#CALEB AT WHAT POINT IS THIS UNMANAGEABLE

[essektheylyss]

I think we also need to talk about the fact that not only did Keyleth call Caleb, but she ALSO has a Sending Stone from him. How many Sending Stones does this man have. How does he keep track of them all. When will he simply TAKE AN EVENING TO COPY DOWN SENDING

[chiauve]

Day 5: Change

So I wanted to do Willsker Week but I got busy, so I’ll try to backtrack the other days but I’m probably going to fail. There’s gonna be a lot of teen Birkin and Wesker if I do. So jumping right to today’s theme and it’s rushed so very...rough.

--

Birkin knew something was wrong as soon as he walked into the lab. Wesker was already there, alone, which by itself wasn’t rare, sitting with his head in his hands in a state of tragedy. But that wasn’t what set off Birkin’s internal warning klaxons.

Wesker looked wrong.

Glancing up at the sound of Birkin’s entrance, he actually whined, “Birkin...”

And the true horror of what had happened stared Birkin in the face. The proof of it lay in chunks and swaths on the floor, golden and dead.

“You,” Birkin choked out, unable to stop staring, “you cut your hair.”

Understatement. Wesker's hair, always at least down to his shoulders since the day Birkin met him, had been horribly hacked, haphazardly cut with lab scissors by what could have only been a desperate, amateur hand. Worse still, Wesker’s wild hair had been kept in some form of control by the weight of its own length, but now, freed, it stuck up and out in all directions. He looked like he’d skinned a yellow, long-haired kitten and glued its coat on his head.

Birkin held the laughter in as best he could, well aware Wesker would murder him and experiment on the body if he let it go. But god he wanted to, he wanted to so bad it physically hurt.

He coughed into the back of his hand instead.  “Why did you...?”

“I was told to...” Wesker sounded so pathetic and lost, like he didn’t know. Birkin rankled at that sound.

“So? That never bothered you before!” The director had in fact outright ordered Wesker to cut his hair several times, and yet Wesker either ignored him or pointed out that as long as they tied their hair back in the lab, their female co-workers were permitted long hair, ergo he was as well.

“A bit different when it’s the damn CEO, isn’t it?” Wesker snapped.

“Is that what he said to you?”

There had been no warning, no fanfare, but suddenly Spencer himself was at the training facility, taking a look around. The director went into Igor mode, practically hopping about in trying to please his master as he guided Spencer around the mansion. His stop through the labs was brief, and the memory of it still made Birkin burn with fury.

He was the best here, the youngest, the smartest, even Wesker agreed on that! But no, Spencer barely gave Birkin a glance as he passed through, going straight to Wesker when the director pointed him out.

The CEO hadn’t looked pleased about something, and spoke shortly to Wesker but Birkin couldn’t make it out, taking minor relief in Wesker’s berating.

Wesker sighed, his hand flicking back, expecting to toss his hair over his shoulder, but redirected to run his hand over the shortened strands instead. “He told me to start ‘looking like a damned professional’.”

Well, Birkin couldn’t ague with that, Wesker still looked like he’d been buying drugs from behind a 7-11 some days.

“So...?”

“So I was going to ignore him, like he’d ever know! But I came to finish up and start shutting down the lab for the night when next thing I knew...” He picked up the scissors and gestured to the blond hair scattered across the floor.

“You just...cut your hair.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember doing it?”

“I remember it happened but...” he trailed off, his brows furrowed in blatant worry. He wasn’t going to finish, he’d never admit to it, but Birkin knew the rest: it wasn’t me doing it.

That happened a lot back in school. And like those days, Wesker would forget about it by tomorrow. He remembered doing it and therefore he meant to do it.

Birkin shrugged. Wesker’s stupid amnesia problems or whatever they were were his problems; Birkin wasn’t going to be slowed down or drawn away from his work, not even by Wesker.

“You did a bad job.”

Wesker glared.

“Give them here,” Birkin walked over to Wesker, hand out for the scissors.

