#just as soon as my body decides to remove itself from the 'surviving' section and return to the 'living' section

[bee-snail]

To whom it may concern,

I'M NOT DEAD

[aion-rsa]

Vikings Ending Explained

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The following contains spoilers for Vikings season 6 part two.

Vikings has always been concerned with legacy: that of the Vikings themselves, and of Ragnar and his sons. It’s clear from the show’s coda – Ubbe and Floki side by side on a distant beach, contemplating existence as the sun glows down upon the endless stretch of ocean before them –  that the two ultimately are inseparable. Bound up in this spider’s web of myth and mayhem, too, is the fate and legacy of the show itself. How will it be remembered now that it is gone? In a word: fondly. 

Creator Michael Hirst has left us a show for the ages, one that transcends the war, blood, and murder that first drew audiences to its story. The closing run of episodes is at turns thrilling, stirring, chilling, harrowing, heart-breaking, savage, sensual and ethereal, and is capped off with a mesmerizing, mytho-philosophical finale that retroactively elevates everything that came before it, all the way back to the moment when Ragnar first asked Floki to help him sail west. So how does it achieve this greatness? And what does it all mean? Let’s break it down. 

Groundhog Deity

One of the central themes of the show is the cycle of violence and bloodshed in which Viking society finds itself mired, and the battle between those who seek to perpetuate it, and those who seek to break free from it. It’s a dichotomy that burns down through the wick of the show, and often rages within its characters, most notably Ragnar, Lagertha, Floki, Bjorn, and Ubbe. Season upon season, each promise of peace is swiftly pounded into the blood-soaked earth by the vengeance, skulduggery or megalomaniacal ambitions of a chaotic individual, faction or rival; the old ways refusing to cede ground to the new. But still the dreamers and visionaries struggle, against themselves, against the furious roar of tradition, again and again. This rise and fall happened so frequently throughout the show’s run that its rhythm caused some sections of the audience to grow weary. This repetition, though, this sense of helplessness, is largely the point (not to mention an accurate portrayal of the brutish life endured by most people in the Dark and Middle Ages), and one that’s made more explicit than ever before in the final stretch of the season. Like the characters themselves, we the audience must feel – truly feel – the suffocating hopelessness of it all before we can begin to appreciate the burst of light at the end. 

All throughout the series the Vikings’ thirst for war and conquest is cloaked in the language of fate, destiny, glory, and the Gods. In a telling sequence half-way through the final ten episodes, these justifications are stripped away to reveal the dark, very mortal truth that lies behind them. Ivar, Hvitserk, and King Harald reunite in a calm and peaceful Kattegat. All three are burnt-out, frazzled, and dissatisfied. There’s a real sense that “the age of the Vikings is gone” and that this is “the twilight of the Gods”. Harald and Ivar admit that there is no pleasure in being a King, despite it being a title both men have dreamed of and longed for, and for which they’ve lied, cheated, betrayed, and killed. In the final analysis, we can see – and finally they can see, however indirectly – that the great cycle in which the Vikings are trapped has been perpetuated not by the Gods – those great scapegoats in the sky – but by bored and angry men seeking in bloodshed distractions from a cold and brutish world whose quotient of misery has only ever been increased by their actions. It is especially sad to see Ivar churned back into this mill given the growth he experienced throughout this season, not only in being a caring, surrogate father to the Rus heir Igor, but in becoming an actual father after his body asserted itself just long enough to plant his seed in Princess Katia’s belly. 

Ivar witnesses two men in a public gathering-place squabbling over a trivial matter, and extrapolates from this that war is a necessary state for the Vikings, because in peace they fight amongst themselves. It’s patently obvious that the lesson Ivar pulls from this incident says more about his pain and psychopathology – his hatred, his emptiness – than it does about society at large. Ultimately, it is he, and Harald, and Hvitserk, and a million other men just like them, who need war. They need external conflict to distract them from their own internal conflicts and inadequacies. Never-the-less, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Ivar’s facile supposition is all that King Harald needs to hear. Before long, the three men and a ready-made army are heading back across the sea to England for a final confrontation with King Alfred and his Christian Saxon soldiers. 

“The Twilight of the Gods”

This climactic confrontation is, on one level, less a battle between two armies and more the continuation of the chess game Ivar and Alfred once played as children, as their fathers – King Ragnar and King Ecbert – cut deals and hatched plots in another room. 

In many ways, Ivar was always marked for monsterhood. He grew up with the fierce love of his mother, Aslaug, which she wrapped around him like a blanket made of steel. By over-compensating for his condition and physical fragility to such a suffocating degree, she left him isolated, conceited and angry. His father, Ragnar, was absent for most of his youth. Though Ivar had Floki to teach and guide him in the ways of the Gods, Ivar didn’t realize quite how much of himself had been missing until Ragnar returned and took him under his wing. Ragnar was one of the few men who seemed to have faith in Ivar’s abilities; who told him that he could be something other than a liability, a cripple, a joke. They journeyed to England together with conquest in mind, but when a storm sank most of their boats, Ragnar swiftly refocused the purpose of their visit, enlisting Ivar’s aid to kill the surviving members of their party (to remove all evidence of their initial intent) and surrender themselves to King Ecbert. 

Ragnar tells Ecbert to deliver him into the hands of King Aelle, so that Ecbert will not be blamed for Ragnar’s death, and the full fury of the Vikings will be directed at their mutual enemy instead. However, Ragnar has instructed Ivar to return home with news of Ecbert’s duplicity, so that both Kings will become the targets of the rage-and-grief-filled Viking horde. Ivar is the perfect capsule for this incendiary message, as Ragnar gambles, quite correctly, that King Ecbert’s sense of fair play, filtered through his Christianity, won’t permit him to harm or imprison a poor, harmless crippled boy. Ragnar thus succeeds in turning the Saxon’s Christian compassion into a fatal weakness, while at the same time teaching his weaponized son that love, violence, deceit, and death are so intimately connected as to be almost indivisible. 

When Aslaug died at Lagertha’s hands, soon after Ragnar’s death, it removed his only other source of love, cloying though it was. He took that love and turned a mutated version of it upon himself, imbuing himself with delusions of Godhood, something his fury at his parents’ deaths only served to magnify.

In the first dramatic round of the final battle against Alfred, Ivar repeats his father’s tactic of weaponizing kindness. He orders traps to be set in the forest with which to painfully ensnare the first line of Alfred’s advancing soldiers. The hope is that Alfred’s Christian compassion will compel him to send the next few lines of soldiers to assist their wailing brothers, allowing the Vikings to ambush them like lambs to the slaughter. And so it proves. Many lives are lost. The fighting is kinetic and savage; the pervading mist and gloom only enlivened by the occasional eruption of fire, like a melding of Valhalla and the Christian conception of Hell. King Harald is killed, finding some solace and peace at last with a dying vision of his brother, Halfdan, whom he’d killed in a previous battle. 

After this, there is a lull in the fighting. Alfred and Ivar meet under a white flag to discuss terms. Alfred will not yield. He will never again reward Ivar for his unprovoked attacks, nor fall into the trap of trusting his word. He tells Ivar to leave his kingdom, leave England, and never return; entreats him to save his people from further pointless bloodshed.  He goes on to declare: “My God is the God of peace and love. Your Gods are savage. They demand sacrifice. They do not know human love.” The final fight that follows is as much the culmination of a struggle between two competing religious and cultural ideologies as it is a battle between Ivar and Alfred; and by the end of this final episode the matter is settled, at least in a thematic sense. 

Alfred and Ivar cleave to their God and Gods on the battlefield, looking to them for guidance and answers. As the situation becomes ever more desperate, both leaders soon find themselves deserted by their Gods, their imagined connection to them severed. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Ivar shouts to his suddenly deaf and mute Gods. “Answer me!”

“Speak to me, please. I’m afraid. Speak!” Alfred beseeches his lord Jesus. 

Stripped of their Gods, both men are forced to acknowledge in whose image they’ve truly been forged: their fathers’. What they do next will decide if history is doomed to repeat itself, and also settle the question of whether it is their own wills or the wills of their fathers that are the stronger. Ultimately, it is love and compassion, in both instances, that proves to be their guiding light, leading Ivar to reject his father’s ways, and Alfred to embrace his father’s – his real father: the monk Athelstan, who was once a friend and confidante of the great Ragnar Lothbrook. 

All You Need is Love

Ivar watches the battle from the side-lines. Hvitserk has long been a tormented, tortured and fractured man, but in combat he’s whole, screeching and roaring through the flames like a mythical demon. But one man can’t best a whole army, and it becomes clear that Hvitserk isn’t long for this world. Ivar’s eyes shine an electric blue, a physical indication known since childhood that his brittle bones are about to break. Ivar knows his actions in the next few minutes will serve as his last will and testament, the means by which the world will remember him. Ivar watches Hvitserk – the brother he’d many times mocked and tormented, whose life he’d tried to ruin, who’d long forsworn to kill him – and charges onto the battlefield to take his place, submitting himself to the same forces of compassion he’d spent a life-time deriding and subverting.  

“I could never kill you,” he tells Hvitserk.

“I love you. I love you brother,” Hvitserk replies tearfully.

“Now go. Go!” hollers Ivar.

Ivar’s rage and defiance seem to shake the very earth around him. He is at one with his army. He fights and lives through them. In the midst of his last stand a young soldier, shaking with fear, approaches him from the mist.

“Don’t be afraid,” says Ivar, an almost Christ-like evocation at this, his moment of sacrifice. The soldier stabs him repeatedly, and, as Ivar falls, his bones snap and break. Hvitserk runs to him and cradles his dying body, while Alfred calls for the fighting to stop. “I am afraid,” Ivar splutters, words no-one thought they would ever hear from Ivar the Boneless. And then there are three more; his final words: “I love you.”   

Ivar has thus broken the cycle. He has sacrificed himself not for hate, as his father once did, but for love. He was finally able to know and to feel human love; and crucially to demonstrate it instead of demanding it, even if it was right at the end of his life, and only for a few moments. Already Ivar had begun to demonstrate humility. On the eve of the battle he told Hvitserk: “Hundreds of years from now, someone will be proud to find my blood is in their body and my spirit is in their soul.” Maybe part of him realized that in becoming a father he’d finally achieved the immortality after which he’d always hungered, and it was enough.  

Hvitserk is carried away on the back of a wagon. We’re given an aerial view of this, lending Hvitserk the appearance of a corpse returning from battle. In many ways he is. Hvitserk is dead, in a sense. The merciful Alfred baptises Hvitserk, allowing him to be reborn with a new name: Athelstan. 

We know from our future vantage point that the loving Christ Hvitserk has now embraced is destined to eventually, and irrevocably, defeat the old Norse Gods. Not only that, but there will be a millennium of distinctly non-loving conquests, wars, decimations, genocides, enslavements and cultural destructions carried out in His name, all of which will make the exploits of the 8th and 9th century Vikings look like the tantrums of naughty children in comparison. But Hvitserk doesn’t know this. All he knows is that he has found peace by rejecting war and embracing love. He has finally found a way to honor his father – or at least the part of his father that loved Athelstan, and came to see Christianity and Paganism as two sides of the same coin. Love and mercy, then, are the instruments that Hvitserk and Alfred use to break free from the ‘endless cycle of suffering and war’.     

Out With The Old

The show’s themes converge, coalesce and crystalize in the New World, too. The journey from Iceland to Greenland to North America is one fraught with danger and death, but characterized by faith and hope and sacrifice. And it is Othere, the Christian wanderer once known as – appropriately enough – Athelstan (no relation), who leads them there. 

 “This is everything [Ragnar] was searching for,” Ubbe tells Othere, in their new land of milk and honey. “And I found it.” Othere cautions Ubbe against behaving in the same ways that he did before – the old ways – lest this land become just like the land he left behind.

They are not alone. The Vikings discover that the land is occupied by a tribe of indigenous peoples they refer to as Skraelings. The tribe welcomes them warmly. Ubbe soon discovers they have a friend in common: Floki, who somehow reached these same shores from Iceland, alone, and now lives on the periphery of the Skraelings’ land as a revered mystic. If it wasn’t for the Skraelings’ kindness, Floki would have died on arrival. They showed him mercy and kindness.

Asked why he left Iceland, Floki says it was because he was ‘imprisoned in sadness’. 

“What made you so sad?”

“I don’t always remember,” he says, with a wistful smile.

Floki here represents the past of the Vikings as we in the modern world have come to know it, a patchwork of tall tales and omissions. Floki embodies how time will continue to wash away both the Vikings’ history and their legend, until there’s little difference between them, and nothing much is left of either. Floki also embodies the idea that the golden age of the Vikings is gone; he remembers that he once was a Viking; he remembers Ragnar, the sons of Ragnar and the people who were important to them, but little else. There was a time when Floki was the greatest soldier of and preacher for the Gods, but he has now let them go, shed them like a dead skin. “I called to them and no longer heard their voices, or they didn’t make sense,” he tells Ubbe. Again, entropy, evolution, death, re-birth, legend, past, future: all suffused. 

The old ways make one last effort to re-assert themselves, even here in this paradise, and Ubbe gets his defining moment – just as Ivar and Hvitserk and Bjorn before him got theirs. One of his party murders the son of the Skraeling’s leader while ransacking the leader’s home for gold. The Skraelings – clearly more civilized than the Vikings ever were – hand this man over to Ubbe to decide his fate. 

This is a pivotal moment for the series. Where once we were encouraged to see Ragnar as the hero, even when he was killing and pillaging his way through innocent peoples, here we perceive this man, this murderer – who has simply acted in accordance with how the Vikings have always acted – as a dangerous savage. We, the audience, have already made a choice about who the Vikings are now, or who they should be – and so has Ubbe.

At first the murderer is to be publically blood-eagled, a particularly savage and painful form of execution that never-the-less guarantees its sufferer entry to Valhalla. At the last moment, Ubbe changes his mind, and slits the man’s throat instead. 

“Valhalla is not for you, my friend,” Ubbe tells him, mere seconds before carrying out his sentence, “Let me put you out of your misery.” Ubbe does not say this to be cruel, to rob the man of his place in the afterlife. He simply doesn’t want to inflict unnecessary pain, and is showing mercy. But it’s deeper than that, too. Valhalla doesn’t seem to matter to him anymore. Ubbe has come to understand that life can be lived without the old ways and their Gods, and be all the better for it. 

On the beach, Ubbe seeks Floki’s advice and counsel. Floki smiles. “You don’t need to know anything. It’s not important. Let it go.”

It’s fitting that Floki is there at the show’s end. Without his innovation as a boat maker, Ragnar would never have sailed west and discovered Saxon lands; would never have met Athelstan. Without Floki, the Vikings would never have discovered Iceland, or Greenland, or the New World on whose shores they now sit. Ragnar is the one who will be immortalized in legend, while the world will slowly forget Floki. He has already started to forget himself. Perhaps that is the point. Warriors live on in legend and infamy, while the people who built the world around them and at their backs fade away. But wasn’t it ever thus? Legends change the world; love saves it. And here we see that love is the more important, and more enduring, force of the two, even if we’re sometimes too proud to acknowledge it, or too blind to see it. 

“I love you, Floki,” says Ubbe, as they stare across the ocean, at their past, at their possible future, at eternity. 

What a beautiful, and truly surprising, sentiment for a show as blood-soaked as Vikings to bow out on.  

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Of course the status quo clings on in Kattegat, and I guess this will be picked up in the spin-off series. Set 100 years after the events of Vikings, Vikings: Valhalla is reportedly coming to Netflix sometime next year.

The post Vikings Ending Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[synaps]

I did not see this 5 years ago, though apparently I did

Hi there! So, in the light of the recent Ao no Exorcist chapters and Katou having a solid grasp on her timeline after all, my brain shocked itself enough to produce some serotonin and I decided I’m gonna diverge from my own principles and post this. Brain producing serotonin should be encouraged. Buckle up, everyone bothering to read: this timeline breakdown/fan theory emerged in 2012, when a bored AnE-fan pieced together a few of the plot reveals we’re starting to see now.

Spoiler warning for The End of the Beginning! Though strictly speaking they’re a timeline framework I developed in order to write TEotB, which means they’re gonna drop very soon via the flashback! So it probably isn’t as mind-blowing as it was to me... BUT I DON’T CARE I’ve been waiting 6 years for the content we’re getting right now, 6 years I’ve been on the edge of my seat for this misfit clone dork to finally tell his story and AAAAAH

This is basically a full-body search of the Kyoto arc chapters, 'cause that was the only bit of the past we had back when I started writing. To this day that’s the part of the manga I have the best grasp on. x’D But all those hours paid off, good gods they paid off! This is long. Bear with me, ‘kay? Old-time AnE-fans remember that it was commonly thought the twins were born on Blue Night, much due to the anime: Kyoto Arc said it wasn’t. If you looked carefully, you could figure out that Blue Night was in fact the time of the twins’ conception, not their birth. Though to be absolutely sure, I plotted out the timeline three times and dug up records from a weather station in Kyoto to see if there would have been snow at that time of year in the early to mid 90′s because that’s how goddamn obsessed I am. And if you did figure out that the twins were conceived on Blue Night, you were inevitably sucked into an even more obsessive downward spiral into crazy fan madness because that meant Fujimoto Shiro was sent to steal Kurikara to “kill some kids” before those kids existed even on an embryonic stage.

My original estimate was that the stage had taken 24 years to set up, based on the info in Kyoto Arc, but with Mephisto’s recent director’s cut of how he ghost wrote history that number bumps up to 36 years or potentially even longer.

