Preamble

I primarily play Hunter, so this is from my perspective as a Hunter player. Dungeons are probably close to my favorite thing in this game. They're topped only by new raids and secret missions. Although generally I like the secret missions a little less than the dungeons (with the exception of Presage which was one of my favorite activities in the game when it was in the game). I'm not the best player in the game, and I experience good days and bad days. So usually my solo/flawlesses take about a week from the point where I start my attempts to getting the completion. The only exception to this was Spire of the Watcher for reasons I'll discuss later. The important point for the preamble is that I didn't complete Spire until last season, even though I made more than a few solid attempts during the week it launched and the weeks after. I just couldn't figure out a strat I was comfortable with for Persys.
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There has been a lot of chat on this sub and others (and in my group lobbies) about this most recent dungeon's difficulty and it's boss HP scaling. Players like Gladd have made rant videos about the HP bars of the bosses (which is notable only because he usually opts to talk shit on people for things being too easy rather than too difficult). I myself spent the first two days of the dungeon's launch in three different 3-5 hour clears because I was helping out friends and figuring out the dungeon and DPS options. And then, I started my solo attempts. And while I haven't yet quite gotten my rhythm down for the final boss, I can reliably get to her solo now in less time than the first successful clear of the first boss took with a group. I also find that even though I haven't figure out how to consistently stay alive in her room yet, her shields are not all they're cracked up to be. I'm not even using Arbalest and they seem to go down quicker than some Barrier Champs... And this is what prompted me to write this post. Because I think people see things like final damage values in a certain light, and then they correllate that to their experience of fighting for hours without stopping to think about alternative explanations for what they're seeing and experiencing.
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And don't get me wrong. It's brutal the first time. The second time. And the third time. Ghosts of the Deep (GotD) has the largest quantity of endlessly intense add phases I've seen since Prophecy. Not even Duality can hold a candle to the sheer volume of enemies you'll defeat by the end of a normal run of GotD. So I'm going to discuss add pressure, discuss boss HP values, number of phases to get the kill, mechanics with a kill timer vs. mechanics without one, and "artificial difficulty" (and probably some other things). So buckle up, because we're gonna be here for a while.
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Difficulty of Dungeons in General

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First, lets just talk about difficulty in general in a pre-GotD world. And to do that, I think a bit of a history lesson is in order.
Shattered Throne
A thing that everyone should keep in mind when evaluating dungeons is that Shattered Throne (ST) as the first came about in an era before we could customize mods in our armor, and long before 3.0 anything was even dreamed of as a possibility. ST came about when the most "efficient" solo strat for killing the final boss was to sit on a pillar and plunk away at her with an infinite ammo Whisper of the Worm. And back then, this dungeon was a slog. Getting to the first boss (The Ogre) was tedious, even though it wasn't too hard. The Ogre itself though would wipe groups because they didn't understand how to pick up the buffs or how to stay alive in a room with little to no cover and a boss that would pin you to the wall with it's eyebeam if it got line of sight on you. Even now, this boss room can still fuck you up if you aren't paying attention and don't treat the Ogre with respect. Back then, this was a 3-4 phase kill IF you had 21% Delirium (which didn't even come out until two seasons after ST launched).
Once you got to the final boss, Dul Incaru's room is still one of the most bullshit boss arenas I've ever fought in. It's small, you've got three fucking huge HP sink knights, a million Psions and a Hive Witch that deletes you if she can see you for more than a second or two. I don't know how people did this fight without Anarchy to chain down the knights, but man was this fight hard to just stay alive in. But if you could, then you were rewarded with a fairly easy 1-2 phase boss (depending on which meta you were playing in) because the damage buff from the Knights buffed your damage significantly. But it also had a timer that would just kill you if you didn't cleanse yourself or kill the boss. Oh and cleansing required you to jump on an exposed plate in the middle and then shoot a crystal with the HP of a yellow bar enemy before you died.
If this all sounds reasonable by comparison, remember that you could only do Shattered Throne one week out of the month (once every three weeks). So yea, it was easier by comparison because you couldn't just run it any time you pleased so it HAD to be easier so that people could actually complete it in a given Strong Curse Week.
Pit of Heresy
IDK what to say about Pit other than that it was my favorite for a long time because I liked how it used verticality to make things feel immense. This dungeon suffered from (and still suffers from) bugs and inconsistent enemy behaviors in the first encounter and the totem encounter. This was also my first solo flawless (I had gotten ST solo, but not flawless). Pit was very approachable as a solo flawless, and I would still recommend it to most people looking to try one out for the first time, because it only has one actual boss encounter. The opening encounter is about as easy as ST's was, but a lot more fun because you could sword fly around.
The maze with the Ogres is the first time I heard people say that dungeons were using "artificial difficulty" (there's that term...). But this encounter is not even a little bit hard IF you take the time to learn a route to go. If you didn't do that and just floundered around complaining about the ogres being too strong and doing too much damage, then this encounter was the bane of your existance. And to this day, if I join Pit groups most of the time at least one if not both of the other people have no clue how to navigate this area. But once you have your route mapped and know that you can punch jump to move quicker with a ball, this mini encounter becomes a breeze as you just run from one to the next in the space of a couple minutes. But you can't do that unless you come in and actually practice and learn the route, learn how to kill the Hive in the caves, and learn how to get past Ogres that are in front of you. And this takes believing that it was possible to do.
The Totems is the true test. So many people would refuse to do this encounter without the ball dupe cheese and would swear it's impossible. For my part, on my clear I would kill two knights and bring two balls back and dunk both to get only one add wave. Which is still somewhat of a cheese, but it doesn't just skip the encounter. This encounter was the second place I heard people say the dungeon was just too hard for no reason. And sure, at first this encounter was extremely hard. It is probably still one of the harder plate defense encounters in the game (if you play it correctly) simply because of how many things you have to juggle to get through it. We're talking a stacking debuff that kills you if it gets too high, a totem that kills you if you don't touch it every few seconds, boomer knights raining death from above, endless waves of acolytes throwing thousands of solar grenades at you while thrall and exploding thrall rushed to push you off the plate. Oh and you had to kill mini-boss knights to get the ball to dunk. And yea, everyone would just cheese this encounter because back then it was the latest version of the "this is too hard and unfair" encounter.
The maze that came next also still throws people for a loop, and again required you to practice your route so you could navigate it safely. If you don't know your way around, then this part could take a long time and you might die many times trying to find your way. But again, just like the Ogres, once you know the way through, it's a piece of cake assuming you can platform past swinging pendulums.
And after all that, the final boss was not too bad. The adds were nowhere near as oppressive as they were at the totem, and the mini-bosses were all close by and in set spawn locations so you didn't have to run all over the place like in the opening encounter. The only part of this that was somewhat difficult was the actual dps phase because there was a timer to it, but you didn't get to see the timer. The boss would swing his huge flaming sword and leave piles of fire everywhere and cursed thrall would come in from all sides and you could only damage him while being in the middle.
For this I remember distinctly choosing to just go with Celstial Golden Gun and Anarchy with the plan to just blap him once, stick two Anarchy's to him and then kill Thrall. This took me like 5 phases to do (I think... It's been a while... but it was at least 5, possibly 6), but because it was consistent and I could do the rest of the fight easily with my other weapons, I went with it.
Overall, once I did this dungeon once solo, I immediately jumped back in (as soon as I was done) to do the solo flawless attempt in one go. And it was easy the whole way except for totems.
Prophecy
Prophecy was brutal. Prophecy was the first one to take me a week to do. I lived in that dungeon all week and I swear it was impossible without god roll Falling Guillotine, god roll heavy GL, and Trinity Ghoul with the catalyst and Witherhoard. There is so much RNG in these fights that it's not even funny. And I remember seeing many threads back then complaining that this new dungeon, while cool, used RNG to create "artificial difficulty".
The first boss had RNG affecting which motes you needed to deposit and how the shadows moved when you banked those motes. He had at the time some of the most oppressive add pressure in the game and he'd boop you off if you got careless for even half a second. This fight was SOOO easy to get yourself stuck in a position that you couldn't get out of and die... Oh and about 1/2 way through the damage phase he summoned a couple dozen goblins to make him immune, so you had to save you super for that so that you could kill them quickly without just losing half the phase... Oh and his shield would block your damage and swords. You had to hot swap Witherhoard with a Guilliotine back and forth to get him down in any kind of remotely quick time, and I'm pretty sure this was a 4-5 phase when I was first learning it and I got it down to a 2-3 phase by the time I was done. But the add phases in between those DPS phases took forever because of how the mote spawning worked and just how many fucking psions he threw at you. Sometimes you even had ot purposely kill the mote spawning Knights to spawn the wrong motes just so that you could alleviate some of the pressure. So sure, this fight only took 2-3 phases once you had it down... but it still took for fucking ever because of what happened in-between.
The Desert is boring. idk what else to say about it other than Trinity Ghoul shit on it.
The Cube Room required Trinity Ghoul. If you didn't have it, you weren't clearing the Acolytes and their Eyeblasts in time. We didn't have Jolt, ignite, or easy access to volatile. But the add pressure was such that you'd think we did... Trin Ghoul with Catalyst was the closet thing you could get to that.
This fight has it all. Minimal cover, many holes to fall to your death on accident, endless waves of strong enemies, snipers that spawn above you and when you kill knights, knights on the ground with you when you kill snipers. You had to kill two snipers to spawn two knights to get orbs. But the moment the knights died, the snipers respawned, and the acolytes spawned endlessly with their eyes. So as soon as you picked up all your motes and now had no weapons, there was shit spawning all around and snipers bearing down. Oh and I forgot to mention that Toland spawned randomly and sometimes on the ceiling (which I STILL to this day do not understand how to choose a side when he's on the ceiling). If he was on the ceiling, your 6 room run was now an 8 room run. Oh and the room it drops you into, and the color of motes you'd need are completely random. Some rooms were equal, some rooms favored light motes, some favored dark. So you could get a room that favored light motes, but you needed dark motes and there might be only 1 or 2 places to stand to be able to spawn those motes... So when you finally get to the "boss" it's easy sure... again because everything else was so damn hard that a hard boss at the end would have just been beyond cruel...
Rainbow Road is pretty, but I hate it because it's just long and boring when you're soloing it. Don't sparrow because you might fall.
Final boss was the definition of a nightmare and early on you were LUCKY to get a group that could three phase this thing... Most groups were going to do four, possibly five, maybe even six if things went horribly wrong.
It has everything we had in the last encounters. Random mote colors needed, random rooms being dropped into, and absurd add pressure the likes of which had not been seen in 3 man content to that point. On top of that, there was literally no where to hide because the boss was in all three corners bearing down on you. So you had to start this encounter off knowing where the psions and knights spawn ahead of time, planting witherhoard on them before they spawn and then deleting them to create the correct color within a minute or you would get overwhelmed instantly and have literally nowhere safe to hide. There was not one single part of any of those rooms that you could hide in for more than a couple of seconds until you cleared off one of the bosses AND killed the Ogre that spawned in his place.
Once you finished all three sides, you were off to DPS where we have a boss designed to thwart Well of Radiance by not only teleporting away down a long room full of platforms to jump to and Taken hobgoblin snipers, but also by throwing a teleport wall at you. You had to flawless this room solo if you were going to have a shot at 5 phasing this boss. I remember mastering my jumps and making sure I was getting double Witherhoard stacks on him (tagging him and putting one on the ground) at every platform he teleported to, while juggling the platforming, the snipers and his teleport death wave. And at the end of the run, you got a chance to dump some heavy into him (also briefly at the beginning to, but you needed to leave early to get ahead of the teleports and enemy spawns).
For most solo completions, this was a five phase boss or more. There might have been some streamers out there who could get him to four. I'm sure having mountain top and not killing yourself on accident with it was part of those loadouts (I didn't have it so that wasn't an option).
This dungeon was a nightmare to solo and even now I imagine the final boss is quite challenging to solo flawless, even if you can probably kill it in far fewer phases now due to power creep.
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Modern Dungeons

This brings us to what I call the Modern Dungeons, which is Grasp of Avarice (GoA), Duality, Spire of the Watcher (SotW), and Ghosts of the Deep. We're going to spend less time here because these ones all have one crucial factor in play that the previous three didn't. They are all tuned with modern abilities and weapons in mind. So their bosses will be tankier than bosses of the previous three which were tuned for different times and different metas.
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Grasp of Avarice
Released too early. Everything through the sparrow race is fantastic, but the Servitor and final boss fights drag on needlessly. I firmly believe this dungeon was originally scheduled to release with Season of Plunder, but was bumped up to release early because they wanted to pad out the anniversary pack due to Witch Queen being delayed.
This dungeon is very easy assuming you can do two things: complete the sparrow section and deal with the sniper shank in the final boss room. This shank that respawned every damage phase has as much HP as a Hero Nightfall boss. He's tanky as fuck, hard to hit, no crits, and he hits you for half your HP if you let him see you. So unless you had heavy to burn on him, you were doing what I did which was sticking the Scorch Cannon blast to him and charging it up to detonate. Killing this Shank alone for every boss attempt took more time than it took me to kill the Ogre at the first part of the dungeon. Between this guy and the boss tier vandal that also spawned with him, this boss had easily 5x as much HP as any other boss (if we think of these two guys like the shields on the bosses in GotD).
I hate this dungeon, but I love the theme.
Duality
While the final fight was plagued by bugs, this dungeon was awesome. It put pressure on you the whole way but also gave you space to breath where you needed it. All the encounters were about managing add spawns and racing the red world timer. I don't like the Dungeon overall because the teleporting that you do between bosses can leave members of your fireteam behind, and there just isn't much going on in the maps in general. It's very bland looking. But I loved the fights and I love the Calus voicelines.
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Spire of the Watcher
I was so excited to get a Vex dungeon and Rasputin themed stuff. But damn was this dungeon a letdown overall. The chasing the node mechanic is a fantastic solo mechanic, but it sucks in group play because you end up with just one person doing it while everyone else just does adds. This is the same problem that RoN had, but that's a different topic. It's just not a good group play mechanic, and so in groups this dungeon just kind of sucks because you're stuck going at the speed of whoever is doing the nodes...
For solo play, this dungeon was mostly fine. The first half of it is a cakewalk once you have the nodes memorized.
The Harpy Boss is where everyone talks about the dungeon becoming a slog... but again this is a slog the player is in control of. The ask is to hit all the nodes to trigger damage, then you break a couple dozen eyes to render the boss vulnerable. The main thing people get stuck on is killing these eyes in a reasonable amount of time, but if you can do it then this boss was 2-3 phasable at launch with artifact mods. Currently it's about 4 phases on my Hunter, 5 if I make mistakes. But chaining the nodes together takes almost no time, so this fight overall has been reduced to a 20min fight at max, even if I do do a short 5th damage phase to chip off the last little bit of HP. But like Pit of Heresy from before, it requires you to memorize a route and a rhythm that allows you to do the nodes quickly. If you don't do that, then this fight will take an eternity.
For the final fight, I got very frustrated because I couldn't figure out a good damage setup, and I couldn't find any guides that didn't use gear swapping for hunters. It's frustrating because I think that while this is certainly optimal, it discourages creative problems solving that could lead to figuring out the best ways to actually do the encounter. I'm always feeling like were one or two patches away from this being nerfed (kind of how they nerfed it in Trials of Osiris). Once Strand came out, the mobility and damage resistance made this fight infinitely more approachable, and the super + a magazine of Xeno had this guy down in 5 quick phases. The only thing that would slow me down was if I had to farm for heavy ammo.
The hardest part of this fight by far is getting the first 5 red cable nodes hit. But again, this is something that the player can master if they spend time to actually study the fight. Just running in blind every time and raging at it for being "unfair" and "artificially difficult" will not get it done. But if you take time to figure out how to manipulate the supplicant spawns, then you can do this easily and you don't even need woven mail.
I don't like DPS on this boss because Wyverns are just too hard to precision hit without a mouse, so I feel forced to use non-precision weapons. I don't mind this sometimes, but for a solo boss I think restricting the player in this way is not good design.
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Ghosts of the Deep

And now we're here. And if you've read this far, thank you. Don't worry, this will be short.
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If we look back over the history of things, we can see that it wasn't uncommon for dungeon bosses to either have large HP pools, long mechanics phases, ammo/time sink enemies, bullshit ways to die, etc. It's just how these things go. And over time, all of them were moved into farmable status once we had time to figure out the best ways to do them.
The Shields
They are vulnerable to anti barrier. They melt to almost any super hit. But the critical part is that damage done to shields shows up in your total damage done. And since they take bonus damage from some things.... while they might go down easy with the right weapons, you'll still see numbers like 12million on damage because of the damage being done to the shields.
As I said near the beginning, I spent many multi hour attempts on these because we were using machine guns, and even when we'd wipe we'd get insane damage numbers. And I know for a fact that my Commemoration, no matter how good it is, doesn't do the dps that those numbers suggested. So stop acting like these bosses have HUGE HP values. They don't have any larger of HP values than any other dungeon boss on average. You're not doing 9million damage with your LMGs/Linears and a super. You weren't doing that against raid bosses, and you're not doing it here. This is simple deductive reasoning. For example one Light-Light-Heavy combo of Lament will destroy more than half of the first bosses' shield, if not completely destroy it. Lament combo does not do 1mil damage. But it does do close to that to his shield.
So the reality is that we don't actually know the HP values of the bosses. No one does. Anyone saying that do that doesn't have a reliable way to account for inflated shield hp/damage is wrong.
The solution then is not to complain that the bosses have too much HP, but to figure out ways of dealing with the shields. I just watched someone strip off the final bosses' shield with one Gathering Storm and a Levi Breath shot or two (and no he wasn't using Star Eater's either... He was using Assassin's Cowl and never swapped). He did enough damage that this boss was four phasable comfortably if you made no mistakes.
My own kill of the first boss also makes it feel like it's four phasable with no mistakes. But probably five phases typically while solo. And this puts them on par for other bosses in dungeon history. And like those bosses... a year or two from now, the new meta of the future will probably shit on these bosses and we'll be 1-2 phasing them and complaining that they're too easy.
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The Add Pressure
What makes these fights drag is the adds. You have to have a build that shreds adds FAST. Because of RoN and all of last season, everyone is defaulting to LMGs for this and then wondering why the bosses take an eternity to kill... Add pressure also makes getting the mechanics done quickly very difficult until you spend enough time with the bosses to understand the spawns well enough to abuse them in your favor. Once you can do that, you can blitz through the mechanics in no-time and that (just like the bosses from ST, Pit, Prophecy, Duality, and Spire) is where you save time in your run. That is how you take your runtime down from 2-4 hours to 1.5 hours. Because if you take a long time to kill the adds, or if the adds are constantly forcing you to hide to recover HP, then you are adding time to the run that you don't need to add to the run. And it makes the boss phases feel worse because you spent 10 minutes getting to the phase, only for it to be over at 7% of their HP bar damaged. But if you practice getting that in between time down to 3-5min, and figure out a good weapon loadout... you find that in the time it took you to do two damage phases before for 7% each, you're doing four phases of 10-15% or more. And that's when it starts to shine through as possible.