Reluctantly, Wesker gave them up. Birkin directed him to turn the chair and stood behind him, sifting through the blond hair and snipping at the worst of the uneven tufts. Wesker’s hair was unfairly soft, and Birkin gently kneaded fingers over his scalp, for his own enjoyment as well as an attempt to calm Wesker, vibrating and tense in his seat.

He knew he was the only person Wesker ever let touch him like this.

“Since when did you become a barber?” Wesker said, voice still sharp but he sounded less distressed.

“You doubt my ability to do whatever I set my mind to?”

“I doubt your ability to care about anything outside your goals, and my appearance is nowhere near there.”

           “Like you’re any different,” Birkin muttered, running the pad of his thumb behind Wesker’s ear. The teen before him shuddered a little, then eased.

While Birkin would never consider himself a professional, or even particularly good at it, he’d been trimming his own hair for years. It started when he was young and whenever his hair had grown to “unseemly” lengths, his mother would give him a genuine bowl cut, with a bowl and everything. He loathed it. The look, his mother’s clumsy work, the heavy bowl on his head, all of it. So in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable, young William used everyday scissors from the drawer to snip at his own hair, keeping it from getting too long. Over the years he got better at it and could manage a decent enough trim that we went bowl free for months.

But a trim couldn’t save Wesker’s mess. Birkin evened it out best he could but the hair was so wild and unmanageable that no matter how he combed his fingers through it or where he tried to part it it just fluffed up like a pissed-off cat again.

The worst part was while the hair was still long enough to grip, he wouldn’t be able to get a good handful and yank anymore, and there was no faster way to make Wesker a writhing, panting…

“What’s the verdict, Doctor Birkin?”

“You messed up.” He passed Wesker one of the concave mirrors they used when dealing with Lisa Trevor so she couldn’t sneak up on them while their backs were turned. An addition after the second researcher got her face ripped off.

Wesker slumped, staring forlornly at his reflection. He would always state otherwise, claim he was above such things, but his appearance was very important to him. Sometimes he would even be beholden to the current fashion, as Birkin learned the day he walked in on Wesker altering a pair of jeans into bell-bottoms. He claimed it was for when he was out on the road; people were more willing to pick up a generic hitchhiking youth out finding himself, supposedly. Birkin didn’t know enough about the subject or care to argue the matter and let Wesker distract himself with stupid, mundane things.

Whatever gave Birkin the edge.

Not to say he never paid attention to Wesker’s looks, obviously, but his colleague’s penchant to look like a bargain-bin rocker had never been part of the appeal. The first time he’d actually looked at Wesker had been in school when he’d invited his roommate back home with him during Christmas, because he couldn’t let Wesker spend his break studying in peace and getting ahead.

Birkin’s father was a traditionalist who viewed family dinners as events that required everyone to be in their Sunday best, and Wesker, even in the black turtleneck that was the nicest thing he owned, wasn't going to cut it. If he wanted to eat, he needed to look a proper man, which also meant the shaggy hair was out. Fortunately, Birkin’s older brother, Caleb, was amused by the whole thing and loaned Wesker some clothes and showed him how to gel his hair back into a ponytail they hid under the collar of his shirt.

Without his stupid aviator sunglasses and the hair out of his face, Birkin got a good look at Wesker and for the first time noticed…

Wait. Wait wait wait. Of course!

“Come on, finish up and we’ll go back to the dormitory.”

Wesker glared at him through the mirror. “I’m not letting everyone see me like this.”

“Nobody likes you anyway,” Birkin said, shoving him out of the chair, “and you can just say it’s the new efficient look and they’ll be all ‘ah, right, Practical Al at it again!’”

“I hate that name.”

“At least yours is vaguely you. The fact that I’m the ‘scholarly’ one among researchers says what kind of people we work with.”

They went out the back to the residence just so Birkin didn’t have to listen to Wesker bitch all night and returned to their room. Once there he kicked out the chair to the desk and motioned Wesker to it while he rooted through his things. He knew he had some somewhere…

“What are you doing?” Wesker sighed, but he sat anyway.

With a victorious “ah-ha!” Birkin found his tin of never-used pomade. He was supposed to use it for when he went to church because his mother assumed he was still doing that, for some reason. He tossed the tin to Wesker.

