(Including F2 because of Jim Clark) (Names and Nationalitys of Spectators are taken from the Motorsport Memorial and some may not be 100% correct) (If instead of the flag it has a "🏁" its because I'm not sure of that person's nationality)
Rest In Peace
1950

🇩🇪 Herbert Morgenstern(Race)(Rund um das Scheibenholz)(F2 Race)
🇨🇭🇨🇭🇫🇷 Spectator Jacob Hurter, Spectator René Meister and Spectator Albert Camer(Race)(Nations Grand Prix)
🇫🇷 Pierre Raymond SommeRaymond Sommer(Race)(Grand Prix de l'Haute Garonne)(F2 Race)
🇩🇪 Karl Alfred Gommann/Karl Gommann(Race)(Grenzlandringrennen)(F2 Race)
🏁🏁 Spectator Carmen Laguna de Lomas and Spectator Secundino Sánchez Navarro(Race)(Penya Rhin Grand Prix)

1951

🇮🇹 Spectator Antonio "Antonino" Cavestri and possibly more Spectators(Practice)(San Remo Grand Prix)

1952

🇩🇪 Paul Suhler Greifzu/Paul Greifzu(Practice)(Dessauer Auto und Motorradrennen)(F2 Race)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Cameron Charles Earl/Cameron Earl(Test)

1953

🇮🇹🏁🇦🇷🏁🏁🏁🏁🏁🏁🏁(?)🏁🏁(?)🏁(?)🏁🏁 Spectator Juan Gallo, Spectator Ítalo Gallo, Spectator Rubén Carrillo, Spectator Claudio Enrique Rivas, Spectator Elvio(Or Pedro) Ulises Etchegaray, Spectator Juan José Temprano, Spectator Oscar Argentino Cabret(Or Cabré), Spectator Hugo Valdés, one unknown Spectator and possibly another Spectator(Race) a young Spectator and possibly 2 other unknown Spectators(Race) and other 2 unknown Spectators(Race)(Argentine Grand Prix)(Note: Some sources list the first crash as killing 15 or 17 people)
🇺🇲🇺🇸 Chester Joseph MilleChet Miller(Practice) and Carl Eugene Scarborough/Carl Scarborough(Race)(Indianapolis 500/Indy 500)(Also part of the AAA National Championship Trail)
🇧🇪 Baron Charles Victor Raymond André Evance de Tornaco/Charles de Tornaco(Practice)(Modena Grand Prix)

1954

🇧🇪🇧🇪 Spectator Antoine de Mittenaire and Spectator Robert Fontesse(Race)(Grand Prix des Frontières)
🇦🇷 Onofre Agustín Marimón/Onofre Marimón(Practice)(German Grand Prix)

1955

🇮🇹 Mario Alborghetti(Race)(Pau Grand Prix)
🇺🇸🇺🇲 Manuel Leaonedas Ayulo/Manuel Ayulo/Manny Ayulo(Practice) and William John Vukovich Sr./Bill Vukovich(Race)(Indianapolis 500/Indy 500)(Also part of the AAA National Championship Trail)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Donald Bentley Beauman/Don Beauman(Race)(Leinster Trophy)(F2 Race)

1956
1957

🇮🇹 Eugenio Castellotti(Test)
🇺🇲 Keith Philip Andrews/Keith Andrews(Practice)(Indianapolis 500/Indy 500)(Also part of the USAC National Championship Trail)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧🇧🇷/🇺🇲 William James Whitehouse/William Whitehouse/Bill Whitehouse(Race) and Hugh FraseHerbert MacKay-Fraser(Race)(1st Coupe de Vitesse/Coupe Internationale de Vitesse)(F2 Support Race)

1958

🇺🇸 Patrick James O'ConnoPat O'Connor(Race)(Indianapolis 500/Indy 500)(Also part of the USAC National Championship Trail)
🇮🇹 Luigi Musso(Race)(French Grand Prix)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Peter John Collins/Peter Collins(Race)(German Grand Prix)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Stuart Nigel Lewis-Evans/Stuart Lewis-Evans(Race)(Moroccan Grand Prix)

1959

🇺🇸🇺🇲 Jeremy Michael Unser Jr./Jerry Unser Jr.(Practice) and Robert Charles CortneBob Cortner(Practice)(Indianapolis 500/Indy 500)(Also part of the USAC National Championship Trail)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Ivor Léon John Bueb/Ivor Leon Bueb/Ivor Bueb(Race)(II Trophée d'Auvergne)(F2/BP Trophy Race)

1960

🇫🇷/🇺🇸 Harry Lawrence O'Reilly Schell/Henry O'Reilly "Harry" Schell/Harry Schell(Practice)(12th BRDC International Trophy)
🇺🇲🇺🇸 Spectator Fred H. Linder and Spectator William C. Craig(Race)(Indianapolis 500/Indy 500)(Also part of the USAC National Championship Trail)
🇳🇱 Spectator Petrus Johannes Maria Alders/Peter(Or Piet or Jan) Alders(Race)(Dutch Grand Prix)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Christopher William Bristow/Chris Bristow(Race) and Alan Stacey(Race)(Belgian Grand Prix)
🇳🇿 George William Lawton/George Lawton(Race)(Danish Grand Prix)(F2 Race)

1961

🇳🇿 Duncan Mackenzie(Race)(April Levin Meeting)(F2 Race)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿/🇬🇧 Shane Lister Summers/Shane Summers(Practice)(Silver City Trophy)
🇮🇹 Giulio Cabianca and by-passers Gino Arboresi, Eugenio Stefani and Ivo Messori(Test)
🇩🇪🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇨🇭🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🏁(?) Wolfgang Alexander Albert Eduard Maximilian Reichsgraf Berghe von Trips/Wolfgang Graf Berghe von Trips/Wolfgang von Trips and Spectator Paolo Perazzone, Spectator Laura Zorzi, Spectator Mario Brambilla, Spectator Luigi Fassi, Spectator Albino Albertini, Spectator Luigi Motta, Spectator Augusto Camillo Valleise, Spectator Franca Duguet, Spectator Claudina Polognoli, Spectator Giuseppina Lenti, Spectator Franz Waldvogel, Spectator Luigi Freschi, Spectator Roberto Brambilla, Spectator Rinaldo Girod, Spectator Renato Janin and possibly more Spectators(Race)(Italian Grand Prix)

1962

🇲🇨 Race Marshal Ange Baldoni(Race)(Monaco Grand Prix)
🇲🇽 Ricardo Valentín Rodríguez de la Vega/Ricardo Rodríguez de la Vega/Ricardo Rodríguez(Practice)(Mexican Grand Prix)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿/🇬🇧/🇿🇼 Gary Stuart Hocking/Gary Hocking(Practice)(Natal Grand Prix)

1963

🇩🇪 Red Cross Volunteer Guenther SchneideGünther Schneider(Race)(German Grand Prix)

1964

🇳🇱 _Jonkheer_ Karel Pieter Antoni Jan Hubertus (Carel) Godin de Beaufort/Carel Godin de Beaufort/Carel de Beaufort(Practice)(German Grand Prix)

1965

🇿🇦 Spectator Michael Twyman(Race)(Natal Winter Trophy)(F2 Race)

1966

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 John Malcolm TayloJohn Taylor(Race)(German Grand Prix)

1967

🇱🇾/🇮🇹 Lorenzo Bandini(Race)(Monaco Grand Prix)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Ian Ewart Raby/Ian Raby(Race)(Grote Prijs van Zandvoort/Zandvoort Trophy)(F2 Race)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Robert Hugh Fearon Anderson/Bob Anderson(Test)

1968

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿/🇬🇧 James Clark Jr./Jimmy Clark/Jim Clark(Race)(Deutschland Trophäe/Martini Gold Cup)(F2 Race)
🇫🇷 Joseph SchlesseJo Schlesser(Race)(French Grand Prix)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Charles Christopher Lambert/Chris Lambert(Race)(Grote Prijs van Zandvoort)(F2 Race)

1969

🇨🇿/🇩🇪 Gerhard Karl MitteGerhard Mitter(Practice)(German Grand Prix)(F2 Entrant)
🇮🇳/🇬🇧 Christopher Michael Mayo Williams/Chris Williams(Test)(F2)

1970

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Piers Raymond Courage/Piers Courage (Race)(Dutch Grand Prix)
🇩🇪/🇦🇹 Karl Jochen Rindt/Jochen Rindt(Qualifying)(Italian Grand Prix)
🏁 A dog(Race)(Mexican Grand Prix)

1971

🇨🇭 Joseph Siffert/Jo Siffert(Race)(Rothmans World Championship Victory Race/World Championship Victory Race)

1972

🇮🇪/🇳🇿 Herbert William Hawthorne/Herbert Hawthorne/Bert Hawthorne(Practice)(Jim Clark Memorial Race)(F2 Race)

1973

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿/🇬🇧 Gerald Hussey Buchanan Birrell/Gerry Birrell(Qualifying)(F2 Trophee D'Europe)(F2 Race)
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Roger Williamson(Race)(Dutch Grand Prix)
🇫🇷 Albert François Cevert Goldenberg/François Cevert(Qualifying)(United States Grand Prix)

1974

🇺🇸 Peter Jeffrey Revson/Peter Revson(Practice/Test)(South African Grand Prix)
🇦🇹 Helmuth Koinigg/Helmut Koinigg(Race)(United States Grand Prix)

1975

🇪🇸🇪🇸🇭🇷/🇮🇹/🇨🇦🇪🇸🏁(?) Fireman Joaquín Morera Benaches, Spectator Andrés Ruiz Villanova, Photo-Journalists Mario de Roia and Antonio Font Bayarri and possibly one more Spectator(Race)(Spanish Grand Prix)
🇺🇲🇦🇹 Mark Neary Donohue Jr./Mark Donohue and Track Marshal Manfred(Or Franz) Schaller(Practice)(Austrian Grand Prix)

1976
1977

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿/🇬🇧🏁 Thomas Maldwyn Pryce/Tom Pryce and Safety Marshal Frederik "Frikkie" Jansen van Vuuren(Race)(South African Grand Prix)
🇦🇺🇬🇧 Brian McGuire and Fire Marshal John Thorpe(Practice)(Shellsport International Series Round 11 or possibly an unspecified F1 Race)
🇯🇵🇯🇵 Photographer Kazuhiro Ohashi and Marshal Kengo Yuasa(Race)(Japanese Grand Prix)

1978

🇸🇪 Bengt Ronnie Peterson/Ronnie Peterson(Race)(Italian Grand Prix)

1979
1980

🇦🇹/🇩🇪(?) Markus Höttinger(Race)(Jim Clark Rennen)(F2 Race)
🇩🇪 Hans-Georg Bürger(Warm-Up)(Grote Prijs van Zandvoort)(F2 Race)
🇫🇷 Patrick André Eugène Joseph DepaillePatrick Depailler(Test)

1981

🇮🇹 Mechanic Giovanni Amadeo(Practice)(Belgian Grand Prix)

1982

🇨🇦 Joseph Gilles Henri Villeneuve/Gilles Villeneuve(Qualifying)(Belgian Grand Prix)
🇮🇹 Riccardo Paletti(Race)(Canadian Grand Prix)

1983
1984
1985
1986

🇮🇹 Elio de Angelis(Test)

1987
1988
1989

🏁 Spectator Ildefonso de Castro(Race)(Brazilian Grand Prix)

1990
1991
1992
1993
1994

🇦🇹🇧🇷 Roland Ratzenberger(Qualifying) and Ayrton Senna da Silva/Ayrton Senna(Race)(San Marino Grand Prix)

1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000

🇮🇹 Volunteer Firefighter Paolo Giancarlo Faletti Gislimberti(Race)(Italian Grand Prix)

2001

🇦🇺 Spectator Marshal Graham Francis Beveridge(Race)(Australian Grand Prix)

2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿/🇬🇧 Henry John Surtees/Henry Surtees(Race)(Brands Hatch Formula Two Round)(F2 Race)

2010
2011
2012/2013

🇪🇸 María de Villota Comba/María de Villota(Test)
🇨🇦 Track Marshal Mark Robinson(Race)(2013 Canadian Grand Prix)

2014/2015

🇫🇷 Jules Lucien André Bianchi/Jules Bianchi(Race)(Japanese Grand Prix)

2016
2017
2018
2019

🇫🇷 Anthoine Gérard Pol Hubert/Anthoine Hubert(Race)(Spa-Francorchamps Formula 2 Round)(F2 Race)

2020
2021
2022

We all talk about the ones with bright futures like OKC, Denver, and San Antonio after winning the lottery but which teams are looking very questionable? Here's my top 3 ranked
3. Chicago Bulls: Questionable drafting and trades have left them with a mediocre squad with no ceiling. The Vucevic trade is a sneaky candidate for one of the biggest fleeces of all time as they gave up Wendell (who's already better than Vuc) along with a future star in Wagner and another lotto pick. Not to mention that Lavine's development has stalled and Lonzo may never play again. Chicago probably needs to enter a full rebuild because this current group has a play in ceiling and they didn't even crack is this year
2. Washington Wizards: The gold standard for mediocrity, they haven't made the conference finals since 1979 and its not gonna end soon as they've saddled themselves with a supermaxed Beal and a middling "young core". The only reason they aren't 1 is because they've completely cleaned house on management so we will wait and see if the new FO can salvage this situation but its not looking nice
1. Houston Rockets: With them owing their picks to OKC and the Brooklyn picks not looking great due to Mikal Bridges, this current core is what they've got and it isn't pretty. Jalen Green is a chucker (and even if he was efficient, his archetype are usually 6th men on good teams due to lack of an all around game) Jabari Smith is an unexciting player who will likely never become much more than a good role player, and Sengun is the clear best of the 3 with interesting potential but Houston has severely disrupted his development by being a dysfunctional mess. Not to mention they really might shell out a 4 year max to a 34 year old Harden who is the absolute last type of guy I would put next to a developing young team
To cap it off, they're awful top down with a trash owner, questionable FO, and horrific coaching the last 3 years. It will be tough for even a guy of Ime Udoka's caliber to clean up this mess. Really, only Wemby could have and they struck out on him and even Scoot (though im glad they weren't thrown into this mess). With the pick situation, they could easily be the new Sacramento Kings being horrible for a decade on end unless this core massively turns it around which is unlikely

Major League Soccer

MLS 360 Stream

Home	Away	Time	TV	Match Thread
CF Montreal	Minnesota United FC	7:39 PM	Apple TV Free	Match Thread
Orlando City SC	Colorado Rapids	7:39 PM	Apple TV Free	Match Thread
New England Revolution	Inter Miami CF	7:39 PM	Apple TV	Match Thread
Atlanta United FC	DC United	7:39 PM	Apple TV	Match Thread
Charlotte FC	Seattle Sounders FC	7:39 PM	Apple TV	Match Thread
Toronto FC	Nashville SC	7:39 PM	Apple TV	Match Thread
Chicago Fire FC	Columbus Crew	8:39 PM	Apple TV Free	Match Thread
Houston Dynamo FC	Los Angeles FC	8:39 PM	Apple TV Free	Match Thread
Sporting Kansas City	Austin FC	8:39 PM	Apple TV	Match Thread
Real Salt Lake	New York City FC	9:39 PM	Apple TV	Match Thread
San Jose Earthquakes	Philadelphia Union	10:39 PM	Apple TV	Match Thread
Vancouver Whitecaps FC	FC Cincinnati	10:39 PM	Apple TV	Match Thread

Live Updating Comment Stream

NWSL

Home	Away	Time	TV	Match Thread
Washington Spirit	Angel City FC	7:00 PM	Paramount+	Match Thread
Chicago Red Stars	North Carolina Courage	8:00 PM	Paramount+	Match Thread
OL Reign	Kansas City Current	10:00 PM	Paramount+	Match Thread

Canadian Premier League

Home	Away	Time	TV	Match Thread
HFX Wanderers	Valour FC	1:00 PM	OneSoccer	Match Thread
Forge FC	Pacific FC	7:00 PM	OneSoccer	Match Thread

International Friendly

Home	Away	Time	TV
Panama	Nicaragua	8:00 PM	-
Mexico	Cameroon	10:00 PM	TUDN

USL Championship

Home	Away	Time	TV
Indy Eleven	Hartford Athletic	7:00 PM	ESPN+
Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC	Charleston Battery	7:00 PM	ESPN+
Tampa Bay Rowdies	New Mexico United	7:30 PM	ESPN+
Louisville City FC	Memphis 901 FC	8:00 PM	ESPN+
Rio Grande Valley FC Toros	Miami FC	8:00 PM	ESPN+
Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC	Orange County SC	9:00 PM	ESPN+
San Antonio FC	El Paso Locomotive	9:00 PM	ESPN+
Las Vegas Lights FC	Monterey Bay FC	10:30 PM	ESPN+
Phoenix Rising FC	Oakland Roots SC	10:30 PM	ESPN+

USL League One

Home	Away	Time	TV
Greenville Triumph SC	Union Omaha	7:00 PM	ESPN+
South Georgia Tormenta FC	Lexington SC	7:30 PM	ESPN+
Forward Madison FC	North Carolina FC	8:00 PM	ESPN+
Northern Colorado Hailstorm FC	One Knoxville SC	9:00 PM	ESPN+
Central Valley Fuego	Richmond Kickers	10:00 PM	ESPN+

MLS NEXT Pro

Home	Away	Time	TV
Timbers2	North Texas SC	8:00 PM	Apple TV

NISA - NISA Live Streams

Home	Away	Time	TV
Flower City Union	Gold Star FC Detroit	6:00 PM	Eleven Sports
Maryland Bobcats FC	Savannah Clovers FC	7:00 PM	Eleven Sports
Club de Lyon FC	Michigan Stars FC	7:30 PM	Eleven Sports

^{All Times Eastern}
Don’t see a thread for the game you want? Try requesting one from the MatchThreadder bot!
Here is a pre-filled message to the bot.
Bot not working? Here is a guide to making match threads.

Team		W	L	%	Rounds
Los Angeles Lakers		26	17		8
Miami Heat		38	26		12
Boston Celtics		36	30		11
Denver Nuggets		28	24		10
Los Angeles Clippers		18	19		6
Toronto Raptors		9	8		3
Milwaukee Bucks		29	21		9
Utah Jazz		11	13		4
Houston Rockets		5	7		2
Oklahoma City Thunder		3	4		1
Dallas Mavericks		14	17		5
Orlando Magic		1	4		1
Portland Trail Blazers		3	8		2
Indiana Pacers		0	4		1
Philadelphia 76ers		20	19		7
Brooklyn Nets		7	17		5
Phoenix Suns		27	20		8
Atlanta Hawks		13	16		5
New York Knicks		7	9		3
Memphis Grizzlies		9	14		4
Washington Wizards		1	4		1
Golden State Warriors		22	13		6
New Orleans Pelicans		2	4		1
Minnesota Timberwolves		3	8		2
Chicago Bulls		1	4		1
Sacramento Kings		3	4		1
Cleveland Cavaliers		1	4		1

WEST		W	L	%	Rounds		EAST		W	L	%	Rounds
Denver Nuggets		28	24		10		Miami Heat		38	26		12
Phoenix Suns		27	20		8		Boston Celtics		36	30		11
Los Angeles Lakers		26	17		8		Milwaukee Bucks		29	21		9
Golden State Warriors		22	13		6		Philadelphia 76ers		20	19		7
Los Angeles Clippers		18	19		6		Atlanta Hawks		13	16		5
Dallas Mavericks		14	17		5		Toronto Raptors		9	8		3
Utah Jazz		11	13		4		Brooklyn Nets		7	17		5
Memphis Grizzlies		9	14		4		New York Knicks		7	9		3
Houston Rockets		5	7		2		Orlando Magic		1	4		1
Portland Trail Blazers		3	8		2		Washington Wizards		1	4		1
Minnesota Timberwolves		3	8		2		Chicago Bulls		1	4		1
Oklahoma City Thunder		3	4		1		Cleveland Cavaliers		1	4		1
Sacramento Kings		3	4		1		Indiana Pacers		0	4		1
New Orleans Pelicans		2	4		1		Detroit Pistons		0	0		0
San Antonio Spurs		0	0		0		Charlotte Hornets		0	0		0

Just over 23 years have passed since the hot late summer evening when 28-year-old Roberta Martucci disappeared into thin air. Since that 20 August 1999, all trace of this young woman has been lost. Those who did not know her may remember the description given to advance the search: brown curly hair, a dazzling smile, a black floral skirt, high-heeled shoes, and a grey jacket.
Roberta’s disappearance revolves around the Apulian towns of Torre San Giovanni di Ugento, the small village where the girl lived and from where she left on her car that August evening, and Gallipoli, the seaside town to which she was heading to meet a friend, with whom she was supposed to go shopping.
Who was Roberta? According to her sister Lorella – who is largely responsible for the reopening of the case and the charge against a man close to Roberta – she was a serene girl with no known troubles; she had recently left her longtime boyfriend, with whom she remained on good terms. Roberta was the last of five daughters and she was employed in a retirement community. She lived with her mother and some of her sisters. For several months now, she had been friends with two girls from Gallipoli, Rory and Cinzia.

Timeline & events

• August 20, 1999, around 8:00 am: Roberta is spending a few days of vacation. It is the day her sister Sabrina returns from Bologna where she is studying at the local university. Roberta is preparing to go to the beach with her aunt and uncle and her sister Gina.
• 9:00 am: According to phone records, Roberta receives a phone call that lasts approximately 5 minutes.
• 9:30 am: Roberta receives a second call but this time it’s 45 minutes long. Roberta is seen walking away from her relatives gesticulating, pacing up and down the beach – she seems to be arguing animatedly.
• Having finished the call, Roberta returns to her relatives and spends the day; she seems serene. During lunch with her aunt and uncle and her mother Roberta says she would use the car in the evening in order to go to a party in Gallipoli.
• 8:20 pm: Roberta dresses to go out; she borrows a skirt from her sister Lorella. She is wearing a gray pearl top, has a bare back, and puts on her gold earrings with a blue stone to which she matches a gray hand-knit jacket. Sabrina asks Roberta for a ride in her car. The two leave the house, drive away in the white Fiat Uno but Roberta will never return.
• 8:45 pm: Roberta and Sabrina are in the car together. Roberta answers a call saying, "Hi, Rory, if you want to believe Cinzia go ahead, I can’t talk right now." Sabrina’s friend’s house is 200 meters from the Martucci’s.
• 9:30 pm: Rory (the friend with whom Roberta is to meet) is agitated because she’s running late and it’s not like her at all. Rory tries to call Roberta, but her phone turns out to be off.
• 11 pm: Rory writes a message to her friend “ROBERTA NON FARE SCHERZI”.
• August 21, 1999, around 3 am: Roberta’s cell phone rings three times, then it will remain off forever.
• in the afternoon: Several of Roberta’s family members are questioned by police. Her uncle and her aunt mention the two calls Roberta had answered on the morning of the 20th. Her brother-in-law Donato tells about seeing her agitated in this circumstance.
• August 23, 1999: A note is delivered to Donato’s sister’s workplace: “Hi I’m Roberta I wanted to tell you that I’m alive.”
• August 24, 1999: A call comes to the Carabinieri station: the owner of Bar Stella, located on Via Genova in Gallipoli, reports that the white Fiat Uno mentioned in the newspapers is parked in front of the bar. The man is adamant about the fact that the car was not there the night before.
• The doors of the car are closed except for the driver’s. The ignition keys (the only set of keys for the car according to the Martucci family) and registration are missing. All that remains of Roberta is her gray knit jacket on the back seat of the car. No fingerprints are detected inside the cabin, but a handwritten note is found: “I love you my sweet love.” Roberta’s car is located near the home of Rory and the workplace of Cinzia.
• September 6, 1999: Donato makes a spontaneous statement to the Carabinieri again. He tells them that he drove past via Genova on August 23 at 10:30 p.m. and did not see Roberta’s Fiat Uno.
• January 15, 2000: Casarano Carabinieri draw up a restitution report in favor of Laudina, sister of Roberta and wife of Donato, and Laudina drives the car to the home of his mother, Concetta, where she parks it. Concetta will use the car in the next months. The car is released without ignition keys and registration.
• August 2000: The car is scrapped by Laudina.

Follow-up

In the following months, there are several reports about Roberta. A viewer of the well-known TV program Chi l’ha visto? claims to have seen her at a famous club in Milan. A mythomaniac swears he saw her eating a Viennetta at a local restaurant. A young woman even comes forward claiming to have seen Roberta in a dream, according to her murdered and then hidden in a trullo (a traditional Apulian dry stone hut with a conical roof). There is also no shortage of notes delivered to family or authorities – in addition to the one found in the car, a fax arrives to a Taranto newspaper: “Roberta Martucci alive, poor health condition, change life change life change life, leave her alone, she will only be heard from by family members.”
In 2007, Lecce prosecutor's office received another fax accusing Roberta’s two friends, Rory and Cinzia, and recommending that they be “thrown in jail” for a few months to make them talk: “Regarding Roberta’s sad story, I inform you that she is now gone, but the truth in detail can only be given to you by those two friends in Gallipoli. They know everything.”
Investigators, evidently struggling, nevertheless try to explore some leads, including that of drug-fueled parties in Gallipoli (initially suggested nine months after Roberta’s disappearance by Donato, who was allegedly told by a friend of his about Roberta’s unsavory acquaintances). Rory and Cinzia are investigated – to the point of driving them away from the city – but this trail leads nowhere. The investigators are sure, though, that the two girls have minimized their relationship with Roberta. Repentant mafiosi from Salento and Calabria are heard by the police, but they cannot help the investigation. The hypothesis of a jealous ex-boyfriend is also discarded.
In 2007, seven years after Roberta’s disappearance, Donato is heard. He tells the investigators he and Laudina received the car registration from the Carabinieri of Casarano when the latter released Roberta’s car. Concerning the ignition keys, he tells they already had a copy. On June 13, 2018, Donato is heard once again (this time as a suspect, the first in this case): he tells he doesn’t remember anything about the car registration and the ignition keys. When confronted with the spontaneous statement he made eleven years before, he tells the investigators he doesn’t remember anything about it, but he’s now sure the car was released without keys. On June 14, 2018, a conversation between Donato and his wife is intercepted: the former threatens to harm himself in case the investigation implicates him.
In 2019, on the TV program Chi l’ha visto?, Sabrina confided that she had been sexually abused by her brother-in-law Donato since she was 16 years old; she also says she admitted the fact to her sister Roberta. (This circumstance is confirmed by Donato, but too much time has now passed for him to be prosecuted for this crime under Italian law.) Criminologists Isabel Martina and Roberta Bruzzone, together with Roberta’s sister Lorella, have in the meantime made the investigators reopen the case – they argue that Donato is directly involved in the disappearance and that Sabrina’s allegations are crucial to understanding his motive. Roberta's family is now split in two: on one side Lorella and Sabrina, on the other side the remaining two sisters and the mother, who defend Donato.
In 2022, Roberta’s case is dismissed and so is the charge against Donato. The preliminary hearing judge writes in his motivations report that “there are mere suspicions and conjectures against the suspect that are not supported by concrete and precise factual data that would support an accusation deserving of trial consideration”; he also argues that there could have been another set of car keys.

Key questions

• Were there really two sets of car keys?
• According to the scrapper, the car was handed over with registration and ignition keys. Who had them?
• Why was the car scrapped if it was only 2 years old?
• Is it significant that Roberta disappeared on the very day Sabrina returned from Bologna?
• Why did Roberta tell her family she was going to a party when her friends say they simply had to go shopping?
• Let’s even say that Donato is implicated in some way. Would he have been stupid enough to give his wife the original keys and registration to allow her to take the car back to her mother?