Closing Thoughts

I don't know what I'd use on a Warlock or Titan because I don't play them much. But you need to find ways to stay alive. You can heal yourself with sublcass abilities and mods. And you can do DPS with things other than what you see on a stream or a youtube video. If you've done these before, then you know how to solve this problem.
There is no such thing as "artificial difficulty". This term refers to challenges that the player feels frustrated by to an unreasonable degree. But all difficulty is artificial. It's all scripted to be a certain difficulty or not. A boss having a lot of HP is no more artificial than a boss having less HP but a long ass mechanics phase. Or very low HP but very short windows for DPS. The bosses in GotD have extremely long DPS phases for how little is actually happening during those phases. All they do is attack you, move around, and spawn some Thrall. And you have what feels like 30-40 seconds of time to shoot at them... So Bungie "artificially" reduced the difficulty there by making the phase take long enough that you have time to deal with the adds and the shield and then still have a comparable amount of time to hit the real HP bar (compared to other dungeons). But right now, it's all fresh and new. And right now you aren't comfortable in the arena. And right now it feels unfair. But it won't in a month or three.
You heard it here first. My predication is that this dungeon will be talked about as one of the easiest released in a long time. And I believe this will be said of it before The Final Shape launches.
So I believe in you Guardian. You can do this. It is made to challenge you to solve the problem. If your solution isn't working, then come up with another one. You don't need a streamer to tell you how to play, or how to do a build. Don't just go for only safety because that too will add full hours to your run that you don't have to spend. Get comfortable with being aggressive. Learn to love riding the red blinking HP line between awesome and despair, and get in there!
TLDR: Ghosts of the Deep is not even remotely out of band compared to previous dungeons in their given release metas. Many dungeons have been outpaced by power creep, but all of them were brutally hard to solo/solo-flawless in their day.

Alright, let’s get down to the nitty gritty of this “mental health awareness” thing that is now so prevalent in society… I am very glad to live in a time where we don’t consider mental disorders to just be a “bad attitude”, of a person in need of a lobotomy, or something like it was in the past, but man, we have overcompensated way too much. We are now in a time where blinking and breathing are “signs of mental illness”. Well, okay, not yet but we’re quickly getting there considering every little quirk that people possess that happens to go against the classic stereotype of “normal”, is now hyper-analyzed and thrown under the diagnostic criteria for any disease that someone could possibly reach and connect it to. I can think of a few things that might be why we came to this. Uncertainty is uncomfortable for people, first of all. It feels good to have an explanation for everything so instead of having all of their burning questions unanswered, people start shoving the wrong puzzle piece in with the hope and desperation that they can finally complete the goddamn thing. “I mean, the puzzle piece literally has the same shape as the one I actually need, it looks so right, why can’t I just put it in instead of sorting through everything for the right one?” I feel like it’s that kind of frustration (I think I’m just bitter about my latest puzzle) but there is also now an “appeal” to sickness in the age of social media. Everyone is comparing themselves to others and feeling inadequate, so they want to find something that makes them unique, not only seemingly to others but even to themselves. Yeah, it’s twisted, I know, imagine practically wishing chronic diarrhea, kidney disease, or cancer on yourself for the sake of attention and validation. It sounds harsh and even “out there”, but think about it, why is a physical illness more unappealing than a mental one? Where the lines do get blurry though, is that while physical illnesses are easily distinguishable, mentally ill behavior can so so easily be recognized as personality traits. And this is why personality traits are now being recognized as mentally ill behavior. For a while, it’s been a simple mistake, which it still is, but now is different. We have glamorized these illnesses based on the kind of people we consider to have them. People are craving depression because it makes them think of the broody poet who is a misunderstood, artistic soul. People are craving anxiety because it makes them think of a submissive sweetheart with an adorable sense of innocence that everyone thinks is so cute. People are craving neurological deficiencies because they think of that one girl from the movies who is… “nOt LiKe tHe OtHeR gIrLs” and is actually more of a catch to the protagonist than the pretty blonde ever was because of her qUirKiNeSs. People are craving psychosis because they think of those mysterious folks who, once you crack, can be the most fascinating of people you’ve ever examined. I can go on for miles but I think you get the point… It sounds insensitive but I just think people need more hobbies or something because I can’t help but know that this is nothing but an attempt to stand out from the crowd and feel established without earning it. If you can’t pridefully be the best, at least you have the chance at being the best at having it the worst. Winning the Oppression Olympics is still a win, and no attention is bad attention. This issue is rooted in the desire for sympathy on top of everything else, of course. The more sympathy you have and the more your mistakes are pinned on some uncontrollable, external force, the more that accountability for shitty actions can just be relieved from your shoulders, masking further feelings of shame and inadequacy. People use these disorders as an excuse for things that literally aren’t even connected to it at this rate. “Sorry I wiped my ass with your toothbrush and then beat your dog, I have depression.” And the worst part is, it’s spread all over the internet so that leads to another potential reason for this nonsense, and that being trends along with word of mouth. Well, it’s not the cause of it all starting in the first place, but certainly a reason why this becomes an even bigger, unstoppable mess. This is so relevant now online that misinformation spreads and spreads, leading impressionable children to jump on the bandwagon, posting themselves faking disorders. I pity all of them, some because I believe they are just ignorant but still genuine, and others because they are so unsatisfied in their lives that they resort to the all time low of crying wolf in the most offensive, grimy way by faking these illnesses on purpose. I wish I could say that was an exaggeration, but there have been multiple cases of people being caught in a lie after having pretended to have things like Tourette’s. And me ten, fuck, even five years ago, would never imagine that the biggest crave would be having autism… It’s absolutely ridiculous and it makes my blood fucking boil because at the end of the day, the attempt was to change the way people view and treat mental illness, Oh it did, alright, but just in the complete opposite direction. The loudest ones on this issue are these people (because trust me, actual sufferers don’t think about taking selfies for Instagram in the midst of a breakdown), and they dominate the internet to the point where they are now the face of all things mental health. Any outsider now will not have increased respect, but will react in such disdain and really, laughter, because it all looks like a pathetic joke now and that fucking sucks for the people who are really in need for patience, support, and understanding. My life has been DESTROYED by the hands of mental illness. It sounds eye-roll inducing now, but to ruin every relationship you have, neglect even basic hygiene from fatigue, and feel so devoid of hope that you contemplate suicide everyday, is very painful and these people just kind of spit in your face by completely devaluing everything you’ve fought through. I have a lot of anger and hate in me for this (as you can tell), but like I said before, I mainly just have pity for the nosedive we’ve taken as a whole…

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My buddy is a badass drummer looking for a badass guitarist in the middle TN area for rock n roll project either new or existing. Msg me here on reddit if interested

Updated May 2023
After changing reddit accounts and about a year since posting it, it seemed prudent to throw this up for visibility. :)
Few things are worse than not knowing what happened to a loved one. Which is what convinced Robin Ayou to get into a drop shuttle with a lifepod with basically nothing, then fire herself down onto an ocean planet where the only place that she could investigate was a tiny little patch of barely-even-land and pray she can survive long enough to find a way to get off the planet.
Nobody ever told Robin she was great at forward planning.
https://subnauticamap.io/belowzero - This map will provide direction/orientation for this guide, but BEWARE! It marks spoilers if you turn those on!

Touchdown

Once you've landed, you'll find some food and water to start you off scattered around the ship. You won't have to worry about getting cold, since standing next to your now-burning ship will warm you up and the meteors coming down don't actually paste you, they're mostly to stress you out.
Note that may not be the case later. The weather in this game is a serious thing.
Once you have your stuff, you'll find the drop pod on your HUD. Don't go straight to it, though. As soon as you hit the water, look for an indentation in the ground. You'll find some copper in there. Then, follow the northern glacial wall (That's to your right when you're looking at your lifepod) until you find a small cave, which will have some silver and gold. That'll get you started off nicely. Get to your lifepod, take a look at your fabricator. You'll find that the items you have blueprints for can be pinned to the top-right in your PDA by clicking on them in the blueprints tab, a useful feature when hunting for materials.
Your goals right now are your basic survival tools. Note that the kelp forest is a bad place to hold your stuff in your hand. The sea monkeys are kleptomaniacs and will gank your stuff. You can totally get it back though, it just means chasing after them a bit, which is annoying and wastes time. However, if you pull out a flare and hold it in front of them, they freak out and run away from you for a little bit.

Time To Get Rolling

Your first task, as indicated by the PDA, is to find Delta Island. This becomes relatively easy once you find a compass. If you've gone to the emergency cache you'll have the beacon blueprint so stock up on them before traveling so you can mark things. You're going to be making a lot of these but since you can toggle them it's not so bad, you'll just need a lot of beacons. Its south of where the drop pod lands. As you spread out your searching range you'll find that the sea floor drops down among twisty coral structures.
This area is called Twisty Bridges. It's the main go-to for coral samples and you'll want those. There's small bits of Alterra stuff scattered around the area. It's here you'll find mobile vehicle bay, sea truck and seaglide fragments. When you've been in the area for a bit, you'll hear what sounds like an SOS. It's worth checking that out and you'll find that this spot goes deeper than you might suspect. Makes you wonder what's down there, doesn't it?
Beyond Twisty Bridges lies the thermal spires, an area of volcanic activity and thermal smokers. Many sea truck fragments are here. The wildlife here is noisy and menacing sounding but if you don't hang out next to them they're easy to avoid. Smacking one with a blade will made it instantly turn and get the hell away from you. They don't like being hit. On the border between thermal spires and twisty bridges someplace is a small foundation platform with external grow beds for you to scan, but you can get these at Omega Station later if you're not sweating on it. There are large crevices and a few volcanic fissures out here. Beware the heat vents, but exploring those areas can pay off, later.
On the island, you'll find blueprints you need, as well as some materials like sulfur and horseshoe nuts. The latter are very useful to plant in the seabase you'll be wanting. Take care to look around thoroughly for blueprints you'll find useful, as not all of them are inside the buildings. Also, keep a sharp eye out for music disks which you'll find scattered throughout the game, especially in bases.
On the south-west corner of the island is a precursor artifact you can scan. Look for the beach with all the pengwings on it. The habitat builder can be found on a box outside Delta Station. Make sure to scan the map inside the sea base. There's also a PDA up by the comms tower.

Let's Go Explorin'

So, by now you've visited Delta Island, have had a good look around Twisty Bridges and you've probably discovered the sea monkey caves in Kelp Forest. If you haven't gone exploring in those, you really ought to. You'll find more MVB fragments there but that's also where the propulsion cannon blueprint can be found, the laser cutter, as well as a fair amount of gold and some precursor artifacts as well. Once that's all done with and taken care of, you've probably got at least a tiny seabase, but if you don't... what are you doing?
Go on, shoo. Go make a base.
...
Okay, got one now? Good! Hopefully it's someplace nice. Your basic sea truck can't get down to where you want to be going next but a depth module will take care of that. A MkII depth module will let you get to the very bottom of where you want to go. Where do you want to go? Koppa Mine. You'll find it on the western side of the island. Take care to look around when you find the door eventually, since there is a databox just inside the main doors, before you head down. It has the moonpool and will allow you to get that much earlier than you would through scanning it.
To drive the seatruck inside the mine, drive north from the entrance of Koppa mine, you'll come across a volcanic fissure in the seafloor nearby which has JUST enough space for you to fit your seatruck through it. The fissure leads right into Koppa Mine, allowing you to drive the seatruck inside!
The other alternative is actually spare air tanks. Totally a viable solution so long as you remember to refill them by equipping them once you're out of the water. You can swap them out mid-dive and extend your breathing time, which is handy since the prawn fragment blueprints you require are kinda far down there. If you're free diving in this way, note that the bottom chamber of the mine has a hole in the ceiling leading to a small cave system which will lead you back to the surface, as well as having a number of oxygen plants to keep you from choking on the way. The entrance to that is almost right next to the Delta Station docks.
Also note that Site Zero, which has useful blueprints, can be found by hugging the northern glacial wall and heading east along it. You can find it by checking breaks in the ice, one of them leads up to a small hidden cave where the base lies. But if you don't find it, you'll be directed here later. It just has some useful things to scan and a lantern fruit tree. There is a music disk here.

Way Down South

By now you've probably answered the SoS. If not, go do that. As you hang out with Al-An, he'll give you prompts to artifacts that you haven't found yet, if you dawdle in looking for the required number. At this point you should have the following:

• A sea base, even a basic one. The databox in Koppa Mine's entrance will grant you the moon pool but if you missed it, you can get the blueprint later following the storyline.
  
• Seaglide, knife, propulsion cannon, beacons, repair tool, scanner, flashlight, builder tool
  
• Seatruck with at least one depth module
  
• Prawn blueprints
  

Building the Prawn is surprisingly easy, but requires lithium, a material you probably haven't seen a lot of yet. There's a little scattered around in thermal spires, but only a little. You can find a lot at purple vents, but be careful to avoid the doom shrimp. A chelicarate hangs out here. There are other things in this area which are relevant to you which you'll want to mark out for later. There is a small seatruck crash site with a variety of fragments out here, if you find it, look around carefully for the music disk that's here.
Following the marker for the unknown pilots last position, you will find a green area rich in confusing cave systems. This area is the lilypads zone. Old girl can be found down near the signal, just look for the shimmering things on the wall, the hive minds. She's near them. Grab the seatruck defense module she has in there. Be sure to pick up the databox directly outside her base to get the stillsuit as well and if you follow the caves down where they turn blue you'll stumble on an old thermal plant of hers, where another databox lies. There's fragments scattered all over this zone as well as The mercury II stern, which lays on the border between lilypads and purple vents, as well as the bow, which is a little further in on the western side of lilypads. Be sure to explore the area thoroughly and take note of the massive crevasse near the middle of the zone. Inside the chunk of land here is Omega Lab, which will net you the external grow beds, nuclear plant, nuclear disposal as well as a couple new beds and the antenna plants. It's in this area you'll need to search for nickel later, so building a scanner station here is a good idea. Deep Lilypads holds an Al-An body part you'll require. Deep Lilypads is also the only place you can acquire the materials to manufacture benzene.
Don't go too close to the Lily Paddlers, unless you like being off your face, in which case go say hi, it's hilarious. Trust me. ;D
In order to disable the satellite for Dances-With-Reapers, you're going to need to wreck dive the Mercury II. Two of its sections can be found in purple vents, while the bow - the largest - can be found in Lilypads, west of Omega Labs floating island. You'll need the laser cutter for this. Your goal is to scan the parallel processors in the wreck, but there's all kinds of really useful stuff in there too, not to mention all the titanium. ALL the titanium. So be sure to drop beacons on these things, bring a spare air tank and bring your pathfinder tool. If you don't have the pathfinder tool, go look around in the caves full of emeralds between Phi Robotics docks and Phi Robotics itself. There is one up on a small ridge in one of those caves. If you can't find it, don't worry though, just bring flares and use them as breadcrumbs while diving to prevent yourself from getting too lost. The alien containment tank, reinforced dive suit, parallel processor can be found in these. A music disk is in the bow section on a bridge console.

LAND HO!

Aaah, glacial basin. How I hate thee. The basin is split into four sections, two for each part of the basin, north and south. South is where you'll probably end up first. You can find the docks to access this area by tracking along the northern glacial wall and continuing west until you come to the eye jellyfish. Check the radio tower next to the docks, there is a music disk there. The upper southern area is where Phi Robotics lays, as well as frost vase plants and spicy peppers. Both of those are excellent crops to grow, as they net you useful things. The spicy peppers scattered throughout the entirety of glacial basin essentially means that you'll not starve while out here so long as you're paying attention to what you're doing. Note that snow stalkers REALLY HATE FLARES. They'll make your trips out here annoying, even in the prawn, which is the best way to ensure the weather isn't a factor for you. Sometimes they're in the caves. Flares will make exploring these much safer.
You can get to lower glacial basin through the upper part, but it's a bit confusing and I prefer to access it via the glacial tunnel. Head south along the western glacial wall from the glacial basin docks and you'll find a tunnel which eye jellyfish are hanging out near. This tunnel leads directly to lower glacial basin and provides a convenient way to access the area without needing to travel through upper GB every time.
Northern Glacial Basin can be accessed by scanning the hydraulic fluid on the bridge, then repairing the bridge to cross it. DO NOT GO HERE WITHOUT THE PRAWN. SERIOUSLY. The grip arm is very handy to have out here and if you haven't found it, use a scanner room in Lilypads to find the sea monkey nests but it's not necessary so don't stress if you don't have it. Just don't use the snow fox. It's useless and handles like crap.
The iceworms here are dangerous if you stay still too long. Take your time, explore thoroughly and mark out any Alterra sites you find with beacons. A couple of these have the blueprints for the Thumper and this is your ticket to working in this area safely. A thumper will keep the iceworms away within a radius, ensuring you don't get whacked while picking stuff up outside the prawn.
Along the western wall of this zone is a small cave with three large ion cube deposits. Keep a sharp eye out for it, you definitely want those. At the north-east tip of the zone you'll find ice worm corpses you can scan that don't put you in mortal danger during the attempt.
Really funny seeing them pop up and chow down on snow stalkers, though. Pay back sucks, don't it? Al-An's body part is out here. Keep an eye out for the precursor cables and make sure to check all the caves, because the master gateway leading to Phi Robotics is here as well. The room containing the gateway leads to a small docks and tunnel with an ice wall you can cut through to easily access the middle of northern glacial basin from the docks. There is a music disk at those docks as well.

Going Down?

By now you're probably wondering where to go. Remember purple vents? The engine part of the mercury II has a crevasse leading down to where you need to go next. Once you've found the crystal caves, you better hope you picked up the defense module at Marg's base. It's sitting inside her room and sometimes gets knocked to the floor when Preston jumps you. You'll be wanting it for what's down here.
The Shadow Leviathan.
Ohhhh boy are they ever aggressive. Good news for you though, they patrol around on a set route and they don't go through the whole of crystal caves. You'll be looking for fragments here, as well as materials. Lots of gold, silver and kyanite in the crevasses in the floor of these caves. An Al-An body part, the final one, can be found at the bottom of a tunnel which is mouthed by a circular formation of crystals. Once you have it, you'll want to go even deeper to find the fabrication facility, forcing you to wander crystal caves until you find the blood crystal caves.

Oh Yeah, It's All Comin' Together

So, you now have everything you need to build your home boy a body. Once that's done, you'll be wanting to wrap up the bit with Sam. If you've explored lower southern glacial basin, you'll have found the cave with the frozen leviathan. Oh, and grab the music disk in the security bunker. Exploring this cave gets you some useful stuff. You know the little caves here with the blinking markers? Explore these with spy penglings! There's some useful stuff in some of them, actually. Including the antidote Sam hid. You can use that on the loader located on the upper part of the leviathan in the cave.
And... that's that! That's the whole game.

Tips and Tricks

• The air bladder can pull a tiny amount of air into your tank. It's not very much but those 10 seconds of extra air can save your life in a deep pinch.
  
• You can find lots of quartz if you hug the northern ice wall and roam east of west, but be careful of the brinewings. They'll freeze your ass, which can be inconvenient if you're low on air.
  