“Oh,” was all Wesker said, turning it in his hands. He then stood up and headed for the door.

“Where’re you going?”

“Bathroom.”

“You’re putting it in now?”

“This,” he hissed, referencing his hair, “is unacceptable,” and then left.

Birkin shrugged, grabbed his most recent notes and necessary reference books, and flopped onto his bed. He didn’t notice Wesker come back until the older boy was standing in front of his bed, the band shirt changed out for the turtleneck.

“Well?”

Birkin sat up to get a good look at him. Wesker’s hair was completely slicked back, looking almost too stiff for all the fluff the gel had to pin down. It wasn’t a good job, too many lumps and gaps, and the back stuck out a bit. Wesker needed to get to town to get a proper cut. And yet…

“That…looks good,” Birkin said, and meant it, “You look older.”

Wesker only nodded and disappeared again, and Birkin went back to his studies, problem solved.

He expected Wesker to grow his hair out again, especially after they left the training facility and were given free rein under Marcus, but it never happened. Wesker continued to flaunt the dress codes where he could but for the most part one could never argue that he wasn’t professional.

Birkin liked the look, at first, but the constant use of hair gel meant that Wesker wouldn’t let anyone, even Birkin, touch his hair anymore.

[stories-and-sails]

Beasts (Short write for NaNo)

I knew why my parents were banishing me to a year of camp up in Dragon Mountains. It was all my tutor’s fault. 

“He’s unmanageable,” the white-haired man had insisted to my mother, stuffing his maps and scrolls back into a leather bag. “And I’m not going to mince words, he’s also dumber than a pile of rocks. No one’s going to be able to teach him to tell his name from a dragon dung, and that’s a pity. But it’s worse that no one bothered to teach him to do as he’s told.” 

I stood between my parents, who kept turning stern looks in my direction. They were great at stern looks. Mother seemed annoyed, and father seemed angry, and my care-aunt seemed sorrowed. I smirked back at all of them. 

“Wait,” my mother said. “We can’t hire another tutor at this time, we need you—” 

“Life is too short to spend in the service of idiots,” the tutor said, and then he left. 

I grinned at my parents. “He thinks I’m stupid,” I said, “but he’s not talking about me.”

Which is how I ended up sitting on my trunk at the edge of the camp with the hundred other hapless fools who’d been awarded a spot at this ultra-competitive shindig. 

“It’s an honor to get to train with dragons,” my father had said. “Many people would kill for your position.”

I didn’t answer him. I knew that lots of the bravest little soldier-wannabes of my age begged their parents to be able to train  for the dragon riding corps, aching to Prove Their Mettle, or Find Their Purpose, or Die Trying. I knew my parents didn’t hold out any hope that I’d actually become one of the riders, but they hoped I’d Figure Out My Shit or Die Trying. 

They might be leaning heavily on the Die Trying. 

“Look, there’s one!” shouted a boy near me, pointing into the sky. 

For a moment, all I saw were clouds, and then, all at once, there was a beast streaking towards us, jaws open wide to show off its teeth, wings stirring the air around us. 

I screamed and fell flat to the ground, which would have been bad news for my social standing at camp if almost all the other kids didn’t follow my lead. When I picked myself up, I could see that the boy who first spotted the dragon hadn’t flinched like the rest of us. He was eyeing the dragon hungrily, thumbs hooked through the straps of his backpack. 

A girl dismounted from the beast in question and smirked at the newbies, still trembling and covered in dust. “I’m Desi. This is Hol. Commander Gao sent me to welcome all of you. So. Welcome. It’s easy to tell which ones are going to be sent home soon.”

“Can I go home now?” I grumbled.

Even though I’d said it under my breath, easy to ignore, her dark eyes caught mine and radiated scorn. “Come now. Don’t be a coward.” Then she continued in a lighter tone, addressing the crowd. “You’ll be staying in tents to the left of the mess hall in groups of four, as have already been determined. You have fifteen minutes to find your own tent and assemble on the combat field.”