Sources

Mentre Morivo puntata #26 - La Morte di Roberta Martucci
A Pista Fredda - Il Caso di Roberta Martucci
Chi l'ha visto? - La scomparsa di Roberta Martucci - 13/02/2019

Rick had expected that taking an entire tribe to Sinco would be slow. Who wouldn’t? It was a whole tiny village after all, one nearing a handful hundred.
But the Orcs, and by extension all the other maidens, had more than one surprise in store.
When the tribe had set off, they’d done so with a grand demolition. The moment everything of value had been picked up and packaged, the village was then torn to shreds by anyone willing to take part in the little destruction-derby.
Following this, the tribe would split up into hut-family units.
Every “family” would be made of one human and multiple maidens. The maiden with the highest standing within the family unit (almost always an Orc) would be in charge of carrying and protecting the human on their back. And the rest would handle the luggage and supplies that “family” unit would take with them.
And from there, they would break into a jogging pace that, to a human, would have been a dead sprint.
Rick had the distinct “honor” of being carried by Urtha since Monica’s job as the chief meant it was her job to be at the tip of the metaphorical spear. Meanwhile, Rick was left seated on a sort-of-backpack the tall Orc carried.
Kiara flew overhead with the handful of other flying maidens that’d been woken up from the boxes. Leaving Eva and Dia to carry their belongings. It left an unpleasant aftertaste in Rick’s gut.
The smirk Dia kept shooting his way as he petulantly crossed his arms and resigned himself to being glorified luggage. “I could at least be playing the drums to mark the pace or something. It’s not like we’re being subtle or quiet.”
“Humans have no place drawing attention where danger lurks,” Urtha said, the only one present that wasn’t even winded. “Less so the Father.”
“Some feral might think you are a cheesy snack.” Dia, huffing as she pushed herself, still giggled.
“The tribe is tense enough already.” The Orc shook her head. “We rarely bring this many weaklings with us.”
“One of many changes to come.” Rick held the sigh, mostly because he was holding on to the chair to keep from falling over. He didn’t want to think about it, but once they reached Sinco, things would get complicated.
They were effectively marching out, seeking to conquer a city. Whether it be through actual warfare or maneuvering, they weren’t sure just yet. They just knew that they were prepared for the former if the latter didn’t work out. The reports had come in: Sinco was not in a good place. The constant presence of highly aggressive ferals had been chipping away at their defenses.
The only hope the city held was that they would receive reinforcements from Aubria.
Rick would get there faster.
It was in these thoughts that he pondered throughout the day. The tribe traveled and rested too often to the Orc’s liking. There was much friction to be had, and the humans were guarded like the treasures the tribe considered them to be.
When night came, a singular large hut was made for the humans, and the maidens would sleep in rotations. There would be small songs and minor stories that were shared, small moments of comfort. But they were all held under the looming watchfulness of the tribe.
Because they were at their most vulnerable. One missed feral deciding to make a stand could mean a human getting hurt. Rick had to begrudgingly respect them for that. As much as he loathed being treated like some kind of porcelain doll, there was no room to question that the maidens were going the extra mile for everyone’s safety and survival.
Though they would sometimes go a bit overboard against the maidens that “slowed down the tribe”. His role mediating such disputes had become his main role throughout the following days.
One morning, as they were preparing to set out, he heard it.
It started with a scream, then a yelp, and then a rush.
By the time Rick realized what was going on, Monica was upon him. Drenched from head to toe and stinking of salt and seaweed. The massive maiden was looking at him with a smile that threatened to split her head in two.
“Rick!” She hovered over him, dripping water all over. “Come! Come!”
“Is everything alright?” He asked from the discomfort of the portable chair he was currently occupying.
“COME!” she insisted, hopping on her feet and skittishly looking back, aiming her ear in the direction she’d come from. “Quick!”
“The tribe is not heading that way.” Urtha pointed out.
Rick considered it for a second. “Are there any problems shifting course to travel nearer to the sea?”
“It is a bad idea. For many reasons.”
Her words brought nods from Eva and Dia, to which Rick could only respond with a shrug. “Ok, then we could call for a break for the day, give everyone a chance to properly unwind, and I’ll go with Monica.” He pointed over at the feline that was bouncing on her heels, just barely holding back from reaching out and yanking him into her wet embrace. “Seems like the chief is very excited about something.”
“I bet its food,” Eva said.
“Urtha?” Rick waited.
The Orc glanced over at the crowd. “We will set camp for the day. We cannot afford to lose any of the weaklings.”
That was as good as he could’ve hoped. Rick nodded and was immediately snatched by Monica’s fuzzy paw. The maiden picked him up, putting him over her shoulder and trotting through the shrubbery and trees with little regard for who might be following.
Rick got himself a face full of leaves, flinching and batting them away. “Hey, wait, the branches-”
The Sabretooth yanked him into her arms and broke into a full sprint. Dirt and rocks burst forth from where she stood as air whipped about them. Her fang-filled smile only grew. Monica’s eyes were only focused forward. Rick, meanwhile, was trying to avoid swallowing bugs. The insects that kept flying about appeared to prefer smacking against his face.
There was a moment of clarity, light, and blue.
And with a splash, he was underwater.
Rick made the mistake of gasping, swallowing sea-water, wildly flinging his arms to get himself to the surface. Monica yanked him out of the water, leaving him feeling like a half-drowned cat as he coughed and spat.
“LOOK!” she proclaimed, dropping him on the sandy beach as she hurried towards the crashing waves, kicking at them and sending sprays of foam high into the air. “Rick! BIG!” She waved wildly, rushing her way into the water, then back out.
“That’s the sea.”
“Monica see!” With wide arms, she tried to point at all of it at once.
“No, it’s a new word. Sounds similar.” He combed his hair out of his face with his hands, removing his shirt. “Sea. S-E-A. Big, wet, and salty.”
“BIG WET!” Monica was cheering and splashing, kicking her way up and down the shore, jumping into the waves and coming out a dozen meters away and then making her way back to the shore.
“It’s the sea.” He couldn’t help but smile, watching as she slapped the water with her huge paws, creating a billowing tower of water and foam to rise at least a dozen meters into the air.
He put the low-end terrifying notion of how much force was packed into that strike and kept an easy-going smile.
“It’s the ocean.” The voice called from above, Kiara leisurely drifting down and sitting next to him. “Too far away from anything or anyone. Few ships go through here.”
“So chock-full of dangerous ferals?”
“Just like everywhere else.” Her eyes weren’t on Monica. The Succubus’ gaze appeared more focused on trailing the waves as they crashed into the shore. “Likely they’ve been scared off, though. The rush must have eaten everything available near the shore.”
Rick looked at the waves, then at her. “How can you tell?”
“There’s nothing in the waves.” She pointed. “Usually there’s at least the odd Sprite.”
“Maybe Monica scared them off.”
“Doubtful.” Kiara shook her head, turning to eye him with a slight smirk. “You’re drenched. Maybe you’d want to take your clothes off?” Her gaze trailed over him in a distinctly predatory way.
“You’re hungry, huh?”
She leaned closer, hand reaching over to caress his shoulder. “Maybe a little more than that…” Gold eyes locked to his, her hand gently pushing his back into the sand, the Succubus moving in closer so that she could pin him down.
Rick grinned. “Careful with the splash.”
The momentary confusion turned to shock and horror as she was yanked away and flung into the sea. Monica stared with ample amount of self-satisfaction as the Succubus swore and sank into the waves. “No horny time.” The feline declared, looking at Rick with a dangerous glint in her eyes.
“I understand.” He raised his hands, playing the role of innocent bystander.
“Play time.”
His eyes widened with concern. Uh oh.
She reached down, pulling him up by the shirt. “Rick train swim.”
“I know how to swim.” He quickly proclaimed, grabbing hold of her claws as her arm tensed. “BUT!”
Monica hesitated, looking at the water, then at him with narrowed eyes. “But?”
“Don’t throw me like you did Kiara or I will break,” he said, quickly relaxing a little as he pointed up into the air. “Throw me a little up. Gently, into the water.”
She eyed him for a moment, and with a flick of her tail, caught a stone. “Like this?” She grasped the rock and gently tossed it into a high arch that fell into the sea with a little plop.
“Yeah, just like-AAAAAHHHH!!!”
He was flying, body spinning in the air as gravity quickly lay claim. Rick did the only thing he could think of, curling into a ball, drawing breath, and plunge. He was underwater in the next instant, bubbles and light, with the sandy bottom still within sight.
It was down there that he spotted Kiara looking up at him with a smirk, a bubble wrapping her head. The conspicuously naked Succubus used her wings to swim up at him, catching him in her grasp and pulling him down.
Rick clutched his mouth, trying to keep his breath.
Kiara’s amusement was apparent as she held him by the shirt, looking at him with a mischievous twinkle. The iron grip remained, and he could see what her plan was, so he leaned into her, breaking the surface of the bubble with his face.
The breath was cut short with the kiss.
Then she shoved him away, waving off and winking as she swam further away from the shore. The speed she was moving with clearly was one not meant for him to follow, so Rick didn’t, going up to the surface.
Monica was waiting for him, excitedly grinning from ear to ear.
“Again!” he declared the moment he stepped on the sand. “But this time not from the shirt or it might rip.”
By the time others were reaching the beach, the duo had figured out a way to make the launch procedure safer… ish. Mostly in that the victim of choice would stand on Monica’s palm and curl into a cannonball, so that she could then throw.
And the maiden had quite the throwing arm.
The couple of Goblins that showed up excitedly joined in. Then came the Orcs, Mousegirls, and Doggirls, and by the time Urtha had shown her face, the various tribe members had a line of eager volunteers to be thrown into the sea. While the Orcs were competing with one another to see who could get their cargo the furthest from the shore.
Dia caught sight of the glare before Rick could even speak up. “I’ve set up a rotation of guards with the ones keeping watch over the tribe,” the healer proclaimed. “And the water maidens are working as lookouts.”
“Do you think that would placate me?”
“Do you want to play in the launch games?” Rick asked, giving Dia a warning look. “I bet you’d give Monica a run for her money.”
“She is stronger.” Urtha spoke after just a moment of observation, shaking her head. “I would need to wait for her to tire.”
He looked at the Orc as she remained near them, but didn’t sit. He could almost taste the tension within her, that knot of uncertainty. “Would you like to build a sand castle, then?”
“A castle of sand?”
“Exactly that.” Rick sat up. “Just wet sand and more sand, and make a castle with it.”
Urtha’s thick brows furrowed. “That… sounds childish.”
He shrugged. “Sand is fragile and crumbles easily if mishandled. Consider it a test of skill.” A sly smile followed. “Or are you scared a little human will be better at it than you?”
With a scoff, she stomped her foot once. “Show me.”
“I’ll join in!” Dia said. “It’s been a while since I’ve played mud-walls.”
“The what now?”
“It’s a game we healers played when little helped give us finer control over our power.” She crouched down, grabbing a handful of wet sand and proceeding to carefully lay it down in the shape of a very thin tube. A tube no thicker than a straw, and tall enough to reach her knee. “The trick is in pushing the water away at the right time.”
Rick and Urtha shared a worried glance.
Two hours later, things had escalated… a little.
It turned out that the Orc’s ability to make wood nearly as tough as steel could be applied to sand to just enough of a degree that Urtha had made a box tower about two meters on the side and five tall. Rick, working with a knife, carved out details on the tower.
Mostly windows and bricks.
Dia, on the other hand, had built a miniature replica of the fortified city of Balet. Devoid of any details, the city was a configuration of boxes roughly knee height.
It was when some maidens that had tired of the Monica-Launcher™ had gathered to watch that things escalated. With Mousegirls quickly getting recruited by Dia so that they could turn the sand boxes into detailed houses, and Urtha recruiting other Orcs so that they could put together a second tower.
Somewhere along the way, Sheel had shown up to set up an impromptu grill service.
Rick got his fill as he watched the competition unfold, recovering his energy and feeling exhausted in a good way. He caught sight of Kiara emerging from the sea, sans clothes. The Succubus took one look at the gathering, and eventually locked on to him.
The alluring blue-haired Succubus shifted her walk, tucking away tiredness and presenting only assuredness and grace. Her ample hips swayed with a mesmerizing rhythm, tail punctuating every step with a flick. The maiden made a show of pushing her sky-blue hair over her shoulder, presenting her bare chest for him to drink in.
There was a twinkle of enjoyment in her golden eyes when his gaze locked on to her body. A sly smile played on her lips, seductive and coy.
As she reached him, the succubus knelt down and whispered in his ear, her voice soft and alluring. “Is this spot taken?”
Rick felt his throat dry, and he coughed a little. “Sure.”
Kiara grinned wider, taking his lap, tail reaching under his shirt to caress his chest. “It is very comfortable.” She punctuated her words by grinding against herself against his crotch a little. “You seem thrilled to see me.”
He wrapped his hands around her midriff, pulling her against his chest, ignoring the slight discomfort of her wings. “Be warned that Monica is looking our way,” he whispered. “Engage and you will get launched. She’s gotten great at it.”
The tail twitched. “Noted.” Her tone was begrudging. “I meant to ask, are you familiar with… this? The sea? The ocean? The depths?”
“I’ve been on my fair share of boats, and went diving in a reef once.” He admitted freely. “And I’ve flown over the clouds in one of the most boring technological marvel my world built.” A little chuckle followed. “But I think you were meaning to lead this somewhere else?”
Kiara shifted, staring over her shoulder for a moment. “I’d like to hear more about your world sometime.” Her voice held an edge of hesitation to it, and Rick had the distinct impression she was trying to hold something back. “But yes, I was meaning to lead the conversation to this.”
The tone was gone; the look was gone, replaced by smug satisfaction as she held up a blue gemstone. The object was the size of a pearl and a deep, glimmering blue.
“An impure elemental stone.” The Succubus declared. “Take it.”
Rick obliged, lifting it to get a better look. Light wavered and refracted within the sphere, adding a shimmer that made it look as if there was a tiny sea contained within. Twisting and shifting the stone did not make the illusion of change, making the little sphere appear like a looking-glass of some sort.
The refracted light swayed and shifted against his palm like an aurora.
“It’s… this is really impressive.” He declared after a moment, glancing back at her.
“I stumbled onto this while looking for something else. It has some minor value, but is mostly useless since it has a very low purity.” She shrugged her lithe shoulders, trailing his jaw with her sharp nail. “Consider it compensation.”
He frowned a little. “Compensation for what?”
She shrugged, beating her wings once and hopping on to her feet. “I will go get myself a change of clothes and a snack.” She turned to leave. “You’re more than welcome to join.”
Rick could only chuckle. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m exhausted right now.”
“Have it your way.” The maiden vanished into the thicket, sauntering off to the tribe. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, pay some attention to the little leech. Wouldn’t want her to feel neglected, now would we?”
Where had that come from? Rick watched her go, taking a moment to stand up and check that the little get-together was going nowhere. From there, he turned his focus inwards and sought the bond to Eva. It was tougher than he’d expected, especially with the noise from all the other bonds trying to drown out everything.
He found her sitting on a rock, at the very edge of the sandy shore, staring off at the setting sun. The maiden had her knees tucked against her chest, body covered under her black cape, only her red eyes and pale face exposed to the sunlight.
She noticed his approach, but didn’t react.
Rick took a spot next to her, not quite within arm’s reach. “You’ve avoided talking with me. Anything I should worry about?” His question caused the intended result. Eva looked at him with wide eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you don’t like small-talk, and this is just about the most important subject I could think of.”
The Fledgling turned away. “True.” She acknowledged. “I cannot answer your question, sir.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t.” She hugged her knees, turning away and towards the horizon.
Was she hesitating to take a stance, or was she unsure of what stance to take to begin with? Rick nodded a little. “If it’s any consolation, it’s weird for me, too.” He lay back on the stone, looking at the orange clouds above. “Especially with how stiff you’re acting.”
“The Wildling-King calls me his property, and then complains he is treated with the due formalities?” Eva glared.
“Point taken.” Rick sighed. “I just expected that you’d learn from the others.”
“I cannot compare myself to the monster that is Monica or Kiara, nor consider myself to hold a fraction of the trust you give Dia,” she summarized. “I am a Fledgling. Anywhere within the kingdom, a slip of the tongue, a mistake, or a perceived fault would earn me severe punishment.” The maiden glowered, then sighed. “I myself have given such for less.”
“So you don’t know what to expect from me, but will avoid talking with me about those expectations.”
The glare intensified. “I would trust you of all would understand the matter is not that simple.”
“You’re not calling me sir.” He replied with an arched brow, watching her flinch. “I don’t want to insult your intelligence, but it seems like you’re intentionally running on a groundless hypothesis. So my question would be, why have you kept at it?”
She deflated with a sigh. “I don’t know.”
Rick reached out, ruffling her hair. “Well, while you think about it, how about spending some actual time together with the others? Brooding didn’t get you the answer you were looking for, so how about trying to change the pace a little?”
The glare intensified. “I was not brooding. What do you take me for? I am older than you! I was the head of a noble house of great prestige!” She shot to her feet, glaring, lips curling into a snarl.
Rick stepped closer, directly into her personal space. “Evangeline.” He declared, his tone holding only the barest edge to it.
The Fledgling flinched, looking away, hands hiding under her cape. “You are right.” She spoke, deflating. “I… am Evangeline now.”
She moved to kneel, to lower herself, but his hand on her chin held her in place. He raised her gaze so that they would meet eyes. “The only line you stepped over was baring your fangs at me. Nothing else.”
He wanted to step away, to turn around and go to the beach with the others. But something else held him in place as he looked down to those ruby red eyes, the way she trembled against his palm, how she inhaled deeply and her eyelids fluttered. The maiden leaned into his touch, taking a hesitant step closer.
“Th-this…” Eva stammered, swallowing.
Rick leaned closer. “This is your chance to step away.”
She didn’t.
The Fledgling followed the gentle tug of his palm, raising herself to her tiptoes, leaning into the kiss. She froze, opening her mouth a little and scratching his lips with her fangs in hunger. They pierced, only enough to draw a drop of blood, only enough to make him flinch.
Eva recoiled, eyes wild, face beet read. “I, no, I-… This isn’t…”
The maiden vanished into the shadows before he could say anything. He could sense her quickly making an escape through the darkness. The human was left mostly amused at the reaction, chuckling as he took the long way back to the others.
He could understand why Kiara found entertainment out of teasing the Fledgling. Idly, he wondered if they could exchange some notes.
​
----
​

Hello, I'm back, kinda.
Things have been a monumental mess over on my end. Lots of things happened over the past couple months.
I'll be clear: Reddit isn't a convenient place to post stories. Yes, there's a community, but the website is very clearly designed for other kinds of content creators. Story writing is more of a "Despite" thing. Combined with the upcoming policy changes ^{(what with the site being sold off and wanting to coerce users into their App, at the cost of all else}), I don't think I'll be sticking around.
The story will continue being regularly posted over at Royalroad and Scribblehub.
There's practically a full volume already posted over there. Seriously, as a writer I can't stress enough just how monumentally important the post-scheduler is for me. My life is far too chaotic and sometimes I spend weeks without time or energy to prepare the posts, and then just dump 15 of them into the auto-loader.
I will try to get the next full volume (up to chapter... 62?) posted here throughout the next couple weeks, and unless something changes, I'll mostly stick to those other sites from there onward.
See you guys around, and thanks for sticking this long with the story.

[First]
[Standard Patreon Link].

1. Los Angeles Lakers: The Lakers are based in Los Angeles, one of the largest media markets in the United States. The team has a rich history, a massive fan base, and attracts significant media attention, making it an attractive destination for free agents.
   
2. New York Knicks: The Knicks play in New York City, another major media market. Despite recent struggles on the court, the team has a loyal and passionate fan base. Playing in the heart of the Big Apple offers players immense exposure and endorsement opportunities.
   
3. Brooklyn Nets: The Nets share the New York market with the Knicks, but they rank slightly lower due to the Knicks' historical significance. Nevertheless, playing in Brooklyn provides players with access to a large media market and opportunities to build their brand.
   
4. Chicago Bulls: Chicago is a major media market, and the Bulls have a storied history with Michael Jordan's dominance in the 1990s. The team's fan base remains dedicated, and the city offers players exposure and endorsement possibilities.
   
5. Golden State Warriors: The Warriors are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is home to a sizable media market. In recent years, the team has become a powerhouse in the league, attracting attention and media coverage. Additionally, the city offers a vibrant lifestyle and endorsement opportunities.
   
6. Boston Celtics: Boston has a strong basketball tradition, and the Celtics are one of the most successful franchises in NBA history. The team plays in a passionate sports city, with access to a solid media market and historical significance.
   
7. Miami Heat: Miami is a desirable location for many players due to its warm climate, vibrant city life, and endorsement opportunities. The Heat have a strong fan base, and the team has achieved success in recent years, which enhances its appeal.
   
8. Los Angeles Clippers: While the Clippers share the same market as the Lakers, they rank slightly lower due to the Lakers' historical dominance. However, playing in Los Angeles provides players with exposure to the media and the city's entertainment industry.
   
9. Philadelphia 76ers: Philadelphia has a passionate sports fan base, and the 76ers have a rich history. The city offers players exposure to the media and a solid market, making it an attractive destination.
   
10. Houston Rockets: Houston has a significant media market, and the Rockets have had periods of success in the past. The city offers players exposure and endorsement opportunities, making it an appealing destination.
    
11. Dallas Mavericks: Dallas is a major media market, and the Mavericks have had success in recent years, including winning an NBA championship. The city offers players exposure and endorsement possibilities.
    
12. Atlanta Hawks: Atlanta has a growing media market, and the Hawks have shown improvement in recent seasons. The city provides players with a vibrant culture and entertainment scene.
    
13. Washington Wizards: Washington, D.C., has a solid media market, and the Wizards play in the nation's capital, which offers players opportunities for exposure and connections beyond basketball.
    
14. Toronto Raptors: While the Raptors are the only Canadian team in the NBA, they still have access to a substantial media market in Toronto. The team has a dedicated fan base, and the city offers a unique international appeal.
    
15. San Antonio Spurs: San Antonio may have a smaller media market compared to some other teams, but the Spurs have a successful track record and a strong fan base. The city is known for its basketball culture, which can be attractive to players.
    
16. Phoenix Suns: Phoenix is a desirable location due to its warm climate, and the Suns have seen a resurgence in recent years. The team plays in a competitive Western Conference and offers players exposure to a growing media market.
    
17. Sacramento Kings: Although Sacramento has a smaller media market compared to other cities, the Kings have a dedicated fan base. The team's proximity to other major California cities can also provide players with additional exposure opportunities.
    
18. Denver Nuggets: Denver has a smaller media market but offers players a high quality of life and access to outdoor activities. The Nuggets have shown promise in recent seasons, making it an appealing destination for free agents.
    
19. Portland Trail Blazers: Portland has a smaller media market, but the Trail Blazers have a passionate fan base. The city is known for its loyal support of the team, and players can benefit from the unique atmosphere and community.
    
20. Detroit Pistons: Detroit has a decent media market, and while the Pistons have had ups and downs in recent years, they have a history of success. The city offers players exposure and opportunities for community involvement.
    
21. Cleveland Cavaliers: Cleveland has a smaller media market, but the Cavaliers have had notable success, including winning an NBA championship. The city offers players exposure and a passionate fan base.
    
22. Orlando Magic: Orlando has a solid media market, and the Magic have had periods of success in the past. The city is known for its entertainment industry and attractions, which can be appealing to players.
    
23. Milwaukee Bucks: Milwaukee has a smaller media market, but the Bucks have experienced success in recent years, including winning an NBA championship. The team has a loyal fan base, and players can benefit from the community support.
    
24. Utah Jazz: Salt Lake City has a smaller media market, but the Jazz have a dedicated fan base. The city offers players a close-knit community and opportunities for community involvement.
    
25. Charlotte Hornets: Charlotte has a smaller media market, but the Hornets have shown improvement in recent years. The city offers players exposure and opportunities for community engagement.
    
26. Indiana Pacers: Indianapolis has a smaller media market, but the Pacers have a loyal fan base. The city offers players a close-knit community and opportunities to make a positive impact.
    
27. Minnesota Timberwolves: Minneapolis has a decent media market, and while the Timberwolves have struggled in recent years, the city offers players a vibrant culture and a chance to be part of the city's sports scene.
    
28. Memphis Grizzlies: Memphis has a smaller media market, but the Grizzlies have a passionate fan base. The city offers players exposure and a unique musical and cultural heritage.
    
29. New Orleans Pelicans: New Orleans has a smaller media market, but the Pelicans have a dedicated fan base. The city offers players a rich cultural experience and opportunities to immerse themselves in the unique New Orleans lifestyle.
    
30. Oklahoma City Thunder: Oklahoma City has a smaller media market compared to other cities, but the Thunder have a loyal fan base. The team’s success in the past has created a passionate basketball culture in the city.
    

It’s important to note that while media market size is a significant factor in evaluating a free agent destination, it’s not the only factor. Other factors such as team success, coaching staff, supporting cast, financial considerations, and personal preferences of players can also heavily influence their decisions.