• Frost Anemone Hearts are actually a really great food source and should be picked up any time you can get them. They'll last forever in the fridge.
  
• Made your base with some helpful sea monkey neighbours? After awhile they stop stealing from you and begin trying to help you - but they don't know what you want! If you mark blueprints in your PDA, they'll try and bring you materials for that if they can.
  
• Most predators will back off if you feed them a fish before they bite you. This includes leviathans. You might still get hurt from them slamming into you or something but feeding them a fish will usually cause them to stop attacking you. This doesn't work against the shadow leviathan, it hates you and everything you hold dear. It doesn't know what those things are, but it doesn't care either. It just does.
  
• Spare air tanks are great and can be kept stocked in your sea truck, but remember to put them on to refill them.
  
• Animals will react to your behavior in some instances. Feel tree to try new things with them like feeding fish. You can even ride on glow whales! Some of them really hate flares too, like sea monkeys and snow stalkers.
  
• Surface bases are a completely viable thing in this game and some of the ice sheets have holes in them, allowing you to have a surface base with a dropped section for moonpools and water filters. Water filters will work outside of the water, but you don't get salt and they're much slower.
  
• Get the cold suit as soon as you can. It's in Phi Robotics. It changes your outside time from 2 minutes to 7 minutes, which is a huge difference. Without it, the prawn is the only way to explore the surface without constantly stressing about freezing to death. You can find the tufts of fur in snow stalker caves where the pups are, make sure you have a flare if you don't like getting nommed on.
  
• Can't figure out how to get on top of the ice sheet, but you want a base up there? Swim down deep and use the air bladder to get some height. You can build a hallway up there, then drop a ladder down into the water to make a surface base with an underwater docking section. Alternatively, you can probably get up there with the prawn and the grip arm.
  
• Speaking of the prawn and grip arm, you can totally launch yourself with it. Attaching the grip to the ground and using it to pull yourself into a jump will get you some serious air time, which is helpful for getting up small ridges on the surface. If you break the map and managed to get above it in the prawn, return to the player area. Being up there breaks progression completely and the only interesting thing is a leftover animation testbed east of glacial basin. The collision on terrain is also patchy here and it's possible to fall through the ground into the void. In your prawn. So don't screw around up there too much.
  
• Spicy peppers and coffee will both warm you up while on the surface, which makes the spicy peppers scattered all over the place pretty valuable.
  
• The greenhouse you get sent to can be found in Lilypads on an iceberg. The three large icebergs here all have things to find so be sure to search thoroughly.
  
• The crashed ship is a great place to get a lot of metal very quickly and will basically hand you a free sea base so long as you're willing to go keep picking it up. If you've already looted it all, give it awhile and check back later, sometimes new scrap shows up as the wrecks continue their eventual rot.
  
• Drop emergency caches of food, water, medpacks, batteries, power cells and flares along with a beacon and never be caught short on supplies because you went out looking for stuff and forgot to bring rations. D'oh!
  
• A small base specifically for replacing vehicles is very helpful when you lose one. Have the materials gathered beforehand and you won't have to spend a long time struggling to get them together after the bad feeling of having your stuff crunched.
  
• Be sure to look for creature eggs out in glacial basin
  
• Rock punchers are jerks and will kill stuff in your containment tank, so now you know, and knowing is half the battle. And the lives of your fish.
  
• There is no good way to scan the leviathans, but your scan progress gets saved if you don't scan other things, so letting it chow down on your seatruck and scanning it while it's distracted, then repairing your vehicle after, will allow you to get the whole scan after a couple rounds.
  
• Make scanner rooms everywhere. Solar panels and bio reactors are your friend. Nuclear power is better but not viable in early game. If you need magnetite, go to the glacial tunnel and look at the ice walls just where the tunnel curves upwards, you'll find ore fissures there with magnetite inside.
  
• Beacons, beacons, beacons. I can't stress this enough, litter them EVERYWHERE. You can toggle them on and off in your PDA, so having a bajillion around the map isn't really a problem and they're really useful.
  
• There are more precursor artifacts than Al-An mentions to you. Keep a sharp eye out, look everywhere and scan for ion cubes. Check icebergs for moulins, AKA hollow chambers inside. You'll need a laser cutter to access the ones you find.
  
• Tree Spires has a hell of a lot of uraninite in its cave systems, it's a good spot to stock up on it. Beware the chelicarate in the zone.
  
• The crystal caves are roughly the shape of a spiral. Knowing this makes navigating them a lot less mystifying. Mind you, it's still difficult. As usual, use beacons a lot. Also make sure to explore the cracks in the floor of the cave!
  
• Penglins/Pengwings drown if you leave them in the alien containment tank after hatching :( They have to hold their breaths. If you breed them, make sure to set them free.
  
• There are no large nodes for lead. You must search for galena outcrops with the scanner room. It's pretty much the only way to stock up on the stuff. The other one people have a lot of trouble with is Magnetite, which can only be found in lower glacial basin. You'll want a scanner room to find it. Upper glacial basin has a TON of lithium if you can handle the ice worms... as well as three large mining nodes for ion cubes hidden in a cave.
  
• Keep exploring Upper Glacial Basin even if you find the precursor body part. There are ice worm corpses and a slipgate out here for you to find. The slipgate links to the Phi Robotics slipgate and has a tunnel which leads directly back out to the docks that you can only cut open from the inside. There's also a music disk down there on a crate so keep a sharp eye out when you find it.
  

Good luck, Robin!

11th Moon, 200 AC
Highgarden
​

But I'm trying to forget about it
Feelin' like I'm breaking a sweat about it
Wishin' you would kindly get out of my head about it
Tellin' myself one day I'll forget about it
Knowin' that it probably isn't true
- Cool About It, boygenius

​
The little ones had been crying for their mother the entire journey. Over a week it had been - eight days of nothing but crying from two toddlers and a baby. Elayna had thought she’d gone mad by the mid-way point. She very briefly considered leaving them on the side of the Ocean Road and carrying on alone, but in an act that surprised Elayna more than anything it had been Emrick to take the reins for her, giving her his wineskin and a few hours of peace as he wrangled their three baby siblings. It was an uncommon act for him, but she tried to rationalise it in her mind. Perhaps he was at his wit’s end too.
But they were here now. Or they were nearly there, and Aerea, Rolder and Aerys were too tired to cry now. At least the last leg of the journey would be an easier one, even if Elayna felt as tired as they did. How much had she slept, she wondered? When she looked at her reflection in the tiny handheld mirror she’d brought with her on the road, she saw the deep, dark bags that surrounded her eyes. Not enough.
She didn’t want to be at Highgarden. She wanted to be at home with her mother and step-father, and her grandfather too. She wanted to hear the peaceful ebb and sway of the sunset sea again, and yet she was here, at Highgarden. She knew why, too - her mother had told her everything before their departure. Uncle Forley was gone, and her mother had to return to the Banefort to secure their ancestral home from their attacks. To refuse to call her banners in response, in order to ensure both Forley’s safety and House Banefort’s as a whole. And Elayna and her siblings were at Highgarden. Dare she say it, but she felt almost scared. She wondered if Emrick and Myrcella felt it too, and Genna all the way Gods-knew-where at that point.
The wheelhouse was approaching Highgarden now - the wheels had begun to creak at some point, and it had been so long with it she wondered if she’d imagined it the whole journey. Burgeoning madness aside, at least they had something to look forward to; They’d met Raymont’s cousins, or sisters, or whatever it was, while they were at Casterly Rock, and they’d travelled back to the Reach nearly as quickly as they arrived. She could at least pick up on where she’d left off when she met them - any marriage with the Hightowers or their bannermen would have strengthened the Baneforts to a hight they’d sorely missed for years.
But there was also Emma - they’d been headed for Horn Hill before they got the messenger her mother had sent for her, and that at the very least cut their journey down a portion. Elayna had met the Tarlys during their visits to the Reach while Denys was alive, and they’d been friendly. She was friendly with Emma’s brother, too. A friend would do her some good right now, she knew.
As the wheelhouse neared the gates of Highgarden Elayne jumped out to hail her House’s arrival, swiftly strutting around it to wave down the guards above her.
“Hail!”
She managed to get one of the guards’ attention, at least.
“Elayna Banefort, and my young siblings. We’ve come to meet the Lady of Horn Hill.”
She went on foot as the wheelhouse sluggishly rolled through the gates and into the safety of Highgarden’s walls. It was… Incredibly green, she realised. Which made sense. She didn’t expect it to be quite so green, though.
She waved down a servant strolling through the yard, and made her way over to him.
“Send for Lady Tarly, please.”

Hi everyone!
50 days ago, just before the launch of Festival of Legends, we had a meta prediction contest here in the subreddit (read more here). Around 325 entrants answered 23 different questions about the meta, and now I will reveal who has won the title "Festival Legend".
There have been a few buffs and one nerf (Rowdy Fan) and the way I ruled it this time is that any card that has been buffed will not be counted towards being the most impactful card, and any card that has been nerfed will automatically be counted as the most impactful card, along with the card with the most "In % of decks".
These are the correct answers:
​

Question	Hearthstone top vote	Correct answer(s) (vote % in parenthesis)
#1 - Most played Death Knight card?	Death Growl (33%)	Arcanite Ripper (11.9%)
#2 - Most played Demon Hunter card?	Glaivetar (33%)	Taste of Chaos (18.8%)
#3 - Most played Druid card?	Groovy Cat (29.2%)	Groovy Cat (29.2%)
#4 - Most played Hunter card?	Barrel of Monkeys (21%)	Bunch of Bananas (16.1%)
#5 - Most played Mage card?	Volume Up (30%)	Cosmic Keyboard (17.3%)
#6 - Most played Paladin card?	Disco Maul (33.1%)	Disco Maul (33.1%)
#7 - Most played Priest card?	Love Everlasting (26%)	Power Word: Synchronize (4.9%)
#8 - Most played Rogue card?	Breakdance (30%)	Mic Drop (8.2%)
#9 - Most played Shaman card?	JIVE, INSECT (26.7%)	JIVE, INSECT (26.7%)
#10 - Most played Warlock card?	Symphony of Sins (35%)	Felstring Harp (15.8%)
#11 - Most played Warrior card?	Roaring Applause (35%)	Blackrock 'n' Roll (4.6%)
#12 - Most played Neutral Legendary card?	E.T.C., Band Manager (48.6%)	E.T.C., Band Manager (48.6%)
#13 - Most played Neutral Epic/Rare card?	Audio Amplifier (29.5%)	Audio Amplifier (29.5%)
#14 - Most played Neutral Common card?	Instrument Tech (22%)	Rowdy Fan (19.1%), Ghost Writer (4%)
#15 - Most played legendary card?	E.T.C., Band Manager (31.9%)	E.T.C., Band Manager (31.9%)
#16 - Most overrated legendary card? - Card with the highest value in [share of votes in #15] - [in % of decks]	Bounce Around (ft. Garona) (21%)	E.T.C., Band Manager (7.6%)
#17 - Most underrated legendary card? - Card with the lowest value in [share of votes in #15] - [in % of decks]	Pozzik, Audio Engineer (17%)	Photographer Fizzle (4%)
#18 - The most played legendary song?	Symphony of Sins (30%)	Love Everlasting (12.5%)
#19 - The most played legendary musician?	Mister Mukla (20%)	Zok Fogsnout (3.6%)
#20 - The most played instrument?	Glaivetar (26%)	Disco Maul (22.8%)
#21 - Highest class frequency on standard ranked ladder (VS data reaper report - over all ranks)	Death Knight (43.2%)	Death Knight (43.2%)
#22 - Lowest class frequency on standard ranked ladder (VS data reaper report - over all ranks)	Warrior (68%)	Shaman (18.2%)
#23 - Most played legendary card in Wild?	E.T.C., Band Manager (22.2%)	E.T.C., Band Manager (22.2%)

This means that the average Redditor (a.k.a Reddit hive mind) would get 8 points correct, which would yield a 23rd place! Well done hearthstone.
So who did the best? Well there were five entrants who managed to get 10 points or above. But just outside the top 3 we find:

1. u/Reelox14 - 10 p (tie breaker 6, 3) (oh look that's me!)
   
2. u/Spinethrasher - 10 p (tie breaker (6, 4)
   

And the winners of the flair "Festival Roadie" are:

1. u/RSunnyG - 10 p (tie breaker 7, 4)
   
2. u/Monkeybreath85 - 10 p (tie breaker 8, 4)
   

Congrats to the both of you!
However... there was one redditor who just couldn't be beat this time. They crushed the competition with a total of 12 points! The winner of this edition of the contest, and the owner of the one and only "Festival Legend" flair is:

1. u/subsume_ - 12 p

Big congrats to you! Hope that you wear your new flair with a sense of pride and accomplishment! Mods will add your new personal flair shortly.
If anyone is interested in their score, the full standings, as well as the list of all submissions can be found here: Link to spreadsheet with all entries.
Thanks for participating to all of you, and let me know if you want any other data that I haven't provided.

Everything in my inventory is up for trade. The most valuable items are listed here, the rest you can find in My Inventory

Feel free to Add Me or even better send a Trade Offer. Open for any suggestions: upgrades, downgrades / knives, gloves, skins / stickers, patterns, floats.

All Buyouts are listed in cash value.

KNIVES

★ Butterfly Knife Freehand FN #1, B/O: $2500

★ Butterfly Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $822

★ Butterfly Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $616

⎯

★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW #1, B/O: $1300

★ Bayonet Autotronic FN, B/O: $1050

★ Bayonet Tiger Tooth MW, B/O: $629

★ Bayonet Bright Water FT, B/O: $326

★ Bayonet Safari Mesh BS, B/O: $233

⎯

★ Karambit Lore FT, B/O: $1110

★ Karambit Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $840

★ Karambit Freehand MW, B/O: $784

★ Karambit Bright Water MW, B/O: $759

⎯

★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1801

★ M9 Bayonet Fade FN, B/O: $1801

★ M9 Bayonet Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $751

⎯

★ Nomad Knife Fade FN, B/O: $1156

★ Nomad Knife Slaughter MW, B/O: $544

★ Nomad Knife Blue Steel WW, B/O: $318

⎯

★ Flip Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $646

★ Flip Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $574

★ Flip Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) MW, B/O: $552

★ Flip Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $257

★ Flip Knife Freehand FT, B/O: $255

★ StatTrak™ Flip Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $287

⎯

★ Huntsman Knife Lore FN, B/O: $461

★ Huntsman Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $436

★ Huntsman Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $353

★ Huntsman Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $212

★ Huntsman Knife Bright Water FT, B/O: $129

★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT MW, B/O: $129

★ Huntsman Knife Forest DDPAT BS, B/O: $123

★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife Rust Coat BS, B/O: $127