She rattled off the occupants of 25 tents, including “E32, Caleb of Snocap, Geovanny, Damien Underhill, and Ivan of Cold Bay.” 

Each person raised a hand as she said their name, and when I saw Geovanny—aka the spunky backpack boy with dragon-vision— raise his hand, I groaned out loud. “Seriously? Don’t put me with him. I’ll kill him within the week. I can already tell he’s obnoxious.” 

“Wow,” Desi replied in a deadpan voice. “You must be really good at spotting the obnoxious person in a crowd.”

Now I officially hated her too, and from the snorts I heard around me, I could count on hating everyone else, too.

I didn’t know who the other boys in my cabin were, only that Caleb of Snocap and Ivan of Cold Bay were likely sons of barons or lords, and probably rich prigs. To the surprise of no one, many of the recruits were of noble birth. Most of the families had to pull a few strings to get their kid accepted. The only difference between them and me was, most of them probably did it because their kid actually wanted an opportunity to face the business end of a dragon. I had no idea how the others, the ones without family names, had scored their place at the sleepaway camp for burning and maiming. It was enough to make Geovanny interesting, and if I didn’t already hate him, I might not have minded having him in our cabin. 

I hefted my trunk into my arms and started down the hillside to the tents left of the mess hall. The mess hall, as far as I could see, was the only real structure, wooden beams holding up a thatch roof. Everything else was temporary, tents and pavilions. Great lights of the sky, I hoped they didn’t decide to take this show on the road. 

It wasn’t long before I noticed a couple of boys jostling near me. They were struggling to keep up because they were dragging their trunks over the terrain, cursing and huffing all the while. 

“Are you following me?” 

The taller boy nodded. “You’re Damien Underhill, are you not?”

“Yes. I did raise my hand when she said that name, so, yes?”

“It is a pleasure to meet you. I am Ivan of Cold Bay, here to earn my family greater honor and pride by gaining a place in the Queen’s Corps of Riders.” 

I faked a yawn. “Wow. That sounds exciting for you.” With that, I turned around and started walking faster to find the tent. 

Of course, somebody beat me there. Little Geovanny with no last name was already standing in the entrance of the tent when I arrived, his arms wrapped around his backpack. No trunk. Guess that was faster. I elbowed him out of the way and set about making myself at home. 

We had a week to settle in before we were supposed to attend our first hatching. Everyone talked about the hatching in hushed voices of awe, and every time they did, I felt a crawling in my spine. We’d stand in a huge cavern, surrounded by cracking and splitting eggs, waiting for one of them to imprint on us or decide that immediate after-hatching nutrition was more important and start chewing on us. 

I did everything to get kicked out that first week. When we were supposed to run a timed mile, I waited until all the fastest kids had finished before I even started, so my time was something like twelve minutes. When we were supposed to be doing drills, I lazed on the grass until one of the older students found me and started shouting at me. And when it came to the history and comportment lessons, I didn’t even have to pretend to be useless. 

When that failed to get me kicked out, I decided to see if some old fashioned Being an Ass could hack it. Geovanny provided the perfect opportunity when he approached me in the mess hall, holding his bowl cradled close to him. “Can I sit with you?” 

I stared at him. He was always edgy around me and kept far clear of me when he could, so I didn’t know what his angle was approaching me in the cafeteria. Maybe he thought he was safer in a public space. Poor, naive child. 

I was sitting alone because everyone, even Ivan and Caleb, had already figured out that I was best left to my own devices. But I was going to need attention for this. 

“What do you want, little freak?” I asked loudly. 

He glanced around at the students starting to turn and look. “Maybe I can sit down and talk—”

“No. Just tell me what you want. Can’t you find someone else to tolerate you during a meal?”

He pressed his lips thin, then said, “Fine. I was going to offer to tutor you. If you want to last here, you’re going to—”

I pressed two fingers down on the lip of the bowl he held so that it tilted away from him. It would have slid harmlessly to the floor if he hadn’t over-reacted, yanking the bowl up and towards him as I removed my fingers. 

“I might be stupid,” I said with a sweet smile, “But I’m not the one wearing my lunch.”

