Tortured Souls Kill 666 Bandits, Cultists, or Knights Hammer Down Kill 50 enemies while Berserking as a Barbarian Emancipation Complete the campaign Curious Collector Unlock all Codex of Power Aspects Convenient Crafts Craft any Elixir, and any Incense Legion Killer Kill 666 Demons, Fallen, or Goatmen Turned Kill 666 Drowned, Vampires, or Werewolves Shifty Swipes Kill 50 enemies in Werebear form and 50 enemies in Werewolf form as a Druid Estuar Sightseer Explore all of Estuar Undead Undone Kill 666 Ghosts, Skeletons, or Zombies Turning the Tides Collect 1000 Aberrant Cinder in Helltide zones Devoted Protector Reach Level 100 with any character Dedicated Protector Reach Level 50 with any character True Perseverance Reach Level 50 with a Hardcore character Army of Bones Summon 100 Skeleton Mages or Warriors as a Necromancer Living Nightmares Complete a Sacred and Ancestral Nightmare Dungeon First Aid Upgrade your Healing Potion to max tier Master Combatant Get 5 PvP kills In and Out Kill 50 enemies in Melee range and 50 enemies out of melee range as a Rogue Exterminator Kill 666 Snakes or Spiders Master of the Elements Kill 100 enemies with Fire, Frost, or Lightning damage as a Sorcerer End of the First Mother Defeat Uber Lilith Potent Alterations Upgrade a piece of Armor, Jewelry, and a Weapon Chaotic Whispers Open 10 Caches of Chaos from the Tree of Whispers Worldly Slayer Kill any World Boss
The whirring blades of my MD-902 throbbed against the warm evening air, and I smiled.
From 5,000 feet, the ground flew by in a carpet of dark forests and kelly-green fields. The sun hung low on the horizon in a picturesque array of dazzling orange and gold, and I could make out the narrow strip of the Ohio River to my left, glistening in the fading daylight. This time of year, the trees would be full of the sweet aroma of fresh blossoms, and the frequent rains kept small pockets of fluffy white mist hanging in the treetops. It was a beautiful view, one that reminded me of why being a helicopter pilot trumped flying in a jumbo jet far above the clouds every day of the week.
Fourteen more days, and I’m debt free. That made me grin even more. I’d been working as a charter pilot ever since I obtained my license at age 19, and after years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, I was closing on the final payment for real-estate in western Pennsylvania. With no debt, a fixer-upper house on 30 rural acres all to myself, and a respectable wage for a 26-year-old pilot, I looked forward to the financial freedom I could now enjoy. Maybe I’d take a vacation, somewhere exotic like Venice Italy, or the Dominican Republic. Or perhaps I’d sock the money back for the day I started a family.
“Remember kleineun, a real man looks after his own.” My elderly
ouma’s voice came back from the depths of my memories, her proud, sun-tanned face rising from the darkness. She and my Rhodesian grandfather had emigrated to the US when they were newlyweds, as the violence against white Boer descendants in South Africa spiraled out of control. My mother and father both died in a car crash when I was six, and it had been my grandparents who raised me. Due to this, I’d grown up with a slight accent that many of my classmates found amusing, and I could speak both English, and Afrikaans, the Boer tongue of our former home.
I shifted in my seat, stretched my back muscles, and glanced at the picture taped to my console. Both my parents flanked a grinning, gap-toothed six-year-old me, at the last Christmas we’d spent together. My mother beamed, her dark hair and Italian features a sharp contrast to my father’s sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. Sometimes, I liked to imagine they were smiling at me with pride at how well I flew the old silver-colored bird my company had assigned to me, and that made the long, lonely flights easier to bear.
A flicker caught my eye, and I broke my gaze away from the photograph.
Perched in its small cradle above the controls, my little black Garmin fuzzed over for a few seconds, its screen shifting from brightly colored maps to a barrage of grey static.
Did the power chord come loose? I checked, ensuring the power-cable for the unit’s battery was plugged into the port on the control panel. It was a brand-new GPS unit, and I’d used it a few times already, so I knew it wasn’t defective. Granted, I could fly and navigate without it, but the Garmin made my time as a pilot so much easier that the thought of going blind was dreadful.
My fuel gauge danced, clicked to empty, then to full, in a bizarre jolt.
More of the gauges began to stutter, the entire panel seeming to develop terrets all at once, and my pulse began to race. Something was wrong, very wrong, and the sludge inside my bowels churned with sour fear.
“Come on, come on.” I flicked switches, turned dials, punched buttons, but nothing seemed to fix the spasming electronics. Every gauge failed, and without warning, I found myself plunged into inky darkness.
Outside, the sun surrendered to the pull of night, the sky darker than usual. A distant rumble of thunder reverberated above the roar of my helicopter’s engine, and I thought I glimpsed a streak of yellowish lightning on the far horizon to my left.
Calm down Chris. We’re still flying, so it must just be a blown fuse. Stay in control and find a place to set her down. My sweaty palm slid on the cyclic stick, and both feet weighed heavy on the yaw pedals. The collective stuck to my other hand with a nervous vibration, and I squinted against the abyss outside.
Beep.
I jumped despite myself, as the little Garmin on my panel flared back to life, the static pulling aside to reveal a twitching display. Each time the screen glitched, it showed the colorful map detailing my flight path over the ground below, but I noticed that some of the lines changed, the names shifting, as if the device couldn’t decide between two different versions of the world.
One name jutted out at me, slate gray like most of the major county names, appearing with ghostly flickers from between two neighboring ones.
Barron County. I stared, confused. I’d flown over this section of southeastern Ohio plenty of times, and I knew the counties by heart. At this point, I should have been over the southern end of Noble County, and maybe dipping lower into Washington. There was no
Barron County in Ohio. I was sure of it.
And yet it shown back at me from the digital landscape, a strange, almost cigar-shaped chunk of terrain carved from the surrounding counties like a tumor, sometimes there, sometimes not, as my little Garmin struggled to find the correct map. Rain began to patter against my cockpit window, and the entire aircraft rattled from a strong gust of wind. Thick clouds closed over my field of vision like a sea of gray cotton.
The blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sucked in a nervous breath.
Land. I had to land. There was nothing else to do, my flight controls weren’t responding, and only my Garmin had managed to come back to life. Perhaps I’d been hit by lightning, and the electronics had been fried? Either way, it was too dark to tell, but a storm seemed to be brewing, and if I didn’t get my feet on the ground soon, I could be in real trouble.
“Better safe than sorry.” I pushed down on the collective to start my slow descent and clicked the talking button for my headset. “Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, over.”
Nothing.
“Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, requesting emergency assistance, over.”
Still nothing.
If the radio’s dead, I’m really up a creek. With my hand shaking, I clicked on the mic one more time. “Any station, this is—”
Like a curtain pulling back, the fog cleared from around my window, and the words stuck in my throat.
Without my gauges, I couldn’t tell just how far I’d descended, but I was definitely very low. Thick trees poked up from the ground, and the hills rolled into high ridges with flat valley floors, fields and pastures pockmarking them. Rain fell all around in cold, silvery sheets, a normal feature for the mid spring in this part of Ohio.
What wasn’t normal, were the fires.
At first, I thought they were forest fires for the amount of smoke and flames that bellowed from each spot, but as I swooped lower, my eyes widened in horror.
They were houses.
Farms, cottages, little clusters that barely constituted villages, all of them belched orange flames and black pillars of sooty smoke. I couldn’t hear above the helicopter blades, but I could see the flashes on the ground, along the road, in between the trees, and even coming from the burning buildings, little jets of golden light that spat into the darkness with anger.
Gunfire. That’s rifle fire, a whole lot of it. Tiny black figures darted through the shadows, barely discernable from where I sat, several hundred feet up. I couldn’t see much, but some were definitely running away, the streaks of yellow gunfire chasing them. A few dark gray vehicles rumbled down one of the gravel roads, and sprayed fire into the houses as it went. They were fighting, I realized, the people in the trucks and the locals. It was horrific, like something out of war-torn Afghanistan, but worse.
Then, I caught a glimpse of the
others.
They didn’t move like the rest, who either fled from the dark vehicles, or fired back from behind cover. These skinny figures loped along with haphazard gaits, many running on all fours like animals, swarming from the trees by the dozens. They threw themselves into the gales of bullets without flinching, attacking anyone within range, and something about the way they moved, so fluid, so fearless, made my heart skip a beat.
What is that? “Echo Four Actual to unknown caller, please respond, over.” Choking back a cry of shock, I fumbled at the control panel with clumsy fingers, the man’s voice sharp and stern. I hadn’t realized that I’d let go of the talking button and clicked it down again. “Hello? Hello, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot out of Pittsburgh, over.”
An excruciating moment passed, and I continued to zoom over the trees, the fires falling away behind me as more silent forest took over.
“Roger that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, we read you loud and clear. Please identify yourself and any passengers or cargo you might be carrying, over.” Swallowing hard, I eyed the treetops, which looked much closer than they should have been. How far had I descended? “Echo Four Actual, my name is Christopher Dekker, and I am alone. I’m a charter flight from PA, carrying medical equipment for OSU in Columbus. My controls have been damaged, and I am unable to safely carry on due to the storm. Requesting permission to land, over.”
I watched the landscape slide by underneath me, once catching sight of what looked like a
little white church surrounded by smaller huts, dozens of figures in the yard staring up at me as I flew over a nearby ridgeline.
“Solid copy on that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot. Be advised, your transponder shows you to be inside a restricted zone. Please cease all radio traffic, reduce your speed, climb to 3,000 feet and proceed north. We’ll talk you in from there. How copy, over?” My heart jumped, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Roger that Echo Four Actual, my altimeter is down, but I’ll do my best to eyeball the altitude, over.”
With that, I pulled the collective upward, and tried my best to gauge how far I was by eyesight in the gathering night, rain still coming down all around me. This had to be some kind of disaster or riot, I decided. After all, the voice over the radio sounded like military, and those vehicles seemed to have heavy weapons. Maybe there was some kind of unrest going on here that I hadn’t heard about yet?
Kind of weird for it to happen in rural areas though. Spoiled college kids I get, but never saw farmers get so worked up before. They usually love the military. Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I turned out of reflex.
My mouth fell open, and I froze, unable to scream.
In the sky beside me, a huge shadow glided along, and its leathery wings effortlessly carved through the gloom, flapping only on occasion to keep it aloft. It was too dark for me to see what color it was, but from the way it moved, I knew it wasn’t another helicopter. No, this thing was alive, easily the size of a small plane, and more than twice the length of my little McDonald Douglass. A long tail trailed behind it, and bore a distinct arrow-shaped snout, with twig-like spines fanned out around the back of its head. Whatever legs it had were drawn up under it like a bird, yet its skin appeared rough and knobby, almost resembling tree bark. Without pause, the gigantic bat-winged entity flew along beside me, as if my presence was on par with an annoying fly buzzing about its head.
Gripping the microphone switch so tight, I thought I’d crack the plastic, I whispered into my headset, forgetting all radio protocol. “T-There’s something up here.”
Static crackled.
“Douglas Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, say again your last, you’re coming in weak and unreadable, over.” “There’s something up here.” I snarled into the headset, still glued to the controls of the helicopter, afraid to deviate even an inch from my course in case the monstrosity decided to turn on me. “A freaking huge thing, right beside me. I swear, it looks like a bat or . . . I don’t know.”
“Calm down.” The man on the other end of the radio broke his rigorous discipline as well, his voice deep, but level. “It won’t attack if you don’t move too fast. Slowly ease away from it and follow that course until you’re out of sight.” I didn’t have time to think about how wrong that sounded, how the man’s strict tone had changed to one of knowledge, how he hadn’t been the least surprised by what I’d said. Instead, I slowly turned the helicopter away from the huge menace and edged the speed higher in tiny increments.
