a decision that drastically alters his life, and even though he has his reasons, I felt at first that they were flimsy. It was here that I made a realisation that all Fantasy is kind of inherently flimsy logic-wise. Sure, you can explain all you want about why someone did something or how something works, but it’s always going to be impossible because it isn’t real.

There’s no real use in worrying about how things would happen in the real world, because this isn’t happening in the real world. These characters have been pushed to make the choices they do because of me. I’m the one in charge, so if I feel that I’ve done a good enough job informing the reader that this is in-character, and on-brand for them, then that has to be enough, because a bad character choice made in the heat of the moment based on limited information isn’t a plot hole, that’s the plot.

I’ve come to realise that, and it’s allowed me to worry infinitely less about how my characters would react in the context of the real world, and more about how they’d react in the context of their own lives, in their fictional world, and I feel that it has improved my flow considerably.

If you want to check out this novel based on my description of it so far, you can with this link right here.

[dexhopper]

What’s found in the woods is better left alone. This is how I learned that lesson.

I never thought that I’d get to where I am today. That’s not to say that I’m not grateful to be alive, mind you. It’s to say that there have been things in my life that weren’t exactly typical. I’ve lived a life full of oddities and strange happenings, so my trajectory hasn’t been what one could call predictable.

In short, there are things out there that are far beyond what we consider natural; vile beings and strange objects that break the rules of reality as we know it. These things are everywhere, you just don’t see them. It’s not for a lack of trying, either, so don’t get any ideas about becoming the next big witch hunter or anything like that. No, these things want to remain hidden. They want to lurk in your dreams and hide in your shadows, for if they are touched by the light, if they are known by the waking mind, they will cease to exist. It is in their nature to be odd, and so contact with mundanity interferes with their existence. That’s what I’ve learned through my strange, strange life.

This is why I’m writing this. This isn’t a memoir, or an attention seeking post to some odd website so that I can be internet famous. No, this is an attack. The more these things are known, the less power they have over the world and those who live in it. I’ve seen far too much for it all to win, so this is my last go around at trying to warn the people of what is lurking just out of their lines of sight. This is how I first learned of what’s hiding in your minds, waiting to pounce when you fall asleep. This is how it all started for me, and hopefully how it’ll all end for them.

The day it all started was like any other. A summer afternoon in Portland was bearable, so I could spend the day outside like I normally did. It was a passtime for my brother, sister and I to go ‘exploring’ along the nearest hiking trail. We knew it wasn’t really exploring, because everything was mapped out, but we liked to pretend that we were intrepid adventurers in the days of Christopher Columbus who had joined him on his quest to find new lands.

I was fourteen at the time, my sister being thirteen and my brother being sixteen. Mason, my brother, was always the creative one of us, cooking up a plotline for our make-believe adventure. Kara, my sister, was always itching for excitement in the dullness of summer, so readily followed whatever Mason came up with. I, on the other hand, was just tagging along for the most part. I knew that they liked making up stories and finding new caves and structures in the woods, so I went with them to be part of their fun. It was one of the only things that we did as a family unit, so I wasn’t about to miss that.

That was how we found ourselves walking along the path that we’d slowly been carving through the woods all summer. We’d been working our way through the woods and leaving small waypoints for ourselves along the way so that we couldn’t get lost, and could find the way to continue at a later date. Mason had declared that he’d find treasure, and Kara had quickly gotten on board with the idea, so we’d all begun to play along with the narrative that we were pirates looking for lost gold in the woods. It was something that had brought us together, and we’d gotten a few hundred feet into the woods and away from the trail. It was strange, being at a point where you couldn’t see the trail anymore, but knowing you were safe regardless. It was as if we were putting ourselves in danger without danger really being present, due to the waypoints. Perhaps that was what gave Mason and Kara their kicks.

“Mark!” Kara called. I’d been off in my own head again, wondering about things instead of enjoying them. I had to be brought back down like that often, and I could tell it was starting to get on peoples’ nerves.

“Sorry. What is it?” I asked.

I noticed that I’d fallen behind, and quickly jogged to catch up. As I approached my siblings, I felt the crunch of leaves and sticks under my boot. That, too, served to ground me further, even nature wanting to keep my head below those pesky clouds. I saw that the two of them were kneeling down and looking at something, talking about it with each other under their breaths. I stood there for a moment, waiting for them to follow through on calling me over, but quickly lost my patience with them.

“What?” I asked again, letting my arms bat against my sides as I huffed in annoyance.

“Look at this,” Mason said, skirting back so that I could see what they were looking at.

It was a line of beige. No, sand. I’d seen the color beige before, but not in nature. It took me a moment to recognize that it was sand, as we rarely went to the beach and I didn’t watch movies at that age. I looked at it, and was wondering where it had come from when I noticed Kara looking away from it and deeper into the woods . As I traced her gaze, I saw that the sand went further than I’d thought, trailing off the path we’d been making and disappearing into the woods. That was odd, and I quickly turned the other way to see if it went to the left as well, and found that it did. What a strange thing to find in the woods; a line of sand leading off into who knows where. Knowing Mason and Kara, I knew that they’d want to follow it to see where it goes, and quickly tried to shut it down.

“We probably shouldn’t mess with it,” I said, using Mason to prop myself up and rise to my feet once more.

“Why not?” Kara asked, her eyebrows knitting together in clear disappointment. It was written all over her face, from the slight pout, to the way she let her shoulders sag, that she wanted to see what it meant.

“We don’t know where it leads. It could be dangerous,” I said, torn between whether putting my hand on her shoulder would be comforting or awkward, as neither of us were particularly fond of physical affection.

“It could be treasure!” Mason exclaimed, his eyes lighting up as he smiled wide.

“That’s pretend. This is real. We all agreed not to leave the path for safety. What if we follow it, but the wind picks up to blow the line away, and then we have no way of knowing the way back home? There’s a dozen things wrong with following a random line in the woods drawn with sand,” I shot back.

“Don’t be such a wet blanket. Let’s go, Kara. We’ll be able to find our way back, no problem,” Mason said.

I glared at him as he looked both ways up the sand trail and paused for a moment. I looked over at Kara to see if she was really going to buy into that, and saw that her eyes were wide and bright, and her smile was back. I realized that they were really going to do this, and wondered if I should really put a stop to it if Mason was that confident in his ability to find his way back. I checked what I had on me, and found my cell phone, over a dozen of the markers that we used as waypoints, the case for my glasses and the water bottle that I’d brought all stuffed into the backpack I was wearing. I looked back at my siblings and sighed. I shouldn’t have enabled them like that, but if they were going to do this, I could at least make sure they were safe about it.

“If we’re doing this, I’ll keep placing markers so we can retrace our steps. Okay?” I said.

“Yeah, sure. Hear that, Kara? We’re in business,” Mason said, tracing along the sand line with his eyes.

Kara smiled, and I thought that it would probably be worth it just for that. Mason immediately set off down the trail. Kara followed closely behind, which left me to pick up the pace as I slipped my backpack around and grabbed the markers from their pocket so that I could light the way, as it were. I’d come up with the waypoint system as Mason had been planning our little expedition at the beginning of that summer.

Our grandfather used to make flags before he passed away, so we had an abundance of them lying around. We’d asked for permission from our parents to use them as markers for our project, and had been able to get our hands on a few dozen squares of multicolored fabric, and we started nailing them to trees every so often to keep ourselves safe from getting turned around and lost in the woods. I thought it was a pretty good system, and the others had come around to it after their initial booing, but it did have some kinks. Some flags were just green, so we couldn’t use those due to their similarities to natural leaves. Some of them got shredded by a bird interested in the color, so we usually had a few to replace every time we ventured along our homemade trail. It was worth it, though, for safety.

As the three of us trekked through the woods, I tried to focus on the snapping of twigs and crunching of leaves under us as we stepped through the uncharted territory. It was about midday, so the beams of white shining through gaps in the gaps in the treetops were able to light the surroundings well enough that we could see. We followed the sand trail deeper into the woods, so far that we could no longer see where we started from at the end of our makeshift path. I kept sticking our markers to trees along the way, but I’d run out soon. We usually only took a handful each, making for about twenty five in total, but I was going to run out if we kept up the pace we were going at.

I went to ask if Mason wanted to slow down, or even just turn back, but I was kept from speaking as Mason stepped through a collection of large leaves and trees to something that made him laugh like a madman. Kara and I shared a look, and she stepped through as well, getting the same result; manic laughter. I felt the soles of my feet burn from so much walking, but decided that I couldn’t leave them alone. I stepped through the barrier and came out in a clearing.

The clearing was quiet, tranquil like a wilderness paradise you’d see in a kid’s movie. It was within a wide circular fence, for lack of a better word, of leaves and trees. That foliage kept everything out, it seemed, as there weren’t any animals or unsightly growths in this clearing. The ground was mostly dirt, with grass growing all over. The corner across from us, however, was rock. That corner was host to a pond, a stream running from further in the woods to the basin of stone to become a pool.

It seemed that Mason was drawn over to the pond, as he’d worked up quite the sweat in getting there. He ran over to the pond and leapt into it, splashing around in the water as it drenched him. I frowned at the thought of moving around once he had to get out, but let Mason have his fun. It’d be his problem to deal with, anyway.

Kara, on the other hand, was captivated by the place as a whole, guessing from the look of slack jawed wonder on her face. Kara took her shoes off and began to walk around on the grass. I was momentarily worried about any thorns or prickly bushes that might have been hiding in the grass, but my fears were dissuaded by the ease with which Kara stepped through the grass.

I remained near the spot we’d entered through. I wasn’t one for playing around in the elements, you see, so I chose to sit on the grass and observe. I was often an observer, so I suppose that I’d gotten good at looking at the little things, things that may not have added up to one cohesive whole. I looked around the clearing we’d stumbled into while my siblings played, and found a number of oddities that didn’t quite have reasonable explanations. Things such as the complete lack of noise coming from anything but my brother and sister. You could always hear something in the woods, but now there was absolutely no sound whatsoever. It was as if someone had gone and snuffed out every little bird, every cricket and even made sure that the leaves didn’t fall so that no sound could disturb this paradisian area.

The second strange thing I found was that the grass grew completely evenly all around the clearing. Everywhere grass could grow, it did grow, and that rubbed me the wrong way. I’d seen the way our lawn looked when Dad let up on the landscaping for a few weeks, and this was not that. It was like someone had very specifically tried to get the grass to grow in this way so that it looked perfect. That gave me a bad feeling, and I made a note to not kick up any of it when I moved.

The last thing that gave me an odd sort of feeling was that I began to feel something the longer I was in there. It started the very moment I stepped through that foliage, but I didn’t truly register it until much later, over twenty minutes after we’d all entered. It was a distinct lack of comfort. No matter what I did, where I sat or how I held myself, I couldn’t get comfortable. It was as if something about this place was keeping me on edge, but I couldn’t pinpoint what could do that.

I got up after a while and started walking around, trying to pinpoint what exactly was making me feel this off, but I couldn’t find anything that would make me uncomfortable, at least on a conscious level. Maybe I was just nervous that we’d changed plans and that we were off the path. That made sense, but if it were that, I thought that I would’ve known it and been able to recognize that it was just nerves. It had to be something different.

There was about half an hour between us entering and my realization that someone was watching me. That had to be it. I felt eyes on me from behind, and was sure that was the feeling that I’d been getting from this place. This was someone’s home, and that person knew we were there. Feeling bold, I spun around and tried to see who was watching me, but nothing was there. I tried my best to turn in a circle so that I could catch whoever it was, as they had to have been fast to get away that quick. I didn’t manage to see anything, but I did succeed in making myself dizzy and almost tripping myself up, needing to support myself with a hand on the rock I’d been sitting on to avoid falling over.

I felt my heart begin beating harder in my chest, and I knew something was wrong. I still felt those eyes on me, but now it was more intense, like they’d been hiding before but were letting me know that they were there, now. A cold trickle of sweat ran down the back of my neck at that thought, and I began to wonder what kind of person could cause me to feel this way. I gripped the straps of my backpack tightly and began to back away from where I’d been standing.

My siblings were still playing in the pond. I began to make my way over to them, the feeling that something was wrong still increasing in my gut. It felt like something was squeezing my torso very gently, but that gentleness wasn’t going to last. The grip of this feeling was gaining strength, and I was powerless to stop it. I walked over to Mason and Kara, who looked up at me with large, smug smiles.

“How’s this, huh?” Mason asked, shooting at me with finger guns.

“Join us!” Kara yelled, pumping her fists in a way that made water splash up at me.

I flinched away from the water and frowned at my siblings. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to remain calm. Freaking out and making myself look crazy wouldn’t get anything done. I needed to explain this calmly and rationally in order for them to take me seriously.

“I think there’s someone here. I don’t think they’re nice. We need to leave,” I said between measured breaths with my strangled lungs.

“Did you see them?” Kara asked, rising slightly out of the water to look around with a frown.

Mason looked at me with a raised eyebrow and a face that told me he was not impressed. I silently pleaded with him to believe me, feeling my heart beat like wild in my chest as the feeling of being watched became almost too much to ignore. It made me want to run far away from there, and never return. It was as if some outside force was guiding my thoughts, and it was taking a lot from me to railroad my mind into staying on the one thing in front of me; my brother.

“No, but I think they see us. This must be their home, which means we can’t be here,” I said, feeling my hands begin to lose their grip on my backpack and shake once more.

“You didn’t see anyone, but you think there’s someone around here. Did you hear them?” Mason asked, raising an eyebrow at me as he leaned back in the water.

“No. I … felt that they were watching me,” I said, realizing how unbelievable that sounded as I spoke.