NARRATOR: (Black screen with text; The sound of buzzing bees can be heard) According to all known laws of aviation, : there is no way a bee should be able to fly. : Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. : The bee, of course, flies anyway : because bees don't care what humans think is impossible. BARRY BENSON: (Barry is picking out a shirt) Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. : Ooh, black and yellow! Let's shake it up a little. JANET BENSON: Barry! Breakfast is ready! BARRY: Coming! : Hang on a second. (Barry uses his antenna like a phone) : Hello? ADAM FLAYMAN:
(Through phone) - Barry? BARRY: - Adam? ADAM: - Can you believe this is happening? BARRY: - I can't. I'll pick you up. (Barry flies down the stairs) : MARTIN BENSON: Looking sharp. JANET: Use the stairs. Your father paid good money for those. BARRY: Sorry. I'm excited. MARTIN: Here's the graduate. We're very proud of you, son. : A perfect report card, all B's. JANET: Very proud. (Rubs Barry's hair) BARRY= Ma! I got a thing going here. JANET: - You got lint on your fuzz. BARRY: - Ow! That's me!
JANET: - Wave to us! We'll be in row 118,000. - Bye! (Barry flies out the door) JANET: Barry, I told you, stop flying in the house! (Barry drives through the hive,and is waved at by Adam who is reading a newspaper) BARRY== - Hey, Adam. ADAM: - Hey, Barry. (Adam gets in Barry's car) : - Is that fuzz gel? BARRY: - A little. Special day, graduation. ADAM: Never thought I'd make it. (Barry pulls away from the house and continues driving) BARRY: Three days grade school, three days high school... ADAM: Those were awkward. BARRY: Three days college. I'm glad I took a day and hitchhiked around the hive. ADAM== You did come back different. (Barry and Adam pass by Artie, who is jogging) ARTIE: - Hi, Barry!
BARRY: - Artie, growing a mustache? Looks good. ADAM: - Hear about Frankie? BARRY: - Yeah. ADAM== - You going to the funeral? BARRY: - No, I'm not going to his funeral. : Everybody knows, sting someone, you die. : Don't waste it on a squirrel. Such a hothead. ADAM: I guess he could have just gotten out of the way. (The car does a barrel roll on the loop-shaped bridge and lands on the highway) : I love this incorporating an amusement park into our regular day. BARRY: I guess that's why they say we don't need vacations. (Barry parallel parks the car and together they fly over the graduating students) Boy, quite a bit of pomp... under the circumstances. (Barry and Adam sit down and put on their hats) : - Well, Adam, today we are men.
ADAM: - We are! BARRY= - Bee-men. =ADAM= - Amen! BARRY AND ADAM: Hallelujah! (Barry and Adam both have a happy spasm) ANNOUNCER: Students, faculty, distinguished bees, : please welcome Dean Buzzwell. DEAN BUZZWELL: Welcome, New Hive Oity graduating class of... : ...9: : That concludes our ceremonies. : And begins your career at Honex Industries! ADAM: Will we pick our job today? (Adam and Barry get into a tour bus) BARRY= I heard it's just orientation. (Tour buses rise out of the ground and the students are automatically loaded into the buses) TOUR GUIDE: Heads up! Here we go.
ANNOUNCER: Keep your hands and antennas inside the tram at all times. BARRY: - Wonder what it'll be like? ADAM: - A little scary. TOUR GUIDE== Welcome to Honex, a division of Honesco : and a part of the Hexagon Group. Barry: This is it! BARRY AND ADAM: Wow. BARRY: Wow. (The bus drives down a road an on either side are the Bee's massive complicated Honey-making machines) TOUR GUIDE: We know that you, as a bee, have worked your whole life : to get to the point where you can work for your whole life. : Honey begins when our valiant Pollen Jocks bring the nectar to the hive. : Our top-secret formula : is automatically color-corrected,
scent-adjusted and bubble-contoured : into this soothing sweet syrup : with its distinctive golden glow you know as... EVERYONE ON BUS: Honey! (The guide has been collecting honey into a bottle and she throws it into the crowd on the bus and it is caught by a girl in the back) ADAM: - That girl was hot. BARRY: - She's my cousin! ADAM== - She is? BARRY: - Yes, we're all cousins. ADAM: - Right. You're right. TOUR GUIDE: - At Honex, we constantly strive : to improve every aspect of bee existence. : These bees are stress-testing a new helmet technology. (The bus passes by a Bee wearing a helmet who is being smashed into the ground with fly-swatters, newspapers and boots. He lifts a thumbs up but you can hear him groan) : ADAM==

• What do you think he makes? BARRY:
• Not enough. TOUR GUIDE: Here we have our latest advancement, the Krelman. (They pass by a turning wheel with Bees standing on pegs, who are each wearing a finger-shaped hat) Barry:
• Wow, What does that do? TOUR GUIDE:
• Catches that little strand of honey : that hangs after you pour it. Saves us millions. ADAM: (Intrigued) Can anyone work on the Krelman? TOUR GUIDE: Of course. Most bee jobs are small ones. But bees know that every small job, if it's done well, means a lot. : But choose carefully : because you'll stay in the job you pick for the rest of your life. (Everyone claps except for Barry) BARRY: The same job the rest of your life? I didn't know that. ADAM:

What's the difference? TOUR GUIDE: You'll be happy to know that bees, as a species, haven't had one day off : in 27 million years. BARRY: (Upset) So you'll just work us to death? : We'll sure try. (Everyone on the bus laughs except Barry. Barry and Adam are walking back home together) ADAM: Wow! That blew my mind! BARRY: "What's the difference?" How can you say that? : One job forever? That's an insane choice to have to make. ADAM: I'm relieved. Now we only have to make one decision in life. BARRY: But, Adam, how could they never have told us that? ADAM: Why would you question anything? We're bees. : We're the most perfectly functioning society on Earth.
BARRY: You ever think maybe things work a little too well here? ADAM: Like what? Give me one example. (Barry and Adam stop walking and it is revealed to the audience that hundreds of cars are speeding by and narrowly missing them in perfect unison) BARRY: I don't know. But you know what I'm talking about. ANNOUNCER: Please clear the gate. Royal Nectar Force on approach. BARRY: Wait a second. Check it out. (The Pollen jocks fly in, circle around and landing in line) : - Hey, those are Pollen Jocks! ADAM: - Wow. : I've never seen them this close. BARRY: They know what it's like outside the hive. ADAM: Yeah, but some don't come back. GIRL BEES: - Hey, Jocks! - Hi, Jocks! (The Pollen Jocks hook up their backpacks to machines that pump the nectar to trucks, which drive away)
LOU LO DUVA: You guys did great! : You're monsters! You're sky freaks! I love it! (Punching the Pollen Jocks in joy) I love it! ADAM: - I wonder where they were. BARRY: - I don't know. : Their day's not planned. : Outside the hive, flying who knows where, doing who knows what. : You can't just decide to be a Pollen Jock. You have to be bred for that. ADAM== Right. (Barry and Adam are covered in some pollen that floated off of the Pollen Jocks) BARRY: Look at that. That's more pollen than you and I will see in a lifetime. ADAM: It's just a status symbol. Bees make too much of it. BARRY: Perhaps. Unless you're wearing it and the ladies see you wearing it. (Barry waves at 2 girls standing a little away from them)
ADAM== Those ladies? Aren't they our cousins too? BARRY: Distant. Distant. POLLEN JOCK #1: Look at these two. POLLEN JOCK #2: - Couple of Hive Harrys. POLLEN JOCK #1: - Let's have fun with them. GIRL BEE #1: It must be dangerous being a Pollen Jock. BARRY: Yeah. Once a bear pinned me against a mushroom! : He had a paw on my throat, and with the other, he was slapping me! (Slaps Adam with his hand to represent his scenario) GIRL BEE #2: - Oh, my! BARRY: - I never thought I'd knock him out. GIRL BEE #1: (Looking at Adam) What were you doing during this? ADAM: Obviously I was trying to alert the authorities. BARRY: I can autograph that.
(The pollen jocks walk up to Barry and Adam, they pretend that Barry and Adam really are pollen jocks.) POLLEN JOCK #1: A little gusty out there today, wasn't it, comrades? BARRY: Yeah. Gusty. POLLEN JOCK #1: We're hitting a sunflower patch six miles from here tomorrow. BARRY: - Six miles, huh? ADAM: - Barry! POLLEN JOCK #2: A puddle jump for us, but maybe you're not up for it. BARRY: - Maybe I am. ADAM: - You are not! POLLEN JOCK #1: We're going 0900 at J-Gate. : What do you think, buzzy-boy? Are you bee enough? BARRY: I might be. It all depends on what 0900 means. (The scene cuts to Barry looking out on the hive-city from his balcony at night) MARTIN:
Hey, Honex! BARRY: Dad, you surprised me. MARTIN: You decide what you're interested in? BARRY: - Well, there's a lot of choices. - But you only get one. : Do you ever get bored doing the same job every day? MARTIN: Son, let me tell you about stirring. : You grab that stick, and you just move it around, and you stir it around. : You get yourself into a rhythm. It's a beautiful thing. BARRY: You know, Dad, the more I think about it, : maybe the honey field just isn't right for me. MARTIN: You were thinking of what, making balloon animals? : That's a bad job for a guy with a stinger. :
Janet, your son's not sure he wants to go into honey! JANET: - Barry, you are so funny sometimes. BARRY: - I'm not trying to be funny. MARTIN: You're not funny! You're going into honey. Our son, the stirrer! JANET: - You're gonna be a stirrer? BARRY: - No one's listening to me! MARTIN: Wait till you see the sticks I have. BARRY: I could say anything right now. I'm gonna get an ant tattoo! (Barry's parents don't listen to him and continue to ramble on) MARTIN: Let's open some honey and celebrate! BARRY: Maybe I'll pierce my thorax. Shave my antennae. : Shack up with a grasshopper. Get a gold tooth and call everybody "dawg"! JANET: I'm so proud. (The scene cuts to Barry and Adam waiting in line to get a job) ADAM: - We're starting work today!
BARRY: - Today's the day. ADAM: Come on! All the good jobs will be gone. BARRY: Yeah, right. JOB LISTER: Pollen counting, stunt bee, pouring, stirrer, front desk, hair removal... BEE IN FRONT OF LINE: - Is it still available? JOB LISTER: - Hang on. Two left! : One of them's yours! Congratulations! Step to the side. ADAM: - What'd you get? BEE IN FRONT OF LINE: - Picking crud out. Stellar! (He walks away) ADAM: Wow! JOB LISTER: Couple of newbies? ADAM: Yes, sir! Our first day! We are ready! JOB LISTER: Make your choice. (Adam and Barry look up at the job board. There are hundreds of constantly changing panels that contain available or unavailable jobs. It looks very confusing)
ADAM: - You want to go first? BARRY: - No, you go. ADAM: Oh, my. What's available? JOB LISTER: Restroom attendant's open, not for the reason you think. ADAM: - Any chance of getting the Krelman? JOB LISTER: - Sure, you're on. (Puts the Krelman finger-hat on Adam's head) (Suddenly the sign for Krelman closes out) : I'm sorry, the Krelman just closed out. (Takes Adam's hat off) Wax monkey's always open. ADAM: The Krelman opened up again. : What happened? JOB LISTER: A bee died. Makes an opening. See? He's dead. Another dead one. : Deady. Deadified. Two more dead. : Dead from the neck up. Dead from the neck down. That's life!
ADAM: Oh, this is so hard! (Barry remembers what the Pollen Jock offered him and he flies off) Heating, cooling, stunt bee, pourer, stirrer, : humming, inspector number seven, lint coordinator, stripe supervisor, : mite wrangler. Barry, what do you think I should... Barry? (Adam turns around and sees Barry flying away) : Barry! POLLEN JOCK: All right, we've got the sunflower patch in quadrant nine... ADAM: (Through phone) What happened to you? Where are you? BARRY: - I'm going out. ADAM: - Out? Out where? BARRY: - Out there. ADAM: - Oh, no! BARRY: I have to, before I go to work for the rest of my life. ADAM:
You're gonna die! You're crazy! (Barry hangs up) Hello? POLLEN JOCK #2: Another call coming in. : If anyone's feeling brave, there's a Korean deli on 83rd : that gets their roses today. BARRY: Hey, guys. POLLEN JOCK #1 == - Look at that. POLLEN JOCK #2: - Isn't that the kid we saw yesterday? LOU LO DUVA: Hold it, son, flight deck's restricted. POLLEN JOCK #1: It's OK, Lou. We're gonna take him up. (Puts hand on Barry's shoulder) LOU LO DUVA: (To Barry) Really? Feeling lucky, are you? BEE WITH CLIPBOARD: (To Barry) Sign here, here. Just initial that. : - Thank you. LOU LO DUVA: - OK. : You got a rain advisory today, :
and as you all know, bees cannot fly in rain. : So be careful. As always, watch your brooms, : hockey sticks, dogs, birds, bears and bats. : Also, I got a couple of reports of root beer being poured on us. : Murphy's in a home because of it, babbling like a cicada! BARRY: - That's awful. LOU LO DUVA: (Still talking through megaphone) - And a reminder for you rookies, : bee law number one, absolutely no talking to humans! : All right, launch positions! POLLEN JOCKS: (The Pollen Jocks run into formation) : Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! LOU LU DUVA: Black and yellow! POLLEN JOCKS:
Hello! POLLEN JOCK #1: (To Barry)You ready for this, hot shot? BARRY: Yeah. Yeah, bring it on. POLLEN JOCK's: Wind, check. : - Antennae, check. - Nectar pack, check. : - Wings, check. - Stinger, check. BARRY: Scared out of my shorts, check. LOU LO DUVA: OK, ladies, : let's move it out! : Pound those petunias, you striped stem-suckers! : All of you, drain those flowers! (The pollen jocks fly out of the hive) BARRY: Wow! I'm out! : I can't believe I'm out! : So blue.
: I feel so fast and free! : Box kite! (Barry flies through the kite) : Wow! : Flowers! (A pollen jock puts on some high tech goggles that shows flowers similar to heat sink goggles.) POLLEN JOCK: This is Blue Leader. We have roses visual. : Bring it around 30 degrees and hold. : Roses! POLLEN JOCK #1: 30 degrees, roger. Bringing it around. : Stand to the side, kid. It's got a bit of a kick. (The pollen jock fires a high-tech gun at the flower, shooting tubes that suck up the nectar from the flower and collects it into a pouch on the gun) BARRY: That is one nectar collector! POLLEN JOCK #1== - Ever see pollination up close? BARRY: - No, sir. POLLEN JOCK #1:
(Barry and the Pollen jock fly over the field, the pollen jock sprinkles pollen as he goes) : I pick up some pollen here, sprinkle it over here. Maybe a dash over there, : a pinch on that one. See that? It's a little bit of magic. BARRY: That's amazing. Why do we do that? POLLEN JOCK #1: That's pollen power. More pollen, more flowers, more nectar, more honey for us. BARRY: Cool. POLLEN JOCK #1: I'm picking up a lot of bright yellow. could be daisies. Don't we need those? POLLEN JOCK #2: Copy that visual. : Wait. One of these flowers seems to be on the move. POLLEN JOCK #1: Say again? You're reporting a moving flower? POLLEN JOCK #2: Affirmative. (The Pollen jocks land near the "flowers" which, to the audience are obviously just tennis balls) KEN: (In the distance) That was on the line!
POLLEN JOCK #1: This is the coolest. What is it? POLLEN JOCK #2: I don't know, but I'm loving this color. : It smells good. Not like a flower, but I like it. POLLEN JOCK #1: Yeah, fuzzy. (Sticks his hand on the ball but it gets stuck) POLLEN JOCK #3== Chemical-y. (The pollen jock finally gets his hand free from the tennis ball) POLLEN JOCK #1: Careful, guys. It's a little grabby. (The pollen jocks turn around and see Barry lying his entire body on top of one of the tennis balls) POLLEN JOCK #2: My sweet lord of bees! POLLEN JOCK #3: Candy-brain, get off there! POLLEN JOCK #1: (Pointing upwards) Problem! (A human hand reaches down and grabs the tennis ball that Barry is stuck to) BARRY: - Guys! POLLEN JOCK #2: - This could be bad. POLLEN JOCK #3: Affirmative. (Vanessa Bloome starts bouncing the tennis ball, not knowing Barry is stick to it)
BARRY== Very close. : Gonna hurt. : Mama's little boy. (Barry is being hit back and forth by two humans playing tennis. He is still stuck to the ball) POLLEN JOCK #1: You are way out of position, rookie! KEN: Coming in at you like a MISSILE! (Barry flies past the pollen jocks, still stuck to the ball) BARRY: (In slow motion) Help me! POLLEN JOCK #2: I don't think these are flowers. POLLEN JOCK #3: - Should we tell him? POLLEN JOCK #1: - I think he knows. BARRY: What is this?! KEN: Match point! : You can start packing up, honey, because you're about to EAT IT! (A pollen jock coughs which confused Ken and he hits the ball the wrong way with Barry stuck to it and it goes flying into the city) BARRY:
Yowser! (Barry bounces around town and gets stuck in the engine of a car. He flies into the air conditioner and sees a bug that was frozen in there) BARRY: Ew, gross. (The man driving the car turns on the air conditioner which blows Barry into the car) GIRL IN CAR: There's a bee in the car! : - Do something! DAD DRIVING CAR: - I'm driving! BABY GIRL: (Waving at Barry) - Hi, bee. (Barry smiles and waves at the baby girl) GUY IN BACK OF CAR: - He's back here! : He's going to sting me! GIRL IN CAR: Nobody move. If you don't move, he won't sting you. Freeze! (Barry freezes as well, hovering in the middle of the car) : GRANDMA IN CAR== He blinked! (The grandma whips out some bee-spray and sprays everywhere in the car, climbing into the front seat, still trying to spray Barry) GIRL IN CAR: Spray him, Granny! DAD DRIVING THE CAR: What are you doing?! (Barry escapes the car through the air conditioner and is flying high above
the ground, safe.) BARRY: Wow... the tension level out here is unbelievable. (Barry sees that storm clouds are gathering and he can see rain clouds moving into this direction) : I gotta get home. : Can't fly in rain. : Can't fly in rain. (A rain drop hits Barry and one of his wings is damaged) : Can't fly in rain. (A second rain drop hits Barry again and he spirals downwards) Mayday! Mayday! Bee going down! (WW2 plane sound effects are played as he plummets, and he crash-lands on a plant inside an apartment near the window) VANESSA BLOOME: Ken, could you close the window please? KEN== Hey, check out my new resume. I made it into a fold-out brochure. : You see? (Folds brochure resume out) Folds out. (Ken closes the window, trapping Barry inside) BARRY: Oh, no. More humans. I don't need this. (Barry tries to fly away but smashes into the window and falls again) : What was that?
(Barry keeps trying to fly out the window but he keeps being knocked back because the window is closed) Maybe this time. This time. This time. This time! This time! This... : Drapes! (Barry taps the glass. He doesn't understand what it is) That is diabolical. KEN: It's fantastic. It's got all my special skills, even my top-ten favorite movies. ANDY: What's number one? Star Wars? KEN: Nah, I don't go for that... (Ken makes finger guns and makes "pew pew pew" sounds and then stops) : ...kind of stuff. BARRY: No wonder we shouldn't talk to them. They're out of their minds. KEN: When I leave a job interview, they're flabbergasted, can't believe what I say. BARRY: (Looking at the light on the ceiling) There's the sun. Maybe that's a way out. (Starts flying towards the lightbulb) : I don't remember the sun having a big 75 on it. (Barry hits the lightbulb and falls into the dip on the table that the humans are sitting at) KEN:
I predicted global warming. : I could feel it getting hotter. At first I thought it was just me. (Andy dips a chip into the bowl and scoops up some dip with Barry on it and is about to put it in his mouth) : Wait! Stop! Bee! (Andy drops the chip with Barry in fear and backs away. All the humans freak out) : Stand back. These are winter boots. (Ken has winter boots on his hands and he is about to smash the bee but Vanessa saves him last second) VANESSA: Wait! : Don't kill him! (Vanessa puts Barry in a glass to protect him) KEN: You know I'm allergic to them! This thing could kill me! VANESSA: Why does his life have less value than yours? KEN: Why does his life have any less value than mine? Is that your statement? VANESSA: I'm just saying all life has value. You don't know what he's capable of feeling. (Vanessa picks up Ken's brochure and puts it under the glass so she can carry Barry back to the window. Barry looks at Vanessa in amazement) KEN:
My brochure! VANESSA: There you go, little guy. (Vanessa opens the window and lets Barry out but Barry stays back and is still shocked that a human saved his life) KEN: I'm not scared of him. It's an allergic thing. VANESSA: Put that on your resume brochure. KEN: My whole face could puff up. ANDY: Make it one of your special skills. KEN: Knocking someone out is also a special skill. (Ken walks to the door) Right. Bye, Vanessa. Thanks. : - Vanessa, next week? Yogurt night? VANESSA: - Sure, Ken. You know, whatever. : (Vanessa tries to close door) KEN== - You could put carob chips on there. VANESSA: - Bye. (Closes door but Ken opens it again) KEN: - Supposed to be less calories.
VANESSA: - Bye. (Closes door) (Fast forward to the next day, Barry is still inside the house. He flies into the kitchen where Vanessa is doing dishes) BARRY== (Talking to himself) I gotta say something. : She saved my life. I gotta say something. : All right, here it goes. (Turns back) Nah. : What would I say? : I could really get in trouble. : It's a bee law. You're not supposed to talk to a human. : I can't believe I'm doing this. : I've got to. (Barry disguises himself as a character on a food can as Vanessa walks by again) : Oh, I can't do it. Come on! : No. Yes. No. : Do it. I can't.
: How should I start it? (Barry strikes a pose and wiggles his eyebrows) "You like jazz?" No, that's no good. (Vanessa is about to walk past Barry) Here she comes! Speak, you fool! : ...Hi! (Vanessa gasps and drops the dishes in fright and notices Barry on the counter) : I'm sorry. VANESSA: - You're talking. BARRY: - Yes, I know. VANESSA: (Pointing at Barry) You're talking! BARRY: I'm so sorry. VANESSA: No, it's OK. It's fine. I know I'm dreaming. : But I don't recall going to bed. BARRY: Well, I'm sure this is very disconcerting. VANESSA: This is a bit of a surprise to me. I mean, you're a bee!
BARRY: I am. And I'm not supposed to be doing this, (Pointing to the living room where Ken tried to kill him last night) but they were all trying to kill me. : And if it wasn't for you... : I had to thank you. It's just how I was raised. (Vanessa stabs her hand with a fork to test whether she's dreaming or not) : That was a little weird. VANESSA: - I'm talking with a bee. BARRY: - Yeah. VANESSA: I'm talking to a bee. And the bee is talking to me! BARRY: I just want to say I'm grateful. I'll leave now. (Barry turns to leave) VANESSA: - Wait! How did you learn to do that? BARRY: (Flying back) - What? VANESSA: The talking...thing. BARRY:
Same way you did, I guess. "Mama, Dada, honey." You pick it up. VANESSA: - That's very funny. BARRY: - Yeah. : Bees are funny. If we didn't laugh, we'd cry with what we have to deal with. : Anyway... VANESSA: Can I... : ...get you something? BARRY: - Like what? VANESSA: I don't know. I mean... I don't know. Coffee? BARRY: I don't want to put you out. VANESSA: It's no trouble. It takes two minutes. : - It's just coffee. BARRY: - I hate to impose. (Vanessa starts making coffee) VANESSA: - Don't be ridiculous!
BARRY: - Actually, I would love a cup. VANESSA: Hey, you want rum cake? BARRY: - I shouldn't. VANESSA: - Have some. BARRY: - No, I can't. VANESSA: - Come on! BARRY: I'm trying to lose a couple micrograms. VANESSA: - Where? BARRY: - These stripes don't help. VANESSA: You look great! BARRY: I don't know if you know anything about fashion. : Are you all right? VANESSA: (Pouring coffee on the floor and missing the cup completely) No. (Flash forward in time. Barry and Vanessa are sitting together at a table on top of the apartment building drinking coffee)
: BARRY== He's making the tie in the cab as they're flying up Madison. : He finally gets there. : He runs up the steps into the church. The wedding is on. : And he says, "Watermelon? I thought you said Guatemalan. : Why would I marry a watermelon?" (Barry laughs but Vanessa looks confused) VANESSA: Is that a bee joke? BARRY: That's the kind of stuff we do. VANESSA: Yeah, different. : So, what are you gonna do, Barry? (Barry stands on top of a sugar cube floating in his coffee and paddles it around with a straw like it's a gondola) BARRY: About work? I don't know. : I want to do my part for the hive, but I can't do it the way they want. VANESSA: I know how you feel.
BARRY: - You do? VANESSA: - Sure. : My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor, but I wanted to be a florist. BARRY: - Really? VANESSA: - My only interest is flowers. BARRY: Our new queen was just elected with that same campaign slogan. : Anyway, if you look... (Barry points to a tree in the middle of Central Park) : There's my hive right there. See it? VANESSA: You're in Sheep Meadow! BARRY: Yes! I'm right off the Turtle Pond! VANESSA: No way! I know that area. I lost a toe ring there once. BARRY: - Why do girls put rings on their toes? VANESSA: - Why not? BARRY:

• It's like putting a hat on your knee. VANESSA:
• Maybe I'll try that. (A custodian installing a lightbulb looks over at them but to his perspective it looks like Vanessa is talking to a cup of coffee on the table) CUSTODIAN:
• You all right, ma'am? VANESSA:
• Oh, yeah. Fine. : Just having two cups of coffee! BARRY: Anyway, this has been great. Thanks for the coffee. VANESSA== Yeah, it's no trouble. BARRY: Sorry I couldn't finish it. If I did, I'd be up the rest of my life. (Barry points towards the rum cake) : Can I take a piece of this with me? VANESSA: Sure! Here, have a crumb. (Vanessa hands Barry a crumb but it is still pretty big for Barry) BARRY:
• Thanks! VANESSA:
• Yeah. BARRY: All right. Well, then... I guess I'll see you around.
  : Or not. VANESSA: OK, Barry... BARRY: And thank you so much again... for before. VANESSA: Oh, that? That was nothing. BARRY: Well, not nothing, but... Anyway... (Vanessa and Barry hold hands, but Vanessa has to hold out a finger because her hands is to big and Barry holds that) (The custodian looks over again and it appears Vanessa is laughing at her coffee again. The lightbulb that he was screwing in sparks and he falls off the ladder) (Fast forward in time and we see two Bee Scientists testing out a parachute in a Honex wind tunnel) BEE SCIENTIST #1: This can't possibly work. BEE SCIENTIST #2: He's all set to go. We may as well try it. : OK, Dave, pull the chute. (Dave pulls the chute and the wind slams him against the wall and he falls on his face.The camera pans over and we see Barry and Adam walking together) ADAM:
  
• Sounds amazing. BARRY:
  
• It was amazing! : It was the scariest, happiest moment of my life.
  