⎯

★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $375

★ Bowie Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $363

★ Bowie Knife Tiger Tooth FN, B/O: $269

★ Bowie Knife Crimson Web WW, B/O: $192

★ Bowie Knife Bright Water FN, B/O: $159

★ Bowie Knife Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $126

⎯

★ Stiletto Knife Slaughter FN, B/O: $616

★ Stiletto Knife Crimson Web FT, B/O: $412

★ StatTrak™ Stiletto Knife Night Stripe FT, B/O: $227

⎯

★ Falchion Knife Lore FT, B/O: $214

★ Falchion Knife Autotronic FT, B/O: $192

★ Falchion Knife Scorched WW, B/O: $105

⎯

★ Survival Knife Crimson Web BS, B/O: $216

★ Survival Knife Case Hardened FT, B/O: $198

★ Survival Knife Scorched FT, B/O: $111

⎯

★ Shadow Daggers Fade FN, B/O: $368

★ Shadow Daggers Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $228

★ Shadow Daggers, B/O: $201

★ Shadow Daggers Damascus Steel FT, B/O: $108

★ Shadow Daggers Ultraviolet FT, B/O: $105

★ Shadow Daggers Black Laminate FT, B/O: $99

★ Shadow Daggers Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $85

⎯

★ Gut Knife Doppler (Sapphire) MW #1, B/O: $1700

★ Gut Knife Gamma Doppler (Phase 1) FN, B/O: $223

★ Gut Knife Marble Fade FN, B/O: $203

★ Gut Knife Doppler (Phase 2) FN, B/O: $191

★ Gut Knife Case Hardened BS, B/O: $127

⎯

★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199

★ Navaja Knife Doppler (Phase 4) FN, B/O: $199

★ Navaja Knife, B/O: $138

★ Navaja Knife Damascus Steel FN, B/O: $111

⎯

★ Classic Knife Urban Masked FT, B/O: $146

★ StatTrak™ Classic Knife Stained BS, B/O: $168

⎯

★ Ursus Knife Doppler (Phase 3) FN, B/O: $476

★ Ursus Knife, B/O: $375

⎯

★ Skeleton Knife, B/O: $1137

★ Talon Knife, B/O: $608

★ Paracord Knife, B/O: $305

★ Survival Knife Forest DDPAT FT, B/O: $97

GLOVES

★ Moto Gloves Transport MW, B/O: $204

★ Moto Gloves Polygon BS, B/O: $142

★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84

★ Moto Gloves Blood Pressure BS, B/O: $84

★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63

★ Moto Gloves 3rd Commando Company BS, B/O: $63

⎯

★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Kimono WW, B/O: $1215

★ Specialist Gloves Tiger Strike FT, B/O: $672

★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander FT, B/O: $305

★ Specialist Gloves Lt. Commander BS, B/O: $140

★ Specialist Gloves Crimson Web BS, B/O: $137

★ Specialist Gloves Buckshot FT, B/O: $75

⎯

★ Driver Gloves Crimson Weave FT, B/O: $359

★ Driver Gloves Imperial Plaid BS, B/O: $229

★ Driver Gloves Overtake BS, B/O: $77

★ Driver Gloves Racing Green FT, B/O: $48

⎯

★ Sport Gloves Omega FT, B/O: $739

★ Sport Gloves Amphibious BS #2, B/O: $733

★ Sport Gloves Arid BS, B/O: $292

⎯

★ Hand Wraps Giraffe MW, B/O: $212

★ Hand Wraps Leather FT, B/O: $160

★ Hand Wraps Desert Shamagh MW, B/O: $101

⎯

★ Broken Fang Gloves Yellow-banded MW, B/O: $185

★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point FT, B/O: $67

★ Broken Fang Gloves Needle Point WW, B/O: $59

⎯

★ Hydra Gloves Case Hardened BS, B/O: $65

★ Hydra Gloves Emerald FT, B/O: $65

★ Hydra Gloves Emerald BS, B/O: $62

WEAPONS

AK-47 Case Hardened BS, B/O: $130

AK-47 Bloodsport MW, B/O: $79

AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76

AK-47 Fuel Injector BS, B/O: $76

AK-47 Bloodsport FT, B/O: $70

AK-47 Neon Rider MW, B/O: $60

StatTrak™ AK-47 Aquamarine Revenge FT, B/O: $72

⎯

AWP Fade FN, B/O: $1039

AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139

AWP Asiimov FT, B/O: $139

AWP Wildfire MW, B/O: $95

AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93

AWP BOOM MW, B/O: $93

AWP Duality FN, B/O: $81

AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79

AWP Asiimov BS, B/O: $79

AWP Chromatic Aberration FN, B/O: $60

StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68

StatTrak™ AWP Hyper Beast FT, B/O: $68

StatTrak™ AWP Electric Hive FT, B/O: $55

⎯

Desert Eagle Blaze FN, B/O: $623

Desert Eagle Emerald Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $241

Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81

Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81

Desert Eagle Cobalt Disruption FN, B/O: $81

Desert Eagle Printstream FT, B/O: $54

⎯

M4A1-S Blue Phosphor FN, B/O: $434

StatTrak™ M4A1-S Bright Water MW, B/O: $55

⎯

M4A4 Poseidon FN, B/O: $1465

M4A4 Asiimov BS, B/O: $55

M4A4 Hellfire MW, B/O: $50

⎯

USP-S Kill Confirmed MW, B/O: $72

USP-S Printstream FT, B/O: $69

StatTrak™ USP-S Kill Confirmed FT, B/O: $139

⎯

AUG Flame Jörmungandr FN, B/O: $234

P90 Run and Hide FT, B/O: $147

Five-SeveN Candy Apple FN, B/O: $61

Trade Offer Link - Steam Profile Link - My Inventory

Knives - Bowie Knife, Butterfly Knife, Falchion Knife, Flip Knife, Gut Knife, Huntsman Knife, M9 Bayonet, Bayonet, Karambit, Shadow Daggers, Stiletto Knife, Ursus Knife, Navaja Knife, Talon Knife, Classic Knife, Paracord Knife, Survival Knife, Nomad Knife, Skeleton Knife, Patterns - Gamma Doppler, Doppler (Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, Phase 4, Black Pearl, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald), Crimson Web, Lore, Fade, Ultraviolet, Night, Marble Fade (Fire & Ice, Fake FI), Case Hardened (Blue Gem), Autotronic, Slaughter, Black Laminate, Tiger Tooth, Boreal Forest, Scorched, Blue Steel, Vanilla, Damascus Steel, Forest DDPAT, Urban Masked, Freehand, Stained, Bright Water, Safari Mesh, Rust Coat, Gloves - Bloodhound Gloves (Charred, Snakebite, Guerrilla, Bronzed), Driver Gloves (Snow Leopard, King Snake, Crimson Weave, Imperial Plaid, Black Tie, Lunar Weave, Diamondback, Rezan the Red, Overtake, Queen Jaguar, Convoy, Racing Green), Hand Wraps (Cobalt Skulls, CAUTION!, Overprint, Slaughter, Leather, Giraffe, Badlands, Spruce DDPAT, Arboreal, Constrictor, Desert Shamagh, Duct Tape), Moto Gloves (Spearmint, POW!, Cool Mint, Smoke Out, Finish Line, Polygon, Blood Pressure, Turtle, Boom!, Eclipse, 3rd Commando Company, Transport), Specialist Gloves (Crimson Kimono, Tiger Strike, Emerald Web, Field Agent, Marble Fade, Fade, Foundation, Lt. Commander, Crimson Web, Mogul, Forest DDPAT, Buckshot), Sport Gloves (Pandora's Box, Superconductor, Hedge Maze, Vice, Amphibious, Slingshot, Omega, Arid, Big Game, Nocts, Scarlet Shamagh, Bronze Morph), Hydra Gloves (Case Hardened, Emerald, Rattler, Mangrove), Broken Fang Gloves (Jade, Yellow-banded, Unhinged, Needle Point), Pistols - P2000 (Wicked Sick, Ocean Foam, Fire Element, Amber Fade, Corticera, Chainmail, Imperial Dragon, Obsidian, Scorpion, Handgun, Acid Etched), USP-S (Printstream, Kill Confirmed, Whiteout, Road Rash, Owergrowth, The Traitor, Neo-Noir, Dark Water, Orion, Blueprint, Stainless, Caiman, Serum, Monster Mashup, Royal Blue, Ancient Visions, Cortex, Orange Anolis, Ticket To Hell, Black Lotus, Cyrex, Check Engine, Guardian, Purple DDPAT, Torque, Blood Tiger, Flashback, Business Class, Pathfinder, Para Green), Lead Conduit, Glock-18 (Umbral Rabbit, Fade, Candy Apple, Bullet Queen, Synth Leaf, Neo-Noir, Nuclear Garden, Dragon Tatto, Reactor, Pink DDPAT, Twilight Galaxy, Sand Dune, Groundwater, Blue Fissure, Snack Attack, Water Elemental, Brass, Wasteland Rebel, Vogue, Franklin, Royal Legion, Gamma Doppler, Weasel, Steel Disruption, Ironwork, Grinder, High Beam, Moonrise, Oxide Blaze, Bunsen Burner, Clear Polymer, Bunsen Burner, Night), P250 (Re.built, Nuclear Threat, Modern Hunter, Splash, Whiteout, Vino Primo, Mehndi, Asiimov, Visions, Undertow, Cartel, See Ya Later, Gunsmoke, Splash, Digital Architect, Muertos, Red Rock, Bengal Tiger, Crimson Kimono, Wingshot, Metallic DDPAT, Hive, Dark Filigree, Mint Kimono), Five-Seven (Neon Kimono, Berries And Cherries, Fall Hazard, Crimson Blossom, Hyper Beast, Nitro, Fairy Tale, Case Hardened, Copper Galaxy, Angry Mob, Monkey Business, Fowl Play, Anodized Gunmetal, Hot Shot, Retrobution, Boost Protocol), CZ75-Auto (Chalice, Crimson Web, Emerald Quartz, The Fuschia is Now, Nitro, Xiangliu, Yellow Jacket, Victoria, Poison Dart, Syndicate, Eco, Hexane, Pole, Tigris), Tec-9 (Rebel, Terrace, Nuclear Threat, Hades, Rust Leaf, Decimator, Blast From, Orange Murano, Toxic, Fuel Injector, Remote Control, Bamboo Forest, Isaac, Avalanche, Brother, Re-Entry, Blue Titanium, Bamboozle), R8 Revolver (Banana Cannon, Fade, Blaze, Crimson Web, Liama Cannon, Crazy 8, Reboot, Canal Spray, Night, Amber Fade), Desert Eagle (Blaze, Hand Cannon, Fennec Fox, Sunset Storm, Emerald Jörmungandr, Pilot, Hypnotic, Golden Koi, Printstream, Cobalt Disruption, Code Red, Ocean Drive, Midnight Storm, Kumicho Dragon, Crimson Web, Heirloom, Night Heist, Mecha Industries, Night, Conspiracy, Trigger Discipline, Naga, Directive, Light Rail), Dual Berettas (Flora Carnivora, Duelist, Cobra Strike, Black Limba, Emerald, Hemoglobin, Twin Turbo, Marina, Melondrama, Pyre, Retribution, Briar, Dezastre, Royal Consorts, Urban Shock, Dualing Dragons, Panther, Balance), Rifles - Galil (Aqua Terrace, Winter Forest, Chatterbox, Sugar Rush, Pheonix Blacklight, CAUTION!, Orange DDPAT, Cerberus, Dusk Ruins, Eco, Chromatic Aberration, Stone Cold, Tuxedo, Sandstorm, Shattered, Urban Rubble, Rocket Pop, Kami, Crimson Tsunami, Connexion), SCAR-20 (Fragments, Brass, Cyrex, Palm, Splash Jam, Cardiac, Emerald, Crimson Web, Magna Carta, Stone Mosaico, Bloodsport, Enforcer), AWP (Duality, Gungnir, Dragon Lore, Prince, Medusa, Desert Hydra, Fade, Lightning Strike, Oni Taiji, Silk Tiger, Graphite, Chromatic Aberration, Asiimov, Snake Camo, Boom, Containment Breach, Wildfire, Redline, Electric Hive, Hyper Beast, Neo-Noir, Man-o'-war, Pink DDPAT, Corticera, Sun in Leo, Elite Build, Fever Dream, Atheris, Mortis, PAW, Exoskeleton, Worm God, POP AWP, Phobos, Acheron, Pit Viper, Capillary, Safari Mesh), AK-47 (Head Shot, Wild Lotus, Gold Arabesque, X-Ray, Fire Serpent, Hydroponic, Panthera Onca, Case Hardened, Vulcan, Jet Set, Fuel Injector, Bloodsport, Nightwish, First Class, Neon Rider, Asiimov, Red Laminate, Aquamarine Revenge, The Empress, Wasteland Rebel, Jaguar, Black Laminate, Leet Museo, Neon Revolution, Redline, Frontside Misty, Predator, Legion of Anubis, Point Disarray, Orbit Mk01, Blue Laminate, Green Laminate, Emerald Pinstripe, Cartel, Phantom Disruptor, Jungle Spray, Safety Net, Rat Rod, Baroque Purple, Slate, Elite Build, Uncharted, Safari Mesh), FAMAS (Sundown, Prime Conspiracy, Afterimage, Commemoration, Dark Water, Spitfire, Pulse, Eye of Athena, Meltdown, Rapid Eye Move, Roll Cage, Styx, Mecha Industrie, Djinn, ZX Spectron, Valence, Neural Net, Night Borre, Hexne), M4A4 (Temukau, Howl, Poseidon, Asiimov, Daybreak, Hellfire, Zirka, Red DDPAT, Radiation Hazard, Modern Hunter, The Emperor, The Coalition, Bullet Rain, Cyber Security, X-Ray, Dark Blossom, Buzz Kill, In Living Color, Neo-Noir, Desolate Space, 龍王 (Dragon King), Royal Paladin, The Battlestar, Global Offensive, Tooth Fairy, Desert-Strike, Griffin, Evil Daimyo, Spider Lily, Converter), M4A1-S (Emphorosaur-S, Welcome to the Jungle, Imminent Danger, Knight, Hot Rod, Icarus Fell, Blue Phosphor, Printstream, Master Piece, Dark Water, Golden Coil, Bright Water, Player Two, Atomic Alloy, Guardian, Chantico's Fire, Hyper Beast, Mecha Industries, Cyrex, Control Panel, Moss Quartz, Nightmare, Decimator, Leaded Glass, Basilisk, Blood Tiger, Briefing, Night Terror, Nitro, VariCamo, Flashback), SG 553 (Cyberforce, Hazard Pay, Bulldozer, Integrale, Dragon Tech, Ultraviolet, Colony IV, Hypnotic, Cyrex, Candy Apple, Barricade, Pulse), SSG 08 (Death Strike, Sea Calico, Blood in the Water, Orange Filigree, Dragonfire, Big Iron, Bloodshot, Detour, Turbo Peek, Red Stone), AUG (Akihabara Accept, Flame Jörmungandr, Hot Rod, Midnight Lily, Sand Storm, Carved Jade, Wings, Anodized Navy, Death by Puppy, Torque, Bengal Tiger, Chameleon, Fleet Flock, Random Access, Momentum, Syd Mead, Stymphalian, Arctic Wolf, Aristocrat, Navy Murano), G3SG1 (Chronos, Violet Murano, Flux, Demeter, Orange Kimono, The Executioner, Green Apple, Arctic Polar Camo, Contractor), SMGs - P90 (Neoqueen, Astral Jörmungandr, Run and Hide, Emerald Dragon, Cold Blooded, Death by Kitty, Baroque Red, Vent Rush, Blind Spot, Asiimov, Trigon, Sunset Lily, Death Grip, Leather, Nostalgia, Fallout Warning, Tiger Pit, Schermatic, Virus, Shapewood, Glacier Mesh, Shallow Grave, Chopper, Desert Warfare), MAC-10 (Sakkaku, Hot Snakes, Copper Borre, Red Filigree, Gold Brick, Graven, Case Hardened, Stalker, Amber Fade, Neon Rider, Tatter, Curse, Propaganda, Nuclear Garden, Disco Tech, Toybox, Heat, Indigo), UMP-45 (Wild Child, Fade, Blaze, Day Lily, Minotaur's Labyrinth, Crime Scene, Caramel, Bone Pile, Momentum, Primal Saber), MP7 (Teal Blossom, Fade, Nemesis, Whiteout, Asterion, Bloosport, Abyssal Apparition, Full Stop, Special Delivery, Neon Ply, Asterion, Ocean Foam, Powercore, Scorched, Impire), PP-Bizon (Modern Hunter, Rust Coat, Forest Leaves, Antique, High Roller, Blue Streak, Seabird, Judgement of Anubis, Bamboo Print, Embargo, Chemical Green, Coblat Halftone, Fuel Rod, Photic Zone, Irradiated Alert, Carbon Fiber), MP9 (Featherweight, Wild Lily, Pandora's Box, Stained Glass, Bulldozer, Dark Age, Hot Rod, Hypnotic, Hydra, Rose Iron, Music Box, Setting Sun, Food Chain, Airlock, Mount Fuji, Starlight Protector, Ruby Poison Dart, Deadly Poison), MP5-SD (Liquidation, Oxide Oasis, Phosphor, Nitro, Agent, Autumn Twilly), Shotguns, Machineguns - Sawed-Off (Kiss♥Love, First Class, Orange DDPAT, Rust Coat, The Kraken, Devourer, Mosaico, Wasteland Princess, Bamboo Shadow, Copper, Serenity, Limelight, Apocalypto), XM1014 (Frost Borre, Ancient Lore, Red Leather, Elegant Vines, Banana Leaf, Jungle, Urban Perforated, Grassland, Blaze Orange, Heaven Guard, VariCamo Blue, Entombed, XOXO, Seasons, Tranquility, Bone Machine, Incinegator, Teclu Burner, Black Tie, Zombie Offensive, Watchdog), Nova (Baroque Orange, Hyper Beast, Green Apple, Antique, Modern Hunter, Walnut, Forest Leaves, Graphite, Blaze Orange, Rising Skull, Tempest, Bloomstick, Interlock, Quick Sand, Moon in Libra, Clean Polymer, Red Quartz, Toy Soldier), MAG-7 (Insomnia, Cinqueda, Counter Terrace, Prism Terrace, Memento, Chainmail, Hazard, Justice, Bulldozer, Silver, Core Breach, Firestarter, Praetorian, Heat, Hard Water, Monster Call, BI83 Spectrum, SWAG-7), M249 (Humidor, Shipping Forecast, Blizzard Marbleized, Downtown, Jungle DDPAT, Nebula Crusader, Impact Drill, Emerald Poison Dart), Negev (Mjölnir, Anodized Navy, Palm, Power Loader, Bratatat, CaliCamo, Phoenix Stencil, Infrastructure, Boroque Sand), Wear - Factory New (FN), Minimal Wear (MW), Field-Tested (FT), Well-Worn (WW), Battle-Scarred (BS), Stickers Holo/Foil/Gold - Katowice 2014, Krakow 2017, Howling Dawn, Katowice 2015, Crown, London 2018, Cologne 2014, Boston 2018, Atlanta 2017, Cluj-Napoca 2015, DreamHack 2014, King on the Field, Harp of War, Winged Difuser, Cologne 2016, Cologne 2015, MLG Columbus 2016, Katowice 2019, Berlin 2019, RMR 2020, Stockholm 2021, Antwerp 2022, Swag Foil, Flammable foil, Others - Souvenirs, Agents, Pins, Passes, Gifts, Music Kits, Cases, Keys, Capsules, Packages, Patches

Some items on the list may no longer be available or are still locked, visit My Inventory for more details.

Send a Trade Offer for fastest response. I consider all offers.

Add me for discuss if there is a serious offer that needs to be discussed.