Once people got the idea that I was bullying Geovanny, it took very little to fuel the fire, and by the sixth day of camp I was facing the Commander across his very own tent, waiting for my discipline. 

“I suppose you’ll have to send me home,” I offered, bowing my head in an attempt to hide how triumphant I felt. 

“You do understand what punishment is, don’t you?” 

I looked up. 

“As in, it’s not supposed to be the exact thing you’re angling to get? We’re not sending you home. I know you miss your family.” 

I snorted. He thought he knew everything. Why would I miss the people trying to sentence me to death?

“And that you’re unhappy to be here. You’ll flunk out when we’re actually sure that we’ve seen what you have to offer and that you’re not cut out to be one of the Queen’s Corps.”

“Sir,” I offered, “I’m horrible. I’d think that’s enough to convince you I’m not cut out for such a prestigious position. There are families that can actually make it worth your while. Why don’t you just wash your hands of me and simplify things for everyone?”

He watched me impassively. “Are you finished?”

I blinked. 

“Good. You think you’re so clever because you were the worst child your parents had ever had to deal with, but guess what? I’ve dealt with thousands. I’m not afraid of you.”

My mind scrambled for a response. All I managed was, “I’m not afraid of you, either.”

He shrugged. “You might consider that while there are families with more means represented here, your own family made it worth my while to keep you away from home for as long as possible. Have a good time at the hatching tomorrow.”

The hatching was at sundown. I didn’t talk to anyone all day, which was probably an improvement for them. The third-year students held torches and marched with us to the mouth of the cavern. 

“Damien Underhill?” It was everyone’s favorite Desi-who-likes-to-terrorize-first-years.

“What?” Lights of the sky. My voice cracked. I cleared my throat. “What?”

“Take the torch. You’re supposed to lead the class in.”

So this was the actual punishment. I forced my hand to rise and take the torch, but that seemed to be all I could do. I couldn’t force the blood to continue pumping through my veins. It had drained from my face and was thumping around my heart like a fist. 

“Go ahead, Damien,” she said, her voice falsely bright. “Everyone’s waiting. You don’t want to miss the hatching.”

The muttering started then. I needed to move, now. I sucked in air and it came too much like a gasp. Everyone could see me setting my shoulders and trying to gather up my nerve. 

“I think he’s freaking out,” I heard a third-year near the back mutter to her friend. And then it was a chorus of whispers, and the first snorts or laughter. This was making the grisly/toasty death waiting for me on the inside of that cavern sound almost appealing. But I still couldn’t force my feet forward. 

There was a shuffling in the crowd next to me, and I waited. Waited for someone else to take the torch and pronounce me useless and go in to find their honor or whatever they were looking for in there. And I’d be left out here, because I wasn’t looking for anything. You don’t bother to go looking when you know there’s nothing to find. 

I glanced over and saw it was Geovanny. Perfect, that he would show up in this moment. He’d lead them in, the torchlight painting the nameless boy as a hero, and it would be—

“Come on.” He put his palm at the center of my lower back and pushed. I took one jolting step forward, and then another. He kept pace with me.

“What are you doing?” I whispered. The rest of the crowd startled itself into motion behind us. 

Behind us, I could hear jostling and shoving, people complaining, “Hey. That was my foot. Wait your turn.” But no one got close enough to touch us. 

“I want to see the hatching,” he said. “You’re holding the torch.”

I had more questions, but none that I wanted to ask with an audience, so I shuffled through the mouth of the cavern. I could feel the air change around me from the warm mugginess of the summer evening to something cool and scaley-dry. I could sense the hugeness of the cavern, but I held the torch closer to myself. I didn’t want it to illuminate the walls and far off ceiling, and I didn’t want to see eggs the size of boulders all around us. 

I could hear them. The clicking and shifting. Fear tapped on the inside of me like I was the shell. 

“Hold the torch up,” someone barked. “I can’t see where I’m stepping.”

I tried for a caustic reply, but there was still nothing in my mind. Geovanny’s hand nudged my elbow higher. 