For reference, the timeline I put together for TEotB plus the fresh dates from the flashback arc: 1977: Mephisto pressures Shiro into promising him a free wish because extorting a kid that’s struggling for his life is an ok move 1984: Satan fails possession for the first time because whoa so many limbs at once 1989: the Myou Dha is struck by disease 1993: Satan figures out how to properly possess someone, that’s Rin’s unrelenting never-give-up attitude right there 1994: after a nine year learning curve on just staying in a body Satan has three PhD’s and ditches school after one year of education - guess possessing a body really is a difficult thing to pull off huh 1995: Shiro unwillingly becoming the caretaker of orphans: part I 1996: not yet confirmed but Saburota’s first meeting with Lucifer/Asylum is probably now Also 1996: Satan returns to Section 13 with a reclamation claim on that crap body they sold him 1996-1997 (somewhere around New Year’s, I estimate): Shiro, who was an Upper First Class exorcist at the time, cures Myou Dha and oh is that a sword in your pocket or are you just happy to return to your boss after a successful mission? 1997 (probably mid-to-late March): Blue Night sucked for everyone, but at least Shiro and Tatsuma got promotions - yay 1997: Shiro unwillingly becoming the caretaker of orphans: part II 2003: when you’re a cursed, massacred and financially broke sect like Myou Dha, there’s few options but to join the Order of the True Cross to stay afloat 2005: Saburota recruits Mamushi to spy by raising suspicions against Mephisto ‘cause really, that ain’t hard 2013: a giant pile of shit appears in Kyoto and unleashes destruction on its surroundings and for once it isn’t Mephisto

The manga and the timeline are pretty self-explanatory so what I wanna stress here is what happened 24 years ago, in 1989, ‘cause that’s something Katou hasn’t touched upon yet and it’s really fun except for those involved. In 1989, a disease starts plaguing Myou Dha and the symptoms are identical to what you get from exposure to the miasma from the Impure King’s Eyes. It seems to be a very local problem, as we don’t hear of any epidemic in the rest of Kyoto. Did the seal on the Right Eye spring a leak? Nope. Because the Eye wasn’t there.

We haven’t seen the shrivelled up bit of IK cause any trouble - not saying it couldn’t, but it seemed like that one hadn’t been active much for the past 150 years and it had been constantly monitored by the High Priest. I cross-referenced with the dates given in the new flashbacks but the outbreak doesn’t coincide with any boost of demonic activity related to Satan’s progress. So? The disease in Kyoto is its own separate disaster, and it’s most likely engineered. Let’s work our way back from the present to see how Mephisto set up this stage~ Mephisto knew of Saburota’s plan to unleash IK, and was all cool with that ‘cause hey, good opportunity to test Rin’s flame, build some team spirit, power up Bon, etc. For that reason he decided to move the Right Eye from his own keep to Myou Dha’s: if Saburota had been able to steal both of them from True Cross he wouldn’t have needed the pit stop at the Kyoto Office. He would have revived IK straight away, and even Mephisto couldn’t have motivated sending a bunch of kids into that chaos. So, move the Eye to a secret strategic location in Kyoto and force Saburota into jumping through a couple of extra hoops to get it. The Eye was moved in 2003 or thereabouts: this coincides with Myou Dha joining the Order, and makes perfect sense. The relic has ties to their sect, and it’s kinda fair to give them something back since Meph indefinitely borrowed their main relic, and now that they’re part of the Order and all - yada yada, smoke screens. Mephisto gave them the relic to set Saburota up, but not until he had the means to also give Saburota a trail to follow. Our fav Uncle Goat approached Mamushi, his student, in 2005 and recruited her to get the Right Eye. He probably thought he was cleverly working around Mephisto’s attempt to prevent theft, but if we think about it: who gave Saburota the opportunity to manipulate her in the first place? It is much easier to get your hands on an impressionable young Myou Dha kid if the Myou Dha kids attend the school where Saburota teaches. But why would they? When their families are very competent exorcists on their own and they’re used to keeping to themselves and...

Keeping to yourself is only an option so long as you can survive by yourself, and from 1989 on Myou Dha couldn’t. But Granpa Suguro, being as stubborn as he is, has refused any modern/outside help for 7 bloody years. This disease is weird for several reasons. Its localised spread, for one; its similarity with the Eye mashou when there is no Eye present; the way it vanishes and is never heard of again after Shiro’s visit; the suspiciously good timing. We now know Mephisto is aware of the future to a certain extent - we saw that confirmed when he set Shiro up with that promise. That was the last doubt removed from my theory about the Kyoto disease, so here we are. Satan hadn’t even manifested with a consciousness yet but Mephisto had his sights on Kurikara and Myou Dha’s cooperation in 1989. He is a man of sophistication, so he takes the “if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must come to the mountain“ approach: he used the Eyes to orchestrate an outbreak that would force the sect to reach out to True Cross - the biggest, most knowledgeable exorcist organisation around - for aid. Because the alternative would be to smash in there and outright steal the sword and nobody would send their kids to your organisation after that. But it didn‘t work. Granpa Suguro refused to follow script and so the years went by, Satan gained consciousness, grew intelligent, grew bored, oops there goes the Asylum ceiling, jfc Suguro how many more have to die before you just play along like a good boy...? In the end Mephisto had to deploy Plan B: screw it, theft it is. If Muhammad won’t go to the goddamn mountain I’m gonna drop the mountain right on Muhammad’s stubborn head.

Of course this means fucking things up for Shiro, ‘cause that’s just how these things go when you’re running a tight deadline getting the Antichrist(s) a birthday present. Also it’s fun.

This frame says everything, really. xD Come now, how would you expect these people to trust you, and develop a friendly attitude to the Order, if you barge in there on your black-ops mission like a humanoid battleship, grab their relic and ditch the scene? Bad PR, very bad PR. Buuut if you’re injured enough that you can’t make that immediate escape, and you just happen to know how to cure this very specific disease that never flares up again, which you can contract from only 2 items in the world, of which both are owned by the snake-tongued sass ball you are enslaved by work for...? What a fortunate coincidence, what a golden opportunity to create some debt gratitude and-

Nevermind... 

I headcanon that if Granpa Suguro hadn’t died on Blue Night, Mephisto would have set him on fire personally for being such a roadblock to his plans. After Blue Night Myou Dha was decimated, bankrupt, thought by the population to be cursed - what is a poor sect to do? Who could possibly help? Oh wait wasn‘t there some guy a while back, y’know, that exorcist dude who came crashing in and saved the lives of our families and friends? He seemed to know what he was doing, think we could ask him? So the take-away from this is If not for that disease, if not for Mephisto’s misinformation and Shiro’s break-in, Myou Dha would never have joined True Cross. The Right Eye would never have been kept in Kyoto, there had been no Myou Dha kids at the Academy for Saburota to recruit, and the cram school kids would never have been in Kyoto to fight the Impure King. And also that Mephisto is a fabulous bastard and a pure joy to write! ☆

[thesevenseraphs]

Bungie Weekly Update - 12/6/18

This week at Bungie, the Black Armory opened its doors.   A new mysterious section of the tower revealed itself and a new vendor by the name of Ada-1 sent you out to reclaim the Lost Forges. Your reward: The ability to craft the most powerful weapons of the golden age. 

Many of you are still increasing your power to attempt this new challenge. Yesterday, we lowered the Power requirement of the Lost Forge encounters by five. This wasn’t a huge change. These Forges are meant to be aspirational extensions of the endgame. But we did want to make them more accessible to Guardians around 600 Power. You can read the full details of the change and our goals here.

For some of you the enemies guarding the Lost Forges are immune to your weapons. We promised more details for players who are still working their way up to 600 and beyond. Here is what we have planned to help you move more quickly up to 600.

Prime engrams will now drop more frequently and with larger power bumps for players under 600 Power

This change is planned to land in the 2.1.2 update on December 11. We are also considering additional changes to assist with the Power climb in a future update. We will continue to monitor your feedback on Season of the Forge as it continues.  

Scourge of the Past

Tomorrow, the Scourge of the Past raid opens up to all of Guardians who have the Annual Pass and are brave enough to venture into the Last City to confront a new threat to its safety.

Design Lead Brian Frank is here to brief you one last time before the race for World First begins tomorrow.

Brian: The team could not be more excited for the Scourge of the Past Raid to unlock tomorrow and accept challengers to be the first to fight their way through the Last City and recover a forgotten secret of the Black Armory. As always, we will be cheering you on from the theater. Dust off your sparrow collections. You’re going to want the right perk, and the right look, for crossing the finish line. Make sure you grab the final chest to complete the activity before returning to orbit. Good luck Guardians!

The first fireteam to defeat the raid will be crowned as World First and awarded with a raid belt. As always, they will be awarded to six teammates. Please note that, if you swap players out during the mission, the spoils will only go to the final six.

Anyone who beats all of the encounters of Scourge of the Past in the first 24 hours will be awarded the “Scourge of Nothing” emblem. If you don’t think you can take down the final boss that fast, you will still have some extra time to qualify for the exclusive raid jacket through Bungie Rewards. You have until 9AM Pacific on 12/12 to beat the raid and claim your code to purchase the jacket on the Bungie Store. Here is a look at all of these rewards.

As Brian mentioned above, if you think you have finished first, have someone in your fireteam grab the final chest and return to orbit immediately. Completing the activity is crossing the finish line. You can read the full rules here. Good luck!

I am the Crucible

Today, we’d like to address the feedback we’ve received about the Crucible. The top issue reported by the community is associated with Matchmaking in the Competitive playlist. Many of you are expressing feedback around matching solos against fireteams, matching high Glory teams against lower Glory teams, and have many other suggestions regarding how progressing through the ranks should be changed. The appropriate teams are investigating possible changes to be included in a future update. We will have details for you as soon as we can.

We do have some information on changes to address another top trending issue in the Crucible: Power ammo spawns. There have been numerous requests to lower the amount of Power ammo spawning in Competitive games. Based on this feedback, we will be lowering the amount of Power ammo available during matches by increasing the time between Power ammo spawns. Here are the details:

Competitive:

Control

Initial timers stay the same

Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 45 seconds, now 120 seconds)

Clash

Initial timers stay the same

Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 45 seconds, now 120 seconds)

Survival

Initial timers stay the same

Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 45 seconds, now 60 seconds)

Rotators:

Showdown

Initial timers stay the same

Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 30 seconds, now 60 seconds)

Rumble:

Initial timers stay the same

Increased respawn timer for heavy ammo (was 60 seconds, now 120 seconds)

It Gets Everywhere

Power ammo and Matchmaking are not the only top-trending pieces of community feedback that we have been tracking. Many of you have Sandbox-related questions that apply to PVP and PVE. There are vocal camps on both sides for a lot of these issues and our Sandbox team is considering a combination of player feedback and data on the effectiveness of certain gear and abilities.

Design Lead John Sandwich with notes on their process.

Joe: Hello again, my friends! Hamrick here to answer some hot community questions we have seen and give you a quick glimpse into what Sandbox is working on for the rest of the year and on into 2019. 

While we have those hot questions coming right up, I just wanted to take a second to call out something you may have noticed. Instead of building up to one or two massive patches a year, we have transitioned to shipping smaller batches of changes much more frequently. We hope that this new approach will allow us to remain more agile than we have been in the past and allow us to shake up the meta a bit on more frequent intervals. We hope that a year from now we can all look back on this new way of working and agree that it was very successful. Alright, enough of my rambling, onward, to the questions!

Can you buff snipers? We would really like flinch to be reduced and to have more lower zoom scopes.

Snipers are definitely one of the archetypes we are actively looking at and making changes to.  For example, later in January, Rapid-fire snipers will be moving to a two-shot body kill. Additionally, we are considering allowing more snipers to be able to one-shot supers on headshots in a future patch.

Lower zoom scopes do exist in the game, but have not been particularly prevalent with post-Forsaken weapons and have been largely limited to a few weapons (ie., The Supremacy), but we’ll be increasing the number of them in the game as we move forward.

We don’t currently have plans to alter sniper flinch any more at this time, but we will continue to keep an eye on your feedback.

Nova Warp??????????????????????????????

Yup, the Nova Warp super is too dominant right now and we are planning to tweak it. It’s currently slated to land with a patch coming in late January. 

Spectral Blades hit detection feels much more consistent. Can sentinel and other melees get the same treatment?

We definitely want all melee supers to feel as good and reliable as possible. This is something we are still looking into. 

A lot of the pre-forsaken subclasses feel underpowered now. Can they get buffed?

Yes! We have some planned buffs coming to older subclass paths in the patch currently slated for late January, but we are already looking ahead to what we’d like to do in patches further down the line. We will be regularly looking into tuning subclass content to ensure that there’s a healthy balance of viable choices in all activities.  We use a combination of data and community feedback to track the right things to fix, so please continue to surface which choices feel the least viable to help guide us.

Any changes to the top exotics being used in the Crucible like One Eyed Mask, Shards of Galanor, etc.?

These exotics get talked about quite a bit and while I don’t have any immediate incoming changes to share, I expect that they will be getting looked at in the future. 

Telesto is currently besto. Can you tone it down or move it to the Power slot?

Late in January you will find that Telesto’s bolts-to-kill will now match its charge rate, where it was previously doing more damage than other fusion rifles of its type. That said, due to it being affected less by damage falloff due to its explosive nature, it will still be more consistent than fusion rifles of the same charge rate. Worth noting, PvE damage will be increased to keep parity there.  Once we see how these changes land, we can decide if and what to do next.  The goal still being to buff where we can, but when we have to nerf, you’re going to find us trying to inch down instead of going nuclear… at least as much as we can. 

Scouts Rifles still feel weak in both PVP and PVE. Can they come up?

This is another archetype we are looking at and I would currently expect to see changes show up in future patches. 

Could SMGs get a non-precision damage buff?

We just recently buffed the range on SMG’s to make them more competitive. We’ll be monitoring the data and feedback for a bit to help us decided where to take them next.  If we find that they still aren’t good enough, we will be happy to buff them further. 

Can Fusion Rifles get buffed? Maybe longer range or higher damage to combat shotguns?

This is another archetype we are looking at and I would currently expect to see changes show up in future patches. We did bring up the damage of Rapid Fire Fusion Rifles in 2.1.0 last week.   

Any plans to adjust Wavesplitter?

It’s not at the top of our list but we do intend to take a look at it. First we want to look at the global ammo economy for trace rifles in PvP, and then we can take a look at Wavesplitter’s effectiveness. 

Titan skating is rampant on PC. Do you plan to remove it?

We’d like to fix this, however, we’re being careful about how we do so because it’s so closely tied to the core feel of the Lift ability. In other words, we don’t want a Titan skating fix to change the way the Lift ability feels for all players.  We’d love to have a simple fix to this issue we could roll out immediately, but this one is going to take us a while to land on something solid. 

To recap, we want to roll out smaller batches of patches more frequently.  We want to bring things up whenever possible, but when we do need to bring something down, we are going to try and inch it down and into the correct location.  And finally, there is a patch coming, currently slated for late January, where we expect you to see some changes coming to things like Rapid-fire snipers, Telesto, Nova Warp and pre-Forsaken subclasses…  And we have much more planned for the months ahead.

Love you, always, Hamrick

That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles

This morning, details about The Dawning hit the Bungie Blog. Our next seasonal event is starting up next week on December 11. We are excited to see you driving around on your new Sparrow, delivering your baked goods across the solar system.

You can read the full details on what to expect in this year’s event in our Dawning 2018 article.

Eva’s Little Helpers

Player support is tracking known issues and keeping you up to date when we deploy updates to address them.

This is their report.

Destiny 2 Update 2.1.1.1This week we deployed Destiny 2 Update 2.1.1.1 to players. This update resolved issues causing crashes at the Morgeth encounter of the Last Wish raid, and reintroduced The Inverted Spire strike activity after it was disabled in Update 2.1.0 due to rather large bug.

For the full Update 2.1.1.1 patch notes, please click here.Destiny 2 Update 2.1.2

Next Tuesday, December 11, Destiny 2 Update 2.1.2 is scheduled to go live.

While the timeline for this deployment has yet to be finalized, players should follow us at @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed on help.bungie.net for the latest information as soon as it is available.

Upcoming Challenges

On Tuesday, the Black Armory officially opened its doors and the Volundr Forge was discovered in the EDZ. Tomorrow, the Gofannon Forge will become available, and the race for world’s first will kick off in the Scourge of the Past raid.

For those among you who accept the challenge of becoming the world’s first Fireteam to conquer the Scourge of the Past, set your alarms and prep your fireteams. Scourge of the Past will unlock in the EDZ map tomorrow (12/7) at 9 AM PST. Players waiting in Orbit who do not see this activity become available in their Director may need to log out and back in after 9 AM. As always, players who encounter issues in newly-launched activities should report them to our #Help forums. Providing imagery or video footage which outlines a reported issue will assist the Destiny Player Support team in escalating investigations with the dev team.

Holiday Cheer

Next Tuesday the Dawning returns in Destiny 2. All players are invited to experience the Dawning who have completed the Red War campaign and unlocked access to the Tower.

The Dawning will conclude at the weekly reset on January 1, 2019. For the full support copy, players should visit: Destiny 2: The Dawning Guide

Destiny 2: Forsaken and Season of the Forge Known Issues

In addition to the items listed above, Destiny Player Support is tracking the latest issues reported by players on the #Help forum. Provided below is a brief overview of the latest known issues in Destiny 2: Forsaken and Season of the Forge.

Blind Well Matchmaking: We are investigating reports regarding players entering empty instances of the Blind Well in the Dreaming City. While we are working on a fix, affected players should try entering the Blind Well slowly, hugging the right side staircase and hallway walls.

Mars Flashpoint: We are investigating reports describing sometimes not receiving powerful gear from the Mars Flashpoint.

Harbinger’s Echo: We are investigating ongoing reports regarding the Harbinger’s Echo exotic sparrow not being awarded as expected to players who have earned it after the deployment of Update 2.1.1.1.

For the latest known issues as soon as they are available, players should visit our Destiny 2 Known Issues and Vital Information knowledgebase article.

[star-going-supernova]

What if demon!Henry became human?

@liliflower137 asked me put this stuff out there from some of our discussions about my Inky Eyes, Golden Heart AU. These are answers to theoretical questions, and I haven’t decided whether or not these events can be considered canon to the AU. This is very long, but it’s separated into sections through specific questions. Hope you enjoy them!  :)

What if Henry became human for a week without knowing that it would only last that long?