“You felt them? Don’t just say things to mess with Kara,” Mason said, his small smile dropping to a frown as he seemed to examine me.

I felt my veins go cold, but not because of the presence that was still slowly squeezing the life out of me. Sitting there in the pool, my own brother had dismissed me as a liar. I’d never lied before, I’d never seen the use of it, so how could Mason believe that I was suddenly one to make up stories? I’d prided myself on my honesty and a care for my siblings, but was that connection I felt with my brother only one way? Did he not respect me enough to see that I was freaking out in this hidden grove that we’d found ourselves in? I felt it was fairly obvious that I was in the grips of a panic attack at that moment, with my hyperventilation, my shaking hands and my high, wavering voice. I admit that it may be with hindsight that I’m able to make these claims, but a good brother would’ve been able to see those signs as clearly as I do now. A better brother than Mason had been, at least.

“We need to leave. Come on,” I said, taking Kara’s hand in my own and turning to leave.

“Hey!” Kara yelped as I dragged her along.

I felt a tugging behind me, but carried on with my plan to get my sister and I out of there. Mason could do whatever he wanted, if it was his wish. I, however, couldn’t let my younger sister be in that place any longer, as the restriction I felt on my lungs was growing tighter and tighter as she flailed her way out of the pool to meet me on the grass and keep up with my dragging hand.

We only managed a few steps out onto the grass before a deafening silence fell upon us. In the moment, I thought it was my shallow breathing that was causing my senses to fade as my consciousness dimmed, but as the seconds went on, both Kara and I frozen in place on the grass as the silence drew on, I knew it wasn’t that I was finally succumbing to whatever influence this place had on me. This was something different.

I looked back at Kara to see that she was looking around with wide, unfocused eyes. She was scared, I could tell just from looking at her. I felt the hand I had taken start shaking, and her grip strangled my own hand as we stopped moving in in light of this new development. I shifted my gaze over to Mason, who was staring at one thing with an odd focus that he didn’t usually have. He’d stopped moving, the water coming to rest with him, and so it truly was silent. I was breathing, and I sure as hell had heard my heartbeat before, but now there was nothing. It was sickening to have that ringing in my ears that only came when everything was still, and I needed it to end.

“What?” I asked, the easiest way to stop the silence and get answers.

Mason didn’t reply, he just raised his hand out of the water, bringing the nerve-settling sounds of water sloshing around, to point at something that was now behind me. I felt my heartbeat quicken once again as I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, a strange feeling of morbid curiosity washing over me. What could Mason have been pointing at? Was it whatever was behind the force pushing me to act as I was? Could he see it? At that moment, I had all these questions and more, and came to the conclusion that the only way to find out was to turn around and see for myself, and that was exactly what I did.

What I was met with was not what I was expecting. It was a woman, about middle aged with long dark hair and no color in her eyes. She wore a long, dirty dress and had long, well maintained fingernails. She stood barefoot on the grass, looking at us with a small smirk on her face as she placed her hands upon her hips in what was probably meant to be intimidating, because that’s what it did to me. The image of this woman, covered in dirt and filth, yet elegant and beautiful in a way I couldn’t describe completely, sent a shock through my system and I let out a gasp as the ringing silence abruptly vanished.

“Hello, children,” she said, her voice impossibly smooth. It was like a melody, only her intonation didn’t change as she spoke. It was odd and contradictory, but it also made complete sense at the time. It threw me for a loop for a moment, but that moment was all it took for Mason to stand up and trudge over to Kara and I.

“Don’t talk to her,” Mason whispered, stepping in front of me to shield the two of us from something. I wasn’t entirely sure of what Mason was thinking at that moment, but it couldn’t have been good. “We were just about to leave,” he said.

“Oh, but you’ve just arrived. Surely you haven’t enjoyed everything my grove has to offer. I see you’ve made use of my pool,” she said, gesturing to the scene of two drenched kids standing next to each other.

Mason began walking toward the tree line that would take us out of the grove. He pulled Kara and I along with him, and the three of us started making our way away from the woman. That was, until she laughed. Instead of the sound of a light, breezy giggle coming from in front of us, the noise came from behind. The three of us whipped around and saw that another of the same woman was sitting on the ledge of the pool, looking at us expectantly. I looked back at the original to find that she was gone, causing me to gasp lightly. It was the same woman, then, just in a different place.

“How’d you get over there?” Mason asked, stepping in front of Kara and I yet again as all three of us started backing away from the woman.

“Some things are better left unknown, for now,” the woman said, standing to her full height, towering over all of us kids, as she hummed in a low voice that was so unlike her previous demeanor that it made my head spin.

As I looked behind myself to see where we were going, I realized that we were heading toward the opening we’d come through when we’d first arrived. I felt my mind focus on that one spot, the place where the shrubbery parted slightly so that I could see a few feet into the woods. I tugged on Mason’s arm as I realized this, getting him to look over at our exit point for just a moment before the woman drew our attention yet again.

“You’re going to make this difficult, children, but you are in luck. I happen to be in a forgiving mood. Now, come closer to me so that we can talk,” she said, smiling and speaking in that off puttingly sweet tone of voice.

None of us said anything. From Mason’s labored breaths and Kara’s uncharacteristic quietness, it seemed like the strange effect this place had on me had begun to take hold with my siblings. I didn’t know who this woman was, or what this place was doing to us, but I knew that we needed to leave. I glanced at our exit point once again and started to think of a plan. The woman’s eyes bored into the back of my head as I turned away from her, but I pushed her out of my thoughts and focused on moving as quickly as possible while the others were dragged behind me.

As I did this, however, I felt that it was a little easier to breathe. My mind was clearer and air flowed quicker when I deliberately ignored the woman’s presence, but it seemed like that was only for as long as I maintained that train of thought, because it was as soon as I realized that it must have been because of her that I was feeling this way, not the grove itself, that these effects began to creep up on me yet again.

I tugged on Mason and Kara’s hands yet again, whispering, “Ignore her and you’ll feel better.”

“What are you talking about?” Kara asked, her hand shaking mine for comfort.

“I don’t think she’s a normal person,” I said, and Mason nodded his agreement after a moment of hesitation.

Mason looked torn. He had the look in his eyes that told me of want. It was clear that even a small part of him wanted to stay and enjoy whatever that woman had in store for us, for him. I had seen that look on his face before, when he was forced to stop playing and come to bed when we’d been younger. It was an expression that he was fighting so hard to keep off his face, because he was obviously trying to be strong in this situation, even if he wasn’t feeling as strong as he let on. It was a few more steps until Mason was able to get himself under control, showing Kara and I a determined smile that caused Kara to not squeeze our hands so hard.

“Okay, guys. Just listen to my voice, and focus on the ground ahead of you and we’ll be fine. Turn around now,” Mason said, leading the two of us in turning away from the woman and facing our exit.

The three of us started walking toward the exit, that parting of bushes that we’d entered through. I could feel something behind us, something that was cold and dark and angry. It felt like the temperature behind the three of us had dropped by dozens of degrees, but we kept on walking away from the woman. Footsteps made me flinch, squeezing Mason’s hand tighter, but he kept his grip and spoke up.

“So, what do you two want for dinner?” Mason asked.

When Kara didn’t say anything, I managed to stutter out, “Fish.”

“Oh, fish, eh? Good choice. It’s been a while since we’ve had fish, so I can’t blame you,” Mason said, sounding as if everything was normal and that they were simply having a conversation like any other day.

We were only a few steps away from the bushes, and then we’d be out of the grove. We were only feet away when the woman’s voice rang out in a shrieking pitch that made my head hurt. I heard Mason curse under his breath, but laugh it off. I was tempted to look back, but I remembered that ignoring her was the key to breaking out of whatever spell she and this place had put them under.

“Come back, children. I’ve got so many fun activities to share with you. Why don’t you stop playing and come back over here so that I can dry you off after playing in the pool? Hello? I know you can hear me! Children? Children! Come back here or else! I command it! Come back!” the woman wailed, each beg and plea for us to stay resonating so deeply within me that it made my bones ache. As she cried out for us, the woman’s voice changed and became deeper, more aggressive, and grating on my ears. I didn’t dare look back to see how she’d managed to sound like that.

As the three of us stepped through the boundary of the grove, it was like a line being cut while fishing. There was a tension within me that was instantly relieved as we set foot on the messy ground of the woods. The woman’s voice was immediately silenced, which caused me to gasp as the pressure I’d felt building in my head and the aching of my bones came to an end. It was as if everything that place had been doing to us simply stopped as soon as we took one step out of that grove. The relief was so overwhelming that my legs failed me for a moment, and I fell to the ground.

“Get back up. We need to get home,” Mason said, dragging me up from the ground.

Leaves crunched and twigs snapped as we bolted away from the grove. I dared a look back to see that nothing was there. There wasn’t even a treeline that was blocking view, there was simply no trace of a grove ever having been there. It looked like any other part of the woods, and that threw me off my step enough for Mason to once again drag me behind himself as we ran from the grove.

It took a while for us to find our way back to the main path, but we eventually gathered our bearings enough to navigate through the woods. We came upon my markers, and I felt a pang of relief wash over me when we did. I remember thanking any higher power that may have existed for giving me the foresight to come up with the waypoint system, but my mind was too preoccupied with the grove and that woman to think on that any further.

The grove had just disappeared as soon as we’d left it. How? Had it ever really been there? It had to have been, since my siblings had experienced the same things I had. Who was that woman? Had she been a person, or just another of the grove’s tricks? Or were they her tricks? It was all unclear, and it hurt my head to think about it any deeper than ‘that was weird’ as we sprinted through the woods and came out at the trailhead near our home. We got home as fast as possible and collapsed inside, scaring our parents half to death.

We tried to tell them what had happened, but they chalked it up to Mason’s wild imagination when Kara went to her room as soon as she could and it hurt my head too much to corroborate anything Mason was saying beyond nodding and writing things down, but they’d already dismissed everything that he was saying before I could get anything meaningful down on paper. The two of us tried to tell them for hours, but we just got praise for inventing such a cohesive storyline this time around. Mason went to bed early, demoralized by his failings to get our parents to understand.

I didn’t sleep that night. I stayed up, wondering what the hell had happened that day and wondering if it had ever happened before, if it would happen again, and if it happened anywhere else. That was the day I learned that the world had a little more magic than what I always assumed. The first time I came into contact with an entity beyond my understanding was so close to being something bad for my siblings and I, but a display of courage from my brother and a streak of foresight saved us from whatever fate that woman in the woods had planned for us. Sometimes, I still think about what she wanted for us, and if any other kids had fallen for her tricks and gotten caught in her trap. I never saw her again, but she haunts my dreams as the first time I learned that the world was far bigger than I ever imagined it to be.

Nobody believed me, but I knew. So did Mason and Kara. We knew what was out there, what was possible, and that had forged a bond between us so strong that it still persists to this day. We’re older than we were when this happened, but I can tell you this: for all that the world is understood more nowadays, the world isn’t any less weird or scary than when we knew nothing at all. I wonder if it was better when we were in the dark, sometimes.

So, be careful of what you find out there in the great unknown. It may be more than you bargained for. If not, well, there are plenty of experiences to draw on from for guidance.

[dexhopper]

Luther’s whole character is:

Give that bitch a moon story. Bitches love moon stories.

AND IT WORKS

[dexhopper]

The Problem, or Lackthereof, with Interpretation

Can't believe I'm saying this, but it's okay to have different interpretations of characters. I'm getting some hate right now because I'm writing a character who is not canonically confirmed to be of any sexuality, as asexual. Because of this, I'm getting told to stop 'forcing my beliefs' on characters and to 'just write the story'. Sorry, sir, but this was always the story. All the other changes I made to canon were alright with you, but this is where you draw the line?

Then, I got a review calling me a faggot, likely from the same person who said all the above shit. They told me to go to One Piece if I want to write ace characters! This isn't some kind of cordoned off area for you to share your fucked up worldview. This is fandom! Where everybody's gay! How on earth do you, in this fandom especially, have a problem with interpretations of characters being gay. My brother in christ, we are the MHA fandom. We make gay ships where there is no foundation whatsoever.

I'm facing bigotry because of my art, and it's sad to see that the same harmful mindset is still as prevalent as ever. LGBTQIA+ folks are not accepted. We are tolerated, and sometimes not even that. I'm not even angry about it; I'm just disappointed.

[dexhopper]

A Theory: Why Hela got more powerful the longer she was on Asgard, as well as Thor having inherited the Odinforce in the MCU, but not from Odin.

(Kinda long post: TLDR at the end in bold)

I've recently responded to a post asking a very simple question; why did Hela get more powerful the longer she was on Asgard in Thor: Ragnarok?

It's not spoken of in the movies much, but Odin's power comes from the Odinforce, which when he dies passes to the next Allfather. Thor got it in the comics, which improved his already existing powers as well as giving him a few other nifty abilities that helped him out, such as teleportation without use of the Bifrost and the power to contain a nuclear missle's explosion. Per the avatar of the Odinforce, the power Thor had to recreate celestial bodies while in possession of it didn't even hold a candle to the Odinforce's true powers.

You may be asking at this point, what's the relation to Hela? In the comics, and the original mythology, she's supposedly the daughter of Loki but in the movie they changed this relation so that she was the only daughter and eldest child of Odin. This made her the true heir to the throne of Asgard and, by extension, the Odinforce. That is why her power is so strongly tied to Asgard once she emerges; Odin's already gone and the inheritance of the Odinforce is taking place throughout her entire appearance.

She got the Odinforce, which holds the power of Odin and his two brothers, and represents the spirit of Asgard as a people, so the more time she spent at the physical location, and the more time that passed since Odin died, the more her powers were boosted by the Odinforce.