As soon as I was roughly two football fields away, I let myself relax, and clicked the mic switch. “It’s not following.”
“You’re sure?” Eyeing the huge flapping wings, I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Yeah, I’m well clear.”
“Good. Thank you, Mr. Dekker.” Then, the radio went dead.
Something in my chest dropped, a weight that made my stomach roil. This wasn’t right, none of it. Who was that man? Why did he know about the thing I’d just seen? What was I supposed to—
A flash of light exploded from the trees to my right and shot into the air with a long finger of smoke.
What the . . . On instinct, I jerked the cyclic stick to one side, and the helicopter swung to avoid the rocket.
Boom. My world shook, metal screeched, and a dozen alarms began to go off inside the cockpit in a cacophony of beeps and sirens. Orange and red flames lit up the night sky just behind me, and the horizon started to spin wildly outside. Heat gushed from the cockpit door, and I smelled the greasy stench of burning oil. The safety belts dug into my shoulders, and with a final slip, the radio headset ripped free from my scalp.
I’m hit. Desperate, I yanked on the controls, fought the bird even as she spun toward the ground in a wreath of flames, the inky black trees hurtling up to meet me. The helicopter went into full auto-rotation, the sky blurring past outside, and the alarms blared in a screech of doom. Panic slammed through my temples, I screamed at the top of my lungs, and for one brief second, my eyes locked on the little black Garmin still perched atop my control panel.
Its screen stopped twitching and settled on a map of the mysterious Barron County, with a little red arrow at the center of the screen, a few words popping up underneath it.
You are here. Trees stabbed up into the sky, the belts crushed at my torso, glass shattered all around me, and the world went dark.
Copper, thick, warm, and tangy.
It filled my mouth, stank metallic in my nose, clogged my throat, choking me. In the murkiness, I fought for a surface, for a way out, blind and numb in the dark.
This way, kleineun. My
ouma’s voice echoed from somewhere in the shadows.
This way. Both eyes flew open, and I gagged, spitting out a stream of red.
Pain throbbed in my ribs, and a heavy pressure sent a tingling numbness through my shoulders. Blood roared inside my temples, and stars danced before my eyes with a dizzying array. Humid night air kissed my skin, and something sticky coated my face, neck, and arms that hung straight up toward the ceiling.
Wait. Not up.
Down. I blinked at the wrinkled, torn ceiling of the cockpit, the glass all gone, the gray aluminum shredded like tissue paper. Just outside the broken windows, thick Appalachian bluegrass and stemmy underbrush swished in a feeble breeze, backlit by flashes of lightning from the thunderstorm overhead. Green and brown leaves covered everything in a wet carpet of triangles, and somewhere nearby, a cricket chirped.
Turning my head from side to side, I realized that I hung upside down inside the ruined helicopter, the top half burrowed into the mud. I could hear the hissing and crackling of flames, the pattering of rain falling on the hot aluminum, and the smaller brush fires around the downed aircraft sizzling out in the damp long grass. Charred steel and burning oil tainted the air, almost as strong as the metallic, coppery stench in my aching nose.
They shot me down. That military dude shot me out of the sky. It didn’t make sense. I’d followed their orders, done everything they’d said, and yet the instant I veered safely away from whatever that thing in the sky had been, they’d fired, not at it, but at me.
Looking down (or rather, up) at my chest, I sucked in a gasp, which was harder to do that before.
The navy-blue shirt stuck to my torso with several big splotches of dark, rusty red. Most were clean slashes, but two held bits of glass sticking out of them, one alarmingly bigger than the other. They dripped cherry red blood onto my upturned face, and a wave of nausea hit me.
I gotta get down. I flexed my arms to try and work some feeling back into them, praying nothing was broken. Half-numb from hanging so long, I palmed along my aching body until I felt the buckled for the seat belts.
“Okay.” I hissed between gritted teeth, in an effort to stave off my panic. “You can do this. Just hold on tight. Nice and tight. Here we go . . .”
Click. Everything seemed to lurch, and I slid off the seat to plummet towards the muck-filled hole in the cockpit ceiling. My fingers were slick with blood and slipped over the smooth faux-leather pilot’s seat with ease. The shoulder belt snagged on the bits of glass that lay just under the left lowest rib, and a flare of white-hot pain ripped through me.
Wham. I screamed, my right knee caught the edge of the aluminum ceiling, and both hands dove into a mound of leaf-covered glass shards on the opposite side of the hole. My head swam, being right-side-up again enough to make shadows gnaw at the corner of my eyes.
Forcing myself to breath slowly, I fought the urge to faint and slid back to sit on the smooth ceiling. I turned my hands over to see half a dozen bits of clear glass burrowed into my skin like greedy parasites, red blood weeping around the new cuts.
“Screw you.” I spat at the rubbish with angry tears in my eyes. “Screw you, screw you, screw you.”
The shards came out easy enough, and the cuts weren’t that deep, but that wasn’t what worried me. On my chest, the single piece of cockpit glass that remined was almost as big as my palm, and it really hurt. Just touching it felt like self-inflicted torture, but I knew it had to come out sooner or later.
Please don’t nick a vein. Wiping my hands dry on my jeans, I gripped the shard with both hands, and jerked.
Fire roared over my ribs, and hot blood tickled my already grimy pale skin. I clapped a hand over the wound, pressing down hard, and grunted out a string of hateful expletives that my ouma would have slapped me for.
Lying on my back, I stared around me at the messy cargo compartment of the MD-902. Most of the medical supplies had been in cardboard boxes strapped down with heavy nylon tow-straps, but several cases had ruptured with the force of the impact, spraying bandages, syringes, and pill bottles all over the cluttered interior. Orange flames chewed at the crate furthest to the rear, the tail section long gone, but the foremost part of the hold was intact. Easily a million-dollar mess, it would have made me faint on any other trip, but today it was a godsend.