ADAM: Humans! I can't believe you were with humans! : Giant, scary humans! What were they like? BARRY: Huge and crazy. They talk crazy. : They eat crazy giant things. They drive crazy. ADAM: - Do they try and kill you, like on TV? BARRY: - Some of them. But some of them don't. ADAM: - How'd you get back? BARRY: - Poodle. ADAM: You did it, and I'm glad. You saw whatever you wanted to see. : You had your "experience." Now you can pick out your job and be normal. BARRY: - Well... ADAM: - Well? BARRY: Well, I met someone.
ADAM: You did? Was she Bee-ish? : - A wasp?! Your parents will kill you! BARRY: - No, no, no, not a wasp. ADAM: - Spider? BARRY: - I'm not attracted to spiders. : I know, for everyone else, it's the hottest thing, with the eight legs and all. : I can't get by that face. ADAM: So who is she? BARRY: She's... human. ADAM: No, no. That's a bee law. You wouldn't break a bee law. BARRY: - Her name's Vanessa. (Adam puts his head in his hands) ADAM: - Oh, boy. BARRY== She's so nice. And she's a florist! ADAM: Oh, no! You're dating a human florist!
BARRY: We're not dating. ADAM: You're flying outside the hive, talking to humans that attack our homes : with power washers and M-80s! That's one-eighth a stick of dynamite! BARRY: She saved my life! And she understands me. ADAM: This is over! BARRY: Eat this. (Barry gives Adam a piece of the crumb that he got from Vanessa. Adam eats it) ADAM: (Adam's tone changes) This is not over! What was that? BARRY: - They call it a crumb. ADAM: - It was so stingin' stripey! BARRY: And that's not what they eat. That's what falls off what they eat! : - You know what a Cinnabon is? ADAM: - No. (Adam opens a door behind him and he pulls Barry in)
BARRY: It's bread and cinnamon and frosting. ADAM: Be quiet! BARRY: They heat it up... ADAM: Sit down! (Adam forces Barry to sit down) BARRY: (Still rambling about Cinnabons) ...really hot! (Adam grabs Barry by the shoulders) ADAM: - Listen to me! : We are not them! We're us. There's us and there's them! BARRY== Yes, but who can deny the heart that is yearning? ADAM: There's no yearning. Stop yearning. Listen to me! : You have got to start thinking bee, my friend. Thinking bee! BARRY: - Thinking bee. WORKER BEE: - Thinking bee. WORKER BEES AND ADAM: Thinking bee! Thinking bee!
Thinking bee! Thinking bee! (Flash forward in time; Barry is laying on a raft in a pool full of honey. He is wearing sunglasses) JANET: There he is. He's in the pool. MARTIN: You know what your problem is, Barry? (Barry pulls down his sunglasses and he looks annoyed) BARRY: (Sarcastic) I gotta start thinking bee? JANET: How much longer will this go on? MARTIN: It's been three days! Why aren't you working? (Puts sunglasses back on) BARRY: I've got a lot of big life decisions to think about. MARTIN: What life? You have no life! You have no job. You're barely a bee! JANET: Would it kill you to make a little honey? (Barry rolls off the raft and sinks into the honey pool) : Barry, come out. Your father's talking to you. : Martin, would you talk to him? MARTIN:
Barry, I'm talking to you! (Barry keeps sinking into the honey until he is suddenly in Central Park having a picnic with Vanessa) (Barry has a cup of honey and he clinks his glass with Vanessas. Suddenly a mosquito lands on Vanessa and she slaps it, killing it. They both gasp but then burst out laughing) VANESSA: You coming? (The camera pans over and Vanessa is climbing into a small yellow airplane) BARRY: Got everything? VANESSA: All set! BARRY: Go ahead. I'll catch up. (Vanessa lifts off and flies ahead) VANESSA: Don't be too long. (Barry catches up with Vanessa and he sticks out his arms like ana irplane. He rolls from side to side, and Vanessa copies him with the airplane) VANESSA: Watch this! (Barry stays back and watches as Vanessa draws a heart in the air using pink smoke from the plane, but on the last loop-the-loop she suddenly crashes into a mountain and the plane explodes. The destroyed plane falls into some rocks and explodes a second time) BARRY: Vanessa! (As Barry is yelling his mouth fills with honey and he wakes up, discovering that he was just day dreaming. He slowly sinks back into the honey pool) MARTIN: - We're still here.
JANET: - I told you not to yell at him. : He doesn't respond to yelling! MARTIN: - Then why yell at me? JANET: - Because you don't listen! MARTIN: I'm not listening to this. BARRY: Sorry, I've gotta go. MARTIN: - Where are you going? BARRY: - I'm meeting a friend. JANET: A girl? Is this why you can't decide? BARRY: Bye. (Barry flies out the door and Martin shakes his head) : JANET== I just hope she's Bee-ish. (Fast forward in time and Barry is sitting on Vanessa's shoulder and she is closing up her shop) BARRY: They have a huge parade of flowers every year in Pasadena? VANESSA: To be in the Tournament of Roses, that's every florist's dream!
: Up on a float, surrounded by flowers, crowds cheering. BARRY: A tournament. Do the roses compete in athletic events? VANESSA: No. All right, I've got one. How come you don't fly everywhere? BARRY: It's exhausting. Why don't you run everywhere? It's faster. VANESSA: Yeah, OK, I see, I see. All right, your turn. BARRY: TiVo. You can just freeze live TV? That's insane! VANESSA: You don't have that? BARRY: We have Hivo, but it's a disease. It's a horrible, horrible disease. VANESSA: Oh, my. (A human walks by and Barry narrowly avoids him) PASSERBY: Dumb bees! VANESSA: You must want to sting all those jerks. BARRY: We try not to sting.
It's usually fatal for us. VANESSA: So you have to watch your temper (They walk into a store) BARRY: Very carefully. You kick a wall, take a walk, : write an angry letter and throw it out. Work through it like any emotion: : Anger, jealousy, lust. (Suddenly an employee(Hector) hits Barry off of Vanessa's shoulder. Hector thinks he's saving Vanessa) VANESSA: (To Barry) Oh, my goodness! Are you OK? (Barry is getting up off the floor) BARRY: Yeah. VANESSA: (To Hector) - What is wrong with you?! HECTOR: (Confused) - It's a bug. VANESSA: He's not bothering anybody. Get out of here, you creep! (Vanessa hits Hector across the face with the magazine he had and then hits him in the head. Hector backs away covering his head) Barry: What was that? A Pic 'N' Save circular? (Vanessa sets Barry back on her shoulder)
VANESSA: Yeah, it was. How did you know? BARRY: It felt like about 10 pages. Seventy-five is pretty much our limit. VANESSA: You've really got that down to a science. BARRY: - Oh, we have to. I lost a cousin to Italian Vogue. VANESSA: - I'll bet. (Barry looks to his right and notices there is honey for sale in the aisle) BARRY: What in the name of Mighty Hercules is this? (Barry looks at all the brands of honey, shocked) How did this get here? Cute Bee, Golden Blossom, : Ray Liotta Private Select? (Barry puts his hands up and slowly turns around, a look of disgust on his face) VANESSA: - Is he that actor? BARRY: - I never heard of him. : - Why is this here? VANESSA: - For people. We eat it. BARRY:
You don't have enough food of your own?! (Hector looks back and notices that Vanessa is talking to Barry) VANESSA: - Well, yes. BARRY: - How do you get it? VANESSA: - Bees make it. BARRY: - I know who makes it! : And it's hard to make it! : There's heating, cooling, stirring. You need a whole Krelman thing! VANESSA: - It's organic. BARRY: - It's our-ganic! VANESSA: It's just honey, Barry. BARRY: Just what?! : Bees don't know about this! This is stealing! A lot of stealing! : You've taken our homes, schools, hospitals! This is all we have! :
And it's on sale?! I'm getting to the bottom of this. : I'm getting to the bottom of all of this! (Flash forward in time; Barry paints his face with black strikes like a soldier and sneaks into the storage section of the store) (Two men, including Hector, are loading boxes into some trucks) : SUPERMARKET EMPLOYEE== Hey, Hector. : - You almost done? HECTOR: - Almost. (Barry takes a step to peak around the corner) (Whispering) He is here. I sense it. : Well, I guess I'll go home now (Hector pretends to walk away by walking in place and speaking loudly) : and just leave this nice honey out, with no one around. BARRY: You're busted, box boy! HECTOR: I knew I heard something! So you can talk! BARRY: I can talk. And now you'll start talking! : Where you getting the sweet stuff?
Who's your supplier? HECTOR: I don't understand. I thought we were friends. : The last thing we want to do is upset bees! (Hector takes a thumbtack out of the board behind him and sword-fights Barry. Barry is using his stinger like a sword) : You're too late! It's ours now! BARRY: You, sir, have crossed the wrong sword! HECTOR: You, sir, will be lunch for my iguana, Ignacio! (Barry hits the thumbtack out of Hectors hand and Hector surrenders) Barry: Where is the honey coming from? : Tell me where! HECTOR: (Pointing to leaving truck) Honey Farms! It comes from Honey Farms! (Barry chases after the truck but it is getting away. He flies onto a bicyclists' backpack and he catches up to the truck) CAR DRIVER: (To bicyclist) Crazy person! (Barry flies off and lands on the windshield of the Honey farms truck. Barry looks around and sees dead bugs splattered everywhere) BARRY: What horrible thing has happened here?
: These faces, they never knew what hit them. And now : they're on the road to nowhere! (Barry hears a sudden whisper) (Barry looks up and sees Mooseblood, a mosquito playing dead) MOOSEBLOOD: Just keep still. BARRY: What? You're not dead? MOOSEBLOOD: Do I look dead? They will wipe anything that moves. Where you headed? BARRY: To Honey Farms. I am onto something huge here. MOOSEBLOOD: I'm going to Alaska. Moose blood, crazy stuff. Blows your head off! ANOTHER BUG PLAYING DEAD: I'm going to Tacoma. (Barry looks at another bug) BARRY: - And you? MOOSEBLOOD: - He really is dead. BARRY: All right. (Another bug hits the windshield and the drivers notice. They activate the windshield wipers) MOOSEBLOOD== Uh-oh! (The windshield wipers are slowly sliding over the dead bugs and wiping
them off) BARRY: - What is that?! MOOSEBLOOD: - Oh, no! : - A wiper! Triple blade! BARRY: - Triple blade? MOOSEBLOOD: Jump on! It's your only chance, bee! (Mooseblood and Barry grab onto the wiper and they hold on as it wipes the windshield) Why does everything have to be so doggone clean?! : How much do you people need to see?! (Bangs on windshield) : Open your eyes! Stick your head out the window! RADIO IN TRUCK: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Carl Kasell. MOOSEBLOOD: But don't kill no more bugs! (Mooseblood and Barry are washed off by the wipr fluid) MOOSEBLOOD: - Bee! BARRY: - Moose blood guy!! (Barry starts screaming as he hangs onto the antenna) (Suddenly it is revealed that a water bug is also hanging on the antenna.
There is a pause and then Barry and the water bug both start screaming) TRUCK DRIVER: - You hear something? GUY IN TRUCK: - Like what? TRUCK DRIVER: Like tiny screaming. GUY IN TRUCK: Turn off the radio. (The antenna starts to lower until it gets to low and sinks into the truck. The water bug flies off and Barry is forced to let go and he is blown away. He luckily lands inside a horn on top of the truck where he finds Mooseblood, who was blown into the same place) MOOSEBLOOD: Whassup, bee boy? BARRY: Hey, Blood. (Fast forward in time and we see that Barry is deep in conversation with Mooseblood. They have been sitting in this truck for a while) BARRY: ...Just a row of honey jars, as far as the eye could see. MOOSEBLOOD: Wow! BARRY: I assume wherever this truck goes is where they're getting it. : I mean, that honey's ours. MOOSEBLOOD: - Bees hang tight. BARRY:

• We're all jammed in. : It's a close community. MOOSEBLOOD: Not us, man. We on our own. Every mosquito on his own. BARRY:
• What if you get in trouble? MOOSEBLOOD:
• You a mosquito, you in trouble. : Nobody likes us. They just smack. See a mosquito, smack, smack! BARRY: At least you're out in the world. You must meet girls. MOOSEBLOOD: Mosquito girls try to trade up, get with a moth, dragonfly. : Mosquito girl don't want no mosquito. (An ambulance passes by and it has a blood donation sign on it) You got to be kidding me! : Mooseblood's about to leave the building! So long, bee! (Mooseblood leaves and flies onto the window of the ambulance where there are other mosquito's hanging out) :
• Hey, guys! OTHER MOSQUITO:
• Mooseblood!

MOOSEBLOOD: I knew I'd catch y'all down here. Did you bring your crazy straw? (The truck goes out of view and Barry notices that the truck he's on is pulling into a camp of some sort) TRUCK DRIVER: We throw it in jars, slap a label on it, and it's pretty much pure profit. (Barry flies out) BARRY: What is this place? BEEKEEPER 1#: A bee's got a brain the size of a pinhead. BEEKEEPER #2: They are pinheads! : Pinhead. : - Check out the new smoker. BEEKEEPER #1: - Oh, sweet. That's the one you want. : The Thomas 3000! BARRY: Smoker? BEEKEEPER #1: Ninety puffs a minute, semi-automatic. Twice the nicotine, all the tar. : A couple breaths of this knocks them right out.
BEEKEEPER #2: They make the honey, and we make the money. BARRY: "They make the honey, and we make the money"? (The Beekeeper sprays hundreds of cheap miniature apartments with the smoker. The bees are fainting or passing out) Oh, my! : What's going on? Are you OK? (Barry flies into one of the apartment and helps a Bee couple get off the ground. They are coughing and its hard for them to stand) BEE IN APARTMENT: Yeah. It doesn't last too long. BARRY: Do you know you're in a fake hive with fake walls? BEE IN APPARTMENT: Our queen was moved here. We had no choice. (The apartment room is completely empty except for a photo on the wall of the "queen" who is obviously a man in women's clothes) BARRY: This is your queen? That's a man in women's clothes! : That's a drag queen! : What is this? (Barry flies out and he discovers that there are hundreds of these structures, each housing thousands of Bees) Oh, no! : There's hundreds of them! (Barry takes out his camera and takes pictures of these Bee work camps. The beekeepers look very evil in these depictions)
Bee honey. : Our honey is being brazenly stolen on a massive scale! : This is worse than anything bears have done! I intend to do something. (Flash forward in time and Barry is showing these pictures to his parents) JANET: Oh, Barry, stop. MARTIN: Who told you humans are taking our honey? That's a rumor. BARRY: Do these look like rumors? (Holds up the pictures) UNCLE CARL: That's a conspiracy theory. These are obviously doctored photos. JANET: How did you get mixed up in this? ADAM: He's been talking to humans. JANET: - What? MARTIN: - Talking to humans?! ADAM: He has a human girlfriend. And they make out! JANET: Make out? Barry!
BARRY: We do not. ADAM: - You wish you could. MARTIN: - Whose side are you on? BARRY: The bees! UNCLE CARL: (He has been sitting in the back of the room this entire time) I dated a cricket once in San Antonio. Those crazy legs kept me up all night. JANET: Barry, this is what you want to do with your life? BARRY: I want to do it for all our lives. Nobody works harder than bees! : Dad, I remember you coming home so overworked : your hands were still stirring. You couldn't stop. JANET: I remember that. BARRY: What right do they have to our honey? : We live on two cups a year. They put it in lip balm for no reason whatsoever!
ADAM: Even if it's true, what can one bee do? BARRY: Sting them where it really hurts. MARTIN: In the face! The eye! : - That would hurt. BARRY: - No. MARTIN: Up the nose? That's a killer. BARRY: There's only one place you can sting the humans, one place where it matters. (Flash forward a bit in time and we are watching the Bee News) BEE NEWS NARRATOR: Hive at Five, the hive's only full-hour action news source. BEE PROTESTOR: No more bee beards! BEE NEWS NARRATOR: With Bob Bumble at the anchor desk. : Weather with Storm Stinger. : Sports with Buzz Larvi. : And Jeanette Chung. BOB BUMBLE: - Good evening. I'm Bob Bumble. JEANETTE CHUNG:

• And I'm Jeanette Chung. BOB BUMBLE: A tri-county bee, Barry Benson, : intends to sue the human race for stealing our honey, : packaging it and profiting from it illegally! JEANETTE CHUNG: Tomorrow night on Bee Larry King, : we'll have three former queens here in our studio, discussing their new book, : Classy Ladies, out this week on Hexagon. (The scene changes to an interview on the news with Bee version of Larry King and Barry) BEE LARRY KING: Tonight we're talking to Barry Benson. : Did you ever think, "I'm a kid from the hive. I can't do this"? BARRY: Bees have never been afraid to change the world. : What about Bee Columbus? Bee Gandhi? Bejesus? BEE LARRY KING: Where I'm from, we'd never sue humans.
  : We were thinking of stickball or candy stores. BARRY: How old are you? BEE LARRY KING: The bee community is supporting you in this case, : which will be the trial of the bee century. BARRY: You know, they have a Larry King in the human world too. BEE LARRY KING: It's a common name. Next week... BARRY: He looks like you and has a show and suspenders and colored dots... BEE LARRY KING: Next week... BARRY: Glasses, quotes on the bottom from the guest even though you just heard 'em. BEE LARRY KING: Bear Week next week! They're scary, hairy and here, live. (Bee Larry King gets annoyed and flies away offscreen) BARRY: Always leans forward, pointy shoulders, squinty eyes, very Jewish. (Flash forward in time. We see Vanessa enter and Ken enters behind her. They are arguing)
  

KEN: In tennis, you attack at the point of weakness! VANESSA: It was my grandmother, Ken. She's 81. KEN== Honey, her backhand's a joke! I'm not gonna take advantage of that? BARRY: (To Ken) Quiet, please. Actual work going on here. KEN: (Pointing at Barry) - Is that that same bee? VANESSA: - Yes, it is! : I'm helping him sue the human race. BARRY: - Hello. KEN: - Hello, bee. VANESSA: This is Ken. BARRY: (Recalling the "Winter Boots" incident earlier) Yeah, I remember you. Timberland, size ten and a half. Vibram sole, I believe. KEN: (To Vanessa) Why does he talk again? VANESSA:
Listen, you better go 'cause we're really busy working. KEN: But it's our yogurt night! VANESSA: (Holding door open for Ken) Bye-bye. KEN: (Yelling) Why is yogurt night so difficult?! (Ken leaves and Vanessa walks over to Barry. His workplace is a mess) VANESSA: You poor thing. You two have been at this for hours! BARRY: Yes, and Adam here has been a huge help. ADAM: - Frosting... - How many sugars? ==BARRY== Just one. I try not to use the competition. : So why are you helping me? VANESSA: Bees have good qualities. : And it takes my mind off the shop. : Instead of flowers, people are giving balloon bouquets now. BARRY:
Those are great, if you're three. VANESSA: And artificial flowers. BARRY: - Oh, those just get me psychotic! VANESSA: - Yeah, me too. : BARRY: Bent stingers, pointless pollination. ADAM: Bees must hate those fake things! : Nothing worse than a daffodil that's had work done. : Maybe this could make up for it a little bit. VANESSA: - This lawsuit's a pretty big deal. BARRY: - I guess. ADAM: You sure you want to go through with it? BARRY: Am I sure? When I'm done with the humans, they won't be able : to say, "Honey, I'm home," without paying a royalty! (Flash forward in time and we are watching the human news. The camera shows
a crowd outside a courthouse) NEWS REPORTER: It's an incredible scene here in downtown Manhattan, : where the world anxiously waits, because for the first time in history, : we will hear for ourselves if a honeybee can actually speak. (We are no longer watching through a news camera) ADAM: What have we gotten into here, Barry? BARRY: It's pretty big, isn't it? ADAM== (Looking at the hundreds of people around the courthouse) I can't believe how many humans don't work during the day. BARRY: You think billion-dollar multinational food companies have good lawyers? SECURITY GUARD: Everybody needs to stay behind the barricade. (A limousine drives up and a fat man,Layton Montgomery, a honey industry owner gets out and walks past Barry) ADAM: - What's the matter? BARRY: - I don't know, I just got a chill. (Fast forward in time and everyone is in the court) MONTGOMERY: Well, if it isn't the bee team.
(To Honey Industry lawyers) You boys work on this? MAN: All rise! The Honorable Judge Bumbleton presiding. JUDGE BUMBLETON: All right. Case number 4475, : Superior Court of New York, Barry Bee Benson v. the Honey Industry : is now in session. : Mr. Montgomery, you're representing the five food companies collectively? MONTGOMERY: A privilege. JUDGE BUMBLETON: Mr. Benson... you're representing all the bees of the world? (Everyone looks closely, they are waiting to see if a Bee can really talk) (Barry makes several buzzing sounds to sound like a Bee) BARRY: I'm kidding. Yes, Your Honor, we're ready to proceed. JUDGE BUMBLBETON: Mr. Montgomery, your opening statement, please. MONTGOMERY: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, : my grandmother was a simple woman. :
Born on a farm, she believed it was man's divine right : to benefit from the bounty of nature God put before us. : If we lived in the topsy-turvy world Mr. Benson imagines, : just think of what would it mean. : I would have to negotiate with the silkworm : for the elastic in my britches! : Talking bee! (Montgomery walks over and looks closely at Barry) : How do we know this isn't some sort of : holographic motion-picture-capture Hollywood wizardry? : They could be using laser beams! : Robotics! Ventriloquism! Cloning! For all we know, : he could be on steroids! JUDGE BUMBLETON: Mr. Benson?
BARRY: Ladies and gentlemen, there's no trickery here. : I'm just an ordinary bee. Honey's pretty important to me. : It's important to all bees. We invented it! : We make it. And we protect it with our lives. : Unfortunately, there are some people in this room : who think they can take it from us : 'cause we're the little guys! I'm hoping that, after this is all over, : you'll see how, by taking our honey, you not only take everything we have : but everything we are! JANET== (To Martin) I wish he'd dress like that all the time. So nice! JUDGE BUMBLETON: Call your first witness. BARRY: So, Mr. Klauss Vanderhayden
of Honey Farms, big company you have. KLAUSS VANDERHAYDEN: I suppose so. BARRY: I see you also own Honeyburton and Honron! KLAUSS: Yes, they provide beekeepers for our farms. BARRY: Beekeeper. I find that to be a very disturbing term. : I don't imagine you employ any bee-free-ers, do you? KLAUSS: (Quietly) - No. BARRY: - I couldn't hear you. KLAUSS: - No. BARRY: - No. : Because you don't free bees. You keep bees. Not only that, : it seems you thought a bear would be an appropriate image for a jar of honey. KLAUSS: They're very lovable creatures.
: Yogi Bear, Fozzie Bear, Build-A-Bear. BARRY: You mean like this? (The bear from Over The Hedge barges in through the back door and it is roaring and standing on its hind legs. It is thrashing its claws and people are screaming. It is being held back by a guard who has the bear on a chain) : (Pointing to the roaring bear) Bears kill bees! : How'd you like his head crashing through your living room?! : Biting into your couch! Spitting out your throw pillows! JUDGE BUMBLETON: OK, that's enough. Take him away. (The bear stops roaring and thrashing and walks out) BARRY: So, Mr. Sting, thank you for being here. Your name intrigues me. : - Where have I heard it before? MR. STING: - I was with a band called The Police. BARRY: But you've never been a police officer, have you? STING: No, I haven't. BARRY:
No, you haven't. And so here we have yet another example : of bee culture casually stolen by a human : for nothing more than a prance-about stage name. STING: Oh, please. BARRY: Have you ever been stung, Mr. Sting? : Because I'm feeling a little stung, Sting. : Or should I say... Mr. Gordon M. Sumner! MONTGOMERY: That's not his real name?! You idiots! BARRY: Mr. Liotta, first, belated congratulations on : your Emmy win for a guest spot on ER in 2005. RAY LIOTTA: Thank you. Thank you. BARRY: I see from your resume that you're devilishly handsome : with a churning inner turmoil
that's ready to blow. RAY LIOTTA: I enjoy what I do. Is that a crime? BARRY: Not yet it isn't. But is this what it's come to for you? : Exploiting tiny, helpless bees so you don't : have to rehearse your part and learn your lines, sir? RAY LIOTTA: Watch it, Benson! I could blow right now! BARRY: This isn't a goodfella. This is a badfella! (Ray Liotta looses it and tries to grab Barry) RAY LIOTTA: Why doesn't someone just step on this creep, and we can all go home?! JUDGE BUMBLETON: - Order in this court! RAY LIOTTA: - You're all thinking it! (Judge Bumbleton starts banging her gavel) JUDGE BUMBLETON: Order! Order, I say! RAY LIOTTA: - Say it! MAN:

• Mr. Liotta, please sit down! (We see a montage of magazines which feature the court case) (Flash forward in time and Barry is back home with Vanessa) BARRY: I think it was awfully nice of that bear to pitch in like that. VANESSA: I think the jury's on our side. BARRY: Are we doing everything right,you know, legally? VANESSA: I'm a florist. BARRY: Right. Well, here's to a great team. VANESSA: To a great team! (Ken walks in from work. He sees Barry and he looks upset when he sees Barry clinking his glass with Vanessa) KEN: Well, hello. VANESSA:
• Oh, Ken! BARRY:
• Hello! VANESSA: I didn't think you were coming. : No, I was just late. I tried to call, but... (Ken holds up his phone and flips it open. The phone has no charge) ...the battery... VANESSA:

I didn't want all this to go to waste, so I called Barry. Luckily, he was free. KEN: Oh, that was lucky. (Ken sits down at the table across from Barry and Vanessa leaves the room) VANESSA: There's a little left. I could heat it up. KEN: (Not taking his eyes off Barry) Yeah, heat it up, sure, whatever. BARRY: So I hear you're quite a tennis player. : I'm not much for the game myself. The ball's a little grabby. KEN: That's where I usually sit. Right... (Points to where Barry is sitting) there. VANESSA: (Calling from other room) Ken, Barry was looking at your resume, : and he agreed with me that eating with chopsticks isn't really a special skill. KEN: (To Barry) You think I don't see what you're doing? BARRY: I know how hard it is to find the right job. We have that in common.
KEN: Do we? BARRY: Bees have 100 percent employment, but we do jobs like taking the crud out. KEN: (Menacingly) That's just what I was thinking about doing. (Ken reaches for a fork on the table but knocks if on the floor. He goes to pick it up) VANESSA: Ken, I let Barry borrow your razor for his fuzz. I hope that was all right. (Ken quickly rises back up after hearing this but hits his head on the table and yells) BARRY: I'm going to drain the old stinger. KEN: Yeah, you do that. (Barry flies past Ken to get to the bathroom and Ken freaks out, splashing some of the wine he was using to cool his head in his eyes. He yells in anger) (Barry looks at the magazines featuring his victories in court) BARRY: Look at that. (Barry flies into the bathroom) (He puts his hand on his head but this makes hurts him and makes him even madder. He yells again) (Barry is washing his hands in the sink but then Ken walks in) KEN: You know, you know I've just about had it (Closes bathroom door behind him) with your little mind games. (Ken is menacingly rolling up a magazine) BARRY:
(Backing away) - What's that? KEN: - Italian Vogue. BARRY: Mamma mia, that's a lot of pages. KEN: It's a lot of ads. BARRY: Remember what Van said, why is your life more valuable than mine? KEN: That's funny, I just can't seem to recall that! (Ken smashes everything off the sink with the magazine and Barry narrowly escapes) (Ken follows Barry around and tries to hit him with the magazine but he keeps missing) (Ken gets a spray bottle) : I think something stinks in here! BARRY: (Enjoying the spray) I love the smell of flowers. (Ken holds a lighter in front of the spray bottle) KEN: How do you like the smell of flames?! BARRY: Not as much. (Ken fires his make-shift flamethrower but misses Barry, burning the bathroom. He torches the whole room but looses his footing and falls into the bathtub. After getting hit in the head by falling objects 3 times he picks up the shower head, revealing a Water bug hiding under it) WATER BUG: Water bug! Not taking sides!
(Barry gets up out of a pile of bathroom supplies and he is wearing a chapstick hat) BARRY: Ken, I'm wearing a Chapstick hat! This is pathetic! (Ken switches the shower head to lethal) KEN: I've got issues! (Ken sprays Barry with the shower head and he crash lands into the toilet) (Ken menacingly looks down into the toilet at Barry) Well, well, well, a royal flush! BARRY: - You're bluffing. KEN: - Am I? (flushes toilet) (Barry grabs a chapstick from the toilet seat and uses it to surf in the flushing toilet) BARRY: Surf's up, dude! (Barry flies out of the toilet on the chapstick and sprays Ken's face with the toilet water) : EW,Poo water! BARRY: That bowl is gnarly. KEN: (Aiming a toilet cleaner at Barry) Except for those dirty yellow rings! (Barry cowers and covers his head and Vanessa runs in and takes the toilet cleaner from Ken just before he hits Barry) VANESSA: Kenneth! What are you doing?! KEN== (Leaning towards Barry)
You know, I don't even like honey! I don't eat it! VANESSA: We need to talk! (Vanessa pulls Ken out of the bathroom) : He's just a little bee! : And he happens to be the nicest bee I've met in a long time! KEN: Long time? What are you talking about?! Are there other bugs in your life? VANESSA: No, but there are other things bugging me in life. And you're one of them! KEN: Fine! Talking bees, no yogurt night... : My nerves are fried from riding on this emotional roller coaster! VANESSA: Goodbye, Ken. (Ken huffs and walks out and slams the door. But suddenly he walks back in and stares at Barry) : And for your information, I prefer sugar-free, artificial sweeteners MADE BY MAN! (Ken leaves again and Vanessa leans in towards Barry) VANESSA: I'm sorry about all that. (Ken walks back in again)
KEN: I know it's got an aftertaste! I LIKE IT! (Ken leaves for the last time) VANESSA: I always felt there was some kind of barrier between Ken and me. : I couldn't overcome it. Oh, well. : Are you OK for the trial? BARRY: I believe Mr. Montgomery is about out of ideas. (Flash forward in time and Barry, Adam, and Vanessa are back in court) MONTGOMERY-- We would like to call Mr. Barry Benson Bee to the stand. ADAM: Good idea! You can really see why he's considered one of the best lawyers... (Barry stares at Adam) ...Yeah. LAWYER: Layton, you've gotta weave some magic with this jury, or it's gonna be all over. MONTGOMERY: Don't worry. The only thing I have to do to turn this jury around : is to remind them of what they don't like about bees. (To lawyer)