Okay, I'm not going to go into how this might've happened, but we'll leave it at this: he's turned completely one-hundred percent human, something that lasts a week but, like you said, he doesn't know that going into this. For all anyone knows, he'll be human forever.

So first of all, Henry was never disdainful of humans. In fact, he does things the human way more often than not, meaning as far as his powers go, he's not totally reliant on them. This is good. He won't be completely lost, given that he's been living on earth since before he even met Joey. In terms of that, while he'd really freaking miss his powers, he wouldn't be lost without them.

But then we get to the bits of being a demon that he was never consciously aware of being different, mainly: his aura.

~ Let's talk about demon auras real quick.

A demon's aura does a lot of things. With it, they can read emotions in the people around them, they can sort of scan their surroundings for fellow non-humans, they can check on their human friend's wellbeing; it can essentially be this additional, intangible limb that gathers information beyond what humans are capable of. We'll call it a Sixth Sense, in addition to sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

But then there are other things, more demon-type things, that an aura can do. It registers the Seven Deadly Sins (although that can be better controlled with age), it warns them of nearby religious symbols, it can manifest itself in unnatural ways (as seen in The Demon that Wasn't), it can affect the emotions and thoughts of those nearby (as seen in chapter 3 of Dreams Come True), detect summonings, alter/switch between physical forms, and so on. 

The demonic aura is, simply put, a power source. It’s The Thing that differentiates them from humans. Literally, give a human an aura, they're a demon; take one away from a demon, they're a human— technically speaking, nothing else is necessary to switch back and forth. It's within them, it surrounds them, they can curl it close and stretch it out.

When Henry becomes human, all that happens is his aura is removed. No harm comes to him, there isn't a twisting of limbs or screaming or anything like that. And that's what's so devastating about it: he just lost something that was so intrinsically him, and the world keeps turning, as though no one noticed.

Within seconds of it happening, Henry collapses, everything feeling muted and dull around him. He's gasping, he can't breath, he can't feel anything. He's not Henry anymore. There's no doubt that he would've gone absolutely completely mad, bonkers, cuckoo, insane— whatever you want to call it, he would've been it within a minute or two. If, that is, Joey hadn't been there.

It takes Joey over an hour to calm Henry down enough to be able to breathe and talk. That first day is a nightmare for both of them. Henry can't stop shivering, he's distant, lost, empty almost, and Joey's never felt so useless in his entire life.

Before the first 24 hours are even up, Henry almost absently tries to kill himself. It's not even a true, conscious decision. His body feels dead already, because it wasn't made to be this way. Joey's mind can't comprehend demon antics; Henry's can't comprehend being aura-less. Like a wounded animal, he's given up.

Joey freaks out. He refuses to so much as leave Henry's side after that, going so far as to handcuff them together. The day after, Henry just trudges along behind him, still not fully aware that he's actually still alive. That's how traumatizing it is.

~ So the almost killing himself thing. Immediately after losing his aura, Henry's body basically shuts down on the intellectual level, leaving only the most basic parts of him functioning. He's not fully aware, is what I'm getting at. Think of it as a sort of defense mechanism on his mind's part, like some people do with trauma. He's just sort of... sealed away. “Henry" is basically comatose, while his body and basic instincts run the show. His body then decides that an even better coping mechanism would to be just putting him out of his misery. Joey's apartment/house (who even knows where they live) had a mouse problem a few months earlier, and he still has rat poison in one of the supply cupboards in his kitchen (not near food or cooking utensils though). Joey's just making some lunch or dinner or doing the dishes, whatever, and he absently notices Henry rummaging around a bit. He doesn't think much of it, until he glances over his shoulder and sees Henry about to drink something— but Joey never heard the fridge open. Gut instinct has him race over there and wrench the bottle away, thankfully before any damage could be done. Henry doesn't fight or anything, because he's not aware enough for even the full ramifications of what he'd almost done to hit him. Joey still breaks out the handcuffs, 'cause no way is something like that happening again, not on his watch. Even after his aura returns, Henry doesn't really remember doing it, and Joey doesn't worry him with saying anything.

But then, he sorta starts to 'wake up,' in a sense. He becomes more responsive, takes the initiative on a few things, eats without prompting, and it's when he makes a joke about the handcuffs ("You just couldn't stand to be apart from my shining personality, eh, Joey?") that Joey knows his friend is coming back to him.

By the beginning of Day Four As A Human, Henry's mostly functioning. He still has these sort of blank moments, when his eyes go dead, but the handcuff comes off and he's able to make a true effort.

The worst part to Joey is that he can't give his friend a silver lining. Henry was already doing human things, so it's not like Joey can take him on some grand adventure to show him the Perks of Being Human.

Over the next few days, they learn just how many mundane things his aura provided for/prevented from happening: Henry is abysmal at reading body language, has a tendency to walk into walls when he's not paying attention (which is often), ends up covered in bruises and scratches and scrapes from many little accidents, somehow manages to get lost four times in the studio, and ends up being allergic to peanuts and shellfish.

But the worst is something he doesn't tell Joey about. It's his drawing. No, his aura didn't make him better or anything. On a technical and professional level, his animations haven't changed a bit. But Bendy and the others don't feel real anymore. Every time he drew them, his love and happiness and passion for his work combined with his aura to give his characters the closest things to emotions and thoughts that not-living, 2D drawings could have. They weren't alive on the page (not in the 2D Bendy AU sense) but he could almost feel them in his soul. This is why Joey saw that longing when Henry looked at them; they were already semi-real, but he never thought they'd ever leave the paper.

Overall, Henry would be okay. He'd never be fully over it, never forget what it felt like to be whole, never completely recover from the absence of an integral part of himself, but with Joey's help, he'd be able to survive. The biggest loss to him would be the drawing thing, because it was the equivalent of if they had died overnight or something. He never got to say goodbye.

Naturally, he comes to resigned terms with his new state of being at the end of the week and then wakes up whole again, aura returned. He freaks out, overjoyed, and probably accidentally makes all the plants in a ten mile radius flourish (which pisses him off, to be honest, because he can't even do that when he wants to, what even) with the sheer force of his happiness.

To celebrate, he teleports himself and Joey to Italy, because Joey's always wanted authentic Italian food, and what better way to thank his best friend for being there for him during those trying times than to pop them over to the other side of the world for some good food.

Henry spends an entire day doing nothing but drawing his characters, because they're alive again, just like him.

More humorous take, inspired by Lili:

Hypothetically, lets say that Henry experienced whatever curse or illness or whatever it was that briefly took his aura away before, when he was a kid/teenager. His parents ended up taking him to the hospital since he was so messed up, but after a week, he was back to normal. The doctors were baffled, but oh well. So Henry finds out more about whatever it was, and learns that short of a deal to sell his aura, it can't leave him permanently.

Jump to adults Henry and Joey, and this happens again, and Henry does one of those full body Ghibli shivers and races to Joey's house despite knowing that he'll be okay soon.

Joey screams when Henry literally kicks in his door and shouts, "JOEY, SOMETHING'S WRONG WITH MY AURA AND I'M HUMAN NOW."

And Joey's on the verge of an aneurism ("NO DON'T, I CAN'T HEAL YOU") until Henry finally gets around to the part about his aura returning in a few days time. Cue massive amounts of amusement for the entire studio ('cause you bet they'd let everyone know) as Henry proves to be a perfectly normal human, just with terrible human sense (aka, all that walking into walls, getting startled easily, somehow ends up lost for several hours at least four times, and so on).

What if the toons were alive when Henry got turned into a human? Or if it was during a time when the rest of the studio knew about him? Is there anything they would be able (or at least try) to do to help?

If the toons were alive, they’d all stick to him like glue, just as distraught as him over it. Because we might joke about the Dad Thing, but there’s a connection that’s forged between a Creator and Creation with the way they did it, and with Henry losing his demon aura, that connection would vanish, for all of them. There wouldn’t be a soul in the entire studio capable of separating Bendy from Henry during the entire duration, and in a way, that would help Henry massively. Joey’s awesome, and there’s no way Henry would’ve survived that week without him, but Bendy would help in an entirely different way. All three of them would. 

(When Henry gets his aura back, there’s a celebration, but at the end of the night, he does exactly what his and Bendy’s auras have been aching to do, and teleports them to a quiet peaceful place. Neither of them are ashamed to admit that they cry pretty hard over it. The loss had been great and terrible for both of them in ways none of the others would’ve been able to understand. They’re both demons whose main personality trait is kindness, and having each other was a dream come true. Henry losing that nearly destroyed him, and Bendy losing that almost sent him into off-model despair on multiple occasions that only Henry had been able to coax him out of. Being brought back together like this would set off All the Emotions, and they’d need some time to themselves to work through them.)

The rest of the studio wouldn’t really know what to do. They mourn the loss, of course they do, because they know what it means to Henry and they can see how destroyed he is. He’s lost a piece of himself, and they offer space and comfort as needed. Towards the end of the week, there would’ve been secret discussions held between the main employees about possibly making a deal with a demon to get Henry his aura back, no matter what it cost them. Because that’s what you do for family, and Sammy hadn’t quite been as ignorant of that budding lung cancer as we thought, and Norman noticed when he stopped seeing dark and dangerous things on the edge of his vision, and Wally knew that a previously shaky wall was magically sturdy, and countless others. Henry might never have mentioned anything, much less asked for something in return, but that doesn’t mean his Acts of Kindness went unnoticed. After everything he’s done for them, of course they’d be willing to do something so potentially dangerous in return. Thank goodness he got his aura back before they could go through with it.

(As a note: that part listing things Henry has done for them in secret was from another question of Lili’s about deals that Henry made with the studio workers. Let me know if anyone wants to see that part too.)

If Henry had stayed as a human forever, would he have eventually told Joey about the drawing thing?

Not on his own. If he ever did, it’d be because Joey noticed that something was really wrong, and kept pushing until Henry spilled.

After that heartbreaking conversation, Henry would go home, but Joey would stay in his office, thinking.

Maybe… maybe he could bring them to life for Henry. Maybe, with a little bit of magick and— and a Machine…

Besides. What could go wrong?

What about when Henry realizes that he’s not immortal anymore, in the permanent situation?

Immortality was never a super important thing to him. He can get over the fact that he’s not going to live for something close to forever now. Worse for him would be the growing old part, and all the helplessness that comes with that. As discussed, he’s rather accident prone without his aura, and he regularly gives Joey little mini heart attacks because gosh dang it Henry, things can actually hurt you now!

One of the reasons losing his immortality doesn’t really phase him as much as it might’ve is that he knows he and Joey and all their other friends will get to live and die together.

On the other hand, though, if the toons were already created, Henry would go a little bit insane from the thought that he’d be leaving them behind, and in that case, well… he might take some drastic measures à la something akin to the Ink Machine. Someone with all that demonic knowledge suddenly determined to cheat death one way or another? Yeah, that would probably be the worst case scenario.

[vondehnvisuals]

Hello every One, and welcome to the Fabulous Free Lance Friday Edition of the Good News Journal where I wield My S-Word (Sean’s Word) fearlessly.  Thank King You for joining Me, I have an unusual and interesting Edition for You today.  I Will be tall King about some of the Ways I Mind My Father’s House, both with respect to the Kingdom God Gave Me and the Land where I am tending My temporary Keep.

I had two new thirty day challenges set out for My Self this month; one was an hour a day dedicated to Art, the other was fifteen minutes a day dedicated to learning Latin.  My Latin challenge lasted only a day, My Mind was just not into it (though I was rather impressed with how much I remembered, so I am inspired to pick it up again soon).  My Art challenge has been successful, though I Give My Self a lot of leeway because painting is something I really need to be inspired to do.  I am also more inclined to paint when I have empty canvas for new character portraits (por-traits, for traits) waiting in the wings.  With the whole covid thing it hasn’t been easy to get new canvas, I’m pretty fussy about what I Wish for when it comes to Art work.  So I allowed for anything Creative to be considered My hour of Art, which might even include gardening because that really is something of an Art, too.

I got some baking done, I’ve been war King on colouring (painting with watercolour) a picture for My niece and hope to get three done to send out before the end of the month.  I had no Idea I would enjoy something as simple as colouring so much but I really do and I have a beautiful set of watercolour felt markers with paint brush-like tips, so it was Good to find something useful and Creative to do with them.  I’ve also spent some time organizing any plants the squirrels haven’t destroyed and always have some new seedlings sprouting somewhere.  I mentioned that gardening is something of an Art, too, and although I am very much an amateur with respect to growing a fruit and vegetable garden (because I’ve never really had a garden before), I have something of a Magical Gift for growing plants indoors.  This is one of the reasons I’m not going to let the squirrels discourage Me too much this year.  I Will come up with a solution for next season and Will just grow My plants in containers this year and bring them indoors when it gets too cold (as it’s getting late to be starting things now).

Crassula Ovata, also commonly known as ‘Jade’ plant here in Canada, is also considered the ‘Lucky’ plant, money plant, or money tree.  I find that interesting because there are no coincidences in My Universe and a pair of leaves I cut from a jade plant at My last address was the first plant to be placed in soil in My new apartment.  It did nothing for roughly three months and ‘Magically’ Showed its first Sign of new Life on My name day, June 5th.

She is now ready to stand on her own.

I have been trying to come up with a name for her, and I have decided it Will be Lady Luck.  Removing the two starting leaves Will encourage the new growth and they Will form a ‘scab’ and dry up where they were cut and eventually fall off, Creating an entirely new plant.  The leaves that were cut Will not go to waste, either.  I’m Creating a Special propagator for them.

The knife isn’t ideal, little big for what I need but it has a tapered tip which actually works pretty well and it is certainly sharp enough.  It should be sharp enough that it doesn’t crush the leaf at all.  The paper is just to keep earth from falling through the slits in the side of the container which Will allow water to drain very well.  Then I fill the container with organic potting soil.

Then I pack the soil down very firmly before adding any moisture.

Now surgery begins.

You can see that I am cutting near the bottom and removing all leaves except the top two or four (depending on size).  Removing the excess leaves makes for a longer stem so it Will be easy to stand in the soil.  As soon as the stem is surrounded by earth, it Will automatically begin producing roots.  The plants get re-potted.

Now, I’ve done all of this before and this is what works for Me, I don’t think I’ve ever killed a jade plant, they are the easiest to propagate like this.  Propagating leaves can be a little trickier, sometimes they just do nothing, shrivel up and dry out.  But any pair of leaves with just a hint of stem has always taken root, Lady Luck is an example that took three months of patience.  If they are not dying, they are growing roots.  I always water generously as soon as I do this, most People would say not to because they are succulents.  In fact, it is recommended to leave them (leaves and stem sections cut) out on a dry windowsill for a couple of days.  The cut scabs over and eventually roots Will sprout from the stem or end of the leaf, it survives by conserving the water in the leaf itself and using sunlight to grow new roots looking for soil and moisture.  I water the soil generously but make sure it is well drained and well ventilated, then I let it dry out completely for at least a full day, maybe two, then repeat.  Usually, new growth Will appear within a week if done during the growing season (now).  I guarantee every one of the eight potted plants Will survive, not sure how the leaves Will work out but I am cautiously optimistic.  Watering generously after transplanting allows the soil to set.  One of the most important things for the leaves Will be not to disturb them, so future watering Will be done with a spray bottle from above until the surrounding soil is generously moistened.

Alright, now for some health news.  One of My other activities I’ve incorporated into My daily routine is war King out.  I do push ups one day, chin ups the next, then repeat.  I mentioned I require a special diet because of My high metabolism and this is no exaggeration.  I require a high amount of fat in My diet to lubricate joints or heavy muscle load is difficult.  Sometimes I can be prone to tendinitis and other similar injuries.  Unlike most People, I believe My body Will evolve and adapt and it has (for Me) proven to be True with tendinitis related to My shoulders.  I also believe I have a high pain tolerance (although it is Truly impossible for Me to know because I don’t know what other People feel) and Will work through pain.  I believe in the ‘no pain, no gain’ theory and Trust that My body can feel the difference between ‘Good’ pain and bad pain.

Yesterday, just before doing My first set of chins, I hang and allow My muscles and joints to fully stretch out to ensure I am achieving a full range of motion.  War King out actually improves flexibility, contrary to what many People think providing proper technique is used including a full range of motion.  Sometimes joints ‘crack’ and ‘pop’ as they are stretching out, this is not entirely uncommon, especially on the first rep or warm up.  My joints did feel as though they were creaking a bit as I allowed them to fully stretch out but there was no pain.  But as I began to pull up for My first repetition, My right elbow joint felt stiff like there was a tendon or something in the Way of the motion I was trying accomplish.  Then there was a sound like knuckles cracking and I felt a wonderful release of all the tension; whatever was ‘in the Way’ felt like it broke, but it didn’t hurt and I was able to complete My set almost effortlessly.

However, a few hours after My workout, I was sitting resting My forearms on My lap, cradling My elbows with My Hands and My right elbow felt like it had started a workout routine of its own!

Yeah…  No pain though.  It sounds like bursitis, except without the pain and without red, burning skin.

Olecranon bursitis is a condition in which swelling and inflammation occur in a small fluid-filled sac (the bursa) at the tip of the elbow. The bursa forms a soft cover over the elbow tip and allows the skin to glide smoothly when one bends and extends the elbow. – Wikipedia

But “allows the skin to glide smoothly when one bends and extends the elbow”.  I could actually feel tension gathering as I was stretching out, before I began to pull up, as if pressure from further down My tendons was collecting near the tip at My elbow.  When I started to pull up, it felt like that same tension was still there and blocking the tendon.  It literally felt like something was removed when it cracked and I was able to pull up almost effortlessly, no pain at all.