Elvis isn’t dead, he just went home.
Exploratory scout DSX862-QQ1 was cruising along at approximately 80% of lightspeed on an outer spiral arm of the galaxy it was native to. Its mission, issued by the Greater Council Exploratory Committee, was to seek out new life, new civilizations, points of scientific interest, and potential future colonies.
80% of the speed of light was a tremendous pace, even for a craft built by a galactic community as ancient as the Greater Council, but its particle shield was more than up to the task, and it allowed the scout to scoop interstellar dust and hydrogen to refuel itself, slowly charging its drives for the next pinch-jump. Each jump would catapult the little craft a hundred light years forwards, followed by another sub-light cruise to analyse, recharge and listen. It wasn’t expected to find much out here. Life had evolved in the warm, bright galactic core, entire civilizations meeting within decades of reaching orbit of their respective home worlds. Resources were plentiful, many of them had been talking for centuries before meeting face to face, with only years of communications lag, instead of the decades or centuries between the species evolving further out, in the colder reaches.
Out here, on the arm, everything was cold. Even the search for possible colony sites and resources was more a formality, record keeping for the sake of the endless bureaucracy that infested the Council.
So, it had come as a tremendous surprise to the scouts simple intelligence when it picked up the ghostly whisper of a deliberate radio signal.
Pulses, blips, zaps, hisses, all were the normal background noise of the cosmos, but this was a firm BUZZ. Soon followed by strings and knots of beeps. The scout rotates, following its radio antenna ‘nose’ to lock in a direction towards the noise. It spooled up its pinch-drive, and jumps, a few lightyears, not enough to drain its energies, but just enough to allow it to triangulate. Then jump again, to get a third point. A fourth, a fifth.
A yellow star, a few billion years old, spectral and gravitational indications speaking of gas giants, rocky and icy bodies, and a potential habitable zone with a world skimming just along the outer edge of the habitable zone. The source of the signals.
The scout spooled its pinch-drive once more, preparing to make the thirty something lightyear jump to close with the noisy world.
It also began the process of waking up its Commander.
++++++++
Kevin Karl and the Karlsons wound down their last song of the evening, sweating under the stage lights and bathed in the adoration of the crowd. This was IT, the high they had all dreamed of, had chased through bars, opening acts, and finally, after just a few years, headline act of a whole show!
They’d bopped along to the other acts on that night, friends all, they’d been on tour together for weeks across the entire USA and would be playing two more shows before wrapping up for the year.
Off-stage, past the cheering, singing, breathless fans of rock and roll, brought together by the joy of the new genre that seemed to defy boundaries and break the locks of society. When they played, no-one saw the colour of their skin, Joeys scars, Mikes club foot. The band couldn’t make out individuals in the crowd. They saw humanity, united and beautiful, wrapped in the music they played.
One of the opening acts were gathered back stage, still bouncing, and their singer passed over a reefer cigarette. Kevin took a drag, feeling the smoke sooth his nerves as he passed it on, then he choked and laughed. “That was some show, could you feel them?”
The other singer, Jack ‘Wabbit’ let out a howl, “Hell yeah baby, felt like lightning, smooth lightning all through… wait, that gives me an idea for a song!”
He was off, crouching awkwardly as he pulled a pencil and notebook from somewhere and started scribbling.
Kevin chuckled, took a beer from Joey, and started walking towards the car. While far from brand new, it was big enough to take the band in relative comfort, while the instruments and gear followed in trucks. He climbed in back, sprawling across the bench, and closed his eyes. It was a thousand miles to the next venue, they were already running late to start getting organised, but he needed just a moment.
He was woken by a nudge. “Hey, Kev, you want a ride down to Jacksonville? Wabbit says his cousin has a plane, can take you both to Florida, rest of us will come down with the trucks, faster then the Catalina can get us there.”
Kevin blinked, groggy, but hanging on to getting to the next stop in comfort.
“Damn, yeah, I’m in! No way I’m passing up a planeride in comfort!”
++++++
The commander of DSX862-QQ1 listened to the sounds of the boisterous world her small ship had discovered. To say it was barely habitable was an understatement. Plenty worlds had higher gravity, but not the weather extremes this one had. Others had far worse weather but lacked the deadly pathogens that were detectable in the outer reaches of the atmosphere. Others still had some version or variation of every horrific threat this single world had, but never so many of them wrapped into one pristine appearing blue and green ball of life that seemed determined to survive by any means necessary.
She was impressed that life had evolved to multicellular levels at all, never mind to the point where it had achieved radio broadcast, powered flight and, if the latest scans were accurate, atomic power, weaponry, and the rudiments of space flight under development.
This world was only a few centuries from needing a first contact delegation, she could sense it.
If they survived. She’d seen plenty of far more peaceful civilisations wipe themselves out before achieving their full potential after all, and the light-delayed data her ship had gathered on the way in indicated that the primary species of this world **really** liked to fight one another.
Well, it wasn’t as if the Greater Council was perfect. A few hundred worlds, usually half at odds with the other half, or outright warring with the non-aligned groups surrounding them. Over what, she could hardly imagine, resources weren’t scarce, habitable worlds almost common, matters of religion seemed pointless to her.
Rather than be caught up in the endless squabbling, she’d worked to be assigned a scout ship, and only went ‘home’ when the databanks were full or the hull degraded.
She flipped idly through the signals her ship was pulling in. Mostly simple vocal signals, some barely encrypted, likely military, the rest completely in the clear. For a while there had been a simple video signal modulated as well, the computers now busy going through it to compile a useable language interface.
Her digit stopped, as one transmission caught her attention. There was a voice there, the words as yet unintelligible, but it was laced through, interwoven with, strung around a **sound**.
It wasn’t the first she’d heard of music from this world, nor even the first she’d heard following this particular set of musical rules, but there was something about **this** voice… It reached inside her, and she felt her soul reach out to embrace it.
It was memetic, the warning symbol now flashing on her display confirming what she already knew, but memetics were weapons, hazards, dangers to be filtered and avoided, while this?
It spoke of pain, it sang of loss, and heartbreak and joy and unity and togetherness. It sent her thoughts on strange tangents where her actions saved worlds, brought together warning species, enabled peace…
She shook off the effects as the music faded out and a smooth voice mumbled something, before the next song started. That too, touched her, yet lacked the sheer power of the first, and she was able to shut off the recording with a shaky digit.
She fumbled the ships controls, aligning with the source of the original transmission. A rickety looking steel tower with several high-powered emitters inside a small building next to it. Clearly not the source of the music itself, merely a civilian broadcast station, the music an entertainment medium.
She turned her attention then, to discovering what, or who, had created such a wonder.
++++++
Kevin stared at the airplane. It looked fresh, but old.
“War surplus, picked her up for a song when she was gonna be dumped out in a desert!” Wabbits cousin was a skinny boy, barely out of his teens, but with the quick and sure motions of an expert when he touched his beloved machine. “I heard you guys playing last night, gotta say, it changed my mind about black folks. Always thought to myself, to each their own right? And the laws are that way too, it made sense, but man, the way you sang, how the band played, I wanted to meet you, to say, you got me to see more. Like how the world looks from way up high, we’re all just one piece of something, right? And I think the world might be less ugly that way. So, I said to my cousin, man, I want to help out, my folks left me a pile of cash, I have my baby here, and if you want, I’ll take you where you gotta go.”
He stopped, looking at the ground, and although Kevin was tempted to accept the offer on the spot, but the kid was offering to sideline everything to ferry around his ass?
“Well, damn, listen man, thanks, and I’m grateful you’re giving us a ride to Jacksonville, but lets take it easy right? See how you feel after the flight and if you want to come to the show, sure, I’ll get you in. I can’t pay for regular flights though, I’m already paying for my car! Besides, as much as I need to get down there and make sure everythings golden, I can’t go leaving my band behind every time!”
“Oh, right, no it’s cool, if they want a ride too its all good. I want to make a change, and helping you out helps me do that, right? If you want to talk money, heck, I could bankroll a few shows, take a percentage in return, but its not about the money. Man you changed me, in a good way. I think you could do the same for people like me! You, uh. I stopped hating, you know? Feels good.”
Kevin started to wonder if he shouldn’t have just curled back up on his car bench and stayed asleep. “Okay, I’m on board, if you want to take the rest of my guys too, that’s great, we all get to our next stop on time, you get a show, and if you still want to help us out, we can look at more shows after the tour. Sound fair?”
They shook hands. Pete, as he turned out to be named, started fussing with his airplane again, and removing what he termed ‘junk’ from the hold and other parts of the craft, which to Kevins untrained eye all looked vaguely important, but were ‘heavy’.
He boarded with his band, and Wabbit, who had his own guitar with him, and as the airplane started taxying, amidst the reefer smoke, and snippets of song Wabbit was working on, they settled down for the flight.
++++++
DSX862-QQ1’s commander was hampered in her efforts to locate the origin of the music she had heard by the lack of any real information link between radio and physical locations. There was undoubtably ground-based cable she couldn’t tap, but there was no evidence of a wide area data network, and given the technology of the ‘Humans’ she wasn’t surprised.
Just frustrated.
Nonetheless, she was able to identify the singer, and his ‘band’ who played the instruments that had so perfectly twinned with his voice. She wondered how a purely non-verbal species would have received his music. Would they have felt what she felt just through the radio signal? Something she would learn, in time. Her plan was simple, she’d locate her subject, and deploy a drone to follow him. Wherever he played, her drone would invisibly follow, recording his music in perfect fidelity.
She’d return home, and share his music. Something no-one had heard before, had never experienced, and perhaps, it would make them see, and feel, what she had when hearing it.
The ship pinged, it had located a small heavier than air craft that had a high probability of carrying her quarry. It was moving at less than a third of the local speed of sound, but was being strangely buffeted. The computer flashed warning symbols on sections of the craft. Simple, but not primitive, the craft was perfectly designed for the task it was meant to perform, very good engineering had gone into creating it.
Yet it was failing, structurally, air pressures flowing over it far in excess for which it had been designed, one of this worlds unique weather phenomenon threatening to rip it apart.
Amidst the horror of realizing she was about to witness the death of those individuals who had touched her very soul, she recognized the craft was operating in excess of two hundred percent its designed stress ratings.
It was a toughness that bought a few seconds of thought. Of decision, and rash, perhaps illegal, action.
Digits brushed controls, summoning a hum from the depths of her ship. The fuel capture system was not meant for rescue, in fact, using for anything other than non-living mass was considered a breach of several laws. First and foremost, it was a very focusable disintegration array, making it a terrifying weapon. Secondly, it could collect the energy released by the disintegration and funnel it into storage cells to fuel the engines.
Thirdly, and this was the illegal part, her scoutships sensors could record exactly how the disintegrated matter had been arranged, down to the subatomic level, and the array could be reprogrammed to then reverse the process to convert the captured energy back into the original thing.
Used on an interesting rock, this was fine. On a living being it was murder at best and non-consensual cloning at worst.
Her digit pressed down firmly on the energize symbol that appeared below her hacked override code.
++++++
The aircraft finally surrendered to the windsheer pulling at it, fragmenting in a shimmering cloud of metallic fragments that erupt in a fireball as unspent aviation fuel is ignited.
Of the passengers and pilot, no trace was ever found, their deaths mourned by millions, in part for the loss of young people who had given the world such wonderful music, but also the sense of loss at the music they would now never be able to play. A pilot who had changed his beliefs and committed himself to promoting the ones who changed him for the better, a brilliant young singer and songwriter, and a band who could touch souls, lost forever.
The great changes they had been about to unleash would not take place. Or at least, not take place as quickly. The seeds had been planted, as other young people took up their instruments, raised their voices in song, and set out to change hearts and minds their own way.
Over the course of the centuries before Humanity could reach the stars as a single family, a steady stream of visitors dropped by the musical ball of rock. To observe, to listen, to rescue, when the opportunity arose.

Author note: The Cryopod to Hell is a Reddit-exclusive story with over three years of editing and refining. As of this post, the total rewrite is 1,933,000+ words long! For more information, check out the link below:
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...................................
(Previous Part)
(Part 001)
...
On the world of Numaria, more than half a dozen Demon Emperors and twenty Demon Dukes march through the paradise-class planet's forests as they head toward Emperor Glinch's Stitched Wasteland.
Emperor Auger does not directly join the party. He stays back at the capital of his world, viewing the happenings remotely through the power of a subordinate.
But Yardrat does lead the party. He is joined by Emperors Fae, Dagon, and Nymph, as well as Duke Hamir and several other elites of their Hell. It becomes obvious to all the other demons present that the Fourth Hell of Punishment is truly the mightiest among all the others. Even mere Dukes can explode with the power of Emperors, should Auger choose to grant them that ability.
As for the First Hell of Damnation, its remaining members are truly a miserable sight. Bael has become the lone Emperor still loyal to his Hell, while Mephisto and Zamiel no longer care about the alliances of their species. Bael is joined by Vepar, formerly the Baron of Toxicity, now having evolved to the rank of Duke through the human-demon alliance efforts.
Vepar, while not an Emperor, is still an insidious existence. Like Mephisto, she can transform her body into formless clouds of poison gas. She can strike with venom and poison alike, paralyzing her foes or corroding their nervous systems with ease.
Also notably absent is Beelzebub, due to him forcibly becoming aligned to Jason Hiro. While Beelzebub might actually prove an incredible powerhouse if he were to continue fighting for the First Hell's benefits, the problem is that none can say whether his allegiances would make him privy to spilling secrets of this operation to the humans...
From the Second Hell of Lust, not a single Duke joins the party. This Hell has already thrown their lots in with humanity, so no members of the Mephisto Extermination Operation are eager to have their secrets blabbed. Defeating Mephisto could lead to a discovery about the potential for ascension past the rank of Emperor. No demon elite wants that information to fall into the hands of their enemies.
From the Third Hell of Blood, few elites remain. Many of them were slain by the Cherubiim, reducing their Dukes to only a sliver of the other Hells. The Emperor of Thirst, Kristoff, still walks the mortal coil. He is joined by two subordinates, Vespera, the Duke of Gloom, and Rhesus, the Duke of Predation. These are the elites he considers his Hell's most capable remaining powerhouses, and the ones most suited for the mission to bring about Mephisto's end.
From the Fifth Hell of Calamity, a large number of Dukes join two Emperors, Serena and Crow, as they trail along behind the other Hells.
Unbeknownst to anyone present, Emperor Yumagi is alive and well. The only demons who observed his return were those aligned with Mephisto. Not even Gorn is aware that Yumagi survived the Cherubiim's wrath, and Yumagi is strangely keen to keep his return quiet.
As for the Sixth Hell of Isolation, only Emperor Melody has chosen to come along. The other elites of her Hell simply aren't in the right headpsace to join her, following their fall to the Plague.
Yama's Hell, the Seventh Hell of Corruption, has fallen apart with its Emperor being absorbed by Mephisto. Now, its many darkness-aligned entities have scattered in search of a figure lost to time...
Yardrat, Fae, Dagon, Nymph, Bael, Kristoff, Serena, Crow, and Melody march on the Stitched Wasteland, along with twenty Dukes. A terrifying force in any previous era, but one that feels somewhat weak and vulnerable in the months following the return of the Cherubiim, as well as the two Wordsmiths, not even mentioning the enemy they might face should they fail to stop Mephisto's ascension.
Yardrat's glum expression does nothing to uplift the moods of the others around him. As he and the other Emperors run across Numaria's surface, weaving their ways through the dense forests and trees, Bael speaks up from the back.
"Hey, Yardy! Why are we runnin' like a bunch of chumps? Just pop us over to Glinch with those fancy portals of yours!"
Yardrat shoots a glance back at Bael without slowing down. "I can't. Glinch's minions have an uncanny ability to twist the space around themselves. I couldn't create stable portals once we're inside if my life depended on it. I've no doubt he bred them for the express purpose of keeping me from spying on him."
Fae jumps over a bunch of twisted prickle-vines, scratching her palm on their thorns. "Doesn't that mean if something goes wrong, you won't be able to yank us out of the Stitched Wasteland?"
"Trust me." Yardrat mumbles, sounding more than a little depressed. "You don't want to hear my answer."
"There is no need to concern yourselves with escaping." Crow says solemnly, deftly flying through the underbrush with her blue wings. "If Mephisto ascends, it won't matter where we flee. He will be capable of hunting us like deer."
Yardrat snorts. "Speak for yourselves. I enjoy running away if it means saving my life."
"Coward." Bael says. "A REAL man always fights to the end!"
"Aren't you in a woman's body now?" Yardrat shoots back. "You're one to talk."
"H-hey! Women can be real men too!" Bael protests. "Get with the times!"
Emperor Melody laughs. "You tell him, Bael! Preach it!"
Serena remains silent, merely rolling her sightless eyes at everyone else's childish barbs.
...
Five hours pass as the demons race through Numaria's forests.
Eventually, the trees begin to thin out, before abruptly disappearing altogether. As if erased by a nuclear bomb, the forest's cover vanishes to reveal a grey-colored lifeless plain lacking all traces of warmth and life.
The Stitched Wasteland.
As soon as the demon leaders reach the edge of the wasteland, they pause their flight to stop and look around.
"Glinch's domain is bigger than you might first believe," Yardrat explains, gesturing toward the horizon. "Offhand, I believe the last time we measured the Stitched Wasteland's diameter, it was nearly 500 miles. You can't even see the other side from here because it dips below the horizon. The good news is, we only have to travel halfway into the interior, where Glinch's central laboratory resides."
Dagon, the Emperor of Pathogens, kneels down to scratch at the ashen soil. He grimaces as it clings to his palm and starts to burn his flesh.
"Acidic." Dagon mumbles.
"Every time Glinch creates a new thrall, his domain expands." Serena explains. "His toxic miasma is invisible and odorless, but it destroys plant-life and lower animals with ease. It won't have any effect on elites like us, but it's best if you don't deliberately play with the soil he's corroded."
Dagon shakes the soil off his palm, grimacing as he has to clap his hands and rub them against his pants to stop the acid from burning him further. Luckily, one of the Dukes nearby has a weak healing ability, so they're ability to fix him back up.
"What a miserable shithole." Fae groans. "I do NOT get what Glinch enjoys about living here! I'd go crazy from boredom after a week!"
Bael laughs. "No kidding, toots. Why do you think Glinch is such a wacko? He already went crazy!"
"Oh. Fair point." Fae mutters.
The Emperors and Dukes start moving toward the center of the wasteland, following Yardrat's lead. They do not run, but move at a brisk walk, keeping their eyes peeled for threats. Ten miles in the distance, they spot a pair of strange aberrant creatures standing perfectly still, looking at one another with hollow eyes, but they can't make out the details of those figures at their current distance.
"Bael, watch out!" Serena suddenly shouts, startling everyone.
Every demon elite's head snaps toward Bael's general direction just in time to see an invisible creature materializing, its massive body poised with a giant claw up in the air, ready to slash down at Bael.
The monster's huge torso and comparatively tiny head and skinny legs contrast with its wretchedly massive arms, its mottled and rotted skin, and its beady green venomous eyes.
The instant it snaps its claws down to assassinate Bael, the dumb galump accidentally trips on a rock, stumbling and avoiding the monster's attack! Bael falls face-first in the soil and the creature's downward slash swishes across his back, barely missing him by a millimeter!
"Lucky!" Yardrat exclaims, his pupils the size of pinpricks.
Crow roars in rage. She leaps toward the monster, the strange deformed horror with proportions far different from any naturally born creature in existence, and she swings her fist at its chest!
THUMP!
Crow knocks the creature down, sending it skidding backward across the dirt to lay in a heap.
But Crow doesn't celebrate. To her shock, she didn't even manage to bruise the monster, only knock it on its ass! The frighteningly durable monster silently stands up, and its body rapidly fades away as it becomes invisible.
Not once does the creature make a sound.
"Everyone watch out!" Crow shouts. "This bastard is strong! I don't even know if I hurt it!"
The heart of every demon elite skips a beat as they try to look for any signs of the monster. Only Serena, with her Soul Sensing capabilities, manages to trace its vague movement.
"Over there!" Serena says, pointing in front of Yardrat.
The monster once again becomes invisible as it tries to slash Yardrat in half, but he isn't caught off-guard and leaps backward, safely avoiding it just in the nick of time.
"TEAR!" Yardrat yells, gnashing his teeth.
The Emperor of the Void tears the air in front of himself, unable to properly create a portal, but still able to momentarily rip a crack in space straight across the monster's torso.
A shallow cut on its chest is his only reward.
"Lucifer's Tits!" Bael exclaims, climbing to his feet. "This thing is as tough as demonstone!"
Melody fires off sonic blasts at the monster, punching with her fists to try and blow out its eardrums, but her attacks have no effect.
The monster continues charging at Yardrat to try and cut him to pieces. As it does, Crow once again steps up to protect Yardrat, deflecting its rending claws with her steel-like feathers while dishing out punishment with her fists. Crow is without a doubt the most physically imposting member of the party, possessing more strength than any demon in existence except for Belial.
But even she can't manage to do more than knock the monster back!
The other Emperors quickly start pitching in. Dagon summons corrosive chemicals to try and melt the monster's thick hide. Nymph summons vines from beneath its feet to wrap its legs and keep it immobile. Kristoff summons bloodied blades to cut the monster from behind, slashing its back with swords made from his own plasma. Fae fires explosive projectiles with a low yield at the monster, taking care not to accidentally hurt her allies. Melody sends sonic shockwaves into the ground, trying to soften the soil to trap the monster in quicksand.
But the monster proves more frightening than any of the Emperors imagined!
Bae and Serena can't provide much assistance to the others. They watch helplessly as Nymph's vines corrode to ash, melted by the Stitched Wasteland's ability to destroy plant-life. Fae's explosions barely even knock the monster back. Dagon might as well be shooting the monster with a squirt-gun for all the use his chemicals have. Melody can't seem to accomplish anything either!
"Shit." Bael growls. "I gotta help them."
"You don't have any magic." Serena says.
"No. But I got this." Bael says, reaching down to touch his weirdly fancy belt.
When Bael activates the Matriarch's Armor, it begins popping out of his waist and engulfing him from head to toe in lethal-looking demonstone armor. His plated chest and spiked shoulders turn Bael from a dopey looking version of Ose into a commanding and fearful warrior clad in demonic armor, making Serena gasp in surprise.
"Bael?" Serena asks, unable to see the armor, but sensing that his soul has suddenly become difficult to detect due to something shrouding his entire body. "What did you do?"
"Ose gave me some armor." Bael explains. "It ain't mine. But we'll talk 'bout it later. I gotta help the others!"
Bael doesn't hesitate. He rushes toward the monster, joining Crow as a frontline tank to try and draw the creature's attention.
Crow barely even registers Bael's new appearance, shoving any concerns about the demonstone-clad warrior to the back of her mind. All she feels is relief when the monster's brutal strikes slow down as it starts slashing at Bael as well.
THUNK! THUNK!!
The brutish monster silently whales on the others. For ten minutes, Bael and Crow take the beatings of their lives while Yardrat slowly tears its skin and cuts its bones with targeted spatial distortions. He alone manages to injure the creature the most heavily, while the other Dukes and Emperors can barely offer much assistance.
Bael grimaces as the creature grabs him by his helmet, lifts him up, and throw him like a ragdoll. Bael cries out in alarm as he goes flying and lands in the dirt, two hundred feet behind the brute.
"Spawn of a- you piece of trash! Nobody throws Bael!"
He jumps to his feet and starts to run back toward the monster, only to pause when he senses movement.
Bael quickly turns around. He nearly jumps out of his skin when he sees what he can only mentally describe as seventeen snakes with baby-heads crawling along the ground toward him. The snakes have a single conjoined core body that ties them all together, but it appears as flat as a pancake. Like some sort of Hydra consisting of stitched-together body parts, this multi-headed monster uses its childish faces to drag itself toward Bael at a speed most distressing, causing his butthole to pucker up.
"Eee! Gross!" Bael cries. "What in the hellhound's anus is that?!
Like the previous monster, this 'Snakedra' freak doesn't cry out or make any noises. It silently slithers toward Bael while one of its heads remains elevated to gaze directly at him.
Not wanting his friends to be overwhelmed, Bael decides to try and take the monster on by himself. His eyes fill with determination, and he conjures Mjölnir in his grasp, summoning it from his belt.
"Bad snake!" Bael barks, lunging at the monster to smash one of its heads.
SPLAT!!
Bael crushes the first head with ease!
But as he raises the hammer to strike again, the monster pounces at him! Its sixteen remaining heads bite his armor and wrap around his arms and legs, smothering him and causing him to fall backward.
"Crap, crap!" Bael yells. "Uh, don't worry guys, I've got this! Just keep killing the big one! I've got this cunt right where I want him! YEEOUCH!"
The Snakedra squeezes with all its strength, trying to burst Bael's body like a watermelon. Luckily, the demonstone only creaks a bit and doesn't fold inward, allowing Bael to survive, albeit not to do much else.
Serena, seeing that the others are too occupied to help, decides to try and assist Bael in some way. Since her abilities aren't much use against the first monster unless it turns invisible, she turns her gaze toward the Snakedra.
Emperor Serena maintains a good distance between herself and the Snakedra. She closes her eyes, focuses her mind, then shapes her right hand into a claw pose, snapping it in the Snakedra's direction.
An invisible beam of soul energy travels the gaps between dimensions, drilling into one of the Snakedra's heads. Serena focuses with all her might, attempting to try and locate the monster's soul so she can manipulate or influence it.
Unfortunately, she finds that while the creature does have a soul, it has become a mish-mash of fifty other souls, all witlessly stitched together to create an aberrant, thoughtless machine for killing.
Pain. Pain. Pain. The Snakedra thinks. Pain. Pain. Pain.
Serena grimaces. Her eyes squeeze shut even tighter as she tunes out Bael's exclamations of how 'totally okay and fine' he is. She digs deeper into the Snakedra's psyche, eventually extracting a thread of its existence for her own benefit.
Serena's eyes finally open.
While most entities possess eyes that can 'see' the physical realm, even as an imp, Serena was blind from birth. She was never able to see the world around her, but all of that changed when she met her husband, Gorn.
He and her were only Imps at the time. They became Lords together, and upon her ascension, she gained a new type of vision utterly unique to herself.
The power to see the soul realm.
While usually incapable of influencing the material realm, the soul realm is the domain Serena has become most adept at influencing over the millennia. As an Emperor, her power has become quite substantial in this regard.
Serena tears a fragment of soul energy out of the monster. It doesn't even shudder, but she doesn't care.
With her soul-seeing eyes, Serena deftly manipulates the thread of soul energy, using her fingers to hastily but efficiently craft a Soul Puppet, something not unlike a voodoo doll.
After forming a Soul Puppet in the form of the Snakedra, Serena grabs it out of the air and begins wrenching its heads around, stabbing at its body with her fingernails, and otherwise torturing the false image as much as possible.
Not once does the Snakedra cry out in pain, but its body does twitch and spasm. It writhes and squirms, continuing to hold Bael steady, but sometimes weakening its grip as it loses control of different parts of its body at random.
Meanwhile, Bael occasionally feels the wretched monster weaken its grip on him. Bael might not be the brightest bulb in the box, but as an accomplished veteran of countless wars, he is well-versed in the art of combat.
Bael isn't certain why the creature has started to spasm, but he won't turn down any good opportunity that arises.
He calls forth the power of Mjölnir, summoning lightning from above to strike the hammer. The moment before the lightning falls upon him, the creature suddenly loosens its grip, allowing Bael to swing the hammer at its central body.
BOOOM!!
A terrific blast of thunder and lightning detonates on the Snakedra, making it recoil in agony, release Bael, and pull away from him.
Abruptly dropped on his ass, Bael jumps backward, leaps to his feet, and lifts his hammer high.
"Nobody gives me a squeeze without my OK, bub!"
Bael charges at the monster. He starts smashing its heads one by one, crushing them to bloody pulps while the creature uselessly writhes on the ground, taking the abuse without retaliating.
Five minutes later, Bael slays the bastard, putting it to death for the rest of eternity.
Tired and winded, Bael gasps for air. Never has he had a fight that left him out of breath, but even with the Matriarch's Armor, Ose's body is far weaker than Bael's ever was. He severely regrets losing his invincibility.
Bael turns around and spots Serena.
"Oh! Hey, whew! I just got done kicking that monster's ass!" Bael says. "Good thing I'm such a badass, I must have intimidated it into lettin' me go, heh."
Serena opens her mouth to correct him, but thinks better.
"Right. Excellent work, Bael. You're as capable a fighter as ever."
Bael grins inside his helmet. "Heh, damn right. Now, lemme help the others finish that fat ugly one off."
Bael charges into battle, this time equipped with Mjolnir. He transforms the hammer into his favorite weapon, Big Bonk, and swings the ten ton steel ball at the brutish monster's back.
BOOM!!!
Bael flattens the creature, burying it face-first in the dirt and giving Crow an opportunity to deliver a full-power punch to the back of its head.
SPLAT!
Her fist connects, and she crushes the monster's skull, spraying its brains out all over her feet.
Crow pants like a dog on a hot summer's day. Sweat pools on Yardrat's head from the amount of focus he had to exert to kill this first monster. Even Fae and the others look a little tired.
With the crisis momentarily averted, the demon elites look around, finally noticing Bael's new getup, as well as Big Bonk pressing against the brute's back.
"Bael?" Fae asks. "Hot damn, that's a sweet set of armor!"
"You really saved our asses!" Melody adds.
Crow glances toward the other dead monster. "You killed that one? By yourself?"
Bael thumps his chest. "Couldn't have done it without Ose's fancy-shmancy armor. The ugly bugger got so scared, it just laid there and let me beat it to death! Heh!"
"It just laid there?" Crow asks, glancing around. She notices Serena, then pieces the events together. "Oh, I see. Well, god job beating it by yourself, Bael. You still know how to kick tail."
"Damn right!" Bael proclaims, smiling from ear to ear.
One by one, the other demon elites figure out Bael didn't exactly defeat the monster all by himself, but seeing as how he's been so down ever since losing his powers, they don't want to hurt his feelings.
"We've only fought two creatures so far, but they were both terrifying." Yardrat points out. "If we have to face two or even three at the same time, we might die! Everyone, proceed slowly. Do NOT rush in. We need to pick Glinch's thralls off one by one."
The other demons nod.
"Right!"