Half-blind in the darkness, I crawled along with only the firelight and lightning bolts to guide me, my right knee aching. Like a crippled raccoon, I collected things as I went, conscious of the two pallets of intact supplies weighing right over my head. I’d taken several different first-aid courses with some hunting buddies of mine, and the mental reflexes kicked in to help soothe my frazzled mind.
Check for bleeds, stop the worst, then move on.
Aside from my battered chest and stomach, the rest of me remained mostly unharmed. I had nasty bruises from the seatbelts, my right knee swelled, my nose slightly crooked and crusted in blood, but otherwise I was intact. Dowsing every scratch and cut with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol I found, I used butterfly closures on the smaller lacerations that peppered my skin. I wrapped soft white gauze over my abused palms and probed at the big cut where the last shard had been, only stopping when I was sure there were no pieces of glass wedged inside my flesh.
“Not too bad.” I grunted to myself, trying to sound impassive like a doctor might. “Rib must have stopped it. Gonna need stitches though. That’ll be fun.”
Pawing through the broken cases, I couldn’t find any suture chord, but just as I was about to give up, I noticed a small box that read ‘medical skin stapler’.
Bingo. I tore the small white plastic stapler free from its packaging and eyeballed the device. I’d never done this before, only seen it in movies, and even though the cut in my skin hurt, I wondered if this wouldn’t be worse.
You’ve gotta do it. That bleeding needs to stop. Besides, no one’s coming to rescue you, not with those rocket-launching psychos out there. Taking a deep breath, I pinched the skin around the gash together, and pressed the mouth of the stapler to it.
Click. A sharp sting, like that of a needle bit at the skin, but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the cut itself. I worked my way across the two-inch laceration and gave out a sigh of relief when it was done.
“Not going to bleed to death today.” I daubed ointment around the staples before winding more bandages over the wound.
Popping a few low-grade painkillers that tumbled from the cargo, I crawled wriggled through the nearest shattered window into the wet grass.
Raindrops kissed my face, clean and cool on my sweaty skin. Despite the thick cloud cover, there was enough constant lightning strikes within the storm to let me get glimpses of the world around me. My helicopter lay on its back, the blades snapped like pencils, with bits and pieces of it burning in chunks all around the small break in the trees. Chest-high scrub brush grew all around the low-lying ground, with pockets of standing water in places. My ears still rang from the impact of the crash, but I could start to pick up more crickets, frogs, and even some nocturnal birds singing into the darkness, like they didn’t notice the huge the hulk of flaming metal that had fallen from the sky. Overhead, the thunder rumbled onward, the feeble wind whistling, and there were other flashes on the horizon, orange and red ones, with crackles that didn’t sound quite like lightning.
The guns. They’re still fighting. Instinctively, I pulled out my cellphone, and tapped the screen.
It fluttered to life, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get through to anyone, not even with the emergency function designed to work around having no service. The complicated wonder of our modern world was little better than a glorified paperweight.
Stunned, I sat down with my back to the helicopter and rested my head against the aluminum skin of the craft. How I’d gone from a regular medical supply run to being marooned in this hellish parody of rural America, I didn’t know, but one thig was certain; I needed a plan. Whoever fired the missile could have already contacted my charter company and made up some excuse to keep them from coming to look for me. No one else knew I was here, and even though I now had six staples holding the worst of my injuries shut, I knew I needed proper medical attention. If I wanted to live, I’d have to rescue myself.
My bag. I need to get my go-bag, grab some gear and then . . . head somewhere else. It took me a while to gather my green canvas paratrooper bag from its place behind the pilot’s seat and fill it with whatever supplies I could scrounge. My knee didn’t seem to be broken, but man did it hurt, and I dreaded the thought of walking on it for miles on end. I focused instead on inventorying my gear and trying to come up with a halfway intelligent plan of action.
I had a stainless-steel canteen with one of those detachable cups on the bottom, a little fishing kit, some duct tape, a lighter, a black LED flashlight with three spare batteries, a few tattered road maps with a compass, a spare pair of socks, medical supplies from the cargo, and a simple forest green plastic rain poncho. I also managed to unearth a functioning digital camcorder my ouma had gotten me for Christmas a few years back, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to do any filming in such a miserable state. Lastly, since it was a private supply run from a warehouse area near Pittsburgh to a direct hospital pad in Ohio, I’d been able to bring my K-Bar, a sturdy, and brutally simple knife designed for the Marine Corps that I used every time I went camping. It was pitiful in comparison to the rifle I wished I had with me, but that didn’t matter now. I had what I had, and I doubted my trusty Armalite would have alleviated my sore knee anyway.
Clicking on my flashlight, I huddled with the poncho around my shoulders inside the wreck of the chopper and peered at the dusty roadmaps. A small part of me hoped that a solution would jump out from the faded paper, but none came. These were all maps of western PA and eastern Ohio. None of them had a Barron County on them anywhere.
The man on the radio said to head north, right before they shot me down. That means they must be camped out to the north of here. South had that convoy and those burning houses, so that’s a no-go. Maybe I can backtrack eastward the way I came. As if on cue, a soft pop echoed from over the eastern horizon, and I craned to look out the helicopter window, spotting more man-made flashes over the tree tops.
“Great.” I hissed between clenched teeth, aware of how the temperature dipped to a chilly 60 degrees, and how despite the conditions, my stomach had begun to growl. “Not going that way, are we? Westward it is.”
Walking away from my poor 902 proved to be harder than I’d anticipated. Despite the glass, the fizzling fires, and the darkness, it still held a familiar, human essence to it. Sitting inside it made me feel secure, safe, even calm about the situation. In any other circumstance, I would have just stayed with the downed aircraft to wait for help, but I knew the men who shot me down would likely find my crash site, and I didn’t want to be around when they did.
Unlike much of central and western Ohio, southeastern Ohio is hilly, brushy, and clogged with thick forests. Thorns snagged at my thin poncho and sliced at my pant legs. My knee throbbed, every step a form of self-inflicted torture. The rain never stopped, a steady drizzle from above just cold enough to be problematic as time went on, making me shiver. Mud slid under my tennis shoes, and every tree looked ten times bigger in the flickering beam of my cheap flashlight. Icy fear prickled at the back of my neck at some of the sounds that greeted me through the gloom. I’d been camping loads of times, both in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, but these noises were something otherworldly to me.