I tried to squeeze my eyes shut before I saw the light falling over the eggs, but I was too slow. I already had an image imprinted in my mind’s eye of dozens of eggs, some of them rocking softly, some of them cracked or chipped, the smallest the size of my head and the largest the size of our tent. 

I kept my eyes squeezed shut as the crowd around me gasped and shuffled out. I could hear their footsteps moving among the eggs, could hear them calling out to one another about how beautiful this one was or how close another seemed to hatching. 

“You should open your eyes,” Geovanny said. 

“You should shut your mouth,” I replied. I was annoyed that he’d been watching me. And that he felt like he got to boss me around. But I peeked my eyes open anyway.

In the flickering light of the torch, the floor of the cave shifted with the cracking and rocking of dragon eggs and the wiggling of limbs. 

“Oh my gosh,” a girl on my left crooned. “Look at this one. He’s adorable.”

I looked at the head of a dragon that had forced its way from the egg, and I let out all the air that I’d been holding inside of me. 

It was a small version of the arial burning machines. I could already see the sharp teeth, the glint in its eye, the coiling of its muscles. 

But yeah, it was also kind of cute. 

One minute, there was only one or two dragon faces to spy in the room, and the next, the cavern was full of writhing bodies as they slithered between the eggs and legs to find the human that they wanted. I saw Caleb of Snowcap bending over to pat a white-and-teal dragon that probably weighed over a hundred pounds already. Was that thing supposed to sleep in our tent? With me? Hopefully we’d be able to store them elsewhere.

For fifteen minutes I stood there, flinching every time a dragon wound itself around my legs on the path to the person it was really trying to find. As dragons and recruits united, the humans led them out of the cavern. I could hear the third-year students shouting their approval at each recruit as they came out. 

In the end, it was just Geovanny and me standing in the cavern with eggshells and a few dragons that didn’t seem interested in us as their human choices. I wondered if Geovanny hadn’t been picked because he was standing too close to me. 

“You know,” I started, “It’s really humiliating needing help from someone like you.” It had sounded more like an insult to him in my head, but saying it out loud it just seemed true.

He smiled. “Good, I was hoping it would be.”

“Is this normal?” I asked. 

“What?”

“Getting rejected by dragons.”

“Be patient.”

I hated being told what to do, but apparently life was full of things I hated. “You could have just left me outside.”

“I don’t like that,” he said. “I thought about it, but that’s not what I wanted.”

He was staring hard at the floor as he said this, and I was feeling annoyed for reasons I couldn’t figure out when he pointed suddenly. “Look!” 

 A few late-to-emerge hatchlings were shaking off the last bits of shell from their wings and tail. That red one--with the gold tipped wings. Lights of the sky, it looked terrifying. It looked like trouble. It was looking at me. 

“You got one,” Geovanny whispered as it pranced over to me, its head wobbling on a skinny neck. 

I forced myself to stand still, not to take a step back. “Hi,” I said to it, holding my hand down so it could sniff at my fingertips. “Hi, you weird little creature.”

Geovanny laughed, and I felt an actual pang of guilt. If there was one recruit at this sham of a training camp that deserved a dragon, it was Geovanny. Where—

“There he is,” Geovanny breathed. He dropped to his knees and held his hand out, waiting. I held the torch up higher and saw his dragon, sidestepping around the light, trying to make its way to Geovanny but too shy to take the final steps. 

I lowered the torch and waited with him while the little creature finally worked up its nerve. 

When we finally left the cave, all the other recruits and the older students had given up on us and gone down to the combat field, where they were celebrating the night by shouting about whose dragon was best. 

My dragon kept tripping me, trying to sniff at Geovanny’s beast, which kept darting just out of reach only to return and flick my dragon with its tail when she’d given up. 

“Look,” Geovanny smiled. “I think our dragons want to be friends.”

“I think our dragons want to be friends,” I repeated in a sing-song voice. “Honestly, you’re so—” I was about to say pathetic, but I looked at Geovanny and saw that my words had actually hurt him.

So pathetic. So stupid, to let me keep hurting him when he’d been in the position to hurt me, and he hadn’t. So obnoxious. 