On the world of Numaria, more than half a dozen Demon Emperors and twenty Demon Dukes march through the paradise-class planet's forests as they head toward Emperor Glinch's Stitched Wasteland.
Emperor Auger does not directly join the party. He stays back at the capital of his world, viewing the happenings remotely through the power of a subordinate.
But Yardrat does lead the party. He is joined by Emperors Fae, Dagon, and Nymph, as well as Duke Hamir and several other elites of their Hell. It becomes obvious to all the other demons present that the Fourth Hell of Punishment is truly the mightiest among all the others. Even mere Dukes can explode with the power of Emperors, should Auger choose to grant them that ability.
As for the First Hell of Damnation, its remaining members are truly a miserable sight. Bael has become the lone Emperor still loyal to his Hell, while Mephisto and Zamiel no longer care about the alliances of their species. Bael is joined by Vepar, formerly the Baron of Toxicity, now having evolved to the rank of Duke through the human-demon alliance efforts.
Vepar, while not an Emperor, is still an insidious existence. Like Mephisto, she can transform her body into formless clouds of poison gas. She can strike with venom and poison alike, paralyzing her foes or corroding their nervous systems with ease.
Also notably absent is Beelzebub, due to him forcibly becoming aligned to Jason Hiro. While Beelzebub might actually prove an incredible powerhouse if he were to continue fighting for the First Hell's benefits, the problem is that none can say whether his allegiances would make him privy to spilling secrets of this operation to the humans...
From the Second Hell of Lust, not a single Duke joins the party. This Hell has already thrown their lots in with humanity, so no members of the Mephisto Extermination Operation are eager to have their secrets blabbed. Defeating Mephisto could lead to a discovery about the potential for ascension past the rank of Emperor. No demon elite wants that information to fall into the hands of their enemies.
From the Third Hell of Blood, few elites remain. Many of them were slain by the Cherubiim, reducing their Dukes to only a sliver of the other Hells. The Emperor of Thirst, Kristoff, still walks the mortal coil. He is joined by two subordinates, Vespera, the Duke of Gloom, and Rhesus, the Duke of Predation. These are the elites he considers his Hell's most capable remaining powerhouses, and the ones most suited for the mission to bring about Mephisto's end.
From the Fifth Hell of Calamity, a large number of Dukes join two Emperors, Serena and Crow, as they trail along behind the other Hells.
Unbeknownst to anyone present, Emperor Yumagi is alive and well. The only demons who observed his return were those aligned with Mephisto. Not even Gorn is aware that Yumagi survived the Cherubiim's wrath, and Yumagi is strangely keen to keep his return quiet.
As for the Sixth Hell of Isolation, only Emperor Melody has chosen to come along. The other elites of her Hell simply aren't in the right headpsace to join her, following their fall to the Plague.
Yama's Hell, the Seventh Hell of Corruption, has fallen apart with its Emperor being absorbed by Mephisto. Now, its many darkness-aligned entities have scattered in search of a figure lost to time...
Yardrat, Fae, Dagon, Nymph, Bael, Kristoff, Serena, Crow, and Melody march on the Stitched Wasteland, along with twenty Dukes. A terrifying force in any previous era, but one that feels somewhat weak and vulnerable in the months following the return of the Cherubiim, as well as the two Wordsmiths, not even mentioning the enemy they might face should they fail to stop Mephisto's ascension.
Yardrat's glum expression does nothing to uplift the moods of the others around him. As he and the other Emperors run across Numaria's surface, weaving their ways through the dense forests and trees, Bael speaks up from the back.
"Hey, Yardy! Why are we runnin' like a bunch of chumps? Just pop us over to Glinch with those fancy portals of yours!"
Yardrat shoots a glance back at Bael without slowing down. "I can't. Glinch's minions have an uncanny ability to twist the space around themselves. I couldn't create stable portals once we're inside if my life depended on it. I've no doubt he bred them for the express purpose of keeping me from spying on him."
Fae jumps over a bunch of twisted prickle-vines, scratching her palm on their thorns. "Doesn't that mean if something goes wrong, you won't be able to yank us out of the Stitched Wasteland?"
"Trust me." Yardrat mumbles, sounding more than a little depressed. "You don't want to hear my answer."
"There is no need to concern yourselves with escaping." Crow says solemnly, deftly flying through the underbrush with her blue wings. "If Mephisto ascends, it won't matter where we flee. He will be capable of hunting us like deer."
Yardrat snorts. "Speak for yourselves. I enjoy running away if it means saving my life."
"Coward." Bael says. "A REAL man always fights to the end!"
"Aren't you in a woman's body now?" Yardrat shoots back. "You're one to talk."
"H-hey! Women can be real men too!" Bael protests. "Get with the times!"
Emperor Melody laughs. "You tell him, Bael! Preach it!"
Serena remains silent, merely rolling her sightless eyes at everyone else's childish barbs.
...
Five hours pass as the demons race through Numaria's forests.
Eventually, the trees begin to thin out, before abruptly disappearing altogether. As if erased by a nuclear bomb, the forest's cover vanishes to reveal a grey-colored lifeless plain lacking all traces of warmth and life.
The Stitched Wasteland.
As soon as the demon leaders reach the edge of the wasteland, they pause their flight to stop and look around.
"Glinch's domain is bigger than you might first believe," Yardrat explains, gesturing toward the horizon. "Offhand, I believe the last time we measured the Stitched Wasteland's diameter, it was nearly 500 miles. You can't even see the other side from here because it dips below the horizon. The good news is, we only have to travel halfway into the interior, where Glinch's central laboratory resides."
Dagon, the Emperor of Pathogens, kneels down to scratch at the ashen soil. He grimaces as it clings to his palm and starts to burn his flesh.
"Acidic." Dagon mumbles.
"Every time Glinch creates a new thrall, his domain expands." Serena explains. "His toxic miasma is invisible and odorless, but it destroys plant-life and lower animals with ease. It won't have any effect on elites like us, but it's best if you don't deliberately play with the soil he's corroded."
Dagon shakes the soil off his palm, grimacing as he has to clap his hands and rub them against his pants to stop the acid from burning him further. Luckily, one of the Dukes nearby has a weak healing ability, so they're ability to fix him back up.
"What a miserable shithole." Fae groans. "I do NOT get what Glinch enjoys about living here! I'd go crazy from boredom after a week!"
Bael laughs. "No kidding, toots. Why do you think Glinch is such a wacko? He already went crazy!"
"Oh. Fair point." Fae mutters.
The Emperors and Dukes start moving toward the center of the wasteland, following Yardrat's lead. They do not run, but move at a brisk walk, keeping their eyes peeled for threats. Ten miles in the distance, they spot a pair of strange aberrant creatures standing perfectly still, looking at one another with hollow eyes, but they can't make out the details of those figures at their current distance.
"Bael, watch out!" Serena suddenly shouts, startling everyone.
Every demon elite's head snaps toward Bael's general direction just in time to see an invisible creature materializing, its massive body poised with a giant claw up in the air, ready to slash down at Bael.
The monster's huge torso and comparatively tiny head and skinny legs contrast with its wretchedly massive arms, its mottled and rotted skin, and its beady green venomous eyes.
The instant it snaps its claws down to assassinate Bael, the dumb galump accidentally trips on a rock, stumbling and avoiding the monster's attack! Bael falls face-first in the soil and the creature's downward slash swishes across his back, barely missing him by a millimeter!
"Lucky!" Yardrat exclaims, his pupils the size of pinpricks.
Crow roars in rage. She leaps toward the monster, the strange deformed horror with proportions far different from any naturally born creature in existence, and she swings her fist at its chest!
THUMP!
Crow knocks the creature down, sending it skidding backward across the dirt to lay in a heap.
But Crow doesn't celebrate. To her shock, she didn't even manage to bruise the monster, only knock it on its ass! The frighteningly durable monster silently stands up, and its body rapidly fades away as it becomes invisible.
Not once does the creature make a sound.
"Everyone watch out!" Crow shouts. "This bastard is strong! I don't even know if I hurt it!"
The heart of every demon elite skips a beat as they try to look for any signs of the monster. Only Serena, with her Soul Sensing capabilities, manages to trace its vague movement.
"Over there!" Serena says, pointing in front of Yardrat.
The monster once again becomes invisible as it tries to slash Yardrat in half, but he isn't caught off-guard and leaps backward, safely avoiding it just in the nick of time.
"TEAR!" Yardrat yells, gnashing his teeth.
The Emperor of the Void tears the air in front of himself, unable to properly create a portal, but still able to momentarily rip a crack in space straight across the monster's torso.
A shallow cut on its chest is his only reward.
"Lucifer's Tits!" Bael exclaims, climbing to his feet. "This thing is as tough as demonstone!"
Melody fires off sonic blasts at the monster, punching with her fists to try and blow out its eardrums, but her attacks have no effect.
The monster continues charging at Yardrat to try and cut him to pieces. As it does, Crow once again steps up to protect Yardrat, deflecting its rending claws with her steel-like feathers while dishing out punishment with her fists. Crow is without a doubt the most physically imposting member of the party, possessing more strength than any demon in existence except for Belial.
But even she can't manage to do more than knock the monster back!
The other Emperors quickly start pitching in. Dagon summons corrosive chemicals to try and melt the monster's thick hide. Nymph summons vines from beneath its feet to wrap its legs and keep it immobile. Kristoff summons bloodied blades to cut the monster from behind, slashing its back with swords made from his own plasma. Fae fires explosive projectiles with a low yield at the monster, taking care not to accidentally hurt her allies. Melody sends sonic shockwaves into the ground, trying to soften the soil to trap the monster in quicksand.
But the monster proves more frightening than any of the Emperors imagined!
Bae and Serena can't provide much assistance to the others. They watch helplessly as Nymph's vines corrode to ash, melted by the Stitched Wasteland's ability to destroy plant-life. Fae's explosions barely even knock the monster back. Dagon might as well be shooting the monster with a squirt-gun for all the use his chemicals have. Melody can't seem to accomplish anything either!
"Shit." Bael growls. "I gotta help them."
"You don't have any magic." Serena says.
"No. But I got this." Bael says, reaching down to touch his weirdly fancy belt.
When Bael activates the Matriarch's Armor, it begins popping out of his waist and engulfing him from head to toe in lethal-looking demonstone armor. His plated chest and spiked shoulders turn Bael from a dopey looking version of Ose into a commanding and fearful warrior clad in demonic armor, making Serena gasp in surprise.
"Bael?" Serena asks, unable to see the armor, but sensing that his soul has suddenly become difficult to detect due to something shrouding his entire body. "What did you do?"
"Ose gave me some armor." Bael explains. "It ain't mine. But we'll talk 'bout it later. I gotta help the others!"
Bael doesn't hesitate. He rushes toward the monster, joining Crow as a frontline tank to try and draw the creature's attention.
Crow barely even registers Bael's new appearance, shoving any concerns about the demonstone-clad warrior to the back of her mind. All she feels is relief when the monster's brutal strikes slow down as it starts slashing at Bael as well.
THUNK! THUNK!!
The brutish monster silently whales on the others. For ten minutes, Bael and Crow take the beatings of their lives while Yardrat slowly tears its skin and cuts its bones with targeted spatial distortions. He alone manages to injure the creature the most heavily, while the other Dukes and Emperors can barely offer much assistance.
Bael grimaces as the creature grabs him by his helmet, lifts him up, and throw him like a ragdoll. Bael cries out in alarm as he goes flying and lands in the dirt, two hundred feet behind the brute.
"Spawn of a- you piece of trash! Nobody throws Bael!"
He jumps to his feet and starts to run back toward the monster, only to pause when he senses movement.
Bael quickly turns around. He nearly jumps out of his skin when he sees what he can only mentally describe as seventeen snakes with baby-heads crawling along the ground toward him. The snakes have a single conjoined core body that ties them all together, but it appears as flat as a pancake. Like some sort of Hydra consisting of stitched-together body parts, this multi-headed monster uses its childish faces to drag itself toward Bael at a speed most distressing, causing his butthole to pucker up.
"Eee! Gross!" Bael cries. "What in the hellhound's anus is that?!
Like the previous monster, this 'Snakedra' freak doesn't cry out or make any noises. It silently slithers toward Bael while one of its heads remains elevated to gaze directly at him.
Not wanting his friends to be overwhelmed, Bael decides to try and take the monster on by himself. His eyes fill with determination, and he conjures Mjölnir in his grasp, summoning it from his belt.
"Bad snake!" Bael barks, lunging at the monster to smash one of its heads.
SPLAT!!
Bael crushes the first head with ease!
But as he raises the hammer to strike again, the monster pounces at him! Its sixteen remaining heads bite his armor and wrap around his arms and legs, smothering him and causing him to fall backward.
"Crap, crap!" Bael yells. "Uh, don't worry guys, I've got this! Just keep killing the big one! I've got this cunt right where I want him! YEEOUCH!"
The Snakedra squeezes with all its strength, trying to burst Bael's body like a watermelon. Luckily, the demonstone only creaks a bit and doesn't fold inward, allowing Bael to survive, albeit not to do much else.
Serena, seeing that the others are too occupied to help, decides to try and assist Bael in some way. Since her abilities aren't much use against the first monster unless it turns invisible, she turns her gaze toward the Snakedra.
Emperor Serena maintains a good distance between herself and the Snakedra. She closes her eyes, focuses her mind, then shapes her right hand into a claw pose, snapping it in the Snakedra's direction.
An invisible beam of soul energy travels the gaps between dimensions, drilling into one of the Snakedra's heads. Serena focuses with all her might, attempting to try and locate the monster's soul so she can manipulate or influence it.
Unfortunately, she finds that while the creature does have a soul, it has become a mish-mash of fifty other souls, all witlessly stitched together to create an aberrant, thoughtless machine for killing.
Pain. Pain. Pain. The Snakedra thinks. Pain. Pain. Pain.
Serena grimaces. Her eyes squeeze shut even tighter as she tunes out Bael's exclamations of how 'totally okay and fine' he is. She digs deeper into the Snakedra's psyche, eventually extracting a thread of its existence for her own benefit.
Serena's eyes finally open.
While most entities possess eyes that can 'see' the physical realm, even as an imp, Serena was blind from birth. She was never able to see the world around her, but all of that changed when she met her husband, Gorn.
He and her were only Imps at the time. They became Lords together, and upon her ascension, she gained a new type of vision utterly unique to herself.
The power to see the soul realm.
While usually incapable of influencing the material realm, the soul realm is the domain Serena has become most adept at influencing over the millennia. As an Emperor, her power has become quite substantial in this regard.
Serena tears a fragment of soul energy out of the monster. It doesn't even shudder, but she doesn't care.
With her soul-seeing eyes, Serena deftly manipulates the thread of soul energy, using her fingers to hastily but efficiently craft a Soul Puppet, something not unlike a voodoo doll.
After forming a Soul Puppet in the form of the Snakedra, Serena grabs it out of the air and begins wrenching its heads around, stabbing at its body with her fingernails, and otherwise torturing the false image as much as possible.
Not once does the Snakedra cry out in pain, but its body does twitch and spasm. It writhes and squirms, continuing to hold Bael steady, but sometimes weakening its grip as it loses control of different parts of its body at random.
Meanwhile, Bael occasionally feels the wretched monster weaken its grip on him. Bael might not be the brightest bulb in the box, but as an accomplished veteran of countless wars, he is well-versed in the art of combat.
Bael isn't certain why the creature has started to spasm, but he won't turn down any good opportunity that arises.
He calls forth the power of Mjölnir, summoning lightning from above to strike the hammer. The moment before the lightning falls upon him, the creature suddenly loosens its grip, allowing Bael to swing the hammer at its central body.
BOOOM!!
A terrific blast of thunder and lightning detonates on the Snakedra, making it recoil in agony, release Bael, and pull away from him.
Abruptly dropped on his ass, Bael jumps backward, leaps to his feet, and lifts his hammer high.
"Nobody gives me a squeeze without my OK, bub!"
Bael charges at the monster. He starts smashing its heads one by one, crushing them to bloody pulps while the creature uselessly writhes on the ground, taking the abuse without retaliating.
Five minutes later, Bael slays the bastard, putting it to death for the rest of eternity.
Tired and winded, Bael gasps for air. Never has he had a fight that left him out of breath, but even with the Matriarch's Armor, Ose's body is far weaker than Bael's ever was. He severely regrets losing his invincibility.
Bael turns around and spots Serena.
"Oh! Hey, whew! I just got done kicking that monster's ass!" Bael says. "Good thing I'm such a badass, I must have intimidated it into lettin' me go, heh."
Serena opens her mouth to correct him, but thinks better.
"Right. Excellent work, Bael. You're as capable a fighter as ever."
Bael grins inside his helmet. "Heh, damn right. Now, lemme help the others finish that fat ugly one off."
Bael charges into battle, this time equipped with Mjolnir. He transforms the hammer into his favorite weapon, Big Bonk, and swings the ten ton steel ball at the brutish monster's back.
BOOM!!!
Bael flattens the creature, burying it face-first in the dirt and giving Crow an opportunity to deliver a full-power punch to the back of its head.
SPLAT!
Her fist connects, and she crushes the monster's skull, spraying its brains out all over her feet.
Crow pants like a dog on a hot summer's day. Sweat pools on Yardrat's head from the amount of focus he had to exert to kill this first monster. Even Fae and the others look a little tired.
With the crisis momentarily averted, the demon elites look around, finally noticing Bael's new getup, as well as Big Bonk pressing against the brute's back.
"Bael?" Fae asks. "Hot damn, that's a sweet set of armor!"
"You really saved our asses!" Melody adds.
Crow glances toward the other dead monster. "You killed that one? By yourself?"
Bael thumps his chest. "Couldn't have done it without Ose's fancy-shmancy armor. The ugly bugger got so scared, it just laid there and let me beat it to death! Heh!"
"It just laid there?" Crow asks, glancing around. She notices Serena, then pieces the events together. "Oh, I see. Well, god job beating it by yourself, Bael. You still know how to kick tail."
"Damn right!" Bael proclaims, smiling from ear to ear.
One by one, the other demon elites figure out Bael didn't exactly defeat the monster all by himself, but seeing as how he's been so down ever since losing his powers, they don't want to hurt his feelings.
"We've only fought two creatures so far, but they were both terrifying." Yardrat points out. "If we have to face two or even three at the same time, we might die! Everyone, proceed slowly. Do NOT rush in. We need to pick Glinch's thralls off one by one."
The other demons nod.
"Right!"