• You got the tweezers? LAWYER:
• Are you allergic? MONTGOMERY: Only to losing, son. Only to losing. : Mr. Benson Bee, I'll ask you what I think we'd all like to know. : What exactly is your relationship (Points to Vanessa) : to that woman? BARRY: We're friends. MONTGOMERY:
• Good friends? BARRY:
• Yes. MONTGOMERY: How good? Do you live together? ADAM: Wait a minute... : MONTGOMERY: Are you her little... : ...bedbug? (Adam's stinger starts vibrating. He is agitated) I've seen a bee documentary or two. From what I understand,
  : doesn't your queen give birth to all the bee children? BARRY:
  
• Yeah, but... MONTGOMERY: (Pointing at Janet and Martin)
  
• So those aren't your real parents! JANET:
  
• Oh, Barry... BARRY:
  
• Yes, they are! ADAM: Hold me back! (Vanessa tries to hold Adam back. He wants to sting Montgomery) MONTGOMERY: You're an illegitimate bee, aren't you, Benson? ADAM: He's denouncing bees! MONTGOMERY: Don't y'all date your cousins? (Montgomery leans over on the jury stand and stares at Adam) VANESSA:
  
• Objection! (Vanessa raises her hand to object but Adam gets free. He flies straight at Montgomery) =ADAM:
  
• I'm going to pincushion this guy! BARRY: Adam, don't! It's what he wants! (Adam stings Montgomery in the butt and he starts thrashing around)
  

MONTGOMERY: Oh, I'm hit!! : Oh, lordy, I am hit! JUDGE BUMBLETON: (Banging gavel) Order! Order! MONTGOMERY: (Overreacting) The venom! The venom is coursing through my veins! : I have been felled by a winged beast of destruction! : You see? You can't treat them like equals! They're striped savages! : Stinging's the only thing they know! It's their way! BARRY: - Adam, stay with me. ADAM: - I can't feel my legs. MONTGOMERY: (Overreacting and throwing his body around the room) What angel of mercy will come forward to suck the poison : from my heaving buttocks? JUDGE BUMLBETON: I will have order in this court. Order!
: Order, please! (Flash forward in time and we see a human news reporter) NEWS REPORTER: The case of the honeybees versus the human race : took a pointed turn against the bees : yesterday when one of their legal team stung Layton T. Montgomery. (Adam is laying in a hospital bed and Barry flies in to see him) BARRY: - Hey, buddy. ADAM: - Hey. BARRY: - Is there much pain? ADAM: - Yeah. : I... : I blew the whole case, didn't I? BARRY: It doesn't matter. What matters is you're alive. You could have died. ADAM: I'd be better off dead. Look at me. (A small plastic sword is replaced as Adam's stinger) They got it from the cafeteria downstairs, in a tuna sandwich.
: Look, there's a little celery still on it. (Flicks off the celery and sighs) BARRY: What was it like to sting someone? ADAM: I can't explain it. It was all... : All adrenaline and then... and then ecstasy! BARRY: ...All right. ADAM: You think it was all a trap? BARRY: Of course. I'm sorry. I flew us right into this. : What were we thinking? Look at us. We're just a couple of bugs in this world. ADAM: What will the humans do to us if they win? BARRY: I don't know. ADAM: I hear they put the roaches in motels. That doesn't sound so bad. BARRY: Adam, they check in, but they don't check out!
ADAM: Oh, my. (Coughs) Could you get a nurse to close that window? BARRY: - Why? ADAM: - The smoke. (We can see that two humans are smoking cigarettes outside) : Bees don't smoke. BARRY: Right. Bees don't smoke. : Bees don't smoke! But some bees are smoking. : That's it! That's our case! ADAM: It is? It's not over? BARRY: Get dressed. I've gotta go somewhere. : Get back to the court and stall. Stall any way you can. (Flash forward in time and Adam is making a paper boat in the courtroom) ADAM: And assuming you've done step 29 correctly, you're ready for the tub! (We see that the jury have each made their own paper boats after being taught how by Adam. They all look confused) JUDGE BUMBLETON:
Mr. Flayman. ADAM: Yes? Yes, Your Honor! JUDGE BUMBLETON: Where is the rest of your team? ADAM: (Continues stalling) Well, Your Honor, it's interesting. : Bees are trained to fly haphazardly, : and as a result, we don't make very good time. : I actually heard a funny story about... MONTGOMERY: Your Honor, haven't these ridiculous bugs : taken up enough of this court's valuable time? : How much longer will we allow these absurd shenanigans to go on? : They have presented no compelling evidence to support their charges : against my clients, who run legitimate businesses. : I move for a complete dismissal
of this entire case! JUDGE BUMBLETON: Mr. Flayman, I'm afraid I'm going : to have to consider Mr. Montgomery's motion. ADAM: But you can't! We have a terrific case. MONTGOMERY: Where is your proof? Where is the evidence? : Show me the smoking gun! BARRY: (Barry flies in through the door) Hold it, Your Honor! You want a smoking gun? : Here is your smoking gun. (Vanessa walks in holding a bee smoker. She sets it down on the Judge's podium) JUDGE BUMBLETON: What is that? BARRY: It's a bee smoker! MONTGOMERY: (Picks up smoker) What, this? This harmless little contraption? : This couldn't hurt a fly, let alone a bee. (Montgomery accidentally fires it at the bees in the crowd and they faint
and cough) (Dozens of reporters start taking pictures of the suffering bees) BARRY: Look at what has happened : to bees who have never been asked, "Smoking or non?" : Is this what nature intended for us? : To be forcibly addicted to smoke machines : and man-made wooden slat work camps? : Living out our lives as honey slaves to the white man? (Barry points to the honey industry owners. One of them is an African American so he awkwardly separates himself from the others) LAWYER: - What are we gonna do? - He's playing the species card. BARRY: Ladies and gentlemen, please, free these bees! ADAM AND VANESSA: Free the bees! Free the bees! BEES IN CROWD: Free the bees! HUMAN JURY: Free the bees! Free the bees! JUDGE BUMBLETON: The court finds in favor of the bees!
BARRY: Vanessa, we won! VANESSA: I knew you could do it! High-five! (Vanessa hits Barry hard because her hand is too big) : Sorry. BARRY: (Overjoyed) I'm OK! You know what this means? : All the honey will finally belong to the bees. : Now we won't have to work so hard all the time. MONTGOMERY: This is an unholy perversion of the balance of nature, Benson. : You'll regret this. (Montgomery leaves and Barry goes outside the courtroom. Several reporters start asking Barry questions) REPORTER 1#: Barry, how much honey is out there? BARRY: All right. One at a time. REPORTER 2#: Barry, who are you wearing? BARRY: My sweater is Ralph Lauren, and I have no pants.
(Barry flies outside with the paparazzi and Adam and Vanessa stay back) ADAM: (To Vanessa) - What if Montgomery's right? Vanessa: - What do you mean? ADAM: We've been living the bee way a long time, 27 million years. (Flash forward in time and Barry is talking to a man) BUSINESS MAN: Congratulations on your victory. What will you demand as a settlement? BARRY: First, we'll demand a complete shutdown of all bee work camps. (As Barry is talking we see a montage of men putting "closed" tape over the work camps and freeing the bees in the crappy apartments) Then we want back the honey that was ours to begin with, : every last drop. (Men in suits are pushing all the honey of the aisle and into carts) We demand an end to the glorification of the bear as anything more (We see a statue of a bear-shaped honey container being pulled down by bees) than a filthy, smelly, bad-breath stink machine. : We're all aware of what they do in the woods. (We see Winnie the Pooh sharing his honey with Piglet in the cross-hairs of a high-tech sniper rifle) BARRY: (Looking through binoculars)
Wait for my signal. : Take him out. (Winnie gets hit by a tranquilizer dart and dramatically falls off the log he was standing on, his tongue hanging out. Piglet looks at Pooh in fear and the Sniper takes the honey.) SNIPER: He'll have nausea for a few hours, then he'll be fine. (Flash forward in time) BARRY: And we will no longer tolerate bee-negative nicknames... (Mr. Sting is sitting at home until he is taken out of his house by the men in suits) STING: But it's just a prance-about stage name! BARRY: ...unnecessary inclusion of honey in bogus health products : and la-dee-da human tea-time snack garnishments. (An old lady is mixing honey into her tea but suddenly men in suits smash her face down on the table and take the honey) OLD LADY: Can't breathe. (A honey truck pulls up to Barry's hive) WORKER: Bring it in, boys! : Hold it right there! Good. : Tap it.
(Tons of honey is being pumped into the hive's storage) BEE WORKER 1#: (Honey overflows from the cup) Mr. Buzzwell, we just passed three cups, and there's gallons more coming! : - I think we need to shut down! =BEE WORKER #2= - Shut down? We've never shut down. : Shut down honey production! DEAN BUZZWELL: Stop making honey! (The bees all leave their stations. Two bees run into a room and they put the keys into a machine) Turn your key, sir! (Two worker bees dramatically turn their keys, which opens the button which they press, shutting down the honey-making machines. This is the first time this has ever happened) BEE: ...What do we do now? (Flash forward in time and a Bee is about to jump into a pool full of honey) Cannonball! (The bee gets stuck in the honey and we get a short montage of Bees leaving work) (We see the Pollen Jocks flying but one of them gets a call on his antenna) LOU LU DUVA: (Through "phone") We're shutting honey production! : Mission abort. POLLEN JOCK #1: Aborting pollination and nectar detail. Returning to base. (The Pollen Jocks fly back to the hive)
(We get a time lapse of Central Park slowly wilting away as the bees all relax) BARRY: Adam, you wouldn't believe how much honey was out there. ADAM: Oh, yeah? BARRY: What's going on? Where is everybody? (The entire street is deserted) : - Are they out celebrating? ADAM: - They're home. : They don't know what to do. Laying out, sleeping in. : I heard your Uncle Carl was on his way to San Antonio with a cricket. BARRY: At least we got our honey back. ADAM: Sometimes I think, so what if humans liked our honey? Who wouldn't? : It's the greatest thing in the world! I was excited to be part of making it. : This was my new desk. This was my new job. I wanted to do it really well. :
And now... : Now I can't. (Flash forward in time and Barry is talking to Vanessa) BARRY: I don't understand why they're not happy. : I thought their lives would be better! : They're doing nothing. It's amazing. Honey really changes people. VANESSA: You don't have any idea what's going on, do you? BARRY: - What did you want to show me? (Vanessa takes Barry to the rooftop where they first had coffee and points to her store) VANESSA: - This. (Points at her flowers. They are all grey and wilting) BARRY: What happened here? VANESSA: That is not the half of it. (Small flash forward in time and Vanessa and Barry are on the roof of her store and she points to Central Park) (We see that Central Park is no longer green and colorful, rather it is grey, brown, and dead-like. It is very depressing to look at) BARRY: Oh, no. Oh, my. :
They're all wilting. VANESSA: Doesn't look very good, does it? BARRY: No. VANESSA: And whose fault do you think that is? BARRY: You know, I'm gonna guess bees. VANESSA== (Staring at Barry) Bees? BARRY: Specifically, me. : I didn't think bees not needing to make honey would affect all these things. VANESSA: It's not just flowers. Fruits, vegetables, they all need bees. BARRY: That's our whole SAT test right there. VANESSA: Take away produce, that affects the entire animal kingdom. : And then, of course... BARRY: The human species? : So if there's no more pollination,
: it could all just go south here, couldn't it? VANESSA: I know this is also partly my fault. BARRY: How about a suicide pact? VANESSA: How do we do it? BARRY: - I'll sting you, you step on me. VANESSA: - That just kills you twice. BARRY: Right, right. VANESSA: Listen, Barry... sorry, but I gotta get going. (Vanessa leaves) BARRY: (To himself) I had to open my mouth and talk. : Vanessa? : Vanessa? Why are you leaving? Where are you going? (Vanessa is getting into a taxi) VANESSA: To the final Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena. :
They've moved it to this weekend because all the flowers are dying. : It's the last chance I'll ever have to see it. BARRY: Vanessa, I just wanna say I'm sorry. I never meant it to turn out like this. VANESSA: I know. Me neither. (The taxi starts to drive away) BARRY: Tournament of Roses. Roses can't do sports. : Wait a minute. Roses. Roses? : Roses! : Vanessa! (Barry flies after the Taxi) VANESSA: Roses?! : Barry? (Barry is flying outside the window of the taxi) BARRY: - Roses are flowers! VANESSA: - Yes, they are. BARRY: Flowers, bees, pollen!
VANESSA: I know. That's why this is the last parade. BARRY: Maybe not. Could you ask him to slow down? VANESSA: Could you slow down? (The taxi driver screeches to a stop and Barry keeps flying forward) : Barry! (Barry flies back to the window) BARRY: OK, I made a huge mistake. This is a total disaster, all my fault. VANESSA: Yes, it kind of is. BARRY: I've ruined the planet. I wanted to help you : with the flower shop. I've made it worse. VANESSA: Actually, it's completely closed down. BARRY: I thought maybe you were remodeling. : But I have another idea, and it's greater than my previous ideas combined. VANESSA: I don't want to hear it!
BARRY: All right, they have the roses, the roses have the pollen. : I know every bee, plant and flower bud in this park. : All we gotta do is get what they've got back here with what we've got. : - Bees. VANESSA: - Park. BARRY: - Pollen! VANESSA: - Flowers. BARRY: - Re-pollination! VANESSA: - Across the nation! : Tournament of Roses, Pasadena, California. : They've got nothing but flowers, floats and cotton candy. : Security will be tight. BARRY: I have an idea.
(Flash forward in time. Vanessa is about to board a plane which has all the Roses on board. VANESSA: Vanessa Bloome, FTD. (Holds out badge) : Official floral business. It's real. SECURITY GUARD: Sorry, ma'am. Nice brooch. =VANESSA== Thank you. It was a gift. (Barry is revealed to be hiding inside the brooch) (Flash back in time and Barry and Vanessa are discussing their plan) BARRY: Once inside, we just pick the right float. VANESSA: How about The Princess and the Pea? : I could be the princess, and you could be the pea! BARRY: Yes, I got it. : - Where should I sit? GUARD: - What are you? BARRY: - I believe I'm the pea. GUARD: - The pea? VANESSA:
It goes under the mattresses. GUARD: - Not in this fairy tale, sweetheart. - I'm getting the marshal. VANESSA: You do that! This whole parade is a fiasco! : Let's see what this baby'll do. (Vanessa drives the float through traffic) GUARD: Hey, what are you doing?! BARRY== Then all we do is blend in with traffic... : ...without arousing suspicion. : Once at the airport, there's no stopping us. (Flash forward in time and Barry and Vanessa are about to get on a plane) SECURITY GUARD: Stop! Security. : - You and your insect pack your float? VANESSA: - Yes. SECURITY GUARD: Has it been in your possession the entire time? VANESSA: - Yes.
SECURITY GUARD: Would you remove your shoes? (To Barry) - Remove your stinger. BARRY: - It's part of me. SECURITY GUARD: I know. Just having some fun. Enjoy your flight. (Barry plotting with Vanessa) BARRY: Then if we're lucky, we'll have just enough pollen to do the job. (Flash forward in time and Barry and Vanessa are flying on the plane) Can you believe how lucky we are? We have just enough pollen to do the job! VANESSA: I think this is gonna work. BARRY: It's got to work. CAPTAIN SCOTT: (On intercom) Attention, passengers, this is Captain Scott. : We have a bit of bad weather in New York. : It looks like we'll experience a couple hours delay. VANESSA: Barry, these are cut flowers with no water. They'll never make it. BARRY:
I gotta get up there and talk to them. VANESSA== Be careful. (Barry flies right outside the cockpit door) BARRY: Can I get help with the Sky Mall magazine? I'd like to order the talking inflatable nose and ear hair trimmer. (The flight attendant opens the door and walks out and Barry flies into the cockpit unseen) BARRY: Captain, I'm in a real situation. CAPTAIN SCOTT: - What'd you say, Hal? CO-PILOT HAL: - Nothing. (Scott notices Barry and freaks out) CAPTAIN SCOTT: Bee! BARRY: No,no,no, Don't freak out! My entire species... (Captain Scott gets out of his seat and tries to suck Barry into a handheld vacuum) HAL: (To Scott) What are you doing? (Barry lands on Hals hair but Scott sees him. He tries to suck up Barry but instead he sucks up Hals toupee) CAPTAIN SCOTT: Uh-oh. BARRY: - Wait a minute! I'm an attorney!
HAL: (Hal doesn't know Barry is on his head) - Who's an attorney? CAPTAIN SCOTT: Don't move. (Scott hits Hal in the face with the vacuum in an attempt to hit Barry. Hal is knocked out and he falls on the life raft button which launches an infalatable boat into Scott, who gets knocked out and falls to the floor. They are both uncounscious.) BARRY: (To himself) Oh, Barry. BARRY: (On intercom, with a Southern accent) Good afternoon, passengers. This is your captain. : Would a Miss Vanessa Bloome in 24B please report to the cockpit? (Vanessa looks confused) (Normal accent) ...And please hurry! (Vanessa opens the door and sees the life raft and the uncounscious pilots) VANESSA: What happened here? BARRY: I tried to talk to them, but then there was a DustBuster, a toupee, a life raft exploded. : Now one's bald, one's in a boat, and they're both unconscious! VANESSA: ...Is that another bee joke? BARRY:

• No! : No one's flying the plane! BUD DITCHWATER: (Through radio on plane) This is JFK control tower, Flight 356. What's your status? VANESSA: This is Vanessa Bloome. I'm a florist from New York. BUD: Where's the pilot? VANESSA: He's unconscious, and so is the copilot. BUD: Not good. Does anyone onboard have flight experience? BARRY: As a matter of fact, there is. BUD:
• Who's that? BARRY:
• Barry Benson. BUD: From the honey trial?! Oh, great. BARRY: Vanessa, this is nothing more than a big metal bee. : It's got giant wings, huge engines.

VANESSA: I can't fly a plane. BARRY: - Why not? Isn't John Travolta a pilot? VANESSA: - Yes. BARRY: How hard could it be? (Vanessa sits down and flies for a little bit but we see lightning clouds outside the window) VANESSA: Wait, Barry! We're headed into some lightning. (An ominous lightning storm looms in front of the plane) (We are now watching the Bee News) BOB BUMBLE: This is Bob Bumble. We have some late-breaking news from JFK Airport, : where a suspenseful scene is developing. : Barry Benson, fresh from his legal victory... ADAM: That's Barry! BOB BUMBLE: ...is attempting to land a plane, loaded with people, flowers : and an incapacitated flight crew. JANET, MARTIN, UNCLE CAR AND ADAM: Flowers?! (The scene switches to the human news)
REPORTER: (Talking with Bob Bumble) We have a storm in the area and two individuals at the controls : with absolutely no flight experience. BOB BUMBLE: Just a minute. There's a bee on that plane. BUD: I'm quite familiar with Mr. Benson and his no-account compadres. : They've done enough damage. REPORTER: But isn't he your only hope? BUD: Technically, a bee shouldn't be able to fly at all. : Their wings are too small... BARRY: (Through radio) Haven't we heard this a million times? : "The surface area of the wings and body mass make no sense."... BOB BUMBLE: - Get this on the air! BEE: - Got it.
BEE NEWS CREW: - Stand by. BEE NEWS CREW: - We're going live! BARRY: (Through radio on TV) ...The way we work may be a mystery to you. : Making honey takes a lot of bees doing a lot of small jobs. : But let me tell you about a small job. : If you do it well, it makes a big difference. : More than we realized. To us, to everyone. : That's why I want to get bees back to working together. : That's the bee way! We're not made of Jell-O. : We get behind a fellow. : - Black and yellow! BEES: - Hello! (The scene switches and Barry is teaching Vanessa how to fly) BARRY:
Left, right, down, hover. VANESSA: - Hover? BARRY: - Forget hover. VANESSA: This isn't so hard. (Pretending to honk the horn) Beep-beep! Beep-beep! (A Lightning bolt hits the plane and autopilot turns off) Barry, what happened?! BARRY: Wait, I think we were on autopilot the whole time. VANESSA: - That may have been helping me. BARRY: - And now we're not! VANESSA: So it turns out I cannot fly a plane. (The plane plummets but we see Lou Lu Duva and the Pollen Jocks, along with multiple other bees flying towards the plane) Lou Lu DUva: All of you, let's get behind this fellow! Move it out! : Move out! (The scene switches back to Vanessa and Barry in the plane) BARRY: Our only chance is if I do what I'd do, you copy me with the wings of the plane! (Barry sticks out his arms like an airplane and flys in front of Vanessa's face)
VANESSA: Don't have to yell. BARRY: I'm not yelling! We're in a lot of trouble. VANESSA: It's very hard to concentrate with that panicky tone in your voice! BARRY: It's not a tone. I'm panicking! VANESSA: I can't do this! (Barry slaps Vanessa) BARRY: Vanessa, pull yourself together. You have to snap out of it! VANESSA: (Slaps Barry) You snap out of it. BARRY: (Slaps Vanessa) : You snap out of it. VANESSA: - You snap out of it! BARRY: - You snap out of it! (We see that all the Pollen Jocks are flying under the plane) VANESSA: - You snap out of it! BARRY: - You snap out of it!
VANESSA: - You snap out of it! BARRY: - You snap out of it! VANESSA: - Hold it! BARRY: - Why? Come on, it's my turn. VANESSA: How is the plane flying? (The plane is now safely flying) VANESSA: I don't know. (Barry's antennae rings like a phone. Barry picks up) BARRY: Hello? LOU LU DUVA: (Through "phone") Benson, got any flowers for a happy occasion in there? (All of the Pollen Jocks are carrying the plane) BARRY: The Pollen Jocks! : They do get behind a fellow. LOU LU DUVA: - Black and yellow. POLLEN JOCKS: - Hello. LOU LU DUVA: All right, let's drop this tin can
on the blacktop. BARRY: Where? I can't see anything. Can you? VANESSA: No, nothing. It's all cloudy. : Come on. You got to think bee, Barry. BARRY: - Thinking bee. - Thinking bee. (On the runway there are millions of bees laying on their backs) BEES: Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! BARRY: Wait a minute. I think I'm feeling something. VANESSA: - What? BARRY: - I don't know. It's strong, pulling me. : Like a 27-million-year-old instinct. : Bring the nose down. BEES: Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! CONTROL TOWER OPERATOR: - What in the world is on the tarmac? BUD: - Get some lights on that!
(It is revealed that all the bees are organized into a giant pulsating flower formation) BEES: Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! BARRY: - Vanessa, aim for the flower. VANESSA: - OK. BARRY: Out the engines. We're going in on bee power. Ready, boys? LOU LU DUVA: Affirmative! BARRY: Good. Good. Easy, now. That's it. : Land on that flower! : Ready? Full reverse! : Spin it around! (The plane's nose is pointed at a flower painted on a nearby plane) - Not that flower! The other one! VANESSA: - Which one? BARRY: - That flower. (The plane is now pointed at a fat guy in a flowered shirt. He freaks out and tries to take a picture of the plane) VANESSA: - I'm aiming at the flower!
BARRY: That's a fat guy in a flowered shirt. I mean the giant pulsating flower made of millions of bees! (The plane hovers over the bee-flower) : Pull forward. Nose down. Tail up. : Rotate around it. VANESSA: - This is insane, Barry! BARRY: - This's the only way I know how to fly. BUD: Am I koo-koo-kachoo, or is this plane flying in an insect-like pattern? (The plane is unrealistically hovering and spinning over the bee-flower) BARRY: Get your nose in there. Don't be afraid. Smell it. Full reverse! : Just drop it. Be a part of it. : Aim for the center! : Now drop it in! Drop it in, woman! : Come on, already. (The bees scatter and the plane safely lands) VANESSA: Barry, we did it! You taught me how to fly!
BARRY: - Yes! (Vanessa is about to high-five Barry) No high-five! VANESSA: - Right. ADAM: Barry, it worked! Did you see the giant flower? BARRY: What giant flower? Where? Of course I saw the flower! That was genius! ADAM: - Thank you. BARRY: - But we're not done yet. : Listen, everyone! : This runway is covered with the last pollen : from the last flowers available anywhere on Earth. : That means this is our last chance. : We're the only ones who make honey, pollinate flowers and dress like this. : If we're gonna survive as a species, this is our moment! What do you say?
: Are we going to be bees, or just Museum of Natural History keychains? BEES: We're bees! BEE WHO LIKES KEYCHAINS: Keychain! BARRY: Then follow me! Except Keychain. POLLEN JOCK #1: Hold on, Barry. Here. : You've earned this. BARRY: Yeah! : I'm a Pollen Jock! And it's a perfect fit. All I gotta do are the sleeves. (The Pollen Jocks throw Barry a nectar-collecting gun. Barry catches it) Oh, yeah. JANET: That's our Barry. (Barry and the Pollen Jocks get pollen from the flowers on the plane) (Flash forward in time and the Pollen Jocks are flying over NYC) : (Barry pollinates the flowers in Vanessa's shop and then heads to Central Park) BOY IN PARK: Mom! The bees are back! ADAM: (Putting on his Krelman hat) If anybody needs
to make a call, now's the time. : I got a feeling we'll be working late tonight! (The bee honey factories are back up and running) (Meanwhile at Vanessa's shop) VANESSA: (To customer) Here's your change. Have a great afternoon! Can I help who's next? : Would you like some honey with that? It is bee-approved. Don't forget these. (There is a room in the shop where Barry does legal work for other animals. He is currently talking with a Cow) COW: Milk, cream, cheese, it's all me. And I don't see a nickel! : Sometimes I just feel like a piece of meat! BARRY: I had no idea. VANESSA: Barry, I'm sorry. Have you got a moment? BARRY: Would you excuse me? My mosquito associate will help you. MOOSEBLOOD: Sorry I'm late. COW: He's a lawyer too?
MOOSEBLOOD: Ma'am, I was already a blood-sucking parasite. All I needed was a briefcase. VANESSA: Have a great afternoon! : Barry, I just got this huge tulip order, and I can't get them anywhere. BARRY: No problem, Vannie. Just leave it to me. VANESSA: You're a lifesaver, Barry. Can I help who's next? BARRY: All right, scramble, jocks! It's time to fly. VANESSA: Thank you, Barry! (Ken walks by on the sidewalk and sees the "bee-approved honey" in Vanessa's shop) KEN: That bee is living my life!! ANDY: Let it go, Kenny. KEN: - When will this nightmare end?! ANDY: - Let it all go. BARRY: - Beautiful day to fly. POLLEN JOCK:

• Sure is. BARRY: Between you and me, I was dying to get out of that office. (Barry recreates the scene near the beginning of the movie where he flies through the box kite. The movie fades to black and the credits being) [--after credits; No scene can be seen but the characters can be heard talking over the credits--] You have got to start thinking bee, my friend! :
• Thinking bee!
• Me? BARRY: (Talking over singer) Hold it. Let's just stop for a second. Hold it. : I'm sorry. I'm sorry, everyone. Can we stop here? SINGER: Oh, BarryBARRY: I'm not making a major life decision during a production number! SINGER: All right. Take ten, everybody. Wrap it up, guys. BARRY: I had virtually no rehearsal for that.