I Will Keep You posted on this if it turns out I’m wrong, I’m not Giving medical advice here, just sharing My own personal philosophies.  I don’t doubt it’s bursitis, but I’m not sure it’s really a bad thing.  I had cartilage in My chest crack when I was young, too once the weights got serious, it was just My body’s Way of adapting to the heavier load.  I don’t believe this is any different.  I think I may be reaching close to a lifetime record of chins per workout (36).

I figured this was worth mentioning because it’s one example of Me not going to a doctor.  The Idea did not even cross My Mind as a serious consideration.  Now, if it continues to grow, change colour, start causing Me serious discomfort, I may reconsider but for now, I just consider it real time evolution; My body adapting to the new physical demands I am may King it do.

Told You this one would be different.  Hope You are all well, more news on Magical Spells coming Saturday.

Love and Blessings!!!

  Volume CXVII: The Fabulous Free Lance Friday Edition; Minding My Father’s House Hello every One, and welcome to the Fabulous Free Lance Friday Edition of the Good News Journal where I wield My S-Word (Sean's Word) fearlessly. 

[jarienn972]

Only a Little Superstitious - Chapter One

I’d been a little hesitant to post the start of this story while I have another WIP out there, but I decided to go ahead and put this one out there too.  I have this one all plotted out but because it is taking more research time to get many of the details and character traits ironed out, I don’t have as much completed as I do with The Right Place.  I have two chapters completed and posted on both AO3 and FF.net and I’ll upload the second chapter here on Tumblr as soon as I have a chance.  

This story basically developed out of the same premise as The Right Place in that I wanted to take Emma out of the magical realm and put her in a position where she had to fall back on her wits along with her newfound ability to trust others to get out of their predicament.  Expect this to be a bit of a bumpy ride with a new twist on some infamous legends.  I’m also going to go ahead and tag @killian-whump because I know this tale will definitely be pertinent to her interests.  

There really wasn't any way to know where or really even how she was going to land. If this portal worked like the others she'd had the occasion to jump or fall into, they'd end up wherever Killian had been thinking of when he lost his footing and fell. She'd just kept repeating the mantra in her head – Bring me to Killian – and when her body finally collided with the ground, it was every bit as unpleasant as she'd expected it to be. The earth here was strewn with rocks – a fact she'd learned the hard way as she'd landed face first, scraping her cheek and shoulder on a boulder that the rest of her head narrowly missed, although she wished she could say the same for the bush she'd landed on top of, colliding with several of its thorn laden branches which tore several small holes in her blouse and jeans. Thankfully, the leather of her jacket spared her from the worst leaving a deep scrape in the fabric that would have laid open the skin on her right side had she not been wearing the outer garment.

The sudden hard landing knocked the wind out of her and she realized later that she must have blacked out for a few moments when she suddenly awoke with a start and a single thought: Where was Killian? As she extricated herself from the jagged bush, she scanned the surrounding area looking for signs of her missing husband. She didn't immediately see him nearby, but thankfully, he must have spotted her first as she heard his voice calling out to her.

"Swan?" His voice sounded so distant, but with her ears still ringing with disorientation from the portal, she couldn't exactly be certain. "Are you alright?"

Alright? He was asking if she was alright? Only moments before the portal opened up in the middle of Main Street, she'd watched him take a dagger to the gut and he wanted to know if she was alright?

"I'm fine," she replied, pushing her protesting body up from the dirt as she wiped at her bloodied face with her sleeve.

"You don't look fine," he continued, his voice closer now as she realized he was walking slowly toward her, partially obscured by clumps of chaparral and some dangerous looking pointy leaved plants, some of which neared five feet tall. She could see that he was clutching tightly to his chest, his fingers already slick with blood from the stab wound she knew lay beneath. "You're bleeding."

"So are you," she reminded him, dumbfounded how he could still be so concerned that she had a few cuts and scratches when he was obviously in greater distress. "I've just got a few scratches and a little bump on the head. You're not that lucky," she stated as he reached her.

"I'll be fine," he insisted as she slid her arm around his waist, moving him toward a slab of nearby sandstone where she could get him to sit down. The slight waiver in his voice told her he was anything but fine.

"I don't think so. Sit down here and let me take a look at you," He didn't put up much fight, his body nearly collapsing onto the boulder which was an even better indicator that he was in a great deal of pain and doing a lousy job of concealing it.

"Is your magic working in this land?" he asked. It was an honest question, but she instantly doubted that she could give him the answer they both wanted to hear. She couldn't feel her magic – couldn't will it to surface. Whatever realm they'd landed in, it was one without magic and that meant she couldn't heal his wound.

"I don't think so," she responded, recognizing the flicker of fear that flashed in his eyes. "I can't feel it, but we'll manage… Do you have your flask on you?" He nodded, producing it from the inside pocket of his leather coat and proceeding to remove the stopper with his teeth and take a quick swig before she snatched it out of his hand. "Hey! I didn't mean drink it!" she scolded him. "We're going to need it to disinfect that wound."

"Just attempting to dull the discomfort somewhat," he confessed as he begrudgingly yanked his shirt from the waistband of his trousers and began to unfasten the buttons of his vest. Emma pushed his hand away knowing she could complete the task faster with two hands. "You do realize that I'm perfectly capable of unbuttoning my own garments…"

"Will you just relax a moment?" she glared, scowling at him as he attempted to reach for the flask she'd placed on the flat surface of the rock beside him to free up her hands. "Leave that alone…" He groaned with displeasure, but withdrew his hand, wincing as she peeled back the blood soaked fabric of his shirt to reveal the wound. "Sorry," she apologized, not wishing to cause him additional pain. The wound itself didn't look like much – just a narrow slit in his skin right below his rib cage, but it was bleeding profusely and there was no way to tell how deep it went or the exact path of the blade. "You don't happen to have a handkerchief or a scarf hiding in there anywhere by chance, do you?"

"Sorry, Love. 'Fraid not," he replied. "Didn't leave the house this morning expecting to be run through with a bloody dagger." Well, at least his sense of humor was still intact despite the injury.

"We've got to find something to help stop the bleeding. Need to keep pressure on it…"

"I've been trying to," he assured her, "but it's a tad difficult with only one hand…" She understood knowing that he'd likely landed as hard as she had so she was worried that there might be other injuries she couldn't even see, but right now, she had to think of something.

Since it was already tattered and torn from her entanglement with the barbed brush, Emma pulled the hem of her blouse free of the waistband of her own jeans and tore off the bottom section of the pale peach fabric leaving a strip of skin exposed at her midsection. Had he not been in so much discomfort, the sight of that glimpse of flesh would have been quite the turn on, but he could barely manage a pained smirk as he focused on how to put an end to the ache in his chest. He already suspected the severity of the injury having been run though enough times in his many years to have a decent grasp on his situation. It was a survivable wound, if they could find help rapidly, but the thought that they didn't even yet know what realm they'd landed in wasn't helping.

While he lamented the seriousness of their dilemma, she folded the strip of fabric into a makeshift pad and after retrieving the flask, soaked it with a generous dosing of rum then pressed it into his wound. She tried to ignore her own stabbing of guilt as he hissed and writhed from the sting of the alcohol on the tender, open wound.

"Sorry… Sorry…," she stammered, fearful of pressing too hard as she really didn't want to inflict more pain.

"I'm fine, Love… Just stings a bit…," he lied as the initial shock wore off leaving him with just a lingering burning sensation. "I'll be fine."

"Fine? You're a lousy liar… Keep holding this against the wound," she instructed. "I need to find us some shelter and try to figure out where we are. Those skies aren't looking too promising…"

"Aye," he replied in a hushed tone as his eyes drifted upward to the clouds. There was still blue sky directly above them but out toward the horizon, ominous dark grey clouds loomed. "There's definitely a storm brewing."

"That was my thought too," she concurred, digging into her pockets to retrieve two items – her cell phone and her department-issue handgun. "I'm going to go scout around a bit," she stated, placing the weapon next to him on the rock's surface. "I'll try not to be gone long, but if anything comes near you that's bigger than a jackrabbit, shoot it."

"And what about you?" he asked, still more concerned for her welfare than his own safety. "You don't have magic here…"

"I can manage. Remember, you're the one with the hole in his stomach. You need the protection more than I do. Besides, I can still run. You can't."

"Point taken. Just please be careful, Swan."

"I will," she promised, not really keen on leaving him here in alone but well aware that she could move faster without him. There had to be something in the near vicinity that could provide some shelter from the approaching storm and if they were lucky, provide them with some clues as to their present location. The landscape here was rugged and arid, evidenced by the sparse vegetation consisting mostly of dry scrub brush and plant life that was likely some form of cacti or maybe yucca? The panoramas were vaguely familiar, yet she couldn't quite place why. Had she been here before?

She tried to scope out a perimeter within a few hundred yards of where she'd left Killian, making sure to identify and remember landmarks so she would be able to find her way back. Her knee high heeled boots weren't the best footwear to be navigating the uneven, gravely terrain. What she wouldn't give for a decent pair of hiking boots and a huge bottle of water right now! The sun's position in the sky and her shadow on the ground had to be her guide as she had little else to use for direction. Without a compass, she could only assume that she was traveling southwest from Killian's location and if she was correct – slightly downhill.

She'd begun to circle back when she noticed that on the far side of a row of bushes similar to the one she'd landed in earlier there was a patch of well-worn dirt which stood out in stark contrast to the rocky earth on this side of the brush. She squeezed herself between the brambles to spy what appeared to be an intentionally cleared path and if she didn't know better, she would have sworn it was a hiking path worn through the wilderness. Perhaps this was some sort of roadway between villages in this realm she thought – until an unexpected object gave her the first clue to their whereabouts.

Approximately twenty feet from her was rectangular wooden post about 18 inches tall that had been driven into the ground and bore an engraved number on it – an 8. Emma scrambled over to the post hoping there might be more information on it besides the number and as she got closer, she realized that the number emblazoned on it was actually a decimal - .8 and below it were four almost imperceptible letters – USDF. Why was a wooden post in the middle of nowhere marked with a decimal – a decimal and a bunch of letters? She stared quizzically at it for a moment then it dawned on her – she had been correct in her theory that she'd been looking at a hiking trail and the post before her was a trail marker! Now – which direction?

She followed the trodden path a short distance, until she came to the next marker which was labeled .6. Counting down meant she was going in the direction of the trail head which held the promise of providing more information and perhaps a picnic area or something with a little cover. She wanted to push ahead and see where the trail led, but she'd already been away from her husband longer than she'd wanted to be. She'd go back for him and they'd head down to the trail head together – hopefully getting themselves one step closer to civilization.

"Killian?" she called out to him as she neared the clearing where she'd left him earlier, fairly certain that she'd returned to the correct spot, but still harboring a few doubts when she couldn't see him. "Killian? Can you hear me?" She'd been away for twenty, maybe thirty minutes – longer than she'd intended, but she should have known that he wouldn't stay put. She'd apparently mistakenly assumed that he would follow her instructions and stay in one place, but it was looking more and more like he'd wandered off in search of her – at least until she heard his faint reply.

"Emma?" His voice was noticeably weaker which instantly renewed her concern that she couldn't see him as her eyes scanned the clearing, recognizing the boulder he'd been seated on when she'd gone in search of shelter.

"Yeah – it's me. I'm back and I have a bit of an idea where we might be. I found a marked hiking trail nearby. If we can follow it back to the trailhead, it might have signage to tell us exactly where we are and maybe a few clues as to how we can get help," she nervously kept rambling on hoping her voice would draw him back to her, but her anxious mind was getting the best of her… "It's not far to the trail. I think we can make it, but I have to find where you've wandered off to first. I told you to stay put…"

"Over here…," he said a little louder this time and his voice seemed to be coming from the direction of the boulder where he'd been sitting earlier, but he wasn't atop it any longer. She could see smears of blood and his hopefully not empty flask, but not him. "And I didn't 'wander off' anywhere… Down here, Love…" he added as he heard her footsteps draw closer.

"Down where?" She started to ask then stopped as she saw his black denim clad leg poking out from behind the stained sandstone slab. Hurrying over, she found him seated on the dusty earth, leaning against the sturdy sandstone for support. In his hand, he still clutched the crimson soaked cloth she'd torn from her blouse, but it was no longer held against the wound as his arm lay across his thigh. Her pistol rested beside his right hip, the safety still in place. He no longer had the strength to hold his arm up and Emma knew there was no time to waste if they were going to make it down to the trail head. "Think you can walk?" she asked him rather bluntly as she stooped to retrieve her weapon and return it to its holster at the small of her back. With time of the essence, she needed to know, determined to carry him if she needed to. She wasn't leaving him behind this time.

"I think so," he replied, pushing his back into the boulder, using it for leverage to push himself to his feet while she took ahold of his left arm at the bend of his elbow, then wrapped his hooked arm around her own waist before slipping her right arm around his midsection. He wasn't steady on his feet, but he was standing.

"Lean on me," she insisted. "It's going to be about a mile over some uneven terrain." He nodded in understanding, reaching back for the glass flask which he tucked back into his jacket pocket.

"We may need this later," he grinned, getting an icy glare of skepticism from his wife in return. "Don't worry. I didn't partake of a single drop while you were gone."

"Come on. The clouds are getting thicker and the wind is picking up. We probably have less than an hour to find the trailhead and if we're lucky, someplace to hide from this storm…"

[not-poignant]

Cancer / Thelma & Louise update:

(Everyone’s calling it cancer now - i.e. the endocrinologists and neurosurgeons and stuff, so I am too). (Also I’m cutting and pasting from my Facebook update because I’m  too tired to rewrite for Tumblr, apologies!) .

Yesterday I saw the neurosurgeon, and things went about as well as I expected them to go. It wasn't a total worst case scenario, which is if they couldn't do surgery at all, so that's something.

But everything else is kind of shitty, so let's talk about that.

Firstly, you know what's crazy? They still can't tell me how fast the tumours are growing. This is partly because if you get a scan at a different place that isn't Charlies, they only keep that scan in their system for two weeks, and then it's deleted. None of the specialists like it, and they've all complained about it, but the hospital IT won't change the policy. This means that my best images, which were from Joondalup PRC two months ago, aren't something the surgeons can see. So I need to get a copy of that from them, and start bringing it with me to appointments.

Secondly, you know what's also crazy? This surgery. This surgery is crazy. When a very seasoned neurosurgeon says to you: 'by my standards, the surgery to remove this cancer is major, *major* surgery, and I recommend observing until you start to become symptomatic' - you know it's a big deal.

You know it's an even bigger deal when he tacks on: 'and by symptomatic, I mean compression on the brain.' Like, big-deal life-ruining serious 'I don't want to do anything anymore' symptoms.

And that's kind of because the surgery itself stands a really high chance of doing that to me anyway, even if I'm lucky to survive it.

The problem with that pesky Glomus Vagale Paraganglioma (Thelma), is that in order to just *get* to her, they'll need to expose four of the main cranial nerves - specifically, cranial nerves 9, 10, 11 and 12. They already know they can't save cranial nerve 10, this is the Vagus Nerve, and the tumour is growing in the sheath that protects it.

Just exposing the nerves and removing the tumour while the nerves are exposed risks destroying every other one. Now, I'm not going to launch into a huge discussion about what that could ruin, but you can Wikipedia 'cranial nerve' and look up each one if you really want to know how life-ruining it can be to have these nerves destroyed. (No, they can't be re-attached). Suffice to say that the surgery could permanently remove the ability for me to move my head, my shoulder, my neck, my tongue, my throat, the ability to talk, swallow and eat. I have mirroring nerves on the other side, but the surgeon was blunt that nerve risks compared to other risks weren't really his biggest issue with the surgery anyway.

And that won't cure the disease, and that won't necessarily stop the tumours from growing back in the exact same spot either. Paragangliomas *really* like to grow in the head/neck.

And anyway, that's to say nothing of the partial skull removal, surgery in the very vulnerable-to-strokes carotid space, and of course the arterial vein graft they'd want to do, and the whole 'temporarily switching off your brain' part of the surgery.

When you hear from surgeon number one: 'I won’t do this surgery without a good neurosurgeon that's willing to do it' and from surgeon number two (who is the neurosurgeon): 'I'm not willing to do this surgery until you are *significantly symptomatic* from the cancer' - and you have heard similar from the Clinical Professor Endocrinologist, and you expect to hear the same from the ENT surgeon (they'll be the ones to expose the nerves in the first place, even the base of skull neurosurgeon refuses to do that), you know that the surgery itself is...

The surgery is not safe. And it can't be done any time soon. Not if I value my quality of life as it is now - which I do. I really do. I want to take advantage of living the life I have now. It's not an easy life. I have many other chronic illnesses and I wake up in pain every day, and have fatigue all the time, but this is the best it's likely ever going to get, and I want to savour that for what it is, for as long as I can. Because it's still a beautiful life, and the specialists want me to look after it.

This means essentially, that the most viable choice right now is to live with the cancer until I don't think I can really stand it anymore, re: impact on quality of life, and then have a surgery that... ah, well... yeah.

We're hoping the tumours are slow growing, because this means that surgery could be two or three years away. But we don't actually *know* yet, and they could decide to metastasise at any time, they could decide to do lots of other things at any point, they may decide to grow quickly, or start secreting toxins into the body (something these tumours are famous for, I'm *very* lucky that my tumours are currently 'non-functional') or whatever else there is...

So I am getting my PET scan soon, seeing the ENT people, seeing Walsh again, seeing the neurosurgeon again in two months, and from there, we will look into radiotherapy (the side effects of radiation to this section of the head/neck is not great), and I'm going to start looking into things like Gamma Knife 'surgery' and so on.

But the surgeons think it would be best if I learned how to live with this cancer until such point as its making my life so miserable I can choose to have a surgery that is honestly, both kind of spectacular in terms of what they're wanting to do, and would certainly be an adventure, but could make my entire life afterwards - if I'm lucky enough to survive it - a very different animal indeed. To say nothing of the fact that the tumours could come back at any point, and if they come back to places where I've previously had surgery like this, there may be nothing they can do.