Strange howls, screeches, and calls permeated the rain-soaked sky, some almost roars, while others bordered on human in their intonation. The more I walked, the softer the distant gunfire became, and the more prevalent the odd sounds, until the shadows seemed to fill with them. I didn’t dare turn off my flashlight, or I’d been completely blind in the dark, but a little voice in the back of my head screamed that I was too visible, crunching through the gloomy forest with my long beam of light stabbing into the abyss. It felt as though a million eyes were on me, studying me, hunting me from the surrounding brush, and I bitterly recalled how much I’d loved the old Survivor Man TV series as a kid.
Not so fun being out in the woods at night. Especially alone. A twig snapped somewhere behind me, and I whirled on the spot, one trembling hand resting on the hilt of my K-Bar.
Nothing. Nothing but trees, bushes, and rain dripping down in the darkness.
“This is stupid.” I whispered to myself to keep my nerves in check as I slowly spun on the spot. “I should have went eastward anyway. God knows how long I’m going to have to—”
Creak. A groan of metal-on-metal echoed from somewhere to my right, and I spun to face it, yanking the knife on my belt free from its scabbard. It felt so small and useless in my hand, and I choked down a wave of nauseas fear.
Ka-whump. Creak. K-whump. Creak. Underbrush cracked and crunched, a few smaller saplings thrashed, and from deep within the gloom, two yellow orbs flared to life. They poked through the mist in the trees, forming into slender fingers of golden light that swept back and forth in the dark.
The soldiers . . . they must be looking for me. I swallowed hard and turned to slink away.
Ice jammed through my blood, and I froze on the spot, biting my tongue to stop the scream.
It stood not yards away, a huge form that towered a good twelve feet tall in the swirling shadows. Unpolished chrome blended with flash-rusted spots in the faded red paint, and grime-smeared glass shone with dull hues in the flashes of lightning. Where the wheels should have been, the rounded steel axels curved like some enormous hand had bent them, and the tires lay face-down on the muddy ground like big round feet, their hubcaps buried in the dirt. Dents, scrapes, and chips covered the battered thing, and its crooked little radio antenna pointed straight up from the old metal fender like a mast. I could barely make out the mud-coated VW on the rounded hood, and my mind reeled in shock.
Is . . . is that a car? Both yellow headlights bathed me in a circle of bright, blinding light, and neither I nor the strange vehicle moved.
Seconds ticked by, the screech-thumping in the background only growing closer. I realized that I couldn’t hear any engine noises and had yet to see any soldiers or guns pointed my way. This car looked old, really old, like one of those classic Volkswagen Beetles that collectors fought over at auctions. Try as I might, I couldn’t see a driver inside the murky, mold-smeared windows.
Because there wasn’t one.
Lightning arched across the sky overhead, and the car standing in front of me blinked.
Its headlights slid shut, as if little metal shades had crawled over the bulbs for a moment and flicked open again. Something about that movement was so primal, so real, so lifelike, that every ounce of self-control I had melted in an instant.
Cursing under my breath, I lunged into the shrubs, and the world erupted around me.
Under my shoes, the ground shook, and the car surged after me in a cacophony of ka-thumps that made my already racing heart skip several beats. A weather-beaten brown tow truck from the 50’s charged through the thorns to my left, it’s headlights ablaze, and a dilapidated yellow school bus rose from its hiding place in the weeds to stand tall on four down-turned axel-legs. They all flicked their headlights on like giants waking from their slumber, and as I dodged past them, they each blared their horn into the night in alarm.
My breaths came short and tight, my knee burned, and I crashed through thorns and briars without thought to how badly I was getting cut up.
The cheap poncho tore, and I ripped it away as it caught on a tree branch.
A purple 70’s Mustang shook off its blanket of creeping vines and bounded from a stand of trees just ahead, forcing me to swerve to avoid being run over, my adrenaline at all-time highs.
This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening. Slipping and sliding, I pushed through a stand of multiflora rose, and stumbled out into a flat, dark expanse.
I almost skidded to a stop.
What had once been a rather large field stood no taller than my shoestrings, the grass charred, and burnt. The storm above illuminated huge pieces of wreckage that lay scattered over the nearly 40-acre plot, and I could just make out the fire-blackened hulk of a fuselage resting a hundred yards away. The plane had been brought down a while ago it seemed, as there weren’t any flames left burning, and I threw myself toward it in frenzied desperation.
Burned grass and greasy brown topsoil slushed underfoot, and I could hear the squelching of the cars pursing me. Rain soaked me to the bone, and my lungs ached from sucking down the damp night air. A painful stich crept into my side, and I cursed myself for not putting in more time for cardio at the gym.
Something caught my left shoelace, and I hurtled to the ground, tasting mud and blood in between my teeth.
They’ve got me now. I clawed at the mud, rolled, and watched a tire slam down mere inches from where my head had been. The Mustang loomed over me and jostled for position with the red Volkswagen and brown tow truck, the school bus still a few yards behind them. They couldn’t seem to decide who would get the pleasure of stomping me to death, and like a herd of stampeding wildebeest, they locked bumpers in an epic shoving match.
On all fours, I scampered out from under the sparring brutes, and dashed for the crumpled airplane, a white-painted DC-3 that looked like it had been cut in half by a gargantuan knife blade. I passed a snapped wing section, the oily remains of a turbo-prop engine, and a mutilated wheel from the landing gear. Climbing over a heap of mud, I squeezed into the back of the ruined flight cabin and dropped down into the dark cargo hold.
Wham. No sooner had my sneakers hit the cold metal floor, and the entire plane rocked from the impact of something heavy ramming it just outside. I tumbled to my knees, screaming in pain as, once again, I managed to bash the sore one off a bracket in the wall.