A question I received upon this explanation is that if Asgard is gone, then is the Odinforce gone as well?

Well, Eitri says when explaining Stormbreaker in Infinity War that it was designed for the King of Asgard to wield, so it's probably built to channel the Odinforce the same way Mjolnir in the comics channels/contains a primordial storm deity.

My bet is that it went with Thor when Hela was killed in Surtur's rampage, but that he only began to actively channel it after acquiring a focusing device in Stormbreaker. After all, that's what the MCU Mjolnir was, a focusing tool for his innate power.

I was then asked if Odin needed such a device, and if that device was Gungnir, Odin's ornate spear. I think it's implied that Gungnir was Odin's focusing device, and if not, well, Odin did have more time with the power, so maybe his mastery of it made a focusing tool irrelevant and the spear was more decorative after all those thousands of years.

This theory was then questioned by another user pointing out that none of the 'focusing tool' concept is necessary to Odin; that he could use his power without the need of an aid.

To that I answered, that's the point. It's not strictly necessary, but it does help to focus the Odinforce so that someone inexperienced with it, as Thor would be when he inevitably inherited it, wouldn't go overboard and do things they'd regret with their newfound Allfather level powers.

Odin likely came into possession of Gungnir when he was younger, and in a similar position to what he was worried about later with Thor, so he needed a focus while he learned to properly manage the power he'd created with his brothers' sacrifices. It's a precaution, not a necessity.

To sum it all up, Hela was the oldest child of Odin at the time of his death. She began to inherit the source of his power, the Odinforce, and that's why she began to grow more powerful the more time she spent in Asgard. It was the place, as well as the inheritance process moving along, that kept boosting her power. When she died, the Odinforce then passed onto Thor who began channeling it through Stormbreaker.

I also think that Mjolnir being a focus for Thor's innate power served a dual purpose; it got Thor to stop messing shit up, sure, but it also provided valuable training in focusing power through tools that he'd need when inheriting the Odinforce, something Odin himself did not have when learning to manage his own power.

Let me know what you think of this! I don't know how accurate this is, so if you have any thoughts, let me know!

[dexhopper]

Split City Sins (Final Part)

I don’t know how long I was out for, but when I woke up, my injuries were covered by layers upon layers of bandages. My wrist was a bit stiff, but I figured that it would work itself out with time. I was more worried about my face and my other arm, though. I had been drenched in the corrosive saliva of the Splitter that was still sprawled across the floor where I had killed it.

Sarah, who had been tending to my wounds, judging by the basic first aid kit at my side, noticed that I was awake. She started to fret over me.

“Don’t move, you’ll mess with your dressings,” she said.

“You know first aid?” I asked. The worst of the damage was above my nose, and I could feel the differences in how the fabric felt on the undamaged skin and the scar tissue.

“Very basic first aid, but … yeah. I had to make sure that the Splitter was dead before I started treating you, so that was fun,” Sarah complained.

“You’re calling it a Splitter as well?” I asked, confused as to how she knew of the conclusions that I had come to.

“You talk in your sleep,” she said, failing to hide a smirk.

“Oh,” I said, the flush that came over my face aggravating my burns.

Sarah proceeded to show me my arm. It was horribly scarred, but it was better than I imagined. I had a lot of mobility, though closing my fist still hurt a lot. She wouldn’t let me see my face. I think it hadn’t ridden out the recommended time the kit said to leave my bandages on.

I was able to get up and move around, and I quickly saw to it that the Splitter was tossed down the hole in the stairwell, falling until it reached the bottom, probably tearing the body into pieces in a gruesome display. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t actually see the bottom, despite my eyes being uncovered. I hadn’t suffered too much from loss of vision. Only certain spots in my field of vision were spotty or blurry.

We were able to hear the Splitter’s body impact the ground in about ten seconds, however, which meant we were close to the bottom, even if we couldn’t see it. I felt good about that because we had almost no food for what was supposed to be a simple in and out mission for one person.

We packed up our things, faith restored that this adventure was actually possible to complete, not that we had any in the first place. Sarah took most of the weight since I was still recovering. We set off down the stairwell and kept going until we couldn’t anymore.

My phone’s clock said that it was 10:30 am, and I had guessed that we had gotten about three hours of good sleep before the Splitter showed up. I had gotten a few more hours in, because of blacking out, but Sarah looked ready to drop after twenty flights of stairs.

“Are you okay? We can go back if you want,” I said.

“No. We need to get to the bottom of this, literally,” she countered.

“Yeah, but we could always use a different staff room again and you can get some actual sleep,” I offered.

“No, that isn’t fair to you. I can keep going, so don’t worry about it,” Sarah said, before trailing off and leaning forward.

She was falling. Fuck. We were on the flat concrete between flights, and she was going to fall onto the stairs and be seriously hurt if I didn’t do something. I rushed forward, ignoring my burning legs, and got in front of Sarah just as her legs gave out. I caught her, but she was unconscious, so I was going to have to carry her down a couple more flights.

I managed to get to the door of sub-level fifty-seven. I barricaded the door again, this time with stronger materials, and I actually fixed them to each other and helped Sarah get to sleep on the couch in that floor’s staff room.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke up lying next to Sarah. It was strange because I was on the floor, curled up in a blanket, while she was supposed to be on the couch, with a bunch of pillows and stuff. Naturally, I was uncomfortable. It was bad enough that I was curled up with anybody, but it didn’t help the fact that Sarah was doing so with a pretty girl.

I didn’t want to talk about this, but Sarah and I have history. We’ve known each other for a long time, thanks to Jay. He and I met as toddlers, and he finally made me talk to her when I was ten. I had always wanted to talk to her, but Jay saw that one of those stupid, childhood crushes was blooming so he shut it down quickly.

After that, I just quietly pined after Sarah for a few years, until she snuck away from Jay and told me that she had felt the same things I was feeling for her. It blew my mind that someone could be that interested in me, so I asked her out on a date. This was when we were fourteen, so the only place I could take a girl was the roller-skate rink at the edge of town.

She didn’t show up. I talked to her the next day and she said that it had been a prank from the other girls, but that she was forced into it. I forgave her but ended up correctly guessing that that group of girls was becoming a major pain in the ass for everyone, so I asked her to stop talking to them.

Sarah agreed and started hanging out with her brother and I, full time, but it was still weird between us. My affection for her withered slightly, but I still respected her. She never acknowledged our little incident again, so I didn’t either. Jay didn’t seem to know anything had happened, so we simply went about our lives.

That was two years ago, though, and I was over that. I never thought to ask if she really did have those feelings, but it was irrelevant. She hurt me, that was all that mattered, and even that had been put to rest.

I snapped out of it as Sarah started to wake up, and she rolled over to come face to face with me.

“Holy shit!” She said, scrambled out of our position.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. I didn’t want to wake you, so I kinda just froze up and tried to go back to sleep,” I said.

“Yeah, right, you liked it,” she teased.

“I can like something and want it to stop. It’s called overstimulation,” I told her.

“Okay, that’s just gross. It was nothing like that!” Sarah groaned.

“What was it like, then?” I asked.

She turned red. It was adorable. That’s what I would say if I still liked her, which I didn’t. Not one bit.

“I must have moved in my sleep!” she almost yelled, and I had to shush her, getting her to mutter a ‘sorry’.

“Do you sleepwalk?” I asked incredulously.

She was silent for a long time.

“Listen, we can talk about this stuff when we get out of here,” I told her, and she gave me a thankful look.

“You mean ‘if’?” she asked.

“No, I mean ‘when’. We are leaving. You are going to live, even if it kills me. We’re almost to the bottom, I know it,” I clarified.

“Thanks, but you shouldn’t think like that. We’re both going home, do you understand?” Sarah said, and I nodded.

A few moments passed until Sarah asked the golden question that was probably setting a few alarms in her brain off.

“How do you know we’re almost at the bottom?” she asked.

“When you passed out, I managed to carry you down a level. Just as I was about to go inside, I saw the lights at the end. It’s only about ten levels down, so we can get there by 1:30 pm,” I explained.

“You carried me?” she asked. Her blush came back full force, and I couldn’t help the smile that overcame my face as she curled in on herself in embarrassment.

“Yep. I had to. I couldn’t drag you down the stairs,” I said.

“Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s get going!” Sarah changed the subject. I could tell that she was uncomfortable with being questioned, so I let it go.

We packed up and hit the … stairs. We made it a couple of flights down before the other question I was expecting came up.

“What time is it?” Sarah asked.

“It’s currently … 12:37 pm,” I answered.

“WHAT?! That’s insane! That means that …” she trailed off.

“We’ve been down here for almost nineteen hours, yeah,” I confirmed.

“That’s crazy. They’ve probably noticed that we’re gone,” Sarah said, and I agreed.

“Both of us disappear at the same time? That’ll paint some pictures,” I said as I accidentally missed a step and stumbled a bit. I regained control of myself, but it was still embarrassing.

Another twenty minutes and we were there. We stood in front of the door, looking at the blinking light above it that said ‘AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY’. We looked at each other and snickered as we pushed the door open easily.

“Top notch American security,” I said sarcastically.

“Hey, this was forty years ago. Plus, there’s Splitters running about down here,” Sarah defended it.

“I can’t believe this!” I said in amazement, which Sarah took for an exaggerated offense taken to her opposition.

“Well, I … that’s wack!” She said as she realized what I was seeing.

We were looking at a massive room, with pods full of ice. They had people in them, but they were dead, I knew it from the smell. That and the fact that the pods were open. A man was standing in front of two of the cleaner looking pods, examining two bodies, the bodies of Ryan and Hurley, who looked to be similarly deceased.

“Hey, you! Who are you and what are you doing to our friends?” I said as we ran closer to the man.

I don’t know how I was able to ignore the fact that Ryan and Hurley were dead in front of me, but I did, and rushed toward the portly man.

He tried to run, but I caught him easily. He was older, so I outpaced him without much effort. I pulled my baseball bat from my backpack and pointed it at him, while Sarah unsheathed the knife she had brought with her when we left the first staff room.

“Answer me, NOW!” I yelled.

“Shut up! You’ll attract them,” the old man said and began walking. “Come,” he told us.

We found ourselves obeying him, for whatever reason. He led us to a room that, once the doors closed, was completely soundproof. We could be however loud we wanted, and we took advantage of that.

“Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

“Do you have any weapons hidden in this office?” Sarah asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Why?” we asked simultaneously.

“To kill the monsters that you have so affectionately called ‘the Splitters’,” he told us.

“You’ve been watching us?” I asked. I recalled a few cameras placed throughout the facility, but I hadn’t thought they would still be active. I didn’t even think there was anyone alive down here, and I said as much.

The old man chuckled at my question of how the hell he was still alive.

“If you store it right, a large enough number of canned goods can last you a century. I’m the only one left who hasn’t been turned into one of those things and subsequently died,” he said.

“How did they die?” I asked.

“Starvation,” the old man answered.

The man sighed and put on a presentation, likely one that he had not shown in a long time, so long that he almost looked giddy. The presentation started, and the old man started talking. He introduced himself as Dr. Kallar.

“Caleb,” I said.

“Sarah,” she followed.

“Okay, then. Caleb, Sarah, how long have you two been in this facility?” Kallar asked.

“Nineteen hours and then some,” I answered.

“We were here last night, too. We were only a few hours that time, and we didn’t go this deep, only to sub-level thirty, was it?” Sarah chimed in.

“Yeah, level thirty,” I confirmed.

“That’s astonishing! You’ve survived for almost an entire day outside the lab with nothing but yourselves. Nobody else made it that far!” Kallar praised.

“I have a few questions about that. If you saw us, why did you not try to help us?” I asked.

“I couldn’t contact you without revealing your location to the Splitters,” Kallar answered. It was good enough for me, but it had some holes.

“Why not?” Sarah apparently didn’t feel the same way.

“The creatures can sense emissions in the electromagnetic spectrum. That includes radio waves,” Kallar explained.

That satisfied us both, but a few burning questions came up after that.

“Why can they sense electromagnetic waves? Do they have some sort of organ that humans don’t or something?” Sarah said, jokingly.

“Spot on. They evolved to be able to know when the guards with radios were coming. They ambushed the guards and killed them. That’s how this place became the way it is now,” Kallar said.

“That makes no sense. Evolution is the steady progression of a species over hundreds of thousands of years. It took us millennia to simply walk upright, do you think we’d believe these things would develop a whole new organ in a few years?” I ranted.

“Yes. These things adapt at an unprecedented level. You experienced the Splitters’ hardened skin and acidic saliva yourself, I can see it. Those features are new to this specific breed. I didn’t expect them to be as powerful as they were when they escaped,” Kallar muttered.

“Escaped?” Sarah asked.

Kallar was silent for a few moments until he decided to tell the whole story of the Splitters, and what this installation was really for. After an hour, he could tell we were getting tired.

“You kids should get to bed. I have actual beds in the back. I’m sure you’d like to sleep and shower,” Kallar said.

We both lit up like Christmas trees. We thanked him for his hospitality and we got settled into bed nicely, clean and happy.

I’ll use this opportunity to relay the story of the Splitters. A hundred years ago, the government came across one and decided to vivisect it, and saw how it worked. The creature was extremely strong, fast, and durable, and it became even more so after time. When the government decided to test an ‘adaptation’ theory of theirs, they introduced snake DNA into the Splitter’s body. It integrated perfectly, and the monster became able to unhinge its jaw and eat people whole. It also shed its skin every so often as it grew.

Next, the scientists introduced spider DNA. It grew fangs that injected a paralyzing agent into the victim. It became even deadlier. In the 1970s, they built this laboratory to farm the creature, as they found that Splitter DNA also merged perfectly with human DNA. They proceeded to conduct experiments on humans and the Splitter hybrids that they had made.