Believe it or not, *that* was not my worst case scenario, lol. But nor was it the best. In fact that was pretty far away from the best. I cried into my gelato at Gusto yesterday after the appointment, I hope the shopkeeper didn't mind, lol.

I've also decided I had best make a bucket list, just in case. I think the first thing I'll put on it is 'have gelato at Gusto and not cry all over it.'

I am, all things being equal, going well. I am not happy about what's happening - who would be? But I genuinely feel I have very good, competent care, and surgeons who won't rush me into a potentially life-destroying decision. I feel like it could absolutely be a lot worse, given my tumours are non-functional and mostly they're just dormant hitchhikers right now that make my neck sore sometimes. And I have very good people in my life, both offline and on. I am very blessed by the good will of friends and strangers, and I love the home I live in, and our garden, and the cats, and Glen, and our mind-blowing collection of books and DVDs (because I am a huge fan of escapism right now, lol).

But yeah that's...where I'm at. As always, all questions welcome! I will answer as best as I can. I can never fit everything I've learned into these posts, they're long enough as it is!

[darkelfshadow]

Session Summary - 27

AKA “The Dragon Eggs”

Adventures in Taggeriell

Session 27 (Date: 22th July 2017)

Players Present:

- Rob (Known as “Oloma”) Human Female.

- Bob (Known as “Sir Krondor”) Dwarf Male.

- Travis (Known as “Trenchant”) Human Male.

- Paul (Known as “Labarett”) Elf Male.

Absent Players

- Phil (Known as “Nac”) Half-elf Male. <Played by Rob>

- Arthur (Known as “Gim”) Dwarf Male. <Played by Bob>

NPC

- (Known as “Naillae”) Elf Female. <Controlled by DM>

- (Known as “Valder”) Elf Male. <Controlled by DM>

Summary

- Starday, 19th of Neth in the year 814 (Second Era). Winter.

- The party begin this session, in the hour before midnight, in a large cavern in the caves of the Hatchery, having just survived a cave in caused by a fight with a group of Kobold Alchemists.

- The party, who are all badly injured decide to take a short rest, as both Sir Krondor and Gim believe that the chances of anyone hearing or feeling the cave in from the upper levels is very remote.

- Trenchant spends a little time searching around the cave in area but soon realises that most of the fallen rocks are too big to move and thus he can not find anything. The three dead Kobold Alchemist bodies are searched, the other two Kobold bodies are under the fallen rock and gone forever, but nothing of value is found. Labarett spends the time pulling bits of dried glue off his body and trying to comb down his hair to cover the missing patch of hair from his run in with the exploding alchemical bombs.

- During this short rest Nac appears to be trying to pray but does not seem to get the response he would like.

- Valder, seeing the expression on Nac’s face asks, “Something wrong?”

- Nac replies with a tired voice, “No. Yes. I don’t know. I am trying to pray to my Goddess, Tahakisis, but I am getting confusing images I can not understand.”

- Valder replies, “Don’t force it Nac. Keep trying and it will come.”

- After an hour passes, the party stop their short rest, thankful for the break and get to their feet. (Most of the party spend Hit Die to recover much needed Hit Points)

- Deciding that they need to go to the lower section of the cavern, Trenchant comes up with a plan to deal with the six Guard Drakes that are down below. Nac starts to cut one one of the dead kobolds into edible chunks of meat and bone. Naillae pours the entire contents of the poison vial she took from a previous killed Kobold Alchemist they dispatched back at the Temple of Chauntea in Anwich, to poison all the meat. The meat is then thrown down into the lower section where all six Drakes race towards and begin to devour the poisoned meat.

- It takes a few minutes for the Drakes to eat the meat, the occasional sickly crunch of bone heard along with the snapping of the Drakes powerful jaws. After all the meat is devoured the six contented Drakes lay down. A minute later the six beasts start to cough and vomit as the poison takes effect, the Drakes are visibly shaken and weaker from the poison.

- Taking advantaged of the weakened state of the Drakes all the party launches an attack at the Drakes in the lower section, except Naillae who is at the base of the entry stairs guarding against wandering patrols. Along the wooden railing on the upper section stands Oloma, Sir Krondor, Labarett, Valder, Gim, Trenchant and finally Nac who stands closest to the collapsed section of the cavern.

- The party’s attack catches the poisoned Drakes by surprise. Spell, arrow, bolt, psionics and hand axes are hurled at the Drakes. Trenchant makes a particularly good shot with his crossbow and fires off two quick bolts in succession (Critical Hit - Maximum damage and Another follow up attack).

- Some of the Drakes, already badly injured from poison, are dropped dead by the sudden attack and a few others are badly wounded. The enraged beasts leap towards the lower wooden gate and start to claw and bite at it, desperate to make their way up to the party. It would appear that there will not be enough time for the injured Drakes to break their way through the gate before they all get killed.

- Nac smiling as he sends his Chill Touch hand to claw at a couple of Drakes shouts, “This is like taking a rattle from a new born baby. This is easy!”

- The smile from Nac’s face quickly disappears when the closest rock column in the lower section suddenly starts to move. One large orange eye snaps open in centre of the column and then a mouth larger than a grown adult opens up. The mouth is filled with 6” long teeth. Suddenly four tentacles shoot out from the thing and fly towards the nearest members of the party. Gim, Valder, Labarett and Sir Krondor all start to duck and dive as the tentacles try to grab them.

- Nac shouts out, “What is that thing!”

- Oloma shouts, “It is a Roper! A dreaded creature of the underdark. Do not let the tentacles grab you, else it will drag you into its mouth to eat you!”

- Valder dives to the ground, the tentacles barely missing him, and then continues to run all the way back to the far wall to try to stay out of the range of the tentacles. Sir Krondor and Gim soon find they each have a long, hard tentacle that has wrapped around their waist with considerable strength. Quickly before the pair can be dragged away they both drop their weapons and use their hands to pry themselves free from the tentacles (Successful Strength checks).

- Labarett hurls one of his javelins at the Roper and hits it dead centre but the weapon bounces off.

- Oloma shouts, “Their skin is very hard. You’ll need to hit it harder than that!” (Roper’s AC is 20 from natural armour).

- The combat becomes frantic now and what was a simple battle has turned into a life and death struggle. Most of the party are trying to either attack the tentacles directly or hurl attacks at the large body of the Roper itself. Naillae abandons the stairway and comes over to help throw daggers too. Each time someone in the party gets a tentacle wrapped around them and manages to free themselves, they soon find themselves attacked and grappled again. Each time the rough tentacles rip open their skin and cause bleeding wounds.

- Nac concentrates his attacks at the Drakes as they continue to try to break through the gate which is now only half hanging up.

- Trenchant is shouting encouragement at the party (he gives one Bardic Inspiration die to both Sir Krondor and Labarett who are trying to attack the tentacles directly).

- Sir Krondor decides to change tactics and rather than using his strength to force himself out of the tentacles, smashes his silver war hammer into one of the tentacles and breaks it in half. The removed section of tentacle drops to the ground motionless whilst the other remaining half, retracts into the body of the Roper. The large orange eye swivels towards Sir Krondor and the large mouth opens wide with a roar.

- Sir Krondor shouts, “I think I’ve pissed it off!”

- Labarett swings his Masterwork long sword at another tentacle but his grip is wrong and he accidentally lets the weapon fly out of his grip and it lands 10’ away and below in the lower section near the Roper. (Fumble) The Elf barbarian pulls out his second Masterwork long sword.

- Another of the Drakes falls dead, leaving only two now, but the gate is now torn off. Before the Drakes can rush up the stairs the party hurl attacks down at the pair, killing one of the Drakes off and injuring the other. Labarett races down the stairs and charges directly at the last Drake and kills it with a single swing of his weapon.

- Gim, finding himself once again wrapped in a tentacle, swings his lion battle axe and cleaves the tentacle in two (Critical Hit - Max damage and sunder) and then cuts another tentacle down. The Roper’s eye turns immediately to Gim and the beast howls.

- Gim looks worried, “Bugger. It’s looking at me now!”

- Suddenly two more new tentacles shoot out from the Roper and now Gim has three tentacles trying to attack and grab him. The Dwarf manages to duck under one tentacle but he soon finds himself with two tentacles wrapped around him. Gim and Trenchant desperately start to swing their weapons at the tentacles and manage to cut both the tentacles off before they can pull the Dwarf in.

- The rest of the party are throwing everything they have at the Roper. Arrows, bolts, daggers, javelins, hand axes, spells and psionic thrusts all take chucks off the large beast.

- With only one tentacle left near the trio of Gim, Trenchant and Labarett, the last tentacle is cut down.

- Sir Krondor fires an arrow at the Roper and the arrow manages to lodge in the mouth of the beast as it was closed. (Critical Hit - “In The Kisser”). The mouth is now stuck shut until it can break the arrow.

- Labarett seeing the mouth is now shut charges at the body of the Roper, his weapon pointed directly ahead. The Roper is trying to force its mouth open, the wooden arrow is starting to break apart but before it can release itself, under the combined effort of all the party attacking from the upper section and Labarett bravely fighting it in close melee, the Roper suddenly stops moving and begins to topple over. With a loud crash the large heavy beast hits the ground.

- The party are victorious but with many injuries again. Thanks to some luck they managed to survive the Roper and Drakes.

- As Labarett bends down to retrieve his Masterwork long sword he notices that the ground in this lower section, which is soft black sand, has small slightly raised mounds all around it. Some of the party come down to search the lower area, and to retrieve their thrown weapons, and all up they count twenty small raised mounds around the lower section.

- Oloma scrapes the cold black dirt from one mound and finds a hard round object about an inch under the surface. She continues to dig and pulls out a large egg, about 10” high, that is very hard and has a scaly surface.

- Valder looks at the egg, “Unless I’m mistaken, that is a Dragon Egg.”

- Quickly the rest of the party get to work to dig out the twenty Dragon Eggs. Once all the eggs are out Valder looks them over. He thinks they are of different Dragon types but he can’t be sure which are which.

- Trenchant checks his Bag Of Sharing but it still has the notes he placed in it before. The Bard looks up, “It appears that Valthrun has not checked the Bag on his end yet. We’re on our own.”

- The party divide the Dragon Eggs up and each member takes two eggs, except Labarett and Nac who take three eggs, and places them into their backpacks. Trenchant places four of the eggs into his Bag of Sharing.

- As the party are now injured from the battle with the Roper they decide to take another short rest. Naillae sits near the stair way to listen out for possible patrols. Everyone else takes the time to simply rest. Nac once again sits down, eyes closed, and prays to his Goddess.

- The hour passes and luckily for the party they are not disturbed (Once again some of the party spend Hit Die to recover Hit Points. The party are getting close to the point of running out of Hit Die, Healing Potions and Healing Spells).

- At the end of the short rest, Nac’s eyes snap open from his prayer, “My prayer is not strong enough! The images, they are stronger now but still eluding me. I saw the statue of Tahakisis in the Dragon Shrine with the silver chest. I believe if I were to pray in that room I will have a stronger connection to my Goddess.”

- As the Dragon Shrine room is just near by the party leave the Dragon Egg Chamber and return to the where the statue of the Dragon Goddess looms tall in the room. The silver chest, engraved with dragons, stands just before the statue.

- Nac states that he will need to perform a prayer ritual for ten minutes and the Cleric of Tahakisis goes over to kneel in the front of the statue.

- Sir Krondor and Gim move over to the long 100’ stairs to guard it. Valder and Labarett look over the  carved and engraved wall of Dragon motifs. Naillae crouches near the silver chest, looking carefully over it but not daring to touch it.

- Meanwhile Trenchant, Valder and Oloma move over to the dead end section to look at the tall vertical natural shaft that extends beyond sight. The rope hanging down from the shaft is thick and sturdy with regular knots tied into it to make climbing with it easier. Valder summons his owl familiar and sends it to fly upwards in the shaft and concentrates to see through his familiar’s eyes. Valder reports that the shaft extends about 80’ up and then stops. There is a rug or mat covering the top of the shaft, little specks of light shine through the covering, and the rope continues all the way to the top.

- After ten minutes, the rest of the party move over to see Nac has finished his prayer. Standing up, rubbing his tired eyes, he speaks, “My goddess has spoken to me. I asked her more information about the Dragon Mask that would summon her into this world. She warned me that once a mortal places the Dragon Mask on they can not take it off. Only their death would release the Mask and in doing so The Dragon Goddess would be returned to the Nine Hells, until someone else placed the mask on.”

- Valder asks, “Is that everything?”

- Nac replies, “Yes, I have told you everything you need know.”

- The party now take some time to discuss what to do. Sir Krondor is very eager to see what lays inside the silver chest. Trenchant believes they should just leave now with the Dragon Eggs and not risk setting off the trap they know is there. The party take a vote and most want to try to open the chest.

- Naillae suggests that she could make a visual examination of the chest to discover the nature of the trap. She spends a few minutes to carefully look over the chest, avoiding touching it. She then informs the party that she can see a small wire inside the key look and another small wire underneath the chest. She believes that the trap is set to go off if the lid were to be forced open, or the chest moved, or if the wrong key was turned in the lock or if the lock was picked opened. The only way to open the chest safely would be to use the right key or Naillae could attempt to disarm the trap and bypass the wire to the key lock. She states that the wire underneath the chest is not accessible and she could not disarm it.

- Most of the party decide to have Naillae attempt to disarm the key lock trap. Trenchant follows the lead of the party, and then offers advice and encouragement to Naillae in her disarm attempt (Bardic Inspiration gives plus d8). So too does Nac who casts a Guidance spell upon Naillae to help guide her hands in the attempt (Guidance spell gives plus d4). After a rope is tied around the waist of Naillae, in case she sets the trap off and they have to drag her out, the rest of the party leave the room and wait on the main stairs in.

- Naillae begins to work her Thief’s tools on the complicated key lock wire. She begins to sweat as she realises that this trap is perhaps beyond her ability and she is about to set the trap off. (As this is an important roll, the DM suggests that he should not roll for the NPCs disarm attempt. So after a bit of discussion, the roll is done by Bob (Sir Krondor), and he rolls a 4 so even with the extra d8 and d4 the attempt will fail and the trap will be set off. However, Rob (Oloma) uses his Inspiration to allow a reroll. This time Travis (Trenchant) decides to make the roll and he rolls very high, and that along with the extra d4 and d8, gives a final result of 23.)

- As just Naillae is sure she is about to fail, she cuts the wire, and nothing happens. She slowly pulls her tiny tools out of the key hole and looks up with a smile, “I’ve disabled the trap.”

- She then goes about picking the lock and with a satisfying click, the lid pops up half a centimetre, “The chest is unlocked. Who wants to open it?”

- The party, still unsure the chest is safe, ask Naillae to examine the partially open lid for further traps. She does so and states she can’t be sure but she can’t see any wires or other mechanisms and thinks it safe.

- Oloma strides over to the chest, whilst everyone else tries to come up with a way to open the lid remotely, and the Mystic boldly opens the lid.

- Inside the chest is a string of pearls, a gold and sapphire ring, and a small open leather pouch containing half a dozen well cut gems, a larger leather pouch with writing on it that is tied shut, four lightning rune stones, and a 3” wide silver heart shaped jewellery box sitting atop a folded note.

- Trenchant speaks whilst pulling out a small note, “I think those are the items referred to in that note we found in Frulam’s command tent.”

- Trenchant then reads out the note again, “Everything must be freighted north, through Singbury, and around Asalea, towards Naerytar. Avoid attention. Use the roads only and do not use river barges. Rezmir allowed us to keep some pearls, a ring, and a handful of stones.”

- The Bard points to the items in the chest, “There is the pearls, the ring and stones. They must be part of the stolen goods from Anwich.”

- The items are taken out. The lightning rune stones are three Tier 1 stones and one Tier 2 stone, which is divided out to the party. The larger leather pouch is opened and inside is ground up rose petals which gives a strong sweet smell. Written on the outside of the pouch in rough common is, “Throw some of this up into the air when entering the lower section to check on the Dragon Eggs. The Roper is trained not to attack when this scent is used.”

- Sir Krondor speaks, “Well, that would have been handy to have BEFORE we went into that dam cavern!”

- Next the party examine the small 3” wide silver heart shaped jewellery box. On the lid is a masterfully engraved scene with such detail as to be almost life like. A brave knight stands, his broken long sword lays on the ground, so too does his shattered shield. He stands in front of and protecting a cowering maiden, whom he holds in his arms, shielding her from the view of a dragon. To the side is a large pile of treasure. Looming over the pair is a massive dragon, with one broken horn, the other half of the horn lays on the ground. The beasts jaws are open with flames flickering and it is obvious the beast is about to kill the pair in its fiery breath.

- The lid of the jewellery box is unlocked so the party open it. The inside of box is lined in plush red velvet. A small, egg sized object, dark red and with rough sides is the only object inside.

- Valder looks at the odd object, “I think that is a shrunken, dried heart. Looks like a human heart.”

- The note that was under the jewellery box is opened and read out by Oloma, it is in common, “Langdedrosa, Keep this heart secure until we can figure out how to make it work. There must be a way that is alluding us.”

- Trenchant the Bard of Valour then speaks (Successful History Check), “I remember an old song taught to me long ago. It was the tale of Sir Gillan. He was a brave and noble Knight and performed many great deeds but the song was not about his many quests but about his end. Sir Gillan, single handedly went to a cave in a tall mountain, as a Dragon there was attacking a near by village and they had asked for the Knights help. This Dragon however proved more of a match than Sir Gillan anticipated. Sir Gillan managed to inflict a serious wound on the Dragon and cut off one of its horns but the battle went badly for the Knight and when his long sword and shield lay smashed on the floor he had no choice but to turn and retreat. The Dragon did not follow and Sir Gillan could have left to save his life but then he heard a faint, desperate cry of help from a female voice back inside with the Dragon. Sir Gillan, with no weapon, went back inside and saw that the Dragon had not only a hoard of gold and treasure but a prisoner too, a young maiden in tears sat in the shadows at the back of the cavern. Sir Gillan ran over to the maiden and stood in front of her. With no weapon and no shield the Knight knew he could not save her nor himself but he would not stand aside. Not even as the jaws of the Dragon opened with flames visible, did the Knight falter, and as the Knight held onto the maiden to speak calming and reassuring words to her that he knew where a lie, the Dragon engulfed the pair in flames. Sir Gillan lost his life that day, to save a girl he did not know, in a noble and selfless sacrifice befitting a hero. The Dragon, after eating the burnt maiden, grabbed the burnt body of the Knight and flew to the near by village where the Dragon dropped the body as a warning. The villagers took the body and gave it proper burial. The song does not tell what happened to his body.”