My hand smeared in something gooey, and I scrabbled for my flashlight.
It clicked on, a wavering ball of white light in the pitch darkness, and I fought the urge to gag. “Oh man . . .”
Three people, or what was left of them, lay strewn over the narrow cargo area. Claret red blood coated the walls, caked on the floor, and clotted under my mud-spattered shoes. Bits of flesh and viscera were stuck to everything, and tatters of cloth hung from exposed sections of broken bone. An eerie set of bloody handprints adorned the walls, and the only reason I could tell it had been three people were the shoes; all of them bore anklebones sticking out above blood-soaked socks. It smelled sickly sweet, a strange, nauseas odor that crept into my nose and settled on the back of my tongue like an alien parasite.
Something glinted in the beam of my flashlight, and my pulse quickened as I pried the object loose from the severed arm that still clung to it.
“Hail Mary full of Grace.” I would have grinned if it weren’t for the fact that the plane continued to buck and roll under the assault from the cars outside.
The pistol looked old, but well-maintained, aside from the light coating of dark blood that stained its round wooden handle. It felt heavy, but good in my hand, and I turned it over to read the words,
Waffenfabrik Mauser stenciled into the frame, with a large red 9 carved into the grip. For some reason, it vaguely reminded me of the blasters from Star Wars.
I fumbled with a little switch that looked like a safety on the back of the gun and stumbled toward a gap in the plane’s dented fuselage to aim out at the surrounding headlights.
Bang. The old gun bucked reliably in my hand, its long barrel spitting a little jet of flame into the night. I had no idea if I hit anything, but the attacking cars recoiled, their horns blaring in confusion.
They turned, and scuttled for the tree line as fast as their mechanical legs could go, the entire ordeal over as fast as it had begun.
Did I do that? Perplexed, I stared down at the pistol in my hand.
Whoosh. A large, inky black shadow glided down from the clouds, and the yellow school bus moved too slow to react in time.
With a crash, the kicking nightmarish vehicle was thrown onto its side, spraying glass and chrome trim across the muddy field. Its electro-synth horn blared with wails of mechanical agony, as two huge talon-like feet clamped down on it, and the enormous head of the flying creature lowered to rip open its engine compartment.
The horn cut out, and the enormous flying entity jerked its head back to gulp down a mass of what looked like sticky black vines from the interior of the shattered bus.
At this range, I could see now that the flying creature bore two legs and had its wings half-tucked like a vulture that had descended to feed on roadkill. Its head turned slightly, and in the glow of another lightning bolt, my jaw went slack at the realization of what it was.
A tree trunk. It’s a rotted tree trunk. I couldn’t tell where the reptilian beast began, and where the organic tree components ended, the upper part of the head shaped like a log, while the lower jaw resembled something out of a dinosaur movie. Its skin looked identical to the outside of a shagbark hickory but flexed with a supple featheriness that denoted something closer to skin. Sharp branch-like spines ranged down its back, and out to the end of its tail, which bore a massive round club shaped like a diseased tree-knot. Crouched on both hind legs, it braced the hooked ends of its folded wings against the ground like a bat, towering higher than a semi-truck. Under the folds of its armored head, a bulging pair of chameleon-like eyes constantly spun in their sockets, probing the dark for threats while it ate.
One black pupil locked onto the window I peered through, and my heart stopped.
The beast regarded me for a moment, making a curious, sideways sniff.
With a proud, contemptful head-toss, the shadow from the sky parted rows of razor-sharp teeth to let out a roar that shook the earth beneath my feet. It was the triumphant war cry of a creature that sat at the very top of the food chain, one that felt no threat from the fragile two-legged beings that walked the earth all around it. It hunted whenever it wanted, ate whatever it wanted, and flew wherever it wanted. It didn’t need to rip the plane apart to devour me.
Like my hunter-gatherer ancestors from thousands of years ago, I wasn’t even worth the energy it would take to pounce.
I’m hiding in the remains of the cockpit now, which is half-buried under the mud of the field, enough to shield the light from my screen so that thing doesn’t see it. My service only now came back, and it’s been over an hour since the winged beast started in on the dead bus. I don’t know when, or how I’m going to get out of here. I don’t know when anyone will even see this post, or if it will upload at all. My phone battery is almost dead, and at this point, I’m probably going to have to sleep among the corpses until daylight comes.
A dead man sleeping amongst friends.
If you live in the Noble County area in southeastern Ohio, be careful where you drive, fly, and boat. I don’t know if it’s possible to stumble into this strange place by ground, but if so, then these things are definitely headed your way.
If that happens . . . pray that they don’t find you.
So I have been recently. I’ve picked up the commandments that I didn’t want to grab because they were “too evil” for me. These include murder, canbalism, intimidation, gladiator fight, and belief in sacrifice. I’ve taken all of them, and for now, my days of pure benevolence are over. I’ll still care for my inner circle of high followers, but the new followers will have to earn their place, or perish. I’m thinking of putting ones that I deem worthy to join through a trial by combat. They have to fight my champion, Barbartos the tax collector: feaster of flesh and deliver of bones. (I had him eat the mince meat of his 1 st opponent. And he is constantly sent on missions, mostly for bones and meat).
The rules are this: if they win, they get to stay, if they lose, they die. Though, if I want someone dead, I’ll put them up against barbartos, and regardless of if they win or lose, they die.
I’ve also been using the natural burial thing to get fertilizer, and I’ve been cutting up those who aren’t worthy enough for a grave.
This text was originally written as a response to a thread about a specific fictotype, but it's all stuff I've found myself repeating a lot on specific requests, so I figured I'd copypasta and just edit it to be applied more generally. Because I don't want to re-write it to any large degree, I'm just awkwardly replacing the name and pronouns with the word "kin" out of pure laziness.