Exploration at KALO KALO.v’s flagship Vatu Aurum Gold Project in the Republic of Fiji continues with updates expected soon.
Specifically, I’m waiting to see what comes back from the CSMAT survey they commenced last month covering an area of approx. 12.5 square km, including the Qiriyaga Hill Prospect and the Vuinubu Ridge Gold Deposits. The geophysical survey is a significant step forward in identifying new resources and expanding the existing resource base of the project.
Also expecting some results from a recent BLEG sampling program from the Qiriyaga Hill and Mouta Prospects (17 samples have been sent for analysis).
https://kalogoldcorp.com/project/
https://preview.redd.it/0bliu0cbqt2b1.jpg?width=804&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a95232c9f9ece6fc1353f4e872c5fbb1ca849f04

Alien-Nation Chapter 168: Now or Never

All Chapters First Chapter of Alien-Nation Previous Chapter
Chapter summary: Elias wanders the grounds inspecting everything he can, has a fatheson moment with Larry then sends Vaughn to go try and spring people from jail.
It had been easy for me to see during the speech I'd given roughly how many had already arrived up the narrow pass, and as I stood from inspecting a firing port in a trench, testing whether the old cast iron cannon would roll back far enough on its rails after firing.
I gave it a pass after measuring against a rod. Certainly it was far from the highest of technologies at our disposal, but certainly it would be either lethal, injurious, or at the very least, extremely loud. The gathered mishmashed array of weaponry pointing outward was impressive enough, but the real piece de resistance was the sheer number of railguns we'd had returned to us, frequently carried by a two man team. I signed off on it for final inspection, noting the plug in place over the end, and went to the railgun positioned further down the trench near the intersection.
This was one I recognized. This shared at least something in common to the cannon, insofar as it was far from the latest model at our disposal. I spotted some of my own extremely crude handiwork, a far more rough set of welds performed along the plate's protective, unsanded metal edges. Mister Singer, if he were ever presented with it, may have recognized the shoddy, unstable hand that welded together some of the protective casing. The service flap told me the model without needing to even open it, the household door frame hinges pulled from Verns' stock of spare parts bin, before we implemented something even so basic as refined latches with catch points.
That had to make this a Mk. II. Sentimentality had no place on the front lines. I sucked in a breath at the sight of another old muzzle-loader being carried into the workshop for upgrades, already laid out on the timber worktable and ready for use and sucked in a breath.
I just hoped the earliest design of managing power flow wouldn't give out from the faster firing. Complex but beautifully arrayed piping had given way to simpler, more streamlined designs as we incorporated a greater number of readily available alien parts. Some of which we were supplied an initial batch of in the bag with the blueprints, and then we were told how to work free those same parts from various broken pieces of technology we'd reclaimed off the Shil'vati, or even the freely given away omni-pads. With every iteration we demonstrated a degree of adaptation to using the parts we had available, and each generation marked a leap forward in our own understanding of Shil'vati technology, courtesy of G-Man and his father's handiwork.
The final barrels of the extremely limited run of the second batch we'd paid handsomely for were marked 'present,' too. They had gone the least far afield, with one already slagging itself during the attack on the data center. I frowned at the spreadsheet, as if my impression of it might cause their fate to improve.
The latest blueprints could maintain a decent rate of fire without burning out its power management system located in the welded together case. Or, rather, the barrel gave out first. For the first time, perhaps as a result of being coupled with the magazines and a relatively rapid-fire exchange meant the neosteel barrels we received had finally become the weak point in the design.
It was only after we'd returned to Camp Death that I'd noticed the difference.
The new batch we'd paid dearly for seemed somewhat altered from the first batch we'd been building all the others out of, made from an alloyed material that shone somewhat dimmer under the sun as George and I worked in the shed elbow-to-elbow, though the contrast was not immediately obvious until one held the two against each other. It was slightly thicker, too, all of which to me indicated a change in supply in some manner, but our supplier had hardly announced themselves to Sam.
This was a troubling puzzle to me. I still couldn't be sure it was the new microbatch of barrels alloys being far from equal to the originals we'd finally finished building out? Or was it the expanded magazines and power couplings' ability to fire faster creating an overall volume of fire that overheated the barrel from overuse? Or was the power management design faulty, generating more heat per shot? Were we misusing them?
I measured the barrel of the Mk. II, just to be sure the shelf life of the barrel hadn't come due. So far, inspections of the original batch of barrels had mercifully indicated they'd all been brought back here were in comparatively great shape, with this one being no exception. That lent me some comfort that these new barrels were just not up to the task of heavy, sustained fire. I couldn't know that for certain, and an unreliable weapon was cause for anxiety.
Indeed, there was almost no wear on this version at all, disproving the worst case scenario that these were only good for a certain number of rounds before they'd be worn down to uselessness. Certainly, they'd eventually give out, but it seemed we were still far off from that point.
"Sir?" Asked the gunner, staring at me.
I stared at him, then down at the spreadsheet. "This thing fires three rounds a minute. Do you think that rate of fire is sufficient?"
I could tell he wasn't sure whether a 'no' would have him replaced with someone professing to be more accurate.
"Get it upgraded." I took the white gel pen and scribbled on it- make ready for an upgrade as soon as the final repaired railgun clears the shed. Assigned to casemate #4, Operator... "Call sign?"
"Brut," he answered.
"Brut...with the Umlaut?" He gave a thumbs up and I added them. Costing nothing but a drop of gel ink for a little personalization if it made for a happy gunner was a good investment. "Use it well. Get it upgraded if there's time, keep an eye on the work shed. Once the repairs stop, you can take this to the front of the line, Brüt."
There was no point dismantling all our old ones and creating a backlog while some still needed repairs. I wrote on the hatch Upgrade from Mk. II to Mk. IV. That would give it a magazine and more than triple its firing rate. Anything more than that, I quietly held my doubts for the feasibility of upgrading in a timely manner. The Mark V's took too much time and effort to build their complex power management systems for not enough gain, stuffed too tightly into the protective case to be completed quickly. The Mark VI's tended to overheat their crude fire control circuitry, the consequence of an overcorrection back to simplicity; they could maintain a high fire rate, but were too delicate. The VII's were the ones with the new barrel. Promising, but those barrel faults...I still worried it might have been the power management system.
We'd started considering adding water tanks to help maintain them, but it brought the weight higher than that of a Mk. I, and successfully swapping a boiling hot tank off a delicate, electronically-loaded railgun in combat seemed like a very questionable use of the time. We'd just have to ask the crews manning the railguns to be a bit judicious in our fire, and hope that the flaw was limited to the new little batch of barrels.
How many rounds, exactly, and exactly how fast was yet to be determined; we hadn't conducted the amount of testing a proper military might carry out, but while we had no shortage to man, we also did not have so many as to test dozens until their point of failure, weighing and comparing all their possible conditions.
All this uncertainty kept bouncing around my head. How many troops did we have here? How many rounds for every type of rifle, including the more exotic variants? How reliant on them were we to deal damage, and was it all stored somewhat safely? On the less direct side of things, how many tons of food did we have stored, and was it distributed well? How many thousands of gallons of water could we draw? How many pounds of soap to wash utensils, cups, wounds, and shower with? How many pounds of food over how many men, to last how many days? If it rained, some of these might be alleviated, and yet might kick off a whole host of other issues. There was no way of knowing, no way of taking a perfect stock. But I could estimate.
We had a lot of people. And a lot of guns. And a lot of defenses, and literally countless tons of high explosives, triggered by various means and methods. And we were mad as hell. While exactly how mad was less concrete a figure, I knew this many men away from home could end poorly.
Ultimately, whether it was the fault of the new barrel or the design had finally reached the limitations of its potential rate of fire without causing other issues, I couldn't say for certain. So I had to do my best.
I gave the railgun a clean bill of health to operate if needed, 'priority upgrade,' and noted the rate of fire for the defensive position at 'three a minute.' This one being one of our oldest models, I left it to the operator with my blessings, and made a mental note to add the next railgun we had to be stationed nearby, just so that we weren't under strength from that angle.
I craned my neck from the trench to behold even more insurgents trickling into the old clearing. The arrivals always came in ones-and-twos, their body language telling me the story of the journey it had taken to get here. They'd had to have abandoned their vehicles to the traffic-snarled roads almost certainly some miles away unless they knew the path George and I would occasionally take;.
Those who brought their own heavy weapons lay them down at their feet before collapsing. Water and food was distributed, though I couldn't speak to the quality, and a trash run would have to be made, tossing the empty tins into ammunition containers.
Of all the newcomers who had yet to be organized into place, I counted two mortars, several more volunteers grouping up to retrieve ammo after taking down descriptions of the vehicles from their exhausted owners and sprinting back out into the night to fetch whatever had been left behind.
The resourcefulness lifted my spirits. No one entertained the notion that these men were taking their leave to flee a certain doom. All present felt some degree of faith, understood who they were, why they were here, and what we were setting out to accomplish. Cells worked to find one another in the darkness, congealing themselves into a more coherent, practiced fighting force by virtue of familiarity with one another. Discipline was sharp and needed little enforcement past an initial reminder. No flashlights switched on inside the premises or campfires were lit despite the encroaching edges of the cold front. Insurgents were guided to whatever defensive positions, pillboxes, trenches, battlements, or bunkers still sat empty, depending somewhat on their expected role after detailing their skills to sentries or those otherwise familiar with the camp carefully explaining sight lines and our overall defensive strategy.
Whispered word overheard from those arrivals seemed to indicate a mixture of panic and outrage was fast spreading through the state's populace, carrying them on frightened wings as they took flight in the night, from here to the southernmost beaches and bays. It seemed word had gotten out successfully, then. That knocked down one more obstacle to our success, or at least set the pieces in place. Soon, all that would remain would be the ugly business of following through, and hoping, no praying that I hadn't massively miscalculated in my hubris.
I took the ramp out of the trench so they could pour some loose gravel into it, helping ensure that if those threatening looking storm clouds opened and if the drains clogged, we still would have some footing, and retired to the command cabin, eyeing how empty it felt with all the finished products being set into defensive arrangements; only the workshop still retained all its rather explosive concoctions.
The manpower situation was such that those familiar in reliably manufacturing complex bombs were spending their time setting up defenses in the fields beyond and settling in our new arrivals.
And then I had the couple hostages, weakened by months of captivity, restrained and kept under guard, but still sitting right on top of the half-done armaments.
I told myself that we had taken precautions- the most reactive sets separated by a thin membranous bag of water to prevent chain reactions from taking root and a few emergency containment systems, but they relied on someone present. I'd need all hands on deck- and what if a direct lance of energy landed from some heavy weapon hit the shed, perhaps to try and make a point? No mere bag of water would make a difference then.
Then again, if they brought that king of weaponry to bear, then the outcome would be certain. The Shil'vati would still lose their hostages, and have tacitly admitted I'd forced their hand, and that they'd declared we were enough of a threat to sacrifice noblewomen just to put a stop to.
I hunched over a smaller map in the command cabin, pinning down the garrisons and jails Verns might be held in. Perhaps I'd been premature in my assessment in lacking a future need of a good map when I'd jumped atop the table for my little motivational speech. I'd gotten caught up in the moment; I hadn't foreseen the need for an offensive element.
I was sorely missing my Lieutenants. Vendetta wasn't here, which was one of the greater anxieties weighing on my shoulders.
The one word I'd whispered in his ear all that time ago to bring him around to believing I did, in fact, have a plan: Victory. He should be here already.
He'd sprinted off across the field in glee back when I told him of this plan's possibility, that "Plan C" might come about due to a few cells going dark and my suspicion that it wasn't moles. The null hypothesis, that there were in fact moles, had put him in direct danger by sending him to double-check.
I cursed my blindness. My eagerness to take a night off, to get him out of the way so he wouldn't clash with the others, so I could be a 'normal boy' for a night and attend a party- one I wouldn't be kicked out of, To find social acceptance.
All part of a 'coming of age,' even after I'd already spilt blood, led a war campaign effort, kissed, earned more money than most would see in a lifetime, and mentally cut ties with my family. By almost any account, I already was a man, yet I'd gotten obsessive in imitating the modern trappings of defining such things. I should have seen the cells reporting members' absences and even going dark as a whole for what it was. I could have called off Town Hall, started assembling even more people here.
Then again, if I had, then perhaps...the shil'vati might not have started grabbing everyone. I hated to think of Verns as 'sacrificial.' They likely didn't have much on him, just a neighbor's report. Then again, we'd had that meeting right after the bar fight at Lucky's, right? How thoroughly had George cleared out his house, if they went back to rummage around and investigate? How well could George cover his tracks? We'd left that ammo crate in the hallway, for starters- clumsy of us, yet we were in a panic. Like children. I tensed as I remembered so vividly the sudden sharp report of the gun, watched Patrick's empty eyes stare up. But not children.
There was nothing I could do for Vendetta. We'd sent the Bat Signal out. Either he'd be here, or he'd miss it.
I weighed the value of sending George away once he got here. The order would certainly annoy him after he'd just arrived, something of an arduous task given how far backed up the traffic had become. I also knew it meant I'd have one fewer lieutenant here, where I desperately needed him. I could hardly ask him to burn down the childhood home, and it would certainly reek of hiding evidence.
"Sir," A sentry stood in the door frame, and I stretched from where my muscles had tensed up, pulling my shoulders back and yawning silently beneath my mask, lumbering toward him.
I didn't realize how tall I'd gotten until I realized he was staring up at me and had taken a half-step backwards- not to make way so I could lead from the door, either, but almost defensively.
"Yes, what is it?" I asked, stopping in place.
"We've received a message for you, sir. Radio is reporting that a 'Hex' has checked in from her position. She and Binary report 'Green as Grass,' sir."
I wasn't used to being called 'sir,' and it caught me off guard. I realized he was standing there, waiting for a response from me of some sort, too.
What should I say for him to send back to Hex? I momentarily remembered the sensation of the kiss, the warm, slightly wet softness, the tenderness, and felt a bit of a blush under my mask. While every instinct screamed at me to not air even a hint of my romances or inner turmoil about a kiss over the unencrypted connection, there was a level of 'not talking about it' that I was unfamiliar with and hadn't planned for. Could my message back be coded into something subtle? Nothing came to mind.
"G-good," I finally stuttered a little awkwardly. "That's very good."
"What does it mean, sir?"
I pushed the distractions out of my head. This was no time to be thinking about girls- and my mind stubbornly disobeyed, wandering right back to Natalie. At first to the hug she'd offered me, when I was scared. Frightened of the mind-wiper device. That tenderness she'd offered- I pushed the memory from my mind, too. This wasn't the time to fantasize, either. I had to live in the world that was before me, here in the present. People were relying on me. I could figure out all that other stuff- girls, hope, my future- sometime later.
"It means the operation can proceed as planned."
If the Twins stopped reporting or got caught with the hostages, then we'd have a lot less leverage stopping Azraea from blowing us all sky high. A couple noblewomen- who I wasn't terribly familiar with and seemed to be somewhat less important, provided they were truthful to me of their station. This unfortunate pair had relied on connections to already-stationed family members to arrive, rather than on their raw political power to muscle their way to Earth's then-closely guarded secret coordinates, and were present only for evidence of said hostages' presence.
"Sir, beg your pardon," I could sense something bubbling under his words, against his better judgment, but some sense of desperation demanded he ask me this anyways. "But what is the operation? I've been manning the airwaves with Radio, helping spread word, but everyone I make contact with seems to want to know."