Soon, they had the Splitters we had been encountering on our journey. These Splitters were able to plant their DNA into humans and that human would slowly transform into a Splitter over a day or so. It was very fast-acting, and there wasn’t a cure. After a few years, they stopped getting volunteers for their experiments, as it came out that they weren’t telling people that it was getting Split that they were signing up for.

They started taking people. Kidnapping people on the streets and bringing them down into the bunker and putting the Splitter DNA in them themselves. They made too much, however, and the hybrids revolted. They destroyed the facility and slaughtered everyone inside. It was mainly on the bottom few layers, and they soon infested the place. They starved to death in a few weeks, a side effect of still being human, if only on a basic level.

That was forty years ago, though. Recently, Kallar had been receiving people from the outside and being forced to experiment on them, the government seemingly having a renewed interest in the ‘Hybreeding Project’.

I got the feeling that I wasn’t being told everything, but I finally knew what these Splitters were, and I was ready to go home when we woke up. We had slept for about twelve hours, which was understandable since we had been through a lot of extremely exhausting things in the last couple of days. I checked my watch, where I had clicked on a stopwatch when I first went down all that time ago. It was at a little over forty-seven hours. It was hard to believe that we had been down there for almost two entire days, but when you’re inside for long enough, time gets muddy.

I was pulled aside by Sarah, who looked very uncomfortable. We went to a back room for privacy.

“I need you to do something for me,” she said.

“Okay. What?” I asked.

“I need some … feminine hygiene products,” her smile was forced, and I could tell that she would rather not be talking about this.

“Oh … oh. Oh! Okay, I’ll look around in the locker area. I saw it when we were about to sleep before, there’s probably some very old but usable stuff in there,” I said, and set off for the room I was talking about.

When I got there, I found that the rooms were separated by gender, which was perfect. I didn’t need to spend time searching around for female names, and I could just head straight for the women's sections.

Kallar was nowhere around. I thought he would stop me, but I was able to rummage around easily and find a few different things that I thought could help. I didn’t know much about this stuff, but my parents had always made sure I understood the things my school taught me in sex ed, about both male and female anatomy. They were awesome.

I realized while walking back that I was sure that I would die while down there before we had found Kallar. What would my parents think? What would Sarah’s parents think, or Jay? My parents would probably think Sarah led me down here, and Sarah’s would think that I did that to her. It would be a whole mess if we never came back one day. It probably was a mess up there. We had been gone for a day and a half already, and my parents weren’t those kinds of hippy people, they were borderline helicopter parents.

I made my way back, and I saw Ryan and Hurley in the cryo-chamber through the window, and I realized that I had been far too tired to form any coherent thoughts about my friends. I felt bad, briefly forgetting about half my reason for coming down there. A question occurred to me as I studied their forms.

If Ryan and Hurley were turned into monsters, then how are they there, alive and well, according to the EKG machines at the pods’ side?

Fuck.

I suddenly recalled how Jay said he got the idea to come down here in the first place. He said he had heard two older men talk about the bunker and how dangerous it is, and that anybody who went in and survived would be a hero in his book. Fuck.

Kallar had said that he had been getting sent people to experiment on, and I had been sickened at the time, but now I understood a fact that I had brushed off earlier. He had known we were there the whole time and was expecting people. Preferably healthy, young individuals to get the best results.

We were sent to him on purpose so that we could get turned into Splitters.

I stuffed the products into my backpack and ran to where I had left Sarah. When I got there, she wasn’t in the storage room anymore. I heard a scream, suddenly, and chased after it. It was a girl screaming, so unless Kallar had people in here that he didn’t tell anyone about, it was Sarah.

I busted the door down and rushed into the room where the screams were coming from. Sarah was strapped onto an operating table by leather restraints. She was straining against them, but she simply couldn’t break them. Kallar was in a surgeon’s outfit and was readying surgical equipment. Scalpels, Petri dishes, and tweezers.

“Hey! What are you doing?” I yelled.

“I thought I locked that door!” Kallar muttered.

“The locks here are all rusted,” I said as I walked toward him, baseball bat raised.

“HEY! Don’t do anything you’ll regret, Caleb!” Kallar said.

“We did that when we walked into this place. You’ve been waiting for us! I bet the phones here really do work, it’s just that you shut them all down so that you can control who communicates with who on the outside!” I accused.

“Well, you’re a smart cookie. You and the girl are my perfect donors!” Kallar revealed.

“What?” I asked.

Sarah was still struggling to get out of her restraints, and I shot her a look that said ‘not yet’. She understood and stopped trying to get out as vehemently. She couldn’t simply stop trying to escape, otherwise, Kallar would catch on. She needed to look like she was struggling, but losing the will to fight.

“I’m supposed to extract her sex cells, combine them with yours, and grow the fetus, injecting small amounts of Splitter DNA along the way,” Kallar explained.

I was speechless. I looked at Sarah, and she was trying harder than ever to get out of her bindings and leave. I smashed the buckle that held the restraints on her left arm, allowing her to undo the bindings on her right arm herself. Once she had undone the binds on her legs, we both stood at the door.

“You’re fucking sick. What, you think introducing Splitter DNA will make it a smoother transformation?” Sarah asked.

“Yes and no. There will be no need for a transformation. The fusion will be born with its Splitter traits already manifested. It will be the ultimate form of humankind. It will be able to take in what makes it stronger and expel the weak from society. It will be … The Chameleon!” Kallar said.

While Kallar was going on and on about his perfect creation, I swung at him and caved his head in. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t something I’m proud of, but I did it. It looked like the skin of a grape with his brains splattered all over the floor behind him, his corpse sprawled across the floor at strange angles.

“Holy fucking shit!” Sarah screamed.

I turned to look at her. She was looking at me like I was crazy, but if I allowed Kallar to keep going, he’d probably win against me. My hand was throbbing as the blood rushed under my burns.

“Come on, we’re leaving!” I shouted, and we rushed to our temporary room.

We grabbed our things and set off. Sarah and I sprinted to the soundproofed room that he had told us the Splitters’ origins in. We were about to make for the door when I saw a flashing set of numbers in my peripheral vision.

I stopped and looked at them properly. They weren’t just numbers, it was a countdown. It also said ‘TIME UNTIL DETONATION’ on it, so I got the message.

“Sarah, stop. This place is gonna blow in two minutes. There’s no hope for us to get to the surface in time,” I said, shrinking in on myself.

I sat down, accepting defeat. Apparently, Sarah wasn’t having any of that, and she kicked me for being stupid.

“Do you think that we should just sit down and die? Fuck no! We have been up against the odds this whole time and we’re still alive! Do you know how crazy that is? I think that we should at least try, don’t you?” Sarah said.

I felt a surge of something. Was it admiration? Respect? I thought it might’ve been my old crush for a second, but I pushed that down and stood up.

“Yeah. How are we going to get out, though?” I asked.

Sarah looked around for things that could help, and I thought back to our travels around the facility. What could’ve been useful to us now? I thought for a few moments until I remembered an idea I had about the entrance our group had used during our first journey into the bunker being an unused elevator shaft.

I voiced that thought and got a look of pure amazement from Sarah. We sprinted all the way to where we approximated the shaft’s bottom entrance was. We found it in about thirty seconds, meaning we still had about one minute left. We got in and the doors closed.

“What floor would you like to go to?” an artificial voice asked me.

I was too nervous to nerd out about how cool it was that the government had invented that kind of technology when it was only now becoming even a little bit commonplace.

“Um, take us to the very top!” I yelled.

The elevator complied and started taking us up slower than I would’ve liked, but it was getting the job done. By my guess, we had about forty seconds until the whole facility went up in flames.

“CAN’T YOU TAKE US ANY FASTER?” Sarah was hyperventilating.

I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Breathe, Sarah! Breathe!” I told her.

Sarah started doing small breathing exercises in the corner while I examined the control board for the elevator.

“What speed setting would you like to move at?” the voice asked, its calm tone actually bringing me down a bit and helping me focus.

“The fastest setting!” I shouted, and it was like the whole world tried to come and punch me in the face.

The speed of the elevator rapidly shifted, and the difference in the speed was so great that I was pulled down, my legs not being strong enough to keep me up under that kind of stress. I fell to the floor in an instant, and so did Sarah. I crawled over to her and told her to hold on, as I knew what was coming next.

I was sure that the elevator wouldn’t be able to stop itself when it got to the top, and I couldn’t see the writing on the walls that indicated what levels we were on as they all blurred past, and that was when I realized that it was going to be worse than I thought.

It was only a few moments until I felt the resistance of the ceiling of the shaft give out, and we went flying through the air as I heard the countdown sound from inside the facility. I also heard the Splitters climbing the walls of the shaft, so we were pretty much fucked if the blast didn’t kill them.

Our elevator landed on the ground with a loud CRASH and I heard screams. They were distinctly human sounds, so I climbed out of the elevator, helping Sarah out after me, and ran towards them.

I saw both our families standing next to the blown-out hatch that leads to the elevator shaft. We started running toward each other, but I was still concerned about the Splitters and the incoming explosions.

“Everybody, get back! It’s gonna--” I didn’t get to finish my sentence as flames erupted from the hole in the ground, and everybody was pushed back.

My vision was fussy for a second. It was always just a bit fuzzy from when I had accidentally been drenched in a Splitter’s fluids. I knew I would have vision problems for life, and my hand would probably always be weaker than the undamaged one. I hadn’t seen my face yet, but I was sure there was a long scar running across my face from my left temple to the bottom right of my jaw, spanning the width of a couple of inches by the textures.

Then, the Splitters came. They were sooty and black and smelled like roast chicken, but they were alive, and that was bad for everyone. I quickly rushed to the one person I didn’t recognize, a police officer. I grabbed his gun and aimed it at the creature.

“Whoa, kid!” he yelled, but I didn’t care, because these fuckers needed to die that very second.

I wasn’t going to let them kill us now, after everything Sarah and I had been through. I shot at the Splitter that used to be Ryan, and it roared at me with its exposed maw. I shot it twice in the pink muscle and brain tissue that I knew was just above the roof of its mouth.

The thin Splitter dropped dead. I couldn’t stop now, though. My scarred hand was starting to throb from the firing of the gun, but I pushed through that pain and kept attacking the bigger, stronger Splitter. The original.

I didn’t know who this thing originated from, but it didn’t matter anymore. That person was dead, and all that mattered was that this thing joined him, preferably soon. I kept aggressing, firing three times at it to get it to expose itself, but it seemingly knew about its own inferiorities and kept its jaw shut the whole time.

This was the last resort, but I unclipped my baseball bat from my backpack. It had scorch marks on it, which made me wonder how powerful that explosion was really supposed to be. I’m sure the chemicals had to be old, but I wasn’t sure how all of that worked in the first place.

I ran at the Splitter with my bat in hand and leaped with my swing. My bat and I came down at the same moment, giving my blow extra power. The Splitter got angry and yelled something at me in some language that I didn’t understand.

Now was my chance. I jammed the gun into the thing’s mouth and pulled the trigger, watching as it fell to the ground in a heap. I grinned but felt that hand of unconsciousness over me like I had the first time I defeated a Splitter.

I passed out again.

I woke up in a hospital, and I was fully healed. It was supposedly the next day, but I was allowed to see my scars. I was right about my face, spot-on, in fact. I had already seen my hand, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that I had sustained hairline fractures along my forearm from my already injured hand firing the gun in rapid succession.

Nobody would believe us when we talked about the Splitters. Our families did, of course, though it didn’t count because they had seen them with their own eyes as well.

I guessed we’d just have to live our lives, knowing things that nobody else could hope to discover. I hope by writing this all down, that I’ve made a believer in just a few, because that’s more than I could have ever dreamed of accomplishing. To all of you believers out there, be aware, that belief itself is a force stronger than any foe. If you are challenged, the belief that you can make it through is all you need to make it so.

[dexhopper]

Eli’s Monologue

(The context here is that the character, Eli, has just been drafted to a program where superhumans undergo training to act as law enforcers. When questioned on what kind of role model he wants to be, he answers with this little ditty.)

There’s a process that all Supers go through. Once they manifest powers, they’re put on a list. That list is split up into two smaller, more precise lists. One for Supers who can become the kinds of heroes that we see on TV, and one for Supers who can’t. Obviously, I’m on the former, what they call the Whitelist. My powers are useful, showy and easily recognizable as mine. I’ve only ever known one other Super, and he was on the Blacklist, the list for Supers with obscure, subtle powers that wouldn’t look good on the news, or are just straight up deadly. My own brother was on the Blacklist.

My brother, Jackson, was something of an oddball, even in a family with two Super kids. He was withdrawn, shy and skittish even around family. Looking back on it, I’ll say with certainty that it was because of his powers. See, Jackson was older than me, which meant that he manifested powers first. That was how we’d known to test me for it in the first place. When Jackson manifested abilities, however, they weren’t good. He could leech the energy from people to empower himself. It usually left the victim—that’s the word they always used, victim—drained of stamina, strength and mental ability. It basically put people into a coma, sometimes for good, and Jackson retained all of their physical strength while they were out. Jackson always wore gloves in my memories of him, and I don’t need two guesses to know why. It was activated on touch, and it wasn’t voluntary. That’s why he had run away a bunch when he was younger, and why he was always a more distant member of the family.

The day the Handlers came is the first time I remember Jackson having any expression playing on his face other than terror. There was relief, but there was also anxiety and fear. Jackson knew what they were going to do. They took him away for tests. When they all concluded that it was impossible for Jackson to function in regular society, they took him away for good and said they’d ‘try to make sure he doesn’t do anything he’d regret’. It was an obvious lie. When they took him away, a few of the Handlers stayed and checked me for signs of being Super. I had all of them, naturally.