Imagine a world staggering beneath the weight of over eight billion souls, most leaving behind a unique scar of cruelty and neglect. It's a burden too heavy for our Earth to bear. And I, a mere blip, found myself on the precipice of non-existence. A Tuesday etched into memory, the second-to-last day of school, and the prelude to my abrupt end. I offer you, reader, not just a recounting of my last week and the only proof of my existence, but also a stark warning.
At fifteen, I was awkwardly wading through the stormy seas of adolescence, complete with the scourge of hormonal surges and the unfortunate sprinkling of acne dotting my face. My world was wonderfully wrapped up in a corner of our high school cafeteria, a realm presided over by Emila. The dazzling subject of my dreams, she held me under her spell with her enchanting beauty. Her hair, a river of glistening platinum, formed a comforting canopy around me, filling my senses with a tantalizing mix of coconut-scented shampoo and the memorable reminder of our gym sessions.
“Alex. ALEX!”
My Emila-infused daydream was interrupted by Elijah, my only friend in a table full of acquaintances.
“Did you see the TikTok I sent?”
He asked, a twinkle of devilish delight dancing in his eyes. I fumbled for my phone, eager for a dose of Elijah’s promised comedy, only to find the video was no longer available with unsurprising speed.
“Man, it was comedy gold! Imagine Thanos, asscheeks and all, telling the most offensive shit. Legendary stuff”
Elijah chuckled heartily, his laughter echoing around the room.
“Sure sounds like it”
I muttered, my gaze returning to Emila. Her attention was stolen by my older brother, the infamous Mikey, whose joke had her laughing. Mikey, a final year student with a solid record of academic underachievement and a proclivity for marijuana, was a walking, talking, stoner stereotype. What was unsettling was his inexplicable charm with the wide-eyed freshman girls, a twisted hobby that gave him an unusual sense of satisfaction.
As the bell shrilled, signaling the end of the school day, Mikey abruptly stood up, the metal chair beneath him screeching. His next words, a slurred mix of slangs and contemporary cuss words, were aimed at summoning his freshman fan club. At the same time, he requested for Emila to join their quest for illicit pleasures. Emila's reaction was a fusion of disgust and amusement, an expression I decided to commit to memory for my poetry. She gracefully declined his offer with a well-rehearsed flip of her hair and a disdainful wave of her hand, then she returned to her conversation, laughter pealing from her like sweet music, completely oblivious to my heart hammering in my chest.
Around me, chaos broke loose as the cafeteria, now released from the clutches of academic torture, transitioned into a war zone of wild whoops, boisterous laughter. The last sight that graced my eyes as I exited the cafeteria was the bewildered expression on the face of our school janitor, as he stood paralyzed amidst the storm, mop in hand It was a fittingly ludicrous end to another thrillingly mundane school day. With that, I picked up my bag, donned my headphones, and began my solitary trek home.
The burden of unrequited love weighed heavily upon my weary shoulders as I trudged homeward. In dire need of a hit, I fumbled for my go-to vape, only to be met with the light show of a dead battery. As I hit the 7-Eleven on my route, I was looking forward to seeing Antonio, this dude who seemed more interested in cracking jokes than caring about checking IDs. But instead of Antonio's playful smirk, I came face-to-face with a new character, with wrinkles that told stories of time gone by. A wave of disappointment washed over me as I nabbed a bottle of Dr. Pepper and headed for the cash register.
"What happened to Antonio?"
I asked, putting my drink on the counter for the mystery guy.
"Who?"
He muttered, his focus on the soda can he was sliding under the scanner.
"Antonio, the guy who's usually here in the evenings"
I explained, a hint of irritation in my voice.
"Dunno. I only started here last week. I just know the young girl who takes over when my shift ends"
He responded, his words leaving a gap in my world, like a punch in the gut of my usual routine.
Taking a bubbly swig of my Dr. Pepper, I tried to swallow the truth of teenage life. It was like walking into my favorite cozy room, only to find the furniture rearranged haphazardly. The change was unexpected, and unwelcome.
Finally trekking my way home after sitting on a bench listening to music for what Must've been hours. I walked under a sky that seemed to be experimenting with shades of orange and purple, I felt a strange kind of solitude sneaking in. My thoughts kept playing a merry-go-round with Mikey, Emila, and now absent Antonio - the trio that had become the stars of my high school drama.
My front door protested loudly under my foot's frustrated kick, and a slurred
"WHAT THE FUCK!"
Bellowed from the living room. My mother, ensnared in an alcoholic haze, lounged over the couch, her shaking finger accusingly pointed in my direction.
"Did you forget that I get migraines?"
The smell of tequila permeated the air, filling my nostrils as soon as I crossed the threshold. I sighed, hoping for a lifeline.
"Is dad home?"
My mother sank back onto the couch, her voice a whisper
"No."
My father, the only one who occasionally lent an ear when I complained about Mikey, was perpetually chained to his cubicle, another cog in the corporate machine.
I ascended the stairs, each creaking step a harmony to the melancholic rhythm of the dark. The silent house held the weight of my unease, my chest tightening with an indescribable yearning. Tucked away in the solitude of my room, I pulled out my phone, the screen's glow illuminating my apprehensive features. I typed out a tentative message to Emilia, a small confession of the feelings that had long been gnawing at my insides.
"Hey, Emilia, I..."
First message sent. But before I could finish my second text, the dreaded words - 'Message Failed to Send' stared back at me. My heart sank. Was it a sign? Maybe the universe was intervening, telling me it wasn't the right time, or perhaps, it never would be. Disheartened, I slung my phone aside, letting the unsent feelings hover in the digital void. Slipping under the comforting shroud of my blanket, I drifted off into a sleep, with dreams tinted in hues of Emilia and unspoken words.
The next morning started out ordinary until it was splattered with the color of angst when I pleaded with Mikey that morning to stay away from Emila. His response?
"Amelia, the freshman? Didn't know you had a thing for her."
His nonchalance was maddening.
"Emila. As your brother, I'm asking you to back off"
I clarified, hoping it would penetrate his stubborn exterior.
His perplexed expression turned into a nonchalant shrug.
"Damn, been saying her name wrong the few times we spoke, and she never bothered to correct me."
Mikey shrugged and walked away, leaving me feeling dismissed and unheard.
Feeling a mix of frustration and confusion, I left for school and shook off the encounter with my brother and headed to my first-period class. As I stepped into the room, I expected to see my usual teacher, Ms. Thompson, waiting at her desk. However, to my surprise, it was someone else entirely—a teacher I had never seen before. I had really liked Ms. Thompson too so to see she got a substitute on the last day was dissapointing. Yet his resemblance to Ms. Thompson was uncanny, from the way he held himself to the tone of his voice. I knew something was off.
I glanced around the classroom, taking in the unfamiliar arrangement of notes and papers hanging on the walls. The subjects and diagrams were foreign to me, not matching the usual decor that adorned this space. It was as if I had entered an alternate dimension, where everything seemed the same yet completely different.
As the class went on, the new teacher droned on with the same monotony I had grown accustomed to, but it felt hollow, lacking the genuine concern and passion that Ms. Thompson always displayed. The other students seemed oblivious to the change, talking and cutting up as if nothing was amiss. But I couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right.
Throughout the rest of class, my mind wandered, retracing the events of the past few days. Antonios unexpected absence, the failed text to Emila, Mikey's nonchalant reaction to my warning about Emila, the strange teacher in place of Ms. Thompson—it all felt like pieces of a puzzle that didn't quite fit together. For the first time, I realized how little attention I had paid to the details of my daily routine. But now, with this subtle shift in my surroundings, I couldn't help but question everything.
As the class finally came to an end, I gathered my things and made my way out.
The unfolding of the remaining classes before lunch did nothing to alleviate the paranoia that was steadily creeping over me. In my second-period class, usually dedicated to cleaning out the science lab, I noticed a set of instruments that we'd never used before. My peers didn't bat an eyelid, but to me, the incongruity was unsettling. Then in English, our final class reading didn't correspond to the assigned book. The text seemed different, as though it had been subtly altered.
Physical education, typically a free play session on the last day, was different too. Coach Peters was blowing a whistle I'd never seen before, its pitch more grating than the usual. And just before lunch, during the end-of-year assembly, the principal's speech, usually so predictable, seemed off. It contained references to events and achievements that didn't match my memories.
As lunchtime arrived, a mix of anticipation and anxiety filled the air. Even with my world falling apart I found time to worry about Mikey's presence around Emila. However, Emila was nowhere to be found. When I mentioned this to the group as I took my seat, my words were met with silence, as if I had become invisible.
Sitting alone at the edge of the table, I sought solace in our group pictures, hoping to catch a glimpse of Emila. I opened Snapchat and scrolled through my camera roll until I found my favorite picture of her. But to my surprise, Emila was inexplicably absent from the image. I blinked in disbelief, rubbed my eyes, and questioned my own perception. How could she have vanished? In the photo, my arm had once embraced her, but now it hung empty at my side.
"Guys, where's Emila?"
I asked, passing my phone to Elijah. He stared at the screen for a long moment, as if emerging from a trance.
"Who?"
He finally responded absentmindedly, his attention quickly diverted by a video shared by another friend.
Taking back my phone, I desperately searched for more pictures, only to find that they had vanished—her Instagram, Snapchat, even her parents' Facebook profiles. Panic gripped me, and I screamed
"WHERE IS EMILA!?"
My voice resonating through the cafeteria, reverberating off the walls. The entire room fell into an eerie silence, and all eyes turned to me, their gazes fixed with a mix of curiosity and concern.
"Her social media is gone. I feel like I'm going insane, and none of you even acknowledge me!"
My voice cracked with desperation as I pleaded for answers.
Mikey and Elijah rose from their seats, their expressions filled with compassion, ready to console me. But I couldn't bear their pity, their feeble attempts to calm my tormented mind. Their words would be meaningless. With a surge of frantic energy, I pushed my chair back and fled the suffocating atmosphere of the cafeteria.
As I stumbled out of the school, my surroundings blurred in a whirlwind of confusion and distress. The world itself seemed to warp and twist, mocking my feeble attempts to comprehend the inexplicable. Thoughts tumbled through my mind, colliding and fragmenting like shattered glass. Where had Emila gone? How could she vanish so completely, leaving no trace behind? Was I losing my grip on reality?
A light drizzle began peppering the surroundings, setting a somber atmosphere. Hours slipped away as I aimlessly wandered, searching for answers. Maybe someone had slipped me acid-laced food, or perhaps I was crazy like my mother. The thought of my brother's affinity for drugs crossed my mind, but I had never dabbled. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to find a sense of respite in my vape once again.
Entering the 7-Eleven, a chilling sensation overcame me as I discovered the same elderly man behind the counter. Without uttering a word, I hopped over the counter, desperate to find any clue.
"Kid, you can't be back there!"
The man exclaimed, attempting to restrain me. Swiftly, I pushed him away, unearthing the work schedule from the wall.
"Where's Antonio?" I stammered.
The old man, seemed to recognize me.
"I asked about that. Antonio doesn't work here"
He said, struggling to regain his footing. Overwhelmed with a sense of paranoia, I bolted out of the gas station, gasping for breath only when I reached the safety of my home.
In the dim light of the early evening, I found myself sprawled on the unkempt grass of the front yard. The recent rain had left the ground sodden, but I barely noticed the wetness seeping into my clothes. As the rain mingled with my silent tears, I heard the familiar rumble of my older brother Mikey's truck pulling into the driveway.
"Hey pussy"
He exclaimed, pushing his rain-soaked hair back from his forehead. His voice carried a light-hearted jest that felt foreign amidst the somber atmosphere. He was always like this, quick to crack a joke even in the gloomiest of moments. It was his way of diffusing tension, I suppose. He reached out, pulling me up and leading me towards the house. Once inside and in his room, an aroma filled my nose – a peculiar mix of stale pizza and mildewy old books – that somehow comforted me in a strange, indescribable way. It was an olfactory reminder of a time before things got so complicated.
Catching my eye, Mikey reached into his drawer and withdrew an intricately designed glass bong. I had seen it before, on one of those rare occasions when Mikey would let me into his private world. Now, he was extending the invitation again. He passed me the bong, a knowing smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
I hesitated for a moment, my mind flashing back to times when mom would sit us down in front of the TV after school, her kind and comforting presence a strong reassurance of love and security. That was before the alcohol took over, before the comforting light in her eyes had been replaced by a glassy, distant look. The thought of her brought an odd sense of calmness, as if her spirit was there with me, in Mikey, guiding me through this haze.
Taking the bong from Mikey, I let out a nervous chuckle, matching his playful demeanor. As I took a hit, we fell into a comfortable laughter, punctuated only by the deafening theme song of Family Guy playing on the large TV in the corner of his room. The memory of our shared laughter resonated deeply within me, a balm to the churning unrest I had been feeling.
"It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and -"
Suddenly, the television vanished, replaced by a weathered dresser that had been stored in the attic.
Mikey's phone suddenly blared a familiar jingle.
"Ah, man. One sec, bro,"
"-sex on TV." My brother's phone blared at maximum volume.
"Sorry, bro, my friend texted me"
He explained, placing the phone between us.
"Where's the TV?"
I muttered, the words hardly audible. As the high intensified, the room started to spin, the comfort of Mickey's presence fading away. I reached out in a futile attempt to steady myself but fell onto the cold, hardwood floor. The room seemed to swirl around me, familiar objects distorting into unrecognizable shapes and colors.
Pulling myself up, I lurched out of the room, navigating the labyrinthine house as fragments of memories flooded my mind. It felt like I was walking through a dream – a vivid, disorienting journey through time and space. Stepping outside, I saw the lawn had morphed into a neatly trimmed landscape, A new 'For Sale' sign swaying gently in the evening breeze, dissolved away as quickly as I noticed it.
The sounds of laughter drew my attention to the house. The windows were aglow with warm, inviting light, revealing an unfamiliar family engrossed in their game night. Their joy was a stark contrast to my growing desolation.
As days rolled on, my world reshaped, transforming from the familiar to an enigmatic panorama. Faces blurred, places mutated, my identity itself seemed to wane, fading into oblivion.
Caught in this mutating reality, I felt a quiet observer, my existence phasing out into the ether. Friends, family, Emila - all were doomed to be memories of a boy who will soon be gone.
Then, amidst the dissolving haze, clarity dawned, presenting a profound revelation. Our Earth was yearning for equilibrium, burdened with the weight of 8 billion souls, a possibly infinite and cruel humanity, now quickly seeking balance before it was too late.
We had pushed our home to her brink. Now, a beautiful transformation is underway. Smiling strangers began to color my world, their joy reflecting the Earth's newfound harmony. Merchandise, once an extravagant luxury, now seemed accessible to all. The battlefield in Ukraine had given way to peace, a testament to the world healing its wounds.
As I type this out in a clean and rather nicely lit alleyway. I find myself blending into the cosmic expanse, my hands and arms fading away before returning as if the universe wants me to finish. As I turn from a solid entity into an echo of existence. The world moves on, its stride unperturbed by my fading presence. Yet, in my diminishing, I realize my contribution to Earth's balance.
Earth is in the midst of achieving perfection. Many of you won't make it and will be gutted like myself, some of you will stay. The rest of you, I catch glimpses of as I fade, timeliness unaffected and left to die without God.
My final thoughts are not of sorrow, but of serene acceptance and profound understanding. As I phase into the ether, I became a cosmic whisper, a gentle reminder of the necessity for balance and respect for our fragile planet.

$EPAZ Bounce Play Watchlist (EPAZ, GAXY, AABB, HMBL)
06/08/2023 03:28am EDT
In the fast-paced world of stock trading and investment, savvy market participants are constantly scanning the horizon for lucrative opportunities hidden within market fluctuations. These periods of volatility can present a unique window for astute investors to capitalize on potential bargains.
​
For this article, let's turn our attention to a selection of four penny stocks that have recently encountered a temporary downturn. However, beneath the surface lies an intriguing narrative of resilience and potential resurgence, capturing the attention of shrewd investors seeking hidden gems in the market.
​
EPAZZ INC. (OTC: EPAZ)
The first company with the potential for a bounce play is Epazz, Inc. (OTC:EPAZ). EPAZ is a mission-critical provider of drone technology, blockchain mobile apps, and cloud-based business software solutions.
​
Throughout this spring, EPAZ and their spinoff company, ZenaDrone, have been making significant strides with their flagship product, the ZenaDrone 1000. This advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has garnered substantial interest from various sectors, positioning Epazz as a rising stock in the industry.
​
In March 2023, ZenaDrone, Inc., received a letter of support from the U.S. Air Force, solidifying the drone's potential for drone cargo delivery, including critical blood transport. The U.S. Air Force invited ZenaDrone to conduct tests at an overseas base under battlefield conditions, showcasing the drone's capabilities in a military environment. This milestone not only attracted attention from the U.S. Air Force but also caught the interest of the U.S. Army.
​
The successful presentation of the ZenaDrone 1000 at the AERO General Aviation Convention in Friedrichshafen, Germany, in April further bolstered its reputation. This exposure resulted in multiple scheduled demonstrations with NATO partner countries, law enforcement departments, and a prominent German rail line. In addition, ZenaDrone's engagement with German UAV regulators for beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations also demonstrates the company's commitment to staying ahead of industry standards and expanding its market reach.
​
In another update, EPAZ announced a meeting with Ossian Smyth, minister of state at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform of Ireland, at ZenaDrone's offices in Dublin. ZenaDrone is currently in negotiations with a financing institution for a deal to purchase up to 100 ZenaDrone 1000s, paving the way for drone-as-a-service operations in Ireland, which could prove to be a lucrative opportunity for the company.
​
Something that could help with a rebound is that EPAZ is not only focused on the drone technology itself but also on key supporting components. The company has been actively filing patents for its artificial intelligence (AI)-based drone technology, with two patents already granted and two others under review with the US Patent Office.
​
In line with their commitment to innovative technologies, EPAZ recently formed Galaxy Batteries Inc., a subsidiary dedicated to housing their battery technology intellectual property. The company's high-powered battery solutions are essential for running specialized devices and aircraft. EPAZ is evaluating opportunities to monetize these technologies and provide additional value to the company.
​
Epazz's strategic updates this spring, including securing military interest, expanding international partnerships, and advancing patent filings, could make them a compelling investment prospect.
​
As EPAZ continues to develop and commercialize cutting-edge drone technology and battery solutions, investors may want to keep an eye on Epazz, Inc. (OTC: EPAZ) for potential opportunities within the ever-growing drone industry.
​
GALAXY NEXT GENERATION (OTC: GAXY)
​
GAXY is a leading provider of interactive learning technology solutions and school communication platforms. With over 22 resellers across the United States, the company serves the commercial and educational markets. The K-12 education segment accounts for nearly 90% of Galaxy's sales.
​
Latest Contract Win on June 6: Galaxy recently secured a significant contract worth a minimum of $200,000 from a prominent school district in Northeast Ohio. The contract involves supplying G2 Bell, Paging, Intercom, and Clock (BPIC) hardware, along with G2 Communicator software, to five schools within the district. Implementation is expected to take place over the next few weeks, marking a promising growth opportunity for Galaxy.
​
Q3 FY 2023 Earnings Highlights from June 1: In its recent earnings report for Q3 FY 2023, Galaxy showcased progress. Revenues climbed quarter over quarter, rising from approximately $430,000 in the three months ending December 2022 to around $657,000 in the three months ending March 2023. Notably, G&A expenses decreased from roughly $1.5 million to approximately $670,000, resulting in a significant improvement in net loss.
​
Strategic Partnerships Fuel Growth: Galaxy's recent partnerships with major audiovisual (AV) dealers have been instrumental in driving sales growth. With a pipeline exceeding $5 million and several upcoming opportunities, Galaxy is capitalizing on their expanded product portfolio. The company expects this shift towards higher-margin products to substantially improve profit margins and contribute to the company's performance.
​
ASIA BROADBAND INC. (OTC: AABB)
​
AABB is a resource company focused on producing and selling precious and base metals primarily in Asian markets. AABB is focused on providing an efficient metal supply from Mexico to Asian clients.
​
In addition, AABB has also ventured into digital assets, introducing AABBG, a gold-backed cryptocurrency, and proprietary platforms such as AABBExchange and PayAABB.com.
​
Yesterday, AABB provided an update on its operations. The company successfully verified shipments of processing equipment for its new facility in Mexico, which is set to enhance processing throughput while minimizing production costs. With an exclusive agreement to purchase a significant gold and silver ore stockpile worth over $800 million, AABB demonstrates its commitment to strategic expansion and increasing physical gold holdings.
​
The initial processing capacity of 200 tons per day, expected to generate over $11 million in annual revenue, is just the beginning, as AABB plans to expand the capacity fivefold to 1,000 tpd once the initial level is consistently at full capacity.
​
This state-of-the-art plant, equipped with advanced mining equipment automation, aims to maximize metal extraction while minimizing production costs.
​
AABB's strategic acquisition of the large-scale gold and silver ore stockpile in Las Jimenez, Etzatlan, Jalisco, Mexico, presents a potential high-yield asset addition. The new processing facility, located in close proximity to the ore stockpile and the AABB Buenavista mining warehouse, is expected to bolster revenue generation and pave the way for further expansion.
​
Overall, Asia Broadband Inc.'s recent progress, including the verification of equipment shipments, exclusive purchase rights to a substantial gold and silver ore stockpile, and the development of an advanced processing facility, could indicate a positive trajectory for the company.
​
HUMBL, INC. (OTCQB: HMBL)
​
At the end of May, HMBL took significant steps to strengthen its position and drive shareholder value. The company announced an extension of the conversion limitations on its Series B preferred stock, signaling its commitment to reducing dilution and securing investor interests.
​
Under the revised terms, Series B holders are restricted from converting any shares between June 2023 and September 2023. From October 2023 to June 2024, conversions will be limited to 500 shares per month, and from July 2024 to December 2024, the limit will increase to 1,000 shares per month. These measures aim to streamline the company's restructuring plan, which includes consolidating and retiring existing debt.
​
Additionally, HUMBL announced it has entered into a marketing partnership with the Swish Foundation, a renowned 501(c)3 organization, and the Swish Pro-Am Summer League. As part of this collaboration, the HUMBL logo will be prominently displayed on jerseys and courts during Swish Pro-Am games. The partnership extends to merchandise, which will be verified and commemorated on the BLOCKS Registry for enhanced tracking and verification.
​
This strategic alliance not only opens avenues for increased brand exposure but also presents opportunities for fan engagement. Swish Pro-Am athletes and teams will connect with fans through verified profiles on HUMBL's social media platform, catering to a global audience across 130+ countries. HUMBL will further leverage its digital wallet, search engine, and verified social media to activate sponsorships and offer authenticated, signed merchandise from the league during the 2023 Pro-Am Summer season.
​
The Swish Pro-Am Competition, set to begin on June 22, 2023, at Lincoln High School Gym in San Diego, promises an exciting showcase of talent and entertainment. HUMBL CEO Brian Foote expressed enthusiasm about the partnership, recognizing the growth potential and enhanced fan experiences this collaboration brings.
​
With these recent developments, HUMBL demonstrates its commitment to driving shareholder value and expanding its presence in the sports and digital content spaces. The company's efforts to reduce dilution and establish strategic partnerships contribute to its potential for a significant bounce in investor interest.
​
Disclaimers:CapitalGainsReport (CGR) is not operated by a licensed broker, a dealer, or a registered investment adviser. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investment advice. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides investors a safe harbor in regard to forward-looking statements. Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, goals, assumptions, or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact may be forward looking statements. Forward looking statements are based on expectations, estimates, and projections at the time the statements are made that involve a number of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those presently anticipated. Forward looking statements in this action may be identified through use of words such as projects, foresee, expects, will, anticipates, estimates, believes, understands, or that by statements indicating certain actions & quote; may, could, or might occur. Understand there is no guarantee past performance will be indicative of future results. Investing in micro-cap and growth securities is highly speculative and carries an extremely high degree of risk. It is possible that an investors investment may be lost or impaired due to the speculative nature of the companies profiled. CapitalGainsReport (CGR) is owned by RazorPitch Inc. and has been retained by Epazz Inc. to assist in the production and distribution of content. 'CGR' is responsible for the production and distribution of this content. It should be expressly understood that under no circumstances does any information published herein represent a recommendation to buy or sell a security. This content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained in this article constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by CapitalGainsReport/RazorPitch or any third party service provider to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments. All content in this article is information of a general nature and does not address the circumstances of any particular individual or entity. Nothing in this article constitutes professional and/or financial advice, nor does any information in the article constitute a comprehensive or complete statement of the matters discussed or the law relating thereto. CGRazorPitch is not a fiduciary by virtue of any persons use of or access to this content.
​
CONTACT: CapitalGainsReport
​
Mark McKelvie
​
Editor
​
[[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
​
585-301-7700
​
.
​
(C) 2023 M2 COMMUNICATIONS, source M2 PressWIRE

>>> Second part of the post
Avetrana is a small rural town – in beautiful Apulia, overlooking the gulf of Taranto – that comes alive especially during the summer season due to the influx of tourists looking for low-priced accommodation compared to the trendier resorts in the region. In the early 1980s, Avetrana was the site of demonstrations by the anti-nuclear movement in opposition to the desire of the national government to plant a nuclear power plant in the territory, though nowadays if you ask an Italian what is the first thing that comes to their mind when you say “Avetrana”, sadly they will almost certainly think of Sarah Scazzi.
Sarah’s case also arguably represents one of the latest examples of the “dark tourism” that has led hundreds of people to travel to the places where the most heinous crimes in recent Italian history – from the murder of Samuele Lorenzi to that of Meredith Kercher and Chiara Poggi – were committed. In the initial months following Sarah’s disappearance, the media has shone a spotlight on the small town from which Sarah disappeared and on its sometimes strange inhabitants. TV stations “dramatized” the whole affair and turned it almost into a soap opera for their loyal viewers. The lowest point in this story was finally reached when, on October 6, 2010, a reporter broke the news of Sarah’s body’s discovery to her mother on live television. This is how journalist Stefano Nazzi describes what happened in Avetrana in the days following Sarah’s disappearance:

From the end of August 2010 and for many months it became one of the most famous places in Italy. A place where an ugly crime had happened turned into a TV set where all rules were skipped, where reporters competed to grab exclusive interviews with those who perhaps had nothing to say.

It should be noted that – despite the fact that the criminal cases mentioned here have occupied the front pages of newspapers and news programs for a long time – it has become much more difficult in recent years for similar events to be treated so obsessively and morbidly by the mass media. Of course, TV programs that unabashedly eviscerate every aspect of a said murder still exist, but traditional news channels now seem to adhere to more careful guidelines on how to treat crime cases.

The disappearance

On the afternoon of August 26, 2010, at the Carabinieri Station Headquarters in Avetrana, 15-year-old Sarah Scazzi was reported missing, having left home – as her mother Concetta Serrano Spagnolo declared – in the early afternoon to go to the house of her cousin Sabrina Misseri, with whom she was supposed to take a trip to the beach. Sarah had on a pink T-shirt, pink shorts, and flip-flops, carried a black fabric backpack with writing on it, as well as the inseparable cell phone, recently received as a gift from her older brother and which she always held in her hand.
Who was the 15-year-old and what can be said more precisely about the hours surrounding her disappearance? Sarah reportedly had a strong character, was a bit lazy, liked Avril Lavigne and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She suffered from being away from her father and especially her brother, to whom she was very close (the two men were working in Milan at the time of the incident). She probably resented her mother’s strictness and saw her cousin Sabrina’s family as a safe haven, to the point of asking to be “adopted” by her aunt Cosima Serrano and her uncle Michele Misseri (at least this is what Cosima and Sabrina will say later).
Concerning what happened in the hours around Sarah’s disappearance, her mother Concetta reported that Sarah had left the house around 9 am; she had returned briefly during the course of the morning to get some money needed to buy some cream on behalf of her cousin Sabrina, and then she had gone home to go, almost immediately, in the company of her father to do the groceries around 12:30 pm; the two had returned home shortly before 1 pm. What happened next is a point of contention, but the most likely conclusion is that Sarah left her house to go to the Misseris between 1:55 pm and 2:00 pm – as indicated by Sarah’s housekeeper Maria Ecaterina Pantir – lying to her mother by saying that she had received Sabrina’s message telling her to go to her house.
Then, at 2:23 pm, Sabrina received a text message from her friend Mariangela Spagnoletti (“[give me] the time to put on the costume and I’m coming”) and immediately afterward notified her cousin (2:25:08 text message from Sabrina to Sarah “put on the costume fast and come”). Sarah, who had no cell phone credit, answered with a ring at 2:28:46 – this is her last alleged communication.
In an email sent to the editor of a local magazine in late August and made public in early September, psychic Rosemary Laboragine wrote:

I see a house but also a kind of garage. I don’t know, unfortunately I have a feeling of death. I feel her buried in the nearby countryside. I see wood and water.