- Naillae looked over to Oloma whilst the tale of Sir Gillan was being recounted by Trenchant. She noticed that Oloma appeared to be talking silently to herself. Concerned Naillae quietly asks, “You ok?”

- Oloma replies softly, “Yes, I was just giving a silent prayer about the tale. Do not concern yourself.”

- The party then move over to the far vertical shaft and get Naillae to use her expertise as a thief and burglar to climb the rope. She does so easily and quickly. She climbs up about 80 feet and finds the exit to the hole is covered with a rug. Little speckles of light can be seen from the rug, so a light source must be on the other side. She can hear the sound of someone writing on paper with a quill, and also the sounds of near by snoring.

- Naillae climbs down and tells the party what she has seen and heard. The party decide it is now time to take on Frulam and her guards. The party guess that the covered hole must come out somewhere around where they know Frulam must be. They get Naillae to climb back up and cut the rope about 10’ down from the exit. They have her wait near the upper exit, hanging onto the rocky walls of the shaft, hidden, to wait for sounds of combat. When she hears the battle start she is to come out from the rear and start to sneak attack. Naillae says she’ll do this but if she doesn’t hear anything she’ll wait for 2 hours and then she’ll go back down to see what has happened.

- The rest of the party now leave Naillae behind, walk through the Dragon Shrine Room, up the 100’ long stairs, through the Kobold Sleeping Chamber and then through the Drake Hatchery cavern where they left the tied up and gagged Kobold Chieftain hanging on the wall; the Daylight spell of Nac has long since ceased to work in this cavern. As they walk past they see that the Chieftain is dead, a single small wound on his chest, as if someone slipped a dagger into his heart.

- The party look at each other and finally Trenchant speaks, “Ok, who is responsible for this?”

- Everyone looks at Nac and the Cleric responds with a smile, “Don’t look at me. I was with you guys.”

- As no one takes responsibility for the killing the party move on. They move into the large cavern with the bat filled ceiling. They once again ignore the descending stairs that smell of blood and death. They move over to the far side of the cavern where the unexplored ledge going down is. With the benefit of light and dark vision now, the party can see the ledge goes down 10’ to another smaller section of the cavern before it descends again into a very low section of the cavern that is filled with rubbish and garbage. There is a smell of rotting food here. There is the occasional glint of metal in the large pile of rubbish but as the pile and cavern is so large, they can not even see the far side of the cavern, they decide not to go down to search it and instead carry on to where Frulam is as per the plan.

- The party proceed on through the cavern filled with fungus and over the trapped stairs to return to the large entry cavern of the Hatchery. They start to search the area where the now dead Kobold Chieftain had indicated there was a secret door.

- They search for ten minutes but come up empty handed even knowing the rough spot the door should be (Advantage on Roll thanks to the information gained by the Chieftain).

- Trenchant huffs, “You know what would have been handy? If the Chieftain was still alive we could have grabbed him to show us exactly where the dam secret door is!”

- No one responds to the comment. Again the party spend about ten minutes to search the area desperately looking for the door but can not find it.

- Sir Krondor now speaks, “Dam it! Surely someone in the party is skilled at finding secret doors!”

- Nac speaks, “Yes and she is currently hanging in a vertical shaft waiting for us to get through and start a battle from this side.”

- With no other choice the party search for the secret door for a third time. Taking another ten minutes to search, this time Nac casts Guidance on himself (+ d4 bonus) and Trenchant gives him some verbal encouragement too (+ d8 bonus) and with that, along with the knowledge gained from the Chieftain (giving advantage on the roll), Nac does indeed find the very well hidden secret door (required a DC 23 check to find).

- Prying open the secret door can be seen a corridor that goes forth. About 30’ away a dark side passage goes off to the right but the main corridor continues around in a slight bend to end at an opening, about 60’ away, to a lit chamber.

- Trenchant pulls up his Elven Cloak and walks forward to investigate. He reaches the side passage and enters it. Ahead is a dark chamber, he can just make out some coins and a broken box on the floor at the entry way, but the human Bard can not see well enough in the darkness to see the rest of the room. From the dark room he can hear snoring. From the lit chamber he can also hear the sound of snoring, a lot of it, and the sound of rolling dice too.

- Trenchant goes back and tells the party what he saw and heard. The party decide to send up Oloma, Labarett and Gim to the dark side room to investigate. Labarett and Gim take the lead as their dark vision makes moving about easy where as Oloma has to use the dim light coming from the lit room to navigate the corridor. Labarett steps on a piece of broken wood on the floor that breaks with a snap.

- Oloma hangs back at the junction as she can still see well enough there and Labarett and Gim move over to the entrance of the dark room to see that it is a large chamber with broken wooden boxes and broken bits of wood are all over the floor, a handful of coins are on the floor, and a body in the corner to the far right is asleep under some blankets. The figure is snoring and has not apparently heard the approach of the party.

- Just then Oloma hears the sound of walking footsteps coming from the direction of the lit room. She leans out to take a look and is confronted by the sight of two surprised guards who look directly at the face of Oloma which is only a few feet away. Both guards are in armour and hold a shield and spear loosely at their sides.

- Oloma quickly and quietly springs into action before the guards can react. (Initiative won by Oloma). She calls forth the twin Soul Knives of light from her hands and bounds around the corner to slice one Soul Knife across the throat of one guard, who silently falls backwards clutching his open bleeding throat, and plunges her other Soul Knife into the heart of the other guard. Both guards lay dead on the floor.

- Labarett silently moves over to the sleeping figure and plunges his long sword twice into the chest of the reclining figure. With a gurgle the figure stops breathing and lays dead. Two empty wine bottles near the body and the reek of liquor would suggest the male was quite drunk.

- Labarett and Gim search the dark room with the darkvision and only find 20 silver coins, 4 gold coins and 10 small gems.

- A voice yells out from the lit room, “Eron, hurry up and come back, it’s your turn!”

- Another voice, sounding sleepy and angry, shouts, “Shut ya dirty mouth! We’re trying to sleep!”

- The party quickly come up with a plan. Nac and Valder will hang back at the open secret door to wait in ambush and to provide covering fire with spells. Gim and Sir Krondor will move to the dark side passage to wait in ambush with their melee weapons. Trenchant along with Oloma and Labarett will boldly walk into the lit room to try to convince them they are Dragon Cult reinforcements sent to ask for a small number to go back to help with a task; at which point the other party members waiting in ambush will attack the split up forces.

- Trenchant, still disguised as a cultist, walks into view into the lit chamber. It is a large chamber with a few lit torches on the walls. About twenty sleeping bodies lay in bed rolls all around the chamber. To the left is a side passage leading to somewhere else. Trenchant quickly scans the room but can not see any rug or mat, this is not the room where Naillae is waiting. To the right on the far wall, seated around a round table are six figures gambling with dice. One of the figures, dressed in impressive armour, stands up, “Who the fuck are you?”

- The other figures start to grab the nearby shields and spears.

- Trenchant speaks calmly, “We’re reinforcements. I need some of your men to come with me to help Lord Frulam with a task.” (Failed Deception check)

- The tall and solid looking man bellows, “Like fuck you are! I’ve never seen you before. UP YOU DOGS! TO ARMS!”

- The bodies on the ground start to stir but before most can do anything, Oloma pushes past Trenchant to move to the side of the entryway and concentrates her mind. A Physic Blast races towards the line of bodies on the ground and in an instant elven of the guards stop breathing as their minds are torn asunder.

- One of the bodies of the far wall, sits up and points a heavy crossbow at the party, releasing a crossbow bolt. At the same time, the standing veteran soldier races across and starts to swing his sword at Oloma. The first swing misses, thanks to Oloma’s cloak that makes her appear just off to the side of where she actually is (disadvantage on combat rolls) but the second back swing swings true directly where she is. Just before the veteran’s blade strikes her Oloma suddenly vanishes and teleports 10’ away.

- Trenchant tries to swing back at the veteran but he times his swing poorly and hits himself in the jaw (Fumble). The Bard will not be able to speak for a short time, thus can not use any of his Bardic abilities or talents!

- Sir Krondor and Gim come running up together, still in corridor. Sir Krondor yells out, “Hold them all here. Langdedrosa is killed and our other group is taking the Dragon Eggs now!”

- Gim shouts too, “Yes we should have all the Dragon Eggs soon!”

- The veteran soldier hears this exchange. (Sir Krondor failed his Deception check but Gim was successful in his Deception roll). Quickly the veteran soldier snaps, “Warn Frulam the eggs are being stolen NOW!”

- One of the guards closest to the left passageway sprints down and out of sight yelling, “The eggs! The eggs are being stolen!”

- Meanwhile the five guards, in full armour, that were at the round table, sprint towards Trenchant and surround him; their spears lunging at him.

- Trenchant realises he is alone at the entry way surrounded by guards but the Bard can’t use any of his special abilities due to his injured jaw preventing him from talking.

- Valder though sees the danger the Bard is in and sends forth the Fireball that he has been saving all this time. The small orange speck flies over the party and lands in the middle of chamber. The speck explodes into a ranging fireball of intense heat. The flames go around the Bard, thanks to Valder’s special evocation mastery of shaping, and kills all five guards around the Bard, and another three guards around the room. The flames have also badly burnt the veteran soldier near Trenchant and the other soldier across the room with the heavy cross bow.

- As the flames die down, Labarett runs in and engages the veteran soldier in armour.

- Just as the party are thinking they have the battle in hand, two robed figures appear from the side passage, Cult Fanatics. One of the Fanatics points at Labarett and the Elf barbarian feels his muscles start to stiffen; he is now Held by magic (Failed save roll). The other Fanatic points at Trenchant but has no effect on the Bard (Successful save roll).

- From the side passage a loud female scream is heard, that quickly fades away and then suddenly stops.

- “That better not be Naillae,” shouts Nac as he fires off a spell.

- “No, that wasn’t her voice,” shouts back Trenchant, as he lunges with his rapier.

- The soldier on the far wall drops his heavy crossbow, and as he lifts himself up, dressed only in a loose undershirt, he grabs a long sword and approaches the immobilised Labarett. The Elf barbarian is helpless against the attack and the large soldier carves two deep wounds into Labarett’s torso. Instantly the barbarian falls over, unconscious and bleeding to death.

- The rest of the party see Labarett drop and rush into gear to save him. Gim, Oloma, Sir Krondor, and Trenchant all move forward engaging foes. Sir Krondor and Gim smash lightning runes onto the their weapons, causing lightning to erupt along each of their weapons.

- The two Fanatics again cast spells and suddenly floating spectral weapons appear next to Gim and Sir Krondor, swinging at them. The combat is frantic now as the party know they have to get to Labarett before he bleeds to death and the remaining foes are fighting to the death too.

- Nac points at the two Fanatics and sends forth his Chill Hand at both and the spectral ghost hand grabs each of their throats bringing the pair to the ground dead (Spell Critical Hit). As the two Fanatics hit the ground dead both of the spectral weapons they had conjured disappear into mist.

- The rest of the party press the attack at remaining foes, giving enough room for Sir Krondor, who takes a swing at a foe on the way through, to rush over to the downed figure of Labarett.

- The Dwarf Knight grabs his backpack hurriedly and opens it searching for his Healing Kit to stop the bleeding on the barbarian. As the battle rages around him the Dwarf Knight starts to apply salves and bandages to Labarett, Sir Krondor has stopped the bleeding and saved Labarett.

- The final foes drop one by one, just as Naillae comes walking into the room from the side passage, casually wiping the blood of her rapier, “What took you so long?”

- Naillae informs the party that when she was waiting in the shaft, Frulam has raced over, pulled aside the rug covering the hole, and started to climb down. When Frulam got 10’ down and noticed that the rope had been cut off, Naillae left her hiding spot in the shadows, grabbed Frulam and pulled her off the rope before she even knew what was happening. Naillae watched the Cult Commander, fall screaming to her death, and hit the ground hard; her limbs and head bent back at weird angles that could only mean she had meet her death.

- Then Naillae saw a guard leaning over the hole to look down, so Naillae who was still hidden in the dark shadows of the shaft, threw a single dagger at the guard. The blade struck him straight in the left eye and the guard fall over onto the floor dead.

- After that Naillae climbed up out of the shaft, retrieved her dagger and came over to the party who had pretty much just dispatched the lost of the foes.

- Whilst Naillae is explaining what happened, Nac and Trenchant are casting healing spells onto the unconscious but stable Labarett. Soon the Elf barbarian sits up coughing, he is alive. Seeing Sir Krondor crouched next to him, putting away his Healing Kit and supplies, the Elf barbarian thanks the Dwarf Knight solemnly, “You risked your life to save mine friend. Thankyou.”

- Sir Krondor smiling, just slaps the Elf barbarian good-naturedly on the back.

- The party move straight into the side passage and into Frulam’s room. This large room is sparsely furnished and has no decorations of any sort. There is a wooden table near one wall with a single seat, a large and nicely made bed in a corner with a nearby open chest (filled with clothes), a rug has been thrown to the side of the room revealing a large hole in one corner of the room and a sturdy rope attached to a metal ring in a wall going into the pit, and a small side room to the north where two rough sleeping bedrolls are which are presumably where the two Cult Fanatics slept to guard Frulam.

- The writing desk is searched on the table is found a solid silver key with a small black dragon on the end of the key made of black onyx.

- Sir Krondor bows his head down and moans, “The key for the silver chest! I think we’ve pretty much done this cave in the wrong order.”

- Most of the letters and notes on the desk are mundane, simple accounting or inventory requirements of the camp or books with bad dragon poetry. However, one note gets the party’s attention:

“Lord Galvan The Blue Wyrmspeaker.

The camp is running well. Raiders from the Anwich attack have returned with suitable treasure. It has been counted and sent forth. Solana Venrel needs to learn her place and duties; her lack of respect for my position and orders are interfering with our plans. We had some issues with a group lead by a Dwarven Knight Of The Anvil and Solana was not up to the task of dealing with them; resulting in her Dragon, Lennithon, taking a grievous wound. To salvage the situation she caused, I sent forth my second in charge, Langdedrosa Cyanwrath, Dragonfang, and he has killed the meddling Knight.

Rezmir The Black, along with one of the fool Red Wizards, came to ensure the tribute was sent. Curse Rezmir the arrogant fool. He along with Severin The Red think they are the most important of the Wyrmspeakers! Ha! I shall bind my time, as you request, and humour him. His time will come soon enough, he and all the other Wyrmspeakers will bow down before you my great and wise Lord, the one who truly speaks for Tiamat.

Interrogations with that dam Harper have revealed little. I will kill him soon.

The Hatchery is running smoothly and the Dragon Eggs are safe.

Your humble servant, Frulam Mondath, DragonSoul

Tiamat, Our Mother and Strength"

<And as the party stand in the private room of Frulam, within “The Hatchery”, and wondering how they are going to get out alive, past the hundreds of troops outside, that is the end of the session.>

XP Allocation

Group - Combined (This is equally divided by the number of players who were involved)

Quests (Only quests that are completed or rendered undoable, during this session, are shown here)

- Locate The Dragon Eggs = 500 XP

- Open The Dragon Chest = 200 XP

- “Cut Off The Head” - Remove Frulam from Command = 300 XP

Creatures Overcome

- Guard Drakes = 2700 XP

- Roper = 1800 XP

- Guards / Cultists = 550 XP

- Veteran Guards = 1400 XP

- Cult Fanatics = 900 XP

- Frulam Mondath = 450 XP

Individual (This is only given to that person and is not divided amongst all players)

Special Bonus (Outstanding Role Playing)

Nil

XP Levels and Player Allocations

Player : Start +  Received = Total  (Notes)

Phil : 20709 + 825 = 21534

Rob : 24902 + 1375 = 26277

Arthur : 17774 + 825 = 18599

Bob : 13846 + 1375 = 15221 (Level up to Level 6)

Travis : 14749 + 1100 = 15849

Paul : 11920 + 1100 = 13020

NPC (Valder) : ??? + 550 = ???

NPC (Naillae) : ??? + 550 = ???

[bastardfur]

Chapter 2

Sammy walked into his apartment with a greater appreciation for his home than he had before the trip. I wonder if this is what the point of camping is? To remind yourself how shitty life could be so you appreciate yours more, Sammy thought. Then again, being attacked by a wolf isn't exactly a typical camping experience.

 Sammy's apartment was a medium sized studio apartment with a high industrial ceiling and hardwood floors. He expertly arranged the open space into sections using IKEA furniture and giant rugs. The rugs served as little islands to compartmentalize his stuff and apartment. He had a living area with his 60-inch TV and game systems and work area that held his desk, computer, and a large white board he used to keep his life organized. In the corner, next to the bathroom was his bed and nightstand. His bed was never made and there was a pile of dirty clothes next to his dresser. As organized as Sammy like to be in every other aspect of his life, laundry was his weakness. Sammy had a kitchen in his apartment but it went mostly unused. It's not that he couldn't cook, he just didn't want to put in the effort. Cooking for one always seemed like the loneliest activity to Sammy and he could just make a sandwich or order food just as easily.