It was then that they came up with the SSIT. The Superhuman Sibling Improvement Theory. The theory states that siblings that are Super have powers that play off and improve each other. Jackson and I both build up energy to empower ourselves, but Jackson had to get that energy from something, someone, whereas I’m able to just generate energy on my own. Whatever part of my DNA that gives me these powers saw what could’ve gone wrong with me, what did go wrong with Jackson, and changed itself to rewrite the bad stuff. I got the improved version of my brother’s power. He got locked away. That’s why I’m here.

I don’t have any grand goal, I don’t want to change the system; I just want to make sure that my powers are worth it. I need to make it so that my brother isn’t rotting behind iron bars for nothing. I’m here to justify my own existence, as well as his sacrifice. I’ll be a hero, and there’s nothing that can stop me. Not even you kicking me out of this program. So, should we get started?

[dexhopper]

Split City Sins (Part 2)

Now, I know what you might be thinking about this, but I went back to the bunker as soon as I could. It may have been curiosity, or it may have been stupidity, most likely a combination of the two, but the thing I knew for sure was that I had to know that Ryan and Hurley were safe. It was against the mindset that my mother had worked so hard to instill in me to leave them behind.

Hours later, I was standing at the door to the underground bunker again, checking the time. The sun was setting, so I didn’t need much confirmation, but it was a habit. I was on the outside, but that was soon going to change. I steeled my nerves and opened the door. It was like walking into a room where they store frozen meat, except the meat down there is very much alive. I know. I’ve seen it.

I had a metal baseball bat clipped onto my backpack, and it was too cold against the skin on the back of my neck.

As I stepped inside, I heard a voice behind me. I recognized it and turned around to see Sarah standing there, hands in her coat and looking at me like I was some sort of psychopath. Considering that I was about to willingly go back into a shutdown, underground government office with a monster roaming around inside that might’ve already eaten my friends, maybe I was.

“You’re going back down,” she said.

“Yes. I can’t let Ryan and Hurley be killed because of my inaction. It goes against everything that I am,” I clarified.

“Well, then. That makes two of us,” Sarah replied, picking up the backpack that had been lying next to her.

“What? No, you can’t come back in with me. It has to be me,” I told her, but she wasn’t stopping.

“Why is that?” she asked.

“You made your choice, that’s why!” I yelled. I hadn’t meant to, but it just came out.

Sarah was stunned.

“Jay couldn’t’ve made you leave if you didn’t want to. You let him drag you out of that bunker and go home like our friends aren’t stuck down there. Maybe they’re dead, but I’m not taking that chance. I need to make sure that they aren’t hurt. If they’re dead, then I’ll probably be killed, but if they’re alive, I can make sure they stay that way, and I’m not passing up that opportunity!” I rambled.

“I understand. I’ve come to make amends with you, Ryan, and Hurley. I feel horrible about what I did, and I want to correct it if I can. That means going with you, so I’m coming whether you like it or not,” Sarah said, locking eyes with me.

We were the same age, but her emotional maturity sometimes made me think she was a few years older. Jay was also very stable, but that was because he had the emotional range of a two-year-old, and he was disqualified from compliments tonight.

The twins, as similar as they were, were also quite different, more and less mature, and ultimately, I got along better with Sarah. That said nothing of their interests and hobbies, simply that Sarah was more agreeable and more likely to come to a compromise instead of arguing the point for hours until we both lost.

I clicked my stopwatch to time our adventure and we went in. It was cold, maybe even colder than before, and it only got worse as we went further, deeper into the building, descending via the stairwell into what was my personal heaven and hell at the same time. It was a beautiful chance to see something similar to the urban legends and creatures that I studied like a religion, but it was also a prime chance to be killed by an amalgam of beings that were simply not supposed to exist in the same body.

After about half an hour of walking down the stairs, we came to a stop at sub-level thirty, the place where we had been trapped the night before. I opened the door to the office space and saw it exactly as it had been. We made our way, making the exact opposite turns that we had last night to get back to the door to what I assumed was a decommissioned elevator shaft. We had entered through this elevator shaft last night, and our two missing party members had gone missing from the platform outside of sub-level thirty, so that was our first stop.

We reached the locked door that had split our group, and I was still unable to open it by myself.

“You got any ideas on how to open it?” I asked, looking around for long, thin objects.

Sarah got closer to the door and inspected the lock. While she did that, I was walking around trying to spot something I could pry the door open with, like a slat or something.

“From the looks of it, this lock is pretty old. If you hit it with your bat it’ll break,” Sarah said, stepping away from my target.

I rolled my eyes as a thought came to me.

“Great, Jay’s idea was right. I feel cheated,” I said, clasping the bat with both hands.

I raised it above my head and brought it down hard. I heard the sprinkling of metal on the floor before I could turn my head down to see it. It shattered like glass, the steel having eroded over the forty years between when it was last used and now.

Carefully pushing the door open, I saw that Ryan and Hurley’s things were gone. There wasn’t a sign that they were ever there, and I thought that maybe they had taken the chance to get out and climbed back up, but there would be crumbs since I knew that Ryan was spilling them all around him while he ate some of the food we brought with us. There wasn’t anything. Someone or something had cleaned it.

That caused me to start a small freak out session on that platform. Was that monster intelligent? Were there still people down here? Did the boys clean it before they left, and are currently hanging out at an ice cream shop, wondering where I am? That seemed right, given my luck lately.

I showed the scene to Sarah, and she was stumped. I pulled a flashlight from my backpack and shined it around, trying to look for anything that might help, when I saw it. The monster. I almost missed it, but I saw that it was clinging to the wall in front of me, looking at me with a sly grin, almost like it was expecting me.

Shining my light back on it, I saw what it looked like. Before, I had only seen its face, but now I was seeing all of it, and it was absolutely horrifying. I had the head of a man, barely, and the unhinged jaw with yellow, rotted fangs was the same as before. I saw that most of it was normal human biology, only the limbs had been further modified.

The thing had scars running along its body. The four most prominent scars ran from the corners of its mouth along its cheeks, and down its neck in the case of the bottom ones. It looked like they were barely staying there, like keeping his jaw on his face was a conscious effort.

It had claws, sharp enough to cut through steel to allow it to cling to the wall like that. Its hands were far larger than any human could be, and its feet were the same. I guessed that it allowed the creature to move faster and, hopefully not, hit harder.

The rest of it was lanky and pale, as you would expect from a creature that had been locked underground for four decades. We made eye contact and I froze. It had the same blue eyes as Ryan. I distinctly remembered that the creature had glowing, powerful yellow eyes, but this thing’s eyes had the exact same shade that I had never seen anywhere but in my friend’s eyes.

The thing that used to be Ryan skittered away, climbing further down the elevator shaft and retreating into the darkness where we couldn’t see it. My legs gave out. I dropped to the ground and my hands were shaking.

“Ryan, come back!” I mumbled, but Sarah heard it just fine.

“What? You’re not making sense. You need to calm down and breathe, Caleb. Breathe,” Sarah said, holding my hands still.

“I saw it last night, and the thing’s eyes were yellow. This new one has blue eyes, Ryan’s blue eyes!” I told her once I had calmed down from my panic attack.

“Shit. What do you think that means?” Sarah asked, dumbfounded.

“I don’t know. Maybe this thing is a mimic or something,” I offered.

“What is that?” she asked again.

I sat up and leaned against the wall, pulling my backpack onto my front and rifling through it.

“It’s a creature that, once it kills something, can mimic aspects of a living thing. It might be a few individual parts of that being, or it could simply change its shape into the thing it killed. It could’ve killed Ryan and Hurley and mimicked some of their traits, like Ryan’s eyes, but I didn’t see any other differences in it from last night to now. It’s skinnier, I guess, but …” I trailed off.

“Ryan was practically a twig,” Sarah recalled.

I didn’t like where this was going.

“You aren’t saying that you think that’s Ryan and there are two of those monsters running loose in this bunker, are you?” Sarah asked, standing up.

“No,” I answered.

“Good. I’d think you’re going crazy if you did,” she said, chuckling slightly.

“I think there’s three,” I clarified.

Sarah groaned and started walking back to the stairwell.

“Well, then. I think the best thing we can do in this situation is to leave and never come back,” She told me, lingering at the doorway.

“I need to know,” I said back.

She paused.

“What? I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I thought you said that you want to stay, like a crazy person,” Sarah called me out.

“I know it’s insane, and I know that you don’t want to stay here anymore. I don’t want to either, but I need to know what’s happening here. If I don't, it'll eat me alive until I come here again, and I don’t want to explain to my parents when I’m caught sneaking out a third time in less than a week,” I explained.

She seemed conflicted, but I didn’t and couldn’t know what was going on inside her head. I wasn’t some supernatural creature, able to lurk in the dark and invade peoples’ minds. I was me, and I was going to do what I could to find out what they were so I could end them, finally putting the bunker to rest properly.

I voiced that thought, and it got Sarah to resign herself to accompany me on my journey deeper into the bunker. I stood up and we hugged out our frustrations. It was kind of awkward for me, to be this close to a girl twice in as many days, but I was able to get over it.

We got to the stairwell, and I knew that the sun had set all the way, and it was now as dark as it was in here as it was out there. I cracked a glow stick and we started going down the stairwell.

We got another ten levels down before realizing that we still couldn’t see the bottom. Sarah and I stopped and discussed our options for sleeping. We could either sleep on the cold, hard floor or we could find a staff room somewhere and use the couches they could have. I would definitely like a few pillows over laying down on steel or linoleum, so we agreed to find a staff room and camp out there. Their food wouldn’t be good if there even was any, but we were lucky that I brought food.

The problem was that, as we came to find, I had only packed for me, so we only had enough food for one person to last them a week, if they were practically starving themselves. What we had was enough to last the both of us three days if we ate even a few bites of it each day.

On sub-level forty, we got the door open and quickly rushed inside. We barricaded the door with a few couches and cabinets. Once we were sure that none of the monsters could break-in, we got comfortable. We made sure to make as little noise as possible as we set up our sleeping places.

We sat on the ground and I pulled out all the food we had so that I could properly ration our portions.

“What do you want out of this?” I asked, pointing to my Snickers bar, a bag of Skittles, a can of already baked beans, and an apple.

Sarah stroked her chin as if she was thinking. I knew she was disappointed in my planning skills, but she couldn’t be more disappointed in me than I was, since now I had to provide for a second person, something I hadn’t even begun to plan for when I was thinking the previous night.

“I think I’ll be fine with Skittles, chef!” she joked.

I laughed, but only to distract myself from the fact that Sarah was going to starve for the time we were going to be down there. I didn’t know how long we would be there, and I was sure that we were going to run out of food before we were done.

“Yeah, well, I’ll be over here with my Snickers bar, so take that!” I said, snatching the bar from the pile. It was probably the second most nutritious thing in the room, after the beans.

We sat like that, me eating the Snickers bar and Sarah eating half the bag of Skittles until we were ready for sleep to come. I think she hoped that she would wake up at home with this whole adventure having been a really bad dream. It wasn’t a dream, though. It was a nightmare.

Sarah woke up with a start at about eleven o’clock. She was sweating, and it was likely that she had a nightmare, but I found it hard to believe her mind could supply something worse than this. I guessed that she could’ve been simply reliving her own memories, but that only happens in movies and stuff.

After a while, I noticed that Sarah wasn’t going back to sleep, so I decided to try and help, however awkward it was going to be. I sat up, which startled her, which I immediately apologized for.

“Do you want to talk about what you dreamed?” I asked, leaning forward.

“Yeah. I had the worst nightmare. I imagined that we hadn’t found a place to sleep and that we had gotten found by the monsters, except there were so many of them. There were easily twenty of them. When I looked up, I saw that Jay had come with us. He was ripped apart, and then I watched you get torn to shreds,” Sarah told me.

I was horrified, to say the least. I felt some adrenaline work its way through me and fade as quickly as it came. I pictured myself actually trying to fight those things and being ripped apart, limb by limb until I was a bloody stump, watching them eat my legs until I died of blood loss or shock, whichever came first.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, even if it was just a bad dream. I promise that will never happen. Jay isn’t even here, so it can’t happen like that,” I said.

“It wasn’t scary because I care about Jay. It was scary because I care about you, too. You’re kind of my best friend right now” she shot back.

“What do you mean? We’ve only been talking because of your brother. If Jay and I weren’t friends then we wouldn’t be friends either,” I told her, slumping down into my makeshift bed.

“That isn’t true! You’re awesome! You risked your life to help your friends. I mean, they’re dead now and mutated into some weird chimera but that was still cool for you to even think about. Nobody I know would’ve done this purely out of selflessness except you. That’s incredible! I think you’re definitely friend material!” Sarah reassured me.

“You think all that? I’m just a guy,” I said.

“Well, let’s agree to disagree. You think you’re a greasy nerd, and I think you’re a hero,” Sarah plainly stated.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I never said the words ‘greasy’ or ‘nerd’!” I argued.

I regretted talking so loud after an extremely loud SCREECH right outside the door. It made Sarah cover her ears, and it sounded as if it was inside our heads. The door shook and with it the massive barricade we had made. It didn’t look like we were going to be getting any more sleep.

Sarah packed up all of our things and I looked around for a weapon. I saw a few things I could use to impale the thing with; a pool stick, a few regular kitchen knives and I still had my baseball bat, so that was more than a few weapons that were immediately available to me.

The door was ripped off the hinges and tossed aside, which was impressive since it was all steel. Heavily aged and probably rusty steel, but it was more than a human could do, so I was still scared shitless.