The investigation

The search for Sarah begins a few days late by virtue of the fact that her disappearance was initially thought to be a voluntary departure. Sabrina suggests investigating Sarah’s father’s hometown and his unsavory acquaintances there. A man from Lecce who had sent a message to Sabrina pretending to be Sarah is heard by the Carabinieri. It also turns out that the 15-year-old had three Facebook profiles and had recently communicated with a married man, but this trail leads nowhere. On September 7, 2010, Carabinieri from the Taranto Investigative Unit handed prosecutors a report in which they requested (and obtained) an urgent wiretap of Claudio’s cell phone, since it was “suspicious that the young man did not feel the need to return to Apulia to inquire directly about his sister’s fate”.
An initial breakthrough in the investigation came with the discovery of the victim’s cell phone by Michele Misseri on September 29, 2010, the day after he was interrogated by the investigators in this case. Misseri recounted that he had gone, with the intent of retrieving a lost screwdriver, to a plot of land where, the previous day, he had done some cleanup work with a friend. There, in a burned pile of olive leaves, he had found the cell phone.
On October 4, 2010, at 4:20 pm, Michele Misseri was served an invitation to appear in the afternoon of October 6 at the Taranto Carabinieri Provincial Command. On the same evening, at 9:58 pm, a phone call between Sabrina Misseri and her ex-boyfriend Andrea Merico was intercepted, in which Sabrina was concerned about the fingerprints left by her father and herself on Sarah’s phone, admitting that she had touched the device on the very day of Sarah’s disappearance.
On October 5, a soliloquy of Michele Misseri in his car was recorded at 5:59 am. Misseri closed the door but did not start the engine and, after standing still and in silence for about a minute, spoke to himself, uttering the following words: “I feel sorry for my family... if they go... I will find them out [sic]”.
On October 6, Michele, his wife Cosima and their daughter Valentina went together to Taranto for their interrogations. At 7:59 am, a conversation was recorded in their car: Cosima advised her husband not to be specific about the times when, on the morning the cell phone was found, he had left home. At 15:46 am, Giuseppe Serrano, colleague and brother-in-law of Michele, tells the investigators that, on August 26, the latter arrived at work “way behind schedule”, 45 minutes later than when he was supposed to be there. Finally, in the evening, after 9 hours of interrogation,

As the search for the little girl continued unabated, Michele Antonio Misseri confessed to having killed his niece, strangling her, and to having suppressed her corpse; he, reserving the right to clarify at a later date the reasons and modalities of that insane act, led investigators to a well located in contrada Mosca in the countryside of Avetrana and allowed the discovery, following laborious digging operations that lasted all night, of Scazzi’s lifeless body and some of her personal belongings. Misseri’s confession was recorded in the presence of his defense counsel.

Misseri confessed that, the day Sarah disappeared, he was working in the garage to fix the tractor that wouldn’t start. At 2:25 pm, Sarah had suddenly arrived and, coming down to the garage, had told him “Uncle...” without adding anything else. The moment the little girl had then turned again to leave, Misseri had taken a piece of rope and twisted it around her neck twice, tightening about five to six minutes, even after Sarah had fallen to the ground. Misseri claimed that he had been seized by an “inexplicable rapture”, by a burst of nerves caused by the tractor not starting, but that it was not at all his intention to rape his niece, toward whom he had no sexual attraction.
The following day, during the hearing for the confirmation of the provisional arrest, Misseri changed drastically his account. To the judge’s and prosecutor’s questions about the possible sexual nature of the cause of his attack, he answered enigmatically: “It may be as well”. He confided that he had sexually assaulted Sarah on August 26, that she had reacted and he had had to kill her.
On October 15, 2010, Misseri was heard again and that consisted of a turning point in the case. In the morning interrogation, he confirmed the self-accusatory version already set forth in the two previous ones, but enriched it with details: he claimed that Sabrina had looked out onto the garage ramp immediately after her cousin’s killing, while Sarah’s body lay covered by a piece of cardboard; to the prosecutor’s objection that, in that case, Sabrina could not have failed to notice at the very least Sarah’s beach slippers, which had been left out of that hastily organized cover, Misseri further modified his account, asserting that Sabrina had arrived at the garage entrance to warn her father that she was going to the beach, and she had noticed Sarah’s body covered by the cardboard. Sabrina had exclaimed: “Daddy, what have you done?” and had burst into tears.
The “glaring inconsistencies” inherent in this version led prosecutors to suspend the interrogation at 11:35 am. Three hours later, at 2:26 pm, a new interrogation began:

Misseri claimed that Sabrina had forcibly dragged Sarah into the garage, where he was already standing, in order to verify, in a three-way confrontation, whether it was true that he had molested Sarah, as she had reported to her cousin. Upon Scazzi’s confirmation, Sabrina Misseri had pinned her down, encircling her around the waist with her arms and demanding that she tell the truth in front of her father; the latter, at that point, becoming impatient, had strangled his niece with a rope he was holding, twisting it around her neck, while his daughter held her cousin down.

Sabrina’s detention and Michele’s accusatory statements against her

On October 18, 2010, Sabrina Misseri was questioned by the preliminary hearing judge, denying any involvement in the killing of her cousin. Four days later, a conversation that took place in prison between Michele Misseri and his daughter Valentina was intercepted and filmed. After an initial moment of emotion upon seeing his daughter again, who immediately reminded him of Sabrina’s status, detained because of his accusatory statements (“Daddy, but look I love you anyway, you know? Sabrina loves you too, of course she can’t come now, she knows you’re here, right?”), Michele, shaking his hands, told her in dialect: “The fact... Which Sabrina is hiding… [I wish] she would talk about it”.
On November 3, criminologist Roberta Bruzzone was appointed as a consultant to Michele through his defense lawyer Daniele Galoppa. Two days later, in jail, Misseri had a conversation with Galoppa and Bruzzone; he began to cry and, quite unexpectedly – after he had until then described the incident by reverting to the initial exclusively self-accusatory version – declared that he was not the one who killed Sarah, but his daughter Sabrina. For that reason, with the consent of Misseri himself, a request was made by his defense attorney for investigators to come in for questioning.
At 3:32 pm, before prosecutors, Misseri articulated a version in which he declared himself to be completely uninvolved in the murderous action, which he attributed to Sabrina. Misseri declared that after he had finished eating, at about 1 pm, he had been called by his daughter who had told him, “Daddy, come to the garage ‘cause something happened”. He had then gone there and found Sarah on the floor, with her arms towards the door and with a rope (a meter long, not too tight and with many knots) twisted around her neck; Sabrina had said that her cousin had fallen while they were playing. “[Sabrina] says they were playing in the garage… she says she slipped and fell [...] however, in my opinion, to show that it was suicide she put the rope around her neck…”
Prosecutors deemed this story illogical because of the weapon used, the dynamics of the murder, and the justification given by Sabrina, so they stopped the questioning at 4:10 pm, at the request of the defense counsel, and resumed at 5:04 pm (after Misseri had conferred with attorney Galoppa and consultant Bruzzone). At this point,

Misseri mutated his account by reporting that the murder weapon was a “belt”, not a rope, and claimed that he had been awakened, while he was asleep in the deck chair, by his daughter Sabrina who, in a state of agitation, had said to him: “Dad, come here for a moment ‘cause something has happened”; following his daughter, he had run into the garage and had seen Sarah lying on the floor upright on the right side of the slide, with her head down facing the entrance; he had then exclaimed “But what is it that you have done?” and his daughter had told him “Yeah, anyway she was bothering me as well”. Misseri later specified that to the question “What happened?”, his daughter had said “I was playing with Sarah… she slipped, she fell”, and to his further question “And the belt around her neck, why does she have it?”, Sabrina had replied, “She was bothering me anyway”.

November 19, 2010 was the day of the special evidence pre-trial hearing (whose function is to “anticipate the acquisition and formation of evidence during the preliminary investigation”). These are the salient points:

• Michele essentially reaffirmed the heteroaccusatory version against Sabrina, but also reintroduced the theme of the “game” that allegedly led to Sarah's death;
• he admitted he had confessed the truth (i.e. Sabrina’s responsability in the murder) to a priest two days after he was arrested, and that happened significantly earlier than his first version mentioning Sabrina;
• he specified that he had never asked Sabrina why she had killed Sarah being able only to speculate that the reason was jealousy for Ivano, since he had heard from others that she liked him and, from Sabrina herself, after Sarah’s death, that the young girl had become “too attached” to Ivano;
• when asked why he had accrued the decision to accuse his daughter Sabrina, he replied, “Why did I have to do so many years if I did not do that thing?”;
• Michele added that while he was searching with his daughter for Sarah’s SIM card, Sabrina had only asked him if Sarah was in a safe place, and he had answered in the affirmative, that is, that the body was in a safe place, where only he could find it; his daughter had also asked him about Sarah’s cell phone, and he had told her he had destroyed it.

The relationship between Sarah and Sabrina

The Court that sentenced Sabrina started from a “fixed point” in its reconstruction of the events that led to Sarah’s death:

When Sabrina Misseri was heard by the Carabinieri of Avetrana [...] Sarah’s body had not been found and, therefore, it was still legitimate to hope for a voluntary departure that precisely a quarrel, a contrast, an argument with her cousin could have explained and justified. Yet Sabrina Misseri, while appearing active and proactive in the search for her missing cousin through both public initiatives and collaboration with the Carabinieri, thought it counterproductive to reveal an apparently insignificant detail – a girl-on-girl argument – which, however, could have uncovered a ‘Pandora’s box’, shedding light on what later turned out to be the motive for the murderous action.

It’s necessary to better introduce the individuals who are involved in this story. It’s not contested by the defense that in the summer of 2010 the two girls – since Sarah’s school was closed and she had a relationship of close kinship and living proximity with her cousin – attended each other assiduously; in particular, Sarah went almost daily at the cousin’s house. The two girls were also part of the same group of friends, Sabrina having introduced the young Sarah to the others in December 2009. The group included Ivano Russo, Alessio Pisello, Mariangela Spagnoletti and, in the summer period, Angela Cimino and Claudio Scazzi, as well as Giovanni Copertino and Antonio Forte. Together the aforementioned frequented the same clubs, exchanged messages and phone calls, went to the beach moving in the same cars. Sarah was only allowed to go out in the evenings with her older cousin on whom, therefore, she depended for all opportunities for recreation.
According to the Court, Sarah’s secret diary is really important to understand what happened because it testifies to the onset of a growing enthusiasm for a new friendship and the emergence of a feeling that troubles and confuses the teenager: that for Ivano, that boy so much older than she is and whom Sarah knows well how much her cousin Sabrina also likes. Some significant entries are the following:

• June 4, 2010 at 3:30 pm: “hi......in this time I am having so much fun you know Ivano is really nice I love him so much only he is 27 years old almost 30 whatever I kind of miss the shit I used to do in school with my friends you know....”
• June 9 at 11:07 am: “hi..........so yesterday I went to the beach with Sabrina and Ivano I had a great time only Sabrina then told me that next time she wants to be alone with Ivano and I have to stay home, it sucks when she does that it gets on my nerves. I can’t wait for my brother and my dad to arrive ah I forgot to tell you that Saturday and Sunday I have to go to the beach but not with Ivano....”
• July 28 at 6:30 pm: “...hello my name is Sarah, in this period I am very attached to I boy who is 27 years old, I am only 15 but he is very sweet with me and he always cuddles me, his name is Ivano, and my cousin Sabrina also likes him but I don’t understand if I like him or if I just love him as a friend...I AM CONFUSED” * July 30: “hi, yesterday Ivano cuddled me...I love him so much...but tonight I’m not gonna see him uff.…”

Although Sabrina refused to describe her relationship with Ivano in terms of a romantic one, saying she was only physically attracted to him, her friends contradicted her in their testimonies (Claudio Scazzi goes so far as to speak of a “fixation”). Moreover, one inescapable objective fact is the text messages with which Sabrina “bombarded” her friends to find out where Ivano was, whether he was at one club rather than another, whether he had gone out and who she took home first and who last, even going so far as to check on the boy through actual stakeouts and sending messages from unknown phones. It is unclear why Sabrina would want to “project” onto her friend Mariangela her obsession with Ivano (as she did in the November 20, 2012 hearing) when all testimony converged in another direction. According to the Court,

Sabrina was dominated by her anxiety to establish a stable and exclusive romantic and sexual relationship with Russo, rather than a relationship of mere friendship, so that her conduct became even more insistent where Ivano proved detached and annoyed by her intrusiveness.

Clearly tracing the development of the story between the two are the 4500 messages exchanged over the months by Sabrina and Ivano. For the Court, “[t]he incursion into the sexual sphere of the two isn’t dictated by morbid curiosity, nor is it intended to land on unacceptable moralistic evaluations of their behavior, but it serves to fully understand how the evolution of that relationship and the inevitable estrangement from the young man, due to the differing expectations of the two, generated in Sabrina a very strong sense of frustration”. This frustration was then exacerbated by the fact that although Sarah played (unintentionally) a role in the breakup between Sabrina and Ivano, she did not stop hanging out with him, and this must have been considered a real betrayal on Sabrina’s part. These are some significant messages sent by Sabrina testifying to her interest/obsession:

• May 2, 2010 at 6:02 pm: “You see I am mocking you, I see you as a big puppy:-)”
• May 2 at 6:08 pm: “Come on admit it, you like cuddling at the end who doesn't, then you are so deep…”
• May 2 at 11:40 pm: “Don’t joke, I mean it I envy you I wish I was as beautiful as you and a special and unique character like yours... to me you are like a god :)”
• May 4 at 3:20 pm: “you are a beautiful vision just as you are... understand God Ivano?”
• May 4 at 11:54 pm: “Sweet night, I hope you have recovered, the nice thing about you [is] that you make me feel useful for something...”
• June 6 at 11:17 am: “I’m right, Liala came today and told me Ivano [is] even more gorgeous with glasses but just so much and I answered ‘I know’ and I told them you could tell him”
• June 8 at 1:53 pm: “The client I said hello earlier sent me an SMS to say you are handsome if you don’t believe me I’ll show you the message I saved it:)”
• June 8 at 1:59 pm: “I don't want to hear you complain anymore so far I haven’t heard anyone say otherwise it has nothing to do with taste you can’t deny the evidence the one who has to complain is me and not you, even my brother-in-law says you’re handsome”

On the other hand, Ivano didn’t seem to reciprocate. He wrote, “Sabri I don’t want you to talk to me like that...the other day that thing shouldn’t have happened, I knew it would end like that.” And again, “But why did you fall in love with me? If you want sex that’s fine, but I don’t fall in love:)”. Hence the profound frustration of Sabrina who, after vainly trying to establish a “real” relationship, had to give up in the face of the indifference of the young man, who in a clear manner, finally told her that he did not conceive, between them, anything other than a loveless sex relationship.
Claudio testified that he tried to talk with Sabrina about her relationship with Ivano, asking her why she continued to hang out with him even if he wasn’t really that interested:

Sabrina made it clear to me that she would rather maybe even be teased, let’s say, even teased in a sense, by Ivano, than lose him altogether.

Concetta was also aware of the relationship between the two, having overheard a telephone conversation between Sarah and Sabrina in which the former said, “If I were in your place, I would kick him. Why do you stand behind him, why do you let him treat you this way?”

The August 25 argument at the “102” brewery

Sabrina was extremely upset and annoyed by the fact that, in her view, Sarah was diverting Ivano’s attention from her – this is a “fact peacefully acquired at the trial”, according to the Court, just as it’s established that this was the reason for the argument that took place on the evening of August 25, 2010. Here is what Stefania De Luca, an older friend of Sabrina’s, testifies:

I was sitting at a table near the front door of the club. After a while, I remember, Mariangela Spagnoletti, Sabrina Misseri and Sarah Scazzi came in. They entered the club, we greeted each other, and immediately Sabrina said, “This time it’s really over”, referring to the relationship she had with Ivano. In particular, already for some time Sabrina had told me several times about her interest in Ivano, her infatuation with him. She herself told me on several occasions that Ivano’s behaviors gave her hope. Evidently during the day of August 25 something had happened for which she had decided to sever this situation with Ivano. After this initial approach, Sabrina and Mariangela entered the bar to get a drink while Sarah stayed close to me. I then noticed that Sarah was very upset and her eyes were glazed over, so much so that I asked her what had happened. Sarah did not answer, shrugging her shoulders and bowing her head.

De Luca confirmed that Sabrina told her she had had a fight with Ivano, adding ironically that he was now only talking to Sarah. “That one sells herself, sells herself for two cuddles, even her mother says so”, Sabrina allegedly repeated twice, referring to Sarah. At that moment Sarah literally went pale and bowed her head almost crying.
Mariangela Spagnoletti – the girl with whom Sarah and Sabrina were supposed to go to the beach – essentially corroborated this version in court:

PROSECUTOR BUCCOLIERO – Here, but these words you said earlier, about Sarah’s and Ivano’s relationship, Sabrina also said them in the car while talking to you? SPAGNOLETTI – Yes. That he was cuddling Sara more than her. […] PROSECUTOR BUCCOLIERO – Listen, was Sabrina jealous of Sarah with regard to Ivano? SPAGNOLETTI – I don’t know if she was jealous, however, with some phrases she made it clear that she was.

Spagnoletti’s trustworthiness was questioned by Sabrina’s defense, which noted how the girl was attracted to Ivano and therefore would turn out to be emotionally involved in the affair; needless to say that De Luca’s testimony still stands and it’s difficult to understand why Spagnoletti would make such serious accusations… just because. The Court also noted that the reasoning of the defense doesn’t make much sense “in light of the little interest Sabrina had managed to arouse in [Ivano]” and since Spagnoletti mentioned the August 25 altercation only when the prosecutor talked about it.

Other episodes corroborating the motive: obsession & desire

Another significant episode that supports the idea of a catastrophic “rupture” between the girls is narrated by Angela Cimino, another friend of the group:

One evening in August, certainly after the 15th, we were in Torre Colimena with Sabrina, Ivano, Claudio and Sarah. With the same, aboard Ivano’s car we returned to Avetrana. I remember that Ivano left Sabrina at home first, only because it was on the way, and, while Ivano dropped Claudio and Sarah, the latter received a message from Sabrina. Sarah read it aloud, “Let me know who [Ivano] drop off home first.” None of those present commented on the message, and I made some reflections. The reading [of the message] took place just before Sarah and Claudio got out of the car as having arrived at their home, [so] Ivano and I, left alone in the car commented on what had happened. I told him that I felt it was time for him to clarify with Sabrina the nature of their relationship beyond a simple friendship. Ivano told me that he would talk to her.

The investigators therefore discovered that Sarah had been indirectly responsible for Ivano deciding to end his “friendship with benefits” with Sabrina, so to speak – but even if it were not for this fact, it would still have happened, as one can see considering the next episode corroborating the motive hypothesized by the Court.
Some days before August 4, 2010, one evening, Sabrina and Ivano drove away from Avetrana, secluded themselves and began to have sex; however, they didn’t complete the intercourse, because Ivano said he didn’t want to ruin the friendship. Sabrina later confided about what happened to Mariangela; Sarah was listening. Without much time passing, the entire group learned of the “failed intercourse” between Sabrina and Ivano. The former stopped going outside and seeing her friends for a while. On August 16, 2010, starting from midnight and going on for the whole day, the two also exchanged some glacial messages:

• August 16 at 0:49 am, Ivano: “I have told you a million times that you are a friend to me, but I prefer to keep my distance if only now I am sure that you don’t want just a friendship” […]
• Sabrina: “Listen dummy what I told you before friendship is fine, but hands off remember what you say to me, the universe does not revolve around you, that’s enough now, out of your mouth must not come my name anymore”
• Ivano: “Thank you for telling everyone about what happened”
• Ivano: “I am leaning towards a friendship but, if you have other ideas, then each on their own way”
• Sabrina: “Don’t worry anyway I’ve decided not to go out anymore, so you don’t say that I’m always looking for you, that I’m always texting you, which isn’t true because lately you were almost always initiating, if I have to pass as the one I’m not I stay at my house”
• Ivano: “Oh listen you're breaking my balls you're doing everything, and fuck off I didn’t tell you anything in fact you said I harass you”

On August 21 there was a face-to-face clarification, arranged by Ivano and not Sabrina, which – it is really hard to understand why, although the Court had its hypotheses – Sarah also attended. Ivano recalled in court:

I told Sabrina what Claudio had reported to me and, after telling her that I was very annoyed, I asked her if she had been the one to report the episode. Sabrina told me that it had not been her and was also annoyed. Confirming that she had not told anyone, she reported to me that Claudio had certainly tried to find out something without having any information, I took the opportunity to reiterate to her that I did not intend to establish a relationship that was anything other than friendship, and I took the opportunity to apologize to her if my behavior had engendered any expectations in her.

According to the Court that sentenced Sabrina, “after making inquiries in the circle of friends, Misseri could only trace the origin of the disclosure of the episode that will lead to the termination of relations with Ivano back to her cousin Sarah”.
Sabrina’s defense attempted to downplay the extent of such feelings by pointing out that the relationship between the two young women was the same: the two girls loved each other “like sisters” and were inseparable, none of those who hung out with them had ever perceived a feeling of jealousy on the part of Sabrina toward Sarah, and, therefore, there was no rivalry or jealousy between the two cousins, so much so that after their conversation with Ivano on August 21, the two girls had continued their evening together, going to the Spizzico club to play karaoke.
Contradicting these theories there is Liala Nigro’s testimony; she was a friend of Sabrina and she testified that, about mid-August, Sabrina arrived angrily at the pub accusing her of telling Ivano about the incident. Some days later, but certainly before August 21, Sabrina apologized to her, telling her that she had identified the person responsible in Claudio. This whole episode corroborates the idea that Sabrina was very angry at whoever had propagated the story of the failed intercourse. Also the fact that Sarah participated in the August 21 face-to-face confrontation can be seen as compatible with the theory that Sabrina had finally identified the “real culprit”, namely Sarah, and had wanted her to be present because she was as involved as the other two.
The relationship between Sabrina and Ivano had therefore broken down irremediably. The former wrote the latter a burst of angry messages:

• August 23, 2010 at 9:04 am: “Btw on Saturday [August 21] when you left I had to tell you that you are good at humiliating people in front of everyone, ‘psychopath, apathetic,’ I at least if I have something to say I say it to you and not in front of everyone like you did to Mariangela, saying heavy sentences in front of people you don’t know, make an examination of conscience. A 27-year-old does not behave like that, you are immature. From what you told me about a certain person you are the one who behaves like this and not me and not that you want to be good, I can accompany you and you keep saying heavy words, I in front of others never allowed myself..., you don’t appreciate things, you don’t know respect, because the night before you didn’t feel like talking, however humiliating in front of others yes, bravo, congratulations.”

The Court notes that it is therefore a fact that the relationship between the two cousins broke down after the August 21 confrontation. Testifying to this, again, there is Sarah going to San Pancrazio Salentino (a nearby town where another cousin of hers lived) from August 23 to 25: “Sarah, no longer having a chance to go out in Avetrana, her brother Claudio having departed, therefore took the first opportunity that came her way to get away from the village”. In these two days, Sarah contacted nevertheless many times Sabrina through calls or rings, but the latter never responded. In court she explained her actions saying that she was “displeased”, i.e. she was missing Sarah (it doesn’t make much sense really).