This is intended to be a continuing WIP and communal [in spite of the silly name I picked when I started this project at 22+ hrs awake ^_^;;] repository for advice and things people have found useful for alleviating their own dysphoria to help others in similar situations. I do hope everyone will add their own advice in the comments, especially if it's something I haven't already included or something that's very specific to your kintype. I'm going to try to keep things more generalized for the sake of the length, but if you have something specific to your kintype that's been helpful for you, please include it so it can help others with your kintype. :)
Appearance:
If you can wear makeup, use it to look more like [kin] (contouring can do amazing things with some practice and a few good tutorials), or wear colors [kin] would enjoy wearing/would resemble [kin].
Style your hair to look like [kin]; even if it's a length or color you can't replicate for reasons, maybe [kin]'s hair does a flippy thing and you can get your hair to do a similar flippy thing, or if [kin]'s hair is side-parted then part your hair on the same side.
If you can wear nail polish and there's a specific color [kin] likes to have [kin]'s nails painted or [kin]'s claws aren't standard-human-nails-colored, paint them that color or just [kin]'s favorite color.
Does [kin] have any tattoos/markings? Assuming they're not distressing to [kin] or you, grab some non-toxic markers/body paints/makeup and illustrate yourself. If they're washable markers/makeup, you'll be able to get rid of the evidence in a hurry if you need to. It doesn't have to be any sort of flawless replica of [kin]'s tattoos/markings, this isn't a competition; the only thing it needs to accomplish is helping you feel better.
Pointy ears? If prosthetic appliances aren't an option at the time but seeing your ears pointed would help, use some bandaids to make temporary ears. Just take the wrapper and paper backing off, wrap that sh*t over itself like an awareness ribbon logo so that the sticky is on the inside and apply the crossed "arms" of the bandaid to the backside of the ear so the point looks nice from the front. ^_^
Clothing:
Wear clothes [kin] would like, or similar to what [kin] wears, or that resemble [kin]'s appearance in some way, depending on what's available to you. If [kin]'s a jean jacket [kin], maybe get a jean jacket. If [kin]'s a suit-and-tie [kin], a button-down shirt would be a start. If [kin] prefers mismatched socks, mismatch your socks. If [kin]'s clothes are patched, add patches to your own. If [kin] has scales, you can look for clothes made with scale-print fabric or add scales to plain clothes with fabric paint by making a stencil out of cardstock or a stamp out of craft foam. If [kin] has wings, perhaps paint [kin]'s wings on the back of a sweatshirt to wear, or find/make a shawl that reminds you of those wings.
You can pick accessories similar to [kin]'s or that [kin] would like. If [kin] has a favorite hat, you may be able to find a hat like it. If [kin] has a specific scarf [kin] wears, you might be able to find or make something similar. If there's a piece of jewelry that's important to [kin], perhaps you can find a similar item. If [kin] has piercings that you can't or wouldn't otherwise want to get, fake-piercing jewelry is widely available in accessory stores and (in the US at least) even easier to find around Halloween. If [kin] has horns, try putting hair clips that have a *little* weight on the places on your head where [kin]'s horns would be. Going back to wings, if [kin]'s wings tend to be heavy, then a small or lightly packed backpack may help replicate the feeling (nothing too heavy, we don't want to get hurt).
Environment:
If you can redecorate to match [kin]'s environment or an environment [kin] would be comfy in, more power to ya. If you can't go all out, smaller changes can help, too. Hanging pictures on your walls that [kin] would hang, maybe pictures you remember in [kin]'s living space or pictures of places or people important to [kin], can help - maybe find some nice fanart online and print it, or order a print from the artist if you can.
Listen to music [kin] likes! On your headphones if you have to, or out loud if you can - music is very therapeutic.
Is there a smell that puts you in [kin]-mode? Maybe there's a scent that's very important to [kin] or makes [kin] very happy. Bring that smell into your space, whether it's a perfume, an air freshener, a scent diffuser with essential oils, a room spray, or a scented jar candle left unlit with the lid off. Scent is a powerful thing, and your nose knows.
Does [kin] have a pet, or is there a pet you know [kin] wants? Don't buy a real pet just because it's what [kin] has/wants, that's not fair to the animal, but find a way to represent [kin]'s pet in your environment. Maybe a picture of that pet, or a plushie that looks kind of like it. You could even make your own. ^_^
Food:
Most non-human beings/creatures/etc have dietary needs and habits that differ from a biological human's, some but not all of which are safe for a human body to eat or live on long term. Raw meats, for example, need to be handled extremely carefully and prepared in very precise ways in order to be safe to eat for a human body, so it's usually not a good idea to do so without the right preparation. Some kintypes eat things that a human body just can't properly handle no matter how it's prepared, such as a being/creature that eats rocks/crystals or ingests metal as a normal part of their diet. Some even subsist on things that don't exist in our universe at all currently (I'm looking at you, energon).
So, what do?
Make something that's safe for a human body that resembles a not-safe-for-human-consumption food that your kintype would likely eat!
Using the arbitrary example of a machinekin who's kinself eats scrap metal, one might get candy molds in the shape of machine parts or hardware and use them with melting chocolate/candy to loosely replicate scrap metal in an edible form. Places that sell cake decorating stuff will often have metallic food coloring sprays along with their regular colors, which can definitely make candy gears much more realistic.
On the example of rocks and crystals, isomalt sugar can be made into lovely crystals that are safe to eat and candy meant to look like pebbles and gravel are pretty common (at least in the US market). One could also use the melting candy idea from above with crystal or gem shaped molds, it would look nice with shiny food coloring spray in colors. Rock candy is also a thing (the candy crystal cluster on a wooden stick) and typically inexpensive when you find it in stores.
For a kintype who eats sticks/trees or bones, crunchy pretzels could potentially be a good human-body-safe substitute, especially pretzel sticks and rods. Not only are there numerous halloween snack recipes out there to decorate them to resemble bones, they have a solid "crunch" as you grind them between your teeth and can be snapped nicely in your hands if your kinself tends to break the bones/branches apart before eating them. Also, if you compare a cross-section of a human long-bone to a cross-section of a crunchy pretzel rod, you'll notice a distinct visual similarity in their inner structures.