I saw that it was a different monster than the others, because of the creature’s piercing green eyes. It was also a couple of shades darker than the others, which made me believe that it was younger, and had less time to settle into its new form and fade from the tan color that Hurley’s skin was to the absolute white that the other two had.

It was also a bit thicker than the others, which fit Hurley to a tee. I watched as this new monster ripped our barricade down in one try, utterly crushing whatever confidence I had in myself. The creature was in the room, but I had hidden Sarah in a bathroom in the back, so she was safe as long as she was quiet.

It lunged at me, but with my bat in hand, I swung. I landed that swing on the thing’s head, and it sprawled on the ground for a moment, trying to regain its bearings. Using the distraction, I ran to the knives and picked up two, keeping my body facing the monster and sheathing one for later use.

The creature jumped at me, and I attacked. I jabbed at the monster with my knife, but the blade broke in half, which also twisted my wrist at an angle that it was probably sprained. I dropped the handle and clutched my wrist.

“Well, that was a bust,” I muttered.

The blade hadn’t affected the creature at all. It was like it was iron or steel, and not the crappy old military base variety, but the good stuff. I simply couldn’t hurt the thing. The monster knew this and got ready for the kill-shot.

The monster stood tall and opened its mouth. When I say ‘open’ its mouth, I mean that the thing’s jaw unhinged and the scars on its face, the same as the creature that once was Ryan, opened and unfurled to let me see the true horror of the monster, and I came up with the perfect name for the creature that I could put in my bestiary for paranormal entities.

The Splitters.

These monsters could unhinge their jaws and open up their mouths and throats to allow them to swallow a human whole. They were big enough to do the deed, and it was likely that their bodily fluids were corrosive, allowing for a smoother meal. They could apparently transform humans into another version of them, though how they did this was unknown to me at the time.

While it had its face open, I got distracted and impulsively poked the Splitter’s exposed flesh with my baseball bat. The Splitter jerked back and seemed to be in pain from the shivering that wracked its body.

I realized the Splitters’ weakness. Their skin was pretty much indestructible, but if you can bypass the outer shell and get straight to the flesh inside, then they were fragile. I guessed that the creature had adapted to be resistant to attacks, but it never was attacked from the insides, with things like poison, or a bomb implanted in the Splitter’s brain. Something like that.

The Splitter’s jaw hinged itself again and it roared at me. I had never heard a sound like that in my life. It sounded like it could have been words, but it was in a language that I couldn’t understand, and like multiple people were talking at once. It was very disorienting.

That allowed the Splitter to pounce. It tackled me and we both fell to the ground. The Splitter was drooling on my face. I guess it was time to test out that ‘corrosive bodily fluids’ theory of mine.

It stung.

Badly.

The stinging was unbearable, and I screamed bloody murder as I slid myself out from under the Splitter and let it fall to the ground. I could feel my skin peeling away as I pulled out the knife and stalked toward the Splitter with what I could only guess is an aura of murderous intent.

I felt the corrosion subside as I finally managed to get a good hit on the Splitter, sinking my knife upwards into its brain from the inside of its own mouth. It felt great to know that I killed such a powerful creature, but my hand was also burning even worse than my face, which was already fucked.

I screamed, victorious, and I passed out.

[dexhopper]

Writing Styles and How They Matter

I positively abuse free indirect discourse in my writing, and as such I feel that my characterization is strong. I like writing vivid personalities in intense situations, which makes the best parts of both, evocative character decisions and exciting set-pieces, shine brighter than they can alone. 

I feel that interweaving the inner monologues of my characters into generally removed prose injects emotion and gives the narration itself a sort of character, and I think that's super cool.

[dexhopper]

Split City Sins (Part 1)

My town is a strange one. It’s called Split City, though it isn’t much of a city rather than a small town, and nobody outside of town will know what you’re talking about if you ask for directions. We’ve been pretty much cut off from the world for forty years, the only connections and communications we have to the larger planet around us we have is the internet. Other than that, we don’t get visitors, new people don’t come to live here and nobody has ever left.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a military installation here in the 1970s and 1980s, though it was abandoned in 1981. There was something about a contamination report being bad enough for even the shadiest parts of the government to say that the base was a major health code violation, and it was all locked down. Some people say they hear noises coming from inside every now and then, but I call bullshit on them every time.

The people, chief among them being a boy my age at the time, sixteen, called Jay Williams, claimed that there was a monster in there and that whoever could go in there and come back out would be the bravest, toughest guy in the universe. They all claimed that they could do it, but once Jay said that they should actually do it, everyone backed out.

One of them was Jay himself. He refused to say that he was making stuff up, but he also refused to back down from his claims that he was actually going into the bunker. That made me want to see how far he would take it, so I obviously told him that I would go.

The second person to join us was, funnily enough, Sarah Williams, Jay’s twin sister. The two looked like gender-flipped versions of themselves, even though they weren’t fraternal. She was a bit less egocentric than Jay, and we actually got along, but that was where the differences ended. The twins got along like a house on fire, and they were evil geniuses when working together.

The twins were about five feet and six inches tall. They had jet black hair and brown eyes, with speckles of orange spread throughout their irises. Both of them were lanky, but Jay was a bit thicker, as he had been really into exercise lately. Sarah’s hair reached her shoulders and was a very wavy, curly mess. Jay’s hair was similarly curly, but it wasn’t very long, and he had a fade that didn’t look too bad on him. I usually didn’t like that type of hairstyle, but he made it work, somehow.

The fourth person to express interest in entering the military bunker was a younger kid named Ryan Deakon. He was like a little ball of energy, and couldn’t stop fidgeting. I suspected that he was ADD, but I thought it’d look bad if I asked him if he was special or something, so I didn’t say anything.

Ryan was scrawny, like a twig, and was the shortest out of the group. His hair was dirty blond, and it was shaggy, with choppy ends and one of his prominent bangs was cut short, giving me a feeling he did it himself. Ryan had the bluest eyes I had ever seen, and it kind of unnerved me if I looked him in the eye, so I avoided that when possible.

Ryan brought his friend, Hurley Rawlinson, along with him. Hurley was a bit pudgier than was average, but not overly so. He had the same haircut as Ryan, which made me think that they both did it on a dare or something.

While I’m going through describing our party, I should probably talk about myself. My name is Caleb. I was probably a bit taller than average for my age, rocking a whole six feet of height. I had chocolate brown hair, which was unruly, which meant that I often gave up trying to brush it in the morning, letting it settle in the curly, natural style that I had most days. My eyes were blue, and I had a few bits of orange in them, just like the twins. I was kind of bookish, being particularly interested in urban legends and modern myths. It was my passion, and I would say that I knew every piece of knowledge that was available to me. I talked about it often, which annoyed the few friends I had, and drove off potential new ones, so that was cool.

So, we had our party, but we needed a way to get into the bunker without being seen or getting in trouble with our parents. Hurley came up with the brilliant plan to tell each of our parents that we were sleeping at the twins’ house, and the twins would tell their parents that they were going to sleep at a different friend’s house, so we all had our alibis. In reality, these excuses were very flimsy as it was, and if even one parent wanted to do a reasonable thing such as call to check in on their kid, it would all fall apart, but it was the best thing we had, so we stuck with it.

Just like that, we were standing at the peak of the tallest hill in town, which was the entrance to the bunker. I’ve been saying bunker because it wasn’t a traditional above ground base; it’s more that the hill was placed there to mask the bunker. The bunker went deep into the ground, deeper than even the hill’s base. Nobody truly knew how low it went. I’d heard a couple of stupid kids say that the bunker went to the Earth’s core itself, and was trying to mine it for resources. It sounded cool, but nothing could withstand the heat, so it was a bust.

Jay was ready to get going. We were all in winter coats because we knew it’d be freezing cold inside. We knew that because the bunker had actually been opened before, but only once. Nobody ever went inside, but they looked in and saw something they didn’t ever tell anybody that they didn’t immediately swear to secrecy. He had described it as bone-chilling, in both the mentally scarring and the physically cold senses.

The twins had coats that were largely the same, with a few major differences so that we could tell them apart if it got too dark to simply look at their face and see how it was. Jay’s coat was red, like his scarf. It was a gradient, with the bottom of his coat basically black, turning into a bright red color as it reached the collar. Sarah’s was the same, except with green. She had a hairpin that was the same color, and I thought how cute it was that they had a theme, but wanted to come off as these badass urban explorer type people.

Ryan and Hurley both had simple grey winter coats on, but they were easy to tell apart due to their height difference. I’m fairly sure that Hurley was closer to my age than he was to Ryan’s, but that the only friend he could make was Ryan. I felt that, so I decided not to bring any of that up. 

Finally, my coat was black, only because it had white trims, giving me a sort of reflective vest look. It would be easy to center on me, and I was okay with being that guy for our group. We checked over our gear. We had our phones, flashlights, sleeping bags, blankets, and food and water stuffed into our backpacks. I had the food, Sarah had the blankets, Jay had the sleeping bags, Ryan had the water since it would be bad if one person had both and got lost, and Ryan held the batteries for our flashlights. Hurley held the portable chargers for our phones, and I was fairly sure that was the most important job of all. 

If we lost communication, we were fucked.

Not wanting to hold in his need for movement and energy, Jay opened the door in a massive, showy heave that went far over his head. The door opened upwards, so it was hard for him to do alone, and I ended up having to help him get it past the peak of its swing so that it would fall to the ground.

Once we got it open, we had to decide who would go first. I could feel the temperature drop by a good ten degrees when we opened the door, and I was sure it was much, much colder inside. 

We all looked at Jay.

“What? You want me to go first?” he asked.

“Obviously, dumbass. You’re the one that was talking so high and mighty about how they were gonna do it alone, so you might as well prove to us that you’re good as your word and go first,” I answered.

Jay sighed harshly and knelt at the opening in the ground. It was circular, so we could all have looked down and seen what he saw, but we didn’t. He gazed into the darkness that seemed to stretch forever downward, but it clicked for him to use his flashlight, like a person with a brain.

He clicked it on and it became so much easier, as if that was its intended use, to see better in the dark. Jay looked down again and exclaimed some words in French that I didn’t understand. The twins’ mother was French, and she had been steadily teaching them the language since they were about eight. They were sixteen, now, so they were pretty much fluent in the language, much to my dismay. They often used it to make fun of people in private, while saying it right to their face. Anybody could simply pick up a French to English dictionary, but that would ruin their fun, and that would be a crime against humanity.

“There’s a ladder. We could climb down it, but that would take too long, so I suggest that we-” Jay was cut off … by me.

“We aren't making a ladder-slide again, you know that James broke his leg the last time we tried,” I told him sternly.

Jay grumpily sat on the ground, mumbling something about me taking over from him and stealing the spotlight. I laughed a bit and took a look down the hole for myself and, true to Jay’s words, there was a ladder that stretched further down than I could see, but it as the only way we know of to get into the bunker, so we had to do it, and I said as much to the party.

“What? That sucks. I guess we have to, though,” Sarah agreed.

I went in first. Followed by Sarah, Ryan, Hurley, and, finally for some reason, Jay. It was almost like he was bullshitting us back at school. I laughed at the thought of his frightened whimpers being the thing that gets us found if we were to get lost down here.

We made our way down. The task wasn’t easy, because of our slightly restrictive coats and our backpacks stuffed to the point of bursting. Eventually, about five minutes after first climbing down, we reached a new level in the bunker, it seemed. The cold had intensified, and I guessed that it was now about fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

I decided that we should take a break after ten minutes. We had noticed that every ten meters or so there was a small platform that had a door on the wall. We had never stopped at one, because Ryan had asked if there could still be people down there, working, and that dissuaded us from checking what was behind the doors.

We sat down on the platform. Jay went to open the door to our left, but I stopped him with a yell.

“What, man?” Jay asked.

“Don’t go in there. We have no idea if this place is radioactive or something, and going in this deep is already uncharted territory,” I reasoned.

“Fuck that, I want to explore!” Jay said.

Jay threw the door open and waltzed through it, moving into the darkness. I tried to grab onto his leg, but he moved too fast for me. Sarah chased after him, so that was two out of our party that was gone. This was happening too fast for me to think rationally, so I chased after them as well.

The three of us ran down the corridor, shouting at each other to shut up and agree with whatever we were all saying. It was confusing for a moment, but Jay stopped in his tracks while looking back at us, but he was looking right at us. He was looking behind us.

I stopped and turned around, hearing the sounds of Sarah crashing into Jay, and saw that the door was slowly closing. It was moving, but I couldn’t see Ryan or Hurley moving it. I started running back to it, and as I was sprinting toward the shrinking light, I saw a head peek around the door.

The head looked like a person’s but it was white as a sheet of paper. Its eyes were beady, and glowing yellow. It had the fangs of a spider, and the thing’s jaw was unhinged, like a snake. I couldn't see any more of it than that, but I’m sure that it was a disgusting amalgamation of creatures that broke numerous laws of nature, science, and the universe.

The door closed just before I got to it. I tried to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge. I don’t recall there ever having been a lock on the door, but this thing had somehow locked the door from the outside.

“What the fuck?” Jay asked.

“I don’t know! There was something there, and it closed the door. It’s locked!” I said, trying my hardest not to panic.

“There was a ‘thing’?” Sarah asked.

“It was this nasty looking motherfucker with a jaw that opened way too wide. Its eyes were glowing and I think it smirked at me! SHIT!” I yelled.

“Well, we’re fucked,” Jay said, which didn’t help the tiny panic attack that was happening with me in the corner.

“No! We still have our phones, right? That means that we can call Ryan and Hurley. If they don’t pick up, we’ll call someone on the outside to come and get us! Do we know what level we’re on?” Sarah thought out loud.