Sources

Italy high court upholds life sentences in Scazzi case
L’omicidio di Sarah Scazzi: quando il male è in famiglia
Mother told live on Italian TV of daughter's murder
The Murder of Sarah Scazzi Apple TV (UK))

Lebron James - The easy joke here is that you are somebody who doesn’t really know anything about basketball and just picked the guy you recognised from Space Jam or adverts, but the truth runs a little bit deeper than that. If Lebron James is your favourite player you don’t even like basketball, you like arguing online. The sad truth is, you desperately crave the facade of friendship that comes with the tribalism inherent to picking a side in a popular argument. You exist only to say Lebron is better than Jordan or Curry or Dwyane Wade or whoever it is you and your gang are arguing about that week. Any game of basketball that doesn’t have Lebron in it is completely worthless to you unless it can be used as evidence about a player that Lebron played with/against. Any game with Lebron in it is a nightmare, because you know if he plays badly MJ fans will make fun of you on Twitter, and to you that’s all that matters.
Steph Curry - To be a Curry fan means that, intrinsically, you are spoiled. Your hands are soft and unworked, your mummy still pays for your groceries and you have a manservant to wipe your ass when you’ve finished shitting. You were raised on state-funded winning and excuses for failure. You would never survive even a day in the wild, you shrink from adversity like a child fleeing the hand of an abusive father and you speak like a ten-year old. You have no place in the dirtier arguments of the NBA, you consider yourself above them. Steph and his superteam have coddled you, made you feeble with his asterisk rings. The thought of supporting a REAL player, somebody you have to FIGHT for scares you too much. You are, and forever will be, bitchmade.
Kawhi Leonard - You will never understand why the rest of us are so jealous of you. Kawhi has his rings, he has his fan love and he has an excuse to retire early and not embarrass you with the sight of having to watch him average 7 points a game for the Grizzlies at the age of 36. You support a basketball player who isn’t. Kawhi is now little more than a myth, a legend of the rings of yesteryear that echoes throughout the barren planes of San Antonio and Toronto. All you, as his trusted liege can do is keep the flame alive for as long as you can. The winds may howl and call him a pussy for his load management but as long as you shelter the flame, and Kawhi keeps conveniently getting injured when the Clippers need him, you will be safe. They will always remember the Philly shot. That’s all you need.
Joel Embiid - He can’t keep getting away with this, right? I mean, you put in WORK to get him that MVP, more work than he did, and this is how he repays you? You remember a time when you laughed at the fans of ringless players. AI, Melo, Lillard, Chris Paul, Harden until he saw the light, all bums. Embiid would get you a ring, he was designed to get you a ring, he had to get you a ring. You deserve a ring. You sat through the rebuild, all those injury problems, Ben fucking Simmons, all because you were promised a ring. And every year you would say ‘we lost because of this thing that isn’t Embiid’s fault, we’ll be back next year!’. And for a while, the public believed you. They bought your tales and your lies. Not anymore. They know the truth now, and they hate him for it. Deep down, you do too.
Kevin Durant - How many times will KD ‘seek a new challenge’ or ‘make the move right for him’ before you come to terms with what he is? He’s a nasty ring chaser, and that’s okay. Everyone would respect you more if you just admitted it. You can cope all you want and justify all his moves by claiming ‘toxic environment!’ or ‘the front office hated him!’ but even you don’t believe that, you just say it to save face. The worst part is, you haven’t heard the worst of it yet. KD has gone remarkably unscrutinized by NBA media as a whole, but when people start to question whether the most remarkable unicorn the NBA had seen since Wemby should have more than two state-funded rings, you might have some explaining to do. Maybe he should have stayed loyal to Oakland. Not OKC though, fuck that place.
James Harden - I want you to find a coin right now and flip it, catch it in your hand and turn it over. Take note of what side it lands on and keep flipping it until it lands on the other side. If you can flip this coin 56 times and have it land on the same side every time, congratulations! You have matched the statistical probability of the 2018 Rockets missing 27 consecutive threes. What this exercise should show you is that God is real and for whatever reason, he hates James Harden. Spare your soul and support a real player instead.
Giannis Antetokounmpo - Nobody has ever enjoyed a Giannis performance without already being a fan of Giannis in the first place. He is perhaps the most consistently boring superstar to watch. He never takes threes unless they’re wide open, he has never had a super interesting or acrobatic dunk, he loves free throws and he makes about 14 barely contested layups per game. He has no dribbling bag and his defence relies on simply being large. He is a boring player, and you know this, because that’s why you like him. Your idea of ‘good basketball’ is simply the person who can score the most points with the highest efficiency. You live and die by the box score because you genuinely think that’s the objective way of saying who had the best game. You could be sat in front of an Excel spreadsheet instead of a Bucks game and have essentially the same amount of fun, because your brain has been programmed to release dopamine whenever it sees three numbers over 10 next to each other. You are boring, we all think you’re dull, and when the rest of us are discussing real basketball we don’t want you anywhere near us because your idea of humour is just saying the jokes that Giannis said again. An Allen Iverson comp would kill you on the spot.
Russell Westbrook - It would be easy to make a joke about how much you miss 2017 and how you pretended it still is to try and stop the pain from setting in, but to be honest I honestly think you do still genuinely believe it to be 2017. For you, time hasn’t progressed at all. You’ve been known to play Despacito and Ed Sheeran when you get the aux and you can’t stop talking about how excited you are for Infinity War to come out. And yes, you do still somehow believe Russell Westbrook is a good player. Despite all your friends and family pleading with you to move on and showing you Youtube videos of that time he hit the side of the backboard, you firmly believe that Russ is still cooking on the Thunder. I can promise you, it doesn’t get better. Wake up now before we lose you forever.
Nikola Jokic. You are a 35 year old white guy with a beard and glasses who would, if asked to, happily pay to get advanced basketball statistics. Your life is filled with words like ‘True Shooting’ and ‘Player Impact Estimate’ that the rest of us couldn’t give a single shit about. You are who KD was talking about when he said people watch basketball through a graph. If I showed you a powerpoint saying that Mike Conley is the piece missing from the Suns to make them chip favourites you would believe me as long as I added in enough bar graphs. You have a poster of Ernie on your wall. You have never discussed basketball without double checking a fact on your phone. When you go to a bar in a city you don’t know you make a big deal about ordering local beers, and if the guy next to you didn’t hear you order it you order it again but louder. You have strong opinions on pirating that nobody agrees with. You are probably a centrist. You have no idea how much I pity you.
Luka Doncic - There are two types of Luka fans, the hollow, soulless Mavs fan who physically cannot talk about his team without saying the phrase ‘We just need to get Luka some help’, and the 16 year old jerker who’s brain instinctively goes ‘Luka Doncic is Devin Booker father’ the second they see his name. Both are equally hard to talk to, but at least the Mavs fan has an excuse for their suicidal demeanour. The jerker is barely even a human at this point, a bag of flesh that surrounds an endless stream of catchphrases and recycled memes. Luka Doncic is Devin Booker father. If you laughed at that for the second time, seek therapy or employment.
Jayson Tatum - Bro I am NOT GAY, I promise but IF I was, IF bro, IF I was then of course I would have sweaty man sex with Jayson Tatum, he’s just cute bro it’s not gay to say that bro it isn’t I swear. What? Tatum’s game isn’t good enough to justify the lengths I’ll go to defend him? He’s not really all that and I only love him so much because I think he’s sexually attractive. Nah bro you’re crazy for that one I won’t lie, just because Tatum’s lips are soft like pillows and I like the way his ass jiggles and I wish the NBA would let him play without a shirt on doesn’t make me gay bro you’re crazy for that one.
Zion Williamson - The Great Zion Debate revolves around a single word; ‘if’. IF Zion was to play regularly, he’d probably be top 3 bigs in the league, but guess what? He doesn’t, so he isn't. That should be a very simple thing to understand, but Zion fans love nothing more than to drag everyone into a world full of hypotheticals and make-believe, where anything is possible except Zion’s shitty conditioning being his own fault. Eventually you’ll be spat out of their portal wearing nothing but a lobster bib and a Jose Alvarado jersey, fully believing that it’s AD’s fault that Zion loves food more than he loves his own mother. After all, you can’t say he plays bad if he simply never plays.
Damian Lillard - Oh fuck you’re so cool man, you’re so cool because the player you support is so loyal man, that just makes you so much cooler than everyone else man. Ignore all the times you’ve screamed for him to be traded because the Trail Blazers are a complete poverty franchise, that doesn’t matter because Dame is so loyal and cool man, Dame time baby let’s go! Let’s fucking go! Who cares that the current state of the NBA would be exactly the same if Dame was never drafted and spent his entire life delivering DnD equipment to Portland’s extensive collective of people who couldn’t care less about basketball, he’s so clutch! Ignore all the red flags and hope the Lakers come through with a trade request. You’ll need post-season success more than you think in the years to come.
Chris Paul - When Chris Paul retires without a ring, which is a near guarantee unless Phoenix fix their shit or he begs Denver to take his dog ass for a season, what will you do? You probably gave up on your hopes of a ring around the same time Harden fans did, but man 2021 gave you hope didn’t it? Just for a second you felt what it was like to support a real player, a real man. Not the banana boat enthusiast who choked leads like they were Bart Simpson, but a player who could maybe win something someday. It must have been nice while it lasted. Then, reality set in. To be honest, I don’t really know who I’m talking to with this one. Chris Paul surely doesn’t have any fans left. He barely even has his own family on his side. Ah well, you’ll always have Lob City. And Kim K.
Jimmy Butler - It’s always someone else’s fault isn’t it. Ever since Jimmy realised he could just blame KAT for all the T’wolves failings you’ve carried on that legacy for as long as you can remember. Maybe if Bam plays better against Denver your beloved Jordan surrogate won’t have to be directly outscored by UDFA’s every night. It’s okay though, Jimmy has ‘fundamentals’. You love fundamentals don’t you, they’re that thing you use when you don’t have any actual arguments to say why Jimmy’s better than the perennial MVP candidate you’ve set him up against for no reason. You can whine and cope and say ‘he makes his teammates better’ but if that were true, wouldn’t he have achieved something in Chicago, or with that very promising Minnesota roster? Surely it must be someone else’s fault. Maybe it’s the leagues for hiring referees. Or maybe it’s KAT’s fault again. Who knows.
Kyrie Irving - Kyrie fans are the rare breed of basketball fan that actually play basketball, the problem is that they think they’re him with the handles and the ankle breakers and the and-ones, but in reality they are complete fucking garbage. I will never choose you to play pickup with unless you are the last option and I will never pass you the ball because I don’t want to watch you bounce it off your own thigh for 20 minutes. And dude, can you please stop talking about the Zionist New World Order or whatever the fuck you saw on Twitter last night? I fucking doubt the guy with the MAGA Pepe pfp has links deep in the US government, so forgive me for not believing that they put aphrodisiacs in the tap water so that we spend all our money on babies, just help me guard their sharpshooter or fuck off. And wear some deodorant fucking hell.
Devin Booker - You know, if a player needs All-Star candidates at every other position on the court just to progress to the Conference Finals, chances are that player isn’t very good. This thought does not register in the mind of the Booker fan, who genuinely believes that KD, Chris Paul and Deandre Ayton isn’t enough help. Your greed knows no bounds and will swallow you whole one day, yet in your lust for power you fail to turn inwards. Where was Booker vs the Mavs that one time? Why did he only score 12 points vs the Nuggets this year? Is he stupid? Does he not know he can play well in big games? No, no, clearly the Suns just need to trade Cam Payne and Ayton for Sabonis or AD or some other top 5 big, surely that’s where the problem lies right? Wait, what do you mean salary cap?
Ja Morant - Oh man I feel bad for you. You’re probably a guy who just enjoys basketball as a spectacle, who doesn’t particularly care about winning or losing as long as you get to watch the most entertaining players in the league pull off the most ridiculously flashy plays. Isn’t that what we all want, deep down? Maybe you were raised on a healthy diet of Vince Carter or D Rose, maybe you just think a guy who can jump over another guy for a bucket is neat, whatever the answer is you’re trapped with this fucking idiot who can’t keep himself out of trouble. Now the team you touted as the most exciting in the league is the most hated in the league, and through no fault of your own you look like a fucking idiot. Worse still, the sheen has come off the Grizzlies young core and now people actually expect them to start winning, probably without Ja. Consider suing Instagram before Adam Silver demands Ja be burned at the stake for his transgressions against his fellow players.
Trae Young - Yes, we all remember that New York series. Yes, we all thought Ice Trae was hot shit at the time. But guess what? That was 2 years ago and Trae has shown no signs of progressions since. Still a liability on defence, still a massive ball hog and still ugly as fuck. Just face the facts and admit that without these rivalries you create, be it with New York or Luka or whoever, Trae would be the most forgettable player in the league. Three point specialists are a dime a dozen in the post-Steph era, and there’s nothing to really separate your fave from Dame or Paul George or De’Aaron Fox or any other number of downtown dwellers. Also like dude, come on, he’s so ugly. Have some self respect.

While Fort Stockton, Texas, might not be the first place that springs to mind when considering hidden jewels, this little community offers plenty of pleasant surprises that are just waiting to be explored. Fort Stockton, located in West Texas, is home to a fascinating history, outdoor activities, one-of-a-kind sights, and delectable regional food that are easily accessible from our hotel in Fort Stockton. Join us to discover its undiscovered wonders which are must-see on your trip. History of Fort Stockton
Fort Stockton was founded as a military outpost to guard travelers on the San Antonio-El Paso Road in the middle of the 19th century. As a supply hub for the westward expansion, the fort was essential to the settlement and growth of the area.
Attractions in Fort Stockton - Visit the Fort Stockton Historic Site to see the museum, officer’s quarters, and rebuilt barracks, and immerse yourself in the past. Learn about the life of the pioneers and soldiers who formerly resided here. The town’s pioneer heritage is also highlighted at the Annie Riggs Memorial Museum, which features objects that depict the lives of its early residents. Explore the stunning natural features that surround our hotels in fort Stockton Tx. Take a trip to the magnificent Big Bend National Park, where untamed panoramas and harsh terrain await. Discover the hiking paths, go birding, or just take in nature’s tranquility. Visit the Comanche Springs Pecos River Nature Trail for a closer look at the local flora and animals.
Outdoor Activities - Hiking in the Davis Mountains State Park will allow you to experience the beautiful routes and the untamed surroundings. Admire the expansive vistas, come across unusual flora and wildlife, and take in the peace of nature. Set up tent at the neighboring Historic Fort Stockton RV Park under the starry sky for those wanting a genuine camping experience. For lovers of nature and birdwatching, Fort Stockton is a wonderland. Visit the Black River Lake animals Management Area to see a variety of bird species and see local animals in its natural setting. Take your time admiring the variety and beauty of the local bird inhabitants while holding a pair of binoculars in your hands. Play a round of golf at the Desert Pines Golf Course or a round of tennis at the nearby courts with your buddies. There are many of possibilities near our pet friendly hotels in Fort Stockton Tx that lets you stay active and play your favorite sports. There are well-kept facilities and a friendly ambiance, whether you’re a tennis or golf fan.
Dining in Fort Stockton -The Executive Inn is the ideal option if you’re seeking for cozy lodging lodging in Fort Stockton Texas. This quaint hotel, which is located in the center of the city, provides a number of services and a warm environment that will make you feel at home. Enjoy comfortable accommodations, helpful staff, and convenient access to the area’s activities. A great place to start your exploration of Fort Stockton’s hidden attractions is the Executive Inn. Conclusion Planning to explore these off-beaten paths without breaking your bank? Find the cheap hotels Fort Stockton Tx, just a short distance away from these off-the-beaten-paths and enjoy a memorable trip into the heart of Texas with its rich history, numerous sights, outdoor activities, and delectable food. Book your stay at Executive Inn Fort Stockton Tx.
Hotel Rooms in Fort Stockton Tx - The Executive Inn is the ideal option if you’re seeking for cozy lodging lodging in Fort Stockton Texas. This quaint hotel, which is located in the center of the city, provides a number of services and a warm environment that will make you feel at home. Enjoy comfortable accommodations, helpful staff, and convenient access to the area’s activities. A great place to start your exploration of Fort Stockton’s hidden attractions is the Executive Inn.
Conclusion
Planning to explore these off-beaten paths without breaking your bank? Find the cheap hotels Fort Stockton Tx, just a short distance away from these off-the-beaten-paths and enjoy a memorable trip into the heart of Texas with its rich history, numerous sights, outdoor activities, and delectable food. Book your stay at Executive Inn Fort Stockton Tx.

https://www.dukebasketballreport.com/2023/6/5/23748338/youtube-gold-tim-duncan-san-antonio-spurs-wake-forest-demon-deacons-nba-basketball-power-forward

1. "I messed up a jump skydiving. I was able to correct the situation and pull the pilot chute for my canopy, but I was very, very close to having my reserve go off. The reserves are generally reliable, but it’s still nothing I want to test. Landed fine and then got a very stern talking-to for pulling so low."
2. "Just google 'Levey PCH,' then ask away…I’ll be very surprised if anyone can beat what happened to me. THANK WHOEVEWHATEVER you believe in for Apple, Scorpion, UCLA, and the LA County Fire Department and Sheriff's Department."
3. "Minutes before it happened, I was under the Cypress structure that collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California (which was a magnitude 6.9). I was traveling north underneath the double-layered structure and felt creepy and claustrophobic on the brightest day. I raced to get out, as I always did, because I hated being under it. After getting out, I felt like my tire had gone flat and started to weave around in my lane, then I noticed that everyone else was losing control and hitting their brakes too. That was the earthquake. I didn't find out until later about the collapse, and felt like I had been punched in the stomach. I'd never felt so close to death before."
4. "I was rappelling off the top of the tallest building in Bangkok (200 meters, or 656 feet) as a promotional stunt. I was supposed to rappel down to the 10th floor, land on a small balcony, and then traverse over to another building. The wind shear off the building was enough to blow me 20–30 feet away from the side of the building. Picture a spider hanging by a thread in the wind. As I got close to the 10th floor, I noticed that my rope had been cut and no longer reached the balcony, let alone the ground. The rope was about 10 feet short of the landing. So, still blowing away from the side of the building, off and on I waited until I was just above the balcony and dropped the last several feet onto the deck. Super pissed but alive."
5. "Going to school in San Francisco, I got off the bus to get cigarettes and a soda at a liquor store. I stopped at the trash can on the way out to open my cigarettes and soda and walked half a block up the street when a crane fell off the roof right where I'd been standing 30 seconds before. The crane operator was killed, and half a minute earlier, I would have been as well."
6. "Although being an ironworker comes with its fair share of risk, as long as you don’t become too incompetent, things can be safe. But that is easier said than done, seeing as the days are long and the work is physically draining. One day, I was about 60 feet in the air rigging a beam to be lowered to the ground. I signaled the crane operator to 'cable up' (lift the beam), but the beam wasn’t budging. I decided to look down the beam to see what was wrong...BANG! Before I knew it, the beam broke free and came up at my face with about 2,000 pounds of force. It knocked off my hard hat and hit every edge of my safety glasses, missing the side of my face by a quarter inch. I thought I had died, it was so sudden. I should never have put myself in what we call 'the line of fire.' I’ll never forget how close my kids were to losing their father that day because I let my judgment slip. Still gives me goosebumps talking about it."
7. "I got hit by a car and walked away with no injuries. The Sunday before final exams during my last semester of college, I went to the library at 6 a.m. to study. At 2 p.m., I needed a break and started walking back to my car. At an intersection, I stopped, made eye contact with the driver of a car at a stop sign, and started walking across the street on a crosswalk. The next thing I knew, I was up on the windshield of a Jeep Grand Cherokee. He hit the brakes, and I rolled off the hood of his car and landed on my feet. I was so freaked out that I told the guy I was fine and left. Later that afternoon, I went to the hospital to get checked out and had no injuries. The doctor told me to buy a lottery ticket on my way home because I was so lucky."
8. "While I was doing the dishes, my hip bumped the dial on my stove, turning it to ignite, but I didn't notice, so the stove was leaking gas all night. In the morning, I could tell something smelled off, but I have a hard time smelling things, so I just figured it was some old cauliflower rice I had thrown out the night before. To deal with the smell, I lit not one, but two candles, one of which was right next to the stove. Later, after coming back from running errands, as soon as I opened the door, I felt instantly violently ill, like a migraine and the flu all at once. Probably 20 minutes later, I finally saw the knob on the stove and realized what was happening."
9. "One time, I was watching TV in my lounge room and I was sitting on the floor eating. We have a really big TV and we had an earthquake, but I thought it was a train passing by. It wasn't. I ran out of the room as everything started to wobble, and the TV nearly fell on top of me."
10. "I went to summer camp when I was 15, and for our last weekend activity, they took us to Martha’s Vineyard and rented us bikes. Now, I loved riding bikes in the park as a kid but had never ridden in the street. But since 'you never forget how to ride a bike,' I figured I could do it. I headed out and tried to go up a street that was very steep. I started to lose control of the bike, and I fell into the street in between a truck that was hauling a trailer (I fell in front of the trailer). I saw this huge wheel coming at me, and my leg was stuck from the fall. I screamed as hard as I could and hoped it wouldn’t kill me (others told me they heard it a few streets away). The driver luckily heard it and slammed on the brakes; I was scuffed up but otherwise fine. You can indeed forget how to ride a bike."
11. "I got hit by a train. I was living and working at a college that has train tracks running through it and only a stop sign before you cross them at the vehicle intersection. You had to cross the tracks to leave campus. I was headed to the gym in July, and the windows were rolled up and the AC and radio were blasting. I’d crossed that crossing a thousand times, so I stopped a bit, passed the stop sign, and looked right, but the train was coming from the left. Its horn blew, but I panicked when I heard it, so I hit the accelerator but braked immediately. I was already on the tracks. It only hit my front end and dragged me about 200 feet down the tracks. I only had a broken rib, three cracked ribs, and a pretty gnarly cut on my finger. The people at the next crossing probably thought they saw someone die."
12. "My last day of driver’s education class, we were just about back to school. We were all feeling pretty good because we’d passed our tests that day. I was in the rear driver’s seat and had a classmate driving, one next to me, and a teacher in the passenger seat. We went through a green light at LITERALLY the last intersection before school when a car blew through the red light going 55 mph and slammed into us on my side, just a few inches back from where I was sitting. It spun our car into the intersection and kept going! We were all concussed and had to be taken to the hospital, but that was it. When we went to retrieve my bags from the trunk of the wreckage at the salvage yard, the shop owner admitted he hadn’t answered my ringing phone because he didn't think we had survived, and didn’t want to break the news to everyone calling me. Two inches between me and being crushed alive. In driver’s ed!"
13. "I was walking to class one day, and the shortest route went under a viaduct. It had been snowing and melting on and off for the past few days. The viaduct is about 100 feet high, and just as I was about to walk from under it and onto the pavement, a 6-foot icicle fell those 100 feet and smashed into the ground in front of me. Suffice to say, I took that as a sign not to go to my lecture and turned back home!"
14. "I was asleep in the passenger seat of a car on a highway when we flipped going about 80 mph. We rolled a few times and landed in a ditch. Airbags did not go off, and I shattered the passenger-side window with my skull. I literally walked away from it and didn't go to an ER until a few hours later. I literally had a concussion and one teeny bruise on my right arm, but nothing else. The nurses told me that if I had been awake for the accident, my neck would have snapped and I'd have died immediately. Whenever I tell people, they're always stunned — imagine my reaction waking up to a missing side window and a crushed car and being fully functional! I feel lucky every day that I was asleep and still have my life."
15. "There was one time my sister and I were driving down a long road with a huge cemetery. I thought it would be funny to hold my breath because people say if you don’t, the spirits of dead people will haunt you or something. When I held my breath, my sister slowed down to torture me. I was a little annoyed, but at the stop sign at the intersection, this car going really fast didn’t even bother to slow down. They even swerved into our lane, so my sister had to barely dodge. I swear, though, if my sister hadn't slowed down to torture me, we would have been in a bad wreck. Now I’m not annoyed that she did that, I’m lucky."
16. "This isn't dramatic, but it's continued to impact my life on a daily basis. When I was 11, I was playing baseball with the rest of my gym class. We took a time-out to argue about who was batting next, and I stood behind home plate, staring into left field. Play resumed, and no one told me to move. The strongest guy in the class laid down a single...and hit me in his backswing...with the baseball bat...in the middle of my forehead. I suffered skull fractures and a brain bleed. To this day, I have anxiety driven by the traumatic brain injury. The neurologist said that the fact that he hit the ball saved my life. Had he swung and missed, I would have died."
17. "I was in college and I had just finished my last class of the day. It was a short walk to my car that consisted of crossing a pedestrian crosswalk on the street separating the school from parking. On each side of the crosswalk were speed bumps so cars were forced to slow down. At this time of day, a good number of students were getting out of class, and a large herd of us started crossing the street at the crosswalk. There must have been 30 of us. I was stupidly looking down at my phone and was walking rather slowly. I didn’t realize that I was lagging behind. Everyone else was on the other side and I was still in the middle of the street. At the same moment, I noticed a freaking DUMP TRUCK whizzing by in front of me. It was probably 1–2 feet in front of me. Either he didn’t see me still crossing or he didn’t care. After I got to my car, all I could do was sit there in silence for a while and contemplate what could have just happened. Even as I write this, I shudder."
18. "This is definitely not the craziest cheating-death story, but it was definitely scary. I was at a waterpark with my family, and I don’t do well with heat and stairs — something about the combination makes me faint. We went on a waterslide that uses tubes, and it was a long trek up. I apparently was so sick from heat exhaustion, I passed out as I was next in line and hit my head on the tube. If it weren’t for the tube, they aren't sure I’d be alive right now."
19. "It was during Christmastime, and my mom, my little brother, and I all wanted to go look at Christmas lights near the middle school. There was a hill and then a lane where you would wait for the light to turn green and then you had to turn left. Well, the main light had turned red, so it was our turn to go, and thank god my mom checked before going, because if she hadn’t checked, a truck would have hit us, going like 60 mph, straight through the side of our car where my little brother was sitting."
20. "I was 4 or 5, and we were living in Estes Park, Colorado. At that time, I was challenging myself to go closer and closer to a river they have there. I was caught by the current and would’ve run into several rocks and a waterwheel if it weren’t for my cousin, who reached down, grabbed my arm, and saved me."
21. "I survived hitting an elk in the Canadian Rockies and going down a mountain 15 times end over end, stopping 20 feet short of a whitewater river. I gave myself first aid. Doctors said I would never walk normally again and I'd have brain damage. I sent one of them a picture of me with three gold medals around my neck."
22. "In the fall of '15, I was riding my motorcycle to work on a foggy morning. A truck with an enclosed trailer ran a stop sign in front of me while I was driving on a 55 mph road. I was unable to stop, ran into the trailer, and was pinned underneath the trailer, being crushed to death. A farmer was on his dirt bike behind the truck going to meet another farmer for coffee who lived on the corner of the intersection. Once he realized I was pinned, he ran to get his friend and his friend's skid-steer loader. They then used the skid loader to lift the trailer off of me and began CPR. Luckily, right as they started, a sheriff's deputy arrived on scene and took over. I owe my life to those two farmers. If they hadn't acted, I would have died underneath the trailer, as there would have been no way for first responders to lift it off of me (it had thousands of pounds of equipment in it) in time."
23. "I've always been handy with tools and taught myself how to do things; I've been changing flat tires for anyone who'll let me. However, one day when I was about 18 years old, my buddy came over to chill, and he had his dad's brand-new Tacoma. So we chilled for a couple of hours, and when it was time for him to leave, we noticed that his front tire was flat, so naturally, I volunteered to change it (no prior experience with independent suspensions). I placed the jack on the frame and started to go at it — lifted the car enough to take the flat out. But when the fully inflated wheel was fitted, it didn't have clearance. My first thought was to get a second jack. Half my body was underneath the car, putting the jack in, when I heard a creek, and the next thing I knew, the car slipped. The car ended up with the front end touching the ground, and I got a big scrape mark on my shoulder. To this day, I don't know how or why I did not die under that Tacoma."
24. "I lived alone with my dog. There was a hole in my gas heater, so it was leaking carbon monoxide, but of course I didn't know that at the time. My dog woke me up one morning, barking and whining, and I thought she had to go out to potty. When I sat up in bed, I got so dizzy and thought I would throw up. I ended up passing out twice, once hitting my head on the bathroom cabinet, very close to my temple, and once hitting my chin on the toilet seat. I called my boss — the only phone number I remembered at the time. (This was before cellphones.) She called 911 and they came to get me. They figured out I had carbon monoxide poisoning, and I was in the ER for eight hours that day. The doctor told that when blood gases are at a certain amount, the victim goes into a coma, without fail. Mine were more than double whatever that number was. He said no matter how much my dog was barking, I should not have woken up."
25. Finally, "I was at the beach with several of my friends, my sister, and my mom. Mom was sitting on the beach watching us. We were around 11–14, I believe, but no younger than 9. Kind of out of nowhere, we started getting sucked under the water in a rip current. I was being sucked under the pier and slammed my face into the barnacles. We were screaming for help, but at first, no one came. As I was being dragged under the water and coming up screaming for help, I could see people just staring and could hear my friends also screaming for help. Finally, people started jumping into the water to save us, including my mom. She jumped in and instantly got sucked into the current but managed to grab one of my friends. She used her body to shield him from the razor-sharp barnacles."

Link to article

Welcome to San Andreas, I’m CJ from Grove Street
Land of the Heinous, gang bangers and cold heat
In Los Santos, Neighbors get no sleep
Beefing with anybody competin’, even police
Four deep in a green rag with gold feet
Blast wit’ the flag on the strap, that‘s OG
Stay in shape, hit the gym, lift the weights
Get supercut and big and buff, nice and straight
You got stats:Respect, weapon skill, Stamina, fat and Sex appeal
You get clothes from Binco, and ProLaps
Suburban, Zip, Victim and D-Sachs
Watch yo’ back when them Rival Hoods
Duckin’ Shells at Cluckin’ Bell
Jump out, bust a gun until they tuck their tail
It seems like I’m on Impossible Missions
Twisted Predicaments, hostile positions
Tenpenny and Pulaski harass me
Cop cars been on our ass the last past week
Cause the ‘Dreas‘s full of gangsters, Homeboy
Hands is the language for the Bangers, Homeboy
And it’s dangerous, Homeboy
Get yo’ brains ’fore how you do yo fingers, Homeboy
Heat Cocked, we poppin‘ hot ones, dump ‘em out
Bend the block, shake before the cops come
Listen for sirens, they don’t got none
Back another lap, catch a straggler with the shotgun
Hittin’ them up with that Grove Street like
In a dirty slingshot, and old levi