 After a shower, Sammy fell into bed and took a nap. It was Sunday, but he was already making mental plans to work from home tomorrow. Sammy didn't have any meetings to go to and since he worked on the website, he could just stay home and be just as productive. Sammy woke up late that afternoon and decided he should probably eat something. He got dressed to go down to the deli across the street. Another perk of living in the city, he thought. I don't understand how Eric survives the suburbs.

 As Sammy was locking up his door, his neighbor from across the hall walked out of his apartment. "Hello, Samuel" he greeted.

 "Hi Clint" Sammy sheepishly replied. Clint Blackbill had lived across from Sammy since he moved in 3 years ago. Clint was an older man (Sammy guessed late 40s early 50s) with silver hair and a salt and pepper beard. Clint refused to call Sammy anything other than Samuel. Clint told him he couldn't bring himself to call a grown man Sammy, and he didn't argue with Clint. Mostly because he was distracted by how handsome Clint was. Clint had piercing blue eyes and a confident aura that drove Sammy nuts. After 3 years, Sammy was no longer paralyzed by talking to Clint, but the attraction was still there. Sammy had spent his first week patrolling the dating apps to see if Clint showed up, but he never did. To this day, Sammy still had no idea if Clint was gay or not. For a man with such powerful eyes, they revealed nothing of his true intentions. "Heading out anywhere special tonight?" Sammy was always trying to find out more about him.

 "Afraid not. I just got back from a weekend trip and need some groceries to get me through the week. What happened to your arm?" Clint said as he finished locking his door. "Looks like something pretty nasty got a hold of you."

 Sammy was confused for half second, and then remembered the bandage on his arm and the last 48 hours. He was surprised at how quickly his trauma and faded in his mind and how little his arm was hurting. "Oh this? I had a run in with a wolf of all things. Damn thing cornered me in the woods."

 "A wolf? That's rare for Georgia. I'm sure it was just a coyote."

 "No, for real. It was definitely a wolf. It got right in my face." Sammy noticed a slight hesitation behind Clint's usual confident demeanor.

 "How strange. I hope that heals ok. Let me know if you need anything. I'm always right across the hall. Take care, Samuel." Clint left down the stairs toward the lobby while Sammy waited for the elevator. They lived on the 15th floor of the building and yet Clint always insisted on taking the stairs. Clint may have been over 20 years older than Sammy, but he was in much better shape than he was.

 Sammy went and grabbed some dinner and brought it back to his apartment. After dinner, Sammy sat down to watch some TV before bed. Curious to how his arm was doing, he decided to unwrap the bandage and check on it. It won't hurt to peek, he said to justify his actions. Plus, I should probably change the bandage anyways.

 Sammy unwrapped the bandage to find that wound had significantly healed itself from last night. It was nowhere near perfectly healed, but Sammy was still impressed with how little it hurt. He put fresh bandages on and went back to watching TV.

 Over the next few weeks, Sammy’s life went on as it pretty much always did with one notable exception. To Sammy's enjoyment, he seemed to be running into Clint more often than usual. Mostly has he left the house, but sometimes around town. Sammy thought nothing of it except how much he had been enjoying seeing and talking to Clint. Clint was just as friendly as always and even seemed to be taking more of an interest in Sammy's personal life. The bite healed up within a couple of weeks and surprisingly didn't even leave a scar. Sammy had almost completely put the whole ordeal out of his mind until the night of the next full moon.

  It was a cold November evening, but luckily Sammy had been able to work from home. Sammy enjoyed his work from home days because it allowed him to spend all day in his underwear and take breaks to play video games. No one ever noticed if he took long breaks because of how much work he could accomplish when he did sit down to focus. Once five o'clock hit he decided that he was done with work and logged out of his company's VPN. He went over towards the kitchen to see if he had any food. Haven't left the house all day, why start now? He thought as he grabbed some ham and cheese from the fridge to make a sandwich. He could see from his window all the rush hour traffic down below as the sun set behind the buildings. Sammy was glad to not have to deal with Atlanta traffic. He didn't live far from work, but it would still have been fully night by the time he would get home.

 Sammy sat down to eat and then play some video games for the rest of the night. Just as the Sammy was about to power on his Xbox, he heard a knock on the door. Who the fuck is knocking? Who visits me? Sammy grabbed some shorts laying nearby and went to the door. He opened the door to see Clint staring at him looking worried.

 "I need to come in." He demanded. Sammy looked at him with a blank stare as if he had just spoken in German. "Now, Samuel" He demanded as he barged into Sammy's apartment. Clint pushed him out of the way and locked the door.

 Sammy was trying his best to keep up with the situation. "Is everything ok, Clint? You're usually a lot more.... stoic than this."

 Clint walked through the house as if he were looking for something that would jump out at them at any moment. He made his way to the windows and studied the sky intently. "Samuel, it's almost time. Whatever happens tonight, I want you to trust me." Clint grabbed the curtains and shut them obscuring the freshly darkened night sky. Clint turned back to Sammy and instructed him, "Take off your clothes. All of them."

 Sammy could feel his brain stutter. As if someone had hard reset his brain and he was stuck until it restarted itself. He had imagined Clint saying these words to him a million times, but somehow hearing them said aloud was enough to make his jaw slip open and become a mindless mouth breather. As soon as he started to gain control of himself, Clint started to undress right in front of him. This can't be real, Sammy thought. As Clint undressed, Sammy saw that the salt and pepper hair he had on his face was mirrored in the hair that covered his surprisingly fit torso for a man his age. Sammy knew he should have looked away when Clint's shorts came off, but as weird as this night was going why should he care.

 Clint stood there in his full glory glaring at Sammy. Sammy still stood there, too dumbstruck to speak. Clint was visibly impatient with Sammy's behavior. He walked over to Sammy's stereo system and turned the volume up just past comfortably loud. Clint yelled over the music,” Samuel. Remove your clothes. You'll only make it harder for yourself."

 "What..." Sammy replied as a lightning bolt of pain shot through his back with a sickening crack that reverberated in his ears. The first strike of pain was all the convincing Sammy needed to head Clint's warning. He removed his shorts just in time to be sent to the ground in agony. He could feel his bones splintering and rearranging themselves under his skin, which was burning and stretching to compensate for all the turmoil happening just below the skin. He cried out in pain and caught a glimpse of Clint. He was no longer standing confidently, but was on the ground seemingly undergoing a similar process that he was undergoing. Every inch of Sammy's body was changing. His fingers retracted as sharp claws burst out from where his fingernails use to be. He felt his jaw snap loose and narrow as it protruded forward, allowing more room for the sharp fangs to move into place. Hair was erupting all over his body as he began to shift his weight evenly between his limbs. After an excruciating few minutes, the pain subsided but Sammy was far from okay.

[itsiotrecords-blog]

http://ift.tt/2rbZJRc

The human body is very resilient, but sometimes the amount of abuse it can take is absolutely remarkable. This list was created to showcase a myriad of stories concerning objects that have, at one point or another, been found in the human body. Whether by accident or on purpose, the sheer size and amount of these objects consumed will blow your mind.

#1 Light bulb If you’re a male and you find yourself in a prison, dropping the soap is definitely something to be cautious about. If you’re a man in a Pakistani prison however, you should be more concerned about the light bulbs you may have shoved up your butt as you sleep. A man named Fateh Mohammad was serving a sentence for bootlegging when he received the surprise of his life. One night he went to bed just minding his own business, and the next thing he knew he was experiencing severe pain in his lower abdomen. As the pain increased, Fateh was taken to the hospital where doctors were baffled as to how a large unbroken light bulb ended up in the man’s anus. Fateh denied any knowledge as to how it got there and claimed he must have been drugged at night as the other inmates or officers inserted it into him… a likely story.  It took surgeons about an hour and a half to remove. He was able to make a full recovery following the surgery, despite the psychological trauma it must have involved. His fellow inmates also now know Mohammad as the only man that has ever been able to bring light where the sun don’t shine.

#2 High Pressure Air Hose Steve McCormack took the term “freak accident” to a whole new level when he accidentally fell onto a high-pressure air hose that began inflating him like a balloon.  As McCormick was working on the brakes for his truck, he slipped and fell onto the valve. As his son began calling for help, the only two ambulances in their small New Zealand town were busy as was the medical helicopter. McCormack continued to grow larger as his colleagues attempted to jiggle him off the valve with no success. At one point, they were finally able to shut off the air, but McCormick was in excruciating pain as he had to lie there until help arrived. The air had filled every available crevice of McCormick’s body including behind his eyelids. This put dangerous pressure on his heart. When the needle to administer the morphine was placed in his skin, it shot right back out due to the pressure. His skin began to crackled like bubble wrap. After three days, McCormick was able to deflate through excessive flatulence and burping. He was able to make a full recovery following the accident.

#3 Cobblestones Many people have fights with their significant others, but few can claim that they decide to go consume more than 20 cobblestones out of pure rage. A woman from Foshan, China decided to do just that in 2006. She first believed the stones could be digested the old fashion way, but when she began experiences severe stomach pain as the cobblestones banged together, she went to the hospital. Doctors were absolutely shocked at finding the 20 cobblestones lumped in the bottom of her stomach. While doctors urged her to have surgery quickly, the girl decided to go the intelligent route and Google advice on online medical forums. To the best of my knowledge, she did decide to have the surgery and was able to make a full recovery, despite most likely losing her boyfriend.

#4 Various pieces of metal A man was admitted to a hospital when doctors found a 12lb mass located in his stomach. The mass was so heavy it was dragging his stomach down to his hips. The man’s name is not known, but he had been previously admitted to the hospital for similar circumstances. The man decided to go to the hospital after his stomach pain grew so severe that he was unable to eat, drink, or have bowel movements. Doctors were shocked to find the man had eaten of $650 worth of coins, necklaces, needles and various other metal objects over a period of 10 years.  Surgeons acted quickly to remove the foreign objects from his stomach, but he died from complications. The man was thought to be suffering from a psychological disorder known as pica, where people have the compulsion to eat non-edible objects.

#5 78 pieces of cutlery While the X-ray of Margaret Daalmans’s stomach looks like she’s housing a jellyfish, it’s actually a mass of the 78 pieces of cutlery she decided to consume. She explained that when she went to eat food, she would end up eating her utensils instead. Furthermore, she had a mysterious aversion to eating knives, with forks and spoons being her utensils of choice. Also thought to be suffering from a severe case of pica, Daalman had been treated several times in the past for similar utensil consumptions, but this particular time she decided to consume the whole utensil canteen. Margaret was able to recover and is working on getting help for her pica.

#6 Unexploded bomb Channing Moss is now known as a true war hero after miraculously surviving an unexploded bomb being lodged into his lower abdomen. In 2011, he was on a routine patrol in Afghanistan in an armored car when he and his crew were suddenly attacked by a barrage of rocket propelled grenades sent at them that killed two of their men. The grenades were very powerful and capable of killing every human standing within a 30 foot range, but somehow it failed to detonate as it became lodged in between Moss’s hips. The team’s only paramedic happened to be with Moss at the time and quickly took care of him. The medical helicopter was called, but it took many hours for it to arrive because of the fighting in the surrounding area. Not only was Moss in excruciating pain and forced to wait hours for the helicopter, he was almost left for dead being that the bomb endangered other soldiers and the military had a rule against transporting injured soldiers that endangered others. Fortunately, the helicopter crew decided to go against military policy and agreed to take him to the nearest hospital. By the time he arrived, his heart had all but stopped due to the massive blood loss. Luckily, one of the few bomb experts happened to be at the hospital the same time as Moss and was able to detonate the bomb in a safe location. Surgeons worked tirelessly and Moss was able to make a full recovery and even walk again. He received the Purple Heart and Medal of Valor for his struggles.

#7 Clothing When 20-year-old Anuj Ranjan came in for a surgery to treat a chest infection, doctors were astounded to find a belt lodged inside of him from a car accident years earlier. He had gotten into the severe car accident in 2006, which had left him with a gaping wound in his abdomen. Ranjan had been suffering from tuberculosis and an infection at the time, which caused a passage to form in his chest. Ranjan was in need of surgery to fix the passage and help treat the infection in order to save his life. As doctors began finishing up his surgery, they suddenly found an 8 inch section of a belt along with some cloth fragments wedged between his lung and heart. The mystery of the infection had been solved, as was Ranjan’s complaints of chronic chest pain.

#8 Microphone stand Usually when a story starts out with a pregnant woman being impaled by a microphone, it definitely doesn’t seem like it could end in any way, but tragedy. Jessie Wickham’s story, however, is one of extreme luck when she had found herself with a 3 foot microphone stand sticking out of her after falling off of a loft. Despite the danger of not only being impaled by a microphone, but the 20ft. fall itself, Wickham only suffered a punctured lung as the mic missed both her baby and heart by only millimeters. She instructed her kids to call 911 and was soon airlifted to a hospital. While it probably didn’t go the way she pictured it would, surgeons were able to deliver the baby unharmed by c-section. Medics decided to leave the stand inside her until she arrived at the hospital where it was surgically removed. She made a full recovery as did her baby.

#9 A stone baby Nine months seems like a long time to most expectant mothers, but how about 60 years? Huang Yijun, a 92 year-old woman from China baffled doctors as she delivered a baby made of stone. In a very rare case of lithopedia, the fertilized egg became stuck outside of the uterus and being that it was already too far along in development, the egg didn’t break down like it usually does. As the child continued to develop, it was calcified and never removed because her body never saw it as an unnatural object. She lived over half a century with the stone baby and never made an attempt to remove it because of her lack of money. Yijun had been visiting the hospital for an unrelated injury to her stomach when the fetus was found and delivered. It hadn’t caused her much discomfort despite being quite heavy. Yijun made a full recovery following the delivery.

#10 Pea Plant In 2009, Ron Sveden received the news that no one wants to hear when he was rushed to the Cape Cod Hospital.  They told him that they had found a mass in his lung and had to do a biopsy to learn more. It had all started a few months prior when he began to suffer from fatigue, loss of appetite, shortness of breath and frequent coughing. The 75-year-old had been a lifelong smoker and feared the worst when he was given the news of the mass. His condition had rapidly worsened and he was rush to the hospital where he spent 10 days waiting for the news that he expected to be lung cancer. After doing an X-ray, the doctors had found that Sveden’s lung had actually collapsed and contained some sort of dark mass. After further testing, doctors were amazed to find the mass wasn’t actually a tumor. The mass had been a small pea plant that had begun to grow in the man’s lung. Sveden had told doctors that he thought the pea pod had just ‘gone down the wrong way’. Fortunately, doctors were able to quickly operate of Sveden and remove the now half-inch long plant from his lung. After his operation hospital staff decided there was nothing better to give him for a first meal than some peas, which he gladly consumed.

Source: TopTenz

[muffinmaster2000]

Flash Fiction

May 6th, 2016 Phone call from number (347) 629-2850 Time: 1:17 PM “Hello?” “Hi, may I please speak to Sam?” “This is Sam .” “You’ve been accepted by the doctor and you are all set” “You are telling me I am approved?” “Yes, you can have your surgery next month. But I need to ask you something.” “Yes, anything! Just so long as I can go through with this.” “Do you think this will improve your quality of life?” “What do you mean? Of course I do. How could it not?” “That's all I needed to hear. We’ll be seeing you next month.” -Click- May 6th, 2016 Current mood: anxious (both excited and nervous alike) When I got the call from the doctor today, a rush of adrenaline overcame my entire body. I cannot believe it. I am finally going to have surgery done. All those dollars placed in the jar, all the doctor’s appointments, and I am finally able to do it. All the money I saved through the extra hours of work and, finally, after years, I can do it. I never imagined this day would come. I have waited so long. So long that it has felt more like mist, unclaimable, wisping through the air unable to ever be obtained. For the longest time it was just a dream that I woke up early from but could never reach the destination for. I will, though, and there is only one way to look; to the future. It’s hard to imagine that all this time of waiting will soon be over. The world will look at me different once it’s all over, and they will see me the same way those closest to me have always seen me. No more lies about who I am, my body can’t hide my mind. It can’t disable me in public anymore. I’m looking forward this new chapter of my life, the truest chapter of my life. May 27th, 2016 Current mood: I met with the surgeon today and we discussed the different procedures I could go through to get the same outcome. We decided on a surgery called a reverse T, named after the incision cut left on the flesh. I began to shut down in the office; I speak less in those moments. My palms began to sweat and my voice began to quiver with every answer to the doctor’s questions. I was nervous and I tried not to show it because this doctor cannot be concerned. He needs to know that I am one hundred percent okay with this procedure. I don't like blood and pain and I especially don't like scars. My heart began to race as I tried to keep a grasp on reality. Despite my performance to the doctor, he saw right through it. He told me that there will be scarring and he picked up on my worry. But he did reassure me. “Don't worry, slowly your body will heal and the scars will fade; you have nothing to worry about. I promise. I have done many operations on this specific surgery. Just don’t let it bother you too much.” His words were comforting, but did little to ease my mind. June 3rd, 2016 Current mood: I’m currently sitting in the waiting room. The walls are bleached white with green tile. There are chairs colored dark forest green with a wooden base surrounding a long table filled with magazines. It has that real doctor smell, reminding me of bleach, and disinfectants. It is just a level away from burning the lungs, but leaves a sour taste in your mouth when you inhale through your nose. I walked up to a lady at the front to get my papers filled out and sat in panic. Every detail was stored perfectly in my memory. I know that this is the place that will change my life. This is something I could never forget. Every worst scenario playing through my head on repeat. The doctor just walked into the room calling my name...nothing has ever echoed so loud through my eardrums. June 4th, 2016 Current mood: Infinite I can’t believe my dreams are finally a reality. I was put on a stiff bed as three bright lights shined down on me blinding me. Everything felt so color washed and faded. A silhouetted figure began speaking. Their eyes were a pale green with a hint of gray. Slowly my mind wandered, and I couldn’t keep track of the words the doctor was saying. I woke up lifting my head up slowly. The world around me was swaying as I tried to get a grasp on reality. My new reality. There were scars covered in a pale tape, and tubes sticking out of my upper rib cage going down my body. The tubes were met with plastic spheres, and I realized they are my drains, blood trickling through them. My body was still numb, and I felt nothing. I smiled, and for the first time in a long time it felt genuine. No guy can say that he is more of a man than me anymore. I cut off whole sections of flesh and nerve. They want to argue that they are more of a man than I am because they were born that way? Well, I made my mind and my body match. I survived the harassment, the pain, the dysphoria, and the surgery. After all this time I can by myself. I have the power to write my own story again, I am not trapped. June 24th, 2016 Current mood: distraught I finally got the draining tubes out of me, and the doctors said it's time to remove the pale tape away from the stitching. I got home and took a shower. As I stood there I began to peel off the tape. Imagine the pain of taking off a bandage sticking to the wound with thick blood attaching itself to both flesh and fabric. It's like the pain of that, but magnified. I could feel every part of my ribs sting with so much agony it almost went numb. I cringed as I slowly peel away at the tape. My mind was pleading with my hands to stop ripping away at the bandaging. When I got it all off the pain signals are still sent to my brain. My rib cage seized up as each drop of water beat against the burnt flesh. I looked down at my ribs and began to cry. I could see the scars, as thick as rope. I tried to calm myself, remembering the doctor's promise of it fading, but it feels so hopeless. I honestly couldn’t believe it standing here, seeing it. I see how thick the scaring is. The skin was so swollen, bulging out in an unclean cut. It looked like someone went to a piece of paper, ripped it up and haphazardly taped the two pieces back together. I realize that there is no way it will fade, at least not completely like I had hoped. There would be scaring that would be a part of me for the rest of my life. I finally managed to pull myself together, and leave the shower. The scars give a visual sign to people. It makes me vulnerable. It shows people the pain I have lived through. To me, it is a literal scaring reminder of how broken I once was. June 3rd, 2017 Current mood: strong I finally feel comfortable wearing side cut shirts. Hell, I could wear a pink hoodie right now, and the world would still visually see me as male. I feel like I am myself now, and I don’t have to be someone I’m not. I have not faced a single day of gender dysphoria since I had top surgery. I am comfortable in my own skin. There was a time when I worried the scars would make me vulnerable, because it is such an obvious marker that you are trans, but I have found myself more comfortable now than I ever was before surgery. Since then the scars have faded a great deal, and all that is left are thin purple lines you only notice when it's too cold out. A year ago, the doctor asked me if surgery improved my quality of life. It did more than that; it made my life worth living, and for me, that's enough.