“That's brilliant! We’re on sub-level thirty, and there’s about a thirty-foot gap between levels, so that means we’re about nine hundred feet in, give or take a couple of dozen feet,” I did the math. It added up to me, and Sarah wasn’t arguing.

“What? That’s insane! We can’t be almost a thousand feet underground; the hill isn’t that big!” Jay screamed.

“You have to remember that the hill is probably just a cover for what they’ve built down here. Maybe they wanted to start at ground level, but the people in charge said it was too deep, and they had to start a bit above ground to satisfy their bosses?” Sarah offered.

“That checks out. We need to see if we get any phone service down here, first,” I said, pulling out my phone.

We all checked our phones, and none of us could use anything other than a flashlight and the clock, which told me that it was midnight, on the spot. I almost laughed at how weird it was that we got trapped just as the witching hour came upon us. I didn’t laugh, though if I did the twins would surely think that I was having a psychotic break or something.

“Okay, what do we do next?” I asked.

Jay and Sarah ruminated for a moment, and they both looked at each other with glee in their eyes, which worried me. The only other time this had happened was when the two had been asked to participate in the demolition of their grandfather’s house after his passing.

“If we can get a big enough object, we could try breaking the door open. If not, we can try the same thing, except for sharp things,” Jay said.

“Exactly,” Sarah agreed.

“That’s insane and you both need professional help. We aren’t going to destroy this place. We need to find a safe way out and I think the only way to do that is to explore and look around to see if there could be an elevator or something, or a satellite phone,” I said, looking down into the corridor.

“What’s a satellite phone?” Jay asked.

“It’s a phone that doesn’t work with cell towers, it connects straight to satellites in orbit. Maybe we can use that to contact someone on the outside,” I explained.

“That’s a good idea, Caleb. I think finding proper communication gear is our top priority, not wrecking the place,” Sarah said.

“Agreed,” I said, shooting Jay a dirty, but playful look.

He returned it with a grin, though he still did look like he understood that he had to be careful.

We started walking down the halls and soon came to find out the place was basically a maze. There were a bunch of offices, laboratories, and bathrooms, but no phone that worked. No computers that would turn on. Nothing. We walked around for about two hours, probably, before we started getting tired.

Another ten minutes after we agreed that we should stop and get some rest soon, we found it. The stairwell. Jay jumped for joy and Sarah and I awkwardly hugged each other. We found that the door was open and that it didn’t require some kind of identification, so we might have had our ticket out of there already.

The problem was Ryan and Hurley. It was possible that they ran away, and that the creature I saw was just my nerves playing up and my eyes playing tricks on me in a low light environment, but I could swear that I saw its shadow, its snarl, its sickeningly yellow, rotted teeth. I knew it was alive, I could smell it. It smelled like urine and blood, with a little bit of shit mixed in. It smelled like it had been down here the whole forty years that the bunker had been locked down.

This thing that I saw, the monster, was probably the reason nobody came down here and was ever seen again. The reason the government had left it. It was probably what was behind the radio silence we received from the world.

I was sure that the government would know this thing existed. It would lock down the site and dissuade anyone from going within a hundred miles. It was the reason we lived in Split City. My town had been wiped off the maps all that time ago, and it was because there was a monster living under us.

I had one question left to answer, which coincidentally opened up so many more for consideration. What is this thing? Where did it come from? Was it made? If so, by who? Are there more? 

I realized that I had been in a sort of trance, stuck in my head as these truths came to me. Jay and Sarah were already looking up, trying to see light at the top of the stairwell. There wasn’t any, which meant that we hadn’t been down there for nearly as long as it seemed. I checked my phone’s clock again and it confirmed that it was only 2:15 am.

We decided that we couldn’t wait any longer, and started making our way up. By the time we had gone up about seven flights, I started thinking out loud. The silence was torture, and I could swear I heard breathing that wasn’t human, so I needed to distract myself or I’d have a heart attack.

“Do you think Ryan and Hurley are okay?” I asked the twins.

They were silent for a long time as we continued climbing the stairs to freedom. After a few minutes, they replied.

“I think we have bigger things to worry about,” Jay said.

“I’m not saying that we should just forget about them and go home, but we can’t go back down there. Not when the exit is so close, and that thing you described is still there, assuming it actually exists,” Sarah agreed with her brother.

“Do you think I’m lying about the monster? I saw it, Sarah. I looked into its beady little eyes and saw it blink, so it couldn’t’ve been a light on the wall or something. Besides that, do you really think that Ryan or Hurley would close the door? Lock us inside? I didn’t see or hear them, so maybe they got taken?” I asked.

“Got ‘got’? What does that mean?” she asked me back.

“You know … the monster got them. Killed them,” Jay answered for me.

“What?!” Sarah was worked up now.

I paused. I could see a door at the very top of the stairwell, now that we were closer. I told the twins of my discovery and we started running up the stairs, despite the burning in our legs and reached the door in about a minute.

We stood in front of the door, not daring ourselves to go through it. I sensed the hesitation coming from the twins and I spoke.

“Are we really going to leave them?” I asked.

They both looked at each other, seeming to perform a feat of telepathy since they seemed to come to a consensus without talking or my input.

“Yes,” they said in unison.

“Why? If we leave Ryan and Hurley down there, and they die, then that’s on us! Whatever that monster does to them will be our fault. You’re really okay with that?” I asked them.

“Yes,” Jay replied, without a moment to think about it.

I looked at him and scoffed.

“I know you are. You don’t have a self-sacrificial bone in your body. I’m talking to you, Sarah. Could you sleep tonight knowing that you left our friends to die?” I turned to Sarah, who looked like she wanted to cry.

“I … I-I don’t know. I don’t know what to do!” she cried.

“This is stupid, let’s just go,” Jay said, grabbing hold of Sarah’s hand and stepping forward.

I put my hand on Jay’s shoulder. We made eye contact for a second before he looked away and opened the door. As soon as it opened, cool, fresh air flowed into the small space. It was warmer the higher we went, and the outside air was refreshing. I wanted so badly to go, but I couldn’t do it knowing that I’d be letting the two boys still trapped inside die.

Suddenly, there was a loud BANG below us. We all looked at each other and came to a conclusion that was equally true for every one of us. If we stay, we die. If we don’t come to a decision, we die. If we leave, we live.

“They’re probably already dead, Caleb. Move on and move it!” Jay yelled as he sprinted down the hill with his sister at his side.

I conceded. I ran outside, bolted the door shut, and booked it down the hill with the twins. There were no pros to staying, and all the cons in the world. It was a simple decision to make after we heard that the monster was coming up. I knew that it was approaching from the sounds getting slightly louder as it continued. I knew that if I were to stay, I’d be dead as soon as I made that choice.

After that, we went our separate ways. The twins went home, and I made my way home as well. As soon as I was through the door, I received all the calls and texts I had gotten when I was down there. It was like a robot with a stutter. DI-DI-DI-DI-DI-DI-DING, DING, DI-DING, DING.

That was probably what let my parents know that I was home, and the fact that I did not try to make my movements quieter at all. They rushed me, my mother hugging me tightly and my father asking where I had been all night.

“Uh, the meet up was canceled. It took me this long to get home. I didn’t get any of your calls because my phone died,” I lied.

I went to my room after that. I searched the few websites there were for looking at installations in small towns and didn’t find anything. I also looked for the name of the town, the real name. ‘Split City’ is just a nickname we gave the town after we had all of our tethers to the world cut. I think the real name was something like ‘Lakeview’, named for our multitude of freshwater lakes that were a dream to swim in on a summer afternoon.

I didn’t find even a single mention of it anywhere. It was as if we didn’t exist, and the space we occupied in Idaho was barren. I didn’t see anything about hills serving as entrances to hidden bunkers, either. That part was a bit of a stretch since people saw them mount the dirt all that time ago, so I think it was kind of an open secret as to what they were doing with it.

So, now I’ve come to you. I’ll tell you my tale, and in return, I want you to do one thing. Never go to Split City. Tune in next time, when things get a hell of a lot weirder.

[dexhopper]

The Halloween Horror

I’ve always had strong feelings about Halloween. I remember my avidity toward the whole notion of dressing like my favorite monster or acting as my favorite superhero for a night. I also recall outgrowing my keenness on the holiday as I grew older. I became engrossed in my studies, following my goal of getting accepted into this fancy university that was fairly well known in my region.

I’ll come off as a huge nerd, but I’ll admit that it basically took over my life at that point. I put off honoring my promise to keep in contact with my friends from high school to get in a little more study time. It wasn’t fun, either. I was doing it simply to get into university so I could get my degree and get out.

My dedication paid off, eventually. I got my journalism degree and got out as quickly as I possibly could, and started doing freelance work almost immediately. A few weeks passed, and then it happened, only days out from October 31st, 2019.

I was asked to write about Halloween.

At that point in my life, I was vehemently opposed to Halloween. I simply didn’t see the point in celebrating a holiday where you pretended to be a character you liked from a book or a movie. Maybe that was me being a prude, I don’t know.

Anyway, I was getting paid a hefty amount, for a relatively new freelancer, one thousand dollars. I was blown away by the pay and dialed the phone number listed on the request. It rang for a few seconds before being answered by someone who sounded like they had just done twenty laps at a swimming pool.

They breathed heavily, and it sounded wet like they had a bit of phlegm stuck in the back of their throat. I gagged slightly at the noises but soldiered on.

“Hello! Is this … Nathaniel Winters?” I asked, checking back at the request to assure myself of the man’s name.

The breathing continued for a moment before the person seemingly snapped out of some kind of trance.

“Yes. I presume that this is Jason Moore, the freelancer I contacted about my Halloween party?” Nathaniel asked back.

“Um, yes, sir,” I said.

“Perfect. I would like you to come to my home this Thursday and experience the gathering I have prepared. I think it would do well to have such a highly rated journalist such as yourself write of my galas. I find myself wishing for more than my usual number of guests, but I see no other way of spreading awareness of my events,” Nathaniel explained to me.

I had noticed halfway through the man’s explanation that he had something in his voice that I recognized. It was soothing, almost attractive to me. I had never been attracted to a man before, but this was cutting it very close. It was so alluring that I almost lost track of what he was saying, but I regained control of myself and listened intently to his words, not his voice.

Nathaniel then told me of the kinds of things I would be documenting during my stay at his gathering. He never called it a party, except when he first picked up the phone, so I figured that he was an older man, trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about.

“You will note the energy levels of all guests, their moods, and their satisfaction while entering and while leaving,” Nathaniel said.

Okay, this guy wanted me to show that his parties cheered people up. I could do that. Probably.

“On top of that, you will be taking part in a special … ceremony,” Nathaniel told me.

“Oh? What kind of ceremony?” I asked, clicking onto a new tab to search whatever he was about to say.

“It does not have a name. It is an ancient tradition originating in my mother country in Europe,” Nathaniel said, almost sounding smug.

I wondered if he could tell that I was about to search whatever name he gave me to prove it’s legitimacy. I thought that he could’ve heard my clicking, but that was far too small a sound for the phone to pick up, so I really didn’t know.

A thought crossed my mind. What if he had eyes on me? That was ridiculous, however, so I dismissed it with a small chuckle and continued our conversation.

“Okay, then. Can you give me an address?” I asked.

There was a small sound in the background. It sounded like a man, similar to Nathaniel’s voice, moaning in the background. The man was clearly experiencing pure bliss, so I figured he was taking some kind of drug. Maybe that was why Nathaniel’s parties were so revered, he dosed the drinks with ecstasy or something?

“83 Chester Street,” Nathaniel told me.

I could tell that he had barely managed to say his address, so I wrote it down quickly to avoid making him try again. There was a strain that was so clearly audible in his voice that I was worried that Nathaniel would collapse, and since he seemed to be on the older side, I was worried that a fall could kill him.

When I heard a loud bang that reverberated through the space Nathaniel was in, I called his name. There was a moment where he didn’t respond, and I grew more nervous every time my watch ticked. I had always meant to get a new, quieter watch, but I guess I started tuning the noise out, eventually.

The call ended, and I was left to stew in my anxiety. Not for long, as Nathaniel quickly messaged telling me to make sure I was there at midnight or the fee would be reduced by fifty dollars for every ten minutes that I was late. That made me set four different alarms on my phone.

I rented a hotel room the day before I was supposed to be at Nathaniel’s ‘gathering’. I used the fact that I had a legitimate deadline for once to empower my writing. I worked on a few other projects while sitting in my room. They weren’t anything special, just stuff like small pieces about local competitions, and a very specific job for a lady that asked for a document that only read ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ for forty-six pages. I figured that writing it out all those times would be a living hell, so I found myself pasting the sentence for an hour.

The day finally came for me to meet with Nathaniel in person, as well as the rest of his guests. I thought it was amusing that I would be meeting everyone at the same time, even though I was only really there for Nathaniel. It was strange because Nathaniel had texted me again since the first time after he had mysteriously ended our call, telling me to not try to meet him before the night of the party. I didn’t know why he wouldn’t want us to meet before I actually carried out the job. Maybe he was ugly and was ashamed of how he looked?

I arrived at the address that Nathaniel had given me and saw that it was a decrepit looking warehouse. It looked like it had been abandoned for about fifty-odd years, and a quick google search told me that I wasn’t far off.

Roots were growing over the entrances, and windows were boarded up, likely to avoid squatters from breaking in and sleeping there. I couldn’t open the door at the front, because the roots had grown so thick, so I had to search the back for an entrance near the back corner of the building.