"I don't see the wisdom in broadcasting the finer details of our plan, I'm sure you understand."
I sensed the inner conflict by the way he froze up. He wanted to object, probably, to swear he wouldn't leak more than the minimum. The problem was, anyone listening for long might take a morsel here, a morsel there, and bring it all together and undo us.
"You have all you're meant to have at this point, frustrating though that must be to try and inform others of the going-ons. Our objective is right before us. When the time comes and the enemy appears, blast them." I didn't want to say there isn't much else to plan. At least, not for them to consider.
"And you, sir?"
"I'll be right here, alongside you," I promised. That seemed to ease some of his pressing curiosity, at least. "We'll be here together, to watch the birth of a miracle." That, or we'd die together. Those words didn't quite have the same catchy ring, though.
I looked over my shoulder back at the map. What more good could be wrought over pondering what jail he might be in, without more details?
"Another matter. Hex said G-Man should arrive in a few minutes."
"Thank you. Anything else to report?"
"No sir, the shortwave beckons." They gave a hand-on-heart and stepped out, leaving the doorframe empty.
I told myself I may as well follow. There was no good to come of disappearing into a tent, secluded for long periods, not when anxiety might run through the gathered troops. I had to make myself seen at least periodically. Besides, it was easier to get a more complete picture from out here than in there.
Radio looked like a one-man-band by the way he was surrounded by boxy electronics of varying sizes, their glows dimmed slightly by thin pieces of fabric taped over the tiny glowing screens, and the trap stretched over his head. Wires snaked their way along the ground, a trooper trying to lay the cable into a thin channel of dirt with a spade to reduce the tripping hazard.
Pierce crouched next to him with a laptop plugged into something wired together, the final outlet of which looked vaguely like an international travel inverter, her fingers flying across the trackpad.
"Radio, how are we?"
"We've made lots of contact, I think. So much traffic on the airwaves it's actually hard to find a clear channel to broadcast on."
"Do they have our encryption keys?" I asked, the question almost automatic.
"No, having one kind of defeats the purpose of being heard and getting the signal out. Besides, encrypting's probably easy for the Shil'vati to crack. Less easy for human intelligence agencies, but impossible for the people who we want to hear us."
I already knew most of this, but humoured him. Little entertained radio quite like his namesake.
"What's our chance of discovery, then? Rough time to them figuring out it's us here, and finding the signal's origin."
"At least with a somewhat uncountable number of HAM signals being thrown across the airwaves, we are a really big needle in a gigantic haystack. Besides, how many times have we actually been where we're broadcasting from?"
That was a point I hadn't considered.
The Shil'vati would likely regard our signal as just a relay point, rather than the source, let alone the destination.
Would they strike it just to silence the orders, once they figured out how many of them were originating from the same point?
I comforted myself by staring upstream of the creek that wandered to the south of Camp Death, following its course with my eyes to where it flowed under the concrete tunnels under the highway, under the train tracks, to where it ultimately ran back to where Radio and I had visited Saint Michael's. Then I turned my head back across the field, toward where the foundation of Mojo and Mister Pasta's had been, where Vaughn had called in the kill team on the Fed's sting operation,
We'd certainly set up plenty of remote broadcast towers before, to entice them into launching strikes on collaborationists. That Saint Michael's was still standing after we'd broadcast all kinds of propaganda from there meant they'd almost certainly learned to be a bit more cautious about lashing out blindly.
In the darkness I saw a familiar figure materialize, and with a bit of relief, I ran up to greet Larry. I wanted to give the old mechanic a hug, but knew that expressions of intimacy while standing near the middle of the camp's defensive perimeter in front of everyone was more than a bit inappropriate, and settled for a nod of acknowledgment.
"I cleaned up the mess at Jules place," he said, going back to referring to his friend by their code name, glancing at Pierce.
I felt a moment of shame. We'd panicked and grabbed everything. Perhaps we were like children after all, leaving our toys out and in the hall. "Thank you."
"Saw Patrick."
"Patrick saw," I said back. "Patrick- called."
Whatever Larry was about to say, that brought him up short. "Oh. Oh." The words seemed to leave him pained. He'd known Patrick, too, and I felt the weight of guilt. It seemed he moved on faster than I could, because he changed the topic quickly.
"What's up?" He gestured at the radio setup.
Pierce seemed to be quite engrossed in her work, trying to connect the laptop to a radio via a USB cable, fumbling with the port in the dark. The laptop's screen was showing a shaky handheld video of a mass arrest- and I thought I could hear my own voice echoing the words I'd spoken just a short while ago.
"Just uploading the speech. I've spliced it up to some footage that one of the newcomers brought. We'll also be exporting raw versions of both- just the audio, the video, make sure people have the record and can decide for themselves."
Sometimes the truth was the best propaganda.
"How are you getting video out? I thought the internet was down."
Radio held a hand up, and then put it down, as if I'd been a teacher asking a question and he'd been chasing extra credit. The next few sentences were practically a foreign language to me, uttering a series of numbers in rapid succession, followed by what sounded like a name. That may've been a model, an edition of a model, a make, a special form of broadcasting- all of it may well have been bounced off the ionosphere for how far it went over my head. I wasn't used to being so completely out of my depth, but everyone seems to have specialized in some skill or another. I'd preferred getting involved in all aspects of the revolution, but at a certain point delegation was a necessity, and I was watching not just the task's needs, but also the capabilities of my lieutenants grow well past my ability to offer useful insight and guidance.
"I...see." I didn't, but I wasn't sure what else to say. I wanted to express curiosity, but I felt like this new capability was something we'd discuss later, if there was a later. "And people can receive high definition video over shortwave? It just takes a long time?"
It seemed to me to be an apparently somewhat technical process to perform over shortwave, and only when finally pressed for details, Radio at last admitted something I did understand: "I am not sure most people know how to collect the signal, or have the right equipment to, but I'm sure someone will, Maybe that person will redistribute the videos."
There. Actionable, useful information.
"Then continue," I said. "At least unless anything more pressing jumps up to do."
"Let's hope it's good for more than the history books," Pierce commented mildly.
"The world has to know, and I am certain the shil'vati have no interest in putting such footage out there. That's reason enough for us, isn't it?" I watched Radio nod and then scurry about the camp, tracing one of the wires toward the antenna array nearest the highway. I turned to Larry, breaking off from the amusing spectacle. "Do you remember my promise?" My question was genuine, but he seemed to waver slightly, now that the possibility of actually delivering on it was here and present. Perhaps the aura of our inner circle's invincibility had been shattered with the loss of his neighbors, and it would be best to set his mind to something productive. "If you want it to come true, see to it that the mortar teams are trained. Get the cannons in position, and make sure we're good for more than just one wave."
Larry snapped a salute, fingers on brow, and I clumsily approximated one in return, though I had never done a salute before in my life. I could sense the slight smile from behind his mask, and with a quick check over his shoulder that no one was watching, he reached out, straightened my palm out slightly, then brought the edge of my palm higher until it was a bit more level. "That's better," he judged, then leaving me alone once I dropped the hand a few seconds later.
George showed up a few minutes earlier than Hex had predicted, out of breath and escorted by a sentry. "Ditched the truck," he wheezed. "The huge bags of claymores and equipment were really heavy. Had to haul it under the interstate." His shoes shone with creekwater; He'd almost certainly taken the path Larry had forbade us from trying, and I couldn't imagine doing it in the pitch black darkness at any speed.
I motioned to the sentry. "Help him get that bag into the workshop." He was the best bomb maker, but he also had helped build this place. I wanted to pick his brain, but I would give him time to rest, first.
"Hey, Radio. Radio!" I heard the shortwave radio he'd set at the top squawk to life with a familiar grumble on the other end, distorted somewhat by the tinny speaker. I scooped it up. Someone with a vocoder- Radio gave those out sparingly.
"'E' here," I answered for him, but didn't want to announce myself. Not right away.
A moment's pause.
"What are your orders?"
"Vendetta?" I wanted to confirm.
"I'm here with over fifty people waiting at Warehouse Base for something to do," I knew the transmission would likely be monitored, but the time for subtlety was over. "You're on speakerphone, by the way."
The line was likely tapped, or at least would be intercepted, its contents determining priority for being passed upward or presented to someone with authority, possibly even Azraea herself.
Whatever orders I gave, they'd have to be in code, or at least sound like something unimportant, low-priority so that we might give him as much opportunity to get the drop on the enemy as he could be afforded.
"Don't bother trying to come here yet," I quickly supplied. "By now, if you're not on your way here, you have your own party to go to." I took a moment to survey the grounds. "We've practically got a full house. See about getting a house party of your own, though you'll have to pull the guests out of their own company. Or something to flank."
"Any idea where to start?"
The map fresh in my mind, I found the answer sprang to me.
"There's a rest stop along Route One. If you've got any party poppers, you can get them to open up to you like a can opener. You know, it's all about introducing yourself well."
I heard him laugh mirthlessly, the sound coming through like a cheese grater run over the asphalt.
"That one's a big bite, maybe more than we can chew without choking. Why don't we start with something smaller?"
I wanted to protest, to direct him to the biggest ones first. Then again, how much did they have on Verns? How likely was he to be somewhere heavily defended?
"What do you have in mind?"
"Well, right across the river from where the naughty girls all get sent. Why don't we start there? Every party needs a few ladies, right?" I could hear a roar of assent from the background.
I wasn't quite sure what he meant by that- was he going to try and attack the Shil'vati base? Surely not those women? He wasn't that insane. Then it clicked- the Women's Correctional Facility in Wilmington, just upstream of the Christina River from where he was broadcasting from at the old Warehouse Base. Easy to get to, certainly, and right near the interstate with pedestrian bridges and neighborhoods to scatter in after the strike made it an excellent candidate. Almost certain to succeed.
The strike wouldn't yield us Verns, though forcing the Shil'vati to admit that they couldn't both take and hold their prisoners at the same time might force them to at least pause rounding up ever more people.
If I gave it my blessing, I would be sacrificing any chance of rescuing Verns for...for what? The tradeoff strained my soul to even consider.
"If you feel that's best, you know your crowd. That said, they got Jules- we want him back." He'd helped build Camp Death. He knew its ins and outs, though my real reasons were somewhat sentimental. "Keep an eye out for Morningstar and a few other cells. I've little doubt they can party with the best of them." They were one of my heaviest hitters, routinely bragging they could go clay pigeon hunting with an unguided RPG, yet I was pretty sure I'd never rallied them to Camp Death- if they were to rally, Warehouse Base was where they'd be.
There was a moment of silence, until Vaughn reported back- "Yeah, they're here. They were going to move up to you once they got everyone together. Should we leave instructions for where to find us, or to find you?"
"Do it- supplies are overall good here. Lots of...uh, balloons, confetti..." I felt like I was stretching the analogy too far, so I gave up trying to equate weaponry to party paraphranelia. "...you know, the works. Take Morningstar and use 'em as you see best fit. What've you got for your party? Any good party supplies?" We certainly could make a trash run and see if we could also deliver them some RPGs at the same time.
"Got some Bump-n-Grinds, and you know those are always good for an up-close-and-personal encounter."
I laughed. "From what I read about bumping and grinding? The closer, the better." Their accuracy left a fair bit to be desired. Still, it would be a good, even vital carry just in case those dreaded Security Forces Technicals made an appearance, and would probably be 'good enough' against a stationary target like a wall, especially in the hands of a capable squadron like Talonstar.
"What time are you thinking?"
"I'd say as soon as we're all ready. You really overestimated how many people know where Camp Death is. A fair number showed up here, and are still trickling in."
"Enough to throw several parties at once?" I asked, suddenly hopeful.
"Well, I suppose, maybe, but I'd be wary of partygoers without someone in charge to, uh..." the metaphor seemed to be breaking down, but I got what he was going for.
"Yeah, I see."
"Are you thinking if there are too many noise complaints at once, it'll keep the party going longer?"
"That's part of it, but I'm hoping we might find a particular person we're missing, lost him when we were playing unexpected host. Someone of G-Man's, you'd know him as Jules. A divide and conquer might maximize our odds of finding him."
"Plus, maximize the number of partygoers we pick up as we move. I like it. A few small house parties for every big house. Any special orders?"
"None. K.I.S.S. principle applies. Good, bad, I want it all out on the streets. 'KISS' 'em until they can't see straight." Keep It Simple, Stupid.
"You're certain?" I could hear the hesitancy in his voice. "This is going to be the greatest thing we've ever done, and I want to be by your side for it 'til the end. I don't want any last-minute cancellations, and I sure as hell don't wanna miss it. How long should I party?"
We'd be letting absolute chaos loose. Fire. Looting. The worst of humanity, turned loose, with Vaughn potentially at its head if he decided to recruit for some reason. Could I still claim to be the good guy if I turned those kinds of people free to wreak havoc on the state I claimed whose denizens I was protecting?
Blackstone's Ratio holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. It would still hold me no less accountable for whatever followed from this mass prison break, though.
I looked over to the recently arrived George, and hung my head.
So be it.
"Confirmed, Vendetta. I'll next talk to you when you're here in person- call it when you start either getting tired or if the hosts hire a doorman, a bouncer, or something you can't handle. Bring any good partygoers and favors you find, guide them here, O Pied Piper. Over and out." The signal went quiet again, and I turned off our radio, standing and yawning. The hour was late, and it would be my last opportunity for some shuteye.
I pulled aside a few sentries to my first order. I felt it was a strange one, and likely futile: I asked everyone to 'try and get some rest.'
The sentries were going to be exhausted, and I needed them to start working in shifts if we were to maintain our vigil and perimeter. Doubtless, more would be coming, and giving them at least some rest might be a difference-maker. G-Man helped lead the newcomers to the subterranean bunkers and tunnels, trying to make sure everyone had a place to stay the night and resources got split, even if it was throwing tarps and blankets on hard-packed dirt. I eyed the tunnels, knowing which one of them would spit me out near the stream, itself running so low I might as well refer to it as a ravine. Digging that had been cramped, paranoia-inducing, but we'd dug out so much of the hill and filled it with enough weapons to wage a full-scale war. What had begun as almost make-work and a place to store things when we'd started out
I couldn't sleep well on the cot that night, tossing and turning- I even tried resting with the mask off, held in my hands, but the risk to my identity if anyone barged in caused me enough stress. Eventually, I stood and donned it, making my rounds around the camp, trying to calm myself. Instead, I felt eyes following me, and I had to force myself to stand tall. For the thousandth time, I thought of this as my Valley Forge.
The sentry at the door to the command cabin gave me a hand-on-heart, and I returned it.
As I patrolled, I could hear whispered prayers, muttered plans of action, and mercifully, snores. At least some were getting some sleep. I could see orange lights reflecting off the clouds, near where I knew Wilmington lay.
I almost jumped a foot in the air when I felt the tap on my shoulder, only to find G-Man's mask staring into mine. How strange that such a haunting visage was a comfort to me.
"Hey. Can't sleep?"
"I can't," I confessed. "G-Man, I'm sorry what happened with your father. Hell of a birthday." I hadn't even had a chance to give him the present I'd bought him- a couple new filters, and vintage craftsman toolkit, "from before they sold out," Verns had told me. The memory of his voice already felt distant somehow- no. I'll see him again.
"Wasn't your fault. Even if Town Hall wasn't your big idea to get them to retaliate, you know? Then they'd still have done something. But, uh, thanks for saying that. And thanks for trying to get dad out. I'll remember that." George said quietly, then the conversation ended when he turned away and went to the edge of the embankment. Just like that.
I could never quite get a read on him.
I went inside, and tried to force myself to get at least some shut-eye.
Thanks to Terran-Armored-Core and DeltaNu for helping with some decisions and spellcheck.
Thanks to Inmutabilis-Ratio for helping with the site, it was very helpful in importing the text.
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