“You’re so stubborn.” I finally said. “You’re really stubborn, aren’t you?”

He blinked, and most of the hurt was gone. “I know what I want,” he said. “That doesn’t always mean I get it.”

I tried to think of something to say that would actually sound like me talking, but I didn’t know how to be in moments like this. I couldn’t think of any moments I’d ever been in that were like this. 

So I said, “Thanks. For helping tonight.” 

He smiled all the way, and we walked straight past the combat field to the tent. I don’t know why he didn’t want to go show everybody that he’d matched with a cool dragon, but I hoped that everyone was writing us off tonight, assuming we’d be going home. I couldn’t wait to see everybody lose their heads tomorrow when we showed up with the coolest dragons by far.

[metaphysicalmatter]

Journal: Fifty

Alrighty, keeping the progress trajectory moving forward, I’m one step closer...errr, one step further. They both work here.

I started my next level practice exercise and it’s going well! I’m approaching this exercise the same as previous ones in that I am calling in the energy of whoever’s turn it is from the practice group and beginning as usual. But, instead of working directly with their guides, I’m asking for the allowance of a crossed-over spirit who’s associated with that person, to provide the spirit a chance to chime in, taking it from there.  The relay portion of the words and pictures has now shifted from Caleb acting as the point person to the spirit who is choosing to step forward. He’s still present during the exercise, but more so acting as a moderator to ensure order and organization.

The current flow and channels seem to be really clear and the message contents are coming through quite easily. I’m sure this is because of my repetitive practice and ascension but it’s definitely nice to be able to monitor and acknowledge adjustments. Because my clairvoyance is the newest ability to open, the visions have some catching up to do to align with the others. I have to sit with them for a few seconds to understand what I’m seeing, which is par for the course, but I can obviously tell more repetition work is needed for it to expand.  

The most interesting part that I’m noticing with this type of exercise is that each spirit has different personalities, mannerisms and means of communication, which are apparent as I sift through the message materials. And I’m finding quickly that I need to calibrate to those variances. Previously, since the communication was only ever coming from Caleb, he and I could create a custom baseline level to remain fluid. Just as we experience in the physical world, depending on that spirit’s previous physical life, their ways of communicating can vary but remain the same in the spirit realm: shyness, apprehension, stubbornness, eagerness, humor, etc. If you’ve ever watched/witnessed/received a medium reading, quite often the recipient will say something along the lines of ‘that’s exactly how they’d present this message, that’s 100% their personality’ (which the spirit conveys for validation purposes).  

Now that I’m advancing, this seems like the best segway into mediumship/spirit communication, though – I can ease into it as doing ‘more of the same, only different’. And it’s pretty exciting shit, guys.

Before I go, I had another thought recently that I wanted to quickly touch on.  As I’ve mentioned many times previously, I began this blog to share the full grit of this journey. This is not a glamorous gig, but the opportunity to ultimately help and heal others’ energy, hearts and souls – even a little bit – is worth it (although I question it often!). The energy exchanged in those shared moments such as vulnerability, healing, gratitude and love is enough to keep those with abilities operating. But, in order to keep my posts on more of a focused path of explanation and ground-level detail, I find that I’m leaving out a lot of my day-to-day struggles. I absolutely do not want to make my posts about struggle (any more than they need to be anyway), but I also don’t want to eliminate it just because there is progress in my practice. Much of the time, I wouldn’t know what to say because it’s daily, and it’s always something different and my head spins from trying to keep up. There are SO many moving parts, I barely know up from down most of the time. And, because the issues vary and because they are a regular occurrence, it also becomes near unmanageable to share. In order to keep someone fully up to speed, I’d have to provide an update of the happenings of my days…daily. And that’s just too much for all involved. And unnecessary. And exhausting. My main thought in this word vomit paragraph is that I still plan to be transparent and share what makes sense. I recall in the very beginning of my journey trying to find someone who would just be honest and share how difficult this really can be; just say it, it has to be happening!  It is happening and I’m always here to discuss it, especially since it’s more difficult to find others that will.

Together in light and love.

Aloha