For more carnivorous kintypes, properly cooked animal proteins are something a human body can definitely handle. If your kinself generally only eats their meat raw, look at the sensory traits from the eating-raw-meat experience and find safe ways to replicate those traits. Is the raw meat extra juicy? Maybe give it a good marinade before you cook it, or add sauce to it after. Is there a certain scent to your kinself's preferred meat? Experiment with sauces, marinades, and seasonings on various meats to get as close as you can to it. Carnivorous kintype but not exactly a "meat" person in this life? Plant-based meat-substitutes are more widely available and more diverse on the market than ever before and could make a great place to start, and don't forget our old friend tofu. Tofu honestly is as versatile as the jokes imply. ^_^
Is your kintype stuck with a warm, liquid protein diet while everyone around you is enjoying lamb chops and Mallowmars? Not to fear, blood-drinkers, you also have options.
u/Sea-Bee1133 and others have made suggestions like wine (if you're legal), cranberry juice, and tomato juice, and included the info that cornstarch or thickening powders sold in stores can be used to thicken beverages to a more blood-like consistency.
Kintype eats bugs? [Uh, no need to share your snacks with me! I'm good, but thanks. ^_^;;] While lots of bugs are or can be made safe for human consumption (I don't have a list of which, if anyone knows of a reliable reference please put a link in the comments), there are a lot of candies on the market that resemble bugs and candy recipes that can be made to look like bugs. Halloween recipe websites tend to have tons of treats, savory and sweet, that can be made to look like bugs in their repertoire. Squid-ink pasta and noodles also look kinda wormy and could be made "slimy" by tossing them with a bit of butter or olive oil after draining them.
Honestly, Halloween recipe websites keep coming up as good resources for stuff. Bones? Look up Halloween recipes. Blood? Look up Halloween recipes. Human flesh? Look up Halloween recipes. Bugs? Look up Halloween recipes. I'm noticing a trend. If you know of any especially good sites, please hook me up with a link.
What about things that don't exist in our known-universe currently?
Let's look at liquid energon: Not an amazing idea, but if one had a slightly cloudy beverage (translucent rather than transparent or opaque), there are cups with lights built into the bottom and light-up "ice cubes" designed for putting into beverages that could add color and glow. Glow sticks, while technically an available option that would do the job of adding color and glow, do have the potential to leak if the outer case gets damaged and that would immediately make food/drink that it touches completely unsafe to consume. On those specific grounds, I can't recommend glow sticks; safety first.
How about gagh, a staple of Klingon comfort food? While there's no serving it live, squid-ink udon noodles do look like a smaller-scale gagh and are completely safe for a human body to eat. Make it a bit slimy by tossing it with a bit of butter or olive oil after you drain it, or try to get Nanna B'Etor and great-Aunt Lursa to share the family's secret recipe for sauce to go on it. The choice is yours. ^_^
Also, bread sculpting is amazing, and any bread sculpture could potentially have fillings in it like a calzone. If you feel the need to rend the flesh of mankind with tooth and claw and feel the hot blood and organs squoosh out, make a calzone shaped like a little guy with pepperoni pizza toppings or something. [BBQ chicken calzone guy sounds amazing, tbh. ^_^;;]
Behavior:
Are there certain social norms in [kin]'s culture that, while not considered bad by the society your current self lives in, aren't generally practiced where you live? Maybe [kin]'s culture sings a song of gratitude before meals like some cultures recite a prayer before eating, or uses a specific greeting that isn't normally used in your community but wouldn't be taken as offensive or cause for concern by your community. Why not include it in your daily behaviors?
In a different thread about vampirekin,
u/Sea-Bee1133 mentioned that a common thread in some vampire lore is that a vampire must ask permission before entering someone's home. While not standard practice in all communities, it is widely accepted as a polite behavior and wouldn't be offensive to most if you were to add it to your normal behavior.
Mentality:
*Important*:
One very important thing to keep in mind, a point I saw bravely voiced by
u/G2Dolphin at risk of being the "unpopular opinion," is that you *are* you and shouldn't need to force yourself into a mold to become you. You already are your kinself and your kinself is you regardless of whether you fit every canon detail or popular stereotype to the letter. It's just like the old "Am I still a Goth if I also like pink?" quandary that continues to arise in new forms. Not being an exact match to the popular stereotypes of [insert thing here] doesn't mean you aren't [that thing], it means you aren't a cookie-cutter stereotype of [the thing]. Relying on being an exact match to the stereotypes/canon details of your kintype (or any other form of identity) to validate your identity will only ever leave you feeling fake, and you don't need that. Your kin identity also doesn't need it - trying to force yourself to fit the mold doesn't improve the legitimacy and failing to fit the mold doesn't diminish the legitimacy. You already are you, and stereotypes are not the law or gospel by which to define yourself.
What stereotypes and canon details of kintypes *are* useful for, is exploring. They can be helpful as a starting point to figure things out. Using vampires as an example again, it's very common in modern lore for vampires to have fangs, drink blood, sunburn even worse than a Victorian poet, dress in fancy clothes, shapeshift, and be seductive. These traits are not standard across the board. Looking at the earlier documented examples of European vampire folklore, they have more in common with George Romero's zombies than they do with Dracula, Lestat, and Edward. If you're vampirekin, but you've found that the modern vampire lore really doesn't fit your experiences, this is a guaranteed indication of one thing alone: that your experiences aren't the same as Edward's. What to do? Expand your search range for vampire traits to test. You don't have to dismiss your experiences or identity just because it doesn't fit what you expected. Maybe start with Dracula, find what does and doesn't fit, and keep going along through Lestat, Edward, Count Orlock, Balkan folklore, all the way around through Jiang Shi (and even Count Chocula if it helps, why not) on a journey of self-exploration to find your truth.
That's what this is all about, after all: *your* truth.
Thanks to
u/Sea-Bee1133,
u/G2Dolphin, and others for letting me share your info and ideas! :D
Please add any little tips and tricks you have to help with kin-related dysphoria in the comments. ^_^