I opened the door, which still took all my strength, even though it was the least blocked entryway. After I had heaved it ajar, I slid in and saw that it was pitch black inside. I didn’t hear anything, either, which worried me. I could’ve had the wrong address, but I had written it exactly as I’d heard it, so maybe Nathaniel’s strange breathing and way of speaking had garbled it.

“Um, hello? Is anybody in here?” I asked the darkness.

I got silence as a response. All I could hear was that strange high pitched tone that you hear when it’s quiet. That, and my own heartbeat. It was fast, and I felt on edge because of it, which only made it rise in response.

As I turned back toward the door, I suddenly felt eyes on me. The hair on my arms stood on end, and I spun around to try and see if anything had moved. My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dark yet, so I was quite literally blind.

Without a sound, the lights turned on and revealed the space wasn’t as big as it seemed on the outside, and it was outfitted for a crowd. There were a few rows of metal chairs, along with a bigger chair, almost like a throne, facing them all, in front of a table with words on it I couldn’t read.

My eyes scanned over the small crowd, only about twenty people, for Nathaniel. My mind skipped over that there were nineteen chairs and twenty people, so it was planned that one would have to stand. Maybe they were going to take a place on the table? Maybe that was the ceremony Nathaniel referred to? I could wonder all night, but I had a job to complete.

I spotted Nathaniel in the crowd and moved toward him. The people closest to me groaned and hissed at me when I did so, which made me step back, flinching slightly. I thought to myself that all of the people in the room were looking at me strangely, but I was too frazzled by the strange occurrences leading up to this moment that my mind let it slip.

Nathaniel moved with ease between the crowd and came to rest at my side. Finally seeing the man, I was a little underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, he was strange looking, but not as sickly as I expected from the way he spoke on the phone and suddenly collapsed.

He was pale as a sheet of paper, and his skin was tight on his skeleton, not appearing to have any muscle at all. Nathaniel was bald, but I swear I could see a few strays that refused to die. His eyes were bright, but I couldn’t discern the color without more time. His eyebrows were sharp, rising and falling in an unnatural arc. He had yellow, rotting teeth, like most of the crowd, from what I could see, and his outfit was messy like he had put it on in a hurry and not bothered to fix any mistakes made along the way.

Nathaniel was wearing a blood-red robe, with a medallion hanging around his neck. The parts of the robe where it dipped seemed to be too deep to be possible. Those shadows held the universe, and it was pulling me in, slightly. I managed to steady myself, though I’m sure that everyone saw that I was becoming uneasy.

“Relax, brothers. This is Jason,” Nathaniel said, the tone of his voice sending shivers down my spine for some reason.

“Um, hello!” I called out nervously.

I was trembling. When had that started? I didn’t know, since meeting these peoples’ eyes seemed to do something to me. I would lose myself for a moment, like a small trance or something.

The crowd looked at me with big smiles that showed off their horrible dental work.

“Now, the festivities can begin!” Nathaniel cheered.

The crowd roared in agreement, and the sound almost deafened me. Nathaniel’s guests soon started talking among themselves and generally enjoying themselves. I didn’t get to talk to them about how they were feeling, because they were already there when I arrived, even though I was early. I also was discouraged from talking to some of the older guests by the looks they shot me when I approached them. Something between disdain and amusement.

I took the chance to silently scan over the crowd again. I realized that the age of the guest fluctuated based on the color of their robes. Black was the youngest, slowly getting brighter and redder until it was nearly the color that I had seen Nathaniel wearing, but not quite. I could tell that the oldest people there, other than Nathaniel himself, were a lot younger than our host, despite not looking even a decade behind him.

The younger men, they were all men, were the best looking by far. They were groomed, with their hair being a full, luxurious mane, and their eyes being a dull grey. They were a bit less pale, but still a bit extreme by my standard. I spent a year of my life inside, studying, but their shades were beyond my even at my worst. These were the men that wore the black robes and their hair sort of melted into it at a certain point, and I couldn’t distinguish where the hair ended and where the robe began. It was bizarre.

After about a few hours, I’m guessing that the guests had enough of the social aspect of the gathering, and were mumbling something about the ceremony that Nathaniel had barely told me about. Maybe this was what drew this crowd? I didn’t know what it was yet, but it must be at least fun, or they wouldn’t be practically begging to get on with it already.

Nathaniel moved with such fluidity that it looked like his legs weren’t even moving under the robes. He looked to simply glide over the ground. He weaved through the crowd and took his place at the big throne-like chair overlooking the rows of regular metal ones.

“Come, brothers. I have made you wait for longer than is necessary. You are indeed hungry, and we will feed momentarily,” Nathaniel said, his voice becoming impossibly loud without a megaphone or speakers.

I was both coming to conclusions, and as confused as ever. Nathaniel was talking about dinner, but there still wasn’t any food or water, something that I had noted when the lights had come on, but only really paid attention to once he spoke of eating.

The crowd kept stealing glances at me, which was worrying. I was thoroughly freaked out by now. My mind supplied that maybe Nathaniel was about to order a pizza or something, but I had a feeling that they were looking at their food, and that I wasn’t going to be leaving this warehouse.

Nathaniel stood.

“Come,” he said to me, his voice so enticing.

His voice sounded like it had on the phone. It was so smooth compared to his usual rasp. Nathaniel’s voice was like the best song I had ever heard, only there was no music, just Nathaniel, and that was more than enough. I felt compelled to obey him, to get him to talk more, and it took over my senses, overrode my will, and forced me to comply.

I took a step, but my body was numb. I had the vague feeling of somebody else in my head with me, but that feeling was brief as another took its place.

Fear.

I saw as Nathaniel grinned, his mouth opened in a sort of snarling happiness. I saw his teeth again, but in the place of his canines were fangs. As I was stepping toward the man, numbly moving through the aisle between the rows of metal chairs, the others started touching my arms as I passed them.

Their oddly affectionate touches burned. It was like their tender brushes were deep slashes, claws digging into my flesh and tearing my muscles, but when I managed to look, there were no gashes, no cuts, just the fingers of the mass of man-eating men.

I felt a surge of energy. Under Nathaniel’s control, I felt cold. It was overwhelmingly cold, and when I managed to fight against it, if only a little, I felt as if I was being electrocuted. It was a faint buzz at first, starting when I had first been taken over. It had been steadily growing, though I hadn’t noticed. But then, as I was nearing the table that had words I still couldn’t read, it was at its peak.

The buzz was loud, and painful, like a speaker that had the bass cranked up too far. I felt it reverberating throughout my entire body, but it was strongest in my head, and I felt like my brain was going to split apart at the effort it took to get it under control.

My whole body was hot, and all of my feelings crescendoed as I felt Nathaniel’s control break. Nathaniel could tell that something was different, I could see it in his eyes. They were glowing now, piercing the dark that had come over the room since I had been taken over.

I kept walking. I thought it best that they were under the impression that I was still under their will, even though Nathaniel was aware that something was amiss. I walked up to Nathaniel and knelt at his feet.

“Good. Now, lay down on the table,” Nathaniel commanded, but it didn’t work.

It seemed that I was permanently free from whatever power he had over others. I acted as if I was only now coming out of the trance and looked up to him in fear. I had guessed what these things were the second I saw the fangs, but I just had to know.

“You're … vampires,” I said, trying to not make eye contact.

“Hmm. That’s right, Jason. We are the last line in the region, and we do not intend to remain this way. To restore the vampire clans to their former glory, we need to feed,” Nathaniel said, and I felt him trying to restore his control over me but failing spectacularly.

I ran.

I didn’t want to be there any longer, and so I ran. All of the vampires stood and blocked my path. I froze, trying to look for a way out, but it had become too dark to see again. Of course, they could see in the dark, I remember thinking.

“Do not flee, Jason. You know it is for naught, boy,” Nathaniel taunted from his throne.

“Fuck you!” I hated how my voice broke.

I usually would’ve come up with a better response, probably some kind of hot insult, but I was kind of preoccupied.

As I ran to the side, toward the front of the building, I remembered that every entrance except the back one was boarded up and blocked. I backed up against the boards and tried to remember everything I knew about vampires. Incredibly strong, fast, and durable. Can dominate the will of anybody through the use of their voice. Are weak to sunlight, garlic, and holy relics.

I thought up a stupid plan that was doomed to fail, but it was the only thing I could think of, so I acted on it almost immediately. As I rapidly typed something into my phone’s browser, Nathaniel waved a hand to his group.

“I am the head of this line. I will do the deed of killing the boy,” Nathaniel said, soothing his underlings.

“Come on, come on, come on!” I muttered, swiping feverishly through pictures on google images.

Nathaniel appeared in front of me without ever having moved, and I screamed. I impulsively flashed my phone’s screen at him as a last-ditch effort. It was a picture of a cross. I said it was stupid, but it seemed to scare Nathaniel, though he checked himself over to see that it indeed did not affect him.

The vampires behind him started snickering, but they quieted down when Nathaniel lifted his hand, in an attempt to shake my own.

“You fought more than most,” Nathaniel said, inching his hand closer to me.

Gingerly, I took Nathaniel’s hand, and we shook like honorable men. His grip was impossibly firm. It felt like my hand was in a vice, slowly getting tighter and tighter until he let go suddenly, making my hand throb as the circulation to it returned.

“Before you kill me, I want to know one thing,” I stalled. “Why me?”

Nathaniel’s genuine little smirk was more horrifying than any of his supernatural abilities.

“You are the Golden Standard, my boy,” Nathaniel said like it was obvious.

"What?” I asked, legitimately wanting to know, now.

“There has been one criterion for vampires since the dawn of our culture. Do not feed on somebody well known. People will look for them, and they will look for us. We could not allow that to happen, so we all swore to never feed on a person that we know has people that will look closely into their disappearance. You are the definition of this, Jason Moore,” Nathaniel explained.

Satisfied, in a morbid kind of sense, I realized that my time was up. I was pressed up against the boarded-up windows, still, leaning away from Nathaniel as he inched closer to me by the second.

Then, it came to me. The solution to my problem. If you kill a vampire, all of the vampires that it created die as well, and if Nathaniel was the head of this line, I was willing to bet that he, as the oldest one there, had made the majority of the vampires that were in that room.

I had my ticket out of there, but now I needed a way to use it. I needed a way to actually kill Nathaniel that wouldn’t kill me as well. I recalled the basic weakness for vampires that everybody knows, sunlight. I quickly formulated a plan and put it into action, relaxing my whole body and straightened my posture, looking at Nathaniel from eye to eye.

He smirked, thinking that he had won. Nathaniel lashed out in my direction, throwing his arm onward me that I was barely able to react to. I ducked to the right and Nathaniel’s momentum carried him forward, crashing into the boarded-up windows.

As Nathaniel’s body collided with the boards, they broke. My survival was entirely dependent on hoping it had been more than six hours, and Lady Luck must’ve had a smidgeon of compassion for me that morning, because as the boards fell from the windows, the morning sun shone in the sky, and the light hit Nathaniel from the waist up, covering us both in its warmth.

I watched as Nathaniel turned to face me, his skin sagging around his skeleton.

“What have you done?” Nathaniel asked, his eyes liquefying before my very eyes.

The few hairs on his head fell off, and more than a little bit of dead skin flaking off of the vampire’s body. He was aging and decaying, dying from exposure, all while his court watched, and as I stood there, basking in my victory.

As Nathaniel became a pile of dust on the floor, his robes pooling at where his feet used to be, I concluded that they weren’t robes. They were part of the vampire’s body. That explained how their hair seemingly linked up with it seamlessly.

I turned to look at the vampires and saw that a few of them had already disintegrated. I watched as roughly seventeen of the twenty vampires became nothing but dust, blowing away with the breeze that came through the open window.

The three remaining vampires all looked at me with wide, fearful eyes. I guess it was understandable, I had just killed the only friends they had, as well as a lot of powerful vampires. I would be feeling pretty good about myself at that moment if I wasn’t still trembling from my confrontation with Nathaniel. If I had gotten any part of my half thought out plan wrong, I would be lunch meat for a coven of mythical creatures.

Considering how close I actually came to dying, I counted myself lucky. I had felt the tiniest nick on my cheek as Nathaniel’s fist had blown past me, and I knew that a nasty bruise was forming on my cheek, and I could feel the blood trickling down my jaw from the small cut that his claw made.

I stared the vampires down with all of the willpower I had left in me. I made sure to make direct eye contact with them, knowing they couldn’t do anything like what Nathaniel could, and I killed that man in front of them.

The three of them backed away from me with terrified looks on their faces. They looked to the door that was still open behind them. One of them stepped toward it, but the others stopped him.

“You wouldn’t want to be doing that, would you? Unless you want to go up in smoke like your friends,” I said, keeping up this uncharacteristically courageous persona.

I walked slowly around the vampires, who had clustered together in the center of the room. They were carefully avoiding the beam of sunlight the shone on the floor. Once I arrived at the door to the outside, I noticed that a tiny bit of sunlight was peeking through there as well. If I were to open the door, the light would shine directly on the remaining vampires, killing the last of them and ending the vampire curse in Portland, Oregon.

Not being one for grandiose acts of heroism, I simply kicked the door open and walked out, not staying to watch the vampiric young men turn to ash and die as a result of my actions. I had won, and that was all I needed to keep me going until I reached home.

The thing was, that I knew nobody would believe me. If I told my family and the few friends I had kept through my school habits, they would dismiss it as Halloween shenanigans. If I submitted the transcript of the events that occurred, what you just read, nobody would accept it as the truth.

Once, I tried to submit my transcript to a newspaper, but all I got was a message that linked me to a fast fiction website, so that was a bust. Believe me or not; I need people to know that there are vampires out there, and they may try luring you to their den in more and more unconventional ways. This has made me despise Halloween more than ever, and people who I know will never know why.