[readbookywooks]

13 My first impulse is to scramble from the tree, but I'm belted in. Somehow my fumbling fingers release the buckle and I fall to the ground in a heap, still snarled in my sleeping bag. There's no time for any kind of packing. Fortunately, my backpack and water bottle are already in the bag. I shove in the belt, hoist the bag over my shoulder, and flee. The world has transformed to flame and smoke. Burning branches crack from trees and fall in showers of sparks at my feet. All I can do is follow the others, the rabbits and deer and I even spot a wild dog pack shooting through the woods. I trust their sense of direction because their instincts are sharper than mine. But they are much faster, flying through the underbrush so gracefully as my boots catch on roots and fallen tree limbs, that there's no way I can keep apace with them. The heat is horrible, but worse than the heat is the smoke, which threatens to suffocate me at any moment. I pull the top of my shirt up over my nose, grateful to find it soaked in sweat, and it offers a thin veil of protection. And I run, choking, my bag banging against my back, my face cut with branches that materialize from the gray haze without warning, because I know I am supposed to run. This was no tribute's campfire gone out of control, no accidental occurrence. The flames that bear down on me have an unnatural height, a uniformity that marks them as human-made, machine-made, Gamemaker-made. Things have been too quiet today. No deaths, perhaps no fights at all. The audience in the Capitol will be getting bored, claiming that these Games are verging on dullness. This is the one thing the Games must not do. It's not hard to follow the Gamemakers' motivation. There is the Career pack and then there are the rest of us, probably spread far and thin across the arena. This fire is designed to flush us out, to drive us together. It may not be the most original device I've seen, but it's very, very effective. I hurdle over a burning log. Not high enough. The tail end of my jacket catches on fire and I have to stop to rip it from my body and stamp out the flames. But I don't dare leave the jacket, scorched and smoldering as it is, I take the risk of shoving it in my sleeping bag, hoping the lack of air will quell what I haven't extinguished. This is all I have, what I carry on my back, and it's little enough to survive with. In a matter of minutes, my throat and nose are burning. The coughing begins soon after and my lungs begin to feel as if they are actually being cooked. Discomfort turns to distress until each breath sends a searing pain through my chest. I manage to take cover under a stone outcropping just as the vomiting begins, and I lose my meager supper and whatever water has remained in my stomach. Crouching on my hands and knees, I retch until there's nothing left to come up. I know I need to keep moving, but I'm trembling and light-headed now, gasping for air. I allow myself about a spoonful of water to rinse my mouth and spit then take a few swallows from my bottle. You get one minute, I tell myself. One minute to rest. I take the time to reorder my supplies, wad up the sleeping bag, and messily stuff everything into the backpack. My minute's up. I know it's time to move on, but the smoke has clouded my thoughts. The swift-footed animals that were my compass have left me behind. I know I haven't been in this part of the woods before, there were no sizable rocks like the one I'm sheltering against on my earlier travels. Where are the Gamemakers driving me? Back to the lake? To a whole new terrain filled with new dangers? I had just found a few hours of peace at the pond when this attack began. Would there be any way I could travel parallel to the fire and work my way back there, to a source of water at least? The wall of fire must have an end and it won't burn indefinitely. Not because the Gamemakers couldn't keep it fueled but because, again, that would invite accusations of boredom from the audience. If I could get back behind the fire line, I could avoid meeting up with the Careers. I've just decided to try and loop back around, although it will require miles of travel away from the inferno and then a very circuitous route back, when the first fireball blasts into the rock about two feet from my head. I spring out from under my ledge, energized by renewed fear. The game has taken a twist. The fire was just to get us moving, now the audience will get to see some real fun. When I hear the next hiss, I flatten on the ground, not taking time to look. The fireball hits a tree off to my left, engulfing it in flames. To remain still is death. I'm barely on my feet before the third ball hits the ground where I was lying, sending a pillar of fire up behind me. Time loses meaning now as I frantically try to dodge the attacks. I can't see where they're being launched from, but it's not a hovercraft. The angles are not extreme enough. Probably this whole segment of the woods has been armed with precision launchers that are concealed in trees or rocks. Somewhere, in a cool and spotless room, a Gamemaker sits at a set of controls, fingers on the triggers that could end my life in a second. All that is needed is a direct hit. Whatever vague plan I had conceived regarding returning to my pond is wiped from my mind as I zigzag and dive and leap to avoid the fireballs. Each one is only the size of an apple, but packs tremendous power on contact. Every sense I have goes into overdrive as the need to survive takes over. There's no time to judge if a move is the correct one. When there's a hiss, I act or die. Something keeps me moving forward, though. A lifetime of watching the Hunger Games lets me know that certain areas of the arena are rigged for certain attacks. And that if I can just get away from this section, I might be able to move out of reach of the launchers. I might also then fall straight into a pit of vipers, but I can't worry about that now. How long I scramble along dodging the fireballs I can't say, but the attacks finally begin to abate. Which is good, because I'm retching again. This time it's an acidic substance that scalds my throat and makes its way into my nose as well. I'm forced to stop as my body convulses, trying desperately to rid itself of the poisons I've been sucking in during the attack. I wait for the next hiss, the next signal to bolt. It doesn't come. The force of the retching has squeezed tears out of my stinging eyes. My clothes are drenched in sweat. Somehow, through the smoke and vomit, I pick up the scent of singed hair. My hand fumbles to my braid and finds a fireball has seared off at least six inches of it. Strands of blackened hair crumble in my fingers. I stare at them, fascinated by the transformation, when the hissing registers. My muscles react, only not fast enough this time. The fireball crashes into the ground at my side, but not before it skids across my right calf. Seeing my pants leg on fire sends me over the edge. I twist and scuttle backward on my hands and feet, shrieking, trying to remove myself from the horror. When I finally regain enough sense, I roll the leg back and forth on the ground, which stifles the worst of it. But then, without thinking, I rip away the remaining fabric with my bare hands. I sit on the ground, a few yards from the blaze set off by the fireball. My calf is screaming, my hands covered in red welts. I'm shaking too hard to move. If the Gamemakers want to finish me off, now is the time. I hear Cinna's voice, carrying images of rich fabric and sparkling gems. "Katniss, the girl who was on fire." What a good laugh the Gamemakers must be having over that one. Perhaps, Cinna's beautiful costumes have even brought on this particular torture for me. I know he couldn't have foreseen this, must be hurting for me because, in fact, I believe he cares about me. But all in all, maybe showing up stark naked in that chariot would have been safer for me. The attack is now over. The Gamemakers don't want me dead. Not yet anyway. Everyone knows they could destroy us all within seconds of the opening gong. The real sport of the Hunger Games is watching the tributes kill one another. Every so often, they do kill a tribute just to remind the players they can. But mostly, they manipulate us into confronting one another face-to-face. Which means, if I am no longer being fired at, there is at least one other tribute close at hand. I would drag myself into a tree and take cover now if I could, but the smoke is still thick enough to kill me. I make myself stand and begin to limp away from the wall of flames that lights up the sky. It does not seem to be pursuing me any longer, except with its stinking black clouds. Another light, daylight, begins to softly emerge. Swirls of smoke catch the sunbeams. My visibility is poor. I can see maybe fifteen yards in any direction. A tribute could easily be concealed from me here. I should draw my knife as a precaution, but I doubt my ability to hold it for long. The pain in my hands can in no way compete with that in my calf. I hate burns, have always hated them, even a small one gotten from pulling a pan of bread from the oven. It is the worst kind of pain to me, but I have never experienced anything like this. I'm so weary I don't even notice I'm in the pool until I'm ankle-deep. It's spring-fed, bubbling up out of a crevice in some rocks, and blissfully cool. I plunge my hands into the shallow water and feel instant relief. Isn't that what my mother always says? The first treatment for a burn is cold water? That it draws out the heat? But she means minor burns. Probably she'd recommend it for my hands. But what of my calf? Although I have not yet had the courage to examine it, I'm guessing that it's an injury in a whole different class. I lie on my stomach at edge of the pool for a while, dangling my hands in the water, examining the little flames on my fingernails that are beginning to chip off. Good. I've had enough fire for a lifetime. I bathe the blood and ash from my face. I try to recall all I know about burns. They are common injuries in the Seam where we cook and heat our homes with coal. Then there are the mine accidents. A family once brought in an unconscious young man pleading with my mother to help him. The district doctor who's responsible for treating the miners had written him off, told the family to take him home to die. But they wouldn't accept this. He lay on our kitchen table, senseless to the world. I got a glimpse of the wound on his thigh, gaping, charred flesh, burned clear down to the bone, before I ran from the house. I went to the woods and hunted the entire day, haunted by the gruesome leg, memories of my father's death. What's funny was, Prim, who's scared of her own shadow, stayed and helped. My mother says healers are born, not made. They did their best, but the man died, just like the doctor said he would. My leg is in need of attention, but I still can't look at it. What if it's as bad as the man's and I can see my bone? Then I remember my mother saying that if a burn's severe, the victim might not even feel pain because the nerves would be destroyed. Encouraged by this, I sit up and swing my leg in front of me. I almost faint at the sight of my calf. The flesh is a brilliant red covered with blisters. I force myself to take deep, slow breaths, feeling quite certain the cameras are on my face. I can't show weakness at this injury. Not if I want help. Pity does not get you aid. Admiration at your refusal to give in does. I cut the remains of the pant leg off at the knee and examine the injury more closely. The burned area is about the size of my hand. None of the skin is blackened. I think it's not too bad to soak. Gingerly I stretch out my leg into the pool, propping the heel of my boot on a rock so the leather doesn't get too sodden, and sigh, because this does offer some relief. I know there are herbs, if I could find them, that would speed the healing, but I can't quite call them to mind. Water and time will probably be all I have to work with. Should I be moving on? The smoke is slowly clearing but still too heavy to be healthy. If I do continue away from the fire, won't I be walking straight into the weapons of the Careers? Besides, every time I lift my leg from the water, the pain rebounds so intensely I have to slide it back in. My hands are slightly less demanding. They can handle small breaks from the pool. So I slowly put my gear back in order. First I fill my bottle with the pool water, treat it, and when enough time has passed, begin to rehydrate my body. After a time, I force myself to nibble on a cracker, which helps settle my stomach. I roll up my sleeping bag. Except for a few black marks, it's relatively unscathed. My jacket's another matter. Stinking and scorched, at least a foot of the back beyond repair. I cut off the damaged area leaving me with a garment that comes just to the bottom of my ribs. But the hood's intact and it's far better than nothing. Despite the pain, drowsiness begins to take over. I'd take to a tree and try to rest, except I'd be too easy to spot. Besides, abandoning my pool seems impossible. I neatly arrange my supplies, even settle my pack on my shoulders, but I can't seem to leave. I spot some water plants with edible roots and make a small meal with my last piece of rabbit. Sip water. Watch the sun make its slow arc across the sky. Where would I go anyway that is any safer than here? I lean back on my pack, overcome by drowsiness. If the Careers want me, let them find me, I think before drifting into a stupor. Let them find me. And find me, they do. It's lucky I'm ready to move on because when I hear the feet, I have less than a minute head start. Evening has begun to fall. The moment I awake, I'm up and running, splashing across the pool, flying into the underbrush. My leg slows me down, but I sense my pursuers are not as speedy as they were before the fire, either. I hear their coughs, their raspy voices calling to one another. Still, they are closing in, just like a pack of wild dogs, and so I do what I have done my whole life in such circumstances. I pick a high tree and begin to climb. If running hurt, climbing is agonizing because it requires not only exertion but direct contact of my hands on the tree bark. I'm fast, though, and by the time they've reached the base of my trunk, I'm twenty feet up. For a moment, we stop and survey one another. I hope they can't hear the pounding of my heart. This could be it, I think. What chance do I have against them? All six are there, the five Careers and Peeta, and my only consolation is they're pretty beat-up, too. Even so, look at their weapons. Look at their faces, grinning and snarling at me, a sure kill above them. It seems pretty hopeless. But then something else registers. They're bigger and stronger than I am, no doubt, but they're also heavier. There's a reason it's me and not Gale who ventures up to pluck the highest fruit, or rob the most remote bird nests. I must weigh at least fifty or sixty pounds less than the smallest Career. Now I smile. "How's everything with you?" I call down cheerfully. This takes them aback, but I know the crowd will love it. "Well enough," says the boy from District 2. "Yourself?" "It's been a bit warm for my taste," I say. I can almost hear the laughter from the Capitol. "The air's better up here. Why don't you come on up?" "Think I will," says the same boy. "Here, take this, Cato," says the girl from District 1, and she offers him the silver bow and sheath of arrows. My bow! My arrows! Just the sight of them makes me so angry I want to scream, at myself, at that traitor Peeta for distracting me from having them. I try to make eye contact with him now, but he seems to be intentionally avoiding my gaze as he polishes his knife with the edge of his shirt. "No," says Cato, pushing away the bow. "I'll do better with my sword." I can see the weapon, a short, heavy blade at his belt. I give Cato time to hoist himself into the tree before I begin to climb again. Gale always says I remind him of a squirrel the way I can scurry up even the slenderest limb. Part of it's my weight, but part of it's practice. You have to know where to place your hands and feet. I'm another thirty feet in the air when I hear the crack and look down to see Cato flailing as he and a branch go down. He hits the ground hard and I'm hoping he possibly broke his neck when he gets back to his feet, swearing like a fiend. The girl with the arrows, Glimmer I hear someone call her  -  ugh, the names the people in District 1 give their children are so ridiculous  -  anyway Glimmer scales the tree until the branches begin to crack under her feet and then has the good sense to stop. I'm at least eighty feet high now. She tries to shoot me and it's immediately evident that she's incompetent with a bow. One of the arrows gets lodged in the tree near me though and I'm able to seize it. I wave it teasingly above her head, as if this was the sole purpose of retrieving it, when actually I mean to use it if I ever get the chance. I could kill them, everyone of them, if those silver weapons were in my hands. The Careers regroup on the ground and I can hear them growling conspiratorially among themselves, furious I have made them look foolish. But twilight has arrived and their window of attack on me is closing. Finally, I hear Peeta say harshly, "Oh, let her stay up there. It's not like she's going anywhere. We'll deal with her in the morning." Well, he's right about one thing. I'm going nowhere. All the relief from the pool water has gone, leaving me to feel the full potency of my burns. I scoot down to a fork in the tree and clumsily prepare for bed. Put on my jacket. Lay out my sleeping bed. Belt myself in and try to keep from moaning. The heat of the bag's too much for my leg. I cut a slash in the fabric and hang my calf out in the open air. I drizzle water on the wound, my hands. All my bravado is gone. I'm weak from pain and hunger but can't bring myself to eat. Even if I can last the night, what will the morning bring? I stare into the foliage trying to will myself to rest, but the burns forbid it. Birds are settling down for the night, singing lullabies to their young. Night creatures emerge. An owl hoots. The faint scent of a skunk cuts through the smoke. The eyes of some animal peer at me from the neighboring tree  -  a possum maybe  -  catching the firelight from the Careers' torches. Suddenly, I'm up on one elbow. Those are no possum's eyes, I know their glassy reflection too well. In fact, those are not animal eyes at all. In the last dim rays of light, I make her out, watching me silently from between the branches. Rue. How long has she been here? The whole time probably. Still and unobserved as the action unfolded beneath her. Perhaps she headed up her tree shortly before I did, hearing the pack was so close. For a while we hold each other's gaze. Then, without even rustling a leaf, her little hand slides into the open and points to something above my head.